● 07.22.15

● Links 22/7/2015: Kodi 15.0, MKVToolnix 8.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:48 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I am Technical Trainer and Consultant specializing in Open Source technologies. The majority of my career has centered around Linux operating system deployment, configuration, and interoperability. I mostly work with Red Hat products and their upstream and downstream projects. For the past two years I have also worked with Cloudera and projects related to the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. I also have a particular interest in security topics.

• Desktop environments are supposed to be yesterday’s technology, gradually being replaced by mobile devices. Yet someone apparently forgot to tell the developers of Linux desktops. At a time when desktops are supposed to be obsolete, Linux offers more alternatives than ever. Apparently, Linux users are not prepared to give up their workstations and laptops for tablets or phones.

• Of course, the modern Linux desktop is not the Linux desktop of five years. If you look at the Linux desktop today, at least seven development trends are visible, including several that are reversals of popular past trends.

• For basic office tasks, the ProBook 455 Ubuntu isn’t a bad desktop replacement, and Ubuntu has made big strides from niche project to a rounded OS that most people will adapt to comfortably.

• Adobe Flash has been in the news a lot lately, and not for any positive reasons. Flash has been roundly criticized in the media for various security flaws. This has led some folks to call for the removal of Flash from people’s computers, but is it practical to remove Flash from your Linux system?

Server

• Now that Docker containers are all the rage among developers basically there are three ways to deploy them in or out of the cloud: on a physical server, on a virtual machine or in a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. In the latter case, a debate has begun over what type of PaaS might be required to efficiently run those containers.

Kernel Space

• MariaDB, which recently launched its Summer 2015 edition, has been part of a flurry of announcements recently, and its database is now becoming standard in SUSE and Red Hat, and as additional support for Docker containers.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that CloudLinux, MariaDB, and Solace Systems will be joining the organization.

• A mere month after Docker and other companies formed the Open Container Project, which placed their software-containerization concepts under the control of the Linux Foundation, another major initiative involving containers is taking off — and many of the same people are in the driver’s seat and riding along.

• The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 4.1.3, has been made available by Greg Kroah-Hartman, which means that this is now the most advanced version released.

• Algolia says Samsung has developed a patch for the Linux kernel that solves the problem. The patch was set to be released to the Linux community on July 18, along with Samsung’s official statement on the matter and details of the issue, but as of today (July 21), the patch has apparently not been released. We’ll try and get our hands on a copy of the statement to see what’s up when it arrives.

Graphics Stack

• For most of the past decade, the idea of gaming under Linux was a contradiction in terms. Apart from a handful of dedicated titles or ports, the only option that gamers had was to either dual-boot into Windows or deal with the Wine emulator. Valve’s decision to pursue the Linux gaming market and develop its own Linux-based operating system has changed that, with a vast array of indie titles (and a handful of AAA’s) now available on the OS. Unfortunately, it looks as though AMD’s driver team hasn’t quite caught up with the times.

• I finally received my GTX 980 Ti review sample from NVIDIA this week and it’s in the midst of running lots of interesting tests, along with putting out a large Linux graphics card comparison for 4K gaming, OpenCL, performance-per-Watt/efficiency, etc. Many interesting tests are coming in the days ahead!

Benchmarks

• The latest graphics card we’ve been testing the past few weeks under Linux is the MSI Radeon R7 370 GAMING 4G. This mid-range graphics card is equipped with a very quiet heatsink fan and will work on both the latest open and closed-source AMD Linux graphics drivers. Of interest to many Linux enthusiasts who are concerned about noise is that with MSI’s ZERO FROZR feature, the fans will stop completely while the system is idling or just engaging in light gaming or multimedia tasks.

• This past weekend I posted an open-source Linux graphics driver comparison with an A10-7870K Godavari vs. i7-4790K Haswell vs. i7-5775C Broadwell. Beyond the already-published discrete AMD/NVIDIA GPU results to see how Intel’s socketed Broadwell with Iris Pro 6200 Graphics stack up, there were also requests from readers for seeing some Haswell Iris results.

