● 10.22.15

● Links 22/10/2015: *buntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Free Software in UK and French Government

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux-dominated home automation business is still a fragmented free-for-all, but it’s also beginning to consolidate, with far fewer startups in 2015 compared to recent years.

• This month we saw several major product announcements from established players related to Linux. First, Google’s Nest Labs announced the first device partners for its Weave home automation protocol using the Thread networking standard. Now Samsung, which began shipping its first Linux-based SmartThings hub last month, released a $249 sensor kit built around the hub. Meanwhile, in the larger Internet of Things world that includes industrial, as well as home automation, the Linux Foundation’s AllSeen Alliance announced a new certification program and security stack. In addition, Amazon unveiled an AWS IoT cloud platform available with starter kits based on Linux hacker boards (see below).

• The Internet of Things can be a mixed blessing. Sometimes all works as planned and sometimes things go terribly awry. Things are getting better, though. The trick is compatibility and we aren’t there yet, but things keep improving and moving forward.

• Now Samsung is beefing up its line of SmartThings products. This isn’t new, but only improved. The company is doubling up its efforts, but others will need to adopt the standard, or any standard for that matter.

Desktop

• Yes, GNU/Linux is on the move in Dominica.

• Wow! After years of using GNU/Linux in schools we can see the users being pumped out of the school-system at a constant rate.

• System 76 on Tuesday announced its latest desktop release, Wild Dog Pro, with a range of high-end customizable configurations to enhance video editing and media creation, software engineering, CAD, and high-end performance for today’s most demanding games.

• It comes preinstalled with Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), and the default desktop environment is Unity. However, users can install other Linux distributions and desktop environments.

Server

• Linux clusters built from Facebook’s blueprints will help crunch numbers for the US government’s hydrogen bomb scientists.

• The computer system, dubbed the Tundra Extreme Scale series, will cost $39m, and at its peak perform between seven and nine thousand trillion math calculations per second – that’s seven to nine petaflops.

• In the first publicly disclosed deployment by a government agency of computing hardware based on specs that came out of the Open Compute Project, the Facebook-led open source hardware and data center design initiative, the US Department of Energy has contracted Penguin Computing to install a supercomputing systems at three national labs.

• Today the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced a contract with Penguin Computing for a set of large-scale Open Compute HPC clusters. With 7-to-9 Petaflops of aggregate peak performance, the systems will be installed as part of NNSA’s tri-laboratory Commodity Technology Systems program. Scheduled for installation starting next year, the systems will bolster computing for national security at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.

• Docker, Inc., the firm behind the red hot open platform for distributed applications, has announced the acquisition of Tutum and its cloud service to deploy and manage Dockerized applications into production on any infrastructure. “By integrating Tutum with Docker Hub, a cloud service for automating development team workflows, Docker provides a complete commercial solution for IT teams to collaboratively build, ship and run production-ready distributed applications,” Docker officials noted.

• Financial terms of the deal were not announced, but here are more details.

HP

• HP has launched the OpenSwitch community and a new open source network operating system (NOS).

• HP and key supporters, Accton Technology Corporation, Arista, Broadcom, Intel, and VMWare, are delivering a community-based platform that provides developers and users the ability to accelerate innovation, avoid vendor lock-in and realize investment protection as they rapidly build data center networks customized for unique business applications.

• HP today has taken the wraps off a refreshed lineup of Chromebooks. In a press release, the company revealed a new Chromebook 14 lineup with hardware and cosmetic improvements. In addition to a 14-inch model with a 1366×768 display, HP is also offering a model with a full 1080p HD display.

• Both models, however, feature an Intel Celeron N2840 processor coupled with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal flash storage. The previous generation model used an Nvidia processor. Battery life is also improved this year, with HP quoting 9 hours of runtime. Though, the higher-resolution HD model will likely clock in a slightly below that.

• In today’s open source roundup: HP’s new Chromebook 14 will use an Intel processor. Plus: DistroWatch reviews Linux Lite 2.6. And a review of the Nexus 6P phone

Kernel Space

• I first started reading and learning about Linux prior to high school, what sparked my initial interest was so long ago I can’t remember. I do, however, remember spending weeks trying to download workable distributions at 33.6kbps and wrestling with compilation dependencies.

• What kept me interested in open source is the sheer amount of tasks you can accomplish without licenses and the possibility of community contributions.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Agenda Open Systems, Apprenda, Doky.io, Exablox and Rausch Netzwerktechnik GmbH are joining the organization.

• Industry reports estimate that 48 million applications will be available on the cloud by 2016 (Global Technology Outlook: Cloud 2014: A More Disruptive Phase), making cloud-based software more prevalent than ever. This evolution has led to new infrastructure-as-a-service models in IT – such as container technologies – being adopted to match the growing data and scale demands placed on enterprise networks. Today’s newest members represent this trend and are investing in Linux and collaborative development to advance these technologies.

• The Linux Foundation regularly awards scholarships as part of its Linux Training Scholarship Program. In the five years that the Linux Foundation has hosted this program, it has awarded a total of 34 scholarships totalling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals who may not otherwise have access to these opportunities. In conjunction with this scholarship program, we are starting a series to tell you more about these scholarship recipients. We would like to share their stories in the hope that they will inspire others.

Graphics Stack

• This Broadcom VC4 DRM/KMS driver has been in the works for a while now with the main hardware target being the Raspberry Pi / Raspberry Pi 2. The Broadcom architectures officially supported by this driver are the bcm2835 and bcm2836. While Eric has also been working on a VC4 Gallium3D driver, this VC4 KMS driver being offered up for Linux 4.4 lacks the kernel bits for hardware acceleration as well as power management. There’s other out-of-tree code for that, but it’s not ready for mainline with Linux 4.4. Thus with Linux 4.4 on the Pi, you’ll just get a nice kernel mode-set powered display with a display plane and cursor.

• Adding to the feature list for Linux 4.4 is more complete TPM 2.0 support.

• Intel and others have been working on TPM 2.0 support for a while and initial support landed for Linux 4.0. However, with Linux 4.4 the work is becoming more suitable for those interested in this new version of Trusted Platform Module.

Applications

• On October 20, Oracle announced the immediate availability for download of the eighth maintenance release of their open-source and cross-platform VirtualBox virtualization software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems.

• Version 8.5.0 of the popular, open-source, free, and cross-platform MKVToolNix project, which is graphical software that helps users manipulate MKV (Matroska) files, has been announced by Moritz Bunkus.

• As you may know, XiX Music Player is an open-source lightweight music player that has support for most popular architectures, including ARM, therefore works well on both Linux and Raspberry Pi Systems.

• The world’s most used open-source software solution for accessing shared Windows folders over the network from GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, Samba, has been updated today, October 20, to version 4.3.1.

• Git is an open-source revision control system, developed by Linus Torvalds, providing a big number of features and an intuitive syntax. It is used a lot by the developers that want to share their code with others.

• As of today, Brackets 1.5 is available for download. As we mentioned last week, the Adobe engineers on Brackets are working on bringing Brackets into Dreamweaver as the code surface and we expect progress on the open source project to be slower as that happens. But we still hope to do regular releases and our community is fantastic so a lot of the work that will be in those releases will be community driven. Brackets 1.5 is a great example of that.

• Qmmp is a popular open-source, cross-platform multimedia player, similar to Winamp and written in Qt. It has support for popular multimedia file formats, including MPEG1 layer 2/3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, Native FLAC/Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WavePack, WMA, Midi.

• Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that used to be called XBMC, has been upgraded to version 15.2 and is now available for download.

• The Poppler PDF rendering library that’s widely used by Linux programs like GNOME’s Evince, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Okular, and countless other programs for PDF handling, is finally nearing support for full digital signatures and verification support.

• I signed up for a free service a few weeks back named LabX. I don’t remember where I learned about it… some article I saw posted on LXer I think. Anyway… today I got an email invite from them, signed up for an account and gave it a try.

• To be honest I don’t know much about it yet and I don’t know exactly what it is for and what to do with it… but one this is for sure, I like virtualization and remoting protocols… so it is right up my alley. After creating an account I logged in. Turns out the email address you registered with is your username although that isn’t exactly clear from the various screens. Once logged in I was able to start and access a virtual environment that was listed as “Ubuntu 14.04″. Connecting to it gave me a GUI desktop in my browser. XFCE / Xubuntu. I recorded a 15 minute screencast (no audio) of the session so enjoy.

Proprietary

• After announcing a few days ago the availability of the Vivaldi snapshot 1.0.298.15, a release that fixed over 50 bugs in the Chromium-based web browser, Ruarí Ødegaard has the great pleasure of informing us today, October 16, about the immediate availability for download of Vivaldi snapshot 1.0.300.5.

Instructionals/Technical

• Oh, and one other thing this Linux-only multiboot installation shows, which I have been asked about several times recently. The UEFI boot configuration has been very simple and very stable. Obviously when you don’t have Microsoft mucking around in the background trying to ‘help’ you avoid ‘mistakes’ such as not booting Windows by default, and OEMs such as HP not blindly insisting on booting one specific file no matter what, then UEFI systems are really not so bad!

• I’ve been wanting to learn Golang for some while. I own the amazing, and very technical, Programming in Go and have been making my way through it over time. I’ve found though that learning a language is much easier when you have a clear project you want to build out. I took a short course on Udemy to give me a primer on the basics of Go and then was ready to build.

Games

• This is starting to be a repeating joke now, of promise after promise and delay after delay. Now with the Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition that was supposed to be a day-1 release for Linux, it has also been delayed.

• I have been waiting for Insurgency to come to Linux for over two years, and I’m glad to see the developers start to really make a push for us.

• You can only play with people also playing the beta (not many), so you may want to hold off unless you plan to test it and report bugs.

• Storm United is probably one of my favourite FPS games right now, and the recent update has cemented that rather firmly.

• I don’t often like platformers, even when they are full of action, but Broforce is just so hilarious and generally entertaining that it’s winning my heart over and over again.

• The game is very of the top—with everything, and I absolutely love all the tiny details that have gone into the game. The characters are all a parody of some kind of well known character from something else, like a film or a game, and it’s brilliantly done. The characters all have weapons that you might expect from who they are imitating too, like “Bro Dredd” who can stun enemies to death with his melee attack.

• Valve didn’t want to share the details about the hardware and software solutions used in the Steam Link, but it looks like the community has been quick to dismantle and share with everyone all there is to know about it.

• If you like stomping around a busy city with a mech unit, or maybe a tank and destroying literally everything then this is the game for you. It’s quite a difficult game at times too, with the limited ammo (you can find ammo pickups), and so many enemies it gets frantic.

• Just a few moments ago, October 17, the SuperTuxKart development team had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the first maintenance version of their awesome fun SuperTuxKart 0.9 kart racing game for all supported platforms.

• Jorge Castro from Ubuntu poked me recently to let us know that Ubuntu 15.10 has already been patched for the Steam Controller, and 14.04+ others will have a patch back-ported this week.

• If you have fond memories of the setting of Darkwatch, or you’ve always wished XCOM featured cowboys and demons instead of aliens, consider yourself lucky.

• I laughed when the rumors started back in 2012: “Valve is building a PC-based game console for living rooms.” Sure it is, I thought. Imagine my shock when “Steam Machines” turned out to be real. The project promised a bizarre, revolutionary controller, a Linux-based operating system designed specifically to play PC games and in-home game streaming for titles that required Windows to run properly. The proposal was unbelievable, but it’s finally here; it’s real; and it will ship to customers in early November. As of today, I have an Alienware Steam Machine nestled in my entertainment center that delivers on almost everything those original rumors promised. Let’s talk about that.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• While not officially announced, the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment has made an appearance on the project’s GitHub page, and just by looking at the changelog, we can notice that it brings over 200 changes, including both new features and bugfixes.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The developers of the open-source, free and cross-platform digiKam Software Collection project, an image viewer, organizer and editor application designed specifically for the KDE desktop environment, have announced the release of digiKam 4.14.0.

• Cutegram is an open-source Telegram application, similar to Sigram. It is developed in Qt5 and QML and uses the libqtelegram and the libappindicator libraries.

• Like other Telegram clients for Linux, it has support for Emoji, allows the users to send data by dragging it in the message window and gets integrated with the system notifications.

• after one week of patching frameworks (and KWrite/Kate), the first success can be seen: a kind of working application bundle for KWrite.

• Still no icons, need to set icon theme + search paths right and bundle that, too, but need to investigate more how the icon lookup works.

• KDE Plasma has received some harsh criticism last week, and a good part of the community has chimed in although, from the looks of it, not all of the criticism was well deserved. A prominent KDE developer wrote a lengthy article explaining why KDE Plasma is considered stable and why the community has some problems with it.

• An overly enthusiastic attempt to upgrade using Debian Unstable has temporarily left me without KDE. As disasters go, it’s a small one, since I can easily restore from backup, but until I have time for repairs, I’ve fallen back on Linux Mint’s MATE. The experience is making me aware of all that I miss in KDE.

• I’m no stranger to MATE — my second favorite desktop — so I am not reacting to the strangeness of the unfamiliar. Still less am I reacting to differences in themes and customization, which I long ago configured to my liking. Rather, the differences I am talking about are structural, and not easily altered.

• The latest release of KD Reports further enhances your ability to get printable and exportable reports from code and XML descriptions.

• For those who like using CMake instead of qmake, you’ll be glad to know KD Reports now comes with a fully functioning CMake buildsystem (see INSTALL-cmake.txt).

• Season of KDE is about to start, and I’ve been getting a number of emails with students struggling to setup a development environment. For KDE, it isn’t quite trivial.

• While there are multiple ways to setup a development environment, I’m going to go through how mine functions. I know many developers who have a similar setup.

• With that in place, I consider Kate/KWrite on Mac at least of alpha quality. Still some plugins are missing, optimizations for the .dmg generation could be done like removing stuff we don’t use like QtWebKit from the bundle, but besides, the programs do something and don’t crash immediately, at least not on my Mac OS 10.10 installation.

• It is now official: KDE will be present again at FOSDEM in the 2016 edition, on the 30th and 31st of January, 2016.

• Talks will take place at the Desktops DevRoom, on Sunday the 31st, but not exclusively: in past years, there were Qt and KDE-related talks at the mobile devroom, lightning talks, distributions, open document editors and more.

• KDE will be sharing the room with other desktop environments, as usual: Gnome, Unity, Enlightenment, Razor, etc. Representatives from those communities will be helping me in managing and organizing the devroom: Christophe Fergeau, Michael Zanetti, Philippe Caseiro and Jérome Leclanche.

