● 03.04.12

● Links 4/3/2012: Cory Doctorow on Code Visibility, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.8

Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Aitech said its new board is “ideal for a number of other embedded and harsh environment military and defense applications” and can be coupled with industry-standard real0time operating systems or Linux.

• Open source and Linux will, for the fourth year in a row, have a presence at this year’s CeBIT trade show. Free and open source software (FOSS) projects and organisations from around the world will be represented in Hall 2 at the upcoming event, taking place next week from 6 to 10 March on the world’s largest fairground in Hanover, Germany. Open Source CeBIT 2012 is organised into three areas: the Open Source Park, the Open Source Project Lounge and the Open Source Forum.

Desktop

• But ‘‘curation’’ covers a broad spectrum of activities and practices. At one end, you have Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux that offers ‘‘repositories’’ of programs that are understood to be well-made and trustworthy. Ubuntu updates its repositories regularly with new versions of programs that correct defects as they are discovered. Theoretically, an Ubuntu repository could remove a program that has been found to be malicious, and while this hasn’t happened to date, a recent controversy on the proposed removal of a program due to a patent claim confirmed the possibility. Ubuntu builds its repositories by drawing on still other repositories from other GNU/Linux flavors, making it a curator of other curators, and it doesn’t pretend that it’s the only game in town. A few seconds’ easy work is all it takes to enable other repositories of software maintained by other curators, or to install software directly, without a repository. Ubuntu warns you when you do this that you’d better be sure you can trust the people whose software you’re installing, because they could be assuming total control over your system.

• The Migration of the city of Munich to GNU/Linux matters because it was the flagship of European migrations. It was not a bunch of school labs like Extremadura or a small operation like random individuals but a whole large complex organization doing it in public. As it was Ballmer himself tried to intercept the ship and FUDsters have kept firing at it for years, but now it is almost complete.

Kernel Space

• Linux filesystems have a long and checkered history behind them and every now and then there is much excitement as a new filesystem is about to become mainstream and production ready. This is especially true when they are not merely a incremental improvement as with the case of Ext4 over Ext3 but take a giant leap forward as Btrfs has been promising for a number of years. So now is a good time to review what has been going on and this article does just that.

• An interesting mailing list question was posed yesterday to DRM developers, which raises the question there might be a new Linux DRM kernel driver being hacked.

Graphics Stack

• Besides X Input 2.2 multi-touch, within the X.Org / Linux input world, one of the recent patch-sets going through several revisions with comments has been for introducing ClickPad support in the Synaptics driver.

• The patch-set, which is comprised of ten patches, was originally authored by Chase Douglas at Canonical (yes, an upstream contribution from Canonical! Albeit, it’s already found in Ubuntu 12.04′s package). These patches enable support within the xf86-input-synaptics X.Org driver for supporting ClickPad.

Applications

• With the advent of Internet TV and YouTube, the popularity of the traditional podcast is currently on the decline. Also, the huge fan following and dominance of iTunes and iPods has restricted the popular medium only to the classes. That said, it’s not as if podcasts are obscure; in fact, notable celebrities like Stephen Fry, Jeremy Clarkson, and Ricky Gervais have gained huge popularity through this then-evolving medium. Moreover, the vogue of this format was such that even the German Chancellor Angela Merkel once launched her own video podcasts.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• I have been thinking about why Red Hat purchased the Gluster parallel file system in October 2011. Back in December 2003 Red Hat purchased the GFS file system. GFS did not work out that well for Red Hat. It never added many features and it did not provide scaling. GFS is a totally different type of parallel file system than Gluster. Gluster does not support multiple threads opening and writing to the same file, often called N to 1 (1 file with N threads writing).

• Oracle has announced last evening, March 2nd, the immediate availability for download of the Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.8 operating system.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Light-Theme is the package which includes the default themes “Ambiance” and “Radiance” used in Ubuntu. Any update to this package would essential mean new visual changes which are always nice as you notice them immediately. This update brings a change to the appearance of the Nautilus sidebar as you can see in the screenshot below.

• Canonical has released Beta 1 of Ubunti 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” which offers a new HUD and a new set of images for the ARMv7 “hard float” ABI (armhf),

Flavours and Variants

• Canonical informed users on March 1st that the first Beta release of the upcoming Xubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) operating system is available for download.

• The first Beta of Xubuntu 12.04 uses the Ubiquity installer, and various new shortcuts have been added, and others changed. Moreover, Alacarte is seeded by default and it shows all Xfce-related menu items.

Devices/Embedded

• The tiny, $35, Linux-based Raspberry Pi computer has drawn a lot of attention in the last few months, and though it was originally developed to teach computer programming to young students, Internet activists have taken notice as well. A recent BBC interview with developer Nadim Kobeissi, creator of a web-based secure communications program called Cryptocat, shows off just one potential use of the low-cost hardware and free software system. Kobeissi says he’s looking forward to the arrival of Raspberry Pi as a way to bring extra-secure communication to web chat, especially in places where conversations might be watched.

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• Nigeria will host the 5th African Conference on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) later this month, Mr Dele Ajisomo, the President, Open Source Foundation for Nigeria (OSFON), has said.

SaaS

• In 2011 ‘Big Data’ was, next to ‘Cloud’, the most dropped buzzword of the year. In 2012 Big Data is set to become a serious issue that many IT organisations across the public and private sectors will need to come to grips with.

• One of the things I love most about the software industry is the way new technologies can materialize from unlikely places and get applied in unexpected ways. Hadoop is a great example of this. Conceived by the open source community, Google, Yahoo and others, this programming framework has emerged as a promising solution to the big data problem.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Leftovers

• Organizations looking to deploy Windows 8 on ARM-based (WOA) devices will have to do so without being able to manage them, according to a Microsoft advisory outlining the business benefits of the new operating system.

