03.14.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Microsoft did its best to usher in a new era of desktop computing with the launch of Windows 8, but many businesses and individuals are opting out. Linux-based operating systems, meanwhile, present an increasingly compelling alternative. Benefits include tougher security and superior customization—not to mention that Linux is usually free.
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Kernel Space
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Atheros has been more friendly towards Linux customers in recent years with open-source WiFi/network Linux drivers. Atheros has even been kind towards BSD users. The latest Atheros open-source contribution is the opening up of their firmware for two wireless chipsets.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel announced the first version of an LLVM IR SDK. The LLVM IR SDK is comprised of an LLVM IR editor plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment.
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The Direct3D state tracker for Gallium3D that for a short time provided hope of a native Direct3D implementation for Linux of the Microsoft Direct3D 10/11 APIs without simply being a translator layer to OpenGL, is set to be nuked from mainline Mesa.
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Brian Paul has published an initial OSMesa state tracker along with OSMesa support for the LLVMpipe and Softpipe drivers.
OSMesa is the API exposing Mesa’s off-screen rendering capabilities. The off-screen rendering infrastructure isn’t dependent upon any specific operating system windowing system, or graphics hardware. OSMesa rendering is simply done in user-space with main system memory. An example use-case all along for OSMesa has been “to use Mesa as an off-line, batch-style renderer.”
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Last week at Linaro Connect Asia 2013, there was a session about OpenGL ES 3.0 and what the Linaro working group can accomplish.
The OpenGL ES 3.0 session at Linaro Connect Asia 2013 was to gather Linaro member requirements for GLES3, discussion the Mesa activity, and review the Piglit regression test framework. The open question asked as a goal is “Within OpenGL ES, WebGL, OpenVG, Renderscript where should [Linaro]
be investing time?”
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Developers from the member companies involved with Linaro are planning continued improvements to the LLVM compiler infrastructure that will benefit ARM developers and customers. With this ARM LLVM work there should also be Gallium3D LLVMpipe enhancements.
Last week at Linaro Connect Asia 2013, aside from talking about OpenGL ES 3.0 improvements, there were also sessions about improving LLVM ARM support.
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The AMD “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver now has basic compute (GPGPU/OpenCL) support.
There has been R600 Gallium3D OpenCL support for running basic OpenCL demos and now the support has come to the RadeonSI driver, which supports the Radeon HD 7000 series and there’s early Radeon HD 8000 series support.
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Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers continue advancing support for the OpenGL Shading Language. Their latest work is on supporting Interface Blocks for GLSL 1.50.
Jordan Justen of Intel published the initial Interface Block support, as mandated by GLSL 1.50. The shading language 1.50 version is for matching OpenGL 3.2.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Unigine Game Engine has picked up several new features, including support for different panorama modes and multi-channel projection rendering.
Through a new Unigine Engine plug-in, 180 degree panoramas can be rendered within the engine using panoramic projection with curved edges, linear panorama without edge distortion, and fisheye spherical panorama.
Another new plug-in (AppProjection) supports single and multi-channel projections. This can be used to create a large immersive curbed screen display covering 360 degrees.
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The latest Humble Indie Bundle game offering, “Humble Bundle with Android 5″, has crossed one million dollars in sales. There’s still time to go and more DRM-free cross-platform games have been added to the pay-what-you-want sale.
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YoYo Games today announced its game development software suite GameMaker: Studio now supports Linux publishing for the first time.
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A partially transparent veil of secrecy hangs over Xi3′s pint-sized Piston Console. When first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, some surmised it was the official Steam Box, though Xi3 never came out and said it. And now that Xi3 is taking pre-orders, there’s still no mention of it being a Steam Box, though it’s clearly intended for living room gaming using Steam’s Big Picture mode. Xi3 released a statement today that adds a little insight into its relationship with Valve, and also hints that things aren’t as rosy between the two as previously thought.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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While Xfce 4.12 was scheduled to be released on 10 March, the release didn’t happen and it looks like the release won’t be coming anytime soon.
Last September plans were expressed with a road-map to release Xfce 4.12 in mid-March. Xfce 4.12 was possibly going to be ported to GTK3, but a full-port to GTK3 was decided later on to not be feasible for this release though some packages may be friendly towards the updated tool-kit.
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Development of the LightDM display manager is now in an awkward state by Canonical’s announcement of developing — and ultimately switching to — the Mir Display Server rather than Wayland.
David Edmundson, who for a long time has been working on LightDM and has led when it comes to LightDM-KDE, wrote an interesting blog post this morning about how Mir conflicts with LightDM — the display manager that’s also used by Ubuntu.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias from the GNOME Release Team was happy to announce a few days ago that the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment was ready for download and testing.
This time, the release has been delayed with only two days from the original schedule and it is available for download and testing on the main GNOME FTP server, bringing numerous updated components, several improvements across basic apps, new features, countless bugfixes and many updated translations.
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We already know that KDE developers aren’t fond of Mir, Canonical’s display server for the Unity desktop not derived from X.Org and Wayland. KDE developers aren’t happy about it, some Xfce developers have also expressed dissatisfaction with the recent Canonical changes, and now there’s a GNOME response. What’s GNOME doing about Mir? They’re laying out plans right now to move hard and fast with Wayland support!
There’s been experimental work on bringing the GNOME Shell and Mutter to Wayland/Weston, but nothing that’s been merged yet and ready for GNOME desktop users. The GTK3 tool-kit does have Wayland support and it’s continuing to be improved. Rather than GNOME jumping on the Mir bandwagon, they want to move now at a vicious rate in supporting Wayland.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Enterprises don’t want to just know that an operating system will run on a piece of iron, they want to know who they are entitled to yell at when it stops working properly. And that’s why a new support agreement has been inked between Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu Server distribution of Linux, and Dell, one of the largest server makers in the world.
As David Duffey, director of technical partnerships at Canonical, explained in a blog post announcing the expanded relationship between the two companies, Dell fired up reference architectures for the PowerEdge-C density-optimized servers back in July 2011, and the following May these reference architectures were tweaked to support Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the long-term support variant of Ubuntu that most enterprise customers go with for their iron.
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Ubuntu fans may recall Ubuntu GNOME Remix, the unofficial flavor of the Linux distribution that was launched last fall for users not fond of the software’s default Unity desktop environment.
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With the start of another week comes another round of information on the Mir Display Server out of Canonical.
Mark Shuttleworth shared on Google+ a post by Christopher Halse Rogers about the Canonical motives for working on Mir. Interestingly, Mark claims, “Contrary to competitor FUD, from people who are not working as openly as they would have you believe, Mir is more likely to enable high-quality graphics for ALL flavours of Ubuntu, and any distro that chooses it. Graphics vendors have been happy to engage and ensure it works well on all architectures.”
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Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has an ambitious plan with a short time-frame: One operating system for computers, smartphones, tablets and TVs by early 2014. One problem with this is how do you get there fast enough and one answer, rolling releases, has got developers upset. Now, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has a new proposal on how to handle rolling releases.
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Ubuntu developer Michael Hall has posted screenshots of early versions of what Canonical is calling the “Core Apps” for Ubuntu Touch, the new flavor of the popular Linux distribution that’s being rewritten to run on mobile devices as well as PCs.
There wasn’t much you could actually do with Ubuntu Touch when Canonical released the Developer Preview firmware images in February. The OS would boot, it supported basic internet access over Wi-Fi, and you could place calls with the smartphone version, but most of the preinstalled “apps” were actually just placeholders for software that had yet to be written.
But according to Hall, work is already underway to build a set of apps to handle most of the everyday functions users expect from their phones and fondleslabs.
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It’s easy to assume, from the stunning rate at which OEMs roll out newer and better versions of PCs, phones, tablets and other popular hardware, that few consumers want to hold on to aging devices. But if a new community-based spinoff of Ubuntu named LXLE is any indication, there are those who are, in fact, keen on keeping legacy computers running–even if it means building the requisite software themselves.
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AndersDX is shipping a miniature computer-on-module (COM) based on a dual-core 1.65GHz AMD G-Series APU. The CM-iGT provides rich graphics and multimedia capabilities and is supported with embedded Linux.
The CM-iGT’s AMD G-Series APU integrates a dual-core, 64-bit x86 CPU clocked at up to 1.65GHz (depending on board model). The module also supports up to 4GB DDR3 DRAM and up to 32GB flash onboard memory.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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HTC is searching for a comeback. After selling 43.2 million phones in 2011, according to research firm Gartner, HTC saw sales slide in 2012 down to 32.1 million units amid intense competition from the likes of Samsung Electronics and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) at the high end and Huawei and ZTE at the lower end of the market. HTC is plotting a return to prominence on the back of the HTC One, the Taiwanese smartphone maker’s latest flagship device. At the recent Mobile World Congress trade show, FierceWireless Editor Phil Goldstein talked with Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s global president of sales, about the company’s brand, the software features of the One and how the company can get its smartphone swagger back. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
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Android
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Sales of Sony Mobile Communications’ new high-end flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z, have been successful, which could help the vendor ramp up sales of its entry-level to mid-range Android smartphones as well as to speed up its deployment in other mobile platforms, according to sources in the handset supply chain.
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If you picked up a new television over the last couple of years the chances are good that you weighed the option of a “smart” TV. Thanks to HDMI and a growing assortment of add-on products, those who opted for a standard model can now smarten their TV up. One such device that’s is worth considering the FAVI Entertainment SmartStick.
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This morning we brought you what initially appeared to be something approaching a realistic rumour regarding the Motorola X Phone. As it turns out, that news was largely unreliable and unsubstantiated rumour, and in respect of the imagery at least, provably false. You can see the pre-aged image used to create the fake as the article image; it’s clearly a (relatively) poorly made render.
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Google’s Android boss is stepping down from his role.
Sundar Pichai will take over the Android division at Google and run it in addition to his duties as the boss of the Chrome Web browser and Chrome operating system.
Google CEO Larry Page said in an announcement that Rubin will “start a new chapter at Google,” but doesn’t specify what the new job will be.
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“Andy’s decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google.”
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Web Browsers
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SaaS/Big Data
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IBM CEO schools executives on how to make data-based decisions and predicts the decline of management by gut instinct.
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In a steady fashion, almost all users of digital technology and devices are using open source, simply because so many open source software components help drive proprietary applications and platforms. The proliferation of open source components is starting to have a very positive effect on the cloud computing scene. As just one example, Netflix–which has a very robust cloud-based proprietary platform–has released Chaos Monkey and a number of other meaningful open source components that can make cloud deployments stronger.
Now, news comes from MIT that researchers are open sourcing software components for cloud-based database-driven applications that could reduce hardware requirements by 95 percent while improving performance.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 4.0 is now available to download with user interface enhancements, and a multitude of fun new features. Here I will review many of the new features for all the LibreOffice lovers out there. This release delivers a cleaner interface and all-around improved usability.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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India may have policy of preferring free and open source applications, but still the world’s largest software maker Microsoft and others, including Adobe, Norton and McAfee, have managed to weasel their way into some of the largest government purchases in the country’s history.
Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are in the process of procuring over eight million laptops preloaded with proprietary software in clear violation of India’s national policy on information and communication technology and incurring avoidable expenditure of large sums of money, activists said.
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Switching to free and open source software contributes to sustainability by making a more efficient use of computer hardware, allowing to use PCs for longer than when following proprietary software vendor’s upgrade cycle, two very recent examples show.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Friends, family and colleagues memorialized computer activist Aaron Swartz and put MIT’s role in his prosecution front and center on Tuesday afternoon at MIT Media Lab.
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The good folks over at the EFF have posted a letter from a group of startups and innovators to Congress seeking reform of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), which has been abused for years, most notably and recently, in the case against Aaron Swartz (full disclosure: I helped review the initial letter and helped the EFF get some of the signatures on the letter). This is important, because, as we have noted, plenty of innovators and entrepreneurs could have been charged under this law for some of their random hacking experiments, some of which directly led them to create amazing innovations.
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When I learned that Aaron Swartz had taken his own life, I cried. I am still desperately sad, for him, his family, for the close friends who loved him, and for our community. We lost a rare and special person, one who did so much in his short life to make the world a better place. Any do-gooder, including myself, could be proud were we to accomplish as much. We don’t know what else he would have acheived were he to have lived. But I admit that I also cried for myself, because I felt guilty that I didn’t do more to help Aaron in his criminal case. This article is about part of that challenge, the challenge to improve computer crime laws, and the criminal justice system more generally. Hopefully in the end, there’ll be something that I, and you, can do about it.
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Federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by withholding key evidence from the defense team of Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist’s legal team alleged in a letter to an internal Justice Department ethics unit.
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Security
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A group of New Zealand organisations responsible for critical infrastructure have established voluntary standards for the security of such systems against digital attack.
The New Zealand Cyber Security Voluntary Standards for Industrial Control Systems were devised with the support of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
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…FinSpy Mobile sample found in the wild, which appears to have been used in Vietnam.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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And the Associated Press noted that the UN “couldn’t ‘unequivocally conclude’ that the death was caused by an errantly fired Palestinian rocket.”
The BBC (3/11/13) casts doubt on the attribution of the infant’s death to a Palestinian rocket, noting “that the Israeli military had reported no rockets being fired out of Gaza so soon after the start of the conflict.” It also pointed out that UN team, arriving four weeks after the attack, “did not carry out a forensic investigation, but said their team did not think the damage was consistent with an Israeli air strike.” Al-Masharawi’s father, for his part, calls the UN finding “rubbish.”
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But the problem with that is that Ali Soufan, in his review, and other agents I’ve talked to, consistently cite Faisal Shahzad, for example — he’s the man who came close to bombing Times Square — or Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the subway system. They cite these men as examples of real terrorists and why sting operations are so necessary.
But the problem with their argument, I think, is that neither of those men was actually caught in a terrorism sting operation. To date, we have yet to find the real would-be terrorist: Someone who was about to strike, who had the weapon, who had the means, who is thwarted by a sting operation.
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Chinese authorities have violently cracked down on an 18-day uprising over landgrabs in a southern Chinese village, arresting nine people and hospitalising dozens.
This weekend, security forces stormed the village of Shangpu, a farming community of 3,000 in southern Guangdong province, cut the electricity supply and phone service, beat demonstrators and fired tear gas into crowds, injuring 30 to 40 people.
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As just one example, an Embassy cable from June 9, 2009, explains how the former Colombian analogue of the FBI, the DAS, had been spying on and “Neutralizing” (a code word which can include actions up to assassination) particular human rights groups, including Father Giraldo’s group, the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace (“CIJP” or “Justicia y Paz”). (12) This cable noted that this surveillance has been ordered by the then-President of Colombia himself, Alvaro Uribe. The cable noted that the “[s]urveillance included physical monitoring of individuals and their families (including minor children), phone and email intercepts, and collection of sensitive financial data. The unit appears to have also taken active measures to disrupt opposition events and intimidate human rights activists. . . . Journalists and human rights activists claim the surveillance [which began in 2004-2005] continues.” (emphasis added).
One must seriously wonder whether, indeed, this state policy of “neutralizing” the CIJP continues even now, and whether the recent assassination attempt upon Father Alberto Franco of the CIJP on February 13, 2013, was indeed carried out pursuant to this policy. I myself will say for the record that should any further ill befall Father Franco or any other priest associated with the CIJP, the Colombian state and its U.S. backer must be held responsible.
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A Navy contract linguist charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act by unlawfully retaining “national defense information” has been hit with a third charge of violating the law.
James F. Hitselberger was working in Bahrain as a translator. A document collector, as Secrecy News’ Steven Aftergood describes, Hitselberger is a “peripatetic collector of rare documents.” In his living quarters, where a “classified document was allegedly found in April” of 2012, newspapers and numerous books could be found. Some of his “discoveries over the years” have been donated “to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which actually maintains a James F. Hitselberger Collection.” The collection includes “political posters and leaflets that he gathered in pre-revolutionary Iran.”
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NASSER AL-AULAQI: I want Americans to know about my grandson, that he was very nice boy. He was very caring boy for his family, for his mother, for his brothers. He was born in August 1995 in the state of Colorado, city of Denver. He was raised in America, when he was a child until he was seven years old. And I never thought that one day this boy, this nice boy, will be killed by his own government.
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The White House has directed the CIA to increase its cooperation and backing of Iraqi state militias to fight al-Qaeda affiliates there and cut off the flow of fighters pouring into Syria.
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While there is nothing that prevents officials from being sworn in on a Bible, there’s certainly nothing wrong with following Brennan’s example and honoring the U.S. Constitution. Doing so not only sends a positive message, it frees government from giving the appearance of religious favoritism.
When CIA Director John Brennan placed his hand on a copy of the U.S. Constitution last week to take his oath of office, did he defy the very document on which he swore? Absolutely not.
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Carroll also wrote that Chavez, himself, believed that the cancers that befell former leftist leaders of Latin America, including Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, diagnosed with colon cancer and Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva, treated for throat cancer, were part of a CIA plot directed against left-wing leaders. Curiously, Carroll suggests that Uruguay’s former leftist president, Tabare Vazquez, also recovered from cancer.
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The astonishing information about this secret weapon of the CIA comes from U.S. Senate testimony in 1975 on rogue activities of the CIA. This weapon is only one of many James Bond-like discoveries of the Church Committee hearings, officially known as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
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Qayum reported that the strike force put a black hood over his head and took him to an “undisclosed location” where he was beaten and asked if he knew any “Taliban commanders.” They also asked if he could help them capture a neighbor from his home village.
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Ewald von Kleist, the last surviving member of a group of German officers who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, has died at age 90. After the war von Kleist played a prominent role in transatlantic relations.
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George Newman (formerly Hans Neumann) was 14 when he fled Vienna, fearing Nazi persecution, for England in 1938. Now, 75 years later, he has returned to Austria for a ceremony at the National Library, where he has donated hundreds of books and documents back to the Austrian nation which would otherwise have been burned by the Nazi regime.
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John Brennan, newly confirmed director of the CIA, assured Americans in a speech last year on targeted killing that there is “absolutely nothing casual” about the process of targeted killing, including that of American citizens. He included in this the use of remotely controlled drone airplanes that have been used to strike and kill people identified as al-Qaida terrorists.
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Congress is considering hearings into the use of deadly drones against terrorists, including U.S. citizens, overseas. It should expand its oversight to cover the entire subject of drones and their long-term implications.
What matters immediately is the Obama administration’s indefensible secrecy about targeted killings overseas, particularly when U.S. citizens are the targets.
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I started to think about the intersection of robotics and the law in earnest a few years ago when I left private practice. In 2011, I came to the conclusion that drones had the potential to create a new Warren and Brandeis moment. Some combination of our visceral reaction to robotic technology, our fascination with flight, and our association of drones with the theater of war could, I thought, trigger a reexamination of privacy law. Drones have indeed captured the public imagination. And we are entering something of a policy window, to borrow a concept from Priscilla Regan. But just how citizens and lawmakers ultimately come down on the domestic use of drones remains to be seen. In this post, I will talk about what I think are the worst and best ways to regulate drones with respect to privacy.
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Cablegate
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But then Mr Mugabe does not think that way. Perhaps he doesn’t have confidence in his own party which is populated with some of the most treacherous and most weird people in the whole wide world! Mugabe knows he can trust them at his own risk especially with the Willowgate Scandal, War Victims’ Compensation Fund looting, Wikileaks and their general incompetence in mind.
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From the information movement initiated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange triggering political revolutions and the “Right to Know” becoming common parlance, WikiLeaks has had “widespread ramifications across the world”, said Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson on Tuesday. Ms. Robinson, who is a member of Mr. Assange’s legal team, was participating in a round-table discussion here involving activists, lawyers and journalists.
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A full audio recording of the whistleblower is released today despite a court prohibition on such recordings
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To discuss Bradley Manning’s recorded court statement that was recently leaked to the press, we’re joined by perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “What we’ve heard are people like The New York Times who have consistently slandered him … that he was vague and couldn’t think of specific instances that had led him to inform the American people of injustices,” Ellsberg says. “The American people can now, for the first time, hear Bradley in his own words, emotionally and in the greatest specific detail, tell what it was that he felt that needed revelation.” [includes rush transcript]
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The story covers an investigation that was spurred, in part, by revelations that USDA “Wildlife Services” employee Jamie P. Olson had posted photos of his dogs tearing trapped coyotes to pieces on Facebook. (Previously, on Pharyngula.) The issue’s been kept on the front burner by my colleague Camilla Fox at Project Coyote; she and her organization deserve your attention and support.
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The UK has just agreed to send 40 troops and another $5 million to support the French led operation and Harper is due to renew his contribution to the takeover on March 14. Other African nations have also begun to mobilize troops.
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Finance
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The Securities and Exchange Commission took a step to curtail the chance computer glitches disrupt markets, proposing rules that also would impose standards for the electronic architecture of private trading venues known as dark pools.
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Censorship
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The Internet and social networks have been conclusively established as tools for protest, campaigning, and circulating information, and as vehicles for advancing human rights and democratic values. The aim of the day is to defend human rights online, promote Internet accessibility for all, and expose enemies of Internet openness — along with governments that are gradually becoming more controlling over how their citizens use the Internet.
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Privacy
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Washington state has led the way in many respects when it comes to the drone issue, something I highlighted recently in my article: Just Say NO: Seattle Residents Kill the City’s Drone Program. It’s not just Seattle though, there is a bi-partisan bill in the Washington state legislature, H.B. 1771, which limits drone use within the entire state. The bill has already passed its House Committee hearing and, as expected, the state’s corporate overlords have started to fight back. Specifically, Boeing. From the Examiner:
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“My computer was arrested before I was.” This perceptive comment was made by a Syrian activist who had been arrested and tortured by the Assad regime. Caught by means of online surveillance, Karim Taymour told a Bloomberg[1] journalist that, during interrogation, he was shown a stack of hundreds of pages of printouts of his Skype chats and files downloaded remotely from his computer hard drive. His torturers clearly knew as much as if they had been with him in his room, or more precisely, in his computer.
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The first great conflict over cryptography and state power happened in the 1990s. In one corner were cryptographers equipped with subtle math, digital technologies, and new ideas. In the other were the Clinton administration and its National Security Agency (NSA), which sought to maintain and extend the federal government’s control over cryptography. They struggled over the concept that cryptography could be classified as munitions, over requirements to include NSA-friendly chips in communication hardware, and, in general, over the shape of post–Cold War security.
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The general wasn’t kidding. Within an hour or so of Alexander’s testimony reports that Chase Bank’s website had been hacked started to bubble up. Shortly before 7 p.m. Chase confirmed to CNBC that they had indeed been targeted. Hackers hit Chase with — you guessed it — a DOS attack, bringing down the company’s website. It’s unclear if any customer data was compromised. It’s also absolutely unclear if the hack has anything to do with the series of hearings in the Senate on Tuesday that mention cyber security and the threat of a cyber attack. Hacking into a bank’s website right after the head of the NSA warns the Senate about hackers hacking into banks’ websites is certainly a clever way to win attention.
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This coming Friday, March 15, Government Accountability Project (GAP) client and National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake will speak at a luncheon at the National Press Club (NPC).
This event is part of the NPC’s involvement in Sunshine Week, a national initiative promoting open government and transparency.
Drake will speak at 1:00 p.m., and a lunch preceding his remarks will be served at 12:30 p.m. Tickets are required for this event; more information about this and other details can be found on the NPC webpage. Journalists can also submit questions to Drake in advance, with instructions to do so contained on the NPC page.
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His “ruminations” may indeed be his personal thoughts, and not official Google policy, but for that very reason represent his real opinions of issues, not just the public gloss that is put upon them. Given his pivotal role at Google when it comes to privacy, it is likely that the Google management team largely share those views – otherwise they would presumably have fired Fleischer and found someone else they felt more comfortable with. Thus his frank comments probably provide us with tantalising glimpses of what Google really thinks about privacy.
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Apple Inc. (AAPL) must show in detail how it’s complying with court orders to turn over evidence in a privacy lawsuit, a judge ruled, saying he can no longer rely on what the company tells him in the case.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, California, issued the order after the plaintiffs’ lawyers claimed Apple withheld documents it had previously been ordered to produce. Apple is accused in the lawsuit of collecting data on the locations of customers through iPhones, even after the device’s geo-location feature was turned off.
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Company moves to protect its iOS customers from security and privacy attacks over Wi-Fi by turning on encryption, at least half a year after being alerted to the problem.
Civil Rights
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Lawsuits challenging government secrecy have fared pretty terribly in the post-9/11 era, with the most recent example being the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that a group of journalists and activists have no right to sue over the FISA spying law.
Only a few cases of this sort are left, including two Bay Area lawsuits being pushed forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One is the San Francisco case over NSA wiretapping, which the government is trying to shut down using the “state secrets” privilege. The other is EFF’s case demanding to see documents about how the government is interpreting Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.
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DRM
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Berners-Lee is so good on so many issues (most of his talk seemed to be about the importance of openness) that this response really stands out as not fitting with his general view of the world. Cory Doctorow has responded eloquently to TBL, explaining why he should be against the DRM proposal.
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The Big Content guys have been seeking to remake the web in their image (i.e., “TV”) for over a decade now, still believing that they’re the main reason people get online. They’re not. There’s room for them within the ecosystem, but professional broadcast-quality content is just a part of the system, not the whole thing. If the world moves to HTML5 without DRM, the content guys will whine about it… and then follow. Especially as the more knowledgeable and forward-looking content creators jump in and succeed.
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Adding DRM to the HTML standard will have far-reaching effects, incompatible with the W3C’s most important policies
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In a blog post with the understated (to say the least) title “Changes to the Public API Program,” Netflix has announced that it’s shutting down its public API program. Effectively, that means that no new apps that take advantage of the data Netflix used to provide — for example, for searching for new shows and movies to watch — will be possible. Netflix director of engineering, Daniel Jacobson, writes that “existing and active affiliates” will still have access to Netflix’s APIs, so any third-party apps you currently use should still work as normally. Along with the changes, Netflix has set its developer forum to “read-only,” shut down its “OData catalog” for programmatically accessing Netflix’s catalog, and directed all developers to Stack Overflow for their questions.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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That suggests that the US is actively involved in this latest move — maybe even its instigator — and would look favorably on Mexico joining TAFTA. There’s also a hint in the article quoted above that Canada too might join TAFTA. Having both Mexico and Canada on board would be consistent with the US’s past approach, where it allowed them to join the TPP negotiations, but on fairly humiliating terms that limit their scope of action.
Whether or not Mexico and Canada become part of TAFTA, and under what terms, it’s pretty clear what the US strategy here is. Just today we learned that South Korea is likely to join Japan in asking to sign up to the TPP talks. That would make TPP the defining international agreement for the entire Pacific region. TAFTA obviously aims to do the same for the Atlantic. As well as establishing the US as the key link between the giant TPP and TAFTA blocs, this double-headed approach would also isolate the main emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India and above all China — if they refuse to join as presumably junior partners. That globe-spanning pair of trade pacts, it would seem, are what Obama hopes to be remembered for when he leaves office: his legacy to America — and to history.
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Copyrights
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One of the nastier tricks of copyright maximalists has been to lump together “counterfeiting” with “copyright infringement” in an effort to conveniently jump back and forth when making silly arguments. Basically, they can argue that copyright infringement is a huge issue, because of the massive amount of unauthorized sharing that happens online. But they have a lot of trouble showing real harm. On the other side, counterfeiting really isn’t that big of a problem when you look closely at the details, but there are a few, extremely limited cases (faulty counterfeit airplane parts, some fake drugs) where there could be real harm. So if you lump them all together you can claim “massive problems” with “real harm.” But that doesn’t work if you look at them individually.
We recently wrote about some Canadian politicians introducing a bill to get Canada in compliance with ACTA, despite the fact that ACTA has been totally discredited around the globe. Some political opponents are now pushing back on that, calling the bill in question an attempt to get ACTA in “through the backdoor.” However, in response Canadian Industry Minister, Christian Paradis, just keeps repeating the “counterfeiting” mantra and ignoring the entire ACTA elephant in the room.
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Porn-trolling firm Prenda Law recently made another baffling move in a retaliatory defamation suit against its online critics: the firm sent a subpoena to Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, demanding a list of all of the IP addresses that have visited the anti-troll websites DieTrollDie and Fight Copyright Trolls, both of which are powered by WordPress. Prenda’s lawyer Paul Duffy wrote to Automattic in a letter accompanying the subpoena, “Due to the emergency nature of the requested information, it is imperative that your organization responds to the subpoena immediately.”
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Send this to a friend
03.12.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Linux wears many different hats. Server, desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, embedded, if there is a device with a CPU there is a good bet that it can run linux. Regardless of Linux’s domination in the datacenter, and it’s mainstream acceptance in mobile and other areas, the fate of the Linux Desktop is what gets people worked up. When a highly public person like Miguel de Icaza switches his desktop to OS X, quite a bit of discussion ensues.
Much discussion, and most of it for naught. The personal computer that de Icaza uses is of little importance to the Linux community as a whole. He is making a switch during a transitionary period of personal computing, where we are moving from PCs to tablets and smart phones, and the new mobile computing platform is clearly the way of the future. The role of PCs will continue to decline, especially in the home use market. However, the enterprise will have a use for PCs for many, many years to come, and this is where the best opportunity for the Linux desktop resides.
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If you’re a Windows 7 user who wants to try out Linux for the first time, one of the easiest ways to do so is to install Ubuntu by using the Windows Ubuntu Installer, or Wubi for short. Using this installer, you can run Ubuntu on your Windows system without having to deal with partitioning and formatting issues, and if you ever get sick of the Linux variant, you can easily uninstall it from within the Programs applet in the Control Panel.
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Google has been working with Netflix (take some tips Canonical) to bring the DRMed services to the Chromebook. This is major as instead of using Microsoft’s Silverlight Netflix is using HTML5 video streaming (which now supports DRM for HTML5 on Chromebooks). Recently Google enabled the much controversial DRM (digital repression management) support for HTML5 in Chrome OS to bring services like Netflix to Chromebooks using HTML5 instead of controversial Silverlight of Microsoft.
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Server
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It should come as no surprise that Akamai, the world’s largest Content Delivery Network uses Linux as a core underpinning for its’ 120,000 server network.