Applications

• While the Telegram Desktop client is still under development, it allows the users to send and receive messages from the Linux desktop, has a feature for synching across all the supported platform, so you can read your mobile notifications from both the computer and your phone, without missing anything. Also, it has file transfer support and the users can create groups for up to 200 people and send broadcast messages. Unfortunately, support for sending voice messages has not been implemented yet, the users can only listen or download received voice messages.

• The developers of the MKVToolnix open-source and cross-platform application used for manipulating MKV (Matroska) files on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems have recently announced that MKVToolnix 8.2.0 is available for download and that all users of MKVToolnix 8.0.0 or 8.1.0 must upgrade immediately.

• On July 20, Jens Georg, one of the developers of the well-known Rygel open-source media server software, announced that a new unstable release of Rygel was available for download and testing.

Proprietary

• Alexander Roshal and RARLAB announced this past weekend that the first Beta build of the upcoming RAR and WinRAR 5.30 popular archive manager software was available for download and testing for all supported operating systems, including Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and Microsoft Windows.

• Today, July 21, Google announced that it promoted the the Google Chrome 44 web browser for Chrome OS, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, as well as Microsoft Windows operating systems to the stable channel.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Hatred is that game people went a bit mental over, and it looks like we may be able to go on a killing spree soon too.

• A couple of months ago, a friend of mine introduced me to OpenTTD, an open source (GPLv2) transportation planning simulator game. Available for Android, I briefly opened the game on my phone and found the interface to be a little too difficult to use for me on a five inch screen. My friend suggested that it worked better on a tablet, and I thought I’d try again later when I had some time to kill and a larger Android device in hand.

• Satellite Rush is a new roguelike shooter developed by Kimeric Labs, and its makers have gone to Kickstarter in order to get more funding for their project.

• Hatred is a game that got famous after it was initially removed from Steam for being too violent. It was later added back, and now it looks like developers are working on a Linux version as well.

• The Steam for Linux platform has been getting a lot of attention lately, and many of the games that have been released have Linux support, which means that top sellers change all the time.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The new wallpaper and icons will be available in 5.4. I’d also like to thank the VDG, everyone is doing great stuff. Additionally, if you are attending Akademy I recommend to the utmost that you attend the various VDG events; we’re interested in roping developers to help out, and any coders will be appreciated. Great UI/UX is more than pretty pictures, and we’d love for developers to contribute so we make the entire package together!

• In order to deliver smooth playback, we cannot simply render the frames on the fly – that would be far too slow, especially once the number of layers starts to build up. Instead, we prerender the animation frames into a cache before playback.

• The biggest issue here is porting – the KDE Network Filesharing repository is currently not on KF5, which would make it impossible to work with PackageKit-Qt5, which is currently being used all across. So, a newbie porter, I’ve been working with Jonathan to port things properly and fix as many bugs as I encounter while doing so.

• We’ve all seen those “screenshot tours” of FOSS desktops, but how about a real, guided tour of the Plasma (KDE) desktop? There are still a great many people who simply are not familiar with Plasma’s features. A large number of people never had any computer training, and when they find themselves in such an advanced environment, they feel completely lost. Many people can barely find their way around a single desktop; the concept of multiple virtual desktops is completely lost on them — never mind Plasma’s activities. So let’s take a little time and make some very basic changes to our desktop theme, and then organize our work. After all, that’s what activities are all about.

• The release process of Qt 5.5 has been focused on stabilizing and improving performances. Once more KDAB is proud to be a part of the release, with its engineers constantly providing contributions and patches, as demonstrated by the commit graph of the last 16 weeks.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Evolution open-source groupware client, which provides email and calendar capabilities to various GNOME-based GNU/Linux distributions, has recently been updated as part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.17.4 desktop environment.

• The GNOME Project is hard at work these days to release the fourth snapshot of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015. The Evince 3.17.4 document viewer app has been updated with new features.

• The development team behind the GNOME Project are hard at work these days to bring you the fourth snapshot of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.

• GTK+ 3.17.5 has been released today as the newest version of the toolkit to coincide with GNOME 3.18 in just a few more months.

Distributions

Reviews

• Emmabuntus 3 boots in to a standard Xfce screen with an Emmabuntus-themed wallpaper and a toolbar at the top. There is a menu button in the top left corner and several icons in the notification area in the top right corner: network, battery and volume indicators, as well as date, time and username.

