● 11.12.12

● Links 13/11/2012: India’s Android Tablets, Tails 0.14

Posted in News Roundup at 10:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the announcement or release of a number of new products: the iPad Mini, an updated version of the full-size iPad, and Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Surface tablet.

• A lot less attention was paid to the October 18 release of one of the most widely-used Linux distributions, Ubuntu. That’s unfortunate, because Linux in its various flavors is a solid operating system. It’s even used by such major companies as Google on both their servers and their desktops.

Server

• IBM is offering new storage servers that combines RAID data security and speed with a new take on file systems and architecture to deliver even faster and more reliable data performance.

Kernel Space

• With most of the interesting hardware monitoring/sensor drivers are living within the mainline Linux kernel, this week’s LM_Sensors point release update isn’t particularly interesting. The new release-, LM_Sensors 3.3.3, adds in support for humidity sensors within the sensors command. Additionally, the sensors-detect command no longer probes I2C adapters on graphics cards.

• Linus Torvalds announced earlier today, November 11, that the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel is now available for download and testing.

• It’s been several months since having anything to report on the state of VIA graphics under Linux. VIA hasn’t been doing anything officially to better their Linux support and the “OpenChrome” development community is quite limited and small. While the long-in-development OpenChrome DRM driver for providing VIA kernel mode-setting support has yet to be merged into the mainline code-base, it’s still being developed.

• In just a few days, a linux-kernel mailing list report of ext4 filesystem corruption turned into a widely-distributed news story; the quality of ext4 and its maintenance, it seemed, was in doubt. Once the dust settled, the situation turned out to be rather less grave than some had thought; the bug in question only threatened a very small group of ext4 users using non-default mount options. As this is being written, a fix is in testing and should be making its way toward the mainline and stable kernels shortly. The bug was obscure, but there is value in looking at how it came about and the ripples it caused.

Graphics Stack

• It’s the Rebecca Black OS that serves as a live platform for experimenting with Wayland. There was a new release at the end of October but now it’s been updated again to handle the recent XWayland patches. XWayland allows for running X11 applications on top of Wayland. THe XWayland code should be merged into the mainline X.Org Server for the 1.14 release in March.

• For a while Chris was releasing new Intel X.Org driver updates weekly but that has settled down now with most SNA fall-out and other recent changes having been worked out. However, on Sunday morning he found it time to release the xf86-video-intel 2.20.13 driver.

• Whenever writing about VIA Technologies on Phoronix, S3 Graphics always comes to mind due to its relations with HTC and VIA. In fact, it’s the only time that S3 Graphics usually ever comes to my mind aside from when talking about S3 Texture Compression. Anyhow, after writing this morning about the VIA KMS driver still not being mainline, it’s worth reminding uninformed Linux users that S3 Graphics products remain poorly supported under Linux.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Sir, You Are Being Hunted is yet another game that will make its official debut on Linux and other platforms, with the help of Kickstarter.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• With the hard feature freeze for KDE 4.10 having been this past week, a number of KWin window manager improvements were merged just in time.

• Kdenlive is a great video editing software which I often use for not too complicated film-editing work. You can read my article here. Now the developer are preparing the next release of Kdenlive which brings notable enhancements.

GNOME Desktop

• We managed to fix 20 Every Detail Matters bugs for GNOME 3.4. That target has already been blown out of the water for the 3.8 cycle. At the time of writing, I count 27 bugs fixed by 9 different contributors. We’ve got some really great fixes in there, like improving animations in the lock screen and making the login experience smoother. There’s also been some nice usability enhancements to the Message Tray and Activities Overview.

• One of the co-founders of the GNOME Desktop Project has reacted to the numerous criticisms that GNOME 3, the latest iteration of the desktop environment, has received, by putting it all down to power users and “yellow” journalists.

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Those following the progress of the Fedora 18 development cycle cannot have failed to notice that the rework of Anaconda, the distribution’s installer, is not going as smoothly as one might have liked. Complaints are common, and there is a real risk that installer problems will end up being what users remember about this release. Given that, it may seem surprising that the Fedora developers intend to change one of the fundamental decisions made by the developers of the new installer.

Debian Family

• One other thing I like about Tails, and I brought this up briefly in the review of Liberté, is there are a few different approaches to take when a user wants to perform an action which is not recommended. The operating system can allow the action, the operating system can warn the user of the potential danger and then give the user a choice as to whether to proceed, or the system can block the action. Liberté opted to block unsafe actions. Tails, on the other hand, takes what I feel is the more desirable approach of educating the user about the potential dangers of their actions and then letting the user decide whether to take the risk. It is a style which protects the operator, but doesn’t presume to know better than the user and I like this approach. Last, but not least, I found the documentation on the Tails website to be clear and fairly easy to navigate. The developers have done a good job of trying to educate their users, both explaining what Tails is and what it is not, and I see that as a good starting point. To date, Tails is probably my favourite security-oriented distribution.