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So, we were caught in a situation where if we upgraded Postfix, we might break the installed MySQL client. There are a couple of things wrong with this situation. First off, why, oh why, does Postfix require a MySQL client to be installed? Postfix is our MTA, a mail transfer agent, setup because it is easy to configure and we need to do a couple things differently from what is available out of the box. We have absolutely no use for MySQL on every server in the environment. Secondly, why was the third party MySQL (or is that first party, since it is from Oracle?) installed over the default filesystem? Packages that are bundled for inclusion on an operating system should respect that operating system’s package manager and install all of their files to /usr/local/. This keeps the filesystem clean, and does not interfere with the standard package manager and patching process.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Chris Wilson of Intel OTC announced the release of the xf86-video-intel 2.21.4 X.Org driver on Monday morning. This new driver has clumsy PowerXpress integration, run-time detection of available CPU instruction sets, Haswell fix-ups, and more work on the SNA acceleration architecture.
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On its “Open Source Technology Center” 01.org, Intel recently released an installation program that updates Intel graphics drivers for some Linux distributions, including the 32- and 64-bit x86 versions of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10. Once the program package is installed, the intel-linux-graphics-installer program can take a look at the distribution and connect to repositories from which it pulls packages with newer drivers.
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Here’s some of the first OpenGL benchmarks of the ultra high-end $999 (USD) NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN running on Linux.
The mighty-impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN was released in mid-February as a graphics card with 6GB of video RAM and boasts 4.5 TeraFLOPS of single-precision compute power and 1.3 TeraFLOPS of double-precision compute power. The NVIDIA 313.26 driver was released to support this ultra-powerful NVIDIA GeForce graphics card under Linux.
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The first working ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) GPU graphics driver built for Gallium3D has been merged into mainline Mesa!
The driver that was merged into mainline Mesa is the Gallium3D Freedreno for Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno graphics hardware. This Freedreno Gallium3D driver initially supports the A220, which is the GPU that Qualcomm uses with its Snapdragon S3 SoC.
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Applications
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The high-end open-source audio workstation software Ardour is up to version 3.0. Ardour 3.0 features many improvements to this GPLv2+ software.
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Ardour chief developer Paul Davis has released version 3.0 of his digital audio workstation. Ardour 3′s most important new feature is the multi-track recorder’s comprehensive MIDI support and MIDI sequencing functionality. Ardour supports instrument plugins in Steinberg’s VST format, the AudioUnit format of Mac OS X, and the LV2 Linux standard, successor to the LADSPA format. The MIDI workflow is modelled after the audio workflow: notes played on a MIDI device can be recorded as separate tracks and then played back via a software synthesizer. An overview of the MIDI-enabled multi-track recorder’s capabilities is available on the project’s feature page.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ever since the advent of Steam for Linux, performance issues have miffed gamers; especially those who are using Ubuntu’s Unity and are forced to use Compiz as their display compositor. Those issues have been combated in several ways. Nvidia and AMD have been ‘stepping up to the plate’ so to speak with increased performance from their drivers, and developers have been working towards more granular performance enhancements geared towards playing well with Xorg. Step one for most users is to simply unset Compiz for fullscreen applications, KWin for KDE users. The former is the most affected, and that was the catalyst behind Michael Bethencourt’s FSGamer.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Sebastian Kügler of KDE has talked about progress made on Plasma 2, the port of the Plasma Workspaces desktop to using KDE Frameworks 5 that in turn works atop Qt 5. The possibilities opened up for Plasma 2 due to KDE Frameworks 5 and using an OpenGL scene-graph are impressive and awesome.
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Today I’d like to share a success story of a picture perfect project collaboration as it only happens in the open source world without any commercial, political or geographical borders. It all started back in 2009 after a short interview about Roundcube was published on a techworld.com blog. Short time after we got an email from Georg Greve, founder of the FSFE and member of the Kolab Groupware project. At that time, Kolab already made its name as a free competitor to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and they were just about to found a new company to push Kolab to the next level. One thing Kolab definitely needed was a better web client to access all the groupware data from anywhere. And this is where Roundcube seemed to fit in perfectly. Although Roundcube was “just” an email client, the Kolab guys saw great potential in our codebase and the vital community around it. And now, more than three years after, we can all witness the great success of this decision.
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For this project, we’ll use a photo of the famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain (you can download the RAW file from https://www.box.com/s/cq3uknqt54o3usf1jg3r). The photo was taken with a Canon PowerShot S90 camera, and the RAW file exhibits several obvious flaws, including visible barrel distortion, underexposed areas, and noise. In other words, this particular RAW file is perfect for tweaking in digiKam.
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Natural ecosystems are wonderful things full of complexity and beauty. There are few ecosystems on this planet that are occupied by only one or two species. Most are a complex meshing of variety, though it is not uncommon for there to be dominant species (numerically, positionally) within them.
Interesting things happen when you change an ecosystem, however. If you remove a species, particularly a populous one, it leaves an opening full of suddenly unused resources in its wake. This opening usually fills up quickly with other species, often creating instabilities that over time even out until the system reaches a new equilibrium. Change the environment in some way (more water, less water; more heat , longer cold; etc.) and previously successful groups may find themselves marginalized, once again creating opportunities for others to grow and proliferate.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Ubuntu Technical board has given the official designation to two Ubuntu flavours, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. The decision was made in an IRC meeting and announced by the projects this week. Ubuntu GNOME 3 sets out to deliver the GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu, while UbuntuKylin aims to offer a fully customised Chinese user experience on Ubuntu 13.04. The official blessing gives the developers of each flavour access to Ubuntu’s build infrastructure and allows them to be managed as part of the Ubuntu project rather than as an unsupported fork.
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Can we really and seriously believe that William Jon McCann, described as one of the main driving forces behind the concepts of GNOME 3, doesn’t know what Xfce is? What are the consequences of having a large corporation like Red Hat (perhaps with strong influence from the ultra-wealthy Google) in control of widely used open source projects like GNOME and GTK, with its teams of developers routinely altering their APIs in unpredictable, erratic ways and offering no real support to independent projects using their libraries? It’s clear that with the advent of GNOME 3, GNOME has become a corporate product solely created for and controlled by Red Hat.
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A number of interesting new Linux releases are due out in the next few days or weeks. Here’s a quick overview of some of them.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 3 Beta 3, the delayed beta release that pushed Mageia 3′s release date into May, has now been released by the development team. The team say they had to face quite a lot of bugs during the QA phase of testing the beta 3 ISO images and that it took more time than expected to fix them. Another beta, beta 4 is scheduled for 28 March, followed by a release freeze on 7 April, release candidate on 19 April, and final release on 3 May.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon Linux is a distribution which uses Gentoo Linux as its base. The Sabayon project is very diverse, featuring many different desktop spins (KDE, GNOME, MATE and Xfce) along with some minimalist and server spins. Each flavour of Sabayon is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. This gives users a variety of editions from which to choose and one of them is bound to fit our needs. The distribution maintains a rolling release, meaning packages are constantly updating to keep users up to date with the latest available versions of software. I decided to try the latest release of Sabayon, version 11, and opted to try the project’s KDE edition. The KDE edition can be downloaded as a 2.2 GB ISO image.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering started its life as a mostly proprietary product built on technology acquired from Makara in 2010.
In April of 2012, Red Hat made OpenShift available as open source under the OpenShift Origin effort. Simply making a project open source, however, doesn’t make it a true open source community with contribution and collaboration.
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Tech companies ended up putting in a mixed trading session Tuesday, with notable losses coming from Apple Inc. and Red Hat Inc., but decent gains coming elsewhere from the likes of VeriFone Systems Inc.
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Fedora
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“I think we offer quite a bit more choice to people. Think in terms of the number of desktop choices we offer. Consider that if somebody in the Fedora community wants to add to those choices, we are supportive of that interest. We will do that. We are not dictating from on high. We don’t focus on ‘Thou shalt have’ and ‘Thou shalt not have.’ We are definitely a distribution that is focused on freedom.”
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Matthias Clasen sparked a new mailing list thread on Monday amongst Fedora developers to improve the Fedora boot experience.
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So I think out of all of the feedback we got about the Anaconda UI redesign, the one piece of the UI that’s received the most negative feedback is the RAID configuration piece of the custom partitioning UI. The designs for how this UI ended up getting implemented in Fedora 18 was posted to this blog in December 2011. I really wish we’d received the level of feedback we received post F18-Beta and post F18-GA at that point, so the design could have been modified before it was implemented! That being said – I’m not placing blame with anybody but myself – I got this design wrong, and for that I am sincerely sorry.
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Debian Family
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Ok so I have put off doing this review for sometime. I tried Crunchbang for the first time about a year ago and I was a little underwhelmed.
[...]
There are some distributions that have a lot of glitz and glamour and they lack functionality (if these distributions were people my nan would say they were “all skirt and no knickers”). There are other distributions that are built for do-ers. (and of course there are some that provide Glitz and glamour as well as functionality).
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The candidates have been announced and the election process for the new Debian Project Leader (DPL) has officially begun. Gergely Nagy, Moray Allan and Lucas Nussbaum are campaigning for the top position in the Debian Project. After three terms, current Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli is not running for re-election this year.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A common complaint about Chrome OS is that it’s not a full OS. That’s no longer true as you can easily run Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS on the Chromebook Pixel and toggle between the two.
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Recently, many people have expressed concern over Ubuntu’s desire to migrate from the X Window System to the Mir display server, which the Ubuntu team will manage themselves. The bulk of the concern seems to be confusion over why Ubuntu developers wouldn’t use Wayland instead.
In this article, I’ll explore the official reasoning for the decision, while also exploring some additional considerations that most people aren’t talking about.
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Seven years ago, it was a bit of a challenge to shift to open source because Linux desktop operating systems weren’t all that easy to set up and use. Today, it’s a snap to install and use Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions with an estimated 20 million users worldwide.
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More than a year after it announced plans to develop an Ubuntu-powered TV, Canonical, the company behind the operating system, is still to announce a hardware partner for the project.
Ubuntu TV is one element of Canonical’s ‘four screen’ strategy, under which the company wants to see its open source operating system also appearing on smartphones, tablets and PCs.
First announced at CES 2012 in Las Vegas, Canonical hoped that Ubuntu TVs would appear by the end of the year.
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Developers at Canonical have been considering a completely new release cycle for Ubuntu in which the interim releases that occur every six months would be dumped in favor of “rolling releases” that happen far more frequently but not necessarily on a set schedule.
Last month, Canonical VP Rick Spencer suggested that Canonical “take a monthly snapshot of the development release, which we support only until the next snapshot.” Users could then choose either the Long Term Support (LTS) edition that comes out every two years, the monthly snapshot, or the absolute newest build, which could conceivably be updated every day.
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Ubuntu 13.04 is the latest version of Ubuntu, scheduled to be released on the 25th of April this year. But what’s it shaping up to? In this article I’ll sum up some of the changes since the last LTS (Long Time Support) release, Ubuntu 12.04. You might wonder “Why not Ubuntu 12.10?” The answer is simple; I never used Ubuntu 12.10 after my first crashtastic experience in VirtualBox. I’m not saying Ubuntu 12.10 was a bad release, but it didn’t really work for me.
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Mark Shuttleworth can’t leave well enough alone. First it was Unity. Then it was Wayland. Now it’s Mir. Inquiring minds want to know: what does he think he’s trying to do? It’s simple, really. He’s not trying to do anything. All indications are that he’s actually accomplishing what he’s setting out to do. Except for making money and only time will tell if that’s going to work out for him.
Unity was a no-brainer. Practically everybody hated GNOME 3, so he pretty much had to do something. What everyone expected that something to be was along the lines of Cinnamon or MATE, an interface that would offer users the look and feel of GNOME as they knew it, not as it had become. What Shuttleworth offered was, in the words of Monty Python, “something completely different.” Different from both GNOME 2 or 3. Different from KDE. Different from Windoze and OS X. Unique to Ubuntu.
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Daylight savings just began, which means it’s the time of year to start looking forward to the spring release of Ubuntu. But could this year’s version, 13.04, be the last one in the biannual release cycle that Canonical has stalwartly maintained for almost a decade? For the moment, that remains uncertain, but the issue, which has produced a stunning amount of debate, could have ramifications well beyond the Ubuntu ecosystem.
Rumors of changes to the Ubuntu release policy have circulated for several months, but Ubuntu developers initially rejected them. The issue re-emerged a couple of weeks ago, however, when Rick Spencer, vice president of Engineering at Canonical, launched a wide public discussion by suggesting on the Ubuntu developers’ email list that a “rolling release” cycle might better serve the Ubuntu community. That would be a major shift away from the current model, under which Canonical introduces a new version of Ubuntu every six months. It designates one out of every four of those releases for “longterm support” (LTS), meaning they receive support and updates for five years.
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So Canonical is chaining its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to a phone/tablet/TV future, and they want us, the community, to write apps for their in-the-works devices and not care so much about the core operating system itself.
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Mark Shuttleworth has irritated some open-source developers by his latest claim: Ubuntu’s Unity existed before the GNOME Shell.
Red Hat’s Adam Williamson, among other open-source developers, are ticked off by some of Mark Shuttleworth’s recent claims regarding Ubuntu. It’s just not about Mir, but other topics too. The Fedora QA manager wrote a personal blog post today entitled Dear Mark Shuttleworth: please tell the truth.
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Flavours and Variants
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This long awaited release is based on Ubuntu Precise, and as usual comes full of free software goodness. We continue to provide an easy to use classic desktop experience complete with full featured browsing, office, communications and social networking utilities. Download it while it is hot!
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As some non-Mir news, Tim Lunn of the Ubuntu GNOME project wrote into Phoronix that the OS spin is now an official Ubuntu flavor. Ubuntu GNOME was originally released last year in conjunction with Ubuntu 12.10, but now the flavor has been approved by the Tech Board per the IRC meeting logs.
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There are some major changes happening at Ubuntu which pans from changing base technologies to community involvement. Ubuntu has quite some flavour and derivatives and there was some concern among the users how these changes will impact these distributions, so we reached out to two major distributions which are based on Ubuntu – Linux Mint and Kubuntu.
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The combination of Xubuntu 12.04 and eeePC is amazing. This Linux distro has breathed fresh air into the lungs of my netbook. Unless it dies because of hardware fatigue, it should breeze on for a few years more without any trouble, blessed with an enhanced and improved presentation layer, much faster responsiveness and multitasking, and the latest set of programs and gadgets. Really nice. So if you happen to have a netbook, I do warmly recommend you give it a try with an Xfce-flavored distro, you’re bound for a pleasant surprise. Well, not a surprise, if you know what you’re expecting, but you get the drift.
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As we discovered last week, Linux pros don’t think Android is the new embedded Linux. Android does, however, have a lot of great uses in embedded projects and many features that even hard core embedded Linux developers can envy.
To dig a little deeper into some of the similarities and differences between Android and embedded Linux, we talked with John Cherry, Senior Engineering Manager of Linux Runtime Services at Mentor Graphics. While you might not need Android in a fixed function device such as your toaster (or maybe you do?), he said via email, “Android is no longer just a mobile communication and tablet operating system.”
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Phones
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commentary BlackBerry. Windows Phone. Firefox. Tizen. Ubuntu. There’s a lot of interest in creating an alternative to Android and iOS. But the lack of concentrated industry support may spell doom.
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Ballnux
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We all are just two days away from the launch of the much-hyped Samsung Galaxy S4. But that should not stop you from feasting your eyes on the first official glimpse of Galaxy S4. After launching the first teaser video for its Android-powered smartphone, the South Korean manufacturer has now come up with a sneak preview of the device.
Samsung’s US Mobile account posted the image of the Galaxy S4 on Twitter on Tuesday, ahead of its unveiling in New York on March 14.
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Android
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XOLO has launched its first quad-core Android smartphone in India. Powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the new Q800 phone has a 4.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 960 x 640 pixels. It features a 1.2GHz quad-core processor.
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LG has announced that its 4-inch dual-SIM smartphone, Optimus L5II, will make its debut in Brazil, eventually trickling out to markets in Central / South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The handset packs 1Ghz processor and 512MB of RAM powering Android 4.1.2 aka Jelly Bean layered in the latest LG UX specific tweaks: Quick Button and Safety Care.
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Developing native code for Android is relatively easy. You’ll have to learn to use Android’s XML-based screen layout mechanism, and you’ll have to learn Java. For iPhone, you’ll need to learn Objective C. If you want to develop for Windows Phone, you’ll need to learn C# as well. Instead, you simply could use Phonegap and maintain a singe code base in HTML/JavaScript/CSS. This is the definition of a “no-brainer”.
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Intel has released their own spin of Google’s Android operating system with some features not yet found in the upstream open-source Android project.
For the past half-year Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have been working on Android-IA, their project that optimizes the AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) code for Intel hardware.
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Ube announced today that its WiFi Smart Dimmer switch, currently an in-process project at Kickstarter, will be able to control other smart devices throughout the home via gestures on the dimmer’s capacitive multi-touch interface.
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The collaborative community contribution model of open source computing is an art form.
This is a view shared by an increasing number of respected speakers in the industry as open platforms now become seriously architected into our computing services from mobile devices to enterprise clouds.
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Growing consumerization of technology means an increasing number of people have control of what technologies they use in both their personal and business lives. Two of the biggest areas where this trend manifests itself these days are mobile technologies and software, the latter of which has resulted in a steady and significant growth in the use of open source software (OSS) thanks to its lower cost and relatively similar functional capabilities. Respondents in last year’s annual Future of Open Source Survey, which is currently being run for 2013 and can be taken here, indicated that by 2017 organizations will spend 50 percent more than they do now on OSS purchases.
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The era of closed platforms in the Ethernet switching industry is over, according to Mellanox Technologies, the Israeli data center Ethernet and InfiniBand networking specialist.
Mellanox has introduced its Open Ethernet initiative, which gives customers the option of running a complete open source networking stack on Ethernet hardware, allowing them to tweak and customize networks to their own specifications, said Gilad Shainer, senior director of market development at Mellanox.
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Events
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Open Source software has had a special area for itself at the CeBIT trade show for the last five years. The H went along to see what was new this year and in the process met Knoppix creator, Klaus Knopper, saw the latest in 3D printing, and talked with John “Maddog” Hall about Project Cauã.
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Web Browsers
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Stitcher has come up with new plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome browsers. You can now listen to the streaming service any time on any browser thanks to the new browser plug-ins customized for Chrome and Firefox. These plug-ins also enable users to stream their favorite programs along with over 15,000 shows using easy toolbar access providing full playback control, the company said.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack Foundation is crowded with heavy-hitting sponsors and partners, and in recent months we’ve seen OpenStack services and announcements from Rackspace, HP, Internap and AT&T. Dell, Red Hat and IBM are also diving into the fray. It seems inevitable that there could eventually be a market shakeout, and some organizations deploying OpenStack could end up very unhappy with the support and services that they are getting.
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Amazon has plugged Node.js into its free platform-as-a-service, Elastic Beanstalk.
Elastic Beanstalk helps developers deploy applications by automating capacity provisioning, load balancing, health monitoring, and auto-scaling the company announced in a blog post on Monday
It also promises some Node.js-specific support features for Elastic Beanstalk, like being able to couple Elastic Beanstalk with the Amazon RDS tech, and to run the Node.js app inside Amazon’s enterprise-friendly virtual private cloud. Elastic Beanstalk now also supports PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, and Java, alongside Node.js.
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CMS
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Dries Buytaert is the founder and lead of the open source Drupal content management system, which OStatic and many other web sites are based on. He’s also the co-founder of Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal. Dries is one of the more respected pundits in open source, and has submitted guest posts here on OStatic.
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Education
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While mainstream attention has been focused on MOOCs, the Open Educational Resource university (OERu) has been developing a parallel education offering which is distinctively open.
The OERu aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognized education institutions.
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So, we put it to you open balloters. What do you think?
Kids should be able to use MSOffice, since that’s what they’ll need to use in most jobs.
Kids should understand how computers work, and how they interact.
Kids should be able to program.
Kids should be able to install Gentoo. We’re trying to build a 1337 super race!
Kids should know nothing otherwise they’ll steal our jobs. As Homer Simpson said, “Children are the future … unless we stop them now”
Or, of course, any other thoughts.
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Healthcare
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In 2006, Luis Falcón founded GNU Health, a free health information system that recently recieved the “Best Project of Social Benefit” award given by the Free Software Foundation.
GNU Health, and in Latin countries, GNU Solidario, started as a free software project for Primary Care facilities in rural areas and developing countries. Since then, it has evolved into a full Hospital and Health Information System used by the United Nations, public hospitals and Ministries of Health (such as in Entre Rios, Argentina), and private institutions around the globe.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Guile 100 hopes to be a collection of useful examples of how to use Guile. Every few weeks, I’ll announce a theme for a collection of tasks. Then each week, I’ll announce a challenge in that theme: a script to be written or a problem to be solved.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The Swiss Canton of Bern has decided to switch to Open Justitia, a management system for legal documents, developed as open source by the country’s Federal Court. The canton procured support for the installing and maintaining the software from a Swiss IT service provider. One competitor disputes the contract. The firm, whose offer of its own proprietary alternative was turned down, is rallying for political support.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Zend Optimizer+ is to be integrated into the currently-in-development PHP 5.5. The announcement was made by Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. The opcode cache and code optimiser was recently open sourced; previously it was only available as part of the proprietary Zend Server. It improves the performance of the interpreter by optimising the bytecode generated from PHP source files. It also stores precompiled bytecode in shared memory instead of reloading and recompiling source code from the hard disk when needed.
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Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech.
Ignore, for a second, the fact COBOL doesn’t feature in the top 20 of languages developers are using in anger today. Those in charge of setting university IT curricula reckon there’s no better guarantee of a job than tooling up on COBOL.
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Standards/Consortia
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My conclusion is that when it comes to Freedom (Software Freedom or otherwise) standards actually matter as much as rights. Standards, regardless of what they are about, industry specifications, public policies, conventions defining legal terms, even words and their meaning, are the fundamental building block on an open, inclusive and efficient system. While their use may be twisted -any tool can, for the hand that uses the tool is the one ultimately defining its intent- standards form the basis of innovation, be it technological or social, and even political. Standards are what we must agree on first in order to agree on principles, values, and on the way we live. Our world, our countries, our lives, the industries we are working in are thus powered by standards. But it would be a pale assertion to stand at that line; for the author of this blog does not just stick to standards. He believes in Freedom as the energy in everything good that’s been happening in his life and around him as far as he can witness; and if the truth about the “primum mobile” will forever remain a mystery to Man, at least part of its manifestation lies in our innate and universal potential and right to Freedom. Software is no different in that respect. This blog will thus continue to be not just powered by standards. It will always be moved by Freedom.
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Possibly because the bad ones can kill you, bacteria get a bad rap. Those Purell stations you see at conferences? They’re barely competent as a viricide, but excel at destroying bacteria. And while the CDC says they’re not necessary, anti-bacterial soaps remain all the rage these days.
We’ve been conditioned to consider bacteria as the enemy by way of related horror stories. The toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum, for example, the bacteria which allows celebrities to give their faces a carboard-like appearance, is incredibly toxic. 1 gram of it, in fact, is enough to kill 14,000 people. Escherichia coli, a normally helpful occupant of our digestive tract, has a variant that can cause hemorrhagic diarrhea, kidney failure or even death.
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Science
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Algae-like structures inside a Sri Lankan meteorite are clear evidence of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe, say astrobiologists.
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A “significant” and “growing” shortage of health information technology workers has led businesses to recruit technologists from other industries to meet their needs, according to a new report.
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Hardware
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Benchmarks up this afternoon are of a Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX, an internal enterprise hard drive, being tested from Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. This Linux disk drive comparison was done with an EXT4 file-system and other disk benchmarks are available from different solid-state and traditional rotating hard drives.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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UK deaths last year from antibiotic resistance: 5,000
Uk deaths last year fron terrorisn: nil
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…asked a Virgin America flight attendant for a soda and was told he had to request one using the aircraft’s seat-back system…
[...]
“My biggest concern is that somebody on an aircraft has the power to outright lie about an incident and get me in all kinds of trouble,” he said. “Civil rights have gone out the window.”
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At 11:47 a.m. Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky embarked on a near-13 hour deliberative filibuster, stalling the nomination of CIA Director John Brennan, to gain clarity on the possibility of the CIA’s drone assassination program being used against American citizens at home.
The CIA regularly uses drones armed with Hellfire missiles to engage various targets abroad. Drone strikes have a cruel and unusual record. Afghani President Hamid Karzai demanded the attacks end, after the drone’s Hellfire engulfed 30 civilian locations in 2012.
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The 29-year-old engineering student was standing outside his classroom here on Saturday morning when he said two pickup trucks full of armed men pulled up. The men, said to be members of a C.I.A.-backed Afghan strike force, grabbed him, tied his hands behind his back, draped a black hood over his head and drove him to an undisclosed location where, the student says, he was beaten and whipped.
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Indeed, the Times story does a remarkable job of conveying official justifications for the Awlaki killing–but we hear nothing from those who have questioned the government’s account and its legal rationale. The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have led the legal challenge on the Awlaki case, and issued a response (3/10/13) to the Times story.
The Times story also included information about the drone killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki. He was killed several weeks later, along with about a dozen others in Yemen. The strike was based on bad intelligence; the intended target was not among those killed.
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Cablegate
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RU: It’s interesting to have a book on Cypherpunk with Julian Assange as the author (his name, at least, is writ largest) when most people think of WikiLeaks as an anti-secrecy organization. Did he (or all of you) intentionally want to complexify the discussion around WikiLeaks or did anything like that even cross your mind(s)?
JA: Personal privacy and institutional transparency are complementary ideas that help to create a free and open society.
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This week on CounterSpin: Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is dead but his independence and help for Venezuela’s poor remains unforgiven in the US press. We’ll talk to Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what media’s portrayal of Chavez says about media.
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Time and again, throughout America’s history, individuals with a passion for truth and a commitment to justice have opted to defy the unjust laws and practices of the American government in order to speak up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. Even when their personal safety and freedom were on the line, these individuals spoke up, knowing they would be chastised, ridiculed, arrested, branded traitors and even killed.
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“Defense Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa was sharply critical of international organizations in his final meeting with Ambassador. Rajapaksa said the ICRC’s job was essentially finished now that the conflict was over. He said the GSL is unhappy with the UN and ICRC for being critical of the GSL when they should have been working with the government to help resolve the conflict and address the challenges Sri Lanka faced. The Defense Secretary said the GSL doesn’t want the ICRC and UN involved in identification of those killed in the former conflict zone because of their ‘negative’ attitude. He claimed their reporting would likely inflame passions, exacerbate divisions, and be contrary to the goals of reconciliation and closure. Ambassador strongly disagreed, saying the ICRC was performing excellent work in assisting GSL efforts to deal with the humanitarian crisis.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.
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Finance
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The current system has made the people who work on Wall Street fabulously rich, and given the rest of us one financial crisis after another. It makes no effort to hold financial professionals responsible for their bad behavior. Instead, they continue to reap all the financial rewards for taking risks with the money of their depositors, counterparties, creditors and shareholders, with little or no accountability when things go awry. After what Wall Street put us through in 2008 and 2009, you would think that the compensation system would have been changed to prevent a repeat. You would be wrong.
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ONCE upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.
The eToys initial public offering raised $164 million, a nice chunk of change for a two-year-old company. But it wasn’t even close to the $600 million-plus the company could have raised if the offering price had more realistically reflected the intense demand for eToys shares. The firm that underwrote the I.P.O. — and effectively set the $20 price — was Goldman Sachs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – parent company of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal – has spent a whopping $250,000 on the Los Angeles school board race, just as the corporation focuses on making money off of public education. News Corp and its for-profit education subsidiaries are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the education initiatives promoted by News Corp’s preferred candidates track the ALEC agenda.
Murdoch has called the for-profit K-12 education industry “a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed” – and his News Corp is investing big to capture that market. In 2010, News Corp acquired Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, for $360 million. Its latest venture is a digital K-12 curricula to be sold and taught on a specialized “Amplify Tablet” that runs on the Android platform.
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European Parliament chiefs are considering setting up a site to target young children with a “playful” presentation of their working methods and democratic principles.
It adds to concern highlighted by the Daily Express about educational materials produced for schools by the European Commission that critics claim are a bid to make children feel positive about the EU.
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Ever since Governor Scott Walker imposed his anti-union legislation on Wisconsin, the state has become exceptionally polarized. This polarization is reflected in the current race for Supreme Court. Once again Wisconsin is seeing massive spending from outside groups in a race that is officially nonpartisan.
The 2011 Supreme Court race between incumbent Justice David Prosser — who was formerly a GOP lawmaker in the state — and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg became a referendum on Walker’s controversial Act 10, with record-breaking spending by groups like the Koch-linked Citizens for a Strong America, the powerful Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the Wisconsin chapter of Club for Growth, and the union-backed Greater Wisconsin Committee. Prosser ultimately won in a narrow victory after the last-minute discovery of uncounted votes in heavily Republican Waukesha County.
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Privacy
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Revision of the European Data Protection Regulation is ongoing and the “Legal Affairs” (JURI) Committee will vote on its opinion on 19 March. Unfortunately, there are strong indications that JURI will vote in the same way as the previous committees and weaken the protection of EU citizens’ privacy against corporations that collect, process and trade their personal data. With only one week left before the vote, citizens must act urgently and contact their members of the European Parliament (MEP).
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The news that IBM is going to shift all its cloud services and software to an open cloud architecture comes as no great surprise. After all, it had already signalled an intent to open up the cloud when it joined the OpenStack Foundation last year as a ‘platinum’ sponsor and then went on to contribute to the codebase.
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Civil Rights
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Readers — The story below makes me so sad and so angry, and you will see why. If anyone at Child Protective Services or the police department would pick up a single book written before predator panic swept the country, they’d see that 6-year-olds were always part of the neighborhood scene, scampering, playing, or even — in many eras and areas — working! The idea that a 6-year-old can’t be outside without constant supervision is new and warped.
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What happens in other countries is important to U.S. media when they can claim that the news matters to U.S. interests. So it was not altogether surprising to see the March 8 headline in the New York Times, “Leader of Vote Count in Kenya Faces U.S. With Tough Choices.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Questioned by the French government on the need to legislate on the protection of freedoms on the Internet, the National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique or CNNum) published today an opinion on Net neutrality1 [fr]. It recommends that the French government makes this principle of non-discrimination into law, broadening its scope to include search engines and other online services. But by overbroadening the neutrality principle, the CCNum’s recommendations could result in a meaningless law.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In a Los Angeles federal courtroom on a blindingly sunny Monday afternoon, US District Judge Otis Wright expressed incredulity at the sheer gall of the Prenda porn copyright trolling firm.
