● 07.16.13

● Links 16/7/2013: Linux 3.11 Name, Another NSA Scandal

Posted in News Roundup at 12:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Cemented as a cornerstone of IT, the open source OS presses on in the face of challenges to its ethos and technical prowess

• WASHINGTON: German inventors have developed a new pen that gently vibrates every time it senses a spelling mistake or sloppy handwriting.

• Lernstift is a regular pen with real ink but inside it, is a special motion sensor and a small battery-powered Linux computer with a Wi-Fi chip.

• Lernstift is a regular pen with real ink, but inside it is a special motion sensor and a small battery-powered Linux computer with a Wi-Fi chip.

• This is a contributed posting for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Peter Linnell, Linux Engineer at SUSE.

• As the hype and competition for big data analysis continues to grow, today’s data scientist has a vast array of tools and technologies at their disposal.

Desktop

• So far this year, market research news has been beyond dreary for PCs and PC equipment makers. But, as sales of PCs slip, sales of new-generation devices, including tablets, are on the rise. And, among PC alternatives, it turns out that Chromebooks running Google’s Chrome OS platform, are bucking the downward trend.

Kernel Space

• Server virtualization advancements made with ARM server support, performance improvements, and tech preview for Open vSwitch

• Late Sunday afternoon, Linus Torvalds released the first release candidate for the new Linux 3.11 kernel.

• Substantially improved support for the power management features of modern Radeon graphics cores is among the major new additions of the now available first release candidate of Linux 3.11. For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from “Unicycling Gorilla” to “Linux for Workgroups” and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993. After the Tuz interlude in Linux 2.6.29, this is the second time that Torvalds has changed the logo since the introduction of Git.

• New kernel version pays homage to Windows past

• New feature will wake the system from sleep mode in six seconds.

• Immediately after the release of Linux kernel 3.9.10, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on July 13 that the first maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.10 kernel series is now available for download.

• Linus Torvalds is well known for his use of colorful language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and he’s not the only one that uses questionable language that some might considering threatening.

• For the last 20 years, I can’t remember anyone actually standing up to Linus (or the other colorful devs) saying that’s just not right — until today.

Graphics Stack

• A stable programming interface for display servers and colour management support are two of the major new features in the now available versions 1.2 of Wayland and Weston. The developers say that the stable server API allows a Wayland 1.2 compositor such as Weston to work with more recent versions of Wayland; in their release email, they mention that having a stable API became necessary because external Wayland compositors are beginning to appear. The protocol for Wayland clients was declared stable in version 1.0.

• The latest release of the Wayland protocol and support library along with the Weston compositor is now out. For the GNOME community this release is particularly interesting:

Applications

• A project is aiming to build a Wine-like compatibility layer for Linux operating systems that would allow them to run OS X applications.

• There are some good news for people who are using Geary Mail Client. Yorba has included a search functionality in the upcoming version 0.4 (unknown date release) that comes to solve the strongest weakness of Geary since day one.

• Conky Manager, a graphical font-end for managing Conky configuration files, has been updated to version 1.2 yesterday, getting 4 new Conky configurations / themes, as well as some new options.

Instructionals/Technical

• I managed to drop the ball yesterday and didn’t have time to write up another text-based system monitor.

Wine or Emulation

• Almost every regular desktop Linux user I know keeps a virtual machine with an old version of Windows around. I’m included in this group, I still run Windows XP in a VM, and will until it no longer works or the need for it is gone. I expect that the need will be the first to go, as the Windows only applications that I use are migrating off to web apps, like the latest release of VMware’s Vcenter server. This personal, anecdotal evidence is what I see as the final failure of the Wine project. Wine promised us the ability to run Windows applications on Linux, but in my experience very few actually do.

• Today in Open Source: Windows RT is a waste of time for developers. Plus: Check out Linux 3.11 features, and a new Linux Mint 15 KDE user is born.

Games

• Get tons of awesome PC/Mac games for dirt cheap during the Steam Summer Sale; Here are recommendations

• Leadwerks, a kickstarter project aims to introduce advanced games development in 3D to the Linux platform which has been witnessing greater acceptance among 3D game developers. However, this comes as a surprise development considering Leadwerks did not start off as ideally suited for developing games for Linux. Rather, it will be ported over to Linux which will ensure the the development of any type of 3D game. Also, it will perhaps be pretty much safe to assume the games will also be easily ported to Windows and OS X since a Linux only compatibility will mean too much of a Linux focused approach and hence a narrow user base.

• Looking for a job in the game development field? If so, and if you happen to be well versed in Linux with a minimum of 2 years of professional software development experience, Crytek would very much like to make your acquaintance. That’s because the German video game company is hoping to port its CryEngine 3D engine over to Linux, further underscoring the growing importance game makers are putting on open source platforms.

