● 01.17.13

● Links 17/1/2013: Kite HD Debut, Open Access Debate Continues

Posted in News Roundup at 10:39 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Dell is reportedly investigating a move to take the company private in a leveraged buy-out to clear the decks for a radical repositioning of the company. And according to a report from Atlantic Media’s Quartz, that includes relaunching Dell’s desktop and mobile business around a brand-new product: a computing device the size of a thumb-drive that will sell for about $50.

Desktop

• For the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending a fair amount of time using the Samsung Chromebook. It’s the basic model Google has on its website for the miniscule price of just $249. In some ways, it’s a great little machine. It’s lightweight and extremely portable. I’ve found myself carrying it around, leaving it on the coffee table or counter and picking it up on a whim.

• End of days for Microsoft’s long abusive monopoly? Lenovo has also joined the Chromebook bandwagon and announced their ThinkPad X131e Chromebook, which the company says is a “fast booting, highly customizable ThinkPad built with rugged features”.

• The Chromebook is targeted at schools and Lenovo says in its press statement, “The ThinkPad X131e Chromebook simplifies software and security management for school administrators and provides students and teachers with quick access to thousands of apps, education resources and storage.”

Kernel Space

• In the open source channel, many developers could stand to focus a bit less on technology itself, and a bit more on making products look and feel smart, intuitive and elegant–especially when it comes to communicating with end users. Most Linux distributions don’t get this right, but Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, shines as an outlier. Here’s how.

Graphics Stack

• The 2.20.18 release announcement for this new driver reads, “A bunch of miscellaneous fixes for assertion failures and various performance regressions when mixing new methods for offloads, along with a couple of improvements for rendering with gen4.”

Applications

• If you’re a digital artist or designer, you’ve no doubt heard of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), often referred to as the preeminent open-source alternative to Photoshop. But did you know that you can extend GIMP’s features dramatically with a plugin called G’MIC?

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• A new game is coming to Linux via Valve’s Steam client as the result of Steam Greenlight and interest in the Linux platform.

• The Cave is published by Sega and developed by Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator) and Double Fine Productions, the award-winning studio behind Psychonauts.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The developers behind the GNOME Settings Daemon package for the GNOME desktop environment, announced earlier today, January 15, the immediate availability for download and testing of GNOME Settings Daemon 3.7.4.

Distributions

• OS4′s developers have worked to deliver an easy-to-use desktop operating system, with a focus on squarely on the Linux distribution’s end users

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• The Red Hat Inc. partner conference has focused heavily on the role open-source technology plays in fostering innovation and interoperability, but without a partner community driving that technology, it can’t be effective. Jerry Lumpkin, senior director of Red Hat’s North American channel sales and development, recognizes this, which is why Red Hat is doubling its efforts to bring widespread support to their partner community in the form of training, education and a variety of other partner-centric investments.

• Good news: Red Hat is driving more than 60 percent of sales from indirect channels, according to Lumpkin, and Red Hat is “absolutely driving that number higher with our commitments and investments. Partners are the only way we’re going to go to market and be successful.”

Fedora

• Late last year I wrote about a few of the interesting features that had appeared in the beta version of the software, but now this finished release brings quite a bit more to the table.

• As the free, community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora is nothing if not a leading-edge distribution, and it tends to offer a sneak preview of what’s to come in RHEL and beyond. Currently in the No. 4 spot for page-hit rankings on DistroWatch, it’s particularly well-known for its business-focused features.

• Fedora 18 is finally released! We have waited for this release for a long time, and it is finally out . It brings many features, some of which I’ve already talked about. I’m going to write my own review of it, and like always I’ll talk about both interesting points and the important or annoying issues I had with it. As it might be long, I decided to divide my review to 2 or more parts, and the first part is what you are (probably!) reading. Typing Booster

• Designing interfaces to deal with storage technologies is not only hard, it’s terrifying. This is especially true if you aren’t familiar with the storage technologies involved and have to learn how they work on-the-fly, even if you don’t have easy or any access to work with some of these (typically quite expensive) technologies first-hand.

