● 05.09.15

● Links 9/5/2015: Firefox OS Smartphones in Africa, Lots of Android

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Every so often I get the pleasure of writing a review where the biggest challenge is finding something, anything, to nitpick in order to ensure I don’t sound like I’ve been bought off by the company. Such is the case with the Meerkat, by System76. A small device that, at first blush, one might think a toy. I can assure you, this 4.5” by 4.5” device performs with the power of a machine three or four times its size.

Server

• The world of application container virtualization is relatively nascent, but it’s growing fast. Initially, Docker commanded much of the hype and attention, but this week in particular CoreOS has been grabbing headlines, thanks in part to its CoreOS Fest event. Now Intel is jumping into the fray, with a new server effort that backs a particular flavor of CoreOS’s container Linux approach.

• Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet many wonderful individuals at conferences. A conference is a unique setting that lends itself to quick exchanges and brief meetings. Every once in a while, however, there’s a connection made that instantly turns into a great friendship.

• As Docker and container technologies continue to evolve, a whole ecosystem of adjunct tools are going to take shape too, including monitoring tools. Software analytics company New Relic has announced a set of new features in its Software Analytics Platform that are designed to enable greater control over microservices, including Docker monitoring.

• New Relic, which provides software analytics, is expanding its platform to monitor Docker containers and microservices in a move that takes it deeper into the enterprise.

Kernel Space

Applications

• We can all admire the vast number of open source apps and tools that are available on modern operating systems. They come in all shapes and sizes. Small console tools that can be easily integrated into large projects, feature-rich apps that offer everything bar the the kitchen sink, well designed tools, and eye catching candy. Open source software holds numerous compelling advantages over proprietary software.

• Just this morning Lubomir released NetworkManager 1.0.2, the latest of the 1.0 stable series. It’s a great cleanup and bugfix release with contributions from lots of community members in many different areas of the project!

Proprietary

• Opera 31 (31.0.1857.0) Dev has been released, being available for all the major desktop platforms: Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

• It is based on Chromium 44 and brings interesting new features, like: Encrypted Media Extensions like Widevine DRM, enhanced Bookmarks Bar and touch support for tab dragging.

Instructionals/Technical

• With the recent release of Ubuntu 15.04, aka “Vivid Vervet”, the Ubuntu community has also unveiled an early release of LXD (pronounced “lex-dee”), a new project aimed at revitalizing the use of LXC and LXC-based containers in the face of application container efforts such as Docker and rkt. In this post, I’ll provide a quick introduction to LXD.

Games

• The developers behind the popular PlayOnLinux project, an open-source and cross-platform application that has been designed from the ground up to act as a user-friendly interface to the well-known Wine project, has released PlayOnLinux 4.2.7.

• Minecraft is a hugely popular game that runs on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and even smartphones. It’s the best-selling PC game of all time and has become a worldwide sensation with obsessive players around the world, a large online community, and a vast array of merchandise. Many people enjoy building complicated structures and even creating their own interactive systems using only the mechanics of the game.

• It looks like Evolve will be coming to Linux sooner rather than later, thanks to more goodness from the SteamDB resource.

• Today, CryTek’s Brand Manager, Marcel Hatam was kind enough to push this announcement in our direction, outlining a “small, but important” update to the EULA for their Engine as a Service platform, confirming that the long awaited Linux client release of the CryEngine is near on the horizon.

• Version 9.8 of the Google Maps app for Android brings three changes that seek to enhance your user experience. You’ll now be able to add multiple photos at a time, hide scheduled events on location cards, and you can pull up all scheduled events with new commands. Here’s how to use each:

• Out of eight games in the latest Humble Weekly Bundle, seven are available for Linux. And it’s a good mix of popular games from indie label Surprise Attack.

• MadSpace: To Hell and Beyond is a rather obscure late 90s sci-fi FPS/Space combat game. Thanks to Night Dive Studios this rather unique game has been re-released and is now available on Steam.

• I do a fair few articles covering Linux sales statistics with lots of different developers, and today is the day for Among the Sleep from Krillbite.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Budgie is a new desktop environment that has been making quite a few waves into the Linux community. It’s used to power the Solus operating system, and a new version has been released, pushing the version number to 8.2.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I started out trying to color ink drawings in GIMP with a mouse! That never turned out very well, haha. I talked my parents into getting me a little wacom bamboo tablet for Christmas when I was in… 9th grade, I think?

• Okay, so I’ve wanted to do a tutorial for transform masks for a while now, and this is sorta ending up to be a flower-drawing tutorial. Do note that this tutorial requires you to use Krita 2.9.4 at MINIMUM. It has a certain speed-up that allows you to work with transform masks reliably!

• The KDE system monitor needs an update. In the first step we like to ask you to join the brainstorming about requirements. What do you want integrated into KSysGuard?

• You get to see and hear Riddell, Rick Timmis, Aaron Honeycutt (ahoneybun), and ovidiu-florin, and pick up a few tricks from the video.

• Users are often confused by the current KWallet system behavior. When their computers start, they enter the KDE session password but just after logging-in, they are prompted yet another password, for something named KWallet. Sometimes, they even see several password prompts from KWallet, depending on their precise desktop configuration.

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.10.0. KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement. This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s that time of the year again: GNOME.Asia Summit at Universitas Indonesia in Depok (Indonesia)! On Thursday some workshops took place how to contribute to GNOME translation and documentation and how to start coding.

Distributions

Ballnux/SUSE

• Dominique Leuenberger from the openSUSE Tumbleweed development team announced today, May 8, what was implemented this week on the Tumbleweed version of the openSUSE Linux operating system.

