● 05.21.14

● Links 21/5/2014: New Qt, Bacon Leaves Canonical

Posted in News Roundup at 2:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Recently Tamil Nadu has become one of the first few adopters of open source through BOSS (Bharat Open Source Software) developed by CDAC Chennai — savinmg a lot of funds for most government departments.

Desktop

• It’s no secret that Chromebooks–portable computers running Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are starting to succeed, especially in several niche markets. In fact, PCMag.com has a big story out on why Microsoft should be worried about Chromebooks. Among other notable points it makes, Intel has a new line of chips for Chromebooks using its Core i3 mobile processors. Intel, of course, was Microsoft’s primary partner as Windows marched forwared to market dominance.

• The sheer variety available to the Linux desktop brings with it a level of discussion and debate most other platforms do not know. Which desktop is the best? Should Linux hold onto what has always worked? Should the Linux desktop mimic what others already know? Dare Linux look and feel like OS X?

• That last idea is a bit of a conundrum – one with multiple arguments. First and foremost, there is no debating that OS X is a fast-growing platform. It not only has deep roots in Linux architecture, it has been accepted by numerous types of users. There have been many attempts at “cloning” the OS X desktop on Linux. Some of those clones have succeeded, to varying levels. One in particular (PearOS) succeeded so well it was bought by an unknown American company and removed from existence. That company is rumored to be Apple (a Black Lab Linux developer announced (in a goodbye letter) he was leaving the team to join Apple “…in a Linux endeavor they recently acquired.” It’s fairly easy to put that two and two together.) But still, until there are facts, it is conspiracy, at best.

Server

• Red Hat was flush with announcements in conjunction with the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta last week, as we covered here. The company announced that itt is open sourcing the ManageIQ cloud orchestration platform, and it also announced some important new collaboration deals surrounding OpenStack. However, one thing that also became clear in Atlanta is that Canonical’s new focus on delivering and supporting private OpenStack clouds is going to create very direct competition with Red Hat.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Renesas Electronics Corporation is increasing its engagement with Linux and The Linux Foundation to become a Gold Member. The company joins existing Linux Foundation Gold members China Mobile, Cisco, Citrix, ETRI, Google, Hitachi, Huawei, NetApp, NYSE Technologies, Panasonic, SUSE, Toyota and Verizon Terremark.

• Two companies that represent the profound changes rippling through the tech industry have joined The Linux Foundation.

• Distributed Linux OS company “CoreOS” and networking software specialist Cumulus Networks announced on Monday that they had joined open source advocacy, collaboration, and support group.

• In today’s Linux news, Katherine Noyes slogs the blogosphere in search of alternatives to systemd, with little success it seems. Jesse Smiths falls into VortexBox 2.3, a distribution for music servers and jukeboxes. Jamie Watson reviews Mint 17 RC and a user survey puts Ubuntu ahead of Red Hat in the OpenStack race.

• Linux kernel debugging may soon be a bit easier for kernel developers and users in the field thanks to the work of Outreach Program for Women intern Teodora Băluţă.

• That very much includes me, btw. I think the whole “cult of personality” is pretty disturbing, and I hate how people take me and what I say too seriously. The same goes for Jobs, Ellison, Gates, you name it. I wish more people thought for themselves, and realized that the technology actually flows from all those random anonymous great engineers that are all around.

• PowerTOP remains one of Intel’s long-standing open-source utilities for trying to improve the power efficiency of Linux systems, particularly around laptops/ultrabooks and other Intel x86 portable systems. With the PowerTOP 2.6 release that happened a few days ago there’s a new look-and-feel to the auto-generated HTML reports, support for compiling the PowerTOP code-base as C++11, and there’s several bug-fixes to the utility itself.

• The latest build of this kernel features quite a few patches and fixes, covering numerous aspects. The interesting thing about it is that the latest update for this branch was released almost a year ago, which makes this the oldest kernel still updated.

