Search the history of over 376 billion web pages on the Internet.

• Apartheid 1 0 Lxde I686 Isotope Download
• Apartheid 1 0 Lxde I686 Isotope 3

Links 25/11/2016: Pinebook, Games Sales

Contents

• GNU/Linux

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Never buying Windows again, eh? How about the Linux powered Oryx Pro?

    The Oryx Pro is the opposite of most of the laptops you have seen reviewed here recently. At 15.2×10.7×1.1″ and 5.5lbs it is bulkier than the slim laptops dominating the market, not to mention the 2lb power brick. It also runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as opposed to Win10, thankfully the install is well configured for the hardware present according to the review at Ars Technica. The hardware on the other hand is familiar and rather impressive, a desktop class GTX 1060, an i7-6700HQ, 32GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The model reviewed at Ars runs you almost $1900 or there is a 17″ model, as well as a GTX 1070 upgrade available if you so desire. Pop by to take a look at the full review of this Linux powered laptop.

  • Pinebook is a Linux laptop with an ARM CPU for $89 and up

    Pine64 launched a single-board computer called the Pine A64 last year. It features an Allwinner A64 ARM Cortex-A53 processor and sells for $15 and up.

    Now the company has introduced a laptop that uses the same processor and supports just about any Android or Linux-based software that can run on the Pine A64,.

    The laptop is called the Pinebook, and there are two options available: an $89 version with an 11.6 inch display or a $99 model with a 14 inch screen.

  • PINEBOOK ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 Processor to Sell for $89 and Up

    Following up on Pine A64 board powered by Allwinner A64 quad core Cortex A53 processor, Pine64 has decided to work on a software compatible laptop based on the processor. PINEBOOK comes with 2GB RAM, 16 GB flash storage, a 11.6″ or 14″ display, and the usual ports you’d expect on such device.

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • RADV Lands More Improvements & Other New Patches Pending

      In the absence of AMD open-sourcing their Vulkan driver code, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver led by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen continues to flourish. There is yet more exciting work that’s landed this week for improving this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

    • Mesa 12.0 vs. 13.0 vs. 13.1-devel Git OpenGL Skylake Benchmarks

      For those curious about the Intel Skylake graphics performance between Mesa 12.0 and now, here are some fresh Git OpenGL benchmarks.

    • The open source Vulkan driver for AMD ‘radv’ continues improving at a rapid pace

      As always, I am massively impressed with the progress the Mesa developers have made. The open source Vulkan driver ‘radv’ has continued to evolve recently.

    • Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library to Improve the Intel and Radeon Vulkan Drivers

      Today, November 24, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming second Mesa 13.0 3D Graphics Library point release.

      That’s right, Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library is now in the works, and it looks like it’s slated for release on November 25, 2016, around or shortly after 5pm GMT, promising a bunch of new fixes for the open source Intel i965, Radeon, and VC4 graphics drivers, as well as multiple improvements for the Intel ANV Vulkan and Radeon Vulkan (RADV) drivers.

    • Mesa 13.0.2 Being Prepped With Intel Geminilake Support, Vulkan Fixes & More

      For those riding the Mesa 13.0 stable release train rather than the adventurous Mesa 13.1-dev Git code, the Mesa 13.0.2 stable update is right around the corner with many fixes.

      Mesa release manager Emil Velikov is hoping to get the 13.0.2 release out the door this weekend, but today he’s issued the 13.0.2-RC1 test release. There are currently around 50 changes set for the Mesa 13.0.2 bug-fix release. Highlights include many fixes to VC4, i965, Radeon, and RADV drivers. There are also a number of Vulkan WSI (windowing system integration) fixes plus driver specific work, more smoke-testing, and memory leak fixes.

• Applications

  • Darktable 2.2 Being Prepared For Release With Many Changes

    This week marks the Darktable 2.2.0-RC1 release as the developers of this open-source photography workflow software prepare for its official release, just in time if you are planning to get some new camera gear this holiday season.

    Darktable 2.2 is a big release even though Darktable 2.0 was great — more than two thousand commits have gone into this 2.2 development code thus far.

  • Calibre 2.73 eBook Manager Allows Import and Export of Column Coloring Rules

    Today, November 25, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal proudly announced the release of yet another maintenance update of his popular, open-source, cross-platform, and free ebook library management tool.

    Calibre 2.73 is here exactly one week after the previous point release, namely Calibre 2.72, to add a bunch of interesting new features, such as the ability to hide row numbers in the main book list by using the new option implemented in the Look & Feel section of the Preferences dialog.

  • darktable 2.2 RAW Image Editor Gets New RC with Support for 4-Year-Old XMP Files

    The developers behind the open-source and cross-platform darktable photography workflow application and RAW image editor are hard at work these days to prepare the final release of the major darktable 2.2 series.

    It’s been only two weeks since our initial report on the upcoming darktable 2.2 release, so we recommend that you read that article first to get yourself familiar with the upcoming new features and improvements, which we have to admit that are overwhelming.

  • Give your eyes a break in the evenings with Redshift

    If you’ve heard of either Twilight or f.lux, you’ll probably know what these sorts of programs do: they adjust the colour temperature of your screen according to the time of day, often by altering the amount of blue light being emitted, to make the colour temperature and brightness more suitable for viewing in your environment. The end result is “normal” bright light during the day, for easy screen visibility during the day, but at night your screen will display a much softer and less bright image, with a reddish hue, which can greatly reduce eye strain and just generally make night time computer use a lot more comfortable.

  • Proprietary

    • Linux Users Unhappy as Adobe Flash Player keeps NPAPI architecture

      Adobe has announced that they will be continuing to support the NPAPI architecture for the Linux version of Flash in 2017 as well. This was not a decision embraced by everyone, as some Linux users voiced their complaints across the online medium.

    • SQL Server on Linux: Runs well in spite of internal quirks. Why? [Ed: Anderson pushes for Windows layer (back doors) on top of GNU/Linux which is what SQL Server technically requires. It's not really a Linux port.]

  • Instructionals/Technical

  • Games

    • Some nuts Black Friday deals for Linux gamers to make note of

      I have done a little search and come up with some interesting stuff that you might want to look into for a good deal.

    • The Feral Interactive store has Tomb Raider for a stupid price, go grab it

      Tomb Raider is a pretty good game, performance issues in certain areas aside. It’s currently on sale on the Feral Interactive store for peanuts.

    • A 2016 Thanksgiving retrospection about the open source game engine ‘xoreos’

      xoreos is a FLOSS project aiming to reimplement BioWare’s Aurora engine (and derivatives), covering their games starting with Neverwinter Nights and potentially up to Dragon Age II. This post gives a short update on the current progress.

    • SteamOS 2.97 Fixes Steam Controller Compatibility with Recent Steam Beta Clients

      A few hours ago, Valve promoted the stable SteamOS 2.97 maintenance release to the brewmaster channel, which means that SteamOS users can finally update their gaming machines powered by the Debian-based SteamOS distribution.

      SteamOS 2.97 arrives nearly four months after the previous stable release, namely SteamOS 2.87, which was pushed to the brewmaster channel on July 29, 2016, with support for Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070, as well as AMD “Bonaire” GPUs. Since then, Valve released no less than four Beta milestones that brought many changes.

    • RadeonSI vs. AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux For Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

      Aside from all the WARHAMMER benchmarking being done in the past few days on Phoronix since Feral Interactive released this latest Total War game for Linux, earlier this month the porting company also released another AAA title finally for Linux OpenGL gamers: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Here are some fresh benchmarks of that game using the newest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI, the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver, and NVIDIA’s proprietary driver.

    • The Very Latest RadeonSI Git Code Provides Minor Benefits For Total War: WARHAMMER

      Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this week. On launch-day we provided NVIDIA Linux benchmarks as well as RadeonSI GPU benchmarks for this game over many different GPUs. Also landing on launch-day in Mesa Git were support for compiling optimized shader variants asynchronously in RadeonSI. So here are some benchmarks with the very newest Git to show the performance difference, which some have claimed is up to 25% faster.

    • Motorsport Manager actually released for Linux, it’s surprisingly good

      After a bit of an issue with the original non-release, Motorsport Manager [Steam] is now available on Linux. I’ve taken a quick look to see what it’s like.

      The developers made a mistake, but after I contacted Valve it was corrected. I will put any attitudes aside to make sure it’s still covered. I wanted to play it after all, and it’s here, so I don’t see why anyone would ignore it now.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Qt 5.9 Planning For Feature Freeze, Other Changes

      While Qt 5.8 hasn’t even been released yet, there is already release planning that is happening around Qt 5.9.

      Qt 5.8.0 isn’t going to be released until the beginning of January due to the latest delays hampering the release. There is now a thread on the Qt mailing list simply entitled Qt 5.9. The Qt 5.9 plans being talked about are to do a feature freeze in early 2017, as soon as 1 February. They would be sticking hard to the feature freeze date to try to avoid any delays holding back the 5.9.0 release.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Plans for Core Apps Hackfest

      I have requested and received a partial sponsorship for a trip to Berlin to participate in the Core Apps Hackfest. This is a great opportunity for me to meet up with other from the GNOME community and immerse myself in contributing. I’ll be going on Saturday the 26th and leave again Tuesday the 29th.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Solus Users Receive Linux Kernel 4.8.10 and Vivaldi 1.5, QOwnNotes Lands as Well

      Fans of the Solus independent Linux-based operating system will be thrilled to learn that a bunch of new and updated packages made their way into the stable repositories a few moments ago.

      We’re using the distribution, so we just want to inform you as well about what landed today, November 24, 2016, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. First off, Solus is now powered by the latest Linux 4.8.10 kernel, which adds a bunch of networking improvements, and the recently released Vivaldi 1.5 web browser is available too.

    • antiX MX-16 “Metamorphosis” Linux OS Is Just Around the Corner, RC1 Out Now

      During the first days of November, we reported that the antiX MX-16 “Metamorphosis” Linux operating system entered development, and that it will be based on Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie”.

    • ALT Linux 8.1 Workstation Released with Linux Kernel 4.4.34, MATE & KDE Desktops

      On Thanksgiving day, BaseALT Ltd, through Michael Shigorin, proudly announced the release and general availability of the ALT Linux 8.1 Workstation distribution aimed for personal and corporate desktop use.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 supports IoT

      Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, which introduces new capabilities around Linux containers and the Internet of Things (IoT).

      The company says Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 also features lightweight tunnels, enabling guest instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 to be more secure, efficient, scalable and flexible. Additionally, enhancements to the bulk packet memory allocator improve performance for both 40 and 100 Gb networking interfaces.

    • Finance

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 25 News & Update: New Linux Based Operating Sytem Available Now; Is This Windows 10, Mac OS Killer?

        The Fedora Project has officially released its new operating system in the market. The open source software Fedora 25 is now available for users to download.

        Fedora 25 is the latest operating system based on Linux kernel developed by The Fedora Project community. The software is distributed under a free and open-source license, unlike the Microsoft Windows OS and Mac OS.

        The Fedora 25 OS has three editions depending on the specific use. The three editions are the Fedora 25 Atomic Host, Fedora 25 Server and Fedora 25 Workstation. According to Fedora Magazine, the three editions are built with a common set of base packages under the foundation of the Fedora operating system.

