● 08.23.14

● Links 23/8/2014: GNU/Linux Growth

Posted in News Roundup at 7:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Again, using the flexible building blocks that Linux is built out of in interesting and creative ways to build something new and amazing. It is incredible to look at the previous generation of server operating systems, which often threw in everything plus Firefox, KDE, and the kitchen sink, and compare that to where we are going now. Small, modular, special purpose server distributions that are miles away from the desktop or what we had before, but still sharing the same open source Linux core. The evolution of Linux continues to be endlessly fascinating, I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Desktop

• Today in Linux news, Matt Asay asks if we can “please stop talking about the Linux desktop?” Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center will open a Linux certification academy in Mississippi next month. A new developmental release of Opera was announced and a new horror game has me rushing to Steam. This and more inside in tonight’s Linux recap.

• I can sympathize with Linus’ desire for Linux to have a larger share of the desktop market. It would be wonderful if we all woke up one day to find that Linux had 30% or more of the desktop market. There would be many celebrations among Linux users if that ever happened and it would send shockwaves across the world of technology.

Server

• Solomon Hykes explains what’s coming next in the open-source Docker container virtualization project.

Kernel Space

• LinuxCon Europe revealed a new Linux certification program, an expansion of IBM’s OpenPower program, and quips from Linus Torvalds on ARM and Raspberry Pi.

• Unlike the European edition of LinuxCon + CloudOpen, the North American version that wrapped up today in Chicago does not co-locate the Embedded Linux Conference. Still, there’s a lot more to Linux than circuit boards, industrial computers, and home automation gizmos. LinuxCon is the place to catch up on the larger tux universe of desktops, servers, and clouds. Despite the enterprise focus, there was some embedded talk in various presentations, including the Linux Kernel Developer Panel.

• A Reddit thread posted earlier this week posed the question, “What if Linux distros were super heroes?” Would Ubuntu be Superman? We’ll leave it to the Redditors to debate that one. But we can weigh in on the question “Which super hero would Linux community be?”

• The developers, system administrators, architects, business managers, and community leaders who attended LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America this week are all Linux super heroes. But this year some attendees also decided to dress the part – mingling in the hallway track and attending sessions as their favorite hero as part of the event’s first ever Comic Book Hero Day and costume contest.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• The Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management software has been promoted to version 2.0 and it integrates a huge number of new features.

• Calibre is a software that can be used for numerous tasks, like reading, converting, and managing eBooks and it’s updated almost on a weekly basis. The developers bring changes and major improvements all the time, but it seems that a significant jump in the version number was also required.

• It has been a year since calibre 1.0 and lots has changed in calibre-land. The biggest new feature is an e-book editor, capable of editing ebooks in both the EPUB and AZW3 (Kindle) formats. Click on the items in the list below to learn more about each new feature.

• HandBrake, a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs, has just reached version 0.10 Beta 1.

• Yorba Foundation, the developers of Shotwell, have announced the immediate availability for download of Shotwell 0.19.0.

Proprietary

• The Opera developers have released a new version of their Internet browser in the 25.x branch, which is still under heavy development.

• Opera is based on Chromium and that means that updates for the browser arrive at a pretty brisk pace. Numerous changes and various improvements have been made to the browser, but it’s still under development and it looks like it’s going to stay this way for a while.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The new major release of KDE 4 has been made available. KDE Software Compilation 4.14.0 is the first of four iterations which will all see the light of day this year, 2014 (KDE 4.14.3 will be released on 11 November). A relatively short cycle, caused by the parallel development towards Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5. What’s still missing for Plasma 5 is the KDE Application ports to Qt5 and the Frameworks and this is where most of the action is nowadays. There is nothing really worthwhile to mention about KDE 4.14 if you look at its feature plan. Nevertheless KDEPIM is being worked on a lot and judging by the activities in the applications’ GIT repositories everybody is still alive and kicking out code. The previously mentioned announcement page has more details about the individual application improvements.

