● 06.18.15

● Links 18/6/2015: Red Hat Results Imminent, Tor Browser 4.5.2

Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Free software, like the web, is promoted by corporations when it is useful to their profit margins. Many disparate organisations collaborate and contribute to GNU/Linux and other free and open source software projects, because they are beneficial to their bottom lines and seldom for altruistic reasons. Contributing to GNU/Linux reduces development costs and encourages open standards. open standards are useful because they reduce barriers to entry for technologies that were ‘not invented here’.

Server

• As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve worked most of my professional life in the tech industry, specifically working for a managed services consultant in Chicago. One of the things we do is advise our clients on hardware rotations. Client machines, like desktops and laptops for instance, are typically recommended on a four to five year rotation. Because, let’s face it, a five year old computer is either functionally worthless or is probably hanging onto a single strand of twisted copper before crapping out entirely, amirite?

• A 30-year-old computer that has run day and night for decades is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools.

• But getting started on a new codebase can be daunting. Docker has many, many lines of code. Fixing even the smallest issue can require reading through a lot of that code and understanding how the pieces all fit together.

• The software described in this article is designed for a Beowulf-style cluster. Such a cluster commonly consists of consumer-grade machines and allows for parallel high-performance computing. The system is managed by a head node and accessed via a login node. The actual work is performed by multiple compute nodes. The individual nodes are connected through an internal network. The head and login node need an additional external network connection, while the compute nodes often use an additional high-throughput, low-latency connection between them, such as InfiniBand.

• DRBD9 provides enterprise Linux users with synchronous server storage replication including support for native remote direct memory access, or RDMA, and OpenStack integration.

• The upgrade to KVM is very easy to carry out, on a Xen Linode’s dashboard, there is a link on the right sidebar titled ‘Upgrade to KVM’. Once you do the upgrade you should then be switched over to KVM. If you want to set your account to default to KVM for new Linodes just go to your Account Settings and set the ‘Hypervisor Preference’ to KVM, any new Linodes you create will be KVM. On a 1GB instance, one user reported the downtime to be between 8-9 minutes while he switched to KVM.

Kernel Space

• The conversation, combined with Linus Torvalds’s aggression behind the wheel, makes this sunny afternoon drive suddenly feel all too serious. Torvalds—the grand ruler of all geeks—does not drive like a geek. He plasters his foot to the pedal of a yellow Mercedes convertible with its “DAD OF 3” license plate as we rip around a corner on a Portland, Ore., freeway. My body smears across the passenger door. “There is no concrete plan of action if I die,” Torvalds yells to me over the wind and the traffic. “But that would have been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago. People would have panicked. Now I think they’d work everything out in a couple of months.”

• On June 16, Jiri Slaby informed us about the immediate availability for download of the forty-fourth maintenance release of the Linux 3.12 kernel, a long-term supported (LTS) branch.

• Are you happy with your life? Maybe you are stuck in a dead-end job. Maybe you are unemployed and living on your mom’s couch. Hell, maybe you just need to enhance your skills for your current job. You know you need to make a change, but you keep putting it off. What is a smart path to take?

• Linux. Yes, careers involved in Linux are in high demand. Getting certified in some way is not only personally rewarding, but also improves your employment potential by bolstering your resume. If you do not have money for such a thing, I have good news — you could get a scholarship from The Linux Foundation. In other words, you can get a free education and certification. Will you improve your life by applying?

• Linux Foundation instructor Mike Day is an expert in Linux hypervisors and led IBM’s work on the Xen and KVM hypervisors as a Distinguished Engineer. But he came upon his calling almost by accident, having been “thrown into the project with colleagues who had worked on hypervisors for more than a decade,” he said.

• “It was a real challenge for me but not too long after that I became viewed as an expert on the subject,” said Day, who now teaches KVM and Linux developer courses for Linux Foundation Training.

• When you run a program as setuid, it runs with all the permissions of that user. And if the program spawns new processes, they inherit the same permissions. Not so with filesystem capabilities. When you run a program with a set of capabilities, the processes it spawns do not have those capabilities by default; they must be given explicitly.

• The Linux Foundation Training Scholarship Program provides funds to applicants who otherwise would not have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses. It attempts to help developers, IT professionals, and promising students to build Linux careers and contribute to shaping the future of the operating system and the enterprise.

• Last year, the free software community was full of debates about systemd, the system manager that replaces init, the process that boots a Linux system. Now that systemd is uneventfully running the latest releases of major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, you might imagine that opposition to it is melting away — but you’d be wrong.

• Instead, casual references on social media show that the rumors are as common as ever. And while you don’t hear much recently about Devuan, the anti-systemd fork of Debian, it is still trudging towards a release while making the same arguments as ever.

• The situation is not unique. Some free software circles have always seemed to require an enemy. For instance, in the first decade of the millennium, it was Mono, an adaptation for Linux of Microsoft’s .Net. Hundreds of thousands of words were written denouncing Mono, yet today it attracts no attention, although it is still available in repositories.

• Perhaps, too, free software users are becoming conservative as they age, as indicated by the user revolts against GNOME and KDE. Yet no precedent comes close to the viciousness of attacks on systemd, or had so little foundation, either.

• Linus: I’ve never been much of a visionary — instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short time frame of ‘issues in the next few months’. I’m a big believer in that the ‘details’ matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own.

• Just a few days after asking the Linux community to let him take a break, Linus Torvalds has said the project he kicked off 1991 can now get along without him.

• He was, characteristically, blunt in his recent interview with Bloomberg, saying Linux would survive his death.

• Linux 4.1 is going to take a little longer than some of its predecessors, with Linus Torvalds release a rare eighth release candidate on June 14.

