China Unveils it’s Supercomputer

China is ramping up efforts to become the world’s supercomputing superpower.

Its Nebulae machine at the National Super Computer Centre in Shenzhen, was ranked second on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list. For the first time, a second Chinese supercomputer appears in the list of the top ten fastest machines.

However, the US still dominates the list with more than half the Top 500, including the world’s fastest, known as Jaguar. The Cray computer, which is owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a top speed of 1.75 petaflops.

One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. It is used by scientists conducting research in astrophysics, climate science and nuclear energy.

Malicious Ubuntu Commands

It always angers me when hear of users developing scripts or promoting codes that contain a malicious content. I mean, why?

Personally I wish I had the scripting ability to be able to deliver a positive program to the world and I would take great delight in sharing it. There are so many talented individuals in the world who utilise and share their skills for the common good. People who educate and nurture others by sharing their knowledge, taking nothing other than the satisfaction of helping someone else. These are the people to be commended and praised within the computing community.

Unfortunately as within all walks of life, there are those within the community, who wish to spread pain and misery on unsuspecting individuals in order to derive some twisted sense of pleasure! I was disappointed to learn that this is prominent within the Ubuntu community of which I respect and admire.

I urge all members of the community to dismiss this type of practice and ensure that we do all we can to prevent the promotion of malicious commands and scripts. Please, share this Ubuntu ATTENTION ALL USERS: Malicious Commands article with others, and help maintain the focus of this great community!

I read articles relating  of I’d like to take a moment of your time to discuss a recent disturbing trend the staff has been noticing on the forums, and also take this as an opportunity to raise awareness of this situation through education.

Ubuntu! The Power Behind Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been Linux-focused from the beginning. The effort started seven years ago running various varieties of Red Hat, mostly because that’s what the other hosting servers were using at the time, according to Vibber. The glow faded over the years after three or four versions of Fedora running on a couple of architectures “and we couldn’t figure out what was going on in terms of [Red Hat] packaging,” he said.

So, when Wikipedia’s infrastructure gurus wanted to standardize on one platform, they started looking around. Vibber said, “We looked at the possibilities including [Red Hat] Fedora, but Fedora moves a little too fast and we were not too happy about some of the configuration management features.” In addition, Red Hat Enterprise was not quite totally free, while some of the clones were free but were also harder to manage.

Meanwhile, several Wikimedia administrators favoured Debian flavours of Linux– especially Canonical Ubuntu. Canonical’s organized and well timed updates helped as well. As did the level of support the company offered. In fact, the whole idea that Canonical backstops the Ubuntu distribution with well organized updates and patches was a big draw for Wikimedia. For a workload this large, the predictability and stability of updates and patches is critical.
Wikimedia started the transition in 2006 with the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS release. The organization now runs Ubuntu 8.04 and “will stick with that as long as possible depending on the server,” said Amsterdam-based Wikipedia network administrator, Mark Bergsma.

While some of the older hardware still runs Fedora, all of the more recently added servers run Ubuntu—as will additional servers coming online. The new machines run custom versions of Ubuntu, including Wikipedia’s own custom packages for applications and software configuration. Wikipedia is a poster child for the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP or LAMP stack. It uses Squid proxy servers and the Subversion open-source code repository for version tracking and a Bugzilla open-access bug tracking system.

Wikipedia runs at least 350 servers, mostly Dell 1U and 2U boxes mostly at three data centers—in Tampa, Fla., Amsterdam and South Korea, said Bergsma. The emphasis is on running industry-standard software and hardware across the board. There is nothing proprietary in the data center platform “except the switches and routers and of course all the BIOS in the servers,” Bergsma said. There is nothing in the stack from Microsoft although technically speaking some of the Cisco routers run proprietary software. He said, “We consider them to be appliances.”

Contributors also use IRC chat and mail to communicate. The staff includes three or four coders, two in Wikimedia’s San Francisco headquarters, along with a handful system administrators and technicians. And Ubuntu is making its presence felt on Wikipedia’s desktops as well. Several staff members, including the executive director, now run Ubuntu on the desktop. There is one remaining Windows PC to run QuickBooks. Wikimedia runs Ubuntu front to back. The Wikimedia team lauds Canonical’s support and backing. They’re particularly happy with its bug fix and security patch methodology. They also like the year and a half of security support that comes as part and parcel of use of the distribution.

The open-source centric, techie-heavy organization’s emphasis is on self-maintenance and fixes. “We have a very small but very talented group of engineers all with different specialities,” said Vibber. “If we have a problem usually the person with the most knowledge of that area will fix it.” There is great pride taken in submitting fixes to the open source community. Wikimedia is also considering a service subscription to address software problems that might occur outside of Wikimedia’s core areas of expertise, Bergsma said.

Wikipedia’s reliance on open source LAMP stack mirrors its community focused existence. The organizations’ contributor/editor model mimics open source methodology. Ubuntu scales up to meet spikes in traffic and facilitates the contributor process: Wikipedia’s use of Ubuntu is a significant endorsement of the distribution as an enterprise foundation.

