● 01.05.13

● Links 5/1/2013: Fedora 18 Delayed; Civil Rights Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• An operating system is the flavor, personality, and structure of a computer. For most machines, Windows and Macintosh make up the functional aspect of how a user views the world.

• One of the first operating systems in the world was invented and entitled Unix. It was implemented under AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1969 for a 1970 release. To this day, Unix still functions as the foundation for both Macintosh and another lesser known, yet quickly growing, operating system that could: Linux.

• Samsung recently announced in a press release that it will be launching a new version (4.0) of its Smart TV software development kit (SDK) at the 2013 international Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is being held in Las Vegas from 8–11 January 2013.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• [d0x3d] is a boardgame designed for informal security education, this is an incredibly fun game that proactively teaches about network integrity and the security of information.

• Inspired by Forbidden Island, d0x3d! and is released under an open source license.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• There was a discussion on the Fedora devel list late last year about moving to a more rolling release model…

• After we redesigned the storage UI for Anaconda around Fedora 12 or so, I gave a short talk at the Linux Plumbers’ Conference in 2010 to share my storage UX ‘war stories.’ We very happily have an interaction design intern, Stephanie Manuel, who will be working on putting together a usability test plan for the new Anaconda UI, courtesy of the the Outreach Program for Women. Since I need to get Stephanie up to speed on how some of the storage technologies Anaconda deals with work, I decided to provide a summary of that Linux Plumbers’ talk to make it a bit easier to access.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu has announced its entrant into the smartphone operating system market. There shouldn’t be as much surprise about this as there is I feel. Linux on a phone? Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, everyone who uses Android for a start, which is really just Linux with a layer or two of Java.

• A few weeks ago I went through the process of setting up a home server using an old computer, a copy of Ubuntu and Amahi, a free home server that comes with its own repository of extras. Loosely referred to as an “app store” by some, once you’ve set up Amahi, it’s easy to add additional services to your server in just a couple of clicks.

• If you’ve just installed your home server or are looking for Ubuntu-specific additions then this article is for you. Not all extras work on the new Ubuntu version of Amahi, and you’ll want to be careful not to install additional packages in Ubuntu itself which can damage your Amahi install and jeopardise your server.

• We’ll be taking a look at the must-have free and paid extras that’ll take your home server to the next level.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, continues to reach out to hardware partners. Specifically, Canonical says it has updated its Hardware Certification Program for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and ODMs (original design manufacturers). The big question: Can Canonical attract more hardware partners to Ubuntu? Here are some clues from The VAR Guy.

• First, some background. Chris Kenyon, VP of OEM Services and Alliances at Canonical, essentially serves as the company’s channel chief. Kenyon is approachable and on-message when our resident blogger speaks with him.

Flavours and Variants

• Big changes this time around for the Cinnamon desktop which is now pushed to version 1.6 for the release of Linux Mint 14. Cinnamon 1.6 offers a more efficient interface, users will notice improved stability as well.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

Android

• Let me make this very clear: Gone are the days where home screens on Android phones almost always looked awful.

• The Free Software Foundation Europe is claiming that recent changes to the Google’s Android Software Development Kit licensing terms has made the SDK into proprietary software. But if you look closely, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The kids in this volcano-rim village wear filthy, ragged clothes. They sleep beside cows and sheep in huts made of sticks and mud. They don’t go to school. Yet they all can chant the English alphabet, and some can spell words.

Free Software/Open Source

• Netflix, the popular online video service that makes extensive use of public-cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has made code for one of the tools it developed to make its cloud-using life easier open source.

• Netflix developers built Janitor Monkey to automate clean-up of unused cloud resources, such as virtual-machine (VM) instances and cloud-storage volumes, or “Elastic Block Storage” (EBS) volumes in AWS parlance.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Your editor has frequently written that, while Android is a great system that has been highly beneficial to the cause of open mobile devices, it would be awfully nice to have a viable, free-software alternative. Every month that goes by makes it harder for any such alternative system to establish itself in the market, but that does not keep people from trying. One of the more interesting developments on the horizon has been FirefoxOS — formerly known as Boot2Gecko — a system under development at Mozilla. In the absence of any available hardware running this system, the recent 1.0 release of the FirefoxOS simulator seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for what the Mozilla folks are up to.