• Valve’s epic ‘Summer’ sale has boosted sales of some games as much as 600%, with the sale still only in its beginning days.

• NOWHERE looks like one trippy game that the developers class as a “a procedural single player, open world, sandbox game”.

• I play video games on a PC. I know this may come as a surprise to some of you – after all I typically don’t blog about gaming that much at all. I mean it’s not like I have a dedicated category for PC game reviews or anything like that. It would be silly, don’t you think. But yes, I am a PC gamer, a firm believer in the One True Gaben (may he deliver HL3 unto us as it was foretold at the dawn of time) and I actually never really felt the need to own a console.

• Last month we shared slides from a presentation about Linux as a gaming platform. After that generated much interest, the developer of this presentation has revised his slides.

• Some days ago Left 4 Dead 2 has been released on Linux on Steam Gaming Platform. The game was released on 2009 for many gaming platforms such as Xbox and Windows, but if like me you like to play games on your Linux box, this is a good opportunity to play one of the most famous FPS cooperative survival Zombie games.

• Universe Sandbox where you can spawn massive stars, launch asteroids, and manipulate gravity with just a few clicks, currently Windows only but the developers have said something interesting for the next version.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• In part 1, I had a look at the GTK based options out there, In part 2, the Qt based Desktop Environments.

• I do have an addition for the Qt environments, even though I haven’t had a look yet, it is certainly intriguing. The team behind LXDE is currently in development of a Qt version of their Environment. I haven’t seen anything other than some screen shots, but it may be worth looking at, it is currently in a “Beta” state, and likely not ready for everyday use, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

• Timothée Giet has received the 2013 Jury’s Akademy Award for “Shaping the future and community of Krita”. The other Akademy award recipients were Eike Hein for Best Application with Konversatiion, Vishesh Handa for Nepomuk and Kenny Duffus for all his work on Akademy.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In the previous posts of this series, we looked at the history of our community and the reasons which pushed us toward answering “What is a KDE Project?”. We also discussed which process we followed which ultimately gave birth to more than a definition in the form of the KDE Manifesto.

• On the eve of the event inauguration, KDE e.V Annual General Meeting was held followed by a party at Hika Ateno in Caco Viejo which gave the attendees opportunity to meet fellow contributors face to face who they know since a long time only through IRC or email.

• While other Free software projects drift apart, splitting up in multiple forks that stop talking to each other, differentiate based on the wrong reasons, what we see here during Akademy is projects growing closer to each other. This is a good development, so let’s look at it a bit more detailed.

• On the eve of the event inauguration, KDE e.V Annual General Meeting was held followed by a party at Hika Ateno in Caco Viejo which gave the attendees opportunity to meet fellow contributors face to face who they know since a long time only through IRC or email.

• Last time i showed off the ownCloud-News client i’d written for Blackberry 10 using QML/cascades. After i did that, the API for the news client changed in the development version, meaning that if I released it, it wouldnt work once people upgrade to the latest version.

• After trying to connect to Mohammed Nafees, our GCi student winner from India, I finally was able to talk with him this afternoon. I was asking about his experience with KDE, and if he had gotten the help and support he needed. The enthusiasm of his reply was a bit surprising. He said he had chosen KDE because it is more than a community. When he couldn’t think of the word he wanted to use to finish his sentence, I said that to me, KDE is family. He said, “YES! KDE is family.”

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• First, it was Ubuntu which innovated in the scrollbars creating a nice overlay, but making them unusable for those like me using a track pointer or a mouse without wheel.

• Now, with GTK-3.0, the scrollbars have also changed their default behavior and when clicking above or below, the scrollbar moves immediately to that position.

• For whoever doesn’t know it yet, this is a service that let you installing GNOME Themes (GTK, Shell, Icons, Cursors, Fonts, Wallpapers?) directly from your web-browser with a single click, similar to extensions.gnome.org page.

• I wasn’t going to post on this and I uploaded it just to test it ourselves. But I did because this thing is surprising fast and it is worth to see it! First time I tried it my self (in a production server) few minutes ago, and it takes less than 2sec [1] to install a Theme!

• A File Manager is just a File Manager and nothing more. File Manager duties and responsibilities are well defined and almost unchanged (with the exception of Online Storage) through the last 30 years. Therefore when you are trying a File Manager, you don’t really examine what it does, but how good does it.

• The Clutter 1.15.2 development release is now available for download and testing, as announced by the GNOME developers on July 10, 2013.

• Wayland 1.2 adds a stable server API among other major and minor updates, and is still poising itself as the successor to the xserver.

