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● 12.05.15

● Links 6/12/2015: CoreOS News, MediaTek Development Platform

Posted in News Roundup at 5:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Linux Users Targeted by New Rekoobe Trojan

• Linux users are about to get a nasty surprise for Christmas in the form of a new trojan targeting the Linux operating system, discovered by Dr.Web, a Russian-based antivirus maker, and named Rekoobe (or its more technical name: Linux.Rekoobe.1).

=> ↺ GalliumOS: The Ideal Linux Distribution for Chromebook Hardware

• I must confess that I’m a big fan of the Chromebook. I do all initial drafts of my novels on a Pixel (the screen/keyboard/trackpad are simply the best) and use an Acer C720 as a “grab and go” device. However, as much as I enjoy working with Chrome OS, there are some things that simply cannot be done with Google’s platform. For example—working with an editor on Google docs is cumbersome. Editing or creating images with Pixlr is like working with half of GIMP’s power. If I want to record, forget having the flexibility and performance of Audacity.

=> ↺ Linux holiday gift guide 2015

• Regardless of which of the various winter holidays you happen to celebrate, one thing remains certain: you’re going to be buying someone a present (possibly even yourself). And you’d really like it to be running Linux. Because you’re awesome. And that’s what awesome people would like. What follows are, what I consider to be, the most fun and/or interesting Linux-powered gadgets that would make awesome gifts this year. In order, from cheapest to… significantly less cheap. Let us begin.

=> ↺ December 2015 Issue of Linux Journal

• Anyone who’s active in the Linux community knows that while we love open source and we swear by the kernel, the real power of Linux is the people making up the community. Whether it’s folks using Linux in a server room, people contributing code or documentation to a project in their spare time, or even geeks putting Linux stickers on their laptops, Linux is about people. This month, Brian Conner has a great interview with Jeremy Garcia, the founder of LinuxQuestions.org. If there’s a better example of a healthy and interactive Linux community, you’ll be hard pressed to find it. If you want to know the history of LinuxQuestions, find out more about the man behind it, or even what the future holds, you should check out the interview. Jeremy is as cool as you’d expect him to be!

Desktop

=> ↺ Xiaomi working on a Linux OS-powered laptop, due Q2 2016

• We had no idea that Xiaomi has plans to venture into the laptop business. Actually, we don’t even think that OEM’s would even think of joining the game given that there’s been a decline and that people are relying more on their tablets and smartphones instead of PCs and laptops. Rumor has it the Xiaomi is almost ready with its first laptop that is due in the 2nd quarter of 2016.

=> ↺ Analyst: Intel’s SoC To Fuel Xiaomi’s & Huawei’s Laptop

=> ↺ Is Xiaomi’s sales blip a cause for worry?

Server

=> ↺ CoreOS Brings Distributed Trusted Computing to Containers

• Tectonic is CoreOS’ commercial platform that includes the CoreOS Linux operating system the rkt (rocket) container technology and the Kubernetes container cluster management system. CoreOS first announced Tectonic in April of this year, alongside a $12 million round of funding.

=> ↺ CoreOS Enables ISE to Use Containers for Options Trading

• In the financial capital of the world, containers aren’t yet king, but they might be – one day. At the Tectonic Summit here, Robert Cornish CTO and Paul Morgan Systems Architect at the International Securities Exchange (ISE) detailed how they are making use of CoreOS and containers in the latency sensitive and performance demanding options trading environment.

=> ↺ CoreOS Enables ISE to Use Containers for Options Trading

• In the financial capital of the world, containers aren’t yet king, but they might be – one day. At the Tectonic Summit here, Robert Cornish CTO and Paul Morgan Systems Architect at the International Securities Exchange (ISE) detailed how they are making use of CoreOS and containers in the latency sensitive and performance demanding options trading environment.

=> ↺ ​CoreOS brings end-to-end trusted computing to containers

• Everyone in IT loves containers. They enable you to run four to six times the number of server application instances as a virtual machine (VM) on the same server. Now, if only you could just easily secure the darn things.

=> ↺ CoreOS Plots a Course Forward for Containers

=> ↺ Getting started with Docker by Dockerizing this Blog

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Podcast Season 3 Episode 21

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Understanding the kernel release cycle

• Now, here is where people start getting confused. They see a “final” release and immediately assume it’s stable. It’s not. There are bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. So why would Linus release a kernel with a lot of bugs? Because finding them all is an economy of scale. Let’s step back a second into the development and see why.

=> ↺ How Microchip Got Their Driver in the Kernel Mainline

• When Microchip Technology decided to publish their MOST Linux Driver to the Linux community, they had no idea how personally connected they’d become in the process. But just 7 months after joining the Linux Foundation as a Corporate Member and receiving one-on-one mentoring from kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Microchip team had their initial code reworked. Shortly thereafter, they had their driver code in the Linux kernel mainline accepted. And they were on a first-name basis with one of the top kernel developers in the world.

=> ↺ Linux Foundation offers OpenStack Admin Course

• The Linux Foundation (LF), a non-profit body for the promotion of Linux, is now offering the online training course “OpenStack Administration Fundamentals” (LFS252).

• This new course is based on an existing course by the foundation called “Essentials of OpenStack Administration” (LFS520) and is targeted at those who are preparing for the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam from the OpenStack Foundation.

• The new course is available for registration now at $499, a $200 discount off the standard $699 price. The Certified OpenStack Administrator exam, which will be available in Q2 2016, will be offered as a standalone exam, or bundled with the course.

=> ↺ Linux Foundation Announces Self-Paced OpenStack Admin Course With Labs on Demand

=> ↺ Linux Foundation moves OpenStack training online

=> ↺ The Linux Foundation Delivers Self-Paced OpenStack Admin Course

• Take a moment and think about it, and It’s hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story isn’t even five years old yet. Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create a sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Since then, OpenStack has won over countless tech titans that are backing it, and has its own foundation.

=> ↺ The Linux Foundation will participate in ‘Hour of Code’

• “The Linux Foundation is joining other companies and organizations this month to partner with Code.org, celebrate Computer Science Education Week and support Hour of Code (HoC). Everyone from the White House to AirBnb, Lucas Films and tech companies like Amazon and IBM will be part of next week’s activities. The Linux Foundation hopes to do its small part through the contributions of its own in-house experts who have volunteered for HoC and will be visiting K-12 schools in their communities to promote careers in technology and teach basic coding lessons. We’re also making a small cash donation to Code.org this month to increase access to computer science education for young people”, says Jennifer Cloer, VP of Communications, The Linux Foundation.

=> ↺ Get Out and Code: Computer Science Education Week Begins Monday

=> ↺ Linux Foundation offers OpenStack admin course

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Intel GPU Tools 1.13 Adds Kabylake Support

=> ↺ The NVIDIA/AMD Cards On Linux With The Best Value For 2015 Holiday Shopping

=> ↺ A Developer Hacked AMD’s GCN GPUs To Run Custom Code Via OpenGL

=> ↺ Intel Lands First Round Of Graphics Work For Linux 4.5, Includes Kaby Lake

=> ↺ AMD R600g Is Making Progress With Tessellation, Running Heaven

=> ↺ XWayland, NotifyFD, Video ABI Bump In X.Org Server Git

=> ↺ Nouveau Patches Revised For Stabilizing Kepler Re-Clocking

=> ↺ Intel Is Working On Miracast (HDMI Over Wireless) For Linux

=> ↺ Intel Is Very Close With Tessellation Shaders For Mesa

• Intel has finally published a new patch series for implementing the OpenGL 4.0 tessellation shader support within their Mesa DRI driver. It looks like this code is about ready to be finally mainlined!

=> ↺ The Linux Graphics Talks For FOSDEM 2016

• We are just under two months away from the 2016 FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium! The X.Org Development Room for FOSDEM 2016 will just be a one-day event, but there are interesting talks scheduled to happen.

• The FOSDEM 2016 “graphics devroom” talks include the NIR back-end for Mesa’s i965 Mesa driver, EzBench, HDMI CEC, compute support for Nouveau via a LLVM TGSI back-end, Ian Romanick talking about hardware simulations, and Jesse Barnes on SVN for Intel Graphics.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Review EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. XFS

• To be honest, one of the things that comes last in people’s thinking is to look at which file system on their PC is being used. Windows users as well as Mac OS X users even have less reason for looking as they have really only 1 choice for their operating system which are NTFS and HFS+. Linux operating system, on the other side, has plenty of various file system options, with the current default is being widely used ext4. However, there is another push for changing the file system to something other which is called btrfs. But what makes btrfs better, what are other file systems, and when can we see the distributions making the change?

=> ↺ Linux 4.4 SSD Benchmarks On EXT4, F2FS, Btrfs & XFS

• For those looking toward some fresh comparison numbers of EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and Btrfs on solid-state storage, here you go.

• A few days back I carried out some fresh benchmarks of these four most popular mainline Linux file-systems while using the Linux 4.4 development kernel.

=> ↺ A Few Benchmarks Of The AMD A10-8700P “Carrizo” On Linux

• For those excited to see some AMD A10-8700P “Carrizo” notebook benchmarks on Linux, here are a few numbers.

• In continuation of yesterday’s article of The Toshiba Carrizo-Powered Laptop Is Screaming, Literally, it seems universally that my initial concern was correct that it’s a faulty fan on this brand new Toshiba Satellite notebook.

=> ↺ What Pi Linux Benchmarks Would You Like To See?

• First up, I’m currently in the process of running benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi Zero and expect to have those initial results later today or tomorrow for this $5 USD ARM development board.

=> ↺ OS X El Capitan vs. Fedora vs. Ubuntu vs. Antergos Benchmarks

• Building off the OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” vs. Fedora 23 Linux results from earlier this week, here are benchmark results that add in Ubuntu 15.10 as well as the Arch-based Antergos Linux distribution.

• These results provide a more diverse spectrum of Linux distributions to see how they compare on the Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air and compare to OS X 10.11.1 Like with El Capitan and Fedora 23, Ubuntu 15.10 and Antergos 2015.11-ROLLING were tested out-of-the-box with their default packages and settings.

=> ↺ The Other New Budget Laptop For Linux Testing

Applications

=> ↺ 10 tools for visual effects in Linux with Kdenlive

• Kdenlive is one of those applications; you can use it daily for a year and wake up one morning only to realize that you still have only grazed the surface of all of its potential. That’s why it’s nice every once in a while to sit back and look over some of the lesser-used tricks and tools in Kdenlive. Even though something’s not used as often as, say, the Spacer or Razor tools, it still may end up being just the right finishing touch on your latest masterpiece.

=> ↺ Stellarium 0.14.1 Free Astronomical Observatory Software Has Better 4K Support

• Alexander Wolf has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first maintenance release of Stellarium 0.14, the best free and open-source astronomical observatory software.

=> ↺ Lightworks 12.6 Beta Professional Non-Linear Video Editor Has Linux and OS X Fixes

• EditShare, the developers of the Lightworks software, a cross-platform and commercial professional non-linear video editor for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X platforms, announced the release of Lightworks 12.6 Beta.

=> ↺ FreeIPMI 1.5.1 Adds Intel Node Manager 3.0 Support

• FreeIPMI 1.5.1 has been released as the latest version of this GNU project for supporting the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification.

