● 05.08.15

● Links 8/5/2015: $9 ARM/Linux Computer, Mozilla Thunderbird Evolves

Posted in News Roundup at 4:42 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• At a time when faith in open source code has been rocked by an outbreak of attacks based on the Shellshock and Heartbleed vulnerabilities, it’s time to revisit what we know about Linux security. Linux is so widely used in enterprise IT, and deep inside Internet apps and operations, that any surprises related to Linux security would have painful ramifications.

• In 2007, Andrew Morton, a no-nonsense colleague of Linus Torvalds known as the “colonel of the kernel,” called for developers to spend time removing defects and vulnerabilities. “I would like to see people spend more time fixing bugs and less time on new features. That’s my personal opinion,” he said in an interview at the time.

• Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable– and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided.

• Admittedly, the free software that runs on Linux has some shortcomings. For example, you still can’t fill out PDF forms, or, in most countries, calculate your taxes using Linux. In other cases, such as optical character recognition or speech recognition, free software tools are available but primitive compared to proprietary ones. However, the number of legitimate shortcomings becomes smaller every year, and, increasingly the complaints are more likely to be the results of ignorance as anything else.

• Linux companies Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical will benefit from the decision by Microsoft to suggest that OEMs not provide a means of turning off secure boot on PCs running Windows 10.

• As the idea of containers gains momentum, there are a couple of problems that increasingly need to be solved – networking, storage and security being the key three. Twistlock aims to solve the last of those and be part of unlocking far-broader container adoption.

• Containers are, of course, a Linux concept that allows the running of multiple isolated Linux systems on a single control host. Instead of creating a full virtual environment, with Linux containers, an operating system is shared across the various containers while running resources are offered to the container in isolation. Linux containers have existed for a long time, but Docker re-invigorated the notion and brought it to a wider audience.

• Linux has been around for quite a long time now, but it still plays third fiddle to Windows and OS X. Which problems are stopping Linux from dominating the desktop? A redditor asked this question and got some very interesting answers.

Desktop

• The Finns have long used a high percentage of GNU/Linux desktops like many European countries.

Audiocasts/Shows

• I want to make this short and sweet. The days that follow will be filled with varied speculation I suspect. This happens anytime there is change afoot! But those who know me, know that I’m merely moving onto new exciting projects.

• As of today, I am no longer part of Jupiter Broadcasting. I enjoyed my tenure co-hosting two of the programs and stand by my belief that they have a great production staff and amazing co-hosts. I wish all of them tons of success in their endeavors going forward.

Kernel Space

• Alexander Holler wanted to make it much harder for anyone to recover deleted data. He didn’t necessarily want to outwit the limitless resources of our governmental overlords, but he wanted to make data recovery harder for the average hostile attacker. The problem as he saw it was that filesystems often would not actually bother to delete data, so much as they would just decouple the data from the file and make that part of the disk available for use by other files. But the data would still be there, at least for a while, for anyone to recouple into a file again.

• Alexander posted some patches to implement a new system call that first would overwrite all the data associated with a given file before making that disk space available for use by other files. Since the filesystem knew which blocks on the disk were associated with which files, he reasoned, zeroing out all relevant data would be a trivial operation.

• …than to understand Linux permissions! Honestly though, that’s not really true. Linux permissions are simple and elegant, and once you understand them, they’re easy to work with. Octal notation gets a little funky, but even that makes sense once you understand why it exists.

• Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.0.2, which is currently the most advanced stable branch of Linux kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman also announced the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the seventh maintenance version of Linux 3.19 kernel.

Applications

• On May 5, Lubomir Rintel announced the immediate availability for download and upgrade of NetworkManager 1.0.2, the default utility for managing network connection under GNOME and GNOME-based desktop environments.

• We’re not just keeping an eye on the kickstarter campaign (three days and almost at 50%! but go ahead and support us by all means, we’re not there yet!), we’re also working hard on Krita itself. Dmitry is busy with improving the performance of clone layers, adding PSD file support to the Layer Styles feature and fixing loading and saving masks to PSD files (we implemented that in October, but broke it subsequently…), and we’ve got a brand new release for you today.

