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07.11.12

Links 11/7/2012: digiKam 2.7.0, Jolla Rises

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Teaching the open source way: An interview with Sameer Verma

    Dr. Sameer Verma first learned about open source software when a college friend gave him a weekend crash course in Linux. Now a professor of information systems in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, Verma has taken those lessons to heart—and is teaching his own students the open source way.

    Recently, we talked with Verma about the challenge of open source pedagogy, about integrating open source technologies and values into the college classroom, about the benefits of learning open source project management, and about his work with One Laptop Per Child.

  • Apache Lucene/Solr making gains in enterprise search

    Open source hasn’t made huge inroads in web search but Apache’s Lucene/Solr platform is beginning to make gains in enterprise search, particularly in light of the acquisition binge of proprietary giants.

  • Cultivating A Culture of Free

    Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is based on a principle: Software Freedom. It is given away under a license that allows you to do with the software as you please. You can modify it, redistribute it, and never pay a penny for it so long as you abide by the terms of the license. This model has worked very well for FOSS. But this model doesn’t work for everything.

  • Syoncloud Released Syoncloud Logs 0.3 Log Processing Software as an Open Source
  • The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Nutch(tm) v2.0
  • Open source Java projects: TomEE

    Apache TomEE aims to provide application developers with a best-of-breed technology stack that can be deployed to a simple and lightweight Java EE container. In this return to the Open source Java projects series, author Steven Haines introduces TomEE, explains how it differs from Tomcat, and helps you set it up in your development environment. He then walks through the process of configuring TomEE to integrate resources such as database connection pools and JMS destinations — bread and butter for today’s enterprise apps.

  • Events

    • GUADEC 2012 Program Published

      The Gnome Foundation has announced the schedule for GUADEC to be held from July 26 to August 1st in Coruña, Spain this year. The event will consist of over 46 talks, with 4 keynotes and a number of lightning talk sessions.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Lew Moorman: Open Cloud Key to Modern Networking
    • Interview: Whamcloud Wins FastForward Contract for Exascale R&D

      Today Whamcloud announced that the company has been awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. FastForward is set up to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing. To learn more, I caught up with Eric Barton, Whamcloud’s CTO.

    • Beyond MapReduce: Hadoop hangs on

      Hadoop is all the rage in enterprise computing, and has become the poster child for the big-data movement. But just as the enterprise consolidates around Hadoop, the web world, including Google – which originated the technology ideas behind Hadoop – is moving on to real-time, ad-hoc analytics that batch-oriented Hadoop can’t match.

    • Stealthy Big Switch plugs into OpenStack clouds

      Big Switch Networks is not even out of stealth mode and has not yet revealed its aspirations and products for software defined networks – SDNs, in modern parlance – and yet the company is nonetheless contributing to the open source efforts to build more flexible and virtual network infrastructure and hoping to build awareness ahead of its eventual launch.

  • AbiWord/LibreOffice

    • First Peek at LibreOffice Android port Prototype

      That LibreOffice continues to respond to requirements of end-users became truly evident when news of it being developed for Android OS arrived a few months ago. And now with screen shot of the progress made so far being released by its developers, LibreOffice’s progress is good to note.

      In the developers own words, the screen shot only “look like – well, that gives a fairly horrific, bolts and all, barely usable (even with keyboard and mouse) office suite on your tablet.”; However, despite the lackadaisical images of the screen shot, the host of features that will finally come through for an Android OS are evident.

    • AbiWord is ready to work with you

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Jaspersoft 4.7 Adds Interactivity to Open Source Business Intelligence

      New Big Data analysis lands in Jaspersoft’s open source business intelligence suite as data caching accelerates information delivery.

      The whole point of using business intelligence applications is to get better insight out of data, a task made easier by better engaging end users. Given this, the ability to visualize and interact with data is a key focus for open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft in its latest 4.7 release out today.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Gnucash For Android Released

      If you use Gnucash on your PC to track your expenses and accounts, here is great news for you. Now you will be able to do the same from any Android powered device. This application has been ported to Android and should run on Android version 2.2 and above.

  • Project Releases

    • TeX Live 2012 released

      Over the weekend, the TeX Users Group (TUG) released a new 2012 edition of the TeX Live distribution. New features this year include many detailed improvements. For instance, the MetaPost program can now be called by default when compiling a file in the \write18 primitive’s restricted execution mode. Output files from the pdftex TeX extension and the dvips driver can now be larger than 2GB, and dvips automatically embeds the 35 default PostScript fonts in the output file to ensure that typesetting is consistent on all systems.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Richard Fontana blows hot and cold on GPLv3 fork

      A lack of clarity on the part of Red Hat open source licensing and patent counsel Richard Fontana as to whether he has, or has not, created a fork of the GPLv3 free software licence has led to well-known free software advocate Bradley Kuhn dissociating himself from the project.

    • Copyleft.next and the Future of GNU General Public Licenses

      “I am puzzled as to why this might be thought a newsworthy story at all,” says Richard Fontana, talking about his new licensing project, Copyleft.next (formerly, GPL.next). “Copyleft.next is just a toy research project, motivated initially by a mere desire on my part to learn more about using Git.”

      Fontana is perhaps being mildly disingenuous. Although the importance of Copyleft.next has been greatly exaggerated, he is not ruling out the possibility that it might play a role in the development of future versions of copyleft licenses such as the GPL family of licenses.

      If nothing else, the project seems to reflect the critique of GPL licenses that Fontana has been quietly making for some months now, which deserves wider recognition and discussion.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Introducing the ARM 64-bit Architecture

      ARM announced a few days ago, on July 6th, that they posted a set of Linux kernel patches, implementing support for the AArch64 architecture, also known as the ARM 64-bit architecture.

      The initial support for the ARMv8 64-bit architecture has been added by ARM in the Linux kernel via a set of 36 patches.

  • Finance

    • Satyajit Das: Mr. Smith Goes to Leaves Wall Street

      In his 1933 inauguration address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt attacked the “callow and selfish wrongdoing” in banking and business. Roosevelt told the crowd of over 100,000 that attended that the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed” and that “unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion”. Some 80 years later, the money changers have not “fled their high seats in the temple of our civilisation”. “Ancient truths” have not been restored to that temple. Something corrupt and rotten continues to fester at the heart of high finance, economic life and, indirectly, modern society.

    • City of London Corporation: a lesson in lobbying

      For almost 1,000 years, the City of London Corporation has resisted virtually every attempt by monarchs, governments or the people to rein in its vast wealth and influence. From the murder of peasant revolt leader Wat Tyler by the lord mayor of London and his men in 1381, to the dispatching from the City to Northern Ireland of rural refugees forced off their land in 17th-century land reforms, the corporation has long been a guiding hand in British history.

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • CETA, the Zombie ACTA, Must Face the Same Fate

        A leaked version of the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) contains the worst parts of ACTA. The EU Commission appears to be once again trying to bypass the democratic process in order to impose ruthless repression online. Commissioner De Gucht cannot ignore the decision of the EU Parliament on ACTA. CETA must be cancelled altogether (or its repressive ACTA parts must be scrapped), or face the same fate as ACTA in the Parliament.

07.10.12

Links 10/7/2012: Thunderbird Put to Rest, Catchup with Free/Open Source News

Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Higgs Boson: Another Feather in Linux’s Cap

    CERN has “played a major role in bringing together scientific technologies and know-how regarding Linux in their Scientific Linux project, which acts as a clone and extension of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” noted Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “This goes *way* beyond the normal high performance computing usage of Linux. CERN is in the forefront of bringing Linux to the scientific community.”

  • FixMeStick gets a virus-infected PC up and running again

    FixMeStick is a USB flash drive with a rudimentary version of Linux and a set of malware-removal tools. Insert it into a Windows-based PC infected with viruses or spyware and you’re able to boot from the basic OS on the drive. It will then scan your PC and attempt to remove the malicious code so your PC is functional again.

  • Linux Credit Where Due

    I read an article on ZDNET. You can read it for yourself here. The Author was raising the point about companies who release Linux based services but fail to even mention Linux or their services’ heritage and what provides the actual base for their service. The Author points the finger specifically at Google’s Android and Canonical’s Ubuntu. I just want to extend on the Authors’ thoughts a little more.

  • Desktop

    • Google’s launches new Chromebox and Chromebooks

      Google has announced the launch of new Chromebook laptops and a new Chromebox desktop running version 19 of Chrome OS, a major software update to the minimalist Linux-based operating system built around the Chrome web browser. Chrome OS, the proprietary version of the open source Chromium OS, is designed primarily for accessing the web and cloud applications such as the company’s Google Apps web-based productivity suite. According to Google, the new devices and version of the OS represent “the next step”.

    • WOW! Computer for Seniors

      In fact, the company is so proud of their product they sell it at a premium price. That is justifiable because of the huge touch-screen, the freedom from worry about software updated and viruses and the great ease of use. It’s still a small computer, though, an all-in-one. No big box at all, and with fewer cables.

  • Server

    • M$ Promotes GNU/Linux By Shipping Cripple-ware For Servers

      Isnt’t that a laugh? M$’s charges more money in relation to how much of your own IT you can use? Do we have parking meters in our garages? Do we have coin-slots on our refrigerators? Do we pay to use our tools? Those are silly concepts. So is that other OS in IT.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Audio: Dan Risacher talks open source

      Dan Risacher, a self-styled “policy wonk” in the directorate for enterprise services and integration under the office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer and open source advocate, spoke May 24 before Mil-OSS LANT, a military open source adoption conference.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Zorin OS 6

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.2: Pretty and solid distro

        I have heard a lot of good things of PCLinuxOS and yesterday, finally I decided to try it out. I downloaded the stable version 2012.2 (KDE) from the PCLinux FTP. The ISO is about 690 MB and I booted it up in my VirtualBox. The initial liveCD boot was easy, it asked a couple of questions on my keyboard and location and finally landed on the desktop.

      • Mandriva divides itself once again

        As Mandriva SA plans its future roadmap, the company will be taking a unique and bold step with its commercial offerings: using and participating in two separate upstreams for its product lines.

        According to CEO Jean-Manual Croset and Director of Community Charles Schulz, the Mandriva server products will be based on the Mageia distribution of Linux, while desktop and OEM products will be based on the historical Mandriva Linux distro.

      • Mandriva for Desktop, Mageia for Servers

        The heads of Mandriva SA have decided to base upcoming server versions of Mandriva on Mageia, the community run Mandriva fork

    • Gentoo Family

      • 2012 Gentoo Screenshot Contest is On

        Every year members of the Gentoo project hold their annual Gentoo screenshot contest, and it’s that time of year again right now. And just as the name implies, it is indeed a contest for the prettiest, coolest, or whatever-vague-criteria-is-used-but-isn’t-published-anywhere Gentoo desktop setup. All you need is a Gentoo install and an Internet connection to win.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Tails 0.12.1 Screenshots (07/08/2012)

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • 64-bit ARM support for Linux AArch64

            ARM employee Catalin Marinas has released a set of 36 patches that will extend the Linux kernel to provide support for ARM’s AArch64 64-bit architecture. This 64-bit ARM support will be provided by the ARMv8 instruction set, which was announced in the autumn of 2011 and is expected to be first used in processors in 2014.

          • Must-Have Missing Features in Ubuntu

            I feel a certain kinship with newer Linux converts. Switching to Linux on the desktop is definitely a unique experience that many of us tend to forget. For instance, the need to stop and think about where a tool’s located can be challenging for newbies.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source’s unlikely enemy: Your procurement rules

    Your procurement rules have gradually built up as you’ve played the procurement game with your suppliers. At its rawest, the vendors’ game is a chase to obtain as large a share of your IT budget as possible, preferably locked-in so that it becomes recurring revenue, while exposing themselves to the least cost and risk possible. Your suppliers’ tools of choice are proprietary software, proprietary data formats, and as much complexity as can be slathered into the solution.

  • Intel says open source fundamental to its cloud growth
  • NYSE Relies on Open Source for Growth

    The announcement by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext, that it is expanding the terms of its partnership with the Warsaw Stock Exchange, illustrates how the exchange company expects to significantly increase revenue by commercializing its own technology.

  • Puppet Partners with EMC on Open Source Razor

    The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.

  • Open-source attitude in the internet era

    The term ‘open source’ comes from computer programming. It refers to a computer program that isn’t owned by any company and is freely available to the general public. Microsoft Word, by contrast, is ‘closed source’ — the Microsoft Corporation owns the code for its software and will never make it available or give it away for free.

    A little-known program called Open Office is a freely available alternative to Microsoft Office with many of the same features. A loose group of programmers around the world created Open Office and constantly tinkers with it to make it better. They do this for free with no benefit besides the pleasure of providing a useful service for anonymous users.