“Ours is an open source infrastructure that millions of people use and thousands of people work on, so it has to be reliable, scalable and secure. Ubuntu fits the bill,” Vibber said. The site peaks at about 50,000 requests per second. Again, citing Wikipedia:Statistics, there are more than 2.5 million articles in English and tens of thousands of edits by hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Lucid 10.04 is good, but is it perfect?

Overall I’m enjoying using Lucid Lynx and I believe it has made a lot of improvements. I’ve experienced a few set backs whilst using it at work, that I didn’t experience using Karmic, but I’ve learned to amend or adapt to suit my needs.

Generally I’ve read some really positive reviews & views from Lucid users. But this one from thepcspy.com which focuses on the “negative apsects” of Lucid, was quite an interesting read with some decent points made.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with all of the points raised, which of course, is a matter of opinion for all users. But I do feel that a cogent argument has been put together. See what you think.

Irish Clampdown on Net Piracy

The Irish Republic has begun a piracy crackdown which could see customers cut off from the net for a year. The country’s biggest net firm Eircom has begun sending letters to those identified as illegal file-sharers. It is the first nation to implement such a system. France is also planning to introduce a similar policy.

UK watchdog Ofcom is due to publish its code of conduct for how UK ISPs should deal with net pirates later this week.

Eircom is the Republic’s largest internet service provider (ISP), accounting for around 40% of the market. The Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) has begun supplying Eircom with “thousands of IP addresses”, from which the ISP will initially cross-reference about 50 per week to extract the physical address of identified net pirates. Irma is employing net monitoring firm Dtecnet to trawl file-sharing sites and identify pirates. It will look specifically for people who are sharing, rather than just downloading, content illegally.

Initially they will be sent a letter and a follow-up phone call from a new unit set up by Eircom to deal with the issue. They may also get a pop-up warning on their screen. If they are identified a third time they will have their service withdrawn for a week and, if a fourth infringement occurs, will be cut off for a year.

“There is a strong educational element, it could be that customers have a security issue with their home wi-fi or they might not know what kids are doing online,” said Eircom spokesman Paul Bradley. The unit will also direct customers to legal alternatives. “We are launching an online music service later this year,” he added.

After three months the effect of the campaign will be assessed and, if necessary, tougher measures including permanent disconnection could be introduced. “We don’t expect many people to get to phase 3 and we are a long way from looking at suspensions,” said Dick Doyle, the director general of Irma. The pilot scheme is the conclusion of a long-running dispute between Eircom and Irma.

It took the ISP to court in January 2009, saying it was not doing enough to protect the intellectual property of its members. These include EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner. The High Court ruled in Irma’s favour and a challenge, issued by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, was also over-ruled earlier this year.

Irma plans to take other Irish ISPs to court. UPC, the country’s second largest ISP will be in court on 17 June and two smaller ISPs will receive summons later this week. Mr Doyle believes the tough stance taken by Irma will have implications across Europe. “The European Parliament has been talking about internet access as a basic human right. It absolutely is not. Intellectual property protection is a right,” he said.

Google all set to launch smart TV service

Search giant Google has launched a TV service that unites live television with the web.

The “smart TV” service allows people to search both live channels as well as content from websites such as YouTube.

Special TV sets – or normal TVs connected to a Google box – will also allow people to access the web and download applications. The first TV sets will be produced by Sony and should be available in the Autumn. “Video should be consumed on the biggest, brightest, best screen in your house – the television,” said Rishi Chandra of the firm. “That’s not the PC, or mobile.” He said that there were currently 4bn TV users worldwide and that around $70bn (£50bn) was spent annually on adverts in the US alone. “There is no better medium to reach a wider and broader audience than TV,” he said.

Google generates the lion’s share of its revenue from selling web ads and many analysts speculate that its move into television is an extension of the business.

Dan Cryan, an analyst at Research Firm Screen Digest, said that television was a “very natural space” for Google. “Its stated ambition is to organise the World’s information, so why not move into it,” he told BBC News. He said that there had been several attempts to connect televisions to the internet in the past but none had been “terribly successful”. “Things have changed recently with an increasing number of higher quality web TV services available on TV sets.”

Google showed off the service at a launch event in San Francisco that was plagued by technical glitches. So many people in the 5,000-strong audience were using the conference wi-fi that the demo ran into repeated problems. Google finally had to ask people to disconnect their phones from the wireless network to free-up enough bandwidth. The service is built around an onscreen search box, similar to Google’s web offering, that allows people to search for content on live channels or the web. M

Mr Chandra showed how searching for the television programme House brought up results from live channels as well as web services such as Hulu and Amazon. “The TV becomes a natural extension of the web,” he said. “You spend less time finding your favourite content and more time watching it.” The service streams shows from the web using Google’s Chrome browser.

Mr Cryan said the approach opened up an “interesting question” about whether people would use the service to watch pirated content. “Google is great at organising information, both legal and illegal,” he said.

