● 03.30.15

● Links 30/3/2015: Linux 4.0 RC6, OpenELEC 5.0.7

Posted in News Roundup at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If you are a Linux open source operating system user then this recent news from Microsoft can make your life tougher. The new Secure Boot requirements can make installing the Linux operating system much harder than it ever used to be. Microsoft gives manufacturers an option to enable UEFI Secure Boot without providing you a manual kill switch, which means that you could only be able to boot your PCs with Microsoft approved operating systems.

Desktop

• Google has announced a couple of days ago, on March 27, that the Chrome OS Beta channel is now open to anyone daring to test the upcoming major release of the Linux kernel-based operating system designed for Chromebooks, which will bring a number of attractive features.

• France has been a hotbed of GNU/Linux adoption for years and the effort is bearing fruit. Schools, governments and business are all playing a part.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing today, March 29, the immediate availability for download and testing of the sixth Release Candidate (RC) version of forthcoming Linux 4.0 kernel. Apparently, some important bugs have been squashed, which means that the final Linux kernel 4.0 will be released sooner than expected.

Graphics Stack

• The NIR intermediate representation for Mesa continues taking flight and driven by Intel’s open-source developers.

• Emil Velikov has pushed out a weekend update for stable Mesa users.

Benchmarks

Applications

• We’ve introduced Cutegram 2 a while back as the best Telegram Client for Linux ever. Since then, the application received several maintenance releases and it has been updated today, March 29, to version 2.1.1, a point release that brings many cool features to the application.

• Rhythmbox 3.2 has been released today, March 29. This is the second maintenance release since Rhythmbox 3.0 was announced and it brings several new features, but also fixes those annoying bugs that you’ve reported since the last stable release of the software, version 3.1, which is still used as the default music player in many popular distributions, such as Ubuntu.

• A new maintenance release of the powerful and popular MKVToolnix software that allows users to manipulate MKV (Matroska) files in Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, has been updated today to version 7.8.0, a release that introduces numerous improvements and some new features.

• I’ve just released gnutls 3.3.14. This is a bug-fix release on the current stable branch.

Instructionals/Technical

• In my previous post I showed how to install CuterCode and Qreator, two simple GUI applications for producing QR Codes, in Gentoo Linux. I have now found a couple of other GUI applications, both of which offer more features than the aforementioned two, such as allowing you to specify the amount of error correction to be incorporated into the QR Code. QR Code codewords are 8 bits long and use the Reed–Solomon error correction algorithm, with four error correction levels possible in the case of QR Codes:

Games

• Captain Forever Remix is a colourful and fun spaceship action and building game that just released into early access, and I took a look.

• The contract between the two companies means that before PC and PS4, Activision has to release its ‘Call of Duty’ expansion packs on Microsoft consoles, which at the moment are Xbox One and Xbox 360. This may not be a big deal for most gamers, but can play a vital role in deciding which console to opt for if the person is a COD fan. Microsoft has a similar deal with EA Sports over ‘FIFA Ultimate Team Legends’.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• For anyone who has been paying any attention of PyKDE5 over the last year or so, it is no secret that development and maintenance has been at a standstill. I’ve been very busy with a family and small children, and that eats time like you wouldn’t believe. (Unit number 2 is almost 6 months now, healthy and happy I can report.) But another important factor is that my interests have shifted towards web related technologies over the last few years.

• qt-kde-620x350Here’s the latest and greatest of KDE’s software collection (Frameworks, Plasma, Applications). SInce my last ‘ktown’ release, all of KDE’s sources have been renewed, and today I am making public a package set for KDE 5 aka Plasma 5 with version 5_15.03: my March ’15 release.

• The KDE Project developers announce that KDE Applications 15.04 RC has been released and is now ready for testing. It will be a while until this is ready for shipment, but until then we’ll be able to take it for a spin.

• KDE’s third update of its 14.12 series of Applications and Frameworks 5.8.0 are now available in Chakra’s stable repositories. With this release kde-workspace has also been updated to version 4.11.17 and kdelibs to 4.14.6.

Distributions

OpenELEC

• Since I laid my hands on the Raspberry Pi 2 (RPi2) I have been experimenting with Raspbian and various Ubuntu builds. But that’s just the starting point for my adventures with the RPi2. One distribution I have been wanting to try for a while is OpenELEC (the Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center), an embedded operating system. This distro turns PCs into a home theatre centre. My WDTV media player is showing its age, and the RPi2 looks a suitable low cost replacement.

