• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Marines dump Microsoft for Linux OS on Northrop Grumman radar

Just weeks after Northrop Grumman got approval to begin building a new breed of mobile radar systems for the Marine Corps, the Corps has asked the defense contractor in Linthicum to change the operating system.

The Department of Defense announced a $10.2 million contract modification Wednesday to change the operator command and control software on its G/ATOR radar system Microsoft Windows XP to a Defense Information Systems Agency compliant Linux OS.

Ingrid Vaughan, director of the program, said the change would mean greater compatability for laptop computers used to control the system in the future.

In a statement released Friday, she said Microsoft Windows XP is no longer supported by the software developer and the shift to a DOD approved Linux operating system will reduce both the complexity of the operating system and need for future updates.

Server

• IBM Partners With Docker, Launches Containers Service

  IBM partners with Docker, launches the IBM Containers Service and becomes the first company to sell integrated solutions with Docker Hub Enterprise.

• Docker Has a New Orchestration Platform but APIs Can’t Come Soon Enough

  The launch also included the first of a set of accompanying open APIs aimed at helping ecosystem partners create products and services that align and integrate with the new Docker orchestration offerings. In high demand from developers, the timeline for future APIs is not for several months, which may disappoint some ecosystem partners who have already been waiting for some time for the “plugin APIs” that will enable them to integrate their ecosystem products with the Docker Engine.

• Where to Find a SysAdmin Job

  The role of system administrator means candidates “need to operate at a somewhat higher level of abstraction,” as Heikki Topi, a professor of computer information systems at Bentley University and a member of the education board at the Association for Computing Machinery, has put it.

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation Expands Management Team to Respond to Growth

• Linux Foundation names Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as CIO

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the Linux open source computer operating system, added to its Oregon staff this week by hiring Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as chief information officer.

• Open Source: Linux Operating System Introduced in 1991

  In the beginning, software was free, something you needed to make the hardware run. Then Microsoft (MSFT) and others demonstrated that people would pay for proprietary code, and for a long while software wasn’t free. But proprietary code was often clunky, and what worked on one kind of computer had to be re-created on others. Soon people realized there was a better way, and software became free again, sort of. Open-source software is essentially software that’s open to the public for tinkering, and over time that tinkering makes the code stronger. Linux, the classic example, is an operating system that’s been so extensively customized and built upon, versions of it now run everything from data centers, PCs, TVs, and cars to your Android smartphone. Companies still charge for apps and services, but much of the technology we use today is based on building blocks that are free and open to the imagination.

• Linux Foundation Adds New Leaders, New Events for 2015

  Over the past couple of years, The Linux Foundation has emerged as a very influential organization overseeing not only directly Linux-related initiatives, but important technology efforts including building out “The Internet of Everything.” This week, the foundation made a series of announcements, including the news that it is expanding its leadership team, and news about events that the foundation will sponsor in 2015. Here is more.

• Graphics Stack

  • Major AMD Catalyst Linux Update Expected Next Week

    Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD’s Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.

• Benchmarks

  • Linux Benchmarks Of Intel’s Edison Module

    Intel’s Edison Module is a development platform for prototyping wearable computing devices and IoT devices. Here’s some Linux benchmarks with the Intel Edison running on Debian.

Applications

• 3 Personal Finance Managers for Linux: Comparing wxBanker, KMyMoney, and GnuCash

  When new Linux desktop users arrive, the first thing to be done is locate apps to take the place of the ones they left behind. Most often, the bare installation will contain everything you need to get work done. But there are certain app categories that demand you do a bit of searching to get just the right tool.

  One such category is personal finance managers. With the Linux platform, you’ll find applications to meet just about every need to keep track of your finances. So if you don’t want to pay the price of QuickBooks Online, you can take control of those records and keep them on your desktop or laptop.

  But which apps to use? Doing a quick search, you’ll find a number of entries in the finance space ─ all of which are not created equal. Instead of going into an in-depth analysis of the cream of the crop, I want to highlight three of the personal finance managers that could, in fact, serve you well as you track your earnings, savings, stocks, etc.

• robotfindskitten: Okay, okay … here it is

• Proprietary

  • Photoshop for Your Chromebook: Almost Here

    You’ve heard the rap on Google’s Chrome OS plaftorm: Sure, it’s fast and boots up quickly, but there are lots of top-tier applications that won’t run it, because Chrome OS does everything in the cloud. When Google first announced its cloud-centric Chrome OS platform, which primarily eschews applications that reside on the desktop for ones out in the cloud, people came out of the woodwork citing popular applications that wouldn’t run on it. Among these applications, the Windows crowd made a big deal out of the fact that Photoshop wouldn’t run on Chrome OS.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Test Your PHP App for Free on IBM’s New POWER8 Servers

  • Ubuntu 14.10 PXE server installation

  • How To Install DrawPile 0.9.6 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How to create a custom backup plan for Debian with backupninja

  • Install Cinnamon 2.4 (Stable) In Ubuntu 14.04 Via PPA

  • Send weechat notifications via Pushover

  • Working with Standard Input, Output & Error in Linux

  • Vnc Server on a CentOS/RHEL 7 system

  • How to upgrade from Linux Mint 17 to 17.1

  • 10 ‘free’ Commands to Check Memory Usage in Linux

  • How to configure the WiKID Strong Authentication 4.0 using the Quick-setup option

  • clean OS reinstalls with propellor

    You have a machine someplace, probably in The Cloud, and it has Linux installed, but not to your liking. You want to do a clean reinstall, maybe switching the distribution, or getting rid of the cruft. But this requires running an installer, and it’s too difficult to run d-i on remote machines.

• Games

  • Intense Gameplay? Try these 13 Roguelike games

    Roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing games. It literally means “a game like Rogue”. Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first released in 1980, standing out for being fiendishly addictive. Its goal was to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, hidden deep in the 26th level, and ascend back to the top.

  • TROG: One small keypress forward for ASCII-kind

    Perhaps most pleasantly, TROG uses a keypad arrangement for movement, but for laptop users like me, also uses the nine keys between QWE and ZXC as compass directions. TROG also keeps to the popup-menu theme, with character creation and most inventory actions bouncing to the forefront as selection menus.

  • Civilization: Beyond Earth Mac And Linux Update: Linux Version Might Not Support Certain Graphics Cards At Launch

  • Galcon 2: Galactic Conquest Is a Swarming Strategy in Space

    Galcon 2: Galactic Conquest is a new game in the famous Galcon series developed by Hassey Enterprises, Inc, and is now available for Linux users.

  • Feral’s Game Port Radar Updated For Linux

    The first Linux hint on there is “Everybody wants to rule the world”, and it seems like that’s the only Linux hint on the page so far. It’s probably related to their previous hints.

  • BioShock Infinite coming to Linux in early 2015

    More details on the Linux port of the first-person shooter are to be shared at a later date, according to the publisher.

  • BioShock Infinite Looks Set For A Linux Release (CONFIRMED)

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Applications and Platform 4.14.3 available in the stable repositories

    KDE’s third update of its 4.14 series of Applications and Development Platform is now available in Chakra’s stable repositories. With this release kde-workspace has also been updated to version 4.11.14.

  • Kubuntu Part of KDE’s Google Code-in

Distributions

• Zorin: That is Flexibility!

  About 2 years ago I tried Zorin 6.0 and have used it and upgraded it on one of my computers since. I especially like the Zorin OS desktop experience because I can change it to look like Windows 7 or like Mac. That is flexibility! I also enjoy the Ubuntu type repository system!

• Puzzle GNU/Linux: Integrated Pieces Create an Intriguing OS

  Puzzle GNU/Linux is a strange OS distribution that shows the value of open source ingenuity. This Linux distro is built around a hybrid desktop that is highly customizable.

• Reviews

  • Makulu Linux 6.0 KDE: Guaranteed to make you smile

    Another Makulu Linux distribution was released today, and that’s always good news! This time it is the KDE desktop for the Makulu 6.x series. The Xfce version of this was just released a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t expect for there to be any major surprises: I hope that means this will not be a very lengthy post.

  • Linux Lite 2.2 Review – Consumes Low Memory, But Failed to Wake My PC from Sleep

    ‘Linux Lite’ is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases. It includes the lightweight & fully functional XFCE desktop environment, comes with full support for proprietor multimedia playback & a few applications of its own (software updater, additional app installer, a ‘cleaner’…) that should assist a novice user for easily managing the installed operating system.

• New Releases

  • Q4OS 0.5.22 version released

    The new version improve font appearance for GTK2 applications and brings more accurate GTK2 styles in both classical and modern Q4OS themes. Lookswitcher, the tool to switch between Q4OS desktop themes, now works flawlessly, it has been fixed to prevent styles mixing on some rare switch attempts. Shortcuts in non-default Kickoff menu have been updated. More internal improvements has been made and several minor bugs has been closed.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • CentOS Rolls Along as openSUSE 12.3 Nears EOL

    Karanbir Singh today announced the inaugural release of CentOS rolling builds. CentOS will be releasing monthly respins of CentOS to include “all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates.” In other news, openSUSE 12.3 nears the end of its support and hit game BioShock Infinite looks to be heading to a Linux machine near you.

  • Tumbleweed is rolling along

    It has been more than a month since the new structure of opensuse Tumbleweed was announced (see my earlier post), and we have seen it in practice for a month.

  • Opensuse linux for education 13.2 — a review

    Overall, this is a nice package. It might be a good place to start for someone wanting to try out opensuse for the first time.

  • openSUSE 12.3 Is Approaching End of Life Fast

    openSUSE 12.3 is now very close to reach End of Life and the support cycle will be terminated in a few weeks time, meaning no more updates will be provided for the aging operating system.

• Red Hat Family

  • Release for CentOS Linux Rolling media

  • ALERT: A Software Security Transparency Breach Warning

    The example of how the NSA intentionally inserted weakened string constants into Elliptic Curve Cryptography lay hidden for several years, in fact, and was only exposed by a languishing open Red Hat trouble ticket. What was odd was how given the potential seriousness of the incident, no action was being taken to look at the source code and change it. As more comments appended to the ticket, the level of suspicion grew to the point of where NIST was forced to open up an investigation.

  • Red Hat, Huawei Partner on OpenStack for NFV

    The two tech vendors see the OpenStack solution as an ideal platform for telecommunications vendors that want to bring NFV to their networks.

  • Building an analytics cloud on OpenShift

    Communication and collaboration between development and operations can be difficult to achieve in many organizations, especially in larger environments. These two areas have traditionally operated within ‘silos’ separate from each other – something that can lead to delays and miscommunication.

  • Red Hat and Partners Aim to Infuse Open NFV Tools in Telco Data Centers

    As 2014 draws to a close, we’re seeing a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology. Telecom companies have traditionally had a lot of proprietary tools in the middle and at the basis of their technology stacks. NFV is an effort to combat that, and to help the parallel trends of virtualization and cloud computing stay as open as possible.

  • Fedora

    • December 9, 2014: The Day Desktop Computing Got Fun Again

      Yes, it is fun to use. I really haven’t felt that way in a very long time and I look forward to turning on my PC every day because Fedora 21 Workstation with GNOME Shell 3.14 is just that good. I would add, Red Hat is the largest supporter of The GNOME Foundation and has worked closely in the design of GNOME Shell. Red Hat also provides web infrastructure for The GNOME Project. The relationship is close knit. The end result is what you see and use.

    • Fedora 21 a GO after Another RC, New Development Tick-Tock

      The big news today is that a fifth release candidate for Fedora 21 was needed, but Fedora 21 was given a GO for the December 9 release. Fedora folks are also talking about a ‘”Tick-tock” release cadence’ for future versions, which would alternate feature releases with “release engineering and QA process and tooling.”

    • “Tick-tock” release cadence?

    • Fedora 21 Final status is Go, release on December 9, 2014

    • Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 5 (RC5) Available Now!

• Debian Family

  • Release Critical Bug report for Week 49

  • Slackware, Crux, Pisi, Manjaro, Devuan… Freedom-Fighters Or Luddites?

    Debian is going astray. Unless they wake up, many loyal devotees of Debian will move to other distros that do IT the right way. I’m a little old to be distro-hopping but even I can see the necessity of escaping the entanglement, the single point of failure, and the loss of control that systemd represents.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Meizu MX4 Running Ubuntu Touch Surfaces

        Meizu is really under the spotlight lately. The company has launched their latest handset just recently, Meizu is doing great as far as sales go and everything seems to be in place. This Chinese OEM has big plans, no doubt about that. They have signed an agreement with Alibaba a while back in order to use parts of Alibaba’s YunOS in their own Flyme OS and basically created a partnership between two companies. That’s not the only agreement Meizu signed in the last couple of month, just last month this company has agreed partnership with Canonical, a UK-based company which is known as the creator and developer of Ubuntu operating system some of us are very familiar with. Ubuntu OS has been available for PCs for a long time now, but this company created a mobile version of this OS (Ubuntu Touch) as well and we’ve seen it in action when Canonical showcased it on one of the Nexus handset a while back, I really don’t recall which one was it. Ubuntu was also shown off on Meizu MX3 a while back and it will be arriving on Meizu handsets officially in Q1 2015 according to the agreement which Canonical and Meizu signed.

Devices/Embedded

• KitKat BSPs support TI Sitara and BeagleBone Black

  Adeneo announced Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) BSPs for the TI Sitara AM335x and Sitara AM437x development platforms and the AM335x-based BeagleBone Black SBC.

  Adeneo Embedded is a Platinum Member of the TI Design Network, and has previously released a number of Linux and Android BSPs (board support packages) for Texas Instruments processors and development boards. In Feb. 2013, for example, Adeneo announced an Android BSP for the TI OMAP 5 family of system-on-chips.

• £50 MIPS is a micro-computer running Android and Linux

  Rapberri Pis are all the rage these days, but now there’s a new kid on the micro-computing block. Unveiled by British chip design company Imagination Technologies, the MIPS Creator CI20 is being dubbed as a rival mini-comp to the venerable Pi.

• Creator CI20 is an Android or Linux-powered Raspberry Pi competitor

• Phones

  • Android

    • A video history of Android

      Today, Android is the world’s most pervasive mobile operating system on the planet, powering millions of smartphones, tablets, wearables, and more. But that wasn’t always the case, and Android’s public life started from humble beginnings just about six years ago.

    • Android motorcycle helmet open for pre-order

      Skully announced a limited public pre-order round for its Android-based head-up display motorcycle helmet, available for $1,499 through Jan. 8.

      The “world’s first augmented reality motorcycle helmet,” was a record-breaking $2.8 million Indiegogo success this summer, says Skully. (The frozen Indiegogo page shows a total of $2.44 million, but hey, it’s still a lot of money.) The helmets are now shipping, and beginning Monday, anyone can order the smart helmet, as long as you have $1,499 left in your holiday gift fund.

    • ​Lollipop 5.01 review: The Android release we’ve been waiting for

      Is it finally safe to upgrade to Android 5 after the recent release of Android 5.01? Based on my experiences with my pair of 2013 Nexus 7 tablets, the answer is an unqualified yes.

    • 10 of the best Android apps from November 2014

      November sure was a busy month for new apps and notable updates; from photo recognition, to launchers, to Biz Stone’s new app for sharing random thoughts.

    • Top 10 Android Apps For November 2014

Awarding graduate students for open source study

Univention presents their annual Graduate Prize for dissertations dealing with applicable and in ­demand open source solutions. The winner of the Univention Graduate Prize will receive $2,500 USD. Univention is a leading supplier of open source products for the operation and management of IT infrastructures.

Engaging with Open Source Brings Competitive Advantage

Last month I wrote about an important development for companies outside the world of computing: collaborating on non-competitive code specific to their sector. That change in business practices is still in the early stages, and will probably take some years to move into the mainstream. Far further along is the transformation of many manufacturing companies into ones where open source plays a central role, not just in their IT infrastructure, but in their product line too. That’s simply a consequence of the fact that more and more products are adding digital elements, and that the cheapest and best way to do that is to use open source.

Open Source License, Product or Community?

As a result, analysts and reporters are constantly asking me what I think regarding their chance of success. Companies are also often asking me my thoughts on whether they should open-source a technology and whether to do it as a separate project or within the sphere of an existing open-source project. Overall, this trend toward open source is very encouraging. Unlike closed-source/proprietary code, open-source licenses allow one to look at the code – to understand the inner workings and spot problems but also to be inspired. The real power of open source is the ability for people to build on top of the original source code.

Events

• TYPO3 Association Joins Open Source Initiative as Affiliate Member

  The TYPO3 Association, a non-profit organization founded to ensure the sustained and long-term development of the various TYPO3 software projects–including the highly flexible, scaleable and customizable TYPO3 Web Content Management system–has joined the Open Source Initiative ® (OSI) as an Affiliate Member. TYPO3 supports an international community of users and developers through: internal and external communication, spreading knowledge and competence; organizing informational and training events, and; securing trademark rights in the interest of the TYPO3 community.

SaaS/Big Data

• How a London Startup is Building Cloud of Clouds to Challenge the Giants

  OnApps’ interface is available as open source GPL code under GNU.

• Mirantis Offers Free Version of OpenStack Express for Developers

  Today, Mirantis is unveiling the free version of Mirantis OpenStack Express (the hosted on-demand version of the Mirantis OpenStack distribution) for developers. It’s a push to try and encourage developers to build products on top of OpenStack, as the need for a rich ecosystem of such tools is increasing.

• Who are the OpenStack Ambassadors?

  Some open source communities form organically, forged by a common goal of users and developers working together to solve similar problems. But every project could benefit from having a few people dedicated to fostering leadership to make sure that the community around the project is as robust and sustainable as the project itself.

CMS

• Acquia Shields Users of Cloud Version of Drupal CMS

  A new security service provides additional protection for users of the cloud-hosted version of the Drupal content management system.

Healthcare

• Will Open Source Architecture Help Win the DOD EHR Contract?

  The Department of Defense’s solicitation for a new EHR infrastructure has put $11 billion up for grabs, and the large-scale contract has attracted interest from some of the biggest names in the EHR market. Each team is bringing something a little bit different to the table in regards to expertise and vision for the lengthy, complex project. While interoperability is a top concern for everyone involved in the bidding, there’s more than one way to achieve it.

BSD

• Video: FreeBSD – The Next 10 Years

  Jordan Hubbard… should need no introduction but if you don’t know who he is, look him up… anyway, Mr. Hubbard spoke recently at the MeetBSD 2014 conference giving a presentation entitled, “FreeBSD: The next 10 years”.

Intel

• Stephen Hawking’s speech system, White House playbook, and more

• Stephen Hawking’s speech software goes open source for millions of others suffering from motor neuron disease

• Stephen Hawking’s Advanced Speech Software To Be Released Freely To The World Online By Intel

• Stephen Hawking’s advanced speech software will be available for free online

• Intel Overhauled Stephen Hawking’s Speech System and Is Releasing It for Free

• Stephen Hawking’s speech software set to be made available in open source format

• Stephen Hawking’s new Intel talking system to be made open-source

• Stephen Hawking’s speech software goes open source for disabled people

• The open-source software Stephen Hawking says changed his life

Openness/Sharing

• Goodwell open-source toothbrush is built to last a lifetime

  If we assume everybody is acting on the advice of their dentist and replacing their toothbrush every few months, then there’s likely a lot of frayed bristles laying in landfill right now. But must our dental care devices take on such as short lifespan? The Goodwell open-source toothbrush is a modern take on oral hygiene, built from eco-friendly materials and made to last until you haven’t got any teeth left to brush.

• Juniper Networks Embraces Open Source Hardware With Newest Switch

  Juniper Networks on Wednesday unveiled a new data center switch based on open source hardware from the Open Compute Project, in a bid to better target the large cloud providers and Web 2.0 companies embracing the “white-box” switching model.

Programming

• Node.js gains a new fork, much to Joyent’s dismay

  Dissatisfaction with Joyent’s stewardship of the Node.js project has bubbled over, leading to the creation of the io.js fork

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• You Couldn’t Make It Up

  Tony Blair names Henry Kissinger as his role model.

• Tony Blair’s wealth estimated at £10m

  Tony Blair has insisted that his much-criticised business dealings with dubious governments round the world have not been as lucrative as people think – as one of his staff suggested his wealth amounted to about £10m.

Finance

• Billionaires Featured Four Times As Often As the Poor on TV News

  In June 2014, Frederick Reese’s Mint Press report highlighted the fact that the advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a study showing that the three major broadcast newscasts – ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News – featured billionaires almost four times as often as individuals affected by poverty. Poverty is an issue that affects 50 million Americans, a significantly larger number of individuals than the 482 billionaires that these newscasts covered.

• It’s official: America is now No. 2

  Hang on to your hats, America.

  And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.

  There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

  It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.

  The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC Fumes: Transparency Threatens Corporate Free Speech!

  After spending hundreds of millions of undisclosed funds on state and federal elections, the corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council are demanding that state legislators preserve their “right” to anonymously spend money on politics and curry favor with elected officials, and to thwart shareholder efforts to hold the corporations they own accountable.

Censorship

• Website blocking orders made more transparent

  Thanks to ORG, block notices are now telling you more about the reasons why websites are blocked, explaining that court order can be challenged.

Privacy

• Court ruling paves the way for European Court of Human Rights to consider “Privacy not PRISM” case

  The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) gave its judgment today in a major surveillance case brought by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. Disappointingly, the IPT ruled against the NGOs and accepted the security services’ position that they may in principle carry out mass surveillance of all fibre optic cables entering or leaving the UK and that vast intelligence sharing with the NSA does not contravene the right to privacy because of the existence of secret policies.

• Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

  Today EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS.

• Wickr brings its self-destructing messages to Windows, Mac and Linux

  Wickr has launched a set of new desktop apps for anyone feeling skittish about conversing over the Internet.

• Passware First to Enable Computer Forensics to Crack Linux Disk Encryption (LUKS)

Civil Rights

• CNN’s Toobin: Eric Garner Is “Dead Because Of Abusive Police Tactics,” Not Taxes

• Briefing Note: Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000

  RIPA governs the use of covert surveillance powers. In 2012 the Protection of Freedoms Act was introduced, partly to solve some of the issues created by the legislation, such as the use of intrusive surveillance for minor issues. Many problems still remain and the need to enact serious reform is now more pressing than ever.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Linux Foundation Releases Report Detailing Linux User Trends Among World’s Largest Companies

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the immediate release of the “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report,” which shares new and trending data that reveals Linux is the primary platform for the cloud and users consider the operating system more secure than alternative platforms. The findings also show a 14-point increase in Linux deployments over the last four years, while deployments on Windows have experienced a 9-point decline.

