● 08.18.13

● Links 18/8/2013: Amarok 2.8, Linux Fund-raising Record

Posted in News Roundup at 3:02 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The open-source Linux operating system is widely deployed on enterprise server infrastructure, but it also has a place on the desktop, as well. While many in the Linux community have long speculated on when “The Year of the Linux Desktop” would finally arrive, the reality is that there is no single such entity as THE Linux Desktop. The Linux desktop ecosystem is diverse, with multiple options and choices to suit different user needs and user preferences. Open-source Linux desktops can also be vendor-agnostic and can be deployed across any number of different Linux operating system distributions. The big enterprise Linux distributions tend to offer the GNOME Linux desktop as the default choice, but it’s not the only one. In fact, GNOME itself is now somewhat fractured with multiple desktop environment options and derivatives, including GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, Unity, Mate and Cinnamon. Looking beyond GNOME-based Linux desktops, KDE, XFCE and LXDE also provide interesting options for users to consider.

• It’s looking like Google should focus on what is going on with Chromebooks. Acer is out with an updated version of its very popular C7 Chromebook portable computer, which runs Google’s Chrome OS operating system. Meanwhile, companies like Samsung and Asus have made clear that they are going to focus less on Microsoft’s Windows RT and more on alternative platforms like Android and Chrome OS.

• I’ve been using Linux for a long, long time. I never thought I’d see the day when I had to actually warn users of trojans such as Hand of Thief, but here we are. Of course, main distributions have the means to help protect you from such attacks (SELinux, repository/package signing, firewalls, etc), but that doesn’t mean you can just blindly continue on as you always have. It’s time to start being a bit more vigilant about how you use your Linux desktop. Here are some suggestions:

• Do not install unsigned packages Do not add unofficial repositories without investigating said repository Keep your system up to date at all times Keep all browser plugins up to date If your distribution has SELinux, use it Do not let others install software on your machines Use solid passwords If asked to enter root user (or sudo) password, always know why

Server

• Businesses have conquered their “irrational fears” of Linux and the majority now depend on it for some part of their mainstream business applications, a survey of 200 IT executives has found.

• It’s a computing truism that when it comes to delivering the fastest possible speeds with high-performance computing (HPC), you must use native computing instead of virtualization. Recent studies have shown that, in some configurations, VMware’s vSphere can actually deliver faster performance than native computing.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Kaltura is the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, providing both enterprise level commercial software and services, fully supported and maintained by Kaltura, as well as free open-source community supported solutions, for video publishing, management, syndication and monetization.

Kernel Space

• - Only 2 per cent of the code, which was originally written by Torvalds, remains in the current Linux kernel.

• - Linux is used in government offices in many countries. In India, Linux is also used for educational purposes in Tamil Nadu.

• - The top 10 supercomputers in the world use Linux. Linux accounts for 33.8 per cent of the world’s data servers compared to the operating systems from Microsoft, which account for only 7.3 per cent.

• - Bullet trains in Japan, the New York Stock Exchange, CERN and the San Francisco traffic control systems run on Linux.

• - Some of the biggest technology related companies like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. use Linux as their primary operating system.

• - In 1991, the GNU project that was developed, did not have any kernels or drivers. That is why Torvalds was led towards working on the Linux kernel development.

• - Hollywood director, James Cameron had said that hit movie Avataar was the first movie to be shot completely in 3D using free software on Linux-driven machines.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of LTS and LTSI, announced 2 weeks ago on his blog that the next LTS and LTSI version will be 3.10. It is now time for the industry to get ready for the LTSI 3.10 release.

• Beats Audio is essentially a technology that is supposed to give a more in-depth sound experience to users. By adding more speakers, subwoofers, and an amplifier Beats Electronics LLC tries to emulate studio quality audio. The extra speakers and subwoofers are arranged in a special way to help compensate for the shape of the laptop. From a software standpoint extra codecs and digital audio processing is used to improve the sound due to the lack of true surround sound speakers.

• I’ve had some adventures with the alsa libraries lately that warrant mentioning them here.

Graphics Stack

• Beignet has been controversial since it’s not leveraging Mesa/Gallium3D but rather is implementing its own form of OpenCL specifically for Intel graphics cores. While there’s a lot of work ahead, a lot of ground is being gained.

• In the past few days several videos have surfaced for “Nemoshell”, a reported window manager for Wayland but details on the software project are scarce.

• For those OpenGL application and game developers seeking to optimize their program’s performance for the Mesa hardware drivers, and more specifically the Intel HD Graphics support, here’s some very useful information.

• When it comes to open-source Linux graphics drivers, Intel is the company most committed to their success. Intel exclusively offers their Linux graphics support through a fully open-source stack while AMD and NVIDIA are mostly focused on their proprietary graphics drivers. AMD does have a handful of employees devoted to their open-source driver while NVIDIA dedicates no one and leaves it up to the Nouveau community for reverse-engineering.

• For those not actively following the Mesa Git repository, there continues to be new performance-optimizing patches flowing in from Intel’s developers for their open-source Linux graphics driver.

• There’s been a number of Mesa Git commits this morning concerning video acceleration within the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.

• While Mesa 9.2 hasn’t even officially been released yet, with it already having been branched from its Git master code-base since last month, are there already some performance-beneficial changes living in master (Mesa 9.3-devel) worth writing home about? Here’s some benchmarks.

• As a follow-up to the news a few days ago about NVIDIA VP3/VP4 Engines Exposed On Nouveau For MPEG-2/VC-1, the support has now been committed to Mesa Git master.

