02.24.13

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• The 2013 Linux Jobs Report

  The Linux Foundation and Dice have released a report about 2013 Linux jobs. The report indicates that Linux professionals are in high demand. You can download the report here.

• Which Linux admin tools and tricks would YOU stake your career on?

  Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform’s sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of “administrator friendliness”.

  Linux – and the community that surrounds the open-source OS – can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but it does not have to be so. To illustrate, I want to go over the single most common “why doesn’t it work” issue I encounter among junior admins: cloning CentOS virtual machines (VMs).

• Linux Essentials meets Computer Science Teachers Association K-12 standards

  The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that its Linux Essentials program which measures foundational knowledge in Linux and Open Source Software has met the requirements of the K-12 Computer Science Standards of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA: http://www.csta.acm.org/). The CSTA has 41 chapters throughout North America and members in 126 countries worldwide.

• Survey: Linux Pros in High Demand Among Employers

• Desktop

  • Chromebook Pixel allows for custom bootloaders, is Linux-friendly

    WiFi-only flavors of the Chromebook Pixel have only just started shipping, but if you’re already itching to install Linux on one of them, you’re in luck. Not only have kernel patches been submitted for the hardware, but Google’s Bill Richardson has now laid out exactly how to load up the devices with Linux Mint.

  • Chromebook Pixel: Wow!

  • Why Google bothered to make the Chromebook Pixel

• Server

  • Pear OS 7 Linux Server Coming Soon

    The Pear OS developer, David Tavares, announced a few days ago that he works on a new project, called Pear OS 7 Server.

    As its name suggests, Pear OS 7 Server is the Server Edition of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Linux distribution, which will be based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and released sometime this summer.

• Applications

  • NetworkManager learns to create Wi-Fi access points

    The latest release of NetworkManager, version 0.9.8, and its associated applet and VPN plugins now enable users to create Wi-Fi hotspots in access point mode with drivers and hardware that support this function. According to a list maintained by the Linux kernel’s wireless driver developers, many modern wireless chipsets by Atheros, Intel and Ralink include the needed functionality. The b43 and b43legacy drivers for older Broadcom chips apparently work as well.

  • 6 Most Good-Looking Music Players for Linux

    There is no dearth for good quality music players in Ubuntu. Even the default Rhythmbox is pretty darn good. But how many of those music players can be considered as good-looking? It is a tricky question since looks are very subjective. Anyway, here’s a collection of 6 best music players for Linux which I think are among the most good looking alternatives out there.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Stop the Vim Configuration Madness

    • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Fedora 18

    • Short Tip: Generate SSH fingerprints

    • Linux file permissions and chmod

    • How to Monitor User Activity on Linux with psacct or acct

    • 9 of the Best Free Java Books

  • Games

    • Fields of War a third person shooter with large scale battles

    • Guns of Icarus Online Linux Version Released and Trailer

    • Hammerwatch A hack and slash action adventure

    • Guns of Icarus online released! [plus initial impressions]

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Some new and beautiful GTK themes for your Linux desktop

• Distributions

  • Meet Manjaro Linux, a brand-new distro on the rise

    New distros come onto the scene on a fairly regular basis; SolusOS and Fuduntu Linux are two I’ve covered over the past few months, but recently another one caught my eye as being particularly worth covering.

  • What you can do to financially help your favorite distro

    Yesterday, I posted an article about Ubuntu is still not profitable. It was really a surprise to me because Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro and it has been around since 2004. And this makes me wonder that if even a big distro – backed up by a big company – like Ubuntu cannot become profitable, how the small distros are doing?

  • Distrohopping On Reddit

    Last night I was browsing through my site states, and saw a link to a subreddit about distrohopping. I had no idea such a reddit existed, but I was delighted to find out that it did. One of Eye On Linux’s older columns was even listed in the top articles tab.

    Currently, the distrohopping reddit has 515 readers. It might be a good idea to click the subscribe link, and see if we can help get that number up a bit. There’s some great threads to read there, and it’s always nice to connect with fellow distrohoppers.

