● 12.08.15

● Links 8/12/2015: Chromebooks Rising, KDE Plasma 5.5

Posted in News Roundup at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• This article details the circumstances behind my switch away from proprietary operating systems and my switch to Linux. Like many, I switched out of frustration with other operating systems and not directly because of Linux’s open source model. I developed my passion for that after the switch was made.

• Christmas is nearly upon us and Linux might be a great gift to consider for your friends and family. But which Linux distributions are worth considering as Christmas gifts? Information Week has a helpful roundup of the best desktop distros for Christmas.

• New archive now available! 22 years of Linux Journal on one searchable archive. Normally $35.00, order yours today for just $27.50 (a $7.50 savings). No coupon code necessary. Savings offer is valid through December 11, 2015.

Desktop

• Linux laptops are more powerful and better for complex tasks. The best one for you is the one that does what you want: if you can find Chrome apps that meet your needs, then a Chromebook is perfect for you. If you need a full office suite, professional video, audio, graphics, or heavy-duty spreadsheet crunching, then you need a Linux computer.

• As the PC market continues its gradual decline, areas for growth are becoming few and far between, but the education world remains a rare area for computers makers to tap into. Over the past couple of years, no one has tapped into schools like Chromebook manufacturers. According to a new report from Futuresource Consulting, the (mostly) budget-priced notebooks that run Google’s Chrome operating system have gone from a statistical blip to the dominant player in the space in the time it’s taken a second grader to reach the fifth grade.

• According to a new report from Futuresource Consulting, Chromebooks now make up more than half of all devices in U.S. classrooms, up from less than 1% in 2012, NBC News reported.

Kernel Space

• Open source will dominate the next phase of enterprise computing — and the Linux Foundation’s growing ecosystem of infrastructure software projects will play a crucial role

• The Open Container Initiative, which was formed last June to set the future direction of container technology, has established its self-governance and new status as a collaborative project of the Linux Foundation, as of December 8. In an interview with InformationWeek, Docker’s lead representative to the initiative, Patrick Chanezon, chief developer advocate, said creating a self-governing body was crucial to maintaining cooperation among the competing members of the initiative.

• The Open Container Initiative was officially announced on June 22 as the Open Container Project, and it has been steadily evolving over the last six months. The Open Container Initiative (OCI) name first emerged in June, along with details about the organization’s efforts to help standardize containers.

• The Open Container Initiative (OCI), represented by a broad coalition of industry leaders focused on common standards for software containers, is today announcing its formalized technical governance structure to advance its mission while welcoming founding and new members.

• The intent to form the OCI was announced earlier this year with the goal to host an open source, technical community and build a vendor-neutral, portable and open specification and runtime for container-based solutions. The OCI is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Founding members, including nine new companies committed to the OCI include: Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Apprenda, AT&T, ClusterHQ, Cisco, CoreOS, Datera, Dell, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Infoblox, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Kyup, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Midokura, Nutanix, Odin, Oracle, Pivotal, Polyverse, Portworx, Rancher Labs, Red Hat, Resin.io, Scalock, Sysdig, SUSE, Twistlock, Twitter, Univa, Verizon Wireless, VMware and Weaveworks.

• Linux v4.4 will include a cool new feature contributed by Sascha Hauer of Pengutronix which propagates voltages set on a regulator to the regulators that supply it (taking into account the minimum headroom that the child regulator needs). The original reason for implementing it was to allow us to set voltages through simple unregulated power switches but the cool bit is that we can also use this to save power in some systems.

Graphics Stack

• With the upcoming Unity 5.3 game engine update, WebGL will become an official build target after being in a preview state since Unity 5.0.

• Rich Geldreich, the compression expert formerly employed by Valve and now working for Unity, has written a blog post covering the future of GPU texture compression.

• Rich has been back to writing a number of new posts about compression and his most recent one was a piece last night on the future of GPU texture compression.

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced earlier today, December 7, the immediate availability for download and testing of the third RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 11.1.0 3D graphics library for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Emil Velikov announced the release of Mesa 11.1-RC3 a short time ago with the latest bundle of bug-fixes. Mesa 11.1 Release Candidate 3 has a bulk of the fixes for the R600 Gallium3D driver, core Mesa, and the NV50 IR code. There are also a few i965, RadeonSI, Clover, and other fixes.

Applications

• Just a few minutes ago, December 8, the developers behind the qBittorrent open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client have announced the release of the first maintenance version of the stable qBittorrent 3.3 series.

• QEMU 2.5-RC3 was released today as the last final release candidate scheduled before the official release of QEMU 2.5.

• Some of the highlights for QEMU 2.5 include the Xen support code now supporting pass-through of Intel integrated GPUs, VirtIO-GPU now supports the 3D mode, Vhost-user now supports live migration, support for multi-queue in Vhost-user, support for network filters, TCG has improved system emulation performance for targets with software TLBs, record/replay support for TCG, and a variety of other changes including many x86 and ARM specific additions.

Proprietary

• Ziften today announced a new version of its flagship Ziften ZFlow for the Linux operating system. Ziften ZFlow delivers greater network visibility by providing full visibility, contextual intelligence, user behavioral analysis, and integration into previously deployed security tools. The integration with Linux offers visibility into the public cloud infrastructure that was previously non-existent and enables Ziften’s new Cloud Visibility Initiative. This effort helps secure cloud operations with the visibility that security professionals need to quickly identify and respond to potential threats and attacks. ZFlow is lightweight, meets IPFIX standards, and enables better east-west visibility to identify lateral movement of an attack within the data center.

Instructionals/Technical

• Get to grips with file access controls in Linux as we take “rwx” to the max.

Games

• It looks like Steam for Linux managed to move past another milestone, 1,700 games for the open source platform.

• It’s certainly one of the better games I have played on Linux thus far.

• As of today, there are 1,699 games on Steam compatible with Linux. That’s just one game short of a 1,700 of a significant milestone. But why the obsession with numbers on a platform traditionally associated more with servers and render farms and very rarely modern games? Because Valve has placed all its Steam OS eggs in one Linux basket and the adoption of the operating system in this market will ultimately seal the fate of what is perhaps the company’s biggest, not to mention riskiest, business venture.

