● 06.11.15

● Links 11/6/2015: Linux in DARPA Robotics Challenge, Fedora 22 Scientific

Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• What’s in a name? I think it is bigger than a name. Whatever the name might or might not be, I for one am very grateful to everyone involved. One small plea, I get an impression that not enough people make donations to software producers. I suspect even small donations would be appreciated from time to time. Whatever the name it is a remarkable movement.

Desktop

• Even if you lump Desktop and Mobile together, Android/Linux beats all other operating systems in Bahrain by a wide margin. These folks are not tied to the past in IT…

Server

• StackIQ is now offering an open source version of Stacki (short for “Stack Installer”), a Linux server provisioning tool. StackIQ initiated the open source project with the goal of providing systems administrators with a tool to install Linux at high speed. Stacki is a streamlined version of the base installer from StackIQ’s flagship product StackIQ Boss.Z

Audiocasts/Shows

• Randal and Aaron are joined by Mounir Idrassi to talk about VeraCrypt. VeraCrypt is a free disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is based on TrueCrypt 7.1a.

Kernel Space

• Somehow I missed this when it was first posted (Feb. 24th, 2015) from the Collaboration Summit 2015… but here it is… Jon Corbet’s most recent Kernel Report.

Graphics Stack

• With the Linux 4.2 kernel that’s soon to enter development, it’s adding the new “AMDGPU” DRM driver as needed to support AMD’s R9 285 Tonga along with Carrizo APUs and Radeon Rx 300 series graphics cards.

• Besides Phoronix celebrating its 11th birthday, last week Intel’s SNA 2D acceleration architecture had its birthday and turned four years old. While the xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX driver release is to make SNA the default for 2D acceleration over UXA, there’s still no signs of this release happening.

• Following patches from last month, within mainline Mesa Git for Mesa 10.7-devel is support for enabling the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver when being built for Android.

• As some quick, standalone results that make easy for running comparisons via the Phoronix Test Suite, I uploaded some very basic results to this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

Applications

• But if you’re not in the graphics business, you can save some cash and provide your staff with all the graphics tools they can eat by choosing open source software instead. Let’s look at the best of the lot.

• Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

• HandBrake is a powerful tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern by using widely supported codecs. A new version has been released, and it looks like it’s just a simple maintenance upgrade.

• As you may know, Darktable is an open-source photo workflow application and RAW developers, managing digital negatives in a database and allowing the users to view them through a zoomable light table. Also, the users can develop and enhance raw images.

• Typhoon is an open-source weather application, forked from Stormcloud 1.1, which is not available for free. It permits the users to change the colors to integrate better with the system wallpaper and theme and adjust the application’s opacity.

• Since I wrote last about Linux backup tools, back in a 2008 article about BackupPC and similar toools and a 2011 article about dedpulicating filesystems, I’ve revisited my personal backup strategy a bit.

• The GNU inetutils team is proud to present version 1.9.4 of the GNU networking utilities. The GNU Networking Utilities are the common networking utilities, clients and servers of the GNU Operating System.

Instructionals/Technical

• So in this article, I describe the special permissions on a Linux system. Where standard permissions are fairly intuitive, the special permissions don’t make a lot of sense at first. Once you understand what they do, however, they’re really not too complicated.

• The project I have been involved with is Scribus, a desktop publishing (DTP) application used to create PDFs for publishing in print or web pages. When I began contributing to the project some 10 years ago, I had no knowledge about it at all, and consequently spent some time reading and interacting with the mail list to develop an understanding of how to use it. Starting out, I asked quite a number of dumb or clueless questions, leading to more intelligent ones, and, after a time, I knew enough to answer other people’s questions.

• The dongle is powered by an ODROID-W, a USB hub and Raspbian. You’ll need some soldering skills to get everything hooked up, but once you’re all done, you can connect it to any TV with an HDMI port, no extra cables required. It’s not pretty, but since it’s hidden behind the TV, it shouldn’t really matter.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine Staging is a Wine version which provides bug fixes and features that aren’t yet available in regular Wine versions.

Games

• Unreal Engine 4.8 has been officially released earlier today for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Less than a week after opening up for pre-orders of the first Steam Hardware, 35% of the units have already been sold. This according to an email sent to the press, including VG247 and PC Gamer, who were early to report on the story.

• A sequel to the popular reboot of Shadow Warrior has been announced and based on the Steam Store page that went live it seems we will be getting a Linux port of this game as well!