• In recent months I have delivered a number of R600 SB shader optimization benchmarks for the AMD Gallium3D shader back-end that’s part of Mesa 9.2. I’ve also delivered tests of the R600 LLVM back-end that’s also been progressing in recent months and viewed as the future for AMD’s open-source driver. This weekend are some independent tests of the R600 LLVM and SB back-ends.

Applications

• Usually, there’s a calculator around for simple math so I can focus on the variables ( read as; something bigger). For those times when I need to deal with real-world numbers, type it into Google. It just works.

• Out of the vast sea of Linux mail clients, for some forgotten reason I have latched on to alpine.

• LyX is a graphical tool, with a familiar drop-down and content-driven menu system, for writing and editing LaTeX documents. TeX and its higher-level macro language, LaTeX, are powerful document markup languages that are the de facto standard for Linux® users. New users can find them difficult to work with because you must know the available markup tags, the contexts they can be used in, and how to use a text editor and previewing tool. LyX simplifies the entire process of working with LaTeX documents — not just on Linux. Learn how to install, use, and customize LyX on Linux, UNIX®, Windows®, and Mac OS X systems.

Proprietary

• Geekbench 3, the first major upgrade to the popular benchmarking software in six years, is now available for download.

• Pipelight is a new open-source project for getting Microsoft Silverlight applications to run within web-browsers on Linux, including the widely sought after Netflix Player on Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

• When I debated this little adventure, way back in December of 2012, I thought to myself that I could probably come up with enough applications to fill a post a day for a year.

Games

• Eschalon: Book III is the third and final game in the Eschalon series, scheduled for release this 2013 holiday season. Eschalon: Book III brings the trilogy to a climatic end as you seek to uncover the mystery of your past, the secrets of the Crux stones, and who the Orakur really are. You’ll traverse miles of virtual wilderness and dungeons, filled with secrets and danger, in an unparalleled role-playing experience designed to feel like a true pen-and-paper RPG.

• This makes me giddy, Enemy Starfighter a space combat simulation game has a brand spanking new trailer to show off some of the progress that has been made on the game.

• All ya Linux gamers, time to update your Steam for Linux client to the latest beta, which comes with quite a lot of good changes. A Linux-only change includes — Fixed particle system fuzziness in Big Picture on Linux and OSX to match Windows.

• Valve announced today that Steam is now available on Linux. They’ve also launched a sale of Linux games – for this week, you can get games that run on all OSs (typically at least Windows and Linux) for up to 75% off!

• Remakes of classic games are a dime a dozen these days, but it’s hard to complain when modern developers are putting in the time to recreate games that, otherwise, would be dang-near impossible to get your hands on. Such is the case with Chaos Engine, Abstraction Games’ throw-up to the 1993 Amiga shooter that helped pave the way for the entire genre. It’s headed to PC, Mac and Linux on August 29th.

• In a steampunk future, a computer gone mad, the Chaos Engine, has started churning out diabolical baddies that you, the player, must stop at nothing to destroy. A sort of twin-stick shooter before the genre really existed, The Chaos Engine is a top-down shooter featuring a skill system, multiple playable characters, abilities, weapons and the like.

• This time, PewDiePie selected the games, which are included in the Humble Weekly Sale Bundle.

• Another Live Stream done by the developers of Planetary Annihilation this time focusing on the art of the game and planet generation. I have listed the main points for you.

• Another bunch of games have been greenlit by Steam and yes there are even some coming over to Linux as well thankfully! It’s getting better and better to be a Linux gamer!

• When Valve introduced its trading cards mechanic on Steam this past May, I wasn’t sure what to expect, or sure if anyone would care. After the recent summer sale wrapped-up, though, I realized that you should never underestimate Valve. For better or for worse, trading cards are intriguing, so we’re taking a look at how it all works.

• Tropico 5 was announced yesterday as the latest in a 12-year-old game franchise of this island maker game. What makes Tropico 5 really exciting is that when released in 2014 this construction/management simulation game will have native Linux support. The Blitzkrieg 3 World War II game is also being ported to Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Enlightenment E19 is making good progress and will be shown off at LinuxCon Europe in October, along with “Project BURRITO”, a high-end demo showing off capabilities of the Enlightenment Compositor.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• With the 4.11 release out of the door (yay!) there is more and more focus on what is coming from KDE in the future. The Workspaces (and only the workspaces) are out with a long term support release: for the next two years, the Plasma team will keep churning out bugfix and tiny-feature releases for the Workspaces 4.11 release.

• There used to be a time when people died of Amarok deficiency. No, really! At least the audiophiles who also happened to be Linux users. Music on KDE meant “Amarok.” GNOME users would install half the KDE just to get their hands on Amarok. At its peak, Amarok had a huge fanbase that impatiently waited for new releases of their beloved music player. Times changed, Qt 4 came out and Amarok made the transition from Qt 3 to Qt 4 for its user interface. Leaving behind its immensely successful 1.4.x series, Amarok received a lot of flak for its revamped UI in 2.x. Fans were angry with the completely revised UI, and the Amarok dev team was unwilling to support the older design. This gave rise to Clementine and Exaile, both of which resembled Amarok of yesteryear, especially Clementine which was forked directly from Amarok’s 1.4.x branch.

• Packages for the release of Amarok 2.8 are available for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS, 13.04 and our Saucy development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA for 12.04 LTS, 12.10 and 13.04.