• As the owner of the Valve the company behind Steam — the most popular online store for digital games — Gabe Newell saw Windows 8 as a threat to the freedom of the Windows software market. The idea of Windows being locked to installing software from a Microsoft-controlled store isn’t a pleasant one if your core business is to run a software store.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0 beta2. This version is the second public release of the new main digiKam version and is a result of the long development process by the team.

• This release marks almost complete port of the application to Qt5 and KF5 API. All Qt4/KDE4 code has been removed and many parts have been re-written, reviewed, and tested. Porting to Qt5 required a lot of work, as many important APIs had to be changed or replaced by new ones.

• Today, December 8, the KDE project will officially unveil the latest and most advanced version of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• We would like to try something new for the Kdenlive community: Kdenlive Cafés. These are one to two hour informal meetings on irc.freenode.net in channel #kdenlive. We might select certain topics for these Cafés but normally you can just chat about recent things in Kdenlive development, ask questions to developers and other users and talk about the progress of this great and free non-linear video editor.

• Today I will share with you a little bit more about the changes that Br-Print3D suffered these days…

• After I learned more about the VTK features, I was able to make the prism to visualize the 3D models.

• Digital photo management application for KDE and Linux digiKam has been upgraded to version 5.0 Beta 2 and is now ready for testing and download.

• Every meeting tends to start with the arrival of the participants, as did the Randa Meetings. Most people arrived by airplane, so either at the Geneva or Zurich airport, both of which are basically at the other ends of Switzerland. But fortunately Switzerland is a small country, so taking the train to Randa only took a couple of hours. Friendly helpers were at the airports to greet people and hand them out a day ticket, which allowed them to use most of the public transports in Switzerland without additional fees. The journey up to Randa is quite an interesting one, as from Visp on it is a rather steep trail up the mountains. As the region is also frequently visited by tourists, the trains have been built with that in mind, so people were able to enjoy a scenic panorama view.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I spent most of the previous week attending the Content Apps Hackfest in Madrid. The agenda was to work on GNOME’s content applications: Documents, Files, Music, Photos and Videos; to identify missing features and sore points; and raise the standard of the overall content experience in GNOME. Of these, I focused mainly on Documents and Photos.

Distributions

Reviews

• BunsenLabs Linux does a bang-up job of picking up where CrunchBang Linux left off.

• Developer Philip Newborough retired the popular minimalist distro earlier this year. In a world of feature-packed operating systems and bloated Linux distros, he felt his CrunchBang alternative served no further purpose.

• Literally, this has probably been the worst distro experience I’ve had this year. Some other operating systems simply refused to boot or such, but they did not frustrate me this much, did not give me false hope, and did not ruin my box too much. Netrunner Rolling 2015.11 did its best to completely obliterate any goodwill there could be.

• I don’t know why or how and when, but so far this autumn, both Plasma desktop failed miserably. Kubuntu Werewolf is a flop, all other Ubuntus are rather mediocre, and now this. Exactly the kind of thing that makes people forsake Linux forever. Luckily, I have a little more stamina, but after all my happy preaching about Plasma, well, I feel like an utter idiot. Moreover, the sheer inconsistency is absolutely maddening. Then, having a rolling distro is pointless if you roll into a disaster. Anyhow, 0/10. I’m out.

New Releases

• The policy is, once a first pacman -Syu becomes a major update, it is time for a new ISO so new users are not faced with a difficult first update. With new builds effecting over half of the KaOS repositories (currently at about 2100), that new ISO is more than due.

• CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is a Linux distribution specifically designed for digital forensics. It is based on Ubuntu.

• The latest edition is CAINE 7, code-named DeepSpace. It is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and, therefore, UEFI and Secure Boot ready.

• It comes with some new features, including booting into a read-only mode whereby all block devices are not writable, and a VNC server and client that allows remote control of a Caine 7 installation.

Arch Family

• If you’re an avid Linux user you probably know by now that it is no operating system for the weak at heart (well sometimes). The chances of you getting crushed when trying to install a Linux-based operating system or learning the usual curves in your first week are pretty high.

• Just a few moments ago, Philip Müller had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) computer operating system.

• It took us a while to prepare the install medias and to polish our graphical tools to get you the best Manjaro experience out there to come.

Ballnux/SUSE

• openSUSE developer Luca Beltrame started a new discussion on the openSUSE mailing list where he explains some facts regarding the future of custom themes for the KDE Plasma desktop environment used in the openSUSE Linux distribution.

• There are of course more updates, but nothing just jumped at me as being highly interesting this week. This must be because people have been preparing a lot for the openSUSE Asia Summit. You should always be on a lookout for local events near you – and make sure you join them.

Red Hat Family

• Open source software company, Red Hat, has launched its virtual training program in Asia-Pacific that aims to help bring online training and real-time courses on its technologies to customers, partners, and IT professionals, especially those in remote areas.

• Mícheál Ó Foghlú, Red Hat CTO for mobile recently engaged in a discussion with the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog as to why we have seen such exponential growth in Node.js at this time.

• Red Hat has stayed out of the public cloud provider role, but it’s wading deep into cloud management with CloudForms 4. Support for Microsoft’s Azure cloud has been added to its hybrid management approach, with services for additional cloud vendors on the horizon.

• RED HAT has announced the release of CloudForms 4, the latest version of its “manager of managers” across the hybrid cloud.

• The new version offers enhanced self-service, better container management and support for Microsoft Azure, following the two companies’ recent announcement of ‘preferred partnership’ in the cloud space.

• An online training offering designed to offer Red Hat customers, partners, IT professionals easy access to real-time training well-suited for remote geographies has launched.

• Open source software and solution provider, Red Hat has launched its ‘Virtual Training Program’ for the Asia Pacific region.