• Black Lab Linux is all about power; it is a complete operating system and should work perfectly fine for all kind of Linux lovers. It is lightweight, boot time is pretty impressive, user interface is charming and working of the operating system is quick. Try it out now, our verdict; you will not be disappointed.

New Releases

• The developers of the Neptune Linux distribution, a Linux kernel-based computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and built around the KDE4 desktop environment, have proudly announced the immediate availability for download of Neptune 4.4.

• We are proud to announce the release of Kodi 15.0. No new name this time around, but many new features that cover requests both more than 5 years old and less than 5 months old. Let’s take a quick look at a few.

• BackBox Linux is a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS that’s used to perform penetration tests and security assessments. A new update has been released, bringing the version number up to 4.3.

• Robolinux is a Linux distribution based on Debian that features various flavors and that allows its users to run Windows apps via a virtual machine solution. Now the developer has released the first version in the 8.x branch, and it’s powered by a Cinnamon desktop.

• The BackBox Team is pleased to announce the updated release of BackBox Linux, the version 4.3!

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The last time I ran Mageia was in 2013. I wrote two articles about Mageia 3 and its predecessor Mageia 2 in these very pages. I had written several articles about Mandriva for years before eventually moving on to openSUSE, Fedora and Debian so I’m not unfamiliar with Mageia’s roots.

Ballnux/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• Ceph is a fully open source distributed object store, network block device, and file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability from terabytes to exabytes. Ceph utilizes a novel placement algorithm (CRUSH), active storage nodes, and peer-to-peer gossip protocols to avoid the scalability and reliability problems associated with centralized controllers and lookup tables. Ceph is part of a tremendous and growing ecosystem where it is integrated in virtualization platforms (Proxmox), Cloud platforms (OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula), containers (Docker), and big data (Hadoop, as a meted server for HDFS).

Fedora

• In a conversation earlier this month about splitting the cloud and atomic workgroups over in Fedora development-land, Josh Boyer said, “We don’t want people to have Fedora on their phones.” This was in response to the assumption that Fedora wants to be answer to all your operating system questions as key players discussed the feasibility and purpose of continuing both a cloud image and an atomic image.

• Users of the Fedora exploded kernel git tree might have noticed that it has been stale for a couple of weeks now. What they might not know is why that is, and when it is going to be fixed. The answer is somewhat complicated and I’ll try and summarize here.

• The Fedora kernel team recently tried shifting to using the exploded tree as the canonical location for Fedora kernel work. The benefits and ideas were written here, and most of those still stand. So I went to work on some scripts that would make this easier to do. The results weren’t terrible. Things worked, kernels were still built, and the exploded tree was spit out (albeit at a different location). By some measures, this was a success.

• I upgraded Fedora on my home router to F22 and immediately IPv6 disappeared on the internal network. The problem is that radvd started throwing its usual “no linklocal address configured on ethmain.5″ (although the message is only visible with “IgnoreIfMissing off;”), which leads to “interface ethmain.5 does not exist or is not set up properly”. With the default IgnoreIfMissing, radvd continues running but refuses to work, quietly. Needless to say, the interface has a perfectly valid link-local address, same as it had in F21 before the upgrade.

• Finally there’s the new release of DNF which fixes the bugs which were highly demanded from Fedora community (former yum users). When a transaction is not successfully finished DNF preserves downloaded packages until the next successful transaction. The resolution configuration hints are printed to the output and user is notified which packages were skipped during update in case there are conflicts. The new –repofrompath switch was added and many more.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project, through Cyril Brulebois, announced earlier today that the first Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” Installer is now available for download and testing.

• The other day, I wrote about our recent performance tuning in lintian. Among other things, we reduced the memory usage by ~33%. The effect was also reproducible on libreoffice (4.2.5-1 plus its 170-ish binaries, arch amd64), which started at ~515 MB and was reduced to ~342 MB. So this is pretty great in its own right…

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After the successful launch of the OTA-5 update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has sent in his daily report to inform us all about the planning of the next major update for Ubuntu Touch, OTA-6.

• Matthias Klose sent out an update on Monday for landing GCC5 into Ubuntu 15.10 on 31 July. Besides this update being huge for the new compiler features, switching over to GCC 5 might be a bit nasty due to a partial ABI transition within their C++ standard library (libstdc++6). Due to this, coming with the landing of GCC 5 will be a rebuild of more than three thousand packages.