Judge Wright had ordered six other Prenda affiliates (or alleged affiliates) to show up in response to his order regarding possible sanctions for their behavior. None of those named parties showed up to the hearing in person, apart from Alan Cooper of Minnesota. (Cooper has alleged that Prenda attorney John Steele used Cooper’s name improperly as the CEO of copyright licensing firm AF Holdings.) Lawyers Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and Prenda paralegal Angela Van Den Hemel had filed a notice on Friday saying that travel to the Central District Court of California was impossible for the out-of-state parties. Today, they were represented by another attorney who identified herself as Heather Rosing.
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Send this to a friend
03.11.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The now available systemd 198 is the first to include the kernel-install command-line program. The command allows kernels to be installed while complying with the new Boot Loader Specification that is defined at Freedesktop.org. The specification defines a way for multiple distributions to safely reside on a dual- or triple-boot system.
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While there are many interesting features to the Linux 3.9 kernel, there is some functionality you will not find yet within the mainline Linux kernel.
Among the most pressing functionality that comes to mind that hasn’t been merged include:
VIA Kernel Mode-Setting – For those unfortunate souls still using VIA hardware, there is still no mainline DRM/KMS driver, even after it’s been in development for years. There’s still work ongoing, but nothing that was merged for the Linux 3.9 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Performance improvements in terms of software rendering as well as fixes for touch devices and hybrid graphics systems are among the major new features of X.org’s just released X Server 1.14. The new X Server also includes modifications that affect the pointer barriers. GNOME 3.8 will use these pointer barriers to establish from what distance and at what speed a user has moved the mouse pointer to the bottom screen edge; if the values are big, GNOME will display the notification panel straight away instead of waiting for a second.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Continuing its adventures into Linux, Valve has released a penguin-friendly edition of another of its games, bringing the total to five. Could it be Left 4 Dead? Portal 2? HL2: Episode Two? Gosh, even Episode 3? Er, no, it’s Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Still, that’s nice, isn’t it?
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In addition to this, the Linux and Mac gaming community will also be in for a hellish treat this spring when Painkiller Hell & Damnation launches on these platforms. Players using the Linux and Mac platforms will finally be able to join the Painkiller PC gaming community and fully immerse themselves in Daniel Garner’s purgatory.
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Bloom: Memories is a beautiful artistic take on the action-adventure / RPG genre that carries players through an epic journey following the theme of the “purest love”; that between a mother and her child.
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Dungeon Fray is a fast paced roguelike game for Windows and Linux. The game features three playable classes, randomly generated levels, turn based combat and unlockable achievements and perks.
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Ever since the advent of Steam for Linux, performance issues have miffed gamers; especially those who are using Ubuntu’s Unity and are forced to use Compiz as their display compositor. Those issues have been combated in several ways. Nvidia and AMD have been ‘stepping up to the plate’ so to speak with increased performance from their drivers, and developers have been working towards more granular performance enhancements geared towards playing well with Xorg. Step one for most users is to simply unset Compiz for fullscreen applications, KWin for KDE users. The former is the most affected, and that was the catalyst behind Michael Bethencourt’s FSGamer.
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Shadowrun Returns brings back one of our most original & cherished game settings as a 2D turn-based RPG with an emphasis on storytelling and tactical combat. Pre-Order today and join us in the dark underworld of Shadowrun’s dystopian cyberpunk reality where Man meets Magic meets Machine.
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When Mike Mika’s daughter was sad to learn she couldn’t play as a girl character in classic Donkey Kong, her father decided a little hacking was in order. Mika modified the ROM of the game so that the damsel/white-knight roles in the game were switched. Now Pauline (Nintendo’s precursor to the better known Princess Peach) runs, jumps, and dodges rolling barrels to save the dulcet Mario at the top of the screen, according to a Saturday post on reddit.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Let me preface this by saying I use KDE on a daily basis, and have for a very long time. There’s a persistent misconception about KDE being this slow and bloated monstrosity of a desktop and, admittedly, at one time it was true. It’s certainly not anymore, but sometimes the ghosts of the past intrude on the present and just won’t be quiet. So let’s see where this ghost came from and put it to rest.
How did this misconception start? Back in late 2005 KDE reached a pinnacle with the release of KDE 3.5, what many believed to be their finest desktop. It had all the KDE hallmarks, infinite configurability, deep integration and most memorable, it was the cheetah amongst big cats. It was super fast. I used it at the time, as well as occasionally using Gnome 2, and KDE was noticeably faster on my hardware. Unfairly or not, this milestone 3.5 release would become the yardstick that later KDE’s would be measured against.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Dubbed Trans-Siberia Express, the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Documents 3.8 package, the main document viewer of the GNOME desktop environment, has been released a few days ago, March 4, for testing.
GNOME Documents 3.8 Beta 2 comes with a translatable “Getting Started with Documents” tutorial in PDF format, the search dropdown button now uses a linked style, the search dropdown now uses a revealer animation, and the page switch widgets are now insensitive for single-page documents.
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New Releases
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With this second release of “Benz”(a code name that will follow the KDE SC 4.10 series), the Chakra-Project team is very happy to announce a new feature that has been on the wishlist for quite some time. Tribe (the installer) has a netinstaller feature implemented, giving the user the option for a regular offline install, or install fully updated packages, starting with a minimal functional KDE desktop, and adding groups of packages to that minimal install as desired.
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The Porteus Community is excited to announce that Porteus 2.0 Final is now available for immediate download!
This is the first stable release of our Standard and Xfce Editions based on Slackware 14.0.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Java is one of the most important technologies (and also one of the reason’s Oracle bought Sun) yet it has a complex relationship with Oracle. It’s also turning out to be one of the most insecure technologies, considering the flood of java vulnerabilities found and exploited recently.
Red Hat has played an instrumental role in Java for Linux users by starting IcedTea project whose “initial goal was to make the Java OpenJDK usable without requiring any other software that is not free software and hence make it possible to add OpenJDK to Fedora and other Linux distributions that insist on free software.”
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Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering started its life as a mostly proprietary product built on technology acquired from Makara in 2010.
In April of 2012, Red Hat made OpenShift available as open source under the OpenShift Origin effort. Simply making a project open source, however, doesn’t make it a true open source community with contribution and collaboration.
Red Hat is now moving to further enable an open source collaborative development model for OpenShift, making it easier for non-Red Hat people to contribute and participate in the platform’s evolution. To that end, Red Hat is now moving to a new model for contribution, using a public continuous integration (CI) environment and hosting a community day at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Portland.
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Fedora
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For those who haven’t been keeping up with all of the awesome code Ralph Bean has been churning out lately, be sure to checkout fedmsg.com. Hop on #fedora-fedmsg on Freenode or load up busmon to see it in action. Not all of the Fedora Infrastructure services currently fire off fedmsgs, but we’re getting very close.
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Debian Family
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I’m not a big advocate for one Linux distribution over another. Or maybe I’m fooling myself. I pretty much run Debian GNU/Linux (as it’s officially known) on just about anything.
I say I’m not a “big advocate”/fanboy because I’m always open to something new. I flirt with Fedora. And Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu. Also Crunchbang. I like what I see in Fuduntu. I think Stella fills a real need.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced quite a few things over the past couple of days, weeks and months. Many of the announcements have been quite exciting in a good way (Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet) and some of them seem to be a little shocking… that have some in the Ubuntu Community feeling betrayed, ignored or worse.
Just to review, I’ve not really been an Ubuntu fan. I’m a Red Hat and Fedora fanboi. I’ve often been critical of Canonical although not really of the volunteer community that supports Ubuntu. You know the same old stuff about how Canonical doesn’t work with upstream, they don’t contribute back much, most of the work that is outwardly visible is on their proprietary stuff… they seem to get way more credit than they deserve… and they still, so far as I know, haven’t figured out a way to be profitable… which I think is very important for something so many people depend on. You’ve heard all of that before many times from many people. Nothing new here.
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Recently there has been some fire flowing about Canonical in the community. These concerns started off as sporadic at first and then we saw a small blog avalanche (blogalanche, if you will) as a number of folks piled onto the ride.
I feel somewhat trapped in the middle of all of this. On one hand I work at Canonical and I believe Canonical are acting in the honorable interests of Ubuntu in helping to build a competitive and forward-looking Free Software platform, but I also feel a sense of personal responsibility when I see unhappy members of our community who are concerned with different aspects of how Canonical engages. Essentially, I sympathize with both sides of this debate; both have the best interests at heart for Ubuntu.
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Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult.
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That should be obvious to anybody who’s been following the development of Ubuntu, but for those who have not, here’s the deal: Ubuntu is not a community distribution.
The sooner you get that, the better, especially if you’ve been under the illusion that Mark Shuttleworth cares very much about your own idea of what a community distribution should be.
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Ubuntu — possibly the most popular distribution of the open source Linux operating system — is striking out on its own. Canonical, the commercial company that oversees Ubuntu, has made a habit of building new Linux components from scratch, moving away from tools built and used by the larger open source community. That’s rubbing many Linux developers and users the wrong way, and now Canonical may have finally alienated these hard-core open sourcers.
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It’s no secret that Linux and open-source projects have fights over the direction of a project, but it’s unusual for Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, to public fuss with programmers via his blog.
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The CeBIT 2013 event takes place these days, between March 5 and 9, in Hannover, Germany, and Canonical is there to enchant visitors with technical details about Ubuntu Cloud Stack and Ubuntu Landscape Systems Management.
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I am concerned with the current status of Ubuntu, not because of the tension on the community or the new software being put out. I am concerned because I feel my time and contributions might go to waste and fall on deaf ears. As leader of a LoCo, how do I know if the work I am putting in is even going to matter in two months when 13.04 comes out? Is my work still relevant because it has nothing to do with a cell phone, nothing to do with a display server, and nothing that in any way is a direct profit source for the Canonical.
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Another item discussed on the first day of the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is about the roadmap for the Ubuntu SDK.
Perhaps most interesting from the hour-long session for the broad community was what they’re looking at for their main tool to the Ubuntu SDK: Qt Creator. Ubuntu developers are looking at the open-source cross-platform Qt Creator, which is also part of the Qt SDK, as the integrated development environment for the Ubuntu SDK.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint has four desktop environments that you can choose from. There is KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon and Mate. The two most common choices by users are Cinnamon and Mate. Technically, you can download any of the desktop environments and change them later. If you decide to go with Mate and later on want to install Cinnamon, the change is going to be easy.
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In 2012, the embedded Linux market lost a valued resource when LinuxDevices.com became a collateral casualty of QuinStreet’s acquisition of a group of websites from Ziff Davis Enterprise. Unfortunately the new owner has no interest in supporting the site, so LinuxDevices has lain dormant for over a year.
As the year wore on, a growing number of individuals and companies urged me (as the site’s founder) to do something to get LinuxDevices back on its feet, or to launch a new site to fill the void.
Thanks to this encouragement, and recognizing that embedded Linux is not simply alive and well, but has been growing exponentially as the OS-of-choice for smartphones and numerous other embedded applications, I decided to launch a successor site.
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In 2012, the embedded Linux market lost a valued resource when LinuxDevices.com became a collateral casualty of QuinStreet’s acquisition of a group of websites from Ziff Davis Enterprise. Unfortunately the new owner had no interest in supporting the site, so LinuxDevices has lain dormant ever since the acquisition.
As the year wore on, a growing number of individuals and companies urged me (as the site’s founder) to do something to get LinuxDevices back on its feet, or to launch a new site to fill the void.
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March Networks has released a new family of high-performance network video recorders (NVRs), which feature an embedded Linux operating system. The 8000 Series NVRs are aimed at video surveillance, license plate recognition, access control, ATM, and other applications requiring secure, reliable, high-definition video monitoring and storage.
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Phones
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As promised in December 2012, Jolla, the company behind the SailfishOS, has released an Alpha SDK of the operating system targeted at developers. The SDK is currently supported only on Linux systems (Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.10), but a PC and Mac-compatible version is in the works.
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s Galaxy S4 will be unveiled in March and when it appears expect to see several improvements over the highly successful Galaxy S3.
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Android
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We first told you about the MG back in September of 2012, when it was in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign attempting to raise a staggering $950,000. Perhaps they were inspired by the historic success of the OUYA just a few weeks prior, hoping to repeat that system’s incredible funding level on the same $950,000 goal. Unfortunately, the MG fell far short of its lofty goals, failing before it even reached $50,000.
But owing to the professionalism of the team behind it, and community interest in a low-cost vanilla Android Ice Cream Sandwich handheld gaming system, the MG beat the odds and was able to launch on-time.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In case you’ve followed us during the past couple of months or so, you might be aware of the fact that we’re quite excited about the Ubuntu Touch OS, and about the smartphones and tablets that are supposed to be powered by Canonical’s operating system. The platform seems very promising, the gesture-based navigation is quite interesting and who could argue that the flexibility of the OS is a bad thing?
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Mellanox Technologies pledged it will support open source software for its Ethernet switches over the next several months. The chip and system provider hopes to gain an edge over larger competitors that are only partially embracing a trend to open software for Ethernet.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS/Big Data
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Big Data is suddenly hot, winning Harvard Business Review’s recent “sexiest job of the 21st century” sweepstakes. It’s been slow to penetrate the world of human resources, however – but all that is changing fast, says Beth Axelrod, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for e-commerce giant eBay Inc., and co-author of The War for Talent. “There’s a lot of value to be created and added through data analytics,” she says, “whether it’s doing a better job spotting talent outside to attract to the company, or doing predictive analysis of who is likely to leave and what are the factors, so you can intervene before that point is reached to try to change the trajectory. There’s a ton of opportunity there.”
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Technology vendors have backed a community-developed software platform as the critical piece to bring big data to the masses.
EMC and Intel have joined IBM and Red Hat in releasing their own flavours of an open-source software that manages how hardware in data centres accesses and processes information. The Hadoop open-source software by the Apache Software Foundation was released in October. It helps extract business insights from huge amounts of unstructured data, a trend commonly referred to as big data.
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Databases
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Industry analysis suggests that Google handles as many as two million pieces of data every minute.
Combine this “fact” with the challenge of managing a transactional workload with big data complexity riddled right through its centre and you can see why data analysis and both macro- and micro-level data management is a pertinent issue today.
The open source community submits that it may have a route to new agility in this space through building functionality on top of MariaDB to keep it from downtime by replicating copies of the database on servers, which are located in different parts of the world.
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MariaDB now has a high-availability option ready for production use; the developers at MariaDB and Codership have released MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 as a Stable GA (generally available) version. The release gives MariaDB users access to a scaling solution for the SQL database with synchronous multi-master replication and guaranteed data consistency. Clusters built with the technology should prove automatically resilient with no risk of losing nodes with unique datasets on them.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Pelican is a Python-powered static website generator which comes with a rather decent feature set. It allows you to write your blog entries in reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc using any editor that you desire.
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Drupal’s creator, Dries Buytaert, on Drupal 8 and the open source project’s future in the enterprise
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Business
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Funding
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The government should not have an “open source first policy,” Homeland Security Department Chief Information Officer Richard Spires said Wednesday, but added officials should look to open source technology whenever possible.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open source software is based on the philosophy of access — allowing people to get to the resources that they need to build things that are useful to them and their way of life. So anyone who is capable of doing so, can make a life for himself or herself without having to rely upon expensive software made by mighty big corporations. Proprietary software is essentially closed — its makers sell it to you and subject you to rules of their own making. They make it seem as if you owe them thanks and as if they are doing you a favour by allowing you use of their system.
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Open Data
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Although occasionally infuriating around roundabouts and new developments, we have placed an inordinate amount of faith in Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites as they exist for in-car and/or smartphone usage.
So why would we need an open source alternative?
Well the GPS system was created and is still predominantly run by the US Department of Defense (they mean Defence) with a history that dates back as far as the early 1970s.
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Open Access/Content
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We know there are going to be books about Aaron Swartz.
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Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, clearly disagreed and suggested that stacking up a large number of felony charges in the case seemed intended at coercing Swartz to plead guilty rather than take the matter before a jury.
“I would suggest to you if you’re an individual American citizen and you’re looking at criminal charges being brought by the United States government with all of the vast resources available to the government, it strikes me as disproportionate and one that is basically being used inappropriately to try to bully someone into pleading guilty to something that strikes me as rather minor,” the Texas senator said.
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“Does it strike you as odd,” Cornyn asked, “that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and million dollar fines and then offer him a three or four month prison sentence?”
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Open Hardware
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After the open source software movement in the IT sector, the new wave is that of open source hardware, wherein the information about the hardware can easily be discerned and it can be further customised.
Beth E Kolko, head, Design for Digital Inclusion Lab, University of Washington, who is in Kerala to promote the movement, said that though at a nascent stage the Open Source hardware movement could go a long way by opening up the space for innovation and could impact the lives of millions.
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Programming
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Hardware
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Forget tablets and economic woes. “Good enough” computer performance might be the real reason for lackluster PC sales.
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Health/Nutrition
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I am afraid this is a personal medical story, but I think it makes a very damning point about the state of the NHS. There is no sensible way to tell it without giving an uncomfortable (I suspect for both of us) level of medical detail about myself.
I had two collapses very early in the New Year, one with loss of consciousness of over ten minutes. On the second occasion we called 999, and the response was superb – a paramedic in less than five minutes and and ambulance in less than ten.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States.
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The progressive ‘empathy gap’, a strain of liberal authoritarianism, and a distortion of Holder’s letter are invoked to defend Obama
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A LOT of what we do is make-believe.
I’ve had to screen small children and explain to their parents I had no choice but to “check” them. I would only place my hands on their arms and bottom half of their legs, and the entire “pat-down” lasted 10 seconds. This goes completely against TSA procedure.
Because the cameras are recording our every move, we have to do something. If someone isn’t checked or even screened properly, the entire terminal would shut down, as this constitutes a security breach.
But since most TSA supervisors are too daft to actually supervise, bending the rules is easy to do.
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A hundred flickering candles and mountains of flowers block the entrance to Varna’s city hall, surrounding a picture of a smiling young man with long hair who has become a symbol of anti-corruption protests that have swept Bulgaria.
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Chalmers Johnson called the CIA the president’s private army. Imperial Rome had its praetorian guard. It served and protected emperors.
CIA rogues work the same way. They do lots more than that. Extrajudicial killing is prioritized. Much that goes on is secret. Unaccountability keeps Congress and ordinary people uninformed.
Johnson said US presidents have “untrammeled control of the CIA.” It’s “probably (their) single most extraordinary power.”
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The recent controversy surrounding the film Zero Dark Thirty only proves the debate surrounding torture isn’t over. There are some who continue to make the false claim that torture worked, and seek to reinstate the practice.
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They don’t target citizens in the United States. They kill them overseas as collateral damage.
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Drones are clearly a big part of the future.
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An RAF base in Britain is being used by America in its controversial drone warfare campaign, it was claimed last night.
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The administration’s outrageous response to the most serious Constitutional question of all — when a government can kill its own citizens — is clear evidence of an executive branch out of control.
Many of the drafters of the Constitution envisioned the presidency as an office with very limited powers, but even the most dedicated proponents of a strong presidency at the time would be shocked to see the concentration of power in the modern presidency.
Today the presidency is viewed as the center of the federal government, with each successive administration expanding the power of the executive at the expense of Congress and the people.
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Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday said it was “very odd” that Republicans who supported waterboarding would join Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) anti-drone filibuster.
Paul began his 13-hour filibuster on Wednesday morning to demand whether the Obama administration believed it could kill a U.S. citizen with a drone strike within the country.
“It was a very weird way to start the debate,” Krugman remarked on ABC News’ This Week. “I mean, specifically about drones and on American soil? Does that mean it is OK to kill me with a drone while I’m visiting Paris or it’s OK to kill me in the United States as long as it’s by a sniper but not a drone? It was a very peculiar way to phrase the question.”
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The recent increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly known as drones, has been observed in conflict areas such as Yemen and in Pakistan and, more surprisingly, in civilian settings like the United States. Whereas its use as weapon for extrajudicial killings – i.e. the processes of sentencing people to death and implementing those decisions without any court decision – poses a myriad of ethical and legal issues, use of drones by the private sector, and police and border patrol agents, has ignited a discussion on the frontiers of legality, revealing a process where ethical, philosophical, legal and political debates have not accompanied the speed of technological progress.
This article focuses on recent developments in the use of drones, and exposes some of the contentious issues surrounding the debate. Departing from public available data, and placing itself within theoretical debates in the domain of international relations theories, this article points to avenues for further inquiry on the use of drones.
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A federal judge said it would not be futile for a former Oxbow executive to amend claims that his billionaire boss William Koch imprisoned him on a sprawling Colorado ranch.
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Cablegate
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I asked that question in the headline last week after Bradley Manning in his lengthy statement at his hearing revealed for the first time that he had called the NYT public editor before contacting WikiLeaks–left a message and did not get his call returned. So tonight, Bill Keller, who was the top editor of the paper at that time–and later published hundreds of stories based on Manning material (while also bashing Julian Assange)–takes up that question in a column.
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IMAGINE if American citizens never learned about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Imagine not knowing about the brutal treatment of terror suspects at United States government “black sites.” Or about the drone program that is expanding under President Obama, or the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Morgan Stanley (MS) lagged behind peers in a key measure of capital strength used by U.S. regulators to stress- test their resiliency in a severe recession.
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Goldman Sachs yesterday lost its bid to keep a shareholder proposal to split the chairman and CEO roles off its proxy statement.
Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission informed the bank that it couldn’t block the proposal from being included among a list of proposals at its next annual shareholder meeting.
[...]
Lloyd Blankfein currently holds both titles at the gold-plated investment bank, which argues that it benefits from having a unified voice at the head of the firm.
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The Masters of Mankind want us to become the “stupid nation,” in the interests of their short-term gain — damn the consequences.
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His death came more than two years after Wells Fargo mistakenly mixed up his Hermosa Beach address with that of a neighbor in the same condo complex. The bank’s typo led Wells Fargo to demand that Delassus pay $13,361.90 — two years of late property taxes the bank said it had paid on his behalf in order to keep his Wells Fargo mortgage afloat.
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The Greater Manchester Poverty Commission states that 600,000 people are in “extreme poverty” in the Greater Manchester region. The region is the largest urban conurbation in the north of the UK, with a population of nearly 2.7 million.
That poverty is so entrenched in a region covering two cities and eight towns is a devastating indictment of the cumulative effects of central and local government policies over the last three decades carried out by the three parties of big business, Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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When China and other nations block the websites of U.S. companies but the United States doesn’t respond in kind there’s a strong argument that creates an unfair trade barrier, said Andrew McLaughlin, former White House deputy chief technology officer.
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Privacy
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Officials from justice departments across the EU have been asked to explore to what extent the pseudonymisation of personal data can be used to “calibrate” businesses’ obligations to data protection.
Pseudonymisation (such as assigning fake names to people), as opposed to anonymisation (complete stripping of identity), allows the same individual to be assigned the same pseudonym across various data sets.
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A southwestern Ohio judge yesterday ordered a halt to a speeding-ticket blitz in a village that installed traffic cameras, saying it’s “a scam” against motorists.
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Its co-founder and webmaster, a feisty 77-year-old architect, doesn’t hesitate when asked why.
“I’m a fierce opponent of government secrets of all kinds,” says John Young. “The scale is tipped so far the other way that I’m willing to stick my neck out and say there should be none.”
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Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) today introduced bipartisan legislation modernizing the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA. Consumers and businesses are increasingly using cloud computing and location-based services, but the law has failed to keep pace with technology – leading to weak and convoluted privacy protections from government access to user data. The bill, H.R. 983, the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act, would strengthen the privacy of Internet users and wireless subscribers from overbroad government surveillance by requiring the government to get a warrant based on probable cause before intercepting or forcing the disclosure of electronics communications and geolocation data.
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For years, conventional wisdom about privacy has been that shoppers—especially younger shoppers—have been consistently sharing more information online to the general public, a trend that would likely continue as privacy desensitization progressed. But a report released Tuesday (March 5) from Carnegie Mellon University found the opposite when it tracked 5,076 Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) users from 2005 through 2011, one of the most extensive studies of social media privacy yet.
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Civil Rights
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Police in America are particularly excited about what predictive policing…
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The software is called Pred-Pol, short for “predictive policing.” It was developed by a professor at UCLA in cooperation with the Los Angeles Police Department and based on the same kind of computer modeling that helps scientists predict aftershocks following earthquakes.
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One of the country’s leading human rights barristers is to resign her membership of the Liberal Democrats to express her outrage over the coalition government’s backing for secret courts.
Dinah Rose QC successfully represented the British-resident Guantánamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed, in his battle to establish that British intelligence services were complicit in his “cruel and inhuman” treatment by the United States.
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Two of the former Drug Enforcement Agency officials who came out this week urging the federal government to nullify new state pot laws in Washington and Colorado are facing criticism for simultaneously running a company that may profit from keeping marijuana illegal.
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Here’s a surprise ruling. For many years we’ve written about how troubling it is that Homeland Security agents are able to search the contents of electronic devices, such as computers and phones at the border, without any reason. The 4th Amendment only allows reasonable searches, usually with a warrant. But the general argument has long been that, when you’re at the border, you’re not in the country and the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply. This rule has been stretched at times, including the ability to take your computer and devices into the country and search it there, while still considering it a “border search,” for which the lower standards apply. Just about a month ago, we noted that Homeland Security saw no reason to change this policy.
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As some DIW readers know, last summer, I received several subpoenas from Duke, demanding among other things my confidential communications with hundreds of people relating to the “lacrosse incident” or discussing in any way President Brodhead’s “job performance.” The targeted correspondents consisted of all members of the 2006 lacrosse team, including the three falsely accused players who had long ago settled with Duke; all lawyers who were involved in the civil suit; all Duke faculty members; all Duke administrators or other employees; and all Duke alumni.
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A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ruled that Ovitz has failed to show that he’s entitled to summary judgment over Busch’s claims that Ovitz instigated a series of acts against her a decade ago, including the wiretapping of the journalist’s phone, a note on her windshield that read “Stop” with a dead fish and a rose, a hacked computer, an attack while she was driving her car and more.
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DRM
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One day after the White House called on Congress to make cell phone unlocking legal, a Minnesota senator today announced plans for legislation that would allow the practice.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said she will introduce a bill this week that would allow for cell phone unlocking.
“Consumers should be free to choose the phone and service that best fits their needs and their budgets,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “I will continue to work to advance commonsense measures to protect consumers and promote competition.”
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In recent years we have seen more and more attempts to separate us from the core computing functions on our personal computing devices. The iPhone is stock full of them and that is the fundamental reason I will never use one. The same is true of the iPad. So iOS users jailbreak their phones. The evasion iPhone jailbreak is on 23 million phones now.
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On January 26 this year, the Librarian of Congress declared that unlocking a cell phone to make it available on other carriers was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Most of us are aware of the basics of U.S. copyright law, including the categories of copyrightable and non-copyrightable works. Some materials are explicitly exempted from copyright in this country, a key example being U.S. Federal documents. (Although if that sounds to you like a clearly distinguishable category, you should ask your local government documents librarian to fill you in on the complexities of defining “U.S. Federal document.”) Another exempted category is that of facts and compilations of facts that have no creative component. This was determined in the famous Supreme Court ruling of Feist v. Rural Telephone, in which the Court interpreted the constitutional wording of “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” as implying some level of creativity.
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A New Zealand appellate court rules that the U.S. won’t have to turn over documents and that the coming extradition hearing will consider only a “limited weighing of evidence.”
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The man behind the petition to re-legalize unlocking of cellphones now has a broader target: The Digital Millenium Copyright Act itself.
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Send this to a friend
03.09.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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TrueAbility, a company that tests the technical abilities of job candidates through hands-on online testing, is a finalist in the innovative web category for the fifth annual SXSW Accelerator competition taking place next week in Austin.
The San Antonio-based startup, which is part of the 2013 TechStars Cloud program, beat out more than 500 companies to secure one of the finalist spots in the SXSW accelerator.
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Desktop
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Their earliest numbers are March 2003 – Linux 2.2%, Mac 1.8%, Windows all the rest. By the time the first Ubuntu release was just about to show up, September 2004, Linux was up to 3.1%, with growth over that 18 month period smooth: contrary to popular belief, Linux use was growing at a constant rate prior to Ubuntu’s emergence, according to these numbers. At that time, Mandrake was the most popular Linux distribution for ‘regular desktop use’, occupying the spot Ubuntu occupies now.
After the emergence of Ubuntu, the growth rate actually appears to decline quite a lot, from 2005 through 2008. The number at the end of 2004 is still 3.1%; by the end of 2007 it has reached only 3.3%. Growth picks up again a bit over 2008, 2009 and 2010: by the end of 2010, Linux use has hit 5.0%. Linux usage finally peaks at 5.3% in the middle of 2011.
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Just one month ago, the Chromebook Pixel was little more than a poorly sourced rumor. (And personally, while I didn’t quite dismiss it out of hand I came pretty close.) Google was releasing a high-end Chromebook with a touchscreen? And that touchscreen would boast a better pixel density than either of the Retina MacBook Pros? The rumor definitely didn’t fit in with the latest (and by all accounts, most successful) wave of Chromebooks, which have turned heads not least because they’re cheaper than any Chromebooks have been so far.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The branch of the GTK+ tool-kit being used for introducing support for client side decorations is being prepped for review and ultimately being merged to mainline.
While there’s already the Wayland back-end within GTK3, it isn’t 100% feature complete and ready to be used by all. Among the missing functionality has been support for handling client side decorations, as used by the Weston compositor, rather than server side decorations as is common now for the Linux desktop.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of the great new things about Drupal 7 is that it’s now easier to customize your site content. In Drupal 6, you typically had to use the CCK (Content Construction Kit) module for fine-grained control in customizing content, but that has been folded into core for Drupal 7. Drupal 7 is now a true content management framework (CMF).
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Games
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It’s long been the tradition in Humble Bundle for Linux buyers to outspend other platforms per payment, but this time Linux users have won another category; total payments by platform. How on the heels of Linux encroaching Apple’s territory in Steam usage, this is just phenomenal. But what does it mean?
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Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is probably sitting in a room right now looking over the various Linux titles available on Steam and, in his best Mr. Burns voice, saying “Excellent” with his fingers clasped together. With the introduction of Counter Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) to Valve’s Linux catalog, the number of Linux games available on Steam now sits at exactly 80 titles, Valve announced in a blog post.
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Nordic Games has announced today that Painkiller Hell and Damnation is being ported to Linux. This popular successor to the Painkiller first person shooter is powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3.
Last year saw the release of the first Unreal Engine 3 game with a native Linux client. UE3 has been around for years but the Linux port of Unreal Tournament 3 that was done by Ryan Gordon was never released. Finally in 2012 we saw the first Unreal Engine 3 title running on Linux.
