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10.09.14

Links 8/10/2014: A Lot of Linux+AMD News, New ROSA Desktop Is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • IBM Power Systems Includes Unix and Linux [VIDEO]

      IBM is aiming to re-invent itself in a new hardware era where it no longer sells x86 based servers. IBM sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo in a $2.3 billion deal that officially closed on October 1.

      Doug Balog is the General Manager of Power Systems within IBM’s System and Technology Group and it’s his job to advance the Power server market position in the new non-x86 era at IBM.

      As contrast to the x86 business, which was largely about Linux, IBM’s Power business includes two other operating systems. IBM Power runs and supports both the AIX Unix as well as the IBM i operating system that was originally known as AS/400.

    • StorPool – A Toolkit for Cloud Application Providers

      It might be tempting to write off StorPool. They are, after all, not really ready for the enterprise, at least in terms of compatibility and interface. But for online application and cloud providers, StorPool sounds exactly like what they want from a storage solution. These organizations are often Linux only, don’t want to deal with a graphical interface, and want the flexibility to scale the way they need to scale at any moment in time.

    • How open source technology is being deployed in science

      Given the transparent and collaborative nature of open source, it is no wonder that the technology is widely used all around the world. Countless organizations and industries have benefited immensely from open source software — with science and engineering among the sectors driving the charge.

      In an industry that heavily relies on technology and innovation, the deployment of open source initiatives in the scientific field should come as no surprise. In fact, CERN, one of the most revered names in the world of science, extensively uses open source software — here’s why.

    • What’s CoreOS? An existential threat to Linux vendors

      While sometimes dismissed as the newest entrant in the “just enough operating system” pageant, CoreOS threatens to displace incumbent Linux distributions with a minimalist approach that seeks to emulate how Google and other Web companies manage distributed systems. CoreOS uses Docker to handle the addition and management of applications and services on a system.

      Indeed, by changing the very definition of the Linux distribution, CoreOS is an “existential threat” to Red Hat, Canonical, and Suse, according to some suggestions. The question for Red Hat in particular will be whether it can embrace this new way of delivering Linux while keeping its revenue model alive.

  • Kernel Space

    • No interest in Poettering’s problems, says Torvalds

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds has indicated that he has no interest in the problems faced by chief systemd developer Lennart Poettering that led to the latter blaming Torvalds for the negative feedback he (Poettering) has faced.

    • Linux Foundation Expands International Membership

      Altera, Chelsio Communications, DataCentred, Imagination Technologies, and Travelping Are Latest Companies to Support Linux

      [...]

      About The Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at http://www.linuxfoundation.org.

    • F2FS File-System Gets Even Better With Linux 3.18

      The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has been running well in our latest SSD benchmarks but with the forthcoming Linux 3.18 kernel it’s going to be in even better shape.

    • Kernel 3.17 and kdbus – the kernel column

      Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate 3.17 kernel (RC1) just ahead of this year’s Kernel Summit. Noting that he would be travelling (and thus not able to keep up with a massive influx of patches), he had closed the “merge window” (the period of time during which disruptive churn is allowed in any kernel development cycle) for 3.17 one day early. He also noted that, typically of northern hemisphere summers, this merge window had been “slightly smaller than the last few ones”. New features pulled into 3.17-rc1 were spread all over the kernel. They include the getrandom() system call, and support for the “memfd” and “file sealing” features needed for kdbus.

    • Meet Linux kernel 3.17′s best new features: Xbox One controller support, laptop ‘free fall’ protection, and more

      New versions of the Linux kernel will eventually make their way into all sorts of other devices, too. A new Linux kernel means improvements for Chromebooks, Android devices, network routers, and any number of other embedded devices.

    • Linux 3.18 To Add Support For Firmware Core Dumps To User-Space

      Added to the driver core interface is a new device coredump class. This new generic kernel interface can be used for dumping firmware “core dumps” to user-space over sysfs. This is primarily intended for wireless and graphics drivers (among other potential drivers of hardware that deal a lot with firmware blobs) to implement so they can dump their hardware firmware state to assist in debugging complicated issues where it could be within the firmware code.

    • Current Status: Adoption of ZFS as Backend File System for Lustre

      In this video from the LAD’14 Conference in Reims, Gabriele Paciucci from Intel presents: Current Status of the Adoption of ZFS as Backend File System for Lustre.

    • Graphics Stack (Mostly AMD)

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Time to Replace XFCE?

      According to my sources, the last stable release of XFCE was about two years ago. By anyone’s time line, that is a long time between stable releases. Bundle this issue with its apparent inability to play nicely with GTK3 friendly items and instead sticking to its older GTK roots. And others users have pointed out that the perceived GTK3 issues are largely with various desktop themes and the “fault” is to be directed at the GNOME project. Long story short, it’s a debate showing few signs of being resolved anytime soon.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • BEST DISTRO 2014

      Is your current Linux distribution really the best in town, or are you missing something even better?

    • ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 Is a Different and Fun KDE Experience

      ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 is the fourth in the series and uses one of the latest KDE versions. It’s a distribution that aims to please a lot of users, even the ones who come from a Windows ecosystem.

      The previous version of this distribution was released back in April, so the developers had a lot of time to improve upon the operating system. That doesn’t mean that ROSA changed too much. From a design point of view it’s still pretty much the same, but many of the included packages have been updated.

    • New Releases

      • Alpine 3.0.5 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.0.5 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

        This is a bugfix release of the v3.0 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.20 kernel which has some critical security fixes.

      • SparkyLinux 3.5.1 E19 is out

        SparkyLinux 3.5.1 “Annagerman” Enlightenment 19 is ready to go.

        Not so long ago, just three years I started my adventure with Enlightenment and Ubuntu.
        At the beginning the name of the system was ue17r (Ubuntu E17 Remix) and it was far away from the current version of SparkyLinux. ue17r was a kind of experiment and I was trying to prove (myself) that a man such me, non-programmer, is able to do something what theoretically shouldn’t does.

    • Red Hat Family

      • The Source of Vulnerabilities, How Red Hat finds out about vulnerabilities.

        Red Hat Product Security track lots of data about every vulnerability affecting every Red Hat product. We make all this data available on our Measurement page and from time to time write various blog posts and reports about interesting metrics or trends.

      • Apprenda extends PaaS with JBoss support, takes aim at Red Hat

        Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Apprenda Inc. has just added support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers, a move which translates to deeper support for more Java applications.

      • Fedora

        • Simply view system logs in Fedora 21 Workstation

          Fedora 21 Workstation (which is currently in alpha), contains a neat new application for quickly viewing and searching the logs of your system. It places all the system logs in a simple to use interface without having to dig through the filesystem or use a command line tool. This new application, simply called Logs should be installed by default on your Fedora 21 install and can be found in the Activities overview by simply searching for “Logs”.

        • GNOME on Wayland in Fedora 21

          Fedora 21 will come with GNOME 3.14, which already runs reasonably well on Wayland. Want to find out? It’s super easy to try it out! Let’s take a look at how to run GNOME on Wayland in Fedora 21, what already works, and what is yet to be finished.

        • The Limitations Of Wayland On Fedora 21

          Following last month’s release of Fedora 21 Alpha I played around with the GNOME Wayland session and shared my thoughts and ran some XWayland benchmarks. The Fedora Project Magazine has also now put the Fedora 21 gnome-session-wayland-session through its paces and delivered a brief write-up. In their write-up they cover a partial list of applications known to break under Wayland some shortcomings. They also do a brief overview of the Wayland architecture and other facts, if you’ve been living under a rock the past few years, or just not reading enough Phoronix.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • UbuTricks 14.10.08 Released

            UbuTricks 14.10.08 has been released. This version arrives with 10 new added programs (two games and eight apps), a new version numbering system which follows the year.month.day scheme, and several other bug fixes and improvements.

          • Canonical Offers OpenStack and Ubuntu Cloud Training in Paris

            Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has added a new offering to its training and education initiatives. This fall, the company is introducing a five-day OpenStack cloud computing training program, which it no doubt hopes will help generate expertise and familiarity with Ubuntu-friendly OpenStack distributions.

          • Meizu MX4 Pro caught in the wild running Ubuntu

            We can’t wait for the day to see the very first Ubuntu-powered smartphone hitting the market. Canonical — which makes the popular Linux distribution — has been experimenting with few different Nexus devices but none of these were ready for prime time.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • AllSeen to Shine a Light on Internet of Things

      The IoT consortium has formed a working group that will develop an open standard for smart lighting.
      The AllSeen Alliance, one of several industry consortiums developing open standards for the Internet of things, is turning its attention to lights in homes and businesses.

    • Pocket-sized mobile touchscreen web server runs Tizen

      A mobile personal web server called “The Egg” runs Tizen on an Intel Atom and features a 12-hour battery, a 2.4-inch touchscreen, and up to 256GB of storage.

    • Linux based touch-panel DAQ system includes GUI software

      Lascar launched a Linux-based DAQ system with a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen, an ARM9-based Freescale i.MX283 SoC, and a free GUI program.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • openSUSE 13.2 RC1 is now out, hands on

          openSUSE 13.2 RC1 is baked and ready to serve!. This previous Beta release was a blast with almost 10.000 downloads. The community responded to the call and we had lot of eyes looking for bugs in openSUSE 13.2 Beta1. Many of them have been already squashed and openSUSE 13.2 Release Candidate 1 is here to prove it.

        • openSUSE 13.2 RC1 Is Out & Still Riding On Btrfs
        • openSUSE 13.2 first release candidate is out for testing

          It’s that time of the year when Linux users get to upgrade their systems – for free of cost, of course. All major distributions are slated for upgrade in the coming weeks including openSUSE (check out our dedicated openSUSE sub-magazine), Ubuntu and Fedora.

        • Samsung Gear S SmartWatch goes on Pre-order with confirmed price in the UK

          We have all been waiting for the Tizen Samsung Gear S to be launched and it looks like unlocked-mobiles will be the first UK online retailer to begin pre-orders with a confirmed price. They are expecting to have Stock on the 24th October, and will have the Gear S retailing for £334.98 inc VAT.

      • Android

        • Nearly half of all Android devices are still vulnerable to two serious browser exploits

          Around 45 percent of Android devices have a browser that is vulnerable to two serious security issues, but some countries have a considerably larger percentage of affected users than others, according to data from mobile security firm Lookout.

          The two security issues were discovered over the past month by a security researcher named Rafay Baloch and were described as a privacy disaster by other researchers. They allow an attacker to bypass a core security boundary, called the same-origin policy (SOP), that exists in all browsers.

        • Hands-on with iRobot’s Android-based robot controller: pictures

          iRobot on Thursday unveiled a new controller for its unmanned bomb disposal and discovery robots, an app that runs on every Android tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Behind the scenes with CTO Michael DeHaan of Ansible

    He gives an idea of what the Ansible open source community is all about, including the rewards and challenges of working with users who also happen to be talented developers. He answers this and more, like what he’d work on if he could just add one more hour to the day.

  • Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Practices is On the Rise

    GitHub last month reported that the number of government employees using the code sharing platform had tripled in the past year, to reach more than 10,000 users from 500 organizations. The accompanying graph (re-published here with permission) shows a steep adoption curve that perfectly illustrates a larger trend toward government use of open source practices and workflows over the past five years.

  • What’s Driving Open Source 2.0?

    It is not necessarily a requirement to have clouds built on an open source component, but there is no denying the prevalence and significance of open source staples such as Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Apache Web Server in cloud environments. Open source software can help smooth the transition to DevOps if people are familiar with its tenets, such as collaboration, communication and transparency.

  • Keys to turn your open source project into a business

    Broadly speaking, there are two types of open source software. The free software, which has a reciprocity requirement in it. Open source software which doesn’t.

    We can have debates about the merits of those two groups for the whole evening. I think both of them are needed and it depends on the usage and the purpose of your project.

  • Advice for front-end developers from Adrian Pomilio of Teradata

    Prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh this year, I asked Adrian Pomilio, UI developer at Teradata, a few questions about the session he’ll deliver, his favorite open source tools, and recent trends in UI/UX technology relevant to open source world.

  • 10 Steps To Overcome Your Fear Of Using Open Source Software

    If you’re going to rely on some OSS, get in touch with the developers of those projects. Most OSS developers are quite community-oriented and usually helpful. In case your senior executives, regulatory, or QA folks have questions, you’ll be able to answer them easily if you’re in touch with the original developers. Also, if you need changes, some developers will likely be available for hire for making changes or helping with validation.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • COWL, a New Web Privacy Tool, to Arrive for Chrome and Firefox

      A group of researchers is making news for building a new web privacy system for the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers that more efficiently handles JavaScript code among other tasks. In a paper introduced this week in conjunction with the Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the researchers reported that 59 per cent of the biggest one million websites, and 77 per cent of the top 10,000 websites, incorporate jQuery, a tool that has been preyed on by hackers.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Look what I did to fix Mozilla

        When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In my case, I have a 3D printer, and every problem is an opportunity to stare at the hypnotic movements of the extruder.

      • Is This How Mozilla Could Change the World?

        As my post last week indicated, I’m increasingly sceptical of Mozilla’s role as the key defender of the open Web, largely because of its decision to embrace DRM. Even as a purveyor of fine Web browsers, things don’t look so rosy. Two years ago, its global market share was fairly stable around 20%; a year ago, that slipped to around 19%; today, it’s slumped to 14%. Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the number two browser, and holds around 21% of the market. Obviously, these figures are to be taken with a serious grain of salt, but I think the trend is real. So, given these developments, the obvious question that needs to be answered is: where exactly does Mozilla’s future lie?

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • A Big Community Mobilizes Around NFV and OpenStack

      As September ended, the Linux Foundation announced the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) Project, a group comprised primarily of telecom operators working across open source projects and vendors to implement Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) within their organizations. News has also steadily arrived from Red Hat about its work to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications technology into OpenStack.

    • OpenStack Juno Races to Completion as RC2s are Released

      The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is *almost* at its next major release, known as Juno — but first there all the release candidates.

    • OpenStack Interoperability Testing, Certification Gain Significance

      Although it is only four years old, the OpenStack cloud computing project is already having a profound impact on the plumbing and architecture of many data centers. Yesterday, I reported on how Network functions virtualization (NFV) is becoming synonymous with OpenStack, and how NFV and OpenStack could effectively rip out the proprietary infrastructure found in network deployments at many organizations.

  • Databases

    • Why I switched from Postgres to MongoDB, then to Neo4j

      When you’re about to start a project and are trying to make a decision on the what applications to use, one way to proceed is to find out what other people have to say about the available options, especially from others with first-hand experience with those available options.

    • Altiscale Releases SQL-on-Hadoop Cloud Storage Service

      What does it take to prepare SQL database storage for the Big Data age? Altiscale believes the answer is SQL-on-Hadoop as a service delivered through the cloud, which it has introduced through a new solution that it says is the first to make Hadoop File System (HDFS) data accessible through SQL interfaces.

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Froont builds open-source community around responsive prototyping tool

        After browsing through all the flashing lights and shiny colors in Dribbble, casual admirers might come to the conclusion that web design is a unique bespoke process. But looking closer you can see some motifs with two columns here, or a grid layout there. When it comes down to layouts, it makes sense to at least have a solid foundation as a starting point rather than coding all the layout and responsiveness yourself.

  • Funding

    • ‘Hello World’ Indiegogo Fundraiser Reaches Goal

      Now that the needed money has been raised, the brothers Nielsen can get to work evolving the quality of their product. As Jared said back in September, “Our production value continues to improve with each video and tutorial we create. ‘Superusers: The Legendary GNU/LINUX Show’ is leagues ahead of our first episode, ‘What is a Robot?’ The ten computer science videos proposed in our Indiegogo campaign will only be better. We will focus on improving our script writing, fine-tuning the balance of education and entertainment, incorporating more animations, and refining our audio/visual production techniques.”

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Former Valve/VOGL Dev: OpenGL Next Could Take 3+ Years

      Rich Geldreich, one of the original Valve Linux team members who started work on their VOGL OpenGL debugger, thinks it will take three years or more before the next-generation OpenGL materializes for users.

      Geldreich sadly left Valve earlier this year without disclosing his reasons at the time. It turns out he’s now relocating back to Dallas, Texas and will be working for a start-up. The former Valve and former Microsoft developer has written his first blog post in a while and made a few interesting remarks:

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Imperial spins and our media

      Regular US drone strikes are back, killing people on Pakistani territory. The mother of all terrorists says it is targeting the terrorists but by now we should be wise enough to know that she’s up to something else. At a time when the Pak Armed Forces are successfully eliminating terrorists from the very area being droned, what axe is the meddlesome superpower trying to grind? Is it leveling the ground for introducing its new and deadlier ISIS offspring into Pakistan via Afghanistan?

    • A Thirty-Year War—If Americans Will Have It

      Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and secretary of defense, says that defeating our enemies in the Middle East and North Africa “is going to take a long time.” How long? “I think we’re looking at kind of a thirty-year war,” Panetta predicts.

      Whether the United States will be involved in this war for thirty years is an open question. But the notion that such a lengthy war is necessary is nonsense.

    • US drone strikes kill 23 in North Waziristan

      At least 23 people were killed and several others injured in three US drone strikes during last 36 hours in North Waziristan’s tribal region. In the latest attack, six people were killed and 11 injured when a US drone fired two missiles on militant Commander Mustaqeem’s centre in Kandghar area of Shawal on Wednesday.

    • John Oliver, Ben Affleck and the Game of Drones

      In President Obama’s six years in office, he’s ordered about eight times as many drone strikes as his predecessor did in eight years in office. Apparently, not everyone thinks that’s a good thing.

    • Latest U.S. Drone Strike Kills 4 in Pakistan

      A U.S. drone strike in Pakistan has reportedly killed at least four people. The victims were described as suspected militants in North Waziristan. At least 25 people have died this week in a series of U.S. strikes in tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

    • Fifth consecutive US drone attack in last five days

      At least four people were killed and two others injured in a US drone attack in the North Waziristan tribal region, security sources said.

      Sources said that the drone fired missiles targeting a vehicle in the Loman area of Dattakhel Tehsil. Today’s strike is the fifth consecutive drone attack in the last five days, as the US-led drone campaign targets suspected militants and their hideouts in restive North and South Waziristan.

    • Age of empire

      There is certainly at least one way America is exceptional

      The U.S. Empire today is the largest in world history with 1,100 military bases and outposts spreading over the globe, dwarfing the Alexander, Roman, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Spanish and British empires of yesteryear.

      President Obama has urged Americans to shift attention to Asia but surreptitiously has increased militarism in Africa from A to Z (Algeria to Zambia). Africa swarms with U.S. military.

    • Plane and simple

      The Obama administration has overseen an eightfold increase in the number of attacks flown by unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones.” These small, pilotless aircraft have become popular with the U.S. Air Force for their ability to take on dangerous missions deep inside hostile territory while keeping American servicemen out of harm’s way. Yet the American drone program has also come under harsh scrutiny by human rights groups.

      [...]

      I’m all for productive discussion of the covert war against terrorism in the Middle East. As we talk, however, remember to keep the focus on the real problem: an endless war against a nameless foe without concrete objectives. Don’t jump to conclusions just because some of our planes don’t have pilots in them.

    • The Ben Affleck-Bill Maher-Sam Harris dispute: Anti-Muslim bigotry and American imperialist policy

      The dispute that occurred on the October 3 edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” between Maher and author Sam Harris, on the one hand, and prominent actor Ben Affleck, on the other, was revealing. In particular, it helped clarify the relationship between anti-Muslim bigotry, the “identity politics” of the affluent middle class and defense of American imperialist policy in the Middle East.

      [...]

      Affleck heatedly responded that those positions were “gross” and “racist.” He commented, “It’s like saying ‘you shifty Jew.’” When Harris went on to claim that “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas,” Affleck responded, quite legitimately, “That’s an ugly thing to say.”

      The actor continued, “How about the more than a billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punish women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches… and don’t do any of the things that you’re saying all Muslims [do]?… [It’s] stereotyping.”

    • US Drone Strikes in Pakistan Kill 23 Over Four Days

      Those days also seem to be over, as another US drone strike tore through Datta Khel, North Waziristan today killing two more people. It was the fifth distinct US strike against Waziristan in just four days.

    • Imran sees general elections in 2015

      Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan said on Tuesday night that he was sure of general elections in the year 2015. “Elections will be held early next year. Nothing can stop ‘Naya (new) Pakistan’ from coming into being,” said Imran Khan while talking to a private TV channel. Elections would be announced in a month or two, Imran Khan added.

    • Drone strikes kill 17 in NWA during Eid holidays

      The Central Intelligence Agency carried out four drone strikes against suspected militants in the North Waziristan Agency during the Eidul Azha holidays, killing 17 persons and causing injuries to several others.

    • US drones mark Eid by killing 23 in NWA
    • Challenging Drone Warfare in a U.S. Court

      On October 7, 2014, Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker appeared before Judge Matt Whitworth in Jefferson City, MO, federal court on a charge of criminal trespass to a military facility. The charge was based on their participation, at Whiteman Air Force Base, in a June 1st 2014 rally protesting drone warfare. Kelly and Walker attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the Base Commander, encouraging the commander to stop cooperating with any further usage of unmanned aerial vehicles, (drones) for surveillance and attacks.

    • UK-Israel trade hits record high despite Gaza carnage

      UK trade relations with Israel between January and August 2014 are reported to have reached record levels, despite worldwide public outrage against the IDF’s recent military assault on Gaza.

    • Obama’s “Strict” Standards on Civilian Deaths That Never Were

      A report published last Tuesday claims that President Barack Obama’s once-strict standards regarding civilian deaths have fallen by the wayside, as US forces intensify air strikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.

      What is most troubling about this specific report is that it conveys the notion that President Obama’s civilian-death standards were, at one time, tight or even “strict.”

    • National Review Online Thanks ISIS for Beheadings

      In an article for National Review Online, anti-Muslim activist David Horowitz described the benefits to conservatives of the recent beheadings carried out by the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS).

      [...]

      Horowitz is a former member of the New Left who, since his political conversion, has made a career out of alleging liberal bias on college campuses and accusing anyone who is not overtly Islamophobic of being in league with terrorists. The Southern Poverty Law Center described Horowitz as “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Rolling Stone Report Rocks Koch Industries

      A recent Rolling Stone article documenting Koch Industries’ “lucrative blend of pollution, speculation, law-bending and self-righteousness” over the last few decades has sparked a string of personal attacks on the reporter, Tim Dickinson, by “KochFacts.com” and a point-by-point rebuttal from Rolling Stone.

    • Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire

      Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world’s largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don’t want you to know is how they made all that money

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

      On Monday, I was pleased to see that Robert X. Cringely shares my thoughts. In an article well worth reading on Forbes, he writes: “Here’s the simple truth: it makes no sense, none, nada, for a bank to send financial transactions over the public Internet. It makes no sense for a bank or any other company to build gateways between their private networks and the public Internet. If a company PC connects to both the corporate network and the Internet, then the corporate network is vulnerable.”

      No kidding.

      Again, retailers are being hit for billions of dollars, almost daily it seems; our military defenses are being constantly prodded and breached by foreign governments; and our infrastructure is a sitting duck waiting to be exploited. It’s time we realize that not everything needs to be online.

  • Civil Rights

    • Bill O’Reilly, Bill Maher and Islamophobia

      So support for sharia law might not be all that revealing. But for Bill O’Reilly, it’s a chance to draw the conclusions you wish to draw about Muslims. The Pew poll also makes clear that Muslims do not “think their religion should dictate what happens in society.” Most who support sharia law think it should apply only to Muslims, and Pew notes that “most Muslims around the world express support for democracy, and most say it is a good thing when others are very free to practice their religion.”

    • America Must End Its Paranoid War on Hackers

      He tells me that he used to log on for his LulzSec romps using his school Internet account so it wasn’t a surprise that he got caught. It was a surprise that it took them so long. He recounts for me the day he got busted, waking up in his bed in Galway, Ireland surrounded by policemen with machine guns. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep; it was so surreal he assumed it must be a bad dream.

    • SWAT Team Raids House And Kills Homeowner Because Criminal Who Burglarized The House Told Them To

      Which seems plausible. Less than 48 hours had passed and Hooks would have had no idea he was on the receiving end of a drug task force “investigation.” The word “investigation” receives the scariest of scare quotes, considering it mostly consisted of a multiple felon trying to explain away the gun, scale and meth in his possession. If the suspect had claimed he didn’t rob Hooks’ house, the police wouldn’t have believed him. But when this same suspect starts blabbering about finding meth during his robbery, the cops are all ears, as though he were Abraham Lincoln himself, swearing on a stack of Bibles.

      How do we know all of this is bullshit? Because the police spent almost as much time searching Hooks’ house — nearly two days — as it did between the point Hooks’ house was invaded the first time (by confessed burglar Rodney Garrett) and the second time (by the SWAT team).

    • Another Person Shot by Police Near Ferguson, Protests Swelling (Watch Live)
    • Video shows officer using stun gun

      A cellphone video released Tuesday shows police in Indiana breaking a car window and using a stun gun on a man after police stopped the driver for not wearing a seat belt.

    • Breaking 43 Years of Silence, the Last FBI Burglar Tells the Story of Her Years in the Underground

      It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:

      Get out of town.

      She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack. As she was about to detach herself from her past geography and her personal connections, she called her parents and told them she had committed a nonviolent direct action “and was possibly being pursued by the federal government. I told them I could not be in touch by phone, and I would do my best to let them know how I was, but not where I was.”

  • DRM

    • Adobe’s e-book reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe—in plain text [Updated]

      Digital Editions even tracks which pages you’ve read. It might break a New Jersey Law.

    • Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries

      Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues.

      A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.

    • Adobe Digital Editions 4 Spies on Users – Because of DRM

      This column has written many times about the deep flaws of Digital Rights Management (DRM) – or “Digital Restrictions Management” as Richard Stallman rightly calls it – and the ridiculous laws that have been passed to “protect” it. What these effectively do is place copyright above basic rights – not just in the realm of copyright, but even in areas like privacy. Yesterday, another example of the folly of using DRM’d products came to light.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Human Rights No, Corporate Rights Yes?

      Much has been made over the last few weeks about the desires of the Prime Minister to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Cameron has said he wants to bring more powers back to London, because he doesn’t like the way it ‘hands power’ off – powers we British have given to that court more than 60 years ago. Most notably, he doesn’t like the way it often deals with his right wing agenda of disenfranchising people, and creeping towards a police state, but seems to be championing the way with misinformation.

    • Copyrights

      • A Unilateral Declaration of the Digital Human Rights Dangerously Mistakes Personal Data and Creative Work

        More specifically, Article 5 of the Declaration poses that “any use of the data as a creative work” is subject to prior consent of the individual. Such a formulation completely ignores the fundamental role of the public domain as well as the exceptions and limitations to copyright, which are all essential in balancing and preserving the system.

