● 04.13.15

● Links 13/4/2015: Linux 4.0 Released; A Look at Antergos 2015.04.12

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• IBM wants to sell a lot of Power8 iron running the Linux operating system Down Under, and it wants to do it fast. Like before the end of the second quarter, which comes to a close in June. To that end, IBM New Zealand and IBM Australia have kicked out some pretty steeply discounted iron that is sure to get the attention of prospective buyers–maybe even those who might otherwise opt for Linux on X86 machinery.

• Under the deal announced in Australia last week in announcement letter ZA2Z5260A, IBM is giving discounts on eight different configurations of the Power S812L, Power S822L, and Power S824L machines, configured with varying numbers of processors cores, memory, and 15K RPM disk drives.

• According to Avi Cavale, Docker not only is ready, his company already runs thousands of Docker containers in production per week. Cavale is the co-founder and CEO of Shippable, a containerized continuous integration (CI) platform, and he says that Docker provides opportunities to radically accelerate how DevOps is “re-engineering the corporation” for IT.

Kernel Space

• Today, April 12 is a big day for all fans of the Open Source movement, as Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 4.0.

• Linux 4.0 is upon us.

• Linux Lord Linus Torvalds made it official with a typically brief post to the Linux kernel mailing list.

• The new number isn’t a sign of a major upgrade. As we’ve chronicled, Torvalds thinks that it looks a bit silly when version numbers go beyond x.19. He therefore decided it would be best to tick over from 3.19 to 4.0 for the sake of neatness, rather than to celebrate any particular milestone in the kernel.

• Which is not to say this release is devoid of improvements. Notable inclusions are the addition of non-disruptive patching, support for Intel’s Quark systems-on-a-chips and better support for the Z13 silicon powering IBM’s latest mainframes. A handful of new ARM chips also get support and there’s the usual round of improvements and tweaks to graphics and sound performance.

• Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux Kernel 4.0, as expected after the RC7 release, last week.

Applications

• This model of federation is criticized by many new users who land on GNU social having had the experience of socialization of Twitter and Facebook. They label this difference “federation issues” and complain that conversations they participate in only show messages from the person that they themselves follow or other people in their node. The solution is as technically simple to implement as it is dangerous.

• What such a request would do, in reality, is break the federation of content based on implicit contracts and open the doors to the aggregation of everything, everywhere, breaking any chain of trust. That is, it would remove the basis for allowing the nodes to create spaces for real conversation. By breaking this model of federating content, we would be importing the social model of the great centralizers, the Facebook-Twitter model, into the spaces and networks that we built on the basis of tools like GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica, etc.

• A short time after branching GCC 5 and initiating GCC 6.0 development, the first GCC 5.1 Release Candidate has surfaced in marking the big GCC 5.

• GCC 5 is to be the first release under the GNU Compiler Collect’s new versioning scheme. The new versioning scheme is outlined on the GCC develop page. Right now the code is at GCC 5.0.0 for the GCC 5 branch but it will become GCC 5.0.1 when in the pre-release state and GCC 5.1.0 will be the first release from the GCC 5 branch, GCC 5.2.0 will be the second release from the GCC 5 branch, etc.

• Soon after my daughter was born, I became increasingly concerned about sharing her pictures in Facebook. I’d usually post one picture of her, and see it quickly reshared by family and friend. Yes, it was flattering, but with privacy concerns growing daily, it left an uneasy feeling.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Valve is now offering its entire catalogue of games to the Mesa developers in order to reward them for the work they’ve put into this open source project.

• Valve are giving away their games for free again, and this time it has been extended to include developers of the Mesa project.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The mini-Debconf Lyon 2015, in addition to being a great meeting to meet both friendly and new faces, has been the occasion for me to update and enrich the GNOME for system administrators course.

Distributions

New Releases

• Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD based on the testing packages from the Debian project that’s using GNOME as the desktop, has been upgraded to version 7.5 Test 2 and is ready for download and testing.

• It’s finally here, elementary OS Freya is the first release since August 2013. The highly polished OS comes with over 1,100 fixes, improvements and new features including better notifications, a refined look and feel, UEFI support and a new captive portal assistant to make connecting to public WiFi easier.