Red Hat Family

• With parts of the emerging application container infrastructure moving ahead on separate tracks, a key player is reiterating its support for a set of open standards for packaging, orchestration and distribution of application containers.

• 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.”

• Red Hat, one of the early Linux pioneers and the first billion dollar open source company, is taking on another pioneering role in enterprise software by putting forth the idea of creating standards for containers. To that end, Red Hat is pushing the development and the adoption of four key standards areas within the Linux community: isolation, packaging format, orchestration, and distribution.

• The systemd developer produced an initialization system that no one liked, but everyone adopted for use with Linux containers. Are his days as a target over?

• This major version release updates Apache httpd and the versions of Apache Tomcat to recent versions, including updates to all of the mod* extensions for httpd, and the version of Hibernate for the JWS Plus product.

• Tata Consultancy Services (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, has been awarded the prestigious recognition of “System Integrator Partner of the Year” by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. Announced during the annual Red Hat North America Partner Awards on April 8 in Orlando, Florida, recipients were honored for their ability to successfully deliver innovative open source solutions to customers in the commercial and public sector channels.

Fedora

• Flock is Fedora’s big annual conference for contributors and developers, where we meet to plan for — and hack on — the future of the project. This year’s event will be August 12-15 in Rochester, New York. The call for papers is complete, and we received 132 submissions. That’s more than we can accommodate, of course, so please vote now on your favorites.

• We again met at Starbucks Coffee, Indiranagar on May 2, 2015 at 6 PM for our monthly Fedora meetup in Bangalore. Like the meetup in the month of April, there were only 2 attendees: myself and Sayan Chowdhury. Well, we are used to such things and were not disheartened.

Debian Family

• In my previous post I looked at the possibility of using rake, a Ruby build tool, instead of make to write debian/rules files. While that turned out to not be entirely impossible as far as the core dpkg-* utilities used to build Debian packages are concerned, wiring it up with the debhelper ‘dh’ command sequencer appears unfortunately impossible without changes to dh itself.

• We can’t possibly express how good Debian 8.0 really is. It is simply fantastic.

• It has found the exact balance between being a distribution for advanced Linux users and veterans alike. It is also usable enough for beginners to jump right in and learn something new. So many Linux distributions have tried to get this balance right, many have come close. None that we have tested here in the Labs have got it so accurate. Debian 8.0 simply could not be any more accurate and has struck the balance right on the head.

• Debian 8.0 is undoubtedly the fastest and more responsive we have ever used. It is fast to install, boots instantly and is responsive like nothing we have experienced in a Linux distribution, to date. It sets a new benchmark for all other Linux distributions.

• The Debian project has just updated their official Wiki with a new entry called DontBreakDebian, which provides some helpful tips on how not to ruin your Debian installation by doing stuff that you’re not supposed to be doing.

Derivatives

• Raspbian is a Linux distribution based on Debian built specifically for the Raspberry Pi platform. Developers have just implemented a huge update to it, and it’s now available for download and upgrade.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has announced plans to switch all versions of Ubuntu to its new Snappy package manager. The new tool offers the promise of greater stability and security for the system and applications.

• Snappy already is used in Ubuntu core, a minimal version of Ubuntu intended for use in the cloud, on mobile devices and in embedded systems.

• The next step is rolling Snappy into “Ubuntu Desktop Next”. Next is a special version of Ubuntu that acts as a test bed for new technology before it is included in the desktop version. Testers use Next to try out new features, such as Mir and Unity 8.

• When I first started out with Linux I used Mandrake (later Mandriva, then Mageia) and then openSUSE and the desktop environment that I used was KDE.

• The first time I tried GNOME was with Ubuntu 8.04 and for years this set the standard. In what was seen as a controversial move at the time Ubuntu switched from GNOME to Unity and GNOME seemed to be heading in a direction aimed at losing its loyal support base.

• At first Unity was hated by nearly everybody but with the release of Ubuntu 12.04 many people could see the benefits.

• Ubuntu’s race to beat Windows 10 to smartphone-PC convergence has a massive potential roadblock ahead of it: The adaptable interface depends on the Unity 8 desktop with the Mir display server, new and untested technologies.

• As you may know, Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet uses systemd as the default init service manager, replacing Canonical’s Upstart (sysVinit on Debian).

• The Ubuntu community is already spotting the operating systems in all kind of cool places, like NASA or The International Space station, but it looks like there is a Manga collection of comic books that details the adventures of Ubuntu users, usually trying to convince other people that it’s a perfectly good system.

• Canonical revealed details about a ClamAV vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04.

• We reported earlier this week that a vulnerability discovered recently in the Linux kernel packages of Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been addressed.

• Back in April, we announced that Canonical and Dell worked together on bringing the next-generation Ubuntu-based Dell XPS 13 laptop developer edition to the Ubuntu’s strong developer community, but the fact of the matter is that, at that point in time, Dell launched two laptops, the Dell XPS 13 and the Precision M3800 mobile workstation.

Devices/Embedded

• C.H.I.P. is a new mini computer that aims to provide powerful hardware at the ridiculous price of just $9 (€8), not to mention the fact that it’s incredibly small.

• The cost of computing keeps getting lower as a project to launch a $9 machine takes to Kickstarter.

• The world’s first $9 computer is about to become a reality thanks to Next Thing Co. The California-based company launched a Kickstarter offering the development board called C.H.I.P.

• A new miniature computer that features all the same functionality as a regular PC has been developed by a US startup, costing just $9.

