11.24.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education once hoped storage systems supporting the long-promised parallel Network File System technology would be the answer to its bandwidth woes. But, in April 2011, the Institute gave up the wait and purchased a proprietary system from Panasas Inc. to give its distributed scientific applications running on clustered servers the direct, parallel access to storage they needed.
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After having a few more days to run and benchmark the Samsung Chromebook, it continues to be a very interesting notebook computer. For $250 USD this notebook packs a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, which bears a dual-core 1.7GHz ARMv7 Cortex-A15 processor and delivers rather good performance results. Here’s some more performance numbers when loading up the Chromebook with Ubuntu Linux.
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Server
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But in an interview James Gudeli, vice-president of business development, said future versions will come only on Linux.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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I try to use GNU/Linux solutions whenever I can. However, one exception to this rule is the printing process in my home. I have one printer, and it is connected to my Windows 7 machine. As GNU/Linux becomes more popular in homes and businesses, it is becoming more common to see mixed GNU/Linux-Windows environments. Printing from GNU/Linux to Windows 7 using Samba did NOT work for me reliably, but I have found a method that works 100% of the time. In The Linux Week in Review 49, I’ll explain how to set up a 100% dependable GNU/Linux-to-Windows 7 printing network. The video at the end of TLWIR 49 demonstrates the entire setup process from beginning to end.
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Kernel Space
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Another season, another Linux kernel. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes as kernel developers churn out new releases every two or three months. Within the next few weeks, Linux 3.7, the latest version of the code at the core of most mainstream open source operating systems — on Android phones as well as PCs and servers — will likely see its official release. And unlike some kernel updates, it will introduce a host of new features that end users may want to know about.
We don’t cover Linux kernel development too frequently on The VAR Guy because it’s not something most end users are likely to care about or understand. Unless you’re deeply interested in how your computer works “under the hood” — and kudos to you if you are — chances are you don’t want to read about the latest innovations in Linux memory management or file systems.
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Graphics Stack
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The Gdev open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time implementation is still being actively developed while PathScale’s “PSCNV” fork of the Nouveau driver hasn’t seen new commit activity in months.
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For those wanting to bring Wayland to proprietary/embedded platforms, Pekka Paalanen has written a long and detailed technical post about doing so.
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More code was pushed to Nouveau’s Linux kernel repository for their open-source DRM graphics driver. There’s improvements to NVE0/Kepler, a new Falcon engine base class, and a number of other changes that have piled up.
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It’s been nearly one year since AMD began rolling out their Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” graphics cards and while there is AMD Catalyst Linux driver support, the open-source driver support for this latest-generation AMD graphics hardware is still a disappointing mess.
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Pinchart — the developer who earlier this year called for deprecating the Linux frame-buffer — has been working on Renesas Mobile SoC display controller support when coming to realize that the Linux kernel already has several driver-based panel support solutions. In talking with other driver developers, he conceived the Generic Panel Framework for display devices. He didn’t want to use the kernel’s LCD framework because it’s tied to FBDEV and he wants this framework to be agnostic towards any subsystem whether it be DRM, FBDEV, or other areas.
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Released last week was NVIDIA’s Linux 4 Tegra R16.2, even after the R16.1 release barely got any publicity at all. The NVIDIA downloads area is still reflecting the old L4T R15 release from June, but while stumbling across the page today after wanting to load up new software on the NVIDIA Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet, I was pleased to see R16 is actually available.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Frank let everyone know via the Steam For Linux group that the Steam Beta has been expanded!
“We’re making good progress finding and fixing issues that our users have reported so we’re expanding the beta by 5000 before the long holiday (US) weekend kicks in. New limited beta testers will have an email notification in their inbox.
Have a great weekend everyone!”
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Earlier this month it was decided that GNOME 3.8 would get rid of the GNOME Shell Fallback mode used for running the desktop environment in a way similar to the GNOME 2 “classic” environment while also not requiring any 3D GPU/driver configuration. Earlier today there was basically a call for forking the GNOME Classic/Fallback code so it could live on, but now it’s been announced that some of the user-interface/experience elements will be brought to the GNOME 3.x world in a manner that’s more easy for users to optionally enable.
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With fallback mode due to be scrapped in the forthcoming GNOME 3.8 release, the development team wants to allow users to easily recreate the classic desktop using an included set of extensions. The existing fallback mode, which is used on systems without 3D acceleration, provides a GNOME 2-like interface with a task bar and application menu.
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It would be difficult to imagine a more vivid testament to many Linux users’ dislike of the new-style GNOME 3 desktop than the many alternative options that have sprung up in response.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Red Hat has announced that they’ve initiated a new project to bootstrap Fedora on the ARMv8 64-bit low-power architecture.