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InXile has managed to raise over $2.1 million dollars in just a few short days for its spiritual sequel to the hit RPG Planescape: Torment. Initially the company was looking to raise $900,000, but that number was surpassed in the first six hours of the crowd funding campaign. Torment: Tides of Numenera is a single-player role-playing game based on designer and writer Monte Cook’s new tabletop role-playing game, Numenera. The game will be distributed DRM-free for Windows (PC), Mac, and Linux and will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.
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A small, unassuming patch was quietly released for Team Fortress 2 earlier today. The new fix has not only added a few crafting recipes and bug fixes, it also has improved performance on Linux systems.
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A link popped up on reddit here a while ago to point out the developer was looking into adding the HIB build of the game to Steam.
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Released during CeBIT this week was a special edition Kanotix 2013 release, which incorporates auto-detection of the binary NVIDIA/AMD graphics drivers and it also pre-installs Valve’s Steam Linux client.
“Kano”, the developer behind the long-standing Debian derivative, announced the release in our forums. The binary driver auto-detection is used for the NVIDIA GeForce 9 series and later and the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, albeit users can still use the open-source Mesa stack too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Mark Shuttleworth surprised the KDE community yesterday when he said, “I’ve absolutely no doubt that Kwin will work just fine on top of Mir. And I’m pretty confident Mir will be on a lot more devices than Wayland.” It was surprising because the KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin had already made it clear, after Wayland controversy, that he won’t support Mir and veto any attempt to do so. It seems like Shuttleworth made that statement without consulting or talking to the KDE developers.
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The Qt developers at Digia have announced that they will be previewing the iOS port of Qt in Qt 5.1. The plan is to support Qt on iOS in Qt 5.2 which is due in late 2013; however, that plan is subject to change depending on resources and app store restrictions. So far the developers have a build process that works in conjunction with Xcode and working support for widgets, graphics view, Qt Quick 1, OpenGL, Touch events and orientation events.
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The KDE e.V. report for the fourth quarter of 2012 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported during that period, including reports of various sprints, conferences and projects.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Dubbed Trans-Siberia Express, the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Documents 3.8 package, the main document viewer of the GNOME desktop environment, has been released a few days ago, March 4, for testing.
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GNOME 3 is making major progress with each and every release. Six months ago, when 3.6 was close to release, I wrote about how excited I was about the improvements that were on their way. That release was a big step up from the previous version in terms of user experience. Now we’re on the cusp of GNOME 3.8, and I find myself in exactly the same position. Testing GNOME 3.8, it is a huge improvement on 3.6. It’s more effective, satisfying and polished. Basic operations like selecting a window or launching an application have seen major improvements and the overall experience feels like yet another upgrade.
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The subject says it all. Since Gnome3 was released, or even in the works, all I’ve read about it is negative. I assume there must be posts that compliment it too, but forever reason, I’ve only run into what is now termed “Gnome bashing”. I’m not going analyse why people don’t like the new design; neither am I going to summarize why people should like it; I’m going to write down why it works for me.
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Yesterday, Mechatotoro gave me a very surprising news: Pardus-Anka, the fork of the Turkish distro named Pardus, is gone.
That news was shocking! How come the Phoenix Pardus (“anka” means “phoenix”) died? And so soon?
Well, actually, what happened (as explained in Spanish here) was that Anka community decided to drop the name “Pardus” altogether to follow a totally independent path. Since they kept PiSi, the packaging system that made Pardus unique, they adopted PiSi as their distro’s new name (and identity). in other words, Pardus-anka died to give birth to PiSi LinuX!
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Portable Linux computing has received an upgrade as the newest Porteus is released, now with an even lighter desktop environment
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New Releases
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Kanotix is a Debian-based desktop distribution originally designed to support a wider selection of hardware and provider newer packages than Debian. Started in 2003, Kanotix has had a rocky history with at least two declared deaths and rebirths. Now today a new release was announced with Steam installed by default.
Kanotix 2013 ships with Linux 3.8.2, Xorg X Server 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, Grub 2, KDE 4.8.4, and NVIDIA 313.18. Some of the applications include LibreOffice 4.0, Amarok 2.7.0, VLC 2.0.3, GIMP 2.8.2, and Iceweasel 19.
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As a little surprise there is a new Kanotix ISO during CeBIT time (I am there as visitor) with some special features not found in normal releases. The main difference is that a newer libc6 2.17 is used (from Debian Experimental) which has the effect that self-compiled binaries can not be shared with Debian Wheezy users. If that does not affect you you can enjoy the new features…
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Lots been going on within the infra team lately. We recently got a couple of brand new servers, courtesy Mr. Leonid Reiman, and have been busy at work configuring them in order to get them ready to host the main website and all associated webservices. Thanks to all infra team members, we are in a very good position to finally migrate the existing website from the old servers, gracefully donated by Alessandro Sironi, to these new ones. The migration should be over by this weekend, with minimal downtime.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Following recent news that Oracle would no longer maintain Java 6, Red Hat announced its commitment to sustaining the open source OpenJDK 6 project. It’s stepping into the project leader role vacated by Oracle, and with the help of the OpenJDK community — including newly arrived IBM, as well as the existing community members — it hopes to be able to keep the widely used code maintained.
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Real Time Linux, that is Linux with a deterministic timing component for an action to occur, is big deal for a lot of industries (military among them). Red Hat first announced it’s production grade Real Time Linux platform, dubbed MRG back in 2007. Back then, Real Time enhancement were not part of the mainline Linux kernel, but that has changed over the years.
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Red Hat has instituted changes at platform-as-a-service OpenShift that put outside contributors on more equal footing with Red Hat employees.
The Linux kingpin and cloud-wannabe announced a set of features designed to increase community participation in its PaaS in a blog post by the OpenShift Team on Thursday.
The most significant change is moving to a pure GitHub pull request format for code contributions, so internal Red Hat developers will have to submit changes in the same way as community participants.
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Red Hat has announced that it is assuming the leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, just days after Oracle issued what it said would be the final patch for version 6 of its commercial Java SE 6 Development Kit.
Oracle posted JDK 6 Update 43 on Monday as an emergency patch for the latest in a series of severe vulnerabilities that have plagued the Java browser plugin. But although Oracle is already investigating other flaws, it said that this would be the last set of public fixes for Java SE 6.
“Oracle recommends that users migrate to JDK 7 in order to continue receiving public updates and security enhancements,” the database giant said in the update’s formal release notes.
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As Oracle brings to an end public updates of Java 6, Red Hat says it has assumed leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community. OpenJDK is the open source implementation of the Java specification and Red Hat has been active within the community, especially since 2007 when it came to an agreement with Sun Microsystems to collaborate around the then newly open sourced Java. Oracle is now the owner of Java and posted Java 6 Update 43 on Monday, as what it says is the last public update of Java 6. The company is now encouraging users to migrate to Java 7 or buy support for Java 6. The end of public updates for Java 6 also means the end of Oracle security updates for OpenJDK 6.
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Red Hat has announced that it is reorienting the OpenShift Origin project to make it transparent to developers wanting to contribute to it. OpenShift Origin, released as open source in May 2012, is the community edition of Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), OpenShift Online and OpenShift Enterprise. Although the Origin project is looking to emulate Red Hat’s work with the Fedora Linux community, it hasn’t been widely perceived as a community project in the same way. Red Hat is therefore making a number of changes that it hopes will boost the Origin project’s open source community vitality.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Xda-developers forum member exception13 has been working to port Debian Linux to run on the Note for a few months. While some features (including GPS and the camera) aren’t fully functional yet, the tablet does support WiFi, Bluetooth, sound, and digital pen input when running Debian.
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Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, that is built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy, with minimal hardware requirements, is now at version 2.1.32 Alpha.
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I had a little extra time today, so I did a ritual backup of my standard Arch Linux framebuffer system, and installed the full Gnome suite to the Solo.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu isn’t for “leets” – or “elite” users – but for mainstream users, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical.
Reacting to community criticism over rolling releases and wider moves to extend the open-source OS to mobile devices and mainstream users, Shuttleworth took aim at so-called “leets”, saying the attitude that Linux OSes should be difficult to use is “dumb”.
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Ubuntu, the user-friendly Linux distro, has seen a multitude of changes and transformations over the last few months. It has sprouted wings and became a fully functional multi-platform operating system. With these changes Canonical has taken a lot of flak and now founder Mark Shuttleworth is speaking out about how he feels.
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Ubuntu founder has shot-down the uncertainty around to-roll-or-not-to-roll for Ubuntu by stating that he is not convinced. In a blog post, after evaluating all the possibilities Mark concluded that “rolling releases are not real releases.”
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Will Ubuntu switch to a rolling release ? This is the big question that is playing in the minds of Ubuntu users and developers alike.
A rolling release model refers to a continually developing software system. In a rolling release, the user will never have to install a new version of the software. Rather, the updates to the software and the system will be pushed to the user as and when the changes are made.
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As hard as it may be to believe, there are times when even I am speechless.
I keep the goings-on of Canonical and the Ubuntu community at an arm’s length — the real reason is to keep my blood pressure down. But actually, the gravity with which Canonical pulls Ubuntu further from its original FOSS orbit is nothing short of tragic, and it’s something that weighs heavily on any FOSS advocate.
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I have been reading the recent posts on Ubuntu Planet with mixed feelings of disappointment but mostly with excitement, and always with keen interest in searching for a pattern that would assist us in understanding change.
Rather than analyse or critique individual posts, I would like to present a visual model of what I think just happened, as an engineer(1) and a manager.
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Responding to ongoing discussions and speculation about the future for Ubuntu’s release cadence, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth published a blog post today, detailing his thoughts on the issue. Shuttleworth, who holds the position of “Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life” of the Ubuntu project, has in the past publicly stated his opinion on cadence and the importance of regular releases for the Ubuntu project. In his latest post, Shuttleworth is of the opinion that “rolling releases are not real releases” and are therefore not the right method for Ubuntu to adopt, but that he is considering accelerating Ubuntu’s release cycle.
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Canonical and I had a long, wonderful relationship. They brought a lot of wonderfully smart and committed individuals in, paid them great, and let them build really awesome free software. We all loved Canonical back then. They were the best sugar daddy anyone could want.
I loved them so much I did a ton of boring work, even! I triaged over 1000 bugs! For free! Granted, I did most of it when I was in grad school with nothing better to do (I was procrastinating when writing papers). But, it was great because I loved the community that was around me and supporting me. Brian Murray was especially awesome. Along with persia and many others I can’t remember right now. Pete, the people who were active back in 2007 were so amazingly helpful, caring, and committed. We all worked together so well because we all saw each other as equals.
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I am concerned with the current status of Ubuntu, not because of the tension on the community or the new software being put out. I am concerned because I feel my time and contributions might go to waste and fall on deaf ears. As leader of a LoCo, how do I know if the work I am putting in is even going to matter in two months when 13.04 comes out? Is my work still relevant because it has nothing to do with a cell phone, nothing to do with a display server, and nothing that in any way is a direct profit source for the Canonical.
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So, Mark, let us take a step back and look at what actually happened.
Kubuntu has always taken pride in being the link between the Ubuntu and KDE communities, and looking out for each’s best interest in order to facilitate the creation of exciting and revolutionary free software products. Jonathan personally has been a great advocate of the Ubuntu way even at times when KDE did not find it appealing; right now appears to be such a time.
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With Ubuntu preparing itself to land on tablets, smart-phones, and other consumer devices, Canonical is beginning to look at ways to support multimedia content protected by Digital Rights Management.
For Ubuntu to be successful on mainstream consumer electronic devices, it will need to be capable of protecting DRM-protected content. Yesterday during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit was a session on hardware-accelerated video decode and rendering support. This video decode/rendering session was mostly about Ubuntu Touch and providing full hardware support for video playback. Right now Ubuntu Touch is using libhybris through Android Media Player while eventually they want to support GStreamer. Since GStreamer is currently used on the Ubuntu desktop, they want GStreamer on the Android-based Ubuntu Touch.
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At the first day of the inaugural online Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), the developer community discussed several topics regarding the next release of the Linux distribution, Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail”. The discussion attracting the most outside interest was undoubtedly the session titled: “Should Ubuntu adopt a monthly cadence/rolling release?” Ubuntu developers also discussed the new Mir display stack, the planned Ubuntu SDK and several cloud-computing-related topics. Alongside the UDS proceedings, Canonical announced a Mir backend for Mesa, and the developers of Ubuntu’s social media client Gwibber unveiled a new version of the application based on QML and targeted at Ubuntu on mobile devices.
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After trying Ubuntu/Unity 13.04 and GNOME 3.8 and Fedora 19, I have to confess that both those desktops have gone to the next level. Yes, there are complains, but if you choose to look at the big picture..
The competition to those, are Mac OS X, Windows 8 and Chrome OS, three totally different OSs by the three software – and not only- giants.
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I have been a huge fan, supporter, and promoter of Ubuntu since about 2006. All the things that attracted me initially were: gratis, free/libre, community, just one CD to install. As I used it more I liked the technical merits as well, things such as timely releases, hardware support, server version, application availability, and LTS. I used it at home and work whenever I could. But things were not always perfect. Things popped up here and there that made Canonical’s direction for Ubuntu more important than the community’s. Things such as CLA, proprietary Landscape, Launchpad, bzr, Unity (initial releases; I love it now), Upstart, Amazon-in-Dash, etc. There was a visible Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome in Ubuntu, which was good to some extent but then became overwhelmingly powerful. In an effort to control all the things they cared about, Canonical started deviating from the wider Linux ecosystem.
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Some of the X/Mesa plans for Ubuntu 13.04 and the future of Ubuntu graphics were announced today. Mesa 9.1 is coming but Ubuntu 13.04 won’t be getting X.Org Server 1.14, in part due to Canonical’s focus on Mir.
Mir wasn’t the exclusive subject of today’s Ubuntu X mailing list message, but rather the status and plans for the X.Org Server and Mesa. Bryce Harrington of Canonical wrote X.org 1.14 and RR / 13.04 (un-)plans.
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The smartphone segment will by the end of the year, or early next year, have three new platforms (Firefox OS, Tizen OS, and Ubuntu Mobile OS) competing with the big names in the business (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone).
This will undoubtedly be an exciting time to be a smartphone enthusiast, with so many options available. Major manufacturers have already expressed interest in the Firefox and Tizen mobile operating system, and it seems (at least according to our poll results) users are expressing much interest in the third.
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Ubuntu — possibly the most popular distribution of the open source Linux operating system — is striking out on its own. Canonical, the commercial company that oversees Ubuntu, has made a habit of building new Linux components from scratch, moving away from tools built and used by the larger open source community. That’s rubbing many Linux developers and users the wrong way, and now Canonical may have finally alienated these hard-core open sourcers.
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Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult.
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Ubuntu, you’ve changed, yes, but we were never closer to our goal of bringing free software to all of the world! Let’s work together to make this happen!
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Mark Shuttleworth hadn’t written on his blog — where he posts just a few times per year — since last December. That changed this morning though where he’s already written two separate blog posts to come to the defense about Ubuntu rolling releases and saying criticism is misplaced about Canonical not taking care of the Ubuntu community.
Mark’s first post was about Ubuntu as a rolling release distribution. He says that rolling releases aren’t releases at all so he hasn’t given it much thought over the years as members of the community have written proposals. This year though he approved the Canonical engineering team doing a deep assessment about turning Ubuntu into a rolling release model.
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Canonical is receiving quite a flack from the free software community as they are transforming from community based distro to a company product. Most of the development now happens in-house, in secret behind the closed doors without any inputs from the community that made Ubuntu the success it is today. After pissing on off the veteran Wayland, X, KDE developers, the company has now lost it’s ex-employee and Compiz contributor Sam Spilsbury.
Sam Spilsbury worked as a Canonical employee between 2010 to 2012 as a software engineer mainly working on Compiz.
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Flavours and Variants
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Back in 2010 I was looking for jobs and I´ve always had a hobby interest in computer and found out that some work ads were asking for basic Linux skills.
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Kubuntu may not be the best implementation of KDE but definitely one of the most followed. For me, Kubuntu has been always a judicious mix of KDE and Gnome applications along with a boring default interface. Of course, with a change of wallpaper, KDE widgets and bringing in some KDE themes made it really shiny and attractive. Even Kubuntu 12.10 had a real boring and plain-vanilla default interface.
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Linux Mint is one of the most important open source projects which cater to the needs of users by proving what users want. Linux Mint has been around for a while but it rose in popularity when Unity happened and Canonical started to drift away from the core Linux and open source communities and began doing their own things secretly, behind the closed doors. What Canonical is doing is fine for protecting a company’s interests but many see it as unhealthy for open source.
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Karim Yaghmour, founder of OperSys founder and a well-known luminary in the real-time and embedded Linux market, led a panel discussion on this topic at the Android Builders Summit in San Francisco last month.
“The idea ignited a lively debate among embedded Linux pros with three of the four panelists ultimately siding with Yaghmour,” writes Libby Clark in a post at Linux.com. “What seemed to be their litmus test? If Android can conceivably be used in ‘classic’ embedded projects, it is embedded Linux.”
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Phones
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Ubuntu wants to make a home for itself on your smartphone and tablet. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu open-source operating system, is working on a mobile version called Ubuntu Touch that the British company hopes will hit the market in late 2013. Although the software is still in beta, Canonical has made an early developer preview available for download, giving app makers and potential users a glimpse at what the operating system will offer.
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Ballnux
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The first dual display smartphone was presented at the NEC booth that got a lot of traffic and buzz. As illustrated below, Samsung is another smartphone player with designs in this category of smart device and others are working on this as well. On the other hand, there’s no sign of Apple even thinking of such an entry at this point in time. It’s this kind of design diversification in the smartphone sector over time that could hurt future iPhone sales.
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Android
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Poking fun at Google’s popular mobile OS, Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller recently tweeted a link to F-Secure’s latest Mobile Threat Report, paired with a ‘Be safe out there’ warning message.
The F-Secure report mentions that around 96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered in the fourth quarter of 2012 alone. Stats reveal that Android’s share of mobile threats rose to 79 percent in 2012 compared to 66.7 percent in 2011, while iOS’ share was just 0.7 percent.
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Chinese telecom giant Huawei is looking to challenge Apple and Samsung in consumer products by leveraging its dominance in network infrastructure.
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Remember Sony announced the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean upgrade schedule for Xperia smartphones back in December? It mentioned in a blog post that Sony Xperia P, Sony Xperia J, Sony Xperia go will receive the Android 4.1 upgrade “from the end of March”, followed by Sony Xperia S, Sony Xperia SL, Sony Xperia ion and Sony acro S, which “will follow in the subsequent weeks”.
So the news of Sony Xperia J getting Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean upgrade should come as a pleasant surprise for many users as the company delivers the roll-out ahead of schedule.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Takeaway: Patrick Gray takes a look at the upcoming Ubuntu tablet and explains why he’ll wait for their second generation device.
A couple months ago, I wrote about the potential for open source tablets, with an adapted version of Linux powering some sort of generic tablet hardware. At that time, there was some movement toward creating a tablet-optimized version of Linux, but the efforts were scattershot at best, with no major Linux player throwing their hat into the tablet ring. That changed recently when Ubuntu announced a tablet-centric version of its eponymous Linux distribution targeted toward tablets.
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Rackspace Hosting has announced a new version of its free and open source Private Cloud Software, powered by OpenStack and supported by its own Fanatical Support services.
Key among the new functionality in the latest release is OpenCenter, a single interface for deploying, configuring and operating clouds at scale in an enterprise datacenter.
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Rock the Vote needed a way to manage the fast growth of the data handled by its Web-based voter registration application. The organization turned to GlusterFS replicated volumes to allow for filesystem size upgrades on its virtualized hosting infrastructure without incurring downtime.
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Making robots that are able to localize, track and separate multiple sound sources, even in noisy places, is essential for their deployment in our everyday environments. This could for example allow them to process human speech, even in crowded places, or identify noises of interest and where they came from. Unlike vision however, there are few software and hardware tools that can easily be integrated to robotic platforms.
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Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, kicked off the last day of ApacheCon with a keynote on Growing Authentic Communities. Despite being early on the final day of a conference, Kanies managed to draw a respectable crowd at ApacheCon eager to hear about techniques for growing a community.
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Platforms are everything these days. They drive users in specific, and well structures ways and can make or break different ways of production. Take for instance the World Wide Web, it’s a platform that allows anarchy and it fundamentally breaks the traditional media’s economic model of charging for content per user. The World Wide Web does this by delivering content not just more cheaply, but more quickly and more succinctly than ever before.
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Events
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BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Friday, March 8, 2013 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the line-up for its upcoming LibrePlanet 2013 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Harvard Science Center on March 23-24.
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Web Browsers
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Who do you love, a browser that fixes discovered problems in hours or in months? The answer is that you love FLOSS, folks, software that works for you and not some corporation hiding bugs so that salesmen can claim they don’t exist…
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Linux, once again, proved to be far more secure than most other operating systems as Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS shrugged off its attackers at the $3.14-million Pwnium cracking competition.
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Chrome
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Google’s latest beta of Chrome for Android, version 26, has added an experimental feature designed to improve the performance of mobile browsing. The new “proxy browsing” feature has to be turned on manually and, when activated, directs mobile users’ connections to HTTP sites through a SPDY connection to a Google-run proxy server. SPDY is Google’s reworking of the HTTP protocol that multiplexes many connections into one, which, combined with other enhancements, gives a faster web experience. SPDY is being used as the basis for the next generation of HTTP, HTTP 2.0.
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RealVNC has come up with VNC Viewer for Google Chrome, which lets users connect to a remote computer and display the desktop within a Google Chrome Web browser window. The software is aimed at ensuring users can simply access their computers wherever they are in the world, according to the company.
VNC Viewer for Google Chrome contains a range of features including a virtual keyboard that enables users to perform operations such as Ctrl-Alt-Delete, as well as sending other controls that may not be available on the machine running the browser, making it simpler for cross-platform connections.
It also automatically optimises colour quality and responsiveness giving users the best performance according to their network speed.
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack Summit 2013 is set to start April 15 in Portland, Ore. The open source platform seems to be gaining momentum with cloud services providers (CSPs). IBM (NYSE: IBM) has just placed a huge bet on OpenStack. Plus, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have each built their public clouds on the emerging software platform.
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IBM is betting big on OpenStack, deeply rooted in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s ingenuity
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Business
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Project Releases
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The OISF development team is pleased to announce Suricata 1.3.6. This the last maintenance release of Suricata 1.3 with some important fixes.
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Performance improvements in terms of software rendering as well as fixes for touch devices and hybrid graphics systems are among the major new features of X.org’s just released X Server 1.14. The new X Server also includes modifications that affect the pointer barriers. GNOME 3.8 will use these pointer barriers to establish from what distance and at what speed a user has moved the mouse pointer to the bottom screen edge; if the values are big, GNOME will display the notification panel straight away instead of waiting for a second.
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Openness/Sharing
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Crowdsourcing, posing a question, problem, or idea on the internet with the hope of soliciting responses from other web-users, has emerged as a valuable new method of soliciting ideas and solutions in the medical field, according to a case study conducted jointly by researchers at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, London Business School, and web-based innovation company TopCoder.
“The beauty of crowdsourcing is that it provides access to people that you would never normally meet,” said Ramy A. Arnaout, an assistant professor of pathology at the Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Arnaout, who co-authored the study, examined the impact of providing cash prizes to software developers and programmers on the web to encourage responses to a computational biological problem.
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Open Access/Content
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A company that offered free “alternatives” to three popular college textbooks has rewritten its controversial offerings following a lawsuit by major textbook publishers.
Boston-based Boundless, which has become a darling of the open educational resources movement seen as threatening traditional textbook publishers, offered versions of textbooks that would normally cost scores if not hundreds of dollars. It pitched what it offered as “textbook replacement,” created by essentially reverse engineering popular textbooks. Boundless attracted considerable attention, including an $8 million round of venture capital funding led by Venrock, an investment group started by the Rockefellers. (Boundless currently generates no revenue, its co-founder and CEO, Ariel Diaz, said Thursday.)
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Programming
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I just received an email about Jolidrive, a new offering from Jolicloud, a technology outfit based in Paris, France. As you can tell from the name, Jolicloud has something to do with cloud computing.
It started life as a provider of Joli OS, a kinda (Linux) distribution for the cloud. I signed up when it was launched just to see what it had to offer, but was not very impressed. I like most or all my computing to be done locally. But that’s another story.
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Hardware
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This week Qualcomm‘s CEO Dr. Paul E Jacobs let it be known that with AllJoyn technology and the company’s dedication to open source development, their newly promised Internet of Everything would become a reality. This chat was had during the Mobile World Congress 2013 set of keynotes entitled Vertical Disruption and had Jacobs letting the world know that it wasn’t a disruption he’d be talking about, it was a bit more positive angle on the whole situation. With the mobile universe advancing as it is today, Jacobs let it be known that wireless connectivity was in bloom, and AllJoyn was – and is – at the center of it all.
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iFixit on Thursday published a list of the best and worst tablets based on their respective repairability scores. While no slate scored a perfect 10, the company found that the Dell (DELL) XPS 10 was the easiest tablet to repair thanks to its accessible case, color-coded screws and labeled cables. At the bottom of the list was Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface Pro and Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and iPad mini. The Surface Pro scored a 1 out of 10 and was said to be difficult to open without shearing the display cables, while the iPad scored a 2 out of 10 for its excessive amounts of adhesive. The Surface RT didn’t fare much better and scored a mere 4 out of 10, compared to Android tablets such as the Nexus 7, which scored a 7 out of 10, and the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, which garnered at score of 8 out of 10.
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Security
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The White House threatened China and other countries with trade and diplomatic action over corporate espionage as it cataloged more than a dozen cases of cyberattacks and commercial thefts at some of the U.S.’s biggest companies.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Nowhere does Time’s Massimo Calabresi mention one rather inconvenient fact: There is no evidence that Iran is actually pursuing a nuclear weapon. Regular inspections have failed to turn up any evidence of that. Instead, we read things like this: “Iran itself has slowed down its efforts, converting some enriched uranium to a form that can be used only in research, not in weapons.” This is treated as evidence that Iran is heading towards its nuclear weapons more slowly.
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I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness — and oh yes, it was madness — not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.
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India on Wednesday expressed its “deep concern” on the security situation in Syria and the continuing spiral of violence in the civil war-torn country that has claimed about 70,000 lives and resulted in one million refugees since 2011.
India’s views were conveyed to Bouthaina Shaaban, political and media advisor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is on a visit to India. “We also expressed our concern about the plight of the people of Syria arising out of intense fighting and conflict,” an Indian foreign ministry statement said after talks between Shaaban and Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid and others in New Delhi.
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The recent controversy surrounding the film Zero Dark Thirty only proves the debate surrounding torture isn’t over. There are some who continue to make the false claim that torture worked, and seek to reinstate the practice.
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Two leading figures within the Obama administration now insist that the president of the United States does not have the authority to launch drone strikes on US soil.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) received a response from the Obama administration on Thursday afternoon after spending 13 hours demanding answers about the possible use of drones inside of the United States.
During a briefing Thursday afternoon, White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “The president has not and would not use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil.”
Mr. Carney also elected to read a statement penned by Attorney General Eric Holder earlier that day that had been sent to Sen. Paul. Mr. Holder’s entire statement, only 43 words, confirmed Mr. Carney’s remark.
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You’d never know from his writings over the past few years, but New York Times pundit David Brooks was a full-throated hawk for the tragic U.S. invasion of Iraq and swallowed all of the Bush administration claims about WMD whole. He attempted to muddy the waters, long ago, after WMD were not found and the “liberation” proved to be a disaster by blaming the post-invasion disaster all on Rumsfeld, perhaps figuring that if he became known as a war critic folks would forget that he’d promoted the conflict from the beginning. Not a chance, in my case. Brooks, meet elephant.
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For over 1000 days, Private Manning has been held in military detention, in Iraq, Kuwait, Quantico, Virginia and Leavenworth, Kansas. Reports from these facilities and the media depicted Manning as unstable, depressed, weak, and worse. While imprisoned, he has endured some of the worst treatment imaginable at the hands of his own government, notably characterized by the UN special rapporteur for torture as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” possibly amounting to torture. Worse yet, this abuse comes in response to actions which Manning believed, and continues to believe, were in the service of both his country and international human rights law. Given all that he has endured, if the characterizations about his mental state were accurate, it would hardly come as a surprise.
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wo senior figures at the Simon Wiesenthal Center have met with Hungarian political leaders to express concern about growing anti-Semitism in the country, including the ongoing failure to bring Hungarian Nazi war criminal László Csatáry to justice.
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An Austrian survey has found that 42 per cent of respondents said that “not everything was bad under Adolf Hitler,” whose Nazi government had annexed Austria 75 years ago.
The survey also found that 54 per cent of the 502 respondents said a Nazi party would have some success in democratic elections today, and that 61 per cent support the concept of a “strong man” as leader.
The poll was commissioned by the Der Standard newspaper and reported on by the Austria Press Agency on Friday, a day before publication by the paper.
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Rand Paul filibuster shines light on Democrats’ reluctance to question Barack Obama’s controversial targeted killing policy
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Should a federal judge review the government’s decision to launch a lethal drone attack against a suspected terrorist? A recently released Justice Department white paper on the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen has prompted calls for judicial intervention. While the instinct is right, any review scheme must strike the correct balance between liberty and security.
Most discussion is focused on creating a new court modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). Congress enacted FISA following revelations that the government had been eavesdropping on Americans’ private communications for decades. FISA created a special court to review requests to conduct electronic surveillance of American citizens for national security purposes.
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Sen. Rand Paul made some dubious warnings about drone strikes on San Francisco cafes in his filibuster last week against the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director. But his larger argument for clearer limits on drones is absolutely right.
Paul’s battle isn’t with Brennan, who said that as CIA director he wouldn’t have any legal power to authorize domestic drone strikes. Brennan, who has been trying to sort out legal rules for drone warfare, deserved to be confirmed, as he was Thursday. Nor is this battle simply with Attorney General Eric Holder, though he used troubling language in responding to Paul’s queries.
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The first drone strike President Obama ever ordered in Yemen was a deadly disaster, but it illustrated a larger issue with drones — they often create more trouble than they prevent.
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While he was speaking, some of those following along on Twitter wondered if this was the lengthiest discussion of drones that had ever occurred in Congress. Searching the official transcript of Congressional business reveals that it was, by far.
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The Pew Research Center said 56 percent of respondents to a February survey, conducted before Rand’s filibuster, expressed concern about drone strikes on U.S. citizens. Pew said it didn’t consider whether strikes were on U.S. or foreign soil, but found a divided nation from rival polls.