• It’s the wonderful month of August and the Amarok Team is back with a very strong release. Amarok 2.8 is titled “Return To The Origin” as we are bringing back the polish that many users loved from the original 1.x series! The new Amarok is more fun to use, it’s rock solid, and it has exciting new features.

• GnuPG offers some very strong encryption algorithms and uses passphrase-protected long keys. But I’m not going to talk about GPG here. I’ll rather tell you that I just added a new backend in kwalletd allowing for GPG-encrypted wallets! The code is fully functional and I actually configured my KDE session to use it! So here are the screenshots.

• Today is one year and 3 days since we announced the Calligra Author project. The aim of the project is to produce a tool that helps writers produce ebooks with extra focus on novels, which are inherently long texts, and textbooks with lots of pictures and maybe dynamic contents like videos.

• Version 13.08 of the Genode OS Framework is now available to mark the fifth anniversary of this open-source operating system framework project.

• Besides Genode 13.08 marking the half-decade anniversary of this project, Genode 13.08 is also critical for the new features it presents.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GUADEC, the GNOME annual European conference, wrapped up last week in Brno, Czech Republic. Over the course of the core conference days, there was a total of 42 talks on a range of subjects, including technological developments and plans, design, and community outreach. There were also two sessions of short “lightning talks” as well as the GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting. The majority of these sessions were recorded, and are now available to view online.

• The GNOME developers released a new development version of the Folks library for the GNOME desktop environment, a library that aggregates people from multiple sources.

• Folks (libfolks) 0.9.4 turns off fatal warnings when distchecking, and fixes a Vala binding issue, by bumping the EDS dependency to version 3.9.1 or higher.

• The GNOME developers behind the popular GLib library released a new stable version, which addresses a major issue and updates lots of translations.

Distributions

• Precise Puppy is a puppy linux variant that is “based” on Ubuntu 12.04 precise. It is designed as a small and fast distro that can run on older hardware with low resources. It is intended to be run in live mode rather than installing on the hard drive. The iso file can be burnt to a disc or put on a flash drive and it would boot like any other linux distro. I always wanted to try puppy linux and this time I finally got my hands on it. Version 5.7.1 was recently released.

New Releases

• OS/4 Enterprise Linux 4.1.4 will be released Friday Aug 16, 2013. Thats our full KDE release and its very stunning in aesthetics and performance so its really a great release.

• illume OS 2.1 “Aarhus” has been released. As you may know, illume OS is a Debian based Linux system, with a Windows like graphical interface. It uses Debian Squeeze as base, because of its stability. illume OS is a single-user operating system, targeting both personal computers and laptops.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• So as most of you probably know, this past weekend was Flock, the first of a new breed of Fedora conference that replaces FUDCon. It was reasonably well-attended (the count I heard was about two hundred). Among those that attended were nearly all of the well-known members of the Fedora community. I’m sure some (many?) of them will also be summarizing their experiences, but I want to get my notes out there while it’s still fresh. This is not a comprehensive overview of Flock. If that’s what you’re looking for, Máirín Duffy has provided an excellent set of blog posts including the recordings and transcripts[1].

• In the last few days, I attended Flock 2013 which was held in Charleston, South Carolina. It was busy first two weeks of August for me. GUADEC kept me on my toes from 8am to midnight for a week. I had to leave GUADEC on the 7th to get to Prague because my flight was leaving early in the morning on the 8th. The journey to Charleston went really smooth. I flew with Sirko from Prague, met Gergely and Patrick in Amsterdam, and Gianluca and Robert in Atlanta. So we arrived to Charleston as a quite large group.

• I last posted here in December. I said at some point I would stop posting here, which seems to be the case, but I guess every now and then I have something I want to talk about.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ahead of the Ubuntu 13.10 feature freeze, expect Mir multi-monitor support and composition bypass support to land around next week.

• Canonical’s Community Manager, Jono Bacon, has written a Mir update and for testing its current state of the next-generation Ubuntu display server.

• After many years of using Ubuntu daily and following the evolution of Ubuntu from 6.04 to the amazing 12.04 LTS with great enthusiasm, the missing link in my Linux software world has always been Adobe. Software like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Dreamweaver, Premiere and InDesign are the workhorses of the media world. Yes you can find similar open-source software but any professional using these tools on a daily basis to get the job done will tell you that nothing beats the tools, speed and integration of the Adobe products.

• $10,311,220. It isn’t sufficient to greenlight Canonical’s innovative hybrid smartphone, but it is just enough to beat the sum raised by the Pebble smartwatch and thereby steal the crowdfunding record.

• Linux has over the years consistently proven itself to be a worthwhile alternative on the desktop and has even become the champion in mobile space in the form of Android. For a long time though its inability to bring about the much advertised Year of the Linux desktop has been blamed, at least partly, on its pathetic gaming support but since the inception and release of Steam for Linux, that is all changing.

• A crowdfunding campaign for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone has set a record for raising more money in pledges than any other such venture.

• And in a sign that – as previously reported – Canonical aren’t ready to give up on reaching their goal of $32 million, a new $7000 ‘Enterprise Starter’ perk has been added to the pledge options available.

• System76 recently sent out their Gazelle Professional laptop that’s been updated with a mobile Intel Core i7 “Haswell” processor. We’re still in the process of fully reviewing this Haswell laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu 13.04 and comparing it to the range of Intel notebook competition, but for this weekend article are some basic Ubuntu 13.04 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 performance benchmarks.

