● 03.25.13

● Links 25/3/2013: GNU/Linux Migration in Boston Education, KDE in Outreach Program for Women

Posted in News Roundup at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Campus fees just keep rising, like our ever-mysterious “educational operations fee,” which really is just tuition under another name. Parking fees, health insurance fees (if you opt for UMass Boston’s Aetna plan). This gets all the more frustrating with the knowledge that we can make smart choices which would drop costs without sacrificing the quality of education.

• I propose we first equip our UMass Boston computers with Linux: a free, enterprise-level, secure operating system perfectly suited for a large educational institution like ours, and replace costly, slow software like Microsoft Word with free, comprehensive office suites like OpenOffice.

• First–Linux? What?

• I consider money paid to M$ for permission to run the computers owned by the government a huge waste since GNU/Linux is available to manage resources on computers for $0 + the cost of installation. Really, the default software should be GNU/Linux just for the savings. $millions is a lot of money to waste. I expect if I had a complete picture the total would be closer to many hundreds of millions annually and then there are licences for the non-free applications on top of that. It’s all a waste considering the government could hire a few developers to keep all computers up to date using GNU/Linux for a fraction of the cost.

Desktop

Applications

• Keeping a diary of your daily life is an activity that is held dear by many people. It represents a good way of storing personal or business information on a day-to-day-basis. Keep track of notes and thoughts through the day, organize and secure memories, ideas, business transactions, emails, accounts, future plans, contact lists, and even secret information.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Numantian Games have announced Lord of Xulima, a turn-based rpg in the good old 2D isometric style. It will appear on Windows first and after that on Mac & Linux.

• Plethea Games are currently seeking $100000 on Kickstarter to help fund this unique voxel based sandbox, adventure rpg. This one looks to be pretty damn exciting with crafting, building etc kinda like Minecraft on steroids. They plan to release on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I almost feel tempted to start with a quote from the Wheel of Time series, something like there are no beginnings and ends, but it was a beginning. Indeed, the guys behind the elementary OS have created their own version of what the next, future desktop for Linux ought to be.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE’s Calligra Office team has been working on the Android port of the app for a while. There were test builds available in .apk format which can be installed on the Android devices, now the app in available in the Google Play store as Coffice.

• KDE will be participating in Gnome’s “Outreach Program for Women (OPW)” this year. Women participation in the FLOSS development has always been a major concern and Gnome Foundation started the program to encourage more women developers to participate in the open source development.

• The OPW is inspired by Google Summer of Code and offers internship to those female developers who are newcomers and or are relatively new to the FOSS community.

• KDE will – for the first time this year – participate in the “Outreach Program for Women”. This was originally started by GNOME, but has also other participating organisations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fedora and others.

• With KDAB as our sponsor we will be offering one internship. This is in no way only limited to coding, but includes user experience design, graphic design, documentation, web development, marketing, translation and other types of tasks needed to sustain a Free Software project.

• Ignoring that it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny (there have been many “truly free software operating systems”), this brought to mind a spectacular feature of freedom: it abhors singularity. Indeed, monopoly positions are exceedingly rare in free systems.

• [...]

• Free software intrinsically exists in a free society: it is mandated in the licenses. The only ways around this are to artificially create singularities by monopolizing the talent pool (hiring all the developers) or keeping all decision making power in one central place that is guarded by veils of inscrutability and a lack of accountability. People who think this way are not the sort of people I would like to see directing free software; it is a recipe to curb the intrinsic freedom brought by free software.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Looking, testing, discussing and analyzing Gnome-Shell 3.8 new features is fun for everyone, but apart from what you see and use directly there are many improvements and new things that happen in the infrastructure of Gnome that is GTK and GLib.

• So I will keep this short… I assembled a task force to work on GNOME Music based on https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Music. Development is really coming along nicely.

• Cesar Garcia Tapia had started a Vala development of it. We used lots of it in the new re-implementation which is in JS, this is due to the fact that.

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• In preparation for this year, a total of 25 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of -14% from one quarter earlier. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully.

• [...]