• A few weeks ago, I went to the Qt World Summit 2015.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• There’s a new GNOME application called Games — not to be confused with the few GNOME games out there like Sudoku and Solitaire. GNOME Games is not a game itself but intended as a tool for managing your game library.

• GNOME Games is trying to be a consistent way to access all your games on a Linux system whether they be games installed by Steam, games installed from your package manager, video game console ROMs, web-based games, and other gaming formats. For some games — like those supporting the Libretro API — it then tries to offer a bit of integration for managing the game.

• Do you like video games but don’t like how inconsistent and annoying it can be to enjoy them on a personal computer? Then read on, I have something for you! And if you’re not such a gamer, you’ll probably learn fun things in the article nonetheless.

• LaTeXila 3.18 has been released last week.

• I’m pleased to announce that there’s going to be a hackfest in Madrid, from 2–4 December. The subject is GNOME’s content apps: Documents, Files, Music, Photos and Videos. A group of us will be getting together to work on making them better, and to make plans for the future. There’s plenty of work to be done, from content sharing and photo import, to smart music playlists.

• There’s less than two weeks ago for those identifying as women or belonging to certain ethnic groups within the United States to apply for this winter’s Outreachy program to get paid to be involved with free/open-source software communities.

• One of the new additions so far in the GTK+ 3.19 development code in the road leading to the March release of GTK+ 3.20 is a new GtkShortcutsWindow widget that landed in Git yesterday.

• The GtkShortcutsWindow is a top-level window designed for showing shortchut helpers for an application, such as showing a program’s keyboard shortcuts or possible gestures or other helpers. The work was spearheaded by Matthias Clasen stemming from this bug report.

Distributions

Reviews

• Linux is great. It’s fast. It’s stable. It’s free (in more ways than one).

• But Linux (or, depending on who you ask, “GNU/Linux”) isn’t the only Free and Open Source operating system out there. Sure, it may be the most popular… but there are others. Over the next few articles I will be taking a look at some of the most interesting. One at a time.

Ballnux/SUSE

• One of the measures of a distro is how long it will stand behind its releases and on that score Leap is once again looking like a great release. The precise life cycle of Leap is still up in the air, but expect it to be a “long term support” style release, roughly mirroring SUSE Linux Enterprise.

• At the very minimum, this Leap 42 release will be supported until Leap 43 arrives. Given that Leap 43 will be based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 13, which isn’t due for at least two years, it’s safe to say that Leap will last quite a while.

• That said, do keep in mind that this is a beta. This release makes a good preview, but for day-to-day use, you’ll want to wait for the final release (due November 4) before diving in with both feet.

Red Hat Family

• Awards recognize women making significant contributions to open source

• Since 2009, Red Hat has provided details of vulnerabilities with CVE names as part of our mission to provide as much information around vulnerabilities that affect Red Hat products as possible. These CVE pages distill information from a variety of sources to provide an overview of each flaw, including information like a description of the flaw, CVSSv2 scores, impact, public dates, and any corresponding errata that corrected the flaw in Red Hat products.

• This is why software provider Red Hat is partnering with Raleigh, NC-based agency Baldwin& to help convey its expertise in open source collaboration or as the company puts it, “The Mastery of the Many.”

• Judging from the comments concerning my most recent IBM (NYSE:IBM) piece, there are a lot of people inside the company who have despaired of Ginni Rometty as CEO and still hold out hope that the company can be saved from its current death spiral.

• “I started off by telling them I was sorry,” said Whitehurst, who’s now CEO of Red Hat, the software company that makes the open-source Linux operating system, during the closing keynote at this year’s HR Tech conference in Las Vegas today. “Then I explained to them Delta’s strategy for how it would emerge from bankruptcy and what it would take for us to get there. It was the same speech I’d been giving to bankers in New York during the previous four weeks in trying to secure loans for us. But I’d never given it to any of our employees.”

• Red Hat announced this morning they are acquiring Ansible, Inc, a leader of IT automation solutions.

Fedora

• These past few weeks have been particularly exciting for me as I become more involved in the world of free and open-source software. For a long time, I’ve sat and idled in the various realms of the Fedora community, and I’ve sat on the sidelines thinking that I would be unable to contribute anything significant because of my inability to write fancy code or design super slick images or write documentation for the fancy code. However, I have gladly been proven wrong.

• Corebird 1.1 was recently released and it is now available in the official Fedora repos.

• In Fedora Release Engineering land we have been undertaking some big changes in how we work. Most of these changes have been quieter than they should have been. We had the latest demo of our work today, you can watch the video on youtube.

• While Fedora 23 was looking good for doing an on-time release compared to some of their notorious delays of past releases, at the final go/no-go meeting it was decided to postpone the official release.

• Due to outstanding bugs in their latest Fedora 23 build, it was decided not to release Fedora 23 but rather postpone it by at least a week. Another Go/No-Go meeting will happen next Thursday to see if it’s in shape to be released.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Valve is moving much quicker now with the SteamOS updates, and it looks like its makers are trying to push fixes and improvements ahead of the November 10 launch for the Steam Machines.

• The developers of the Debian-based GALPon MiniNo GNU/Linux distribution, which is popularly known as PicarOS, have had the great pleasure of announcing the release of PicarOS Diego 2015.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In the last hours of October 20, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the things that happened in the Ubuntu Touch world since the release of the OTA-7 software update on October 19, 2015.

• CANONICAL HAS formally announced the latest version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, which is now stable and ready for servers.

• Ubuntu 15.10, also known as ‘Wiley Werewolf’, will be available to download from 22 October, and is an incremental release designed as a bridge towards the next Long Term Support (LTS) release, 16.04, which is due in April 2016. It’s also the first to run on the recently launched OpenStack Liberty.

• The recently announced Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series is now running the Ubuntu Snappy Core, making this one of the most flexible and robust products of its kind.

• CANONICAL HAS formally announced the latest version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, which is now stable and ready for servers.

• Ubuntu 15.10, also known as ‘Wily Werewolf’, will be available to download from 22 October, and is an incremental release designed as a bridge towards the next Long Term Support (LTS) release, 16.04, which is due in April 2016. It’s also the first to run on the recently launched OpenStack Liberty.

• Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has just announced the name of the new Ubuntu LTS that will launch in April 2016, and it’s Xenial Xerus.

• What a great Wily it’s been, and for those of you who live on the latest release and haven’t already updated, the bits are baked and looking great. You can jump the queue if you know where to look while we spin up the extra servers needed for IMG and ISO downloads

• Canonical has released an important security patch for the kernel packages of Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems.

• Canonical has released Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), a new version of its iconic software that delivers a number of incremental improvements for users and developers alike.

• Canonical is set to release the latest version of its Ubuntu Linux platform which, as tradition dictates, comes with the newest version of the OpenStack cloud computing platform, plus release versions of two Canonical technologies: the Autopilot tool for managing OpenStack deployment and LXD for containers.

• Nearly a year after its introduction, LXD is finally coming of age. Canonical Ltd. will include the homegrown virtualization engine in the new version of its popular Linux flavor that is launching tomorrow as the default option for running containers in an effort to draw some attention away from the competition.

• Yes, it’s that time of the year again, when a new release of the Ubuntu Linux operating system approaches and everyone in the community goes nuts. So how about winning an Ubuntu Phone?

• The Ubuntu developers are always hard at work to bring you all the latest technologies and software versions, and they have just released a new update for the next-generation Mir display server.

