● 04.23.15

● Links 23/4/2015: Ubuntu 15.04 is Out, Debian 8.0 Out Very Soon

Posted in News Roundup at 5:46 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Rocket has also announced a training course on the fundamentals of U2. The self-paced course on U2 fundamentals includes training on two MultiValue databases: Rocket UniData and Rocket UniVerse. U2 data servers are secure, flexible, and integrated across a variety of business needs.

• When it comes to choosing a computer, there’s loads to consider. These days, most of us want something that’s stylish, has a sharp display, fits in plenty of connectivity ports, and packs ample processing power under the hood.

Desktop

• What’s this? Three big spikes, on week-days? Getting higher and longer each time? Oh-oh! There’s a big rollout happening. Apparently, Finns have a heart and it’s beating for GNU/Linux on the desktop. I like it!

• Citrix has that they have made available a limited technology preview of virtualized Linux apps and desktops that integrates with XenApp and XenDesktop and extends the FlexCast Management Architecture (FMA) to enable additional use cases in industries such as automotive, manufacturing, oil and gas and financial services. When used with Citrix HDX, the company’s market-leading user experience technology, customers will get unmatched performance and bandwidth efficiency for people accessing Linux desktops from any device, over any network. In the future, the HDX technology for hosted Linux apps will continue to evolve to enable even the most demanding GPU-based graphics applications. People interested in participating in the Citrix Linux Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) Tech Preview to test and provide feedback on this project may submit an application at http://now.citrix.com/LinuxPreview.

Server

• Yesterday, I covered the news that VMware has announced two new open source projects focused on enterprise adoption of cloud-native applications — Project Lightwave, an identity and access management project for enterprise-scale and security to cloud-native applications; and Project Photon, a lightweight Linux operating system built for cloud-native applications.

• The most demonstrably effective and efficient data center scheduling and apportionment platform to date will not only support, but will actually include, Google’s system for managing clustered Linux containers. This as a result of Mesosphere, the commercial backer of the Apache Mesos project, acting on its agreement with Google reached last August.

• This week’s guest is Joe Dickman, senior vice president of Vizuri.

• Today, we tackle the confusing topic of open source and containers.

• The interview began with setting the stage.

• VMware is expanding its embrace of Linux containers in a big way today with the launch of a pair of efforts that aim to enable a new era of cloud-native applications.

Kernel Space

• As Linux version 4.0 was released on 15 April, one of the most discussed new features to be included in this release is “no reboot” kernel patching. With the major distros committing to support the 4.0 kernel and its features (including “no reboot” patching) at some point this year, it’s a good time to take a look at what this feature actually does and what difference it will make for you.

• First of all, what does it actually mean? Well, for once, this is a feature with a name that describes what it does pretty well. With versions of Linux before 4.0, when the kernel is updated via a patch, the system needs to reboot.

• Linux++, as it is called, can’t make full use of the Machine’s power but will be compatible with most existing Linux software, so programmers can easily try it out. Those who like it will be able to step up to HP’s second new operating system, Carbon, which won’t be finished for two years or more. It will be released as open source, so anyone can inspect or modify its code, and is being designed from the ground up to unleash the full power of a computer with no division between storage and memory. By starting from scratch, Friedrich says, this operating system will remove all the complexity, caused by years of updates on top of updates, that leads to crashes and security weaknesses.

Graphics Stack

• It will not be officially rolled in until kernel 4.2 but you can currently grab the new binary blob by following the links from Phoronix. This new AMDGPU kernel driver will be used by both the full open-source driver and the Catalyst driver provided officially by AMD and provide support not only for the R9 285 but upcoming families as well. There is still some development to be done as AMD’s Alex Deucher told Phoronix that this initial code lacks power management features for Tonga but that will be addressed shortly.

• As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s article about a new TearFree option for the Radeon X.Org driver as the latest effort to eliminate tearing, that feature is now in Git.

Benchmarks

• With the recent big update to ZFS On Linux I’ve begun running some new ZFS Linux file-system tests. Today are just some preliminary numbers from running ZOL 0.6.4 with various RAID levels across six 300GB H106030SDSUN300G 10K RPM SAS drives.

