● 12.29.12

● Links 29/12/2012: Calculate Linux 13, Finnix 107

Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Taken as a whole, 2012 was a great year for Linux. The most popular stories, however, were more about the day-to-day happenings of Linux then the big picture.

• 2012′s top Linux story was The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. The title said it all. We’d long known that Google uses its own house-blend of Ubuntu on its PCs, but it wasn’t until this summer that Google finally revealed exactly how its workers use Ubuntu,

• The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive.

• That doesn’t mean we won’t see Linux on a tablet, but you’ll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop – clinging to a tiny percentage of the market.

• There is of course Android, which does use a Linux kernel somewhere under all that Java, but when Canonical or Red Hat talk about building Linux tablets, obviously Android is not what they have in mind.

• The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception.

• 2012 was the year that the Linux desktop diversified.

• Two years ago, users could choose between two or three desktop environments. But by the end of the first quarter of 2012, they had at least eight choices, with more on the way.

• Similarly, the year started with LibreOffice as the main office suite. But halfway through the year, LibreOffice was joined by Apache OpenOffice as well as Calligra Suite.

• Many Phoronix readers have written in over the past few days about the new effort to bring the Torque 3D Game Engine to Linux. The desire for Torque 3D coming to Linux is because the engine developers believe Linux is turning into a commercially viable platform for gaming.

• Torque 3D is the game engine out of Garage Games as the successor to the original Torgue Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) but with modern functionality like deferred lighting, NVIDIA PhysX, and modern shaders. The original Torque Game Engine had been originally developed in 2001 for the Tribes 2 game but it’s been developed much more extensively since its inception.

Desktop

Server

• We talk to Andreas Olofsson, founder and chief executive of Adapteva, about his company’s project to create a $99 many-core pocket-sized supercomputer: Parallella

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has announced the first pre-release version of Linux 3.8, releasing it on the “longest night of the year”. As previously reported, it includes support for the Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS), which has been designed for use on flash storage devices such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and internal storage in devices such as cameras, tablets and smartphones.

• While there’s a lot of features that are new to the Linux 3.8 kernel as covered in The Feature Overview For The Linux 3.8 Kernel, there’s also several promising new features and functionality that didn’t make the cut for this next kernel release.

• Linus Torvalds is one of the most influential people in the Linux world and among the most active figures that promote open source as a real alternative.

• When one says mechanical keyboard you think gamers, at least I did. Gamers prefer mechanical keyboards because the physical act of typing is more precise. That’s it in a nutshell, the feedback provided by mechanical keyboards gives gamers another edge over the game and opponents. So, one may think Windows, because gaming in Linux is rarely as competitive. But I’m here to tell you a Linux user, not even an avid gamer, can and does love her new CM Storm QuickFire TK.

Applications

• I think it is fairly obvious at this point onwards that as a project in itself, its no longer viable to continue development of compiz. Lots of people still use it though, so its is worth maintaining for those that use it, but nothing more than that.

• Podcasts are usually the first media I consume when I wake up in the morning and the last media I consume before falling asleep. Sadly, some of my favorites have gone AWOL over the past few years, but I haven’t stopped discovering new ones to listen to. I’m now going to tell you about the top Linux – and open-source-related podcasts making the rounds in my media player.

• The REAPER digital audio workstation software may be coming to Linux per a statement by its developers.

• REAPER, short for Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording, is one of the professional audio software solutions available on Windows and Mac OS X. While REAPER can work to some extent under WINE, the development studio behind this software, Cockos, is working towards a native Linux port.

• As you may know Dan Vrátil and I are working in a brand new screen manager that will solve most of the issues that we currently have on the desktop, making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple.

• Kraft developer Klaas Freitag has announced version 0.50 of the Kraft, a software for easy business document management. As per announcement on the official blog, Main change in Kraft 0.50 is support for multiple tax rate in a single document. For example one invoice items without tax, with reduced or full tax rate are supported.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• It’s Christmas time for Linux games, Humble Bundle has launched Humble Indie Bundle 7. This version includes many cross platform and DRM free games.

• The history of Linux in gaming is quite poor, but this year so many changes happened in this area that we might be able to review top commercial video games very soon. By commercial I mean those created by most significant gaming companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda, and not indie video games. Even though real gaming in Linux based operating systems got a boost this year, emulators were everywhere to be found, for most known video game consoles.

• Much hyped god game GODUS has been fully funded on Kickstarter. The game is being developed by Peter Molyneux, who created god games Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White.

• GODUS blends the power, growth and scope of Populous with the detailed construction and multiplayer excitement of Dungeon Keeper and the intuitive interface and technical innovation of Black & White.

• The Unvanquished open-source game is preapring for a great year ahead and for kicking off the New Year they will soon be releasing Unvanquished Alpha 11.

• Lately there’s been an increasing number of open-source projects sprouting up to design open-source game engine implementations around older closed-source engines to handle certain game content. Another one of these projects is Prequengine, which is for Little Big Adventure.

• Among the open-source game engines that re-implement closed-source game functionality and have been talked about recently on Phoronix include Xoreos, GemRB, and OpenMW. A Phoronix reader wrote in this weekend about another such game engine project, Prequengine.

