● 07.26.14

● Links 26/7/2014: New Wine, Chromebooks Strong Sales

Posted in News Roundup at 8:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Acer has seen booming sales of Chromebooks, including government procurement orders for educational purposes in many countries, and therefore has asked supply chains to increase production to reduce supply shortages, according to company CEO Jason Chen, adding that global Chromebook shipments in 2014 are expected to increase 70% on year.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation is honoring some of its very own SysAdmins in celebration of SysAdmin Day 2014 by profiling them here on Linux.com.

• System administration can be a thankless job. To all of the tireless administrators out there who keep the systems we reply upon up and running, today is the day that we say thank you!

• Happy SysAdmin Day 2014! Over the past three weeks we’ve been profiling the Linux Foundation’s heroic team of system administrators in honor of the amazing work they do behind the scenes to keep this organization and our collaborative projects humming. Here are some of their best quotes, which highlight just how talented, passionate and also fun-loving Linux SysAdmins really are.

Graphics Stack

• For the better part of a year, the X.Org Foundation has been evaluating a possible merger with SPI. That work is still ongoing and could be put up for a vote in the weeks ahead.

Benchmarks

• As the second part of our Linux graphics testing this week after a Radeon R600/RadeonSI performance update with the Linux 3.16 kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel are some comparative numbers that include Intel’s Haswell HD Graphics and various NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the Nouveau driver.

Applications

• Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, is now at version 0.23.2.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.23 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - Better support for files drag & drop. - Improvements to the HTTP cookie management. - Initial support for 64-bit Android builds. - Fixes to crypto certificates management. - Various bug fixes.

Games

• For long-suffering Linux users who have endured the dearth of high-quality action games on their open source desktops, the wait for better game developer support soon may be over.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE has released the third beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Here the new GNOME release just in time for GUADEC, this time from Strasburg!! Remember this is a development release, so go ahead and test it, break it, send bug report and patches!

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Global Knowledge , the world’s leading IT and business skills training provider, today announced the availability of new courses to support the recently launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 . Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 establishes the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures – pushing the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform.

Debian Family

• TAILS Linux, used by Edward Snowden to communicate with journalists, is patching holes in one of its network overlays

• If you want to use Tor, then Tails is your best friend. Tails is a version of Linux that sends data through the Tor network.

• All Internet traffic to/from Tails goes through Tor, making it resistant to end user mistakes. Tails is not normally installed on a computer, instead it’s run from a bootable DVD, USB flash drive or flash memory card. Compared to the Tor Browser Bundle, Tails is unquestionably the way to go. Ed Snowden uses it.

• Elive 2.3.4 Beta, 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 been released and is now available for download and testing.

• Cornell University’s Gemini AUV will compete in next week’s 2014 RoboSub competition. The sub runs Debian Linux on an Intel Core-based computer-on-module.

• The Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV) team’s Gemini AUV will enter next week’s 17th Annual International RoboSub competition with the help of Adlink, whose ‘Express-HL’ COM Express style computer-on-module will power the autonomous sub using a stripped down version of Debian ‘Wheezy’ Linux. The competition will be held at the Space and Naval Warfare Command Research facility in San Diego, from July 28 through August 3.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the first point release in the new series, has been released and is now available for download.

• In today’s open source roundup: Canonical releases an update to Ubuntu 14.04. Plus: The NY Times bashes open source for not making enough money, and a review of Deepin 2014

• Canonical announces that a number of Apache HTTP Server vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

Devices/Embedded

• Denon debuted a line of Sonos-like wireless multi-room HiFi speakers that stream audio from both Internet and local sources, and run on embedded Linux.

• Like the similarly Linux-powered devices available from Sonos, Denon’s ‘Heos’ wireless streaming speakers offer multi-room (multi-speaker) synchronized audio, and can deliver multiple audio streams from disparate sources to individual speakers or stereo-configured speaker pairs distributed around the home. Subscription streaming sources initially offered by Denon include Rhapsody, Pandora, Spotify, and TuneIn, with additional services offering DRM-free tracks ‘coming soon,’ says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• First off, Happy SysAdmin Day. We think we have a pretty good SysAdmin surprise in store for you today as we are announcing the CoreOS stable release channel. Starting today, you can begin running CoreOS in production. This version is the most tested, secure and reliable version available for users wanting to run CoreOS. This is a huge milestone for us.