Graphics Stack

• On June 16, Adam Jackson had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release of the X.Org Server 1.17 display server for GNU/Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.

Applications

• A new release for the stable Tor Browser is available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

• The release of Blender 2.75 is right around the corner. Granted, with a two[-ish]-month release cycle, that always seems to be the case. Of course, this particular release cycle has happened squarely in the middle of the Blender Institute’s production of Cosmos Laundromat, also known as the Gooseberry Open Movie Project. A lot of the goodies from that project are still in heavy development (and use) in a separate branch; however, there have been a boatload of cool and interesting features—in addition to critical bug fixes—that have found their way into the master branch. Let’s have a gander at some of the big ones.

• When it comes to tools for working with Big Data, open source solutions in general and Apache Hadoop in particular dominate the landscape. Forrester Analyst Mike Gualtieri recently predicted that “100 percent of large companies” would adopt Hadoop over the next couple of years. A report from Market Research forecasts that the Hadoop market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58 percent through 2022 and that it will be worth more than $1 billion by 2020. And IBM believes so strongly in open source Big Data tools that it assigned 3,500 researchers to work on Apache Spark, a tool that is part of the Hadoop ecosystem.

Proprietary

• A new Beta version of the Opera Internet browser has been announced by the Opera Software, and the developers have brought a couple of new features, along with a ton of other changes and various improvements.

Instructionals/Technical

• In March of 2015 the 0.10.0 version of OpenConnect VPN was released. One of its main features is the addition of MS-KKDCP support and GSSAPI authentication. Putting the acronyms aside that means that authentication in FreeIPA, which uses Kerberos, is greatly simplified for VPN users. Before explaining more, let’s first explore what the typical login process is on a VPN network.

• Recently, I’ve been fighting with the never ending issue of timezones. I never thought I would have plunged into this rabbit hole, but hacking on OpenStack and Gnocchi I felt into that trap easily is, thanks to Python.

Wine or Emulation

• Building on last Friday’s release of Wine 1.7.45, the newest Wine-Staging release is now available that tacks in extra, experimental functionality.

Games

• Some time ago Minor Key Games published their political stealth action thriller Neon Struct. I think we better cover this game before the big brother comes and censors us.

• The fantastic Steam Monster Summer Sale 2015 continues, and Valve has just announced the titles eligible for discounts for the next 24 hours for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows users.

• This year’s Steam Summer Sale is probably one of the biggest put together by Valve so far, and it looks like Linux is also present in a way that will certainly get noticed. All of the games in the Top Sellers chart have Linux support.

• The Perils of Man is a traditional point-and-click adventure game with time travel, created by LucasArts veteran Bill Tiller (The Dig, The Curse of Monkey Island) and writer and designer Gene Mocsy (1954: Alcatraz) in collaboration with IF Games. The duo have previously worked together on A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island and recently successfully crowdfunded their next adventure game Duke Grabowski in cooperation with Jeremiah Grant.

• IGN with their paid-for exclusives on XCOM 2 is annoying, but we will have to make the best of what we can get here. XCOM 2 looks good in this first, and it’s getting me excited.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Cinnamon is best known as one of the two default desktops for Linux Mint, which is fast approaching its next major update. Mint 17.2 will include the brand new Cinnamon 2.6, just released, when delivered later this year.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• There is more to GNOME than just the desktop environment. GNOME is a stack of apps, and many of those applications are constantly improved and worked on. Allan Day, one of GNOME’s designers and developers, detailed some of the changes that are being made to the Music app.

• I wanted to share a brief update on the Outreachy project that Gina and I are working on, where Gina is preparing for a usability test in GNOME.

• So far, we’ve been in an “information gathering” mode, where she has been learning about some of the basics of usability testing. In our next step, Gina will now start doing an analysis in preparation for a usability test.

• I’ve been a bit quiet about GNOME’s applications of late. This isn’t because nothing has been happening, though – quite the opposite. We’ve been steadily working away behind the scenes, and our application designs have evolved considerably.

Distributions

Reviews

• I’ve been experimenting in Calculate Linux lately because it offered a modern KDE without systemd or selinux installed by default, and perhaps a bit because of my nostalgia for Gentoo. Things got off to a rocky start, but after ironing out most of wrinkles and I’m finding myself right at home. I think you could too.

New Releases

• Black Lab Software, through Robert Dohnert, had the great pleasure of informing us earlier about the immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Linux GNOME 2015.6 operating system based on Ubuntu.

Gentoo Family

• I first discovered Gentoo Linux when I left Oracle/Sun in 2010, gave up my Mac and decided to experiment with creating a mac-like desktop experience on Linux. The initial reason was the optimizations you can do to squeeze every bit of performance out of your hardware (I’d bought a cheap Lenovo laptop).

Ballnux/SUSE

• The current stable version of GCC 5, GCC 5.1.1, has been added to openSUSE Factory and in turn will see all packages rebuilt against this new compiler and this will become the default compiler in the openSUSE Tumbleweed snashot due out later in the week.

• The newest GNU Compiler Collection was checked in today to openSUSE Factory, which is the rolling development code base for Tumbleweed, as the default compiler, so all packages will be rebuilt against GCC 5 and the next Tumbleweed snapshot will include GCC 5.1.1

• On June 16, the openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, had the great pleasure of announcing that the Tumbleweed version of the openSUSE Linux operating system has moved to the 5.x branch of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection).

Red Hat Family

• When venture capitalists open their wallets and hand out $3.3 million for a seed round, you have to figure the new company has some industry veterans with startup experience, and such is the case with Minio, an open source cloud storage product being built by veterans from Gluster.

• Gluster was purchased by Red Hat in 2011 for $136 million.

