● 08.30.14

● Links 30/8/2014: Jailhouse 0.1, *buntu 14.10 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Microsoft would make you think it’s the only alternative, however that ignores the shining beacon of Linux just beyond the horizon. Once thought to be the malformed operating system of only the most hardcore tech nerds, speaking in riddles and snake languages such as ‘Python’, the Linux landscape has changed to be more welcoming to everyone.

Desktop

• You see, I was out in the world for more than a decade teaching in many different communities all over Canada. At first it was rare to meet anyone who had ever heard of GNU/Linux. After a few years, about 2004, if I recall correctly, I began to visit random communities where one or more people actually had used GNU/Linux. These were communities from about 1K to 4K people in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, so one person in 1K is tiny but definitely far beyond, “many average computer users have no idea that they exist”. I can promise you that all of the high school and many of the younger students in those communities did learn about it so the proportion abruptly changed to about 1 in 10.

• The Linux Foundation has created all of the content for the course, including the videos, written text, activities, and labs. It’s clear to me that their content team has made an effort to space out the videos between the written material in a way that gives you a break from endless reading. Also, each video is only approximately 30 seconds to 2 minutes long. They avoid getting into the weeds too much at once, giving you chunks of knowledge, letting you test it out, then moving on to another topic. Each chapter points out that as the course progresses, you will go into further depth with each topic.

• The vendors are leveraging their respective technologies to enable the popular notebook to better handle graphics-rich applications. VMware, Nvidia and Google want to take the Chromebook, which is increasingly popular among consumers and in such areas as education, and make it more attractive to the enterprise.

• At the VMworld 2014 show this week, the three companies demonstrated how the combination of VMware’s Blast Performance software and Nvidia’s Grid vGPU technology will enable Chromebooks to handle graphically intensive applications, such as Adobe Illustrator CC, AutoDesk’s AutoCAD and Microsoft Office, in desktop virtualization environments.

• In some ways, Scrivener is the very embodiment of anti-Linux, philosophically. Scrivener is a writing program, used by authors. In Linux, one strings together well developed and intensely tested tools on data streams to produce a result. So, to author a complex project, create files and edit them in a simple text editor, using some markdown. Keep the files organized in the file system and use file names carefully chosen to keep them in order in their respective directories. when it comes time to make project-wide modifications, use grep and sed to process all of the files at once or selected files. Eventually, run the files through LaTeX to produce beautiful output. Then, put the final product in a directory where people can find it on Gopher.

• Thanks to Vladimir Serbinenko, as of today there’s now mainline support for the Lenovo X220. The Lenovo ThinkPad X220 is an Intel Sandy Bridge era laptop/ultra-portable. While Sandy Bridge isn’t exactly the newest hardware out there, it’s better than some of the recently enabled Coreboot devices and certainly much better than the Free Software Foundation prompted re-brand of the Lenovo ThinkPad X60 with its Libreboot downstream of Coreboot.

• Samus is a much rumored device, potentially a new version of the Chromebook Pixel. While we don’t know when this Chromebook codenamed Samus is launching, the Coreboot support confirms a few details of the hardware.

• Intel is expected to launch its 5th-gen Intel Core CPUs based on Broadwell architecture by the end of this year. According to the latest leaked information, Google’s Chromebook might feature this Broadwell chip. Intel is focusing on bringing high performance CPU which has minimum power requirement with Broadwell chip.

• Even though Broadwell is the scaled down version of Haswell, it will still maintain the same CPU performance as Haswell. The company is working on better performance-per-watt and lower power consumption to improve battery life of devices. Broadwell is just 14 nanometer in size.

Server

• Let me make one thing clear up front: I like Docker. I think it is good tech. I can see all sorts of scenarios when a lightweight, containerized deployment mechanism could be really nifty, even if it doesn’t have the advantage of a hypervisor under it to protect its host operating system. I get it. It’s cool.

• But there are a few loud, but lonely, voices in the crowd who proclaim, “The battle is over! Containers have won! Hypervisors are obsolete!”

Kernel Space

• At LinuxCon last week, the Linux Foundation announced a new certification scheme for Linux professionals to complement their existing training activities. The Linux Foundation Certification Program offers a peer-verified certification for both early-career and engineer-level systems administrators for a fee of $300.

• In the world of hypervisors for Linux, a couple of names have come to the fore over time: Xen and KVM. But a new hypervisor called Jailhouse, designed for safety-critical and real-time use cases, made its public debut this week.

• Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has putout some slides covering the general process for reviewing patches, in order to help out those new to contributing to the open-source community.

Graphics Stack

• A German web-site is hosting a yet to be officially released Catalyst Linux driver.

• As pointed out in our forums there is a new Catalyst Linux driver version that’s being hosted by Computerbase.de. This driver is marked Catalyst 14.201.1008 and was uploaded today for Linux along with Windows.

