● 12.21.14

● Links 22/12/2014: GNU/Linux at Sky News, Another Tizen Camera

Posted in News Roundup at 9:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux is a platform ready for everyone. If you have a niche, Linux is ready to meet or exceed the needs of said niche. One such niche is education. If you are a teacher or a student, Linux is ready to help you navigate the waters of nearly any level of the educational system. From study aids, to writing papers, to managing classes, to running an entire institution, Linux has you covered.

• If you’re unsure how, let me introduce you to a few tools Linux has at the ready. Some of these tools require little to no learning curve, whereas others require a full blown system administrator to install, setup, and manage. We’ll start with the simple and make our way to the complex.

• There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever tax haven Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its income.

• Welcome to this week’s edition of About Linux Weekly News. Some of you will probably have noticed that this bulletin is going out later than normal and there is a very good reason for that.

Server

• Infoxchange is one of the few places I’m aware of that runs Docker in prod. If you’re looking at using Docker to do web development, it’s worth checking out what we’ve been doing over on the Infoxchange devops blog.

• Nick Hardiman argues that the problem with Linux is that multi-purpose distros, which are great for cloud computing jobs, are making the server OS fat.

• Hewlett Packard High-performance computing (HPC) markets are powered by the adoption of Linux clusters. High-performance computing (HPC) markets are powered by the adoption of Linux clusters. Cluster complexity is rampant hardware parallelism: systems averaging thousands of processors, each of them a multi-core chip whose core count doubles every 18.24 months.

• But before Docker co-founder and CTO Solomon Hykes got a chance to board the plane, he got word that operating-system provider CoreOS announced its own Rocket container technology, which caught the Docker team off guard, according to Docker CEO Ben Golub in this week’s Structure Show.

Kernel Space

• Merged already for Linux 3.19 were significant power management and ACPI changes while a second serving of ACPI+PM updates have been requested for pulling just prior to the end of the 3.19 merge window.

• With the Kernel-based Virtual Machine in Linux 3.19, the code for the IA64 architecture has been dropped. Hardware-assisted virtualization for the PowerPC 970 was also dropped as part of some “spring cleaning” of KVM.

• The Linux Foundation has announced via it’s blog that those who sign up for the $99 individual membership will be entitled to a $100 discount from certification courses that the Linux Foundation offers, in addition to this they have said that if you become a member by January 16th 2015 they will donate $25 to Free Geek, a non-profit which refurbishes old computers and donates them back to schools, community organisations and sells them on it’s online store.

• The first Linux kernel Release Candidate has been made available in the 3.19 branch and it looks like it’s one of the biggest ones so far. Linux Torvalds surprised everyone with an early launch, but it’s easy to understand why.

• In the past I’ve written a number of favorable entries about systemd. In the interests of balance, among other things, I now feel that I should rake it over the coals for today’s bad experiences that I ran into in the course of trying to do a yum upgrade of one system from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21, which did not go well.

• Hewlett Packard is going to introduce their “revolutionary” new operating system next summer that’s dubbed Linux++.

Graphics Stack

• I’m sure you’ve seen a 4k monitor on a friends desk running Mac OS X or Windows and are all ready to go get one so that you can use it under Linux.

Benchmarks

• The performance of Civilization: Beyond Earth on Linux is quite demanding. The OpenBenchmarking.org test profile of Civilization Beyond Earth uses roughly the high image quality settings and for this article the tests were done at 1920 x 1080. As the results are about to show, even with modern graphics cards, it’s quite a chore putting out a decent frame-rate at 1080p for this strategy game.

Applications

Proprietary

• I almost missed one of the most important Dropbox updates, thanks to Arch Linux. The package was updated a few days ago when I ran a system update, I did see a Dropbox update with version 3.something but didn’t pay attention until I booted my system and had to unlink it to move the folder. That’s when I spotted the Qt based UI we reported a few months ago.

• There are stable, beta, and developer updates out this week for the Linux / OS X / Windows versions of the Opera web-browser.