• CoreOS, the lightweight Linux distribution designed for clustered deployments and depends upon utilization of Docker/LXC software containers, has experienced its first stable release.

SaaS/Big Data

• The future of cloud computing lies in open source. That’s the message this week enterprise software giant SAP, which has announced significant new endorsement of open source cloud projects OpenStack and CloudFoundry, as well as the release of related developer resources.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Anyway, I took the leap of faith and proceeded with the installation. OpenMandriva Lx worked like a charm: it took care of the partitioning (interestingly, it said “Moondrake” instead of “OpenMandriva” :D) and installed itself in less than 10 minutes. When we booted the machine (expecting a catastrophe, if I must be honest), none of our visions of doom panned out. GRUB2 picked up Windows 7, that OS was fully operational, and OpenMandriva also launched (desktop effects included, yay!).

• We’ve now converted all but 54 of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format. This is due to the much appreciated efforts of Palenik Mihály and Szymon K’os, two of our GSOC2014 students, who are tackling the last bunch of hard to find or hard to convert ones.

Healthcare

• Will the next revolution in healthcare be built on open source collaboration and principles? There are increasing signs that it will be, and that the old model of scientists and doctors pursuing breakthroughs behind closed doors might be broken. Samsung, for example, has announced the Samsung Digital Health Initiative, which will be based on open hardware platforms and open software architecture. The initiative has several arms, and one surrounds an open healthcare platform called SAMI. Apple, too, announced its HealthKit at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, although it remains to be seen how open that effort will be.

BSD

• The FreeBSD project has issued their latest quarterly status report that covers activities for the open-source operating system made between April and June of 2014.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Octave is a project started by James Rawlings and John Ekerdt, but its main developer is John Eaton, with the name inspired by the chemist Octave Levenspiel.

• The Guix package manager that’s designed to be a purely-functional package manager for GNU with an emphasis on being dependable, hackable, and liberating is out with its latest release.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Programming

• “All software contains security flaws,” touts the homepage of Bugcrowd, a new site that seeks to streamline the way flaws are reported by enforcing crowdsourced “responsible disclosure” policies. The Bugcrowd statement is probably pretty close to correct, too. As we’ve reported, Google, Mozilla and other companies have had success offering cash bounties for people who find security flaws, and those who find them are often security researchers.

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• An 80-year-old local Navy veteran is facing a potential year in prison if convicted of charges stemming from his involvement in an anti-drone protest at a New York Air Force base in April.

• The results of this three-trillion-dollar effort included 4500 U.S. soldiers dead and another 32,000 seriously wounded;150,000 to 400,000 Iraqis killed; and another 2.3 million Iraqis turned into refugees.

• The United States has boosted the number of surveillance flights over Iraq to nearly 50 a day from one a month as it faces militants who control swaths of Iraqi territory, a top State Department official said on Wednesday.

• U.S. efforts to undermine democracy were spectacularly illustrated in Guatemala. Its “democratic spring” was ended by a CIA coup in 1954. A bloody, three-decade civil war followed. Hundreds of thousands, mostly non-combatants, were killed. Guatemala today is still characterized by extreme social inequality, pervasive drug violence and corruption, and impunity for human rights violations.

• Repeated inconsistencies in Israeli descriptions of the situation have sparked debate over whether Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into a confrontation. Israeli intelligence is also said to have known that the boys were dead shortly after they disappeared, but to have maintained public optimism about their safe return to beef up support from the Jewish diaspora.

• In 2006, the CIA released documents showing that it wrote to its West German counterpart in 1958, saying it had information that Eichmann “is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias ‘Clemens’ since 1952″.