  • Monetizing Open Source with Fairware: Interview with Virgil Dupras

    There has been a long standing belief (or perhaps more accurately, fear), that developers who chose to release the source code for their software under a free and open license can’t turn their project into a viable source of income.

    It’s not hard to see how this negative connotation has developed. Those who may not be well versed in the various free and open licenses may believe that they are literally prohibited from charging for their software. Others may fall victim to the failed logic that, if the source is freely available, people won’t pay for the convenience of a binary build.

  • Filmmaker to attempt year of Open Source Everything

    On August 1st, Berlin-based filmmaker Sam Muirhead is abandoning all copyrighted products and switching to Open Source software, hardware, and services for one year, as the subject of his own series of online documentary videos.

  • DHS Sponsorship Boosts Open-Source Security Engine

    Network security companies looking for an open-source-based intrusion detection and prevention engine have a next-generation tool that can be incorporated into their existing or new offerings: Check out the latest beta of the Open Information Security Foundation’s (OISF) Suricata Engine.

  • Google scraps — and shares — Web-based collab coding tool

    Collide, which lets multiple programmers tap into a software development project, is open-source software now that Google has cast it off. One project member hopes it’ll inspire related projects.

  • From accountancy, to e-accountancy, to lion taming

    Electronic business has many levels. No surprise then that e-business (or e-commerce if you prefer) is served by e-accounting, which itself comprises of e-payments and (before that) e-invoicing… and every other level of e-accounting if you have the stomach for an endless stream of new-age e- prefixes.

  • Open-Source Science: The New Norm

    The discovery of the Higgs boson is of course a monumental achievement. But also noteworthy is how the physics community has evolved to get things done – and what this trajectory suggests for other scientific fields and fast-changing industries.

  • Google Collide Dims Hope For Brightly IDE

    Google has been developing a Web-based editor for computer code–what’s known as an integrated development environment, or IDE–for several years now. Mark S. Miller, an engineer for the company, revealed the existence of the project, known as Brightly, in a post to a mailing list in November 2010 about Google’s Dart programming language.

  • Events

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderfork: Canonical’s Chance To Expand Its Ecosystem With Thunderbird

      With the recent news that Mozilla will no longer be innovating with new versions of Thunderbird, many Ubuntu users might be left wondering what this will mean for their favorite distribution’s default suite of software. In fact, it seems like Canonical has had it’s hands full over the last two years trying to find a winning combination. Canonical has thrown it’s hands up in the air before and changed default software on a whim, most famously switching from enterprise friendly Evolution to user-friendly and mainstream Thunderbird. Also, it chose to abandon the stellar Banshee player in favor of the more homely and less feature-rich Rhythmbox.

    • Mozilla is Wrong. There is Still Room for Open Source Thunderbird Innovation

      Mozilla’s current success is born out of a decision made over a decade ago to split up the Mozilla Browser Suite. The original Mozilla Browser (now continued in SeaMonkey) has both email and browser which was split out into separate projects: Thunderbird and Firefox.

    • Mozilla Puts the Brakes on Thunderbird

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • Why MongoDB? It’s the developers, stupid

      Increasingly the third standard within enterprises for databases, MongoDB, has been claiming a lot of victories lately. In relative terms, it has become the second-hottest skill to have on one’s resume, right after HTML5, according to Indeed.com job trend data. And despite plenty of hating on its technology, with one person telling me recently that “it sets database technology back 25 years,” MongoDB continues to get deployed for numerous, large mission-critical applications.

    • MySQL’s growing NoSQL problem

      Just a few short years ago, MySQL was the undisputed king of the open-source database hill. But with the NoSQL market emerging at an 82 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it’s looking like MySQL may get bulldozed by its NoSQL peers.

      While this shift toward NoSQL provides an interesting commentary on where the industry is heading, it’s even more instructive about the frenetic pace of innovation that open source is driving.

  • CMS

  • Education

  • Business

    • PEPPOL now available through Open Source; installed in only a few hours

      We all know that PEPPOL focuses on e-procurement, but it is no secret that pan-European adoption of e-invoicing is also high on the project’s agenda. The technological PEPPOL developments have taken another step towards this goal. And this all thanks to Norwegian SendRegning.

    • Zurmo Releases Beta Open Source CRM Application

      Under development for the past 19 months, Zurmo is the brainchild of McKay, cofounder Ray Stoeckicht, and Jason Green, cofounder and lead architect, who are all part of the leadership team at Intelestream, an open source enterprise applications developer and professional services firm.

    • Zurmo open source CRM app pins its hopes on gamification

      Company hopes gamification principles in its CRM application, now in beta, will make it stand out and better engage users

    • Zurmo Gamified Open Source CRM Releases Beta Version
    • Open Source Open Days from Sirius

      Sirius is launching an Open Source Open Day programme to educate Government, Public Sector and business organisations on how to get the most benefit from using Open Source software within their technology infrastructure.

      With the UK in double-dip recession, no let-up in the Government drive for austerity, and the old-fashioned idea of economic growth making a comeback, Western economies have much to learn from the BRICS in utilising Open Source to combine public austerity with private growth. Extensive usage of Open Source is a signature of those economies which are thriving despite the global downturn and contrast markedly with the malaise throughout European economies.

  • Funding

  • Project Releases

    • Piwik web analytics now with Do Not Track by default

      The developers of the open source web analytics engine Piwik have released versions 1.8 and 1.8.1 of their software. Version 1.8 brings several key improvements to the user interface and introduces Do Not Track (DNT) support. The 1.8 release is also rated as a critical update after a security review identified a “limited” XSS vulnerability, a cookie denial of service vulnerability and a local file inclusion vulnerability. The Piwik developers recommend updating to the latest version as soon as possible, with the latest version being 1.8.1, released a few days after 1.8 after a number of regressions were found.

    • Transmission BitTorrent client supports Retina display

      In the latest major update to their open source BitTorrent client, the developers at the Transmission Project have mainly focused on enhancements that affect Mac users. The 2.60 release of the peer-to-peer file sharing client adds support for the new Retina display (HiDPI) in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptop and is, the developers say, now ready for the Gatekeeper security feature in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which is expected to arrive later this month.

    • FFmpeg adds Blu-ray and ProRes support

      The FFmpeg developers have announced the first major update to the open source audio and video codecs package since January. FFmpeg 0.11, code-named “Happiness”, includes several new encoders and decoders for additional video formats including Blu-ray and Apple’s ProRes. A significant number of bugs have also been fixed.

    • New Nmap probes IPv6 networks
    • Open source initiatives in Spain

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open-Source R software driving Big Data analytics in government

      As government agencies and departments expand their capabilities for collecting information, the volume and complexity of digital data stored for public purposes is far outstripping departments’ ability to make sense of it all. Even worse, with data siloed within individual departments and little cross-agency collaboration, untold hours and dollars are being spent on data collection and storage with return on investment in the form of information-based products and services for the public good.

    • Pentagon releases open-source health record software
    • DoD official: Open source memo doesn’t mandate a support vendor

      The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.

      The October 2009 memo (.pdf), widely seen as a landmark for its assertion that open source software qualifies as a “commercial item” under federal and Defense acquisition policy definition of the term (and so removing a previous barrier to is wider use), also stipulated that program managers before using open source software must “ensure that the plan for software support…is adequate for mission need.”

    • R is ready for big data
    • Government open source foundation needs to happen

      Talk within the Defense Department of creating a government open source foundation hopefully will become reality despite the climate of budget austerity that might prevent its formation.

    • Metadata plan should ease EU open source projects

      The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.

    • Proposal Aims to Improve EU Software Repository System

      The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.

    • Why there’s no quick fix to get open source into government

  • Licensing

    • NHS Hack Day brings open source to UK Health Service

      The first NHS Hack Day has highlighted applications which could help the UK’s National Health Service provide better, more customisable services for people. The event was won by a group who developed an electronic patient task list for doctors.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source powers big data index

      Avination Virtual Limited announced today that it has released code for llCastRay to the open source OpenSimulator project, as promised at Linux Day in Berlin last month.

    • Open-source ski films?

      If you’ve ever watched ski or snowboard films and thought “I could do that”, Teton Gravity Research (TGR) have now given you the perfect excuse to prove it. They’ve put up a $100,000 cash prize for the best segment submitted to TetonGravity.com during the 2012/13 season.

    • Loughborough professor calls for ‘open-source banking’

      The future of the UK economy depends on the switch to ‘open-source banking’, according to Alistair Milne, Professor of Financial Economics at Loughborough University.

      Speaking at today’s launch of the Loughborough University Centre for Post-Crisis Finance, which is part of the School of Business and Economics, Professor Milne advocated radical change in the structure and process of banking, defining ‘open-source banking’ as having open access to banking information and systems.

    • Open Data

      • TomTom’s Not A Fan Of Open Source Street Maps

        TomTom makes its money from navigation solutions, so it’s not a huge surprise that it’s not terribly fond of open source maps on a general level. It has been accused, however, of overstating the error potential in competing open source map sources as part of a blog post discrediting them.

      • TomTom launches assault on open mapping data

        Satnav manufacturer TomTom has written an article strongly criticising cartographical open data projects like OpenStreetMap for their “accuracy and reliability”.

        “Open source mapping has really come into the limelight in the past few years, and many businesses have started to experiment with its use in industry,” says TomTom on its website. “The limelight, however, brings with it closer scrutiny, and recent reports on the accuracy and reliability of open source maps make for uncomfortable reading.”

    • Open Access/Content

      • Scientific Journal Offers Flat Fee to Authors for ‘All You Can Publish’
      • Journal offers flat fee for ‘all you can publish’

        Science-publishing ventures continually battle for market space, yet most operate on one of only two basic business models. Either subscribers pay for access, or authors pay for each publication — often thousands of dollars — with access being free. But in what publishing experts say is a radical experiment, an open-access venture called PeerJ, which formally announced its launch on 12 June, is carving out a fresh niche. It is asking its authors for only a one-off fee to secure a lifetime membership that will allow them to publish free, peer-reviewed research papers.

    • Open Hardware

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • The Cloud of Lowered Expectations

    Alas, I’m not surprised that the customers of the various services will view this as “business as usual.” We’ve all become accustomed to the idea that web sites go down, emails go astray, computers fail, and in general Internet services are mostly available.

    Many years ago, I worked for a short while on telephone switching systems. Those were the days of Ma Bell, and Ma was very demanding. As I recall, switching systems were required to have a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of ten years, and a Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) of thirty minutes. It wasn’t easy, but those specifications were met…and rare indeed was the occasion when you picked up a telephone and were met with total silence. (Telephone offices typically had 48 hours of backup power.)

  • Finance

    • Wall Street Employees Lose $2 Billion in 401(k) Bet on Own Firms

      Wall Street employees, who dispense financial advice to individuals and companies, aren’t following a basic investing tenet with their own money: diversification.

      Workers at the five largest Wall Street banks saw the value of company stock in their 401(k) accounts, sometimes the biggest holding of those plans, decline more than $2 billion last year, according to annual filings. Those losses don’t include shares received as bonuses.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Criminal Tax Penalties for ALEC? CMD’s Investigation Provides Facts for Powerful New Complaint by Former IRS Official

      This month, a former leader of the Internal Revenue Service filed a complaint that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has violated the terms of its nonprofit status by operating primarily for the private benefit of its corporate members, based on documents and research from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which manages PRWatch, ALECexposed, and SourceWatch. The complaint, which also alleges that ALEC misrepresented itself in tax filings, raises additional allegations beyond those in earlier IRS complaints filed by Common Cause.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • The DRM graveyard part 2: A brief history of digital rights management in video and TV

      A few months ago, we outlined a few of the major moments in the history of digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry. This time, we’re talking about TV, video, and the events in the ongoing fight over copying. We’re still calling it the “DRM graveyard”–but as you’ll see, the failures that DRM has seen in the music world aren’t quite yet as plentiful when it comes to video.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Monsanto Guilty! France convicts big ag firm of chemical poisoning
    • The Java IP Story

      Every year, I teach the AMOS class, a lab course on “Agile Methods and Open Source” that combines lectures with a real software project that ideally turns into a startup (see the AMOS Project concept, in German). To explain open source, I have to introduce students to intellectual property rights, of which most have been blissfully unaware of until then. Nothing teaches concepts better than a colorful story, and so I have been using the IP strategies around Java to make this dry topic come alive. For fun, comments, and corrections, I’m providing the short version of my talk below, including commentary. (You can also download a PDF version of the talk, licensed as CC-BY 3.0. If you find this useful for teaching, please tell me.) Students at this point have a basic working understanding of intellectual property and exclusion rights. Please let me know what you think! Finally, IANAL.