Distributions

• SuperX is a Linux-based distribution that does not like to advertise its Linux roots. Hence, the official website, which only speaks about the ultimate computer operating system and superior alternative solutions. Moreover, it boasts an enterprise like approach, with heavy emphasis on support. Somewhat slightly intrigued, and bolstered by a warm recommendation by a friend, I gave it a chance.

New Releases

• PCLinuxOS Mate ISO updates are now available in both 32 and 64bit flavors. These ISOs are small enough to fit on a standard 700 mb CD or a small usb key.

• I’m happy to announce our 2nd preview build of Manjaro 0.8.7 which we will release in late July. This first build is fully installable and stable. You will find only a minimalistic XFCE 4.10 Desktop on it. One of the biggest changes you might see is the use of Whisker Menu which replaces the standard XFCE menu.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS project earlier released maintenance updates for several of their popular varieties of Linux operating systems. Version 2013.07 of MATE, LXDE, and KDE MiniMe editions commonly feature Linux 3.4.52, Xorg 1.10.4, and GCC 4.7.2. Maintenance releases fix minor and security bugs while providing for new installs, but loyal users are encouraged to update through the update manager.

Arch Family

• i pulled the slow magnetic hdd running gentoo from my thinkpad r61i; swapped it with a 2009-era 32GB ssd running archbang, a variant of arch linux.

• it’s been several years since i last tried arch, and i wanted a desktop environment installed & preconfigured. archbang offers a minimal openbox desktop with a few basic programs: web browser, terminal, text editor, file manager, etc.

Red Hat Family

• Conn. & RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Cigna(NYSE: CI), a global health service company that offers health, life, accident, dental, and disability insurance, and related health services, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cigna has been named the 2013 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Cigna was recognized during a ceremony at Red Hat Summit for its innovative use of Red Hat technologies to revitalize the company’s IT infrastructure and solidify the company’s position as a leader in the health care industry. Cigna also won an Innovation Award in the “Outstanding Open Source Architecture” category.

• Last week, Red Hat, unveiled the costs for its bundle of products and services aimed at giving it a strong foothold in the cloud computing market. The bundle includes Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which combine the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS (RHEL) and the KVM hypervisor plus Red Hat’s own distribution of OpenStack. If you look closely at the pricing, it’s clear that Red Hat wants to attract users of its existing Linux platform and support services to its cloud platform and associated support. Now, there are questions arising about the strategy.

Fedora

• The latest offering from the Fedora Project, Fedora 19, was released on July 2nd. The new version carried the code name “Schrödinger’s Cat” which seems appropriate. Fedora, being a cutting-edge distribution, is an unpredictable beast and one never knows, prior to installing it, if the release is going to bring joy or heartache. Looking through the release notes for Fedora 19 I got the impression this version was to be a fairly small evolution from Fedora 18, which was released earlier this year. The release notes highlight such desktop features as the inclusion of GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.10, LibreOffice 4.0 and packages for the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. Less obvious changes include improved boot times and enhancements to the systemd init software. The release notes also mention that users who run logical volume management (LVM) file systems will be able to take advantage of file system snapshots. These snapshots will be taken by the yum software manager during updates to allow administrators the ability to rollback to previous package versions. We’re also told yum now has delta-update capability built in directly and enabled by default. This means the package manager only downloads changes to software packages rather than downloading the entire package again.

• For the release of Fedora 18 the installation tool was completely overhauled, which also resulted in a different layout to the former Anaconda installer. As with every subsequent release more bugs are squashed it may eventually mature, in the meantime unintuitive and inconsistent layout prevails, coupled with the odd crash. Here I walk you through the installation of Fedora 19 from Live image. You may also want to look at the official installation guide but it’s missing the section on encrypting drives.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• That box you see above? It’s a quad-core ARM-based PC running Ubuntu called Utilite. The desktop system, made by Compulab, will be available next month starting at $99. While there are plenty of Android dongles built on ARM SoCs out there, few (if any) can truly offer a PC-like experience. The company — best known for its Trim Slice, Fit-PC and MintBox products — wants to change this.

• Forget your Raspberry Pi and all of those Android dongles: this quad-core, ARM-based box claims to offer up a PC-like experience for just $100.

• CompuLab announced a tiny mini-PC based on a 1.2GHz, single-, dual-, or quad-core Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip. Supported with Ubuntu and Android, the 5.3 x 3.9 x 0.8-inch Utilite offers up to 4GB RAM and up to a 512GB internal SSD, as well as dual gigabit Ethernet ports, dual serial ports, five USB 2.0 ports, and dual-head HDMI and DVD-D, all starting at $99.

• The base model will feature a Freescale i.M6 single-core processor, but dual and quad-core versions will also be available. The system will also support up to 4GB of RAM, up to 512GB of built-in storage thanks to an mSATA solid state drive slot, and up to 128GB of removable storage via the SDXC card slot.

