● 01.31.15

● Links 31/1/2015: Open Lunchbox, Librem 15 at Around $400,000

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• It was a slow news day today for Linux but a few tidbits stood out. First up is Danny Stieben with his article persuading prospects how easy Linux really is.

• We’ve written plenty of articles about helping you switch over to Linux from your current operating system. However, even with all of those materials at hand, it’s sometimes still difficult to take the leap of faith and actually try it out.

• So, this article will be all about questions you might have about switching, and what you can do to ease yourself into the world of Linux. If you read it from start to finish, you’ll have plenty of answers and tips to succeed at Linux.

• A government announces a programme to distribute GNU/Linux to schools and it takes a few years to roll out.

• Open Lunchbox is the latest project attempting to do an open-source laptop design. Open Lunchbox is trying to do their laptop project in a modular, open hardware design.

• How Open Lunchbox claims to be different from the other modular computers and laptop projects that claim to be open-source friendly is that “Open Lunchbox will the first open source modular laptop that is powerful enough for everyday use…The problems with other so called open laptop projects have been either not being x86, not being powerful enough to use as a laptop, not being open or not being an actual laptop.”

• The manufacturing goal was $250k USD and thanks to the extension they’re now set to close the campaign at the end of today at around $400k. With the extra funds, they’re planning to add hardware kill switches for the microphone/camera and for all RF/WiFI/Bluetooth adapters. Those behind the project are also looking at replacing the HDMI port with two mini Thunderbolt ports.

Kernel Space

• This has been a banner week for new online technology coursework that you can flex to fit to your schedule. We’ve covered some new, free and on-demand Hadoop courses that you can take through MapR, and now The Linux Foundation is serving up a SysAdmin offering that is designed to respect your time.

Graphics Stack

• Bryce Harrington tagged the release candidates for the forthcoming Wayland 1.7 and Weston 1.7 versions.

• A Google engineer is still working on his virtual GEM driver that will benefit the performance of Mesa’s software rasterizer for increasing the performance when not running on real graphics hardware.

Benchmarks

• While benchmarked the most this month on Phoronix was the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Broadwell CPU given its the latest-generation Intel microarchitecture, February on Phoronix will be much more interesting if you’re at all interested in servers or workstation hardware… Or just seeing what’s possible if you happen to have a ton of system memory and disks.

Applications

• Linux is now also a gaming platform, so naturally, people will want to record their gaming sessions. This is not easily done on Linux, but there are some ways to do it. SimpleScreenRecorder is probably the best of them, but the competition is getting fierce.

• Depending on your allegiances, this screenshot is likely to make you howl with maniacal laughter, curse the heavens, or vomit uncontrollably.

• Calibre is an eBook reader, converter, and editor, just to pinpoint some of the major features of the application. A new update has been released for it and the developer has made a number small improvements to the app.

Proprietary/Privacy-Infringing

• Other communications features include a chat history for all conversations, making it possible to locate a previous message across devices.

• There are almost three years since Google Drive launched and we have yet to see an official client for Linux. While there are various unofficial clients, none of them is perfect, with Insync probably being the best option, but it costs $15 per Google account and not everybody wants to pay for something Google is offering for free on Windows, Mac and mobile.

• Google Drive has unofficial clients available for Linux, but there hasn’t been an official one released by Google. That may be about to change as a couple of screenshots have leaked, according to WebUpd8.

• To complicate things I got two tips via e-mail, one from Rashid and one from Lewis, mentioning gmail-attachment-downloader. I like to check things before I add them to the list, and at first glance it looked like a simple python script that scrapes through attachments in your account, and gives you a local copy.

• The man behind the Opera browser has created a new one, he says, because power users are poorly served. The new Vivaldi browser launched today in a “Technical Preview” form, with customisation and speed taking it in a different direction to the mainstream, where minimalism rules the day.

Instructionals/Technical

• Surf the Internet securely with your very own portable WiFi VPN/TOR router. You can configure a Raspberry Pi with Linux and some extra software to connect to a VPN server of your choice. The VPN connection encrypts your internet traffic so that hackers and spies can’t figure out what web sites you are visiting, and the web sites you are visiting can’t tell which computer you are surfing from.