Server

• Linux Container Adoption Set to Grow Rapidly

  The Linux Foundation today released its 2014 end user trends report, providing visibility into how some of the world’s largest IT organizations are thinking about and using Linux.

• Running mission-critical applications on Enterprise Linux servers

  At the core of any organisation are important IT systems that are vital for continued successful operation. Mission-critical applications, such as ERP, CRM, business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytics, advance and support business in many fundamental ways. In the modern, global corporate landscape, it is almost certain that users will need to access these systems at any time of day, demanding around-the-clock, 24/7 availability. Any outage of mission-critical server infrastructure directly impacts revenue and profitability, so downtime must be avoided.

• Juniper Embraces Linux for Junos and Open Compute for New Switch

  The Open Compute Platform launched its networking effort in 2013 in a bid to disrupt the business model of big networking vendors. One of those big vendors is Juniper Networks. Today, in a surprising move, Juniper announced that it is embracing the Open Compute Platform with its own open hardware switch, the OCX 1100.

• Docker Swarms With New Application Virtualization Technology

  The open-source Docker project is growing today with the announcement of new efforts that expand the deployment and usability options of the popular container application virtualization technology. Docker Inc., the lead commercial vendor behind the open-source Docker project, is also announcing a commercial enterprise product and partnerships to help further accelerate adoption.

Kernel Space

• Benchmarks

  • Fedora 21′s Performance Is Close To Ubuntu 14.10

    Fedora 21 is due out in a few days and as such I’ve been busy extensively testing and benchmarking this first Fedora Linux update in a year. To not much surprise given the close package versions to Ubuntu 14.10, Fedora 21 isn’t performing very differently from the Ubuntu Utopic Unicorn.

Applications

• aa3d: I know there’s a pony in there somewhere

• Telegram Desktop Native App for Linux Is Simply Awesome

  A large number of people are using Whatsapp on their phones, but a very good alternative for that app is Telegram. The main difference is that the Telegram devs have also released a desktop client for the Linux platform, that is also open source.

• miscom: The Reagan-era psyche, crammed into 80×24

• Autokey: Shorthand for Typists

  For years I avoided installing keyboard shortcut tools on my computers. I thought dog-gonnit, if something needed to be typed out, I’d type every letter myself. Recently I capitulated, however, and I must say, going back seems unlikely. If you’ve never tried a text-replacement app, I highly recommend doing so. The time it saves is incredible, and after I abandoned my grouchy old ways, I’ve grown to love it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Drop Database In Oracle 11 Without Using DBCA

  • AM_INCLUDES doesn’t exist

  • Use GRUB-Customizer to give GRUB a prettier face on Linux Mint 17.1

  • How to configure a syslog server with rsyslog on Linux

  • Set Up SSH Tunneling on a Linux / Unix / BSD Server To Bypass NAT

  • How To Install QMPlay2 14.12.01 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Telegram Desktop 0.6.15 On Linux Systems

  • How To Install Converseen 0.8.5 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Indicator Multiload 0.4 On Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Boomaga 0.6.2 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Use Powerline on Fedora

  • How Linux Works

    Beyond the reviews I also provide how-to guides including tutorials for creating live USB drives, testing virtual machines and installing the Linux distributions that I review.

• Games

  • Airline Tycoon Deluxe Gets a Linux Release 16 Years After the Windows Version

    Airline Tycoon Deluxe, an economic sim game that lets players take control of an airline, has been finally landed on Linux 16 yeaesrs after the original launch.

  • Steam Hardware Survey For November 2014, A Growth Is A Growth…. Right?

  • Always Sometimes Monsters, A 2D Story Driven Adventure Coming To Linux

    Always Sometimes Monsters is a highly rated, award winning, and great looking 2D game that looks like it really will be coming to Linux.

  • Jane Jensen’s ‘Moebius’ Finally Appears To Be Arriving For Linux

    The crowd-funded point-and-click adventure from the designer of the classic ‘Gabriel Knight’ games, Jane Jensen, was funded on Kickstarter in 2012. In April the game was released for Windows and Mac, and now it looks like the long wait for a Linux version might soon come to an end.

  • Civilization: Beyond Earth for Linux Could Drop Intel and AMD/ATI Support

  • Porting Civilization: Beyond Earth, Dev Update 6 From Aspyr Media

    According to the blog post Firaxis/2K are planning to release a patch for the Windows version. Aspyr intends to release the patch for Mac simultaneously, but unfortunately they have run into some problems with it. The post doesn’t specify the nature of the problems, but it’s bad news for Linux too, since they want to have the patch in before the full release for our platform.

  • Stream Introduces A Broadcast Service, Watch What Your Friends Are Failing At

    I look forward to watching you all fail, horribly. Sadly it seems like it’s not available on Linux yet.

  • GOG & Steam Both Hit Milestones For Linux Games

    Steam has hit over 800 Linux games recently, so if you head over to the SteamOS + Linux section and filter to “Games” the current count at time of writing is 820, that’s a whopper of a number!

  • QLLauncher: Quake Live Launcher For Linux

    QLLauncher is a Quake Live launcher for Linux which comes with various tweaks that should improve the game’s performance. Furthermore, the tool supports downloading and updating Quake Live along with other useful features.

  • Braveland Wizard Turn-Based Strategy Arrives on Steam for Linux

    Braveland Wizard, a turn-based strategy game developed and published by Tortuga Team, has been released on Steam for Linux and is now available with a 15% discount.

  • More ‘Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel’ DLC Announced For Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Using the Kano method to prioritize requirements

    KGet is the download manager of KDE. As part of the current porting to the KF5 frameworks its functionality was taken under verification. In an online survey users were asked about their opinions, needs and requirements. The evaluation for the current program can be found in the posting on “What people think about KGet“. The analysis of requirements follows in this posting.

  • Looking at the memory improvements of KDecoration2

    This week I finally moved kdecoration2 to the kde/workspace project structure and merged in the required backend code in kwin. This means the upcoming 5.2 release will ship with the new Breeze window decoration by default.

  • KDE at LinuxDay in Dornbirn, AT

    Several KDE users came by for a little chat or to see the new Plasma 5. But there were also many none-linux-users. They were interested and I think also a little bit impressed by our powerful software and community.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Using ownCloud to integrate Dropbox, Google Drive, and more in Gnome

    Within OpenShift Online, in the main menu, click on the Add application button, and search for ownCloud if you do not see it on the list. Choose the URL of your application, and then starting the application in the cloud usually took OpenShift about 30 seconds. Then, it is time to login to your app using the generated password. For safety, make sure that you change the password during your first login. Now, you are good to go, you have 1 GB of online storage for free!

Distributions

• Semplice Linux 7 Shows That You Can Still Innovate with a New Desktop Environment

  Semplice Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian’s Sid unstable branch that aims to provide a clean and simple user experience. A new version has just been released and it’s quite different from any of the previous versions.

• Arch Family

  • Diary of a new Arch user: One weird trick to make Arch easier.

    Arch users always say that the Wiki is the best feature of Arch, and you need it to keep everything running properly. I knew this when I started. What took me so long to figure out is that it’s import to not wait until something’s broken to use it.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • Three seats available for openSUSE board elections

    Individuals who apply for an openSUSE Membership will be able to vote during elections and run for candidacy

• Red Hat Family

  • Huawei and Red Hat to Deliver Carrier-Grade, OpenStack-based Cloud Solutions

    As part of this initiative, Huawei and Red Hat aim to combine Huawei’s world class domain expertise and extensive global experience with telecommunications companies and Red Hat’s leading OpenStack and open source expertise to help CSPs embrace cloud computing with a carrier-grade OpenStack solution. Huawei and Red Hat plan to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Huawei’s FusionSphere Cloud OS at the management layer to offer a unified open, flexible, and production-ready cloud solution to support telecommunication carriers’ NFV evolution. Working together, Huawei and Red Hat plan to align upstream contributions, engineering, product, and go-to-market efforts to drive the adoption of OpenStack for NFV implementations by CSPs.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 4 (RC4) Available Now!

    • Fedora Might Shift To A Tick-Tock Release Cadence

      Inspired by Intel’s tick-tock model of processor development cycles in flipping between architecture and manufacturing advancements, Fedora Linux developers are currently considering a similar model in flipping between feature releases.

      Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller brought up for public discussion the idea of Fedora moving to a tick-tock release cadence. Under the proposal, it would allow alternating between a focus on release features and on release engineering / QA / tooling. The “tick” releases of Fedora would drive features and reduce release engineering changes while the “tock” would focus more on the engineering / tooling changes.

    • Fedora 21 Final status is Go — Release on December 9, 2014

      At the Fedora 21 Final Go/No-Go Meeting a few minutes ago, Fedora QA, Release Engineering, and Development agreed to Go with the Fedora 21 Final.

• Debian Family

  • WordPress 4.0.1 fixes for Debian stable

  • Derivatives

    • Meet Devuan, the Debian fork born from a bitter systemd revolt

      Debian’s suffering a civil war, and it’s all because of systemd. A Debian systemd maintainer and others have resigned, a splinter group threatened to fork Debian if the controversial init system was made mandatory, and a Debian Technical Comitttee vote chose systemd as Debian’s default init system.

      The latest development is a vote that concluded “Support for other init systems is recommended, but not mandatory.” In other words, packages in Debian can force the use of systemd.

      Now, the group that threatened the fork is making good on their threat.

    • Elive 2.4.6 beta released

      This version of Elive includes a first selection of the packages that should be used in the next Stable version, we have not finished yet with the selection but there’s already a good amount of them included, there’s also nice tools created by elive that are meant to make your life much easier!, also, since the version of Reiser4 supports TRIM for SSD drives we updated the version of reiser4progs.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Image of Meizu MX4 Running Ubuntu Touch Leaked

        The Ubuntu Touch operating system is almost ready and soon we’ll start seeing various devices running it. Until that happens, we only have some leaked images to talk about, like the one that landed today.

      • New photo of Ubuntu-powered Meizu MX4 emerges

        Last week we mentioned that the release of an Ubuntu Touch version of the Meizu MX4 is now tantalizingly close. We should be seeing the new OS on the already familiar handset some time, early next year.

        Today we received an email with a new photo, showing the smartphone and what appears to be the Ubuntu Touch menu. It seems that everything is finally coming together and the agitating wait for OEMs to pick up Canonical’s mobile OS might be nearing to a close.

      • Canonical Has Started Working At Implementing The Click Packages On Ubuntu Desktop

        The best thing about the Click packages is that they do not require dependencies, dependencies being a big issues on all the Linux systems. Also, it is easier for the developers to pack their apps as click packages, via the Ubuntu SDK, instead of using the DEB packaging format.

      • An Ubuntu Tablet Inspired By The Ubuntu Edge Is Coming

        Another week, another Ubuntu Tablet news item… This time there’s an unheard of company that’s looking to deliver an Ubuntu Tablet inspired by Canonical’s failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Configurable Menu: Install the best menu for Linux Mint 17/17.1 Cinnamon

          Configurable Menu is one of the best applet’s I’ve found in Linux Mint Cinnamon. I’ve been using it for about three weeks on Linux Mint 17 installed on my laptop. And I’ve just installed it on a test installation of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon in VMware.

          In this post, you’ll read why I like Configurable Menu so much and how you can install it on your Linux Mint 17/17.1 Cinnamon desktop.

          So, why do I like Configurable Menu so much?

          The answer, dear reader, lies in its name – configurable. Configurable Menu is very, very configurable. It can take on any form that you want – from a classic menu type to a fullscreen application launcher and any form in between.

        • Mint Ultimate 17.1 Has the Best-Looking Boot Loader and a Ton of Cool Tools

          A distribution that uses the word “ultimate” in its title always seems a little bit much, but the fact is that Mint Ultimate 17.1 is actually quite close to filling that bill. It’s a new spin of Linux Mint and many users will find it quite interesting.

        • Linux Minty Fresh, Zuul Logo & Weighing In on SCALE

Devices/Embedded

• CompuLab Utilite2 Android Or Ubuntu Mini PC Unveiled

  Anyone in the market for a mini PC that is capable of running either Android or Ubuntu might be interested in the newly unveiled CompuLab Utilite2 which is powered by a Snapdragon processor and supports Android 4.4.3 operating system.

• Brewing machine hops to it with Linux

  At Indiegogo there’s a Linux-based automated beer brewing machine called the Brewie, with 20-liter capacity, plus touchscreen, RFID, and mobile app access.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Tizen Themed Samsung Gear S Backgrounds – Vol 8

    • Tizen 2.3 Rev1 SDK Released

      Recently we had the release of the Tizen 2.3 SDK, and now we have a maintenence release of Tizen 2.3 Rev1 SDK which is available to available via the SDK download page.

    • [Video] Samsung NX1 Smart Camera Hands-on by Getty Images Photographer Dan Kitwood

      Here is a video of a Seasoned photojournalist, in this case Dan Kitwood, who has taken the Tizen based Samsung NX1 Smart Camera into the elements with him to put it to the test.

    • Tizen and wearable sessions at the Samsung Developers Conference 2014

  • Android

    • Linux/Android MIPS hacker SBC goes for $65

      Imagination’s Linux/Android “Creator CI20″ hacker SBC, featuring a dual MIPS core Ingenic JZ4780 SoC, 4GB flash, WiFi, and BT 4.0, is now selling for $65.

    • The $65 MIPS Development Board for IoT on Linux

      Imagination Technologies today launched Creator CI20, a new development board that unites a dual-core 1.2 GHz MIPS32 CPU and a full suite of connectivity options (Fast Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0) into an Internet of Things platform that runs a variety of Linux distributions or Android 4.4 KitKat and retails for $65.

    • MIPS Creator CI20 development board now available for only $65 – Imagination Blog

    • Google quietly pushes out Android Lollipop 5.0.1 images

      After a less-than-smooth rollout three weeks after it began to roll out Android Lollipop to users, Google has begun the process of getting Lollipop 5.0.1 out the door.

    • YotaPhone 2 hands-on: This dual-screen phone is downright exciting but staggeringly expensive

      The big advantage with the paper display is the increased battery life—up to five days when using it as an e-reader and up to two days when using the paper display as a smartphone, Yota promises. The problem for the company is that features for extending battery life have become much more common, which makes it less of a differentiator compared to a year ago.

Open Washing, Kali Story, and Fedora RC4

In the Linuxphere today Adam Williamson announced Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 4. Lifehacker is running an interview with Kali developer Mati Aharoni and the Linux Foundation released a study on Linux usage trends. Patrick Masson discusses “openwashing” and Linux gaming reaches new milestones. In software news Opera 26 was released, Eric Geier presents firewall options, and The Register features 10 “freeware apps” for Linux.

Unhappy Node.js users fork the Joyent-run project, creating community-driven io.js

The Node.js server-side Javascript runtime is today’s hot thing. You might say it’s the Ruby on Rails of the ’10s. Where developers used to code in Perl and PHP, then Ruby/Rails, today’s startup-fueled web-development world is all about Javascript on the server, and Node is the grease that makes it all go.

The Ongoing Wars Against Free Tech

We’re still suspicious of their motives and know they would destroy us tomorrow if they could — but that doesn’t worry us, because they can’t. They have too much on their plate as they fight for survival. But even if they didn’t we still wouldn’t be afraid — not of them, nor of Oracle or anyone else who’d like nothing better than to squish us under their thumbs. We’ve won. As Dwight Merriman, co-founder of DoubleClick – a closed company if ever there was one — told me recently when I asked him about open source in the enterprise, “I think it’s mainstream.” He should know; he’s on our side now.

These days the future of FOSS is pretty secure; we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. We even seem to be slowly gaining the upper hand on the patent front, with many recent court rulings taking the wind out of the trolls’ sails, if you’ll excuse the cliche.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome 40 Beta: Powerful Offline and Lightspeed Loading with Service Workers

    The newest Chrome Beta channel release includes several new developer features to help you make richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox coming to iOS because that’s where the users are

  • 5 Tempting Firefox Features That May Make You Ditch Chrome Forever

    Chrome has transformed itself from a mere browser to a full-fledged operating system. It now has apps, extensions, themes, and a complete ecosystem built around it. Developed by Google, this browser, which is based on an open-source project, has become one of the most popular products made by the search giant. In fact, combined with Android, Chrome has the potential to become a formidable force that might be able to completely unshackle users from the clutches of Microsoft.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Fraudulent apps stalk Apple’s App Store

  The scale of the problem became apparent in an open source project where I volunteer, the Apache OpenOffice community. For several months, the user support mailing list has been bothered with apparently random questions — some very angry — from people seeking support for an iPad app. The community has been confused by these questions, since they have nothing to do with any work at Apache; Apache OpenOffice doesn’t even have an iOS version.

Funding

• Google Code-in tasks and rewards for teens

  Google Code-in is an initiative for 13-17 year olds to get involved in open source software projects.

BSD

• OpenBSD-Forked Bitrig Finally Sees Its Initial Release

  Back in 2012 OpenBSD got forked as Bitrig and as of this week the initial release is finally available.

  Bitrig launched to focus on supporting modern architectures, a focus on LLVM/Clang rather than GCC, and other modern development focuses compared to OpenBSD carrying a lot of legacy support.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Denemo – News: Release 1.2.0 is out now.

• GNU Ghostscript 9.14.0 released

  Since the last GNU GS release Artifex Software have moved from GPL to the GNU Affero GPL V3 the gpl-ghostscript package (at version 9.07), and GNU-GS moved to this license too with this release.

Project Releases

• [Proprietary] First Stable Opera 26 for Linux Is Out, Features Best Possible HiDPI Support

• Opera 26 Stable for Linux now available

• Opera 26 released. Install it on Linux Mint 17.1 and Ubuntu 14.10

• FFmpeg 2.5 Officially Released

  FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video and it was just upgraded to a new major version, 2.5. It comes with a lot of new features and it’s pretty interesting.

Licensing

• Become a Conservancy Supporter Today!

  The current Zeitgeist of the broader Open Source and Free Software community incubated his disturbing mindset. Our community suffers now from regular and active cooption by for-profit interests. The Trade Association Executive’s fundraising claim — which probably even bears true in their subset of the community — shows the primary mechanism of cooption: encourage funding only from a few, big sources so they can slowly but surely dictate project policy.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Help this open access journal plan their upcoming Open Source Strategy issue

    The TIM Review is an open access journal with an upcoming Open Source Strategy issue they want you to contribute to. Mekki MacAulay is the guest editor for the issue, and in this interview find out more about the journal, this issue, and how you can share your expertise on the subject.

CIOs fight back in battle for control of ICT spending

CIOs are under pressure from their line-of-business colleagues who are reportedly exerting greater influence over IT purchasing decisions, according to a newly released global study.

The shift away from CIOs has caused them to change their priorities for their businesses as they turn to new measures to regain control of ICT spending.

Science

• To address tech’s diversity woes, start with the vanishing Comp Sci classroom

  In May 2014 at the all-girls Emma Willard School in upstate New York, nearly a third of the school’s 300+ students were preparing for their final Advanced Placement (AP) exams. But exactly three were studying for the AP Computer Science exam—and they weren’t doing so on campus. The school (full disclosure: my alma mater) completely eliminated its computer science program in 2009.

Security

• Sony Pictures leak shows employees used worst passwords ever

  Everyone is bad at passwords; that’s nothing new. But if you’re working at a high-profile studio like Sony, perhaps you should choose a better password than “s0ny123″ or “password.”

• Google Can Now Tell You’re Not a Robot With Just One Click

  On Wednesday, Google announced that many of its “Captchas”—the squiggled text tests designed to weed out automated spambots—will be reduced to nothing more than a single checkbox next to the statement “I’m not a robot.” No more typing in distorted words or numbers; Google says it can, in many cases, tell the difference between a person or an automated program simply by tracking clues that don’t involve any user interaction. The giveaways that separate man and machine can be as subtle as how he or she (or it) moves a mouse in the moments before that single click.

• “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” is as annoying as reCAPTCHA if…

  When completing an online form, proving that you’re not a robot can be very annoying. Sometimes even frustrating, especially if the website uses reCAPTCHA or a similar implementation of a system that asks you to decipher some cryptic text.

  I don’t use reCAPTCHA on this website, but I do encounter it on other websites. So it was heart-warming to learn that Google has released a new implementation of reCAPTCHA called No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA that doesn’t come with reCAPTCHA’s annoying aspects.

  The official announcement has it that “a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.”

  What’s not to like about that? But is it as simple as that? And how does the system know that the entity completing a form is a human and not an automated script? The simplest way to find out is to try and complete an online form protected from bots by No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Unhappy Node.js users fork the Joyent-run project, creating community-driven io.js

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas

  After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A Two-Day Battle to Charge My Car Convinced Me We’re Not Ready for EVs

  The problem is not a lack of places to plug in: There are at least 20,000 stations in the US, and that number is quickly growing. But they’re no help unless they’re both easy to find and available. In my case, they were neither.

Finance

• A political statement – not a principled plan

  With more money available the prices of houses at the lower end will increase – a bribe to current homeowners with houses valued between £125k and £750k – exactly those swing voters predominantly located in marginal constituencies.

• Chicago Tribune Ignores Experts On New City-Wide Minimum Wage Increase

  Chicago City Council Voted To Increase Minimum Wage To $13 Per Hour In 2019. On December 2, Chicago’s 50-member city council “overwhelmingly” approved a plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $13 per hour by 2019 with only five alderman opposing the measure. Chicago will raise its minimum wage to $10 next year, and increase the minimum wage “by steps of 50 cents and $1″ until the $13 dollar an hour mark is reached in 2019. Approximately 400,000 workers in the city will be affected by the increase. [Associated Press, 12/2/14]

• Zero-hours contracts are forcing me out of teaching

  I love teaching. It is what I was born to do. I’m a thirtysomething further education teacher with a first class degree, a PGCE, qualified teacher status and two subject specialisms, who has repeatedly been rated outstanding in my teaching.

  I’m also a parent of a 15-year-old child with an autistic spectrum disorder and straight after I have written this piece, I will be leaving teaching.

  I’m not unusual. I’ve been on zero-hours contracts for some time and it has finally got to me. I’m tired of thinking I’ve secured a future for me and my child, tired of thinking I won’t have to worry about whether we both eat or whether we have heating, tired of worrying how we will cope if my child loses their school coat. As I explained yesterday on 5Live, I’ve decided to leave teaching for a supermarket job that will give me the security of knowing how much I’ll have available to pay my bills each month.

Privacy

• Securing Blockchain.info Users with Tor and SSL

  Over the past couple of weeks there has been a marked increase in the number of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against Tor users of web based Bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain.info. One user reported 63 bitcoin stolen, and there were many other examples as the thefts continued despite warnings to users. The attacks were so successful that Blockchain resorted to blocking all traffic to the wallet service from Tor exit nodes.