• It’s been another successful Humble Indie Bundle so far with the latest pay-what-you-want, cross-platform, DRM-free game offering approaching the two million dollar mark.

• Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 12 Loucetios”, the twelfth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features diplomacy, packing siege engines, super fancy water and more!

Desktop Environments

• A few years ago, my neighbors asked for help securing their computer. They were running Windows, so my knowledge was limited, but I did set up a separate administrative account and add passwords to their regular accounts. When I looked at their computer a month later, they had removed both — and were back to getting viruses and malware along with their movie downloads. Their explanation? That my simple safeguards were “too inconvenient.”

• “Let me get this straight,” I wanted to say (but didn’t). “It’s too inconvenient to spend ten seconds typing a password, or twenty logging into a different account to install software. But it’s not too inconvenient to have your computer at the shop every few months to scrub it clean and to sometimes lose files because you haven’t bothered backing them up.”

• Awesome, the dynamic X window manager written in C and Lua that started off as a fork of dwm, is out with its version 3.5 “Last Christmas” release.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A new screen manager is being worked on for the KDE desktop to dramatically improve the multi-monitor experience by making it work “auto-magically” or at least be “super simple” to configure.

• Dan Vrátil and Alex Fiestas have been working on writing a brand new screen manager for KDE to overcome the current configuration shortcomings of the current settings panel. As Fiestas wrote today on his blog, “We are trying be as smart as possible adapting the behavior of it to each use case making the configuration of monitors as simple as plugging them to your computer.”

• The Krita community has created Stichting Krita Foundation to support the development of Krita through funding. The foundation will also help the community by organizing creative and open content projects like, Comics with Krita DVD. The have done some funding before where Lukáš Tvrdý was sponsored before actual development work and currently they are sponsoring Dmitry Kazakov, who is working on Krita performance improvements.

• Qt is one of the most important projects for both commercial and non-commercial players, especially in the embedded space. Now RIM is trying to lure Qt developers for the success of BlackBerry. If you are a developer of Qt apps RIM is offering a great deal for your Qt applications under Blackberry Qt porting program.

• The Qt project and Digia, the company behind Qt framework, have released the most awaited C++ framework for developers, Qt 5.0. The company claims that it’s one of the best releases till date and has invested a significant amount of time behind this release. It’s an overhaul of the Qt 4.x series and makes Qt fit for the future.

GNOME Desktop

• It seems fair to say that Linux users enjoy a degree of choice that’s unmatched by the proprietary players in the desktop computing world, what with the wide variety of both distributions and desktop environments from which they can choose.

• The last few years have been troubled for the Gnome Project. Once a premier desktop environment for Linux, it has seen its market share diminish amid user dissatisfaction over Gnome 3 and accusations that the project was ignoring users. Yet, over the last six months, something important has been happening: Slowly and quietly, the members of Gnome have started trying to turn the situation around.

• There is a nice Search in Calendar, by Reda, a support for two batteries and plugged devices in Power Panel, by Allan and some mockups in Gnome Maps, by Andreas.

• Keep on mind that these are just early designs that may never arrive in GNOME the way they look now, or the may arrive at all!

• The goal that Gnome board of directors set for the upcoming year is to improve the safety features of our favorite desktop environment by implementing and integrating special tools and features.

Distributions

• These were my 2 first GNU/Linux distros that I used on my home desktop (actually, I met with GNU/Linux a little earlier – the very first GNU/Linux distro that I saw, it was RedHat 9.0).

• Several familiar names cropped up in the news the last few days. The Mint team finishes out their lastest family tree and the Slax guys has rushed out a couple of bug-fix updates to the recently released 7.0. And KNOPPIX got an update too.

• You know how I like to rate distributions at the end of each year? Yes, you do. However, while I do try to make those articles be as impartial and fair as possible and encompass as broad spectrum of users as possible, they ultimately reflect one man’s experience, me. Not bad, given my awesomeness, but still.

• Between the new innovations that emerge practically every day and the fairly constant rate of change in general, things never stay the same for long in technology.

• Unlike many of the Linux distributions out there today that are little more than minor user-facing changes to Ubuntu or another tier-one Linux operating system, Slax for the past many years has followed its own dance. Slax, a LiveCD Linux distribution built around Slackware, is very lightweight and calls itself a “pocket operating system” as with the most recent release it can fit a full Linux OS with the KDE4 desktop in about 200MB. Slax is also intended to be quite easy for others to modify and create custom images via Slackware packages and Slax modules. The recent Slax 7.0 release was the first update for the open-source operating system in several years. For those interested in knowing how this very lightweight and customizable operating system can work so efficiently, Tomáš Matejícek, the Slax creator, has written an exclusive Phoronix article about the process.

• Presented in two formats based on two distros, which version of Puppy stays true to the commitment of being small and fast?

New Releases

• Steven Shiau proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 18, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.

• Being based on the Debian Sid repository as of December 17, 2012, the Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15 operating system is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.35 and incorporates various improvements, bug fixes and updated translations.