Instructionals/Technical

• Revision control is a practice that tracks and provides control over changes to source code. It is a critical tool in the developer’s tool chain. Git is a distributed revision control system initially designed and developed by Linux Torvalds for Linux kernel development. It is used on many kernel-related projects besides the Linux kernel such as OpenVZ, KVM, ALSA, and udev. Git is also frequently used for source code management for non-kernel projects.

Games

• “Furthermore, it also means that the toolset is going to be improved for a long time to come and so eventually we’ll get more and better mods. We’ll even have a Linux version.”

• Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest title in the Civilization franchise, is finally coming to the Linux platform and the released date is tomorrow, December 18.

• Divinity: Original Sin is a complex RPG developed by Larian Studios that managed to get a lot of praise from the community. It’s been out on Windows for quite some time and the developers are also planning a Linux version.

• Run or Die, a new 2D endless runner developed and published by Team Flow on Steam has been released for all the supported platforms, including Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• To generate this changelog we diff from previous release to the released one and use the commit message with a few annotations for stuff like REVIEW: BUG: etc.

• The KDE Community just announced that Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, is now at version 5.1.2 and it comes with a large array of changes, improvements, and various fixes.

• I always have been a huge fan of astronomy, stars, cosmos etc. I must admit that I find it absolutely breathtaking, especially, looking at particular constellations, the way they combine into jewelry shapes that have lots of similarities with known objects. Interesting, somewhere in space there could be a guy like me, looking at sky and finding other objects…

• Plasma 5 pushes QtQuick to the limits. It sounds like a cheesy marketing line, but it’s true. Unfortunately this isn’t a good thing. Although Plasma 5.1 is somewhat stable we have had some crashers, and whilst we’ve worked hard to fix the ones that are ours a sizeable number of these were caused by problems deep inside Qt.

• digiKam Software Collection is digital photo management application for the KDE desktop that includes an image editor for photo corrections and manipulation. The application was just updated to version 4.6.0.

• The digiKam Software Collection 4.6 release offers many bug fixes to the image editor and batch queue manager. There’s also many other bug-fixes found with today’s update. The next bug-fix release for digiKam 4.x is planned in 2015.

• Trinity, a desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems with a primary goal of retaining the overall KDE 3.5 computing style, has finally reached version R14.0.0 and is now ready for download.

• Kubuntu 15.04 Alpha 1 (Vivid Vervet), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses the KDE desktop environment, has been released and is now ready for testing.

• Well, Marley might be dead, but Krita ain’t! So, here’s what’ll be the last beta build of Krita before the festive season really breaks lose. Apart from building, the Krita hackers have had a pretty good week, with lots of deep discussions on animation and coding safety, too.

• After adding the first theme, I was working on a theme on nature. That theme represents the basic elements in the nature such as trees, flowers and etc. Since KDE Pairs is developed for pre school children the objects represented in the themes should be familiar and educational to them. Following are some screen shots after adding the theme nature to the game. These screenshots represents the different game modes such as logic, pairs, relations and words.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Appart from porting Yelp, I submit a patch to WebKit2Gtk+. I expose some part of the API to could check if the clicked element corresponds to a selected area or not. Working with the WebKit code has been a really challenging and cool experience that I want to repeat. When I have time I would end my work on this patch to enable improve plugin support at WebKit.

• At the GUADEC I spoke with Allan Day about a new design for gnome clocks. He was very fast in putting it into an image. It will fix some issues, among them we will get multiple and labelled timers so we can stresslessly roast potatoes while baking a cake and making a tea – repeatedly without having to redefine the timers. Strange meal though.

• Various GNOME packages are being checked in this week for GNOME 3.15.3, another development release toward GNOME 3.16.

Distributions

• Looking back at my 2013 summary, I just realized I’m a bloody prophet. I wanted openSUSE to make a nice comeback, and it did. And I wanted Fedora to shine, and it did, and it’s version 20 no less. The utter and total dominance of the Ubuntu family has been shattered, and this is a very good thing. Competition is always good.