Instructionals/Technical

• I personally like Google’s Chrome interface. It’s simple, fast, elegant and did I mention fast? Unfortunately, I don’t like how locked down the Chrome OS is on a Chromebook, nor do I like its total dependence on Google. I also don’t like the lack of ability to install Chrome easily on generic hardware. Thankfully, Budgie is here to help.

Games

• One of the strengths of Linux is that there really is a distribution for everybody. But which distro would work best for a game developer? One redditor asked that question and got some interesting answers.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• My efforts to revamp the Jenkins Continuous Integration system for KDE finally came to life and went live!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As I hinted in my retrospective in February, 2014 has been crazy busy on a personal level. Let’s now take a look at 2014-2015 from a GNOME perspective.

• When I offered my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation‘s Board of Directors in May last year, I knew that there would be plenty of issues to tackle if elected. As I was elected president afterwards, I was aware that I was getting into a demanding role that would not only test my resolve but also make use of my ability to set a clear direction and keep us moving forward through tough times. But even if someone tries to describe what’s involved in all this, it remains difficult to truly grasp the amount of work involved before you’ve experienced it yourself.

Distributions

• Despite the fact I have a different view of which distros are best for kids — Qimo (pronounced “kim-o,” as in the last part of eskimo, not “chemo”) tops the list, as it should, but the French distro Doudou (add your own joke here) is unfortunately left out — the link there is informative. So for those who are just getting their proverbial feet wet in Linux, this is a godsend.

• Clonezilla Live, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do a lot of maintenance and recovery work, has been updated to version 2.4.1-15 and is now ready for download.

• Voyager-X 10.14.4, released in March, is based on Xubuntu/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). This new Voyager-X is one of the first distros to use the new Xfce 4.12 desktop, more than one year in the making.

New Releases

• The OpenELEC team is proud to announce its 1st Beta of OpenELEC 6.0. Internally this will be known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 5.95.1.

• The OpenELEC 5.95 release series are test releases (beta) for OpenELEC-6.0. OpenELEC-6.0 will be the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-5.0.

• The most visible change is the update from Kodi-14.2 Helix to Kodi-15.0 Isengard (beta 1). Beginning with Kodi-15 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer included in our base OS, but they are available via Kodi’s addon manager and must be installed from there, if needed. Our own PVR backends such as VDR and TVHeadend will install needed dependencies automatically. Other than that, please refer to http://kodi.tv/kodi-15-0-isengard-beta-1/ to see all the changes in Kodi-15.

Ballnux/SUSE

• The German GNU/Linux company SUSE has announced support for the “simpler choice” database programme from SAP, whereby it will offer to help businesses migrate any legacy database solution to a more modern alternative.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has been grabbing headlines the last couple of days. It started yesterday with the announcement of RHEL 6.7 Beta which brings new and updated features to those not ready to move on to RHEL 7.x. Today Red Hat took “a stand against container fragmentation” and announced their part in six record breaking Intel Xeon E7 v3 systems. SuSE lead seven to world records too and Debian Jessie reviews are still rolling in.

• At Red Hat, our involvement in open source technologies does not just revolve around code commits and community stewardship; one important focus is on the creation of standards. It may sound boring, but open standards applied to emerging software technologies can go far in not only fostering adoption but also helping to further drive innovation.

• Open standards and the governance model of open source projects are closely related. The best projects create innovation and ubiquity by becoming the defacto standard for a given set of problems, absorbing and aggregating the many agendas and needs that drive their contributors. Our approach to open standards is demonstrated by the “power of code,” developed in the open, unlike abstract documents negotiated in the backroom.

• With every new Intel Xeon processor generation, the benefits typically span beyond simple increases in transistor counts or the number of cores within each processor. Things like increased memory capacity per chip or larger on-chip caches are tangible and measurable, and often have a direct effect on performance, resulting in record-breaking scores on various standard benchmarks.