• Canonical will take its Ubuntu suite of distros, especially Ubuntu Snappy Core and other various products and will present them at the Dell World event that will take place in Austin, Texas, between October 20-22, 2015.

• Earlier today, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-8 software update.

• Ubuntu 15.10 as a operating system for Review is pretty lackluster. There’s nothing new as such and there’s nothing we can really say that is going to change your opinion from its predecessor, 15.04. Therefore, we recommend you to upgrade either out of habit and according to your regular upgrade schedule rather than out of a specific necessity for a specific feature of this release. Because there is really nothing that could possibly differentiate it from the older, yet still very stable 15.04 release. But if you’re going to stick with 15.04 for a little longer, we do recommend that you look at upgrading the kernel to the latest 4.2 branch. It is worth it.

• If you really want a reason to upgrade? Linux kernel 4.2 would be our sole reason for taking Ubuntu 15.10 into consideration.

• Canonical has kicked out its container management architecture for the suits with Ubuntu 15.10.

• The Linux spinner is today expected to drop its latest disro with the server including final code for its Linux Container Hypervisor (LXD).

• LXD is Canonical’s container management environment which it claims is similar to a hypervisor but of course isn’t a hypervisor.

• Mark Richard Shuttleworth is the founder of Ubuntu or the man behind the Debian as they call him. He was born in 1973 in Welkom, South Africa. He’s an entrepreneur and also space tourist who became later 1st citizen of independent African country who could travel to the space.

• Mark also founded Thawte in 1996, the Internet commerce security company, while he was studying finance and IT at University of Cape Town.

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has just sent his daily report to shed light on the latest work done by Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-8 software update.

• Zemczak reveals that the new Ubuntu-push patches the power-consumption issue that occurred when no network was available on Ubuntu Touch-powered devices. The update also brings new versions of the Unity Scopes Shell, Web Browser app, and account-polld, along with multiple bug and UI fixes.

• Since the launch of Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 software update on 19th October, there have been regular reports coming on from Canonical’s staff regarding the changes in the new software. According to Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak, the OTA-7 (r26) has been fully deployed to all supported Ubuntu phones and tablets, including BQ Aquaris E4.5, BQ Aquaris E5 as well as Google’s Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices.

• While the update has been sent out to everyone, those that still haven’t received it yet should reboot their devices and then check for an update again by going into “Settings” > “About this phone” and pressing the “Check for updates” button.

• Ubuntu device convergence is now starting to happen as we move closer to bringing the first smartphones to market carrying a full Ubuntu desktop interface.

• Today marks the eleventh anniversary of the first ever release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog.

• Yes, it’s now been eleven years, and some twenty-two releases of Ubuntu, since Mark Shuttleworth sat down to type up the first ever Ubuntu release announcement.

• As I write this, Canonical is just a few days away from releasing the next incarnation of Ubuntu. I found myself in a situation the other day where I had to reload one of my machines, the laptop that the entire family uses, the one that needs to work and be stable. This little HP EliteBook with its Intel i5 processor and integrated graphics has been running Ubuntu 14.04 for most of its time with us but I wanted to try something new, so I did this totally crazy thing: I installed Ubuntu 15.10 Beta. No, I didn’t test it, I didn’t read the release notes and I didn’t have one single issue with it at all. It just worked. I installed every piece of software I needed on that machine except one that is not out for 15.10 yet. I’m sure that PPA (personal package archive) will come to life in a week or two. It took me less than two hours to totally rebuild it including putting all the data back on it.

Flavours and Variants

• For me, the ability to collaborate is the best thing about FOSS and the FOSS community. When asked this question, a lot of people talk about being able to look at the source code, test it and verify it it has no serious bugs or vulnerabilities. But what I love most is finding some Open Source software, using it, discovering it doesn’t quite do what I want it to do, then modifying it, sending those changes back to the author and seeing them incorporated in future releases. It’s that freedom, the power to collaborate, and constantly improve the ecosystem that I believe is FOSS’s most powerful attribute.

• Kubuntu comes with KDE Applications 15.08 containing all your favorite apps from KDE, including Dolphin. This is the first stability update, and contains bugfixes and translation updates. 107 applications have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5 but those which aren’t should fit in seamlessly.

• Non-KDE applications include LibreOffice 5.0 and Firefox 41.

• Ubuntu MATE 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that’s using the beautifully crafted MATE desktop environment, has been released and is now available for download.

• Ubuntu MATE 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that’s using the beautifully crafted MATE desktop environment, has been released and is now available for download.

Devices/Embedded

• AMD’s first SoC version of its R-Series family offers a 25 percent faster CPU, 22 percent faster graphics, plus 12W TDPs, DDR4, and fully open Mentor Linux.

• Phytec’s 55 x 45mm, “PhyCore-AM57x SOM” supports the TI Sitara AM57x SoC, and offers a Linux BSP, -40 to 85°C operation, and an optional carrier board.

• The PhyCore-AM57x SOM is the second computer-on-module we’ve seen after the CompuLab CL-SOM-AM57x to tap TI’s newly announced Sitara AM57x SoC. The AM57x also appears on the BeagleBoard-X15 single-board computer.

• Germany-based Phytec is targeting the PhyCore-AM57x SOM at industrial human machine interface (HMI), factory automation, machine vision, building automation, networking, test and measurement, and medical imaging applications. The company previously employed a Texas Instruments Sitara SoC — the Cortex-A8 based Sitara AM335x — in its PhyCore-AM335x COM and PhyBoard SBC.

• After reporting on the upcoming Solu revolutionary computer, the time has come to introduce you guys to DragonBox Pyra, an open-source handheld computer powered by Debian GNU/Linux and featuring gaming controls and a full-size keyboard.

• FPGA development has advanced dramatically in the last year, and this is entirely due to an open-source toolchain for Lattice’s iCE40 FPGA. Last spring, the bitstream for this FPGA was reverse engineered and a toolchain made available for anything that can run Linux, including a Raspberry Pi. [Dave] from Xess thought it was high time for a Raspberry Pi FPGA board. With the help of this open-source toolchain, he can program this FPGA board right on the Raspberry Pi.

• CompuLab announced a $68 “Fit-Uptime” UPS that offers up to three hours of 12V DC backup, designed for its Fit-PCs, Intel’s NUCs, and other mini-PCs.

• CompuLab developed its Fit-Uptime uninterrupted power supply for its AMD-based, Linux-ready FitPC mini-PCs, especially when used for mission-critical applications in which power outages are not an option. It also works with many other mini-PCs, including Intel NUC, says the company.

• Advantech’s “UNO-1252G” is a rugged IoT gateway that runs Yocto Linux on an Intel Quark, and offers isolated serial and DIO ports, plus mini-PCIe expansion.

• We’ve seen a variety of Internet of Things gateways that run Yocto Project Linux or Wind River’s Yocto-based Wind River IDP XT on Intel’s low-power (10W) Quark processor, and they’re all fairly distinctive. Like Advantech’s UBC-221, its new UNO-1252G is a less feature rich device than the Aaeon AIOT-X1000 or Adlink’s Matrix MXE-100i or top-of-the-line Matrix MXE-200i.

• Now that we’ve introduced you guys to the Solu computer, it’s time to meet UP, the single-board computer (SBC) that looks like Raspberry Pi 2 and runs Linux, Windows 10, and Android.

• The Linux-dominated home automation business is still a fragmented free-for-all, but it’s also beginning to consolidate, with far fewer startups in 2015 compared to recent years. This month we saw several major product announcements from established players related to Linux.