• As Make: points out, some of C.H.I.P.’s specs are similar to the BeagleBone Black: a 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM and 4GB storage. But C.H.I.P. has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity out of the box, and is of course is much cheaper than the BeagleBone Black. C.H.I.P. only has a composite video out port though, but maker Next Thing Co. – the same company behind the Otto GIF camera – will release VGA and HDMI shields for the computer.

• The world’s first $9 microcomputer to rival Raspberry Pi has landed on Kickstarter.

• When your latest project requires a bit more processing power than an Arduino provides then most Makers switch over to the Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone Black. Now there is another option. It’s called the C.H.I.P and it’s being sold as the world’s cheapest computer.

• Remember when the $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer seemed crazy cheap? Actually that is still a pretty good price for a computer that’s as versatile as the Pi.

• Development board lovers, some news for you today. Our friend Leon, with the assistance of his colleagues in the Konsulko Group, has successfully built Tizen:Common with Linux kernel 3.14.14 using Yocto. The target dev board is the HummingBoard-i2eX (Freescale i.MX6 SoC) and interestingly hardware accelerated graphics is supported in Wayland/Weston 1.6.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung Electronics is reportedly working on a new mobile cloud service called Samsung Artik, which is a Internet of Things (IoT) based cloud platform that would connect different devices made by the company. According to a trademark application that was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on April 27, Samsung applied for a cloud service called Samsung Artik (serial no. 86610549). The description for the service was for a “cloud computing system to connect, manage, and operate devices, in addition to M2M communication.”

Android

• The device runs Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box.

• Google announced an update to Android Wear in April, making its debut on the LG Watch Urbane and rolling out to other devices in the family. It’s the most significant Wear update so far, a step change in functionality.

• Focus on user data privacy is tipped for Google’s next version of Android, to bring it in line with Apple’s iOS and custom Android versions such as Cyanogen

• Motorola has just started the soak test of the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Moto X (2014) 2nd generation smartphones across select countries. Along with the laundry list of bug fixes and tweaks, a couple of interesting features are also included.

• It has been a long wait for the Lollipop update for the Dell Venue 8 7840. Dell has missed several deadlines to get Lollipop rolled out to this device, but now it’s here. Android 5.0.2 is available for download from the update menu right now.

• Not long after Android 5.0 Lollipop started rolling out on various Android devices, the 5.1 version of the mobile OS began arriving in a number of Android-based gadgets, as well. According to Christian Today, the Moto X 1st generation and 2nd generation 2014 models will reportedly be receiving the update “as early as next week,” based on Motorola’s recent announcement regarding the new OS update.

• Warner Bros and NetherRealm Studios finally released the Android version of Mortal Kombat X this week, and for those who are a fan of either the Mortal Kombat series or just simply enjoy the mindless, indulgent swiping and tapping on screen within Netherrealm’s action games, this will be one to keep on the radar, or better yet just download immediately. Similar to the likes of the Injustice Gods Among Us or Batman Arkham Origins mobile adoptions, Mortal Kombat X is a simpler action game meant to mirror image the likes of a true fighting title, and although there is no free movement involved like an actual fighting game, there is enough action, eye candy, and interaction with the character movements to make it pretty enjoyable.

• The Nexus 9 isn’t the only device getting a 5.1 update today—Motorola has made the Android 5.1 update for the 2nd gen Moto X official and has started sending it out. The rollout is starting with a soak test in Brazil, but it shouldn’t be long before it hits all the Moto X variants.

• A new quick-access gesture in the latest Lollipop build turns on the phone’s flashlight with a wave of the wrist.

• Several variants and later iterations of the Sony Xperia Z have already received an Android Lollipop update, yet the original flagship Sony Xperia Z has gone un-updated so far. That’s no longer going to be the case, as the official OTA rollout for the Sony Xperia Z has an official release date.

• Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including a long-term review of the Galaxy S6 Edge, the iPhone 6 Plus Killer is launched in China, Lollipop reaches for a ten percent share, LG’s Urbane smartwatch, phablet fans switching to Apple, A/B testing for Android developers, I/O sessions and topics, and what does the ‘M’ stand for in Android M?

• In the past two weeks, we’ve seen the Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1 update and release start to develop. Samsung isn’t talking about its Galaxy Android 5.1 release just yet but thanks to a flurry of leaks, we now have a pretty good idea about what to expect from Samsung’s next big Lollipop update.

• While many people may have forgotten about it altogether, Amazon hasn’t left the users of its Fire smartphone behind. The company just released an update to the device that’s based on Android 4.4 “KitKat,” and provides the handful of loyal Fire phone users with some key, long-awaited improvements to the device.

• Google I/O kicks off by the end of the month, and the search giant has now put out the schedule for the event. While Android M is said to be one of the biggest announcements, Google also has some nifty details up its sleeve to reveal at its upcoming event. Here’s a quick look at what to expect at Google I/O.

• While many smartphone users might be considering a switch over from Android to iPhone – and recent sales data shows the iPhone 6 is a great incentive for doing that – others are interested in doing the exact opposite. Leaving behind one smartphone platform for another isn’t as simple a task as it may sound, especially if you want to take most of your data with you. However, Re/code has put together a neat guide that tells you how to move your most important data over from an iPhone to Android, including contacts, music, photos and even apps.

• Sometimes things just don’t work out. You invest a lot of time and energy (and money) into the relationship, but you’re not getting what you need. Or you fight constantly about everything, even though you’ve created some wonderful memories together. So, you decide it’s time to break up … with your phone.

• Whatever candy Google chooses as the nickname for its upcoming Android M update, it seems that M may also stand for “workplace.”

• Google is set to introduce A/B testing for Android developers at its I/O Conference (reports Amir Efrati at The Information). This will allow developers to run multiple variants of an applications profile in the Google Play store to test which choices offer the best results.