      • Why Are We Letting Critical Infrastructure Get Regulated By A Cartoon Industry?

        It’s now been 20 years since the Internet went mainstream. Today, every single aspect of private life, business, and civic society depends on a functioning net. Without it, you’re basically in exile from society.

        In some countries, coding is now the most common profession. All growth sectors are heavily technology-dependent, which always means that the net is at underpinning all of it. All celebrated entrepreneurs have built super-scaling businesses enabled by the net. We also shop for food online, we date online, we build things together online.

        It stands clear that the net is by far the most critical piece of infrastructure existing today. Not only does it build all future jobs, growth, economy, and entrepreneurship; we also exercise all our civil liberties, civic duties, and spend a lot of our social activities on this infrastructure. It’s more important than any other piece of infrastructure in society. We can do without the phone network, without cable TV, even without paved roads when we have the net.

      • Google Adds Custom Search Box For The Pirate Bay, and Others

        Google’s new and improved sitelinks section has introduced a novel feature that could prove unintentionally popular with Pirate Bay fans. Alongside the same feature for other sites, the search engine now displays a custom Pirate Bay search box complete with related AutoComplete suggestions. Needless to say, copyright holders are not going to be happy with these latest improvements.

      • Finland Wants to Kill Crowdsourced Copyright Law

        The future of copyright amendments crowdsourced by the Finnish public appear to be in doubt. The citizen-drafted proposals, which received 50,000 signatures, seek to decriminalize file-sharing, but Finland’s Education and Culture Committee now wants to reject the historic initiative.

10.08.14

Links 8/10/2014: Gummersbach Moves to GNU/Linux, Docker Acquires Koality, KDE Frameworks 5.3

Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • About Linux Weekly News – 6th October 2014

  • Desktop

    • Kano’s DIY computer teaches kids to code, and now it’s available to everyone

      Kano, the runaway Kickstarter success that raised $1.52 million on a promise to teach kids how to code and assemble a Raspberry Pi-based computer, is now widely available to the public. Priced at $149.99, the kit includes everything you need to get started — other than a display, which you’ll need to provide yourself. (An HDMI cord comes in the box.) But beyond that, it’s all there: the Raspberry Pi, a custom-made Bluetooth keyboard with built-in trackpad, the plastic case that holds this mini-computer together, and plenty of stickers and colorful options for customizing your Kano. The first of two illustrated guides walks younger users through piecing Kano together, and most everything in the kit is color coded to make setup a breeze for all ages. The second book will teach you how to start using the Kano OS software, which comes preloaded on an SD card that plugs into the Raspberry Pi.

    • Chromebooks come closer to Android, get MTP support

      Google has pushed an update for the stable channel of its Chrome OS, bringing MTP support to all Chrome OS devices, excluding Chromeboxes. MTP support means you can now plug your Android devices to your Chromebooks and transfer files between devices. The update also adds a set of features that enhances touch screen accessibility.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • MSI: Update Your BIOS From The Linux Desktop

      Now that the MSI X99S SLI PLUS is running great on Linux, I’ve been working with the company towards some other Linux improvements along with some other interesting Linux hardware reviews to come thanks to our renewed cooperation. One of the items I’ve been voicing has been regarding better supporting Linux users with regard to a smoother BIOS/UEFI update process. Well, there is a utility they support for updating your MSI motherboard BIOS from the Linux desktop!

    • Many ACPI & Power Management Changes For Linux 3.18 Kernel

      Rafael Wysocki sent out his first aligned set of changes of ACPI core and power management changes he’s planning on volleying over to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 3.18 kernel merge window.

    • Linux Foundation certifications are taking off

      According to a study conducted earlier this year by Dice, the tech career site, 93 percent of hiring managers are looking to employ Linux professionals. If you want one of those jobs, a great way to increase your chances is to go to human resources with one of the Linux Foundation’s new certifications as a Certified SysAdmin (LFCS) or Certified Engineer (LFCE).

    • Systemd Dev Slams FOSS Culture

      The open source community is “quite a sick place to be in,” Red Hat engineer and Systemd developer Lennart Poettering said Monday in a post on Google+.

    • Everyone Has Different Views On The “Open-Source Community”

      Meanwhile, Michael Hall of the Ubuntu camp wrote a post entitled the open-source community is wonderful. Hall says the community isn’t perfect but it’s still wonderful. He cites that mono-culture is dangerous, good people are humans too, and to love the whole rather than parts. “There are some annoying, obnoxious people in our family. There are good people who are sometimes annoying and obnoxious. But neither of those truths changes the fact that we are still a part of an amazing, inspiring, wonderful community of open source contributors and enthusiasts.”

    • Poettering Fallout, GamingOnLinux Shake-up, and Replacing Xfce
    • 64-bit ARM Kernel Gets Closer To Building Under LLVM With Linux 3.18

      The ARM64 changes for the Linux 3.18 merge window were sent in and include an eBPF JIT compiler for ARM64, a CPU suspend back-end for the PSCI firmware interface, EFI stub improvements, and a code clean-up to allow partially building the kernel with LLVM.

      Via the LLVMLinux initiative has been work to build the Linux kernel with Clang for its faster build times, lower memory usage, static analysis capabilities, and for making the kernel’s code more portable across compilers. The Clang compiler for x86 and ARM is generally in good shape for being able to build the Linux kernel but there’s still patches that haven’t yet been mainlined for the kernel side. For more information you can read Building The Linux Kernel With LLVM’s Clang Yields Comparable Performance. The good news is that for Linux 3.18 the 64-bit ARM code is closer to being Clang-compatible from mainline.

    • 5 Exciting New Features in Linux 3.17

      Though he had at one point been hoping for an early release, Linus Torvalds unleashed version 3.17 of the Linux kernel on Sunday, thereby sticking to the “normal” schedule after all.

      “The past week was fairly calm, and so I have no qualms about releasing 3.17 on the normal schedule (as opposed to the optimistic ‘maybe I can release it one week early’ schedule that was not to be),” Torvalds wrote in the official announcement.

    • Systemd 217 Will Introduce Its New “Consoled” User Console Daemon

      Back in August I wrote about systemd working to create a new user-space VT solution that could eventually succeed the Linux kernel’s VT support. With the upcoming systemd 217 release, the terminal is present.

    • Linux 3.18 Improves FocalTech, Razer Sabertooth & Other Input Devices

      Highlights of the Linux 3.18 input changes include a TI haptics/vibrator drv260x driver (DRV2667) written by Texas Instruments themselves, the Xpad driver can now properly identify the Razer Sabertooth game controller, support for detecting FocalTech PS/2 touch-pads, a haptic driver for the max77693, and other changes. The PID/VID mappings for the Razer Sabertooth make it recognize as an Xbox 360 controller rather than generic Xbox controller.

    • Xbox One Controller Now Works On Linux (Without Vibration)
    • USB Sees Many Changes For Linux 3.18 Kernel

      Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in pull requests on Tuesday for the various kernel subsystems he maintains. The USB changes as he put it are “lots of little changes in here, all over the place”, per his mailing list post.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • Apprenda extends PaaS with JBoss support, takes aim at Red Hat

        Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Apprenda Inc. has just added support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers, a move which translates to deeper support for more Java applications.

      • Nominations Open for Red Hat Innovation Awards 2015

      • Fedora

        • Whats new with Fedora Badges

          It has been a while since we had a badge post, with getting ready for Fedora 21, Shellshock and getting planning started for Flock 2015, things have been very busy around the community.

          I wanted to first highlight some of the new badges that are in a series. We all know about Wiki Editing. Helping out on a page or helping clean up old info out of pages counts as an edit.

        • Fedora Council, Flock 2015, Workstation, F21 @ Rackspace, and Better Rawhide

          Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for October 7th, 2014:

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Untangle Next Generation (NG) Firewall Is Now Based on Debian “Wheezy”

          Users might know this distribution by its old name, which was the Untangle gateway. The name changed a while ago into Untangle Next Generation (NG) Firewall, but the system has remained true to its roots. It’s now based on Debian “Wheezy” and it’s using the 3.2.0 branch of the kernel.

        • Meizu MX4 with Ubuntu Touch makes an appearance

          Images of Meizu MX4 running Ubuntu Touch made the rounds online. By default, the high-end Chinese smartphone runs Android-based Flyme OS.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Touch Smartphone to be Released Before 2015

            Ubuntu will finally enter the ocean of mobile operating systems with its Ubuntu Touch, before the end of the year. So as Meizu and Canonical announced their partnership earlier this year, we know that the first phone powered by the Ubuntu Touch will be Meizu’s MX4 model.

          • Meizu MX4 Pro May Give New Life To Ubuntu Touch

            After a few rumors that Meizu may be using Ubuntu Touch as its “stunning new OS,” there seems to be some confirmation that the rumors are real after what appears to be a Meizu MX4 Pro device was spotted in the wild running Ubuntu touch.

          • Mark Shuttleworth, The State and Ubuntu 2.0

            Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu is an open source software with limited proprietary components, meaning that users are encouraged to upload it, improve it, upload those improvements, and make the world—or, rather, the computer—a better place. Once, back when these things were discussed by men with nicotine-stained fingers and furtive eyes, open source promised to be the keystone in a shared economy ushered in by the digital revolution. Open source too often fell in a paradoxical grey zone—software created by a billionaire who lives on an island of money is not exactly the stuff of utopian dreams. But that shouldn’t detract from the fact that it once offered very real possibilities. Sadly, the digital revolution was thoroughly co-opted by non-visionaries like Bill Gates, a man so boring he made a fucking office out of pixels, and those who helped turn the Internet into a one-click shopping mall.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • AllSeen Lights Up IoT Networking World

      The Internet of Thing (IoT) isn’t just about connected refrigerators and toasters sending you email. It’s about lighting, too. Today the AllSeen Alliance announced the formation of a new Connected Lighting Working Group that is tasked with building out a framework for network-enabled lighting.

    • Open IoT alliance to tackle smart, connected LEDs

      The open source AllSeen Alliance, which is standardizing IoT built around Qualcomm’s AllJoyn platform, has launched a Connected Lighting Working Group.

      The Linux Foundation announced the AllSeen Alliance last December to promote Qualcomm’s cross-platform AllJoyn open source project for Internet of Things interoperability. Since then, the Allseen Alliance has launched a number of working groups, the latest of which is a Connected Lighting Working Group.

    • COM runs Linux on quad-core Marvell Armada XP SoC

      Pactron announced a Linux-based “Sherwood” COM Express Module and hardware development kit built around Marvell’s Armada XP SoC featuring four ARMv7 cores.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Tizen Samsung Gear S brings the Opera Mini browser to your wrist

          Opera Mini has the ability to shrink a webpage down to an amazing 10% of its original size, and can hopefully reformat it for a 2″ display. Users also get The Smart Page, which gives users all their social updates and the latest news on one screen. We also get website shortcuts as large buttons and Private browsing which removes any trace of the web pages visited on your wearable device.

        • [Wallpapers] Samsung Gear 2 / Gear 2 Neo and Galaxy Backgrounds Vol 28

          Here are this weeks wallpapers for your enjoyment for your Samsung Gear / Gear 2 / Neo Smartwatches. They are mainly abstract and Avatar (from the movie) ones.

        • How to Flash your Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch to Tizen, using Kies software

          If your a Samsung Galaxy Gear owner that is still running the old outdated Android OS, then its time for you to move with the times and get Tizen running on your wrist companion. Below is a step by step instructional guide (created by JaysDMC) on how you can safely flash your Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch to Tizen, using the Samsung Kies application.

        • Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch gets cloned in China, Smartwatch LX36

          The Tizen Samsung Gear 2 has certainly been out for a while now, but it seems that it has more admirers than we initially thought. The Gear 2 is so good that they have actually started copying it in China, model Smartwatch LX36.

      • Android

        • Top 10 Android games for this Fall

          There always comes a time when you just need to take a break and chill out, so that you can get rid of all the accumulated stress of the day. In those moments, I choose to play a game on my Android phone, because it takes up less time than playing Metro 2033 on the PC and because I can jump right back into my daily routine after a 15 minute break. What’s always hard when it comes to these breaks is to choose an Android game that is actually fun and doesn’t make me close the app after two levels. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of 10 Android games that I consider the best ones I’ve stumbled across recently. Enjoy your breaks!

        • HTC Nexus 9 With Android L ‘Lollipop’ Release Date October 16? FCC Documents Leaked, Device Imminent

          The HTC Nexus 9 will be shipped with Android L “Lollipop” soon, according to reports. The device was just passed through the FCC, so the official unveiling is imminent.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source has already won in the Information age

    Open source has already won the enterprise, and we’ll continue to see use cases expanding into new environments, according to Red Hat, Inc. CIO Lee Congdon. During a live interview at this week’s Splunk conference, Congdon explains the reasons behind open source’s enterprise victory. he feels open source is best suited for the enterprise, highlighting that as communities come together, people manage to solve their business issues, support each other, and gain recognition from peers and vendors.

  • Six of the Best Open Source Data Mining Tools

    Along with the transition to an app-based world comes the exponential growth of data. However, most of the data is unstructured and hence it takes a process and method to extract useful information from the data and transform it into understandable and usable form. This is where data mining comes into picture. Plenty of tools are available for data mining tasks using artificial intelligence, machine learning and other techniques to extract data.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Consolidation and Breakups May Loom in the OpenStack Arena
    • What Network Function Virtualization means for OpenStack and open source

      Last week’s launch of OPNFV is a good opportunity to think about a simmering debate in the OpenStack developer community for a while now—what exactly does NFV (Network Function Virtualization) have to do with OpenStack, and is it a good thing?

      My own “journey” on this started exactly one year ago today when I visited a local Red Hat partner to talk about OpenStack and, towards the end of our Q&A, I was asked something like “will OpenStack support NFV?” I’d never heard of the term and, when the general idea was explained, I gave a less than coherent version of “OpenStack implements an elastic cloud for cattle; this sounds like pets. Sorry.” After the meeting, the person who asked the question forwarded me an NFV whitepaper from October 2012 and, glancing through it, most of it went right over my head and I didn’t see what it had to do with OpenStack.

  • Databases

    • SUSE, MariaDB and IBM team up to tame Big Data

      SUSE and MariaDB (the company formerly known as SkySQL!) officially teamed up today, joining forces with IBM Power Systems, in a partnership that promises to expand the Linux application ecosystem. According to sources at SUSE, customers will now be able to run a wider variety of applications on Power8, increasing both flexibility and choice while working within existing IT infrastructure. More options is ALWAYS a good thing!

  • Funding

    • Google Announces 2014-2015 Dates for Student Centered Open Source Code Programs

      AH Google Logo Colored 1.6Each year Google facilitates contests and mentorships to help students from all over the world gain valuable experience in the field of open source code development. Google has recently revealed some of the information regarding their upcoming Code-In and Summer of Code events. The Code-In will begin this upcoming December and last until mid- January. The Summer of Code will begin in May of 2015 and last until August. According to their official statement regarding these programs, Google states that “we are passionate about introducing students to open source software development. Since 2005, the Open Source Programs team at Google has worked with over 10,000 students and over 485 open source projects in a variety of fields to create more code for us all.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Announce: OpenSSH 6.7 released

      OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.

    • OpenSSH 6.7 Released With Significant Improvements
    • Blender 2.72 Brings Cycles Volume Rendering To The GPU

      Blender 2.72 brings the pie menus feature for menu items spread radially around the mouse, animation improvements within its editor, a “face split by edges” tool, a new workflow for texture painting, a new “sun beams” simulation, game development improvements, freestyle non-photorealistic rendering improvements, and a ton of other new features. There’s also many new add-ons like a new DXF importer, new game publishing features, and much more.

    • Blender 2.72

      The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.72

  • Public Services/Government

    • German City Gummersbach Drops Windows XP and Gets SUSE with a MATE Desktop

      Germany is now at the forefront on open source because many cities in this country are either considering the switch to Linux or they have already finished this process. Now, the German city of Gummersbach is reporting that the administration is now almost exclusively running on Linux systems.

    • Another German Town Comes Out Of The Closet
    • Gummersbach completes switch to open source

      The German town of Gummersbach announced that this summer it has completed its switch to Linux PCs, retiring a decade-old proprietary operating system no longer supported by the IT vendor. The migration has saved the town a five-figure sum, and Gummersbach expects a further reduction of IT costs, a combination of savings on proprietary licences and lower hardware costs.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Coding is fun! Europe Code Week is back

      The first ever Europe Code Week took place last year and was largely an experiment to test things out. Opensource.com covered it in an interview with Julie Cullen, the Irish Ambassador, asking her what activities were planned in her home country. This year, Europe Code Week has even more activities planned, over 1000 and counting! To get more insight on the event, I interviewed Alja Isakovic, one of the Young Advisors and organizers for the Europe Code Week program. In this interview, she shares some of last year’s successes and tells us what people can look forward to this year.

    • Understanding HHVM’s Compilation Process & Bytecode

      For those into compilers, bytecodes, and low-level programming or just wanting to know why Facebook’s HHVM project tends to be so much faster for PHP than PHP itself, here’s a great article.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Audio: Gary Webb on ‘Dark Alliance,’ CIA and Drugs

      Webb’s reporting for the San Jose Mercury News cast a harsh light on the links between the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua and drug trafficking in the United States, particularly the crack cocaine boom of the 1980s.

    • The Ghost in the GMO Machine

      The bodies and minds of children living on the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i are being threatened by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a synthetic insecticide that is heavily sprayed on fields located near their homes and schools.

  • Security

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • WI Attorney General’s Latest Attack on Transparency Reeks of Partisanship

      Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s refusal to defend the Government Accountability Board in a federal lawsuit challenging the investigation into Governor Scott Walker and his allies is a reversal of his office’s earlier position, could have grave implications for openness in the state, and undermines the GAB’s role in enforcing the state’s campaign finance laws. It isn’t the first time that Van Hollen has put politics above government transparency.

    • FCC Putting Comcast/Time Warner Cable Investigation On Hold

      On Friday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said that it has extended its time to file responses and oppositions for the Comcast/Time Warner merger from October 8 to October 29. This is due to a motion filed by DISH Network, which said that Comcast didn’t fully respond to the Commission’s Request to Responses and Oppositions.

  • Privacy

    • ORG responds to calls by National Crime Agency for greater surveillance powers

      ‘Open Rights Group welcomes any public debate about the surveillance of our personal communications by the police and intelligence services but so far the government seems intent on simply increasing its powers to allow unchecked whole population profiling. To tackle terrorism and serious crime, we need need targeted surveillance that is authorised by judges not politicians, as well as proper democratic oversight to ensure that powers are not abused.’

    • Twitter sues U.S. government over limits on ability to disclose surveillance orders

      Twitter, the world’s largest microblogging platform, on Tuesday sued the U.S. government, alleging that the Justice Department’s restrictions on what the company can say publicly about the government’s national security requests for user data violate the firm’s First Amendment rights.

    • Data and Goliath: Digital surveillance and what you can do about it

      Data and Goliath is the title of a soon-to-be published book by Bruce Schneier, a well-known figure in cryptography and currently the Chief Technology Officer of Co3 Systems, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

  • Civil Rights

    • Hillary Clinton Loses

      No, I’m not making a prediction. She hasn’t lost the nomination battle for 2016, not yet anyway. However what she did do today, or what I should more accurately say, is she lost my respect. Back in 2011, at a speech she, in her capacity as Secretary of State, was giving for international internet freedom, a worthy cause. During the speech, Ray McGovern, a retired CIA agent who became a political activist against the wars fought in our name in the Middle east, stood up and tuned his back on her, a silent form of protest. For that he was arrested for disorderly conduct.

10.07.14

Links 7/10/2014: CAINE 6.0, PC-BSD 10.0.3

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Breakthrough in Wireless Technology…Or Not

    Exactly three weeks ago today I caught myself before hitting the “share” button on my Google Plus stream. My intent was to complain about some thing or another. I believe it was an out loud groan about a USB wireless device not working out of the box with Linux. I think I was going to triangulate on Broadcom’s insistence on making wireless a real headache.

    And yeah, it doesn’t take that much to get a Broadcom chip working in most cases. Unless you are installing Linux at a friend’s house or another place that doesn’t have a wired connection. Then you’re pretty much sunk. The popup says that the wireless will work once you connect to the package manager. Uh, what if I am not located near a wired connection? That’s kinda why I wanted to connect to the web anyway you friggin’ ijit.

  • Desktop

    • 5 powerful things you didn’t know Chromebooks could do

      This last feature isn’t for the novice users that just buy Chromebooks for their simplicity. But this is World Beyond Windows, where I tout the benefits of Linux, so I can’t leave it out.

      Flip the developer mode switch (it’s in software now, but it used to be a hardware switch) and you can get full access to your Chromebook’s internals. You can install a full desktop Linux system (like Ubuntu) alongside your Chrome OS system. Flip over to the Linux system when you want to do some work with traditional desktop apps and powerful terminal commands.

    • Acer Chromebook 13 (FHD): Initial impressions

      The performance of the device is about acceptable (unfortunately, I do not have any comparison in this device class). Even when typing this blog post in the visual wordpress editor, I notice some sluggishness. Opening the app launcher or loading the new tab page while music is playing makes the music stop for or skip a few ms (20-50ms if I had to guess). Running a benchmark in parallel or browsing does not usually cause this stuttering, though.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation: Certification More Popular But Tough to Get

      The Linux Foundation’s “Introduction to Linux” MOOC on edX has enjoyed impressive popularity since launching in the summer. And the organization’s Certification Program for open source engineers, which went live in August, is also rising in stature, according to data the Foundation has made available.

    • Linux 3.18 Gets Better Wacom Tablet & Sony Controller Support
    • Many ACPI & Power Management Changes For Linux 3.18 Kernel

      Rafael Wysocki sent out his first aligned set of changes of ACPI core and power management changes he’s planning on volleying over to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 3.18 kernel merge window.

    • Linux 3.17 is Getting ready for the Year 2038

      The Linux 3.17 kernel is the fifth major kernel release so far in 2014 and among its features is a fix for a flaw that wouldn’t actually impact Linux for another 24 years.

    • What’s New in Kernel Development

      Kernel configuration has become more and more complex through the years with the proliferation of new drivers, new hardware and specific behaviors that might be needed for particular uses. It has reached about 3,000 config options, and that number will only increase.

      Jean Delvare recently pointed out that a lot of those config options were relevant only to particular hardware, and yet the config system presented them to users who didn’t have that hardware. This seemed like a bug to him, and he suggested that maintainers begin requiring proper hardware dependencies for all config options.

    • Lennart Poettering’s Linus Torvalds rant

      Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator and leader, is known for his sometimes frank and vulgar language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). He doesn’t suffer programming fools gladly. For him, his management style works. Not everyone is happy about it and Lennart Poettering, a Red Hat engineer and one of the creators of the controversial systemd system and service replacement for Unix and Linux’s sysvinit daemon, has called out Torvalds for his salty attitude in a public Google+ post.

    • Linux systemd dev says open source is ‘SICK’, kernel community ‘awful’

      Lennart Poettering, creator of the systemd system management software for Linux, says the open-source world is “quite a sick place to be in.”

      He also said the Linux development community is “awful” – and he pins the blame for that on Linux supremo Linus Torvalds.

    • Bitter Poettering, LibreOffice at 4, and Linux Tidbits

      The systemd fallout is getting to creator Lennart Poettering, who is sounding quite disillusioned. Sean Michael Kerner scored an interview with The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli on the future of LibreOffice. Jesse Smith reviewed PC-BSD 10.0.3 in today’s Distrowatch Weekly and Paul Venezia imagines Linux servers as “transient processes and services.” And finally today, we have several Linux distribution tidbits to report.

    • Lennart Poettering On The Open-Source Community: A Sick Place To Be In

      With Lennart spearheading projects like systemd and PulseAudio that have ruffled the feathers of some users, Lennart is no stranger to controversy but today wrote about how “the Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source.” He also claims to receive hate mail from people who want him to stop developing and how reportedly there’s even a Bitcoin collection for people trying to hire a hitman for him.

    • Stable kernel updates

      Greg KH has released stable kernels 3.16.4, 3.14.20, and 3.10.56.

    • Graphics Stack

      • NVIDIA vs. AMD 2D Linux Drivers: Catalyst Is Getting Quite Good At 2D

        Our latest Linux graphics driver benchmarks are taking a look at the binary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst drivers using the latest versions while running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It’s been a while since last time we closely compared the two proprietary GPU drivers with 2D workloads on an array of graphics cards so these results should be definitely interesting.

      • AMD Adds Native Object Code Support To Clover/Radeon: Big Performance Win

        Tom Stellard announced his latest OpenCL-related improvements to the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver.

        Announced this afternoon by Tom Stellard are patches that add support to Gallium3D’s Clover — the OpenCL state tracker — for compiling compute kernels into native object code. These native object code binaries from Clover are then accepted by the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers.

      • NVIDIA vs. AMD 2D Linux Drivers: Catalyst Is Getting Quite Good At 2D

        Our latest Linux graphics driver benchmarks are taking a look at the binary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst drivers using the latest versions while running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It’s been a while since last time we closely compared the two proprietary GPU drivers with 2D workloads on an array of graphics cards so these results should be definitely interesting.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • The Linux Desktop-a-week review: Cinnamon

      In the end, I like Cinnamon. It’s high-quality, beautiful, and the team that works on it should be incredibly proud of what they’ve done. I just can’t imagine the scenario in which I’d use it over something else.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Just Say No

        Instead, GNOME, which breaks most of the traditional “desktop” meme, has returned to being the default. Newbies will need their hands held just to start something up. Single-CD installations are dead. That hammers much of the emerging “market” for GNU/Linux where CDs and even electricity and networks are in short supply. Of course, one can install XFCE4 instead of GNOME but the user has to take charge, something newbies may find intimidating.

        Just say “No!”. Uncheck GNOME. Check XFCE in the “tasksel” page of the installer or use APT to install XFCE4 after you boot your system. You can do it. You have the power.

      • GNOME 3.14 Gives a Well-Known Interface a New Lease on Life

        Recently, the GNOME Project announced the release of GNOME 3.14. Since it’s arrival it has drawn some attention for its enhanced application development platform and some compelling new features. Some people in the open source community view GNOME as a project that lost its way, but the new version is actually being heralded as a big comeback for a project that has made the Linux desktop friendlier to use for many users.

      • GNOME Boston Summit 2014

        GNOME Summit is a three-day hackfest for GNOME developers and contributors. It is not primarily aimed at users or new contributors, but if you want to jump right into the deep end, it’s a fantastic way to meet everyone and get involved. Unlike traditional conferences, the Boston Summit is all about getting developers together and getting things done. While there are some non-hacking sessions, they are geared heavily towards many-to-many, interactive discussion and planning, rather than one-to-many presentations.

