• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

5 Unique Linux Based Products at CES 2013

January has come to an end and the highlight of the month was undoubtedly, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held annually at Las Vegas. With each new events featuring latest and greatest from the world of consumer electronics, Linux and products based on it are becoming more prominent than ever. This year’s CES was no different. Here’s a quick roundup of 5 very unique Linux based devices introduced during CES 2013.

Arctic releases a tiny $229 Linux PC designed for XBMC

Arctic is now selling a small form-factor desktop computer with an Intel Atom processor, AMD Radeon HD graphics, and a Linux-based operating system designed to support the XBMC Media Center application.

Integrating Linux into automotive systems for the long haul

Linux-Powered Pen Calls You Out For Crappy Grammar

In the digital age, we have barely any use for the common pen. What good is something that doesn’t even have WiFi? Luckily, a European startup is creating a “learning pen” to drag penmanship lessons into the 21st century.

The Lernstift digital pen vibrates to warn you that your handwriting is becoming illegible or that you’ve made a grammatical error. Its goal is to help teach kids to write using instantaneous feedback.

Though it has an actual ballpoint pen inside, it also recognizes writing done in the air, so it can be used on any surface or no surface at all. In case you need a virtual whiteboard, perhaps.

Desktop

• Linux Won the Desktop Wars a Long Time Ago

  To make my point, I’ll take us back to 2006.

  Just like now, in 2006 the FOSS press was busy at work asking, “Will this be the year for Linux on the desktop?” Let’s start by looking at what we meant by “desktop” in those days, because what we really meant was the personal computer.

• Linux Won

Server

• IBM’s New SMB Cloud-making Machines

  This week IBM released a bunch of new hardware, including 8 new Power Systems, 3 PureSystems models, and new storage technology. This is good news for small and medium businesses, because it means the same powerful hardware that powers Watson (http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/) is now available at prices designed to compete with commodity hardware from other vendors.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 297 – Megalomaniacs

• Tapper

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Development Pace Of X.Org Is On The Decline

    Donnie Berkholz presented at FOSDEM 2013 with various X.Org statistics and a look at the health of the development community. Not counting just the X.Org Server but also related components within the X.Org umbrella, the pace of development appears to be on the decline.

Applications

• GIMP 2.8.4 Released – Install Details For Linux

• Proprietary

  • SoftMaker FreeOffice: Free Alternative to Microsoft Office

  • The status of Blender

    First of all, upstream has been at least discussing how to deal with these kind of complains: while some commenters complained about leaving Gentoo because of our decision of not bumping to 2.65a (yet), with the idea that it’d be much easier to have Blender on Debian, Arch Linux or whatever else, it turns out that Gentoo was not alone having trouble with Blender, and indeed Matteo asked our help with patching at least for libav-9 support.

    For what concerns Gentoo, while I keep getting bugs requesting an update to version 2.65a, I’ve been basically closing them every time, as none seem to care about getting it right — and I really don’t want to get a crappy ebuild in, as I’d be the one taking the pieces anyway. Mostly, what we need is a version of Blender ebuild that does use CMake, but also does not use the bundled libraries for all the code we have in the system already. The main issue here is Bullet, which requires a version bump, possibly with a pre-release snapshot of 2.82, due to the patches that are applied on top of the copy that comes with Blender.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Introducing Grive

  • Batch editing your photos with Phatch

  • How to run Linux inside Windows using VirtualBox

  • How to fix Nautilus in Fedora 18

  • The Linux expect Utility

  • task-spooler – Personal job scheduler

  • How-To Reload Ubuntu Linux Laptop Webcam; Fix Without Restart

  • [How To] Install LibreOffice 4.0 In Arch Linux

  • Customise Your Ubuntu Desktop With The Unity Tweak Tool

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Fedora 18 x86_64)

  • Semi-manual LVM disk partitioning guide for Fedora 18

  • Install ImageMagick bitmap editor in Linux Mint

  • Install Hugin panorama stitching software in Linux Mint

  • Install Flareget download manager in Linux Mint

  • Ten Tips on Linux Systems Management for SysAdmins [Slideshare]

  • Advanced Job Scheduling With Cron

    The cron daemon is a core component of any Unix-like operating system. On the surface, cron is a scheduler, meant to run a command at regular intervals. However, if we dig a little deeper into the configuration options, we find that we can configure cron to be as detailed and granular as we need. If you need a script to run every seven minutes, five days a week, between the hours of 8AM and 4PM, cron has you covered.

• Games

  • Game Fever: Vector

    The story of the game is that you escape from the clutches of an opressive government that made the humans work like machines around the clock and you are that one guy who manages to escape from this horrible routine and make a run for it.

  • See you soon Cyber-Cowboy…

  • Counter Strike: Source, Closure, Psychonauts And Shank 2 Available On Steam For Linux

    After Counter-Strike 1.6 and Half-Life 1, another important game is now available in Steam for Linux: Counter-Strike: Source (CS: S), a popular first-person shooter developed by Valve.

  • Counter-Strike: Source Is Now Available on Steam for Linux

  • Carmack would be stunned by mainstream Linux gaming support

  • Carmack: Supporting Linux isn’t worth the hassle at the moment

  • Steam for Linux will have More Launch Titles Than Mac

  • Savage 2: A Tortured Soul to Arrive on Steam for Linux Soon

    Savage 2: A Tortured Soul, a game developed and published by the S2 Games, LLC studio, will be launched on Steam for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Akademy 2013 Call for Presentations and Registration

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Color Calibration Survey Results

  • GNOME Session 3.7.4 Now Allows Empty Sessions

    The GNOME developers behind the GNOME Session application, which is part of the GNOME desktop environment, have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the 3.7.4 development release.

    GNOME Session 3.7.4 (yes, 3.7.4 and not 3.7.5) is part of the upcoming GNOME 3.7.5 desktop environment, a development version towards the highly anticipated GNOME 3.8 release, which should see the light of day sometime at the end of March 2013.

Distributions

• SolusOS 1.2

  SolusOS is a new Debian-based distro that uses the GNOME 2.3 desktop. SolusOS comes with such core applications as Firefox, VLC, and LibreOffice. It’s a relatively easy way to get both Debian and a GNOME 2 desktop in one, convenient package.

• The Impossible Quest for the Most Popular Linux Distro

  Which Linux operating systems are the most popular among home and small business users? Which Linux desktop is the best choice for enterprise users? Questions like these are meaningless and unanswerable, even for Linux developers. “Measuring Linux adoption … has always been — and will likely always be — a difficult task, due to the lack of empirical data,” said Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org.

• New Releases

  • Linpus 1.9.1 (Lite)

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat CEO: Jobs are coming

    Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says it’s too soon to pinpoint the number of jobs his company will create in the next year — but jobs are coming.

    The open source company’s chief information officer Lee Congdon has been quoted as saying Red Hat plans to add 1,000 jobs worldwide.

    “I think somebody just threw that number out there,” Whitehurst said. “We’re in the middle of our budget process, so it’s impossible to answer that, whether it’s 800 or 1,500. I don’t know.”

  • Fedora

    • New Anaconda – a retrospective

      During FUDCon, I got to wondering: with all the rewriting and refactoring and fixing we’ve done on anaconda in the past couple years, is there any of the old code left anymore?

    • We need your Fedora 19 Artwork / Wallpaper Ideas

• Debian Family

  • Using a variant of Debian’s Iceweasel that keeps pace with Firefox

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • The Ubuntu smartphone cometh — to the Galaxy Nexus, specifically

        Perhaps most interestingly, the “superphones” will be able to dock to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and deliver a PC-like experience. That’s a lot of computing power in a little package — the Galaxy Nexus, to be exact, one of the current flagships of the Android fleet.

      • Do You Work For Canonical?

        It asks me if I work for Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux (for the uninitiated). I don’t. Not a company I am either for or against to any great degree. They do some great stuff I like and other stuff I don’t so much They know how to ignite some angry beards though, which are a bit like Angry Birds only more hairy. Just thought this was quirky enough to share with you.

      • Ubuntu Vs BlackBerry 10: Would Ubuntu Banish BlackBerry Z10 From The Mind’s Of Consumers?

      • Ubuntu Invites Phone Makers to Cheat on Google

        A mobile version of the world’s most widely used Linux operating system shows promise, but it will face stiff competition.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi to get camera module soon

  The Raspberry Pi foundation has signalled that a camera module for the device could be available in a matter of weeks.

• Phones

  • Android

    • comScore: Android holds strong at 53.4% of the mobile market

    • New Google Nexus 7 tablet to use Qualcomm’s S4 Pro processor

    • Smartphone operating systems: The rise of Android, the fall of Windows

    • 5 Wishes for Android 5.0

    • Android powered a third of all mobile phones shipped in Q4 2012

    • Nexus 4 Owners Estimate One Million Handsets Have Shipped Since November 2012 Launch

    • Nexus 4 Owners Estimate One Million Handsets Have Shipped Since November 2012 Launch

      Last month we reported how Android enthusiasts on the XDA Developer forum had worked out a method to estimate the smartphone’s production run based on each device’s IMEI number. Going into the end of 2012 the estimate suggested LG had produced about 400,000 devices in total. Now, according to a post on the same forum by member draugaz, Nexus 4 production has passed the millionth device.

