● 10.15.14

● Links 15/10/2014: KDE Plasma 5.1 is Out, GOG Reaches 100-Title Mark

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Softpedia has an article describing the kind of places where the KDE Plasma desktop is being used in the wild including movie studios and scientific studios.

• Linux is also being used on the new US Navy Autonomous Swarmboats. The unmanned boats can choose their own routes and cooperate with other unmanned vessels to swarm on enemy targets or to protect other assets.

Desktop

• Surprising a lot of readers a few days ago was word that Google was dropping support for EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems from its file manager within the Linux-based ChromeOS. Now, after receiving a lot of criticism, Google is adding back the support for these common Linux file-systems.

• Ben Chan of Google wrote on the bug report, “Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We’ve heard you loud and clear. We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we’re working to get it into the next stable channel release. Please star this bug to get the latest updates. We’ll post everything here.”

• Linux users have recently been celebrating the arrival of an official Photoshop for Linux— yup, once Adobe’s Photoshop-streaming-via-Creative-Cloud is out of beta for Chrome, Linux users will be able to use Photoshop in an official way.

• No return to using Windows as the main desktop OS is planned, but the council is intending to conduct a study to see which operating systems and software packages – both proprietary and open source – best fit its needs. The audit would also take into account the work already carried out to move the council to free software.

• Now in a response to Munich’s Green Party the mayor Dieter Reiter has revealed the cost of returning to Windows.

• Georg Greve is CEO of Kolab Systems, the company that recently began implementing groupware software to manage mail, calendar, task, and contact lists for the council.

• The reason the mayor was unable to access email through his smartphone is due to how a legacy server had been set up, he explained, and would still have been a problem if the council had stuck with Microsoft.

• “They had a system in place which was a plain old mail system, an IMAP server, the same system they’ve been using for a very long time,” he said.

• “It’s behind a firewall and the firewall is configured in a way that a mobile phone shouldn’t be able to access it, because all of this goes back to pre-mobile phone days.

Server

• The shared IT service centre for Germany’s federal government (ZIVIT) has awarded a 10 million euro support contract for open source software, it announced on 8 October. The four-year contract was won by CGI, a large ICT service provider. The contract is for maintenance and management of a high availability Linux cluster running databases, file and network services and backups systems, used by the Federal Ministry of Finance.

• Cumulus Networks first emerged from stealth in June of 2013, promising to build a new model for network operating systems. It’s a promise that the company continues to deliver on with the announcement of Cumulus Linux 2.5 today.

Kernel Space

• For the most part, this friction has led to new ideas that have provided ease of use and in some instances, improved functionality. Distros such as Ubuntu best showcase this example, despite the grief it gets from parts of the Linux community. Digging deeper beyond the surface, however, some of this friction has proven to be more divisive than productive.

• Over the last decade, virtualization has drastically transformed the way software and services are provisioned and delivered. Coupled with open source hypervisors like Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), these technologies have given way to amazing innovations in cloud computing, storage and more. The introduction of container technologies like Docker are also surfacing new opportunities as well as introducing new complexities, like any new technology.

• Linus Torvalds doesn’t regret any of the technical decisions he’s made over the past 23 years since he first created Linux, he said Wednesday at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe.

• In celebrating Ada Lovelace, we recognize all of the women who were, and continue to be, pioneers and contributors in the advancement of computer science. In honor of the day, we asked Linux community members attending LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe this week to show their appreciation by sporting Ada Lovelace pins during the conference. We captured a few of them in this slideshow.

• Jarkko Sakkinen of Intel has published his revised patch series for providing Trusted Platform 2.0 (TPM2) support for the Linux kernel.

• Linus Torvalds talked today at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe, a conference organized by the Linux Foundation that reunites all the big names in the open source world. He answered a lot of questions and he also talked about the effects of the strong language he uses in the mailing list.

Benchmarks

• Announced over the summer when AMD was celebrating their 30 years of graphics celebration was the Radeon R9 285, a $250 graphics card built on the company’s latest GCN graphics processor technology to replace the Radeon R9 280. We finally have our hands on a Radeon R9 285 “Tonga” for delivering the first look at its Linux performance.

• For the past month I’ve been testing out the CompuLab Intense-PC2 and it’s been a terrific, small, Linux PC. The Intense-PC2 is packed with a low-power “Haswell ULT” Core i7 4600U processor and for some fresh Linux benchmarks I compared it to the former Sandy Bridge Core i7 3517UE and Intel Bay Trail Celeron N2820 NUC. For making things real interesting, I also ran some new benchmarks on an aging Intel Atom 330 system to show how the Intel low-power performance has been improving in recent years.

Applications

• Brackets is an free and open source editor for web designers developed and maintained by Adobe. it support for web design and development built on top of web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Instructionals/Technical

• Officially the PI320 only supports UEFI bootable media and it can only support a 32-bit UEFI BIOS. Since most Linux installations that support UEFI are currently 64-bit builds, you can’t simply load the 32-bit versions of Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, or other popular operating systems on the ZBOX PI320 pico and expect them to work.

Games

• Borderlands: The Pre-sequel, a game in the Borderlands series, has been released for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It should be available for everyone, but it’s not.

• For all the classic-style adventure fans: You can now grab the first three parts from Blackwell series on Steam for Linux!

• Raven’s Cry, the pirate-themed open-world action RPG from TopWare Interactive and Reality Pump has a new release date. It will be released on November 27, 2014.

• The Linux Version will released on the same day like the Windows or Mac version.

