● 12.05.12

● Links 6/12/2012: White House on FOSS, Drones Backlash Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• We’ve covered using Google Drive on Linux with third-party software, but why bother jumping through those hoops? You can use a cloud storage service that officially supports Linux instead – several of Google Drive’s competitors do.

• Google may be leaving Linux users out, but other services like Dropbox, Ubuntu One, SpiderOak, and Wuala don’t ignore Linux users. They even offer more storage and other useful features, such as local encryption of your files.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, December 4, the immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.

Graphics Stack

• One week after NVIDIA published 2D open-source driver code for their Tegra 2 ARM SoCs, which is applied to the Tegra DRM driver that will premiere with the Linux 3.8 kernel, code has now emerged for supporting the NVIDIA Tegra driver within the libdrm component.

Applications

• As a Linux user, you have plenty of photography applications to choose from: digiKam, GIMP, Rawstudio, Darktable, just to name a few. However, if you are just dipping your toes into the world of photography, you might want to keep things simple, and start with a less complex tool for managing and tweaking your photos. In this case, consider gThumb. This image viewer packs several powerful features which make it a perfect tool for managing photos and retouching them.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps. He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer. He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center. Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce. The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map. Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.

• I remember when Google Earth got big. I was already into Linux so I went through the rigmarole of getting it to work on Linux. In actuality, it wasn’t much work although it wasn’t installed in the usual manner. I played with it for a few days, but I was already past the age of caring too much about geography. I would have loved Google Earth when I was in elementary school and I used to marvel at my globe and peruse atlases. It certainly would have been interesting to grab the update on the day the Soviet Union collapsed. Rather than have an out of date globe or map I’d have an up-to-date resource. Of course, that does go back into the whole political thing – when Google decides to show this or that disputed region as belonging to someone they are, in a sense, making a political statement. And they make another one – they tend to show country names as written in that country in addition to English.

• The two most recent releases of Kubuntu, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, have both received a new update for KDE, pushing the version number up to 4.9.4.

• The announcement was made today on kubuntu.org and lists 71 bug-fixes, major improvements to Dolphin file manager and Kontact PIM as well as stability improvements. Improvements to the 55+ available translations have also made this release.

GNOME Desktop

• The GNOME project took an important step when Matthias Clasen announced that it would support a set of extensions that would re-create the GNOME 2 desktop. Many observers, including me, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Katherine Noyes immediately interpreted the news as proof that GNOME was turning itself around and finally starting to listen to users.

• Privacy Panel arrived today in GNOME Control Center, and is one of the three new Panel (Privacy, Search, Notifications) we will get on the next GNOME. But there is also a re-designed Power Panel, and there are many improvements for Wacom, Users (added History Logs), Wireless, Bluetooth..

Distributions

New Releases

• Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.

• I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0 and thank you all for funding this release. In this release we made the switch from our deskbar tool to the xfce4-panel ‘deskbar’ mode which introduces many new features just like extensible plugin support and the ability to more flexibly configure your desktop.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mageia 1 has now reached EOL (end of life) and will not receive any further security or bugfix updates.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• RHEL 6.4 provides users with improved security enhancements as well as a number of new Microsoft-enabling features. The new RHEL beta update follows RHEL 6.3, which debuted in June and provided users with enhanced virtualization scalability.

Fedora

• The beta of Fedora 18 has been released, and here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find in it. This release has been dubbed “Spherical Cow.” Apparently, the Fedora developers have decided to follow in the footsteps of Apple and Ubuntu by using cute animal names for their operating system releases.

• There have been a number of threads about how the new Anaconda UI is unintuitive or hard to use. So many that I thought maybe there was something to the claims. Maybe working on Fedora for the past many years and being involved constantly for the past year and a half has skewed my opinion so much that I wouldn’t even recognize something being hard to use. So I decided to find a couple people that don’t work on Fedora and have never done a Fedora install at all. That is to say, I used my family as guinea pigs.

• Now, before you shout and rant about this, I am not claiming this is a scientific study. I’m not pretending this is somehow valid User Experience interaction data. This is is just me wanting to observe what happens when you sit someone down in front of a newUI screen and ask them to complete a default install. I found it interesting. If you don’t, then that’s cool with me. That’s why I gave the short answer at the top. OK, onto my experiment.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Many people believe Ubuntu revolutionized dpkg package management with its Ubuntu Software Center. And there is no question, Software Center is certainly user friendly by most people’s standards.

• But is it truly good enough for the masses?

• In this article, I will look at the current state of Ubuntu software management, how far software management has come since Ubuntu first came out, plus where I think Ubuntu software is headed.