• Sifting Fact from Fiction with All Writs and Encryption: No Backdoors

  Following recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica, there’s been new interest in the government’s use of a relatively obscure law, the All Writs Act. According to these reports, the government has invoked the All Writs Act in order to compel the assistance of smartphone manufacturers in unlocking devices pursuant to a search warrant. The reports are based on orders from federal magistrate judges in Oakland and New York City issued to Apple and another unnamed manufacturer (possibly also Apple) respectively, requiring them to bypass the lock screen on seized phones and enable law enforcement access.

• Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement

  You may recall, back in June, that there was a key House vote that took NSA supporters by surprise. An amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill pushed by a bi-partisan team of Thomas Massie, Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren passed overwhelmingly, with a plan to slam the door shut on questionable NSA “backdoor searches” (as described in detail earlier). The House voted 293 to 123, making it a pretty clear and overwhelming statement that Congress did not, in fact, support such practices by the NSA.

• Use Tor Browser, get your computer blacklisted

  But I was surprised today when I tried to use it from Tor Browser and it failed to generate a short URL. Instead, I got this message: “Your computer is blacklisted; cannot make ur1s!”

Civil Rights

• An ‘Entertaining’ Lesson on How Cops Can ‘Win the Media’ After They Kill

  The class, taught by PR agent Rick Rosenthal, focused on such topics as “Managing the Media When Things Get Ugly (Think Ferguson).” A flyer promoting the class promised, “In addition to the Ferguson case study, this fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!”

  Sound boring? Not at all! “The training is also highly entertaining,” the flyer emphasized. “You will learn a lot, and you’ll have fun doing it!”

• Many Convicted of Crimes They Didn’t Commit

  Why are people falsely convicted? The reasons include mistaken witness identification, false confession, official misconduct, perjury, false accusation, and false or misleading forensic evidence. As Lavender reports, “The factors involved in a wrongful conviction vary depending on the crime.” In child sexual abuse cases, for instance, over 80% of exonerations involve perjury or false accusation. By contrast, in sexual assault cases, a majority of exonerations hinge on mistaken witness identification.

• Baggage-theft ring busted at JFK Airport

  Seven contractors were rounded up for swiping electronic items, jewelry and other items from checked baggage at Kennedy Airport’s Terminals 4 and 7 between 2012 and June of this year, officials said. The thieves would then sell the items they stole.

• In NYT’s Retelling of Eric Garner’s Death, the Officer’s Arm Has a Mind of Its Own

  It’s debatable whether or not you’d refer to Garner as resisting; he’s certainly loudly protesting that he’d done nothing wrong, and he does not appear eager to put his hands behind his back to be handcuffed. But that “resistance” lasted a few seconds before he was choked.

• NYPD Invokes Notorious Glomar Response

  The Glomar Response dates back to the 1970s, and allows agencies to respond that they can “neither confirm or deny” as a response to requests for information made under the federal Freedom of Information Act, when responding might compromise national security or privacy. As CJ Ciaramella writes, “The Glomar doctrine gives agencies the obvious power to hide the existence of records, but it also allows agencies to short-circuit the appeal process, since requestors can’t file an appeal for records they don’t know exist.” In Abdur-Rashid’s case, the NYPD argued that responding to his request would disclose, in Campbell’s words, “sensitive information about the department’s investigative techniques.”

• Wash. Post Digs In Its Heels On Botched Immigration Fact Check

Internet/Net Neutrality

• What Canada can teach the U.S. about net neutrality

  If there are two ways in which the Internet is similar in the United States and Canada, it’s that it’s slow and expensive in both places relative to many developed countries. The big difference, however, is that Canada is looking into doing something about it.

  The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the northern equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—is in its second week of hearings on how to ensure that Internet subscribers get access to the newest and fastest services at the best prices possible.

Intellectual Monopolies

• TTIP Update XLIV

  One reason for this hiatus is that there has been a change at the top. Karel De Gucht has relinquished his post, which has been taken by the Swede Cecilia Malmström. She is adopting a very different style, not least in terms of her attitude to the public. Faced by the growing scepticism about TTIP’s benefits, and anger over its complete lack of any meaningful transparency, Malmström has taken a conciliatory approach, promising more openness, some of which has now been announced.

  But Malmström is still trotting out the same old misinformation about TTIP. In a recent opinion piece she published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the paragraph about ISDS is particularly pernicious. Malmström says that European member states have signed a total of 1400 agreements that include ISDS; this is presumably to “prove” that ISDS is completely normal and totally harmless. Neither is true.

• Copyrights

  • ISPs Must Take Responsibility For Sony Movie Leaks, MP Says

    As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister’s former IP advisor, as “facilitators” web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame.

  • Court Orders French ISPs to Block The Pirate Bay

    The Paris Court has ordered French ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. The legal action, brought by anti-piracy group SCPP, resulted in an injunction ordering local service providers to “implement all necessary measures” to render not only the site inaccessible, but also its proxies.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Node: Atomic upgrades, image based delivery, and room for customization

Yet another post (Jasper) on image based OS deliveries. Jasper is also utilizing ostree which become widely known with the Fedora Atomic or Project Atomic effort. And there is also the idea from the systemd people which got some attention.

It’s not that image based OS delivery is new. oVirt Node is around for some years and is an example of an image based OS with atomic upgrades. Maintaining this small project gives us some experience, and we also see the limitations of our current approach, this is the reason why we are also investigating how to redesign Node, and keep the image based delivery. There are similarities between Node’s requirements and the use cases addressed byostree and the systemd people, so we also keep close eye on those projects. One difference we, especially to ostree is, that Node is an appliance intended to be the OS of a bare-metal machine, which needs to be somewhat customizable at runtime.

What is Linux?

You may not know this, but Linux is the most popular operating system in the world. It’s at the heart of your Android smartphone or tablet, your smart thermostat, your television, and set top box. Linux runs on the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and on the International Space Station. If you’ve used the Internet today to send an email, you used Linux. Linux powers the Internet. If you searched for cat pictures online, you used Linux. If you sent a letter, the old fashioned way, you probably used Linux as well. Linux runs on the large server farms that create those cool special effects in Hollywood. If you’ve been to see the latest superhero epic at the local theatre, and were totally blown away by the effects, you can thank Linux for part of that.

Linux is everywhere.

The Linux Setup – Akkana Peck, Developer/Writer

Akkana has a great Openbox-driven setup that relies on keybindings but what’s great about her setup is that she chooses Linux not so much for the philosophy, but for the control it gives her (which I would argue is also philosophical). I always appreciate when people recognize Linux for its technical flexibility and sophistication and not just as something that isn’t Windows or OS X. The politics of Linux is important and fascinating, but it also happens to be a wonderful product.

About Linux Weekly News – 1st December 2014

Linux Foundation finds enterprise Linux growing at Windows’ expense

This report is based on data from an invitation-only survey of The Linux Foundation’s Enterprise End User Council as well as companies and organizations with sales of $500 million or more, or 500 or more employees. The surveyed group included Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bristol-Myers Squibb, NTT, Deutsche Bank, DreamWorks, ADP, Bank of New York, NYSE, NASDAQ, Goodrich, MetLife, and AIG. Of course, these companies are already invested in Linux. That said, it’s noteworthy how many Fortune 500 and financial powerhouses now put their trust in Linux for mission-critical software.

Download Linux Voice issue 1 — with audio!

Highlights in this issue: master Vim, understand systemd, solve word puzzles with Bash and Grep, discover the technology behind Bitcoin, and secure your communications with PGP. Plus many more tutorials, features and interviews — 116 pages in total!

Server

• CoreOS breaks with Docker

  While CoreOS is relatively unknown outside of Linux circles and Silicon Valley, it’s seen by those in the know as an up and coming Linux distribution for datacenters and clouds. It’s not an insignificant company crying foul, because Docker’s take on virtualization has proven to be so popular. Indeed, CoreOS currently requires Docker to work well, and Brandon Philips, CoreOS’ co-founder and CTO, has been a top Docker contributor and was serving on the Docker governance board.

• Joyent Defends Docker, Adding Closer Ties

  Following a tumultuos two days in the Docker community, Joyent has announced two open source initiatives and a container service that further its ties to Docker. With the news, Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill also has some choice remarks about CoreOS “full-frontal assault” on Docker. First, there is the sheer brazenness of the remarks, but also reflects something that could have been predicted.

• Joyent Announces Linux Branded Zones and Extension of Docker Engine to SmartDataCenter Provides a New Platform to Run Docker Securely With Bare Metal Performance

• Docker Faces Stiff Competition in Open Source Virtualization Niche

  CoreOS has launched Rocket, which is only the latest open source competitor for Docker’s container-based virtualization and app delivery platform.

• CoreOS Team Develops Rocket, Breaks with Docker

  Docker has easily emerged as one of the top open source stories of the year, and has helped many organizations benefit from container technology. As we’ve reported, even Google is working closely with it, and Microsoft is as well.

• SLES 12 anchored in enterprise Linux server availability

Audiocasts/Shows

• Disney Newscast Finds Trailer for Upcoming Disney Film Especially Newsworthy

  A trailer teasing the newest Star Wars film has fans of the franchise very excited. But they’re not the only ones; the Disney-owned nightly newscast ABC World News has also found the upcoming Disney film to be an important news story too.

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 3.18 RC8 Is Out, Final Version to Arrive in a Week

  Linux Kernel 3.18 RC8 has been announced by Linus Torvalds and it looks like the development cycle is coming to an end, despite a problem that has been bugging the team for a couple of weeks.

• The Linux Foundation Announces 2015 Events Schedule

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced its 2015 events schedule, which includes LinuxCon and CloudOpen in North America and Europe, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Embedded Linux Conference, Android Builders Summit and ApacheCon, as well as new events for 2015, open source storage and filesystems conference, Vault, and ContainerCon, focused on the rapidly expanding container industry.

• Linux Foundation reveals 2015 lineup, adds new events

• The Linux Foundation Releases Report Detailing Linux User Trends Among World’s Largest Companies

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the immediate release of the “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report,” which shares new and trending data that reveals Linux is the primary platform for the cloud and users consider the operating system more secure than alternative platforms. The findings also show a 14-point increase in Linux deployments over the last four years, while deployments on Windows have experienced a 9-point decline.

• AMDKFD Is Present For Linux 3.19 In Open-Source HSA Start

  The AMDKFD driver, which has been under development in the public spotlight for the past few months as a necessary piece to having AMD HSA open-source support on Linux, will premiere with the Linux 3.19 kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • Qualcomm Looks To Add HDCP Support To Freedreno

    One month ago was the surprising contribution by Qualcomm’s Innovation Center that they were adding new hardware support to Freedrenon, the open-source and reverse-engineered Gallium3D driver for Adreno graphics hardware. Qualcomm’s contributions haven’t ended and they’re looking to add more patches — including for HDCP support.

Applications

• Little Known GUI Firewall Options for Linux

  As you may know, IPtables and NetFilter combine to make the most popular firewall solution in Linux. Given there’s only a native command-line interface (CLI) for the two, though, there can be a learning curve. The good news, however, is that there are many graphical user interfaces (GUIs) you can use with Linux. Let’s look at some of the most powerful yet easy-to-use options available.

• Ten Linux freeware apps to feed your penguin

• Linux Software Releases, November 2014

  Welcome to our November edition of Linux Software Releases. This month we examine a project which takes software freedom very seriously and attempts to make using and sharing free software as easy as possible. The project is Warzone 2100, an open source real-time strategy game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. We begin with a short introduction of this software and continue with the list of the projects released during November 2014.

• aop: Two points worth bragging about

• How To Install Sigil 0.8.2 on Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

• Proprietary

  • Opera 26 for desktops brings stable Linux release, bookmark sharing and more

    Opera has just released version 26 of its desktop browser, that sees a stable Linux version, a new bookmark sharing feature and a few other small updates.

  • After an 18 Month Gap, Opera for Linux Returns With New Stable Release

    Opera for Linux is 64-bit only. The company say this decision was made based on ‘what most Linux desktop users have installed’. While annoying it is part of a larger overall trend away from 32-bit software, with Opera for Mac also being 64-bit exclusive, too.

  • Opera 26 Released, First Stable Linux Release In More Than A Year

  • Opera 27 Dev Arrives with Password Sync Fixes

  • Opera 26 Stable Now Available For Linux

  • How To Install Opera 26 Stable On 64 Bit (AMD64) Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Install Apache Ant, Maven And Tomcat On CentOS 7/6.5

  • How To Delete Oracle 11g Database Manually ?

  • Linux Namespaces

  • Check successful & unsuccessful user login attempts in linux

  • Install Oracle Java JDK 8 On CentOS 7/6.5/6.4

  • How To Get Flash And H.264 To Work In Opera Browser (Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10 and 15.04)

  • How To Install Sigil 0.8.2 on Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Firefox 34.0.5 Has Been Released. How To Install Firefox 34.0.5 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • MySQL On Fedora 20 Setup

  • Paying attention to webserver logs

  • How to migrate your Database from MySQL to OpenSource MariaDB

• Games

  • The Deer God, A Beautiful Pixel Art Platformer Now On Linux

    The Deer God has arrived on Linux, and it’s in the early access section. With that out of the way, the game does look stunning.

    We’ve had goats in platformers and silly games, but now it’s time for the Deer to shine! The graphics actually slightly remind me of Minecraft in a side-scrolling form, and the lighting looks great.

  • Taking A Look At Goat MMO Simulator & Introducing The New Guy

    As one of Gaming on Linux’s newest contributors I thought I’d introduce myself through the medium of gameplay video. In that spirit I take a look at Goat Simulator’s latest downloadable content.

  • Steam Linux Gaming Usage Remains Just Above 1.1%

    The November 2014 survey results are now out from the Steam Survey that show the current Linux gaming market-share.

  • Steam Hardware Survey Shows More Linux Users, but Not by Much

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • My journey in Season of KDE so far

    It has been almost a month since SoK has started, and my project has kept me quite busy for the last couple of weeks. Here I am going to discuss my experiences with KDE, and a detailed report on the work done by me on my project so far. I think this post is going to be a bit long, so a fair warning to all the readers

  • KF5 kdegames

    When I searched which modules were ported to KF5, I saw that kdegames programs were not ported.

  • Calligra 2.8.7 Released

    This supplementary release 2.8.7 marks the end of Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.8 series. If you update to 2.8.7 (and you should), you’ll receive over 20 improvements, mostly in Kexi and Krita.

  • Help us for a New Unified Graphics for GCompris

    Currently the graphics are one of the weakest part of GCompris, as they were mostly done by the developers, using free graphics assets and sparse graphic artist contributions.

    To address this problem, we found Timothée Giet, a talented graphic artist interested in working on a complete graphics redesign. He is a long standing Free-Software contributor, active member of the Krita team and so part of the KDE community. Making new graphics for more than 100 activities is a big work, so we need your help to achieve this goal.

Distributions

• Linux Lite 2.2 Is a Light and Fun OS for Users Disappointed in Windows

  The final version of Linux Lite 2.2, a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS created to show people just how easy it is for non-technical folks to use a Linux distribution, has finally arrived and it’s packed with a lot of changes and improvements.

• Reader poll: the Ultimate Distro Guide, have your say

• Behind the App: The Story of Kali Linux

  It began out of necessity for lead Kali developer Mati Aharoni (known as muts in the community). While doing professional security work he needed a variety of security tools without being able to install any software on his client’s systems, and so he took to Linux. We spoke with Mati to learn more about how it started and how the community-driven project has grown and evolved over the years into one of the leading security-focused Linux distributions.

• Screenshots

  • Manjaro Xfce 0.8.11 OpenRC Edition

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • They make Mageia: David Walser

    I am generally a man of few words, but I probably need a few more to introduce myself. I have been using Linux for 15.5 years, and Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia for 15 years. I have been contributing since the summer of 2001 to some degree. I did a fair amount the first few years, not much for the next seven, and have done quite a bit since I joined Mageia at the end of 2011.

    I am 33 years old, am a former high school math and computer science teacher, still am involved with high school track & field, and now teach Linux/Unix fundamentals to adults. I am a distance runner and I enjoy watching American football and listening to music.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro 0.8.11 Has Arrived, Users Can Choose Between Systemd and OpenRC

    The final version of Manjaro Xfce 0.8.11, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been released and is now available for download.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • With Btrfs the default on openSUSE, when will other distros follow suit

    One change that was implemented in openSUSE 13.2 makes Btrfs the default file system for the root (main) partition. That makes openSUSE the first desktop distribution to use Btrfs as a default file system for any partition.

    That should be encouraging news for the Btrfs development team, because the core of Btrfs has been marked as “no longer unstable” for sometime. In some circles, that means production-ready. In fact a few companies have been using Btrfs in their products, including Facebook, which was testing it in production in April (2014)

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 release on track; new leadership and thanks to the old; counting users

      Things are looking good for our scheduled December 9th release. We’re in the process of validating release candidates, and everything seems in great shape.. (And it’s not too late to join in: see the announcement on the test list if you’re interested in helping.) Assuming no unexpected showstoppers, we’ll approve this as official at the Thursday “Go / No-Go” meeting, and then it’ll be off to the mirror network for release next Tuesday morning!

    • Corey84-, Southern_GentlemF20-UPDATED-LIVES-20141201 (December 1, 2014)

    • Readers’ Choices, Linux Philosophy, and Fedora Numbers

    • How many users does Fedora have?

• Debian Family

  • Voice of the Masses: Is the Devuan fork a good thing?

    There’s been plenty of controversy in the Debian camp recently, with fiery debates about the default init system, resignations from the Technical Committee, and the systemd package maintainer quitting after receiving piles of abuse. Now a gang of “Veteran Unix Admins” has forked the distro: say hello to Devuan.

  • Debian Project News – December 1st, 2014

    The Debian Developer community voted and decided that no General Resolution was needed on init system coupling. The General Resolution init system coupling vote was proposed in response to a Technical Committee decision choosing systemd as the default init system for Linux architectures. Of the 5 available options for voting, option #4 “General Resolution is not required” won the vote.

  • A Devuan and A-two…

    By now, much of the news and commentary is already out there about a fork of Debian called Devuan — pronounced Dev-One (sharp, folks) — and what it means to the newly minted systemd/anti-systemd rift in the FOSS world. I can’t add anything to the news part, but leave it to me to add to the commentary.

    Forking is commonplace in the FOSS world, a part of its natural process. Someone thinks they can do something better — or it may be a group of folks of like mind thinking they can do something better — and they do it for reasons ranging from rational improvement to unabashed ragequit.

    So personally, I wish this project luck. They’re going to need it.

  • Derivatives

    • Tails 1.2.1 is out

      Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.2.1, is out.

      This release fixes numerous security issues and all users must upgrade as soon as possible.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu MATE 14.10 to Get a Gorgeus New Theme

        Ubuntu MATE 14.10 was just released a couple of weeks ago and the community has received it with open arms, but the system could benefit from a nicer theme. Now, it looks like it’s about to receive one.

      • The UbuTab. A 1TB Ubuntu tablet for media lovers.

      • Readers’ Choice Awards 2014

        Although this year the Debian/Ubuntu-based distros took the lion’s share of the votes, the “Best Linux Distribution” category is a bit like “Best Kind of Pizza”—even the bottom of the list is still pizza. It’s hard to go wrong with Linux, and the wide variety of votes only proves how many different choices exist in our wonderful Open Source world.

      • Meet Mutate, a Spotlight Alternative for Ubuntu Systems That’s Blazing Fast

        The Spotlight feature on Mac OS X has drawn the Linux community’s attention and it looks that at least one developer has tried to replicate its functionality and feel. It works very well in Ubuntu, but the source is provided so it should work just as well in other distros.

      • Canonical Is Porting The modRana Navigation Software For Its Ubuntu Touch

        Mike Sheldon, one of the Canonical developers has started porting modRana navigation software for Ubuntu Touch. Mike has chosen modRana because it is open-source and is already available on Sailfish OS, Jolla’s Linux based mobile operating system.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS To Ubuntu 14.10 Offers Some Performance Improvements

        Curious how the CPU performance of Ubuntu Linux has evolved from the 12.04 LTS release compared to 14.04 LTS and then the latest 14.10 release? Here’s some benchmarks.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ released

Devices/Embedded

• First Quark-based SMARC module runs Linux on 2W

  Kontron unveiled the first SMARC COM for headless, industrial IoT devices based on Intel’s Quark X1000 CPU. The Linux-ready module runs on just 2 Watts.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Tizen Common running on Radxa Rock

      Exciting times are ahead for Tizen as we see it being run on SO MANY different development boards. Here is a Demonstration on how to boot Tizen Common on the open source hardware development board Radxa Rock (with Rockchip RK3188 ARM SoC), booting from a MicroSD card.

    • Samsung to Launch Tizen based Samsung Z1 on Dec 10 in India, also 160,000 Smartphone Labels Imported!

  • Android

    • The Linux desktop-a-week review: Android as a desktop environment

      Last week, I reviewed ChromeOS from a desktop environment perspective as part of my “Linux Desktop-a-Week” series (which, really, has become less of a weekly thing and more of a “Desktop-Every-Few-Weeks-Or-So” thing. But I’m sticking to my original title. Because I’m stubborn).

      This “week,” I am spending time with another Linux desktop environment that isn’t exactly traditional. This week, I’m using Android.

    • How does Android stack up as a desktop operating system?

      Android is generally known as a mobile operating system. But it’s quite possible to use it on a desktop computer. And since Android is based on Linux, some would consider it a Linux distribution in its own right. Network World took Android for a spin on the desktop and found it to be surprisingly good.

    • Will Android’s Material Design be a big hit with Linux users in Quantum OS?

      Material Design has been a big hit in Android 5.0 Lollipop. But now a distro developer has plans to incorporate it into a desktop distribution called Quantum OS.

Openwashing: adopter beware

It’s great to see where open source software and the communities that support it are today. Many of those who have worked over the years to develop feature-rich applications and enterprise ready systems, that not only compare to, but exceed proprietary options, must feel like pinching themselves.

Interview: Apache Software Foundation Elevates Drill to Top-Level Project

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which stewards more than 200 Open Source projects and initiatives, has announced that Apache Drill has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Drill 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.

How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?

At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.

For example, US health care, like pretty much every business category, is full of Linux and FOSS, and is to some degree connected on the Net. Yet, it remains a vast feudal system of suppliers that nearly all work to lock doctors, hospitals and labs into dependency on closed, proprietary, incompatible, non-interoperable and non-substitutable systems. I’ve witnessed these up close as a patient. In one case, diagnostic scans by one machine and software system couldn’t be read by computers with software designed to read the output of a different company’s scans. In another case, records kept by one specialty failed to inform another specialty in the same hospital. The first one gave me a case of pancreatitis, and the second one gave my mother a fatal stroke.