Screenshots

Ballnux/SUSE

• This week we have Hack Week at SUSE. The whole engineering team works on projects of their choice during this week. Everybody is free to innovate, to learn, and to collaborate with others.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The promise of a smartphone powered by Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, is quite an old one but it seems that 2015 is finally the year when it all takes flesh. First among the promised batch of Ubuntu phones, bq unveiled its Ubuntu-flavored Aquaris E4.5 at MWC 2015 last February. Now that very same device is available for purchase, but limited only to the European Union. Late to the market and limited availability, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, might have an even harder time breaking into the space than, say, Firefox OS.

Flavours and Variants

• Entroware has become the first hardware partner for Ubuntu MATE, meaning that users can now purchase a laptop powered by this operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• OpenEmbed announced a “SOM5360″ module that runs Linux or Android on a Cortex-A5 Atmel SAM5D34 SoC. The COM adds a Cortex-M3 chip plus CAN and LCD I/O.

Phones

Tizen

• Digital Photography Review is a well established and respected Photography enthusiast site that was founded back in 1998, and which specializes in reviews of consumer digital cameras. Recently they have got hands on with the Tizen based Samsung NX1 Smart Camera and have carried out a full in-depth review, which is what they are famous for. This was a production Samsung NX1 running the latest firmware 1.22.

Android

• Google’s Nexus 6 Android 5.1 Lollipop update has been rolling out slowly for several weeks and we’re finally starting to see Google make a big push with the roll out. We’ve shared how to install the latest software, gave it an initial look and tested performance, and now we’re sharing additional details in our Nexus 6 Android 5.1 Lollipop update review.

• The days when iOS had all the fun are over – these Android games are as good as any you’ll find round Apple’s way

• Google has been experimenting with Android Wear so that Android smartwatch owners could use them with their iPhones. Apple, of course, would have to allow it in the Apple Store.

• We’re not exactly sure where the little green robot that’s become the staple of Android’s branding originated. But apparently it just started to “show up” all over Android’s apps.

• “So the robot [is] starting to show up,” one person who worked on the Android team in its early days told Business Insider. “Some engineer, somebody created it. I don’t even know who. And then they probably showed it to Andy [Rubin], and he said ‘that’s cool,’ and he took that robot and he open sourced it.”

• Samsung’s latest Lollipop update for the Galaxy Note 4 — Android 5.0.1 — doesn’t just bring some crucial bug fixes, but also a proper mute mode that’s been missing from Android since Lollipop made its public debut last fall.

• Prolific software programmers of XDA Developers Forum have released the latest CyanogenMod CM12.1 series custom ROM to the Sony’s 2013 flagship smartphone Xperia Z1 (aka Yuga) model.

• I must confess that, at first, I did not like the idea of taking a phone out when I am jogging. However, I like to listen to music while on the street. Moreover, there are apps that can actually motivate you to keep going. For Android, my favorite is RunKeeper. For Firefox OS, Run-Bike-Hike is my app of choice.

• OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei has now confirmed that the eagerly anticipated CyanogenMod 12S update for the OnePlus One smartphone has received certification and will be rolled out within a few days.

• While last month HTC reportedly started rolling out Android 5.0 Lollipop OS to HTC One handsets in India, the Taiwanese tech firm is now reportedly rolling out the update to the HTC One (E8), Desire Eye, and Butterfly S.

• The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has announced the arrest of a 25-year-old, believed to be the creator of a particularly harmful strain of Android money-stealing malware, known as Svpeng, that had infected as many as 350,000 Google devices last year. Four other suspects thought to be members of the cybercriminal gang, who were said to have a penchant for Nazi iconography, were also detained.

Free Software/Open Source

• The recent news around Nebula shutting its doors has stirred speculation that OpenStack startups are struggling because of the state of the OpenStack market. There is even a piece claiming that the OpenStack dream is on “life support.”

• This couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that winning in open source requires a playbook that is drastically different from one that most VCs investing in technology today are used to.

• I’ve felt this tension firsthand. My company, PencilBlue, an open source content management system, was instantly dismissed by a well-known venture capitalist because, as he put it, “No website creation tool makes money unless it completely gets rid of the need for developers.” This is someone who made seed investments in multiple household-name tech startups, and he had no clue that more than 70% of all websites are created by developers and that the $21 billion web development industry is ruled by open source platforms.