• In this article the NVIDIA hardware is being benchmarked to a similar stack from earlier this week with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then upgrading to the Linux 3.17 Git kernel and employing the Oibaf PPA for the upgraded xf86-video-nouveaui DDX and Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. Compared to the Radeon tests, the Nouveau driver was bumped slightly ahead to address a Nouveau driver problem that otherwise was a show-stopper. So even though it shows Mesa 10.3-devel vs. Mesa 10.4-devel, it’s just a few days difference of Mesa Git due to the recent branching of Mesa 10.3. The rest of the stack was maintained the same for this Nouveau Linux gaming tests. The tested NVIDIA hardware included both old and new graphics processors:

• An open-source project that’s currently Windows-only allows for creating virtual computer monitors that are then rendered on an extra computer, tablet, or smart-phone as a secondary display. Making this different from other VNC-like programs is that the secondary system’s monitor can be rendered to an HTML5 web-browser window. The developer behind this software is now working on bringing it to Linux.

• Beignet is the project out of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center for exposing GPGPU/compute capabilities out of Ivy Bridge hardware and newer when using a fully open-source Linux stack. While Beignet differs greatly from Gallium3D’s Clover state tracker, this Intel-specific open-source OpenCL implementation is working out quite well for Ubuntu Linux.

Benchmarks

• Frame-buffer compression (FBC) support was disabled by default in the Linux 3.15 stable series for Haswell hardware and newer since the support wasn’t mature and there were Intel HD Graphics users reporting issues with this feature being turned on, so it was disabled by default and hidden behind a kernel module parameter. After an Arch Linux user experienced a 4+ Watt increase in power draw for his Apple laptop, he bisected it to this FBC feature, but Intel Linux developers weren’t expecting FBC to make such a huge difference in power draw. The matter is still being investigated but FBC simply can’t be flipped back on by default since the code is incomplete and there’s still some unmerged patches under review that won’t make it until at least the Linux 3.18 kernel.

Applications

• Kazam is a GStreamer-based screen recording and screenshot tool for Linux.

• Matt Mullenweg founder and CEO of Automattic which is responsible for WordPress.com has reached out to people who develop software on the GNU/Linux platform to find someone who will bring the Simplenote application to GNU/Linux.

• I had already mentioned in passing here that I am using Emacs for a variety of tasks: outline, project management and planning with Org-Mode, IRC (go figure, my default email client on all my machines is Emacs’ ERC), notes editing or quick scribbling with the Scartch buffer (happens to me all day long), and regularly, albeit less frequently than in 2013, various editing of html pages, javascript and sometimes even Python when I dare to edit one or two things in Python scripts. A consequence of all these use cases is that I have Emacs open almost everyday on almost any of my machines.

• UberWriter is described by its developer as a simple markdown editor, but it’s so much more than that. It has only a handful of features and some people might be disturbed by its simplicity, but in the end everyone will love it.

• The Linux platform has no shortage of media players, and most of them are really good. It should come as no surprise that Quod Libet is also playing in the same league and that users will really enjoy it.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Sentris is a new kind of music game that puts you at the epicenter of musical creation. It’s colourful and filled with great music, so what more could you want?

• It’s very early though, so be warned they will be plenty of bugs and nasties lurking around, but the basic game is actually a pretty awesome idea.

• The Journey Down: Chapter Two is a point-and-click adventure that will transport you back in the golden era of gaming that was populated by titles like Grim Fandango and Broken Sword. It’s an amazing experience and it shows us that adventures games are not a thing of the past.

• Metro Redux is on its way to Linux and it will require Linux gamers have OpenGL 4.x core support. For now this means that right off the bat the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers are off-limits for the time being.

• One of the developers of a ”next-gen” first-person mystery game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter tweeted out that they are looking into Linux as one of the platforms to release for.

• The third part in my articles on giving some limelight to open source games, this time I have a completely different set to show you! See part one is here where I highlight 18 different projects, also see part 2 for even more open source goodness!.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The E19 RC3 release most notably features the rewritten Wayland compositor that was talked about on Phoronix earlier this week. The Wayland compositor rewrite for Enlightenment reduxes the memory footprint along with the code-base size and at the same time lowers the rendering complexity. This new version also supports Wayland clients inside X11, wl_shell/xdg_shell protocol support, initial support for standalone Enlightenment Wayland, and has no hard requirements on X11. This new compositor is still considered unstable and doesn’t yet feature XWayland support.

• What impresses me considerably about XFCE in Peach OSI is its fresh appeal. Its integration leaves nothing of standard XFCE out, but it rolls in a list of design features. The result is a user experience that is very pleasing. Much of Peach’s appeal to more seasoned Linux users comes from its preconfigured layout. Newcomers to Linux will like its desktop appearance and intuitive operation.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Christmas season for GNU/Linux is coming as most communities will be releasing the next version of their Linux-distributions. Betas have started to arrive and there is obvious excitement around those distributions which offer a great Plasma experience and Kubuntu is one such distribution.