• Due to the fact that Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has witnessed a declination in interest from the smart money, we can see that there was a specific group of fund managers who sold off their full holdings in Q4. Interestingly, Brett Barakett’s Tremblant Capital dropped the biggest investment of all the hedgies we key on, worth an estimated $40 million in call options. Daniel Benton’s fund, Andor Capital Management, also sold off its stock, about $28 million worth. These moves are important to note, as total hedge fund interest fell by 4 funds in Q4.

Fedora

• Rawhide is the development version of Fedora which includes the latest upstream packages. At some point in the Fedora release schedule a fork (called branched release) is created to become the next stable Fedora and the rawhide version continues on its own.

• As of today Fedora Rawhide contains packages that will be part of both Fedora 19 and Fedora 20. If you want to take a peek at the next Fedora version, Rawhide is what you need, but bare in mind though that it can be unstable so in the event of a system crash you should know what to do to recover it.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 0.17.1, is out.

• One thing I really like about Linux Mint is the refinement and completeness they render to each and every release. I have been using Linux Mint since 2009 and except for the repetitive art-work, I have never been disappointed so far. Normally Linux Mint releases mimic Ubuntu and mostly require fresh installation. I tried upgrading a few but with no luck and hence, had to do a fresh installation to make things work. However, in 2012, Linux Mint deviated from convention and brought a semi-rolling release LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). LMDE is based on Debian testing and doesn’t require ever to re-install the OS. I tried the Mate version in 2012 and was highly impressed with aesthetics as well as performance.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Non-LTS releases to get only nine months after version 2014′s 13.04

• Canonical today through software engineer Robert Bruce Park confirmed plans to cancel the Twitter app for Ubuntu Touch.

• Let’s face it, Ubuntu cops a lot of criticism. From beginners, Linux veterans, developers and even Ubuntu enthusiasts. We’ve all been critical to Ubuntu Linux at some point. Whether the Ubuntu Developers pump out a good, bad or average release; the online criticism comes in thick and fast from all angles of the internet. With the current release of Ubuntu 12.10, the overall consensus seems to be negative. I have to admit, this shocks me a little. I found 12.10 to be a fast, clean and very good release.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• MiiPC has taken to Kickstarter in an effort to gain backing for what it describes as an $89 Android-powered family computer.

• Designed by Young Song, the founder of eMachines, the MiiPC is hoping to redefine the PC market by launching the first (mainstream) family computer on Android, which will supposedly allow parents to give their young children access to the Internet under their supervision from a companion mobile app.

• It’s what science fiction dreams are made of: brightly colored, sphere-shaped robots that float above the ground, controlled by a tiny computer brain. But it isn’t fiction: it’s the SPHERES satellite, and its brain is an Android smartphone.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• operating systems based on the open-source platforms Linux and Mozilla’s Firefox will be hitting the market this year, challenging the stranglehold of the two market leaders, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

• Android and Apple account for more than 90 percent of the surging smartphone market, and third place is being contested by BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, reports the Herald Sun.

SaaS/Big Data

Business

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 23rd, held during the LibrePlanet 2013 conference at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two awards were given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

Project Releases

• Select Identify is now vastly improved. Supporting multiple columns and LIMIT, coupled together with the other improvements of this release, makes it an invaluable tool during support and maintenance of a Salesforce org. How else could you check the status of a lot of objects, say Cases or Accounts? The object inspector is always handy too.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Microsoft said the Federal Bureau of Investigation is secretly spying on its customers with so-called National Security Letters that don’t require a judge’s approval, a revelation Thursday that mirrors one Google announced two weeks ago.

• Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft announced that the type of accounts the feds are targeting with National Security Letters, warrants or court orders include Hotmail/Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365.

Programming

Leftovers

Hardware

• Some years ago, we had (one may say) good, classic brands of computers, and others not so good. The price of ones and others vary. An original IBM PC was very expensive (all computers were, at the beginning), but clones came cheaper.

• Quality was also quite well divided by boundaries, and followed the quality and durability of the equipment. A Toshiba, or HP, Compaq, etc., machine was considered of good (hardware) quality, and last as long as what you expected for the money you had paid. Maybe some of you still have one of those running a minimal GNU/Linux distribution today because the hardware lasted. (Image Credit: http://www.whitesettlement.lib.tx.us)

Health/Nutrition

• What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind.