      • The GNOME Infrastructure is now powered by FreeIPA!

        The GNOME Infrastructure is now powered by Red Hat’s FreeIPA which bundles several FOSS softwares into one big “bundle” all surrounded by an easy and intuitive web UI that will help users update their account information on their own without the need of the Accounts Team or any other administrative entity. Users will also find two custom fields on their “Overview” page, these being “Foundation Member since” and “Last Renewed on date”. As you may have understood already we finally managed to migrate the Foundation membership database into LDAP itself to store the information we want once and for all. As a side note it might be possible that some users that were Foundation members in the past won’t find any detail stored on the Foundation fields outlined above. That is actually expected as we were able to migrate all the current and old Foundation members that had an LDAP account registered at the time of the migration. If that’s your case and you still would like the information to be stored on the new setup please get in contact with the Membership Committee at stating so.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • ownCloud, Red Hat Partner on Open Source Storage

        ownCloud Inc. and Red Hat (RHT) say they can deliver open source storage with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and better compliance standards through a partnership that combines Red Hat Storage Server 3 with ownCloud’s file syncing and sharing platform.

      • China’s Inspur Forms Linux Partnership With Red Hat

        Chinese technology company Inspur and American open source manufacturer Red Hat have reached a strategic deal to combine Red Hat’s latest-generation enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with Inspur’s X86 platform products.

        According to the agreement, Inspur and Red Hat will become OEM partners. The OEM partner designation is the highest partner rank for Red Hat and Inspur will enjoy the best prices and the highest priority technical support. Other financial terms of the deal were not released.

      • Making Red Hat Enterprise Linux manageable with Red Hat Satellite 6

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of these open source infrastructure solutions, and offers the benefits of open source with the capabilities expected from modern IT infrastructure. To make management even easier, enterprises can utilize Red Hat Satellite to handle life-cycle and systems management.

      • Diversity is a crucial component of meritocracy

        This year’s keynote speaker at the annual All Things Open conference is Red Hat’s DeLisa Alexander, executive VP and head of Red Hat’s human resources operations. DeLisa is not only in a professional position to comment on gender and diversity in open source and tech but has also personally campaigned for inclusiveness in the workplace to produce better outcomes for everybody.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Might End Up Disabling Delta RPMs By Default

          Going back to 2009 with Fedora 11 has been delta RPM support to enable support with Yum for these packages that just contain the differences between one installed RPM version to the next version. With Fedora frequently pushing down new packages, delta RPMs have allowed those in bandwidth-constrained environments to more easily download updates since the file sizes of the deltas tend to be significantly smaller than full RPMs. Additionally, it’s placed less of a burden on the Fedora infrastructure by having less disk space and bandwidth requirements. However, with DNF it looks like Fedora could revert to going back to full RPMs for distribution of updates.

        • Fedora To Replace Bash With Either Dash Or Mksh As The Default, Non-Interactive Shell?

          This being said, one of the Fedora developers have asked on the mailing lists whether Debian’s dash or Android’s mksh would be a safer alternative, as the future system’s default, non-interactive shell.

        • Fedora 23 Might Adopt Btrfs as Default

          Fedora 21 hasn’t been released just yet, but the developers are already making plans for subsequent releases that will be made in the future. Right now, they are looking for a possible implementation of the Btrfs file system instead of the current Ext4.

        • The pain of trying to install a .deb package on Fedora using Alien

          During my search for a good Markdown text editor for Linux, I came across a few that had binary installation only for Debian and Ubuntu distributions. See The search for a usable Markdown editor for my Linux desktop.

          Because my main Linux desktop is powered for Fedora, I decided to find an alternate method of installing those applications other than compiling them from source. Call it a lazy approach, but sometimes you have to find shortcuts.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 8.0 Beta 2

        Debian comes with over 20,000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine) – all of it free. It’s a bit like a tower. At the base is the kernel. On top of that are all the basic tools.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Users don’t want Ubuntu 14.10

            What is also interesting that some people still plan to install Ubuntu 14.10 even though they are not waiting for that release. And, vice versa, some people are waiting for Utopic Unicorn release, but do not plan the installation.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • The right fit? 4 open source projects evaluated

    In the guide, I wrote about doing your research by casting a wide net, then evaluating yourself (your skills, your goals, and your time). In this evaluation to find the right fit, I looked at my motivations and skills, made a list of goals, and named a few target projects. Because this isn’t my first rodeo, I take a good, hard look at my track record. What can I learn from the ones that didn’t stick to find the one that will? I notice patterns I can avoid and see how they line up against my new list of goals and skills. Then, I evaluate four open source projects and their communities to see if they might be a good fit. See the winner at the end!

  • 9 things to look for in an open-source project

    Not all open-source projects are created equal. There are plenty that have not been touched in years — heck, I probably wrote a few of them. If you’re going to rely on a community-contributed open-source project, you’ll want to ensure the code is up to your standards and that the community will continue to support it throughout the project’s life cycle.

  • The Importance of Being FOSS

    It’s a fact of life in virtually every community that there will be countless daily distractions — news announcements, controversies, squabbles — that take up the majority of our time and energy, leaving little for the big picture.

    The Linux community is no exception.

    That’s why it was such a relief to see a post over at Linux.com recently that struck directly to the core of all that is FOSS and offered a reminder as to what it’s really all about.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Web Browsers for Linux

      Here is an overview of nine web browsers for Linux. Does not include terminal-based ones.

    • Mozilla

      • Testing a $35 Firefox OS phone—how bad could it be?

        You’ve got it pretty good, you know that? While you’re sitting there using your Internet-enabled device to read about some other Internet-enabled device, it’s easy to forget that the majority of people doesn’t have any access to the Internet at all. The “World Wide” Web is actually not that worldwide—only about one-third of the population is online. That’s 4.8 billion people out there with no way to get to the Internet.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The inside track on Oracle’s open-source strategy

      “NoSQL is definitely a component of Big Data and is part of the strategy of storing and managing very fast but simple operations over simple data,” Seglau explained to hosts Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Oracle’s namesake relational system has a notoriously difficult time handling that kind of unstructured information, a critical gap that leaves the vendor little choice but to embrace the new paradigm of enterprise data management.

    • LibreOffice at 4: How the OpenOffice Fork is Forging Ahead

      The Document Foundation has been able to attract contributions to LibreOffice from AMD and Intel as well as governments, including Saudi Arabia and France. Donations are the primary source of revenue for The Document Foundation and Vignoli said that the donations have been growing steadily over the years. That funding has enabled The Document Foundation to hire three full-time people and two part-time people, as well as supporting continuing developer efforts around LibreOffice.

      [...]

      One of the main areas of growth for LibreOffice is in competitive migrations away from other office suites, including Microsoft’s Office. While The Document Foundation would like to see more people use LibreOffice, the plan is not for all users to totally abandon Microsoft Office.

      “The objective is not to eradicate Microsoft Office from companies,” Vignoli said. “The concept of migration is about giving an alternative to companies.” – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/libreoffice-at-4-how-the-openoffice-fork-is-forging-ahead.html#sthash.Jp29EQC7.dpuf

  • CMS

    • WordPress Foundation Becomes an Open Source Initiative® Affiliate Member

      The Open Source Initiative ® (OSI), the premiere organization that promotes and protects open source, announced today that the WordPress Foundation (WordPress) has joined the OSI as an Affiliate Member. The WordPress Foundation’s mission, to democratize publishing through open source, has elevated WordPress to not only a globally recognized content management tool, but a vibrant community encompassing the ideals of open source software development, and advocacy for the adherence to the Open Source Definition. Its affiliation with OSI helps enhance and sustain the open software development community, while ensuring that millions of individuals, organizations and businesses can cost-effectively communicate online using a robust set of content management capabilities.

  • BSD

    • Ten Year Old “Critical” Bug Discovered In OpenBSD

      While OpenBSD generally prides itself on being a secure, open-source operating system and focusing more on code corectness and security rather than flashy features, it turns out a potential security bug has been living within OpenBSD for the past decade.

    • PC-BSD 10.0.3: An alternative to desktop Linux distros?

      Linux is a terrific desktop operating system but sometimes it can be fun to use something else, particularly if you have the personality of a distrohopper. PC-BSD is one alternative that’s worth considering since it’s based on FreeBSD. DistroWatch has a review of PC-BSD 10.0.3 and finds that it compares well to most desktop Linux distributions.

    • First impressions of PC-BSD 10.0.3

      All in all, I am impressed with what the PC-BSD team has managed to deliver with their 10.0.3 release. The project has taken on additional polish with the last few releases. The graphical front ends look nicer, some bugs I spotted in previous releases (especially with Life Preserver) have been fixed and the way ZFS integrates with the other PC-BSD tools was very useful to me. There are a lot of great features in this release I would love to see ported to Linux and there were no serious problems during my trial, beyond the video driver issue I was able to work around. I definitely recommend giving PC-BSD a try, it offers a great deal of power in an attractive package.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU’s Data Recovery Tool Updated With New Options

      GNU ddrescue, an open-source data recovery tool that copies data from one file / block device to another while rescuing the good portions of data in case of read errors, is out with a new version.

    • GNU ddrescue 1.19 released

      I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ddrescue 1.19.

      GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors.

  • Project Releases

    • man-pages-3.74 is released

      I’ve released man-pages-3.74. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

  • Public Services/Government

    • GSA CIO: Platform Reuse, Open Source Among Guiding IT Principles

      Platform reuse and open source technology are guiding IT principles being championed by GSA’s CIO, Sonny Hashimi. The agency’s new IT integration policy requires all new projects that are undertaken within GSA to follow several IT principles. For example, GSA must consider the reuse of its existing platforms before any new investments are contemplated.

    • Uganda Takes on Free and Open Source Software

      On this historic Wednesday, the Government was interfacing with the IT community to discuss among others the draft FOSS and Open Standards Policy and the National FOSS Strategy. This is the very reason that made it indeed historic, finally FOSS has arrived. While a few other African countries make mention of FOSS in their ICT related policies, one can hardly identify those that have come up with specific policies and strategies addressing FOSS. South Africa and now Uganda are going the extra mile to take the bull by the horn with the hope that others may follow.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Mick Cash interview: Disillusioned with Labour, RMT union chief plots a new party for the left

    The north London headquarters of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union is replete with history.

    When the executive meets, just across the corridor from Mick Cash’s office, they sit around a table where, more than a century ago, union leaders made the decision to found the Labour Party.

  • The Purpose of Politics

    That is, nothing to do with their beliefs, just trying to save their jobs. Exactly like the Westminster Labour establishment in Scotland.

  • 18 dead after illegal Indonesian gold mine collapses

    At least 18 people, including 16 men and two women, have lost their lives after an illegal mine collapsed in Indonesia’s Borneo island.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Qatar and Saudi Arabia ‘have ignited time bomb by funding global spread of radical Islam’

      Qatar and Saudi Arabia have ignited a “time bomb” by funding the global spread of radical Islam, according to a former commander of British forces in Iraq.

      General Jonathan Shaw, who retired as Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff in 2012, told The Telegraph that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were primarily responsible for the rise of the extremist Islam that inspires Isil terrorists.

      The two Gulf states have spent billions of dollars on promoting a militant and proselytising interpretation of their faith derived from Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar, and based on the Salaf, or the original followers of the Prophet.

    • Moazzam Begg offered help over hostage release

      Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg offered to intervene to help secure the release of British hostage Alan Henning, he has told the BBC.

      Mr Begg, 46, said he thought he knew who had been holding the aid worker but said the government rejected his offer.

      He said Mr Henning’s friends had sought his help and he had told the government he was going to intervene regardless.

    • US drone strikes kill eight militants in Pakistan

      At least eight militants were killed today when a US drone fired four missiles on a Taliban compound in Pakistan’s volatile North Waziristan tribal region, the second such incident in the area in 24 hours.

    • U.S. Drones Strike Pakistan for 3rd Day

      On Tuesday, a U.S. drone strike hit a suspected militant training camp in northwest Pakistan, in an attack that intelligence officials say killed six and wounded nine. It marked the third U.S. drone strike on Pakistan in three days, after 2014 began with a six-month hiatus of strikes against terror cells in the country. Five suspected militants were killed in a strike Monday and another five in a strike Sunday. All three were in the Shawal area of South Waziristan. The U.S. had halted drone strikes in the first half of the year at the behest of Pakistan while it attempted, but failed, to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. Pakistan is dealing with unrest in other areas, as well. Its tenuous relationship with India has also flared up over Kashmir. In the worst attacks since their 2003 ceasefire, there have been casualties on both sides, with nine civilians dead in total.

    • Is there no other way?

      The difficulty seems to be that addressing the issues which drive people to violence and terror is more complex and demanding than simply bombing them. Rather than listening to grievances and struggling to address them, the choice is made to send in drones. They don’t risk American lives and they keep the war far from America’s shores.

    • North Waziristan: 19 killed in three drone strikes during last 36 hours

      At least nineteen people have been killed while several others injured in three US drone strikes during last 36 hours in North Waziristan tribal region, Dunya News reported on Tuesday.

      In the latest attack, six people were killed and 11 injured when a U.S. drone fired two missiles on militant commander Mustaqeem’s centre in Kandghar area of Shawal today.

    • Drones and Everything After

      Late one afternoon in December, a drone armed with Hellfire missiles was flying low over the Yemeni desert, an audible buzzing presence, tracking a ­convoy of cars and trucks that were caterpillaring along a route between villages. Within the convoy were the members of two large families, escorting a bride from a wedding celebration in her own village to another in her groom’s, and though they noticed the drone, its presence was not unusual. Then, while the group was stopped because of a flat tire, the noise from the drone grew louder, as if a decision had been reached, and it began to discharge missiles. Several men jumped from the fourth truck before it was destroyed, but as they fled the drone seemed to track them across the sand, and fired again, according to Al Jazeera America. An older sheikh ran from his car and found his son, dead and bloodied, pierced by flying shrapnel in his face, neck, and chest. Twelve men were killed. They were farmers, shepherds, and migrant laborers, mostly. U.S. government officials would say later that the target had been a militant, affiliated with Al Qaeda, who managed to escape the attack. A report by Human Rights Watch suggested that he might never have been there at all.

    • Anti-drone activists, limited to ‘Free Speech Zone’ at Hancock Air Base, protest without incident

      A group of about 50 anti-drone activists cordoned off by barriers protested without any arrests or incidents Sunday afternoon.

      The protesters, led by Upstate Drone Action and the Syracuse Peace Council, obtained a permit from the town of DeWitt, which allowed them to demonstrate for about two and a half hours starting at 1 p.m. The protest was part of a Global Action Day against the use of drones for surveillance and killing.

    • As Canada debates ISIS mission, U.S. already weighing potential civilian casualties

      As Canada’s Parliament prepares to vote this week on expanding military involvement in the Middle East, the U.S. political system has already moved on to the next difficult conversation — about civilian casualties.

    • The war on terrorism can only be ended morally

      So, why shouldn’t the United States torture suspected terrorists, rain hellfire missiles into Middle Eastern villages aimed at terror targets or use mass domestic surveillance to gather intelligence? Well, even if you have no sympathy for those who support terrorism, there are both blatant, moral and strategic flaws in these policies that not only violate the very principles that our great nation was founded on, but further perpetuate the seemingly never ending war on terror.

    • Why Air Strikes Against ISIS Will Fail

      War is a dirty, unforgiving business. It is not rendered clean by remote deployments and orders executed at a distance from seemingly safe areas. It takes lives, inflicts unspeakable harm, and rarely brings smiles to those who suffer it. But the members of the US-led coalition currently involved in striking Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq would have you think otherwise. They give the impression that clean distances are golden, and air strikes will have their intended “degrading” effect. Therein lies the message about the false salvation of machinery – the technological panacea that rarely does what it is meant to.

      The notion that air power would win the day has been something of a fetish for enthusiasts, both of the prophetic and practising sort. It prophetically concerned H. G. Wells in The War in the Air (1908). It enraptured Britain’s blood lusting Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris during World War II, who believed in characteristically delusional fashion that his death sowing fleets won the war in exclusive fashion. Curtis “Demon” Le May fronted as the US equivalent, instrumental behind the striking of sixty-four Japanese cities between March and August 1945 that killed around 330,000 people. The doctrinal holy water, however, came from the font of the US Strategic Bombing Survey.

    • Fighting the Hopelessness Machine

      Jeremy Scahill and Glen Greenwald’s report Death by Metadata reveals that US drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen and are mostly targeted using phone metadata obtained by the NSA, with very little human intelligence (of either sort) involved. The result is pretty much what one would expect. “Real terrorists” who know they’re targets change phones and SIM cards regularly to avoid detection, while victims of strikes often include random bystanders and uninvolved users of the same phone. This situation will only get worse for the NSA as word of Scahill and Greenwald’s report spreads and more people start taking appropriate precautions.

    • Kenyan forces kill 22 ‘al-Shabaab’ fighters in southern Somalia

      Kenya’s military has confirmed that its soldiers have killed 22 ‘al-Shabaab’ militants and disrupted logistical base in Bula Gadud in southern Somalia.

    • Kenyan Forces Kill 22 Al-Shabaab Fighters In Southern Somalia
    • Hamas has resumed rocket manufacture, says top IDF officer

      Hamas has resumed rocket manufacturing in Gaza, the head of the Israeli Air Force’s Air Defense Command said.

    • Egypt army kills 16 militants in North Sinai

      Egypt’s army killed 16 militants from the Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis jihadist group early Tuesday as it continues its operation to rein in extremists in the restive Sinai Peninsula, Aswat Masriya reported.

    • Critical thinking the first casualty of war

      Not only are we not getting satisfactory answers about the new conflict in Iraq — no one is even asking the right questions.

    • Eric Holder: A mixed legacy at best

      Ironically, while Holder scored on the civil rights front, he failed on the civil liberties front. His Justice Department authorized the use of drones to kill American citizens on foreign soil without a fair trial. His Justice Department has also defended the National Security Agency’s wholesale collection of phone data on millions of Americans accused of no crimes.

    • The Late Triumph of the Bush-Bin Laden Dance

      The terrorist group known as ISIS or ISIL has committed some atrocious acts, beheadings or throat slittings of innocent Westerners from the United States, Britain and France. This suddenly prompted a change in public opinion in these three countries, which now support air strikes on the facilities or oil rigs controlled by this spin-off of al-Qaeda. In the United States, a strong majority of Americans opposed strikes on Syria in 2013 and now supports them – even though they are illegal and will prove ineffective.

      The politics of emotion have won and abolished the lessons that the failure of the war on terror should have taught leaders, citizens and all kinds of political decision makers. France, which famously opposed the war in Iraq in 2003, is now in the forefront, at least the rhetorical forefront, of this new misguided war. This war could push the whole world into a Huntington corner and ignite a “clash of civilizations” which did not exist before the Soviet and American forays into Afghanistan.

    • Documenting the Next Generation of Drone Pilots

      During the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Barack Obama told the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters. “I’ve got two words for you,” he said, cueing up the punchline: “Predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.” The crowd burst into hysterics.

      Back then, flying death machines that kill innocent people were a lot of laughs. Nowadays, it’s unlikely the president’s joke would get the same response. The Obama administration has launched eight times more drone attacks in the past five years than Bush did throughout his entire presidency, the deaths of civilians in drone strikes are frequently publicized, and in late 2012 the world became aware of “double taps,” which involve two attacks in quick succession, ensuring the slaughter of friends and family trying to rescue their loved ones from the bomb site.

    • The Law of Futility: Air Strikes Against the Islamic State
    • Dangers of weaponized heavens need attention

      Perhaps you are among many who give little thought to a growing arms race arising from the proliferation of military hardware in space overhead. The US Strategic Command is strengthening US space dominance over the entire world through satellites that control our so-called missile defense system, drones that kill by remote control, laser weapons that could destroy other nation’s satellites and the possible placement of nuclear weapons in space. There are dangers that space clutter from a war in space could make space impenetrable in the future eliminating the benefits space provides us.

    • Ethical and methodological issues in assessing drones’ civilian impacts in Pakistan

      Since 2004, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has conducted 379 armed drone strikes against presumed terrorists living in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which is comprised of several so-called tribal agencies and governed by a colonial-era legal dispensation that effectively renders the citizens of the FATA second-class citizens. While drone strikes have occurred in all agencies, the vast majority of them have taken place in the two agencies of FATA known as North and South Waziristan. Because international media cannot travel to FATA legally and because the U.S. government refuses to speak about the covert program, most reports rely upon the often conflicting claims made by militant groups or parts of the Pakistani government. What is known is that American drone strikes have killed innocent persons in Pakistan (and elsewhere where drones are used). What remains unknown — and perhaps unknowable — is how many of the persons killed in U.S. drone strikes are in fact innocent civilians.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • California drought worries pool industry

      California swimming pool companies just regaining their financial footing after the recession are now facing a new challenge: a devastating drought that has put the state’s ubiquitous backyard pools under the microscope.

      More than three dozen water agencies and local cities are cracking down on water use in swimming pools with rules that range from requiring a pool cover to prevent evaporation to banning residents from draining and refilling older ones that need repairs.

    • Dog Days of Yulin – Part 1

      Animal rights activists across China and the rest of the globe have increasingly condemned the Dog Meat Festival, calling for an immediate stop to eating man’s best friend. They say the dog meat trade is illegal, unregulated, and cruel. Many claim that numerous dogs that end up in cooking pots are stolen pets or diseased strays.

  • Finance

    • Argentina passes law to establish debt audit commission

      Argentina has legislated to create a commission to investigate the origin of the country’s debt, dating back to the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. The law states that once the commission has been established, it will report within 180 days. Campaigners in Argentina have been calling for a public audit into the debt, to discover if any loans were odious or illegitimate, and hence should not be paid. It is not yet clear when the commission will be established.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Justices in Walker Criminal Probe Face Conflicts of Interest

      The Wisconsin Supreme Court could decide the future of the criminal investigation into Governor Scott Walker and independent electoral groups, but some of the justices are faced with a significant conflict of interest: two of the groups under investigation have been the dominant spenders in Wisconsin Supreme Court elections in recent years, spending over $10 million to elect the Court’s Republican majority.

    • Manufacturing Consent – Pakistani Style

      The Left is ignored, and the Right is pampered. The critical, thoughtful professional of yesteryear has been replaced by the savvy networker who conforms to all the rules and regulations of the well-oiled machine that is the modern media corporation.

      Public media in the United States, while having an appearance of neutrality, is actually a tool of powerful groups representing establishment interests. Years ago, Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent showed, using example after example, just how this happens. At times it could be a bit subtle – effective media engineering may require a dash of contrary opinion just to make it sound even-handed.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Journalists and their sources require privacy. But so does everyone else

      The police’s use of RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to access journalists’ phone records came under attack this weekend from the Lib Dems, the Sun newspaper, Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, and the Government’s Interception of Communications Commissioner.

    • EPIC Sues CIA For Release Of Senate Spying Report

      The CIA’s spying on Senate staff members during the compilation of the “Torture Report” (last seen delayed until late October) provoked some righteous (but hypocritical) indignation from political figures who were otherwise fans of government surveillance of American citizens. Dianne Feinstein’s dismay may have been genuine, but it was also completely tone-deaf.

      CIA director John Brennan said no spying occurred while also admitting some spying had occurred. Further details revealed by an Inspector General’s investigation noted that spying continued after Brennan finally told everyone to knock it off, using a classified “hacking tool” to peer into Senate staffers’ email accounts.

    • Law Enforcement Still Defending ComputerCOP: Says They’ll Keep Distributing It Until After Someone’s Been Hurt

      It appears that the police and other law enforcement folks who spent department money on the awful ComputerCOP spyware simply can’t admit that they were handing out software that made kids less safe. Instead, they’re sticking by their decision to do so. Given that the company personalized the software in the name of local law enforcement, and pitched it as the “perfect election and fundraising tool,” you can understand their reticence to actually admit that they’ve been making kids a hell of a lot less safe. We already discussed San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis defending the software, even while issuing an “alert” telling parents how to disable the keylogging feature. Even more bizarre was the response of Limestone County, Alabama, Sheriff Mike Blakely, who simply questioned EFF’s credibility in revealing the dangerous nature of the software.

    • FBI Director: The Internet Is The Most Dangerous Parking Lot Imagineable

      FBI Director James Comey was on 60 Minutes on Sunday, in a segment that will continue next week as well. Apparently next week is when we’ll find out his views on mobile encryption and whether or not the FBI is spying on all of us, but this week, he gave us a tiny hint towards the end of the segment, in which he discusses why the internet is so dangerous.

    • Another 60 Minutes Puff Piece

      Based on its legacy, the CBS show 60 Minutes is still sometimes thought of as the remaining place in TV news where tough investigative journalism has a home. But lately, they’ve been doing something else.

    • Washington Post’s Clueless Editorial On Phone Encryption: No Backdoors, But How About A Magical ‘Golden Key’?
    • Documents Released In Silk Road Case Add More Evidence To The ‘Parallel Construction’ Theory
    • Silk Road Lawyers Poke Holes in FBI’s Story

      New court documents released this week by the U.S. government in its case against the alleged ringleader of the Silk Road online black market and drug bazaar suggest that the feds may have some ‘splaining to do.

    • U.K police used anti-terrorism laws to spy on journalists

      British police are to be forced to disclose their use of anti-terror legislation to investigate journalists as part of a new investigation by the U.K.’s top interception official.

      After the Mail on Sunday revealed this weekend that British police had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)—a piece of legislation designed for combatting terrorism—in order to uncover one of the newspaper’s sources for a report implicating a government minister in perverting the course of justice, acting Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy announced on Oct. 6 an enquiry into the use of RIPA against journalists throughout the U.K.

  • Civil Rights

    • Nicky Hager’s house raided by police
    • Hate crimes against Muslims spike: We must face up to normalized Islamophobia

      Over the course of the last few years Islamophobia has alarmingly risen throughout the world. The roots of the problem can be traced back to 9/11, which to this day, is still constantly evoked by political leaders to justify murderous foreign policy.

      Countless human beings, including many Muslims, have been killed by Western bombs in the years following 9/11.All of this was done of course, in the name of making the world a safer place.

    • Bad Information Leads to Worse Police Raids

      David Hooks’s death reads like a boilerplate tale of a police raid gone wrong. Around 11 PM on September 24, deputies from the Laurens County, Georgia, sheriff’s department stormed their way into his house looking, they say, for meth. A reported 16 shots later, the 59-year-old was dead, and naturally there are conflicting accounts about what happened. The cops claim Hooks brandished his shotgun at them when they came in; Hooks’s family’s lawyer says that the raid victim’s wife, Teresa, had seen cops in hoods lurking around the house and was worried they were robbers (the home had been burglarized only a couple nights before) and Hooks was merely worried about defending his property. No drugs or anything illegal was found in the home, according to the lawyer.