• Fedora 18 made me nostalgic. It was delayed no less than 7 times, missing the November 6, 2012, ‘arrival’ time. Unlike the Indian railways, this delay was not due to incompetent, bribe inflicted, corrupt system; it was due to some showstopping bugs. Finally Fedora 18 train has arrived – but what caused this delay and how did it effect the release? One Muktware reader said that this delay will make Fedora better. Is that true? We will find out soon. Since I switched to KDE (thanks to Ubuntu for ditching Gnome Shell and moving to Unity), I went ahead and downloaded the KDE flavor. I prefer KDE due to the personalization (customization) it offers along with complete control over my system – something I would expect from an OS based on GNU/Linux. I will also see what kind of KDE experience does Fedora 18 offer.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

• Rumours about the next generation HTC flagship phone, the M7 have been doing rounds since a long time and very first images of the device seems to have finally surfaced. The image is a render from what is supposed to be the animation clip instruction for first time users of the phone.

• If the source of the information is to be trusted, at first look the image suggest a strong resemblance of the phone to the iPhone 5. However the device will have a 4.7 inch full HD Display which will be larger than Apple’s offering and smaller than the current phablets from other manufacturers.

Android

• Released on 10th January 2013 is Defence Zone 2 for the Android platform which I’ll be taking look at today.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The Ubuntu phone is very much real, but it’s not yet shipping to interested consumers – and by shipping we mean to say the OS is not available to download and install on existing Android devices that have what it takes to run Ubuntu’s mobile OS version.

• While you wait to run Ubuntu on your Android device, you may be interested to hear that there’s a tablet out there ready to offer you the best of both worlds, a dual-booting Exynos-powered tablet, the Kite, that’s going to sell for just €309, or around $413.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open-source programs refers to the programs whose source code made available and licensed so that anyone has rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

• Since his suicide, friends and admirers have cast free-information activist Aaron Swartz as a martyred hero hounded to his death by the government he antagonised.

• One newspaper columnist – whose piece on Swartz was accompanied by a photo showing him at his computer, his head encircled by a golden halo – even compared him to an internet-age Martin Luther King Jr.

• But those closest to the 26-year-old Swartz say the hacker prodigy wasn’t out to be a hero.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Do you use the same browser across multiple devices? Have you ever been perplexed at how, say, a particular version of Firefox might offer perfect, fast performance on one computer, but the same version is pokey and prone to crashing on another comparable computer? Most browser users are familiar with these conundrums.

SaaS/Big Data

CMS

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Anna Morris is co-founder of FLOSSIE conference for women in Free Software, Manchester Fellowship Group Deputy Coordinator, and Co-Director of ethical-pets.co.uk. She is currently writing a book on video editing with Free Software, and volunteering with Document Freedom Day 2013 in her spare time.

Project Releases

• The new major version of the Kolab Groupware Solution has been released today. Version 3 of the proven groupware solution includes many benefits for users who are looking for an intuitive and effective way of collaborating through the cloud, wherever they may be.

Public Services/Government

• Within the virtualization world, VMware (NYSE: VMW) can hardly claim to be more friendly to open source than competing platforms such as KVM and Xen. Nonetheless, the company has signed on as a leading member of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), a trade organization dedicated to promoting open source solutions in government. Is this a sign of renewed commitment to open source by VMware, or a more mercenary move by the company to protect its slice of the open source market? Here are some thoughts.

• VMware’s relationship with the open source community is a complex one. Most core commercial VMware products are not open source, but the company does maintain some open source tools. In addition, most of its virtualization solutions support Linux as well as proprietary operating systems. Still, now that open source virtualization platforms have matured to become as feature-rich and robust as many of VMware’s tools—and are also available for free—the company faces an increasingly difficult market within the open source space.

Openness/Sharing

• Attending an adult puppet show about the evolution of human happiness created by a collective from Alberta may not be your idea of a fun way to spend an evening. But the Old Trout Puppet Workshop could alter your perspective. Their latest show, Ignorance, is witty, imaginative, and asks the big questions while indulging in loopy child’s play, some of it moderately X-rated.

• Rackspace launched the industry’s first OpenStack powered cloud platform of compute, storage and networking in 2012.

Open Access/Content

• A far more urgent task for a government which has promised ”a new era” of openness would seem to be determining why the system is in such turmoil and sending an unequivocal message about what is expected of the public service. And acting to abolish those application fees wouldn’t hurt either.

• In the days since the tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research. It’s an act of solidarity with Swartz’s crusade to liberate (in most cases publicly funded) knowledge for all to read.

• While this has been a noteworthy gesture, the problem of open access isn’t just about the ethics of freeing and sharing scholarly information. It’s as much — if not more — about the psychology and incentives around scholarly publishing. We need to think these issues through much more deeply to make open access widespread.

