● 09.23.14

● Links 21/9/2014: Fedora 21 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Well autumn is nigh upon us here in the Northern reaches of the Linux blogosphere, and any day now the a/c will downshift to “medium” over at the Broken Windows Lounge.

• Oktoberfest ales are selling like hotcakes, the scent of pumpkin spice lattes fills the air, and more than a few bloggers are rejoicing at the end of the Dog Days at last.

• The world might feel once again like a happy and wondrous place, in fact — Systemd, Schmystemd! — but for the recent arrival of a sad bit of news.

• Jeff Hoogland has since clarified the situation on his own blog “Thoughts On Technology”. Whilst it is true that Jeff has stepped down as the lead developer he has been actively seeking other volunteers to keep the project going.

Desktop

• Samsung has decided to exit the laptop market stopping sales of Ativ Windows and Chromebook devices in Europe, PC Advisor can confirm.

• It’s common knowledge that the PC market is in decline with Sony pulling out and selling its Vaio business back in February of this year. Despite being a giant of the tech world, Samsung has now followed suit.

• Whether you’re moving to a paperless lifestyle, need to scan a document to back it up or email it, want to scan an old photo, or whatever reason you have for making the physical electronic, a scanner comes in handy. In fact, a scanner is essential.

• But the catch is that most scanner makers don’t have Linux versions of the software that they bundle with their devices. For the most part, that doesn’t matter. Why? Because there are good scanning applications available for the Linux desktop. They work with a variety of scanners, and do a good job.

• Let’s take a look at a three simple but flexible Linux scanning tools. Keep in mind that the software discussed below is hardly an exhaustive list of the scanner software that’s available for the Linux desktop. It’s what I’ve used extensively and found useful.

Server

• Much commotion has surrounded this column in the past few weeks. Not even counting the systemd discussion, my call for a server-only Linux distribution that does not support any desktop applications or frameworks caused a tizzy, mostly from folks who couldn’t quite grasp that I wasn’t only talking about not selecting desktop packages during installation.

• Applications can more easily be redeployed on servers or made available on public clouds using Docker. “You configure it once, and once it’s configured, it’s very easy to [roll it out] in multiple places,” Azul President/CEO Scott Sellers said in an interview. Although others have offered Java via Docker, Azul says its open source Zulu JVM is the first Docker-based Java offering to be officially certified as Java-compliant and fully supported. “This is really needed in order for enterprises to deploy Java on Docker in real production environments,” Sellers said.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Continuing in his Sunday tradition, Linus Torvalds put out the sixth release candidate to the Linux 3.17 kernel. Depending upon how the next week goes, this could be the final release candidate for Linux 3.17.

• The boycotting of systemd has led to the creation of uselessd, a new init daemon based off systemd that tries to strip out the “unnecessary” features.

• Uselessd in its early stages of development is systemd reduced to being a basic init daemon process with “the superfluous stuff cut out”. Among the items removed are removing of journald, libudev, udevd, and superfluous unit types.

• While I’ve written extensively about the Linux 3.17 kernel and its many new features, there is an interesting addition that was merged for Linux 3.17 that I missed out on noticing (or that of Anzwix) until today.

• While there hasn’t been much to report on lately as it pertains to the open-source Exynos DRM driver, it continues to be updated and maintained by Samsung’s staff.

Graphics Stack

• A significant patch-set was published on Saturday night that implements the driver-independent bits of OpenGL 4′s ARB_tessellation_shader extension inside Mesa.

• One week after the DisplayPort 1.3 debut, VESA this morning is announcing a new advancement to the DisplayPort standard: DisplayPort over USB.

Benchmarks

• Several hours ago Valve finally released to the public the Linux port of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive! This has been one of the most sought after titles to come to Steam on Linux by gamers and now it’s finally out there. Of course, soon as it was made public, we added support for the game to our benchmarking software. After a very busy night, here’s the first widely available benchmarks of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive running natively on Linux. Up for this first round of testing are an assortment of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with the proprietary graphics drivers.

Applications

• One of the great strengths of Linux is the whole raft of weird and wonderful open source utilities. That strength does not simply derive from the functionality they offer, but from the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with applications.

• Geeknote is a command-line client for Evernote, useful to add notes to Evernote via Bash scripts, cron, applications that can’t directly use the Evernote SDK or to simply manage your Evernote notes from the command-line.

Proprietary

• sNetflix is looking to expand its business, and one of the ways to do that is to look at what other platforms it can support. Ubuntu is the most used Linux distribution, so it stands to reason that they might be interested to have their service working on it.

• Netflix may soon offer official support for Ubuntu Linux. But does that really matter now that Netflix has unofficially worked on Linux via Wine for nearly two years?

• Canonical developers have acted swiftly and pushed a security updated today (I got it on my Kubuntu box) which bumps nss to version 3.17.x. Now the ball is in Netflix’ court to make the proposed changes which will allow Linux users to run Netflix through Google Chrome.

• Coming back to the point of Netflix, Linux users owe it to multiple players and some controversial technologies. NSS or Network Security Services, the missing piece of this Netflix for Linux puzzle, is a technology co-developed by Google, Mozilla,Sun Microsoft (and Oracle due to acquisition), AOL and others.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• A new development version of Wine, 1.7.27, has been announced by Alexandre Julliard and is now available for download and testing. It features a few interesting major improvements and a host of smaller changes.

Games

• With all the doom and gloom recently about games here’s a nice one. The head of Chucklefish has created a blog post about how healthy Starbound is and will continue to be.

• We already knew that the Linux version of Divinity: Original Sin wouldn’t be out at the same time as Windows, but we didn’t know when at all. Users have been asking them about it a lot recently and they still claim it’s going to be this year.

• Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a great looking RPG currently in pre-alpha that has Linux builds available, and it needs help to get on Steam. The game is being created by a team that includes Richard “Lord British” Garriott the creator of the Ultima series.

• Mesa 10.3 just went stable two days ago. The rolling release distro’s are busy shoving it into testing and those brave enough to use such a distro can have some fun with that.

• In this article, let’s take a look at Red Hat Inc. (RHT), a $10.95 billion market cap company, which is a leading provider of Linux operating systems for enterprises, and related middleware and virtualization software offerings.

• SNOW is an upcoming free to play, open world winter sports game that is going to use CryEngine and the developers sent a little teaser out.

• In Tropico the player takes over the role of “El Presidente”, the dictator of the island “Tropico” and is responsible for the islands nation from the colonial period to the 21st Century.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The QtWayland support for Qt 5.4 is considered a technical preview with support of QWidget-based apps being less than ideal, the QtCompositor API in QtWayland not seeing a release for Qt 5.4, and other work still needs to be pursued. The QtCompositor API for the QtWayland module is what’s needed for those out there wishing to write their own Wayland compositors using Qt. Qt’s support for XDG-Shell is also less than complete and there’s also not any official sub-surface protocol support for QtWayland.

• “This release, versioned plasma-5.0.2, adds a month’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important such as fixing text which couldn’t be translated, using the correct icons and fixing overlapping files with KDELibs 4 software. It also adds a month’s hard work of translations to make support in other languages even more complete,” reads the announcement.

• It wasn’t but a few days ago that I approached the KDE community in Google Plus to ask a question. In asking that question, I included a screenshot to present a graphical representation of my problem. Three community members responded right away. The first two responses were legitimate queries: questions seeking to gather information needed to calculate an effective attack vector. The third response was…well, not so much.

• I have tagged, pushed and tarball‘d a release candidate for Grantlee 5.0.0, based on Qt 5. Please go ahead and test it, and port your software to it, because some things have changed.

• Even when it sounds like KDE Akademy is a just big party, we have been very productive as well. During the birds-of-a-feather (BoF) session on user experience, we discussed usability and visual design for some projects. Here we want to report about the first one: Artikulate.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If all goes according to plan, I’ll be able to merge the aforementioned automatic rotation support into systemd/udev. The kernel API is pretty bad, which makes the user-space code look bad…

• Speaking of gedit, after the major changes of 3.12, 3.14 has been a cycle focused on stabilization and polishing. Overall the revised user interface got mostly positve feedback.. I for one, as a heavy gedit user, adapted to the new UI without problems. 3.14 will have a few incremental changes, that among other things try to address some of the issues pointed out by Jim Hall’s usability study presented at GUADEC: “Open” will be a single button removing the dichotomy between the open dialog and recent files and providing quick search among recent files. “Save” now uses a text label since it turns out a lot of people did not grok the icon (and no, I am not going back to the floppy image!) and the view menu has been reorganized and now uses a popover. With regard to the “Open” button, we know things are not perfect yet, search among recent is great, but when the “cache misses”, going through a double step is painful… we already have a few ideas on how to improve that next cycle, but for now I can vividly recommend to try the “quickopen” plugin, one of the hidden gems of gedit, which already provides some of the things we would like to integrate in the next iteration.

• Cinnamon is the default desktop environment in Linux Mint and it’s built by the same developers who are making the Linux distro. It stands to reason that the best implementation for Cinnamon will be on Linux Mint. It’s also the place that integrates the latest updates for Cinnamon as soon as they are made available.

• In preparation for this week’s GNOME 3.14 debut, the deadline is today for checking in the 3.14.0 release tarballs. One of the most prominent packages now checked in for the Wednesday release is GTK+ 3.14.

Distributions

Slackware Family

• Along with the Openbox version of Salix, the Fluxbox edition is one of the lightest iterations available in the series. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly on the list of priorities for the developer and it’s been trailing a little behind, but now it’s ready.

• Salix is one the few very active distributions based on Slackware, which is a famous and very stable operating system that has been around for quite a while. It’s rather different from what everyone else is doing because it is a modular system and it has a rolling release model.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is in the midst of changing its image from a top Linux company to the future king of cloud computing. CEO Jim Whitehurst told me in 2011 that the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud would be Red Hat’s future. Today in a blog posting, Whitehurst underlined this shift from Linux to OpenStack.

• Red Hat posted strong quarterly results last week that beat Wall Street’s expectations, and a big part of the news was that the company is starting to see meaningful revenue from its many initiatives surrounding cloud computing. Enterprises are a big part of Red Hat’s cloud focus, but the company has also made clear that it will focus on cloud services for big telecom companies, and organizations in niche sectors.

• Modern datacenters and next-generation IT requirements depend on capable platforms, with open source solutions offering a strong foundation for open hybrid cloud and enterprise workloads. A powerful, unified platform enables enterprises to use a solid foundation to balance demand while utilizing new trends and technologies such as virtual machines and the open hybrid cloud.

• Not content with running the industry’s largest enterprise Linux vendor, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says he wants to make the company the industry’s leading enterprise cloud vendor – and he plans to “win” that market before someone else does.

• RED HAT HAS ANNOUNCED that it will shift its emphasis from Linux to cloud computing in the next few years.

Fedora

• Fedora 21 release schedule saw a number of delays in the recent past. But it seems that things are looking brighter now with an announcement by Ryan Lerch that the Alpha will be released next Tuesday i.e. September 23, 2014.

• It’s been a busy day in Linux news with top stories featuring new openSUSE 13.2 Beta and Debian 8 packages. Bodhi Linux founder Jeff Hoogland said he has someone to take over the distribution project. Red Hat is changing focus from Linux to OpenStack! Knoppix 7.4.1 update was released and there’s been a lot buzz about upcoming GNOME 3.14. And, of course, we have today’s latest systemd news.