• A few weeks ago, the keynote speakers for Akademy were announced. KDE is fortunate to have Sascha Meinrath at Akademy in Brno, Czech Republic to open our eyes about hot topics and important issues. Sascha’s work doesn’t fit into limited categories; he’s an activist, think tank founder, policy pundit, hacker, futurist, political strategist and more…as the following interview shows.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I’ve recently been hard at work on a new and updated version of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, and am pleased to announce that this will be ready for the upcoming 3.14 release.

• While we haven’t heard much out of the DirectFB camp in recent months, it turns out their code is still churning and they continue making progress for this library that provides a plethora of features while running off the Linux frame-buffer.

• The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) have announced that version 3.14 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• It’s practically a given that the ARM processor architecture – so beloved by makers of small devices everywhere – will graduate to servers soon. But before ARM servers can ship in any significant volume, a standardized hardware platform that specifically targets the data center is a must.

• So sayeth Jon Masters, chief ARM architect for enterprise Linux giant Red Hat, who addressed the topic during a session at the LinuxCon 2014 conference in Chicago on Thursday.

Fedora

• If you are a Fedora Eclipse user, then you’re probably saddened since the release of Eclipse Luna (4.4) because you are still using Eclipse Kepler (4.3) on Fedora 20.

• Well, be saddened no longer because Eclipse Luna is now available for Fedora 20 as a software collection!

• A very famous name in Fedora QA “Adam Williamson“, we all know him more as “Community Monkey”. I was already quite impressed the amount of work he has been putting in Fedora QA since quite a long time and I am sure it is not just me. I got a golden opportunity to meet him in person at flock and it was really nice to know about him more as a person.

• You may have noticed that this nominally-Tuesday update is actually appearing on Friday. That’s because I’m at LinuxCon North America in Chicago, and I kept thinking “I’ll have a few minutes to work on that…” and it turns out, nope.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical and VMware (VMW) forged a closer bond this week with the announcement of certified Ubuntu Linux images in vCloud Air, VMware’s new enterprise cloud-computing platform.

• Ubuntu uses many of GNOME’s settings dialogs, so it’s losing these options along the way. For example, disabling Caps Lock used to take a few clicks — on Ubuntu 14.04, it now requires terminal commands.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• It has been less than two weeks since the last OnePlus OTA update for CM11S and today we are already seeing a new update hitting user’s phones.

• Android has long been criticized for fragmentation that sometimes makes it hard for users to get timely software updates. But it’s important to note that Android updates can vary wildly between device manufacturers. Ars Technica has a helpful look at which Android manufacturers provide speedy updates and which ones fail to do so.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Mozilla Foundation’s aim to create a Firefox OS for mobile devices was not to take a quixotic tilt at the top end of the smartphone market. Instead, it hoped to provide an alternative that would enable the delivery of low-cost, but still smart, devices to places where smartphones are still a significant purchase.

• That plan looks to be working in India, where local outfit Spicephone has just announced it will offer the nation’s first Firefox-OS-powered phone for Rs 2,299 (US$38, £23).

SaaS/Big Data

• Mark McClain and Kyle Mestery have some news for networking professionals: OpenStack Juno is going to be a big release. McClain currently works for Yahoo, Mestery at Cisco, and both men are actively involved in leading the OpenStack Neutron networking project. In a presentation at the LinuxCon/Cloud Open conference, McClain and Mestery detailed what’s coming for networking in OpenStack.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU community members and collaborators have discovered threatening details about a five-country government surveillance program codenamed HACIENDA. The program employs a technology known as port-scanning to map every server in twenty-seven countries and detect vulnerabilities to be exploited.

• Community members of the open-source GNU Project have unearthed evidence of HACIENDA, a government surveillance program used to map servers in 27 countries. Discovered by security researchers Julian Kirsch, Christian Grothoff, Jacob Appelbaum and Holger Kenn, the HACIENDA surveillance technology employs a technique known as port scanning to detect server vulnerabilities.

