Agreguesi i feed

Open Help is on this weekend in Cincinnati. We’re half way through the two conference days and have seen very interesting presentations from Jorge Castro about helping users help users, Janet Swisher on sprints and Rich Bowen about writing better help, which led to interesting discussions during the panel and open floor.

The trip over to the US was a bit long as Dave and I were delayed at almost every point of the way, but we finally arrived in Cincinnati after a 22 hour trip to a lovely reception at Via Vite on Fountain Square.

The conference itself has a very relaxed atmosphere. With around 40 attendees, it is possible to meet everyone and it is rather nice to have a fluid schedule. There are people here from a range of different projects, including Drupal, the Wikimedia Foundation and WordPress, including four people who previously participated in the OPW. Unfortunately, Sindhu and Aruna, the Documentation Team interns from round 5 and 6, could not make it because they have exams right now, but I am hoping to meet them at GUADEC.

bill_mcgonigle writes with this news from from CNET: "Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D NY) disclosed that NSA analysts eavesdrop on Americans' domestic telephone calls without court orders during a House Judiciary hearing. After clearing with FBI director Robert Mueller that the information was not classified, Nadler revealed that during a closed-door briefing to Congress, the Legislature was informed that the spying organization had implemented and uses this capability. This appears to confirm Edward Snowden's claim that he could, in his position at the NSA, 'wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.' Declan McCullagh writes, 'Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.' The executive branch has defended its general warrants, claiming that 'the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law actually says, to order domestic spying without [constitutional] warrants,' while Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney at EFF claims such government activity 'epitomizes the problem of secret laws.'" Note that "listening in" versus "collecting metadata" is a distinction that defenders of government phone spying have been emphasizing. Tracking whom you called and when, goes the story, doesn't impinge on expectations of privacy. Speaking of the metadata collection, though, reader Bruce66423 writes "According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration took 'bulk metadata' from the phone companies under voluntary agreements for more than four years after 9/11 until a court agreed they could have it compulsorily." Related: First time accepted submitter fsagx writes that Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive has calculated the cost to store every phone call made in the U.S. over the course of a year: "It's surprisingly inexpensive. It puts the recent NSA stories (and reports from the Boston bombings about the FBI's ability to listen to past phone conversions) into perspective."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New rules for labs that use chimpanzees as test subjects may be on the horizon. From the New York Times blog: "The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal came in response to a petition filed in 2010 by the Jane Goodall Institute, the Humane Society of the United States, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and other groups. It would require permits for interstate commerce involving any chimpanzees, or for what the law calls 'taking,' which could be anything from harassment to major harm to something as simple as obtaining a blood sample. And those permits, Mr. Ashe said, would be granted only if the action could be shown to benefit the survival of the species. If the new rule is enacted, it will be a major success for animal welfare groups, a grave disappointment for some scientists and another sign of the profound changes over the last half-century in the way animals are used and imagined in science and popular culture." The L.A. Times lauds the proposed rule change in an editorial.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 

Back in Cincinnati for my second Open Help Conference and Sprints, thanks to GNOME Foundation generous travel grant. Conference started with a reception in an Italian bistro on Fountain Square in Downtown Cincinnati, with a busy open air concert in the background of our geeky networking evening.

First time accepted submitter Clarklteveno writes "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his San Francisco counterpart, Ed Lee, said at a news conference Friday that they are sponsoring a pair of technology summits over the next year. The mayors said the 'digital cities' summits — one in New York in September and another in San Francisco early next year — will seek to find ways to use technology to solve problems the cities face. The mayors made the announcement after touring the office of San Francisco-based mobile payment company Square with co-founder Jack Dorsey, who also helped found Twitter. Bloomberg pointed to power outages and dangerous winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy as examples of issues the summits would seek to address."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iddo Genuth writes "Videographer Tom Antos developed an advanced DIY camera stabilizer which can hold almost any DSLR or mirrorless camera steady for video photography. Although this surely isn't as sophisticated (and super expensive) as the professional MVI M10 handheld 3-axis digital stabilized camera gimbal, its still quite impressive especially when you consider it only costs a few hundred dollars rather then tens of thousands — that is if you feel like building it yourself." Antos' design takes advantage of stabilized gimbal systems made for hanging cameras on remote-controlled helicopters, and does a very impressive job for its price.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