Samsung’s Open Source Group is Growing, Hiring Developers (Video)

The open source group is admittedly a small team for such a large company. But it indicates a significant shift in the company’s approach to development – and one that is gaining in popularity among enterprises, in general. Companies start by using open source software, then advance to participating in open source communities, contributing upstream, and adopting open source practices internally.

Cisco Goes Open-Source for Big Data Security Analytics

Cisco is no stranger to the open-source world and is now expanding its efforts with the OpenSOC (Security Operation Center), which is a project that is freely available on Github.

Stephen Hawking’s new Intel talking system to be made open-source

Events

• LCA 2015 and InternetNZ Diversity Program

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 34.0.5 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu Distros

    Canonical has updated the Firefox packages in the repositories for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 14.10. If you have this application installed right now, the next system update should bring the latest version.

  • New tablet UI for Firefox on Android

    The new tablet UI for Firefox on Android is now available on Nightly and, soon, Aurora! Here’s a quick overview of the design goals, development process, and implementation.

SaaS/Big Data

• Selling a Non-Product: The Multifaceted OpenStack

  When the Rackspace team first created the idea of an open stack, they knew that the opportunity was not just to build public clouds. Rather, the software was to service companies that were using all kinds of cloud or virtualization technologies. It was built with flexibility in mind. “That involved more than just how they might package it and distribute it,” explained Metacloud VP Scott Sanchez.

• jKool Unveils Open Source SaaS Platform for Spotting Patterns in Big Data

• Apache Drills into Hadoop

  In a big week for Big Data, Apache Drill becomes a top level project as Hadoop 2.6.0 is released.

  It’s a big week for Big Data and the open source Hadoop ecosystem. The Apache Hadoop 2.6.0 project was released on Nov. 30, and today the Apache Drill project announced it had become a top level project in the Apache Software Foundation.

Funding

• How four students are changing online donations with CommuniGift

BSD

• Nzega’s Digital Library Becomes a Reality

  We installed the FreeBSD operating system on each of the workstations. FreeBSD is an open source derivative of Unix that is renowned for its speed, customizability and rock-solid stability. We also installed a variety of open source software packages from a repository that we created on the Mini. The second Mini serves as a backup and content mirror, which we aim to sync once per year with new material and as needed.

  For both teachers it was their very first exposure to FreeBSD. They enjoyed the control and customizability of the installation process, as well as the wide availability of open source software packages in the repository (more than 20,000).

• BSDCan 2015 call for papers

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Help the FSF stay strong for 30 more years

• FSFE needs your support for 2015!

Project Releases

• Announcing netdev 0.1

  Netdev 0.1 (year 0, conference 1) is a community-driven conference geared towards Linux netheads. Linux kernel networking and user space utilization of the interfaces to the Linux kernel networking subsystem are the focus. If you are using Linux as a boot system for proprietary networking, then this conference may not be for you.

• Watch Movies and TV Shows for Free with the Latest Popcorn Time

  Streaming movies and TV shows directly from torrents without having to download them is the main purpose of Popcorn Time. The devs have released a small update for the application and they have fixed a number of small problems that have been reported by the community.

• Kodi 14.0 Prepares for Massive Release, XBMC to Be Finally Replaced

  Kodi 14.0 RC, the successor of the current XBMC project, has been released and is now available for testing. The famous media hub is preparing for a major name change, but the devs also plan to make the 14.0 branch the best one so far.

Openness/Sharing

• ‘Open-source brewery’: Why Tin Whiskers is sharing its beer recipes

• Open Data

  • Data-sharing projects awarded by Netherlands research group

    The Dutch Data Prize is awarded by the Research Data Netherlands (RDNL), a collaborative partnership between 3TU.Datacentrum, DANS, and SURFsara. The awards were presented by professors Karel Luyben of Delft University of Technology and Kees Aarts of University of Twente, both in the Netherlands. The award session was one of the satellite events adjacent to RDA Plenary 4.

Data Loss And Downtime Costs The UK £10.5 Billion Per Year

78 percent of UK organisations are not confident that they can fully recover after a disruption

Data loss and downtime cost enterprises $1.7 trillion around the globe in the past year – the equivalent of nearly 50 percent of Germany’s GDP.

Science

• New research suggests that we learned to metabolize alcohol by eating spoiled fruit

  Anyone born after Prohibition (i.e., anyone reading this) was likely taught growing up that alcohol is, at its core, a poison. Really fun poison. Poison that leads to dancing. Poison that makes you drunk-text your co-worker and spend the next six days caked in cold sweat and nauseous from dread.

  Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms that classification. We actually developed our ability to consume alcohol around 10 million years ago when we started to eat rotten fruit.

Health/Nutrition

• How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

  Ask an agribusiness exec about sustainable agriculture, and you’ll likely get an earful about something called “precision agriculture.” What is it? According to Yara, the fertilizer giant, it’s technology that “enables farmers to add the specific nutrients needed for their crop, in exactly the right amount, at the right time.”

• Ebola Story Puts Old Fears in New Virus

  In other words, Ebola is less a story about a bizarre new disease and its unpredictably disastrous capacities, and more a sad old story about poverty and priorities.

Security

• there are no good constant-time data structures

  Imagine you have a have a web site that people can access via a password. No user name, just a password. There are a number of valid passwords for your service. Determining whether a password is in that set is security-sensitive: if a user has a valid password then they get access to some secret information; otherwise the site emits a 404. How do you determine whether a password is valid?

  The go-to solution for this kind of problem for most programmers is a hash table. A hash table is a set of key-value associations, and its nice property is that looking up a value for a key is quick, because it doesn’t have to check against each mapping in the set.

  Hash tables are commonly implemented as an array of buckets, where each bucket holds a chain. If the bucket array is 32 elements long, for example, then keys whose hash is H are looked for in bucket H mod 32. The chain contains the key-value pairs in a linked list. Looking up a key traverses the list to find the first pair whose key equals the given key; if no pair matches, then the lookup fails.

  Unfortunately, storing passwords in a normal hash table is not a great idea. The problem isn’t so much in the hash function (the hash in H = hash(K)) as in the equality function; usually the equality function doesn’t run in constant time. Attackers can detect differences in response times according to when the “not-equal” decision is made, and use that to break your passwords.

  So let’s say you ensure that your hash table uses a constant-time string comparator, to protect against the hackers. You’re safe! Or not! Because not all chains have the same length, “interested parties” can use lookup timings to distinguish chain lookups that take 2 comparisons compared to 1, for example. In general they will be able to determine the percentage of buckets for each chain length, and given the granularity will probably be able to determine the number of buckets as well (if that’s not a secret).

  Well, as we all know, small timing differences still leak sensitive information and can lead to complete compromise. So we look for a data structure that takes the same number of algorithmic steps to look up a value. For example, bisection over a sorted array of size SIZE will take ceil(log2(SIZE)) steps to get find the value, independent of what the key is and also independent of what is in the set. At each step, we compare the key and a “mid-point” value to see which is bigger, and recurse on one of the halves.

• Security updates for Tuesday

• Security Audit Automation Made Easy with SCAP

  Security automation can be defined as the use of standardized specifications and protocols to perform specific common security functions.

  Which leads us to SCAP – the Security Content Automation Protocol, an industry and government initiative to automate security audits and compliance.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Latest ISIS attack on Kobanê implicates Turkey once more

  Ever since ISIS commenced its attack on Kobanê the town has been cut off from the outside world. ISIS controlled the western, southern and eastern fronts and the hermetically sealed border with Turkey formed an unsurpassable border in the north. The Turkish armed forces (TSK) have maintained a heavy military presence at the border, with dozens of tanks stationed on hills overlooking Kobanê, regular patrols along the border fence and watch towers and outposts every few kilometers.

• Primary Sources: Emails Show FBI Worked to Debunk ‘Conspiracy Theories’ Following Michael Hastings’ Death

  When journalist Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles last year, rumors immediately began to surface on social media suggesting his death was tied to a federal investigation into his work.

  The claims attracted widespread media interest when WikiLeaks tweeted the day after the crash that Hastings had contacted the anti-secrecy group’s attorney and said that the FBI was investigating him. The FBI was then bombarded by inquiries from journalists who tried to confirm or deny the allegations, and the bureau struggled to come up with a statement to debunk what it referred to as “rampant conspiracy theories.”

  [...]

  VICE News obtained dozens of internal FBI emails that provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the bureau managed the inquiries into Hastings’ death and the rare steps it took to shoot down claims that he was the target of a federal probe. The documents were turned over in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit VICE News jointly filed with Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in FOIA research.

  [...]

  That day, Eimiller also sent out an email to FBI special agents across the country under the subject line “Urgent Media Issue” and linked to a New York magazine report about the growing conspiracy theories surrounding Hastings’ death. She said the reports had attracted the interest of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice, and that FBI headquarters “would like to debunk growing conspiracy theory if possible (assuming that’s what it is).”

  “Has anyone’s division been contacted in relation to an FBI investigation that may have led to foul play in the car crash death Tuesday of reporter, Michael Hastings,” Eimiller wrote. “There are many reports on the Internet that Hastings was being investigated by the FBI. He died in a car accident in LA on Tuesday. Before his death, according to a tweet, he told others he worried he was the subject of an investigation. None of this is confirmed and the LAPD is reporting no foul play in car crash based on evidence. This is getting the attention of DOJ and the Director’s Office.”

Censorship

• A long list of sex acts just got banned in UK porn

  While the measures won’t stop people from watching whatever genre of porn they desire, as video shot abroad can still be viewed, they do impose severe restrictions on content created in the UK, and appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults.

Civil Rights

• ‘There were hundreds of us crying out for help’: the afterlife of the whistleblower

  In his former life, Dr Raj Mattu was an internationally recognised cardiologist. On course for a professorship in London, he nonetheless jumped at the chance to return to his home town of Coventry in 1997, to set up a medical school at Warwick University and help turn the large district Walsgrave hospital into a teaching facility. It was a choice he would live to regret.

• IGs form front line of war on waste and fraud, but weak links remain

  Allegations against top officials at the State Department were devastating and had to be suppressed, so the agency’s inspector general quickly obliged, delivering what amounted to a cover-up of a cover-up.

  What happened at the State Department is not unusual, recent disclosures show.

• Big Brother Watch supports campaign to limit pre-charge bail to 28 days

  Living in limbo with no indication as to when a charge may or may not be brought is a form of punishment in itself. The impact on a person’s day to day life, health and mental wellbeing is profound. Your life is simply put on hold with no right to appeal.

• Columnist Often Called ‘Racist’ Doesn’t Think Police Activists Should Use That Word

  Exhibit A is the fact that members of the audience at a conference laughed when NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton attributed the drop in New York City’s crime rate to “the cops.”

• THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE: An Interview with Peter Dale Scott for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio

  The following is a transcript of a recent interview conducted by Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. They sat down with noted author and scholar Peter Dale Scott to discuss his latest book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy. This wide-ranging discussion examines the “Deep State,” an evolving level of secret government separate from the elected government. Scott looks at the origins of the deep state, its communications and finances, and its involvement in landmark events, from the JFK assassination to Watergate, to September 11th and beyond.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Net neutrality essential to our democracy

  In May, HBO comedian John Oliver opened his segment on net neutrality by saying, “The cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.” He then delivered an incisive 13-minute monologue that was anything but boring, drawing more than 7 million views on YouTube. Indeed, as Oliver demonstrated so effectively, while net neutrality may seem like a dull subject, protecting it is essential to not only the future of the Internet, but also the future of our democracy.

• U.S. House subcommittee postpones hearing on net neutrality

  A key House panel has delayed a hearing on the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to write new Internet traffic rules aimed at assuring “net neutrality.”

  The U.S. House of Representatives Communications and Technology subcommittee had been expected on Dec. 10 to quiz all five FCC commissioners about so-called net neutrality rules that would regulate the how Internet service providers (ISPs) manage web traffic that travels through their networks.

• Net Neutrality: France Is Playing The Telcos’ Game

  Seven months after the historic vote in the European Parliament on Net neutrality, the Council of the European Union could soon bury this fundamental principle. While its inclusion in French law could be debated in the coming months, it is high time for the government to put an end to is doublespeak and supports an uncompromising defense of Net Neutrality in front of its European partners. However, in Brussels, the French government seems in tune with the lobbying of big telecom operators.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Linux holiday shopping guide

Traditionally, finding gifts for the Open Source-loving, Linux-running person in your life has not been terribly easy to accomplish. Not so this year. It seems the world is filled with Linux-powered gadgets and gizmos galore. What follows are my personal recommendations (ranging in price from $35 to well over $1,000) that, I feel, most Linux enthusiasts would be stoked to receive – and every single one is powered by one Linux-based system or another.

December 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Readers’ Choice

I love the Readers’ Choice issue. I jokingly say it’s because all the work is done by the community, but honestly, it’s because I love hearing the feedback from everyone. Year after year, I inevitably learn about a new technology or application, and I’m usually surprised by at least one of the voting results. It’s also an “unthemed” issue, which means our articles can be from any discipline in the Linux world. Welcome to the Readers’ Choice issue of Linux Journal.

Learn to reprogram your BigTrak in RasPi issue 5

Coolest Things You’ve Done with Linux

Friendship & the Linux Community

Linux is a global community…a quarrelsome community, I will give you that, but a community nonetheless. We are richer by many degrees for our links to each other within this community. We are friends within the Linux community. A community where real friendships do in fact begin.

Desktop

• Now crowdfunding: A laptop that protects your digital rights

  Do you have any idea what your laptop is doing deep down? Is there any way to find out? Usually, the answer is no. Anything could be in there, and as Edward Snowden’s revelations have disclosed, plenty of people in official positions want to make sure that “could be” becomes “is.”

  Until now, if you wanted a laptop where you or someone you trust could inspect all the source code needed to use it, you had to build it yourself. But a new crowdfunding campaign wants to make a laptop that’s designed to use open source software and comes with open source-licensed code to everything, even the firmware.

• The impact of the Linux philosophy

  All operating systems have a philosophy. And, the philosophy of an operating system matters. What is the Linux philosophy and how does it affect the community? How has it changed software development for the ages?

  Whether we know it or not, most of us have some sort of philosophy of life. It may be as simple as, “Be kind to others,” or it might be a very complex life philosophy.

• Google Chromebooks Outsell iPads in U.S. Schools

  Chromebooks from vendors such as Acer, HP, Samsung and Dell edged out iPads in sales to U.S. schools during the third quarter, according to new data from IDC.
  Google’s low-cost Chromebook laptops have for the first time overtaken Apple’s iPads in sales to U.S. schools.

Server

• Docker, Part 2: Whoa! Spontaneous industry standard! How did they do THAT?

  Today, Docker is powered by Libcontainer, rather than the more widespread LXC. The switch has some very real implications for the future of Docker, for its potential adoption and for its interaction with the community.

• Cavium Debuts 48-Core ARM Server Chip

  From an operating system perspective, Cavium’s MontaVista software division worked on optimizing its Linux distribution for the new ThunderX SoC. Chugh also noted that Cavium’s other distribution partners, including Canonical and Red Hat, have been working on enabling Linux on ThunderX.

Kernel Space

• Coreboot Ported To RISC-V Architecture

  Coreboot has now been ported to UC Berkeley’s RISC-V architecture and can at least work in an emulated environment.

• Graphics Stack

  • Nouveau On Mesa 10.5-devel Doesn’t Change Much

    Last week I ran benchmarks showing Intel HD Graphics having some changes with Mesa 10.5-devel Git and improvements with the AMD Gallium3D drivers. Rounding out the Mesa Git master tests, here’s some tests with the open-source NVIDIA graphics performance via Nouveau.

  • Nouveau Changes Queued For Linux 3.19, Adds Initial GM204 Support

    With David Airlie continuing to close the drm-next merge window early prior to the official N-1 kernel release, the open-source NVIDIA/Nouveau driver changes have now landed in Git.

  • Relative Pointer Motion Patches Published For Wayland’s Weston

    First person shooter gamers can rejoice that relative pointer motion is being worked out for Wayland’s Weston compositor.

Applications

• Heaptrack – A Heap Memory Profiler for Linux

  with a tingly feeling in my belly, I’m happy to announce heaptrack, a heap memory profiler for Linux. Over the last couple of months I’ve worked on this new tool in my free time. What started as a “what if” experiment quickly became such a promising tool that I couldn’t stop working on it, at the cost of neglecting my physics masters thesis (who needs that anyways, eh?). In the following, I’ll show you how to use this tool, and why you should start using it.

• zis: So very close to perfect

• Syncthing GTK Gets HTTPS Support, Syncthing Daemon Auto-Updater And More

  Syncthing GTK is a GTK3 & Python GUI for Syncthing, which includes a tray icon / Ubuntu AppIndicator. In case you’re not familiar with Syncthing, this is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go, similar to BitTorrent Sync. It can be used to synchronize files between computers however, unlike BitTorrent Sync, Syncthing is open source.

• yuxtapa: A good, old-fashioned ASCII deathmatch

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install GIMP 2.8.14 on Ubuntu

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 7 x86_64 (nginx, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3)

  • How to install and configure PrestaShop on Ubuntu 14.04

  • How to configure and Install Config Server Firewall & Login failure Daemon

  • The Easy Way to Keep Track of Multiple Time Zones in Ubuntu

  • What options exist for installing Linux on Windows 7?

  • Install & use Dropbox (cloud storage) in Ubuntu 14.04 / 14.10

  • How to display a changing output like top

  • DoS website with GoldenEye – Layer 7 DoS tool with KeepAlive NoCache

  • HOWTO Run Ubuntu GNOME as a Rolling Release

  • How To Install SLPhone 1.4.1 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, OpenSUSE 13.2, OpenSUSE 13.1 And Fedora 20

  • How To Install Google Chrome 39 (Stable) On Mageia, OpenMandriva And ROSA Desktop

  • How To Install KchmViewer 7.1.1 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kodi 14.0 RC On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kernel 3.16.7 CKT2 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kernel 3.18 RC7 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivatives

  • A simple way to install and configure puppet on CentOS 6

  • Intro to Enterprise Cloud Storage: How to Set Up a Cloudant Database

  • De-Chroming the Acer c720 Chromebook

  • Kadokawa Course Internet vol.2 “Open Source – composes Internet, evolution of software”

  • Introduction To Python *args and **kwargs For Beginners – Part 1

  • How To Install PostgreSQL 9.3 And phpPgAdmin In CentOS 7/6.5/6.4

  • How to use matplotlib for scientific plotting on Linux

  • How to build a cross-distro package with Limba

  • Ripping a whole CD on Linux

  • How to install ADB tools on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer

  • Installing Tomcat 8 on a CentOS 7 Linux VPS

  • Install an SSL certificate on a Linux VPS with the DirectAdmin control panel

• Games

  • zombies!: There’s always room for one more ASCII zombie game

  • TetriNET: The natural evolution of things

    And I suppose, if we reach all the way back to things like netships or vitetris or nettoe, or maybe even further back into the recesses of bsd-games, there are plenty of titles that were intended to take advantage of network connections, if not simultaneous multiplayer games.

  • Try Point-And-Click Platformer Prototype ‘Petrichor’ For Free

    Petrichor is something as odd as a point-and-click platformer. It’s an interesting game for sure, and it can be downloaded for Linux for free. The game is developed by Sundae Month; a student game development collective who aims to release a new game every month. Petrichor is their fourth game, and the most ambitious so far.

  • GOL Survey Results: November

    Looking at the results from this time and those from last time, most changes are within the 1-2% threshold, which could either mean that there are no changes and this is simply within the margin of error, or that changes will be very incremental and only observable with a few months of data. There are a couple of exceptions which I will cover here, but otherwise most will be left for trends once we have 4 or more surveys done and those changes become more meaningful. Otherwise, open up the old article and you can see the results side by side.

  • Let’s Play: Pro Evolution Soccer 2015

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE (in) Austria

  • Interview with Esfir Kanievska

    I guess it was back in 1999 or so, I just installed my first Photoshop ever. I had no clue what a graphic tablet is, so I grabbed the mouse to create my worst digital painting ever.

  • The QML State Machine

    The Qt 5.4 release is coming closer and it brings a whole lot of nice things: high DPI support, Qt WebChannel, and much more. One of these very cool, yet maybe slightly inconspicuous, new features is the QML State Machine. It brings a fully featured state machine to the QML world, which is a finite automaton consisting of states, transitions that define on which event to transit from one state to another, and event handlers that are called when a stated is left or entered.

  • Google Code-In 2014 is ON!

    Google Code-In 2014 just started and I chose KDE as my main organisation for the 3rd time I am on this contest. For those who are not familiar: GCI is an open-source development competition for students all around the world, held by Google every year. This year we have 12 organisations: Apertium, BRL-CAD, Copyleft Games, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, Mifos, OpenMRS, Sahana, Sugar Labs and Wikimedia Fundation. Everything there is around tasks, these do include:

Distributions

• Best distro of 2014 poll

  This poll will be open for two weeks. Do your best. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I will include your responses as a separate entry in my best distro article. I must tell you, in advance, that the result of this poll will not affect my own decision, but it will be quite interesting to see what you think, and whether our options coincide in some strange way. Now, off you go. See ya.

• Reviews

  • Living free with Trisquel GNU/Linux 7.0

    Trisquel’s system installer is essentially the same installer Ubuntu uses, but with a few minor changes to the appearance and some of the options. The installer asks us to select our preferred language and provides us with a link to view the distribution’s release notes. Next we are given the chance to download software updates while the installer is running. The following screen asks if we would like Trisquel to automatically divide up our hard disk for us or if we would like to manually partition our hard drive. Manual partitioning is quite straight forward and I found it easy to navigate the disk partitioning screen. Trisquel gives us the option of working with Btrfs, ext2/3/4, JFS and XFS file systems. I opted to install Trisquel on a Btrfs partition. While partitioning the disk we can also choose where to install the distribution’s boot loader. The following screen gets us to select our time zone from a map of the world. Then we confirm our keyboard’s layout and create a user account for ourselves. We can decide to encrypt the contents of our home directory. The installer copies its files to our hard drive and then asks us to reboot the computer.

