● 11.03.12

● Links 3/11/2012: Fedora as Rolling-Release Distribution Amid Delays?

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When many of us think of Linux, we think of our own roll-your-own deployments of it on our own devices, but there is a fast-growing trend toward powerful companies with commercial interests driving desktop and server systems that run Linux.

Server

• Globetom today announced that GP3, globetom’s charging and fulfilment platform, has achieved Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Linux Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Today’s announcement demonstrates that globetom supports GP3 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• At the beginning of the week I reported that AMD got rid of at least three of their Linux kernel developers. It’s becoming more clear though that it’s not only three long-time Linux kernel developers they have let go.

• Since the posting on Monday, there’s been talk and speculation within the forums what is happening at AMD. We have known since last month the company has been making plans to let go around 15% of its staff due to poor financial performance out of the company, but it seems their Linux work will take a material impact in this latest round of “layoffs” at the organization.

• Linus Torvalds takes to social media to call for 2560 x 1600 to become the new standard for laptops.

Graphics Stack

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Penumbra games collection developed by Frictional Games and distributed by Paradox Interactive, have appeared in the Steam for Linux application database.

• Last year there was the release of CoreBreach, a racing game originally developed for Mac OS X that came out of the Austrian-based CoreCode game studio. Back in June the studio exclusively shared with Phoronix that they want to open-source CoreBreach while now to kick off November, they have released the game’s source-code. CoreBreach was ported to Linux from OS X using GNUstep, etc.

• It’s not yet been announced yet on the CoreCode web-site, but they sent in an exclusive email to Phoronix yesterday and then this morning proceeded to announce it in the Phoronix Forums. Their brief announcement reads, “the source code to CoreBreach (GPL) and its 3D engine (MIT) has now been published on GitHub. enjoy.” The code is available as Core-Code on GitHub.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• To express myself mildly, I’m not a fan of interfaces for mobile devices. At best, they seem clumsy makeshifts, tolerable only because nothing better is available. The only exception is KDE’s Plasma Active, which not only works well on tablets, but, with its recently released version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface I can tolerate on a workstation — and that includes Unity and Windows RT.

• He has now given KDE a try after a long time. Linus using your software is double edged sword, it cuts both ways especially if Linus doesn’t like it, get ready for the harshest, yet the most honest and useful criticism.

• So, what does Linus think of KDE? It looks he did not use KDE for a long while as his statement clarifies, “I’m trying out KDE after a long absense.”

Distributions

• Pear Linux 6 is based on Ubuntu 12.04, and features many new and cool features. In fact, the version of Pear Shell that comes with Pear Linux 6 is a near-complete overhaul of the edition in Pear Linux 5. And by my assessment, it is probably the best GNOME Shell adaptation available. It is most definitely better than the stock GNOME Shell.

New Releases

• Tiny Core Project lead Robert Shingledecker has released version 4.7 of his minimal desktop Linux distribution. Shingledecker says that the major theme for the new version is improvements to its bundled GUI programs. The OnDemand system has been overhauled to add support for Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications OnDemand menus and icons.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• While Adam Williamson emailed a serious proposal about considering Fedora as a rolling-release distribution, so far there haven’t been many other Fedora developers/users in favour of such a change. Most of those expressing dissenting opinions are concerned that Fedora would just become too unstable and that a rolling-release model isn’t too different from the “Fedora Rawhide” development packages as it stands today.

• It’s unlikely that Fedora as a rolling-release will get picked up, but for

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s VP of Sales and Business Development, Chris Kenyon, shared some interesting stats on Ubuntu’s uptake in the world in a presentation to attendees of the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit.

• Early in October I wrote that Ubuntu TV would be a focus for 13.04 as the TV-focused Ubuntu spin was still being ported to Unity 3D. This week in Copenhagen at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, new plans for Ubuntu TV were drawn.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Facebook, Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard and other big vendors have joined a project to develop Linux OS software for the upcoming generation of ARM-based servers, the companies announced Thursday.

• Red Hat, HP, Facebook and other big vendors have joined a project to develop Linux OS software for the upcoming generation of ARM-based servers, the companies announced yesterday.

• Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Micro, Calxeda, Canonical, Cavium and Marvell are among the other companies to join the Linaro Enterprise Group within Linaro, a not-for-profit, multivendor engineering group. They join existing members ARM, HiSilicon, Samsung and ST-Ericsson.

• The tiny, wildly popular $35 Raspberry Pi Linux computer may become a player in the game emulation world. A new Kickstarter project, launched on Tuesday, aims to create kits that will use the ARM devices to power little gaming cabinets: the Picade and Picade Mini.

• At the end of September, after years writing about how ARM Holdings (ARMH) was beating Intel (INTC), I decided to run an experiment.

• I sold some Intel shares, which I’d had since the 1990s, and bought 100 ARMHs.

• Since then ARMH is up about 20%, while INTC is down 1%. It’s true INTC carries a fatter dividend, which gets me even on the period once that comes in later this month, but for now I’d have to say that my intuition about these stocks was right and I’m profiting from it.

Phones

Android

• t’s been five days fat with Android achievement this week to the point that the maestros over at Mountain View must think Christmas has come early. Following the disappointing cancellation of Monday’s launch event in New York City due to the horrendous hurricane Sandy, we learned that the Google Play store had gained an incredible 25,000 extra apps in the last month alone and was now home to a whopping, Apple App Store rivalling, 700,000! News enough for one week, you might think, however…

• Google’s Android OS has grown a lot since its humble beginnings in 2008. Some may have thought that it couldn’t beat iOS, but its spread across multiple devices from multiple OEMs has insured its success. That success can be plainly seen in smartphone shipments during the third quarter.

• GnuCash is an open source accounting app for Linux, Windows, and Mac computers. It’s sort of an open source alternative to Quicken, allowing you to track your income and spending, run reports, view graphics, and do much, much more.

• Oh, sure, Android appears to be on track to dominate tablets, just as it does the smartphone market. But Android is hardly a paragon of open-source virtue. In 2011, VisionMobile concluded that Android is one of the most closed open-source projects, at least when compared to other major open-source projects like Linux, Firefox and others. Google, not surprisingly, chafes at this characterisation, but its own engineering directors admit Android is “both open and closed depending on business needs at any given time.”

• It’s just another day at the office for Android handsets, kicking everybody else’s behinds. According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Android-powered handsets maintain their commanding lead over Apple’s iOS devices and others in the global smartphone market for Q3 2012.

• With the release of version 1.5 of the Free Edition of its Burp Suite, PortSwigger has given the security tool suite a fresh new look and taught it to listen to Android devices. The Burp developers say that Android deviates from the SSL standard when establishing encrypted connections but added that this no longer causes problems for the analysis tool as they have implemented a workaround for the non-standard CONNECT requests.

Free Software/Open Source

• There are many business advantages of vendor-supported open source software over proprietary software, such as greater business flexibility due to no vendor lock-in and better business support.

• Jan-Jan van der Vyver, MD of Linux Warehouse, says this is a key finding of the ITWeb-Linux Warehouse Open Source Survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for a fortnight in September, attracting 192 responses.

Web Browsers

Chrome/ChromeOS

• Indeed, we’ve already seen Ubuntu loaded up on the cloud-centric laptop, along with a port of openSUSE and a published guide to accessing the Gentoo Linux kernel that powers the versatile Chromebook.

Mozilla

• VIEW ALL PHOTOS IN GALLERY

• It’s a continuation of one of computing’s longest-standing dilemmas: Open or Closed.

• An earlier episode of this saga was Apple’s closed desktop OS platform, which can only be installed on Apple’s hardware, versus Microsoft Windows’ ability to be installed on any manufacturer’s PC hardware. Then there was closed source like Windows versus open source like Linux. The latest strife is between mobile apps and Web apps based on HTML5. Mobile apps are obtained through the platform makers own gate-keeping app store, and run only on the one platform, while HTML5 apps should run an any device with a browser.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• Australian Drupal development shop PreviousNext has launched a beta program for a new open source offering intended to make adoption of the open source content management system (CMS) more appealing to government agencies.

