● 02.02.13

● Links 2/2/2013: Android Apps on BB, Fedora Reviews

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Glyn Moody wonders whether the car – a currently undeveloped yet important platform with great potential – can provide the inspiration for the next generation of Linux coders.

• It’s been another interesting week in the world of Linux and Open Source development. Several items have caught my attention today, so I thought I’d just do a round-up. Red Hat on another hiring spree, New Mandriva enterprise website, and the Free Software Foundation achievements are among the topics.

• The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that in 2012 the organization surpassed two significant milestones: delivering over 350,000 exams and 120,000 certifications worldwide since the organization’s inception.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While xf86-video-sunxifb sounds like an old X.Org driver from the Sun Microsystems days for some obscure SPARC system, this driver is a fork of the xf86-video-mali DDX driver. What makes this ARM X.Org graphics driver interesting is that it promises better performance on the Allwinner A10/A13 SoC compared to the ARM vendor’s official driver.

Benchmarks

• In this article are some early benchmark results comparing the OpenGL gaming performance of the Unity, Xfce, Openbox, LXDE, KDE, GNOME Shell, and Enlightenment desktops when running on a recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04. As many earlier benchmarks have shown, the OpenGL frame-rate for Linux games can sway quite greatly depending upon the desktop in use and more specifically the desktop’s compositing window manager.

• Back in September there was Ubuntu 12.10 testing done of the different desktops when Ubuntu’s Unity provided very slow to KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and the LXDE desktops. The 2D performance was also poor for Unity. Fortunately, with Ubuntu 13.04, there are new versions for most of the major Linux desktop environments plus the open-source graphics drivers continue to be improved.

Applications

• Hello, scrobble fans! Were you wondering where your desktop app updates had gone? Well wonder no longer! With the last major version released back in 2007 (those were the days, eh?) you’d be forgiven for thinking there weren’t any more coming, but we’ve actually been hard at work on an update to bring us crashing into 2008, a little late.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Though still in beta, Valve’s Steam client for Linux is stable, fast, and from what we can tell, matches the feature-set of the Windows and OS X clients 1:1. That being the case, there felt like no better time than the present to dive in, give a tour and relay our experiences with both the client and a slew of games.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Twenty-five women have been accepted for participation in the GNOME-led Outreach Programme for Women which runs from January 2 to April 2, according to a media release from the GNOME Foundation.

Distributions

• With all the excellent Linux distributions available today, it can be easy to focus exclusively on the few that dominate the headlines, such as Ubuntu Linux, Linux Mint, Fedora, and Mageia Linux, to name just a few.

• The answer is simple: an active community that raises PARDUS ANKA from its ashes!

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

• Craig Muzilla is vice president, Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat where he is responsible for the overall middleware and JBoss product business.

• In 2012, CIOs and IT teams in enterprises worldwide leveraged cloud computing architectures while they designed their data centres to best manage the explosive amount of structured and unstructured data. Red Hat envisions even more significant movement in the data centre in 2013 in cloud, middleware, storage, and virtualisation technologies. Here are our top predictions for enterprise IT.

Fedora

• Folio is a new web magazine of Fedora Online community (fedoraonline.it also named FOL) focused on Fedora and Fedora Project. It is completely written in Italian by FOL’s guys.

• Two of the biggest names in desktop Linux are Ubuntu and Fedora. Both have a huge and sometimes emotionally charged following and will defend one against the other vehemently.

• There were some comments asking how to upgrade Fedora 18 to Fedora Rawhide. Instead of answering one by one, I am writing this sort intro for using next Fedora.

• Fedora Rawhide is not a panacea to use the very latest GNOME, and it will give you some hard times. Using it with caution

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary operating system since 2005. Back then it was truly amazing. Before I started using Ubuntu I tried out Red Hat, Mandrake (and later Mandriva), Slackware, Gentoo, and even Debian. In all of them, something didn’t work. Usually it was wifi, but sometimes it was audio or video, or weird X config problems. But when I switched to Ubuntu, all of that went away. Rather than being frusturated that I was still a Linux noob and couldn’t even connect to the internet, Ubuntu helped me get past the initial barriers so I could really dive in. I’m eternally grateful to Ubuntu for this, and I’m very impressed at how successful they’ve has been at fixing bug #1 (though there’s still a long way to go).

