Here’s a sneak preview of LibreOffice 4.2 – the next version of this great cross platform open source office suite – which is due for release in February 2014.
The first release candidate (RC) for this version was also released this week.
Just before the end of last month Wildfire Games announced the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 15 “Osiris”. 0 A.D. is a real time strategy game and the new release comes with additional functions. It’s available free of charge for Linux, Mac and Windows and is licensed under Version 2 of the GPL. The Alpha 15 release, which is playable, provides a multi-player lobby, in which players can meet and play each other, whilst a new playable civilisation can be added with the Ptolemaic Egyptians. However, only some of the latter’s buildings units and play functions can be tested; the civilisation itself shall only be made available in the next alpha version.
A new play mode has been added to the game with so-called “Skirmish Maps”. Units now also gain a bonus if they come within reach of a certain building or special unit. Up top now temples regenerate the health of nearby units and most heroes also have such an “aura”. This function will be further refined and extended in future versions of the game.
The user interface has also been improved so that players can now order their troops to defend other units or buildings. An audible signal or a chat message notifies when a player is being attacked, whilst flashing pixels on a miniature map show where the attack is taking place. Fighting units can be returned to the civilian work they were previously carrying out with a new “Back to work” button.
In addition, there are new graphic elements, pieces of music and bug fixes, etc. in 0 A.D. Alpha 15 “Osiris”. The game is available for download from the project website.
Finally, the project is seeking volunteer contributors in programming, art, sound, documentation and more. For details, log onto #0ad-dev on QuakeNet on IRC and meet the developers or register on the project’s forums and start participating!
In a case brought by civil liberties campaigners, a Brooklyn court has ruled that US Customs officers do not need to suspect a crime to examine travellers’ computer equipment at borders, Le Monde Informatique reported yesterday.
In the United States the border police may carry out checks of travellers’ portable computers and other mobile devices without having to justify suspicions that the content they wish to examine is connected with criminal action, an American federal judge concluded last week at the end of a case brought in 2010 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU believed such behaviour infringed the US constitution. However, Judge Edward Korman of the Brooklyn District Court did not share this opinion and rejected the case. The ACLU is contemplating an appeal.
The ACLU submitted the complaint on behalf of Pascal Abidor, a student with dual French and American nationality and two other associations, one which defends lawyers and the other press photographers. In 2010, Customs officers confiscated Mr. Abidor’s portable computer as he was entering the United States aboard a Montreal (Canada) to New York train as he was entering the USA. Mr. Abidor was studying the history of the Shi’ites in Lebanon and had downloaded photographs linked to the militant organisations Hamas and Hezbollah onto his computer. He was detained for several hours while his computer equipment was examined before being released with no further action being taken. He had disclosed his password and the officers searched through his private data, including messages he’d exchanged with his girlfriend. Some information was retained for the purpose of further inquiries after he had handed over his equipment.
For lawyers and journalists whose work entails maintaining keeping the data they hold confidential, such investigations by customs form a real problem and the lawsuit aimed to highlight the violation that Abidor’s treatment represented. However, Judge Korman asserted that Customs already had special procedures for examining this content which required suspicions of crime. Furthermore, he stated that searches of this kind are rare at borders and are already made within the scope of these procedures. In summary he states in his ruling, published by the ACLU, that giving reasons would not be appropriate because it is highly unlikely that one of the members of the plaintiff organisations had been subject to an examination of their electronic equipment at borders since, according to the judge, there is little chance that such a search would take place without reasonable suspicion. In view of the figures submitted by US Customs and Border Protection, Judge Korman believes there is a less than one in a million chance that a computer carried by a foreign traveller entering the USA would be confiscated.
Joinup reports that the European Parliament’s Greens/EFA Group has started trial use of laptops running a tailored version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and “is reaching out to the Free Software community”, in order to achieve trustworthy email encryption in moves to counter mass surveillance by companies and governments.
In a press release, Greens/EFA co-president Rebecca Harms stated:
“Thanks to Snowden we are beginning to understand the full scope of what it means to live in a digital environment polluted by pervasive surveillance. Commercial and governmental surveillance is undermining trust in our democratic institutions and corrupts the very fabric of democracy. This is now a global problem of such scale that each individual effort will fail, yet without taking small concrete steps from accepting where we are, no progress is possible. Therefore, the Greens/EFA is now reaching out to the Free Software community to join in a small project to use trustworthy email encryption in cooperation and dialogue with the European Parliament IT services.
“As the Green Group in the European Parliament we want to make an effort to ensure that nobody but the intended recipient of an email can read it. Such emails need to be encrypted, travel over the internet, and then be decrypted on the receiving computer — and nowhere else. In this project, me and colleagues in the Greens/EFA will use a selection of Free Software from Debian and run it on computers dedicated for this purpose. We will start small scale with 10 regular consumer laptops. This is not special hardware running special software, but general computers running software available for everybody.”
For secure email, a combination of the cryptographic software tools provided by GnuPG and the Icedove email client (a Debian-specific version of Mozilla Thunderbird) will be used as the European Parliament’s proprietary email solution cannot offer trustworthy encryption.