Leftovers

• A spectacular exposé alleging prime minister John Key and his National party colleagues were involved in dirty tricks campaigns has created the most significant political maelstrom in nearly six years in office and blown the government’s re-election strategy dramatically off course, writes Toby Manhire

• Adult female gamers have unseated boys under the age of 18 as the largest video game-playing demographic in the U.S., according to a recently published study from the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group focused the U.S. gaming industry.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In the past week, the Abbott government has revealed a new package of anti-terrorism laws targeting Australian jihadists returning from Iraq and Syria that aroused the resentment of several Islamic community representatives. Recently, ASIO chief David Irvine decided to meet with a team of Arab-speaking journalists in Sydney in an attempt to communicate his message, which centred on the distinction between a War on Terror and a War on Islam.

• When the hysteria began following the revelations about NSA surveillance, I predicted that we’d have an enjoyable hissy fit — then nothing would change (details here). And 14 months later little has changed (perhaps nothing). Now the events in Ferguson MO have sparked a new cycle of outrage over the militarization of police. My prediction is that again little or nothing will change. Here we consider why public outrage has so little effect: news is just entertainment.

• After Modi ministry came to power, violations per day by Pakistan army has escalated. The reason being that cross border infiltration by terrorists has been stopped by Indian Army. The combined efforts of Indian Army acting on NSA’s advise based in IM, RAW and IB is making J&K becoming hot for jihadis. The tunnel was discovered two weeks back and since then Pakistan has not stopped attack on Indian Army outposts. The Pak Army has admitted that two civilians were dead and soldiers injured on their side.

• A long list of prominent individuals has signed, a number of organizations will be promoting next week, and you can be one of the first to sign right now, a petition titled “Call For Independent Inquiry of the Airplane Crash in Ukraine and its Catastrophic Aftermath.”

• The combination of events – first, the anti-Semitism expressed by IS supporters and, then, the anti-Semitism by calling IS itself a Jewish plot – is more than simply dizzying. It is treacherous. And it can lead only to the creation of more widespread Jew hate, and thorough confusion among politicians, security agencies, and the police.

• Germany’s announcement that it was ready to arm Iraqi Kurdish fighters against IS was neither expected nor demanded by the US. And yet it’s a welcome boost for the Obama administration – and also helps Berlin.

• An Israeli activist has told Channel 4 News that he has gathered testimony from three Israeli soldiers who said they witnessed Shamaly’s killing. “They were completely convinced that what they did was wrong,” the Israeli activist, Eran Efrati, said. “They were guilty. The man in the green shirt was not any threat to their lives.”

• Israel was the first country to incorporate targeted assassination into its law books, followed by America, which since the September 11, 2001, attacks has perfected the use of sophisticated drones to target terrorist leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

• As of Thursday, 76.8 percent of the 2,090 fatalities documented by the Gazan human rights organization Mizan have been civilians.

• At least six members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) were killed following a drone strike in eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan.

• Provincial police chief for Kunar province, Gen. Abdul Habib Syed Khel, confirmed that six Pakistani militants were killed following a drone strike by coalition forces.

• Gaza gunmen executed 18 Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel Friday, including seven who were lined up behind a mosque with bags over their heads and shot in front of hundreds of people.

• The killings came in response to Israel’s deadly airstrike against three top Hamas military commanders.The incident occurred after more than six weeks of heavy fighting between Israel and Hamas.

• The Obama administration is debating a more robust intervention in Syria, including possible US airstrikes, in a significant escalation of its weeks-long military assault on the Islamic extremist group that has destabilised neighbouring Iraq and killed a US journalist, officials said on Friday.

• A Hamas official admitted Friday that militants from his group abducted three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June, but the official said the kidnappers did not tell their leaders about the action.

• An Israeli child was killed by mortar fire from Gaza on Friday, the army said, bringing the number of civilians killed in Israel during the 46-day conflict with Hamas to four.