• Fedora 21 in alpha form is finally expected for release today. With Fedora 20 having been released last December and the Fedora 21 release getting continually dragged on due to delays, here’s a recap of some of the major changes being worked on for this next Fedora release.

• Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, the first alpha version of Fedora 21 will be released tomorrow, after several delays, using GNOME 3.14 (stable or not) as the default desktop environment.

• Red Hat sponsored Fedora Project has announced the alpha release of Fedora 21.

• Fedora prides itself on bringing cutting-edge technologies to users of open source software around the world, and this release continues that tradition. No matter what you do, Fedora 21 has the tools you need to help you get things done.

Debian Family

• Anyone who installs Jessie from scratch will find that they are not offered no choice in the matter. This means that only the technically well-equipped will be able to make a switch in the event that systemd does not work as promised. Existing users of the testing stream will find, on checking, that their systems have been migrated over to systemd. Systems running the stable version of Debian have not been migrated across yet.

• Knoppix developers have released a major version of their operating system Knoppix 7.4.1 based on the usual picks from Debian stable (wheezy) and newer Desktop packages from Debian/testing and Debian/unstable (jessie). According to the official release note, this distro version uses kernel 3.16.2 and xorg 7.7 (core 1.16.0) for supporting current computer hardware.

• The Debian developers decided a while ago that they were going to adopt Xfce instead of GNOME as the default desktop, but that doesn’t mean that users won’t be able to find all the GNOME packages in the repositories.

• There still though is the chance for change as Hess explains, “Some desired data is not yet available, but at this point I’m around 80% sure that gnome is coming out ahead in the process. This is particularly based on accessibility and to some extent systemd integration… The only single factor that I think could outweigh the above is media size, if there was a strong desire by Debian to see a single CD with a standalone usable desktop. However, the Debian live team doesn’t care about fitting on a traditional CD; and while the Debian CD team hasn’t made a statement, my impression as a member is that this is not something we care enough about any more to make it a hard blocker on the default desktop.”

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has been working on Ubuntu Touch for almost two years, and now the company finally has a stable product that can be shown off and improved before the official launch, which is scheduled for sometime in December.

• The truth is that Ubuntu Touch has been deemed stable for quite some time and it was easy to make a preview article a few months back, but it wouldn’t have been representative of the final product. The direction of the design has changed a couple of times already, or better yet it has evolved. Numerous features have been added in just a few months, so any kind of analysis would have been rather pointless.

• Despite what all the Linux haters say, choosing Ubuntu is logical and migrating from Windows 7 to Ubuntu is a breeze. This article summarizes the process and provides solutions to some of the most common beginner hiccups.

• The Windows Vs Mac Vs Linux debate has been going on for years and doesn’t look to be settled anytime soon. If you are a Windows 7 user and still haven’t made the switch to Windows 8, you may want to consider migrating to Ubuntu 14.04, the latest Linux distro from Ubuntu. In addition to strong support from developers and a massive software repository, it’s free, faster and safer than Windows.

• “As of nowish, the archive is frozen for 14.10 Final Beta preparation, and will continue to be frozen from here until Final release next month. As with the previous release, we have a bot in place that will accept uploads that are unseeded and don’t affect images. Don’t take this as an open invitation to break Feature Freeze on those components, this is just to reduce the burden on the release team, so we only review the uploads that need very serious consideration,” notes Canonical’s Adam Conrad.

• Canonical and Oracle are collaborating to offer customers support for both Ubuntu and Oracle Linux as fully supported guests on one another’s respective OpenStack offerings.

• As part of this collaboration, Canonical will support Ubuntu as a guest OS on Oracle Linux OpenStack, and Oracle will support Oracle Linux as a guest OS on Ubuntu OpenStack. Canonical will test Oracle Linux as a guest OS in its OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) program. This gives customers the assurance the configuration is tested and supported by both organisations.

• Android and iOS have long been the two top dogs in the mobile world. But Canonical has been quietly brewing a competitor in the background that is almost ready to enter the mobile wars. Softpedia has a preview of the RTM version of Ubuntu Touch and finds that it’s already in very good shape.

Devices/Embedded

• Mentor Graphics has begun shipping Mentor Embedded Linux for AMD’s new Steppe Eagle, Crowned Eagle, and Bald Eagle G-Series and R-Series SoCs.

• The Relay runs a version of Android on an unstated processor, and duplicates the Wink Android app on its 4.3-inch multi-touch display. Wink lists only WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee as supported protocols, with no mention of Z-Wave or other wireless radios. However, Wink suggests the Relay replaces all features of the Hub, stating that “Relay will automatically connect with all Wink App Ready products, from light bulbs to garage door openers, as well as Wink App Compatible products that use the Wink Hub to connect.” The company also says that Relay supports 100 products from 15 trusted brands that already work with Wink.

Phones

Ballnux

• openSUSE team has announced the release of the first beta of openSUSE 13.2. The final release is scheduled for November. As usual 13.2 will bring the best experience and integration with two top desktop environments – KDE’s Plasma and Gnome.

• Samsung’s postponed Tizen Linux-based smartphone is now heading for a launch in India by the end of the year, reports India’s Economic Times.

• According to a Zauba International shipping manifest, Samsung have shipped 150 of these units from South Korea to India for R&D and Evaluation purposes, which is a fair amount for an R&D unit to continue its work with. We have been tracking two budget Tizen based Smartphones lately, the SM-Z130H & SM-Z130E, with various parts being shipped to India every couple of months or so, but this is one of the largest shipments that we have seen so far.