• That open source startups are hard to find in the investment-first ecosystem is not surprising, because they’re usually started by people who actually build the product. Most of the time, seeking early stage investment for an open source product doesn’t make financial sense. On the other hand, there’s much to be gained from the business and marketing knowledge in local startup communities, so being sequestered from them can put open source developers at a disadvantage.

Events

• With three days to go, innovative new conference Open Source // Open Society (OS//OS) has sold out.

CMS

• Over the next year, political pundits will spend far too much time dissecting the horse race, scandals (real or imagined), the electoral college and more polls than you can shake a stick at. I’m doing none of that. I’m just looking at websites.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Opening up the code could give enterprise customers more input into what new features are added into future versions. For Pivotal, the move provides an entry to those corporate clients that have adopted policies of using open-source software whenever possible, said Roman Shaposhnik, Pivotal’s director of open source.

• The company also hopes the software, released under the name Project Geode, will find a wider user base, one looking for big data analysis technologies speedier than Hadoop or Spark, Shaposhnik said.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• We use git extensively for documentation in OpenStack so that we can “treat the docs like the code”—and I’m seeing this trend many places especially in the Write the Docs community.

Leftovers

Security

• The head of the French TV network that suspended broadcasting following last week’s hack attack has confirmed the service exposed its own passwords during a TV interview, but said the gaffe came only after the breach.

• “We don’t hide the fact that this is a blunder,” the channel’s director general Yves Bigot, told the AFP news service.

• The exposure came during an interview a rival TV service broadcast on the TV5Monde attack. During the questioning, a TV5Monde journalist sat in front of several scraps of paper hanging on a window. One of them showed the password of for the network’s YouTube account. As Ars reported last week, the pass code was “lemotdepassedeyoutube,” which translates in English to “the password of YouTube.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Police in northern India have reportedly acquired pepper-spraying drones intended for use on protesters and others labeled as threats to public safety.

• “They can be used to shower pepper powder on an unruly mob in case of any trouble,” said Yashasvi Yadav, police superintendent of Lucknow, a major city in northern India, according to the Times of India.

Transparency Reporting

• Government secrecy has long been a hallmark of Britain, where neither laws nor traditions made it easy to obtain the documents and records that are the underpinnings of any bureaucracy. But a decade ago, the doors were swung wide open to allow the sunshine of public scrutiny into agencies, bureaus and councils, and the result has been both gratifying and slightly alarming.

• While Britain’s Freedom of Information law has established itself as a potent tool to scrutinize the work of public authorities and hold those in power accountable, it has also had some expensive consequences — and, in some cases, revealed the absurdity of public whim.

• The hundreds of thousands of requests that have been received at various levels of government in the last decade have not only been time-consuming for agencies and councils, they have also proved extremely costly.

• Such, though, is the side effect of transparency, say the proponents of open government, who also argue that the benefits outweigh the burdens.

• “What people often forget is just how much F.O.I. saves money, because it exposes wasteful and extravagant spending,” said Paul Gibbons, a freedom of information campaigner and blogger. “Just one example: a local council in Scotland was spending thousands every year sending a delegation to Japan for a flower festival. Once F.O.I. came into force, they quickly realized they couldn’t justify doing that.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Despite having among the highest water availability per capita in the world and holding about 2.7 percent of the world’s total fresh water reserves, Nepal suffers from a chronic water shortage.

• Set against a decade of political turbulence, acute mismanagement of water supplies and large in-migration from villages to the capital Kathmandu, the less socio-economically advantaged half of Nepal is increasingly left to fend for itself to gain access to clean water.

• In Kathmandu, the Nepalese government’s Central Bureau of Statistics shows that one out of five households do not have a domestic water source, while two-thirds live with a water supply which most probably would fail the standard for being ‘clean and safe.’

Finance

• As one watched representatives of the three most important IT companies in the world being grilled by an Australian Senate committee on tax avoidance last week, it soon became obvious that the whole show was a farce. The corporations have been fleecing Australia of billions of dollars in tax revenues for years and successive governments have been either powerless or unwilling to do anything.

• In the revenue leeching stakes, Apple is by far the worst offender followed by Microsoft, with Google bringing up the rear only by the virtue of its Australian R&D activities.

