● 02.18.13

● Links 18/2/2013: SystemRescueCd 3.4.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• So, for about half the capital cost and half the cost of operation giving the same performance, you should use GNU/Linux rather than that other OS. It makes sense. When you add to these obvious advantages, which alone are sufficient to make the choice, the advantages of freedom from M$’s EULA, and the freedom to run the code, examine, modify and distribute the code under a FLOSS licence, it’s a no-brainer. Use FLOSS. Use GNU/Linux. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Humans may be the most creative species on the planet, but we spend a lot of time doing tedious things.

• Look at the internet: it’s a revolutionary and disruptive technology, with the potential to change education, governments and scientific research, yet most people use it to post comments on YouTube videos of mobile phones being unboxed.

• Here in the free software world, we’re familiar with the collaboration opportunities that the internet brings, and many great applications have been developed by teams of programmers around the globe.

• The very cool tones of Blues News bring word that Natural Selection 2 developers Unknown Worlds have released their ‘Decoder’ IDE – their Integrated Development Environment, or Thing Wot They Used To Program The Game – for free, taking the exciting decision to make it open source as well. The team created Decoder in 2007 using the programming language Lua, and until now they’ve been licensing it out to other developers, using the money to fund the company. Now that NS2 is out, Unknown Worlds have decided to not only remove the licensing fee but to open its innards to the public, with the intention of making it “the best IDE out there!”

• There’s also music on this $1 tier: Be Mine Anniversary Special EP, Recalibrated Vol. 1 (unlocked bonus) and Square Tactics (unlocked bonus)

• …they need just under $20,000 more to hit their target with 12 days to go.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• With Steam officially being released for Linux I took some time out this evening to run a few benchmarks on my Ubuntu 12.04 based Bodhi system to see how a few of the different modern Linux desktops compare in terms of OpenGL performance with the source engine. Please do not take my numbers to be anything super scientific or precise. I simply recorded a short demo using Team Fortress 2, loaded TF2 from Steam under each of the Linux desktops with no other background applications running and ran the demo through a built in source engine bench marking tool.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Distributions

• Several cool Linux items have popped up this week that deserved a mention. Someone over at Mageia is quite excited about the formation of a new documentation team. Just in case one person out there missed it, the Ubuntu family of distros released developemental versions of their upcoming 13.04s and the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS got an update. And for some strange reason, Chris Smart changed the name of Kororaa Linux to Korora Project.

• When your computer starts behaving strangely, won’t boot, or you start getting strange errors that you can’t pin down, a great way to troubleshoot the problem is to boot to a rescue disc and see if you can isolate the problem. It might be your operating system, it could be hardware, but you’ll never know until you boot to some other media to take a look. That said, there are tons of great system rescue discs to check out if you want a tool to save your ailing system. This week we’re looking at five of the best, nominated by you, our readers.

New Releases

• “Community Editions” of Manjaro Linux are released as bonus flavours in addition to those officially supported and maintained by the Manjaro Team, provided that the time and resources necessary are available to do so.

• Due to popular demand from members of the Manjaro community, this now includes a special new release of the MATE flavour for both 32 and 64-bit systems.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• For those people who use Mageia 2 and like to test other OSs or need to keep another OS for work purposes, installing Virtualbox from the Mageia repositories might lead them to a disappointment. The distro seems to only support Virtualbox OSE (as it is the only package in the repos), which does not allow one to enable USB support. Therefore, you end up with a Virtual Machine that cannot read your flash drive.

• To solve this pesky problem, you must understand that the situation springs from having installed a Virtualbox version that does not do what you need or want. You must, then uninstall it and grab the Virtualbox PUEL version package from the Oracle site here.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has hired another well known name from the open-source Linux graphics driver community.

• Rob Clark, the graphics driver developer from Texas Instruments that was part of the OMAP team and also collaborated with Linaro, has joined Red Hat. Rob Clark was the one largely responsible for the TI OMAP DRM/KMS driver, he’s also proposed DRI2 Video, worked on Wayland video playback, and most recently began the Freedreno driver.

