● 06.19.15

● Links 19/6/2015: ‘Rebasing Ubuntu on Android’ Suggestion, Red Hat Profit Rises 28%

Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Feeling like something different, I recently bought a HP Chromebook 11. In this article I give my impressions on the device itself and also some Linux-specific goodness thanks to something caled Crouton, plus a few thoughts on working in the “cloud”.

• Dell is at it again… selling Linux powered laptops. Jack Wallen explains why and what this means for the Linux desktop operating system.

• If you stay tuned to news from U.S. school districts, you’ll see that school systems are purchasing Chromebooks at a steady clip. Westwood High School in Massachussetts is buying Chromebooks to issue to students who will return them once they graduate. The Bell-Chatham school board has approved Chromebook purchases for students, as has the Sumner School District.

• CompuLab, the manufacturer of the Fitlet based in Israel, describes their new line-up as, “a fanless mini PC with high performance, excellent graphics, up to 4 LAN ports and 5 year warranty. filtet is among the smallest PCs available and packs more features than any similar PC…For those familiar with the Intel® NUC – fitlet is somewhat similar. Just much smaller, fanless, with more features, and more powerful than NUCs in its price range.”

Server

• That’s the finding of a new survey conducted by DevOps.com, which finds that 38 percent of respondents use containers in their production environments at this time, and at least 65 percent expect to do so over the next 12 months. Containers in this sense are abstractions implemented at the operating system layer of the stack to support highly distributed applications.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the world’s most popular free operating system, has been more than happy to announce earlier that Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. is launching the world’s first 25/100 Gigabit Open Ethernet-based switch IC.

Kernel Space

• More of the Linux kernel’s complicated and poorly maintained x86 Assembly code continues to be rewritten in modern and clean C.

• The Linux 4.2 has many new features coming and now there’s another one: atomic mode-setting support for the OMAP DRM driver that also improves the overall open-source driver quality.

• Apart from philosophical and security concerns, I have over time amassed quite a collection of startup and shutdown scripts on my Slackware boxen. I prefer to be able to have full control over what my machines do and hand crafted and edited scripts have never let me down so far. If it’s written correctly, it works and does exactly as it says on the tin. That’s the beauty of an old-fashioned operating system like Slackware. You may be running a VPN server, offer VNC or ssh login and whatnot. The most reliable way to control them is via your own scripts – and you will know where you put them, thereby learning more about the system you’re using. I’m afraid systemd is more of an abstraction layer that will separate users from understanding what us actually being called, what is actually going on under the hood. It may be fine for professional admins who, once they have learned the new commands, will know what they’re doing as they know their Linux, but for a lot of private users this will just be a step towards another ‘walled garden’ operating system that they don’t understand. Of course, many don’t want to and only want to use an appliance that does the job, and that is fine. It is dumbing down nevertheless and potentially dangerous, in a time when everyone needs to understand the implications of the technology they’re using, not the least to safeguard themselves and their families.

• Fourteen of you — who can demonstrate the greatest need and best illustrate what a Linux career means to you — will be awarded training scholarships.

Graphics Stack

• It looks like OpenGL tessellation shader support within Mesa/Gallium3D is finally about to become a reality! Prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák has finished up the enablement work started by others and now has OpenGL tessellation working with the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source graphics driver.

• SPIR-V, the heart of OpenCL 2.1+ and The Khronos Group’s forthcoming Vulkan specification, is a step closer to being worked on within the LLVM compiler stack.

• The DRM subsystem pull for the Linux 4.2 kernel is nothing short of huge. There’s some more work to talk about today.

• It’s been three years since Linus Torvalds did his very public shaming of NVIDIA over their Linux support and called them the worst company he ever dealt with, gave them the finger, etc.

• Last week I started posting AMD A10-7870K Linux benchmarks for this “Godavari” APU that’s effectively a Kaveri Refresh and slightly faster for its four CPU cores and Radeon R7 Graphics over the former high-end Kaveri, the A10-7850K. In today’s articles are some benchmarks of the Radeon R7 Graphics on the A10-7870K when running Ubuntu and testing the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver against Catalyst on Linux.

• While the new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver is being added to the Linux 4.2 kernel as the next-gen driver for supporting Tonga, Carrizo, and all other new AMD graphics hardware, the 4.2 version will not support AMD’s newly-announced Fiji GPUs.

• While there’s long been an X.Org Wiki page with some pipe dreams for X12 as the successor to the X11 protocol, don’t bet on it ever happening.

Applications

• As you may know, Kodi (previously named XBMC) is a famous open source media hub and home theater PC, being translated in more than 30 languages. Also, its features can be highly extended via third party plugins and extensions and has support for PVR (personal video recorder).

• A new version of the popular Calibre open-source and cross-platform ebook library management application was released a few minutes ago by Kovid Goyal for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• UFRaw “The Unidentified Flying Raw” is an open source tool for reading and manipulating raw images from digital cameras, by using DCRaw. It supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles.