• So, I’ve blogged a few times randomly about getting ZFS on GNU/Linux, and it’s been a hit. I’ve had plenty of requests for blogging more. So, this will be the first in a long series of posts about how you can administer your ZFS filesystems and pools. You should start first by reading how to get ZFS installed into your GNU/Linux system here on this blog, then continue with this post.

• The Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope is an Unity Scope that allows users to easily search the Thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms or words. It uses the same API as the Dictionary app.

• The best part is that Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope allows you to search words right from Unity home, without accessing a Lens first.

• If you’re running Ubuntu and want the same look and feel for your system, it won’t take much to make it happen

Flavours and Variants

• Ubuntu Satanic Edition 666 is a Linux distribution based on two different versions of Ubuntu, 10.10 and 11.04, and comes in two distinct flavors.

Devices/Embedded

• Husband and wife-led team developed a board game offering customisation abilities which encourages players to experiment with programming at 24-hour hackathon in Leeds

• [...]

• …Dhajan developed a Pi operating system to replace the Pi’s Linux.

• It’s a rare product indeed that surpasses expectations as utterly and thoroughly as the Raspberry Pi did this year.

• Conceived as an educational tool that would be used in teaching kids to program, the device has since gone on to inspire countless new uses that must surely boggle the minds even of its creators.

Phones

• There was certainly a loud buzzing on the internet regarding Nokia’s recent moves. Nokia is certainly on the spotlight since people are watching what they will do next. After all, the company practically vowed revenge and plans to take the number 1 spot in mobile phones once more.

Android

• After accepting a phone upgrade from my service provider, I decided to embark on a mission of investigating some new Android software and for the first time found myself genuinely keen to download a game. The game in question – Zookeeper. Why? Because its probably the one game I wasted months of my life to on the Nintendo DS (before giving over ownership of aforementioned DS to my kids)

• So now I’m presented with the “adult” version of the same DS title. I say adult because by my reckoning anything that goes on my phone is just as acceptable for adults to play as anyone else and I can fully justify wasting hours of time on a tile matching game featuring cute animals as long as its on my phone.

• Announced on Tuesday for Google Apps customers, the Google Play Private Channel lets IT shops build their own applications and distribute them to employees on the Google Play store without making the apps available to the general public. “Whether you’ve built a custom expense reporting app for employees or a conference room finder, the Google Play Private Channel is designed to make your organization’s internal apps quick and easy for employees to find,” Google Play Product Manager Ellie Powers wrote in a blog post. “Once your company has loaded these internal apps using the Google Play Developer Console, users just need to log in with their company email address to browse the Private Channel and download apps.”

• Yesterday’s WSJ.com video “Tablet Wars: How Are People Using Tablets?” had a shocking statistic: 98% of the web traffic from tablets comes from Apple’s iPad. Further, most of mobile commerce is from Apple’s iPhone:

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• There are plenty of great Android tablets on the market now that weren’t around even a year ago. If you’re looking for one to wrap up for someone special, get your game on, or get some work done, you have plenty of options. Earlier last week, we asked you which models you thought were the top of the class, and then we took a closer look at the five best Android tablets. Now we’re back to crown the overall winner.

• Amazon has introduced Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a special bundle available only on the new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD that brings books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows—into one easy-to-use service for kids ages 3-8.

Free Software/Open Source

• Let’s say you’re a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive.

• You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.

• Conceptually straightforward and easy to work with, Storm makes handling big data analysis a breeze.

• Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm’s API with a small demonstration app.

Events

• open2012, Maven’s upcoming conference at the Computer History Museum on December 11th, 2012, seeks to bridge that gap. open2012 will bring leaders of the Open Innovation movement to Silicon Valley to highlight their successes and discuss areas of pain. The event will feature keynote addresses by Venture2 and Procter & Gamble, Open Innovation case studies by Intel, Strategyn, Boston Consulting Group, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, panel discussions including Roche, SAP, Agilent, Wrigley, GSV Capital, and Citi Ventures, and company presentations by BrightIdea, NetBase, Spigit, Inno360, competIQ, and many more.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I guess you all know about the upcoming Firefox OS, but what you might don’t know is how easily you can run it in GNOME and play with it.

• Its Apps and Interface is made totally by WEB Technologies (CSS JavaScript, HTML) and I think it could easily catch up with Apple’s and Google App Stores. Besides we all have bored to listen and talk about Google

SaaS

Databases

• The MySQL community in exile made a significant announcement yesterday in London at the Percona Live conference. The three main companies investing in the MariaDB fork of MySQL joined with leaders of the MySQL development community to unveil the MariaDB Foundation, intended as a home for serious, commercially backed development of future versions of the popular open source SQL database. Already enjoying substantial commercial backing, the new foundation is seeking further participants and aims to elect a representative board in two months.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Even as traditional enterprise IT vendors come under pressure from modern cloud and open-source applications, these old-school businesses have one strategy that is the gift that keeps on giving: Enterprise licence agreements.