• In the Utilite mini-PC, if you’re all about working with open-source software, small form factor, and more ports than you know what to do with, the team at Compulab may have created just the monster you’re looking for. This week the creators of the Utilite have announced not only that the machine itself exists, but that they’ll be selling it in different configurations starting at under $100 USD. The smallest of these works with a Freescale i.M6 single-core processor and will be aiming to be just about as basic as possible.

• Mir is Canonical’s new display server. It fulfils a broadly similar role to Wayland and Android’s Surfaceflinger, in that it takes final responsibility for getting pixels onto the screen. XMir is an X server that runs on top of Mir. It permits applications that know how to speak the X protocol but don’t know how to speak to Mir (ie, approximately all of them at present) to run in a Mir-based environment.

• For Ubuntu 13.10, Canonical are proposing to use Mir by default. This doesn’t mean that most applications will be using Mir, though – instead, the default session will run XMir as a full-screen client and a normal X environment will be run on that. This lets Canonical deploy Mir without forcing anyone to update their applications, allowing them to take a gradual approach. By 14.10, Canonical expect the default Unity session to be a Mir client rather than an X client. In theory it will then be possible to run an Ubuntu system without any X applications at all, leaving XMir to do nothing other than run legacy applications.

• Long before Ubuntu ever existed, Debian was a major player in the Linux space. To put a finer point on that statement, Debian is a distribution of Linux that has made countless other distributions, from Knoppix to Simply Mepis, a reality. This is similar to how Ubuntu relates to Linux Mint by providing Mint a base from which to develop.

• Canonical’s Christopher Halse Rogers wrote a blog post over the weekend to try to clear up the XMir performance situation and say that Canonical engineers are working on improving the performance, as users begin to discover there’s a performance hit in using XMir.

• Download here (MP3) (ogg) (FLAC) (Speex), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net.

• Some say Canonical has lost its way. Are they right?

• Since the last update my 550 paracord (both orange and purple) and vinyl wrap has been put to use, mostly on the mac mini, i still have plenty of both left though. Unfortunately, i broke my psu after i got the +4 pin done so sleeving will have to wait until i’m less poor. As a result, i made some other stuff with the paracord.

• This box packs quite a punch, and is ready to plug-and-play. Starting at $99, the computer connects through WiFi or Bluetooth, HDMI, USB, microUSB, microSD, ethernet, and DVI-D ports. The customer will be able to configure from single to quad-core processing, and the price will vary respectively. The box measures a little over 5 x 4in, and is just under 1in tall. It uses very little power, and is becoming very attractive to prospective users, both of Linux and those new to the OS. The box supports Android use as well as Linux for users who are more comfortable in that environment.

Flavours and Variants

• If I think of any distro which just works without any issue month after month, year after year, it is got to be Linux Mint. I am using Linux Mint 13 XFCE (with LTS support) on my netbook and it’s been a trouble free 1.5 years – with absolutely no issue. Everything just working as it should work and I keep it on most of days at night to download Linux distros or movies – no heating problem till date. Linux Mint 13 XFCE was and still is so amazingly efficient!

• Linux Mint 15 Codename ‘Olivia’ Xfce Edition is released with the exciting features stated below. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment aiming to be fast instead of low system resources. In this edition, Xfce 4.10 desktop, all the improvement with latest packages are included. In this post we’ll see step by step installation and Update of packages post installation.

• As I’ve said that many times before, Linux is all about choice: first, and most obviously, choice in operating systems for your computer. If you don’t like the desktop or user interface of Windows 8 (I personally don’t know even one sane person that does), or if you just don’t like paying Microsoft over and over and over again, Linux gives you another choice. But even within the Linux world, choice is an important advantage — choice of distributions, and within many distributions, choice of desktops.

• The Linux Mint team has released the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 15, code-named “Olivia”. The release includes the Whisker Menu as a replacement for Xfce’s native application launcher. Whisker is inspired by KDE’s Kickoff menu, but also takes design cues from the Mint menu application included in the Cinnamon edition of the distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Ever since the announcement of the Raspberry Pi, sites all across the Internet have offered lots of interesting and challenging uses for this exciting device. Although all of those ideas are great, the most obvious and perhaps least glamorous use for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is creating your perfect home server.

• Blue Chip Technology announced a Ubuntu-ready “digital signage player” based on a 1GHz AMD G-Series processor with AMD Radeon HD graphics. The Vario-A2 is packaged in a polished stainless steel enclosure, runs from 0 to 40° C, accommodates internal SATA HDDs and SSDs, and has a mini-PCI Express card socket for functions such as WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, GPS, and 2G/3G modems.

