● 07.27.14

● Links 27/7/2014: KDE 4.14 Beta 3, KDE 4.14 Beta 3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Benchmarks

• Complementing yesterday’s Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau benchmarks using the very latest open-source driver code, here’s some power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and thermal numbers when using an assortment of graphics processors on the latest open-source drivers.

Applications

• Atraci is a new open source music player which uses YouTube as a source. The app supports creating playlists and comes with some basic features like repeat, shuffle and so on.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Epic Games has posted another video about their upcoming free Unreal Tournament game that is natively supporting Linux.

• Frozen Synapse developer Mode 7 has renamed its strategic future sports sim, switching from Frozen Endzone to Frozen Cortex, which sounds less like what happens if you sit on an iceblock.

• The online sale and distribution service of PC games, GOG Ltd. accidentally gave away a whole bunch of Linux games to its users.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, Linux offers a wide variety of desktop environments. Here are my picks of the most important of these PC interfaces.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After the KDE 4.0 debacle I wrote KDE off as a lost cause. Only in the past year have I rediscovered just how good KDE is, but that doesn’t excuse a 9 year old bug, and possibly a show-stopping bug from being ignored. Imagine with me for a moment. Your buddy tells you how great Linux is and he gives you a disk to use and install. Since you are tired of the horse crap Microsoft has been feeding you for two decades, you decide to do something about it.

• While not incorporating Plasma 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 (coming later this year will be a 4/5 mix release), the third beta to KDE 4.14 is now available.

• Before heading into the weekend I thought about writing a small update about the KDecoration2 status. Since my last blog post I started integrating KDecoration2 into KWin. This was partially easier and partially more difficult than anticipated. Especially ripping out the old decoration code is rather complex. There are quite some design differences which make the transition complex and especially values inside KWin core are using enums defined in the decoration API – e.g. the maximized state is kept as a KDecorationDefines::MaximizedMode. This will need further work to move the enums and so at the moment the old decoration library is still compiled although the library is no longer in use.

• This is a quick blog post to say that I’m working on support for the Node.js framework by the KDevelop QML/JS language plugin. Th e first part of my work is already finished: “require” is properly recognized and Node.js modules are properly looked-up and included. The “exports” and “module.exports” identifiers are also recognized and allow Javascript files to export symbols and to be used as modules. This means that you can now edit Javascript files using Node.js and have most of the modules recognized, included and parsed.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GUADEC 2014 is taking place in Strasbourg. Because GNOME has been the default desktop environment in Fedora from the very beginning, and is going to be the environment for Fedora Workstation, I’ve decided to cover GUADEC for Fedora Magazine.

Distributions

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Deepin is a rather interesting distribution of GNU/Linux. It’s especially useful if you haven’t tried out GNU/Linux before. Website makeuseof.com said recently: “It’ll be interesting to see how this distribution progresses… and seriously hope that it gets more popular because it definitely has the potential to be huge. More people just need to hear about it.”

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• An administrator responded on the OnePlus blog by giving a clear indication the One will eventually be available to buy in India. At launch (even though there was no official launch) the OnePlus One was only available in North America and Europe. However it now seems that India is one of the country’s most eager to purchase the device. According to the OnePlus blog India ranks eight in the world via traffic trying to obtain the device through the OnePlus site. If this is correct than this ranks India higher than a number of the countries the device was actually launched in.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• These are real people and organizations buying these tablets. The real PC is no longer a big box filled with air and fans, but a tiny energy-sipping small cheap computer running */Linux. OK, quite a few run iOS but iOS has certainly lost most of its early lead.

Free Software/Open Source

• Docker will be using Orchard’s Fig orchestration tool to help automate deployment of the open source container-based virtualization platform, and will discontinue Orchard’s hosted Docker service.

• The open source project OpenDaylight is on a mission to increase enterprise adoption of software-defined networking (SDN). Read about this ambitious effort to unite all SDN controllers.

Web Browsers

• Modular, Open Source, Hackable – Breach is ticking all the boxes with the ambitious browser project they launched this month. The team, originally composed of TOTEMS (formerly Nitrogram) CTO Stanislas Polu, Socket.io (now Automattic)’s Guillermo Rauch, Alejandro Vizio & others, is now made up of around 80 developers collaborating on the project.

• [...]