  • New Releases

    • SolusOS 1.3 Released

      The SolusOS Team are pleased to announce the release of SolusOS Eveline 1.3. This is strictly a maintenance release, and includes base system adjustments and updates not present in the 1.2 release. This release is available in the following architectures: x86, x86 with PAE, amd64

    • SalentOS 12.04.2 released

  • Screenshots

    • Elive 2.1.31 Screenshots

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Launches Enterprise Linux 6.4, Big Data Focus

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Hands-on with Ubuntu’s rudimentary phone and tablet OS

          Canonical says that Ubuntu 13.10 will include “a complete entry-level smartphone experience” when it ships in October. Anyone brave enough to try out the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, however, will quickly discover that the current incarnation of Ubuntu for phones and tablets offers considerably less than that.

        • Canonical releases Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview for Nexus smartphones, tablets

        • In the cloud-server world, Ubuntu is quietly cleaning up

          Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical make a lot of noise about phones and tablets they’re not shipping and desktop interfaces that are liked by some and loathed by many. Not that my current favorite environment, GNOME 3, is the object of universal love (hint: it’s not).

        • Hands-on with the Ubuntu Touch Linux smartphone

          Developers got their first hands-on peek yesterday of Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch OS for mobile phones, with the release of the first developer beta. So did I.

          The good news: Ubuntu Touch is a more compelling mobile environment, even in the first developer version, than I expected. It borrows heavily from other mobile UIs, including BlackBerry 10, the iPad, Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone, yet manages to feel like its own OS. It’s much too soon to rate, but the OS is promising, for reasons I explain shortly.

        • Ubuntu is still not profitable

          2 days ago, Sean Micheal Kerner from internetnews.com published a short article about how Ubuntu is still not profitable. According to him, Mark Shuttleworh had admitted that Canonical was not cash flow positive in 2008. And nothing has changed since then.

          “Fast forward to 2013 and during a call announcing Ubuntu for Tablets and Shuttleworth once again said that his company was still not profitable.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The rise of Chinese hardware, open source OSes and phablets: What’s in store at MWC 2013

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • INTRODUCING THE GALAXY NOTE 8.0, A NEW ERA OF PORTABILITY AND EVERYDAY PRODUCTIVITY

      • Galaxy Note 8.0 Spotted At MWC

      • Dual-SIM Galaxy S3 Duos Lands In China

        Samsung’s dual-SIM Galaxy S3 Duos – model number SCH-I939D – is now official in China. Featuring support for CDMA and GSM networks, the device is said to be virtually similar to regular Galaxy S3 versions sold internationally.

    • Android

      • CoolShip Android all-in-keyboard computer

      • Google’s Android Reborn as Network-Hacking Kit

        The folks at security tools company Pwnie Express have built a tablet that can bash the heck out of corporate networks. Called the Pwn Pad, it’s a full-fledged hacking toolkit built atop Google’s Android operating system.

        Pwnie Express will be selling the cool-looking hack machines — based on Google’s Nexus 7 tablets — for $795. They’ll be introduced at the RSA security conference in San Francisco next week, but Pwnie Express is also releasing the Pwn Pad source code, meaning that hackers can download the software and get it up and running on other types of Android phones and tablets.

      • YouTube Android App Gets Updated

      • Samsung plays down Android copy-paste bug, angering developer

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Pwn Pad Pen-Testing Tablet Coming Up At RSA 2013

      Meet the Pwn Pad, a 7-inch tablet aimed at the professionals. Security tools company Pwnie Express has come up with its new tablet or rather a full-fledged hacking toolkit running Android 4.2 and Ubuntu 12.04.

