● 03.27.13

● Links 27/3/2013: Document Freedom Day!

Posted in News Roundup at 10:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Have you been looking for a job, or extra work on the side, and getting ever more frustrated even though the job market is turning up? While the market is improving, it’s still a tough environment out there, especially for college graduates who have little experience on their resumes. The good news is that a number of recent surveys and studies show that open source skills are in increasing demand at many organizations.

• There are thousands of charities. Aids Research, Cancer Research, the British Heart Foundation. This fragmentation is killing our chances of actually curing Cancer. If you funnel all the money from Aids prevention, Comic Relief, Leukaemia and so forth there is no doubt in my mind we’d have cured Cancer by now. If we coerce the scientists working on making Shampoo into curing Cancer we’d have an even better shot. We might even save more lives in the long run. Don’t question how useful Shampoo scientists are to curing Cancer, just accept they are scientists and trust me.

• The huge rate of growth of GNU/Linux noticed for February is continuing in March. The increase from February to March was almost 1%, a growth rate of 11% per month. It’s taking share from that other OS and even with a slow-down the share may reach ~10% soon. Any system-wide changeover likely will go in stages so this may just be the beginning of something much larger. There are well over 1 million computers in Venezuela so 1% of share is over 10K PCs. Munich, eat your heart out…

• The traditional and most common method of installing Linux is by burning the installation ISO image to a CD or DVD. But with many laptops, notebooks, ultra notebooks, subnotebooks shipping without an optical drive, installation via USB flash stick has become the most common method for installing Linux on these types of computers. That’s were a Linux USB installer come into play.

Desktop

Server

• Back in October Adapteva wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to build a Raspberry Pi-inspired $99 Linux supercomputer. Next month the company expects the first Parallela boards to be in production — just in time to show off at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.

• Here, CEO Andreas Olofsson gives us a preview of his talk at Collab, the benefits of parallel processing, and his company’s quest to make parallel computing available to the masses. Have a burning question he doesn’t answer here? Join us for a live Twitter chat with Andreas (@adapteva) Thursday, March 28 at 11 a.m. PST. Follow the conversation and submit questions with the hash tag #LiveLinuxQA.

• Annual Survey of World’s Largest Enterprise Linux Users Shows Strong and Consistent Growth Due to Demand for Supporting Cloud Initiatives, Greenfield Deployments and Mission-Critical Workloads

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Defragfs optimizes files on a system, allowing videos to load faster and large archives to open in the blink of an eye.

• Released shortly after Upstart 1.8 is systemd 199. Features of systemd 199 include systemd-python gaining an API to expose the libsystemd daemon, SMACK setup logic improvements, behavior changes to several components, a few kernel sysctl variables being set by default, new tunables, a new libsystemd-bus module that implements a near-complete D-Bus client library, journald improvements, and much more.

Graphics Stack

• Yesterday I reported on Wayland and Weston being forked as “GH-Next” as a new project that sought to drive new Linux desktop innovations. Now today, enter Northfield/Norwood.

• The GH-Next initiative was announced by Scott Moreau as basically a playground to experiment with future Wayland/Weston developments and to particularly focus on “desktop bling” and other graphical desktop effects. After one year of working on Wayland with little to show, Moreau decided to do this GH-Next project.

• The VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver, which has long been in development but has yet to reach the mainline Linux kernel, now supports HDMI.

• Displays can now be driven over HDMI with this open-source VIA KMS/DRM driver that’s largely developed by just James Simmons of the Linux kernel community.

• The latest accomplishment of Marek Olšák is developing a “heads-up display” for Gallium3D DRI2 drivers for showing off various attributes of the current system state like the frame-rate and CPU load.

• Marek developed a new Gallium3D module to draw transparent graphs and data on top of whatever OpenGL applications are running. This allows an overlay of system vitals like the frame-rate, CPU load, number of pixels rendered, and other interesting technical information over any application. The work also allows for drivers to expose driver-specific information too.

• Display server expert Daniel Stone explains what is really happening with the future of graphical display protocols on Linux.

• I’ve spent the last two weekends with the GTK+ Wayland backend, trying to make some progress towards day-to-day usability. While there are still some big gaps, things are looking pretty ok now.

• The state of the GTK+ tool-kit for the Wayland Display Server is now ready for day-to-day use.

• Matthias Clasen of Red Hat has been one of several developers recently working on the Wayland back-end to the GTK+3 tool-kit. Clasen spent most of the past two weeks working on Wayland GTK+ support and getting it into shape for “day-to-day usability” by Linux desktop users.

• Another round of updates have gone into the impressive multi-platform multi-renderer Unigine Engine.

• Unigine’s AppProjection plug-in has seen some love, which is used to create multi-projector setups for virtual training and simulation systems. The plug-in supports geometry distortion correction, soft-edge blending, color correction, and other features. Within the latest development blog posting by Unigine are some really nifty photos showing off Unigine on multi-projector curved screens. The AppProjection plug-in now supports panorama, linear, and fisheye rendering.

• The drm-intel-testing Git branch has been updated with new code that’s ready for testing and eventual merging into the Linux 3.10 kernel.

• It was just one week ago that AMD released the Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 driver while now it has been succeeded by Catalyst 13.3 Beta 3.

• The Intel Linux graphics driver should now work better when overclocking your Intel graphics core thanks to a new Linux kernel patch.

