● 07.20.14

● Links 20/7/2014: Jolla in India, Mega Censored in Italy

Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• As part of an ongoing video series from The Linux Foundation you can now nosey at the desk and work ethic of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. In the short 4 minute clip you’ll learn what he keeps on his desk, what he gets up to between kernel releases and witness him use a contraption called the ‘zombie shuffling desk‘.

• It doesn’t matter how organised — or cluttered — your workspace is, if it makes you productive, that’s all that matters. Not that it stops one from wondering if greats, such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds, operate in the equivalent of clean rooms as they go about making the world a better place. Well, it turns out Torvalds isn’t exactly stressed about keeping his home office in a state of perfection, as this video shows.

Graphics Stack

• Samuel Pitoiset has shared another blog post on his excellent work for reverse-engineering NVIDIA hardware performance counters and implementing the functionality within the open-source Nouveau driver.

Applications

• Geary, a lightweight email program designed around conversations and built for the GNOME desktop by the Yorba software group, is now at version 0.7.0.

• I never really thought about a bookmark manager for the console; the browsers that I use these days — specifically elinks or Pale Moon — have onboard bookmarking systems already.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 1.7.22 is a new development version of the software that has been announced and its makers have implemented quite a few changes and improvements, not to mention various fixes for a huge number of Windows applications.

Games

• The Leadwerks developers have overcome some issues they faced that prevented the Linux version of Leadwerks appearing on Steam.

• So, this is good news for any game developers waiting on it, as you will have an easy way to get it and keep it up to date when it hits Steam.

• While Leadwerks has been out for Linux and Leadwerks is in the Ubuntu Store, it hasn’t been on Steam for Linux up to this point. Barring this Kickstart-funded Linux game engine port from being on Steam came down to a technical requirement — GCC mandating 16-bit ABI alignment. After help from Valve and Blitz Research, that issue has been overcome so Leadwerks will soon be released on Steam.

• The history of Linux in gaming is quite poor, but this year so many changes happened in this area that we might be able to review top commercial video games very soon. By commercial I mean those created by most significant gaming companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda, and not indie video games. Even though real gaming in Linux based operating systems got a boost this year, emulators were everywhere to be found, for most known video game consoles.

• The Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition game is a modest feature and graphics re-make of the Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, Duke It Out In D.C., Duke Caribbean: Life’s a Beach, and Duke: Nuclear Winter titles. The Windows version has been out for a while on Steam while the Linux version is still evolving.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’ve begun prototyping a system for green processes in Qt applications. I’m not yet at the code-writing stage, but the API is definitely taking shape and a design is starting to emerge. It’s a spare-time project for me, so is progressing at a reasonable but not extremely fast pace.

• When we want to remove kdelibs4support there is a class which is used by all kde application: KDialog.

• Each time that we wanted to create a dialog we used it.

• So it’s necessary to have a script to help us to port to QDialog now that KDialog is deprecated.

• When we port to QDialog, we need to add a QDialogButtonBox and mainwidget (if necessary)

• As in kdepim there is a lot of KDialog I created a script for it.

• Developing a new project is usually done in two phases: first, the most important features are added, and the feature list of the project quickly grows. Then, the features need to be polished, bugs fixed, and the overall usability of the project improves slowly. This second phase is often considered less interesting than the first one, but personally, I like to fix small annoyances. Fixing them makes the difference between an experimental project and one that can be reliably used by real users.

• Being done as part of a Google Summer of Code project this year is porting KDE’s Plasma Active to their newer technology stack.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GTK+ 3.13.4, a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that provide a complete set of widgets, suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites, is now available for download and testing.

Distributions

Arch Family

Debian Family

• This tenth point update is actually a very important one because it’s the last one in the life of this branch of the Debian distribution, which was released back in February 2011. The developers have announced that no more major updates will be made for Debian 6.x “Squeeze, but there are also some good news.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• “This is the FINAL reminder to make sure you have retrieved all your data from Ubuntu One filesync, as we will be deleting all the content permanently on 31st July 2014. After that date, we will no longer be able to retrieve any of your files.”

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi foundation has recently released a new version of its really small and adaptable computer, this week. This is the third model of the device, which includes USB ports for input devices (keyboard and mouse), an SD card slot, an Ethernet port and an HDMI port to enable connection to a monitor or a TV.

• Michael Mozrek gave a presentation recently about his work as the project lead on the DragonBox Pyra, the slated replacement to the Open Pandora handheld Linux game system.