• Yesterday was the first LaKademy’s day and we had some presentations for the general public. During this second day Sandro Andrade is presenting his Qt programming course. In the next two days we will have hacking sessions on KDE software and as Plasma Network Management maintainer I am interested in making networking easy for KDE users.

• Kubuntu 14.10 beta 1 is out now for testing by early adopters. This release comes with the stable Plasma 4 we know and love. It also adds another flavour – Kubuntu Plasma 5 Tech Preview. Try Kubuntu Plasma 5 to see the future of desktop software but expect some more bugs as we iron out the integration.

• With a series of icon tests we currently study effects on the usability of icon design. This article however does not focus on these general design effects but presents findings specific to the Tango icon set.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (RHT) CTO Brian Stevens stepped down this week in an unexpected move that some reports are attributing to tension in the executive boardroom.

• No one’s saying why long-time Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens left the company, but it seems clear he left from his own desire for a bigger, better job elsewhere.

• He went on to say that some within Red Hat speculate that tensions between Stevens and Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies, might be responsible, although there doesn’t appear to have been any current argument between the two. Cormier will take over Stevens’ duties until a replacement is found.

• Vaughan-Nichols also said that others at Red Hat had opined that Stevens might’ve left because he’d risen as high as he could within the company and with no new advancement opportunities open to him, he’d decided to move on. If this was the case, why did he leave so abruptly?

Fedora

• I’ve been talking to my fellow Fedora user, James [who happens to be my boss] and he’s told me a few extensions that are available for gnome 3 that make things a little better, and to be honest I like them lots.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today in Linux news, Terry Relph-Knight takes the new Ubuntu 14.10 Beta 1 for a test-drive and wrote up his opinion. Jack Wallen today said, “Linux on the desktop isn’t dead.” In other news, Bryan Lunduke spent his last week running the Pantheon desktop environment and shared his thoughts today. And finally today, Bruce Byfield explains why Linux “isn’t a desktop alternative.”

• It might seem like an official flavor of Ubuntu, but it’s not there yet. The Ubuntu MATE developers, which included a MATE and Ubuntu devs, are seeking to gain official Ubuntu flavor status, but they are not there yet. Still, they are following the release schedule for the regular Ubuntu versions and they have now made available their first Beta in the 14.10 series.

• The Ubuntu 14.10 Beta 1 (Utopic Unicorn) flavors have been released and users can now download and test them properly.

• Many users might have something against the Unity desktop environment that’s being used in Ubuntu, but the truth is that Unity comes with a great app launcher. Coincidentally, the same kind of launcher might work very well on phones and a similar implementation is being done for Ubuntu Touch.

• The family of Ubuntu flavors have released their first Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn beta.

• A team of developers is working hard to develop the classic, simple and lightweight Ubuntu MATE Remix. Now current Ubuntu users can try out MATE without having to wait for the release of the distro. One of the developers working on MATE Remix has given Ubuntu 14.04 users a chance to try out MATE though a PPA (Personal Package Archive). PPA allows users to use the software that isn’t there in Ubuntu’s official repositories.

• The Canonical X PPA offers the “X staging” packages with the new package versions providing the support. Besides the upgraded xserver package there’s also version bumps to xserver-xorg-input-evdev, xserver-xorg-video-ati, xserver-xorg-video-intel, and xserver-xorg-video-nouveau that are built against the X.Org Server 1.16 ABI. Those wishing to upgrade to the X.Org Server 1.16 code can run sudo apt-add-repository ppa:canonical-x/x-staging; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade for trying out these packages on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic. Canonical sadly hasn’t done any updates to these packages since the end of July per the Launchpad package details.

• Linux distributions and goofy names go together like peanut butter and jelly. There is a method to the madness though, as code names make it easier to search for version-specific issues. Still, I wish the names would be a bit less silly. Case in point, the new version of Ubuntu, 14.10, is code-named “Utopic Unicorn”. Sigh. Whatever.

Flavours and Variants

• “The upcoming release of LMDE will be version 2, codename ‘betsy’ and it will use a Debian ‘jessie’ package base. The team is currently adapting to the new LMDE, setting up its repositories and porting various packages onto it. The target for a stable release is estimated for this November, along with an official upgrade path from UP8 to Betsy,” said the leader of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre.

• T Creator – for QT 5 Gambas 3 – Visual Basic for Linux Ubuntu Quickly – Quick and dirty development tool for python emacs and Xemacs – Advanced Text Editor Anjuta and Glade – C++ RAD development tool for GTK Netbeans – Java development environment GNAT-GPS – IDE for the following programming languages. Ada, C, JavaScript, Pascal and Python Idle – IDE for Python Scite – Text Editor

• Linux Mint, as the name suggests, has always been green in its icons and themes. Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint project lead, updated today that more colors are on the cards for the next releases of Mint.