Android

• India is now the world’s third largest Internet market and “on a bullet train to become the second”. But even when we become the second with around 300 million Internet users, India would still have over 75 per cent of the population that has no access to this so-called information superhighway. It is this chunk of population that will form the “next billion” which companies like Nokia, and now Google, has been talking about. And it is this next billion that Google thinks will line up to buy and good smartphone that is also affordable.

• Recently Google started making it possible to run Android apps on Chromebooks. For now, there are only four applications, but developers looking into the code have already found that porting their applications to Android on Chrome will require almost no effort.

• MediaTek announced a Mediatek Labs hacker site, plus a MediaTek SDK for Android and a “LinkIt” RTOS that runs on an ARM-based, IoT-oriented “Aster” SoC.

• Apple might not have the most mobile market share or sell the most units, but it can get more attention than any other mobile device maker. Year after year, it’s able to build anticipation for its latest products to a fever pitch. That has become abundantly apparent in the wake of the iPhone 6 launch. While there are still countless devices available that might in one way or another top the iPhone 6 in terms of features or price, it’s Apple’s product that generates the most hype. But now that the iPhone 6 is shipping, consumers who aren’t already totally committed to Apple’s products will go back to calmly considering in the clear light of day which product offers the best deal—the iPhone or one of the many handsets that run Android. This eWEEK slide show looks at 10 Android smartphones ranging from lower-cost units to the top-of-the-line flagship models that might prove to be suitable alternatives to the iPhone. From the Samsung Galaxy S5 to the Amazon Fire Phone, there are Android handsets that can suit any mobile phone buyer’s needs.

• The media has been gushing nonstop over Apple’s iPhone 6, and many stories have appeared about the possibility of many Android users switching to Apple’s new phone. But one Android phone has blown away the iPhone 6 in battery tests. I mentioned the Sony Xperia Z3 in a roundup last week, and now Phone Arena has very good news about the phone’s battery life.

• We are not going to mince words here – Sony is the current king of battery life when it comes to brand-name smartphones. We did our grueling battery benchmark on the Xperia Z3 over the weekend, and it broke all records in its respective category, just as we suspected it would do, given Sony’s consistent performance in that department this year.

• I’ve always been a big fan of Picasso, the Android image loading library by the Square folks. It provides some powerful features with a rather simple API.

• One of the tools we’ve leaned on heavily in some of our lab testing of software privacy and security is Kali Linux. The Debian-based operating system comes packaged with a collection of penetration testing and network monitoring tools curated and developed by the security training company Offensive Security. Today, the Kali developer team and Offensive Security released a new Kali project that runs on a Google Nexus device. Called NetHunter, the distribution provides much of the power of Kali with the addition of a browser-driven set of tools that can be used to launch attacks on wireless networks or on unattended computers via a USB connection.

Free Software/Open Source

• Software-defined networking (SDN) is emerging as one of the fastest growing segments of open source software (OSS), which in itself is now firmly entrenched in the enterprise IT world. SDN simplifies IT network configuration and management by decoupling control from the physical network infrastructure.

• I don’t think you can compare Red Hat to other Linux distributions because we are not a distribution company. We have a business model on Enterprise Linux. But I would compare the other distributions to Fedora because it’s a community-driven distribution. The commercially-driven distribution for Red Hat which is Enterprise Linux has paid staff behind it and unlike Microsoft we have a Security Response Team. So for example, even if we have the smallest security issue, we have a guaranteed resolution pattern which nobody else can give because everybody has volunteers, which is fine. I am not saying that the volunteers are not good people, they are often the best people in the industry but they have no hard commitments to fixing certain things within certain timeframes. They will fix it when they can. Most of those people are committed and will immediately get onto it. But as a company that uses open source you have no guarantee about the resolution time. So in terms of this, it is much better using Red Hat in that sense. It’s really what our business model is designed around; to give securities and certainties to the customers who want to use open source.

• About a week later I got another email with the subject, “Did you receive my previous email?” It was Samantha again; she really, really thought that FOSS Force and her software selling partner would be a perfect fit. I remained unconvinced and again ignored the email, figuring that would be the last I’d hear from her. Most affiliate marketing companies don’t try to interest me more than twice for a particular client. After the second go, they’d usually rather wait until they have another client to use as bait on the hook.

• Not Samatha. On Friday I received a third email. She was still wondering if I’d received her previous messages. She still thought FOSS Force would be a perfect fit for her client. “We sell retail, OEM and discounted versions of software titles from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Corel, Intuit, McAfee, Symantec and many more,” she gushed.

• Obviously she doesn’t understand FOSS or those of us who advocate its use. She’d probably seen the site, noticed a lot of writing about computers and software and jumped to the conclusion that we’d be great for her software hawking client. I wouldn’t doubt that she’d Googled the term “FOSS,” but got no further than the word “software” when reading the definition.

• This time I broke down and sent a reply, thanking her for her interest in our site. Unfortunately, I explained, almost all of our visitors use Linux and most of your client’s software won’t even run on Linux. Besides, I went on, our site advocates the use of free and open source software and a large percentage of our visitors would take exception if we were to offer software by the likes of Microsoft or Apple, even if it would run on their machines. As for McAfee and Symantec, I explained, our visitors rarely need antivirus products.

• The new controller, which will launch in November, is based on the upcoming “Helium” release from OpenDaylight.

• Brocade in November will launch a software-defined networking controller based on the OpenDaylight Foundation’s upcoming “Helium” release and which will represent the vendor’s latest move to grow its Vyatta platform.

• Brocade on Monday announced the release of the Vyatta Controller, a new keystone product within its SDN portfolio.

• In recent years, there has been a proliferation of JavaScript presentation frameworks. These frameworks use HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create presentation slides that can be viewed in any modern web browser. Gone are the days of being tied to using PowerPoint, nowadays there are a plethora of tools to choose from when it comes to creating a presentation.