=> ↺ Fotoxx 15.12 Open-Source Image Editor Launches with Metadata Batch Report, More

• Kornelix has informed us about the immediate availability of Fotoxx 15.12, a new feature release of the open-source image editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

=> ↺ Opus Codec 1.1.1 Brings Encoder/Decoder Optimizations

• Opus Codec 1.1.1 brings optimizations to the encoder/decoder, including SSE, SSE2, and SSE 4.1 optimizations with run-time CPU detection. There are also MIPS and ARM NEON optimizations. Additionally, there are other architecture-specific optimizations too along with lowering the memory footprint on all platforms. Beyond these optimizations, Opus 1.1.1 is made up of bug-fixes.

=> ↺ 5 open source web apps, alternatives to Google Drive

• I’d like to take a moment to highlight some of my favorite open source web apps that have become part of my work and life routine.

=> ↺ PeaZip 5.9.0 [file archiver]

• The new release updates to p7zip 15.09 backend, providing out of the box RAR5 format extraction without the need of additional plugin based on RarLabs backend.

=> ↺ ClamAV 0.99 Free AntiVirus Released for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows

• The development team of the Clam AntiVirus (popularly known as ClamAV) open-source, cross-platform and free antivirus solution has announced today, December 2, 2015, the release of ClamAV 0.99.

=> ↺ RcppCCTZ 0.0.2 — now with Solaris support

=> ↺ podlators 4.02

=> ↺ RQuantLib 0.4.2: Now with intra-day times

• A new minor release of RQuantLib was released onto CRAN and into Debian. It takes advantages of some changes from last week’s QuantLib release 1.7.

=> ↺ Cockpit 0.86 Released

=> ↺ RcppArmadillo 0.6.200.3.0

=> ↺ ownCloud Desktop and Mobile Clients Updated with File Sharing Support, More

• Earlier today, December 3, we’ve been informed by Jos Poortvliet from ownCloud about the immediate availability for download of new point releases of the ownCloud Clients for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Android, and iOS operating systems.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Opera 35 Web Browser Updated with Mute Tab and Simple Settings Improvements

• Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, has announced yet another update for the Opera 35.0 web browser, build 2064.0, which is still in the developer channel for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

=> ↺ New Vivaldi Web Browser Snapshot Adds STFU, Netflix Support and HTML5 Notifications

• The Vivaldi team, through Ruarí Ødegaard, has announced the release and immediate availability for download of a new snapshot build for their Chromium-based proprietary and free web browser for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ FLOSS Manuals’ Essential Documentation for Free, Open Source Applications

=> ↺ Linux Cli: Background and Foreground Process

=> ↺ How to convert your Raspberry Pi into a NAS shared drive using samba share

=> ↺ How to Delete User Accounts with Home Directory in Linux

=> ↺ How to install the Enlightenment E20 Desktop on Ubuntu 15.10

=> ↺ Install Textpattern CMS with CentOS 7

=> ↺ How to install and use Guake Terminal on Fedora 23

=> ↺ How to Install and Use ‘yum-utils’ to Maintain Yum and Boost its Performance

=> ↺ arduino: Build a proximity sensor

=> ↺ Install and Configure Munin monitoring server in Linux

=> ↺ Building A Cheap Intel Skylake System For Linux Use

• Here are a few parts recommendations I have if you are looking to build a low-cost Intel Skylake system while achieving decent performance on Linux this holiday season.

=> ↺ How to configure and Install Config Server Firewall & Login failure Daemon

=> ↺ How to install PHP 7 as PHP-FPM & FastCGI for ISPConfig 3 on Debian 8 (Jessie)

=> ↺ Configure DomainKeys (OpenDKIM) with Postfix on CentOS 7

=> ↺ How to Create Own Online Learning Management System Using Moodle in Linux

=> ↺ Migrating to php 7

=> ↺ The Perfect Server – Ubuntu 15.10 (nginx, MySQL, PHP, Postfix, BIND, Dovecot, Pure-FTPD and ISPConfig 3)

=> ↺ How to produce a YouTube series with open source tools

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine Announcement

• The Wine development release 1.8-rc3 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

• The source is available from the following locations:

• http://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/1.8/wine-1.8-rc3.tar.bz2

• http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.8/wine-1.8-rc3.tar.bz2

=> ↺ Wine 1.8 Gets a Third Release Candidate Build, 40 Bugs Have Been Fixed

• Just a few moments ago, Alexandre Julliard announced the release of the third RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Wine 1.8 open-source and free implementation of Windows on Unix and GNU/Linux operating systems.

=> ↺ Wine 1.8 RC3 Clears Out 40 More Bugs

Games

=> ↺ OpenMW 0.37 Released, Switches To OpenSceneGraph

=> ↺ OpenMW 0.37.0 Open Source Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Remake Improves OpenCS

• The developers behind the OpenMW project, an open source reimplementation of the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game, have announced the release and immediate availability for download of OpenMW 0.37.0.

=> ↺ Vendetta Online MMORPG Finally Updates the Oculus Rift VR Headset Support

• Guild Software announced the release of a new maintenance build for its popular Vendetta Online game, a cross-platform MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game).

=> ↺ Warsow 2.0 Released With Better Graphics, CC-Licensed Game Assets

=> ↺ Europa Universalis IV: The Cossacks Now Available

• The latest expansion for the popular grand strategy game, Europa Universalis IV, is now available. Hordes get a lot of shiny new features but there’s a lot of new internal and diplomatic options introduced as well. It’s been released alongside a massive patch that improves things for all players.

=> ↺ Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition for Linux & SteamOS is in testing

• The founder of Larian Studios has confirmed on Twitter that the Linux and Mac versions of Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition are currently ready, and undergoing testing.

=> ↺ Total War: ATTILA looks like it’s preparing a Linux & SteamOS version

• Against a darkening background of famine, disease and war, a new power is rising in the great steppes of the East. With a million horsemen at his back, the ultimate warrior king approaches, and his sights are set on Rome…

• The next instalment in the multi award-winning PC series that combines turn-based strategy with real-time tactics, Total War: ATTILA casts players back to 395 AD. A time of apocalyptic turmoil at the very dawn of the Dark Ages.

=> ↺ Linux is holding exactly where we thought it would in the Steam Hardware Survey

• Linux is holding out at 0.98% which is a change over last month of +0.03%. The numbers are still so small it’s pretty much irrelevant, but hey change is change right.

=> ↺ Valhalla Hills, a rather unique city-builder strategy game now on SteamOS & Linux

• I only learnt about Valhalla Hills recently, as they stealth-added a Linux version just before the official release. GOG sent over a key for this interesting Unreal Engine city-builder strategy game, so I took a look.

=> ↺ Bound By Flame, an impressive looking action RPG now on SteamOS & Linux

• Always fun to see an old port request thread on Steam revived, especially when it’s created by me. Not claiming I had a hand in it or anything, but it’s great. Times sure do change, I don’t do any posts like that anymore.

=> ↺ Speculation: It looks like the Saints Row series will all launch together on SteamOS & Linux

• We all love a bit of speculation now and then (okay, some really don’t, but I do), and to me it looks like the Saints Row series will all launch on Linux together.

=> ↺ GRID Autosport releasing for SteamOS & Linux on December 10th

=> ↺ GRID Autosport Racing Game Is Coming to Linux and Mac OS X on December 10, 2015

• Feral Interactive has just dropped the news that they will release the Linux and Mac OS X ports of the GRID Autosport game next week, on December 10, 2015, on Valve’s Steam digital gaming store.

=> ↺ GRID Autosport Mac and Linux Versions Dated

• Feral today announced that GRID Autosport, previously released for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, will also arrive for Mac and Linux via Steam on December 10th, and on Mac via the Mac App Store soon. Players will get behind the wheel of 80 highly desirable rides including front-wheel drive hot hatches, souped-up Muscle cars, lightweight open-wheelers and 1,000 horsepower hypercars, by manufacturers including Jaguar, McLaren, Pagani and Aston Martin. They’ll put these vehicles through their paces on 22 speed-friendly locations around the world, including purpose-built circuits such as Spa-Francorchamps, Brands Hatch and Yas Marina, and the city street circuits of Barcelona and San Francisco.

=> ↺ GRID Autosport on the fast track for a December 10th release on Mac and Linux

=> ↺ Warsow 2.0 Released and LinuxMint.com MIA

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Ships Release Candidate of KDE Applications 15.12

• December 3, 2015. Today KDE released the release candidate of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

=> ↺ Mobile-oriented HIG, the first prototypes and the mock-up kit

• Some of you already know me (as Alex L.) for my contributions in the Visual Design Group (VDG). Now it’s time for me to blog a little about my work in KDE, but first of all I want to use this post to introduce myself to you:

=> ↺ New KDE HIG Mobile Mockups

=> ↺ KDE Applications 15.12 Up To Release Candidate State

=> ↺ KDE Applications 15.12 Release Candidate Officially Announced for KDE Plasma 5.5

• Today, December 3, KDE has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming KDE Applications 15.12 software suite.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME: Three years and counting

• It’s been a long run which made me proud, for the things I learnt, for the tasks I’ve been able to accomplish, for the great support the GNOME community gave me all the time and most of all for the same fact of being part of the team responsible of the systems hosting the GNOME Project. Thank you GNOME community for your continued and never ending backing, we daily work to improve how the services we host are delivered to you and the support we receive back is fundamental for our passion and enthusiasm to remain high!

=> ↺ Minutes of the Board Meeting of December, 1st, 2015

Distributions

=> ↺ Solus Linux Operating System Drops LightDM for GDM as Default Login Manager

• On the second day of December, Josh Strobl of the Solus Project announced the release and immediate availability for download of yet another daily build ISO image for the forthcoming Solus Linux operating system.

Reviews

=> ↺ Sluggish Download and Install Subtract From Netrunner’s Pluses

• Netrunner Rolling 2015.11 version is a disappointing release. It seems sluggish and unimpressive right from the start.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ Q4OS 1.4.4 Screenshot Tour

Gentoo Family

=> ↺ Gentoo-Based Pentoo 2015.0 Penetration Testing Linux Distro Gets All-New Installer

• The Pentoo Team is proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of another RC (Release Candidate) build for the upcoming Pentoo 2015.0 GNU/Linux operating system designed for penetration testing tasks.

Arch Family

=> ↺ Arch Linux on your Android phone

• In this tutorial I will show you one of methods how to install Arch linux together with your android system on your phone. This method WILL NOT REPLACE your current android system and is safe to use for everybody. It uses independent file which is mounted and you are chrooted to this system. After you can connect via SSH, VNC directly from your phone, PC …

Slackware Family

=> ↺ PuppEX Linux Is Now Based on Puppy Slacko64 6.3.0, Runs Linux Kernel 4.3

• Arne Exton has informed us about the availability for download of a new build of his PuppEX Linux distribution, a remix of the Slackware-based version of the lightweight Puppy Linux operating system.

=> ↺ Cinnamon Version of Slackware Live

• I mentioned about the possibility of adding Cinnamon version for Slackware Live edition and now the ISO has been generated by Eric Hameleers last night. It consist of latest cinnamon 2.8.x packages taken from my CSB repository (development tree).

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ The best ideas win: Community reflections on The Open Organization

• Since June, Opensource.com has published nearly 100 stories about the ways open source values are changing the way we work, manage, and lead. And today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve collected some of our favorites into a companion volume, The Open Organization Field Guide: Practical Tips for Igniting Passion and Performance.