• Deepin 2014.1 was released today with numerous bug fixes meant to improve the system stability and performance as well as a few interesting enhancements / new features. Users who have already installed Deepin 2014 don’t have to reinstall – a simple upgrade via the Deepin Store or command line (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) is enough to get the latest Deepin 2014.1.

Devices/Embedded

• One of the things the Raspberry Pi is supposed to encourage is an appreciation and wonder for the world of coding and making. This issue we’ve put together ten Raspberry Pi projects that will hopefully inspire you to do a little bit more. From dusklights to mini arcade cabinets, we have a wide range of projects you can do in your own home. The best thing is, all of them work with a Model B+.

• Hard to choose between Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, and MinnowBoard Max? Now there’s another choice: the open source MIPS-based “Creator CI20″ dev board.

• You don’t need an electrical engineering degree to build a robot army. With the $35 Raspberry Pi B+, you can create robots and connected devices on the cheap, with little more than an Internet connection and a bunch of spare time.

• The Raspberry Pi is a computer about the size of a credit card. The darling of the do-it-yourself electronics crowd, the Pi was originally designed to teach kids computer and programming skills without the need for expensive computer labs. People have used Raspberry Pis for everything from robots to cheap home media centers.

• The Pi sports USB ports, HDMI video, and a host of other peripherals. The latest version, the B+, sports 512MB of RAM and uses a MicroSD card instead of a full-size card.

• I am based in the UK and I have never seen a person who likes Xiaomi or MIUI (the ROM that Xiaomi makes and runs on their devices, it can also be installed on 3rd party devices). The main reason for this is because they have not really expanded too far from China, since their launch they’ve expanded into a few more Asian markets and recently India where their Mi3 device sold out in under three seconds on Flipkart, the registration for that device in three days is already closed but you can register to buy the entry level Redmi 1S here.

• Eric Anholt, formerly a lead developer on Intel’s Linux graphics driver, has been quickly working away at the VC4 Gallium3D driver and related code now being a Broadcom employee tasked with making an open-source driver for the Raspberry Pi. If you’re looking to try out his in-development driver or help him out in the driver creation process, he’s published a brief guide to lower the barrier to entry.

Phones

Ballnux

• Samsung announced yet another smartwatch, Samsung Gear S that runs Tizen and comes with a 3G wireless radio. I have seen some call this the Gear Note because it does have a long two inch curved Super AMOLED display.

• The Gear S has WiFi, Bluetooth, and 3G radios and antennas inside so you can use the watch when your phone isn’t handy. Turn-by-turn pedestrian navigation is powered by HERE. It has an integrated GPS chip and can be used for exercise, again without a phone connection.

• Samsung in Partnership with Nike have announced the Nike+ Running App for the newly announced Tizen Samsung Gear S, which fully utilises its Bluetooth, 3G and GPS connectivity features to bring Nike’s running experience to your wrist.

Android

• DIY electronics fans will be glad to hear that the MIPS Creator CI20 development board for Linux and Android has arrived. The board has a 1.2GHz MIPS-based dual-core Ingenic apps processor running Debian 7 and Android 4.4 KitKat. The dev board is running Linux right now and the Android support will come soon.

• Yesterday, we advised of a new call recording feature which has recently popped up on the CM nightlies. Today we have information on another new feature which seems to have recently been added to CM11 nightlies.

• Those of you who are used to non-CM ROM’s will already know of this feature as it appears on other ROM’s such as Omni, Slim and Paranoid Android. So although not a novel feature this is a new feature to CM and one which users should be happy with.

• Recently, Android talk has been overwhelmed with reports on Android Wear and Android L. So much so that one would be forgiven for forgetting about another big Android project in the pipeline.

• Just like Wear and L, ‘Android One’ was also announced at Google’s I/O event back in June. Since then there has been little information or reports released. However that is very likely to change over the next few days with reports coming in that Android One is set to launch in September.

Free Software/Open Source

• Haiku, the open-source operating system that maintains compatibility with the defunct BeOS, now appears to have basic support for Haswell graphics.

• Linux and *BSD have completely changed the storage market. They are the core of so many storage products, allowing startups and established vendors alike to bring new products to the market more rapidly than previously possible.

• Almost every vendor I talk to these days has built their system on top of these and then there are the number of vendors who are using Samba implementations for their NAS functionality. Sometimes they move on from Samba but almost all version 1 NAS boxen are built on top of it.

• Yahoo has announced its decision to halt the development of Yahoo User Interface library (YUI), its open-source JavaScript library for writing HTML application interfaces. In the announcement, the company cites the rise in popularity of Node.JS, which has changed how developers build HTML applications, as have recent changes in package management and web application frameworks.

• At Cray, we are a big user and investor in Lustre. Because Lustre is such a great fit for HPC, we deploy it with almost all of our systems. We even sell and deliver Lustre storage independent of Cray compute systems. But Lustre is not (yet) the perfect solution for distributed and parallel-I/O, so Cray invests a lot of time and resources into improving, testing, and honing it. We collaborate with the open-source Lustre community on those enhancements and development. In fact, Cray is a leader in the Lustre community through our involvement in OpenSFS.