Flavours and Variants

• I discovered elementary OS earlier this week and decided to give it a try after seeing the trailer of their newest release, Luna. Being only version 0.2, I guess we should not expect too much, but the trailer gave me the impression that the guys at elementary OS are putting serious effort in creating a professional Linux desktop environment. The focus lies on providing the community with the best possible experience and being both beautiful and usable. Elementary OS uses Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as its base.

Devices/Embedded

• In the previous article we took a look at the Texas Instruments OMAP5432 board. This time we will focus on the performance of those A15 cores, the SATA interface, internal flash, and how much difference the hardware video decode makes.

• Airware demonstrated its Linux-based os-Series autopilot computers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The os-Series osNanoPilot, osFlexPilot, and multi-rotor capable osFlexQuad autopilots include radios, GPS and inertial systems, servo interfaces and I/O ranging from USB to CAN, and are preinstalled with the company’s configurable, royalty-free AirwareOS Linux software.

Phones

• Following reports that Tizen open-source OS (co-developed by Samsung and Intel) was scrapped, new information indicates that the project is still very much alive. Indeed, if the below shipping manifest is believed, then developer prototypes of the Tizen-runnning Samsung SM-Z9005 are shipping to…

Ballnux

• It looks like Samsung is releasing its long expected smartwatch on the 4th of September. There isn’t much information yet about the new gadget from Samsung, but we know for sure that it will be running on Android and will make the user able to make phone calls, use the internet or manage emails.

• The report implies that the device will operate independently of your smartphone, but it’s entirely possible that the site’s anonymous sources are in fact pointing to a companion device that will connect to your smartphone to place calls and access data services.The watch is unlikely to have a flexible display. The Samsung Galaxy Gear is expected to launch on September 4th at the company’s press event in Berlin.

• Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) will introduce a wristwatch-like device named the Galaxy Gear next month that can make phone calls, surf the Web and handle e-mails, according to two people familiar with the matter.

• Just like Google went with Asus again for the new Nexus 7, it is reported that LG will be trusted again for making the next generation Nexus smartphone. The rumour mills are churning and the Chinese website ‘MyDrivers’ reports that, like Nexus 4 was based on LG Optimus G,. the alleged Nexus 5 will be based on LG G2. To make things even sweeter, Nexus 5 should be carry affordable price tag of $299, just like its predecessor.

Android

• The world has already seen smartphone walkie-talkies, but Voxer Pro Business takes the old push-to-talk concept and revamps it with multimedia capabilities for business users. The idea behind it is that you can create grouplike teams of smartphone-wielding users, all of whom are visible on a desktop map within a dashboard. Teams can be grouped by location or department, for example.

• The Chromecast developer community has been very active right from Day 1, and the hacking seems to never slow down. Leon Nicholls, a clever chromecast developer hasd been able to control the device by motion gestures, using the Kinect.

• Intel subsidiary Wind River announced a collaboration with Chinese embedded software company PATEO on an Android-based automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. PATEO is using Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Android to enable an Android IVI system to play music and videos from iPhones, iPads, and iPods.

• Gigwalk, until now an iPhone-only service, has launched an Android version of its app, which posts crowdsourced jobs for the mobile workforce marketplace. Now the 400,000 Android users who had signed up in anticipation can now go out and get some work.

• The app comes as the company continues on its tear, growing 300 percent in the last year with 320,000 iPhone users already in its workforce. Gigwalk expects the new Android app to double this number by the end of September.

Free Software/Open Source

• Co-inciding with the first DebConf in Switzerland, one of the world’s leading financial centers, the first official packaging of open messaging and market data distribution framework OpenMAMA for a Linux distribution has just been uploaded. The packages, along with the Avis low-latency event-router middleware/transport were uploaded to the Debian unstable catalog this week and will soon be available conveniently to install with apt-get.

• For the past years, PLVision has been working on technologies in the Networking domain, namely Software Defined Networks. Apart from assimilating already existing solutions, the company has developed its own Open vSwitch package for OpenWrt which considerably extends router functionality and adaptability, and is completely free.

• Open Source software are never the less one of the biggest innovations in the history of technology. Simply buy an all new computer device and install any software you want without spending a single penny (except the internet datacharges). It offers you everything from a free word processor, free image editor, media player, sound editor, file archiver, PDF creator and what not.

• Although a few of these software might not stand parallel to its commercial rivals in terms of functionality, there are many that stand far beyond of everything else on the market in terms of features and capabilities.

• VMware, perhaps more-so than any other vendor on the planet, is responsible for helping enterprises move to more agile and efficient virtualized server infrastructure. Simply put, VMware is the vendor to beat in the enterprise virtualized server space.

• When it comes to the cloud though, VMware’s dominance is not a foregone conclusion, with Amazon and perhaps more importantly OpenStack, leading the charge. OpenStack is an open-source multi-stakeholder effort that is building an open-cloud platform solution.

• An open-source project aims to give a rudimentary eye to robots with the help of a camera that can detect, identify and track the movement of specific objects.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today in Open Source: ZTE’s Firefox OS phone is perfect for hunting season! Plus: Metro Last Light comes to Linux, and Netrunner 13.06 protects your privacy and fights censorship!

SaaS/Big Data

• When Edward Snowden leaked intelligence files, a storm was triggered in the cloud, leaving a path of destruction. Snowden’s email provider Lavabit shut down. So has the email offering of Silent Circle. The Guardian ran a story declaring: Lavabit’s closure marks the death of secure cloud computing in the U.S. And the EU is not entirely unaffected either. Be it by the Tempora program in the UK or the U.S. National Security Agency facilities that reportedly reside in Germany.

