● 12.02.10

● Links 2/12/2010: Nokia and Intel Linux Updates, GCC vs LLVM Measurements

Posted in News Roundup at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While we anticipated Mesa 7.10 being a late Q4’2010 or very early Q1’2011 release, today that’s now been formalized with Intel’s Ian Romanick once again stepping up to the plate to manage this next Mesa 3D release. Ian’s proposal calls for Mesa 7.10 to be branched on 8 December and then for the final release to be out around or on the 7th of January. In traditional Mesa fashion, a Mesa 7.9.1 bug-fix release will also come around that time.

• It’s long been a topic of what parts of X.Org should be killed with fire. There’s plenty of dated and obscure X.Org and Mesa drivers around for hardware that hasn’t even been manufactured in years and are rarely used. At XDS Toulose and on other occasions it’s been decided not to do a massive purge of all these legacy graphics drivers for Linux. Old hardware support by the X Server has once again been brought up, but this time it’s about monitors.

Applications

• http://www.webupd8.org/2010/12/zeitgeist-extension-for-chrome-to-use.html

Proprietary

• Adobe Flash Player 10.2 beta was released today with preliminary support for Stage Video which is supposed to reduce the performance impact while playing back video content across all platforms. The new version also brings enhanced text rendering, and two popular requests from the community: a native custom mouse cursors API and support for full screen playback with multiple monitors.

• Yesterday afternoon the Adobe developers came out to release their first Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Beta for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. This Flash Player releases introduces “Stage Video”, which is their new API and method for accelerating Flash video content across all platforms, including Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Back in May we reported that Ryzom was released as free software, with Ryzom being a massively multi-player online science-fantasy role playing game developed by a French game studio. Six months after putting the code out there, Winch Gate Properties Ltd is announcing the official release of their native Linux client for the Ryzom game.

• It’s now two months since Linux Game Publishing went offline due to a failure of their only web server and full service has still not been restored. Last week their service was partially restored with the LGP DRM system going back online along with some of their other web-sites, but the main Linux Game Publishing web-site is still down with no update since the 23rd of November.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• As El Reg reported back in September, Makara was shopping itself to various potential suitors, and today Linux, virtualization, and middleware juggernaut Red Hat snapped up the startup to pad out its platform as a service products to better compete against Microsoft, VMware, and others.

• [...]

• Crenshaw did not tip the company’s cards on when this future integrated product based on Makara and JBoss technologies would be delivered.

• Several days ago, Chen Lei, aka supercyper, told me that Thorsten Leemhuis (thl) has entirely left RPM Fusion. Thl will spent more time in his other jobs. Supercyper is so worried about that. He said RPM Fusion will die if thl no longer works for RPM Fusion.

• For the CentOS developers and users, Christmas Day may bring more than the usual presents under the tree.

• If past experience holds, it should take the CentOS development and QA teams about 45 days from the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to get CentOS 6 ready for release… which puts the projected release date on December 25.

Debian Family

• While the upstream FreeBSD project doesn’t have an easy root ZFS file-system installation option within FreeBSD 8.0/8.1, this isn’t particularly ground-breaking, as the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD already has ZFS installation support that is quite easy to work.

• Users of Linux can save themselves a lot of time, trouble, heartache and pain by taking the path of least resistance and using a distribution that works with their hardware out of the box.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo

• Mobile Linux has had a difficult road to the mainstream and remains highly fragmented. The

• most famous Linux-based mobile OS, Android, officially doesn’t even qualify as Linux any more. This seems to have given Intel and Nokia the opportunity to present themselves as the guardians of Linux for mobile devices. However unlikely this scenario may seem, given past history, their mutual platform MeeGo has its credentials firmly intact, and is hosted by the Linux Foundation, which fosters development of the open source platform. Now Intel and Nokia are taking even more of the high ground, as both have entered the top five contributors to the Linux OS kernel for the past year.

• With the growing popularity of Google’s Linux-based Android operating system for smartphones and other mobile devices and the excitement surrounding Intel’s and Nokia’s joint MeeGo project for tablets, Linux is becoming a key player in the mobile market. All top smartphone makers, excluding Nokia and Apple, have at least one Android phone in their product lineup. Nokia is expected to rollout a slew of MeeGo devices in 2011.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Symbian Foundation announces website closures starting mid-December 2010.