Flavours and Variants

• Despite overwhelmingly warm feedback from pretty much everyone to my first review of Bodhi Linux almost two years ago, which pretty much sealed the deal, I decided to give it another shot. My label as an idiot, so to speak, notwithstanding, Bodhi has changed quite a bit since version 0.15. Now at increment 2.2, it continues its mission as a minimalist distribution based on Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The Motorola X Phone is rumored to be the first Android device jointly developed by Google and Motorola in the post-acquisition era, but its existence has been mostly speculation…until now. A job listing posted to LinkedIn by Motorola Mobility is looking for a Senior Director of Product Management to work directly on the X Phone project. And, yes, they indeed refer to it by that name.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Tablet shipments worldwide grew by more than expected in the final three months of last year, with more than 50 million units being shipped worldwide.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Dear Users:

• Please be advised AP has been effected by the automated system patch released by Apple this morning, blocking java based applications on mac computers. This may slow down the publishing of some AP photos. AP Engineers are working on a solution. We will keep you updated.

• Should you have any questions or issues, please contact AP Customer Support.

Funding

• After being announced in December, mobile gaming backend service OpenKit plans to bring in the first 50 developers into its private beta program tomorrow.

• Co-founder Peter Relan told me that when the team first publicized the project last month, “not a single line of code” had been written. Instead, it was sussing out developer interest, with plans to focus on the project if more than 100 developers signed up. In fact, 160 developers signed up on day one, and that number is now up to 500.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Whether or not desktop 3D printing is the forerunner of the “third industrial revolution,” as Jeremy Rifkin and Chris Anderson have suggested, it’s definitely one of the hottest tech trends around. Open source DIY hacker engineers, artists, and craft designers have led the surge on the low end while higher-end models are already being used in rapid prototyping and short-run, custom manufacturing.

Leftovers

• As every web developer knows, one of the biggest headaches of building modern, standards-compliant web pages is getting them to look and work right in Internet Explorer. Well, coders, apparently Microsoft feels your pain, because it has released a new set of free tools to help you do just that.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Bill explores the moral and legal implications of using drones to target our enemies — both foreign and American — as well as other intelligence issues with Vicki Divoll, a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, and Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

• A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on one hand; an overseer of a weekly “kill list,” on the other.

• John Brennan’s been a key player in the president’s possibly illegal drone attacks. Now he’s up for a promotion

• The Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officials who approved or conducted “enhanced interrogations,” and yet it goes after the man who blew the whistle on these practices.

• WikiLeaks Central presents an exclusive interview with Chilean journalist Patricio Mery, who claims the CIA has been actively plotting to destabilise or even assassinate Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, after US anger over decisions such as the granting of political asylum to Julian Assange and the termination of the US lease on a military base in Manta.

• Mery claims the CIA is running an Iran-Contra style drug operation in Chile, trafficking “about 200 kilos of cocaine per month” from Bolivia in order to fund anti-Correa operations. Early last year, Italian police discovered 40 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador’s diplomatic mail. Mery alleges senior Chilean officials were involved, and he has a dossier of proof for the Ecuadorian government.

• The United States will have to keep up an open-ended drone war against Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan and elsewhere to prevent another terror attack on America, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.

• The sight of a drone in flight is likely to become a regular occurrence in the United States within the next few years. But the rise of unmanned technology could lead to new crimes like “drone stalking” and “drone trespassing,” lawmakers are being told.

• Why he’s as tough on Truman and Obama as Nixon and Bush

• Yesterday, Judge James Pohl ordered the government to disconnect any outside censors to the courtroom, stating that he is the only person with the authority to decide whether the proceedings should be closed to the public. Judge Pohl’s orders followed a confusing episode on Monday in which an unknown government agency cut the audio feed during a pre-trial hearing in the 9/11 case.

• Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

• Almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is locked up in one country: the United States.

• For years, the U.S. has held the infamous reputation of having the highest per capita rate of incarcerated individuals on the planet, dwarfing that of other comparable industrialized nations. There were 1.6 million state and federal prisoners in the country as of 2011, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reports 492 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents were sentenced to more than 12 months in prison that year.

• They can already learn a lot about you with their spy technologies

• What really happened in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogations? Three former officials tell their stories.

• The critical outcry over the depictions of torture in the film Zero Dark Thirty has led to a series of interviews with the film’s director Kathryn Bigelow, in which she has addressed the negative reactions to this provocative subject. Despite her public condemnation of torture, Bigelow takes little responsibility for her film’s potentially harmful influence on public opinion.

• Zero Dark Thirty lies. End of story

• Beneath the headlines, out of sight of most Americans, a critical war is being fought between those who would reveal the starkest truths about the United States’ national security policies, and a federal government ever more committed to shrouding its activities in secrecy.