Fedora

• One rough spot was the boost rebuild. Boost has a cycle similar to Fedora, so a new major version comes along about every 6 months or so and requires rebuilding all the packages that use it. In Fedora thats around 170ish packages or so. I communicated with the Boost maintainers and we decided the best way forward was to just commit the new Boost and rebuild everything in one day and then fix up the parts that broke.

• Fedora 16 reached its official end of life at the beginning of the week. This means that the release was maintained for 16 months as opposed to the usual 13 months. In most cases, Fedora discontinues support for a release when the next version over has been released for a month. The three-month delay in the release of Fedora 18 explains the longer support cycle in this case.

Devices/Embedded

• Last month saw the review of the Define R4, a big ATX tower that could easily double up as a small server case, with a lot of bells and whistles. This month we’re looking at the Node 304, also from Fractal Design, a small, Mini ITX case with a very minimal aesthetic. Don’t let appearances deceive you though, the Node can do a lot more than you’d think at a cursory glance.

Phones

Ballnux

Android

• Motorola is set to launch a brand new smartphone in Australia which one senior Telstra executive has described as a “game changer”.

• CEO Meg Whitman may be directing HP to get back in the tablet game, and the first example could be an Android device. The move to go with Google’s OS is getting tongues wagging in Silicon Valley, but HP apparently wants in on an OEM trend to offer different operating systems as companies look to stay competitive in a changing computing environment.

• Two researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany have demonstrated a way of accessing an encrypted Android smartphone using a freezer. To access the cryptographic key stored in the phone’s memory, they placed the phone in the freezer compartment for an hour, with the result that the memory content remained – almost literally – frozen. They used a special tool to read the cryptographic key from the phone’s memory (cold boot attack).

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• ARCHOS, an award-winning innovator in consumer electronics, introduces the Platinum range, a new line of tablets that feature a sleek aluminum design combined with the best high-definition IPS displays, quad-core processors and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. There will be three tablets in the range including an 8-inch, 9.7-inch and 11.6-inch, all of which deliver true vivid colors, sharper text and amazingly fast performance.

• So instead of just running a pure Android tablet, you get the option to run your favorite Linux distribution and Android in dual-boot fashion, provided your Linux distribution has an edition for the hardware.

Free Software/Open Source

• PeerJS is a new open source JavaScript library and associated server which is designed to allow web applications running on different systems to contact each other. The developers say that PeerJS completes WebRTC, as the video connection protocol says nothing about how WebRTC-based clients should locate users to connect with.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We are proud to announce that Firefox Flicks will welcome back: Edward Norton (Oscar Nominated Actor), Shauna Robertson (Producer of hit comedies, including Superbad & Knocked Up) and Couper Samuelson (We Own the Night and Sundance Winning short, Whiplash ), to the judging panel, along with new judges Bob Harvey (EVP Global Sales and Marketing for Panavision), Franklin Leonard (founder of the Black List) and Catherine Ogilvie (EMEA Marketing for Dolby).

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The growth of FLOSS seems to be growing exponentially with few corners of the world remaining ignorant of FLOSS and therefor having choice in IT. What a refreshing time in which we live.

Business

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Justice Department officials will give a congressional briefing Friday afternoon on DOJ’s handling of the case against Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was facing years in prison when he took his own life, a congressional aide tells The Huffington Post.

• The aide said that Steven Reich, an associate deputy attorney general at DOJ, is expected to brief House Oversight Committee staffers, and potentially members, on Friday afternoon. A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

Programming

• R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and visualization. The R language is frequently used by statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. The language is mature, simple, and effective. R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. It offers a large collection of intermediate tools for data analysis. R supports procedural programming with functions and, for some functions, object-oriented programming with generic functions. It includes conditionals, loops, user-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.

• Version 5.0 of the Texinfo GNU documentation format is now available and is designed to be more extendable thanks to the new Perl-based converter. According to the developers’ announcement, texi2any can convert Texinfo files to any format that is supported by texi2dvi and makeinfo. To use it, Perl 5.7.3 and its standard Encode module are required.