SaaS/Big Data

• Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success. As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

Licensing

• There are times where one might be inclined to use a different license, e.g. the BSD license or even a license similar to the openmotif license. At least that’s the theory since what I really did was release source code with no license mentioned at all, kind of an ad hoc free/open software release. So I’m going to mellow a bit and say if someone wants to use a different but still open/free type license then I’ll accept that and not argue about it.

Leftovers

• It’s still not time to treat M$ as a normal business. They don’t yet work for a living, making $hundreds of thousands per employee per annum doing little more than shipping licensing agreements to OEMs. Certainly their OS is not worth what people are paying for it and M$ still attacks other businesses, most recently spreading FUD about Google at FTC, which dropped the matter after Google agreed to make a few changes. Google makes far more per employee per annum but they do work for it making huge server-farms do much of the work. That’s smart and does not harm competition. It’s time the rest of the world became smarter and dropped M$ as a “partner” in anything.

• Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation’s college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.

• Apple’s changes to its product warranty policies in Italy have been enough to satisfy investigators, but not before the company was slapped with one final fine totaling $264,000.

• Google is muscling in on Microsoft ’s turf as it wins over more business customers with its cloud-based software.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It’s a very sparse selection of myths, attached to even sparser “debunkings.” Sadly, the CIA’s debunkings can be easily debunked simply by taking a few quick peeks into the past, along with even briefer peeks into its present actions.

• The FBI, as far as we know, never gets to press the buttons on JSOC and CIA’s drones. And as I noted last June, FBI information we know exists (some of it in unclassified form) was suspiciously absent from the materials identified in the response to ACLU’s request for information on the evidence supporting the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.

• In the US foreign policy community, one major legacy of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq is that it gave Iraq to the Shiites and thus to Iran. There is some focus on the fact that the administration lied the country into war, and almost none on the fact that this led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and unimaginable suffering for millions of Iraqis. Among the “foreign policy community,” the geo-political legacy is that the war was a gift to Iran, which no longer faces a neighboring nemesis and is exponentially better positioned for the regional dominance it seeks.

• I was asked earlier this week by an reporter for PressTV, the state television network in Iran, if I could explain why the US political system seemed to be so dysfunctional, with Congress and the President having created an artificial budget crisis 17 months ago, not “solving” it until the last hour before a Congressional deadline would have created financial chaos, and even then not solving the problem and instead just pushing it off for two months until the next crisis moment.

• MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson on her show Thursday night.

• Jose Rodriguez thinks the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is “well worth seeing.” But the retired CIA veteran has reservations about its gut-churning portrayal of the CIA’s treatment of detainees. Which is rich, coming from the man who destroyed the video footage documenting many of those brutal agency interrogations.

• Another source shows up to 2,100 civilians have been killed…

• Far-fetched Orwellian paranoia?

• Death Squads in Iraq and Syria. The Historical Roots of US-NATO’s Covert War on Syria

Cablegate

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Shell has admitted that the Kulluks generators are wrecked. The weather forecast for today is strong winds and high seas.

Finance

• At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting.

• The phrase ‘fiscal cliff’ invokes images of an economy spiralling to the bottom.

• It was that image that was supposed to force politicians on Capitol Hill to work together to avoid the simultaneous expiration of tax cuts as well as the implementation of deep spending cuts.

• Extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income continue to enable the richest and largest individuals and enterprises to manipulate the economy and control the political parties. The result is an economic structure disinterested in a democratically focused way out of crisis and decline.

Censorship

Privacy

• More than 88,000 Germans applied last year to see the files kept on them by the hated and feared Stasi secret police of the former East Germany, the archives office said Friday, some 23 years after the Berlin Wall fell.

• Our resident video ninjas, Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg, assembled this short video explaining just what happened using footage from that all-too-brief Senate debate—and revealing how little interest Congress seems to have in protecting us from dragnet surveillance by the National Security Agency.

• A computer engineer has been arrested in Yemen on charges of spying for Israel and will soon face trial in the southern city of Aden.

• Officials in Sudan say they have captured an electronically-tagged vulture suspected of being dispatched by Israel on a spying mission.

• Russia’s intelligenc service – the KGB-has admitted to spying on the British Royal Family.

• A Royal Navy petty officer was jailed for eight years on Wednesday for trying to pass Britain’s nuclear submarine secrets to men he believed to be Russian spies.

• Children’s personal information, such as photos, videos and geolocation information, can now no longer be collected by online services and online ‘cookies’ can’t be used to send kids personalized ads, among other new rules.