• What about Mint, you ask? Well, Linux Mint behaved splendidly, but this year, the few spins I tried weren’t as sharp and spectacular as what we saw in 2013. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the best-of is more than just a list of grades. It also packs an emotional element, a surprise element, as well as the overall combination of what the selected distributions have achieved with their given parameters. For instance, CentOS is not supposed to be a desktop system, so when it does that well, it’s more interesting than similar results with the stock Ubuntu family members and cousins. Hence, this list and its players.

• Of course, this is entirely my private, subjective observation, but I think it fits the global shift in the Linux field. With the Mir vs Wayland game, a big delay in Ubuntu Edge, and a general cooling off in the distro space, seeing more effort from outside the Ubuntu range is only natural. And welcome. That said, the big winner is still Trusty, and it shows that even though some years may be rougher than others, Ubuntu has its merit and cannot be easily disregarded, no matter how we feel, or want to feel, even if purely on a reactionary basis. And to prove us all wrong, Canonical has baked a phenomenal LTS release, which should bring much joy and fun to Linux users worldwide for years to come. I hope you’ve liked this compilation. See you next year.

• As the year draws to a close it is a good time to reflect on the good and bad of 2014.

• In this article I am going to list my favourite alternative Linux distributions of the year.

• What constitutes as an alternative Linux distro? To define the alternative, we need to look at the mainstream distributions first.

Reviews

• Debian is the great-granddaddy of many Linux distributions, and Parsix is definitely one of its grandchildren. Parsix uses Debian as its base, but builds on it to provide a very desktop-oriented distribution. Parsix has reached version 7.0 and this release ships with GNOME 3.12 as the default desktop, and Linux kernel 3.14.23.

• Tanglu GNU/Linux is a distribution based on Debian Testing. When I wrote recently about the future of Linux Mint Debian Edition and other distributions based on Debian Testing, what I was concerned about was the fact that they will be changing their base to Debian Stable in the near future. Tanglu has not given any indication that they intend to change, so this could be a good alternative for the future.

New Releases

• Devil-Linux 1.6.7 has been released! This release brings lots of software updates. Please see the change log for details.

• SuperX 3.0 Beta, an operating system that is highly modular, flexible, and that comes with a customized KDE desktop aimed at all user categories, is now available for download and testing.

Slackware Family

• There was an announcement a few days ago by The Document Foundation about their latest release. LibreOffice 4.3.5 is now available for download. When browsing the download directories, I noticed that sources for 4.4.0 are already present there, but since there is no public announcement yet, I chose to ignore those sources for now. The 4.3.5 release targets “individual and enterprise users” and fixes 70 bugs compared to the previous version – which is perfect for a Slackware 14.1 user.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana will help organisations make smarter, faster decisions; accelerate business processes; and enable consistency of operations across the business through standardisation on the Red Hat platform, which powers mission-critical systems in more than 90 per cent of the global Fortune 500.

• Customers around the world are changing their perceptions about open-source technology, making it more mainstream, and open source is driving innovation at enterprise and cloud services giant Red Hat (RHT) , according to its president and chief executive Jim Whitehurst.

• Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open-source solutions, reported fiscal third-quarter results Thursday that topped Wall Street’s revenue and profit estimates, sending its shares up more than 9% in after-hours trading. In an interview after earnings were released, Whitehurst discussed Red Hat’s performance and outlined how the company plans to stay ahead of the competition in its core markets.

• With the recent hack on Sony, one major issue on the minds of businesses in the U.S. is cybersecurity. Jim Cramer has had his eye on Red Hat, as it is the largest provider of open sourced software in the world.

• Not only is the company is up 28 percent since June, and is right in the epicenter of the cloud software security debacle.

• When Red Hat refers to open source, its goal is to create collaboration with technology that allows the users to see the code, learn from it, ask questions and offer improvements. The company offers the software for free and then sets up its customers as subscribers who pay regular fees for maintenance and customer service.