• The company says the goal of its new initiative ‘is to make access to training on Red Hat’s open source technology simple and quick, helping to eliminate the limitations of having to travel training in a single location and train more people on Red Hat technologies, to help prepare participants to meet the requirements for Red Hat certification.’

• Value Labs, involved in enterprise consulting and system integration services has announced its collaboration with US-based ‘Red Hat’ – provider of open source solutions, to offer business process management industry solutions to compete in the digital era.

• Business technology services and solutions provider ValueLabs here said it will collaborate with Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, to use Red Hat’s technology for offering business process management (BPM)-based industry solutions.

• Parent company for Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book estimates nearly ten years of time and $5 million in savings achieved with Red Hat CloudForms hybrid cloud management platform

Fedora

• Chapeau 23 “Armstrong,” a Linux distribution based on the Fedora 23 Workstation has been released and is now available for download.

• During the last weekend the FAD APAC in Singapore did happen and I have to say it was very successful. We completed the budget plan for next year in just one day. We also had some time to figure out why APAC did this year spent the budget not as planned and what we do with the left money. We want to spent some money for the upcoming BarCamp Yangon, which is the biggest tech-related event in Asia and some money we want to bring the indonesian Ambassadors together to give this community new life.

• Fedora elections are upon us once again, starting tomorrow. There’s one Fedora Council seat open, and I’ve decided to throw my, er, hat into the ring. I’ve put up the platform questions on the Fedora Community Blog, but also wanted to chime in here.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• FM Radio seems to have been forgotten as a feature on modern smartphones, but it was all the rage a decade ago. Now, developers are looking at enabling that function of Ubuntu phones that support it.

• Today, December 8, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has just sent his daily report for the day of December 7, 2015, to inform both Ubuntu Touch developer and Ubuntu Phone users about the latest work done for the upcoming OTA software updates.

• Ubuntu developers are planning to implement a default VPN solution into Ubuntu Touch that will be later made available in the regular Ubuntu desktop.

Flavours and Variants

• In this article, you’ll find a few screenshots from a test installation of Linux Mint 17.3 MATE. Screenshots from a test installation of Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon are available here.

• Linux Mint 17.3 MATE ships with the very latest edition of the MATE desktop, and that’s MATE 1.12, which was released on November 5 (2015). Figure 1 shows the login screen. Like the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon login screen, it features a slideshow of different backgrounds.

• The bottom line is, as I said at the beginning, MATE has come a long way from its beginning as a way to keep Gnome 2 alive. As I hope these examples have demonstrated, today’s MATE is powerful, flexible and highly configurable. It is no wonder that it has acquited a large and dedicated user base.

• Both Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” ship with the same improvements for several of core components and applications, such as Software Sources, which is now more reliable, can detects your location and starts its speed tests with mirrors near you, Driver Manager, which is now more robust, Update Manager, which can perform more checks, and The login screen features an on-screen keyboard and improved HiDPI support.

• Today, we have the pleasure of introducing our readers to a brand-new GNU/Linux operating system, called GalliumOS, based on the Xubuntu Linux distribution and tailored for Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.

• A few moments ago, December 8, the developers of the elementary GNU/Linux operating system, an Ubuntu derivative loved by the community for its gorgeous look and feel, have announced the migration of the distro’s icons to GitHub.

• Linux Mint 17.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable to use.

• This article shows how to enable UFW via its graphical interface and install FirewallD as a replacement for UFW. Keep in mind, however, that you only need to run one firewall application. So it’s either UFW or FirewallD, not both.

Devices/Embedded

• With a Raspberry Pi and as little as a couple of motors and a motor controller board, you can build your own robot. There is a vast range of robots you can make, from basic buggies held together by sellotape and a homemade chassis, all the way to self-aware, sensor-laden metallic stallions with camera attachments driven by games controllers.

• Need a cool gift idea? Hankering to build a robot army? These Arduino-powered robotics kits are affordable, expandable, and the perfect way to learn robotics OR conquer your enemies.

• An “AON” Kickstarter project is pitching a $4,500 and up, Pi-based industrial 3D printer with dual FDM extrusion heads and a 18 x 18 x 25-inch chamber.

• Montreal-based AON started as a 3D printer service provider, but is now switching to the hardware business after the owners became frustrated with the limitations of the dual-extrusion printers. Limited build sizes, high failure rates, and cracked and warped end products were said to be all too common.

• I did have a review lined up for this week but due to illness I haven’t prepared as well as I would have liked.

• Instead therefore I thought I would provide a list of Christmas present ideas and because many of them require the use of Linux they just about fit into the Everyday Linux User niche.

• With all of that said, first up are the comparison results in raw performance for the Pi devices compared to the Pentium 4 and Celeron CPUs from the NetBurst days… But before getting too far ahead, if you find these tests interesting along with my many other Linux hardware articles, consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip this holiday season.

• NXP automotive unit chief executive Kurt Sievers said in an interview that the combination will allow the company to assemble a range of discreet automotive applications into more complete systems running on top of Freescale processors. It propels NXP into new application areas in cars including powertrain, safety and body electronics, Sievers said, building on its existing leading positions in audio infotainment, security and vehicle networks. It also aims to build security into critical car systems to guard against hacker threats. NXP grew out of Dutch consumer electronics giant Philips, the co-developer of CDs and DVDs, and also had historic roots in Silicon Valley. Freescale was spun out of cellphone and walkie-talkie pioneer Motorola.

Phones

Android

• I freely admit I learned about this app from my wife. In fact, I saw a few nostalgic posts on her Facebook timeline and investigated where they came from. It turns out she had installed an app called Timehop. I normally wouldn’t write about something that at first glance seems like an ego-stroking shot of nostalgia, but I had so much fun looking at the posts it dug up, I couldn’t help myself.