• Geometry shaders are one of the few remaining features to be implemented before Mesa can officially declare itself in compliance with the OpenGL 3.2 specification. Fortunately, work on the Gallium3D side is ongoing.

• Support for OpenGL Geometry Shaders within Mesa/Gallium3D has been a work-in-progress for many months by numerous developers from different organizations. The most recent “GS” patches to be published were by Zack Rusin this morning at VMware. Zack is one of the developers to be working on Gallium3D/Mesa Geometry Shaders support for the longest time.

Benchmarks

• Recent compiler testing of the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 SVN code-base has yielded some significant performance boosts for some common C/C++ benchmarks against LLVM/Clang 3.2.

• With running some new Phoronix benchmarks for comparing against the recently released GCC 4.8, I’ve been tossing some LLVM/Clang Linux x86_64 compiler configurations in the mix too. Interestingly, there’s some very notable rises with LLVM/Clang 3.3 SVN over LLVM/Clang 3.2 stable.

Applications

• (5 votes)

• OpenShot, a very popular video editor for Linux, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to hasten its next phase of development, which will include a Macintosh and Windows port of the program.

• Jonathan Thomas, the lead designer and programmer for the project, is eager to hire some extra programmers to assist with this phase of the program’s development. As an open source advocate, I’m thrilled about it.

• Collabora has announced the release of their GStreamer OpenMax IL wrapper plug-in for the GStreamer 1.x multimedia framework.

• Open Media Acceleration, a.k.a. OpenMAX, is the royalty-free set of programming interfaces for audio/video/image processing. OpenMAX is maintained by the Khronos Group and provides some similar functionality to video APIs like VDPAU and X-Video for hardware processing.

• The new plug-in release by Collabora supports the stable GStreamer 1.x API/ABI with a generic OpenMAX IL implementation as well as special support for the OpenMAX features of the Raspberry Pi.

• Cairo-Dock 3.2 has been released and it improves multi-screen support for the animated application launch bar/dock. There’s also a new applet and plug-in.

• Cairo-Dock 3.2 was announced on Friday with improved multi-screen support, a new screenshot applet, a new sound effects plug-in, and distant folders (e.g. FTP and Samba) as well as encrypted disks are handled in the shortcuts applet.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• There are masses of changes, far too many to list here but here are a few interesting/important ones!

• The Urban Terror open-source first person shooter has been updated to version 4.2.010, with the new version bringing a variety of improvements throughout the game.

• GameLaunched went live last week and so far is featuring only 4 projects, but surely more will follow in the next days.

• Aside from the Urban Terror game update, there’s also a new version of Red Eclipse this weekend.

• A few weeks ago, we built our own Steam Box with several goals in mind. We wanted to publish a clear, comprehensive guide to help our readers build their own Steam Box – but we also wanted to learn more about the hardware, the pricing, and how well Steam works on Linux. This is why we focused on a conservative, low-end gaming computer rather than a powerhouse.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Terminology 0.3 has been released, which is the Enlightenment project’s own terminal emulator built atop EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Library) components. Terminology is written from scratch and with its v0.3 release it boasts some truly original and innovative features for this terminal emulator. There’s embedded support for previewing videos/images and other new inline capabilities.

• Enlightenment’s Terminology 0.3 introduces support for splits, tabs, and inlined videos and images. Besides just videos and image files, there’s also support within this terminal emulator for SVG and PDF files.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE contributor Jeff Mitchell has written a blog post on what he says “almost became The Great KDE Disaster Of 2013″ – the project narrowly avoiding the loss of all of its Git repositories. The KDE Project hosts 1500 code repositories for a number of open source applications that are affiliated with the desktop environment and all of them were nearly wiped out last week due to a combination of a software fault and a problematic mirroring setup. The KDE developers are now looking into ways of avoiding such a potential disaster in the future.

• There was almost “The Great KDE Disaster Of 2013″ when the KDE project almost lost all of their 1,500+ Git repositories.

• Last week the virtual machine running git.kde.org was taken down for security updates. When the host came back up, which handles the 1,500+ Git repositories for the project, there was EXT4 file-system corruption. The KDE back-up system mirrors the Git trees of this server, but it turns out that these mirrors were also pulling in the corrupted Git repositories.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you dislike the GNOME 3 release series, the new 3.8 version of the popular desktop environment won’t change your mind. However, if you do use GNOME 3, you’ll appreciate the enhancements. Essentially, 3.8 is an incremental release, in which the project does what it has always done best — making dozens of tweaks that affect the user experience (generally for the better) without making any major changes to how it works.

• GNOME 3.8 should be making its way to the package repositories of major distributions later this week. Those who want to satisfy their curiosity sooner can download the release candidate image. Alternatively, they can download the still-in-development Ubuntu 13.04, add the repositories ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging as sources, and then enter apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-shell-extensions. Release notes are available so that you know what to look for.

• GTK+ 3.8.0 has been released ahead of this week’s GNOME 3.8 desktop release. GTK+ 3.8 supports the Wayland 1.0 protocol, provides Broadway HTML5 server advancements, performance improvements, and much more.

Distributions

• Fenrus Linux is a new Linux distribution being led by a well known Intel Linux developer. Goals of Fenrus Linux include focusing upon an optimal developer experience rather than world domination and also maximizing the performance and power management of the open-source operating system.