• Genode OS 14.08 also brings pluggable VFS file-system support, C run-time support for time functions, a port of the CPU jitter random number generator, a new port of OpenVPN, networking support for VirtualBox, and much better integration of the Qt5 tool-kit.

Events

• Next Tuesday, Sept. 2, is the deadline to apply for The Linux Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program. Don’t miss this opportunity for free tuition on a Linux Foundation training course.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Today’s Chrome Beta channel release includes a ton of new primitives and APIs to simplify development and give developers more control over their web applications. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.

• Since the beginning of the Web era, the simple image tag has defined the use of nearly all static images. Google’s new Chrome 38 beta browser will change that with the introduction of a new element known as “picture,” which could usher in a new era of responsive design.

Mozilla

• Back in July we kicked-off Maker Party, our annual campaign to teach the web around the world. Throughout this two-month campaign we have seen people on nearly every continent increase their web literacy by writing their first line of code, making their first app, taking steps to protect their privacy, or creating engaging content for others to enjoy, share or remix. They’re all coming together thanks to the individuals and organizations that are helping us grow a movement by teaching their friends, family and communities through hands-on making and learning events.

• This November, Mozilla is up for renegotiation with Google for placement of Google search as the default search in Firefox and for the related subsidies that Google pays Mozilla, which reached almost $300 million last year. That comprised the majority of Mozilla’s income. With Chrome establishing itself as a leader in the browser wars, its unclear what relationship Google will continue to pursue with Mozilla.

• The launch of two Firefox OS phones in India in the same week marks an exciting moment in Mozilla’s mission to promote openness and innovation on the Web, and an opportunity to empower millions of Indians wanting to buy their first smartphones. Firefox OS will enable users to obtain lower-cost devices that offer telephony, messaging and camera and rich capabilities like built-in social integration with Facebook and Twitter, the Firefox browser, FM radio and popular apps.

SaaS/Big Data

• Docker has created a lot of buzz in the news over the last year. At Eucalyptus, we really understand the need that Docker addresses regarding the DevOps culture. In recognizing that, we have come up with a series of blogs and videos that demonstrate how to deploy, use and maintain Docker on a Eucalyptus — while still proving that Eucalyptus is the best on-premise AWS compatible cloud environment.

• Docker has only gained traction since its launch a little over a year ago as more companies join the community’s efforts on a regular basis. On July 30, the first official Docker build for openSUSE was released, making this distribution the latest among many to join the fray. I connected with Flavio Castelli, a senior software engineer at SUSE, who works extensively on SUSE Linux Enterprise and has played a major role in bringing official Docker support to openSUSE. In this interview, he discuses the importance of bringing Docker to each Linux distribution, the future of Docker on SUSE Linux Enterprise, and other interesting developments in the Docker ecosystem.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.1, the first minor release of LibreOffice 4.3 “fresh” family, with over 100 fixes (including patches for two CVEs, backported to LibreOffice 4.2.6-secfix, which is also available for download now).

• As more and more open-source programs get brought up for 64-bit ARM, LibreOffice is the latest to receive such AArch64 enablement.

Education

• Open source software is hugely important to us here at edX, since it’s what we do all day, every day. Two weeks ago, the O’Reilly company hosted their annual OSCON convention in Portland, Oregon—a convention focused on open source software. Of course, we had to be there. So, my edX colleague James Tauber and I packed our bags and headed to Oregon for a week of learning and teaching to meet wonderful people, and to get excited about open source. We even gave a presentation about edX!

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This month, we welcome Raman Gopalan as a new co-maintainer of GNU gengen (with its author Lorenzo Bettini), Marcel Schaible as the new maintainer of GNU gperf, and Sergey Poznyakoff adds yet another new package, direvent, to his long list. I’d also like to specially thank Assaf Gordon (the author and maintainer of GNU datamash, new last month) for a significant amount of effort with all aspects of Savannah; new Savannah volunteers are always needed, and welcome. Thanks to all.

• Media publishing platform, MediaGoblin, has hit version 0.7.0. With this update new features include initial support for federalisation, a responsive CSS system, a featured media option, bulk uploading via the command line and a blogging media type.

Public Services/Government

• Why choose open source? “In some ways, [the open source software used by the agency] is effectively more capable” than commercial products, he said. “In terms of cost-effectiveness, [it] wins hands down: no license/maintenance fees, extensible architecture [and] global open source R&D.” The team uses an open source software package called ‘R’.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• If you want to download court records in the United States, your first stop is probably PACER, the oft-maligned digital warehouse for public court records. Maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the system charges 10 cents per page of search results within its archive, and 10 cents per actual page of court documents that are officially in the public record. It’s a useful tool for attorneys, but often difficult for the average citizen to navigate and understand.