• This release also blacklists the floppy module from the kernel, just because none really uses a floppy drive anymore. But, in case you’re one of those people who still use a floppy drive, you will be able to manually load it by running the “modprobe floppy” command in a terminal.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Finally here is Mageia 3 beta 1. This first beta release was a bit tricky as it comes with some major new features in installer. GRUB2 has been included as an option for now.

Gentoo Family

• When you are running Gentoo with SELinux enabled, you will be running with a particular policy type, which you can devise from either /etc/selinux/config or from the output of the sestatus command. As a user on our IRC channel had some issues converting his strict-policy system to mcs, I thought about testing it out myself. Below are the steps I did and the reasoning why (and I will update the docs to reflect this accordingly).

Red Hat Family

• Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says “the state of the union at Red Hat is strong.”

• Whitehurst took a break from running the billion dollar company to blog about accomplishments over the past year, as well as to look ahead to what he called “massive” potential in 2013.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) is a success story for troubled times. The economy falters? No problem. Southern Europe on the brink of collective bankruptcy? Sure, but sales are growing there anyway. Corporate IT budgets trimming down? Hey, that’s actually a business opportunity!

• Big Blue has been talking about the Power7-based “Blue Waters” supercomputer nodes for so long that you might think they’re already available. But although IBM gave us a glimpse of the Power 775 machines way back in November 2009, they actually won’t start shipping commercially until next month – August 26, to be exact.

• The feeds and speeds of the Power 775 server remain essentially what we told you nearly two years ago. Today’s news is that the Power 775 is nearly ready for sale, and the clock speed on the Power7 processors and system prices have – finally – been announced.

• What does it feel like to be the CEO of a super-hot company as it crests the billion-dollar-revenue mark and grows to 5,000 employees?

• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says that it’s hard to notice the changes. Then something happens to make you realize you are the boss of a very big place.

Fedora

• Fedorians have a nice sense of humor, and FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the new upgrading tool for Fedora 17->18 and beyond, that replaces PreUpgrader.

• Earth survived from Mayan prophecy, end of days didn’t come, and Fedora 18 release will make it at Jan 8, 2013 -hopefully

• After the 2 months delay and the 8 months release cycle of Spherical Cow, Fedora now will try to make a “Speedy Gonzales” release inside in just 4 months. This is the shortest release cycle that Fedora ever had from its day one – Nov 2003, Yarrow / GNOME 2.4 / Linux 2.4.19.

• One of the gripes of the Fedora users, and mine as well, was that it doesn’t come bundled with any office suite. Users have to manually install LibreOffice or Calligra to get some work done. This is changing now. The LiveCD of Fedora 18 Spherical Cow will be shipped with LibreOffice installed. This is a great step from Fedora developers towards usability. This change is pushed by Bill Nottingham to Fedora 18.

Debian Family

• Welcome to this year’s twenty-fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

• * Bits from the DPL * Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests * Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin * Other news * New Debian Contributors * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Important Debian Security Advisories * New and noteworthy packages * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN?

• It has been a while since I wrote about bitcoin, the decentralised peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the state of bitcoin in Debian again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package is now maintained by a team of people, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We owe a huge thank you to all these team members. But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt Corallo in a PPA for Ubuntu, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the Debian package.

Derivatives

• Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD, made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by an automatic hardware detection and support for many video cards, SCSI and USB devices, is now at version 7.0.5.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Unity desktop environment is something which has intrigued me a lot over the past year or so. My interest has partly been in the strong reactions, for or against the environment, from Ubuntu users. The other key point of my interest has been that I’ve really only used the desktop in short bursts and, as a result, I don’t feel I’ve really got a feel for it. Once every six months I will install Ubuntu, play with Unity for a few days, not long enough to unlearn the habits I’ve picked up from using other desktop environments, and then I’m off to another distribution and another desktop. In these quick looks at Unity I’ve certainly encountered things which rubbed me the wrong way, but I’ve also caught sight of design features which struck me as being beneficial. Or they would be beneficial if one were to use them long enough to form new work patterns. At any rate, I wanted to find out how I would feel about Unity if I used it long enough to unlearn old habits, behaviour learned after over fifteen years of using desktops with approaches different from Unity’s. With that in mind I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on one of my machines and tried to use Unity as much as I could while still taking time to test other Linux distributions. Right upfront I want to say that it took about a week for the old habits to fade away and for using Unity’s controls to become reflex rather than considered actions. Little things like moving the mouse pointer to the right of the window instead of the left have long been actions performed automatically and they were hard to break. This led to several days of jerking the mouse right, then back left to close windows or minimize them. There was also some trial and error at first finding the best way to handle window organization, launch applications and deal with window grouping on the launch bar. Typically, I have found I am most comfortable with setting up multiple virtual work spaces, populating them with related applications and switching between the work spaces. This allows for a small number of open windows in each space and avoids programs grouping on the task switcher. Unity, on the other hand, while it does allow for multiple work spaces, the desktop appears to be much better suited to having few windows open at a time and I slowly came around to typically using one workspace and grouping program windows together, switching between windows rather than work spaces.

• Over the years, I’ve watched Ubuntu develop into quite the impressive Linux distro. While Ubuntu definitely has room for improvement, it does offer the casual user an outstanding experience overall. In this article, I’ll share the areas where I think Ubuntu is raising the bar on Linux for the masses.