Phones

• Mobile operating systems are kind of like comic book heros or horror movie villains — just when you think they’re gone for good, they come back with a new bag of tricks. Thus is the case of Sailfish OS, a challenger that’s on the verge of launching a high volume product to the burgeoning Indian market.

• Local smartphone makers Micromax, Karbonn, Lava and Intex have eaten into market shares of multinationals Nokia and BlackBerry, though South Korea’s Samsung still leads the market. Now the four are eyeing Russia.

Ballnux

• Google is growing increasingly worried that Samsung, its largest licensee, is working to undermine its own strategy for Android, while Samsung and the rest of the industry is concerned that Google has become a “bully,” according to a new report by The Information.

Android

• If you’re familiar with CyanogenMod (CM) or simply part of any of CM’s social network you will be well aware of the CM’s Theme Store. For those of you who don’t know this is simply a CM powered theme generator which allows users to instantly change the theme, fonts, and color-scheme for the UI. Some themes are available for free while most charge a small amount to download and install. These are lightweight items for your device and simply change the aesthetic appearance completely.

• Ironically, in the world of mobile, there’s more than just one One. HTC, for one, has several Ones, and not forgetting the OnePlus One. One? One.

• Room for One more? How about Android One? Launched at this year’s Google I/O, it’s aimed squarely at emerging markets, and we’re hearing that the first handset might land as early as October.

• While Android Silver will see Google working closely with its best mates at the high end of the spectrum, the aim of Android One is to make a decent phone that’s truly affordable for every Tom, Dick, Harry, Sanjay, Raj and Mukul across the world.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced the release of the alpha version of an Open Wireless Router firmware. It was officially announced at the HOPE X (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York City.

• Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, argues that when companies lock in to their own design and customizations, it’s as harmful as when they lock in to a vendor. Mickos explains why he thinks using standardized open source products is the best way to avoid both types of lock-in.

BSD

Public Services/Government

• All primary and secondary public schools in the Swiss Canton of Geneva are switching to using Ubuntu GNU/Linux for the PCs used by teachers and students. The switch has been completed by all of the 170 primary public schools, and the migration of the canton’s 20 secondary schools is planned for the next school year. Ubuntu GNU/Linux offers powerful services to the teachers, is easier to maintain, faster, safer and more stable than the decade-old proprietary operating system it is replacing, the canton’s school IT department concludes, based on several four-year long pilots.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• The Makeblock kit is all about assembling building blocks in three major parts: putting together the Arduino caddy, constructing a chassis for it and finally programming it via Arduino IDE.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Back in March of last year, we were somewhat disturbed by UPS agreeing to forfeit $40 million to the US government for shipping drugs from “illegal internet pharmacies.” Not that such drugs or pharmacies should be legal (that’s a whole different discussion), but it’s insane to pin the blame for the shipments on the shipping company, whose sole job is to get packages from point A to point B. In fact, we don’t want shipping companies to be liable for what’s in packages, because then they have not just the incentive, but the mandate to snoop through all our packages.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It will likely take some time to determine who downed the Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 over eastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing all 298 people onboard. Initial speculation is that someone with a missile battery mistook the plane as a military aircraft, but the precise motive may be even harder to discern.

• President Obama and the State Department’s “anti-diplomats” are fanning flames of anger against Russia after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine. But some U.S. intelligence analysts doubt the popular “blame-the-Russians” scenario, reports Robert Parry.

• On Saturday, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said the US administration sought to pin the blame on separatists and Russia without waiting for the results of an investigation. “The statements of representatives of the US administration are evidence of a deep political aberration of Washington’s perception of what is going on in Ukraine,” he told Russian news agencies. “At least, that is how the relevant statements can be interpreted,” he said. “Despite an obvious and indisputable nature of the arguments provided by rebels and Moscow, the US administration is pushing its own agenda,” he said. Meanwhile, a rebel leader appealed to Russia for help with worsening conditions at the crash site of a Malaysian airliner, accusing the Ukrainian government of preventing experts from arriving and allowing bodies to rot.

• Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that was blown out of the sky while flying across eastern Ukraine, was not a sole casualty of warfare.

• Stinger man-portable missiles may also threaten the U.S. Army crews of Apache helicopter gunships recently dispatched to Baghdad to secure the airport and defend the U.S. embassy. Intelligence reports say that the Islamic State organization, also known as ISIS, has likely captured U.S.-made Stingers. In seizing major cities such as Mosul and Tikrit, and overrunning four Iraqi army divisions, Islamic State fighters have reportedly taken control of two major weapons depots, where Stingers were likely stored along with other sophisticated U.S.-manufactured armaments.