Applications

• GNU Parallel 20150422 (‘Germanwings’) has been released.

• The middleware is designed to be used without modification as the system grows in capability while being scalable. Multiple instances can be run across different systems and the results should (eventually) be the same. I say “eventually” since in such a system one can not guarantee the exact order of events, only the exact results after some period of time. Or, in more familiar terms, it is eventually consistent.

• Nearly one year ago, the OpenBazaar project began via a DarkMarket fork. On Tuesday April 21st, the fourth beta of the decentralized OpenBazaar marketplace was released for Linux and Mac OSX users. According to the release blog post, binaries for Windows users will be “released soon.” Unlike many anonymous dark net markets, OpenBazaar does not allow listing illicit items.

Proprietary

• Syncthing is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go. The tool is similar to BitTorrent Sync (but it’s open source as opposed to BT Sync), and it’s used to synchronize files between computers

• Vocal is a podcast manager designed to integrate tightly with the elementary OS desktop, which supports both audio and video podcasts, with built-in video playback.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Gratuitous Space Battles 2, a strategy game that lets users build their own fleets and engage in massive space battles, has been released and is now available on Steam for Linux.

• Technobabylon is an upcoming cyberpunk point & click adventure game from Wadjet Eye Games and Technocrat.

• Yes, that’s right, the Trinity Bundle game sale from Bundle Stars is back, and it includes no more than 10 awesome games for your GNU/Linux distributions, as well as for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Half-Life 2: Update, a community-made mod of Valve’s acclaimed Half-Life 2 first-person shooter video game, the sequel to Half-Life, is now available on Steam for Linux.

• The big community made update to Half-Life 2 is now available on Linux. This promises lots of new goodies for the ageing game.

• Jonathan Blow, developer of the hit game Braid has mentioned during one of his coding videos if he will bring ‘The Witness’ to Linux or not. The answer isn’t too great right now, but the future is brighter.

• Total War: Warhammer has been officially announced, and it seems like it will be coming to SteamOS/Linux as well.

• As usual thanks to SteamDB it looks like Arma 3 could be heading to Linux. Arma 3 is a massive military sandbox from Bohemia Interactive and I am sure it will excite a lot of people.

• SuperTuxKart is now much more beautiful thanks to the hard work of the developers, and they have released a new major version.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Conf.kde.in 2015 – KDE conference organized by passionate KDE India team. This year it took place in Amrita college, Kerala from 17th to 18th April. Schedule of these two days conference included talks on various KDE applications, Qt tutorial, how to contribute to KDE, etc. We also organized Qt workshop to give a hands-on feeling to attendees. Slides and pictures from conference are available.

• Packages for the release of KDE’s desktop suite Plasma 5.3 beta are available for Kubuntu Vivid. You can get it from the Kubuntu Beta PPA.

• Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The popular GIMP image editing program continues in its quest of being ported to GTK3, but it’s still not clear when it will be finished and merged to mainline.

• Curiosity got the best of me this morning so I decided to see the latest state of GIMP’s gtk3-port branch. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get it built quickly as after building the latest BABL and then GEGL dependencies, the newest GEGL Git code ran into problems building on my system. But in looking over the gtk3-port branch, a whole lot of code was pushed out in late March by Michael Natterer and others.

• Thanks to GNOME I am going to be able to visit Indonesia in a couple of weeks to give a lighting talk. I wanted this for years; but it is still kind of hard to believe this is the real.

Distributions

New Releases

• This spring seems to be rich for news! Recently we have released ONLYOFFICE Documents for iOS, updated SaaS solution to version 8.5.0 and today we have prepared 5 great news for ONLYOFFICE open source community.

• Developed and designed exclusively in-house, VXL’s new, industry-leading Gio 6 Linux operating system features a new look, user-friendly design together with greater flexibility, connectivity, security and multimedia capabilities.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Chakra Linux is a distribution specially built to take advantage of KDE and the Plasma desktop, but the project has been lagging a little behind the KDE project. The developers of the OS have rectified some of the issues with the release of some interesting updates.