• gImageReader is an open source tool for OCR (optical character recognition) scanning, available on both Linux and Windows, enabling the users to scan JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIFF or PDF files or files directly imported from the scanner, and recognize the characters.

• One of the great things about Linux is how deeply you can dive into the system to explore how it works and to look for opportunities to fine tune performance or diagnose problems. Here is a selection of basic command line tools that will make your exploration and optimization easier. Most of these commands are already built into your Linux system, but in case they aren’t, just Google “install”, the command name, and the name of your distro and you’ll find which package needs installing (note that some commands are bundled with other commands in a package that has a different name from the one you’re looking for). If you have any other tools you use, let me know for our next Linux Tools roundup.

• I started working on blivet-gui more than a year ago. The UI was originally mostly inspired by GParted — its UI and visualization of partitions is simple and easy to understand. Displaying devices and their relations this way works quite nice for “simple” storage configurations (e.g. only partitions or basic LVM setup) but it’s really hard to understand (and to work with) for more “complex” storage configurations that involves RAIDs end encryption.

• Vojtech Trefny has been working on blivet-gui for more than one year as a storage and partition manager for Fedora. Blivet-GUI’s design was originally inspired by the popular GParted interface while using the Blivet back-end library for storage management that’s used by Fedora’s Anaconda Installer. Blivet-GUI is now in process of having an overhauled user-interface.

Proprietary

• Fresh Player Plugin was updated recently with support for hardware accelerated video decoding via VA-API and VDPAU, along with video capture support (ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio) and other improvements.

• Just a few moments ago, Opera Software, through Błażej Kaźmierczak, had the great pleasure of announcing that the Opera 32.0 web browser had landed in the Developer channel for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• As you may know, Vivaldi is a Chromium-based open-source internet browser, built by the Opera founder. It did not reach a stable version yet, but it is already usable.

Instructionals/Technical

• Kubernetes is a Container Cluster Manager from Google which basically means that Kubernetes is an orchestration of many services running on plenty of Docker containers. Google actually supports a several ways how to run Kubernetes and luckily Vagrant is one of them.

Games

• A new day of Steam sale is upon us, and there are lots of Linux titles to choose from. In fact, “The Steam Monster Summer Sale Day 7″ is one of the most fruitful offerings made until now.

• Feral Interactive is one of the two companies that are now doing most of the porting work for major Linux games, and they want to know just how many Linux and Mac OS X fans are out there.

• Update: We were contacted by a Dell representative (Dell is the company that own Alienware) who explained that it was a Steam Machine running SteamOS in the video and that we were mistaken.

• “Alienware’s Steam Machine currently runs and will be shipping with the Linux-based Valve SteamOS, and is available now for pre-order through GameStop. We’ve been working with Valve for several years and have a strong partnership with the company.

• Humble Weekly Bundle: Retroism is one of the latest collections available for the Linux platform, and users have only a little over a day to get all of these old titles.

• Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is a 3D space arcade game that was released on the Windows platform a while ago and that managed to get quite a following going. This particular title has been ported by Aspyr and it’s now available for Linux.

• Dota 2, the immensely popular MOBA game developed by Valve, has switched to the Source 2 engine, but it looks like the Linux users will have to wait for a few more weeks until they get to play it.

• OpenRA is an open source project that aims to recreate the classic Command & Conquer and that actually gathers the C&C: Tiberian Dawn, C&C: Red Alert, and Dune 2000 titles under the same roof. A new update has been released for it and it looks like some major new features have been added.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Sebastian Kügler published a few days ago a new video on his YouTube channel about a demonstration of KDE’s native Plasma shell interface running on the Wayland display server, as showcased by Martin Gräßlin.

• Developers would like to make Qt 5.5 a LTS release, but they want this long-supported release to be done with their new continuous integration system. The issue though is their new CI system is being developed in-step with Qt 5.6, which is pushing back their LTS plans.

• Cutelyst the Qt Web framework just got a new release!

• I was planning to do this one after Qt 5.5 was out due to the new qCInfo() logger and Q_GADGET introspection, but I’ll save that for 0.10.0.

• This release brings some important API breaks so if everything goes well I can do another CMlyst release.

• I know the next weeks/months a lot of applications will be ported to KF5. If you’d like to offer Breeze icons please ask on https://github.com/NitruxSA/plasma-next-icons we now have an good solution between standard icons and app specific icons and hope we can offer an Breeze and Breeze-Dark experience as you wish.

• Overall there are 102 wallpapers submitted. Most of them via opendesktop.org. So the winner is the user. You can use the new wallpapers via the Get new Wallpaper button and can use all submitted wallpapers.

• Attached some of the submitted wallpapers (most of them are not in plasma 5.3 so you have to install the package to see the best of the best). I have to say thanks for all contributors and hope that you are happy with the results.

• So an input method allows you for example to input Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Indian characters into a text input field of an application, even though there is only a Latin keyboard attached to the computer. That is done by analyzing the text, which is typed in as Latin, and e.g. opening a popup menu with a pre-selection of Chinese characters, which are associated with that Latin input. The user can now select one of these Chinese characters, which will then replace the Latin input in the text field.