Phones

Tizen

• Capsule Rider 3D is the first 3D Racing Game that has made its way to the Tizen Store and is now available to download! The game runs quite fast and fluid on the Samsung Z1 and gives a great gaming experience.

Android

• There are new requirements that manufacturers have to follow if they want their phones to pass the Google’s Compatibility Test Suite due to Google’s update of Android Compatibility Definition document. There are different levels of recommendation in the Android Compatibility definition. The use of “MAY” is a light suggestion from Google, while “SHOULD” is a strong level of recommendation and “MUST” is the highest form of suggesting a necessary feature.

• Android as an operating system has changed dramatically since it was first acquired by Google in 2005, and along with it so has the phone hardware that it runs on. Every Android fan knows about the T-Mobile G1 (aka the HTC Dream) as the first Android-powered phone made available to consumers, but before that milestone was this, the “Sooner.”

• The latest version of Android boosts battery life and adds new advanced search features making it Google’s most polished operating system yet.

• Android 6.0 Marshmallow is already available on Google’s Nexus devices and LG and others have announced that they are bringing updates to their top-end smartphones within weeks.

• Recently I was contacted by Gear Best to review one of their tablets and I reluctantly agreed as I usually review products that I use or buy. They sent me a review unit and what I found in the package was quite surprising.

• Traditional watchmakers are thirsty to break into the smartwatch world and today, Fossil announced its plans to do so. The new Fossil Q line is an entire range of connected wearables, with the Android Wear-powered Q Founder as its flagship.

• The very first thing that drew me into the clutches of Android was the ability to use widgets on the home screen. This silly feature meant that I was able to see app information without actually having to stop and open the app itself. For some software titles, this was huge.

• Another discovery that finally won me over for good was the software known as AirDroid. This app allows me to operate a lot of my phone’s functionality from my desktop: SMS messages, remove/add apps, files, and images. AirDroid made managing a smart phone a lot easier. Plus, I could manage these tasks wirelessly, which was a huge benefit.

• That’s not an iPhone you’re looking at—it’s the newest Android phone from HTC, the One A9. The new phone is packed with powerful hardware including a fingerprint scanner and NFC technology that enables Android Pay. But perhaps the most exciting thing about the new smartphone is that it’s one of the first to be powered by Google’s newest operating system, Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

• ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is someone who says that he loves his iPhone but he’s nonetheless giving Android a second look. Why? Because ever since he upgraded his device to iOS 9, it’s seriously hurt his device’s overall performance even though it was supposed to be a release aimed at ironing out the bugs that plagued the releases of iOS 7 and iOS 8.

• Chromecast and Android TV users have been experiencing streaming issues as of late. Luckily, Google appears to be on the case; Android Police reports the company has issued updates that should eliminate problems that are preventing folks from streaming the day away.

• Reddit, what many call the “front page of the internet” is currently working on an Android app of their own, but for now users have to rely on the confusing web interface, or multiple 3rd party apps for Android. Whether your first cake day is coming up, or you’re a long-time Reddit user, below are five or so of our favorite Reddit apps for Android.

• After officially announcing the BlackBerry Priv, the company acknowledged an outpouring of interest on its blog. It’s obvious that fans want more information, and while BlackBerry isn’t ready to divulge all the details of the Priv, the company did post three images of the phone to whet our appetites.

• BlackBerry’s reputation for security is so strong that its devices are frequently used by world leaders as their go-to smartphone of choice. With the forthcoming Priv, the firm has had to try and bring its brand-name security to Android, an operating system with a less-than stellar history when it comes to security and privacy. In order to reassure customers that the Priv has all of the benefits you’ll find on its BB10 handsets, Alex Manea, BlackBerry’s director of security, has opened up on the measures it took to make Android secure.

• Quite a few phones make their way to my desk.

• The list includes all sorts of devices from Samsung, LG, Motorola, Apple, and HTC. But none have garnered as much excitement and interest as Google’s new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P smartphones.

• Motorola and Verizon have already announced that we’ll be seeing the next Droid smartphones on October 27th. But with that unveiling still over a week away, Droid Life has published leaked print ads for the phones that spell out some of their features.

• In each of our eight installments over as many weeks, we’ll track the technologies, handsets, people and events that shaped Android throughout its life, bringing you a unique insight into a platform used by over a billion people.

Free Software/Open Source

• Sure, I may have only contributed a couple hundred lines of code. In the long run, however, I know that my CI efforts will soon pull together better software that’s tested thoroughly, beginning with the community of developers themselves. I see that as indirectly contributing millions of lines of better code. I had an idea on how to do something better and took action on it, a freedom you won’t find in other types of organizations.

• In the last five years, Southeast Asia has grown to become a big consumer of modern web technologies to create digital products and services. More and more tech companies from the US are opening offices here and many with the goal to build engineering and development offices for their regional needs.

• I’d like to share my experiences with Free Software Melbourne, its free software workshop, and, more importantly, what has happened since then because it’s kinda cool—it’s not what I expected.

• I consider myself a beginner programmer. Most of the time I have no idea what I am doing and no idea what the documentation is trying to convey. Lost is perhaps my most common emotion.

• The Orbbec Persee is basically a less expensive XBox Kinect on steroids, and the developers are committed to making sure that their technology is available for everyone to develop and improve. They say that they want to foster a culture of open source innovation where the developers and the creative coding community play an irreplaceable role in the evolution of gesture controls and the Persee hardware. To that end they have released an open source software development kit (SDK) on GitHub so anyone can download and develop software using the versatile and powerful smart 3D camera-computer.

• “Footballs in a basketball state,” I said wryly, looking down on a guy who was sitting across the table, absently playing with some small swag footballs imprinted with a company logo.

• LookingGlass Cyber Solutions has announced OpenTPX, a contribution to the open-source community to enable threat intelligence providers and security operations to integrate full context across their security portfolios.

• Dev2, a software developer based in Hillcrest, has been awarded the prestigious 2015 BOSSIE open source aware.

• I’m looking to release a stable version sometime this month after adding new features from user feedback. I’ve recently completed the user acceptance testing.

• The open source system is now used by companies such as NASDAQ…

• The open source community holds dear the concepts of open exchange, participation, rapid prototyping, meritocracy, transparency, participation and collaboration, values emphasized among startups.

• When looking to provide Cloud deployments, channel players are faced with a vast array of offerings from vendors all claiming to offer the ideal solution to a client’s needs. Being spoilt for choice, it has become increasingly difficult for partners to differentiate from competitors.

• As the model for Cloud providers expands to include private Cloud build-outs, container-based infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, partners need additional flexibility to better meet customer needs for Cloud-based technologies.

• As such, a complete set of unique Cloud services can help partners plan, build and manage a private or hybrid Cloud while still using a multi-vendor infrastructure.

• Three years ago, Kersey Sturdivant and myself launched an ambitious crowdfunding project–the OpenCTD–with the plan to produce a low-cost, open-source CTD for thousands of dollars less than the commercial alternative. That campaign fizzled, bringing in barely 60% of our target goal. After taxes and fees, that amounted to about $3500 available to us to play around with. The OpenCTD wasn’t dead, but it was on life support.

• Zepheira updated Linksmith and Scribe, its open source linked data management tools, to have better scalability, linkability, and internal and external linking. Scribe is publicly available on GitHub. Students and alumni of the Zepheira Practical Practitioner Training class have exclusive access to Linksmith, but the results of their work with the tool may be publicly shared.