Databases

• As NoSQL databases catch on for Big Data applications, where are the NoSQL partner programs for resellers, integrators and VARs? So far, 10gen seems to be the only company shouting an answer.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• For a long time, Microsoft Office has been the reigning champ of office suites, but that doesn’t mean the free alternative, LibreOffice, isn’t worth considering. Let’s take a look at how the two compare, and if it’s finally possible to ditch the paid option for the free one.

• Another day, another example of excessive DMCA takedown actions. The latest is that Microsoft has been issuing DMCA takedowns to Google directing the search engine to remove links to Open Office.

• It’s to be expected. M$ is still run by the same people who thought up every dirty trick they could over the decades to prevent having to compete on price/performance. The latest deed covers demanding removal of links to downloads of OpenOffice.org under the DMCA nonsense. “Office” is in the name, right? Grounds for banning it… What’s next? Banning downloads of */Linux because there’s an “X” in the name? Nope. This is grounds for further anti-trust action. US Department of inJustice, Are you paying attention?

Funding

BSD

• A developer behind JabirOS has written into Phoronix to announce their new FreeBSD-derived project. Formerly JabirOS was based upon Ubuntu.

• Muhammadreza Haghiri fired off an email this morning to announce JabirOS, a FreeBSD operating system.

• While OpenBSD lagged behind FreeBSD in getting the initial kernel mode-setting (KMS) graphics support mainlined, the BSD platform now has support for AMD Radeon graphics.

Project Releases

• QEMU 1.6.0 has been released and with this open-source processor emulator commonly used with Linux KVM are a whole lot of new features and capabilities.

Openness/Sharing

• In the last few years, audience participation and collaboration has been an increasingly discussed topic among museum professionals worldwide. Emerging technologies and the open source movement provide an opportunity for new forms of collaboration, namely collaboration among individuals with different areas of expertise using an online platform. In this blog post, I briefly describe two open source initiatives that focus on collaboration in Museum Exhibit Design, and share my conversation with Bob Ketner, an independent curator and an expert on open source collaboration methods, who was actively involved in both initiatives.

Open Access/Content

• India graduates nearly 400,000 to 500,000 MBAs annually from some 3300-odd business schools. Based on an extensive study, The Wall Street Journal (December 2012) estimated that only 10% of Indian management graduates are employable! Given that a larger proportion of the ‘employable’ graduates must understandably be from the IIMs and other handful of high-rated business schools, the large majority of lower ranked business schools must be adding little value to the MBA graduates.

Programming

• This week Twitter was in the news for buying San Francisco-based company Marakana, which has focused on tech training, including training many people to use open source technology platforms and tools. As ZDNet reported, “Twitter is in the process of building its own engineering education program, dubbed Twitter University.” Marakana’s team will help build out this effort and the company will no longer train any individuals or organizations who want training.

• While SDL 2.0 was finally released this week after being in development for years, future SDL 2.x features and changes are already being plotted and even some early thoughts concerning SDL 3.x for game developers and other cross-platform developers relying upon this important Simple DirectMedia Layer library.

Leftovers

• APPLE GADGET FANS can kick in to pay for the construction of a gigantic statue of Steve Jobs through the Indiegogo crowdfunding website.

• Jobs passed away from cancer in 2011, but since then his influence has still been seen in Apple’s designs, so much so that the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S have been credited to him. Some people want to make sure that he will always be remembered and would like to erect a huge – think Statue of Liberty proportions – statue of the late Apple co-founder.

• A lively debate among current and former Google engineers is raging on Hacker News about Quartz’s piece on the death of 20% time at Google—that formerly hallowed portion of an engineer’s week set aside for his or her own projects, which brought us innovations such as Gmail and Adsense.

Security

• A former deputy secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security has announced the launch of the nonprofit Council on Cybersecurity, devoted to both encouraging the adoption of cybersecurity best practices and addressing the lack of skilled cyber-experts in the workforce.

• Academic advances suggest that the encryption systems that secure online communications could be undermined in just a few years.

• Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of popular email encryption service Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and co-founder of Silent Circle, told us even he was using e-mail less and less, and relying more heavily on mobile messaging services in the quest for privacy. He also explained the gnawing problem of Silent Circle’s e-mail service and why the company was now planning to put servers in Switzerland. Read the full Q&A with Zimmermann below, and you can read Kashmir Hill’s interview with Lavabit’s founder here.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• India allowed the US to use one of its air bases for refuelling the CIA’s U-2 spy planes to target Chinese territories after its defeat in the 1962 war, a declassified official document said today.

• India used US U-2 spy planes to map the extent of Chinese incursion in the 1962 war, starting a short-lived cooperation wound down after prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s death.

• Konkel reported on March 18, 2013 that the CIA has contracted with e-commerce giant Amazon to the tune of up to $600 million over 10 years to help them build a cloud computing infrastructure.

• Dubious sources feed national-security reporter Eli Lake a fraudulent story for political purposes — once again

• Kill the Messenger tells the true story of investigative journalist Gary Webb, who exposed evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the spread of cocaine in Los Angeles.

• Five decades after his death in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy continues to capture the public imagination. Dozens of books, films and television shows have centered on the tragic event, yet some feel the full story hasn’t yet been told.