Leftovers

Science

• A British academic has unearthed a 500-year-old proclamation calling for the arrest of the Renaissance political writer Niccolo Machiavelli.

Health/Nutrition

• The crops under the association’s authority undergo their testing through an Israeli firm called Lab Path, which imports the same equipment used by the FBI and the CIA. Unlike the American intelligence organizations, the Ein Yahav association does not actually use the technology to check for chemical terror in the crops, but the incredibly expensive, sophisticated equipment allows Israeli agriculturists to ensure that the vegetables they sell are entirely residue free and safe to eat, Sade explained.

Security

• A McAfee administrator accidentally revoked the digital key used to certify desktop applications that run on Apple’s OS X platform, creating headaches for customers who want to install or upgrade Mac antivirus products.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Key questions about the credibility of the Afghan attorney general’s office as it prepares to investigate accusations that Kam Air is involved in drug-smuggling.

• Mossad man was not a senior agent and did not do anything ‘iniquitous,’ writes leading Israeli security analyst, blaming Australian intelligence for putting media on his trail

• [...]

• Zygier was not a senior Mossad agent, Ben-Yishasi stressed, but rather filled a role as more of a “support operative.”

• Ben-Yishai speculated that an officer or officers in the ASIO, which called in Zygier and two other suspected Australian-Israeli Mossad agents for questioning months before his arrest — reportedly suspecting espionage activities and abuse of Australian passports — may have leaked the names of the trio out of frustration that the suspects hadn’t cracked, or injured professional pride, or anti-Israeli sentiment. Later, another factor may have been anger at Israel’s reported use of Australian passports in the alleged Mossad assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the Hamas weapons dealer, in January 2010 in Dubai. (A Kuwaiti claim that Zygier was himself involved in the alleged Mossad hit in Dubai has been widely discredited.)

• Palestinian prisoner Samer Issawi, 33, embarked on a hunger strike over 203 days ago to protest Israel’s inhumane treatment of detainees, making it one of the longest hunger strikes in human history.

• A Florida prisoner who escaped in Texas after stabbing a detective with his eyeglasses was shot and killed by law enforcement officers early Saturday after police officers responded to a report of a home burglary near Dallas, the authorities said.

• Believe it or not, there’s a fascinating debate going on over at NRO. First, Charles Krauthammer points to the muddle of the Administration’s white paper, which could have (he argues) just authorized Awlaki’s killing under the laws of war.

• What are the implications of US news outlets concealing the truth about drones in the interest of national security?

• It pays to ask a simple question when confronted with a piece of legislation such as the justice and security bill, which has become so complicated that probably no more than 100 people in the country fully understand it.

• Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan find little ethical defence in the ‘just war’. Each of us struggles to make peace with our actions

• President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the CIA met for an hour with one of the filmmakers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the movie about the agency’s effort to find and kill Osama bin Laden.

• In our system, courts don’t grant indulgences or offer absolution; they decide cases, and they don’t advise the president.

• …special ops are blindly pushing the process of destabilisation forward.

• As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.

• [...]

• But who is to say we should align ourselves with U.S. foreign policy? Though its goals are at times morally defensible, they can also be appalling. The techniques soldiers learn at Yale might be used, for example, to identify candidates for President Obama’s “kill list,” which is itself unethical and likely illegal. If someone lies to protect their friend from ending up on that kill list, is that a lie it is moral to detect? By training soldiers to perform these interrogations, Yale would be complicit in achieving these goals.

• But I’m not aware of anyone commenting at length on the section she titles, “Constitutional and Statutory Concerns about Targeted Killings,” a 5-page discussion of assessing targeted killing in terms of due process, treason, and other laws.

• Different US Senate committees are supposed to do oversight of different federal agencies. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to oversee the Department of Justice. The Senate Armed Services committee is supposed to do oversight of the Pentagon. And the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to do oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the CIA is conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and since this is, to say the least, a controversial policy, the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be doing oversight of that.