• Building on their UOS Hangout, the Kubuntu Podcast Team has created their first Hangout, featuring Ovidiu-Florin Bogdan, Aaron Honeycutt, and Rick Timmis.

• The talks programme for Akademy 2015 is now available. Details for organising BoFs will be announced later.

• As you know we decided to release kdepim kf5 in 15.08. (We have 2 months yet).

• I use kdepim kf5 by default now on my main computer. Of course when I started to use it all apps crashed, or there was some part of code which was not ported to kf5 yet.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Tarballs are due on 2015-06-22 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.17.3 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.17.3. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

• Music, the GNOME music player that isn’t Rhythmbox, has been quietly progressing in the past few GNOME releases.

• As you may know, Cinnamon is a desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint team, created when GNOME has decided to ditch GNOME 2 and create the more-modern GNOME 3 DE.

• Though MATE has added GTK3 support, it is still considered experimental. The team has noticed many serious regressions with each new GTK3 release. “So while MATE 1.10 built against GTK 3.16 currently works, we can not guarantee that will be the case when GTK 3.18 lands,” said Winpress.

• That said, the team feels that the future release of GTK3 will be less demanding on MATE and the DE will continue to benefit from it.

• If you want to test GTK3 builds of MATE, there are two major distros offering it: Arch Linux and Fedora.

Distributions

New Releases

• Netrunner Rolling, Linux distribution based on Manjaro that features KDE as the default desktop environment, has been updated, and a new Beta release has been made available for download.

Arch Family

• Antergos is considerably more user-friendly than other Arch Linux distros, but it doesn’t eliminate all of Arch’s quirks. Users who are already familiar with Arch but want a quicker installation method will appreciate what Antergos brings to the Linux table. Those less familiar with the Arch Linux methodologies are sure to be much less enthusiastic about using the OS.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Going back a while now, AMD has been working with SUSE on adding HSA support to GCC. Some of the work has landed in GCC while more additions are still pending — including some newly-published patches.

Red Hat Family

• Whitehurst used the auto industry as an example where the old brands must change, or else face trouble ahead. Automakers have been focused for the last 100 years on how to make cars more cheaply, and management has been the same way, focused on how to control employees most effectively, Whitehurst said.

• Union Bank of Switzerland reiterates its Buy rating and price objective of $78 on Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) stock, while expecting solid first-quarter financial results with minimal impact of foreign exchange headwind.

• Red Hat Inc, the world’s largest commercial distributor of the Linux operating system, reported a 13.5 percent rise in quarterly revenue, helped by increasing adoption of open-source software and its cloud-based products.

• Midway through a day packed with events celebrating the launch of his new book, The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst was unflagging. More than 450 business leaders, industry veterans, and open source devotees gathered in a virtual conference room on June 2, 2015, to hear the Red Hat CEO discuss the future of management in a fast-changing economy.

• Red Hat is the largest open source software company in the world. Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, it’s estimated the publicly-traded firm will generate $2 billion in revenue this fiscal year. It’s highly profitable, has close to 8,000 employees, operates in more than 35 countries and as a member of the S&P 500 is one of the 500 largest companies in the U.S. The company is one of the best-known IT brands in the world and was named one of Forbes Most Innovative Companies.

Fedora

• Fedora is OK . It does all the things that you can do with the other distros no less and no more. One should never consider switching from say Centos to Fedora, but if you insist you can get all the three versions of Fedora here. I can promise you though, that the whole experience can be kind of underwhelming.

• Right now Fedora Atomic is released alongside the other flavors of Fedora Linux on the roughly six month release schedule. However, due to upstream Atomic moving very fast, in the period of going from alpha to beta to final, Fedora Atomic is already dated. The developers admit that by the time the last two Fedora Atomic releases shipped, they were “basically obsolete.”

• The Fedora Project has always had a stance, both for legal and philosophical reasons, to not ship or make available by default non-free software such as Google Chrome, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, DVD and MP3 playback, etc. While this stance is arguably a noble one and one to be commended, it does tend to run contrary to what a user might consider a “working desktop.”

• After having informed us about the proposal to move the Fedora Atomic Host development cycle to a two-week cadence, Jan Kurik came with a new proposal for the upcoming version of the operating system.

• On June 18, Jan Kurik published details about a new proposal to move Atomic Host cloud images from a six-month cadence to two-week releases for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system.

Debian Family

• The Clement Lefebvre today announced the release of Linux Mint 17.2 RC in Cinnamon and MATE varieties. Newly released MATE 1.10 and Cinnamon 2.6 are among the features. Elsewhere, Debian may have let Google put spyware on users’ machines and Gearhead Mark Gibbs suggests using Linux AIOs for full enjoyment. Ashlee Vance scored an afternoon drive with (and several quotes from) Linus Torvalds and Christine Hall asks if the end of Open Source is nigh.