• Inside an academic lab, Ben Hindman created key parts of Apache Mesos, an open-source tool for efficiently running lots of applications in data centers. He found himself at Twitter for four years, putting the system in place. But now he is doing what he arguably was destined to do: working on the project for a living to make it a standard everywhere.

• Modern computers are built with nanotechnology. A processor contains billions of transistors, each around 14 nanometers. A single bit of information on a hard disc drive is confined to a 10 nanometer domain spinning on a disc 75 miles per hour. The accelerometers in our smartphones contain nano-springs that measure gravitational forces to determine orientation.

• Providing an end-to-end solution for building and deploying new connected applications extremely quickly, at scale, and at a fraction of the cost compared to conventional processes is key to streamlining M2M development. And, using an open-source, Linux-based platform, companies can run applications on any vendor’s hardware and use any cloud management platform.

• Network and system monitoring is a broad category. There are solutions that monitor for the proper operation of servers, network gear, and applications, and there are solutions that track the performance of those systems and devices, providing trending and analysis. Some tools will sound alarms and notifications when problems are detected, while others will even trigger actions to run when alarms sound. Here is a collection of open source solutions that aim to provide some or all of these capabilities.

• Sharing information in the name of innovation isn’t anything new. Collaborative intelligence helped publish the Oxford English Dictionary, spur advances in 19th century science and powered the world’s first automobile. Even Ben Franklin insisted on donating his bifocals and lightning rod to the public domain, likely dubbing him America’s first open-source advocate. The notion of “open source” predates software and the Internet by centuries, yet many of today’s largest government IT shops are still reluctant to turn to open alternatives from proprietary software, even in the face of shrinking budgets, overworked staff and heightened citizen expectations.

• The methodology of open source development has come a long way in the past twenty years. It took the Linux kernel team eleven years to gain one hundred contributors in a month; it’s taken Ansible two years. Of course, the Linux community had to make up the methodology as they went along; the Ansible team has benefitted from years of studying and participating in Linux and other open source communities.

• The list also includes a potpourri of projects from other categories, including Web content management, software-defined networking, desktop publishing, games, IT management, electronic health records, operating systems and more. All of these apps were released for the first time within the last couple of years and most of them haven’t been featured on our lists in the past.

Events

SaaS/Big Data

• Over the past two years IT managers at the public research universities in Germany’s most populous state, Northrhine-Westfalia, have been researching how to build a private inter-university cloud. It will provide about 6 Petabytes of free-to-use storage to 500,000 affiliates of more than 30 public research and applied science universities in the region, Raimund Vogl, director of IT at Münster University wrote on Linux.com.

• It’s no secret that the list of companies backing the OpenStack cloud computing platform is growing mighty long. In fact, most analysts agree that that list has to be whittled down over time. But if you think you have a handle on which companies are the top contributors to OpenStack, you may find some surprises.

• Hewlett-Packard didn’t just buy cloudy startup Eucalyptus Systems to build its fledgling OpenStack cloud biz, it also bought Marten Mickos, the firm’s Finnish CEO.

• HP isn’t the first to pay for Mickos’ expertise – that was Sun Microsystems, when it acquired his venture previous venture, MySQL AB, for $1bn in 2008.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Larry Ellison announced on September 18 that he was stepping down as CEO of Oracle, but little will actually change at the company he has led for four decades. Ellison is now Oracle’s Chairman of the Board and CTO, while Mark Hurd and Safra Katz now jointly hold the CEO role.

CMS

• Open source platforms like Drupal and WordPress provide a backend framework that small businesses can use to build and customize their websites while managing key functions like registration, system administration, layout and RSS. Users can also create their own modules to enable new functions or change the website’s look and feel.

• Smaller companies can use open source content management systems (CMS) to reduce or eliminate the need for coding while delivering rich media online, including text, graphics, video and audio. They can use open source assets to create responsive design sites that optimize content for viewing across multiple device types, including smartphones, tablets and laptops, while eliminating the need to scroll from side to side.

• With open source tools available to help small businesses establish an online presence with robust front and backend functions quickly and affordably, there’s never been a better time to focus on content excellence. And the best way to do that is to concentrate on the customer. Engage with your target customers and find out what they value the most. Use that information to develop your content, and speak directly to your customers’ needs.

Education

• This is a $15 million competition in which teams are challenged to create Open Source software that will teach a child to read, write, and perform arithmetic in 18 months without the aid of a teacher. This is not designed to replace teachers but to instead provide an educational solution where little or none exists.

• I still wear my XPrize t-shirt for the first sub-orbital private manned spaceflight from Mojave Space Port. The XPrize Foundation is best known for this and other high-technology challenges such as the prizes to land a private robot on the moon and to create a true Star Trek style Tricorder. Now, the Foundation has turned its eyes closer to home with its new Global Learning XPrize.

Public Services/Government

• The Italian city of Turin will switch to a complete open source desktop system, over the next 18 months. In August, the city administration decided to phase-out the current outdated proprietary system on its 8300 PCs and replace it by the Ubuntu open source alternative. Turin estimates the move will save some six million euro over the next five years.

Openness/Sharing

• For a few years now, we’ve heard about Google Glass, wearable technology that essentially brings the functionality available on a smartphone to a pair of eyeglasses.

• WikiHouse has unveiled the world’s first open source, digitally printed two-storey home as part of this year’s London Design Festival.

Programming

• PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7. It’s fast (pypy 2.4 and cpython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

Leftovers

• Oettinger has no experience in the area he has been nominated for, Reda said. And by appointing Ansip, the Commission is getting a vice president who has been an advocate for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which threatened digital rights of European citizens, she added. The Commission gave up its fight on behalf of the controversial antipiracy trade pact in 2012.