• A six-person jury acquitted anti-drone protester Russell Brown on July 31 in an East Syracuse, N.Y., court of all charges after he testified about how current U.S. murderous drone strikes are like the U.S. war crimes committed during the ­Vietnam War.

• Brown was on trial for an April 2013 protest at Hancock National Guard Airbase in Syracuse. He smeared himself with red dye to represent the death of drone victims and lay down in a roadway in front of the base. He was arrested and faced charges carrying a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

• In the twisted world of compensation for errant drone attacks, an attempt at making up for killing innocent civilians in one country has proven far more valuable than a year’s worth of slaughter in another nation.

• The family members of 12 people killed and others injured in a U.S. drone strike on a wedding party in Yemen last year have received condolence payments totaling more than $1 million. Documents provided by the group Reprieve to The Washington Post show the payment ostensibly came from the Yemeni government, but the high amount suggests the U.S. government is providing reimbursement. The documents also show the identities of those killed. They include a 29-year-old man identified as an associate of a Yemeni group working against Islamist militancy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Westchester County Airport will consider new methods of scaring off birds and other wildlife without killing them, after meeting with animal advocates, an official said.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• It’s a time when PR outfits have to bat on through the dog days of summer with very little of any substance to rely on. So they pump out a welter of verbiage in the hope that equally desperate journalists will discern a gleaming nugget lurking in the dross, pick it up,and give it a polish. Indeed, it is so bad I actually came very close to writing a piece about a GPS service that tracks the whereabouts of cats on their nocturnal peregrinations. In the end though I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Dignity, you know, always dignity.

• That said, I couldn’t resist this one. The Foxy one himself, for it is he, Rupert Murdoch, an occasional user of Twitter after discovering social media in the halcyon years of his mid-dotage, has taken to the medium again to express the opinion that Google is worse than America’s NSA!

• Here’s the twit’s deathless Twitter in full, “NSA privacy invasion bad but nothing compared to Google”. Now that has to be enough to make the aforementioned tabby chortle it’s little furry bootees off.

Censorship

• The government isn’t just keeping track of what civilians are looking at online. They’re also concerned with the browsing habits of their own soldiers.

• Diaspora, an open source, distributed social network, has come under fire recently for not being able to censor members of Islamic State in the same fashion that Facebook and Twitter have.

• Recent articles in the mainstream press explain how Diaspora doesn’t have a central body with the ability to remove users or their posts because of the distributed nature of the network, however these claims seem ill-considered as they aren’t correct.

Privacy

• Many people believe that by simply firing up a VPN their entire real-life identity can be instantly masked from outsiders. The truth is, however, that no amount of encryption or IP address obfuscation can save those who leave huge trails in their regular Internet activities.

• Despite the NSA’s insistence that it’s totally kosher for them to record Americans’ phone calls, the rest of us have to make sure we cross our t’s and dot our i’s before we press the red button. Rick Broida has a piece up on CNET that works as a basic guide to being your own personal Gene Hackman.

• Over the last year most peoples opinions of intelligence agencies have sunk pretty low, irrecoverably in fact. However in an interview with BBC’s Leo Kelion, Tor developer, Andrew Lewman, suspects that agents within the NSA and GCHQ still posses a moral compass and report bugs to the Tor project, saying “There are plenty of people in both organisations who can anonymously leak data to us to say – maybe you should look here, maybe you should look at this to fix this”.

• NSA leaker Edward Snowden has totally changed how we view privacy as it relates to the Internet. In addition to being more cautious about what we share online, some have taken additional steps such as switching to encrypted e-mail services, using proxy services and surfing with Tor, the anonymous web browser / network.

• British and American intelligence agents attempting to hack the “dark web” are being deliberately undermined by colleagues, it has been alleged.

• Spies from both countries have been working on finding flaws in Tor, a popular way of anonymously accessing “hidden” sites.

• But the team behind Tor says other spies are tipping them off, allowing them to quickly fix any vulnerabilities.

