● 06.24.15

● Links 24/6/2015: Meizu MX4, Red Hat and Samsung Partner, Women in Open Source Awards

Posted in News Roundup at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Oracle technology chief Larry Ellison is embarking on a journey Microsoft couldn’t complete: beating Amazon’s cloud services on price.

• Oracle was once critical of the cloud computing trend but it’s now very clear that the company is hitching its cart to the cloud. As Reuters and many media outlets are covering, founder Larry Ellison has said that “we are prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price,” in announcing robust new cloud plans this week.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 3.4.108 kernel.

• The x86 EFI changes for Linux 4.2 were mailed in this morning and indeed they offer the EFI System Resource Table support as necessary for supporting UEFI 2.5+ system firmware updates.

• In preparation for the rewrite of a bunch of kernel Assembly x86 code into C, the x86 core pull request has many Assembly code changes. As explained by Ingo Molnar, “Tons of cleanups and small speedups, micro-optimizations. This is in preparation to move a good chunk of the low level entry code from assembly to C code.”

• The new CPU port of the Linux kernel is to the Renesas H8/300 micro-controler. The H8 is a family of micro-controllers from Renesas Technology and the H8/300 uses an 32-bit CPU (though there’s also versions of 8 and 16-bit, but they appear unsupported by this new port) designed for real-time control applications. The H8/300 has been around for a while and one of the many products its found in is the LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Up to now the Linux support for the H8 300 has been maintained out-of-tree.

• With Linux 4.1 having been released this week and being mid-way through 2015, here’s some Git development statistics for the newest kernel code.

• The KDBUS in-fighting between upstream Linux kernel developers was once again reignited today after a kernel developer publicly asked Linus Torvalds on the prospects of merging KDBUS.

• Jiri Kosina of SUSE has sent in the HID driver updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel and with it comes new device support.

• First up, the Logitech M560 mouse is now supported with Linux 4.2. The Logitech M560 is a ~$25 wireless mouse that has a “comfort design”, Windows 8 edge menu button, thumb buttons, a hyper fast scroll wheel, and a reported eighteen month battery life.

• A brand new version of the Linux Kernel — the heartbeat of the modern world (if we you want us to be poetic about it) — has been released.

• With today’s release of systemd 221 besides enabling KDBUS support being compiled in unconditionally, it also stabilizes the new SD-BUS.

• Docker and CoreOS on Monday announced the formation of a coalition of 21 industry leaders to create the Open Container Project, a nonprofit organization seeking minimal common standards for software containers for cloud storage.

• The two companies made the announcement on the opening day of Dockercon, a two-day conference covering all aspects of the Docker ecosystem.

• The version of btrfs-tools in Debian/Jessie is incapable of creating a filesystem that can be mounted by the kernel in Debian/Wheezy. If you want to use a BTRFS filesystem on Jessie and Wheezy (which isn’t uncommon with removable devices) the only options are to use the Wheezy version of mkfs.btrfs or to use a Jessie kernel on Wheezy. I recently got bitten by this issue when I created a BTRFS filesystem on a removable device with a lot of important data (which is why I wanted metadata duplication and checksums) and had to read it on a server running Wheezy. Fortunately KVM in Wheezy works really well so I created a virtual machine to read the disk. Setting up a new KVM isn’t that difficult, but it’s not something I want to do while a client is anxiously waiting for their data.

• The Linux Foundation was among those today announcing a new project formed “to establish common standards for software containers.” Companies like Red Hat, Docker, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMware have joined together to create the Open Contain Project “to enable users and companies to continue to innovate and develop container-based solutions, with confidence that their pre-existing development efforts will be protected and without industry fragmentation.”

• To be clear though, the point of the OCP is not to standardize Docker, but rather to standardize the baseline for containers. Polvi explained that with an open standard, there can be multiple implementations of the standard. So for CoreOS, it means the company will continue to work on its Rocket container technology, while Docker will continue to work on the Docker container technology.

• The Core Infrastructure Initiative announced today that they will support two Debian Developers, Holger Levsen and Jérémy Bobbio, with $200,000 to advance their Debian work in reproducible builds and to collaborate more closely with other distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenWrt to benefit from this effort.

Graphics Stack

• Nvidia has just released a new update for the Linux branch of the long-lived driver, and it brings support for new GPUs and a number of small bug fixes.