• The router is small and portable, so you can plug it in anywhere, adding secure internet browsing to any occasion, from your room to the café. You can even connect WiFi devices that don’t support VPN, like your Chromecast or Pebl.

Games

• Even though we still haven’t found out what game we teamed up with Feral Interactive to do a competition for, they have unleashed a new radar blip for a new Linux port.

• I’m going to be honest, I’ve never even heard of this game before, but multitude of awards speak for how good it is. We are getting a revamped version with more content, and going by the trailer we really are in for a treat. The visuals are beautiful, and it looks amazingly action-packed. I can’t wait to give this a crack!

• Steam Machines could be the PC that time passed by. These small computers, designed for streaming games in your living room, were intended as an alternative platform for gamers during the dark years of Windows 8. But what actually happened—or rather, didn’t happen—with Steam Machines makes their future uncertain.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• You thought you had seen every post about Randa Meetings in 2014, right? Or perhaps you posted about Randa and thought you were super late? Well, abandon all hope: this is the definitive latest post about Randa Meetings 2014

• Plasma 5 has abandoned the old xembed-based system tray support. I mentioned that in my announcement post for the Plasma 5 packages for Slackware-current, and also mentioned that there are solutions for that in Plasma 5. This means that a lot of applications (meaning: all non-Plasma 5 applications) will fail to display an icon in the system tray of your new Plasma 5 Workspace. No more Skype, no more Dropbox, no more Steamclient, etcetera. The applications will be running of course, but you can not interact with them through their system tray icon.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• With the GNOME 3.16 series, Mutter uses GTK+ for drawing all window decorations regardless of using client-side decorations, and there’s also many other GTK+ improvements.

Distributions

New Releases

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.1.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release of the v3.1 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.30 kernel which has some critical security fixes.

• BackBox is a free Linux Operating System based on the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu. BackBox provides penetration testing, incident responce, computer forensics and intelligence gathering tools. The latest Release 4.1 includes many interesting changes.

• The team has been toiling night and day to make the transition to Debian Jessie and Debian Wheezy as smooth as possible for you.

• Everything is ready and you should now be able to upgrade. If you experience connection problems while attempting to upgrade this is probably due to a request overload of our server. Just wait a bit and try later.

Slackware Family

• I failed to mention this earlier because of the time I spent on KDE 5, but there was a new Flash from Adobe. following closely on last week’s security fix.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• With the upgrade to CentOS 7, some of the services I was using are no more present in CentOS repositories. An example of this is BackupPC and ddclient, which I use for services and reachability of the machine.

• Inkscape just released version 0.91 of their Open Source vector graphics editor, and the new package will soon be available in the stable repositories for Fedora 21. Inkscape 0.91 is the first major release of Inkscape for a few years, and it has many bugfixes and new features compared to the previous Inkscape 0.48 release.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Recently, Canonical has revealed the hardware specifications of Bq Aquarius E4.5 running Ubuntu Touch. It comes with a 4.5-inch screen with a 960×540 resolution, 13 MPX camera, a Quad Core ARM Cortex running at 1.3 GHz, 1 GB of RAM memory, 8 GB internal memory and Mali 400 graphics.

• Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Canonical intends to use either Kernel 3.19 or Kernel 20 on the final version of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, depending on how fast Linus moves with the kernel development.

• The battle for the best modern desktop still rages on. Two of Linux world’s favorite distributions are often difficult to choose from, especially if you are new to the penguinland. Whether you are a dabbler, a budding programmer, or an ever-curious tinkerer; choosing your first Linux desktop is a tough choice. Asking on the Internet for random people to make that choice for you, adds even more to the confusion. They will give you various answers, from Slackware and Fedora to Ubuntu and Plan 9. However, if you filter their responses to only pick the most popular ones, the distribution deathmatch can boast of only two contenders in the ring: Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Devices/Embedded

• With a 16-core coprocessor based on Epiphany architecture, is Parallella the single-board computer that developers have been waiting for?

Phones

Android

• Samsung has been pretty silent when it comes to tablets in the last few months. The Korean tech giant rolled out the Galaxy Tab Active at IFA 2014, but that was just a rugged, re-branded version of the Galaxy Tab 4 8.0-inch model.