Phones

• Is a bunch of cash to spur app development all that’s needed to propel Tizen to success with its fledgling Linux-based mobile operating system? “I’ve always wanted to be excited for Tizen, but it’s never really given me enough to be excited about,” offered blogger Mike Stone. “I’ve never seen anything where I just had to stop and say, ‘Now that is cool.’”

Ballnux

• Samsung’s Galaxy Note family has been one of the most successful tablet devices in the market as a result they’ve had to face competition from notable companies such as LG and Sony. Now a new competitor is rumored to appear which as the title gives away is the HTC One Max. According to Mobile Geeks reports, it’s a 6 inch device expected to have a 2.3GHz quad core snapdragon 800 chip, along with 2GB of RAM and up to 64GB of storage powered by a 3200mAh battery.

Android

• Tinder has been the hot new social dating service on the iOS since its release in October last year. They claim to have generated 75 million matches and 50 engagements over the period of time. Despite all those statistics, we haven’t seen the application on the most popular platform of the mobile OS market yet. But that isn’t to say they aren’t working on it, they actually have it ready but they want to make sure that at-least one million people explicitly request for the application to be available. That is quite entertaining for the developers maybe considering they haven’t yet monetized the app.

• Following Samsung and HTC, Sony is set to make a smaller version of its flagship Smartphone available to the customers. Even before any confirmation about existence of ‘Honami’ flagship device from Sony, we already have rumours around a ‘mini’ version of the device coming in.

• It’s not raining, but pouring, rumours around Moto X phone just don’t want to take a break. If you believe that Google is spending $500 million on marketing, you should wonder if they really need it with all the hype it has already created. Yesterday we saw the allege Moto X phone in Eric Schmidt’s hand, and now we have a hands on video of the device in use.

• It’s a given that NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 can handle 3D — unless you’ve been crafting a fully open source project around the chip, at which point you’ve been stuck in a flat world. Fresh contributions from Avionic Design’s Thierry Reding have brought that extra dimension back, albeit in limited form. His early patches for the Linux kernel enable support for 3D when using the Tegra Direct Rendering Manager driver. There’s also a matching Gallium3D driver for us regular users, although it’s still young: it can run reference 3D code as of a recent check, but can’t produce visible imagery. While it may take some months before everything falls into place, the officially-backed work should make the (slightly aging) chip that much more useful beyond the realms of Android and Windows RT.

Free Software/Open Source

• Elon Musk has been dropping hints about a revolutionary form of transport called Hyperloop for over a year, and on Monday he said that the full details will be released on August 12, and that the system’s key technologies will be open sourced.

• It’s time to take a look back at June and see how open source is changing the world. We’ll take a look at what articles where hot, a few that you may have missed, and what the chatter was all about last month.

• A decade ago, as CTO of a large service provider, I was lucky to be able to drive an open-source everywhere strategy. In addition to the ubiquitous LAMP stack, we managed to use open-source software in almost every part of the business, not just in the data center but also in departments like accounts and HR. However, there were two holdouts against the power of open source: storage and networking.

• Quite often on Phoronix we cover various experimental open-source projects that catch our interest as they’re interesting from a technical perspective, but often these projects don’t end up stabilizing due to limited manpower or prove to be too technically ambitious. Here’s a look at some of the less heard of open-source projects that have previously been covered on Phoronix to look at where they are today.

• For those involved in data analysis, numerical computation and taks of that nature, Matlab is an industry standard software to use, though it is not necessarily the best available. The problem is that (Matlab) is commercial and can be expensive.

• Recently I took a class on Machine Learning and was surprised to find that the professor was not going to use Matlab, but a Free Software alternative called GNU Octave, which was good news because it meant not having to spend money on a proprietary software.

• For more than a decade, Evan Prodromou has worked to build open source tools that help people share things online. In 2003, he co-founded Wikitravel, a website that lets world travelers collaborate on the ultimate travel guide. Then, in 2008, Prodromou launched StatusNet, a decentralized, federated networking tool whose public face, identi.ca, became the microblogging service of choice for many free software advocates and open enthusiasts.

• In 2007, the Korean government first held the OSS World Challenge in an effort to promote open source software and bring awareness to developers within the country.

• The Tax Office has moved to encourage more big business to adopt a government-devised scheme to automate lodgement of financial reports, by replacing a proprietary interface with its systems with open-source software.

Events

SaaS/Big Data

• Building a storage startup is no easy task — just ask Markus Rex, the co-founder and CEO of ownCloud.