• Fenrus Linux is largely the work of Arjan van de Ven, a well known Linux developer from the Netherlands who is employed by Intel and its Open-Source Technology Center. Arjan has made — and continues to make — many upstream Linux contributions while Fenrus Linux is a new pet project.

• Today, when I checked the archives of the websites of the Linux distros, I was really surprised to see how different these sites looked back then. Here are the screenshots of the websites of some popular Linux distros when everything just started.

• Today, I experienced an upset incident which Kali Linux freenode channnel banned me for I just told them the truth about the fact that one of the developers (he is muts) to delete some of the bug reports.

• In my opinion, why they not rated the entries as invalid instead of deleting it. However, I was banned. Therefore, I deleted what I posted in the forum of Kali Linux (http:www.kali.org). Later learnt that I was also banned for the Kali forum.

• When one hears the word calamari, they usually think “yuk!” …or I do anyway. Others will still inevitably think “fried squid.” So, when such an unusual name for a Linux distribution popped up on distrowatch.com, it caught my attention. Then when I saw it was based on openSUSE, I had to give it a boot.

• It’s not often you see a distribution based on openSUSE. But, as it turns out, it was built using SUSE Studio. With that one can design an installable live CD or USBs as well as a cloud system. You can pick and choose whatever software your heart desires and, like a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle, your distro magically appears. So, it doesn’t feel quite like a “real distro” compiled from scratch while your better half threatens divorce, buuut, it’s close enough to get on Distrowatch’s waiting list. So, let’s take a peek.

New Releases

• Version 3.0.0 of OpenELEC has been released, which is a Linux distribution with a multimedia bent that is shipping with XBMC 12.1 Frodo.

• OpenELEC 3.0.0 is designed around XBMC Frodo 12.1 while other key parts of the Linux distribution’s stack has also been updated.

• The OpenELEC Linux distro came out of beta with its official 3.0.0 version this week, and according to its makers nearly every part has been upgraded since the 2.0 release last year. This release of the media center package is based on XBMC 12.1 and as such includes its assortment of updates, as well as specific improvements for the Raspberry Pi, MC001 devices, Apple TV and AMD hardware. If you’re on 2.0 you’ll need to manually update to the new version, hit the source link for a full changelog and instructions on how to get it all working.

Slackware Family

• The next version of Slackware Linux will drop MySQL in favour of MariaDB. The change was announced on the front page of the site and in the project’s change log by Patrick Volkerding. Slackware is following a trend within Linux distributions of switching away from Oracle’s MySQL to the MariaDB Foundation’s MariaDB, a fork of MySQL created when Oracle acquired Sun and, with it, MySQL. Community fears of Oracle closing MySQL or charging licence fees for the community edition have prompted distributions such as Fedora and also openSUSE to switch to MariaDB as their default database. Slackware appears, though, to be going further – it is completely replacing MySQL with MariaDB rather than just selecting it as a default.

Red Hat Family

• The European Commission (EC), the central governing body of the EU, has in the past several years pursued ICT policies that increasingly have been good for “openness” in the areas of standards, data, and software. Its recent announcements on cloud computing have continued this theme.

• Red Hat (RHT) will continue to be a growth story as long as its core business of migrating companies from older Unix servers to its open source Linux operating system continues to flourish.

• That’s the conclusion from some analysts who follow the enterprise software company, which is set to release its fiscal Q4 numbers after the market close on Wednesday.

• Wall Street anticipates that RHT will earn $0.30 according to Yahoo and 21 cents according to Zacks.com for the quarter. iStock expects the application software company to report earnings that will meet Wall Street’s consensus number. The iEstimate is $0.30 or $0.21 based on the source.

Debian Family

• It wasn’t all that long ago that Canonical extended the support period for Long Term Support (LTS) releases of its Ubuntu Linux from three years to five, but last week it made a move in the opposite direction for its non-LTS software.

• For those of you who have been waiting for a review, I think I may have said before that my writing would shift more to science-y stuff and away from distribution reviews. However, that does not mean that reviews will stop entirely. I’m on spring break now and have a little more time to do these reviews, so today I am reviewing Linux Mint MATE 201303, which came out earlier this week.

• One of the more peculiar Linux distributions to emerge recently has been SprezzOS, which debuted with claims of being the most robust, performant, and beautiful Linux. When it launched it didn’t generate much attention, but recently the SprezzOS developers began rewriting Debian’s APT software.

• Earlier this month I reported on the SprezzOS Raptorial project that is rewriting Debian APT with a focus on performance. Raptorial is meant to be a drop-in replacement to APT that focuses on parallelism and project art. The initial program to be published was “rapt-show-versions”, which was much faster than apt-show-versions on modern hardware.

Derivatives

• Let’s start this off with a brief review of what Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is and what it isn’t, followed by what this release is and what it isn’t.

• LMDE is a Linux Mint distribution, containing all of the nice Mint tools (installer, updater, menus and other utilities), plus lots of preloaded and preconfigured packages, but built on top of Debian GNU/Linux, rather than Ubuntu as the numbered/named Mint distributions (currently 14/Nadia).

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Richard Stallman sent to Lista Nacional de FLISOL, the FLISOL mailing list. He asks them not to promote or distribute Ubuntu at their events, and it’s in Spanish…

• I’m among the first to admit that when I find a Linux distribution that I like, it takes a lot for me to be impressed with any of the alternatives. I’ve looked into countless distros, such as Arch, Fedora and Linux Mint, among others. Yet at the end of the day, I kept finding myself coming back to Ubuntu. And in many ways, I find this comical since I was one of the early naysayers about their use of Unity and other controversial decisions. But something happened over time – I found myself growing comfortable with the way Ubuntu does things. With my busy schedule, a distro that “just works” appeals to me.