Security

• Revelation of the early public key cryptography work of James Ellis, Malcolm Williamson and Cliff Cocks at GCHQ occurred in 1997, eleven years after this secret 1986 review cites them. Whitfield Diffie, one of the inventors or PKC, commented in 1999 on the British precursors:

• Some time ago, while I was having lunch with the Director of Security of one of our NATO allies and we were discussing the rash of books on intelligence agencies such as the CIA and Britain’s MI-5 and MI-6 that were flooding bookstores, he asked, “Why aren’t there more best selling books on INFOSEC?” I replied, “It’s because the best days we have in INFOSEC are when nothing exciting happens in the outside world. When we are successful, which we are most ofthe time, the result is a non-event.”

• …participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the challenge.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Citing classified security authority documents, the Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday that 129 members of the far-right scene aided the so-called National Socialist Underground (NSU) over the years.

• According to a report in the Bild newspaper on Sunday, security officials have compiled a list of 129 people who are suspected of helping the group, accused of murdering eight ethnic Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.

• The existence of the cell, which called itself the Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU), only came to light by chance in late 2011 after two members committed suicide in the aftermath of a botched bank robbery and a female accomplice set fire to an apartment used by the gang.

• The Hammered Music Festival, organised by an Australian white supremacist group called the Southern Cross Hammerskins, will be held at a secret, private location in Carrara on May 4.

• ‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country.

• British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense. It claimed they were best understood as ‘unwilling to subordinate personal interests to communal ones’, ‘ready to do most things for money’ and ‘ready to blame other people’. A memorandum entitled ‘The Persian Character’, issued by the Persian Oil Working Company the same year, defined Iranians as dishonest, vain, unprincipled and motivated by personal gain.

• A new interactive graphic, which uses the Bureau’s drone data, has brought a fresh perspective to the CIA’s nine-year drone campaign in Pakistan.

• A team of developers has pulled together every known drone strike and casualty from data provided by the Bureau and New America Foundation. This data has been represented in an interactive timeline which allows the viewer to see how the campaign builds over time, as well as the number of people killed.

• In January 2012 officials from Fairfax County, Va., proposed that the FBI move it’s headquarters to “a half-empty warehouse” in the area. The government-owned site, which lies just outside of Washington D.C., could handle a planned $1.2 billion complex and would bring nearly 12,000 jobs to the area. But the plan has hit a snag: the CIA already lives there.

• Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts.

• Holding up his own CIA smartphone, he reminded the audience that “Even if you turn off your cell phone you can be tracked.”

Cablegate

• Sydney, Mar 25 (ANI): Former American military analyst and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has backed US Army private accused Bradley Manning for spilling secrets to website WikiLeaks.

• PENTAGON Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg waited decades for someone like Bradley Manning to follow in his footsteps.

• He hails the US Army private accused of spilling secrets to website WikiLeaks as a champion of truth and not a betrayer of his country.

• Just over one year ago, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) sent a letter to the military judge presiding over Pfc. Bradley Manning’s court martial that decried the “lack of openness” in proceedings. It condemned the fact that “documents and information filed in the case” were “not available to the public anywhere.” It complained about the failure to give the public proper “notice of issues to be litigated in the case.”

• The US Army did not respond appropriately to the letter. The military court at Fort Meade rebuffed an attempt by a CCR attorney to make a statement on press and public access to proceedings on April 24. The same day the military judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, issued a ruling that invoked Nixon v. Time Warner, a case involving press access to the Watergate tapes, to justify secrecy in the proceedings, and she said the Freedom of Information Act was available to the press if they wanted records. CCR filed a lawsuit in May about a month later (which I signed on to as a plaintiff).

Finance

• Just your ordinary run of the mill Russian billionaire oligarch in exile who had so much money he was terminally depressed… or just the opposite, and the first tragic casualty of the Cyprus capital controls which are about to eviscerate a whole lot of Russian wealth (and ultraluxury Manhattan real estate prices)?

