● 01.19.13

● Links 19/1/2013: Aaron Swartz-Bradley Manning/Wikileaks Link Publicised

Posted in News Roundup at 12:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• With Git activity that took place this morning in mainline Mesa, the Nouveau driver now supports hardware-accelerated video decoding for this open-source NVIDIA driver with GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” and GeForce 600 “Kepler” graphics cards using their dedicated video engines.

Applications

• If you are too prissy about your finances then the old pen and paper method of bookkeeping doesn’t work that well in this technology age. You often tend to misplace those papers and yeah, it’s tedious writing every single detail out. Many users, these days, are moving towards finance software that helps them make their work easier. These tools help you organize your finances and make sure that all your bills, expenses and payments are manageable.

Proprietary

• Corel, once a software giant bent on overtaking Microsoft with it’s own Corel LinuxOS and Corel WordPerfect products, has just released Corel AfterShot Pro 1.1 for Linux (and the other two big OSes).

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A New Year, a new Amarok! The Amarok Team is proud to present the new Amarok 2.7, codenamed “A Minor Tune”.

• As I wrote before, we are trying to make PA4 as stable as possible, and as well as it was noted by some people, this involves also having images for a wide variety of devices.

• What I’m doing, is kindof even another step: making the image creation as easy as possible, so that is possible for people to contribute easily in the creatoin process of those images, (especially images for previously unsupported devices).

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Systemd is a framework responsible to manage services/daemons and start up scripts in Linux based Desktop Distributions and is a replacement for Init.

• What is cool about it, except all the tech facts, is that Systemd provides a very simple interface to handle some services in Linux.

• The GNOME developers published yesterday, January 15, version 3.7.4 of the GNOME Themes Standard package for the upcoming GNOME 3.7.4 desktop environment.

• Like we were telling you a while back, Linux Mint 15 will get a new screensaver, among other cool new features and changes.

• The work on the new Cinnamon screensaver has started and the code is available on GitHub:

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• The future of the cloud lies in open source, keeping Red Hat at the center of cloud development, company executives said at the recently-concluded Red Hat Partner Conference.

• And because public cloud development is tied so closely to open source, other cloud technology providers such as Microsoft and VMware will find it difficult to take advantage of cloud opportunities, said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat.

• Are you a Python programmer who wishes your storage could do more for you? Here’s an easy way to add functionality to a real distributed filesystem, in your favorite language.

• We are looking for some more people to join the Red Hat Desktop team. We have some flexibility on the tasks we need these new hires to do, so we are casting the net wider this time. We are open to candidates from anywhere in the world where Red Hat has an office. For the right candidate working from home is an option, but you would still need to live in a country where we have an office. That said candidates interested in joining the 500 people strong and growing team at the Brno office in the Czech Republic will be preferred, especially in cases where we have multiple candidates with similar skill levels.

• In last week’s post, we discussed how we created our network by integrating Open vSwitch into RHEL KVM. Now we need to create some virtual machines to run the workloads. (VMs are required to run within a virtual environment, so we need an easy way to create them.) Once more we will approach this from running on a RHEL 6 and RHEL 5 box, as the steps are somewhat different.

Fedora

• In earlier Fedora Linux releases there was generally a desire with having Btrfs become the default file-system. It’s generally proposed to make the next-generation Linux file-system the default in Fedora, but every time in the end the idea has been dropped. With Fedora 19 due in mid-2013, Btrfs for Fedora is again being talked about.

• Fedora is typically more for Linux users with intermediate levels of experience and comfort with Linux, as well as for developers and administrators who want to see what is coming in RHEL/CentOS. That said, it can sometimes make a good consumer-grade desktop distribution as well, as long as it is done right; that’s why there are so many remixes of it out there. But that doesn’t explain why this review exists. I am trying Fedora today because I have not checked out GNOME 3/Shell in a while. I am also trying it because the Anaconda installer is supposed to have been thoroughly revamped. But mostly, I am trying it out because as a physics student, the codename tickled me enough to give it another look. (For those who don’t know, a popular joke about physics problems takes such modeling to its logical extreme by applying it to a cow milking: “Imagine that this cow is spherical and radiates milk isotropically…”.)