• We were among the first to report that the federal court system’s PACER electronic database of court records had deleted a ton of old cases, and once our story went live, we saw a ton of lawyers, law professors and journalists flip out over the news, which had been hidden in a little-read notice on the PACER site, posted with basically no notice at all. The Washington Post got the Administrative Office of the US Courts to provide a statement about the deletions that makes almost no sense at all.

• Here’s some nice news. Kalev Leetaru has been liberating a ton of public domain images from books and putting them all on Flickr. He’s been going through Internet Archive scans of old, public domain books, isolating the images, and turning them into individual images. Because, while the books and images are all public domain, very few of the images have been separated from the books and released in a digital format.

Open Hardware

• And if these three modes and their respective functionalities bore you, you’re in luck! The M!ltone is open-source and compatible with Arduino, an electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software that allows users to write their own code.

Programming

• Two-and-a-half months after Git 2.0, a new version of Git has been released. Though a minor update, the list of new features and improvements is large.

• The complete release notes can be found on git repository and provide full details about what can be found in Git 2.1. What follows provides a minimal selection of new features in Git 2.1.

• make does it, Haskell does it, spreadsheets do it, QML can do it and below I explain how to do it with C++11: declarative programming. And not just any declarative programming, but my favorite kind: lazy evaluation.

• Having not ran any PHP 5.6 development build in quite some time, this morning after the official PHP 5.6.0 official release I was running some tests to ensure the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org wouldn’t run into any problems when deployed on the latest version of PHP. Overall, everything is good and for those running the Phoronix Test Suite using any recent version of our open-source benchmarking software should be good for PHP 5.6.

Leftovers

• Google Inc. (GOOG) executive Megan Smith is close to heading to the White House.

• Smith, 49, who was most recently a vice president at Google’s X lab, is a top candidate for the role of U.S. chief technology officer, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the process is private.

Health/Nutrition

• The makers of “Omo”, a new clothes washing detergent, are considering changing their labelling after accidentally poisoning unsuspecting riders particpating in the “Fredagsbirken” race in Rena, near Oslo . The product was available as part of a sampling campaign by Lilleborg, sponsors of the event.

• All competitors were given a free sample of “Omo Aktiv & Sport”, together with their starting numbers before the race, reported Hamar Arbeiderblad.

• But the problems of the piece were bigger than just the cover. The piece is built around the idea that illegally imported “bushmeat”–what we would call “wild game” if it were being eaten in the United States–could carry the deadly Ebola virus.

Security

• Q: In doing some research it seems that some of the hoopla surrounding Heartbleed came from the fact that Cloudfare announced they had fixed it, but only for their customers, is that correct?

• A: No, not at all. Once the existence of the bug was disclosed, the fix was absolutely trivial to anybody with technical knowledge because the code in question was Open Source. Anybody who wanted to fix it could very easily do so. This is very different from the later bug in Microsoft software that, even though the details were well known, only Microsoft could fix because the bug was in proprietary code that only Microsoft could change.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It is difficult to find a coherent explanation for the Post’s apparent position that Putin’s aggression so obviously violates “international norms” that are “uncontroversial,” but US warmaking is, if anything, insufficiently aggressive. Unless you accept that the kind of people who edit the Washington Post are the kind of people who do not believe that “universal norms” apply to everyone.

Finance

• KlearGear’s unprecedented $3,500 charge for customer complaints tossed whatever little reputation it had down the drain and it’s abusive actions earned it a $300,000 judgement when a former customer took it to court. Of course, the company only exists as a half-assed website and handful of remailing services. Someone named Vic Mathieu claimed the company is actually run by Descoteaux Boutiques out of France, and as such, is out of reach of the judgement.

• It’s hard to be a good teacher. It means planning weeks’ worth of lessons in detail. It means covering the needs of every student, whether they’re dyslexic, or don’t speak English as their first language, or are high achievers and so on.

• Being a good teacher means uncovering themes which will engage kids, trawling websites and libraries for films and texts as stimuli. It entails writing four different intentionally-flawed versions of a suspenseful story for them to modify in their first lesson, and five different tiers of riddles about 3D shapes for them to tackle in the second, all before 8am.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• As the Labor Day holiday approaches, ask yourself how often you see unions represented on corporate-owned television. On the highest-profile public affairs shows, the answer is basically never.

• Using Twitter to follow the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown, Bilton said he saw “thousands of one-sided accounts, many of which were grossly inaccurate.”

Censorship

• Back in April, I wrote to inform you of the crazy-pants lawsuit filed by Katherine Heigl after Duane Reade, a drug store chain, tweeted out a photo of Heigl shopping at one of its stores. Under the auspices of publicity rights and the corollary idea that celebrities are simply better people with more legal privileges than the rest of us, Heigl wanted six-million dollars for the following tweet.

Privacy

• One thing sits at the heart of what many consider a surveillance state within the US today.