• The United States was reportedly able to target an alleged al-Qaeda operative named Adnan al-Qadhi for a drone strike after U.S. allies in Yemen convinced an eight-year-old boy to place a tracking chip in the pocket of the man he considered to be his surrogate father. Shortly after the child planted the device, a U.S. drone tracked and killed al-Qadhi with a missile. He was killed last November, less than 24 hours after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Gregory Johnsen writes about the case in his new article “Did an 8-Year-Old Spy for America?” published in The Atlantic.

• According to a CBC report, the Toronto police officer who shot the teenager was suspended with pay.

• In a powerful speech, Chomsky lays out how the majority of US policies are practically opposite of what wide swathes of the public wants.

• The West effectively supported the military, for reasons which reflect its usual predatory and self-interested motivations, dressed up by pious rhetoric about ensuring stability.

• It got a lot of attention this morning when I tweeted, “You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist.” It’s been quickly retweeted dozens of times, indicating that the idea is interesting to many people. So let’s discuss it in more than 140 characters.

• A U.S. judge ruled on Monday the New York Police Department’s “stop-and-frisk” crime-fighting tactic was unconstitutional, dealing a stinging rebuke to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who vowed to appeal the ruling.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange praised United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and his father, Dr. Ron Paul, during an interview Friday in which he said the family has been among the biggest supporters his whistleblowing group has in Congress.

• Tell them that going through “proper channels” will provide meaningful redress to their concerns, not injure them

• The unethical and legally questionable statement made by TIME magazine’s senior national correspondent has been met with a barrage of criticism. Although Michael Grunwald deleted the comment and apologized, WikiLeaks is still pushing for his resignation.

• The scandal was sparked by a Twitter post on Grunwald’s account which stated that he is eager to write an article on Julian Assange’s execution by a drone.

• TIME senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald sent out a controversial tweet Saturday evening that advocated for a drone missile strike against Wikileaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Bees are extremely important. We’ve been writing about for years about the various threats that they face (Margaret has a great timeline of bee articles between 2005 and 2013), and about various ways to protect them. But this story from Australia might be the most original yet, or at the very least the cutest.

Finance

• Things are getting serious for Bitcoin this month: a federal judge declared it real money, Bloomberg gave it an experimental ticker (XBT), and New York’s financial regulator announced an interest in regulating it. Declaring Bitcoin “a virtual Wild West for narcotraffickers and other criminals,” the New York State Department of Financial Services is stepping into the sheriff’s boots.

• We learn that “the gross domestic product of the 17-nation euro zone grew at an annualized rate of about 1.2 percent in the second quarter,” and that Brazil has gone from a 7.6 percent growth rate two years ago to a projected 2.3 percent rate this year–though the alert reader will notice that 2.3 percent for a year is better than 1.2 percent for a quarter.

• There are many different kinds of Web attacks today. The one that The New York Times admitted to in January was an infiltration by attackers going after usernames and passwords for email accounts. That type of attack is about information gathering and isn’t about taking a site offline.

• There are also distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where hundreds of millions of data packets slam into a service in order to render it inaccessible. In my experience in a DDoS attack, Web browsers simply time out and no response comes back from the given site.

• A Delaware judge on Friday denied a request by Carl Icahn to reschedule Dell Inc.’s annual meeting, dealing a blow to the activist investor’s fight against a buyout offer led by the company’s founder, Michael S. Dell.

• Aleynikov was hired by Goldman to help improve its relatively weak position in what is rather euphemistically called the market-making business. In principle, this is the business of offering quotes on both sides of an asset market in order that investors wishing to buy or sell will find willing counterparties. It was once a protected oligopoly in which specialists and dealers made money on substantial spreads between bid and ask prices, in return for which they provided some measure of price continuity.

• Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Center for Media and Democracy filed a letter with the Texas Attorney General on Thursday refuting efforts by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to declare itself immune from the state’s open records law. Texas is the first known state where ALEC has formally asked an Attorney General for an exemption from sunshine-in-government laws, and it marks a new low in the organization’s attempts to advance its legislative agenda in secret and avoid public accountability for facilitating special interest influence.

• By highlighting this comment, CBS is suggesting that Snowden made some kind of important admission with his use of the word “spies.” Couple that with Pelley referencing the “collaboration” with an unnamed journalist–presumably Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian–and you can put the pieces together: Snowden, now “being harbored by Russia,” was acting as a spy when he “spilled” those secrets, with Greenwald his collaborator.

• Sure, it’s not as alarming as, say, NBC’s David Gregory musing about whether or not Greenwald should be arrested, but it’s striking language nonetheless.

• Twitter on Friday became an official member of Washington’s influence economy, with the formation of a political action committee and the appointment of its first registered lobbyist.

Censorship

• Here’s the official description of the Pirate browser:

• “PirateBrowser is a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), FireFox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs that allows you to circumvent censorship that certain countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland impose onto their citizens.”

• Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales said he would rather have no Wikipedia in China than comply with any form of censorship.

• In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, Mr. Wales said the company will always refuse to comply with government requests to restrict information, calling access to knowledge and education a human right.

• If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to circumvent any filters or blocks that your ISP (or country) has put into place on your Web browsing, The Pirate Bay might have a solution for you. As part of the commemoration around the site’s ten-year anniversary, which it officially celebrated yesterday, The Pirate Bay has officially released its own web browser. Sort-of.

