● 01.14.13

● Links 14/1/2013: Desktops Market in Demise, Aaron’s Eulogies

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• IIT Bombay professor, Kannan M Moudgalya and his team have been documenting and creating tutorials for free open source software available on Linux to popularise it in India’s schools and colleges. Hassan M Kamal visits the lab to find out more

Desktop

• A Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebook has arrived at The VAR Guy’s doorstep. Starting January 14, our resident blogger will live on the cloud-centric notebook (running Google’s Chrome OS) for 30 days. Why should channel partners, businesses and consumers care about this niche (but promising) form factor? Here are 10 points The VAR Guy hopes to cover during his real-world, month-long review.

Server

• As a parent, some of your proudest moments occur when your children begin to talk. After several months of ear-shredding cries and indistinguishable babble, they finally begin to communicate in a language you can understand. A first word is an indescribable joy, whether it’s “mama,” “dada” or “roku.” The future now seems to be an amazing place where you and your child will strive towards excellence together, culminating in a comfortable retirement in which you live off their immense earnings as a person of brilliance.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Last year UBO and TBO for the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver was talked about and early patches proposed, but merged on Friday was finally this support for Uniform Buffer Objects and Texture Buffer Objects. With the OpenGL UBO/TBO support, the Radeon R600g driver is now advertising GLSL 1.40 as needed for OpenGL 3.1 compliance.

Applications

• There is no guarantee that suffixing the name of your program with “-top” will endear it to me.

Proprietary

• “But for now at least, Photoshop CS2 can be downloaded legally for zilch,” the story read. “And the best bit? Photoshop CS2 will even run on Ubuntu.”

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• OUYA and Kill Screen have announced a programming competition for OUYA games with a prize pool of $45,000. From 14 to 23 January, developers can submit prototypes of games that they have programmed using the OUYA Development Kit, the software development environment for the OUYA console. Development can be done completely on a computer or on an Android tablet, which means that participants do not have to own one of the first developer consoles, which were just recently sent out.

• Aside from the X.Org meetings at FOSDEM, another interesting development track that takes place at the annual Free and Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting is about open-source/Linux gaming.

• Joining the array of Linux game console attempts is GCW Zero, an open-source game hand-held console. This isn’t an Android-based solution but rather a pure Linux game console.

• In terms of Linux game consoles there’s the Android-based OUYA game console that was very successful last year on Kickstarter and is now shipping with a large following of gamers and developers for the modestly-priced solution. What I’m more excited about though is the Steam Linux console for both the living room and mobile solutions and that should surface later in 2013.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The 4.10 release for the KDE Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications is drawing nigh… as you may have read, there is now an additional release candidate in order to test some last-minute changes.

• I have felt frustrated at times, when I press the Volume Up/Down buttons on my keyboard and the sound volume in KDE becomes just too loud, or just too soft. When you are running the KDE desktop, the increments in volume change are controlled by KMix, the KDE mixer. By default, the sound volume changes with increments of 4% which means that with a few keypresses you go from almost inaudible sound to full blast. And there is no way to change that 4% increment value into something more fitting… pretty annoying.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Those of us who work on GNOME design have been busy with all kinds of things recently. One major area of activity has been settings (aka System Settings, aka GNOME Control Center). In total, we have produced designs for four new panels (search, notifications, privacy, and sharing) and we have redesigned four of the existing panels (power, network, display, and date & time). Some of these have already been implemented, some are being developed on, and a few more are waiting for coders to get involved.

Distributions

New Releases

• Sonar GNU/Linux is an accessible distrobution built off of Ubuntu. The versions of Sonar will be built off of the current Ubuntu releases. If you are a new user to GNU/Linux you must understand that GNU/Linux is not a replacement of proprietary operating systems but an alternative. Since it is an alternative there are some differences between GNU/Linux and the proprietary operating systems. So there is going to be a small learning curve to understand how GNU/Linux operates and is structured. There are some simalarities between the two so it is not like you will have to start from the beginning and forget everything you knew about the proprietary system you are coming from. Both systems do share some simalarities.

• Slackel Openbox 1.0 has been released.

• Dimitris Tzemos proudly announced earlier today, January 13, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of the Slackel 1.0 Openbox Edition Linux operating system.