    • A cop may be following you everywhere

      The crackdown on protesters after the police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, highlighted that more and more, police departments possess sophisticated weapons and equipment originally designed for the battlefield. Federal anti-terrorism funding is a major driver of this trend, but once police departments have this equipment they use it — even if it’s not against terrorists.

      What few people understand is that police increasingly make use of sophisticated surveillance equipment as well. NSA-style mass surveillance technologies are making it possible for local police departments to gather information on each and every one of us, on a scale never before been possible.

  • DRM

    • Apple Facing Trial Over Whether Its Use Of DRM Violated Antitrust Laws

      When Apple first launched the iTunes store for music, it had DRM deeply embedded in it. According to reports around the time, this DRM was a key part of allowing Apple to get into the business of selling music. The labels demanded strong DRM. It didn’t take long for most people to recognize how the labels’ own demands for DRM actually gave Apple tremendous leverage over the record labels by basically handing the market over to Apple while making it that much more difficult for a competitor to jump into the space. While, years later, Apple and the labels finally ditched the DRM on music, one of Apple’s competitors, Real Networks had tried to hack its way around Apple’s DRM, which was called FairPlay, with its own DRM, called Harmony, that more or less reverse engineered Apple’s DRM. Apple responded by changing things so that Real’s music wouldn’t work on iPods (yes, this was back in the day of iPods). Real adjusted… and Apple broke it again.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XXXIX

      As previous updates – and many economists – have pointed out, the huge economic gains claimed for TTIP are largely illusory. The 119bn euros boost for the EU not only turns out to be under the most optimistic assumptions, clearly impossible to obtain now given the growing resistance to TTIP’s de-regulation, but refers to 2027, and is the difference between an EU economy with TTIP and without. That means the claimed 0.5% GDP boost is actually a ten-year cumulative figure, and amounts to the rather less impressive 0.05% extra GDP on average – in mathematical terms, indistinguishable from zero given the very approximate nature of the models used to make these predictions.

10.06.14

Links 6/10/2014: Linux 3.17, OpenELEC 4.2.1, FreeBSD 10.1 RC1, Debian 8.0 Beta 2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • With This Many Linux Games On Steam, You Could Almost Drop Windows

      It didn’t happen overnight, but Steam’s catalogue of Linux games has grown significantly over the last few years, no doubt helped by the release Value’s Debian-powered SteamOS. Abandoning Windows for the open source platform was once the quickest way to gaming frustration, be it a lack of native ports or wrestling with the likes of Wine or other virtualisation option, but with almost 700 working titles available, the variety is certainly there.

  • Server

    • How thin? Imagine the Linux server as a process

      Lately I’ve been causing a ruckus among readers who appear to have a very narrow view of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. My main point has been that we need a streamlined, finely tailored Linux server distro that better supports what server instances are becoming: transient, highly specialized bundles of processes and services. At some point, beyond Linux containers and cloud-scale server instances, we hit on the concept of server as process.

    • ARM and TSMC unveil roadmap for 64-bit ARM-based processors on 10nm FinFET process

      ARM and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have announced a new multi-year agreement that will deliver ARMv8-A processor IP optimized for TSMC 10nm FinFET process technology. Because of the success in scaling from 20nm SoC to 16nm FinFET, ARM and TSMC have decided to collaborate again for 10FinFET. This early pathfinding work will provide valuable learning to enable physical design IP and methodologies in support of customers to tape-out 10nm FinFET designs as early as the fourth quarter of 2015.

    • ARMed And Dangerous To Monopoly

      It gets even better. ARM and its “partners” are drawing a bead on 10nm which will make ARMed processors even less expensive to produce/operate. This will allow even more processors to be sold for tiny gadgets, mobile gadgets, personal computers and yes, servers and HPC. Of course Intel can do this too, reclaiming some performance leads but Intel will have to go head to head on price/performance, the antithesis of monopoly.

  • Kernel Space

    • Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV) Joined by AT&T, China Mobile, NTT, Telecom Italia, Vodafone, Orange, Sprint & Vendors

      AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone are the platinum-level founding members of Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNVF), a newly established carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform by Linux Foundation intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV.

    • Linux kernel 3.17 is released with some nifty new features

      Other updates that are included with the release include support for the Radeon R9 290 GPU family in the open-source AMD Linux driver. In addition, the open-source NVIDIA driver has received several improvements.

    • Linux 3.17 Kernel Released With Many Great Features

      After a calm week when Linux 3.17 was extended by one week, Linus Torvalds happily released the Linux 3.17 kernel a few minutes ago. Linux 3.17 is out in all of its glory and due to Torvalds’ travel schedule the Linux 3.18 merge window will be open for about three weeks.

    • Linux 3.17

    • Graphics Stack

      • Freedreno Gallium3D Is Passing 90%+ Of Piglit Tests

        In addition to doing the xf86-video-freedreno 1.3.0 release this weekend, Rob Clark also took the opportunity to write a lengthy blog post on the progress made for the open-source, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver stack for Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics hardware. The few contributors involved have done a stunning job over the past few months to implement much of OpenGL 3 for this ARM graphics driver and make other improvements — all without the support or backing of Qualcomm.

      • Freedreno Update

        A number of people have recently asked what is new with freedreno. It had been a while since posting an update.. and, well, not everyone watches mesa commit logs for fun, or watches #freedreno on freenode, so it seemed like time for another semi-irregular freedreno blog post.

      • NVIDIA Linux 2D Benchmarks With The GeForce GTX 980

        Last week having done the GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with a ton of OpenGL benchmarks followed by GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks and yesterday even running some updated NVIDIA VDPAU Linux benchmarks, next up for this high-end Maxwell graphics processor are some 2D performance benchmarks using NVIDIA’s binary blob.

      • NVIDIA VDPAU Performance With The GeForce GTX 980

        Now having done the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with plenty of OpenGL benchmarks and yesterday running a bunch of GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks, for your Sunday morning viewing are now some Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) results for a range of NVIDIA GPUs.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Open Source GNOME 3 Desktop Environment Wins Back Fans

        Is there still a future for GNOME 3, the open source Linux desktop that was once massively popular, yet in recent years has seen its preponderance wane in favor of alternatives such as Xfce and Canonical’s Unity? Recent indicators say yes.

        Full disclosure: I should was an avid GNOME user in the days of GNOME 2, the dead-simple yet elegant desktop environment that powered many Linux desktops for the better part of a decade. But when the GNOME developers switched their focus to the next generation of the platform, GNOME 3, circa 2011, I jumped ship, mostly because I couldn’t make sense of GNOME Shell, the developers’ attempt to discard everything users have learned to expect from the desktop-computer experience over the last 30 years and impose a radically new metaphor of user interaction in its place.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat scales up Storage Server 3 with support for Hadoop

        Red Hat has revamped its Storage Server platform, adding support for the Hadoop framework and the ability to scale up to support larger volumes of data.

      • Red Hat Storage Server 3 Advances File Storage and Apache Hadoop Big Data Services

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the availability of the newest major release of Red Hat Storage Server, a leading open software-defined storage solution for scale-out file storage. The advanced capabilities in Red Hat Storage 3 are well-suited for data-intensive enterprise workloads including big data, operational analytics and enterprise file sharing and collaboration. With its proven and validated workload solutions, Red Hat Storage Server 3 enables enterprises to curate enterprise data to increase responsiveness, control costs and improve operational efficiency.

      • Open source as second nature to this project leader

        Heiko Rupp, a contributor to Opensource.com and Principal Software Engineer and Project Lead for the RHQ project at Red Hat, shares with us in this Community Spotlight the hardware he wishes were more open in his life. Heiko also gives a glimpse into his day-to-day on the RHQ-Project, an enterprise management solution for JBoss middleware projects and other server-side applications.

      • Fedora

        • Btrfs Won’t Likely Replace EXT4 As The Default Until Fedora 23

          Josef Bacik commented this Sunday morning, “My plan is to push for F23, I’m still wrapping up some balance bugs and some other issues we’ve found at work and then this will be my next priority. Suse benefits from having a narrow ‘supported’ criteria, like only use it with lots of space and don’t use any of the RAID stuff, plus they have two kernel guys on it and Dave Sterba who is now in charge of btrfs-progs. Fedora unfortunately has me who has Facebook work to do and Eric [Sandeen] who is a professional [file-system] juggler. We will get there, and when we do it will be less painful than its going to be for Suse since they will have fixed it all for us.”

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 8.0 Beta 2 “Jessie” Released with GNOME as Default

        The Debian Installer Team has announced that Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is out and ready for download. This latest version brings some very interesting changes for Jessie and a ton of improvements.

        The Debian installer is always launched first, so if you want to test the latest Debian 8 version, you will have to install it. There is no Live CD, which means that you will need to have a lot of patience. From what we’ve seen so far, Debian Jessie Beta 2 was worth the wait.

      • Debian Installer Preps For 8.0 Jessie With Beta 2 Release

        Significant about the Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is that it defaults again to using the GNOME desktop environment over Xfce and there’s currently initial support for the ARM64 and PowerPC64el architectures with the Debian installer. This Jessie beta 2 update also has console setup changes, hardware detection improvements, and a number of other changes.

      • Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 release

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The Ubuntu 14.10 Upgrade: What to do

            The first thing you need to know is that Ubuntu 14.10 is almost exactly like 14.04. There are virtually no visible meaningful differences as far as I can tell. So if you are using Ubuntu and are sticking with Ubuntu, don’t expect pretty fireworks. This will not be an exciting upgrade.

          • Meizu: Ubuntu Touch Landing On Meizu MX4 In December

            Meizu’s MX4 flagship has been launched at the beginning of last month and the device is selling like hotcakes. People around the world have ordered (and many of them already received) Meizu’s flagship. It seems like Meizu will soon get an interesting software offering. Meizu, Bq and Canonical announced their partnership a while ago and it was just a matter of time before we see Ubuntu on Meizu, that’s at least what everyone was guessing at the time.

          • UbuTricks

            UbuTricks is a Zenity-based, graphical script with a simple interface. Although early in development, its aim is to create a simple, graphical way of installing updated applications in Ubuntu 14.04 and future releases.

          • The Ubuntu Touch RTM #3 Image Got Better support for Secure Connections and Updates For The Dialer, Messaging And Adress Book Apps

            While the first Ubuntu Touch RTM (release to manufacturing) image has been made available a few weeks ago, the Ubuntu Touch RTM #3 image has been recently released, bringing better user feedback for secure connections has been implemented, the developer mode has been enhanced, and fixes for the dialer, messaging, address-book, the ofono packages have been added and the Mir display server and QtMir packages have been updated.

          • Ubuntu MATE 14.10 Will Be Available With Two Desktop Layouts: One Providing GNOME2 Experience And One Mimicking Windows XP

            hile Canonical is focusing a lot on developing Ubuntu Touch and taking the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Mobile systems closer to convergence, the Ubuntu Mate version may convince many users to switch to Ubuntu.

            Ubuntu Mate 14.10 will be using MATE 1.8.1 as default and will contain some special optimizations for Ubuntu, optimizations that are not available if you only install the classical Mate version on Ubuntu.

          • Jono Bacon: How to Build Exponential Open Source Communities

            Open source projects live and die by their communities. Cultivating that core group of developers, administrators, users and other contributors who work together to improve the code base is no easy task, even for experienced community managers. There are some tried-and-true methods to follow, however, pioneered by some of the best open source communities around.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.1 to Let Users Choose the Login Screen Design

              Most of the Linux operating systems usually choose a specific design for the login window and stick with it. Developers rarely let users choose details about the login window, and at most they only allow them to modify the background.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Pi Vessel Mini PC Based On Raspberry Pi Platform Running Linux (video)

      German developers have this week launched a new mini PC called the Pi Vessel, which as the name suggests is based on the Raspberry Pi platform and comes supplied running a version of the versatile Linux operating system.

      The Pi Vessel has been created to provide a complete mini PC package and offers a fully enclosed Pi minicomputer using the Raspberry Pi a model B+ computer encased in an aluminium outer casing.

    • Phones

      • Top 4 Alternatives for iOS and Android – Firefox, Ubuntu, Tizen and Sailfish

        Firefox OS was developed by Mozilla and it made its appearance in 2012, but it was released one year later for smartphones and tablets, following to be used on smart TVs as well. It was built on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, which means that the websites are treated as applications and the HTML5 apps are communicating with the phone’s hardware through Web APIs. This makes it unique, but it’s not just a browser that runs on a Linux-based OS. Even the camera or the dialer are considered applications, and every website that is ran in the form of an app is accessed through Gecko engine. For now, the devices that can support Fire OS are Keon and Peak by Geeksphone.

      • Android

        • Google Launches Closed Version of Open Source Android

          So in an attempt to stem the flow of phone manufactures using the free version of Android, Google have developed Android One, which is essentially a premium version of Android which Google itself will run and maintain. It is essentially a light weight version of the original with less customization options which manufactures will be able to install and forget about because Google will take care of the maintenance.

        • SureMote Makes Your Android Phone a Remote For Any Wi-Fi Device You Own

          SureMote controls appliances through the infrared blaster on newer Android phones (there’s no iOS version yet, so iPhone fans need to hold on to their Blu-Ray clickers for now). It was developed by Israeli company Tekoia and already has thousands of devices connected. It’s a strong start, though the app will need to continue growing its list of compatible devices to be a true approximation of a universal remote.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Markdown throwdown: what happens when FOSS software gets corporate backing?

    Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into Web-ready HTML; it’s also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. Markdown has been around for a decade now, but it hasn’t seen an update in all that time—nearly unheard of for a piece of software. In that light, the fact that Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.

  • Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

    I already knew that academia is behind the curve when it comes to IT, from my non-tech part time job at a local university library. For starters, there’s the overreliance on Windows. Then there’s the use of poorly designed proprietary products when perfectly acceptable GPL solutions exist — not to mention the look of scorn and fright coming from the IT people whenever the term “free and open source” is uttered within their hearing.

  • Operating systems war story: How feminism helped me solve one of file systems’ oldest conundrums

    I was working on another human-centered file system feature, union mounts, when I heard that a friend of mine had been groped at an open source conference for the third time in one year. While I loved my file systems work, I felt like stopping sexual harassment and assault of women in open source was more urgent, and that I was uniquely qualified to work on it. (I myself had been groped by another Linux storage developer.) So I quit my job as a Linux kernel developer and co-founded the Ada Initiative, whose mission is supporting women in open technology and culture. Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault.

  • Stanford dropout returns to teach open-source startup class

    Nine years ago, Sam Altman was a Stanford University computer science student. And then he dropped out to start a startup.

    This year, he’s returned to campus — not to finish his degree, but to teach a class called “How to Start a Startup.”

    Altman, whose mobile location startup Loopt eventually sold for a cool $43.4 million, is now 29 years old and the president of Y Combinator, an accelerator that provides seed funding and guidance to fledgling startups. He launched the class to make the wealth of knowledge Y Combinator gives to a select group of startups more publicly available — not only by giving it to a class of 300 Stanford students but to everyone.

  • Elasticsearch director tells us how the magic happens

    I was introduced to open source nearly 15 years ago by a friend when I asked him what that foot thing was bouncing around on his screen saver. He then explained what GNOME was and what open source software was. I was hooked immediately; the philosophy and methodology made perfect sense to me. It took awhile for it to become the focus of my career, but it’s been an incredibly rewarding path.

  • Indians on open source honour roll

    Sayan Chowdhury couldn’t believe his name would be etched on the wall of fame along with other Mozillians. The Mozilla Monument outside the company’s office in San Francisco recognizes contributors who’ve helped the maker of the Firefox browser and other products keep the internet alive, open and accessible. Chowdhury is one among the 5,000-odd Mozilla volunteers doing his bit for the love of code.

  • Databases

  • CMS

    • Moodle will always be an open source project

      In 2001, Moodle was launched as an online solution for educators to freely adopt as a tool to reach and engage students in the learning experience within their own websites. Today, Moodle’s design and evolution continues to achieve this goal as a free and open source learning platform with clear pedagogical principles, adopted by over 50 million users in pretty much every country that has computers.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Make 4.1 released!

      The next stable version of GNU make, version 4.1, has been released and is available for download from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/

    • GCC Has A Call For Help To Improve Diagnostics

      Manuel explained, “GCC diagnostics have steadily improved in recent releases. In addition to the myriad of bugs fixed per release, every release had at least one major improvement in diagnostics. Unfortunately, the number of people contributing to this effort is very limited and we are more and more busy with other obligations. We need new blood and we need help. It has never been easier to contribute to GCC than nowadays. There are many ways you can help and there are tasks for every level of skill and time commitment.”

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Canadian firm develops ‘open source’ hydroponics system

      A Canadian 3D printing company has devised a hydroponics system which it calls 3Dponics, using some parts which are printed on a 3D printer and others which are commonly available.

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap as infrastructure – a localgov map?

        The Moabi project is reusing the tools of the OpenStreetMap project to map natural resource use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is an example of what Mikel Maron (from the Moabi project) and Elizabeth McCartney (from the US Geological Survey) called ‘OpenStreetMap as Infrastructure’ in their recent talk at State of the Map US. ie taking the OpenStreetMap tool-chain and applying them to new problems.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Apple completely loses the plot, revokes Computer Bild magazine accreditation over #bendgate video

    Obviously Apple is very keen to only supply review units and grant event accreditation only to medias that are guaranteed to heap praise on its products and wouldn’t bother investigating any potential issues with it.

  • Science

  • Health/Drug War

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Vast Majority of Americans Believe We’ll Use Combat Troops in Iraq. Of Course They Do.

      The vast majority of Americans—some 72 percent, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late September—say they believe that the United States will end up using ground troops to combat ISIS in Iraq.

      In other words, they don’t believe the multiple explicit promises that President Obama has made to the contrary since he first announced the start of this conflict in August.

    • You break it, you own it: American misadventures in the Middle East

      US intelligence services seem to have a knack for seeing what isn’t there – Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and endless communist plots in an earlier era – while missing what is. The CIA famously failed to spot the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union but it has also missed the pretty conspicuous warning signs of looming catastrophes where benign American action could have saved a lot of lives, such as the genocide in Rwanda two decades ago.

    • Political risk is now a growth industry in its own right

      Brandishing colour-coded maps and complex scoring systems and boasting an array of top-level government contacts, political risk consultancies can charge large sums for their analysis and reports.

    • Can bombs end it all

      It should be obvious by now that if such bombing campaigns have an effect, it is to make things much worse. What western leaders portray as valiant efforts to rid the world of evil forces such as ISIL just don’t play the same way in the region. In Iraq, for instance, western military intervention is viewed as support for the authoritarian, sectarian and West-approved leadership, whose persecution and air strikes are so bad that many Sunnis are prepared to put up with ISIL, for now, as preferable.

    • Washington’s Secret Agendas

      One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.

      [...]

      The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.

    • Iraq air-strikes: In the war against Isis, we have much more powerful weapons than bombs

      Waging war abroad won’t stop the long-term spread of extremism, but tackling it in our schools and mosques will

    • The US Government Won’t Give Peace a Chance

      Indeed, going further back in history, the United States grew from 13 former colonies into a vast nation based on the European model of colonial conquest: Wage brutal war on the indigenous population with the goal of annihilation.

      The nation that prides itself on declaring its independence from a colonial empire actually adapted the colonial model of expansion, both domestically and as an international military interventionist.

    • Learn the lessons of history: Oppose the threat of world war

      American bombs had killed 36 civilians in the first days of the Syrian campaign.

    • Fact-checking the war comparisons between Obama and Bush
    • Stephen Colbert mocks Fox News over Obama-Bush comparisons
    • Conservative Media Blames Rise of Islamic State On Long Debunked Claim That Obama “Missed” Intelligence Briefings

      Conservative media is dubiously claiming that the rise of the Islamic State is due in part to President Obama skipping scheduled daily intelligence briefings. The basis of this claim is a misleading interpretation of how intelligence briefings are received by the White House that was debunked two years ago.

    • Obama skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings – Govt Accountability Institute
    • ‘US wars in Mideast – only excuse for $ trillion military budget’

      The purpose of the US campaign against the Islamic State is to provide grounds for the trillion dollar annual military budget Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, told RT.

    • Why the Showdown with Islamic Extremists Is the War the Pentagon Was Hoping For
    • Bureau project shortlisted for Amnesty and Lovie awards

      The Bureau’s drones team has been shortlisted for two awards: an Amnesty Media Award for digital innovation and a Lovie Award for best news website.

    • US & Russia Re-Arming for a New Cold War

      The U.S. and Russia are sinking billions into nuclear-capable bombers, missiles, and submarines. Another round of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” anyone?

    • Lavrov: US Base Their Statements on Ukraine on Unverified Facts or Framing-Up
    • Operation Gladio: NATO’s Secret Armies

      This fascinating new study shows how the CIA and the British secret service, in collaboration with the military alliance NATO and European military secret services, set up a network of clandestine anti-communist armies in Western Europe after World War II.

    • ‘Join the invisible to make the impossible’: Israel’s Mossad now recruits agents online

      Israeli intelligence has given up to modern trends and introduced an online questionnaire for would-be spies. Unlike the businesslike CIA or MI5 web draft campaigns, Israelis are luring volunteers with mystery halo always shrouding Mossad’s activities.

    • Want to work for the CIA to kill ISIS terrorists? Try an internship with the National Clandestine Service
    • Egypt’s pain: Paralysis vs. people power in the land of the Pyramids

      When the CIA’s ex-Cairo station chief Miles Copeland penned his book ‘The Game of Nations’ in 1969, readers were shocked to discover the huge resources spent by Washington stage-managing the post-war politics of the Middle East and Egypt in particular.

    • Will New Film, ‘Colonia,’ Starring Emma Watson, Address U.S. Role in Chile?

      This could get awkward. A new film, “Colonia,” starring Emma Watson (@emwatson) and Daniel Bruhl, depicts events that transpired during the 1973 Chilean military coup. Will it touch on things the United States might or might not have done during that time frame?

      The United States, in 2000, admitted to some indirect involvement in the coup, which led to the ascension of dictator Augusto Pinochet. But the CIA has not gone so far as saying it was involved directly. That led to a peculiar exchange when President Obama went to Chile in 2009.

    • US Interference in Bolivia to be Revealed in New Documentary

      The documentary is called “USA Invasion: History of American Intervention in Bolivia”, covering the relationship between North America and Bolivia from 1920 until recent times.

      A documentary series that implicated Bolivian opposition candidates with United States agencies and neoliberal policies will be released on Friday, which is less than two weeks before the general elections.

    • Terror in Latin America and the Caribbean

      Cuban national hero José Martí referred to land lying between the Rio Grande River and the Straits of Magellan as “Our America.” In an essay with that title published in 1892, Martí evoked the Rio Grande boundary as a divide between peoples with their own history, culture and future and an industrializing, crass civilization to the north promising no good.

      Indeed, U.S. agents or proxies would soon be sewing grief and despair. Early in the 20th century they launched military incursions. Subsequently less blatant interventions left terror in their wake. Anniversaries in September and October – a season of sorrow in Our America – recall murder and mayhem. One asks: Can international solidarity prevent victims? Who in North America, epicenter of terrorist plotting, will take on that job?

    • Chamber of Commerce of Cuba renews licenses to foreign companies
    • Warren of conspiracies: Kennedy’s assassination

      The committee was formed in the mid-1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal and subsequent revelations about CIA activities, including information about the agency’s anti-Castro efforts not divulged to the Warren Commission.

      Its conclusion was stunning, though tempered by its choice of language: Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”, but investigators were unable to identify a second gunman or the extent of the conspiracy. The committee ruled out the Cuban and Soviet governments, as well as the Secret Service, FBI and CIA; it didn’t rule out the possible involvement of individual members of organised crime or anti-Castro Cuban groups.

    • Cuban Exile Militant Claims CIA Meeting With Oswald Before JFK Killing

      A former Cuban exile anti-Castro militant told a conference audience Sept. 26 in a blockbuster revelation that he saw accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with their mutual CIA handler six weeks before the killing and there would have been no anti-Castro movement in Cuba without the CIA funding.

    • Records: Kissinger made plans to attack Cuba
    • Kissinger wanted to smash Cuba in 1976 for its intervention in Angola

      US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew up plans to “smash Cuba” with air strikes nearly 40 years ago, government papers obtained by researchers show. He was angered by Cuba’s 1976 military intervention in Angola and was considering retaliation if Cuban forces were deployed elsewhere in Africa.

    • Fred Grimm: About Henry’s plan to bomb Cuba

      Except it wasn’t just Cuba that was intervening in Angola. China, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were messing about. Zaire (as the Democratic Republic of Congo was called under the terrible, autocratic reign of Mobutu Sese Seko) was trying to steal the oil province of Cabinda from Angola. And South Africa had invaded, worried that a leftie Angola might undermine apartheid and give upstart Namibians unwelcome notions about independence.

    • Kissinger’s Plan to Bomb Cuba (Video)

      In the new book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” authors Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande use recently declassified documents to expose the secret history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba.

    • Kissinger Wanted to Attack Cuba in 1976
    • Secret History of U.S.-Cuba Ties Reveals Henry Kissinger Plan to Bomb Havana for Fighting Apartheid

      In the new book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” authors Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande use recently declassified documents to expose the secret history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba. Among the revelations are details of how then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger considered launching airstrikes against Cuba after Fidel Castro sent troops to support independence fighters in Angola in 1976. In the years that followed, top-secret U.S. emissaries, including former President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, worked to normalize relations with Cuba. The book’s release comes as Cuban leader Raúl Castro is set to participate for the first time in next year’s Summit of the Americas in Panama. Cuba recently denounced the Obama administration for extending the more than 50-year embargo for another year in a little-noticed move in September.

    • The Reporter Behind the Unveiling Scoops that Brought Down CIA

      The Secret Service did not disclose this amount of information. Also, after the hearing, Leonnig brought to light President Obama‘s elevator ride with an armed felon who was acting strange.

      Leonnig “…has been on the beleaguered agency’s tail for years: She reported in 2012 that a dozen agents solicited prostitutes while traveling with the president,” Yahoo! said.

    • Former CIA director’s undoing was quick as support vanished

      Pierson’s undoing was not telling the president about a Sept. 16 incident in Atlanta in which President Barack Obama rode an elevator with an armed security contractor during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two White House officials said. The armed contractor’s proximity to Obama violated the agency’s security protocols.

