● 03.21.16

● Links 21/3/2016: PAYDAY 2 for GNU/Linux, PDFBox v2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Redox uses Rust for its kernel-level code to provide more memory safety considerations than C allows by default. But the project doesn’t simply rewrite Linux in a new language. Redox discards as much from Linux’s version of the Unix tradition as it keeps.

• As explained in the project’s wiki and design documents, Redox uses a minimal set of syscalls — a deliberately smaller subset than what Linux supports so as to avoid legacy bloat. The OS also uses a microkernel design to stay slender, in contrast to Linux’s monolithic kernel.

Desktop

• One of the most practical aspects of software is what it empowers us to accomplish. Software can help us with our daily lives, our work, education, and of course entertainment. Ideally, I’d love to suggest that we Linux users proudly avoid proprietary software as a matter of course. In truth, this isn’t entirely possible for everyone out there. Below are some applications that are incredibly difficult to quit.

• At the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet2016 conference on Saturday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden participated in a discussion regarding free software and security. He joined the talk via video conferencing from Russia.

• Edward Snowden told that he was able to disclose the secrets of American government and its projects of mass surveillance using free software. The event was being held in an MIT lecture hall and this statement drew a wide round of applause.

• Praising the likes of Debian, Tails, and TOR, he said — “What happened in 2013 couldn’t have happened without free software.”

• OS X and Linux are nowhere near as popular as Windows when we look at the PC market as a whole, but the two platforms are actually extremely popular with a certain crowd.

Server

• Web development used to seem so simple. You get a domain, set up a server, slap together some software, and you’re in business. And indeed, you often still can do that today. But, if you’re expecting to get lots of visitors at once, you need to understand the different types of “fast” that you’ll need to consider, measure and then optimize.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has honored the request to land the “objtool” stack frame validation support for the Linux 4.6 kernel.

• This new Objtool effort provides build-time object file validation for kernel stack frame correctness. This new objtool user-space utility is run at the kernel’s build time to analyze the resulting .o machine code, decode the instruction stream, and checks the interpreted instructions. Suspicious Assembly code patterns are then output with currently this objtool just checking frame pointer usage but other features are planned. Another early limitation is that so far, only x86_64 is supported.

• Many XFS file-system changes can be found in the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel release.

• Dave Chinner sent in the XFS updates over night for the Linux 4.6 merge window and it’s a heavier pull than normal.

• Tuxera has published a new stable version of their NTFS read-write driver for Linux.

• This new NTFS-3G Linux driver is marked as 2016.2.22 while the actual release happened just today (not in February as implied by the version number).

Graphics Stack

• Today, March 21, 2016, Nvidia has announced the immediate availability for download of an updated display driver for GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris operating systems, Nvidia 364.12.

• Well Nvidia dropped a bit of a big one today didn’t they! Nvidia driver version 364.12 is now out and brings in official Vulkan support, Mir support and Wayland support.

• NVIDIA’s 364 Linux driver series is now available and it’s pretty darn exciting!

Applications

Games

• How many Linux gamers are there? It’s tough to say. We don’t even know how many Linux users there are in general. Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey supposedly sheds light on the OS breakdown among gamers, and it appears to show Linux use declining. But Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey is misleading, obscuring the fact that Linux gaming is healthier than ever.

• Team17 really are getting more Linux friendly, and the latest game in the Worms series title ‘Worms W.M.D’ will be heading to Linux at release.

• The co-op shooter PAYDAY 2 is now officially available on SteamOS & Linux, yet another popular game!

• I’ve been waiting on this one as I am keen to play it to see what the fuss is all about. Being the bad guy is always more interesting than being forced to be the hero of everything most of the time.

• As some more exciting news to Linux gamers besides NVIDIA releasing a Wayland/Mir-supportive driver and mainline Vulkan support is the release of PAYDAY 2 for Linux.

• PAYDAY 2 is self-described as “an action-packed, four-player co-op shooter that once again lets gamers don the masks of the original PAYDAY crew – Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf and Chains – as they descend on Washington DC for an epic crime spree.”