        The release of Fedora 25 comes with bug fixes, tweaks and enhanced packages which include Docker 1.12, Node.js 6.9.1, Rust support, PHP 7, and multiple Phyton versions. The software features Wayland display severs by default. Wayland display server will be replacing the X11 system after years of development, Softpedia reported.

      • Flock Stories 2016, Episode 5: Haïkel Guémar

        Package maintainer, developer, contributor, mentor, and diversity advocate Haïkel Guémar challenges the Fedora audience to help make on-boarding for new Fedora users simpler. He talks us through example actions we can take to increase diversity in the Fedora Project community.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical Releases Snapd 2.18 Snappy Daemon for Ubuntu Core 16 and Ubuntu 16.10

          The Snappy Team, through Canonical’s Michael Vogt, has had the great pleasure of announcing on November 24, 2016, the release of the snapd 2.18 maintenance update to Ubuntu’s Snappy daemon.

        • Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 Slated for Early December Release for Ubuntu Phones, Tablets

          On Thanksgiving day, Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak wrote yet another landing e-mail to inform the Ubuntu Phone and Tablet communities about the release date of the long-anticipated Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 software update.

        • Mcomix Is An Ace Desktop Comic Book Reader for Ubuntu

          I very recently stumbled across a blog post that shared something I’ve been looking for for years: the little-known run of 35p ‘choose your own adventure’ comics.

        • Intel Graphics Installer 2.0.3 Now Supports Ubuntu 16.10

          The Intel Linux graphics driver tool has been updated to support Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 24. The Intel Graphics Update Tool for Linux v2.0.3 offers up the latest Intel 2016Q3 graphics stack.

• Devices/Embedded

  • SUSE releases first 64-bit Linux OS for Raspberry Pi 3

    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Raspberry Pi supports built-in I/O including WiFi, Bluetooth.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Nokia’s flagship Android could sport 2K display, Carl Zeiss optics

        Nokia is set to make its big comeback to the smartphone segment in 2017. And rumours around the former mobile leader’s upcoming phones have started to gain momentum. With Nokia expected to make a return in the market with Android OS, there are some serious expectations from the company given it had such a formidable reputation in the mobile phone world before losing out to Apple and Samsung. Now according to a tipster on Weibo, the new Nokia Android phone will come either come with a 5.2-inch or 5.5-inch screen with 2K display.

      • Nokia’s new Android powered entry-level handset turns up on Geekbench powerd by Android 7.0.1 [Ed: Some of the company survived Microsoft’s attack on it, went back to Linux]

Free Software/Open Source

• Groovy, an Open Source Success Story

  Apache Groovy is a multi-faceted general purpose programming language for the Java platform. While primarily an object-oriented language with many dynamic language features, it also supports functional programming, static type checking and static compilation. This article looks at some interesting aspects of Groovy’s history and some of the significant guiding principles which help keep it a vibrant open source project.

• The Conventions of Contributing to Open Source

  We all love using open source, right? I have done my fair share of contributing to open source, mainly through small contributions here and there. I’ve tried to open source some libraries in the past, with varying levels of success and failure. I would say I am somewhere in the middle on the Contributor’s Spectrum. There are those that do much more and those that do much less.

• How Open Sourcing Bootstrap Made It Huge

  Teaching and learning from each other and building awesome stuff as a result of open communication and collaboration lie at the heart of the open source philosophy. Bootstrap certainly stands out as one of the most successful instances of the open source approach, which has made it what it is today.

• Love the Amazon Echo? Meet these 3 open source projects

  But where does open source fit into the picture? Is voice-controlled, connected future destined to be forever dominated by a few proprietary choices of custom-built hardware/software combinations that are essentially black boxes to their users? We hope not!

  In fact, there are a few open source tools for voice control out there already, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the field grows as the technology becomes more pervasive. Looking for a weekend project? Check out a few of these options.

• FreeDOS 1.2 Release Candidate 2

  We started FreeDOS in 1994 to create a free and open source version of DOS that anyone could use. We’ve been slow to make new releases, but DOS isn’t exactly a moving target anymore. New versions of FreeDOS are mostly about updating the software and making FreeDOS more modern. We made our first Alpha release in 1994, and our first Beta in 1998. In 2006, we finally released FreeDOS 1.0, and updated to FreeDOS 1.1 in 2012. And all these years later, it’s exciting to see so many people using FreeDOS in 2016.

• FreeDOS 1.2 RC2 Arrives, Still Evolving After 22 Years

  The second release candidate of FreeDOS 1.2 is now available, approximately one month after FreeDOS 1.2-RC1 and twenty-two years after the FreeDOS open-source project began.

• 10 holiday gift ideas for open source enthusiasts

  It’s that time of year again! Our amazing community members shared some of their favorite open-source-related products and gifts with us, and we’ve pulled together some of the best for our annual holiday gift guide.

  Kick off the holiday shopping season by checking out these 10 great gifts for open source enthusiasts. While you’re at it, don’t forget to enter our Holiday Gift Guide Giveaway for a chance to win your very own LulzBot Mini 3D printer.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice contributor interview: Leif Lodahl

    Until September 1st I was working as project manager and business developer in the company Magenta. From September 1st I’m working as IT architect at City of Ballerup (Ballerup Municipality). My work for (and with) LibreOffice has, until recently, been both professional and in my spare time.

• Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Apple releases macOS 10.12 Sierra open source Darwin code [iophk: 'open core']

  • Ross Gardler, Apache President and Microsoft Manager, talks the future of open source [Ed: another liar for hire]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • ProtoLeap Starter Educational Open Source Platform (video)

    Mazi Hosseini based in Toronto Canada has created a new educational open source platform, which has been designed to provide an easy way for anyone to learn more about electronics, as well as simplifying the sometimes laborious task of prototyping electronic circuits.

Leftovers

Apartheid 1 0 Lxde I686 Isotope Download

• Huge fire hits Manchester’s Chinatown

  Fire has ripped through a building in Manchester’s Chinatown, yards from the quarter’s imperial arch.

  The huge blaze began at about 2.15am and threatened to cause disruption as shoppers head out to grab Black Friday deals.

  A fleet of fire engines sent to tackle the flames illuminated the decorative gateway at the peak of the blaze and blocked city centre roads.

• Fire breaks out in Manchester Chinatown

  The blaze began at about 02:15 GMT at a building on Nicholas Street and lit up the Chinatown arch at its peak, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue said.

• Security

  • Hackers attack European Commission

    The European Commission was the victim of a “large scale” cyberattack Thursday, a spokesperson said.

    “The attack has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time. No data breach has occurred,” the spokesperson said.

  • 8 Books Security Pros Should Read

    Calling all infosec pros: What are the best books in your security library?

    On a second thought, let’s take a step back. A better question may be: Do you have a security library at all? If not, why?

    Security professionals have countless blogs, videos, and podcasts to stay updated on rapidly changing news and trends. Books, on the other hand, are valuable resources for diving into a specific area of security to build knowledge and broaden your expertise.

    Because the security industry is so complex, it’s impossible to cram everything there is to know in a single tome. Authors generally focus their works on single topics including cryptography, network security modeling, and security assessment.

    Consider one of the reads on this list of recommendations, Threat Modeling: Designing for Security. This book is based on the idea that while all security pros model threats, few have developed expertise in the area.

  • DoD Opens .Mil to Legal Hacking, Within Limits

    Security researchers are often reluctant to report programming flaws or security holes they’ve stumbled upon for fear that the vulnerable organization might instead decide to shoot the messenger and pursue hacking charges.

    But on Nov. 21, the DoD sought to clear up any ambiguity on that front for the military’s substantial online presence, creating both a centralized place to report cybersecurity flaws across the dot-mil space as well as a legal safe harbor (and the prospect of public recognition) for researchers who abide by a few ground rules.

  • Data breach law ‘will create corporate awareness’

    The introduction of a data breach law requiring disclosure of consumer data leaks is important because it will make big corporates aware they need to be transparent about their state of security, the head of a big cyber-security firm says.

    Guy Eilon, the country manager of Forcepoint, was commenting on the speech made by Dan Tehan, the minister assisting the prime minister on cyber security, on Wednesday.

  • US Navy breach: 130,000 soldiers at risk after HPE contractor hacked [iophk: 'MS, possibly MS sharepoint?']

    The Navy has acknowledged the breach and said it was made aware of the incident after being notified that a laptop belonging to an employee of Navy contractor Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) was compromised by hackers.

  • US Navy warns 134,000 sailors of data breach after HPE laptop is compromised

    Sailors whose details have been compromised are being notified by phone, letter, and e-mail, the Navy said. “For those affected by this incident, the Navy is working to provide further details on what happened, and is reviewing credit monitoring service options for affected sailors.”

  • Personal data for more than 130,000 sailors stolen, admits US Navy

    A spokesman for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, said: “This event has been reported to the Navy and because this is an ongoing investigation, HPE will not be commenting further out of respect for the privacy of our Navy personnel.”

  • Riseup’s Canary Has Died

    Popular provider of web tools for activists and anarchists and backbone of much infrastructure for internet freedom, Riseup.net has almost certainly been issued a gag order by the US government.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Haifa fires: Tens of thousands of Israelis flee city

    Tens of thousands of Israelis have been fleeing wildfires in the northern city of Haifa, with the prime minister warning that any proof of arson would be treated as “terrorism”.

  • Israel fires: Tens of thousands flee as fires hit Haifa

    “Every fire that was the result of arson or incitement to arson is terror in every way and we’ll treat it as such,” he was quoted by Haaretz newspaper as saying.

    “Anyone who tries to burn parts of the state of Israel will be severely punished.”

    Police chief Roni Alsheich said that if fires had been started deliberately it was “safe to assume… it is politically-motivated”.

  • Haifa fire overcome but others rage elsewhere in Israel

    Israeli firefighters on Friday reined in a blaze that had spread across the country’s third-largest city of Haifa and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, but continued to battle more than a dozen other fires around the country for the fourth day in a row.

    Some 60,000 have yet to return to their homes as police forces and firefighting units were still heavily deployed in the Haifa area for fear that the fire could be reignited due to the rare dry, windy weather.

    Though no serious injuries were caused, several dozen people were hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Hundreds of homes were damaged and in a rare move, Israel on Thursday called up military reservists to join overstretched police and firefighters and made use of an international fleet of firefighting aircraft sent by several countries.
    Firefighters work in Haifa, Israel, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2016. A raging wildfire ripped through parts of Israel’s third-largest city on Thursday, forcing tens …

  • One by One, ISIS Social Media Experts Are Killed as Result of F.B.I. Program

    In the summer of 2015, armed American drones over eastern Syria stalked Junaid Hussain, an influential hacker and recruiter for the Islamic State.

    For weeks, Mr. Hussain was careful to keep his young stepson by his side, and the drones held their fire. But late one night, Mr. Hussain left an internet cafe alone, and minutes later a Hellfire missile killed him as he walked between two buildings in Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s de facto capital.