• The contempt with which all three companies view the Australian Government and the Australian people was obvious by the personnel they chose to front the Senate committee.

• For most of World of Warcraft’s history, the only way to buy in-game gold with real currency was to go through one of many gray market third-party services (which technically goes against Blizzard’s terms of service for the game). That was true until yesterday, when Blizzard introduced a $20 game time token that can be sold for gold at the in-game auction house on North American servers (European servers will get the feature at a later date). While the real-world price of those tokens is fixed at $20, the gold price is “determined dynamically based on supply and demand,” as Blizzard puts it.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A front-page article is devoted to a flawed story about a campus rape in the journal Rolling Stone, exposed in the leading academic journal of media critique. So severe is this departure from journalistic integrity that it is also the subject of the lead story in the business section, with a full inside page devoted to the continuation of the two reports. The shocked reports refer to several past crimes of the press: a few cases of fabrication, quickly exposed, and cases of plagiarism (“too numerous to list”). The specific crime of Rolling Stone is “lack of skepticism,” which is “in many ways the most insidious” of the three categories.

Privacy

• Rights groups have asked the European Court of Human Rights to rule on the legality of the UK’s large-scale surveillance regime.

• Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International filed a legal complaint with the court today.

• The scale of the surveillance carried out by GCHQ has been revealed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• Angered by Edward Snowden’s revelations on the wiretapping habits of tri-lettered American agencies, Brazil is taking the internet into its own hands — and giving Uncle Sam the middle finger. Right now most internet traffic between South America and Europe travels through the overly inquisitive US, but that’s about to change. Next year, Brazil’s Telebrás and Spain’s IslaLink will begin laying £120 million worth of undersea internet cable to span the 5,600km of Atlantic Ocean between Fortaleza, Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal. The Americans can just follow their allies’ activities on Facebook like everyone else.

• Social network claims privacy report commissioned by the Belgian privacy watchdog ‘gets it wrong multiple times’ over what Facebook does with user data

• The approach is only one of several options being studied by the White House. One alternative under consideration would have a judge direct a company to set up a mirror account so that law enforcement officials conducting a criminal investigation could read text messages shortly after they are sent. To obtain encrypted photos, the judge could order the company to back up the suspect’s data to a server while the phone is turned on and its contents are unencrypted.

Civil Rights

• Three months ago, Maj. Gen. James Post — the deputy chief of Air Combat Command — warned airmen that talking to Congress about the A-10 Warthog is an act of “treason.”

• On April 10, the U.S. Air Force announced it had canned Post from his job.

• To be sure, the flying branch doesn’t like the A-10 and is locked in a battle with legislators over the attack plane’s future. But it certainly didn’t like Post making veiled threats. He made the comments during a January gathering of airmen at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

• A D.C. dog owner did what anyone with a missing pet would do. He posted fliers — but then, he says, police threatened him with a $750,000 fine.

• The public is more concerned about access to justice than free healthcare, according to a poll commissioned by lawyers campaigning to reverse cuts to legal aid.

• The findings from a YouGov poll have been released as the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats vie to pledge more and more funding for the NHS.

• The reserve Tulsa County Sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot and killed a man last week when he thought he had pulled his Taser, is part of a group of wealthy donors who make large contributions to the department for the privilege of playing police officer.

• According to Tulsa World, Robert Bates, 73, who made the fatal mistake that cost a man his life, is a local insurance company executive who has donated multiple vehicles, weapons, and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008.

• Police in Singapore destroyed two pieces of evidence tied to the death of Shane Todd, whose body was found in his apartment there in June 2012, according to the American engineer’s family.

• The 31-year-old’s parents, Rick and Mary Todd, have for months been demanding the Singapore government return the hand-made noose and towel around their son’s neck when his body was discovered by his girlfriend hanging from his bathroom door.

• Ever since the body of American engineer was found hanging in his Singapore apartment in June 2012, his mother Mary Todd has maintained that the five typewritten suicide notes found at the scene were not written by her son.

• “My son did not write those suicide notes,” Mary Todd has repeated to anyone who would listen.

• Two pieces of evidence central to the death of 31-year-old American engineer Shane Todd — whose body was found in his Singapore apartment in June, 2012 — have been destroyed by police on the island nation, according to an official letter sent to the Todd family lawyer earlier this month.