• The OpenELEC development team has announced today, March 29, the seventh maintenante release of the OpenELEC 5.0 Linux kernel-based operating system for embedded devices, such as Raspberry Pi or Apple TV, transforming them into portable media centers based on the popular Kodi software, formerly XBMC Media Center.

• The OpenELEC team is proud to announce OpenELEC 5.0.7.

• OpenELEC-5.0 is the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-4.2.

New Releases

• The availability of the Beta version of the upcoming HandyLinux 2.0 computer operating system has been announced today, March 30, on the distribution’s website, which has been redesigned to match the look and feel of the OS.

• Zbigniew Konojacki had the pleasure of announcing today, March 28, on his Twitter account that the development cycle towards the 4MLinux 12.0 computer operating system has started with the Beta release for the 4MLinux Allinone Edition, 4MLinux Core, and 4MLinux distributions.

• On March 27, 2015, French developer Rodolphe Bachelart, the creator of the Live Voyager series of GNU/Linux distributions based on Ubuntu/Xubuntu, was proud to announce the immediate availability for download of a new computer operating system, Live Voyager X 14.04.4 LTS.

• François Dupoux has announced today, March 30, the second maintenance release for his popular SystemRescueCd 4.5 Linux kernel-based Live CD operating system that can be used by system administrators for all sorts of system rescue and recovery tasks.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• Last time we looked at the Manjaro Linux Cinnamon computer operating system, about one month ago, when version 0.8.12 was made available for download, it was using a default Cinnamon theme with a mix of icons borrowed from the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Debian Family

• Arne Exton had the pleasure of informing Softpedia earlier today, March 29, about the immediate availability for download of a new build (150329) of his DebEX Barebone computer operating system derived from the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 8 Jessie distribution and built around the recently released Xfce 4.12 desktop environment.

• All of my improvements have been committed into the various Debian packages involved, and the latest release candidate for Jessie’s debian-installer build (RC2) works just as well as my test builds on the Bay Trail system I’ve been using (Asus X205TA). Job done!

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As you may know, Canonical has started working at Dekko, its own email client for Ubuntu Touch, using the lightweight Trojita email client as code-base.

• Canonical has struck a three-year deal with Ericsson to power up the Ericsson’s Cloud System platform with the Ubuntu operating system.

• Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is almost here and the developers are mostly done with the development, but the kernel team still has some time for various updates. In fact, the Linux kernel has been updated to a newer version.

Flavours and Variants

• Not only are the Linux Mint developers working on the operating systems, they are also making sure that third-party developers have a say in their project as well. That is why they have started to work on a new project called “mint-dev-tools,” which is aimed specifically at devs, as the name implies.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• LG has launched one of its new curved mid-range smartphones in India, the LG Spirit, listing it on its country-specific website at Rs. 14,250. The company has not yet announced availability details for the smartphone.

• The popular Video LAN Client may finally have a stable release for Android, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. The 1.2 update adds support for audio playlists, which was apparently missing from the previous releases. Unfortunately due to the limitations of M3U files (the default playlist type for the desktop version of VLC) it’s tricky to simply copy your playlists from your computer to your phone. You’ll probably need to set them up manually in the app, as below.

• Verizon is re-seeding the Google Android 5.0 (Lollipop) OS update, for Samsung Galaxy S5 users who have subscribed to its wireless network services in the US.

• After the Nexus devices, Motorola is rumored to be next in line to receive the Android 5.1 Lollipop update. And with news that the Android 5.1 Lollipop notes already up at the Motorola website, it seems practically imminent that the Moto X will be getting the updated Android OS soon.

• A new Android 5.1 Lollipop CM12.1 custom ROM has been made available to the Samsung’s 2014 flagship smartphone, Galaxy S5.

• Owners of the 2014 Moto G in the U.K. are now receiving the handset’s latest Android 5.0 Lollipop software. The release brings lots of new features and improvements, including Google’s gorgeous new Material Design overhaul.

• Verizon customers with a Galaxy S5 are finally getting Lollipop again, almost two months after the update began its rollout and was subsequently pulled. In addition to visual improvements, the update brings numerous new features.