• Cloud-native computing relies on ephemeral containers instead of pinned servers. Executing applications within ephemeral containers solves resource scarcity challenges, but also creates a dynamic environment that requires new practices and tooling. To address these concerns, Ian Lewis of Google is giving a talk at this month’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Japan entitled “In a world of ephemeral containers, how do we keep track of things?”

• The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that Freescale and KDDI R&D Labs have joined as Silver members while Morgan Richomme of Orange has been appointed to the Board of Directors as the first technical community representative. Launched just one year ago, the OPNFV project is supported by 19 Platinum and 36 Silver member companies committed to advancing the creation of a flexible, open source framework for NFV.

• Mistakes like these are inevitable in a negotiation process that is closed to public review and which structurally excludes input from all affected stakeholders. We should therefore hardly be surprised that trade agreements are bad news for open access and open source. But neither should we accept it. These captured, undemocratic negotiations are a relic of a pre-Internet age, that no longer have any legitimate place in public policy making for the 21st century.

• As for making decisions about using open-source packages, availability of support, licensing flexibility and code security were the top three factors. Among reasons cited for seeking support were a lack of expertise regarding particular open-source packages, as well as integration and performance issues.

• Cisco’s Jamal Haider acknowledged during a presentation this week that his team that works on the company’s open source-based customer support portal hasn’t given much back to the wider Drupal community yet, but he said this talk at the sold-out Acquia Engage conference in Boston is part of an effort to change that.

• And why not? Cisco has plenty of reasons – more than $400 million of them, in fact – to be grateful for Drupal since migrating its Support Community portal to the open source content management system early last year. Cisco started working on project requirements in 2013 with Acquia, a SaaS provider that has commercialized Drupal offerings.

• We knew going in there would be a record number of speakers this year — 131 according to a count on the ATO website — and we learned on our way out — at the closing ceremonies — that this year’s attendance topped 1,700, much more than last year and nearly doubling the attendance from the first ATO in 2013. Todd Lewis, the master of ceremonies for the event — his official title, chairperson, doesn’t begin to describe what he does — said that next year they’re aiming for 2,500, a number they probably have a good chance of hitting.

• Sigh. Another day, another useless open source project.

• This time it’s Walmart, open sourcing its cloud technology to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). But, as David Linthicum writes, it’s open source for all the wrong reasons.

• More pertinently, it’s open source in all the wrong ways.

• In any end-to-end proprietary platform, there’s fear in the community about support, accessibility and cost. However, thanks to acquisitions, Pentaho Corp. has showed it is ready to embrace a more open world.

• Rogue Wave Software released their 2015 Open Source Support Report, solidifying the company as a leader in the open source software (OSS) community and providing information on OSS package use that could only be gathered from their own database. Taking data from over 8,000 OSS packages, surveys, experiences, and experts from across different industries, this report brings a new level of visibility into OSS support reporting that has been lacking until now.

• I went to a night sky photography talk on Tuesday. The presenter talked a bit about tips on camera lenses, exposures; then showed a raw image and prepared to demonstrate how to process it to bring out the details.

• His slides disappeared, the screen went blank, and then … nothing. He wrestled with his laptop for a while. Finally he said “Looks like I’m going to need a network connection”, left the podium and headed out the door to find someone to help him with that.

• I’m not sure what the networking issue was: the nature center has open wi-fi, but you know how it is during talks: if anything can possibly go wrong with networking, it will, which is why a good speaker tries not to rely on it. And I’m not blaming this speaker, who had clearly done plenty of preparation and thought he had everything lined up.

• Eventually they got the network connection, and he connected to Adobe. It turns out the problem was that Adobe Photoshop is now cloud-based. Even if you have a local copy of the software, it insists on checking in with Adobe at least every 30 days. At least, that’s the theory. But he had used the software on that laptop earlier that same day, and thought he was safe. But that wasn’t good enough, and Photoshop picked the worst possible time — a talk in front of a large audience — to decide it needed to check in before letting him do anything.

• Neo Technology Inc. made a lot of new friends in the open-source ecosystem this morning after releasing the query language powering its hugely popular graph store under an open-source license. The move officially clears the way for other vendors to implement the syntax in their own systems.

• The openCypher project, as the startup refers to the free standalone implementation, already has several big-name supporters lined up on launch. The list includes providers such as Tableau Inc. and Tom Sawyer Software Inc. that have offered connectors for Neo4j long before the announcement of initiative as well as newcomers hoping to secure a seat on the graph bandwagon.

• I was in Berlin last week for Flink Forward, the inaugural Apache Flink conference. I’m still learning about Flink, and Flink Forward was a great place to learn more. In this post, I’ll share some of what I consider its coolest features and highlight some of the talks I especially enjoyed. Videos of the talks should all be online soon, so you’ll be able to check them out as well.

IoT

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla developers continue moving along with their support for the GTK3 tool-kit inside the Firefox web-browser.

• Firefox Nightlies/Aurora are built with GTK3+ on Linux. While there’s been the basic GTK+ 3 support, other items relating to this new tool-kit support still need to be finished up. One of the items now complete is handling touch events of this latest GTK+ version.

SaaS/Big Data

• Egle Sigler, Kavit Munshi, and Carol Barrett are organizers and active members of OpenStack’s Diversity Working Group. The OpenStack Foundation has a deep commitment to fostering the diversity and inclusivity of the OpenStack community. The foundation’s Board of Directors created the group to formulate, deliver, and monitor programs to help increase the diversity of the community.

• Oracle has updated its Oracle OpenStack platform, almost a year to the day after it first released its own flavor of the open-source cloud-building fabric.

• Because “cloud” means different things to different people, and because OpenStack tries to be all those things, individual OpenStack deployments can look very different from one another depending on many criteria. The “big tent” conversation, which has been ongoing in the OpenStack community for some time, strives to provide all of the answers for all of OpenStack’s large audience.

• The cloud is well on its way to becoming the standard model for IT, just sixteen years after it first formed. It couples flexibility, scale, and reliability to user-friendliness and ubiquity. It has created some of the world’s largest companies, as well as empowering some of the smallest. The cloud has changed the economics of providing and using services, bringing many new opportunities—and also a few teething problems, of course.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Personal reports from the recent LibreOffice conference were few, but today Rajesh Ranjan shared his experience. Bruce Byfield today said, “Sometimes, losing a Linux desktop is the best way to appreciate it” as he muddles through the absence of KDE. Ubuntu celebrates its 11 year path to convergence as eWeek.com looks at upcoming 15.10 features. Elsewhere, Scott Gilbertson reviews openSUSE 42.1 and Jack Germain said Liquid Lemur Linux has promise.

• In late September, I attended my first LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, Denmark. There were 150 participants from more than 30 countries present, and it was an incredible experience.

• Though the conference didn’t officially start until September 23, my work started the day before at what we called the “Community Day.” After a general get together, Native Language Project (NLP) community members met to discuss relevant processes, tools, resources, development, and marketing. In the evening, we rejoined the rest of the contributors for dinner.

Business

Semi-Open Source//Openwashing

BSD

• The OpenBSD Project has announced the release of the OpenBSD 5.8 BSD-based computer operating system today, October 18, 2015, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the OpenBSD source tree.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Parallel 20151022 (‘Liquid Water’) has been released.

