● 07.10.14

● Links 10/7/2014: LXLE 14.04 in Headlines, Plasma 5

Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Summary: Linux Mint 17 – the live-booting distro on the disc for 141 – does not install properly. Please download a newer version of the ISO from the Linux Mint website.

Desktop

• The answer to your USB worries was presented in April this year in the name of the reversible USB dubbed USB Type-C. Unlike the present USB, the new Universal Design Bus design will be smaller and symmetrical. So you no more have to worry about the orientation and can smoothly slip it inside the slot without fumbling. Now the latest news is that Chrome developers are reportedly working on supporting the new USB. So suggests the recent commits to the Chromium source code.

• But he adds that it is important to make sure there are no compatibility problems between GNU/Linux and hardware, which is often a problem due to its complexity, and to ensure automatic updates are available.

• I hate having to wade through these kinds of articles, but it’s necessary to answer them lest the perception take root that “Linux is doomed!” and all the usual blather that goes along with such nonsense. Every single time I read one of these articles my eyes roll into the back of my head and various profanities burst from my lips.

• The article focuses on the corporate desktop, but as we all know there has been a revolution going on inside companies as people move their focus from desktop computers to mobile devices. And Linux has been a part of that via Android and Chrome OS since the very beginning. And let’s not forget that we’ll soon have phones and tablets coming from Canonical that run Ubuntu.

• The author acknowledges the transition to mobile, but then downplays it and focuses back on Windows on the desktop. Well, if Windows is still the main OS being used on the desktop then who’s fault is that exactly? I hardly think that the users can be blamed for that, it’s much more likely the IT department that is making those kinds of decisions.

Server

• It’s OSCON time again, and this year the tech sector is abuzz with talk of cloud infrastructure. One of the more interesting startups is Docker, an ultra-lightweight containerization app that’s brimming with potential

• I caught up with the VP of Services for Docker, James Turnbull, who’ll be running a Docker crash course at the con. Besides finding out what Docker is anyway, we discussed the cloud, open source contributing, and getting a real job.

Kernel Space

• Almost all Linux kernel developers, if not all, are very active Linux users themselves. There is no requirement that testers should be developers, however, users and developers that are not familiar with the new code could be more effective at testing a new piece of code than the original author of that code. In other words, developer testing serves as an important step in verifying the functionality, however, developer testing alone is not sufficient to find interactions with other code, features, and unintended regressions on configurations and/or hardware, developer didn’t anticipate and didn’t have the opportunity and resources to test. Hence, users play a very important role in the Linux Kernel development process.

• I’ve been doing some form of systems administration since my freshman year in college (1994) and I’ve been making my living as only a sys admin since 2000…

• Now that the 3.14 branch of the Linux kernel has been declared LTS (Long Term Support), which means that it will be supported for a few years with patches, updated drivers, and general improvements, a new maintenance version is available for download.

• In a message about the release of the 3.14.10-rt7 realtime Linux kernel, Thomas Gleixner reiterated that the funding problems that have plagued realtime Linux (which he raised, again, at last year’s Real Time Linux Workshop) have only gotten worse.

• The DisplayPort MST support code that’s been in the works for several months is starting to land with the Linux 3.17 kernel that will be officially entering development stages next month.

• Josh Boyer (Fedora Kernel team member & FESCo Nominee) recently announced the new kernel-playground COPR repo. Basically, this is a repo for users that want to try out some new and shiny (yet not ready for primetime) kernel features in Fedora, such as the overlayfs “union” filesystem, and kdbus (the in-kernel d-bus replacement).

• It is important to note that this new kernel-playground is an “unsupported” kernel, designed for developers of the new features they include, as well as curious users that want to test out these bleeding edge features, and that.

• System administrators keep our lives and work seamlessly humming. They are the super heroes who often go unnoticed and unrecognized only until things go wrong. And so, leading up to SysAdmin Day on July 25, we’re honoring the hard work of our Linux Foundation sysadmins with a series of profiles that highlights who they are and what they do.

• Ryan Day is one of nine Linux Foundation system administrators, and is part of the global team that supports developers working on collaborative projects. Here he describes a typical work day, talks about his favorite tools, his nightmare scenario, and how he spends his free time, among other things.

• So 3.16 is has quite a few new features in terms of newly supported devices, also some what surprisingly this blog post will be out before 3.16! In terms of new device support all the SoCs listed here are exciting for a number of reasons for Fedora ARM. Aarch64 (ARM64) makes it’s first debut with support of real hardware although we’ve actually had kernel support enable for it for some time in Fedora even if only usable on the glacial Foundation emulator.

• The 3.16 release is also very likely to be the kernel that ships with Fedora 21 GA and with the Alpha due in about a month we’re starting to polish and test all the platforms and devices we want to support for GA.

• In complementing the earlier Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD (and the later Btrfs testing), here are benchmarks of EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs from the Linux 3.15 and 3.16 kernels being compared from a traditional rotating hard drive.

• As has become common practice at Phoronix, for each new development kernel we end up benchmarking the most commonly used, mainline Linux file-systems on a hard drive and solid state drive. With the SSD results out there in the aforelinked articles, in this article are results using a high-performance Western Digital HDD from a Core i7 Haswell system running Ubuntu and comparing the mainline stable Linux 3.15 kernel against a daily snapshot of Linux 3.16 from this week.