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The Fedora Project held a Thanksgiving Day Go/No-Go meeting for the long-delayed Fedora 18 Beta. The developers decided that the beta is finally in a condition where it’s ready to ship.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Jolla, the Finnish company that was formed by many ex-Nokia employees that were responsible for their MeeGo work and the Nokia N9 smart-phone until Nokia jumped in bed with Microsoft for the Windows Phone, finally showcased its Linux OS today: Sailfish, a fork of MeeGo Linux.
Sailfish uses the core distribution of Mer, implements the MeeGo API, its own in-house interface, and heavily promotes the use of HTML5 along with Qt and QML.
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Jolla, the mobile operating system start-up founded by Nokia refugees, has finally unveiled Sailfish, the smartphone operating system based on Linux.
The company had been in “stealth mode” for almost a year before it launched in the summer, and has finally demonstrated a working prototype of Sailfish at the Slush start-up event in Helsinki, Finland today.
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Android
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Replicant, a fully free version of the Android OS has released images 4.0 to give users the Ice Cream Sandwich experience. Also they have added support new devices i.e. the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S2. The new image also improves the hardware support on older devices that it already supported. Also improvements have been made to the telephony system which has become more stable and reliable.
For those of you who are not familiar with Replicant, it is a project to provide totally free version of the Android OS. Android is a free Operating System but there are several components on the software stack like the device drivers that are proprietary. The Replicant project aims to replace these and provide a complete free Android Operating System.
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Web Browsers
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Open Access/Content
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I recently had lunch with as staunch an advocate for open access as you’ll ever meet (I won’t name him, because it would be rude to attribute casual remarks to him without permission). We were talking about plans to mandate free and open publication of publicly funded scientific research. In the USA, there’s the Federal Public Research Act, and in the UK, there’s the coalition government’s announcement that publicly funded research should be made available at no cost, under a Creative Commons licence that permits unlimited copying.
We’d been talking about Ben Goldacre’s excellent new book, Bad Pharma, in which Goldacre documents the problem of “missing data” in pharmaceutical research (he says about half of the clinical trials undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry are never published). The unpublished trials are, of course, the trials that show the pharma companies’ new products in unflattering lights – trials that suggest that their drugs don’t
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Programming
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The benchmarks in this article are of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS loaded up on the Samsung Chromebook with the Linux 3.4 kernel. The GCC 4.6.3 compiler was compared to GCC 4.7.2 with a number of C, C++, and Fortran benchmarks. The same compiler flags were maintained within the test profiles during the benchmarking process. In a future article will be LLVM/Clang compiler benchmarks as well as performance results from the Cortex-A15 compiler tuning.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Overall, Gordon stated that the criticism of the West Bank courts goes overboard and that the system tries hard to treat Palestinians decently and to give them a fair trial.
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The use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by armed forces and non-state armed groups during wartime endangers students and their education around the world, said the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack in a study released today.
The 77-page study, “Lessons In War: Military Use of Schools and Other Education Institutions during Conflict”, examines the use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by government armed forces and opposition or pro-government armed groups during times of armed conflict or insecurity. Schools are used for barracks, logistics bases, operational headquarters, weapons and ammunition caches, detention and interrogation centers, firing and observation positions, and recruitment grounds.
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PIX11 viewer and parade-goer found that confetti that fell on him and friends had detectives’ social security numbers, bank info and unveiled undercover officers’ identities
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President Obama began his first term with a dramatic change of course for the CIA, issuing orders on his second day in office to close the agency’s secret prisons and ban harsh interrogation techniques.
As Obama approaches a second term with an unexpected opening for CIA director, agency officials are watching to see whether the president’s pick signals even a modest adjustment in the main counterterrorism program he kept: the use of armed drones to kill suspected extremists.
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Just like it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA and U.S. military act on bad intel when designating targets for drone attacks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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More than 1,000 coal-fired power plants are being planned worldwide, new research has revealed.
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The decision to reuse or recycle an old desktop computer takes some consideration, but letting an old PC turn to electronic waste should never be an alternative.
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Blogging about climate change, or anything, can get repetitive fast. The reports come out and the news is tweaked, maybe, but familiar—the Arctic is still melting, average global temperatures are still rising, the oceans are still acidifying. This was the warmest month record ever recorded. No, this one was. No this. This.
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After the 1992 super-hurricane Andrew, South Florida was in a state of shock, similar to coastal New Jersey and New York today. Andrew was a compact, category five hurricane. In South Dade where the impact was strongest, the morning after the storm, sun and blue skies prevailed. The strike zone looked like a bomb had gone off.
Civic leaders quickly rallied under the proud banner, “We Will Rebuild”. How would South Florida rebuild? the blue ribbon panel asked. Twenty years later, the coastal areas of New Jersey and New York are facing a similar question after Superstorm Sandy. This time, the answers may be very different.