• If you’re looking for truly open-source software for the Android platform, you don’t have to do a ton of searching or check through licenses from within the Google Play Store. All you have to do is download a simple tool called F-Droid. With this tool, you can download and install apps (from quite a large listing) as easily as you can from the Google Play Store.

• You won’t, however, find F-Droid in the Google Play Store. Instead, you have to download the .apk file and install it manually. Once it’s installed, the rest is just a matter of searching for an app and tapping to install.

Free Software/Open Source

• The PHP community here is really strong, and we have Rafael Dohms to thank for that. Getting in contact with those amazing folks inspired me to get out of my comfort zone, and that little world where I used to live before started to look too small for me.

Events

• Ross currently serves as director of member services with the Linux Professional Institute. He has over 15 years of experience as Linux trainer and has authored several books on Linux and open source software.

SaaS/Big Data

• Although the courses will be free, students hoping to gain certification as a Hadoop or HBase developer will still need to pay $250 for the exams, which are available to take online.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• One of the major complaints levelled against free and open source software is that it looks bad. The user-interfaces for many applications are not geared towards being pleasing visually and this is not surprising as the software is merely meant to do a job.

• Back at its OpenWorld event in 2014, Oracle announced it was working on a Node.js driver for its database products. The resulting code was released last week, as open source code with an Apache 2.0 license.

• The driver is now available from GitHub, and includes tools for working with JavaScript objects and arrays, and for translating between Oracle and JavaScript data types. It’s designed to handle transactions, and to work with Oracle’s built-in scaling tools. This includes the ability to quickly end transactions in the event of server failures – allowing Node.js applications to quickly failover to another database, without losing user data.

• Having used OpenOffice for several years on the Panasonic Toughbooks I use in the field, I’ve avoided buying into traditional or subscription-based services. While enterprises may have a different view on licensing, cost most always figures into the decision-making process. So if they go the subscription route, they’ll have to then ask what strategies they can use to lower those costs. Will they be able to haggle on price?

• If the subscription model does become the norm, will OpenOffice and other open-source software thrive, dive, or stay the same in market share? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

CMS

• Sydney-based WPCommerce has launched a hosted cloud e-commerce platform on the open source WordPress and WooCommerce platforms.

• WPCommerce automates the integration, localisation and deployment requirements to provide business owners with a fully hosted local solution that allows them to start selling online without manual setup or configuration.

• Platforms like WordPress and Drupal, which are maintained by a community of users, can be a cost-effective and flexible option for charities, writes the digital media manager at Epilepsy Action

Project Releases

• I like SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). I use it a lot on this blog because I don’t need thumbnails and the viewer gets the size he wants.

• The Inkscape community proudly announces the release of Inkscape 0.91.

• Bugzilla 5.0 is gearing up for a release in the next few weeks and with this big version bump will come a number of new features to this popular open-source bug tracking software.

• Bugzilla 5.0 RC2 was released this week in preparation for an official Bugzilla 5.0 release in “the next few weeks” for general availability.

• Calamares 1.0 is a completely modular design with three plug-in interfaces, C++ and Python API support, 25 different modules for extending the base framework, a self-contained branding component, an advanced partitioning tool, and various other features.

• On behalf of the Calamares team and Blue Systems, I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Calamares 1.0.

Public Services/Government

• Effective cyber defense has never been more sought after, with leaders in the public and private sectors seeking more efficient and robust methods to protect sensitive data. One key to building proficient cyber defenses is using metrics to grasp what happens how breaches and threats work. The Army is lending a hand on this front, releasing a forensic analysis code called Dshell, which it has used for five years to help understand compromises of Defense Department networks, to the public-access site GitHub.

• The U.S. Army Research Laboratory, or ARL, is a leader in protecting and defending defense networks. In 2013, ARL established a collaborative research alliance to explore the basic foundations of cyber science issues in context of Army networks.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• As I mentioned last summer, it’s scandalous that the privatisation of the Royal Mail resulted not only in the public being short-changed by a billion quid or so, but also – arguably even worse – in the loss of one of the most precious UK datasets: postcodes. These are crucially important because geolocation data is central to providing services to mobile devices; giving a monopoly on this information to a company was irresponsible in the extreme.