Red Hat Family

• Which Red Hat scale-out storage product should you choose: Ceph or Gluster?

• Red Hat has brought Ceph – acquired with InkTank in May last year – up to its engineering standards and branded it Red Hat Ceph Storage, and is now touting it alongside its Red Hat Gluster Storage.

• Both Ceph and Gluster are open source, scale-out, software-defined storage products running on commodity hardware. Red Hat suggests Ceph is better for OpenStack and Gluster for Big Data analytics, but both could do either job.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) said it has earned Common Criteria certification for the latest iteration of its JBoss commercial middleware platform, providing clients a tool with an Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ rating that meets government security standards, ExecutiveBiz reported Monday.

• Red Hat has introduced a new business resource planner to help enterprises quickly and efficiently address complex scheduling and resource planning challenges.

Fedora

• The next version, or should we say three versions, of Red Hat’s community Linux, Fedora, are now in beta.

• Much of what we cover on Maximum PC revolves around Microsoft’s Windows operating system, though lest anyone forget, there’s this alternative called Linux. And of course there are many varieties of Linux to choose from, including Fedora 22 beta, which is now available. According to the Fedora Project, desktop and workstation users may not notice huge changes, but will see better performance behind the scenes in managing updates.

• The Fedora developers have been busy working on their next release, and now you can download the beta version of Fedora 22 Workstation for testing purposes.

• Fedora attended HackRU spring 2015, a hackathon centered around students. Hackathons are events where developers from surrounding areas or even across the world gather to create cool projects over a period of time, usually a weekend.

• The Cloud Edition of the Fedora 22 Beta Linux operating system was officially unveiled on April 21, along with all of Fedora’s Spins, including Fedora 22 Server, Fedora 22 Workstation (GNOME), Fedora 22 KDE Plasma 5, Fedora 22 Xfce, Fedora 22 LXDE, and Fedora 22 MATE/Compiz.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project, through Steve McIntyre, announced on April 23 that the Debian CD/DVD/BD team is ready for the Debian 8.0 (codename Jessie) release, urging users to test the images before the unveiling of the final release of the highly anticipated operating system on April 25, 2015.

• Debian often has a reputation for being very slow to release (in terms of cadence), or for freezes to hold up development for an excessive length of time, but the current pattern does lend itself well to two attributes: predictability and reliability (in terms of high-quality releases). It’s true that this means shipping with slightly older versions of major software, but you can sleep well knowing they’re thoroughly tested – and that’s really important in Debian’s core market, which tends to be highly-available services rather than desktop machines.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 15.04 is shipping with a few interesting features and improvements, but it’s also arriving with two Internet browsers installed and one of those browsers is developed by Canonical.

• Ubuntu 15.04 for cloud and servers will be available for download from Canonical on Thursday, 23 April. For cloud users, this release delivers the new, Snappy Ubuntu Core for transactional systems, such as cloud container hosts, smart devices, and a new container-based hypervisor, LXD, which Canonical says sets a new benchmark for density and performance. With updated developer tools and the latest frameworks, languages, databases and packages, this is a significant release for Ubuntu professionals and developers.

• It’s no secret that Ubuntu has put quite a bit of its muscle behind the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform, and this latest release comes with a pre-release version of the next version of OpenStack, which is scheduled for release on April 30. Among other things, this upcoming “Kilo” release of OpenStack features updates to the platform’s network stack and identity federation service.

• Canonical published details about MySQL vulnerabilities for its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS that have been found and corrected.

• According to Canonical, a number of security issues have been discovered with MySQL, and this update includes new upstream MySQL versions. The Ubuntu maintainers have been quick to push the new packages into the repositories.

• Like it or not, during the second decade of the 21st century Ubuntu has been the operating system to watch. This, despite the fact that its gathered a large base of followers who loyally despise it. While it’s true that much of this animosity is deserved, just as much is because we love to hate a big shot, and our jealousy over the success of others is made worse when success comes to those who don’t act according to our plans.