• A new Steam Beta version has been released by Valve, and a new development cycle has started for the gaming platform. It’s nothing to write home about, but it does feature an entry for the Linux platform.

• Out of Reach is yet another survival MMO on the Steam platform. This game is developed and published by a studio called Space Boat Studios, and the developers decided to release it for Linux as well.

• If you are familiar with Super Mario, you will find right at home here: you will find turtles, mushrooms, nasty plants, pipes, and many other elements that are typical of this classic game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A great piece of news for Ubuntu Krita users is coming today! We have just opened a repository with regular builds of Krita git master!

• Only one week after we sent out our Kickstarter survey, 581 of the 661 15-euro-and-up backers (including the PayPal backers) have sent in their votes. This is a response rate of a whopping 87.90%! Here’s the current tally:

• Earlier today, just days after the ending of their latest Kickstarter campaign, the Krita team happily announced the release of Krita 2.9.5.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• coala is a code analysis framework designed to ease the task of static code analysis for both users and developers. In the last months the coala community has been growing more and more active so we’re able to get even better code out to the world of free software.

• I am honored to work with Gina this cycle on usability testing, as part of Outreachy and GNOME. We are off to a great start. I wanted to share Gina’s excellent description of personas, and how they are used in usability testing.

Distributions

• Version 1.1-RC1 of the Calamares Linux distribution installer framework is now available. This distribution-independent installer has garnered the interest of Manjaro, Kubuntu, and others seeking to make a more unified, better Linux installer. With Calamares 1.1, more features are coming.

New Releases

• I’ve been thinking of looking around for a new distribution, not that Mint hasn’t been a wonderful and stable system. Sabayon 15.06 was released last week and looked attractive in Jeremy Garcia’s screencast and screenshots. Neil Rickert tempted me with his notes on Tumbleweed 20150608 and the IgnorantGuru made OpenBSD sound doable. But I think I’ll check out Calculate Linux.

Ballnux/SUSE

• I have been doing monthly installs of Tumbleweed, mainly to test out the installer. For June, I installed the 20150608 snapshot. I used the DVD installer (written to a USB), and this was for the 64-bit version.

Red Hat Family

• “It’s been fast,” says CEO Jim Whitehurst, adding that, at this pace, Red Hat Tower will be at capacity in two years. “We thought it would take a lot longer than that.”

• Karanbir Singh had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of 64-bit (x86_64) images for the Vagrant open-source and cross-platform virtual development environment creation software.

• To help companies get the most from their cloud adoption, the latest upgrade to Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform adds features across the lifecycle to make it far easier to bring Java apps – and Java skillsets – to the world of hybrid clouds.

• The release of the latest edition of JBoss EAP (version 6.4) comes as the cloud is triggering big changes in how Red Hat’s customers are developing and deploying applications, Mike Piech, Red Hat’s vice president for middleware told IDN.

• A SENIOR MANAGER at Red Hat has warned the community of the importance of ensuring that OpenStack users have sufficient, qualified support for their infrastructure.

• Alessandro Perilli, general manager for cloud management strategy at Red Hat, made the point in a blog post this week entitled Beware scary OpenStack support.

• It’s 2015 and it’s pretty clear the Open Source way has largely won as a development model for large and small projects. But when it comes to security we still practice a less-than-open model of embargoes with minimal or, in some cases, no community involvement. With the transition to more open development tools, such as Gitorious and GitHub, it is now time for the security process to change and become more open.

• Based on user feedback and website stats a large part of syslog-ng users are running it on the Red Hat family of operating systems: Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and other RHEL derivatives. This is true both for the syslog-ng Open Source Edition and the syslog-ng Premium Edition. This is only one of the reasons that this year BalaBit is a sponsor of the Red Hat Summit and will be present with a booth. You will be able to ask BalaBit engineers about syslog-ng or any other software from our IT security portfolio: Shell Control Box, our privileged activity monitoring software and even our upcoming user behavior analytics software, Blindspotter. There are several interesting new features in syslog-ng to discuss: language bindings to Java and Python are coming to syslog-ng OSE 3.7, while Perl and Lua will stay in the syslog-ng incubator. The new, Java-based Elasticsearch destination helps to create a high performance Elasticsearch syslog-ng Kibana (ESK) stack. Kafka support is also coming, which is a high-performance distributed messaging system. It is gaining popularity as a centralized interface because it can consolidate a wide range of enterprise log data for downstream processing.