• According to a report published this weekend, the new version of TouchWiz that is found on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 edge could be made available to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 when the phablet receives its Android 5.1 update. The first Samsung devices to get the Android 5.1 update will be the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge. Keep in mind that none of this has been confimed by Samsung and is all speculation at this point.

• Unlike a smartwatch, A high-quality traditional watch doesn’t need to be recharged on a daily basis. Also, it will likely be perfectly useful decades after its purchase, while a smartwatch isn’t likely to endure the tests of time very well. But can you change a classic watch’s face? Nope, we don’t think so.

• While Mesa is talked about as being able to be built for Google’s Android operating system to run these open-source graphics drivers on Android devices with OpenGL ES support, in reality there’s a lot left to be desired.

• Over the years there’s been a handful of developers working on Android Mesa support to let the popular open-source graphics drivers run over there — from the Intel driver now that they’re using HD Graphics within their low-power SoCs (rather than PowerVR), AMD has made a few steps toward Android netbook/laptop devices with Radeon graphics, and we’re starting to see Gallium3D drivers for Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno) and the Raspberry Pi (VC4) where there’s interest from Android users. This year as part of Google Summer of Code we also might see a student focused on Freedreno Android support.

• Two Technologies’s LTE-ready “N5Print” handheld runs Android on a Snapdragon 800 and has a built-in printer plus Smart Card, magstripe, and barcode support.

• Early smartphones were modeled in part on field-service handhelds, which in turn have increasingly imitated smartphones. This has been especially true in recent years as the product category has migrated from Windows Mobile and CE (and to a lesser extent plain Linux) to Android. In the past, handhelds, which are often available in commercial, as well as similar, but more robust military models, have trailed the current smartphone technology by several years. Yet, we’re seeing and more Android handhelds that rival high end smartphones, such as Arbor’s quad-core, 5.5-inch Gladius 5.

• After the One M9 that was announced earlier this month, it looks like there are more devices from the Taiwanese manufacturer than everyone expected.

• First on the list is the One M9 Plus, which is already expected to make an appearance in an April 8 event in China.

• One of the major modifications in Android’s newest system update, revolves around the ‘quick settings’ menu. For those who aren’t aware, sliding down the notifications bar twice(or once with two fingers), brings up a quick settings menu, within which one can toggle settings like screen brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, a flashlight, airplane mode, auto rotate settings, location, screen casting etc. Additionally, in Android 5.0, activating a specific toggle led to it being added to the quick settings menu, the first time they’re activated. In Android 5.1 however, it is possible to hide these icons with a long press.

Free Software/Open Source

• While yesterday I was talking about many Intel Broadwell improvements landing in Coreboot, the new Git activity today for Coreboot is about 64-bit ARM.

• I’ve written about the potential for open source in China several times, and the same can be said about India. Here’s some big news on that front, just announced by the Government of India’s Department Of Electronics & Information Technology [.pdf]:

• India has said it will use open source software in all e-governance projects, though it did not rule out the use of proprietary software to meet specialized requirements.

• The government on Sunday announced a policy on adoption of open source software, which makes it mandatory for all software applications and services of the government be built using open source software, so that projects under Digital India “ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs”.

• In a move sure to delight iOS and Android developers, Facebook has launched React-Native, an open source, cross-platform JavaScript framework for building mobile applications. Announced Thursday at the company’s F8 developer conference, the framework is based on React, another open source JavaScript framework Facebook released two years ago to help developers build user interfaces for Web projects.

• The Innovative Technology Partnerships Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, announced the release of its core Flight System (cFS) Application Suite to the public. The cFS application suite is composed of 12 individual Command and Data Handling (C&DH) flight software applications that together create a reusable library of common C&DH functions.

Events

• In a departure from prior Plumbers tradition, we are pleased to announce not a Development Tools Microconference, but rather a set of Development Tools tutorials, including interactive tutorials, demos, and short presentations. Topics include Coccinelle (Julia Lawall), testing and debugging tools (Shuah Khan), issues with copying and pasting Linux kernel code (Michael Godfrey), and LLVM/clang and the Linux kernel (Behan Webster).

• OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the first annual international tech conference in Albania organized by the open source community in Albania to promote software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge.

CMS

• Version 4.2 of WordPress, the world’s most popular web software that allows anyone to create beautiful blogs and websites in minutes, is getting closer with the recently released Beta 3 version that brings over 65 changes. The new version is available for download here.