      Google declined to comment on Nexus 4 sales figures when contacted by TechCrunch but a source close to the company indicated that Mountain View is very happy with the take up so far.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • ASUS Planning 7″ Ultra-Budget Tablet Powered By Intel Z2420 Processor

    We know ASUS is king of the low-priced tablet market, given the popularity of the Nexus 7, but it seems that they just can’t help themselves from going lower and lower. They recently launched the 7″ MeMo Pad in Europe for about $150, and now there is new talk of an Intel-powered “ultra-budget” tablet.

Beyond Cost-Cutting: Why Open Source Software Is Gaining Traction on Wall Street

Financial firms need to take an active role in adopting and governing OSS’s broader usage, according to Black Duck Software’s CEO.

BitRock’s BitNami enables OS X to run popular open source CMS’s

OS X has a massive following of web developers who constantly used Linux based web server stacks to run their CMS stacks – it’s actually a pretty common trend at the moment. Within Apple’s OS X App Store, users can now find four of the most popular CMS’s that run inside BitNami – Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and a generic MAMP stack (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

Time for the financial industry to contribute more to open source projects

Open source pioneers next generation chat and forums

Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: “Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be”.

Netflix Promises To Make Its Open Source Cloud Management Tools More Portable

Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.

Events

• Berners-Lee visit: Linux Australia pays up

  Berners-Lee was reportedly paid in excess of $200,000 for his visit.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Switching to Chrom(ium)

    For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla’s Firefox was my default browser.

SaaS/Big Data

• MariaDB living in interesting times

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0

• LibreOffice Gets A Brand New Home

  The team has revamped the LibreOffice.org, bidding goodbye to the ‘boring’ and aged design. The new design is jazzy and reflects how aggressive the ‘new’ LibreOffice community is, shedding the old brand image it inherited from the doomed OpenOffice. This change also gives a hint that the UI of this popular open source office suite may also get the same make-over

• LibreOffice 4.0 Has Arrived

• LibreOffice 4: A new, better open-source office suite

  LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.

• Highlights of LibreOffice 4.0

  With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.

• LibreOffice 4 released

• LibreOffice 4 Sweeter Than Ever

  I love the new LibreOffice 4 even though I’ve only kissed her once.

• New LibreOffice turns up the heat on Microsoft

  Today saw the release of a landmark update of LibreOffice, the community successor to OpenOffice.org that’s developed by TDF (The Document Foundation) and its global volunteer community. LibreOffice version 4 looks fresh, includes new enterprise features, and offers improved performance.

  TDF is a nonprofit that allows a wide range of corporate sponsors to join with individual volunteers to build, localize, and test LibreOffice. I spent some time with core developer Michael Meeks of Suse to understand the highlights of the new release.

CMS

• Good or Bad? The Verdict on Open Source CMS

  We’re going to tip our hand here at the start by admitting that the question is unanswerable. The answer depends on who you are and why you’re asking. This is sort of like the question, “What’s better — chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream?” There’s no right answer. It all depends on whom you’re asking. Unfortunately, the open vs. closed debate engenders more negative emotions than choosing ice cream flavors.

BSD

• What the future holds for PC-BSD

  PC-BSD is a multi-purpose distribution of FreeBSD. The last stable release is PC-BSD 9.1. Development and releases tend to be slow and infrequent, and it does not get as much press coverage as Linux distributions.

  I have been reviewing its major releases since this website was launched, though I’m yet to review the last stable edition.

Licensing

• Law Review Helps to Keep Your Practices on the FOSS Fairway

  Not only are open source applications and platforms continuing to raise their profiles, but many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so. All of which means that it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators.

Openness/Sharing

• The Next Generation of Open Source Smart Grid

  Open source software — code that’s free for anyone to use, as long as they share what they’re doing with it — plays a small, but growing, role in the smart grid. Examples include OpenADR, a Berkeley Labs-California Energy Commission-backed standard for automating demand response, and OpenPDC, a Tennessee Valley Authority’s Hadoop-based data management tool for transmission grid synchrophasor data.

• The Death Star Ain’t Dead Yet: Open Source Death Star Has A Kickstarter

  A White House petition to build the death star from Star Wars received the 25,000 necessary signatures to warrant an official response. The official White House response was essentially a no, citing the estimated $852 quadrillion dollar cost of building a death star as the reason. Hey, that’s only 13,000 times the entire world’s yearly GDP and a redonkulous amount of steel. No biggie.

• Open Data

  • International Open Data Hackathon Wiki now live

    The Open Data Day wiki (sans logo, so a little rough around the edges) is now live and ready for action.

• Open Access/Content

  • Darrell Issa Praises Aaron Swartz, Internet Freedom At Memorial

    One of the staunchest Republicans in Congress, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), attended a Capitol Hill memorial on Monday for progressive activist Aaron Swartz, praising the fallen Internet icon’s political courage and saying he has common ground with much of Swartz’s legacy.

    “He and I probably would have found ourselves at odds with lots of decisions, but never with the question of whether information was in fact a human right,” Issa said at the memorial.

    Swartz, who was one of the earliest minds behind Reddit, took his own life in January after fighting federal hacking charges for two years. He had long been an advocate for both an open Internet and the democratization of knowledge. Prosecutors pursued him for downloading millions of academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR, but Swartz had devoted much of his activist energy to liberating information. At age 14, he helped develop the Creative Commons license, an alternative to copyright that allows works to be shared freely, so long as they are not used for profit. The license is used heavily by Flickr and many other websites. Later, Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public.

  • ‘Open source’ texts best for poor students

• Open Hardware

  • One step closer to an open-source assault rifle: A 30-round 3D-printed magazine

    Defense Distributed, the project that aims to release an open-source, print-it-yourself assault rifle, has succeeded in 3D-printing a high-capacity AR-15 magazine, dubbed Cuomo. The magazine has so far survived the firing of 342 rounds — 227 of which were in full auto mode.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Open-source data contradicts Feinstein on ‘single-digit’ civilian drone deaths

• Senator Warns CIA Against Lying About Civilians Killed in Drone Strikes

  The CIA’s biggest ally in Congress for its targeted killing program is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But there’ll be hell to pay at Langley if Feinstein learns the CIA is misrepresenting how many civilians its lethal Predator and Reaper drones kill, she indicated to Danger Room on Friday.

• The Warrior King

• One of Just Four Overseers on Drone Targeting Believes First Amendment Protected Activities Merit Execution

  While the Gang of Four do not have access to the CIA’s kill list (and therefore did not know whether Samir Khan was on it before his death), they are the only people outside the Executive Branch who had, before today, seen the government’s rationale for killing Anwar al-Awlaki (and DOJ still has 8 memos on targeted killing to turn over). Thus, up until today, the Gang of Four has been the only outside review on that killing, 16 months after Awlaki’s death.

• Challenging NDAA Indefinite Detention, Second Panel

• Can the Military Detain US Citizens? Appeals Court Hears Arguments in NDAA Lawsuit

• John Brennan Decimates the Logic of Drone Program

  …can’t (or refuses to) say whether waterboarding is torture because he is not a lawyer…

• Brennan and Kiriakou, Drones and Torture

  John Brennan and John Kiriakou worked together years ago, but their careers have dramatically diverged. Brennan is now on track to head the CIA, while Kiriakou is headed off to prison. Each of their fates is tied to the so-called war on terror, which under President George W. Bush provoked worldwide condemnation. President Barack Obama rebranded the war on terror innocuously as “overseas contingency operations,” but, rather than retrench from the odious practices of his predecessor, Obama instead escalated. His promotion of Brennan, and his prosecution of Kiriakou, demonstrate how the recent excesses of U.S. presidential power are not transient aberrations, but the creation of a frightening new normal, where drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, assassination and indefinite detention are conducted with arrogance and impunity, shielded by secrecy and beyond the reach of law.

• Here’s who was arrested producing the most valuable part of the Brennan hearing

• Lethal Force Must Be Last Resort

  But even if capture is not feasible at the moment, if the suspect is not about to attack us, it is possible that capture will become feasible later. Self defense requires that lethal force be used only as a last resort; the Obama administration’s redefinition of “imminence” permits it to be used as a first resort. Is it any wonder that the administration has killed hundreds of suspected terrorists outside Afghanistan, but captured almost none?

• WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT DRONES

  For starters, as American officials confirmed, the attack was not carried out by the Yemeni Air Force but, rather, by the United States. The U.S. had launched a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles from a ship off the coast. (As far as we know, most of the attacks in Yemen since then have been carried out with drones.) As was later revealed in documents released by Wikileaks, American and Yemeni officials had reached a secret agreement that allowed the U.S. to take action against suspected terrorists. The Yemeni President told General David Petraeus, then the head of CENTCOM, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”

• 10 Questions for John Brennan’s Confirmation Hearing

• Whistleblowers Challenge NDAA 2012 Indefinite Detainment Provision: Daily Whistleblower News

  A lawsuit challenging a provision in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which gives the federal government the right to indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of terrorism-related activities, sans charge or trial – was back in court yesterday. Last December, GAP filed an amicus curiae brief in the lawsuit challenging the overbroad and vague provisions, which specifically, as the brief states, “greatly expands [sic] the Executive’s military detention authority,” which allows the federal government to indefinitely detain American citizens, such as those who: a) “substantially supported” groups engaged in hostilities against the U.S., b) substantially supported “associated forces” engaged in such hostilities, or c) have “directly supported” such hostilities.

• Fox’s Gretchen Carlson Questions Drone Uproar: ‘Are You Against Actually Killing Terrorists?’

  Uproar has been evident on both sides of the aisle following the recent news about President Obama‘s drone program. Not everyone, however, has been critical. Including Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson, who questioned some of the outrage during this morning’s show.