• Sources also say that Google plans to launch a new Android One handset in partnership with an India-based smartphone manufacturer Lava. The phone is expected to cost less than Rs. 4,000, and Android 6.0 Marshmallow will almost certainly going to come pre-installed on that handset. As rumored recently, Sundar Pichai is also expected to give more control to companies which manufacture Android One devices, like Lava for example, which should make it easier for manufacturers. It is possible that there’s more to this event than Android One, but this is all the info we have at the moment. As a side note, Google has launched Android One project in India back in 2014, and up to today, Android One devices didn’t exactly meet expectations, let’s see what’s Google’s next step.

• Perhaps Tag Heuer initially made these watches scarce to drive demand. Or perhaps longtime customers are interested in owning the watch for the brand, rather than the technology. But either way, it’s interesting to see a smartwatch — particularly an expensive Android-powered smartwatch that can only be bought in stores — start to perform well.

• According to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report, despite an overall slowdown in smartphone shipments worldwide, the shipments of Android-powered will see an increase by 9.5 percent when compared to 2014. In 2015, nearly 1.16 billion Android-powered smartphones have been shipped globally. Buoyed by this growth, the ecosystem will account for a substantial percent of the global smartphone market pie – 81.2 percent by end of this year.

• Android or iPhone, that is the question. For die-hard Apple fans, the answer is clear. Despite the monopoly Apple seems to have on everything related to their devices, from apps to phone chargers, Apple fans are loyal. But the new features Verizon is rolling out to Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge may finally close that gap once and for all.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai is coming to India this month and is expected to spell out his vision for the coming year at an event on December 16.

• The invite reads, “At Google we believe that technology can change people’s lives for the better. Indians are coming online at an astonishing rate with affordable smartphones. These new users have a completely fresh view on what the Internet has to offer.”

• Last night I found myself clumsily thumbing a PSN message to a friend explaining that I couldn’t play Destiny right this second because I was on my way to get a haircut, silently cursing the terrible, overwrought, sluggish PlayStation app and its blurry-keyboarded lack of optimization for my iPhone 6S Plus. “I’d honestly settle for just a simple messaging app,” I sighed to myself.

• Adobe today announced Lightroom Mobile version 1.4 for Android devices. With this latest version, the photo editing app is now completely free — you don’t need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to download and use the app.

• Google’s Safe Browsing technology is now enabled by default on Android to protect mobile Chrome users from accessing phishing sites and web pages that harbor malware.

• Android 6.0.1 begins rolling out today, bringing with it a minor tablet layout tweak, the reintroduction of setting up “Do not disturb” to stop at the next alarm, and—far, far more important than either of those—the introduction and reinvention of a couple hundred emoji.

• A company that specializes in designing watches has released an Android Wear model you might actually wear to dinner. Fossil’s Q Founder smartwatch is now available on Google Play for $275 in leather (coming soon), with the stainless steel model priced at $295. Like the Tag Heuer Connected, it’s powered by an Intel Atom CPU rather than the Qualcomm chips used in most Android Wear models. Other specs include 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, 24-hour battery life and a 1.5-inch, 360 x 326 display (240 ppi) display. Sensor-wise, it packs an accelerometer, gyroscope and ambient light sensor.

Free Software/Open Source

• Recently, the company announced its first open source project, called Open Service Catalog Manager, which is cloud management software created by Fujitsu. The software was internally developed by Fujitsu and has been on the market for a while. Wolfgang Ries, Chief Marketing Officer Fujitsu Enabling Software Technology, told me that it can be used in both enterprise and service provider scenarios.

• I felt the need to write this opening paragraph due to a highly visible source code closing done by another company. We have no intentions, plans, thoughts or wavers in that direction. Furthermore, we consider contributions to be the least important benefits of Open Source Software.

• This is not to say that Linux and open source will always get off this easily. This time around, the creators of the ransomware made a crucial error. Who’s to say next go ’round they won’t make that error and find a vulnerability in an even more prevalent software to use. Say, for example, they find a vulnerability in Apache or BIND…that could spiral into a catastrophe. And considering some vendors (such as IBM) are so lazy that they cannot adequately get their software to function with SELinux (so much so, they advise users to disable the critical security layer), more and more vulnerabilities will be found. Linux is, in no way, immune to attacks. They will happen. But thanks to the very nature of the platform, overcoming such issues is far easier and expeditious than its proprietary counterpart.

• The Node.js Foundation is a community-led, industry-backed consortium created to advance the development of the Node.js platform. Node.js itself is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side web applications. It is used by thousands of organizations, including PayPal, GoDaddy, Joyent, and IBM, and is the runtime of choice for high-performance, low-latency applications. Node.js can be found in everything from cloud stacks and enterprise applications to mobile websites and the IoT.

• Jens Steube, the creator of the password cracking toolkit Hashcat, has announced that his tool and its derivates will from now on be made available under an open source license.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has just announced that Apache Kylin, an open source big data project born at eBay, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), “signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.”

• Before The Open Organization by Jim Whitehurst was The Open Organization by Philip A. Foster. While Jim admits that his book isn’t management theory (“I’ll leave that to the academics,” he says), Foster’s is unabashedly so. Published in 2014, The Open Organization is quite frankly the textbook on what both authors call a “new management paradigm.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox’s targeted sponsored tiles always seemed a little out of place for a browser that is essentially predicated on free, libertarian ideals. You can’t exactly blame Mozilla for trying, though. Since its inception, Mozilla has been entirely reliant on revenues from search engines. For years, Google paid Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars to be Firefox’s default search engine. In recent years, Mozilla has diversified its search engine defaults

• Mozilla has announced that it’s dropping a program everyone but Mozilla seemed to realize was a bad idea from the start. In a blog posting on Friday, the organization’s vice president of content services, Darren Herman, wrote that Mozilla has “made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.” The much disliked sponsored tiles won’t immediately disappear from users’ browsers, however. “Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.”

• This was the second time last week that Mozilla announced it was dropping (or wants to drop) one project in order to “focus” on something else. Last Monday, executive chairperson Mitchell Baker wrote in a memo that the organization is seeking to drop support of the popular Thunderbird desktop email client in order “to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact.”