• On May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy plane operated by the CIA took off from an airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan. The existence of the U-2 was a secret. It had an unusual appearance created by its long, slender wings. These wings gave it the ability to fly at heights beyond 70,000 feet to the edge of the stratosphere, way above any other airplanes.

• Ricardo and Lugo flew back to Trinidad and checked in at the then Holiday Inn in Port of Spain. There, that said evening, that local police under Randolph Burroughs arrested them and found incriminating evidence that linked them to anti-Castro CIA operative Luis Carriles.

• It turned out that the CIA, and possibly higher officials in Washington, were aware of the plot to blow up the Cubana plane. Even worse, Washington helped Carriles escape and evade prosecution in Venezuela and/or Cuba (Ricardo and Lugo were jailed in Caracas).

• Yuval Diskin, who served as director of Israel’s Shin Bet security service from 2005 to 2011, posted some rather blunt observations on his Facebook page this morning regarding the tit-for-tat murders of teenagers, the Palestinian rioting in East Jerusalem and the Triangle (the Arab population center south of Haifa) and what he fears is coming down the pike.

• It strikes me that he’s probably saying a lot of what IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz was thinking at this week’s security cabinet meeting, when Gantz’s far more restrained comments led to a tongue-lashing from Naftali Bennett. In other words, this is how the current meltdown looks to much of the top Israeli military and intelligence brass. It’s what they’ve been saying privately while in uniform and publicly after retiring (and occasionally even while still in uniform). I’ve taken the liberty of translating Diskin’s Hebrew into English.

• In an online offensive against Israel, the global hacker group took down hundreds of Israeli websites including that of Tel Aviv Police Department, which is still not available, at the time of writing this report

• The munitions are not prohibited under international humanitarian law, but according to B’Tselem, “other rules of humanitarian law render their use in the Gaza Strip illegal. One of the most fundamental principles is the obligation to distinguish between those who are involved and those who are not involved in the fighting, and to avoid to the extent possible injury to those who are not involved. Deriving from this principle is the prohibition of the use of an imprecise weapon which is likely to result in civilian injuries.”

• Dubai- Israel’s Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer landed himself in hot water Thursday when Palestine activists posted a barrage of sarcastic questions to his Twitter Q&A #AskDermer thread. The Q&A was held amid escalating violence between Israel and Hamas forces in Gaza. The hashtag, which was used more than 20,000 times, included questions that were harshly critical of Israel’s strategy in Gaza. Many tweets by activists were snarky, and others were angry. Eli Clifton wrote: IDF says houses, hospitals, schools and mosques are weapons depots. What were the “human shields” shielding on the beach? #AskDermer US Dept of Drone War wrote: A Palestinian walks into a bar. Do you A) Blow up the bar, B) Blow up the person’s home, or C) Kill 4 random kids on a beach? #AskDermer

• In their most audacious attack Saturday, Hamas fighters dressed in Israeli army uniforms slipped from central Gaza into Israel through a tunnel and attacked an Israeli army patrol, killing two soldiers and injuring two others. The army returned fire, killing one militant and forcing the rest back through the tunnel into the Palestinian territory.

• Eight Palestinian militants emerged from a tunnel some 300 yards inside Israel on Saturday morning, armed with automatic weapons and wearing Israeli military uniforms, the Israeli military said. The gunmen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at two Israeli military jeeps on patrol, starting a battle that killed two Israeli officers and one of the militants, according to the military. The rest then retreated underground, back to Gaza.

• As Israel continued its deadly assault on the Gaza Strip, Hamas militants sneaked into the country on Saturday and killed two soldiers, delivering the worst blow to the Israeli military on its side of the Gaza border in years.

• Pakistan has condemned the US drone strike in North Waziristan in which 15 suspected militants were reportedly killed early Saturday, saying these strikes would have a negative impact on its efforts to bring peace and stability in the country and the region.

• When LIRR workers and the MTA reached an agreement to avoid the strike that would have begun on Sunday, it seemed that Mayor de Blasio and his family would be able to leave for their ten-day Italian vacation on Friday, as scheduled. But on Friday evening, De Blasio’s office announced that the mayor would remain in New York until Saturday “to attend to City business.” According to the New York Times, the mayor wanted to “spend more time making calls to elected officials, community leaders and members of the clergy, and talking to the police” about Eric Garner, the 43-year-old Staten Island man who went into cardiac arrest and died after NYPD officers put him in a chokehold on Thursday. Anyone who has seen the cell phone video of five cops piling onto an unarmed Garner can probably understand why De Blasio felt the need to at least briefly postpone his trip.

