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Seeing this piece in the news, about how Debian-Multimedia.org is now unsafe, I was reminded we don't have a tool to manipulate sources.lists entries.

For example:

$ apt-sources list .. deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main ..

How about listing only my repos?

$ apt-sources list steve.org.uk deb-src http://packages.steve.org.uk/firefox-wrapper/squeeze/ ./ deb http://packages.steve.org.uk/firefox-wrapper/squeeze/ ./ deb http://packages.steve.org.uk/meta/squeeze/ ./ deb-src http://packages.steve.org.uk/meta/squeeze/ ./ deb-src http://packages.steve.org.uk/minidlna/squeeze/ ./ deb http://packages.steve.org.uk/minidlna/squeeze/ ./

Now add in a command to delete lines matching a given pattern:

# apt-sources delete debian-multimedia.org

Doesn't that seem like a tool that should exist?

I've added this quick hack to this repository which you can submit pull requests against, or use as a base.

TODO: Write the "add" handler. Neaten.

Ever felt jealous that Ubuntu users can add PPAs? Nows your chance to do something like this:

# apt-sources add "deb http://packages.steve.org.uk/lumail/wheezy/ ./"

An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it is retiring Chrome Frame, a plug-in that brings Chrome's engine to old IE versions. The company wouldn't share an exact date, but did say it will end support and cease releasing updates sometime in January 2014. Google's reasoning appears to be based on the fact that Chrome Frame was released (initially in September 2009 and then as a stable build in September 2010) at a time when old versions of Internet Explorer, which don't support the latest Web technologies, were still in very high use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Debian warns on its blog: "The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we're wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! This means that the repository is no longer safe to use, and you should remove the related entries from your source.list file." Update: 06/14 02:58 GMT by U L : If you're wondering where it went, it moved to deb-multimedia.org, after the DPL (at the time) asked the maintainer to stop using the Debian name.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nerval's Lobster writes "One year and seven months after beginning construction, Facebook has brought its first datacenter on foreign soil online. That soil is in Lulea, town of 75,000 people on northern Sweden's east coast, just miles south of the boundary separating the Arctic Circle from the somewhat-less-frigid land below it. Lulea (also nicknamed The Node Pole for the number of datacenters in the area) is in the coldest area of Sweden and shares the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a local booster site. The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn't stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961, and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit. Air cooling might prove a partial substitute for powered environmental control, but Facebook's datacenter still needed 120megawatts of steady power to keep the social servers humming. Sweden has among the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and the Lulea area reportedly has among the lowest power costs in Sweden. Low electricity prices are at least partly due to the area's proximity to the powerful Lulea River and the line of hydroelectric dams that draw power from it."

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judgecorp writes "The OpenStack project could be the 'Linux of the cloud', according to Red Hat, which just announced a fully supported distribution of the open source software. The plan seems to be to offer it as a competitor to VMware's vSphere. From the article: 'The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programs.'"

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sfcrazy writes "Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to movies after his role as Governator of California and the legendary actor is all set to play the role of The Terminator once again — the character which turned him into an icon. Schwarzenegger told the fan site TheArnoldFans.com, 'I'm very happy that the studios want me to be in Terminator 5 and to star as the Terminator.'"

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Freshly Exhumed writes "Dave Siever always fancied himself as something of a musician, but also realized he did not necessarily sing or play in perfect key. Then he strapped on the electrodes of a device made by his Edmonton company, and zapped his brain's auditory cortex with a mild dose of electricity. The result, he claims, was a dramatic improvement in his ability to hear pitch, including the sour notes he produced himself. 'Now I tune everything and I practise my singing over and over and over again, because I'm more sensitive to it.' Mr. Siever was not under the supervision of a doctor or psychologist, and nor is he one himself. He is part of an extraordinary trend that has amateur enthusiasts excited, and some scientists deeply nervous: do-it-yourself brain stimulation." With studies suggesting that small doses of electricity can: increase your memory, help you learn new tasks, make you better at math, turn you into a sniper in minutes, and most importantly make the ugly seem attractive, we can expect a lot of brain zapping in the next few years.

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MojoKid writes "Dell recently introduced their Alienware X51 series of small form factor gaming PCs but until now, squeezing in components that were powerful enough for the enthusiast gamer was a significant thermal challenge. Intel's recent Haswell Core processor release, as well as NVIDIA's GeForce 670 series graphics cards have changed the game considerably though. The X51 R2 is shaped similar to to an Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger, it would be right at home in a living room setting. Alienware is also bundling Steam Big Picture mode installations with systems as well. Performance-wise, with its latest CPU and GPU upgrades, the system is over twice as fast as the first generation X51, again thanks to Haswell and upgraded NVIDIA GeForce graphics. The console-sized PC is capable of running virtually any current gen DX11 title at full 1920X1080 HD resolution and high image quality settings."