• Not even two months ago we’ve rolled out a feature that you, dear GOGgers, have requested almost since day one of our service: support for Linux games. It took us some time to do it the GOG-way, but we managed to unite our ideals of how DRM-free gaming should be, with the idea of the truly free OS, so passionately loved by many. We’ve kick-started our Linux games catalog with a selection of 50 titles, old and new, many of them available officially for that OS for the very first time! Doing that, we’ve mentioned our plans to expand this offer to over 100 titles in the coming months. Well, the day has come. With today’s 15 additions we’ve passed the 100-title. And, boy, what great additions these are! Just look at those titles:

• The new Alien: Isolation game developed by Creative Assembly is out, and for the time being only the Windows platform is supported. That didn’t stop fans of the Alien franchise from asking for a Linux port on the Steam forums.

• Besides native OpenGL support for GTK+, another early change to look forward to with next year’s GNOME 3.16 release is native monitor hot-plugging.

• The first of three sets of puzzles for Sigils of Elohim was released for Linux on Steam as part of the promotional campaign leading up to their next bigger title, The Talos Principle. Playing it unlocks reward codes that can be used to unlock content in the upcoming game.

• If the tension of Alien: Isolation is too much for you, and you’d prefer to shoot at aliens rather than hide from them, then this is timely news: Alien Versus Predator Classic 2000 is now free on GOG.com. You’ve got 48 hours to download the game—that’s until 10am GMT on the 17th October.

• The developers from Epic Games have released a new version of their Unreal Engine, 4.5, and they are making great progress with one of the best game engines that have support for Linux.

• Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4.5 yesterday and the improvements are looking great for this Linux friendly game engine.

• The new game from the Borderlands franchise, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has been released yesterday and gamers from all over the world are excited to play another alien hunting, shoot and loot adventure.

• The latest expansion to the medieval grand strategy series Crusader Kings II was released yesterday.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The latest version available is LXQt 0.8 which has been released yesterday, being entirely developed in Qt 5.3, but also compatible with Qt4.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.14.2 are available for Kubuntu 14.04LTS and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA, and the Kubuntu Utopic Updates PPA

• In today’s open source roundup: Animators used KDE Plasma in the production of last year’s hobbit movie. Plus: Testing rolling-release distributions for reliability, and a review of Cylon Linux 12.04.1

• The KDE Community has released the Plasma 5.1.0, the first major update to the new desktop that was initially made available a few months ago. This is not just a simple maintenance iteration, but a full-fledged new version with a lot of new features.

• Today, KDE releases Plasma 5.1, the first release containing new features since the release of Plasma 5.0 this summer. Plasma 5.1 sports a wide variety of improvements, leading to greater stability, better performance and new and improved features. Thanks to the feedback of the community, KDE developers were able to package a large number of fixes and enhancements into this release, among which more complete and higher quality artwork following the new-in-5.0 Breeze style, re-addition of popular features such as the Icon Tasks taskswitcher and improved stability and performance.

• There is no such thing as a “normal” user. Everyone is different and what is rock solid 100% stable to one person may be very problematic for another. This makes it very hard to give a single answer.

• A good example of this was translations. Due to some changes in frameworks when we released Plasma 5.0, we made a very poor job of translation loading and a sizeable amount didn’t work properly. Most developers tend to run things in English even when they’re across the world and it simply fell through the cracks till it was too late (fixed for 5.1).

• Today we released Plasma 5.1 which features a new library called KWayland. KWayland originates from KWin and got split out to allow code-reuse especially in KDE components which use LGPL instead of GPL.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We will soon publish the schedule for our next releases, and a first development release, 3.15.1, should soon hit the streets.

• A few people have asked me now “How do I make my font show up in GNOME Software” and until today my answer has been something along the lines of “mrrr, it’s complicated“.

Distributions

Ballnux/SUSE

Slackware Family

• When you’re interviewing a Slackware developer, you have certain expectations about what they’ll say in terms of controlling your own system and Eric delivers. In fact, he makes the case that Slackware, known as a more challenging system to setup and maintain, is valuable because it requires so much thought. Which is true—I’ve always seen Slackware as one part distro and one part teaching tool. The rest of Eric’s interview is great as he’s a very smart guy who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a distro work, not just in terms of specific software, but also in terms of what’s ultimately best for the user in the long-term.

• Remember when everybody was so excited that the KDE developers abandoned their “monolithic” release schedule where all the software was stamped with the same version number and released as a “Software Compilation”…

Red Hat Family

• I’ve been saying for the longest time that if you want to run RHEL/CentOS on the desktop and don’t want to quickly hit a wall in terms of packages, you need to either run the Stella spin on CentOS, or use the developer of that project’s repo to give your existing CentOS/RHEL system what it’s otherwise lacking.

Fedora

• The package database pkgdb2 is the place where is managed the permission on the git repositories.

• In simple words, it is the place managing the “who is allowed to do what on which package”.

• There is no way to get experimental devices in Nicaragua. Just for FUDCon local team pitch in to get 5 Raspberry Pi +B and 5 Arduino UNO R3. This will not be all, there are sonic distance sensors, temperature sensors, infrared movement sensors, light sensor among other cool stuff.

• Very shortly, the Fedora Council will replace the Fedora Project Board as Fedora’s top-level leadership and governance body, with the particular aim of having more engaged and effective whole-project coordination and planning.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A lot of users are anxious to use the latest Plasma desktop because it’s quite different from the old one. We can call it “the old one” even if the latest branch, 4.14.x, is still maintained until November.

• The KDE developers split the project into three major components: Plasma, Frameworks, and Applications. Plasma is actually the desktop and everything that goes with it, Frameworks is made up of all the libraries and other components, and Applications gathers all the regular apps that are usually KDE-specific.

• While much of Canonical’s recent focus has been about reading Unity 8 for mobile devices, their plan is still to ship Unity 8 by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop ahead of its next LTS release.

• Their plan for a while has been to use Mir by Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on the desktop spin along with using Unity 8 to replace Unity 7 + Compiz + X.Org Server. Will Cooke, the team manager of the new Desktop Team at Canonical, did a guest post on Michael Hall’s blog to reiterate these plans.