• Ubuntu 15.04 (Unity) will be the first Ubuntu system to use systemd as the default init service manager, the Locally integrated menus will be enabled by default, Unity 7 and Compiz will receive important updates and the main applications will be updated to their latest stable versions.

• While there are a lot of unofficial Ubuntu Touch ports already started, the most advanced is the Ubuntu Touch port for the OnePlus One phone, which has recently received support for WiFi and OTA updates.

• But Canonical does not provide information on how they count the total number of Ubuntu users. In 2010, the Ubuntu systems contained a package called canonical-census which sent an “I am alive” ping to Canonical, but this method was not relevant because a user may have more than one Ubuntu computers (or Ubuntu virtual machines).

• While we know Intel Broadwell performance is much faster on Ubuntu 15.04 than Ubuntu 14.10, with this week’s release of Ubuntu Vivd Vervet, here’s some fresh results looking to see how the Intel Haswell graphics performance has evolved over the past six months. For the many Intel Haswell owners out there, you’ll be pleased that the performance has overall improved.

Devices/Embedded

• Ubuntu MATE 15.04 is now available for Raspberry Pi 2, which means that users can download it and use it just like any other OS for this platform.

• Adeneo has released an Android KitKat 4.4.4 BSP for the TI Sitara AM437x EVM kit in both a free binary version and a commercial version with source code.

• Adeneo Embedded’s Android 4.4.4 “KitKat” Reference Board Support Package is designed for use with the Texas Instruments AM437x EVM (TMDXEVM437X EVM). The EVM kit was announced last June with a Linux BSP when TI announced the Cortex-A9-based Sitara AM437x SoC. Adeneo tipped the BSP last December when it also announced a BSP that has since been made available based on the Cortex-A8 based Sitara AM335x. At the time, the company had few details on the AM437x BSP, however.

• The concept of a “PC stick” — a processor and RAM embedded into a gum-pack-sized device that can connect to your HDTV via an HDMI connection — is nothing new, but when a company like Intel embraces the concept, a lot more people start paying attention.

• That was the case at CES back in January, when Intel showed off the Compute Stick, its version of a teeny-tiny PC that includes a quad-core Atom processor and — depending on whether you want the Windows 8.1 or Linux edition — comes with up to 2GB of RAM and up to 32GB of onboard storage. All of this fits onto something with dimensions of just 4.1×1.5×0.5 inches.

• Intel Compute Stick, first unveiled at CES back in January, is now available for pre-order, costing $149 for Windows and $110 for Linux.

• Is Intel’s Compute Stick a solution looking for a problem, or is this PC the size of a USB stick a solution to a problem you didn’t you know you had?

• Who wants a cheap HDMI stick that can turn any TV into a full Windows computer? Everybody, right? That’s what we thought. Oh god were we wrong. When Intel announced the $150 Compute Stick at CES, we figured it could become the ultimate miniature PC for all kinds of people. Too bad it’s terrible.

Phones

Tizen

• Following on from yesterdays news that you can get Tizen running on Raspberry PI 2, today the good guys at the Samsung Open Source Group have made available a bootable Tizen image Tizen for the Raspberry Pi 2, ready for you to download and flash a Micro SD Card with.

Android

• The software acts as the bridge between your smartwatch and Android phone, so it’s a key element of the overall experience. The companion app is used to manage apps and notifcations, for example, and is the primary way of configuring the watch’s Bluetooth connection.

• If you’re a ROM developer, or just in the mood to poke around the latest Android source code, you’ll be excited to know that 5.1.1 has just been uploaded to AOSP. The tag for this release is 5.1.1_r1, and it carries the build number LMY47V. A factory image is already available for the Nexus Player, and the rest of the Nexus family will probably stabilize on this version over the coming weeks.

• Say goodbye to calls from unknown numbers. Facebook’s newest app Hello instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show you info about who you’re talking to, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call. Today, Hello is rolling out for public testing in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria, but the catch is that it’s Android-only since iOS won’t let apps interact with phone calls.