• One thing to note about these graphs is 2015 is not yet complete so there can be change that will occur in 2015. The statistics should not necessarily be considered to correlate to Ubuntu overall losing popularity. Data from Google Trends for instance overall shows a downtrend for other desktop operating systems which likely correlates to end users focusing and spending more time on mobile these days.

• Almost all Ubuntu users out there have asked us almost daily when Canonical will upgrade the default and only email client used on their Ubuntu Linux operating systems, Mozilla Thunderbird, to the latest version available.

• There are few Linux distribution as popular as Canonical’s Ubuntu and yet in the eye of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Canonical has taken some liberties with Free and Open-source licensing.

• Ubuntu is based on Linux, the same underlying code that powers data centres and household-name operating systems like Android. So the chances are you have actually used something powered by Ubuntu at some point in your life already, albeit indirectly.

• Being able to stand out in a mobile market dominated by Android and iOS so the total is really difficult, and to date no one has done it even if Microsoft seems to be the only company in a position that they could play. Canonical is trying for years and with its Ubuntu Touch has created a smartphone operating system that has attracted a large audience of lovers of technology geek. Now comes the first Ubuntu Phone marketed on a large scale, a remake of the Meizu MX4 with Ubuntu Touch.

• Last week, the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Free Software Foundation announced that Canonical had, with their help, updated the Ubuntu Intellectual Property Rights Policy to comply with the GPL.

• Issues relating to the Ubuntu IP Policy aren’t new; I wrote about Linux Mint’s run-ins with this policy over a year ago. And issues relating to this very policy were front and center in the recent fallout between the Ubuntu Community Council and Jonathan Riddell of the Kubuntu project.

• Prominent GNOME developer Matthew Garrett talked about the recent change in Ubuntu’s IP, and he is saying that anyone using a container image with a modified version of Ubuntu is infringing the license.

• The switch to GCC 5 for Ubuntu 15.10 was announced a while ago, and now Ubuntu developer Matthias Klose has also put a clock on it. It’s going to be a difficult transition, but it needs to be made.

• Didier Roche, the developer of the popular Ubuntu Make command-line software that lets users install various third-party applications in the Ubuntu Linux operating system, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of Ubuntu Make 0.9.

Flavours and Variants

• On July 21, Alexander Tratsevskiy, the creator and lead developer of the Russian Calculate Linux project, had the great pleasure of informing us all about the immediate availability for download of the first MATE edition of his Gentoo-based distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• NetComm unveiled a Linux-based 4G wireless router for M2M and IoT, equipped with a Sequans LTE module, a NAMUR sensor input, and remote management software.

• Renesas unveiled a Linux-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) starter kit based on its R-Car H2 SoC, supporting PCIe, HDMI, and multiple cameras.

• Renesas Electronics has announced the smallest development kit in R-Car history—the ADAS Starter Kit. Designed to both simplify and speed ADAS applications, the kit is based on Renesas’ high-end R-CAR H2 System on Chip. It provides enhanced computer vision performance with OpenCV and high-performances graphics power with OpenGLES.

Phones

Android

• One of the most fascinating announcements that Nintendo has made in the past year is that it has plans to enter into the mobile gaming market. Within the next few months, we’ll be able to buy a first-party Nintendo game on our mobile devices for the very first time, but concept artist Pierre Cerveau decided to take the idea to its natural conclusion.

• Generally speaking, in software development a new version number usually indicates the size or significance of the update — a jump from version 1.5 to version 2.0 is supposed to be a much bigger deal than a move from version 1.4 to 1.5. So when we transitioned from Android 4.3 Jelly Bean to Android 4.4 KitKat, Google was telling us that something bigger is cooking for the 5.0 slot — Lollipop.

• Sony’s Android concept appears to be an entirely new OS, not just a bump of their current Android skin to the latest Android version.

• Sony is starting a beta test of this ‘Sony’s Android concept’ in Sweden. The beta is only for Z3 users in Sweden currently and can fill out a form to apply for a spot in the beta group.

• It is also noted that this software beta will only be open to Sony Z3 owners and not compatible with compact model.