• The documentary is rooted in an investigation on the surreptitious Joint Special Operations Command, a branch responsible for finding and killing targets that make a “Kill List,” some of whom are American citizens. Like the quotidian protagonist of a frenetic militia novel, Scahill is drawn into a world of clandestine operations implemented by men so furtive, they don’t exist on paper.

• The point is that intervention is ultimately self-defeating, because it creates the enemies the government says it seeks to defeat. The way to obtain resources is through peaceful market purchases.

• In the days just before Barack Obama took the oath of office to begin his second term as president, the U.S. launched drone strikes in Yemen that reportedly killed 15 people. The administration’s escalation of America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles in its targeted killing of suspected terrorists across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa is provoking increased opposition at home and abroad. During the inauguration ceremonies in Washington D.C., the group Code Pink Women for Peace protested against the U.S. drone program and called on the Senate to reject President Obama’s nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Brennan, who is currently deputy bational security advisor and assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, is the architect of Obama’s drone program and is referred to by some as the nation’s “assassination czar.”

• Dominating the skyline of Yemen’s capital of Sana’a is the fortress-like Mövenpick Hotel, which serves as a visual marker for what Yemenis term the city’s “Green Zone.” The nearby Sheraton Hotel is now used to lodge US Marines, while the adjacent British and US embassies hunker down behind blast walls, check points and razor wire. According to local residents, the buildings in the zone are being connected with tunnels as an added security measure.

• Days after he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, John Kiriakou — the first CIA official to be jailed for any reason relating to the torture program — denounces President Obama’s appointment of John Brennan to head the CIA. “I’ve known John Brennan since 1990,” Kiriakou says. “I worked directly for John Brennan twice. I think that he is a terrible choice to lead the CIA. I think that it’s time for the CIA to move beyond the ugliness of the post-September 11th regime, and we need someone who is going to respect the Constitution and to not be bogged down by a legacy of torture.” [includes rush transcript]

Cablegate

• Iceland refused to cooperate with an FBI investigation into WikiLeaks two years ago. The Icelandic Interior Minister said he ordered police to cease contact with the FBI, and made it clear their presence was not “well-seen” in Iceland. Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson informed the AP of his displeasure upon discovering that FBI agents had arrived in the country in August 2011.

• Angered that agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) traveled to his country unannounced in an attempt to investigate the whistleblower website Wikileaks, Iceland’s interior minister had the Americans deported.

• One of the things DOJ is protecting from FOIA in Electronic Privacy Information Center’s suit is information other governments have shared with the US on the investigation.

• “In separate meetings with Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse and Peace Secretariat head Jayantha Dhanapala on September 15, the Ambassador discussed prospects for resumed negotiations between the Government of Sri Lanka (GSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While Rajapakse expressed guarded optimism, Dhanapala offered a bleaker assessment, noting that in the lack of movement tensions between the Tigers and GSL security forces have increased in Trincomalee and Nagarkovil, while the small but vocal ‘anti-peace’ lobby in the South had become more strident. Dhanapala does not expect the visit of Norwegian Special Envoy Erik Solheim to alleviate the situation, since he has returned to Sri Lanka with no new proposals from the LTTE. Dhanapala asked the Embassy to raise LTTE encroachments in Trincomalee with the ceasefire monitors. Both Rajapakse and Dhanapala agreed that the LTTE seems to have dropped the March defection of Eastern military commander Karuna as a pretext for refusing to negotiate.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

Finance

• The Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), the private sector lending arm of the multilateral Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), continues to display its contempt for the U.S. justice system, despite the fact that the United States government is the IIC’s largest single donor.

• Jacques Rogozinski, former General Manager of the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), failed to appear at a deposition in Washington, D.C. earlier this month on Tuesday, Jan. 15, in the case of Vila vs IIC. The Plaintiff’s counsel, Douglas Hartnett of Elitok & Hartnett, has been requesting Rogozinski’s appearance since October 2012. But the former IIC official left for Mexico immediately after he resigned as General Manager on Dec. 31, 2012. Although Rogozinski had been subpoenaed by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia he did not indicate if or when he would return to the U.S. for a future deposition.

Censorship

• Now, CES itself has put out a press release slamming CNET’s behavior and announcing that CNET won’t be allowed to produce the “Best of CES” awards anymore. Those awards are produced by CNET under contract with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which puts on CES. CEA said it will work to identify a new partner to run the Best of CES awards.

• “We are shocked that the ‘Tiffany’ network which is known for its high journalistic standards would bar all its reporters from favorably describing classes of technology the network does not like,” said CEA President Gary Shapiro in the statement.