• This post is aimed to clarify certain terms often used in the security community. Let’s start with the easiest one: vulnerability. A vulnerability is a flaw in a selected system that allows an attacker to compromise the security of that particular system. The consequence of such a compromise can impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the attacked system (these three aspects are also the base metrics of the CVSS v2 scoring system that are used to rate vulnerabilities). ISO/IEC 27000, IETF RFC 2828, NIST, and others have very specific definitions of the term vulnerability, each differing slightly. A vulnerability’s attack vector is the actual method of using the discovered flaw to cause harm to the affected software; it can be thought of as the entry point to the system or application. A vulnerability without an attack vector is normally not assigned a CVE number.

• Not ready for the jump to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7? Be of good cheer, Red Hat is still improving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x.

• Red Hat have announced JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.4 and expanded benefits for subscribers of the software. This release is notable as it now supports Java 8 applications.

• Red Hat has made available a beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.7, an update for the firm’s Enterprise Linux 6 operating system that provides security enhancements along with updated systems management and monitoring capabilities for customers.

• Red Hat, a provider of open source software solutions, has made a strategic investment in VMTurbo, a demand-driven control platform for the software-defined data center.

• VMTurbo plans to use the funds to develop its control platform, improve adoption of demand-driven control in OpenStack deployments, and increase support to VMTurbo’s growing customer base.

• Charles Crouchman, CTO of VMTurbo, said: “Our demand-driven control platform, tightly integrated with Red Hat CloudForms and the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, makes OpenStack deployments more resilient, performant and agile.”

Fedora

• AAEON Technology Inc., a Taiwanese computer manufacturer, has recently introduces a new ultra-slim compact embedded computer that runs the Fedora Linux operating system on Bay Trail Intel Atom or Celeron processors.

Debian Family

• The Debian project has a long and rich legacy. Debian is one of the oldest surviving GNU/Linux distributions and, along the way, it has also become one of the largest (over 1,000 developers work on Debian, providing users with over 40,000 packages) and Debian has even branched out, adding GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/Hurd ports to its list of offerings. Debian is sometimes referred to as the “universal operating system” because it runs on a wide array of architectures, offering not only a production branch (Stable), but also multiple development branches (Testing, Unstable and Experimental). Debian, in short, provides a little something for everyone. This “universal” approach, which allows Debian to work just about anywhere while doing almost anything, also attracts developers who wish to build products using Debian’s packages and open infrastructure. Many of the world’s more popular Linux distributions, including Linux Mint and Ubuntu, have their roots in Debian.

• The Debian Project may not be that slow with new releases, but sometimes it feels like it. The project typically releases a new version “when it’s ready,” which seems to work out to about once every two years lately.

• Debian 8, branded Jessie, in keeping with the Toy Story naming scheme (Jessie was the cowgirl character in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3) had its feature freeze in November 2014 and there’s a been a beta and RC release available for testing. It wasn’t until the end of April when Jessie was finally judged range ready.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In a recent security notice, dated May 5, Canonical announced the immediate availability of a new kernel update for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin).

• Do you want to use OpenStack, but you’re afraid of the headaches of getting its architecture just right? Well, EMC is here to help with OpenStack reference architectures for three leading OpenStack vendors: Canonical, Mirantis, and Red Hat.

• The first kernel update for the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system arrived on May 5 and it patched a very important vulnerability in the upstream Linux kernel 3.19. As such, all Ubuntu 15.04 users are urged to update their systems as soon as possible.

• Canonical is bringing some very significant changes to Ubuntu and that includes a new way of packaging and maintaining the system. That being said, the company will continue to provide support for both the .deb based and .snap based Ubuntu systems for a long time.

• Mark Shuttleworth had a very interesting keynote at the opening of the Ubuntu Online Summit for 15.10, and he said the developers from all the desktop environments should work together towards a common goal.

• The desktop flavor of Ubuntu has already moved to systemd from an upstart, but Ubuntu Touch is still using upstart. It’s not clear when the mobile platform will move to the new init system, but Ubuntu developers are already working towards this goal.

• A new official Xubuntu flavor called “core” has been announced by developers. It’s based on Ubuntu, and it integrates the Xfce desktop environment and nothing else.