• This beta will run from July 27th to September 13th. Signs point to this new Android concept to ship out with Sony’s newest flagship expected soon if the betas go well!

• What do you think? Will this Android concept be the fire starter that Sony needs to get their devices into the limelight?

• Sony Mobile looks set to bring wholesale changes to its Xperia UI as part of a new initiative dubbed “Sony’s Android concept”. Judging by the language used in its website, the program is designed to offers users the “opportunity to trial a new concept Android software build for [the] Xperia Z3“.

• The new Galaxy Tab S2 comes in two sizes: 9.7 inches and 8 inches. Both versions have AMOLED screens, and the bigger one has a resolution of 2048×1536. They’ve got quad-core processors up to 1.9GHz and storage up to 64GB internal, plus microSD slots for more. The frames on these are metal, quite attractive, and very very thin. It’s a bit of a shame they’re so close together in size—it would be nicer if the smaller one was seven inches instead of eight. Alas. The S2 tablets will be on sale in August.

• Although the Linux kernel forms the beating heart of the Android operating system, it’s still a very different platform from most distros. In fact, beyond the kernel, most of the libraries, services and applications are completely different. While there are hundreds of different Linux distros out there, they all share components from the GNU project. Android, on the other hand, has taken a completely different route, tailored to the requirements of mobile devices.

• As a result, it’s not been possible to run Android apps natively on GNU Linux systems without using a virtual machine. Obviously running a VM and the complete Android stack adds a lot of overhead, and as a result, Android apps tend to run much slower. This is bad news for developers, who must run their apps thousands of times over during development and testing, and although it is possible to run tests through a device via a USB connection, it’s still clumsy.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open-source communities seem to do a better job than standards committees in creating new software that sticks to a common plan. In the latest example, The Linux Foundation, is once more fostering a new group: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF, building on the newly laid foundation of Kubernetes 1.0, will seek to bring unification and creativity to cloud native applications and services.

• SIGFOX, the provider of a global network dedicated to the Internet of Things, and FIWARE, an open initiative whose platform provides application programming interfaces (APIs) that simplify development of smart applications, announced a seamless connector between the FIWARE platform and SIGFOX ReadyTM devices.

• The National Security Agency (NSA) is not perhaps known for its openness and willingness to share. That’s not what it does, essentially — and of course not why it exists. That being said, it appears that the core spirit of open source collaborative software application development is very much recognized by ‘the agency’, just as it is in any other commercial business. Community code evolution benefits all (including the NSA) if the principals of natural selection hold, which they do.

• Today a group of 19 companies, led primarily by Google, created a new open source foundation that aims to specify how clouds should be architected to serve modern applications.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is housed in the Linux Foundation and includes big names such as Google, IBM, Intel, Box, Cisco, and VMware, along with a variety of smaller companies like Docker, Cycle Computing, Mesosphere and Weaveworks.

• Collaborative communities often involve lots of moving parts. This can include websites, code hosting, bug tracking, communication channels, and more. Deciding which tools and services to use is an important consideration. If we don’t have the tools to be successful, it is difficult to have an impact, yet if our tools are too complicated, fewer will be able to figure out how to get involved.

• “Open is a means to an end—and that end is trust.”

• Facebook is adding query packs to the open-source osquery security framework that group together common sets of use cases for data analysis.

• Facebook is enhancing its open-source osquery security framework with new features that make it easier for users to organize and gain insight from operating system information.

• Software. It’s been a thing that has fascinated me for decades. As a layman, the fact that lines of gibberish can be aligned to make a computer do the things wanted or needed is almost miraculous and resides in the shadows between magic and science. I am almost childlike when being shown how that gibberish makes devices do their stuff…stuff I want to to do.

Events

• The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference — we like to call it SeaGL — is the Emerald City’s best grassroots technical conference for free and libre software. The 3rd annual conference happens Friday, October 23 and Saturday, October 24 at Seattle Central College, and it’s already shaping up to be better than last year!

• Live feeds of the keynote addresses at OSCON 2015 can be seen here Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. EDT. For a schedule of the keynote speakers, see the schedule page for the appropriate day on the OSCON website.