• Thus going after someone like Canonical and calling what they doing spying actually hurts the promotion of free software. What they are doing is a huge step in the right direction.

• Having run a business based on free and open source software for a decade, you can imagine that I am a big fan of it. Last year, for a variety of reasons, I decided to make the jump to using a desktop based on Linux. I tried a number of options, but the one that worked for me, the one that “stuck”, was Ubuntu. Using it just comes naturally, and I’ve been using it for so long now that other desktops seem foreign.

• ‘Unredirect Fullscreen Windows’ option is finally enabled by default in Ubuntu 12.10. Compiz developer Daniel Van Vugt and his team has done lots of work in past few months to make sure that all the bugs related to this feature are fixed.

• Ubuntu may not quite be a religion, but it has its committed evangelists all the same. And now, Canonical has made their jobs easier with the release of an official “Ubuntu Advocacy Development Kit.” Will Ubuntu fans soon be showing up on your doorstep, asking you to convert? Probably not, but the move is an interesting endeavor nonetheless.

Flavours and Variants

• All the Linux Mint Editions have arrived just in time for the holidays – Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce dekstops, and Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 6 with Cinnamon and MATE desktops.

• Linux Mint does it again! The thing I admire about Linux Mint is the ability to work on any type of system and refined interface that it brings on the table – every time! When I reviewed the Mint Maya KDE, I was wondering if I had seen any KDE distro more complete than this. With the Mint Nadia KDE release my impression has changed. This edition not only looks gorgeous but the KDE bloat-wares are gone to actually give the users a more functional set of applications.

• I now refrain from comparing Linux based distribution because what my needs are could be different from yours and what works for you may not work for me, but I am really impressed with Linux Mint in the ‘out-of-the-box’ experience department, it’s becoming one of my favourites along with openSUSE and Kubuntu.

• It is not far-fetched to say, open source and its poster child, Linux, is going through a golden period. The emergence of internet has a lot to do with the popularisation of open source way of thinking. But in the world of Windows and Macs, what makes Linux tick? Redhat was the first to explore Linux’s potential. But Redhat had a very enterprise centric approach. And in 2004, Ubuntu came along with the focus firmly back on end-users. This kick started a flurry of activity and a number of new Ubuntu based Linux distros started to sprung up. The latest one being elementary OS Luna. And this brand new OS has a lot going for it.

Devices/Embedded

• A real, useful, open source computer, the $35 Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to use as a PBX. A DIY laptop is coming, too

• The Raspberry Pi now has an accompanying store where users can download software, raw code, tutorials, tools or games for the Linux computer.

• I decided to replace my aging Compaq mini desktop in the bedroom with the Raspberry Pi,

• [Jacken] loves his lossless audio and because of that he’s long been a fan of Squeezebox. It makes streaming the high-bitrate files possible. But after Logitech acquired the company he feels they’ve made some choices which has driven the platform into the ground. But there is hope. He figured out how to use a Raspberry Pi as a Squeezebox server so that he can keep on using his client devices and posted details about the RPi’s performance while serving high-quality audio.

Phones

Android

• HTC is preparing to launch an Android handset, codenamed M7, according to Unwired.com. This device, claimed to be the flagship phone, is expected to ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, skinned with the latest iteration of HTC’s love-it-or-hate-it UX enhancement, Sense 5. M7 will have 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal flash memory.

• Japanese bathrooms are about to become a little more interactive, thanks to a new smartphone-controlled toilet known as the Satis. Manufactured by Tokyo-based Lixil, this Bluetooth-enabled commode can be controlled with an Android app called “My Satis,” allowing users to flush, raise the toilet seat, and activate a bidet jet stream with the touch of a button. The app also lets you stream music through the toilet’s speakers and will automatically monitor “usage history,” giving you a better idea of how much electricity and water you’re consuming with each visit.

• A Brazilian company has risked inciting the rage of the world’s biggest technology firm by releasing its own ‘iphone’.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland has launched a new tool that allows Nexus 7 users to install the Bodhi Linux OS on their Google slates.

• The new tool means that Ubuntu is no longer the only Linux-based operating system that can run on the popular Google Nexus 7 tablet. To offer this tool, Hoogland basically piggybacked on Canonica’s work with Ubuntu, and Nexus 7 owners can now install Bodhi on their tablets.

• Netbooks – those compact, underpowered, inexpensive notebook PCs once hailed as the future of mobile computing – are set to disappear from retailer shelves in 2013, as the last remaining manufacturers of the devices prepare to exit the market.

• According to Taiwanese tech news site DigiTimes, Acer and Asus are the only two hardware makers still producing netbooks, and they are mainly doing so to sell them to emerging markets such as South America and Southeast Asia.

• Dell, what’s wrong with competing on price/performance like everyone else except M$? Others are making tons of money selling Android/Linux devices. So could Dell. If Dell’s business is making and selling hardware, just do it.

Free Software/Open Source

• Zanata is an open source translation platform written in Java that offers translation memory, an online translation editor, and workflow integration with REST APIs and command-line tools. For translators, it is a web browser-based translation environment where previous translations provide context for their work. For software developers, it’s an integration tool that provides a centralized localization repository along with translation tools that save time and resources.

