● 03.27.15

● Links 27/3/2015: Ubuntu 15.04 Second Beta, Dart 1.9

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I have been using Ubuntu Unity for a very long time. In fact, I would say that this is, by far, the longest I’ve stuck with a single desktop interface. Period. That doesn’t mean I don’t stop to smell the desktop roses along the Linux path. In fact, I’ve often considered other desktops as a drop-in replacement for Unity. GNOME and Budgie have vied for my attention of late. Both are solid takes on the desktop that offer a minimalistic, modern look and feel (something I prefer) and help me get my work done with an efficiency other desktops can’t match.

• Without a doubt, the key technological revolution of our time has been the rise of mobile computing. With iOS and Android leading the charge, the way people communicate has been transformed.

• Of course the most significant competition in the space is the one between the two dominant mobile platforms: Google and Apple. Together, they make up the lion’s share of the mobile market. The fierce competition between the two has been the driving force behind the incredible pace of development and innovation the market has seen.

Desktop

• Two years after the unveiling of its predecessor, the Dell M3800 Developers Edition aluminum-backed laptop for programmers is now here, and while it has improved in a number of interesting ways that include a new 4K ultra HD screen, it’s still a laptop that doesn’t come with the light, airy body of other brand models. Then again, this isn’t a gaming laptop, it’s built with programming in mind.

Server

• Google is offering a new incentive for using its Google Compute Engine. With Google Cloud Launcher, you can launch more than 120 popular open-source packages.

• Google and Bitnami are launching a new feature for Google’s Cloud Platform today that makes it easier for developers to deploy over 120 popular open-source applications to its Cloud Platform. In total, Google and Bitnami have packed up over 120 applications, including the likes of WordPress, Drupal, Redis, MongoDB, Gitlab and Django, as well as infrastructure stacks for Ruby, LAMP apps, Puppet and others.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced today, March 26, the immediate availability for download of the third maintenance releases for Linux 3.19 kernel, along with Linux kernels 3.14.37 LTS and 3.10.37 LTS. Additionally, Linux kernel 3.18.10 LTS has also been announced a couple days ago.

• With this month’s release of the Catalyst 15.3 Beta for Windows, FreeSync Technology support was added. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like any Linux support is imminent.

• Some Radeon DRM changes have already been queued for Linux 4.1 and now the AMDKFD HSA driver has its initial -next pull request for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Graphics Stack

• As of this morning, there’s been 69,102 total commits to Mesa from 683 authors. The code-base is at 1.493 million lines of code. So far this year there’s been just under 1,500 commits.

• Since last year the NVIDIA Linux binary graphics driver has exposed the NVENC API for GPU-based video encode support. FFmpeg has supported NVENC for offloading the encode job to newer NVIDIA graphics processors and now they’ve extended that code to support H.265 encoding on the GPU.

• NVIDIA just released their first beta Linux graphics driver in their new, short-lived 349.xx driver series.

• Eric Anholt has called on the first pull request for the X.Org Server 1.18 merge window to improve the GLAMOR 2D acceleration code.

Benchmarks

• With having a new Apple Mac Mini in our testing labs this week, I ran some basic benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.10.2 to Ubuntu 15.04 to Fedora 21 in a few different configurations.

• It’s close to 50 Linux systems initially in the new automated test farm that are doing nothing but benchmarking day-in and day-out of upstream, open-source code! I’ve spent over the past month and hundreds of hours building the new server room and after a lot of work, it’s now back to being fully operational and churning out tons of Linux code being rigorously tested throughout the day in looking for performance regressions and other issues. Here’s a look at the new environment: an open-source test farm that has a command-center-like screen and a bar.

• Last week NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX TITAN X, their latest $999+ USD graphics card. This new graphics card packs 12GB of GDDR5 video memory and the Maxwell-based GPU is capable of 7 TFLOPS of single-precision compute power. Now it’s time for some Linux benchmarks of this new high-end graphics card at Phoronix.

Applications

• An early preview release of Git 2.4 is now available but it doesn’t add too many features as this cycle has organically found itself doing a ton of polishing and bug fixing.

• Berry is a new image viewer written in Qt, licensed under GPLv3, with a modern, simple interface and basic features.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Pillars of Eternity is the brand new RPG from Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive. It’s expensive compared to a lot of our games, so here’s our look at it.