• Cramer spoke with Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst to find out his take on the issue of cybersecurity and where the stock could be headed.

• “I’m not surprised that it happened, and we are obviously involved with a lot of agencies that look at security, and it’s a major, major problem in general,” Whitehurst said.

• He stated that the root of the problem is not just about the technology. The issue stems from people and access to passwords with every company at risk. He described it as a “multifaceted, layered and complex problem.”

• So with Red Hat promoting an open software platform, does that make them vulnerable to cybersecurity risks?

• “I think open source itself is proving to be very safe. The simple analogy here is; are you safer in a crowded shopping mall or down a dark alley? Having the wisdom of the crowd is actually a powerful thing,” the CEO said.

• Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ) reported third quarter adjusted EPS of $0.42 after the bell Thursday, which was flat with the prior year result. The consensus estimate was for EPS of $0.40.

• In an announcement on Monday, Red Hat have said that their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for SAP HANA can be deployed on public clouds as well as that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) have joining the RHEL for SAP HANA ecosystem as a certified hardware partner and will begin offering RHEL for SAP HANA on SAP-certified hardware.

• Red Hat’s strategy of sacrificing service revenues to increase subscription revenues over the long run is expected to hurt top-line growth in the next couple of quarters.

• After more than ten years of development, Dan Williams of Red Hat has announced the release of NetworkManager 1.0. The NetworkManager 1.0 release is more than just bumping the version after waiting long enough, but there’s many improvements too over NetworkManager 0.9!

• The news never stops and Sky News must ensure its systems are always available and adaptable for changes to service provision.

• To ensure the scalability and resiliency of operations, the news organisation has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and Red Hat Satellite in two datacentres. The upgrade to IT infrastructure allows the firm to deliver flexible broadcasting and publishing.

• The Raleigh, N.C.-based company reported third-quarter GAAP net income of $48 million, or 26 cents a share, compared with $52 million, or 27 cents a share, in the year-earlier quarter. Adjusted earnings per share of 42 cents came in higher than analysts’ expectations of 40 cents. Revenue jumped 15% to $456 million.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) earned at least 10 price target hikes from investment banks Friday, after the Linux leader late Thursday posted Q3 earnings that soundly beat estimates, and its stock rose to 14-year highs.

• After eleven and a half years, today is my final day at Red Hat.

Fedora

• For the moment next 6 months, i will stick with fedora 21 only, Lets see what UBuntu 15.04 will come up with an answer to Fedora 21.

• So if you think of yourself as the adventurous type, someone who likes everything to be pretty new all the time but doesn’t really want to deal with a lot of breakage and is curious about Wayland in the real world, give Fedora 21 a try.

• OpenStack can now be installed using Fedora 21 or Rawhide, on aarch64 hardware.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Elive, a Linux distribution that uses Debian as a base and Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 2.5.0 Beta. The devs are still making some important changes and this latest release is proof of that.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• First alpha of Ubuntu flavors of 15.04 cycle is available for download and testing. Since Ubuntu Unity doesn’t participate in the alphas there will be only on beta of Ubuntu Unity in March, 2015.

• The first alpha releases in the Ubuntu 15.04 development cycle are now available to download for testing.

• Four flavors participate in this milestone, including Ubuntu GNOME and Kubuntu. Ubuntu ‘proper’ will once again only participate in the final beta release due March 2015.

• There isn’t much time left in 2014 so we suppose it comes as no surprise that Canonical, the parent company behind Ubuntu, recently confirmed that the first Ubuntu-powered smartphones have been delayed until “early” next year. The first Ubuntu-powered devices were originally scheduled to launch sometime in 2014.

• Canonical’s stripped down “Snappy” edition of Ubuntu Core is now available on Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform.

• If you’ve followed along over the last few weeks, that’s not a major surprise. Snappy first launched on Microsoft Azure at the beginning of this month and then arrived on Google’s Compute Engine platform earlier this week. It was pretty obvious that AWS’s EC2 would be next.