Just before Christmas the release of version 0.18 of the Enlightenment desktop environment for Linux was announced, according to Heise. Modules for controlling Bluetooth and music software are amongst the new features for the Enlightenment 0.18.0 (E18). It has been released as planned just one year after version 0.17.0 (E17), whose development took 12 years.
In the new version the compositor which combines the application windows and desktop components into an overall picture is no longer optional, but firmly integrated into the desktop’s main components. Support for running Wayland, the potential successor X11 is also new, as is better interaction with systemd, the system management daemon designed exclusively for the Linux kernel API. The developers have also fixed several crashes and made considerable improvements to the file manager, according to the release notes.
The developers are currently working on Enlightenment 0.19.0 (E19), which will be able to work as a Wayland Compositor. Details of these plans may be found on the E19 Release Manager blog, as well as in the video below.
Tails is a live Linux operating system (based on Debian. Ed.), that can be booted on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick or SD card. Tails aims at preserving its users’ privacy and anonymity, as well as helping them to:
A crowdfunding campaign to support encryption tools for journalists has been launched by The Freedom of the Press Foundation; this campaign will last for two months and is collecting funds for Tails, Tor, the encrypted mobile communication tools RedPhone and TextSecure, plus the LEAP encrypted email platform.
The Linux Foundation has released a video for the end of the year. It features quotations from developers and other members of the open source community year about how open source and collaboration are making amazing things happen. When collated, their words send a strong message: Linux and open source developers are changing the world one line of code at a time.
Heise reports that the GnuPG project has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise €24,000 for the further development of the free encryption software. According to chief developer Werner Koch, the aim of the campaign is to make GnuPG easier to use and understand for the general public. GnuPG has seen a sharp increase in popularity in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the activities of the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s GCHQ.
GnuPG implements the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards (the latter with effect from version 2.0. Ed.) The software is used mainly for email encryption. Due to its open source code, the software is free of backdoors and is used amongst others by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, security expert Bruce Schneier and PGP inventor Phil Zimmermann.
The developers want to get version 2.1 of GnuPG ready and released with the crowdfunding monies. Major changes to the GnuPG website are also planned: pages will be adapted for viewing on mobile devices and the developers also want to link to third party instructions, videos and manuals, to provide a user-friendly download page for all devices and enable anonymous access via Tor. A new server for web services and the creation of an infrastructure for processing regular donations are also planned.
According to Joinup, GnuPG’s crowdfunding campaign will run for 40 days. The campaign was launched at 10.00 am on Thursday morning. By 5.00 pm donors had already pledged over half the requested amount. Donors can choose between donating €5 in exchange for their name being mentioned on the site, €12 in exchange for a sticker, whilst those pledging €35 euro will receive a t-shirt and those giving €60 or more will receive an email address at the GnuPG.net domain.
The in-depth revamp of the data.gouv.fr has been given a high level relaunch. The French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault and Ministers Marylise Lebranchu and Fleur Pellerin unveiled the portal developed by Etalab.
The government has set three targets for the site, i.e.
Although the interface has been redesigned for better ergonomics compared with the old site which dated from 2011, it’s the content part which is benefiting from this. The portal claims it has 200 contributors of data including research centres, local authorities, representatives of collective organisations and civil society. Etalab has provided a non-comprehensive list of additional data sets, political parties accounts (2011 financial year), grants for parliamentary scrutiny (2012 financial year), number of students or lists of public contracts placed between 2008 and 2012, etc. Some work still remains to be done in some local authorities and territories to make their public data available.
The data are also more numerous – 4 times as many as the previous site, i.e. some 1.45 mn. entries. Etalab explains that this information is destined to be grouped together into series for better legibility. On the old site 350,000 files were grouped into 2,900 series. Today the site comprises 13,000 freely available data sets. The site claims to be “the social network of a community of producers and users of public interest data who are involved in improving and interpreting these data”. The collaborative aspect is therefore highlighted with the involvement of citizens in improving, grading and reusing the data.
In the immediate aftermath of my mother’s recent death, I offered to prepare the order of service for her funeral. I felt this was one small service I could perform for her, as well as presenting me with an ideal opportunity to re-acquaint myself with Scribus, the free and open source desktop publishing (DTP) package.
When it comes to operating systems, Scribus will run on Linux, other Unix-like operating systems, Mac OS X, Haiku, Microsoft Windows, OS/2 and eComStation; and that’s pretty impressive for a start.
Scribus is designed for layout, typesetting and preparing files for professional quality image setting equipment. It can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms. Example of its use include writing small newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters and books.
Scribus supports most major bitmap formats, including TIFF, JPEG and Adobe Photoshop. Vector drawings can either be imported or directly opened for editing. The long list of supported formats includes Encapsulated PostScript, SVG, Adobe Illustrator, and Xfig. Professional type/image setting features include CMYK colors and ICC color management. It has a built-in scripting engine using Python.
Text can be imported from OpenDocument (ODF) text documents, such as those produced by LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Word, PDB (Palm OS) and HTML formats, although some limitations apply. OpenDocument text (.odt) files can typically be imported along with their paragraph styles, which are then created in Scribus. HTML tags which modify text, such as bold or italic will also be handled pretty well.
Scribus is available in more than 24 languages and is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).