      The cool-looking device also features a OSS-Based Pentester Toolkit and Long Range Wireless Packet Injection. The company aims to sell the device at $795, a price tag that should turn many away except (perhaps) security pros willing to impress clients by showing how they can identify security issues with just a few taps on their brand-new tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• Events

  • Registration opens for LibrePlanet 2013

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Chrome 25 arrives with speech recognition

      Google has released Chrome 25 to its Stable Channel. Chrome 25.0.1364.97 for Windows and Linux and Chrome 25.0.1364.99 for Mac OS X bring improvements to extension security, support for the JavaScript Web Speech API and fix 22 security vulnerabilities, five of which were fixed as part of Google’s bug bounty program for the browser; the rest were found by employees of the company.

  • Mozilla

    • Director Of Product Blake Ross Is Leaving Facebook

      Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross is leaving the company, he announced in a Facebook post yesterday afternoon.

      For those of you who weren’t reading TechCrunch in 2007, Firefox co-founder Ross and Joe Hewitt came to Facebook through its acquisition of Parakey, a web OS that was still in stealth at the time. Parakey was Facebook’s first acquisition. Hewitt, who spearheaded many Facebook Mobile projects including iOS, left the company in 2011.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • Open Source ‘Lingual’ Helps SQL Devs Unlock Hadoop

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • OpenClipart.org in LibreOffice – part 3

  • LibreOffice 4 review – Getting better but …

    Just a few days ago, LibreOffice 4 was released. As you know, this is an important milestone, both technically and historically. Since the split from OpenOffice, managed by Oracle, LibreOffice has quickly grown to become the dominant open-source office suite, and has completely pushed away OpenOffice from the spotlight. Moreover, this latest version brings a whole bunch of good things.

• Business

  • Hortonworks unveils Stinger Initiative

    Hortonworks’ Alan Gates has announced the Stinger Initiative, a four point plan for making Apache Hive 100 times faster. With other Hadoop distributors already having taken steps to speed up processing of large data volumes (e.g. MapR’s Drill), Hortonworks prefers to rely on existing tools and input from Hadoop’s large community.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Protesters Torch FSF Headquarters Over GIMP User Interface

    After burning an effigy of Free Software Foundation (FSF) president Richard Stallman, protesters in Massachusetts today burned down the building housing the headquarters of the FSF in response to rising frustration caused by the user interface of the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

  • Winners announced for free software gaming’s highest honor, the Liberated Pixel Cup

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today is proud to announce the winner of the first Liberated Pixel Cup, a design competition of free software video games using only freely licensed art and media.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • Obama White House expands access to federally funded research

      Campaigners herald boost for accessibility of scientific information and say Aaron Swartz case gave momentum

    • Aaron Swartz Prosecutors Weighed ‘Guerilla’ Manifesto, Justice Official Tells Congressional Committee

      A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

      Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”

      “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto. “We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”

      The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.

    • U.S. attorney: Criticism of Aaron Swartz prosecution is ‘unfair’

    • White House Open Access Memo Strong, Could Be Stronger

      Today, the White House released a memorandum (PDF) in support of a more robust policy for public access to research, making the results of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research freely available online. The memorandum gives government agencies six months to detail plans to ensure the public can read and analyze both research and data, without charge. Both open access and open data are key to promoting innovation, government transparency, and scientific progress.

    • White House says government-funded research should be more public, but critics want more

• Programming

  • Eclipse 2014 release name chosen

  • Eclipse Foundation starts Long Term Support initiative

    The Foundation has announced the Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS) initiative. With industrial uses of software which expect support and maintenance of the software stack from ten to fifty years, there has long been a desire to address this need. With the new LTS initiative, led by CA Technologies, IBM, EclipseSource and SAP AG, the Foundation will provide the facilities and processes needed to create signed deployable updates for older versions of Eclipse. This should, in turn, enable a new ecosystem of companies and enterprises to share fixes and releases. The initiative will be open to all organisations with an interest in extending the productive life of Eclipse technologies.

