● 12.12.12

● Links 13/12/2012: Guy Kawasaki Evangelises Android, WordPress 3.5 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• On December 11, Linux released a new version of its operating system (OS). The explosion of web platforms and business is in part due to Linux and the push to develop open source software.

• For many students and teachers, the hassles of traditional computing often prevent them from making the most of technology in the classroom. Schools that have adopted Chromebooks, however, have been able to bring the web’s vast educational resources—whether it’s conducting real-time research or collaborating on group projects—right into the classroom. Chromebooks are fast, easily sharable, and require almost no maintenance. Today more than 1,000 schools have adopted Chromebooks in classrooms, including some school districts like Richland School District Two (S.C.), Leyden High School District (Ill.), and Council Bluffs School District (Iowa) who have deployed Chromebooks to tens of thousands of students.

Kernel Space

• Linux has long been about more than just x86. With the new Linux 3.7 kernel, the open source operating system is improving its multi-architecture support with a significant improvement to the way that ARM support and development is handled.

• ARM Holdings has more improvements for their ARMv8 AArch64 architecture with the Linux 3.8 kernel that just officially entered the first stages of development.

• Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux kernel no longer supports Intel’s 80386 processors.

Graphics Stack

• While there hasn’t been much to report on with the open-source Freedreno driver in recent months — a reverse-engineered attempt at creating a free 3D driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno/Snapdragon graphics processor — it’s still being developed with new Git commits continuing to be common.

• Intel should finally have Haswell graphics support on Linux in shape with the Linux 3.8 kernel after earlier admitting they screwed up, not all areas of the open-source GPU driver support are polished ahead of the big Haswell CPU launch in 2013.

• In addition to pushing OpenGL transform feedback for Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe, David Airlie has released a new patch-set for Uniform Buffer Objects (UBOs) and Texture Buffer Objects (TBOs) within Mesa’s Gallium3D infrastructure.

• Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs pushed out new code this morning into the Nouveau DRM driver repository. In addition to some video BIOS work and other changes, initial support for the NVIDIA GK106 GPU was pushed into this reverse-engineered open-source driver.

• Martin Peres, the developer who has been a longstanding contributor to the Nouveau graphics driver project, delivered two presentations at a recent French Linux event where he provided an introduction to graphics processors and the Linux graphics driver stack. The second talk focused upon GPUs and Linux drivers in much greater detail.

Applications

• Fotoxx is not well known, but its obscurity is not necessarily a bad thing. It is very capable at editing and managing photo collections. What might be a problem is future development. It seems the developer has abandoned it out of frustration over the difficulty of packaging it into various Linux distro formats. So you must rely on other software centers to download Fotoxx if your distro’s repository does not include it.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Like most iD titles, RTCW was ultimately released under the GPL, and is thus available as a GNU/Linux native game. Installing it under Gentoo is as simple as “emerge games-fps/rtcw”, but unfortunately the game itself no longer works in modern GNU/Linux systems. This is only to be expected with proprietary software that becomes abandoned, and would affect the operation of that software on any OS, but naturally it doesn’t have to be that way with Free Software, which can be revived at any time, even years later.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Digia has put out a new Qt 5.0 package for those interested in testing out this major tool-kit update that will hopefully be released before month’s end.

• Just days after releasing Qt 4.8.4 with 170+ improvements and sharing they hope to release Qt 5.0 by the end of the year, a new version of the Norwegian tool-kit is available for testing.

• For KDE, giving is always in season. In 2012, KDE community members all over the world met and collaborated with a strong desire to produce the best software possible. They’ve spent countless hours delivering new features, while supporting existing versions with timely releases and bugfixes. Working with students in programs such as the Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In and the Season of KDE, KDE mentors gave time and guidance towards developing new technical talent. Truly, the KDE Community thrives by giving all year round.

Distributions

New Releases

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Sony already rose to prominence among Android manufactures this year, snatching the 2nd place from HTC, with just the almighty Samsung before it. If the rumored Sony Yuga/Odin flagships for the first half of next year are any indication, it might also carry this trend into 2013.

• …Full HD smartphones are set to become the norm rather than the exception in a short while

• One of the more prolific Apple figures of the 1980′s, Guy Kawasaki, loves his Android smartphones and tablets. So much so, in fact, he no longer uses Apple mobile devices.

• The press-shy Google CEO talks about mobile computing, his tussles with Apple — and the future of search.

• Android Won. Windows Lost. Now what? We have passed the tipping point now, the balance has tipped and can’t be flipped. The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks – and collect consumer insights on our consumption.. Ok. The numbers for Q3 are in, inwhat I anticipated to be the “smartphone bloodbath” three years ago, that would last long into this new decade. That was then, when the battle was joined, and since have called and the battle of the century, the battle for the pocket, the battle for the platform to control the digital destiny of humanity.. that battle, the biggest race of all time – has been won. Already? But we barely got to know you? Yes.

• Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple, has jumped ship from iOS to Android.

• In an interview with Dan Lyons of ReadWrite, Kawasaki said that he’s a diehard Android fan.

• Kawasaki switched to a phone running Google’s mobile operating system about a year ago so that he could use a 4G LTE network.

• [...]

• Even after Apple released the iPhone 5, Kawasaki stuck with Android because he thinks “Android is better.”

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The PengPod tablet, which allows for dual-booting Google’s Android and Ubuntu/Linaro on an ARM-based tablet, is becoming a reality after it was successfully crowd-funded.

• While the PengPod calls itself the “true Linux tablet” and it’s interesting that it will support both Android and Ubuntu/Linaro, it isn’t too interesting from just a end-user who just wants a compelling Linux tablet. The PengPod isn’t shipping until early next year and the hardware inside is already dated by the latest-generation Android/Linux tablets on the market.

Free Software/Open Source

• The city of Limerick, Ireland, is known for a lot of things: the infamous “broken treaty” of 1691, Gaelic sports and the eponymous form of poetry. Now, the town is also aspiring to become a model for deploying open source in government. It completed the latest move in that process this week with the adoption of the Zentyal Small Business Server and Zarafa groupware suite.

• Limerick is hardly the first local administration in Europe to consider moving to open source software solutions. Plenty of other municipalities and larger government organizations have made similar migrations. The French ministry of police, for example, has adopted Ubuntu, and the city of Munich, Germany, is in the midst of a long-term effort, called LiMux, to migrate fully to open source platforms.

• Open-source provider Talend has received a favorable advisory ruling from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency concerning the government’s ability to purchase open-source software, opening the way for all software vendors to increase their share of business with US federal agencies.

• The figures for female developers in open source are not much different at 2-5%.

Events

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the program and dates for its annual ApacheCon North America conference. The main conference will take place between 26 and 28 February 2013 in Portland, Oregon under the general theme of “Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation”. The two days before the start of the main conference will be filled with training as well as barcamp and hackathon style events, beginning on 24 February. After the main conference, sprints and workshops will be held until 2 March when the event officially concludes.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Although it is still calling it a technical preview, Mozilla has delivered an official version 1.0 of its Firefox OS simulator, and promises that it will run on many more systems, including Linux systems that previously had problems with it. Mozilla has been making some noise about its entry into the mobile OS business, and has smartphone partners lined up to deliver phones running Firefox OS in emerging and developing markets. Here are more details on version 1.0 of the simulator.

Databases

CMS

Healthcare

• Oroville Hospital in California has made the e-prescribing module it created for the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) open source, making it available for free to any private organization that uses VistA.

Business

• Open source technologies play a vital role in helping small businesses achieve desired capabilities at minimal cost. To help SMBs implement open source software in their environment, Asahi Technologies has launched cost effective open source implementation services in New York.

Semi-Open Source

• With ‘a new approach to identity management’, the UK recently saw the launch of ForgeRock.

Project Releases

• White Source, the leading provider of SaaS Open Source Lifecycle Management solutions, announced today the release of a new Jenkins integration.

Public Services/Government

• Open source has had a mixed reception in Poland’s public sector, with some government agencies actively blocking efforts to increase uptake of the software. But the situation could be set for a reversal, after changes in the education sector.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Someone once said to me that the best way to get researchers to be serious about the issue of modernising scholarly communications was to let the scholarly monograph business go to the wall as an object lesson to everyone else. After the last couple of weeks I’m beginning to think the same might be said of the UK Humanities and Social Sciences literature. I get that people are worried, even scared. I can also see some are stirring up mud behind the scenes to get academics and editors angry. But the problem is that people are focussing on the wrong problems and missing the significant opportunities to rejuvenate H&SS in the UK.

Open Hardware

• Meet the Arduino Esplora, an open source Arduino Leonardo based gaming pad that can be used in DIY Gaming projects, to control robots or just about any other project where a hand held controller is needed. Sporting an Atmega32U4 AVR microcontroller with 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connection capable of acting as a USB client device, like a mouse or a keyboard.

Programming

• The original open source software “Benevolent Dictator For Life” and author of Python, Guido van Rossum, is leaving Google to join Dropbox, the startup will announce later today. Van Rossum was a software engineer at Google since 2005, and should be a huge help as Dropbox is built on Python. He’s the latest big hire by the cloud storage startup that’s capitalizing on its 100 million-user milestone.

Standards/Consortia

• An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM’s Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner.

• Edwin Vane of Intel Canada has called for comments on his proposal to develop a Clang-based tool using the LibTooling library for automatically transforming C++ code-bases to take advantage of modern C++11 features without needing any manual code rewriting.