Privacy

• If the leak of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to provide the FBI and NSA with millions of call records was the most important in advancing the debate about privacy and surveillance, Barton Gellman’s report in the Washington Post about NSA’s internal compliance audits should count as a close second.

• National Security Agency spy programs need better oversight to prevent excesses in collecting Americans’ voice and data communications, lawmakers said after the disclosure of an audit showing privacy rules were broken thousands of times.

• Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is now living in exile in Russia, fearful that if he returns to the United States he’ll be arrested on espionage charges.

• The irony is that the charges against Snowden, who was a computer expert at the high-tech National Security Agency, come from a law that dates back to before most Americans could listen to the radio, much less watch TV or surf the web.

• The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.

• Tables are turned as China raises security concerns about US IT firms following reports of mass surveillance by the NSA

• Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government’s electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previously reported, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter.

• With each recent revelation about the NSA’s spying programs government officials have tried to reassure the American people that all three branches of government—the Executive branch, the Judiciary branch, and the Congress—knowingly approved these programs and exercised rigorous oversight over them. President Obama recited this talking point just last week, saying: “as President, I’ve taken steps to make sure they have strong oversight by all three branches of government and clear safeguards to prevent abuse and protect the rights of the American people.” With these three pillars of oversight in place, the argument goes, how could the activities possibly be illegal or invasive of our privacy?

• In the modern art wing, we have Obama’s brilliantly nonsensical, Dadaist argument that Snowden isn’t a patriot because, among other equally schizophrenic reasons, “he is convicted of three felonies.” This is a leitmotif pervading Obama’s work: equating illegal with immoral. He notably employed this technique when asked about Bradley Manning, saying that “He broke the law.” (Scholars are trying to reconcile this technique with Obama’s professed admiration of MLK, Jr., who famously remarked that “I disobeyed an unjust law.”)

• The Washington Post dropped two reports that exposes the recklessness of the NSA’s spying program. The first report is insane: the NSA has “broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority” thousands of times a year and the second report explains the insanity: the FISC court that’s supposed to be in charge of government spying programs has said that “its ability do so is limited and that it must trust the government” to report when the government has screwed up.

• When government officials can’t directly answer a question with a secret definition, officials will often answer a different question than they were asked. For example, if asked, “can you readAmericans’ email without a warrant,” officials will answer: “we cannot target Americans’ email without a warrant.” As we explained last week, the NSA’s warped definition of word “target” is full of so many holes that it allows the NSA to reach into untold number of Americans’ emails, some which can be purely domestic.

• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs, told Rolling Stone that he considered disclosing classified information on the Senate floor prior to the leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden.

• One of the intelligence community’s most outspoken critics says he considered talking about the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance program on the Senate floor.

• Lon Snowden, the father of fugitive U.S. National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, has reached out to his son via the Internet, officials said.

• The older Snowden communicated with his son through a protected Internet channel using encrypted messages, RIA Novosti reported Thursday.

• NUCLEON: Global telephone content database

• Reuters broke another report about the way the government lies to us entitled, “U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans.” From the report: “‘I have never heard of anything like this at all,’ said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

• However it turns out that dime is still 29.21 petabytes of data a day. That means NSA is “touching” more data than Google processes every day. Google only has 20 petabytes. Also the packet analyzer gear at the front-end of XKeyscore (can pick out a very small fraction of the actual packets sent over the wire while still extracting a great deal of information (or metadata) about who is sending what to who.

• This week on CounterSpin: Edward Snowden’s NSA’s surveillance disclosures have sparked a debate over privacy, spying and civil liberties. A new book tells the history of those issues, and warns about the threat to democracy posed by snooping government agencies and corporations. We’ll talk to author Heidi Boghosian about her book ‘Spying on Democracy.’

• The saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order.

• The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

• Just minutes after the post, Khalil says he received a response from a Facebook engineer requesting all the details about the vulnerability. His account was blocked while the security team rushed to close the loophole.

• After receiving the third bug report, a Facebook security engineer finally admitted the vulnerability but said that Khalil won’t be paid for reporting it because his actions violated the website’s security terms of service.

• Although Facebook’s White Hat security feedback program sets no reward cap for the most “severe” and “creative” bugs, it sets a number of rules that security analysts should follow in order to be eligible for a cash reward. Facebook did not specify which of the rules Khalil had broken.

• Washington has 16 known US spy agencies. NSA and CIA are best known. Perhaps few Americans know much about the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

• It calls itself “first in all-source defense intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners, and policymakers.”

• “DIA deploys globally alongside warfighters and interagency partners to defend America’s national security interests.”

• Thursday night, The Washington Post published an internal audit of the NSA surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden, which show that the NSA has violated the privacy rules in place to protect Americans’ communications 2,776 times in one year. The infringements relate to the restrictions enacted by executive orders, which supposedly prevent the surveillance of American individuals without legal authorization. It has been determined that the majority of mistakes have been made by intelligence operators and computers.

• Allegations of chronic violations renew calls for serious change

• President Barack Obama’s promises to protect Americans from domestic spying came under fresh scrutiny Friday after an internal audit showed the National Security Agency had repeatedly violated privacy rules in its electronic surveillance.

• The revelations appeared to challenge Obama’s reassurances that strict oversight of NSA snooping had prevented abuses.

• The Washington Post, citing NSA documents and the audit, reported that the eavesdropping service had breached privacy restrictions thousands of times and in some cases withheld details from other government departments.

• The server-side encryption means that the data will seamlessly be encrypted without the users having to do anything.