Cablegate

• Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has been re-elected for a third term with more than 50% of the vote. His main challenger has admitted defeat.

• ECUADORAN President Rafael Correa has called on Europe to quickly settle the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has been holed up in the country’s embassy in Britain for eight months.

• That should be enough to slingshot him from Knightsbridge to Canberra. Set aside the cheap diatribes and what you think of Julian Assange as a person, or whether he’s done this or not achieved that. The fact is that electoral victory for him later this year would be one of those rare political miracles that make life as a citizen worth living. In a country weighed down by sub-standard politicians, sub-standard journalists and sub-standard freedom of information laws, the political triumph would be great. It would breathe badly-needed life into Australian democracy. And, yes, if the miracle happened, from that very moment the fun party down under would begin.

• WikiLeaks didn’t unleash the end to government secrecy some feared (or hoped for). But Julian Assange, holed up in a London embassy, is planning his next act: running for the Australian Senate.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

• The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives.

• Thousands of environmental activists from across the continent plan to gather in Washington, D.C., tomorrow to launch a two-week protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive pipeline would cross the Yellowstone River, as well as the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest freshwater aquifer in the United States.

Finance

• A senator critical of Wall Street took regulators to task on Thursday for failing to take banks to court over misconduct, coming out swinging in her first public appearance as a member of the Senate Banking Committee.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The next scenes feature backstage shots of the Saudi Arabia “set” – an entire news crew, complete with fake props.

• Turns out Jaco, Rochelle and their crew aren’t in Saudi Arabia at all. They are on a sound set near the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, a faked broadcast that the cable news channel eventually had to quietly admit.

• The video contains clips of Jaco and crew clowning around. Jaco holds up a mock SCUD missile with a rag attached to its tail that acts as a rocket “plume.” The CNN reporter goes on to joke about how “they always call an ‘all clear’” when he orders his “burger and fries.” He clowns around about other things as well.

Privacy

• Ambassador Philip Verveer addresses internet governance and casts water on European cloud privacy concerns.

Civil Rights

• In the face of efforts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), some buinesses have told lawmakers that the CFAA should be used to punish breach of contract where the breacher acted “for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. Such a proposal does not fix the ability of prosecutors to go after people for disregarding terms of service.

• The 2012 NDAA authorizes the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens on U.S. soil, without a warrant or due process if the military simply suspects them of supporting terrorism. This is exactly what the U.S government did in 1942 to 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, and who spent years in prisons without notice of charges, the right to an attorney, or the right to a trial.

• Compare what Hirabayashi was fighting in 1942 with what is now legally codified under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Obama threatened to veto until it included language allowing U.S. citizens to potentially be indefinitely detaine

• The Washington State House is considering bill HB1581, which would create “the Washington state preservation of liberty act condemning the unlawful detention of United States citizens and lawful resident aliens under the National Defense Authorization Act.” There are 21 co-sponsors, with representatives from both major parties: Representatives Overstreet (R), Santos (D), Shea (R), Taylor (R), Buys (R), Condotta (R), Scott (R), Upthegrove (D), Fitzgibbon (D), Blake (D), MacEwen (R), Crouse (R), Wylie (D), Pollet (D), Pike (R), Harris (R), Kagi (D), Moscoso (D), Warnick (R), Magendanz (R), and Stonier (D).

• Indiana, South Carolina both bucking idea of arresting, holding Americans

• Chris Hedges, a former correspondent for the New York Times and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is lead plaintiff in a suit brought by a group of reporters and activists against the Obama Administration over the NDAA provision authorizing indefinite detentions without trial. He was one of a group of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the New York Times’ coverage of global terrorism.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• The Python Software Foundation is in the midst of a trademark battle. A UK company is trying to trademark the name Python for software, services and servers everywhere in Europe. If successful, that would make it impossible for Python to continue to use the name in Europe, despite using it now for some 20 years. They have issued a call for help, which I’ll reproduce here to make sure everyone knows exactly how you can help.

Copyrights

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