    • Copyrights

      • EU does an 1812 on US software companies

        In a move that scares the pants off of online software distribution such as Steam, the Court Of Justice of the European Union has just ruled that people should be able to resell downloaded games.
        While this does not effect the Land of the Free, where its French-backed Junta wants its people to pay many times for software they own.
        However, the ruling means that what it might say in the EULAs you are allowed to sell your old software. Steam, Origin, and GamersGate will now have their work cut out trying to work out a way to restore some rights to those who buy software online.

07.09.12

Links 9/7/2012: Linux 3.5 RC 6, Ex-Nokia Staff Resurrects MeeGo

Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 207
  • How to move from Windows to Linux?

    Some background: I have 10+ years of programming experience on Windows (almost exclusively C/C++, but some .NET as well), I was a user of FreeBSD at home for about 3 years or so (then had to go back to Windows), and I’ve never had much luck with Linux. And now I have to develop software for Linux. I need a plan.

    On Windows, you can get away with just knowing a programming language, an API you’re coding against, your IDE (VisualStudio) and some very basic tools for troubleshooting (Depends, ProcessExplorer, DebugView, WinDbg). Everything else comes naturally.

    On Linux, it’s a very different story. How the hell would I know what DLL (sorry, Shared Object) would load, if I link to it from Firefox plugin? What’s the Linux equivalent of inserting __asm int 3/DebugBreak() in the source and running the program, and then letting the OS call a debugger? Why do release builds use something, called appLoader, while debug builds work somehow different? Worst of all: How to provision Linux development environment?

  • A Linux computer for grandpa and grandma

    Tired of playing tech support for your older, less computer savvy relatives? Then you may want to consider getting them a Linux-powered WOW! Computer.

  • Desktop

    • Dell seeks Linux fans to try cut-price Ubuntu Ultrabook

      Dell is tempting Linux developers with the promise of a cut-price XPS 13 Ultrabook running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

    • How to Get One Of Dell’s Linux-Based Developer Laptops And Become A Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut

      Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Dubbed “Project Sputnik,” the effort has started to gain some traction.

      As part of its development, Dell has launched a beta program called the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program. Selected participants will receive the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04LTS pre-loaded at a discounted price.

      Project Sputnik signals Dell’s changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking offerings and solutions.

  • Kernel Space

    • ARM Delivers 64-bit ARMv8 Linux Kernel Support (AArch64)

      ARM has today posted their set of patches that implements core Linux kernel support for AArch64, the ARM 64-bit architecture.

    • Intel Implements CMS MSAA For Ivy Bridge Driver

      The latest noteworthy patch-set coming out of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is Mesa support for CMS MSAA for Ivy Bridge hardware.

    • Valve Software Finds Bugs With Linux Kernel

      As Valve Software’s Linux efforts continue to advance, they uncover Linux bugs. Fortunately, at least one Valve-spotted Linux kernel bug has now been corrected by NVIDIA.

      As mentioned back in March, Valve’s encountered OpenGL Linux performance problems. Those problems haven’t been for the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers that are riddled with issues and incomplete functionality, but with the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers. I haven’t checked recently but I hope those performance issues are now worked out with the latest upstream binary blobs. I would assume those OpenGL performance problems have been worked out with Valve Software showing their Linux client to partners. Aside from Linux OpenGL, Valve is now evidently uncovering non-graphics related problems.

    • Proposal: A DRM SoC Framework
    • Linux 3.5-rc6
    • Download Linux Kernel 3.5 Release Candidate 6

      Linus Torvalds announced yesterday, July 7th, that the sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.5 kernel is now available for download and testing.

    • Linux leap second issues being fixed: developer

      Fixes are being readied to fix the problem in Linux that caused problems when an extra second was added to clocks at the end of June, according to a senior kernel developer.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • E17 heading towards a Stable Release – No Really!

      I’ve been pushing the Enlightenment desktop for some time now and for as long as I’ve been promoting it I’ve also been warning folks that it is under heavy development. Well folks – Duke Nuke’em Forever might have beat them to a release, but E team is prepping for a major (stable!) release themselves.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Akademy 2012 Impressions

        Almost all communication between KDE community members happens online, and includes people from all around the world. At Akademy, KDE people meet each other and work together in person. Virtual communication is necessary and valuable for day-to-day work; working face-to-face is much more effective. And Akademy provides much more than that.

      • Calling on the KDE Community to Celebrate: 4.9 Release Parties

        The date for the release of the next milestone in KDE’s 4.x series is quickly approaching. Developers, testers and bug chasers have been busy putting the final touches on the latest version of our software, so it is once again time to get together and celebrate our community’s accomplishment.

      • KDE: Rely on Qt, protect Qt’s freedom, contribute to it

        The KDE community is one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Most of the software written by KDE is based on the Qt toolkit. With the recent strategy changes within Nokia—the largest contributor to Qt, there is uncertainty about the future of Qt that concerns KDE. This is the position of the KDE community regarding the future of Qt…

      • Pandora: Managing Your Season of KDE Participation

        If, unfortunately, you did not get selected for GsoC, SoK offers a great opportunity to started and work on an open source project and win yourself a KDE t-shirt and certificate.

        What if there is a tool which makes it easier to manage and organize your participation on SoK? Sayak Banaerjee, a KDE developer, has created an app called “KDE Students Program”, code named Pandora, which does exactly that. The app will be soon available on season.kde.org.

      • Dolphin 2.1 and beyond

        You have probably heard last week that Peter stepped down as Dolphin maintainer. I would like to thank him for the good collaboration that we had during the last years. It was a great pleasure to work with him, and I think that his departure is a big loss for KDE.

        He entrusted the future maintenance of Dolphin to me, so I will do my best to keep it in good shape. I think that ease of use and stability are what users appreciate most about Dolphin, and I want to make sure that it stays that way.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Archbang 2012.07.02 Screenshots (07/05/2012)
    • Zorin 6 Review

      It’s been a long while since Linux distros have tried to emulate the look and feel of Windows. Most distributions thought it would be the best way to get Windows users who are fed up with the constant virus and malware threats to switch to Linux and it has not been a successful run back in the day with Linspire and Xandros closing up shop a long time ago.

    • Doudou 1.2: A Linux 4 Kids | Review

      Doudou is a French Debian based distro for kids 2-12 years old and a quite popular actually. Few days ago they released version 1.2 and I thought to have a quick look at it.

      I’ll be totally honest. Doudou looks very promising and is really useful distro, but.. but it suffers from old school Linux developing attitude. What’s that? It’s handy made.

      Developers just packed lots of software in a poor environment and the only modern thing here is the GCompris platform. They say that target up to 12 years old kids. Oh well, my opinion, do not gift this to a 12 years old kid, he will hate you. You better buy him a barbie ;)

    • Zorin OS 6 Multimedia Edition Released

      The Zorin Group has released the latest version of Zorin OS which is optimized for multimedia consumption, creation and editing. The team recently released Zorin OS for Home and Business users.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Gears up for 2013 Release

        RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux receiving a major update approximately every two years, RHEL 7 is due to be released sometime in 2013.

        Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, noted that key themes for RHEL 7 will include data center operational efficiency, virtualization and cloud enhancements as well as advancements in the integrated developers’ tools.

      • Red Hat moves app development to the cloud

        Open-source software developer Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has introduced its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering designed to help enterprises and their developers decrease speed application delivery.

        Red Hat’s new platform lets enterprises move application development and deployment to the cloud without the need to diverge from open industry standards, according to the company. It can be deployed in on-premise, private and public clouds to suit the needs of enterprises in various stages of cloud migration.

      • 2012 Red Hat Summit: RHEL Roadmap, Intel, Etc

        2012 Red Hat Summit: RHEL Roadmap, Intel, Etc
        This news is a few days tardy, but the videos from the 2012 Red Hat Summit are now available.

      • Red Hat Introduces Comprehensive Open Hybrid Cloud Solutions Portfolio
      • Red Hat’s journey through the “land of the giants”

        Open source provider Red Hat claims it is gaining traction in the New Zealand market.
        Red Hat credits this in part to the establishment of a presence here with the opening of an office in Auckland in April, 2011.

        But with last month’s global rollouts of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, and upgrades to its JBoss Data Grid and Enterprise Business Rules Management System, the company sees itself in a better position to compete for business with middleware ISVs, systems integrators and resellers.

        “Traditionally, organisations have looked to IBM and Oracle for this, and we’ve struggled to gain legitimacy because we lacked a presence and a track record,” says Max McLaren, Red Hat’s MD for Australia and New Zealand.

    • Debian Family

      • DebConf Managua 2012 Begins Tomorrow

        DebConf 2012, this year’s Debian event, will begin on Sunday and run through next week.

        DebConf 2012 is being hosted in Managua, Nicaragua at the Universidad Centroamericana.

      • Debian Working On Inclusion In FSF Recommended Distributions List

        Debian project leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, has announced his plans to get Debian added to the list of FSF approved free software distributions.

        Zacchiroli explains the reason Debian is not listed in the FSF approved list, “Historically, one of the main argument to exclude Debian from the free-distro list (argument we have share with essentially all other popular distros) has been non-free firmware in main. This argument has become moot since the early days of Squeeze development (early 2010).”

      • Derivatives

        • 3 Things You’ll Love in the New Knoppix Live Linux Distro

          Experienced Linux users would know that when a Linux system initializes, it starts a lot of services, some of which are either unnecessary or not needed immediately (printing, for instance). So unless you know how to turn them off, it can be very frustrating to wait for the Linux desktop to fully load and become usable.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland System Compositor

            While there’s still more than one month until the Ubuntu 12.10 feature freeze, Canonical/Ubuntu developers continue to work towards their concept of having Wayland serve as a system compositor for this next Ubuntu Linux release due out in October, but will they make it?

          • The Good And Bad Lessons Ubuntu Taught Me About Linux And Windows

            A long-time Windows user and an avid gamer, I never felt the need to install Linux on any of my systems. That was until I required a server box to handle automated build compilation, source control and backups for my programming work. The idea of buying another copy of Windows for a machine I’d never be in front of seemed ludicrous and so a copy of Ubuntu was installed instead. Having used Windows and Linux side-by-side for almost a year has given me an entirely new perspective on both operating systems.

          • Ubuntu Cloud Mirrors Now Globally Available

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Scrappy doo. Lucid has puppy powers

              For those who have been following you will know that I have recently embarked on a three part review of Puppy Linux. For those who haven’t been following, I have recently embarked on a three part review of Puppy Linux.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi Modded To Play Super Nintendo Games

      PetRockBlog founder Florian has found a cool way to play with his new credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi PC: turn it into a universal gaming console.

    • Phones

      • Ex-Nokia staff to build MeeGo-based smartphones

        A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for “dinghy”), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of “directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.”

      • Startup Brings Nokia MeeGo Back to Life

        Nokia’s MeeGo software, which was dropped by the company in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, is to live again after a group of former Nokia employees have set up a company to use the Linux-based mobile operating system.

      • MeeGo Resurrected: Linux Mobile Makes Comeback

        Just last week, it was announced that Nokia’s MeeGo team—the same team responsible for the revered OS used on the N9—walked away from the company. Although everyone has stayed hush on the matter, it is believed Nokia’s 10,000 job cuts had something to do with it.

        But it’s not that easy walking away from a labour of love. Those unfamiliar with MeeGo should know it’s built upon Linux, a programming language that is free and can be used by anyone with the skillset, ultimately promoting innovation before financial gain. That’s why most of the Nokia team have gone into business for themselves, creating a company called Jolla to continue bringing MeeGo powered devices to the market.

      • Ex-Nokia guys start mystery company to build Linux-based phones

        A six-man group of open-source diehards from Nokia have teamed up to form Jolla Mobile, a company focused on building phones using the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.

      • Android

        • Amazon Said to Plan Smartphone to Vie With Apple IPhone

          Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is developing a smartphone that would vie with Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone and handheld devices that run Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

        • Hooray! Google Now Gets Ported From Jelly Bean To Ice Cream Sandwich

          Good news, Android fans. A developer over on the forever awesome XDA Developers forums has figured out how to extract Google Now from Android Jelly Bean and port it over to devices running Ice Cream Sandwich. The process for doing so requires a slightly geeky skill set, of course. You have to have a rooted device and you’ll need to be comfortable navigating through the Android file system, for starters. But assuming that’s you, then you can be among the first to try Google Now in (nearly) all its glory.

          In case you’re wondering what the big fuss is about, Google Now is only the most innovative, futuristic, and even downright creepy updates to Google’s search service ever to come. Instead of presenting a blank box where you type in text and hit enter, Google Now flips the search paradigm on its head. It alerts you to things you’ll want to know about before you search for them. Yes, really. Billed as a smart personal assistant to rival Apple’s Siri, Google Now comes pre-loaded on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean devices (the most recent version of Android, introduced at Google I/O), and proactively alerts you to things like weather changes, flight times and delays, sports scores, interesting places near you where you might like to eat, shop or visit, and more.