• The fifth maintenance release of the current stable Linux kernel package, version 3.15, was announced last evening, July 9, by none other than Greg Kroah-Hartman. The release introduces numerous improvements and bug fixes.

• Linux kernel 3.4.98 LTS is here to introduce better support for the PowerPC (PPC) computer architecture, several updated wireless, Radeon, ACPI, SCSI, and USB drivers, improvements to the CIFS and NFS filesystems, as well as networking enhancements, especially for Bluetooth and Wireless.

Graphics Stack

• Succeeding last month’s NVIDIA 340.17 Linux driver beta is now the first official release in the 340.xx driver series for Linux / Solaris / BSD. The NVIDIA 340.24 driver was released this morning with new features but is heavier on the fixing side.

• The main feature to the NVIDIA 340.24 driver (and carried over from the 340.17 driver) is initial support on Linux for G-SYNC monitors. The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver now has support for dealing with G-SYNC (NVIDIA’s variable refresh-rate technology similar in nature to AMD FreeSync and VESA Adaptive-Sync — the support came just months after we reported NVIDIA was working on G-SYNC Linux support.

Applications

• Transmageddon is a video transcoder for Linux and Unix systems built using GStreamer. It supports almost any format as its input and can generate a very large host of output files. The goal of the application was to help people to create the files they need to be able to play on their mobile devices and for people not hugely experienced with multimedia to generate a multimedia file without having to resort to command line tools with ungainly syntaxes.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games.

• When Sony announced at its E3 conference that a remastered version of the classic LucasArts adventure, Grim Fandango, was coming to PlayStation 4 and PS Vita, everyone wondered if Double Fine will be bringing it to other platforms as well. Well, wonder no more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Windows XP’s long run may have finally come to an end, but that doesn’t mean your XP-era hardware has to go too. No indeed: There are numerous options available in the Linux world, and one shining example is LXLE.

• LXLE has been kicking around for a while now and, for a supposedly lightweight distro, it’s looking fearsomely feature-packed right now. Having said that, it’s hard not to love LXLE, as it’s treading the line between resource efficiency and usability pretty well, and is borderline addictive when it comes to the DE itself. The clue’s in the updated acronym; rather than standing for ‘Lubuntu eXtra Life Extension’, as it did in the days before Lubuntu LTS releases, when LXLE was around to fill that niche using the LXDE desktop environment, it’s now pitched as the ‘LXDE eXtra Luxury Edition’.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Community has announced the first release of Plasma 5. It’s a release candidate so it’s meant for testing and preview purpose, like the developer preview of Android L. The final release will be announced next week so this is the last chance for testers and developers to find issues and get them fixed before the release.

• For KDE desktop users unhappy with the level of integration with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, the situation might finally be changing.

• There’s been a bug going back to early 2002 about properly integrating Mozilla with KDE, “Mozilla has ‘Windows Integration’ on win32, I believe it should have such a thing on KDE as well (gnome folks, feel free to file your own bug). We should at least provide an icon in the KDE menu, perhaps we could even tell KDE that some file types can be opened with Mozilla…” That bug, Mozilla Bug 140751, has been open for the past twelve years and finally now might be inching closer to being resolved.

• While KDE Frameworks 5 was just released this week, there’s already new features and functionality sought after for future revisions of this modularized set of next-gen KDE libraries.

• Nitrux SA. is well known for their themes and icons and recently they also collaborated with the KDE Community for the default icons of Plasma Next. Nitrux does much more than just themes and icons and in this exclusive interview, the founder and main designer of Nitrux, Uri Herrera talks about it.

• KDE 4.14 code is getting ready while being worked on for a December debut is a mix of KDE4 and KF5 application code.

• The KDE 4.14 software code has been branched from master for all KDE Software Compilation repositories (sans KActivites that’s being left out for a 4.14 release). In terms of what’s next for the master code-base, while before a potential “KDE 4.15″ release was talked about, it was agreed upon by KDE developers that 4.14 will be the last of KDE Applications that exclusively use KDE Platform 4.

• We are happy to announce the Qt Creator 3.2 beta today. So you can already check out the many improvements we have done for the upcoming 3.2 release, and, not to forget, give us feedback on what we have so far. We mostly concentrated on stability and improvements, so no completely new platform supported this time, sorry Wink . I’ll randomly highlight some of the changes here, but you should probably check out our change log as well for a more thorough overview, and just download the binaries and try it for yourself.

• This is the first release of a new chapter of Plasma, in which a new release method will be used to celebrate the diverity of the KDE community. We used to have a 6 months “big release” of all things KDE, called in the beginning just “KDE”, then “KDE SC”, but this release is not that anymore, because KDE grown a lot in the past years, is not just that anymore, and “a single release of everything” scales only so much….

Distributions

• Historically, Linux and gaming were like oil and water — it did not mix. For the most part, this was just accepted as a fact of life. Quite frankly, this was OK as users were more interested in maintaining their box and chatting with other Linux users anyway. However, as time went by, jealousy of DOS, and then ultimately Windows, definitely grew as more and more amazing games were released for Microsoft’s operating system. Even Linus Torvalds himself dual-booted Linux and DOS to play Prince of Persia.

• Enter Operating System U, OSu. It’s not Ohio State University with a lower-case “u.” The “u” is for you, the one reading this, and the one wishing to control your operating system. The standout thing about OSu is how much customization it gives to the user. That’s our mission and our statement. (It also happens to be our mission statement, but I’m done with little jokes).