• Optimism surrounds Red Hat, as it gets ready to report its first quarter results on Thursday, June 18, 2015. Analysts are expecting the company to book a profit of 27 cents a share, up from 24 cents a year ago.

• Red Hat reported strong results in the last quarter with both earnings and revenues surpassing the respective Zacks Consensus Estimate.

Fedora

• The Fedora Wiki got a new entry last month that makes one wonder if Fedora really wants users at all. If folks complain it’s because they didn’t read the information provided or don’t understand what they’re reading. Users are too dumb or lazy to file bugs reports and would rather complain than test “every possible feature and/or configuration switch.” Hardly anyone bothers to read the source code or its license and, if they do, they’d rather complain than write the code to fix whatever their complaint is themselves. If they do write the fix and it’s not committed, then they’ll complain rather than learn from it. Folks are going to complain, so just ignore it.

• And so, without any application testing, any customization, desktop effects, resource usage testing, and some other bits and pieces, we must bring the Fedora Twenty-Two KDE review to a halt. Because the distro is dead, and it can’t cope with some simple updates and installs. Really a shame. It reminds me that Fedora is a testbed. But it used to be quite stable recently, and now, we’re back in 2010.

• I really am disappointed. I wish I had some better news for you, but this release simply doesn’t cut it. It’s riddled with bugs, even when it works, and then it stops working. Slow, laggy, average hardware compatibility including Nvidia problems, a less than ideal presentation layer, all in all, a rushed edition with no soul or passion. You can’t fake those. Grade we must, and so Fedora 22 gets a very feeble 2/10. See you around.

• Fedora 22 comes with the newest version of Gnome – 3.16. You’ve probably heard about this already. The new version brought quite a few shiny changes, a major one of which was a brand new notification area. You don’t have a notification bar at the bottom any more, your notifications now come up at the top with the calendar. It’s really neat! More information can be found in the release notes here.

• An important aspect of xdg-app is application sandboxing, which will require application changes to use sandbox-specific APIs. However, xdg-app is also a good way to deploy and run non-sandboxed (or partially sandboxed) regular applications.

• Pkgdb2 is the application managing in Fedora, who is allowed to access which git repo containing the files necessary to build the packages present in the distribution.

• Still, since the idea for hubs is also to help new contributors get integrated more smoothly into the Fedora community, an effective way to message people did seem like it would be valuable. Since the team/project hubs will have the ability to include an embedded IRC channel, using IRC to send private messages seemed logical. But Fedora Hubs is not an IRC client – it will use IRC to send private messages between users and to enable the channel discussions, but every channel must be directly associated with a hub and the messaging interface will only support messages between Hubs users, not to anyone external. This is an active design choice that Mo and I made, based on the concept of keeping the hub as the central organizing principle of this app in order to help fend off scope creep.

Debian Family

• “Anyway, I haven’t said that banning such software from Debian would be the only solution… but at least these incidents come far too frequent recently, so apparently something needs to be done at Debian level to pro-actively prevent future cases/compromises like this.”

Derivatives

• Valve’s SteamOS has been updated once more and the developers have upgraded many of the default packages. More importantly, they have also added a new font called Liberation, which was requested by the community.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Touch is a young platform, but it’s already getting some apps that would make other platforms jealous, like offline GPS navigation, for example.

• Ubuntu Touch is a young platform, but it’s already getting some apps that would make other platforms jealous, like offline GPS navigation, for example.

• We reported a couple of weeks ago that Martin Pitt, a renowned Ubuntu developer and Canonical employee, proposed the implementation of stateless persistent network interface names in the next major versions of the Ubuntu and Debian operating systems.

• It’s official! The final version of the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) will be based on the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel, due for release at the end of June 2015, according to Canonical.

• I don’t mind a bit of controversy. It’s a good mental exercise. Especially when people go wild over what Microsoft is doing, my favorite, and then Linux conspiracy theories, my even more favorite topic. However, as much as we want these little stories to be our Jason Bourne kind of thingie, they are really just empty, pointless tales that stem from emotion and lack of knowledge, which seems to be the case for pretty much all and any conspiracy theory out there, alien crap included.

• You may say, Dedoimedo, look what NSA is doing, it means the conspiracies are true. Nope. There’s no hacking involved, just a bunch of MITM appliances planted inside data centers with compliance from the hosts, which just shows how difficult it really is to obtain digital information on a large scale. Should make you feel relaxed and cozy inside. And the same applies to Canonical and Ubuntu. You may disagree with their business, you may not like the people involved, but at the end of the day, it’s just Linux, compiled by people like you and me, who have no ulterior motives or Illuminati NWO agenda. Oh did I fail to mention that Canonical is NOT a US company? We’re done. Enjoy your Internetz.

• BQ and Canonical were proud to announce a few hours ago on their Twitter account that the recently announced BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition smartphones moved from pre-order to being available to buy.

• It would appear that many users reported issues after upgrading their Ubuntu phones to the massive OTA-4 software update released by Canonical for their Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, which is used in devices like BQ Aquaris E4.5.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint developers have just revealed that Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” MATE RC is now available for download and testing. It integrates the latest MATE 1.10 and numerous other changes and improvements.

• Ubuntu is one of the best overall Linux distributions, but it does have its fair share of detractors. Many people dislike the direction Canonical takes sometimes, including the much-maligned Unity desktop environment. Truth be told, I rather like Unity, but I can understand why some people prefer different desktop environments.

Devices/Embedded

• Axiom’s portable wireless 150W speakers stream music from the web, mobile devices, or USB, and include a WiFi access point and a 9- or 18-hour battery pack.

• Speaker and home theater manufacturer Axiom has found Kickstarter success with its AxiomAir wireless speaker system, which has surpassed its $75,000 goal to reach $121,000, with 25 days to go before the July 12 deadline. Two dozen $475 packages were still available at publication time. Other packages go for $497, said to be more than $300 under the retail price, or $950 for a two-pack, among other discounted combo packs.