• Canonical, in concert with the Chinese government and local developers, is building an Ubuntu-based, open source operating system for China.

• China, with a population of some 1.3 billion people, is without doubt the mother lode of operating system markets in terms of number of potential users, with the potential to cascade a dramatic expansion in reach for Ubuntu and Linux. In other words, this could be big.

• Unity has serious performance issues. Improvements are slowly starting to trickle in, but even then, the current state of affairs leaves a lot to be desired. Making Unity faster and slicker should be Canonical’s top priority in my opinion, and that is why I am still a big proponent of “Project Butter” for Ubuntu. Let’s just hope that, Unity’s performance will get the deserved attention it needs to compete with the best out there. In the meantime, here are some nice little tweaks to significantly improve performance of Unity in Ubuntu.

• Today marks the beginning of the end of me having an Ubuntu machine at home, and I have mixed feelings about that. By the weekend the last machine that I do have, my network file server and general dogsbody machine, will have been replaced and its replacement will not be running Ubuntu.

• The primary purpose of the machine is to be a point of backup for my laptop and other devices, as well as a host for the large and valuable content collections such as my photos, music, purchased TV shows, movies, etc.

• Continuing with the work to refine and improve how we build Ubuntu in an open, transparent, and collaborative way, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some work going on to improve the regularity of our planning and the benefits this brings.

• A mobile OS which scales up to the full desktop. But does the beta work?

• A weekly status update on Ubuntu Touch has been shared that illustrates more work on their key applications and more ports of this phone/tablet-oriented Ubuntu Linux heading to more hardware.

Flavours and Variants

• The elementary OS team has released the first version of AppCenter, a tool used to install and remove software, designed to be beautiful, fast and lightweight.

• The changes to Ubuntu Unity and Gnome3 set me into motion in search of a replacement Distro. Last year I tried many Distros looking yet something was missing. I didn’t realize what it was until I tried Fuduntu in its 2013.1 version released in January.

• I tried it and truthfully, I didn’t expect what I found. That name just threw me because it’s not a silly Distro. Quite the opposite, in fact, I discovered a ‘sleeper’. This product, developed by +Andrew Wyatt, has all the earmarkings of a thorough-bred commercial grade Distro, yet is community-based managed by a small dedicated collective team who understand the ‘fundamentals’.

• Linux Mint is beautiful, beautiful beyond words. Not only is it well-thought out, stable, and well-behaved, but it looks damned good while its at it.

• The Linux Mint team has announced the release of its Debian based edition of the popular GNU/Linux based operating system. LMDE comes in two flavors – Cinnamon and MATE. This edition brings MATE 1.4 and Cinnamon 1.6.

• The version also brings installer improvements (graphical timezone and keyboard selection, support for installation on multiple HDD, slideshow, webcam and face picture support). It also brings improved Device Driver Manager and Plymouth splash screen among many other.

Devices/Embedded

• As usual, we’re rushed off our feet and we don’t think we’ll have enough time to arrange a live podcast this week. We’ll try our best to make it happen next time.

• The OpenELEC developers have released version 3.0 of their minimalist multimedia Linux distribution. The Linux system serving as the basis of the “Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center” – or OpenELEC for short – has been completely updated and now supports even more hardware. The system only comes to between 90 to 130 megabytes, and there are now ISO images specifically for the Raspberry Pi and Arctic MC001 barebones computers.

• We celebrate the first birthday of the Raspberry Pi with an exclusive interview with its creators covering its first year on sale and goals for 2013

• The trend of mini computers is still going on. A new kid just showed up into the family of cheap, mini computers. MiiPC, a mini-Android based PC aimed to provide a safe environment for children to use the internet under the watchful eye of their parents.

• This little device is designed for large screen connectivity and is optimized to provide a true keyboard and mouse experience, essentially offering your kids a basic PC experience. And the price is quite affordable, under $100.

Phones

• A handful of new smartphone platforms are expected to become available 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.

Ballnux

Android

• A company developing a low-cost personal computer based on Android launched a Kickstarter project yesterday, to help get the device into production. After just one day, the MiiPC project has already achieved Kickstarter pledges of more than $10,000 beyond its $50,000 goal.

• Steve Kondik, founder of the CyanogenMod project and creator of its popular alternative ROM for Android devices, has left Samsung. Kondik revealed that he is no longer employed by the company as an aside in a Google+ post concerning the Galaxy S4 hardware. The well-known Android hacker, who also goes by the online name Cyanogen, started at Samsung’s mobile division in August 2011 to work on “making Android more awesome”. It is not currently known what Kondik’s future plans are; when queried he replied “ask me in a couple of months”.

• Cyanogenmod founder Steve Kondik has quit Samsung after spending almost two years with the Korean giant. Steve joined Samsung in August 2011. Steve’s G+ profile now says that he works at Cyanogenmod.

• Wave Systems has released a Pico-ITX motherboard based on Freescale’s single- and dual-core i.MX 6 processors, which integrate ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs plus 2D and 3D GPUs. Unlike SODIMM-style COMs (computer-on-modules), iWave’s i.MX6 Pico ITX SBC offers easy connection of audio, video, Ethernet, and USB I/O, without requiring a custom baseboard.