Leftovers

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.

Security

• The Metasploit penetration testing framework has always been about finding ways to exploit IT, in an effort to improve defense. The new Metasploit 4.5 release from security vendor Rapid7 goes a step further than its predecessors, offering a new phishing engine and updated exploit modules.

• “The phishing engine is part of a larger Social Engineering module that supports a wide range of client-side exploitation and security assessment capabilities,” said HD Moore, chief architect of Metasploit and chief security officer for Rapid7.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• …more than 100 federal, state and local government entities to fly drones within U.S. airspace.

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.

• The video is pretty scary.

• Azerbaijan, for example, cut a $1.4 billion arms deal with Israel in February; dozens of drones were included in the package.

• Drone strikes have increased exponentially under President Obama, yet the program remains shrouded in secrecy.

• …unnamed suspects are targeted, based on their pattern of behavior.

• The 13 will defend themselves without using attorneys.

• Negron said drone surveillance is “Orwellian” and “Big Brother at its worst,” but he said the bill’s terrorism exception is reasonable. He plans to add another exception allowing for drone use with a search warrant.

• If law enforcement believes nefarious activity is afoot and it has probable cause, it could get a warrant from a judge for a set amount of time, Negron said.

• Julian Assange has been trapped in Ecuador’s embassy in London for six months. Will he ever come out? He spoke to Philip Dorling.

• [...]

• But Assange clearly finds his circumstances oppressive.

• Even someone convinced that we need some sort of drone war ought to be alarmed at the specific one being waged.

• Far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, a Predator drone was summoned into action last year to spy on a North Dakota farmer who allegedly refused to return a half dozen of his neighbor’s cows that had strayed onto his pastures. The farmer had become engaged in a standoff with the Grand Forks police SWAT team and the sheriff’s department. So the local authorities decided to call on their friends at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy a multimillion dollar, unarmed drone to surveil the farmer and his family.

• U.S. Special Operations Forces have a brand new home in Afghanistan. It’s owned and operated by the security company formerly known as Blackwater, thanks to a no-bid deal worth $22 million.

• The Thai authorities have charged the former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva over the use live ammunition that led to civilian deaths during a military crackdown on an anti-government protests in 2010.

• [TS] confiscate your personal property, acquired for nothing, then sell it for a profit

• Washington, DC – Twenty-six of the nation’s most respected retired military leaders today urged the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) to adopt a report on CIA interrogation and detention practices and to make it public with as few redactions as possible. The Committee is planning to vote on the report’s adoption tomorrow, December 13.

• America has never apologised for accidental rendition of Khalid el-Masri, a German car salesman of Lebanese birth who was arrested by Macedonian border guards in December 2003 and handed over to the CIA and flown to a detention centre in Afghanistan known as the “salt pit”.

• The military judge overseeing the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks granted a U.S. government request to limit disclosure of classified information about “sources, methods and activities” used in fighting terrorism.

• Just after 5:00 p.m. Tuesday, the Senate did it again. By a vote of 98-0 (two senators abstained) lawmakers in the upper chamber approved the Fiscal Year 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Not a single senator objected to the passage once again of a law that purports to permit the president, supported by nothing more substantial than his own belief that the suspect poses a threat to national security, to deploy the U.S. military to arrest an American living in America.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Proposals to conduct ‘scientific’ whale hunts similar to those carried out by Japan provoked storm of international criticism

Finance

• Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen is going on the offensive once more, this time in pursuit of cuts to military spending.

• Mullen, who has previously called the national debt the “most significant threat to our national security,” is heading the new Coalition for Fiscal and National Security along with several other foreign policy luminaries. The group, operating out of the Peter G Peterson Foundation, is seeking to influence the debate surrounding the fiscal cliff by lending th

• Right now, EFF representatives in Auckland, New Zealand are being shut out of the 15th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe. Hundreds of delegates and private representatives from the 11 participating nations are gathering at an Auckland casino to discuss this contentious trade agreement. EFF joins KEI, the Stop the Trap Coalition, Derechos Digitales and many other organizations representing public interest concerns to sound the alarm over the TPP’s intellectual property chapter.

• Despite growing opposition in Canada, the Canadian government has begun formal participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, aimed at establishing one of the world’s most ambitious trade agreements. As nearly a dozen countries – including the United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Mexico and Vietnam – gathered in New Zealand last week for the 14th round of talks, skeptics here have already expressed doubts about the benefits of the proposed deal.

• Canada has free-trade agreements with the United States, Mexico, Chile and Peru, leaving just six countries – currently representing less than 1 per cent of Canadian exports – as the net gain. Moreover, the price of entry may be high, since leaked documents suggest the deal might require a major overhaul of Canadian agriculture, investment, intellectual property and culture protection rules.