• Today in Linux news, Desktop Team manager at Canonical says the desktop isn’t being neglected at Ubuntu. Matt Hartley looks at how friction helps and hurts the Linux community. Steven Ovadia talks to Eric Hameleers about his “Linux setup” and Dietrich T. Schmitz shares his thoughts on Fedora 21 so far. And finally today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 was released.

• Later this month Ubuntu will celebrate its 10th birthday, and to mark the occasion we’re looking to find out more about what you think of it.

• We need to log all the bugs which need to be fixed in order to make Unity 8 the best desktop there is. Firstly, we need people to test the images and log bugs. If developers want to help fix those bugs, so much the better. Right now we are focusing on identifying where the work done for the phone doesn’t work as expected on the desktop. Once those bugs are logged and fixed we can rely on the CI system described above to make sure that they stay fixed.

• As one of the important apps to Ubuntu Touch is, of course, an e-mail client. Up to now the Ubuntu Touch email client has been based off the lightweight, Qt-based Trojita application but now it’s being forked off entirely for Ubuntu.

• [...]

• It will certainly be interesting to see how many more projects are forked by the Ubuntu (Touch) community in their plans to have a unique, convergence platform and very ambitious hopes to take on the mobile phone world. The first Ubuntu phone is expected to finally ship by the end of the year while the Ubuntu covergence strategy with the new Unity Desktop not premiering for at least another twelve months.

• The Ubuntu desktop flavor hasn’t been the developers’ focus for some time now, but that is going to change very soon. The new Desktop Team Manager at Canonical, Will Cooke, has talked about the future of the Unity desktop and laid out the plans for the next few Ubuntu versions.

• As we’ve reported, OpenStack Foundation surveys on how organizations are implementing OpenStack show that Ubuntu is by far the most prevalently used operating system underlying the popular cloud computing platform. That makes Canonical a significant player on the OpenStack scene, but OpenStack isn’t the only cloud platform that Canonical facilitates use of.

Flavours and Variants

• Last month I posted about packaging and why it takes time. I commented that the Stable Release Update process could not be rushed because a regression is worse than a known bug. Then last week I was pointed to a problem where Baloo was causing a user’s system to run slow. Baloo is the new indexer from KDE and will store all your files in a way you can easily search for them and was a faster replacement for Nepomuk. Baloo has been written to be as lightweight as these things can be using IONice, a feature of Linux which allows processes to say “this isn’t very important let everyone else go first”.

• Most of the update managers used today by various distributions, including Ubuntu and Linux Mint, give way too much information to the user by default. Most people don’t really want to know every last library or dependency that is updated, and if it’s a bigger package, the amount of information presented is sometimes way too much.

Devices/Embedded

• Allwinner unveiled octa-core, Cortex-A7 based “A83T” and “H8″ SoCs for tablets and media-streaming boxes, respectively, plus a quad-core, 64-bit “H64″ SoC.

• Allwinner system-on-chips based on the ARM Cortex-A7, such as the dual-core A20 and quad-core A31, have become the darlings of Android- and Linux-based open source single board computer projects and media players. Now, the fast growing Chinese chipmaker is increasingly going octa-core.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced that they have sold 3.8 million Raspberry Pi mini PCs and the demand for this small device seems to increase every day.

Phones

Tizen

• The Tizen based Samsung Gear S has been launched in India and is priced at Rs. 29,500 (MRP), and it is estimated that it will have a market operating price of Rs. 28,900. The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 was also launched. The Samsung Gear S allows you to break free from being connected all the time to a Smartphone for data, as it has 2G/3G cellular and data connectivity built in and takes a Nano sized SIM card. You also get the latest Bluetooth 4.1, Wi-Fi connectivity and also GPS, accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, heart rate, barometer and UV light sensors. The devices is also IP67 certified dust and water resistant.

• The Tizen Samsung NX-300M Smart Camera, which was the first officially announced Tizen Smartcamera, has got a firmware update. We now get an update from version 1.13 to the dizzy heights of version 1.14 via a 331Mb download (245Mb compressed).

Android

• Getting everyone in on the party is the same spirit behind Android One—an effort recently launched in India (coming to other countries soon) to make great smartphones available to the billions of people around the world who aren’t yet online. It’s also why we’re excited about Lollipop, our newest software release, which is designed to meet the diverse needs of the billion-plus people who already use Android today.

• First up, Google has confirmed what we’ve known as “Android L” to be Android 5.0/Lollipop. Android Lollipop is the biggest Android UI redesign inyears and pursues a “material design” approach. Android Lollipop also uses the new ART run-time to replace Dalvik, a new battery management system, thousands of new APIs, and a new notification system, among other benefits. Android Lollipop powers the new Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 devices while it will begin rolling out to existing Android devices over the weeks ahead.

Free Software/Open Source

• From device discovery to visibility into systems, networks, and traffic flows, these free open source monitoring tools have you covered

• Apparently, working for a free and open Internet also caught the attention of the Syrian government, which sadly wasn’t as enamored with Bassel’s work as was Foreign Policy magazine. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus, Syria.

• Catalyst are once again delighted to be the main organisers and Platinum sponsors of the awards. Don Christie, Director of Catalyst and the chair of the NZOSA judging panel states “As New Zealand’s and Australasia’s leading open source company Catalyst and our clients benefit hugely from the generosity of spirit that is represented by the open source software community. These awards are an acknowledgement of that spirit and one small way in which we can recognise and promote the open source software community in general.”

• Remember when Sun Microsystems proclaimed that “the network is the computer”? Many people guffawed at that proclamation. What was once a clever slogan is now a reality thanks to the proliferation of web-based applications.