• Andrew Lewman, head of operations for The Onion Router (TOR), an anonymity and privacy tool that is particularly loathed by the spy agencies’ capos, credits Tor’s anonymous bug-reporting system for giving spies a safe way to report bugs in Tor that would otherwise be weaponized to attack Tor’s users.

• There is a law student in Austria that filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) for privacy violations. It gathered support from 60,000 users and passed the first legal review.

• Privacy activist Max Schrems, leader of the “Europe-versus-Facebook” movement, has had a procedural win in Austria that means Facebook Ireland has to prep its defence.

• “Facebook throwing a party at Def Con is kind of like the NSA throwing a party at Def Con,” a programmer from San Francisco will tell me, summing up the general mood.

• An Austrian law student said his class action challenging Facebook for alleged privacy violations had gathered support from 60,000 users and passed its first legal review.

• Max Schrems, who already has a case involving the social network pending at the European Court of Justice, is claiming damages of 500 euros ($663) per user from U.S.-listed Facebook. The $195 billion company has 1.32 billion active users.

• The ODNI continues to comply with court orders from FOIA lawsuits but its compliance is in letter only. Declassifying documents the way the ODNI does isn’t helping further the debate on privacy vs. security or making the government’s arguments for surveillance dragnets any more clear.

• Two more documents were released late Friday, with one of them being more about what it doesn’t include than what it does and the other potentially leading to irreversible eye damage.

• A famous Washington watchdog attorney who earlier sued the Taliban, al-Qaida, Iran, Afghanistan and others for the deaths of members of the U.S. military’s SEAL Team 6 in the Extortion 17 calamity now is going to court against the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense for concealing information about the disaster.

• A legal challenge to the National Security Agency’s program of spying on Americans has received the support of two privacy-rights heavyweights, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• Former National Security Agency crypto-mathematician Bill Binney was blowing the whistle on domestic spying long before Edward Snowden became a household name, and has gone on record describing the agency’s growing powers as increasingly “totalitarian.” Now the 36-year agency veteran is explaining the reason for its expansion — “power, control and money.”

• Since Edward Snowden leaked information about NSA surveillance to the world, encryption has seen itself thrust in the spotlight, with Snowden himself emphasising that “encryption does work.” Now, even household names like Google and Yahoo are jumping on the privacy bandwagon, and the promotion of end-to-end encryption by mainstream services is on the rise.

• “Metadata isn’t trivial,” EFF Legal Fellow Andrew Crocker says. “Collected on a massive scale over a broad time period, metadata can reveal your political and religious affiliations, your friends and relationships, even whether you have a health condition or own guns. This is exactly the kind of warrantless search the Fourth Amendment was intended to prevent.”

• As Clay Shirky famously noted years ago, “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” That appears to absolutely be the case here. It’s why there’s so much FUD. The NSA and the rest of the intelligence community has built up the threat to be this huge issue that requires huge dollars as well. And once they have the huge dollars and the giant staff, they have to keep that up. So they have to create a continuing problem for which they are the solution — and since it’s all (mostly) done in secret, you get this nefarious circle (as opposed to virtuous), in which more FUD is spread, more money flows in and everyone has to justify themselves to keep it all going.

• Bulk surveillance offers “intimate portraits of the lives of millions of Americans,” legal brief reads.

• New documents show the agency missing a massive number of violations.

• Earlier this month, Google announced that its search ranking algorithm will now consider whether a site is HTTPS. Does this mean you should now go out and make the switch to HTTPS, or is this just political jousting with no real search relevance on Google’s part?

• A US specific site that provides analysis on defense and other governmental concerns published an article in May about the feasibility of having an impossible-to-intercept email service. Encryption, it claims, only offers a false sense of security. A real step towards total security when it comes to email is via cloaking, or a speculative tool in the near-future: quantum encryption.

• In an interview on the BBC, Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, recently reported to have been a target of NSA malicious spyware, said he receives tips on security breaches from NSA and GCHQ, indicating that numerous leakers may be inside the spy services.