Distributions

Reviews

• Black Lab Linux is supposed to be a distribution that focuses on being easy to use and having a consistent user interface, with the hope of attracting users new to Linux. Unlike many other distributions, it offers professional support (for a fee), and also offers computers for sale that have Black Lab Linux preinstalled. As is typical, the distribution by itself is offered as a free downloadable ISO file, so that’s what I tested here. I tested the 64-bit version using a live USB system made with UnetBootin; follow the jump to see what it’s like.

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, said developers are now targeting the company’s Ubuntu platform for “game changing” areas such as Network Function Virtualisation and Internet of Things.

• Last month, the company significantly boosted its convergence strategy, unveiling the first Ubuntu-powered tablet, from European vendor BQ, following earlier launches in the smartphone space.

Flavours and Variants

• Edubuntu is a version of Ubuntu Linux designed for schools, students, and folks generally interested in education. Formerly known as Ubuntu Education Edition, the operating system is based on Ubuntu, but includes a suite of apps aimed at teachers and students.

• The first version of the operating system was released in 2005, and the last major release came in 2014, when the developers decided to only offer new versions alongside Ubuntu’s LTS (Long Term Support) releases every two years instead of the more frequent releases which come out every six months.

• Jonathan Carter and Stéphane Graber are retiring as Edubuntu’s project leaders. After 14.04 they decided to move to LTS-only releases as they began working on other projects, but with 16.04 LTS due next month, they decided they can’t invest the resources to make a new release.

Devices/Embedded

• I have loaded and briefly tested both Raspbian and NOOBS on all of my various Raspberry Pi systems. The best news of this release is that the NOOBS installer now recognizes the Raspberry Pi 3 built-in wireless network adapter, so it is now possible to install from NOOBS on a Raspberry Pi 3 without having to use a wired network connection or a second wireless adapter.

Phones

Android

• Facing multiple Android security challenges in March so far, Google is issuing an unprecedented mid-month emergency patch update. The emergency patch is not, however, related to reports of a new Stagefright flaw but, rather, is a known Linux kernel vulnerability that Google was scheduled to fix.

Free Software/Open Source

• As I noted recently, the Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has been steadily advancing a number of important open source projects. Now, the foundation has announced the availability of Apache PDFBox v2.0, an open source Java tool for working with Portable Document Format (PDF) documents.

Animation

• Not exactly gaming news, but could be useful for developers. Dwango has obtained the rights to the animation software Toonz used by Studio Ghibli and plan to release an open source version named OpenToonz.

SaaS/Big Data

• According to a LinkedIn report on the 25 Skills That Could Get You Hired in 2016, cloud and distributed computing ranked as the most in-demand skill globally last year. LinkedIn has a 19-page report available on Slideshare that breaks down the most in-demand job market skills by country.

Databases

• Enterprises could save up to 90 per cent on licensing costs by moving away from incumbent proprietary databases to an open source alternative, according to Frank Fanzilli (pictured), independent board director at PostgreSQL vendor EnterpriseDB and board director of the Linux Foundation.

• Fanzilli, former global CIO at Credit Suisse First Boston, explained that banks have been adopting open source software, particularly Linux, since the 2008 crash in a bid to cut costs. Governments are also starting to trust open source to run mission-critical applications.

• But they won’t be able to do it for ever, says Frank Fanzilli of EnterpriseDB

Networking

CMS

• International media group Hubert Burda Media makes its Drupal 8 based Thunder Content Management System (CMS) available online as a free open-source platform for use and further development by other publishers. With this move, Burda joins forces with sector and industry partners including Acquia, Facebook, Microsoft, nexx.tv, Riddle.com and Valiton, aiming to develop the best open-source CMS platform for publishers. Burda believes that in today’s world, successful media offerings result from the right combination of quality journalism and technology expertise. For the media company, this meant future-proofing its Content Management System by developing Thunder, an open-source system based on leading-edge technology, now available online free of charge for use and continuous development.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• A decade later and Twitter is used by millions every day. Officially it’s a ‘micro-blogging’ service, but in the past 10 years it has become everything from an instant messenger, a news source and a dating site, to a tool of political subversion, a revolution in the way we watch TV together and so much more.