  • Arms Sales To Saudi Arabia: The Kingdom Hires A Powerful Former Lawmaker To Lobby Trump White House And Congress

    Saudi Arabia just added another heavyweight to its already formidable team of lobbyists: former California Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon. The longtime GOP lawmaker isn’t any ordinary lobbyist. Between 2011 and 2015, he was the chair of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Department of Defense and its multibillion dollar foreign-military sales program to Saudi Arabia. According to data from the Center for Responsive politics, McKeon was among the top five recipients of defense contractor money in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  • UK rejects MPs’ calls to stop arms sales to Saudis

    The UK government has rejected calls by lawmakers to temporarily stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the Kingdom’s war crimes in Yemen.

    Britain has signed off £3.3 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia since March 26, 2015, when it launched a war in Yemen in order to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to Saudi-backed former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • London Calling: When Sweden Finally Questioned Assange

    On Tuesday 15 Sweden undertook questioning of Assange, the session lasting until the late afternoon. With a new statement provided by Assange and Sweden developing their enquiries based on the information Julian has given, in full cooperation, it is unclear at this point if the Preliminary Investigation has concluded or whether further visits from Sweden are planned. Pressure should be applied to the Swedish prosecutors to act swiftly in either scenario. It should be remembered the the initial investigation of the allegation against Assange was closed by the Stockholm area prosecutor in just 5 days on the basis “that evidence did not disclose any offence”. It is imperative that Ny either makes a formal charge or closes the investigation without further delay.

  • WikiLeaks releases The Yemen Files.

    The Yemen Files are a collection of over 500 documents from the United States embassy in Sana’a, Yemen. Comprising of over 200 emails and 300 PDFs, the collection details official documents and correspondence pertaining to the Office for Military Cooperation (OMC) located at the US embassy. The collection spans the period from 2009 until just before the war in Yemen broke out in earnest during March 2015. This time covers both Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (2009-2013) and the first two years of Secretary John Kerry.

  • WikiLeaks Releases Documents Evidencing US Arming Yemeni Forces Ahead of War

    WikiLeaks released on Friday more than 500 documents from the United States embassy in Yemen, offering documentary evidence of Washington arming, training and funding of Yemeni forces ahead of the war.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finland set to become first country to ban coal use for energy

    Finland could become the first country to ditch coal for good. As part of a new energy and climate strategy due to be announced tomorrow, the government is considering banning the burning of coal for energy by 2030.

    “Basically, coal would disappear from the Finnish market,” says Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University, and chair of the energy programme at the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council.

    The groundwork for the ban already seems to be in place. Coal use has been steadily declining in Finland since 2011, and the nation heavily invested in renewable energy in 2012, leading to a near doubling of wind power capacity the following year. It also poured a further €80 million into renewable power this past February.

  • Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level

    Arctic scientists have warned that the increasingly rapid melting of the ice cap risks triggering 19 “tipping points” in the region that could have catastrophic consequences around the globe.

    The Arctic Resilience Report found that the effects of Arctic warming could be felt as far away as the Indian Ocean, in a stark warning that changes in the region could cause uncontrollable climate change at a global level.

    Temperatures in the Arctic are currently about 20C above what would be expected for the time of year, which scientists describe as “off the charts”. Sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year.

    “The warning signals are getting louder,” said Marcus Carson of the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the lead authors of the report. “[These developments] also make the potential for triggering [tipping points] and feedback loops much larger.”

• Finance

  • Kela’s outgoing director general voices support for basic income

    Liisa Hyssälä, the director general at the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela), has reiterated her concerns about the sustainability of the country’s social security system.

    “Our basic social security system is a patchwork and we cannot afford the constantly rising social security costs. Various benefits should be brought together into larger wholes both for the sake of customers and for the sake of sensible administration and the public economy,” she writes in a blog on Sosiaalivakuutus.fi.

  • 5 Things to Know about Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump Education Choice

    Billionaire Betsy DeVos, a major GOP funder and party activist from Michigan, has been tapped by Donald Trump to become the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education next year.

    Many have decried the choice as a looming disaster for public schools in America, with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia observing that DeVos’ “efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students. She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers–which take away funding and local control from our public schools–to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense.”

    Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, stated that “Betsy DeVos is everything Donald Trump said is wrong in America–an ultra-wealthy heiress who uses her money to game the system and push a special-interest agenda that is opposed by the majority of voters. Installing her in the Department of Education is the opposite of Trump’s promise to drain the swamp.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Emails: CIA Official Reviewed Parts of Times Reporter’s Book Before Publication

    New York Times reporter David Sanger worked extensively with former deputy CIA director Michael Morell during the reporting of his book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power—even arranging to provide Morell with access to an entire unpublished chapter for his review—according to documents obtained by Gizmodo.

    The records, consisting of internal emails from the CIA press office, show that Sanger met with Morell on more than one occasion in 2012 to discuss his then-forthcoming book, promising to bring with him a full chapter for Morell to read in case “he has issues” with the reporting. The emails, which we received under the Freedom of Information Act, are redacted in a manner suggesting that Morell and Sanger discussed sensitive national security information, and show that on at least one occasion, a CIA public affairs officer sent Sanger an encrypted message via email.

    While the notion of a national security reporter meeting with a senior CIA official is obviously not unusual—such transactions are in the reporter’s job description, and Sanger’s book acknowledges that he withheld information at the request of government officials—the extent of Sanger’s collaboration with Morell and the fact that the men apparently discussed sensitive information is noteworthy in light of the Obama administration’s unprecedented campaign against government leakers.

  • How long before the white working class realizes Trump was just scamming them?

    While we’re still analyzing the election results and debating the importance of different factors to the final outcome, everyone agrees that white working class voters played a key part in Donald Trump’s victory, in some cases by switching their votes and in some cases by turning out when they had been nonvoters before.

  • Washington Republican proposes charging protestors with ‘economic terrorism’

    The proposed bill would make protesting a class C felony should it cause any sort of “economic disruption” or “jeopardize human life and property.” Such a proposal would mean violators could face five years in prison, a $10,000 fine or both.

    Any group who organizes a protest that is considered disruptive would also be charged with “economic terrorism.” The law would not apply to strikes or picketing.

    The bill is aimed at protests in the Pacific Northwest, often by environmental activists, that are aimed at shutting down commerce and transportation.

    Protesters in Olympia, Wash., recently camped out for more than a week on railway tracks to stop a shipment of sand used for fracking.

    The bill is also being proposed at a time when anti-Trump protests are taking place across the country, including in Washington. Protests in Seattle have been reported to be peaceful and nonviolent so far.

  • Australia ceases multimillion-dollar donations to controversial Clinton family charities

    AUSTRALIA has finally ceased pouring millions of dollars into accounts linked to Hillary Clinton’s charities.

    Which begs the question: Why were we donating to them in the first place?

    The federal government confirmed to news.com.au it has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.

    The Clinton Foundation has a rocky past. It was described as “a slush fund”, is still at the centre of an FBI investigation and was revealed to have spent more than $50 million on travel.

    Despite that, the official website for the charity shows contributions from both AUSAID and the Commonwealth of Australia, each worth between $10 million and $25 million.

  • By the Numbers: The Recount Scenarios (It is a Long Shot)

    Green Party candidate Jill Stein (Disclosure: I voted for Stein) is calling for a recount in key states, and has raised some $3 million for that purpose. Her funding page estimates the total cost, including lawyers, will be $6-7 million.

  • Trump’s team of gazillionaires

    Donald Trump campaigned as a champion of the “forgotten man” and won the White House on the strength of his support among the white working class.

    So far, he’s stacking his administration with masters of the universe.

    Beyond Trump himself, who claims a net worth of more than $10 billion, the president-elect has tapped businesswoman Betsy DeVos, whose family is worth $5.1 billion, and is said to be considering oil mogul Harold Hamm ($15.3 billion), investor Wilbur Ross ($2.9 billion), private equity investor Mitt Romney ($250 million at last count), hedge fund magnate Steve Mnuchin (at least $46 million), and super-lawyer Rudy Giuliani (estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars) to round out his administration. And Trump’s likely choice for deputy commerce secretary, Todd Ricketts, comes from the billionaire family that owns the Chicago Cubs.

    Even retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who’s up for the job of secretary of housing and urban development, has an estimated fortune of $26 million, while White House adviser Steve Bannon has likely earned millions off his stake in the show “Seinfeld” alone. Andrew Puzder, a possible labor secretary, is no slouch, either — he made more than $4.4 million in 2012 as CEO of the holding company that owns restaurant chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

  • Jill Stein raises over $4.5m to request US election recounts in battleground states

    Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is preparing to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states.

    Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a multimillion-dollar fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    The drive has already raised more than $4.5m, which the campaign said would enable it to file for recounts in Wisconsin on Friday and Pennsylvania on Monday.
    Hillary Clinton urged to call for election vote recount in battleground states
    Read more

    The fundraising page said it expected to need around $6m-7m to challenge the results in all three states.

  • Jill Stein asks for another $2.5 million after reaching goal to fund election recounts in two states

    Jill Stein has now crowdfunded more than $4.5 million to cover the costs of election recounts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The Green Party presidential candidate has since upped her requested total to $7 million, a figure that she says would also cover a recount in Michigan, a hotly contested battleground state where “statistical anomalies” in voting were identified.

  • Campaign: Stein raises millions for recount effort

    Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein raised more than $4 million over two days to fund recount efforts in three states.

    Donations had nearly reached her campaign’s $4.5 million goal by late Thanksgiving evening, according to a fundraising page on her web site.

    “Congratulations on meeting the recount costs for Wisconsin. Raising money to pay for the first round so quickly is a miraculous feat and a tribute to the power of grassroots organizing,” her campaign said.

    “Now that we have nearly completed funding Wisconsin’s recount (which is due on Friday), we can begin to tackle the funding for Michigan’s recount (due Monday) and Pennsylvania’s recount (due Wednesday).”

    Stein said Wednesday that many Americans are wondering if the election results were reliable after a “divisive and painful” race and reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual email accounts.

    [..]

    The total cost of the effort in the three states could be as high as $7 million, her campaign said, including attorney fees and recount observers.

    A group of election lawyers and researchers are urging Hillary Clinton to ask for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, claiming that they found evidence that voting machines had been tampered with.

  • Jill Stein campaign to recount key states in US election reaches $2.5m target

    A campaign launched by the Green Party candidate Jill Stein to recount key states in the US election has reached its initial funding target of $2.5m (£2m) in just a matter of hours.

    The money will allow Ms Stein to review the results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where concerns have been raised about irregularities with electronic voting results.

    Each of the states voted narrowly in favour of Donald Trump (though the final Michigan count is still to be confirmed), and carry enough electoral college votes between them to change the result of the election if all were redeclared for Hillary Clinton.

  • Donald Trump’s Argentinian tower suddenly gets the green light to proceed

    Only three days after Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his upset victory, it was announced that construction on a long held-up project for a Trump tower in Buenos Aires would proceed.

    As Quartz reported on Wednesday, Trump’s associates at YY Development Group in Buenos Aires told La Nacion, one of Argentina’s most influential conservative newspapers, that construction on the tower would be going ahead. La Nacion also reported that the initial call between Trump and Macri (who have been friends since the 1980s) was arranged due to efforts made by foreign minister Susanna Malcorra to get in touch with Trump’s son Eric through Felipe Yaryura, an Argentine businessman who is friends with Trump and was present to celebrate when he discovered that Trump had been elected. Eric Trump reportedly then put Malcorra in touch with Trump’s foreign affairs team.