• If that looks pretty weak to you, it is. This is more a one-person variation on the original Pong than a clever imitation at the console. And given that it has an upright orientation over a horizontal one, it has more of a feel of Arkanoid than Pong proper.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.16 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of six months’ work by the GNOME project. It includes major new features, as well as a large number of smaller improvements and enhancements. The release incorporates 33525 changes, made by approximately 1043 contributors. New features and improvements being introduced in GNOME 3.16 include:

• Red Hat garnered much of the press today with the release of their fourth quarter 2015 earnings report last night. Red Hat stock prices rose today after the announcement on this a down day on Wall Street and continued to gain a bit in after hours trading. The other big winner today was GNOME 3.16, whose headlines began yesterday with its release announcement. Just what is causing all the buzz?

• And what a release it is coming packed with more polish than a shoe shop and filled with shiny features, GNOME 3.16 sees the desktop environment level up once again to take on its critics and meet the evolving needs of Linux desktop users.

• I downloaded the GNOME 3.16 live demo image and experimented with what the latest GNOME has to offer. My focus is usability testing, so I wanted to explore the live demo to see how the usability has improved in the latest release.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat reported its fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2015 earnings on March 25, once again showing continued growth across its entire software portfolio.

• Red Hat, the world’s largest commercial distributor of the Linux operating system, reported revenue and profit that beat estimates, as the company benefited from higher demand for open-source software and its cloud-based products.

• Red Hat Inc., up $6.91 to $75.36

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• When constantly benchmarking dozens of systems daily in a fully-automated manner there’s one issue particularly on Ubuntu that’s proved over the past few months to be most annoying…

• As some more exciting open-source benchmarking news this week besides the release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 and The New Place Where Linux And Other Open-Source Code Is Constantly Being Benchmarked (a.k.a. the new ~50 system upstream Linux benchmarking test farm complete with a bar), the barrier to entry for benchmarking Ubuntu in the Cloud is now even lower. It’s becoming rather trivial to run Ubuntu Cloud benchmarks.

• Last week we relayed the article by Carsten Munk of Jolla about the kernel of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Phone being a mess. Since then, it looks like BQ and Ubuntu developers have taken to cleaning up the kernel source tree.

• Some of you might be aware of the fact that about a week ago, on March 18, Carsten Munk, Chief Research Engineer at Jolla, published an interesting article on his blog, where he claimed that BQ is not offering a GPL license for the Linux kernel that powers the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition device.

• Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet final beta was released today, bringing quite a few changes, like locally integrated menus (LIM) by default, upstart was replaced with systemd by default as well as various other improvements and fixes. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Flavours and Variants

• The second Beta of Vivid (to become 15.04) has now been released!

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• When it comes to text-based communication tools, we’re experiencing a kind of Cambrian Explosion. Emoji has long gone mainstream, leading to a wave of niche Ikea emoticons and Saturday Night Live pictograms. Even this week’s New Yorker is a riff on emoji.

• This is the Android-x86 boot menu. You have the option to boot into a live desktop or straight to the installer. The latter option seems to be the most appropriate thing to do here.

• This isn’t your typical Kickstarter. Jeremy Chau, one of the company’s co-founders, states it clearly from the get-go in the campaign’s introductory video. Remix isn’t a bunch of over-promised under-delivered hogwash that may get stuck for years in the development and manufacturing process like 90% of Kickstarter products — it is a real tablet, it was demo’ed at CES, and it’s already being sold in China.

Free Software/Open Source

• Some great questions have been answered in a recent blog post from the OpenGeo crew. The meaty article takes a close look at the OpenGeo Suite as well as a look at the individual, OpenGeo Components. For the non-developer type like yours truly, this is an excellent and must read if you think there’s any chance you might be considering a move to open source solutions in your mapping workflows.

• Services such as Apache OpenOffice can provide much of the functionality of Microsoft Office without the cost, while Mozilla Firefox is currently the world’s third most-used browser. Both are completely free and customisable.

Databases

• Let’s hope Apple just sent the wrong memo and will reopen the repository perhaps under a different name.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The GTK3 port of LibreOffice is finally taking shape and gaining new functionality.

• Earlier this month I wrote about some much desired work on improving the GTK3 port of LibreOffice and getting that finally squared away. Yesterday’s news about LibreOffice Online as a web/cloud-based version of the software further demands the GTK3 port due to its use of the GTK3-only HTML5 Broadway back-end.

CMS

• Both of these represent an infusion of proprietary interests into the community model to ensure that the work moves forward. And institutions are discovering that a certain level of corporate involvement just might help turn around the thinking of institutional leaders who aren’t persuaded that open source is right for their campuses.

• [...]