Programming

• The Google Native Client (NaCl) team is looking to upstream some of their LLVM changes such as support for Software Fault Isolation (SFI). As part of pushing forward the changes for Native Client in LLVM, they’re also looking to see mainlined the x32 ABI support. X32 is the Application Binary Interface that looks to take advantage of common x86_64 CPU features like increased CPU registers and more instruction set extensions while using 32-bit pointers.

• David Sehr of Google, part of their Native Client team, wrote a new mailing list thread on Tuesday about upstreaming x32 ABI support inside LLVM. What the NaCl team would like to work on next with their LLVM upstreaming is the x32 ABI portion, “our ABI is dependent on the existence of an ILP32 ABI on x86-64. The conventions we rely on are the same as those developed for the x32 effort, and we propose that the community begin reviewing changes to implement the x32 ABI.”

• A cobbled-together team of 40 developers built 200 apps in the cloud that could scale from hundreds to millions of users in minutes — and managed to meet their deadline with no major failure.

Leftovers

Science

Health/Nutrition

Security

• South Korea has accused North Korea of carrying out a series of cyber attacks on the web sites of South Korean government and financial institutions over the past few years. North Korea denies the allegations. A few days before the cyber attack on the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper, North Korea had threatened to stage a “military attack” on the newspaper company and other media firms in Seoul. The threat came after controversial media reports were published about a children’s festival in Pyongyang.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Even if Brennan’s candidacy is not approved by the Senate, the mere fact of him becoming Obama’s initial choice of the CIA director does not bode well for pacifist forces in American society.

• The Winners of the Academy Award and Golden Globe Are … Government Propagandists

• …concerned that this signing statement language could create a chilling effect for federal contractor whistleblowers

• To live in America right now is to be the beneficiary of untold suffering.

• Ian Cobain’s history of British state involvement in torture, “Cruel Britannia” – appears to have been radically censored between the review copies and publication.

• The drone war is carried out remotely, from the U.S. and a network of secret bases around the world. The Washington Post got a glimpse – through examining construction contracts and showing up uninvited – at the base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti from which many of the strikes on Yemen and Somalia are carried out. Earlier this year, Wired pieced together an account of the war against Somalia’s al-Shabaab militant group and the U.S.’s expanded military presence throughout Africa.

Cablegate

• A parcel containing a camera is sent to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London through the Royal Mail. Through a hole in the parcel, the camera documents its journey through the postal system.

• CHRISTINE Assange says a British student organising a protest against her son is unwittingly aiding the misuse of rape allegations as a political weapon.

• Simone Webb is gathering support for a January 23 rally at Oxford University to coincide with a video address by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the exclusive institution’s Union.

• The punishment of Bradley Manning goes directly against the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s own laws, namely Section 813 article 13, which basically states, “No punishment before trial.” This law was obviously broken. People in this country are entitled to a “speedy trial,” which is normally between 100 and 120 days from the date of the crime. Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for more than 1,000 days before his trial has begun and even a United Nations investigation confirmed that Manning was being held in inhumane conditions that was tantamount to torture.

Finance

• The transitions from feudalism and other pre-capitalist economic systems to modern capitalism have always and everywhere been celebrated for bringing a new epoch of human history. Freedom, democracy, and equality were the hallmarks of those celebrations. The French Revolution of 1789 raised the slogan of liberte, egalite, fraternite. The US has long celebrated its capitalism for producing a vast “middle class” that permanently overcame previous societies’ tendencies toward extreme inequalities of wealth and income. Yet the recent decades-long rise in such inequalities inside most capitalist economies has led many today to see in capitalism not the enemy but rather the cause of rising economic inequality. Here we take up that argument and move it a step further to show how a transition to workers self-directed enterprises is a necessary change to solve the problem of rising economic inequality. Our thesis is that the many well-intentioned efforts over the last century to overcome extreme inequalities of wealth and income failed because they left intact the capitalist system with its inherent tendency to produce economic inequality.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Vietnamese propaganda officials have admitted deploying people to engage in online discussions and post comments supporting the Communist Party’s policies.

• The party has also confirmed that it operates a network of nearly 1,000 “public opinion shapers”.

• Throughout his career in Congress, Dennis Kucinich has marked himself as somewhat more than a mouthpiece for left-leaning liberal counterpoints. But in his new job as contributing Fox News analyst, that’s pretty much what he’ll be.

Censorship

• A Canadian human rights monitoring group has documented the use of American-made Internet surveillance and censorship technology by more than a dozen governments, some with harsh human rights policies like Syria, China and Saudi Arabia.

