● 01.19.16

● Links 19/1/2016: qBittorrent 3.3.2, Manjaro Linux 15.12

Posted in News Roundup at 10:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Recently I found myself thinking back to when I first started using Linux, roughly thirteen years ago. Back then, I was dual-booting with Windows because Linux was merely a curiosity for me and something interesting to explore. Today, I use Linux exclusively.

• It’s not only my go-to platform, I simply couldn’t imagine using anything else. In this article, I’ll explore some things I miss about using Windows. This isn’t to say I miss Windows, because I honestly don’t. But there are elements of the Windows experience, that I’ve found myself missing lately.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Whenever posting news items about the X.Org Foundation, it’s common to routinely see a few comments about “let X.org die already!”, “Wayland is the future!”…

Applications

• Earlier today, January 19, the qBittorrent open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems has been updated to version 3.3.2.

• Today, January 18, ownCloud Community Manager Jos Poortvliet informs us about the work that the ownCloud developers will do shortly for the Activities and Notifications apps of the self-hosting cloud server.

• Fedora contributor and NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel writes on his blog about an important feature that is currently missing from the NetworkManger network connection management software used in hundreds of GNU/Linux OSes.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments/WMs

• It looks like January 18 was a good day for free software releases, and in this article, we would like to inform our readers about the availability of the third maintenance release for the Enlightenment 0.20 open-source desktop environment.

Distributions

• The GParted development team was happy to announce today, January 18, the release and immediate availability for download of the GParted 0.25.0 open-source partition editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Reviews

• The latest release of the Linux distro now called “Depth OS” deserves serious consideration. It is fast, reliable and innovative, with an impressive homegrown desktop design dubbed “Deepin Desktop Environment,” or DDE.

• Depth OS has a bit of an identity problem. It’s not well known outside Asia and Europe, but that’s not the major cause of confusion.

New Releases

• Rescatux developer Adrian Raulete today (January 18) informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download and testing of the fifth Beta build for the upcoming Rescatux 0.40 Debian-based Live CD targeted at system rescue operations.

• A few minutes ago, on January 19, 2016, the Zorin OS developers were extremely happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming Zorin OS 11 computer operating system.

• Being based on Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Zorin OS 11 will be released later this year with a completely revamped desktop environment. The fact of the matter is that the entire Zorin OS experience will be overhauled with a new look and feel, new tools, and much more.

• Just a few moments ago, January 18, SystemRescueCd developer François Dupoux proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of SystemRescueCd 4.7.1.

• SystemRescueCd 4.7.1 comes right after the announcement of the GParted 0.25.0 free and open-source partition editor software, which is now integrated into the system recovery Live CD. Additionally, the first maintenance release in the SystemRescueCD 4.7 series updates the FSArchiver filesystem archiver tool for Linux to version 0.6.21, improving support for XFS file systems.

Arch Family

• We are happy to announce our fourth update for Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

• With this update, we renewed our our manjaro-desktop-settings packages, added KDE Framework 5.18, KDE Apps 15.12.1 and some newer Deepin 12.15 packages to our repositories. As usual Mesa, SQLite, Hasekell and Python packages got updated, new configs for the 4.4 kernel series and a fix for Plasma Desktop. We also updated our printer-stack, fixed some issues in QT5 and espeak and added some needed firmware to our manjaro-firmware package.

• The Manjaro community, through project leader Philip Müller, proudly announced today, January 18, the general availability of the fourth stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) series of operating systems.

Red Hat Family

• If you’re going to really make use of a cloud to its full potential, you need DevOps tools. And one of the best of these tools has just gotten a serious makeover: Ansible 2.0.

• This is the first major release of Ansible since Red Hat bought the company in October 2015.

• Ansible brings to the Red Hat‘s OpenStack-based OpenShift cloud an agent-less cloud management approach. Ansible is not, however, OpenStack specific. It can work with, to name but a few, VMware, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

• Like most DevOps programs, e.g., Chef, Juju and Puppet, Ansible doesn’t require your IT crew to be coding samurai. It’s designed to make it easy to automate cloud deployment and configuration to rolling upgrades.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today, January 19, Mr. Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical sent us his daily report to inform all Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Phone users about the latest work done in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-9 software update.

