Tech | Steve Woods

Is there a backdoor in Linux?

20/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

Linus Torvalds ponders answering another awkward question
At this year’s LinuxCon held in New Orleans, Linus Torvalds and fellow kernel developers were asked whether they’d been approached by US security services to put a backdoor in Linux, thus compromising the operating system’s security, The Register reports.

Linus responded to the question by saying no whilst at the same time nodding his head, thus indicating that he had been approached. He then resumed by completely denying any approach had been made. This was followed by another developer saying that such things couldn’t be discussed. Linus’ reaction is reminiscent of the reserve Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, on the NSA‘s Prism programme because any mention of it could be “treason”.

Rumours of backdoors and other forms of hidden access routes in operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and security protection products have been in circulation for years. These rumours have been given a fresh lease of life following the recent revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Linus’ and the other developers answers have not exactly cleared the air as to whether Linux is as secure an operating system as its users are likely to believe. As The Register article points out:

Worried netizens have become far more paranoid about the possibility of backdoors in the technology they use and this paranoia extends to both closed-source and open-source software.

However, it is pointed out by The Register that security service agents who are rebuffed by developers then tend to leave them alone.

Finally, there’s one point to consider: in open source anyone with the requisite skill is free to examine the code, modify and adapt it. On that principle, wouldn’t it therefore be more difficult to hide vulnerabilities and backdoors in open source products than closed, proprietary software?
Argentina introduces Huayra Linux

19/09/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Politics, Tech

The Argentine state has developed its own Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux, Germany’s Heise reports. Huayra Linux (the word huayra is from Quechua and means wind) is part of the Conectar Igualdad programme, which is aimed at closing the digital divide in Argentina by equipping schools better. Three million netbooks were handed out to pupils and teachers under this programme between 2010 and 2012. Huayra Linux is an important building block for achieving this programme’s goals since it frees users from reliance on proprietary software suppliers, such as Microsoft.
France’s Elysée Palace makes modest contribution to open data

18/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Social Media, Tech

Le Monde Informatique reports that the website of the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French president is taking a step towards open data. In a tweet on 16th September, it announced it was opening up its data in a new open data section of its website.

At present this open data section consists essentially of the diary of President François Hollande which has been appearing since last December at the top of the site’s home page in the form of a timeline. The data in this timeline are offered in two formats: XML and JSON.

The Elysée is also releasing the origin of visits made to its website during the previous week in JSON format. Some 41% of its visitors originate from Google, 30% reach the site directly, 8% are referred by Twitter and 4% by the Elysée’s Facebook page. There are also daily statistics for the site’s servers (energy consumption, load) and visits displayed in graphical form: number of visitors, number of pages viewed per hour and the source of visits.

Since the announcement of the the French government’s open data portal data.gouv.fr in February 2011, several public sector organisations, publicly-owned companies (e.g. SNCF and RATP) and local and regional authorities have opened up some of their data.
LibreOffice improves support for OOXML

18/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

According to Heise, Suse and Lanedo have completed a project to improve the interoperability of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite with OOXML, the format used by Microsoft Office files. The requirements were jointly defined by several bodies, including Munich City Council, the Swiss Federal Court and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the project received total funding of €160,000.

The improvements have been incorporated into LibreOffice versions 3.6, 4.0 and 4.1. The code is licensed under the LGPL and MPL 1.1 3, but may also be used under the Apache 2 licence, so it can also be incorporated into Apache OpenOffice.
Switzerland launches open data portal

17/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Tech

The Swiss Federal Government launched its open data portal opendata.admin.ch comprising over 1,600 public data sets, including election results, key figures for cantons and local authorities, as well as demographic information and data at the start of the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva, the German technology news site Heise reports. The portal will provide a central point of access for the open data portfolio in Switzerland. The website already features the first applications based on the data made available.

Open Data currently ranks fairly high up the Swiss political agenda: last week the National Council called for a master plan for open government from the Swiss Federal Council. The Swiss Federal Council in turn announced the development of a national open data strategy by 2014, which, amongst other things, should clear the way for the repeal of restrictive usage rights, as well as the abolition of fees on public data.
Know Your Place now better

15/09/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Social Media, Tech

Know Your Place, Bristol City Council‘s historical mapping service that allows you to explore the city through historic maps, images and linked information, has been featured before on this blog before (posts passim).

Earlier today Pete Insole, archaeologist for Bristol City Council, announced via Twitter that Know Your Place has now been augmented by the addition to the Hartley Collection layer of original architects’ drawings for the reconstruction of Bristol after World War 2.

Bristol was the fifth most heavily bombed British city of World War 2. The presence of the city docks and the Bristol Aeroplane Company made it a target for bombing by the Luftwaffe whose pilots were able to trace a course up the River Avon from Avonmouth into the heart of the city using reflected moonlight on the waters.

A screenshot featuring the new one of the new additions – one of the drawings for what ultimately became Broadmead shopping centre – is shown below.

Now improved – Know Your Place. Click on the image for the full version
Orca screen reader improves Braille functions

10/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Orca, the screen reader for the GNOME desktop used on Linux machines, is now at the Beta 2 stage for its forthcoming 3.10 release. According to Softpedia, the 3.10 Beta 2 release fixes the broken text attribute presentation for Gecko, the new sliders are now present in GNOME Shell, partially-implemented value interfaces with range of 0 to 1 are now handled and a workaround has been added for Delete and Backspace text changed events.

Moreover, Braille functions are now performed only when Braille is enabled and object:active-descendant-changed has been added to events that may be part of an “event flood”.

Finally the Polish and Slovenian translations have been updated in Orca 3.10 Beta 2.

See the fairly basic change log for all changes since the last release.
Under 3 weeks to LibreOffice Conference

09/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech
The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic Cà Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.

The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.

The conference tracks will cover the following:
- Open Document Format (ODF);
- LibreOffice Development;
- Community Development;
- Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
- Building a Business with LibreOffice.
For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.
Linux for Munich

08/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Munich City Council has announced that a total of 2,000 Linux CDs featuring the Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distribution will be given away from next Monday in Munich’s public libraries according to the German technology news site Heise. The city’s Administration and Personnel Commission decided to take this step on 19th June 2013 because Microsoft is finally ending support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014 and will not be providing any more security patches for the operating system from that date onwards.

Bavaria’s capital city thus wants to make sure first and foremost that computers which have been using Windows XP do not end up as electronic waste. Furthermore, Munich wants to be regarded as an “innovative expert in the open source sector”.

Nevertheless, the council points out that it cannot provide any support at all for the chosen Linux distribution and that users should refer to for this to suppliers in the database of the local Chamber of Commerce & Industry (IHK) and ubuntuusers.de.
Canonical and Dell launching Ubuntu computers in 1,000+ shops in China

07/09/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The Canonical blog reports that Dell and Canonical will be launching Dell machines running Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux operating system in more than 1,000 outlets in China in the next few weeks.

Dell and Canonical will be jointly extending a range of Dell hardware pre-loaded with the Chinese language version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS across a swathe of major Chinese cities. Sales in the original stores have proven so successful that the companies have agreed to expand to beyond 1,000 outlets.

Ubuntu’s Chinese store promotional materials

This is the latest of a series of developing partnerships in China for Ubuntu. In March 2013 it was announced that the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology had selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems (posts passim).

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