01.22.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Virtual reality may be best known for its entertainment value, but its practical applications are at least as compelling. With Cave automatic virtual environments (CAVE), for instance, engineers can save time and resources by testing out products and solutions in the lab to see which are best-suited to a particular problem or site in the real world.
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It is with no small sense of regret that Linux Girl brings you this week’s Linux Blog Safari, dear readers, because in writing it she must convey some very difficult news.
Namely, Linux Girl is departing LinuxInsider — her home away from home for lo all these years — and so must hang up her cape for good. By the time you read this, she’ll be off on new adventures — traveling new lands, telling new tales and testing new tequilas.
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Desktop
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Yet the apparent reasonableness disappears on closer investigation. Blender, for one, was originally an in-house application for the Dutch design house Neo Geo and Not a Number Technologies (NaN) – a bit of history that immediately refutes any claim that it is not ready for professionals.
Similarly, Krita owes its increasingly popularity to the project’s habit of consulting designers about each feature. Boudewijn Rempt, Krita’s maintainer, adds that ImagineFX, a major print magazine for illustrators and concept artists, recently gave Krita its Artist’s Choice Award.
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Acer has unveiled two new Chromebooks aimed at schools and students, featuring durable construction to hold up under rough treatment and a myriad of technology features to help students get their schoolwork completed at home or at school.
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That’s a testimony to how far Wintel has fallen as a force in consumer-IT. Wintel used to have >90% of the market. Intel used to have 80% of the legacy PC market. Now they have to sell Atoms and Celerons to remain relevant because Chromebooks do more computing on servers. Of course Intel is doing great on servers but so is GNU/Linux. Acer struggled to make a living with Wintel but is thriving with ChromeBooks. Acer has 35% of that market and is making a 15.6″ ChromeBook.
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Chromebooks have generally been cheaper than Windows-based laptops…
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My personal experiences with Linux in the workplace actually started shortly after I adopted Linux on my home PC (well I was am still am dual booting Windows). I was at a startup who had installed Ubuntu on all the desktops, other than a few, and had no idea what they were doing. Luckily the IT guy and myself both were familiar enough with it to work through some of the early problems (mostly on the fly problem solving). Once we got past the growing pains that all start ups go though, we were in the clear. It saved the company a lot of money and, even though the new people we eventually hired did grumble about having to learn a new OS, it eventually worked out for the best.
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Server
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Want a good job in tech? Then learning Linux is well worth your time. In 2013, the tech job site Dice reported that senior Linux administrators were making $90,853. Last year, Dice stated that Linux jobs were more in demand than ever and that salaries and bonuses were going up.
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The Linux job market has been hot for a while, and system administrators make top dollar. But being a successful Linux system admin requires some education and training.
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In its first year, the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community created to leverage IBM’s POWER processor, went from zero to 80—figuratively and literally. After its formation in December 2013, the foundation now has more than 80 members across the full hardware and software stack from 20 different countries.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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So basically TraceFS provides the same functionality now for kernel traces that is done currently via DebugFS. With TraceFS though you don’t need to worry about enabling the potentially security-prone DebugFS and by having their own file-system it can implement features not supported by DebugFS (e.g. mkdir and rmdir support). Assuming it clears developer review fine, it’s possible we could see TraceFS for Linux 3.20 or another near-term kernel update.
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CoreOS developers have had enough issues with the Btrfs file-system that they’ve decided to move from using the Btrfs file-system to instead use EXT4 plus OverlayFS.
Since December the CoreOS developers and stakeholders have been debating switching off Btrfs due to issues. The original proposal mentioned, “We chose btrfs because it was the most straightforward Docker graph driver at the time. But, CoreOS users have regularly reported bugs against btrfs including: out of disk space errors, metadata rebalancing problems requiring manual intervention and generally slow performance when compared to other filesystems.”
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Last year at LinuxCon a Google administrator was talking up Btrfs and encouraging attendees to try it. That Google admin, Marc Merlin, traveled down to New Zealand last week for LCA2015 to further promote the Btrfs file-system.
Marc Merlin’s presentation at Linux.Conf.Au 2015 was entitled “Why you should consider using Btrfs, real COW snapshots, and file level incremental OS upgrades.” The talk was much like the one last August at LinuxCon Chicago where he was trumpeting Btrfs. Aside from openSUSE beginning to ship with Btrfs by default, most Linux distributions still tend to be EXT4/XFS based and leaving Btrfs as just an experimental install-time option. In fact, CoreOS switched away from Btrfs to EXT4+OverlayFS. Whether or not this next-generation Linux file-system is ready for production use remains a very controversial topic.
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Modular application development, in which a set of loosely coupled modules can be integrated into one large application, has been one of the most successful software development practices. The term “loosely coupled” highlights the fact that the modules are both independent and can communicate with one another. OSGI (the Open Services Gateway Initiative), a dynamic module system for Java, defines one such architecture for modular application development. The SDN controller OpenDaylight (ODL), which we will be discussing in this article, is one such controller (apart from Beacon/Floodlight) that is based on the OSGi architecture. ODL is an open-source collaborative project that focuses on building a multi-vendor, multi-project ecosystem to encourage innovation and an open/transparent approach toward SDN. We need to look at these terms, “open,” “multi-vendor,” “multi-project,” “innovation,” etc., in detail to really appreciate the strengths of ODL.
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Graphics Stack
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Martin Peres is now one of the newest members of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center, working to improve the open-source Linux graphics support. On Monday there was a trivial Mesa commit but what was interesting is that it marked Martin Peres’ new email address as coming from “linux.intel.com.” After checking, on the X.Org BoD page it also now lists Martin’s affiliate as Intel. I’ve also confirmed Martin working for Intel through a source at XDC2014 last year in France where he originally heard this information, which was organized by Martin. (To be clear, Martin isn’t replacing Keith, the timing is just a coincidence.)
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Earlier this month we covered new Mir features that ended up being incorporated into the Mir 0.10 release. Mir 0.11 is now under development and it’s already packing significant improvements.
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OpenGL is a well-known standard for generating 3D as well as 2D graphics; it’s extremely powerful and has many capabilities. OpenGL is defined and released by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) and is a big state machine. Most calls to OpenGL functions modify a global state that you cannot directly access. WebGL is a JavaScript implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 that runs on the latest browsers. The OpenGL ES (Embedded Subsystem) is the mobile version of the OpenGL standard and is targeted towards embedded devices. OpenGL ES is a C-based, Platform-Neutral API. The OS must provide a rendering context that accepts commands as well as a framebuffer that keeps the results of the drawing commands.
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It was just last June that Eric Anholt left Intel for Broadcom to focus on creating the Broadcom VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi to have a new DRM/KMS driver and a Gallium3D driver. In less than one year, he’s made a lot of progress.
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Benchmarks
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If you’ve been wondering about the impact of enabling full-disk encryption when doing a fresh install of Fedora 21, here’s some reference benchmarks comparing the Anaconda option of this latest Fedora Linux release.
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Applications
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Although I consider Mejiro more or less feature complete, I still find ways to improve and tweak my no-frills photo publishing application. The latest Mejiro release is a case in point. Previously, the application offered a rudimentary visitor tracking feature. When enabled, it saves visitors’ IP addresses in a log file. The new version of Mejiro replaces this functionality with a link to the CrazyStat web analytics PHP script. I forked and slightly modified CrazyStat for use with Mejiro and made the result available in a separate GitHub repository. To enable integration with CrazyStat, change the $stats = false; line in the Mejiro index.php file to $stats = true; This not only enables analytics, but also shows a minuscule visitor counter, which injects Mejiro with a dose of retro-chicness. The Little Mejiro Book provides instructions on how to deploy CrazyStat and make it work with Mejiro.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Most sane programmers hate writing tests. Because of that, we have a lot of testing frameworks around that make that task more streamlined, but it is still borring work.
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Games
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Linux Is Safe Again, Valve Fixes Steam Bug That Could Delete All Files on System
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I have often longed for a more adult orientated form of Pokemon, and to find the developer of Deity Quest reach out to me to take a look I was rather eager to get going.
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Invisible, Inc. is the new game from Klei Entertainment (think Don’t Starve) that has been in early access for a while without Linux support. Today they released an update with news of our much anticipated Linux support!
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The Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) Linux operating system is out with its first update of the year, fixing multiple security issues, in the privacy focused Linux distribution.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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One week after the Elementary 1.13 Alpha release, Enlightenment developers have released the first beta of v1.13.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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For more than 1800 years, the Tower of Hercules has guided ships sailing near A Coruña. Soon it will beckon KDE users and contributors, when Akademy—the annual KDE community meeting—is held in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain) 25–31 July. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE Community to discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. Many participants from the broad free and open source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.
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KDAB has continued their interesting blog series about Qt3D 2.0 and what’s coming for this new component to Qt5.
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“Leaves” is the newest theme I created for KDE-Pairs as a part of my ongoing project ‘Theme Designing of Pairs’. This is done under the guidance of my mentor “Heena Mahour” who initially gave the idea about leaf structures. This will only work in 3 game modes namely, pairs, relations and logic.
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Following a month of usage at a group of pre-selected customers, Kolab Systems is happy to announce general availability for Kolab Enterprise 14. This latest feature release of Kolab Enterprise will be supported until 2019 and packs a whole set of new capabilities including tags, notes, better resource management, task delegation capabilities, usability improvements for deployments with very large numbers of shared groupware folders and much more.
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With the 5.2 release basically done, I decided to do some performance investigation and optimizations on KWin last week. From time to time I’m running KWin through valgrind’s callgrind tool to see whether we have some expensive code paths. So far I hadn’t done that for the 5.x series. Now after the switch to kdecoration2 I was really interested in the results as in the past rendering the decoration used to be a bottle neck during our compositing rendering loop.
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Martin Gräßlin has fixed some outstanding bugs and further tuned the performance of the KWin window manager for the KDE Plasma 5 stack.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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For a real-world example, see the GNOME MultiWriter example commit that uses this.
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Mutter 3.15.4 was checked in this morning by Florian Müllner and it has Wayland improvements and other exciting changes with GTK+ now drawing all window decorations, a change to replicate the monitor EDID parsing for Mutter on Wayland so it acts the same way as under X11, Mutter now handles input device configuration, and there’s support for pointer barriers with Mutter on Wayland. The pointer barriers on Wayland will ensure that the pointer never enters “dead areas” of the screen due to different monitor sizes, etc.
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GNOME now has support in Mutter to synchronize and apply input device settings via a session-wide configuration.
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It is no secret that we’ve been interested in sandboxed applications for a while. It is evident here, here, here or here, to name just a few.
What may not be widely known yet is that we have been working on putting together a working implementation of these ideas. Alexander Larsson has made steady progress, and we’re now almost at the point where it is useful for other people to start playing with it.
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New Releases
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Great news for Enlightenment fans: Bodhi Linux returns with a new release – 3.0.0 RC2 Reloaded.
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New command-line tool to globally change display DPI is introduced in Q4OS to be usable with high-DPI screens. Important core system packages updates and security fixes has been applied. Users could appreciate better system integration and cleaner dependencies of Adobe Flashplayer, especially in combination with Firefox 34 or later.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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So Red Hat are currently looking to hire into the various teams building and supporting efforts such as the Fedora Workstation, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and of course Fedora and RHEL in generaL. We are looking at hiring around 6-7 people to help move these and other Red Hat efforts forward.
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Fedora
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Today in Linux news Matt Hartley has the key to getting Linux adopted. Christian Schaller discusses some of the coming attractions of Fedora 22 and Phoronix.com is reporting that KDE 5 may also be coming to Fedora 22. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson gives Tumbleweed a roll and Softpedia.com is reporting that Steam is safe for Linux again.
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Fedora 21 was just released last month but already there’s a lot to get excited about for Fedora 22 when it’s released around the middle of May.
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For those of you keeping score at home, Smoogen is a long-time Fedora contributor who now serves on Fedora’s EPEL Steering Committee. And EPEL? That’s what’s commonly known as Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, “a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL),” according to their wiki.
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My guess is that this proposal will be debated among those in the Fedora Project, and my hope is that it crashes and burns. Smoogen made a “Devil’s Proposal,” but I hope he was prepared to catch hell for it.
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Even though Fedora 21 is just over a month old, the Fedora Workstation developers are already hard at work planning the next release, Fedora 22. In a detailed post on his blog, Christian Schaller details some of the areas that the developers are focusing on for Fedora 22.
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I would like to apologize for my last blog post. My original intention was to make an absurd point by proposing to drop 32 bit architectures from being primary in Fedora. I didn’t communicate clearly that this was meant to be absurd. It also did not clearly state that the problem I am worried about is that with many core developers only focusing on x86_64 and hardware that is less than 4 years old that people using x86_32 and ARM32 are in effect on borrowed time.
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We have found some bugs in PackageKit and related components which require an update to fix. Unfortunately, the bugs can prevent Fedora Workstation’s default update mechanism – the ‘offline update’ system, where a notification of new updates appears, and you reboot to install them – from working correctly. The bugs can also cause problems with software installation and/or removal when using GNOME Software or Apper (the KDE software manager).
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For Python stakeholders using Fedora, the Fedora 22 release is preparing to ship Python 3 as the one and only Python implementation on the installation media.
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Earlier this month it didn’t look like GCC 5 would be added to Fedora 22 unless the release was delayed and at least week’s FESCO meeting, the committee decided not to delay Fedora 22. After this week’s FESCo meeting, GCC 5 will now be added as the Fedora 22 compiler while still aiming for a mid-May release.
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Debian Family
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A new version of Stellarium was recently released (0.13.2), so I wanted to upload it to Debian unstable as I usually do. And so I did, but it was rejected without me even knowing, since I got no e-mail response from ftp-masters.
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Derivatives
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Not long ago, the Linux Mint team has decided to change their release policy and adopt only the LTS versions of Ubuntu, the systems released between to LTSs being only point releases that update the main components. Also, they have moved Linux Mint Debian Edition’s (LMDE) code base from Debian Testing to Debian Stable.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Earlier today, Canonical (“the company behind Ubuntu”) announced the arrival of Snappy Ubuntu Core, an operating system for the Internet of Things. The lightweight OS is designed to power things like drones, robots, appliances, and home automation platforms.
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As I’ve noted before, open source is perfect for the currently-fashionable Internet of Things, where you need an extremely lightweight, low-cost, customisable but secure and rock-solid operating system that can be easily ported to thousands of devices. Only free software fits that bill. I’ve written a couple of times about AllSeen’s bid to become the de facto operating system for the Internet of Things. But of course, it would be too simple – and not necessarily advisable – if there were only one solution, even an open source one. And so it’s probably a good sign that other projects are starting to pop up to address this important sector.
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After years of hype, the Internet of Things is finally making its way into this here reality of ours. The array of connected devices trying to integrate themselves into our lives—from watches and workout clothes to kitchen appliances and cars—only seems to grow as time marches futuristically onward. And if the company behind Ubuntu Linux has anything to say about it, this vast array of intelligent objects will all be open source.
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The new effort will extend Ubuntu’s Snappy Linux technology to help enable the Internet of things.
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One of the elements of Ubuntu Unity that I have been able to handle the least is Scopes. Part of that is due to the fact that Canonical has done a pretty terrible job of properly showing people what Scopes are and what they do. The other part is… no… actually, that’s really the whole problem. Here is how Ubuntu defines this feature:
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“Smart, connected things” are redefining our home, work and play, with brilliant innovation built on standard processors that have shrunk in power and price to the point where it makes sense to turn almost every “thing” into a smart thing. I’m inspired by the inventors and innovators who are creating incredible machines – from robots that might clean or move things around the house, to drones that follow us at play, to smarter homes which use energy more efficiently or more insightful security systems. Prooving the power of open source to unleash innovation, most of this stuff runs on Linux – but it’s a hugely fragmented and insecure kind of Linux. Every device has custom “firmware” that lumps together the OS and drivers and devices-specific software, and that firmware is almost never updated. So let’s fix that!
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The Internet of Things promises to immerse us in a world of intelligent everyday objects, from self-regulating heating systems and chargers than know when your device is fully charged to weight-watching kettles to the cliched “internet refrigerator”.
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Flavours and Variants
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Not going to lie, talking with you a few weeks ago had me feeling a bit nostalgic about the project. This past weekend was one of my first full weekends at home in the last four months. I sat down to finish cleaning up the Bodhi build scripts and before I knew it I was spinning up some fresh ISO images.
My schedule in the future is looking to be less hectic and I was able to set aside more time in the next six weeks to get things really ironed out for the new release. The new folks are still helping with the project, but I feel I asked too much of them by dumping the responsibility of a new major release on them.
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The venerable PC/104 stackable connector/mezzanine form-factor has gone through half a dozen major updates during its 24-year history. This time, the advancement takes the form of the addition of a significantly more compact OneBank bus connector option, added as part of rev 3.0 of the PC/104 Consortium’s “PCI/104-Express and PCIe/104 Specification.”
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While this is certainly exciting, virtualization remains a roadblock to some in the smart car industry. I personally had the opportunity to demonstrate GlobalLogic’s Nautilus platform for automotive virtualization at GENIVI’s CES demo and networking event. Leveraging a TI J6 SoC, I demo’d a dual-screen virtual cockpit with one screen emulating a Linux-powered driver information display, and the other screen emulating an Android-powered IVI system. The entire configuration ran on Xen Project Hypervisor 4.5 with three domains: Dom0 (thin control), DomU (Linux), and DomU (Android).
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The infusion comes just a few weeks after investors backed Rethink Robotics Inc. and highlights the latest in a string of artificial intelligence startups leveraging algorithms based on user preferences that deliver different results as the user evolves.
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Phones
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General-purpose PCs have long since made a mature market and everyone in the food-chain is desperately trying to wring “value” from the legacy PC while they still can. There will continue to be a need for large screens, keyboards and mice but with voice-input becoming feasible in mobile, it won’t be long before keyboards will be optional on desktops. In such a market, adoption of GNU/Linux is one of the few ways forward that can still provide income to most of the food-chain. GNU/Linux costs less to buy and less to maintain but there’s still enough maintenance to provide a living to retailers and IT-types.
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Android
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The Document Foundation (TDF) is happy to see the LibreOffice Viewer (Beta) for Android released in the Google Play Store, allowing mobile users to access Open Document Format (ODF) files from devices such as tablets and smartphones.
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A few months ago we told you that one of the hottest office suites out there, LibreOffice, was in development for the Android consumer base. The report also mentioned that the app would be made available soon, but no specific dates were given.
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Is it the fate of every popular app — especially the open source ones — to be ported to Android? LibreOffice has made that leap, but don’t expect to take your work on the road with your tablet yet.
Collabra Productivity, a major contributor to the LibreOffice project and a provider of LibreOffice services and consulting, has released the first version of a LibreOffice port for Android. However, it is — by design — an extremely minimal application, not intended to do much more than preview text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.
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So, I started to check the apitrace (retrace) source code to see how and if it can be ported on Android. The challenge was to pass the application arguments and to redirect somehow the stdout and stderr from the device to the desktop.
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The BBC is giving the free BBC News app for iOS and Android its first major redesign since it launched in 2010. The new app will roll out for both platforms in the UK over the next few days and go global over the next few months.
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The Android of today is worlds better than what we had even a few years ago, but Google is certainly not infallible. Android has been evolving at a breakneck pace since it hit the market in 2008, and sometimes that has led to errors in judgement. Mistakes were made. There are plenty of examples where Google had to backpedal (or pull a feature entirely) after it failed to catch on, and here are four of the most prominent.
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The centerpiece of the announcement is the Android duo, the Pro Slate 12 and Pro Slate 8, slates in the truest of senses. The larger 12.3-inch model actually has a lower resolution at 1600×1200 pixels, resulting in a rather mediocre by today’s standards 163ppi.
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Are you an Android user who loves Instagram? Then you may soon have a chance to be an early beta tester of the photo-sharing app’s new features for Google’s mobile platform.
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Much of the initial work was done by Tor Lillqvist, while at SUSE (now Collabora), creating a cross-compilation framework which we continue to use for iOS, Android and was originally setup to do cross-compiles to Windows – so that we could have a predictable toolchain, and a reliable/repeatable free-software build environment. Tor also did some amazing bootstrapping work to overcome several debilitating limitations of C++ on Android, get to get the initial startup, and packaging into a good state.
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Android. It can be a divisive word in the free and open source software world. Some embrace it, others shun it. Some still use open versions of Android like Cyanogenmod and Replicant. If you do use an Android device—no matter what version of the operating system it is—there’s one thing that you need to get the most out of your device: apps. There’s just no way around that.
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In a relatively short period of time, mobile devices have become ubiquitous in the workplace. A recent survey of enterprise and small business workers found that just 3 percent of organizations ban their employees from using personal iPads or iPhones for business use, and only 7 percent ban Android devices. In fact, 40 percent of organizations provide iPhones for more than a quarter of employees, and 25 percent provide Android-based smartphones.
The open source community has responded to this trend with a host of new projects, including solutions that help enterprises track and manage mobile devices, mobile development tools for creating new apps and open source apps that enable greater productivity. This month, we’ve put together a list of 50 of these tools that are worth notice. While there are many good open source mobile apps for home users, this list focuses instead on those that would be most useful in the workplace.
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Marc Frons, senior vice president and chief information officer of the New York Times, discusses how The Times actively contributes to open source communities.
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Two major open source Java projects, Groovy and Grails, are looking for new sponsors.
Pivotal, a company which supplies tools for big data analytics and cloud-oriented agile development, has announced the end of its funding for Groovy (a dynamic language that runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and Grails (a web application framework which uses Groovy) from March 2015.
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Whether you’re starting an open source project or deciding whether to participate in one, you don’t want to waste time in an endeavor that imposes arbitrary restrictions that will stop you in your tracks down the line.
The Open Source Initiative, of which I am president, has successfully focused on copyright licensing as a concrete expression of software freedom. OSI does not only provide guidance in the form of the Open Source Definition; it also manages a process by which the copyright licenses used for outbound licensing by open source authors can gain OSI approval.
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AnsibleFest comes around at an interesting time i.e. every major software player from CA to HP to IBM and onwards is currently trying to sex-up the abilities of its software orchestration engines, configuration management tools and continuous delivery offering — and the term DevOps is never far away.
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Events
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The Daala open-source, royalty-free video codec being developed by Xiph.Org and other organizations continues to be developed as an alternative to H.265 and VP9. While much progress is being made, it looks like another year of heavy development will be needed before Daala is ready for primetime.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Users of an experimental build of Firefox will be able to explore virtual reality inside the browser after Mozilla added support for the Oculus Rift headset.
People running Firefox Nightly will be able to explore 3D environments inside web pages using the Rift, following the addition of support for the WebVR API.
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Since last week, WebVR support has been present in Firefox Nightly builds for having core VR support to work with devices like the Oculus Rift.
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Mozilla’s Servo Engine that’s written in the Rust programming language and designed to be a highly parallel layout engine continues to be advancing very well and could see an alpha release this year.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Earlier this month, Mirantis announced the launch of Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, the latest version of its OpenStack cloud computing distribution. According to the company, it is based on OpenStack Juno, and version 6.0 is the first OpenStack distribution to let partners write plugins that install and run their products automatically.
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“Pure-play” OpenStack vendor Mirantis believes existing cloud computing training programs for OpenStack don’t meet the soaring demand for expertise in the open source cloud platform. That’s why it’s expanding its OpenStack training offerings with two new courses and a certificate verification portal.
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Platform9 is hoping to make it easier for organizations to adopt private cloud with the introduction of Platform9 Managed OpenStack. The company is describing the new solution as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that “transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes.”
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A conversation on the OpenStack-Community listserv caught my eye this week, which started with a simple question: “I’ve been contemplating starting a new OpenStack meet-up and am excited about meeting with and hearing what folks are doing in the local area. While continue working on this, I’m wondering how others who have created user groups got the word out and evangelized?”
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Recently, Mesosphere has been covered here on OStatic in a series of posts, including an interview with the company’s Ben Hindman, in which he discusses the need for a “data center operating system.” Mesosphere’s data center operating system is built on the open source Apache Mesos project, which is being leveraged by many organizations for distributed resource and network management.
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IBM is announcing a significant stride in its bid to be the best cloud company with a $500 million services contract today with Anthem.
Under the deal, IBM will build a hybrid cloud environment for Anthem, transforming that company’s information technology infrastructure. IBM recently formed its IBM Cloud business unit, bringing together a team of services, software, development, and research initiatives to further fuel IBM’s momentum in this market and accelerate new innovations into the marketplace.
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CMS
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The winner this year will not be a surprise to anyone as it’s the very CMS that has been taking over the world of content management of late. We would be remiss to not hand this award to the incredibly popular..
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Business
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Open Source Strategies has released opentaps CRM2, a new free extension for online stores running Magento.
Using big data analytics, the opentaps CRM2 extension for Magento automatically links email with orders. All past customer communications, support requests, and tasks for a customer are right where the customer’s orders are.
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BSD
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So, I dug in to how to set this up in an OpenBSD environment. First of all, whatever porting effort needed to make it run was already fixed, so “sudo pkg_add afl” takes care of that. Then you need to have a space to run the tests in, and since the fuzzer is going to create a huge amount of junk files to throw at your program, you really want this to be inside a tmpfs or mfs. This affects the speed a lot. It doesn’t need to be very big, just fast in creating and deleting files.
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Adam Nemet as part of Apple’s compiler team is looking to work out loop distribution and partial vectorization for upstream LLVM. He explained, “We’d like to propose new Loop Distribution pass. The main motivation is to allow partial vectorization of loops. One such example is the main loop of 456.hmmer in SpecINT_2006. The current version of the patch improves hmmer by 24% on ARM64 and 18% on X86. The goal of the pass is to distribute a loop that can’t be vectorized because of memory dependence cycles. The pass splits the part with cycles into a new loop making the remainder of the loop a candidate for vectorization.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 5 feature development is over and as of today the mainline code is in “stage four” development ahead of the GCC 5 release.
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Project Releases
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Popular messaging service WhatsApp over 700 million monthly active users has now launched a new services called WhatsApp web. “Today, for the first time, millions of you will have the ability to use WhatsApp on your web browser”, Jan Koun, founder of WhatsApp posted on facebook. Let’s see how to use this on our PC or Chromebook.
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Stellarium is an open source planetarium software that displays a realistic and accurate sky in 3D that is built for multiple platforms. The supported platforms include Linux and the developers have added a large number of features and they’ve also ported some of the changes to an older version.
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The latest feature added to NetworkManager is support for WiFi power-savings.
With devices that support WiFi powersave for WiFi adapters that support a power saving mode, NetworkManager will now enable it when appropriate.
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Public Services/Government
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The Dutch municipality of Arnhem wants to increase its use of free and open source solutions, says Martijn Leisink, municipal executive councilor responsible for ICT. The primary aim is to replace proprietary server solutions by open source alternatives. Getting rid of IT vendor lock-in on the desktop workstations will be difficult, and is deferred until later.
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Licensing
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As we know, use of the term “infographic” generally causes involuntary gagging and may result in unwelcome skin irritation.
Paradoxically, open source licensing and vulnerability management solutions company Protecode (pron: pro-ta-code) appears to be using the “information graphic” (to use the old school expression) approach to good effect.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’ve been keeping up with augmented and virtual reality news, you’ll remember that spacial haptic feedback devices aren’t groundbreaking new technology. You’ll also remember, however, that a professional system is notoriously expensive–on the order of several thousand dollars. Grad students [Jonas], [Michael], and [Jordi] and their professor [Eva-Lotta] form the design team aiming to bridge that hefty price gap by providing you with a design that you can build at home.
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Open Data
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As a former database manager of a junior exploration company, I have had the run-down of how data should be kept: a secret. The majority of mining data is proprietary and companies carefully guard this data for a variety of different reasons. One of these reasons is the sheer cost of obtaining this data. My company spent over $20 million in exploration and at the end of the day what remains valuable is the data. Another reason that data is guarded so carefully is that it needs to go through a careful vetting process before it can get released to the public. Geologists must qualify for professional designation before being eligible to release technical reports to the public, in Canada; those technical reports are referred to as 43-101s. This requirement is in place to stop market scandals and hold geologists accountable for their scientific integrity. I agree that geological data should be released to investors and the public with ethical standards. The last reason that mining data and methods are kept proprietary is to maintain an edge over competitors. Logically speaking, it does make sense to avoid leaking trade secrets, however, the world is a rapidly changing place and we should consider radically new approaches to one of the oldest industries.
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Open Access/Content
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I first met Stephen O’Connor, a fifth grade public school teacher at Wells Central School, at the New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education Conference in 2007. I don’t recall the exact subject of his presentation, but I came away from his presentation with some new information that helped me implement Moodle in my classroom. He pointed me in the direction of a good hosting company that allowed me to work on Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress development, which I was most interested in at the time.
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Open Hardware
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An open hardware computer is a computer for which all the specifications for manufacturing the computer are provided, not just the source for the software that runs on it. Software source code of an application enables experienced developers to rebuild, modify, and extend that software application. Similarly, the source code for an electronics printed circuit board (PCB) or mechanical drawings for a computer enclosure enables experienced developers to build, modify, and extend the hardware. By hardware, I mean that computer board in a case you put on your desktop, by your television, in your car or wherever you might be using it, even in your thermostat or water sprinkler.
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Programming
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At MediaFire, it’s no secret that we are huge fans of the open source community. From server management, to building next generation storage applications, open-source tools enable us to do great things.
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Open source has helped shape the team at PushAgency.io into the programmers and developers we are today. We’ve used it throughout our educations and careers, and now incorporate it into the products and services we deliver.
We look up to people like Linus Torvalds and companies like 37Signals for their contributions to the open source movement, and it’s a goal of ours to give back to the community in some way. Now that our business has reached a level of maturity, we feel we’ve made it to the point where we can devote some development time to open sourcing small parts of our product, SimplyBuilt. This is how our first open source project materialized.
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When biicode began, almost two years ago, many risks were taken by both the founders and investors. Our funders invested a lot of money with just a simple prototype in their hands. Our founders quit their safe and well-paying job positions at prestigious universities. The opportunity was huge though, because there are approximately 4 million C/C++ developers, and both languages represent up to almost 20% of the world’s code. Moreover, these tools easily become standardized. Once the most popular and reused libraries of a specific programming language are handled with ease and effectiveness by a given dependency manager, this tool naturally becomes the standard.
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Facebook developers have released version 3.5.0 of HHVM as a faster alternative to the reference PHP implementation.
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Standards/Consortia
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As part of the Open Consortium Interconnect, led in particular by Samsung, Intel and Cisco, published a first version of the Internet of Things (IoT) source code standard IoTivity. It will allow connected devices from different manufacturers to communicate and compete with AllJoyn standard, led by Qualcomm, Microsoft and LG.