• John Brennan, Unplugged

  As a special service to emptywheel readers, I am going to provide an abridged version of John Brennan’s answers to Additional Prehearing Questions in advance of his confirmation hearing on Thursday.

• The Weak Justification for Keeping the Targeted Killing Memos Secret

  But, Wyden had been requesting “secret legal opinions.” That suggests the existence of more than one memo. (Marcy Wheeler wrote in a recent post on how the release of the memos is being misreported.)

• The Jihad That Wasn’t

  Same goes for Islamist radical attacks on American interests overseas – it’s just not happening to the degree that our favorite jihad hunters here in the U.S have been ranting about for the last 12 years. Turns out that most of the terror attacks occurring in the world today, according to 2012 Global Terrorism Index, are happening to someone else, and in many cases associated with conditions created by western military interventions.

  According to that report, the top places for terror remain Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where their civilians are dying, not ours. In fact, Iraq is by far the worst. But no American has died there since November, while more than 200 Iraqis have been killed since Jan. 1 in violence perpetuated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorists who are the direct outgrowth of the U.S occupation of that country in the last decade.

• Jon Stewart slams Obama’s hypocrisy over classified drone memo

  However, Stewart noted that the definition of “imminent threat” in the leaked document wasn’t particularly imminent.

• QUESTIONS JOHN BRENNAN SHOULD FACE TODAY

• Watch Two Far-Left MSNBC Hosts Actually Support DOJ Drone Memo

• Police surveillance against police turns up routine abuse, leading to the termination of an entire Miami PD unit

  Miami police officers learned that lesson the hard way after the internal affairs division, acting on an unknown tip, turned common police surveillance tools against police officers and uncovered serious abuse of power. The investigators used surveillance cameras and GPS trackers to monitor a unit’s behavior, finding that instead of responding to calls for service, officers were making out with their girlfriends, drinking coffee, going shopping, and spending hours just hanging out.

• Newspapers accused of ‘shameful’ complicity for hiding existence of secret U.S. drone base

• The Historic Report on Recent CIA Abuses That You’re Not Allowed to See

  Right now, the Senate Intelligence Committee possesses a 6,000-page report on detention and interrogation techniques used by the CIA in the War on Terrorism. As yet, it remains classified, but White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan has a copy, and at his confirmation hearing to be CIA director, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked if he’s read it, or at least the 300-page summary.

• ‘Brennan the perfect guy to head CIA… if its job is to create more terrorists’

• Uzbekistan: Report Ties Uzbekistan to CIA Black Ops

• Iran releases suspected CIA spy

  Slovak national accused of spying for US set free after ‘difficult and complicated’ bilateral negotiations

• U.S. excluded Israel from secret CIA terror interrogation program

  The report was issued on Feb. 4 in wake of a ban on Israel by a new U.S.-sponsored counter-insurgency forum. Officials acknowledged that opposition by Muslim states, particularly Turkey, prevented the attendance of Israel.

• White House cites threat to Israel in explaining decision not to arm Syria’s rebels

  The White House on Friday defended its decision not to endorse a CIA plan to arm the Syrian rebels, saying it was worried that U.S. weapons could “fall into the wrong hands” and worsen the situation in the civil war-torn country.

  In his remarks, Press Secretary Jay Carney specifically mentioned danger to “our ally Israel” as one of the reasons President Barack Obama rejected providing lethal aid to rebels fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

• Imagine: No Israel Lobby

  I’m in good company when I contemplate a world without AIPAC. Upon his election as prime minister in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin told the lobby that Israel would be better off without it and that it did more harm than good. He wanted AIPAC out of the way because he was planning a peace initiative with the Palestinians and knew that AIPAC would try (as it did) to thwart his efforts.

• Drone protesters disrupt Senate hearing for nominated CIA director John Brennan

  Nominated to head the CIA, John Brennan told a protest-disrupted Senate confirmation hearing that every US drone strike ordered is considered in depth, and that he no longer sure that waterboarding ever garnered “valuable” information.

• Anti-drone protesters temporarily derail CIA Director confirmation hearing

  As Brennan took the floor to begin his opening statement, a woman in the audience clutching a sign that said “Brennan = drone killing,” launched into an only occasionally comprehensible tirade about drones, torture, and protecting soldiers. Feinstein promptly ordered the police to remove the woman who – clearly eager to make her 15 seconds in the spotlight count – continued hollering her discontents as she was escorted away from the hearing. As she left, several audience members lifted their hands in what appeared to be a gesture of solidarity. Feinstein then let it be known that she’d be happy to clear the room if the audience failed to control itself.

  As he began singing the praises of his wife Kathy, a second protester began shouting abuses about a 16-year-old who was killed in a drone strike.

• Protesters disrupt CIA director nomination hearing

• Malaysia’s shocking collaboration with the CIA

  Lawyers for Liberty is shocked and outraged at Malaysia’s involvement…

• Report: UK Warned – CIA Will Access All Government Data

  Britain’s ambitious plans to store all government data on the so-called G-Cloud have led to warnings from the European Union that security will be compromised now that U.S. intelligence agencies have the legal right to survey all data held on U.S. owned Cloud services.
  At least four U.S. companies are involved in the U.K. government’s G-Cloud project which Whitehall hopes will slash costs and “deliver fundamental changes in the way the public sector procures and operates.”
  Eventually, it is hoped the G-Cloud will hold the bulk of State data in addition to that of schools, charities, the BBC and police, even the Bank of England.

• CIA and Samsung Have Similar Taste in Cutting-Edge Tech

  The investment is an interesting one for Samsung, but even more interesting for throwing light on Cloudant’s other investors. Which include, as it turns out, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund, headquartered on the 11th floor of a nondescript office building in Arlington, Va.

• Protesters hold up hearing for Obama’s CIA director nominee (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

• Code Pink protesters interrupt CIA Director-nominee John Brennan confirmation hearing

  The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to confirm John Brennan as the next director of the CIA was briefly suspended on Thursday after anti-war Code Pink protesters repeatedly interrupted the session.

• Report reveals Zimbabwe worked with CIA

• CIA Orchestrates Pre-Election Campaign in Paraguay

  …maintain control over the Paraguayan government.

• Paraguay presidential hopeful Oviedo dies in crash

• American Military Power

  Interview with William Blum…knowledge of US military and CIA interventions

• CIA nominee says he objected to torture

  He described as “reprehensible” the use of waterboarding on detainees, which simulates drowning, and said it should never have been carried out by the CIA, but he stopped short of describing it as torture.

• The Assassination Bureau: the CIA and Zero Dark Thirty

  The cover of the Feb. 4 issue of Time features Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, and dubs her new film ‘the year’s most controversial movie’ in its headline. The article inside makes an even bigger claim, calling Zero Dark Thirty “the most politically divisive motion picture in memory.” Though Bigelow has made a point in interviews to condemn torture as “reprehensible”, her depiction of torture in the Oscar-nominated dramatic thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has created a firestorm, and could create some frissons at the 85th Academy Awards telecast later this month.

• Ireland facilitated CIA’s secret detention, rendition and interrogation of suspects after 9/11

  Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed that former United States ambassador James Kenny had noted in 2006 that the Irish Government “acted to ensure continued US military transits at Shannon in the face of public criticism.”

• US drones kill nine in Pakistan: officials

• US drones, bombing kill 25 in Pakistan tribal regions

  “Six drones were hovering in the sky at the time of the attack. One drone fired two missiles at a house,” a security official in Miran Shah said.

• US drones kill nine in Miranshah: officials

• US drones kill hundreds of Afghan children: UN

• UN Report Says U.S. Attacks Kill Hundreds Of Children

  The Committee on the Rights of the Child says the casualties were “due notably to [a] reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force.”

• UN: US air raids kill hundreds of Afghan children

• A license to kill Americans: no judge, no jury

  Have you heard? George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are up to their old tricks.

  It wasn’t so long ago that they cited congressional authorization for the war on terror, passed by Congress one week after September 11, 2001, to justify their use of rendition, torture and widespread wiretapping. Now Bush and Cheney are claiming that the same law gives them unlimited authority to use unmanned drones to kill American citizens overseas without a trial.

  Gotcha! As much as Democrats might like to blame Bush and Cheney for America’s vastly expanded drone warfare, it’s not the previous occupants of the White House who are sending out the drones. It’s today’s. The Obama administration made its case for lethal use of drones in a white paper provided by the Justice Department to key members of Congress last summer and leaked this week to NBC News.

• Obama’s license to kill by drone

  If you really want Washington’s chattering classes to pay attention to something, an old saying goes, leak it to the media.

• US drone attacks unacceptable, Jilani tells Senate body

• Drone-speak lexicon: from ‘Bugsplat’ to ‘Targeted killing’

  …”extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping) and “enhanced interrogation” (torture) are now part of the political language.

Cablegate

• Another Iranian bank released by the EU – Wikileaks here as well

  Last week I posted on the Bank Mellat case where an Iranian Bank succeeded in persuading the General Court to unfreeze its assets from orders made by EU institutions. The Bank Saderat case is virtually identical, and annulment was duly granted by the General Court. But it is troubling that the EU Council should go so wrong in wielding its draconian powers more than once. It does rather support the suspicions of the Bank (common to this and the Bank Mellat case) that pressure was brought to bear on the Council ultimately emanating from the US – hence the Wikileaks cables again – such that the EU did not robustly analyse the assertions made to them before making the orders. Basic errors were made again, and, as will emerge, the EU had no evidence for much of what it said.