• While WOA scrimps on battery life, it falls short in management and compatibility with legacy applications, making it less than ideal for business.

Finance

• The Economist sees financial innovation as positive; regarding it in the same sense as charity and goodwill to one’s fellow creatures. The reader is told that: “Finance has a very good record of solving big problems, from enabling people to realise the value of future income through products like mortgages to protecting borrowers from the risk of interest-rate fluctuations.” The definition of the “big problems” of our time is obviously subjective.

Censorship

• We’ve been writing about German music collection society GEMA’s bizarre fight against YouTube for a few years now, in which all major music videos are blocked from YouTube in Germany because GEMA is suing YouTube and refuses to even discuss a potential license until the lawsuit is over.

Civil Rights

• The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.

• Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.

• A Cook County judge today ruled the state’s controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional.

• The law makes it a felony offense to make audio recordings of police officers without their consent even when they’re performing their public duties.

• Judge Stanley Sacks, who is assigned to the Criminal Courts Building, found the eavesdropping law unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes “wholly innocent conduct.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Apparently there was some tension at the Mobile World Congress—the world’s largest mobile phone trade show—as the growing battle over text messaging took center stage. As you may know, SMS text-messaging is a rip-off, and a huge cash-cow for the mobile telecoms, who charge premium rates for a service that has an effective cost of zero (SMS messages are encoded into regular signals that cell towers have to send anyway).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Apparently it’s a week of paywalls for a bunch of big newspaper websites. Newspaper giant Gannett announced that all of its newspaper websites with the exception of USA Today, will go paywall by the end of the year. The system will allow between 5 and 15 article views before you’re locked out. And then, the news broke that next week, the LA Times will be launching its own paywall. Again, it will allow 15 “free” article views per month, but then require payment — with the price being a rather astounding $3.99/week.

Copyrights

• In the past we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of claiming that the internet is some sort of “wild west” without laws just because some people don’t like the laws covering the internet. Clearly, there are plenty of laws that deal with the internet. What people really mean when they call the internet “the wild west” is that they simply don’t like the laws — and specifically that those laws don’t fit into the analogy they have crafted for the internet.

• It was obviously a moment of some embarrassment for the US Department of Commerce and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Hardly two weeks after more than 100 NGOs and a few individuals, mostly located in the global South, requested that these two agencies postpone the upcoming Africa IP Summit, this is exactly what has happened to the session originally scheduled for Cape Town, South Africa in early April. But what about their substantive criticisms of the ideology, themes and speakers for this conference which were made in a 7 February open letter to WIPO Secretary General Francis Gurry? According to the NGOs, the original Cape Town event was promoting ‘an unbalanced IP agenda’ and they instead wanted a ‘balanced forum’ that would endorse a ‘balanced’ intellectual property agenda across the world. This article takes up the question: is balance the answer?

• Generally speaking, if you’re facing criminal charges, it’s probably not a wise idea to give public interviews to the press, and I don’t see how doing this helps him in any way. He more or less lays out his expected argument concerning the copyright infringement claims, which are pretty much what you’d expect: that they followed the DMCA, took stuff down on request, and even gave copyright holders special access by which they could take links down themselves. Dotcom is clearly very well versed in the legal issues here, and he’s choosing his words extremely carefully, but it still seems a bit silly to reveal such arguments outside of court, and it could come back to haunt him later (you can bet US prosecutors are pouring over every word to figure out what they can hang him on.

• One of the most insidious aspects of recent Internet policy-making is that much of it is taking place behind closed doors, with little or no consultation — think of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. But there’s another dangerous trend: the rise of “informal” agreements between the copyright industries and Internet service providers.

• With the implicit threat that tough legislation will be brought in if voluntary agreements aren’t drawn up promptly enough, governments are using this technique to avoid even the minimal scrutiny that consultations on proposed new laws would permit. This allows all kinds of bad ideas to be forced through without any evidence that they will help and without the chance for those affected to present their viewpoints.

• The TV networks hate, hate, hate this because they’ve been raking in oodles of cash from carriage fees from the cable and satellite guys. That’s how much cable and satellite has to pay to “retransmit” the local broadcast channels, and it’s become a huge, multi-billion dollar business that the TV guys have no interest in giving up in any way, shape or form. It’s the reason why you probably hear stories on a regular basis about some cable or satellite network will no longer carry a certain broadcast channel… leading to a lot of posturing and such before one side eventually backs down (often after a short blackout period).

• In an attempt to sabotage a new anti-piracy law that went into effect today, hundreds of websites in Spain are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites all link to an “infringing” song by an artist loyal to the protest, who reported the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests.

• US Copyright Group was the first of the US-based copyright trolls, suing thousands of individuals in a single lawsuit, trying to get them to pay up (rather than going through an actual trial). US Copyright Group is really a front for a DC law firm, Dunlapp, Grubb & Weaver. One of its very first “big” lawsuits was against about 5,000 people for supposedly partaking in the sharing of Uwe Boll’s Far Cry. Of course, as we had noted, there was a pretty big problem in the Far Cry lawsuit, in that the US copyright registration was filed too late for many of the accusations of infringement.

ACTA

• Even though the European Commission has referred ACTA to the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament continues to examine the treaty in its various committees. Earlier this week, the one dealing with International Trade met for a preliminary discussion. One of the key speakers was the Commissioner responsible for ACTA, Karel De Gucht, who naturally tried to make light of the many problems that have been raised in recent weeks.

• But as the text of his speech makes clear, he did a poor job. For example, in an apparent attempt to distract attention from the real issues, he brought up the irrelevant and widely-condemned DDoS attacks on the European Parliament, perhaps hoping to spread around a little guilt by association.

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