• New Releases

  • Q4OS: Debian Stable with the Trinity Desktop Environment

    Q4OS is like Exe GNU/Linux a distribution using the Trinity desktop and based on Debian Stable. In fact I could have picked Exe as well for review but Q4OS just had a new release and it looks cleaner from the start. It was simply the novelty factor that pulled me towards it and it’s got a few nice touches of its own as we shall see. Version 0.5.20 was just released on 11/11/2014 and is available both for the mainstream 32 (i386) and 64-bit architectures. The images are a modest 314MB and 337MB respectively which makes for a speedy download and will definitely fit on your CD or even older USB sticks.

• Screenshots

  • Linux Lite 2.2

  • Manjaro Linux 0.8.11

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro 0.8.11 Ships A Linux 3.16 Based Arch Experience

    While Manjaro updates were dry the past few weeks, users can rejoice today that Manjaro 0.8.11 is now available as the latest version of this Arch Linux based distribution.

  • Manjaro 0.8.11 released!

    The Linux kernel used on the 0.8.11 installation media is the 3.16 series.

  • Manjaro 0.8.11 Has Arrived, Users Can Choose Between Systemd and OpenRC

    The final version of Manjaro Xfce 0.8.11, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been released and is now available for download.

• Red Hat Family

  • Marye Anne Fox to Leave Red Hat Board of Directors Next Summer

    For more than a decade, Fox has played an invaluable role on Red Hat’s Board of Directors, bringing passion, insights and wisdom to Red Hat and its shareholders.

  • CoreOS is building a container runtime, Rocket

    Rocket is a new container runtime, designed for composability, security, and speed. Today we are releasing a prototype version on GitHub to begin gathering feedback from our community and explain why we are building Rocket.

  • CoreOS issues its own open-source container technology, amid all the Docker hype

    CoreOS, a startup building a server operating system in the shadow of enterprise giants like Red Hat, has ridden the coattails of Docker and its trendy container technology for deploying and running applications. Now CoreOS has come out with its own standard.

  • CONTAINER WARS: CoreOS blasts Rocket rival at Docker

    CoreOS, the lightweight Linux distro based around Linux containers and Docker, will develop its own application container tech to compete against Docker.

  • Fedora

    • Who matters in the Server Working Group ? You do!

      At the last meeting Miloslav raised the issue that some people feel that not being a voting member of the working group is perceived as not having their opinion valued and may discourage participation. Luckily for us we have quite a few participants that didn’t get that nonexistent memo and are providing great contributions to the Fedora Server project.

• Debian Family

  • SSD adventures and fun times!

    In June, I bought a new laptop, and a new SSD for it. I used that model of SSD before (Samsung 840 Evo), although not for a long time, so I wasn’t expecting anything unusual.

    Since the laptop is a slower one, I installed Debian as follows: connect SSD to my workstation, do an install on it (via Virtualbox connected to the raw device), disconnect and install in the laptop. First sign of trouble was that the SSD didn’t boot reliably. I said – maybe my Virtualbox method (new method) wasn’t right – so I reinstalled on the laptop, and everything was mostly OK.

  • Debian Gets Forked

    A group of Debian developers have announced that they are forking the Debian source code to start a new Linux project, which they have dubbed Devuan (pronounced “DevOne” in English). The group, which calls itself the Veteran Unix Admin (VUA) collective, is alarmed about the drift of most major Linux distos toward the systemd service manager daemon. A service manager is the first process that starts on a Linux system, and it has the role of starting other processes. The init tool served as a universal service manager for Linux and for many Unix systems until recently, when several Linux vendors became concerned that the init code was too slow and not versatile enough for modern systems.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch for Mobile Devices Almost Ready

        Canonical still hasn’t finished “converging” Ubuntu Linux across PCs, servers, phones and tablets, but it’s now closer than ever with a new development release of Ubuntu Touch, which partners Meizu and Bq are using to build the open source mobile devices that should appear in the new year.

      • Unity 8 Has Received Improvements For Desktop Usage

        Now, Unity 8 looks pretty much like an oversized tablet, but Canonical has assured the Ubuntu fans that Unity 8 for desktop will not be a desktop optimized clone of Ubuntu Touch’s Unity 8, but a more modern Unity 7-like interface.

      • CompuLab launches Utilite2: Tiny ARM-based Ubuntu/Android PC

        CompuLab is updating its Utilite line of tiny, low-power desktop computers. The new Utilite2 is 30 percent smaller than last year’s Utilite. But the company says the new model offers up to twice the performance, thanks to a more powerful processor.

      • Tiny mini-PC boasts quad-core Cortex-A15 SoC

        CompuLab unveiled a second-gen Ubuntu and Android ready Utilite2 mini-PC based on a quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600, that shrinks to 3.4 x 3.4 x 1.1 inches.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 394

      • Fanless Android/Linux ”desktop” pairs Snapdragon quad with mSATA storage

        Embedded PC maker CompuLab has created a tiny Linux “desktop” based on ARM hardware. The Utilite2 crams a Snapdragon SoC along with a surprising selection of goodies into a die-cast aluminum chassis that measures just 3.4″ x 3.4″ x 1.1″. Linaro-based Linux builds will support the machine, which will also be offered with a Google Play-approved version Android 4.4.3 KitKat.

      • UbuTab: An Ubuntu Tablet With A Terabyte Hard Drive

        The UbuTab is an Ubuntu tablet that was announced last week as a “1TB Ubuntu tablet for media lovers.” Nearly all consumer tablets ship with solid-state storage but the UbuTab is packing in a 7mm thick 1TB spinning hard drive for offering the greater storage capacity at a reasonable price.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Hands-on with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE

          The final rease of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE was announced this weekend. I have picked up both versions, and I have installed them on a number of computers around here, with both legacy (MBR) and UEFI boot. The results have been very good, as expected.

          As anyone who has been around Linux much probably knows, Linux Mint (numbered) is derived from Ubuntu. However, starting with Mint 17 the releases no longer track the latest Ubuntu releases. Mint is now based on the Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases and will update their own distribution as they see fit.

          That means that although Ubuntu recently released 14.10, this Mint release is still based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and the new Mint numbering system indicates that (this is 17.1, not 18), although the name change is a bit contrary to that (17.1 is called Rebecca rather than Q…, but I guess Q-names are not easy to come up with.

        • Setting up Linux Mint 17.1 for the first time

          Given a choice between a DVD disc and a USB stick, I’d go with the USB option. Mint, and any other operating system, will install and run much faster from it.

        • Linux Mint 17.1 released

          The final release of Linux Mint 17.1 is now available to download. You can opt for the Cinnamon or MATE versions of Linux Mint 17.1, depending on which desktop you prefer to use. MATE now has support for the Compiz window manager, and Cinnamon has had numerous improvements including performance tweaks and additional polish.

        • Systemd to Free BSDs, Mint 17.1, and Coolest Things

          Today was another busy day in Linuxland. Linux Mint 17.1 was released over the weekend and a couple of reviews have emerged already. Katherine Noyes says some Linuxers are thinking of heading towards the free *BSDs and Shawn Powers has a list of some of the coolest things folks do with Linux. Jasper St. Pierre explains what’s wrong with package managers and Dedoimedo.com is running a best distro of 2014 poll. Ian Sullivan explains how to “De-Chrome” laptops and Bryan Lunduke has a holiday shopping guide.

        • Linux Top 3: Linux Mint 17.1 Goes GA, Fedora 21 Goes RC, Devuan Forks Debian

          Linux Mint has emerged in recent years to become one of the most popular Linux distributions, thanks in no small part to its focus on creating the best possible desktop experience for users.

        • Linux Mint Project Releases Mint 17.1

Devices/Embedded

• Tiny i.MX6 COM and dev kit offer triple camera inputs

  E-con released a Linux-friendly i.MX6 based COM with optional eMMC, WiFi, BLE, Ethernet, and -40 to 85°C support, plus a dev kit with triple camera inputs.

• New FUZE Tribute Special Edition

  The FUZE is an all-in-one computing workstation that houses the Raspberry Pi and comes with the easy-to-learn FUZE BASIC language and electronic components (LEDs, buttons, a light sensor, resistors, etc). Fun and simple to use for both parents and children.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Introduction to Tizen IVI Webinar

      Do you want to learn more about the exciting world of Tizen IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment)? As part of their webinar series, Geoffroy Van Cutsem from Intel’s Open Source Technology Center presents a Tizen IVI session. In this 40-minute session Geoffroy discusses some of the challenges for the automotive industry such as multi-user requirements and security. You can learn how Tizen IVI addresses Automotive requirements, Architecture overview, Tizen IVI roadmap and more.

  • Android

    • Google Nexus 6 review: A larger Moto X with fewer Motorola enhancements

      The Nexus 6 is the best Nexus ever and for once a Nexus device is not lacking in any specification. The price reflects the high-end nature of the Nexus 6, but the competition in the Android marketplace is also much stiffer than it was in the past. I still need to use the Nexus 6 a bit more with my T-Mobile SIM to convince myself it isn’t the device for me. I enjoy large screen smartphones, but find other offerings to be more compelling.

    • Android’s Material Design reaches into Linux

      A new OS has been proposed, based on Linux and Android’s Material Design specifications. Jack Wallen opens up his hat of supposition to imagine the possibilities this platform could bring to life.

    • Jack And Jill Are Google’s New Compilers For Android App Developers

      Android has gone through quite a few changes during its short 6 years of life. The Android that drives most of the world’s smartphones of today would be almost unrecognizable to what was launched in late 2008. We’ve seen massive visual changes, expansion to almost every conceivable form factor, and a completely fleshed-out content ecosystem for multimedia and apps. As the operating system matured, some elements have successfully grown with it, and others have become dead weight. Naturally, progress calls for the replacement of those pieces that haven’t scaled well. We’ve seen an excellent example of this when ART came to replace Dalvik as the standard Android runtime. With the release of Lollipop, a similar project emerged that promises to replace a part of the existing app development toolchain with a pair of new compilers called Jack and Jill.

    • Google Glass will return in 2015 with Intel inside, says WSJ

      2015 will see Google launch a new model of its Glass headset, which will be powered by an Intel chip and offer longer battery life than the current Explorer Edition, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google Glass has already been through a couple of small iterative upgrades — one to add compatibility with prescription lenses and another to double the RAM — but the shift to a new processor could signal a more thorough overhaul of the entire wearable.

    • The Android 5.0 Lollipop Review

      Google has been very busy with their expansion of Android as a platform this year. At Google IO we saw the announcement of endeavors like Android TV and Android Auto. But the stars of the show were a preview of the next version of Android, code named Android L, and Google’s new Material Design principles for interface design across all of their products. In the years since Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich released, we’ve seen the launch of Jellybean and KitKat, but both of these versions were very iterative improvements upon 4.0 and had equally iterative version numbers with Jellybean being major versions 4.1 through 4.3 and KitKat being 4.4. Lollipop is given the major version number of 5.0, and it’s quite fitting as it’s arguably the biggest advancement to Android in a long time. It comes with an entirely new interface based on Material Design, a new application runtime, and many new features that I could not hope to summarize in this paragraph.

    • More Android Apps Arriving for Chrome OS and Chromebooks

      Just a few years ago, before Android marched to its dominant position in the mobile market, there was much speculation that Google might merge Chrome OS and Android. Early last year, I wrote a post on why that won’t happen.

      However, an interesting corollary trend is now appearing. Following an initial round of Android apps that can run on Chrome OS, more and more are arriving. The news was announced on a Chrome G+ page, bringing the total number of apps available across Chrome and Android to more than 40.

    • Android Devices Driving Shipment Volumes, iOS Drives Revenues

      Llamas noted Apple does not appear to have a huge play in the low-end of the market like Android, and until it does, the main battle for Apple is at the high-end of the market.

Why Open Leadership Has Become Essential

Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, “a community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software,” took me through his thoughts on those principles during a conversation at the HATCH experience.

10 Open Source Security Tools from Google, Facebook, Netflix and Cisco

Choice has long been a defining feature of the world of free and open source software, and the constellation of options only gets bigger every year. Often it’s brand-new projects causing the increase, but sometimes the growth happens in another way, when tools that were developed for a company’s internal use get opened up for all the world to see, use and improve.

That, in fact, is just what has been happening lately on a grand scale in the security arena, where numerous major companies have been opting to open the doors to their own, in-house tools. Google, Facebook and Netflix are all among the companies taking this approach lately, and it’s changing the security landscape significantly.

SD Times blog: Surveys show open source makes for faster secure development

One of the things we see a lot of here at SD Times is surveys. It’s a great idea for your company to survey its customers, and the resulting information can be really useful—not just to your company, but to those of us who track the industry and its trends.

Thus, I was fairly disturbed by the results of a recent survey by Mendix that found that enterprise developers are having a very hard time giving the business folks what they’ve asked for. Gottfried Sehringer, vice president of marketing at Mendix, painted a fairly bleak picture of the state of enterprise development.

Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

Open-source software plays an increasingly prominent role in many areas of modern business IT – it’s in servers, databases and even the cloud. Vendors like Red Hat, Canonical and others have managed to graft open-source principles onto a profitable business model. The former company became the first open-source-centered business with $1 billion in annual revenue in 2012.

Why change is hard for any open source community

A lightning talk recap about how the Apache Foundation has always done things a certain way at ApacheCon Budapest by Rich Bowen.

As you know, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has a number of open mottos that we like to use. Like, “Community Over Code,” and “No Jerks Allowed.” Another popular motto recently has been “We’ve Always Done It That Way.”

Gngr Begins Open-Sourcing Their Web Browser Code

When Gngr was originally announced as a privacy-minded web browser, they said the code would be opened up after the initial release. In the past few days though, some of the Gngr components are being published on GitHub.

8 ways to contribute to open source without writing code

Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits. Put another way, “If you don’t make commits for a project you are not contributing to it.” Or so they say. That notion is far from the truth in my eyes. Let me tell you why.

Nginx 1.7.8 Updates Open-Source Web Server

Today a new incremental version of nginx was released with the 1.7.8 milestone update.

Stephen Hawking unveils ‘life changing’ new voice technology in London

Intel said they planned to make the system open-source and free for users.

Intel reinvents Stephen Hawking’s voice systems and will open source the software

Stephen Hawking’s speech software goes open source for disabled

Stephen Hawking’s new speech system is free and open-source

Events

• Zenoss Survey Shows the Momentum of Open Source Clouds

  There is now no question that countless IT departments are turning to open source cloud computing platforms instead of proprietary ones. Several recent roundups of survey results have illustrated that, and I recently covered cloud survey results from IDG Enterprise here.

• Defining Software Defined Networking: Part 1

  Over the next several weeks we will run a seven-part series about software defined networking (SDN). The stories serve as education resources and as a way to help better understand what SDN means to people developing and managing new stack infrastructures.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 34 Brings Its Improved Search Bar, Firefox Hello

    First off, Firefox 34 is the release that switches to Yahoo as the default search engine for US users. This experience also comes with a new search bar experience. For Firefox users in other parts of the world, you may experience a new search provider too.

  • Firefox 34 Makes It Official: Google Is Out, Yahoo Is In

    Firefox 34, which includes eight security fixes, is the first version since Mozilla announced it was dropping Google for Yahoo as its default search engine.

SaaS/Big Data

• Report: Hortonworks Sets Terms for Hadoop-Centric IPO

  Hortonworks, the company focused on Big Data crunching platform Hadoop, has been much in the news lately regarding plans for an initial public offering (IPO) for its shares. Now, according to a post by Renaissance Capital on the NASDAQ site, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has announced plans to raise $78 million by offering 6 million shares at a price range of $12 to $14. “At the midpoint of the proposed range, Hortonworks would command a fully diluted market value of $659 million,” notes the post.

• Cloudius Touts Open Source OSv for Container Virtualization Optimization

  Would containerized virtualization à la Docker work better if it didn’t depend on the Linux kernel? That’s the question startup Cloudius Systems is asking as it promotes OSv, a competing open source operating system designed specifically for the cloud. (Hint: Its answer is “Yes.”)

• Maximizing the performance of your enterprise cloud

• Who’s who of OpenStack, solving operators’ problems, and more

• Survey: OpenStack Dominates Open Source Cloud

  Open source is becoming an increasingly attractive option for companies in the cloud, or planning on moving to it. And of those companies, a clear choice has emerged as their No. 1 option: OpenStack.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• On Document Sharing and Ignorance

  Fortunately for them, with the impending migration to LibreOffice, their problem will soon be solved … but they don’t know.

CMS

• What’s New in December for Open Source CMS

  It’s a big day for Skien, Norway-based eZ Systems, which released the latest version of its flagship open source content management system this morning.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • 5 Open Source Business Intelligence Tools

    It’s impossible to imagine making good business decisions without the right information to back up the decision making process. Business intelligence (BI) tools help by making it easy to extract and understand the information that you need from the mass of business data that you collect and store. In other words, they can help turn piles of data into meaningful insights that help you run your business.

Funding

• Open source Hadoop distributor Hortonworks sets terms for $78 million IPO

  Hortonworks, which develops and supports open source distribution of Apache Hadoop for enterprises, announced terms for its IPO on Monday. The Palo Alto, CA-based company plans to raise $78 million by offering 6 million shares at a price range of $12 to $14. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Hortonworks would command a fully diluted market value of $659 million.

BSD

• Is It Time to Give BSD a Try?

  It’s never easy to stand by and watch a relationship in trouble, but that’s just how things have been feeling here in the Linux blogosphere of late.

• How did you get into BSD?

  We’ve got a fun idea for the holidays this year: just like we ask during the interviews, we want to hear how all the viewers and listeners first got into BSD. Email us your story, either written or a video version, and we’ll read and play some of them for the Christmas episode. You’ve got until December 17th to send them in (that’s when we’re prerecording).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 21 new GNU releases!

Project Releases

• QEMU 2.2 Is Planned For Release Later This Week

  QEMU 2.2 is due out on Friday while out now is 2.2-rc4.

Public Services/Government

• Limerick Finds FLOSS Is The Right Way To Do IT

Openness/Sharing

• Tin Whiskers Brewery bucks the trend of secret recipes

  If there’s one business that values secrecy it’s brewing beer. Most breweries hold their cards very close to their chests. They keep their recipes and techniques away from the prying eyes of competitors to retain a competitive advantage.

• Nature makes all articles free to view

  All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

• Bill Gates and the True Nature of Open Access

  ReadCube is available for Windows, Macintosh and the iPhone – but not GNU/Linux, so this is a retrograde step purely in terms of platforms: PDFs may be clunky, but at least they can be read on most systems. And of course, in order to prevent people from downloading or printing a paper, ReadCube wraps PDFs with DRM. Again, that is making publishing less open than it is now. It also shuts out the visually-impaired, who will be unable to use their screen-readers if the files are locked up in a proprietary format on the ReadCube site: that’s a huge kick in the teeth for a community that has enough problems to content with.

• The WASP Resurrection System Provides an Open Source Stop and Save System for 3D Printers

  Living in Florida, we experience thunderstorms on a daily basis in the summertime. Literally our power goes out for a few seconds at a time and this happens at least a few times a week. This makes running a 3D printer during the months of May, June, July, August and September almost impossible, unless you have it hooked up to a battery backup. Even then, there are times when the power is out longer than that battery can handle. Up until now, there really has not been a reliable method to recover a print job if the power running that 3D printer were to go out.

Programming

• Network clock examples

  Way back in 2006, Andy Wingo wrote some small scripts for GStreamer 0.10 to demonstrate what was (back then) a fairly new feature in GStreamer – the ability to share a clock across the network and use it to synchronise playback of content across different machines.

• Why developers love and hate PHP

  PHP, the venerable server-side scripting language, is famous for its use in Web development. First released in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, it has been leveraged by the likes of WordPress and Facebook and reportedly is used in 82 percent of websites whose server-side programming language is known, according to W3Techs. The language is slightly behind Java in the PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, and it ranks sixth in the rival Tiobe index. A high-performing upgrade, PHP 7, is due in 2015.

• Google’s Go 1.5 To Feature Many Improvements

  The updates due for Google’s Go 1.5 programming language implementation are aplenty and should better position this promising language.

• New features in Git 2.2.0

Standards/Consortia

• Now HTML 5 is finished, W3C boss Jeff Jaffe discusses what comes next

  The development of HTML 5 has been the major driver for web standards for the past five years or so, and it was finally sent as a Recommendation to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the end of October. Does that mean it’s finished and done with? If so, what comes next?

Science

• That Takeout Coffee Cup May Be Messing With Your Hormones

  Most people know that some plastics additives, such as bisphenol A (BPA), may be harmful to their health. But an upcoming study in the journal Environmental Health finds that entire classes of plastics—including the type commonly referred to as styrofoam and a type used in many baby products—may wreak havoc on your hormones regardless of what additives are in them.

Health/Nutrition

• Toiletry chemicals linked to testicular cancer and male infertility cost EU millions, report says

  Nordic Council calls on EU to ban damaging compounds found in household products that cost millions due to their harmful impact on male reproductive health

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

Finance

• Black Friday Now Just Another Opportunity to Mock the Poor

  But O’Neil has a point, and it’s one that irks me as well. It’s similar to my irkitude over loyalty cards. Some of this, I’ll admit, is just my own personal brand of curmudgeonliness, but mainly it’s because the discounts they provide have become so damn big in recent years. For me, loyalty cards are optional if I feel like being cranky about it, but most people no longer have that luxury. If you’re living on a working-class income, you flatly can’t afford to give up a 10 or 15 percent discount on your food every week. You have to fork over your loyalty card number, and that means everything you buy is sliced, diced, tracked, and sold to every marketer in the world. Don’t like it? If you’re poor, that’s tough. Your privacy is no longer even an option.

• Full Show: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy

  From luxury skyscrapers — taller, more expensive and exclusive than ever before — the dark shadows of plutocracy are spreading across the commons of democracy.

• Report: ‘FIN4′ hackers are gaming markets by stealing insider info

  Cybercriminals have been discovered hacking more than 100 companies to access insider information about mergers and other business deals that could affect stock prices.

  The group, dubbed “FIN4” in a report from the cybersecurity company FireEye, is targeting top executives, lawyers, consultants and others with private information about mergers and acquisitions, especially in the health-care and pharmaceuticals industries.

• Lawyers targeted in sophisticated email hack attack seeking insider-trading info, consultant says

  Often, attempts to get email recipients to click on bogus links are easily recognized because of grammar and spelling errors or ridiculous claims about vast sums of money a stranger is seeking the recipient’s financial backing to obtain.

  But that isn’t true of a year-long scheme to hack into the email of health-care industry executives, general counsel, corporate law firms, scientists and others likely to know of information that could affect the price of stock in pharmaceutical companies, a security consultant says.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rusbridger The Worst Editor in the World Part 97

  One war criminal writing about another. Nice chums you have, Rusbridger*.