• Longtime open-source graphics developer Luc Verhaegen has written on the Linux-SunXI about further Allwinner misbehavior. Five days ago they updated their media codec framework with various new “proprietary” files that is then being built together with LGPL-licensed code and the binary is being dlopen’ed into the LGPL’ed code.

• David Airlie has been adding output master support to the xf86-video-modesetting generic DDX as well as reverse PRIME support and other changes to benefit USB display adapters.

• The recent mode-setting driver work by Airlie allows for having USB devices attached, such as the DisplayLink USB adapters, while benefiting from GLAMOR acceleration on the host GPU using this X.Org DDX compatible with any DRM/KMS driver. The GLAMOR support is contingent upon OpenGL / OpenGL ES acceleration being available.

• Back in 2013 Timothy Arceri sought crowd-funding to work on another OpenGL extension for Mesa: GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays. While progress was made on this OpenGL 4.3 extension, the “AoA” support has yet to be merged to mainline but progress is being made.

• While it doesn’t have the backing of Intel Corp, the ILO Gallium3D driver continues to advance on its own for bringing HD/Iris Graphics to Gallium3D as an alternative open-source driver to the i965 Mesa DRI driver.

• Daniel Stone at Collabora has been working on atomic mode-setting support for Wayland’s Weston compositor.

• One of the primary benefits of the DRM driver supporting atomic mode-setting is that it can allow a full mode-set operation to be tested prior to actually being committed to ensure it can be properly handled by the driver and display hardware. For end-users, this is meant to yield less problems and ideally avoid any display flickering. Atomic mode-setting support has been ongoing within the Linux kernel’s DRM drivers for a while now, though more patches still have yet to be mainlined. Daniel has been leading the charge to let Weston make use of the atomic mode-setting interfaces to the Linux kernel.

• Last year work started on making libweston and now that work is being picked back up on making the Weston code-base useful to other Wayland compositors.

• For those still living on the Mesa 10.5 release train rather than the latest Mesa 10.6 stable or even Git, there’s the 10.5.8 update out this weekend.

• Today is already a good day, you can now add CRYENGINE to the official list of game engines that support Linux, so here’s to hoping more games can come over.

Applications

• “A picture is worth a thousand words”, a phrase which emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century, refers to the notion that a single still image can present as much information as a large amount of descriptive text. Essentially, pictures convey information more effectively and efficiently than words can.

• Today we present to you a great tool that will help you to good manage the IP address.

• Dedicated server monitoring tools have largely replaced the need to manually parse log files except for the most esoteric of issues. This however raises another issue — selecting one that has the right combination of features, usability and performance. Fortunately, many free options exist if you’re willing to learn their ins and outs.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Good news folks, it seems Larian are planning to release Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition on Linux at the same time as Windows!

• We’ve been waiting too long for Divinity, so hopefully the extra wait for Linux gamers will have been worth it.

• Last week the beta of the Dota 2 Reborn that’s powered by Valve’s Source 2 Engine began rolling out but was initially limited to Windows. The Dota 2 Reborn for Linux has now started rolling out today for those wanting to experience this big update to Dota 2 and Valve’s underlying game engine.

• 0 A.D. is easily one of the most beautiful open source games around, but it has been plagued by poor performance. Hopefully this new and faster pathfinder is a step towards a rock solid game.

• Civilization V is already a pretty massive game, and now even more so thanks to the continued support from Aspyr Media. Civ V now supports mods thanks to Steam Workshop on Linux.

• Developer and publisher Nicalis, Inc. has made an improved version of the popular physics platformer available on Steam for Linux. NightSky was originally developed by the developer of the Knytt games, Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren, but has been ported to Nicalis’ own cross-platform engine.

• Sid Meier’s Civilization V, the most successful game in the franchise released Firaxis Games and ported on Linux by Aspyr Media, just received support for the Steam Workshop.

• The Linux update was due on Friday, but sadly that release was missed due to lack of time for testing. The new update is going to be massive though, so it will be more than worth the wait that’s for sure.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• One of the things we all love about Linux (sorry I mean GNU/Linux) is the amount of choice that is available to us.

• When it comes to choosing a desktop environment there is an abundance of choice and each one has its own unique way of providing a user experience which the developers hope will make us happy enough to use it over one of the other products on the market.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Earlier this month I wrote about Qt developers looking at making Qt 5.6 a long-term support release. Today that decision was firmed up by Lars Knoll and he’s also reinforced the plans for making Qt 5.7 release where the code-base will take advantage of C++11 language features.