• WordPress is something of a dark secret on the Internet. The blogging platform, which is nearly a decade old, powers an incredible one-sixth of the Internet (including this blog).

• The secret of WordPress’s domination, said its youthful founder, Matt Mullenweg, is being open source. “It is not about openness, it is about responsiveness,” he told the audience at the Founders Festival in Vienna. “Users, customers and for us, our developers are all the same thing. They tell you what they want–if you listen.”

Education

• A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.

Business

• Cloud services provider Acquia has commissioned a Forrester report on open source WCM, and while the results are not overwhelming, it does show more enterprise companies are employing open source systems.

• Digium this week released Asterisk 11, (though I bet more than a few people missed it since Digium didn’t do a particularly good job in promoting the release IMHO, great tech terrible marketing/PR). This is the first major Long Term Support release (LTS) since the 1.8 release that came out two years ago in October of 2010. So yeah, a bit of a number jumble here..

• As part of Microsoft’s attempt to convince us all that Windows 8 is not the dogs’ dinner some claim it is, Steve Ballmer announced this week that the company had sold 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in the first three days of general availability. While that number (which must include some combination of downloads and discs) sounds impressive, it leaves me cold. After all, I remember the open source download metrics at Sun Microsystems.

Funding

• Entrepreneur and inventor website FundaGeek has launched a software development stream at fundageek.com/software to assist software developers in securing funding for their projects.

• With a strong leaning towards independent open source innovators, the site aims to help all areas of software development – web applications (e-commerce), games, social media apps, open source, mobile apps and traditional “shrink wrap” software.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• Libvirt, the virtualization API born at Red Hat seven years ago for interfacing with KVM/QEMU, Xen, LXC, OpenVX, VirtualBox, and other virtualization components, has finally reached version 1.0.0.

Public Services/Government

• Sirius has confirmed that it has been awarded a place on the UK government G-Cloud Framework. The firm will be making its full range of open source products available through the CloudStore.

• Tang and velcro aren’t the only things that NASA helped to invent that are part of our modern world. NASA has also played a pivotal role in the emergence of cloud technology that could reshape the vast IT world here on Earth.

Openness/Sharing

Standards/Consortia

• Members of the independent Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have approved version 1.0 of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) as a standard. AMQP is an open protocol for exchanging messages between systems that defines transmission formats, queuing behaviour and the implementation of services.

Leftovers

• I agree with nearly everything Jill Stein of the Greens and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party say: except when they say “vote for me” in swing states.

• The privatization of public goods and services turns basic human needs into products to buy and sell. That’s more than a joke, it’s an insult, it’s a perversion. It generally benefits only a privileged group of businesspeople and their companies while increasing inequality and undermining the common good.

Health/Nutrition

Defence/Police/Aggression

• THE US mission in Benghazi that came under attack by militants on September 11 was mainly a secret CIA operation, the Wall Street Journal reports, shedding new light on the deadly assault.

• What happens when one of the biggest media groups in the world sets up its own private security force? What happens when part of this operation goes rogue? Fairfax reporter Neil Chenoweth’s new book, Murdoch’s Pirates, investigates News Corporation’s links to worldwide piracy. Here is an extract from the book.

• The story is complex, but I’ll attempt to summarize. In the late 90s, NDS (the branch of News Corp that deals with private security and anti-piracy activities) sent top hacker Oliver Kömmerling undercover to Toronto, under the pseudonym Alex, with a mission: pose as a satellite pirate and infiltrate the rings selling hacked DirecTV smartcards. Oliver was also one of the hackers directly involved in the hacking of competitors’ smart cards, but in this case he was being put to work defending News Corp’s own satellite operation. But NDS made one big mistake: they never told DirecTV, which had its own security/anti-hacking division led by a former FBI agent, and they believed Oliver was still a bonafide satellite pirate at large. They had no idea he was now working for NDS—and one of the Canadian hackers Oliver met with turned out to be working for DirecTV, and ratted him out to them. Moreover, no matter NDS or Oliver’s intentions, he was breaking the law by hacking and selling smart cards to track down the “real” hackers—so he ended up facing potential arrest or detainment at the border.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The fossil fuel industry has paid a hefty price for the privilege of framing the political discourse about America’s energy future. Hundreds of millions have flowed into campaign coffers from energy companies attempting to purchase complete freedom to drill, frack, and burn. Huge “dark money” groups, the Koch’s, Karl Rove, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, join dozens of oil and gas industry associations in pouring money into television ad campaigns demanding “energy independence,” while trashing wind and solar.