• Built on Google’s open source Chromium project, Breach goes one step beyond Mozilla & Chrome, who enable developers to build 3rd party add-ons/plugins for the respective browsers – when you first start Breach, it has no functionality. Functionalities are brought in by modules, meaning that everything down to the core features of a browser – navigation, display, etc. – are hackable.

Chrome

• Google is trying to migrate its Chrome browser away from the buggy OpenSSL cryptography library toward BoringSSL, its homegrown fork, but swapping out the crypto code is proving more difficult than it sounds.

SaaS/Big Data

• When does a software project grow to the point where one must explicitly think about governance? The term “governance” is stiff and gawky, but doing it well can carry a project through many a storm. Over the past couple years, the crucial OpenStack project has struggled with governance at least as much as with the technical and organizational issues of coordinating inputs from thousands of individuals and many companies.

• It looks like an open source, on-premise implementation of Dropbox. Look closer, though, and you’ll see a way to securely open up object stores on an OpenStack platform.

• Zettaset will soon offer individual components of its Orchestrator security and management software for Hadoop and NoSQL Big Data platforms as standalone applications, starting with the data-encryption module.

• Additionally, the companies will integrate their engineering strategies and work together to enable HP customers to deploy the Hortonworks Data Platform as the Hadoop component of HP HAVEn.

CMS

• The open-source WordPress blog and content management system (CMS) software is widely deployed and is increasingly being targeted by attackers too.

Education

• One of Germany’s top universities wants to ditch German and switch almost all of its master’s programmes to English in the next six years, prompting fears that the academic standing of the German language is under serious threat.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Actuate signed on with the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer back in 2004, just a few months after the organization was founded. The South San Francisco-based company proposed the industry’s first open-source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project (BIRT), and a decade later, BIRT is one of the best known open-source initiatives for data-driven development.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Linus Torvalds’ latest tirade is over the GCC 4.9 code compiler.

• In a kernel mailing list thread about a random panic in a load balance function with the in-development Linux 3.16 kernel, Torvalds looked at the code being generated by GCC 4.9 and was disgusted with the output.

• Last week in Cambridge (UK) was the GNU Tools Cauldron 2014 conference where a number of interesting GCC-related talks took place, including greater collaboration between the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler crews.

• At Red Hat, we take pride in the fact that we actively contribute to the projects that are used to build our set of leading enterprise solutions. And when one project’s community is distinguished for their exemplary efforts – we want to recognize them as well.

• As such, we are pleased to announce that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 2014 Programming Languages Software Award. Awarded to an institution or individuals that have developed a software system with lasting influence, the award recognizes GCC’s 27 years of success and the substantial impact it has had on the software industry, an example of which is its importance to modern datacenter operations.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• The author is Craig Smith, a security researcher at Theia Labs and part of OpenGarages, a group of vehicle modding enthusiasts. Smith is looking for guest authors for future versions of the handbook. “Car hacking is a group activity and we welcome all feedback,” he writes.

Leftovers

• Millions of people awaiting US travel documents have been left in limbo, as a major computer glitch crashed the United States global system for passport and visa services.

• But he was allegedly turned away by border control when he tried to get back to the US for the Comic-Con conference in San Diego.

Science

• Shortly before the mission, though, the CIA got word that Russia was about to send a two-man craft to orbit the moon. The U.S. couldn’t let Russia get ahead in the space race, so they changed the mission.

Health/Nutrition

• It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.

• David Tredinnick, a member of Commons committees on health and science, says Britain should look to the stars to improve the nation’s health

• A federal judge in Mexico overturned a permit that allowed Monsanto to plant GMO soy when evidence proved that the frankenplants endangered native honeybee colonies.

Security

• In a world of always-on connectivity, Internet of Everything and Internet of Things, where most devices now have an embedded computer, the risk posed by hackers tampering with them cannot be overlooked.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A series of unanswered questions about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shows the limits of U.S. intelligence gathering even when it is intensely focused, as it has been in Ukraine since Russia seized Crimea in March.

• U.S. intelligence officials suggest that the person who fired the missile that downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 may have been “a defector” from the Ukrainian army, an apparent attempt to explain why some CIA analysts thought satellite images revealed men in Ukrainian army uniforms manning the missile battery, writes Robert Parry.

• The Russian government has finally realized that it has no Western “partners,” and is complaining bitterly about the propagandistic lies and disinformation issued without any evidence whatsoever against the Russian government by Washington, its European vassals, and presstitute media.