• Way back in 2013, Google quietly added the “Google Settings” app to Android (not to be confused with Android’s normal “Settings” app). At first it didn’t have much, but over the years, it’s added a ton of useful features, especially for the privacy-conscious. If you haven’t checked it in awhile, it’s worth a second look.

• Hey, how hilarious would it be if NVIDIA managed to update its SHIELD Tablet to Android 5.1 before Google updates the Tegra-powered Nexus 9? Wait, no, hilarious isn’t the right word. ____ is the right word (which the Android Police style guide won’t let me publish), according to N9 owners.

• Android 5.1 is only about a month old, but Google is already pushing out a new release to the public AOSP repository. Android 5.1.1, as the name would suggest, consists of a bunch of bugfixes.

• Coincidence of timing? Only days before a certain high-profile smart timepiece begins shipping, Google is announcing a major software upgrade for Android Wear watches that it must hope will steal some of the attention from the Apple Watch.

• Motorola has already announced that it will update the first-generation Moto models from Android 4.4.4 directly to Android 5.1. Today, a changelist has been posted in Portugese for the Android 5.1 update heading to the first-gen Motorola Moto X. The changelist is posted on Motorola’s Brazilian website, where the update is soon expected to rollout.

• We’ve seen signs of Android 5.1.1 for the last couple of weeks in both the Android SDK Manager and Developer Portal, and it looks like it’s finally ready to go live. The Nexus Player is the first device to be graced by the update, bringing the build number up to LMY47V. So far, there haven’t been any reports of OTAs hitting the set-top box, but Google has posted the factory image and binaries.

• At the beginning of this month we learned from Motorola’s David Schuster that the Moto X (1st gen), Moto E (1st gen), and the Moto G with LTE (1st gen) would all be making the jump from KitKat directly to Android 5.1 Lollipop. With Android 5.1 already available on the Moto X (2014), you may be wondering how much longer before the original Moto X will see it. If a new OTA release in Brazil is any indication, the wait might not be so long.

• That linguistic flip is one of many at play in the Chocolate Factory’s Android security division, which has dumped various general infosec terms overboard. Lead Android engineer Adrian Ludwig told the RSA Conference in San Francisco today that spyware is also a garbage term.

• Conventional digital prophet wisdom says that in the near future, everything you own — and a bunch of stuff you don’t — will have a chip, rendering it smart. But this paper proposes an alternate version of the Internet of Things — one where stuff is dumb, and repurposed Android phones (and a bunch of clever code) make your home smart.

• Android smartphone buyers are spoiled with choices. New handsets from manufacturers such as HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung are hitting store shelves all the time. So choosing which new phone to get — and when to get one — can be daunting.

• Yahoo Tech is here to help. Read on for the best Android phones to buy right now (April 2015). Whether you’re on a budget, are looking for a big-screen behemoth, or just want the overall best smartphone, these are the Android handsets to get.

Free Software/Open Source

• The man behind the privacy-focused search engine talks about the benefits of privacy in web search and explains why he recently donated $125,000 to open source projects.

• Linus’s Law, named after Linux creator Linus Torvalds, postulates that open code leads to more effective bug detection because when an entire community is scouring through code, fixes come more quickly. This is often the first thing IT pros consider when installing security inside an open-source model. Through popular code-and tool-sharing sites like GitHub, the open-source community aids other organizations in securing their own code and systems, offering a list of free security tools and frameworks for malware analysis, penetration testing and other tasks. Along these same lines, a recent report from the Ponemon Institute explored how IT professionals view commercial open-source software, data protection, and the security impact of messaging and collaboration solutions on their organizations. This slide show, based on eWEEK reporting and industry insight from Olivier Thierry, chief marketing officer of Zimbra, offers eight takeaways to help your business harness the value of open source and get serious about security.

• The open source, IoT-focused Udoo Neo SBC has won Kickstarter funding. The Neo runs Android or Linux on an i.MX6 SoloX, and has WiFi, BT, and Arduino hooks.