• OSu is Linux-based. It boasts a Wayland display server, which I love because it squashes clunky xorg extensions and renders directly. We’re also looking at starlight and customization through GUI’s.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Time has come again for ISO testing!

• Here is the first step towards Mageia 5. Most of your favorite software has been updated to their latest versions. There is still a long road ahead, but all in all, this first alpha is in rather good shape.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s bread and butter will always be Linux, but OpenStack is increasingly bringing home the bacon. For proof of Red Hat’s commitment to OpenStack look no further then its release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5.

• When Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was first introduced in 2007, it was done so with an expected seven year lifecycle. Five years later, in 2012, we saw the continued strong adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and decided to extend its seven year lifecycle to 10 years. Now, in 2014, the original retirement year for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, we still see an active, dedicated customer base that has come to value this long, predictable lifecycle in addition to the platform’s inherent security, stability, and reliability.

• In today’s Linux news, Red Hat announces the “beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11.” Several gaming posts caught my attention and Ryan Lerch says try out new kernel features in the new Fedora kernel-playground. The first Linux.com Linux poetry contest winner was announced and his poem posted. And another Deepin review pops up.

• After being under public QA since last month, CentOS 7 has been released as the popular community-based re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

• The CentOS Project has announced general availability of CentOS-7, the first release of the free Linux distro based on the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.

• Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5, which is the third enterprise release of the company’s OpenStack offering. Aside from new features, the platform is clearly being aimed at many types of organizations, including “advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.”

• In this article just for putting the initial CentOS/SL results into some perspective, I have some initial data from a single Intel Core i7 system running these new releases plus Fedora and Ubuntu Linux. Just as some initial metrics to get started with our benchmarking, from an Intel Core i7 4770K system with 8GB of RAM, 150GB Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD, and Intel HD Graphics 4600, I tested the four Linux distributions. The hardware and its settings were maintained the same during testing.

• Originally for this first article I also hoped to test Scientific Linux / CentOS 6.5 too, but after doing the 7.0 tests and trying to boot the 6.5 releases, there was a kernel error preventing the testing from being realized (on initial boot was the i915 DRM error about detecting more than eight display outputs; when booting without DRM/KMS mode-setting support, there would be an agpgart error.) The i915 issue is corrected on future kernel revisions but for this system it was preventing the 6.5 releases from running nicely. From an older, more workstation focused system I will be running the new vs. old CentOS/SL releases.

Fedora

• The latest Fedora Copr repository established provides a “kernel playground” whereby currently out-of-tree and/or experimental kernel features are enabled for developers and enthusiasts to try out.

• Josh Boyer of the Fedora Project has setup the Fedora Kernel Playground as a Copr repository to use if you wish to try out bleeding-edge Linux kernel features. This kernel isn’t officially supported, bug reports will be largely ignored, and this kernel isn’t recommended for production machines. However, for those wishing to try out kernel features not even found in Fedora Rawhide, this is a great repository without having to patch and spin your own kernel.

• Ubuntu has a LTS while upgrading it only takes a click, so everyone can make it, but to upgrade Fedora you need to have more expertise and you have to upgrade around once every year!

• Yeap, Fedora installations do pay better Smile

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• My daily computing experience is pretty “tablet-heavy.” My Nexus 7 is my constant companion. In fact, for the better part of the last year, I’ve done the vast majority of my actual work on this little Android tablet of mine.

• Codio is a browser-based IDE supporting a large number of languages and including its own Ubuntu instance to test the code.

Flavours and Variants

• Deepin 2014 is the latest version of Deepin, a Linux desktop that’s based on Ubuntu Desktop. Deepin 2014 is actually based on Ubuntu 14.04. It was released yesterday.

• Deepin has always been on my list of the best desktop distributions, and Deepin 2014 just vaulted it to the top-2 of that list. The aim of this post is to show you why that happened and why I highly recommend that you should take Deepin 2014 out for a spin. I guarantee that you will like practically all it brings to the table.

• Linux Mint (Xfce) has a simple interface and is pretty perky, even on old computers. The installer will install Firefox, the LibreOffice office suite, and a variety of programs for managing e-mail, videos and music; perfect for a backup Internet surfing and word processing computer. The installer will ask if you want to install third-party utilities — choose “yes” for compatibility with websites that use Adobe Flash and other multimedia software. Depending on your computer, the installation should complete in fewer than 30 minutes.

• It is with great pleasure I give you Ultimate Edition 4.2 Lite.

Devices/Embedded

• Following the recent announcement of the Android L Developer Preview supporting the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture, Linaro, the collaborative engineering organization developing open-source software for the ARM architecture, has announced that a port of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) to the ARMv8-A architecture has been made available as part of the Linaro 14.06 release.

• On June 30, the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project released the first version of its open source AGL stack for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). Based on Tizen IVI, AGL adds a stylish user interface and various applications written in HTML5 and JavaScript. The AGL stack, which is partially compatible with the somewhat similar, open source Linux GENIVI Foundation spec, supports multiple hardware architectures.

Phones

Ballnux

• Granted, Google has been updating handset issues at a quicker pace – particularly when it comes to security patches, via Play Services –and so far, the telcos have not played spoilers. But remember: Google has not initiated a move to push an entirely new OS directly to users except to those who own Google’s telco independent Nexus brand devices. Keep in mind that there’s a big difference between updating a feature or security patch and producing an entirely new OS. OS updates typically up the Kernel and the radios. It will be interesting (and historical) if the telcos continue to stay out of the way.