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Nearing the Iraq War’s tenth anniversary, an overriding truth is that few of the key participants – in government, media or think tanks – have faced accountability commensurate with the crime. Indeed, many of these Mideast “experts” are still go-to people for advice.
One regularly hears much talk in Washington about accountability, but also regularly sees examples of how the concept of accountability gets applied in this town in an inconsistent and warped way. There are the inevitable calls for heads to roll after any salient untoward event, and huzzahs to senior managers who do roll heads in response.
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Quietly and without much notice, the Air Force has reversed its policy of publishing statistics on drone strikes in Afghanistan as the debate about drone warfare hits a fever pitch in Washington. In addition, it has erased previously published drone strike statistics from its website.
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Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks said the department was not involved in the decision to remove the statistics. AFCENT did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
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Who Will Stand Up Against the Military-Oil-Banker Mafia?
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During the Justice Department’s oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder engaged in a lot of clunky tap dancing.
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Although would-be dronees would not be in custody, their rights (or lack thereof) would be more extreme than for current terror detainees: death with no due process whatsoever. The government brags that at least 50 home-grown terror plots have been foiled since 9/11. Under the new definition embraced by Holder, here are some of the people who could have been droned: everyone on the flight with “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, once the plane entered American air space; “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, the “Lackawanna Six,” the 11 Virginia “Paintball” network, and those who proved to be “mistakes,” like Brandon Mayfield. I’m trying to picture drones dropping bombs or Hellfire missiles in Chicago, New York, Virginia.
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As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.
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Several buildings in a police officers’ club complex in the Egyptian capital were in flames on Saturday, an AFP reporter said.
According to a senior security official, hardcore football fans known as the Ultras stormed the complex and set fire to the buildings.
Residents of the affluent island where the club is situated were using garden hoses to try to extinguish the flames. Other buildings in the complex had their windows smashed.
[...]
The unrest comes hours after an Egyptian court upheld death sentences for 21 defendants over a deadly football riot in Port Said last year and handed down life sentences to five defendants, with 19 receiving lesser jail terms and another 28 exonerated.
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That means, when Brennan vowed to protect and defend the Constitution, he was swearing on one that did not include the First, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments — or any of the other Amendments now included in our Constitution. The Bill of Rights did not become part of our Constitution until 1791, 4 years after the Constitution that Brennan took his oath on.
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Cablegate
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Anyone losing sleep over Bob Woodward’s relationship with the White House can finally rest easy. The éminence grise of access journalism has made his peace with the Obama administration. After a spat with economic adviser Gene Sperling over an op-ed he was writing about the sequester, Woodward received an apologetic e-mail from Sperling, who said “as a friend” he thought Woodward would “regret” his comments. Woodward took to the airwaves, casting it as a veiled threat. But by Sunday, order was restored: Sperling called him a “legend” on ABC’s This Week. “I’m going to invite him over to my house,” Woodward said on Face the Nation, adding magnanimously, “Hopefully, he’ll bring others from the White House, or maybe the president himself.”
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Who designed the WikiLeaks logo? According to this Metahaven interview, a designer named Aśka. She created the WikiLeaks hourglass in 2006, and her story is most interesting.
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With the Wikileaks hoopla a few years ago and the recent leaking of government documents concerning President Obama allegedly targeting American citizens for assassinations, a lot of attention is now being paid to how and where reporters, bloggers, etc receive the information they use to inform their reports, posts and articles. Nowhere has this been more paralyzing than in the current events/news blogging niche.
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An ‘Heir to an Execution’ speaks out for Manning, 60 years after his parents’ death at the hands of the state.
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A week ago today, Pfc. Bradley Manning surprised both detractors and supporters by reading a thirtysomething-page statement articulating the specific Whats, Hows and—most importantly—Whys of his disclosures to the popular media site WikiLeaks. In the week since Manning’s dramatic statement, media coverage of the case has shifted from a trickle to a steady storm as even mainstream outlets such as the Guardian, X and Y now echo the message of the 25-year-old army private’s supporters. With no public record or transcript of court proceedings, it is indeed these grassroots supporters who have kept an important faith, serving as a bridge in between the mainstream media’s rare spikes of coverage and its more frequent lulls.
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Bradley’s 35-page testimony last week detailed his time as an intelligence analyst in Iraq and how he concluded that the American public needed to see the United States’ secret abuses in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He deserves thanks, not jail time.
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Khan took a role on Universal’s $2.5m budget documentary “We Steal Secrets”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest — in just one century.
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Finance
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Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy.
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The Bush Tax cuts were an unaffordable bribe, decreasing tax receipts while increasing spending. Meanwhile, representatives of the Clinton and Bush Whitehouse actively blocked regulation of the derivatives markets which were destined to implode, crashing the global economy, on Bush’s watch.
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Shoddy political theater distracts people with vague demons called debt ceiling, fiscal cliff and now, sequester. Party leaders posture for major donors, media boosters and the faithful. They claim to save us from the demons. Meanwhile, backstage they all agree on austerity as the “necessary” response to “our major problem,” namely federal budget “imbalance.” “We” are spending “beyond our means,” accumulating “government debts.” So “we” must raise taxes and cut spending – impose austerity – to regain balance.
On January 1, payroll taxes rose (from 4.2 to 6.2 %) for 150 million Americans. Their checks shrank as that regressive tax became more so. Obama’s hyped “tax increase for the rich” was comparatively trivial. It affected only the very few Americans earning over $450,000, raising their top tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. Our leaders hope we forgot the 1950s and 1960s, when the top tax rate was 91 percent. On March 1, the sequester hit, unleashing federal spending cuts.
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When the state government of West Virginia ordered Cisco routers to upgrade their networks in 2010, they did not calculate that dealing with Cisco would lead them to losses in tune to $7.88 million. Apart from the fact that the secondary bid process was legally unauthorized (instead of competitive bid process as required by law), the West Virginia legislative auditor has uncovered that Cisco supplied equipment that are extremely high-end and not at all required for the current state of affairs. Moreover, Cisco sold the state another $6.6 million worth of services like upgraded software licenses and extra security features.
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Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Wall Street executive, is joining Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.) to introduce legislation that would undercut one of the most meaningful elements of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
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Tonight, millions of people will enjoy a beer. What the vast majority of them probably won’t realize is that the variety of brands they see in the stores come from just two foreign-based multinational companies that control 80 percent of the market here in the U.S.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Beyond doubt, a significant number of Scottish citizens are disturbed at what they perceive as a systemic bias in the BBC against Scottish independence. I have read some sixty internet articles to the same effect in the last 24 hours. There is a citizens internet revolt against the mainstream here.
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It’s possible to debate the Chavez legacy, of course. But in a region that saw a wave of democratic elections usher in leftist governments after Chavez came to power in Venezuela–where Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic all declared periods of national mourning to mark his death–it sure seems odd to suggest there’s not much to be said for his legacy.
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Censorship
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Though Google is a U.S. company, its American rights don’t transpose across the pond. A court case will determine whether Google has to comply with EU law, which could have far-reaching consequences for European users.
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THE IT DEPARTMENT at the European Parliament has denied that it is deliberately blocking emails that it does not want its members to see.
The European Parliament was accused of this by Christian Engström, MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party, who called the news an “absolute disgrace” in a blog post about the discovery.
He said that he had been receiving a steady stream of emails about a vote, due on Tuesday, on whether or not the European Parliament will accept a report called “Eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report is contentious because it suggests a ban on all types of pornography in the media.
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Privacy
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Appeals court slaps down Obama administration’s claim that customs agents can peruse Americans’ electronic devices for evidence — without having even a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
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After the US Supreme Court upheld the right of the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans’ communications with foreigners without a warrant, the White House seeks to quash a similar lawsuit citing the plaintiff’s inability to provide evidence.
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Can the irascible, voluble and sizable founder of Megaupload.com blow the lid off the National Security Agency’s global spying network? Kim Dotcom sure thinks so. In a series of tweets on Thursday, the sometimes bombastic internet entrepeneur claimed a lawsuit he is pursuing against New Zealand’s spy agency will reveal that it passed intelligence illegally gathered on him to the NSA.
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Though FBI agents are held to a high standard of conduct, some fall short—far short. Take, for instance, an incident in 2007 when an FBI employee “drove past a felony traffic stop, yelled ‘Rodney King’ out his car window and momentarily lost control of his vehicle, swerving into the oncoming lane and almost striking a police officer,” according an account of an internal FBI investigation. (When cops pulled him over, the employee claimed he had yelled, “Geeze Louise.”)
Thanks to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which rounds up accounts of these infractions and distributes the cautionary tales to employees each quarter, we get glimpses of the seedier side of life inside the agency. CNN has obtained a recent set of these memos (after obtaining earlier ones last year) that show employees sexting, breaking e-readers, viewing pornography in the office, improperly accessing databases, and even shoplifting “two ties from a local retailer.”
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Civil Rights
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DRM
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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, for the latest installment in the popular SimCity video game franchise, which was released this week to massive sales, and then just as quickly, an epic fail as the paying customers were unable to play the game they just bought. The culprit isn’t the game itself, which by most accounts is pretty good; no, the problem is the game’s DRM scheme.
That software requires each user to maintain an “always online” connection to the publisher’s authentication server—even for single player mode—but the publisher, Electronic Arts, is having trouble keeping that server available. Even if you connected, the double helping of fail continued: all cities are saved to the cloud, and if the servers bug out, hours of work can go up in smoke faster than Godzilla can decimate a metropolis. No more local saves, lest you mange to defeat the DRM.
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Following an online uproar over a law banning the unlocking of cell phones, the Federal Communications Commission will investigate whether the ban is harmful to economic competitiveness and if the executive branch has any authority to change the law.
The “ban raises competition concerns; it raises innovation concerns,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told me last night at a TechCrunch CrunchGov event at our San Francisco headquarters.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Would you rather pay $12 a dose for malaria drugs or $2.40 – and potentially boost your country’s economy at the same time?
The Ugandan government faced an easy choice when it decided to start producing its own version of a key malaria treatment, rather than continuing to rely on expensive imports. Since the country began making its own medicine in 2007, Uganda has produced not only anti-malarials, but also antiretrovirals (ARVs) used to treat HIV. The public-private company, Quality Chemicals, plans to roll out more ARVs, anti-malarials and antibiotics in the coming months and years.
The venture, a shining example of African pharmaceutical manufacturing, was made possible in part because Uganda is considered a “least-developed country”. As such, it doesn’t yet have to respect international intellectual property laws, set out through the World Trade Organisation’s trade-related aspects of intellectual property agreement, or “Trips”. All countries are required to adopt the agreement’s measures into their laws if they want to be part of the organisation.
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China and the European Union could start investment talks in the coming months, the Chinese ambassador to the EU said.
China has also submitted a proposal on launching a feasibility study on a free-trade agreement with the EU, said Wu Hailong, who is also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
China does not want to be left behind while EU-US trade negotiations are under way. The EU and Japan are also expected to enter into trade negotiations.
The EU has been a major source of China’s foreign direct investment and has been an attractive destination for China’s outbound direct investment.
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In light of the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz, there is a need to reconsider intellectual property enforcement standards in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The 16th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations are taking place in Singapore until March 13. There have been concerns that the Intellectual Property Chapter would “ratchet up IP enforcement at the expense of digital rights”. Maira Sutton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation fears that “the Trans-Pacific Partnership could turn Internet Service Providers into copyright cops, prompt ever-higher criminal and civil penalties for sharing content, and expand protections for Digital Rights Management”.
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Copyrights
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Someone in DC thought they had snuffed out an official Republican report on radical intellectual property reform by convincing the authoring agency to erase the document from the Internet and fire the staffer charged with writing it. The shadowy politicking backfired. The young fall-boy, Derek Khanna, instantly became a front-page living martyr against the entertainment and telecommunication lobbies, who have long been villainized for pushing aggressive anti-piracy laws at the expense of innovation.
Just 3 months later, Khanna led a massive 100,000-person petition to give consumers more rights over their cell phone carriers, convincing the White House and Congress to publicly prioritize consumer choice and uphold the principles first laid out in the now non-existent committee document. A day later, legislation was introduced to codify the White House’s support into law, with an official hat-tip to Khanna.
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An injunction is denied because a judge says there’s no evidence that CBS Interactive purposely encourages infringement “now or in the foreseeable future.”An injunction is denied because a judge says there’s no evidence that CBS Interactive purposely encourages infringement “now or in the foreseeable future.”
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After months of delay, the “Copyright Alert System,” (also known as “six strikes”) is ready for its “implementation phase.” Participating ISPs will be rolling out the system “over the course of the next several days.”
As we’ve reported previously, six strikes was conceived of by Center for Copyright Information (CCI)—an umbrella group representing major ISPs across the US and representatives from the recording and film industries. The group agreed in 2011 to come up with a six-stage warning scheme that would progressively warn—and eventually penalize—alleged online copyright infringers. (Here’s the CCI’s new video explaining the process and its new promo video.)
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The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.
The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.
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Send this to a friend
03.07.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As someone who started using Red Hat Linux back in 1997, and then worked for Red Hat for six years, helping to deploy and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux on thousands of high-end servers for Wall Street investment banks, I often get questions when students find out that one of my laptops runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Canonical’s enterprise Linux distribution. Likewise, the fact that I run OpenSUSE on my server seems to raise questions about where my preferences lie in the Linux ecosystem.
If I’ve always been associated with Red Hat, why wouldn’t I just stick with their products? The answer that I give is that being familiar with a variety of distributions allows for greater flexibility.
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Desktop
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I’m not a Google fangirl. I have Gmail accounts for personal and work use, and I spend some time in Google Docs and Calendar, but that’s about it. And until a few weeks ago, I had never even more than glanced at the Chrome OS or browser, let alone touched a Chromebook.
I have, however, read the vitriol aimed at Chromebooks by my tech press colleagues. The low-cost laptops that make up the majority of the Chromebook market have been dismissed as disposable toys. The new Chromebook Pixel, meanwhile, has attracted much greater interest—and even greater disdain, because it’s seen as an outrageously expensive disposable toy.
But is the Chromebook platform really such a bad idea?
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Only in the UK. Pity. The price? £349 VAT included and delivered.
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Many people know that Chrome OS is based on Linux. But where did Google’s operating system actually come from — and what is it made of today? Here’s its story.
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We last reported on Dell’s Ubuntu-powered XPS-13 Developer Edition at the tail end of November 2012, when the laptop was released. Comments from the Ars community on the device were generally positive, though one overwhelming sentiment seemed to dominate: the XPS-13′s 1366×768 resolution was totally insufficient for the laptop’s intended audience and use case.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Often we try and remain very focused on our goals and work hard to avoid distractions. Keeping a very narrow vision on our target can help shepherd a product to completion on schedule, a goal very important both to project managers and the engineers tasked with the work. However, it can also become tunnel vision and lead to unnecessary work, delays, and failed deadlines and ultimately a weak product.
The more you understand about the Linux kernel as a whole, the better you can work on its individual components, including device drivers. Normally device drivers do not (and should not) explicitly address (much less modify or control) global kernel issues such as scheduling and memory management. However, a badly written driver can certainly sabotage a lot of good work done in these kernel arenas, disrupting performance, wasting memory, etc, and at the same time deliver weak fulfillment of its mandated device service.
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Last year ARM Holdings published ARM KVM virtualization support. This support was for ARMv7 hardware using the ARM Cortex-A15 since it’s the first 32-bit ARM processor to support hardware virtualization. Ahead of the debut of any 64-bit ARM (AArch64) hardware, KVM has now been ported to ARM64.
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Graphics Stack
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While it’s not part of the NVIDIA 310 or even the latest NVIDIA 313 driver series, this morning was marked by the release of the 304.84 certified Linux graphics driver.
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Keith Packard tagged X.Org Server 1.14 in Git on Wednesday morning and issued this brief release announcement. Some of the changes in the past few weeks that landed as fixes since the earlier release candidate were fixes to the touch device, GPU hot-plugging bits, software rendering speed-ups due to taking advantage of new Pixman APIs, elimination of a lot of warning messages, and pointer barrier improvements.
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Applications
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With my recent focus on minimalism and efficiency in my work environment, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the state of command line music players. I’m glad I did, because the C* Music Player, also known as “cmus”, is fantastic. It’s small, scriptable, and has a great feature set; perfect for the hacker looking for some background music.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I recently moved our clients off of dyn.com to ChangeIP.com for their “free” dynamic DNS needs. These are clients for whom my micro-business provides monthly remote service over TCP/IP with ssh and VNC connections. I have dozens of scripts on our support system here that had the old dyn.com domains in them for connection to the client sites when providing service each month. As I was loathe to hand edit each of these dozens of scripts I created yet another script to interactively change the string in each client’s files from the old “free” domain to the new “free” ChangeIP.com domain. There are hundreds of other scripts out on the Internet to perform a similar task. But none I looked at did exactly what I wanted, so I made my own.
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Games
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Counter-Strike started as a user modification to Half-Life. Players are split up into two teams, counter-terrorist and terrorist, to compete in objective-based matches. Counter-terrorists must rescue hostages from the terrorists, or prevent terrorists from planting a bomb on a target. With each round, players earn money to purchase weapons, body armor and other equipment.
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We’ve been looking for Valve to release their proper Linux-based Steam Box before the end of the year and the BBC is now reporting that they will “offer prototypes of its upcoming video games console for testing within four months time.”
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Continuing its adventures into Linux, Valve has released a penguin-friendly edition of another of its games, bringing the total to five. Could it be Left 4 Dead? Portal 2? HL2: Episode Two? Gosh, even Episode 3? Er, no, it’s Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Still, that’s nice, isn’t it?
Condition Zero added single-player to the CS world, facing off against snazzy bots. The development was a bit of a mess, started with Rogue Entertainment in 2000 then going to Gearbox, passed to Ritual Entertainment, and finally finished and released by Turtle Rock Studios in 2004. Yes, the gang who went on to create Left 4 Dead. The end result was a so-so mish-mash of scrapped, restarted, reworked and remade content, but shooting men is generally fun.
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Valve has released a Linux version of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, the company’s fifth port for the operating system.
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Torment: Tides of Numenera can be seen as the follow-up of the legendary Planescape: Torment (which I started a week ago in Wine again), it’s developed by inXile who are also working on their Wasteland 2 kickstarter.
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In its latest sales campaign, the HumbleBundle team has released four commercial games for Android, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. As before, prospective buyers can choose their own price for the DRM-free game package. Buyers who pay more than the average price for the “Humble Bundle with Android 5″ will receive two extra games. The current average price is $6.64. All games are DRM free, but there are no plans for any of the titles to be open sourced in this round of Humble Bundle.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I just released Xfdesktop 4.10.1 which contains some bug fixes and updated translations which had been there for months. Congratulations to Eric Koegel who committed most of them!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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More and more developers and long-time Ubuntu members are getting disappointed with the Canonical leadership and breaking their association with what they call the Canonical community. Martin Owens, popularly known as DoctorMo, is one such developer.
There is special place for Ownes in my life as he directly affected me. He used to maintain the tablet pen drivers for Ubuntu. I have one such device and I was able to use it under Ubuntu because of the work he had done on it. I wrote about it extensively.
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Redo and Undo are basic functions in almost every word processor. It is essential to be able to revisit your last actions, because human actions are error-prone. Simply using a function to go back and forth between actions is saving a lot of time and energy. The Tango and Oxygen icon sets use arrows pointing left or right. They are additionally colored yellow (Undo) and green (Redo). But these icons tend to get mixed up, as our Icon Test shows.
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Over one hundred bug fixes and translation updates are in the first of the monthly stabilisation updates to KDE 4.10, KDE 4.10.1. The announcement notes bugs fixed in the Kontact PIM and KWin compositing window manager components of the KDE 4.10 desktop environment, which was released a month ago.
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On the 23rd of February, a crowd of about 330 enthusiastic people gathered to be a part of the first major open source event in the State of Gujarat, India. Some people traveled hundreds of kilometers to attend, coming from places such as Delhi, Durgapur (more than 1800 km), Nainital, Bardoli and Mumbai. Students from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) in Gandhinagar organized the event—KDE Meetup 2013. It was an opportunity for passionate students to take their first steps towards becoming true software developers. The two day event was filled with talks on the latest KDE developments, sessions on how to start contributing, coding sessions, hands-on workshops, and a whole lot more, along with a big serving of the magic ingredient – fun!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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gThumb is one of Gnome’s great choices when it comes to image viewers and browsers, but I admit that we have overlooked it for far too long.
With version 3.1.4 getting released a few hours ago, I had the chance to test the application new features and general abilities for a typical daily use.
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I’ve been asked by a few people now to outline my plans for improving software installation in GNOME. I’ve started to prototype a new app called ‘GNOME Software’. It exists in gnome git and currently uses PackageKit to manage packages. It’s alpha quality, but basically matches the mockups done by the awesome guys in #gnome-design. It’s designed to be an application management application. GNOME PackageKit lives on for people that know what a package is and want a pointy-clicky GUI, so I’m not interested in showing low level details for power users.
Of course, packages are so 2012. It’s 2013, and people want to play with redistributable things like listaller and glick2 static blobs. People want to play with updating an OS image like ostree and that’s all awesome. Packages are pretty useful in some situations, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to being just another package installer. From a end-user point of view, packages are just an implementation detail.
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Rob Clark shared yesterday that his reverse-engineered ARM Qualcomm graphics driver is successfully handling the GNOME Shell with the Mutter compositing window manager. In a time when the ARM Linux graphics space is rather closed-up and many of the ARM reverse-engineering graphics projects don’t actually have any code to show for it or any working end-user driver but just code demos, this is really great to see.
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GNOME 3 is making major progress with each and every release. Six months ago, when 3.6 was close to release, I wrote about how excited I was about the improvements that were on their way. That release was a big step up from the previous version in terms of user experience. Now we’re on the cusp of GNOME 3.8, and I find myself in exactly the same position. Testing GNOME 3.8, it is a huge improvement on 3.6. It’s more effective, satisfying and polished. Basic operations like selecting a window or launching an application have seen major improvements and the overall experience feels like yet another upgrade.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Gentoo Family
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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An EMC (NYSE: EMC)-VMWare (NYSE: VMW) partnership could mean added competition for Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT).
The pair have teamed up to announce a new Hadoop distribution Pivotal HD, expanding the platform’s reach to structured query language (SQL) programmers.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This week Jono Bacon announced that Ubuntu Developer Summits will become a series of online events. Having thought about it a few days, I’m now ready to input my own opinion to the discussion.
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Launchpad asked me if I wanted to continue to be an Ubuntu member. I thought about it, and have decided that I don’t. The one thing I’ll miss is being able to post to Planet Ubuntu. But I have to be honest, there isn’t an Ubuntu community any more. There’s a Canonical community, an ubuntu-users gaggle and maybe an enthusiasts posse. But no community that makes decisions, builds a consensus, advocates or educates. It’s dead now, it’s been that way for a while.
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Rick put forward that proposal last week.
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After several months without posting, Mark Shuttleworth has returned to his official blog with some harsh words for those in the Ubuntu community who have been critical of Canonical’s recent efforts to transform the OS into a multi-faceted platform for mobile devices and the cloud.
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There has been a lot of talk lately about people leaving the Ubuntu Community and people disappointed with the direction Canonical is taking with the Ubuntu Community. Mainly how announcements are being handed down with little or no comments from community contributors.
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Nine years have gone by since Canonical was founded; the 19th release of its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution will take place in October this year.
Thus, it is fair to assume that the founder of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, is by now used to the reaction whenever Ubuntu moves in a direction different to the prevailing conventional wisdom.
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When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn’t come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from?
With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian—the officially recommended Pi operating system—came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the launch of a blue, one year anniversary edition of the low-cost, credit-card-sized single-board computer. The Foundation is celebrating the first anniversary of the launch of Raspberry Pi with the unveiling of a special limited edition of the Linux-based pocket computer.
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Is Android the new embedded Linux? Of course not, said Karim Yaghmour, OperSys founder, during the panel discussion on this topic at the Android Builders Summit last month in San Francisco. It was a question meant to spur discussion, he said, that’s all.
It worked. The idea ignited a lively debate among embedded Linux pros with three of the four panelists ultimately siding with Yaghmour. What seemed to be their litmus test? If Android can conceivably be used in “classic” embedded projects, it is embedded Linux.
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Recantha, a known developer in the Raspberry Pi community, has managed to use the mini PC in an entirely unique way. He himself built a working tricorder, inspired by the devices in Start Trek.
He used some sensors, two for temperature and one each for magnetism and distance, a simple LCD display, switches, a light-resistant resistor, a thermistor and an Arduino Leonardo clone. All of these were enclosed in a Lego case. A camera might be added later.
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Systech recently demonstrated the first model in a new series of Linux-powered M2M (machine-to-machine) intelligent gateways at the Distributech smart grid conference in San Diego. The highly modular SysLink M2M Gateway series enables access to a wide variety of sensors and devices for monitoring and control purposes.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Taiwan’s HTC Corp has unveiled a new smartphone that it hopes will set it apart from the crowd of Google Android devices on the market.
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Android
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Android and iOS have existed in tension for a few years now, and each is continually borrowing ideas, designs, and features from the other. Nothing wrong with a little friendly theft when trying to stay competitive.
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At some point in the early 2000s, I got my wife a Nokia phone with a keyboard, so we could text each other. It was a great little phone, not hard to use or understand, but she texted me only once with it, to send the word “no”. Then, in late 2007, not long after the iPhone came out, she told me she wanted one. Why? “Because I can work with it.” So we got her one, and she worked it like a chef with a collection of Wüsthofs. A few months later, I got an iPhone 3G. She immediately schooled me on how to use the thing, and she still knows more about texting and other essential iPhone apps than I do. After the iPhone 4 came out in mid-2010, we traded up to those, and that’s where we’ll stay until our AT&T contract runs out. The plan after that is to replace them with Androids.
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Android was everywhere at Mobile World Congress last week – there seems to be no stopping Google’s mobile operating system that’s now almost as ubiquitous as a colour display. But the success hides the platform’s problems, insists one analyst.
Former Nomura analyst Richard Windsor paints a picture of increasing fragmentation creating a clear dividing line down the middle – with one half of the split populated by shoddy low-end devices that look good but “barely work”.
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Venezuelan general claims history will reveal plot to poison fallen comrade as vice-president calls for investigation
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…use of drones to kill Americans on U.S. soil.
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He also called on the British Government to make public the interim report of the Gibson Inquiry, which seeks to look into allegations that the UK intelligence services were complicit in the torture of detainees and rendition flights, and establish a timetable for the proposed judge-led inquiry, stating its mandate and powers.
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A trio of CIA contractors has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a whistleblower case accusing the companies of plying CIA employees with gifts to win contracts.
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In March 1933, Germans voted for a new parliament – their last free election before all but the Nazi party was banned. Such extraordinary measures of terror preceded the election that there was little “free” about it.
In February 1933, Germany found itself in the midst of a parliamentary election campaign. By the time voters went to the ballots one month later, on March 5, 1933, one single issue was on their minds.
The burning of the Reichstag, home to the parliament, was alleged to have been carried out by communists in an attempted coup. Chancellor Adolf Hitler and other National Socialist leaders latched on to the “coup attempt” in order to stoke fears of a communist revolution amongst the German populace. Thereafter, Hitler and his allies unleashed an unprecedented wave of terror throughout the country.
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THE Vienna Philharmonic, which is often berated for its slowness to act, has reacted quickly to charges that it shields access to its archives to conceal the darker aspects of its Nazi past.
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We’ve previously reported on the NASA project to base a new generation of small, cheap, spacecraft around Android phones, dubbed PhoneSat. While PhoneSat is still on track to launch in April, the British have beaten their American counterparts to the punch with the Surrey Training, Research, and Nanosatellite Demonstrator (STRaND-1) satellite, currently orbiting the Earth.
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Devops represents a dramatic change from the old siloed developers and script-heavy system administrators of yesterday. Any tools that can provide some common ground for developers and IT operations professionals can help, and it seems Chef and Puppet often do.
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Self-promotion in an open source world, it starts with a shameless plug—a simple way to make people aware of something you’re passionate about. Then, over time, you get more comfortable with using the shameless plug and that desire to make people aware transforms into purposeful marketing. At some time or another when working on an open source project, you’re bound to have to promote it. Self-promotion can be an uncomfortable topic for some people, but I’ve found word of mouth is the best way to promote open source.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The new design will likely arrive in the Nightly Channel in the next few days, but if you’d like to test it today, you can download the Firefox UX branch. Retina MacBook Pro users should note that, thus far, the new curvy tabs don’t support high-DPI screens.
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Mozilla
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Though Android and iOS are currently ruling the roost as far as mobile operating systems are concerned, new players are emerging and disappearing each month in a feeble attempt to overthrow the giants. Being a third wheel to these top contenders is Microsoft’s own Windows Phone OS with an elegantly designed Metro interface. Such is the strength of iOS and Android though some people say that Windows Phone OS is better than Android feature-wise and performance-wise. That said, the market share that this new OS garnered leaves a lot to be desired and serves as a testimony to the fact that both Google and Apple are behemoths of the mobile world.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Of the non-relational datastore technologies created in the past several years, none has been more successful or seen greater acceptance than Hadoop. Popular with startups, enterprise vendors and customers alike, Hadoop improved substantially the processing time associated with certain workloads. One early example, which came from a user of the technology as opposed to a vendor selling it, asserted that a customer profiling query which processed over a period of weeks in a traditional data warehouse executed in around thirteen minutes on a (sizable) Hadoop cluster. This type of performance guarantees relevance, even within the most conservative organizations.
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IBM has disclosed plans to make all of its cloud services and software based on an open cloud architecture.
“This move will ensure that innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of insecure and difficult-to-manage offerings. Without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing, businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities associated with interconnected data, such as mobile computing and business analytics,” the company said.
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The world of cloud based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is about accelerating time to market for applications. With a PaaS, organizations can get up and running the cloud quickly, but one security researcher is warning that there may be an element of risk with that speed as well.
eSecurity Planet met up with Nicholas Percoco, senior VP at Trustwave SpiderlLabs, during the RSA conference last week to discuss the state of PaaS security. Percoco specifically took aim at the Red Hat OpenShift PaaS in his demo, though he cautioned that OpenShift is not necessarily vulnerable.
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Databases
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The startup claims to have found a way to bring consistency to NoSQL data stores
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Today The Document Foundation announced an update to the milestone LibreOffice 4.0 released just one month ago. In that time, quite a large number of annoying bugs have been squashed. This update is recommended for all running 4.0.