Free Software/Open Source

• But choosing open source as a platform does offer some help in solving both budget and user needs. In the case of NAS solutions, you get to pick what hardware to use, and you have lots of options when it comes to customization.

• The two options under consideration in this article are FreeNAS and OpenFiler. Both have been around for a while and have many of the features you would expect in a business-class storage system. While FreeNAS is completely open source, OpenFiler has taken the approach of offering a base system for free but charging a fee for some additional features. You can still put together a usable system with the free version, but you might want to consider some of the paid options for the improvements they offer.

• “There is definitely a place for OX Documents — if anything, we need more choices,” said Google+ blogger Brett Legree. “Would I use OX Documents? Yes, I would. I like the design and overall user experience, and since it can be used with a wide range of file formats, as well as with local files via what they call ’round-trip editing,’ I could use it everywhere.”

• Deployment of new and advanced technologies, support for an increasing number of devices, increasing virtualization and the general expansion of business have dramatically altered the volume and nature of the workloads beings handled by data storage systems.

• Hot off a new round of funding, Big Switch Networks says it now has open-source and commercial software to help companies scale out networks more easily and cheaply with commodity switches, further threatening the likes of legacy network gear sellers.

• In yet another recent example of the increasing global reach of open source solutions, Opengear, which develops remote management solutions based on open source technology, has posted impressive growth figures for 2012–while also bragging about other major achievements in the realms of awards, product innovation and channel engagement. And partners seem to be taking notice.

• The BBC is to share its TV Application Layer (TAL) with the connected TV sector at large through the open source repository GitHub.

Web Browsers

Chrome

SaaS/Big Data

• As we’ve reported several times, Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, is gaining prominence in the cloud computing world. Now, Mirantis has open sourced its own library of configuration and deployment tools for OpenStack under an Apache 2.0 license. The library is called Fuel, and should be of interest to many people doing cloud deployments.

• A year ago, Citrix walked away from its open source OpenStack effort called Project Olympus, instead putting its CloudStack technology into the Apache Software Foundation.

• For the past year, CloudStack has been in the Apache Incubator, a preliminary process for new projects at the Foundation that aims to validate that a project can follow the ‘Apache Way’ of getting things done. CloudStack has now officially graduated from the Incubator and is now a Top-Level Project at Apache.

• Apache has approved CloudStack as a top-level project, showing how the project is moving beyond the control of Citrix

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Why? Because we need to improve the interoperability between software in order to communicate better and give everyone the opportunity to use the software they want to use to produce documents.

• During the live event, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison proclaimed the new SPARC servers to be the fastest computers in the world.

• It’s a claim we’ve heard before from him – in reference to his company’s x86/Linux based Exa-class systems.

Business

Funding

BSD

• I recently installed NetBSD on my RaspberryPi. Although not all the hardware is fully supported, enough is there to make it a usable system. It’s nice to have my RPi provide the same system experience (configuration, organization, etc.) as other NetBSD machines I maintain. A big “Thank you!” to the developers that made this possible.

• One concern I have, however, is that the boot drive is an SD card. Solid state cards have limited write cycles and I worry that, since most Unix systems assume a mechanical drive which allow essentially infinite writes, my SD card will not last very long. To measure this, I monitored the disk writes using ‘iostat’ and was disappointed in how many writes were occurring on an otherwise idle system.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• In a ceremony at last weekend’s LibrePlanet 2013, FSF president Richard Stallman presented the Free Software Award 2012. The Free Software Award is given out each year by the Free Software Foundation to one person for their contribution to Free Software and to one open source organisation or project for its social benefit.

Project Releases

• The new version, 1.8, of event daemon Upstart, which is used by Ubuntu and other distributions as an alternative to SysV init and launches the various system services during the boot-up process, can now also monitor files and directories. If a particular file or directory is created, modified or deleted, Upstart starts a related job. This means, for example, that services can be automatically restarted when their configuration file is changed; until now, administrators had to manually restart the service using initctl. The Upstart Cookbook has examples of how the new function can be used.

Public Services/Government

• Politicians in the German states of Berlin and Lower Saxony are again pushing for the use of free and open source software solutions by the states’ public administration, the IT trade press reports.

• Next week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — has tapped into the White House.

• Two members of President Barack Obama’s technology team will highlight the annual conference, which has grown into a national event over the past five years.

Licensing

• At SCALE 11x in Los Angeles, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy presented a unique look at the peculiar origin of the Affero GPL (AGPL). The AGPL was created to solve the problem of application service providers (such as Web-delivered services) skirting copyleft while adhering to the letter of licenses like the GPL, but as Kuhn explained, it is not a perfect solution.

• The history of AGPL has an unpleasant beginning, middle, and end, Kuhn said, but the community needs to understand it. Many people think of the AGPL in conjunction with the “so-called Application Service Provider loophole”—but it was not really a loophole at all. Rather, the authors of the GPLv2 did not foresee the dramatic takeoff of web applications—and that was not a failure, strictly speaking, since no one can foresee the future.

Openness/Sharing

• By using badges, we hoped to extend the life of the conference, reveal important exchanges that often go unnoticed at large professional development events, and encourage new behaviors and exchanges among participants. In order to accomplish this, we took advantage of Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure, and created badges on badg.us that could then be easily displayed and shared using Mozilla’s Open Badge Backpack management platform.