• Change management is one of the most popular topics in business literature, and something I first encountered during my evening MBA studies while I was working at Red Hat. The most surprising thing that I learned in business school, which I continue to think of often, is the fact that so many organizational change initiatives fail (some say more than 70%; my professor said 90%), despite the fact that we have a well documented and proven formula for their success. Do 70% of leaders of change initiatives forget to read the book?

• A notable mover in today’s trading session is Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) as the stock opened the most recent session at 78.82 and at the time of writing the last Bid was at 78.30. In the current trading session the stock reached as high as 78.97 and dipped down to 78.11. Red Hat, Inc. Common Stock, a NYQ listed company, has a current market cap of 14.35B and on average over the past 3 months has seen 1358910 shares trade hands on a daily basis.

• A few months ago when Nebula folded, and then again this month when tech titans IBM and Cisco announced high-profile purchases of OpenStack-focused companies, we drove home the point that the OpenStack scene is starting to consolidate. Eventually, there will only be a few players of any significance, and I’ve made the point before that support will be the big differentiator as enterprises increasingly deploy OpenStack.

Fedora

• HP was happy to announce earlier today, June 10, the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release of its HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing) 3.15 software.

• As you can see, the new home for Fedora Scientific looks amazing. The “Featured Applications” section features the most important and useful tools in Fedora Scientific. I think that is a great idea. Everyone associated with it, thank you very much.

Debian Family

• I’ve had some 8GB USB keys made, with the Debian swirl and text. By buying a reasonable number, I’ve got what I think is a good price for nice high-quality keys (metal body with a solid loop for attaching to a keyring). I’m now selling these for 7 pounds each, and I’m planning on bringing some to DebConf 15 too, where they’ll be 10 EUR.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical, through Joseph Salisbury, has announced the summary of the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place on June 9, 2015, which concerns their activity on the Linux kernel packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.

• After releasing kernel updates for the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems, Canonical announced on June 10 the immediate availability of a new kernel update of its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) distro.

• Canonical, through Andres Rodriguez, has recently announced that the 1.7 version of their MAAS (Metal as a Service) software that brings the language of the cloud to physical servers will arrive soon with multiple new features.

• After having announced the immediate availability of a new and important kernel update for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, Canonical has announced that the Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10, and 14.04 LTS distros have also received new kernel updates.

• Snappy Ubuntu Core is a new version of Ubuntu, designed to work with transactional updates and aimed at clouds and embedded devices at least for now. A stable version, this new OS has been released by Canonical and joins the other flavors in the 15.04 cycle.

• The search in Unity has been the source of serious debates in the past few years, but that should change dramatically with the new Unity 8, which no longer needs the current privacy tab that is available in the options.

• Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has recently announced that Kernel 4.0.5 has been made the default kernel of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, being already used on the daily images.

• Vimix icon set is elegant, modern, lightweight designed for Linux desktop. It offers flat type style with a minimal use of shadows for depth. This icon theme is based on two icon sets are Numix Circle and Paper icons by snwh. Since this icon theme based on two icon sets, the creator recommends that install those icons as well to get enhanced and greater experience. Vimix icons offers two panel theme so if you are using dark theme then you can select Vimix dark and if you are using light theme then you can select light version. It is compatible with most of the Linux desktop environments such as Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Lxde, and others. For this icon theme most of the application icons available, still if you found any missing icon or bug in this set then report it. Ambiance Blackout Colors theme used in following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change themes/icons.

• If you are a Linux user looking to buy a computer, System76 is one of the best manufacturers to target. Rather than buy a Windows machine and formatting the drive to install your favorite distro, the company’s machines come pre-loaded with Ubuntu. Even cooler, its laptops do not have the Windows logo on the super key, instead having the Ubuntu logo. Even if you are a fan of a different distro such as Fedora, supporting a Linux-focused seller is good for the overall community.

• The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition’s slim design and 4.5 inch screen are perfect to experience Ubuntu’s edge interactions and Scopes.

Flavours and Variants

• A long time Ubuntu fan, Jack Wallen opts to depart from the safe and familiar in search of something new. That search led him to a very Chrome OS-like Linux distribution called Chromixium.

Devices/Embedded

• A Xenomai Linux based robot from Korea’s Team KAIST called the DRC-Hubo won the $2 million DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, one of only three bots to complete the course on time.