Twenty years ago in Florida, talk of sea level rise and climate change was in the margins. The subject had a place in the corner, where Chicken Little’s nursed their wounds, far from sight and off the political radar.
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Finance
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Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Several opinion columns praising Russia and published in the last two years on CNBC’s web site and the Huffington Post were written by seemingly independent professionals but were placed on behalf of the Russian government by its public-relations firm, Ketchum.
The columns, written by two businessmen, a lawyer, and an academic, heap praise on the Russian government for its “ambitious modernization strategy” and “enforcement of laws designed to better protect business and reduce corruption.” One of the CNBC opinion pieces, authored by an executive at a Moscow-based investment bank, concludes that “Russia may well be the most dynamic place on the continent.”
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Censorship
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The arrest of two women on Monday over a comment on Facebook has sparked off widespread anger in India.
One of the women had criticised the shutdown of Mumbai in her post, after the death of politician Bal Thackeray, while the other “liked” the comment.
The women, accused of “promoting enmity between classes”, were released on bail after appearing in court.
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Privacy
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After a student protested a pilot RFID tracking system in San Antonio, lawyers are now moving to stop expulsion.
John Jay High School sophomore Andrea Hernandez was expelled from her high school after protesting against a new pilot program which tracks the precise location of all attending 4,200 students at Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School, according to Infowars.
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Students learn how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.
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GMO
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A second species of worm has evolved to withstand pesticides in genetically modified crops, the latest escalation of the natural arms race spurred on by GMOs. “Armyworms” — so called because their infestation of fields resembles a military onslaught — were able to eat DuPont-Dow corn containing a pesticide protein without adverse effects, according to a field trial conducted in Florida this year.
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It has come to our attention that Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed healthcare organization in the United States, has advised its members against GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in food.
In its Northwest Fall 2012 newsletter, Kaiser suggested membership limit exposure to genetically modified organisms.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Distracted”? Uh, no. Consumers have little need of a over-powered/huge/clumsy/expensive big box PC or a burdensome notebook either. They can do it all with a smart phone running */Linux. The fall of 29% includes the end of a government procurement (of notebooks running “7″). This is not just a shift to less Wintel but a shift to more GNU/Linux and more Android/Linux. It puts the lie to the saying that folks “choose” Wintel when that’s all that was on retail shelves. There’s more choice on retail shelves today and more real choices are being made. This is not a blip but the new way of IT. Get used to it.
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Desktop
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It’s so-called “Black Friday” today, an annual US event in which adults gather en-mass at retail stores to fight each other for discounted electric whisks, George Foreman grills, and plasma TVs.
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If you plan to upgrade your Linux desktop hardware in the near future or will be shopping for new PC hardware this holiday season, here’s a few words of advice on recommended components and manufacturers to go with for the best Linux hardware experience.
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Last month Google and Samsung released the first commercially available product using the ARM® Cortex™-A15 SoC design: the new Series 3 Chromebook. Not only does the Chromebook have the new Samsung Exynos 5250 providing the core compute power, but it also has the new ARM Mali™-T604 providing the power to move all those pixels around. As with previous Chromebooks, it uses a custom operating system known as ChromeOS (which is based loosely on Gentoo Linux). If you’ve ever used either the Chrome or Chromium browser from Google you’ll have no issues, as everything is orientated around the browser.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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A new version of systemd was released today by Lennart Poettering. The systemd 196 release brings many new features.
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Linux 3.7 can use signatures to verify the integrity of kernel modules, while the new integrity appraisal extension helps to detect malicious software from a third party. The new kernel loads firmware files without udev and includes important container improvements.
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The Intel DRM graphics driver in the Linux 3.8 kernel will feature a number of user-facing changes.
We’re still a few days out from the Linux 3.7 kernel but already we know a lot of what to expect from the Linux 3.8 kernel, including the open-source GPU driver improvements for Linux 3.8.
Among the Intel DRM driver work you will find merged during the Linux 3.8 merge window when it’s open around early December include:
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Graphics Stack
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Last week marked the release of a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver beta that was intended to improve the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance. AMD said this updated closed-source Linux graphics driver would bring “significant performance improvements” for Valve’s recently ported Left 4 Dead 2 Linux game. Curious about AMD Linux OpenGL performance improvements elsewhere, I ran some benchmarks of this new driver on several different graphics cards. Unfortunately, the performance improvements aren’t too widespread and there’s other problems making this beta driver not appealing.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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It’s time for another bi-weekly Wine development release. This time around there’s scattered changes from Windows Codecs to Wine’s built-in web-browser.
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Games
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The Real Texas is an action RPG game that plays like a mashup of Zelda: Link to the Past and Ultima VI.