    • For Julia Pierson, No Face-to-Face Meeting With Obama
    • Op-Ed: In Libya attacks hit CIA-linked Haftar’s air base in Benghazi

      After being driven out of most of Benghazi CIA-linked Khalifa Haftar and his allies are holed up in the key Benina air base on the outskirts of Benghazi.

    • US headed for ‘China Syndrome’ meltdown in Syria

      Usually, Washington starts scapegoating its spies after its wars have failed to achieve their objectives – as happened in Iraq, when the natives failed to greet the American invaders with bottomless gratitude, and in Vietnam, where the awesome U.S. war machine slaughtered three million people but still could not subdue a Third World country’s quest for independence.

      But President Obama has essentially inaugurated his bombing campaign in Syria with an admission of past “mistakes,” telling 60 Minutes that the CIA “underestimated” the strength of ISIS. What Obama’s admission actually shows is that the real U.S. mission in Syria – the three-year proxy war to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad – is already a failure.

    • REALITIES BEHIND THE RAPID EXPANSION OF ISIS

      As far as the public knows, there is no money attached to the bill. The Saudi government has already volunteered to train and contribute funds to approved Syrian rebel groups. According to an expert from Foreign Policy Magazine, the CIA has already been training Syrian fighters at a base in Jordan for a long time. Understandably, the efforts have not started to pay off yet. Obviously there is a broad range of people fighting against the regime in Damascus. One of them has gained strength more rapidly than the others – ISIS. Well, who are these militants? Where do they come from? According to the BBC, the group was first established in Iraq as a derivation of al-Qaida in Iraq.

    • A serial intervener, after all

      America’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate president, Barack Obama, who helped turn Libya into a failed state by toppling ruler Moammar Gadhafi, has started a new war in Syria and Iraq even as the U.S. remains embroiled in the Afghanistan war. Obama’s air war in Syria — his presidency’s seventh military campaign in a Muslim nation and the one likely to consume his remaining term in office — raises troubling questions about its objectives and his own adherence to the rule of law.

    • US targets Syria infrastructure rather than militants: Sabrosky

      Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Tuesday while commenting on Washington-led coalition airstrikes in Syria that began last week.

    • The mess in Afghanistan
    • Afghanistan Signs Pact Allowing 10,000 U.S. Troops to Remain
    • As US-Afghanistan Sign Troop Deal, CIA-Backed Warlord Behind Massacre of 2,000 POWs Sworn-In as VP

      Afghanistan has inaugurated its first new president in a decade, swearing in Ashraf Ghani to head a power-sharing government. Joining him on stage Monday was Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s new vice president. Dostum is one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, once described by Ghani himself as a “known killer.” Dostum’s rise to the vice presidency comes despite his involvement in a 2001 massacre that killed up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war. The victims were allegedly shot to death or suffocated in sealed metal truck containers after they surrendered to Dostum and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. The dead prisoners — some of whom had been tortured — were then buried in the northern Afghan desert. Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll, has been widely accused of orchestrating the massacre and tampering with evidence of the mass killing. For more than a decade, human rights groups have called on the United States to conduct a full investigation into the massacre including the role of U.S. special forces and CIA operatives. We speak to Jamie Doran, director of the 2002 documentary “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death,” and Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy at Physicians for Human Rights, the group that discovered the site of the mass graves of the Taliban POWs.

    • Glenn Greenwald: U.S. manufactured militant threat as pretext to bomb Syria

      In an extensive new report, The Intercept questions whether the much-hyped Khorasan Group actually exists

    • How the U.S. Concocted a Terror Threat to Justify Syria Strikes, and the Corporate Media Went Along

      As the U.S. expands military operations in Syria, we look at the Khorasan group, the shadowy militant organization the Obama administration has invoked to help justify the strikes. One month ago, no one had heard of Khorasan, but now U.S. officials say it poses an imminent threat to the United States. As the strikes on Syria began, U.S. officials said Khorasan was “nearing the execution phase” of an attack on the United States or Europe, most likely an attempt to blow up a commercial plane in flight. We are joined by Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept, whose new article with Glenn Greenwald is “The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria.”

    • MSM Support Brazen Lawlessness

      Media scoundrels cheerlead them. They regurgitate Big Lies doing so. Last week’s headlines featured a so-called Khorasan Group.

      It’s more fiction than fact. It’s fake. Irresponsible fear-mongering gets people to believe otherwise.

      Posing a threat to Europe and America’s heartland, it’s claimed. Truth is polar opposite.

    • A coherent strategy for the Middle East

      The ranks of the Islamic State jihadists are already full of “moderate rebels” previously trained, equipped and funded by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA. So much for the State Department and CIA’s vetting process, particularly when these militias have shown a capability to shift allegiances on a daily, if not more frequent, basis. The fact of the matter is that the main beneficiaries of our attacks on the Islamic State will be the Iranian proxies in Damascus and Baghdad.

    • Has the ISIS Crisis Pushed the CIA into Bed with Hezbollah?

      A few months ago, a former top CIA operative applied for a Lebanese visa to do some work in Beirut for an oil company. While he was waiting for approval, a package arrived at his client’s office. Inside was a full dossier on his CIA career. “It included things on where I had served, well back into 1990s,” said Charles Faddis, who ran the CIA’s covert action program in Kurdistan during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, among other top assignments. “It had details on my travels to Israel and Lebanon—years ago.”

    • Americans: Who’s Your Enemy Now?

      What the U.S. government doesn’t want the world to focus on is the fact that the CIA was very active in supplying Libyan rebels with support to take down Gaddafi. Unfortunately, in an effort to take out one enemy of freedom, the CIA got in bed with another — many of the Libyan rebels included Al-Qaeda backed jihadists who were also Al-Qaeda in Iraq. (1)

    • Who’s to Blame for ISIS ‘Surprise’?

      For several years, Official Washington blinded itself to the growing radicalism of the Syrian opposition, all the better to portray the Assad regime as the “bad guys” and the rebels as the “good guys.” Now, everyone is pointing fingers about the ISIS “surprise,” as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

    • Eyes Finally Open to Syrian Realities

      For the past three years, Official Washington has viewed the Syrian civil war as “white-hatted” rebels against “black-hatted” President Assad, but finally some of the “gray-hatted” reality is breaking through, though perhaps too late, Robert Parry reports.

    • US airstrikes launched amid intelligence vacuum

      Human rights groups also say coalition airstrikes in both countries have killed as many as two dozen civilians. U.S. officials say they can’t rule out civilian deaths but haven’t confirmed any.

    • Civilian casualty standard eased in Iraq, Syria

      Warren acknowledged that the Pentagon could not say for sure that every person killed in the bombing of Iraq and Syria has been a combatant.

    • Activists still selling peace, but is public still buying?

      The activists assured me their message was still relevant — that America’s foreign policy remains one of “war-making,” as longtime protestor Greg Giogio put it — and it seems they were right.

    • Cornel West: Obama Administration Is a ‘Drone Presidency’

      Famed public intellectual Cornel West, whose new book Black Prophetic Fire is a re-examination of key black political figures through a different lens, was initially a big supporter of Barack Obama and appeared with him during his first presidential campaign. But in 2012, West says he didn’t even vote. “I couldn’t vote for a war criminal,” he said, calling Obama’s administration a “drone presidency.”

    • Cornel West: Obama ‘Paternalistic’ to Young Black Men, but ‘Subservient’ to Wall Street

      Cornel West has been one of President Obama‘s biggest liberal critics, both on race and foreign policy, and in a new video for TIME, West says that Obama has a very “paternalistic” way of speaking when he addresses young black men.

    • The Civil Rights Leader Cornel West Thinks You Should Know About

      Cornel West — acclaimed thinker and activist — sat down to talk with Belinda Luscombe about his new book, Black Prophetic Fire. The book, which he wrote with Christa Buschendorf, looks at the work of six leaders from African-American history. But, as is pointed out in the video above, those six leaders aren’t all equally well known: the book moves from the most famous Civil Rights names, W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King, Jr., to a name that may be unfamiliar to those not versed in the subject.

    • Fred Branfman, who exposed secret U.S. bombing of Laos, dies at 72

      Fred Branfman, the first person to draw public attention to a previously unknown U.S. bombing campaign inside Laos during the Vietnam War and who later became a leading antiwar activist in Washington, died Sept. 24 at a medical facility in Budapest, where he had lived for several years. He was 72.

    • Jordan on high alert for possible IS retaliation

      Many rumors are circulating in Amman about alleged terror threats to shopping malls and other public places in response to news that the kingdom’s air force has joined the US-led coalition in targeting Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria.

    • Opinion: Did US intelligence truly underestimate ISIS?

      While US President Barack Obama has said his country’s intelligence services underestimated the strength of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Saudi Interior Minister Prince Muhammad Bin Naif said: “We know that ISIS was not randomly formed but rather sponsored by states and organizations that employ all their resources and ill intentions in backing ISIS.” How can we interpret this?

    • ISIS Threat: Let’s Refuse to Be Scared

      Late in the 20th century, state terror was a routine instrument of policy, both domestically and internationally. The Phoenix Program in South Vietnam was a CIA-sponsored assassination campaign against suspected Communist leaders on the village level. Chile’s dictator Pinochet waged state terror against leftists and even blew up a Chilean exile in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan funded the Nicaraguan contras, who murdered schoolteachers, while the CIA laid mines in Nicaraguan harbours. South Africa’s apartheid regime carried out state terror against African National Congress members both domestically and in other African countries.

    • Last Days in Vietnam: Rory Kennedy Looks at the Fall of Saigon
    • Chaos and Tragedy in a “Post-War” Zone: Last Days in Vietnam

      Next April will be the 40th anniversary of the operation. Watching the film made me think again of the all the follow-on effects and long-term consequences of any war. It made me think also of the refugees who came to the U.S. and of their accomplishments. In 2009, Commander Hung B. Le, son of a Vietnamese navy officer and rescued by the USS Barbour County (LST-1195) at sea after the air evacuation ended, commanded the USS Lassen (DDG-82) as she sailed into Da Nang. Maj. Bung Lee and his family, now retired Rear Admiral Chambers and Commander Vern Jumper, the USS Midway’s Air Boss who managed the flight deck that hectic day, attended the 35th anniversary celebration held on the Midway, now a museum in San Diego. Recently, Brigadier General Viet Luong, whose family left Vietnam in the “black operation” the day before the official evacuation, became the U.S. Army’s first Vietnamese general officer.

    • Biden apologizes to Erdogan in phone call

      US Vice President Joe Biden apologized Saturday to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was angry over comments in which Biden said Erdogan had admitted that Turkey had made mistakes by allowing foreign fighters to cross into Syria.

    • Biden: Turks, Saudis, UAE funded and armed Al Nusra and Al Qaeda

      When Joe Biden gets candid, he really lets rip. The US vice president, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, on Thursday told his audience – point blank – that America’s Sunni allies are responsible for funding and arming Al Qaeda-type extremists in Syria.

    • Peace prize pundit bets on Article 9 guardians to win Nobel

      A Nobel Peace Prize observer with a relatively unsuccessful betting record speculates that the Japanese people who uphold war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution are most likely to be chosen the winner of this year’s award, which is to be announced this week.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • When WikiLeaks cold-called Hillary Clinton

      In a trailer advertising WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s new book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, the never-before-seen clip (below) shows WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison phoning the State Department’s front desk and asking to speak with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It’s an emergency,” Assange prompts Harrison to say, passing a notecard across the table.

    • Wikileaks accuses intelligence watchdog of misleading Senate inquiry

      Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has accused an Australian government agency of giving misleading evidence to a parliamentary inquiry.

    • The CIA Still Redacts How Much It Paid for PCs in 1987
    • CIA: Cost of Personal Computer in 1987 is a Secret
    • The Dissenter [reposted from here, “Inspector General Claims to Have Found No ‘Instances’ Where CIA Over-Classified Secrets”)

      Also, the CIA “chose not to evaluate declassification actions” in this report but provided “no explanation for that decision.” In other words, it did not bother to inspect whether it is appropriately declassifying information that should not be kept secret.

      All the recommendations in the inspector general report are censored. They all address how the CIA can better mark information that the agency classifies and for some unclear reason that is sensitive information that if released would help the terrorists win.

    • CIA Doesn’t Think It’s Keeping Too Many Secrets

      In a September 2013 report, the CIA’s inspector general could find “no instances” of over-classification. The report, obtained Wednesday by The Huffington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, was based on a sample of CIA intelligence reports.

      The report was produced in response to a federal law meant to reduce over-classification. In January, the CIA refused to release the report to HuffPost until after it underwent a review process.

    • CIA Asks to Destroy Email of Non-Senior Agency Officials

      The Central Intelligence Agency has asked for authority to destroy email messages sent by non-senior officials of the Agency. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has tentatively approved the proposal.

    • CIA gets permission to destroy certain emails

      The CIA asked the National Archives and Records Administration In August if it could destroy certain employee emails, according to an NARA appraisal obtained by the Federation of American Scientists.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Pacific Islands Facing ‘Existential Threats’

      Taking to the General Assembly podium today, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Joe Natuman said that as a Pacific small Island developing State (SIDS), his country was confronted with unique development challenges, which needed to be addressed by the UN and international community.

    • On final day of UN Assembly, small island nations discuss climate change, economics

      Noting that small island developing nations must speak with one voice at the global level, representatives of those countries today pressed for international economic partnerships and efforts to combat climate change, on the final day of the annual General Assembly debate in New York.

      The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade for Barbados urged the international community to make provisions for countries which are both small island developing nations and highly-indebted middle income countries.

    • Neil Young and Willie Nelson Protest Keystone Pipeline in American Heartland

      Harvest the Hope, a concert on the farm of Art and Helen Tanderup in Neligh, Nebraska, right on the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, was many things: a musical tour de force starring Neil Young and Willie Nelson; an anti-pipeline message to President Obama whose election graphic formed the O of “Hope” on the stage banner, the word itself Obama campaign terminology; an artistic call to activism designed by artists Richard Vollaire and John Quigley whose crop design “Heartland No KXL” was plowed by farmer Tanderup into his corn field as he followed Quigley’s direction, in an image spanning the size of 80 football fields; and “The day the idea of the Keystone Pipleline died” as pronounced by thousands of attendees who stood in rows like the corn and chanted in call and response with Quigley.

    • Dead water reserves can’t quench Sao Paulo’s thirst

      Four months after Sao Paulo’s state water utility Sabesp spent 80 million reais (26.3 million euros) to tap so-called dead reserves in its shrinking reservoirs, water supplies for South America’s biggest metropolis are even worse than they were before.

      Brazil’s worst drought in eight decades has turned most of Cantareira, the four-lake complex that supplies half of greater Sao Paulo’s 20 million residents, into a dried-up bed of cracked earth. What’s left are sediment-filled pools in the centre — the dead reserves — that were previously untappable until Sabesp built 3 kilometres of pipes to drain the water.

      The manoeuvre bought Sabesp some time by boosting drinking supplies by 182.5 billion litres to almost 27 per cent of Cantareira’s capacity. Sabesp, formally Cia. de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo, expected the water to last until reservoirs are refreshed by summer rains that typically run from October through March.

  • Finance

    • Has Neoliberalism Turned Us All Into Psychopaths?

      We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatization have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re skeptical, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favors certain personality traits and penalizes others.

    • Convicted former U.S. congressman James Traficant dies

      He claimed the government had tried to frame him because of his criticism of the FBI, CIA and Internal Revenue Service.

    • Flamboyant U.S. congressman James Traficant served time for bribery

      He claimed the government had tried to frame him because of his criticism of the FBI, CIA and IRS. During the two-month trial, he did a curbside interview on live network TV outside the courthouse each morning and then went inside to challenge U.S. District Judge Lesley Brooks Wells, who tried to dissuade Mr. Traficant from representing himself.

    • James Traficant Jr., flamboyant former congressman from Ohio, dies at 73

      In Washington, he barreled through the House in rumpled sports coats and loud shirts. Traficant fashioned himself as a maverick populist, spending much of his career railing against foreign aid and various government agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the CIA.

      “Lying, thieving, stealing nincompoops” is how he once described the latter.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Scalia has a secrecy problem: Hiding and hypocrisy at the Supreme Court

      The court plays a growing activist role in our politics and lives — yet all nine justices hide in the shadows

    • The Surprising Power of Subtitles

      Evangelists aren’t the only ones who have long recognized the virtues of cross-lingual engagement. By the end of World War II, the U.S.-funded Voice of America radio network was producing more than 1,000 different programs for worldwide broadcast in over 40 languages. In the late 1950s, the CIA had thousands of copies of a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago printed, which it then surreptitiously distributed to Soviet citizens.

    • Cuomo’s terrorism card game

      He jets to Afghanistan and announces a new commitment to address threats. Honest awakening or election-year opportunism?

    • TV show makes fun of ISIS propaganda
    • Iraqi comedy show mocks Islamic State propaganda
    • Propaganda to fight back with IS TV satire

      As Iraqi forces struggle to pin back the Islamic State group on the ground, Baghdad is taking its war against the jihadists to the airwaves with a television comedy series.

      The usually elusive Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi features prominently in the show, whose promoters argue that ridiculing the jihadist supremo can help dent his aura of almost supernatural villainy.

  • Censorship

    • How Liberals Became the New Book Banners

      Before last week’s Banned Book Week recedes much farther in the rearview mirror, let’s pause for a moment to note this curious fact: Some of those who oppose censorship also support it.

    • The deplorable censorship of the installation Exhibit B at the Barbican

      There was once a telling advertisement for Guinness that went: “I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it.” This super-intelligent cautionary jingle was adopted as the touchstone for his case by Dr Kehinde Andrews in his Head to Head with one of Exhibit B’s actors, Stella Odunlami (New Review).

    • Censorship in ‘New Turkey’ out of control, media groups show

      This past week, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government shut down a critical news site, censored an article written by a columnist and launched an investigation into another news portal.

    • Turkey’s Erdoğan Says He Is ‘Increasingly Against the Internet Every Day’

      Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lined himself up against a powerful enemy today, when he voiced his growing opposition to the world wide web.

    • AP History class standards spark fight over patriotism and censorship

      When the College Board established new national standards for Advanced Placement U.S. History courses, conservative members of the school board in Jefferson County, Colorado, called for changes to their local curriculum to promote patriotism and the free enterprise system and discourage civil disorder. Hari Sreenivasan reports on the ensuing protests against censorship by students.

    • Egypt Seizes Newspapers to Censor an Article

      The Egyptian authorities on Wednesday confiscated all the copies of one of the country’s largest private newspapers in order to censor an article, just days after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi vowed in an American television interview that there was “no limitation on freedom of expression in Egypt.”

    • Internet in Iran: A Daily Struggle Against Censorship

      It is estimated that Iranian authorities block access to more than 5 million webpages, including popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; in addition to porn sites, bank webpages, and any media considered hostile to Iran.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Ray McGovern

      Today’s Project Censored Show presents a speech given by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. After his retirement from the CIA, McGovern founded “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,” and has criticized US spy agencies for their lawbreaking, and subservience to the agendas of politicians. He spoke in Santa Rosa, California on September 24, 2014, at an event co-sponsored by Project Censored.

    • Ray McGovern Triumphs Over State Department
    • Ex-Spy Vindicated After Protesting Hillary

      McGovern is a changed man. He started out in the Army, then he worked for the CIA from the Kennedy administration up through the first Bush presidency, preparing the president’s daily intel brief. He was a hell of a spy. McGovern began to see the evil of much of the government’s work, and has since become an outspoken critic of the intelligence world and an advocate for free speech. He speaks on behalf of people like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

    • Detention orders obtained before anti-terrorism raids were carried out

      This may be the first time that Australian anti-terrorism powers have been used in detention of suspects without charge

    • Scores of students still missing after ambush by Mexican police and gunmen

      At least six people killed and at least 20 students ‘disappeared’ by police in Iguala believed to be controlled by drug cartel

    • Mexican women pay high price for country’s rigid abortion laws

      Mexico has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, and women can find themselves criminalised even after miscarriage

    • US envoy warns against press censorship

      South Africa has to be wary of attempts to censor the media, such as SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s recent suggestion that journalists be licensed, US ambassador Patrick Gaspard said on Tuesday.

    • Washington Times Settles With DHS in Case Involving Improper Seizure

      When the Department of Homeland Security illegally seized notes from Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson in 2013, the Times and the reporter took the DHS to court. A settlement has now been reached that includes a review of training for the DHS’ Coast Guard criminal investigators.

    • Student Journalism Conference Features Lovejoy Award Recipient

      Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter who faces possible jail time for refusing to reveal confidential sources, will receive Colby’s Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism and give a formal address at 5:30 p.m. in Lorimer Chapel. The public is invited to the panel discussion and the convocation.

    • NY Journalist Wins Lovejoy Award

      A New York Times reporter who faced the prospect of jail for refusing to reveal a CIA source of classified information is recipient of this year’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award.

    • Colby College honors journalist James Risen

      The New York Times journalist who’s receiving this year’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism has faced down the prospect of jail for refusing to reveal a CIA source of classified information.

      The Justice Department is trying to force reporter James Risen to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information. Risen used an unidentified source for his reports about a botched CIA effort to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

    • [Western media:] Russian state television says Britain and US provoked Hong Kong protests

      Accusations from pro-Kremlin media reflect Russia’s growing ties with China after US and EU sanctions

    • More Washington Lies. Hong Kong, ISIS, Ebola, Afghanistan …

      Whatever is occurring in Hong Kong, it bears no relation to what is being reported about it in the Western print and TV media. These reports spin the protests as a conflict between the demand for democracy and a tyrannical Chinese government

      Ming Chun Tang in the alternative media CounterPunch says that the protests are against the neoliberal economic policies that are destroying the prospects of everyone but the one percent. In other words, the protests are akin to the American occupy movement.

    • The Skinny on Hong Kong’s Occupy Central Movement

      I have been watching the Occupy Central Movement with some detachment (some are also calling it the Umbrella Movement, since protestors sport umbrellas against the tropical sun and afternoon showers). The rubber stamp, Ministry of Truth-Western mainstream media is kowtowing to the Washington-London-Paris consensus, declaring that Occupy Central is hungering for Western style “democracy”, that it is bigger than Hong Kong. It all sounds so predictably deja vu. Knowing that free-wheeling Hong Kong is gladly letting CIA front NGO National Endowment for Democracy operate on its soil, is all we need to know. The main “non” governmental organizations (NGOs) that do the CIA’s bidding around the world are…

    • US State Dept Funding and Occupy Central, the Ties that Bind

      We Fully Support A People’s Movement In Hong Kong. As we explain further details about ‘Occupy Central’, it is the intention of this article to help the students and Hong Kongese people who are fighting for the future of Hong Kong make informed decisions on who they join in coalitions with and choose for Chief Executive when they achieve True Universal Sufferage.

    • Ships Passing in the Night

      (This Chinese peninsula) became a colony of the British Empire after the First Opium War (1839–42). As a result of the negotiations and the 1984 agreement between China and Britain, Hong Kong was handed over to the People’s Republic of China and became its first Special Administrative Region on 1 July 1997, under the principle of “one country, two systems”. The educational system followed the British English model until 2009, and Hong Kong’s independent judiciary functions under the common law framework.[15][16] The constitutional document drafted by the Chinese side before the handover based on the terms enshrined in the Joint Declaration,[17] governs its political system, and stipulates that Hong Kong shall have a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign relations and military defense.[18][19] Although it has a multi-party system, a minority controls 30 out of 70 seats of its legislature. Hong Kong has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world but also the highest income inequality among advanced economies.[5][tag]

    • Libeling a democracy movement: Accusing Hong Kong Activists of Being Tools of US Policy is Both Ignorant and Dangerous

      A number of progressive and left-leaning writers in the US have jumped on a report by Wikileaks that the neo-con dominated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and various other US-government linked organizations with a history of subversion and sowing discord abroad are operating in Hong Kong and on that basis are making the leap of “logic” that the democracy protests in Hong Kong must therefore be a creation of US policy-makers.

    • Beyond 935 Lies

      Charles Lewis’ book, 935 Lies, would make a fine introduction to reality for anyone who believes the U.S. government usually means well or corporations tend to tell the truth in the free market. And it would make an excellent introduction to the decline and fall of the corporate media. Even if these topics aren’t new to you, this book has something to add and retells the familiar quite well.

      The familiar topics include the Gulf of Tonkin, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the civil rights movement, U.S. aggression and CIA overthrows, Pinochet, Iran-Contra, lying tobacco companies, and Edward R. Murrow. Lewis brings insight to these and other topics, and if he doesn’t document that things were better before the 1960s, he does establish that horrible things have been getting worse since, and are now much more poorly reported on.

    • Top German Editor: CIA Bribing Journalists

      Members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for spinning the news in a way that supports US interests, and some German outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO, according to a new book by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers.

    • German Journalist Reveals That The CIA Has Compromised The Western Media

      A German journalist reveals in his new bestseller that Western Media is paid by the CIA to print propaganda instead of the news.

    • CIA and US military use of Shannon Airport examined by Oireachtas Petitions Committee

      AN OIREACHTAS COMMITTEE visited Shannon Airport this week to look at concerns by human rights group Shannonwatch about its use by US military aircraft in contravention of Irish neutrality and its possible use by the CIA for illegal renditions.

    • Joint Oireachtas Committee to visit Shannon
    • CIA Mum Regarding Surveillance of U.S. Senate

      The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the CIA for records on the agency’s spying on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network.

      The complaint recounts events leading up to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accusing the CIA of secretly removing documents from the Intelligence Committee, searching its computers and trying to intimidate congressional investigators.

      The Committee has been investigating the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

    • Majority Say Brennan Violated Checks and Balances, and Must Go

      The Public Policy robo-poll of 898 registered voters was commissioned by the Constitution Project, a highly-respected non-partisan group that has been active in calling attention to the lack of accountability for the torture of detainees during the last administration.

      The poll found overwhelming public support for release of a long-completed report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report is said to disclose abuse that was more brutal, systematic and widespread than generally recognized, and to expose a pattern of deceit in the Bush administration’s descriptions of the program to Congress and the public.

      But despite having been completed in December 2012, the report remains inaccessible to the public. Most recently, the White House and the CIA have proposed redactions that Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein said effectively undermine its key findings.

    • Former ambassador calls Roberts ‘congenital liar’ complicit in torture scandal
    • Pat Roberts, Congenital Liar

      Make no mistake: Torture is not “enhanced interrogation,” but a war crime under the Geneva Conventions written at the direction of the U.S. since World War II when Japanese officials were executed for the offense.

    • Will There Be a Backlash Against Torture?

      The Senate intelligence committee hopes to release soon a redacted summary of its 6,300-page report on the CIA’s interrogational torture program. As we wait, the committee is wrangling with the CIA over redactions that the CIA is demanding. So it is an opportune moment to think about how the public might react to the report.