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Science
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A new study from the University of Exeter has found that viruses carried by commercial bees can jump to wild pollinator populations with potentially devastating effects. The researchers are calling for new measures to be introduced that will prevent the introduction of diseased pollinators into natural environments.
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Security
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And that thing about federal prison I opened the post with? That’s the way the DOJ wants it. The CFAA currently allows for misdemeanor charges under certain circumstances. But this proposal does away with that. Instead of a misdemeanor-to-3 year sentence range, punishments start at 3 years and escalate to a 10-year cap. Unless, of course, your hacking is part of the commission of another felony, in which case the government proposes it should get to double dip (at minimum).
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And while Java, once a favorite exploit platform, gets harder and harder to compromise, attackers have simply moved on to new targets such as Silverlight.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The BBC led their 10 O’clock News today with a five minute piece on the delay to the Chilcot report. It gave a retrospective on the Iraq War that did not mention, once, Weapons of Mass Destruction as the raison d’etre but told us the war “removed a brutal dictator”. They said the dead of the war were in thousands – not hundreds of thousands, not even tens of thousands. “Thousands died”, they said. Literally true, but diminishing the scale. They could equally have said dozens died, also literally true – just an awful lot of dozens.
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We caused it by our invasions, occupations and bombings of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, none of which had ever attacked the UK. We caused it by all the dead women and children that British bombs, missiles or bullets killed accidentally. We caused it by the terrible deaths of the people we killed deliberately, who were only defending their country from foreign invaders, just as most of us would do. We caused it by the detainees killed or tortured. As a country, the United Kingdom caused it.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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CNN offered just a tiny bit more, saying that “she was a tea party favorite for her positions on everything from abortion to the federal minimum wage”–on the latter, “she doesn’t believe in a ‘one-size-fits-all approach’”; her position on abortion, and on everything else, went undescribed.
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Fox News host Bill O’Reilly falsely claimed that he had no role in hyping the myth that Muslim “no-go zones” exist throughout France, just days after Fox News apologized for spreading the fiction. In fact, O’Reilly previously cited the so called “no-go zones” as one of the contributing causes of the Paris terror attacks.
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Newly-elected Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) will give the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, perhaps providing further proof that the Koch political network has evolved into an independent political force.
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The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank complains that Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t have enough terrorism in it. Why, it only mentioned “terrorism,” “terror” or “terrorists” nine times!
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Rogers is a Republican strategist who chairs and co-founded the BGR Group with former Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) in 1991. As the Post itself has reported, the firm is one of the top Washington D.C. lobbying firms, having banked more than $15 million in 2014. The newspaper’s reporters have described Rogers as a “Republican mega-lobbyist,” “lobbyist extraordinaire,” and “a go-to guy for Republicans.”
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This week, Republican presidential hopefuls like Gov. Scott Walker, Gov. Chris Christie, and Sen. Rand Paul will travel to an exclusive resort near Palm Springs, Florida to kiss the rings of David and Charles Koch.
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After a scorching two-year controversy involving a “John Doe” criminal investigation into potential illegal coordination between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and outside big money groups, state GOP leaders are readying a legislative package to dismantle the nonpartisan elections board.
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Censorship
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BROADCASTER SKY is joining the puritanical push for pornography filters and, like the rest of the industry, is throwing up a thick curtain in front of the more salacious elements of the web, and some of its security risks.
Such curtains, we’ll call them sainted aunt filters, are employed by the majority of ISPs because that is how the UK government likes it.
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Privacy
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The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more.
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I remain convinced her and the Cabinet’s position on encryption is based on a non-technical misinterpretation of detailed advice from within the Home Office. Her response, and other responses by her colleagues and by the US government, imply that the security officialdom of the US & UK believes it can resurrect “golden key” encryption where government agencies have a privileged back door into encryption schemes.
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“I guess seeing your passwords on someone else’s computer screen generates some strong feelings,” cyber expert Markus Alkio said to me, as I stared at the results of what he’d managed to dig up.
He was right. After two weeks of having my personal information raked over by researchers tasked with digging out as much as possible, I was indeed bewildered by just how much of what I’d thought was private turned out to be nothing of the sort.
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Civil Rights
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Video games developer Zoe Quinn is fighting a hate-filled online campaign against her by launching Crash Override – a service dedicated to helping other whose lives are made miserable by online abuse and threats
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The chaos behind the scenes of the official inquiry into child abuse has been laid bare with accusations of bullying and silencing members as the investigation struggled to get off the ground.
One panel member, Sharon Evans, an abuse survivor and chief executive of the Dot Com children’s charity, told MPs the inquiry’s counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, had in effect taken it over in the absence of an appointed chairman, and had made threats and intimidated panel members.
She made the accusations to the Commons home affairs select committee as the home secretary, Theresa May, considers whether to disband the independent panel and create a fresh statutory inquiry.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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To derail February’s expected unveiling of Title II-based neutrality rules, the broadband industry is engaged in a last ditch effort to pass some of the flimsiest net neutrality rules we’ve seen yet. Spearheaded by Senator John Thune and Representative Fred Upton (the latter a particular magnet of Comcast campaign contributions), the goal appears to be to propose intentionally awful neutrality rules, offer a few meager concessions, then insist the marginally-less-awful result was crafted only after a long “public conversation” and with bipartisan support.
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The Senate and House are holding hearings today on a legislative proposal to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or throttling online traffic. It is encouraging that the bill’s sponsors, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), now recognize that net neutrality is a legitimate public policy concern rather than a “solution in search of a problem,” as Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, described it last year. However, as is often the case in policymaking, the devil is in the details.
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DRM
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This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today’s topic is “you bought it, you own it,” — a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA — the You Own Devices Act — which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the devices with the software on it without creating a copyright mess. It was a small attempt to take back basic property rights from copyright law which often stamps out property rights. Hopefully, a similar bill will show up in the new Congress, and become law. Even better would be for copyright law to actually recognize true property rights, rather than limiting them at nearly every turn.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Because of the complicated nature of power-sharing in the European Union, some international agreements require the approval of both the European Parliament and of every Member State — so-called “mixed agreements.” It is generally accepted that both the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) and TAFTA/TTIP are mixed agreements, and will therefore require a double ratification: by the full European Parliament, and all the EU governments. Indeed, the European Commission has frequently cited this fact to bolster its assertion that both CETA and TAFTA/TTIP are being negotiated democratically, since the European public — through their representatives — will have their say in these final votes.
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Copyrights
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From phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment, software is helping our stuff work better and smarter. But those features come at a high hidden cost: the rapid erosion of ownership. Why does that matter? Because when it comes to digital products, owners have rights. Renters on the other hand, have only permission.
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In 2012, a contest for US schools to win a gig by Taylor Swift was hijacked by members of the 4chan website, who piled on its online vote in an attempt to send the pop star to a school for deaf children.
Now, imagine a similar stunt being pulled for a general election, if voting could be done online. Far-fetched? Not according to Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden’s Pirate party.
“Voting over the internet? Would you really want 4chan to decide your next government?” he said, during a debate about democracy and technology in London, organised by the BBC as part of its Democracy Day event.
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Over the past two years, as talk of copyright reform has escalated, we’ve also heard complaints about the supposed expansion of fair use, or “fair use creep.” That kind of talk woefully misunderstands how fair use works.
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It may seem odd to say so during Copyright Week, but copyright in itself isn’t very important. Sure, EFF expends a lot of time and energy arguing about copyright law, and some of our adversaries spend even more. But we don’t do so because copyright has any independent value. Rather, its value is derived from its ability to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (in the words of the US Constitution), as well as to promote other important values such as the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, education, and participation in cultural life.
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01.21.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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ArduPilot is the open source software which controls our own Vulture 2 spaceplane on the 3DR Pixhawk autopilot. As Tridge demonstrated, it can now be deployed on a range of hardware which, with the addition of a suitable interface, allows aficionados to create a fully-functioning autopilot.
Last year, for example, a group of Russians successfully raised funds for the Navio, an autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi.
As part of his talk, Tridge connected live to a model aircraft in Canberra, in this case equipped with an embedded Linux box – the BeagleBone Black – coupled to a PixHawk Fire Cape (PXF).
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Desktop
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I often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS). Here are my thoughts.
I’ve spent many years in the visual effects (VFX) industry from the perspective of being either an artist, compositor, video editor, or systems engineer. (I’ve even got film creds on IMDB!) In the past, I had the pleasure of cutting on, training people on, setting up, and supporting Avid Media Composer, the cream of the crop of professional real-time video editing tools for film and TV alike—at least before things like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere became useful enough to professionals.
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Every few months, new articles roll out proclaiming “this year” to be the year of the Linux Desktop. A wide selection of reasons are cited, explanations given, and various acts of patting we Linux users on the backs takes place.
I’d be first to admit that it’s worth celebrating each time something is made more secure or easier. But we’re still a long ways off from the average person trying out any Linux distributions on their own.
In this article, I’ll discuss an untapped resource that can be used to get desktop Linux into the homes of casual users and finally jump start Linux adoption outside schools, governments and geek circles.
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Microsoft is engaged in a silent war and it’s actually losing. They are fighting an enemy that is so insidious and so cunning that it’s actually hurting the company more than anything else. The enemy is called Chromebooks and they are using Linux.
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Windows fans are worried that the desktop PC will follow too closely the design of Windows 10 for phones and tablets, and they are right to do so. This all plays out due to Microsoft’s plans for convergence, but it’s a twisted approach that only makes things more complicated than they should be.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds, the founder and lead developer of the Linux open source operating system, has raised controversy with remarks about diversity and “niceness” among open source programmers.
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The number of companies that base their systems (especially those that don’t actually distribute their kernels outside the company) on the long-term stable releases of Linux caught me by surprise. We dismissed the idea of basing on long-term stable releases in Fedora after giving it a try circa Fedora 14, and it generally being a disaster because the bugs being fixed didn’t match up much to the bugs our users were seeing. We found that we got more bugs we cared about being fixed by sticking to the rolling model that Fedora is known for.
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On the Internet, no one cares if you’re a dog, the saying goes. In open source, no one cares if you’re a jerk.
That seems to be the lesson emerging from Linux founder Linus Torvalds’ latest run-in with the sensitivity police. In the open source world, code is king (or queen). The people who write it don’t necessarily matter.
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He switched to Mandrake Linux because his Windows machine kept crashing and built his Linux skills by tinkering on his home computer. As he learned more, he took a series of sysadmin jobs that were progressively more advanced. He’s now a Linux Foundation Certified Engineer and is looking for his next career opportunity.
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A question and answer session at Australia’s national Linux conference has led to a bitter Twitter attack on Linux creator Linus Torvalds by Shanley Kane, founder of tech and culture essay publisher Model View Culture.
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Graphics Stack
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My personal Nvidia repository has seen quite a few updates on versions, CUDA enablements, legacy drivers and Delta RPMS.
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After a decade of working for Intel, he left the company and started working at HP. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now serving as a “distinguished technologist” at HP. Prior to joining Intel in late 2005, he had worked for HP for a couple years as an engineer following his SUSE days. The X.Org BoD page has also been updated to reflect his employment now by HP.
Outside of his open-source graphics roles as the X.Org Server release manager and X.Org BoD member, he also remains a member of the Debian Technical Committee.
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Applications
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Right before the 2014 holidays, and more than 10 years after the first line of NetworkManager was typed, we released version 1.0. A huge milestone on the way to making NetworkManager more cooperative, more flexible, more configurable, and more useful than ever before.
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No need for a introduction to Telegram, right? Telegram is a popular free Instant messenger application that can be used to chat with your friends all over the world. Unlike Whatsapp, Telegram is free forever, no ads, no subscription fees. And, the Telegram client is open source too. Telegram is available for many different platforms, including Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and Mac OS X. The messages which are sending using telegram are highly encrypted and self-destructive. It is very secure, and there is no limit on the size of your media and chats.
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Linux programs to make a detailed recording of themselves as they run, claimed Undo Software of Cambridge as it announced a product called Live Recorder.
“Until now, in order to solve a problem reported on code running in production, developers have needed to gather information relating to the failure to write a test case and, or, reproduce the bug in-house,” said the firm. “Recording enables developers to debug an exact copy of the original program’s execution, allowing them to track down bugs without needing to reproduce them in-house, write test cases, or make visits to customer sites.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Verde Station is a strange game. It lets you wander through a space station. You’re all on your own for a full year and just need to keep the station running. You can think of it as a sort of a solitude simulator.
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Age of Wonders III is confirmed to be heading to Linux, and it has seen more activity on the SteamDB, but the developer has noted the Linux build is a “bit too Michael Bay at the moment”. Hah!
For those that don’t know, Michael Bay is a director who loves his explosions, so it means the Linux version is a bit unstable right now, but it is coming!
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Steam has done a lot for us, and they are always adding useful features people get excited about. Game streaming is huge now, and Steam wants a bit of the pie.
What better way to keep customers around than to get them to buy and watch games on Steam directly?
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Xonotic is a free and fast-paced first-person shooter for multiple platforms, including Linux, developed by a team of people from all over the globe. The latest version is now 0.8 and it gathers a large number of improvements.
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Cue heavy breathing, Shadow Warrior, the fantastic and brutal looking FPS from Flying Wild Hog and Devolver Digital has some very promising signs it’s going to come to Linux.
The game has “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam from 5,804 people. With very few bad reviews, and that’s quite amazing.
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4MDoom 11.0 Beta is a new Linux distribution based on 4MLinux distribution and basically booting directly into a game, without any kind of other desktop or features.
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I know quite a few people who will be waiting on this, and it looks like The Banner Saga is preparing their Linux release now.
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Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath is an interesting looking mix of adventure and RPG that has graphics similar to “Realm of the Mad God”.
It has been out on Linux for over a year now, but has finally made its way onto Steam. Nice to see too, as I had completely forgotten about it, did you?
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As a big Star Wars fan I approve of this. STAR WARS: DARK FORCES is now officially available and supported on Linux and is available from GOG.
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Heroes of Steel is a top-down RPG game developed and published on Steam by a studio called Trese Brothers. The developers have just released a patch that makes the game compatible with Linux platforms.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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One gap that has not been closed yet is support for Wacom tablets. The required libinput changes and Wayland protocol extensions did not quite make it into libinput 0.8 – but much of the work has been done and will hopefully land before long.
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Reviews
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MakuluLinux 6 Cinnamon, a Linux distribution based on the Debian testing branch, Jessie, that provides stability, speed, and a modern desktop, has been upgraded to version 2.0 and is now ready for download.
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New Releases
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Today I’ve released a new version of uid_wrapper (1.1.0) with full threading support. Robin Hack a colleague of mine spent a lot of time improving the code and writing tests for it. It now survives funny things like forking in a thread. We also added two missing functions and fixed several bugs. uid_wrapper is a tool to help you writing tests for your application.
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HandyLinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian and Xfce that comes with a special kind of launcher and desktop interface, has been upgraded to version 1.8.0. The developers have made a large number of improvements and that is quite obvious from the big changelog, although many of them are not very complex.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux has received a new update pack and the developers have upgraded many of the core components and applications. This particular update was made available for testing more than a week ago and now it’s ready in its stable form.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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For the past several years, there have been two semi-official rolling release distributions for openSuSE Linux. The obvious one, the ‘Factory’ distribution, was actually supposed to be where development for the next release was going on, but a lot of people (including me) were willing to use it despite the inherent instability. I learned the hard way, for example, that the Factory Live images were very frequently the first thing that got broken during the development cycle, and the last thing to get fixed before a new release was made. So it was always better (safer) to use the full-blown installer images.
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Red Hat Family
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OpenSCAP support has been integrated into Red Hat Satellite and into the Spacewalk open source management platform.
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The enterprise software company said Tuesday that it has developed an on-premise, private cloud infrastructure with advanced IT services that includes its open-source Linux operation system for the space agency’s user communities.
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The European Space Agency has developed a “flexible and reliable” private cloud infrastructure, called ESA Cloud, which offers advanced IT services for its user communities. ESA Cloud, which partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is based on VCE systems, on a blade x86 architecture. It is managed entirely by Orange Business Services.
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Red Hat, Inc. RHT, -0.06% the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the European Space Agency (ESA) has developed an on-premise, private cloud infrastructure that offers advanced IT services for the agency’s user communities. The infrastructure partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and has proven to be flexible and reliable – critical for ESA’s environment. After seeing exceptional results, ESA has finalized the implementation of a similar infrastructure for another datacenter.
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Red Hat‘s OpenStack focus continues to move the company beyond its popular distribution of the Linux operating system, and investors are starting to notice. The company’s stock was up around 25 percent last year on the heels of several moves expanding its position and its place in the cloud ecosystem.
Its bigger vision and strategy is the open hybrid cloud. Red Hat provides common management, common storage and middleware that enables building workloads across footprints in heterogeneous environments. It helps an enterprise with its hybrid strategy by helping put the right workloads in the right place. Open source is the way to make everything work together and enable true hybrid cloud.
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Fedora
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I am going to make the uncomfortable and ugly proposal to drop 32 bit in Fedora 23 and only look at 64 bit architectures as primary architectures. All 32 bit architectures (arm7hl, i386) would be moved to being secondary architectures that would require their own build teams and ‘koji’ to maintain builds in future releases. At the moment that would make the only 64 bit primary architecture x86_64 with arm64 and ppc64 possible candidates for mainstream support in F24 (if they aren’t ready by Fedora 23).
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To get a context of changes, you will have to visit the current AskFedora instance and observe the changes. Newer slides and the desktop views are on the way. Even though this takes time, its important to have an idea of how you want your interaction with the application to be and FAD gave me a change to do some mockups before we dive into code and CSS.
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So taking into consideration most of the suggestions I had obtained during the recent Design FAD at Red Hat, the initial slides of desktop version are also ready. Maybe these are enough to start off with a basic CSS template which we can build upon iteratively while we work on more mockups for other major pages in parallel. Here is the updated mockup:
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For KDE users on Fedora, the Fedora 22 release is seeking to focus on the still-maturing Plasma 5 shell that’s powered by KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5.
An in-progress change proposal for Fedora 22 is to use Plasma 5 (and KF5/Qt5) with the latest KDE components to be fully-packaged in time for F22, an upgrade path be provided from KDE 4, and to retire any KDE 4 packages in Fedora that aren’t compatible with the “KDE 5″ work.
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Today in Linux news Matt Hartley has the key to getting Linux adopted. Christian Schaller discusses some of the coming attractions of Fedora 22 and Phoronix.com is reporting that KDE 5 may also be coming to Fedora 22. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson gives Tumbleweed a roll and Softpedia.com is reporting that Steam is safe for Linux again.
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Debian Family
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Soon after publishing the chromium/chrome extension that allows you to edit Debian online, Moez Bouhlel sent a pull request to the extension’s git repository: all the changes needed to make a firefox extension!
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Debian Linux doesn’t usually make many headlines about commercial software products. But the open source operating system is part of the latest anti-spam and anti-virus platform from Proxmox Server Solutions, which was released this week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical released a “Snappy” version of its lightweight, Ubuntu Core OS for IoT, featuring an app store, hacker-proof updates, and a 128MB RAM footprint.
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Canonical is today bringing Snappy Ubuntu Core out of the cloud and into physical devices with the reveal of Snappy Core for smart devices.
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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, wants to bring its operating system to more connected devices and intelligent objects with the launch of its “snappy” Ubuntu Core for the Internet of Things today. Over the last few months, the company launched “snappy” versions of Core on a number of cloud computing services, but given that the whole idea behind Core is to offer stripped-down versions of Ubuntu that developers can then easily customize based on their needs, the Internet of Things and robotics applications are a logical next area of focus for Canonical.
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Ubuntu could soon been powering all manner of connected devices and autonomous machines with the newly unveiled Snappy Ubuntu Core, which has been designed specifically for the Internet of Things.
As the latest and lightest version of the Ubuntu operating system, Snappy — as we will affectionately refer to it — is aimed at developers who want to create connected devices or robots using an open, safe system that isn’t overly clunky, and so can be easily customised.
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Ubuntu has released a number of patches for security vulnerabilities in several versions of the OS, including some remote code execution flaws in Thunderbird, which is included with Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been updated in order to fix a couple of RPM vulnerabilities that were identified.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi is a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu and that features low system requirements. The developers have just released a new Reloaded edition for the distro, but they decided to keep the RC tag, at least for now.
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Here’s some news that should make Bodhi Linux users happy. Jeff Hoogland has returned to Bodhi in his former position as project manager/lead developer.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Recent leaks show three new Samsung Tizen devices: a pair of cameras, and a round-faced “Orbis” watch with a digital crown, bezel, and wireless charging.
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Android
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Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: Get 73 per cent off 20×40-inch canvas photo prints from Big W, crashed RC plane captures amazing aquatic life, the worst bugs in Android 5.0 Lollipop (and how to fix them).
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Android 4.3 and earlier suffers from a vulnerability Google doesn’t plan on patching itself. Jack Wallen tells you what you can do to avoid possible exploits on your aging Android device.
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If you’re sceptical about rooting your Android smartphone for several reasons but still wonder what rooting exactly is or should you root your device or why do rooted phones get software updates so quickly and easily or how safe it would be, this article is for you.
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A video by Simrandeep Singh Garcha shows Tizen operating on the Samsung Z1, and demonstrates that Android apps are compatible on Tizen once an extra runtime layer is installed.
Samsung also unveiled its first range of smart televisions equipped with Tizen at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 in Las Vegas, as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Google. Plans for a Tizen TV have been in the works since last year, when the South Korean electronics giant showed off a prototype version at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Samsung has also rolled out Tizen-based digital cameras and smartwatches.
Tizen was born after Intel and the Linux Foundation decided they were going to abandon the MeeGo platform, and is an alternative operating system to Android and Apple’s iOS.
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With Android 5.0 Lollipop Google has slightly improved the lockscreen. There’s now a shortcut to the dialer by swiping left to right, and notifications are more useful and interactive. Shown right on the lockscreen they can be swiped away, slide down to expand, or double tap to instantly unlock right into that app or notification. Everything is simple and smooth, and we still have full-screen album artwork on the lockscreen while playing music.
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QualityTime, a new app for Android devices which launched today, hopes to make you more aware of how much time you spend on your device.
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Events
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Open source storage now has a convention all its own in the form of Vault. Organized by the Linux Foundation, this event will take place for the first time in March with speakers and sessions focused on distributed storage, the Btrfs and Ext4 file systems, memory management and much more. Read on for details.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Canonical published details about a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, which means that a new version is now available.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Oracle Board of Directors today announced that it has unanimously elected the Honorable Leon Panetta, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to the company’s Board of Directors. The election is effective as of January 19, 2015 and increases the size of the Board to 12 directors.
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Public Services/Government
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A public competition has been launched to boost the development of Oskari – a collection of map tools made available as open source by National Land Survey of Finland. Interested software developers have until the end of this month to submit proposals for applications using Oskari or for improvements to the existing tools. National Land Survey of Finland will award EUR 3,000 to the best application and EUR 1,000 for the best concept. Two more prices, EUR 1,000 each, will go to the next best projects.
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Peterborough City Council is looking to drop Microsoft and its “expensive” user agreements in favour of other, more open source applications and collaborative tools.
That’s what Richard Godfrey, ICT, strategy, infrastructure and programme manager for Peterborough Council, revealed to Computing in a recent interview.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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NON-WRESTLING ORGANISATION the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) has published its latest Open Data Barometer and awarded the UK government the ‘most open’ crown.
However, Tim Berners-Lee, head of the WWWF, said that it is a shallow win, and does not mean that the UK government is really open, just more open than others.
Openness, in these instances, relates to the way in which governments make official data available and usable.
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Page Three has split opinion in recent years. A ‘No more Page Three’ campaign, started in 2012 by Lucy-Ann Holmes and featuring the tagline “boobs aren’t news,” has attracted more than 200,000 signatures. It’s also been backed by MPs and anti-sexism charities.
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Here are 14 nightmare clients you may very well encounter on your quest for success as an independent software developer. May you have strength in recognizing, avoiding, and neutralizing them, when possible. Please feel free to add your own in the comments below.
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Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.
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For the past six months or so, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the quality of Apple software. From the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, to the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, I’ve gotten a bad feeling about Apple’s software quality management. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.
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The rise of iPad apps such as Microsoft Office would make the transition easier than you might expect, but it’s still no slam-dunk
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a recent video from Saudi Arabia, three uniformed security officers and a professional swordsman in a white gown struggled to placate a woman cloaked in black and sitting in the street.
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Surprisingly, there have been a number of mainstream celebrities to actually speak up about the blatant propaganda film and its celebration of death.
Actor Seth Rogen was even bold enough to compare the movie to a Nazi propaganda film.
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On Tuesday, Shiite insurgents overran Yemen’s presidential palace, posing a coup-style threat to current President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Should Hadi be pushed out, it’ll likely have broad consequences: Hadi had proven himself a loyal ally in the fight against al-Qaeda’s much-feared branch in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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The U.S. government should immediately close and evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
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To Khalek, any movie that lionizes Kyle represents “dangerous propaganda that sanitizes a mass killer and rewrites the Iraq War.” She said Kyle was consumed by “unrepentant bloodlust” fueled by “hatred, bigotry and enthusiasm for killing Iraqi ‘savages.’” Khalek got death threats almost immediately for her comments.
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In the wake of this month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, European leaders are calling for significant changes to what has long been a paradox of their borderless continent: Their citizens can move freely, but information about them does not.
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China dismissed accusations it stole F-35 stealth fighter plans as groundless on Monday, after documents leaked by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on a cyber attack were published by a German magazine.
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Transparency Reporting
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (2012) predicted this banality of evil in the digital age, alerting us to how the internet has been transformed into a “threat to human civilization” (p. 1). In his recent book When Google Met WikiLeaks (2014), Assange exposed Google’s part in the hijacking of large swaths of the Internet for surveillance in collusion with the U.S. government. He pointed out how by getting close to Washington halls of power, this Silicon Valley tech giant lost the “language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing” (p. 60).
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Finance
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The Bank of Canada surprised markets today by cutting its key overnight lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point, citing the economic threat posed by plunging oil prices.
Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz will hold a news conference at 11:15 a.m. ET Wednesday from Ottawa to comment on the bank’s rate cut as well as the lowered growth outlook. CBC is livestreaming his remarks.
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The British Bankers Association (BBA), which represents organisations including Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, has written to the Chancellor warning that his push to make Britain a haven for virtual currencies could be putting the country at risk.
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By 2016 the richest 1% of people in the world will own over 50% of its wealth, according to a study by Oxfam.
The latest calculation shows an increase on the 48% of wealth owned by the wealthiest 1% in 2014.
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Billionaires, world leaders and pop stars are clogging up the skies with their private jets as they descend on the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to liaise over issues such as terrorism, the central banks and growing economic inequality.
Over the course of this week, approximately 1,700 private jets are expected to fly into the region, resulting airport traffic increasing by 10% which means that landing spots are in short supply.
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In Switzerland, a whistleblower has been found guilty of violating bank secrecy laws by giving information on offshore accounts to WikiLeaks. Rudolf Elmer headed the Cayman Islands office of the bank Julius Baer until his firing in 2002. In 2011, he publicly handed compact discs containing information on offshore account holders to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a bid to reveal what he called the “damaging” impact of hiding money offshore. Elmer’s attorney has vowed to appeal the guilty verdict, which comes with a suspended fine, but no prison time.
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A former private banker found has been found guilty in Switzerland of breaking the country’s strict secrecy laws by passing confidential client data to WikiLeaks in 2007.
Rudolf Elmer claims he was trying to expose rich tax evaders banking with his former employer, Julius Baer, which fired him in 2002.
Elmer’s lawyer, Ganden Tethong, says Zurich’s district court also found her client guilty of forging a document purporting to be a letter from the bank to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The mayor of Paris plans to sue Fox News for its reporting on the city in the wake of the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“When we’re insulted, and when we’ve had an image, then I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.”
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Censorship
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Sky Broadband have announced they will force web-filters on all customers, starting this week, unless the account-holder opts out.
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All ISPs promised David Cameron they would make all customers choose whether to use filters or not. Sky is not offering a choice however – they are imposing filtering unless customers opt out – an approach that the government rejected after running their own consultation. In addition, most households do not contain children so, Sky’s default-on approach seems over-reaching.
Could Sky Broadband be seeking to increase adoption of web filters through “nudge” tactics in order to avoid Government criticism for a lack of uptake? Public interest in activating filters has been low since the Government started pressuring ISPs to introduce them in summer 2013. Ofcom said in July 2014 that just 8% of Sky Broadband subscribers had switched them on. The same report showed a 34% adoption-rate for competitor TalkTalk, who promote filters aggressively, and have made them the default option for new subscribers for a long time. Nudge tactics rely on the principle that most people don’t bother changing defaults.
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As part of David Cameron’s plan to protect young internet users, broadband providers have been forced to offer an “unavoidable choice.” This impels new subscribers to decide whether they want to enable or disable blocks on adult content. However, UK consumers have already highlighted their dislike for such filters, with only one in every seven customers letting the big four UK ISPs guard them from porn and the darker parts of the internet. One of those major providers, Sky, saw just eight percent of customers enable the option before July 2013, but that statistic could change drastically as part of new measures announced today.
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Privacy
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“cryptography is bypassed, not penetrated”
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Microsoft’s Outlook email service was subject to a cyberattack over the weekend, just weeks after Google’s Gmail service was blocked in China.
On Monday, online censorship watchdog Greatfire.org said the organization received reports that Outlook was subject to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in China. A MITM attack intrudes on online connections in order to monitor and control a channel, and may also be used to push connections into other areas — for example, turning a user towards a malicious rather than legitimate website.
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The N.S.A. claims it needs access to all our phone records. But is that the best way to catch a terrorist?
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The FBI wants to search through your electronic life. You may think it’s a given that the government is in the business of collecting everyone’s personal data — Big Brother run amok in defiance of the Constitution. But under the limits of the Fourth Amendment, nothing it finds can be used to prosecute its targets. Now the FBI is taking steps to carry out broad searches and data collection under the color of authority, making all of us more vulnerable to “fishing expeditions.”
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Inbox has the right idea, in that the protocol and API set it has devised are open source (GNU Affero GPL licensed), and the project is designed to appeal most directly to developers of email applications building on mobile platforms. A similar project both in its approach and its design is JMAP, a protocol proposed by FastMail. JMAP uses JSON to encompass and package all the possible requests and responses used for email: sending and receiving, calendaring, contacts, and so on.
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At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.
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In the past, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics firm Palantir, has called wealth “culturally corrosive.” A former money manager for high-net-worth individuals, the cofounder of the CIA-backed data analytics firm has maintained that personal riches were of little importance to him, despite associating with some of the world’s wealthiest to raise funds for his company.