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DeviceGuru writes "Variscite has unveiled what it claims is the world's tiniest Cortex-A9 system-on-module, measuring 52 x 17mm. The Linux- and Android-compatible DART-4460 board is based on a 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP4460 SoC, is available with up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM and 8GB eMMC flash, and can run at 400MHz on just 44mA. The module provides interfaces for display (HDMI, RGB, DSI), wireless (Bluetooth, WiFi), audio, camera, USB, and more, and it consumes as little as 5mA in suspend and 44mA while running from a 3.7V battery at 400 MHz, according to Variscite. And in case you were wondering, the iconic Gumstix form-factor is 12 percent larger, at 58 x 17mm."

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Normally Skype isn't mentioned by name on this blog, but today I'm making an exception.

When a new scandal broke out in the Australian Army today, one of the first questions asked was how does it compare to the Skype Scandal which had everybody talking (and blushing) in 2011. A concise military reply direct from the General:

"I'd say it's worse than the Skype matter"

(For those who are interested, the original Skype Scandal cadets are going on trial in six weeks)

Jedi Council brings cultural change in the Army: from Skype to email

Since the original scandal, there have been plenty of PR-orchestrated headlines about cultural change in the Army. Sadly, it seems that several ranking officers believed that was a cue to simply start using email instead of live feeds

Operating under the operational code name Jedi Council, they've apparently been swapping annotated images of female colleagues and members of the public service.

Usually such senior ranking officers have given many years of dedicated service to the country. They are widely respected and the vast majority of them are unlikely to be systematically involved in such games.

On the other hand, it's likely that all of them, including the bad apples, have top secret security clearances. After the revalation that Australia has a direct peering arrangement with the NSA, there are all kinds of questions about whether a couple of rogue officers have access to pursue their private projects using tools like PRISM and Boundless Informant. Maybe they even have direct access to images from those invasive airport body scanners - like these pictures that were not supposed to exist. Just like the British undercover cops stealing the identities of dead children and fully engaging impressionable young women from environment campaign groups, there is always a risk of things getting a little too naughty.

While this latest Army example involves private pursuits, it is not hard to imagine many other permutations: perhaps a couple of rogue Government employees making unauthorised use of a citizen's data for a commercial objective and gaining the upper hand on private sector competitors who have no such data feed.

100% trust?

In every organisation there will always be a few people bending the rules. It's human nature, if it wasn't that way, we'd all be robots. The Army and the Catholic Church tend to be hammered a lot more in the public eye when these transgressions are discovered although statistically their crime rates are no higher than average. The bottom line is that no organisation is perfect and people have to take some responisbility to object to the excessive growth of the security state and keep our data to ourselves as you just never know who you can trust.

The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we're wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! ;) )

This means that the repository is no longer safe to use, and you should remove the related entries from your source.list file.

After all, the need of an external repository for multimedia related packages has been greatly reduced with the release of Wheezy, which features many new and updated codecs and multimedia players.

Not sure if you're using the debian-multimedia repository? You can easily check it by running:

grep debian-multimedia.org /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

If you can see debian-multimedia.org line in output, you should remove all the lines including it.

An anonymous reader writes "Some journalists ran into Steve Wozniak at the airport and asked him about iOS 7 and PRISM, where he made an interesting comparison about how the US is becoming what it once feared most. In communist Russia 'you couldn't own anything, and now in the digital world you hardly own anything anymore (YouTube video). You've got subscritpions and you already said ok, ok, agree and you agree that every right in the world belongs to them and you got no rights and anything you put in the cloud, you don't even know,' says Woz. 'Ownership was what made America different than Russia.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aardappel writes "TreeSheets has been available as freeware for Windows / Linux / OS X since 2008, but is now also Open Source (ZLIB license). TreeSheets is a cross between a spreadsheet (you can create grids) and an outliner (you can create grids inside grids) allowing you to create almost any structure to organize your data in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