Public Services/Government

• The 600-bed Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton (UK) has switched to using OpenMaxims, a patient record solution made available under the AGPL, an open source licence. This marks the first deployment of OpenMaxims, announces IMS Maxims, the UK-based firm that is developing the software.

• The U.K. government has made a deal to make the open-source office suite Libre Office available across its public sector, in what seems to be an effort to ween itself off of Microsoft Office.

• Collabora GovOffice is based on LibreOffice, developed by The Document Foundation as one of the major open source alternatives to Microsoft Office.

• French voters voiced strong support for a proposal that will see the country’s government expand the role of free and open-source software in a national referendum on technology called the Digital Republic bill.

• The French government is now seriously looking at implementing open source software in the public sector after a public debate for France’s Digital Republic bill (La République numérique).

Licensing

• The argument for open source in both cases rests on the belief that exposing the code to millions of eyeballs will ultimately make it more secure and just plain better overall. In the VW case, anti-copyright groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing for open source and an end to DMCA anti-circumvention provisions.

• Back in July Apple promised to open source Swift. Well, Apple? What’s going on? Is this still the plan, Apple?

Openness/Sharing

• Puri’s open approach to evolving her career has led her to report for Fortune, serve as an assistant solicitor general for the New York State Attorney General, work as a senior advisor to the president of the Empire State Development Corporation, run the nonprofit Scientists Without Borders, and help lead the Nike Foundation as its executive director for global innovation.

• The firm suggests that the financial industry is increasingly turning to open technology standards to spur the innovation and flexibility institutions need to remain competitive in an increasingly complex business landscape.

Open Data

• Of course, there’s more data formats than that. Heck, even on top of these data formats there’s a lot more out there (these days I spend a lot of time working on ActivityStreams 2.0 related tooling, which is just JSON with a specific structure, until you want to get fancier, add extensions, or jump into linked data land, in which case you can process it as json-ld).

Open Access/Content

• My name is Meghan Healey. I’m an undeclared freshman. Being on this exploratory track, most of my textbooks were relatively cheap, but they were still more expensive than they should be. If all textbooks were as “cheap” as my American Politics class, students would still have to pay at least $150 in order to have a proper education. This $150 could have been spent toward my tuition, my meal plan, or a plentiful amount of other academic expenses. Geology Textbook: $50. Environmental Science Packet: $30. Sustainability Book: $10. Freshman Seminar: $20. iClicker 2 for American Politics: $60. American Politics Textbook: $90 My total? $260. What should it be? Priceless.

• new Congress legislation is advancing to seek the cost-effective reduction of university textbooks through appropriate grant programs that aim to promote the utilization of Open Education Resources (OER).

• Two ideas are being proposed by Democratic Senators this week that if instituted would have a major impact on America.

• Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois are co-sponsoring the Affordable College Textbook Act. This act would have college institutions apply for government cash to fund the creation of a textbook that could be shareable online.

• A survey of North Dakota faculty shows most have heard of “open source educational materials” – textbooks and other things available on line at little or no charge.

• “Open source” could save students a lot of money in textbooks.

Open Hardware

• PLOS Collections joined forces with Andre Maia Chagas and Tom Baden of University of Tübingen, TReND in Africa and Openeuroscience to create a collection of Open Source Hardware projects with application in a laboratory setting. Open Source Toolkit: Hardware will be updated on a regular basis.

• The Organelle is equipped with a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor and a range of intuitive controls together with a powerful and flexible sound engine that provides a limitless music machine that is capable of creating a huge variety of different sounds and tunes.

• [...]

• The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level.

• The rise of 3D printing technology owes a lot to the open-source movement, whereby the source code for software and hardware blueprints are made available to be used or modified at absolutely no cost. It’s a movement that recognizes the power of the people, of collective minds working towards diverse goals, yet all with the same intentions of technological advancement, innovation and improvement. Honouring their commitment to the open-source movement as well as their long-standing tradition of releasing the blueprints for their 3D printers six months after going to market, Ultimaker today released the open-source files for their Ultimaker 2 Go and Ultimaker 2 Extended 3D printers. Files for the Ultimaker 2, Ultimaker Original, Original + and Heated Bed Upgrade as well as their Cura software are already available on their GitHub repository completely free of cost.

Programming

• If you’re writing a web application from scratch, you’ll want to select a framework to make your life easier and reduce development time. Java, one of the most popular programming languages out there, offers plenty of options.

• Traditional Java applications, particularly web-facing apps, are built on top of a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, which follows the MVC software architectural pattern. Starting with Apache Struts, MVC frameworks have been a staple of Java development including such popular frameworks as WebWork, Spring MVC, Wicket, and GWT. Typically these applications host the view code on the server, where it is rendered and delivered to the client (web browser). Click a link or submit a form in your browser and it submits a request to the server, which does the requested work and builds a new view, refreshing the entire display in your client.

Leftovers

Hardware

• The Nintendo Entertainment System or NES is one of the most famous video game consoles ever made, and it has just turned 30. Why are we celebrating NES 30 years later? The answer is simple: because it’s still relevant.

• If Dell-EMC merger was not enough for the tech world to digest, Western Digital shook the world with the largest acquisition in the storage space. The hard drive major is acquiring flash-based storage device player SanDisk for $19 billion.

• MICHAEL DELL has taken a sly dig at Microsoft, saying to CEO Satya Nadella that the prices of its hardware, such as the Surface, are “pretty high”.

• Speaking on stage during an interview with Nadella at Dell World 2015, Dell’s comments came in response to a question regarding whether Microsoft and Dell now see one another as rivals as both have expanded to offer products that they were not first renowned for.

Health/Nutrition

• From keeping pink slime out of school lunches, to demanding labeling to show which of their foods are genetically modified, Americans are learning to raise their voices when it comes to what they eat. That activism generally focuses on the consumer end of things, where most of us mainly are, but there’s a growing awareness that food is not simply a product, it’s a system, and it starts for many foods at the farm.

Security

• Serious weaknesses in the Internet’s time-synchronization mechanism can be exploited to cause debilitating outages, snoop on encrypted communications, or tamper with Bitcoin transactions, computer scientists warned Wednesday.

• A nonprofit effort aimed at encrypting the entire Web has reached an important milestone: its HTTPS certificates are now trusted by all major browsers.

• The service, which is backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco Systems, and Akamai, is known as Let’s Encrypt. As Ars reported last year, the group will offer free HTTPS certificates to anyone who owns a domain name. Let’s Encrypt promises to provide open source tools that automate processes for both applying for and receiving the credential and configuring a website to use it securely.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flew to Moscow on Tuesday evening to thank Russia’s Vladimir Putin personally for his military support, in a surprise visit that underlined how Russia has become a major player in the Middle East.

• It was Assad’s first foreign visit since the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011, and came three weeks after Russia launched a campaign of air strikes against Islamist militants in Syria that has also bolstered Assad’s forces.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A modern diesel car pumps out more toxic pollution than a bus or heavy truck, according to new data, a situation described as a “disgrace” by one MEP.

• The revelation shows that effective technology to cut nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution exists, but that car manufacturers are not implementing it in realistic driving conditions.

• Diesel cars tested in Norway produced quadruple the NOx emissions of large buses and lorries in city driving conditions, according to a report from the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research. A separate study for Transport for London showed that a small car in the “supermini” class emitted several times more NOx than most HGVs and the same amount as a 40-tonne vehicle.