• The ONOS Project and partners said Wednesday they have demonstrated the real-world practicality of using a router with open source software to connect networks in Australia and the US. The test validates the vision of SDN, open source for carriers, as well as ON.Lab’s ONOS network operating system, according to one of its coordinators.

• “SDN is about disaggregation of closed, proprietary boxes and separating of forwarding planes, control planes and applications,” says Guru Parulkar, executive director and board member of ON.Lab , which coordinates ONOS development. The communications test between Australia and the US achieved just that, he says. (See ON.Lab Aims to Make White Boxes Carrier-Grade , ON.Lab Intros Open Source SDN OS and SK Telecom Bets on SDN for Wireless.)

• We reported the other day that the Ubuntu Touch developers had a great session during the Ubuntu Online Summit for the next major release of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).

• Unity 8 is the next iteration of the desktop environment that powers the Ubuntu Linux distribution. It’s still under development, but the Ubuntu developers have presented a short demo during one of the Ubuntu Online Summit sessions.

• Making a mobile device act like a PC might seem like a thing of the future, but it’s not. Ubuntu developers just showed how connecting a mouse to a tablet transforms the Ubuntu Touch into a desktop experience.

• The Ubuntu Touch platform has a music scope and one of the music sources for that service was Grooveshark, but the service has been shut down. Now Ubuntu developers need to make some adjustments to Ubuntu Touch.

• Today was the last day of the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event that took place online on the UbuntuOnAir channel on Google+ via YouToube live sessions, between May 5-7, and there were still some interesting discussions about the upcoming features of Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).

• Despite the recent announcement that Windows 10 phones will be able to be used as PCs when connected to an external monitor, Ubuntu—the first operating system to toy with the idea—hasn’t conceded the smartphone-PC convergence race to Microsoft just yet.

• As the proprietary and open-source systems battle for mobile and PC users, what are the prospects for these two champions of converged computing?

Flavours and Variants

• During a very informative session at UOS (Ubuntu Online Summit) for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) that took place today, May 7, Martin Wimpress had the great pleasure of informing us about the upcoming features of the Ubuntu MATE 15.10 operating system.

• elementary OS “Freya” was released a month ago, but the developers are still making big changes to it. One of these modifications will bring a new “Open File Dialog” that should look and work much better than the previous one.

• The Linux Mint project is constantly working to improve the operating systems they are developing, along with the Cinnamon desktop environment. A new major update for Cinnamon is expected to land pretty soon, and it will come with lots of new features and changes.

• Ubuntu MATE is now an official distribution for Raspberry Pi 2, and the images for this light and modern operating system are now listed on the website.

• The Linux Mint developers have announced today, May 7, in what appears to be the shortest monthly newsletter ever released, that the team works hard these days to bring you the second installment of the Linux Mint 17 operating system.

• During the last day of Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), the Lubuntu development team discussed some of the upcoming features that will be implemented in the Lubuntu 15.10 Linux operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• Giada’s compact i200 mini-PC for thin client and signage runs Linux on a 4th Gen Intel Core, and offers mini-PCIe, mSATA, and automated scheduling features.

• Snuggly situated in an industrial section of Oakland, CA is Next Thing Co. a team of nine artists and engineers who are pursuing the dream of a lower cost single board computer. Today they’ve unveiled their progress on Kickstarter, offering a $9 development board called Chip.

• The board is Open Hardware, runs a flavor of Debain Linux, and boasts a 1Ghz R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC storage. It is more powerful than a Raspberry Pi B+ and equal to the BeagleBone Black in clock speed, RAM, and storage. Differentiating Chip from Beagle is its built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and the ease in which it can be made portable, thanks to circuitry that handles battery operation.

• A Kickstarter campaign promises a $9 computer with a larger processor than Raspberry Pi and the ability for cheap and easy mobile computing.

• Anyone who thought the Raspberry Pi was a little expensive priced at $35 is sure to find the $9 C.H.I.P. tiny computer much more to their liking.