Science

• This time last year, I walked into a Toronto store called Moog Audio and walked out with a Teenage Engineering OP-1—a curious little portable digital synthesizer that looks, at first glance, like a child’s toy. It has a row of just four candy-colored knobs as primary input controls, and there are only enough keys for an octave-and-a-half’s worth of range. But damn does it ever sound cool. Its tiny OLED screen uses all sorts of clever visual conceits to convey otherwise complex audio transformations. Colors and animations explain the differences between synthesizer engines, changes to modulation and frequency, and attack and decay. And it’s done in a way that’s easy for anyone with little synthesizer knowledge to understand while still being powerful in more experienced hands. This is a synthesizer, drum machine, and four-track recorder all-in-one—all in a device that fits inside a purse or messenger bag with ease.

Security

• While the Open Crypt Audit Project, headed by cryptographer Matthew Green and Kenneth White, Principal Scientist at Social & Scientific Systems, has been considering whether to take over the development of TrueCrypt and is working on the second phase of the audit process (a thorough analysis of the code responsable for the actual encryption process), one of TrueCrypt’s developers has expressed his disapproval of a project that would fork the software.

• Google is turning on data encryption by default in the next version of Android, a step that mirrors broad moves in the technology industry to ensure better data security.

• Android has been capable of encryption for more than three years, with the keys stored on the device, according to a Google spokesman.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The past week was filled with officials coming before members of Congress to sell President Barack Obama’s strategy for escalating war in Iraq and Syria. It worked. Congress approved the arming and training of rebel forces in Syria to fight ISIS. However, this did not take place without members of Congress hearing some voices of dissent loud and clear.

• CODEPINK Women for Peace managed to convince a group of people to be at almost all of the hearings on combating ISIS. They held up pink signs that could be seen behind officials like Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry. The group even provoked a lecture from Kerry, who scolded them for protesting the administration’s war plans.

• Professor Lowell Ewert, director of Peace and Conflict Studies, Conrad Grebel University College

• “Events in the world today profoundly demonstrate how violence begets violence. It is impossible to kill one’s way to peace. What is needed is a new paradigm of mutual respect, human rights, affirmation of the dignity of everyone, which is formed and strengthened through education.”

• The photo was taken just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq had concluded. We’d missed the initial combat, but within the next eighteen months Doug would fight in the First Battle of Fallujah and I would fight in the Second. Both of us would be wounded. Doug was decorated for his valor, and a much-circulated profile of him ran in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “The Unapologetic Warrior.” When he was asked about the intense fighting he’d seen in April, 2004, he replied with characteristic bombast. “I’ve told [my troops] that killing is not wrong if it’s for a purpose, if it’s to keep your nation free or to protect your buddy,” he said. “One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy.” Doug often said things like that, and he believed them. I’d anchored myself in his mentorship because of his unshakable faith in being a Marine. Combat made more sense when you held to those kinds of precepts, and when they felt true.

• [...]

• When I look at the photo, I can’t help but think that Suleimani would recognize the irony that his victory was due in part to the very U.S. air power that his surrogates had once dodged in Sadr City, where Doug was killed. I doubt he would be aware of a further irony—that his surveillance drones were taking off right next to Zembiec Landing Zone. Given that America’s wars are no longer punctuated by clear declarations of victory or defeat, the photo seemed an appropriate bookend to my memory of the conflict in Iraq. With American planes once again flying sorties there, and with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff speculating about the deployment of ground troops, it may also mark, for someone else, a beginning.

• War has changed in recent decades. Once, it was about opposing armies facing off across a battlefield. But in the “war on terror”, one side attacks with air strikes and drones that can be operated by an Air Force lieutenant in Nevada, putting in a 9am-5pm shift before going home for dinner with his wife and kids. And the other side responds by chopping the heads off journalists and aid workers – and is now threatening to do the same to a taxi driver from Salford whose only crime was to deliver nappies and baby food to refugees in a far-off land. We have entered a new and thorny thicket in the military moral maze.

• [...]

• So where lies justice in our modern wars? We clearly have to rethink the rules to reflect our changed reality. But in doing that, we must not throw away the ethical constraints of the classical tradition. We must not sacrifice our openness to self-criticism by becoming trapped in a self-referential morality. Democracies may be at a disadvantage when it comes to terrorism. But we will be even more disadvantaged if we throw away the values on which democracy rests in our determination to win.

• News comes amid claims RAF’s Reaper squadron could operate against jihadists in the Middle East

• An insider in the U.S. military’s covert drone war has confirmed what critics of the killing program have long-warned: the program is far more “dangerous” than the government admits.

• In an op-ed published in Salon on Tuesday, the unnamed former Air Force imagery analyst writes, “I was the only line of defense between keeping someone alive and providing the intelligence for a strike using technology not accurate enough to determine life and death.”

• President Obama seems poised to declare war on the world. American policy in 2014 has taken on a “zombie-like” feverishness aimed at war. Terror has been turned into a horror gag reel these days, as Washington acts out some fetish for chaos in our world. And for those who consider Obama a Machiavellian genius, this requires a massive intellect. A modern day political Frankenstein seems more apt.

• Former president Bill Clinton told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he agreed with Hillary Clinton that the Obama administration should have taken the chance years ago of arming Syrian rebels fighting Bashar Assad.

• He said she lost the argument “within the administration and she admitted then and acknowledged in her book that she can’t know that if her recommendation had been followed, it would have worked. That’s one of those things you can’t know,” said Clinton. “That’s why all of these decisions are hard,” according to CNN.

• Last week, the House and Senate voted to rubber stamp President Obama’s war plans for the Middle East. Both bodies, on a bipartisan basis, authorized the US to begin openly training and arming the rebels who have been fighting for three years to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.