• Seco’s Udoo project unveiled the Udoo Neo single board computer in prototype form in early March. The project went to Kickstarter yesterday to formally launch the tiny Linux- and Android-ready hacker board and raised its modest $15,000 goal in just 80 minutes. We say modest because the Udoo project has already won a fair share of popularity in the community SBC world with open-spec SBCs like the Udoo Quad, and probably didn’t need a Kickstarter campaign to find success with the Neo. The campaign is now running in the $60,000+ range, with 43 days to go.

• A goldmine of open source code is available to programmers, but choosing the right library and understanding how to use it can be tricky. Sourcegraph has created a search engine and code browser to help developers find better code and build software faster.

• Sourcegraph is a code search engine and browsing tool that semantically indexes all the open source code available on the web. You can search for code by repository, package, or function and click on fully linked code to read the docs, jump to definitions, and instantly find usage examples. And you can do all of this in your web browser, without having to configure any editor plugin.

Events

• Wow, I haven’t posted anything new in a quite a while. Been working on remixing Fedora 22 since slightly before the Alpha was released. The Beta was released today. Been remixing EL6 and EL7 (CentOS, Scientific Linux and even OEL)… but enough about that.

• This post is to state what presentations I plan to attend at the upcoming LFNW in Bellingham, WA (this weekend). How many LFNWs in a row have I attended? I can’t recall.

• But what’s more important than those two items at the moment — we can deal with those later — is that LinuxFest Northwest is ramping up its 15th annual show in Bellingham, Washington, this week.

SaaS/Big Data

• Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing framework. In contrast to Hadoop’s two-stage disk-based MapReduce paradigm, Spark’s in-memory primitives provide performance up to 100 times faster for certain applications.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• In September 2014, rumors were flying that Apache OpenOffice was floundering and might soon merge with LibreOffice. The rumors were denied, but revived in March 2015 when Jonathan Corbett used development activity statistics to show that OpenOffice was seriously short of developers, and had corporate support only from IBM. Now, OpenOffice’s most recent report to the Apache Foundation appears to reinforce these previous reports, and then some.

• To be fair, the report is listed as “a working copy and not to be quoted.” However, I am discussing it anyway for two reasons. First, much of the report was mentioned in earlier reports, which suggests that its information is accurate. Second, when I contacted Jan Iversen, the new OpenOffice Chair, three weeks ago, he gave the same warning even more strongly. Since then the contents has gone through at least one more draft, but with little change of content, which makes me suspect that the excuse is an effort to delay discussion of the content. If I am mistaken, the fact will eventually become obvious, since the report is, after all, a public document.

BSD

• So I switched to OpenBSD, and this blog post is here to talk about my first impressions. This probably won’t be my last blog post on the subject.

• Since there was a huge rush of submissions just on the very last day, we have decided to give a second chance for all of you that didn’t quite finish your talk or tutorial proposal in time for the deadline.

• For OpenBSD users, it has been pretty disappointing that Digital Ocean didn’t launch other BSDs with introduction of FreeBSD, even though the technical barrier had been removed to allow it.

Public Services/Government

• The European Union should finance initiatives that increase security and privacy of open source solutions, and set up certification schemes for essential open source tools, IT security experts recommend in two studies written for the European Parliament. They argue for EU funding of key open source tools and for the financing of bug hunts, to find and fix security issues in open source tools.

Openness/Sharing

• Collaboration is essential for helping us effectively tackle our sustainability challenges, and it also reduces the amount of duplication. It’s actually a little crazy. Did you know that several organizations are trying to achieve the same objectives, often very near to each other geographically, but who don’t know that they are both tackling the same challenges?

Leftovers

Science

• Internet forums have a positive impact on life satisfaction and lead to increased involvement in communities outside the confines of the online world, according to a study published in Computers In Human Behavior. Redditors might be doing it right. The study approached users on a range of interest, lifestyle and hobby forums. The study split users into two groups: stigmatized subjects (like mental health discussion), and non-stigma related forums (sports, cooking and the rest). They were then polled about their reasons for joining the forum, how they felt about it, their life satisfaction and offline engagement with “issues raised in the forum”. Author lead Dr. Louise Pendry of the University of Exeter said that: “As well as finding answers, our study showed users often discover that forums are a source of great support, especially those seeking information about more stigmatizing conditions.”