• Even the educated are not immune to these feelings. Consider, for instance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a well-paid speaker and author, respected by many as an expert in international affairs. Yet, in an interview with Charlie Rose on May 29, 2003, Friedman justified his support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on the grounds that if we killed enough Iraqis, Arab terrorists would give up believing they can attack us without repercussions. He concluded by saying that “they” needed to see “American boys and girls going from house to house from Basra to Baghdad” and telling people to “suck on this!”

• In the nineteen-eighties, the C.I.A. handed out Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the mujahideen

• President Bill Clinton’s advisers carefully considered how to explain the president’s military action against Iraq in 1998 as the House was debating his impeachment, according to records from the Clinton White House that were released Friday. The documents also touched upon al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, consideration of military action in Haiti in 1994 and preparations for Supreme Court nomination hearings.

• The latest batch shows Mr Clinton asked his national security aides whether the CIA overstated bin Laden’s role in the August 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

• By expelling the CIA station chief in Berlin recently, Germany hoped to jolt the United States into paying attention. Germans are outraged by reports that American spies may have been working inside their security services. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that hostile operations like this “contradict everything that I understand to be a trusting cooperation between friendly partners.”

• A specialist on German foreign policy at the European Council on Foreign Relations has described the US as a “weak superpower” whose spying methods and surveillance on other countries is solely driven by a feeling of insecurity.

Finance

• The 13 U.S. states that raised their minimum wages at the beginning of this year are adding jobs at a faster pace than those that did not, providing some counter-intuitive fuel to the debate over what impact a higher minimum has on hiring trends.

• The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history.

• Whether I was working as a barista or a paralegal, the story was the same: My employers wanted me to keep my mouth shut about money.

• When the water trucks arrived near Arlyssa Heard’s home on the west side of Detroit at the end of June, the 42-year-old single mother of two said it felt like the entire neighborhood was being taken over. “There were water trucks literally circling up and down blocks. I’d never seen so many in my life,” she says. “It’s like they were the police hunting down a criminal.”

Censorship

• The UK government has launched the ‘Friendly Wi-Fi’ licensing scheme – an effort to make harmful and pornographic content inaccessible through public Wi-Fi networks.

• As Spain struggles with its continuing online piracy problems, a local court has issued an order for several file-sharing sites to be unblocked by ISPs. The decision overturns a ruling in May which required the service providers to censor torrent and download sites on copyright infringement grounds.

• The Court of Rome has issued a nation-wide block of two dozen sites that facilitated the distribution of pirated movies. Among the blocked domains is Kim Dotcom’s cloud hosting service Mega, Firedrive (formerly known as Putlocker), and even Russia’s largest email provider Mail.ru.

Privacy

• If you care about digital rights you should be horrified by DRIP. The UK’s new Data Retention and Investigatory Powers law was rushed through parliament just before MPs go on holiday, with very little debate.

• The law forces communications companies to store all our data for up to 12 months so that the security services can snoop on them should they so wish. Companies were already doing this before, but then an April ruling by the European Court of Justice stated that the mass data collection interferes with “fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data”. DRIP — which went from draft to law in just over a week — reinstates the legal framework for spying on this personal data. If that’s not bad enough, DRIP attempts to extend the territorial reach of the UK’s powers to mandate the interception of communications across the globe. Any foreign firms holding data relating to UK citizens can be served a warrant to hand over information. This means that companies beyond the jurisdiction of the UK’s Data Protection Act must also store UK citizens data. How will this be safeguarded?

• Following on the news that Ed Snowden told the Guardian how NSA employees routinely passed around pictures they had intercepted of “extremely attractive” people who were naked, the NSA has issued one of its typical non-denial denials.

• Mann said that in the wake of 2010 Stuxnet computer worm, which attacked Iran’s nuclear program, he became fascinated with what was happening in the world of cyber-crime and cyber-espionage.

• ProtonMail and Subrosa are two separate communications services that’s attempting to offer users a platform for secure, encrypted communication. They are trying to offer what’s come to be known as zero knowledge (also zero access) Cloud data service, that is, the service provider cannot read your data.