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Actually, the Navigator implemented in LibreOffice doesn’t provide some kind of help function as it might be understood by new users, but it shows or hides a side bar, where you can quickly jump to different parts of the document. The icon consists of an abstract star or, metaphorically, a compass rose.
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Business
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Digium – which promotes Asterisk (the open source IP PBX) — has finally launched a cloud-based PBX service, aptly called Switchvox Cloud. No doubt, there’s demand for hosted voice services. And Digium partners can resell the new cloud service, which is based on Digium’s Switchvox brand. But how exactly will partner engagements work, and can partners earn recurring revenues? Bryan Johns (pictured), a product manager at Digium, offered some insights to The VAR Guy.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD Q4’2012 status report has been issued to update its users and other stakeholders on the state of this BSD operating system.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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The Latvian Open Technology Association is calling on the Ministry of Economy to make open standards and open technologies one of the core themes of the ministry’s business education efforts. The group published a statement on Wednesday, pleading for a continuation of funding of ICT training for Latvian companies. The ministry earlier this week announced a four-fold reduction in the budget for such trainings.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The Justice Department never intended for Internet activist Aaron Swartz to go to jail “for longer than a three, four, potentially five-month range,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee during an oversight hearing on Wednesday.
Calling Swartz’s January suicide “a tragedy,” Holder defended the Justice Department’s handling of the case, stating that looking at Swartz’s conduct and fashioning a potential sentence based on that conduct was “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.”
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Open Hardware
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Bartenders beware: A robotic drink-dispensing rig is aiming to steal your customers while pouring cocktail creations at the push of a touchscreen button. Its creators call it Bartendro.
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Programming
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SourceForge is pleased to announce our new Enterprise Directory – a sub-section of our site focused specifically on Enterprise projects. These are the projects that are geared specifically for use within a company. This might include areas such as project management, office suites, or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Often, software in this category is backed by a company, but this isn’t always the case, nor is it a requirement for inclusion in the directory.
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Health/Nutrition
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Earlier this year, following an investigation into 38 Chadian children harmed by a meningitis vaccination campaign done wrong, questions were raised about the Gates Foundation and Chad’s Ministry of Health that were, at that time, not answered.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A trove of recently declassified documents leads to several inescapable conclusions about the FBI’s role in protecting both proven and alleged Nazi war criminals in America. First, there can be no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover collected Nazis and Nazi collaborators like pennies from heaven. Unlike the military and its highly structured Operation Paperclip — with its specific targets, systematic falsification of visa applications, and creation of bogus biographies — Hoover had no organized program to find, vet, and recruit alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators as confidential sources, informants, and unofficial spies in émigré communities around the country. America’s No. 1 crime buster was guided only by opportunism and moral indifference.
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With Chavez’s death, Venezuela may rid itself of its international pariah status but the poor will always remember him as a hero
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AS MALIK Daud Khan rose with the glaring sun on a Pakistani spring morning two years ago, he was blissfully ignorant that this would be the last day his son had a father.
As well as being a British citizen, Khan was a pillar of his North Waziristan community. On March 17 2011, he was living up to this role, presiding over a community meeting trying to settle a mining dispute. Both the young and the old from the village had come to meet, with a child as well as police officials among the scores assembled.
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Senators voted by 12 votes to three to approve Brennan, putting him on track to be President Barack Obama’s third confirmed national security nominee, after Secretary of State John Kerry and Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel.
A full Senate vote on Brennan’s confirmation is expected this week.
“No one is better prepared to be CIA director than Mr Brennan,” committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein said in a statement announcing the vote.
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A Golden Dawn candidate for parliament threatens the extermination of immigrants on camera (alt) (NSFW). There is also an interview with the filmmaker.
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Over the past few years, the Obama administration has institutionalized the use of armed drones and developed a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.
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In February, he was arrested by Turkish authorities in Ankara. However, Turkey was unable to extradite him to the United States because no international warrant for his arrest had been issued, the newspaper said.
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…he had not committed any crimes in Turkey.
The U.S. asked Turkey to extradite Abu-Ghaith…
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The big story buried in all the commentary about the US government’s drone policy is that the old algorithm of the liberal state no longer works. Focusing on drones is almost a distraction, if it weren’t for the number of men, women and children they have killed in only a few years. What we should focus on is the deeper condition that enables the drone policy, and so much more, and that is the sharp increase in unaccountable executive power, no matter what party is in power.
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Yesterday, I spent some time defending Holder from what I believed to be false claims as to what he was asserting in his letter to Rand Paul. Today, there is no defense—Holder is wrong in what he said today. Egregiously wrong. And his testimony “can only breed fear and suspicion.”
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The federal government is pushing back against reports that it has drones specifically designed to track firearms and cellphone signals, the latest clash of an increasingly paranoid public and an administration trying to keep its unmanned aerial systems program under wraps.
Citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, numerous media outlets have reported over the past 48 hours that the federal government was in possession of unmanned aerial vehicles capable of detecting guns and of tracking citizens via their cellphone signals.
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While the federal government had yesterday off, Congress came to life after its long slumber through all things terrorism. In a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing for the Justice Department and an historical filibuster over the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA, a lot of the controversy discussed dealt with drones–a conversation that desperately needed to be had, and must continue with equal vigor. However, the real elephant in the room is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which has been used to justify all manner of civil liberty-infringing, extralegal and often unconstitutional conduct and programs since 9/11.
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The proposal was a non-binding resolution opposing the President’s ability to kill Americans in drone strikes on US soil. Simple enough, you might think. Who could oppose that?
The Democrats, that’s who.
Senator Dick Durbin, speaking for the majority, rose to say he objects to Paul’s non-binding resolution. He objects to a unanimous statement from the Senate that the President cannot drop bombs on Americans on US soil. Durbin said he doesn’t want to make such a vote until we’ve had proper and thorough congressional hearings on all the issues Senator Paul has brought up today.
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Much of the motivation for standing on the Senate floor for the past hours has to do with the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder has declined to say outright that targeting and killing a US citizen suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on US soil, who did not pose an imminent threat, would be illegal. Paul submitted three letters and finally on March 5 Holder gave him an answer. However, it did not rule out the use of drone strikes and say this would be unconstitutional.
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Former U.S. and Iraqi officials have implicated Gen. David Petraeus and his two top civilian police advisors in the operations of Shiite death squads and secret torture centers.
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Dick Cheney has spent his career not revealing himself, and in his new memoir and the ensuing PR blitz, he appears to be staying largely in character.
But as the former vice president uses media interviews to sell books, reporters have an unprecedented opportunity to confront him about his highly controversial legacy and push him to divulge more about how he pursued his agenda.
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In the last few weeks, the Administration has been pushing hard to show how sequestration has produced dire consequences even though it involved only $85 billion (including the implausible claim that thousands of illegal aliens had to be released due to the cuts). For some of us who have complained about the Administration giving billions to Israel and other countries, it was a hard sell even if you do not agree with sequestration. Now a report has come out showing, as has been discussed for years on this blog and other sites, most of the $60 billion given to Iraq in the last ten years was wasted or lost to open corruption. The long documented waste of billions did not cause either the Bush or Obama Administration (or Congress) to take meaningful steps to stop the funding or, better yet, pull out of the country.
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We don’t get it. We really don’t. We may not, in military terms, know how to win any more, but as a society we don’t get losing either. We don’t recognize it, even when it’s staring us in the face, when nothing — and I mean nothing — works out as planned. Take the upcoming 10th anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as Exhibit A. You could describe what happened in that country as an unmitigated disaster — from the moment, in April 2003, U.S. troops first entered a Baghdad in flames and being looted (“stuff happens”) and were assigned to guard only the Interior Ministry (i.e. the secret police) and the Oil Ministry (well, you know what that is) to the moment in December 2011 when the last American combat unit slipped out of that land in the dead of the night (after lying to Iraqi colleagues about what they were doing).
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Leading Nazi Hermann Göring was instrumental to Hitler’s reign of terror, but research suggests his brother Albert saved the lives of dozens of Jews. Israel must now decide whether he deserves to be honored as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed that his website holds more US classified documents which are yet to be published online.
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WikiLeaks is set to receive major new financial support this week from a new group that funds independent journalism organizations dedicated to transparency and accountability in government. This comes as MasterCard, Visa and PayPal continue to refuse to process payments for WikiLeaks, making it difficult to send donations. “We don’t need just one WikiLeaks; we need 10 WikiLeaks or a hundred. We have a situation in this country where government secrecy is at an all-time high,” says Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder and executive director Trevor Timm. We are also joined by Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, who is a member of the foundation’s board. [includes rush transcript]
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Finance
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Chávez grew up a campesino, a peasant, raised in poverty. His parents were teachers, his grandmother an Indian whom he credits with teaching him solidarity with the people. During his military service, he learned about Simon Bolivar, who freed Latin America from Spanish Empire. This gradually led to the modern Bolivarian Revolution he led with the people. The Chávez transformation was built on many years of a mass political movement that continued after his election, indeed saved him when a 2002 coup briefly removed him from office. The reality is Venezuela’s 21st Century democracy is bigger than Chávez. This will become more evident now that he is gone.
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Politicians backed by conservative group Alec have introduced 67 laws in 25 states aimed at reducing minimum wage levels
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In January 2011, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) created by Congress put out its final report. But it only released a portion of all the source documents it scoured, so last year the government accountability group Cause of Action filed a lawsuit seeking the release of those documents, including emails, memoranda, and draft reports. Last week, the DC district court announced it was dismissing the case. But it’s not over yet: COA vowed on Tuesday that it will appeal the decision. In a statement, the group said the judge’s ruling that the documents were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act was “a misapplication of the law,” and said that “COA will continue to fight to shed light on the workings of our government.”
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While it is widely assumed that the too-big-to-fail banks in the US (and elsewhere) are beyond the criminal justice system – based on simple empirical fact – when the Attorney General of the United States openly admits to the fact that he is “concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” since, “it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” one has to stare open-mouthed at the state of our union. It appears, just as the proletariat assumed, that too-big-to-fail banks are indeed too-big-to-jail.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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That’s right: Chavez squandered his nation’s oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world’s tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?
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A Greek criminal prosecutor has launched an investigation after a report on Channel 4 News showed a member of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party threatening to turn immigrants into soap.
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A particularly sickening trick from the BBC a few weeks back raised my blood pressure whilst in hospital and almost finished me off. A French Euro MP was asked for “the French view” on Scottish independence. She said that France would oppose it and the French government takes the view that an independent Scotland would be outside the European Union. I was absolutely astonished that the BBC had managed to find the only French person in the entire world who is against Scottish independence, and that she was telling an outright lie about the position of the French government.
Then I realised who she was – the former research assistant (and rather more) of New Labour minister and criminal invoice forger Denis Macshane. She worked for years in the UK parliament for New Labour, in a Monica Lewinsky kind of way. All of which the BBC hid, presenting her simply as a French Euro MP. There are seventy million French people. How remarkable that the one the BBC chose to give the French view of Scottish independence was a New Labour hack!
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Censorship
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The IT department of the European Parliament is blocking the delivery of the emails on this issue, after some members of the parliament complained about getting emails from citizens.
This is an absolute disgrace, in my opinion. A parliament that views input from citizens on a current issue as spam, has very little democratic legitimacy in my opinion.
I will be writing a letter to the President of the European Parliament to complain about this totally undemocratic practice.
In the meantime, please continue to email members of the parliament on both the issue of the porn ban and on any other issW
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Privacy
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New Delhi: The Government plans to take possession of the server and other infrastructure placed by BlackBerry in Mumbai to test the solution offered by the smartphone maker for legal interception of Internet communication.
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The FBI used National Security Letters — a form of surveillance that privacy watchdogs call “frightening and invasive” — to surreptitiously seek information on Google users, the web giant has just revealed.
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Open Rights Group is asking organisations and individuals to ask the Home Office for a consultation on communications data and the Communications Data Bill. This briefing lays out some background to the Communications Data Bill and why a new consultation is needed.
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On February 21, 2013, I conducted a brief, impromptu, interview with Monty E. Moss #5598 of the Seattle Police Department about security technology, policies, and procedures for the set of surveillance cameras the department recently began installing on Alki Beach in Seattle. Of particular interest are Moss’ belief that it is important to keep secret the details about this system, such as the make and model of the equipment used, and that the SPD have been given direct access to various privately-owned and privately-operated surveillance cameras throughout the city.
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Citing week-old Supreme Court precedent, the President Barack Obama administration told a federal judge Wednesday that it should quash a federal lawsuit accusing the government of secretly siphoning Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.
The San Francisco federal court legal filing was in response to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White’s written question (.pdf) to the government asking what to make of the high court’s Feb. 26 decision halting a legal challenge to a once-secret warrantless surveillance project that gobbles up Americans’ electronic communications — a program that Congress eventually legalized in 2008 and again in 2012.
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European data watchdogs said on Monday they plan to take action against Google by this summer for its privacy policy, which allows the search engine to pool user data from across all its services ranging from YouTube to Gmail.
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Last summer, we took a look at how Google plans to see through your eyes (literally). This has a lot to do with Google Glass, but that’s not the only piece of the puzzle.
Do you like the direction Google is going in? Is it getting too up close and personal, or is it taking the necessary steps to make users’ lives easier? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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Citing week-old Supreme Court precedent, the President Barack Obama administration told a federal judge Wednesday that it should quash a federal lawsuit accusing the government of secretly siphoning Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.
[...]
The justices ruled the plaintiffs submitted no evidence they were being targeted by that law.
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A couple weeks ago you may recall that I wrote about my efforts to draft legislation relating to the City use of surveillance cameras.
Passed today by the Public Safety, Civil Rights, and Technology Committee, Council Bill 117730 will require all City departments to obtain Council approval prior to acquiring surveillance equipment of any type. The respective department must also proactively conduct outreach in each community in which the department intends to use the equipment. In addition, the legislation requires that operational protocols will be developed and passed by ordinance. Separately, data management and retention protocols are required to be developed and presented to the City Council, but approval of that set of separate protocols by ordinance will be optional.
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In 1989, when the internet was predominantly ASCII-based and HyperCard had yet to give birth (or at least act as a midwife) to the world wide web, R.U. Sirius launched Mondo 2000. “I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-web day,” William Gibson said in a recent interview. “Posterity, looking at this, should also consider Mondo 2000 as a focus of something that was happening.”
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All is not as it appears … Chalk marks on a mailbox, a button on a stranger’s coat … all around you things that seem unimportant are actually changing world events.
The shadow world of espionage is thrilling, and makes a great “hook” to engage students in the classroom.
As educators at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., though, we not only bank on the “cool factor” inherent in the subject, we view the world of intelligence as a len
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The Joint Committee on the Communications Data Bill instructed the Home Office to run a consultation on communications data. They’ve failed to do so. We need your help to tell the Home Office why we need a consultation.
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Good article on “Stingrays,” which the FBI uses to monitor cell phone data. Basically, they trick the phone into joining a fake network. And, since cell phones inherently trust the network — as opposed to computers which inherently do not trust the Internet — it’s easy to track people and collect data. There are lots of questions about whether or not it is illegal for the FBI to do this without a warrant. We know that the FBI has been doing this for almost twenty years, and that they know that they’re on shaky legal ground.
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If signed into law, cops would finally need a warrant to get location data.
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Civil Rights
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The anti-NDAA bill: Senate Bill 400, one prong of efforts nationwide geared against the federal National Defense Authorization Act, passed the Indiana Senate 31-17 last month and now goes to the Indiana House for consideration.
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There were some 42,500 camps set up during the Nazi era – seven times more than had been thought, according to a recent study. Such numbers, researchers say, make it absurd to claim that ‘nobody knew what was going on.’
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The scale of the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate Europe’s Jewish population could far exceed what historians have long believed to be the case, according to a group of academics from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. As part of a 13-year project to catalogue the sites of Nazi atrocities and build a comprehensive map of the Holocaust, researchers have found evidence of 42,500 Nazi “killing centers”, ghettos, forced labor camps and other sites of persecution and murder.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the Georgia Legislature are pushing a bill to thwart locally-owned internet in underserved communities, an industry-sponsored effort that effectively reinforces the digital divide. A vote in the Georgia Assembly is scheduled for Thursday, March 7; if Georgia passes the bill it would be the twentieth state to eliminate community control over internet access.
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Ownership
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As we wait patiently for the Supreme Court to decide the Kirtsaeng case, concerning whether or not you can resell goods that were made outside the US but that can be covered by copyright inside the US, the folks at Demand Progress have put together a nice two and a half minute video highlighting the possible consequences of a ruling that goes against first sale rights and limits your ability to freely sell items you legally purchased.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It is a blessing upon this nation that Woody Guthrie’s voice, the relentless voice of the poor and the powerless, is heard anew this winter in the form of a powerful book, a newly-discovered novel titled House of Earth. Edited and with an extensive introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp, Guthrie’s book, written in 1947, searingly portrays the joy and sorrow of a poor farming couple living through the Dust Bowl during the Depression. And when I read it last week it naturally made me think immediately of the United States Supreme Court.
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Copyrights
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The 52 page bill requires careful scrutiny, but the NDP is right for drawing attention to the elephant in the room. ACTA has been rejected in Europe and stands as a discredited agreement. Despite that, Bill C-56 is fundamentally a bill designed to allow Canada to implement ACTA.
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The country’s attorney general had sought to have the agency excluded from the MegaUpload founder’s lawsuit.
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The Dutch antipiracy group BREIN seeks to increase its daily amount of notice and takedown-requests (NTD-requests) in order to remove copyright-infringing search results. In practice, most notices are directed to Google. At this moment, BREIN submits some 5.000 NTD-requests per day, mostly containing search results that refer to infringing content on filesharing-websites such as isohunt.com and torrentz.eu.
Currently, Google maintains a limit of 10.000 NTD-requests that can be processed per day. However, copyright advocates at BREIN expect Google to increase this limit to 40.000 NTD-requests per day. Ultimately, BREIN is planning to submit an unlimited stream of take down notices daily.
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German rights group wants $0.005 per stream and Google says nein.
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I’m writing the week’s Editor’s Corner from Berlin in Germany, and one thing I noticed when I got here is that I can’t access any shows on Neflix, Hulu Plus or Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Streaming Video here in Germany–and frankly I’m a bit miffed about it because I believe I should be able to get the content I pay for anytime, anywhere, on any device.
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A group of technology heavyweights including YCombinator, Reddit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet advocacy group Fight For the Future and others have launched a new campaign called Fight for the Future. The roots of the campaign go back to a January petition on Whitehouse.gov calling for the U.S. government to make it legal to unlock cell phones. The petition arrived after The Librarian of Congress decided in October 2012 that unlocking of cell phones would be removed from the list of exceptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). At FixtheDMCA.org, you can find out much more about the new campaign.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.06.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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At the beginning of last year I tested the CompuLab Trim-Slice, which was a great ARM-based Linux desktop for the time. While the hardware now shows its signs of aging in the fast-paced ARM world, modern Linux distributions can still be loaded up on the platform.
The Trim-Slice is built around the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC, which sports a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor clocked at 1.0GHz. The device has a built-in drive and supports SHDC expansion, bears 1GB of RAM, and 802.11n WiFi. With the Tegra 3 quad-core hardware now being widespread that’s multiple times faster than the Tegra 2 and the Tegra 4 hardware being around the corner that’s much faster with its use of the ARM Cortex-A15, the Trim-Slice is no longer competitive from a hardware point of view.
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Following two years of collaborative development, the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) this week announced the availability of v1.0 of MirrorLink, which defines methods for implementing interoperable phone-centric car connectivity.
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Desktop
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Linux Lord Linus Torvalds is thinking about making Google’s Chromebook Pixel his main computer – once he installs a proper Linux distribution on the machine, that is.
Posting on Google+, Torvalds lauded Google’s newest creation, writing “… the screen really is that nice” [his emphasis] and that “I think I can lug around this 1.5kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1kg or less.”
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Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebooks, those cloud-centric notebooks, often carry low price tags that won’t generate much partner profit — at least not at first glance. But if you take a closer look at the Google Apps ecosystem, you’ll see at least five ways that channel partners can generate recurring revenues from one-time Chromebook sales. Here they are.
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Ready to take the plunge on a new all-in-one, but not super pumped about tackling Windows 8? You’re probably not alone, and it looks like HP’s got a solution.
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Server
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Amazon Web Services Monday reduced its prices on its lowest cost option, reserved instances, by “up to 27%.” That means a reserved instance virtual server may cost 65% less than the comparable on-demand instance running on the AWS EC2 infrastructure at $0.06 per hour.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, March 4, the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.8.2 comprises arch fixes (x86 mostly), filesystem improvements (EXT4, FUSE, NFS, OCFS2 and UBIFS), sound improvements, as well as many updated drivers. Please check the official raw changelog for the juicy details.
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George Grey, CEO of the Linaro organization, gave a keynote speech on benefits of collaboration in Linux development at last month’s Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco.
In his keynote, Grey expounded on the benefits of multiple companies collaborating to accelerate Linux development. Additionally, he explained the purpose and goals of Linaro and reported on the group’s recent accomplishments and current priorities. Watch the video below.
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Linux founder Linus Torvalds recently picked up a Google Chromebook Pixel, and the hardware left such a positive impression that he posed the question “Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?” on his Google Plus page.
Google‘s design philosophy for the Pixel is decidedly unusual when stacked against the average portable PC. Chief among the differences is its 3:2 aspect ratio. Torvalds mentions that he “despises” widescreen displays and continues: “I don’t understand why people complain about ‘black bars’, when I can’t see why it would be any different to have ‘no pixels at all’, which is what the silly widescreen displays do.”
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Gaming on Linux is a very real thing right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you’re using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop?
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Not a bad deal this time around. I sure hope dungeon defenders has been fixed up though it’s launch for Linux in another bundle was riddled with show stopping bugs which is a common thing with Humble launches sadly.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today I got many questions about KWin and Mir, how it affects us, what it means for our Wayland plans and so on. I did not want to write anything about it because I think there is nothing to write about, but before answering the same question again and again I think it’s better to put down a few lines here. Wiki will be updated once Wayland wiki is updated so that we have something to link to.
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There are some news in the Plasma, Lancelot, Shelf, QML components, blah blah whoop whoop land. As some of the people have noticed from the previous screenshots, I’ve begun working on a QML port of Lancelot.
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In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributors Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Richard Hughes has been working on a new package manager for the GNOME desktop that he’s dubbed “GNOME Software.” With it, and the right plugins, a user might install software from just about any repository.
It may not surprise folks that GNOME Software “currently uses” PackageKit. PackageKit has had the goal of providing one package manager for them all and, in their words, “to make the process suck less.”
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To me it seems, and with the Gnome Shell release this has become even more pronounced, that the situation around Gnome is like the situation around political parties in Czech Republic. They mostly lost touch with reality and majority of people either lost their interest in them, became their haters or their (almost) unconditional adorers. Pointing out an issue equals hating now (and yes there are some exceptions). I have lost faith. Sadly. In both. Does it need to happen to Fedora as well? If we gnomeifficate anaconda, we might end-up like this as well. Users aren’t as dumb as we tend to make them. People don’t want grey lives with nothing to look forward to, with nothing to choose from. With computers treating them as monkeys. I don’t want an environment where I cannot choose between grey two-colour symbolic icons and colorful normal ones. Is reaching out specifically to women making them feel equal?
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GNOME 3.8 is still a few weeks from release, but with the latest beta, users can view the new GNOME Classic for the first time. The replacement for the retiring fallback mode, GNOME Classic uses extensions to provide something of the GNOME 2 experience — but it is a strangely limited experience that fails to match Linux Mint’s Mate or Cinnamon, as though the GNOME project is reluctant to provide a “classic” experience at all.
GNOME Classic is not included on the beta Live CD. You might find the beta in development directories for distributions such as Fedora or openSUSE, and the option of compiling from source is always available.
However, the easiest way to view it is to download the latest version of Ubuntu 13.04, then use the command sudo add-apt-repository to add ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging as sources.
Then running apt-get update followed by apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-shell extensions should add GNOME Classic to the selection of desktops when you log-in. Both these Launchpad sources are in rapid development, so you might have some unexpected problems (in my case, the keyboard stops working if the screen is locked).
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A new development version of the GVFS software has been announced yesterday, March 4, bringing various fixes, some new features and the usual translation updates.
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Over the last couple of months there have been a number of discussions on the Arch boards about the forum policy of only providing support for Arch Linux, culminating in this long thread about Archbang users (login required) being denied support and having their threads summarily closed. As it emerged in the discussion, there seem to be two separate issues at play here; the question of Arch-derivatives using the Arch brand (logo, colours and even the forum style sheets), and how the wider community of GNU/Linux distributions are treated on our boards.
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The latest version of Puppy Linux could easily win best of breed; it’s got all the convenience and user-friendliness you would expect from its bloodline, but this Precise Puppy also possesses whippet-like speed. That’s impressive when you consider that it boasts an expanded software repository. Like its predecessor, it’s also a very portable option.
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New Releases
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Proxmox Ve is an Open Source project developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Austria under the auspices of the Internet foundation of Austria (IPA) and it’s released under the GNU General public license 3. It is a solution based on Debian 6 Squeeze at 64 bit, which duly “customized”, allows to create a virtualization environment of type “bare metal” based on OpenVZ and KVM technologies.
Proxmox Virtual Environment, today announced the release of version 2.3. The version brings new compelling features like KVM live backup technology as well as the integration of the Ceph RBD (RADOS Block Device) as storage plugin.
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Gentoo Family
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For once you have tasted Gentoo you will compile the kernel with your eyes turned red monitor-squared, for there you have been and experiencing the raw power of Linux. There are some days I want to go back to the early ages of Linux, some days I want to use top notch packets and bleeding-edge software, but today I will debug — for this is Gentoo Bugday !
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I just wanted to post a quick blog entry thanking everyone who joined the first day of our inaugural online Ubuntu Developer Summit today. Overall we didn’t see many glitches in our plan of how to run the event, and we also gathered some fantastic feedback for things we can improve and extend upon next time.
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Not too long ago, Mark communicated the vision for Ubuntu and Unity for 2013 as “[...] Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile – bringing Ubuntu to phones and tablets [...]” and my team is responsible for taking Unity to these hardware platforms.
What you should expect to see during this year is an overhaul of Unity in order to power a wide variety of display sizes (think phone to tablet to desktop to TV to…), input methods (touch screens & on screen keyboards, traditional keyboards & pointer devices, voice, and whatever else Tony Stark makes us think of [*]), CPUs & GPUs, external peripherals and everything else we expect from a modern OS.
Looking closer at the problem ambitious goal, we had to take a few interesting decisions how we possibly would get to where we want to be.
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Canonical’s decision to develop Mir, their own display server not derived from X11 or Wayland, hit many as a big surprise today. Canonical previously committed to Wayland in a future Ubuntu release but now it turns out that for months they have secretly been rolling their own solution behind closed doors.
It will be interesting to see how the Mir situation plays out on Ubuntu, but already Canonical has once again disgruntled upstream open-source developers. Aside from end-users being surprised by this decision to no longer pursue Wayland, the X.Org and Wayland developers themselves were taken for a ride.
Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland/Weston, has posted to his Google+ page about the Canonical Mir announcement.
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After Canonical announced they are building their own display manager to replace X and to squash the Ubuntu dreams of Wayland fans, they also announced Unity Next, a new session-level shell implementation build on Qt and QML.
When Unity was first introduced back in 2010, people didn’t like it. It caused an uproar and a lot of users were not ready to adopt a new way of navigating the operating system.
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In addition to X.Org and Wayland developers criticizing Canonical on Google+ about the Mir display server, there was a colorful discussion about this new open-source project on the Wayland IRC channel.
Shared via this forum post is a copy of the #Wayland IRC channel that took place with exchanges was Chris Halse Rogers “RAOF”, he’s the only Canonical employee that participated in the discussion, who works on X for Wayland and is one of the Mir Canonical developers. Participating in the IRC exchange on the Wayland side were Kristian Høgsberg “krh”, David Airlie “airlied”, Daniel Stone “daniels”, and other Wayland stakeholders.
Chris Halse Rogers, the Canonical employee, was quick to joke around that “It’s [Canonical's] turn to pull a systemd!” He admitted that he knew internally about Mir and that’s his reason for his “lack of work on the wayland system compositor branches.”
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Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.
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The Ubuntu Touch operating system, which is scheduled for October release on a range of smartphones and tablets, will struggle to find a niche in a crowded mobile marketplace.
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The Ubuntu phone represents a new ecosystem for mobile devices, but the company behind it says that it won’t be primarily focused on Africa when it launches.
Canonical, founded by billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, plans to launch the device to the developed markets of the US and Europe first.
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The news yesterday that an Australian company called Intermatrix has begun offering pre-orders of the first dedicated Ubuntu tablet has already made waves in gadget circles – but many raised questions about the device’s legitimacy.
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In November 2010 Canonical committed to using Wayland in the post x11 world. Mark Shuttleworth had said, “There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.”
Despite that public support for Wayland Canonical secretly started developing a display manager without communicating it to Wayland developers. It was a U-turn from that commitment as the company is now ‘chasing an alternative’. Canonical has announced that they are working on Mir, it’s own display manager which competes with Wayland instead of contributing to it and making it better.
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Phones
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Ubuntu, Firefox, Tizen, Sailfish, WebOS, Nokia Series 40, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone want a piece of the pie, but it won’t be a cakewalk
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Ballnux
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Like the home of the US government’s gold reserves, Samsung’s KNOX project is all about keeping intruders out. Samsung’s version, however, will not protect precious metals, but business data in mobile device storage. KNOX, which was unveiled today, is based on SE Android, the Android version of SELinux that was originally developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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These screenshots mainly confirm that Samsung’s next generation Galaxy S will indeed have the much hyped Smart Scroll and Smart Pause features. The screenshots also confirm that the Galaxy S IV will feature a Full HD 1080p panel. It also looks like that Samsung is keeping some UI elements from the Galaxy S III but we are looking forward to see Samsung’s upcoming Nature UX 2.0.
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Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that it plans to introduce a 5.9-inch handset in the latter half of the year to solidify its leading position in the rapidly-growing “phablet” market.
”Samsung is working on introducing a new phablet using a 5.9-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen,’’ an official told The Korea Times on condition of anonymity.
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Android
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Owners of Verizon’s 4G LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset may soon receive an update to the latest version of Android, weeks after other Galaxy Nexus devices received it and fully six months after the Verizon model got its last official update.
Twitter user @WinDroidGuy was the first to spot the update package on Monday, which so far is only available as a downloadable Zip file that must be flashed to the device by hand.