• However, while that encryption will make the data held in Google’s cloud more secure from attack, the keys will still be held by Google. That means that the US National Security Agency (NSA) will still be able to access customers’ data with a simple order approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

• For that, Barth recommends that customers encrypt their data before uploading it to the Google Cloud.

• According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, the National Security Agency broke its own privacy rules thousands of times per year. Many of the violations seem like unintentional infractions, such as a typo while searching telephone area codes, which results in a swath of phone records that shouldn’t have otherwise been scanned. It is unclear whether any of the wrongly obtained information was used for illegal or illicit purposes.

• Under increasing pressure to justify electronic surveillance programs that at times capture communications of American citizens, the U.S. National Security Agency went to unusual lengths on Friday to insist its activities are lawful and any mistakes largely unintentional.

• Leading critics of NSA Ron Wyden and Mark Udall say ‘public deserves to know more about violations of secret court orders’

• “The reason I say this is unrealistic is because in order for this $180 billion to play out, then companies need to aggressively start pulling back from using outsourcers, using [hosting firms], using cloud providers,” Staten told CSOonlineA’A on Friday. “And frankly, we don’t see any evidence that suggests they’re going to start doing that.”

• An internal audit carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) and leaked to the Washington Post reveals that Chinese Spring Festival tourists were targeted while on holiday in the US.

• Revelations that NSA collected records it was not permitted to acquire pile further pressure on intelligence chief James Clapper

• The church says this type of surveillance is reminiscent of that felt by the congregation during the McCarthy era

• Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, says new revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program suggest the Obama administration has “abused the authority granted to them by Congress” and that he will investigate the matter.

• Reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) routinely breaks the law and violates court orders and the Constitution in order to collect private data of hundreds of millions of Americans has prompted some federal lawmakers to finally exercise a little oversight.

• Though it took two and a half pages to do so, the NSA denied my application. “[Y]our request is denied because the fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter,” it wrote.

• Oh. Thanks anyway, NSA.

• An internal audit from leaker Edward Snowden — now enjoying asylum in Russia — also revealed that the agency intercepted phone calls and emails from U.S. citizens during that time, and often did not report the intrusion.

• Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan said Sunday he’s hopeful the House will have another chance to vote on a measure that would curb the National Security Agency.

• Nearly 3,000 violations of Americans’ privacy, mentioned in the National Security Agency’s internal audit recently leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden, weren’t “willful” and are results of mistakes by employees, the agency claimed.

• Because the NSA’s activities are largely classified, we can never truly know what we’re paying.

• Snowden. PRISM. XKey­score. It seems that you can’t turn around these days without reading another story about government surveillance.

• [...]

• If as a society we don’t start fighting government snooping laws, they are only going to become more restrictive. For example, recently, the Obama administration pushed to make it a felony to stream copyrighted material over the Internet, which was a key part of the tabled Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) of last year. SOPA targeted user-generated content sites like Tumblr and YouTube and Internet startups in the social and online search space.

• Ladar Levison, who shuttered the Web mail service he founded — and his only e-mail account — when the U.S. government demanded access to his company’s servers, tells CNET he created Lavabit because of the Patriot Act.

• Ever been standing in a checkout line only to realize that you’re unable to pay because you’ve left your wallet, cash, or credit card elsewhere? Or perhaps you’re like the 83% of respondents to a recent PayPal survey who said you’d rather not carry a wallet at all. If PayPal’s latest technology using face recognition to facilitate payment transactions is successful, wallets may soon become a relic of the past.

• Edward Snowden: After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power — the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government — for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. From a business perspective, this was the obvious strategy, but what benefited the institutions ended up costing the public dearly. The major outlets are still only beginning to recover from this cold period.

• Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, and resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given — reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world — making her an obvious choice.

Civil Rights

• Ajam’s case takes a new approach to Guantanamo habeas litigation: Ajam challenges Section 1028 of the National Defense Authorization Act—the section which imposes detainee transfer restrictions on the President—as an unconstitutional Congressional intrusion into plenary Presidential foreign policy power.

• When the government gives itself the power to deny a person his or her constitutional rights, it is alarming, to say the least. When the government prevents the people it governs from being able to do anything about it, it is truly frightening.

• What we have in the Hedges v. Obama case is yet another very bad precedent. As Judge Forrest had pointed out, “Courts must safeguard core constitutional rights.” The 2nd Circuit Appeals Court, clearly not applying the principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) to this situation, has sold out that obligation for a handful of dubious promises. Recent history provides no confidence that such promises are given in good faith. No, it is bad faith we are witnessing here. The government lawyers should hang their heads in shame for obviously undermining the Constitution they are sworn to uphold. It just goes to show there are always those, be they soldiers, police, or lawyers who will simply follow orders no matter what the consequences.

• The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that the government may not take the life, liberty or property of any person without due process.

• A smart new book reveals precisely how and why Oliver Wendell Holmes changed his mind about the first amendment.

DRM

• A federal judge took Apple to task on Friday for showing no contrition about potentially defrauding its customers of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Remember Guava LLC v. Merkel? A collusive Prenda’s lawsuit filed in Hennepin County court in Minneapolis? I thought that this lawsuit was over, and I was gladly surprised to learn (hat tip to Jason Sweet) that yesterday Judge Tanya M. Bransford ordered Prenda parties (Guava LLC, Michael Dugas and Paul Hansmeier’s Alpha Law Firm) to jointly and severally pay $63,367.02 in attorney fees.

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