        • Friday Poll: Will you buy Android now or wait for iPhone 5?
        • Samsung Releases Source Code For Sprint Galaxy S III

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Archos Launches $250 9-Inch Elements Tablet

        Archos is creating some stiff competition for Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The company has announced its 9-inch tablet for US$250 to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

        If compared with Amazon Kindle Fire, Archos has an edge in almost every department:

        - It allows users to access the Google Play Store which has more than 600,000 apps compared to Amazon’s smaller profile. Amazon blocks access to Google Play Store.
        - Amazon Kindle Fire has only 8GB internal storage with only 6GB for content. On the contrary Archos Carbon has 16GB of internal memory with SD card support so you can keep all your music, movies and games without worry.
        - 9-inch (1280×786) display as compared to 7-inch screen of Kindle Fire.

      • Nexus 7 review
      • Multiple Kindle Fire successors due, including a 4G LTE model

Free Software/Open Source

  • Essential Open Source Tools for Web Developers
  • Beliefs and Misbeliefs about Open Source Software

    What does “open source” mean? With open source software being so prevalent in our lives (Android, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox are almost fixtures), you would think that it would be simple enough to find somebody who can explain the term around here. A quick survey around the office turned out dismal results, however. A fellow intern told me “open source software” simply meant that the source code is open for view; another insisted that it means the software is free to use. I personally had the impression that it meant the code was crowd sourced and created by volunteer developers–the idea was immediately shot down by the other two. So what, really, does “open source” mean?

  • Colectica Releases Open Source Blaise to DDI Metadata Converter
  • Rethinking the social network: 3 open-source alternatives to Facebook

    Despite being still in the testing stages, Diaspora* is arguably the most well-known distributed social network at the moment. The brainchild of four NYU students, Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the project was able to fundraise over $200, 000 in 2010 through Kickstarter (Mark Zuckerberg was a donor). The code is open-source and hosted on Github, where it is worked on by volunteer developers. In Diaspora*, users set up a personalized server, termed “pods”, using the Diaspora* software. This server can then be used to port content from

  • NASA needs open source framework

    Despite some well-known open source projects undertaken by NASA, the space agency lacks a framework for understanding the use and production of open source software at the agency level, say a clutch of computer programmers and technologists.

    In an article published earlier this spring by IT Professional, information technology professionals led by Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, say that when they tried to open source a JPL project, they “entered uncharted territory.”

  • TEDGlobal 2012: ‘The more you give away the more you get back’

    First there was “open” – open source, open tech, open journalism. And now? Prepare yourself for “radical openness”.

  • Open Source Awards open for entries

    Sponsored by companies in the local open source community, the awards have been running since 2007. They “work to raise awareness of the free and open source advantage for New Zealand by telling powerful success stories based on real achievements that are already making a difference for our country,” say organisers on the awards website.

    Award categories recognise outstanding use of free open-source software in the public sector, the private sector, education, the arts and social services – including charities and community organisations.

  • In defence of open source

    he Internet world changes quickly. Open source, the practice of promoting free redistribution and access to an end product’s implementation, was little known and often unpopular.

  • Lockheed Upgrades Joint ISR System With Free Open-Source Software
  • How important is the source in Open Source

    The use of open source in trading systems is at an interesting stage. Financial markets participants are now starting to look at open technologies for financial markets, particularly those targeted at trading, to supplement the general open source systems they are already using, such as Linux, Apache and MQ systems.

  • Open source middleware protects and maintains CERN collider

  • Events

    • The Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon, CloudOpen Conferences are Approaching

      If you’re looking for a good way to close out the summer on a high note, keep in mind that the LinuxCon and CloudOpen conferences are taking place together in San Diego, Calif., August 29-31. And, The Linux Foundation has finalized the complete programs and keynote confirmations for the events. Here are the details on what looks like a good time if you’re into Linux and the cloud.

    • Open Source: OSS Leads new Software Innovation

      Open Source software continues to grow in terms of acceptance. In fact, it has become the leader in software segments like cloud computing, mobile applications and enterprise mobility. That’s based on a survey sponsored by North Bridge Venture partners and conducted by Black Duck Software and the 451 Group.

    • Linux.conf.au 2013 Extends Deadline For Papers

      The deadline for submitting paper proposals for Linux.conf.au 2013 in Canberra was originally supposed to be last Friday, but has now been extended by a fortnight. Am I bitter that I set aside time to make sure I submitted my proposal before the deadline? No. (Grinds teeth.)

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Essential Firefox Extensions
      • Extensions…? Here’s a few some missed.

        Recently, LXer carried a story that highlighted several Firefox extensions that are a “must have” for any browsing experience. While there were a few in that list that I find newly-useful, it was lacking in some basic extensions that make life ever-so-much-easier for computer commandos.

        There is a set of extensions we add to every Reglue computer we place and I have trouble understanding why they didn’t make this list. Here are a few of them that should have made the cut. I’m sure that you are aware of most of them but I put them here to be passed along to your less savvy friends,

      • Mozilla To Shaft Thunderbird Next Week

        Mozilla will be announcing Monday that they will be basically stripping away their resources towards the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client.

      • So, That’s It For Thunderbird

        Mozilla is not “stopping” Thunderbird development, it has just decided that: “continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals.” And it’s pulling people off the project. But it’s not stopping? Right.

        This, according to a letter shared with “Mozillians” ahead of the official announcement to be revealed on Monday. Recipients were asked not to share the letter, blog or tweet about the news until then, but obviously someone out there didn’t agree with that plan.

      • Mozilla Foundation and EFF join hunt for Syrian open source developer

        The open source community and human rights organizations have joined forces to find a software developer who has been missing for months following the recent civil unrest in Syria.

        Bassel Khartabil, a 31-year-old computer engineer, was the project leader of Aiki Framework, an open source tool for building web applications. He also contributed to various community-based online projects, including Creative Commons, Fabricatorz, Mozilla Firefox, Open Clip Art Library, Sharism, and Wikipedia.

      • Mozilla To Stop Innovation On Thunderbird
      • Evolution of Thunderbird e-mail Client

        Mozilla has decided to freeze the features and concentrate on web/cloud stuff. That annoys some who have grown to depend on Thunderbird, particularly those with many e-mail accounts. Thunderbird makes sense for its ability to concentrate those accounts in one application.

      • Thunderbird development to be stalled by Mozilla

        An email leaked on Friday forced Mozilla to reveal its decision to reduce resources for the Thunderbird email client ahead of a planned announcement next Monday. The early announcement from Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker explained that the organisation felt that, as an open source, cross-platform email client, Thunderbird was unlikely to be a “source of innovation” and future leadership. Mozilla’s officials say they have concluded that what is important for Thunderbird is ongoing stability and that “continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts”.

      • Mozilla to halt further development of open-source email client Thunderbird

  • SaaS

    • Rackspace president: Cloud needs open alternative to Amazon
    • Open Source, the Fuel for Cloud Disruption
    • 5 Ways Cloud Computing Is Like Open Source

      You may not remember the angst of the early- to mid-2000s, when the open source debate raged hot and heavy. Many times I witnessed IT professionals vociferously denigrate open source in favor of established proprietary vendors. I heard endless arguments about the quality disadvantages of open source, the lack of “professional ability” among open-source developers, the absolute requirement that a large company stand behind a software component used in a corporate system, the dangers of lack of indemnification, and on and on. According to large numbers of IT organization staff, open source was a toy, fine for unimportant hobby systems, but woefully inadequate for “real” corporate IT applications.

    • Increasingly, Clouds Are Built the Open Source Way

      Today’s cloud computing landscape has no clear leading vendor; but rather is a mosaic of services. While the commercial opportunities are enormous, open source clouds are beginning to dominate the private cloud side of the market.

    • Open source powers big data index

  • Education

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Features Coming For FreeBSD 10

      Here’s a look at some of the planned features that are being worked on for the FreeBSD 10 release.

      The FreeBSD 10 features that have already been talked about on Phoronix include:

      - FreeBSD 10.0 will deprecate GCC and switch to the LLVM/Clang compiler by default. GCC will likely remain within FreeBSD ports, but LLVM/Clang is the future for FreeBSD rather than using the GPLv3-licensed GCC. Other BSD distributions are also working towards migrating from GCC to LLVM/Clang.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Game of the day: GNU Backgammon

      It’s almost a cliche in Western culture. For some reason, those swanky-looking leather-bound backgammon sets became either the mark of tasteful distinction or the default Christmas gift when you don’t know what else to get. I see them in households everywhere. Unopened. Unplayed. Checkers still in the little sealed plastic baggies. Unloved. I don’t know, I guess backgammon sets got advertised in the back pages of Playboy during the ’70s or something; it has that kind of aura.

  • Project Releases

    • Etherpad Lite 1.1.1 Released

      The Etherpad Foundation has released a new version of their collaborative web based editor, Etherpad Lite. This release features a lot of bug fixes along with support for node 0.8, new hooks and API endpoints, resolution of various security issues, Postgres support and better Microsoft Windows support out of box.

    • Transmission 2.60 Released

      The version 2.60 comes with all tickets closed, which means all the open bugs and requests have been resolved. Some of the key changes in this release include better support for magnet links, better scraping behavior for various trackers, notifications for seeding and downloading completion on the web client and various other small bug fixes.

    • Transmission 2.60 Has Been Officially Released

      Transmission 2.60, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, has been released last evening, July 5th.

    • Pidgin 2.10.6 Released

      Pidgin, a popular cross-platform IM client, has got a new release. This version fixes a major bug that required users to triple click on the buddy list to open the messaging window.

    • PacketFence 3.4 supports up to 100 custom VLANs

  • Public Services/Government

    • VA awards $4.9M contract to support open source tech

      The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded Ray Group International of Tampa, Fla., a $4.9 million contract to support the open source community that is contributing software code to the VA and Defense Department integrated electronic health record system.

    • France awards €2 million open source support tender

      The central IT department for the French government has granted a €2 million contract to support 350 different open source tools throughout fifteen different ministries. The three to four year contract, which was officially tendered last year, was awarded to consulting companies Alter Way, Capgemini and Java specialist Zenika.

    • Government departments snub open source storage
    • Vietnam considers drastic measures to encourage open source software use

      Forty three out of the 63 provinces and cities have installed and used open source software. It is estimated that 7300 officers have been trained in the plan to build up the labor force to support the open source software application.

      In many localities, open source solutions have been developed and utilized by the local budget. Quang Nam province, for example, has 90 percent of electronic information websites of the local state agencies developed onJoomla open source. Meanwhile, two districts and three departments in the province are using the one-stop-shop software based on Drupal open source.

      Tuyen said that Vietnam encourages organizations and agencies to use open source software because of its outstanding advantages. It is clearly more economical to use open source software than close sourced software which is always very expensive.

  • Licensing

    • Open source incest: GPL forked by its coauthor

      One of the principal authors of version 3 of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) has spun off his own version of the license without the participation of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in a move that could ruffle feathers in the often-cantankerous free software community.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • From Tech to Toilet Paper, Berliner Tries to Live Completely Open Source for One Year

      Open source computer, open source mobile phone, open source toothbrush, open source jeans, open source video codec, open source camera, open source beer and even open source toilet paper: these are just a few things you need if you decide to make every aspect of your life open source for a year. A 28-year-old filmmaker from New Zealand living in Berlin is going to try just that.

Leftovers

  • Country Most in Love with M$ Gets the Most Machines Knocked off the Internet Monday

    USA has about 10% of the world’s infected machines. China which has about the same number of on-line users has 1/7 as many infected PCs as USA. India which has four times the population of USA has 1/3 as many infected PCs. To keep the problem at home in USA, the world should just stop using that other OS. It’s not needed and not worth the trouble it cause

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs Loses $20.6 Million Award Appeal

      On Tuesday, the Goldman Sachs group lost an appeal against a $20.6 million award won by creditors of Bayou Group, the now bankrupt hedge fund. Goldman’s argument was rejected by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which found Goldman’s assertion without merit in claiming that the arbitrators making the award had disregarded the law. The three-judge panel appeals court observed, “The manifest disregard standard is, by design, exceedingly difficult to satisfy, and Goldman has not satisfied it in this case.”

    • Goldman Sachs facing £250m lawsuit
    • Wall Street Confidence Trick: How Interest Rate Swaps Are Bankrupting Local Governments

      The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

    • Full Show: How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy

      PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees — many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank — beg the question: For how long and how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice?

      On this week’s Moyers & Company, Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

  • Privacy

    • Maple Seed Drones Will Swarm The Future

      Imagine a cheap, tiny, hovering aerial drone capable of being launched with the flick of a person’s wrist and able to provide manipulable 360-degree surveillance views.