• The Ubuntu Edge was an incredible concept, and Canonical wanted to make something really unique. It didn’t happen, but the technology has progressed sufficiently to get to the level of what the company wanted to build in 2013.

• The second largest telecommunications firm in the US, AT&T, has chosen to move to Canonical, the maker of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, for its infrastructure needs.

• The company said in a media release on Monday that it was moving to Ubuntu “as part of its effort to drive innovation in the network and cloud”.

• On January 18, Canonical’s Rae Shambrook has shared with us some examples and thoughts on the upcoming design that will be implemented in Ubuntu, based on the company’s new Suru visual language.

Devices/Embedded

• This is going to be a tiny post (pun intended). The recent announcement of piCore Linux 7.0 caught my eye — I have been meaning to try Tiny Core on the Raspberry Pi. The fact that they now have one distribution which will run on both Pi 1 and P 2 hardware was just the impetus I needed to actually download it and give it a try.

• First, what is Tiny Core Linux? It is one part of The Core Project, which produces very, very small Linux distributions. Their smallest distribution is about 10MB, a size I haven’t seen since the days when I was loading 7th Edition Unix on a Motorola 68000-based system. The distribution is modular, so it is easy to add extensions.

• Our Oz readers attending the forthcoming linux.conf.au 2016 shindig in Geelong might like to catch Andrew Tridgell’s presentation on “Helicopters and Rocket-Planes”, which will include a look at our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane.

• As regular readers know, Linux guru Tridge has been working on the custom ArduPilot parameters for the vehicle’s Pixhawk autopilot, seen below with our Raspberry Pi rig during an avionics rejig in 2014.

• iCracked’s “Ocean” is a tiny battery powered microserver and power pack that comes with Debian but also supports Android, Raspbian, and other Linux builds.

• You might call iCracked the “Uber” of the iOS device repair market. Founded in 2010, the company has since grown into a network over 4,000 “certified iTechs” located in a dozen countries, and claimed to be “the world’s largest on-demand repair and trade-in network for iOS devices.”

Phones

Android

• If you want proof that Android is the operating system of emerging markets, look no further than Indus OS. The company, formerly known as Firstouch, is tweaking the Google-run operating system to the unique demands and culture of India. And it’s raised $5 million in fresh funding to push on with its lofty target of reaching one billion emerging market users.

• Bluboo is to release its Xwatch Android Wear smartwatch this February, according to its blog. What’s more, the Chinese-built smartwatch has been reported by GizChina to cost just $99.99.

• It’s claimed that the Bluboo Xwatch will pack a 1.2GHz processor with 4GB of storage and a 1.3-inch, 360 x 360 pixel display. That compares to the Moto 360′s 1.56 inch, 360 x 330 screen, and it doesn’t seem as if the Xwatch suffers the ignominy of the flat tyre. At 9.8mm the Xwatch also claims to be thinner than the likes of the Apple Watch (10.5mm), as well as the Moto 360 (11.4mm).

Free Software/Open Source

• Parker Abercrombie is a software engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he builds software to support Mars science missions. He has a special interest in geographic information systems (GIS) and has worked with teams at NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy on systems for geographic visualization and data management.

• Parker holds an M.A. in geography from Boston University and a B.S. in creative studies with emphasis in computer science (which he swears is more technical than it sounds) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In his spare time, Parker enjoys baking bread and playing the Irish wooden flute.

• Every package is a little different—some run on different operating systems than your home machine, some have different dependencies, some expect a certain minimum level of technical expertise. Some are crazy-easy, like LibreOffice or WordPress. Some are much more challenging due to factors like high complexity, lots of moving parts, lots of dependencies, or that the community’s developers haven’t yet gotten the installers built like they want to. But as someone who’s looked at a lot of different packages out there can tell you, there are some pretty common lessons learned that you can—if you’re wise—learn from the easy way (by reading them here) rather than the hard way (wrestling with that installation at midnight when you should be doing something else).