• Recently the Symbian Foundation announced Nokia’s commitment to making the Symbian platform available under an alternative direct and open model. As a result of the Symbian Foundation licensing transition, there will be a reduction in daily operations and staff numbers.

Events

• Allies are extremely important. There aren’t that many women here yet. So, in order to be successful at changing the tone in the free software community, we need your help.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• It has finally happened. It took a little longer than anticipated, but Chrome has now passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit TechCrunch. For the month of November, Chrome is number one for the first time, edging out Firefox 27.80 percent to 27.67 percent.

• Back in early September, on Chrome’s second birthday, we noted that Google’s browser had been making huge gains over the past couple of years and was only about 3 percent away from passing longtime leader (again, in terms of browsing traffic to TechCrunch) Firefox. The quickly progressing Firefox 4 beta likely slowed Chrome’s march to the top a bit, but it couldn’t fully hold it back. Now the question is: can Chrome hang on?

Funding

• Some time ago I was asked to do a study of our most popular open source projects to assess 1) what governance models are out there and 2) if the governance model has any effect on the project’s success (such as size of developer community) on the one hand and on the other hand on the business of the related vendor(s).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A few weeks ago there were benchmarks of GCC, LLVM-GCC, DragonEgg, and Clang. In this compiler performance comparison the releases of GCC 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, and a 4.6 development snapshot were benchmarked. On the LLVM side there was LLVM-GCC 4.2, DragonEgg with GCC 4.5 and LLVM 2.8, and then Clang with LLVM 2.8. This combination of eight open-source compilers were tested on three distinct Intel and AMD systems (even a 12-thread Core i7 Gulftown), but all of which were 64-bit capable and contained relatively high-end processors from their respective series. To complement this earlier article, available now are some new GCC/LLVM benchmarks but this time an older Intel Atom CPU was used to look at the 32-bit compiler performance on a slower, low-power netbook.

Project Releases

• After over a year it’s about time that I announced an arm release so here it is! What’s new since August of 2009, you ask? Lots. The project has been under very active development, continuing to add usability improvements to make relay operation nicer and less error prone. If you’re really curious what I’ve been up to this last year then it’s all available in the change log.

• There’s long been a desire by KDE users to have a Phonon back-end for the VLC media player (there’s 4 year old bug reports on the matter) and just now there is finally a Phonon-VLC release that is considered “stable enough for day to day use.” Phonon-VLC is a version of VLC that uses the Phonon back-end from KDE4 as it’s back-end. This multimedia API was originally provided by KDE libraries and then integrated into Qt is abstracted and can then target a particular multimedia back-end like GStreamer or Xine.

Openness/Sharing

• The open source community has a phrase for the principle of rapid prototyping: “Release early, release often.” The theory is sound: Don’t wait until a project is perfect to share it. Instead, keep producing work so more people can experience it, react to it, find bugs, and improve it.

• But does the principle also work in a creative environment? Ideas are fragile. Their merit is judged not just on the idea, but the quality of the execution. Often they need to be protected just to get that far. All it takes is one naysayer to sweep the legs out from under your idea.

Leftovers

• Florida student is relieved to know deputies aren’t searching for him…but he’s still in shock that the Polk County Sheriff’s Office erroneously released his photo in connection to a September murder.

• Investigators originally released a driver’s license photo of Zachary Garcia — spelled with an “A” — but it was Zachery Garcia — spelled with an “E” — who was charged in connection with the crime.

• Oklahoma’s FOX 23 News found out about “Jus N Walk” and his Facebook page, which, sadly, no longer contains the photographs of Walker taking bong rips, drinking hooch and licking shanks. He likes fantasy novels, the movie Natural Born Killers, and, according to FOX 23, adheres to white power ideology. Watch the news report above.

• Google Editions, the Internet giant’s book store business promised for last summer, is set to launch before the end of 2010, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• One of the latest disclosure by Wikileaks that is doing the round today is the news that Gordon Brown personally appealed to the US Ambassador to resolve the Gary McKinnon case and allow him to face justice in the UK. By all account the US gave him a flat refusal.

• The conspiracy theorists are suggesting it seems that this appeal by Brown took place around the same time as Scotland were pissing off the yanks by letting the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al Megrahi free because he only had a few months to live (still alive I think). In other words, the yanks took the “fuck you” approach as payback.

• Muscling up on cloud technologies, Cisco is in the process of acquiring network management software vendor LineSider Technologies, the company announced Wednesday.