      It’s real, it’s inspired by maple seeds, and the company behind it, Lockheed Martin, envisions a future in which swarms of the new drones can be deployed at a fraction of the cost and with greater capabilities than drones being used today by the military and other agencies.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • U.N. Affirms Internet Freedom as a Basic Right

      Will Internet companies help or hinder government authorities that try to restrict their citizens from using the Web freely? And will their customers, investors or shareholders care enough to do something about it?

      That debate was freshly stirred on Thursday as the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution supporting freedom of expression on the Internet. Even China, which filters online content through a firewall, backed the resolution. It affirmed that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.”

    • Civil liberties organisations advocating for a free internet

      Several international civil liberties organisations have put their weight behind a Declaration of Internet Freedom. The first signatories included the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Digital Democracy, and Mozilla. Both individuals and organisations can sign the declaration which reads, in full:

    • Verizon: net neutrality violates our free speech rights

      Verizon pressed its argument against the Federal Communications Commission’s new network neutrality rules on Monday; filing a legal brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The company argued the FCC’s rules not only exceeded the agency’s regulatory authority, but also violated network owners’ constitutional rights. Specifically, Verizon believes that the FCC is threatening its First Amendment right to freedom of speech and its property rights under the Fifth Amendment.

  • DRM

    • Recent iOS, Mac app crashes linked to botched FairPlay DRM

      iOS and OS X users are experiencing crashes due to corrupted binaries pushed out by Apple’s servers over the Fourth of July holiday, according to Instapaper developer Marco Arment. The problem appears to be linked to Apple’s FairPlay DRM scheme, which is added to apps downloaded via the iOS App Store or Mac App Store. While Apple appears to be working to correct the issue, the problem is ongoing as of Thursday.

      Arment discovered the problem late Tuesday night after pushing an update to his Instapaper app to the App Store. “I was deluged by support e-mail and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install,” Arment wrote on his blog.

07.06.12

Links 6/7/2012: Mandriva Name Changes; Next GPL

Posted in News Roundup at 7:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of ‘Higgs boson’

    Scientists working at CERN, Geneva have announced the discovery of Higgs boson which is considered to be one of the most important scientific feats in understanding the creation of Universe.

    Higgs boson is a a new subatomic particle that enables particles in atoms to gather mass, the basic building blocks of the universe. It is called ‘God particle’ because its existence is fundamental to the creation of the universe.

  • I failed the Linux Community

    Last night I’m afraid to say I failed the LINUX community.

    My wife’s Aunty and Uncle came up from Glasgow to Aberdeenshire to visit my mother in law for a few nights and en route stayed at our house for a meal.

    After the meal my wife’s Uncle asked whether he could use our PC to check his emails etc. My wife asked my son to give the Uncle his laptop to use which is running Windows 7 but I saw the instant opportunity to demonstrate the power of LINUX by letting him loose on my laptop running Mageia 2.

    Now the reason I am running Mageia 2 is that I had an unfortunate incident last weekend whilst playing with the partitions on my laptop whereby I accidentally destroyed the version of Zorin I was running previously. This however was not I thought an issue because I had set up Mageia meticulously with the KDE 4 plasma desktop and I think it looks really impressive. I have even installed Compiz to add some whizzy effects. Add to this the Chromium browser and you would think you have a really good setup to demonstrate to a non Linux user.

  • Tux and the God Particle

    One CERN physicist, though, went out of his way to give Linux some credit where credit is due, and posted a complimentary thanks to the operating system on Reddit.

  • Linux central to Higgs Boson discovery, claims CERN physicist

    After Linux was founding wanting over last weekend’s leap second server hiatus, some better news – it helped CERN physicists track down the mysterious Higgs Boson.

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Climate skepticism not rooted in science illiteracy

      People who strongly resist data indicating that human-induced climate change could spell catastrophe aren’t ignorant about science or numerical reasoning. Quite the opposite, a new study finds: High science literacy actually boosts the likelihood that certain people will challenge what constitutes credible climate science.

      Who will be receptive to climate science, the study found, depends more on cultural factors such as attitudes toward commerce, government regulation and individualism than on scientific literacy.

      “Simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict” over climate, the study’s authors conclude online May 27 in Nature Climate Change.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3.5.3 Development Release Out, To Become 3.6

        The GNOME project have released the third update to the development cycle heading for GNOME 3.6. This is an unstable release and though usable, its mainly for testing and hacking purposes. The major changes in this release are a new API framework for Evolution Data Server, new widgets in GTK+ and a new Empathy interface to integrate well with the Gnome 3 style.

      • GNOME and input method integration

        Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one’s keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.

      • Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 Test 1 Ships with GNOME 3

        Alan Baghumian announced last night, July 4th, the immediate availability for download of the first test version of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system.

      • Shotwell vs F-Spot

        Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. In 2010 it replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based major Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu. Shotwell’s power is its simplicity, ease of use and speed.

  • Distributions

    • 4 Fine Linux ARM Distros

      The ARM platform is exploding like a mad wet cat out of the bath. Here are four good distros cram-full of ARM fun.

      Linux has had ARM support since forever, but it’s been bumpy. There are hundreds of vendors of ARM devices (see Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot for a sampling), all shoving their own personal hacked code out the door as fast as possible. This made Linux support complicated and unwieldy, to the point that Linus Torvalds threatened to stop accepting ARM changes in the mainline Linux kernel.

    • Arch linux – not just for geeks
      ?
    • Cultix RC1 Screenshots
    • ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME preview
    • Porteus 1.2 Screenshots
    • Preview: CrunchBang (“#!”) Linux 11 “Waldorf”

      I’ve been a fan of #! ever since I tried version 9.04.01. It’s quite lightweight, yet the UI doesn’t feel antiquated, and it’s quite well-stocked with features that normal users would find useful. Two months ago, the first testing images of version 11 “Waldorf” went online, so I am previewing that now.

      #! is a Debian-based Openbox distribution. It used to be based on Ubuntu, and at one point, it gained [and then later lost] an Xfce edition. It aims to be quite lightweight yet have the niceties of other distributions with more mainstream DEs.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Help Name New Mandriva Community Distribution

        Last week when Schulz posted his diagram of the general structure of the new Mandriva foundation, he used the name OpenMDV as a placeholder for the new community distribution. It sounded liked like a good name to me, I even liked the spelling. However, Schulz being the community minded sort he is, decided to put it to an open vote. So, now, you too can help pick the name of the new Mandriva community distribution.

      • Voting opened to name Mandriva community distribution
      • Mandriva To Change Name: Votes Open

        Mandriva is going through a complete overhaul. The company recently decided to turn this once #1 GNU/Linux distribution into a community driven distribution. Now, they are seeking a name change for the distribution (and the foundation governing the development of Mandriva) to separate its identity from the company Mandriva S.A.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Knoppix 7.0.1

          Aren’t you frustrated at having to wait for all of an operating system’s services to load before you get to a usable desktop? Experienced Linux users would know that the system initialization of a Linux system, until recently, (by default, unless you know how to customize it) starts several services (some of which are either unnecessary to the user OR some are not needed instantaneously on startup, e. g. printing). Sounds familiar?

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Community Leadership Summit 2012: A Week Away!

            Just a quick reminder that in just over a week we will be hosting the Community Leadership Summit 2012 in Portland, Oregon on from Sat, July 14, 2012 – Sun, July 15, 2012. The event happens the weekend before the OSCON conference, so this is a great opportunity to attend both events.

            The Community Leadership Summit 2012 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community.

          • The Power Consumption In Ubuntu 12.10

            Since last year when spotting a major Linux kernel power regression and subsequently finding the cause of the power problem that affected a large number of mobile Linux users, plus other regressions, it’s been fun to look at the Linux power performance situation. How though is the latest Ubuntu Linux code performing when it comes to power efficiency? Here are some early tests of Ubuntu 12.10.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • MeeGo team to part ways with Nokia

        Sotiris Makrygiannis, MeeGo’s Head of Development has announced that the entire MeeGo team will be parting ways with Nokia.

        MeeGo announced this just after releasing the MeeGo PR1.3 update for the Nokia N9, which was the first and last MeeGo phone by Nokia. The Finnish mobile manufacturer will be now concentrating fully on the development of Windows Phones with the help of Microsoft.

        MeeGo was very closely involved in the launch of various handsets by the Nokia, such as N770, N800, N810, N900, N950 and the N9. MeeGo, as you know, is a Linux-based open source operating system designed for various hardware platforms such as netbooks, desktops, tablets, and mobile computing. It is currently being spearheaded by the Linux Foundation.

      • Android

        • Amazon Working On Its Own Phone?

          According to reports, Amazon is working on its own Smartphone running a forked version of Android. Amazon already has its own Kindle Fire tablet which runs on Android. However, Amazong has cut Google out of its platform as user’s can’t buy content or apps from Google Play Store. On the contrary Google allows Amazon to sell their content on Android devices. So, an Android powered Amazon phone can be a lucrative market for Amazon as it has the entire ecosystem in place.

        • Nexus Q gets torn down, some parts are in fact imported
        • Android is Not a Single OS

          Long time ago I argued that Linux is not an OS the way many people think. Most people, when they say “Linux”, think of a singular operating system like Windows and Mac OS X when it in fact refers to a multitude of distributions each of which practically qualifies as its own OS. I argued that a better way to present “Linux” is as a brand representing a rather sizable family of operating systems with a common core: the Linux kernel. Back then I actually called it a “market of operating system components” out of which various Linux based operating systems are made.

        • ROM Manager Makes Device Maintenance a Pleasure
        • Nexus S 4G Reunited With The AOSP Family

          Jean-Baptiste Queru, Technical Lead on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and man after my own heart announced the return of the Nexus S 4G (Sprint) back into the main AOSP tree. In a post in the Android building group on Tuesday, Queru stated, “We’ve been able to resolve the issues around Nexus S 4G, and we can now properly distribute its CDMA and WiMAX binaries. That allows Nexus S 4G to work with AOSP just as well as Nexus S”. As a Nexus S user on Sprint, I can say that I did a few virtual cartwheels, but what is the current status of all Nexus phones within AOSP?

        • Recon MOD heads-up-display goggles go open source with Android

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Interview: Sebastiaan Mathôt talks about Psychological experiments with OpenSesame
  • Blender

    Blender was created as a rewrite by a Belgian company and spun off in its own company Not a Number Technologies. They expanded too fast and went bankrupt. Blender lives on under the umbrella of a non-profit organization The Blender Foundation. A failure it is not. About every two years, the organization produces a new animated movie and continues to thrive on donations and other revenue.

  • Public Art with Augmented Reality and Blender
  • The Open Source Balance at Banks

    While many banks still ponder the benefits of using open source technology for their coding needs, nascent BankSimple has gone full steam ahead.

  • ZaReason: a computer company with freedom built in

    For the past couple of months, I’ve been playing with a laptop from ZaReason, a small, GNU/Linux-based system builder founded in Oakland, CA (though it has expanded to New Zealand). ZaReason’s deal is that they build computers themselves, using components that are guaranteed to have free and open drivers, and pre-install your favorite free/open operating system at the factory. They offer full support for the hardware and the software, and promise that they’ll never say, “Sorry, that component just doesn’t work right under Linux.” So unlike buying a ThinkPad or other commercial laptop and installing a free operating system on it (which can be a bit of a gamble, and will shortly become more of one, see below), ZaReason’s machines arrive ready to run. And unlike buying a commercial laptop from a freedom-friendly vendor like Emperor Linux (who’ll sometimes warn you that certain features of your hardware aren’t supported), ZaReason can promise you that every single capability of every single component in your system will just work.

  • We could build an open Twitter, but would anyone use it?

    Amid the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s future — which some say is aimed at restricting what developers can do with the real-time information network, in an attempt to monetize it more easily — a number of critics have proposed duplicating the network using open-source tools and principles. This idea, which has also been proposed in the past by blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer, seems to have a lot of merit: after all, if a short-messaging utility like Twitter is a useful service for society to have, then why not recreate it as an open-source project? The only problem is that others have tried to do exactly that, and have mostly failed to achieve any traction. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with Twitter.

  • GWT Swept Under Open Source

    Google is handing over control of its GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for browser application development to a steering committee. A release candidate of GWT 2.5, the final Google-directed release, is also available and features compiler optimizations.

  • Open source developer Bassel Khartabil detained by Syrian government

    Days after Human Rights Watch revealed that the Syrian government was putting political detainees through 20 torture techniques in 27 locations around the country, EFF learned that open source developer Bassel Khartabil has been detained by Syrian authorities.