• The rugged Arcturus “uCP1020″ COM for IoT/M2M gateways runs Linux on Freescale’s QorIQ P1020, with up to up to 64GB eMMC, three GbE ports, and a baseboard.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the first official case for the Raspberry Pi, which exposes all ports and features a clip-on lid for adding HATs.

• A variety of third-party enclosures for the Raspberry Pi have become available over the years, but the vendors no doubt realized the Raspberry Pi Foundation would eventually build one of their own. The time has come, with the unveiling of the “Official Raspberry Pi Case.”

• Sierra Wireless unveiled a Cortex-A5 based “AirPrime WP” IoT module with 3G or 4G radios, plus a modularly expandable, open-source “mangOH” carrier board.

• We’ve seen plenty of low-power, Linux-ready Internet of Things computer-on-modules, mostly based on Qualcomm’s MIPS-based Atheros SoCs. The Linux-based AirPrime WP modules from Sierra Wireless instead tackle IoT and industrial M2M with integrated cellular radios. A 3G HSPA+/EDGE/GPRS/GSM version called WP75xx is due in the fourth quarter while a WP8548 version that adds 4G LTE is due in Q1 2016.

• Rejoice Pi fans! The team behind Raspberry Pi have announced an official case for the Pi 2 Model B and the Pi Model B+. The case was announced today on their blog and is available from all the main Pi retailers for a cheap £6 (which works out to about $9).

• Axiom Audio has this week unveiled a new range of wireless speakers they have added to their existing range that are powered by the awesome Raspberry Pi mini PC.

Phones

Android

• The company’s annual rollout of big features and small tweaks includes some whizzy capabilities as usual, and finally, mobile apps for Android phones.

• With its latest smartphones, the BlackBerry Classic and BlackBerry Passport, continuing to attract no buyer interest, BlackBerry’s hardware business seems destined for the dustbin of history. Yet fans continue to hope for some Hail Mary move from the once-dominant mobile device maker.

• By moving to Android, BlackBerry might regain some handset business — but it is unlikely that it could recapture anywhere near the market share it had even five years ago. Instead, “BlackBerry is clearly now on track to become an enterprise software and services company first, with its devices playing a minor role,” said Daniel Gleeson, senior analyst for mobile devices and networks at IHS.

• Welcome to this week’s roundup of the latest, greatest Android apps and games, covering smartphones and tablets.

• All these apps have been released for the first time – ie not updates – since the last roundup. All prices are correct at the time of writing, with “IAP” indicating use of in-app purchases.

• Bethesda has a lot of fun demo opportunities for fans and media like at E3 2015. Besides the big games like Fallout 4, fans had a chance to check out the company’s journey into mobile gaming with Fallout Shelter.

• On a recent trip to Canada, I decided to take an Android Wear smartwatch. I’d be doing a lot of walking, and I brought it on the principle that carrying the Internet on my wrist would enable me to pay more attention to my environment and less to my phone. (As an Android phone user, I can’t use the Apple Watch.)

• The trip with Android Wear left me believing a little more in smartwatches, and appalled to the point of embarrassment by Google’s efforts. It’s all on Google, too, not the watch manufacturers. While the various Android Wear watches look different, and my LG Watch Urbane was handsome and comfortable, they all run stock or nearly stock Google software.

• Google today announced the launch of a security rewards program for Android at Black Hat’s Mobile Security Summit in London. The Android program will only cover vulnerabilities that affect Nexus phone and tablets available for sale in the Google Play Store, though. Right now, that’s the Nexus 6 phone and Nexus 9 tablet.

• Last year, Google released an open-source web project called Topeka. The project demoed the power of Polymer and material design on the web, and aimed to give developers some direction on how to execute material design in their own projects.

• Building a massive viewership for your startup video service can be hard to do without a presence on Android, so today Vessel — the company led by Hulu’s ex-CEO Jason Kilar — is launching an app for Google’s OS. If you’re unfamiliar with Vessel, the service offers subscribers who pay $2.99 per month exclusive early access to popular short form videos. Creators who publish clips on Vessel must wait at least 72 hours before sharing them elsewhere (i.e. YouTube, where many of these viral stars first built their audience), but the company offers higher cuts of ad and subscription revenue in exchange for those early rights.

• In April Google confirmed a new Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update was headed to all Nexus smartphones and tablets, aimed at squashing a few more bugs and improving the Android Lollipop experience, and today that update is arriving for more Nexus 6 users.

• The Google Play store allows developers to list applications as paid for, or for free. Paid for apps can be switched to free apps, but the same is not true in the opposite direction. Once an app is ‘free’, then it’s free for ever. The addition of a ‘Free App Of The Week’ program from Google could herald a change in that policy, with the assumption that the ‘Free App’ is a temporary special offer, rather than highlighting apps that are already set up as free.

• You might have noticed the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, a rather distinctive handset with a curved screen. The extra display can be used to alert you to different notifications and give quick links to contacts and other parts of the TouchWiz OS. Thanks to a clever app, you can get one of these features on your standard flat-screen Android device.

• Vulnerability remains months after discovery, allowing hackers to eavesdrop on calls, steal data and activate camera, microphone and GPS remotely

• Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are fairly evenly matched where functionality is concerned, so the primary differences come down to differences in their core design philosophies.

• Like most Apple products, CarPlay presents a simplified and well thought-out design that leaves very little room for confusion. With one hand, Apple gives its drivers the largest selection of third-party music and audio apps. With the other, it takes away all other choices with zero support for third-party messaging apps. Considering that messaging is historically more distracting than listening, I can sort of understand Apple’s stance here.