• Having Their Hate and Defeating Dems Too: At Fox News Latino, immigrants go from target to target audience

  The anti-immigrant reporting of Fox News Channel (FNC) comes as no surprise, considering that its viewership is similar to the base of the Republican Party—older white conservatives. The growing Latino share of the population, however, spurred the creation of the website Fox News Latino (FNL) to try to capture this audience.

• For Fox News, ‘Bad Guy’ Michael Brown Makes Obama a ‘Three-Time Loser’

  It wouldn’t surprise anyone to find out that the Fox News Channel’s coverage of Michael Brown killing was awful. But the night of the announcement of the grand jury decision (11/25/14), it was especially bad.

Censorship

• “Right To Be Forgotten”: Privacy Watchdogs Turning Censors of the Net

  “The guidelines published by European privacy watchdogs underline the serious issues raised by the EU Court of Justice decision of the right to de-indexation. The Right To Be Dereferenced puts in jeopardy freedom of expression and access to information. By entrusting search engines and administrative authorities with the responsibility to arbitrate between the right to privacy and freedom of speech, the Court’s decision worsens the dangerous drift towards an extra-judiciary regulation of the Internet. Now, these guidelines sanctify this decline of the Rule of Law rather than inviting the legislator to clarify the law in order to strike an appropriate balance between privacy and freedom of expression. If nothing is done, the CNIL (French DPA) will condone private censorship of the Internet, increasing confusion of roles created by the recent law on terrorism1, which already gives it authority over the administrative blocking of websites.” said Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

Privacy

• MegaSync Your Cloud Data for True Internet Privacy

  You may recall, the take down of Kim Dot Com’s MegaUpload by the U.S. Government. Kim Dot Com said it was “a death sentence without a trial”.

  Mega with MegaSync client changes all that.

  Now, Mega can reliably claim what is legally termed ‘plausible deniability’ for what clients store on their site, by virtue of how this method of encryption works.

• Privacy as Innovation Interview

  A recent inter­view I gave while in Stock­holm to the Pri­vacy as Innov­a­tion pro­ject:

• Keynote at Internetdagarna, Stockholm, November 2014

• Microsoft Buys Email App Acompli For $200M, Will Still Support Gmail And Other Competitors

  Just before Thanksgiving here in the U.S., a Microsoft blog post accidentally leaked the company’s intention to buy mobile email application Acompli. Though the blog post itself was pulled down, the URL still revealed the forthcoming acquisition. Today, the two companies are officially confirming the news, with the Acompli team of around two dozen joining Microsoft as a part of a $200 million+ deal.

• Lions, Tigers, Bears, and FBI Warnings, Oh My!

  It really has grown to a fever pitch lately.

  What stuck in my craw today was a Bloomberg report Exclusive: FBI warns of ‘destructive’ malware attack in the wake of the SONY attack.

  Like, I should be mortified maybe? Do these ‘brainiacs’ remember StuxNet?

  Would it help to revisit the topic? I’d rather not, thank you very much. Please feel free to read the Wikipedia link on the subject.

  It was the perfect road-side billboard if there ever was for why Microsoft Legacy (x86) Windows should be abandoned on grounds of National Security.

  Sadly, the software industry hasn’t changed and quite frankly isn’t going to as long as ‘big business’ is married to a security-flawed ‘by design’ operating system.

Civil Rights

• Iranian Opportunity

  Iran has undoubtedly improved, but remains a theocratic state with an appalling human rights record, where the persecution of gays is particularly horrifying. There are only two countries in the world with systems of government so appalling as to have seats reserved for clerics in the legislature. One is Iran. The other is the United Kingdom.

• Social media T&Cs branded as ‘meaningless drivel’

  Its report on the responsible use of social media data, published today, has condemned internet companies for making users sign up to long, incomprehensible legal contracts and calls for an internationally recognised standard or kitemark to identify sites with clear terms and conditions.

• If You Don’t Mind A Little Perjury, You Can Convict Two People For The Same Crime

  So, the police had a suspect convicted for this burglary. And the corroborating video showed that Greenlee performed the criminal act on her own. But that wasn’t enough. They brought charges against Smith “for committing the same December 19 burglary of the Dollar General store.”

  This double-charging obviously presented an issue. The state prosecutor’s case hinged on Greenlee’s testimony, something that (a) contradicted her previous testimony during her guilty plea and (b) the surveillance recording of the incident. None of that deterred the state from attempting to achieve the impossible. The state prosecutor warned the jury that it was going to have to come to terms with the fact that the State was willing to use perjury to achieve its goal of putting two people in jail for the same criminal act. Of course, it worded it a bit differently.

• Brazen Young Facebook Pimpette Nabbed By Police After She Bragged About Her Crimes On Facebook

  I’m always amazed at how often social media plays a role in the attempted exploits of dumb criminals. Whether it’s posing with the merchandise they recently stole, posting a video of the crime itself, or sharing the police’s bulletin seeking their arrest, our idiot bad guys just seem to love posting dumb stuff to Facebook in particular. But even correcting for a younger criminal, it’s difficult not to judge someone unbelievably stupid in the era of online surveillance when they elect to run their underage prostitution ring on Facebook and coordinate their illicit business via Facebook’s messaging app.

• Police arrest 2 teens for prostitution ring

  Venice police arrested a second teenager in a prostitution ring going around three Sarasota County high schools.

  Police say the ring leaders were a 17-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy.

• St. Louis Police Claim It’s Their ‘First Amendment’ Rights Not To Protect Football Players Who Supported Protestors

  It’s been pretty obvious that law enforcement in the St. Louis area has a rather tenuous grasp on the concept of the First Amendment. Obviously, they’ve done a fairly terrible job recognizing the right to “peaceably assemble” for quite some time, even having a court declare its “5 second rule” approach unconstitutional. They’ve also ignored the freedom of the press by repeatedly arresting journalists. And, remember, the local prosecutor has claimed that it was really all those people speaking out on social media who were to blame.

• U.N. investigators urge Obama to release CIA report

• ‘Being homeless is better than working for Amazon’

  I am homeless. My worst days now are better than my best days working at Amazon.

  According to Amazon’s metrics, I was one of their most productive order pickers – I was a machine, and my pace would accelerate throughout the course of a shift. What they didn’t know was that I stayed fast because if I slowed down for even a minute, I’d collapse from boredom and exhaustion.

  During peak season, I trained incoming temps regularly. When that was over, I’d be an ordinary order picker once again, toiling in some remote corner of the warehouse, alone for 10 hours, with my every move being monitored by management on a computer screen.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Net neutrality: Five myths, and the real facts

  Regardless of where you stand on the net neutrality debate, one thing doesn’t help: misleading or confusing statements. Unfortunately there are plenty of them.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Kim Dotcom Plans U.S. Internet Party After New Zealand Failure

    “I’m not a pirate. I’m not a fugitive. I’m not a flight risk,” Dotcom tweeted today. “I’m your Internet freedom fighter and Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016.”

  • Kim Dotcom Announces United States Political Party

    Kim Dotcom will launch a political party in the United States next year. Run by American citizens, Internet Party US will feature “celebrity founders” from the music, movie and Internet sectors. Dotcom will be its PR man and is already warning that “Hillary” faces her “worst nightmare” in 2016.

  • US Efforts to Jail Dotcom Fail as Kim Walks Free

    Efforts by the United States government to have Kim Dotcom put back behind bars have failed. Arguments that the Megaupload founder poses a flight risk ahead of his extradition battle next summer were rejected by the Auckland District Court and the entrepreneur walked away a free man.

  • Kim Dotcom at liberty after US copyright corps lose court battle

    KIM DOTCOM remains at liberty despite the best efforts of the copyright corps and cops to strip him of his possessions and right to roam.

    Dotcom admitted that he is personally stoney broke thanks to a combination of legal fees and sanctions.

    The Mega business is still running, but is in the hands of his family, and Dotcom said that his finances have been eviscerated by a legal team that, from the sounds of it, did some work and then swaggered off in their alligator shoes when the money ran out.

  • Eagles Sue Concert Footage Archivist Over Bootleg Performances

    Glenn Frey and Don Henley seek the Shelley Archives’ entire vault after theatrical showing of unlicensed Eagles footage

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.18-rc7: Linux 3.18 Final Likely In One Week

  Linus did his 3.18-rc7 release just minutes ago. Activity surrounding Linux 3.18 is beginning to calm down although the nasty lockup issue still has yet to be solved. Linus noted in today’s announcement that the lockups appear either due to watchdog and possibly RCU code — and that the issue also still seems present for Linux 3.17.

• Linux 3.18-rc7

  Things are calming down nicely, and everything looks pretty normal.
  In fact, if it wasn’t for the pending issues with odd watchdog (and
  possibly rcu) lockups I’d be pretty happy. As it is, that isn’t a
  regression from 3.17, but is still very disturbing.

  At the same time, with the holidays coming up, and the problem _not_
  being a regression, I suspect that what will happen is that I’ll
  release 3.18 on time in a week, because delaying it will either mess
  up the merge window and the holiday season, or I’d have to delay it a
  *lot*.

  We’ll see. Maybe DaveJ will be able to bisect it a bit now that the
  false lead of “3.17 was ok” has been shown to be wrong (right now it
  looks like the problem seems to have crept in between 3.16 and 3.17).

  Annoying, because as mentioned, other than that we seem to be doing
  well. The rc7 patch looks very normal, with two thirds being drivers
  (spread all over: usb, networking, staging, thermal, gpu, sound..) and
  half of the remaining being arch updates (mostly mips, arm, powerpc).
  The remaining is mainly networking and some filesystem fixes (nfsd and
  btrfs).

  Linus

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 10.4 Brings Performance Improvements & New Features

    Mesa 10.4 is being released as soon as next week and continuing in usual tradition this new version brings a lot of exciting changes for users of the open-source Linux hardware graphics drivers.

  • Mesa 10.4 Release Candidate 3 Is Here For Weekend Testing

    Emil Velikov has released the third weekly release candidate to Mesa 10.4 that’s expected to be officially released in December.

  • Intel Has Last Round Of DRM Changes For Linux 3.19, Starts Dropping DRI1/UMS

    The Linux 3.19 kernel that’s a few weeks out still from officially being under development is quite heavy on the changes.

• Benchmarks

  • Fedora 21 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 Performance Benchmarks

    With the official Fedora 21 release due out soon and the release candidate being available this weekend, I ran some basic performance benchmarks comparing the speed of Fedora 21 64-bit to that of Ubuntu 14.10 on an Intel Xeon workstation.

    Fedora 21 Workstation was compared to Ubuntu 14.10 using the x86_64 version of each and maintaining the default settings. Fedora 21 is shipping with the Linux 3.17 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.14.2, X.Org Server 1.16.2, Mesa 10.3.3, and GCC 4.9.2. The package versions this time around aren’t too far off from the Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn release from back in November with the main change being the use of the Linux 3.16 kernel.

Applications

• 8 Linux Microsoft Paint Alternatives

  As part of the KDE desktop, KolourPaint looks much like the versions of MS Paint that would have been released with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

• curses-of-the-undead: Your 3D zombie apocalypse in ASCII

• text-text-revolution: You can see where this is going

• zapm: Cyberroguelike, part 1

• PRIME: Cyberroguelike, part 2

• scribble: Shall we play a game?

• roflbalt: ASCII action, at its finest

• oldrunner: Aiming for pixel-perfect

• gpcslots1: A portrait of the artist as a young man

• Why Package Managers are not my Ideal Software Distribution Mechanism

  Package managers aren’t magic, they’re a set of well-understood technical tools, with tradeoffs and limitations like every other system out there. I hope we can move past our differences, recognize issues in existing technology, and build something great together.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install xCache on a CentOS 7 VPS

  • How to install Gerrit2 on a CentOS 7 Linux VPS

  • Install GitLab on a CentOS Linux VPS with Nginx and MySQL

  • Install WordPress using SVN on a CentOS 7 VPS

  • How To Install Pidgin 2.10.10 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • What is a good free control panel for VPS

  • How To Install Haroopad 0.12.2 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Linspeed 1.0 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Otter Browser 0.9.0.3 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Fedora How-To: End Unresponsive Applications with Xkill

• Aping Microsoft

  • Wine 1.7.32 Brings New Mono Engine, Fix for Blizzard Updater, and More

    A new version of Wine (Wine is not an emulator), 1.7.32, has been released and is now available for download. The devs have made a number of very important improvements, including to the Mono engine, which has been updated.

  • Wine 1.7.32 Updates Its Mono Engine

  • ReactOS Lands Its New Explorer Shell

    ReactOS, the open-source OS that’s long been striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications and drivers, has landed its new explorer shell as a Thanksgiving present.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Introducing KWayland::Server

    A few weeks ago I blogged about the new KWayland module in our workspace modules. Back then I also mentioned the server component of KWayland and that it’s not part of the 5.1 release. Yesterday I finally committed a change to install the library and the header so that starting with Plasma 5.2 the server component is also available. This is a good point in time to explain what the server library is and what can be done with it.

  • Last two weeks in Krita — and development builds!

  • Table View and Report Barcodes junior jobs

    Kexi has improved quite a bit since the last time, especially in Reports. We’re close to supplementary 2.8.7 release within Calligra, then 2.9 will follow and Qt5/KF5-based 3.0 with a shiny mask.

  • Building and Running KDE Pairs

  • Quantum OS Aims For A Linux Desktop With QML, Wayland & Material Design

    Quantum OS (formerly known as Quartz OS for a brief time) is a new Linux distribution mostly focused around providing a clean, very attractive desktop experience. This latest Linux desktop project is focused on providing a Qt5-based desktop that complies with Google’s Material Design concepts.

Distributions

• Screenshots

  • Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Screenshot Tour

  • Linux Mint 17.1 MATE Screenshot Tour

• Arch Family

  • Arch-Based Manjaro Users Express Concern Over Update Strategy

    While I’ve ran benchmarks of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution in the past and found it a convenient way to play with Arch and overall a nice distribution, it seems for users running it day in and day out aren’t entirely satisfied with the update strategy of Manjaro.

• Red Hat Family

  • Social media for slackers

    In this lightning talk presentation, Rikki tells us some of the tips and tricks she’s learned from running social media over the last six years. One example, be sure to share relevant, interesting, and accurate information.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 Release Candidate 1 Awaits Your Testing

    • Customize Fedora’s Out-of-the-Box Experience

• Debian Family

  • On being excellent to each other

    The thing I personally find the most annoying is when someone thinks what someone else says is inappropriate and says so, it seems like the inevitable response is to scream censorship. When people do that, I’m pretty sure they don’t know what the word censorship actually means. Debian/Ubuntu/Insert Project Name Here resources are not public spaces and no government is telling people what they can and can’t say.

  • Systemd 217 Updated In Debian & Soon Making Its Way To Ubuntu 15.04

    Users of Debian and its derivatives can soon expect to find systemd 217.

    Systemd 217 brings many features and is currently the latest systemd stable release. Systemd 217 brought its experimental user console daemon, support for job timeouts, logind enhancements, udev updates, KDBUS handling improvements, and a plethora of other work.

  • Debian, Ubuntu Touch & More…

    This week, Bruce Byfield used his blog to talk about Debian’s place in Linuxland. He points out that of the 285 distros on Distrowatch, 132 are based on Debian and 67 on Ubuntu. What this means, if I understand how Mr. Byfield is slicing the cake, is that there are 199 distros based on Debian, since all Ubuntu derivatives are based on Debian by proxy.

  • Devuan: Debian Without Systemd

    Last month we wrote about a group of administrations planning to fork Debian GNU/Linux over not liking its direction due to adopting systemd over Upstart or SysVInit. The Debian administrators have made good on their word and announced the Devuan fork of Debian.

  • systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

    The vivid difference of opinion over Debian’s future direction has ended with a new fork of the Linux distribution.

    The dispute centred on plans to replace the sysvinit init system management toolkit with systemd, a similar but less-Linux-specific set of tools.

  • Debian Forks as Stormy Seas Lie Ahead.

  • Derivatives

    • Simply put, silence is golden

      Simply put, it isn’t. To look at our standing on Distrowatch, ranging from the teens to the mid-40s, we are still viable; remarkably viable for a distro with a community of its size. Again, Debian 8 Jessie just froze: Once the 1,100 or so bugs are worked out of Debian 8 Jessie and it is released to the world, there will be a CrunchBang 12 Janice somewhere along the line.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Touch to Receive Offiline GPS Navigation App Soon

        One of the things that Ubuntu Touch will definitely need once it’s launched on mobile devices is a solid navigation app and modRana seems to be the first that will make it.

      • Meizu To Launch Ubuntu Phones By Early Next Year

        Ubuntu OS doesn’t really have that much of a presence in the smartphone market even though ROMs have been released for compatible devices like the Nexus 4 but Canonical hopes to change that through partnerships with OEMs that will put Ubuntu OS on smartphones from the get go. Chinese manufacturer Meizu has formed one such partnership with Canonical and it has confirmed that its first Ubuntu powered smartphones are coming in early 2015.

      • Yahoo Will Become The Default Search Provider On Firefox, But Firefox For Ubuntu Will Be Sticking With Google

        Because Ubuntu packs in the repositories its own semi-customized version of Firefox that comes with a custom Google-powered start page, Google will remain the default search engine of Firefox for Ubuntu, if Firefox is installed from the official repositories.

      • Both Meizu And Bq Will Be Releasing Their Ubuntu Phones In (Early) 2015

        Meizu has confirmed that the first Meizu MX smartphone running Ubuntu will be release in the first quarter of 2015.

      • Ubuntu Touch RTM Update 10 Comes With Stability Improvements And A New Music App

        As you may know, Canonical has been added a few stability enhancements already to the RTM (release-to-manufacturer) branch of Ubuntu Touch, still based on Ubuntu 14.04, adding new features only to the development branches which uses Ubuntu 14.10 as code base.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Officially Released

          Codenamed “Rebecca”, the Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon edition has been released, and brings many new improvements, featuring a brand new, more stable and polished Cinnamon than ever, a Ubuntu 14.04 software base and Linux Kernel 3.13.

        • Linux Mint 17.1 Released In MATE & Cinnamon Flavors

        • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon and MATE Officially Announced

        • Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE

          I was very impressed with Linux Mint 17.1. The common feature upgrades and bug fixes add real value to this distribution. The changes in Update Manager, the Login Screen, Language Settings, Kernel Menu, and artwork should please almost all Linux Mint users. And the huge range of background wallpapers, along with the slideshow feature make it a great choice for those who want frequent changes to the look of their Linux Mint systems.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Smartphone Samsung Z1 to be released in India next month?

      Here is another story about Samsung, India and the elusive Tizen Smartphone or the the Samsung Z1 SM-Z130H/DS to be precise. We were expecting a Samsung Tizen Smartphone to be released this month in india, but that hasn’t managed to materialize and the latest rumour is that it will be released next month.

  • Android

    • iOS, Android Shopping Data

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Jolla Tablet Could Have Upgrades For MicroSDHC, Split Screen, 3.5G

    Last week Jolla launched the Jolla Tablet with Sailfish OS 2.0 that’s set to take the waters next year. The Jolla Tablet launched via crowd-funding and thus far it’s been wildly successful. Given the success, Jolla has added some stretch goals to the campaign that ends in December.

Google Santa free & open source anti-malware tool

Santa is so named because it keeps track of binaries that are both “naughty and nice” said Google.

Events

• Coreboot Now Works On A ~$70 Intel Motherboard

  Coreboot has been ported to work on another Intel motherboard. This new support target is for older Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors but the motherboard can still be purchased via retail channels and sells for only about $70 USD.

• AMD Richland APU Support Added To Coreboot

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Supporting LibreOffice users everywhere

• Yahoo Will Become The Default Search Provider On Firefox, But Firefox For Ubuntu Will Be Sticking With Google

  Oracle has recently added the Virtualbox package for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn to their main repository, permitting the users to easily stay up to date with their favorite virtual machine emulator.

• Comparing text style support in Calligra, Abiword and LibreOffice

  This weekend I spent time on preparing for the ODF Plugfest again. The test software ODFAutoTests now has many more tests.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU LibreJS 6.0.7 released

• GNU libtool-2.4.4 released [stable]

  The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.4.4.

• GCC 5 To Boast New x86 Optimizations

  GCC 5 already boasts an incredible amount of new compiler features as laid out now over dozens of Phoronix articles, but there’s even more abound for this major compiler update due out in 2015.

• GCC 5 Adds Support For ARM’s Cortex-A17

Project Releases

• Qt 5.4 Release Candidate Does Thanksgiving Day Debut

  For those in the US not busy with Thanksgiving today, the Qt 5.4 release candidate is now available for testing.

• XenOrchestra 3.6 Release Brings New Features

  Version 3.6 of XenOrchestra, an open-source web interface to the Xen Server, is now available with various additions.

• FLAC 1.3.1 Improves Decoding Efficiency, Some Faster Encoding Too

  Version 1.3.1 of the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) was released this week, a year and a half since the release of FLAC 1.3.0.

Public Services/Government

• Changing Limerick’s government services boosts open source

  The overhaul of government service delivery in Limerick, Ireland’s third-largest city, proceeds in concert with the introduction of free and and open source software, says Bilauca Mihai, part of the change management team for Limerick, both the city and the county.

Openness/Sharing

• New UN-backed open-source tool to help prevent and respond to crises

  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme (FAO) has announced a coalition of partner agencies to develop a new data crunching tool to help national governments, development and relief organizations in their efforts to prevent and respond to crises such as animal diseases, plant pests and even conflict.

• Open Access/Content

  • Bill Gates Evidently Gets Open Access And Open Data: So What About Open Source?

    One of most important ways of helping to promote open access is for major research organizations to make it a condition of their funding. Two of the pioneers in this respect were the Wellcome Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which made open access a requirement in 2006 and 2007, respectively.

    [...]

    Now, this is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation making this announcement, not Bill Gates, but it’s hard to believe he doesn’t know about and approve of the move. After all, it represents a very high-profile boost for the idea that making things freely available for anyone to “transform and build upon” is better than locking things up so that neither of those is possible. So the natural question is: when will Gates admit the same is true for software too?

Programming

• 5 Lessons From a 1970s Female Programmer

  Planet Money points out that in this golden age of computer hobbying, American culture strongly implied that this hobbying was only for boys. They tell an anecdote of a sister who had to get the key from her brother every time she wanted to use the computer because it was locked in his room. There’s also just general stories of parents bringing home computers for boys (and not so much for girls) because of this computer boy stereotype exemplified by Weird Science and WarGames and computer ads.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• China’s Nicaragua Canal Could Spark a New Central America Revolution

  Many of those who’ve come together here to protest have been loyal supporters of President Daniel Ortega since he was part of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) junta that overthrew the Somoza dynasty in 1979. They backed him when the Sandinistas tried to establish their own Cuban-inspired dictatorship. They backed him in his war against the CIA-trained Contra rebels in the 1980s. And when the country started holding legitimate elections in the 1990s, they backed him in his bid to build the FSLN into a powerful political party that eventually returned him to the presidency—a position he does not look like he’ll give up any time soon. But right now these Sandinistas are absolutely enraged by plans to evict them from their lands to make way for his latest and by far most grandiose project: the Interoceanic Canal.

• Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret

  When 28 civilians were killed in Athens, it wasn’t the Nazis who were to blame, it was the British. Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith reveal how Churchill’s shameful decision to turn on the partisans who had fought on our side in the war sowed the seeds for the rise of the far right in Greece today

• Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo and the Rights of the Serbian Minority: Ten Years After The “March Pogrom 2004″

• Jordanian’s comic book tales counter terrorist ideologies

  Bakhit, 36, is a Jordanian comic book author and entrepreneur who creates Middle Eastern stories that are an alternative to terrorist ideologies. His field research has included surveys of children in poor neighborhoods in and around the Jordanian capital of Amman and in Syrian refugee camps.

• The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes

  The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes by arguing on grounds of efficiency. These targeted strikes, it claims, always kill the intended targets and minimise civilian casualties. This rationale, as many suspected, has turned out to be false. According to research done by NGO Reprieve, drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have ended up killing 28 unknown people for every targeted militant. This will come as no surprise to critics of drone strikes who have always maintained that poor intelligence all but guarantees that many civilians will end up being killed by these supposedly pinpoint weapons. The US has tried to elude its responsibility for civilian deaths by classifying any male of military age as a militant unless it is specifically proven he is a civilian. This is a kind of casual racism which assumes anyone in the tribal areas of Pakistan got what they had coming. For the US, Fata is packed with militants and anyone it targets there must surely be a militant. It has bombed wedding parties and funerals but always claimed that its precision strikes went after only militants.

• US flies roughly 85 percent of airstrikes against Islamic State, in complex mix of tactics, politics

  U.S. fighter planes and drones have conducted 819 strikes, compared to 157 from the 10 other countries, states the detailed report obtained last week by FoxNews.com.

• Nigeria: Kano mosque blasts death toll above 102

  Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan vowed to track down the perpetrators of the bomb blasts that killed more than 100 people at the central mosque in the city of Kano.

• Intervention feeds terrorism

  The “Global Terrorism Index,” published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, reported last week that fatalities due to terrorism have risen fivefold in the 13 years since the 9/11 attacks, despite the U.S.-led “war on terror” that has spent $4.4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and anti-terrorist operations elsewhere. But it’s not really “despite” those wars. It’s largely because of them.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• We may never have another coldest year in history

  A surge of Arctic air has left much of the continental U.S. shivering in unusually bitter November cold. But this early foray into winter weather is just a small blip in the overall global picture, which is of a warming world that is still on track to see 2014 set the mark for hottest year on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.

Finance

• The Meaning of Black Friday

  When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths.

• “Even it Up”: Inequality Spirals out of Control

  Since the financial crisis of 2009, the number of billionaires has more than doubled, to 1,645, showing that while those at the top have recovered quickly, the benefits of economic growth are not being reaped by the vast majority. Even more staggering, the world’s richest 85 people hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. The consequences of extreme inequality are harmful to everyone. It not only deprives millions of people better life chances, it fuels crime, conflict, and corruption. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily.”

• 90-Year-Old Florida Man Charged for Feeding the Homeless Again, Still Won’t Stop

• Europe feels sting in the tail of Russia sanctions

  At a technology fair in Moscow last month, European executives faced the new reality of doing business in Russia since the West imposed sanctions: the number of companies at the international showcase had shrunk by half from a year ago.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Corporate and Financial Sectors Dominate the Boards of Public TV Stations

  In October 2014, Aldo Guerrero of Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR) reported that individuals with connections in the corporate and financial sectors dominate the executive boards of public television stations. FAIR conducted a study to determine trustee occupations, specifically to discover their corporate connections. They researched the boards of five major public television stations in the United States: WNET of New York City/Newark, WGBH of Boston, WETA of Washington, DC, WTTW of Chicago, and KCET of Los Angeles. The study reveals that 84% of the boards’ 182 members have corporate backgrounds, and 138 members are “executives at elite businesses.” The report also provides the percentage of corporate and non-corporate board members for each television station. WTTW and WNET had the highest percentage of corporate members, 92%.

Privacy

• The Snowden Effect, Quantified

  The failure of the USA Freedom Act in the Senate earlier this month was a disappointment to many in favor of reforming the National Security Agency. The bill, far from perfect, and certainly incomplete in its scope was thought of by some as a possible first step. To others, it was a way for Congress to pass something that merely looked like reform.

• THE US/UK CAMPAIGN TO DEMONIZE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES AS TERRORIST ALLIES

  In May, 2013, a British Army soldier, Lee Rigby, was killed on a suburban London street by two Muslim British citizens, who said they were acting to avenge years of killings of innocent Muslims by the British military in, among other places, Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the attackers, Michael Adebolajo, had also been detained and tortured in 2010 in Kenya with the likely complicity of Her Majesty’s Government. The brutal attack on Rigby was instantly branded “terrorism” (despite its targeting of a soldier of a nation at war) and caused intense and virtually universal indignation in the UK.

• Deconstructing the Jeremy Becker troll network

  The former Twitter account @JbJabroni10 has a long history of harassment on Twitter against people involved in the net freedom movement, and notably against myself (@puellavulnerata) and Tor developer Runa Sandvik (@runasand). Over the last four and a half months, some ‘journalists’ from Pando have been whipping up a harassment campaign against us, relying heavily on getting a cluster of associated trolls to make the most unsupportable accusations they are unwilling to make themselves, and then retweeting them. The target of this doxxing, @JbJabroni10, was a prominent member of that network, and has been frequently retweeted by the Goebbelsesque propagandist @YashaLevine in recent weeks. Since he has deleted all his accounts and certain other members of the Pando mob have been pretending he is some sort of fallen hero (see fig. 1, 2), this is being written to document the evidence against him, all his known sockpuppets and as much of his history as it has been possible to recover.

• The Pando Tor conspiracy troll

  The military and government throws research money around with reckless abandon. That no more means they created Tor than it means they created the Internet back in the 1970s. A lot of that research is pure research, intended to help people. Not everything the military funds is designed to kill people.

  There is no single “government”. We know, for example, that while some in government paid Jacob Appelbaum’s salary, others investigated him for his Wikileaks connections. Different groups are often working at cross purposes — even within a single department.

  [...]

  Dissidents use Tor — successfully. We know that because the dissidents are still alive. Even if it’s a secret conspiracy by the U.S. government, it still does what its supporters want, helping dissidents fight oppressive regimes. In any case, Edward Snowden, who had access to NSA secrets, trusts his own life to Tor.

• New Facebook Rules Will Sting Entrepreneurs

  Chrisy Bossie built a $100,000-a-year gemstone e-commerce business by sharing information about her products on her company’s Facebook page several times a week.

• White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering

  Through public speeches and secret meetings, FBI Director James Comey has been pushing to stop companies like Apple and Google from encrypting users’ phone data. Two former Navy SEALs say that the policy that the FBI and the Justice Department are pursuing would hurt men and women in uniform and possibly even our allies by forcing them to use insecure devices and services for communication.

• The FBI’s Desired Encryption Back Doors Could Harm Intelligence Gathering, Military Operations

  While FBI director James Comey discusses all the inevitable horrors encrypted phones are poised to wreak on the nation’s youth, those in the encryption business are pointing out how encrypted phones make things safer for our nation’s military.

• UK Government Brings In Yet More Counter-Terrorism Measures — Including Internal Exile

  The UK has the sad distinction of leading the way in the West when it comes to playing up the terrorism threat to justify the introduction of disproportionate surveillance laws. One of the favorite rhetorical tricks employed here is to invoke the “capabilities gap”: this refers to the fact that the security services are unable to capture all communications in the same way they once could. But it’s a misleading comparison.

  [...]

  The parallels between the UK and Soviet Russia become more painfully apparent by the day.

• German loophole allows BND spy agency to snoop on own people

  The revelation comes after a BND employee was arrested in July on suspicion of selling secret documents to a CIA contact. Rather than report the contact to their allied German counterparts, the US spy agency was reported to have paid the agent €25,000 (£20,000) for 218 documents classified as confidential or top secret.

Civil Rights

• VIP paedophile ring ‘abused teenage boy INSIDE Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle’

  A teenage boy working at Buckingham Palace revealed he was groomed and sexually abused by a VIP paedophile ring there.

  The lad was also assaulted at the Royal Family’s Scottish retreat Balmoral, according to shocking Home Office files, reports the Sunday People.

  In a heartbreaking note, the boy – then just 16 – told how he was the victim of “exploitation of the highest order”.

  The chilling claims could now be the subject of a police investigation into ­historic allegations of child sex abuse in the 1970s and 80s – linked to MPs and powerful figures.

• UN Report Documents Torture, Police Violence in US

  There are some significant revelations. The committee notes that the US government had filed reservations to the Convention on Torture at the time of ratification, indicating that some practices condemned by the treaty would continue, and that the Obama administration has refused to alter this “restrictive interpretation” of the anti-torture treaty or introduce a prohibition of torture into federal law.

• The UN Just Issued a Scathing Critique of America’s Justice System

  A new report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture released Friday expressed “deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals,” as well as “the alleged difficulties to hold police officers and their employers accountable for abuses.”

• British spies ‘bugged Scotland Yard’: Letter claims conversations with Met over Libyan case intercepted

  Britain’s security and intelligence agencies were last night rocked by claims that they bugged Scotland Yard detectives who were investigating the agencies’ own alleged malpractice.

  A Yard spokesman yesterday confirmed that police are investigating the allegations – which stem from documents disclosed in court by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

  If substantiated, the claims – set out in a letter to Met commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe from Cori Crider, a director of the human rights charity Reprieve – would mean that one arm of the State supposed to keep the country safe from terrorism spied on another, the Metropolitan Police.

• Britain’s GCHQ monitored Irish internet traffic

  Britain’s surveillance body, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), could be tapping underwater cables connecting Ireland to the global web, according to a new document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released by German media.

• Active Duty and Veteran Military Families Must Use Food Pantries to Meet Basic Needs

• The OTHER Government Revolving Door: Sheriff’s Departments, State Troopers Provide New Homes For Bad Cops

  It’s not just our nation’s legislators that enjoy a “revolving door” — one that moves them from Congress to the private sector and back again, to the mutual benefit of legislators and certain industries… not so much the rest of America.

• Officers who left LPD after complaints find jobs with sheriff, patrol

  John McGahan, the Lincoln Police Department’s 2013 Officer of the Year who resigned this year after Internal Affairs accused him of using excessive force, is now working at the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office.

• The Legality of the Voting Rights Act: An Equal Vote for Natives

  It has been over 50 years after the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Native Americans (both Indians and Alaska Natives) still do not possess equal access to voting polls, as Stephanie Woodward reports for In These Times.

  Unequal voting access has produced lower voting turnout among Natives for two distinct reasons. The first being that voting polls lie off of reservations. This creates a myriad of extra costs including travel funds and loss of income. Many natives cannot afford the gas money needed to get to these polls as well as taking a half day off of work. The other sanction upon Native voting is fear. There have been accounts of numerous hate crimes, murders, and even police brutality against Natives in the surrounding areas off of reservations. This along with the language barrier cause the few Natives who can afford the travel expenditures to avoid voting for fear of the repercussions.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It’s Important

  Cuban also offered up a Q&A session with the Washington Post because, Post writer Nancy Scola informs us, “there’s nothing that Cuban dislikes more than untested conventional wisdom” (aka the need for net neutrality rules). Most of us by now know the U.S. broadband market isn’t free or functional — it’s a broken duopoly, slathered in a layer of regulatory capture, preying on a captive audience incapable of voting with their wallets.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Sony films ‘Fury’ and ‘Annie’ said stolen in studio cyberattack

    The recent picture “Fury,” a Brad Pitt war movie, and the yet-to-be-released “Annie” and “Still Alice” have appeared on file-sharing sites, said the person, who sought anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter. The website TorrentFreak, a news site on file-sharing, said “Fury” was the second-most-downloaded film at one site.

  • Kim Dotcom beats US bid to get him thrown back in jail

    Kim Dotcom has successfully fended off an American government bid to put in him back in a New Zealand jail for allegedly violating his bail.

    “That was a good win today, but also another attempt by the US government to get my liberty removed—it’s unbelievable,” Dotcom told Ars by phone late Sunday night.

  • Torrent Site Admin Sentenced to Five Months Prison

    Following an initial investigation and complaint filed by Rights Alliance in 2012, this week the admin of a Sweden-based torrent site learned of his fate. Dismissing claims that the site had been sold four years earlier, a court sentenced the 40-year-old to a five month jail sentence.

  • Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Picks Up Fight for a Free Internet

    Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde was released from prison earlier this month. Today he looks back at his tough time in prison and to the fights ahead, including the battle for a free and open Internet. Peter sees data as the oil of the 21st century and likens the fight against piracy to the invasion of Kuwait.

  • YouTube Briefly Shuts Down Blizzard’s Own YouTube Channel For Copyright Infringement

    YouTube’s ContentID system gets mocked quite frequently for bogus takedowns, which happen with unfortunate frequency. The latest, as pointed out by YouTube star Total Biscuit is that Blizzard’s own damn YouTube channel for World Championship Series StarCraft, WCSStarCraft, was down for at least 40 minutes earlier today.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Issue 10 Out Now!

Once we’ve finished boasting about the prowess of Linux, we search out the best light-weight distro, look into the murky world of patent litigation, uncover the secrets of systemd, play with Google Cardboard, add more forms of input to a Raspberry Pi and program autonomous battle droids.

Server

• Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Today we begin

  Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds.

  Docker started out with the standard LXC containers that are part of virtually every Linux distribution out there, but eventually transitioned to libcontainer, its own creation. Normally, nobody would have cared about libcontainer, but as we’ll dig into later, it was exactly the right move at the right time.

Kernel Space

• Nasty Lockup Issue Still Being Investigated For Linux 3.18

  When Linux 3.18-rc6 was released last Sunday, Linus Torvalds noted in the release announcement that a “a big unknown worry in a regression” remained. Nearly one week later, kernel developers are still figuring out what’s going on with this regression that can cause frequent lockups. Worse off, it looks like it might affect the Linux 3.17 kernel too.

• Generic TrustZone Driver Proposed For Linux Kernel

  ARM’s security extensions are in the process of being bettered on Linux.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa Git Yields Performance Improvements For Newer AMD GPUs

    Earlier this week I published some benchmark results showing Mesa 10.5-devel delivering Intel performance changes compared to Mesa 10.3 as found in Ubuntu 14.10. The next logical step to this testing is looking at the AMD Radeon graphics results for the R600g and RadeonSI drivers using multiple graphics cards while seeing what the open-source Radeon Linux driver has to offer if upgrading past what’s shipped in Ubuntu 14.10 and other recent Linux distribution releases.

• Benchmarks

  • OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Fedora 21 vs. openSUSE Factory

    This week I posted some OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 performance results that were quite interesting and showed Ubuntu Linux largely dominating over OS X Yosemite with a Haswell-based MacBook Air. For those curious how other Linux distributions compare in this performance showdown, here are some results when also testing Fedora 21 in its near-final state and also openSUSE in its rolling-release form.

Applications

• Insync For Linux Gets Nested Selective Sync Support (Unofficial Google Drive Client)

  Insync is an unofficial Google Drive client which “extends Drive’s web functionality to your desktop by integrating tightly with Windows, Mac and Linux so you can get work done”.

• Calibre Is Now Better Equipped to Edit eBooks, New Version Is Out

  Calibre, a complete application to edit, view, and convert eBook files, has been updated to version 2.12 and the developer has added a number of very interesting new features.

• Inkscape: Go from Beginner to Expert for Free

  In the world of open source graphics tools, GIMP gets a great deal of attention, and there are many free online resources available for it, but if you’re looking for a free drawing and illustration tool that can compete with Adobe Illustrator and is increasingly used by web designers for effects, logos and still graphics, give Inkscape a try. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and is well-known as a powerful and flexible drawing and vector editing application. In this post, you’ll find our newly updated collection of outstanding free resources for getting familiar with Inkscape’s capabilities, and they’ll help you get going quickly with the application.

• mpv Is an Awesome Command Line Media Player for Linux

  mpv is an open source media player that has been forked from mplayer2 and MPlayer. It works entirely from command line and it’s extremely light and easy to use.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to back up a Debian system using backupninja

  • System Program Problem Detected – How To Fix Or Remove It In Ubuntu?

  • Some handy systemd/journal tips

  • How To Setup FTP Server On openSUSE 13.2/13.1

  • Intel Graphics Installer For Linux – Install Latest Intel Graphics And Video Drivers On Linux

  • Encrypt Everything: Encrypt data using GPG and save passwords

  • XCP / XenServer and Debian Jessie

  • Server monitoring with Nagios on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and Debian Wheezy

  • 11 ‘Avconv’ Commands to Record, Convert and Extract Videos & Audios from Linux Terminal

• Wine or Emulation

  • The Wine Development Release 1.7.32 Is Now Available.

• Games

  • Battle for Wesnoth 1.12 Has Big New Features [Overview, What’s New, Screenshots]

    With each new major version of Wesnoth released, a review at TuxArena undoubtedly follows. Battle for Wesnoth is one of the flagship open-source games, with a huge, dedicated community and an almost unmatched feature-completeness among the open-source games.

  • 1000 Games and Counting

    On August 8, 2012, OUYA was successfully funded on Kickstarter. A console built on the idea that great game experiences can come from anywhere, and the living room should be a place where we as gamers and game makers can experiment and discover new games together, without the walls of traditional publishers and distributors telling us what is fun.

  • GCW Zero Starts Seeing New Game Releases

    The Kickstarter-funded GCW Zero open-source gaming handheld console is finally starting to see more games out there for those that backed the device last year.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Google Code In 2014 : Call for Participation

    The Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015. For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development.

  • KDE at LISA 2014 conference

    KDE was one of about 50 exhibitors at the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference November 12th and 13th in Seattle. The expo was part of the week-long conference for system administrators that has been held annually since 1986. Expo participants included big name tech companies and smaller niche organizations offering products and services to this audience of professional technical people. As we discovered, KDE is well known among this audience.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • ClassicMenu Indicator Review – A Blast from the Past for Unity and GNOME 2 Fans

    ClassicMenu Indicator is an applet designed for Ubuntu systems that brings back a small part of the old GNOME 2 desktop’s functionality. It’s a simple solution that is really helping a lot of people to cope with Unity.

Distributions

• Material Design Adorns Desktop Thanks to a Custom Linux OS

  Google introduced the clean new design language this year naming it Material Design. The design ideology of Material Design was loved by many thanks to its clean and simple UI. If you too are one of those in love with Lollipop’s Material Design, chances are you will soon be able to get the design for your desktop. Currently being developed by Michael Spencer, this upcoming Linux distribution is being called Quantum OS (previously Quartz OS).

• Red Hat Family

  • [Red Hat JBoss Unified Push] Now Available on Openshift

    The Unified Push Server allows developers to send native push messages to Apple’s Push Notification Service (APNS) and Google’s Cloud Messaging (GCM). It features a built-in administration console that makes it easy for developers to create and manage push related aspects of their applications for any mobile development environment. Includes client SDKs (iOS, Android, & Cordova), and a REST based sender service with an available Java sender library.

  • Fedora

    • To Do

      OK, there are endless to-do list applications, each with its own plusses and deltas. I tried the emacs todo without a lot of joy. I more or less settled on using bugzilla since it allowed me to not only capture relationships and estimates, but also to keep notes on various projects or bits of projects. I tend to have lots of things that I need to do “right now”, but even more things that I would like to do if I ever get one of them round tuit thingies. BZ works well for this in terms of capturing things, and especially capturing thoughts on those things I want to get around to some day.

    • It’s a good thing they pay me to break stuff

      Yesterday’s was triggered by me messing up the Fedora kernel package git repository – whoops. I keep Fedlet’s kernel as a branch that only exists in my checkout; it’s not pushed anywhere (I should just push it out on my git server now I have one, but I keep forgetting). I accidentally ran git push from that branch yesterday, and it promptly pushed all the changes on it to master, effectively turning Fedora’s kernel into the Fedlet kernel for a few glorious hours until Josh reverted it.

    • [Test-Announce] Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 1 (RC1) Available Now!

• Debian Family

  • Systemd fallout: Debian fork Devuan set up

    A group styling itself as veteran UNIX administrators has announced that it has set up a fork of the Debian GNU/Linux project.

  • Fork Debian Project Announces the Systemd-less OS Devuan

    A group of unknown developers have proposed a while ago to fork Debian in an effort to create a parallel project that would go on without Systemd. It seemed ridiculous at the time and many have thought that it was just just some kind of pressure, but it looks like the project is real enough.

  • Debian Forked, Ubuntu MATE Fabulous, and Fedora 21 RC1

    Everybody went back to work today and there is so much news I hardly know where to start. The top story tonight is bound to be the official forking of Debian. In other news, Dediomedio.com says Ubuntu 14.10 MATE is “almost fabulous” and the Free Software Foundation released their 2014 gift buying guide. Mint 17.1 is almost here and a Fedora 21 release candidate has been released. Carla Schroder has an exclusive on Linux.com about being a maker instead of a user and, finally, a bunch of too-good-to-resist tidbits.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Meizu’s first Ubuntu phones coming in early 2015

      • Ubuntu powered Meizu smartphones could arrive in early 2015

      • A Ubuntu Phone will finally go on sale next year

        Fans of Ubuntu have been waiting patiently for a phone running Canonical’s mobile OS to make its way to retail shelves. Thanks to Chinese OEM Meizu, they may only have a few more months to wait.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 MATE edition – Almost fabulous

        Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn with the MATE desktop environment is a very cool distro. It suffers from two big problems, one of which has been inherited from its Unity parent, and that would be the inability to format old partitions, created by previous versions of Ubuntu. This is somewhat worrying. Samba printing is another disappointment. There was no screenshot problem like with some other distros, though.

        Besides these issues, everything else was perfect. Familiar, friendly, extremely productive. Super fast and super stable, too. There was nothing out of ordinary, no problems. Suspend and resume worked without any issues, the system blazed at the speed of light, and with maybe ten minutes of work, you can transform it into anything you want. Docks, menus, new fonts, new themes, all there, just waiting for you. Total freedom and fun.