Android

• Silent Circle, a company known for mobile apps designed to thwart government surveillance, is introducing on Thursday a secrecy-cloaking phone service that lets customers make and receive private phone calls for as little as $12.95 a month.

• Sprint has launched the “LivePro,” an Android-based, ZTE-built DLP projector and 3G/4G mobile hotspot shareable by eight WiFi-users, with a 4-inch display.

• ZTE showed off the LivePro at January’s CES show as its “Projector Hotspot“, and it’s now coming to the U.S. via Sprint under the LivePro name. On July 11, Sprint will begin selling the device for $450, or $299 with a two-year contract. Of course, the real money is in the data plans, which start at $35 per month for 3GB of data.

• This week, following much talk about it coming out of the Google I/O conference, there are a lot of discussions arising about Android Wear and whether it will become the next big mobile platform. Some early smartwatches running the open platform are appearing, and some reviewers are really liking them. Just as you once didn’t carry a smartphone, and then did, are you on the cusp of owning an open source smartwatch?

• Software maker Avast is calling the security and thoroughness of Android’s factory reset feature into serious doubt today. The company says it purchased 20 used Android smartphones online and set out to test whether personal user data could be recovered from them. Each phone had been reset prior to being sold, according to Avast, so in theory the test should have failed miserably. But that’s not what happened.

• Using widely available forensic software, Avast says it was able to successfully pull up over 40,000 photos previously stored on the phones. Many of those featured children, and others were sexual in nature with women in “various stages of undress” and hundreds of “male nude selfies.” The company also managed to recover old Google search queries, emails, and texts. All told, Avast successfully identified four original phone owners using data that those people falsely assumed had been permanently deleted. Users must overwrite previous data to truly get rid of it, Avast says.

• Founded in 2008, JFrog provides open source solutions for package repositories and software distribution aimed at a new breed of developers. With a focus on open source and the burgeoning cloud scene, JFrog has garnered their fair share of awards and press from industry heavyweights and communities alike.

• Developers have cobbled together unofficial builds of Android L for the Nexus 4 and the first Nexus 7 model.

• Google’s approach to the release of Android L is a little different to that for previous versions of its OS: for the first time, it’s offering developers a preview version and a subset of source code for the forthcoming operating system.

• So last month we saw the release of CM 11 M7 as a Snapshot. Again, those of you who are new to CM a ‘Snapshot’ is a nearly-stable release. This type of release is considered safe-to-use by CM and believed to contain all features and all bugs worked through. It is worth remembering being a Snapshot this does mean it is possible some unknown bugs may still exist although these will be minor. Now already we are seeing the next major release available today. CM 11 M8 was released this morning and offers Android 4.4.4. As the release has only just been made public the devices supported are rather limited although the variance will grow quite quickly knowing CM.

• The Odroid-XU3 runs on a 5V 4A power supply, and once again features four energy monitoring chips for tracking the Big.Little cores. A plastic enclosure and an active cooler are available, along with numerous optional modules. OS support has been boosted to Android 4.4.2 and Ubuntu 14.04, available with full source code. Schematics will be posted upon shipment, and community support is available via the Odroid project. The quad-core Exynos4412 based Odroid-U3 board came in at third place after the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black in our recent Top 10 Hacker SBC survey.

• Chromecast users can now start ‘mirroring’ their Android devices over the WiFi. Google has pushed an update for Chromecast, which adds this new feature to the device. The feature was already there on Apple TV and the star Android developer Koushik Dutta (Koush) also offered mirroring for his ‘AllCast’ app.

• Volvo Cars has joined the Open Automotive Alliance to make the Android smartphone platform available to drivers through its new ground breaking user interface. This move brings together one of the world’s most progressive car companies and the world’s most popular smartphone platform, developed by Google.

Free Software/Open Source

• Metaswitch Networks today is contributing the initial code base for Project Calico, an open-source solution that enables the implementation of large, standards-based, cloud data center infrastructures. The code is available to the worldwide community of network operators, software developers and systems integrators at Project Calico.

• In tonight’s Linux news, Distrowatch.com went offline for much of Sunday. Serdar Yegulalp looks at the upcoming CentOS7, the first since joining hands with Red Hat officially. Bruce Byfield says Open Source has lost its way and is now wandering aimlessly with no purpose. And that’s not all.

• Founded in 2008, JFrog provides open source solutions for package repositories and software distribution aimed at a new breed of developers. With a focus on open source and the burgeoning cloud scene, JFrog has garnered their fair share of awards and press from industry heavyweights and communities alike.

• Creating and maintaining relationships with customers can be a challenge. But it’s also essential for a business’ survival and growth. To maintain those relationships, a CRM system is a must. And CRM is one area in which open source shines brightly.

• For non-profit organizations, open-source/free software might not actually be the best solution according to a director at a non-profit software solution provider.

• Most open source software projects come to life because someone is trying to scratch an itch.

• Some group of coders or a team of academics or a fast-moving startup will build some software that solves a very real computing problem, and then they’ll open source the code, sharing it with the world at large. Maybe, the coders are trying to help the larger world of software developers, believing that others will find the code useful too. Maybe, they’re trying to get more eyes on their code, hoping that others will contribute bug reports and fixes to the project. Or maybe, as is typically the case, they’re trying to do both.