• In the first week of February BQ will be launching a version of it’s Aquaris e4.5 device loaded with Ubuntu software, the release will be limited to Europe for now however it will still have the low price of €159. The launch will see Ubuntu Phone’s debut launch of a commercial device, unless Meizu surprise up and release their device before then.

• The contest is an extension of national carrier China Mobile’s ‘”AND Your Dream Come True” Million Youth Entrepreneurship and Employment Programme’ . Launched in 2010 with support from the Communist Youth League Central Committee, ‘AND’ aims to give young people employment opportunities and foster a sense of “can do”.

• It looks like the Ubuntu team made a very good decision in creating the new, stripped down and fast performing “snappy” version of Ubuntu Core. This minimalist take on Ubuntu is targeted at those doing cloud deployments, and is already integrated with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Google Cloud. Snappy is optimized for Docker deployments and platform-as-a-service environments, as I covered here.

• Canonical has issued fixes for a number of Linux kernel vulnerabilities that have been identified and resolved by the developer for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn).

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux Mint developers have just outed the first and probably only RC for the Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Xfce edition. Users can now download the images and test the new release.

• Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” KDE RC uses KDE 4.14 as the default desktop environment and it looks like users will have to keep employing this old version for a while. KDE SC 4.14.3 was made available a couple of weeks ago, but it’s the last one in the series.

• Ubuntu Kylin, a Chinese Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and developed in collaboration with Canonical, has been promoted to version 15.04 and the first Alpha in the series is now ready for download and testing.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Lenovo early next year will announce two new smartphones , with both using not only a low-power 64-bit Atom processor but also a cellular modem chip from Intel, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. One of the smartphones will be sold in China, a growing market that Intel officials have tagged as being key to the company’s mobile ambitions.

Tizen

• Samsung has had a busy year with Tizen and not only in with Smart watches. Following the release of the first Tizen Smart Camera, the Samsung NX-300M, we have had the NX Mini, NX 30 and recently the NX1.

Android

• This year kicked off with OnePlus and Cyanogen Inc announcing the OnePlus One invitation only device which created a buzz in the tech community, since then, relations have taken a downward turn and now the two companies are in a legal debacle over the Indian market.

• Back in February on the 28th, OnePlus and Cyanogen both signed a collaboration agreement and earlier on that month, on the 1st, they signed a trademark license agreement which is valid until 31st January 2016. These agreements meant that OnePlus was allowed a non-exclusive license to use Cyanogen trademarks and software worldwide except mainland China. Everything is OK up until September 2014.

• This hands-on review takes a first look at SolidRun’s tiny CuBoxTV set-top box, running both its default OpenELEC/XBMC OS, as well as an Android 4.4.4 beta.

• The CuBoxTV is one of several CuBox-i models currently available from Israel-based SolidRun. Whereas the full-up “CuBox-i Pro” model comes with 2GB RAM, WiFi, and Ethernet, the CuBoxTV hits a $110 price target though the reduction of RAM to 1GB and the elimination of the WiFi/Bluetooth radio module, though it still possesses the power of a Freescale i.MX6 Quad SoC clocked at around 1GHz.

• I pay for a premium membership, and to be honest, I don’t think I even use the premium features. I just love Evernote so much, I want to support the company. But in the spirit of fair comparison, I forced myself to try Google Keep.

• Android fans rejoice, for today Blizzard’s super-addictive digital card game, Hearthstone, is available for Android tablets. Sure, it’s been out on PC and iOS for a while, but it’s a newcomer amongst the Android ranks — and since it’s a game that’s really designed for the touchscreen experience, that’s definitely a tough fact for Android owners to cope with.

• Blizzard’s free-to-play card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is now available to Android tablets in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The game can be downloaded for free from the Google Play store and Amazon Appstore. Blizzard has announced that a worldwide release will roll out “in the days ahead.”