• Plenty of other institutions have already adopted it. When Albert posted a message to a Drupal listserv asking for other schools that were using Drupal, they came out in droves. People from Washington University in St. Louis (MO), the University of Missouri School of Journalism, San Francisco State University (CA), Wright State University (OH), Penn State University, Oregon State University, Portland State University (OR) and many others spoke up, advising on which version of the software to deploy.

Licensing

• While Allwinner has been caught violating the (L)GPL and resulted in obfuscating their code and playing around with their advertised licenses, now this ARM vendor is taking things a step further.

Openness/Sharing

• By assuming control of the Swagger API project, SmartBear now supports two of the most popular open-source API projects, SoapUI and Swagger.

• DroneKit is the company’s API for drone app development, designed to provide a platform for developers to create Web-based drone apps.

Programming

• Google’s Dart team has announced the release of Dart 1.9 today with new async and await support.

• Asynchronous programming is everywhere – user interaction, network access, file I/O. Dart simplifies and enhances these scenarios with the 1.9 release.

Leftovers

• SCO started out here in my neighborhood, essentially, in Santa Cruz, California. It was called The Santa Cruz Operation (hence, SCO). That manifestation of SCO was founded in 1979 by Larry and Doug Michels, a father and son, as a Unix porting and consulting company which, over time, developed its own brand of Unix. In his book “The Art of Unix Programming,” Eric Raymond calls SCO the “first Unix company.”

• As the story goes, the first SCO was sold to Caldera, a Linux company, in 2001 and rebranded The SCO Group, which moved it to Utah and made it a litigation company, and we pretty much know the rest of the story from there.

• [...]

• So pre-sale SCO –- the original SCO –- wasn’t the evil entity it is now, and by no means is this recollection an endorsement of what the current manifestation is doing in the courts. It just serves as a reminder that sometimes things –- good things –- can go south very quickly and become the complete opposite of what the original folks had in mind.

• In Andreas Lubitz’s home town in western Germany, the sense of disbelief was palpable. Everyone who had encountered the 27-year-old, who grew up dreaming of becoming a pilot, described him as quiet, polite and “normal”.

• Yet, in what German Chancellor Angela Merkel described as a “new, simply incomprehensible” dimension to the Germanwings air disaster, it appeared that Lubitz was responsible for the deaths of 149 people.

Hardware

• Samsung may be interested in buying Advanced Micro Devices as it looks to boost its position against such chip-making rivals as Intel and Qualcomm, according to reports coming out of South Korea.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• NATO countries are to all intents and purposes at war with Russia. The US knows it and Russia knows it too. Unfortunately, most of those living in NATO countries remain blissfully ignorant of this fact.

• The US initiated economic sanctions against Russia, has attacked its currency and has manipulated oil prices to devastate the Russian economy. It was behind the coup in Ukraine and is now escalating tensions by placing troops in Europe and supporting a bunch of neo-fascists that it brought to power. Yet the bought and paid for corporate media in the West keeps the majority of the Western public in ignorance by depicting Russia as the aggressor.

• The Pentagon lost track of sensitive equipment from a $750 million program to help U.S. soldiers spot roadside bombs — and some of it wound up for sale on eBay, Craigslist and other websites, according to a Navy intelligence document obtained by The Intercept.

• The Washington Post reported this morning that, pursuant to CIA Director John Brennan’s vaunted re-organization plans, the chief of the agency’s counterterrorism center has been unceremoniously reassigned. The newspaper declined to report this name, however: Michael D’Andrea.

Transparency Reporting

• A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability. The details are crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here.

Finance

• Less than three weeks after a classified draft of its proposed 12-nation trade pact included provisions that critics say empower foreign companies to overturn domestic regulations, the Obama administration explicitly declared that the deal would not permit such actions. The declaration came in an email challenging the veracity of a report about earlier leaks of language in the proposed agreement.

• The email challenged an International Business Times report noting the details of a 2013 draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That draft proposed to let foreign companies file lawsuits in international tribunals seeking payments for financial losses incurred by domestic laws — a power that critics say could ultimately compel governments to overturn those laws, for fear of facing even more lawsuits and damage payments.

• Wikileaks has released the “Investment Chapter” from the secret negotiations of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. It contains the highly controversial investor-to-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS), which makes it possible for multinational to sue states for international tribunals.