Finance

• Anonymous Plans To Hack Goldman Sachs, Days After Federal Reserve Hack

  According to Anonymous’ Twitter account, the hacktivist group is planning on shutting down Goldman Sachs’ Facebook and Twitter page on Feb. 14 to express their hatred of the financial behemoth. The account tweeted out the request to their 869,000-plus Twitter followers on Thursday.

• Millionaires Are–or Perhaps Aren’t–Leaving California

  The early headline on a New York Times story (2/7/13) by Adam Nagourney was, “Millionaires Consider Leaving California Over Taxes.” At some point they changed the headline, probably because there’s nothing in the article that would support it.

• Afghan Corruption Soars: Bribes Twice as Much as Tax Revenue

  Afghanistan’s near-legendary levels of corruption continue to worsen, with the latest UN report putting the bribery industry at $3.9 billion, twice what the Afghan government actually collects in above-the-table revenue.

• Liars, Thieves and Conmen: Who Really Runs Britain? [BLOG]

  There seems to be a consensus of opinion that our Members of Parliament are not that truthful which is probably why I have heard so many people express the view, “Of course Chris Huhne lied, he’s a politician”.

  That the people who make the laws we have to live by are flat out lying doesn’t seem to overly bother us any more and we just seem to accept the fact as just something they do. That strikes me as strange.

  It wasn’t that long ago that a significant amount of politicians were revealed to be fraudulently abusing the expenses system to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of pounds and after an initial show of public anger, it has been conveniently forgotten – much to the relief of the right honourable Members of Parliament who were claiming for such things as toilet seats and duck houses.

• So God made a banker

  And on the eighth day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need someone who can flip this for a quick buck.”

• Anonymous reveals ample Fed access, FBI opens criminal investigation

  Anonymous published a file revealing significant access to the Federal Reserve’s internal files and servers; amid accusations of inaction and non-transparency the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into Sunday’s bank hack.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Obamacare creator leaves White House job for lobbying role with Big Pharma

  A key figure involved in designing the president’s signature health insurance mandate referred to as Obamacare has left her role at the White House to work for one of the very companies profiting off the bill she helped create.

• Bill O’Reilly and the ‘Epidemic of Disrespect’

Censorship

• US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets

• Is This the Secret U.S. Drone Base in Saudi Arabia?

• Russian Lawmakers Aim at Foreign Cars, Films and Schooling in Patriotic Purge

  The members of Russia’s lower house of Parliament — which last year passed so many harsh new laws with so little debate that commentators compared it to a “rabid printer” — returned to work last week as the standard-bearers for President Vladimir V. Putin’s brand of patriotism.

Privacy

• War on Web: UK govt to use ‘black box’ spy devices to monitor internet

• John Brennan And Warrantless Wiretapping

  It’s been all drones and all John Brennan all the time this week: ever since Michael Isikoff dropped his bombshell about an administration white paper justifying targeted killing on Monday, everyone’s been talking about flying death robots. Last night the White House announced that it would allow Congress access to the Office of Legal Counsel memos that lay out why it thinks it can kill American citizens. Today John Brennan gets grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

• Walton appointed presiding judge of FISA Court

  U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has been appointed presiding judge of a secretive special court that oversees warrants for government surveillance in spy and terrorism cases.

• Obama to Give DOJ Targeted Killing Memo to Congressional Intel Committees

• 5 questions for John Brennan’s confirmation hearing

• What would President Eisenhower say about our military-surveillance industrial complex?

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower is remembered for issuing the first screaming alarm about the growing power of what he called the military-industrial complex. His farewell address in 1961 is largely remembered for this major milestone, but it’s worth listening to the entire fifteen minute speech to see how directly his warning applies to us today, in the 21st century.

Civil Rights

• The population decline of Black Jews in Israel

  Ethiopian Jews are challenged daily by white Israelis for not being “real” Jews. About a year ago a national television station in Israel broadcasted a story of an Ethiopian family that sparked protests across the country among Ethiopian Jews living in Israel. The story took place in the southern city of Kiryat Malachi where a family with an Ethiopian background struggled to buy an apartment and soon discovered that many tenants in the city have signed agreements not to sell or rent properties to Ethiopians (3). The WikiLeaks cable adds that 50% of Ethiopian parents in Israel are not equipped to support their children stay in school. As a result, according to the cable, in 2009 roughly 26% of the children dropped out of school at early ages.

• Fair Trials International Disappointed by Home Secretary’s Announcement on Extradition Amendments

  The Home Secretary has published her long-awaited proposals to change to the way extradition decisions are taken in the UK. The proposed amendments introduce only one new safeguard against unjust extradition, relating to forum.

• “Most Transparent Administration Ever” Is Still Not

  For years, the Obama administration refused to make public the Justice Department’s classified legal opinions on the “targeted killing” of terrorism suspects. But Wednesday’s news that the administration will let some members of Congress see the memos explaining the administration’s legal justification for killing American citizens does not mean this administration is suddenly “the most transparent administration ever.” In fact, forget classified memos: The administration can’t even get the Freedom of Information Act right. On Monday, two congressmen demanded the Obama administration answer for its failure to improve the public’s access to information through FOIA, under which American citizens can request government documents.

• Brennan: “Perhaps” Classification System is Outdated

• The NDAA Appeal Hearing You Won’t Read About in the MSM

  Yesterday, was the appeal hearing in one of the most important cases going on in the country: challenging the National Defense Authorization Act’s (NDAA) pernicious provision for indefinite preventive detention by the military.

  In September, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest struck down the indefinite detention language as an unconstitutional First Amendment violation of free speech rights. Government lawyers quickly made an emergency appeal of the ruling because our military is already doing this, and now could be held in contempt of court.

• Questions for John Brennan That Won’t Get Asked

• President Obama gives himself permission to kill

• Court Hears Arguments On US Government’s Ability To Indefinitely Detain Citizens

• Michael Moore Asks Americans to Stand Up to Obama, Back NDAA Suit

• U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Hears Arguments in NDAA Battle (We Barely Could)

• Justice Dept. Argues Appeal of NDAA Ruling

• Whistleblowers Challenge NDAA 2012 Indefinite Detainment Provision: Daily Whistleblower News

• Activist Heavyweights Convene Against NDAA

  After a court hearing over the 2012 NDAA in Manhattan on Wednesday, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges appeared on a panel of activists who are suing the Obama administration over its attempt to claim the right to indefinitely hold U.S. citizens in military detention.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • House Intelligence Committee Plans To Re-introduce CISPA

    The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Dutch Ruppersberger, stated that he plans to re-introduce CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) along with Mike Rogers, the current Intelligence Chairman this year.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

LPI participates in CeBIT 2013 Poland Partner Events

Arctic debuts Linux-powered XBMC system

Arctic has introduced a Linux-powered system specifically designed to run XBMC’s popular Media Center app.

Linux: What it means

It was deep in the heart of 1996 and I’d had enough of Windows. After a bit of Alta Vista searching, I discovered something that would completely change my life. That something? Linux. It was Caldera Linux 1.0 and it was a challenge. You’re probably assuming I was studying computer science in the dank basement of some elite university (maybe writing my dissertation on super computers or UNIX). Wrong. I was an actor and a writer. Strange bedfellows, but I was also a big fan of the underdog. That was enough to spur on a curiosity that would, eventually, land me a gig writing with Techrepublic. At the time, there were few tech writers who had a firm enough grasp of the Linux operating system. And honestly, I got lucky. How? I connected with a guru. His name was Mark and he introduced me to AfterStep and the command line. Had it not been for that connection, I probably would have given up on trying to keep my modem consistently connected to the network. With Mark’s help, I wrote my first bash script that kept watch on my system to retain my network connection. Luck? Maybe. But I like to chalk it up to fate.

Desktop

• Google Working On Touchscreen Retina Plus Chromebook?

• Leaked video: Google-designed Chromebook Pixel with touchscreen and 2560 x 1700 resolution

Server

• IBM Powers Up Server Lineup

  IBM’s Power server architecture has typically been thought of as a technology for really large enterprises and huge data center deployments. IBM now sees a wider deployment future for Power.

Kernel Space

• Developers Still Pursue Linux Kernel With LLVM/Clang

• Google Pushes “Project PIANO” Into Coreboot

  Project PIANO was merged today into the Coreboot code-base, which is for mainline TianoCore boot support.

  TianoCore is the open-source implementation of UEFI from Intel. TianoCore itself doesn’t provide for any hardware initialization support but does complement Coreboot quite nicely for completing the stack.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta Driver For Linux Released

    An AMD Catalyst “13.2 Beta 3″ driver has surfaced on the Internet for Linux users relying upon this binary blob for graphics acceleration on Radeon and FirePro graphics hardware.

  • Geometry Shaders For Mesa Not Yet Ready

    While there’s been early code available for several months, Mesa support for OpenGL Geometry Shaders still isn’t ready for merging into mainline Mesa.

    While Mesa 9.1 has picked up many features over the past six months, OpenGL Geometry Shaders won’t be found in the release due out by late February.

  • Graphics Card Support For QEMU/KVM Comes Closer

  • The Hawaii Desktop Readies To Dance On Wayland

    With the Green Island Compositor, the Hawaii Desktop is looking to be the very first Wayland-friendly desktop environment for Linux.