• As the Gaza conflict intensified, the Palestinian death toll surpassed 700, more than two-thirds of them civilians. Add to that 4,000 injured, widespread infrastructure destruction, and 1.8 million Palestinians trapped in an area the size of Manhattan. On the Israeli side, the civilian death toll is three.

• Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

• Hamas and its Palestinian and Western propagandists continue to insist that the Islamist movement does not use civilians in the Gaza Strip as human shields during war. But the truth is that Hamas itself has admitted that it does use innocent civilians as human shields, to increase the number of casualties and defame Israel in the eyes of the international community.

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• Palestinian sources have confirmed that Hamas has executed at least 13 Palestinians on suspicion of “collaboration” with Israel. None of the suspects was brought to trial, and the executions were reportedly carried out in the most brutal manner, with torture that included severe beating and breaking arms and legs.

• Army says it has used ‘riot dispersal means’ against protesters but refuses to comment on live round use

• An old foreign correspondent friend of mine, once based in Jerusalem, has turned to blogging. As the story he used to cover flared up once more, he wrote: “This conflict is the political equivalent of LSD – distorting the senses of all those who come into contact with it, and sending them crazy.” He was speaking chiefly of those who debate the issue from afar: the passions that are stirred, the bitterness and loathing that spew forth, especially online, of a kind rarely glimpsed when faraway wars are discussed. While an acid trip usually comes in lurid colours, here it induces a tendency to monochrome: one side is pure good, the other pure evil – with not a shade of grey in sight.

• Once again the Gaza Strip is subject to intense attack from Israeli forces. As of yesterday the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has documented 593 killed, among them 483 civilians – 151 children, 82 women – and 3,197 injured. Among the injured are 926 children and 641 women, although this does not include the figures for the border areas or the Shejeia area.

• I don’t know about you, but if the attack had happened to me, I would be pretty damn angry. Yet on Monday, Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading human rights organizations, issued a report on the fighting in Gaza that accused Israel of “war crimes” because one of its “accurate missiles” had struck a hospital (unlike in my parable, no one was killed but four patients and staff were wounded). Therefore, according to Human Rights Watch, given the accuracy of the Israeli weapons, this must have been an “intentional or reckless attack” deserving of a war crimes prosecution even though, according to Israel, the hospital grounds were being used by Hamas to fire rockets and Israel had given an advance warning.

• An estimated 45,000 people marched through London from the Israeli Embassy to Parliament Square, via Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, according to figures released by the Metropolitan Police.

• The United States shut down its embassy in Libya on Saturday and evacuated its diplomats to neighbouring Tunisia under U.S. military escort amid a significant deterioration in security in Tripoli as fighting intensified between rival militias, the State Department said.

• Militants resumed firings rockets into Israel from Gaza on Saturday, rejecting an extension to a ceasefire in a conflict in which more than 1,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died.

• Sunday, July 27, 2014 – Pakistan from the 1950s onwards, is insisting to go together with the US despite all the negative and even shameful experiences we have made in this relationship. The first Prime Minister of Pakistan Liaquat Ali Khan, preferred to visit the US instead of Moscow first, and was afterwards assassinated when he refused to give air bases to US for spying on USSR.

• A Hamas official says the group has rejected a four-hour extension of a humanitarian truce proposed by Israel.

• We’ve written twice about the Maryville, Tennessee restaurant that has seen it’s business go through the roof after posting signs that lawfully carried handguns were welcome.

• On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan. Dozens have been sentenced, previously, for peaceful protest there. But uniquely, the court convicted her under laws meant to punish stalkers, deciding that by taking pictures outside the heavily guarded base she violated a previous order of protection not to stalk or harass the commanding officer.

• Can’t Golding see the distinction between collateral killing of another nation’s civilians during ‘war’ and extrajudicial slaughter of Jamaican citizens by Jamaican police sworn to protect all citizens? For someone Booklist Boyne insists is brilliant, surely he could’ve found more suitable analogies such as the treatment of black Americans under Jim Crow laws particularly by crazed mobs, including law-enforcement officers hiding under white hoods. Still, the distinction is Jim Crow is defunct, while we still butcher innocents and guilty alike without troubling the courts.

• Former Green MP Keith Locke is urging New Zealanders to demand information about the Kiwi killed in a drone strike overseas last year.