• If you are a Debian user and you want to contribute to the community, then you have your chance this fall with the Debian BSP Marathon. You might know that the next release of Debian, codenamed “Wheezy”, is in the testing phase and your contribution might be helpful to speed up the release date.

• So what is a BSP? According to the Debian wiki: “A Bug Squashing Party is a come-together (either virtual or reallife) of Debian Developers and Debian enthusiasts on a specified timeframe where these persons try to fix as many bugs as possible.”

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With Ubuntu 12.10, Linux has grown up and learned to do its own marketing. It’s snappy, it’s tasteful, and it’s aggressively attacking ground in which competitors’ customers lie. That’s good. But it won’t succeed, not yet.

• Why?

• Because in order for people to believe anything free can be good – anything at all – it has to be really good. As in, a better package than something you’d pay for. And Ubuntu 12.10 is good – but it’s not that. Not yet.

• The Ubuntu team had an awesome LTS release with Pangolin, so they can afford to play silly with Quantal Quetzal. Indeed, Ubuntu 12.10 is a fairly buggy release overall, with lots of regressions. There are some tiny improvements, some visual polish, but you also get a whole lot of new problems, Amazon thingie notwithstanding. To name a few, memory and CPU usage, network activity, weird artifacts, dumb programs, bad virtual machine performance, and still more. Not at all what we used to see in Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu GNU/Linux has shipped on $7.5 billion worth of hardware in the last 2 years,

• A STUBBORN streak led me to try installing Ubuntu 12.10 (a.k.a. Quantal Quetzal) on my home PC again, after an anti-climactic failure last week to get past the “Preparing to Install” screen the first time around.

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux Mint team has published a new release candite for the upcoming version (14) of Linux Mint, codenamed Linux Mint Nadia. This release is based on Ubuntu 12.10, and comes with MATE and Cinnamon desktops.

• Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced a few minutes ago, November 11, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 operating system is now available for download and testing.

• Being based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, Linux Mint 14 RC (Release Candidate) is powered by Linux kernel 3.5 and includes lots of new features and updated packages.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• I use a Verizon Android smartphone, the Droid 4, but I’ve never used any of Verizon’s built-in Android applications or gone to its app. store. It turns out I wasn’t the only one. By January 2013. Verizon won’t just be removing its apps from the market, it will start deleting its Verizon specific apps from your Android or Blackberry smartphone.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• True, the Android operating system is based on Linux, but many dyed-in-the-wool Linux users would prefer a tablet running “real” Linux, which is exactly what Peacock Imports is trying to do with its line of PengPod Linux tablets.

• The long-awaited low cost Aakash 2 tablet from UK firm Datawind has finally been officially launched in India, complete with several new hardware enhancements which the government will be hoping helps spur student learning.

• The Aakash 2, which is commercially available as the UbiSlate 7Ci for Rs 3,500 ($US64), is costing the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) Rs 2,263 ($US43), although government subsidies will put the price charged to students at just Rs 1,130($US24.65).

• Belinda Stronach is promoting use of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in aboriginal schools in Canada. I can relate to that. In many aboriginal communities, the ratio of students per PC is ~10 when most educators seek a range from 1 to 3. OLPC Canada is getting started with a first goal of 5000 OLPCs. It’s just a start. The need is at least 100K. OLPC has the advantage over using recycled desktop PCs, the solution I used, because they are a better size for small children and their classrooms.

• Signs are stil appearing that Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, after a somewhat lukewarm early reception for it. Recently, we covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249.Now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook, shown here, that sells for only $199. These devices, at these price points, along with some of the bundled deals that come with them, signal that a number of Google’s expected Chrome OS strategies have finally come to fruition.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• Today at the Mozilla Festival in London, we’re extremely proud to announce the launch of new Mozilla Webmaker badges.

• This weekend, the Mozilla Festival took place in London, and Mozilla officials made a number of notable announcements there. The organization announced Popcorn Maker, a free web app that lets you add live content to any video — photos, maps, links, social media feeds and more. It’s basically a browser-based, web-aware video editor designed for quickly making pop-up videos.

SaaS

• Facebook has open sourced its Corona scheduling component for Hadoop, which the company calls “the next version of Map-Reduce”. Facebook is using its own fork of Apache Hadoop which is optimised for the massive scale of its operations.

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

• DIY biology is a hot topic and has piqued the interest of the Wellcome Trust and NESTA in the UK and the FBI in the US. What has it got to do with open source and hacking? Quite a lot as it happens and those curious could get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, at a series of workshops held in Manchester over the weekend of 3 and 4 November 2012.