• The contents of a conference agenda often reveal quite a bit about the event in question. Case in point? An overzealous Googler posted an entry for an Android for Work session that seemingly confirms the existence of Android M, the next logical release of Google’s mobile operating system.

• The timing and name make sense. Google’s historically progressed through the alphabet for Android version codenames, naming each after a distinctive dessert — last year was Android L, or Lollipop. The company typically showcases releases at its opening I/O address and issues a developer preview edition ahead of stabler releases in the months that follow.

• After spending roughly a month with the Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update this is our AT&T Galaxy S5 Android Lollipop review that covers the performance of this major update for the AT&T model.

• Google finally delivers a new Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update to the Nexus 7 with a collection of bug fixes wrapped up in a small update that is rolling out to many Nexus 7 devices right now. After spending a day with the Nexus 7 Android 5.1.1 update We want to share an early Android 5.1.1 review to help you decide if it is worth installing on your Nexus 7.

• The average free Android app silently connects to more than 100 different web addresses to serve adverts and track users, according to a paper from French research institute Eurecom.

• The worst offenders found on the Google Play store connect to orders of magnitude of up to 20 times more sites. One app that does nothing more than control volume “connects to almost 2,000 distinct URLs” when it’s booted up on a phone

• The latest figures from Google show the adoption of Android Lollipop is rapidly increasing. From a 5.4 percent share of the active Android handset space at the start of April, version five of the mobile operating system is now on 9.7 percent of Android handsets communicating with the Google Play Store. That represents a month on month increase of 79.6 percent.

• LG’s newest smartwatch, the LG Watch Urbane, costs $350. So let me just throw it out there now: judging LG’s new Watch Urbane from a value perspective is sort of completely silly. When it comes to value, I don’t think any Android Wear watch has especially great appeal – after all, you’re paying as much or more for one than you would a relatively inexpensive smartphone, a smartphone that does many, many more things. But the Watch Urbane has even less value appeal than most Wear devices (not that this is at all fatal to its success as a product).

• The Android 5.0.2 update apparently is breaking some Nexus 9s. But it’s possible to reset your way out of it.

• Ever wish you could leave your phone at home and rely only on your smartwatch for a while? With Google’s latest Android Wear update — available now on the LG Watch Urbane and making its way to other Wear watches soon — you can.

• One of the more common things people need to do is transfer files from their mobile device or tablet to their desktop. Sometimes it’s a photo, sometimes it’s a song, and many other times it’s some sort of document, presentation, or other file that needs transferred. There are actually quite a few ways to transfer files from Android to PC (and back again) and we’ll take a look at them here.

• A slew of new Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1 release details have emerged today as Samsung works to update its devices with the latest version of Google’s Android Lollipop operating system.

• Wi-Fi connectivity has been one of the real headline features for Android Wear 5.1, and rightly so: this new functionality will allow your Android Wear device to stay connected to the internet even when your phone is nowhere to be found (so long as you have a saved Wi-Fi network nearby). Here’s what we’ve learned about the feature in using it so far, including a video primer of how to get it set up.

• It’s been awhile since Android app developers have felt that spark of innovation from Google’s app marketplace — but the company is reportedly about to play a cool hand.

• Typically when we talk about the Amazon Fire phone, it’s because Amazon has slashed the handset’s price in an attempt to get more folks to spring for its not-totally-well-received phone. That’s not the case today, though.

• Amazon is pushing an update to the Fire phone that includes Fire OS 4.6.1. What’s notable about this update is that it bumps the Fire phone up to Android 4.4, which while not totally exciting now that Android 5.1 is out, is exciting for the Fire phone since it’s coming from Android 4.2.

• Today Android M was listed by Google in their collection of events for Google I/O. This is Google’s yearly developers conference, one where it’s common for Google to reveal a new flavor of Android – or at least major updates for flavors of Android. At this year’s Google I/O 2015, Google’s first mention of Android M has appeared. This will most likely end up being called Android Marshmallow. Meanwhile there’s a rumor that the Nexus 9 will be replaced amid some (relatively outlying) price drops abroad.

• Lollipop continues to chomp its way up the Android food chain.

• Released Tuesday, the latest update of Google’s Android Developers Dashboard shows a collective share of 9.7 percent for Android 5.0 and 5.1 — both otherwise known as Lollipop.

• Now that Android 5.1.1 factory images have been posted for a number of Nexus devices, we are starting to see the rollout of over-the-air (OTA) updates to them, namely the Nexus 7 (2012) and (2013), Nexus 10, and Nexus Player. More will arrive soon (Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 4, and Nexus 9), so we are starting to compile a list of them all below. We know that many of you like to sideload updates rather than wait for them to hit your device – feel free to bookmark this one.

• The Nexus 9 already feels like the forgotten child of the Nexus program. Introduced only six or so months ago, this device seems to be the slowest of them all to receive timely updates. We aren’t sure if the tablet’s NVIDIA chip is to blame, if Google is mad at it for coming in “sand,” or if they keep confusing their whale phone for it, but the N9 has been stuck on Android 5.0.1 for quite some time. It hasn’t been updated to 5.0.2 or 5.1 or 5.1.1 to date. Look at our Android 5.1 OTA update list – see anything missing? Yep, only the Nexus 9 is without links to update files.

• Apple may have been right all along with the iPhone, at least according to the recent actions of several top Android device makers. There’s one smartphone feature that’s still important to many outspoken shoppers who choose Android over iPhone, but now that feature seems to be disappearing from flagship handsets in favor of an approach more like the one Apple has been taking since it first launched the iPhone in 2007.