• KDE developer Alexander Mezin was looking at the Qt Wayland compositor code and rather than building yet another Wayland compositor decided to build something similar for X11. Mezin ended up building “qmlcompmgr”, a compositing manager for X11 written in Qt Quick / QML.

• A pre-alpha is out of Kexi 3, the port of the visual database creator to KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.4.

• Two weeks before voting closes we’re at a response rate of 91.38%: 604 of 661 possible votes. If you’re eligible to vote and haven’t done so yet, you have until 10am CEST on July 6 to make the response rate even higher! Note that no-award backers who have pledged 15 euros or more can also vote, though they haven’t received a survey. If this is you, please send mail to irina@krita.org, either with your vote or to ask for the list.

• The release candidate to Qt 5.5 is now available with The Qt Company hoping to officially ship this tool-kit update soon.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME 3.17.3 desktop environment, a milestone towards GNOME 3.18, will be released in the coming days and will include major updates to some of the most essential core components, including the Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier.

• The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing the release of the third milestone towards the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.

• The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing the release of the GNOME 3.17.3 desktop environment, a milestone towards GNOME 3.18, which means that many of its core components received updates, including the Epiphany web browser.

• You can see that I am staying on the path of nice, simplistic and easy-to-use design features which re-build GTG into a modern feature of GNOME. Moreover, I will introduce some of the latest additions to the Gtk library: the popovers. Thanks to these, we are able to arrange efficiently all the buttons and options within the relatively small-sized editor window. This will be great once we merge this with the master since it will be a major unifying aspect between the browser and editor.

• This time, we were only four: Mario, Fabian, Briggette and me. Mario was trying to install jhbuild build gtk+ requieres packages like sysdeps, flex, anthy and many others.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Mageia 5 is a distribution that many people where waiting for. Initially scheduled for November 2014, it was finally released on the 19th of June 2015.

Red Hat Family

• As an open source contributor, I began as a newbie and grew into a decent contributor thanks to working on many great projects. Today, I am mentoring new contributors on how to make their first contributions to open source. So, I think I can answer this question more elaborately.

• Open source organizations have projects that need contributions from everyone, from all skills and levels of expertise. There are many non-coding ways too contribute as well, like: reporting issues, writing documentation, helping with design, trying previous versions, checking quality and translation, outreach for a product, and organizing events. Doing so helps you learn more about the open source project as well as to network with the community while adding positive contributions.

• What do you do when you’re king of the Linux server mountain and you want more? In Red Hat’s case, you develop a new mobile software stack, Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP), and you partner up with the world’s top Android smartphone vendor, Samsung.

• Last year Red Hat announced its first Women in Open Source Award, created to recognize the contributions that women are making in open source technologies and communities. I was honored to be on one of the committees that reviewed more than 100 nominations and narrowed the list down to 10 finalists divided into two categories: community and academic. Then the open source community voted, and I anxiously awaited the results. I wanted every woman on both lists to win, so I knew that no matter who ended up with most votes, I’d be happy.

• Shah, currently the director of Women Who Code in Gujarat, India, also mentored at Season Of KDE, Learn IT Girls! and Google Code-In, helping students from across the globe develop their first open source contributions. She was a recipient of the prestigious Google Anita Borg Memorial Asia-Pacific Scholarship, and Anita Borg Pass It On winner for teaching basic computer and smartphone technologies to middle-aged women, especially mothers in her province.

• Shilpa Nair has just graduated in the year 2015. She went to apply for Trainee position in a National News Television located in Noida, Delhi. When she was in the last year of graduation and searching for help on her assignments she came across Tecmint. Since then she has been visiting Tecmint regularly.

• Red Hat and Samsung jointly announced today from Red Hat Summit 2015 that kicked off in Boston that they’re forming a strategic alliance to work on next-generation mobile solutions for the enterprise.

• Liferay, maker of the enterprise, open source Liferay Portal, today entered a partnership with Red Hat to deliver an open source portal solution that brings together the Liferay Portal and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

• This collaboration includes joint go-to-market initiatives and sales efforts around Liferay and Red Hat JBoss Middleware. The collaboration aims to offer organisations the advantages of an open source stack backed by portal and application server technologies.