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) – Large Cap End of Day Report

=> ↺ Stocks close to 52-week high: Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT), SEI Investments Co (NASDAQ:SEIC), Stanley Black & Decker Inc (NYSE:SWK)

=> ↺ Red Hat to Webcast Results for Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2016

=> ↺ Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Receives Average Rating of “Buy” from Brokerages

=> ↺ Jim Whitehurst: the evolution of open source

• When I joined Red Hat eight years ago, much of what I talked about revolved around whether open source was safe, secure and reliable – now, I think everybody knows it’s all of those things. So over those intervening eight years, we’ve clearly checked that off.

=> ↺ Meeting agenda

• We now have defined meeting agenda for CentOS Cloud SIG.

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. Price Target Update

=> ↺ AppDynamics Extends Collaboration With Red Hat to Help Enterprises Optimize Application and Business Performance

=> ↺ Growth Score By Zacks: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

• Zacks Research has assigned a positive Growth Style Score to Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). The Growth Score focuses on both the company financials and the future growth potential of a company. The score is arrived at by measuring multiple company financials such as Cash Flow Statement, Income Statement and Balance Sheet and a ranking in between A-F is provided. The rating of A denotes that the stock has a higher growth potential to outperform the market.

Fedora

=> ↺ After Fedora 21, Now Chapeau 21 Linux Distribution Reaches End of Life

• Vince Pooley of Chapeau Linux has informed us that his Chapeau 21 GNU/Linux operating system reached end of life on December 1, 2015, and it will no longer be supported.

=> ↺ After Fedora 21 and Chapeau 21, Now Korora 21 Linux Reaches End of Life

• We reported the other day that the Chapeau 21 Linux distribution reached end of life, after our previous announcement about the end of life for the Fedora 21 operating system, published on December 1, 2015.

=> ↺ Fedora 24 Slated To Receive Default Local DNS Resolver & Node.js 4.2

• • The other change to mention at this time is Node.js 4.2 as the project’s newest LTS release.

=> ↺ Fedora Stakeholders Discuss Moving Away From Grubby

• It doesn’t look like this proposal will end up panning out, but Fedora stakeholders are discussing the prospects of dropping Grubby in favor of just using grub2-mkconfig.

• Grubby is the tool that Fedora has been using for updating and display information about boot-loader configurations. Contrary to the name, Grubby not only supports handling GRUB but also other boot-loaders like LILO, Yaboot, ELILO, and Zipl. Those unfamiliar with Grubby can see its GitHub page.

=> ↺ Life with Wayland – Fedora Rawhide: Real Experience And List of Native/XWayland Applications

• Wayland is default in Fedora Rawhide since November. This rolling Linux Distribution with the newest software positioned for developers and advanced users. This article may be helpful for all Wayland users and peoples that interests in Wayland.

=> ↺ Korora 21 Darla Reached EOL.

• Since we use Fedora as the base for our distribution and thus follow the Fedora Project’s life cycle, it means that Korora 21 Darla reached it’s End Of Life status yesterday on December 1.

=> ↺ Jamie Duncan: How do you Fedora?

• Jamie started using Fedora around 2007 and became a Fedora Ambassador in 2012. Duncan contributes to and maintains a few projects in Fedora. The project that gets the most attention is SOSCleaner. SOSCleaner is a tool that takes sosreports or datasets and intelligently obfuscates potentially sensitive data.

=> ↺ FAmSCo Elections: Interview with Abdel Martínez (potty)

=> ↺ FESCo Elections: Interview with Kevin Fenzi (kevin / nirik)

=> ↺ FESCo Elections: Interview with Parag Nemade (Pnemade)

=> ↺ Mumble ready for testing

• The popular Voice Over IP (VoIP) program, Mumble, is being repackaged again for Fedora 22 and 23. Fedora contributor fedpop unretired the package from the Fedora Package Database and is working on getting it added to the stable repositories.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Linux comes to Microsoft’s Azure

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Linux Is Latest Open Source Option on Microsoft Azure Cloud

=> ↺ Debian Officially Endorsed on Azure

=> ↺ Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Platform Now Endorses Debian GNU/Linux

• Today, December 2, 2015, Microsoft, through Stephen Zarkos, Senior Program Manager, Azure, has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the Debian GNU/Linux open-source operating system on its award-winning Azure cloud computing platform.

=> ↺ Microsoft brings Debian GNU/Linux to Azure cloud

• Microsoft is has collaborated with credativ to offer Debian GNU/Linux as an endorsed distribution on its Azure cloud.

• Microsoft already had ties with SUSE and Canonical to offer openSUSE, SLE and Ubuntu on Azure cloud. It also had deals with OpenLogic to offer Red Hat’s CentOS. And after a very long wait, Microsoft struck a deal with Red Hat to bring RHEL to its cloud. That left Debian, one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions on servers, behind. Until now.

• Customers can now easily provision Debian-based virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. There are two supported versions of Debian available for Azure: Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”) and Debian 8 (codename “jessie”), both built by credativ.

=> ↺ Microsoft announces availability of Debian GNU/Linux as an endorsed distribution in Azure Marketplace

=> ↺ Microsoft adds Debian to Azure tool belt as it joins forces with HPE

=> ↺ Microsoft Adds Debian Linux to the Azure Marketplace

=> ↺ Microsoft endorses Debian GNU/Linux for Azure Cloud

Derivatives

=> ↺ Debian-Based Robolinux 8.3 Distro Removes Popcorn Time, Adds 10 New Apps

• The developers of the Debian-based Robolinux computer operating system have announced the release of Robolinux 8.3 (Raptor) Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and LXDE editions, as well as the Robolinux Multimedia Bonanza.

=> ↺ SteamOS Brewmaster 2.55 Moves to Linux Kernel 4.1.13 to Fix an Intel Video Driver Bug

• Today, December 4, Valve has pushed a new update for the SteamOS Brewmaster to the brewmaster_beta channel, version 2.55, which is a drop-in replacement for the SteamOS Brewmaster 2.49 release announced last month.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Snapcraft 0.6 Ubuntu Snappy Creator Tool Is Out with Support for 32-bit Node.js

• Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov announces the release and immediate availability of the sixth maintenance release of the Snapcraft open-source Snappy creator tool for supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.

=> ↺ Canonical Partners with 6WIND to Accelerate the Growth of Ubuntu Cloud Networking

• On December 2, 2015, Canonical, the team behind the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, had the great pleasure of announcing a new partnership with the 6WIND high-performance networking software company.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-8.5 Hotfix Should Arrive Soon for All Ubuntu Phone Users

• On December 4, 2015, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report for the day of December 3 to inform both Ubuntu Touch developers and Ubuntu Phone users about the latest work done on the mobile operating system in preparation for the next OTA updates.

=> ↺ First Night Clock App Released for Ubuntu Phones, Available Now for Free

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch Is Being Ported to LG Optimus G, Again

• Ubuntu Touch is currently available only on a small number of devices, but that might change with the help of the community. A number of ports are already in the works, and it looks like LG Optimus G might be one of these phones.

=> ↺ LibreOffice Document Viewer 2.0 App Officially Released for Ubuntu Phones

• A few minutes ago, Stefano Verzegnassi had the great pleasure of announcing on his Google+ page that the LibreOffice Document Viewer application landed in the Ubuntu Store for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices.

=> ↺ 6WIND Partners with Canonical to Accelerate Ubuntu Cloud Networking

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Linux Mint website has been down since yesterday

• Linux Mint 17.3 was supposed to have been released at the end of last month, but that seems to have been delayed until further notice.

• And that could be linked to the fact that the developers and administrators are still busing trying to bring the main website and forums back online, which has been down since yesterday.

=> ↺ 2015 LQ Awards and Linuxmint.com Returns, 17.3 Delayed

• The 2015 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards categories are being updated this year. Discussion are ongoing. Slackware Live got Cinnamon and MATE flavors and Linuxmint.com is back saying 17.3 “isn’t out yet.” Elsewhere, Italo Vignoli suggested six LibreOffice extensions to “add new functionality or make existing functionality easier to use” and Doc Searls examined how “The Regulatorium” is ruining Linux wireless.

=> ↺ [Linux Mint] Apologies for the downtime and delay

• I would like to apologize for keeping you in the dark. You probably noticed our website and forums were down and even though it’s early December, Linux Mint 17.3 isn’t officially out yet.

=> ↺ Deepin the Best, Fedora 21 Buried, and RMS

• Linuxbsdos.com today wrote that Linux Deepin could be the best distribution of the year. The Ubuntu-based distro features its own in-house desktop that’s “a whole lot better” than Cinnamon. To Jack Wallen, Ubuntu GNOME is the “perfect” distribution though. Elsewhere, Fedora 21 reach its end-of-life and Slackware Live hit Beta 2. In software news, KDE user Swapnil Bhartiya said today that GNOME 3.18 is “simple and easy” and GIMP 2.9.2 was released.

=> ↺ Deepin 15 Alpha 2 Released With Many System Changes

=> ↺ Is Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 the perfect desktop Linux distro?

• Ubuntu is certainly one of the most popular desktop Linux distros around, but what happens when you combine Ubuntu with GNOME? One writer at TechRepublic believes that the combination of the two might be the perfect desktop Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ MediaTek Labs Announces Open-Source IoT Development Platform

• To that end, today MediaTek Labs unveiled a new development platform called the MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688. This new platform runs OpenWrt Linux (a distro commonly flashed onto routers to provide a wide range of customization options). MediaTek supporting OpenWrt over Google’s Brillo is a fairly unsurprising choice. We’ve seen Google pushing to get Brillo out of the gate most recently by releasing its source code and providing developers guidance on developing for the new OS, but so far the Google-backed OS is too early along to support for a company like MediaTek looking to compete with Qualcomm.

=> ↺ MediaTek Announces Open-Source IoT Development Platform That Runs OpenWrt Linux

=> ↺ Entropy drought hits Raspberry Pi harvests, weakens SSH security

• The November 2015 release of Raspbian does not use a hardware random number generator by default, according to a bug report posted to the Pi forums. Ideally, this generator should pour unpredictable numbers into a so-called entropy pool from which cryptographically secure numbers can be obtained – but this doesn’t happen, and so the operating system’s algorithms end up producing rather predictable “random” numbers.

=> ↺ Hands-On with the Raspberry Pi Zero, Part 3: Software

• In Part 1 of this mini-series I talked about the trials and tribulations and eventual joy of ordering and receiving a Raspberry Pi Zero. In Part 2 I looked in more detail at the Raspberry Pi Zero hardware, and some issues and possibilities with configuring it and connecting peripherals. Now it’s time to move on and look at the software.

=> ↺ Hands-On with the Raspberry Pi Zero, part 4: Wrap up

• I still haven’t even tested the Pi Zero with openElec or OSMC, so I will probably do that next, when I have some time. For now I need to get back to work on the Customizing Linux Desktops series. In fact, that’s a perfect example of where I can use the Zero — it will be the system that I use as an example for the LXDE desktop.

=> ↺ Latest Raspbian update

• Amid all the excitement last week, some people have noticed that we also released an updated Raspbian image, and have been asking what is in it.

• Obviously, one of the most important features of this image is support for Pi Zero (which is also the main reason we didn’t make any fuss about it in advance…) But there are a few other small changes which apply to all versions of the Pi, so here’s a list for the curious.