    As Quartz also notes, Malcorra avoided answering a question posed by a reporter about whether she knew Yaryura and used him to get Macri in touch with Trump. Similarly, a spokeswoman from YY Development refused to comment to Quartz about any of these questions because “they have already had too much media exposure.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The CEO of Reddit confessed to modifying posts from Trump supporters after they wouldn’t stop sending him expletives

    Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has confessed to modifying the posts of some users on the most visible Donald Trump-supporting “subreddit” community after they repeatedly slung verbal abuse in his direction.

    The story begins earlier this week, when The New York Times published a report on Comet Ping Pong, a Washington DC pizza place that a false news item on social media had pegged as the center of a child-abuse ring run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign head John Podesta, despite a lack of any evidence.

    Following that report, Reddit took steps to shut down the “r/Pizzagate” subreddit community, which had the stated goal of proving the existence of a conspiracy centering on Comet Ping Pong. “We don’t want witchhunts on our site,” says the warning that replaced the Pizzagate page on Reddit.

  • Reddit CEO admits to editing user comments amid Pizzagate malarkey

    Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, today admitted to editing several comments that criticised him on the site.

    He made the admission on Reddit, where he posts under the username Spez.

    Huffman got a lot of flak from members of the The_Donald, a subreddit for supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, after Reddit banned the Pizzagate subreddit. Pizzagate was dedicated to a debunked conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton to a paedophile ring.

    In response, he edited comments reading “fuck Spez” to instead be directed at moderators of the The_Donald subreddit.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Bill Binney: New UK spying law is going to kill people, ex-NSA technical director and whistleblower warns

    Britain’s new spying laws could kill people, the ex-technical director of the NSA has warned.

    Pursuing a strategy of allowing spies to look in on everything that everyone says “costs lives, and has cost lives in Britain because it inundates analysts with too much data”, Bill Binney has warned UK MPs who are scrutinising the Investigatory Powers Bill.

    The bill, also known as the Snoopers’ Charter, is set to be passed by parliament early this year and will bring with it huge and unprecedented spying powers for UK intelligence agencies and the government. But it has been criticised by privacy campaigners and technology companies who argue that it will put lives in danger.

    “It is 99 per cent useless,” Mr Binney said in a letter sent to MPs. “Who wants to know everyone who has ever looked at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts.”

  • Microsoft is reportedly sharing Windows 10 telemetry data with third-parties

    MICROSOFT HAS REPORTEDLY signed a deal with FireEye that will see it share telemetry data from Windows 10 with the third-party security outfit.

    So says Australian website ARN, which reports that Microsoft and FireEye’s partnership, which will see the security firm’s iSIGHT Intelligence tools baked into Windows Defender, will also see FireEye “gain access to telemetry from every device running Windows 10.”

    Microsoft uses telemetry data from Windows 10 to help identify security issues, to fix problems and to help improve the quality of its operating system, which sounds like a good thing. However, with the company previously admitting that it’s latest OS is harvesting more data than any version before it, Microsoft’s mega data-slurp also raised some privacy concerns.

  • The opportunity cost of mass surveillance is lost innovation and jobs

    Surveillance kills jobs and drives investment and innovation elsewhere. Lost among the common talking points of liberty, human rights, and Big Brother, there’s a much more economic effect when you force people to conform to a gray mass: you lose the radicals and the free thinkers, those who innovate and build the next generation of industries and jobs. Politicians care a lot more about that than about a theoretic concept of liberty.

    An opportunity cost is the cost you pay for not realizing the alternative you didn’t choose. When you choose a pizza, your opportunity cost is not having the hamburger. When you choose a bus ride because it’s cheaper, the opportunity cost is the time you’d save by taking a taxi. When you choose a cheap supplier of goods, your opportunity cost is low quality and more maintenance. And so on.

  • NSA Head Meets With Trump Team But Doesn’t Give Obama A Heads Up

    David Greene talks to Foreign Policy columnist James Bamford about the future of NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, whose tenure has been rocked by cyber-security breaches of classified material.

  • Lawmakers decry possible removal of NSA director, call for hearings

    Several key GOP members of Congress began to weigh in this weekend with strong disapproval over suggestions that Adm. Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, may be fired during the final weeks of the Obama administration.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Dutch race hate row engulfs presenter Sylvana Simons

    The images of a black Dutch TV presenter’s face super-imposed on the hanged bodies of victims of a lynching are too nauseating to look at. And yet a video featuring the mocked-up pictures has been widely circulated online here.

    Sylvana Simons has for years been a familiar presence on Dutch TV and radio, and the attack on her has highlighted a debate bubbling inside the Netherlands far removed from its reputation as a liberal tolerant nation.

    A former presenter on talent show Dancing with the Stars, she recently joined the political party “Denk” (Think) and is running in the next election.

  • Bad Santa: German town sacks Father Christmas over alleged far-right support

    A town in Germany has sacked Santa Claus over alleged links to a far-Right movement.

    Peter Mück has dressed as Santa and distributed sweets to children at the annual Christmas market in the Bavarian town of Mühldorf for 30 years.

    But this year the Christmas market opened without him after the mayor of Mühldorf announced that he had been fired.

    Mr Mück was dismissed over comments he wrote on Facebook in support of a post by the far-Right “Identitarian Movement”, which campaigns against immigration and Islam, and has been accused of open racism.

  • Two Saudi Women Sentenced to 20 Lashes for Using ‘Obscene Words’ on WhatsApp

    One of the young women came to the Criminal Court in Jeddah and accused the other of using abusive expressions during their WhatsApp conversation. She then showed her phone at the Court’s request to prove her words.

    During the next session, the court confirmed that the woman had indeed sent obscene messages to the other, but the defendant said she was not the first to start the hassle and showed a message which she received from her counterpart two months ago.

  • #NoLove4USGov – An extradition too far

    Amber Rudd has signed Lauri Love’s extradition order despite huge public uproar, opposition both inside and outside her own party, inside and outside of government and a previous home secretary, now Prime Minister blocking an extradition with almost exactly the same conditions. Lauri is unlikely to meet justice in America, in his case the most likely outcome is jail without a trial.

    Naomi Colvin of Courage Foundation has previously said:

    “Judge Tempia’s ruling on Friday shows that the legal changes Theresa May introduced after she blocked Gary McKinnon’s extradition are not fit for purpose.”

    David A Elston Pirate Party Spokesperson said:

    “Clearly the US is not interested in justice and our own government is unwilling to stand up for our civil liberties.

    “Instead through extradition the USA is seeking to silence and lock up Love. Knowing this was blocked before, this clear failure of our government is a chosen path. The forum bar does not work as this is precisely the kind of scenario it was meant to prevent. More importantly they have failed Lauri and through the ruling on him, our civil liberties and our rights, our right to a fair trial has taken a heavy hit.

  • All residents in China’s restive Xinjiang region must hand in passports to police: media

    All residents in China’s restive region of Xinjiang must hand in their passports to local police stations for “examination and management”, the Global Times newspaper said on Thursday.

    “Anyone who needs the passport must apply to the police station,” an anonymous police officer in Aksu prefecture told the paper, adding that the policy had been implemented throughout Xinjiang.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Forget Net Neutrality, Trump FCC Advisor Wants to Kill the FCC Itself

    Under President Donald Trump, the US government’s policy protecting net neutrality, the principle that all internet content should be equally accessible to consumers, is likely to be rolled back, according to tech policy experts.

    But that shift, as important as it would be, may be just the beginning of the changes in store for the Federal Communications Commission under Trump’s administration. In fact, the nation’s top communications regulator itself may look very different than it does today.

    Like, very different. As in, practically non-existent.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Iceland (the country) is actually suing Iceland (the shop)

      The island nation of Iceland has said it is taking legal action against British frozen-food chain Iceland over the right to use their shared name.

      Iceland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it has challenged Iceland Foods at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. It says it is acting because the retail chain “aggressively pursued” Icelandic companies using the word Iceland in their branding.

      Iceland Foods holds a Europe-wide trademark registration for the word “Iceland,” and the Nordic country’s government said it was “exceptionally broad and ambiguous in definition.”

  • Copyrights

    • Pirates across Europe… can the Dutch keep the momentum going!

      Following the success of Pirates for Iceland, and the strong showing of the Icelandic Pirate Party the next European Election on the horizon for Pirates to keep an eye on is the Dutch General Election in March 2017.

Links 3/4/2016: LabPlot 2.2.0, NixOS 16.03

Contents

• GNU/Linux

GNU/Linux

• An Introduction to Linux Distributions

  What this means for you is that even though Linux is Linux, not all distributions are interchangeable. If you’re using one distribution and want to switch to another, you can’t just flip a switch. Instead, you would need to completely install the new distribution. If you’re running one distribution and want a piece of software that’s in the repositories of another, you can’t just connect to another repository. And if you find a software package for one distribution online, you can’t necessarily install it on your system. Different distributions might look the same, but there are technical differences between them that prevent them from being completely interchangeable with each other. Distributions are ecosystems. The big advantage of Linux is that it’s not a closed ecosystem. There’s a lot of choice and flexibility in it, so if you don’t like the default music player chosen by your distribution, it’s trivial to remove it and choose the one you like. And if a piece of software you want isn’t in the repositories, there’s usually a way to install it.

• Desktop

  • IBM ThinkPad X40 Tour [Ed: Puppy Linux.]

• Server

  • Why Google Will Dominate Cloud Computing

    Google Cloud Platform is running behind in the battle for cloud market share, yet recent changes will accelerate GCP’s fortunes.

  • Containers Are Entering the Mainstream

    Container technologies, like the white-hot Docker platform, are quickly becoming the norm among enterprise IT environments according to a new study by the Web server and application specialists at NGINX.

  • Here’s What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe

    Connor Krukosky is an 18 year old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe…an IBM z890. This is his story.

  • CoreOS Linux Hits Day 1000

    This past weekend we shipped CoreOS 1,000. Each release version number is a count of the days since the CoreOS Epoch, July 1, 2013. Sunday’s release marks 1,000 days of CoreOS Linux.

    We started CoreOS with the mission to secure the infrastructure that powers the Internet. Like Chrome made the front-end of the Internet more secure by bringing automatic updates to the Web browser, CoreOS Linux made the back-end of the Internet more secure by delivering automatic updates to servers and clusters. Since common practice is to set up a server and never touch it again, we believe the only way to secure the Internet is to provide automatic software updates to the server.

• Kernel Space

  • A Stable Linux Kernel API/ABI? “The Most Insane Proposal” For Linux Development

    For some lighthearted weekend reading and sure to make for some interesting discussions in the forums is what was volleyed today onto the kernel mailing list: “The most insane proposal in regard to the Linux kernel development.” It’s about shaking up the way the Linux kernel development happens, but almost surely the proposal won’t end up resulting in changes.

    The proposal was sent out this morning by Artem Tashkinov who from the Linux kernel Git logs has contributed to the upstream Linux kernel just in the form of reporting issues and testing patches.

  • Linux Kernel 3.2.79 LTS Out Now with Small s390, x86, and JFFS2 Improvements

    Linux kernel developer Ben Hutchings announced the release and immediate availability for download of the seventy-ninth maintenance release in the Linux 3.2 LTS kernel series.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Lima Driver Code Sees First Commits In Years

      The commits were to limadriver-ng, but before getting too excited, the latest changes were just some mundane tweaks. With the latest two pull requests, it’s just build fixes and a fix for adjusting the Lima dump path.