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The next development version of the CyanogenMod’s Jelly Bean spin has been released, and supports many new phones along with the Nexus family
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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An Ubuntu-powered tablet is not something that folks would camp out for, but this does not mean we should not pay closer attention to such a tablet. The Intermatrix U7 is an Ubuntu tablet which has been touted to be the “first of its kind in the world”, hailing from Australian manufacturer Intermatrix. Just what kind of hardware does the Intermatrix U7 pack underneath the hood? For starters, it is said to come with a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex A9 CPU, coupled with a quad-core Vivante GC1000+ GPU, and accompanied by 1GB RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a 7″ IPS capacitive touchscreen display as well as cameras in front and at the back.
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After almost three decades of development, open source software has firmly crossed over into mainstream use. Companies understand the unique value derived from software developed through open communities and are welcoming its use in mission critical settings throughout the enterprise.
Companies that adopt open source are in a prime position to contribute back to the open source communities on which they depend. For example, most of the Linux kernel is developed and maintained by employees from companies like IBM and RedHat. However, corporate culture in many companies (and particularly in small businesses) tends to lean strictly toward consumption of open source and away from contribution. For example, in a recent survey of the Liferay community we discovered almost 75% of companies that responded do not reward or encourage open source contribution.
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What is known as ZIP to most of us, is actually the DEFLATE algorithm, and Google has made it slightly better.
The search giant announced Zopli today, which is a new compression algorithm that is compatible with existing DEFLATE decoders, and produces slightly smaller files at the cost of increased CPU load during compression.
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Twitter has open sourced a Java library for its Streaming API. The Hosebird Client (hbc) supports OAuth and automatic reconnections with appropriate wait periods and Twitter says it has been “battle-tested in production” by its internal teams.
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Web Browsers
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I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine. But perhaps I’m in the minority among geeks on this topic.
The anxiety about the possibility of a “WebKit monoculture” is based on past events that many of us remember all too well. Someday, starry-eyed young web developers may ask us, “You fought in the Web Standards Wars?” (Yes, I was once a Zeldi Knight, the same as your father.) In the end, we won.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, “The Cloud.” When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, “let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud.”
Then, finally, the concept started to solidify into offering specific services or entire software applications as a commodity removed from the server infrastructure. Honestly, I think that was the intent from the beginning, but it took several years before anyone really implemented anything useful in, “the cloud.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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When I think back, I can’t remember my first involvement in the Koha community. I remember talking to Chris Cormack on Instant Messenger nearly everyday before ever really communicating with the community has a whole. I remember trying to find a job working with Koha when it was time for me to move on from my first job, but I still don’t remember really being involved in the community. I read a great post by Siobhan Mckeown about participating in the WordPress community and I highly recommend reading it, but I thought maybe I should do a Koha variation for those who want to get involved.
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BSD
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PC-BSD, the popular desktop FreeBSD-based operating system that’s rather friendly towards conventional end-users, has now become a rolling release platform.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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You see, Pete is not only motivated by what open source and open thinking can do to change our world, he is moved by it. He tell us that his passions change every few years, but always revolve around open source.
Right now, he’s working on an open source project called: Smarter Safer Better, a study and research (what he calls, neuro-hacking) on trust. Read more about his work on the subject: What They Don’t Teach You in “Thinking Like the Enemy” Classes and Mind Control.
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In addition to Norton’s revelation that the prosecution seemed surprised when she first mentioned the Guerilla Manifesto, that seems to be another significant revelation implicitly included in her article. She’s not the source of whatever Googlegroup conversations the government got. At least according to the government, someone else turned this material over willingly.
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Hacker Aaron Swartz is dead. It is reported that he hung himself.
I’m having some real trouble with the way this story is being spread. Very early on, accusatory fingers got pointed in two directions:
(1) Swartz allegedly “wrestled with depression”, a vague suggestion that he was killed by some impersonal (but psychologically devastating) illness.
(2) Swartz was driven to suicide by a mean, self-promoting prosecutor and her accomplices in the administration of MIT.
In either event we’re encouraged to regard his death as a kind of martyrdom for some vaguely specified “information wants to be free” agenda. (This may or may not be how he himself thought of dying; it doesn’t matter to my point.)
I hate this popular telling of the story because is it completely ignores the middle aged male svengalis who brought the pretty 13 year old boy to the dance of tech industry celebrity, only to turn their back on him, defame him, and even drive him out of a job as soon as the blush was off the rose.
Going down his Wikipedia page and adding some notes of my own:
At the very crest of the dot-com boom there is Philip Greenspun, emerging millionaire. The company he founded was building “community backed” web sites for clients, just before the big crash. That company, ArsDigita, spun off a publicity generating competition with cash money prizes encouraging teenagers to crank out their own “community backed” web sites.
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Programming
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The developers of Eclipse Orion have announced that version 2.0 of the web-technology-based editor and development platform has been released. Eclipse Orion 2.0 focused on making the editor technology easier to consume by other projects; library dependencies have been removed, the process for embedding the Orion editor has been simplified, and the Orion Shell has been enhanced.
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Standards/Consortia
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So, to summarize: Google forces others to use open standards which they do not support themselves.
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Security
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It’s only March, but 2013 has not been a good year so far for Oracle Java security. On the negative side, Java has been repeatedly shamed and blamed for being at the root cause of big name exploits. On the positive side, Oracle is continuing to swim upstream issuing fixes as rapidly as it can.
Late Monday, Oracle’s upstream swim continued with its fifth major update to Java this year for security fixes. Java 7 Update 15 provides two fixes for vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild today. Both vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without user authentication, and both carry the highest possible CVSS (Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System) rating of 10.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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If you’ve checked out the news these past few (or many) months, you’ve probably noticed some news about drones. Drones used by the CIA to vaporize suspected terrorists. Drones used by the United States military. Drones that deliver food. Drones used by cops. Drones possibly violating the US Constitution. Drones protecting wildlife. Drones in pop culture. Maybe this has left you with some burning questions about these increasingly prominent flying robots. Here’s an easy-to-read, nonwonky guide to them—we’ll call it Drones for Dummies.
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I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.
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Seven Lib Dem rebelled to support public interest test amendment
Ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw also backed the legislation
Chakrabarti: ‘History teaches that politicians abandon ancient legal principles at their peril’
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Hacking Team’s software was allegedly used by repressive regimes to track down citizens for torture. We ask their lawyer Eric Rabe to explain
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The US government has the right to use military force on American citizens, even at home – but only in “extraordinary circumstances,” the attorney general has stated in a letter to Senator Rand Paul.
Paul had threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s pick for CIA director, “until [Obama] answers the question of whether or not the President can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on US soil.”https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/309174502129029120
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General David Petraeus and ‘dirty wars’ veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse
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Cablegate
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In a cable dated April 3, 2006, Mexican cardinal Juan Sandoval appears worried about left winged leaders in Latin America, and asks for Bush’s “help”.
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Over two years ago, in January of 2011, Amnesty USA told me they were “investigating” if Bradley Manning qualified as a “Prisoner of Conscience”. They told me they weren’t sure about his motivations and they’d have to look at his employment contract. I was then dismayed to see that the LA Times editorial board, hardly a revolutionary group, came out with a strong denunciation of Manning’s barbaric pre-trial detention before Amnesty had made any public statement in his defence.
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I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.
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Julian Assange has confirmed that WikiLeaks still holds classified United States government documents that it is yet to publish.
However the transparency website will not release this material during the court martial of its source, US Army private Bradley Manning.
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New Delhi: Whistleblower website WikiLeaks on Monday claimed to have in possession ‘millions’ of Stratfor mails that establish its links with Dow Chemicals, one of the prime accused in the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. Stratfor is a US-based intelligence firm.
WikiLeaks alleged that it had proof that Stratfor monitored and analysed online activities of the Bhopal activists, reportedly on Dow’s asking.
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Please consider donating to my out of pocket expenses covering United States v. Private First Class Bradley Manning.
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We discuss Private Bradley Manning’s motives for leaking thousands of classified US documents.
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It’s the first anniversary of the day Jeremy Hammond was arrested for the last time. Since his March 5, 2012 arrest, he’s been in Federal custody, and currently resides in “The Hole”—solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The State Department’s recent conclusion that the Keystone XL pipeline “is unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the rate of Canada’s oil sands development was based on analysis provided by two consulting firms with ties to oil and pipeline companies that could benefit from the proposed project.
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That’s the question Ecojustice hoped to help answer when we undertook our latest research. What we uncovered was unsettling, to say the least. Our research showed that toxic emissions from oilsands facilities in Northern Alberta are polluting the nearby Athabasca River, contaminating a waterway that’s home to more than half of the province’s fish species.
The Athabasca River is Alberta’s longest and only major free-flowing river, and it holds ecological, cultural and commercial significance for the people that live along its shores. It is also a vital life source for many wildlife species.
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Finance
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Bill Moyers explores how America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered.
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Bitcoin’s value is at an all-time high again. Following the hype peak and crash in 2011, many seemed to have thought it was just another dotcom fluke. But bitcoin was much more than that, and it has returned with a vengeance – its market cap is now twice what it was in the 2011 peak, and it is nowhere near its potential, which is four orders of magnitude above today’s value.
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As sequester cuts start to bite a little harder, the Fix the Debt gang is pushing for a “grand bargain,” deep cuts to earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare in exchange for some vague promises about “tax reform.”
They may have a powerful ally in the White House. Rather than barnstorming the country demanding that Congress cancel the sequester (Representative John Conyers, Jr. wrote the one sentence bill to do this) and address our jobs deficit (now topping 9 million), President Obama seems ready to make a deal on the deficit, which is already in a steep decline.
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The same idea has been developed systematically in a number of bestsellers, from Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. There is also a more down-to-earth version that one often hears in the media, especially those of non-European countries: crisis, what crisis? Look at the so-called Bric countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, or at Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states – they are all progressing. The losers are western Europe and, up to a point, the US, so we are not dealing with a global crisis, but simply with the shift of progress away from the west. Is a potent symbol of this shift not the fact that, recently, many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonisers?
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This week, BitCoin (BTC), the virtual cryptocurrency that is not supported by any national bank or government, reached an all-time trading record, selling at $33.22 for a single BTC.
Kim Dotcom’s cloud hosting website Mega has recently started accepting BitCoins as a form of payment, following the example set by WordPress, Reddit and countless other online businesses. But how do you begin working with BitCoins?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The BBC just said that Venezuela is a dictatorship, and the election will be close between left and right. They missed the irony. The incongruity and imbalance of the Chavez demonisation is ridiculous. Sky News did a five minute piece in which the evidence of him being evil and demented was that he called George Bush a devil and declared the age of imperialism over; he did however reduce poverty and improve housing, they added. I am not sure they left their audience with the same certainty as their presenters that he was a bad thing.
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…accusing him of “proposing destabilizing plans”
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Documents purporting to show extensive links between MI6 and the British media during the Cold War have been authenticated, a BBC documentary is to claim.
The documents, which were passed to a state-controlled newspaper in the Soviet Union and published towards the end of the 1960s, listed Fleet Street publications and the journalist or editor that MI6 had as its contact.
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Censorship
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We just recently wrote about the RIAA bitching about how Google wasn’t living up to its promise to “downrank” so-called “pirate” sites. The issue was that the RIAA could still find sites that it didn’t like ranked relatively highly in the index. Well, the folks at TorrentFreak have noticed that, at least in the UK, if you do a search for “pirate bay,” you no longer get the actual TPB website as one of the top 100 results. Of course, you do get a variety of proxies, instead, and perhaps that makes sense, given the decision last year by a court that ISPs must block access to TPB. Perhaps Google is just reflecting, accurately, that clicking directly to TPB will fail.
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Privacy
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BAE Systems has won a $127 million, multiyear contract from the National Security Agency to furnish infrastructure and software development support to the agency’s High Performance Computing Infrastructure Group, the company said March 6.
Through the agreement, BAE Systems will furnish architecture, installation and administration for a networking environment that supports multiple enclaves and high-speed data center access, the company said.
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A newly established government privacy oversight board said Tuesday that it has begun investigating the National Counterterrorism Center’s ability to scrutinize massive amount of information about innocent Americans.
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Civil Rights
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THE head of the Crime and Misconduct Commission says an “administrative error” is to blame for thousands of sensitive files relating to the Fitzgerald inquiry becoming publicly accessible.
The error gave the public access to sensitive files at the State Archives about murder suspects, secret informants, undercover agents, drug operations and police corruption.
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DRM
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The legality of unlocking one’s cell phone to run on any network has flipped back and forth in the past several years. It was deemed illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—then it was made legal by the Library of Congress in an exception to the DMCA passed in 2006. The Library chose not to renew the exemption in 2012, however, and it expired in January of this year. That inspired a petition to the White House, which a few weeks ago passed the 100,000 signature mark. The White House then promised to respond.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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David Mason (@dcm) and Heather LaGarde (@heatherlagarde) were interested in expressing open source in other ways and wanted to help spread mobile and open technologies across developing worlds at IntraHealth. They combined these two goals by remixing a song.
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The Pirate Bay (TPB) has revealed that the claim that it had been offered “virtual asylum” in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by its leader, Kim Jong-un, was a hoax.
The world’s most popular peer-to-peer sharing resource revealed that the announcement, carried by a number of websites, was false, and made fun of the gullible readers who would think it would partner “with the most hated dictatorship in the world”.
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Missed this when it first came out, but Bloomberg ran a fantastic report at the beginning of February, highlighting how piracy and fraud were key components to helping America catapult into the industrial revolution. In fact, there are reasonable arguments to be made that if the US was not a “pirate” nation, it would not have had the kind of success that it has had as the industrial world leader. We’ve discussed some of this in the past, and have highlighted how Eric Schiff’s research showed how other countries (the Netherlands and Switzerland) industrialized by explicitly rejecting patents. The US didn’t go that far, but it did involve quite frequent copying of the efforts of others and then improving on them, without fear of repercussions.
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03.05.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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When Gus looked over the Chromebook Pixel recently, he liked the design but didn’t think much of the Pixel’s productivity potential. It’s feasible to take a Pixel and run other operating systems on it, including Ubuntu and Android.
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Linus Torvalds is a huge fan of Nexus 7, he wrote on his Google + stream how much he liked it. He was, however, not that excited about the early Chromebooks, but he did use one in kitchen (as a common PC to check calender etc).
Despite being the creator of the Linux kernel, he is a huge admirer of Apple’s Macbook Air due to it’s sleek design. He criticized PC vendors for using low res screens and cheap material in laptops.
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Pretty much everyone agrees that Google’s Chromebook Pixel is too expensive to just run the Chrome OS Web browser. But what if it could run Android tablet apps as well?
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Server
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Kernel Space
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“I hate that Microsoft has so much power in the Trusted Computing debates and how that plays out in new hardware,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. The kernel “should be about being an OS. It’s a fine distinction what constitutes ‘OS’ — always has been — but in my opinion, extending or modifying the Linux kernel to Microsoft’s whims is too big a concession.”
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Experimental RAID 5 and 6 support in the still experimental Btrfs will be one of the major new features of Linux 3.9, expected to arrive in late April. This has become apparent because Linus Torvalds has now issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.9 which, as usual, closes the Linux development cycle’s “merge window”, the phase during which the developers integrate the majority of changes for the next version. This time, the merge window, which started with the release of Linux 3.8, only lasted thirteen instead of the usual fourteen days.
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Applications
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For years, I’ve been singing the praises of BackupPC, and for servers, I still think it’s the best thing going. The problem with BackupPC, however, is in order for it to work reliably, your workstations need to be on all the time. This is especially difficult with laptops.
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Instructionals/Technical
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quickplot is a fast, interactive 2-D plotter. All it needs to do its job is a text file with x and y points in a list. If those points are longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, quickplot works like a simple GIS program, with some surprising capabilities.
This article explains how I set up quickplot to do species mapping for Australia. For most of my mapping work I use qgis and Google Maps/Earth, but quickplot is handy for quickly making simple maps and zooming in on details. With an executable size of only 453 kb, quickplot is the tiniest and fastest GIS I know.
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Games
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Seems like Linux is finally catching up with Mac OS users, at least as a gaming platform. Valve software has released some stats of hardware survey which shows Linux users have become almost double while compared to January. This considerable increase is obviously because of Steam being pushed to Ubuntu Software Center, thus making it available to more number of users.
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Valve’s survey shows Linux already accounts for two per cent of users
Valve’s latest Steam survey shows Linux is already close to overtaking Mac in terms of user base.
Steam for Linux recently left beta testing, and is now available for download through the Ubuntu store.
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2% doesn’t sound like much perhaps, but it’s worth noting that Mac users represent just over 3% of total users, despite having been supported for much longer. Trends show Mac operating systems are losing popularity while Linux is on the rise, too.
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The open source ecosystem is mostly about code. After all, sharing code is at the core of the open source ethos. But for many Free Software projects, there’s more at stake than code itself, as the development team behind the open source game 0 A.D. made clear recently when it highlighted the contributions of musical composer Omri Lahav–whose work is an important reminder that software success, in many cases, is about more than ones and zeroes.
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Just weeks after a native Linux client launched for Valve’s popular Steam digital distribution service, Linux users already make up more than two percent of all Steam users.
Steam for Linux launched last month with more than 100 games readily available for Linux OS users, including a multitude of Valve games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike Source and Team Fortress 2.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has switched by the Gnome 3, saying the desktop’s shortcomings can be fixed via the use of extensions.
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I’ve been noticing my work machine getting slower, and slower, and slower over the past few months, and over the weekend it finally gave up the ghost and died. For the past five years I’ve been using the most current version of OS X on an old MacBook Pro, but the Mac had a hardware problem. When I dropped by desktop support with the dead Mac, they offered me an equally old Mac, or a new PC. I chose the PC. I’ve returned to Ubuntu for the first time since 2008, and I’ve gone the minimalist route with xmonad, the tiling window manager. I’ve got one thing to say about the new setup, this thing is fast.
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BP prolonged the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by two months by concealing the rate of oil flowing from the broken Macondo well, Transocean claims in a document filed in the damages trial.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In the past, we’ve written about several cool KDE apps. I’m now going to show you some desktop applets – called plasmoids – that have caught my attention. They are all included in KDE 4.9. KDE and productivity junkies, read on!
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Plasmate follows the UNIX philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well”. As such, it is not a general purpose IDE but rather a tool specifically tailored to creating Plasma Workspace add-ons using non-compiled languages such as QML and Javascript. It guides each step in the process, simplifying and speeding up project creation, development, adding new assets, testing and publishing. The goal of Plasmate is to enable creating something new in seconds and publishing it immediately.
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KDE has released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. They are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended for everyone running the initial 4.10 release. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be safe and pleasant for everyone.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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While it’s already known that Raring Ringtail, the next major release of Ubuntu will mostly have Gnome 3.6, users can now install Gnome 3.8 Beta in this currently development version of Ubuntu and try out the new features. All you need to do is add a personal package archive and update the packages using apt.
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Gnome 3.8 is currently in active development phase and a few features planned earlier are being implemented. One of the Gnome developers, Debarshi Ray has posted some screenshots of awesome work he has done with Gnome lately. Like you can now add IMAP/SMTP accounts directly to Gnome Online Accounts via its single sign-on dialog, and integrate all email clients to use them. Best still, Evolution has already been integrated and you will no longer need to separately add accounts in Evolution to receive your mail.
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With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things).
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I have been following ROSA Linux since 2012. Now that possibly not everything going right for Mandriva Linux, the emergence of ROSA has assumed paramount significance. ROSA has not only enhanced the Mandriva based, but also created its own very distinct theme, especially for KDE. Even I am an ardent admirer of the unique design that ROSA brings on the table. Every ROSA release so far has been very refined and amazingly attractive.
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New Releases
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We are proud to announce our release candidate of Neptune 3 “Brotkasten” our first 64bit version of Neptune. This release candidate comes with several bugfixes and changes aswell as the new KDE SC 4.10.
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Wary and Racy 5.5, as well as Quirky 5.4.91, can be downloaded from the ibiblio servers. Explanations of the different members of the Puppy Linux family are available from Kauler’s web site.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Though Mandriva has been a popular Linux desktop distribution for many years, the company early last year found itself in a tough spot financially. Since then, Mandriva has undergone some major changes, adopting a new enterprise focus and creating an independent nonprofit foundation to carry on the Mandriva open source community work. The company also recently joined The Linux Foundation, a sign that Mandriva is “back in the game,” says CEO Jean-Manuel Croset. Here, he discusses how the company turned around, its new enterprise server and cloud products and its relationship to the new OpenMandriva foundation.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon Linux 11 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a distribution inspired and based upon Gentoo Linux, a version of Linux that uses source based installation rather than binary packages. Sabayon is intended to have the features of Gentoo with less work, and does include binary package management. This is a review of Sabayon 11, using the MATE desktop. 64 bit edition. As in my previous review of Sabayon 8, I had no trouble creating a bootable USB key with UNetbootin on Windows. I chose MATE not only because it fit within 2 GB, but because I’ve done an Xfce review already.
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Red Hat Family
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Spin Systems, a leading provider of enterprise-wide medical, legal and financial solutions to Fortune 500 companies and federal government agencies, announced today that it has joined the Red Hat partner program.
Spin Systems has broad knowledge of technologies based on Red Hat and Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions and created a solution that collects more than 1.2 billion records per day from medical diagnostic devices, electronic medical records, information kiosks, and other sources. In addition to reducing costs and improving efficiency, the solution is designed to help clients access healthcare records in seconds rather than weeks or months.
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Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Intel, (NASDAQ: INTC), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) have teamed up to open a dedicated facility for hospitals to test and deploy new healthcare software running on x86 servers using Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux.
The idea is to show small- to medium-sized hospitals and medical facilities that Epic Systems’ electronic health records (EHR) software running on x86 industry-standard servers with Linux can meet the needs of mission-critical healthcare solutions. Inasmuch as the healthcare industry has long been the poster child for proprietary software and hardware, highlighting the cost savings and interoperability advantages offered by an open source platform also is a key priority of the initiative.
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Fedora
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So in short, while I use Xfce, and will continue doing so, from this short comparison, KDE comes out as the winner.
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Debian Family
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Lucas Nussbaum has been crunching some numbers that lead him to conclude that “Debian is (still) changing.” Over the years a few trends have emerged as Nussbaum demonstrates using snapshot.debian.org and a data mining script.
In a blog post earlier today, Nussbaum posted graphs of some of the trends he’s seeing in Debian package development. His first graph shows that the number of team-maintained packages have seen a dramatic increase the last several years while the number of “not co-maintained” and small independent group maintained packages have remained fairly steady. Nussbaum believes these numbers show the team-maintained model is preferred by today’s developers.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With the recent introduction of Ubuntu Touch a very interesting change of strategy is emerging for Canonical.
As Phoronix and others have discovered, Ubuntu Phone and Touch are using SurfaceFlinger as their compositor. SurfaceFlinger uses OpenGL ES to render applications screens/windows in a hardware accelerated way using the OpenGL driver of the GPU directly.
Now, Canonical is promising a completely integrated experience for Ubuntu 14.04 which will run Phone, Touch, TV and Desktop applications in one common GUI environment. How will they be able to fulfill their promise for Linux desktop applications currently running on Xorg?
So far, everyone has believed that the Ubuntu desktop is migrating from Xorg to Wayland. This migration has been going so slow that there is actually no visible sign of happening any time soon. It seems that Canonical has slightly changed the “to” part of their migration plans. They are not moving to Wayland, they are moving to SurfaceFlinger.
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A few hours after Canonical announced Mir, a new display server that is not derived from X or Wayland, we saw mixed reactions from developers and users. While it seems that some upstream Wayland and X developers are not at all happy with Canonical taking such a decision, some users are excited and expect a faster and snappier desktop out of box, tightly integrated with Unity.
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Unity has been in development for over two years and was based on Nux/Compiz (Unity 3D) and Qt (Unity 2D). It forms the foundation of Canonical’s convergence plan to have one code base and interface on all devices running Ubuntu. This poses several challenges like developing a common display server which is capable of running on all devices without much overhead and an interface to rule them all. This was the sole reason behind the creation of Unity and not choosing other desktop environments such as Gnome Shell etc
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Owners of the Zealz GK802 Mini PC might be pleased to learn that a new released of Ubuntu has been released for the stick mini PC which allows you to get full use from the mini PC and now even includes hardware accelerated graphics to enjoy.
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Linux distro Ubuntu 13.04, which hit its first beta today, is already showing promise: there are small but very useful usability tweaks planned for Ubuntu’s Unity user interface.
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While the preview version of Ubuntu Touch for developers is a promising look at what the OS has in store it’s far from a fully featured version of the final product. However according to Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth it shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready for daily use. According to an interview with ZDnet an everyday driver is going to be ready to download in a couple of weeks.
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Last year HP announced its intention to start selling machines shipping with Ubuntu instead of always opting for Windows. That push started in China, but today HP shipped its first new consumer Ubuntu hardware for Europe.
It’s a Pavilion all-in-one carrying the forgettable name of the Pavilion 20-b101ea. It’s also not going to set any performance records as this is a low-end machine aimed at users who want to use the Internet, an office suite, watch HD video, and play a few web games. But what is compelling is the price. In the UK it is being sold for £349 including sales tax. A quick conversion puts the price pre-tax at just US$429.
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On the evening before the first online Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical has revealed its plans for “Mir”, a next-generation display server which will run as a system-level component to replace the X Window system. Canonical has rejected Wayland, seen by many as the successor to X Windows, because they feel it recreates X semantics in its input event handling and parts of the protocol include privileged shell integration which the Mir specifiers would rather not have. The decisions along this path of development appear to have been taken in the summer of 2012.
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Normally, I am not a big fan of smartphones. Scratch that, I am very much not a fan of smartphones. However, after I heard and saw Mark Shuttleworth present the upcoming mobile devices that will be running Ubuntu on them, for the first time, I was really intrigued with the technology and its potential use.
Indeed, sometime in Q4 2013 or Q1 2014, I will be buying myself one. In fact, I will be buying two devices, one for myself and one for the lucky winner of the Dedoimedo Ubuntu smartphone contest. Please read to see how you can participate and maybe win yourself a handsome smartphone.
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is possibly one of the most landmark long term release for Ubuntu and Canonical for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is the first long term release with Unity desktop. Second, first time the LTS is supported for 5 years. Love it or hate it, Unity has now become synonymous with Ubuntu. And after reviewing a lot of distros with stock Gnome 3 as desktop, I now understand why canonical didn’t pursue Gnome 3. Unity, at least, is intuitive and easier to use even for a Linux novice. If that right side strip irritates you, simply check the auto-hide option. Agree, customisation is sacrificed if you use Unity, but it looks elegant.
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At the time of this article’s creation, the Samsung Chromebook is the number one top seller on Amazon.com. Chrome OS is attacking other operating systems head on.
In this article, I’ll explore how Chrome OS stacks up against Ubuntu and whether the two operating systems are likely to appeal to the same user base.
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The X window system has served numerous Linux- and Unix-based operating systems well over its nearly three decades of life. But Canonical is ready to move on from X, saying a new display server is necessary to power the Unity user interface in Ubuntu as the OS expands from desktops to tablets and phones.
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Is Ubuntu Phone based on CyanogenMod 10.1? If so, is this a major scandal in the mobile business? According to some, Ubuntu Phone is indeed based on CyanogenMod, while others say that’s not quite so simple.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung may be on the verge of doing something paradoxically Apple-ish: being original. Often accused of copying Cupertino — both in and out of courtrooms — it appears the company may have something completely different to unveil at its Galaxy S IV launch event next week. Not only that, it’s taking a new tack with its prelaunch ad campaign, building suspense instead of taking swipes.
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Samsung’s next big smartphone, to be introduced this month, will have a strong focus on software. A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling.
The phone will track a user’s eyes to determine where to scroll, said a Samsung employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.
The source would not explain what technology was being used to track eye movements, nor did he say whether the feature would be demonstrated at the Galaxy S IV press conference, which will be held in New York on March 14. The Samsung employee said that over all, the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.
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Android
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With an aim to meet strong demand for entry-level tablets, Acer is reportedly planning to ship 10 million tablets in 2013, an increase of 400 per cent year on year.
Of the projected shipments for this year, seven million units will use an Android-based platform, while the remaining are going to be based on Windows.
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Google has announced the release of Android 4.2.2 Android Open Source Project (AOSP) binaries. These are intended for use with any Nexus AOSP-enabled device including Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 and the previous generation Galaxy Nexus.
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ASUS has started rolling out Android 4.2 Jelly Bean to its Asus Transformer Pad TF300 in the US region. The roll-out makes it the first non-Nexus device to receive the update to Google’s latest mobile operating system.
Android 4.2 will be released to Transformer Pad owners via a free over the air update starting today in the United States and will be available in other regions later this month. This makes the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 just the fourth device to receive the update, after the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices.
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Android developer Koushik Doutta has made a name for himself developing some of the most popular tools used by folks who root their devices and install custom ROMs. His ClockworkMod Recovery and ROM Manager apps are some of the most popular tools for installing custom firmware on an Android device.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Recently Canonical showed off a special Ubuntu build for tablets, and now Australian company Intermatix is offering its customers the chance to pre-order the first tablets running the new OS. Unsurprisingly, two models are being offered: the Intermatix U7 and U10, which sport screens measuring 7 and 10 inches, respectively.
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Here is great news for our readers and Ubuntu fans. World’s first Ubuntu powered tablet is here and currently available for pre-order. The tablet is priced at AUS $299.00 and a discount of 10% is announced for the first 50 customers.
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Google has open sourced its Zopfli data compression algorithm. Zopfli, according to the company, can produce files three to eight percent smaller than zlib and can be used to speed up Web downloads.
Zopfli, based on the Deflate algorithm, has been optimised to produce smaller file sizes at the expense of compression speed. The smaller compressed size would mean better space utilisation, quicker load times, and of course lower Web page load latencies.
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The Blender graphics tool can result in some great-looking 3D imagery — once you learn the software so you can unlock all its capabilities. Blender Master Class holds the keys to those features and functions; it’s easy to understand and executed with a useful hands-on style that takes advantage of the author’s considerable experience in creating graphics masterpieces.
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A couple of former Red Hat veterans think there’s an easier way to configure, deploy and manage IT across an organization and founded AnsibleWorks to attack that problem.
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Events
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SaaS/Big Data
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The critical momentum that the industry is seeing today for the open standards cloud movement is reminiscent of Linux and its turning point in the late 1990s, and we’re willing to bet that cloud will have a similar outcome – the triumph of open standards over proprietary approaches to cloud computing.