McGruber writes "In June of 2012, we discussed news that Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief executive of Oracle, purchased the Hawaiian island Lanai for $300 million. Ellison now owns nearly everything on the island, including many of the candy-colored plantation-style homes and apartments, one of the two grocery stores, the two Four Seasons hotels and golf courses, the community center and pool, water company, movie theater, half the roads and some 88,000 acres of land. (2% of the island is owned by the government or by longtime Lanai families.) Now Ellison is attempting to win over the island's small, but wary, local population, one whose economic future is heavily dependent on his decisions. He and his team have met with experts in desalination and solar energy to change the way water and electricity are generated, collected, stored and delivered on the island. They are refurbishing residential housing intended for workers (Mr. Ellison's Lanai Resorts owns and manages 400 of the more than 1,500 housing units on the island). They've tackled infrastructure, such as lengthening airport runways and paving county roads. And to improve access to Lanai, Mr. Ellison bought Island Air earlier this year and is closing a deal to buy another airline."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It is with a great pleasure that we are opening registration for SFD 2013. The deadline for registered teams to get the free goodies is July 21st which should give us enough time to ship everything everywhere. For registration, simply create your team page under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2013 (/country/city/team for most) and complete this registration form.

We are available for support through email on sfd-discuss or on IRC (#SFD on freenode). SFD artworks are available under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Artwork and CC-BY licensed. Feel free to use, enhanced and eventually localize them.

We want to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible, namely Canonical, Google, and Linode for the time being. We would also like to thank our media sponsors who offer us magazine ads, they are Linux Magazine, Ubuntu user, Admin, Smart developer and Linux Journal. Should your organization be interested to sponsor and support DFF please get in touch with us.

Happy SFD preparations!

 

It’s been a long time since I have posted in Planet Ubuntu (due to exams). Since I’m back, I think I would want to share something. For today, I want to tell you about Ubuntu Studio’s plans and progresses on multiple desktop environments (DEs).

One of Ubuntu Studio’s good advantages is that we developers and users can use whatever desktop environment we want from the Ubuntu repositories, since what we are providing is a multimedia creation experience, not providing a single, discrete DE-based environment. For example, if an audio user likes Unity over Xfce (Ubuntu Studio’s default DE) he can install it using Synaptic or apt-get and use it within several minutes. Users can also choose from LXDE, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, GNOME 3 and others.

Sometime ago a audio producer joined the Ubuntu Studio community and complained that since Ubuntu Studio does not use Unity, he doesn’t want to use it. This made me and Kaj Ailomaa having to reply long (in my case, VERY long) comments. We were thinking: desktop environments shouldn’t be the deciding factor that one will (or won’t) use our operating system. Henceforth, we came up with the idea of enabling users to choose multiple desktop environments.

Len Ovenwerks, our desktop menu master, is doing a great job into enabling our XDG menu to fit into every single DE (albeit, he seems to be having trouble with MATE). The menu especially works well in Xfce, KDE and LXDE. We are also trying to make our own desktop metas, with me responsible for KDE (as a Kubuntu member), Kaj for Unity (which seemed to be in high demand on G+), Maik Adamietz on GNOME 3, and volunteer lukefromdc for Cinnamon.

Our plan is to make an extension in ubiquity where users can choose whatever DE they want to use. Our live ISO will still include Xfce as the default desktop (and probably we will install it along with the user’s DE of choice alongside so there’s a backup solution), but we will give the users a convenient choice for using KDE or Unity.

This is still WIP of course. We hope to get some or most of it done by 13.10 Feature Freeze so we can test it in Beta 1. Fix the reported bugs, re-test in Beta 2, and 13.10 shall be good enough.

I will continue to keep on updating you guys as our work goes on, but before then, it’s time to celebrate Father’s day.