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Civil Rights
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On January 22, jailed American journalist Barrett Brown will finally learn his sentence. This had been expected to happen last month, on December 16, but the government unleashed a torrent of exhibits, supposedly to demonstrate “relevant conduct”, and wasted the day with testimony from an FBI agent, eventually leading the judge, Sam A. Lindsay, to decide that he needed more time to make his decision.
Judge Lindsay should sentence Mr. Brown to time served. The man has been in jail for 28 months now, and I’ve been advocating for him at each step of the way. By now, many people have heard his name, and much has been written about him. The popular perception of Mr. Brown is based on his work with Anonymous and his crowd-sourced research outfit Project PM. He’s noted as an activist who made an impact to exact greater transparency: helping to overthrow Middle Eastern dictatorships, and investigating private intelligence firms.
Not a spokesperson for the group, but one who thoroughly understood its potential for collaboration and effecting change, Brown holds some Anonymous operations closest to his heart: OpTunisia, OpBahrain, the hack of HBGary’s Aaron Barr and the investigation that followed, which was termed OpMetalGear. He focused on the secret surveillance regime at a time when it was regarded as a paranoid conspiracy, as in before Snowden. Because of his activist brand of journalism, people messed with him – starting with security contractors and confidential informants, and rising to the FBI. This is all true and known information.
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GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.
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A Hockessin man arrested about 30 minutes after multiple gunshots were fired near Vice President Joe Biden’s Greenville home says he was “accosted” during an altercation with New Castle County Police.
Rock Peters, 57, was not charged in connection with the shooting incident, The News Journal has learned. But he faces reckless endangering and resisting arrest charges after fleeing from an officer near the Biden estate and scuffling with two others just before 9 p.m., according to a police affidavit.
“They’re lying through their teeth,” Peters said Monday night during an interview at his Hockessin home, saying the officers were the aggressors.
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Midway through the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, one comment stands out. “A criminal case,” defense attorney Edward MacMahon told the jury at the outset, “is not a place where the CIA goes to get its reputation back.” But that’s where the CIA went with this trial in its first week — sending to the witness stand a procession of officials who attested to the agency’s virtues and fervently decried anyone who might provide a journalist with classified information.
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In another tweet, the activist explained that he has to pay 200 BHD (£350) bail if he wants to stay out of prison until the appeal.
Rajab, who is president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) was freed in May 2014 after serving two years in prison for his role in the pro-democracy uprising. He was arrested again last October and charged with publicly “insulting a public institution” on the microblogging site.
The Bahraini ministry of interior said they summoned Rajab “to interview him regarding tweets posted on his Twitter account that denigrated government institutions”.
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“There is no hairdresser privilege,” the judge presiding over the case, Leonie Brinkema, ruled.
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While the jury will likely neither note nor learn of them, there were details from last week’s testimony in the Jeffrey Sterling trial that resonated with two other notable cases involving the CIA: the New York Police Department’s spying on Muslims and the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity.
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The 466-page handwritten manuscript was written in his single cell at Camp Echo in 2005. The Guardian and Canongate Books worked together to publish a declassified version. It still was censored by the United States government, and 2,500 black bars appear throughout the text accentuating the criminality described vividly by Slahi.
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Memoir serialised by Guardian tells how Mohamedou Ould Slahi endured savage beatings, death threats and sexual humiliation
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A Dutch court on Tuesday blocked the extradition of a man accused of having fought against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying it could not be ruled out that the CIA had been involved in his torture after his arrest in Pakistan.
Dutch court documents showed the suspect, a Dutch-Pakistani dual citizen named Sabir Khan, was tortured after his arrest by Pakistan’s ISI security service.
He faces charges in New York of conspiracy to commit murder and of supporting al-Qaida.
The court said the Netherlands could not transfer him because Dutch and international law prohibits the extradition of torture victims to countries that played a role in abuse.
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John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee to go to prison in connection with the agency’s torture program. Not because he tortured anyone, but because he revealed information on torture to a reporter.
Kiriakou is the Central Intelligence Agency officer who told ABC News in 2007 that the CIA waterboarded suspected al-Qaeda prisoners after the September 11 attacks, namely Abu Zubaydah, thought to be a key al Qaeda official. Although he felt at the time that waterboarding probably saved lives, Kiriakou nevertheless came to view the practice as torture and later claimed he unwittingly understated how many times Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding.
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Four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a junior member of Congress introduced a bill to establish a federal holiday to honor the slain civil rights leader.
Five decades later, the holiday is on the calendar, and that lawmaker, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), is now the longest-serving member of Congress.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Virgin Media, Vodafone and EE have promised to be more upfront with their subscribers about traffic management policies two and half years after rival, big name UK ISPs signed up to the voluntary “Open Internet Code”.
The telcos have also vowed not to choke the services of competitors, such as over-the-top players – Microsoft’s Skype for example, and the BBC’s iPlayer.
However, the code has long made it clear that it is perfectly acceptable for ISPs to throttle traffic to “manage” congestion or block sites and services based on a court order to, for example, cut off access to pirated material or to prevent illegal child abuse images from being served up on broadband networks.
BT, Sky, EE, KCOM, giffgaff, O2, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone are signatories of the code, trade body the Broadband Stakeholders Group said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After signing an anti-piracy deal with Xunlei last year the MPAA is already suing the Chinese file-sharing giant. What went wrong is unclear but documents obtained by TorrentFreak reveal the toughest and most shocking set of anti-piracy demands to be found anywhere on the planet.
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Julia Reda, a politician for the German Pirate Party and member of the European Parliament, has this morning released her draft report for the overhaul of EU copyright. In her role as rapporteur, Reda says that EU copyright rules are “maladapted” to the increase of cross-border cultural exchange facilitated by the Internet.
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It would be something of an understatement to say that European copyright is a mess, with different rules applying in each of the 28 Member States, making cross-border cultural exchange and business hard to the point of impossibility. But worse than that inconsistency is the fact that European copyright is simply not fit for the digital age. There is now a huge gulf between what copyright allows, and what the public would like to do – and, in many cases, is already doing online, irrespective of the law. That was revealed in the results of the European Commission’s consultation on copyright last year – shown most dramatically in this interesting visual representation of the widely-differing views on various aspects.
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As that small sample makes clear, this is pretty heady stuff. The copyright industries will doubtless fight very hard against practically everything here, as is their wont when any change to copyright in favour of the public is proposed.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.20.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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To make matters worse, Microsoft finds itself competing in mobile with companies it thought it had eliminated from the market — like Nokia for instance.
Microsoft may have bought the Finnish company’s mobile division back in 2011, but that hasn’t kept the “old” Nokia from keeping a hand in the mobile game, where it had once excelled.
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Desktop
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`Albert` is a relatively new quick launcher for Linux, which might remind you of Alfred (Mac) or Synapse (Linux). Using it, you can quickly launch applications, open files or perform web searches.
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Kernel Space
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For those interested in the annual Linux.Conf.Au conference that’s filled with tons of Linux/open-source technical talks but weren’t down in New Zealand last week for the event, the videos are available.
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Open source has come under fire by some recently for lacking enough diversity. Now some jokesters have responded by creating a fake Linux fork that pokes fun at feminism and diversity in software development.
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Not being a jerk doesn’t just mean tolerating noobs, though. Communities should have an established code of conduct which addresses both annoying and mean actors. When the code of contact is being repeatedly breached, the violator needs to be nudged in the right direction. When a community is welcoming and actively works to remain that way, it thrives. That’s how it can get the diversity of ideas and grow the technical competency that Linus Torvalds so desires.
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Another week, another -rc.
Fairly normal release, although I’d wish that by rc5 we’d have calmed down even further. But no, with some of the driver tree merges in particular, this is actually larger than rc4 was.
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Despite sounding fine when played by SMPlayer, the audio clips that sounded distorted/scratchy and too loud when played by Thunderbird also sounded that way when played by VLC. Then I discovered several other .wav files on various Web sites that sounded distorted when played by the browser’s Windows Media Player plug-in (Gecko Media Player). So the problem clearly was not caused by Thunderbird itself. I began to wonder if PulseAudio was the cause. So I adjusted PulseAudio’s sampling frequency, number of fragments and fragment size, and all the clips that previously sounded distorted and too loud now play fine. Here is what I did to fix the problem…
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The Paris Observatory has confirmed that, on the appointed day, atomic clocks will be programmed to add in 11:59:60 to compensate for the idiosyncratic nature of the Earth’s orbit. Linux- and Unix-based systems are expected to go tits up.
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People are less willing sometimes to brush the problem under the mat, and leave it up to vendors that have disclosures, like infinity long disclosure times,” he said. “I’m a huge believer in just disclosing, still somewhat responsibly, but security problems need to be made public — and there are people who argue, and have argued for decades, that you never want to talk about security problems because that only helps the black hats — and the fact is that I think you absolutely need to report them, and you need to report them in a reasonable time frame.
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Linus Torvalds has released yet another update for the Linux kernel 3.19 branch and this is the fifth Release Candidate in the series. The development cycle is getting closer to its end and that can be observed from the changelog.
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Graphics Stack
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A new stable NVIDIA driver has been released and the developers have made a series of very important improvements, implementing support for new video cards and Linux kernels.
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Benchmarks
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Like the reasoning for the mass OpenCL Linux comparison, the 2D benchmarks were done since having all of these graphics cards out and testing them on the latest proprietary drivers for the Unreal Engine 4 / Metro Redux game comparison. With not having done any big 2D performance comparison in a while, I ran these few extra tests to look at the 2D performance with the NVIDIA 346.22 driver compared to Catalyst 14.12 for the many different graphics cards.
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Applications
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As a Linux user, you always want to keep your files and folders up to date, and this is especially true in those situations where you can create a backup. This is why you have to use a tool that automatically syncs the content of two folders in order to keep them up to date. FreeFileSync is a utility that fits the bill quite nicely, since it automates the aforementioned process and makes it easy for you to compare as well as synchronize the content of any two different or similar files that are located on your computer or network.
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Documenting processes and systems or just keeping a diary of the daily happenings are things that many computer users are doing very often. RedNotebook is a professional application that allows you to create a log or journal of all those tasks as well as document issues with your network. The app can be seen as a professional journal for IT experts, although it can also be used by home users as well.
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PhotoQt 1.2 was released recently and it includes some important improvements, like better SVG support, XCF support, better handling of large folders (15,000+ files), shuffle and loop options for the slideshow and much more.
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PhotoQt is an image viewer written in Qt 5 with a very basic interface, yet many options under the hood, and a fullscreen mode by default. The latest release brings many new features and bug fixes.
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Data is growing both in volume and importance. As time goes on, the amount of data that we need to store is growing, and the data itself is becoming more and more critical for organizations. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to back up and restore this information quickly and reliably. Using cloud-based systems spreads out the data over many servers and locations.
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Proprietary
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A new Opera development version has been released and the makers have made a number of important improvements to the browser that include better bookmarks and new themes for the application.
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of the biggest driving factors behind the design of Qt3D 2.0 is the ability to configure the renderer in order to accommodate custom rendering techniques. In this blog post I will explain how to render a scene in Qt3D with shadows.
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Games
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The issue is being a bit overblown though, as you need to do some pretty specific stuff to make it happen, and it isn’t just on Linux, the issue does exist in some form on Windows too. On Windows for example if you install Steam inside a folder with other data, it will remove that too…
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I have been following this realistic survival game for about a year now as they stated Linux support on their official website. Some of its main features include an infinite procedurally-generated world, dynamic weather, hunting, crafting and on top of all that it has great graphics.
They will soon be on Steam Early Access, but don’t expect Linux support at that time. The good news though, is the developers have verified that they didn’t forget penguin lovers, but just won’t deliver the game for us at the initial release.
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This is a game that flew under the radar a little bit since its Linux launch a couple of months ago. Son of Nor is an action adventure title set amidst rolling dunes, temples and oases. Challenging collectibles, environmental puzzles and four player coop are just some of the game’s highlights.
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Aspyr Media, one of the studios that have been doing some of the biggest and most important ports for the Linux platform, has revealed that it’s almost breaking even financially and this is actually great news.
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Aspyr Media has revealed that it is betting its future on the success of Valve’s SteamOS project, and that despite the tiny minority of machines running Linux is already approaching a break-even point.
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Move or Die, a new competitive party game developed and published on Steam by Those Awesome Guys studio, has been released for all the supported platforms, including Linux.
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Rich Geldreich, the former Valve developer associated with some of the game company’s past Linux and OpenGL projects, is getting close to releasing LZHAM v1.0 as his lossless data compression library.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Around 1999 I discovered an SUSE Linux live CD and I was fascinated with the open source communities who were behind this operating system and the different applications. But I was young and inexperienced. I thought that I had to use the industry standard tools to be competitive. As I grew up, I realised that they were just tools and I was the artist. These days I think that open source communities are more important than ever! They are like a torch in the dark.
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I know I know, the PIM sprint has already been last November, but in my defence (@David: !!!), the VDG and KDE as a whole has been so buzzing with activity in the meantime that I didn’t find the time to write the blog post I had meant to write about it. So here it is, better late than never.
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Krita is considered to be a digital painting application, but it’s best described as a raster graphics editor. No matter what you call it, the Paris 8 University has decided to drop Adobe’s Photoshop and to adopt Krita instead.
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As a part of my ongoing project “Adding new themes for KDE Pairs game”, a new theme ‘Stationery’ is added. The motivation behind selecting the particular theme lies on its simplicity. Stationery objects are very much familiar with pre-school children rather than other objects. Hence these stationery items can be used in the ‘Pairs’ game to develop their logical skills, rather than worrying about their familiarity with the domain.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Ubuntu developers have corrected a small issue with GTK+, which would allow users to bypass the lock screen in certain conditions. It might be a trivial matter, but it had to be fixed nonetheless.
According to the security notice, “Clemens Fries discovered that GTK+ allowed bypassing certain screen locks by using the menu key. An attacker with physical access could possibly use this flaw to gain access to a locked session.”
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The Linux Mint developers are not only working on the next iteration of the operating system, they are also trying to improve upon the Cinnamon desktop environment, which is also built by them.
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For the average desktop computer user I would recommend Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, Elementary and openSUSE as first choices with Debian, Fedora, Mageia and CentOS as secondary options. I would only choose Arch if you really want to control every aspect of your computer from top to bottom or you have an interest in learning more about the underpinnings of using Linux.
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Manjaro Xfce 0.9.0 Pre1, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, is now ready for testing and download.
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Reviews
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How shall I put it? Let there be no doubt. Manjaro 0.8.11 is a better version than 0.8.5 that I tested a while back. But calling it the best and most awesomest KDE around, as I’ve seen here and there in various forums and social media sites is literally pushing it. Now, it does deserve a lot of praise, A LOT, regarding its visual appearance. However, that is not enough to distract from or reduce the impact of the underlying system bugs.
Desktop effects, printing, broken Steam packages, weird menu entries, misbehaving media player, an identity-confused collection of software, installation issues, missing swap use and very high memory consumption, all of these are big problems that the Manjaro dev team needs to address. But overall, the important thing here is progress.
But if you’re asking me, the distro needs to simplify its mission statement, and focus on the core message of practicality. Hopefully, we will see that happen soon. Let’s call it the emergence of Manjaro into its own rightful place. At the moment, it’s trying to do so much, at the same time, it’s like a juggler with one ball too many. Grade wise? Hmmm, well, something like 7.5-8/10, and I am being generous. However, if all else fails, it so damn beautiful. Definitely one of the top three. Imagine Plasma 5 there. Looking forward to the next version.
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I downloaded the most recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid” which is said to feature Unity 8 running on Mir. I then tried running the technology preview in VirtualBox and on a desktop machine. When running in VirtualBox, at first Ubuntu with Unity 8 seemed quite similar to Ubuntu running the classic Unity desktop. The system booted, asked if I would like to try running the desktop in live mode or if I would like to install the operating system. Attempting to try the live desktop mode brought me to a login screen. I was unable to login or reach a terminal from the login page and so I rebooted my VirtualBox instance and tried installing Ubuntu’s Vivid preview.
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If you are looking for a trouble free KDE distro for long term use, look no further than Linux Mint. The Linux Mint 17.1 KDE is perhaps the best KDE distro I’ve used in quite sometime. Though it presents the stock KDE DE but it irons out a lot of bugs and presents a really stable, smooth to use and super efficient distro. The RAM and CPU consumption is one of the lowest I have noted among KDE spins, the boot time is decent and the battery life is simply the best among Linux operating systems. It symbolizes the amazing work done by the developers before releasing a distro. I wish all other distros were like Linux Mint.
So, by now you have understood that Mint 17.1 KDE is definitely recommended from my side for all users looking for a good KDE distro devoid of bloat and is very efficient. I go with the highest score I ever gave to a KDE distro for Linux Mint 17.1 KDE.
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New Releases
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Some of you might already noticed that some of our developers started in September last year to work on our next release series we call Bellatrix (0.9.0). With this series we switch over to a more modern graphical installer framework called Calamares.
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MakuluLinux Cinnamon Edition 2.0 [MCDE] is now live, Read the release notes and grab your copy by clicking here, or via the Cinnamon section in menu above. Please take a minute to read the release notes, they give vital information about the release.
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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It’s been more than five years since SUSE delivered its last full release, and a lot has happened to the company during that time. In our testing we find that SUSE Linux 12 has been worth the wait. SUSE 12 is a broad set of Linux distributions ranging from desktop through enterprise level. We tested several instances and found them quite ready for enterprise use. All in all, SUSE 12 is a worthy competitor to Red Hat and Ubuntu in the enterprise Linux market.
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Red Hat Family
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An ambitious proposal is seeking to make Fedora 23 — the Linux distribution release due out around October — 64-bit-only for both x86 and ARM architectures.
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Fedora
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So Fedora Workstation 21 is done and out and I am extremely pleased to see the positive reception and great reviews. But we are not resting on our laurels here and are already busy planning for the Fedora Workstation 22 release. As many of you might know Fedora Workstation 22 is going to come up relatively fast, so we only have about 6 more weeks of development on it feature the freezes starts to kick inn. Luckily we have a relatively long list of items that we started working on during the Fedora Workstation 21 cycle that is nearing completing and thus should make the next release. We are of course also working on bigger long term developments that you should maybe see the first outline of in Fedora 22, but not the final version. I thought it would be nice to summarize some of the bigger items we expect to land and link to the relevant blogs and announcements for each one.
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Since the middle of last week we’ve been aware of some bugs with the PackageKit stack. The initial bug report was for offline updates failing, but during testing of the fix for that, various other bugs were identified which could potentially cause problems with many PackageKit transactions – that’s mostly documented in this report. Mostly, though, folks only seem to have been noticing issues since libhif 0.1.7 came out as an update in late December.
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In Fedora Infrastructure, all our applications are Free software. It’s one of our base requirements, allowing anyone out there to examine source, improve or modify things. Sometimes, just having the source of an application isn’t enough, you need the raw data to figure out some issue or generate some metric or support a theory.
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While Wayland by default replacing the X.Org Server as the default display environment has been talked about for a while within the next-generation Fedora world, it looks like Fedora 23 could finally be the time that the switch happens.
Fedora 23 already has ambitious possibilities like only supporting 64-bit software while one of the more likely proposals is enabling Wayland by default. With Fedora 21, Wayland is shipped with Fedora Workstation as a log-in-time switch for GNOME, but the X.Org Server is still depended upon. With Fedora 22, the Wayland experience will be even better and then for Fedora 23 is when there might be the switch.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting events in five different areas every week. Here are the five events for January 16th, 2015:
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Debian Family
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Spamassassin hasn’t been providing rules as part of the upstream package for some time. In Debian, we include a snapshot of the ruleset from an essentially arbitrary point in time in our packages. We do this so Spamassassin will work “out of the box” on Debian systems. People who install spamassassin from source must download rules using spamassassin’s updates channel. The typical way to use this service is to use cron or something similar to periodically check for rule changes via this service. This allows the anti-spam community to quickly adapt to changes in spammer tactics, and for you to actually benefit from their work by taking advantage of their newer, presumably more accurate, rules. It also allows for quick reaction to issues such as the one described in bug 738872 and 774768.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced that an unzip exploit has been found and fixed for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
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Mars One is a project that aims to put people on planet Mars by 2025, before NASA and everyone else. The kicker is that it’s designed as a one-way trip for the colonists. The good news, if you can call it that, is that they seem to be favoring Linux.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint project is using Ubuntu as its base and there is even a branch that’s using Debian, but it looks that for the moment it won’t be using systemd as the default init system.
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Bodhi Linux founder, who recently resigned from the project, has announced that he’s decided to return. Accompanying that news was also the announcement for Bodhi Linux 3.0 RC2. Elsewhere, Gary Newell briefly recaps the top 10 distributions of 2014 and Phoronix.com is reporting that Fedora 23 is likely to default to Wayland. Adam Williamson introduces Updatrex™ in response to PackageKit bug and Softpedia.com said today that Ubuntu will probably be the first operating system on Mars.
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Just over four months ago I announced that I was stepping down from the active role I had maintained in the Bodhi Linux project since it started a little over four years ago. Today I am happy to share that I am returning in my full capacity as project manager/lead developer and I come bearing gifts!
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First, the 338TP uses the .338 Lapua Magnum long-range rifle for its base. This rifle started as a design for a US Marine sniper rifle. Then, to acquire the target, the rifle uses a laser to enable you to “tag” your target. More than just a laser-targeting system, its sensors also track wind speed, direction, temperature, and barometric pressure. As serious shooters know, all of these factors must be taken into account for an accurate shot at great ranges.
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An “EVB” Kickstarter project replaces the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot’s ARM9 brick with a BeagleBone Black, adding performance, expandability, and sensors.
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Samsung Electronics Co. have revealed that they plan to sell 30 million Tizen TVs in 2015, according to an Industry source. Samsung aim to ship an estimated 60 million TVs in 2015 with Tizen TVs expected to be over 50% of that figure. These will be using the new quantum-dot display technology which has the capability of showing 1 billion colours, which is 64 times more than what current TV models can perform.
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Israel’s maker of small fanless computers CompuLab has revealed a tiny computer for Linux lovers, the MintBox Mini. A fifth of the size of the original MintBox, which was based on the company’s fit-PC3 and launched in 2012, the silent, fanless Mini will come with a quad-core processor, solid state storage and be available in the second quarter of 2015 for US$295.
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Phones
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Android
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In general, your Android device probably already includes a fair bit of Lollipop features — even if you don’t actually have the full system upgrade installed. The only exceptions would be hopelessly outdated devices that simply can’t run newer Google Play Services and Google Search apps, or users who prefer updating their apps manually and haven’t gotten around to it in the last several weeks.
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The wait is finally over. OnePlus One owners can rest their curiosity as the company has decided to shower the first stable version of CyanogenMod-based Android 5.0 Lollipop update over its flagship smartphone. The updated ROM will be rolled out to OnePlus One owners in India starting next month, one of the top CM engineers revealed during an interview with Android Central.
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Starter apps are the ones you want to use to ensure your child’s digital journey starts with a bang and not with a thud. These introductory apps set the stage for what kids can expect going forward. But your child’s age is relevant, so the following five starter apps — selected for their ability to provide a positive experience — are divided into two age categories. And iOS owners, these apps are available on your devices as well.
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So, is Google setting more than half its users up for a fall? In practice this may not have a huge impact for most. It may encourage phone manufacturers and the telecoms companies that sell them on to us to be more forthcoming with software updates for their devices, reducing the number of devices running out-of-date software.
Ultimately, the key message is that we need to start thinking of mobile devices as computers, not just phones, with all the caveats about security software, updates and precautions which that entails. This could be the tough love from Google that pushes people in that direction.
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With a Nexus Android 5.0.2 Lollipop release date now here for two more devices, we want to offer up some helpful tips to Nexus users poised to receive the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update from Google. These tips should help make release day go a lot smoother for Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 users looking to make the move.
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This is the Gold-East MS937, and it looks a lot like the iPhone 6. Everything from the size of the bezels along the side of the screen to the gold trim look reminiscent of the iPhone.
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Just a few weeks after Samsung started pushing out the Lollipop update to Galaxy S5 owners in Poland and Spain, reports are now indicating the update has gone live in the United Kingdom.
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There have been quite a few reports in the media announcing the end of Google Glass. Some journalists have even written what amounts to obituaries for the much-maligned Glass technology. But is Google Glass really going away? I think not and in this column I’ll tell you why Glass 2.0 just might be the next iPod.
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One of the most interesting new companies leveraging an open source Apache project has to be Mesosphere, which OStatic covered in a recent post. The company offers a “data center operating system” (DCOS) built on the open source Apache Mesos project, and has announced a recent round of $36M in Series B funding. New investor Khosla Ventures led the round, with additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and others.
According to Mesosphere’s leaders, the tech industry now needs a new type of operating system to automate the various tools used in the agile IT era. They argure that developers and operators don’t need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire datacenters.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 35 has been pushed to the Stable channel recently by Mozilla and while the majority of users did not notice any incompatibilities or issues, some users noticed that one or multiple of installed browser add-ons stopped working suddenly.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Open source NoSQL companies are making headlines for investment figures, but they’re offering knowledge and building communities too
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Google is rapidly becoming our Internet overlords, if they aren’t already. Gmail and Chrome are not Google products…we are the products. We are the marketable items. Gmail and Chrome are simply the useful playgrounds given to us in order for them to collect our data. Why does the choice between a red pill and a blue pill come to mind?
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BSD
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FreeBSD hasn’t been out in the clouds that much but that may be changing. DigitalOcean has announced FreeBSD on their cloud and thats a company who has till now only done Linux as their OS. Someone quickly posted the Dmesg output to show it was a real thing too. This could be a very special year for FreeBSD.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Indeed it’s been made using Free Software only and goes through the work of the foundation for the past thirty years.
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The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.4.5.
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Project Releases
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This release fixes the integration with recent systemd (as in Debian Jessie), makes logging more consistent and eases integration into downstream distributions. It’s available in Debian Sid and Jessie and will show up in Wheezy-backports soon.
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QEMU 2.2 was just released last month while already for QEMU 2.3 is a long list of changes.
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Public Services/Government
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MIMO, France’s inter-ministerial working group on free software, is expanding its reach. The responsibility of the working group now includes the selection and certification of solutions that allow large-scale desktop management, including inventory management and software deployment.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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One professor at the University of Illinois thought textbooks were getting too expensive, so he partnered with other educators to write their own book and make it available online to download for free.
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Open Hardware
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First, what do I mean by open hardware? I mean that the components that make up a device are available for the user to see. No secret formulas. The ingredients are completely transparent, and if you chose, you can source the raw parts and assemble them yourself. You can also learn from the process of assembly and with a team spirit share any problems encountered, then improving the formula of the device. For example, you could suggest better parts or improve the code to make it run faster.
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Programming
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At some point last year I started to write a Launchpad API client in Ruby, for the very simple reason that Kubuntu CI tooling is almost entirely written in Ruby and I wanted to avoid round tripping into Python to use launchpadlib for trivial things such as querying the version of a package in a PPA. Not only would that be slightly slower it also raises the ever so unfortunate problem of how to exchange data between Ruby and Python.
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Security
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The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.
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To do the controlling the NSA has to replicate the total world in realtime in their computer model!! The whistleblowers I read about and spoke to had in fact suggested to only filter the massive incoming flow of surveillance data, to extract certain patterns, and NOT STORE IT or keep files updated about all individual citizens. The generals decided to do that total storage We already see the first symptoms by USA and the five eyes countries of ‘simplification’ by law enforcement and legal system that perform arrests, judgement and jailing based on secret info provided by the NSA. Many other things are already going wrong in conflict with the Constitution and Human Rights. Civilisation is only a thin layer, can be gone in minutes.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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When Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 he warned against the growing menace to democracy of “the military-industrial complex,” to which The Nation devoted an entire issue in October of 1961 authored by Fred Cook, who more or less single-handedly revived the muckraking tradition in the United States with his issue-length investigations in the 1950s of the CIA, the FBI and the culture of political corruption in New York City. Here, in “Juggernaut: The Warfare State,” Cook investigated and expanded on Eisenhower’s warning, which had, up to that point, received relatively little attention in the mainstream press.
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On Sunday morning’s Reliable Sources, The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill reiterated his critique of cable news’ habit of hosting “terror experts” who have financial stakes in prolonged and expanded military conflicts.
The concept of terror experts/analysts was heightened in the past couple weeks following the Paris attack, and some outlandish statements by the likes of “terror expert” Steve Emerson.
“CNN has some great reporters on the ground,” Scahill said. “When you get into this kind of fear-generating territory is when you have these so-called ‘terror analysts’ on the air, many of whom also work for risk consultancy firms that benefit from the idea of making us afraid.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Humans are ‘eating away at our own life support systems’ at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years, two new research papers say
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Finance
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Putin did not invade Ukraine to invade Ukraine, but as a genius invasion against the U.S. Dollar. Almost all media have missed the high-level geopolitical chess at play and focused so narrowly on the individual moves, that they’re completely missing the big picture. There’s currently a war about what reserve currency the world should use – and the U.S. is poised to lose.
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Two companies, handling the collection of the funding for Wikileaks, have demanded that Valitor, which handles VISA in Iceland, should be made bankrupt due to an unpaid claim for damages, amounting to about 10 billion kronas (approx: 75 million dollars) with interests.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Mind pollution has permeated the internet. Computer articles are mostly written from the point of view of a person who uses Microsoft products. The assumption is that everyone uses Microsoft Windows and Windows software. To be fair there are a few OSX and Linux articles. Heaven help you if you use something really unusual like Plan 9 or HaikuOS. I can only assume those folks have a lot of patience and a strong will.
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Stelter: “I’m Worried That All Of This Content On Fox … Plays Into A Narrative That Portrays Muslims As The Other, As Somehow Evil”
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Censorship
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Want to get the latest issue of the world’s most controversial magazine but can’t get your hands on a paper copy? Don’t worry, there’s an app for that.
The Charlie Hebdo app features the so-called “survivors’ issue” of the satirical magazine, which sold out within minutes in France and across Europe this week. Versions are available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Once downloaded, users can purchase the latest edition for $2.99.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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Prior to Wallenberg’s arrival as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest in July 1944, some 430,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in only 10 weeks — the fastest, cruelest, and most efficient mass murders of the Nazi genocide. Yet Wallenberg rescued more Hungarian Jews than any single government, notably saving 20,000 by issuing Schutzpasses, documents conferring diplomatic immunity. He even went to the trains as mass deportations were underway, distributing Schutzpasses to people otherwise consigned to death.