• Android Auto on the other hand takes a different tack with nearly the same feature set. Rather than a barebones interface, it brings information to the driver with contextual Google Now cards that seemed to know where I was headed before I did. Google also gains the edge in number of apps supported, thanks to its ability to integrate third-party messaging apps.

• Which is best for you will depend on what you prefer from your mobile OS, but realistically your decision was already made when you chose the phone that’s in your hand right now.

• Google has experienced lousy sales of its OEM-partnered Android One smartphones in India. Yet, the company seems committed to the long haul in what is a sizzling smartphone market.

• [...]

• If this is true, then the whole raison d’etre of the Android One idea faces an existential threat: Consumers want to buy phone brands first, not operating systems. Faced with a flood of what is essentially the same phone in a different skin doesn’t seem to be such a hot proposition after all. Of course, in my opinion, this is pretty much what so many phone companies do anyway; phones are armed with the same processors, cameras, screens, and OSes. Yet, they all tout themselves as being uniquely different. In which case, at a minimum, the appearance of differentiation at the very least seems to be important in order to get the consumer to pick your unit versus an almost identical one offered by a competitor.

• Nvidia has built two Shield devices in the past, but their latest hardware to carry the brand differs a little since it’s the first non-portable in the lineup.

• As a Guy Who Reviews Android Devices™, I’ve been faced with a strange sort of conundrum lately: When someone asks me to recommend a 10-in. Android tablet, I haven’t had a good answer.

• Sure, there are plenty of options out there. But it’s been quite a while since there’s been one that’s stood out for being really great. Most of the contenders come with at least one serious caveat, be it chintzy construction, less-than-perfect performance, or software that makes you want to strike yourself with the nearest blunt object. And suffice it to say, those kinds of things take significant tolls on what a device is like to use.

• Razer and a small group of other companies have been trying to standardize how VR headsets work, and today the standard is getting an important update. Razer said this morning that OSVR — the Open Source Virtual Reality platform— now supports Android and position tracking. Position tracking, in particular, was a noted absence from OSVR’s initial release back in January. It’s something that the biggest VR headsets are using, and OSVR had to eventually get on board with it. Android support is a nice update as well, which should allow developers to start creating mobile VR experiences. Hardware support within OSVR will eventually be added to allow Android phones to take the place of a dedicated VR display.

• Razer recently launched its Open Source VR intiative, complete with a virtual reality headset to get more developers into the VR game. The initial launch notably lacked Android support and positional tracking hardware, but it’s now filed those holes with its latest OSVR Hacker Development Kit (HDK) 1.2. The IR system is included in the kit price, including the 100Mhz IR LED system and a camera that provides 360 degrees of position tracking. Previously, Razer included IR position tracking designs and templates, but didn’t supply the hardware.

• Rumor has it BlackBerry is working on building an Android smartphone with a slide-out keyboard. A separate report suggested that Samsung may be a partner on the device, at least in some respects, though it’s unclear what role Samsung will play. Now an image published recently appears to show Android already running on a BlackBerry.

• The subsidized smartphone market is sort of a racket. Well, Okay, it’s not sort of a racket. It’s definitely a racket. Every time your phone starts feeling old or worn out, or if you’re jonesing for the latest superphone bling, most mainstream consumers have to consider dealing with their carrier’s “new every two” plan or some other scheme to lock you into a long term contract. So you’re stuck with potentially lousy coverage if you move or travel a lot to a new area, or if that carrier isn’t keeping up with competitive rates. It’s a catch-22 of course. How else are carriers going to offer reasonable prices on the latest premium smartphones, but to rope you in and make up the profit on service fees?

• Android is an interesting operating system and over the years has gone through some massive changes and evolutions to become the system that we are all familiar with now. Today we bring you the history of Android OS infographic designed with the help of The Smart Phone Company . That said, have you ever wondered about the history of Android OS, each release and how Android has evolved through the generations? Well, chances are that most people associate Cupcake as the first generation of Android, but those who remember, will know there were a couple of generations before. In fact, as you might expect, it all started with Android 1.0 which came pre-loaded on what was the first commercially available android device, the HTC Dream or T-Mobile G1 depending on where you were.

Free Software/Open Source

• Ships in the Arctic and Antarctic are turning to using open source software that helps them navigate near or in sea ice-infested waters. This year, the tools are to be used by the Swedish icebreaker Oden, and at least one Antarctic tourist vessel. The software solution, part of EU-funded research projects, is being developed by European scientists.

• There may well be a fair few raised eyebrows at SAP with this headline but there is a seriousness attached to it that is worth exploring. I am not the only one who has thought of this. A few years ago, when SAP Mentor/developers were getting a good amount of attention from SAP’s technical folk, the licensing topic was never very far from people’s minds.

• A robo advisor that is free and open source quietly went live last month and may put more pressure in the digital wealth management space with a unique business model that emulates other open source icons such as WordPress or Magento.

• The technology AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is open sourcing is being used by the carrier to transform expensive GPON OLTs into virtual network functions running on commodity servers and other hardware. It’s part of AT&T’s Gigapower gigabit Internet service for home and enterprise.

• Those benefits are why companies like Hewlett Packard are jumping in with both feet with their own open-source productivity systems. But too often, the issues with such software turn out to be both practical (it has different needs from proprietary software) and political (those needs may make it a tougher sell to the board).

• For under 80 bucks, OSTraining opens up their vault to you, offering more than 2,500 videos covering the most popular topics in web design and open-source programming. You’ll get in-depth training in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, SEO, HTML, CSS, PHP and more from field experts with professional and teaching experience.

• The online backup service has open sourced its code for data storage

Events

Web Browsers

• On June 16, the Tor Project, through Mike Perry, announced the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release of the Tor Browser 4.5 web browser for users who want to navigate the Internet anonymously.