• For years now, we’ve been warning about the problematic “ISDS” — “investor state dispute settlement” mechanisms that are a large part of the big trade agreements that countries have been negotiating. As we’ve noted, the ISDS name is designed to be boring, in an effort to hide the true impact — but the reality is that these provisions provide corporate sovereignty, elevating the power of corporations to put them above the power of local governments. If you thought “corporate personhood” was a problem, corporate sovereignty takes things to a whole new level — letting companies take foreign governments to special private “tribunals” if they think that regulations passed in those countries are somehow unfair. Existing corporate sovereignty provisions have led to things like Big Tobacco threatening to sue small countries for considering anti-smoking legislation and pharma giant Eli Lilly demanding $500 million from Canada, because Canada dared to reject some of its patents noting (correctly) that the drugs didn’t appear to be any improvement over existing drugs.

• An ambitious 12-nation trade accord pushed by President Obama would allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment “expectations” and hurt their business, according to a classified document.

• The Trans-Pacific Partnership — a cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s remaining economic agenda — would grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.

• The United States is in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive free-trade agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries. Who will benefit from the TPP? American workers? Consumers? Small businesses? Taxpayers? Or the biggest multinational corporations in the world?

• The controversial investment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) has just been posted by Wikileaks, along with an analysis by Washington-based Public Citizen. Dated 20 January 2015, at the start of the negotiating round in New York, it clearly shows the governments has capitulated to US demands.

• ‘We haven’t seen a text since 2012’, said Auckland University law professor Jane Kelsey. ‘Today’s leaked text confirms all our worst fears.’

• Australian health, environment and public welfare regulation, including plain tobacco packaging legislation, will be open for challenge from largely US-based corporations, if a new deal that is part of the Trans Pacific Partnership goes through.

• WikiLeaks has revealed that the Australian government is close to agreement on a wide-ranging trade deal that could allow multinational corporations to challenge these regulations as well as local food safety standards. The new TPP free trade agreement will cover approximately 40 per cent of the world economy.

• Intellectual property law expert, Australian National University Associate Professor Matthew Rimmer says the WikiLeaks publication is “a bombshell” that will “galvanise resistance and opposition to fast-tracking of this mega trade deal”.

• The Government must be more transparent around the draft investor state dispute settlements in the TPPA, says David Parker, Labour’s Export Growth and Trade spokesperson.

• “Labour is pro trade, and is proud of the FTA we negotiated with China, which includes well drafted ISDS provisions. We also support the FTA with South Korea.

• Australia appears to be the lone holdout – for now – to a key section of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that details how multinational companies could take legal actions against governments over decisions they consider detrimental to their interests.

• WikiLeaks today revealed the controversial investment chapter of the TPP, which shows the intent of negotiating parties, led by the US, to create a supra-national court where foreign firms could sue states using investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses and overrule their national court systems.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• US government officials are calling to overhaul the state funded media apparatus and focus on counter-propaganda against hostile nations, according to a report seen by Reuters.

• The study was written by two former Western state funded news employees, Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) governor and Radio France Europe/Radio Liberty vice president, who declared the US is losing the information war to adversaries. Despite its annual $730 million budget, the BBG is asking Congress for an additional $15 million to combat Russian media specifically.

Privacy

• How much longer can the GCSB spying scandal run? Nicky Hager recently told the radio station bFM that “in some respects we’re only just at the beginning of what people are going to find out”. This continued drip-feeding of information about what our spies have really been up to will not bring down the Government or lose National the Northland by-election, but the ongoing revelations might still seriously tarnish New Zealand’s international reputation, as well as erode the public’s faith in its surveillance institutions.

• Opposition parties have used Parliament’s question time to accuse the Government of using the country’s spy agencies for its own political purposes.

• An inquiry into the activities of New Zealand’s electronic surveillance agency has been launched by the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security.

• New Zealand’s inspector-general of intelligence and security is launching an inquiry into allegations that the Government Communications Security Bureau intercepted the communications of New Zealanders in the South Pacific.

• New Zealand’s spy agency watchdog is launching an investigation into the scope of the country’s secret surveillance operations following a series of reports from The Intercept and its partners.

• On Thursday, Cheryl Gwyn, New Zealand’s inspector-general of intelligence and security, announced that she would be opening an inquiry after receiving complaints about spying being conducted in the South Pacific by eavesdropping agency Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB.

• In a press release, Gwyn’s office said: “The complaints follow recent public allegations about GCSB activities. The complaints, and these public allegations, raise wider questions regarding the collection, retention and sharing of communications data.”

• This month, The Intercept has shined a light on the GCSB’s surveillance with investigative reports produced in partnership with the New Zealand Herald, Herald on Sunday, and Sunday-Star-Times.