• A crowd funded startup named Next Thing Co. is creating world’s cheapest computer which will be priced just $9. Named as “C.H.I.P”, this is technically faster, smaller & cheaper than Raspberry Pi, which is currently hailed as the leader of single-board computing world, introduced at $25.

Phones

Android

• There are plenty of TV boxes available to choose from on the market, but if you are looking for something a little different that allows you to dual boot Android and Ubuntu, the Ugoos UM3 TV Box is worth more investigation.

• The Ugoos UM3 is a small box that you can plug into your TV to run Android apps. But unlike most devices that fit that description, this one can also run Ubuntu Linux.

• That means you could use it to stream videos from YouTube or Netflix, play music from Pandora or Spotify, or play Android games. Then you could reboot the device and switch operating systems to run full desktop apps including LibreOffice and Firefox.

• Ugoos offers a larger model called the UT3S which sells for about $179. But the Ugoos UM3 costs about $50 less.

• Samsung had confirmed earlier this year that it was taking its time with the next Gear smartwatch in order to make sure it’s as perfect as possible. Called the Gear A, this watch will be the first round smartwatch from Samsung and will bring a new method of user interaction thanks to its use of a rotating bezel ring. Samsung has never actually offered a time frame for when the Gear A will be officially announced, but according to our insiders, the company has delayed the launch till the second half of this year.

• In the world of smartphones, Samsung and Apple cast big shadows. Perhaps no company is more familiar with those shadows than LG, which has been chasing Samsung’s mobile phone division for years. Each time that Samsung makes a move, LG follows along a few months later and a little less impressively.

• Those looking for a new Android phone in the month of May are going to find themselves staring at a number of solid options. With that in mind, we want to help narrow things down for those that are need of some assistance. Here, we take a look at the device’s we think represent the best Android phones for May, 2015.

• Last month, Samsung and HTC released their new 2015 flagships into the wild. The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, Samsung Galaxy S6, and HTC One M9 join a crowded field of competitors tempting those looking for a new Android phone this month. They will soon be joined by an LG G4, a device that’s set to replace the popular LG G3 in June.

• It looks like Google will reveal the successor to Android 5.0 Lollipop at its upcoming annual I/O 2015 developer conference.

• Arne Exton had once again the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the general availability of a new build for its AndEX Live CD project, whose primary goal is to help you run the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop mobile operating system from Google on your personal computer.

• The choice of Android TV devices has finally expanded beyond Google’s Nexus Player. Last week, Sony, which years ago launched the first Google TV set-top, began shipping the first Android TV based TVs, and this week it will be joined by Razer’s Forge TV gaming player. Later this month, Nvidia will ship its third-generation Nvidia Shield, which similarly runs Google’s new media player and gaming platform.

• In today’s more enlightened tech world, failure is not exactly acceptable, but it is at least considered natural. Fail twice in the same product category, however, and few will give much credence to future attempts. The pressure is on for Google to see some early wins for Android TV that can erase memories of its failed Google TV integrated TV/web platform.

Free Software/Open Source

• Bitcoin startup Bitseed has announced it is open-sourcing the creation of its new plug-in node.

• The company, which launched its first node in March, is asking contributors to help evolve its product by completing tasks and solving bounties in exchange for rewards.

• Bitseed’s project is hosted on Assembly, a collaborative platform that tracks contributions to projects with coloured coins on the bitcoin blockchain.

• Nervana Systems, one of a handful startups focusing on a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, today is announcing that it has released its Neon deep learning software under an Apache open-source license, allowing anyone to try it out for free.

• The startup is pointing to benchmarks a Facebook researcher recently conducted suggesting that the Nervana software outperforms other publicly available deep learning tools, including Nvidia’s cuDNN and Facebook’s own Torch7 libraries.

• Ammenti explained that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.

• Open source software is everywhere, and chances are high that you’ll be writing, deploying, or administering it when you enter the workforce. Hiring managers are looking for candidates with experience in open source. Employers will often ask you for your GitHub username along with – or instead of – your resume. So, if you’re all new to open source, where should you get started?