    • CSS: Revolutionizing the Appearance of the WWW

      Upon further inspection of the original Compiz code and the default configuration, resize is blocked from triggering the effect. Applying this to the updated effect code resolved the issue for the time being.

      As a bonus, a small issue encountered during the very early stages of the project was the velocity from the initial placement of the window creating some even more interesting animations:

    • Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

      It’s almost the Year of Wayland on the Desktop(tm), and I have reached out to each of the projects this message is addressed to (GNOME, Kwin, and wayland-devel) to collaborate on some shared protocol extensions for doing a handful of common tasks such as display configuration and taking screenshots. Life will be much easier for projects like ffmpeg and imagemagick if they don’t have to implement compositor-specific code for capturing the screen!

    • Wobbly Windows Support & Other Post-Processing Effects For Wayland

      Samsung developers have been working on implementing client-side post processing effects for Wayland. This is to achieve similar effects like “wobbly windows” as were common to the Linux desktop going back many years with AIGLX / Compiz / Beryl.

      Samsung’s Derek Foreman and Mike Blumenkrantz have been working on a “Wayland Wobbly Windows” protocol that exposes when clients are being moved and when they’re being dragged in order to implement different graphical effects.

• Applications

  • NetworkManager 1.0.12 brings a couple of fixes

    It’s quite some time since we’ve done an update to the 1.0.x version. As it matures, we’re busy getting the 1.2.x tree ready for release. Nevertheless, fixes waiting to be delivered have accumulated over the time, so we’re releasing them now.

  • Simplenote Text Editor Now Available for GNU/Linux & Windows

    Simplenote is a minimalist looking and a versatile syncing text editor that was only available for Mac OS previously. Not anymore though, because Simplenote developers have just released a new version finally enabling the application to natively run on both Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.

  • Simplenote Finally Has an Official Linux App

    One of the most popular note-taking apps on iOS is now available for Linux desktops.

    Simplenote, developed by WordPress makers Automattic, lands on Linux and Windows 10 through the flexible combo of React and Electron.

    If you know the name ‘Electron’ but can’t quite place it, it might be because we’ve recently featured a bunch of other awesome Linux apps that use it.

  • Internet Messengers lead the way of FOSS to the end users

    The year 2016 may become pivotal in the world of open source.
    It is no longer a secret that many “backbone” systems of the world work on open source products. But a “regular” user, Joe Blogs, is not so familiar with Free Open Source Software.
    This is changing. Internet messengers take a lead here.

  • 6 Best PDF Document Viewers for Linux Systems

    …in this series we will introduce you most famous open source tools for Linux systems.

  • LabPlot 2.2.0 released

    We are happy to announce the next release of LabPlot. You can download the source code of the KDE4Libs-based version of LabPlot here. For the KF5-version of LabPlot use this link.

    The main new feature of this release is a new tool that allows you to easily extract data from image files – Datapicker. This tool was contributed by Ankit Wagadre during GSoC2015, s.a. his final report, who continued to work on this tool even after the summer program was over.

  • OpenShot 2.0.x Crowd Funded Video Editor Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

    OpenShot video editor is an open-source video editor for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac, it is free and released under GNU GPL 3 license. Using OpenShot video editor you can create a film with your videos, photos, and audio tracks that you have always thought of. It lets you add transitions, effects, and sub-titles, and you can export to DVD, YouTube, Video, and many other common formats. OpenShot is written primarily in Python, with a GTK+ interface, and uses the MLT framework, FFmpeg, and Blender to power many of the advanced features. After a successful Kickstarter campaign of OpenShot we have seen that it reached to 2.0 version in recent past and made tremendous improvement. Recently developers released a new update 2.0.7 beta-4, currently main PPA doesn’t have this version but testing PPA, hopefully the main PPA will be updated soon.

  • 3 Best Evernote Alternatives With Official Linux Clients

    Evernote is very popular note taking application allows to create, edit and delete notes from their web based application as well as Evernote client app available for Windows, Mac and all major mobile platforms. Sadly Evernote does not provide any client app for Linux. There are some unofficial clients for Evernote such as Everpad. But there are always some issues with such unofficial clients. In this article, I have come up with the list of 3 Evernote alternatives that provide all note taking features with Linux client to sync notes right from your Linux desktop.

  • Discourse 1.5 Released!

    We’re proud to announce that today marks the release of Discourse 1.5!

  • Proprietary

    • Skype For Linux: Dead? Or Just Resting? [Ed: Microsoft never added GNU/Linux support to Skype but merely inherited it when NSA/Microsoft took over, then phased it out, over time]

      Last month many users reported that Microsoft had broken the app’s ability to join calls. Two Linux enthusiasts penned the issue in a blog signed by “lots of angry Linux users.” I have contacted Microsoft numerous times over the past few weeks but it remains tight-lipped on the matter. I have a feeling Microsoft isn’t going to update Skype for Linux.

    • Vivaldi – A Modern Web Browser for Next Generation Internet Browsing

      Vivaldi is a Chromium/Blink engine based web browser with very appealing interface. The browser is tab based thus allowing user to open multiple tabs and switch between them using input devices. The browser is designed to fit all the open tabs in one windows.

  • Instructionals/Technical

  • Games

    • Valve Reports Steam Linux Usage Fell Further In March

      The Steam survey results are out for March 2016 and indicate a further reduction in the Linux gaming market-share.

      The March 2016 Steam survey results report the Linux gaming market-share at 0.85%, which is a drop of 0.06% compared to the month prior. That’s quite the drop considering that for January 2016, Steam on Linux was at 0.95%. For many months recently, the Steam Linux market-share has hovered at just under 1% and generally not seeing ~0.06% swings on a monthly basis.

    • Warsow 2.1 (Quake-Like Game) Has Been Released

      As you may know, Warsow is an open-source, multi-platform, first-person shooter game, being somehow similar to the good old Quake 3 game, but it provides a cartoonish look and feel.

      The latest version available is Warsow 2.1 (stable), which brings a big list of changes. For information about this release, see the official announcement.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • A brief history of visual interfaces

    The command line should be familiar to anyone who used Unix systems “back in the day.” You will also be familiar with the command line if you used the original Apple computer, or MS-DOS or any of the other DOS systems from the 1980s and early 1990s. (In 1994, I created a free software version of DOS, called FreeDOS. Many people still use FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, to run legacy business software, or to support embedded systems.)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • PlasmaShell Sans GL

      Since Plasma 5, the main shell is powered by QtQuick, which till now brings a requirement on a working OpenGL setup. This causes problems for Plasma in situations where we can’t run OpenGL; either extremely cheap hardware, xrdc or when a user upgrades and breaks their nvidia setup (a seemingly common occurence).

    • Plasma Weather widget: code template available to add your favorite weather data provider

      Plasma 5.6 has finally seen the return of the Plasma Add-ons Weather widget, which had been missing the port from Plasma4.

    • Next Kdenlive cafés

      After our successful 4th edition of the Kdenlive café(*), we are preparing the next 2 meetings.
      If you are interested to join us to discuss the future of Kdenlive, you are welcome.

    • Touring CERN and the LHC

      During the Sprint at CERN everyone got to take a tour of the Large Hadron Collider, it was a fantastic time and a proud moment for members of the KDE community to see the massive and incredible machines which happened to have KDE software running at the controls.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Vivacious Colors Gtk Theme Suite Available in ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ Variants

      Vivacious Colors is a new theme suite released by RAVEfinity targeting Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial. It looks similar to previous suites (Ambiance and Radiance Flat Colors) but from top to bottom the suite is written from scratch in order to make it better and faster for Cinnamon, Gnome Shell, and other desktops (the entire code base has been overhauled meaning it is much cleaner, modern and has some awesome new features and effects and visuals that Ambiance & Radiance Flat does not have.), it works fine in Unity, Xfce, Mate too.

    • GNOME 3.22 Pencils In a Release Date

      GNOME 3.22 is set to be released on September 21, 2016.

      The date is listed in the draft release schedule for the next major version of the GNOME desktop.

• Distributions

  • Reviews

    • Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa – Cinnamon Installation, Review and Customization

      Linux Mint is arguably one of the easiest and most user-friendly Linux-based operating systems to come by in the Linux world; and while it might be second to Ubuntu in popularity, it remains the favorite of a large majority of Linux users around the globe.

      Why? It’s easy; Linux Mint is essentially “Ubuntu done right”. While the latter might not be bad in it’s own right, it is no news that the stability and flexibility the former offers is unmatched by Ubuntu.

    • Pisi Linux 1.2 Xfce don’t love me none

      I know what the Pisi team can do. I’ve seen it. Pardus was one of the more refreshing concepts for a long while, with its super-unique, super-friendly and frankly awesome approach to computing. That seems to be missing from Pisi 1.2 Xfce, and I want it.

      The current release seems to have lost some of the flare, that enthusiasm, and that can happen when projects change their name, missions statement and whatnot. What I see is an almost template-like attempt to have an Xfce edition, without all that fire and fervor that we’ve seen with Xubuntu and Mint. First and foremost, the hardware piece. After that, everything else. And like Cindy sings, I wanna have fun. Alas, not meant to be this time around. Looking forward to version 2.0, which is currently in the alpha stage. Hopefully, it will be good. Seeing what Pardus had done once upon a time, I’m counting on it.

  • New Releases

    • NixOS 16.03 “Emu” Operating System Released with systemd 229 and Linux 4.4 LTS

      NixOS developer Domen Kožar announced the release of the NixOS 16.03 operating system, which is considered an update to the previous version, NixOS 15.09.

      Dubbed Emu, NixOS 16.03 introduces updates to most of the core components, starting with the systemd init system, which has been updated to version 229, and continuing with the Linux kernel packages, now rebased on the latest long-term support branch, version 4.4, replacing the old 3.18 kernels.

      Among other software that received updates during the six-month development cycle of the NixOS 16.03 “Emu” operating system, we can mention GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.3, which is a significant upgrade from the previous 4.9 release, the Glibc 2.23 library, Perl 5.22, as well as Binutils 2.26.

  • Arch Family

    • Arch Linux 2016.04.01 Is Now Available for Download with Kernel 4.4.5 LTS

      Another month has passed, and it’s already April, so the time has come for the lightweight and flexible Arch Linux operating system to get its monthly ISO respin.

    • Latest Manjaro Linux 15.12 Update Brings Linux Kernel 4.5 and KDE Plasma 5.6.1

      The Manjaro Linux development team announced the general availability of the fourteenth update pack for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) operating system.

    • Manjaro 16.06 – second preview released

      It took us another month since our first preview to prepare this second preview of our upcoming stable release we call Daniella.

      The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. We ship Xfce 4.12 with this release of Manjaro. We mainly focused on polishing the user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies such as switching to a new theme called Maia, we already using for our KDE edition.

    • Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” Gets a Second Preview Release, Download Now

      Manjaro Project leader Philip Müller announced the immediate availability for download of the second preview release of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” Arch Linux-based operating system.

  • OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • Slackware Family

    • Zenwalk 8.0 Beta 3 Arrives for Slackware Fans with LibreOffice 5.1.1, FFmpeg 3.0

      The development cycle of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux kernel-based operating system continues, and its maintainers have announced the release of the third Beta build.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Finance

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 23 finally running on Lenovo G50-70! Results.

        I’m pleased that Fedora 23 runs on my G50 laptop now. It’s a good thing, and I’m pleased with the system and its behavior. Hardware compatibility is decent, but it isn’t stellar, and there’s more to be done, including better Bluetooth, better battery life, and of course, normal and sane network. C’mon! Performance and responsiveness are just okay, not as sharp as Xfce desktops, though.

        Apart from that, all the goodies we had in the original review still work. Media, smartphone support, apps, and such. Oh, I couldn’t install Gnome extensions this time, but I believe this is a temporary glitch with the online system, and not a Fedora problem. At the end of the day, Fedora comes with its mixed bag of chaos, state-of-art technology, weird issues and surprising stability, and with Gnome 3, it delivers a fair compromise between speed and aesthetics and raw functionality. No mind-splitting conclusions here, no ugly twists. Solid, dependable, just as it should be. And now, on modern technology, too. Once again, Fedora 23 proves itself, and its availability on my Lenovo box means there ought to be some great stuff coming out soon. Have fun.

      • Last week to submit your FLOCK talk!

        The Council is particularly interested in talks that address any of the current Council Objectives as well as discussions around new Objectives people would like to see. Of course, innovation happens outside of Fedora itself and we’d love to hear about that as well. If you’ve been using Fedora as a foundation for other interesting Free and Open Source software and/or community work, consider submitting a talk or workshop around it.

      • Fedora 24 Alpha released

        The Fedora 24 Alpha is here, right on schedule for our planned June final release.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” and 7.10 “Wheezy” Officially Released

      Today, April 2, 2016, the Debian Project proudly announced the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 and Debian GNU/Linux 7.10 “Wheezy” maintenance releases for existing users.

    • Updated Debian 8: 8.4 released

      The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename “jessie”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • ubuntuBSD 15.10 Beta 3 Released, Brings Support for Virtual Text Consoles

          The upcoming ubuntuBSD 15.10 operating system has just received a third Beta build on the first day of April to fix a bug reported by a user in the LightDM display manager init script.

        • Ubuntu Make 16.03 Has Been Released

          As you may know, Ubuntu Developer Tools Center is an command-line, open-source tool that enables the users to easily install the main platforms for Android application development.

        • UbuCon Europe, the Very First European Ubuntu Conference, Announced for November

          Ubuntu Member José Antonio Rey was happy to announce the first ever UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu users and developers alike, which will take place later this year in Germany.

          As you may well be aware, Canonical revived its popular Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) conference, which they’ve killed about three years ago and replaced with an online event called Ubuntu Online Summit (abbreviated UOS), under the name UbuCon last year in October.

          The first UbuCon Summit event already took place earlier this year, between January 21-22, as part of the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo a.k.a. SCALE 14x, which was held in Pasadena, CA, USA, but not many Ubuntu members could attend, especially those who live in Europe. As such, a team of dedicated Ubuntu members have put together the UbuCon Europe conference.

        • An awkward confession and what we should do about it

          I have an awkward confession.

          At this point, we have been running Ubuntu machines for at least nine years or so, starting with Ubuntu 6.06 and moving forward from there. In all of that time, one of the things I haven’t done (and I don’t think we’ve done generally) is really dive in and learn about Debian packaging and package management. Oh sure, we can fiddle around with apt-get and a number of other superficial things, we’ve built modified preseeded install environments, and I’ve learned enough to modify existing Debian packages and rebuild them. But that’s all. That leaves vast oceans of both dpkg and APT usage that we have barely touched, plus all of the additional tools and scripts around the Debian package ecosystem (some of which have been mentioned here by commentators).

          I don’t have a good explanation for why this has happened, and in particular why I haven’t dug into Debian package (because diving into things is one of the things that I do). I can put together theories (including me not being entirely fond of Ubuntu even from the start), but it’s all just speculation and if I’m honest it’s post-facto excuses and rationalization.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Fair Source, April Fools’, Winbuntu review

    Today in Linux news, Matt Asay explained why Fair Source isn’t Open Source and Blogger Locutus reviewed the new Winbuntu monster. Microsoft lured Oracle’s Linux guy to Redmond and LinuxGizmos changed name and focus to Hackerboards.com. Of course, April 1 wouldn’t be the same without some April Fools’ jokes.

  • This Student Built An Amazing Steam Engine-powered Raspberry Pi

    Running a Raspberry Pi doesn’t need much power and a 5V microUSB executes the job. However, a Swedish student decided to go for a more badass way to run his DIY-companion and used an actual steam engine to power his single board computer.

  • RaspEX (Build 160331) Brings Kodi Installed By Default

    As you may know, RaspEX is a free and open-source distribution specially created for the Raspberry Pi 3 singleboard computer, by Arne Exton, a third party, independent developer.

    A few days ago, RaspEX Build 160331 has been released, bringing Kodi pre-installed, Wicd network manager, Mozilla Firefox as the default internet browser, SAMBA, PulseAudio and Bluetooth support, among others. The system has replaced LXDE with Kodi, but is still based on Debian 8.3 Jessie and Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

  • RISC-V Offers Simple, Modular ISA

    The RISC-V ISA has been featured in the latest edition of the Microprocessor Report written by David Kanter of The Linley Group.

  • ownCloud Pi Drive

    You get a Micro usb/2A power supply, a case with a 2 TB HD, a three headed cable for internal connections, a 4GB microSD (and a useless SD adapter) with the software, an elbow HDMI adapter and a screwdriver/screws to attach the PI to the case.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Copperhead, Guardian Project and F-Droid Partner to Build Open, Verifiably Secure Mobile Ecosystem

        Three open-source projects haved joined together to announce a new partnership to create an open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware. Led by the work of the Toronto-based CopperheadOS team on securing the core Android OS, Guardian Project and F-Droid have joined in to partner on envisioning and developing a full mobile ecosystem. The goal is to create a solution that can be verifiably trusted from the operating system, through the network and network services, all the way up to the app stores and apps themselves. Through a future planned crowdfunded and commercial offering, the partnership will provide affordable off-the-shelf solutions, including device hardware and self-hosted app and update distribution servers, for any individual and organizations looking for complete mobile stacks they can trust.

      • Announcing CopperheadOS Crowdfunding

        Copperhead Will Be Crowdfunding with Privacy Partners Guardian Project and F-Droid

      • This Video Shows How to Build an Android App for Your Arduino Project

        There are several great projects you can do with an Arduino, and if you’re just getting started, you can use other people’s code. However, as the video above shows, you can also create your own simple apps for your Arduino project using MIT App Inventor.

Apartheid 1 0 Lxde I686 Isotope 3

Free Software/Open Source

• Crowdsourcing code: why startups are turning to open-source software

  A startup wants a mobile menu for their new app. It’s going to cost them time and money to build one from scratch, so they search on Google to find one that is ready-made, a template if you will.

  It is because of publicly available ‘open-source software’ (OSS) that finding such a component is relatively easy. Simply put, OSS is when a product, and the source code that accompanies it, is made available for others to use and even change, or add on to, as they see fit.

• Events

  • Tickets are live for foss-north

    I’ve written about foss-north earlier. From now, tickets are available. What we are looking at is a free and open source one day conference in Gothenburg. Great speakers already now, and the CfP isn’t even closed.

  • Talking at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore

    This year I was able to attend this year’s FOSSASIA in Singapore. It’s quite a decently sized event with more than 150 speakers and more than 1000 people attending. Given the number of speakers you can infer that there was an insane number of talks in the two and a half day of the conference. I’ve seen recordings being made so I would expect those to show up at some stage, but I don’t have any details. The atmosphere was very friendly and the venue a-maze-ing. By that I mean that it was a fantastic and huge maze. We were hosted in Singapore’s Science Museum which exhibits various things around biology, physics, chemistry, and much more. It is a rather large building in which it was easy to get lost. But it was great being among those sciency exhibits and to exchange ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, we could see an experiment being made as a show to the kids visiting the museum. These shows included a Tesla coil or a fire tornado. Quite impressive.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox and cookie micromanagement

      For most of its existence, Firefox has provided users with the ability to manage how cookies are stored with a rather high degree of granularity: users can block specific cookies, create site-wide exceptions to the accept/block policy, and configure behavior for third-party cookies. Up until Firefox 44, there was an additional option as well, one that allowed users to choose the expiration point (that is, expiring them at the end of the session or letting them persist) for every cookie they encounter. That option was removed in the Firefox 44 release, which has made some users rather unhappy.

      The option in question was found in the Privacy preferences screen, labeled “Ask me every time” on the “Keep until:” selector. When enabled, the option raised a dialog box asking the user to accept or reject each cookie encountered, with a “accept for this session only” choice provided. Removing the option was proposed in 2010, although the patch to perform the removal did not land until 2015. It was released in Firefox 44 in January 2016.

    • How Safe Browsing works in Firefox

      If you want to learn more about how Safe Browsing works in Firefox, you can find all of the technical details on the Safe Browsing and Application Reputation pages of the Mozilla wiki or you can ask questions on our mailing list.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Testing ODF on Document Freedom Day

    Because OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the open standard that I am involved in most, I want to write a few words about it.

    Since last autumn, I’m working on the ODF standard for the Dutch government. Supporting standards in government is an important task: new software comes and goes, but documents, once created, should be readable and reusable into the future.

  • LibreOffice Logic

    When you switch to LibreOffice, you can usually assume that all the features available in other office suites are available. They might have a slightly different name, or be placed in another menu, but the basic functionality should be the same in both. If you make a note of the features you use most often, and systematically learn how to do each one, you can often cope with the transition.

• BSD

  • Book Review: FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem

    A filesystem is nothing but the data structures that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a disk. The filesystem stores pictures, music, videos, accounting data and more. The different operating system comes with various filesystems. One may need to move data between FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems like OS X or Linux based devices. Knowing all about filesystem help us to archive or move data between system. The “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem” is an essential, practical and well-written book.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Inessential weirdnesses in free software

    I’ll discuss aspects of our behavior and jargon that stop or slow down some new users and contributors in free software, so that in outreach efforts, we can be better at bridging the gap. These include git’s terrible UI, our in-person conference structures, and widespread scorn of and dismissiveness towards team sports, Top 40 music, patriotism, religion, small talk, and Microsoft Windows. In getting rid of unnecessary barriers, we need to watch out for disrespectful oversimplification, so I’ll outline ways you can know if one of our weirdnesses is necessary. And I’ll talk about how to mitigate the effects of an inessential weirdness in your outreach efforts.

  • PSPP 0.10.1 has been released

    I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

• Public Services/Government

  • Is Source Code covered by the PSI Directive?

    Concerning France, the court decision may have a considerable impact, as the source code of any software produced by or for the various national or local administrations becomes legally “libre” or open source under no or very permissive conditions. Therefore the interest to clarify the applicable licence: when communicating it, relevant administration should then apply the EUPL or the French CeCILL, according to the 12 September 2012 prime minister Ayrault circular.

  • MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS*

    The MIT Media Lab is part of an academic ecosystem committed to liberal sharing of knowledge. In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that we are changing our internal procedures to encourage more free and open-source software.

• Licensing/Legal

  • BMW *are* complying with the GPL

    Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW’s compliance with the licence terms.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Platform: Open Systems, Open Source, Open APIs… Open Opportunities?

    The panacea of true data optionality and portability is technically possible today, but is being held back by a range of factors at vendors and end-user firms. Andrew Miller, managing director of consultancy Net Effect, highlights the key gating factors and encourages us to take a leap of faith that will deliver benefits for all.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Open Source Trend Overtakes CPUs

      Open source may be ready to consume a category of products that has thus far eluded the trend: microprocessors.

      Researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Bologna have collaborated on the development of an open source microprocessor designed specifically for use in wearable devices and other small Internet of Things (IoT) things.

• Programming/Development

  • Atom reaches one million active users

    We have reached an exciting milestone: one million people have launched some version of Atom in the last month. That’s three times the number of active users we had under a year ago at the one-year anniversary of Atom becoming completely open-source.

  • Here’s A New Programming Language That Talks To Living Cells And DNA

    The genius minds at MIT have created a new system that uses a programming language to design complex DNA circuits and control the living cells. As a part of their research, MIT researchers have programmed 60 circuits with a variety of functions.

  • JavaScripthon — A Simple Python To ES6 JavaScript Translator

    So many, Python and JavaScript seem like similar languages — object oriented, functional hybrid, dynamically typed and a rich library. Keeping the same in mind, probably, a coder has created a small and simple Python to JavaScript translator.

Leftovers

• Here’s What Happened to Apple’s Third Co-Founder

  “WHEREAS,” it read, “Mr. Stephen G. Wozniak (hereinafter referred to as WOZNIAK), Mr. Steven P. Jobs (hereinafter referred to as JOBS), and Mr. Ronald G. Wayne (hereinafter referred to as WAYNE), all residents of the County of Santa Clara, State of California, have mutually agreed to the formation of a company to be specifically organized for the manufacture and marketing of computer devices, components, and related material, said company to be organized under the fictitious name of APPLE COMPUTER COMPANY.”

• Can Premier League leaders Leicester City hold their nerve? [Ed: off topic]

  It was a year ago, on 4 April 2015, when the great recovery to survival started as bottom-of-the-table Leicester beat West Ham United 2-1. With the pressure to avoid relegation at its height, Leicester won seven of their last nine games to stay up.

• Southampton boss: Jamie Vardy’s rise from non-league to Leicester and England is crazy

  Vardy has helped push Leicester City to the verge of the Premier League title, and forced his way into England’s Euro 2016 reckoning just four years after plying his trade in non-league football.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Libyan Enterprise: Hillary’s Imperial Massacre

    In fact two documents strongly backed Qaddafi on this issue. The first was a secret cable to the State Department from the US embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the Wikileaks trove, entitled “Extremism in Eastern Libya,” which revealed that this area was rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.

    [..]

    By October of that year, Muammar Qaddafi was dead and stuffed in a meat locker. Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world was presented with photographs of Qaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte.

  • Cleaning Up Hillary’s Libyan Mess

    U.S. officials are pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political risk at home is that voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton’s responsibility for the mess, writes Robert Parry.

  • Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit Neglects 98 Percent of the World’s Bomb-Ready Uranium

    But critics have pointed out that the summits have only focused on highly enriched uranium in civilian possession, which, according to the Department of Energy, only accounts for 2 to 3 percent of the world’s supply. That small percentage is used mostly by academics for research and medical isotope production.

    The remaining 97 to 98 percent is held in military stockpiles, which the security summits have largely ignored. Countries keep the safeguards on these stockpiles secret, and military material falls outside the scope of international security agreements.

  • A ‘Silent Coup’ for Brazil?

    Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments are on the defensive as U.S.-backed political movements employ “silent coup” tactics to discredit and remove troublesome leaders, writes Ted Snider.

  • Iraq is Broke. You Have to Pay for It.

    The next time a candidate or reporter asks during a debate about education or healthcare “But how are you going to pay for that?” I would like the person being questioned to respond “The same way we find money to pay for Iraq.”

    So maybe it would just be better for Flint, Michigan to claim it is under attack by ISIS instead of just being poisoned because no one has the money to fix America’s infrastructure.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • ‘I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me’: Clinton snaps at Greenpeace activist

    A question about fossil-fuel-industry donations to her campaign unleashed a rare flash of anger from Hillary Clinton on the rope line in New York on Thursday.

    The moment was recorded by an activist, whom Greenpeace identified as Eva Resnick-Day, who sought to pressure Clinton about the roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars her campaign has received from individuals with ties to fossil-fuel industries.

  • Unilever ditches major palm oil trader after its sustainability certification is revoked

    Unilever has cancelled its contracts with the IOI Group, after the major Malaysian palm oil trader was suspended by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for destroying forests and peatlands in Indonesia.

    The IOI Group – whose customers include Kellogg’s and Mars – is one of the largest companies to have lost RSPO certification since the roundtable was formed in 2004.

    The decision will be seen as a test of consumer company policies on responsible sourcing of palm oil, which commit major brands to excluding suppliers responsible for deforestation and peatland drainage.

  • The Danger of a Runaway Antarctica

    The startling new finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature by two experts in ice-sheet behavior: Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University. It paints a grimmer picture than the one presented only three years ago by a United Nations panel that forecast a maximum sea level rise of three feet by 2100. But that projection assumed only a minimal contribution from the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. And things could get worse in the centuries to come — the melting from Antarctica alone, not counting other factors like thermal expansion, could cause the seas to rise by nearly 50 feet by 2500, drowning many cities.

  • Saudi Arabia Plans $2 Trillion Megafund for Post-Oil Era: Deputy Crown Prince

    Saudi Arabia is getting ready for the twilight of the oil age by creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund for the kingdom’s most prized assets.

    Over a five-hour conversation, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out his vision for the Public Investment Fund, which will eventually control more than $2 trillion and help wean the kingdom off oil. As part of that strategy, the prince said Saudi will sell shares in Aramco’s parent company and transform the oil giant into an industrial conglomerate. The initial public offering could happen as soon as next year, with the country currently planning to sell less than 5 percent.

  • Norway Is Killing Whales To Feed Animals Raised For Fur

    Norway has killed more whales than any other nation over the past four years, and some of that meat has become animal feed for the Norwegian fur industry, according to new documents unveiled by two environmental organizations.

    Revelations from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) come as Norway opened up its whaling season Friday, and a week after Japan reported killing more than 300 minke whales — including pregnant females — for what it labeled as research. Now, groups are once again calling for an end to whaling — though this time the attention is placed on Norway, which along with Iceland and Japan, ignores a 30-year-old international moratorium on whale hunting.

  • With Coal Crashing, Will Polluted Communities Be Left Holding the Bag?

    Federal law requires coal companies to clean up and reclaim toxic mining sites. But what happens when a coal company’s gone bankrupt?

  • Flesh Vs Fossil: Let’s shut down the UK’s largest opencast coal mine in May

    2016 has got off to an even worse start. The United States’ second largest coal company – Arch Coal –­ filed for bankruptcy. The Chinese government announced the closure of more than 5,000 coal mines, with 1,000 to go this year. Almost half the UK’s coal power stations have announced closure in the last 12 months.

  • Did Sanders Lie About Clinton’s Oil Money? NPR Factchecker Can’t Be Bothered to Check

    So the factchecker’s job is to determine whether Clinton is right to say that she just gets money from people who work for fossil fuel companies, and that the Sanders campaign is lying about this, or whether the Sanders campaign is actually correct in saying that she relies heavily on funds from fossil-fuel lobbyists—right?

    See, that’s why you don’t have a job at NPR.

  • Bernie Sanders Took Money From the Fossil Fuel Lobby, Too — Just Not Much

    The Bernie Sanders campaign countered by pointing to a Greenpeace tally that says she has collected “$1,259,280 in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.”

    Additionally, Greenpeace found “$3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA,” the main Super PAC backing Clinton’s campaign.

  • Flint Moves to Sue Michigan Over Water Contamination Fallout

    Flint has made moves to sue the state of Michigan, citing “grossly negligent oversight” that led to the city’s ongoing water contamination crisis.

    The city filed a notice of intent to sue with the Court of Claims on March 24, and it was reported on by various Michigan news outlets on Friday.

    It names the state, the Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), and four MDEQ employees as defendants.

    Flint mayor Karen Weaver wrote in the notice of intention to file claim, which the Flint Journal has posted here (pdf), that “the damage to the water system infrastructure caused by the MDEQ employees’ grossly negligent oversight is irreversible.”

• Finance

  • This Obama Endorsement Is a Sign Pro-Corporate Democrats Are Getting Nervous

    PRESIDENT OBAMA on Monday endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his handpicked Democratic National Committee chair, in her congressional race. What’s stunning about that is that Obama felt the need to endorse a six-term congresswoman running in a heavily Democratic district at all.

  • After WikiLeaks Revelation, Greece Asks I.M.F. to Clarify Bailout Plan

    Greece called on the International Monetary Fund on Saturday to explain whether it was seeking to usher Athens toward bankruptcy ahead of a pivotal referendum in June on Britain’s membership in Europe. Greece’s comments came after I.M.F. officials raised questions in a private discussion published by WikiLeaks about what it would take to get Greece’s creditors to agree to debt relief.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • You’re not a farm animal: A plea to journalists to release themselves from Trump’s press pens

    Covering the Trump campaign on a daily basis today appears to be a rather miserable media existence. Reporters are threatened by staffers, and the Trump communications team seems to be utterly nonresponsive to media inquires. (“There is no Trump press operation,” one reporter told Slate.)

  • “It’s a Revolution”: Actress Rosario Dawson on Why She Supports Sanders for President Over Clinton

    As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders campaign in New York ahead of the state’s primary later this month, more than 16,000 people gathered in St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx for a Sanders rally on Thursday. He spoke alongside film director Spike Lee and actress and activist Rosario Dawson, known for her roles in “Kids” and many other films, including “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Amy Goodman caught up with Dawson after the rally to discuss why she supports Bernie Sanders. “It’s a revolution,” Dawson says, noting the corporate media has failed to fairly cover his platform. She also discusses the rise of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. “He isn’t the problem,” she says. “There is a lot of stuff been going on for many years that has gotten out of control.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • German Television Pulls Satire Mocking Turkey’s Erdogan

    GERMANY’S STATE BROADCASTER, ZDF, apologized on Friday for what it called satire that had crossed the line into slander and removed video of a comedian reading an obscene poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from its website and YouTube channel. Wondershare serial key and email.

    The poem, which was read by the German satirist Jan Böhmermann on Thursday’s edition of his late-night show “Neo Magazin Royale,” described Erdogan in vile, obscene terms — even comparing him, at one stage, to Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he held in a cellar for 24 years — but the text was presented as part of a comic demonstration of the difference between satire and slander.

  • For Israel’s Sake The Israel Lobby Must Be Held To Account

    It was ten years ago that the London Review of Books published an article on the Israel Lobby by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, distinguished scholars at two of America’s top universities. The following year the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux found the courage to publish The Israel Lobby, a book with 357 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews.