Security

• In an e-mail today to the Open Source Software Security (oss-security) mailing list, the maintainer of wireless network client code used by Android, the Linux and BSD Unix operating systems, and Windows Wi-Fi device drivers sent an urgent fix to a flaw that could allow attackers to crash devices or even potentially inject malicious software into their memory. The flaw could allow these sorts of attacks via a malicious wireless peer-to-peer network name.

• A recently-discovered vulnerability in the popular open source wpa_supplicant software for wi-fi could potentially put large numbers of client systems at risk.

• [...]

• Chinese e-tailer giant Alibaba is credited with having discovered the flaw.

• Apps used by millions of iPhone and iPad owners became vulnerable to snooping when a flaw…

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A series of earthquakes that rattled a small Texan community have been linked to nearby oil and gas operations.

• In 84 days from November 2013 to January 2014, the area around Azle, Texas, shook with 27 magnitude two or greater earthquakes.

• Now scientists believe these earthquakes were the result of high-pressure injection of drilling wastewater into the ground.

• In November of 2011, a magnitude 5.7 earthquake ripped through the small Oklahoma town of Prague, damaging more than a dozen homes and toppling a turret on a St. Gregory’s University building in nearby Shawnee.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Study of Finnish schoolchildren claims boys better at searching for info on the web while girls better able to gauge the trustworthiness of internet content

Privacy

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced a bill Tuesday night to extend through 2020 a controversial surveillance authority under the Patriot Act.

• The move comes as a bipartisan group of lawmakers in both chambers is preparing legislation to scale back the government’s spying powers under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

• Some technology and communication firms are helping militants avoid detection by developing systems that are “friendly to terrorists”, Britain’s top anti-terrorism police officer said on Tuesday.

• Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies needed to think about their “corporate social responsibility” in creating products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during investigations.

• “Some of the acceleration of technology, whether it’s communications or other spheres, can be set up in different ways,” Rowley told a conference in London.

• Europe’s top rights body, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), has crystalized its censure of mass surveillance as a threat to fundamental human rights and to democracy itself by adopting a draft resolution in which it reiterates deep concerns over the practice of intelligence agencies systematically harvesting untargeted communications data, without adequate legal regulation or technical protection.

• “Mass surveillance does not appear to have contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks, contrary to earlier assertions made by senior intelligence officials. Instead, resources that might prevent attacks are diverted to mass surveillance, leaving potentially dangerous persons free to act,” PACE warned yesterday.

• “These powerful structures risk escaping democratic control and accountability and they threaten the free and open character of our societies,” it added.

• Among all of the NSA hacking operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years, one in particular has stood out for its sophistication and stealthiness. Known as Quantum Insert, the man-on-the-side hacking technique has been used to great effect since 2005 by the NSA and its partner spy agency, Britain’s GCHQ, to hack into high-value, hard-to-reach systems and implant malware.

Civil Rights

• These moms left their kids for a few minutes and got arrested. A scary look at our new moral vigilantism

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Google shook the US ISPs with their Google Fiber project which forced monopolies like Comcast to improve their own services. Google is now all set to shake another abusive market – wireless carriers.

• Despite the endless, breathless proclamations about “outdated, utility-style regulation” or the death of innovation, there’s really only one reason ISPs don’t want to be reclassified as common carriers by the FCC: the billions to be made by abusing the uncompetitive broadband last mile. The very threat of a regulator actually doing its job and establishing what are relatively thin consumer protections (just ask ISPs like Frontier, Cablevision, Sprint or Sonic.net) is really only a problem if you plan to make money off the backs of a captive audience that can’t vote with its wallet.

DRM

• It’s official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.

• In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• MPAA chief Chris Dodd has urged theater owners and customers alike to support WhereToWatch, a “one-stop shop” designed to quickly guide audiences to legal content. Following its launch everyone could access the resource but perhaps fittingly, users outside the U.S. now need a VPN to receive advice.

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