Debian Family

• The DEP-11 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive, is a proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is downloaded by the browser.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With the recent reveal of Ubuntu on phones, and now the release of an example “Notes” application and toolkit , we thought this would be a great opportunity to share a summary of the process we went through for the design of the application itself.

• The developers of the SolusOS Linux distribution have announced the Consort Desktop Environment. This user interface for Linux systems is based on code from the same components that currently provide GNOME 3′s fallback mode, also known as GNOME Classic. This mode works without 3D acceleration and provides a desktop which resembles that of GNOME 2; however, the associated code will be removed in GNOME 3.8 – among the reasons given is that nobody has maintained the code base and that the interface appears to have undergone very little testing in recent times.

Flavours and Variants

• Fuduntu Linux was initially conceptualized to be somewhere between Fedora and Ubuntu by Andrew Wyatt – possibly to combine the fun of Ubuntu with the professionalism of Fedora, I guess. The distro is currently forked from Fedora and has rolling releases with four major updates coming in 2012. Continuing with the same trend, on 7th Jan’13, the first updated release of this year came out for Fuduntu with version 2013.1. With the release note in Distrowatch stating some major changes like moving to Cairo dock from AWN, Jockey to check hardware and detect the drivers required, no Jupiter, addition of Netflix and making Silverlight to work in WINE, nVidia optimus compatibility, still maintaining support for Gnome 2, etc., I was more than interested to actually try it out hands on.

Devices/Embedded

• Everybody loves the Raspberry Pi, and there are so many things it can do, filling an issue with Raspberry Pi goodness should be a piece of cake! To do that, however, we need your help. Do you have an awesome RPi project you’d love to share with the Linux Community?

• While titans like Apple, Microsoft and Google are grappling for global dominance, ordinary people around the world have begun tinkering with gadgets again.

• Just look at the Raspberry Pi. It’s barely bigger than a credit card and costs less than R250, but the Pi is a fully fledged computer. Hook it up to your TV and a keyboard and you can use it for everything from word processing to playing high-definition videos.

Phones

Android

• A half year after formally showing off its Google Glass technology at its developer show the company is now holding a pair of developer events that will center around glasses that will be held at the end of the month, according to Slashgear.

• Kite (Nibbio in Italian) is a Full-HD tablet made by little known Italian electronics firm, DaVinci Mobile Technology. Kite tablet will be powered by Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core processor and is supposedly going to dual boot latest stable versions of Ubuntu and Android, an idea no other major consumer electronics vendor has come up with yet.

Free Software/Open Source

• “Our starting point was obviously all open source. Our main framework was Ruby on Rails. We do a lot of processing in Hadoop. We are standing on the shoulders of giants here. Wherever we can find little bits and pieces that are easy for us to open source and do fixes that we can put back, we are happy to do it,” said Ian Sefferman, CEO of MobileDevHQ.

• As the Vert.x community selects its future home, it offers a fascinating illustration of the role of governance

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Purportedly, one of the best lessons in software development to have come from the open source movement is the rapid release cycle, and partly because the Google Chrome browser was benefiting from rapid releases, in February of 2011, Mozilla announced that it was moving the Firefox browser to a rapid release cycle. As you can see if you look at the comments on this OStatic post from April of 2011, not every user of Firefox was pleased with the arrangement, due to performance problems that were showing up in the browser.

• Critics of the Firefox web browser might say that Mozilla never gets it right the first time and base that assumption on the version updates the company releases shortly after Firefox moves to a new version.It happened several times in the past that Mozilla had to release an update after releasing a new version of the browser, and it appears that this streak won’t break with the release of Firefox 18.0

• A security researcher has demonstrated how it is still possible to silently install extensions, or as Mozilla calls them add-ons, for the open source Firefox web browser. In a blog post, Julian Sobrier of ZScaler detailed the process, which makes use of the fact that Firefox uses an Sqlite3 database to maintain information about which add-ons are installed and, of those, which ones have been approved by the user.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• If you wish there was an English grammar checker for OpenOffice Writer, you’re in luck. Two popular extensions let you add an English grammar check to OpenOffice for free.

CMS

• When it comes to open-source content management systems, Drupal really stands apart from Joomla and WordPress, its closest competitors, for several reasons.