Open Data

• For many, Gov 2.0 is about putting government in the hands of citizens. Whether it’s a mobile app alerting residents to a local meeting or checking social media networks to see which roads are clear for the morning commute. The term should be defined primarily by its utility in helping citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the commons, according to a recent article on the subject by Alex Howard on GovFresh.

Programming

Leftovers

• Conservative MP Mark Warawa (pictured) asked the Speaker of the House to intervene Tuesday after party whip Gordon O’Connor struck him from the list of backbenchers who were scheduled to deliver a member’s statement last Thursday.

Security

• Today Andrew Tyrie MP and Anthony Peto QC have published their follow-up paper on the Justice and Security Bill for the Centre for Policy Studies. It makes for harrowing reading.

• The Bill now heads back to the Lords today, where it started. The House of Lords voted for major amendments, introducing more discretion for judges and making the use of CMPs a last resort. The Government removed most of these amendments during Committee stage, in most cases by a single vote, despite repeated warnings that the Bill’s proposals constitute a radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles.

• As Andrew Tyrie MP says: “The Lords did good repair work on the Bill, but the Government has undone much of it. The Lords now have a final chance to restore their original sensible amendments and further improve the Bill. I very much hope that they will do take it.”

• Martin Roesch, founder of IPS vendor SourceFIRE, discusses the need for network visibility, web application firewalls and what it should all be called.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• You know what, Paul Farhi? Skeptics are aware that it was possible to “connect the dots,” because they did so, in real time–citing the same exceptional journalists whom you now cite to prove that the media as a whole were doing their job.

• But the real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense of what reality is like. By this basic standard, the corporate media failed.

• The wreck of a long-lost Nazi submarine, the U-486, has been found off the west coast of Norway, more than 60 years after it was sunk.

• The remains were first spotted north of the port of Bergen last year but have only now been confirmed as the missing U-boat, the Bergen Maritime Museum announced today.

• The U-486 last sailed on April 12, 1945, when she came under attack from a British submarine. A torpedo broke the German vessel in two, sending her and all 48 crew onboard to the bottom of the seabed.

• In 2007, John Kiriakou was settling into a lucrative life as a former spy. His fourteen-year career as a C.I.A. officer had included thrilling, if occasionally hazardous, tours as a specialist in counterterrorism. In Athens, in 1999 and 2000, he recruited several foreign agents to spy for the United States, and at one point was nearly assassinated by leftists. In Pakistan, in 2002, he chased Al Qaeda members, and when Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda logistics leader, was wounded and captured, Kiriakou guarded his bedside. (Kiriakou recounted many of his exploits in a colorful memoir, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror.”) In 2004, he retired, and soon took a job with the accounting and consulting firm DeLoitte. He worked in the field of corporate intelligence and advised Hollywood filmmakers on the side.

• The cloud is old news, it’s “so three years ago,” and Big Data “was so last year,” but according to the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, this year is about “how to get value” from Big Data. At the GigaOM Structure Data conference, Hunt presented, “The CIA’s ‘Grand Challenges” with Big Data” and I highly recommend that you take about 30 minutes to personally listen to it.

• Human Rights First today joined with Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Kay Granger (R-TX) to call on the Department of Defense to uphold its legal responsibility to end its business relationship with Russian-state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, an enabler of the mass atrocities in Syria. Russia, through Rosoboronexport, has served as the chief arms supplier of weapons to the Bashar al-Assad regime since the beginning of the two-year Syrian conflict that has left more than 70,000 dead.

• Guest speaker Josef Korngruen will tell his story of escape from Nazi rule as a child. Korngruen was born in Austria to Polish parents. It was only after his parents renounced their Polish citizenship and became stateless that they were issued papers that allowed his sisters and him to travel—one sister to Israel, one to America and Josef to England on the Kindertransport.

• Delays in Poland’s investigation into whether the CIA ran secret jails on its soil could have caused evidence to be lost and given security services time to cover their tracks, according to a submission to the European Court of Human Rights.

• How much difference does it make for a Pentagon finger to fire a Hellfire missile, rather than the CIA’s? Some, but not enough

• As the Obama Administration looks to reform its drone program, it should focus on assessing its actual success rate.

• Americans should assess whether Langley engaged in torture in its war against al-Qaida. The country’s honor is at stake, not just the competence of its primary intelligence service. Neither the CIA nor national security is likely to be harmed if the behemoth were released with the necessary camouflage for operatives, tradecraft and foreign intelligence services.

• The number of drone strikes has decreased dramatically in recent months. The last drone strike took place on March 10. Drone strikes by the United States are deeply resented in the country and considered a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

• County commissioners made it loud and clear Tuesday they want no part of drone testing at the airport.

• The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza gave his most recent “Worst Week in Washington Award” to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose assault weapons ban got stripped from a Democratic gun control package last Tuesday for lack of support. Fair enough, but if nonhumanoids can be eligible for the award (and why discriminate?), I’d say that drones had the “worst week in Washington” last week.

• Federal regulators still have until 2015 to come up with drone rules, but some local and state governments don’t want to wait that long. In February, Charlottesville in Virginia, became the first US city to ban drones for two years. While these bans are mostly symbolic and would be overruled by a federal drone law, they highlight the anxiety that surrounds drones and doubts whether the FAA – an agency much more experienced in dealing with safety than privacy issues – can produce drone legislation that addresses privacy concerns. Those concerns are real, agrees Joanne Gabrynowicz, director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. “But we can come up with a regulatory system. If we did it for satellites I am confident we can do it for drones. But it will be difficult and there a lot of interests involved.”