• The activities of FOSSEE revolve around creating educational content around open source software and encouraging the introduction of courses on open source in syllabi of universities, apart from promoting it through publicity initiative.

• DevOps (developer-operations) was born out of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) by its very nature because it aims to address the “incongruous nature of integrating traditional LOB applications” with other applications.

Web Browsers

• There is a growing amount of excitement around virtual reality recently, with companies like Facebook expressing much interest in the space. Viewing devices like the Oculus Rift and input devices such as the Leap Motion, PrioVR, Sixense Stem and others are making high-quality VR experiences affordable.

Chrome

Mozilla

• A Firefox OS evangelist and volunteer working as the platform’s Early Feedback Community Release Manager, Kerensa will use his time on stage at this year’s OSCON to wage a recruitment effort. Along with Alex Lakatos, Kerensa will present Getting Started Contributing to Firefox OS, an introduction to building applications for the operating system. Attendees will learn how Firefox OS embodies Mozilla’s commitment to open web standards like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

SaaS/Big Data

• Postgres continues to ride high in the database popularity stakes — and the new features appearing in its next release will only add to that appeal, according to Dave Page, a member of the open-source project’s core team and EnterpriseDB chief architect.

• The open-source relational database — full name PostgreSQL — for which EnterpriseDB sells apps and services as well as its own commercial fork, currently sits in fourth place in the DB-Engines rankings, behind Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

• Object storage with OpenStack Swift gained an important feature in yesterday’s 2.0 release with the addition of storage policies. John Dickinson, Swift Program Technical Lead, called storage policies the “biggest thing to happen to Swift since it was open-sourced four years ago.” So what exactly are storage policies, and how do they affect the way data is stored in an open source cloud?

Databases

• MongoDB is a popular open source “NoSQL” database platform, offering functionality not available in traditional, relational databases, such as MySQL.

• SolidFire hopes the performance increases offered by its all-flash storage solution will attract enterprises aiming to maximize the speed of their MongoDB deployments. “Enterprises choose to deploy NoSQL solutions for a variety of reasons,” said SolidFire founder and CEO Dave Wright. “Our customers often cite performance, scalability, and ease of deployment as key factors in choosing to deploy MongoDB. The YCSB Benchmark demonstrates that utilizing SolidFire’s all-flash array with MongoDB allows businesses to achieve their objectives regardless of type of workload.”

Funding

• OpenStack and Yorba are denied nonprofit status. Does this challenge the role of foundations — or signal open source’s maturity?

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Openness/Sharing

• Earlier this year, Honda introduced its Smart Home, a home on the University of California Davis West Village campus that, among other things, produces more energy than it consumes. Interest in the Smart Home has been high, and due to that demand, Honda has announced that its Smart Home is now open source.

• Bitcoin ATM’s have been popping up in cities all over the world during the last 12 months and so are companies that manufacture these machines. Like any new technology, however, the company that keeps their products on the cutting-edge and provides a wide range of services will be the most successful. Bank ATMs often allow not only withdrawals but additional services such as direct deposits and bill paying as well.

• I’m in love with open source, but I’ve been dating open content for many years. You would think these two would jump at the chance to cross-promote, but too often that doesn’t happen. Open source claims it has a headache. Open content says it’s too busy. Really, a headache? Really, too busy?

Open Data

• While OpenStreetMap offers great mapping data, its community-driven approach may not be enough to unseat Google Maps.

Programming

• Katie Miller is a Developer Advocate at Red Hat for the open source Platform as a Service, OpenShift, and co-founder of the Lambda Ladies group for women in functional programming. She has a passion for language and linguistics, but also for the open source way.

• I have a Red Hat sticker on my laptop that simply says: It’s better to share.

• In this interview, Katie shares with me how she moved from journalism to a job in technology. Also, how she got introduced to functional programming, the Haskell programming language, and how open source is part of her daily life.

Standards/Consortia

• The consortium will seek to define connectivity requirements to ensure the interoperability of billions of devices projected to come online by 2020.

Leftovers

Science

• The quest to save the ISEE-3—a long-lost NASA probe launched in the disco era and abandoned in the dot-com boom—might just succeed. Late last week, the amateur scientists and engineers working to salvage the probe hit a major milestone: They coaxed the craft into firing its rotational thrusters.

Health/Nutrition

• Intersex fish have been found in 3 Pennsylvania rivers because of water contamination, researchers say

Security

• Remember the Love Actually airport scene? It needs a rewrite, complete with confiscated mobile phones, endless queues and deserted baggage carousels

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Last time we checked on far-right provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, he was pleading guilty to campaign finance fraud (CNN, 5/20/14) in a scheme to funnel money to a Republican political candidate. Before that, he was peddling a dubious conspiracy movie about Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign, which portrayed Obama as pursuing a radical “anti-colonial” political agenda inspired by his father.

• Israeli aircraft are targeting houses in the Gaza Strip as never before, firing precision missiles into family living rooms. They have killed at least five known militants with the tactic — but they appear to have killed more civilians, including a growing number of women and children.

• Israel’s major military operation against Hamas and other militant groups in the Gaza Strip entered its third day Thursday, with a surge in deaths in the territory, including nine Palestinians killed while watching a World Cup game at a beach-front cafe.