• The payoff for using Drupal is the development of very tightly configured sites that perform well and scale excellently. This is why many developers are willing to put up with its idiosyncrasies.

Education

• A list to help schools find open source alternatives to proprietary software applications was published earlier this week by OSS Watch, a service for higher and further education institutions in the UK. Introducing the list, OSS Watch development manager Mark Johnson says: “Where possible, we’ve included real-world examples of their usage.”

Business

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Internet Freedom Day isn’t just about celebrating; it’s about action:

• * A free Internet needs free JavaScript: You can help by installing the LibreJS plugin. * Join millions of others in the actions at InternetFreedomDay.net. * Internet activist Aaron Swartz was a leader in the SOPA/PIPA protest. Watch and share this video:

• By popular demand, we are now selling the GNU/Linux Inside sticker pack. For $15, you receive 10 GNU/Linux stickers. Because these stickers are high-quality and durable, they won’t fade away or scratch off your computer, making it the ideal way to rep your use of free software!

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Episciences Project to launch series of community-run, open-access journals.

• Cable Green doesn’t have to look very far to find an example of an education system weighed down by what he considers a bloated and inefficient textbook industry. The director of global learning for Creative Commons simply points to his home state of Washington. “My state spends $130 million per year buying textbooks,” he says. “We only have a million public school kids in the state, so we’re spending $130 per kid per year.” Because each book is expected to last half a decade, the kids aren’t permitted to keep them or write in them. The books are only available in one format, paper, and are sometimes seven to 10 years out of date. If one of Green’s kids loses a textbook, as a parent Green is expected to fork over the money to replace it.

Open Hardware

Programming

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who helped expose the Bush administration’s torture program, recently plead guilty to sharing the name of a colleague to journalists to use as a source. He is expected to receive a sentence of 30 months in prison.

• Earlier this month, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013. Once again, our commander-in-chief demonstrated how futile his veto threats really are.

• John Brennan latest in line of Irish American to lead national security efforts

• An intelligence analyst tells Press TV that rogue elements within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are responsible for the assassination of American dissident Aaron Swartz. He also added that the US mainstream media has also turned a blind eye to the issue.

• And not just in its torture scenes. A former operative weighs in on the year’s most controversial movie

Cablegate

• Last week in Fort Meade, MD, government prosecutors said that if PFC Bradley Manning had released documents to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, they would still charge him with indirectly ‘aiding the enemy,’ which carries a life sentence.

• This would be unprecedented: never before has a soldier been sent to jail for ‘aiding the enemy’ as a result of giving information to a news outlet. Government prosecutors argue that Manning needn’t have intended to aid the enemy; merely that he knew Al Qaeda could use the information is enough. This would turn all government whistle-blowing into treason: a grave threat to both potential sources and American journalism.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The film chronicles the story of a gas industry salesman, played by Matt Damon, and his attempt to convince the residents of a rural Pennsylvania town to agree to fracking development. The questions raised by actors in the film mirror the debates taking place in communities across the country. What type of chemicals are used in fracking? What is the effect of fracking on air and water? While the industry may make a few struggling families rich, what is the cost for the community as a whole?

Finance

• The beleaguered government of Mariano Rajoy has been embarrassed by revelations that its party’s former treasurer had a bank account in Switzerland containing up to €22 million.

• Luis Bárcenas held the treasury post in the conservative Partido Popular (PP) from 2008 until 2009, when he resigned because of an investigation into his part in a massive fraud network. He stepped down from the party in 2010. The inquiry into that case continues and information a Spanish judge has requested from Swiss authorities shows details of an account held under the politician’s name which coincides with the time he was managing the PP’s finances.

• …it derives about half of its income from things that many people would consider trading.

• People in the 25–34 year-old age group carry the heaviest home mortgage burden.

• Sixty percent of all households owe money to the bank, with home loans accounting for 70 percent of this debt.

• Those in their thirties are the most saddled by debt, with 119,000 euros being the average amount owed. On the other hand, half of young families are debt-free, according to the statisticians.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• …celebrate the finest sham media.

Privacy

• U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson unveils a draft bill that would require developers to disclose how they gather personal data and let users delete all their stored data.