• DebConf is not just for Debian Developers, we welcome all members of our community active in different areas, like translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, and many other ways that help make Debian better.

• Debian feels that greater diversity at DebConf and in the Debian community will “significantly help” them in their goal of becoming the Universal Operating System, so they’ve launched a diversity sponsorship program for their annual DebConf event.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu Touch platform is currently based on Ubuntu 15.04, but it looks like the developers are preparing to move to Ubuntu Snappy, a decision that could open some incredible, new and exciting avenues for the platform, like competing with products such as the Raspberry Pi 2.

• Canonical released some details about an Aptdaemon vulnerability that has been found and corrected in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04.

• For some businesses, containers seem too new and thorny, while VMs seem too antiquated and slow. So now vendors are exploring a sweet spot between the two.

• Joyent’s Triton Elastic Container host uses SmartOS’s (from Solaris) native containerization functions to run containers on bare metal instead of in VMs. It now allows Canonical Ubuntu Linux to run as a “container-native Linux image,” says Joyent.

• Mark Shuttleworth has lost his long-running fight to reverse a US$20m (£12.8m) bank charge levied after he transferred a fortune out of South Africa.

• In 2001, Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical, emigrated from South Africa to the Isle of Man. In 2008, he tried to withdraw R2.5bn (US$204m, £128m) from his account in the South African Reserve Bank. The bank, under orders from the SA finance minister, withheld 10 per cent of the transfer as an exit charge.

• The Ubuntu phone is evolving step by step. The team has worked their socks off to build a convergent user interface, toolkit, and full SDK. The phone exposes an exciting new concept, scopes, that while intriguing in their current form, after some refinement (which the team are already working on) could redefine how we use devices and access content. It is all the play for.

• The Ubuntu Developer Membership Board (DMB) has issued a call for nominations to fill a vacant seat on the board following the recent resignation by Scott Kitterman.

• Not long ago, we have announced GPS Navigation, a navigation software for Ubuntu Touch that works only online and is built on OpenStreetMap.

• To address a local root privilege growth vulnerability that can be used to gain administrative privileges on the system, Canonical has released updates for Ubuntu.

Flavours and Variants

• Sourceforge currently has some big problems and many projects have decided to change their hosting providers. The service has been accused of infusing some Windows executables with Adware and things just got worse from there. elementary OS devs have decided that it’s a good time to move on from Sourceforge as well.

• Martin Wimpress, leader of the Ubuntu MATE project, teased all Ubuntu MATE users with a screenshot for the upcoming welcome screen that will be implemented in the next major various of the Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system.

• Clem has announced the release candidates of Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” for the Cinnamon and MATE desktop editions.

Devices/Embedded

• Google’s Nest upgraded its Linux-based automation line with a new “Nest Protect,” and a 1080p “Nest Cam” surveillance cam with optional cloud analytics.

• The upcoming OpenWrt “Chaos Calmer” 15.05 open-source firmware for wireless routers is now closer to a final release, as the team has announced that the second RC (Release Candidate) version is available for testing.

• Intrinsyc’s tiny “Open-Q 410″ module has a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 Snapdragon 410, offers WiFi, BT, GPS, and 8GB eMMC, and runs both Android and Linux.

• Like Axiomtek’s eBOX620-841-FL (quad-core Atom E3845) and eBOX638-840-FL (quad-core Celeron J1900), the new eBOX625-841-FL, eBOX625-842-FL, and eBOX626-841-FL are fanless, embedded computers that run on 22nm Bay Trail system-on-chips. The “841” models tap the dual-core, 1.46GHz Atom E3826 while the eBOX625-842-FL goes for the same 2GHz Celeron J1900 found on the eBOX638-840-FL. All three models support extended operating temperature ranges, for example -40 to +55°C on the 842.

• Raspberry Pi 2 now has an official case that is built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and distributed on all the major channels.

Phones

Tizen

• India developers get ready as the Tizen Developer Summit India 2015. The dates have been announced and it is being held 30-31 July 2015 in Bengaluru, India. This is a technical event that is geared towards application and platform developers that want to learn more about the Tizen Operating System (OS). There will be technical content for App developers, platform designers, ISVs, OEMs, hardware vendors, software vendors, open source enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to learn more about Tizen.

Android

• The BB10 mobile OS can already run some Android apps, but BlackBerry is recently in the crosshairs of rumor mongers with the speculation that it is prepping a phone with Android as the stock operating system. The device is allegedly codenamed Venice internally, and, again eventually, is said to be a slider of sorts. The handset is said to come with options to be either an Android, or a BB10 device, according to the user’s preferences.

• BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) is said to be working on an Android-based phone, and such reports have been on the web for the past few days. But now we are hearing news of Android seen running on a BlackBerry Passport.

• Samsung has started working on the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update, the latest version of the Android mobile operating system, for the Galaxy S5, a report said Thursday. While the South Korean technology giant is rumored to bring the Lollipop experience to its 2014 flagship smartphone model, the company’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge received the update only from a single carrier in the U.S. earlier this week.