Health/Nutrition

• Scientists at the University of Missouri used cinnamon to replace almost all toxic chemicals needed for making gold nanoparticles used in electronics and healthcare products.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• The Pentagon Papers were a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The New York Times published the papers in defiance of the Nixon administration, and was investigated by the White House. Attorney Floyd Abrams, who defended the newspaper in the Pentagon Papers case, talks to Renee Montagne about the laws that apply to WikiLeaks.

• I’ve been dealing with a family illness, but couldn’t let the Wikileaks Cablegate incident pass without comment. In between hospital visits, I’ve been jotting down links related to the historic leak.

• It’s a stunning experiment of forced transparency, prying open government against its will without much care or concern about the ramifications. Wikileaks is the Pirate Bay of journalism — an unstoppable force disrupting whole industries because they can.

• To help make sense of my own opinions about it, I rounded up some of the more interesting responses and visualizations. Enjoy.

• Kevin Poulsen at Wired News: “The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden.”

• Admire him or revile him, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency, the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago. Over the last year his information insurgency has dumped 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war into the public domain–the largest classified military security breaches in history. Sunday, WikiLeaks made the first of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department cables public, offering an unprecedented view of how America’s top diplomats view enemies and friends alike.

• I think there actually is something talismanic about designating Assange a terrorist–politically talismanic. I think we’re getting close to a point where “terrorist” indicates a certain view of your enemies, as opposed to a statement of tactics. I have mixed feelings about the Wikileaks dump, mostly because I don’t really see any great scandals, atrocities, or cover-ups being exposed. Assange oeuvre is mostly hacker, and occasionally, accidentally humanitarian.

• Tom Flanagan, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, says he regrets his “glib” comment calling for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• “It was a thoughtless, glib remark about a serious subject,” Flanagan said Wednesday on the CBC’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon.

• As more and more documents become available from Wikileaks, the public has gotten a novel and close up view of U.S. diplomats and their operations abroad. I was particularly interested to review heretofore secret documents dealing with Latin America, a region which has absorbed the attention of Washington officials in recent years. While it’s certainly no secret that the Bush administration, not to mention the later Obama White House, have both sought to isolate the so-called “Pink Tide” of leftist regimes in South America, the Wikileaks documents give us some interesting insight into the mindset of U.S. diplomats as they carry out their day to day work.

• He is a new kind of whistle-blower: one made for the digital age. Those before him (like Daniel Ellsberg) were limited in the ways they could go public with their information. But in founding WikiLeaks.org, Julian Assange gave himself the freedom to publish virtually anything he wants, whether it’s the true nature of Iraqi prisoner abuse, the double role Pakistan plays in Afghanistan or the personal e-mails of Sarah Palin.

• Sarah Palin, who is widely tipped as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, has said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

• Update: U.S. politicians told Amazon to remove Wikileaks

• Once a nation honored for our commitment to peacekeeping, today Canada’s international reputation is in tatters thanks to Tom Flanagan.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• President Barack Obama’s administration is to maintain a ban on off-shore oil and gas drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Atlantic coast.

• The decision reverses a plan to open up new areas announced by Mr Obama in the spring, just before the BP oil spill.

• Wednesday’s move sparked protests from oil firms and their allies in Congress.

Finance

• First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.

• For the holiday season-to-date, $13.55 billion has been spent online, marking a 13-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• It wasn’t until I left America that I started to realize how badly the American plutocrat owned media lies to the American people through its disinformation campaign.

• Well today for a span of at least this one Daily Kos diary, you will get to see what the American plutocrat owned media never wants you to see, and that is how Europe in particular and the world in general has come to see America as a country in decline, whose people are so badly misinformed by the media, they actually don’t realize that America is the only major industrialized nation in the world that by right of law does not offer universal medical access, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave and paid annual leave. It just seems almost impossible to get that word out to the American people. Even diaries on that subject at the Kos top out at just over 2,000 views.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook’s ‘Like This’ button is watching your every move.

• Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not.

• In Germany, a few blogs and websites have already decided to throw in the towel before a law comes into effect from January 1, 2011. The so-called Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag (JMStV) will task anyone operating a .de domain with adding an age certificate to his or her website – imagine having to add a BBFC certificate on your blog.