• Kubernetes and Docker are the latest buzz words in the IT sector. Businesses and IT enthusiasts alike are clamoring to learn more about containerization.

Licensing

• Remix OS is an Android based desktop operating system. A recent post about Remix OS on the Linux Homefront Project blog charges that Remix OS has violated the GPL and Apache licenses.

Leftovers

• The Blue box was designed in 1972 by Jobs’ close friend and future co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. Marketing man Steve Jobs came up with the idea of selling those boxes to the public. They even made around $6000 but they had to give up the idea of Blue box venture eventually.

Security

• Dr.Web, a Russian antivirus maker, has detected a new threat against Linux users, the Linux.Ekocms.1 trojan, which includes special features that allow it to take screengrabs and record audio.

• Discovered four days ago, Linux.Ekocms is only the latest threat targeting Linux PCs, after the Linux.Encoder ransomware family and the Linux XOR DDoS malware had caused a large number of issues last autumn and put a dent in Linux’s status as impermeable when it comes to malware infections.

• Security researchers from Perception Point have uncovered a new zero-day in the Linux kernel that affects both the Linux operating system and the Android mobile OS. Successful exploitation of this flaw (CVE-2016-0728) gives attackers root access to the impacted devices.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Speculation, of course. There may be an explanation for the boats’ misnavigation as simple as a young sailor’s human error. But the science suggests at least one other reason, with significant repercussions for years to come.

• It’s not at all surprising that this nonsense is coming from a megalomaniacal lunatic like Trump. What’s disturbing, however – although not the least bit surprising – is that a more sophisticated version of this is coming from the frontrunner on the other side of the partisan divide. While paying lip service to the Obama administration’s “achievement” in securing the nuclear deal – and now the release of the five Americans held by Tehran – Hillary Clinton has proposed undoing all that by imposing new sanctions on Iran…

• The achievement of “implementation day” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), when for both sides the central elements of the nuclear bargain went into operation on Saturday, means that it is going to be a fact of life in global and regional politics for many years. But will it have a profound impact on regional politics?

• That is the argument both the Barack Obama administration and US allies in the Middle East who have opposed it have made in the past.

• While Washington has said the agreement makes it more likely that Iran will eventually come to terms with its neighbors, Israel and Arab states have advanced precisely the opposite forecast, suggesting it will inevitably cause Iran to be far more aggressive and uncompromising.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Human beings have not just started to leave a unique geological stratum that will announce their existence long after the species has been extinguished. They may have altered a climate cycle that has been stable for millions of years and even cancelled – or certainly postponed – the next Ice Age.

• Andrey Ganopolski and colleagues from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany report in Nature that they took a look at the conditions that determined the geologically recent cycle of Ice Ages.

Finance

• China’s economic growth in the fourth quarter slowed to the weakest since the financial crisis, adding pressure on a government that is struggling to restore the confidence of investors after perceived policy missteps jolted global markets.

• Concerns about China’s policy making ability have shot to

• the top of global investors’ risk lists for 2016 after a renewed plunge in its stock markets and yuan currency CNY=CFXS stoked worries that the economy may be rapidly deteriorating.

• After being a major locomotive of international growth for decades, China is locked in the midst of a protracted slowdown, leaving the United States as the only main driver of the global economy.

• The vast and growing gap between rich and poor has been laid bare in a new Oxfam report showing that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population.

• Timed to coincide with this week’s gathering of many of the super-rich at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, the report calls for urgent action to deal with a trend showing that 1% of people own more wealth than the other 99% combined.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Sanders surge and the accompanying Clinton campaign angst has generated a slew of press reports pondering the prospect of yet another doomed presidential run by the former secretary of state. As a Friday Washington Post headline read, “Clinton’s lead is evaporating, and anxious Democrats see 2008 all over again.” A Saturday New York Times report similarly stated that the Clinton camp has become “unnerved by the possibility that Mr. Sanders will foment a large wave of first-time voters and liberals that will derail her in Iowa, not unlike Barack Obama’s success in 2008, which consigned Mrs. Clinton to a third-place finish.”