• The Chinese are the imperial masters now. Cameron begs them to build a nuclear power station for which the British state guarantees it will pay double the market price for electricity produced, for twenty years. And a government which has just announced the extension of thought crime to the expression of non-violent or anti-violent thought deemed “extreme”, has no locus to talk about human rights, a concept at least as alien to Teresa May as it is to the Chinese Communist Party. Britain has its own war criminals like Blair and Straw running around, immune and very wealthy.

Finance

• JOHNSON-HUSTON: You are confusing an economic status of someone with their character, and people make mistakes in life, but you know what? My mother loved me and what you put forth was that people who are in these situations, that they’re abusing their children. I know people who have been abused. I was not abused and my mother did the right thing by me which was to put me in a more stable environment–

• Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley attacked Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for supporting progressive income tax rates to fund government investments, falsely claiming that additional tax cuts for the wealthy are a better method of increasing tax revenue.

• According to Boscariol, Canada has been signing a “spaghetti bowl of trade agreements” and joining trading blocks for the simple reason that lots of other countries seem to be doing it. “If we don’t, we will lose preferential market access that other countries are getting by way of these deals. So we’ve got to be at the party,” Boscariol says.

• Wisconsin Republicans have been caught in the spin cycle with their latest attack on the state’s independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Board (GAB), which oversees elections and ethics.

• The GAB, which is led by a board of retired judges appointed by the governor, has been widely regarded as a national model for nonpartisan election administration. But this week the Republican-led legislature seeks to dismantle it as payback for investigating Governor Scott Walker.

• “Political payback” doesn’t poll well, so Republicans have tried advancing a series of disingenuous arguments to justify the attack on the GAB: they say the GAB accepted “Mickey Mouse” on recall petitions (it didn’t), that the Walker probe had no legal basis (it did), that the board wasn’t informed of the staff’s work on the John Doe (it was), and an array of other false assertions.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Got that? Bill Gates is incredibly rich because of his aptitude and attitude; the government’s willingness to arrest anyone who infringes on the patent and copyright monopolies it gave him has nothing to do with his wealth. We’re supposed to also ignore all the other millionaires and billionaires whose wealth depends on these government-granted monopolies.

• And we should ignore the Wall Street boys who depend on their banks’ too-big-to-fail insurance, or on the fact that the financial sector largely escapes the sort of taxation applied to the rest of the economy. And we shouldn’t be bothered by the fact that Jeff Bezos got very rich in large part from avoiding the requirement to collect sales taxes that was imposed on his brick-and-mortar competitors. And we need not pay attention to the tax scams that allow for much of the wealth of the private-equity crew.

• Following the bipartisan “John Doe” investigation into campaign finance violations by Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin Republicans are out for revenge. And the Kochs have their back.

• This week, the Wisconsin state legislature will take up a trifecta of bills that will undermine the state’s long traditions of clean and transparent government.

• One bill will gut the state’s campaign finance laws and retroactively decriminalize the secretive campaign finance schemes that Walker engaged in during the recall elections, opening the doors to new levels of dark money in state elections.

• Another bill will cripple the the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board–considered a model for other states–and turn it into a toothless, partisan agency. The board of nonpartisan retired judges will be replaced with partisan appointees that are guaranteed to gridlock (like the broken Federal Elections Commission), and gives the legislature power to cut funding for an investigation that it doesn’t like.

• Sixty one communities in Wisconsin, including some in the most conservative pockets of the state, have passed referendums expressing opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United and declaring money is not speech. Poll after poll has shown that both Republican and Democratic voters want less money in elections and stronger donor disclosure laws.

• Wisconsin politicians, though, are opening the floodgates to an unlimited flow of secret money.

• Fox News (10/14/15) reported last week that Cuba has sent Gen. Leopoldo Cintra Frias and hundreds of troops to Syria to assist the Russian and Assad governments in “operating Russian tanks.” This explosive claim was soon echoed by James Bloodworth in the Daily Beast (10/16/15) and subsequently spread widely on social media.

• A Cuban troop presence in Syria would be a blockbuster story indeed—undermining the easing of tensions between Cuba and the United States while serving as a huge embarrassment for the Obama administration, which has spent much political capital restoring relations with the socialist island nation. There’s only one problem: The story is looking increasingly bunk.

Censorship

• On Monday afternoon, members of the European Parliament’s LIBE Committee will vote on the Dati report on the “prevention of radicalisation and recruitment of European citizens by terrorist organisations”. This report contains dangerous provisions, which aim to make online platforms and hosts responsible for the distribution of messages glorifying terrorism, creating a high risk of pre-emptive censorship. Such provisions severely threaten European citizens’ freedom of speech.

Civil Rights

• This is the party symbol of Paribiy’s Social National Party, in case anybody doubts me. It is perfectly clear what Mr Paribiy stands for. That the Royal United Services Institute invites him to spread his views in the heart of Whitehall, says a great deal about the position of the right wing British establishment. Today, the British government proposes new legislation to close down mosques and bookshops deemed extreme, even if they advocate against violence and do not break the law. These are dangerous times – and the danger is from the right.

• A British woman who was working as the Iraq director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) has died in an Istanbul airport, the Foreign Office has confirmed.

• Former BBC journalist Jacky Sutton, 50, is understood to have been found dead in a toilet at the city’s main airport. The circumstances of her death are as yet unknown. Local media reported it appeared that Sutton, who was travelling to Irbil, northern Iraq, had killed herself after missing a flight connection, a claim colleagues said was unlikely.

• The fact that IWPR accesses direct first hand knowledge of what really happens during conflicts, almost certainly holds the key to the death of Jackie Sutton. She was killed for something she knew. The official Turkish story that she killed herself in the airport in despair at missing a connecting flight, is risible.

• The National Rifle Association is promoting an article that suggested “radical” Democrats will attempt to confiscate firearms in the United States and trigger a civil war where “the survivors of the Democrat rebellion” are ultimately hanged.

• In an October 17 post, conservative gun blogger Bob Owens claimed that if the “radical left” attempts to “impose their ideas on the American people” — which Owens claims includes gun confiscation — “it would end poorly and quickly” for them after they are confronted by “armed free citizens.”

• Earlier this month, I wrote about a landmark lawsuit filed by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) against the Central Intelligence Agency seeking information about possible war crimes committed in El Salvador during that country’s civil war. Over the weekend, someone broke into the office of Angelina Godoy, the center’s director.

• “Her desktop computer was stolen, as well as a hard drive containing about 90 percent of the information relating to our research in El Salvador,” the center said in a statement today.

• JJ: I think it’s interesting that California law enforcement, who will now have to record race/ ethnicity data on stops and what happens after that, are sort of complaining–well, some of them, anyway–“This will cause us to racially profile. We didn’t do it in the past, but now if we have to actually report race and ethnicity of the people we arrest, that will lead us to think about it in a way we weren’t thinking about it before.” There’s always a kind of push back on the collection of information, but it seems to me that from reporters’ perspective, and policy advocates’ perspective, more information ought to be non-controversial, in a way. We ought to all be able to be behind more sunlight.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The European Parliament will vote next Tuesday the text on Net Neutrality. Following months of trialogue negotiations, during which the Council has sought to undermine all the provisions in favour of Net neutrality, an unsatisfying compromise has been reached. The final vote on 27 October during the plenary session shall set out the rules that will be applied in France and in all other Member States. In April 2014, the European Parliament had voted a text with very strong provisions in favour of Net Neutrality. Such a vote had been possible only thanks to the important mobilisation of European citizens.

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