Wallenberg saved an additional 32,000 by establishing dozens of safe houses in a diplomatic zone protected by neutral legations. He organized hospitals, soup kitchens and childcare centres, and when thousands of Jews were sent on a 200-kilometre death march in November 1944, he followed alongside, distributing improvised Schutzpasses, as well as food and medical supplies.
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“Guantánamo is a betrayal of American values,” the former military officers wrote. “The prison is a symbol of torture and justice delayed. More than a decade after it opened, Guantánamo remains a recruiting poster for terrorists, which makes us all less safe.”
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On Friday, Depression Quest developer and doxing victim Zoe Quinn launched an online “anti-harassment task force” toolset, staffed by volunteers familiar with such attacks, to assist victims of a recent swell of “doxing” and “swatting” attacks.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The new rules triggered a lively debate by the US public, with users leaving four million online comments on the FCC website.
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President Obama’s strong support for community internet networks drew sharp criticism on Wednesday from cable and telecom industry groups, as well as Republican lawmakers who called the White House’s plan to boost local internet coverage and speeds an unacceptable breach of “states’ rights.”
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DRM
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When an incomplete and early version of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked to torrent sites in 2009, Twentieth Century Fox announced that the uploader “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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EU copyright rules simply aren’t suited to cope with the increase of cross-border cultural exchange facilitated by the Internet…
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Former Pirate Bay operator Fredrik Neij is currently the last person serving his sentence for his involvement with the notorious torrent site. To make his stay in prison a little easier he’s hoping to receive letters, cards and other goodies from people around the world.
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Kim Dotcom has never been shy. And in December 2011, roughly a month before things for Dotcom were set to drastically change, he still oozed with bravado: Dotcom released a song (“The Megaupload Song”) in conjunction with producer Printz Board. It featured a number of major pop stars—including the likes of Kanye West, Jamie Foxx, and Serena Williams—all singing that they “love Megaupload.” If the star power wasn’t enough, Dotcom placed an exclamation point at the end. In the lyrics, he claimed that Megaupload comprised four percent of all Internet traffic. He rapped that the site received 50 million hits daily.
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With a rather peculiar takedown request Hollywood is going after OpenCulture.com, one of the largest collections of cultural and educational media online. According to a takedown notices the MPAA sent to Google, Open Culture’s list of 700 free public domain movies contains copyright infringing material.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.18.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I want to buy an inexpensive, low to medium-end notebook that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu. I want it to have hardware that is supported by the latest Linux kernel so I can put any GNU/Linux distribution on it that I want. I want it to look nice, you know, like all those fancy HP Stream notebooks and Chromebooks that you’re selling. I want it to cost $300 to $450.
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Desktop
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We need that choice everywhere to make the world of IT a very different place. Go ahead, retailers, offer GNU/Linux and that other OS on more or less identical hardware and see what your customers want. Aren’t they always right? I believe when consumers first got a crack at GNU/Linux on the netbook, that movement should have spread to all PCs but was stifled by M$ and “partners”. It’s time that was revisited and the supply chain starts producing what the consumer wants.
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Kernel Space
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Sometimes in life YOU have to be the wolverine, and fight for what’s yours with tooth and claw! Reach inside and unleash your inner wolverine. It’s in there and it’s waiting for you to use it when the need arises to defend yourself or what’s yours. So if you go into open source or anything else, stand up for yourself when you need to and don’t let anybody walk all over you.
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Are you all thumbs when it comes to Linux? If you follow [Chris]’s guide to building a handheld Linux terminal, that particular condition could work to your advantage. His pocket-sized machine is perfect for practicing command line-fu and honing your scripting skills on the go.
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While Google’s Chrome OS supports asynchronous device/driver probing, the mainline Linux kernel does not. However, patches are working toward this feat in order to speed up the kernel’s boot process for hardware/drivers that are slow at probing.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel developers are in the process of landing their GLSL shader cache into mainline Mesa.
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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 sequel to the puzzle racer Audiosurf is now in the early-access phase and is also available for Linux.
In the “classic” game mode MONO, the player controls a spaceship on a track that matches the music the player has selected from his music library.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In addition to my usual work on things like Plasma and Konversation, I’ve been hacking away on bugs that pose barriers to the use of the Korean language and writing system in KDE/Qt systems lately (I took up studying Korean as a new hobby last year). As a bonus, many fixes also tend to help out users of other CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, or even generally of languages other than English.
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These and more features and bug fixes are available on latest master version of Marble. It still needs some polishing and improvements but you can start using/testing it already.
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Phones
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I just received an email on Sailfish Developer Mailing List regarding the Sailfish OS road map for 2015 which is a rather long one but worth reading. I decided to share it with you as it’s important to know where we’re going with our devices in the coming year.
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Android
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Android Lollipop is a HUGE update that sees Google taking its already mature platform several steps further. The Big G has tightened up nearly every element of its mobile platform, refining the look and feel of Android across the board, as well as touching up back-end tools and protocols to make the platform even more efficient.
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This weekend ownCloud turns 5 (5 years old, not 5.0 :P), congratulations to Frank Karlitschek and the entire ownCloud community!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) continues to strengthen the region’s free and open source ICT service providers. The region’s Technology Support Centre (BILIB) is helping companies pilot cloud solutions based on this type of software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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When Professor Jonathan Tomkin went looking for a textbook to use in his introductory Earth Systems class, nothing was quite right.
He couldn’t find a book that he felt was worth the high price tag for students. So he put one together with a few colleagues — for free.
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Science
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We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.
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Health/Nutrition
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Before it was shadowed by the heinous attacks in Paris, France last week, it emerged that the NHS is in a grim state. Numerous hospitals across the UK declared major incidents.
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One of the many messes the United States is leaving behind as it formally withdraws from Afghanistan is that it’s more or less a narco state. Despite the United States spending nearly $8 billion to fight the Afghan narcotics trade, the country is producing more opium than ever. It’s unlikely to get better anytime soon: Last month, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan “are no longer a top priority.”
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Militant Group Has Gained Territory Despite U.S.-Led Strikes, Raising Concerns of the Obama Administration’s Mideast Strategy.
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At 11 p.m. on Sept. 5, 2007, 10 F-15 fighter bombers climbed into the sky from the Israeli military base Ramat David, just south of Haifa. They headed for the Mediterranean Sea, officially for a training mission. A half hour later, three of the planes were ordered to return to base while the others changed course, heading over Turkey toward the Syrian border. There, they eliminated a radar station with electronic jamming signals and, after 18 more minutes, reached the city of Deir al-Zor, located on the banks of the Euphrates River. Their target was a complex of structures known as Kibar, just east of the city. The Israelis fired away, completely destroying the factory using Maverick missiles and 500 kilogram bombs.
The pilots returned to base without incident and Operation Orchard was brought to a successful conclusion. In Jerusalem, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his closest advisors were in a self-congratulatory mood, convinced as they were that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was seeking to build a nuclear weapon and that Kibar was the almost-completed facility where that construction was to take place. They believed that their dangerous operation had saved the world from immense harm.
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In a SPIEGEL interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses the dangers of poor relations between Russia and the West in the Ukraine crisis, saying there is a danger that things could get worse. Germany, he says, has a significant role to play.
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Chinese army hackers apparently caused more than $100 million worth of damage to U.S. Department of Defense networks, according to NSA research detailed in documents from the Edward Snowden cache.
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Notwithstanding the president’s endorsement, a legislative attempt at rewriting the rules for metadata collection and storage by way of Congress came two votes short of advancing when the USA Freedom Act failed in the Senate in November.
According to Volz, however, the forthcoming report will indeed include details about what’s been accomplished as far as adjusting policies for metadata collection goes, along with information concerning a proposed technological solution to the dragnet surveillance issue described in a report released on Thursday by the National Research Council. That report – assembled in response to the Presidential Policy Directive 28 the White House issued one year ago in concert with Obama’s Jan. 17 remarks – concluded that “no software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence, but methods can be developed to more effectively conduct targeted collection and to control the usage of collected data.”
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Allowing US private sector actors to conduct offensive, retaliatory cyber attacks deserve some consideration, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said at a cybersecurity conference.
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A CIA drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki also killed another US citizen, Samir Khan – the FBI had considered recruiting him as al-Qaeda informant.
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PESHAWAR: At least seven suspected militants have been killed while four others were injured in a US drone strike near the Pak-Afghan border in South Waziristan Agency.
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The civilians were being held in a makeshift jail in the town of Al Bab, close to the Turkish border, when the aircraft struck on the evening of Dec. 28, the witnesses said. The building, called the Al Saraya, a government center, was leveled in the airstrike. It was days before civil defense workers could dig out the victims’ bodies.
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Eyewitnesses and a Syrian opposition human rights organization claim an unannounced U.S. airstrike killed at least 50 civilians in in a government building located in a small city in the country’s north.
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The number of drone strikes carried out in Pakistan by the United States dropped by more than 32 per cent in 2014 as compared with the previous year, according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies’ (PIPS) Pakistan Security Report 2014. A total of 21 strikes were reported last year, killing an estimated 144 and wounding 29 over a period of six months.
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When the U.S. targets a person for murder, it kills 27 additional people.
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You might not have noticed, but the world has acquired a new country. With its own capital, army and self-styled “emir,” this domain possesses some of the features of statehood. But don’t expect an application to join the United Nations: the consuming ambition of this realm is to reverse just about every facet of human progress achieved over the past millennium.
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For more than a decade, there have been drone and aircraft strikes in countries including Yemen and Pakistan and allegations that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of civilians have been killed. For the first time, the U.S. government has admitted that there may be civilian deaths in the campaign against ISIL as well. CCTV America’s Jim Spellman reported this story from Washington, D.C.
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Imagine living in a town or neighborhood where a serial killer is on the loose. The killer’s primary weapon is a pipe bomb filled with small metal projectiles like BBs and nails. The bombs are designed to kill and maim those in the vicinity of the explosion. The killer’s weapons are usually aimed at male targets, but quite often several others in the vicinity are also killed, including women and children. Oftentimes, a note is sent to the media after the attacks warning of future attacks unless the people being targeted give in to the killer or killers’ demands. The fact of the attacks’ unpredictability has created a perennial fear in the region, leaving every resident uncertain of their future and their family’s safety.
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Security forces in Niger used tear gas to disperse hundreds of opposition supporters taking part in a banned demonstration in the capital Niamey.
The political altercation came after 10 people were killed in two days of violent protests against a French publication’s cartoon depicting Islam’s prophet.
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The U.S. might at this point retain close to exclusive control over deadly drone warfare but it has neverthless created an easy to imitate model of targeted violence where the claimed legitimacy of the violence is not defined by its instruments or the authority of its perpetrators but simply by the idea that the targets are not innocent.
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A woman accused of setting fire to her newborn baby girl in the middle of a road has been charged with murder.
Burlington County prosecutors said Hyphernkemberly Dorvilier, 22, of Pemberton Township, New Jersey, was in custody on 500,000 dollars (£331,000) bail. She tried to flee after starting the fire but was detained by residents, according to a witness.
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From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union until that crisp September morning of 2001, Americans lived without the specter of fear. Our sense of security was shattered on that day and our country has spent the better part of the past decade striving and fighting to restore what was lost.
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Isolation and desperation are the likely cause of young men becoming “terrorists,” argues Larry Beck.
The “terrorists” have struck again, offering up last week’s version of mindless violence in the name of some cause. When this happens, I am appalled at the violence, heartbroken that innocents usually die and always left wondering what it is about some causes that seemingly provide a framework for destruction. This is particularly so when I can’t figure out what the cause really is.
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Transparency Reporting
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1. How would you describe the current situation of investigative journalism in the UK?
I think it’s a mixed situation as always. There’s certainly a lot of interest in investigative journalism, with a lot of people taking the initiative to launch their own projects. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been particularly notable in that respect, but also the work of Brown Moses stands out.
Crowdfunding in particular is playing an increasing role (one of my distance learning students at Birmingham City University raised over $6000 for her investigation), but also campaigners and activists publishing their investigations, and data journalism techniques being used by a wider number of people.
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One of the grossest hypocrisies of Washington officialdom is the willingness to denounce leaks of some classified information and to countenance leaks of other classified information. But the gap between indignant pretense and standard practice has widened into a chasm in recent years, with Barack Obama’s administration prosecuting leakers in record numbers while protecting its own. Selective prosecution of leaks in the name of national security has never been more extreme.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A Texas hunting club was once again scheduled on Saturday to auction off a chance to kill a large animal whose numbers are dwindling, a year after it faced international criticism over doing the same with a permit to shoot an endangered black rhino.
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I don’t know how we missed this chart on its first go-around (it was created by Eli Dourado in May 2014, using data extrapolated from a 2013 op-ed by Jon Mooallem, who spent the summer of that year keeping track of power outages caused by squirrels), but it is everything, and you deserve to know that it exists.
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Finance
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The future demands a new political consciousness. We can’t just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. Cultural critic Henry Giroux published his thoughts in the Truthout analysis article Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies. Author and cultural critic Henry Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.
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For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
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Nearly three years after he famously said he was “not concerned about the very poor,” former presidential nominee Mitt Romney told Republicans in a speech Friday night the party must focus on helping “lift people out of poverty.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981.
Despite Casey being under investigation by Congress for being involved in a major disinformation plot involving the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi in 1981, and despite Casey arguing on the record that the CIA should have a legal right to spread disinformation via the mainstream news that same year, this quote continues to be argued by people who weren’t there and apparently cannot believe a CIA Director would ever say such a thing.
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Censorship
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Here is what they say about themselves: “Index on Censorship is an international organization that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.”
Reidy wrote a scathing article about me and others who dared to question the right of people to object to an Irish Famine sitcom. The idea for the sitcom was recently made public.
Padraig waxed eloquently and with lots of anger against people who would dream of censoring such a remarkable project as a sitcom about Ireland’s Holocaust that Britain’s Channel 4 is considering.
He continued his rant in the Irish Examiner newspaper during the week, slamming those who dared to think that the Famine was not a fit subject for humor.
I decided to write a response to the Index on Censorship, given that he had certain facts wrong about my contribution, especially the one that I had called for the show to be banned.Help! I’m censored on Famine sitcom by anti-censorship mag
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Twitter and Turkey have a bit of a love-hate-hate-hate-hate relationship, insofar as Twitter users love to publish unflattering facts about the government, and the government hates that and tries to get Twitter to censor messages. In this particular case, the government is threatening to outright block Twitter unless it takes down “offending” messages.
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On his way to the Philippines this week, the Pope was asked to pronounce on the question that has been on everyone’s minds: What limits should we draw around freedom of expression? The Pope answered, quite sweetly, that he would punch in the nose anyone who swore at his late mother. Then, more troublingly, he said, “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith. … There is a limit.”
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Regarding Leon Pitt’s letter (“The Interview,” Jan. 6 Review-Journal), it seems he would like some form of censorship for movies and how the media portray certain aspects of a war we did not ask for. The fact that he is able to express his opinion in a daily publication shouldn’t be lost on him.
“Saturday Night Live” isn’t a movie, but every weekend since 1975, it has lampooned every sitting president, former presidents and many other elected officials. Although the show never did an assassination skit, the political skits aired on “SNL” would not be seen in North Korea — or many other countries, for that matter — because of the basic lack of freedom.
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British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “in a free society, there is a right to cause offense about someone’s religion,” taking issue with Pope Francis’ assertion that there are “limits” to free speech.
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Says his condemnation of Paris attack was to support freedom of expression but sees ‘tricky calculus’ in countries where that’s restricted
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China’s most popular television drama has been re-edited to get rid of the plunging necklines featured in the show.
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Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur said there should be no censorship for anyone above the age of 16. The director, who was in Delhi for a panel discussion with FICCI Ladies Organisation, said if a person can vote, he can censor a film too.
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On Sky News, former Charlie Hebdo journalist Caroline Fourest was trying to explain how “crazy” it is that certain journalism mills in the United Kingdom won’t show the cover of the latest edition of the magazine. Well, Sky News provided a stronger explanation than Fourest ever could have. Watch some memorable seat-of-the-pants censorship, live.
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In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, the principal message has been, quite rightly, to defend free expression and to condemn those who would use violence to respond to messages they dislike. Yet at the same time, the French Ministry of Justice has ordered prosecutors to enforce with “utmost vigor” a law that itself imposes violence, albeit of the state-sanctioned variety, on speech whose messages the French majority dislikes.
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On the day another cartoonist victim was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery, the pope came as near as dammit to suggesting that Charlie Hebdo had it coming. “One cannot provoke; one cannot insult other people’s faith; one cannot make fun of faith,” he said.
Oh yes, you can. You may not choose to. It may not be wise or polite or kind – but you can. And to show you can, without being gunned down, Charlie Hebdo has just gone on sale in the UK, in bolder outlets, proudly defiant with an image of Muhammad on the cover – though with a tear and a kindly thought: “All is forgiven.”
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Arrests for speech at a march in support of free speech? Mais oui!
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Abby Martin discusses the flogging of a Saudi Arabian blogger for insulting Islam and the State Department’s non-reaction to the event, plus the hypocritical arrest of a French comedian for his controversial social media comments in the wake of a mass demonstration in Paris defending free speech.
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Privacy
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The NSA’s mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars — a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway.
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The U.S. government amassed a secret law enforcement database of Americans’ outbound overseas telephone calls through administrative subpoenas issued to multiple phone companies for more than a decade, according to officials and a government affidavit made public Thursday.
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The database only stored metadata, which is the information regarding what phone number is calling where, when the call took place and the duration of the call. The content of the calls was not stored. The data was collected for the Drug Enforcement Administration to be able to monitor calls made by U.S. citizens connecting with people in countries “determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities.”
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Yet another secret U.S. government database containing the phone records of American citizens has been revealed this week.
Disclosed in a new court filing, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is said to contain a record of calls made to and from foreign countries by Americans. Metadata from the calls are collected through the use of administrative subpoenas, which can be issued by the DEA without prior judicial oversight.
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…fear that the spread of encryption globally would cause NSA to “go dark.”
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We live in remarkable, transformative times. We have the library of Alexandria at our fingertips; all the recorded knowledge of the world is being digitized and made available through the Internet Archive, a free, non-profit digital library offering universal access to books, music, knowledge, news and web pages.
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Following the recent data breaches at Sony and the attacks at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, certain politicians have wasted no time calling for increased government surveillance, broader anti-hacking statutes (with stiffer penalties), and, in the case of British Prime Minister David Cameron, a call to limit non-government use of encryption technologies. Oddly enough, a leaked cybersecurity report from the U.S. government pointed out just how important crypto is to everyday internet functionality.
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President Barack Obama said Friday that police and spies should not be locked out of encrypted smartphones and messaging apps, taking his first public stance in a simmering battle over private communications in the digital age.
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New Snowden documents show that the NSA and its allies are laughing at the rest of the world. National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet.The new documents presented by Der Spiegel show that NSA surveillance programs are at the foundation of efforts to create sophisticated digita
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A team of nine journalists including Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras have just published another massive collection of classified records obtained by Edward Snowden. The trove of documents, published on Der Spiegel, show that the National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet. Der Spiegel reports that the intelligence agencies are working towards the ability to infiltrate and disable computer networks — potentially giving them the ability to disrupt critical utilities and other infrastructure. And the NSA and GCHQ think they’re so far ahead of everyone else, they’re laughing about it.
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We meet a former FBI undercover agent, Edwards Snowden’s lawyer, and journalists including Andy Greenberg of Wired magazine and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, who are publicizing his findings. Greenberg speaks of a cat-and-mouse game in which the “mice” are challenging the secrecy of the surveillance state. We also meet and hear from Snowden himself, as well as officials from inside the intelligence community.
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Incidentally, the NSA is only one of 16 US intelligence services, together employing perhaps some 200,000 spies.
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When it comes to intelligence, everybody, be they democracies, dictatorships, or in between, wants it all.
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It’s difficult to establish an exact dollar amount, but “experts have estimated that losses to the U.S. cloud industry alone could reach (US)$180 billion over the next three years. Additionally, major U.S. tech companies like Cisco and IBM have lost nearly one-fifth of their business in emerging markets because of a loss of trust,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute.
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A top NSA researcher has gone on the record to condemn the agency’s long-standing endorsement of a controversial cryptographic tool even after learning of its flaws – including a vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers and spies.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has offered some sort of apology for pushing insecure cryptography solutions to businesses, describing it as a “regrettable” move.
Michael Wertheimer, former director of research at the NSA, made the admission about the agency’s support of the widely criticised Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) in a letter published by the American Mathematical Society (PDF).
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DPM backs ex-MI5 chief’s statement that UK needs to ‘retain the ability to intrude on the privacy’ of terrorists but rejects blanket power to retain records of every website visited by general public
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With Congress not only failing to rein in National Security Agency (NSA) spying, but actually expanding its power in a recent funding bill, many privacy activists are looking to the states to take action to block warrantless surveillance programs. A bill filed this week in Indiana would not only support efforts to turn of NSA’s water in Utah, but have some practical effect in the Hoosier State should it pass.
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Surprise! An academic advisory panel, chaired by director of national intelligence James Clapper — yup, the same guy who lied to Congress — has concluded that there’s no alternative to bulk data collection. Sorry, citizens.
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“The report doesn’t provide justification for continuing mass surveillance programs,” says Neema Singh Guliani, the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel.
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The NSA’s former director of research Michael Wertheimer says it’s “regrettable” that his agency continued to support Dual EC DRBG even after it was widely known to be hopelessly flawed.
Writing in Notices, a publication run by the American Mathematical Society, Wertheimer outlined the history of the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG), and said that an examination of the facts made it clear no malice was involved.
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Metadata collection also failed to prevent attacks such as the Fort Hood shooting of 2009 and the 2013 Boston Marathon attack, and has proved massively detrimental to public trust.
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The 231-page report, obtained by the New York Times, explains that “in 2008… the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system.” It also developed the protocols that were used to ensure that the email accounts that were targeted didn’t belong to U.S. citizens.
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Much like the secret NSA and FBI databases, the DEA got its information under subpoena from American telecommunications companies, irrespective of whether or not the target had committed any crime. The dialing and receiving number were stored, along with the data and time of the call, and who it was billed to.
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The Drug Enforcement Administration formerly maintained a secret database of Americans’ telephone calls to some foreign countries, the Justice Department revealed this week.
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Calling the Stasi “secret police” is misleading. The name is an abbreviation of STAatsSIcherheit, or State Security. Founded in 1950 as the East German Communist Party’s “sword and shield,” it never hid the fact that it was spying. By the late 1980s, more than 260,000 East Germans—1.6 percent of all adults in the country—worked for the organization, either as agents or as informants. (If the NSA employed as many analysts to spy on 320 million Americans, it would have 5 million people on the payroll.) It wanted you to constantly wonder which of your friends was an informant and, ideally, tempt or pressure you into the role of snitch too.
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Do you want a hands-on lesson on staying clear of NSA snooping? If you live in the Washington, D.C., area, you’re in for a treat. Later this month, you could be part of a seminar on how to keep your personal information private.
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Do you want to use the Internet without fear of the National Security Agency or other government operatives snooping on your business? The public library in our nation’s capital is here to help.
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A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.
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As Sargent says, the Patriot Act is coming up for reauthorization this year (which may or may not be necessary to keep operating the dragnet). It would be relatively straightforward to design an NSA reform (or better yet, a top-to-bottom reorganization of the whole intelligence community) that preserves the ability to surveil genuine suspects while protecting innocent Americans’ constitutional rights. Indeed, there is a strong case that doing so would improve the quality of their work.
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Although today’s agreement between the US and the UK to step up intelligence-sharing to defend their financial services sectors against cyber-crime, it is ironic that it is the taxpayers of both countries who are – once again – forced to step in and save the bankers, who have left themselves wide open by outsourcing data to save money and make profits.
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The countries’ intelligence agencies will work together and conduct cyberwar games later this year to test the security of financial institutions.
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UK security startups like Darktrace and Surevine have been invited on the trip to discuss cyber terrorism and grow their businesses in the US.
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One of the UK’s fastest growing cyber security companies has pushed forward plans to open its US headquarters after seeing a surge in demand following the Sony cyber-attack.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lived in Hawaii before leaking classified information about the government’s secret surveillance programs.
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The FBI claimed the man, Christopher Cornell, plotted to bomb the Capitol building, and had cited “tipsters” who told them about Cornell’s Twitter posts, crediting their own informants for the arrest. They never mentioned the NSA.
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A bill filed in South Carolina this week would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.
South Carolina Sen. Tom Davis (R-Beaufort) introduced the South Carolina Fourth Amendment Protection Act on Jan. 13. S.275 would ban “material support or resources” from the state to warrantless federal spy programs, making it the third state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.
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Leaked documents from the U.S.-based National Security Agency (NSA) published in a German weekly have shown that data from the famously malware-resistant iPhone can be accessed even when the device itself has not been compromised.
The documents detailing ways employed by the British GCHQ to track targets through their phones revealed that when an iPhone syncs with a compromised computer, any data on the phone can be pulled out, reported The Verge.
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The case served as an early test of the limits for researchers who had hoped to use the National Security Agency’s phone records collection program as a treasure trove for their efforts. But Judge James A. Boasberg, sitting in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., said the NSA is within its rights to refuse to say what kinds of records it has, and unless researchers can specifically prove the agency has them, the NSA doesn’t have to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.
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The NSA was obviously aware of the trick, and Wertheimer says they are constantly changing their algorithms, which means it is likely that nowadays spam email is the domain of bad marketeers rather than jihadists.
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Introduced by Sen. Branden Petersen (R Dist. 35), SF33 stipulates that “a government entity may not obtain personal identifying information concerning an individual without a search warrant
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Since its founding in 2004, Palantir has managed to grow into a billion dollar company while being very surreptitious about what it does exactly. Conjecture abounds. The vague facts dredged up by reporters confirm that Palantir has created a data mining system used extensively by law enforcement agencies and security companies to connect the dots between known criminals.
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Leaked documents obtained by TechCrunch have shed new light on Palantir, a secretive data analysis company whose tools are used more than a dozen U.S. government agencies, including the NSA and FBI.
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Privacy has never been so important, but in a digital age where personal information made public is easily retrievable, and even private data isn’t necessarily safe, what alternatives have been produced to respond to the growing demand for online solitude?
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During a joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday, President Obama agreed with his plan to pressure U.S. tech companies to cooperate with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in fight against terrorism.
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Mass surveillance by the NSA was apparently just the beginning. The agency is now preparing for future wars in cyberspace, in which control over the internet and rival networks will be the key to victory, documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal.
The National Security Agency’s aim is to be able to use the web to paralyze the enemy’s computer networks and all infrastructures they control – including power and water supplies, factories, airports, and banking systems, Der Spiegel magazine wrote after viewing the secret files.
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The arrests came quickly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. There was the Muslim man suspected of making anti-American statements. The Middle Eastern grocer, whose shop, a tipster said, had more clerks than it needed. Soon hundreds of men, mostly Muslims, were in American jails on immigration charges, suspected of being involved in the attacks.
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In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The New York Times, the Justice Department has declassified additional portions of these two inspector general reports about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is the legal basis for the once-secret National Security Agency program that systematically collects records in bulk about Americans’ domestic and international phone calls.
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A major row between the political parties is brewing over demands by David Cameron and the intelligence services for even more surveillance powers in the wake of the terrorist atrocities in Paris last week.
David Cameron has promised new legislation so that terrorists no longer have “safe spaces” to communicate.
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Cameron is essentially calling on companies like WhatsApp and Apple to install backdoors in their systems to allow the UK authorities access them whenever they want.
Not only is this a huge invasion of people’s privacy, it will also mean that such services will now be much more vulnerable to attack from everyone from cyber-criminals to hacktivists.
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The USA is called the land of the free, but there is no freedom in the analysis of a citizen’s conversation.
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The document at issue is not an order issued by a judge, but an order template used by law enforcement in San Bernardino County (CA) to draft anticipated order applications seeking authority to operate cell site simulators. It is common practice for law enforcement to create order applications from templates prepared by state or federal prosecutors. These templates have wording such as “Detective Name” and “Crime Definition,” which are replaced with case-relevant information before filing the applications in court. Requiring law enforcement to use templates, rather than letting them write their own legal documents, allows prosecutors to use preset legal strategies while defending the legitimacy of the resulting orders in court.
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Following last week’s tragic events in France, the world has spoken out in solidarity against religious extremism, and in support of the freedom of expression. But alongside this, another narrative has emerged. In the name of safety, British officials have begun arguing in favour of stronger powers for the security services to intercept personal data.
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The US Department of Justice has been maintaining a secret record of all phone calls in and out of United States even before the start of its National Surveillance Programs, according to a new report.
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The NSA isn’t the only American government agency keeping track of phone call metadata… or rather, it wasn’t. A Department of Justice court filing has revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration maintained records of every call made from the US to Iran and other nations for nearly 15 years, stopping only when the initiative was discontinued (prompted at least partly by leaks) in September 2013. The DEA didn’t get the content of those calls, but it also didn’t get court oversight — it used administrative subpoenas that only required the approval of federal agents. And unlike the NSA, this program was meant solely for domestic offenses like drug trafficking.
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When the rights of a people are violated, what do you do? Do you do nothing, or do something, even if that something is unpopular or illegal. Edward Snowden chose to do something, making information that needed to be known public. In doing so he opened the eyes of the American people to living in a “fishbowl of constant surveillance” (Turley). Though many believe the leaks to be dangerous, the release of data was reviewed and contained little that could damage national security. It also opened debate on the legality of unconstitutional spying. But the discussion quickly switched to Snowden’s personality, an irrelevant and distracting subject. Whatever his personal motives, the information Snowden divulged will have ramifications for years to come.
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Kalashnikovs trained on free speech, police protection for Jewish schools and 10,000 troops out on “sensitive” streets in Britain’s nearest neighbour. The last few days in Paris stir searching questions about the nature of European society, the values it holds dear, and the right way to protect them. One might hope for answers reflecting fresh thinking, but the emerging response of SW1 is drearily familiar – mass surveillance on the assumption that “the gentleman from Whitehall knows best”.
[...]
The Paris gunmen had been on watchlists for years. Building up extra intelligence on all 66 million residents of France would not have helped; keeping an unflinching eye on the few thousands who provoke serious fears might have done. If the question were resources, the spies would deserve a fair hearing. But they seem more interested in the power to add hay to the stack, a perverse way to hunt the needle. For all the claims made for untargeted sifting, the sole “plot” that the US authorities can hold up as having been disrupted by it is a taxi driver’s payment of a few thousand dollars to al-Shabbab. Terrorists, from 9/11 to the Woolwich jihadists and the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik have almost always come to the authorities’ attention before murdering. Society can’t afford too many scruples about the privacy of those who provoke such suspicions.
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Presumably for anyone to use encryption in Cameron’s world would require escrowing decryption keys so the government could examine any and all communications as they pleased.