• Not only do ELAs help to shield vendors from pricing pressure from open-source alternatives, they also increase friction for those anxious to swap out ageing applications and infrastructure for better alternatives. But how long can ELAs block customers from embracing the future of IT?

• [...]

• Matt Asay is vice president of corporate strategy at 10gen, the MongoDB company.

Healthcare

• The Veterans Affairs Department will establish a separate repository for its fully open source Gold Disk version of its VistA electronic health record system to assure a common software baseline compared with the 133 instances of VistA operating at its hospitals and clinics across the country.

• VA also will put in place a software testing platform, standards supporting open source development and documentation of open source community outreach planning, according to a Nov. 27 announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.

Business

• As an end consumer looking at the cloud space, there are two major types of clouds to choose from: open source clouds, championed by the likes of Citrix and Rackspace, and closed clouds, characterized by Amazon, HP and Google. There are reasons that the two types of cloud technology are differentiated, whether from a functional or marketing perspective, but in the end which is better for an end consumer’s business?

• One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The OpenACC 1.0 API has been public for more than one year as an open standard to simplify parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs, but to this point it’s basically only backed by commercial compilers. OpenACC is similar to OpenMP in terms of using PRAGMA compiler directives and special functions for tapping multiple CPU cores in an easy and straight-forward manner with C/C++ and Fortran code, but unlike OpenMP, OpenACC is also aware of GPUs.

Public Services/Government

• Open government means different things to different people. Is it about transparency, collaboration, or participation? Maybe it’s a combination of all three? If you listen to Tim O’Reilly speak about open government, he’ll tell you about his vision of government as a platform.

• You say sure. When she returns the screwdriver a couple days later, your friend mentions that she made an improvement: now it works with both Phillips and flat head screws. Another friend hears this and asks if he can take a look, too. When he returns the screwdriver, it’s been upgraded again: now it’s a power screwdriver. Then a third friend gets excited and adds some extra speeds and a better battery.

• This situation sounds improbable, but it’s how open source software development takes place.

• Draft legislation proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to overhaul federal information technology has drawn opposition for its section on open source software adoption.

• The draft (.pdf) would require the Federal Chief Information Officers Council to issue guidance that mostly reaffirms open source’s status as a commercial item under federal acquisition regulations, but it would also create a governmentwide open source software approval process to address “issues such as security and redistribution rights.”

Openness/Sharing

• …using open-source principles.

Programming

Leftovers

• I have been having an absolute blast of a time testing out a new operating system for this article. It is called Haiku OS. It is not a Unix or Linux based operating system, but rather an operating system based upon BeOS.

• Beneath the placid surface of Amazon, authors and reviewers have been in a ferment this fall. After several well-publicized episodes involving writers soliciting or paying for reviews, the retailer seems to be cracking down on log-rolling. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of book reviews have been killed. Amazon has not explained exactly why.

• One possible target: authors who have sent gift certificates to reviewers to buy their books. While it’s easy to see the potential for abuse here — “Here’s a $100 gift certificate. Buy a copy of my novel for 99 cents and keep the change” — some writers argue it is no different than sending a physical copy of a book to someone, which is what publishers do in the offline world and therefore is allowed by Amazon. At least, the line between the two is blurry.

Hardware

Security

• A hacker by the name of Kingcope has found another security problem with the popular MySQL database. Using an already well-known characteristic of the database’s user management, it is possible to significantly increase the speed of a brute force attack. “Brute-forcing” typically involves trying out a huge number of possible passwords in order to guess the actual password of the user. Each password would be presented to the login process which can take time, and when thousands of passwords need to be processed, that time can become substantial.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Once completed, the DIA will have approximately 1,600 so-called “collectors” the world over who will be “closely aligned” with the CIA and elite military commando units. As the Washington Post notes, “an unprecedented total for an agency whose presence abroad numbered in the triple digits in recent years.”

• The Alameda County, California, sheriff’s office has been forced to suspend the purchase of a surveillance drone after constitutionalists and activists slammed the agency with concerns that the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle would violate privacy protections.

• Sheriff Gregory Ahern had asked the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to approve a $31,646 grant to purchase a drone. The money was part of a $1.2-million grant handed out by the California Emergency Management Agency.

• The legality of drone strikes was a recurring theme among panelists speaking on national security and armed conflict at the 22nd Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law, held Friday at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C.

• …our country’s invidious use of drone warfare.

• They had met with anti-drone activists and relatives of the 760 civilians murdered by U.S. drones.

Cablegate

• In failing to send its own reporter to cover the fascinating and important pretrial testimony of Bradley Manning, The New York Times missed the boat.