 

Thorfinn.au sends this quote from Space.com: "The pervading carpet of perchlorate chemicals found on Mars may boost the chances that microbial life exists on the Red Planet — but perchlorates are also perilous to the health of future crews destined to explore that way-off world. Perchlorates are reactive chemicals first detected in arctic Martian soil by NASA's Phoenix lander that plopped down on Mars over five years ago in May 2008. It is likely both of NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 measured signatures of perchlorates, in the form of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Other U.S. Mars robots — the Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity — detected elemental chlorine. Moreover, orbital measurements taken by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft show that chlorine is globally distributed. [Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith] said microbes on Earth use perchlorate for an energy source. They actually live off highly oxidized chlorine, and in reducing the chlorine down to chloride, they use the energy in that transaction to power themselves. In fact, when there's too much perchlorate in drinking water, microbes are used to clean it up, he said. Furthermore, seasonal flow features seen on Mars may be caused by high concentrations of the brines of perchlorate, which has a strong attraction to water and can drastically lower its freezing point, Smith told SPACE.com. The high levels of perchlorate found on Mars would be toxic to humans, Smith said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Two decades before the White House was petitioned to remove U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and her Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann from their jobs for the allegedly overzealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the Boston Globe reported on allegations of 'sometimes heavy-handed tactics and inaccuracies' of an NFL investigation into sexual harassment charges made by a sportswriter against the New England Patriots that was led by Watergate prosecutor Philip Heymann (Stephen's father) and included Ortiz. 'From the day Philip Heymann and his colleagues walked into Foxboro Stadium to investigate Lisa Olson's charges of sexual harassment,' the Globe reported, 'the New England Patriots were on the defensive, and apparently, they stayed there to the end. One day after conducting a preliminary six-hour interview with Olson, Heymann introduced each investigator to the Patriots and outlined their backgrounds at a meeting he later called benign. Yet he also said two weeks ago, "They were frightened from the beginning by the way I introduced people. I said that Jerry O'Sullivan had been US Attorney. I said Jim Ring had been FBI special agent in charge of organized crime."' Regarding Ortiz, the Globe reported, 'Heymann investigator Carmen Ortiz wrote in a memo of her Oct. 18, 1990, interview with [Lisa Olson] that she took no notes and did not tape-record the conversation. Yet she used direct quotes when writing up her 15-page report on the session. When asked to explain, she referred the Globe to Heymann.' Aside from transcripts of two interviews (the tapes of which were destroyed), the Globe reported the NFL kept no notes on its interviews with 89 other people. '"It was contemplated that there would be a motion such as this [a lawsuit by Olson] and we did not want to create that type of document," an NFL attorney explained. According to the Globe, an attorney representing the Patriots said that 'one reason the tapes were destroyed may be that the NFL did not want anyone to hear raised voices or pounding of tables. He said some of those interviewed were not allowed to leave the room and had their livelihoods threatened if they did not cooperate.' Curiously, the elder Heymann featured prominently in a recently-upheld DOJ motion to keep the names of key people involved in the Aaron Swartz case secret — a postcard threat received by Philip Heymann was cited by Ortiz's office as evidence of why such secrecy was necessary."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msm1267 writes "Researchers recently have seen a major increase in the volume of autorun malware in some countries, thanks to a couple of new worms infecting those older machines. The two new worms, Worm.JS.AutoRun and Worm.Java.AutoRun, both take advantage of the autorun functionality to spread, and the JavaScript worm has other methods of propagation, as well. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab say that the volume of autorun worms has remained relatively constant over the last few months, but there was a major spike in those numbers in April and May, thanks to the distribution of the two new pieces of malware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Ubuntu 13.04 was released I had been running the OS on my Lenovo T500 for almost five months, but I was not able to migrate my main laptop due to two bugs.

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1098216
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/linux/+bug/1112652

Both of these bugs have had fixes released with the 3.8.0-25-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP kernel. I am excited to experience some of the 13.04 polish that I have had on my testing machine for several months. Thanks to all the folks that helped track down the regressions and get fixes released.