• We’ve got some solid options for Android Wear watches, but let’s be honest: It’s been tough so far to single out any one of them as providing a truly great all-around user experience.

• The Moto 360 is gorgeous but not without its issues. Sony’s SmartWatch 3 has lots of positives but also has a weird display that gets monochromatic and practically impossible to read in its dimmed state. Asus’s ZenWatch is pretty but with lackluster screen quality, meanwhile, and LG’s G Watch R has outstanding hardware but a clunky form (and let’s not even get into that awkwardly marked bezel).

• In its battle with Uber for passengers — and relevancy — Lyft has formed a national partnership with Verizon Wireless that the pair hope will steer more customers their way.

• Android Auto is rolling out, and it’s coming to major auto makers such as Acura, Chevy, Honda and more later this year. But you don’t have to wait to get directions, voice actions, music, apps and more behind the wheel. You can outfit your vehicle now with Pioneer’s NEX line of in-dash receivers.

• The Sprint variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 received the Android 5.0 Lollipop firmware update on Friday. The update came nearly three weeks after the network provider rolled it out and later pulled it back for the Galaxy S4 Spark variant that has the company’s enhanced Long-Term Evolution (LTE) service.

• Likely as the result of the well-deserved flack it’s caught over poor app security, Google’s made significant strides towards cutting down on the number of unscrupulous apps inhabiting the Play Store. And perhaps in recognition of the fact that no centralized system is perfect, the company’s planning to put part of curation in the hands of users. According to Bloomberg, a future update — presumably Android M — will give “more detailed choices over what apps can access.”

• Each wearable platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, if you’re already deeply invested into the iPhone ecosystem, the Apple Watch is the way to go. And if you’re an Android user, Android Wear makes sense. Neither is compatible with one another (although there’s a rumor that Google is working on an Android Wear app for iOS).

• So many pundits, bloggers and technology journalists focus on telling you what’s best. This is the best phone. These are the best apps. I do it too, though I often try to explain exactly why the device I’m covering is the best for the widest range of users. This time, however, I’m going to forget about what’s best for you and focus instead on what’s best for me. And if your priorities are at least somewhat aligned with mine, it’ll likely be what’s best for you as well.

Free Software/Open Source

• Vatican wants to save the human history in a digital form, and the best way to do so is to use open-source, non-proprietary software that will still be easily accessible and usable in 50 years, it says.

• The results from the annual Future Of Open Source survey are in, and they confirm everything we already knew: Open source is now the default.

• The survey reports that 78 percent of its respondents are now running their businesses with open source software, and two-thirds are building software for their customers that’s based on open source software. More significant, the percentage of respondents actually participating in open source projects has increased from 50 percent to 64 percent, and 88 percent say they expect to contribute to projects within the next three years.

• Over the past few years there has been a race among old-school tech providers—companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, VMware—to paper over their proprietary roots by open-sourcing at least some of their technologies.

Events

• Proposals are due by June 5th, and accepted speaker notifications will go out by June 12th.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We are happy to share that the first Firefox OS smartphones went on sale in Senegal and Madagascar this week. This follows an announcement from Mozilla and Orange at Mobile World Congress 2015 that Firefox OS smartphones would be available in markets across Africa and the Middle East later this year.

• “We are pleased to partner with Orange to bring the mobile Web to users in a substantial number of new growth markets across Africa and the Middle East said Andreas Gal, CTO of Mozilla. “I’m also thrilled to see how the imminent arrival of Firefox OS has created excitement in the local Mozilla communities.”

• Microsoft has included a surprise feature in its new Edge web browser for Windows 10, in the form of support for the ultra-optimizable Asm.js JavaScript dialect.

• First developed by Mozilla and championed by the nonprofit’s former CTO Brendon Eich, Asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that aims to be the “assembly language of the web.”

SaaS/Big Data

• In order for an open source project to have a truly global reach, it must reach its users in their native tongue. OpenStack is no different. In order to bring open source cloud computing to countries around the world, a dedicated team of individuals helps translate both the project itself and its documentation into the native language of numerous peoples.

• One of the translators working on that effort is Łukasz Jernaś. Jernaś is a software engineer for the Allegro Group doing internal tools development in Python, but he is a systems administrator by heart. He started working on OpenStack around the Grizzly release, when the company he works for deployed its first private cloud. Striving to keep his environment in his native language, translating Horizon (the web-based interface to OpenStack) seemed a natural thing to do.

Databases

• The world is moving toward a NoSQL one. It’s requiring us to learn new techniques and approaches to working with data. We have to spend more time engineering and designing schemas. Finally, we have to know more about our database’s workings than with relational databases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 4.4 is the most beautiful and featured release ever by The Document Foundation and now The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 4.4.3, a bug-fix release with 88 bug fixes over 4.4.2. This release makes LibreOffice even more stable. So let’s install or update LibreOffice 4.4.3 inUbuntu/Linux Mint or in other Ubuntu based distributions.

• The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third minor release in the “Fresh” branch of the popular Open Source office suite. This release features nearly 90 fixes, mostly import/export and formatting issues as well as some functionality bugs. In the same post, Italo Vignoli called for LibreOffice Conference 2015 papers and help bug hunting in LibreOffice 5.0.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Recently, I wrote about the interesting Open Humans Network, which aims to make it easier for people to share various forms of biological data. That’s become a hugely important area; the hope is that by applying big data analytical techniques to the increasingly large stores of genetic data now being produced by low-cost sequencing techniques, it will be possible to come up with personalised medicines designed for a specific genetic make-up, rather than average ones as now.

Project Releases

• Today we are very proud to announce the release of our very first version of Macaw Movies! If you don’t know what this is about, please read our previous post.