• A report alleges a significant risk to Samsung phones, but the threat may be overstated. It is just one of many risks Android device users face.

• Samsung is facing accusations that it has a vulnerability in its Android phones that could be leaving more than 600 million users at risk. Security firm NowSecure first disclosed the vulnerability, known as CVE-2015-2865.

• While the vulnerability poses risks, the simple truth is that it is just one of many that could potentially impact Samsung’s Android users.

• We told you on June 4th that Motorola was still working on the update because performance just wasn’t quite up to speed.

• Sony’s gone and done something few manufacturers have done at E3 before: It unveiled its latest smartphone. The Xperia Z4v builds on last year’s solid Z3v, and at first glance, it’s pretty similar to last year’s model: 5.2-inch display, 3GB of RAM, 20.7MP rear camera, 32GB of local storage, a microSD slot that supports 128GB cards, and a similar design to its older Xperia Z brethren.

• A few months ago, we caught wind of a rumor that BlackBerry would soon further its utilization of Android beyond just a runtime. Currently, BlackBerry uses the Android 4.3 runtime within the BlackBerry 10 operating system.

• With this setup there are limitations, which restrict BlackBerry from using Google Play Services. It has been said, BlackBerry has apparently always had the option to change it, but it would require them adding the “powered by Android” logo on the boot-screen.

• Android fans who still desire a physical keyboard might have something to celebrate about later this year. It was reported last week that BlackBerry might be working on an Android phone, and it looks like it’s more than just a rumor. Codenamed “Venice,” this new BlackBerry phone is slated to arrive in November with the following specs: a 5.4-inch Quad-HD screen, a 1.8GHz 64-bit Hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor, 3 GB RAM, as well as an 18-megapixel rear-camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

• Every week, at least three or four or twenty people ask us in some way or another, “What phone would you recommend I buy?” In reality, they just want to know what the best Android phone is that they can buy today. I get why we get asked. After all, we handle every new flagship under the sun.

Free Software/Open Source

• Design and user experience (UX) can often be an afterthought for open source projects. But that’s changing. PatternFly is a project helping to bridge the gap between developers and designers.

• PatternFly is an open source project that promotes design commonality and improved user experience. It’s a place where open source developers and designers can collaborate, create, and share user interface (UI) components and widgets. PatternFly is based on Bootstrap, a mobile-first front-end framework for creating web sites and applications.

• Open source software (OSS) positively impacts many large industries from healthcare to education—these effects are now being felt at the individual level as well. The speed of delivery and cost efficiency of OSS enables developers to provide multi-use, flexible and readily available software as opposed to proprietary options. OSS allows software developers to create assistive technologies using open source interfaces that directly improve the day-to-day lives of members of the special needs community or individuals who have physical disabilities.

• I have to solve this issue for the user. We make a point to distinguish PencilBlue from the competition through our user experience, even if we have no control over who uses our product.

• Ultimately, that’s what makes UX in open source content management such a daunting task. The limitless, unpredictable variance in use cases, combined with an ever-increasing demand for multi-language, “easy to understand” interfaces is difficult to keep up with.

• AT&T (NYSE: T) says the future of its network is all about software, and it’s blazing a trail to virtualize 75 percent of its network by 2020. This week, John Donovan, senior EVP for technology and operations at AT&T, said the operator’s engineers have figured out how to turn complex appliances into software running on commodity servers and other hardware.

• CloudBees is leading the Docker integration effort with plug-ins that enable the use of containers as part of a Jenkins continuous integration workflow.

• Recent community concerns have triggered an extensive internal review of our mirroring program and how mirrored content is used on SourceForge. In light of this review, third-party bundling of mirrored content was discontinued May 27th. As of June 18th, we have taken a further step in removing SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects, and are engaging our newly-formed Community Panel to discuss site features and program policies including a redesigned mirror program.

• A new open-source, Web-based platform for building corporate PBX (private branch exchange) telephone networks has been released by Duxbury Networking.

• Julian Shapiro is a leading web developer and a major contributor to open source technologies. He is the creator of Velocity.js, the most popular open source Web animation engine that powers the user interface animations for WhatsApp, Tumblr, Yahoo!, HTC, and thousands of other companies.

• Linux, the most popular open source project of all time and widely used in just about every data center there is, got its start in 1991 when creator Linus Torvalds decided to write an operating system just for fun.

Google

• Recently, Google’s DeepMind—an artificial intelligence firm acquired for over $400 million in 2013—has been widely featured for demonstrations of an algorithm that teaches itself to play video games. In a paper, the DeepMind team said the software had learned to play Atari Breakout, and some 48 other games, as well as any human gamer.

• This year I’m participating in Google Summer of Code with a project called “Pointing Devices KCM”. It is about creating new unified KCM for both mouses and touchpads (and maybe some other devices like ThinkPad’s pointing stick later).