  • Mesa 9.1 Delivers Faster Intel OpenGL Graphics

Applications

• Is Last.FM’s New Linux App A Hit?

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft Considering A Linux Version Of Office In 2014

    According to ExtremeTech, Microsoft is taking a “meaningful look” at releasing a full Linux port of Office in 2014. That would be quite something and it makes perfect sense. It’s apparent that Office, as proprietary software, will not regain the luster of its enterprise glory years. Open sourcing Office gives the company a window, no pun intended, into collaborating with a developer community outside the .NET universe.

  • Do Linux Users Want a Native Version of Microsoft Office?

    In case you haven’t noticed, rumors are circulating around the web that Microsoft has plans to release a version of its Office suite of productivity applications for Linux. The rumor appears to have gotten started at a Linux conference in Germany, and Microsoft has not said anything about it. The question is, do Linux users really want Office?

    This latest rumor about Office joins other ones that claim that versions of Office for the iPad, iPhone and Android are imminent. While Microsoft remains mum, there are some users of all these platforms who would welcome a version of Office for them, and there are businesses standardized on Linux and allowing Android on smartphones that would likely buy licenses for Office on these platforms.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • [How To] Install KDE 4.10 in Kubuntu 12.10

  • How to dual-boot Fedora 18 and Windows 8 on 1 HDD, with GRUB in a PBR

  • Linux tip: Using multiple terminals with byobu

  • A quick GNU R tutorial to statistical models and graphics

• Wine or Emulation

  • Android and Linux users enjoy Wine

    Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows “Apps” on Linux, Mac OSX, BSD and soon Android on ARM devices.

    I reported that you can now run an Android operating system on Windows x86 devices so I guess it is fair that Android users can run Windows programs (not the Operating system) on their devices.

  • John Carmack claims porting games to Linux is not commercially viable

  • John Carmack: “Improving Wine better than native ports”

• Games

  • Id Software games unlikely to come to Linux

    Id Software technical guru John Carmack has said he doesn’t expect to provide Linux support for any future games.

  • Ouya Coming in June, and Game Development Ramps Up

    Although there are a lot of people saying that the Android-based Ouya gaming console will be hindered by not having cutting-edge games available for it as it launches, the console continues to generate major buzz, and has been seen in videos all around the web. Ouya is billed as “a new kind of video game console” and first became famous for drawing millions of dollars in crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • QupZilla: A Web-Browser That Supports Qt5

    QupZilla is a not often spoke of web-browser that is written in Qt and supports Qt5 while using the WebKit rendering engine.

  • Calligra 2.6 released, improvements and new writing app

    The Calligra team announced today the availability of Calligra 2.6 – the latest release of the office suite. While there have been feature enhancements and bug fixes like usual, this release introduces a new app called Calligra Author. It is designed keeping in mind a distraction free writing mode which is basically a word processing tool but designed specifically for activities like book writing.

  • Calligra 2.6 office suite gains e-book tool

    The Calligra developers have released version 2.6 of their office suite for the KDE desktop and its mobile-focused Calligra Active version, which is QML-based. Calligra 2.6 is the first production version of the modular office package that includes Calligra Author, a writing and editing tool specifically for e-book creation. With Calligra Author, the developers hope to meet the needs of groups like novel authors who want to write long texts but do not need complicated formatting. The tool is also supposed to take into account the unique aspects of e-books.

  • KDE 4.10 Review: Time To Switch To KDE

    The KDE team has announced the release of much awaited 4.10, which caused some ruckus within the Arch community. This is an important release for the KDE user-base as it not only brings massive performance enhancements but also introduces many new features.

    KDE keeps the desktop relevant and powerful as it doesn’t force an interface designed for phones or tablets on desktop users. KDE offers different GUI environments for different form factores. There is Plasma Desktop for desktop computers,Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and “Plasma Active” for smartphones and tablets. So a desktop or tablet user doesn’t have to make any compromise.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Boxes 3.7.5 Brings Further Improved Usability

    Yet another development version of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.8, a sophisticated application to easily and quickly access remote or virtual systems on the controversial and popular GNOME 3 desktop environment, has been announced last evening, February 5.

  • GNOME Online Accounts 3.7.5 Enables ownCloud by Default

    GNOME Online Accounts 3.7.5 has been released earlier today, February 6, and it brings fixes for 8 bugs found in previous releases, as well as numerous updated translations.

Distributions

• What’s the best linux distro for a celeron d (478) based pc?

• New Releases

  • Frugalware 1.8 (Cinna) released

  • Webconverger 17.0

• Screenshots

  • Bio-Linux 7.0.5 Screenshots

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Expands Product-Specific Technical Support Offerings

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 18 arrives for ARM

      Fedora 18 was published a month ago and now it is available in versions for the ARM architectures known as ARMv5tel and ARMv7hl in the Linux space. The Fedora Project is providing pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3).

    • Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) review

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu OS smartphones to hit stores in October

        The open-source operating system for PCs and TVs is making its way to mobile. Look for the first phones to arrive in the fall.

      • Ubuntu smartphones will begin shipping in October, Canonical founder says

      • Ubuntu phone launch set for early October 2013 ‘in two large geographic markets’

      • Ubuntu Phone OS handsets will hit shelves in October

      • Ubuntu PC-Phone Hybrids to Arrive This October

      • Ubuntu smartphones set for October launch in two markets

      • Canonical expects Ubuntu-powered smartphones to hit retail in October

      • Ubuntu OS smartphones to be available starting October: Report

      • Report: Ubuntu smartphones launching this fall

      • Ubuntu Powered Smartphones Coming This October

      • Ubuntu Smartphone Shipping in October

        Smartphones running the open source Ubuntu operating system will be available to customers beginning in October 2013, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd. Canonical provides services for corporate customers using Ubuntu open source software. Application developers will have access to the smaartphone operating system, which is optimized for the Galaxy Nexus handset manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co. , in late February.

      • Ubuntu for mobile: a Linux OS fights to break into the smartphone market

        One of Linux’s biggest players is heading to mobile. The new Ubuntu has a gesture heavy interface and will be entering the the market amid a number of mature operating systems. We have reservations about how it will fair in the crowded mobile market but are interested to see how Canonical’s open-source OS develops. Follow along here as Canonical works to bring mobile Ubuntu into consumers’ hands.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi on a diet: New skimpier, cheaper model on sale

  An even cheaper Raspberry Pi has gone on sale in Europe with less stuff on it so the tiny ARM-compatible Brit-puter can consume even less power.

  The Model A Pi was touted during the hype-gasm surrounding the Raspberry Pi’s launch in February last year. But it was the Model B circuit board that went on sale first, and went on to sell a million units to date, whereas the A-series is now available.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • 5.5″ LG Optimus G Pro picture and specs sheet are in: Full HD screen, 3140 mAh battery and microSD

      While LG’s current flagship, the Optimus G, has been selling in the US for a while, and hitting Europe and China, we’ve been hearing about an upcoming upgrade, the Optimus G Pro, for a while now, and even saw the handset confirmed in promo materials with renders.

      Over in Japan the G Pro version for NTT DoCoMo actually got announced recently with a 5″ Full HD display, and 3,000 mAh battery, but there was speculation for another one in the pipeline, with a larger, 5.5″ display.

  • Android

    • Sony Xperia SP shown next to Xperia V cousin in leaked pics

    • 7-inch Wikipad due in spring

A list of open source software options from OSS Watch

Journalist creates open source solution to extract data from PDFs

A group of journalists are announcing the launch of their breakthrough open source solution for the problem many writers and journalists have of how to take data in PDFs or images and easily convert it to a spreadsheet or other usable format.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Updates to Firefox 18.0.2 For Facebook ‘Tickle’

SaaS/Big Data

• Netflix Promises To Make Its Open Source Cloud Management Tools More Portable

  Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.

CMS

• DrupalCon Sydney: Looking beyond content management

  Drupal 8 will continue the open source project’s move beyond being purely a content management platform, Drupal’s creator, Dries Buytaert, told the inaugural DrupalCon Sydney, held in Coogee.

  The next version of Drupal, Drupal 8, is due to enter feature freeze on 18 February, followed by a code freeze on July 1. Drupal 8 will be released at the end of the year or “whenever it’s ready”, Buytaert said. So far more than 4700 patches have been submitted for Drupal 8, by more than 1000 contributors, he said.

Business

• Zurmo, the free CRM: Interview with Ray Stoeckicht

  I had the privilege to interview Ray Stoeckicht, the co-founder of an exciting new free software/open souce company creating Zurmo. Zurmo is a “social CRM”: a program aimed at making CRM fun (if you know something about CRM, you will know that the word “fun” never seems to associate with CRM).

• Anturis Launches IT-Monitoring Service For Small Business Market, But Open Source Critiques Are Unfounded

  Anturis is an IT-monitoring service for the small business market (SMB) that launched this week at the Parallels Summit with the intent of providing a service that fits between enterprise software and open source offerings. It looks like a decent service, but its critiques of open source offerings are disingenuous.

Funding

• Open-source Death Star project launched on Kickstarter

• Open Source Death Star

BSD

• Enhancing BSD Benchmarking With 4.4-Forsand

  New features and other enhancements for the performance benchmarking of *BSD operating systems have been committed with the forthcoming release of Forsand.

  It was just last week that Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand Milestone 1 was released along with some impressive new/updated benchmarks (Wine benchmarks too) while ready for testing today is the second development milestone release.