• I can’t stop thinking about the strange circumstances surrounding the tragic death of a promising young American electric engineer in Singapore two years ago.

• His name was Shane Todd and his story is a cautionary tale for sanctimonious ideologues like Edward Snowden.

• Unlike Snowden, Todd defended America’s secrets and doing so may have cost him his life.

• While local authorities in Singapore claim that Shane committed suicide, his family is convinced he was murdered. For better or worse, so am I.

• Rather than recapitulating the circumstances surrounding Todd’s death, I would refer readers to an enormously compelling piece that appeared last year in the Financial Times about Todd’s death.

• Ironically, the only evidence I can add is taken from a classified diplomatic cable sent to the Central Intelligence Agency about seven years ago from a federal export controls official in China. The cable, which was made public by Wikileaks, reviews an application from a Chinese company for a license to export the technology that Shane had worked on in Singapore – a metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial system for producing epitaxial materials like gallium nitride (GaN), a semiconductor circuit technology that offers disruptive capabilities in efficient microwave power generation.

• “Mom, I might be paranoid, but I have the feeling that they are threatening my life if I don’t stay,” Shane said. “I am so naive. Coming to Singapore was the worst mistake of my life.”

• Just before his planned return to the United States, he was found hanged in his apartment. He already had a job lined up in the United States and had his family postpone celebrating Father’s Day and his brother’s birthday. He was going to be in a wedding in the summer.

• Rick and Mary Todd flew to Singapore, where they met with police. The official account of Shane’s apparent suicide soon unraveled.

• The Singapore police told the Todds that Shane had hanged himself but, almost from the start, they did not believe it. Aside from having a new job, Shane had made summer plans with his brothers and had even asked his grandmother if he could use her car and apartment in the interim before he started his new job. He’d queried his future employer about the company policy regarding vacation time and publishing opportunities, Mary said.

• Even as Rick Todd staggered off the plane in Denver, devastated by the news of his son’s death, Mary and her sons already had hatched a plan to fly to Singapore immediately. There’s no doubt that the Todds had an advantage given that Rick flew for a major airline and the entire family had passports at the ready. Seemingly overnight, they were in Singapore asking pointed questions of police officials.

• Peter Van Sant and 48 Hours return to a family’s quest to prove their son was murdered and did not commit suicide as officials in Singapore say, and they’re determined to clear his name in an updated edition of “Spies, Lies & Secrets,” to be rebroadcast Saturday, August 30 (10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

• With the sheer determination of a mother on a mission, I made a beeline for Shane’s bathroom. As I looked into the bathroom, I was perplexed and shocked. Nothing I saw matched IO Khal’s description. “Oh my gosh, John, come quickly, you’ve got to see this,” I yelled.

• John ran to me and we both began to exclaim, “Where are the bolts, the ropes, and the pulleys? Why is the toilet not across from the door as Khal described it?” Perplexed, we ran our hands over the marble walls searching for holes that might have been patched, looking for anything that would back up what Khal had told us. Nothing!…

• A week and a half after we returned to Montana, we discovered through various media sources that Minister Shanmugam was still in Washington D.C. and was scheduled to meet with Senator Baucus, Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Eric Holder, and various other government officials, including Arizona Senator John McCain.

• Prior to these meetings, USA Today cited Sen. Baucus, emphasizing that the SPF and Singaporean government “have been less than forthcoming” in the Shane Todd case and that evidence he had seen so far raised “very, very strong questions” and “deep concerns about national security.” …

• Mary Todd is coming to New York in her quest for justice.

• The mother of Dr. Shane Truman Todd, the American engineer found hanging in his Singapore apartment two years ago, has co-written a book, “Hard Drive: A Family’s Fight Against Three Countries,” with Shane’s cousin, Dr. Christina Villegas.

• The California women claim Shane was murdered and that authorities ruled his death a suicide for political reasons.

• “He had expressed fear for his life,” Villegas told me. “We don’t know who is responsible for his murder, but all three countries are guilty of destruction of evidence and the coverup.”

• Villegas, who is coming with Todd to New York on Sept. 5, said, “The US State Department is fully aiding the perversion of justice. As soon as John Kerry met with Singapore Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam, the FBI lost all interest in the case.”

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