=> ↺ Raspbian Linux Silently Updated with Support for the Raspberry Pi Zero $5 Computer

• The development team behind the first Debian-based Linux distribution, Raspbian, which was designed from the ground up to support the Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC) series, has announced the availability of Raspbian 2015-11-21.

=> ↺ Set Up a Raspberry Pi Zero in “Headless Mode” When You Don’t Have Access to a Monitor

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Zero $5 Computer Sold Out 24 Hours Post Release; Linux-based Raspbian OS, Minecraft, Scratch, Sonic Pi Present; Restock Happens in Three Weeks

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Mini Computers Vulnerable to Attacks, Company Acknowledges

=> ↺ Using Raspberry Pi to build IoT gadgets just got a lot easier

=> ↺ Raspberry PI adds IBM’s Node-RED for easier IoT integration

=> ↺ Brit hardware hacker turns Raspberry Pi Zeros into selfie slayers

=> ↺ Pi Zero and CustomPi: More Flexibility for Open Embedded Hardware

=> ↺ Rasp Pi Generates Weak SSH Keys

=> ↺ Renesas goes 64-bit for latest automotive R-Car SoC

• The H3 provides software scalability from the previous R-Car H2, M2, and E2 designs, says Renesas. Supported operating systems are said to include Linux, Android, QNX, Neutrino, Integrity, and “others.” An evaluation board will be available, although there appear to be no further details other than that it “Includes car information system-oriented peripheral circuits, providing users with an actual device verification environment; Can be used as a software development tool for application software, etc.” and “Allows easy implementation of custom user functions.”

=> ↺ Industrial Linux PC boasts 16 serial ports

• Aaeon’s Fedora Linux ready Boxer-6914 is quite similar to the Boxer-6614 it released earlier this year, but it lacks the external heatsink, and adds a lot more serial ports, as well as additional USB ports and DIO. Instead of running an Intel Celeron from the Bay Trail family, it harkens back to an Intel Atom D2550 “Cedar Trail” processor. The Atom D2550 has dual 1.86GHz cores, a 10 Watt TDP, and 640MHz Intel graphics. This is a processor with a separate Intel NM10 controller chipset, not a system-on-chip.

=> ↺ Wio Link Internet Of Things Open Source Development Board (video)

=> ↺ MediaTek Labs Announces MediaTek LinkIt™ Smart 7688 – an Open-Source Development Platform for a More Connected World

=> ↺ MediaTek Labs Announces LinkIt Smart 7688 for connected world

=> ↺ MediaTek Launches Open Source Development Platform

=> ↺ MediaTek unveils open-source IoT development platform

=> ↺ MediaTek announces open-source development platform for IoT devices

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Zero Isn’t Free – but it is Cheap

Phones

Android

=> ↺ OnePlus 2 Android smartphone? You no longer need invite to buy one

• From Saturday, December 5, fans of the well-specced $389 OnePlus 2 can buy the Android phone unlocked without an invite.

=> ↺ Android Headliner: Fragmentation Is Android’s Greatest Strength

• If there’s one common theme that always seems to center around the Android operating system, it’s fragmentation. In some circles fragmentation can be viewed as a term that is somewhat taboo, despite the fact that it is still a very real issue with the platform, and not just on a single level. Around the right people, or rather the wrong people depending on how you look at it, utter the word fragmentation and it almost always seems to spark a debate that never ends well. There should be no misconceptions about the topic though. Android is still very fragmented and that isn’t going away anytime soon. The negative connotation with the word “fragmented” isn’t the only side of things though. Android’s fragmentation has and still is an opportunity for Google. From the beginning, Android’s fragmentation (wealth of choice or options) is what has gained the platform such a following in the first place. Without that openness, that collection of options for consumers, there’s a good chance that Android wouldn’t be as big as it is today.

=> ↺ Unlocked HTC One M8 Finally Receiving Android 6.0 Marshmallow

=> ↺ Nextbit’s Robin Android phone is a glimpse of a cloud-first future that’s still a long way off

=> ↺ Twitch makes its long-awaited Android TV arrival

=> ↺ Google’s latest app can turn Android phones into VR cameras

=> ↺ Google picks best Android games of 2015

=> ↺ Miss the Android Hangouts widget? Here’s how to replace it

=> ↺ Android update will bring new emoji to Nexus phones next week

=> ↺ Android Marshmallow update for unlocked HTC One M8 rolling out today

=> ↺ Android 6.0 Marshmallow OTA Update Available For HTC One M8; Release Imminent For HTC One M9

=> ↺ Android Marshmallow gets ported to the HTC HD2, a phone from 2009

=> ↺ Google’s picks for 2015′s best Android apps

=> ↺ Android developers, enter our competition for chance at prizes

=> ↺ How to Use Android’s Parental Controls

=> ↺ Deezer for Android rebuilt to help you discover new tracks and organize your music

=> ↺ 5 Google Now tricks that will change how you use Android

=> ↺ The Moto X Pure Edition Gets A Soak Test For Android 6.0 In The United States

=> ↺ HTC One M8 and One M9 Android 6.0 Update Breakdown

=> ↺ Android’s new emoji arrive next week on Nexus devices

=> ↺ Steve Ballmer thinks Windows phones should run Android apps

=> ↺ Steve Ballmer: Windows phones need “to run Android apps”

=> ↺ Ballmer Points Out Error of Microsoft’s Ways

=> ↺ Windows Struggles As iOS, Android Dominate Smartphone Space, IDC Says

=> ↺ Extend your Android Wear watch’s battery life with these quick tips

=> ↺ Super Saver: Android, Apple Smartwatch for $39

=> ↺ Slow clap: Android 6.0 Marshmallow’s market share just surpassed that of Android 2.2 Froyo

=> ↺ Moto preps Android 6.0 upgrade for Moto X Pure Edition

=> ↺ Cisco patches permission hijacking issue in WebEx Meetings app for Android

=> ↺ 5 reasons why the BlackBerry Priv could be the best Android business smartphone

• But it’s not only about looks. BlackBerry didn’t pull any punches when it came to the hardware specs for the Priv. The phone matches the best handsets on the market with welcome extras like a larger battery, a microSD card slot or that Schneider-Kreuznach certified camera, which boosts an 18-megapixel resolution.

=> ↺ Android Everywhere

• When you’re dominating the smartphone world and successfully carving out a niche against Apple in the tablet space, where do you go next? In 2014, the answer for Android was everywhere. In the space of twelve months, Android exploded onto wearables, TVs (again, after the ill-fated Google TV push), cars and even Chromebooks. Android was quickly going from being Google’s mobile OS to the company’s everything OS.

=> ↺ Android co-founder Andy Rubin may want to start a new smartphone company

• Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Android before it became a central part of Google, is eyeing a return to the smartphone market. Instead of making smartphone software, however, Rubin is reportedly interested in developing an Android handset, according to a report today from The Information. The man responsible for co-creating the world’s most ubiquitous mobile operating system is trying to recruit people for the new venture, the report adds, but it’s unclear whether Rubin would take a leadership role with the new project or simply fund it.

=> ↺ 2015: Best Android tablets for work and play

• With 2015 drawing to a close, let’s take a look at what are the very best Android currently on offer. And what an amazing year it has been for Android tablets.

• I’ve distilled all the manufacturers and models available down to seven tablets from Sony, Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Dell and Samsung that I think are the very best tablets currently available.

=> ↺ BlackBerry PRIV review: A new standard for Android in enterprise?

• PRIV is the first BlackBerry that doesn’t run a version of the company’s own OS. Instead, it runs Google’s Android OS. It’s a forward departure from what most of the world expects from BlackBerry today. It’s aimed at the enterprise, and its productivity-focused users — but PRIV legitimately measures up to the most popular consumer devices. And BlackBerry put a sharp focus on privacy. (PRIV’s name is a play on the phrase, privilege of privacy.)

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Top 10 Open Source Developments of 2015

• Open source is driving an ever-expanding market. The notion of community-driven development is a growing disruption to proprietary software controlled by commercial vendors, and the free open source software concept has become a major disruption in industry and technology.

=> ↺ New Open Source Zipnish Tool Promises Better Microservices Performance

• One of the big challenges of cloud-based distributed computing is how to make sure the many services and pipelines involved are running efficiently. Varnish Software aims to provide a solution through a new open source tool for microservices performance tracking called Zipnish.

=> ↺ Top 5 open source community metrics to track

• So you decided to use metrics to track your free, open source software (FOSS) community. Now comes the big question: Which metrics should I be tracking?

=> ↺ More, Older Intel Motherboards Get Added To Coreboot

• First up, “Little Plains” is now supported by Coreboot. As explained by the commit from Intel’s Marcin Wojciechowski, “This adds a new mainboard: Little Plains for Intel’s atom c2000. It was based on Mohon Peak board with some minor changes. This board is not available as standalone product. It is a managment board for Intel Ethernet Multi-host Controller FM10000 Series”

=> ↺ SeaBIOS 1.9 Brings Many Additions

• SeaBIOS 1.9 has been out since last month as the latest version of this open-source implementation of a 16-bit x86 BIOS widely used by Coreboot, QEMU, and other projects.

=> ↺ Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 15.11

=> ↺ Genode OS Continues Making Progress As A Desktop OS

• Genode OS 15.11 has many desktop-related enhancements, ports over the Intel KMS driver from the Linux kernel, enhanced USB Armory support, support for the Xilinx Zynq 7000, optimized VirtualBox, and more.

=> ↺ Non-Linux FOSS: Airsonos

=> ↺ Open-source contributor wants to bring healthcare innovation to the masses

• Glucosio is the only open-source diabetes app that does glucose tracking with third-party integrations and crowdsourced research, led by Kerensa himself. It gives open-source developers the ability to use, copy, study or change the source code as a way to contribute to the project. Contributors can find the source code on GitHub, and the team behind Glucosio is always looking for feedback to improve the project.

=> ↺ Reasons Why Google’s Latest AI-TensorFlow is Open Sourced

=> ↺ Open Source Will Drive Telecom Innovation: Telestax’s Restcomm Is Poised To Set The Precedent

• Smaller, more focused conferences like TADSummit and The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) are bringing significant competition to the larger industry events and tradeshows. These gatherings provide more product and technology insight and better 1:1 networking opportunities. Competitors collaborate and learn, and smaller technology vendors can rise above the noise with direct access to end users and service providers. Please see my colleague John Fruehe’s overview of the ONUG conference here.

=> ↺ US regulators propose powers to scrutinise algo traders’ source code

Events

=> ↺ Execs at Financial Firms Offer Their Take on Containers

• Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch tech executives talk about how they’re using containers and why cost savings is not the primary driver.

=> ↺ MINIXCon 2016 Announcement and Call for Talks

• MINIX has been around now for about 30 years so it is (finally) time for the MINIXers to have a conference to get together, just as Linuxers and BSDers have been doing for a long time. The idea is to exchange ideas and experiences among MINIX 3 developers and users as well as discussing possible paths forward now that the ERC funding is over. Future developments will now be done like in any other volunteer-based open-source project. Increasing community involvement is a key issue here. Attend or give a presentation. The schedule will be posted in early January.

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ Google Ends Chrome Support on 32-bit Linux, Releases Chrome 47

=> ↺ Chrome 48 To Bring Presentation API & Custom Notification Button Work

=> ↺ Google Chrome 47 for Android Brings Download ‘Snackbar’ and More

• Hours after rolling out Chrome 47 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS, Google started seeding out Chrome 47 to Android devices via Google Play. Chrome 47 was in beta since October this year. The update includes performance and stability fixes along with much awaited features.