• [...]

• Perhaps donating Twitter to the open source community would give the company more time to concentrate on the real money-spinning aspects of the service – the training, the strategy planning, the support – because plenty of people make a living out of Twitter. It just isn’t Twitter itself.

Public Services/Government

• The US’ Federal Government is asking for public comment on a draft Federal Source Code policy. The policy will require new software developed specifically for or by the Federal Government to be made available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies. Part of this code is to be made available publicly.

• The city of Dortmund (Germany) is levelling the playing field for open source software solutions. The city in January stated that it accepts electronic documents in the Open Document Format (ODF). Do-FOSS, a free and open source software advocacy group in the city, welcomed the “landmark decision”.

• It may be five or ten years behind the curve, but the U.S. government has now declared its love for open source software — or what it calls open source software, at least.

Programming

• Apple has released Swift 2.2, the latest version of their mobile and server programming language. This version is the first official release that has been cotributed to by open-source developers, including contributions from 212 non-Apple contributors.

Leftovers

Science

• For Assane Gueye, a Senegalese cybersecurity expert based at both University of Alioune Diop in Senegal and University of Maryland in the US, sustainable innovation solutions could emerge from going beyond incubators as people share ideas.

• “Usually in Africa when we talk about infrastructure we always talk about money, it’s not true,” he said.

• If people have enough information about the technology, they can tweak it and make better use of it,” he explained.

Security

• It has to be patched, says Koen Van Impe, warns a security analyst at the Belgian national computer security incident response team.

• The Google Security Blog published a post in mid-February 2016 on a critical issue found in glibc getaddrinfo (CVE-2015-7547). The mention of a vulnerability in glibc should ring a bell: One year ago, everyone put on their patching gloves when a critical problem was found in gethostbyname, also part of the glibc library. This one was dubbed GHOST (CVE-2015-0235).

• Keeping its national security in view, Denmark’s national intelligence agency PET has launched a campaign for the people to join its ‘Hacker Academy’ where they will be trained in offensive and defensive hacking and online attacks.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The unintended but entirely predictable consequences from the UK’s disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act keep on a-coming. You will recall that this handy piece of legislation tasked teachers with weeding out possible future-terrorists amongst the young folks they are supposed to be teaching. This has devolved instead into teachers reporting children, usually children that would be peripherally identified as Muslim children, to the authorities for what aren’t so much as transgressions as they are kids being kids. It has even turned some teachers into literal grammar police, because the universe is not without a sense of humor.

• And now we learn that these part-teacher-part-security-agents may be incorporating art criticism into their repertoire, having reported a young Muslim boy of four years old to the authorities because of his inability to properly illustrate a cucumber.

Censorship

• The company’s controversial slogans have previously been the subject of numerous complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.

• Chief Censor Andrew Jack said his office recently received its first complaint about the vans – from the police.

• “I can confirm that we have received a submission in respect of some of the Wicked campervans from the police, and we’ll be working through the classification process and testing those publications against the criteria in the Films, Videos, and Publications Act to determine whether or not they need to be age restricted or might be objectionable.

• “This is the first time a publication, in respect of Wicked Campers, has been submitted to us.”

• He would now consider whether the images need to be banned or restricted.

• Matt Lauer, aka Mr. Softee (when interviewing people with whom he sympathizes), tried to act like a tough guy in his Friday interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. You’re not fooling us, Matt.

• A protest urging the UK National Union of Students (NUS) to reform its Safe Space and No Platform policies took place last Thursday in London. A grand coalition of humanists, atheists, liberal Muslims and human-rights activists set up shop on the pavement outside NUS headquarters. Talking to the students and campaigners involved made this reporter hopeful about the free-speech fightback, which has recently erupted on campuses up and down the country.

• Facebook may now be one step closer to its dream of accessing China’s 720 million Internet users, though I wouldn’t count on a full reconciliation between the two countries just yet.

• Over the weekend, while attending an economic forum in Beijing, Mark Zuckerberg took some time out to meet with Liu Yunshan, China’s propaganda chief, it was reported by Xinhua News Agency, China’s official press agency, over the weekend.