• Given that now even some small open source projects are forming their own foundations, Glynn Moody thinks that perhaps open source foundations have come of age. He suggests that the time may now be right for the formation of an umbrella foundation to help share best practices, legal advice and other information and support.

• Open source used to be an aberration — now it is an imperative. If you’re not using or developing open source projects, you’re putting your business at risk. That’s the message from Black Duck Software and Forrester, as recently presented in a webinar describing Open Source software and innovation.

• DESPITE the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run to hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.

• I remember first meeting Jeffrey A. “Jam” McGuire in person at DrupalCon Denver. We talked about communities, music, and shared ways to show why open source is a better way. Even before meeting him, I could tell from my first interaction with him that he was passionate about Drupal and open source. He’s becoming an in-demand Keynote speaker and presenter at Drupal and other business and software events around the world. He’s already a staple for the Intro to DrupalCon session and always seems to incorporate music and singing as part of the performance.

• Think of all the photos and videos you’ve stored on various devices and social networks over the years. Enter: OpenPhoto, a new, open source platform all about gathering them into one place and never losing them. Their software imports your photos from Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram, and there’s an app for the iPhone (Android coming soon).

• At the same time, women make up an estimated 2% of the open source community, far lower than the percentage of women in computing overall, estimated at around 20%. Is it any wonder that women founders are so rare in Internet-related startups, when many of the founders come from a population that is 98% male?

• Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS

• The OpenStack open source cloud platform started out with only two components: Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Nova originally came from NASA and Swift came from Rackspace.

• Over the course of the last two years, OpenStack has expanded beyond NASA and Rackspace and has been embraced by many large tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, AT&T, Cisco and Intel among others. As OpenStack participation has grown, new capabilities have been added, including most recently the Cinder block storage project and the Quantum networking project. Cinder and Quantum both debuted in the recent Folsom release.

Databases

• For Gunnar Hellekson — a chief technology strategist at Red Hat who closely follows the government’s approach to open source software — this language posed a threat not only to Accumulo but to open source project across the government. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see that same ‘adequacy criteria’ applied to all open source software projects,” Hellekson wrote earlier this year. “Got a favorite open source project on your DoD program, but no commercial vendor? Inadequate. Only one vendor for the package? Lacks diversity. Proprietary software doesn’t have a burden like this.”

• From where Hellekson was sitting, it was obvious that Accumulo was very different from the likes of Hbase and Cassandra. “When Accumulo was written, it was definitely doing new work,” he told us. “Some of its differentiating features are being handled by other pieces of software. But other core concepts are unique, including the cell-level security…. That’s an incredibly important feature, and to do it properly is incredibly complicated.”

• But it appears the Senate has now backed down. In that joint House-Senate statement on the DoD bill, Accumulo is cited by name. “[The Department of Defense] has already determined that the Accumulo database that NSA developed using government and contract engineers is a successful open-source project that is supported by commercial companies,” the statement read. “[We] expect that future acquisitions of Accumulo would be executed through such commercial vendors.”

• Those commercial vendors include Sqrrl. But Oren Falkowitz isn’t quite ready to celebrate. “Obama still has to sign it,” he says. “I wouldn’t jump for joy until it’s actually a law.”

• The MySQL relational database serves as a back end for millions of websites, and powers millions of non-Internet data-handling applications. In 2009 ownership of MySQL passed to Oracle when it bought Sun, which had acquired MySQL the previous year. Since then developers and IT managers have worried that Oracle would someday cease support for MySQL because it competes with the company’s profitable proprietary database products. This fear may be justified. In August, Alex Williams wrote at TechCrunch, “Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.” We tried to get Oracle to rebut that accusation, but multiple emails and phone calls did not get a response. Does this mean it’s time to move from MySQL to another open source database – and if so, which one?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Although there are many others, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are the two 800lb gorrillas of the open source office suite world. One or other comes bundled with pretty much every Linux distro out there.

• Without OpenOffice.org, it’s fair to say that the OpenDocument format would never have stood a chance of becoming an open standard. Pretty impressive, when many open standards haven’t had anything like the same success (how many people – even hard core Linux users – commonly spurn mp3 files for ogg vorbis?). Because (nearly) everyone needs a word processor and spreadsheet, OpenOffice.org has long been one of the open source poster children to encourage take up – “Why pay $$$ for Microsoft Office when this is just as good and you can have it for free?”.

• Italo Vignoli today published lots of cool graphs and stats demonstating the growth and other accomplishments over the course of 2012. From the growth in number of contributors to high-profile roll-outs to increasing numbers of downloads, 2012 has been a banner year. He said, “Looking back, it has been amazing.”

• Starting with the contributor list, LibreOffice had 379 contributors at the start of the year, but that number had grown to 567 by Christmas 2012. The Document Foundation also announced 14 LibreOffice releases in 2012 and the team is currently working on LibreOffice 4.0, which should be released in February 2012.

• The Oracle Java Development Kit 7 Update 10 (JDK 7u10) release provides new updating and control capabilities that go beyond what Java users have enjoyed in the past.