• For a while, I have believed that there are at least three leakers inside the Five Eyes intelligence community, plus another CIA leaker. What I have called Leaker #2 has previously revealed XKEYSCORE rules. Whether this new disclosure is from Leaker #2 or a new Leaker #5, I have no idea. I hope someone is keeping a list.

• Speaking before the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey urged Congress to pass legislation requiring tech companies to install backdoors in their encryption programs. These backdoors would allow government agencies to easily intercept the electronic communications of American citizens, the District Sentinel reports.

• Guests at hundreds of hotels around the world are susceptible to serious hacks because of routers that many hotel chains depend on for their Wi-Fi networks. Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the systems, which would allow an attacker to distribute malware to guests, monitor and record data sent over the network, and even possibly gain access to the hotel’s reservation and keycard systems.

• Special operations troops heading to war zones are asking for commercial intelligence analysis software they say will help their missions. But their requests are languishing, and they are being ordered to use a flawed, in-house system preferred by the Pentagon, according to government records and interviews.

• Over the last four months, six Army special operations units about to be deployed into Afghanistan, Iraq and other hostile environments have requested intelligence software made by Palantir, a Silicon Valley company that has synthesized data for the CIA, the Navy SEALs and the country’s largest banks, among other government and private entities.

• It’s getting easier to secure your digital privacy. iPhones now encrypt a great deal of personal information; hard drives on Mac and Windows 8.1 computers are now automatically locked down; even Facebook, which made a fortune on open sharing, is providing end-to-end encryption in the chat tool WhatsApp. But none of this technology offers as much protection as you may think if you don’t know how to come up with a good passphrase.

• The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to “disclose information about the existence or non-existence” of a warrant to spy on journalists.

• Governments and corporations gather, store, and analyze the tremendous amount of data we chuff out as we move through our digitized lives. Often this is without our knowledge, and typically without our consent. Based on this data, they draw conclusions about us that we might disagree with or object to, and that can impact our lives in profound ways. We may not like to admit it, but we are under mass surveillance.

• Police conducted spying operations on a string of Labour politicians during the 1990s, covertly monitoring them even after they had been elected to the House of Commons, a whistleblower has revealed.

• Peter Francis, a former undercover police officer, said he read secret files on 10 MPs during his 11 years working for the Metropolitan police’s special branch. They include Labour’s current deputy leader, Harriet Harman, the former cabinet minister Peter Hain and the former home secretary Jack Straw.

• The FBI used to publish excellent advice about encrypting your devices to keep your data secure when your stuff is lost or stolen; this advice has been silently dropped now that FBI Director James Comey is trying to stop manufacturers from using crypto by default.

• The FBI has joined with others, like UK Prime Minister David Cameron in calls to end the use of effective cryptography because it makes it harder to spy on people.

• The measure would have made Italy “the first European country that explicitly and broadly legalised and authorised the state to conduct remote computer searches and use spyware,” said lawmaker Stefano Quintarelli, a member of a small centrist party that supports the governing coalition.

Civil Rights

• When Ron Wyden arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1996, he was determined to focus on more than just trees.

• In the mid-1990s, Oregon, Wyden’s home state, was best known for environmental industries, like forestry. But Wyden, a Democrat who had just won a special Senate election after serving eight terms in the House, wanted to expand his portfolio.

• “I said, ‘I am gonna be a fierce advocate for Oregon’s resource-dependent communities and jobs in forestry,’” Wyden told the Daily Dot during a recent interview, “and I made the judgment that we had to get into some additional areas.”

• A man who faced accusations that he was plotting to mount an Islamic State-inspired gun or bomb attack on the streets of London has been acquitted after a highly secretive Old Bailey trial.

• Erol Incedal, 27, was cleared of preparation of acts of terrorism after a four-week retrial in which large parts of the evidence were heard inside a locked courtroom.

• Incedal broke down and wept as the jury returned a majority verdict after 27 hours of deliberation.

• Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels overseas over a period of several years, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s watchdog.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Minister of Culture announced yesterday a plan of action for the fight against piracy and an agreement (fr) on online advertising negotiated between advertisers, advertising agencies and rightsholders under the supervision of the government. This agreement confirms the fears La Quadrature du Net has expressed over the last several months about the growing threat of repressive online policy (fr). It organises a system in which identifying “massively infringing sites” is relegated to advertising companies while circumventing the law, which alone should be authorised to decide about this in order to adequately guarantee freedom of expression and the right to information. This new development marks a step towards the creation of a private police force in the name of intellectual property rights.

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