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Steam Autumn Sale has kicked off with massive discounts on games. Out of total 27 games currently verified on Linux, 23 games are on sale.
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The year of 2012 is almost over and the number of games released has grown slowly, but exponentially. Here are the best games released for the Linux platform, so far.
Before Valve became interested in Linux and before any other major developer took an interest in the Linux platform, the developers of Bastion, Supergiant Games, decided that they should port their game.
It was released with Humble Bundle V and made quite an impact, showing that major games can sell really well on a free open source platform.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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While i was messing around with the tool i noticed two check boxes at the top right hand side. One is labelled “New Headlines” and other “Forecast”. The Headlines check box is turned ON by default and the tool seems to try and correlate news headlines with search trends. I at once thought that this feature has a lot of hidden potential. I noticed that when i turn ON the other check box the graph extrapolates into the future along x axis(years) probably based on past data of searches made in Google search engine. Future trends are plotted in dotted lines whereas past data is in the form of a contiguous line.
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GNOME Desktop
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I was very optimistic about the potential of Gnome3 since the beginning ..but I couldn’t never imagine all these things that are happening in 3.8. Gnome 3.8 is above any expectation and that has mostly to do with the refreshed Shell and Gnome Control Center we will get.
If Gnome Shell 3.6 was a good release, Gnome Shell 3.8 will be more than amazing!
There is a number of huge changes like the integrated search or the re-worked notification API (and maybe a Privacy Section – work in progress), but I’ ll just go with the visuals for the moment. And not all of them. This is just the second release of Gnome Shell (3.7.2) towards the stable 3.8 (next March), many many patches are under review and they’ll be pushed in master in next releases.
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GNOME’s Vincent Untz has written about the recent decision to remove the GNOME3 fall-back mode with the forthcoming GNOME 3.8 release. He thinks the situation will improve but he basically calls for the community to fork and maintain the GNOME fall-back (gnome-panel, Metacity, etc) components assuming there is enough interest.
GNOME developers decided to drop the fallback mode rather than maintain it since it was already a burden to take care of and not always well tested. For those without the GPU/driver support to handle GNOME Shell with Mutter, LLVMpipe will now be used instead for running the heavy GNOME desktop. However, LLVMpipe doesn’t work for everyone.
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Salix, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware, that is simple, fast, easy to use, and relying on XFCE desktop environment, is now at version 14.0 RC3.
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Cinnarch is a new project coupling Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop with the popular Arch Linux. Like Arch, it’s technically a rolling release distribution, but with periodic snapshot releases. A new update, considered “in beta stage” by founder Alex Filgueira, was just released and it sounded ripe for a test drive.
Cinnarch is an installable live system for i686 or x86_64 and offers your choice of several languages upon boot. The first stop is a selection dialog asking if you’d like to run as a live system or install Cinnarch. The installer is a console menu-based installer, but developers are working on a graphical version.
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A reader of my blog recently made a comment about Arch’s lack of package signing, and this got me looking into the issue more carefully. What I found has left me deeply concerned with a number of aspects of Arch.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its cloud OpenStack cloud platform distribution in a new preview release.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s not just Windows 8 that’s been criticised for expecting users to swallow an unpopular and ill-suited new interface. When Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, moved its default desktop OS interface to Unity in April 2012, it also alienated many loyal followers.
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Flavours and Variants
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It seems like the shiny new Linux releases are coming fast and furious this fall, and this week has been no exception.
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Kubuntu is almost like Ubuntu, and then not at all. It is amazing how much difference there can be between two operating system releasing sharing so much DNA. As you probably recall, I was utterly disappointed with Quetzal, on two occasions. The first time, on a generic laptop with SSD and Intel graphics, where it blossomed with bugs and glitches. And then, the second time around, when it utterly failed me on my high-end laptop with its Nvidia card.
For this very reason, I will be testing Kubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal on the said laptop first, to see whether the Nvidia issues are strictly related to Ubuntu and its unity desktop and who knows what else, or perhaps a much bigger, more serious phenomenon. So we will begin with a dandy setup, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GT 320M 1GB VRAM card, with two operating systems installed on the internal disk, and booting a handsome new bunch from an external USB disk. Sounds glorious, and as real as it gets.
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Ubuntu users with a hankering for Gnome can take comfort: the latest version of Linux distro Mint has been released.
Mint 14, codenamed Nadia, is based on Ubuntu 12.10 comes with Mate 1.4, an updated version of the Mint user interface with greater stability and bug fixes.
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Phones
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Breaking into the smartphone market with a new platform may seem to be a tall order, but Finnish company Jolla think it can be done and has demonstrated the user interface of its upcoming operating system Sailfish.