Education

• Advocates of free and open source are warning that the Greek government is going to waste millions of euro on proprietary software licences for the country’s schools. They are calling on the Ministry of Education to cancel its latest procurement. “Favouring proprietary software while ignoring the potential of open source, constitutes a choking of the educational process.”

Healthcare

• Open source in healthcare remains in its infancy. This year saw some great activity with open source in health. Our community covered medical devices with available source code, electronic patient records, open product design and 3D printing, crowdfunding, and big data. These big ideas and innovations, but I predict that as more people take personal responsibility for their health in 2013, the greater the demand will be for faster, more affordable solutions… read: open source.

Business

• You can’t just expect a community to emerge

Funding

• Ever since OStatic’s inception, we’ve been fans of the Piwik online analytics application, which is a free, open source alternative to tools like Google Analytics. For example, we discussed Piwik in our roundup of open source tools aimed at web developers. When it comes to doing web analytics, it’s beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with Google Analytics or on its own.

BSD

• PC-BSD is a desktop based derivative of FreeBSD and typically PC-BSD releases follow FreeBSD releases. That’s not quite the case with the new PC-BSD 9.1 release which is actually coming out *before* the official release of FreeBSD 9.1

• FreeBSD 9.1 was originally set for official release at the end of October but has been hit by some delays. Though an official announcement has not yet been made the primary FreeBSD mirror currently has FreeBSD release ISOs available (ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.1/)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Work began on the Hurd, the true kernel of the GNU operating system, in May 1991, but it has yet to materialise as a production-ready kernel. Richard Hillesley tells the story…

• But sometimes all Stallman had to offer on the topic was “We still prefer C to C++, because C++ is so ugly”.

• The fight against DRM often pits us against some of the biggest companies and the most dominant ways of thinking in the technology business. What gives us the independence to speak out — and the power to make your voice heard –is the support of our members. Now, we need your help to keep Defective by Design strong in 2013.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) Open source software adoption by the U.S. Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or a designated country.

• The European Commission will postpone until early next year the publication of its guideline on how to make best use of ICT standards in tender specifications. Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, in a video speech on Friday said that the guideline should ensure that public authorities get the most value from open source and open standards. “And also that open source suppliers can compete fairly in tenders.”

• I wanted to share my notes with you all from this TED talk with Clay Shirky. You can watch the video—and I recommend that you do—but since I took notes I figured I’d share my textual summary as well!

• As the United States military marches further into the age of networked warfare, data networks and the mobile platforms to distribute and access them will become even more important.

Licensing

• The European Union’s open source licence, EUPL, is to be revised, aiming to make it compatible with the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 and other licences. A public consultation begins today on Joinup, with the publication of a first draft and a background document on some of the proposed changes.

Openness/Sharing

• If you’ve seen an unbelievable interactive projection or a mind-blowing piece of generative video art, odds are you’ve come across openFrameworks, an accessible programming platform that has helped create projects like Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald’s Faces, a real-time face-substitution project, the EyeWriter graffiti headset from F.A.T. Labs, and Chris O’Shea’s playful, Monty Python-inspired Hand from Above, among many other works of technology-based art. What makes openFrameworks and similar coding tools like Processing so powerful in an artistic context is that they are open source, free for any artist to use and hack to their own ends, and are made by artists, for artists.

Open Data

• The Commission has launched an Open Data Strategy for Europe, which is expected to deliver a €40 billion boost to the EU’s economy each year. Europe’s public administrations are sitting on a goldmine of unrealised economic potential: the large volumes of information collected by numerous public authorities and services. Member States such as the United Kingdom and France are already demonstrating this value. The strategy to lift performance EU-wide is three-fold: firstly the Commission will lead by example, opening its vaults of information to the public for free through a new data portal. Secondly, a level playing field for open data across the EU will be established. Finally, these new measures are backed by the €100 million which will be granted in 2011-2013 to fund research into improved data-handling technologies.

Open Access/Content

• Instagram has undergone several big changes lately, most noteably taking away the ability to quickly view Instagram photos on Twitter. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom described this update during the LeWeb Internet conference in Paris as Instagram’s evolution, and explained that the company would naturally change as it grew.In an article from Business Insider on December 6, Alyson Shontell calls for Instagram to make a bolder move: to publish all photos under Creative Commons unless the photographer specifically changes their publishing license.

Open Hardware

Standards/Consortia

• Protecting sensitive electronic information in different situations requires different types of cryptographic algorithms, but ultimately they all depend on keys, the cryptographic equivalent of a password. A new publication* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aims to help people secure their data with good keys no matter which algorithm they choose.

• The W3C announced today that the HTML5 definition is now complete. This is a big deal for the web and all of us that work and use it…but it’s not end of the story.

• The definition is not a final standard for HTML5, though it is an important milestone. HTML5 will not likely be a full bona-fide standard until mid 2014 according to what Jeff Jaffe told me during a conference call today to talk about HTML5.

Leftovers

• The problem on Reddit is the quality: They’re drowning in crap.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• …Paul Scott, who was a nationally syndicated columnist. He was illegally wiretapped by the agency in 1963…

• The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.