• An appeals court in Milan on Friday overturned the conviction of three Google executives on charges of violating Italian privacy laws, in a decision that the company hailed as a victory for Internet freedom.

• Facebook recently started rolling out a new “experiment” that would allow any individual to pay a small fee to send a message to your inbox. Your Facebook messages page has two folders: “Inbox” and “Other.” Currently, most friend and group messages go to the inbox, while messages from everyone else automatically go to the Other folder. Facebook is testing a feature that would make this no longer true: now anybody can pay ($1 is the latest rumor) to make sure her message goes straight to your inbox. Even before this change, one could not have a private profile—all profiles are now searchable. But this new experiment takes it even further, where a stranger can not only find your profile, but can also ensure that a message reaches you.

• The Senate late Thursday forwarded legislation to President Barack Obama granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they’re watching on Netflix. While lawmakers were caving to special interests, however, they cut from the legislative package language requiring the authorities to get a warrant to read your e-mail or other data stored in the cloud. Instead of protecting privacy, the Senate tinkered with the Video Privacy Protection Act, (.pdf) which outlaws the disclosure of video rentals unless the consumer gives consent, on a rental-by-rental basis. That prohibits Netflix customers from allowing their Facebook streams to automatically update with information about the movies they are viewing, though Spotify and other online music-streaming customers can consent to the automatic publication on Facebook of the songs they’re listening to.

Civil Rights

• In the final days of the 112th Congress, President Obama signed two last minute bills. Both were extensions of highly controversial Bush-era policies. Both were scheduled to expire January 1, 2013. And both owe their passage largely to calamitous predictions that the sky would fall if they weren’t reauthorized in time.

• Now, the lawyers representing Al-Haramain have decided that they will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, on the belief that the “current composition” of the court works against them. In other words, they believe that the current Justices on the court would side with the appeals court in rejecting their case, and then that would be precedent across the country (unless Congress changed the law, which it’s unlikely to do). The “hope” then is that somehow, down the road, someone else somehow gets evidence that they, too, were spied upon without a warrant, and it happens in a different district, and (hopefully) that circuit’s appeals court rules differently, setting up a circuit split. Oh, and that by the time that happens, the “composition” of the court shifts enough that the court actually respects the 4th Amendment. In other words: none of this is likely. Instead, the feds retain their ability to spy on people without warrants in direct violation of the 4th Amendment.

• The Homeland Security Department is footing a potentially $6 billion bill to provide civilian agencies with the technology and expertise needed for near real-time threat detection, DHS officials said this week. The White House has demanded so-called continuous monitoring since 2010, but many agencies did not have the resources or know-how to initiate such surveillance.

• WHILE everyone was watching the fiscal-cliff debacle, Congress and Barack Obama decided that they could still eavesdrop on Americans’ putatively private conversations without putting themselves to the trouble of obtaining a warrant.

• In mid-December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg awarded damages of €60,000 to Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. The judges accepted that Macedonian security services had illegally seized El-Masri at the end of 2003, subjected him to abuse and finally handed him over to agents from the CIA.

• Stop Torture Now has committed to collect trash from the road outside the airport under the state’s “Adopt-a-Highway” program.

• President Barack Obama may round out his new national security leadership team next week, with a nomination for defense secretary expected and a pick to lead the CIA possible.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It’s a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.

• We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It’s become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written and has inspired great responses. But the most important question we can ask is: How do we rebuild the positive aspects of the web we lost? There are a few starting points, building on conversations we’ve been having for years. Let’s look at the responsibilities we must accept if we’re going to return the web to the values that a generation of creators cared about.

• The decision bans service providers, as well as government agencies and their personnel, from leaking or damaging users’ digital information, as well as from selling or illegally providing this information to others.

• Michael Anti, a Beijing-based critic of Web censorship, believes the current pushback on the Web reflects paranoia over incoming President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on official corruption. Local officials could be pressuring propaganda departments to curb freedom of speech online, he said. “Officials hate the Internet,” Anti said. “They’re afraid of being victims of the anti-corruption campaign.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Despite at least five smackdowns by federal judges, copyright trolls are still accusing Internet subscribers of “negligently” allowing someone else to download porn films without paying. Last week, subpoena defense attorney Morgan Pietz fought back by asking the Northern California federal courts to put all of the open “negligence” cases filed by a prolific troll firm in front of a single judge – a judge who already ruled that the “negligence” theory is bogus.

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