• Chances are you use more than a couple of web apps in your daily life—email, storage, office applications, and more. What’s great about web apps is that you can use them anywhere and with any computer or mobile device. On the other hand, with most of those apps you’re locked in a closed ecosystem. Or worse, you may be handing over the rights to your content and your files when you agree to the terms of service. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

• A software startup debuted this week proposing software-defined networking to Docker, the open source software for creating Linux application virtualization containers.

• SocketPlane was founded by former Cisco, Red Hat, HP, OpenDaylight and Dell officials. In the open source world, their names are well known: Madhu Venugopal, John Willis, Brent Salisbury and Dave Tucker.

• The above are just a sampling of this week’s SDN and NFV news, attesting to the industry interest in the emerging technologies, interest that was further evidenced by yesterday’s announcement from Dell’Oro Group that SDN datacenter sales will grow more than 65 percent this year. “With architectures ratified and production deployments under way, network security appliances and Ethernet switches will continue to comprise the majority of SDN’s impact, with SDN gaining a foothold outside of the major cloud providers,” the research firm said while hawking a for-sale report.

• So what are going to be the hot topics of debate this week? I’ve been here a day, sitting in on the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) workshop and chatting to a number of companies with a vested interest in SDN’s future success, and there are a number of debates likely to rage all week:

Events

• “Companies are now as the norm using open source to shed comunity R&D, to do collective innovation, particularly at the infrastructure layer, for almost every aspect of technology, not just Linux – SDN, IOT, network functions virtualisation, cloud computing, etc. What you have seen as a result is this proliferation of organisations who facilitate that development, on a very large professional scale. That’s a permanent fixture of how the tech sector operates. We launch a new one of these about every 3 months. Next year we’ll have many many more of these type of projects.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Also worth mentining, Firefox 33 comes with optimizations for session respore, JavaScript and HTML5 enhancements, search suggestions on either the Firefox Start (about:home) and new tab (about:newtab) pages, a new CSP (Content Security Policy) backend, support for connecting to HTTP proxy over HTTPS and new features for developers.

• Today Firefox 33 has been released, among it’s main features is OpenH264, an open source, Cisco provided solution for viewing H.264 content over webRTC. OpenH264 is a free H.264 codec plugin that Firefox downloads directly from Cisco. Cisco published the code to Github making it open source. Mozilla and Cisco have set up a process where the binary is verified to be built from the source on Github so that users trust the integrity of the binary that is shipped with the browser.

• Mozilla has just released Firefox 33, the next iteration of the famous Internet browser. As it was to be expected, users will find an assortment of features and various changes that really make the update worthwhile.

• Mozilla has updated its Firefox browser for both mobile (Android) and desktop (Linux, Mac, Windows) platforms, bringing it to version 33.0. The update adds some new features to revamp the video streaming and viewing experience for users, apart from assorted bug fixes and performance improvements.

• We make Firefox for Android to give you greater flexibility and control of your online life. We want you to be able to view your favorite Web content quickly and easily, no matter where you are. That’s why we’re giving you the option to send supported videos straight from the Web pages you visit in Firefox for Android to streaming-enabled TVs via connected devices like Roku and Chromecast.

• Today, we’re announcing a promotion with Humble Bundle, one of the real innovators in game distribution, that brings eight hugely popular Indie games including the award-winning FTL directly to Firefox users. This promotion only runs for two weeks, so jump straight into the action here!

• In a surprising move today, Mozilla and Humble Bundle have partnered up to provide a new collection of games, but with a twist. With the help of some new technologies, it’s now possible to play some of the new games just in the browser.

SaaS/Big Data

• Formerly known as Continuuity, the three-year-old startup makes an application server for Hadoop. It’s the company’s core product and it’s designed to make it easier for developers to build and manage applications on the complex Hadoop framework.

• Cloudera on Tuesday launched its latest version of its big data enterprise software, Cloudera Enterprise 5.2, with a bevy of features aimed at improving analytics and integration.

• In a perfect world, every workload that runs on OpenStack would be a cloud native application that is horizontally scalable and fault tolerant to anything that may cause a VM to go down. However, the reality is quite different. We continue to see a high demand for support of traditional workloads running on top of OpenStack and the HA expectations that come with them.

• Cloudera Inc. is coming prepared to the Strata Conference + Hadoop World 2014 in New York this week. The company fired the opening shot for the landmark conference last night with a volley of major updates that significantly up the ante for rival Hortonworks Inc.

• Okay yes, sorry, we haven’t spoken about this firm much yet — the company is a big data analytics specialist and its software works in tandem with the open-source software framework Apache Hadoop.

CMS

Healthcare

• Over the years there have been several discussions and literature over the impact of open source software (OSS) on economic development. Countries, international organizations including the United Nations, the USAID, the British DFID, have all touted the benefits of open source software on economic development, especially on developing countries. Yet, in Liberia, the discourse has not been as ubiquitous and widely embraced as it has been in other countries or in the literature. While open source software has made some progress in permeating the Liberian society over the years (Mozilla Firefox, Apache Webserver, PHP, Java, MySQL), its impact has not been felt as much as it has been in recent times.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when we share stories of women in technology and their achievements.

• The holiday is named after a 19th-century English mathematician who is considered by many to be the first programmer. Though generations passed before her contribution was fully acknowledged, she was a pioneer both as a scientist and as a challenger of rigid gender roles. For this Ada Lovelace Day, we’re profiling Lisa Maginnis, who is the FSF’s senior systems administrator.

• As the leader of the technical team, Lisa is responsible for choosing, configuring, and maintaining the FSF’s office computers and servers. She uses extensive knowledge of hardware, networking, and electrical engineering to maintain a complex array of all-free software. An alert system sends text messages to her OpenMoko if servers have problems, and she’s no stranger to urgent after-hours trips to the office to get something back online.

• There is now a brand-new mirror of the GNU Autoconf Archive’s Git repository available at https://github.com/peti/autoconf-archive that those who enjoy this sort of thing can use to submit patches to the Archive by means of a Pull Request instead of going through Savannah’s patch tracker.