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I’m happy to report that we at Mozilla have started working with Chromium, Edge and WebKit engineers on creating a new standard, WebAssembly, that defines a portable, size- and load-time-efficient format and execution model specifically designed to serve as a compilation target for the Web.

• A WebAssembly back-end has been proposed for LLVM. WebAssembly is a new virtual ISA designed to run compiled code within web browsers.

SaaS/Big Data

• Container technology remains very big news, and if you bring up the topic almost everyone immediately thinks of Docker. But there are tools arriving that can compete with Docker, and tools that can extend it and make it more flexible. We’ve covered Rocket, which comes from the CoreOS team, and is a command line tool for running app containers. And then there is ClusterHQ which has an open source project called Flocker that allows developers to run their databases inside Docker containers and make them highly portable.

• ClusterHQ has inked an agreement that will see its Flocker container management code integrate with EMC’s flashy fare.

• Throughout the history of networking, appliances that bundle key components of the network stack have helped make network configuration and deployment easier. Now, a company called Breqwatr, which focuses on making private clouds more accessible to the enterprise, has announced that it is pursuing the appliance path with OpenStack.

Databases

• The thing that these challengers have in common is that they’re released as open source software, meaning that developers all over the world have helped develop them.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• On June 18, Collabora announced that they added two versions of the popular LibreOffice open-source office suite software for Apple’s Mac OS X operating systems on the Mac App Store.

• It’s an event of historical magnitude: One of the most popular Open Source projects, LibreOffice, is now available directly from Apple’s Mac App Store. You can get LibreOffice on OSX with automatic updates, long-term maintenance, and optional professional support, for the first time.

CMS

• “Nothing too unusual. Went on TV yesterday to help users understand the LastPass breach. Been working on PowerPoints for a briefing. Oh, and I accidentally crashed somewhere between 10,000 and 70,000 nonprofit Web sites.”

Healthcare

• The Dutch Association of Research Quality Assurance, a trade group representing about 600 health care institutions and suppliers, is to assist in validating open source software solutions for use in health care. Approved solutions will be given so-called vendor compliance statements, asserting compliance with European and global health care ICT standards.

Business

• Many programmers are not writing their own original source code anymore because of market pressure to produce software quickly and cheaply.

Semi-Open Source

• Of all the various backup companies on the market, few have documented their work and research as thoroughly as Backblaze. The company has previously made headlines for open-sourcing both the underlying hardware design that it uses for its Storage Pods and its hard drive reliability data (the latter early this year). Now, Backblaze is opening up another facet of its operation — the implementation of its Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes.

Funding

• Code-sharing website GitHub is pursuing a new round of venture capital based on a US$2bn (£1.26bn) valuation.

• Bloomberg cited sources familiar with the matter in reporting that GitHub is in the middle of a series-b funding push to raise US$200m in capital.

• Mapbox provides scalable open sourced customizable maps for mobile apps and websites. It is said to be one of the largest providers, competing with the likes of Google. This comes as a result of their initial offering allowing nonprofits to build custom maps. At the core of their business is a mission and dedication to being open, with only a small portion of their software being closed. They currently contribute to more than 350 public repositories on Github, and a majority of their data is open.

BSD

• Secret key files contain a 64-bit hash (truncated SHA512) of the secret key data which is used to verify the user’s password. You wouldn’t want to enter the wrong password and accidentally sign something with a bogus key. Unfortunately, this creates something of an oracle. If you steal somebody’s secret key, instead of guessing passwords which will be terribly slow because of the KDF, you can just guess keys and compute hashes until you get a match. The good news is that the key space is fairly large; you won’t have much luck guessing one. Harmless as this may be, it’s bothered me quite a bit because it’s plainly wrong. (The rationale for this decision was that encrypting the hash as well would require another iteration of the KDF.)

Openness/Sharing

• There is much to be said about open government. While there are many different open government movements, I’ve not yet seen a “platform” that is available for local governments to use. There is a company called OpenGov which does address local government financial transparency, and that is a start, but falls woefully short if you want a fully transparent local government.

Open Hardware

• At this week’s E3 show in Los Angeles, virtual reality took another step toward becoming the real deal as companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Facebook’s Oculus showed off VR headsets. More significantly for the never-say-die Linux gaming community, as well as others looking for an open VR platform for immersive applications, up-and-comer Razer announced upgrades for its own Linux-compatible, fully open source VR Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) headset. In addition, Valve had updates on its SteamVR platform, and HTC showed off its SteamVR-based Vive headset, which can similarly be controlled from a Linux desktop.

• Michiel Brink based in Almelo, Netherlands has created a new wireless LED strip controller called EspLight, that is capable of using both analog and digital strips.

• The wireless LED strip control board is perfect for makers, developers or hobbyists that would like to control their projects via smartphones or computers.

Programming

• The recent news of adware being bundled with Windows installers of popular open source apps was unfortunate to hear. Nobody likes it when financial incentives supersede the user experience of a product or service that is doing great things, but the reality is that we’ve been part of the problem here. We haven’t paid Sourceforge a dime for the petabytes of bandwidth that we’ve consumed over the years. We’re the teenager that rages against their parents, screaming “no fair” while freeloading. Finally, we’ve woken up and decided to put on the grown-up pants.