• Judging by Silicon Valley’s reigning “Failure rocks!” mantra, this week’s DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals held earlier this week in Pomona, California, was a resounding success. Of the 23 teams that entered the event, which simulated a disaster response scenario, only three accomplished all eight major tasks in the allotted eight hours. The pit crews were kept busy with a field littered with falling robots.

• Logic Supply, a renown industrial and embedded computer manufacturer, which you might remember from an article we wrote last week that the company sells Ubuntu-powered industrial and embedded systems, has announced recently that they will release a new series of ventless and fanless PCs with unmatched mix of performance, reliability, and I/O.

• Last month, LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation’s Linux.com community website sponsored a 10-day SurveyMonkey survey that asked readers of both sites to choose their favorite three Linux- or Android-based open-spec single-board computers. This year, 1,721 respondents — more than twice the number from the 2014 survey — selected their favorites from a list of 53 SBCs, compared to last year’s 32.

• The DARPA Robotics Challenge is now over, and the competition has been won by a team from South Korea with a robot called DRC-HUBO. It’s not hard to imagine that the robot is actually running a modified Linux distribution.

Phones

Tizen

• The Tizen Smartphone has been released in India, Bangladesh and soon Sri Lanka, but there is another country that has firm Interest in Tizen, Russia. The federation has a historical mis-trust of Google & Apple and could find a new alternative to BlackBerry for its secure Corporate needs.

Android

• We’re hearing that Razer, which creates laptops and other gaming hardware, is in the process of acquiring Kickstarter-backed Android console maker Ouya. TechCrunch couldn’t learn the terms of the deal, which we’ve heard are still in flux, but the acquisition would bring to a close the tale of a very early first-mover in the market of set-top gaming consoles outside of traditional power players.

• Both Google and Apple have now released developer preview versions of their upcoming mobile operating systems. Coincidentally, both iOS 9 and Android M are focusing primarily on releasing a more stable OS this year, though each of them is also bringing some neat new features to the table. Since both mobile platforms can be already installed on supported devices, it’s time to take a look at what these betas look like side by side.

• The PBS Video Android app has gained support for a cheap little media stick that frees shows from mobile devices and sticks them on something bigger. This way users can go back to viewing shows like Frontline, NOVA, and PBS NewsHour the way they’ve been watching them for decades.

• You want the internet on your TV? There are several ways to go about that, but the latest is to use Android TV and the Opera TV Browser app. It’s free to download, but compatibility is a bit odd. It doesn’t seem to support the Nexus Player right now, but it will install on the Shield and ADT-1 just fine.

• Google announced today that it’s rolling out a new feature to Android devices that will optimize Web pages so they load faster on slow 2G connections in India.

• Google’s Hangouts messaging service has been at the epicenter of the company’s efforts in a lot of areas: it’s taken on video chat, Google Voice calling, and even SMS over the years. That’s a lot of features (or cruft, depending on your feelings), and it’s made Hangouts on Android feel really messy. Now, Android Police has apparently acquired Hangouts 4, the next version of the app, and it seems to have a much cleaner interface.

• You know that story from earlier today that suggested Nest may unveil a new wireless camera at next week’s event? This is the camera. This is the Nest Cam.

• Apple announced a lot of cool new things during its WWDC 2015 keynote, but there was one significant item that was mentioned with little fanfare. During the presentation of its new streaming music service, it quietly announced that Apple Music is coming to Android. Wait, what!? Yes, Apple is launching an app for Android devices, something that would have shocked the world in the Steve Jobs era.

• Last week, Android TV went from a platform bereft of apps to a platform lousy with them. With devices like the Nexus Player and the Nvidia Shield Android TV, you can now venture beyond Google’s curated selection and browse the entire catalog of more than 600 apps.

• Yesterday, we took a look at the upcoming Hangouts 4.0, a yet unreleased update that promises to clean up the Hangouts interface in many ways. But there was one thing we didn’t cover in that post – the Android Wear app that will apparently come with the update to 4.0. Since yesterday we’ve been playing with the app and thought it would be good to follow up with a quick overview of what it does.

• Almost after a week of announcing the start of the Android 5.0 Lollipop update rollout for its first generation ZenFone 4, ZenFone 5, and ZenFone 6 for global and China users, Asus India on Wednesday announced the update was available for its users in India as well.

• Google will deliver lighter versions of Web pages in search results for Android phones users with slow connections in India and Brazil.

• With iOS 9 and Android M available in beta versions, users have already started comparing the main features of Apple’s and Google’s latest operating system updates. After seeing an iOS 9 vs. Android M comparison in side-by-side pictures, it’s now time to explore the two mobile software platforms on tablets.