• I am considering modernizing the application a bit. First migrating it to Python 3, then to Qt 5, we’ll see how it goes.

• Many of us use Telegram on our smartphones and tablets but if you are using Linux then you can also use Telegram on Linux by installing Cutegram. Cutegram is a completely free and open source graphical software project that has been designed from the offset to act as a Linux client for the Telegram messaging service. It offers an attractive and modern graphical user interface implemented in Qt.

Openness/Sharing

• Scandinavian countries are the most advanced countries in Open Government, with Sweden ranking first, according to the World Justice Project Open Government Index 2015. Norway ranked 3rd, ahead of Denmark (4th) and Finland (6th).

Open Data

• SINCE A MASSIVE 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, over 7,000 people have died, and many more have been injured or left stranded in rural areas. Aid groups like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have deployed teams to help those left behind in the districts of Dhading, Gorkha, Rasuwa and Sindhupalchowk. But there are plenty of people who are contributing from thousands of miles away—on their lunch break, after work, or on the weekend. They’re part of an online community of volunteers from all over the world who are mapping Nepal from their laptops, creating data that’s critical to on-the-ground relief.

Open Hardware

• After [Brian] starting selling his own Raspberry Pi expansion boards, he found himself with a need for a robot that could solder 40-pin headers for him. He first did what most people might do by looking up pre-built solutions. Unfortunately everything he found was either too slow, too big, or cost as much as a new car. That’s when he decided to just build his own soldering robot.

• At the NFV World Congress, ARM is teaming with Enea, Applied Micro and Netzyn to show off platforms for OPNFV and virtual set-top boxes.

Programming

• I cringe when I see job listings searching for “rock star developers.” What does that even mean? Developers who take all the credit, while the band, agent, road crew, and sound engineers do the heavy lifting?

• I revamped some code based off of work I did a few years ago to make relatively fast perf counters. We are going to start using this in Builder so we can have fairly accurate statistics about our subsystems.

• On modern Intel x86_64, these take about 5-8 instructions based on your optimization level. The nice thing is that they don’t require any atomics. Those in the know are getting that warm feeling right now about why that is important. Atomics cause cacheline flushes, and cacheline flushes are the enemy of fast code. I once had a manager that called atomic instructions “cacheline nukes”. Appropriate.

Leftovers

• Authorities are looking for a teen who wanted a date with Destiny and hoped to get it by spray-painting a prom proposal on an Idaho cliffside.

• The Idaho Statesman reports (http://bit.ly/1GYk3Us ) that the message “Destiny, Prom?” was painted in large pink and blue letters on the side of the Black Cliffs, in a popular rock climbing spot, east of Boise. The Ada County sheriff’s office is searching for the culprit.

• SSDs have a shelf life. They need consistent access to a power source in order for them to not lose data over time.

• I’m not a celebrity — I’m a Twitter celebrity. But the retweets and faves don’t do it for me anymore

Security

• As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. There are also many concerns about security, though. Many people have some level of familiarity with how the Internet of Things will make everyday devices and objects smarter, but it’s also important to understand that it will also extend all kinds of devices toward the cloud and new types of networks.That potentially leaves lots of back doors open.

• Security’s heavy reliance and emphasis on technology–due to both its heritage and the reality of a shortage of manpower–is part of the reason attackers are getting the upper hand, experts said here this week.

• In-brief: A researcher studying the workings of a wireless-enabled drug infusion pump by the firm Hospira said the device utterly lacked security controls, making it “the least secure IP enabled device” he had ever worked with. His research prompted a warning from the Department of Homeland Security.

• Promoted tweets have been part of the Twitter service since 2010, and they’ve allowed advertisers to pick and choose who sees specific ads based on “what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a Tweet, what they retweet, and more.” But users have found how loosely those ads are monitored or filtered before they reach users’ eyeballs—and how cheap, fast, and easy the system can be exploited to annoy users as opposed to “engaging” them.

• When a man was fired from his job in Minneapolis, Minn., last May, he inadvertently touched off a boom in Silicon Valley.

Transparency Reporting

• Classified briefings and bill-readings in basement rooms are making members queasy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• New techniques of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) are now used to unlock oil and gas from rocks with very low permeability. Some members of the public protest against HVHF due to fears that associated compounds could migrate into aquifers. We report a case where natural gas and other contaminants migrated laterally through kilometers of rock at shallow to intermediate depths, impacting an aquifer used as a potable water source. The incident was attributed to Marcellus Shale gas development. The organic contaminants—likely derived from drilling or HVHF fluids—were detected using instrumentation not available in most commercial laboratories. More such incidents must be analyzed and data released publicly so that similar problems can be avoided through use of better management practices.

• Oklahoma officials have acknowledged a likely connection between earthquakes and oil drilling. But will they act to stop the shaking?

• Public arguments about fracking (at least among those who have heard of the natural gas production technique) have become contentious—a situation not helped by the technical and complicated topic. Lots of information and claims fly around, but there’s little in the way of an established framework to help make sense of them.

Finance

• The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), sometimes known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), is currently being negotiated behind closed doors by the European Union and the US. If it is successfully completed, it will be the biggest trade agreement in history. But TTIP is not just something of interest to export businesses: it will affect most areas of everyday life, including the online world.

• Opponents fear it could undermine many of Europe’s hard-won laws protecting online privacy, health, safety and the environment, even democracy itself. For example, it could effectively place US investors in the EU above the law by allowing companies to claim compensation from an EU country when it brings in a regulation that allegedly harms their investments—and for EU companies to attack US laws in the same way.