• Sounds like a dumb idea, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it is set to become reality due to politicians ratifying the law in the parliaments of Germany’s 16 federal states.

• YouPorn is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with an Alexa ranking of 61. Those who visit the homemade-porn featuring site — essentially, a YouTube for porn enthusiasts — are subject to scrutiny, though, of the Web tracking variety. When a visitor surfs into the YouPorn homepage, a script running on the website checks to see what other porn sites that person has been to.

• [...]

• So I checked in with Interclick. Interclick explained that it deployed the script on websites around the Web over a limited period, from March to October, to test the quality of data sets it had purchased. “Interclick purchases anonymous audience data from several vendors for the purpose of targeting advertising campaigns. Consequently, it has a number of quality control measures in place to understand the quality and effectiveness of this data. The code observed in the paper was a quality measure being tested,” said Interclick in a statement to me.

• He’s off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris’s start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world’s estimated 10 billion devices.

• Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people. So, Mr. Norris is building a “credit bureau for devices” in which every computer or cellphone will have a “reputation” based on its user’s online behavior, shopping habits and demographics. He plans to sell this information to advertisers willing to pay top dollar for granular data about people’s interests and activities.

• Device fingerprinting is a powerful emerging tool in this trade. It’s “the next generation of online advertising,” Mr. Norris says.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission plans to announce Wednesday a controversial proposal that would prohibit Internet providers from favoring or discriminating against any traffic that goes over their networks.

• He would do so, however, without resorting to the more drastic step of changing the way the FCC regulates broadband providers, a move that would have more clearly asserted the government’s authority over Internet access.

Intellectual Monopolies

• It’s been sort of amusing over the past few years to watch the entertainment and media worlds focus increasingly on the idea that they need to “protect” content in some way, as if (a) that’s possible or (b) desirable. It is neither. At this point, it should be clear that there is no realistic way to “protect” content. The debunking of DRM has gone on for many years, and I don’t think we need to contribute any further to that discussion. But, more importantly, even if it were possible, I would argue that it is not a good idea. The opportunities for smart business models going forward are in enabling people to do more with your content. That is, it’s in using the content to create greater and greater value — and then setting up business models that allow you to capture some of that increased value.

Copyrights

• We’ve discussed in great detail the efforts by Voltage Pictures, the producers of the movie Hurt Locker to sue thousands of people for sharing the movie. Well, “sue” should be used loosely, as the effort, coordinated by US Copyright Group (really DC law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver), is really about demanding people pay up to avoid getting sued. We also wrote about a lawyer, Graham Syfert, who was offering (for sale) a DIY legal kit for individuals on the receiving end of such a lawsuit, who couldn’t afford a lawyer. Apparently a bunch of folks have used those legal forms to make pro se filings — and apparently some of them are working. The motions to quash have gone nowhere, but motions to dismiss are apparently getting some traction, and USCG and Voltage are not at all happy about it.

• “What’s happening?” Jenkins continued. “This level of granularity–licensing two or three notes–IP rights are being applied down to the atomic level of culture. Tiny fragments of music come loaded with demands for payment and copyright protection.”

• Despite the assertion that creativity is unaffected, these rulings have changed the music that we create and the way that it sounds.

• Will it in any way give us more art, more creativity? Because after all, that’s the purpose of copyright, which is defined in US law as “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” It doesn’t seem so.

• Would jazz, blues, rock, or soul have developed the same way under this legal regime? Probably not.

• Dmitriy Shirokov is suing a Washington law firm that sent threatening letters to thousands of alleged movie downloaders, accusing the firm of fraud and extortion. He filed the 96-page lawsuit, which argues that lawyers at Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver made a business of threatening people with expensive litigation and fines unless they pay “settlement offers” of $1,500 to $2,500, in the US District Court of Massachusetts.

ACTA

• After last week’s rejection of the joint resolution on the anti-Counterfeiting Tade Agreement (ACTA) by the European Parliament, and the adoption of a bad, pro-ACTA resolution tabled by the conservative EPP group, La Quadrature has analyzed the results of the vote. The results show an overall polarized poll, with the bulk of the political groups who tabled the resolution voting in favor (S&D, ALDE, Greens/EFA, EUL/NGL), while the Conservatives rejected it (EPP and ECR). But details show that some MEPs did not follow their group’s position. The overall picture gives a clear view of who to convince in order to obtain a full rejection of ACTA during the upcoming consent vote.

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