• Google Gears, Google Wave, Nexus Q and of course Google Glass. Is it time to add Android One to the list? Having been hailed as a significant advance in the march toward global domination by Google’s phone operating system, Android One may have to be added to the list of interesting stuff that has not really worked.

• Google has no plans of dropping its ambitious Android One project and will continue work with existing and new partners to expand its reach, Caesar Sengupta, vice president of product management, said. Some fear that the failure of the first set of smartphones on Google’s Android One platform in India may force the search giant to drop the project. Speaking to ET, Sengupta, however admitted that the search giant had learnt a lot since the launch in September last year, which will help improve future offerings. Sengupta oversees product strategy for Android One, Android for Work, and Google Chromebooks. Edited excerpts:

• Although I am still skeptical about the whole of wearables, that skepticism is growing thinner and thinner every six or so weeks. Now that the hardware is up to the spec of the platform, it’s now time for Google to concentrate its wearable efforts on the software side of things. Android wear needs third-party apps to really bring the platform to life–third-party apps that can seriously take advantage of available wireless.

• One of the sweet spots for tablet pricing seems to be around the £300–350 range, where you’ll expect to get a decent-sized screen, at least 16GB of memory, reasonable performance and battery life – and a tempting selection of iPads.

• The LG G4 is an impressive Android smartphone so I looked forward to checking out the new LG Watch Urbane smartwatch. It’s definitely one of the classiest Android Wear devices available with a fantastic display that looks great with a suit and tie.

• After testing every flagship Android phone released in the past two years over hundreds of hours, we think the Samsung Galaxy S6 is the best new phone for most people. It looks and feels fantastic, it’s packed with useful features, and its 16-megapixel camera and 1440p Super AMOLED screen are the best on any Android phone. We came to this decision after combing through all the available reviews of the top Android phones and going hands-on with them ourselves. If you want a phone with a larger screen or one that’s friendlier to your budget, we have alternative picks as well.

Free Software/Open Source

• One of Deutsche Telekom’s virtualization experts has said operators must pressure vendors into adopting open source practices or face the risk of depending on a single supplier for critical infrastructure.

• If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

• Last fall we introduced Pinot, LinkedIn’s real-time analytics infrastructure, that we built to allow us to slice and dice across billions of rows in real-time across a wide variety of products. Today we are happy to announce that we have open sourced Pinot. We’ve had a lot of interest in Pinot and are excited to see how it is adopted by the open source community.

• Among the apps within Facebook’s portfolio already using Infer include the standard Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

• Facebook today announced that it is open sourcing Infer, a static program analyzer the company uses to find bugs in mobile code before it’s shipped. Internally, the company uses this tool to analyze the Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and others.

• Things are moving smartly forward in the world of upstart, disruptive networking technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), as open source stewards in both camps have come out with new software releases.

Events

• Peer-production is one of the strengths of open source projects. TYPO3, a self-organized project without corporate backing, always lived from the spirit of sharing ideas, work, and values. It’s not by accident that one of our core values is, “Inspire people to share.” Over the years, as a result of the massive success of TYPO3 as a product, core team members became increasingly decoupled from the work with clients. Instead, they focused on the core development. On one hand, this transition was great because it means a lot of people have contributed their time and passion into the product. But on the other hand, the change brought disadvantages.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• After months and months of hard work, Mozilla finally released today a major version of its email, news aggregator, calendar, and chat client, Thunderbird, for all supported operating systems.

• Chances are pretty good you’ve heard of either Firefox OS or Ubuntu Touch (aka Ubuntu Phone). Chances are not so good that you’ve actually seen one in action. There’s a reason for that–when first officially released, both platforms aimed low. The Firefox OS set its sights on low-end devices and smaller markets. The Ubuntu Phone had the unlikely misfortune of being first released on an underpowered device (for such a powerful platform). This low-end hardware ensured one thing–the major markets would completely ignore the platforms.

• After maintaining the same vulnerability rewards for five years, Mozilla decided to increase its monetary acknowledgement for bugs reported by external security researchers.

SaaS/Big Data

• ownCloud had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of the ownCloud 8.0 DIY (Do It Yourself) open-source self-hosting cloud storage solution.

• Are you looking for an automated, guided way to deploy OpenStack? Some people feel daunted relying on nothing but documentation, and want a wizard-style approach to a new software installation. That’s exactly what the folks at Bright Computing are banking on. At the recent OpenStack Summit, they showed off Bright OpenStack, billed as a complete, standalone OpenStack private cloud solution. It even features a wizard to guide you through installation.