• Tor, a web browser known for its privacy protection features, has an anonymous tip line that makes it safe for conscientious objectors to report the potential malicious activities of their spy agency employers.

• “There are plenty of people in both organisations who can anonymously leak data to us to say – maybe you should look here, maybe you should look at this to fix this,” Lewman said. “And they have.”

• Lewman says that, based on the detailed complexity of the tips, those delivering the tips have likely spent significant time on an otherwise non-commercial endeavor.

• The NSA’s website is pretty vague about all this but in the FAQ section it recommends that companies wishing to work with the NSA, “first register with the NSA Acquisition Resource Center (ARC) at www.nsaarc.net [I've purposely removed the hyperlink] to highlight your company’s capabilities and identify points of contact.” Ironically when you click on the link it takes you to a site where Chrome doesn’t recognize the certification and gives you a warning that someone may be trying to hack your computer…how odd.

• If you aren’t a giant company like Google or Microsoft or Facebook you may be flying just under the NSA radar until after your app hits the market and then going back to try and retrofit your app with whatever spyware they might want could be expensive. Does the NSA reimburse you for those expenses?

• A few weeks ago, former FISC judge John Bates (now helming the Administrative Office of the US Courts) sent a letter to the intelligence oversight committees arguing that the Senate’s USA Freedom Act would do too much damage to the NSA and the FISA Court. Bates feels the toothless bill passed by the House would be a much better fit for the FISA Court.

• Salesforce has experienced resistance to its cloud customer relationship management (CRM) offering in Europe, especially in Germany, several sources told me. But it’s already taken measures to grapple with these problems.

Civil Rights

• Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has called for demilitarizing of American police.

• Greens speak out in the wake of the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., warn about the emergence of a police state

• Keep the sentiment of Godwin’s Law in mind as you read, listen, write and speak here and elsewhere. Hyperbole exists, can be sneaky or unintended, and actually can ruin the importance of what you have to say. The legitimacy of your point could be threatened by such dire comparisons. If you don’t even bother trying to catch it, well then truly, you are worse than Hitler.

• The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the heavy-handed police tactics that have followed point to a growing problem in this country: the threat of a police state that endangers not only public safety, but democracy itself.

• After the fatal shooting of the unarmed Brown by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson, local law enforcement descended upon the city like an occupying force, complete with military weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets and armored personnel carriers.

• By now, we’ve heard much about the militarization of police forces, but not so much about other advances in cop-tech that could be as consequential. With national attention lingering on the issue of police brutality — some 400 police killings take place per year, according to USA Today — questions around new policing technologies are pressing. Some of the new gadgets, like Taser’s officer cam, are meant to foster accountability. But others aim to keep pace with increasingly connected and tech-savvy criminals. The civil libertarians are fretting.

• As the public release of the Senate’s report on a four-year investigation into the CIA’s torture program approaches, John Brennan, the agency’s director, is in an uncomfortable spotlight. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is responsible for overseeing the CIA, has accused the agency of abusing its power. See Brave New Films’ short video below.

• The White House could hardly contain itself earlier this month when President Barack Obama signed a bill allowing American consumers to unlock their cell phones. The bill was driven in part by the White House’s own petition website, “We The People,” and touted as an example of a new model of citizen advocacy influencing change in Washington.

• St Louis police say it has suspended one of its officers expressed contempt for the protesters on his Facebook account

• A police spokesman confirmed officers had obtained a warrant for the raid, but admitted no drugs were found or arrests made. She added: “We are aware an official complaint is being lodged. Under these circumstances it would be inappropriate for us to comment at this time.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Carl DeMaio campaign on Thursday accused Rep. Scott Peters of siding with the cable industry in efforts to undermine net neutrality.

• Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers should treat all data on the Internet equally. Cable industry leaders argue that providers of data-intensive services such as movie delivery should be given preferential treatment if they pay more.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.