• The Open Source Bridge Conference took place between June 23 and June 26 were exposed to Salmonella. Multnomah County health officials confirmed that the event was the source of an outbreak: Fifty-three people became ill at the conference, held at the Eliot Center in Portland’s West End.

SaaS/Big Data

• CenturyLink contributed three projects to the open-source community designed to improve the way developers use Docker, Chef and vSphere technologies. The first project is a chef provisioning driver for vSphere that simplifies the process to provision Chef nodes on VMware vSphere infrastructure. The second is Lorry.io, a tool for creating, composing and validating Docker Compose YAML files. The third is ImageLayers.io, a tool that enables developers to visualise Docker images and the layers that compose them, see the ways in which each command in the Dockerfile contributes to the final image and compare multiple Docker images side-by-side.

• CenturyLink’s contribution to open-source is growing with developer assistance aimed projects with Docker, Chef and vSphere.

• CenturyLink has open sourced a number of tools aimed at improving provisioning for Chef on VMware infrastructure as well as Docker deployment, orchestration and monitoring.

• CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has contributed three projects to the open-source community that they say will improve the way developers use Docker, Chef and vSphere technologies.

BSD

• Registration for this year’s European BSDs conference is now open at registration.eurobsdcon.org, open up until right before the conference starts but early bird discounts end on August 31st (midnight CEST).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• Pixelitor is available for Ubuntu systems via the GetDeb repository. In order to get the latest Pixelitor version on your system, you need to add the repository and the key to your system, update the local repository index and install the pixelitor package.

Public Services/Government

• The Graphics and Visualization (GVIS) lab at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio specializes in creating scientific visualizations and virtual reality programs for scientists at Glenn and beyond. I am thrilled to be a member of the small army of interns in the GVIS lab. So are Carolyn Holthouse, Joe Porter, and Jason Boccuti, interns from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Wright Brothers Institute’s Discovery Lab who are working remotely at NASA Glenn. Their project involves robots, open source software, and virtual reality. I caught up with Carolyn, Jason, and Joe to talk about their project.

Openness/Sharing

• The contest between proprietary technology and open source has been ongoing for a decade.Today, some of the most premium technology is open-sourced and free. Even Google’s highly prized Borg software is becoming open-sourced.

• After Google bowed to the pressure to make Borg an open source technology it’s safe to say open source is winning the tussle. In fact, the lines are expected to keep on blurring irrevocably as previous proprietary firms keep pouring their resources into the development of open source. Open source communities spread across the globe are producing the kind of technologies businesses require to remain competitive in a century that is so data rich that is making most tech giants to simply embrace open source.

• Here, you can see Brazil’s exciting startup scene with our data aggregated map and open source spreadsheet, which provides information on startups, investors, events, and more. With your help, this spreadsheet will encompass a real insider’s perspective of Brazil’s startup ecosystem.

Open Access/Governance

• A corollaries to the “no vendor lock-in” part are that organizations have total control of IT and cooperating developers/organizations are united rather than divided by “the vendor”. The world can and does make its own software for less than the monopolists would. There’s just no reason at all that the world should pay multiple times over the cost of developing software when they can do it themselves.

• Belgium’s police forces are increasingly switching to open source web technology. The federal police and already 49 local police forces across the country are using the openpolice.be platform for their websites. In total 126 of police websites in Belgium are reusing and sharing the platform.

• Services provided by Ukrainian ministries and governmental agencies are now accessible online, using the volunteer-run igov.org.ua eGovernment portal. The site is an of Ukrainian citizens’ initiative that is being assisted by some government agencies, according to press reports.

• [...]

• In the introduction to their portal, the volunteers explain that their aim is to fight government corruption and speed-up business processes in the Ukraine’s public institutions. The group is looking for volunteers with experience in developing IT solutions, inviting them to register. “When public services are transferred to electronic form, they become more transparent and formalised. No longer requiring meetings also takes away the possibility of government officials demanding bribes.”

• The Norwegian government has updated its IT procurement templates, Difi, the country’s Agency for Public Management and eGovernment, announced on 2 July. New provisions in the so-called State Standard Agreements should make it easier to request and offer standardised products and services, and the templates no longer distinguish between large and small contract agreements.