• The Power and the Peril of Oil is Firooz Zadeh’s passionately written account about how oil has given strength and empowered some countries while it has imperiled others. It documents the history, politics, and players in the quest for dominance of the Middle East and its highly prized resource.

• Sanctions, sanctions and more sanctions! Every day we are subjected to an onslaught of stories and reports about how western countries, Europe, certain Asian countries and their master across the Atlantic are imposing new and ever more expanded and devious sanctions against Russia, its leaders, its businesses, industries, entire segments of the financial sector and other parts of the Russian world, even Japan has jumped on the sanctions wagon to show “support” for the hegemon across the Pacific, yet no one stops to question or stand up and say “Wait! All of these sanctions are based on lies.”

• During the 1980s, the CIA helped arm and train Osama Bin Laden and his mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet invasion, which became a way for the mujahideen to give the USSR “their Vietnam.” Bin Laden’s goal was to bleed the USSR dry of its money and resources; it worked. The USSR soon crumbled and Bin Laden’s new target became his former ally, the U.S. Bin Laden’s new goal was to have the U.S. become involved in the region in the same capacity the USSR had; this also worked. After over a decade of the War on Terror, the U.S. claims to have decimated al-Qaeda and its leadership, with the biggest blow coming when they finally took out Bin Laden. Now, new enemy ISIS has become the U.S.’s biggest concern. ISIS has been moving through Iraq killing tons of innocent people in their path. ISIS must be stopped, but we must ask, how did they become so powerful and, knowing what we do about the history of U.S. involvement in the region, what is the best course of action to take in stopping them?

• [...]

• Chelsea Manning, the jailed Wikileaks whistleblower, recently stated in an op-ed on ISIS that the U.S. should let ISIS die out on its own. The only way for this to happen is if the U.S. stays out of the fight and stops supplying arms to rebels. If the U.S. were sincere about stopping ISIS, they would stop arming rebels. But the U.S. is not sincere; this is not about stopping ISIS. This is about the profits of Boeing, Raytheon, and the entire weapons industrial complex. The U.S. must do what’s best, stop supplying weapons that are only helping to escalate violence and embolden the enemy. Only then will we see ISIS die out.

• US air strikes against the ISIS for more than a month appears to have done little to tamp down the conspiracy theories still circulating from the streets of Baghdad to the highest levels of Iraqi government that the CIA is secretly behind the same extremists that it is now attacking.

• As the U.S. steps up arms and training, Syria’s “moderate” rebels are joining a long line of resistance movements the Americans have backed over the decades, from Angola to Afghanistan.

• The high-water mark was President Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, when the U.S. supplied weapons to three rebel groups on three separate continents in Cold War proxy fights designed to undermine the Soviet Union.

• In the Reagan 1980s, I often attended the annual gatherings of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Several days of meetings featuring speeches by the most influential (domestic) thinkers on the right were capped off by a formal dinner that was often attended by President and Mrs. Reagan.

• Political Islam has a long history of cooperating with Western imperialism at certain times and in certain places, and of turning against it at other times and in other places. For example, Osama bin Laden cooperated with the United States to overthrow a progressive pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, and then launched a jihad against the domination of the Middle East by the United States. Many Palestinians were sent to Afghanistan in the 1980s by the Muslim Brotherhood to struggle against the atheists in Kabul (much to the delight of Israel) only to return to join a Palestinian national liberation struggle against Israel in the ranks of Hamas.

• What separates the rebels in Syria that the United States and its allies arm, train, fund and direct from those it seeks to degrade and ultimately destroy is not a secular vs. Islamist orientation. Even the so-called “moderate” rebels are under the sway of Islamist thinking. Instead the dividing line between the good “moderate” rebels and the bad “extremist” rebels is willingness to cooperate with the United States and the region’s former colonial powers. The “good” ones are under the control of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, or aren’t, but are working in directions that comport with Western foreign policy goals, while the “bad” ones are working in ways that frustrate the attainment of the foreign policy objectives of the West. In other words, one set of rebels is cooperating with Western imperialism while the other frustrates it.

• The “moderate” Syrian rebels who US officials are counting on to battle the Islamic State as part of the Obama administration’s plan to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS comprise dozens of groups which report directly to the CIA [1] and are under the sway of Islamist thinking. [2] According to General Abdul-Ilah al Bashir, who led the Free Syrian Army before its collapse at the end of last year, the CIA has taken over direction of the rebel force and FSA groups now report directly to US intelligence. [3]

• With an agreement on constraining Iran’s nuclear program within reach, Official Washington’s neocons are getting apoplectic about the need to rev up new animosities toward Iran, an approach not helpful to real U.S. security needs, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more quickly.

Finance

• In your book you say the rich are afraid of the poor. Do you think fear played a part in the media’s treatment of you?

• In America we have this myth that if you deserve it, you will have it. We’re afraid to look at our downtrodden because it undercuts that myth. There is a fear of the poor that is uniquely American. It’s especially hard to look at someone who could be one of their kids – someone like me who’s white and intelligent – and see them as poor. When the crash happened, there was a panic among the rich because suddenly wealth wasn’t only to do with how hard you’d worked. It could be taken away! They got really fearful. So much of Americans’ self-image is based on what we own and how we present ourselves.

• On Thursday, the CIA declassified hundreds of files from its in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, after a successful Freedom of Information Act request from a former employee, resulting in a bonanza of fascinating and downright weird tales from the history of the CIA from the 1970s through the 2000s. Among the hundreds of files, available here, we found this intriguing tale of Nazi plans to destabilize the American and British economies in the final days of the Third Reich.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• THE article ran above the fold on the front page early this month, a Times investigation into the influence of foreign money within American research organizations.