Jolla, which means dinghy in Finnish, was founded last year by a group of former Nokia employees who wanted to continue the development work the Finnish phone maker had done on the MeeGo operating system. The company’s newly appointed CEO Marc Dillon worked at Nokia for almost 11 years.
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Android/Ballnux
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What happens when you combine two of Samsung’s 2012 flagship devices in order to create a totally new handset? You get a 5-inch Galaxy Grand apparently, which will reportedly launch by the end of the month and offer buyers the best of the two worlds.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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…nothing but Android/Linux on dozens of choices.
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UK security services have begun bridging the gap that has stopped open source software getting security clearance for use in government systems.
The initiative has come too late to stop the first big contract wins delivered under the government’s flagship G-Cloud procurement vehicle going to a supplier that shunned open source products because they did not have security accreditation.
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Dreamworks Animation has released a new version of its OpenVDB library. The animation production company open sourced the project in August and has now released version 0.99.0. OpenVDB has been used for some time within Dreamworks for features such as Puss in Boots, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted and the just released Rise of the Guardians.
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The rise of social enterprise tools intended to facilitate workplace collaboration have naturally impacted the software application development function in terms of user interconnectivity and integration.
Specifically here we see the popularised term “DevOps” coming to the fore. Used to express the orchestration of both the ‘developer’ and the ‘operations’ functions responsible for the building and subsequent deployment of software as it is.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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This week, Mozilla released version 17 of the Firefox browser, and if you’ve been increasingly married to Google Chrome or another browser, there are some new features in the latest Firefox to take note of. They include new integration with Facebook, and more protection from Firefox extensions that may cause performance problems. Here are the details.
Firefox 17 is available for the Mac, Windows and Linux, and you can find system requirements for it here. There is also an updated post from Mozilla on extensions and their compatibility with the new version.
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Plans for 64-bit Firefox for Windows have been put on hold by Mozilla in a bid to concentrate more on the 32-bit versions it has been found.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Bjoern Michaelsen from Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, who works on LibreOffice has announced the alpha1 of LibreOffice 4.0. Michaelsen writes on his blog, “Its a pre-release, an alpha — essentially just a named daily build — and will kill your dog and eat your children.”
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BSD
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Unix as a whole predates Linux by many years, and even the rather younger BSD variant was well into its teens by the time Linus released his first kernel. BSD networking defined and enabled the Internet. This illustrious history notwithstanding, BSD has long since ceded the spotlight to Linux in most settings. As Linux has come to dominate the free software development world, the result has been some occasional pain for other operating system distributions. Now, as a recent discussion on an OpenBSD mailing list shows, BSD developers are feeling that pain in a heightened manner. This situation has some serious implications.
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Public Services/Government
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So which is “dog bites man” and which is “man bites dog”? A look at the press coverage tells us:
* Leipzig OpenOffice coverage == 2 hits
* Freiburg OpenOffice coverage == 1150 hits
The larger migration away from Microsoft Office in Leipzig was barely covered in the press. But the Freiburg story has had enormous press uptake. By this I take it that moving from Microsoft Office to open source alternatives like OpenOffice is normal, the expected, the non-newsworthy common occurrence. It is “dog bites man”. Moving in the opposite direction, from free software to proprietary is newsworthy because it is so rare. It is “man bites dog”.
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Isn’t it the truth? There was a wave of huge migrations to FLOSS in the period of 2003-2005 which made headlines but far larger migrations recently barely are noticed in the noise. We now have several governments of large nations moving to GNU/Linux and FLOSS, huge corporations like Google too and countless millions of individuals. It’s not news any longer but I still enjoy reading about it when it does break through.
M$ has some tenets about mindshare for technology. One of them is that you only win when the status quo becomes thinking the competing technology works is a mental defect. Conversely, M$ must know it is losing because no one now believes using FLOSS (GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, FLOSS applications…) is irrational. FLOSS works for everyone who tries it. The few exceptions I have read are quite unusual, involving some constraint other than price/performance, like inability to run application X. When people consider “doing task X” instead of some lock-in they suddenly find themselves doing IT the right way, the way that works for them.
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Licensing
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I first met the original group of VLC developers at the Solutions GNU/Linux conference in 2001. I had been an employee of FSF for about a year at the time, and I recall they were excited to tell the FSF about the project, and very proud that they’d used FSF’s premier and preferred license (at the time): GPLv2-or-later.
What a difference a decade makes. I’m admittedly sad that VLC has (mostly) finished its process of relicensing under LGPLv2.1-or-later. While I have occasionally supported relicensing from GPL to LGPL, every situation is different and I think it should be analyzed carefully. In this case, I don’t support VLC’s decision to relicense.
[...]
So, I’m left baffled: do the VLC community actually believes the LGPL would solve that problem?