• World history is filled with empires, e.g. the Roman and Byzantine empires, the European colonial empires, various ancient Iranian empires, the Arab Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union to name a few. These historic empires have one thing in common: they no longer exist. As the lifecycle of empire wanes, rather than being a benefit to the home country, sustaining empire becomes more expensive than it is worth.

• Around 5,000 people took part in a protest against the war in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, with a heavy police presence to deter rightwing extremists who abused and attacked the demonstrators.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A major drought across the western United States has sapped underground water resources…

• “Your equipment will be confiscated if you try to return,” said a masked protester to contractors doing prep work for pipelines to proposed LNG terminals.

• …struggle against the spread of fossil fuel pipelines.

Finance

• Bitcoin is a digital currency that became popular in 2013. It’s not controlled by banks, or anyone. It’s a decentralised currency designed to free out money from those who would oppress us. But how does a digital currency work? How can it be valid if there’s no one to say who has what? Ben Everard investigates.

• The cost of redundancy payments for NHS managers has hit almost £1.6bn since the coalition came to power and embarked on its sweeping reorganisation, according to the latest Department of Health accounts.

• The total includes payouts to some 4,000 “revolving door” managers, who left after May 2010 with large payouts but have since returned either on full-time or part-time contracts.

• China is supplanting America’s international role, new data from the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project shows the growing international consensus in this regard.

• The median percentage of people naming US as the world’s leading economic power has dropped from 49% six years ago to 40% today. During the same period, the percentage of people naming China has risen from 19% to 31%, according to Pew’s analysts.

• About one per cent of Chinese households own one-third of the nation’s wealth, a report has said, raising concerns about income inequality in the world’s most populous country led by Communist Party of China.

• Presenting the radical new proposal, Natalie Bennett, the Green leader, said other political parties only offered minor tweaks to the UK’s failed economic system, instead of major changes to deal with inequality.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The revelation that undercover Met officers spied on the family of Jean Charles De Menezes after they murdered him, leaves me utterly appalled.

• You have to consider this in the context of the lies that the Met assiduously spread about De Menezes – that he entered the tube without buying a ticket, that he vaulted the ticket gates, that he ran away from officers, that he was wearing a bulky jacket.

Censorship

• Jimmy Wales says that “right to be forgotten laws” must not mean that a private company such as Google is in charge of deciding what parts of history are recorded and which are erased

• A new open-source project called Streisand is designed to make it easy to setup a new server running a wide variety of anti-censorship technologies that can completely mask and encrypt all Internet traffic, and essentially circumvent most forms of online censorship.

Privacy

• His audience was the crowd at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference, a group of people no one would ever mistake for attendees at a political convention. Amid the sea of black clothing were many unconventional fashion statements: purple bandanas and balloon pants, and tartan kilts, and white robes, and green hair. The only man in sight in a suit and tie was also toting around a pair of payphones of murky provenance. Even the federal agents present had found a way to blend into the crowd of EFF merchandise and white dude dreadlocks.

• Two MPs, Tom Watson and David Davis, are to sue the government for introducing “ridiculous” emergency legislation allowing police and security services access to people’s phone and internet records.

• Pen, notebook – and encryption key. It’s time to add digital security to the reporter’s toolkit, security experts say, and that includes journalists in New Zealand.

• An Ontario judge has agreed to hear a Charter of Rights challenge brought by Telus and Rogers after they were asked by police in April to release cellphone information of about 40,000 to 50,000 customers as part of an investigation.

• Justice John Sproat says that the case has highlighted important issues about privacy and law enforcement that should be challenged in open court, even though Peel regional police tried to withdraw the requests.

• NSA in 2009 spied also on other leaders of the Balkan countries, like the PM of Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation, Nexhat Brankoviq and the former Croatian president, Stipe Mesiq. The news was made public by the digital library “Kriptom”, that deals with secret documents.

Civil Rights

• The extortion case against Thomas DiFiore, a reputed boss in the Bonanno crime family, encompassed thousands of pages of evidence, including surveillance photographs, cellphone and property records, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings.

• But even as Mr. DiFiore sat in a jail cell, sending nearly daily emails to his lawyers on his case and his deteriorating health, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn sought to add another layer of evidence: those very emails. The prosecutors informed Mr. DiFiore last month that they would be reading the emails sent to his lawyers from jail, potentially using his own words against him.