• For the past year Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working with NVIDIA to bring OpenACC 2.0 support to GCC and to allow for this heterogeneous parallel programming API to be taken advantage of with NVIDIA GPUs from GCC. This work is closer to finally being realized for allowing OpenACC programs to be compiled with GCC and target NVIDIA GPUs on Linux.

Public Services/Government

• He’s a Government Evangelist at GitHub, where he leads the efforts to encourage adoption of open source philosophies, making all levels of government better, one repository at a time.

Openness/Sharing

• This is a very cool crowdfunding campaign – you can help create a new cancer drug and at the same make it much cheaper. How? The researchers will not patent the drugs. Like polio vaccine, which was never patented, therefore it was widely available. Check out the website and the video. I loved it and made a donation of $50, because I find projects like this can change the existing paradigm in healthcare when the existing drugs are just deadly expensive. I encourage you to support the project and share it with your friends.

Programming

• Some weeks ago on Twitter a follower had mentioned a rumor that Apple was forcing its compiler developers to focus less on general LLVM work and to basically spend their time on Apple’s new Swift project. While there’s been a general slowdown of direct Apple contributions to LLVM, there’s the latest sign today they might be divesting their interest somewhat in direct management of this open-source compiler infrastructure.

Leftovers

• I have never been a great fan of Russell Brand’s media persona, and for a revolutionary to be shacked up with Jemima Khan’s millions is perhaps some kind of extended exercise in post-modern irony as performance art. But Brand’s perception that the neo-con political parties are all the same is absolutely correct, and his is almost the only voice the media will broadcast saying it. When I have been saying precisely the same thing for a decade it is not news. News, apparently, lies not in what is said, but whether or not it is a celebrity who says it.

• We must acknowledge that with any evolution in communications technology, there are those seeking to corrupt, misuse and exploit channels for sinister purposes and nowhere is this more prevalent than the Web. Privacy, cyber terrorism, online security and data theft are wedged firmly into the social consciousness of many Europeans and their complexity can further deter those who lack even a basic understanding of the issues. But like any societal ill, there is a treatment.

• [...]

• The company behind the FireFox browser – whose guiding principles are the promotion of openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web – run a Webmaker programme, which provides tools, events and teaching guides designed to train the informed Web creators of tomorrow. However, a more powerful byproduct of this is the building of an online/offline community, based around the processes that increase participation, accountability and crucially, trust.

Health/Nutrition

• Fox News ramped up its attempted character assassination of CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden with direct calls for his resignation, suggestions that he is uninformed on the spread of infectious disease, and a comparison of the public servant to Saddam Hussein’s one-time propaganda minister.

• Fox News hosts stoked fears that the United States’ ability to respond to Ebola may be weakened by the absence of a Surgeon General, a concern that whitewashes the network’s history of smearing the pending Surgeon General nominee Dr. Vivek Murthy.

• A new poll last week revealed disturbing trends about the increasingly dire media coverage of the Ebola story in the United States. Measuring the rising anxiety among news consumers, a Rutgers-Eagleton poll of New Jersey residents found that 69 percent are at least somewhat concerned about the deadly disease spreading in the U.S.

• Right-wing media outlets have turned to serial misinformer Betsy McCaughey as their go-to expert on the Ebola outbreak. But McCaughey has a history of hyping false health care myths and was the chief architect behind the myth that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included so-called “death panels,” a discredited claim that McCaughey pushed even after being dubbed PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year in 2009.

Security

• POODLE aka Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption is a major flaw that was found in SSL 3 by three Google security researchers. Bodo Moller, Thai Duong and Krzysztof Kotowicz published a paper about the flaw which they found.

• So, the bottom line is: on servers and clients, disable SSLv3 (and, of course, older). Updates to Fedora packages which make this the default will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, you can do it manually. Red Hat is working on a security blog article explaining the steps to take for different software; we’ll link to that when it becomes available.

• I mentioned earlier that I’d update on this, and here we go. Our friends over in the Red Hat security team have posted POODLE – An SSL 3.0 Vulnerability (CVE-2014-3566), an article explaining the vulnerability in (not terribly technical) depth. If you’re curious (or worried!), check it out.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Ted Nugent called for “freedom” or the “evil carcasses” of President Obama and other progressive politicians in a Facebook post where he told followers to support the National Rifle Association and discredited gun advocate John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center.

• A Somerset woman and two co-defendants were acquitted on one charge but convicted on two others, albeit with reduced penalties, related to a recent drone targeting protest outside the National Security Agency office at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

• Manijeh Saba of Franklin Township, and Ellen Barfield and Marilyn Carlisle, both of Baltimore, spoke openly in court for nearly three hours, showing photographic evidence of NSA drone targeting, naming names and mourning children killed by drones, and asserting their First Amendment rights and Nuremberg justifications.

• A local peace activist is spending 90 days in a Syracuse-area jail for protesting the country’s use of drone warfare.

• Jack Gilroy of Endwell was one of 31 people arrested during an act of civil disobedience outside of the Hancock Airbase near Syracuse in April of last year.

• Foreign military intervention heightens problems in the Middle East, internationally recognized expert Rami Khouri said.

• Since 9-11-01, the United States, by any objective assessment a globe-girdling military empire, has been sucked into an ongoing global civil war between brutal extremists (often fighting among themselves) and those, including us, they perceive as their mortal enemies. We are rightfully outraged by cruel beheadings videotaped for Internet distribution. The beheaders and suicide bombers are equally outraged by our extensive military presence in their ancestral homelands and drone attacks upon weddings.

• Meanwhile, though the government of our mighty empire can read our emails and tap our telephones, the worldwide nonviolent movement to bring about positive change somehow flies completely under its supposedly all-seeing radar screens. The peoples of the earth are overwhelmingly against war, and they want their fair share of the earth’s resources and the possibilities of democratic governance.