• Washington, Dec 27 (Prensa Latina) Investigations around the attack against the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, resulting in the killing of the US ambassador and another three officials, have exposed a secret CIA armed wing.

• The CIA security force had been created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington and was so far an almost unknown defensive arsenal.

• The National Rifle Association and its allies would have us believe that the solution to this epidemic, itself but a sliver of America’s overall gun violence, is to put firearms in the hands of as many citizens as possible.

• In a potentially precedent-setting decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a Guild lawyer’s challenge to military spying on peace activists can proceed. The ruling marks the first time a court has affirmed people’s ability to sue the military for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

• “This has never been done before,” said NLG member attorney Larry Hildes, who is handling the case. “The U.S. government has spied on political dissidents throughout history and this particular plot lasted through two presidencies, but never before has a court said that we can challenge it the way we have.”

• The ruling is the latest development in the lawsuit, Panagacos v. Towery, first brought by Hildes in 2009 on behalf of a group of Washington state antiwar activists who found themselves infiltrated by John Towery, an employee at a fusion center inside a local Army base. Fusion centers are multi-jurisdictional intelligence facilities which house federal and local law enforcement agencies alongside military units and private security companies. Their operations are largely secret and unregulated. There are currently 77 fusion centers in the United States.

Cablegate

• The Swedish Pirate Party wants a probe of banks’ role in the blocking of donations by Visa, PayPal and others

• Julian Assange has said, he is willing to answer questions in the UK relating to accusations against him, or alternatively to go to Sweden provided the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the US where plans are ready for him to be tried for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuse to give such assurance. Mr. Assange is right to be concerned about the dangers of extradition to USA. American media has reported that the US Justice Department and the Pentagon have been conducting a criminal investigation into ‘whether wikileaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the groups release of government documents including possible charges under the espionage act’. Mr. Assange’s only crime is that he embarrassed the USA and powerful governments with Wikileaks release of thousands of US state department cables and of the video footage from an apache helicopter of a 2007 incident in which the US military appears to have deliberately killed civilians, including two reuters employees, revealing USA’s Crimes against humanity. For this truth telling he has inherited the wrath of the US government, and has been targeted in a most vindictive way – as has American soldier, pt. Bradley Manning, currently undergoing a military Court hearing for allegedly leaking classified documents to wikileaks. Pt. Bradley Manning has been subjected, according to formal UN investigation, to ‘cruel and inhuman’ treatment whilst held in solitary confinement in US prison for nine months. The American government has admitted to the torture of Pt. Bradley Manning, one of their own soldiers.

• Two Swedish transparency sites that have supported WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been abruptly shut down at the request, seemingly, of the Swedish defence forces.

• Despite Crippling Financial Blockade And Other Efforts To Set Them Back, Publishers Of Biggest Leaks In Journalistic History Press On

• Many documents produced by the U.S. government are confidential and not released to the public for legitimate reasons of national security. Others, however, are kept secret for more questionable reasons. The fact that presidents and other government officials have the power to deem materials classified provides them with an opportunity to use national security as an excuse to suppress documents and reports that would reveal embarrassing or illegal activities.

• “Swedish (government) officials got the impression that they were working under direct orders of the CIA” – Mike Ölander’s reportage “CIA demanded that Sweden would expand cooperation”, Expressen, 6 December 2010

• In the third part of our recent interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson, Kristinn talks about a Russian measure to form an independent banking mechanism that was the subject of diplomatic cables from the US and was susequently killed, US spying and information mining and profiling, communications analysis, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Kristinn makes the revelation that the entire foreign apparatus of the US was activated by banking concerns to stop the Russian measure.

• The best way to arrive at the truth is to first figure out what the media are trying to sell you. The people at the top are aware of all the ongoing scams and revel in them. One must understand that people at the top don’t read the MSM or turn on the telly to find out what’s happening in the world – they have their friends for that. They read and they turn on tellies to find out what’s being sold to you.

• It’s an informal setup. People who don’t perform are shut out. It’s a cruel game up that high. But they’re all in for a penny and a pound and they rarely go away willingly.

• Despite the pressures from the United States and other pro-western governments, the Republic of Ecuador has granted political asylum to Mr. Assange. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has hindered the free movement of Mr. Assange even though the same government blocked the extradition to Spain of the late Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Pinochet was wanted for the murder of 94 Spanish citizens and many other charges of torture and rape against his own people. Although Julian Assange is an Australian citizen, the Australian government has refused to protect him and has instead accommodated Swedish Ambassador Sven-Olof Petersson, who supports rendition and torture. This is unacceptable in a free, democratic and transparent society.

• Here is a man who has dedicated his life (possibly literally) to defend the right to expose corruption in high places…

Finance

• A constant conservative charge against President Obama is that he is inherently anti-business. However, businesses keep defying the storyline by making larger and larger profits, rebounding nicely out of the Great Recession.

• If you are as cynical as I am, I know you are not surprised that Facebook paid Irish taxes (via Tax Justice Network) of about $4.64 million on its entire non-US profits of $1.344 billion for 2011.* This 0.3% tax rate is a bit below the normal, already low, Irish corporate income tax of 12.5%.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who became nationally known for severely limiting the union rights of teachers and other public employees, has indicated support for arming those same school officials who apparently cannot be trusted to collectively bargain.