• The problem does not begin with political systems that discourage transparency or technologies that can intercept everyday communications without notice. Like everything else in Washington, there’s a legal basis for what many believe is extreme government overreach—in this case, it’s Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981.

• “12333 is used to target foreigners abroad, and collection happens outside the US,” whistleblower John Tye, a former State Department official, told Ars recently. “My complaint is not that they’re using it to target Americans, my complaint is that the volume of incidental collection on US persons is unconstitutional.”

• The small number of protesters on Friday were reportedly outnumbered by the police and members of the media, according to the BBC. There was minor disruption at the Cheltenham site on Friday morning, as GCHQ staff were driven by bus into the site itself, instead of the usual practice of being dropped off outside.

• The study–or the Times recap, more to the point–is likely to get a lot of I-told-you-so attention from people who take a dim view of Twitter and the like. So it’s worth making two points.

• Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies are pushing for access to more personal data and other records with a minimum of court oversight. The most recent development tells us they should be trusted as much with this additional info as the guy standing in front of an empty barn asking for more horses. If they can’t keep what they already have safe and secure, why on earth would you give them access to more?

• Thus, while depressing, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find out that when a Section 215 request came to him concerning activity of a US person that was entirely protected by the First Amendment, Bates figured out a way to give the FBI the go ahead to spy on the person anyway. Because terrorism.

• More news of secret surveillance has been uncovered, thanks to FOIA requests. Police in Tacoma, Washington have a Stingray device and have been using it, unbeknownst to pretty much everyone in the area. And it’s not just a recent development. According to information obtained by The News Tribune, this dates back more than a half-decade.

• At least at the time I’m writing this, you can still see the full text via Google’s cache, though that may go away soon. The really ridiculous part is actually the final paragraph. The main part of the article lists out five areas where there are benefits to sharing your info (more on that in a second) and then it comes to this ridiculous conclusion:

• Back in July, we wrote about the Intercept releasing a leaked copy of the US law enforcement guidelines for putting someone on the no fly list. There have been a series of lawsuits recently concerning the no fly list, and the government has basically done everything possible, practically to the point of begging judges, to avoid having those cases move forward. So far, that’s failed miserably.

• The Obama administration is fighting a federal judge’s order requiring it to explain why the government places US citizens who haven’t been convicted of any violent crimes on its no-fly database.

Civil Rights

• Turning police departments into military bases has been one of the side effects of the 1033 program. This program routes military weapons and vehicles (as well as ancillaries like office equipment and medical supplies) to police forces, asking for nothing in return but a small donation and the use of the words “terrorism” or “drugs” on the application form. The program has been extremely popular and the US government can rest easy knowing that its excess inventory won’t go to waste.

• The ridiculousness is our notion that we will stop the jihad commanded by Islam by repurposing Cinnabon workers, dressing them up in faux cop uniforms, and stationing them at airports to feel us up and violate our Fourth Amendment rights.

• The two groups want one week’s worth of data during Ramadan last year. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge will not force local law enforcement to release a week’s worth of all captured automated license plate reader (ALPR, also known as LPR) data to two activist groups that had sued for the release of the information, according to a decision issued on Thursday.

• Among the many, many, many problems with running a torture program (beyond being morally problematic and with no history of effectiveness) is the fact that it makes it easier for others to justify torture programs as well. It’s now come out that ISIS has been waterboarding prisoners, including reporter James Foley whom they recently beheaded. Waterboarding, of course, was one of the CIA’s favorite torture techniques. And, of course, people had warned for years that having the CIA waterboard people would only encourage others to use the technique against Americans.

• One of the more unfortunate side effects of police militarization isn’t directly the fault of law enforcement agencies or their enablers at the Pentagon. But it is related. Thanks to the Drug War, nearly every town in the US has a SWAT team or one minutes away, whether they need one or not. This has led to the rise of SWATting — calling in a false report in order to send a charged-up SWAT team to raid someone’s home.

• [...]

• At the beginning, the SWAT team does the usual cop thing of everyone yelling at the same time because that apparently works better than having a point person designated to deliver concise, well-enunciated instructions. (Note: it does work better than other situations where officers have yelled contradictory instructions over each other ["Stand up!! Lay on the ground!!].) Bonus points for swearing because no one takes guys with assault rifles and Kevlar vests seriously unless they use variations of the word “fuck.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits.

• Thomas Stocking is chief operating officer of US operations at gandi and I met him during LinuxCon Chicago. We talked about gandi’s no bullshit policy, how a France based company is offering services across the globe, how gandi is defending the Internet and how they engage with the Linux & Open Source community.

• We’ve written a little bit about the campaign of Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu for Governor and Lt. Governor of NY — in particular about incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo’s petty attempt to bankrupt the campaign with a bogus attack on Teachout’s residency. That required a significant waste of time and resources, eventually leading a judge to toss out Cuomo’s frivolous challenge. Teachout and Wu have long histories of being really in touch with the internet generation, and being true anti-corruption reformers. While their campaign may be a longshot (big time “outsiders” against the quintessential insider), they’ve certainly managed to make some noise.