• Today, we are making the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview 7.1 available to all current and future members of the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program as well as their end users as an unsupported development platform, providing a common standards-based operating system for existing 64-bit ARM hardware. Beyond this release, we plan to continue collaborating with our partner ISVs and OEMs, end users, and the broader open source community to enhance and refine the platform to ultimately work with the next generation of ARM-based designs.

• Whether on public or private clouds, businesses today are growing more willing to make their data more accessible to employees and customers. Aside from the convenience and improved service quality, using the cloud also helps businesses save time and money, which — in turn — helps boost their profits and their stock prices. Few companies have capitalized as well as Red Hat on servicing these needs.

• Red Hat, the open sources solutions provider, has released its financial results for the quarter ended May 31, 2015.

• Total revenue for the quarter was $481 million, an increase of 14% from the year ago quarter.

• Red Hat reported its first quarter earning Thursday night which beat expectations on both the top and bottom line.

• Red Hat is taking over stewardship of the OpenJDK 7 project, at the moment a generation behind the current release of Java.

Fedora

• There’s been no recent pushes for making Btrfs the default file-system of Fedora Linux while many releases/years ago there was once talk and hope of it becoming the first tier-one Linux distribution using it by default rather than EXT4/XFS. However, after years of development, Btrfs isn’t the default on Fedora — but those customizing their install can continue to setup a root Btrfs file-system. Other Linux distributions like openSUSE and Mageia have since defaulted to Btrfs, but Fedora apparently doesn’t feel ready yet to make this jump.

• We are sorry to inform all users of the Fedora 20 Linux operating system that today, June 23, was the last day when the distribution, dubbed “Heisenbug,” received security patches and software updates.

• The latest proposed feature for Fedora 23 is to have a standardized passphrase policy for providing greater consistency when it comes to inputting passwords/passphrases throughout the system.

• With Unicode 8.0 having been released last week, Fedora developers are planning on incorporating it into Fedora 23.

• Bottom line, Bolivia community now have 200 disk to raise interest about fedora and spread all the blue uber-force. There is already part of that material going to Cochabamba.

• As many of you may have noticed, we have had some issues the last few days in Fedora Infrastructure, in particular with metalinks (the files used by dnf/yum to pull down repository data).

Debian Family

• You may have noticed that Jessie no longer includes the useful rescue flavour of live image, formerly included in Wheezy and earlier releases, and neither will Stretch unless you take action. This is my second public call for help this year to revive it. So if you care about rescue, here’s how you can help:

Derivatives

• Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, the company behind the open-source server virtualization platform Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), a Linux kernel-based operating system derived from Debian GNU/Linux, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of Proxmox Virtual Environment 4.0 Beta 1.

• The developers of the Q4OS Linux distribution built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) and derived from the popular Debian GNU/Linux 8.1 (Jessie) operating system had the pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of Q4OS 1.2.5.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The MX4 packs in a 20.7MP camera and Sharp 5.36in Retina screen – but is it better than the first Ubuntu phone?

• The new Ubuntu based smartphone from Spanish Smartphone maker BQ which was released earlier this month, the BQ Aquarius E5 HD Ubuntu Edition was available for pre-order from 11 June and now is available for immediate buying when BQ began processing the orders on June 22. This phone is projected as the successor the Ubuntu OS based BQ Aquarius E4.5 released earlier by the company. The phone is currently available in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, will cost EUR 199.99 (Rs. 14,334).

• After taking more than two years to get Ubuntu into its first smartphone, Canonical is picking up the pace. The second Ubuntu handset was announced earlier this month, and tomorrow, a third is going on sale in Europe. The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition takes Meizu’s existing MX4 (a Chinese-only Android device released last September) and replaces Google’s operating system with Canonical’s home screen-focused OS. Canonical says it’s primarily focusing on attracting “enthusiasts” with the MX4, and the device’s mildly eccentric buying system certainly reflects this.

• Immediately after the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place on June 23, 2015, Joseph Salisbury announced the next plans for the main kernel packages of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.

• Ubuntu 15.04 is a next step in the development of Canonical’s flagship distribution. It definitely becomes more useful with each release, and you can see that since version 11.10 where Unity first appeared.

• Of course, many argue that Ubuntu becomes more commercialized with all the adware and bloatware. But, as with other Open Source systems, there are ways to switch unnecessary components off, if you dislike them.

• For me Ubuntu 15.04 is a nice distribution. I hope that next Long-term Support version 16.04 will not be worse.