• OwnCloud Inc got its start in December of 2011 as a commercial enterprise. The promise of the commercial enterprise is to build out the enterprise supported version of the open source ownCloud storage system. Today, ownCloud officially released its Enterprise Edition 5.0 release, providing enhanced file sync and share capabilities. Among the improved features is better Active Directory (AD) integration as well as native AES encryption for data at rest.

• Tracing the career path of Dr. Kongkiat Kespechara is like reading a treasure map: there are twists and turns and surprises all along the way, but promises an unfolding bounty at the end. Here are some of his current activities: Dr. Kespechara is a still-practicing MD, a software entrepreneur, an open source pioneer, a force in economic development, a big data processor, a nutritionist, an agriculturist and a retailer. Let me explain.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• So that were extremely busy weeks for all people active in LibreOffice localization and QA. Today the last translations – many up to 100% – have been pulled and the last triple reviewed code commits were done. And somewhere next week already we expect the release of LibreOffice 4.1.

• What started as a simple text editor and later became am office suite is actually becoming a very comprehensive set of tools for the daily office work.

• Scrubbing millions of lines of code? Yeah, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day

• Oracle has decided to stop development on its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Sun Ray Software and Hardware, and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client product lines. Some Oracle partners, which received the news over the weekend, are not happy with this change.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Licensing

• Last November, I wrote about the huge contradiction embodied in GitHub. Though the site is self-described as the “world’s largest open source community,” a significant number of GitHub projects come with no rights whatsoever for you to use their code in an open source project. That’s because so many don’t include an OSI-approved open source license.

Openness/Sharing

• Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and chairman of SolarCity, has been teasing us for a while what he calls the ‘Hyperloop’, a “fifth mode of transportation” that would provide a very high-speed, high-efficiency, and safe alternative to boats, planes, automobiles and trains.

• Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is one of the most exciting and fastest-growing technology areas today, with a projected 50 billion connected devices deployed by 2020.1 And yet M2M technology is still not evolving as quickly as it could because too many basic development functions remain closed and proprietary.

Programming

• Eclipse users and developers have just under a month left to submit a talk proposal to the organisers of EclipseCon Europe 2013. The organisers from the Eclipse Foundation are looking for proposals for 35 minute talks and three hour tutorials that cover one of a number of subjects, including Eclipse itself, OSGi, Java and web technologies. Additional themes of this year’s conference are machine to machine (M2M) embedded systems and using Eclipse to build industry-specific applications in areas such as banking, aerospace automotive. In the latter area, the EclipseCon team is looking for speakers who can present case studies involving the use of Eclipse software.

Leftovers

• Technology website The Register called it. With the search called off, we must presume that Evi Nemeth is no longer with us. Their obit, “Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea”, gives an excellent overview of her life and influence.

Health/Nutrition

Security

• With the recent release of Apache web server version 2.0.65, the Apache project has discontinued the maintenance of the 2.0 version branch. The developers have urged users to migrate to current version series 2.2 or 2.4 editions as soon as possible; version 2.4 was released in February 2012.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Lee Harvey Oswald had closer ties to Cuba’s intelligence agency in the months before his fatal shooting of John F. Kennedy than previously known, according to a new book by a former CIA analyst.

• So– the NSA engaged in an act of war using cyber attack on IRan. That suggests that the NSA, without congressional oversight, since the NSA people lie to congress, can start a war without congressional authorization. And then, on top of that, you’ve suggested that Obama may claim that HE didn’t know.

• An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2014 (H.R. 1960), which passed June 14, would impose reporting requirements on the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments’ integrated electronic health record project, as well as stand up an advisory panel to provide additional oversight.

• There has been significant movement in both the House and Senate on the pending legislation to create a national historical park for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge as well as Los Alamos, N.M., and Hanford, Wash.

• In times of economic uncertainty and mounting national security issues, it is critical that each branch of government is allowed to play its constitutional role. We must protect the uniquely American system of checks and balances set forth by our forefathers, which helps prevent abuse or overreach of power. Stepping outside of the roles intended and defined only leads to unfortunate, harmful decisions that affect the entire country.

• At least 19 suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region overnight in a Pakistani military operation and a separate U.S. drone strike, security officials said on Sunday.

• At least 19 suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region overnight in a Pakistani military operation and a separate U.S. drone strike, security officials said on Sunday.

• At least 16 people were killed and five others wounded when an American drone strike hit a suspected Haqqani militant compound in a remote tribal region of northwestern Pakistan late Tuesday, according to Pakistani government and intelligence officials.

• Two missiles were fired as the suspected militants rode a motorbike in the village of Mosaki, the sources said.

• US President Barack Obama has promised to scale them back, resorting to them only when a threat was “continuing and imminent”.

• When Bilal Berjawi spoke to his wife for the last time, he had no way of being certain that he was about to die. But he should have had his suspicions.