• Patients need to be made aware of the possibilities of cross-border healthcare in EU Member States, according to a study commissioned by the EC on the transposition of the Cross-border Care Directive. “The implementation could benefit from more targeted and regular publicity and communication activities”, the study writes. “Evidence indicates that demand for cross-border healthcare would be larger should the patients be made aware of the possibilities offered.”

• The performance of Europe’s Points of Single Contact is mediocre, according to a study commissioned by the EC and published on 29 June. All PSCs score about average in an evaluation of the quality and availability of information. Similarly, tests of their online administrative procedures and the accessibility for cross-border users show the PSC are falling short of their goal.

Open Hardware

• You probably know the Linux penguin, that cud­dly mascot of open-source software, but do you know the mascot of open-source hardware?

• While recently demonstrating a prototype to a family member I was asked, “Are you going to patent that?” While happy to see such enthusiasm, I tactfully declared that I couldn’t seek a patent, as it was built using open source components. This perplexed my family member who, being from a generation or two (or three) before me, thought that is how “inventing things works.” So, I did my best to explain the seemingly “hippie-ish” concepts of open source, copyleft, and Creative Commons licenses to someone from America’s Greatest Generation with little success.

• In the end, we simply agreed to disagree on the issues of patents and capitalist pursuit.

• Makers, developers and hobbyists that are looking to build different communication systems may be interested in a tiny open source digital walkie-talkie development board that is being launched several Kickstarter crowdfunding website.

Leftovers

• The sheer volume of paper out there means that there’s simply no way that archivists have been able to go through everything. Some boxes haven’t been opened since the 1800s, and we may never have any idea what these things are. See, archivists need permission to go through material like that. To do so, you need to tell the higher-ups specifically where you want to look and what you’re looking for. You can’t simply start randomly spelunking in piles of government papers — the files will get messed up even worse than they are now. Somewhere in our records are papers that could change what we know about the history of our country. Every archivist knows this. But we need to get through everything first, and with mundane governmental papers taking priority (looking at you, Veterans Affairs), archivists rarely get the chance to discover new things.

Science

• The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there’s general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there’s a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there’s DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there.

Security

• 1024 bit RSA keys are quite common throughout the DNSSEC system. Getting rid of 1024 bit keys in the PKI has been a long-running effort; doing the same for DNSSEC is likely to take quite a while. Yes, rapid rotation is possible, by splitting key-signing and zone-signing (a good design choice), but since it can’t be enforced, it’s entirely likely that long-lived 1024 bit keys for signing DNSSEC zones is the rule, rather than exception.

• Yes but RFB 5 is new… and it’s a closed, secret, previously unpublished protocol (unlike earlier RFB 3.x versions).

• Hmm, still doesn’t sound very secure.

• Security in remote access solutions will always be a concern for some it’s true.

• Is radical transparency the best solution to expose injustice in this technocratic world, a world that is changing faster than law can keep up with?

• That question became even more relevant to me, a privacy activist, when I found myself in the Wikileaks archive, because I worked at Hacking Team 9 years ago.

• [...]

• This is a leak in the public interest, and I really feel that the personal and corporate damage is smaller than the improvement our society can gain from it. But to reach such an improvement, we have to focus on the bigger picture rather than getting distracted by the juicy details.

• Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun.

• At that point, the interstate began to slope upward, so the Jeep lost more momentum and barely crept forward. Cars lined up behind my bumper before passing me, honking. I could see an 18-wheeler approaching in my rearview mirror. I hoped its driver saw me, too, and could tell I was paralyzed on the highway.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• With the latest mass shooting in Chattanooga, corporate media followed the usual pattern of being ready and willing to label violence as “terrorism” so long as the suspect is Muslim—e.g., Time‘s report on the shooting, “How to Stop the Next Domestic Terrorist” (7/20/15)—despite questions occasionally raised about whether “terrorism” is the appropriate frame to describe attacks on military installations (e.g., Slate, 7/17/15).

Transparency Reporting

• IN LIGHT OF the Magna Carta’s 800th birthday and what modern democracy is based on today, is there really equal justice for all?

• Whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are wanted. Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Sterling are in gaol. John Kiriakou recently released from gaol. Thomas Drake and David Petraeus free. Free? If they all leaked classified information why are two free?