  • Mozilla, Activists Call for Release in Syria of Open-source Developer
  • Kaltura expands open-source video in Europe
  • Non-profit launched to advance open source point cloud processing
  • Europeans develop open-source software for biosciences

    Processing bioimaging data has just become easier, thanks to new open-source software for multidimensional image visualisation, processing and analysis, developed by a team of German and Finnish researchers. In the making for the last 10 years, the so-called BioImageXD software is facilitating the analysis of cell and tissue functions, including how molecules move on cell surfaces and how they bond together. Presented in the journal Nature Methods, the study was funded in part by a grant under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

  • Mama is Open – why should clients care ?

    Simply put – it represents a real chance to have a single market data abstraction that clients can commit to, resulting in significant benefits arising from code reuse, reduced support and better tooling when compared to supporting the multiple platforms that many organisations have today. In addition, they will be able to turn to a large number of vendors externally who are committing to OpenMama.

  • .eu and EURid: .eu goes open source with YADIFA name server solution

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Eucalyptus Branches Towards Open Clouds

      Version 3.1 brings enterprise-grade cloud computing to open source

    • Open source: SugarCRM at Footprints Recruiting

      Customer relationship management (CRM) software is generally hard to get excited about, but Jeff Strachan a founder of Footprints Recruiting[1], an English as a second language (ESL) placement agency, verges on evangelical. And little wonder: Being burdened with a legacy system built using forms in Microsoft Outlook and being burnt by the lock-in of proprietary software would be enough to make an open source evangelist out of most people.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Group-Office 4.0 groupware released

      Dutch company Intermesh has announced the availability of version 4.0 of its Group-Office groupware solution. The open source Community edition of the suite of online applications includes address book, email, calendar, task and notes functionality, as well as file sharing, email templates and a newsletters module. Support and other features such as projects, a helpdesk system, and synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices are available in the commercial Professional version.

    • Atlassian’s big experiment with performance reviews

      Do you ever wonder if and how you could call a halt to your performance review process? Do you think traditional processes are marred by the distribution curve (and forced rankings), huge time investments and low impact on performance improvements? Maybe you agree that your processes have their faults, but you think that it’s not sensible to abolish performance appraisals altogether or replace them with coaching sessions.

  • Licensing

    • The next GPL: Why it’s being shaped on GitHub

      While you were getting ready to stick a fork in a burger for the Independence Day holiday, Red Hat employee Richard Fontana was making a fork of the GPL. Fontana previously worked at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a nonprofit law firm providing pro bono legal services to free and open source projects. He’s now the open source licensing and patent counsel at Red Hat, but he’s been careful to explain that the GPL fork is a personal project.

    • Red Hat Storage 2.0 Hits General Availability

      Red Hat is now officially a storage vendor. The open source operating system vendor released it first commercially supported storage system, dubbed Red Hat Storage 2.0, this week at the company’s annual user conference event.

      Red Hat Storage 2.0 first appeared as a beta in April of this year. The solution is built of top of Gluster, a company Red Hat acquired October of 2011 for $136 million.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Drug Discovery programme to cover drug development and delivery soon

      Spurred by the progress of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) scheme, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is planning to expand its scope of work to include more areas like drug development and delivery.

      The OSDD programme, which has emerged as a new platform for innovation in the domain of affordable healthcare, will expand to cover Open Source Drug Discovery, Open Source Drug Development, Open Source Drug Delivery, Open Source Disease Diagnostics during the current Plan period, sources said.

    • White House to open We the People platform

      The White House is in the process of creating an open source version of its “We the People” online petition platform, says Chris Vein, deputy federal chief technology officer.

      The effort will fulfill one of its objectives under the National Action Plan it revealed as a member of the international Open Government Partnership. One OGP member country, Latvia, plans to use the platform as soon as it’s available, said Vein June 20 at NASA’s Open Source Summit in Washington, D.C.

    • Hardware

  • Programming

    • Eclipse Developer Survey

      The results of this years Eclipse Open Source Developer Survey include some interesting finding about what motivates participation in open source projects and motivates developers to build apps in their free time.

      Compared to previous years, the survey noted that corporate policies are becoming more positive towards open source participation with only 0.6% of respondents choosing the “Does not allow the use of any open source software” to describe their organizations policy.

    • Eclipse 4 Lives – alongside 70 Open Source Projects in Eclipse Juno

Leftovers

  • Apple ‘fesses up: We broke App Store downloads

    An Apple App Store server spat out broken copies of several high-profile titles this week, the iPad maker has admitted.

    Updates for popular software including Instapaper and Angry Birds in Space were corrupted when downloaded, causing the programs to crash when fanbois attempted to use them.

    Instapaper dev Marco Ament chronicled his nail-gnawing frustration after a flood of punters blamed him for the error even though he was powerless to fix it. Deleting the app and installing it from scratch fixed the problem on individual devices, but Apple’s cock-up meant a new version of Instapaper received a rash of one-star reviews.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • NPR, NBC Use One Guy for Small Biz Opposition to ACA and Fail to Disclose his NFIB Ties

      With millions of small business owners in the United States, why can multiple news outlets find only one small business owner to say that federal health care reform will negatively impact business?

      When national news outlets want to know how ordinary small business owners feel about the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), they apparently all turn to just one man: Joe Olivo, owner of Perfect Printing in New Jersey. In recent weeks, Olivo has been quoted by both NPR and NBC News as a representative small business owner concerned that the ACA will make him reluctant to hire more employees.

  • Censorship

    • Freeing your router from Cisco’s anti-porn, pro-copyright cloud service

      But shortly after my purchase, Cisco pushed a firmware update to this router that limited owners’ ability to administer the devices ourselves. The update led me (and many others) to install an older version of the firmware in order to regain all the control we had in the first place. More on just how to do that in a bit. First let’s explain what Cisco did, and why many people are upset.

  • Civil Rights

    • WikiLeaks Releases 2.5m ‘Syrian Emails’

      WikiLeaks has started publishing 2.5 million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies.

      The emails date from August 2006 to March 2012 and come from 680 “Syria-related entities”, including the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture, WikiLeaks said.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • YouTube Audio Ripping Website Takes On Google

        Philip Matesanz, a 21 year old student of applied computer science and the sole owner of the YouTube-mp3.org website, has ignored “cease and desist” letters from Google and has instead launched a public campaign against the company.

        Matesanz operates an mp3 conversion service which extracts the audio tracks from content hosted on YouTube. After being threatened with a court case, he consulted legal professionals and now claims that Google had no right to block his website from accessing YouTube. He has also launched a petition which has already collected 334,361 signatures.

      • Could Oracle ruling lead to used e-book, music sales?

        When the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Oracle couldn’t block the sale of used software over the Internet, did it open the door to sales of used e-books, digital music, and video?

      • BitTorrent usage increases in Europe, following the blockade of The Pirate Bay

        In a twist that will surprise no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies, the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries.

      • ACTA

        • ACTA: Last-Minute Appeal to EPP Group

          If you watched the stream of the plenary session in the European Parliament yesterday, you will know that what we saw was an incredible parade of politicians from all parties denouncing ACTA – with one exception. The centre-right EPP Group is asking for a decision on ACTA to be postponed until after the European Court of Justice hands down its judgement on the compatibility of the treaty with EU law. That’s likely to take a year or two, and amounts to a massive delaying tactic, as I’ve explained before.

07.05.12

Links 5/7/2012: Android 4.1 Reviewed, RHEL 7 Preview

Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is a community approach to IT security ever safe?

    Back in February of this year we heard about security firm AlienVault’s creation of the OSSIM standard open source SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) information base.

    Described (arguably) somewhat hopefully by its makers as a new “de facto” standard mechanism for sharing cyber threat intelligence, the AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) system is free to all users of OSSIM (and the firm’s own customers) as it aggregates, validates and publishes threat data.

  • Countly’s Gorkem Cetin argues open source is best when it comes to app analytics
  • Open Source Content Management Systems Offer Wider Range of Functionality for Horton Group Clients
  • SAP Open Source initiative progressing well
  • Open Source’s Promise

    While many banks still ponder the benefits of using open source technology for their coding needs, nascent BankSimple has gone full steam ahead.

  • EURid debuts YADIFA name server

    An open source DNS name server that supports DNSSEC and is designed to be authoritative has been released by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. YADIFA is intended to be a lightweight alternative to more established projects; the developers say it was “built from scratch to face today’s DNS challenges, with no compromise on security, speed and stability”.

  • Free Open Source Radio Automation Software

    It’s called Airtime 2.1 and it’s open source, free to download, but only runs on Ubuntu Linux and Debian Squeeze. But, once installed you can interact with it through any web browser.

  • HP Cloud Strategy to Focus on Open Source

    HP’s Converged Cloud model will depend on interoperability with hardware from other vendors.

  • Sometimes Open Source Software Just Wins

    When I first came across open source software I was amazed. I could hardly believe that good quality software could be made available for a minimal cost. Sure there could be issues with support and maintenance from time to time, but the flexibility and pure value for money equation was hard to beat.

  • UK teachers are free to choose open source curriculum

    The UK Department of Education has confirmed that information and communications technology (ICT) lessons that teach children how to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint will soon be more open.

    Starting September 2012, computer teachers will be given “the freedom and flexibility to design an ICT curriculum that is best for their pupils,” says Michael Gove, Department of Education secretary. This means teachers can change the curriculum to teach open source if they prefer.

  • Collide: A Dead Google Project Now Open-Source

    Google’s canning their engineering efforts in Atlanta, Georgia this month. Their engineering staff is moving on, but as one last effort, they were allowed to open-source portions of their last project: Collide.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mucker Lab and Mozilla Team-up on Open-Source Startup Accelerator Program

        Mucker Lab, one of the newest startup/accelerator programs based in Los Angeles announced yesterday they will be partnering with Mozilla’s WebFWD to create a joint acceleration program aimed at at open-source ventures. The companies hope to help the Los Angeles area open-source community turn projects and ideas into viable businesses through the resources of both Mucker Lab and Mozilla.

      • Firefox OS: One more for the road

        Choice, as they say, is a good thing. Or you can never have too choices. In the mobile device operating system space, there are plenty to choose from, with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android leading the pack.

        Not to be left out, the Mozilla Foundation, publishers of the popular, open source Firefox Web browser, plans to add one more mobile OS to the mix.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice For Android Starts Taking Shape

      The Document Foundation is planning to release LibreOffice, the free software office suite, for Android devices. A good amount of work has been done on the app and here we bring the latest screenshots of how this app will look like.

  • Project Releases

    • Tomahawk cruises to version 0.5

      The developers of the open source Tomahawk media player have announced the release of Tomahawk 0.5 and a new version of the accompanying Toma.hk online service. Tomahawk is an open source music player that includes sharing functionality and is designed to be source-independent. New features in Tomahawk 0.5 include a new grid view for albums, and redesigned artist and track pages. The new version can also bi-directional sync playlists with Spotify and Last.fm. New media key controls have been added for Windows and Linux.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Alfresco to open up Bristol City Council

      Open source vendor Alfresco has implemented its services at Bristol City Council (BCC) as part of the council’s revamp of its document management systems and continued efforts to reduce spending.

  • Open Hardware

Leftovers

  • Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

    Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.” Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue. Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.

  • Security

    • Double security for Flash under Linux

      Chrome version 20 represents a major step forward for the security of the Google browser, at least for Linux users, for whom this has often been a somewhat neglected area. It introduces a new sandbox concept which precisely regulates and filters the system calls a process is able to make.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • New Film Hammers Democrat Andrew Cuomo’s Plan to Frack New York

      Gasland director Josh Fox released a short film last month targeting the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, for his plan to open economically distressed parts of the state to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” The 18-minute film skewers Cuomo for his plans and exposes oil and gas industry internal documents which detail that some of corporations also have concerns about well safety and water contamination.

  • Finance

    • Regulators release ‘living wills’ for big banks

      Banking regulators released public portions of “living wills” submitted by nine of the world’s largest banks, which details how they could be dissolved if trouble strikes.

      The documents, required as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, mark an effort to ensure that huge financial institutions, if struggling to stay afloat, can be safely wound down without posing a threat to the overall financial system.

      The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) posted the public portions of the plans online, saying they had not been reviewed or edited by the regulators.

  • Censorship

    • UK Pensioner Could Face Arrest For Atheist Poster

      Along with ridiculous libel cases, the UK is also infamous for laws that are designed to stop people hurting the feelings of others. Maybe that’s a laudable aim, but the end-result is that they can cast a chill over freedom of speech

  • Civil Rights

    • Evidence of a US judicial vendetta against WikiLeaks activists mounts

      The US Department of Justice (DoJ) tried to hack by legal means into my social media accounts without my knowledge. But they were exposed by Twitter’s legal team who manged to unseal the DoJ’s secret document and give me a chance to defend in court my personal information from being used in a dragnet for the first serious attacks on WikiLeaks’ supporters and volunteers. I still am not sure why they chose to take the risk of going after a member of Iceland’s parliament, because it has caused distress among fellow parliamentarians from around the world. As a result of the speaker of the Icelandic parliament raising the issue at the International Parliamentarian Union (IPU), I was asked to appear for the human rights committee at the IPU to explain the details of my case. A resolution on my case was put forward and adopted unanimously by the IPU’s governing council, in October 2011.