SaaS/Big Data

• A piece of software called Cassandra was originally designed in 2008 as the engine that underpinned storing and searching through all the messages in your Facebook inbox, which is a tall order considering how many millions of messages the company has to deal with every day.

• OpenStack is hardly the first open source project to be the center of broad-based, cross-category investment and collaboration, of course. Linux has been successful on this front for years. But successful projects have typically had a clear sense of purpose and identity: to be an operating system kernel, for example. OpenStack’s raison d’être, by comparison, has been less clear. On a high level, it’s been a mechanism for building an IaaS-type private cloud, but there have been major disagreements between project participants on how to get there, what to build it from and more. In some circumstances, this diversity can be a strength: the ability of OpenStack to substitute different storage subsystems based either on issues with the default choices, customer preferences or both has been useful. Abruptly attempting to redefine the IaaS vision to suddenly extend into PaaS, less so.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has revealed that the second RC (Release Candidate) for the LibreOffice 4.4.4 branch has been released and it should now be available for download and testing.

Openwashing

• The times are changing for open/free/libre software and OSes, and what the words mean. Make no mistake: collaborative, truly open projects are powerful sources of innovation and problem solving. The only way proprietary, corporate models can even survive is through sheer bullying and anti-competition tactics, as have been used for years to keep Linux from wider adoption. Now that that is changing, the tactics are changing too.

• The latest trend in this area seems to be bringing disinformation and propaganda tactics into the fray.

• Storage giant EMC stunned the IT community recently with the announcement that it plans to release an open source project based on its ViPR Controller software defined storage product.

• Toyota said it may use an open-source version of Ford Motor’s AppLink connectivity system to speed up development of its connected in-car infotainment systems.

BSD

• As a Linux sysadmin in the 2010s, it’s hard not to have an opinion on systemd. But what I find baffling about it is how divisive it is; nearly everyone (or at least the most vocal crowd) seems to either love it or hate it. When I tell people that systemd was the catalyst for my defection to OpenBSD last year, their usual reaction is to assume that I am part of the “hate it” group. Nope.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Our current outreach and communication coordinator has moved into a new position at the FSF, so we are looking for another person to fill the role.

Project Releases

• Wireshark, one of the world’s most popular open-source and cross-platform network analyzer software, reached version 1.12.6 on June 16, 2015, for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Today at 7 it is ownCloud meetup time in C-Base again (and also in Munich, by the way!). As ownCloud Server 8.1 is scheduled for the beginning of next month, I hope to grab a daily ownCloud snapshot, put it on a Banana Pi and run the cool Smashbox testing tool against it to see how it fares.

Licensing

• Open source licenses and the software programs that go along with them are critical to bringing great minds together to build great technology that spans boundaries while solving real world problems.

• I believe open source licensing will continue to play a part in IoT, and I think it has to given the breadth of what IoT is all about. Today many IoT solutions are proprietary as different startups and companies investigate the technology. This is great for pushing the boundaries of what is possible, what will work, and what won’t work. However, each of these proprietary solutions is created in silo of each other. They cannot communicate as there are limited standard protocols for this new generation of technology to adopt. This, by definition, ends up limiting the Internet of Things because it’s now “Company A’s Internet of Things that can talk to each other, but not to Company B’s Internet of Things.” This is commonly seen in household consumer products today. I have home lighting automation that can’t speak to my home security automation that can’t speak to my home TV automation.

Openness/Sharing

• Smart buildings will soon be able to control themselves using “internet of things” (IoT) technology running on open-source operating systems if a joint project between American IT firms realises its ambitions.

• On Wednesday, June 17, the Open Overheid (Open Government) agency, part of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, is organising a consultation event to gather input for the next OGP Action Plan. The agency has invited stakeholders, experts and visionaries to be present in Utrecht, where 140 people will be able to contribute to the direction and contents of the Action Plan for the period 2016-2017.

• In yet another move showing its dedication to implementing the IoT, the City of London this week got its very own Smart City network thanks to the Weightless SIG, an IoT standards advocacy body that supports the Weightless open source standard for M2M communications.

• The network will operate on Nwave technology. Nwave, an international hardware and software provider of IoT technology, has been deployed by Digital Catapult, a British national centre for technological innovation, to make the base station infrastructure available for developers.

Open Access/Content

• Taking a lesson from the open-source movement wouldn’t mean turning church doctrine into a free-for-all. There’s still hierarchy in open source, and there’s still process. Certain people decide, based on experience and authority, which code submissions to approve or reject.

Open Hardware

• Further refinements of the design will include some primitive graphics routines. Not OpenGL or anything fancy, just something to reduce the number of writes on the SPI bus. It’s a great project, and perfect if you want to add video out to an Intel Galileo or other microcontroller project. [PK] has a video demo, you can check that out below.

• Aleph Objects has reported a successful two years for the growth of its open source 3D printing technology including a string of award nominations and an impressive 809% revenue growth.

• 3DPrinterOS has this week announced it is making its cloud 3D printing management software and features open source.

Programming

• Open source communities are often recognized for their constructive debate. There is a commonly held philosophy among open source contributors and developers that the best ideas result from disagreement and smart people discussing the merits of decisions and, of course, code. The Node.js and io.js communities are no different. Node.js, for example, is downloaded more than 2 million times a month and is supporting a new generation of network applications. io.js has a strong developer community innovating at the speed of light.

• The Git development team was happy to announce on June 16 the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release for Git 2.4, the stable branch of the widely used open-source distributed version control system.

• The Linux Foundation started talking to Node.js stakeholders last summer and was a facilitator in discussions that took place over the last eight months or so among the community and companies that support Node.js, according to Zemlin.