Privacy

• oday’s announcement from the Health Secretary that all patient medical records will be held in electronic form by 2018 has grabbed some headlines, but the underlying privacy risks seem to have been given short shrift.

• Paperless records is a nice soundbite but the change creates significant privacy risks. The Department of Health needs to be absolutely clear who will hold our medical records, who can access them and reassure patients that their privacy will not be destroyed in another NHS IT blunder.

• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has received what it considers to be two key memos, which indicate how the Justice Department views when it can and cannot legally track Americans with GPS tracking devices. The memos requested after the ACLU sued the department in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request are both heavily redacted to the point where it makes it pretty much useless that the Justice Department released them.

• The German Federal Police office has purchased the commercial Spyware toolkit FinFisher of Eleman/Gamma Group. This is revealed by a secret document of the Ministry of the Interior, which we are publishing exclusively. Instead of legitimizing products used by authoritarian regimes for the violation of human rights, the German state should restrict the export of such state malware.

• In October 2011, German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club (CCC) analyzed a malware used by German government authorities. The product of the German company DigiTask was not just programmed badly and lacking elementary security, it was in breach of German law. In a landmark case, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled in 2008 that surveillance software targeting telecommunications must be technologically limited to a specific task. Instead, the CCC found that the DigiTask software took over the entire computer and included the option to remotely add features, thereby clearly violating the court ruling.

• A quick Google search for IntelliStreets shows that the company has attracted the attention of activists who are worried that these lighting products represent a kind of spy tool, and a spooky public monitoring system that would strip citizens of their right to privacy and bolster law enforcement activities.

Civil Rights

• I am delighted that a new canpaign has started today against the state enforced child slavery in the uzbek cotton industry, especially as this campaign originates in Germany, where a significant portion of society appears to have finally woken up to the reality of the German government’s appalling complicity in the Nazi style regime and atrocities of Karimov.

DRM

• One of the striking features of the drug world is how pharma companies become noticeably more inventive immediately before their patents are due to run out and their drugs are about to enter the public domain. That’s because they need to find a way to differentiate themselves from the generic manufacturers that are then able to offer the same medicines for often vastly lower prices.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• It portrays MIT as the core problem in this tragedy. In fact, there are claims that it was actually MIT who was breaking computer laws. Because not only did Aaron Swartz have JSTOR guest visitor privileges on MIT’s completely open network, it claims, but once MIT discovered Aaron’s laptop, all it had to do was disconnect it from the network and hold it, according to the filing. If Aaron showed up to claim it, they could tell him that they felt he was excessively downloading and to cut it out. And that could have been all there was to it. Instead, MIT contacted the police and the rest is the tragedy that ensued.

• In a freak legal accident straight out of the movie Brazil, Swartz, amidst his hacktivism, managed to download a bunch of free academic articles from a freely accessible website, an act which inexplicably angered somebody in the academic sausage-grinder. Then, like so many hacktivists before him and so many hacktivists that will come after him, the government proceeded to pursue Swartz as their target as this decade’s lottery-selected cybercrime scapegoat.

• The two fathers’ anguished comments came as criticism continued to mount against U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who has refused to comment. A citizen’s petition at Whitehouse.gov calling for her ouster topped 33,000 signatures last night — 8,000 more the threshold needed for an official response. A White House official said the petition is being reviewed. Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann are under fire for what critics call an overzealous prosecution of Swartz. The reddit.com co-founder was facing more than 30 years in prison on charges of hacking into MIT computers to freely post academic papers held by a subscription service.

• The CFAA is incredibly broad and covers swaths of online conduct that should not merit prison time. To point out that under the CFAA, Aaron’s defense was hard is not to say that I believe Aaron was guilty. Aaron was authorized to access JSTOR as a result of being on MIT’s campus. The CFAA may protect the box from unauthorized access, but it does not regulate the means or the speed of access. If you are allowed to download, and Aaron was, then it is not a crime to download really, really fast. Even if the server owner would prefer you took your time.

• Most people have never heard of PACER, and those who have might not have heard of it prior to the press coverage surrounding Aaron Swartz’s untimely death on January 11th. PACER is the federal judiciary’s database of all federal court cases. It includes information on civil, criminal, and bankruptcy cases. All of the information in PACER is public.

• But it is not free. That is why Aaron was trying to download it—because he was savvy enough to understand the importance of access to information in the justice system at a remarkably young age, without being a lawyer—and because the Administrative Office of the Courts never suspected that someone like him would take incredible advantage of a short trial period in 2008 when the per-page pricing suddenly dropped to zero at a few locations nationwide.

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