• A combination of midazolam-hydromorphone led to Joseph Wood ‘gasping and snorting’ for almost two hours during his execution on Wednesday night

• What if democracy as it has come to exist in America today is dangerous to personal freedom? What if our so-called democracy erodes the people’s understanding of natural rights and the reasons for government and instead turns political campaigns into beauty contests? What if American democracy allows the government to do anything it wants, as long as more people bother to show up at the voting booth to support the government than show up to say no?

• The inspector general for the CIA obtained a “legally protected email and other unspecified communications” between whistleblower officials and lawmakers related to alleged whistleblower retaliation. The CIA inspector general allegedly failed to investigate claims of retaliation against an agency official for helping the Senate intelligence committee with the production of their report on torture, according to McClatchy Newspapers.

• About a dozen former CIA officials named in a classified Senate report on decade-old agency interrogation practices were notified in recent days that they would be able to review parts of the document in a secure room in suburban Washington after signing a secrecy agreement.

• About a dozen former CIA officials named in a classified Senate report on decade-old agency interrogation practices were notified in recent days that they would be able to review parts of the document in a secure room in suburban Washington after signing a secrecy agreement.

• Then, on Friday, many were told they would not be able to see it, after all.

• The European Court of Human Rights yesterday ruled against Poland, charging our ally with human rights violations for helping the CIA operate an ‘extraordinary rendition’ program in which two persons suspected of terrorism were delivered to a “black site” in 2002-2003, for detention, interrogation and torture — in the attempt to extract bogus confessions.

• A tentatively titled and reported New York Times article glimpses former agency director George Tenet’s efforts to suppress and discredit a report accusing “former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House” about the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

• Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.

• It’s the latest chapter in the drama and recriminations that have been playing out behind the scenes in connection with what some call the Senate torture report, a summary of which is being declassified and is expected to be released in the coming weeks.

• “I am outraged,” said John Rizzo, one of the former officials who was offered, and then refused, a chance to see the summary report before publication. He retired in 2009 as the CIA’s top lawyer after playing a key role in the interrogation program.

• Several former CIA officials are outraged that the Senate withdrew its offer to allow them to read an extensive report on interrogation techniques that many of them are implicated in.

• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is set to publicly release — as early as next week — selected and carefully redacted portions of its 6,300 page report on controversial CIA detention, rendition, and interrogation techniques used after 9/11, several administration and intelligence officials said.

• From El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, these people are coming from nations where the U.S. in the past frequently meddled in their internal affairs, often with quite negative effects.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Chattanooga and Wilson, North Carolina, are two of the most successful municipal fiber networks by a variety of metrics, including jobs created, aggregate community savings, and more. This has led to significant demand from surrounding communities for Wilson and Chattanooga to expand. We have profiled both of them in case studies: Wilson and Chattanooga.

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• And both Sam Gustin and Karl Bode were quick to post on the matter as well. Sam wrote on Motherboard at Vice:

• We’ve written a few times about the highly cynical astroturfing practice in Washington DC, in which certain lobbyist groups basically have “deals” with certain public interest groups. The basic deal is that the lobbyists guarantee big cash donations from their big company clients, and then the lobbyists get to write letters “on behalf of” those organizations for whatever policy they want enacted (or blocked).

DRM/Locking

• House gives in, passes the Senate version that unlocking activists preferred.

• Nearly 900 authors across world back criticism of online retailer’s business tactics in ebooks dispute with US publisher Hachette

Intellectual Monopolies

• Germany is to reject a multi-billion free trade deal between the European Union and Canada which is widely seen as a template for a bigger agreement with the United States, a leading German paper reported on Saturday.

• Citing diplomats in Brussels, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that Berlin objects to clauses outlining the legal protection offered to firms investing in the 28-member bloc. Critics say they could allow investors to stop or reverse laws.

Trademarks

Copyrights

• We’ve been covering the discussion around copyright reform down in Australia for a while, and it’s continuing to get worse and worse. As you may recall, after a long and detailed process, involving careful input from a variety of stakeholders on all sides of the equation, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) came out with a set of proposals that were actually pretty good, including things like introducing fair use to Australia.

• Peter Sunde might be sitting in a Swedish prison for the next few months but he’s still making his voice heard. Following a recent dispute with authorities over food, the Pirate Bay founder has filed a new complaint after he was denied a meeting with a representative from the ‘pirate’ Church of Kopimism.

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