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Openness/Sharing
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The functional application of open source designs,
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Programming
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The first beta of version 2.0 of PyPy has been released with support for ARM CPUs and CFFI compatibility. PyPy is an alternative Python 2.x implementation with a just-in-time compiler, a stackless mode and a sandbox for untrusted code. It is described by its developers as faster and “almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7.3″. The new version of the “very compliant” Python interpreter is the first version to officially support the ARM processor architecture. The software will work on soft-float ARM/Linux builds on ARMv7 or later CPUs that have a floating-point unit.
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A group of Ruby on Rails developers has announced Rails::API, a derivative of the original Rails project that provides a slimmed-down set of functions which are useful for developers using Rails to write applications that use a backend API-only server or servers. This new subset of the Ruby on Rails feature set has had ActionView and other rendering features removed; this makes it easier and quicker to use for developers who are not concerned with writing frontends of web services and also makes the platform more lightweight. Work on Rails::API has been ongoing for several months, but the developers have now decided to go public with the framework, which is currently at version 0.0.2.
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Standards/Consortia
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Back in October, we wrote about a report that the FTC was preparing to file antitrust charges against Google. In trying to find out more, the story kept shifting. First, we heard it was all about “search manipulation” in putting Google-related info on top of search results (i.e., search for a location and a Google Map shows at the top of the page). Then, there was some talk about how it was going to focus on how recently-purchased-by-Google Motorola Mobility was abusing standards-essential patents. If it was the latter, that seemed like a weird way to go, since it was so unrelated to Google’s main business. Similarly, the whole “search manipulation” claim seemed odd. What kind of “harm” is it when someone searching on Google for an address is shown a Google map. It seems like it actually benefits consumers.
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This time last year, Brown’s factory was buzzing, with his employees working overtime to fulfill holiday orders. With the help of Sears, Brown’s company sold more than 200,000 wrenches at Christmas alone.
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You may recall that, earlier this year, we wrote about a very troubling ruling in the UK against the founder of SurfTheChannel, Anton Vickerman. STC was a linking site, no different than others that had been found perfectly legal in the UK. After the conviction, which resulted in Vickerman being put in jail for four years, some additional info came out that was really horrifying. First, there was the fact that this criminal case, including the investigation, was driven entirely by a private anti-piracy organization, FACT, which is financed by the Hollywood studios. Yes, a criminal case that was run by private interests. Actual law enforcement had refused to proceed with the case, saying that there wasn’t evidence of direct infringement. Furthermore, some “anonymous” notes from the court room suggested a judge was on a mission to put Vickerman away.
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Health/Nutrition
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IT’S A SWELTERING LATE FEBRUARY afternoon when I pull into the Esso gas station in the tiny town of Bukit Merah, Malaysia. My guide, a local butcher named Hew Yun Tat, warns me that the owner is known for his stinginess. “He’s going to ask you to buy him tea,” Hew says. “Even though he owns many businesses around here, he still can’t resist pinching pennies.”
An older man emerges from the station office. His face and hands are mottled with white patches, his English broken.
“I’ll talk to you,” the man says, “but only if you buy me tea.” He grins.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” says Hew, laughing. “A rich man like you.”
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Ireland has opened a new investigation into the death of a woman denied an abortion of her dying fetus, as the government scrambled to stem criticism of its handling of an incident that polarized the overwhelmingly Catholic country.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The world recently celebrated Malala Day in honor of the young Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, an innocent victim of political violence perpetrated by the Taliban. She is rightfully honored as a hero for her willingness to speak up for her right to an education and against religious extremism.
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“Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for Al-Qaeda,” one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana, the capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.”
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The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf leader, Imran Khan, led a successful anti-drone march to Waziristan on October 7, raising global awareness regarding the devastation and miseries inflicted in the tribal region by the US drone attacks.
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This week marks the beginning of the busiest travel time of the year. For millions of Americans, the misery of holiday travel is made considerably worse by a government agency ostensibly designed to make our journeys more secure. Created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Transportation Security Administration has largely outlived its usefulness, as the threat of a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland continues to recede. These days, the TSA’s major role appears to be to make plane trips more unpleasant. And by doing so, it’s encouraging people to take the considerably more dangerous option of traveling by road.
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Why? Israel’s government has declared that the aim of the current strikes against Gaza is to rebuild deterrence so that no rockets will be fired on Israel. Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders in the past sent the Hamas leadership underground and prevented rocket attacks on Israel temporarily. According to Israeli leaders, deterrence will be achieved once again by targeting and killing military and political leaders in Gaza and hitting hard at Hamas’s military infrastructure. But this policy has never been effective in the long term, even when the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed by Israel. Hamas didn’t lay down its guns then, and it won’t stop firing rockets at Israel now without a cease-fire agreement.