• On June 8, a US drone attack in North Wazirstan killed seven people. It was the first drone attack since Nawaz Sharif took office as Pakistan’s prime minister for the third time. He condemned the attack as a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

• Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), are being used by the US to kill people seen as militants by the US media and government. As well as Pakistan, drones are also being used in Yemen and Syria to kill people. However, the resentment against drone strikes is present all around the world, including the US itself.

• The report by the Abbottabad Commission about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s house, leaked at Al-Jazeera News website was the new media play-card. Much is being said and written about it. The report quotes General (retd) Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who headed Pakistan’s premier Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency at the time of bin Laden’s killing in 2011, telling investigators that drone strikes had their uses. Though there were no written agreements, there was a political understanding, between America and Pakistan, it said. Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat and US envoy to the Pakistan and Afghanistan region, coined the term, “AfPak,” understanding that the theatre of war extended to both ends of the Durand Line. He understood that it was the eastern side, which served as the backyard for militants’ sanctuaries. Geography played a huge part in this arrangement. Battle fought by the US and its allies was focused on taking over the heartlands of Taliban in Afghanistan. The provinces in southeast of Afghanistan are unsuitable for guerrilla warfare, mostly comprising of plains. Adjoining the Hindu Kush with passes to Pakistan’s tribal belt offered the perfect sanctuary to retreat and regroup. A strategy was developed to destroy the supply lines of the militants and then wipe out their sanctuaries through drone strikes in the tribal areas. Unfortunately, the drones killed more civilians than it killed militants.

• In stark contrast to traditional means of fighting wars, drones are both inexpensive and safe for the military to operate, even on a large scale. The risk of friendly casualties alienating domestic support for the war is almost nil, and the relative unobtrusiveness (at home) of operating these aircraft means that the military can fight wars in multiple countries with the public barely noticing the impact. After all, by the traditional standard of what one would define as a “war,” the United States is indeed at war in Yemen, Somalia and parts of Pakistan; yet few Americans recognize it as being the case and, indeed, neither officially does the United States. That violence can be carried out on such a massive scale with so little scrutiny is one of the most important aspects of the drone war and perhaps its most insidious. In the past governments have often found their ability to wage wars abroad constrained by the citizenry who have borne the brunt of the social pressures these wars inevitably create. As such, the prospect of perpetual war fought on an expanding scale would have been impossible until very recently. Casualties would occur, enormous sums of money would be spent, and upon reaching a breaking point in stress the people would come out into the streets to demand an end to such policies.

• At least two health workers have been killed and several others injured after an attack by heavily-armed gunmen against anti-polio workers in the troubled northwestern Pakistan.

• Obama’s drone calculus ignores the CIA’s warning about the continuing “possibilities of blowback.” Officials in Washington ignore the high-cost ways in which the U.S. “war on terror” and the use of tactics such as drone strikes fuel the fires of home-grown radicalization in Western societies. This is a rising phenomenon that has not been seriously debated, despite a string of high-profile attacks. While trials have yet to take place, the Woolwich attack in London and the Boston Marathon bombings are suspected to be the latest cases in point.

• On Monday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying, “These unilateral strikes are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” adding that “such strikes also set dangerous precedents in inter-state relations. Pakistan has repeatedly emphasized the importance of bringing an immediate end to drone strikes,” press tv reported.

Finance

Privacy

• Fugitive appeals for the help of human rights groups in Russia, as his latest revelations suggest Microsoft lets US government access its customers’ data

• Not long before headlines exposed National Security Agency programs that secretly collect records of Americans’ phone calls, another surveillance system got far less attention: Nordstrom, the department-store chain, acknowledged it was tracking customers without their knowledge in 17 stores.

• Newly released documents reveal the depth of collaboration between Microsoft and the National Security Agency in collecting data from the company’s users, including communications and documents sent or accessed over Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. They also show that Microsoft worked with the NSA to break the company’s own encryption, ensuring the fullest possible access for the agency.

• As talks on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership began this week in Washington, a second topic loomed large: US intelligence programs. Germany wanted to make sure the issue didn’t fade into the background.

• Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.

• Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who closely communicates with Snowden and first reported on his intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that the former NSA systems analyst has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.”

• Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, fled the United States saying he did not want to live in a surveillance state.

• Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.

• When I received an email late on Thursday from “Edward Snowden”, I was naturally sceptical. The invitation, supposedly from one of the world’s most sought-after people, had a whiff of Cold War spy thriller to it. The note instructed me to go to the arrivals hall of Sheremetyevo Airport, and “someone from airport staff will be waiting there to receive you with a sign labelled G9”. What would you think?