SaaS/Big Data

• The NoSQL startup today announced Streams as the newest part of what the firm has branded the MapR Converged Data Platform. MapR joins fellow Hadoop spinners Hortonworks and Cloudera in the handy platform branding stakes, with Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Cloudera Distributed Hadoop (CDH).

• MapR, one of the three big vendors of the Hadoop open-source big data software, is today announcing MapR Streams, a new piece of software for sending many kinds of data around a company.

• MapR Streams is a type of publish-subscribe messaging system. It’s comparable to a tool like Apache Kafka

• Look at the data infrastructure at many companies, and you’ll still find silos of data that prevent culling the best possible insights with today’s tools. MapR, which is focused on Hadoop, has its eyes on that problem. The company announced its MapR Converged Data Platform, which integrates file, database, stream processing and analytics.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which is already the steward of more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has announced the availability of Apache CloudStack v4.6, the well-known software platform used for creating private-, public-, and hybrid cloud environments.

• PLUMgrid’s prime focus in recent years has turned to OpenStack. Lang commented that as organizations decide to use a private cloud approach, many are choosing OpenStack. While OpenStack SDN is PLUMgrid’s focus, Lang noted that his company will also aim to build products and services for adjacent areas. One such product is called CloudApex. It provides a map between the physical and virtual networking worlds, enabling organizations to correlate the two.

Databases

• We’re excited to release ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database, to the world. ZeroDB makes it easy to develop applications with strong security and privacy guarantees by enabling applications to query encrypted data.

• As announced earlier, I will try to publish weekly reports on contributing to the phpMyAdmin. Here comes the first one.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice and Thunderbird project could join forces in an effort to push for a singular solution.

• The Document Foundation announced that the first Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.4 branch is now out and ready for testing.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• On December 3 Apple has open sourced the Swift programming language on Swift.org. The language was first released (not Open Source yet) about the same time as iOS 8 and was created by Apple to make Mac and iOS app development an easier task. Swift is welcome as one more Open Source language and project but is too early to make a lot of noise about it.

• [...]

• For now Swift has no client-side (as Angular for JavaScript) or server-side (as Rail for Ruby, Django for Python) application frameworks. Exceptions are the proprietary Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks for Apple platforms only.

• For now Swift can only offer a very young set of core libraries.

• We have enough modern Open Source languages: Python, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Java just to mention the most recent ones. A lot of energy is required to create an ecosystem around a language.

• It is difficult to unbound Swift from Apple platforms since a lot of Open Source extensions for Swift still use proprietary Apple class libraries as NSString etc.

• Last week Apple’s open sourcing of Swift naturally saw the spotlight thrown over Apple’s open source pages. This included a paragraph that claimed Apple was “the first major computer company to make Open Source a key part of its strategy”. Unsurprisingly, this riled some members of the developer community as being disingenuous and untrue.

• But it may be a bit too proud. On its page celebrating open-source software, Apple originally claimed it was “the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy”.

• That claim will have come as some surprise to most major computer companies. While Apple has a long history of adopting open-source code for its own releases, most notably with the Unix basis of Mac OS X in 1999, it isn’t exactly the first mover in the field. And as for releasing its own proprietary code as open source, that’s something that it has been even slower on – certainly compared to arch rival Google, whose Android operating system is and always has been freely licensed.

• Ah, I don’t think so.

• Many older open-source programmers think, with reason, that’s nonsense.

• True, Apple has used open-source software for years, but that’s not the same thing as making open-source development “a key part of its strategy.” It would be more correct to say that Apple was the first major company to take advantage of open source.

• Dropbox users are petitioning the cloud storage giant to consider open-sourcing its iOS email app Mailbox, after announcing plans to shut it down in 2016.

• The famously proprietary and secretive cargo-cult Apple has been trying to copy Microsoft’s moves into the weirdy beardie world of Open Sauce. Needless to say, it has not quite got the hang of it.

• The Tame Apple Press trumpeted Apple’s move to make its Swift programming language available to the great unwashed claiming that it bought the company’s open source efforts to the forefront.

BSD

• To be clear, the BSDs are not Linux distributions. They are Unix-like, so they are similar to Linux, but they are their own family of open source operating systems with their own rich history. Unlike Linux with its multitude of distributions, the BSD family is much smaller; the big three distributions are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The small handful of other BSD distributions branch off from one of those projects, most frequency, from FreeBSD.

• DragonFly version 4.4 bring further updates to accelerated video for both i915 and radeon users, a new locale system, and a new default linker. Significant behind-the-scenes work has also been done, with symbol versioning, Hammer1 improvements, and other changes. Version 4.4.1 was the first release due to the late inclusion of OpenSSL update 1.0.1q.

• OpenBSD and PC-BSD got the review treatment today at Distrowatch.com and OpenSource.com, proving Linux isn’t the only game in town. Several rolling distribution topics arose as well with Dedoimedo fighting Netrunner 2015.11 from destroying a laptop and Jesse Afolabi looking at the best user-friendly distributions based on Arch. Elsewhere, the Mint 17.3 screenshots sprang up faster than a boot-up screen and Curtis Franklin Jr. put together a slideshow on 10 distros perfect for gifts.

• The OpenBSD project has long held a reputation for producing a secure operating system. The project boasts just two remote security holes reported over a span of about twenty years. It’s an impressive accomplishment for the developers and a good indication of why OpenBSD is so often trusted for security oriented tasks like running firewalls. However, the OpenBSD team has been steadily working on other projects too. The team behind OpenBSD also creates the widely used OpenSSH software which is used around the world by system administrators to remotely work on servers and securely transfer files. The OpenBSD project also spawned the LibreSSL software (a replacement for OpenSSL) following the Heartbleed vulnerability. In the latest release of OpenBSD we also saw improvements to the project’s lightweight and secure web server (called httpd), the introduction of the doas command (a replace for sudo), a new implementation of the file command and W^X support for i386 processors. The latest version of the operating system, OpenBSD 5.8, also switched to denying root logins in the default installation.

• Today, December 7, 2015, Justin Sherrill from the DragonFly BSD project, a BSD-based computer operating system, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of DragonFly BSD 4.4.