Databases

• The Dutch Kadaster (Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency) has switched to using Postgresql for four of its major business solutions. “Open source allows us to deliver services at lower costs”, says Paul Schluck, one of the database administrators at the land registry.

• France’s nuclear energy and defence research institute CEA is looking for help with maintenance of Postgresql, an open source relational database management system. The institute this week published a call for tender, aiming to design a seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic and radionuclide monitoring system, as part of its task to monitor compliance to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

• Beyond the LAMP stack, open source technology for development of enterprise class applications has arguably become mainstream, especially in modern databases like NoSQL and Hadoop based systems. They are unlocking huge value.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• With the newest LibreOffice Git code, the GTK3 support code compiling is enabled by default. However, this is just building for the GTK3 VCL plug-in. At run-time, the GTK3 usage is still disabled by default. A –disable-gtk3 option is available for those not wanting to build with the GTK3 support.

Business

• Open source business intelligence vendor Pentaho, now a part of Hitachi Data Systems, bulks up its Big Data support with Apache Spark integration.

Semi-Open Source

• NGINX leads the pack in web performance, and it’s all due to the way the software is designed. Whereas many web servers and application servers use a simple threaded or process-based architecture, NGINX stands out with a sophisticated event-driven architecture that enables it to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections on modern hardware.

BSD

• I recently tried out OpenBSD as a possible answer to recent Linux engineering. I thought I’d share my notes here on my results, from a beginner’s and Linux user’s perspective. (I tried FreeBSD briefly before as well.) If you’ve used OpenBSD more extensively on the desktop, your feedback on any of this is welcome too – I’d like to know what you think of my opinions, you being a longer-term user.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Love him or hate him, you have to admit that the founder of the free software movement isn’t shy about sharing his opinions on things he finds objectionable.

Project Releases

• Apple announced the immediate availability of the third maintenance release of the CUPS 2.0 (Common UNIX Printing System) software for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.

Public Services/Government

• While the DSM does not explicitly state it, to achieve a lot of these objectives, open standards will be essential. While many parts of the strategy are explicit in their proposed actions, this section has been written in broad strokes. For this reason, open source/open standards proponents must stay engaged both to help steer the DSM toward a positive outcome and for fear that the DSM may instead seek to secure the “free flow of data” via mandating contractual requirements and cumbersome and problematic data ownership definitions.

Licensing

• Bryce Harrington sent out the patches today for the in-tree license text to be updated. He clarified the situation a few weeks after the matter was brought to the attention of Wayland developers with the FAQ and license text not matching.

Openness/Sharing

• Craig McLuckie took the idea to Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s global network of computer data centers, and Hölzle didn’t like it.

• Together with two other engineers in Google’s Seattle office, McLuckie wanted to recreate Borg as an open source project. Borg is the sweeping software tool that drives everything from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps, letting the company carefully parcel computing tasks across that global network. For years, it was one of the company’s best kept secrets. And McLuckie wanted to share its blueprint—or at least some of it—with the rest of the internet.

Programming

• Well, here’s a possible first in open government: a Congressional Representative issuing a pull request on a government policy posted to GitHub, leading the US CIO to merge the request into the document. The White House has actually been using GitHub a bit lately. In fact, we had just noted how the White House CIO, Tony Scott, had been using Github to solicit feedback on various proposals, including the one to require all federal government websites go HTTPS only.

• Earlier this week I wrote about the BPF back-end seeking a promotion in LLVM to officially become a first-class back-end. The feedback was positive and now for LLVM 3.7 the BPF back-end is official.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C today adopted a new Software and Document License, an update to the W3C Software License, as the default permissive license in cases such as relicensing of unfinished specs where W3C has decided to use a permissive license. The Software and Document License, compatible with the GPL, permits copying and modification with attribution (by inclusion of a reference to the original W3C document), and can be used in W3C Community Groups, among other venues. All work that W3C has previously made available under the prior W3C Software License is also made available under the new Software and Document License.

Leftovers

• DCOS is designed to help enterprises unlock the next generation of scale, efficiency and automation. The Mesosphere DCOS pools datacenter and compute resources, givesIT operators a much simple administration model, and improves developer velocity with more modern abstractions and APIs for writing distributed system.