The browser also allows people to search non-video content from the web. “We can make your TV into a games console, a photo viewer or a music player,” Mr Chandra said.

The first television sets will be built by Sony, who will also build the service into a Blu-Ray DVD player. Set top boxes and peripherals will be built by Logitech, although the service can also be controlled from a mobile phone running Google’s Android operating system.

The TVs and boxes will also use Android and will rely on an Intel microprocessor. “We want to have the same impact on TV that the smartphone had on the mobile experience,” said Mr Chandra.

The firm has also used the conference to launch various initiatives, including an update to its Android operating system and an open source video project called WebM.

The WebM project will make the VP8 video codec, which it acquired when it bought On2 for $133m (£92m), open source.

Codecs are used to encode and decode web video. Various formats are currently competing to become the default standard for web video in the future.

Several web browser makers, including Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Opera, have agreed to support Google’s new format, which will be offered for free. Another codec called H.264 has the support of Apple and Microsoft. Whilst it will be free for the next five years, it is encumbered by patents and its owners MPEG LA plan to charge for its use.

Diaspora, the new Facebook?

Diaspora is open-source personal web server software intended to provide a decentralized alternative to Facebook. It is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirsky, and will be released in September 2010.

The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers (called “seeds”) so that users can “fully control the information they share.”

Users will share pictures and videos securely via GPG, and Diaspora software will allow services to optionally interact, so that a photograph uploaded to an image hosting service (e.g., Flickr) might automatically generate an update to a microblogging service (e.g., Twitter). The software will incorporate OpenID, VOIP, distributed encrypted backups, an instant messaging protocol, and UDP.

The project was announced on April 24, 2010 on Kickstarter and reached its initial $10,000 fundraising goal in 12 days. In the weeks that followed, it raised more than seventeen times the original goal, mostly via a stream of small donations.

The group was inspired to create Diaspora by a February 5, 2010 speech by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen to the Internet Society, “Freedom in the Cloud”, in which Moglen described centralized social networks as “spying for free.”

After its foundation is completed, Diaspora’s developers intend to concentrate on creating a “battery of add-on modules” in order to “facilitate any type of communication”, and plan to offer a paid hosting service for Diaspora seeds.

Facebook set to make U-turn on privacy issue

Facebook looks likely to cave into pressure from users and simplify its privacy settings in the near future, according to a report from BBC News.

The social networking giant told BBC News that it was listening to the message from users that it has “made things too complex”. “We’re working on responding to these concerns,” a spokeswoman said. “Watch this space,” she added.

At the end of last year Facebook changed its default privacy settings, allowing profile information to be shared with the wider web, unless users specifically opted out. Last month it moved a step further, opening up Facebook data to third-party websites, described by founder Mark Zuckerberg as a move towards “a web where the default is social”.

While Facebook sold the idea as a way to offer a more personalised surfing experience, critics were concerned that users were losing control over their information. It prompted a letter from the European Commission saying changes to its privacy settings were “unacceptable”.

The move caused outrage among some users, who have organised a “Quit Facebook” day, scheduled for May 31. Last week Facebook held an internal meeting to deal with the crisis, which has already seen some high-profile users deactivate their Facebook accounts. Facebook said it “didn’t comment on deactivations”. “Some 10 million users have joined Facebook since the recent privacy changes,” said a spokeswoman. “There is a notion that people don’t know what they are doing but people are much more savvy about their online privacy than is often portrayed,” she added.

Since the changes were introduced in December, more than 50% of users have changed their privacy settings, Facebook said in a statement to BBC News. “The fact that approximately half have accepted, and half are customising shows that our recommendations are reasonable,” the statement read.

But it acknowledged that more could be done. “We have heard from our users that our efforts to provide granular control have made things too complex. Of course we’re working on responding to these concerns,” it said.

Critics say navigating its privacy policy is overly complex. Its current privacy policy has 50 different settings and 170 options and runs to 5,830 words, making it longer than the US Constitution. Alternatives to Facebook are springing up, including open source social network Diaspora. Designed by four students from New York University, the project has quickly gained thousands of backers and received $125,000 in donations to help get it off the ground.

British web users spend more than ‘one day a month online’

British web users are spending 65% more time online than three years ago, according to a survey of net habits. The average surfer spends 22 hours and 15 minutes on the net each month, according to the UK Online Measurement company (UKOM).

The lion’s share of that time is spent on social networks or blogs, which accounts for nearly a quarter of users’ time online. Instant messaging (IM) has been one of the victims of social network growth. Three years ago 14% of online time was spent using IM but that has fallen to just 5%.

But e-mail, also predicted to suffer as more people used Facebook and its rivals, is still healthy and accounts for 7.2% of time compared to 6.5% of time three years ago. Networking, communication and playing games remain the most popular online activities.

The use of online classified adverts and auctions is creeping up the usage table, accounting for 4.7% of time. Online news has also seen strong growth with 2.8% of online time spent browsing such sites compared to just 1.5% three years ago. People spend more time on news sites than they do on adult content, the survey shows.

Please take this Ubuntu Poll