Finance

• Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama even mentions six alternative economic policies that, deployed together, would reduce unemployment, increase workers’ real earnings and decrease the federal deficit.

• Kostas Vaxevanis hates being the centre of attention. On Thursday moments before taking the stand in one of the most sensational trials to grip Greece in modern times, the journalist said he was not in the business of making news. “My job is simply to tell the news and tell it straight,” he averred. “My job is to tell the truth.”

• Truth in the case of Vaxevanis has been a rollercoaster that has catapulted the 46-year-old from relative obscurity to global stardom in a matter of days. But , after a hearing that lasted almost 12 hours – with a three-member panel of judges sitting stony-faced throughout, he was vindicated: the court found him not guilty of breaking data privacy laws by publishing the names in Hot Doc, the weekly magazine he edits, of some 2,059 Greeks believed to have bank accounts in Switzerland.

• The stakes couldn’t be higher for the $60 billion global diamond industry, and Israel’s burgeoning diamond industry in particular, as the dynamic forces of economics, human rights, and politics careen towards a major showdown in Washington. The fallout is likely to blow the lid on a cozy cartel that has kept the scandal of cut and polished blood diamonds hidden from public scrutiny.

• In November members of the Kimberley Process (KP) diamond-regulatory system, ostensibly set up to end the trade in blood diamonds, will come under severe pressure to adopt a US proposal, rejected last June, which would slightly broaden of the definition of a “conflict diamond” to include rough diamonds linked to violence by government forces associated with diamond mining.

Censorship

• A civil court has sentenced an online activist to six months in prison on charges of insulting the Gulf nation’s king in Twitter posts, the official news agency said Thursday.

• Kuwaiti police used teargas and smoke bombs on Wednesday to disperse thousands of protesters marching on a prison where an opposition leader is being held on charges of insulting the emir, witnesses said.

• Does a tweet on reports of corruption, sent out to 16 followers, deserve a possible penalty of three years of imprisonment? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to Congress leader and Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s son Karti, who filed a complaint against small-time Puducherry businessman Ravi Srinivasan, and the Puducherry police which charged Mr. Srinivasan under Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act, 2008.

• Section 66-A deals with messages sent via computer or communication devices which may be “grossly offensive,” have “menacing character,” or even cause “annoyance or inconvenience.” For offences under the section, a person can be fined and jailed up to three years.

• The Russian government has opened a blacklist of websites that will be blocked from domestic internet users to avoid them harming themselves with too much information.

• The new rules mean that ISPs will automatically block websites that the courts have deemed inappropriate. The law was introduced with the usual caveats about it being to protect children from online predators and to stop drug distribution, but political websites that criticize Tsar President Putin have already been blocked by the courts.

• I’ve been buried in a book deadline for all of October, and haven’t been paying much attention to anything else. When I finally took some time to catch up reading email, I noticed I had many authors (more than twenty) contacting me because their Amazon reviews were disappearing. Some were the ones they wrote. Some were for their books. One author told me that reviews her fans had written–fans that were completely unknown to her–had been deleted.

• I took a look at the reviews I’d written, and saw more than fifty of them had been removed, namely reviews I did of my peers. I don’t read reviews people give me, but I do keep track of numbers and averages, and I’ve also lost a fair amount of reviews.

Privacy

• Larry Ward will concede that he “poked the bear.” As president of the D.C.-based Political Media Inc., Ward administers the Facebook page of a group called Special Operations Speaks (SOS), an anti-Obama group consisting of “veterans, legatees, and supporters of the Special Operations communities of all the Armed Forces.” Essentially hard guys who want the president out of office. “These are the toughest sons of a guns out there and they say what they mean,” says Ward.