• Just because drone wars have succeeded in killing terrorists doesn’t mean they’re working.

• General Abizaid’s report reveals that not to be the case. “To the best of our knowledge, however, the US executive branch has yet to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of targeted UAV strikes as a routine counterterrorism tool,” the report noted.

• “To the best of our knowledge … the US executive branch has yet to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of targeted UAV strikes as a routine counterterrorism tool.” “We are concerned that the Obama administration’s heavy reliance on targeted killings as a pillar of US counterterrorism strategy rests on questionable assumptions, and risks increasing instability and escalating conflicts.”

• For millions of Americans, however, consuming is what patriotism has become.

• Starting in 2010, news organizations and nonprofit groups filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the memo. In late June, a federal judge ordered the memo’s release, handing victory to the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times.

• Pakistan said on Thursday that American drone strikes are harming the military operation in North Waziristan tribal region to eliminate terrorism.

• Foreign Office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam condemned drone strikes in Pakistani territories during her weekly briefing in Islamabad, saying they are counterproductive and unacceptable as they violate the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

• Foreign Office official Tasnim Aslam condemned the strike, saying that such acts undermine the nation’s integrity and sovereignty.

• While Obama affirmed the United States’ desire to support the rule of law—which the State Department has recognized to be in line with battling extremism—the president stopped short of linking this support to his counterterrorism fund. Obama also failed to acknowledge that the erosion and bastardization of the rule of law in parts of the Middle East is largely happening under the auspices of the fight against terrorism. Although described by the president as a country that has successfully “gone on the offensive” against terrorists, Yemen clearly demonstrates the failure of this narrow obsession with counterterrorism.

• Former executive-branch officials and military leaders see strategic, legal, and ethical shortcomings in the targeted-killing program.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Virginia’s highest court has ruled that the American Tradition Institute (ATI), a free-market think tank that promotes climate science denial, must pay damages to the University of Virginia and former professor Michael Mann for filing a frivolous lawsuit against them. The decision comes in a case that has sparked controversy about the abuse of public records laws to harass climate scientists.

Finance

• Fast food workers have been demonstrating and striking around the country, and some have been fired or arrested as they protested their low wages. The current minimum wage is $15,080 if earned full-time, while the average pay of top restaurant CEOs in 2013 was $10,872,390—721 times more than minimum-wage workers. These corporate CEOs earn more on the first morning of the year than a minimum-wage worker will earn over the course of a full year.

• The NSA may be changing the amount in people’s financial accounts and manipulating financial systems with its offensive cyber capabilities

• Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document.

• After leaving the agency in March, Keith Alexander is now pitching his cyber consultant services to the country’s biggest financial institutions. It’ll cost them, though. Alexander is reportedly asking for up to $1 million per month, according to Bloomberg.

• The US Senate Intelligence Committee has approved a bill designed to ‘encourage’ private companies to share data with the American government.

• Vilifying left-leaning Latin American and Caribbean leaders is nothing new from the US media–from Chile’s Salvador Allende to Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to Mauricio Funes of El Salvador. Bolivian President Evo Morales is no exception, as he caught the attention of the website Vox (6/26/14), a new outlet that sets out to “explain the news” with an emphasis on data analysis.

• But the piece offers no real evidence that people, and Democrats in particular, are less concerned with inequality or measures that might fight it. This isn’t the first time media have warned Democrats about going “too far” with economic populism. Earlier this year–when Obama evidently starting talking more about inequality–the Associated Press warned that this “put him at risk of being perceived as divisive and exposed him to criticism that his rhetoric was exploiting the gap between haves and have-nots.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has vetoed a bill that included a drafting error copied-and-pasted from American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation, and criticized ALEC members for having “simply parroted … the ALEC model act without alteration.”

Censorship

• A leading music website has censored album covers by artists including Sigur Rós and Lambchop after they fell foul of a Google ban on “sexually explicit content”.

Privacy

• The expulsion comes shortly after two alleged US agents were unmasked, suspected of acting as double agents within the state security apparatus, and passing secrets to US intelligence contacts.

• Officials familiar with the case confirm role of Central Intelligence Agency in latest spy scandal to damage relations between Washington and Berlin

• Germany already taking counter-measures as CIA maintains silence over alleged recruitment of German intelligence official

• To credibly demand change from the Americans, Merkel’s government must come clean about its own mass surveillance

• German authorities have carried out a raid on the residence of a defense ministry official suspected of passing secrets to the US, just one week after the arrest of a German intelligence officer who worked as a double agent.

• President Obama was unaware of the arrest a full day after it occurred, administration officials told the paper, putting him in a precarious position when he phoned German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the situation in Ukraine.

• German authorities said on Wednesday they were investigating an alleged foreign spy as reports said the suspect was the second within days believed to be working for US intelligence.

• The Senate intelligence committee voted Tuesday to adopt a major cybersecurity bill that critics fear will give the National Security Agency even wider access to American data than it already has.

• Glenn Greenwald has disclosed that NSA and FBI spied on innocent, law-abiding Muslim citizens of the US after 9/11. The Muslims included lawyers, academics, civil rights activists, and a political candidates and these agencies probably didn’t even need any warrant to mass spy on American Muslims. These were law-abiding US citizens which were spied by these two agencies because of their ethnic background.