    The Israel Lobby is an understated critique of the enomous influence that the tiny state of Israel, which consists of land stolen by fire and sword from the helpless Palestinians, exercises over United States foreign policy. The crazed Israel Lobby went berserk. Mearsheimer and Walt were demonized as anti-semetics who wanted to bring back Hitler.

    Also in 2006 former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, was published by Simon & Schuster and became a New York Times bestseller with 846 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews. Carter, who as US president did his best to bring Israel and Palestine to a settlement, truthrully explained that Israel was the barrier to a settlement. The Israel Lobby demonized Carter as an anti-semite, and the Jews on the board of the Carter Center resigned.

  • Espousing freedom of speech, and practising censorship

    Have you noticed how people you are eager to meet often prove to be disillusioning? Perhaps anticipation builds up huge expectations but they end up less than they originally seemed. Rather than their perceived star qualities it’s their faults and flaws you notice. Consequently, heroes end up with feet of clay.

  • Bonnici wants criminal libel removed, but censorship law comes first

    Justice minister says government is discussing the removal of criminal libel but the pending censorship and freedom of expression law takes precedence

  • Criminal libel should have been abolished in 2011 – Law Commissioner Franco Debono

    Law Commissioner Franco Debono yesterday told The Malta Independent that the whole criminal libel controversy involving shadow Justice Minister Jason Azzopardi could have been avoided if criminal libel was abolished in 2011, as he had proposed in a private members bill.

    The ‘controversy’ that Dr Debono spoke of is the 6 April criminal libel case against Shadow Minister for Justice, Dr Jason Azzopardi which was instituted through a criminal complaint by former police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit.

  • Busuttil insists police ‘in Muscat’s grip’ over Azzopardi arraignment

    Opposition leader Simon Busuttil insisted that the police, who are instituting criminal defamation charges against PN MP Jason Azzopardi, are “state apparatus in the grip of Joseph Muscat”.

    Busuttil told MaltaToday that criminal defamation is a perfectly acceptable legal tool unless “manipulated by government to intimidate the Opposition” and that Opposition MPs are only charged in court with criminal defamation in banana republics and dictatorial regimes.

  • Some prominent Chinese are chafing against censorship

    The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, a tabloid closely tied to the Communist Party and known for its often-rabid nationalism, isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be calling publicly for more freedom of speech and less censorship.

  • China Party journal denounces critics seeking to discredit anti-graft drive

    A top magazine of China’s ruling Communist Party lashed out at critics of its ongoing anti-corruption campaign, saying foreign media and individuals from home and abroad were intentionally trying to discredit the effort as a political “power struggle”.

    Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued a sweeping campaign to root out corruption since assuming power about three years ago, and has promised to strike hard at both senior and low-level officials, the “tigers” and “flies”.

    Nonetheless, there has been persistent speculation that the graft crackdown is also about Xi taking down his rivals.

  • It’s time for America’s lawyers to come to the aid of their Chinese counterparts

    Last summer, the Chinese Communist Party regime began a nationwide crackdown on human rights activists and attorneys. It’s time that the American Bar Association, the largest attorneys organization in the world’s most powerful democracy, took a clear, unequivocal stand on the crackdown in defense of universal values and the rule of law.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Bringing Signal to the desktop

    The non-profit Open Whisper Systems (OWS) organization is best known for its smartphone apps: first TextSecure and, more recently, Signal. Lately, however, the project started branching out by developing a desktop front-end for Signal, thus allowing users to take advantage of verifiable, end-to-end encryption for instant messages and group chats from the comfort of a full-size keyboard. The desktop version remains linked to the smartphone edition, although opinions certainly may vary as to whether that constitutes a plus or a minus.

    TextSecure was released as open-source software in 2011, followed by an encrypted voice-calling app named RedPhone in 2012. OWS then merged the functionality into a single iOS app called Signal in March 2015; the Android version was released in November of the same year. Signal Desktop was announced in December, via a beta program for which potential users had to sign up and wait to receive an invitation. As with all of OWS’s projects, of course, the source code for Signal Desktop is available on GitHub.

  • Decentraleyes Addon Fixes Browser Privacy, Circumvents CDNs

    Widespread CDN acceptance has been a security flaw that sacrifices privacy simply because it breaks web pages on anything put a text-based browser, which is a sacrifice few are willing to make for the sake of their information remaining local.

  • Remember that California bill to ban the sale of encrypted phones? It just got worse

    The assemblyman, who decried Apple for “risking our national security and the safety of our kids” by using encryption, also uses an iPhone.

  • RAF’s new ‘GCHQ in the sky’ spy planes which can hack enemy emails and phone calls

    Air chiefs have bought nine spy planes, each one like a flying GCHQ.

    The Boeing P-8 Poseidon is as effective at information ­gathering as the Government’s eavesdropping headquarters.

  • Sure, why not? FBI agrees to unlock iPhone for Arkansas prosecutor

    The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas, the Associated Press reports.

    TechCrunch has contacted the prosecutor’s office for details, which for the moment are thin on the ground — but the timing seems unlikely to be a coincidence. It was only Monday that the FBI announced it had successfully accessed a phone after saying for months that it couldn’t possibly do so — and that Apple was endangering national security by refusing to help.

  • British Authorities Demand Encryption Keys in Case With “Huge Implications”

    BRITISH AUTHORITIES are attempting to force a man accused of hacking the U.S. government to hand over his encryption keys in a case that campaigners believe could have ramifications for journalists and activists.

    England-based Lauri Love (pictured above) was arrested in October 2013 by the U.K.’s equivalent of the FBI, the National Crime Agency, over allegations that he hacked a range of U.S. government systems between 2012 and 2013, including those of the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

    The U.S. Justice Department is seeking the extradition of Love, claiming that he and a group of conspirators breached “thousands of networks” in total and caused millions of dollars in damages. But Love has been fighting the extradition attempt in British courts, insisting that he should be tried for the alleged offenses within the U.K. The 31-year-old, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, has argued that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S., where his legal team says he could face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail.

  • ODNI Lawyer Bob Litt Says There’s No NSA Data Sharing With Law Enforcement… If You Don’t Count The FBI, DEA, Etc.

    Just when we thought some surveillance reforms might stick, the administration announced it was expanding law enforcement access to NSA data hauls. This prompted expressions of disbelief and dismay, along with a letter from Congressional representatives demanding the NSA cease this expanded information sharing immediately.

  • The Trouble with CloudFlare

    Wednesday, CloudFlare blogged that 94% of the requests it sees from Tor are “malicious.” We find that unlikely, and we’ve asked CloudFlare to provide justification to back up this claim. We suspect this figure is based on a flawed methodology by which CloudFlare labels all traffic from an IP address that has ever sent spam as “malicious.” Tor IP addresses are conduits for millions of people who are then blocked from reaching websites under CloudFlare’s system.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Video shows white cops performing roadside cavity search of black man

    For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an investigative series about police abuse in South Carolina. I’ve found a dizzying number of cases, including illegal arrests, botched raids, fatal shootings and serious questions about how all those incidents are investigated. Many of these cases were previously unreported, or if they were reported, the initial reports were a far cry from what actually happened. The series will run at some point in the next week. But in the meantime, I want to share one particularly horrifying incident that I came across this week while researching the series.

  • asha bandele and Laura Carlsen on the War on Drugs

    What this country calls a War on Drugs has never been indiscriminate in its victims. The punitive, interventionist drug policies embraced by a succession of US administrations have hit hardest in communities of color, and, in Latin America, it has been the poor, the indigenous and those outside of power that have borne the brunt of practices, nominally aimed at stopping drug-trafficking, that have only driven corruption and horrific violence.

  • DOJ Reopens Asset Forfeiture Sharing Program After Temporary, Budget-Related Shutdown

    Right before the end of last year, the DOJ — facing budget cuts — announced it would be ceasing its “equitable sharing” program with local law enforcement agencies. These agencies complained loudly about the unfairness of being decoupled from the asset forfeiture money train, as this partnership often allowed them to route around more restrictive state laws.

  • The feds have resumed a controversial program that lets cops take stuff and keep it

    The Justice Department has announced that it is resuming a controversial practice that allows local police departments to funnel a large portion of assets seized from citizens into their own coffers under federal law.

  • ‘They Want South America Back the Way They Used to Have It’

    Mark Weisbrot: “They’ve been trying to get rid of all the left governments, really, for the whole 21st century.”

    [..]

    “In a flash, Argentina has become pro-American,” CBS’s 60 Minutes told viewers, and Leslie Stahl shared that watching Macri and his wife play with their daughter, “you can’t help but think of the Kennedys and Camelot.” US corporate media seem to concur: Macri is a pragmatist, and though they aren’t certain he can lift Argentina from what CBS called “a morass of debt, inflation and international isolation,” it’s clear we’re meant to wish him well.

  • Houston Federal Marshal Tries to Snatch Camera from Citizen Journalist Who Was Assaulted by 2nd Agent

    “You’re about to go to jail for being a dumb-ass,” said a Houston Federal Agent Calderon to PINAC citizen journalist David Warden.

    Boy, was he wrong.

    The Houston Federal Court Security Agent assaulted PINAC correspondent David Warden when he lawfully recorded outside of a Federal Courthouse on its sidewalk.

  • Texas Cops’ Complaint Censorship Attacks YouTube Videos of Public Officials in Public

    Texas police launched a “complaint censorship” attack on David Warden’s YouTube channel News Now Houston, claiming his videos violate their privacy.

  • Houston Prosecutors Exonerate PINAC Correspondent Recording Near Shell Oil Refinery

    Texas prosecutors admitted they can’t prove their contempt of cop case “BARD” against PINAC correspondent David Warden, who recorded video near a Shell Oil Refinery on the outskirts of Houston.

    In other words, state attorneys had no way to prove that David Warden interfered with public duties of an officer last December, as charged, because BARD stands for ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ and officers couldn’t conceive of a single illegal thing Warden did while recording near the oil refinery as you can see in the legal document below.

• DRM

  • Fighting DRM in HTML, again

    In 2013, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) raised the ire of many in the free-software community (and elsewhere) by adopting an API that adds support for DRM modules within web content. Now, the working group that produced the API in question has come up for renewal, and a number of high-profile parties—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Free Software Foundation (FSF)—are using the occasion to push back against the DRM camp, in hopes of regaining some of what was lost.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Awesome Stuff: Putting Nature In The Public Domain

      This week, we’ve got one standout project that seems worth highlighting here at Techdirt because of its commitment to things we all care about: cutting-edge media technology, the planet we all live on, and the public domain. Catalog.Earth is a project to use the first to capture the second and dedicate it to the third.

    • EFF to Copyright Office: Improper Content Takedowns Hurt Online Free Expression

      Safe Harbors Work for Rightsholders and Service Providers

      Washington, D.C. – Content takedowns based on unfounded copyright claims are hurting online free expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the U.S. Copyright Office Friday, arguing that any reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should focus on protecting Internet speech and creativity.

      EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply.

      “One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.”

    • Music Industry: DMCA Copyright Law is Obsolete and Harmful

      A coalition of 400 artists and various music groups including the RIAA are calling on Congress to reform existing copyright law. The DMCA is obsolete, dysfunctional and harmful, they claim, calling for stronger measures against the ongoing piracy troubles they face.