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Here’s what this poster says: 1. The IDF promotes extra-judicial killing as punishment for crimes committed with no due process (past terror attacks and kidnapping) 2. The IDF thinks that portraying Israel as the Terminator is a GOOD thing, showing fundamental disconnect with the language of modern diplomacy and current political sensibilities about the conflict. 3. The killing is absurdly divorced from the larger picture: the conflict, the Gaza policy, the occupation, actually it landed on us ex nihilo, or from the moon. 4. The whole conflict can be reduced to a big joke: if we present a Hollywood poster, preferably bathed in scary blood red, we’ll win! But personal commentary aside, what the poster is really trying to say is: we had no choice. This was our only option.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Still disbelieving the FBI/DOJ responses, a FOIA request was submitted to the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy for its records regarding the aforementioned appeal. The DOJ OIP responded and reveals that not only does the FBI have WikiLeaks records, but the FBI/DOJ lied about having records. WikiLeaks’ records are tucked away in other files, thus are considered for cross-references and not responsive because the request was for “all records” and didn’t use the magic words “cross-references.”
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Finance
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A RETIRED painter and decorator died while living in his garden shed after being kicked out of his house by a landlord.
Malcolm Frost was left begging for food after he was evicted from his home in Ashmores Lane, Alsager, where he had failed to pay rent.
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In These Times has exclusively obtained a leaked internal Honeywell document outlining an anti-union strategy that includes leveraging Obama administration connections. The documents suggest that the megacorporation is deeply concerned about recent union activity at its factories and the bad press that has resulted (one example cited is a Working In These Times op-ed).
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A new report came out from the Fraser Institute this week looking at income mobility. It certainly doesn’t intend to make this conclusion, but a thorough look at their data shows that the rich stay rich as everyone else fights for entrance to this exclusive club.
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The National Audit Office’s report said that between 2004 and 2011, about 2,300 avoidance schemes were disclosed to the tax authorities, with more than 100 new schemes emerging in each of the past four years.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The new round of criminal charges brought in the UK against former senior News International editors has once again raised the prospect that Rupert Murdoch’s New York-based parent company may be prosecuted under US anti-bribery laws, and complicates the rehabilitation of his son James as a possible successor to lead the global media empire.
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Privacy
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Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has famously stated that his vision is to make the world more open, and that’s precisely what is happening. Through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter people are opening up to each other and the world more than ever. Everybody has something about themselves to say, and they seem quite eager to put it out there.
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This is also the reason why the value of privacy is relative. An individual should be free to reveal or conceal as much or as little about themselves as they wish. If more people voluntarily share more about themselves, this fact alone doesn’t then necessarily represent any kind of a social problem. Of course, it is still possible for people to make arguably bad choices, but those are still their choices to make.The important thing is to promote personal responsibility, without demanding that some be responsible for the choices of others.
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Civil Rights
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STATEMENT FROM THE FREE JEREMY HAMMOND SUPPORT NETWORK (https://www.facebook.com/supporthammond) This is what we know for certain surrounding the unfortunate circumstances of Jeremy Hammond’s ongoing prosecution. A time line published only days after Jeremy’s arrest suggests that Operation AntiSec was orchestrated by the FBI through the agency of FBI informant Hector Monsegur; http://www.scribd.com/doc/85351496/Timeline-of-ANTISEC-as-Created-and-Operated-Under-FBI-Supervision. As if this were not unfortunate enough, new evidence suggests that Loretta A. Preska, the federal judge currently presiding over Jeremy’s case, has an undisclosed conflict which could potentially influence her decisions regarding Jeremy’s trial. Loretta A. Preska is the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and a former nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Preska is married to Thomas J. Kavaler, with whom she attended law school. Information leaked from the very hack Jeremy is being prosecuted for having committed show that Thomas J. Kavaler is affiliated with Stratfor; http://archive.org/details/Stratfor. Sensitive information belonging to Kavaler was leaked along with the sensitive information of more than eight hundred thousand other Stratfor users and millions of internal emails. We demand that Loretta A. Preska, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, excuse herself from Jeremy case immediately. We demand that all previous rulings made by Chief Judge Preska be dismissed. We demand an investigation into the tactics used by law enforcement officials to entrap hacktivists. We demand an investigation into the circumstances which allowed for Chief Judge Preska to preside over Jeremy’s case. We demand a fair trial for Jeremy Hammond! We will not be silent in the presence of such great injustices. If those prosecuting Jeremy deny him a voice, they will hear ours!
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And I’m not alone. A group of activists who are concerned about the so-called “advanced” imaging technology are also urging air travelers to just say “no” next week.
Opting out means agents will either give you an “enhanced” pat-down or wave you through the screening area (and when there’s a long line, it’s a safe bet it’ll be the latter). But the peaceful protest will also slow screenings to the point where the agency will have to reconsider the way it checks air travelers, as it did during a successful opt-out action two years ago.