Graphics Stack

• The NVIDIA 331.79 Linux driver was just announced by NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner and it includes fixes for: a crash with the nvidia-installer, a module signing issue with the NVIDIA Unified Memory kernel module, a blank screen/flickering issue when rotating displays with Base Mosaic, a bug that caused errors for big-endian X11 clients with certain RandR requests, a bug that corrupted certain software rendering, and a bug that caused issues with EDID version 1.3 or older for systems using DisplayPort in certain configurations.

• Wayland 1.5 features a new internal event queue for Wayland display events, which allows for the client library to dispatch delete and error events immediately. On the build front, Wayland now uses non-recursive Makefiles.

• While Wayland/Weston 1.5 was just released hour ago, Kristian Høgsberg is already making plans for Wayland 1.6.

• NVIDIA has just announced that a new version of its Long Lived Branch driver for the Linux platform, 331.79, has been released and is ready for download.

• The new driver from NVIDIA is not an impressive one, but again, the ones that do make it to this particular branch don’t usually gather too many major changes. There is a very simple reason for this and it all has to do with the way the drivers are handled.

• The Linux DisplayPort MST code has been working for nearly one month and it’s now undergoing further review by other upstream Linux DRM developers. Airlie wrote in a new mailing list post tonight, “So this set is pretty close to what I think we should be merging initially, Since the last set, it makes fbcon and suspend/resume work a lot better, I’ve also fixed a couple of bugs in -intel that make things work a lot better. I’ve bashed on this a bit using kms-flip from intel-gpu-tools, hacked to add 3 monitor support. It still generates a fair few i915 state checker backtraces, and some of them are fairly hard to work out, it might be we should just tone down the state checker for encoders/connectors with no actual hw backing them.”

• Mesa 10.1.4 has been released. Mesa 10.1.4 is a bug fix release which fixes bugs fixed since the 10.1.3 release, (see below for a list of changes).

Benchmarks

• In the past when comparing the Linux and Windows performance with NVIDIA graphics when using their proprietary drivers, the performance has largely been the same. With the very latest drivers on each platform, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS seems to have an advantage over Windows 8.1 in many of the tests. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we were using the NVIDIA 337.19 Beta as the latest publicly available driver at the time of testing while for Windows 8.1 Pro x64 the 337.50 driver was their latest equivalent. As usual for ensuring accuracy and being a fair “out of the box” comparison, the stock settings were used for each operating system.

Applications

• Take on “dependency hell” with Docker containers, the lightweight and nimble cousin of VMs. Learn how Docker makes applications portable and isolated by packaging them in containers based on LXC technology.

• Phoronix Test Suite 5.2-Khanino Milestone 2 is now available and it has working all of the fundamentals of the new Phoromatic server and client features for easily and quickly building your own open-source test farm.

Proprietary

• Spotify is a music streaming service that comes with native clients for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux as well as mobile devices such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Epic Games is a company that is all too familiar with Linux and its community. The studio released Unreal Tournament 2004 for Linux at a time when no one was really giving a damn about open source as an entertainment platform. Also, the devs have always had some sort of Linux dedicated servers in place for their titles.

• Epic Games appears to be taking Linux support for Unreal Engine 4 quite seriously, per their latest blog post. They’ll also be exploring Phoronix Test Suite support so that we’ll be able to run benchmarks and test improvements of the graphics driver stack.

• Valve has just released a new update for the Beta branch of Steam, but this time it’s a little bit smaller, which means that it might be getting closer to another stable version.

• SteamOS, a Debian-based distribution developed by Valve to be used in its hybrid PC / console, has received an update for the Beta branch, a couple of fixes, and a new important package.

• Valve has a large catalog of games and some of them are pretty old, but that doesn’t mean developers don’t care about them any longer. They’ve now released a massive update for the Source engine, which applies to quite a few titles.

• SteamOS, a Debian-based distribution developed by Valve to be used in its hybrid PC / console, has received an update for the Beta branch, a couple of fixes, and a new important package.

• Valve has two builds for SteamOS. One is a stable version (sort of) and the other one is a Beta (Alchemist). The differences between them are not that big at the moment, but from time to time, Valve makes some changes on the Beta side that need to be tested by the community before landing in the Stable release.