Open Access/Content

• With the rising cost of textbooks, which can cost hundreds of dollars every semester, more students are turning to e-books.

Open Hardware

• Existing open hardware tools now make it easy for anyone to greatly contribute to this change. For example, the team at BITalino recently completed a series of anti-wearable biohacking projects that resulted in things like a bicycle handlebar fitted with a 3-axis accelerometer and an Electrocardiography (ECG) sensor. The ECG sensor leads are connected to conductive textile electrodes on the left and right grips of the handlebar. Whenever the rider holds the grips with each of his/her hands, the data is streamed via Bluetooth to a smartphone that shows the heart rate.

• Mark Bonenfant and students from Calumet High School will present “Open Source 3D Printing” at the Calumet Public Library.

• Spanish tech firm BQ manufactures smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and 3D printers, but it’s their entry into the 3D scanner market that’s turning heads. The company’s new Ciclop 3D scanner uses laser triangulation technology and a rotating turntable, and it’s billed as “the first DIY 3D scanner.”

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• The killer blows to Adobe’s multimedia browser plugin were delivered this week in a one-two punch.

Leftovers

Security

• VPN users are facing a massive security flaw as websites can easily see their home IP-addresses through WebRTC. The vulnerability is limited to supporting browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, and appears to affect Windows users only. Luckily the security hole is relatively easy to fix.

• D-LINK ROUTERS have been found to contain a software bug which could allow traffic hijacking and DNS rerouting.

• The bug is in ZynOS, designed by ZyXEL, which also features in products from TP-Link, ZTE and ZyXEL itself.

• However, it was the D-Link DSL2740R that was subject to a proof-of-concept hack this week by a Bulgarian white witch hacker collective called Ethical Hacking, mailed to Computerworld.

• The miscreant wouldn’t even need credentials to make the changes, just access to the remote set-up page or the local network.

• I’m speaking on a frequent (and increasing) basis with customers about the opportunities and risks that they need to prepare for as they continue to support new business models related to mobility, cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• From the point of view of the U.S. military and the national security state, the period from September 12, 2001, to late last night could be summed up in a single word: more. What Washington funded with your tax dollars was a bacchanalia of expansion intended, as is endlessly reiterated, to keep America “safe.” But here’s the odd thing: as the structure of what’s always called “security” is built out ever further into our world and our lives, that world only seems to become less secure. Odder yet, that “more” is rarely a focus of media coverage, though its reality is glaringly obvious. The details may get coverage but the larger reality — the thing being created in Washington — seems of remarkably little interest.

• The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.

• The 77th Brigade, to be based in Hermitage, near Newbury, in Berkshire, will be about 1,500-strong and formed of units drawn from across the army. It will formally come into being in April.

• The British military is setting up a specialist force modelled on the Chindits, the commandos who gained renown through their daring missions behind enemy lines in Burma during the Second World War.

• They will specialise in “non-lethal” forms of psychological warfare, using social media including Facebook and Twitter to “fight in the information age”.

• On January 28th a barrage of Israeli artillery fire struck near the South Lebanese village of Ghajar, killing United Nations peacekeeper Francisco Javier Soria. Soria, 36, was a Spanish citizen deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in the occupied Golan Heights.

• In late December 2010, 18-year-old Somali-American Gulet Mohamed was detained in Kuwait without charges and tortured, almost certainly at the behest of U.S. officials. Through a cellphone smuggled into the detention camp by another inmate, Gulet was able to call me and New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti and recount what happened; that morning, we both published articles reporting on the detention, and (with Gulet’s consent) I published the recording of the 50-minute call I had with him, showing him in extreme distress as he described his ordeal.

• Al-Qaeda and ISIS are products of US and Saudi imperialism.

• The protest broke out at the opening of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on national security and global challenges, where Kissinger and other prominent former secretaries of state were testifying. Standing inches behind the Nixon-era diplomat, the protesters shouted, “Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The world’s ocean species are up to nine times more likely to become extinct than previously thought, according to new research.