• CentOS 7 was officially announced and Scientific Linux is pulling up the rear. There’s more on the NSA targeting Linux users – someone says the NSA code was fake. Linux Deepin 2014 grabbed several headlines today and John Brandon said desktop Linux is dead in the enterprise setting. This and lots more in tonights Linux news report.

• A computer science student accused of hacking offences has been jailed for six months for failing to hand over his encryption passwords, which he had been urged to do in “the interests of national security”.

• In March, a router company that threatened to sue a redditor unless he deleted a negative comment from Amazon.com lost its selling privileges on Amazon.com. And just last month, a federal judge ordered KlearGear to pay $306,750 to a Utah couple that left a bad review over an undelivered $20 order, prompting legal threats from KlearGear that resulted in the couple prevailing in court and winning punitive damages.

• Pentagon wants to learn how to mold social media to prevent “adverse outcomes”

• It is rumoured that the government is to introduce “emergency” legislation in response to a judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in April 2014 which held that the EU Data Retention Directive was unlawful on the grounds that it breached human rights. The invalidation of the Directive means that the British law implementing the Directive and requiring UK communication service providers retain communications data for a 12 month period is equally invalid. Any legislation mandating data retention must now comply with the ten points set out in the CJEU judgment, as outlined below. In particular, blanket data retention is unlawful.

• In my first two columns in this series, I gave an overview of Tails, including how to get the distribution securely, and once you have it, how to use some of the basic tools. In this final column, I cover some of the more advanced features of Tails, such as some of its log in options, its suite of encryption tools and the persistent disk.

• The National Security Agency’s attempts to enhance U.S. security through the massive collection of personal computer and communications data has actually had the opposite effect, a panel of industry experts maintained.

• In a July 7 discussion hosted by New America Foundation, the panel said the NSA has systematically weakened IT security protocols by co-opting standards bodies and companies, inserted back doors into popular software and hardware products such as security and operating systems, and inserted spyware into social media and other popular web sites.

• Two big privacy stories popped up recently. One involved a social network slightly changing how it presents data shared by some of its members. The other involved a secret government agency extracting and keeping private data about hundreds of thousands of people who were not targets of its investigations.

• The news of Facebook’s experiment in “emotional contagion” dominated the news. The Washington Post’s frightening story on the latest Edward Snowden-sourced revelation of the National Security Agency’s data-hoarding habits did not get quite the same attention.

• Different people react differently to specific phrases or buzzwords. For example, anyone arguing against privacy with the “nothing to hide” argument used to really trigger my temper. Some of these buzzwords are born in an attempt to explain otherwise complex ideas like encryption, but a good-for-privacy email contender took issue with the “completely unverifiable” buzzword “NSA-proof.”

• Despite the surveillance revelation, Amirahmadi, who describes himself as a peace activist, wasn’t surprised or angry when Greenwald and his team told him about the government’s surveillance about a month ago.

• Ever since Edward Snowden started leaking NSA documents, he’s released the information to a small crew of investigative journalists. One of those journalists is Glenn Greenwald. So it makes sense that when Greenwald talks about Snowden and the NSA, people listen. He did just that over the weekend, and what he said can’t be comforting to the U.S. government.

• Greenwald sent out a tweet on Friday saying it “seems pretty clear at this point” that there’s a second NSA leaker releasing information.

• The latest Snowden leak is big news, but old news: civil-rights leaders spied on because of who they are. But why didn’t I make the list?

• A report from researchers at Harvard University and Boston University warns that the National Security Agency could freely monitor the electronic communications of American citizens by rerouting Internet traffic through overseas networks.

• Former NSA whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney discuss how 90 percent of data intercepted by NSA originates from non-targets

• Enterprises are being told not abandon the cloud out of fear of possible threats to their data security posed by US government snoops.

• The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has advised big companies the benefits of cloud – escaping their legacy IT – far outweigh risks of the National Security Agency pilfering their secrets.

• All that’s required, the ODCA reckons, is some prudence from IT types on the type of cloud services they embrace and where they place their companies’ data.

Civil Rights

• Holly Fisher is a right-wing online agitator who posted the photo on the left above last week after a similarly in-your-face image taken in front of a Hobby Lobby went viral. Her pose was soon compared to the image at right of Reem Riyashi, a mother of two from Gaza who killed four people and herself with a suicide bomb in 2004. (It’s not clear who first put together the side-by-side comparison, which has been widely distributed on social media.)

• A Texas hospital and its emergency room physicians have reached a $1.1 million settlement with a New Mexico woman who sued them and U.S. customs officials after she was subjected to a body cavity search, her attorneys said Monday.

• There’s good intentions behind it, but the implications are worrying. For years now, dogs have been trained to sniff out drugs by law enforcement agencies. (Well, in most cases, trained by third-party specialists before being turned over to law enforcement agencies.) The problem is that these dogs now ride around in cruisers and give the police “probable cause” to perform vehicle searches and, believe it or not, hours of rectal/vaginal searches, simply by “alerting” to an odor.

• Mere weeks after right-wing media loudly defended racist Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy with erroneous allegations of a “federal land grab” of his property, the same conservative outlets are now advocating for a border fence that would require an immense seizure of private lands.

• The CIA said the tweets were in response to questions the spy agency received since joining Twitter exactly one month ago.

• A lawyer representing people allegedly flown on CIA flights to Libya and tortured has accused Britain of covering up details of its involvement. Britain says its records are incomplete because of water damage.