• mpi@ came with patch (sent to priv. list only currently), which adds a new lock for PF. It’s called PF big lock. The big PF lock essentially establishes a safe playground for PF hackers. The lock currently covers all pf_test() function. The pf_test() function parts will be gradually unlocked as the work will progress.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The lead developer of GNUstep, a GPL-licensed implementation of Apple’s Cocoa frameworks and toolkit, is considering a fork of the project.

• Martin Jambor at SUSE has sent out the latest set of patches for implementing support for the AMD-backed Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) inside the GNU Compiler Collection.

• These proposed regulations are meant to facilitate public reuse of works funded by Department of Education grants. Currently, as explained in the NPRM, grantees are allowed to make their federally-funded works proprietary. The Department of Education receives a special license to share the works with the public, but in practice it rarely does so. Worse, teachers and students absolutely cannot use them in freedom (except for those few that happen to be made free).

• Since the course materials are works of practical use, they should carry the four freedoms of free software, just as programs and manuals should.

• The proposal would require grantees to publish the works under an “open” license. In the case of software, they may be thinking of “open source”, which is not quite as strong as free; in the case of courseware, many “open” courses are not free. The flaw in the proposed specific rules is that they don’t require that the license permit redistribution of modified versions. Without that freedom, the works will be nonfree.

Project Releases

• After a 10+ year hiatus, the NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6, a combination of the old and the new.

• Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.

• Those of you expecting a huge raft of new features will probably be disappointed. Although we have included a number of new features, the focus of this release was to get the foundation established so that we can build on it going forward.

Licensing

• Free Software has been growing pretty much everywhere around the world, and so much so that we now face challenges nobody would have thought possible even ten years ago. One of these unexpected issues is the need for proper legal structures. Traditionally, only a handful of entities used to exist. They could be dedicated to one, large project or act as a hub for a “forge” or a set of more or less related projects: that’s the case with the Eclipse or the Apache Software Foundation. Others were one of kind: Software In the Public interest, SPI, is handling funds for large and small projects and has been doing so for well over 15 years. The Free Software Foundation both directly and through the Free Software Conservancy has also hosted many FOSS projects developments, infrastructure and financial resources.

• GPLv2, first published in 1991, provides for automatic termination of the license in the event of violation, with no stated opportunity for cure. By the time of the drafting of GPLv3, the Free Software Foundation, steward of the GPL license family, had come to consider automatic termination to be an unduly harsh policy. GPLv3, introduced in 2007, formally retained automatic termination in its section 8 but moderated it in certain ways, including by providing for automatic reinstatement of the license for first-time GPLv3 violators who cure the violation prior to 30 days after receiving notice from the copyright holder. The precise wording of section 8 was drafted with German preliminary injunction procedure in mind.

• This is the latest instalment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works. In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Michael Lissner and Brian Carver of RECAP The Law.

• Famously, a few years ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so. As businesses adopt open source platforms such as OpenStack and Hadoop, they are complementing them with their own open source projects.

Openness/Sharing

• It’s been a little over a year since Ionic launched the alpha of its open source Ionic Creator platform which provides an HTML5 SDK to build cross platform, native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The company has recently released a number of updates to the platform adding new features, polishing existing ones, and fixing issues.

• An Indian-origin scientist has developed new, open-source 3D software that can track the embryonic development and movement of neuronal cells throughout the body of the worm. Although scientists have identified a number of important proteins that determine how neurons navigate during brain formation, it is largely unknown how all of these proteins interact in a living organism.

• Now it will be possible for the medical fraternity to track the growth and development of the brain in an embryo. An Indian-origin scientist from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has developed an open-source 3D software that can track embryo’s brain activity.

• Wio Link is a new open source product that aims to make it easy to develop Internet of Things products and services. The Wio Link is an ESP8266 based WiFi development board that is made specifically for creating IoT applications using virtualized plug-n-play modules to RESTful APIs with mobile apps.

• Using the Wio Link developers are able to build IoT applications with no hardware programming, no breadboard, no jumper wires, and no soldering. The people behind Wio Link claim that users can build IoT applications in three steps in about five minutes.

Programming

• Andrey Ponomarenko has announced his work on ABI-Tracker, a new open-source tool for tracking ABI changes of C/C++ software projects.

• Ponomarenko shared on the Fedora developer list this weekend about his aptly-named ABI-Tracker.

• Quick (rhetorical) question: how many of you either try your best to ignore Unicode, or groan at the thought of having to deal with it again?

Leftovers

• In case it wasn’t clear: I really dislike large open office spaces. (Not 2-3 person offices, but large industrial scale 20-100 person open office spaces of doom.) Valve’s was absolutely the worst expression of the concept I’ve ever experienced. I can understand doing the open office thing for a while at a startup, where every dollar counts, but at an established company I just won’t tolerate this craziness anymore. (See the scientific research below if you think I feel too strongly about this trend.)

• European Union antitrust regulators charged Qualcomm on Tuesday with abusing its market power to thwart rivals, putting the world’s number one mobile chipset maker at risk of a hefty fine.

• The accusations by the European Commission are the latest antitrust problems for the company as regulators in the United States, China, Japan and South Korea look into its licensing model and its dominant patents in mobile networks and devices.

Hardware

• My main issue is that modern systems are just plain noisy, often with multiple small fans whining away. I have worked to reduce this noise by using quieter components as replacements but in the end it is simply better to be able to put these systems in a box out of the way.

Health/Nutrition

• One of the cases was filed in Los Angeles on September 22, 2015 by 58-year-old Enrique Rubio, who used to work on farms in California, Texas, and Oregon. His job used to consist of spraying fields with the herbicide Roundup, which he is alleging caused his bone cancer in 1995. 64-year-old Judi Fizgerald in New York filed the other lawsuit. She used to work at a horticultural products company and was exposed to Roundup in the 1990s. She is attributing her diagnosis of leukemia in 2012 to the herbicide.