BSD

• For years now, Linux has been all the rage. But in recent times, there have been murmurings among some veterans — long-time users — after the introduction of systemd, the init system that seems to overstep its boundaries.

Public Services/Government

• Proxy FatturaPA [1], an eInvoicing software solution co-financed by the Autonomous Province of South-Tyrol (Italy), is made public using the GPLv3 free software licence. The software is developed by Link.it, a IT company based in Pisa.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Facebook showed plans last week for drone aircraft that beam lasers conveying high-speed data to remote parts of the world.

• As powerful as that sounds, Facebook already has something that could be even more potent: a huge sharing of its once-proprietary information, the kind of thing that would bring a traditional Silicon Valley patent lawyer to tears.

Programming

Leftovers

Security

Finance

• On Wednesday afternoon, PayPal reached a settlement with the US Treasury Department, agreeing that it would pay $7.7 million for allegedly processing payments to people in countries under sanction as well as to a man the US has listed as involved in the nuclear weapons black market. The company neither confirmed nor denied the allegations, but it voluntarily handed over its transaction data to the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

• The Natural Resources Defense Council recently put out an alarming press release claiming the Xbox One is causing consumers to waste an aggregate of $250 million annually in energy costs. The culprit: the “instant on” mode that draws significant power 24 hours a day, even when the system is supposedly “off.”

• The NRDC put out the release in an effort to convince Microsoft to turn off this “instant on” setting by default, or to at least offer an option to turn it off on the system’s initial setup (as it does in Europe). Until Microsoft takes that step, though, we thought we’d bust out the old Kill A Watt power meter and confirm just how much energy our consoles are wasting when they’re not in use, and offer you some tips on how to avoid that potential waste.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• President of the Xinhua News Agency Cai Mingzhao and his Associated Press (AP) counterpart Gary Pruitt discussed cooperation between the two news outlets in the new media era on Friday at the Xinhua head office in Beijing.

• Xinhua and the AP should forge a strategic cooperative relationship, Cai said, expressing the wish that the two news agencies will expand cooperation onto a wider range of areas.

• Xinhua has been turning out omni media products integrating texts, pictures and videos, and reducing costs through application of technologies to meet the new demand of its clients, Cai noted.

Censorship

• The government has introduced a bill that will allow copyright holders to apply for court orders forcing ISPs to block access to pirate websites.

• Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull today introduced the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015.

• “Existing copyright law is not adequate to deter a specific type of infringing activity, which is the facilitation of the online infringement of copyright owners’ content… by online operators,” the minister said, introducing the bill into the lower house.

• “There are a number of foreign-based online locations that disseminate large amounts of infringing content to Australian Internet users.”

• If the bill becomes law rights holders will be able to apply to the Federal Court for an injunction that will force an ISP to block a site.

Privacy

• The NSA in no way went “cold turkey” in 2011. Starting in 2009, just before it finally confessed to DOJ it had been violating collection rules for the life of the program, it rolled out the SPCMA program that allowed the government to do precisely the same thing, from precisely the same user interface, with any Internet data accessible through EO 12333. SPCMA was made available to all units within NSA in early 2011, well before NSA “went cold turkey.” And, at the same time, NSA moved some of its Internet dragnet to PRISM production, with the added benefit that it had few of the data sharing limits that the PRTT dragnet did.

• That is, rather than going “cold turkey” the NSA moved the production under different authorities, which came with the added benefits of weaker FISC oversight, application for uses beyond counterterrorism, and far, far more permissive dissemination rules.

• That AP’s sources claimed — and AP credulously reported — that this is about “cold turkey” is a pretty glaring hint that the NSA and FBI are preparing to do something very similar with the phone dragnet. As with the Internet dragnet, SPCMA permits phone chaining for any EO 12333 phone collection, under far looser rules. And under CISA, anyone who “voluntarily” wants to share this data (which always includes AT&T and likely includes other backbone providers) can share promiscuously and with greater secrecy (because it is protected by both Trade Secret and FOIA exemption). Some of this production, done under PRISM, would permit the government to get “connection” chaining information more easily than under a phone dragnet. And as with the Internet dragnet, any move of Section 215 production to CISA production evades existing FISC oversight.

• Mr Wainwright said that in most current investigations the use of encrypted communications was found to be central to the way terrorists operated.