• As Americans search for answers and policy solutions in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Gov. Walker has apparently decided that the problem is not too many guns — it is that there are not enough.

• When George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February, Zimmerman — who considered himself a neighborhood watchman — almost certainly thought of himself as a “good guy.”

• In November, 45-year-old Michael David Dunn likely thought he was playing the role of the “good guy” when he confronted a vanload of teenagers for playing their music too loud, then fired nine shots into their vehicle after claiming he saw a shotgun barrel. 17-year-old Jordan Russell David was killed, and neither Jordan nor anyone else in the van had a gun.

Censorship

• …just in time for Christmas. In better news, the Government has decided against ‘default on’ internet blocking

• Five days ago, the Department for Education announced a very reasonable approach to child protection online. Their plan was to make sure parents are supported in making easier, more informed decisions about how to keep their children safe online.

• This was based on a consultation that focused on evidence, engagement with stakeholders and soliciting to the views of parents and industry.

• But today the Prime Minister is singing a different tune. His article in the Daily Mail today suggests he is taking a more restrictive line, and that he wants to see ‘default on’ filtering. This has created a lot of confusion, seemingly just to satisfy the Daily Mail’s editorial whims. Are they really to be the drivers of Internet policy?

Privacy

• Current interception and surveillance laws are simply not built for a digital age which is seeing exponential growth in the production of personal information. More data than ever before is available.

• The draft Communications Data Bill is a dangerous fudge of a solution that should not simply be redrafted and brought back to the table. A fundamental review of surveillance law is the only justifiable basis for any future legislation. This should examine how pervasive, personal and intrusive data now is and what powers over its collection, storage, and use would be proportionate and appropriate.

Civil Rights

• FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.

• The US Senate has voted to approve the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, which will authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans for counter-terrorism purposes for another five years. The bill extends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008, which granted retroactive immunity for wiretaps and email monitoring under the Bush Administration and created a framework for future warrant-free surveillance as long as one party is located outside the US and terrorism is suspected.

• Nearly 12,000 people over the past five years have wrongly been branded criminals or seen irrelevant or inaccurate information disclosed during criminal record checks.

• * 11,893 people successfully challenged CRB results in past five years * £1.98m paid out in redress * 4,196 people challenged information held by a local police force * 3,519 people given the wrong person’s criminal record * 4,088 found inaccurate information or potential wrong identity on police national computer

• Oregon resident Julie Keith was shocked when she opened her $29.99 Kmart Halloween graveyard decoration kit to find a letter, folded into eights, hidden between two Styrofoam tombstones.

• Coming all the way from unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China, the letter written mostly in English read,

• “Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

• The letter went on to describe 15 hour work days, no days off, and pay at 10 yuan per month ($1.61 US Dollar) if any. It also described the 1-3 year average forced labor terms without trial, and the large amount of Falun Gong practitioners in forced labor, a banned spiritual group.

• Acting CIA director Michael Morell has publicly disputed the accuracy of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, Zero Dark Thirty. The movie, which examines the 10-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, features scenes of torture and depicts actual CIA agents involved in the hunt for the founder of al-Qaeda.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• 2012 was surprisingly good for Canada. The decade long revision of the Copyright Act was completed; most parties agree that it was a good compromise. Amendments included: expanding fair dealing to include parody, satire, and education; protecting consumer behavior that reflects the conduct of consumers in a digital age; maintaining the independence of ISPs and the privacy of subscribers; implementing a cap on damages for non-commercial infringement ($5,000 is the maximum but a judge can award as little as $100; this is intended to discourage file-sharing lawsuits); and, creating an exception for non-commercial user-generated content. To be sure, all the exceptions come with the expected provisos, and all are subject to the overarching ban on any circumvention of technological protection measures. It still strains credulity as to why Canada in 2012 adopted a prohibition first conceived in 1996; but, given the fierce opposition by rights-holders, the fact that the user allowances were not rolled back in committee speaks well. Michael Geist gives a good synopsis of the new Act here.

• Open Rights Group intervened in the case on behalf of the Internet users potentially affected by the Order. We were able to do so because of the extraordinary generosity of the supporters who donated to our appeal.

• PRQ, the infamous ISP created by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm of The Pirate Bay, has been nuked by PayPal. After a fruitful partnership lasting three years, PayPal decided to ruin their relationship with the so-called “bullet-proof” hoster by freezing the company’s funds for up to 180 days. On PayPal’s advice PRQ opened a second account to get by while the dispute was being sorted out, but then without warning PayPal seized those funds too.

• Yesterday the Government announced its plans to implement the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review – namely, how it will put in place various exceptions to copyright that permit more uses of copyrighted work. Here is the detail (pdf).

• These were reforms recommended in the report by Professor Hargreaves in May 2011. (See our write up from the time in Comment is Free). After that, the Government announced its intention to implement his proposals and ran a three month consultation on the plans. You can read our response to the consultation here, and a full list of responses is available at the IPO website.

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