• Our media narrows discourse and fans the flames by only allowing U.S. citizens to see through the narrow lens of exceptionalism, polarization and violence. Fear mongers, legion in our culture, insist that adherents of ISIS are hardly human. But we should keep their humanity in our hearts even as we abhor their acts, just as we ought to abhor our own descent into torture and extra-judicial killings. People do not do what those ISIS fighters do without having been rendered desperate and callous by some painful sense of injustice. As Auden wrote, “Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return.” The question for us is how we can best respond to evil without rationalizing our own evil behavior.

• War is becoming faceless. Warfare in general is becoming increasingly automated. There is a race to develop weapons that can be used without human intervention. Killer drones and robots are such weapons.

• In his speech last month to the United Nations, President Obama summoned foreign leaders to join his “campaign against extremism.” While his clarion call was spurred by beheadings by the terrorist group the Islamic State, Mr. Obama has repeatedly invoked the “extremist” threat since taking office in 2009. However, the president’s own record makes it tricky for him to pirouette as the World Savior of Moderation.

• [...]

• Although Mr. Obama campaigned in 2008 criticizing the bellicosity of his predecessor, he has bombed seven nations since taking office. Mr. Obama justified pummeling Libya in 2011 so that that nation would not become “a new safe haven for extremists” — but there are far more violent terrorists there now than before the United States intervened. Mr. Obama has written himself a blank check to expand bombing in Iraq and Syria owing to extremist perils — even though the U.S. government previously covertly armed some of the same extremists it is now trying to destroy. The notion that the U.S. government is entitled to bomb foreign lands based solely on the president’s decree — regardless of congressional opposition — would have been considered extremist nonsense by earlier generations of Americans.

• At least 110 people have been killed in 16 American drone strikes in Pakistan so far this year, according to the Washington-based think tank New America Foundation, which has documented at least 2,174 deaths as a result of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004. It includes at least at least 258 civilians, but the actual figure is thought to be higher.

• Members of local VFW 917 gathered once again to support the 107th Airlift Wing drone program at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station on Saturday.

• “It’s not just getting the program,”said Les Carpenter, retired Air Force. “When you get it, you have to support it.”

• He was joined by Army veterans Sgt. Major Vince Canosa, Bill McKewon, and Post Chaplain Eugene Ashley.

• “We come out once a month and then for beer and bologna sandwiches at the VFW,” Carpenter said.

• The members held signs at the station entrance: ISIS beheads with knives, we behead with tomahawks (in reference to the ballistic missile), Predators vs. Aliens, coming soon to a border near you, and KILL FOR PEACE.

• Our latest bombings in the Middle East remind us of a scary truth: Here’s what the “war on terror” is really about

• There is now a growing international movement for developing an international convention on drones and similar technology.It is time that based on the evidence available we move the international system to start putting the brakes.

• Two gunship helicopters belonging to the NATO-led international coalition forces have violated the airspace of Pakistan, according to security officials.

• The officials quoted by local media agencies have said that the helicopters remained in the Pakistani territory for at least ten minutes.

• A series of CIA drone strikes launched last week against Taliban insurgents in Pakistan’s northwest tribal areas provide the clearest demonstration yet that the U.S. intelligence agency and Pakistani security forces are once again cooperating on defeating the insurgents.

• Following the lead of Ethiopia, Chad, and Djibouti, Niger has recently permitted the US and France to operate drones from an air base in its capitol, Niamey. The US military will also be establishing a second drone base in the northern desert city of Agadez, not far from the Algerian border. A major security partner of the US, Algeria’s security forces have already had success in scaling up surveillance and patrol along their border with Niger.

• In recent weeks, Obama has “reluctantly,” for the 7th time since taking office, begun bombing a predominantly Muslim country (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, and now Syria), testing, once again, the “limits of reason.” This begs the question: How far beyond such limits is our political-military elite willing to reach to initiate militarism in our name?

• The spectacle of disproportionate force wielded against exclusively civilian targets in the heart of Gaza City had only begun.

Finance

• Fundraising page for man identified by the magazine as Bitcoin’s creator says magazine’s report was “reckless” and caused chaos for his family.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• We’ve written a few times now about Walter O’Brien, the claimed inspiration for the CBS primetime TV show Scorpion. As our reporting has shown, a very large number of the claims about O’Brien’s life simply don’t check out when you look into the details, and in many cases appear to be flat out false. As we’ve said repeatedly — though people keep bringing this up — we don’t care at all about Hollywood folks exaggerating a “based on a true story” claim. What concerns us is (1) the journalistic integrity of those engaged in promoting the false claims about Walter O’Brien for the sake of a TV show and (2) the fact that O’Brien has been using this to promote his own business, which may lead people to giving money to him under questionable pretenses. Each time I write about him, more people who have known him in the past come out of the woodwork to repeat the same claims: nice enough guy, but always massively exaggerating nearly everything.

• The Wall Street Journal is dismissing efforts to convince corporations to be more transparent about their political contributions as “partisan agitprop,” despite the fact that the conservative justices of the Supreme Court reaffirmed the need for such transparency in 2010′s Citizens United decision.

• Wisconsin candidates can now coordinate with “dark money” nonprofits that accept secret, unlimited donations and run sham “issue ads,” under a ruling from the same federal judge who blocked the criminal coordination investigation into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker earlier this year.

• The thing about factchecking is that the person making a claim actually has to have evidence that what they’re saying is true; if they can’t produce any, then there’s not much left to say. Honestly believing that something false is true, or a spokesperson insisting that a lawmaker stands by a claim, doesn’t actually matter. But ABC manages to cloud up an issue that should be crystal clear.