• Of the 10,000-plus staff at the Government Code and Cypher School during World War II, two-thirds were female. Three veteran servicewomen explain what life was like as part of the code-breaking operation during World War II.

Civil Rights

• San Francisco Sheriff’s deputies have been organizing jail inmate fights and gambling on the outcomes, according to the city’s public defender.

• At a hastily-arranged press conference Thursday, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said that deputies at the city’s jail at the Hall of Justice were involved in setting up gladiator-style fights and betting on who would win.

• “I can only describe this an an outrageously sadistic scenario,” said Adachi.

• Adachi said the ringleader in the fights was Deputy Scott Neu, who was accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to perform sexual acts on him. That case was settled out of court.

• It doesn’t happen often, but a judge has called out police officers for using a non-existent offense — “contempt of cop” — to justify the use of force against a detained person. Multnomah County (OR) Judge Diana Stewart cleared 16-year-old Portland resident Thai Gurule of several charges brought against him after he was pummeled and tased by police officers for… well, basically for responding angrily to a somewhat derogatory gesture.

• A Multnomah County judge Thursday found a 16-year-old boy not guilty of all criminal charges filed against him after a violent tussle with Portland police last year on a North Portland sidewalk.

• Circuit Judge Diana Stuart ruled that Thai Gurule, a Roosevelt High School sophomore, didn’t resist arrest. He also didn’t strangle and assault police officers, she said.

• Saudi blogger Raif Badawi has spoken for the first time since being jailed and sentenced to 1,000 lashes to say it was ‘miraculous’ that he had survived the first 50.

• Badawi was arrested in 2012 for offences including insulting Islam, cyber crime and disobeying his father (a crime in Saudi Arabia).

• Michigan cops pulled a man over for a minor traffic violation, proceeding to yank him out of his car and brutally abuse him, including one officer who placed him in a chokehold and punched him repeatedly while another officer kicked him and a third officer tased him several times.

• Inkster police say they were only trying to protect themselves from a man who threatened to kill them.

• But a police dash cam video shows they approached him at gunpoint, then yanked him out of the car without provocation on the evening of January 28, 2015.

• My son Matt has seen the ugly and inhumane side of US jails and prisons.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Now that the FCC is the subject of several lawsuits, and its leader, Chairman Tom Wheeler, was dragged in front of Congress repeatedly to answer the same battery of inanity, it’s worth checking in to see how the agency is feeling. Is it confident that its recent vote to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Telecommunications Act will hold?

• With either an ISP lawsuit or a 2016 party shift the only way to kill our new net neutrality rules, neutrality opponents have some time to kill. As such, they’re in desperate need of somewhere to direct their impotent rage at the foul idea of a healthier Internet free from gatekeeper control. Step one of this catharsis has been to publicly shame the FCC for daring to stand up to broadband ISPs in a series of increasingly absurd and often entirely nonsensical public “fact finding” hearings. Step two is to push forth a series of editorials that tries to rewrite the history of the net neutrality debate — with Netflix as the villainous, Machiavellian centerpiece.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• When I grew up, file-sharing was already rampant. But we didn’t have any Internet. We had a so-called Sneakernet. And it was actually quite comparable in sharing efficiency – not just over large distances.

• With bots performing all sorts of intellectual property policing these days, fair use considerations are completely off the table. Nuances that can’t be handled by a bot should theoretically be turned over to a human being in disputed cases. Unfortunately, dispute processes are often handled in an automated fashion, leading to even more problems.

• The MPAA and RIAA are backing a new copyright curriculum showing kids how to become “Ethical Digital Citizens.” After public pressure the curriculum was edited to include fair use principles, but a leaked MPAA email shows that there’s more fair use in the lesson plans than Hollywood wanted.

• Infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay has a new European block to contend with after a judge in Spain handed down a ruling against the site today. Local ISPs now have 72 hours in which to block the site, the first instruction of its type under the country’s so-called Sinde Law.

• City of London Police and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations underlined their relationship this week with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding. Focusing on IP crime, the agencies collaborate to suspend domains, shut down file-sharing sites, and arrest uploaders.

• A draft of new legislation aimed at stopping Aussie consumers accessing ‘pirate’ sites has been made available this morning. The amendments, which contain criteria that could see hundreds of sites blocked by ISPs, is believed to have been reworded to ensure that VPN services don’t become caught in the dragnet.

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