[...]
If Western governments want that kind of control over their citizens then it has to be symmetrical which would mean that all government activities other than those that could be proved to be truly in the national interest (for example, how to make nuclear bombs) should become, in turn, completely transparent. That means every government committee meeting, every government memo, every government phone call, every donation to any politician, every political deal, all of it … completely and immediately transparent with severe consequences for any kind of evasion or failure to do so. No more backroom deals, no more horse trading, no more obfuscation. And along with that all surveillance by a government would have to be justified and authorized and documented.
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A trenche of fresh Snowden leaks published in Der Spiegel by Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and others detail the NSA’s infiltration of other countries’ intelligence services, detailing the bizarre, fractal practices of “fourth-party collection” and “fifth-party collection.”
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Civil Rights
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On Wednesday, Mr. Holder announced revisions in Justice Department guidelines for issuing subpoenas and search warrants to journalists or for their newsgathering materials. The revisions are being made to an earlier update of the guidelines, an effort that followed the uproar over leak investigations involving the Associated Press and Fox News. The new revisions reflect nearly a year’s discussions between the Justice Department and a coalition of news organizations and journalists, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press and this newspaper, among others.
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A CIA manager testified under cross-examination in a trial near Washington that more than 90 people knew about a covert Iranian mission that was leaked to the media.
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A lawyer in Saudi Arabia who founded a human rights group was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His wife, a women’s advocate who won a courage award from the State Department, says she is barred from leaving the country. Her brother, a writer who ran a liberal online forum, is also in jail and was sentenced to be caned regularly in a public square over the next few months.
International condemnation of the writer’s sentence, which also included a prison term and a heavy fine, has mounted since a video of him receiving his first round of blows appeared on YouTube, and the State Department and the United Nations have called for the caning to stop.
The Saudi authorities did not administer the second round of blows as scheduled on Friday. But the case of the writer, Raif Badawi, has nonetheless drawn new attention to the Saudi government’s harsh treatment of dissidents for acts that are considered anything but criminal in the West.
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Gruesome footage circulating on social media shows Saudi authorities publicly beheading a woman in the holy city of Mecca earlier this week. The execution is the tenth to be carried out in country in the last two weeks; setting 2015 up to be even more bloody than last year, when 87 people were punitively killed by the state.
Rare video of Monday’s killing shows the woman, a Burmese resident named as Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, screaming while being dragged along the street. Four police officers then hold the woman down before a sword-wielding man slices her head off, using three blows to complete the act.
In the chilling recording, Bashim, who was found guilty in a Saudi Sharia court of sexually abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step-daughter, is heard protesting her innocence until the very end. “I did not kill. I did not kill,” she screams repeatedly.
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In the coming days, Ali al-Marri, former enemy combatant, is scheduled to be released from federal criminal custody, clearing the way for his removal by immigration officials to Qatar, and thus ending a legal odyssey that began more than 13 years ago with Mr. al-Marri’s arrest by the FBI in Peoria, Illinois. [Disclosure: I served as al-Marri’s lead counsel in his habeas corpus challenge to his military detention]. Al-Marri’s case raised issues central to the war on terrorism, including the distinction between combatants and civilians, the legitimacy of responding to terrorism through a military, as opposed to law enforcement, approach, and the geographic scope of the armed conflict itself. Above all, al-Marri’s legal challenge raised the important question—never definitively resolved—whether the president’s detention authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) extended to individuals lawfully present in the United States. Below, I offer some lessons to be drawn from his case and suggest why it provides a cautionary tale against domestic military detention.
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Israel is lobbying member-states of the International Criminal Court to cut funding for the tribunal in response to its launch of an inquiry into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, officials said on Sunday.
ICC prosecutors said on Friday they would examine “in full independence and impartiality” crimes that may have occurred since June 13 last year. This allows the court to delve into the war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza in July-August 2014 that killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis.
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Sterling denies leaking any information to Risen. Defense lawyers say the leak could have come from anywhere and that Sterling has faced unfair suspicion because he sued the CIA for racial discrimination.
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The wife of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi has called on the international community to pressure the Saudi Arabian authorities to release her husband, after his public flogging was postponed this weekend.
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The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. That’s a cliche, but politicians often follow the hoariest routes to power, and attempting to enact change by doing the same thing repeatedly is one of them.
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For the first time in a long time, American police departments are on the defensive. They’re on the defense in New York, where, after the NYPD’s open insurrection against the mayor, 69% of New York “voters, black, white and Hispanic” disapprove “of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at funerals for two police officers” according to a Quinnipiac poll – and now, even some cops have started openly airing their disgust with their own union leadership. They’re on the defense in Washington, where they’re “on the hot seat” at President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. And they continue to be on the defense in municipalities across the country, as every new police shooting sparks intense national scrutiny on social and in traditional media.
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“Our biggest advantage, major, is that our Muslim populations – they feel themselves to be Americans,” Obama told a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
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Indeed, there are so many legitimate reasons questioning the moral credibility of the huge march.
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Senior Conservative MP David Davis has issued a stark warning about Britain’s possible role in the US’s secret drone war against militants in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
The former Shadow Home Secretary told the Bureau that any British complicity in the US drone campaign is “in the same moral space, as far as I’m concerned, as collusion in torture”.
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It is particularly appropriate that we are gathered here around International Human Rights Day and our theme is Peace and Living It. I believe that Peace is a Human Right for everyone, and its presence is necessary in order to protect and sustain all the other rights enshrined in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I am sure we can agree that although we have a Universal Declaration, we have a long way to go to ensure that our Governments implement and uphold all these rights. In spite of this I am full of hope because I believe that we, the human family, are at a turning point in history.
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When the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America’s most high profile missing person cases.
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The police are poised to tell US authorities they want to see the uncensored version of a CIA torture report as part of their investigation into extraordinary rendition flights.
Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, Scotland’s top prosecutor, has confirmed that the force has been “instructed to request and consider the unredacted version” of the US Senate study.
SNP MSP Kevin Stewart urged the US authorities to co-operate fully with Police Scotland and “hand over an unadulterated copy”.
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Less than a quarter of the 119 detainees named in the US Senate’s summary report into the CIA’s secret torture programme remain in the military prison for the most ‘hardline’ terror suspects—Guantánamo Bay—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established.
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Hearing the testimony from CIA operatives, it’s clear that the agency is extremely eager to make an example of Sterling. Despite all the legalisms, the overarching reality is that the case against Sterling is scarcely legal — it is cravenly political.
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When the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling got underway Tuesday in Northern Virginia, prospective jurors made routine references to “three-letter agencies” and alphabet-soup categories of security clearances. In an area where vast partnerships between intelligence agencies and private contractors saturate everyday life, the jury pool was bound to please the prosecution.
In a U.S. District Court that boasts a “rocket docket,” the selection of 14 jurors was swift, with the process lasting under three hours. Along the way, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema asked more than a dozen possible jurors whether their personal connections to the CIA or other intel agencies would interfere with her announced quest for an “absolutely open mind.”
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New York Times reporter James Risen prevailed over the U.S. government in its three-year effort to force him to testify at trial about a confidential source as part of a CIA leak prosecution.
The request by prosecutors that Risen be dropped as a witness capped a longer battle to avoid revealing his sources. The fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing attention on the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder reacted to the controversy by issuing guidelines last year restricting the use of subpoenas and search warrants for journalists.
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For the past seven years, New York Times journalist James Risen has been embroiled in a legal battle with two presidential administrations over his refusal to reveal an inside government source.
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The CIA held prisoners in a secret Lithuanian prison despite official denials, a detailed investigation by human rights investigators claims to show.
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In the most recent New York Review Of Books, there’s an excellent interview about the now-largely-forgotten report from the Senate about how the United States government’s regime of torture was developed, and about how it was operated, with Mark Danner. Along with Marcy Wheeler, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage and very few other reporters, Danner was one of the people who thought that this country’s decision to torture people — in contravention of treaties, American law, and over 200 years of military custom — was worthy of extended acts of journalism. In one of the more striking passages in the interview, Danner explains how a complicated infrastructure of mendacity was constructed and how it became equally as vital to the torture program as were the waterboard and the rectal feeding tube. Not only did the CIA arrange this infrastructure in order to lie to the American people about what was done in their name, but also the CIA built this infrastructure to provide an institutional basis for the American government to lie to itself.
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For the last three years, Bozeman artist Deb Vanpoolen has taken part in an annual fasting and protest against torture and perceived American imperialism in Washington, D.C. This was the first year she got arrested for it.
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You just renewed your oath to support the Constitution. Please make sure that things get done which are constitutional.
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Human rights campaigners criticise American media hypocrisy
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As with the two protestors arrested on a “Torturers Tour” outside Dick Chaney’s residence on January 10th, we must place our hopes that Hoffman won’t be easily silenced, and he will be equally ruthless and fearless should the accusations against the APA hold true, whether the torture techniques were effective or not.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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At the annual Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Chairman Tom Wheeler of the Federal Communications Commission made clear that his agency plans to re-enact strong net neutrality rules in late February.
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DRM
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Remember when the entertainment industry was thrilled about its temporary defeat of the Pirate Bay? Well, the victory – such as it was – hasn’t stopped the pirates from removing the DRM that was supposed to protect this year’s Oscar movie screeners. Yep, the pirates simply stripped the watermarking and uploaded the files anyway to many other torrent sites.
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Send this to a friend
01.17.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Last summer Microsoft talked its partners into trying to stop the growing popularity of Chromebooks in its tracks by making a big push during the holiday season. While full retail results won’t be in for a while, we do know the laptop sales results from the most important retailer of them all, Amazon. Guess what. With that retailer at least, Microsoft and its buddies failed. Miserably.
Amazon reports that its top three computers sold over the holidays were — drum-roll, please — Chromebooks. It was that way last year too. Oh, wait, I’m wrong; Microsoft did worse this year. In 2013, one of Amazon’s top three sellers was a Windows machine, The Asus’ Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 “2-in-1” device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop.
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Collabora has been making improvements to the Tegra-based Chromebooks for running the non-ChromeOS Linux desktop.
The Nyan Blaze and Big Tegra K1 powered Chromebooks should now work nicely with Linux given the eleven new patches done by Tomeu Vizoso of consulting firm Collabora.
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Kernel Space
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The systemd-import command is now more powerful after the latest batch of changes committed by Lennart Poettering prior to starting the weekend.
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Asked about diversity in the workplace, a current focus of many tech companies, Torvalds responded: “All that stuff is just details and not really important.”
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Few pieces of software in history have been so fiercely debated as Systemd. Initially a replacement for Sysvinit, the boot scripts that start up a Linux installation, Systemd has grown into a hugely powerful – and sometimes complex – replacement for the “bag of bits” that make up the Linux base system. It’s growing all the time and now handles logging, device hotplugging events, networking, scheduled actions (like Cron) and much more. Almost every major Linux distribution has adopted Systemd, but there are still some unhappy campers out there, so Mike and Graham ventured to Berlin to meet the software’s lead developer and get his view.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman posted the thirteen KDBUS patches in their latest form on Friday to the kernel mailing list. This new version rewrites major parts of the meta-data implementation to allow for per-recipient namespace translations, KDBUS_ITEM_CREDS changes, removed KDBUS_CMD_CANCEL, monitors are now entirely invisible, compile warning fixes, and a variety of other changes.
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Yesterday ArsTechnica.com quoted Linus Torvalds saying a focus on diversity is distracting and apparently it didn’t set well with some folks. Today Torvalds emailed ArsTechnica.com in an effort to explain what he meant more precisely. Elsewhere, a mock distribution seems to be poking fun at feminists and diversity crowd. In other news, Mageia 5 Beta 2 is out after a bit of bad luck that may delay the final.
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On Friday, following comments made by Linux legend Linus Torvalds about diversity in the open source development community, a new Linux fork went online at Github, apparently to mock diversity advocates. Dubbed ToleranUX, the fork, created by a one-day-old Github account called The Feminist Software Foundation, was announced with a lengthy diatribe full of over-the-top mockery of feminist and diversity movements within the tech sector.
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Linus Torvalds, the internationally famous creator of the Linux operating system (which powers your Android phone and most of the internet), does not in way, shape or form suffer from Imposter’s Syndrome.
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Prominent for Util-linux 2.26 is a “completely new” sfdisk command that’s now based on the libfdisk library. This new sfdisk command now supports MBR and GPT disk labels (along with potential but untested SGI and SUN disk labels). Those dependent on sfdisk, a partition table management program for Linux, are encouraged to re-test their scripts against this new version, per the official release information on 2.26-rc1.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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In having 22 graphics cards out for testing and swapping them all in the same system for the recent Unreal Engine 4 Linux benchmarking and 22-Way AMD+NVIDIA Graphics Card Tests With Metro Redux On Steam For Linux, I ran some OpenCL tests on all of the graphics cards.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Just Add Water have just revealed when PS3, Xbox One and PC gamers can get their anxious little mitts on their delicious remake of Oddworld Inhabitants PSX classic, Abe’s Oddysee. Titled Oddworld: New n’ Tasty, the completely rebuilt game stays true to the Abe’s Oddysee formula, adding a glossy sheen of much needed beauty.
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The original game, which was released in 1997, was recently remade and fans of the puzzle platformer are patiently waiting for it’s release. Oddworld has already released remakes of some of their games, like Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD and Munch HD.
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Linux desktop gamers should know of a bug in Valve’s Steam client that will, if you’re not careful, delete all files on your PC belonging to your regular user account.
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Users have found out that Steam for Linux is capable of deleting the entire home directory under certain circumstances, which would present a major problem for users.
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While some are pondering the state of SteamOS and Steam Machines rumors, Valve has put out SteamOS Update 153 after being in the Alchemist Beta state for the past week.
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Cities: Skylines is an upcoming city-building game by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It’s a sequel of sorts to the transportation-focused Cities in Motion franchise but with a much broader scope; it’s now a fully-fledged city simulation game. Zoning, construction, taxation and infrastructure management are some of the things that set apart the game from its predecessors. Some of you may be familiar with the game as GOL has covered it twice already (here and here) but the new information we’ve gotten in the past few months from the developers make it worth revisting.
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Aspyr Media, who are one of our favourite developers, has noted on reddit that they are getting close to breaking even on their Linux ports.
If you are living under a rock: Aspyr ported Borderlands 2, Borderlands TPS, the latest two Civilization games and the newest Geometry Wars to Linux
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To summon your inner Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, you don’t need to join a detective squad anymore. There are many new games that allow you to solve crimes, catch the bad guys, and prove to the world that there is a master detective in you waiting to be recognized. These games let you play as a detective or a cop for hours and make you rack your brain to come up with clues that will help solve the mystery.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I want to thank publicly the 788 donors that helped us raise over 22000 euro.
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The KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser has finished. Thank you everybody who supported us in this fundraiser. Go to the KDE donation page if you want to support us further.
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As a Krita developer, I’m not too happy comparing Krita to Photoshop. In fact, I have been known to scream loudly, start rolling my eyes and in general gibber like a lunatic whenever someone reports a bug with as its sole rationale “Photoshop does it like this, Krita must, too!”.
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Reviews
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Once in a while I run into a Linux distribution that surprises me in terms of how much I enjoy using it. MakuluLinux is definitely one of those distros. I found an article about it when I was doing my usual news roundup article for my blog Eye On Open on ITworld. I was intrigued enough to want to do a full review here on Desktop Linux Reviews.
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One of the things you can count on in the Linux community is love and understanding from the wider audience, especially if you write a less favorable review of a distribution favored by a particular segment of the community. The smaller they get the fiercer the response. Most people would decide the flak was not worth their time, file relevant distributions under the ignore label, and move on to friendlier crowds.
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New Releases
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Parted Magic, an operating system that employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, has been upgraded to version 2015.01.13 and is now ready for purchase and download.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Mageia is a Linux distribution that distinguished itself in the past year or so with some very interesting releases, and the users expect to see the same kind of quality from the current ones as well. The developers know this and they want to provide the best experience possible, which is also the reason they had to delay this release for short while.
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After several delays the beta 2 version of Mageia 5 is finally out! You can find more information here.
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After being challenged by delays, Mageia 5 Beta 2 was officially released on Friday. A revised release date for the Mageia 5 official ISOs has also been determined.
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Red Hat Family
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Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has announced the release of libinput 0.8 and with this update comes many new features for the input handling library.
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Goldman Sachs downgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research note released on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. They currently have $70.00 target price on the stock, up from their previous target price of $67.44.
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Debian Family
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Diversity is something that society needs. In all aspects. Also within the Debian project.
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As I said, I did not certain events that begun with “lea” and end with “ing” prevent me from organising a Debian/m68k hack weekend. Well, that weekend is now.
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There was a spin of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi during the early days of its release, but that was quickly dropped in favour of Raspbian when it proved to be a bit slow and buggy. It was almost two years after this incident that a proper version of Fedora was released on the Raspberry Pi in the form of Pidora. An almost straight-up port of the codebase to the specific ARM architecture of the Pi, Pidora has had a few tweaks to let it run on Pi hardware without much loss in performance, at least.
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Phones
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Tizen
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South Korean tech giant Samsung seems to have some really big plans around the Tizen open source operating system this year. After launching its first commercially available Z1 Tizen smartphone in India, the company is now looking to launch numerous Tizen based devices throughout 2015, reports Phone Arena.
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Android
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We brought you our last top 5 Android list back in October and, as it’s already the first quarter of this year, it’s time to revisit that list. There are certainly some new models to discuss, the G Flex 2 was just introduced during CES 2015, for example, but we’re also just a couple of months away from Mobile World Congress, where it’s almost certain that the following phones will be replaced by the next batch of flagships.
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Everyone and their mother (in Tech News) is monitoring Xiaomi, the *fourth largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung, Apple and Lenovo (owners of Motorola). But that doesn’t mean everything they put out is gold.
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When Google acquired Android back in 2005, Android quickly became the “open” mobile platform of choice, a haven for developers that didn’t like all of Apple’s rules and the walled garden of iOS.
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It’s time for this week’s Android and iOS app round-up. As usual, the apps included will be a combination of the best of what has been released this week, but also my favourite must-have apps that I’ve recently come across.
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Google will this year launch its modular DIY smartphone, dubbed Project Ara, but only in the US territory of Puerto Rico.
Ara, announced by Google 15 months ago, was developed by Motorola’s Advanced Technologies and Products (ATAP) group as a fully modular system where components such as batteries, screens, GPS and cameras, can be swapped in and out of a basic smartphone framework.
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To root or not to root? It’s a question that most people don’t ever ask themselves, because Android devices are powerful and customizable from the get-go, and rooting can be risky.
But it’s not that risky. And if you want to really unlock the full potential of your device—if you want to be able to control everything, backup everything, customize everything, and do all sorts of fun things like install custom ROMs and get Android Lollipop ahead of the pack—you’ll need to root your phone.
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Citrix announced that CDFMonitor – the Swiss Army knife of CDF trace collection – is being released as an open source project under the MIT license.
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Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for itself and others,
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Security researcher and member of SoundCloud security team, Michael Henriksen has developed a open source command line tool that can crawl the GitHub repositories and reveal sensitive information back to him.
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Free online code repositories such as GitHub provide a valuable collaboration service for enterprise developers. But it’s also a trove of potentially sensitive company and project information that’s likely to warrant attention from hackers.
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Events
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This year’s program showcases how free software is used around the world, from “Engaging Nepali kids with free software” to “Implementing electronic medical record systems in rural Haiti”. We’re also taking a close look at how international treaties will affect free software users, with sessions from April — a French free software activist organization — and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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SaaS/Big Data
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BSD
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Following last month’s LLVM 3.6 plans, the mainline code of LLVM was branched for preparing the 3.6 release so now the master/trunk code is for LLVM 3.7.
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The FreeBSD Foundation has issued their latest quarterly status report for covering from October to December 2014.
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Project Releases
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An update of the open-source Xen Hypervisor to v4.5 brings reduced footprint, increased power efficiency, and new “experimental” real-time services.
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Public Services/Government
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Sweden’s public administrations will increasingly turn to open source and open standards, expect ICT procurement specialists at the National Procurement Services, the central purchasing body for the country’s public sector. The agency is readying a new approach for the acquisition of sofware and ICT services. When using these frameworks, only open standards and open source can be mandated. This greatly facilitates public administrations to prefer this type of software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Standards/Consortia
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Since last year the Khronos Group and their partners have been busy working on “OpenGL-Next” as the first huge overhaul to the OpenGL API and designed to compete with AMD’s Mantle, Microsoft DirectX 12, and Apple’s Metal. They’re still working towards this new API but they need your help.
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The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida has gone to the dogs. Well, at least its rugs have.
Department spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda said Wednesday that a new, $500 rug at the sheriff’s administration building said “In Dog We Trust” instead of “In God We Trust.”
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Science
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When the war poet Wilfred Owen wrote of “men whose minds the Dead have ravished” he was attempting to describe the mysterious effects of shellshock which started appearing during the First World War and of which he himself was a sufferer.
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Security
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Those following me on various Intarweb Media may have noticed I’ve spent half the week staring at openssl source code and weeping. Here’s one of the results of that.
OpenSSL has two somewhat different mechanisms for deciding what uses a certificate is good for: trust and purpose. This is quite subtle and not terribly well documented, so I thought I’d write it up here.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Lithuania is publishing a manual to advise its citizens on how to survive a war on its soil as concerns grow that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine heralds increased assertiveness in its tiny Baltic neighbors.
“Keep a sound mind, don’t panic and don’t lose clear thinking,” the manual explains. “Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world.”
The manual, which the Defence Ministry will send to libraries next week and also distribute at army events, says Lithuanians should resist foreign occupation with demonstrations and strikes, “or at least doing your job worse than usual”.
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Thousands of buildings were burned, damaged or destroyed in northern Nigerian towns in recent days when Boko Haram militants stormed through, using scorched-earth tactics against civilians, according to a new analysis of satellite images by human rights groups.
In a succession of attacks, fighters from Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group that has gripped northern Nigeria and battled the government for years, have swept through a cluster of villages along the shores of Lake Chad in a “systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in the area,” according to Human Rights Watch.
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An anti-terror court on Wednesday indicted Pervez Musharraf over the 2006 killing of a separatist leader, the latest legal hurdle facing the former military ruler since his return from self-imposed exile two years ago.
The charges by the court in Quetta are unlikely to cause any immediate problems for the 71-year-old, who has not attended a single hearing in the case since it began in 2013. He was previously indicted for treason in March last year over his imposition of emergency rule in 2007, but proceedings have stalled since then as the country’s civil authorities and judiciary appear to lack the will to take on the military.
“The anti-terrorist court has indicted Musharraf along with former interior minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao and former home minister [of] Balochistan province Shoaib Nosherwani in Nawab Akbar Bugti’s murder case,” said public prosecutor Taimur Shah. He added the court would resume hearings in the case on Feb. 4.
Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in a military operation in 2006, sparking deadly nationwide protests and inflaming a separatist insurgency in resource-rich but impoverished Balochistan.
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Reports that emerged on Thursday evening that a Burmese woman was publicly beheaded in Mecca by Saudi authorities for allegedly killing her step-daughter has outraged social media users.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Is this the right way or the wrong way to cover the news of the record heat? That depends. Is the purpose of an article like this to convey how open-minded the New York Times is? If so, then the piece is a success, managing to give one-third of its quotes to a proponent of a fringe theory without giving any indication that his eccentric views are virtually absent from peer-reviewed science.
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Although it may not have been warm where you live, scientists announced Friday that 2014 was the Earth’s hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The climate milestone was made possible in large part by exceptionally mild ocean temperatures and above-average temperatures on most continents.
Remarkably, the warmth came without the assistance of an El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean. These events are naturally occurring ocean and atmospheric cycles that tend to boost global temperatures. Previous El Niños have been responsible in part for the prior warmest years, such as 1998 and 2005, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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The planet’s warmest year on record was 2014, federal scientists announced Friday.
“Humans are literally cooking their planet,” said Jonathan Overpeck, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Arizona.
The global temperature from 2014 broke the previous record warmest years of 2005 and 2010 since record-keeping began in 1880.
Two separate data sets of global temperature — from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — confirmed the record. Another data set released last week by the Japan Meteorological Agency also found 2014 was the planet’s warmest.
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Finance
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On Thursday afternoon Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel filed a settlement in a class-action lawsuit [PDF] involving former employees of the companies, agreeing to pay them $415 million. The 64,000 employees and former employees who made up the class alleged that their employers had agreed not to cold call or poach each others’ employees, creating artificially low wages for the employees for years.
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In the following interview, New School professor and economist Richard Wolff provides his analysis of the causes of the economic crisis in Greece and in the eurozone, debunks claims that the Greek economy is recovering and offers his proposal for what a post-capitalist future could look like for Greece and the world.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“This isn’t an election–it’s a rerun,” he complains. He’s talking about all the people that are running or might be running who have run before or have relatives who have run.
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Censorship
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The Turkish government has been battling with Twitter for quite some time. It’s gone after citizens for comments on Twitter, blamed Twitter for social unrest and even tried (temporarily) banning Twitter entirely in the country. There was even a lawsuit by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, filed with the Constitutional Court, over his own government’s “failure” to implement rules for removing content on Twitter.
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The only people who still feel they can clearly define who is and isn’t a journalist are legislators. They’re almost always wrong. Journalism isn’t a career. It’s an activity. Anyone can do it and, thanks to the internet, anyone can find a publishing platform and readers. But, according to many politicians, it ain’t the press unless it involves one.
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Leaders in Europe are justifiably trying to figure out what they should be doing to prevent terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Regrettably, some politicians are proposing the kind of Internet censorship and surveillance that would do little to protect their citizens but do a lot to infringe on civil liberties.
In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.
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The French authorities are moving aggressively to rein in speech supporting terrorism, employing a new law to mete out tough prison sentences in a crackdown that is stoking a free-speech debate after last week’s attacks in Paris.
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More recently, the Saudi Arabian government announced that it had hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornography and arrested many of the handles’ owners. The move was organized by the Commission for the Promotion and Prevention of Vice, also known as Haia, the Saudi religious police.
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Raif Badawi was flogged in public 50 times last week. He has 950 lashes and nearly a decade in prison left to serve – simply for blogging about free speech.
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The latest issue of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has ignited controversy in the Middle East and elsewhere due to a caricature of the prophet Muhammad depicted on its cover.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the journal’s central Paris headquarters last week and murdered 12 people, they said to avenge the publication’s regular lampooning of Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous and the decision to again publish a cartoon of Muhammed has caused widespread debate.
The cartoon itself depicts the Prophet shedding a tear while holding a sign that says “Je suis Charlie” — the slogan which has become popular around the world as a declaration of solidarity with the victims of the attack — under a headline that reads “All is forgiven.” It was drawn by the weekly’s cartoonist Luz, who escaped the massacre because he was late arriving for work.
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Privacy
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Ladar Levison, who ran Edward Snowden’s email account, said moves to allow government access to encrypted data would weaken safety online for everyone
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The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court filing and officials familiar with the program.
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The cypherpunks are winning the second crypto-war against government spies. What will happen when everyone is anonymous?
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In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on the European Commission to deliver on its “promise” of a new EU-wide data retention directive to replace the one struck down by the EU’s highest court last year.
Merkel wants to implement this new directive into German law. There’s only one problem: the Commission doesn’t seem to have promised any such thing, at least not in public.
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This week the Prime Minister introduced a policy of banning strong encryption in the UK in order to deny terrorists ‘safe spaces’ in which to operate. Sounds robust, doesn’t it? In practice such a policy is impossible to implement and so would never yield any security benefit. It would, however, leave all of us vulnerable to trivial cyber-attacks and David Cameron’s vision of a Digital Britain in tatters.
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We’re usually very happy to see the government release documents shed light on unconstitutional surveillance. We’re less happy when the release is done Christmas week, in an attempt to ensure that they will get as little attention as possible.
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Last week we wrote about how a ruling by Europe’s highest court, the EUCJ, that blanket data retention was “invalid,” had received a further boost from an analysis by the European Parliament’s legal services. That, in its turn, made it more likely that more overbroad data retention laws in EU nations would be challenged, as has already happened in the UK and Sweden.
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Google’s smartglasses have ‘graduated’ from the company’s development lab placed under the control of the father of the iPod
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Civil Rights
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Before the Law chronicles sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder’s arrest, three-year incarceration in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, and the months following the dismissal of his case without a trial. On May 15, 2010, Roberto Bautista reported to the police that he had been robbed. The police detained Kalief, but he was not in possession of any of the stolen items. When they spoke with Bautista after the search, he changed the date of the robbery to two weeks prior. On Bautista’s inconsistent accusation alone, Kalief was arrested on multiple felony charges and held without bail.
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The prisoner could barely stand. He and a group of fellow detainees at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, had started a riot in a cell and the unit of soldiers that I led, the Quick Reaction Force, had quelled the violence with whatever it took — fists, boots, clubs, shields and rubber bullets.
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That’s because the state’s contract with private prison corporation Corrections Corp. of America includes the stipulation that CCA can impose penalties on the state if the number of prisoners from Vermont drops below 380, Pallito said.
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Hanging out in an IRC chat room giving advice to people now makes you a member of a “criminal enterprise”, allowing the FBI to sweep in and confiscate all your assets without charging you with a crime.
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Some two years following her rape, Ripley attended a Salt Lake City council meeting and discovered that it was not only her case that had been brushed aside. Approximately 79% of SLCPD’s rape kits had never been sent to the lab for testing. Ripley’s kit was one of over 1,000 collected by the SLCPD in an eight year period – of these, 788 were either destroyed or still sitting on a shelf in the police department. Salt Lake City’s unprocessed rape kits make up only a small portion of the number across the United States – which, according to a January 2014 White House report total well over 20,000.
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Mount Holyoke College, the historical women’s college in western Massachusetts, will no longer participate in the now-decades-old tradition of performing “The Vagina Monologues” in February, to raise awareness of gender-based violence, out of concern that the play is not inclusive of transgender students. The school, which recently changed its definition of “woman” to include male-to-female trans students, has become a site of controversy over the decision to retire Eve Ensler’s 1996 feminist classic permanently.
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Oklahoma executed Charles Warner on Thursday night, the state’s first lethal injection since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.
Attorneys for Warner and three other Oklahoma inmates asked the US supreme court for a stay, but the court denied the request in a 5-4 decision. The lawyers argued that the first of three drugs in a lethal cocktail – midazolam – would not properly sedate a person, even if the drug were properly administered.
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Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.
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Riseup, a tech collective that provides security-minded communications to activists worldwide, sounded the alarm last month when a judge in Spain stated that the use of their email service is a practice, he believes, associated with terrorism.