• Liu expressed interest in working with Facebook to “enhance exchanges and share experience so as to make outcome of the internet development better benefit the people of all countries,” it said in the report.

• On Sunday, the CBLDF held a panel hosted by Charles Brownstein and Betsy Gomez highlighting the wave of censorship spreading across the world like kudzu, relentless and nearly impossible to stop. And the results are frightening.

• Ever wonder why Hollywood’s married sleuths Nick and Nora Charles retired to separate beds after their comic adventures? We have film censors to thank—or blame—for those twin beds.

• For much of filmmaking history, government entities sliced and diced the movies as they saw fit, cutting out profanity, violence and obscenity until the movies were squeaky-clean. But did this silencing of the salacious protect Americans or control them?

• Well, this isn’t necessarily a huge surprise, but Friday afternoon a Florida jury sided with Hulk Hogan in his lawsuit against Gawker, awarding him a fairly astounding $115 million (he had asked for $100 million) for posting a short clip of a Hogan sex tape along with an article about it. We hadn’t written about this case recently, as it was getting tons of press coverage elsewhere — but when we discussed it three years ago, when a Florida court first issued an injunction against Gawker, we noted the serious First Amendment issues here. Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) had originally sued in federal court where it was more or less laughed out of court, mostly on First Amendment grounds. However, he was able to try again in state court, where it’s astounding that it even went to trial in the first place.

• Hogan brought the case three years ago after Gawker, a 13-year-old digital news site founded by Nick Denton, an entrepreneur with an allergy to celebrity privacy, published a video the wrestler claimed was secretly recorded. The sex tape was sensational, showing Hogan — whose real name is Terry Bollea — engaged in sexual intercourse with Heather Cole, the then-wife of his best friend, Tampa-area radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge (real name: Todd Alan Clem). Gawker’s posting of the Hogan sex tape was accompanied by an essay from then–editor-in-chief A.J. Daulerio about celebrity sex and a vivid play-by-play of the encounter between Hogan and Cole.

Privacy

• A federal watchdog has concluded that the Pentagon inspector general’s office may have improperly destroyed evidence during the high-profile leak prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake.

• The Office of Special Counsel, which is charged with protecting federal employees who provide information on government wrongdoing, said its review of the handling of the Drake case had determined that there is “substantial likelihood” that there had been “possible violations of laws, rules or regulations” in the destruction of the evidence.

• So, this morning we wrote about a new flaw found in the encryption in Apple’s iMessage system — though it was noted that this wouldn’t really have impacted what the FBI was trying to do to get into Syed Farook’s work iPhone.

• One of the points that seems to be widely misunderstood by people who don’t spend much time in computer security worlds, is that building secure encryption systems is really hard and almost everything has some sort of vulnerability somewhere. This is why it’s a constant struggle by security researchers, cryptographers and security engineers to continually poke holes in encryption, and try to fix up and patch systems. It’s also why the demand for backdoors is idiotic, because they probably already exist in some format. But purposely building in certain kinds of backdoors that can’t be closed by law almost certainly blasts open much larger holes for those with nefarious intent to get in.

• Apple’s growing arsenal of encryption techniques — shielding data on devices as well as real-time video calls and instant messages — has spurred the U.S. government to sound the alarm that such tools are putting the communications of terrorists and criminals out of the reach of law enforcement.

• But a group of Johns Hopkins University researchers has found a bug in the company’s vaunted encryption, one that would enable a skilled attacker to decrypt photos and videos sent as secure instant messages.

• When the FBI branded Martin Luther King Jr a “dangerous” threat to national security and began tapping his phones, it was part of a long history of spying on black activists in the United States. But the government surveillance of black bodies has never been limited to activists – in fact, according to the FBI; you only had to be black.

• In the current fight between Apple and the FBI, black perspectives are largely invisible, yet black communities stand to lose big if the FBI wins. A federal judge in California is set to rule on Tuesday whether the FBI will be granted a request compelling Apple to unlock the iPhone of a San Bernardino shooter.