• If you’re feeling a bit intimated about the wide world of open source software, it’s totally understandable. There’s thousands of projects, and it’s hard to know which one will give you the best experience you can use to build your skill set. And it can be even harder to know which one will give you the best experience as a contributor and human being.

• Project CoprHD is positioned in the data center as a single, open control plane for multivendor storage. It offers the same level of flexibility, choice, security and transparency as EMC’s commercial ViPR Controller product. It adds the ability to create new services and applications. EMC will continue selling ViPR Controller as a commercial offering.

• With the release of the Nginx 1.9.0 Web server, Nginx has taken TCP load-balancing capabilities from its commercial Nginx Plus product and fitted it to the company’s open source technology.

• TCP load balancing improves failover consistency among worker processes, according to Nginx. The feature already has appeared in the commercial Nginx 5 and 6 products.

Events

• This is a fun month. Not only are we moving forward with the ownCloud Contributor Conference (some cool interviews coming out soon), but there’s a sudden avalanche of events this month. The ownCloud.org blog already wrote about it – we have had FOSDEM, SCALE, Chemnitz and may others I didn’t attend myself. Find out about the openSUSE conf from last week and the upcoming OTS in Berlin!

• I asked this of the openSUSE community at the start of my keynote last week at the openSUSE Conferene in The Hague, and they gave some great answers. Community, YAST, quality, OBS, etc.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has revealed how it reckons Firefox should look when it’s on the tellie.

• Firefox OS user experience designer Hunter Luo reckons that the four basic functions of a smart television are watching shows, accessing apps, controlling devices and looking at list of your content. The user interface for Firefox-for-tellies therefore presents each of those options as a “deck”, concealing “cards”. So in the image below, “TV” is the deck and each of the channels gets a “card”, in this case Channel 32.

• Every committed Mozillian and many enthusiastic end-users will use a pre-release version of Firefox.

• In Mac and Windows this is pretty straightforward, you simply download the Firefox Nightly/Aurora/Beta dmg or setup tool, and get going. When it is installed it is a proper desktop application, you could make it your default browser, and life goes on.

• Believe it or not, the folks at Mozilla are working hard these days to bring you a major update to one of the best open-source and cross-platform email, news, and chat clients on the market.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has just announced that LibreOffice 4.4.3 has been released and is now available for download. It’s a maintenance release with not so many improvements, but it’s here and it will land in repositories soon enough.

• Please do NOT use this VirtualBox Beta release on production machines. A VirtualBox Beta release should be considered a bleeding-edge release meant for early evaluation and testing purposes.

• You can download the binaries here. Please use sha256sum to compare the hash of the downloaded package with the corresponding hash from this list.

• Please do NOT open bug reports at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker but use our VirtualBox Beta Feedback forum to report any problems with the Beta release. Please concentrate on reporting regressions since VirtualBox 4.3.26.

CMS

• After helping to put the dot in .com by building and configuring enterprise class solutions with WorldCom as a Sun hardware and software engineer, Jason Smith went on to AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the publishers of the journal Science) to direct the technical needs of the education directorate.

• Jason has built or architected solutions ranging from enterprise to small business class and has found in Drupal a flexible, scalable, rapid development framework for targeting all levels of projects. A long time beneficiary of the open source movement, Jason—now a senior software architect at The Weather Company—is an avid supporter of open source projects and believes strongly in giving back to the community that supported him.

• My favorite part about our open source project, PencilBlue, is that I get to interact with people from all over the world. When we first started, there were just two of us, but as the months progressed we saw our contributors begin to grow. It got me thinking about what it takes to be a good maintainer and how my team will make sure the project continues to run smoothly for years to come.

• How many people across the world contribute to open source software? If GitHub’s user base is any indication, the open source community is more than 8.5 million. That’s a massive number of people that have the capacity and desire to contribute. These numbers don’t even take into consideration those who clone or download distributions anonymously. Now that we know how many people we can potentially engage, how do we get them interested in our projects?