  • jQuery Mobile gets responsive with version 1.3

    Responsive web design (RWD) has been the focus for the jQuery Mobile developers as they put together the new version, jQuery Mobile 1.3.0, of the touch-optimised mobile web framework. The developers say that they had been faced with designers asking whether they should use RWD or jQuery Mobile – the answer is “both” say the jQuery Mobile developers, and with 1.3, they have set out to educate users by adding responsive documentation and demos to explain key concepts. They have also added responsive tables, panels and grids to make it easier to build responsive sites and applications.

  • Google App Engine update eases cloudy mobile app development

Leftovers

• Science

  • New Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is misguided

    Like a lot of people, I awoke this morning to the news of the new Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Initiated by multibillionaires Art Levinson, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Yuri Milner, the Breakthrough Prize is intended to recognise “excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” Winners are awarded $3 million each and since this is a prize, they can spend this money in any way they wish. According to the website, this prize is “dedicated to advancing breakthrough research, celebrating scientists and generating excitement about the pursuit of science as a career.”

    Wonderful — anything to give science a positive and prominent public profile. But unfortunately, this prize is flawed and seriously misguided and thus, I don’t think it will accomplish its stated goals.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Miracle grow: Indian farmers smash crop yield records without GMOs

    What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind.

  • ‘Organic’ from China exposed: The shocking truth about ‘organic’ foods grown in the world’s worst environmental cesspool

  • China Admits Existence Of ‘Cancer Villages’ In Report, As Pollution Concerns Mount

• Security

  • LulzSec’s ‘Sabu’ has sentencing postponed – but could face 124 years

  • Some Off-Shore Oil Rigs Have Been “Incapacitated” By Malware Thanks To Pirated Music and Porn

    Hacks have been popping up all over the place recently. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, various news organizations. And off-shore oil rigs aren’t to be left out. According to the Houston Chronicle, more than one of the things have been “incapacitated” by malware that can be traced back to the Internet’s most common vices: pirated music and porn.

  • SSHD rootkit in the wild

    There are a lot of discussions at the moment about a SSHD rootkit hitting mainly RPM based Linux distributions.

  • Blogger Claims Eric S. Raymond has “Severe Mental Problems”

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • A Ground-Level View of the U.S.’s Drone Campaign

    Yemen’s fractured tribal politics reveal the shallowness of Washington’s current debate about targeted killing.

  • Texas bans shooting immigrants from helicopters

    Officials in Texas announced on Thursday that State Troopers would no longer be allowed to open fire on suspects from helicopters after the recent killing of two immigrants.

  • CIA whistleblower Kiriakou gets posh send-off to prison

    John Kiriakou stood in the ninth-floor banquet hall of the Hay-Adams hotel Thursday night and took in the spectacular view of the White House and the Washington Monument. He recalled briefing two presidents during his career with the CIA. “It’s ironic,” he said, spreading his arms as if to embrace the tableau. “This really is the reason I came to Washington 30 years ago in the first place.”

  • Drone Pilots Are Shown to Have Stress Disorders

    In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

  • U.S. Military Personnel Arrive In Niger: Obama In Letter To Congress

  • There’s An Even Worse Scandal Hidden In Obama’s Secret Drone Memo

    The accords with foreign governments — which include Pakistan and Yemen — are a key element excluded from the Department of Justice (DoJ) “white paper.”

    [...]

    The expert told the Journal that the administration believes Congress would leak the information to the public, which could be extremely embarrassing to the U.S. and its foreign partners given the unpopularity of the drone program and the potentially shady details of the agreements.

  • Montana Bill Would Let Sheriffs Arrest FBI Agents for Arresting People

    If Montana voters approve Gary Marbut’s referendum in November 2014, any FBI agent who tries to arrest a Montanan for a federal crime could be arrested—and charged with kidnapping.

  • Egypt imports 140,000 teargas canisters from US

    In January, the Interior Ministry ordered the import of 140,000 teargas canisters from the United States at a cost of LE17 million.

  • Egypt orders $2.5mln worth of teargas from US despite plunging economy

  • Increasingly Venal Justice Department Settles on Gentle Punishment for Ex-Blackwater Executives

    Two ex-Blackwater Worldwide executives pled guilty to one count of “failing to make and maintain records related to firearms.” They were sentenced by a federal judge to three years probation, four months house arrest with stipulations and fined five thousand dollars.