Public Services/Government

• Adding value to Singapore’s tertiary education with Open Source

  Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore has successfully incorporated open source software into its curriculum. Heng Yiak Por, lecturer, School of information technology, and Cyrus Guo, a third year student pursuing his Diploma in information Security at Nanyang Polytechnic, share their views about open source in education.

Openness/Sharing

• Companies Aim to Leverage Open-Source Opportunities

  Open-source approaches now appear to be migrating from the fringe to the mainstream in the education market.

• Open Access/Content

  • Researchers opt to limit uses of open-access publications

    Advocates of open publishing fret that misunderstandings lead scientists to choose restrictive licenses.

acebook: two thirds of users log off for weeks at a time

Cambodia’s king is dead, long live the PM – By Didier Lauras

He towered over his kingdom through tumultuous decades. Yet when Cambodia’s “king father” Norodom Sihanouk finally ceded power, experts say, it was not to his heir but to strongman premier Hun Sen.
Since his death in October in Beijing, Cambodia has paid homage to the man who was king, prime minister, head of state, then king once more, before stepping down in favour of his son Sihamoni in 2004.

Military Arrest in Doubt as U.S. Fights Rookie Judge

Forrest, 48, a military-history buff, went from living on food stamps as a teenager to advising Time Warner Inc. and United Airlines Inc. as a corporate litigator. She then took a seven-figure pay cut on the path to her dream job as a judge, and was appointed to U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 2011.

Within months, Forrest blocked Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta from enforcing part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012, rejecting arguments that she should defer to congressional and executive authority in national- security matters. The plaintiffs in the case said the law permits the military to arrest U.S. citizens for exercising their freedom of speech and of the press.

Security

• Department of Energy ‘negligent’ security? 1 breach by hacking, 1 by 82-yr-old nun

  In the end, any employee who clicked on the link had their machine infected with malware that exploited an IE zero-day vulnerability. Microsoft had just issued a patch three days before the attack.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Drone Attack Kills Five in Pakistan

  Pakistani security officials said that the attack, which took place in Spin Wam tribal region, also left damage in various surrounding houses.

• Drone strike in Waziristan kills Five

  The drones hovered over the area after the strikes and for of fears of another drone targeting by the US authorities, locals were reluctant to leave their house and rescue efforts were delayed. After the drones disappeared, the locals started rescue efforts and recovered five bodies from the debris.

• Drone strike in Waziristan kills Five

• US drone kills three in North Waziristan

  Local people retrieved the bodies, the sources said, adding the dead could not be identified.

• US drone kills 3 militants in Waziristan, jets pound Orakzai

  The first US drone strike of February 2013 follows six attacks conducted in January, in which 42 militants were killed and seven were injured in both North and South Waziristan.

• Drone kills three in North Waziristan

  he official said that soon after the drone attack, other militants surrounded the site and shifted the dead bodies and injured to unidentified location, adding that the identity of the victims could not be ascertained.

• US Drone Strike Kills Five in North Waziristan

  killing five unidentified people.killing five unidentified people.

• U.S. drone kills 5 suspected militants in Pakistan’s tribal region

  At least five suspected militants were killed Wednesday when a U.S. drone targeted a suspected militant compound in Pakistan’s volatile tribal region, Pakistani intelligence officials said. There were no immediate reports of civilian casualties.

• A double standard on drone strikes

  what kind of action constitutes “imminent threat.” At present, the government’s definition is a little cryptic.”

• White House Drone Plan Reveals Obama’s ‘Hypocrisy’

  Obama decried George W. Bush’s use of presidential war powers…

• Who Authorized Obama to Use Drone Strikes? You Did!

• Drone Strikes Under Scrutiny

  Stanley McChrystal, the retired general, has warned that drone strikes are so resented abroad that their overuse could jeopardize America’s broader objectives. The secretary of state, John Kerry, spoke at his confirmation hearing of the need to make sure that “American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone.”

• U.S. CANCELS REGULAR DRONE STRIKES ON SATURDAYS

• In Mali, a war ‘without images and without facts’

• Video: U.S. drone memo: Legal claim for civilian strikes

• Terror Tuesday: Pop! Go the secrets

  ?

  Secrets cannot be bottled up in the dark forever. Today, some stunning secrets that both the Obama and Bush Administrations hoped would never see the light of day are fizzing out of their containers.

• Obama faces new questions on drones

• How is Obama’s Targeted Killing Program Permissible Under International Law?

  There is absolutely no way the targeted killing program can operate under these incredibly authoritarian presumptions and reasonably considered to follow international law.

• Brennan nomination exposes criticism on targeted killings and secret Saudi base

• Secretary of State John Kerry, Our Newest “General” Leading Cambodia 2.0

• Does Obama’s Kingly Power to Kill US Citizens Extend to Domestic Suspects?

  The leaked Justice Department memo detailing the Obama administration’s legal rationale for killing US citizens without charge or trial or judicial review or any publicly available evidence of their guilt has raised a lot of questions.

  One of them, which doesn’t get fleshed out in the memo, is whether this kingly authority to play Judge, Jury, and Executioner and deprive Americans of their life without due process of law applies only to Americans abroad or also to citizens that are inside the United States. The memo does say that one prerequisite to putting an American on the kill list is if their capture is “not feasible.” Presumably that wouldn’t happen in the US, but since it isn’t specified in the memo, nobody has really been able to give an informed opinion on this. And even if the authority is not currently used in this way, unless there is an explicit prohibition in the current legal rendering, it could conceivably be used this way in the future.

• Democratic Senator Questions Administration’s Drone Program

• Israel Enters Syria

  With its air strikes against targets inside Syria last week, Israel announced its formal entry into the Syrian crisis. The Israeli targeting of Iran has thus entered the Syrian theater.

  According to McClatchy, the Israeli strikes on January 30 targeted anti-aircraft missiles at a military base outside of Damascus. The missiles, according to Israeli intelligence sources, were headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

• Israel Steps Into Syria

• As Syria Devolves, Israel Rampages

  The Israeli attack on Syria last week confirms the observations I made in my post on Syria in August; namely that: 1) the US has assured Israel in advance that, whatever transpires from the US-backed rebellion, Israel will get the net benefit of a weakened Syrian state, open to at-will Israeli incursion; 2) for both Israel and the US, the object of this game is to utterly destroy the Syrian state, to make it disappear as a military and political force in the region; and 3) “chemical weapons” were introduced into the narrative as a flimsy excuse for military attacks by the US or Israel whose actual objective will be to destroy, tout court, the Syrian state’s military capability, and its ability to provide any significant resistance to future Israeli attacks or any significant material support to other targets of Israeli aggression — like Iran, Hezbollah, or any other Palestinian resistance groups.

• Israel, Iran and Turkey use Syria as whipping boy

  Israel has not officially confirmed the fact of an air raid on a research center in Syria. Washington has not provided an official confirmation to this either. The UN Security Council has not condemned the attack. Syria has become a “whipping boy”, whom Iran and Israel use to flex their muscles to each other at the time when Turkey tries to establish itself in its pan-Turkism.

  According to sources at the Pentagon that refer to The Times, the night raid on January 30 was sanctioned by the U.S. in order to prevent “the transfer of arms from the regime of Bashar al-Assad to his ally – Lebanon – and then to Shiite organization Hezbollah,” which controls the Gaza Strip.

• Iran’s state TV airs video allegedly extracted from CIA spy drone captured in 2011

• Iran broadcasts footage ‘extracted from CIA spy drone’

• CIA used ISI facilities in Karachi, says US report

  Detention facilities in which detainees were held at the behest of the CIA include the ISI detention facility in Karachi, which was allegedly used as an initial detention and interrogation point before detainees were transferred to other prisons.

• How did they allow the CIA to become a death squad? – Medea Benjamin

  CodePink director and co-founder Medea Benjamin spoke with VoR about the recently exposed US Justice Department white paper rationalizing and making legal the execution of Americans. She talks about the illegality of drone assassinations, recounts her recent trip to Pakistan, where CodePink peace activists apologized to the Pakistani people, who she says were more than a little shocked to hear Americans saying “Your lives and your children are worth as much as ours.” CodePink is one of the most active and most publicly heard peace groups which has been protesting the illegal use of drones and the assassination machine that the US Executive Branch and the CIA have become.

• CIA nominee Brennan was interviewed in leak probes

  President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, has been interviewed in connection with U.S. prosecutors’ probes into unauthorized leaks of government secrets to the news media, documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday said.

• SA accused of helping CIA

  South Africa has been named in a new report on “Globalising Torture” as one of 54 countries that collaborated with the US in secret CIA detentions and extraordinary renditions of terrorist suspects.

• Canadian passports: The disguise of choice for international dirty deeds

• Europe considers designating Hezbollah as terrorists

  Under pressure from the United States and Israel…

Cablegate

• Geoffrey Robertson speaks on the fate of Assange2

• WikiLeaks Julian Assange on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ Friday Feb. 8

• Wikileaks accuse Union

  Wikileaks believes that the Union doctored the live stream footage, claiming that the video footage that was playing behind Assange during his speech was censored.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Shouldn’t Work for Russia, Human Rights Group Says

• Human Rights Foundation Calls On Goldman Sachs To Cancel Russia Consulting Deal

Privacy

• The Threat of Silence

  Meet the groundbreaking new encryption app set to revolutionize privacy and freak out the feds.

• Drone-free Virginia?