• It reported that more than a dozen think tanks “have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities.” It warned of the danger of that big money, which it said was “increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington.”

• Google chairman Eric Schmidt said Monday that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is “literally lying” that climate change is not a reality, and that its membership in ALEC “was some sort of mistake.”

Privacy

• Social-media users, beware — that next Facebook “poke” could be from a process server.

• In a groundbreaking court ruling, a Staten Island man got permission to use Facebook to serve his ex-wife legal notice that he doesn’t want to pay any more child support.

• A Family Court official ruled that Noel Biscocho could use Facebook to serve Anna Maria Antigua because other, more traditional methods to slap her with papers have not worked.

• Documents recently released by WikiLeaks have brought new evidence to the public eye that the intrusive surveillance spyware FinFisher may be in use by several members of the Freedom Online Coalition, including Mongolia, Netherlands, and Estonia.

• Normale Leute: a Berlin-based group wants to fight data protection protest prejudices – and government spying – by demonstrating in suits. “Akkurater Widerstand” reject anonymous masks to appear “normal.”

• Oliver Stone is set to make a film of Edward Snowden’s story, and is targeting Joseph Gordon-Levitt to star…

• Parliamentary delegations from 16 different EU member states have called upon the EU to rapidly adopt the legislative package on the protection of personal data.

• The EU must act swiftly on the protection of personal data. This is the clear message sent by elected representatives of 16 EU member states, assembled in Paris for an interparliamentary meeting.

• The first big revelation of NSA criminality in the modern era came from the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who revealed the NSA was warantlessly wiretapping over 30 million Americans, or roughly one in every ten citizens of the country.

• On August 11, former NSA head Michael Hayden, the man at the center of the Bush administration’s 2005 surveillance scandal, was defending his former agency on CBS News in the wake of the latest NSA spying scandal. Commenting on President Obama’s half-hearted promises to reform some NSA practices, Hayden told host Bob Schieffer that “the President is trying to take some steps to make the American people more comfortable about what it is we’re doing. That’s going to be hard because, frankly, Bob, some steps to make Americans more comfortable will actually make Americans less safe.”

• Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff had a similar message when he appeared on ABC News August 4. Speaking about the purported threat from an Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen that led to the closure of 19 U.S. embassies, Chertoff said that “the collection of this warning information [about Al Qaeda] came from the kinds of programs we’ve been discussing about, the ability to capture communications overseas.”

• CBS and ABC did not see fit to inform viewers that both Hayden and Chertoff are employees of the Chertoff Group, a private firm created in 2009 that companies hire to consult on best practices for security and combatting terrorism. Some of the companies the firm advises go on to win government contracts. Chertoff is the founder and chairman of the group, while Hayden serves as a principal. So they profit off a war on terror they say is crucial to keeping Americans safe.

• Like most trends involving nudity, sexting was also started by the most despicable group of people in the world: teenagers. Now, I didn’t actually speak to a real live teen person for this piece. I wouldn’t wish such a fate even on my worst enemy. Instead, I watched an episode of a “reality” show on MTV and accidentally spent ten seconds in the vicinity of a car that was playing a Justin Beiber song. So, by the conventions of the Indian Columnists Association, I am now considered a bonafide expert on #teens and their psychology. In fact, in some circles I’m known as a teen whisperer. Sure, none of those circles exist outside my head, but as a wise fellow once said, it’s the thought that counts.

• The obvious conclusion to draw from these claims is firstly that the NSA can peer into the databases of Facebook, Amazon, Google (for Gmail) and other large American corporations. Slightly disturbing perhaps, but hardly surprising or news.

• Israel is stepping up its cyber-defense efforts. The government on Sunday announced establishment of a new cyber-defense authority to coordinate cyber-security efforts among government, industry, and the civilian sectors. Just last year, it set up the National Cyber Bureau and the two steps show that the nation is taking cyber threats seriously, now that it’s a favorite target for politically motivated hackers.

• Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden warned New Zealanders in a media blitz on Monday that all of their private emails, phone calls and text messages are being spied on despite government denials.

• The grand unbundling of Google’s G+ social network continues, with Gmail becoming the latest Google service to gain its independence from Google’s campaign of forced integration. As noted in a post on the WordStream Blog, Google has axed the requirement that new Gmail accounts be tied to a G+ social networking account as of “early September.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Russia must think about protecting its Internet against threats from the West, a Kremlin spokesman said on Friday, in comments that one prominent critic said could herald moves to control all web-based data exchanges with the rest of the world.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Copyright infringement is everywhere. A few years back, John Tehranian wrote a paper (and then a book*) called “Infringement Nation” about just how much copyright infringement happens incidentally on a daily basis. The conclusion, from a back of the envelope estimate, is that an average person is likely liable for $4.544 billion in incidental infringement in a normal year. And that’s not for sharing music and movies and what not, but just doing the normal everyday things you do.

• The BPI has reached a new milestone in its ongoing efforts to have pirated content removed from the Internet. This week the music industry group reported its 100 millionth URL to Google. Although the takedown notices are processed quickly, the music industry group believes that Google should do more to prevent piracy.

• People are still getting distracted by the silly question of “how somebody will get paid” if the copyright monopoly is reduced. It’s irrelevant, it’s a red herring. What this debate is about is bringing vital civil liberties along from the analog environment into the digital – and that requires allowing file-sharing all out.

• After very publicly taking down a number of sites offering music, movies and TV shows without permission, City of London Police appear to have taken down their first ebook-related domain. OnRead is now under police investigation but according to its operators the site operated legally. That seems unlikely, however.

• [...]

• While it seems more than likely that OnRead was operating without licenses recognized by UK publishers, an archive of the domain reveals that the site’s operators tried to claim that in at least one jurisdiction the site had operated legally.

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