Ivansichfreitas

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier has written a blunt article in CNN about the state of privacy on the internet. Quoting: 'The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period. ... This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell. Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters. There are simply too many ways to be tracked."

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Atheros has been more friendly towards Linux customers in recent years with open-source WiFi/network Linux drivers. Atheros has even been kind towards BSD users. The latest Atheros open-source contribution is the opening up of their firmware for two wireless chipsets...

OwnCloud 5.0 was released this morning, the latest major update to the popular open-source cloud storage software suite...

Introduced to the world on Monday and already revised today is the Linux Kernel Wait-Free Concurrent Queue Implementation...

With Canonical allocating its resources elsewhere, the Bazaar revision control system has fallen stagnant...

For those using Wayland's Weston compositor with the stock shell, a patch was proposed today for implementing "bubbles list" style notifications...

Last year I wrote about the Torque 3D game engine wanting to come to Linux and they were attempting a crowd-sourced campaign to finance the port. The campaign was a flop, but a developer has been bringing the support anyways to Linux...

In all honesty, this has taken far longer than I anticipated. Google, the world's largest internet advertising company, has removed several popular ad-blocking tools from the Play Store. While they are technically in the right to do so - they violate the Play Store developer distribution agreement - it's still a bit of a dick move. Luckily, though, unlike some other platforms, you can easily sideload the adblockers onto your Android device.

Proprietary software like Windows often includes surveillance code to track user behavior and send this information to vendor servers. Linux has traditionally been immune to such privacy violation. Ubuntu 12.10 now includes code that, by default, collects data on Dash searches. The code integrates Amazon products into search results and can even integrate with Facebook, Twitter, BBC and others as per Ubuntu's Third Party Privacy Policies. This article at the EFF tells how it all works and how to opt out of information sharing, while Richard Stallman himself comments here.

U.S. president Barack Obama signs new bill set to come into effect a year from now.

The government gets five more years of warrantless wiretapping of mobile devices.

It seems there's some dissenting views finally being pushed into the center of the table for discussion about the GNU project and Free Software Foundation. This comes as the maintainer of GNU Grep and Sed has announced his resignation from the projects...

For those interested in cryptography, BLAKE2 has been announced as a new alternative for MD5 and SHA-2/3 algorithms. The benefits of BLAKE2 is better security than MD5 while being higher performance in software...

With last week's release of LLVM 3.2, here are new benchmarks of LLVM 3.2 with the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end. The LLVM/Clang 3.2 performance using last week's source code releases were compared to the earlier LLVM/Clang 3.1 release and then for competition was the GCC 4.7.2 stable release and the latest GCC 4.8.0 development snapshot.

A new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel was announced on Saturday. This new scheduler is based upon the controversial "Brain Fuck Scheduler" scheduler but attempts to support multiple run-queues for better CPU scaling...

Yet another change for the upcoming Linux 3.8 kernel is the removal of support for the old Intel i386 processors...

The Free Software Foundation Europe reports that the European Parliament has adopted a proposal to create a patent with unitary effect for Europe. "This decision will leave Europe with a patent system that is both deeply flawed and prone to overreach. It also ends democratic control of Europe's innovation policy." The proposal still needs to be ratified before it will take effect. "According to the European Parliament's website, "the international agreement creating a unified patent court will enter into force on 1 January 2014 or after thirteen contracting states ratify it, provided that UK, France and Germany are among them."

"For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits - Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others - on which so many graphical applications already depend?"

Clang UPC has been announced, which is a Unified Parallel C implementation targeting the LLVM/Clang compiler stack. Unified Parallel C is a C99 extension targeting high-performance computing on parallel machines...

This is remarkably cool. "Plan 9 occupies an interesting niche in the open source operating system world. It is a full-fledged descendant of Unix, but not in the way that most systems out there are. It took the bones and beating heart of Unix and then built a brand-new cybernetic exoskeleton around it, with lasers, and heat vision... oh wait. You want to boot this bad-boy up, right? Well, okay, we'll do that. But what hardware shall we run it on? Hey, you got a Raspberry Pi? Well then, read on!" A ready-made image to run Plan 9 on your Pi.

A client told me she couldn’t access the information I had saved to her flash drive. The client insisted I come to her office with a new flash drive and the file. After arriving at her office, I decided to try her flash drive first. After plugging the flash drive into her computer, the file opened right away.

Client: I tried literally everything. 

Me: It looks like it works fine when I plug it in.

Client: You were supposed to plug it into the computer? I thought it was wireless.

Literally. Everything.

dsinc writes "Last week Curiosity was able to use its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) device to confirm the discovery. A robotic arm with a complex system of Spectral Analysis devices was able to vaporize and identify gasses from the sample, concluding that it is in fact plastic. How plastic formed or ended up on the Martian surface is quite an exciting mystery that sparks many questions. The type of plastic sampled as we know so far can only be formed using petrochemicals, meaning not only that there could possibly be a source of oil on the Red Planet, but that somehow it got turned into plastic. Even more interesting is that oil or petrochemicals used to create this type of plastic are only known to come from ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae, which geochemical processes convert into oil pointing to the earthshaking evidence that there was once life on mars. 'Right now we have multiple working hypotheses, and each hypothesis makes certain predictions about things like what the spherules are made of and how they are distributed,' said Curiosity's principal investigator, Steve Squyres, of Cornell University. 'Our job as we explore Matijevic Hill in the months ahead will be to make the observations that will let us test all the hypotheses carefully, and find the one that best fits the observations.'"

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An anonymous reader writes "A Tor Exit node owner is being prosecuted in Austria. As part of the prosecution, all of his electronics have been held by the authorities, including over 20 computers, his cell phone and hard disks. 'During interview with police later on Wednesday, Weber said there was a "more friendly environment" once investigators understood the Polish server that transmitted the illegal images was used by Tor participants rather than by Weber himself. But he said he still faces the possibility of serious criminal penalties and the possibility of a precedent that Tor operators can be held liable if he's convicted.' This brings up the question: What backup plan, if any, should the average nerd have for something like this?"

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NVIDIA has published initial patches for providing open-source 2D hardware acceleration support on their NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs. This work is based upon the experimental open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver to be merged into the Linux 3.8 kernel...

Rocks, the RHEL/CentOS-derived operating system focused upon supporting Linux on real and virtual clusters, has delivered on its 6.1 release...

The first point release of Wayland 1.0 is now available for those interested in this next-generation display server environment...

James Bottomley has written about the problems being faced by the Linux Foundation in having a Microsoft-approved validly-signed UEFI pre-bootloader...

Various improvements to the major open-source Linux graphics drivers will be landing with the Linux 3.8 kernel in the months ahead...

Andy Updegrove covers a press release from the Portuguese Open Source Business Association on the government adoption of standard formats for documents. "[T]he Portuguese government has opted for ODF, the OpenDocument Format, as well as PDF and a number of other formats and protocols, including XML, XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, CALDAV and LDAP. The announcement is in furtherance of a law passed by the Portuguese Parliament on June 21 of last year requiring compliance with open standards (as defined in the same legislation) in the procurement of government information systems and when exchanging documents at citizen-facing government Web sites."