• Canonical’s David Barth has sent his regular report to the Ubuntu Touch mailing list archive, informing us about the new features that have been implemented for Web Apps in the mobile operating system for Ubuntu phones.

• This past week the Ubuntu 15.10 desktop updated many of their GNOME packages to the GNOME 3.16.x series. There’s also been other improvements on the desktop front.

• Mark Shuttleworth this morning announced Fan: their solution to container-to-container networking.

Flavours and Variants

• The Ubuntu MATE project now has a hefty user base and that can only mean one thing; it’s time to get some t-shirts going, and developer Martin Wimpress has already presented the model.

• On Wednesday, Clement Lefebvre, the guy in charge of the Mint project announced the availability of Linux Mint 17.2, if you’ve been keeping up with Linux Mint you’ll realise these point upgrades aren’t so small after all.

Devices/Embedded

• Freescale’s dime sized “SCM-i.MX6D” module runs Linux or Android on an 800MHz i.MX6 Dual SoC, includes a PMIC and up to 2GB of RAM, and targets IoT apps.

• At the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Austin, Texas, where Freescale tipped a new Cortex-A7 line of i.MX7 system-on-chips, the company also revealed a tiny, 17 x 14 x 1.7mm SCM-i.MX6D computer-on-module that runs Linux or Android on a dual-core, Cortex-A9 i.MX6 Dual SoC. When it ships in August, Freescale claims the dime-sized COM will be “the world’s smallest single chip module (SCM) for the Internet of Things.”

• Wave announced two Linux-friendly, SODIMM-style COMs. One supports up to a quad-core i.MX6 SoC, while the other has the new i.MX6 UltraLite.

• In conjunction with this week’s Freescale Technology Forum (FTF, iWave Systems unveiled two Linux-ready computer-on-modules that extend the Freescale i.MX6. The iW-RainboW-G18M-SODIMM i.MX6UL follows TechNexion’s similarly SODIMM form-factor EDM1-CF-IMX6UL, as well as its 36 x 25mm PICO-IMX6UL module in supporting the new i.MX6 UltraLite SoC. A similar new iW-RainboW-G15M-SODIMM i.MX6 supports all the earlier i.MX6 SoCs up to the iMX6 Quad.

• One of the Raspberry Pi’s engineers, and also a moderator of the official Raspberry Pi forum, announced recently that the default firmware branch of the world’s most known single-computer board (SBC) has been updated from the 3.18 kernel series to the more recent Linux kernel 4.0 branch.

• Freescale revealed two Linux-enabled QorIQ LS1 networking SoCs with four and eight 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 cores, and says it will offer a Cortex-A72 LS2 model.

• Freescale has been showing off its two Linux-ready, 28nm i.MX7 SoCs.

• Based around the Cortex-A7 cores and Cortex-M4 MCUs, the pair have lower power consumption than the predecessor the i.MX6.

• Aaeon’s rugged, Linux-ready “Boxer” PC for vehicles offers a 4th Gen Core CPU, dual GbE and four 10/100 PoE LAN ports, mini-PCIe expansion, and a SIM slot.

Phones

Android

• Collaborating with co-workers used to be a real chore. Ever try to get everyone together in the same room at the right time? Or have to moderate a discussion to make sure everyone’s ideas were being acknowledged? These are just two of the many ways collaborating with with co-workers used to be painful.

• Although Ant builds have made Android development much easier, I’ve long been curious about the cross-platform phone development apps: you write a simple app in some common language, like HTML or Python, then run something that can turn it into apps on multiple mobile platforms, like Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows phone, UbuntoOS, FirefoxOS or Tizen.

Free Software/Open Source

• For IBM, its love of Docker is part of a larger philosophy: Docker’s main container technology is open source, meaning any developer anywhere can download the source code for free and put it to work however they want to.

• Diaz is quick to remind people that IBM has a long history of boosting open source efforts, including leading the 1999 creation of the Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the development of a lot of high-profile open source projects, including Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.

• At Milpitas-based flash memory storage and software company SanDisk Corp., Nithya Ruff, director of the company’s open source strategy, is a huge driver behind science, technology, engineering and math initiatives to get more girls interested in the field. After growing up in Bangalore, India, Ruff learned to code at North Dakota State University, where she earned her computer science master’s degree.

• This message to tech companies was delivered Tuesday morning by Kronda Adair, founder of WordPress consultancy Karvel Digital, and the first keynote for this year’s Open Source Bridge Conference. The conference, organized by the group Stumptown Syndicate, is a three-day technical gathering for people in the Open Source community and those interested in the community.