William Robinson writes "Astronomers have discovered 26 new likely black holes in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy — the largest haul of black hole candidates ever found in a galaxy apart from our own. The central region of the Andromeda galaxy is chock-full of black holes, according to extensive observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory." These 26 black hole candidates add to nine previously known for a grand total of 35.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UnknowingFool writes "Best Buy and Microsoft will launch 600 Microsoft stores within Best Buy retail locations in a store-within-a-store concept. The Microsoft stores will occupy 1500-2000 sq ft within each location. The terms of the deal are not announced, but I assume it benefits both as Best Buy would likely charge rent to help with declining revenue. For Microsoft, they may get cheaper facilities than building their own stores. The last I heard, MS had a very ambitious plan to launch hundreds of stores a year. I have doubts about the success of this venture, considering anecdotally almost every MS store I've seen in my travels was nearly empty. Since they all were located near Apple stores, the stark difference in foot traffic was apparent. The only exception was the MS store near Redmond, which had a decent crowd."

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McGruber writes "According to a report by Rochester, NY CBS affiliate WROC Kodak has ended in-house production of the cellulose acetate base that is the primary component of photographic film. Popular Photography magazine adds that, for more than 100 years, Kodak has made the acetate in house in bulk, providing the structural basis for the company's film. Now, with Kodak in bankruptcy, the company is firing 60 workers and shutting down the acetate machinery. Citing the decline in interest in film photography as a primary cause, Kodak will no longer undertake the time intensive process of acetate production. Thankfully, the company has large stockpiles of the material, and once that runs out they will source it from elsewhere."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For some time now, I’ve been using Trello to organize my free software contributions. My main use is to give me a cross-project view of what I’m working on. As most of my contributions stem from packaging software for Debian and Ubuntu, I end up working on and following bugs across many different hosting projects (e.g. Launchpad, Debian’s BTS, GitHub). Each does a decent job (some better than others) of displaying and prioritizing issues within a certain project. Though a bug that is critical in a project that I’m only tangentially interested in might be a lower priority from me personally than a wishlist issue in a different project. So Trello has been extremely helpful in giving me a global view of how I should be spending my limited time across projects. Though putting information from all of these different places into Trello can be tedious…

So that’s why I created Bug 2 Trello, a Chrome extension to add bugs/issues to a Trello board.

 

 

It currently supports Launchpad, GitHub, SourceForge, Google Code, BitBucket, and Debian’s BTS. There is also support for some Bugzilla instances. This support currently requires that the JSON-RPC interface is available. It is known to work with with Wikimedia, Mozilla, KDE, Apache, and Redhat. It is known not to work with GNOME, Kernel.org, and Novell.

• Install it from the Chrome Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bug2trello/aomnoofmdnaccffobkddehcmdihggcke
• Report bugs: https://github.com/andrewsomething/bug2trello/issues
• Grab the code: git clone git://github.com/andrewsomething/bug2trello.git

Bug 2 Trello is licensed under the MIT License.

vinces99 writes "A new analysis shows that world population could reach nearly 11 billion by the end of this century, according to a United Nations report issued June 13. That's about 800 million, or about 8 percent, more than the previous projection issued in 2011. The change is largely because birth rates in Africa have not declined as quickly as had been expected, according to Adrian Raftery of the University of Washington's Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. The U.N. estimates use statistical methods developed at the center. The current African population is about 1.1 billion and it is now expected to reach 4.2 billion, nearly a fourfold increase, by 2100, Raftery said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We’re back with the sixteenth episode of Season Six of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team! Alan Pope is on a boat somewhere in the Midlands but Mark Johnson is back with Tony Whitmore and Laura Cowen in Studio A with cake (carrot) and an interview.

 Download OGG Play in Popup  Download MP3 Play in Popup

In this week’s show:-

• We interview Daniel Foré about ElementaryOS, an Ubuntu derivative.
• We share some Command Line Lurve: ubuntu-support-status
• We chat about getting a new job, upgrading a desktop’s hardware, and Internet meat.
• And, of course, we go over your marvellous feedback.

Please send your comments and suggestions to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
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crookedvulture writes "With its Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, Intel allowed standard Core i5 and i7 CPUs to be overclocked by up to 400MHz using Turbo multipliers. Reaching for higher speeds required pricier K-series chips, but everyone got access to a little "free" clock headroom. Haswell isn't quite so accommodating. Intel has disabled limited multiplier control for non-K CPUs, effectively limiting overclocking to the Core i7-4770K and i5-4670K. Those chips cost $20-30 more than their standard counterparts, and surprisingly, they're missing a few features. The K-series parts lack the support for transactional memory extensions and VT-d device virtualization included with standard Haswell CPUs. PC enthusiasts now have to choose between overclocking and support for certain features even when purchasing premium Intel processors. AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.