Health/Nutrition

• House votes to repeal meat labeling law under threat of retaliation from Canada and Mexico.

Security

• Back in May a security vulnerability went public that let VMs escape QEMU’s security and gain access to the host via an issue in QEMU’s virtual floppy disk driver code. Another QEMU security issue is going public today.

• On May 9, a test flight of the A400M, intended to replace the aging Hercules as a mainstay of NATO’s air mobility fleet, crashed in Spain, killing four of the six crew. According to Reuters today, a faulty software installation on the aircraft’s systems deleted configuration information, and caused three of the four turboprop engines to shut down after takeoff.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.

• Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions tons of it every year.

• Businesses don’t pay that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us—in the form of more extreme weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it.

• We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.

Finance

• Yes, folks, it’s desperation time for the supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). To get this sucker through, they will say anything, because, hey, making stuff up for the cause always sells in official Washington.

• I have witnessed IMF prescriptions in developing countries which have had abysmal results. Forcing African countries to break up their electricity utilities between producers and distributors in order to favour private electricity producers, has been an absolute disaster. It has simply meant that disproportionate percentages of electricity revenue – and effective tax subsidy of electricity prices for the majority population – has been diverted into the capacious pockets of international financiers and bankers. I have no doubt the result has been less electricity generated. I don’t even want to discuss the IMF’s immoral insistence that in Africa the very poor have to pay for clean drinking water.

• Zimbabweans will start exchanging ‘quadrillions’ of local dollars for a few U.S. dollars next week, as President Robert Mugabe’s government discards its virtually worthless national currency, the central bank said on Thursday.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rupert Murdoch is preparing to step down as the CEO of 21st Century Fox, according to CNBC, planning to hand control of the media conglomerate to his son, James.

• CNBC, citing unnamed sources in the mogul’s family, said the announcement will come soon though it’s not clear when Murdoch would step aside.

• Rupert Murdoch is reportedly planning to step down as CEO of Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox “and hand that title to his son James,” according to CNBC. James Murdoch previously resigned his role as the head of News International — which published several tabloids and newspapers abroad — amid the widespread scandal over phone hacking at News of the World, a since-shuttered UK tabloid he oversaw. As part of the fallout from that scandal, Murdoch also resigned his position as chairman of UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

• Rupert Murdoch, the 84-year-old chief executive of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc, is preparing to step down and name his son James as successor, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing sources close to the Murdoch family.

Censorship

• Reddit, which has long billed itself as “the front page of the Internet” is facing a massive revolt by its members due to perceived censorship. The folks running Reddit have removed a number of subreddits and that’s what sparked the revolt and the mass exodus to Voat.co.

• There are early indications that the Reddit admins may have finally crossed the Rubicon on the road to alienating their user base. User activity on their main competitor, Voat.co had been rising steadily since social media censorship became an issue during the #GamerGate controversy, but in the past few hours their figures have skyrocketed. At the time of writing, there are over 3,700 active users on Voat’s alternative to /r/fatpeoplehate —almost double its number of subscribers.

Privacy

• UK intelligence agencies should be allowed to retain controversial intrusive powers to gather bulk communications data but ministers should be stripped of their powers to authorise surveillance warrants, according to a major report on British data law.

• The 373-page report published on Thursday – A Question of Trust, by David Anderson QC – calls for government to adopt “a clean-slate” approach in legislating later this year on surveillance and interception by GCHQ and other intelligence agencies.

• However, Downing Street hinted that David Cameron was unlikely to accept one of his key recommendations: shifting the power to agree to warrants from home and foreign secretaries to a proposed new judicial commissioner.

• The prime minister’s spokeswoman said the authorities needed to be able “to respond quickly and effectively to threats of national security or serious crime”, which appears to suggest ministers are better positioned to do this than judges.

• More than 20 “intrusive” fake mobile phone towers that eavesdrop on public conversations have been found active in the UK, the first time the technology has been detected in the country.

• The IMSI catchers, also known as Stingrays, have been found to be operating in London, but the Metropolitan Police have refused to say who is controlling them or what is being done with the information they are gathering.

• Fake mobile phone masts that can be used to eavesdrop on telephone conversations without users being aware have been discovered in London by Sky News. IMSI catchers, also known as “stingrays” after a US company that makes such devices, have been widely used in the US for years. They work by sending out a signal that tricks a mobile phone into connecting with the stingray, rather than a legitimate base station, allowing information to be gathered about the device and its conversations by carrying out a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.