• Anti-Drone Laws: Town Passes First US Vote

• Virginia city passes legislation banning drones

• Charlottesville anti-drone resolution sparks similar action across US

• Committee passes revised version of drone bill

• Heroic assumptions from the Home Office

  The report itself contained some new insights into the legislation that would require details of of everyone’s emails, web use and social media messages to be recorded.

Civil Rights

• Egypt: Children taught cannibalizing non-Muslims authorized

• Journalists McKenzie and Baker go unshielded before demands to reveal sources

  Fairfax investigative journalists Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker had a small win in a Melbourne court yesterday. Their barrister told the court that a previous ruling agreeing that the magistrate had the right to order the disclosure of their confidential source has been appealed.

• Join Michael Moore, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Attorneys, Journalists & Luminaries for a Discussion of the NDAA Lawsuit

  Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, attorney for CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou, Jesslyn Radack, filmmaker Michael Moore, RevolutionTruth Executive Director and NDAA Case Coordinator Tangerine Bolen and journalist Alexa O’Brien, each supporters or plaintiffs in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit challenging the controversial indefinite detention provision set forth in § 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), will address the U.S. government’s assault on civil liberties under the NDAA in a discussion at 5pm this Wednesday, February 6th at The Culture Project, 45 Bleecker St, NYC.

• Ortiz on the hot seat

  The Justice Department is scrambling to answer pointed inquiries from a congressional committee about U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s prosecution of Internet whiz Aaron Swartz, raising the specter of a brutal Beltway hearing that could call her judgment into question as she pursues high-profile cases, including her Probation
  Department probe.

• Daniel Ellsberg: NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision

• Tenther Radio Episode #85: Most News Ever, Drones, NDAA, Obamacare, Supremacy Clause, & more!

• Resistance to NDAA Kidnapping Powers is our Duty

• NDAA & CISPA Are Back: New Controversies Emerge Over Laws Concerning Rights

• In NDAA Lawsuit, Government Claims It Has ‘Decade of Experience’ & Hasn’t Detained Any US Citizens

  Argument in the government’s appeal against the provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which grants the military the authority to indefinitely detain US citizens, took place this morning at the Second Circuit United States Court of Appeals.

  The lawsuit was filed in 2012 by a group of journalists and activists that includes journalist Chris Hedges, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, writer Noam Chomsky, RevolutionTruth.org co-founder Tangerine Bolen, Occupy London co-founder Kai Wargalla, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and US Day of Rage founder and journalist Alexa O’Brien.

• Lawsuit filed against Obama over controversial NDAA program

• NDAA is back in court

  A federal appeals court homes in on what’s at stake in the indefinite detention statute lawsuit

• NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision Challenged In Federal Appeals Court

  The NDAA allows the military to indefinitely detain anyone who “substantially supported” al Qaeda or its allies. At issue during the Wednesday hearing was whether US citizens are included under that definition — and what exactly it means to “substantially” support al Qaeda. Three judges from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals peppered both sides with questions during the oral arguments, but seemed reluctant to wade into the constitutional issues that civil liberties advocates have raised.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Real Story Behind ‘Super WiFi’ And The Fight Over Spectrum; It’s Not What You Read Yesterday

  Early yesterday morning, I saw that Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post had a story up about the years-long fight for white spaces entitled: Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks. It struck me as odd, because so much in the article seemed… wrong or misleading. The main part about efforts to finally do something with the old TV spectrum isn’t anything new at all. We first wrote about the FCC “proposing” this back in 2004 and have covered it a few times since. The FCC has been trying to use some of that TV spectrum for better, more efficient and more useful endeavors. It’s been an ongoing battle that feels like it’s never going to end. The short version is that TV broadcasters got a ton of free spectrum many years ago (just look at how giant chunks of the spectrum chart belong to TV broadcasters). A big part of the move to digital TV was to force broadcasters to give up a chunk of wasted, valuable spectrum that can be turned into (among other things) some useful wireless services. TV broadcasters hate this and have been fighting it in a variety of ways.

  The latest version of this plan is for the FCC to do a multi-part, multi-directional “auction” process for a chunk of spectrum currently held by the broadcasters. Part of that auction would be to offer incentives to broadcasters to cough up the spectrum. And then part of it would be auctioning off whatever spectrum broadcasters agree to dump. Finally, part of it would also include designating some portion of the spectrum for unlicensed uses.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • The Pirate Bay Is The World’s Most Efficient Public Library

    The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This supposedly deprives the author or artist of those millions of people’s money. One group has acquired over 50 million media items, and makes each of them available to approximately 20 million people — which must be a tremendous hit to creative professionals’ wallets. This notorious institution is called the New York Public Library.

  • Court Of Human Rights: Convictions For File-Sharing Violate Human Rights

  • Warner Bros. Targets Kim Dotcom’s Mega With Bogus DMCA Requests

  • ACTA, CETA, TAFTA: Is De Gucht Again Trying to Impose Anti-democratic Repression?

    Commissioner De Gucht is currently in Canada, trying to conclude CETA, the Canada-EU Trade Agreement. Meanwhile, he has started negotiating with the US on TAFTA, a new US-EU “trade agreement”. La Quadrature du Net recalls that there is still no credible evidence to suggest that ACTA-like criminal sanctions and repressive copyright provisions damaging a free Internet were removed from CETA, and it is likely that they will appear in TAFTA. Karel De Gucht, who several times lied openly to the public and the European Parliament during the ACTA debate, might once again push for repressive measures undermining fundamental freedoms, under the cover of trade agreements. Citizens must remain watchful and denounce this growing trend.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How to get a Linux Job in 30 days or less!!!

Arctic releases a tiny $229 Linux PC designed for XBMC

Arctic is now selling a small form-factor desktop computer with an Intel Atom processor, AMD Radeon HD graphics, and a Linux-based operating system designed to support the XBMC Media Center application.

Desktop

• Why the Linux Desktop Needs More Usability Testing

  Linux desktop projects often overlook formal usability testing. Attempts to introduce it are generally short-lived. After a few experiments, most developers fall back on a series of informal alternatives.

  Yet as Linux becomes increasingly popular, the need for usability becomes more pressing. Implemented properly, it might have prevented or mitigated some of the upheavals of the last few years.

• CDW to offer enterprise Chromebook support

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 296 – Salty Sea Dogs

• Podcast 96 OpenRC | SystemD | Pulseaudio

• Going Linux Feb 05: #198 Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• Support For Compressing The Linux Kernel With LZ4

  A set of patches that allow the Linux kernel image to be compressed with the LZ4 lossless compression algorithm have been published. The size of LZ4-compressed Linux kernel images are larger than using LZO compression, but there’s promise that the boot times could be better.

• Reiser4 On The Linux 3.7 Kernel, Possible TRIM

  The Reiser4 file-system has been ported to run on the Linux 3.7 kernel. Separately, TRIM/DISCARD support for Reiser4 on solid-state drives is being discussed amongst the remaining Reiser4 developers.

  Edward Shishkin, the main developer left working on the Reiser4 file-system in his spare time, announced the port of Reiser4 for Linux 3.7 earlier this month. The actual porting to the 3.7 kernel was largely done by Ivan Shapovalov while Shishkin also made some other changes to be found in the latest version of the Reiser4 file-system patch. The new Reiser4 release was made on the reiserfs-devel mailing list and the patch to apply against the vanilla/mainline kernel can be found at SourceForge.

• Re: Further work on reiser4: discard support and performance issues

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Driver Works On “PM Suspend Freeze” Support

  • Intel’s Mesa Driver Gets A Small Performance Boost

    Another patch landed in mainline Mesa today that’s capable of providing a small performance boost for some OpenGL workloads with Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver.

  • New OpenGL Support In Mesa 9.1

  • AMD adds open source driver support for next card launch

  • AMD Releases Open Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver

    AMD isn’t yet ready to welcome its upcoming Radeon HD 8000 Series graphics cards to the world, but the company is preparing for the impending launch, in part by publishing initial open source Linux drivers. Found in the Mesa graphics library, the open source drivers pertain to the Radeon HD 8870 and 8850 graphics cards.

  • Lima Graphics Driver Can Beat ARM’s Binary Blob

    The open-source Lima graphics driver that’s a reverse-engineered user-space software driver for ARM’s Mali graphics core, is now faster than the official ARM binary graphics driver in certain cases, such as when running Quake 3.

  • Development Pace Of X.Org Is On The Decline

  • Freedreno Gallium3D Shows Much Promise

    In continuation of the article noting Freedreno Gallium3D might be merged soon, here’s the video showing off the progress of this open-source Gallium3D graphics driver that was made to support the Qualcomm Adreno hardware.

Applications

• Guide to Open Source and Linux-Compatible 3D Printers, Part Two

  3D printers run on simple microcontrollers – many of them based on the open Arduino hacker platform — and are controlled by desktop PCs like any other printer. Like almost all the open source contenders — and almost none of the proprietary designs – MakerBot’s Replicator 2 still supports Linux desktops, in addition to Windows and Mac.

• CCleaner asks BleachBit to Remove Winapp2.ini Importer

  I received an email from Piriform, makers of CCleaner, asking me to remove a feature from BleachBit that allows individual BleachBit users to use winapp2.ini files created by the community of users. I don’t see how the terms of use apply, but I am checking into it.

• This Wink Doesn’t Come With a Smile

• EasyRE System Recovery Disc Review + Giveaway

  If you ever find yourself in a situation in which your computer doesn’t start, and you’ve already tried the “Last Known Good Configuration” option and it doesn’t work, what else can you do?