=> ↺ Google Chrome 48 Is Now in Beta for Chrome OS, Linux, Windows, OS X, and Android

• Only two days after the promotion of the Google Chrome 47 web browser to the stable channel for all supported operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, Android, and Chrome OS, Google announces today that Chrome 48 is in the Beta channel for all the platforms mentioned above.

=> ↺ Google Promotes Chrome 47 Web Browser to Stable Channel for Linux, Mac and Windows

• Today, December 1, 2015, Google has announced the promotion of the popular and cross-platform Google Chrome web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

=> ↺ Google Ends Chrome Support on 32-bit Linux, Releases Chrome 47

• Google announced this week it will end Chrome support for older, 32-bit Linux distributions early next year and will maintain the browser on more popular distributions of the software.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Visualizing the Invisible

• We recently released Private Browsing with Tracking Protection in Firefox – a feature focused on providing anyone using Firefox with meaningful choice over third parties on the Web that might be collecting data without their understanding or control. This is a feature which addresses the need for more control over privacy online but is also connected to an ongoing and important debate around the preservation of a healthy, open Web ecosystem and the problems and possible solutions to the content blocking question.

=> ↺ Mozilla: Open Source Thunderbird Email Client and Firefox Should Split

• Baker suggested that both Firefox and Thunderbird would be better off if they reverted to being separate projects. That would allow developers working on Firefox to focus all of their attention on that application, while Thunderbird developers could do the same for the email client.

• Baker did not propose a specific plan for spinning Thunderbird off into its own project. She did make clear that Mozilla would like to make the transition smooth and that the organization will continue to support Thunderbird until a transition is complete.

=> ↺ Mozilla Wants to Pass Off Thunderbird Work Once and For All

SaaS/Big Data

=> ↺ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of Apache™ CloudStack™ v4.6, the turnkey Open Source cloud computing software platform used for creating private-, public-, and hybrid cloud environments.

=> ↺ Standing up clouds

• One thing that is interesting for me is the sheer number of ways of getting your OpenStack cloud to an end product and the way in that no one system has prevailed.

=> ↺ Cloudera Deepens Integration of Spark with Hadoop

• Cloudera, focused on big data and Apache Hadoop, has announced that it has further matured Apache Spark integration within Hadoop environments. Spark and Hadoop are both flourishing on the big data scene. To further expand the enterprise capabilities of Spark, Cloudera has added support for Spark SQL and MLlib into Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 and CDH 5.5, which the company launched recently.

Databases

=> ↺ RethinkDB: how to be successful with open source

• It’s about the community. Open source is a fantastic software development model, but it’s as much about the people as it is about the license involved. Most prominent projects have mailing lists, a GitHub project and IRC / Slack channels; getting both users and maintainers to collaborate in a positive way encourages the growth of new ideas.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ 6 useful LibreOffice extensions

• LibreOffice is the best free office suite around, and as such has been adopted by all major Linux distributions. Although LibreOffice is already packed with features, it can be extended by using specific add-ons, called extensions.

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.1 Up to Beta State, the Hunting Session Squashes Nearly 400 Bugs

• The first Beta build of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.1 open-source and cross-platform office suite was silently released at the end of November 2015 for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

CMS

=> ↺ How open source solves the innovation problem

• A couple of weeks ago, a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of one of the largest mobile telecommunications companies in the world asked me how a large organization such as hers should think about organizing itself to maintain control over costs and risks while still giving their global organization the freedom to innovate.

• When it comes to managing their websites and the digital customer experience, they have over 50 different platforms managed by local teams in over 50 countries around the world, she told me. Her goal is to improve operational efficiency, improve brand consistency, and set governance by standardizing on a central platform. The challenge is that they have no global IT organization that can force the different teams to re-platform.

=> ↺ WordPress.com Goes Open Source

• WordPress, the world’s largest open source content management system (CMS), has just become even more open sourcier.

• Chalk it up to some changes from Automattic, the web development corporation most notable for its contributions to WordPress and WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPress.

=> ↺ Open Sourcing Your Website: Automattic Revamps WordPress.com Blogging

• WordPress.com is fully open source and on GitHub as the result of a revamp of the popular blogging website by Automattic, which has rewritten WordPress.com to work like a mobile app rather than a traditional website.

Education

=> ↺ Teaching teens 3D animation with Blender

• We also need to prepare 2D assets (textures), for which GIMP and Inkscape are both used. I would like to get MyPaint and Krita (which I prefer to GIMP) installed as well, but the computers we use are running Scientific Linux, which is a rather conservative distro, and installing them has proved unjustifiably time consuming for the support staff. Would also like G’Mic (a plugin for GIMP and Krita) as it contains some useful tools for preparing textures.

=> ↺ ‘This House believes 21st Century skills aren’t being taught – and they should be’

• I’ve no problem with skills per se. In teaching, ‘behaviour management’ is a skill. Coding is a skill. So is searching for things on Google.

• I have some problem though with the notion that there are ‘21st century’ skills, but Allan did a fine job already of demolishing that notion.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Apple open sources Swift and makes a Linux port available

• Apple made good on its promise earlier this year to open source its Swift programming language, saying it welcomes contributions from all to make Swift better.

=> ↺ Apple Ports Its Swift Programming Language to Linux

• Alongside its open sourcing of the Swift Programming Language earlier today, Apple has announced a port of Swift to Linux.

=> ↺ Apple’s Swift language goes open source

=> ↺ Now you can tailor Swift – Apple open-sources the whole shebang

=> ↺ Apple’s Swift is open source now

=> ↺ Apple’s new programming language Swift is now open source

=> ↺ Apple Open Sources Its Swift Programming Language

=> ↺ Intel Debuts Snap Open-Source Project for Cloud Visibility

• Getting visibility into applications and infrastructure that is running in the cloud is not always an easy task. At the Tectonic Summit here, Intel announced a new open-source project called Snap, designed to help improve visibility into cloud infrastructure.

• In a video interview with eWEEK, Jonathan Donaldson, vice president and general manager, Software Defined Infrastructure Group at Intel, details what Snap is all about and how it can also help drive increased use of cloud technologies.

=> ↺ Hints for Successfully Managing an Open Source Project

=> ↺ Nexenta to Bring Open Source-Driven Software-Defined Storage Focus to the Software-Defined Infrastructure Summit

=> ↺ Apple’s Swift programming language is now open-source and available on Linux

=> ↺ Apple’s Latest Push For Business Customers

=> ↺ Craig Federighi talks open source Swift and what’s coming in version 3.0

=> ↺ Apple Swift Programming Language Is Now Open Source

=> ↺ Apple’s Swift Now an Open Source; Boosts Enterprise Division

=> ↺ Apple Makes Swift Programming Language Open Source, Available Now for Ubuntu

=> ↺ Apple Open Sources Powerful Swift Programming Language

=> ↺ Apple’s Swift Is Now Open-Source, Development Snapshots For Ubuntu

=> ↺ Apple makes Swift open source, so its influence will reach beyond the walled garden

=> ↺ Apple open-sources Swift, posts the language to GitHub

=> ↺ Apple programming language Swift goes open source

=> ↺ Apple Makes Swift Open Source, Developers Rejoice

BSD

=> ↺ Is That Linux? No, It’s PC-BSD

• Linux was fast enough on this machine. But in street racing parlance, with PC-BSD I’m burning rubber in all four gears.

=> ↺ DragonFlyBSD 4.4 Brings Collation Support, Uses Gold Linker By Default

• DragonFlyBSD 4.4 is ready for release with a number of exciting improvements and new features.

• DragonFlyBSD 4.4 delivers improvements to the i915 and Radeon DRM drivers that are now up to parity with their state from Linux 3.18, supports collation for named locales, a overhauled locale system, and the regex library was replaced with the TRE library. Also very prominent to DragonFlyBSD 4.4 is that it uses the Gold linker by default.

=> ↺ ARM Cortex-A35 Support Added To LLVM

• The ARM Cortex-A35 processor cores are now supported by upstream LLVM.

• As of this morning, the latest LLVM code adds support for the Cortex-A35 ARMv8-A core.

=> ↺ bsdtalk259 – Supporting a BSD Project

• A recording from vBSDCon 2015 of the talk titled “Supporting a BSD Project” with Ed Maste and George Neville-Neil.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ Fighting For Social Justice Is a Major Contribution to Society

• I have something to say that I’m sure everyone is going to consider controversial. I’ve been meaning to say it for some time, and I realize that it’s going to get some annoyance from all sides of this debate. Conservancy may lose Supporters over this, even though this is my personal blog and my personal opinion, and views expressed here aren’t necessarily Conservancy’s views. I’ve actually been meaning to write this publicly for a year. I just have to say it now, because there’s yet another event on this issue caused yet another a war of words in our community.

=> ↺ Software Freedom Conservancy needs your support!

• Last August, Debian and Conservancy announced a partnership and formed the Copyright Aggregation Project where, among other things, Conservancy will be able to hold copyrights for some Debian works and ensure compliance with copyleft so that those works remain in free software.

=> ↺ The Free Software Foundation Updates Its Gift Giving Guide

=> ↺ GnuPG 2.1.10 released

• The GnuPG team is pleased to announce the availability of a new release of GnuPG modern: Version 2.1.10. The main features of this release are support for TOFU (Trust-On-First-Use) and anonymous key retrieval via Tor.

=> ↺ GCC 5.3 Officially Released

• Version 5.3 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is now available.

• Before getting too excited, remember that under the revised GCC versioning scheme adopted by GCC 5, this is just another bug-fix release. All major feature work for the past number of months has been for GCC 6, which recently ended its “stage one” feature development process with an aim of releasing GCC 6.1 in early-to-mid 2016. GCC 5.3 succeeds the GCC 5.2 release from July as the latest stable version with all of the latest bug-fix and regression fixes.

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ ‘Public administration should prefer open source’

• Public administrations should enhance their use of open source systems for public administration systems, eGovernment and cloud, says Dietmar Harhoff, director of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The auditability and openness of open source software is the main reason, but it is also because of efficiency, argues Professor Harhoff. “I definitely plead for a preference for open source systems in public infrastructures.”

=> ↺ European Commission site developers eying Drupal 8

• The performance and scalability improvements promised by the upcoming, 8th version of Drupal are getting the attention of the Drupal website builders working for the European Commission. The open source content management system will also be able to accommodate larger sites, and will also improve delivery of turnkey web site solutions (Software As A Service, SAAS), the EC developers notice.

=> ↺ DHS IT priorities focused on data, agile and open source

• In general:

• Data fusion and integration User experience – lessons learned from Healthcare.gov means that there is a need to take a more holistic view of systems and solutions. Agile development Digital Service Open source

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Take a Tour of Austin’s Newest Co-Working Space

• Open Source Co-Working is part of a boom in co-working space in Austin that includes Capital Factory, WeWork, Urban Co-Lab, Vuka, Orange Co-Working and several others. Filipos said Open Source diferentiates by providing a calm and quiet space that’s largely dedicated to developers and designers who want a distraction-free work space.