        There can’t be a perfect score, because the associated problems do not allow it. But assuming you had this distro given to you, and someone bothered to install the needed Samba package that normal people require, it would be an excellent alternative to many other mainstream releases. Highly polished, slick, and almost overwhelmingly simple and easy to use. The grade is something like 9.0/10, but it can do better. I demand it. For you, this is an excellent test bed. Go for it.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 17.1 `Rebecca` Available For Download

          Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” has been released and is available as usual in two main editions: MATE and Cinnamon. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

        • Just a few more days before 17.1

          The ISO images for the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” just passed QA testing and were approved for a stable release. This release should go public in the coming days.

          If you are running Linux Mint 17.1 RC, you do not need to wait for the stable release, and you do not need to reinstall. You can simply use the Update Manager to install any level 1 update you haven’t installed already.

        • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon released!

        • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” MATE released!

        • Do you smell the minty goodness? Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ is finally here!

          Christmas is coming, which means lots of festivities are about to happen. For me, however, the holiday is all about one thing — smells. No, I’m not crazy, although many will disagree. What I mean to say is, the smells of Christmas resonate with me more than any other aspect. Of course, the smell of pine trees conjure images of decorated trees with gifts underneath, but don’t forget the smells of cookies baking and grandma’s perfume. All of these scents comes together to culminate Christmastime.

        • Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Is Out and the Best So Far – Screenshot Tour

          Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon has been released and is now available for download. The new version of the operating system features a major update for the desktop environment, along with a multitude of other upgrades.

Devices/Embedded

• Imagination brings virtualised Linux security to the Internet of Things

  IMAGINATION TECHNOLOGIES has announced the creation of a tiny hypervisor rig to power its MIPS-based CPUs.

  The joint venture with Japanese firm Seltech saw the Fexerox hypervisor embedded firmware from Seltech paired with an Imagination MIPSM5150 CPU to create a virtualised environment, allowing multiple operating systems to run independently off a single unit packed into a tiny space.

• Rugged box-PC runs Linux on quad-core 2.1GHz Core i7

  An MPL spokesperson confirmed in an email that the “PIP39 as well as all other MPL CPU products are fully Linux supported.” Although a specific version was not mentioned, the PIP39 presumably is supported with the same Debian Linux distribution that’s available with the company’s CEC10 system.

• Hands-on with the Raspberry Pi Model B+

  There have been a several interesting new hardware announcements from the Raspberry Pi Foundation this year. Sometimes I wonder how they do it all – with so much involvement in education, development of new hardware and software, and the many Pi user groups and events. It really is quite impressive.

• Raspberry Pi and Coder by Google for beginners and kids

  Coder is an experiment for Raspberry Pi, built by a small team of Googlers in New York. It converts a Raspberry Pi into a friendly environment for learning web programming. It is ideal for beginners and requires absolutely no experience with coding.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Jurassic World shows off the Tizen Galaxy Gear

      The Samsung Galaxy Gear was the Korean companies first Smart watch contender, which originally debuted with the Android Operating System. Now fast forward a mere 12 months and you can see how it has transformed itself, now no longer running on the old cut down Android OS and been updated to Tizen.

    • Skinomi TechSkin – Samsung Gear S Screen Protector + Gold Carbon Fiber Full Body Skin Protector

  • Android

    • Preview: Office for Android tablets is like Office for iPad, but on Android

      Google’s Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps are a lot of things—they’re fast, they’re convenient, and they’re available on both iOS and Android—but you couldn’t call them “powerful.” Even the Web versions of Google’s productivity software are pretty basic compared with the feature-stuffed behemoth that is Microsoft Office, and the mobile apps are minimalist by comparison.

    • CuBox-i4Pro: A whole lotta Linux or Android for not a whole lotta cash

      I recently reviewed the Hummingboard, an excellent, low-priced single board computer that competes in the same market as the the Raspberry Pi. Recently the manufacturer of the Hummingboard, SolidRun, sent me one of their new products to check out: The CuBox-i4Pro.

    • 35 Android Apps for Pure Fun

      Why, yes, of course you have apps on your Android phone and tablet. But most of these Android apps are for work or purely practical reasons, right? All work and no play not only makes you dull but it’s actually bad for your health. (Isn’t there a study somewhere that supports that?) So, in the interest of health and the joy of nonsense, here are 35 Android apps that have only one purpose: fun!

Robocoin Bitcoin ATMs Can Now Run Lamassu Open Source Software

Robocoin Bitcoin ATM operators now have a new attractive alternative to abiding by Robocoin’s new compliance standards. In response to Robocoin’s move to enforce AML/KYC compliance for all of its ATM operators (even non-American ones), some Bitcoin enthusiasts have banded together to port Lamassu’s open source Bitcoin ATM software to run on Robocoin’s hardware.

Enjoy the New ReactOS Explorer

The new ReactOS Explorer is much more compatible, stable, and comes with more features than the current (and now old) explorer. We expect it to be a big quality jump in terms of usability, and the rockstar feature of the upcoming 0.4 release. Just keep reading to discover more about it!

India’s offline mobile internet is going open source

“By giving away the source code, we can ignite the creative energies of the entire developer community and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the SMS market. Customers can benefit from world-class technology advancements, the development community gains access to a whole new market opportunity and Innoz core businesses benefit from licensing it with telecom operators.”

Events

• LinuxDay 2014 Dornbirn

  Again the Fedora Project was present at the LinuxDay at Dornbirn (a small linux event near the German, Swiss, and Austrian border beside the Lake Constance). I arrived some minutes before the event started. Matthias Summer was already there and prepared the booth. Well, there was not much to prepare.

• Learn about open source software in Bernardsville

Web Browsers

• 4 Cutting Edge Web Browsers

  The usage share of web browsers is dominated by a few mature applications. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera account for around 95% of all desktop web browsing activity. However, there are a myriad of other web browsers that are worth investigating.

• Mozilla

  • Don’t like the Mozilla/Yahoo deal? Make StartPage your search engine

    Last week Mozilla announced that, starting from December (2014), the default search engine provider in its Firefox Web browser application will be Yahoo, a deal that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, trumpeted as “the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years.”

SaaS/Big Data

• Open Cloud Alliance Rallies Open Source Community

  To assist with maintaining the interoperability of open source software, IBM and Univention have formed the Open Cloud Alliance (OCA), a consortium that is dedicated to reducing the cost of open source interoperability of open source software deployed in cloud computing environments.

BSD

• Failed attempts to dual-boot PC-BSD 10.1 with Windows 8

  So it appears that the installation attempt failed at that point because the correct gpart option was not specified. The -i option is used to run gpart interactively, but why it’s necessary to use it in the graphical application? In any case, I’ll be logging a bug report.

• FreeBSD Plans For The Next Ten Years

  Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and CTO of iXsystems, gave a talk at this month’s MeetBSD California 2014 conference about the next ten years of FreeBSD.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The 2014 Giving Guide is here!

  Today, we’re launching the 2014 Giving Guide, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) guide to smarter gifts, compared with their restrictive counterparts.

Project Releases

• Qt 5.4 Release Candidate Expected Later This Week

• Qt 5.4 Planned For Release On 9 December

  As a continuation of yesterday’s story about the Qt 5.4 release candidate being expected later this week, The Qt Company has now expressed their plans for a final release date.

Openness/Sharing

• Top 5 articles of the week: Firefox OS for mobile and Year of open source miracles

• An open source iPad alternative, Creative Commons turns 12, and more

• Valve at the Game Dev Conference, 1000 games on OUYA, and more

• Open Access/Content

  • Measuring the size and state of the commons

    At its heart, Creative Commons is a simple idea. It’s the idea that when people share their creativity and knowledge with each other, amazing things can happen.

    It’s not a new idea. People have been adapting and building on each other’s work for centuries. Musicians sample beats from each other’s music. Artists create entirely new works from other people’s images. Teachers borrow each other’s activities and lesson plans. Scientists build off of each other’s results to make new discoveries.

Pigs can’t fly: Passenger escorted off US flight after 80-pound ‘emotional support’ hog is disruptive

Security

• Sony looks for possible North Korea link in hacking incident – report

  Sony Pictures Entertainment is investigating to determine if hackers working on behalf of North Korea might be responsible for a cyber attack that knocked out the studio’s computer network earlier this week, the technology news site Re/code reported.

• Sony Looking Into Possible North Korea Link to Hack Attack

• Sony investigating if North Korea behind hack attack to damage ‘The Interview’: report

• Friday’s security updates

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Letter: US military’s drone policy worth fighting

  “(My husband Michael Pike died in September of Agent Orange related cancer.) My husband was Special Forces in Vietnam and came to regret his role in the war and what the U.S. government did. I am here today in loving memory of that fine man to ask you to stop your role in the kill chain which uses the Northrup Grumman Global Hawk drone to identify human targets for extrajudicial execution. This is neither lawful (international and higher law) nor moral and you must know that. Horrible acts, like drone strikes, lead to the atrocities we see now. Inhumanity engenders inhumanity.

• Egyptian Judges Dismiss Charges Against Mubarak

• Obama’s dangerous embrace of war

  The fact that the U.S. today is increasing its military action in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, after a decade of intense warfare in the region, should be a reason for American officials and the public alike to ask some serious questions about how they use their military power around the world. The biggest problem that we see confirmed again this week is that American military action in distant lands usually only turns those lands into chaotic, dysfunctional, ungoverned and violent places. In the chaos that follows such warfare a new danger now steps in – militant Islamist killers such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

• In Congo, peacekeepers at war

  Since Congo’s civil war broke out in 1994, it has become the world’s deadliest conflict, pitting neighboring governments and dozens of local warlords in a free-for-all over the prodigious profits to be made in eastern Congo’s mines. According to demographers, 5.4 million Congolese died during just one stretch from 1998 to 2006.

• New Australian terrorism bill to facilitate targeted military killings

  …Australian Senate has signed off another “counter-terrorism” bill that grants unprecedented powers to the intelligence and military apparatus.

• £120m deal to promote a form of terror

  The International Business Times reported this month that British and French governments have signed a £120 million pound deal to develop a military drone – aka unmanned combat air system – following a two-year feasibility study. The combat drone could be deployed from 2030.

• “Global” Terrorism

  Sure enough, there are now half a dozen Canadian planes bombing ISIS jihadis in Iraq (although it’s unlikely that either of the Canadian attackers, both converts to radical Islam, had any contact with foreign terrorist organizations). But Harper has got the logic completely backwards.

  The purpose of major terrorist activities directed at the West, from the 9/11 attacks to ISIS videos, is not to “cow” or “intimidate” Western countries. It is to get those countries to bomb Muslim countries or, better yet, invade them. The terrorists want to come to power in Muslim countries, not in Canada or Britain or the US. And the best way to establish your revolutionary credentials and recruit local supporters is to get the West to attack you.

• Terrorists actually welcome attacks from the West

• Giving terrorists what they want

• Why terrorists love Western intervention

Transparency Reporting

• Icelandic hacker says guilty of stealing money from Wikileaks

  An Icelandic computer hacker and former associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange unexpectedly pleaded guilty on Wednesday to embezzling 30 million Icelandic crowns ($240,000) from the organization.

• Siggi “The Hacker” ad­mits guilty to all charges

  The case against Siggi “The Hacker” has un­der­gone a sharp turn-around. Siggi has de­cided to change his plea to “Guilty”. Charges against him amount to thirty pages of em­bez­zle­ment and fraud amount­ing to thirty mil­lion kro­nas.

  Orig­i­nally Siggi pleaded “Not Guilty” and the main trial was to take place in Reyk­janes dis­trict court next week. His lawyer, Vil­hjál­mur H.Vil­hjálms­son said at court to­day that “Af­ter go­ing over the charges thor­oughly and speak­ing with my client he has de­cided to plead guilty to all charges.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Oil Price Fall: Saudi Arabia Targets U.S. Shale Oil, Iran, Iraq, Russia

  It is clear that among the major losers in the fall in the price of Brent crude petroleum from $115 a barrel last summer to about $75 a barrel today are Russia, Iraq and Iran. Petroleum sales are 50% of Russia’s income, and are also central for Iran and Iraq.

  But the big loser will likely be shale oil producers and prospectors in the US, who probably cannot make a profit if the price falls into the 60s.

  The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country. Most petroleum is used to fuel transport. Some is used for heating or cooling, as in Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, but that practice is relatively rare. US journalists seem to feel it obligatory to mention US shale oil production as a contributor to the price fall, since prices are a matter of supply and demand, and US supply has increased by a couple million barrels a day. But frankly that is a minor increase in world terms– global production is roughly 90 million barrels a day. Between Iran, Iraq (Kirkuk), Libya and Syria, enough oil has gone out of production to more than offset the additional American oil. It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies.

Finance

• Ukraine Admits Its Gold Is Gone: “There Is Almost No Gold Left In The Central Bank Vault”

  Ukraine gold’s reserves had constantly increased hitting a record high just before the presidential coup…

• The long Black Friday: Bargain hunting turns violent as American phenomenon comes to UK

  The Black Friday sales have been criticised by police after violence broke out among crowds vying for bargains.

  Chaos was reported in many UK stores as several major supermarkets, clothing and electrical retailers offered reduced prices both online and on the high street.

Censorship

• China writer goes on trial for media censorship protest after long delay

  The long-awaited trial of a prominent Chinese writer and activist resumed in southern China on Friday, more than two months after his lawyers boycotted an earlier hearing with Beijing showing little sign of easing its clampdown against rights campaigners.

• Chinese Activists Go on Trial for Protesting Media Censorship; Lawyers Claim Human Rights Violation

  Feixiong, whose original name is Yang Maodong, was charged for ‘gathering crowds to disturb public order’ after he organized protests outside the office of the Southern Weekly newspaper last January. Activist Sun Desheng, who was part of the protest, was also arrested.

• Censorship distortion of ‘comfort women’

  The U.S. Occupation censored Taijiro Tamura’s 1947 story “The Life of an Alluring Woman” (Shunpu den) for describing Korean prostitutes in a war zone. The Civil Information and Education Section with censorship power decided that identifying the nationality of the prostitutes constituted “criticism” of that nation.

• Lessons On Censorship From Syria’s Internet Filter Machines

  Organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, or the Open Net Initiative periodically report on the extent of censorship worldwide. But as countries that are fond of censorship are not particularly keen to share details, we must resort to probing filtered networks, that is, generating requests from within them to see what gets blocked and what gets through. We cannot hope to record all the possible censorship-triggering events, so our understanding of what is or isn’t acceptable to the censor will only ever be partial. And of course it’s risky, even outright illegal, to probe the censor’s limits within countries with strict censorship and surveillance programs.

  This is why the leak of 600GB of logs from hardware appliances used to filter internet traffic in and out of Syria is a unique opportunity to examine the workings of a real-world internet censorship apparatus.

• Council member objects to museum’s “pornographic” photo

  A nude photo of a pregnant woman at a local art museum has drawn the ire of a Jacksonville council member.

  Emails obtained by First Coast News shed light on the nude photo that has city council member Clay Yarborough calling for the City of Jacksonville to pull nearly $233,000 worth of funding designated for the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art.

• The Story Behind Iran’s Censorship Redirect Page

• Morehshin Allahyari’s Art on Iranian Censorship Will Soon Be Out of This World

• Europe wants Google to expand ‘right to be forgotten’ censorship to global search

  Google should start applying the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” to its global, .com domain, European privacy regulators say.

  European data protection authorities in the so-called Article 29 Working Party (WP29) have compiled a set of guidelines detailing how search engines should apply a court ruling that gave Europeans the right to be forgotten by search engines. As of the May decision, EU citizens have the right to compel search engines to remove search results in Europe for queries that include their names if the results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.”

• EU demands “right to be forgotten” goes international

• EU wants ‘right to be forgotten’ applied globally

  Privacy watchdogs in Europe say the controversial ruling, which affects only local European versions of Google’s search engine, should be applied more broadly.

• When (if ever) is media censorship justifiable?

  How does one measure the degree to which content is ‘inappropriate’ or ‘harmful’? Are there cases where media censorship is justifiable?

• Russia’s Freest Website Now Lives in Latvia

  Moscow-based Editor in Chief Galina Timchenko was fired for ‘extremism’ after running an article on Ukraine. So she and her staff packed up shop and moved west.

Privacy

• Germany Signs No-Spy Deal with BlackBerry

  Germany has approved BlackBerry’s purchase of encryption firm Secusmart after signing a “no-spy” agreement with the Canadian smartphone maker.

  Duesseldorf-based Secusmart provides special smartphones to German government officials that are meant to be safe from eavesdropping.

• Big Data Ethics and Your Privacy [INFOGRAPHIC]

  But access to data is not the only important aspect of Big Data ethics. The fact that our privacy is not for granted any more became quite clear after the NSA files were made public in the summer of 2013. All of a sudden it was public knowledge that the governments basically had unlimited acces to all of your data. But not only governments have access to your data. Many of the largest organisations that you interact with every day know probably more about you than you do yourself. Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn know a lot about you, because you provide that information to them. Although Facebook just released a new, simpeler, privacy policy that does not mean that they collect less data about you. On the contrary; they want to collect a lot more data about you.

• UK spy base GCHQ tapped Irish internet cables

  New documents released this week via the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden outline how Irish subsea telecommunications cables have been targeted by British intelligence.

  The documents detail a whole series of underwater cables – essentially the backbone that connects Ireland to the globe – that are being tapped.

• Europe’s next privacy war is with websites silently tracking users

  The pan-European data regulator group Article 29 has issued new opinion on how websites and advertisers can track users and the permissions they require.

  The new opinion dictates that “device fingerprinting” – a process of silently collecting information about a user – requires the same level of consent as cookies that are used to track users across the internet.

• The UK’s Real Intelligence Failure

  That is, the Home Office wants CSPs based outside the UK (Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to co-operate with the UK government in the same way as UK-based ones by handing over any requested information. But the Home Office itself admits that any US company doing so would breach the US Wiretap Act. Which means that the Home Office seriously expects US companies and their officers to risk punishment by the US government just because the UK wants easy access to information.

• No Halt to the Sharing of Medical Records

  Despite uncovering thousands of cases of patient information being wrongly disclosed to third parties a recent review into the sharing of medical records with private sector companies endorses the practice.

• NHS to carry on selling patient records to insurers

  The National Health Service will continue to sell medical data to insurers and other third parties despite an investigation that has discovered tens of thousands of patient records were unlawfully sold.

  Fears were raised earlier this year that patient records were being misused and sold to insurers, and the Government amended the law to restrict access to data.

  The report from an eight-month inquiry has found tens of thousands of records were wrongly passed to third parties.

• Germans end investigation into Merkel phone tapping

• How to stop NSA from snooping on you

  The first thing to know about securing your phone is that you can’t secure your phone.

• Panel probing NSA surveillance finds legal loophole that lets German intel spy on own citizens

  German lawmakers probing the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency have uncovered a legal loophole that allows the country’s foreign intelligence agency to spy on its own citizens.

  The agency, known by its German acronym BND, is normally forbidden from eavesdropping on Germans or German companies.

  But a former BND lawyer told Parliament this week that Germans aren’t protected while working abroad for foreign companies.

  The government confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press that work-related calls or emails are attributed to the employer. If the employer is foreign, the BND can intercept them.

• Edward Snowden Revelations Not Having Much Impact on Internet Users

  Despite the shocking revelations by Edward Snowden about the degree of surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA), most internet users across the world do not appear to be taking proper measures to be safe online.

• The bigger the haystack, the harder the terrorist is to find

  The UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee report this week into the murder of Lee Rigby described British intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ multiple failures to prevent the terrible crime.

  Rigby’s killers together had figured in seven prior surveillance operations during the course of which officials learned that one of them had travelled to Kenya in an attempt to join the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab.

  The shocking failures and bungling that ensued in the years the two men were tracked is, tellingly, chalked up to the “extreme pressure” brought on by the fact that at any one time, MI5 is investigating several thousand individuals suspected of links to Islamic extremist activities in Britain.

Civil Rights

• Denver Police seize tablet, delete video of brutal arrest. But it had backed up to “the cloud”.

• American Way: Obama disappoints with mixed signals over torture

• UN torture report condemns sleep deprivation among US detainees

  The committee’s conclusions, released in Geneva on Friday, praise President Barack Obama for having banned excessive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding that were widely used under the previous Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. But it cautions that one important method that was central to Bush’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – sleep deprivation – continues to be approved for use.

• Tamir Rice shooting: Cleveland Police release video and identify officer who fired the fatal shot

  Tamir Rice was confronted Saturday by officers responding to a 911 call about a male who appeared to be pulling a gun in and out of his pants. The president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association has said the officers weren’t told the caller thought the gun might be fake.

• Andrew Mitchell’s career left in tatters after losing Plebgate libel case

  Andrew Mitchell, the former Conservative cabinet minister at the centre of the long-running Plebgate saga, lost his high court libel trial on Thursday in a ruling that leaves him facing an estimated legal bill of £1.5m and his political career in tatters.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Global net neutrality pact hopes to silence European malcontents

  THE ELECTRONIC FREEDOM FOUNDATION has announced a worldwide coalition of organisations dedicated to the fight for net neutrality.

  The Global Net Neutrality Coalition defines the term thus: “Net neutrality requires that the internet be maintained as an open platform, on which network providers treat all content, applications and services equally, without discrimination.”

  Comprising 25 organisations from 19 countries, the coalition will use its site as a repository for information regarding net neutrality laws and legislation in given territories, along with advice on petitioning the relevant authorities to preserve an equal internet for all.

DRM

• Buy from Amazon and Apple and it’s you that ends up owned

  Readers of Nick Hornby’s debut novel High Fidelity will remember that much of it takes place in a record shop on Holloway Road called Championship Vinyl. Not surprisingly, Hollywood deemed Holloway a postcode too far when it adapted the 1995 book. The studio installed John Cusack and his music-buff sidekick in a sunny gaff in Chicago. At least, in 2000, Hornby’s obsessive blokes still sold rotating plastic discs. A decade later, the film business would have treated any story set in a music or bookshop as an antique period piece to feature (if at all) alongside samurai yarns or Roman sword-and-sandal epics.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Music publishers finally pull the trigger, sue an ISP over piracy

    BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the Internet service provider doesn’t do enough to punish those who download music illegally.

    Both BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don’t forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are “repeat infringers” of copyright.

  • Cox Communications Sued For Not Disconnecting Pirates

    Cox Communications, one of the largest telecoms companies in the U.S., is being sued by a pair of music publishers for refusing to disconnect persistent music pirates. Evidence in the case is being provided by Rightscorp, who say that ISPs lose their safe harbor protections if they fail to take action against repeat infringers.