• Mainstream Democrats breathed a sigh of relief in October when Hillary Clinton dominated the first debate with Bernie Sanders — but after Sunday night’s debate, they’re probably hyperventilating. Or ought to be.

• The Sanders surge in the Democratic primaries, which suggests he’s on the verge of beating her in the first two states and closing in on her nationwide, was mirrored in the way he ate her lunch Sunday night. And, for good measure, gobbled up her breakfast and dinner, too.

• Hillary Clinton’s goal was clear — to make the point that she’s the serious and sober candidate and Bernie Sanders is a pie-in-the-sky fantasist. Indeed, Sanders more than once said he wanted “revolutionary change.”

Censorship

• With pornography being easily accessible nowadays, telecom companies are mulling over the possibility to offer parents a censorship tool in order to keep check on their children’s online behaviour.

• As per the Economic Times report, telecom companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, Telenor and Reliance Jio Infocomm are considering a plan that will give consumers options either to choose or bar access to porn sites.

• Telecom companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, Telenor and Reliance Jio Infocomm are said to be considering a plan that will make consumers responsible for barring access to porn sites by offering them a censorship tool.

• Arthur MacMillan, Tehran deputy bureau chief of international news agency Agence France-Presse, told the Telegraph YouTube is working as normal over a Wi-Fi connection, although Twitter and Facebook are not.

• Muslim organizations in the United Kingdom told the paper that they have repeatedly alerted Facebook and Twitter to abusive content but the social media giants did nothing about it.

• It’s unclear what kind of speech Facebook will specifically be targeting with this new initiatives. Specifically, the recent rise in hate speech in Germany has been as a result of the Syrian refugee crisis, over a million of whom are set to be coming to the country in the coming year.

• The venture is called the “Online Civil Courage Initiative” and although it is based in Berlin and supported by the German ministry of justice and consumer protection, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that it will be the London-based think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue leading the initiative.

• Reports in the Russian media last week have sparked fears regarding censorship of theatre productions by the Ministry of Culture.

• Since October 2015, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project has recorded a total of 40 verified violations against press freedom in Ukraine, six of which took place in Crimea. Of these reports, 17 included a physical assault or an attack to property, showing just how unsafe the country is for many media workers. To break this number down further, seven violations were physical attacks on journalists only, six were solely damage to journalists’ property and four included a mix of both.

• “State and non-state actors alike are undermining the freedom of the press in Ukraine, including Crimea,” Hannah Machlin, Index’s Mapping Media Freedom project officer, said. “Clashes in the eastern region of the country, along with blocked access to local government meetings, frequently incite threats against media workers, including arrest, harassment, violence and even death, all of which set a disturbing precedent for the country as a whole.”

• Pakistan has removed a three-year ban on YouTube after the video-sharing website launched a local version that allows the government to demand removal of material it considers offensive.

• Pakistan has this week lifted a three-year ban on YouTube, days after customized versions of the video streaming site were launched across the region.

• The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom said, in a statement to Reuters, that under the new version of YouTube the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority will be able to ask for offending material to be blocked.

• There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.

Privacy

• Connected devices talking to each other and to humans could solve major global challenges and be a vector for global development, according to a new report by the UN International Telecommunication Union and Cisco Systems. However, issues remain, such as strategies to protect privacy, and interoperability between devices and systems.

• But I’m particularly interested in Bedoya’s reminder that the government targeted African Americans for surveillance as subversives in the wake of World War I.

• The government’s practice of targeting specific kinds of people, often people of color, as subversives continued, after all. It’s something J. Edgar Hoover continued throughout his life, keeping a list of people to be rounded up if anything happened.