• JILL MOUNTFORD: Lucy, can you explain to us what is going on right now? The Health and Social Care Act has been law now for almost a year, and we thought surely that’s all going to go ahead. All of a sudden there is a lot of movement, a lot of anxiety and a lot of agitation around something that’s happening in parliament that’s going to have a big effect on the National Health Service. What is it and why?

• Goldman Sachs won a huge victory yesterday. A federal court ruled that Lisa Parisi, a former managing director, must take her gender-discrimination lawsuit against the firm to arbitration.

• With the ruling, Parisi — who had sued Goldman in 2010, along with two other women — can kiss her chances of victory goodbye. Arbitration is where plaintiffs’ dreams go to die, which is probably why it was in her Goldman Sachs employment contract.

• These plaintiffs aren’t renegade feminists. They’re mainstream financial types who played by the rules and hoped to reap the rewards. The men who fought them are simply corporate types who prefer to keep Wall Street an old boys’ club.

• Some of the allegations in the suit are straight out of “Mad Men.” During their work at Goldman Sachs, the women were subject to sexual banter, which is what passes for conversation among traders, as well as to come-ons and sexual assaults. They were passed over for promotions and bonuses, excluded from some male outings and included in others designed to embarrass them. A celebration for new managing directors was held at a topless bar. Afterwards, a married male colleague pinned one of the plaintiffs to a wall and sexually assaulted her.

• Goldman Sachs has been granted approval to build a new “banking factory” in the City, ending a protracted bid to develop the site that was held up by protected murals on the existing building.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• And like other giant corporations it already has personhood.

• What makes Google so all-powerful? So Visible? So very Google?

• Are various administrations and Yes, I’m thinking Obama’s, simply afraid of it and the people who run it?

• Is it grandiose?

• Is it a part of the Gobal Elite?

• If Google was Good …

• Google could be everything it touts itself as being — a good company providing genuine services, constantly trying to improve the ‘user experience’.

• It could revolutionise the world of business by being completely transparent in all respects, completely open in its dealings with the people it depends on — you and I — and completely up-front about what it does and how it does it.

• It certainly has enough in the way of hard cash and other reso

• Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 3/21/13), claiming victory in the “War on Christmas,” declares that the new battle is the “War on Easter.”

Censorship

• The Leveson Inquiry was set up to address “the culture, practices and ethics of the press, including contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police”. Our views diverge on whether the outcome of the Leveson process — and the plans for a new regulator — are the best way forward. But where we all agree is that current attempts at regulating blogs and other small independent news websites are critically flawed.

Privacy

• Under CEO Larry Page, Google has made a practice of “spring cleaning” throughout all the seasons so it can narrow its focus. Reader was just a another bullet point on the latest closure list.

Civil Rights

• We’re told that politicians are concerned, exempting small and medium size businesses from the Bill could lead to “gaming”. That is, a large publisher could create small subsidiaries to avoid the Leveson sticks applying to them. We believe this can be avoided. The Companies Act anticipates “gaming”, and includes protections against it.

• The American Civil Liberties Union describe the 2012 NDAA as “codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president – and all future presidents – to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield,” it continues. “The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

• Quiggle made it a written policy last May that he would not cooperate with this portion of the NDAA in his position as constable.

• Even the U.S. secretary of defense has expressed misgivings about the NDAA.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• It seems suing for trademark infringement is really a prevalent game in the business world. Oko International, the maker of a wide range of watches and timepieces sold under the brand name ‘Android,’ is suing the giant Google for trademark infringement.

• A recent rumor in many tech sites is that Google is reportedly building a smartwatch to compete with Apple and Samsung.

Copyrights

• While Spain actually has a fairly vibrant culture and entertainment industry, Hollywood has really had it in for the country for some time, in part because Spanish courts had a more evolved recognition of secondary liability protections, such that they ruled that linking is not infringement, and that neither was basic file sharing. Hollywood flipped out, said all sorts of nasty things about Spain, and US diplomats basically handed the Spanish government a new copyright law. The first few attempts to pass the bill failed, after the public spoke out, economists explained how it would hurt the economy rather than help and even the head of the Spanish Film Academy noted that the American movie industry seemed to be fighting the internet and the public.

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