• Over the past several days, as compelling testimony over the harsh treatment of this 24-year-old Army private turned whistle-blower (or illegal informant, depending on your point of view) flooded the media zone, The Times was notably absent.

• Julian Assange is wasting little time while shut inside Ecuador’s embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder has recently released a book called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. The book consists chiefly of the transcript of a conversation between Assange and three others. In a nod to openness, he has chosen not to offer the ebook version on Amazon. Instead, the book is being sold exclusively on reKiosk, a self-described uncensored portal.

• Julia Gillard was tipped off by the US government that the WikiLeaks cable dump would be embarrassing for her and the federal government, prompting the Prime Minister to make the claim the group had acted “illegally” in 2010.

• We welcome the call by Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and Archbishop Desmond Tutu for an immediate stop to the US persecution of private Bradley Manning who is accused of allegedly disclosing information to Wikileaks resulting in the exposure of atrocities by the US military in the name of the US people.

• We likewise call on the Nobel Laureates in Sweden this week to take a stand for global justice and support a resolution for the freedom of Julian Assange.

• As the alleged source of many of the most vital WikiLeaks reports of the past several years, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning shed considerable light on how the United States has prosecuted the Iraq and Afghan wars. Other State Department cables reportedly leaked by Manning conveyed vital information about U.S. foreign policy.

• Last week, in a Grisham-like courtroom scene, Bradley Manning—the Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks—testified publicly for the first time since his arrest in May of 2010. For more than five hours, Manning described the two months he spent in a “cage” inside a dark tent in Kuwait and the nine months that followed in 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement on a Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. In one theatrical moment, Manning got up from the stand and paced inside a 6 by 8 tape outline on the courtroom floor to demonstrate the size of his prison cell. In another, he donned the suicide smock he had to wear.

• WikiLeaks number two and the official spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organization, Kristinn Hrafnsson spoke with the Voice of Russia regarding the recent ruling by the European Parliament regarding the extra-judicial economic blockade by US based financial institutions who are in violation of international and European law in their continued blockade of the organization. Mr Hraffnsson also spoke about Bradley Manning equating his detention to torture and when asked about WikiLeaks, promised more releases to come.

Finance

• The real threat to the middle class is not there, it’s in the erosion of the programs I just mentioned. That is to say, it’s in the attack on the public schools, it’s in the squeeze on higher education, it’s in the threat to Social Security. When you look at housing, you have a very large unambiguous loss. Millions of people have been displaced, but many, many more have lost the capital value of their homes. They won’t be able to sell and retire on the proceeds.

• After the backlash from this year’s Budget, the Chancellor has been quick to stress once more that we are all in this together. This was a joke in 2010. It is a sick joke today. Some window dressing measures will not compensate for slicing 5% off the top-rate of income tax – paid by the richest 1% – back in March. That measure alone gave an extra £42,500 a year to anyone earning over £1m annually.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A new report by the International Forum on Globalization details the role of David and Charles Koch in undermining international talks to address the rapidly escalating problem of climate change. As the United Nations meets in Doha, Qatar this week, the goal is to create a framework in which the governments of the world make internationally binding commitments to cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep climate change within the agreed threshold of 2C.

• The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward obtained an audio recording of a conversation between David Petraeus, the general turned CIA Director who recently resigned in the midst of a sex scandal, and Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland. The conversation took place in spring 2011 in Kabul, during the time that Petraeus was the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. McFarland is a national security analyst for Fox News and has a long resume working for GOP administrations going back to Reagan.

Privacy

• Obviously we never thought that we would be joining in with all of the media that has amassed after the announcement of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy. However the Duchess has found herself embroiled in a data protection scandal.

• Extraordinarily, a prank call made by Australian 2Day FM radio presenters to King Edward VII Hospital enabled them to obtain intimate medical information about the health of Catherine. The presenters pretended to be the Queen, Prince Charles and, most bizarrely, corgis in order to attempt to get Catherine live on air. The transcript shows that, despite a very unconvincing performance by the presenters, a nurse gave private details of Catherine’s condition.

• Relief is on the way. Cellphone users are sending more text messages than ever, but increasingly they are free — thanks to the Internet. While that is good news for consumers, it could cost the world’s wireless companies tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue.

• European data stored in the “cloud” could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe’s strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

• If you travel to China or Russia, assume government or industry spooks will steal your data and install spyware.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The BPI have this afternoon confirmed to us that they have asked ISPs to unblock PromoBay.org as the organization responsible for maintaining the list of sites blocked under the injunctions to block the ThePirateBay.se.

• On Monday, ORG wrote to Virgin, BT, O2, TalkTalk and Sky to ask them why the PromoBay.org is being blocked. Virgin confirmed to ORG that the site was supplied to them as a domain to be blocked.

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