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The worst offenders include Northumberland and Leeds local councils, both of which have more than 500 officials with powers of entry, whilst Hertfordshire, Chorley and Cornwall all have more than 300.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Draft net neutrality legislation released Friday by Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or selectively slowing legal Web content, but it would allow them to engage in “reasonable” network management.
The proposal would give broadband providers wide latitude to engage in network management, with a management practice deemed reasonable “if it is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose.”
The draft legislation would also prohibit the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from reclassifying broadband as a regulated public utility, and it would stop the agency from creating any new net neutrality rules.
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Net neutrality legislation unveiled by Republicans today would gut the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the broadband industry.
As expected, the bill forbids the FCC from reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, preventing the commission from using authority it has under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This is the statute the FCC uses to regulate landline telephone providers.
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Ajit Pai, part of the commission’s Republican minority, has clashed with Netflix over its use of technology that is not compatible with “open caching software” used by Internet service providers. Netflix says that it “obscured certain URL structures to protect our members from deep packet inspection tools deployed to gather data about what they watch online,” which apparently had the side effect of forcing ISPs to use different caching systems. Netflix does offer caching appliances to Internet service providers, but the bigger carriers have refused, demanding payment for connections to their networks.
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Last month I noted how longtime domain registrar Tucows had decided to try and kick-start stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a fixed-line residential broadband market all-too-often dominated by just one or two giant, apathetic players. Ting promised to offer 1 Gbps speeds at a sub-$100 price point, while at the same time promising to respect net neutrality.
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Send this to a friend
01.16.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Failing to add a check for an empty variable has left some Steam users on Linux running a recursive delete of their entire filesystem with user privileges.
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The Linux landscape is ever changing. Over the last few years, the flagship open source tool has found levels of acceptance thought unreachable for software running on a free platform. That momentum isn’t going to let up. In fact, 2015 promises to be a very bright year in Linux land ─ from enterprise Linux all the way down to the desktop. In fact, the Linux desktop should find 2015 to be a rather exciting time.
Why? Applications. There are some outstanding projects on the horizon that could easily bring the Linux desktop into a realm of relevancy it has yet to enjoy.
Let’s take a look at six such projects and see what they have to offer.
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Now that Linux has essentially gained parity with Windows across the enterprise, solution providers have a vested interest in where customers who will make use of the open-source platform in 2015 are headed. In a new survey of 115 customers, Red Hat finds that, in general, optimism concerning IT spending in 2015 is relatively high with investments in mobile computing and big data topping the priority list. Just over half those customers are planning new application deployments on Linux, but perhaps most interesting to the solution providers in the channel is the fact that 26 percent are planning on migrating application workloads from Windows to Linux and another 15 percent are planning to migrate from Unix to Linux. Most of the application workloads also appear headed for private or hybrid clouds rather than public clouds. Also of note to solution providers should be the fact that 33 percent either already have or plan to embrace containers as an alternative form of virtualization in 2015 for reasons, ranging from the ability to deploy applications faster to streamlining testing and development.
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After such a banner year of Linux releases it might seem overly pessimistic to pause and ask this question: is there a future beyond this?
The answer is, of course, “yes” – or rather it’s yes, but… The qualifying “but” can take many forms, depending on who you talk to and what their stake is in the game.
Even if you take the most optimistic outlook for the future of the Linux desktop, to what end do all these distros continue turning out all these great releases year after year? Are we waiting for the day when there are no more laptops or desktops left?
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Desktop
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Apple has always had attractive and stylish hardware, but now it seems that some users are opting to run Linux instead of OS X on their Macbooks. A redditor asked about this trend and got some very interesting answers.
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Server
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My current setup at home involves a HP Microserver. It has four drive bays carrying two SSDs (for home directories) and two Western Digital RE4 2TB drives for bulk data storage (photos, source tarballs and other things that don’t change often). Each pair of drives is mirrored. I chose the RE4 because I use RAID1 and they offer good performance and error recovery control which is useful in any RAID scenario.
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iTWire interviews ESET Malware Researcher Olivier Bilodeau, on his way to be one of the speakers at the 2015 Linux.conf.au conference, presenting on advanced Linux server-side threats.
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Kernel Space
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Following his keynote speech at the Linux.conf.au Conference in Auckland, New Zealand, Torvalds opened a Q&A session by fielding a question from Nebula One developer Matthew Garrett that accused Torvalds of having an abrasive tone in the Linux kernel mailing list. “Some people think I’m nice and are shocked when they find out different,” Torvalds said in response (quoted via multiple Twitter accounts of the event). “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”
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On Thursday, Linux legend Linus Torvalds sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica responding to statements he made in Auckland, New Zealand earlier that day about diversity and “niceness” in the open source sector.
“What I wanted to say [at the keynote]—and clearly must have done very badly—is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different,” Torvalds wrote via e-mail. “I think people sometimes look at it as being just ‘programmers,’ which is not true. It’s about all the people who are more oriented toward commercial things, too. It’s about all those people who are interested in legal issues—and the social ones, too!”
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If there is strength in numbers, there is a whole lot of strength in the open source movement for Internet of Things technology. On January 14, the IoTivity open source project announced a preview release of of its technology that is being developed as a Linux Foundation Collaboration Project.
The Linux Foundation is also the home of the AllSeen Alliance IoT project that is based around Qualcomm’s open-source AllJoyn framework. It is unclear if there is any overlap between IoTivity and AllSeen’s inititiatives. The Linux Foundation did not respond to a request for a comment from Datamation on any potential overlap between the projects. That said, there has always been a lot of choice within the Linux and open source ecosystem and having multiple IoT options isn’t a surprise.
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Systemd is coming to a linux distro near you.
In fact, if you’re using RHEL 7+, CentOS 7+, Fedora 15+ or Arch, you’re already using systemd. You can always stick to a distribution that stays clear of systemd, but chances are you’ll eventually run into systemd — so we may as well learn to get along with it.
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The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.12.36, has been announced by Jiri Slaby and it has arrived with a fair number of changes and improvements.
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Applications
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The official definition of NTP (Network Time Protocol) says that it is a “protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network.”
To participate in that synchronization of clocks, a computer must be running either an NTP daemon (server) or an NTP client. A computer providing NTP services to other computers is an NTP server, while the one syncing to an NTP server is an NTP client.
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Popcorn Time is an app that allows users to stream movies and TV shows directly from torrents, without having to save the files locally. It’s still under development, but it’s quite stable and new features are being added all the time.
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Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cloud based file backup system that put Linux FIRST? One that made it so we didn’t have to use FUSE? One that didn’t put out a Windows client first and the Linux client was an afterthought? One that you could get installed and configured quickly and easily which would allow you to ‘set it and forget it’? Me too!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The game has some minor tweaks to the structure compared to Injustice, but it’s overwhelmingly similar. Our Shaun Musgrave, a veteran of Injustice, wrote up a guide on how to play the game without spending money and discussing how to do well in the game. Blocking is very important with the combat being based around grappling. Defnitely check that out. If you never played Injustice and prefer wrestlers to superheroes, check this out regardless of the platform, it’s one of the better ways to do not just a mobile-friendly fighting game, but also a fair free-to-play game.
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Nostalgia junkies will be pleased to hear that Super Mario 64 is getting a complete overhaul as fans are rebuilding the game from scratch using the FOSS Blender Game Engine with a Linux release confirmed.
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The remake of the popular classic ‘Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee’ was released for PlayStation 4 last summer, and now the long wait for the Linux version of the game is coming to an end.
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With two weeks left until its January 27th release, Double Fine have announced that Grim Fandango is now available for pre-order via GOG.com. At the same time, a new Grim Fandango Remastered website has gone live, and a third episode of 2 Player Productions’ The Making of Grim Fandango documentary series has been released.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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According to François, “we don’t want to let ourselves be pushed around and make choices that go against our beliefs. This freedom of choice is exactly the advantage that a public institution has over a private school.” All other animation schools in France, fellow members of RECA (the network of French schools of animation), are watching ATI avidly to see how this new methodology works out.
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Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, has been updated to version 2.9 Beta 2 and it comes with a large number of improvements and various fixes.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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gnome-battery-bench is basically usable as is. The main remaining thing to do with it is to spend some time designing and recording a couple of sequences that better reflect actual usage. The current tests I checked in are basically just placeholders.
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Tarballs are due on 2015-01-19 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.15.4…
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The newest GNOME application is for testing your laptop’s battery power use under various scenarios.
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New Releases
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SparkyLinux 3.6-dev2 is the second testing release of out spin with LXQt.
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UberStudent is a Linux distribution for everyone, especially higher education and advanced secondary students, people who teach them, and their schools. It is designed for Linux beginners while being equally satisfying to advanced users.
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Black Lab Linux, a distribution based on Kubuntu and that uses one of the latest KDE packages, has been upgraded for version 6.0 and is now available for download.
Users might associate the name of Black Lab Linux with a GNOME desktop, but the developer also had a KDE edition of the operating system, which they didn’t bother too much to upgrade. Now they have finally got around to it, and backed by popular demand, and they made quite a few improvements.
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Want a new and improved hypervisor for your cloud or data-center? Then consider the latest edition of Xen, Xen 4.5, from the Linux Foundation’s Xen Project Collaborative Project.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I am delighted to announce the release of Chapeau 21 “Obree”.
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Like most Linux distros, Fedora is a massive, sprawling project. Frankly, it’s sprawl-y to the point that it has felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? The distro has served as a kind of showcase for GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage. So Fedora in theory is meant to target everyday users, but at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like DevAssistant. Does that make Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro?
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 2.5.2 Beta and is now available for download and testing.
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Tails, a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps you use the Internet anonymously, is now at version 1.2.3 and is available for download and testing.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Caffeine is a tool used to temporarily prevent the activation of the screensaver / lock screen / sleep mode when using full-screen windows. The application is useful when using video players that don’t do this automatically, when listening to music while not using the computer, etc.
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It’s easy to think that Ubuntu developers are usually working only on the next version of the operating systems, but they also put a lot of effort into the distros they already released. For example, an important Unity update has been unveiled now for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
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Canonical has updated the Firefox packages for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. If you have this application already installed, you only need to update your system
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Juju first debuted in Ubuntu 11.10, the “Oneiric Ocelot,” back in October of 2011. The word “juju” is a word meaning magic in the African language from which the name Ubuntu itself was derived. Ubuntu Linux Server The promise of Juju is easier application and service deployment, which is enabled by way of a number of Juju components.
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While it already has many applications specially developed for it, Canonical’s Will Cooke has managed to make LibreOffice’s Writer tool (developed for X.org) run on Ubuntu Touch.
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For now, Ubuntu’s convergence concept has been previously demoed by Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s former Community Manager, via the Weather App and the Karma Machine.
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A single GParted vulnerability has been found and corrected in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). The developers have issued a patch and the GParted app has been updated.
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One of the problems on Ubuntu platforms is that the Software Update tool doesn’t remove the old kernels after an upgrade, but the Ubuntu devs are now talking whether their tool should be used to perform this kind of cleaning.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” was released. It and the MATE edition are notable in featuring…Compiz! This really caught my eye, so I wanted to review it. There are several other changes too, so I figured that it would be worthwhile to review the Xfce edition rather than the MATE edition, given that I already tried the MATE edition of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” not too long ago. Note that Ubuntu-based Linux Mint is sticking only to LTS releases, so a major release will roughly coincide (lagging by a month or so) with the Ubuntu LTS release, and then decimal point releases will be put out every 6 months or so and be given a new code name while still sticking with the last LTS release as its base. As far as this review goes, I tried this as usual as a live USB system made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.
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We’re starting 2015 with exciting news. Linux Mint and CompuLab will be announcing a brand new unit called “MintBox Mini” in Q2 2015.
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The Linux Mint project has announced the MintBox Mini, which is a mini PC that is basically small enough to almost fit into a pocket.
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CompuLab’s MintBox computers have always had a relatively small form factor, and have gotten very positive reviews from customers on Amazon. But now they are getting even smaller with the upcoming release of the MintBox Mini. The MintBox Mini is expected to debut sometime in the second quarter of 2015 and will sell for $295.
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Tails is a Linux distribution geared toward helping you protect your privacy and anonymity while you use the Internet. The latest release is version 1.2.3 and you can download it now.
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The OIC’s “IoTivity” project released a v0.9.0 preview of its open source IoT framework software, with ready-to-test builds for Arduino, Tizen, and Yocto.
IoTivity is a project sponsored by the Open Internet Consortium (OIC), an industry association formed last July in order to develop open source standards and software for providing “interoperability and services” to potentially billions of Internet-of-Things devices.
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Phones
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Android
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Android: A while back, Adobe released a Lightroom companion app for iOS phones and tablets. Now, Android is catching up with a version of the app for phones. And it starts with a 30-day free trial.
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It’s no secret that Adobe hasn’t exactly done a stellar job at keeping parity between its collection of apps for iOS and Android. iOS users, for instance, enjoy Adobe Illustrator Line and Draw, Color CC, Premiere Clip, Brush CC, and many more that have yet to see the light of day on the Play Store.
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Originally discovered by Notebook Italia, both tablets are powered by an Intel quad-core Bay Trail Atom Z3735F processor. Accompanying the processor package is 2GB of RAM, as well as 32GB of internal storage. Both the Pro Slate and Pro Tablet come with 10.1-inch displays, as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.
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In terms of specs, the tablet description isn’t far off. The consumer model is powered by a Snapdragon 805 system-on-a-chip, which frequently appears in flagship phones and tablets from Android OEMs. The current demo unit is running Android Kit Kat, though the final release will sport Lollipop.
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If you’re still waiting for your OnePlus One to make the official jump to Android 5.0 Lollipop we have some good news. The Cyanogen-powered phone is getting its own specialized version of Google’s latest mobile OS in February, according to Cyanogen founder Steve Kondik.
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Last week on our Android customization series, we went a little crazy with device security, rigging things up using Tasker to take a photo of anyone accessing your device. We were sure to save the device’s current GPS coordinates as a part of the file name of the photo, making it as likely as possible you can recover a lost device.
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Back in December, the Nexus 7 (2012) received a new factory image with the build number LRX22G, containing an update to Android 5.0.2. Now the Nexus 7 (2013) Wi-Fi and Nexus 10 are following suite, as factory images have just landed for both of these tablets.
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The plain English takeaway is that faster training of neural networks will now be widely available via open source project Torch.
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Events
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Next week will be the first Berlin ownCloud meetup of 2015.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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L10n teams are incredibly diverse in nature, and Mozilla is no exception. At the meetup, I had a chance to meet people of many different cultures and languages who are all working to enable their Mozilla products. Michael Bauer, for example, works on Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken by less than 100,000 people. Michael’s efforts helped Scottish Gaelic be present on several applications.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As predicted, 2015 is turning out to be the year when many IT departments are moving from evaluation stage to deployment stage for OpenStack cloud instances.
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BSD
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As countless user surveys have shown, Linux is a predominant platform for many cloud deployments, with Ubuntu reigning king. In fact, many surveys show that more than half of OpenStack deployments are built on Ubuntu.
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Openness/Sharing
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Science
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For the past 10 years, I’ve had a front row seat to the transition of they way young adults approach IT work. As a professor teaching software architecture at the National Technology University, I’ve witnessed a lot of changes in students today.
First, I need to point out that my class is an elective for students in the final year of their degree. They typically enroll in my “IT Project Architecture” class because they want to learn and they want to get a job after they graduate, which tends to eliminate any slackers from my class.
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Security
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Most Americans still don’t worry about malware on their mobile devices. But the halcyon days of Android innocence are fast coming to a close, according to a new report by San Francisco-based mobile-security-software developer Lookout, Inc.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a follow-up to coverage on Democracy Now! over the past few days, the news network CNN has been given some direct, on-air criticism of its use of so-called terrorism “experts” for discussion of violent attacks like the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Speaking to CNN, The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill was asked about his comments during a Democracy Now! interview on Monday in which he criticized corporate media coverage of the attack’s aftermath. Scahill called out CNN and other networks for using pundits he said have no right to call themselves “terrorism experts.”
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The Secret Service is forcing out four of its most senior officials while two others are retiring…
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Years after the U.S. military tried to create a new army in Iraq — at a cost of over $25 billion — American trainers have returned to help rebuild the country’s fighting force.
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Emily Miller, the chief investigative reporter for Washington, D.C.’s Fox affiliate WTTG, is scheduled to speak at a rally organized by Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), a far-right pro-gun group. VCDL has previously published racially charged content in its newsletter and suggested violent action against the government may be an “option” for gun advocates.
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“Congress needs to show patience,” Mr. Obama said during a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. “There is no good argument for us to try to undercut, undermine the negotiations until they have played themselves out.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Last year broke another global heat record, becoming the hottest since 1880. But did it feel that way to you? Probably not, since it was Canada’s coolest in 18 years.
NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced today that last year broke the global temperature record for the third time in a decade.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Fox News pundit Steve Emerson drew international ridicule for claiming Birmingham, England, was a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims (FAIR Blog, 1/12/15). But he was far from alone on Fox in advancing this xenophobic fantasy of urban areas lost to Western civilization.
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Audrey Cooper does not believe it should have taken a century and a half for the San Francisco Chronicle to name its first female editor-in-chief.
And she should know. She’s that editor.
Cooper, who was named to the top post at the Chronicle on Wednesday, said a glass ceiling still exists at news organizations and she’s personally had experiences where she felt she wasn’t treated equally because of her gender.
“Obviously there is (a glass ceiling),” Cooper said. “I think all of the coverage of [New York Times editor Jill Abramson's 2014] departure laid bare a lot of things that other female editors felt but hadn’t really articulated. They’re much more subtle than people might think. Sexism in general is a lot more subtle than it used to be 20 years ago. Yes, I’ve had the experiences that I think that I was not treated the same as men based on my gender.”
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Censorship
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Weighing in on last week’s terror in France and the debate over freedom of expression it stirred, Pope Francis said en route to the Philippines that killing “in the name of God” is wrong, but it is also wrong to “provoke” people by belittling their religion.
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Immediately upon unveiling its new cover — a depiction of Muhammad — the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Tuesday reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities that has embroiled Europe since 12 people were killed during an attack on its Paris offices by Muslim extremists a week ago.
The cover shows the bearded prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign saying, “I am Charlie,” the rallying cry that has become synonymous with support of the newspaper and free expression. Above the cartoon on a green background is the headline “All is forgiven.”
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Privacy
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In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the UK government is redoubling its efforts to engage in mass surveillance.
Prime minister David Cameron wants to reintroduce the so-called snoopers’ charter – properly, the Communications Data Bill – which would compel telecoms companies to keep records of all internet, email and cellphone activity. He also wants to ban encrypted communications services.
Cameron seems to believe terrorist attacks can be prevented if only mass surveillance, by the UK’s intelligence-gathering centre GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, reaches the degree of perfection portrayed in his favourite TV dramas, where computers magically pinpoint the bad guys. Computers don’t work this way in real life and neither does mass surveillance.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered 17 people, were known to the French security services and considered a serious threat. France has blanket electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert what happened.
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The FBI had, and most likely still has, a much closer involvement with the NSA’s mass surveillance programs than previously thought – with access to raw foreign intelligence and data on Americans gleaned from the PRISM program.
The 231-page report, from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, was obtained – albeit in a heavily redacted form – after a Freedom of Information request by The New York Times, a request made possible using key details leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The report finds that in 2008 – almost since the inception of the PRISM program, which allows the NSA access to citizens’ information stored by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo! among others – the FBI had access to slurped private data.
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It has invoked the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to catch viewers evading the £145 charge.
The Act, which regulates the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation, was introduced in 2000 to safeguard national security.
But a series of extensions mean it can now be applied to investigate minor offences, including not paying the licence fee.
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The chairman of the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party successfully fooled attendees at a major Swedish security and defense conference into connecting to an open Wi-Fi network that he controlled—as a way to protest mass digital surveillance.
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Double agent working for US, identified only as Markus R, may have sold top-secret details of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad, according to Bild newspaper
[...]
An employee of the BND, Germany’s equivalent of MI6, Markus R worked in the registry section of its overseas operations department, where he had access to top secret documents including the identities of operatives posted abroad.
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That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the “Alec Station,” the cover name for CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova documentary on PBS, “The Spy Factory.” Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. The station’s rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group.
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As we try to process our rage and grief after attacks like the one on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Chris Hayes examines how we are susceptible to mistakes that can have devastating consequences.
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It’s academic, Google Glass is reported to now be on the way out. I remember in May 2014 I voiced my concerns about the product, the dislike of its camera pointing at you and also mentioned the fan boys/girls who defended the device with cries of “Glass Hater”. Seems I was right, because the views I aired appear to have been echoed by potential consumers (or the lack thereof).
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Laura Poitras’s “Citizenfour,” about Edward J. Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents, has long been seen as the front-runner for the best documentary Oscar. It plays out like a thriller while touching on one of the rawest nerves of our time – government surveillance of private citizens.
Of course getting the actual nomination is another thing altogether. What had been seen as “Citizenfour’s” biggest challenger, the Roger Ebert film “Life Itself,” failed to get a nod.
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In the wake of recent terror attacks in Europe, British Prime Minister David Cameron has called for an end to secure communications technology.
In other words, he wants to ensure that you will never again be able to use encryption technology to maintain privacy.
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A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.
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Civil Rights
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The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to wage an unprecedented war on national security whistle-blowers.
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“Both the CIA Inspector General and the review board appointed by Director Brennan have now concluded that the CIA’s unauthorized search of Senate files was improper. It is incredible that no one at the CIA has been held accountable for this very clear violation of Constitutional principles. Director Brennan either needs to reprimand the individuals involved or take responsibility himself. So far he has done neither.
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The Central Intelligence Agency will not discipline any of the five agency employees who accessed Senate Intelligence Committee computer systems last year during the Senate investigation of abusive interrogation tactics by the CIA.
While the CIA’s decision was in line with a review that the agency commissioned, it contradicts the agency’s own internal watchdog, the CIA Office of the Inspector General, which had concluded that the employees accessed Senate computers “improperly” and didn’t respond with candor when questioned.
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No Central Intelligence Agency personnel will be disciplined for intruding into computers being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of a highly-sensitive investigation into the agency’s use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, the agency said Wednesday.
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Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan’s decision last year to quietly flag White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to a developing showdown with the Senate drew repeated warnings at the time from a CIA lawyer who said such contact was unwise because it might undermine a criminal investigation or appear to do so, a report released Wednesday revealed.v
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Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.
The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before CIA employees were ordered to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands. The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe.
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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a highly unusual public appearance Thursday — taking the witness stand for the prosecution in a criminal case against a former CIA officer on trial for leaking details of a top-secret spy program.
Rice, who once traveled the globe as America’s top diplomat, found herself describing another type of diplomacy to a federal court jury: the Bush administration’s effort in 2003 to kill a New York Times story that threatened to reveal a CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program by secretly providing Tehran with flawed plans for an atomic weapon.
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The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.
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This week, in a federal courtroom, I’ve heard a series of government witnesses testify behind a screen while expounding on a central precept of the national security state: The CIA can do no wrong.
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The United States transferred five more detainees — all of them Yemenis — from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday, the Defense Department announced. Their release intensified the dispute between the Obama administration and several Republican senators over President Obama’s recent flurry of transfers as he seeks to empty the American-run prison.
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In the aftermath of a series of brutal terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 17, including eight journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, police officers and hostages at a kosher food market, more than three million people marched in Paris in solidarity with the victims and in support of freedom of the press. Forty heads of state also joined the march, but as many critics pointed out, some of the nations they represented, such as Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Russia and Israel, have poor records when it comes to press freedom at home. The U.S., criticized by some for not sending a high-level representative to participate in the Paris march, also has a flawed record on freedom of the press.
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The FBI and federal prosecutors have recommended felony charges against former CIA director David Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. Petraeus resigned in 2012 after admitting to cheating on his wife with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The recommendation of charges stems from a probe into whether Petraeus gave Broadwell access to his CIA email account and other sensitive material. Attorney General Eric Holder was supposed to have decided by the end of last year on whether to indict. According to The New York Times, the delay has frustrated some federal officials “who have questioned whether Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Holder has led a crackdown” on government whistleblowers. On Sunday, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California urged the Department of Justice not to bring criminal charges against Petraeus, saying “the four-star general of our generation” and “very brilliant man” has “suffered enough.” We are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who calls Feinstein’s comments “one of the most disgusting you will ever hear. What she’s actually saying is that because David Petraeus is a really important person, that he should be immunized from consequences for his lawbreaking … Dianne Feinstein has called for the prosecution of all sorts of leakers, and yet she exempts David Petraeus.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Even as China cuts access to some foreign online services, it is laying more fiber optic cables to improve its connection to global Internet networks.
China recently added seven new access points to the world’s Internet backbone, adding to the three points that connect through Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Monday.
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Frustrated over the number of Internet providers that are available to you? If so, you’re like many who are limited to just a handful of broadband companies. But now President Obama wants to change that, arguing that choice and competition are lacking in the U.S. broadband market. On Wednesday, Obama will unveil a series of measures aimed at making high-speed Web connections cheaper and more widely available to millions of Americans. The announcement will focus chiefly on efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T — a public option for Internet access, you could say.
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Expansion in DNS means you may struggle to handle email from Chinese or Arabic domains
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Send this to a friend
01.15.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The mayor of Munich, the city that replaced Windows with Linux, is told his public attacks on the move to open source are hampering efforts to end the authority’s IT staffing shortage.
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Desktop
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Server
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In October 2014, Databricks participated in the Sort Benchmark and set a new world record for sorting 100 terabytes (TB) of data, or 1 trillion 100-byte records. The team used Apache Spark on 207 EC2 virtual machines and sorted 100 TB of data in 23 minutes.
In comparison, the previous world record set by Hadoop MapReduce used 2100 machines in a private data center and took 72 minutes. This entry tied with a UCSD research team building high performance systems and we jointly set a new world record.
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Kernel Space
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Storage industry technologies are undergoing a major shift and operating systems must evolve to keep pace with the change. That’s one reason why Micron Technology, a global leader in advanced semiconductor systems including DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash, recently joined the Linux Foundation as a corporate member.
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AtomicRNG is an open-source project started by a Phoronix reader that’s an experimental random number generator that feeds the Linux entropy pool and is based on an Alpha Radiation Visualizer.
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Over the past year or so various people have been automating kernel builds with the aim of both setting the standard that things should build reliably and using the resulting builds for automated testing. This has been having good results, it’s especially nice to compare the results for older stable kernel builds with current ones and notice how much happier everything is.
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While Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has publicly had Broadwell Linux GPU driver code to post public since the end of 2013 and they’ve already started on Skylake enablement, there’s still yet-to-be-mainlined patches for the Linux kernel to benefit Broadwell graphics performance.
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Graphics Stack
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Marcin Juszkiewicz, the ARM developer at Red Hat responsible for a lot of RHEL/Fedora ARM work, has finally managed to get an X11 Server running on real AArch64 hardware.
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NIR aims to be lower-level than GLSL IR but still high enough to be device-independent and support generic optimizations. NIR is flat, type-less, GLSL-like features, native support for SSA, and uses much less memory than GLSL IR.
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Took me some time but finally I managed to workaround all issues and got X11 running on real AArch64 hardware.
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Benchmarks
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This week there was a 22-way graphics card test of Metro Redux on Linux using GeForce and Radeon hardware with the latest AMD and NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Today the newest Linux gaming test candidate to look at is the AMD/NVIDIA Linux performance with the latest Unreal Engine 4 demos. In this article is a look at the UE4 Linux performance on AMD and NVIDIA graphics hardware running with Ubuntu.
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For your viewing pleasure today are some benchmarks of PC-BSD 10.1 compared to Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 when testing with both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers.
FreeBSD 10.1 was released back in November along with PC-BSD 10.1 and its new TrueOS. It took a bit of time though to get some benchmarks completed of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.1 due to running into issues loading the updated OS on a few test systems I frequently use for Linux testing. In particular, disk/SATA issues on multiple systems when booting the PC-BSD 10.1 installer. Fortunately, I came across one of the powerful workhorse systems that played nicely with PC-BSD 10.1
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Applications
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Proprietary
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A fresh Beta version of the Opera Internet browser has been released by its developers and the Linux users can test it along with everyone else. It brings quite a few minor changes, but there are also two major improvements that really stand out.
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Instructionals/Technical
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While movies like to think they’re still common, the concept of a mainframe with dumb terminals is a bit of an obsolete concept now. The proliferation of high-powered machines made it easier to give everyone their own system and that hasn’t really changed.
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Games
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However, according to the CEO of Origin PC, the Steam Machine is “pretty much dead” and is just a new term for a living room PC.
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Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is a brutal multiplayer game that pits players against one another, but using medieval weapons and tactics. It’s insanely fun and now Linux users can also play it.
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Gunslugs 2, a new 2D side scrolling arcade shooter that draws its inspiration from games like Contra, has been published on Steam and is also available for Linux users.
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The sequel to the popular run ‘n’ gun platformer is now out, and as a last minute surprise, the developer OrangePixel also made the first game available for Linux today. We have played the follow-up, and it offers the same enjoyable action frenzy as the original, but in a more accessible package.
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Pillars of Eternity will be officially released on the 26th of March this year, and we have it confirmed that they are aiming for a same-day Linux release.
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Shadowrun: Hong Kong, a new turn-based action game from the famous Harebrained Schemes studio, has been announced for the Linux platform and it’s already making quite an impression on Kickstarter.
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JumpJet Rex, a new 2D platformer developed and published by TreeFortress Games, has been released on Steam and is now available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The developers from the KDE project have made some important changes and you might have noticed that it no longer says KDE Applications and Platform, jus KDE Applications. Also, you might have spotted the fact that KDE SC is also gone. The project has been split into KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Applications and they are now quasi-independent.
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KDE Frameworks 5.6.0 was released a few days ago and Plasma 5.2 will be out later this month. Meanwhile, the KDE Applications release is coming out in April.
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Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, has been updated once again and the KDE Community has detailed all the wonderful improvements and numerous fixes that have been implemented.
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On Tuesday KDE has released first beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.2. Plasma 5.2 is adding many new features and improvements and we would welcome testers to help find and fix bugs before the final release.
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Been a while since my last post. Exams came in and threw my momentum off. But now I’m back on track. I’ve been working on porting Baloo to use lucene instead of Xapain using Lucene++. Lucene++ is a C++ port of the java Lucene.
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We are happy to announce the second beta release in 2.9 series of Calligra Suite for you to test. We are focusing on fixing issues including those that you’d report so please continue to work with us. The next beta (3) is expected in February 2015.
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Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, has been updated to version 2.9 Beta 2 and it comes with a large number of improvements and various fixes.
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A few days ago, I was cleaning my desk in the lab and happened upon a printout of a fake distro called Chuck Norris Linux — more commonly known as CHUX — which casually mentions that “…if Chuck Norris wrote Linux, you couldn’t boot it, it would boot you.”