How do we know? When you look at cloud, the fundamentals are the same.
The strategy articulated around open source in 1998 – preventing vendor lock in, providing market choice, spurring innovation, and enabling modularity of design to drive higher quality software – holds true today for enterprise cloud computing.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Apache OpenOffice has reached an impressive 40 million downloads since the release of OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) said that this number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge, excluding language packs and source tarballs.
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Education
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And the unvarnished truth is what I got. They raised a lot of interesting points. From subjects I’m well familiar with, like the need for a modern, European copyright framework. Plus we had an interesting debate about the need for a more modern, dynamic education system – one that is adapted to digital realities. It’s very challenging providing courses and certification in a fast-moving world where practices can change within months; and sometimes, indeed, the best teacher is experience.
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BSD
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I thought it would be fun to share how well GNUstep runs these days. FreeBSD now is a first-quality platform! Stable and not second to Linux at all. NetBSD is close to it too. I try hard that all application maintained by me are not “Linux centric” as most of today’s desktops are!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
* Will you be at LibrePlanet? Register today for March 23-24
* Mako Hill remembers Aaron Swartz
* Only Gandalf can protect Europe from the unitary patent
* Winners announced for free software gaming’s highest honor, the Liberated Pixel Cup
* Announcing the Empowermentors Collective: a group for women of color and queer people of color
* GNU Press discounts Bison Manual!
* FSFE asks you to show your love for free software!
* Keep the pressure on the White House and US Copyright Office to fix anti-circumvention provisions
* Announcing status.fsf.org: Our new home for microblogging
* FSF licensing team: What we did in 2012 and why it matters for 2013
* Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
* LibrePlanet featured resource: Coreboot installation party at LibrePlanet 2013
* GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 19 new GNU releases!
* GNU Toolchain update
* Other FSF and free software events
* Thank GNUs!
* Take action with the FSF
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Public Services/Government
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Communities of developers of free and open source software can create their own governing laws, using more than just their software licences, say two Irish researchers Ian Ó Maolchraoibhe and Maureen O’Sullivan, from the National University of Ireland, in the city of Galway. The two are currently working on an academic paper, a follow up to the presentation they gave at the Fosdem conference in Brussels earlier this month.
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Open standards and the compatibility of data and IT systems are two of the core themes of a network of municipalities, founded last week Thursday. The new organisation is called Linked Organisation of Local Authority ICT Societies (LOLA). It is the international version of national networks of local administrations in Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The Obama administration recently responded to a petition asking the government to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.”
I first heard about the petition on Google+, and am very proud to be signature #52. Back then 25,000 signatures seemed like a tall order for what is a somewhat niche area. In the end, the petition gained over 65,000 signatures and an official response from the White House. The Open Science Federation posted a screen capture of the 25,000th signature landmark on June 3, 2012. John Wilibanks started the petition with signature #1.
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Open Hardware
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For many years now, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Open source robotics platforms have flourished, but they’ve also been fragmented, with software and hardware designs produced all around the world that have little to do with each other. That’s why it was so promising when the folks behind Willow Garage–a robotics project that originated at Stanford University–announced the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).
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Programming
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I’ve been following the development of Orion, since the Eclipse Foundation started the effort back in January of 2011. The basic idea behind Orion is to move development online into a web-based development model.
The Orion 1.0 release came out in October of last year, and here we are four months later with an Orion 2.0 release.
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Standards/Consortia
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I just figured out that I’ve been involved with standards for almost one-third of my life, since the mid-1990s. During that time, I’ve been employed by IBM but I’ve also worked collaboratively with other people in the IT industry on standards efforts in groups like the W3C and OASIS. I think that collectively we’ve helped move the industry from “proprietary and locked-in” toward “open and interoperable.” That’s a good thing.
With that prolog, I’m pleased to help announce that, moving forward, IBM will base all its cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture. To kick this off, IBM will deliver a new private cloud offering based on the OpenStack open source software. (More marketing sort of stuff is available in the press release, which I will link to just as soon as I get the URL.)
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The current divide between proprietary and open approaches to enterprise cloud computing has implications beyond the obvious. More than just issues of cloud interoperability and data portability, open standards have benefits for user identity, authentication and security intelligence that closed or proprietary clouds threaten to compromise.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Ten years ago, a major American magazine published a bombshell report about the non-existence of Iraq’s WMDs. But it was hardly noticed by a corporate press corps too busy hyping the threat from those non-existent weapons.
The story appeared in the March 3, 2003, issue of Newsweek–a short piece with the headline “The Defector’s Secrets.” It almost seemed as if the magazine didn’t know what it had on its hands. Or perhaps it did.
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Remember how Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has been trying to get a straight answer about whether the United States government reserves the legal right to assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil? Well, Attorney General Eric Holder has just answered the question in a letter to Paul, partially reprinted by Mother Jones.
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The annual AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference was the stage for U.S. and Israeli leaders to affirm their message that “all options are on the table” against Iran.
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…pathologist hired by the parents in the United States after their son’s body was flown back said it showed signs of struggle, and ruled the death a homicide.
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Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation join us to discuss domestic surveillance drones and the secrecy surrounding military drones around the world. “I think the importation of the war on terror and its tactics, generally, to the U.S. is probably the most significant development in the world of civil liberties,” says Greenwald. Timm is also the co-manager of the @Drones Twitter account. As a result of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, drone use in the United States is expected to expand rapidly in the next few years, an issue that is being closely watched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [includes rush transcript]
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As his inquiry into U.S. drone strikes gets underway, the United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism and human rights has stepped up his rhetoric against the agency he’ll inevitably investigate. The CIA’s torture program was at the center of an “international conspiracy of crime,” he told a U.N. panel on Tuesday.
The CIA’s torture in the last decade is unrelated from its current drone campaign. But Ben Emmerson, the U.N. rapporteur, will still need access to the drones from a CIA he portrayed on Tuesday morning as something similar to a Bond villain. In an interview with Danger Room last month, Emmerson said he was confident the Obama administration would grant him access to one of its most secretive counterterrorism programs.
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Cablegate
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Following is the reasoning we sent to the committee explaining why we felt compelled to nominate Private Bradley Manning for this important recognition of an individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world. The lengthy personal statement to the pre-trial hearing February 28th by Bradley Manning in his own words validate that his motives were for the greater good of humankind.
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A record number of Nobel Peace Prize nominations were received this year, which saw US soldier and Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning being nominated for a third time.
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Finance
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Switzerland will still go to any lengths to protect the ultra-rich dictators and mafia who flock there. Mutabar Tadjibaeva – multiple rape victim, survivor of repeated torture and still dogged human rights activist, is wanted for questioning by Geneva Police for the crime of ringing the bell of Gulnata Karimova’s 25 million dollar house and asking to speak to her.
That is absolutely all she did. I know, as I was there and did it too. We both left our visiting cards, took some photos from the streets so the children of Uzbekistan could see where the profits from their slave labour in the cotton fields went, and then we left on the bus, as we came.
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A job creator! I’m a job creator, Selig.
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Among those persuaded of the value of Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs) and of a transition to an economic system that includes a large and growing number of such enterprises, the question often arises, how do we get there from here? In other words, what sorts of strategies and alliances might allow or facilitate that transition? Here is an initial response to that question.
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Since the Center for Media and Democracy’s launch of ALEC Exposed in July 2011, CMD has known that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its corporate funders are accelerating the race to the bottom in wages and working conditions for America’s working families. ALEC has a raft of “model bills” to lower wages and slash benefits for workers, even one to repeal state minimum wage laws.
Now the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has joined in the effort to take a closer look at this ALEC agenda, tallying the bills introduced and pushed in states in the last few years.
In an issue brief called “The Politics of Wage Suppression: Inside ALEC’s Legislative Campaign Against Low-Paid Workers,” NELP has documented that since January 2011, legislators from 31 states have introduced 105 bills aiming to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the state and local level, and 67 of these 105 bills were directly sponsored or co-sponsored by legislators affiliated with ALEC.
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…offshore tax havens would net about $90 billion annually.
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Following the failure of the U.S. Congress and President Obama to navigate away from an otherwise avoidable sequester, the FBI is up in arms over the subsequent spending cuts they say will hamper, among other things, its ability to pursue financial crimes.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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On March 1, 2013, Milwaukee Country prosecutors shut down the long running “John Doe” probe into corruption in Scott Walker’s office during the time he served as Milwaukee County Executive. Six people were charged and convicted, including three former Walker staff, but no charges were brought against Walker. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm issued a brief, telling statement: “After a review of the John Doe evidence, I am satisfied that all charges that are supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt have now been brought and concluded.”
There is no doubt that Walker emerges from the scandal in a stronger position to advance his extreme legislative agenda and his plans for higher office.
Walker’s recently-unveiled budget is covered with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) fingerprints: his tax plan disproportionately benefits the top one-fifth of earners while putting a whopping $2 in the pockets of the bottom one-fifth; his school voucher program would leave 870,000 public school students with no additional funds; and his food stamp stipulations would force the needy to look for the 212,400 jobs that the governor has promised but failed to create. To top it all off, his ALEC cronies want to cover their tracks with a bill that would put a price on the public records that expose them.
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controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t get covered much in corporate television–it takes tens of thousands of activists marching in Washington to get a few words on the nightly newscasts.
But the State Department’s recent draft assessment of the pipeline’s environmental impact got a mention on one show, and it said a lot. Not about the pipeline, really, but about corporate media.
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For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.
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Privacy
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European rules to combat the trade of illegal timber have come into force, but NGOs and think tanks doubt the readiness of EU countries to carry out the legislation.
The new laws, which came into effect on Monday (4 March), require operators importing or producing wood to identify its country of origin and legality.
The regulation also prohibits the sale of illegally harvested timber on the European market to cut profits from the trade worldwide, which analysts link to deforestation and desertification, rising CO2 emissions, corruption, armed conflict and the destruction of vulnerable communities.
The EU law requires member states to lay down “effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties”. However, despite two years of preparation, EU countries have so far failed to apply the legislation or impose credible penalties and sanctions, said analysis by the WWF.
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National Security Agency’s massive new surveillance compound in the Utah desert outside Salt Lake City.
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A reporter tried to take pictures of a massive new government data center in Utah. Bad idea
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Most people who visit Salt Lake City in the winter months are excited about taking advantage of the area’s storied slopes. While skiing was on my itinerary last week, I was more excited about an offbeat tourism opportunity in the area: I wanted to check out the construction site for “the country’s biggest spy center.”
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National security letters are the Fight Club of government data surveillance. Thanks to the gag orders that accompany those FBI requests for users’ private information, the first rule for any company that receives an NSL is that it doesn’t talk about receiving an NSL. Now Google is doing its best to blur–if not quite break–that rule.
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Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos. We work exceptionally hard to keep that information safe—hiring some of the best security experts in the world, investing millions of dollars in technology and baking security protections such as 2-step verification into our products.
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Today, Sen. Rand Paul received two pieces of correspondence regarding the legality and constitutionality of the U.S. government using lethal force, including drone strikes, on Americans and in U.S. territory. Sen. Paul sent three inquires on the matter to President Obama’s nominee to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan (HERE, HERE and HERE). He finally received responses from both Mr. Brennan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on one item of inquiry.
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Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in “an extraordinary circumstance,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.
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Civil Rights
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Time is running out to ensure that the British legal system is not fundamentally altered in favour of the State’s desire to keep secret what it chooses. Today several amendments to the Justice and Security Bill are before the House and we urge MPs to back them, if they are unwilling to vote against Part 2 of the Bill.
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Unbelievably, tens of thousands of children, as young as 12, are still being subjected to the “undignified” practice of strip searches, despite reassurances from the Youth Justice Board.
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DRM
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If restricting what consumers can do with the cell-phones, smartphones and tablets that they own is unconscionable, isn’t it time personal computers of all kinds were freed from the unconscionable terms of end-user licence agreements (more likely, decrees by monopolists) which are clear attempts to monopolize hardware and to extend copyright beyond what legislators conceived? This is not a new concept. Richard Stallman was decades ahead of the US government when he called for Free Software to be used everywhere.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of the national advocacy organization Food and Water Watch, will be in Madison, March 18, to read from her acclaimed new book “Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.” Publishers Weekly calls it a “tour de force.”
Since 2005, Food and Water Watch has lead the fight against corporate control of the U.S. food system, against the privatization of the U.S. water supply and against water contamination by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.
In her new book “Foodopoly,” Hauter examines farming at the turn of the 20th century until today, and details the consolidation of the food chain from crop seeds to retail stores to argue that the people who grow our food, and consumers, have been cheated and manipulated by agribusiness and the leading food companies. She explores how the evisceration of anti-trust laws has dramatically increased consolidation among food and agricultural firms, which, along with the growth of big box stores and the marketing of junk food, has perverted how food is sold and marketed and what people eat.
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Copyrights
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Why is a song that I play digitally or a book I read electronically subject to extensive controls that are not considered appropriate to records or books? It’s because they are subject to licenses that can’t be applied by the seller to the physical works. Why can those licences be imposed on digital works? Because the use of digital works is considered subject to copyright, whereas the use of physical works is not. Why is that? Because the act of instantiating the work for use has been described as “copying”, allowing the rules surrounding copyright to be used as a threat to back up arbitrary license terms controlling use.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.04.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is a natural platform for “blind and low vision people …people who struggle with dyslexia and learning disabilities as well as accessibility for people with low motor skills and quadriplegics.” Jonathan Nadeau, Free software developer and activist, wants to build a completely accessible Linux distribution, and has launched an IndieGoGo campaign to fund it.
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Desktop
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Take a moment to think about how computers are used in your home. How much of that time do you spend browsing the web, working on word processing documents or presentations and checking email and social networks? If your answer is a good chunk of the time, you may be a candidate for a Chromebook computer.
Chromebooks run Google’s Chrome OS, which looks like the Chrome Web browser but runs apps as well. In fact, there’s a whole ecosystem of Chrome apps available through the Chrome Web Store. There are games, like Angry Birds Heikki, Battlefield and Need for Speed World; productivity tools, including Dropbox, Picasa and Evernote; and, of course there are the Google apps, like Google Docs, Gmail and Google Maps. Currently, there are tens of thousands of apps available through the Chrome Web Store—some that are primarily web-based and some that run within a browser tab, but have been downloaded and work offline.
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Google has pushed another Chrome OS update in its stable channel. As usual this update contains a lot of bug fixes and security improvements. Chormebooks (or boxes) running stable channel will be receiving updates over the next several days.
Some of the notable improvements are improved audio quality in Google Hangouts as it has upgraded the GTalk plugin to version 3.14.17 (if this number makes any sense to you). If you use the photo editor then you can be relaxed (you don’t have to worry if you are using Pixel which has more RAM), as the update also improves memory handling in the photo editor. It has also improved the low battery notification.
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This new operating system was originally code-named “Google OS” and since 2009 has been released to the public under the product names, Google Chrome OS, Chromebook, and Chromebox. I wrote a patent for it, #8,239,662, titled “Network-based Operating System Across Devices” that was finally granted in August 7, 2012. Long after I left Google.
Here’s a few interesting tidbits about the invention of Chromebook.
First, Chromebook was initially rejected by Google management. In fact I wrote the first version as early as July 2006 and showed it around to management. Instead of launching a project, the response was extremely tepid. My boss complained, “You can’t use it on an airplane.” Actually, you could as, under the covers, it was still a bare-bones Linux distribution and could execute any Linux program installed on it.
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Kernel Space
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Borqs International, a mobile communication software and solutions company, has joined the Linux Foundation. The company said it aims to increase its investment in Linux, bringing more innovative solutions to partners and end users. It is worth mentioning here that more than 1.3 million Linux-based Android devices are activated every day.
Borqs has four offices in the APAC region, located in Beijing, Bangalore, Wuhan and Shenzhen. In the future, Borqs will participate in the Code Aurora Forum and other Linux Foundation activities, including the Linux End User Summit. Linux and collaborative development have both become pervasive in the mobile and enterprise computing markets.
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The XFS file-system update for the Linux 3.9 kernel isn’t particularly exciting, but it does address some open bugs and regressions for this still very relevant and competitive Linux file-system.
The XFS pull request for Linux 3.9 reads, “Please pull these XFS updates for 3.9-rc1. Here there are primarily fixes for regressions and bugs, but there are a few cleanups too. There are fixes for compound buffers, quota asserts, dir v2 block compaction, mount behavior, use-after-free with AIO, swap extents, an unmount hang, speculative preallocation, write verifiers, the allocator stack switch, recursion on xa_lock, an xfs_buf_find oops, and a memory barrier in xfs_ifunlock.”
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Most often when carrying out any Linux file-system benchmarks — or really, any benchmarks in general — on Phoronix it’s using solid-state storage. SSDs are just too great to pass up with their incredible performance. However, for those still using rotating media, here’s a collection of file-system benchmarks from the new Linux 3.8 kernel when tested on a Serial ATA 3.0 Western Digital hard drive.
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Graphics Stack
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With talking recently about LLVMpipe driver improvements and having not benchmarked this Gallium3D software driver in a while, here are new benchmarks of this LLVM-based software fallback driver when using Mesa 9.1-devel Git in conjunction with LLVM 3.3 SVN code, for the very latest look at the OpenGL software acceleration possibilities.
The last time there were thorough LLVMpipe performance benchmarks on Phoronix was last November when benchmarking Mesa 9.1-devel with LLVM 3.1/3.2. Since that point, Mesa 9.1 has become stable and there’s been many Gallium3D/LLVMpipe driver changes in the past three months. LLVM itself also continues to advance and saw the release of LLVM 3.2 while LLVM 3.3 is now under heavy development.
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Applications
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Development version 0.10.8 of the upcoming Almanah 0.11 diary software for the GNOME desktop environment has been announced a couple of days ago, on February 26.
Almanah 0.10.8 brings a redesigned main window, in order to support the GNOME 3 guidelines. It also includes GMenu and a menu button in the toolbar.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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For those of you who have been abroad the Linux Steam train since the early betas late last year, things are really on the up & up.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The first Beta version of the upcoming GNOME Online Accounts 3.8 application, which is part of the GNOME desktop environment, has been released for download and testing last week.
GNOME Online Accounts 3.8 Beta 1 fixes support for the OAuth2 open source authorization protocol when getting refresh_token from URI fragment and fixes implicit declaration of goa_kerberos_identity_inquiry_new.
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Javier Jardón Cabezas proudly announced a few days ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment is ready for download and testing.
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With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things).
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A new development release of the Gnote note-taking application for the GNOME desktop environment has been released earlier today, March 3, including various new features, updated translations and many bug fixes.
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The Evolution developers were happy to announce earlier today, March 3, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second and last Beta release of the upcoming Evolution 3.8 email client.
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The Linux desktop choices of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, tends to pique people’s interest. Linus has now shared he’s switched back to using the GNOME 3.x desktop.
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A new extension adds native-looking Ubuntu Unity like AppIndicator support for GNOME Shell, a feature for which some patches were submited more than a year ago, but they were rejected because the feature “conflicts with the design”.
AppIndicators have are widely used now, with Ubuntu disabling the message tray (systray) by default, and popular applications like Dropbox or Steam come with AppIndicator support by default.
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New Releases
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The developers of Grml have released version 2013.02, code-named “Grumpy Grinch”, of their Debian-based distribution aimed at diagnosing, repairing and maintaining Linux systems. Grml 2013.02 includes updates to several of its tools and the developers have extended the grml-hwinfo application which is used to collect information about the system that is being repaired. The distribution has also been updated to make use of Linux kernel 3.7.9 and has a new grml-network tool that can scan for available wireless networks.
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The Alpine Team announced a few hours ago, March 1, that the Alpine Linux 2.5.4 Linux distribution is available for download.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is by no means any stranger to either Big Data or the open hybrid cloud, having been closely involved with both efforts for several years already. But with the company’s announcement last week of a fresh strategic direction in those areas, it’s clearly embarking on a new path.
Not only did Red Hat discuss a new focus on providing solutions for enterprises with Big Data analytics workloads, but it also announced that it will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop open community, thus transforming Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for Big Data IDC big data environments.
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Let’s get this straight. Red Hat should package up its own commercial Hadoop distribution or buy one of the three key Hadoop disties before they get too expensive. But don’t hold your breath, because Red Hat tells El Reg that neither option is the current plan. Red Hat is going to partner with Hadoop distributors and hope they deploy commercial Hadoop clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Java and use the Gluster File System, known now as Red Hat Storage Server 2.0.
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Fedora
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Other than these two problems noted above, Fedora 18 has been just as good for me as Fedora 17 was. The upgrade from Fedora 17 to 18 was flawless, and I have had no major problems running F18 in the past six weeks. I have been just as productive as ever, and I conclude the Fedora 18 is a solid product.
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Debian Family
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Debian, the mother of Ubuntu, has made a historical decision by changing the terms of their trademark policy. According to the new trademark policy, Debian logos and marks may now be used freely for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. The Debian Project encourages wide use of its marks in all ways that promote Debian and free software.
Stefano Zacchiroli, current Debian Project Leader and one of the main promoters of the new trademark policy, said “Software freedoms and trademarks are a difficult match. We all want to see well-known project names used to promote free software, but we cannot risk they will be abused to trick users into downloading proprietary spyware. With the help of SPI and SFLC, we have struck a good balance in our new trademark policy. Among other positive things, it allows all sorts of commercial use; we only recommend clearly informing customers about how much of the sale price will be donated to Debian.”
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The Debian project has announced the first release candidate of the Debian Installer for Debian 7.0 Wheezy. Changes mainly affect the installer’s EFI and UEFI support; for example, the developers have introduced a uniform look for menu items to ensure that the installer’s appearance is as consistent as possible regardless of the boot method used. Various hardware drivers have also been added to the installation system.
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Derivatives
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It might not come as much of a surprise, but according to a recent survey conducted by EE Times, Linux continues to tear up the charts in the embedded market (embedded refers to special-purpose PCs found in things like TVs, media players, cars, machinery and so forth).
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The latest in our series of ARM Linux benchmarking is looking at the impact of GCC compiler optimizations on the ARM Cortex A15-based Samsung Exynos 5 Dual.
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Phones
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Android
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Very little is known at the moment about the next version of Android, known as Key Lime Pie, but a recently opened up public code repository may be evidence that works is well underway on the new OS. As reported by Phoronix the repository contains work Google has done on the Linux 3.8 kernel which hints, but by no means is any proof, that the next version of Android could be based on this kernel.
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It looks like there is one big paradox in the Android camp. Why is it that every other Android phone maker is struggling to stay in business while Samsung is raking in billions of dollars in profits every quarter?
This is the question Brian S Hall of Unwired recently asked. And he is definitely not the first one to pose it. Let me attempt an answer on the basis of what I see in India, where Samsung has made a killing in the two years.
It all starts with Galaxy S. This is the phone with which Samsung’s Android journey began in earnest. And yes, before you say that Galaxy S became successful because it looked like iPhone 3GS, and that Touchwiz, the user interface powering it, had the look and feel of iOS, let me clarify that I don’t agree. I will come to this point later.
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Google has open sourced a new compression algorithm called Zopfli that it says is a slower-but-stronger data squasher than the likes of zlib.
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With Zopfli, Google has introduced a new, C-based compression library as open source software. Named after a Swiss pastry, its algorithm is said to produce results that are 3 to 8 per cent more compact when compressing web content than the popular zlib library at maximum compression level. These results have been documentedPDF by Google. Like zlib, Zopfli is an implementation of the Deflate algorithm that is also used in the zip file format and in PNG files, but it appears to result in smaller output files.
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Events
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I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, and certainly I am not. Honest. But one of the problems with working on a show like Southern California Linux Expo and this year’s SCALE 11X leaves me little time to do anything but the wood-chopping and water-carrying that goes with being the publicity chair for the show. Let me be clear: This is not a complaint, but rather an explanation about why you’re not going to get a comprehensive report about the event.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox OS may be up for a good start with 17 operators wowing to support the nascent platform. Among those committing to carry these smartphones are Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telefonica, America Movil, KDDI, Telecom Italia, Telenor, China Unicom, 3 Group, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, TMN and VimpelCom, while Telstra has only “welcomed” the initiative. These diverse group will make Firefox OS-based devices available in a number of countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela, with additional markets announcing soon.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Implicit in this statement, and in pretty much all of what we do at Sunlight, is an understanding that openness and transparency, enabled by technology, lead to more democratic accountability, and that, on balance, this leads to better governance. It’s an understanding that we share with a growing global community.
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One of the keys to this next generation of mashups will be a strong understanding of how copyright interacts with physical objects. While copyright will not protect functional objects, it will protect decorative ones. Understanding the difference will mean the difference between a mashup encumbered by copyright and a mashup that is in the clear.
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Open Access/Content
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The White House has released a memorandumPDF saying that the results of government-funded research must be made publicly available in a science journal twelve months after their first release. The initiative by US president Barack Obama also includes accompanying scientific data in digital formats, as long as their publication doesn’t affect third party rights such as the right to privacy.
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These digressions became more frequent and detailed as delegates watched the minister begin to internalize what he was saying. We saw the dawning realization that open access really does offer an important step for better research and faster economic and social development. After the speech, Hanekom asked the representatives from the Max Planck Institute, one of the sponsors of the Berlin Conference, for a meeting to discuss open access policy.
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Programming
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AESOP is a new auto-parallelizing C/C++ compiler for shared memory systems. This new open-source compiler was written at the University of Maryland and is now available to the public.
The AESOP auto-parallelizing compiler is based upon LLVM and is designe for real-world workloads rather than just small, simple kernels. AESOP is said to already be able to compile SPEC2006 and OMP2001 benchmarks.
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Standards/Consortia
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Aaron Gustafson and two of his fellow contributors, Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth, have announced the closure of The Web Standards Project (WaSP) which was formed back in 1998.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was co-founded by Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman and has been spreading Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible and universal community as well as working towards propagation of World Wide Consortium’s (W3C) gospel.
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Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.
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The Surface Pro is not a repair-friendly machine. In fact, it’s one of the least repairable devices iFixit has seen: In a teardown of Microsoft’s tablet-laptop hybrid, the company gave it a rock-bottom score of just one — one! — out of 10 for repairability, lower even than Apple’s iPad and the Windows Surface RT.
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Hardware
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Freescale’s latest microcontroller measures 1.9 by 2 millimetres, and could be used in ‘ingestible’ computing.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Homeland Security’s specifications say drones must be able to detect whether a civilian is armed. Also specified: “signals interception” and “direction finding” for electronic surveillance.
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Cablegate
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While the trial of Bradley Manning has sparked some interest in certain circles, many people probably think the former U.S. Army private’s case will have little impact on either them or American society as a whole. Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, however, argues that they are wrong — and that if Manning is found guilty of “aiding the enemy” for releasing classified documents to WikiLeaks, it could change the nature of both journalism and free speech forever.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We know fracking isn’t exactly the safest of practices. We’ve heard of its propensity to pollute our air and drinking water and thereby raise human health concerns. The media, however, isn’t talking about the massive sinkholes pockmarking the nation, the radiation leaks, and other lesser known but no less earth-shattering effects of fracking.
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Minnesota’s depleting aquifers show consequences of climate change, unsustainable water management
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Finance
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RunRev, the company behind the multi-platform, HyperCard-like development environment LiveCode, reached its goal for its Kickstarter campaign: the fairly ambitious target of £350,000 was met about 60 hours before the campaign was due to end. In fact, although the total amount only approached the target in the last five days, donations then went far beyond the original goal, finally reaching almost £500,000 (about €570,000), allowing LiveCode to be released under the GPLv3 open source licence. RunRev plans to use the additional money to implement more project goals.
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Dell’s leveraged buyout deal has run into more resistance. Today, T. Rowe Price Chief Investment Officer Brian Rogers said that his company would vote against the buyout.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In December 1968 the state-controlled Russian newspaper Izvestia ran a series of articles accusing several high-profile British journalists of being spies – listing their names and alleged codenames.
The articles caused a storm of protest in Britain: the Russians were claiming journalists and editors at the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the BBC worked directly with MI6.
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Privacy
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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This past week, we’ve had quite the discussion around Cecilia Kang’s WashPo piece describing a plan by the FCC to create a national WiFi network by making the right decisions on the “TV whitespaces” (TVWS), the unused, high-quality frequencies between broadcast TV stations. As Kang describes, the FCC’s opening of sufficient spectrum for TVWS could lead to “super WiFi networks (emphasis added) around the nation so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the internet without paying a cell phone bill every month.”
Although the article initially faced a great deal of skepticism, Kang’s claims are not as far fetched as they appeared. In fact, if the FCC makes the right spectrum choices, it is reasonable to assume (although not inevitable) that we will eventually get to the kind of ubiquitous and easy to use publicly accessible WiFi access Kang describes in her article.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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At the end of January 2013, the WTO authorized Antigua to suspend its intellectual property obligations toward the United States in retaliation for the United States’ breach of WTO rules. There are at least three reasons why the decision and the potential internet-based implementation of the retaliation are notable.
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It should come as no surprise, then, that Gates owns 500,000 shares worth 23 million US dollars (or more) of Monsanto stock. The very same company that has been caught running slave rings in Argentina in which workers were forced to work 14+ hours a day while withholding payment, has used their massive finances to fund organizations that literally fake FDA quotes to support GMOs, and of course peddling through GMOs that have been linked to numerous health concerns.
This is not even taking into account the farmer suicides that occur around every 30 minutes due to Monsanto’s failing GMO crop yield bankrupting small-time farmers in India’s notorious ‘suicide belt‘.
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Trademarks
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The owner of the iPhone trademark in Brazil, IGB Eletronica SA (IGBR3), said it would consider selling the naming rights to Apple (AAPL) Inc.
“We’re open to a dialogue for anything, anytime,” Eugenio Emilio Staub, chairman of IGB, said in an interview in Sao Paulo, adding that the company hasn’t been contacted by Apple. “We’re not radicals.”
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Copyrights
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A federal judge in Manhattan has thrown out a copyright lawsuit brought by an attorney who sued legal research companies Westlaw and LexisNexis, claiming they had unlawfully profited from his copyrighted legal filings.
In a brief ruling issued Friday, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed Edward White’s lawsuit. White, who specializes in intellectual property law, had alleged that Westlaw, owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, and LexisNexis, owned by Reed Elsevier Plc, profited by selling his copyrighted legal briefs in their databases.
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Dutch Secretary of Justice Teeven has issued a draft bill to remove the so-called ‘geschriftenbescherming’ from Dutch copyright legislation. This is part of the modernization process of Dutch copyright law. The goal is to have a flexible, technology-neutral and future-proof copyright in order to properly connect to modern reality.
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