Standards/Consortia

• We have evaluated tenders in accordance with the evaluation criteria set out in the Invitation to Tender (ITT) and have reached an advanced stage in this process. Any suppliers who have been unsuccessful at the qualification stage have been notified separately. All tenders successful at the qualification stage will proceed in the procurement.

Leftovers

• Stockmann announced on Thursday a plan to sell off its Academic Bookstores to Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier Books. In accordance with the newly inked letter of intent to sell, the bookstore will continue to operate in connection with the department store chain after the acquisition.

• UK Anti-Doping are to issue a statement on Thursday, which will respond to newspaper claims that Mo Farah missed two drugs tests leading up to the London Olympic Games in 2012.

• A report in the Daily Mail says the double Olympic champion missed one test in 2010 and another after joining forces with coach Alberto Salazar the following year.

• Salazar, who manages the Nike Project in Oregon, is currently under suspicion after a TV documentary made allegations against the 56-year-old with regards to doping abuse.

Science

• No one was more pleased by the Food and Drug Administration’s decision Tuesday to eliminate artificial trans fats from the U.S. food supply than Fred Kummerow, a 100-year-old University of Illinois professor who has warned about the dangers of the artery-clogging substance for nearly six decades.

• “Science won out,” Kummerow, who sued the FDA in 2013 for not acting sooner, said in an interview from his home in Illinois. “It’s very important that we don’t have this in our diet.”

Health/Nutrition

• Ségolène Royal says Nutella is made using palm oil, which is contributing to deforestation, and urged Ferrero to make the spread with ‘other ingredients’

Security

• The National Security Agency may find and purchase zero days, but that doesn’t mean it’s sharing its hoard with other government agencies such as the U.S. Navy, which apparently is in the market for some unpatched, undisclosed vulnerabilities of its own.

• A request for proposal posted last Wednesday—which has since been taken down—to FedBizOpps.gov was a solicitation by the Naval Supply Systems Command seeking a CMMI-3 (Capability Maturity Model Integration) contractor capable of producing operational exploits that integrate with commonly used exploitation frameworks, the RFP said.

• Six university researchers from Indiana University have revealed that Apple’s password manager, Keychain, is susceptible to hackers. If exploited, the flaw would give a hacker access to the users passwords. The really worrying thing here is that Apple has known about the issue for months and still hasn’t managed to issue a fix.

Transparency Reporting

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• One of Eurasia’s most abundant bird species has declined by 90% and retracted its range by 5000 km since 1980 a new study shows.

• Yellow-breasted Bunting Emberiza aureola was once distributed over vast areas of Europe and Asia, its range stretching from Finland to Japan. New research published in the journal Conservation Biology suggest that unsustainable rates of hunting, principally in China, have contributed to not only a catastrophic loss of numbers but also in the areas in which it can now be found.

Finance

• Jeb Bush thinks the next president will need to privatize Social Security, he said at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday — acknowledging that his brother attempted to do so and failed. It’s a position sure to be attacked by both Republicans and Democrats.

• About 600,000 payments that failed to enter the accounts of RBS customers overnight may not be completed until the end of the week, the bank has said.

• Payments of wages, tax credits and disability living allowance were among those that failed to be credited to accounts.

• RBS initially said some payments were “missing”, but it had now identified and fixed the underlying problem.

• Delayed payments would be processed “no later than Saturday”, it said.

• Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace from Watching the Hawks interview Professor Richard Wolff about the House vote to reject the Trans Pacific Partnership and where this massive trade deal will go from here.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• So here is a challenge to the Sunday Times, BBC and rest of the mainstream media.

• Jeb! is fine, as far as logos go. It’s uninspired, sure, but it gets the job done. But as a piece of typography, it’s crap.

• I woke up on Sunday and checked the news as I usually do. “British spies ‘moved after Snowden files read’” exclaimed the BBC, probably hoping to whip up anti-Russian/Chinese sentiment, immediately I rolled my eyes, surely revealing mass spying to the billions being spied upon is more important than a few spies having to be moved.

• After reading the headline, I was left puzzling, I was sure that Snowden handed everything he had over to journalists. A day later my understanding of the issue had been confirmed, Glenn Greenwald said that Snowden doesn’t have access to the documents anymore and hasn’t been able access them since they were handed over in 2013.

Censorship

• The Estonian courts had found that Delfi AS, the news portal, should have prevented clearly unlawful comments from being published in the portal’s comments section, even though Delfi had taken down the offensive comments as soon as it had been notified about them. When Delfi lodged a complaint with the European Court, the Court concluded unanimously that the domestic courts’ findings were a justified and proportionate restriction on Delfi’s right to freedom of expression.

• In a surprise decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg has ruled that the Estonian news site Delfi may be held responsible for anonymous and allegedly defamatory comments from its readers. As the digital rights organisation Access notes, this goes against the European Union’s e-commerce directive, which “guarantees liability protection for intermediaries that implement notice-and-takedown mechanisms on third-party comments.” As such, Peter Micek, Senior Policy Counsel at Access, says the ECHR judgment has “dramatically shifted the internet away from the free expression and privacy protections that created the internet as we know it.”

• Swearing at someone via WhatsApp in the UAE could land you with a $68,000 (£45,000) fine, under a new law.

• Those living in the country could also face jail, and foreigners deportation.

• The new law was brought to light when the UAE’s supreme court ordered the retrial of a man fined $800 for the offence, arguing the fine was too lenient.

Privacy

• Privacy will be on the docket at a Belgian court on Thursday — and Facebook will be the defendant.