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You could only imagine how old that was, it’s a Dell Dimension 3000. It still has the old boob tube type monitor. Quickly I said Yes! It had Windows XP on it. I went out to the local computer store and spent money I didn’t have to obtain all the necessary software to keep my business going.
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Our Ultimate Distro & FOSS Guide 2015 is joined by our introduction to becoming a Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin
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New Releases
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Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 2.5.2 Beta and is now available for download and testing.
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Gentoo Family
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Today’s tiptoe through the newsfeeds found a list of distributions we’ll never see. Elsewhere, Phoronix.com said Fedora leadership is still planning releasing version 22 on time. Bruce Byfield has the advantages and disadvantages of popular Linux desktops and Jon maddog Hall shares his road to Open Source success. Over in Gentooland developer Donnie Berkholz says Gentoo needs focus to stay relevant and Andreas Hüttel has started a new blog series highlighting Gentoo derivatives.
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After nearly 12 years working on Gentoo and hearing blathering about how “Gentoo is about choice” and “Gentoo is a metadistribution,” I’ve come to a conclusion to where we need to go if we want to remain viable as a Linux distribution.
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Gentoo Linux is the foundation for quite some very cool and useful projects. So, I’m starting (hopefully) a series of blog posts here… and the first candidate is a personal favourite of mine, the famous SystemRescueCD.
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Red Hat Family
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Goldman Sachs cut shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research report sent to investors on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. The firm currently has $70.00 price target on the stock, up from their previous price target of $67.44.
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Analyst concerns about Red Hat’s growth prospects appeared to all but disappear last month after the enterprise software company reported third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street views.
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Red Hat‘s David Egts says government agencies can use Linux container technology to support virtualization efforts in an effort to efficiency and flexibility of their information technology systems.
Egts, the chief technologist at Red Hat’s public sector business, wrote in a piece published Tuesday on GCN that Linux containers include applications that agencies can deploy as a single package through isolated host systems.
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RED HAT has announced an update to Satellite 5, promising new features, improvements to security and automation, and a “refreshed” interface.
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Fedora
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This morning I wrote about Unless Fedora 22 Is To Be Delayed, GCC 5 Might Not Make It due to needing a mass rebuild of all the Fedora packages and the time involved on the short time-line. The Fedora FESCo committee convened today and their outcome is a bit surprising.
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While Fedora developers have been trying hard for Fedora 22 to be released on time and be stricter about time-based releases with Fedora releases currently being notorious for delays, there’s already some challenges with the fresh Fedora 22 plans for releasing in mid-May.
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Besides deciding to stick to Fedora 22′s time-based release schedule, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee also approved some new features for Fedora 22.
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Debian Family
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Depending on what one is looking for, it should be much easier to find. There’s now a high-level status overview given on the landing page, maintainers can learn how to make their packages reproducible, enthusiasts can more easily find what can help the project, and we have even started writing some history.
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Derivatives
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Valve has just released a new update for the stable branch of SteamOS and they’ve updated a ton of important packages, including the proprietary drivers and the Linux kernel.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical published some details about a Git vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
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Last month, Canonical announced snappy Ubuntu Core, the new, transactional version of Ubuntu, designed for public clouds. So far, snappy Ubuntu Core images are available on Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Amazon AWS.
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Canonical is hard at work building Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and they are implementing all sorts of important updates, including for the Linux kernel and other core components.
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I predicted it would fail. Honestly, I didn’t want it to — I was fairly sure the Ubuntu Phone would be just the mobile interface we really needed, but it just seemed Canonical and the Ubuntu Phone were both on a collision course with vaporware-dom. However, like that little train in that adorable children’s story, the Ubuntu Phone seemed to keep moving forward. In a few weeks, thanks to bq, the Ubuntu Phone will finally be given a chance on the marketplace… at least in Europe.
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There isn’t much time left in 2014 so we suppose it comes as no surprise that Canonical, the parent company behind Ubuntu, recently confirmed that the first Ubuntu-powered smartphones have been delayed until “early” next year. The first Ubuntu-powered devices were originally scheduled to launch sometime in 2014.
“Canonical continues to work closely with its first selected hardware partners, Meizu and bq, to bring Ubuntu phones to market in Europe and China,” Canonical’s vice president of mobile Cristian Parrino recently told PCWorld, without discussing rollouts to other markets such as the United States. The phones are expected to cost somewhere between $200 and $400 when they do launch.
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Flavours and Variants
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When it comes to Linux desktops, there are a few routes to go. The most common is to buy a Windows desktop and either replace Microsoft’s operating system or partition the drive with your favorite Linux distro. If you are a bit more technical, you can build your own machine, but this can sometimes be costly (depending on your needs).
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The MintBox Mini is a small form-factor desktop computer that comes with Linux Mint software preloaded. If the computer looks familiar, that’s because it’s a version of CompuLab’s fitlet, a line of small, fanless desktops introduced this week.
What makes this model a little different is that it’ll have a green case and come preloaded with the popular Linux Mint operating system.
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Linux Mint has announced that a new PC in its ‘MintBox’ line of PCs is coming in the spring: the ‘MintBox Mini’.
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Robinson’s build uses a Raspberry Pi A+, a USB hub, battery, touchscreen, charger, backlit keyboard and a few other random parts. The whole thing is housed inside of two plastic hard drive enclosures that are connected with a piano hinge. You’ll need some extra tools, including a drill, a soldering iron and some wire cutters, but Robinson’s guide is otherwise pretty straightforward.
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CompuLab is the Israeli PC manufacturer of industrial computers, single-board computers, etc. Given the industrial focus of the company, Linux is important to them and generally their hardware plays great with various Linux distributions. Over the years at Phoronix I’ve reviewed their Intense-PC, Utilite, Trim-Slice, and their other interesting petite PCs.
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Phones
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Originally I wrote this about Sony (hence the long analysis) and before I posted it, I learned about Blackberry. So we have TWO potential deaths in the Bloodbath now pending. Lets do quick analysis of both. First up
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Tizen
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“The Indian market has shown incredible smartphone growth, and we believe migration from feature phones to smartphones will increase,” a Samsung spokesperson said in a statement provided to LinuxInsider by Ashley Wimberley.
“India’s mobile market is … open to new smartphone platforms that are open source, can provide unique local solutions, and are adaptable across multiple brands,” the spokesperson noted.
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After much expectation and many false starts, Samsung finally launched the Tizen-based “Samsung Z1″ smartphone into India’s vast and rapidly growing market.
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After a string of rumours and amidst much fanfare, Samsung finally launched its first Tizen phone in India dubbed Z1. This time around, it’s the software that’s being talked about instead of the specs or design. And, why not? With Tizen, Samsung is trying to take on its long-time partner Google.
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The SmartThings hub was a great home automation hub, and now it is time for the next version, the upgraded model with new new sensors, battery backup, optional cellular, and premium services … oh and it will be running Tizen.
When Samsung first acquired SmartThings, the company told of its plans to move from an embedded RTOS (real-time operating system) to Linux, which we hoped at the time was Tizen as it kinda made sense at the time. Now a SmartThings rep has told LinuxGizomos that “We will be moving to Tizen over time.”
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Tizen is an important part Samsung’s Internet of things (IoT) strategy as BK Yoon, the company’s CEO, highlighted at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that all Samsung devices will be IoT-ready in five years. We know that many of these devices will be running Tizen and with over 665 million devices last year alone, that will be a lot of Tizen Linux devices.
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Android
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In addition to the phablet and headphones announced today, Xiaomi also threw in a little surprise. And by “little” we do mean literally, because this new Mi Box Mini is much smaller than the company’s earlier Android streaming devices; it’s so small that when it’s plugged into the power socket, you’d easily mistake it as a USB phone charger.
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As the map below shows, Android/Linux has overtaken desktop operating systems over much of the world, a huge swath through Asia and most of Africa. Along with skipping lock-in to Wintel, many folks are skipping copper and cable and satellite for WiFi. Further, a huge chunk of the world has Android/Linux in second or third spot. The PC may not be dead yet but it’s certainly changed.
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Every streaming device, from your aging Blu-ray player to your Roku, has limitations. At some point, you’re going to want to stream a service that your device doesn’t support. When that happens, your only big-screen option is to plug a laptop, tablet, or smartphone into your HDTV. That way, you get a real operating system with complete flexibility.
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Google has shed fresh light on Project Ara, its modular Android smartphone initiative, including plans to pilot the project in Puerto Rico through food truck-style stores.
Project Ara will offer a smartphone endoskeleton; users will be able to add the functionality they want piece by piece, rather than being confined by the hardware configurations determined by operators and providers.
Google debuted the project’s first functional prototype, known as Spiral 1, in 2013.
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Adobe has put plenty of energy into the mobile side of its Creative Cloud marketplace. However, this concentration has thus far been focused on the iOS side of the equation. That is about to change with the launch of Lightroom Mobile for Android, available free on the Google Play Store.
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Livescribe’s amazing smartpens currently only work with iOS, but the company is hard at work on an Android version of its app. Since Livescribe’s smartpens communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy, the company had to wait for Android to support it first, before making the new app.
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Samsung released the Android 5.0 update in the U.K. on Tuesday, following an international rollout throughout other parts of Europe and Asia. Also called Android L, or Lollipop, Google’s latest version of its operating system includes the “material design” makeover in addition to a number of other changes.
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The popular media player app VLC is coming to Android TV: VLC developers have released a preview version that already looks pretty neat — here’s a first look.
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LG still isn’t talking about the LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop update, but they’re making progress and working hard to deliver it to eager customers. And while we haven’t heard anything since last year about the update coming soon, this week more details have surfaced along with a full video showing the LG G2 Android 5.0 update running rather smooth.
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Samsung has been releasing a lot of Tizen-based devices lately including smart TVs, smartwatches and now smartphones. To explain the benefits of Tizen, Samsung has written a new post explaining what the software platform has to offer the world… and it’s something that will no doubt annoy any Android fan who’s ever owned a Samsung device.
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So you won’t need five different home screens anymore
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One of the promises of the HTC Advantage program was Android software updates for up to two years. HTC officials publicly stated it will try to deploy these updates within 90 days of release and HTC is doing everything it can to stick to the plan.
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Yesterday, an engineer at Motorola by the name of Luciaono Carvalho revealed that Android 5.0.2 Lollipop will be coming real soon to all Motorola devices from 2013 and 2014. That means that a Motorola Droid Turbo Android update is also to be expected, although the phone being a Verizon exclusive, it might take longer for the OTA to hit. The Droid Turbo is a highly acclaimed smartphone which boasts with great performance and battery life, and even has an international version called the Moto Maxx.
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The Android 5.0 Lollipop update that HTC One M8 owners have been waiting for is about to arrive – or is arriving now, depending what version of the phone you have.
For users with the developer or unlocked editions of the HTC flagship, Android Lollipop has already begun rolling out, according to Android Central.
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What do you do if you are trying to establish an ecosystem of apps for your mobile operating system, or are simply trying to bolster the numbers a bit in order to look more attractive to consumers? If you’re Jolla or Blackberry, the answer is adding Android app compatibility. It’s something we are seeing more of as of late when it comes to smaller players in the mobile OS market, and it seems that Samsung is now getting on this train too — well, sort of.
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Best known for its game development work with the like of BBC (Doctor Who), Ubisoft (Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes) and Mindy Candy (Moshi Monsters Village), Dundee studio Tag Games is now getting into the tools business.
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Maybe you’re looking for new open source tools that your business can use to take it to the next level. Or maybe you’ve made use of countless solutions over the years and feel as though it’s time to give back.
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Events
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Join the Regional Technology Partnership at 5:30 pm on January 28 for our event located at the Bonita Springs Chamber of Commerce, 25071 Chamber of Commerce Dr., Bonita Springs. “Mandatory Considerations before using Open Source Code” is sponsored by The McDonough Law Office, P.L., and the featured presenter will be William McDonough. This event is free for RTP Members and $25.00 for future members. Registration, sponsorship opportunities and additional details are available at www.swfrtp.org.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla community has just released a new update for the Thunderbird email client and the developers have made a couple of important changes to the application and corrected a few security problems.
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The first Mozilla browser release of 2015 brings Firefox Marketplace and improved performance to desktop users.
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In today’s open source roundup: Firefox 35 is now available. Plus: Linux distros we’ll never see, and Peppermint 5 reviews
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SaaS/Big Data
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For the past few years, cloud has been one of the biggest buzzwords among technology enthusiasts. Whether you want data accessibility across devices or need computation power for your business or even develop applications—cloud can help you.
With growing adoption for cloud computing, almost everyone from individuals to large corporations are leveraging it. For example CERN, the famous European nuclear lab, uses OpenStack to manage their IT infrastructure. Several open source projects related to cloud computing have also come up in last few years, prominent among them are ownCloud, OpenStack etc.
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Featuring full integration of the technology from Google’s acquisition of Stackdriver last year, Google Cloud Monitoring has arrived. It’s a tool that developers can leverage to monitor the performance of application components. If you’re a Google Cloud Platform customer you can try it out for free beginning immediately. Here are more details.
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As the Big Data trend marches forward in enterprises and as Hadoop becomes a true open source star driving the trend, MapR Technologies doesn’t get quite as much attention as some other players. However, the company offers a slew of informative and helpful posts, videos and educational offerings that can help any enterprise get smart about leveraging Big Data tools, including many free, open source applications.
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Databases
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MariaDB says its newly-released MaxScale software, which acts as a gateway between databases and apps, will transform life for admins and developers.
MaxScale, available for MySQL as well as the MariaDB fork, is an open-source proxy that allows databases and apps to be fully decoupled, enabling admin processes to run without affecting apps and for apps to evolve without hampering underlying databases.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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2015 has started and I realized that in between the New Year and last week’s tragedy, I hadn’t had the time to discuss what’s on the table for the Document Foundation in 2015. This is purely a personal opinion and does not represent any sort of official statement by the Foundation. Let’s try to keep this somewhat synthetic. LibreOffice_external_logo_200px
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Education
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This brings up one major point of education: Education is often best when it is proactive, and you receive the education before you need it.
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Funding
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Creandum led the round joined by Dawn Capital and current investors Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It seems like all those arguments (about Twitter, about implementing support for proprietary systems on Free Software, and others) are ultimately about reaching users that would otherwise remain ignorant of the Free Software philosophy. And how can someone have counter-arguments for this? It is impossible to argue that we do not need to take the Free Software message to everybody, because when someone does not use Free Software, she is doing harm to her community (thus, we want more people using Free Software, of course). When the Free Software Foundation makes use of Twitter to bring more people to the movement, and when I see that despite talking to people all around me I can hardly convince them to try GNU/Linux, who am I to criticize the FSF?
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The word, “radical”, has been in the news a lot lately. Often it’s associated with some bad news like problems caused by radical this that or the other.
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we are happy to announce today’s GNUnet developer mumble taking place
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Public Services/Government
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Financial pressures have pushed the intelligence community (IC) to relinquish control of some of its data to cloud based services provided by the private sector. And along with trying to tie its 17 agencies together on a single platform, the IC has been forced to adapt to emerging technology trends as well as growing realities.
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Openness/Sharing
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While the 3D printer has garnered an enormous amount of attention, performing new and heroic tasks on almost a daily basis, the 3D scanner has not historically received a proportionate amount of time in the spotlight, necessary tool that it often is to achieving the desired result in the maker’s world.
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Open Hardware
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How does one crowd-source a dildo? I wondered, until I realized that the makers of The Mod are actually crowdfunding their toy, and open-sourcing the design. And the design is phttp://www.montanalinux.org/firewalld-info.html retty fancy.
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Facebook’s Oculus VR, Samsung Electronics and Sony are pressing ahead into virtual reality, but they’re going to have some company in the form of gaming accessories manufacturer Razer, which is testing a headset that will retail for $200.
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Programming
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Michael Henriksen, a member of the SoundCloud security team, has been recently tasked with creating a system that will constantly check the company’s GitHub organizations (i.e. repositories) for unintentionally leaked sensitive information.
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The C Framework For OpenCL has reached version 2.0. CF4OCL allows the rapid development of OpenCL host programs in C/C++ while making it easier to provide OpenCL, simplify the analysis of OpenCL environments, etc.
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After releasing Weblate 2.0 with Bootstrap based UI, there was still lot of things to improve. Weblate 2.1 brought more consistency in using buttons with colors and icons. Weblate 2.2 will bring some improvements in other graphics elements.
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Standards/Consortia
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The group on Jan. 14 unveiled the preview release of IoTivity, an open spec designed to make it easier for the growing number of sensors and devices that will make up the Internet of things (IoT) to connect to each other and exchange data. IoTivity is now an open-source project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
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I’m a sucker for history videos… and I enjoyed the trip back in time that these were. While I was aware of the feuds that existed in UNIX-land and UNIX-GUI-land back from the early days I didn’t witness it personally… so the first two expose some of that. The third video shows what moving from Windows 95 to Windows 98 was like… including the Linux alternative with an interview with Linus himself. Enjoy!
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Science
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A worker ant collects sweet nectar from the trap of an insect-eating Nepenthes pitcher plant. Research from the University of Bristol, UK, has found that, by ‘switching off’ its traps for part of the day, the plant ensures ‘scout’ ants survive and are able to lead large numbers of followers to the trap. When the trap gets wet, it suddenly becomes super-slippery and captures all visitors in one sweep. Credit: Dr. Ulrike Bauer, University of Bristol, UK
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Security
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Routers belonging to thousands of homes, universities and businesses could have been used to run LizardStresser DDoS attack service
Notorious hacking group Lizard Squad has apparently been using unsecured home internet routers to power its LizardStresser service, new research has discovered.
LizardStresser, which offers paying customers the chance to take down websites using DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, was reportedly run by the group as part of a widespread ‘marketing campaign’ for Lizard Squad.
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KeySweeper a $10 spy tool disguised as Wall Charger which can read data from any wireless Microsoft Keyboard
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The Personal Data Notification & Protection Act is another swing at a long postponed Federal data breach notification law. The Act would clarify and strengthen laws that obligate businesses to notify customers when their personal information has been exposed. Among the changes would be a uniform, federal 30-day notification requirement from the discovery of a breach. The illicit trade of stolen identifies would also be criminalized.
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On January 3rd, the SSL certificate of our website hosting provider, boum.org, expired. This means that if you still are running Tails 1.2.1 or older, you will not get any update notification. Please help spreading the word!
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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I am working very hard on getting Sikunder Burnes into shape for publication. Just ten weeks left to achieve that. Still hacking a lot of draft material out of the text. This passage on the Russian Empire was written before the tragic events in Ukraine.
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USA Today has a feature called “Common Ground,” which is a back-and-forth involving Cal Thomas, “a conservative columnist,” and Bob Beckel, billed as “a liberal Democratic strategist” but more accurately described as a Fox News Democrat with a lucrative sideline as a corporate lobbyist.
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Before Samir Khan was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011, the FBI had hoped to capture and prosecute the blogger on terrorism charges. But Khan, a US citizen who wrote about violent jihad and was the founding editor of al Qaeda’s glossy English-language magazine Inspire, somehow slipped out of the United States in 2009 and eluded capture.
The new revelations about the government’s investigation into Khan were detailed in heavily redacted FBI files obtained by VICE News under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Previous documents revealed that the FBI launched an investigation of Khan in 2006 after the bureau discovered his incendiary blog, Inshallahshaheed, an Arabic phrase that means “Martyr, God willing.” Less than a year later, according to the set of records, the FBI’s “primary goal” was to determine if Khan “Is influencing/did influence anyone to commit an act of terror.”
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A brutal attack on a Nigerian town by the militant group Boko Haram that killed as many as 2,000 people has been given relatively little attention by the U.S. media.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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As climate-change activists pressure public institutions to dump their fossil-fuel investments, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do
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Censorship
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Francis spoke about the Paris terror attacks while en route to the Philippines, defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one’s mind for the sake of the common good.
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Within an hour of the massacre at the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, thousands of Parisians spontaneously gathered at the Place de la Republique. Rallying beneath the monumental statues representing Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, they chanted “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) and “Charlie! Liberty!” It was a rare moment of French unity that was touching and genuine.
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Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.” The comedian, Dieudonné (above), previously sought elective office in France on what he called an “anti-Zionist” platform, has had his show banned by numerous government officials in cities throughout France, and has been criminally prosecuted several times before for expressing ideas banned in that country.
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Privacy
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The White House has announced a new proposal to fix cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the positive effects will be minor at best; the real issue is not addressed. This is a serious missed opportunity by the Obama adminstration; it will expend a lot of political capital, to no real effect. (There may also be privacy issues; while those are very important, I won’t discuss them in this post.) The proposals focus on two things: improvements to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and provisions intended to encourage information sharing. At most, these will help at the margins; they’ll do little to fix the underlying problems.
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This is similar to FBI director James Comey’s remarks from last year. And it’s equally stupid.
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Activists from the Pirate Party’s youth wing have wiretapped high-level political surveillance hawks at Sweden’s top security conference. They set up an open wi-fi access point at the conference and labeled it “Open Guest”, and then just logged the traffic of about a hundred high-ranking surveillance hawks who argue for more wiretapping, and who connected through the activists’ unencrypted access point. They presented their findings in an op-ed in Swedish this Tuesday.
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An online ad company called Turn is using tracking cookies that come back to life after Verizon users have deleted them. Turn’s services are used by everyone from Google to Facebook.
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David Cameron is to urge Barack Obama to pressure internet firms such as Twitter and Facebook to do more to cooperate with Britain’s intelligence agencies as they seek to track the online activities of Islamist extremists.
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Later this month, the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use the internet anonymization tool Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy.
A series called “Orwellian America,” held by a publicly funded entity mere minutes from a Congress and administration that allowed the NSA’s surveillance programs to spin wildly out of control certainly seems subversive. But the library says it wasn’t really intended that way.
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Facebook today debuted Facebook at Work, a new pilot program the company is testing to try its hand at social networking in the business world. The product is only available to select partners on the web, as well as Android and iOS apps available on Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
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Danish authorities look set to bring back mandatory internet session logging despite an EU ruling last year that blanket data retention is illegal.
Last May the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concluded that the EU Data Retention Directive was “a particularly serious interference with fundamental rights”, meaning countries across the EU were forced to re-evaluate their national laws on data retention.
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“There is something about the internet that isn’t working anymore,” is the line that opens filmmaker Jonathan Minard’s short documentary on Deep Lab—a group of women hackers, artists, and theorists who gathered at Carnegie Mellon University in December to answer the question of what, exactly, that disquieting “something” is. The film premieres on Motherboard today.
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I’ve been working on some other blog posts, including a conclusion of (or at least an installment in) this exciting series on zero knowledge proofs. That’s coming soon, but first I wanted to take a minute to, well, rant.
The subject of my rant is this fascinating letter authored by NSA cryptologist Michael Wertheimer in February’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Wertheimer is currently the Director of Research at NSA, and formerly held the position of Assistant Deputy Director and CTO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for Analysis
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Civil Rights
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Raif Badawi, the Saudi liberal convicted of publishing a blog, has been told he will again be flogged 50 times on Friday – the second part of his 1,000-lash sentence which also includes a 10-year jail term.
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Sir William Hunter was a senior British civil servant and in 1871 published a book which warned of “fanatic swarms” of Sunni Muslims who had “murdered our subjects”, financed by “men of ample fortune”, while a majority of Muslims were being forced to decide “once and for all, whether [they] should play the part of a devoted follower of Islam” or a “peaceable subject”.
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More people were using the mail to get high, and Jared Der-Yeghiayan knew it.
“We hadn’t seen ecstasy being seized in letter-class like that in a long time,” said the Homeland Security special agent. “Since I’d been at O’Hare.”
Der-Yeghiayan was speaking on Wednesday from the stand in a Manhattan federal courtroom, where 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht stands accused of being the mastermind in the most successful drug-dealing website of all time, the Silk Road.
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We’ve written before about faulty legal activities based on nothing stronger than an IP address. An IP address is not a person, but many entities have decided it’s “close enough.” Fortunately, the judicial system has (occasionally) stepped in to correct this assumption, usually in the context of copyright infringement lawsuits.
There are those in the law enforcement arena that know an IP address can’t be used as an identifier. Careless statements get made about the “danger” of open WiFi connections, or it’s suggested that accessing open networks should be illegal. This doesn’t have much to do with keeping citizens safe, but it does have everything to do with easing law enforcement’s investigative workload.
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The Los Angeles Police Department isn’t laughing about a videotaped prank involving a “coke” sale that they say misused police resources, was misleading and potentially dangerous.
The video, titled “Coke Prank on Cops,” was posted to YouTube on Monday with the caption, “officer we have some coke in our trunk.” By 3 a.m. ET Thursday the video had been watched more than 440,000 times.
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On Friday, shortly after the gunmen were killed by French forces in a raid on a printing plant outside of Paris, a source from within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) provided The Intercept with a series of messages and statements taking responsibility for the attacks, asserting that AQAP’s leadership “directed” the raid on the magazine to avenge the honor of the Prophet Mohammed.
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According to public records, at least 58 U.S. politicians have accepted campaign contributions from David Duke supporters. This includes candidates for federal office, current and former Members of Congress, and one former president. Oh, and one Democrat. This information is all accessible in public records and we’ve presented it here at the bottom of this article.
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The United States has a prison crisis of epic proportions. With just five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, the United States has, far and away, the highest incarceration rate, the largest number of prisoners, and the largest percentage of citizens with a criminal record of any country in the world.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Most eyes have been on the US arrangements, due to be announced at the end of February, but quite a storm has emerged on the Indian sub-continent almost overnight, forcing one of the world’s fastest growing economies to face up to decisions on the future of the internet on its own soil, reports Techdirt.
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We recently reported on extraordinarily wide-ranging censorship imposed on Internet users in India. That’s rather obscured another story that’s been playing out there: an attempt to undermine net neutrality in the country.
[...]
That’s a clear attack on the principle that all IP packets should be treated equally, and prompted the creation of the site Net Neutrality India to raise awareness of what’s at stake, as well as vague promises from the Indian government to “look into it.”
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We’ve been saying for months that while the FCC may have a role to play in promoting and protecting an open Internet, Internet users shouldn’t rely entirely on the FCC. That’s because, at root, the “neutrality” problem is a competition problem. Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty good job of divvying up the nation to leave most Americans with only one or two choices for decent high-speed Internet access. If there’s no competition, customers can’t vote with their wallets when ISPs behave badly. Oligopolies also have little incentive to invest, not only in decent customer service, but also in building out world-class Internet infrastructure so that U.S. innovators can continue to compete internationally. Even in cities like San Francisco and New York, we pay more for slower connections than people in many Asian and European cities.
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The U.S. broadband market has failed. It’s time for the people to step in.
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Hotel group Marriott International has announced it will stop blocking guests from using personal wi-fi kits.
The firm was fined $600,000 (£395,000) last year by a US watchdog after a complaint that it had jammed mobile hotspots at a hotel in Nashville.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Hoping to deter and stop the ongoing threat of ‘cyber’ attacks President Obama unveiled new cybersecurity plans yesterday. While the plans don’t reference copyright infringement, the MPAA notes that Congress should keep online piracy in mind as it drafts its new cybersecurity bill.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.14.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In other words, “the year of Linux on the desktop” is a diversion. Don’t sit around waiting for Linux to become mainstream—it already is. The year of Linux on everything but the desktop is here!
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The perfect desktop is undoubtedly the one you would design yourself. However, lacking the necessary time and expertise, many users hop instead from desktop to desktop desktop with the same enthusiasm as others hop between distros, hoping to find the ideal distribution.
In many cases, they never find their ideal, and for good reason — even the simplest Linux desktop is a mixture of advantages and disadvantages.
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Desktop
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Crouton is a script that lets you run Ubuntu or Debian on a Chromebook without uninstalling Chrome OS. Developed by David Schneider, the tool has been around for a few years, offering an easy way to run native desktop Linux apps such as GIMP, LibreOffice, and even Firefox on Chrome OS laptops and desktops.
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GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED that Chromebook users can now choose an alternative operating system for their prized devices.
It’s only for the brave, and will involve potential permo-borkage of your machine if you get it wrong, but brand evangelist Francis Beaufort has been telling Google+ users about a new and easier process for poking around under the bonnet of Chromebooks, if that is your bag.
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Google’s Chromium team is making it easier to modify the software stack of your Chromebook, boot a Linux distribution from a USB drive, and carry out other tasks.
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Server
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On Tuesday, IBM launched the z13, which it bills as the first mainframe specifically designed to accommodate the booming mobile app economy. Mainframes—the refrigerator-sized, pre-PC computers beloved of government, corporations, and Tron—were long synonymous with IBM, which introduced its first mainframe in 1952. The company has long since reinvented itself as a provider of business services rather than hardware. But it turns out the old standby is still around.
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IBM today officially announced the z13 mainframe platform, loaded with silicon and other hardware innovations to accelerate mobile, analytics and security-driven workloads.
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CloudPassage provides tools to monitor application security and enforce security policies. Now, the company’s platform will include security-vulnerability assessment, file-integrity monitoring, log-based intrusion detection, access control and firewall micro-segmentation for Docker as well.
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Kernel Space
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These either alone or accumulated can draw a solid, thick line between trying the Linux kernel development and letting it go. This is especially true for the less experienced individuals who therefore may fear to try however the truth is that the devil is not as black as painted.
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In December 2014, a critical vulnerability was found in Git that affected Mac OS X and Windows users. Even if the vulnerability didn’t affect Linux users, it could harm users who work on Windows or Mac systems.
A patch was released immediately, but that wasn’t soon enough to keep Linus from yelling out loud about how horrible Apple’s HFS+ file system is. As an Apple user, and as much as I love their hardware, I am not a fan of their software.
So what’s the basic problem with HFS+? Both NTFS and HFS+ are case insensitive, which means if you have a folder named ‘Linux’ or ‘linux’ they will treat them as the same folder, which understandably causes a lot of problems. Thomas Pfeiffer, a usability consultant to KDE, refers to an article by Brian Tiemann and says case-insensitive but case-preserving file systems are actually a good idea from a desktop user’s point of view.
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For basic use things just work, you don’t need to learn anything new to use systemd.
It provides significant benefits for boot speed and potentially security.
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IoTivity is hosted by The Linux Foundation and will release a reference implementation of the IoT standards defined by the Open Internet Consortium (OIC), which has more than 50 members including Intel and Samsung.
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The systemd project is off to a quick start in 2015 with already seeing over 200 commits (granted, in 2015 systemd development skyrocketed with nearly 5,000 commits). With the newest work that’s landed, the networkd component to systemd has been improved with new features.