=> ↺ Top Chefs Talk Open Source Cooking at ICC

=> ↺ New, Open Source Database Compares the Environmental Impacts of Building Products and Materials

• To that end, we launched The Quartz Project, a collaborative open data initiative based on the understanding that data can help lead to better buildings. Data enables designers and builders to take into account all the factors that make performant and sustainable buildings. The four founding partners — thinkstep, committed to helping clients adopt more sustainable practices, Healthy Building Network, committed to research into the health impact of building materials, Google, a tech leader committed to healthier buildings for their global workforce, and Flux, a technology innovator committed to better processes to improve design – bring perspectives required to make this kind of initiative work.

Open Data

=> ↺ Climate resilient development: New open source index and indicators

• The JRC’s new open source index facilitates the ex-ante evaluation of the structural features of the vulnerability to climate change of the target countries of the GCCA+. It covers social, economic and environmental aspects of achieving climate-resilient development by aggregating 34 country-level ‘fit-for-purpose indicators’. These have been identified on the basis of their relevance for the EU GCCA+ initiative and their compliance with criteria such as reliability, open source, consistency, scientific robustness, global coverage, and publicly available data.

Open Hardware

=> ↺ Science for All: How to Make Free, Open Source Laboratory Hardware

• In the not-so-distant future you will read of a scientific breakthrough in an area your daughter was excited about in school. In the journal article you will click on the supplementary materials and be able to download all of the source code needed to replicate the instruments used to do the experiment. You will fire up your home 3-D printer to fabricate the equipment. Then, with a few more clicks, you will order any specialty supplies. By the weekend all the supplies will have arrived and now you and your daughter will have the fun of assembling the experiment and participating in state-of-the-art research for almost no money on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

=> ↺ More Details On The Do-It-Yourself ARM64 Laptop

• Last week I wrote about the in-development, build-it-yourself 64-bit ARM open-source laptop. That generated a fair amount of interest by the community in Olimex’s work and now some more details have emerged.

Programming

=> ↺ PHP 7.0 arrives, so go forth and upgrade if you dare

• PHP 7.0 was launched today, so we’ve asked @sydphp organiser and #phunconf convener Jack Skinner to explain its significance. Over to you, Jack …

• PHP is the language we love to hate and often hate to love. After celebrating it’s 20th birthday earlier this year, it’s clearly here to stay, not least because version 7 arrived today.

=> ↺ I am already a zygote. Is it too late for me to learn to program?

• So if you’ve been interested in learning to code, but intimidated by the brain-science, rocket-surgery reputation of programming, worry not. You are not too old to learn to program.

=> ↺ Hacktoberfest campaign leads to nearly 50K GitHub contributions

• In 2014, cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean decided to encourage contribution to open source software projects, so they sponsored Hacktoberfest. More than 500 participants completed the challenge by making at least 50 commits to projects. This year, DigitalOcean wanted to focus on improving projects.

=> ↺ PHP 7.0 Is Ready For Release

=> ↺ PHP 7 has been released

=> ↺ HHVM Nightly Releases Already Support PHP 7 Features

• While PHP 7 was just released, the nightly builds of Facebook’s HHVM are already supporting the latest language features of PHP 7.0 if you wish to take advantage of them in this alternate run-time.

=> ↺ PHPUnit 5.1

=> ↺ PHP version 7.0.0 is released!

• RC8 was GOLD, so version 7.0.0 GA is just released, at planed date.

Leftovers

Science

=> ↺ The dawn of the Digital Dark Age threatens us with ‘bit rot’

• Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and the vice president of Google, is now warning of a new type of degradation threat: “bit rot.”

• Bit rot is basically created by a sort of planned obsolescence in software, and the formats associated with that software. As an example, Microsoft phased out Windows XP officially in 2014, which now won’t install on most newer computers.

Hardware

=> ↺ Plummeting SSD prices are quickly closing in on traditional hard drives

• The decision between solid state and hard disk drives should become a lot less agonizing over the next couple years as consumer SSD prices plummet.

• Research firm DRAMeXchange projects average SSD prices to hit $0.24 per gigabyte in 2016, down from $0.39 per gigabyte this year, Computerworld reports. Those prices will see another dramatic drop to $0.17 per gigabyte in 2017. Meanwhile, HDD prices are projected to stagnate at $0.06 per gigabyte over the next few years.

=> ↺ SSDs aren’t as cheap as hard drives yet, but they’re getting there

• CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, motherboards, RAM, Wi-Fi, and all the other components you think of when you think about a PC have all been getting continuously faster over the last five years, but so far this decade nothing has offered the performance boost of a solid-state drive. Putting an SSD in a five-year-old computer is enough to make it feel like a new machine even if every other component stays the same, and at this point you’re really doing yourself a disservice if you’re buying a new machine without one.

=> ↺ Seagate and Newisys Demonstrate 1 TB/s Flash Architecture

• Today Seagate and Newisys announced a new flash storage architecture capable or 1 Terabyte/sec performance. Designed for HPC applications, the “industry’s fastest flash storage design” comprises 21 Newisys NSS-2601 with dual NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Modules deployed with Seagate’s newest SAS 1200.2 SSD drives. These devices can be combined in a single 42U rack to achieve block I/O performance of 1TB/s with 5PB of storage. Each Newisys 2U server with 60 Seagate SSDs is capable of achieving bandwidth of 49GB/s.

Security

=> ↺ OpenSSL Affected By Four More Security Vulnerabilities

=> ↺ Let’s encrypt all the things

• Now that letsencrypt is more widely released, I took the opportunity to generate the certificates and install them manual on my hosting. In the future I will flip the switch to force HTTPS here. For now I made sure to avoid mixed-content as much as I could.

=> ↺ I jumped on the SSL-bandwagon

=> ↺ Friday’s security updates

=> ↺ Security updates for Thursday

=> ↺ Let’s Encrypt Enters Public Beta

=> ↺ SSH SHA-2 support in Twisted

• Launchpad operates a few SSH endpoints: bazaar.launchpad.net and git.launchpad.net for code hosting, and upload.ubuntu.com and ppa.launchpad.net for uploading packages. None of these are straightforward OpenSSH servers, because they don’t give ordinary shell access and they authenticate against users’ SSH keys recorded in Launchpad; both of these are much easier to do with SSH server code that we can use in library form as part of another service. We use Twisted for several other tasks where we need event-based networking code, and its conch package is a good fit for this.

=> ↺ Can you keep Linux-based ransomware from attacking your servers?

=> ↺ Elasticsearch Servers Targeted by Linux-Based Botnet Operators

• A honeypot experiment ran by AlientVault has shown that the recent security vulnerabilities discovered in Elasticsearch servers over the summer are now actively being used by botnet operators.

=> ↺ Researchers Found Another Malware Targeting Linux Users

• Many analysts believe Rebooke is a harmless Trojan which is true, but its simple design allows the attacker to maneuver the type of attacks which can allow them to deliver powerful payloads on the systems.

=> ↺ Let’s Encrypt May Improve Security for Regular People More Than Any Other Initiative This Decade

• Secure websites have always been standard for ecommerce companies like Amazon or Shopify, and in recent years companies that handle private communications like Google and Facebook have invested millions of dollars in enabling encryption for all users. But what about everyone else?

=> ↺ Public Beta: December 3, 2015

• Let’s Encrypt will enter Public Beta on December 3, 2015. Once we’ve entered Public Beta our systems will be open to anyone who would like to request a certificate. There will no longer be a requirement to sign up and wait for an invitation.

• Our Limited Beta started on September 12, 2015. We’ve issued over 11,000 certificates since then, and this operational experience has given us confidence that our systems are ready for an open Public Beta.

• It’s time for the Web to take a big step forward in terms of security and privacy. We want to see HTTPS become the default. Let’s Encrypt was built to enable that by making it as easy as possible to get and manage certificates.

=> ↺ Let’s encrypt automation on Debian

=> ↺ DHS to Silicon Valley: Tell us how to secure this “Internet of Things”

• The US Department of Homeland Security has announced that its Silicon Valley Office (SVO)—the agency’s liaison point with the technology industry—will hold an event on December 10 to kick off a recruiting drive for startups and “non-traditional small businesses” interested in latching onto government funding. The Industry Day, being held at the Menlo Park, California, offices of SRI International, will be focused on the current leading source of worry for DHS officials: the “Internet of Things” (IoT).

=> ↺ Millions of smart TVs, phones and routers at risk from old vulnerability

• There’s growing concern over how manufacturers of devices such as routers and smart TVs deal with security vulnerabilities that emerge in their products. Their patching regimes are not nearly as rigorous as those from major software manufacturers, which could expose consumers to attacks as the products age.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ Is Turkey Really Benefiting From Oil Trade With ISIS?

• Relations between Russia and Turkey hit a new low this week after Moscow doubled down on its claims that Turkey shot a Russian warplane in order to protect its supply of oil with the militant group ISIS.

=> ↺ War Porn

• Scotland is being dragged into a war it voted near unanimously against. 96.5% of Scotland’s MPs voted against the airstrikes in Syra. On platforms all up and down this country, I argued that I do not care a damn about how strong powers are given to Scotland’s parliament in domestic affairs, it we are not a sovereign nation and can still be taken to war against our will. I was proud of Alex Salmond last night for expressing contempt at the notion that civilians are not killed in British airstrikes, a big lie nobody else directly challenged.

=> ↺ Deselection is Essential to Democracy

• This goes to the heart of the Blairite cause. It is apparently not “undemocratic” for them to take legal advice on whether they can keep Jeremy Corbyn’s name off the ballot in a future membership ballot. It is not “undemocratic” to discuss deselecting the Leader, but it is a heinous offence against democracy to consider deselecting an MP. The odious Blairites are the most self-centred, selfish and indeed sociopathic group ever to have a serious presence in the UK parliament.

=> ↺ Zionist Benn’s Grab For Power

• It is worth reading the next article BICOM published. Brigadier General Michael Herzog, head of strategy for the Israeli defence Force, sets out a strategy for Israeli interests in Syria which dovetails precisely with what Benn and Cameron were pushing in the Commons. Note that Herzog says an overall diplomatic solution is not realistic and rather de facto partitioning of Syria suits Israel’s interests. Therefore there should be no waiting for diplomatic progress before western military action.

=> ↺ Emily Benn and Alex Salmond

=> ↺ O’Reilly And NYPD’s Ray Kelly Hype NYPD’s Failed Muslim Surveillance Program To Combat Terrorism

• Bill O’Reilly and former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly defended the NYPD’s now defunct surveillance program called, “The Demographics Unit” in response to the deadly attacks in San Bernadino, California. Kelly argued that the program foiled sixteen terror plots in New York City, but a report found that the program never produced one viable lead since being adopted.

=> ↺ CNN’s New Day Explains How “Ease Of Access” To Guns Is Linked To High Levels Of Gun Violence

• CNN Analyst: “It’s Easier To Buy A Gun In The United States … Than Most Comparable Countries”

=> ↺ Murdoch Trails Behind Murray

• Eight days ago I published a leak from an MOD source that the MOD’s Defence Intelligence Service fundamentally disagreed with Cameron’s “70,000 moderate rebels claim” and were incensed about. Today the Murdoch Press – the Times and the Sun – publish as massive front page exclusives exactly what I published eight days ago.

• Interesting isn’t it that they didn’t publish it before the parliamentary debate on Syria?

=> ↺ Guns killed more Americans in 12 years than AIDS, war, and illegal drug overdoses combined

• At least 14 people were shot and killed at Wednesday afternoon’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. It’s a shocking number, one that will contribute to a rolling national tragedy: roughly 33,000 Americans every year are killed with firearms (homicides, suicides, and accidents).