• The Belgian Privacy Commission has sued Facebook and will take the world’s largest social network to court on Thursday for allegedly violating privacy laws both in Belgium and in the European Union. Speaking to Belgian news outlet DeMorgen, the country’s chairman of the Privacy Commission William Debeuckelaere said that Facebook’s behavior “cannot be tolerated.” He added that he hopes the court will force Facebook to change its privacy practices.

• Imagine a piece of information that would be useful to store digitally if it could be kept secure, but that would do more harm than good if it ever fell into the wrong hands. With Friday’s news that “hackers have breached a database containing a wealth of sensitive information from federal employees’ security background checks,” just that sort of fraught information has arguably been exposed to hackers.

• The ostensible reason for this massive surveillance is to catch people who steal mobile phones, but that really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The database that the 100,000 faces were matched against was “custody images from across Europe”, but it seems improbable that criminals would travel all the way across Europe to this particular music festival in the hope that they might be able to relieve a few spaced-out musicgoers of their phones. Nor was general criminal behavior an issue: apparently, last year there were just 91 arrests with 120,000 people attending. It’s more likely that the facial scans were born of a desire to see if the hardware and software were capable of capturing such large numbers and comparing them with the pan-European database.

• [...]

• It’s easy to see this kind of technology being rolled out ever-more widely. First at other music festivals — purely for safety reasons, you understand — and then, once people have started to get used to that, elsewhere too. Eventually, of course, it will become routine to scan everyone, everywhere, all the time, offering a perfect analog complement to the non-stop, pervasive surveillance that we now know takes place in the digital world.

• EFF has signed on to a joint civil society statement welcoming the groundbreaking report supporting encryption and anonymity by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye. The Special Rapporteur will present the report on June 17th at the 29th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

• Given all the fuss over the ridiculous article this past weekend — which has since been confirmed as government stenography rather than actual reporting — security maven Bruce Schneier has written up an article making a key point. It’s quite likely that the underlying point in the article — that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have access to the documents that Snowden originally handed over to reporters — is absolutely true. But, much more importantly, he argues, the reason likely has almost nothing to do with Snowden.

• Last weekend, the Sunday Times published a front-page story (full text here), citing anonymous British sources claiming that both China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents. It’s a terrible article, filled with factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims about both Snowden’s actions and the damage caused by his disclosure, and others have thoroughly refuted the story. I want to focus on the actual question: Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents?

• I believe the answer is certainly yes, but that it’s almost certainly not Snowden’s fault.

• The Government is facing calls to review a little-known policy under which Downing Street emails “self-destruct” after three months.

• Any messages which David Cameron’s aides fail to save and store are automatically deleted – a practice that campaigners claim is designed to thwart later freedom of information requests.

Civil Rights

• Saudi Arabia has reportedly taken its number of executions for the year to 100, far exceeding last year’s tally and putting it on course for a new record.

• Earlier this month Google announced that the company’s self-driving cars have had just thirteen accidents since it began testing the technology back in 2009, none the fault of Google. The company has also started releasing monthly reports, which note Google’s currently testing 23 Lexus RX450h SUVs on public streets, predominately around the company’s hometown of Mountain View, California. According to the company, these vehicles have logged about 1,011,338 “autonomous” (the software is doing the driving) miles since 2009, averaging about 10,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets.

• If we accept the premise that law enforcement and intelligence agencies encroach on personal freedoms and rights in “the public interest” — i.e., to ensure the safety of non-criminals — then we have to ask ourselves how this raid of a medical marijuana dispensary fits into this thought process.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Three in four families are not getting the headline broadband speed promised by their internet service provider, according to damning research published today.

• The failure means as many as 15.4million users are suffering painfully slow access to the internet, emails and video streaming services, such as the BBC’s iPlayer and Netflix.

• Up to three-quarters of UK households are still not getting the top broadband speeds promised by advertisements, according to consumer watchdog Which?

• As Australia’s site blocking Bill took a step closer to becoming law yesterday, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull made it extra clear that VPN use won’t be a problem under the legislation. Ordering “the big boys” to sort out the VPN issue between themselves, Turnbull told rightsholders to leave consumers alone.

DRM

• Amazon has removed the popular media center Kodi from the app store claiming it facilitates piracy. The software, formerly known as XBMC, doesn’t link to or host any infringing content, but third-party add-ons are giving the software a bad reputation.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Some months ago I received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that my site IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights. In that letter they asked that I agree to voluntarily transfer the domain name IKEAhackers.net to them, failing which they reserve the right to take any legal action it deems necessary against me.

Copyrights

• That mistake could cost this restaurant to the tune of several thousands of dollars for each of the four songs that Broadcast Music Inc. claims the venue played one Friday night in May 2014.

• The heirs of Hergé, the creator of the popular Tintin comics, were dealt a crushing blow in Dutch court this week. In a shocking decision, the court ruled that they do not have the rights to the iconic boy reporter character.

• The ruling hinged on the unexpected production of a long-lost 1942 document in which Hergé, whose real name was Georges Remi, transferred the Tintin rights to his publisher, Casterman.

• The MPAA is refusing to hand over documentation discussing the legal case it helped Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood build against Google. According to the Hollywood group, Google is waging a PR war against Hollywood while facilitating and profiting from piracy.

• Following the largest case of its type in Denmark, in October 2014 Gottfrid Svartholm was found guilty of hacking IT company CSC. The Pirate Bay founder immediately appealed but after a technically complex hearing a jury at the High Court today unanimously upheld the decision of the lower court.

• When Neil Young released his anthemic track “Rockin’ in the Free World” off 1989′s Freedom, the song quickly became a rallying cry in post-Reagan America for “American values” and the fall of communism. With George H. W. Bush still settling into his presidency, Young criticized the president’s ideology, specifically referencing Bush’s “thousand points of light” comment and blasting Republicans for what he felt was a disregard toward the lower-class.

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