• There are must have Android apps that everyone has – the big apps that get all the buzz. There are also apps that win popularity contests in specific groups of people.

• But there are also Android apps worthy of download that aren’t that well known. Think of them as the “must have” underdog list.

• To avoid missing out on what may prove to be your most helpful app ever, take a look at these lesser known contenders:

Free Software/Open Source

• We pride ourselves at The Apache Software Foundation on our principles of “community over code” and “don’t be a jerk”. But, alas, we’ve been slow to codify some of these things in public. Part of this, I’m sure, is that it’s easy to think we all just know how we’re supposed to treat people, and so you shouldn’t have to say, right?

• In a recent post on the organization’s blog, Chris Price, chairman of the technical steering committee (TSC) for the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), said the panel is reviewing a broad array of project ideas to see what ones will be pursued by the committee. In addition, the wider OPNFV community will focus on establishing an integration and baseline platform while also creating several NFV-related projects that will find their way into the OPNFV’s second release of 2015.

• OpenDaylight accepted seven student interns for the summer of 2014 to work in the community and receive hands-on development experience in SDN. Each intern worked closely with an active OpenDaylight developer as their mentor on a project that suited interest and community need.

• Cloud Dataflow, which it describes as “a platform to democratize large-scale data processing by enabling easier and more scalable access to data,” was just unveiled in June. It’s still an alpha release, but used internally in the company, Google says.

• All the way back in June, at Google I/O, Google pronounced that the venerable MapReduce data crunching scheme was “tired” and launched a service dubbed Cloud Dataflow that analyzes pipelines with “arbitrarily large datasets.” Dataflow was a much talked about star in a set of cloud services discussed at Google I/O and Google officials even confirmed that Dataflow had replaced MapReduce at Google. MapReduce, of course, is built for processing and generating large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on clusters.

Events

• The GNOME Asia Committee is pleased to announce that the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 will be hosted in Depok Indonesia May 7-9 2015. It will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements to GNOME 3.

• We are thrilled to report that GNOME.Asia is a founding member of KAIYUANSHE(开源社) launched Oct 16, 2014. KAIYUANSHE roughly translated as “open source alliance,” is a group of enterprises, communities, and individuals in China supporting and promoting free and open source software (FOSS).

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Dell is now dishing out full-fledged USB Chrome keyboards on its online store in the US, and it is expected to start selling it outside the US soon.

• Google’s media streaming stick Chromecast now has a guest mode. That means you no longer have to share your Wi-Fi password with your guests if they want to stream a video from their smartphones to your television.

Mozilla

• The Mozilla project is dedicated to tackling these challenges. Our community makes Firefox products that are loved and used the world over, all in service of our mission to protect the Web. We are also hard at work teaching thousands more people how to help build the Web, developing innovative open source technologies for others to leverage, protecting individual privacy and establishing technical standards.

• It looks like the effort to bring Mozilla Firefox to Apple IOS iPhone/iPad devices is getting real. Some very preliminary code for the effort is now available on Github.

Databases

• The open source cross-platform document-oriented database company MongoDB has acquired WiredTiger for its database storage engine technology.

• PostgreSQL 9.4 is out in time for Christmas with numerous changes for users of this open-source database solution.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3.5, the fifth minor release of LibreOffice 4.3 “fresh” family, which is a stable release of the more advanced version of the software, targeted to individual and enterprise users. LibreOffice 4.3.5 contains over 70 bug fixes.

• …importance of working with upstream projects and initiatives for a government like the UK Government.

• [...]

• Public interest and software freedom are not always aligned, in the sense that software freedom grant rights to users of Free Software but does not imply users will get what they want; in this case however, these two notions could become very much aligned. The same holds true for Open Standards: if major chunks of the UK’s public sector’s pool of documents is migrated to ODF, there is something close to a liability – and an opportunity- for this Government to ensure the format continues to thrive and be improved.