• Cori Crider, a lawyer from charity Reprieve which is investigating CIA flights through the Britain-administered island of Diego Garcia, said Thursday that the loss was strikingly convenient.

• The Government was last night accused of a “cover up” over complicity in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme after it claimed that documents which could expose British knowledge of the practice have been lost due to “water damage”.

• The Justice Department has decided not to pursue accusations that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee and allegations that committee staff slipped classified documents from a secure agency facility, McClatchy has confirmed.

• A controversial,$40 million report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogations techniques during former President George W. Bush’s administration could put Americans in danger while inflaming the Middle East, officials fear.

• In the controversy surrounding Edward Snowden’s decision to leak numerous classified National Security Agency documents, one of the repeated critiques levied by his critics is that the former intelligence contractor should have gone through “propper channels” to voice his concerns about the agency’s far-reaching—and what he judged unlawful—surveillance practices.

• My heart goes out to Jeffrey Scudder, who was thrown out of CIA after trying to get some documents declassified. His story, captivatingly told in the WaPo by Greg Miller, will be incomprehensible to those who have been spared the Kafkaesque experience of trying to get the agency to cough up important old stories. I’ve been there, and Mr. Scudder’s story, albeit very unusual, rings true.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• If you happen to experience blurring video or excessive buffering, Google-owned YouTube wants you to know that it’s probably because of your Internet service provider’s slow network.

• As I’m sure you remember, a few years ago, the biggest story in the technology world was the fight to protect the internet from dangerous copyright legislation in Congress called SOPA/PIPA. Here at Techdirt, we covered that story top to bottom — even walking the halls of Congress on January 18th, 2012, the day of the big internet blackout. A study done by Harvard following that fight, found that Techdirt became “the single most important professional media site over the entire period, overshadowing the more established media.” We’ve already highlighted how the ongoing fight over net neutrality has some similarities, in that the threat to the future of the internet may be made by folks in Washington DC who don’t fully understand what they’re doing. And we’d like to do the same level of blanket coverage we gave to the SOPA/PIPA fight.

• At an event funded by the telecom industry, organizations funded by the telecom industry argue against – wait for it! – regulating the telecom industry

Intellectual Monopolies

• The most important news of the last few days is undoubtedly that the European Commission’s consultation on ISDS in TTIP has been extended by a week until 13 July – for full details on how to reply, see previous update. Other than than, what is striking is how TTIP is popping up everywhere, with developments across the entire political and economic spectrum.

Copyrights

• As a follow-up to the story about a Qualcomm DMCA notice taking down 100+ repositories of open-source code on GitHub, Qualcomm has changed course.

• Qualcomm has reversed its take-down notice and has allowed the 100+ Git repositories to re-appear. Qualcomm came under pressure and likely took a look at the reported files to realize they weren’t confidential, with some of the take-down requests being over Android kernel source files and code from CyanogenMod, Sony Xperia, and even their own QCA repository.

• In December when Qualcomm, the Linux Foundation, and several major consumer electronics companies announced the open source Allseen Alliance for standardizing Internet of Things connectivity, we wondered at the absence of major semiconductor companies. Well, here they are, starting up their own rival IoT group called the Open Interconnect Consortium. Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, and Atmel have launched OIC along with computer manufacturer Dell and Intel’s embedded software provider Wind River.

• The OIC members will “create both a standard specification and an open source project to address the challenges of connecting billions of IoT devices,” according to the OIC FAQ. The organization says it will create a “standard for interoperability across multiple vertical markets and use cases,” starting with smart home and office markets, followed by automotive, and later moving to industrial and health applications.

• Kim Dotcom has been told that his extradition hearing will be delayed once again. The Megaupload founder will now have to wait until at least February 2015 to discover his fate, not during the next few weeks as planned.

• Likewise, Bill Gates and his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen innovated at the boundaries of the law before founding Microsoft. The pair had obtained an administrator’s password at the company where they were employed in order to use the time-shared computers for personal projects. Today, these activities are illegal and subject to serious prosecution under existing federal and state level computer crime laws. Armed with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and state-level computer crime laws, prosecutors could have forced Zuckerberg, Allen and Gates to face a threat of serious jail time.

• In recent days an estimated 30,000 Internet users have received emails containing copyright warnings and demands for cash settlements. The emails, which detail alleged infringements on content from EMI, Sony, DreamWorks and Paramount, are not only fake but also have a sting in the tail – a nasty trojan just waiting to be installed.

• Last week, we had a post from author Barry Eisler, responding to a bunch of other authors who were attacking Amazon over its current contract dispute with Hachette. As Eisler noted, nearly all of their complaints were either misleading or didn’t make sense. There’s no doubt that there’s a contract dispute going on, but claims of “boycotts” and other attacks seem really directed to people misunderstanding what’s going on in the dispute — and thus, those authors are defending the traditional gatekeeper publishing model in which Hachette gets to keep nearly all of the proceeds of book sales. Of course, the authors’ main “complaint” was that they felt like they were being used as pawns in the fight, and that the dispute might impact their sales directly.

• A pair of award-winning writers decorated by the Queen have told a House of Commons debate that only education can solve the piracy problem . Assemblies on copyright should take place in every school, one suggested, while the other favors letting kids know that it’s only J.K Rowling that gets Hollywood money “for writing a little story about wizards.”

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