 

An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld has an interview with an Australian startup called LIFX, producing WiFi-connected LED light bulbs. Each light bulb is a small computer running the Thingsquare distribution of the open source Contiki operating system that creates a low-power wireless mesh network between the light bulbs and connects them to the WiFi network. The wireless mesh network lets the light bulbs be controlled with a smartphone app. Through a Kickstarter project, the company has already raised a significant amount of money: over one million USD. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sorry i had to re-post, the poll didn’t work then planet ubuntu didn’t work

Since my last post i’ve got a lot more done towards this project.  I’ve made a crowdfunding account so i can get sponsored. I’ve got a shortlist of cases, the poll is here. I also have a PSU and sleeving is on it’s way. If you have advice or want more frequent updates, either use the comments here, my email ( noskcaj@ubuntu.com ) or http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=54532

The Cases:

Case 1: CMStorm Enforcer

I had a previous build in this case, my main worry is it’s side panel won’t work with the ubuntu logo. The case is steel with a hard plastic front

Case 2: Lian-li case

I had attempted cleaning up this case already but had no reason to. As you can see i’ve partially pulled it apart. This case is fully alluminium

Case 3: Generic case with Handle

This case has a giant handle and no existing windows. It’s steel with top and front panels made from hard plastic.

<noscript><a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/7179411">Take Our Poll</a></noscript>

If you reblog this, do not dissable comments. i would rather take the hate and get some actual help rather than nothing.

An anonymous reader writes "Most of us hear the equivalent of 'let me bring up your record' several times a week or month when dealing with businesses and government agencies; sometimes there's a problem, but clerks are accustomed to dealing with changes in street address, phone numbers, company affiliation, and even personal names (after marriage). But what about gender? Transgendered folks are encountering embarrassing moments when they have to explain that their gender has changed from 'M' to 'F' or vice versa. While there are many issues involved in discrimination against transgendered individuals, I have to confess that the first thing that came to my mind was the impact on database design and maintenance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey writes "Facebook and Microsoft say they received thousands of requests for information from U.S. authorities last year but are prohibited from listing a separate tally for security-related requests or secret court orders related to terror probes. The two companies have come under heightened scrutiny since reports leaked of a vast secret Internet surveillance program U.S. authorities insist targets only foreign terror suspects and is needed to prevent attacks. Facebook said Friday it had received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for user data affecting 18,000 to 19,000 accounts during the second half of last year and Microsoft said it had received 6,000 to 7,000 requests affecting 31,000 to 32,000 accounts during the same period." Meanwhile, an article at the Guardian is suggesting the government may have better targets to pursue than Edward Snowden. "[U.S. director of national intelligence James Clapper] has come out vocally to condemn Snowden as a traitor to the public interest and the country, yet a review of Booz Allen's own history suggests that the government should be investigating his former employer, rather than the whistleblower."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:3.10-rc6 (mainline) Released:2013-06-15 Source:linux-3.10-rc6.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.10-rc6.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.10-rc6.xz

New submitter afarhan writes "India will pull the plug on its 160-year-old telegram service on 14 July, this year. This will probably be the last telegram ever sent in the world. However, telegrams are still relevant in this vast country. More than 500 million people are still without access to a phone or Internet. For these people, telegram still remains the only digital communication available. 'At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.' In India, telegram is also considered a legal correspondence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2 x laptops, 1 x HP microserver, 3 x routers, 1 x Raspberry Pi given to a charity to go to Kenya to help provide Internet and other services for an NGO. The house has the fewest working desktop computers it's ever had - but it is for a good cause.

Somehow, I suspect that £50 / $100 Android tablets that are starting to be common won't be quite as useful in a couple of years as this lot may be today. For those of us that have good access to technology, fast connectivity as a given and computers to give away - maybe it's time to share the benefits of prosperity with others. If nothing else, it is sharing Debian and Raspbian since I made sure that they were all working well with Debian 7 and Raspbian operating systems respectively before they went. The routers were also running OpenWRT - so it's all FLOSS :)