  • Blackwater Felony Charges Dropped, They Were Following CIA Orders

  • Whistleblower John Kiriakou trashes Obama’s appointee for CIA director

  • The Ben Zygier case: Questions that not even the journalists are asking…a J-Wire editorial

    Journalists routinely berate governments for maintaining secrecy about security matters. Some of them seek to penetrate that secrecy, despite the obvious risks to the lives of agents, and to the success of the operations in which they are involved, that ensue when security leaks occur. Wikileaks has been responsible for some notable examples.

    [...]

    The dark corners of the world of journalism are every bit as murky as those of the world of espionage. This should not come as a surprise. The activities of the two worlds are not unrelated. Even accepting, as I do, that Ben Zygier died by his own hand, I cannot help wondering how many other hands around the world are stained with his blood.

  • Lebanese report: Mossad killed Mughniyeh
    

    Israel’s Mossad was responsible for killing Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, an investigative report published by the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar said.

  • How the Mossad Works: The Mystery of Israel’s ‘Prisoner X’

  • “Oops…one less Arab”: Even more disturbing Instagram images from the Israeli army

  • US investigated Gaza flotilla passengers for terror ties but not Israel’s slaying of citizen, new docs show

  • AZ board investigates ex-cop who reportedly used stun gun on stepson

  • Killer robots must be stopped, say campaigners

    ‘Autonomous weapons’, which could be ready within a decade, pose grave risk to international law, claim activists

  • Navy proposes drone base at Point Mugu

    About 700 personnel and their families would move to Point Mugu under a military proposal to make Naval Base Ventura County the West Coast home for a drone aircraft.

  • United Arab Emirates set to buy U.S. Predator drones

    General Atomics of San Diego County plans to sell unarmed drones to the Persian Gulf nation, in what would be the first such sale to a non-NATO country.

  • Bahrain Opposition Meeting at Frontline Club

    Please, please, do watch the video that starts about three and a half minutes in. Absolutely horrifying yet hilarious brief account of British complicity in torture and repression in Bahrain over sixty years.

• Cablegate

  • U.S. wants Wikileaks shut down – will recruit hackers for help

    A recent report from the U.S. Attorney General shows a real interest in seeing Wikileaks and other groups like them shut down. The report also suggests the U.S. government may be recruiting and using civilian hackers as an aide in catching cyber threats early on.

  • Bradley Manning supporters stage UK events

  • Bradley Manning: 1,000 days in detention and secrecy still reigns

  • Events planned over WikiLeaks source

  • US Marine Bradley Manning Jailed Over #Wikileaks Leaks Marks 1000th Day In Prison

  • Cracking the First Amendment: USG builds conspiracy into the trial of Bradley Manning

    For over a year, in a soundproofed courtroom located in the confined wasteland of Fort Meade, the U.S. Army is prosecuting the most consequential and unprecedented leak trial of the digital age in secrecy and managed obscurity. A twenty-five year old whistleblower, Private First Class Bradley Manning is charged with indirectly aiding Al Qaeda for allegedly providing information to WikiLeaks, who published the information on the Internet. Prosecutors have recommended life in prison; but the presiding military judge has the authority to impose the death penalty.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Climatologists issue warning over Siberian permafrost thaw

• Finance

  • Family Lives Without Money—By Choice—and Thrives

  • Locksmiths and firemen refuse to aid evictions in Spain

    Locksmiths and firemen in Spain are rebelling against a wave of evictions in the economic crisis by refusing to help bailiffs open ruined homeowners’ doors to throw them out.

    “Families’ lives were being ruined and we were acting as executioners,” David Ormaechea, president of the Locksmiths Union, told AFP. “It was causing us tension and unease.”