Security

• Being more patient isn’t all that hard in theory, but it’s really hard if you’re used to proving everyone wrong all the time. You just have to learn to listen. It sounds simple but for most security people it’s going to be really hard, one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. Let’s cover some examples.

• Today, December 7, 2015, Canonical’s Marc Deslauriers published details about new security fixes for the OpenSSL packages in all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.

• LetsEncrypt is an initiative being sponsored by several different organizations including Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation following from recent privacy discussions in various communities last year. The key goal is to provide free, easy encryption via free SSL certificates to any public website.

• Experts agree that security is paramount when it comes to containers. Yet how to properly secure containers is still a matter of some debate.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have consistently underreported the number of fatalities resulting from US drone strikes. Research conducted by Jeff Bachman, co-director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs Program at American University, compares fatality reports from both papers to more completely researched reports from City University London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism. While the NYT reported only two civilian deaths out of 81 drone strikes covered, TBIJ found that there were actually 26 civilians killed. Likewise the Post had reported one civilian death out of 26 drone strikes covered. TBIJ documented seven.

• When both the NYT and the Post covered 33 drone strikes that they reported caused civilian causalities, both claimed only nine deaths over the course of three different stories. TBIJ had found between 180-302 civilian deaths.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Every year, forest fires ravage Indonesia, causing massive environmental, social and economic devastation. This year’s fires are the largest in nearly 20 years, destroying three million hectares of land and causing an estimated $14 billion in losses related to agriculture, forest degradation, health, transportation, and tourism.

• Janine Jackson: Coverage of the upcoming UN conference on climate change has shifted to concerns about security in Paris and resulting clampdowns on activism. But before that, the conference itself was billed as pivotal on global action on the issue. Barack Obama recently declared the US global leaders in the fight against climate change–but is that really true, and what should we actually expect from the conference itself? Janet Redman is director of the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Janet Redman.

• The chemical known as perfluorooctanoic acid (also called C8, because of the eight-carbon chain that makes up its chemical backbone) has spread from the company DuPont’s plant into the drinking water of 80,000 people in West Virginia and Ohio. A 59-year old woman named Carla Bartlett has developed kidney cancer after drinking C8-contaminated water for over 10 years. Bartlett is the first of many personal injury and wrongful death claims stemming from the 2005 settlement of a class-action suit filed on behalf of the people who lived near this plant. DuPont’s attorneys presented their arguments stating that the company is not responsible for the tumor that Bartlett was treated for in 1997. Their defense is that the company’s employees did not realize that C8 was dangerous when Bartlett was exposed, even though there were internal documents indicating DuPont’s knowledge that the chemical posed risks to both animals and humans.

Finance

• When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that he will give away 99 percent of his personal fortune—now estimated at $44 billion—during his lifetime, he was lauded in newspapers and TV broadcasts from coast to coast. But few people noted that giving away his billions will still leave Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and newborn daughter Max, with at least $440 million to live on.

• Such vast sums of money are unimaginable to most of us. But according to a just-released report, “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” by the Institute for Policy Studies, the Facebook founder is merely one of the 400 wealthiest Americans, whose net worth is growing while they evade taxation and drive economic inequality.

• “The Forbes 400 provides a useful snapshot of the nation’s wealthiest individuals, an insight into a world most people will never witness firsthand,” the report said, as it lists some incredible comparisons that contrast the vast wealth held by a select few compared to average Americans. “The Forbes 400 also provides an insight into just how lopsided our economy has become: Just 400 people hold as much wealth as over 190 million.”

• Consider the following six bullet points from the report. The authors state they “believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration,” because, “the growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Appearing on Face the Nation, Republican frontrunner Trump told host John Dickerson that prior to the attacks, the wives of the 9/11 hijackers “knew exactly what was going to happen” and were flown “back to Saudi Arabia” days before the hijacked plane strikes.

• This is complete nonsense. As The Washington Post explained, “There is no support for Trump’s claims … virtually all of the hijackers were unmarried.” And anyone who followed news of the attacks, and the subsequent years-long investigation, ought to know that. But on Face the Nation, Dickerson didn’t flinch when Trump floated his latest 9/11 lie; Dickerson didn’t question Trump’s absurd claim.

• A Fox & Friends demonstration where children neutralized a gunman during an active shooter situation offered dubious advice to parents, as experts emphasize that confronting the gunman should be “a last resort.”

Censorship

• Democracy doesn’t just mean putting an X in a box once every four years — it also means allowing everyone to express their opinion, however rough and ugly it might be

• Pirate Bay’s original .org domain was suspended by EuroDNS a few hours ago, after the registrant failed to verify the contact details. Even though it’s no longer the main domain name for the site, the bookmark was still in use by many people as a redirect to Pirate Bay’s latest home base.

Privacy

• Notice how there’s no mention, in the headline or the lead, of the FBI? They’re the agency that will lead the investigation of the San Bernardino attack. That’s important because FBI has their own databases and the ability to obtain records from phone and Internet companies directly going forward (and already had, given reports from Facebook, before this article was written). The PCLOB report on the 215 phone dragnet showed that the FBI almost always accessed the information they otherwise might have gotten from the 215 dragnet via their own means. “[O]ur review suggests that the Section 215 program offers little unique value here, instead largely duplicating the FBI’s own information-gathering efforts.”

• But the real problem with this utterly erroneous article is that it suggests the “US government” can’t get any records from NSA, which in turn suggests the only records of interest the NSA might have came from the Section 215 dragnet, which is of course nonsense. Not only does the NSA get far more records than what they got under Section 215 — that dragnet was, according to Richard Clarke, just a fraction of what NSA got, and according to NSA’s training, it was significantly redundant with EO 12333 collection on international calls to the US, which the NSA can collect with fewer limits as to format and share more freely with the FBI — but there are plenty of other places where the FBI can get records.

• I was inspired by the Snowden documents to write a TCP injection attack detection tool. Powerful entities world wide are stock piling zero-days. TCP injection attacks can be used to deliver many of these attacks.