• Website publishers using the popular free and open source WordPress content management system (CMS) woke up this morning to find that their sites had been upgraded to version 4.2.2. Users who’s sites somehow missed being automatically upgraded are urged to update immediately, as this update addresses several important security issues. According to Wordfence, maintainers of a popular WordPress security plugin, this release fixes one recently discovered vulnerability and further hardens a security issue that was addressed in version 4.2.1.

Healthcare

• Software projects in health care would benefit from increased collaboration, using open source, exchanging know-how and open documentation, say experts from IsfTeH, International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth. “Most important is the sharing of best practices, but reusing common software components also reduces costs”, the experts say.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Gnubik is a 3D single player game which displays an interactive cube similar to the well known Rubik Cube.

• This is a bug-fix release, network still only works at a prototype stage. However, a bunch of bugs have been fixed, including a good deal show-stoppers which were preventing the game from starting some os OS/hardware combinations.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a Boston-based individual to be its full-time Web Developer.

Project Releases

• Cutegram 2 is once again back as one of the best Telegram clients for Linux ever. Version 2.2.0 is here to attest just that, as announced today by its developer on the project’s website.

Public Services/Government

• Ammenti explained that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.

• Gecamed, an open source Electronic Health Record system developed in Luxembourg since 2007, is already used by more than 10 per cent of all general practitioners in the country. It is also the first EHR system in Luxembourg to achieve interoperability with the health records management system used by eSanté, the country’s national eHealth agency, says Guido Bosch, a research engineer at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology.

• Political commitment and innovative individuals are crucial to get public administrations to switch to open source software, conclude researchers at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University (Netherlands). The potential cost savings or the size and complexity of the public administration “have no discernible effect”, the researchers write in Government Information Quarterly.

• Germany’s Rhine-Neckar metropolitan area, with the three states of Baden Wuerttemberg, Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, are testing an open source patient portal that provides access to a ‘personal’ Electronic Health Record (p-EHR) system.

Leftovers

• It’s fair to say no one was expecting that. Not the political parties, not the punditocracy and – least of all – the pollsters. The exit poll that came on the stroke at 10pm will have caused ashen faces at Labour headquarters. At Lib Dem towers, the spirits would have crumpled in an instant. At Tory mission control, the joy would have been unconfined.

Finance

• CMD’s guide, “New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money Is Wasted by Charter Schools—Stringent Controls Urgently Needed as Charter Funding Faces Huge Increase,” analyzes materials obtained from open records requests about independent audits of how states interact with charter school authorizers and charter schools.

• These documents, along with the earlier Inspector General report, reveal systemic barriers to common sense financial controls. Revealing quotes from those audit materials, highlighted in CMD’s report, show that too often states have had untrained staff doing unsystematic reviews of authorizers and charter schools while lacking statutory authority and adequate funding to fully assess how federal money is being spent by charters.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In case you’re curious, the percentage of Democrats who say they “would consider voting for” Sanders has risen from 14 percent in February to 23 percent now–but 61 percent say they haven’t heard enough to be able to say…which is, of course, in part a function of journalists treating next year’s Democratic contest as a foregone conclusion.

Censorship

• Copyright law is frequently misused as a tool to censor unwanted online criticism. And often, this misuse does not make it into court. But one such case has recently made its way up to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And yesterday, EFF filed a “friend of the court” brief, urging the court to consider the First Amendment interests at play when copyright is used to silence public criticism.

Privacy

• The US court of appeals has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful, in a landmark decision that clears the way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency.

• A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit overturned an earlier ruling that the controversial surveillance practice first revealed to the US public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 could not be subject to judicial review.

• There is a measure of irony to the landmark intelligence bill that passed the lower house of France’s Parliament on Tuesday: It is intended to legalize some activities that French spies are already doing illegally. With militant fighters streaming back into Europe from the battlefields of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, French authorities have more radicals to keep track of than they have police officers to shadow them. That has left the French security apparatus deeply strained, and the bill passed Tuesday embraces digital mass surveillance as a solution to the manpower problem: What can’t be tracked by a team of undercover officers can perhaps — and “perhaps” is the operative word — be more efficiently monitored by banks of computers.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.