• The three most influential papers in the country at the time — the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the Washington Post — apparently were embarrassed by critics who accused them of missing the story and reacted by devoting resources to essentially knock it down.

Censorship

• As we reported a few weeks ago, Australia has passed a dreadful “anti-terror” law that not only allows the authorities to monitor the entire Internet in that country with a single warrant, but also threatens 10 years of jail time for anyone who “recklessly” discloses information that relates to a “special intelligence operation.” But what exactly will that mean in practice? Elizabeth Oshea, writing in the Overland journal, has put together a great article fleshing things out.

• The parliament has passed legislation that permits the Attorney General to authorise certain activities of ASIO and affiliates as ‘special intelligence operations’. We can only assume that ASIO will seek such authorisation when its operatives plan to break the criminal or civil law – the whole point of authorising an operation as a special intelligence operation is that participants will be immune from the consequences of their unlawfulness. It will also be a criminal act to disclose information about these operations.

Privacy

• Judge Katherine Forrest has shot down Ross Ulbricht’s defense team’s motion to suppress evidence it claims was acquired illegally by the FBI. The FBI asserted in its response to the motion that Ulbricht had expressed no privacy interest in the alleged Silk Road servers located in Iceland. The FBI further claimed that it needed no legal permission (i.e., a warrant) to hack foreign servers during criminal investigations.

• TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) is a trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors between the United States and the European Union. The agreement is supposed to “increase trade and investment” but there are significant concerns around its potential negative impact on democracy, the rule of law, innovation, culture and privacy.

• Nobody likes giving up their privacy. But as much as we complain about it, relatively few of us are willing to put time, money, or effort into consistently protecting our privacy online. And it’s not like it’s that hard, relatively speaking: the Tor Project offers excellent, free software that lets you browse the Internet in complete anonymity, if you use it properly. With Tor, data you send over the Internet are encrypted and stripped of any identifying information (namely, your IP address) before reaching their destination. It’s one of the most reliable methods that you can use to protect your identity online. However, it does take some amount of experience to use, along with a conscious decision to choose security over convenience. If that sounds like too much work (and it sure sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?), the Anonabox could be exactly what you need.

• A Kickstarter project called “Anonabox” offers a tiny Tor router for anonymous Internet use, running OpenWRT Linux on a MediaTek MT7620n WiFi chipset.

• The Anonabox is a “completely open source and open hardware” networking device that provides anonymous Internet access and encryption, says Chico, Calif.-based project leader August Germar on the Anonabox Kickstarter page. The device has already blasted past Germar’s $7,500 funding goal, which was intended to “help us move out of our garage, into full production.” With the $340,000 the Anonabox has garnered so far, Germar should be able to afford some nicer digs, indeed.

• She was still in Hawaii when news broke from Hong Kong that he was the whistleblower. Days earlier, authorities, suspicious about his prolonged absence from work, had visited their home.

• On her blog, subtitled, ‘Adventures of a world-travelling, pole-dancing superhero,’ she wrote that she felt “sick, exhausted and carrying the weight of the world”. Shortly afterwards, she took the blog down.

• The two appear to have been together since at least 2009, living part of the time near Baltimore before moving to Hawaii in 2012.

• The CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence both complied. Keith Alexander, via the NSA’s refusal to turn over the documents, is the lone holdout.

• NSA leaker Edward Snowden on Saturday defended his disclosure of reams of classified information and said his actions were worth fleeing his seemingly idyllic life in Hawaii and ending up in hiding in Russia, where he was joined by his girlfriend in July.

• News that Dropbox credentials had been obtained and leaked by an unknown attacker spread on Reddit yesterday, just days after Edward Snowden advised people to ditch Dropbox, Google and Facebook. Dropbox quickly reacted to the the allegations that it had lost the data and said that 3rd parties were responsible for losing the users data, unrelated to Dropbox.

• The same technologists who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students.

• Privacy International today has made a criminal complaint to the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, urging the immediate investigation of the unlawful surveillance of three Bahraini activists living in the UK by Bahraini authorities using the intrusive malware FinFisher supplied by British company Gamma.

• Techdirt has been reporting on the disturbing rise in the use of malware by governments around the world to spy on citizens. One name that keeps cropping up in this context is the FinFisher suite of spyware products from the British company Gamma. Its code was discovered masquerading as a Malay-language version of Mozilla Firefox, and is now at the center of a complaint filed in the UK…

Civil Rights

• Among its least savoury members is a feudal state that regularly murders people. Saudi Arabia beheads individuals for the crime of sorcery, among other things. Don’t try to hold a church service there unless it’s of the approved variety – the Saudis officially go in for a medieval, hard-line interpretation of Islam. It’s the country that won’t even let women drive cars. Adultery? Compared with Saudi Arabia, Russia is a bastion of democracy, a beacon of equality, a paragon of human rights.

• Recipients of humanitarian awards often invite controversy. In Pakistan, religious and political identities are valued more than the contributions of such recipients. Malala Yousafzai may have the Nobel Peace Prize, but she remains the target of criticism from Pakistani conservatives and also many ‘progressives’.

• Those getting it will always be marred by the contradictions any peace prize suggests. The greatest of all remains the fact that the dynamite guru – Alfred Nobel himself – did as much for the cause of war as he decided his profits would supposedly do for peace. Peace was a sentimental afterthought. Many winners of the prize have since kept this legacy alive: that of war maker turned peace maker; a fair share of hypocrisy, with a good share of feigned sincerity.

• On October 10, Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai–who received worldwide attention after being attacked by the Taliban for her advocacy for girls’ education–was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi. Yousafzai’s work on educational equity is well-known. But less well-known is what she said to Barack Obama about how his wars were undermining the fight against terrorism.