• “The world has not ended, so… now be Elive!” This is a catchy phrase in the release announcement for those of us who, after seeing one of the most beautiful Linux distros go dormant, are now excited at the release of a new alpha of Elive.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

• I have been a fan of Snowlinux for quite sometime and their Debian spins have always been exceptional – Lightweight, fast and very customizable. The new year release of Snowlinux 4, codenamed “Glacier” is no exception. Based on Debian Wheezy, it has Mate 1.4 as the default desktop environment and uses Linux kernel 3.5.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On Sunday last weekend I flew out to CES to join the rest of my colleagues to exhibit Ubuntu at the show. We were there to show the full range of Ubuntu form-factors that we have available; desktop, TV, Ubuntu for Android, and most recently, Ubuntu for phones.

• At CES 2013 on Wednesday, I managed to corner Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s Community Manager, for a few minutes and ask him some of the questions I saw popping up over and over again in the comments section of the Ubuntu Phone OS demonstration video I posted earlier this week. Hope you enjoy his responses!

• A common problem we have on Ask Ubuntu is people assuming that it’s just “another forum” and not quite grasping the concept of how the site works. Today Stack Exchange has rolled out a new About page that helps to curb this issue and educate new users with a quick start on how to use the site. You can view this page by clicking “About” at the top of the Ask Ubuntu website.

• South African millionaire and Canonical boss, Mark Shuttleworth, announced during a “virtual keynote” on 2 January 2012 that a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system (OS) would be coming to smartphones.

• The smartphone ecosystem today has two dominant players: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. A late entrant, Android, has been quick to catch up with iOS and the Open operating system only seems to be surging ahead.

• Given the success of Android, many other Open Source paradigms are being floated, most notably the Free and Open Source projects Firefox (of browser fame) and Ubuntu that are re-making their debut this year in the commercial smartphone segment. Together, these projects that have been successful in the technology segments they currently operate in could perhaps help break into the combined monopoly of Apple and Google in the smartphone segment.

Flavours and Variants

• A bit high CPU usage aside, Bodhi 2.2.0 is a remarkable improvement over Bodhi 2.1.0, undoubtedly. Enlightenment 17 never looked so enticing on any other Linux OS and Bodhi never looked so attractive. I am sure the high CPU usage will get resolved in an update or two. Even with high CPU usage, Bodhi is buttery smooth to use, runs super fast, provide all essential functionalities and has a rich repository. Further, presentation and offline mode are two utilities which increase the functionality of the distro.

• Moreover, Bodhi is always ahead of even Ubuntu 12.10 in terms of providing the latest of the Linux packages and softwares. Even this release is not an exception and provides the latest Linux kernel and softwares to the users without compromising on stability, and possibly, one of the reasons for me to like Bodhi Linux and why any Linux enthusiast should try Bodhi out. It is truly bleeding edge Ubuntu LTS!

• I definitely rate this release of Bodhi as the best one I have seen for any E17 Linux OS. If you are looking for a lightweight distro, look no further than Bodhi Linux 2.2.0, possibly one of the best releases of 2013.

• In the world of Linux distributions, it’s fairly easy to get lost trying to figure out which “flavor” of Linux fits you best. As the user, you have a plethora of desktop interfaces, default apps, package managers, and bundled services to choose from. This can be a major barrier for someone new to Linux, and an endless journey for a veteran user who hasn’t yet found their “perfect” distro. For either type of user, there’s a new distribution in town that can meet their needs: elementary OS.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

• More bad news for Nexus 4 fans who have still not got their hands on this stunning device. LG is playing the spoilsport this time and is rumoured to stop the production of Nexus 4 to give way for its future products.

• It has always been tough to book a nexus 4 for yourself with the purchase screen most of the time showing the “SOLD OUT” status. We can either assume that Nexus 4 demands were too huge to provide a constant supply or the production of the phone was flawed and could not meet the demands.

Android

• Are you ready to hack your fridge? I expected Android-powered home appliances to have a higher profile at CES this year than they did. But still, a few manufacturers were carrying the torch for smartening up devices in your home, and trying to provide some solid reasons for you to buy them, like energy savings.

• The flashiest Android appliance at CES was definitely Dacor’s Android-powered oven, which automatically programs itself according to recipes selected from a tablet.

• Along with the rapid changes in hardware, phone market is also to witness to some auspicious changes in software field in coming months. Many more new OS platforms are to join the fray. Two major new arrivals are expected to be Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Canonical’s Ubuntu for phone. The Linux-based Ubuntu for mobile has been officially announced by its maker Canonical now. It has been in news for almost a year and it is to get the first device sometime this year.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• I got in the world of FOSS around 2003/04, I was lucky I got some good mentors. I felt like writing down what all I learnt after growing up in this world. Here is what I have learnt after following some awesome community like KDE, Ubuntu, OpenStack, etc.