Civil Rights

• Today ORG have launched a new campaign to fund a legal project which will allow us to create new case law and lead on bringing digital rights issues to the courts.

• When I read and translated that post, I immediately thought of what happened and is happening in my home country, Argentina. I was about to start my vacations in Europe and I thought that particular trip would help me write this. I was not wrong.

• We Argies are not new to biometric data. One of the existing fingerprint-recording systems was invented in Buenos Aires and used as a tool during the military dictatorships the country suffered (particularly during the last). In fact, thanks to a law enacted during one of those dictatorships, every citizen must have a government-issued ID, consisting of his/her name, last name, address, date of birth, sex, fingerprint and photograph.

• Every week, somewhere in the US, there’s a story of some kind of police activity that leads people scratching their head, or saying ‘That isn’t right’. It’s an issue that’s been around as long as police officers have and has become a cliche, accepted without question. The problem is that it’s a problem that’s only getting worse, not better, and it’s a problem that’s not being addressed.

• The Iranian authorities must protect all detainees and prisoners from harassment and degrading treatment, Amnesty International said today, after nine female political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, started a hunger strike in response to alleged abuse by prison guards.

• The women, who are all held in Tehran’s Evin Prison include activists and journalists. They say they were subjected to humiliating and degrading body searches by female guards from the Prison Security Section who subsequently confiscated some of their personal belongings on Tuesday

Internet/Net Neutrality

• We’ve had plenty of stories concerning open WiFi, and there seems to be a general opinion among some that open WiFi is “a bad thing.” Some have even tried (and failed) to argue that having an open WiFi network makes you negligent. In some areas, law enforcement has even gone around telling people to lock up their WiFi. Those who argue against open WiFi are generally conflating different issues. It is true that if you use an open WiFi network without securing yourself you do open up yourself to snooping from others. Similarly, if others are using your open WiFi, it it could lead to at least an investigation if your access point is used for nefarious purposes. But combining those to claim that open WiFi itself is bad or illegal is a mistake. It is entirely possible to secure your own activities, and to set up an open WiFi network in a reasonable manner that minimizes any such threat.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Village Voice is claiming that Yelp’s infringement is “willful” because it notified the company, and Yelp apparently told them to go away. It’s also ridiculously claiming that Yelp’s usage has “irreparably harmed” the company. I realize that’s standard language used in such lawsuits, but seriously?

Copyrights

• The laws governing intellectual monopolies in the UK are in a state of flux at the moment. After the previous government in its dying hours rammed through the shoddy piece of work known as the Digital Economy Act, the present coalition government took a more rational approach by commissioning the Hargreaves Review into the impact of digital technologies on this area. One of its key proposals was that policy should be based on evidence, not “lobbynomics”; the fact that this even needs to be mentioned says much about the way laws have been framed until now.

• As a result, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has been trying to gather evidence in order to help politicians draw up new policies that correspond to the data, not just dogma. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those that have done well under the previous evidence-free approach have been mounting a rearguard action against the changes.

• The third party DMCA patrolbot featured today first made its name known by claiming malware uploaded by a computer security researcher as its own, resulting in a shutdown of the researcher’s Mediafire account. LeakID, the “company” (and we’ll explore those scare quotes in a moment) behind the takedown practices what many other sketchy content enforcers do — bulk keyword searches. This results in false positives that get swept up with all the actual infringement, such as in the case linked above. LeakID also ordered a Microsoft Office patch (freely available at Microsoft’s website) be removed from this user’s account.

• A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case. In a default judgment defendant Kywan Fisher from Hampton, Virginia is ordered to pay $1,500,000 to adult entertainment company Flava Works for sharing 10 of their movies on BitTorrent. The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law. It’s expected that the verdict will be used to motivate other BitTorrent defendants to settle their cases.

• Earlier this year, we applauded District Court Judge Alsup for getting it right and holding that, as a matter of law, one could not copyright APIs. The case, Oracle v. Google, is now on appeal to the Federal Circuit, where a three-judge panel is going to revisit Judge Alsup’s ruling.

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