• Amazon Web Services has expanded its AWS Lambda programming model to support functions written in Java, the cloud kingpin said on Monday.

• Lambda, which allows developers to run event-driven code directly on Amazon’s cloud without managing any application infrastructure, launched in November 2014 and initially only supported code written in JavaScript and Node.js.

• This open source union means the two communities will now continue their work in a neutral forum, the Node.js Foundation, hosted by The Linux Foundation.

• Node.js is the software that allows you to run Javascript to create amazingly powerful server-side applications by using Google’s V8 Javascript Engine. As a Node developer myself, I have always felt frustrated by seeing that Joyent, the company behind Node.s, was extremely conservative in terms of upgrading node to use the latest V8 version; the project was also struggling to get developers to actually contribute to code. This is why Fedor Indutny did the unthinkable: forked node and created IO.js. Today, the two projects are uniting possibly offering developers the best of both worlds.

• Programming is a creative activity that any kid can engage in. Your child might not care about writing data processing algorithms, but they might enjoy creating games, programming music, designing websites, or just playing around with code.

• Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, has announced a new project that could not only speed up web applications but could eventually see the end of JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development.

• ECMAScript 6 (ECMAScript 2015) has been approved at this week’s ECMA General Assembly meeting for becoming the latest standard edition of JavaScript.

Standards/Consortia

• A proprietary, but open standard is one that has been developed without community consensus.

Leftovers

• When a German man scanned the QR code on a bottle of ketchup, he expected to land on a page about designing his own label. Instead, he was taken to a hardcore porn website.

Science

• Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says London’s cultural assets make it a better place to live than Silicon Valley but wants capital to have a tech commnity

Health/Nutrition

• Athlete says he didn’t hear doorbell but it emerges that UK Anti-Doping officials would have been under orders to make several attempts to raise him

• People eating avocados don’t “contribute” to California’s drought–even if a sliver of it takes 4.1 gallons of water to produce, as the Times tells us. California’s drought is caused by lower-than-normal precipitation coupled with higher-than-normal temperatures, not by people eating too many grapes (24 gallons for a bunch) or mandarin oranges (42.5 gallons for three).

Security

• Fedora and CentOS templates will accept a root password from the user during the build and set a randomized password for the root user if a password isn’t specified. Ubuntu Cloud takes another approach by locking out the root user and requiring cloud-init configuration data to configure the root account.

• Six university researchers have revealed deadly zero-day flaws in Apple’s iOS and OS X, claiming it is possible to crack Apple’s password-storing keychain, break app sandboxes, and bypass its App Store security checks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Using measurements taken by NASA’s twin Grace satellites, scientists found the most overstressed groundwater basins were located in the driest regions.

• Leave it to Pope Francis, a Jesuit trained as a chemist, who has only one lung, to breath new life into a tired global environmental debate.

• It has been droning on for so long now that it has become background noise, easily drowned out in the din of the 24-hour news cycle. While the glaciers melt, and close to 2,500 people in India are killed by a heat wave that produced a 118 degree ambient air temperature, we’d much rather dissect the twists and turns of “Game of Thrones” in our air conditioned parallel universe. The brutality of a make-believe place is so much easier to cope with than confronting the cruelty that defines so much of our own real world.

Finance

• Corporate media have a storyline ready to explain the defeat (for the time being, anyway) of the Trans Pacific Partnership : Big Labor is to blame.

• The Washington chattering class is really upset that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) looks like it’s going down. David Brooks pulled out all the stops, using his New York Times column (6/16/15) to yell at “Tea Party” Democrats for not supporting the fast-track authority that would facilitate passage of the TPP.

• A lot has been written on what is bad about TTIP, CETA, TISA, TPP, etc. Some people accuse us about being opposed to any trade deal at all. To repute this let us imagine for a moment on how such trade deal would ideally look like and how they should have been negotiated.

• As Congress stands poised to increase funding for the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year federal Charter Schools Program by a whopping 48 percent, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has uncovered that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General has major nationwide probes underway into closed charter schools and suspected waste and financial mismanagement within the program.

• It’s no secret that former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich has some misgivings about the direction of the American economy. But the prolific writer, radio commentator and longtime University of California, Berkeley professor isn’t thrilled about how we are educating our kids, either.

• As part of a new project with the activist group MoveOn.org, Reich recently released a video that described our education system as “squashing passion for learning, eroding the love of teaching and grinding up generations of young people.” The critique is accompanied by a set of proposals to reinvent American education – one of 10 planks in a broader agenda titled “10 Ideas to Save the Economy.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• When called out on the lie that David Miranda had been arrested at Heathrow after visiting Snowden in Moscow – a lie crucial to the fabric of deceit they had twisted into a story to justify the “snoopers’ charter” – Ivens did not apologise or explain, he merely had the lie excised from the online edition with no explanation. The print edition was already out, and despite the fact that the online “story” which had already been full of holes, now made no sense at all, they continued with it.