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • The European Parliament Rejects ACTA: The Impossible Becomes Possible

        On October 23, 2007, the U.S., E.U., Canada, and a handful of other countries announced plans to the negotiate the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The behind-the-scenes discussions had apparently been ongoing for several years, leading some countries to believe that a full agreement could be concluded within a year to coincide with the end of the Bush administration. Few paid much attention as the agreement itself was shrouded in secrecy. ACTA details slowly began to emerge, however, including revelations that lobby groups had been granted preferential access, the location of various meetings, and troubling details about the agreement itself.

      • European Parliament Rejection Puts ACTA Future In Doubt

        Today’s overwhelming defeat of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) by the European Parliament could have a resounding effect on the treaty’s prospects for survival, according to sources. Meanwhile, public interest groups are celebrating and copyright holders fuming.

      • ACTA Killed In European Parliament

        Today at 12:56, the European Parliament decided whether ACTA would be ultimately rejected or whether it would drag on into uncertainty. In a crushing 478-to-39 vote, the Parliament decided to reject ACTA once and for all. This means that the deceptive treaty is now dead globally.

      • ACTA: Total Victory for Citizens and Democracy!

        The European Parliament rejected ACTA1 by a huge majority, killing it for good. This is a major victory for the multitude of connected citizens and organizations who worked hard for years, but also a great hope on a global scale for a better democracy. On the ruins of ACTA, we must now build a positive copyright reform2, taking into account our rights instead of attacking them. The ACTA victory must resonate as a wake up call for lawmakers: Fundamental freedoms as well as the free and open Internet must prevail over private interests.

      • ACTA Defeated In EU Parliament: Happy Fourth Of July

        Happy Independence Day. The day when Europeans stood up for their own freedom from the US corporate interests. The day when ACTA — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — proposed by the US corporations was defeated on the European soil.

        ATCA was the ‘international’ edition of SOPA/PIPA which was defeated within the US by huge protest from public and organizations like Google and Wikipedia.

        SOPA/PIPA’s cousin ACTA has been rejected by the European Parliament, by an almost unanimous margin of 478 votes against to 39 in favor. 165 members abstained from the vote. In a nutshell, “with 682 MEPs ACTA was supported by 5.7%, rejected by 70% of MEPs,” posts Jan Wilderboer on Google+.

07.04.12

Links 4/7/2012: Blizzard’s Linux PR Crisis, Fuduntu 2012.3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why We Still Need the Open Source VLC Media Player

    The Monday Version 2.0.2 release of the free open source VLC media player points out a surprising hole in the age of the Internet video – there is still no universal standard for video formats and players.

    Fortunately, VLC is there to fill in the gaps among proprietary formats and competing ecosystems, playing just about every video in use.

  • .FREE, .OPEN gTLDs may not be open to public

    The applications for new gTLD domains offered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have been made public, and although the .LINUX registry has been unclaimed, other potentially FLOSS-related gTLDs are being vied for in this big Internet land grab that could leave some domains out of public reach and in the hands of corporations.

  • Anubex Successfully Migrates BEZEQ to Open Platform

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • CMS

  • Education

  • BSD

    • Dru Lavigne talks about FreeBSD | Interview

      IT happens to be my third career. I started out as an entrepreneur (co-owner of an independent moving company). Once the company was established, I took a second job as a municipal government worker. After a few years it became obvious that the glass ceiling at that agency was far too short for my liking, so I went back to school to learn telecommunications, networking, and system administration.

    • The State Of Gentoo FreeBSD: Gentoo Sans Linux

      To some surprise, Gentoo FreeBSD — the port of Gentoo running with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel — is progressing.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Glibc 2.16 supports the x32 ABI – Update

      Among the new features of the GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.16, which was released on Saturday, is support for the x32 ABI (Application Binary Interface); the Linux kernel has offered support for the interface since version 3.4. Programs that are compiled for the x32 ABI can now access the 64-bit registers and data paths of 64-bit x86 processors while only using 32-bit pointers and data fields. In general terms, programs that are compiled for the x32 ABI avoid the overhead that comes with full 64-bit operation while making use of some of the most important advantages of x86-64 processors; this is thought to be of particular relevance for low-specification systems in the embedded and mobile markets.

  • Project Releases

    • Computer vision library ccv reaches 0.1 milestone

      After two years in development, ccv 0.1, “a modern computer vision library”, has been released. Ccv began development in 2010 when author Liu Liu, frustrated by problems with image preprocessing for a gesture recognition demonstration, decided to work on a different approach.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • ‘Governments that embrace open data will also switch to open source’

        Public administrations that grasp the benefits of making publicly available their data will also increase their use of free and open source, experts on open data agree. Open data and open source face comparable threats: initial lack of support and a fear for the impact on the organisation.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Free, open ebook offers ideas for rebooting American government

        Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age collects the wide-ranging, provocative, and often blunt responses this question generated. But the book’s title is somewhat misleading. The writers it features aren’t interested in merely rebooting American government — interrupting its core processes, taking it momentarily offline, then restoring it to an earlier, somehow simpler, state. They’re hacking on its principal architectures — its frameworks and principles — sketching mock-ups for a government that embraces open technologies and values to become more transparent, nimble, responsive, and accountable than previous iterations.

    • Open Hardware

      • How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry

        The potential of 3D printing to transform the way we get things – the market is predicted to hit $3.1 billion in the next four years – gets a lot of press. But not much of that attention has focused on the unique role of open source hardware in enabling 3D printing to realize its promise.

        Open source software has been a key player in all kinds of disruptive technologies – from the Web to big data. Now the nascent and growing open source hardware movement is helping to power its own disruptive revolution.

  • Programming

    • PCC: Portable C Compiler Isn’t Quick To Advance

      The Portable C Compiler 1.0 was released in April of 2011, but since then there hasn’t been many updates out of this open-source compiler that was originally spawned in the late 1970′s.

      The PCC web-site remains rather basic with not much information and the latest news is last year’s 1.0 release. The only information since that I’ve been able to find is that they do have limited C++ support going into PCC for the past few months, but the support is still very limited. The main language for the Portable C Compiler is C99. At the project’s current development pace, don’t expect C11 or C++11 coverage any time soon. And for supporting all of the latest instruction set extensions on the latest ARM and Intel CPUs, guess again.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security vulnerability found in Cyberoam DPI devices

      Last week, a user in Jordan reported seeing a fake certificate for torproject.org. The user did not report any errors when browsing to sites such as Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, which suggests that this was a targeted attack. The certificate was issued by a US company called Cyberoam. We first believed that this incident was similar to that of Comodo and DigiNotar, and that Cyberoam had been tricked to issue a fake certificate for our website.

  • Finance

    • MMT: A Doubly Retrospective Analysis

      *We’re going to take a break from the regularly-scheduled MMP this week. In its place, I’m posting the keynote talk I gave at Bill Mitchell’s annual Coffee conference in Newcastle. As most of you know, Coffee is the sister center to UMKC’s CFEPS. Some of the participants asked for copies of my talk and I figured some of you might also enjoy it, so am posting it here. It has some of the history of the development of MMT—although it is based on my faulty memory so should not be taken too seriously!

    • Wall Street banks angling for Dodd-Frank loophole

      While all eyes were on the Supreme Court and Obamacare, a quieter battle was being waged against the president’s other major initiative, the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. Wall Street has already watered down or delayed most of Dodd-Frank. Now it wants to create a giant loophole, exempting its foreign branches from the law.

      ‌

      Yet the overseas branches of Wall Street banks are where the banks have done some of their wilder betting. Four years ago, bad bets by American International Group’s London office nearly unraveled the U.S. financial system.

      One advantage of being a huge Wall Street bank is you get bailed out by the federal government when you make dumb bets. Another is you’ve been able to choose where around the world to make the dumb bets, thereby dodging U.S. regulations. It’s a win-win. Wall Street wants to keep it that way.

  • Civil Rights

    • US Government Wants Access To Your Data

      US is becoming one of the most restrictive and invasive countries in the world. The recent Twitter transparency report, inspired by Google, shows that US government is topping the chart with maximum number of request to gain access to user data.

  • Copyrights

    • Kim Dotcom: Joe Biden Ordered the Megaupload Shutdown

      Kim Dotcom says he knows who ordered the shutdown of his company and related sites. The Megaupload founder informs TorrentFreak that he has insider information which reveals that none other than Vice President Joe Biden directed attorney Neil MacBride to target the site. Biden is known to be one of the best friends of former Senator Chris Dodd, who’s now heading the MPAA.

    • ACTA

      • ACTA Is DEAD After European Parliament Vote

        The battleground wasn’t some administrative office, but the representatives of the people – the European Parliament – which decided in the end to do its job beautifully, and represent the people against special interests.

07.03.12

Links 3/7/2012: KDE on the Raspberry Pi, Linux 3.5 RC5

Posted in News Roundup at 6:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Twitter’s Load Generator, Iago, Now Open Sourced

    If you needed something to test your website for traffic load before you publish it to production environment, Iago is a perfect choice for you.

  • 6 Meritorious Free Linux Modelers
  • Website creation: Dreamweaver v open source

    Recent years have seen huge changes in internet use, and therefore in the challenges presented by modern website design. Software developers are consequently racing to catch up and provide website design, creation and management tools that address these changes.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Opens Voting For Best Splash Screen Contest

      The LibreOffice team is getting ready for the next release and things have been getting exciting. This week, LibreOffice Design team has opened a poll for best splash screen to be included in LibreOffice 3.6. Weeks ago, LibreOffice developers hadd started a contest and best splash splash sreen selected from them are open for public voting.

    • LibreOffice 3.5.5 RC2 Released

  • CMS

    • WordPress 3.4 Update

      With the latest version of WordPress just arriving, version 3.4, I’m sure people who are using the self-hosted version of WordPress are interested to know what is included with this update. Along with the usual bug fixes, included are many improvements and additions that will benefit both designers, developers and end users. Let’s take a look and see why.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF’s new operations assistant

      Hello, I’m Chrissie Himes, the new operations assistant, and I’m excited to officially be with the Free Software Foundation. I handle sales, donations, and general office operations.

    • Two job openings on the FSF campaigns team

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Massachusetts 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks *two* motivated and organized tech-friendly Boston-based individuals to be its full-time campaigns managers.

    • GNU C Library 2.16 Brings Many Features (GLIBC)

      Version 2.16 of glibc, the GNU C Library, was released on Saturday afternoon. This update to the de facto C library for GNU/Linux systems brings many new features. There’s x32 and ISO C11 support along with performance optimizations.

    • Free Software Foundation: Ubuntu’s Secure Boot Plan Won’t Fly

      There’s still no end in sight to the ongoing Secure Boot saga arising from Microsoft’s Windows 8 plans, and just recently we’ve seen both Fedora Linux and Ubuntu Linux respond with two very different approaches to working around the problem.

    • ‘Secure’ boot: Ubuntu goes one worse than Red Hat

      After Red Hat revealed how it would kowtow to the overlords at Redmond, it was only a matter of time before Canonical would genuflect as well over the issue of secure boot.

      But Canonical, which is best known for its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has come up with a way of getting its distribution to boot on PCs certified for Windows 8 that is even worse than that devised by Red Hat.

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Who Killed the Open Set-Top-Box?

      A few years ago, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With my trusty Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 I enjoyed the ability to watch and record Comcast TV on my desktop computer — and even to occasionally edit and re-upload it to YouTube along with fair use critical commentary. When I moved across the river to Boston, Comcast required me to pay for a set-top box that would tune channels on my television. However, when I plugged my PVR-150 into the cable connection, it got almost no channels at all. As it turns out, the Comcast system in Boston had been migrated to use mostly digital signals, but my tuner card worked only with analog cable signals. Fair enough, I thought, I’ll buy a digital cable tuner. As it turned out, that wouldn’t help much. The cable companies had implemented encryption to fight “service theft” of most channels that subscribers had not paid for. As a result, I lost the ability to view channels I had paid for on a device of my choosing.

  • Programming

    • Death to Javascript: CNN Edition

      Some weeks back I wrote “Death to Javascript”, in which I related the problem my wife has reported, of web pages that tie up her computer. She’s been seeing this more and more often lately. But today we got lucky: she was able to identify a specific page, on CNN.com, that causes this to happen.