• Nuclear Throne is probably one of my favourite Procedural Death Labyrinth games right now for Linux and it keeps getting better with every update.

• Ever had those times when you didn’t have any games left to play? The gaming blues as we gamer folks like to say it. Well, if you had or are having it now all you have to do is to turn to Steam to blow it all away. According to an analysis report by Gamasutra, Steam has seen more game released in the last 20 weeks than it has released in all of 2013!

• As Valve gears up for the launch of Steam Machines at the end of this year, many third party manufacturers are showing their concerns. Their major concerns about the machines are that it is going to be a tricky system to manufacture as compared to other consoles or entertainment systems.

• Wargame: Red Dragon, a real time strategy developed by Eugen Systems and published by Focus Home Interactive, has been released on Steam for Linux.

• Eugen Systems supported the Linux platform right from start and it was one of the few studios that ported its games when Steam for Linux was only in its infancy.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In Qt5, the locale support has seen a lot of improvements compared to Qt4. John Layt has done some fantastic work in contributing the features that are needed by many KDE applications, to a point where in most cases, KLocale is not needed anymore, and code that used it can now rely on QLocale. This means less duplication of code and API (QLocale vs. KLocale), more compabitility across applications (as more apps move to use QLocale), less interdependencies between libraries, and a smaller footprint. This is one of the areas where porting of applications from KDE Platform 4.x to KDE Frameworks 5 can cause a bit of work, but it has clear advantages. KLocale is also still there, in the kde4support library, but it’s deprecated, and included as a porting aid and compatibility layer.

• I’m happy to announce that Qt 5.3 has been released. The main focus for this release was performance, stability and usability. Nevertheless, Qt 5.3 has also gotten a fair amount of new features that help make developers’ lives easier.

• KDE‘s Plasma is one of those few desktops which offer extreme cutomization, giving a user full control over the system. Those who complain that the default icon sets have not changed for ages need to understand that art & design need heavy investment (good designers are expensive) and you can’t expect new icon theme with each release – look at Android, iOS or Mac OSX. iOS just got an icon theme reboot which got mixed reviews from users.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Yorba Foundation, the prominent developer of Shotwell photo manager, has recently announced their development of a new slick and stylish calendar app for GNOME called “California.” It has now been included into Yorba’s daily PPA for testing on Ubuntu systems and looks just as promising and stylish as their minimalist email client Geary.

Distributions

• Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has just reached version 2.2.2 Beta and is available for download.

• SliTaz, an open source and minimalistic Linux distribution built from scratch, has announced that a new Release Candidate in the new 5.0 branch is now ready for testing and download.

• The developers have been working for a few years already on this versions of the SliTaz. This is understandable because it’s not exactly easy to build an operating system from scratch.

• Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-10, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, is now ready for download.

• The Clonezilla team released a new stable version of their operating system and they made some important modifications to it, including a new Linux kernel.

• “The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of May 18, 2014,” reads the official announcement.

• OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has just reached version 4.0.2 and is now available for download.

• The OpenELEC developers have been keeping themselves very busy and they’ve implemented the latest changes made available along with XBMC 13.1 Beta 2, which arrived only a couple of days ago. Nonetheless, this is considered to be a stable release even if it’s based on a Beta.

• Valve has released yet another Beta version of its Steam client, making this one the busiest weeks on record, with a new update every day.

• The Steam developers have been working very hard to get a new stable version of the application, but it seems that we’ll have to wait a little longer.

• This latest updated only takes care of some small issues with the In-Home Streaming: a rare crash that occurred while streaming the desktop has been fixed, and a case where the video would stop streaming, leaving audio and control unaffected, has been corrected.

New Releases

• The Chakra team is proud to announce the first release of Chakra Descartes series, which will follow the 4.13 KDE releases.

• We are excited to include the new artwork set by Malcer, codenamed Sirius. The whole Chakra experience has been improved in every detail, from the GRUB theme to the KDE Desktop.