• Tor is an anonymizing network that’s designed to protect you by “bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.”

• Like Snowden, Drake does not fit the bill of your typical hacker icon.

• The tenth Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference has been organized around supporting dissenters, especially how to support hackers or hacktivists who are targeted by the government.

• The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office appears to be the first agency in the state to use an unmanned aerial drone for law enforcement purposes.

• The term ”collateral damage” was once primarily used to describe the victims within a conflict, such as those who died in war who were not soldiers but who still lost their lives. One side attacks a target and, in pursuing its aims, inflicts casualties and damage as a consequence of the attack. There is no intention within the action, but still it occurs. This is war. And war is hell.

• “We have the power,” says Arab American Association of New York Executive Director and community civil rights activist Linda Sarsour in the promotional video. “We have the power. We have the capability and the opportunity here to change the way our society views our community to create a society that accepts our children and allows them to be proud of who they are as Arab-Americans and/or Muslim-Americans.”

• Jonathan Zdziarski’s paper about backdoors, attack points and surveillance mechanisms built into iOS is quite, quite interesting.

• Internet Party leader Kim Dotcom says that he will announce a political bombshell capable of toppling the Prime Minister on September 15 – five days before the general election.

• Kim Dotcom has revealed more details today on his “Moment of Truth” event, scheduled for five days before the September 20 election.

• Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom says he has enlisted heavy-hitting US journalist Glenn Greenwald, who blew open secrets about mass spying by the US Government, to help embarrass Prime Minister John Key immediately before the election.

• Edward Snowden, a former US spy agency contractor who leaked details of major US surveillance programs, called on supporters at a hacking conference to spur development of easy-to-use technologies to subvert government surveillance programs around the globe.

• Edward Snowden, a former U.S. spy agency contractor who leaked details of major U.S. surveillance programs, called on supporters at a hacking conference to spur development of easy-to-use technologies to subvert government surveillance programs around the globe.

• Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a “targeted, wannabe PRISM partner” that is “very hostile to privacy.”

• So is national security any better now? We can’t “see” security anymore in the age of computers and passwords and all kinds of encrypted things. I sure could see the guy in front of me with the red light. It was a little awkward but effective. I was probably the least threatening person ever to walk the halls of the NSA, but they still kept an actual, physical eye on me all the time. I wonder what it means that, before we started to color code our level of threat, such a non-threatening consultant as myself would have required an escort at all times, and yet now, living at a time of more serious threat, a consultant like Snowden gets unlimited access to everything. Maybe the real threat is complacency and those pesky unintended consequences.

• Although he is “probably three steps from death” considering his way of living, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is quite happy and leading a “pretty open life” and not feeling any “oppressive surveillance” in Russia, he told The Guardian.

Civil Rights

• Jason Casella also said that he is pleased that Emmett is the first city in the state to block provisions associated with the National Defense Authorization Act.

• Florida Governor Rick Scott really knows how to pick a fundraiser. Last month, he was scheduled to attend a $10,000-a-plate event at the home of a real estate developer who’d done prison time on tax charges. Hours after Mother Jones disclosed the event, Scott canceled it. Now, on July 21, Scott will headline a $10,000 per person fundraiser at the Boca Raton home of another deep pocketed donor who is the CEO of a private prison company that’s profiting handsomely over the immigration crisis at the Mexican border.

• Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• During her time at Comcast, Bruce attended an all-day training session, on a Sunday, four times a year. At the training session, 40 people would be lectured by a trainer who would give “pep talks” about the importance of retaining customers and making sales. In addition to managing calls, Bruce also worked at the counter, where she was instructed to try to convince customers to keep their service, even as they were returning cable gear following a processed cancellation.

• This Netflix video streams at 375 kbps (or 0.375 mbps – 0.5% of the speed I pay for) at the fastest. I was shocked. Then I decided to try connecting to a VPN service to compare.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Earlier this week it was reported how the RIAA had decided to turn the licensing thumbscrews on a site offering decades-old radio archives for download. Now another archival site, one that pays thousands of dollars in license fees to BMI, ASCAP and SoundExchange yet makes not a cent, is now in the RIAA spotlight.

• Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has announced its intention to go public with a backdoor listing on the New Zealand stock exchange. The deal, worth a cool NZ$210m ($179m), will be actioned via a reverse takeover of a local investment shell company.

• Google’s Chrome browser has started to block downloads of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent. Those who attempt to download the software are told that it’s malicious and harmful, hinting that the website might have been hacked.

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