• Today, open-source software is everywhere but many peple still think of it as being relatively new. It’s not. Open-source software actually goes back decades.

• Before beginning our journey in the way-back machine though we should go over our terminology. “Open source,” the phrase, only goes back to February 3, 1998. The phrase was deliberately chosen to separate the more pragmatic open-source supporters from the more idealistic “free software” community members. Gallons of ink and gigabytes of pixels has been spilled on debating the differences between these two, but for my purposes I’m talking about programs that qualify by either definition.

• In the past couple of years, a powerful paradigm shift has occurred in user experience (UX) design. UX designers used to focus on desktop users but now, mobile devices and mobile users are at the center of attention. The evidence for the importance of this paradigm shift is stifling: Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2014, mobile users will exceed desktop users. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt says that “if you don’t have a mobile strategy, you don’t have a future strategy.”

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google yesterday released the Chrome 25 beta for Android 4.x for smartphones and tablets, a version number in sync with the release for personal computers. Previously, the only option was the stable version of Chrome for Android, which is still way back at version 18.

• The Chrome for Android beta is available on the Google Play app store, but only by following that link — it’s not visible in Google Play’s search, Google said. The beta version can be installed and run side by side with the stable version.

Mozilla

SaaS/Big Data

Databases

• The tutorials were prepared online using Sphinx and where planned to be executed as hands-on exercises by students in just about one hour each. The tutorials were delivered in two undergraduate Database classes with instructors Dima Kassab and Alex Jurkat, and one group in the MBA program, with instructor Shobha Chengalur-Smith.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Reading www.tuxmachines.org, I found this article that describes a new feature in LibreOffice 4: the possibility to decorate LibreOffice by using Firefox personas.

• Yes, I know that some LibreOffice users might find this feature trivial or silly. I, for one, appreciate the idea and the effort of the developers Kendy and Oliver. The way I see it, anything that contributes to make my computer (and the applications I run) feel my own, the more productive I become.

Funding

BSD

• NetBSD developers have announced the release of pkgsrc-2012Q4, the latest quarterly release of the package management system used by many BSD operating systems and other Unix-like platforms. This latest release also marks fifteen years that this open-source “package source” program has been around.

• The detailed release announcement for pkgsrc-2012Q4 hit the netbsd-announce list. “The pkgsrc team is proud to announce that pkgsrc-2012Q4 is available. This release marks the 15th birthday of pkgsrc (the first entries were added in October 1997), and this release includes many new packages and updates.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Join the FSF and friends, today, Friday January 11th, from 2:00pm to 5pm EDT (19:00 to 22:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Project Releases

• The GNOME Disk Utility developers have announced earlier today, January 12, the immediate availability for download and testing of the GNOME Disk Utility 3.7.1 storage device management tool for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

Public Services/Government

• The Norwegian Ministry of Finance wants all the cash registers in its country tossed, and replaced with new machines, this time with code that it can verify. Norway is not the largest of countries, but this move would result in the installation of as many 90,000 replacement registers.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• The suicide of American online activist Aaron Swartz has ignited a debate about the cost of academic journals and access to information.

• Swartz, 26, known for his work on RSS and co-founding social news website Reddit, took his life over the weekend.

• He was facing charges for allegedly downloading millions of academic journal articles from the subscription-only academic database JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in the basement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Open Hardware

• This morning we sat down with the creators of Pairasight, a unique system for adding stereo vision to almost anything, including glasses. While the company is still nascent, they do have a very compelling technology that could help EMTs, police, and military record their world wirelessly when on duty.

Leftovers

• I’m sure no one is surprised that upgrading to a new version of Windows means tossing out your old computer and buying a new one. That’s pretty much par for the course for any Windows upgrade.