• The UK’s Independent Review of Terrorism Legislation has said, “it is time for a clean slate” when it comes to surveillance law in the UK. In his report published today, David Anderson QC condemned the current legislative framework as, “fragmented, obscure, under constant challenge and variable in the protections that it affords the innocent”.

• A new study says that the U.S. tech industry is likely to lose more than $35 billion from foreign customers by 2016 because of concerns over government surveillance.

• “In short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies,” the authors of a new study from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation write.

• As Washington weighs new cybersecurity steps amid a public backlash over mass surveillance, U.S. tech companies warned President Barack Obama not to weaken increasingly sophisticated encryption systems designed to protect consumers’ privacy.

• In a strongly worded letter to Obama on Monday, two industry associations for major software and hardware companies said, “We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool.”

• The Information Technology Industry Council and the Software and Information Industry Association, representing tech giants, including Apple Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, IBM and Microsoft Corp, fired the latest salvo in what is shaping up to be a long fight over government access into smart phones and other digital devices.

• When it comes to the National Security Agency’s recently disclosed use of automated speech recognition technology to search, index and transcribe voice communications, people in the United States may well be asking: But are they transcribing my phone calls?

• The answer is maybe.

• A clear-cut answer is elusive because documents in the Snowden archive describe the capability to turn speech into text, but not the extent of its use — and the U.S. intelligence community refuses to answer even the most basic questions on the topic.

• Asked about the application of speech-to-text to conversations including Americans, Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said at a Capitol Hill event in May that the NSA has “all sorts of technical capabilities” and that they are all used in a lawful manner.

• “I’m not specifically acknowledging or denying the existence of any particular capability,” he said. “I’m only saying that the focus needs to be on what are the authorities the NSA is using, and what are the protections around the execution of those authorities?”

• So what are those authorities? And what are the protections around their execution?

Civil Rights

• A police officer in Des Moines, Iowa, shot an unarmed man dead on Tuesday evening, after he got out his vehicle and started “walking with a purpose” towards her car.

• Police officer Vanessa Miller, who has seven years’ experience, shot 28-year-old Ryan Keith Bolinger, after he led her and Ian Lawler, another senior officer, on a slow chase through the city streets.

• The New York Post, the notorious right-wing tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, inspired a media stampede of stories highlighting increases in New York City’s crime statistics. The hysterical headline “You’re 45% More Likely to Be Murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan” (5/26/15) served as a springboard for other local media outlets to question if the city was suddenly a crime-ridden hellhole under Mayor Bill de Blasio–presented by the Post as a liberal on policing.

• You can’t tolerate that which to you is inoffensive. Toleration necessarily implies putting up with people who hold views or exhibit behaviour which you do not like. The hounding of Professor Tim Hunt from his University position is an exhibition of extreme intolerance.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For most of the last few months the House has been holding a series of “investigative” hearings into the FCC’s passage of net neutrality rules. On the surface, the hearings claim to be aimed at ensuring the FCC is operating transparently and within the confines of its authority, but in reality the hearings have been about one thing: publicly shaming the FCC for standing up to deep-pocketed campaign contributors like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Of course this never-ending “fact finding mission” has accomplished absolutely nothing in relation to finding notable facts, but it has proven useful in riling up a base utterly convinced that net neutrality rules destroy the Internet. All on the taxpayer dime, no less.

• [...]

• Obviously these lawsuits could go on for several years, and well into the term of a new Administration, one many House members hope would then strike the rules from the books. Of course much like the never-ending hearings shaming the FCC, this is largely a partisan patty cake show pony, since it won’t be signed by the President. Still, it’s very sweet of the House to be so incredibly worried about consumers and the health of the Internet that they’ll work tirelessly to protect ISPs’ god-given right to abuse the lack of last mile broadband competition.

• In what FCC chairman Tom Wheeler calls ‘a huge victory,’ the rules will go into effect Friday despite a handful of lawsuits challenging them

DRM

• THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (EC) has opened yet another investigation into Amazon and is this time probing the company’s allegedly questionable e-book distribution agreements.

• The European Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation into certain business practices by Amazon in the distribution of electronic books (“e-books”). The Commission will in particular investigate certain clauses included in Amazon’s contracts with publishers. These clauses require publishers to inform Amazon about more favourable or alternative terms offered to Amazon’s competitors and/or offer Amazon similarterms and conditions than to its competitors, or through other means ensure that Amazon is offered terms at least as good as those for its competitors.

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