• As the Israeli killing of Palestinians spreads from Gaza to the West Bank, Prime Minister Netanyahu weighs his pursuit of military objectives against growing world outrage. But his trump card remains the fear of U.S. politicians to voice any criticism of Israel, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.

• These past weeks, Israel has established its dominion possibly for the first time since A.D. 70 by destroying holes in the ground built by terrorists to kill them. Israel is no longer a Washington abstraction. It no longer asks Washington or anyone else for permission to be. It is now a Jewish place. Hamas fights for abstractions, as do Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Secretary of State John Kerry. Jews today fight for earth; filling holes of terror which go back to the Oslo Accords and to the “co-presidency” of Hillary and Bill Clinton in their fleeting moment of global arrogance which has cost the death of thousands.

• A 12-hour truce has begun in Gaza, as efforts continue to secure a longer ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the scale of damage becomes clear.

• After days of placing hostile blame for the downing of the Malaysian airliner on Russia, the White House permitted US intelligence officials to tell reporters that there is no evidence of the Russian government’s involvement.

• Both these politicians have shamelessly sought to exploit this terrible tragedy to step up their pro-war and imperialist propaganda and they have been urged on by the capitalist media.

• French soldiers recovered a black box from the Air Algerie wreckage site in a desolate region of restive northern Mali on Friday, officials said. Terrorism hasn’t been ruled out as a cause, although officials say the most likely reason for the catastrophe that killed all 118 people onboard is bad weather.

• Israel has attacked targets in Sinai by drone previously, though such involvement is unpopular within Egypt, and the Egyptian Defense Ministry denied the reports, saying there were no drones in Sinai.

• Jha begins by recounting the most important moment in Nepal’s contemporary history – the 2006 Jana Andolan, which forced the monarch King Gyanendra to step aside. He traces the development of the Maoist-led armed struggle from the first weapons they obtained: two rifles that the CIA airdropped in 1961 for Tibetans to use against the Chinese Government. He chronicles how the Maoist movement in Nepal then drew upon discontentment against prevailing conditions and power equations in society, as well as police abuses and disenchantment with ‘moderate left’ politics.

• A Gallup poll found that 79 percent of Americans think that the government should not use drones to kill other Americans — even if they are suspected terrorists. Why should it be any more palatable for the government to use lethal injections or electric chairs to kill other Americans — even if they have done horrifying things?

Finance

• Heritage Foundation chief economist Stephen Moore was caught using incorrect statistics to mislead readers about the relationship between tax cuts and job creation in the United States.

• According to the proposed 17th July bitcoin regulation from New York State, the public now has 45 days to comment and then a 45-day grace period prior to full adoption. But what’s after 17th October? More importantly, what’s after New York?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• Ofcom has just published a report that shows that some 60% of households are actively switching off filters despite the best efforts of companies. ISPs that aren’t pushing filters are reporting even lower stats, with well over 90% declining filters. Ofcom’s report on Network Level Filtering Measures was based on survey questionnaires sent to the big four ISPs: BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.

• Earlier in 1967, Kermode had resigned from the co-editorship of Encounter magazine over revelations – which came as news to just about no one – that its original backer, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was in turn being funded by the CIA.

• Google’s interpretation of the European Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is prejudicing the intention of the court, the State’s data protection watchdog said yesterday, as regulators and search engine giants met in Brussels to discuss the matter.

Privacy

• You may be dead, but the U.S. government won’t take you off its terrorist roster.

• That’s according to newly leaked internal guidelines from last year that reveal intimate details regarding the government’s process for determining whether an individual should be designated as a possible terrorist suspect.

• According to an online job posting, the spy agency is looking for a new director of strategic communications who will serve as its primary representative and walk the fine line between transparency and the necessary secrecy for an intelligence agency.

• Spooks ask Dabbsy to suggest a nice hotel with pool

• The actions of the US and UK stand in stark contrast to a groundbreaking and forceful report released last week by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, about privacy in the digital age. Many of her findings directly challenge US and UK arguments defending secret, mass surveillance.

• Federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities say they are increasingly struggling to conduct court-ordered wiretaps on suspects because of a surge in chat services, instant messaging and other online communications that lack the technical means to be intercepted.

• The president who promised an unprecedented level of transparency has been disturbingly opaque during his current fundraising trip to the West Coast, as far as reporters are concerned. As Barack Obama meets with large, influential private donors like Costco co-founder James Sinegal and Silicon Valley moguls, the media is being denied even moderate access. Christi Parsons, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told Politico: “We think these fundraisers ought to be open to at least some scrutiny, because the president’s participation in them is fundamentally public in nature.”

• The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the “trusted” computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who pushed Apple’s admission.

• The White House and the NSA have something in common; they both track website user data. But it looks like the folks at the White House might not have known it was happening, and the tracking could be a violation of the White House privacy policy.

• A five-day hearing before the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) on the operations of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spying operations concluded July 18.

• Civil liberties and human rights organisations, including Privacy International, Amnesty International, Liberty and the US Civil Liberties Union, brought the legal case before the Tribunal. They are attempting to establish whether GCHQ’s massive state surveillance operations are a violation of British and international law.

• Four Democratic senators have sent a letter to the director of national intelligence expressing concerns about the scope of the collection of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls under a National Security Agency program that targets foreigners overseas.

• Law enforcement and intelligence agencies want to be able to wiretap social media, instant message and chat services. But building in ways to wiretap these kinds of communication can lead to less secure systems, say technical experts, including former National Security Agency officials.

• In a recent debate on Rethinking the U.S. National Security Apparatus, Michael Hayden, a retired general and the former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Edward Snowden “blew the whistle” on the NSA’s use of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 to collect phone records of nearly every American.

• The Russian government is offering four million roubles (£65,000) to anyone who can crack the anonymous Tor network.

• In an effort to increase surveillance and censorship efforts, the Russian government is putting up a bounty to anyone who can make significant inroads to reveal users on Tor, the anonymizing network for privacy seekers.

• Tor, most often accessed via the Tor Browser, is a network that encrypts user browsing data and redirects it randomly across multiple servers (known as ‘chops’) before reaching its destination. This keeps the location, IP address, and identity of the user relatively anonymous, though the fact that Tor is being used won’t be secret.

• A warning to those who might do a little online research about Internet privacy software: The NSA is tracking you, a report by the German public broadcasting group ARD concludes, according to a story published by The Independent.

• The question to bear in mind, when reading this whole sorry tale, is this: if Americans are, on average, no stupider than Germans, then why are their intelligence services so stupid?

• Given recent German indignation about the National Security Agency, it has been easy to overlook the fact that for decades the German government has cooperated extensively with the NSA on surveillance activities. But after a high-level meeting in Berlin this week, this long-standing but veiled cooperation may have a firmer legal and political base.

• The two countries’ past partnership became so extensive that they even developed a special logo for their joint signals-intelligence activity, known by its initials, ‘JSA.’ It shows an American bald eagle against the colors of the German flag, next to the words Der Zeitgeist, or ‘the spirit of the age.’

• On a visit to Munich, Germany, wildly differing views between the European Union and the U.S.A. are immediately apparent on the frequently talked about (over here) subjects of information capitalism, NSA spying, and American ‘dominance.’ They can teach a lot about ourselves. The German and French perspectives on issues pose genuine cognitive dissonance.

• …embedding of computers, sensors, and Internet capabilities into more and more physical objects.

• Hekmati, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen born in Arizona and raised in Michigan, was arrested in August 2011 and sentenced to death for spying. Iran’s Supreme Court annulled the sentence. He later was convicted of ‘cooperating with hostile governments’ and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Civil Rights

• And while you’re at it, don’t photograph the water tower in Farmer’s Branch, Texas (as professional photographer Allison Smith found out), or planes taxiing to takeoff at the Denver airport (if you have a Middle Eastern look to you), or that dangerous “Welcome to Texas City” sign (as Austin photographer Lance Rosenfield discovered when stopped by BP security guards and only let off after “a stern lecture about terrorists and folks wandering around snapping photos”), or even the police handcuffing someone on the street from your own front lawn (as Rochester, New York, neighborhood activist Emily Good was doing when the police cuffed and arrested her for the criminal misdemeanor of “obstructing governmental administration”).