• When I finally got through the media scrum to Terminal F, there was a man with a sign, “G9”, just like they said. So, along with eight other people – including the Russian ombudsman, an MP and representatives of other rights groups – I was put on a bus and driven to another entrance. We walked in and there he was: Mr Snowden, waiting for us along with someone from WikiLeaks and a translator. The first thing I thought was how young he looks – like a school kid.

• Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.

• Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who closely communicates with Snowden and first reported on his intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that the former NSA systems analyst has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.”

• A RUSSIAN state service in charge of safeguarding Kremlin communications is looking to purchase an array of old-fashioned typewriters to prevent leaks from computer hardware, sources say.

• The revelations about the activities of the U.S. National Security Agency have strengthened the hand of those in the European Union calling for stronger data protection, a European tech conference was told Monday.

• General Keith Alexander, the Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Commander of the United States Cyber Command, is to be a keynote speaker at this year’s Black Hat conference. This announcement has caused a stir after the organisers of the DEF CON hacker conference, which is being held in parallel, requested only a few days ago that government officials stay away from the conference: the latest revelations concerning the US government’s extensive surveillance programmes have made communicating with federal law enforcement officers uncomfortable for many hackers, they argue.

• For those of you who haven’t kept up, the National Security Agency (NSA’s) Prism program has been in the news. Prism provides the NSA with access to data on the servers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, etc.

• Prism is just a part of the NSA’s larger mass electronic surveillance program that covers every possible path someone might use to communicate; tapping raw data as it flows through fiber optic cables and Internet peering points, copying the addressees on all letters you physically mail, all credit card purchases, your phone calls and your location (courtesy your smart phone.)http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/15/your-pc-may-already-be-compromised-by-the-nsa/

• Of course readers realize by now that this patriot or, in some minds, “overzealous” man, is General Keith B. Alexander, whose title reads, Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) and Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service (NSA/CSS).

• The actual story that matters is not hard to see: the NSA is attempting to collect, monitor and store all forms of human communication

• The time to join the battle for privacy is now, because whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange can’t fight against Big Brother on their own, software freedom activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, told RT.

• Stallman says that the revelations of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who exposed secret US and British surveillance programs to the public, are a confirmation of his worst concerns – which he voiced over a decade ago.

• Data centers are notorious for using a lot of power and other resources, but residents of Bluffdale, Utah are a little annoyed by the volume of water that will soon begin flowing to a new NSA facility. When it is completed in September, cooling the massive collection of servers will require as much as 1.7 million gallons of water each day. That’s no drop in the bucket when you’re in the middle of a desert like Bluffdale happens to be.

• People worry that Google is accepting code from the NSA and pushing it into Android, but really, don’t we want some of those code breakers showing us how to do it right?

• As Edward Snowden continues to expose the connection between Internet companies and NSA surveillance programs like PRISM, the popularity of alternative Internet services continues to boom. IBTimes previously reported on DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has saw traffic spike to more than 3 million daily searches in the days following the original PRISM leaks.

• Recent alarming revelations have raised some incredibly important questions about the use of surveillance techniques and Big Brother Watch, alongside seven other foremost campaign croups, have called on MPs to begin an enquiry into exactly how ministers and the security agencies have been interpreting the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), as reported in today’s Guardian.

• Dotcom has put a strong emphasis on privacy since he began preparing the Mega storage website. Mega places content and the responsibility for it in the hands of the end-user, and limits Mega’s exposure to litigation and takedowns.

• He has talked up the privacy benefits of Mega before and spoken of secure private messaging, and now he wants to go further.

Civil Rights

• “Sweeping” subpoena violates rights of those who spoke out against oil giant’s devastating actions in Ecuador

• The acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing unarmed high-schooler Trayvon Martin serves as a reminder of the continuing inequities in America’s criminal justice system — and might be the impetus to repeal a law like “Stand Your Ground,” which was adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and subsequently spread across the country. Stand Your Ground was part of the jury instructions in Zimmerman’s criminal trial, and it could again come into play if Trayvon’s family brings a civil suit.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• While countries have their own laws, many individuals worldwide choose to be guided by their faith in matters of morality. When it comes to movie piracy, for example, some Christians may be believe “thou shalt not steal.” So it’s perhaps interesting that in the Middle East where a similar law exists, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan piracy actually increases by 30%.

• Earlier this week a movie and TV show subtitling site was raided by police following an investigation carried out by a Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group. With the site’s equipment seized but data safe, the youth division of the Swedish Pirate Party is now overseeing Undertexter’s crowd-funded return to glory. Meanwhile, as the prosecutor stands behind his decision to take down the site, a law professor thinks that things may not be so cut and dried.

• A handful of tech giants have teamed up with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the White House to reduce the flow of ad revenue to operators of sites engaged in significant infringement and counterfeiting.

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