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ Seeing Through the Smoky Pall: Observations from a Grim Indonesian Fire Season

• In September and October 2015, tens of thousands of fires sent clouds of toxic gas and particulate matter into the air over Indonesia. Despite the moist climate of tropical Asia, fire is not unusual at this time of year. For the past few decades, people have used fire to clear land for farming and to burn away leftover crop debris. What was unusual in 2015 was how many fires burned and how many escaped their handlers and went uncontrolled for weeks and even months.

=> ↺ Manslaughter charges dropped in BP spill case—nobody from BP will go to prison

• In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and began spewing oil into the US Gulf Coast. In all, this released some 134 million gallons of crude over a span of almost three months. Eleven workers were killed in the nation’s worst offshore oil spill.

• Today, federal prosecutors moved—and a judge agreed—to drop manslaughter charges against two supervisors aboard the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded. This development, in which prosecutors said they believed they no longer could meet the legal threshold for a conviction, means that nobody will go to prison for the disaster that soiled coastlines from Texas to Florida, killed nearly a dozen people, and was an environmental disaster that perhaps brings with it never-before-seen longterm consequences.

=> ↺ Facebook Has Activated Safety Check in India for the Chennai Floods

• The website activated its Safety Check feature early Thursday, allowing people to mark themselves as “safe” from the floods. The feature, which debuted in October 2014, has now been deployed on several occasions, the most recent — somewhat controversially — being last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris.

=> ↺ The High Cost of Indonesia’s Fires

• Enormous fires have been burning for several months on the Indonesian side of Borneo, and on Sumatra. The resulting haze has been a catastrophe for the region, with severe impacts for human health and wildlife. The fires are also a climate disaster, resulting in 1.62 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions so far this year — triple Indonesia’s normal annual output.

• [...]

• Indonesia, is the global leader in terms of palm oil, pulpwood, and timber production, and fires are used to clear the land and make way for agricultural produftion. The driving force behind this destructive system is foreign demand. In the United States, palm oil is being used by companies including PepsiCo, Nissin, and Frito Lay as an alternative to hydrogenated oils. In Europe, it is used as a biofuel. Today, the biggest markets for palm are China and India.

• Of course, there are other ways to clear forest, but fire is often cheaper — set a fire and then nature takes over. Fires also provide an opportunity for land grabs in Indonesia, adding an additional incentive for those who want land. Due to restrictions on deforestation, pristine forests are more difficult to legally convert into palm oil or pulp plantations. But recently burned forest and peat? It becomes “degraded land” that is ripe for agricultural production. Greenpeace has already observed this pattern of land grabbing on recently-burned land in Borneo.

Finance

=> ↺ JPMorgan Wrote Complaints After Firing a Whistle-Blower

• Mr. Burris complained in 2013 that JPMorgan was pressuring brokers like him to sell the bank’s own mutual funds even when the offerings from competitors were more suitable. A few weeks after an article in The New York Times about Mr. Burris’s concerns appeared, complaints from some of his former clients in Arizona began showing up on his disciplinary records that are maintained by a regulatory agency and publicly available.

=> ↺ Six Key Flaws In The EU’s Proposed ‘New’ Corporate Sovereignty Court

• A few months back, Techdirt wrote about the European Commission’s proposal to replace the traditional corporate sovereignty system — generally known as “investor-state dispute settlement ” (ISDS) — with what it called the “Investment Court System” (ICS). That seemed to us little more than a re-branding exercise; now an international investment law scholar has weighed in on the issue with his own, rather more expert opinion. Gus Van Harten is Associate Professor at York University in Canada.

=> ↺ Facebook shares: what’s behind Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘hacker philanthropy’?

• Whatever motivates them, these new philanthropists aren’t happy with the model for altruism that they’ve inherited. In his WSJ article, Parker, dismissing traditional philanthropy as “largely antiquated” and motivated by “safe” gifts that result in the chance to “name buildings”, described a new approach that would be at ease with failure, agile, and sceptical of received wisdom – just as its proponents had been in tech. “They’re much more comfortable with risk,” says Breeze. “This is not an easy area: trying to do something about intense social problems outside of the state and outside of the market. If they take a risk and they learn from it, that’s held up as a success. The willingness to talk about failure is another part of their gift.”

=> ↺ Imagining a World Without Growth

• Could the world order survive without growing?

• [...]

• Economic growth took off consistently around the world only some 200 years ago. Two things powered it: innovation and lots and lots of carbon-based energy, most of it derived from fossil fuels like coal and petroleum. Staring at climactic upheaval approaching down the decades, environmental advocates, scientists and even some political leaders have put the proposal on the table: World consumption must stop growing.

=> ↺ Zuckerberg Responds To Critics, Explains How He’s Spending $45B

• The revelation generated a lot of attention, much of it due to the sheer volume of Zuckerberg’s net worth — $45 billion!

=> ↺ Mark Zuckerberg explains why he didn’t give his Facebook billions to charity

• Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg made the surprise announcement that he, along with his wife Priscilla Chan, would be donating 99 percent of their Facebook shares — worth around $45 billion — to the causes of “advancing human potential” and “promoting equality.” The gesture appeared altruistic, but some have criticized the way Zuckerberg is using the money, giving it to a limited liability company rather than a charitable foundation. Now Zuckerberg has responded to those complaints, posting another message that attempts to explain why he set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and what he and his wife want to do with the money.

=> ↺ Justice Department Collects More Than $23 Billion in Civil and Criminal Cases in Fiscal Year 2015

• Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced today that the Justice Department collected $23.1 billion in civil and criminal actions in the fiscal year (FY) ending Sept. 30, 2015. Collections in FY 2015 represent more than seven and a half times the approximately $2.93 billion of the Justice Department’s combined appropriations for the 94 U.S. Attorneys’ offices and the main litigating divisions in that same period.

• “The Department of Justice is committed to upholding the rule of law, safeguarding taxpayer resources and protecting the American people from exploitation and abuse,” said Attorney General Lynch. “The collections we are announcing today demonstrate not only the strength of that commitment, but also the significant return on public investment that our actions deliver. I want to thank the prosecutors and trial attorneys who made this achievement possible, and to reiterate our dedication to this ongoing work.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ Trump wins because he lies: Truthiness, Fox News, and why the right likes a fact-free zone

• Conservatives decided years ago, as a matter of strategy, to attack the mainstream media as hopelessly liberal. There’s a kernel of truth to this, in that there are likely more liberals than conservatives working in media. But the coverage, if it’s biased at all, isn’t biased in favor of liberals. If anything, the media favors the sensational and the attention-grabbing – this is what drives ratings and clicks.

• The media, after all, is a commercial enterprise, and so its biases are financial, not political.

=> ↺ Donald Trump Praises Leading Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones And His “Amazing” Reputation

• Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on Alex Jones’ program, where Trump praised Jones as having an “amazing” reputation and promised, “I will not let you down.” Jones is America’s leading conspiracy theorist — he believes the government was behind 9-11 and several other catastrophes.

=> ↺ Neo-Con YouGov At It Again With Leading Questions

• There is no need to mention the RAF in this question – it is not their decision and the impression is subtly conveyed that the RAF want to do it. The question is carefully designed to tap in to the public’s well-documented inclination to support the armed forces in any conflict situation.

• [...]

• Nevertheless, there are two very interesting facts. Even on this biased question opinion is swinging very fast against airstrikes. Secondly, yet again there is a very real divergence of opinion between England and Scotland.

=> ↺ In “Extraordinary” Move, WI Supreme Court Fires Scott Walker Prosecutor to Stave-Off SCOTUS Review

• “What a mess this court has wrought!” Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson declared in the latest chapter in the state’s John Doe legal saga.

• On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s majority contorted itself to find a new way to protect both Scott Walker and the Court’s biggest supporters–not to mention itself–following its decision in July rewriting the state’s limits on money in politics and ending the “John Doe” investigation into Walker’s campaign coordinating with dark money groups.

• Wednesday’s ruling was supposed to be a straightforward decision on a motion to reconsider, in light of additional evidence that Walker and his allies had violated the campaign finance laws that the Court upheld in July.

=> ↺ Conservative Media React To San Bernardino Mass Shooting With Evidence-Free Solution Of More Concealed Guns

• Conservative media are using the mass shooting that claimed 14 lives in San Bernardino, California, to once again push the carrying of concealed guns as a deterrent for mass shootings. There is no evidence that concealed guns are a real-life solution to mass shootings; according to an analysis of public mass shootings over a 30-year period, not a single one was stopped by an armed civilian with a concealed carry permit.

Censorship

=> ↺ After Illegally Censoring Websites For Five Years On Bogus Copyright Charges, US Gov’t Quietly ‘Returns’ Two Domains

• One of the craziest stories of outright censorship by the US government isn’t getting any attention at all. Five years ago, ICE — Immigrations and Customs Enforcement — a part of the Department of Homeland Security, illegally seized a group of domain names, claiming that they were violating copyright law. As we noted soon after this, the affidavit that ICE used to get a court to sign off on the seizures was particularly ridiculous, showing a near total lack of understanding of both the law and how the internet worked.

=> ↺ It’s time to smash the cosy Question Time chumocracy

• Not every white person thinks the same: Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon and Nick Griffin share not much more than a skin colour. There are class, gender, cultural, political, national and religious differences that are far more powerful than ethnic similarities.

• Everyone, of course, realises this – not least the media. Watch a programme such as Question Time and you will see a wide range of white panellists representing the wide range of views that white people in the UK hold.

• Why, then, is the same civility not extended to Britain’s ethnic minorities? Instead, the select few BAME (Black Asian minority ethnic) “representatives” are wheeled out again and again as if somehow they alone who speak for Britain’s 8.1 million ethnic minority citizens.

• Here’s an open secret: they don’t. Political views are just as broad and diverse among people of colour as they are among white citizens. It is worrying that this still needs pointing out.

=> ↺ If Any Kind of “Shaming” Can Be Called Legitimate and Useful, It Must Be Prayer Shaming

• I would go a step further to suggest that prayer is not just insufficient but harmful—not only in crisis situations (when it is just empirically ineffectual), but every single day. Every prayer is a tacit and/or explicit affirmation that the navigation of human life, human interaction, and human interdependence are somehow not the responsibility of humans. This can obviously take much more malign significance in the minds of the deeply faithful, but even in those little “god, give me strength”/”wow, the universe is really looking out for me today” moments, all of humankind is subtly diminished by the suggestion that there is a deity whose plan is being served by our suffering, and, more to the point, other people’s suffering.

Privacy

=> ↺ Facebook to stop tracking people without Facebook accounts in Belgium after privacy ruling

• Facebook will stop tracking browsers of Facebook pages in Belgium who are not signed into a Facebook account, seeking to comply with a court ruling last month ordering it to do so or face daily fines.

• The company’s action means Belgians will have to log into Facebook before they can see Facebook pages, forcing them to create and sign into an account if they want to view the pages or related content.

• Previously non-users could view public Facebook pages from sports teams, celebrities, tourist attractions and businesses without needing to log into Facebook. As a result of the changes registered Facebook users in Belgium who attempt to log in from an unrecognised web browser will be forced to comply with some added security steps, the company said.

=> ↺ Google Cloud Vision API Could Revolutionize Machine Vision

• You can currently call the API by embedding an image as part of the request. In future phases, Google will add support for integrating with Google Cloud Storage. The Vision API enables you to request one or more annotation types per image.