• That’s not all that surprising, of course. People have known about burner phones for ages. But the thing that stood out for me was the desperate need of the NY Times reporters to insist that there must be encryption used by the attackers, despite the near total lack of evidence of any such use. Immediately after the attacks, law enforcement and intelligence officials started blaming encryption based on absolutely nothing. Senator John McCain used it as an excuse to plan legislation that would force backdoors into encryption. And Rep. Michael McCaul insisted that the Paris attackers used the encrypted Telegram app, despite no one else saying that. In fact, for months, the only thing we’d heard was that they used unencrypted SMS to alert each other that the attacks were on, and made almost no effort to hide themselves.

• New details of the Paris attacks carried out last November reveal that it was the consistent use of prepaid burner phones, not encryption, that helped keep the terrorists off the radar of the intelligence services.

• As an article in The New York Times reports: “the three teams in Paris were comparatively disciplined. They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims.”

• The article goes on to give more details of how some phones were used only very briefly in the hours leading up to the attacks. For example: “Security camera footage showed Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the assailants, as he paced outside the stadium, talking on a cellphone. The phone was activated less than an hour before he detonated his vest.” The information come from a 55-page report compiled by the French antiterrorism police for France’s Interior Ministry.

• Outside the Bataclan theatre venue, the investigators found a Samsung phone in a dustbin: “It had a Belgian SIM card that had been in use only since the day before the attack. The phone had called just one other number—belonging to an unidentified user in Belgium.”

• Hundreds of residents have been asked to give their views on an ‘increase’ in cars parked by GCHQ workers in the Fiddlers Green and Hester’s Way areas of Cheltenham

• Liberal Democrat councillor Wendy Flynn, a former mayor, said she had delivered 400 letters to residents and has set up an online petition and survey.

• Wendy told the Echo: “GCHQ do a vitally important job keeping us safe and their presence helps the local economy.

• “However they also have a responsibility to the community that are situated in and a moral obligation to be a ‘good neighbour.’

Internet/Net Neutrality

• CBS CEO Les Moonves hasn’t always been a huge fan of change. The CEO likes to whine a lot about how the television landscape is shifting, whether that’s the fact that Netflix doesn’t have to share viewership numbers in the subscription streaming age, or the way Dish is giving users what they want with DVRs that automatically skip ads. Moonves is also a big fan of pouting and claiming CBS will pull all of its broadcast content off the air if the network doesn’t get what it wants (a man, in a very nice suit, threatening to take his ball and go home).

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Aw, who are we kidding? The monkey has no clue about any of this. It’s a monkey! The case is really about a giant publicity stunt by PETA, which is pretending to represent the monkey and claiming that a monkey taking a selfie can get a copyright. Incredibly, PETA hired a big time, previously well-respected law firm by the name of Irell & Manella, which argued with apparently straight faces that someone must own the copyright, and thus the monkey (and PETA) were the most obvious choice. But, that’s something anyone with even the most marginal knowledge of copyright should know is not true, because we have something called the public domain. No one needs to hold the copyright because there might not be a copyright (and in this case, there is none).

• The American Petroleum Institute (API), a group that represents the oil industry, apparently releases a fee-based report on oil prices, which is released to paying subscribers a week before the US government releases “official” data. For obvious reasons, this information is fairly valuable to traders, who are more than willing to pay the monthly fee to get early access to some crucial information on the price of oil. Apparently, last week, some people then took that data, and tweeted about it… leading API to issue DMCA takedown notices, which Twitter promptly complied with.

• Any time anyone routes around Hollywood’s windowed food chain — theatrical release, delay, video release, delay, VOD, longer delay, pay TV, even longer delay (or never), on-demand streaming — studios and theaters get bent out of shape. This terrible system makes major studios and theaters happiest (and their own worst enemies), even though it’s apparent a large percentage of the public would rather enjoy films on their own terms.

• Along with the complaints about the reshuffling of The Schedule come the inevitable cries of “PIRACY!” Sean Parker, formerly the major labels’ worst enemy, is now at the receiving end of motion picture industry hate, even though his plan — the “Screening Room” — involves everyone getting paid.

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