CMS

• The popular open-source CMS and blogging system gets a major milestone update that includes an enhanced distraction-free writing mode.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• For those sticking to the GCC 4.8 compiler series rather than the newer GCC 4.9 stable series, the GCC 4.8.4 release is now available.

• With OpenACC, NVIDIA’s NVPTX back-end, and other improvements finally materializing within mainline GCC and its related code-bases, users are beginning to wonder how to actually use these new GCC features and experience GPU offloading with this free software compiler.

Public Services/Government

• The European Parliament has approved funding for several projects related to Free Software and privacy. In the EU budget for 2015, which the European Parliament adopted on December 17, the Parliamentarians have allocated up to one million Euro for a project to audit Free Software programs in use at the Commission and the Parliament in order to identify and fix security vulnerabilities.

• Public administrations in the EU are hindering competition by asking for specific brands and products when procuring software solutions, says OpenForum Europe, an organisation campaigning for an open, competitive ICT market. “No progress has been made in recent years. In fact the practice of referring to brand names in public procurement has become more widespread”, OFE says.

• EU software procurement breaches rules more than ever before – OFE PDF – Because they really do prefer to feed what they perceive as corporate power brokers rather than work to create European value with European money.

• EU allocates half million euros for testing open source – FSFE – It’s a rounding error on the budget, but at least it’s something. Let’s see who gets it.

Openness/Sharing

• If cars are indeed set to become “smartphones on wheels”, able to connect to the internet and each other, there are a few things we need to settle first. What kind of operating system will they run on, for example, and will they use proprietary or open source applications? Will upgrades to the car’s underlying system happen as seamlessly as mobile OS updates do today, or will you have to call out a mechanic?

• It looks like our Linux friend Tux enjoys racing karts! The SuperTuxKart team is wishing its gamers a Merry Christmas by releasing SuperTaxKart 0.8.2 beta. SuperTuxKart is a 3D kart racing game licensed under GPLV3 and available on many platforms, including Linux. This new beta release includes a new graphical engine, Antartica. You should really check out the release post and the screenshots of the improved graphics. Another new feature is online accounts in preparation of networked multiplayer gaming—which is still to come.

• Why do we share? What makes it different from giving? And what does it have to do with strategy and impulse control? Mike talks to the scientist Nikolaus

• “We just wanted to play video games in real life,” said Ibrahim Pasha, the youthful CEO of Skirmos — an ambitious open-source laser tag gun started by a handful of former high school pals.

• The holiday season is in full swing and you may still have a few people to check off your gift-giving list. If you’re at a loss for what to buy the open-source-focused engineer or maker in your life, take a gander at these 8 open-source gifts.

Open Data

• U.S. intelligence agencies and the military are increasingly leveraging analytics platforms based on machine learning to sift through data sources like social media. In the vernacular of the Pentagon, these efforts are generally referred to as open source intelligence initiatives.

Leftovers

Security

• In the meantime, you can use this extension to turn off SSLv3 in your copy of Firefox. When you install the add-on, it will set the minimum TLS version to TLS 1.0 (disabling SSLv3). If you want to change that setting later, like if you really need to access an SSLv3 site, just go to Tools / Add-ons and click the “Preferences” button next to the add-on. That will give you a drop-down menu to select the minimum TLS version you want to allow.

• Several severe vulnerabilities have been found in the time setting software NTP. The Network Time Protocol is not secure anyway due to the lack of a secure authentication mechanism. Better use tlsdate.

• Alert Logic admits it has NOT seen any exploits that harness this vulnerability. Other security firms believe Alert Logic is overstating the risk, which Trend Micro characterises as “limited”.

• [...]

• An independent researcher first posted about the vulnerability – which he called PackageKit Privilege Escalation – almost a month ago before Alert Logic picked up on the threat and publicised it.