    • Poll shows strong support for releasing Senate torture report

      An overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans thinks that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence should make public its comprehensive report on the CIA’s detention and torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11, according to a new poll released today by The Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.

    • Controversial former militia leader puts himself forward as Libya’s savior

      He claims that he was “abducted by the CIA” with his then-pregnant wife a decade ago, in Thailand, then transited through the UK-controlled island Diego Garcia and handed over to the Gadhafi regime.

    • Former Military and Intelligence Officials Condemn U.S. Torture Regime

      On October 1, 2014, Human Rights First released the following letter, signed by over a dozen former military and intelligence officials, categorically condemning the U.S. torture regime – calling it illegal, ineffective and counterproductive. As the Senate Intelligence Committee gears up to release portions of its CIA torture report, the Government Accountability Project commends the efforts of these and other former military and intelligence officials, without whom the public would still be in the dark about the United States’ torture program. National security whistleblowers have a long and notable history of exposing the crimes and human rights abuses the United States has committed in the name of national security, including torture. By bringing these abuses to light, national security whistleblowers play a vital role in ensuring that the United States never commits these terrible acts again.

    • CIA sued over Senate spying

      A Washington-based privacy organization is suing the CIA to obtain details about how it spied on Senate staffers.

      The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the agency inspector general’s report on the spying incident, it announced on Thursday.

    • Crackdown on terrorism threatens civil liberties

      President Obama’s “war on terrorism,” spurred by the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), poses a potential threat to American civil liberties. Under mounting pressure to eliminate an increasing number of security threats, national security professionals may be tempted to overlook boundaries in the name of national security.

    • MI5 ‘gave green light to Moazzam Begg trip to Syria’

      Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said he was effectively given a “green light” to go to Syria by MI5 before being detained on terror charges on his return.

    • Did John F. Kennedy’s death Impact You?

      This last weekend the AARC Conference drew over 200 to the Bethesda Hyatt Regency on the 50 th anniversary of the Warren Report. Kennedy’s violent death in 1963 shocked Americans, undermining public trust.

    • CoE: Human organ trafficking trials outside Kosovo

      The Council of the European Union decided on Monday to mandate EULEX to support the judicial proceedings relocated from Kosovo that arise from the investigation by the EU Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) into the allegations contained in prosecutor Dick Marty’s Council of Europe (CoE) report on the human organ trafficking in Kosovo and Albania in 1999.

    • Vecer: Yugoslavian army used to test chemical weapon in Macedonia
    • Dirty Politics: Police raid Nicky Hager’s home

      Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager has had his home raided by police searching for the hacker Rawshark.

      In a 10-hour search of his house, Hager said computers and papers were seized in what appeared to be an attempt to discover the identity of the person who provided information used in the Dirty Politics book.

    • ‘Criminals are at work in refugee homes’

      A photo appearing to show a refugee being abused at a home for asylum seekers has caused outrage in Germany. The photo has been compared to those from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Police are now investigating six cases of abuse at three different centres.

    • Criminal Guards Under Investigation for Abusing Refugees in Asylum Centres

      German police are investigating reports that guards at three asylum centres in North Rhine-Westphalia have been abusing the refugees interned in the centres. Photos released showing the abuse have been compared to Abu-Ghraib, whilst a colleague has told German media that the group of guards were nicknamed “the SS”, The Local has reported.

    • Justice in America. Falling Short of the Mark: The Eric Holder Dossier

      Holder, for that reason, leaves the rule of law in something of a tattered state, and his successor is not likely to do much of a restoration work. This, suggests Ryan Cooper, may be as much a matter of personal flaw as systemic problem.[4] Truly, an altogether illustrative statement about the Obama administration.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

10.04.14

Links 4/10/2014: WebOS is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Lures The Killer App Closer

    A comment like that will draw some fire from IBM. Big Blue has megabucks invested in Linux and is tooting the Eclipse horn to prove its openness in developing software such as Rational Developer for i. Zend Technologies has had success with PHP, as has other application development vendors such as Profound Logic and BCD. And newcomer to the IBM i community, PowerRuby, has joined the app dev party as well.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla might add Tor encryption to its Firefox web browser

        The proof of concept for this is already out in The Pirate Browser, a product of The Pirate Bay, which offers a Firefox Tor bundle designed to access banned websites, though not specifically to protect anonymity. Tor’s web browser, too, is a version of the open source Firefox web browser.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Reasons I Love GNUstep — Speaking for Free Software

      Recently, I had a discussion with RMS about being a speaker for Free Software. In the end I was told simply to record some of my talks and that I would be given some feedback, but during the discussion I explained why I think GNUstep is important to free software and I believe that this is something that I think is important for other people to understand as well:

  • Public Services/Government

    • Myanmar to build open source e-government platform

      Myanmar is to build an open source e-government platform with help from Vietnam.

      The first phase of the platform will be launched at the end of the year with functions allowing officials to manage citizen data and exchange information with other ministries and local governments, according to Vietnamese media reports.

      The platform will be upgraded in 2015 with cloud technology, and capabilities to handle more complex datasets and mobile users, it added.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Apple boycotts COMPUTER BILD: An open letter to Tim Cook

    In a video COMPUTER BILD showed how easy it is to bend an iPhone 6 Plus. The reaction from Apple: no more testing devices and no more invites for COMPUTER BILD. It is time for an open letter to Tim Cook.

  • Apple’s Responds To Tech Mag Showing The Amazing Bending Phone By Freezing Them Out Of Bendy Apple Products

    If you’ve paid attention to anything tangentially related to technology news over the past couple of weeks, you’re probably familiar with “bendgate”, the feverish reaction to the realization that Apple’s newest iPhone 6 Plus includes the feature of a bending case if you accidentally sit on it or something. As an Android loyalist, these reports have been an endless source of entertainment thus far, but even that has now been trumped by Apple’s reaction to the issue. Apparently the company has decided that the best response to a technology news organization’s reporting on the bendy Apple phones is to threaten to freeze that publication out of future bendy phones and likely-bendy Apple events.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Politics of Terror and Finding a Way Back

      Does ISIS pose a credible threat to the United States and its interests? And if so, what is the best way to manage that threat? If you had asked any politician in 2003, they most likely would have agreed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq under his reign posed a credible threat to the United States, and a 10-year war was started because of that belief.

    • Here’s Everything Wrong With the White House’s War on the Islamic State

      But now, with scarcely a whisper of serious debate, Obama has become the fourth consecutive US president to launch a war in Iraq—and in fact has outdone his predecessors by spreading the war to Syria as well, launching strikes not only on fighters linked to the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) but also on the Al Qaeda–linked Nusra Front and Khorasan.

    • Fighter jets can’t destroy Daesh ideology

      A long-term solution to terrorism will be a comprehensive battle against dangerous ideas that occupy minds of some youths in Middle East

    • Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s Orwellian War in Iraq: We Created the Very Threat We Claim to be Fighting

      As Vice President Joe Biden warns it will take a “hell of a long fight” for the United States to stop militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, we speak to Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” We talk about how the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that helped create the threat now posed by the Islamic State. We also discuss the role of Baathist forces in ISIS, Obama’s targeting of journalists, and the trial of four former Blackwater operatives involved in the 2007 massacre at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square.

    • US has responsibility for Islamic State rise

      That’s how the US government has found itself since George W. Bush started a “war on terror” by invading Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, dragging US allies into a “coalition of the willing” that got mired in two wars for over a decade. Barack Obama, vowing to end the long and costly conflicts, withdrew American troops from Iraq (in 2011) and scheduled a wind-down in Afghanistan this year.

    • Jim Brock: Time to call off the drones, Mr. President

      Have you ever considered what life would be like if attack drones were visible over New York, Omaha, Nashville, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver and San Francisco?

      If our government were to deploy drones over American cities with the intent of targeting terrorists, what would our lives be like?

      Would we be comfortable with robot death machines flying through the sky like in a Ray Bradbury novel?

    • Check Out John Oliver on Drones

      Oliver’s funny, angry piece is a great summary of the lawlessness of the US’s drone policy, going from President Obama’s ill-advised drone striking the Jonas Brothers joke in 2009, to the fact that “imminent threat” and “civilian casualty” mean whatever the government wants them to mean.

    • Legality of Obama’s Drone Policy: A Conversation with Prof. Mary Ellen O’Connell

      Two U.S. presidents have authorized the use of drones to carry out attacks beyond armed conflict zones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. The deaths of all persons from missile strikes is unlawful. The situation in Afghanistan is more complicated because it is the scene of a civil war. Because [ex-]President Karzai has demanded a zero civilian death rate and his policies are the only legitimate ones in the civil war, then civilian deaths are unlawful there, too. As for why international institutions have not done more, the U.S. has a veto that prevents the Security Council from taking up the matter.

    • London marchers say no to new Iraq war

      More than 2,000 people marched through London in the driving rain today, Saturday, against the bombing of Iraq.

    • US Should Consider Putting Plainclothes Soldiers in Schools, Call of Duty Director Says

      “The public won’t like it. They’ll think it’s a police state.”

    • Mass Arrests of American civilians

  • Transparency Reporting

    • National Security Agency probing cyber alert on Pakistan’s software

      The National Security Agency (NSA) is probing an alert from cyber security experts on weaponised surveillance software used by Pakistan and Bangladesh intelligence to spy on computers and mobile phones used by Indian politicians, journalists and security establishments. Several computers and mobile phones have already been exposed. Following the most recent Wikileaks release titled ‘Spyfiles 4’ on surveillance malware FinSpy, cyber security experts here claim that several computers and mobile phones of important people could have been compromised, exposing a huge chink in Indian cyber space.

      On September 15, Wikileaks released previously unseen copies of weaponised German surveillance malware, FinFisher, that had been used by intelligence agencies around the world to spy on journalists, political dissidents and others.Analysing the report in detail, cyber security experts at Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation (CSPF) here isolated records of Pakistan-based users, accessing FinFisher products to spy on Indians. “Several FinFisher products have been sold to a person/organisation in Pakistan.

    • CIA Can’t Let You Know How Much It Paid For A Single Amiga Computer In 1987 [Updated]

      Does the CIA actually believe some sort of irreparable rift in the National Security Complex might occur if this dollar amount from three decades ago (unadjusted for inflation) was made public? Probably not. Aftergood theorizes that it’s a blanket exemption used to redact more sensitive dollar amounts and this innocent cost just became collateral damage during the rush to declassify several dozen documents in response to an FOIA lawsuit court order.

  • Finance

    • The New York Times Has Had A Very, Very Rough Year

      The announcement on Wednesday that the paper was slashing hundreds of jobs and retooling its troubled digital products was just the latest in a string of bad news for the Times in 2014.

    • This Country Just Abolished College Tuition Fees

      Prospective students in the United States who can’t afford to pay for college or don’t want to rack up tens of thousands in student debt should try their luck in Germany. Higher education is now free throughout the country, even for international students. Yesterday, Lower Saxony became the last of seven German states to abolish tuition fees, which were already extremely low compared to those paid in the United States.

    • Nick Clegg accuses George Osborne of balancing books ‘on backs of poor’

      Deputy prime minister attacks his coalition partner’s austerity measures, and says ‘compassionate conservatism’ claim is dead

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Marriott fined $600,000 for jamming guest hotspots

      Marriott will cough up $600,000 in penalties after being caught blocking mobile hotspots so that guests would have to pay for its own WiFi services, the FCC has confirmed today. The fine comes after staff at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee were found to be jamming individual hotspots and then charging people up to $1,000 per device to get online.

    • FCC Fines Marriott For Jamming Customers’ WiFi Hotspots To Push Them Onto Hotel’s $1,000 Per Device WiFi

      Hotel WiFi sucks. If you do any traveling, you’re aware of this. Though, from what I’ve seen, the higher end the hotel, the worse the WiFi is and the more insane its prices are. Cheap discount hotels often offer free WiFi, and it’s generally pretty reliable. High end hotels? I’ve seen prices of $30 per day or higher, and it’s dreadfully low bandwidth. These days, when traveling, I often pick hotels based on reviews of the WiFi quality, because nothing can be more frustrating than a crappy internet connection when it’s needed. But, even worse than the WiFi in your room, if you’re using the WiFi for a business meeting or event — the hotels love to price gouge. And, it appears that’s exactly what the Marriott-operated Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville did. Except, the company went one step further. Thanks to things like tethering on phones and MiFi devices that allow you to set up your own WiFi hotspot using wireless broadband, Marriott realized that some smart business folks were getting around its (absolutely insane) $1,000 per device WiFi charges, and just using MiFi’s. So, Marriott then broke FCC regulations and started jamming the devices to force business folks to pay its extortionate fees.

  • DRM

    • Apple will face $350M trial over iPod DRM

      Apple will soon have to face a trial over accusations it used digital rights management, or DRM, to unlawfully maintain a lead in the iPod market, a federal judge has ruled. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing a class of consumers who bought iPods between 2006 and 2009, are asking for $350 million.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Almost No One Wants To Host The Olympics, Because It’s A Costly, Corrupt Mess

      For many years, we’ve written about questionable activities by the Olympics, usually focusing on the organization’s insanely aggressive approach to intellectual property, which could be summed up as “we own and control everything.” Yes, the Olympics requires countries to pass special laws that protect its trademarks and copyrights beyond what standard laws allow. Of course, this is really much more about control and money

    • Copyrights

      • ‘Mash-ups’ now protected under copyright law – but only if funny

        Under a new exception to copyright law, anyone will be able to make creative montage from existing material – as long as it is funny

      • New UK Copyright Exception Allows Mashups — But Only If Judges Think They Are Funny
      • The Two Poles of Kiwi Journalism and A New Vanguard

        Mainstream Kiwi journalism in the wake of Dotcom, Assange, Snowden & Greenwald’s pre-election ‘Moment of Truth‘ event has fallen squarely along ideological lines.

        The media have yet to give any serious consideration to the possibility of any new political paradigm outside of the left-right sphere in which they remain firmly entrenched. The results are predictable and must be challenged.

      • Google Removes News Snippets From Complaining Publications In Germany; Publications Claim It’s ‘Blackmail’

        Earlier this year, we noted a somewhat ridiculous and cynical attempt by some German newspapers to demand payment from Google for sending them traffic via Google News — and not just a little bit, but 11% of gross worldwide revenue on any search that showed one of their snippets. There were a few issues that we noted here: first, anyone not wanting to appear in Google News can quite easily opt-out. Second, Google News in Germany doesn’t show any ads. Third, those very same newspapers were using Google’s own tools to appear higher in search, suggesting that they certainly believed they were getting value out of being in Google’s index.

      • Head Of City of London Police Unit That Operates Without Court Orders Worries About Online ‘Lawlessness’

        A year ago, Techdirt wrote about a new unit set up by the City of London Police to tackle crimes involving intellectual monopolies. Since then, there have been a flood of posts about its increasingly disproportionate actions, including seizing domain names, shutting down websites, inserting ads on websites, and arresting someone for running an anti-censorship proxy. This makes a PCPro interview with the head of that unit, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Andy Fyfe, particularly valuable, since it helps shed a little light on the unit’s mindset.

10.03.14

Links 3/10/2014: 700 GNU/Linux Games in Steam, Hamburg Greens Want Free Software

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Learn GNU/Linux the Fun Way

    Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World Program, “an educational web series making computer science fun and accessible to all”. If it had been just that, I might not have been interested.

  • Windows 10 doesn’t matter to the future of Linux

    Ugh, here we go again with the Windows versus Linux desktop blather. I hate having to wade through this stuff, but it’s necessary because articles like this continue to promote the idea that the desktop is of primary importance to Linux and that simply isn’t true. Usage habits have shifted considerably from desktop computers to mobile devices.

    Linux will always be around on the desktop, it may or may not have a sizable percentage of market share, but it will always be there as an alternative to Windows and OS X. And Windows 10 (or 11 or 12 or 13) isn’t going to change that, no matter what Microsoft does to improve its desktop operating system.

    The real action is in mobile devices and in that arena Linux has utterly smashed Windows and Microsoft into oblivion. You see Linux in Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks, Kindle ebook readers and in many other devices. The article grudgingly notes the success of Linux in mobile at the very end but otherwise seems totally focused on a pointless desktop horse race between Linux and Windows.

  • Server

    • Infographic: Three Facts About the Open Source Cloud

      With CloudOpen Europe now less than two weeks away, we took another look at the data from the recent open cloud survey, conducted by Linux.com and The New Stack. Three surprising conclusions emerged that aren’t necessarily obvious on a quick read through the survey results.

    • Cumulus Linux: First Impressions

      One company looking to benefit from this trend is Cumulus Networks. Cumulus does not produce or sell hardware, only a network operating system: Cumulus Linux. The Debian-based OS is built to run on whitebox hardware you can purchase from a number of partner Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs). (Their hardware compatability list includes a number of 10GE and 40GE switch models from different vendors.)

    • In Support of Open Source

      The most obvious of these is the Linux operating system, used by almost all HPC systems. MPICH, OpenMPI, and their variants are examples of other open source tools that “facilitate scalable, distributed computing and have supported decades of research, including spinning off multiple derivatives that have made their way into commercial offerings by big name vendors such as Cray, IBM, and Intel,” says Schroeder.

  • Kernel Space

    • Actions have consequences (or: why I’m not fixing Intel’s bugs any more)

      Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I’m also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won’t be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won’t be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn’t work, the number of fucks I’ll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.

    • Indian Developers Redesigning Linux Kernel With OOP, C++ Support

      DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai out of India are aiming to redesign the Linux kernel as MOOL, or the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux. The project site explains, “MOOL (Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux) aims at redesigning the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of OO (Object Oriented) abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in existing kernel. Studies have shown that common coupling is increasing in successive versions of Linux. This will make maintainability of Linux difficult in coming years. As a starting step we have tried to reduce the number of global variables of the kernel. Some global variables are used only by two or three kernel modules. These are passed as function arguments. The performance of the modified kernel is measured with the standard performance analysis tools. The modified kernel performs almost same as original. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules.”

    • BOSSMOOL is an Object Oriented Linux kernel from India

      The primary reason behind using a procedural language like C for writing the Linux kernel was efficiency. However, this resulted in higher degree of dependencies (or coupling) among different parts of the Linux kernel and makes it difficult to maintain. A touch of object-oriented design may make things easier.

    • Graphics Stack

      • FOSDEM15: Graphics DevRoom: call for speakers.

        At FOSDEM on the 31st of january and the 1st of February 2015, there will be another graphics DevRoom.

      • 15-Way GPU Comparison With Mesa 10.3 + Linux 3.17

        For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that’s what most Q4’2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here’s a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.

        Using the Mesa 10.3 packages that recently landed in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn are some fresh benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 14.10 state but with switching to the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel. All tests were done from the Intel Core i7 4770K system with Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard, 8GB of RAM, and 140GB Western Digital WD1500HLHX HDD. Ubuntu 14.10 was in its updated state as of a few days ago with Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16.0, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, xf86-video-intel 2.99.914, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11. Mesa 10.3.0 was present while as said we upgraded to the Linux 3.17 Git kernel as Ubuntu 14.10 by default is shipping with Linux 3.16; there’s a few DRM driver improvements in 3.17 worth testing.

      • A Multi-Year Effort Has Started To Better Document Intel’s DRM/KMS Driver

        One of the most frequent reasons we here when it comes developers not getting involved with the open-source Linux graphics driver development (or even just driver bug-fixing) comes down to the high barrier to entry due to a lack of comprehensive documentation, etc. As one step towards improving the driver documentation situation, Daniel Vetter has begun a long process of documenting the Intel (i915) DRM/KMS kernel driver.

      • Other Projects Participating In This Winter’s Women Outreach Program

        So far it looks like there’s just 2~3 women interested in the X.Org program but there’s also a lot of other projects involved for Phoronix readers that were assigned female at birth or anyone who identifies as a woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth.

    • Benchmarks

      • Fedora 21 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 Development Benchmarks

        With the very latest development packages for Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21, here’s some new Linux benchmark results when running from the Core i7 5960X platform and using the new MSI X99S SLI PLUS.

        The MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard played well with both Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 that are powered by the modern Linux 3.16 kernel. As a quick comparison just for kicks I ran some benchmarks using all of the same hardware and the stock settings for each of F21 and Ubuntu Utopic on this system with the latest packages as of yesterday~today.

      • 15-Way GPU Comparison With Mesa 10.3 + Linux 3.17

        For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that’s what most Q4’2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here’s a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • API Design Part 1: Impact on the Performance (Qt vs STL example)

        First of all, this post is not meant to criticize Qt in any way, just to raise some thinking points for people who create libraries.

      • Marvelous Marble

        OSMhyd showing hydrants in Wennigsen (Deister) I’m one of those persons that always prefers a native application over some web stuff. Usually this comes from some things I want to have, may it be speed, offline capabilities or just hacking possibility. So as a long-time user and contributor of OpenStreetMap as well as an active firefighter I of course know about OpenFireMap. And of course I want a local version of it.

      • Kubuntu: KDE 4.14.1 on Trusty released.
      • KDE Applications and Development Platform 4.14.1

        Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.14.1 are available for Kubuntu 14.04LTS and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

      • Porting Muon Discover to KF5

        Muon has been a project that I’ve been very eager to port and iterate for a longtime. I’m happy with the 2.0 series, lots of changes were made and it has served us well. More importantly though, we have a solid technology to keep pushing our work on.

      • Yet another static code analyzer run

        Looking for the answer to a 64-bit build question I ran into a news item titled “The Unicorn Getting Interested in KDE“. Since I never saw an unicorn before this made me curious.

      • Putting the code where it belongs

        I have been working on better ways to write asynchronous code. In this post I’m going to analyze one of our current tools, KJob, in how it helps us writing asynchronous code and what is missing. I’m then going to present my prototype solution to address these problems.

      • KDE will be at Qt Developer Days in Force

        Qt Developer Days Europe is next Monday to Wednesday in Berlin. It features tutorials and talks on making the most of the Qt toolkit most KDE Software is based upon. Since Qt opened up its development process a large part of KDE Frameworks development has been to ensure close cooperation between the two projects. This has succeeded spectaularly well and at this Qt Dev Days an incredible over 50% of the speakers are active or past developers with KDE.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • How GNOME 3.14 is winning back disillusioned Linux users

        GNOME 3.14 is now out. It’s a release full of polish from the desktop environment once preferred by most Linux distributions—and almost a story of redemption. After arguably losing its way around GNOME 3.0, GNOME is back with a vengeance.

        GNOME Shell has matured immensely since their immature launch. Thanks to solid releases like GNOME 3.14, GNOME will once again be the default desktop on Debian, pushing out Xfce. GNOME 3’s “classic mode” offers enough familiarity to be the default desktop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, too.

      • GNOME 3.14 Improves Linux Desktop Visual Detail, Other Features

        The open-source GNOME 3.14 desktop release is the second major update to the popular Linux user interface in 2014. Version 3.14, which the GNOME Project released Sept. 24, follows in the footsteps of GNOME 3.12, which debuted March 26. As was the case with GNOME 3.12, as well as GNOME 3.10, the emphasis is on the refinement of features and function as opposed to any larger-scale desktop overhaul. That doesn’t mean that there are not a whole lot of changes in GNOME 3.14. According to the GNOME Project, the new release includes 28,859 changes that 871 contributors made. While many of the changes are bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements, there are also a number of user-facing feature and function improvements. GNOME 3.14 offers a renewed emphasis on multi-touch capabilities, including improved gesture support. Window animations have also been improved giving the overall desktop more polish and refinement. Within GNOME, the included bundled applications also have been updated with the new release. Among the updated applications is the Maps tool, which now gains an integrated navigation capability. eWEEK looks at new and enhanced features in the GNOME 3.14 release.

  • Distributions

    • Netrunner Rolling 2014.09 review

      Ok, that’s just about it for the features of the manual partitioning tool. The next two screenshot shows what happened when I tried to install Netrunner Rolling 2014.09.1 on real hardware. The computer is an all-in-one system with a 320 GB hard drive. I had two Linux distributions installed in dual-boot mode on the hard drive, but the computer is my crash-and-burn system, so I didn’t have to keep whatever data was on it.

      Everything I’ve written so far about the computer should tell you that it has existing partitions on it. However, when I started the installer and navigated to the manual partitioning tool, it failed to detect any partitions on the hard drive. In other words, it detected it as a brand new drive. I wasn’t about to create new partitions manually, so I tried the default automatic partitioning option.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • 15 years of whois

        Exactly 15 years ago I uploaded to Debian the first release of my whois client.

        At the end of 1999 the United States Government forced Network Solutions, at the time the only registrar for the .com, .net and .org top level domains, to split their functions in a registry and a registrar and to and allow competing registrars to operate.

      • Derivatives

        • Knoppix 7.4.2 Arrives with Linux Kernel 3.16.3, Shellshock Patch, and More

          Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by automatic hardware detection and support for a large number of hardware devices, is now at version 7.4.2.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Netflix Working on Ubuntu Touch Native App – Softpedia

            Netflix recently got in touch with the Ubuntu developers to ask them to update a library in the latest 14.04 LTS release that would allow for native playback on that platform. Now, it looks like they are also working on an app for Ubuntu Touch.

          • Developers Can Publish Apps for Ubuntu Touch in Just 60 Seconds

            The Ubuntu Touch platform is preparing for its release in December and it really needs a powerful ecosystem of apps to succeed. A Canonical representative has revealed just how fast a developer can submit an application to the store and how fast it will be available for download.

          • How to Log in Ubuntu Without Knowing the Password

            This is a very useful method to employ if you forget your password and need access to the operating system

          • People Still Want Ubuntu Edge to Happen

            Back in July 2013, Canonical proposed a new type of smartphone, an extremely powerful device that would be built with the best the industry had to offer at that point. It’s safe to say that it attracted a lot of attention and that people keep wondering if there still is a chance to see something like it.

          • Ubuntu MATE Will Steal the Show of the Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn Launch

            Ubuntu MATE is a new flavor based on Ubuntu that will see an official launch alongside all the other regular ones on October 23, and it’s very likely that it will steal the show.

          • Ubuntu Touch RTM Video Tour

            The Ubuntu Touch operating system has just received a new RTM branch and the developers are working hard to provide a stable and good operating system. We’ve put together a video tour of Ubuntu Touch.

          • IBM Expands POWER8 Server Portfolio with Ubuntu Linux

            IBM today is expanding its POWER8 server lineup as part of the company’s continuing effort to provide a competitive alternative Intel x86-based server systems.

            The Power8 silicon and server system first debuted in April. One of the new systems is the IBM Power S824L server.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Elementary OS ‘Freya’ Is Worth the Wait

              The 2013, or Luna, version of Elementary OS is a very solid Linux distro. Its pending replacement, Elementary OS Freya version, will push the unique desktop design to a new level of dependability. However, one question left unanswered is whether this new Linux distro will give seasoned Linux users enough configurability to be more than just a pretty desktop face.