Privacy

• During testimony today in a grueling two-hour hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Katherine Archuleta claimed that she had recognized huge problems with the agency’s computer security when she assumed her post 18 months ago. But when pressed on why systems had not been protected with encryption prior to the recent discovery of an intrusion that gave attackers access to sensitive data on millions of government employees and government contractors, she said, “It is not feasible to implement on networks that are too old.” She added that the agency is now working to encrypt data within its networks.

• The undersigned civil society organizations (including La Quadrature du Net) and independent experts work to promote human rights and press freedom online. We welcome the report of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression on the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communication (A/HRC/29/32), which was presented at the UN Human Rights Council on June 17.

• The Belgian government will be suing Facebook. The Commission for the Protection of Privacy states that Facebook violates Belgian and EU law by tracking systems that target both Facebook users as well as non-Facebook users. Facebook is known for cooperating with the U.S.’ National Security Agency.

• [...]

• Facebook failed to comply, and the Commission has no power to enforce the law; hence the decision to sue Facebook to attain a a court ruling.

• My interview today for RT about the German prosecutor’s decision to stop the investigation of the NSA tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, and much more…

• We will issue the first end entity certificates under our root under tightly controlled circumstances. No cross-signature will be in place yet, so the certificates will not validate unless our root is installed in client software. As we approach general availability we will issue more and more certificates, but only for a pre-approved set of domains. This limited issuance period will give us time to further ensure that our systems are secure, compliant, and scalable.

• In the past year, a conflict has erupted between technology companies, privacy advocates, and members of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities over the right to use and distribute products that contain strong encryption technology. This debate between government actors seeking ways to preserve access to encrypted communications and a coalition of pro-encryption groups is reminiscent of an old battle that played out in the 1990s: a period that has come to be known as the “Crypto Wars.” This paper tells the story of that debate and the lessons that are relevant to today. It is a story not only about policy responses to new technology, but also a sustained, coordinated effort among industry groups, privacy advocates, and technology experts from across the political spectrum to push back against government policies that threatened online innovation and fundamental human rights.

• Let’s Encrypt, a project aimed at increasing the use of encryption across websites by issuing free digital certificates, is planning to issue the first ones next month.

• Digital certificates are used to encrypt data traffic between a computer and a server using SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) and for checking that a website isn’t a spoof.

• Read nearly any article about the dark web, and you’ll get the sense that its name connotes not just its secrecy but also the low-down dirty content of its shadowy realms. You’ll be told that it is home to several nefarious things: stolen data, terrorist sites, and child porn. Now while those things may be among what’s available on the dark web, all also are available on the normal web, and are easily accessible to anyone, right now, without the need for any fancy encryption software.

• [...]

• Terrorist forums are also hiding in full view of anyone with an Internet connection. Regular websites allow extremist supporters and prominent jihadis alike to communicate with one another and post brutal propaganda videos. Al Qaeda’s first forum was launched way back in 2001, and although that site was shut down, a handful of other violent Islamic extremist sites continue to exist on the normal web and are used heavily today. Shutting these sites down is “like a game of whack-a-mole,” Evan Kohlmann from Flashpoint, an intelligence company, told me last year.

• [...]

• And yes, child porn is accessible on the normal web. In fact, it is rampant when compared with what’s available from hidden sites. Last year, the Internet Watch Foundation, a charity that collates child sexual abuse websites and works with law enforcement and hosting providers to have the content removed, found 31,266 URLs that contained child porn images. Of those URLs, only 51 of them, or 0.2 percent, were hosted on the dark web.

• [...]

• Instead, the dark web is a small collection of sites that reflect the limited number of good, bad, and downright weird humans that use it. Doctors can give impartial advice to drug users, who come out of the woodwork because of the anonymity awarded to them by Tor; Chinese citizens can discuss whatever they like and circumvent The Great Firewall, and, yes, the dark web is also used to host some seriously depraved sites, such as extreme pornography. At the moment, the space is probably used mostly for criminal purposes, but its relevance to the world of cybercrime and other domains has been grossly exaggerated.

• THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) has published its annual league table of tech companies and their use of customer data.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Pirate Bay has dropped the www prefix for all of its domains. The changes occurred earlier this week and were made without a redirect, which is causing some visitors to believe that the site is currently offline.

• The long awaited own initiative report of the European Parliament, on the evaluation of the Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC), has passed the vote in JURI committee today, with 23 votes in favour and 2 against. All 30 compromise amendments have been adopted with a rather large majority every time, showing both the ongoing effort of the rapporteur to find a suitable wording for all political parties, and the MEPs’ willingness to find a common ground for the ongoing EU copyright reform. OFE welcomes this milestone in the reform process, while waiting for the Commission’s legislative proposal later in 2015. Although the final report is less ambitious than the initial proposal, it still goes further than the proposals made by the Commission in its Digital Single Market strategy.

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