Programming

• The Raspberry Pi has created a lot of interest in the press for its low cost and credit-card size. The main reason for the creation of the Raspberry Pi was to see it used by kids all across the globe to learn programming. Computer classes in the UK have been constrained by the national curriculum for ICT, with students having to limit their computing activities to learning applications such as Word and PowerPoint, and using the internet to help with their school work. However, learning how to use Microsoft Office is often of little or no interest to students. Students are motivated by interactive activities such as programming, as they like to make things to find out how they work.

Leftovers

• When it comes to explaining election results, there’s no precise way to determine whether voters gave the winner a “mandate”–defined by Oxford as “the authority to carry out a policy, regarded as given by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins an election.” That makes it interesting to see how media use the expression–and which presidents they think earned one.

• Seven fresh claims for damages involving highly sensitive national security evidence have been made in the past year, the government has revealed. Three cases have been settled confidentially.

Science

• A Georgia congressman who attacked the theory of evolution found himself with an unlikely opponent in Tuesday’s U.S. election, when 4,000 voters in one county cast write-in ballots for the 19th century father of evolution, British naturalist Charles Darwin.

Health/Nutrition

• Brian Rinfret likes imported beer from Germany. He sometimes buys Spaten. He enjoys an occasional Bitburger. When he was 25 years old, he discovered Beck’s, a pilsner brewed in the city of Bremen in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law of 1516. It said so right on the label. After that, Rinfret was hooked.

• One Friday night in January, Rinfret, who is now 52, stopped on the way home from work at his local liquor store in Monroe, N.J., and purchased a 12-pack of Beck’s. When he got home, he opened a bottle. “I was like, what the hell?” he recalls. “It tasted light. It tasted weak. Just, you know, night and day. Bubbly, real fizzy. To me, it wasn’t German beer. It tasted like a Budweiser with flavoring.”

• Pfizer’s legal monopoly on one of its top-selling drugs just got shredded in Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled 7-0 the company should have its patent taken away because the drug company attempted to “game” the system, grabbing a patent without disclosing what their invention really was.

• Pfizer was able to acquire its Canadian patent without naming the compound required to make Viagra, namely, sildenafil citrate. The Canadian patent system, like all patent systems, is a kind of bargain between patentees, who are given a limited monopoly on a particular product or process, and the public, which is supposed to benefit from the disclosure of a new invention, the justices noted in their opinion.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• A jury acquitted a Florida photojournalist who was arrested on January 31 while documenting the eviction of Occupy Miami protesters. The police accused Carlos Miller, author of a popular blog about the rights of photojournalists, of disobeying a lawful police order to clear the area. But another journalist testified he had been standing nearby without incident.

• The Israeli political leadership is committed to crushing Palestinian hopes for a decent future.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• With the candidate’s relentless focus on the economy, climate change was a non-issue – until Nature herself brought it savagely into focus with Hurricane Sandy, the largest and most destructive weather event on record for the mid-Atlantic states. Climate scientists have been saying for years that warmer ocean temperatures, together with rising sea levels, would lead to an increase in punishing hurricanes. This prediction has tragically proved accurate ever since Hurricane Katrina, which killed over 1,800 people in New Orleans in 2005.

• A season full of setbacks in Shell’s quest to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean isn’t over yet. More than a week after preparatory drilling operations ended for the season, the company is struggling to get all of its equipment out of the Beaufort Sea as winter ice encroaches. As Popular Mechanics reports, as of Tuesday night, the company’s Kulluk rig was still moored in the Beaufort Sea where temperatures have dropped below zero.

• Given the failure of UN climate talks, a carbon consumption tax would be the most effective way of lowering emissions

Finance

• Amazon is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is ruthlessly efficient, has low prices and excellent delivery (or “shipping” as it says, in distressing Americanese). It is renowned for economies of scale and tight cost control – and now for aggressive tax avoidance. The UK’s biggest online retailer has avoided paying corporation tax on profits it makes from billions in sales here.

• Wall Street’s leading “false flag” group, the Third Way, has responded to the warnings that Robert Kuttner, AFL-CIO President Trumka, and I have made that if President Obama is re-elected our immediate task will be to prevent the Great Betrayal – the adoption of self-destructive austerity programs and the opening wedge of the effort to unravel the safety net (including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid).

• The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night’s election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

• This is a long post but it’s about something pretty interesting so I hope you’ll indulge …

• Like many folks, Occupy Wall Street has been some doing good work in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, helping people on the ground.

• Now OWS is launching the ROLLING JUBILEE, a program that has been in development for months. OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)

• Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers’ resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city’s refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: “Mom-and-pop stores simply can’t do what big stores can in these circumstances,” he wrote.