Security

• On its web site, Oracle has announced which security patches will be released on Tuesday. The company said that the 86 fixes will affect “hundreds of Oracle products”. The most serious hole with the highest CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) rating of 10 will be closed in Oracle’s Database Mobile/Lite Server mobile database variant.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• My husband, John Lennon, and I bought a beautiful farm in rural New York more than 30 years ago. We loved the tranquility and beauty of the area. Our son, Sean, spent many precious days there growing up. Our family still enjoys it now. Like the rest of our state, this peaceful farming community is threatened by fracking for gas. Giant pipelines, thousands of tractor-trailer trucks ripping up roads, loud air compressors, air pollution — and most of all, the certainty of poisoned drinking water. Certainty is the right word, according to the engineers, as the wells drilled for fracking will leak. According to industry documents from the gas drilling giant Schlumberger and other studies, 6 percent of the wells leak immediately, and over 60 percent of them leak over time. And no wonder they leak — the pressures of the earth thousands of feet under the ground cracks the cement well casings. The big variations in temperature along the well at various depths expand and contract the cement until it cracks and leaks.

Finance

• A brutal assault from ideologically-crazed demagogues comes down to this: you have been mugged and therefore your less deserving neighbour should be mugged too.

• An SEC action that appears likely to do considerable harm to companies and individuals in the US and abroad appears to have gone completely unnoticed, save for an important piece in The New Republic by Linda Khan.

• [...]

• The SEC is undermining provisions in Dodd Frank calling for the CFTC to rein in undue speculation in critical commodities. Readers may recall that commodities prices moved up in a coordinated manner in 2008. It looked like a speculative bubble, and was, since prices collapsed in the second half of the year (we were pretty sure that oil was a bubble, and called it and even traded it well; there was similar behavior in other commodities, but bad harvests and ethanol subsidies made the price rises arguably influenced by fundamentals in the grains complex).

• The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a second major investment bank, started a run on the three remaining investment banks that would have led to the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs if the Fed, FDIC, and treasury had not taken extraordinary measures to save them. Citigroup and Bank of America both needed emergency facilities established by the Fed and treasury explicitly for their support, in addition to all the below market-rate loans they received from the government at the time. Without this massive government support, there can be no doubt that both of them would currently be operating under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge.

• Of the six banks that dominate the US banking system, only Wells Fargo and JP Morgan could conceivably have survived without hoards of cash rained down on them by the federal government. Even these two are questionmarks, since both helped themselves to trillions of dollars of below market-rate loans, in addition to indirectly benefiting from the bailout of the other banks that protected many of their assets.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Tea Party-affiliated group FreedomWorks — the right-wing organization that helps connect “Tea Party” groups with talking points, rallies, and more — is gearing up to direct its sizeable war chest towards advancing anti-union initiatives in the states, supporting an agenda set by groups like David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This strongly suggests that the battle for the future of private and public sector unions in America is beginning a new phase of combat.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• At the beginning of the year, some folks in France, who used the popular ISP Free (whose name is a bit misleading, as it is not, in fact, free), discovered that the company had started providing a service in which it blocked all internet banner ads. There was no whitelist. It was either all or nothing (and if you went “all,” you were trusting that it wouldn’t over-filter). This quickly raised an awful lot of questions — with the biggest among them being “can they do that?” According to the French Digital Economy minister, the answer apparently is no. Free was quickly told to turn off its ad blocking software.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

• My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I’m still digesting it — I suspect I’ll be digesting it for a long time — but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

• I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

• [...]

• Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

• Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

• Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer that morning. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

• The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist…

• [...]

• But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

• Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

• The Internet activist committed suicide in New York on Friday. He was 26. “The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” Swartz’s attorney Elliot R. Peters confirmed in an email to The Tech, which broke the news.

• Swartz is being remembered today for co-authoring RSS code at age 14. He created DemandProgress.org to campaign against SOPA/PIPA and the website theinfo.org. In July 2011, he was arrested for stealing some four million academic documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit digital archive.

• Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

• It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses, and helped build the movement that has carried us so far. Before Creative Commons, he had coauthored RSS. After Creative Commons, he co-founded Reddit, liberated tons of government data, helped build a free public library at Archive.org, and has done incredibly important work to reform and make good our political system. (DemandProgress.org, his most recent org, was instrumental in blocking the SOPA/PIPA legislation one year ago.)

• Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

• The facts:

• MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open. In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to. MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices. At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.

• Less than 48 hours after Aaron Swartz’s tragic suicide, the institution involved in his high-profile JSTOR incident (that eventually lead to federal charges) has issued a statement.

• MIT President Rafael Reif e-mailed the members of the university community this morning to address the situation, despite Swartz never having a formal affiliation with the school. Reif emphasized he was compelled to comment not only because of MIT’s role in the JSTOR incident, but also because Swartz was beloved by many within the MIT community. The president’s tone was clear throughout: “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”

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