Screenshots

Arch Family

Red Hat Family

• Traditionally software companies have relied upon the ‘unique’ qualities of their software as the selling point, but selling free software is a different proposition. Most, but not all, of the distributions that Distrowatch currently lists began life as copies or derivatives of one or other of the generic Linux distributions – Red Hat, Slackware or Debian – each of which owed some kind of a debt to Linux pre-history in the shape of SLS or Owen le Blanc’s MCC Interim Linux, which is often claimed to be the first installable Linux distribution.

• The primary role of a commercial server-based GNU/Linux distribution is not the sale of the software but of follow-up services – subscription, consultancy, installation, training, support, upgrades and maintenance. Advances to free software may come from any number of sources, but for a distribution to succeed it has to have something that differentiates it from the others, an extra layer of polish or a loyal following, and a reputation for providing good service.

• One of the most controversial things that happened on the Linux Planet over the course of the last week has been a series of stories in the Wall St. Journal taking aim at Red Hat. The first story alleged that Red Hat will not support its’ Linux customers who choose to run a non-Red Hat OpenStack distribution. It’s an allegation that Red Hat denies.

• The open-source community is beating up Red Hat for deciding to make OpenStack more enterprise-ready. Is this a replay of Red Hat’s “enterprise Linux” decision in 2003?

Fedora

• Robyn Bergeron, project lead of The Fedora Project for over two years had decided to step down from the role. As noted in her blog, she thanked all people associated with the project and said she is “much obliged” to others for the experience she had working with Fedora till date.

• Our top story tonight Fedora project lead has tendered her resignation saying it’s about time. In other news, Linus Torvalds, father of Linux, was interviewed by TechScape’s Bill Robinson. And finally, Gary Newell blogged about his recent experiences with Linux Mint 16.

• In February 2012, Robyn Bergeron was named Fedora Project Leader for the Red Hat-sponsored community Linux Fedora Project. On May 19, Bergeron announced her intention to transition out of the Fedora Project Leader role. Bergeron has not publicly disclosed when her last day will be as Fedora Project Leader, and Red Hat has not yet announced a replacement for her.

• The Fedora Packagers are the folks behind the scenes that take all the new software coming down from upstream and build them for the rest of us to use on Fedora.

• For Fedora 21 there is the KDE Frameworks 5 feature with the goal of shipping all of the KF5 library components that can live side-by-side with KDE4. Some of the packages have already landed into Fedora Rawhide while the rest are expected in the weeks ahead. However, Fedora 21 isn’t being released until late in 2014… For Fedora KDE users right now running Fedora 20, fortunately there is a solution.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The biggest problem with any Windows operating system is the security, whether it’s about viruses or back doors, and this spyware “message” in a Linux system about Windows drivers shows just how much of a problem security is for Microsoft’s OS.

• Good news isn’t it? Yes, 5 Ubuntu derivatives all in one ISO file. One thing I like about this is no more clearing ISO files of the distros on these AIO ISO from USB drives. Mounting this AIO ISO to a USB drive saves you a lot of time. What do have to say about this AIO DVD?

• Looks like it’s time for Open Source community managers to mover on. In the month of April openSUSE community manager announced that he was leaving SUSE to join ownCloud and now Jono Bacon, the rock star community manager of Ubuntu is leaving Canonical.

• Jono will be joining the XPRIZE Foundation as a senior director of community. XPRIZE focuses on solving major problems facing humanity, according to Jono.

• Digia has released an all new version of Qt, a C++ framework for creating intuitive cross-platform apps. Starting from Qt 5.2, the framework supports building apps for the Android and iOS platform. Version 5.3 adds some more features on the top of it and also stabilizes Qt for cross-platform mobile programming.

• Ubuntu is now running on the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, as per an update from Ubuntu Insigths. China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and Canonical have teamed up to run OpenStack on Tianhe2.