            • Elementary OS Freya: The Next Major Update To A Rising Linux Distro

              Elementary OS is a Linux distribution that has been making waves as of late. For a lot of people, including our own Akshata, it made them switch to Elementary OS full-time from Windows. However, the latest stable release, “Luna”, is becoming quite old. Now, we’re getting a glimpse at the first beta of the next released, codenamed “Freya”.

              What’s new in Freya, and is it worth upgrading or switching to it from other distributions? Let’s take a look.

            • elementary OS Freya Beta 1 is Looking Sparse But Fast and Sleek

              elementary OS is a GNU/Linux distribution that you will either adore or on the other hand, find isn’t for you. Fast, tight and favouring beauty and a logical simplicity over the ability to customize every little thing, eOS takes a different approach to many Linux distributions. In this article we shall take a look at elementary OS Freya Beta 1, a preview of the upcoming Freya release.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Atmel revs up Cortex-A5 SoC with video decode, security

      Atmel is sampling a Linux supported, Cortex-A5 based SAMA5D4 SoC that bests the earlier SAMA5D3 with new NEON, L2 cache, 720p decode, and security features.

      Atmel announced the SAMA5D4 system-on-chip at ARM TechCon 2014, which is underway this week in Santa Clara, Calif. The SAMA5D4, builds upon the foundation of the earlier SAMA5D3 SoC, and similarly uses ARM’s Cortex-A5 processor. It supports Internet of Things (IoT) applications including control panels, communication gateways, and imaging terminals, says Atmel. The SAMA5D4 is supported with an Atmel Xplained development kit, as well as a mainline Linux BSP, with Android support coming in December.

    • Slide Show: 11 Smart Eyewear Devices Running Android or Linux

      Google Glass wasn’t the first eyewear computer, but it achieved several technological breakthroughs, especially in its sleek, lightweight construction. The much maligned device has spawned a growing industry of head-mounted smart eyegear. Our slide show of 11 Android and Linux eyewear devices includes simple Bluetooth accessories for notifications, full-fledged industrial headgear, sports gear for bikers and skiiers, and even a motorcycle helmet (click Gallery link below).

      Like Glass, eight of the 10 other devices listed in our slide show are based on Android, while two — Laforge’s ICIS and Tobii Glasses 2 — use embedded Linux. Almost all the devices are open for pre-orders at the very least, and most are shipping, although sometimes only in beta form. Several are OEM-focused devices. Glass only recently became publicly available for $1,500, and sales are still controlled by Google, with restrictions in terms of age (18+) and a requirement that you live in the US or UK.

    • Gallery : 11 Smart Eyewear Devices Running Android or Linux
    • LG is working on a webOS SmartWatch

      The world’s favorite abortive mobile operating system, webOS, refuses to go away quietly. After being open-sourced by HP and then sold off to LG, webOS is now apparently returning to mobile devices in the form of a new LG SmartWatch. A developer website hosted by LG teases a software development kit for a webOS SmartWatch, while the familiar Bean Bird from LG’s webOS TVs also shows up, this time supporting a classically styled analog wristwatch.

    • pcDuino SBC adopts i.MX6 Quad, loads up on storage

      LinkSprite unveiled a “pcDuino Acadia 1″ SBC that runs Linux or Android on a 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 Quad SoC and features eMMC flash and dual microSD slots.

    • Tizen Smartphone powers a Robot using WiFi and NFC

      Using input device / control events in the Tizen Linux they were able to control mouse and keyboard events. You can charge the Tizen phone when it is place inside the robots head, and notifications messages are displayed in the robots LCD screen. You can also perform file transfers between devices and even use the robot as a media output device.

    • Linux micro computer runs Android and Ubuntu

      We have discovered another Linux computer module, the HummingBoard from Israeli firm SolidRun.

      The HummingBoard allows you to run many open source operating systems – such as Ubuntu, Debian and Arch, as well as Android and XBMC.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android L build for Samsung Galaxy S5 gets previewed

          By all accounts, Android L’s release is coming soon, perhaps even this month (or in November). We’ve known for months what Google wants its next mobile OS version to look like, since the company’s already presented its new Material Design. But what about the different phone makers? They’ve so far gotten used to modifying the looks of stock Android quite a lot, so it’s interesting to see how they’ll approach this version.

          And now we can get a look at what Samsung’s interpretation of Android L will look like, as someone got their hands on a pre-release build of the new OS for the Galaxy S5. This build is said to be very slow and buggy, so there’s clearly a lot of work that Samsung still has to do (and this is the reason why it hasn’t been made available for download).

        • Google reportedly tried to buy Cyanogen

          A report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google tried to buy Cyanogen, Inc, the maker of the custom Android ROM CyanogenMod. According to the report, Cyanogen’s chief executive told shareholders that Sundar Pichai, the head of Chrome and Android at Google, met with the company and “expressed interest in acquiring the firm.” The report says Cyanogen Inc. declined the offer, saying that it was still growing.

        • Why Google is pushing Android One at the expense of open source

          I have somewhat mixed feelings about Android One, but I can completely understand why Google has created it and why it’s so important to them. It might help them maintain and grow profits by making sure that their applications and services are in as many Android devices as possible. Google is a publicly traded company so they have a responsibility to maximize profit for their shareholders.

        • Nvidia Tegra rides shotgun on Honda’s Connect IVI system

          Nvidia announced that its Tegra SoC will run Android on a newly tipped Honda Connect IVI system in 2015 Honda Civic, Civic Tourer, and CR-V cars in Europe.

        • Cyanogen Spurns Google Acquisition Interest, Seeks $1 Billion Valuation

          A startup that distributes smartphone software based on Google’s Android mobile operating system recently drew attention from Google’s rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo. Now it’s gotten Google’s attention, too.

Free Software/Open Source

  • What Will Run The Internet of Things? Hint: It’s Fully Open

    As you may have noticed, the Next Big Thing is the Internet of Things. It’s certainly true that in addition to computational capabilities, connectivity is also being added to an ever-wider range of everyday objects. On the other hand, in the light of Snowden’s leaks about pervasive surveillance of our online activities, you might have thought people would be a little more cautious about wiring up even more of their lives.

  • DARPA joins math-secured microkernel race

    In a discussion that will sound familiar to Australian readers, US military development agency DARPA wants to create provably-secure software.

    According to Threatpost, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar told a Washington Post security conference that embedded systems are among the kinds of applications for which it’s feasible to create such OSs.

    [...]

    In July of this year, NICTA open-sourced the code for its seL4 microkernel, identifying DARPA among the software’s users.

  • Project OpenDaylight Brings Open Source SDN Close for MSPs

    An open source approach to software-defined networking (SDN) moved several steps closer this week to becoming a de facto standard. Here are the details.

  • Replace Microsoft Small Business Server with this open-source solution

    Zentyal is one solution. Zentyal Community Edition is a free, open-source all-in-one server that includes all of the features listed above. Plus, you get Samba4 integration, so it’s a perfect replacement for that aging Active Directory server. One of the best parts about Zentyal is that you can take advantage of less powerful hardware. Even though there’s a graphical interface, the server is fully administered via a web browser (which means you can manage it from anywhere on your network).

  • ARM’s Mbed falls short of true open source

    ARM hasn’t been paying attention. While the rest of the world has turned to open source for essential infrastructure software, ARM’s Mbed operating system for the Internet of things (IoT) is proprietary, with just enough open source sprinkled in to attract developers.

    ARM insists this is necessary to prevent Mbed from becoming fragmented, which is a reasonable concern. What may not be reasonsable, however, is relying on a proprietary operating system to dominate IoT.

  • Ericsson releases WebRTC browser and framework as open source

    Ericsson is resurrecting its WebRTC-based browser, Bowser, to help spark the development of more websites and apps that embrace voice, video and messaging features.

    WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) is a technology designed to help developers add real-time communications features to Web browsers and apps via JavaScript APIs.

  • Guest View: How to build a flourishing open-source community

    The type of license you choose for your open-source project is paramount. Some licenses are very rigid, while others are more flexible. It is advisable to tap into the developer community for their feedback to find out what will work best for your target audience.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS-based Chromecast Competitor Will Attract Business Users

        Google has has achieved more success than many people thought it would with its Chromecast dongle, which performs many of the tasks that set-top boxes do, but the Chromecast dongle is headed for some competition. And, given the historical competition between the Chrome and Firefox browsers, it’s fitting that the dongle that is poised to compete with Chromecast is based on the Firefox OS.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • TokuMX 2.0 released

      TokuMX is a MongoDB distribution from TokuTek, a company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA).

      TokuMX is a drop-in replacement for MongoDB, the most popular NoSQL database. It is to MongoDB what MariaDB is to MySQL.

      TokuMX is said to offer 50x performance improvements and 90% reduction in database size over MongoDB. And it has support for ACID transactions and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC).

    • Master the Cloud with Free OpenStack Training Tools
    • 7 new tips, tricks, and tutorials for OpenStack

      Interested in building an open source cloud using the latest and greatest that OpenStack has to offer? You’re not alone. We’ve collected some of the best howtos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection. Take a look, get ready to learn, and when you get stuck, remember that he official documentation for OpenStack is your friend, too.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

      Seriously? Quickly, am I the only one who laughs when I hear the words Oracle OpenWorld spoken aloud, the name of Oracle’s conference now being held in San Francisco? Can I at least see a show of hands of people who find this expo’s name even the slightest bit ironic?

  • BSD

    • GhostBSD 4.0-RELEASE finally ready

      GhostBSD 4.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64 and i386 architectures, it GhostBSD 4.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded via SourceForge or TorrentFTP as described in the section below.

      MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISOs and memory stick images are included the bottom of this message and in Download page.

    • GhostBSD 4.0 Defaults To Clang Compiler & MATE Desktop

      GhostBSD 4.0 highlights include replacing GCC with the LLVM/Clang compiler by default (as many other BSDs are also doing), make has been replaced by NetBSD’s bmake, pkg is now the default package management utility, NetworkManager is enabled by default, and MATE is now the default desktop environment. This is a pretty big shake-up for the GhostBSD 4.0 release codenamed Karine.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Hamburg Greens call for a switch to open source

      The German city of Hamburg should do like Munich, and switch to open source, says the city’s Alliance ’90/The Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen). Switching to free and open source software enables innovation and increases security, and the city administration should emphasise this when selecting ICT solutions. “We want to lead by example”, says Farid Müller, spokesperson for the party in Hamburg. “We want an exit strategy for proprietary software used by Hamburg’s administration.”

    • Hamburg Greens spearhead switch to open source

      Hamburg’s local Green party has expressed that it wants to see the city follow the lead of Munich by adopting free and open source software. Citing innovation and increased security, the Greens want to make sure that the city has an ‘exit strategy’ from using proprietary software.

    • Tyrol government shares test tool with industry

      An open source solution developed for the government of South Tyrol (Italy) to automatically test government websites and services is now also being used to probe sites of the region’s tourism sector. The software will help avoid double bookings and lower the costs of building and maintaining tourism portals, the government expects.

    • Genoa gradually switching to open source tools

      The Italian city of Genoa will continue to use open source where possible, says the city councillor responsible for IT, Isabella Lanzone. A pilot with Linux PCs is underway and the city is also gradually moving to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools that is being installed side by side with a aged version of the ubiquitous proprietary alternative.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Google’s open source blueprint lets connected devices commune without specialized apps

      A new Google project aims to create nothing less than an open standard for the entire “Internet of Things,” which the company’s Chrome team is calling the Physical Web.

      The idea is to create a comparatively simple system, using a subscribed discovery service, of beacons broadcasting URLs to smartphones in a given area, allowing users to interact with vending machines, posters, and bus stops in a location-aware, organic way, using only Bluetooth and web technology – no specialized app required.

    • Firefox OS streaming video, Arduino to sell 3D printers, and more

    • Open Hardware

      • Build-a-Bot Kit Makes Robots Open Source

        A new toolkit could help veteran and beginner roboticists design, create and assemble a variety of soft-bodied bots. The online resource, which includes a trove of blueprints, tutorials and how-to videos, could spur the development of new robots to operate in the medical industry, disaster relief efforts or an array of other applications.

      • Arduino adds affordable 3D printing to its open source hardware model

        Arduino may be known for revolutionizing open source hardware platforms, but this week enters the 3D printer market with the small and (relatively) affordable Materia 101. Produced in partnership with fellow Italian company Sharebot, the printer is targeted towards educators, beginners, consumers, and makers.

  • Programming

    • PHP As A Next-Generation Programming Language?

      Frank Karlitschek, the founder of the ownCloud project, is making the case that PHP isn’t that bad of a scripting language and should be taken to the next level with its shortcomings addressed so it can regain some of its popularity.

Leftovers

  • Rwanda’s Untold Story Documentary

    Former close associates from within Kagame’s inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda’s economic miracle and apparent ethnic harmony has led to the country being one of the biggest recipients of aid from the UK. Former prime minister Tony Blair is an unpaid adviser to Kagame, but some now question the closeness of Mr Blair and other western leaders to Rwanda’s president.

  • Science

    • Why do honeybees die when they sting?

      When a honeybee stings, it dies a gruesome death. The bee’s stinger is structured in such a way that once it punctures human skin, the bee can’t yank it out without self-amputating. As the honeybee tries to pull out the stinger, it ruptures its lower abdomen, leaving the stinger embedded, pulling out instead a string of digestive material, muscles, glands and a venom sac. What results is a gaping hole at the end of the abdomen.

    • Head Of ALEC: ‘I Don’t Know The Science’ Of Climate Change

      The person who runs the American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market lobbying group that opposes policies to fight climate change, is not sure whether humans actually cause climate change, according to an interview with the National Journal published Wednesday.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Understanding The Xen XSA-108 Security Issue

      Many Phoronix readers likely heard of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and other hosting providers rebooting their clouds in recent days as a result of a Xen security issue. If you’re not yet familiar with this XSA-108 security issue, our friends at Xen Orchestra have a nice write-up covering the issue.

    • Open source’s “shallow bugs” theory hasn’t been Shellshocked

      It hasn’t been a good year for open source. Not for its generally golden reputation for software quality and security, anyway. But in a rush to lay blame for the Bash Shellshock vulnerability (and previously for Heartbleed) some, like Roger Grimes, want to dismantle some of the cardinal tenets of open source, like the suggestion that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Exclusive: U.S. Special Ops Readied Syria Attack in June

      Months before the U.S. started bombing Syria, American commandos made detailed plans to hit al Qaeda planners there. But the targeting packages weren’t even sent to the White House.

    • Fifteen dead in blast at Bulgarian explosives factory

      Inspectors had found that outdated tools were being used to dismantle ammunitions and that explosives were not being stored properly, the labour ministry said. It has now closed the plant, where 150 people worked.

    • America at War by Perry Diaz

      America has been at war since the “War that will end all wars” or World War I…

    • US Airstrikes Anger Syrian Civilians Fleeing Their Homes

      KILIS, TURKEY- Syrians fleeing their homes have suffered nearly four years of devastating civil war and now a U.S.-led coalition is launching airstrikes on jihadists in their country. But at least 20 non-combatants appear to have been killed in the early raids and civilians seeking sanctuary in Turkey are asking why.

    • September 2014 Update: US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
    • Records of two high court’s decisions need to be attached in drone attack case

      Islamabad High Court (IHC) has directed the petitioner to attach all the record of decisions given by Peshawar High Court and IHC in drone attack cases with the petition filed by him for registration of murder case against former president Pervez Musharraf in respect of people killed in drone strikes.

    • IHC moved against Musharraf for allowing drone attacks

      A petitioner Mian Zahid Ghani here on Wednesday filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court (IHC) for the registration of an FIR against former President General (retd) Pervez Musharraf for allowing US drones to operate in Pakistan.

    • Pak reservations to get adequate attention
    • There’s more we need to know before going to war

      Stephen Harper’s heritage minister, Shelly Glover, says the Islamic State “are people who are violent and brutal and they have decapitated journalists, they have raped and brutalized women. That is all we need to know…” in order to start bombing. With respect, let me suggest what else we might need to know.

      Harper himself, who’s been channelling his inner Churchill (“when we think something is necessary and noble we don’t sit back and let others do it”), lacks Churchill’s direct experience of war. When he was young, in Sudan, Churchill felt the “exhilaration” of being shot at and missed. He didn’t experience the obverse (being killed) but that’s what made a lot of upper-class Brits effective officers and war-makers: their snobby sense of invulnerability.

    • Obama Policy in Syria is Same One He Opposed in Israel

      The Obama Administration has acknowledged that its strict policy of preventing civilian deaths does not apply to American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

      The statement confirming the loosening of high standards pertaining to minimizing collateral damage comes amid reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a Syrian village.

    • Fox Pundit: Civilians Die–Get Over It!

      A familiar critique of corporate media is that journalists too often avoid discussing one grim reality of US wars: the innocent civilians who die from American bombs and missiles. But one Fox News regular isn’t ducking the issue: Not only is he not afraid to talk about civilians deaths in Syria–he complains that there aren’t enough of them.

    • Drone protest scheduled in Ipswich

      The North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice, Chapter 45 of Veterans for Peace and the House of Peace will sponsor a protest against the U.S. use of drones to attack and kill and for surveillance in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other parts of the world 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the intersections North Main, South Main, Central and Market streets Saturday, Oct. 4.

    • What Laws Of War?

      In a perverse way, maybe it’s progress that the US is now admitting that it doesn’t really care about how many civilians it kills in its efforts to “decapitate” a few suspected terrorist leaders.

    • US War against the People of Syria and Iraq

      The statement coincided with the heaviest attacks so far in the air war in Syria and Iraq, with US and allied countries launching 24 strikes, 12 in each country on Tuesday, with British warplanes making their first attacks.

    • US Relaxing Standards for Killing Civilians in Iraq and Syria

      Yahoo News reported Tuesday that Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told the news outlet that a standard imposed last year by President Obama, which requires “near certainty” that civilians will not be harmed in drone strikes, does not apply to the expanding war on Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Iraq and Syria.

    • 79-year-old Hancock drone protester sentenced to 90 days in jail

      A man convicted on several charges resulting from a drone protest last year was sentenced in DeWitt Town Court Wednesday evening.

      Jack Gilroy, 79, was sentenced by Justice Robert L. Jokl Jr. to 90 days incarceration in the Onondaga County jail and three years probation in Broome County, where he resides. Jokl also fined Gilroy $1,000.

    • Ithaca Drone Protester Appeals Sentence

      Peace activist Mary Anne Grady-Flores is out on bail pending an appeal of her conviction for violating a court order of protection set up for the commander of Hancock National Guard Air Base in Dewitt. She was arrested in February while protesting at the base, where weaponized drones are piloted by remote control to target and kill people on the ground in Afghanistan.

      She has been an activist for decades and now sees the connections among many injustices. “The issue of what’s being done to people of color here and around the world, and to the poor, it’s all related,” she said. “Drone warfare intersects with the militarization of the police. [Using drones] is the same as us being global cops.

    • US could topple my government, kill me: Argentina’s Kirchner

      Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner charged in an emotional address that domestic and US interests were pushing to topple her government, and could even kill her.

      Domestic business interests “are trying to bring down the government, with international (US) help,” she said.

    • As Afghan security pact signed US drones kill 4 civilians

      Ashraf Ghani, the newly inaugurated Afghan president, has signed a bilateral security agreement(BSA) with the US to allow US troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond the end of 2014 when the present agreement will expire.

    • Agreement in Afghanistan

      The very first act of the unity government of Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah was to soothe frayed American nerves and sign the Bilateral Security Agreement. Hamid Karzai, erratic to the very end, had eventually left the decision to his successor. This is why the US was so involved in hashing out an agreement between Ghani and Abdullah over the disputed election. It was worried about the possibility that the agreement would not be signed before the troop withdrawal began at the end of the year. The BSA itself, and a similar agreement with Nato, is hardly what either Afghanistan or the US needs. It would extend what is already the longest war the US has ever fought by another 10 years. US troops, ostensibly staying on to train the Afghan army and security forces, will still control all their bases in the country. Most scandalously, these troops will have immunity from prosecution under Afghan law. It was that very point which scuppered a similar agreement when the US withdrew from Iraq – and it should have signalled the death of the BSA too. US troops have killed and tortured their way through the country, indefinitely holding thousands of Afghan citizens in secret prisons without charge. They can now continue doing that with impunity till 2024.

    • Reaper Drones – Sowing the Seeds of Revenge

      I won’t say that drones have not killed militants. But was that worth taking hundreds of other lives? Was there no other alternative? North Waziristan is an area where there is no major war or military offensive going on. They could have used assassins with precise ground intelligence to find militants without indiscriminately bombarding areas and causing civilian causalities. Such attacks are helping create dozens of suicide bombers, including young girls and women. These attacks are also creating local facilitators, collaborators and sympathizers against those who are supporting or siding with this senseless war on terrorism.

    • Nine world issues that are still going on, but we forgot to care about [Murdoch-owned media makes up numbers]

      American drone strikes have killed over 2000 people, many of whom were civilians and children.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • CIA Inspector General Can’t Find A Single Example Of CIA Overclassification

      A few days ago, we wrote about the CIA redacting information regarding the price it paid for a single Amiga computer back in 1987. After such news reports came out, the CIA admitted that this was an error and shouldn’t have been redacted. Of course, the only reason the documents with that information came out in the first place was because of the efforts of former CIA agent Jeffrey Scudder, who had come across a bunch of classified documents internally that he realized should no longer be classified. Based on that, he filed a FOIA request for those documents — leading the FBI to come after him and end his CIA career (despite his actions being entirely legal).

    • Inspector General Claims to Have Found No ‘Instances’ Where CIA Over-Classified Secrets

      The inspector general for the CIA conducted a review of whether the agency was keeping information secret that should be public and found “no instances of over-classification.”

      The Reducing Over-Classification Act, signed into law on October 7, 2010, requires the inspector general for each United States department or agency with an officer who makes classification decisions to evaluate whether information is being appropriately classified. The inspector general is also to assess policies, procedures, rules, regulations, etc, to reduce “persistent misclassification of material.” This is to be done in “consultation” with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

  • Finance

    • $600 Billion ‘Fat Finger’ Causes Deals Worth More Than Sweden’s Economy To Be Cancelled

      Naturally, the most striking feature of this particular fat finger is its size: $600 billion, bigger than Sweden’s economy ($552 billion). The second unusual aspect is that this error cancelled sales by mistake, rather than make them. That was fortunate for the company concerned, since it probably limited the damage caused.

    • PBS Goes Easy on Paul Ryan

      As for being “against doing programs for the poor,” that was one of the knocks on Ryan’s budget proposals that made him a national star even before he was named Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate. This characterization of Ryan’s policies was, as his critics often pointed out, accurate; his plans called for deep cuts in spending paired with tax breaks for the wealthy.

  • Privacy

    • Join ORG to fight increasing surveillance and attacks on our human rights

      The ECtHR has recognised the importance of this case by giving it priority status. The case is currently adjourned pending judgment in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) case brought by other human rights NGOs. We expect it to proceed in 2015 following the judgment in the IPT case.

    • The NSA and Me

      The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation, and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress.

    • Darkcoin Price in Decline after Open-Source Release

      After enduring a tumultuous cooling period in August, Darkcoin’s prospects were beginning to look up. Kristov Atlas’ review of Darkcoin’s source code was mostly positive, and developer Evan Duffield announced Darkcoin would soon become open-source. Moreover, the Darkcoin price increased during the first half of September. After declining a bit from its mid-month highs, the Darkcoin price rallied before Darkcoin’s open-source release. However, the Darkcoin price has declined since the actual release. Nevertheless, Darkcoin investors should not panic-sell yet.

    • Nobel Peace Prize nominees: who’s missing from the list?

      Norwegian Nobel Committee will soon decide this year’s winner of the peace prize from a list of nominees including Edward Snowden, Jose Mujica and the International Space Station partnership. Who would you add to the list?

    • Another Police Chief Says Phone Encryption Is A Pedophile’s Best Friend

      More law enforcement officials are coming forward to express their dismay at Apple’s and Google’s decision to encrypt cellphones by default. And the hysteria seems to be getting worse. As was recently covered, FBI director James Comey stated that no one was above the law, while failing to realize there’s actually no law preventing Apple or Google from doing this.

  • Civil Rights

    • On Occupy Central’s Ties with the NED

      Numerous alternative media outlets, including WikiLeaks, have pointed out the connections between Occupy Central and the United States government through an organization called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). I am not surprised at this, nor do I welcome it, given the United States’ questionable record (to put it nicely) at bringing “democracy” to countries where it has intervened in the past. It is most likely in Hong Kongers’ best interests that the US withdraw its monetary support for Occupy Central, as unlikely as this is to happen.

    • Women wearing jeans is against Indian culture: Yesudas

      Sparking a controversy, singer K.J. Yesudas on Thursday resented women wearing jeans, saying this went against Indian culture.

      “Women should not cause trouble to others by wearing jeans,” Mr. Yesudas said at a function organised by a voluntary organisation in connection with Gandhi Jayanti celebrations in Thiruvananthapuram.

    • Why is the European court of human rights hated by the UK right?

      Amiran Natsvlishvili is not complaining about the kidnapping. Nor about the brutal beatings, or the huge ransom his family had to pay for his release. The former managing director of a state car plant in Georgia is not bitter, either, about the accusations of embezzlement and misuse of public funds.

    • Ex-NATO chief Rasmussen opens consultancy advising governments, companies

      The European Commission, NATO’s neighbour in Brussels, has a code of conduct barring former commissioners from lobbying the EU’s executive body for 18 months after leaving office.

    • Killing Americans on the White House Lawn Is Wrong

      America’s forever war has come to this — the front lawn of the White House may become a kill zone. That’s crazier than whatever prompted Iraq war veteran Omar J. Gonzalez to jump the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue two weeks ago, running for the Oval Office.

    • Al-Qaida’s icon cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was FBI informant: New documents
    • FBI Documents Suggest al-Qaida Terrorist Was Informant

      A radical Muslim cleric who bought plane tickets for three of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackers was communicating with the FBI for years afterward as a likely informant.

      Newly released internal documents indicate that Anwar al-Awlaki, also known as the “bin Laden of the Internet,” was emailing and leaving voicemails with an FBI agent in 2003 and 2004, after having been captured at JFK International Airport in 2002 but released at the instruction of the agency.