    • jQuery 2.0 to drop support for older IE versions
    • Pymothoa: JIT’ing Python Over LLVM

      As explained on the project’s web-site, “Pymothoa extends the Python language by adding JIT compilation without any modification of the interpreter source code. Pymothoa lives at the application level. It uses the AST generated by Python. Therefore, users write in the original Python syntax but with a new contextual meaning in some cases using the new dialect provided by Pymothoa. User uses the decorators provided to mark Python functions for JIT compilation. Pymothoa uses LLVM for the JIT ability. Comparing to writing C-extension to speedup Python, Pymothoa is less cumbersome and easier to distribute as the user does not need to compile the C-extensions. Programming in the Pymothoa dialect is similar to writing in C. Variables must be declared and are statically typed. Despite a few extra constructs, the syntax is the same as raw Python code.”

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The FFmpeg/Libav situation

      One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover, mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly explain, these people made a new project called Libav.

    • W3C forges ahead with Selectors API

      The Web Applications Working Group at the W3C has published a last call working draft of the Selectors API Level 1 specification. Widely used in CSS, selectors are patterns that match a set of elements in a structure tree. As accessing elements in HTML documents using DOM methods such as getElementById or getElementsByTagName can quite laborious, frameworks like jQuery have developed simple CSS selector methods. Many browsers offer querySelector and querySelectorAll functions that also use these selectors.

    • Google Web Toolkit now under a steering committee

      Google has released its grip on the development of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and moved it under the control of a steering committee comprising developers from Google, Sencha, Red Hat, ArcBees, Vaadin, mgwt and other GWT advocates such as Thomas Broyer, Christian Goudreau and Daniel Kurka. First released as open source in 2006 and controlled by Google, GWT will now be under the control of a committee which will set out a direction for future GWT development, approve new committers, review code, administer releases, adjust the GWT development processes and work as master committers on the GWT project.

Leftovers

  • Gmail Becomes World’s Largest Email Service; Google Continues To Unseat Microsoft

    Gmail’s growth has skyrocketed since its public introduction in 2007, but this year in particular, Google has been successful in attracting millions of new users. In January, Google mentioned in its earnings call that it had about 350 million monthly active users on Gmail; six months later, about 75 million more users had flocked to Gmail, growing the total number to 425 million monthly active users. By this measure, Gmail has dethroned Hotmail.

  • ‘Leap Second’ Bug Wreaks Havoc Across Web

    Reddit, Mozilla, Gawker, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software underpinning their online operations choked on the “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks.

  • Minitel service shuts down

    TOMORROW at midnight is the end of an era –Minitel is shutting down.

    After 20 years of service, owner France Télécom is pulling the plug by switching off the “X 25”, the network over which the service works.

    A precursor to the internet, Minitel gave a dial-up information service over phone lines via special terminals, consisting of a screen using text and basic graphics, with a keyboard and modem. Long before the World Wide Web, people could use it, for example, to reserve trains, search for phone numbers, buy online, pay bills, play games or chat.

  • U.S. Supreme Court Deals Blow to Unions, Shows Preference for Corporate “Rights”

    A little-noticed U.S. Supreme Court decision from June 21 has dealt a blow to public sector unions and demonstrated the conservative majority’s preferential treatment for corporate “rights.” The decision in Knox v. SEIU could have an impact on future election cycles.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Explaining the Legalese of the US Supreme Court’s Ruling on the Affordable Care Act ~ pj

      I was offline most of yesterday, and I returned to see long threads about health care and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling [PDF] on the Affordable Care Act [PDF]. That surprised me, because I didn’t think you would be greatly interested. That’s why I didn’t even put it in News Picks, let alone write about it. But now I see I was wrong, that many of you are interested, and I also see a lot of misunderstanding of what the ruling actually says, not only in your comments but in the media. I also see a lot of FUD in the air. So I thought I’d take the time to explain it. If nothing else, it fits our purpose for doing Groklaw, since antiFUD is very much what we set out to do, and we have covered Constitutional issues before, albeit in the First Amendment context usually.

    • Americans for Prosperity Rally Calls for “Nullifying” Health Care Law (with Help from ALEC)

      The evening after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Wisconsin chapter of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity held a “Hands Off My Health Care” rally to plan next steps in their effort to defeat “Obamacare.” The plan apparently involves American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation.

  • Finance

    • Completing The Circle: Meet The US Ambassador To Germany

      Everyone knows that Italy’s unelected PM, Mario Monti, is a former Goldman Sachs International ‘advisor.’ As such, it is only natural that being part of the banking cartel he would do everything in his power to promote an inflationary agenda, one that seeks ECB bond monetization intervention, (another central bank headed by a former Goldmanite of course, who just happens to be Germany’s most hated man), perpetuates the status quo, and one that naturally contravenes everything that German citizens have been pushing for in their desire to avoid the risk of another hyperinflationary episode. Especially if, as is well-known, resolving Europe’s problems, however briefly, facilitates an Obama re-election campaign because as conventional wisdom is also catching on, should Europe implode before November, Obama’s reelection chances plunge accordingly. And yet, even as Goldman’s tentacles had spread all over Europe (as seen here), conventional wisdom was that Goldman’s influence in Germany was relatively muted.

    • CFTC Skips `Intergalactic’ Power in Dodd-Frank Guidance

      JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and other banks won greater ability to fall under foreign regulations when they trade swaps overseas under guidance proposed for the Dodd-Frank Act’s international reach.

      Commodity Futures Trading Commission members, in a private vote, unanimously approved proposing interpretive guidance allowing for so-called substituted compliance for branches, subsidiaries and other overseas affiliates of U.S. banks when foreign jurisdictions have comparable rules. Banks have spent two years lobbying against efforts to automatically apply Dodd- Frank to their overseas operations, saying doing so would hurt their ability to compete.

    • Western banks ‘reaping billions from Colombian cocaine trade’

      While cocaine production ravages countries in Central America, consumers in the US and Europe are helping developed economies grow rich from the profits, a study claims

  • Censorship

    • Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk, Part VIII: Charles Carreon Gets Sued, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen Joins The Fray

      Everyone knows what you do when someone like Charlie the Censor sues you. You lawyer up. If you’re very lucky, you have funds to hire a good lawyer, or you can get the backing of extraordinary advocates like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

      But what do you do if someone like Charlie the Censor just threatens to sue you at some unspecified future time or place, but doesn’t yet? Do you simply wait and see? Do you live your life under that cloud?

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Three NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF’s Lawsuit Over Government’s Massive Spying Program

      The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF’s brief are William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe. All were targets of a federal investigation into leaks to the New York Times that sparked the initial news coverage about the warrantless wiretapping program. Binney and Wiebe were formally cleared of charges and Drake had those charges against him dropped.

    • Cops in USA to drive around in pornoscannerwagons, covertly irradiating people and looking through their cars and clothes

      American cops are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering’s Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call “the amazing radioactive genital viewer,” now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly, and you (yes you).

    • Twitter Ordered to Turn Over Data on Occupy Protester

      Twitter has been ordered by a New York judge to hand over the account information and tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protester…

    • Megauploads, WikiLeaks and Independence Day

      Wednesday is the Fourth of July, the day when we in the U.S. celebrate whatever we perceive to be the vision of our founding families. This would seem to be a good time to wonder what the framers of our constitution would think about the way we’ve been applying, or not applying, due process to the Internet.

      There are two cases in the news these days that are quite disturbing. For starters, there’s Megaupload.

      The only things that Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, appears to have done wrong was to start Megaupload, a hugely successful file hosting service. The feds see it differently. They’re convinced, mainly by circumstantial evidence, that’s his website has made him the biggest pirate of movies and music online, an allegation he denies.

      Federal authorities were evidently waiting for SOPA to pass before making their move against him and his site. On the same night that public opinion forced SOPA to fail, however, the feds decided to act anyway. They took down his website and had Dotcom taken into custody by the New Zealand authorities. They seized most of his assets, without proving anything in court, and are now attempting to have him extradited to the United States.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • A Politics for Open Networks

      The essence of a network is its connections and, indeed, the multiplicity of those connections. While there are many ways of networking (putting up a card in the newsagent’s window still works fine!) we can not avoid at this point of the 21st century that the network of networks is the Internet.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The USPTO: Where Up Is Down, Expensive Medicine Saves Lives, And Cheap Alternatives Violate International Law

      Well, this is unfortunate. We’ve written a few times about how various countries, under the TRIPS agreement are able to break patents on important medicines in the interest of public health. Most recently, we wrote about how India did this with a cancer drug made by Bayer called Nexavar. Despite the fact that Bayer has more than made back the money it spent bringing Nexavar to market, it’s been pricing the drug at an unaffordable $70,000/year. After India allowed a small bit of competition, the price has dropped. We’ve seen that the USPTO doesn’t like this at all and has tried to claim that high priced drugs are good for one’s health, but that’s beyond ridiculous to anyone who actually thinks.

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • This Week We Kill ACTA – Or Get Locked Down In Monopolies For Decades

          This is it. This is the week when ACTA lives or dies, globally. We have seen it coming. Now is the time for the very final push in contacting the European Parliament. On Wednesday, in the session between 12 noon and 14:00, the European Parliament votes on ACTA. If the European Parliament kills it, it dies globally.

        • Down with ACTA! The EU must protect our commons

          Joint press release by 55 European and International organisations to invite Members of European Parliament to reject ACTA, and beyond, engage in a positive reform of copyright and patents.

          ACTA threatens fundamental freedoms online, Net neutrality, innovation, access to and sharing of free/libre/open technologies, education, culture, essential medicines and seeds.

        • We Want to Share Books, Music, Films With You!

          La Quadrature du Net felt the urge to share works with the Members of the European Parliament and their assistants ahead of the ACTA vote, and in order to shed light on the urgency of reforming copyright. Some of these works aim at enjoyment and others at extending knowledge or enriching the public debate. All of them innovate in content, ways of distribution, economic models and relationship between authors, contributors and users. All citizens can do the same, and share pieces of digital culture with their elected representatives!

06.28.12

Links 28/6/2012: Over a Million Android Activations Per Day, KDE 4.9 RC1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Olympics Website Leans on Open Source, Akamai for Winning Results

    CIO – You may be aware that a little event is about to be unleashed on the world from London-the 2012 Olympics. My chance encounter was with Russ Ede, who is responsible for the London 2012 Olympics website. He shared some amazing information about what it takes to create a website that can stand up to the most widely watched sports event in the world.

  • Netflix open sources Asgard cloud deployment smarts

    Very few companies know how to scale and deploy cloud applications like Netflix, the ginormous movie streaming site. And now it’s making some of that cloud management expertise available to the masses via Github.

  • The Truth About Open Source In The Enterprise

    When I first got into IT back in the late 90′s as a teen, I was always baffled by the landscape in regards to infrastructure and software. And coming from a Linux background, who could blame me? When I went off to get my secondary education, I chose the vocational route and I chose to certify in Novell and Microsoft because they were the two major players at the time. And in my opinion, Novell was actually doing it right with the NDS operating system which seemed way ahead of windows NT at the time.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Doug Cutting: Hadoop dodged a Microsoft-Oracle stomping

      We’ve all heard plenty about open source changing the dynamics of the tech industry and upsetting the old order. Open source, we’re told, is manifest destiny. Companies that ignore it will be consigned to history and CIOs who assert there’s no freebie code behind their firewalls are out of touch with devs happily humming to Tomcat, Apache, Linux and PHP. At least that’s how the story goes.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • An open source city takes shape: Open, online tools and data

        Open government scored another victory when the City of Raleigh announced the Open Raleigh initiative—an online repository with open data, web and mobile applications, and links to participatory tools and organizations. It’s all part of Raleigh’s open source strategy focusing on transparency, collaboration, and improved access to information. It’s proof of the ongoing work of the public-facing, open source resolution Raleigh unanimously passed earlier this year.

        As part of the Open Raleigh announcement, the city included an online feedback system: My Raleigh Ideas! It’s a new service the city will use to collaborate with the public to solicit ideas on future projects and topics. Currently, the city is using it to prioritize the data citizens might want in the open data portal and to solicit input for the open data policy.

      • New Media Commons white paper examines future of transparency in peer review

    • Open Access/Content

  • Programming

    • Eclipse Juno Release Train Has Arrived

      As is the tradition for the end of June, the Eclipse community celebrates the release of the annual Eclipse release train, this year code-named Juno. This is the ninth year the community has shipped a release train, and each year the release gets bigger. Juno represents the work of 72 project teams by 445 open source committers on 55 million lines of code, and the participation of 40+ Eclipse member companies.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Adobe’s Open Source Code Editor For Web Developers

      There’s more surprise for Linux users from closed source software vendors. After Microsoft unexpectedly updated Skype recently, Adobe has announced details of its source code editor for web developers. Unlike other Adobe products, this will be open-source distributed under MIT license.

Leftovers

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