• Let’s look at each case pertaining to these whistleblowers apart from the Assange and Snowden cases.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• An unprecedented coalition of the UK’s most eminent scientific, medical and engineering bodies says immediate action must be taken by governments to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

• Project Censored Show host Mickey Huff covers The Myth of Clean and Safe Nuclear Technologies– Holding the Nuclear Industry Responsible for Environmental Contamination and Human Disease.

• The UK government has published a new proposal for the widely criticised £11 billion smart metering scheme, laying out details for energy firms that will have to deploy the technology by 2020.

Finance

• Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) chief executive Hisao Tanaka and a string of other senior officials resigned on Tuesday for their roles in the country’s biggest accounting scandal in years.

• Tanaka will be temporarily replaced by Chairman Masashi Muromachi after an independent inquiry found the CEO had been aware the company had inflated its profits by $1.2 billion over a period of several years.

• Back in January, when we reported what the very first official act of open European defiance by the then-brand new Greek prime minister Tsipras was (as a reminder it was his visit of a local rifle range where Nazis executed 200 Greeks on May 1, 1944) we noted that this was the start of a clear Greek pivot away from Europe and toward Russia.

• Prof. Wolff joins The Big Picture RT’s Thom Hartmann to discuss the latest on China. China – the world’s second biggest economy – recently saw its stock market plummet 30 percent in a month. Does this mean that next big economic crisis is right around the corner?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• On July 22, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) annual meeting will once again see corporations and state lawmakers gather to discuss and vote on model legislation meant for introduction in state legislatures across the country. On the eve of the three-day conference in San Diego, Media Matters looks back at five examples of great reporting by local news teams who pulled back the curtain and held ALEC accountable for hosting lobbyists and legislators in secret meetings — where they wrote corporate-supported bills blocking minimum wage hikes, attacking unions, and eliminating environmental regulations — and previews this year’s agenda.

Privacy

• UK’s High Court found the rushed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) to be illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights and EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, both of which require respect for private and family life, as well as protection of personal data in the case of the latter.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has urged the world’s leading group of internet engineers to design a future ‘net that puts the user in the center, and so protects people’s privacy.

• Speaking via webcast to a meeting in Prague of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the former spy talked about a range of possible changes to the basic engineering of the global communications network that would make it harder for governments to carry out mass surveillance.

• The session was not recorded, but a number of attendees live-tweeted the confab. It was not an official IETF session, but one organized by attendees at the Prague event and using the IETF’s facilities. It followed a screening of the film Citizenfour, which documents the story of Snowden leaking NSA files to journalists while in a hotel room in Hong Kong.

• Digital extortionists are holding the sexual profiles of potentially 37 million adulterers hostage after a breach of infidelity website AshleyMadison.com. In a ransom message published on the site’s homepage today, the hackers threaten to publish reams of private information unless AshleyMadison.com and its peer site, EstablishedMen.com, are taken offline. Among that information, the message states, are “all customer records” including “real names and addresses.”

• The — depending on who is doing the reporting — cheating, affair, adultery, or infidelity site Ashley Madison has been hacked. The hackers are threatening to expose all of the company’s documents, including internal e-mails and details of its 37 million customers. Brian Krebs writes about the hackers’ demands.

• Instagram has apologised after it handed control of a Spanish user’s account over to a Barcelona football player with the same name.

• Andrés Iniesta, from Madrid, is the holder of the @ainiesta Instagram account. Andrés Iniesta, from Fuentealbilla, is the captain of Barcelona football club. The former Iniesta woke up on Wednesday to find that access to his Instagram account was blocked.

DRM

• Apple Music, the App Store and other services are temporarily down for some users.

• Apple said on its system status page that some users are experiencing difficulties accessing the services, and that it was investigating the problem.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• We had two separate stories late last week about copyright issues in the UK, and it occurred to me that a followup relating one to the other might be in order. The first one, from Thursday, was about the UK’s plan to try, once again, to push a new “education campaign” to teach people that “copyright is good.” We’ve seen these campaigns pop up over and over again for decades now, and they tend to lead to complete ridicule and outright mockery. And yet, if you talk to film studio and record label execs, they continually claim that one of the most important things they need to do is to teach people to “respect” copyright through education campaigns.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.