• New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s been on a roll lately. First he announced he wanted to ban super-size sodas, then it was ear-buds and cigarettes. Now the mayor has announced he may actually allow something. Look up; the Big Apple may soon be called the big brother.

• “What’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building?” Bloomberg asked when comparing aerial drones to the thousands of security cameras already placed around New York City.

• A year ago, as the presidential race was taking shape, The Washington Post’s pollster asked voters whether they favored the use of drones to kill terrorists or terror suspects if they were “American citizens living in other countries.” The net rating at the time was positive: 65 percent for, 26 percent against. Today, after a month of Rand Paul-driven discussion of drone warfare, Gallup asks basically the same question: Should the U.S. “use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against U.S. citizens living abroad who are suspected terrorists?” The new numbers: 41 percent for, 52 percent against.

Cablegate

• Former chairperson of the US National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, received the 2013 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence on January 23 for his role overseeing the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

• The NIE report’s finding that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program gave lie to years of US-Israeli anti-Iran rhetoric, and has been credited with preventing a pre-emptive war against Iran.

• US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show that the NIE also hampered Western efforts to pass a fourth United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution against Iran.

• New York Times media critic David Carr blasted the United States military’s “eyedropper” approach to releasing information about Pfc. Bradley Manning’s public pretrial in a column on Sunday, March 24. Chronicling the hurdles reporters have faced covering the trial, Carr observed, “A public trial over state secrets was itself becoming a state secret in plain sight.”

• According to Carr, the military has released only 84 documents out of nearly 400 requested under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents released were so redacted the critic wrote they were “mystifying at best and at times almost comic.” Carr also noted that the court did not provide written transcripts from the proceedings.

• The late I. F. “Iffy” Stone was a talented and insightful columnist whose beat was the Washington political arena, and he operated on a premise that every investigative reporter would do well to emulate.

• 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

• Wikileaks has had a transformative effect on global politics and our attitudes to government power and responsibility.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The hit 2000 film Erin Brockovich, which tells the story of how a novice legal clerk holds a huge corporation liable for contaminating a town’s drinking water with the carcinogenic chemical hexavalent chromium, or chromium (VI), ends in justice for those harmed. But as it turns out, Hinkley, California, the real-life town featured in the movie, is still contaminated.

Finance

• Reports on land grabbing reveal that investors target control of both the land and the water beneath. Today’s “water barons”- multi-billionaires, financial institutions and corporate multinationals- are increasingly investing in water resources globally. Over-extraction and large land purchases in the Ogallala Aquifer and Great Lakes region in the US are proof that water scarcity is a growing problem not just in the Global South. Furthermore, efforts to track the water footprint of companies and other water-related risks, such as the “water disclosure project,” could actually backfire by providing information to investors interested in water-grabbing. Thus, regulatory mechanisms at the national and international level are needed to control large-scale land (and water) investments threatening the lives and livelihoods of local communities dependent on these resources.

• Although deposits under 100,000 euros will be spared, deposits over 100,000 euros will be seized and subjected to an as-yet undetermined haircut–with the confiscated money going to bail out the gambling losses of the aforementioned reckless idiots who run some of Cyprus’s banks. This seizure, needless to say, will dampen the enthusiasm of rich depositors for keeping money in banks that get themselves into financial trouble. And because many, many banks in Europe have gotten themselves into financial trouble, this will create a general state of unease among rich depositors throughout the Eurozone. And it should wig out some bank lenders, as well. After all, never before in the history of this global financial crisis has a major banking system allowed depositors to lose money, no matter how reckless and stupid and greedy their bank managers have been. And only rarely have bank lenders–those who hold bank bonds–been asked to pony up.

• As of today, Detroit is under the control of a governor-appointed Emergency Financial Manager (EFM). The Motor City is the largest district in the nation to have its voters and elected officials sidelined by this new experiment in “crisis management.”

• A JPMorgan Chase employee stepped onstage at a black-tie gala on Wall Street last week to accept a “best crisis management” award given by an investor relations magazine. The bank, which was recently the subject of a U.S. Senate investigative hearing and an ongoing FBI probe into $6.2 billion in trading losses known as the “London Whale” fiasco, is not the subject of ridicule — but praise – from its cronies on Wall Street.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the investment bank nicknamed “Government Sachs” because of senior executives who have moved into public posts, won’t be entering politics itself.

• A shareholder proposal that the New York-based company run for office instead of funding political campaigns was discarded, according to a letter last month from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which agreed the firm can exclude the measure from its annual meeting.

• Fox News can afford to have economists to give its opinion masters factual information. It is obvious they have no interest in that. O’Reilly could not possibly believe what he is saying. Not only is there evidence from Europe as was stated by Professor Wolff, but it was true here in America.

• A Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) “urgent bulletin” being sent to Embassies around the world today is advising both Russian citizens and companies to begin divesting their assets from Western banking and financial institutions “immediately” as Kremlin fears grow that both the European Union and United States are preparing for the largest theft of private wealth in modern history. According to this “urgent bulletin,” this warning is being made at the behest of Prime Minister Medvedev who earlier today warned against the Western banking systems actions against EU Member Cyprus by stating:

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Within days of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a challenge to an Arizona voting registration law that had been adopted as a “model” by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), two more states advanced bills that appear to track the ALEC/Arizona template.