• Malala has not restricted her struggle to sending girls to school. She has stood up for children killed in drone attacks and has expressed her determination to get the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to sit together in dialogue. When meeting with President Obama, she spoke against war and militarization. Perhaps if the Nobel committee had awarded Malala for her anti-war spirit, it would have delivered a strong message to the war-torn world in keeping with the spirit of Sir Alfred Nobel.

• Now that Malala Yousafzai has won her hard-earned and well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize, she and her amazing, tragic story is back in the spotlight. Per usual, nevertheless, the corporate media has taken this positive development and exploited it, in the service of US imperialism.

• Ben Norton describes how U.S. news outlets have selectively reported only the aspects of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai they want you to see.

• It has been suggested that the recipients of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are “safe choices” because they advocate for the rights of children and for the fair and respectful treatment of girls and women. Advocacy for an end to child labor, for universal education, for strong trade unions, for economic justice and social democracy, and for an end to war and violence should not be controversial.

• Is the global world in oblivion when it comes to Nabila because her story puts a face to what we often call ‘war victims’? Are we too insensitive to see the consequences of war and refuse to acknowledge the fact that these civilians are not even given the basic right to live, forget everything else. “When I hear that they are going after people who have done wrong to America, then what have I done wrong to them? What did my grandmother do wrong to them? I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Nabeela in her testimony. Well, no one has bothered to answer that question.

• Last week, the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced two winners: Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai and India’s Kailash Satyarthi for their struggle for the rights of children. While for most Indians K Satyarthi’s name was a bit of a mystery, Malala was already a widely known international figure, her personal story documented on magazine covers around the world.

• We all know about Pakistan’s braveheart Malala Yousafzai — the girl who defied Taliban and stood up for education and rights of girls in war ridden Pakistan. Recently, Malala received Nobel Peace Prize for her bravery alongwith Kailash Satyarthi and her ‘AWorldAtSchool’ campaign has received record number of petitions. But, do we know about Nabila Rehman — the girl who lost her grandmother due to a drone attack while her sisters were injured. Her only question to US senators being, ‘What was our fault’ which was largely ignored by most of the politicians.

• A year ago, Malala met President Obama, who is himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner from 2009, and in another act of boldness, she told him that his drone policy was fueling terrorism.

• “Instead of soldiers, send books. Instead of sending weapons, send pens,” she said.

• The Nobel Peace Prize is required by Alfred Nobel’s will, which created it, to go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The Nobel Committee insists on awarding the prize to either a leading maker of war or a person who has done some good work in an area other than peace.

• Al-Shabaab militants, who only two years ago controlled a broad swathe of Somalia, have been retreating from more than 20,000 advancing AMISOM troops as well as Somali government soldiers, whom the German army is helping to train. In early September a US drone killed al-Shabab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane.

• As the city of Montreal tightens its belt-buckle and is cutting budgets, two Montrealers who are challenging the city’s regulations around demonstrations are questioning the amount of resources the city is putting in to defend the bylaws.

• “It seems like there is room for austerity measures around everything except repression,” said Julien Villeneuve, better-known as Anarchopanda, in an interview.

• Apparently it’s OK to take money from uncharged individuals during stop-and-frisks as long as it’s: a) not very much money, and b) it’s vouchered at the station.

• What went unaddressed was the officer’s use of pepper spray to shut up both Joye and his sister, who were both asking for the return of the money taken by Montemarano.

• An NYPD officer stands accused of stealing more than $1,000 in cash from a Brooklyn man during a police stop.

• In a video obtained by the New York Times, an unnamed officer forces 35-year-old Lamard Joye against a fence surrounding a Coney Island basketball court and removes what appears to be a handful of cash from Joye’s pocket at the six-second mark.

• There are 2 major issues with the existence of secret courts. Firstly, it removes one of the fundamental tenets of the right to a fair trial – that the trial be conducted in public. As recently as 2011 in a landmark hearing (Al Rawi) the Supreme Court of the UK upheld the principle of open justice. The removal of this openness means that the accused can either never hear evidence which helps to convict them, removing them of the ability to accurately refute that evidence; or alternatively it means that they too are restricted from talking about certain aspects of the trial in public meaning that even if found to be innocent, they have restrictions placed on their freedom of speech.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• I’ve been using the Internet since the 80s. To me, Internet applications were programs most of you have never heard of such as Archie, Gopher, and Veronica. Then, along came the Web, and everything changed.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Last month, the European Commission refused to accept a request to allow an official EU-wide petition called a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) to take place. This was a curiously maladroit move by the Commission: it would have been easy to allow the petition against TAFTA/TTIP and CETA to proceed, thank the organizers once it was completed, file it away somewhere and then ignore it. Instead, by refusing to allow it to take place, the European Commission has highlighted in a dramatic manner the deeply undemocratic way in which so-called trade agreements are conducted.

Copyrights

• A new study carried out in Australia has found that most 12-17 year-old teens are not online pirates, with around 74% abstaining from the habit. However, those that do consume illegally tend to buy, rent and visit the movies more often than their non-pirating counterparts.

• A raid and subsequent arrest hailed by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit as one of their most significant yet has taken an unexpected twist. After being accused of masterminding an “industrial scale” sports streaming operation, a UK man has had all of the charges against him dropped.

• We’ve certainly questioned the efforts by the City of London Police to set themselves up as the legacy entertainment industry’s private police force. Over the past year or so, the police operation (which, yes, represents just one square mile of London, but a square mile with lots of big important businesses), has demonstrated that it will be extremely aggressive, not in fighting criminal wrongdoing, but in protecting the private business interests of some legacy companies, often with little to no legal basis. It also appears that the City of London’s famed Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is not particularly technology savvy, and seems to just accept what big record labels, movie studios and the like tell it.

• Lawyer Martin Husovec has a post detailing an important case that has been referred to the EU Court of Justice, which could have a tremendous impact on legal liability for those who offer open WiFi in the European Union.

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