• With the recent release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (affectionately known as “Trusty Tahr”), there are a number of people (and organizations) that have been waiting to upgrade from LTS to LTS desktop or server. The question to ask yourself might be whether to upgrade or to re-install? The answer to that question may lie in some of the changes that have taken place between these LTS versions (a little more than two years between them), so let’s take a quick look at some of them.

• Candice Swanepoel is a South African model that seem to have a preference of Ubuntu systems and Unity. At least this is what we can deduce from her Youtube channel and the commercial she just posted.

Flavours and Variants

• There’s quite a bit to look forward to in Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon. Changes in this release include Update Manager and Driver Manager improvements, Login Screen enhancements, a new Language Settings tool, tweaks to the Software Sources menu, and a redesigned Welcome Screen, among other things.

• Edubuntu 14.04 LTS trusty tahr is a ubuntu-derived that adds many default open source software for educational use developed by a community of developers together with educators, parents and technology enthusiasts.

Devices/Embedded

• Embedded developers are able to immediately begin their evaluation, prototyping, and development today by downloading Mentor Embedded Linux Lite and Sourcery™ CodeBench Lite products, both tailored for the new 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APUs. Additionally, those developers who require support, commercial business terms, enhanced development experience, or customization services can easily migrate to commercial versions of the Mentor Embedded Linux and/or Sourcery CodeBench Professional tools.

• The Tiny Core team has announced that piCore 5.3, the Raspberry Pi port of Tiny Core Linux, has just received a new version and is now available for download.

Phones

Ballnux

Android

• PQ Labs announced a tiny, signage-oriented, $109 “iStick A300″ mini-PC that runs Android 4.2 on a quad-core RK3188 SoC and supports up to 55°C environments.

• Entegra announced a rugged, modular tablet that’s configurable for a wide range of environments and applications, and supports both Android 4.2 and Linux.

• The $100 and under tablet market has mostly been the home of third-tier vendors, whose devices are as likely to be found at drugstores as at electronics retailers. Intel has been touting the promise of $100 slates using its Bay Trail processors, but we’ve haven’t seen any yet from major manfacturers. Instead, its hardware partner HP has just rolled out a new bargain-basement tablet with no Intel inside.

• The Android-x86.org is happy to announce the 4.4-RC2 release to public. This is the second candidate of Android-x86 4.4 stable release. A live CD ISO is available in the following site.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Chen says that “SlateKit Base is a small Linux distribution (binary compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 amd64), with specially configured Qt 5.2.0, Mesa 10.0.1, two web engine/renderer: the default QtWebKit, and Oxide, which based on Chromium/Blink.”

Free Software/Open Source

• The standard comment trolls make to FLOSS is that non-Free software is better, somehow, because you pay for it up front. I’ve seen several instances of that being false in schools. Here’s an example of a big business rolling out non-Free software. It didn’t work for them and they are stopping the rollout part way through. You don’t always get what you pay for…

• The proof that open source, properly applied, is available. Studies, such as the one recently done by Coverity, have found that open-source programs have fewer errors per thousand lines of code than its proprietary brothers. And, it’s hard to ignore the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), the group within the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that assesses operating systems and software for security issues, when they said that that while no end-user operating system is as secure as they’d like it to be, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most secure desktop.

• On the other hand, the mere existence of Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday says everything most of us need to know about how “secure” proprietary software is. I also can’t help noticing how every time Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Explorer (IE), they always claim it’s the most secure ever. And, then, a new hole is found, and guess what, that same security hole is in every version of IE from IE 6 to IE 11. If IE really were being rewritten to make it secure why are the same holes showing up In Every Version??

• As a platinum member of both the Linux Foundation and the OpenStack Foundation, HP hasn’t exactly kept its interest in open source a secret. Recently, however, it upped its commitment to open source in two key areas. First, it added the OpenDaylight project — one it helped found — to its list of platinum memberships. Second, it launched the Helion portfolio and pledged to invest more than $1 billion in support of new open source cloud products and platforms.

• “Our views on open source are captured by our commitment to base HP’s cloud product and services strategy entirely upon the open source OpenStack framework,” Mark Pearson, chief technologist for HP Networking, told Linux.com. “We believe openness speeds up innovation.”