• I’ve been thinking about that practice as I’ve been trying to explain, even to civil liberties supporters, why the current 2-degree targeted dragnet is still too invasive of privacy. We’ve been having this discussion for 2.5 years, and yet still most people don’t care that completely innocent people 2 degrees — 3, until 2014 — away from someone the government has a traffic-stop level of suspicion over will be subjected to the NSA’s “full analytic tradecraft.”

• While much of the focus in the past few years has been on surveillance conducted by the NSA for the US, it should be noted that many European countries do a ton of surveillance too — often with fewer restrictions (though they may not be as good at it). And while there have been some high profile legal attacks on the surveillance done by the UK’s GCHQ (a close partner of the NSA), CDT is noting that some little-watched cases in the European Court of Human Rights may have technically outlawed mass surveillance without most people even realizing it. It’s two separate cases in particular, Roman Zakharov v. Russia and Szabo and Vissy v. Hungary…

• The Freedom Act, which was signed into law in June and took effect on 29 November, restricted the NSA from indiscriminately collecting telephone metadata, instead requiring the agency to demand records from telecommunications companies on a case-by-case basis. Communications firms are, in turn, required to store the records for possible scrutiny by the NSA.

Civil Rights

• Since 2000, President Vladimir Putin’s regime has rolled back many of the civic freedoms Russians received in the 1990s after seven decades of Communist rule. The government has intimidated and demonized dissenters, and brought most of press under its control. The authorities have relentlessly pressured activists and NGOs that promote human rights, using both legislative and extra-legal measures.

• The Russian public appears at best indifferent toward human rights NGOs and their causes.

• Scores of Congressional Republicans took to Twitter on Monday to highlight their appreciation for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fight for civil rights for all. But since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling gutted much of the Voting Rights Act that King helped pass, their caucus has refused to move even bipartisan legislation to restore the law’s key provisions.

• Just 14 Republicans in the U.S. House have signed onto H.R.885, officially the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015, even though its lead sponsor is Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

• Peter and Mickey spend the hour in conversation with historian Laurence Shoup. Shoup’s new book, Wall Street’s Think Tank, is a study of the Council on Foreign Relations; Shoup describes the CFR as “the most influential private organization in the country,” and traces how it connects major U.S. corporations with government, academia, and media.

• For the first time since it was delivered 51 years ago, it is now possible to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in its entirety.

• Nobelprize.org released the rare recording of King’s 1964 address today on Facebook. Its release coincides with the 30th anniversary of the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States.

• King delivered the lecture on Dec. 11, 1964, in Oslo, Norway. The Prize was awarded for King’s nonviolent protests against racial segregation and economic injustice in the American South during the early 1960s. King accepted the Prize on behalf of the civil rights movement as a whole.

• As noted in the new book, Dark Money, by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Charles and David Koch have spent millions on public relations in the past few years to try to re-make their image as many Americans have grown increasingly concerned about their efforts to distort democratic elections to serve their corporate and ideological agenda.

• This week’s issue of the magazine focuses on that campaign, which has generated positive press for the Kochs for supporting the bipartisan “criminal justice reform” movement.

• The Kochs’ interests in certain changes to the law was exposed by CMD (the Center for Media and Democracy) last month, when CMD documented the substantial Koch-backed effort to change criminal intent laws that would make it harder to prosecute corporations and CEOs, like Koch Industries and the Koch brothers, for any financial or environmental crimes. (The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on criminal intent this Wednesday.)

• As Mayer notes, the Kochs have also secured positive press for a major grant to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) in 2014.

• A FORMER NAVY SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case.

• Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, expanded after Bissonnette agreed to hand over a hard drive containing an unauthorized photo of the al Qaeda leader’s corpse. The government has fought to keep pictures of bin Laden’s body from being made public for what it claims are national security reasons.

• The retired SEAL voluntarily provided investigators with a copy of his hard drive as part of an agreement not to prosecute him for unlawfully possessing classified material, according to the two people familiar with the deal.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Private copying levies? Surely a sexy topic of conversation, but also a very contentious issue.

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