• Legislation requiring tech companies to report on terrorist activity on their platforms is likely to be revived, following concerns about the widespread use of Internet communications by terrorists.

• Legislation requiring tech companies to report on terrorist activity on their platforms is likely to be revived in the U.S., following concerns about the widespread use of Internet communications by terrorists.

• A proposed rule that would require companies to report vaguely defined “terrorist activity” on their platforms had been included as section 603 in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016.

• US PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA went on television at the weekend to talk up his administration’s efforts to combat terrorism, and to urge tech firms to help the government to protect citizens.

• In what’s been seen as an unusual move, Obama decided to reach out to America’s TV-loving masses and beam his anti-terror/smash encryption message straight to their living rooms.

• Computer programmers have developed software that can uniquely identify an individual by the way they type with a reported accuracy rate of 99.7%. This particular method of identification is the latest avenue of biometrics research and technology.

• This software works by analyzing minor variations in keyboard use. This is possible because every individual uses a keyboard slightly differently. These differences can be due to a number of reasons, ranging from the size of a person’s hands to the impaired use of a finger. All of these factors result in unique characteristics when typing, such as the length of time a key is pressed or the pause between hitting the “j” and the “o” keys. Each press of a key can be measured down to the millisecond. Taken together, an individual’s traits contribute to a unique typing signature that is virtually impossible to mimic without detection. Researchers have found that this signature also translates very similarly onto the use of touch-screen keyboards.

Civil Rights

• French police have made their Christmas wish-list, and it includes banning Tor and public Wi-Fi.

• As legislators debate new antiterrorism laws, police and security services have been studying how technology hinders their enquiries, according to French newspaper Le Monde.

• In the hours following the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris the French government declared a state of emergency, granting police sweeping powers to impose curfews and conduct warrantless searches.

• In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, France has enacted a three-month state of emergency, widening the powers of police and security agencies. It has done so with relatively little public debate about the deterioration of civil liberties.

• The Army has recommended that David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former CIA director who quit in a scandal three years ago, not face further punishment for having an affair with his biographer and providing her with top-secret materials, according to Pentagon officials.

• The final decision on whether to discipline Petraeus under military law rests with Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter. Although he could overrule the Army’s recommendation, such a move would be unusual.

• Oh, good lord, we’ve got a “thinker” on our hands. Seriously, that’s how he describes himself in the bio for his self-published book about psychopaths (based on his personal experiences rather than psychological research, natch). Only now he’s thinking about codes of conduct.

• Is there a problem with thinking? Nope. Is there a problem with this guy thinking? Not in particular. It sounds like he’s even pretty good at it when it comes to software. So what’s the problem?

• It’s the same problem that continually happens with people who define themselves as smart or as good thinkers: They forget about GIGO. They come to think of themselves as experts without having done any of the work.

• Peter and Mickey spend the hour in conversation with political author Chris Hedges; his latest book is “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.” The discussion covers issues from freedom of information to U.S. Middle East interventions, and the ideas of intellectuals from W.E.B. Dubois to Cornel West to Sheldon Wolin.

• Fox Business invited gun store owner Jan Morgan to respond to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims, including American citizens, from entering the United States. Morgan bragged that Donald Trump is “basically going to do what [she is] already doing at [her] gun range” by banning all Muslims from buying or renting guns.

• In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United. The landmark decision allowed for nearly unlimited funding of political campaigns by corporations. Arguably, the decision is one of the largest detriments to American democracy, as it essentially allows the “highest bidder” to buy members of office. American media have touched on the case in general. However, it has received minimal attention given the seriousness of its consequences.

• A recent Bloomberg poll revealed that 78% of Americans do not agree with the Citizens United decision and are in favor of the law being overturned. While a majority of Americans share this belief, corporate media failed to cover this story. The Huffington Post covered the story, however they were the only major news corporation to do so. This means that this poll was largely unshared with the general public.

• In New York state, citizens’ freedom is being put in jeopardy by part time, lack-luster public defenders. The right to an attorney is a basic right that should help people through the court system, however these lawyers are not giving their clients enough time or energy. Most people are showing up to their court dates without having seen their appointed public defender once. The five New York state counties that are fighting for better public defenders for the poor have finally won their argument with the state and are receiving “new funding and oversight to help the five counties upgrade the quality of legal representation” that people deserve.

• A major factor that deters girls from pursuing computer science is the perception that coders are mostly white and male, according to a recent Google-commissioned Gallup survey. That’s why non-profit organization Girls Who Code has partnered with mobile game-maker Pixelberry Studios to tell the story of a young girl coder in its flagship game, “High School Story.”

• The coder, named Gabriela, will be the first tech-related character featured in “High School Story,” a game that over 30% of high school girls in the U.S. have played, according to Pixelberry. The storyline is inspired by a group of Girls Who Code alumnae. In the game, Gabriela leads players on a mission that culminates at a hackathon, where the objective is to build a mobile app. Previous storylines on High School Story have addressed cyber-bullying and body image.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• One thing you can say for traditional broadcast media: They scale really well. If you put an analog signal on the air or on a wire with enough repeaters and amplifiers, it will serve every client that connects. That’s not the case with most of the network world, unfortunately. Sure we have multicast, but that’s not on an Internet scale — and the Internet is where the problems lie.

• First, let’s define multicast as used in IP networks. This is a method by which a single source stream can be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously, without increasing the load on the source itself. Thus, this functions much like an analog broadcast: You have a single source that a client can connect to at any time. The downside is that the client is a silent subscriber of the content and cannot control the stream; there’s no rewinding or restarting on a per-client basis. This is content broadcast over IP, and it’s what television networks use to distribute video streams through their networks, financial institutions to receive stock quotes, and so forth.

• Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just said the US should consider “closing up” the internet to curb radical extremism. Trump, a man that routinely claims everyone in charge of the US is stupid, believes that as president he could just call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet. Trump floated the idea at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight as a way to stop ISIS “jihadists” from recruiting Americans to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is so dumb it almost has us, too, at a loss for words.

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.