Privacy

• It’s extremely difficult for us to imagine the full extent to which our electronic communications and other transactions are monitored and collated in secret government databases and office parks. Most people don’t even think about the pervasive and ever growing monitoring — it’s too big, too scary, too unfathomable. And that unimaginable-ness is a huge part of why: even if we regularly think about the problem, the omnipresent and yet invisible surveillance regimes operate in the background, like malware on our computers. We don’t realize they are there because we cannot see them, touch them, smell them.

• A Kansas City high school will begin collecting hair from students to conduct mandatory drug tests.

• KSHB-TV reports that Rockhurst High School will start the random drug testing during the 2013-14 school year.

• In the debate on reducing the national debt, members of Congress have focused on two options–tax increases and entitlement cuts—both considered unhelpful to restarting a stalled economy. Congress seemingly has forgotten that it has another option for reducing the debt: eliminating waste, fraud and corruption in government programs. Perhaps, Congress knows that the success of such a plan would correspond with the effectiveness of whistleblower protections—protections it has been reluctant to provide to the thousands of whistleblowers who hold security clearances.

• The above video was produced by the US military in 1968, and describes how the Defense Department and civil law enforcement agencies should disrupt and crush civil “disturbances,” or protests. Mostly, protesters just want to “let of steam,” after which they’ll go home. But there are others — “professional agitagors” — against whom the police and military must deploy “more force”; in the video, they look an awful lot like Black Panthers.

Civil Rights

• A federal jury today found former Valdosta State University (VSU) President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for $50,000 for violating the due process rights of former student Hayden Barnes in the case of Barnes v. Zaccari. In May 2007, Zaccari expelled Barnes for peacefully protesting Zaccari’s plan to construct two parking garages on campus, calling a collage posted by Barnes on his personal Facebook page a “threatening document” and labeling Barnes a “clear and present danger” to VSU. Barnes first came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help in October 2007.

• The National Rifle Association is considered one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. The way it operates — including how it recruits and maintains an active membership — have given it outsize influence over lawmakers at the state and federal level.

• The NGO’s World Report criticizes mass incarceration and U.S. record of torture and extrajudicial killing

• Bill talks with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent in Congress for 21 years — longer than anyone in American history. In 2010, Sanders made national news when he delivered an eight-and-a-half-hour speech attacking the agreement President Obama and the Republicans had made to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

• A new International Business Machines Corp. security tool uses Big Data to help CIOs detect internal and external security threats in new ways—and can even scan email and social media to flag apparently “disgruntled” employees who might be inclined to reveal company secrets, according to Sandy Bird, chief technology officer of IBM’s security systems division.

• Richard O’Dwyer is the Shef field stu dent who is cur rently wanted by the USA on copy­right infringe ment charges. Using a bit of old-fashioned get-up-and-go, he set up a web­site called tvshack​.com, which appar ently acted as a sign-posting ser vice to web sites where people could down load media. Put ting aside the simple argu ment that the ser vice he provided was no dif fer ent from Google, he also had no copy righted mater ial hos ted on his website.

• Richard has lived all his life in the UK, and he set up his web site there. Under UK law he had com mit ted no crime.

• How ever, the Amer ican author it ies thought dif fer ently. O’Dwyer had registered his web­site as a .com and the US now claims that any web site, any where in the world, using a US-originated domain name (com/org/info/net etc) is sub ject to US law, thus allow ing the Amer ican gov ern ment to glob al ise their legal hege mony. The most notori ous recent case was the illegal US intel li gence oper a tion to take down Megaup load and arrest Kim Dot com in New Zea l and earlier this year.

• Rios Montt will be the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide.

• A U.S. Justice Department lawyer faced sharp questions today from a Washington judge over the government effort to restrict an author’s ability to challenge whether certain details in his book about the Afghan war should remain secret.

• Retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who penned a memoir titled “Operation Dark Heart,” is pursuing a First Amendment case in Washington’s federal trial court over the government’s insistence that passages in the book contain classified information that cannot be publicly disclosed. In late 2010, Shaffer sued the CIA, the Defense Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

• Shaffer’s case presents thorny legal issues regarding the control and disclosure of classified information in civil litigation. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, at a hearing in the case today to discuss procedural issues, expressed concern that DOJ’s litigation stance will hinder Shaffer’s ability to present his contentions by restricting the information he’s allowed to tell the court.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• If you’re a journalist, blogger, or any other type of written content producer, you have likely found yourself hunting for images to use in your publications. It is important when using stock imagery that you make sure the images are licensed for your use. Simply performing a Google image search and grabbing the first file you find might be easy, but you face the risk of stealing someone else’s non-freely licensed work – which not only can be considered unethical, but can also damage your reputation.

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