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I have to admit, there are times when I find South Korea immensely confusing when it comes to technology. They appear to embrace the hell out of the more modern view of the music business. They’re heavily invested in their population’s internet connectivity. Yet they can also get goofy when it comes to intellectual property, such as when they decided patenting their military uniforms was a surefire way of keeping the North Korean military from dressing alike. They’ve also put in place a mildly enforced version of 3 strikes legislation to appease American entertainment companies.
Admitting all that, however, my surprise has boiled over upon learning that a South Korean man was found guilty of “praising, encouraging or propagandizing” North Korea under their “National Security Law” for tweets associated with his account. His crime? Well, mostly retweeting North Korea’s official Twitter account, tweeting out a couple of links to North Korean propaganda songs, and tweeting nonsensical nonsense (is there any other kind?) about their neighbors to the north. Oh, and he also mercilessly mocked the hell out of this country he’s accused of supporting as well.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Euro MPs have opposed the idea of a UN organisation taking control of the internet away from US bodies, saying it would hurt the free flow of information online.
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That’s because I did not explicitly authorize you to access this site…
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We’ve been covering how the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been moving forward with its plans next month to consider a number of proposals to takeover aspects of internet regulation and governance. There are, of course, a number of different proposals being submitted by different countries. The problem, of course, is that the setup of the ITU is not open to the public, and there are some special interests involved — mainly by countries with oppressive governments looking to use this as a way to gain control over the internet for the sake of censorship, as well as local (often state-run or state-associated) telcos using the process to see if they can divert money from successful internet companies to their own bank accounts. While the ITU likes to present itself as merely a neutral meeting place for all of these proposals, what’s been clear for a while is that the ITU leadership has taken an active role in encouraging, cultivating and supporting some of the more egregious proposals.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It seems extraordinary that in the area of copyright it is only recently that people have started to consider the evidence before formulating policy. Even now, there is still resistance to this idea in some quarters. Elsewhere, though, there is a growing recognition that policy-makers must have access to the data they need when considering how to achieve given goals.
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Copyrights
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Reacting to Ofcom’s new research into online copyright infringement, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:
“Only 16% of respondents said they would stop unlawful file sharing if sent a letter by their ISP…”
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A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.
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Since the GOP decided to chicken out on holding the very necessary debate on copyright reform, let’s keep the debate going without them, and hope they join in. As we’ve discussed, the Republican Study Committee released a fantastic report from staffer Derek Khanna, and then retracted it under lobbyist pressure. The RSC wants to claim that the paper didn’t go through its full review process, but we’ve heard from multiple sources that this is simply not true, and that the RSC is pushing this story to appease angry lobbyists (apparently the US Chamber of Commerce has taken over as the leader of the cause on this one, following the initial complaints from the MPAA and RIAA). Either way, all this has done is draw much more attention to the report, which you can still read here.
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On Friday, we wrote about the unsealed seizure warrants against Megaupload, and noted that they showed how Megaupload had assisted in a criminal investigation, in which they were told not to interfere with the files, but then those very files were used as evidence against Megaupload itself. It’s now come out that this was part of the case against NinjaVideo, which we wrote about a few times.
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Somewhere deep down, we’re sure Seattle-based conceptual artist and serious Prince obsessive Troy Gua expected he’d someday have to face saying goodbye to the much-lauded miniature doll that was at the center of his art series, Le Petit Prince. This was no small project — Gua literally recreated many famous Prince moments with the little guy and even included detailed props like the Purple Rain motorcycle. Ironically, we were recently emailing with Gua to do a piece about the new calendar he was putting out featuring some of these photographs, but this week Gua sadly informed us the dream is over. He received a cease and desist letter from the real Prince’s people on Monday.
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Last month we wrote about an interesting case in which a judge effectively called the bluff of Malibu Media, a copyright trolling operation that has filed 365 lawsuits, targeting about 6,000 people. And, of course, it’s never taken a single one to an actual trial, because that does not appear to be the goal. Instead, it’s all about getting people to settle, and it sounds like Malibu has been successful on that front. In the case we mentioned last month, the judge made it clear that he wanted Malibu Media to actually go through a trial, and highlighted four defendants who had claimed innocence, and wanted to use those as a “bellwether” trial, to effectively test Malibu’s theories. The judge, Michael Baylson, was pretty clear that he would not be happy if Malibu Media tried to squeeze out of the case.
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In retrospect, it is now clear that the pivotal moment in the campaign against ACTA was last January, when thousands of people took to the streets in Poland despite the sub-zero temperatures there. A few weeks later, similar protests took place across the continent, especially in Eastern Europe, which then influenced politicians at all levels, culminating in the rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament on July 4.
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