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Graphics Stack
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Rob Clark’s work on the open-source Freedreno driver stack the past few years is turning out quite nicely and suitable for end-users wanting an open-source graphics stack for Qualcomm Adreno hardware.
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After last week delivering initial open-source Radeon DRM driver tests on Linux 3.19, here’s similar treatment in testing out the new Linux 3.19 kernel with the Nouveau DRM driver for open-source NVIDIA graphics.
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The latest quarterly update to XenGT for Intel Graphics Virtualization Technology is now available that allows providing a complete vGPU solution with mediated GPU pass-through.
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NVIDIA announced the release today of the CUDA 7.0 Release Candidate that brings new features to their popular but proprietary parallel programming toolkit.
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Kristian Høgsberg has been out of the Wayland spotlight for the better part of one year with stepping away from its development for unknown reasons although he remains employed by Intel and working on their Linux graphics stack. Following Kristian’s departure, Pekka Paalanen of Collabora took over release manager roles for Wayland and Weston.
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Benchmarks
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A few days back I wrote about being able to finally get the Metro Redux game benchmarks running in an automated manner under Linux to the point that we’re now able to test it with the Phoronix Test Suite. With Metro 2033 Redux and Metro Last Light Redux now running well for our testing purposes, I’ve carried out performance tests of these two games with twenty-two AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Linux. Besides looking at the normal FPS result there’s also frame latency metrics, power consumption data for each of these graphics cards, performance-per-Watt metrics, and GPU thermal results. If you’re wondering what graphics card works best for your needs for OpenGL 4.x Linux gaming, here’s an interesting look with the Metro Redux titles that premiered on Steam for Linux back in December.
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Applications
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While the configuration, tools and output has dramatically changed… really firewalld makes things easier and more manageable. Really. One of the problems with Linux across distros is that there really hasn’t been a standardized way to handle the host-based firewall. Each distro seems to have their own way of doing it… and popular packages like Shorewall have been around for years. I think firewalld tries for a happy medium somewhere between simple and complex and a standard that distros can choose to adopt.
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Samba, an app that integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, has been upgraded to version 4.1.15 and is now available for download.
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Proprietary
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RAR, a powerful archive manager that can be used to reduce the size of files and to decompress RAR, ZIP, and other formats, has reached version 5.21 Beta 1.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Lets set up 3 Fedora servers for the purposes of testing flannel on Fedora. These can be bare metal, VMs (on KVM, VMware, RHEV, etc…). Why do we want to test this? This is to demonstrate setting up the flannel overlay network and confirming connectivity. Specifically, I want to test container connectivity across hosts. I’d like to make sure that container A on host A can talk to container B on host B. I received quite a bit of guidance from Jeremy Eder of breakage.org – Thanks for the tips!
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Games
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Hi everyone, we’d like to get your help in testing Chivalry for Linux and Mac OS X.
Everyone who owns Chivalry should now have access to the Linux and OS X versions. Currently you will need to switch to a Beta branch to access this, the “linuxtesting” branch (for both OS X and Linux).
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Heroes of Steel is a tactical RPG set in a grim post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Coordinate your party of four heroes in turn-based combat and navigate a engaging world and story.
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Egosoft have been detailing their porting X Rebirth to Linux with a series of forum posts. It’s good to see them be open about it, and we look forward to testing it out.
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A new bundle called “Abstract Bundle” featuring 10 great games that are available on multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, has been released and it’s available with a ridiculously small price.
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I found this pretty awesome arcade racing game while i was browsing through Kickstarter and i wanted to share it. I am glad to see another racing game coming to Linux, since our supply of racing games is a bit short.
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Are you an avid video gamer? Are you on the hunt for a simple yet effective technique for playing play station games on a PC? While this was virtually impossible decades ago, the advent of technology in recent years has simplified the process; enabling gamers to enjoy their favorite play station titles on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers with minimal effort. This article highlights these steps in detail, to help increase your probability of success.
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Version 4.2 of the cross-platform C4 Game Engine was released today. The big change of C4 Engine 4.2 is that it gets rid of Linux support after its lead developer has had a very unhappy and difficult experience with Linux.
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In the past few days there’s been some progress in benchmarking newer Steam Linux games thanks to support from Valve developers and separate from that was now support for automated benchmarking of Metro Redux (Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux). The Metro Redux test ability led to yesterday’s 22-way AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison for this OpenGL 4 Linux game. The latest excitement? Getting automated tests up and running for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The Enlightenment crew were hard at work during the holidays and today in getting the new year going they’ve released the first alpha of the Elementary 1.13 library.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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So its has been a long time since I published anything Oxygen-KDE related. Well been taking some time off from the extreme amount of responsibility/work Oxygen/KDE was. It was for the best and its great fun seeing Breeze develop its own little magic. They are just great.
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I noticed a while ago that the CMake installation variable names used by KDE projects (defined either in kdelibs or KDEInstallDirs in extra-cmake-modules) are inconsistent with what GNUInstallDirs, for example, uses.
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Today KDE releases a beta for Plasma 5.2. This release adds a number of new components and improves the existing desktop. We welcome all testers to find and help fix the bugs before our stable release in two weeks’ time.
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After much research I’ve finally found the right company to make our KDE T-shirts for FOSDEM 2015.
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As Lydia described, KDE has many things to offer and many goals to achieve. We are looking for a talented professional who will push the organization, alongside the rest of the Community, and help create the useful technologies of today and tomorrow.
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Even though I caught a bad cold (luckily, it was not the flu as I feared at first) I managed to do a lot of prepping for new KDE 5 packages (Frameworks, Plasma, Applications) since last week.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I made 4 snippets for RPM Spec files to get spec skeleton: minimal, library, python-arch, python-noarch. You can start typing one of this, press ENTER and see how this magic works. It’s very useful when you packaging something to avoid calling rpmdev-newspec with parameters, opening editor, manual walking by lines and etc.
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Yes. Chrome OS, and its open source variant, Chromium OS, are distributions of the Linux kernel that come packaged with various GNU, open source, and proprietary software. The Linux Foundation lists Chrome OS as a Linux Distribution as does Wikipedia. Even Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, while he does not approve of Chrome OS’s restrictions, recognises it as “a variant of GNU/Linux.”
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There are many different Linux distributions available, but not all distros are created equal. ITworld has a list of nine Linux distributions that are worth watching in 2015.
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Reviews
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I usually don’t dig into new distros, unless they have something new to offer. The reason is because there are so many distros that are released everyday that it’s challenging, and to some extent, pointless to track them all.
I was not very excited when I decided to download Deepin as I assumed it to be yet another distro. I was wrong. It turned out to be an extremely polished, robust and easy-to-use distribution targeted at traditional Windows or Mac users. So what makes this OS so special? Almost everything.
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New Releases
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.5.2
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Red Hat Family
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The software vendor Red Hat has launched an upgrade to Satellite 5, its lifecycle management tool, continuing support for the software despite the release of version 6 in September.
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In this interview, Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon discusses the role he sees for openness and collaboration in the innovation process. Congdon also highlights the benefits offered by the open hybrid cloud model, and shares advice for IT leaders who want to guide their business partners on their journey to the cloud.
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Fedora
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With Snappy Ubuntu being out there for atomic upgrades in the cloud and on servers, Fedora 22 is looking to have RPM-OSTree for providing atomic upgrades and server-side composes.
One of the latest features being proposed for implementing in Fedora 22 is rpm-ostree, which allows composing RPMs on a server in an OSTree repository to provide image-like upgrades with package-like flexibility. The rpm-ostree software was started by Project Atomic, an initiative around deploying and managing Docker containers.
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After it didn’t pan out for Fedora 21, Fedora developers are now looking at having a default local DNS resolver used by Fedora 22 as one of its new features.
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One of the Fedora 22 changes being mentioned today is the Direct3D 9 state tracker “Gallium Nine” that landed in Mesa 10.4 that can interface with a patched version of Wine to offer better D3D9 performance on the open-source drivers. This state tracker is an alternative to using Wine’s Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. Users relying upon this state tracker have generally reported very positive results.
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Debian Family
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While Debian 7.8 was released this weekend, for those living on the bleeding edge the release candidate of the installer for the upcoming Debian 8.0 “Jessie” release is now available.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Recently, Kernel 3.18.2 has been implemented on Ubuntu 15.04, but the final version of the system will most likely ship with Kernel 3.19.
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Canonical now has X.Org/X11 applications running on the Ubuntu Phone/Touch via XMir.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux AIO Linux Mint DVD is a project that aims to provide users will a single DVD ISO image that has all the interesting flavors.
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A Pi competitor using a MIPS chip with potentially a lot more power and much more uses for makers and hackers
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LG showed off an unannounced smartwatch at CES and a hands-on video revealed the device was running webOS. A new report claims LG is planning to release the device in early 2016.
Most companies making smartwatches are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from competitors. Pebble uses an e-paper monochrome LCD display, which allows the device to get up to 7 days of battery life, and it’s also one of the few smartwatches that supports both iOS and Android.
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Sony updated its decades-old Walkman media player line with an aluminum model running Android 4.2, featuring high-res audio, and priced around $1,120.
The NW-ZX2 is the first Walkman to integrate Sony’s new LDAC codec technology. LDAC provides an enhanced wireless audio experience by transmitting digital audio data “three times more efficiently than previous Bluetooth connections,” says the company.
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LG Electronics turned up at last week’s CES with a smartwatch that apparently runs webOS.
LG used the watch to unlock an Audi at the show.
“LG has never officially confirmed that we were planning a webOS smartwatch,” company spokesperson Ken Hong told TechNewsWorld.
“I think that is speculation based on the watch that Audi announced here at CES, which we developed but have not finalized the OS for,” Hong continued.
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With the announcement of the Compute Stick, Intel has signaled its intent to battle for market share at the low end of the mobile computing space.
Like existing compute-on-a-stick devices, Intel’s Compute Stick will transform any display with an HDMI port into a fully-functional computer.
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The Raspberry Pi credit card-sized personal computer has just been turned into the central driving component of 3D printers, solving one of the biggest issues with home-brewed additive manufacturing machines for the first time ever.
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Well it was a fairly quiet week here in the Linux blogosphere, as much of the mainstream tech world staggered directly out of their New Year’s revelries and into the halls of CES.
Not that Linux didn’t have a presence at the gargantuan show, mind you. It was there, all right — not just in phones but in TVs, smartwatches and cars, to name just a few examples.
Still, there was no denying that the mega-event left things a little more peaceful than usual for those of us who chose to stay put in the Linux blogosphere, where we could ponder the news at leisure and — most importantly — from afar.
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CompuLab’s latest tiny, fanless desktop computer is powered by a low-power AMD processor, supports up to 8GB of RAM, and is designed to run Linux Mint or Windows 7 or later.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Tizen Experts Team and Linux enthusiasts EVERYWHERE (almost everywhere) are delighted to see this moment finally happen.
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Samsung has finally announced its first ever Tizen-powered smartphone, though the Samsung Z1 is targeted specifically at the Indian market.
We’ve been reporting on Samsung’s plans to launch a smartphone running on its own OS for several years now, but all we’ve seen on the Tizen front are smartwatches, cameras, and just recently TVs.
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So its now out, actually being sold, finally. Tizen. The latest OS to join the Bloodbath, two years behind schedule and with a totally revised strategy from what it originally promised. But we have one device out now, from Samsung, in one market. Yes, India is the third largest smartphone market globally, thats not a bad thing but now Samsung does need to expand the reach of Tizen, more phones more countries. And the platform does need validation from other hardware makers, so hopefully by next year there will be more than just Samsung making Tizen smartphones. Can the Z1 give Tizen 1% market share by the end of this year. No. That needs more but this is a start and hopefully Sammy is serious about Tizen and gives us more phones in more markets and gives Tizen its full chance.
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Having scotched plans to launch a premium flagship handset in Russia last year, Samsung has refocused its Tizen smartphone strategy on accessibility and affordability, choosing to target India first.
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Android
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Blackberry stock is up over 29% after Reuters reported hit that Samsung was talking about buying the company for $7.5 billion.
Samsung is reportedly interested in Blackberry’s patent portfolio.
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But the situation isn’t as black and white as Beardsley and Fox-Brewster are suggesting. Ask yourself this question, when was the last time that Samsung, or HTC, or LG posted an update for devices running Android 4.1, 4.2 or 4.3? Obviously, I am unable to keep track of every update pushed out by every company in the world, so I am sure there will be some exceptions to this, but the answer is – rarely.
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HTC makes good on its promise to deliver the latest version of Android in a timely manner.
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The Replicant project released version 4.2 0003 recently. I have been using Replicant on a Samsung SIII (I9300) for around 14 months now. Since I have blogged about issues with NFC and Wifi earlier, I wanted to give a status update after upgrading to 0003. I’m happy to report that my NFC issue has been resolved in 0003 (the way I suggested; reverting the patch). My issues with Wifi has been improved in 0003, with my merge request being accepted. What follows below is a standalone explanation of what works and what doesn’t, as a superset of similar things discussed in my earlier blog posts.
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CES is the proving ground for many new innovations in technology. Here are the Google and Android trends you need to know from CES 2015.
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Whether you’re a CSS rookie or frontend virtuoso, frameworks can be used effectively during the early stages of development. Crafting a website from scratch is sometimes useful and oftentimes necessary. But it’s not the only solution in this wacky open source wonderland.
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ABC’s Shark Tank is a US television show and a favorite among American entrepreneurs. Each week, business owners offer up a piece of their equity in exchange for cash from savvy and respected investors. It’s exciting to see entrepreneurs get their dreams funded — but what do these contestants have in common? And although a majority are using WordPress, what other platforms and CMSs are these businesses running on?
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Lumicall, the free, open source and secure alternative to Viber and Skype.
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Tor is apparently no longer a safe place to run a marketplace for illegal goods and services. With the alleged operator of the original Silk Road marketplace, Ross Ulbricht, now going to trial, the arrest of his alleged successor and a number of others in a joint US-European law enforcement operation, and the seizure of dozens of servers that hosted “hidden services” on the anonymizing network, the operators of the latest iteration of Silk Road have packed their tents and moved to a new territory: the previously low-profile I2P anonymizing network.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Google developers have been keeping themselves busy and they’ve released a new stable version of the Google Chrome browser that comes with an updated Flash (not for Linux) and a few other changes and fixes.
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Today in Linux news Jim Mendenhall discusses whether Chrome OS is a Linux distribution. In other news, Konrad Zapałowicz said contributing to the Linux kernel is easier that one might imagine and another Linus quote is making headlines. Elsewhere, Danny Stieben compares Linux to BSD and OpenSource.com is wondering which distro you use.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced that a new version of the Firefox browser, 35.0, has been released and is now available for download. As usual, the new release is full of interesting changes and improvements, although it’s not all that exciting.
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who has been a contributor for many years. Vineel is raising money for Collab House, a Collaborative Community Space in India which has been used for many Mozilla India events and other open source projects.
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The Adobe Flash Player plugin that’s bundled with Google Chrome is in the form of a PPAPI (or Pepper Plugin API) plugin and Mozilla isn’t interested in adding support for it. Because of this, Rinat Ibragimov has developed Fresh Player Plugin, a wrapper that allows Linux users to use Pepper Flash from Google Chrome in Firefox and other NPAPI-compatible browsers.
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The new update to Firefox 35 is available on PCLinuxOS and OpenMandriva.
I have been expecting this update because it includes Hello, the new video-call feature from Mozilla.
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SaaS/Big Data
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When open source projects grow, their governance models must evolve to support them. We’ve written on the governance of the OpenStack project before, but an important event taking place this week is to make some modifications that might make a big difference.
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Funding
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Basho was once a rising star in the NoSQL space, but over time other vendors began to move in, and it lost a step or two — then came a big turnover of key personnel last year. With the company ready to start anew, CEO Adam Wray says a new $25M cash infusion should help get Basho moving.
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BSD
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At MakeUseOf, we cover Linux quite a bit as the “alternative” to Windows and Mac OS X. However, those aren’t the only three operating systems out there — there’s also the BSD family of Unix-like operating systems, which are technically speaking different from Linux.
In the name of fair competition, it’s time that we gave BSD operating systems some recognition as well. And there’s no better way to do that than to compare them against Linux. What’s different about BSD operating systems, and should you be running it instead of Linux? How does Linux and the best BSD desktop OS, PC-BSD, compare on the desktop?
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Users of DragonFlyBSD on the desktop (or otherwise using sound on this popular BSD platform) will benefit from the next major update of the operating system.
DragonFlyBSD has pulled in the sound system from the FreeBSD 11 development code and it offers a huge improvement over the previous code, which was from FreeBSD 6.x.
With this new sound system update there’s smarter volume controls, improved HDMI/DisplayPort audio, an easy way to switch the default sound device, and HTML5/YouTube videos should now play with sound out-of-the-box. There’s also new hardware support with this new sound update.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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These beautiful badges come in four different styles, each with three color schemes to pick from. They’re perfect for sharing on social media or embedding on your Web site or blog, and we’ve provided embed code that links back to pages that will help new people get acquainted with free software.
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A few days ago, the Free Software Foundation announced a new video explaining Free software in simple terms. The video named User Liberation is 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a way to explain what Free Software is all about. Unfortunately several of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did not make sense to show it to them.
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Project Releases
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A new version of RcppGSL is now on CRAN today. This package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp.
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Lua 5.3 was released today with a variety of new features for this lightweight scripting language.
The big ticket items for Lua 5.3 is support for integers, official support for 32-bit numbers, bitwise operators, basic UTF-8 support, and functions to pack/unpack values.
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Licensing
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Fabless processor company Allwinner Technology Co. Ltd. (Zhuhai, China) has been accused of violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) under which Linux is distributed.
The alleged violations are within the software development kits that support the writing of software for some of Allwinner’s 32-bit system-chips, according to Linux-Sunxi, a community of open-source developers that has formed around the Allwinner SoCs. The Linux kernel is at the heart of the Android operating system, and therefore a significant factor in the tablet computer market which has been a key part of Allwinner’s business to date.
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Openness/Sharing
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A startup called Comingle is trying to raise $50,000 to launch The Mod, a “multivibrating open-source dildo.” OK, you’ve got my attention.
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Open Data
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You are invited to participate in a mapping event with OpenStreetMap (OSM) that will kick off on January 16, 2015 called #MapLesotho Mapathon! Last year, we had 5 out of 50,000 American OSM users participate. By contrast Germany had over 200 and Poland over 40. Let’s show the world that America can map with OSM!
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Programming
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“A real coder doesn’t use an IDE, a real coder uses [insert a text editor name here] with such and such plugins.” We all heard that somewhere. Yet, as much as one can agree with that statement, an IDE remains quite useful. An IDE is easy to set up and use out of the box. Hence there is no better way to start coding a project from scratch. So for this post, let me present you with my list of good IDEs for C/C++ on Linux. Why is C/C++ specifically? Because C is my favorite language, and we need to start somewhere. Also note that there are in general a lot of ways to code in C, so in order to trim down the list, I only selected “real out-of-the-box IDE”, not text editors like Gedit or Vim pumped with plugins. Not that this alternative is bad in any way, just that the list will go on forever if I include text editors.
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Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion among authors protesting at dropping definitions of words like ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ in favour of ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste’
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Academic achievement hasn’t improved much, so why are college-goers getting higher GPAs than ever before?
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The average shopper likely thinks Amazon has the lowest prices anywhere on the web.
That’s not always true. In fact, Amazon will tweak its prices many times per hour (equaling millions of individual price changes per day), taking advantage of the psychology of price perception.
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Security
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I am COO of a London-based startup, Eris Industries, that specialises in distributed computing. Hence, cryptography is involved. If the UK bans proper E2E encryption we are going to pack our bags for more liberal climes such as Germany, the U.S., the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe, or Iraq.
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While the SCAP technologies are interesting, they have limited value without security content – the actual set of security tests run by SCAP. Fortunately there is a good set of content available that can be used as a starting point.
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A report [pdf link] recently released by Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) details only the second known cyberattack that has resulted in physical damage. According to the report, hackers accessed a steel mill’s production network via the corporate network, following a spear-phishing attack. This then allowed them access to a variety of production controls, culminating in the attackers’ control of a blast furnace, which prevented it from being shut down in a “regulated manner.” The end result? “Massive damage to the system.”
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Transparency Reporting
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Please do not be distracted by the array of reputational attacks – including that he is everything from a rapist, megalomaniac and a traitor – that have been made on Mr Assange. The claims are entirely irrelevant and have no bearing on his fundamental human rights or the right to the presumption of innocence. Indeed Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, has been trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for two and a half years. He has not been charged with any crime. Wikileaks has extensively exposed the US military’s crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including its killing of journalists – and the USA’s ongoing efforts to oust democratic governments. The Swedes have used sexual assault allegations against Assange which are based on ridiculously flimsy evidence as a pretext to do the USA’s dirty work. Highlighting Sweden’s gross hypocrisy and its true motives in the Assange case, in 2001, US agents sexually assaulted two “rendition” victims in Stokholm in the presence of Swedish officials. Nobody has been prosecuted for it. One positive outcome of Assange having challenged Sweden’s efforts to extradite him for questioning is that it forced the UK High Court to describe the allegations against him. I strongly encourage people to read the court’s account (paragraphs 74-76 and 93 in particular). Under normal circumstances (i.e. when US “security interests” are not involved) allegations based on such weak evidence would get tossed by a legal system with any respect for the accused’s presumption of innocence. The only credible reason Swedish prosecutors have not dismissed them (as they initially did) is to punish Assange for his work with Wikileaks. There is even less excuse for Sweden’s refusal to question Assange via Skype or by travelling to the UK. Swedish authorities recently questioned a professional hockey player via Skype regarding assault allegations so that he wouldn’t miss a game. I learned about that from the Wikileaks Twitter account many UK liberals would like everyone to ignore.
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Privacy
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Taken at face value, his words imply much, much more. As well as those chat apps, encrypted email would be affected. The UK government might be able to use warrants to twist the arm of big companies like Google and Microsoft to hand over encryption keys for specific users, but it won’t be able to do anything about users of smaller services that have been set up specifically to avoid that eventuality. And what about PGP, Tor and OpenVPN? Even HTTPS could be a problem, since soon many sites will be using certificates provided by the Let’s Encrypt project, and unlike companies providing such services, it will doubtless be unwilling to hand over anything to British government.
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But in an era when communication takes many forms, and with the added problem that much of this communication is encrypted, how easy is it to turn this sound bite into reality?
[...]
“Encryption is mathematics, not technology. It can’t be suppressed by law,” Mr Bloch told the BBC.
Whatever route the government elected in the UK in May decides to go, Prof Woodward hopes that it will listen carefully to the technology industry.
“The government will need to take a lot of wide-ranging advice as this has the potential to go spectacularly wrong.”
It is also worth noting, he added, that the men involved in the Paris shootings were known to the authorities and had been under surveillance until it was deemed that the threat from them had lessened.
“The security forces need better resources not more powers.”
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Of course, that is impossible. You cannot ‘always’ be able to open, read, or find a record of a communication. Nor should it be compulsory for you and I to record every time time we talk to someone, online or offline. But we should take a moment to consider what Cameron might actually be proposing.
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On Monday David Cameron managed a rare political treble: he proposed a policy that is draconian, stupid and economically destructive.
The prime minister made comments widely interpreted as proposing a ban on end-to-end encryption in messages – the technology that protects online communications, shopping, banking, personal data and more.
“[I]n our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?”, the prime minister asked rhetorically.
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Sorry, but that’s not a system, it’s a bit of red tape. A pathetic formality lies between the government and access to the most sensitive personal communications data ever amassed. The content — not just the metadata — of your phone and email conversations, your instant messaging and literally anything else you can think of. It’s all fair game in Cameron’s eyes. Strong encryption may well face some sort of ban or prohibition. The intimate details of your internet activity could be watched over at will.
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It’s the new NSA director saying that the alleged damage from the leaks was way overblown.
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Politicians and Beltway commentators are today consumed in a debate over whether President Obama, in failing to attend the march in Paris, failed to show solidarity with the victims of the terror attack and the cause of free speech in general.
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It was almost inevitable that the Communications Data Bill, aka the Snoopers’ Charter, would be called for once again in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris. Having regenerated a number of times since the powers were first mooted in 2007 under a Labour Government, the powers have proved to continuously be controversial due to their un-targeted nature.
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I watch with alarm as, in the wake of the barbaric murders in France, politicians seek increased surveillance powers for the security services.
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It is not just libertarians who are dismayed by the growing calls for the return of the Snooper’s Charter in response to events in Paris, but anyone who has studied the reality of recent terrorist atrocities and the role of intelligence and surveillance.
The Charlie Hebdo shooters — just like the murderers of Lee Rigby and the Boston bombing suspects — were known to the authorities, and had been for years, linked with known groups.
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Civil Rights
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James Risen, a New York Times reporter, will not be called to testify at a leak trial scheduled to begin this week, lawyers said Monday, ending a seven-year legal fight over whether he could be forced to identify his confidential sources.
The Justice Department wanted Mr. Risen to testify at the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer charged with providing him details about a botched operation in Iran that was intended to disrupt that country’s nuclear program. Mr. Sterling had raised concerns inside the government about the program, and prosecutors suspect he took those concerns to Mr. Risen, who described the program in his 2006 book, “State of War.”
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Twelve jurors and two alternates, an even mix of men and women, will hear the case in a trial that is expected to last three weeks. Prosecutors released a witness list that includes Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser, as well as several C.I.A. operatives who will testify behind screens and reveal only their first names and last initials.
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The James Risen saga is basically over, but ended in a bizarre way. As you hopefully recall, this case goes back many years, and involves the DOJ trying to convict Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA official, of leaking info to Risen. However, Risen has made the compelling case that the DOJ’s desire to involve him was an attempt to punish him for earlier work he’d done exposing questionable practices by the intelligence community — and specifically to force Risen to give up a source, so that future whistleblowers can’t trust him. This backfired massively, as Risen fought this entirely, promising never to give up his source, even as the issue went up the Supreme Court (which refused to hear the case), but technically ended with a court saying Risen had to give up his source. Risen still insisted that he would not, and he’d go to jail if he had to. This put Attorney General Eric Holder in a bit of a bind, as he’d promised not to put reporters in jail. Thus, last month, Holder blinked, saying the DOJ would not force Risen to give up his source. However, he was still supposed to testify, just not on that.
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The Espionage Act is a bad law — but here’s why the former CIA director needs to be prosecuted for violating it
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While the hacks on Monday appeared relatively superficial and limited to CENTCOM’s presence on third-party social media sites, the proposals from Obama targeted incidents where digital intruders access the inner workings of a company’s computer systems and steal personal data. When companies get hacked like this, executives, employees, law enforcement, and contractors can often find out about the incident long before the customers whose data has been breached.
Obama today called for a single federal standard on notifying customers that their data has been breached, within 30 days of the hack.
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To be fair, he wasn’t wholly responsible. If it wasn’t for all the lunacy that preceded him, I probably would have dismissed his cartoon as just another Herald Sun atrocity, more a piece of Murdoch-madness to be mocked rather than trigger for outrage.
But context is everything. And after days of sanctimonious blather about freedom of speech and the Enlightenment values of Western civilisation, his was one pencil-warfare cartoon too many.
The cartoon in question depicts two men – masked and armed Arab terrorists (is there any other kind of Arab?) – with a hail of bomb-like objects raining down on their heads. Only the bombs aren’t bombs. They are pens, pencils and quills.
Get it? In the face of a medieval ideology that only understands the language of the gun, the West – the heroic, Enlightenment-inspired West – responds by reaffirming its commitment to resist barbarism with the weapons of ideas and freedom of expression.
It is a stirring narrative repeated ad nauseam in newspapers across the globe. They have been filled with depictions of broken pencils re-sharpened to fight another day, or editorials declaring that we will defeat terrorism by our refusal to stop mocking Islam.
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“Never again.” This was the vow of many lawmakers and government officials when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its long-awaited so-called “torture report” examining the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA under the Bush administration.
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Top U.S. Department of Justice officials violated policy in suspending two prosecutors involved in the botched case against the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a federal board ruled this month in declaring the discipline invalid.
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Make no mistake: whatever the news may say about the changing cast of characters the US is fighting and the changing motivations behind the changing names of our military “operations” around the world, you and I will have fought in the same war. It’s hard to believe that you will be taking us into the 14th year of the Global War on Terror (whatever they may be calling it now). I wonder which one of the 668 US military bases worldwide you’ll be sent to.
[...]
The number of non-combatants killed since 9/11 across the Greater Middle East in our ongoing war has been breathtaking and horrifying. Be prepared, when you fight, to take out more civilians than actual gun-toting or bomb-wielding “militants.” At the least, an estimated 174,000 civilians died violent deaths as a result of US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan between 2001 and April 2014. In Iraq, over 70% of those who died are estimated to have been civilians. So get ready to contend with needless deaths and think about all those who have lost friends and family members in these wars, and themselves are now scarred for life. A lot of people who once would never have thought about fighting any type of war or attacking Americans now entertain the idea. In other words, you will be perpetuating war, handing it off to the future.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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President Obama today called for an end to state laws that restrict the rights of cities and towns to build their own broadband networks.
In a report titled, “Community-based broadband solutions: The benefits of competition and choice for community development and highspeed Internet access,” the White House said it wants to “end laws that harm broadband service competition.”
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DRM
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The Linux community has pressured the GOG developers to remove the password-protected archives that were present in a number of their games, making the contents of those titles accessible to all the platforms.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Senators are now working around the clock to re-introduce a bill that would put trade agreements on the fast track to passage in the US after those deals are finalized. Deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have been negotiated in almost complete secrecy, except for private industry advocates serving on trade advisory committees who can read and comment on these texts. That has enabled these agreements to include extreme copyright and other digital policy provisions that would bind all signatory nations to draconian rules that would hinder free speech, privacy, and access to knowledge. Under fast track, also referred to as Trade Promotion Authority, lawmakers would only have a small window of time to conduct hearings over binding trade provisions and give an up-or-down vote on ratification of the agreement without any ability to amend it before they bind the United States to its terms.
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One of the many big problems with TTIP is the lack of democracy: it is being negotiated behind closed doors, with virtually no input from the public. The texts will be made available once the negotiations are complete, at which point it will not be possible to make changes. Even the national parliaments will be limited to a simple yes or no vote.
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Copyrights
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A long running legal battle between the world’s largest record labels and an Irish-based ISP has resumed today. Sony, Universal and Warner want UPC to warn and disconnect subscribers found sharing infringing content online but the ISP doesn’t want to foot the bill.
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The mandatory piracy notifications that were implemented to deter copyright infringement in Canada have boosted the interest in anonymous file-sharing tools. Data from Google reveals a massive increase in searches for VPNs over the past two weeks, while VPN providers see a surge in traffic and sales.
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