Events

• Taught by Dr. Jerry Cooperstein, The Linux Foundation’s Training Program Director who developed the Essentials of System Administration course, this workshop will provide the opportunity to dig into topics relevant to taking the exam and to get your questions answered live. Jerry is an amazing Linux talent and teacher so this is a wonderful chance to learn from the best at a very small price.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The GNOME developers are working on some really cool new features, and some this new stuff will be landing with the next release. In this case, it’s about the integration of LibreOffice with GNOME Documents.

• Our LibreOffice gtk2 vclplug inherits from our generic X11 vclplug and so in lots of places we just continued to use our historic X11 vclplug for various things, one big example being clipboard support.

• Getting an open source project into the storefront of Apple’s walled garden is tough. But LibreOffice has done it, thanks to hard work from community member Collabora

CMS

• There are many translation plugins available for WordPress, and most of them deal with translations of articles. This might be of interest for others, but not for me. If you have a blog with visitors from various language background, because you are living abroad, or writing in several languages, you might feel tempted to provide visitors with a localized “environment”, meaning that as much as possible is translated into the native language of the visitor, without actually translating content – but allowing to.

Education/documentation

• Last week 11 academics and two industry professionals spent three days in New York participating in something that would look like a doc sprint to open source contributors. Instead of working on project documentation, though, this sprint was focused on producing computer science- and open source-focused learning activities, which are similar to “experiments” for those familiar with chemistry or physics courses.

• Let’s say you’ve created a program or launched an open source project, and now you have people’s attention. They start to ask more and more questions, taking more and more of your precious developer time to answer. They fill your mailbox, sometimes even spam your IRC channel, often repeating the same questions. You know that you need to provide something in writing to help your users. But where should you start? What tools can you use? What output format do you choose? What subjects must you cover?

Business

• Now Facebook is extending its practice of delivering tested open source tools through releasing Infer, a code verification tool. Facebook bills it as “a static program analyzer that Facebook uses to identify bugs before mobile code is shipped.” Static analyzers are automated tools that spot bugs in source code by scanning programs without running them.

Semi-Open Source

• To be clear, open source is a key, long-term, strategic differentiator for us, with the knowledge that times are changing. Instead of the majority of the development work being done by the community (as was the case historically) the larger proportion of development will be done by the company, going forward. But we will continue to involve the community, encourage them to make checkins, and continue to make all the Kuali code available.

Funding

• Throughout 2015, tools that demystify and function as useful front-ends and connectors for the open source Hadoop project are much in demand. Hadoop has been the driving technology behind much of the Big Data trend, and there are many administrators who can benefit from simplified dashboards and analytics tools that work with it. In fact, as we covered here, MapR’s CEO predicted toward the beginning of the year that “in 2015, IT will embrace self-service Big Data to allow developers, data scientists and data analysts to directly conduct data exploration.”

BSD

Public Services/Government

• Better late than never… In 2010, Putin ordered Russia to convert to FLOSS by 2015. It took them until now just to figure out how to do that:

• – Prefer locally generated software,

• – Choose GNU/Linux and FLOSS as the platform, and

• – Collaborate with other countries, particularly BRICS, to create specific applications.

Openness/Sharing

• Of course, Higgins then goes on to pinpoint the exact position in Russia of the military convoy shown there, using not just the image’s co-ordinates (which anyway need to be verified) but tiny signs in the photo, including road markings, half-visible posts and cracks in the road that most of us would miss completely. It’s an amazing performance, and demonstrates well the incredible potential of this field. Whatever it’s called.

• Also in case you missed the news, ZeMarmot’s crowdfunding got extended by the platform so you are still encouraged to contribute if you wish to be part of an awesome 2D animation film under Creative Commons BY-SA/Free Art, made with Free Software and with a cool story (well I write it, of course it is cool :p)!

• The EU’s Open Data Portal is the single point of access for businesses and citizens to a growing range of data from European institutions. Data are free for reuse for commercial or non-commercial purposes. By providing easy and free access to data, the portal aims to promote their innovative use and unleash their economic potential. The EC adds that the portal aims to help foster transparency and accountability.

Open Data

• This approval represents a key evolution in Open Data policy in Spain, as it transposes the new elements of the revised PSI Directive into Spanish law. The PSI Directive provides a framework for Member States to help them include a public data re-use model in their laws.