DRM

• The law only affects California, but phone manufacturers won’t sell two different phones. So this means that all cell phones will eventually have this capability. And, of course, the procedural controls and limitations written into the California law don’t apply elsewhere.

• Earlier this year, we wrote about Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, maker of the infamous Keurig single cup coffee makers, and its plan to DRM its next generation coffee pods. The original pods were going off patent, and competition was rising. So, of course, the solution is to come up with something new… and lock it down to make it less useful for consumers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• President Obama nominated a longtime trademark and copyright lawyer to be the White House’s new intellectual property enforcement officer.

• The White House announced on Thursday evening that Danny Marti was the president’s nominee for the post, which is tasked with coordinating ways to protect intellectual property with companies and other government officials.

• Marti, who is currently a managing partner at the Kilpatrick Townsend and Stockton law firm in Washington, was greeted warmly by industry groups when his name was announced on Thursday.

• While we’re still waiting for the White House to actually nominate a new head of the US Patent and Trademark Office, the other big administration “intellectual property” job has also been vacant for over a year: the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator” (IPEC) job, frequently referred to as the “IP Czar.” That job was previously held by Victoria Espinel, who left a year ago and immediately jumped to a lobbying job with the BSA, the copyright maximalist trade group run by Microsoft.

• Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto V, has told a judge that Lindsay Lohan’s publicity rights lawsuit is a publicity grab.

• Every so often we see this kind of thing: a reporter (who may very well do amazingly good work) gets upset to realize that other news sites and aggregators pick up on some of his stories and write about them — potentially even getting more attention than the original. In this case, it’s reporter Matthew Taub, who is annoyed that other sites got the glory for his investigative reporting on… on a guy dressing up as a clown and running around a Brooklyn cemetary…

Trademarks

• Yesterday we wrote about the ALS Association trying to trademark “ice bucket challenge” despite having absolutely nothing to do with the ice bucket challenge or its rise to viral fame. A lot of other news sites also wrote about the story, and there was quite an uproar on Twitter. At first, the ALS Association defended the move claiming that it only did so “after seeing many examples of unscrupulous profiteers trying to drive revenue to themselves, instead of the fight against ALS.” However, a little while ago, the ALS Association reached out to us (and via their Twitter feed, it appears they’re trying to respond to pretty much everyone) to say that it has withdrawn the trademark application:

Copyrights

• The digital company also renews a challenge to the irreparable harm faced by TV broadcasters

• Tom Giovanetti is a wacky sort of copyright maximalist, who insists that “copyright is property, no questions asked” and never misses an opportunity to defend stronger and stronger copyright. Every so often he pops off with something totally nonsensical like the time he insisted that copyright could never be used for censorship. He recently spouted off, comically, about how “piracy” is “killing movie franchises.” Now, this might be a surprise to anyone who, you know, actually pays attention to Hollywood. Because nearly every top grossing film these days is… part of a movie franchise. Let’s take a look at the top performers of 2014 so far:

• Kevin Carson points us to a fascinating story in The Atlantic about fans trying to recreate the “original” version of Star Wars (“Episode IV — A New Hope for the folks who feel like being pedantic) from 1977. As various fans have pointed out repeatedly (mainly each time Lucas went back and “edited” Star Wars again), back in 1988 Lucas spoke to Congress about the importance of preserving original versions of movies, and avoiding the constant attempts to update and modernize them in ways that might erase the original versions.

• City of London Police have increased the pressure on domain name registrars who do business with file-sharing sites. With a “notice of criminality” the police hopes to pressure the companies into taking action, or else.

• VAP, the anti-piracy association of the Austrian film and video industry, has sued four local ISPs after they failed to act on a request to block streaming portals Movie4k.to and Kinox.to. The IFPI says it is preparing legal action against the ISPs for their failure to block The Pirate Bay.

• Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against a small bar from Amityville, New York, for playing one of their songs without permission. The track in question is not a recent pop song, but the 80-year old love song “I Only Have Eyes for You” which first appeared in Warner’s 1934 movie “Dames.”

• Kim Dotcom has lost his appeal to keep his worldwide assets hidden from Hollywood in advance of a Court of Appeal hearing in October. The Court ordered the Megaupload founder to hand the information to Hollywood lawyers, although they must obtain permission to further share the information.

• I got a nasty letter(in English here) in the mail. I was being demanded 600 euros for alleged copyright infringement. I operate a TOR exit node and an open wireless network. I’m also an active member of the Pirate Party and have been a municipal election candidate in Turku, Finland.

• A leaked draft prepared for government submission has revealed Hollywood’s Australian anti-piracy strategy. Among other things, the paper says that providers should be held liable for infringing customers even when they only “reasonably suspect” that infringement is taking place.

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