    • Disclosures Pried From Government Strongly Suggest Terrorist Awlaki Was an Informant
    • Enemy or Asset? FBI documents show radical cleric Awlaki communicated with federal agent in ’03
    • New Documents Show FBI Kept Channels Open to Al-Aulaqi Despite Terrorist Designation
    • Folk International Law and Syrian Airstrikes

      Earlier this year, I published an article called “Folk International Law,” in which I argued that there were many unappreciated and little understood costs to the convergence of LOAC and international human rights law. I suggested that the legal debate over targeted killing had driven US-based human rights advocates to contribute to and participate in a bizarre legal admixture of IHRL, IHL and jus ad bellum in order to attempt to impose some legal regulation on the seemingly extra-legal lethal strikes on targets outside of situations of armed conflict. I suggested that many lawyers seeking to influence the Obama administration’s decisions had accepted an approach to global NIAC that treated distinct bodies of international law as a policy toolkit that could be used to create “folk international law” norms that were not recognizable to most international lawyers outside of the immediate US conversation.

    • Killing Trayvons

      Summer 2014: a year since George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin. Another summer of violence and justification: US shells incinerating Palestinian children, devastating UN refuges in Gaza, pounding Afghan villages, again. Another trial of another white man who says he was scared, who had to defend himself with a blast of ammunition against an unarmed black teenager – a womanchild this time, 19, in Michigan this time, shot through a locked screen door. Another police killing on the front pages of the New York tabloids: a big man, a black father, put in a choke hold, kneed in the back as he gasped for air, as he told cops he couldn’t breathe; extinguished for passing a cigarette to someone on a street in Staten Island. He may have been selling looseys, police said, and he refused to submit; they had to bring him down. Then they watched as he expired. “The perpetrator’s condition did not seem serious,” one stated.

    • Dozens of Libyan troops killed in Benghazi attacks, clashes

      Dozens of soldiers were killed and more than 70 wounded in car bomb attacks and clashes between troops and Islamists around Benghazi airport, a Libyan army spokesman said today, as the UN threatened sanctions.

    • Is Obama Regime Planning Mass Arrests?

      Is the Obama regime preparing for mass arrests of American civilians? Some indicators suggest this is a real possibility.

      It has all the laws it needs to imprison anyone should it plan to make mass arrests (thanks, Congress, for the unconstitutional Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act).

      It has illegally compiled lists of some 8 million names, (thank you, FBI and NSA).

    • Sheriff Slams EFF As ‘Not Credible,’ Insists ComputerCOP Isn’t Malware & Would Have Stopped Columbine

      Okay, so we thought the response from San Diego’s District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis was pretty bad to the revelations about ComputerCOP. After all, she was responding to the news that she had purchased and distributed dangerous spyware masquerading as software to “protect the children” — and the best she could come up with was that her “security” people still thought it would protect kids? But apparently Damanis has nothing on Sheriff Mike Blakely of Limestone County, Alabama.

    • Limestone Sheriff clashes with activist group over computer program

      Limestone County’s Sheriff is clashing with an activist group over a new computer program to protect children online.

      Sheriff Mike Blakely started offering the program “Computer Cop” for parents to better protect their kids from predators or inappropriate websites.

10.02.14

Links 2/10/2014: Kano Brings GNU/Linux to Education, Fedora 21 Desktop Matures

Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Join me in supporting The Ada Initiative

    When I first read that Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora would be changing careers to work full-time on behalf of women in open source communities, I never imagined it would lead so far so fast. Today, The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization with global reach, whose programs have helped create positive change for women in a wide range of communities beyond open source. Building on this foundation, imagine how much more they can do in the next four years! That’s why I’m pledging my continuing support, and asking you to join me.

  • Eight Key Open-Source Internet of Things Projects

    Open source is key to the development of the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, the Eclipse Foundation is taking a hard look at IoT for Java developers. In fact, the Eclipse IoT community is making it easier for Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution by delivering at JavaOne 2014 an open IoT stack for Java developers. Based on open source and open standards, the Eclipse Open IoT Stack for Java simplifies IoT development by enabling Java developers to reuse a core set of frameworks and services in their IoT solutions. In addition to the core Open IoT Stack, a set of industrial frameworks are available to accelerate the process of creating home automation and SCADA factory automation solutions. “Our goal with this is to ensure that Java developers have a free and open-source platform for building IoT solutions,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse.

  • Facebook engineers open source ‘cookbooks’ for Chef framework

    Facebook is opening up its cookbooks — but these recipes won’t taste good from the kitchen. Chef is Facebook’s engineering framework, and Facebook engineers have decided to open source that technology.

  • Inbox, Focused on Smart Email Apps, Takes Next Steps, Reveals Pricing

    Back in July, when there were only a few details available about it, I covered the announcement of Inbox, an email-focused startup company founded by MIT graduates who had worked for Dropbox.

  • Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope

    I’ve been working on Telescope (an open source Hacker News-type app built with the Meteor JavaScript framework) for close to two years now, and along the way I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make an open source project successful.

  • How Talko wielded cheap cloud services and open source tools to build its communications app

    On this week’s Structure Show, hear how Talko stood on the shoulders of AWS and Azure — and wielded the Opus codec, WebRTC, FreeSwitch and other open-source tools to build an app that actually makes voice calls worth making again.

  • Goldman-led open source chat service makes its debut

    The much-anticipated chat service that Goldman Sachs has been rumored to be working on with startup messaging company Perzo was formally announced Wednesday under the brand name Symphony.

  • Vendors join hands to foster open source NFV

    The Linux Foundation has added another string to its virtualisation bow, with the launch of OPNFV, its project for an open-source network function virtualisation (NFV) platform.

  • Telecom operators and vendors push for open source NFV

    Rival telecom operators and infrastructure vendors lay down their swords to collaborate in an open source NFV consortium that will develop standards for productizing interoperable technology.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS media-casting stick strikes Kickstarter gold

        The first Firefox OS based media player has arrived on Kickstarter, in the form of a $25 open-spec HDMI stick that supports Chromecast-like content casting.

        The Matchstick, which has already zoomed past its Kickstarter campaign’s $100,000 funding goal, with 28 days still remaining, was teased back in June by Mozilla developer evangelist Christian Heilmann. The unnamed prototype was billed as an open source HDMI stick that runs Mozilla’s Linux-based Firefox OS and offers casting capabilities. Few details were revealed at the time except that the device used the same DIAL (DIscovery And Launch) media-casting protocol created by Netflix and popularized by Google’s Chromecast.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • CMS

    • Role of Open Source in WordPress Popularity

      Almost every person associated with the web industry realizes the fact that open source solutions tend to produce better and cost-effective results. And the open source feature can be considered as a crucial factor that led to the evolution of the most popular and extensively used CMS, WordPress. I doubt that WordPress would have received the same recognition as it enjoys today, without the open source feature. This post throws light on how open-source feature has been the driving force behind WordPress popularity, but before that let’s have an overview of what open source exactly means.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • ‘Hello World’ Fundraising Update

      A little over two weeks ago, I told you about the Brothers Nielsen, Jared and JR, who produce short educational videos which teach Linux and other tech skills to nine to thirteen-year-olds under the “Hello World” banner — a name which should be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a “programming for dummies” course.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Freedom Day in Hanoi

      To travel to Hanoi, Vietnam from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, we have to do two flights and my first flight was flying to Vientiane, Laos. I had to wait for 1 hour to transfer to Hanoi, Vietnam. Laos (WATTAY) International Airport was small, so I did not take any picture of it. Just after I landed like you see in the below picture. I departed from Phnom Penh at 5:50PM and arrived at WATTAY International Airport at 7:15PM and left there at 8:00PM and arrived Hanoi at 9:00PM.

    • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 14 new GNU releases!

      To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

  • Public Services/Government

    • HealthWatch England adopts open source CRM

      With Britain looking to cut it’s deficit the Government is looking to cut costs where it can including on the software-front by moving from proprietary solutions from the likes of Microsoft over to Free/Libre and Open Source solution. HealthWatch England, a part of the United Kingdom’s national health service, is the latest governmental body to move to open source solutions for some of their work.

  • Licensing

    • Open source more about process than licensing

      It is a testament to the success of the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) branding campaign for open source software that “open source” and “licensing” are functionally synonymous. To the extent that people are familiar with open source software, it is the source code released under a license that lets anyone see the “crown jewels” of a software program as opposed to an opaque binary, or black box that hides its underpinnings.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Satoshimycin: The Future of Cancer Research and “Open-Source” Science

    • Open Hardware

      • Project PAM – College Students Look to Create an Entirely Open Source DLP 3D Printer

        Open source has contributed to 3D printing in such a tremendous way. Without the open sourcing of many desktop 3D printers several years ago, the space would not be nearly as advanced as it currently is. Open source allows for brilliant people to take brilliant ideas and products, and then develop them further through the implementation of their own ideas. Open sourcing is not for companies looking to make huge profits, although it definitely still remains possible. Open sourcing is meant for those individuals who believe that the ideology behind technology should be for the greater good of mankind, not for the profits on certain individuals. We have seen many companies originate as part of an open source movement, only then to slowly migrate into closing off the rights to their designs, through the filing of patents and other means.

  • Programming

    • A possible future for PHP

      ownCloud is one of the biggest open source project written in PHP if you look into the latest statistics. It is used for the server part of ownCloudas most of you know. We use other technologies like C++ and Qt for the Desktop Clients, Java for the Android app and Objective-C for iOS, JavaScript for the web-interface and more. But the heart of ownCloud is the server component which is using PHP 5.3 or higher..

Leftovers

  • Nick Griffin expelled from BNP

    The British National Party has expelled its former leader, Nick Griffin, over allegations that he harassed members and told “lies” about its top brass.

    Mr Griffin, who stood down as leader of the BNP in July, was found guilty of a string of offences by a party conduct committee, which released a statement that said Mr Griffin was “trying to cause disunity by deliberately fabricating a state of crisis” in the party.

  • Nick Griffin expelled from British National partyNick Griffin expelled from British National party
  • CUPS Turn 15 Years Old, CUPS 2.0 Released

    The British National party has expelled former leader Nick Griffin for allegedly “trying to cause disunity” in a bid to destabilise the organisation.

  • ‘Internal affair’: Beijing warns foreign countries not to meddle in Hong Kong

    China’s foreign minister made it clear Beijing would not allow other countries to meddle into its ‘internal affairs’, responding in this way to US Secretary of State’s call for Beijing to grant Hong Kong the “highest possible degree of autonomy.”

    The American and the Chinese heads of foreign offices exchanged their views on the massive protests in Hong Kong before their talks at the US State Department on Wednesday.

  • Security

  • Censorship

    • Recommendations on The Right to Be Forgotten by La Quadrature du Net and Reporters Without Borders

      The European Union Court of Justice ruling of 13 May 2014 on a case brought by Google Spain highlighted the problems for the protection of freedom of expression and the right to information posed by the right to de-indexation from search engine results and, more broadly, the right to be forgotten. Privacy and freedom of expression are fundamental rights of equal value (articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and articles 8 and 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). Whenever one conflicts with the other, a balance must be reached under a judge’s authority because, as a matter of principle, one cannot be given more importance than the other.

  • Privacy

    • Darkcoin Steps Out of the Shadows

      Darkcoin this week announced that it has exited beta and is now ready for mainstream use. Also, the software’s code is now open source.

      Darkcoin — a Bitcoin competitor — is the first fully open source cryptocurrency with financial privacy built directly into the software, its developers claimed.

    • The Ghost of Ronald Reagan Authorizes Most NSA Spying

      U.S. intelligence agents have broad authority to spy on U.S. companies as long as they are “believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” — a description that could conceivably apply to any company with foreign shareholders, subsidiaries, or even employees—according to newly released government documents published this morning by the ACLU.

    • ORG responds to Conservative’s UK Bill of Rights proposal

      Executive Director of Open Rights Group, Jim Killock said:

      “This will make it very convenient for the government to carry on with mass surveillance and ignore future legal decisions limiting GCHQ’s whole population profiling. It is clear is that this government is determined to reduce the human rights protections available to ordinary people in order to avoid facing limitations on its own powers. But it is precisely these limitations that allow democracies to hold governments to account.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Michael Brown Had a Father

      But will Ferguson shift media ideas on ‘fixing’ black men?

    • In Wisconsin, a Push for Voter ID Law, But Not Voter IDs

      In May of 2011, Wisconsin Republicans took the rather extraordinary step of stopping work on the budget to pass a voter ID bill in advance of the recall elections. Earlier this year, Walker vowed to call the legislature back into session to pass a new voter ID law if courts didn’t ultimately uphold the measure, which lower courts had blocked.

    • Theresa May Must Resign

      There was never any doubt that the accusation of terrorism against Moazzam Begg was, once again, a tissue of politically motivated lies. What is still more appalling, I am told by a Home Office source that the decision to arrest and detain him was taken by Theresa May herself. This involvement of politicians in the abuse of individuals by the state is appalling.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Open Letter to the Council of the European Union on Net Neutrality

      In the wake of the debate on the Telecom Single Market, which is becoming quite intense within the Council of the European Union, La Quadrature du Net has joined other organisations, consumers groups and industry representatives in sending to Member States representatives in Brussels a letter urging them to protect to Net neutrality in the European Union.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

10.01.14

Links 1/10/2014: OPNFV Goes Public, PDF Reader Pullout

Posted in News Roundup at 4:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • An open source networking ecosystem shapes up

    Open source networking is becoming a reality now that standards bodies, vendors and development communities are working together. Yet these players face a slew of challenges.

  • Facebook has over 200 open source projects on GitHub

    Facebook. It’s one of the world’s most well-known tech companies and on the forefront of open source technology. Just take a look their portfolio of over 200 open source projects on GitHub.

  • Learn how to support women in open source

    Women are an underrepresented group in the open source world. According to data from the FLOSS 2013 survey, a little more than 10% of open source developers are women. Recently, there have been several attempts to make open source more welcoming to women contributors and supportive of their accomplishments. Two good examples of these efforts are GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women, an internship program designed to welcome women into the open source community and provide them with mentoring, and Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Award.

  • Open source is starting to make a dent in proprietary software fortunes

    Open source has promised to unseat proprietary competitors for decades, but the cloud may make the threat real.

  • The Path to Full-time Open Source

    Three months ago I quit my job to work on Sidekiq and build a brand new OSS project and commercial product. Tomorrow I want to introduce it to you.

  • Apache Storm is ready for prime time

    What do you do when you have terabytes and more of data and you want to work it with in real time? Well, one solution is to turn to Apache Storm.

  • Events

    • Next-Generation Email Platform Inbox Rolls Out Open Source Apps, Details Its Hosted API Pricing

      Inbox, the email startup founded by Dropbox and MIT alums offering modern APIs that allow developers to build new applications on top of email’s aging underpinnings, is today taking steps to make it even easier for developers to get started with the launch of open source email apps. The company is also announcing the pricing for its hosted version of the Inbox API for the first time publicly.

  • Web Browsers

    • Firefox, Google Chrome Updates Fix BERserk SSL Flaw

      Both Mozilla and Google updated their Web browsers on Sept. 24 for a vulnerability that had been present in all prior releases. The updates fix a single issue in the core Network Security Services (NSS) library that is present in both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The new Mozilla update is Firefox 32.0.3, and the Google Chrome update is version 37.0.2062.124.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Dear clueless assholes: stop bashing bash and GNU.

      This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not somehow benefitted from his contributions, and many have benefitted to the tune of billions. In return for the countless billions of wealth that people made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule. Now that the world is done taking from him, they are heading to the next step of villifying him as incompetent.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Small firms and open-source software put Spine back into NHS after IT fiasco

      Without the fuss and delays that have plagued so many large government IT projects, a key part of the NHS digital infrastructure was recently migrated and updated in a single weekend.

      The collection of applications and directory services known as the Spine connects clinicians, patients and local services to core NHS services such as the GP2GP patient record transfer, the Electronic Prescription Service, patients’ Summary Care Records, and the Choose and Book service. More than 250,000 health service staff connect to it every day, sending more than 400m messages each month.

    • England’s Healthwatch switches to open source CRM

      England’s Healthwatch organisations are now using CiviCRM, an open source solution for customer relationship management. “Open source affords access to a wide community of developers, which means that the software continues to develop and security updates and bug fixes are regularly rolled out”, explains Tim Schofield, the organisation’s interim systems manager.

    • Udine city struggles to remove IT vendor lock-in

      The Italian city of Udine is ‘gradually and painfully’ removing all the ties that bind the city’s ICT systems to the usual proprietary operating systems and office productivity solutions, reports head of the IT department, Antonio Scaramuzzi. The city aims to slowly introduce more free and open source software alternatives.

      Unhurried, the municipality is implementing open source technologies where feasible, avoiding big migration projects, Scaramuzzi writes to the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).

      Earlier this month, IT trade news site Zdnet that the town is making Apache OpenOffice the default office suite. The software is already installed on all of the city’s 900 PCs. ZDNet writes that this switch will save the city about 400 euro per PC in proprietary software licences.

  • Licensing

    • Open source history, present day, and licensing

      Looking at open source softwares particularly, this is a fact that is probably useful to you if you are thinking about business models, many people don’t care about it anymore. We talk about FOSS, Free and Open Source Software, but if we really are strict there’s a difference between free software and open source software. On the left, I have free software which most typically is GPL software. Software where the license insures freedom. It gives freedoms to you as a user, but it also requires that the freedoms are maintained.

      On the right-hand side, you have open source software which is open for all, but it also allows you to close it. So here we come back to the famous clause of the GPL license, the reciprocity requirement which says, “If I am open, you need to be open.” So software that comes under the GPL license carries with it something that other people call a virus. I call it a blessing because I think it’s great if all software becomes open.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Humanitarian applications in OpenStack, the Rosetta Stone of the cloud, and more
    • The geocaching experience is catching

      What does the above have to do with open source? Do you use tools like c:geo? Then, you are using open source to go geocaching! Geocaching is an offline scavenger hunt, out in the real world, with the help of GPS coordinates. The person who hides the “cache” is the owner and prepares it by finding a nice hiding spot and putting sheet of paper, the log book into a cache container. Cache containers come in different kinds sizes and forms. The most popular kind is a 35mm film container. There are others that look like old rusty screws, parts of a tree, bird houses, or look-a-like rocks. The owner then hides the container, records its GPS coordinates, and makes it available to other geocachers so that they can go find the cache and sign the log book to record the finding.

    • Jazz is the music of open source

    • Open Data

      • France appoints Chief Data Officer

        France is the first country to appoint a Chief Data Officer (Administrateur Général des Données, AGD), to ensure open data reaches its full potential in improving government services. On 17 September, France appointed Henri Verdier, director of Etalab, which runs the Inter-ministerial open portal, data.gouv.fr. Verdier is to coordinate government actions aimed at inventorying, governing, producing, circulating and using government data. With the CDO, France aims to enhance evaluation of government policies, increase government openness and boost research and innovation.

    • Open Hardware

      • Axiom crowdfunding campaign to develop open source camera

        For almost three years a community of independent filmmakers called the apertus project have been developing an open source digital cinema camera with Axiom, which would allow filmmakers the ability to modify, repair and create their own custom cameras. After creating a proof-of-concept prototype, the Axiom Alpha, the group launched a crowd-funding campaign on indiegogo.com in September 2014 to raise further development funding for the Axiom Beta, a second model which will allow the team to test and advance the product further.

      • Build-a-Bot Kit Makes Robots Open Source

        A new toolkit could help veteran and beginner roboticists design, create and assemble a variety of soft-bodied bots. The online resource, which includes a trove of blueprints, tutorials and how-to videos, could spur the development of new robots to operate in the medical industry, disaster relief efforts or an array of other applications.

      • Open source hardware pumpkin-puppet

        David writes, “A year ago I pledged to make a fully interactive version of my augmented jack-O-lantern, Gourdy; I’ve finally gotten around to doing it, and I’m releasing him free for anyone to use.

      • Arduino to sell 3D printer—$800 in kit form or $1,000 pre-assembled

        Open source hardware maker unveils Materia 101, a “precision 3D printer.”

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Other Kind of Climate Change Denial

      Whew. Back on planet Earth, burning more fossil fuels is going to have at least one consequence: It will continue contributing to the heating of the planet. But Samuelson never mentions climate change, which is too often treated as a non-event in coverage of energy (FAIR Blog, 5/15/12; 9/9/14).

      In a way, this is merely a different type of climate change denial, one that wishes away the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels. Interestingly, the Samuelson column has a “Read more about this topic” link at the bottom, which takes readers to a Post editorial on the same subject, headlined “Commerce Dept. Should Allow Exports of US Crude.” This is notable because the Post editorial page has drawn attention for a series they’re calling “A Climate for Change,” which is supposed to represent the paper’s decision to take the climate crisis seriously. Except, apparently, when the same editorial page is making the case for drilling for more oil.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Darkcoin Releases Open Source Code, Exits Beta Stages

      Privacy-centered digital currency Darkcoin (DRK) is now a fully open-source cryptocurrency as it unveils its source code and moves out of the beta stages of development.

    • Darkcoin 2.0 Open Source – Interview With Darkcoin’s Duffield

      If you don’t already know, Darkcoin was released in the first quarter of 2014, and it’s unique selling proposition as a digital currency was it’s enhanced privacy and security structure relative to the almighty Bitcoin. A minor-league detective can figure out the transaction origins made on Bitcoin’s Blockchain, and mine your privacy, in effect. Darkcoin aims to take your financial dealings into total darkness, with a security-centric design language.

    • Darkcoin Solves Bitcoin Privacy Challenges; Releases Open Source Code

      Darkcoin is a revolutionary new cryptocurrency which offers privacy and fast transaction speed. Four years ago, the mysterious and brilliant Satoshi Nakamoto developed a revolutionary piece of software called Bitcoin. In doing so, Satoshi created both a digital currency (so-called “cryptocurrencies” are decentralized and secured by cryptography, rather than by a government) and an inexpensive payment network. Bitcoin uses a decentralized financial ledger called a “blockchain” to keep track of everybody’s balances and to transfer money from one bitcoin address to another.

    • Darkcoin Releases Darksend’s Open Source Code

      As scheduled during the release of RC5 last week, the Darkcoin Foundation today open-sourced Darksend. The code of this anonymity-offering platform was kept closed-source since the time of its launch. The reasons given for hiding Darksend’s source code were the unsureness of its functionality in mainstream market, due to which the platform had to go through some really rigorous testing and audit procedures.

    • Saving Face and the threats to privacy in our society

      Now this argument has been solidly debunked in various articles, breaking down to these main reasons:

      You don’t know what you have to hide

      You should have something to hide

      Privacy is a basic human need

      On the first two, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike wrote for Wired Magazine.

    • ORG responds to calls by Theresa May for new communications data bill

      Open Rights Group has responded to the Home Secretary, Theresa May’s call for a revival of the snoopers’ charter to give the police greater powers to access communications data.

      Open Rights Group’s Executive Director, Jim Killock said:

      “We already have GCHQ engaging in illegal mass surveillance justified by the investigation of terrorism. Why exactly does Theresa May need to revive the snoopers’ charter which would give the police the same powers to infringe our liberties? We need targeted surveillance not data trawling and population profiling.”

    • Theresa May’s call for new Snooper’s Charter can launch a national debate

      The Conservatives have made a clear offer to the public: they are saying that they will, if elected, revive plans for the Snooper’s Charter. Massive data gathering and analysis of your online habits would become available to the police and a range of public bodies. Powers that are currently being challenged in the courts, but are in practice available to GCHQ under programmes like TEMPORA, would become an everyday policing tool.

    • Holder urges tech firms to cooperate with law enforcement

      Wading into a fight that’s about to get more interesting, Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday urged tech firms to cooperate with law enforcement.

      “We would hope that technology companies would be willing to work with us to ensure that law enforcement retains the ability, with court-authorization, to lawfully obtain information in the course of an investigation, such as catching kidnappers and sexual predators,” Holder said.

    • Security doesn’t discriminate

      That was all too typical in Holder’s call to tech companies to leave device back doors open to police.

  • Civil Rights

    • Oettinger’s Hearing: All for the Industry, Nothing for Citizens

      The European Union’s “Digital Agenda” should not only be about digits and economy. It is also about rights and freedom. After several hours of hearing of Günther Oettinger, the designated EU Commissioner for the “Digital Economy and Society”, one question remains unanswered: what about the protection of fundamental rights in the digital environment?

    • Life Sentence For Sulaiman Abu Ghaith Discredits Guantánamo’s Military Commissions

      Last Tuesday, in a courtroom in New York City, a long-running chapter in the “war on terror” came to an end, when Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, 48, a Kuwaiti-born cleric who appeared in media broadcasts as a spokesman for Al-Qaeda the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, received a life sentence based on the three counts for which he was convicted after his trial in March: conspiracy to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

    • Fixing the internet for confidentiality and security

      A fair society is one where laws are clear and crimes are punished in a way that is deemed fair. It is not one where thinking about crime is criminal, or one where talking about things that are unpalatable is criminal, or one where everybody is notionally protected from the arbitrary and the capricious. Over the past 20 years life has become safer, not more risky, for people living in an Internet-connected West. That’s no thanks to the listeners; it’s thanks to living in a period when the youth (the source of most trouble in the world) feel they have access to opportunity and ideas on a world-wide basis. We are pretty much certain to have hard challenges ahead in that regard. So for all the scaremongering about Chinese cyber-espionage and Russian cyber-warfare and criminal activity in darknets, we are better off keeping the Internet as a free-flowing and confidential medium than we are entrusting an agency with the job of monitoring us for inappropriate and dangerous ideas. And that’s something we’ll have to work for.

    • Holder’s inconsistent constitutional legacy

      The American Civil Liberties Union and other activist groups denounced a speech that Holder gave at the Northwestern University School of Law in 2012 in which he argued that Barack Obama’s administration had the authority to engage in targeted killings anywhere in the world without judicial review, a critical check on executive power. In May the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld deference to the administration in a case brought by the family of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011 after he had been placed on a kill list. Journalist Jason Leopold recently obtained a copy of a DOJ memo about the justification for extrajudicial assassination that was heavily redacted, and the human toll of both intended targets and civilian casualties remains shrouded in secrecy.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XXXVIII

      In my last update, I mentioned plans to organise a European Citizens’ Initiative, a formal petition against both TTIP and CETA. I think everyone assumed that the European Commission would just ignore this when it was presented, but in fact it has done something rather more spectactular – and stupid: it has refused to allow the ECI to go ahead at all.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright exceptions for parody and format shifting become law

        After nine years of campaigning, Open Rights Group is delighted that copyright exceptions for parody and format shifting have passed into law.

        Executive Director Jim Killock said:

        “It has been a long, drawn-out campaign but we’re delighted that people who contribute to the rich creativity of the internet by creating parodies will now have protection under the law. It’s also right that copying our own legally bought music or books for personal use will no longer be illegal.

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