• Senator Ron Wyden is apparently getting tired of waiting for the White House to use up its buckets of black ink in redacting everything important in the Senate’s big torture report. He’s publicly pondering the idea of using Senate privilege to just release it himself.

• As you may recall, the Senate Intelligence Committee spent years and $40 million investigating the CIA’s torture program, and the 6,000+ page report is supposedly devastating in highlighting (1) how useless the program was and (2) how far the CIA went in torturing people (for absolutely no benefit) and (3) how the CIA lied to Congress about all of this. The CIA, not surprisingly, is not too happy about the report. At all. Still, despite its protests, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify the executive summary of the report.

• The National Security Agency last year significantly expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world’s most repressive and abusive government agencies. An April 2013 top secret memo provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden details the agency’s plans “to provide direct analytic and technical support’ to the Saudis on “internal security” matters.

• The Saudi Ministry of Interior “referred to in the document as MOI” has been condemned for years as one of the most brutal human rights violators in the world. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that “Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse,” specifically mentioning a 2011 episode in which MOI agents allegedly ”poured an antiseptic cleaning liquid down [the] throat” of one human rights activist. The report also notes the MOI’s use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents.

• The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress about alleged whistleblower retaliation related to the Senate’s classified report on the agency’s harsh interrogation program, triggering fears that the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

• The CIA obtained a legally protected, confidential email between whistleblower officials and Congress this spring, raising questions over whether the agency illegally has access to other communications regarding whistleblowers, McClatchy reported.

• It is unclear how the CIA got hold of the email and other unspecified communications between Daniel Meyer – the intelligence community’s top official for whistleblower cases – and lawmakers, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy.

• The executive branch will not eavesdrop on the computer keystrokes and Internet use of members of Congress and legislative staff members with security clearances as part of its stepped-up efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosures of classified information, the nation’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Friday.

• The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., made that promise in a letter to Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. The lawmakers had raised constitutional concerns about a new ‘insider threat’ detection program amid a controversy over the C.I.A.’s search of computers used by Senate staff members who were at a C.I.A. site preparing a report on agency interrogation practices during the Bush administration.

• A little over a decade ago, federal prosecutors used keystroke logging software to steal the encryption password of an alleged New Jersey mobster, Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., so they could get evidence from his computer to be used at his trial.

• The technique was classified and FBI technicians warned prosecutors that if the case went to trial, details about the tool could get disclosed in court.

• Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday Warsaw will probably appeal against a European Court of Human Rights ruling that Poland hosted a secret CIA jail.

• One of the most frustrating and depressing aspects of following extremism-related stories in the UK is the predictable frequency with which the denialist brigade rush to the fore to hush things up.

• While Gazans, their Hamas leadership and pro-Palestinian supporters around the world condemn Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, it’s time Muslims examined the other occupation: the inexorable advance of political Islamism over Islam.

• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is looking to defend the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not just from the Obama administration, but from states that are finding it too easy to seize private property without first charging and convicting property owners.

• Plus, Europe’s top rights court slams Poland over CIA renditions and two more anti-Putin protesters receive long prison sentences.

• A senior Senate Democrat is firing a warning shot at the White House against stalling the release of a report about the past use of torture by the U.S. intelligence community.

• Sen. Ron Wyden is talking with his colleagues about the possibility of using a seldom-invoked procedure to declassify an Intelligence Committee report on the use of torture in the event the White House does not move ahead quickly.

DRM

• Amazon has reportedly warned of slower sales in the current quarter after it incurred a loss of 126 million dollars in the second quarter. According to the BBC, Amazon forecast third quarter sales of between 19.7 billion dollars and 21.5 billion dollars, which could mean sales growth of as little as 15 percent – well down on previous quarters.

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