• Nordea Bank has come forward to help fund a field trip for students of Kilpisjärvi school, which was razed by a fire last Sunday. Despite the best efforts of school officials, they were unable to deposit cash raised from the students’ fundraising efforts in a bank, so the money which was stored on the premises, went up in smoke with the school.

• Mathew Ingram recently wrote a fantastic post about Twitter’s big mistake a few years back, basically killing off its openness for developers. He builds his argument off of an interesting post from Ben Thompson, arguing that Twitter has lost its strategic focus. Both articles are great, and I recommend them both. In the early days, Twitter was almost completely open. Many of its most useful features and services came from others building on top of it.

• We’ve long talked about how companies are only just starting to figure out the litany of ways they can profit from your cell location, GPS and other collected data, with marketers, city planners, insurance companies and countless other groups and individuals now lining up to throw their money at cell carriers, auto makers or networking gear vendors. For just as long we’ve been told that users don’t need to worry about the privacy and security of these efforts, and we definitely don’t need new, modernized rules governing how this data is being collected, protected, or used, because, well, trust.

• There is no doubt that this is the best possible election result for achieving Scottish independence in the near term. The one thing that I believe might have postponed independence for decades, was a Labour Party government of the UK with SNP support, governing as Tory Lite but making the dreadful repressive UK state that little bit less openly vicious, the abuse a little bit more disguised, the wealthy corporate elite less openly triumphalist.

Censorship

• The RIAA and BPI have reached a new milestone in their ongoing efforts to have pirated content removed from the Internet. This week the music industry groups reported the 200 millionth URL to Google. Looking ahead, the BPI is urging Google to introduce more piracy prevention measures, or else Governments will have to intervene.

• Norway has scrapped its longstanding blasphemy law, meaning it is now legal to mock the beliefs of others, in a direct response to January’s brutal attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Privacy

• One of the godfathers of the Internet has harsh words for federal efforts to insert “back doors” in digital security systems.

• “If you have a back door, somebody will find it, and that somebody may be a bad guy or bad guys, and they will intentionally abuse their access,” Vint Cerf, one of the co-founders of the Internet, said during remarks on Monday at the National Press Club.

• Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf argued Monday that more users should encrypt their data, and that the encryption back doors the U.S. FBI and other law enforcement agencies are asking for will weaken online security.

• The Internet has numerous security challenges, and it needs more users and ISPs to adopt strong measures like encryption, two-factor authentication and HTTP over SSL, said Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google, in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

• Recent calls by the FBI and other government officials for technology vendors to build encryption workarounds into their products is a bad idea, said Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP. “If you have a back door, somebody will find it, and that somebody may be a bad guy,” he said. “Creating this kind of technology is super, super risky.”

• The Conservatives are already planning to introduce the huge surveillance powers known as the Snoopers’ Charter, hoping that the removal from government of the Liberal Democrats that previously blocked the controversial law will allow it to go through.

• The law, officially known as the Draft Communications Data Bill, is already back on the agenda according to Theresa May. It is expected to force British internet service providers to keep huge amounts of data on their customers, and to make that information available to the government and security services.

• The snoopers’ charter received huge criticism from computing experts and civil liberties campaigners in the wake of introduction. It was set to come into law in 2014, but Nick Clegg withdrew his support for the bill and it was blocked by the Liberal Democrats.

• The French parliament has approved a controversial law strengthening the intelligence services, with the aim of preventing Islamist attacks.

• A new transparency project has mined LinkedIn to create a database of the US intelligence community – complete with codewords.

• Against all expectations the Conservatives have won an absolute majority in the General Election. They will be able to propose whichever new laws they like. And if all the Conservative MPs vote together, they will be able to pass whichever laws they like.

• End result? A tracking device on Afifi’s car, and for something he didn’t even write. So, he sued the FBI and the DOJ for violating his First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. The suit was stayed by the court while the Supreme Court sorted out US v. Jones — a case dealing with warrantless GPS tracking. Unfortunately, the Court returned not much in the way of a decision, stating that GPS tracking did constitute a “search,” but didn’t go so far as to add a warrant requirement, suggesting the longer the tracking lasts, the worse it is constitutionally.

• Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate majority leader, urged lawmakers Thursday to renew the expiring section of the Patriot Act that the National Security Agency says authorizes the bulk telephone metadata spying program. That’s the same section that the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled hours earlier didn’t justify the NSA’s phone spying program.

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other top Republicans on Thursday defended the National Security Agency’s surveillance program as vital to protecting national security.

• McConnell and other Republicans also starkly criticized legislation that would effectively end the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program.

• At the height of the War on Terror, in May 2005, James Comey walked into the headquarters of the National Security Agency and explained just how hard it is to say “no” to them.

• Given an unprecedented mission scope following 9/11, the NSA began engaging in warrantless domestic wiretaps, among other growing surveillance powers, that would soon spark national controversy. When Comey stood in front of the NSA in 2005, the American public remained ignorant of its government’s overreach; his speech was mostly ignored by the press. Within the NSA, however, the surveillance was no such secret.

• “It can be hard [to say no],” Comey said, “because the stakes couldn’t be higher. Hard because we are likely to hear the words, ‘If we don’t do this, people will die.’”

• Uploading photos to Microsoft’s viral How Old Am I app lets the company post them anywhere on the internet along with your name.

• The right to privacy is a fundamental human right defined in international and regional human rights instruments. As such it has been included as a core component of key legislature and policy proceedings throughout the brief history of the World Wide Web. While it is generally recognized in public policy making that the right to privacy is challenged in new ways in a structurally transformed online public sphere, the way in which it has been framed does not seem to acknowledge this transformation. This paper therefore argues for a reformulation of “online privacy” in the current global policy debate. It presents the results of a qualitative study amongst 68 Danish high school students concerning how they perceive, negotiate and control their private sphere when using social media and builds a case for utilizing the results of studies as this to inform the ongoing policy discourses concerning online privacy.

• Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper wasn’t lying when he wrongly told Congress in 2013 that the government does not “wittingly” collect information about millions of Americans, according to his top lawyer.

• He just forgot.

• “This was not an untruth or a falsehood. This was just a mistake on his part,” Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency on Friday.

• “We all make mistakes.”

• Investigators do not need a search warrant to obtain cellphone tower location records in criminal prosecutions, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a closely-watched case involving the rules for changing technology.

Civil Rights

• Many years ago I received spam from a woman I did not know. It was the type of spam where I could tell that her computer was compromised by a bot. That is, the spammer wasn’t simply using her email address and sending the email from somewhere else. With the best of intentions I emailed her to let her know I was an Internet security professional, and I had received a spam email from her computer indicating it was actively infected. I told her what to do to clean it.

• Her reply was very defensive and went something like this: “I’m tired of you people accusing me of sending out viruses and infecting my machine. If you don’t stop emailing me I’m going to report you to the Internet police!” I calmly replied that I was a good guy trying to help. But she said she had reported me to the Internet police and I was surely to be arrested soon.

• Obama administration officials and lawmakers are calling for greater accountability and tougher disciplinary procedures at the Drug Enforcement Administration after the agency imposed only light punishments on agents who forgot a San Diego man in a holding cell, leaving him without food or water for five days and nearly killing him.

• In a remarkably swift turnaround — no doubt prompted by some media backlash — the Warwick, RI, police department has announced it will no longer be accepting late night guest list faxes from Motel 6.

• Security video from the garage of the Miami Beach Police Department shows a group of officers milling about, a petite, handcuffed woman standing among them. The woman reaches out her foot, as if to trip one of the officers, who then slugs her in the face and kicks her.

• A campaign has been launched by the anti-censorship organisation Backlash to stop young people who exchange sexually-explicit images of themselves consensually from being prosecuted. A flaw in existing child abuse legislation means that possession of all sexually explicit images of people under 18 is classified as “indecent,” regardless of who makes them, why or how. Thus young people aged between 16 and 18 are able to consent to sex, but are unable to possess images of their own lawful sexual activities.

• Police quizzed a four-year-old and his six-year-old sister after a neighbour complained they were making too much noise while playing in the street.

• Uniformed officers were called to the quiet cul-de-sac in Belper, Derbyshire, where Zara and Tom Corden were playing on their go-kart and scooter with friends on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

• A neighbour had rung police because the children were ‘being too loud’ and officers asked whether they could play further down the street.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The European Commission presented a plan for making the internet and digital content more ‘border-free’ on Wednesday, suggesting ways to loosen up restrictions that often see music, movies and other services blocked when users travel across borders. But could such a plan succeed?

• Companies have been gunning for the FCC’s open internet rules since the very moment news crossed the wires, and their latest move involved pushing for a stay — a sort of legal “not so fast!” — on the classification of the internet as a public utility. While visiting TechCrunch Disrupt in New York this morning, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler reaffirmed his belief in a victory for the internet, saying he was “pretty confident” in the outcome of the cases and that his plan for now was simply “not to lose.”

• Moving on to policy, Fiorina again had strong words for the FCC’s net neutrality plan, calling it a “terrible thing.”

• The FCC issued its net-neutrality plan “without anyone commenting on it or anyone voting on it,” according to Fiorina, though Lane pointed out that the plan did in fact attract millions of public comments. Fiorina, however, said that she does not have a lot of confidence that the FCC took into account those comments.

• Government on Tuesday promised to ensure “non-discriminatory access to internet” to all citizens as members cutting across party lines in Rajya Sabha slammed TRAI for its consultation paper that sparked off a debate over net-neutrality.

• FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, shown above in a March appearance, warned cable executives not to stifle competition, especially when it comes to Internet service.

DRM

• The labels have always found a way to keep the bulk of the money made from recorded music, and this unfortunate fact is truer than ever today. The large license fees that the labels get from streaming services fall mainly to their bottom lines, and little finds its way to the artists. This is also the case of label investments in streaming services, as we’ve seen when Beats Music was purchased by Apple and Universal Music reaped a $500 million windfall for its 14% stake. You didn’t hear any artists thanking the company for the bonus they received in their next royalty statements, did you?

• SPOTIFY HAS HIT BACK at Apple with claims that its App Store practices are ‘anticompetitive’, following reports that Cupertino is trying to convince music labels to force it to can its free streaming offering.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Skype, the popular telephone software platform owned by Microsoft, has lost its latest trademark tussle in Europe with British satellite broadcaster Sky.

Copyrights

• On February 13, 2014, the European Court of Justice – the Supreme Court of the European Union – appears to have ruled that anything published on the web may be re-published freely by anybody else. The case concerned linking, but the court went beyond linking in its ruling. This case has not really been noticed, nor have its effects been absorbed by the community at large.

• Simply introducing ‘roaming for Netflix’ will not end the discriminatory practice of geoblocking.

• The European Commission adopted a new Digital Single Market Strategy today, which aims to improve consumer access to digital services and goods. Among other things, Europe vows to end geo-blocking and lift other unwarranted copyright restrictions.

• Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has failed in its bid to go public via a backdoor listing on the New Zealand stock exchange. While conceding that the news is a disappointment, CEO Graham Gaylard informs TorrentFreak that it is not viewed as a setback for Mega.

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