Civil Rights

• The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will remove airport body scanners that privacy advocates likened to strip searches after OSI Systems Inc. (OSIS) couldn’t write software to make passenger images less revealing.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes has stated that it should be up to ISPs to decide how they manage their traffic, essentially admitting that Net Neutrality wouldn’t become part of EU legislation.

• Without appropriate laws, network operators will be able to offer cheaper, ‘tiered’ Internet connections with limited capabilities, alongside full strength Internet services. Before taking responsibility for the EU Digital Agenda, Kroes insisted that ISPs should be regulated in order to ensure that companies are not limiting access to online content “out of commercial motivation”, but critics say she has now backtracked.

• That does not mean more pages to your 100-page contract! The Commission has been encouraging the advertising industry to ensure users get a clear choice about cookies, based on short, digestible information. The Commission is also working with a wider set of online actors to develop a “Do Not track” standard, so that consumers who make this choice can be sure it is respected.

• On net neutrality, consumers need effective choice on the type of internet subscription they sign up to. That means real clarity, in non-technical language. About effective speeds in normal conditions, and about any restrictions imposed on traffic – and a realistic option to switch to a “full” service, without such restrictions, offered by their own provider or another. Ensuring consumer choice can mean constraints on others – in this case, an obligation for all internet service providers to offer an accessible “full” option to their customers. But such choice should also drive innovation and investment by internet providers, with benefits for all. I am preparing a Commission initiative to secure this effective consumer choice in Europe.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• I hate my perpetual optimism about our government. Aaron was buried on the tenth anniversary of the time that optimism bit me hardest — Eldred v. Ashcroft. But how many other examples are there, and why don’t I ever learn? The dumbest-fucking-naive-allegedly-smart person you will ever know: that guy thought this tragedy would at least shake for one second the facade of certainty that is our government, and allow at least a tiny light of recognition to shine through, and in that tiny ray, maybe a question, a pause, a moment of “ok, we need to look at this carefully.” I wasn’t dumb enough to believe that Ortiz could achieve the grace of Reif. But the single gift I wanted was at least a clumsy, hesitating, “we’re going to look at this carefully, and think about whether mistakes might have been made.”

• As Friday is one year since the Internet blackout against the Stop Online Piracy Act, some Internet activists are marking the date by declaring “Internet Freedom Day.”

• A few years ago I started thinking about taking a vow of non-violence: a commitment to never sue anyone over Knowledge (or Culture, Cultural Works, Art, Intellectual Pooperty, whatever you call it). Copyright law is hopelessly broken; indeed, the Law in the US is broken all over the place. Why would I resort to the same broken law to try to fix abuses that occur within it?

• While we’ve seen some politicians in Congress speak out about the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, for the most part, it had been the “usual crew” of folks who had formed the core of the anti-SOPA alliance — Reps. Lofgren, Issa and Polis. That’s great, but it also made it unfortunately easy for some to dismiss their complaints. However, it appears that this may be getting bigger.

• As I noted, the same day that Aaron Swartz resubmitted his FOIA on Bradley Manning’s treatment, the Secret Service got a warrant to search most of the hardware captured on the day he was arrested (a USB on his person and a laptop and hard drive found elsewhere on MIT’s campus), as well as his home (and they subsequently got a warrant to search his office at Harvard).

• I have shown earlier how, during the period when the Grand Jury was investigating Swartz, Swartz was FOIAing stuff that the prosecutor seems to have subpoeaned as part of a fishing expedition into Swartz. I have also shown that a FOIA response he got in January 2011 suggests he may have been discussed in a (presumably different) grand jury investigation between October 8 and December 10, 2010. And Jason Leopold has also pointed to some interesting coincidences in Swartz’ FOIAs.

• He had co-written a basic RSS spec the year before, when he was 14. He was to go on to play a fundamental role in Creative Commons. When you now search for stuff online, using its legal status as a search prerequisite, not just a text query (Physics textbook, available to use or share, even commercially) you are doing something that Aaron’s volunteer work helped to enable. People talk of him now as some kind of Data Liberation activist, which he certainly was, but principally he was and is one of the great architects of the commons, a builder, as Dave Weinberger stresses, not just a hacker — though hacker, of course, is actually a name that programmers wear with pride. The guy who invented the World Wide Web had this to say about him. “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

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