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The Chrome Team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 35 to the Stable channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack Juno Summit last week in Atlanta was a source of many new and exciting announcements, from both vendors and the OpenStack Foundation itself. One of the more interesting of such announcements was of a new OpenStack Marketplace. For those looking to explore their options in commercial offerings of OpenStack, from training to distributions to public clouds and more, the Marketplace is designed to help users better understand what resources are available.

• Last week was filled with soundbytes and announcements from OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, and there were also announcements of several new services and resources surrounding the OpenStack cloud platform. In case you missed some of the most important ones, here is what you need to know, whether you are considering an OpenStack deployment or already have one underway.

• During an afternoon session at the OpenStack Juno Summit in Atlanta on May 14, members of the OpenStack User Committee publicly revealed the results of the latest OpenStack user survey. OpenStack is an open-source cloud platform originally started by NASA and Rackspace in 2010 that has since grown to include many of the leading names in the technology world, including IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco and AT&T. Since 2010, there have been nine major milestone releases of OpenStack, with the most recent being the Icehouse release that debuted on April 17. The new OpenStack user study includes responses from 506 OpenStack deployments around the world. The top country for deployments is the United States, followed by China. Across the 506 OpenStack clouds, organizations are in various stages of deployments, with 210 being in development/quality assurance, 218 in proof of concept and 209 in production deployment. One of the key findings of the user survey is that OpenStack users are running different OpenStack releases and don’t always update to the latest version, for various reasons. For the OpenStack clouds running in production, the survey found that the Ubuntu Linux operating system is the leading choice. In this eWEEK slide show, we take a look at some of the key findings from the OpenStack user survey.

CMS

• This update is a bugfix update of the previous major WordPress update 3.9 (codenamed “Smith”). WordPress 3.9.1 has been available for a few days in Fedora 20, and was recently just pushed to the Fedora 19 repos.

• The 3.9 WordPress update introduced a slew of new features and refinements, including a new theme browser, improved post editing, and updates to the image editing tools.

Public Services/Government

• Europe Commons, an online platform for the sharing, exchange and reuse of software solutions for Europe’s municipalities and other local government organisations was revamped earlier this month, during which it also received a new name – Civic Exchange. The platform collects and promotes applications and digital services that help improve public services in Europe. The platform’s consortium is doubling its efforts to find new solutions, announcing evidence-based case studies to showcase those with the most impact.

• Open government is a critical dimension to democracy. It is also difficult. If it were easy, our work would be over. Yet, open government by its nature needs constant iteration. Open government, much like open source, is grounded in collaborative and participatory processes that ultimately shape how we experience our cities, states, and country. It requires several dimensions—from releasing information to creating structures and processes to empower people inside and out of government.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• A release candidate Git v2.0.0-rc4, hopefully the final one before the real thing, is now available for testing at the usual places.

Standards/Consortia

• To a technology director at the White House, the State of the Union is like the Superbowl. While the world is watching the President of the United States deliver an address to the nation, Leigh Heyman and his team are managing the media technology behind the scenes to create an enhanced and interactive experience for the viewers. How many of you watched the State of the Union on YouTube this year?

• A new initiative is underway by a Mesa developer to pair the OProfile system profiler with the Phoronix Test Suite for more easily finding OpenGL driver bottlenecks, etc.

Leftovers

• The 1,606 respondents said they saw many potential benefits to the Internet of Things. New voice- and gesture-based interfaces could make computers easier to use. Medical devices and health monitoring services could help prevent and treat diseases. Environmental sensors could detect pollution. Salesforce.com chief scientist JP Rangaswami said that improved logistics and planning systems could reduce waste.

• A spoof advert suggesting Apple’s new iOS 7 operating system made handsets waterproof appears to have fooled some users into destroying their iPhones.

• An academy chain in charge of running six state schools became the first in the country to fold today – forcing a sudden hunt for new sponsors to take them over.