• The alarming study by the University of Sheffield, said to be the most thorough analysis of marine conservation data yet, comes as campaigners accused the Government of “watering down” plans to protect England’s marine life.

Finance

• Tens of thousands of people have massed in central Madrid for a rally organised by radical Spanish leftists Podemos.

• The “March for Change” is one of the party’s first outdoor mass rallies, as it looks to build on the recent victory of its close allies Syriza in Greece.

• Podemos has surged into the lead in recent opinion polls, and says it will seek to write off part of Spain’s debt if it wins elections later this year.

• Running on an uncompromising anti-austerity platform, Greece’s Syriza party, the Coalition of the Radical Left, won a decisive victory over the conservative New Democracy party in the economically battered nation’s Jan. 25 election. Syriza fell only two seats short of winning an absolute majority in Greece’s 300-seat Parliament, prompting party leader Alexis Tsipras to form an alliance with the small, center right Independent Greeks party to form a governing coalition.

Censorship

• As if Comcast’s recent account name change to “asshole” wasn’t bad enough, there are new reports of more rude names like “whore,” “dummy,” and “Fakoe Boz.”

• According to the travel website BoardingArea, which first broke the story this week of the earlier vulgar naming incident, more users have written in with their own reports of Comcast naming chicanery.

Privacy

• And Harper introduced Bill C-51, a sweeping piece of legislation that covers everything from what you’re allowed to say and write to who can board a plane, what happens to your tax information and how long you can be detained without charge, he cited fatal attacks last fall in Ottawa and St. Jean Sur Richelieu.

• Facebook Thursday said it would begin testing a service to deliver information about shops and landmarks to users who are nearby, in part by using localized transmitters known as “beacons.”

• Drop the disguise: your metadata still gives you away.

• Microsoft has released their iOS for Outlook today. And it will break your companies security for mobile PIM access in multiple ways! No matter if you’re a Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes Traveler customer.

• ORG and Privacy International have filed a second submission in the judicial review proceedings against the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA). We argue that the legislation is contrary to EU law, in particular Article 15 of the E-Privacy Directive. The intervention draws the Court’s attention to (i) the substantial and carefully calibrated EU rules in the field of data retention, (ii) the seriousness of data retention as an interference with the relevant Charter of Fundamental Rights and European Convention on Human Rights rights and (iii) the inconsistency between the relevant provisions and the strict requirements of EU law.

• Each year, recruiters from the National Security Agency (NSA), said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, visit a few dozen universities across the country in search of new talent. It used to be an easy sell. “One of the appealing aspects that they pitch is that you’ll be working on incredibly hard and interesting puzzles all day,” says one mathematician who requested anonymity. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, he adds, “I felt that if there was any way I could use my mathematical ability to prevent such a thing from ever happening again, I was morally obligated to do it.” Several times over the past decade, he has set aside his university research to work for the agency.

Civil Rights

• The New York City Police Department says it won’t be carrying machine guns at protests, despite comments Commissioner Bill Bratton made recently. Speaking at a breakfast hosted by New York City’s Police Foundation Thursday, the commissioner unveiled a new unit–the Strategic Response Group or SRG–that will be made up of hundreds of officers tasked specifically with counterterrorism and “disorder” policing.

• New dossier shows Mrs Thatcher was briefed on Sir Peter Hayman paedophile scandal when she had been in Downing Street only a year, and officials feared the diplomat’s offending went back to at least 1966

• But more surveillance is not necessarily better surveillance, and increasing the scope and scale of government spying or interfering with freedom of expression is not the answer to all our security or societal problems. French officials have admitted they had prior intelligence, which suggests that neither did inadequate surveillance contribute to these horrific attacks, nor would heightened surveillance have prevented them.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A major problem with the TTIP negotiations so far has been the disturbing lack of transparency. General summaries of what has been discussed in each round of negotiations are released, but the negotiating texts are not. Because the talks are shrouded in secrecy, proper scrutiny by the public, media, law-makers and civil society of what is being negotiated on our behalf is not possible. The negotiating texts should be made public. We cannot move ahead with a process where the first time the details of TTIP are made public is when the text is final and the opportunity for constructive input has passed. This is clearly an undemocratic and unacceptable way for trade negotiations to be carried out.

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