  • Stacking the Deck: The Phony ‘Fix the Debt’ Campaign

    Who does that elevating? Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as figureheads for a fearmongering campaign to convince Americans that the deficits the United States has run throughout its history have suddenly metastasized into “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.” It is the latest incarnation of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

  • Sequestration Cuts To Education Programs Threaten To Widen Education Gap Between Rich And Poor

    The achievement gap between school districts in high-income neighborhoods and those in low-income ones is already more canyon than crack, and if $1.7 trillion in automatic sequestration cuts are allowed to go into effect on March 1, that gap could grow even wider.

  • Fashionable Economics

    Fashion in economics is fascinating. Now every financial pundit on the BBC and Sky has noticed that quantitive easing causes devaluation and inflation. Suddenly they have remembered that if you create a lot of something, it decreases its unit value.

  • The Untouchables: Masters of Fraud

    The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions for the large-scale bank lending fraud behind the financial crisis of 2008, came when the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, voiced his concern that bringing criminal charges might cause thousands of bankers to lose their jobs. This came after voluminous evidence was provided that senior bankers, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were culpably aware the mortgage securitization businesses they were running were purchasing, packaging and re-selling trillions of dollars of mortgage loans that were never intended to be paid. It also came after it was known the economic calamity caused by corrupt bankers cost tens of millions of people around the globe their jobs, homes, life savings and all hope for a better future.

  • Interview with Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia

  • ‘Citizens’ tide’ of anti-austerity protests hit Spain (PHOTOS)

    Tens of thousands of enraged protesters from all walks of life have gathered in cities across Spain to oppose ever-increasing hardship and corruption brought on by the financial crisis.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Sometimes David Brooks Gets So Mad He Can’t Write Straight

    In elite media, the way to make people know you’re mad about something is to express your disgust at the failure of both parties to “get something done.” What the “something” is doesn’t matter as much as your own conviction that the political parties have become hopelessly polarized, and that serious leaders are needed to find the Sensible Center.

• Censorship

  • Patent Offers Clues on How Google Controls the News

    News may not be very profitable anymore, but it sure is popular.

    Consider this: About half a million people pay for digital subscriptions to The New York Times, one of the few newspapers that commands a paid following online. Meanwhile, Google News, which curates primarily free content, draws 1 billion different readers every week. That is over 4,000 times the online subscriber base of the Gray Lady.

• Privacy

  • Alan F. Westin, Who Transformed Privacy Debate Before the Web Era, Dies at 83

    Alan F. Westin, a legal scholar who nearly half a century ago defined the modern right to privacy in the incipient computer age — a definition that anticipated the reach of Big Brother and helped circumscribe its limits — died on Monday in Saddle River, N.J. He was 83.

  • India’s Spies Want Data on Every BlackBerry Customer Worldwide

    There are about 79 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide—and India’s government wants to hand its spy agency data on every one of them.

    In late 2012, back when it was still officially known as Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry handsets worked with the Indian government to enable surveillance of Blackberry Messenger and Blackberry Internet Service emails. But now India’s authorities are complaining that they can only spy on communications sent between the estimated 1 million BlackBerry users in India—and they want a list of all BlackBerry handsets across the globe.

  • Blake Ross Leaves Facebook Because It’s Not Cool Anymore?

• Civil Rights

  • Merkel to delay compensation to Holocaust survivors until halt in settlements

    Israeli media sources reported that Germany is to delay compensation payments for holocaust survivors until Israel halts its settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

  • Grand Jury Refusers: Attorneys Ask the Court to Let Them Go

    Item one: Matthew Duran, Katherine Olejnik, and Maddie Pfeiffer are still in solitary confinement at the SeaTac FDC. And Kim Gordon and Jenn Kaplan, the attorneys for Duran and Olejnik, say they still haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer about why. (In response to a request from The Stranger about the three, a spokesperson for the FDC replied: “Where inmates are housed within the confines of our facility is not public information.”)

  • Montana Bill Would Give Corporations The Right To Vote

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

  • Copyrights

    • “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Scheme Starts Monday