• And the preemptive scapegoating didn’t stop there. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is) then “pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act” would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public-works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the prevailing wage in the region.

• This Real News Network interview with Bill Black provides an overview of why Wall Street and the Administration are so keen to gut well loved and socially valuable safety nets for the elderly, in particular, Social Security. This talk is a good introduction for people who may not understand how high the stakes in the budget fight are and why the economic arguments used to justify it are bogus.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• This July, we will be celebrating the centennial anniversary of London’s First International Eugenics Conference of 1912. One century later, on July 11, 2012, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the largest private foundation in the world) and the British government will co-host a new London conference on eugenics with global coalition partners such as American abortion chain Planned Parenthood, British abortion chain Marie Stopes International, and the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA). The only difference is that the July 2012 London conference will never acknowledge that eugenics is its driving idea. Melinda Gates has claimed that the conference, which is officially dedicated to “deliver[ing] more modern family planning tools to more women in the world’s poorest countries,” should involve “no controversy.”

• So the Republican claims about Obama’s welfare plan were “over-the-top”–which I guess is another way of saying flatly untrue. The questionable “counterspin” (hey!) Kessler is talking about would appear to be mostly about something Bill Clinton said, based on a letter written by Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. The core of the Republican claim–that Obama was seeking to end the work requirements under current welfare law–is not supported by any evidence. But Kessler, even on this controversy, wants to make it seem like the deception is bipartisan.

• Yet another PR agency is blatantly busted doing the thing we patiently warn them against over and over, with the consequences we warn them of over and over.

• The apparently-unanimous industry response, per PR Week: “It’s all Wikipedia’s fault, they should make it easier for us to spin.”

• PRCA in particular appear to have turned their opinion 180° since June, when they heartily endorsed the CIPR/WMUK guidelines.

Censorship

• On 24 October, Sibina and Dante were found guilty of defamation against Josep María Via, health advisor at the Government of Catalonia. Dante and Sibina accused Via, amongst others, of links with corruption. They were convicted to pay a fine of 10,000 Euros. Josep María Via justified his complaint with the title of the video (“The biggest robbery in the history of Catalonia”) and specifically the word “robbery”. Of the original sum of 20,000 Euros, the judge considered only half of the complaint and finally condemned the magazine to pay 10,000 Euro. Via, who manages the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, said he would give the amount to charity.

Privacy

• Yesterday, we got a rare look at how information on your public social media profiles—including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn—is being harvested and resold by large consumer data companies.

• Responding to a congressional query, nine data companies provided answers to a detailed set of questions about what kinds of information they collect about individual Americans, and where they get that data.

• Their responses, released Thursday, show that some companies record — and then resell — your screen names, web site addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.

• A newly uncovered clandestine computer network, known as the ‘One System,’ can reportedly share children’s personal details across different UK agencies, including age, sex, address and their school behavior records – all without parents ever knowing. One of Britain’s biggest government contractors has created a database containing the personal details of 8 million children, the Sunday Times revealed. The database was created by Capita – a company specializing in IT systems – and includes information on a child’s sex, age, exam results, if they have special needs, bad behavior like absenteeism and how many minutes late they are to lessons.

• It was a little more than a decade ago that the United States was rocked by the events of 9/11. Much happened on that day, including a sharp turn away from personal privacy and toward national security. Up went the cameras and the Patriot Act, and down came many laws that help safeguard privacy. A new industry for domestic surveillance emerged.

• But does it need to be this way? At the beginning of a second term for President Obama, it is time to move beyond the paranoid strategies for public safety that have dominated both Democratic and Republican presidencies.

Civil Rights

• In the early hours of this morning around 5,000 young Tibetans took part in the biggest protests to happen in Tibet since March. The students marched through the streets of Rebkong County, stopping to demonstrate outside a local government building.

• The protest come one day after China mobilised paramilitaries to suppress the protests carried out in Rebkong yesterday.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• WHAT A WEEK it has been. A hurricane thrashed New York City and New Jersey on the US east coast last weekend, killing over 100 people with fierce winds and storm flooding, demolishing entire seaside communities and cutting power to millions of homes and businesses. The region had only started to recover before it got hit by another storm. Tens of thousands of people are still without power and heat, and are miserable and starving due to transit disruption and petrol shortages.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Opponents of genetically modified food will continue to fight despite defeat in California (Photo by asianfarmers via flickr) Opposition of Proposition 37 was spearheaded by large agribusiness and chemical companies—such as Monsanto and Dow—and big food manufacturers—including PepsiCo, Nestle, and Conagra—who dumped more than $45 million into the fight. Monsanto, a leading maker of genetically engineered seeds, contributed $8.1 million alone against the measure which would have required labeling on genetically modified food.

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