• DigitalGlobe has partnered with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to launch the Hootenanny open source project in an effort to offer developers software tools for crowdsourced mapping and geospatial big data analytics functions.

Open Hardware

• A little more than a month ago, Katsu demonstrated the drone to the world by drawing on a billboard of Kendall Jenner. He captured the historic event on video and put it on YouTube, where it has racked up nearly 1.3 million views.

• Earlier this year, graffiti artist and feces portrait painter KATSU carried out what has been described as the first recorded act of drone graffiti. Using a modified quadcopter, KATSU sprayed a thin, red scribble over the face of Kendall Jenner on a gigantic advertising billboard in New York City. It wasn’t the most legible of tags, but it was there. Now, KATSU wants to make this power available to all, and earlier this month he launched ICARUS ONE: the “world’s first open-source paint drone.”

Programming

• Quick summary: Cabal integration is very good (like haste, but unline fay), interfacing JavaScript is nice and easy (like fay, but unlike haste), and a quick check seems to indicate that it is faster than either of these two. I should note that I did not update the other two demos, so they represent the state of fay and haste back then, respectively.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Could there be anything worse for the chicken industry than this month’s outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that hospitalized 42 percent of everyone who got it—almost 300 in 18 states?

• Yes. The government also announced that China has been cleared to process chickens for the US dinner plate and that all but one of arsenic compounds no one even knew they were eating have been removed from US poultry production. Thanks for that. Also this month, some food researchers have revealed the true recipe for chicken “nuggets”…just in time for Halloween.

Security

• Government officials have been vague in their testimony about the data breaches—there was apparently more than one—at the Office of Personnel Management. But on Thursday, officials from OPM, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of the Interior revealed new information that indicates at least two separate systems were compromised by attackers within OPM’s and Interior’s networks.

• Israel-based researchers said they’ve developed a cheaper and faster method to pull the encryption keys stored on a computer using an unlikely accomplice: pita bread.

• For those new to Linux/UNIX command line interfaces, there are lots of Internet sources that provide cheat sheets for the most common commands you’ll need to navigate and perform actions. Here’s another option we like because it’s particularly handy.

• The larger the site, the greater its functionality and visibility, and the more it uses third-party software, the more that the process of reducing inherent vulnerabilities in the site will be costly.

• The Internet allows for information to be readily available at your fingertips. However, it also allows for the same information to be accessed by malicious threat actors who are targeting your organization with cyberattacks. The recent explosion of social media has only increased the information available, and with it the risks to your corporate data, intellectual property, and brand. Some organizations call the awareness of this risk “threat intelligence,” but we have found that organizations need to focus on more than just current threats. Organizations can leverage an emerging intelligence-gathering capability to determine data leakage, employee misbehavior, or negative brand exposure at a higher level than threat intelligence using Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT.

Finance

• Palace considers Queen and Duke of Edinburgh moving to Windsor Castle, their holiday home, while urgent repair work is carried out

• Profit motives offer little incentive to feed the hungry, treat the sick or provide any kind of retirement security

Privacy

• The company behind the open-source blogging platform Ghost is moving its paid-for service out of the UK because of government plans to weaken protection for privacy and freedom of expression. Ghost’s founder, John O’Nolan, wrote in a blog post: “we’ve elected to move the default location for all customer data from the UK to DigitalOcean’s [Amsterdam] data centre. The Netherlands is ranked #2 in the world for Freedom of Press, and has a long history of liberal institutions, laws and funds designed to support and defend independent journalism.”

• O’Nolan was particularly worried by the UK government’s plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which he said enshrines key rights such as “respect for your private and family life” and “freedom of expression.” The Netherlands, by contrast, has “some of the strongest privacy laws in the world, with real precedents of hosting companies successfully rejecting government requests for data without full and legal paperwork,” he writes.

Civil Rights

• A 37-year-old New Jersey cop accused of exposing his genitalia to the young male motorists he pulled over has accepted a plea deal in which the officer loses his job in exchange for pleading guilty to tampering with his patrol car’s dashcam “to conceal unprofessional and inappropriate conduct.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Providers who defied TV company demands to switch off their VPN services have caved in following legal threats. CallPlus and Bypass Network Services faced action from media giants including Sky and TVNZ for allowing their customers to access geo-restricted content. Their ‘Global Mode’ services will be terminated by September 1.

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