Security

• The Linux Format team genuinely hope you love this issue, as we think it shows how GNU/Linux is touching every aspect of not just the computing world, but our everyday lives too. Nothing highlights this better than our lead news story and the fallout from Heartbleed. Suddenly the world woke up and realised an open source project – OpenSSL – was a vital element in their lives, but from a near-disaster comes an amazing new solution.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• If anybody is surprised that key letters between Tony Blair and George Bush on launching the invasion of Iraq have gone missing, they have not been paying attention. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Obama and Cameron regimes have consistently and continually covered up the crimes of their predecessors, from launch illegal wars of aggression to instituting programmes of torture and extraordinary rendition and murder.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian aardvark,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. He and his brother had spotted several coatis while on a trip to the Iguaçu Falls, in Brazil, where they had mistaken them for actual aardvarks.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• So who should those of us living in England vote for tomorrow? I intend to vote Green – it seems to me that in England that is the best way to give a positive expression to the discontent with mainstream parties. I particularly hope that those who have the opportunity to vote for Rupert Read in the East of England will do so. Their support for renationalizing the railways would be enough for me, but actually I find myself in agreement with the large majority of their platform. I reproduce here an article from the ever excellent Peter Tatchell.

• How Victor Orbán launched a constitutional coup and created a one-party state.

Censorship

• A woman in Italy is accusing Facebook of closing her account with less than 24 hours notice after she refused to remove a photo of two women kissing. Carlotta Trevisan says Facebook deemed that the image, which she described as “chaste” and “pure,” “violated the community’s standards on nudity and pornography.”

Privacy

• …without a hearing, I was never given the opportunity to object, let alone make any any substantive defense, to the contempt change. Without any objection (because I wasn’t allowed a hearing), the appellate court waived consideration of the substantive questions my case raised – and upheld the contempt charge, on the grounds that I hadn’t disputed it in court.

• Warning of an erosion of confidence in the products of the U.S. technology industry, John Chambers, the CEO of networking giant Cisco Systems, has asked President Obama to intervene to curtail the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.

• One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched on Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.

Civil Rights

• The TAFTA/TTIP negotiations remain almost totally lacking in real transparency, with little information about what exactly is happening behind closed doors being released to the public — and most of that coming from the EU side. This has naturally forced those excluded from the inner circle to speculate about what might be going on — and, inevitably, to fear the worst.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• LAST THURSDAY the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted by a three to two margin to move forward with chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposals to gut net neutrality rules in the USA. But what exactly does that mean? And why should we, on a small island 3,000 miles away, care anyway?

• It all started in January when US internet service provider (ISP) Verizon successfully appealed against FCC Open Internet Order 2010, arguing that because internet service had been classified as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service”, the FCC had no right to enforce net neutrality rules under the common carrier regulations that had been the backbone of the 2010 rules, and a cornerstone of the Obama administration.

Intellectual Monopolies

• This is probably the most action-packed update so far – a reflection of the fact that we are now deep in the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which have been running for nearly a year. Of course, information about what exactly is happening behind the closed doors is still thin on the ground. To its credit, the European Commission has recently published its negotiating positions in five areas: chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceutical products, motor vehicles, textiles and clothing. Significantly, though, it did not publish its proposals for energy. That’s because they are far more contentious than for those other sectors.

Copyrights

• Last Friday, Swedish Public Radio opened with the headline “Swedish Pirate Party Heading For Re-Election To European Parliament” as a fresh poll was published. This was followed by similar news from the Czech Republic. As election week opens, more is up in the air than ever – but things are looking overall positive for the movement.

• A student has been awarded a valuable Pirate Bay-related domain after successfully complaining to Denmark’s domain name dispute body. ThePirateBay.dk will now be taken away from its current owner and transformed into a special site to protest the ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay in Denmark.

• In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models. Colette wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.

• The Pirate Bay has just launched a banner campaign to support the various Pirate parties participating in the European Parliament elections this week. The notorious torrent site is running localized ads, encouraging its millions of visitors to vote Pirate.

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