• “Linux clients are not affected if they run in a case-sensitive filesystem,” the service’s warning reads, but are nonetheless encouraged to upgrade. Windows and Mac OS users have no excuse not to upgrade, as “Git clients running on OS X (HFS+) or any version of Microsoft Windows (NTFS, FAT) are exploitable through this vulnerability.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Some politicians seem to act as if “terrorism” means a terrible crime committed by someone who doesn’t fit the speaker’s own racial & religious profile. Just because something induces terror in some or many people, that doesn’t make it terrorism. That diminishes the concept as well as grouping routine crime – for which society has millennia of experience and solutions – into the same bucket as a more subtle and serious phenomenon that preys on the meshed society.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The first thing you notice about the Mirai, Toyota’s new $62,000, four-door family sedan, is that it’s no Camry, an international symbol of bland conformity. First there are the in-your-face, angular grilles on the car’s front end. These deliver air to (and cool) a polymer fuel-cell stack under the hood. Then there’s the wavy, layered sides, meant to evoke a droplet of water. It looks like it was driven off the set of the Blade Runner sequel.

Finance

• The Times might offer in its defense that this piece is labeled as one of Sullivan’s “Wealth Matters” columns, a feature specifically set up to give advice to the 1 percent (or the 0.01 percent) on how to “manage not only their money and fortune, but their overall well-being.” To which one can only note that it’s not a coincidence that the Times does not have a “Poverty Matters” column.

Censorship

• BT, Sky, and Virgin Media are hijacking people’s web connections to force customers to make a decision about family-friendly web filters. The move comes as the December deadline imposed by prime minister David Cameron looms, with ISPs struggling to get customers to say yes or no to the controversial adult content blocks.

• [...]

• The hijacking works by intercepting requests for unencrypted websites and rerouting a user to a different page. ISPs are using the technique to communicate with all undecided customers. Attempting to visit WIRED.co.uk, for example, could result in a user being redirected to a page asking them about web filtering. ISPs cannot intercept requests for encrypted websites in the same way.

• BT is blocking people’s browsers until they make a decision, making it impossible for customers to visit any websites once the in-browser notification has appeared. A spokesperson for the UK’s biggest ISP said: “If customers do not make a decision, they are unable to continue browsing. The message will remain until the customer makes a decision.”

Privacy

• A federal judge in New Jersey has signed off on the practice of law enforcement using a fake Instagram account in order to become “friends” with a suspect—thus obtaining photos and other information that a person posts to their account.

• The Tor Project has learned that there may be an attempt to incapacitate our network in the next few days through the seizure of specialized servers in the network called directory authorities. (Directory authorities help Tor clients learn the list of relays that make up the Tor network.) We are taking steps now to ensure the safety of our users, and our system is already built to be redundant so that users maintain anonymity even if the network is attacked. Tor remains safe to use.

• Many of you by now are probably aware than I run a large exit node cluster for the Tor network and run a collection of mirrors (also ones available over hidden services).

• Tonight there has been some unusual activity taking place and I have now lost control of all servers under the ISP and my account has been suspended. Having reviewed the last available information of the sensors, the chassis of the servers was opened and an unknown USB device was plugged in only 30-60 seconds before the connection was broken. From experience I know this trend of activity is similar to the protocol of sophisticated law enforcement who carry out a search and seizure of running servers.

• Until I have had the time and information available to review the situation, I am strongly recommending my mirrors are not used under any circumstances. If they come back online without a PGP signed message from myself to further explain the situation, exercise extreme caution and treat even any items delivered over TLS to be potentially hostile.

Civil Rights

• Today, 21 December 2014, WikiLeaks releases two classified documents by a previously undisclosed CIA office detailing how to maintain cover while travelling through airports using false ID – including during operations to infiltrate the European Union and the Schengen passport control system. This is the second release within WikiLeaks’ CIA Series, which will continue in the new year.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In 2011, police in two countries coordinated to take down a private torrent site that had largely flown under the radar. This week, 3.5 years after the raid, two alleged operators of the site faced a criminal trial in Sweden. Having uploaded no content themselves, will they be held liable for the actions of their users?

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