• On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (ITCA), which will decide whether Arizona’s refusal to register voters that do not provide proof of citizenship is in conflict with federal law.

• PEOPLE WATCHER Mark Zuckerberg has political ambitions to shake up the US immigration system. Zuckerberg is rallying a posse of technology politicos to help him create a lobbying group that will campaign – that is, throw money at – liberalising the US immigration and visa system.

• The Washington Post has been accused by a journalist of spiking a piece he was commissioned to write about the US media’s failures in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

• Greg Mitchell, a veteran journalist and author (see here), claims his assigned piece for the Post was killed and replaced by an article that defended the media’s coverage.

Censorship

• A Dietrich science teacher is being investigated by the state’s professional standards commission after a complaint from parents over his teaching methods.

• Tim McDaniel is being investigated after a complaint was filed by a handful of parents who objected to how McDaniel taught the reproductive system, Dietrich Superintendent Neil Hollingshead said.

• “It is highly unlikely it would end with his dismissal,” Hollingshead said. “Maybe a letter of reprimand from the school board.”

• According to McDaniel, four parents were offended that he explained the biology of an orgasm and included the word “vagina” during his lesson on the human reproductive system in a tenth-grade biology course.

• “I teach straight out of the textbook, I don’t include anything that the textbook doesn’t mention,” McDaniel said. “But I give every student the option not attend this class when I teach on the reproductive system if they don’t feel comfortable with the material.”

Privacy

• Microsoft handed over online user account details of 2000 Australians to law enforcement agencies last year. Google and other software companies do the same thing.

• Under CISPA, companies can collect your information in order to “protect the rights and property” of the company, and then share that information with third parties, including the government, so long as it is for “cybersecurity purposes.” Companies aren’t required to strip out personally identifiable information from the data they give to the government, and the government can then use the information for purposes wholly unrelated to cybersecurity – such as “national security,” a term the bill leaves undefined.

• In response to her letter to the Financial Times, ORG and Privacy International have written to Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Sarah Ludford urging her to support stronger privacy rights in the upcoming and crucial LIBE Committee vote.

• The US government is planning to scan private firms’ web use and email communications, as part of a bid to prevent cyber-attacks which has been requested by President Obama.

• The government is proposing to extend existing powers, so it can analyse the communications of organisations such as banks, utility providers and transport companies, to prevent online attacks on the country’s infrastructure, according to US security officials.

• The move is in response to an executive order signed by President Obama in February that calls upon the owners and operators of critical US infrastructure to “improve cyber-security information sharing and collaboratively develop and implement risk-based standards”.

• It’s hard being the Department of Homeland Security. Foreign agents are constantly trying to slip inside the D.H.S.’s computer systems. But America’s hotshot hackers either go for the private sector ($$$) or somewhere you can go on the offensive, like the N.S.A. (which, let’s face it, sounds super-badass).

• So, according to the New York Times, the agency, desperate for recruits, is now making like a college football program and hunting for recruits at high school hacking competitions

Civil Rights

• A handful of Israeli teenagers go to prison every year because they refuse to serve in their country’s army on grounds of conscience.

• Nineteen-year old Natan Blanc from Haifa has been through this seven times in four months.

• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Sunday: Sometimes government does know best. And in those cases, Americans should just cede their rights.

• Congress has the gall to discretely slip another clause into the #NDAA 2013 that repeals the World War II-era legislation…

• The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will not be enforced in Las Vegas. Rejection of the unconstitutional provisions of that controversial federal act was the purpose of a resolution passed by the city council just after noon on March 20.

• By a vote of 5-2, the council passed R-18-2013. The resolution, offered by Ward 2 Councilman Bob Beers, will now be presented to the Clark County (Nevada) Commission.

• So yesterday we broke the news about a proposed CFAA reform bill that, rather than fix the problems of the CFAA made the law much, much worse. It added computer crimes as a racketeering issue, increased sentences and made just talking about a potential CFAA violation the equivalent of having committed it. Bad stuff all around. There was one section, however, that we said was slightly good. We noted that they ever so slightly rolled back what would constitute a crime for “exceeding authorized access” listing out a few qualifications that needed to be met — including that the information obtained was valued over $5,000, that you had to be targeting private information and that the access was done in furtherance of a crime. Based on the bill as written, I had assumed that all of those elements needed to be present to qualify.

• The USA Patriot Act codified many of the wishes of statists into law. Whether it is the act’s regulation of bank accounts, the broadening of the government’s authority to deport citizens, or the authorization of roving wiretaps and non-consenting business record searches, the act is only the first brick in the construction of the modern police state. We have also had the unfortunate passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which appropriates and divides up defense and war spending, but contains a blatantly unconstitutional clause that gives the government the authority to indefinitely detain American citizens. And now – even after the intense political backlash against the NDAA 2012 – our Congress has the gall to discretely slip another clause into the NDAA 2013 that repeals the World War II-era legislation that prevents the government from using state-approved propaganda, and would make Washington immune to any court cases challenging them.

• All that Americans have held on to and relied on is being assaulted. Obama won’t stop until America is forced into submission to his dictatorship plans and the rest of us locked up or killed. What survives the Obama battering rams will be taxed and redistributed to his seduced worshipers. They will be slaves and controlled like mutant little toys, but they will thank Obama and give him their worship.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.