=> ↺ Amazon wants to fill your living room with sensors and cameras to bring you augmented reality

• We’ve had a couple virtual reality headsets in the Digital Trends office, and whether or not they’re comfortable to sport on your face, they make the wearer look kind of ridiculous. If your living room was one big augmented reality space, though, that would mean you’re not constantly hunting for your headset. That’s Amazon’s idea, away, according to a couple new patents the retailer recently filed.

=> ↺ Submission to Science and Technology Committee on Investigatory Powers Bill

• Parliamentary committees have started examining the draft Snooper’s Charter, so it is important to engage and explain what is wrong with the bill. In this submission we decided to focus on the provisions to create “internet connection records”. We ask for these to be scrapped as they are disproportionate and technically unworkable without the excessive and intrusive collection of everything we do online. There are alternatives that should be explored.

=> ↺ The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

• Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plea for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.

=> ↺ Is Google spying on students who use Chromebooks?

• I’ll let you make up your own mind about Google’s response. To me it doesn’t carry much weight, but I’ve become somewhat cynical regarding Google’s motives and behavior over the years. So you’ll have to decide for yourself if the company’s explanation trumps the EFF’s report.

=> ↺ After Safe Harbour ruling, legal moves to force Facebook to stop sending data to US

• The Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has sent complaints to the data protection agencies in three EU countries—Ireland, Germany, and Belgium—asking them to suspend the flow of personal data from Facebook’s operations in Ireland to the US. This follows his earlier success at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which ruled that the Safe Harbour framework under which personal data was being transferred was no longer valid because of mass surveillance of EU citizens by the NSA. Subsequently, the Irish High Court said that the Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) was obliged to investigate Schrems’ earlier complaints.

• His letter to the authorities in Ireland, where Facebook has its European headquarters, asks the Irish data protection agency “to suspend all data flows from ‘Facebook Ireland Ltd’ to ‘Facebook Inc’.” Schrems makes the same request to the data protection agencies in Germany and Belgium. In a release accompanying his complaints, Schrems explains why he has taken this unusual approach of involving several data protection agencies (DPAs): “My personal experience with the Irish DPC are rather mixed, which is why I felt involving more active DPAs make proper enforcement actions more likely. I hope the DPAs will cooperate in this case.”

=> ↺ LinkedIn’s revised Android app emulates Facebook

=> ↺ Why Electronic Health Records aren’t more usable

• Federal government incentives worth about $30 billion have persuaded the majority of physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic health record (EHR) systems over the past few years. However, most physicians do not find EHRs easy to use.

• Physicians often have difficulty entering structured data in EHRs, especially during patient encounters. The records are hard to read because they’re full of irrelevant boilerplates generated by the software and lack individualized information about the patient.

• Alerts frequently fire for inconsequential reasons, leading to alert fatigue. EHRs from different vendors are not interoperable with each other, making it impossible to exchange information without expensive interfaces or the use of secure messaging systems.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ The Police Were Right That Someone Could Abduct Her Son

• Video here. Check out how close the playground is to the houses. This is like my parents allowing us to play in our backyard, except apartment dwellers don’t have their own yard.

=> ↺ University Islamic Society students ‘make death threats’ as they disrupt controversial blasphemy lecture by human rights activist who they said ‘violated their safe space’

• One student switched off the projector after the speaker showed a cartoon of Muhammad, while a member of the audience claimed that an activist pointed his fingers at his head in the shape of a gun and said ‘boom’ in a bid to intimidate him.

• The Islamic Society spoke out in advance of the talk – titled ‘Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of ISIS’ – insisting Ms Namazie should not be allowed to speak because of her ‘bigoted views’.

=> ↺ Islamic students pull plug on talk by atheist who ‘violated safe space’

• A secular campaigner has told how she was heckled and shouted down by members of a student Islamic society who said that she was violating their “safe space”.

• Maryam Namazie claimed that the Islamic society at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was addressing the institution’s atheist group, tried to stop her talk going ahead by invoking a “no platform policy”.

=> ↺ Goldsmiths’ Islamic Society students disrupt human rights activist’s speech

• A renowned human rights campaigner has told how she was “intimidated” by Muslim students at a London university during a talk on radical Islam.

• Members of the Goldsmiths University Students Union’s Islamic Society switched off a projector and heckled as Maryam Namazie delivered a lecture on Monday evening.

• The students disrupted the speech, entitled ‘Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of Isis’, because they claimed it “violated their safe space”.

=> ↺ Pakistan Aims To Take Home ‘Worst Cybercrime Legislation In The World’ Trophy With Prevention Of Electronic Crimes Bill

• Pakistan is pushing forward its version of CISPA/CISA, the PECB (Prevention of Electronic Crime Bill). Much like here in the US, legislators have put this together without the input of legal or technical experts and, to make matters worse, this one is being pushed under a regime already notorious for censorious actions and intrusive surveillance.

=> ↺ Gitmo Prisoner Held For 13 Years Was Victim Of ‘Mistaken Identity’

• He’s been held without charge at Guantánamo Bay for 13 years. Believed to be an al-Qaeda courier or trainer, he was deemed dangerous enough to be held for an “indefinite” amount of time at the prison camp.

• But on Tuesday, in documents released at a Guantánamo hearing, U.S. officials admitted that the man — a Yemeni named Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri — was not who they thought he was. His arrest, they conceded, had been partly a case of “mistaken identity.”

• Al-Shamiri, the documents revealed, had been a low-level Islamic fighter — and not a significant member of al-Qaeda as had previously been suspected.

• “It was previously assessed that YM-434 (al-Shamiri) also was an al-Qaeda facilitator or courier, as well as a trainer, but we now judge these activities were carried out by other known extremists with names or aliases similar to YM-434’s,” officials said.

=> ↺ Saudi woman seeks asylum in UK after death threats from her family

• A Saudi woman who fled to the UK with her young son after leaving her husband has told a court how she received death threats from relatives – one of whom told her they would “cut off your head like we do to the sheep” for bringing shame upon their family.

• The woman, who is in her 30s but has not been named, is claiming asylum in Britain after her decision to separate from her husband angered her family. In one incident recounted to the court, her father attacked her with a piece of furniture and her brother tried to strangle her.

=> ↺ Will Ukip break up? These bookmakers think Ukip could disband and Nigel Farage could step down

=> ↺ Massive Collapse in Tory Vote Share in Oldham

• The Tory vote in Oldham West was not tiny and statistically insignificant. In 2010 it was 23%. The national media has been plugging a narrative about the political dominance of the Tories for months, which bears no relationship to people’s experience in real life. Tens of thousands of words of utter bilge have been written about the Conservatives “Northern powerhouse” strategy and how it will enable them to win in the North, and especially in precisely this Greater Manchester region. This is revealed as complete and utter nonsense. This by-election shows the Tories are deeply unpopular.

=> ↺ The mask slips: Oldham result brings out the real Nigel Farage

• Now before I get into the substance of Farage’s argument, it’s worth actually taking a look at the article he referred to in all his interviews this morning.

• The Guardian’s Northern editor is a journalist called Helen Pidd. You can read the article she wrote about the Oldham by-election last Saturday in full here.

• As you can see, there is absolutely no mention of a street where “nobody spoke English, nobody had ever heard go Jeremy Corbyn, but they were all voting Labour.”

• There is one woman quoted who had not heard of Corbyn and another man quoted who had heard of him, didn’t like him, but was still voting Labour because of the local candidate.

=> ↺ Ken Livingstone: ‘After Oldham, all those MPs who think we can’t win with Jeremy Corbyn might start to rethink’

• Ken Livingstone gazes out of his kitchen door, where the autumn leaves are floating gently down towards his cherished pond. “The garden wouldn’t be such a mess,” he says laconically, “if Jeremy hadn’t won.”

• At 70, he was meant to be retired by now, devoting himself to domesticity. When he lost his last mayoral election three years ago, he swapped roles with his wife, Emma, who had previously put her career on hold to support his; she has now retrained as a teacher while he became a househusband, running around after 12-year-old Thomas and Mia, 11. (He also has three grownup children by previous partners.)

=> ↺ Oldham may be the end for UKIP

• In 1997, Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling threatened the very existence of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation. The WWF was being beaten in television ratings, pay-per-view buy rates, merchandise sales and all the other pecuniary methods of measuring success in professional wrestling. McMahon, however, is a canny operator and managed to turn around his company the following year, destroying the insurgent organisation and eventually buying it out for a paltry $2.5 million.

• Fast forward to December 2015 and another McMahon, Labour’s Candidate Jim in the Oldham West and Royton by-election, may also prove to be a canny operator who spells doom for an insurgency. UKIP, who had high hopes of causing another by-election headache for the increasingly desperate Labour party, have been held off in a distant second place. McMahon stormed home with a 10,722-vote majority, smaller than predecessor the late Michael Meacher’s due to turnout but with an increased share of the vote over the General Election result.

=> ↺ Death Mob Bays For Blood of MPs

• It is astonishing that Tom Watson says that anybody in that video should be expelled from the Labour Party, and that the entire mainstream media has described it as “intimidation”. There really is a genuine attempt to delegitimise even the concept of dissent from the neo-con war agenda.

Internet/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Can We Save Wireless from Regulators?

• Linux was born and grew within an ecosystem of norms, not laws. Those norms were those of programming (C), operating systems (*NIX), command shells (bash, etc.), e-mail (SMTP, etc.) licenses (GPL, etc.) and Internet protocols (TCP/IP and the rest).

=> ↺ NetworkManager and privacy in the IPv6 internet

• The other problem (privacy) is a bit harder to solve. An IP address (be it IPv4 or IPv6) address consists of a network part and the host part. The host discovers the relevant network parts and is supposed generate the host part. Traditionally it just uses an Interface Identifier derived from the network hardware’s (MAC) address. The MAC address is set at manufacturing time and can uniquely identify the machine. This guarantees the address is stable and unique. That’s a good thing for address collision avoidance but a bad thing for privacy. The host part remaining constant in different network means that the machine can be uniquely identified as it enters different networks. This seemed like non-issue at the time the protocol was designed, but the privacy concerns arose as the IPv6 gained popularity. Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem.

DRM

=> ↺ I Can’t Let You Do That, Dave

• DMCA 1201 prohibits breaking “digital locks” that restrict access to copyrighted works. Though it was originally conceived as a means of preventing piracy, it has proved most useful at preventing competition and the creation of legitimate, otherwise legal technologies. Copyright law has many flexibilities and exclusions that product designers, developers, and users can freely exercise, without any permission from the copyright holder. But under 1201, you can only make these uses if you do not have to break a lock.

=> ↺ Adobe Renaming Flash Software To “Animate CC”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ University: ‘Pirating’ Students Being Deliberately Targeted

• Data published by Central Michigan University has revealed a worrying trend in copyright complaints. Out of 1,912 received so far in 2015, more than 80% were from Rightscorp, a company that demands cash to settle. The university’s chief information officer believes that campuses like his are being deliberately targeted.

=> ↺ Popcorn Time Developers Poke MPAA with A New Fork

• A new group of Popcorn Time developers has officially launched a “Community Edition” of the popular application. What started as a relatively simple fix to get the most used fork working again has turned into a fork of its own, challenging the MPAA’s efforts to bring Popcorn Time down. s

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