• The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a huge, and growing, coalition of powerful CEOs, politicians and policy makers on a mission to lower taxes for the rich and to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the cover of concern about the national debt. The group was spawned in July 2012 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, architects of a misguided deficit reduction scheme in Washington back in 2010. By now, the “fixers” have collected a war chest of $43 million. Private equity billionaire Peter G. Peterson, longtime enemy of the social safety net, is a major supporter.

• Steadily – and stealthily – Goldman Sachs is carrying out a global coup d’etat.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• With final receipts tallied, spending on the 2012 federal elections has topped $6 billion, making it the most expensive election in the history of the world — and absent reform, election spending is certain to escalate in coming cycles.

Privacy

• Georgia resident Andy Morar is in the market for a BMW. So recently he sent a note to a showroom near Atlanta, using a form on the dealer’s website to provide his name and contact information. His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.

• Despite claiming to offer its users some semblance of democracy, Facebook has made the changes it wants to its policies – blaming users themselves for not bothering to vote on a topic which received little promotion from the company.

• Last week, the site opened the polls to give its users the chance to vote on how Facebook handles people’s data, and, ironically, a plan to get rid of the site’s policy to let users vote in the first place. But it has now said that participation was not high enough to reach a consensus from its users.

• A former Google advertising scientist is behind a service that matches people across devices to serve more targeted advertisements, while promising to protect their privacy.

• Specifically, Apple wants to protect the leaf on its company logo. Apple applied for to the European Trademark Registry on 3 December, with the help of London lawyers from Edwards Wildman.

Civil Rights

• New York, December 7, 2012–CPJ condemns a series of attacks on journalists covering protests in Cairo over the proposed constitution and calls on authorities to investigate the assaults and bring an immediate end to the anti-press violence. At least five journalists were struck by rubber bullets, leaving one in critical condition, and several others were assaulted, according to news reports.

• When journalists make trouble for the PM in Istanbul, the tax inspectors or counter-terrorism officials soon appear in the newsroom. So now almost no one makes trouble

• The tortured and decapitated body of 39-year-old María Elizabeth Macías Castro was found on a Saturday evening in September 2011. It had been dumped by the side of a road in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican border town ravaged by the war on drugs. Macías, a freelance journalist, wrote about organized crime on social media under the pseudonym “The Girl from Laredo.” Her murder, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, was the first in which a journalist was killed in direct relation for reporting published on social media. It remains unsolved.

• The state of Washington has abandoned its defense of legislation passed earlier this year that could have exposed website operators to legal liability if they inadvertently hosted advertisements for child prostitution. The Internet Archive, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, challenged the legislation in June. They argued that the law was unconstitutionally broad and that it conflicted with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants website providers broad immunity against liability for hosting material posted by third parties.

• “I last saw Nabeel Rajab, the President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, in March 2012. Nabeel flew to the United Kingdom, where I interviewed him for my television programme The World Tomorrow. While he had been on the plane, his house had been surrounded by armed police.

• On Monday December 17 Open Rights Group will be at Parliament letting MPs know that the Comms Data Bill must go back to the drawing board and calling for a review of digital surveillance.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Leaked proposals from the U.N. WCIT-12 summit show Russia, China, and similar regimes are making a bid to define the Internet as a system of government-controlled networks

• In a key victory for the United States’ delegation at the ITU moot in Dubai, a proposal backed by Arab states, China, and Russia has been beaten back. Or, put another way, it has been pulled from discussion, rendering it over for the time being.

• According to Verizon’s third-quarter reports, net income rose 15%, to $1.59 billion (56 cents per share), up from $1.38 billion (49 cents a share) a year ago. According to Verizon Communications Inc., its wireless business reported record high margins and improved revenue and still on pace to meet its 2012 financial goals. SAN FRANCISCO – OCTOBER 04: A pedestrian walks by a Verizon Wireless retail store on October 4, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Verizon Wireless is set to give refunds to 15 million of its subscribers who complained of “mystery fees” on bills for services that they did not initiate. The total could end up being over $90 million in compensation.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In the summer of 1981, I sneaked out of my parents’ home in Altrincham to sit on the wall of a churchyard and have a smoke. A police car roared up. The officer ordered me to get indoors and stay there. You will find this hard to believe, but I was an argumentative young man. I replied that the police had no right to order a British citizen to do anything when he was not committing a crime or – and I added this caveat carefully – giving the constabulary reasonable grounds to suspect that he might commit a crime.

• In the ongoing fight over whether YouTube owes Viacom billions of dollars for hosting copyrighted material, Google gets cute with a 1373-page filing.

• How we use the internet and access to music, books, and films are at risk in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, sector groups claim. Geoff Cumming hears their concerns

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