  SystemDiscs has a solution that might actually take you away from your frustrations with an automatic repair application called Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE, in short). This is a great software that allows you to repair your Windows and backup your files even if you can’t boot into Windows, and we have a giveaway too. Read on for more detail.

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft Looking At Office For Linux In 2014

    It seems thanks to the increasing market-share of Android devices and the rise of Linux on the desktop thanks to the many commercial Linux gaming initiatives that have been shared in recent months, Microsoft is being forced to take a serious look at Linux and a meaningful look at releasing their popular Office software for Linux in 2014.

  • Native Microsoft Office Suite on Linux by 2014, Maybe

  • Microsoft looking to release Office for Linux in 2014

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Deployment of Kippo SSH Honeypot on Ubuntu Linux

  • Install PHP5 Taint in Debian Squeeze

  • Install KVM on Ubuntu

  • Utilizing Iptables with Linux for Network Packet Mangling

  • Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 12.10

  • How To Write Linux Shell Scripts (Part 1)

  • Upgrading and Installing Fedora 18 in VMware Fusion

  • Keeping SSDs fresh

  • Fuzzy fonts in Firefox 18? No more!

  • How to run Linux inside Windows using VirtualBox

  • Netstat: network analysis and troubleshooting, explained

• Wine or Emulation

  • Carmack would be stunned by mainstream Linux gaming support

  John Carmack Shares More Of His Linux Views

  • John Carmack of id software chimes in on Wine gaming

    This tweet has sparked posts over Reddit and other popular Linux related websites so it’s time for my views.

    I am as usual torn on the subject because I think Wine is important but bad at the same time. I will keep it short and just bear in mind as usual these are just my personal views and personal experiences using wine.

  • John Carmack Argues Against Native Linux Games

  • Native(ish) Netflix!

    The folks over at http://www.iheartubuntu.com recently put up a challenge to the Linux community to get Netflix to work natively under our beloved OS. Thankfully, Erich Hoover stepped up to the challenge and patched the Wine Project in a way to allow Firefox/Silverlight to be installed and actually work with Netflix’s DRM’d Silverlight!

• Games

  • Serious Sam 3 On Linux Becomes More Serious

    Serious Sam 3 was one of the original games on Steam for Linux and is available to everyone since Valve’s Steam Linux client went public. Serious Sam 3: BFE is developed by Croteam and the latest in the Serious Sam franchise. The game is powered by Serious Engine 3.5 and was first released for Windows in 2011.

  • Braid Developer Finds Linux Tools Lacking

  • Braid creator bemoans Linux debugging process

  • Livalink the new Unity FPS has been updated!

  • Open Source Game Editor Lets You Create Multi-Platform Games

    Makslane Rodrigues has released Game Editor, a free, open source game creation application that lets you design and create exciting, interactive games for the Windows, Windows Mobile, iPad, iPhone, Mac OS X, Linux, Pocket PC, and Android markets. With no investment or royalty fees, Game Editor lets you create games for family and friends, as well as commercial games that you can sell. In addition, Game Editor is an easy way for businesses to participate in the gamification trend that lets you create and distribute games that build brand loyalty for your company.

  • GetDeb, PlayDeb Return, Ubuntu Gamers Rejoice

  • An open source games editor everyone can use?

    Independent developer Makslane Rodrigues has released Game Editor, a free and open source cross platform game creation application.

    What does cross platform mean to the true open source evangelist?

    It’s the Windows, Windows Mobile, iPad, iPhone, Mac OS X, Linux, Pocket PC and Android markets – each and every one of them.

  • Gemini Rue developer Wadjet Eye seeking Linux beta testers

  • Steam’s January 2013 hardware survey is on, Linux is growing

  • Counter Strike Source has been added to the CDR and apparently installable too

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Awesome Window Manager Default Themes

  Awesome Window Manager offers three simple themes for users that need a ch ange. Here you can get a brief look at the default themes, along with instructions to sample them for yourself. Although style choices may be limited, this is one of the most efficient window managers available.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • The Luminosity of Free Software Episode 2

    The day and time for the next live video cast on Google Hangout has been set. There was a clear preference among those who responded to the survey. (Thanks to you all!) The live show will happen this Thursday, the 7th of February at 20:00 UTC.

  • Qt 5.1 To Feature Improved Support For Wayland

    A number of improvements to QtWayland have been merged this month, primarily around the Client Side Decorations support and other functionality needed for proper support of this likely X11 Server successor.

  • What’s Being Brewed For KDE’s Plasma Active

  • 4.10 Release of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform

  • KDE 4.10 Released, Fastest KDE Ever

    The KDE team has announced the 4.10 releases of KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. It brings many improvements, features and polishes the UI even further, which already is one of the most polished, stable and mature desktop environments.

  • a release

    Contemplating things that are in a state of balance evokes serenity. It can also provide wonder and enjoyment, such as when watching someone walk a tightrope high above the ground or execute a particularly tricky bit of gymnastics in a game of sport. There is also an inherent sense of tension within systems in balance: the sweet spot that is neither too far one way or the other; a counterpoint found for every force that pulls or pushes.

  • Calligra 2.6: Features, Usability, Bugfixes

  • Krita 2.6 Released

    Not only are there hundreds of bug fixes and performance improvements all over the place, Krita 2.6 now incorporates support for the OpenColorIO colormanagement system which is a standard in the movie and VFX studio. This makes Krita a natural choice for 2D painting work in the movie and vfx pipeline. (Note: like OpenGL support, the Lut docker with OpenColorIO integration is only available on Linux.)

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Keith Curtis Questions GNOME JavaScript Path

  • Gnome Panel is Alive

    Gnome Panel (or more properly, gnome-panel) is the main dock that you would see in the Gnome 2 series desktop, and in the Gnome Fallback session (also called Gnome “Classic” in many distributions) in Gnome 3.

  • GNOME developers plan “Linux apps”

    Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such “Linux apps” at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Beta of hosted Kolab groupware service launched

  • Kolab 3 and Activesync

    Kolab 3 has built-in ActiveSync support, using Syncroton. It’s integrated into Roundcube, all settings can be done using the Webmail client. Installing it is very easy on Debian Wheezy: apt-get install kolab-syncroton

  • Bio-Linux 7.0.5

• Slackware Family

  • Which Linux distro is best? Survey says: Slackware

    One of the biggest ongoing challenges for Linux advocates has always been that there is such a paucity of data available to demonstrate the preferences of the people who are actually using the free and open source operating system.

• Red Hat Family

  • Ten Years of Support Promised For Red Hat

    Red Hat announced earlier this week that they would be extending support for Red Enterprise Linux versions five and six from seven to ten years. On top of the promised ten years of production support, there will be another three years of extended support. RHEL 5 was released in 2007, which puts it’s lifespan out to 2017, and RHEL 6 was released in 2010, which Red Hat promises now to support in production until 2020, and in extended support until 2023. That’s a long time for a single operating system.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 19 Features: GLIBC 2.17, GNOME 3.8, MATE 1.6

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Everybody gets to design Ubuntu phones—see the best “fan-made” mockups

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 302

      • Stormfly: a Ubuntu desktop on the wrist

        The scenario is well known: it is difficult to trust your children on the family computer, between the parental controls that need to be set and the increased risk of virus contamination; the simple use of separate user accounts just isn’t enough. StormFly has the job of offering a solution to these risks.

      • StormFly: Personalised Portable Linux Based OS In A Cool Wristband

      • Unity to Ship with Smarter Dash Search in 13.04

      • Is Canonical Working on New, Custom Display Server for Unity?

        Canonical are evaluating different options for improving the display server in Ubuntu as it seeks to span multiple devices, Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has recently confirmed.

        The news comes by way of response to questions raised on the status of Ubuntu’s adoption of alternative display server ‘Wayland’.

      • Ubuntu Allegedly To Have Its Own X, Wayland Alternative

        There’s been talk already this morning in the forums, Twitter, and via email to Phoronix that Canonical is allegedly developing its own display server rather than using X.Org/X11 or Wayland.

        For three years now Canonical has been expressing plans of moving from an X.Org Server to Wayland in a yet-to-be-determined future Ubuntu Linux release. Wayland may finally be ready for some level of use by year’s end or H1’2014 while X.Org isn’t moving anywhere anytime soon.

      • Ubuntu Grabs 1.12 Percent OS Market Share on Steam, Windows 8 at 8.67 Percent

      • The Inside Story Of Ubuntu’s Gesture-Centric Smartphone

      • Community Leadership Summit 2013 Sponsorship

        The Community Leadership Summit 2013 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.

Devices/Embedded

• $25 Version Of Raspberry Pi Now Available In Europe

• Phones

  • ANALYSIS: New Mobile Operating Systems – Ubuntu, Sailfish, Tizen, Firefox, BlackBerry

    The year 2013 will see the arrival of several new smartphone operating systems. This article is my first overview to the new arrivals, what do I think of Ubuntu Linux, Firefox, Sailfish or Tizen…

  • Ballnux

    • Apple, Samsung gobble all 2012 handset profits, and then some

    • RUMOR: Samsung will unveil the GALAXY S IV on March 15th and on sale from early April

      We have some hot news for all those happy Samsung Galaxy owners. Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S IV on March 15th. The biggest Android smartphone unpacked event is still not confirmed by Samsung self, but our trusted insider confirmed it to SamMobile. That Samsung will announce the Galaxy S IV on March 15, but the place of Samsung’s unpacked event is still top-secret SamMobile earlier reported that the Galaxy S IV will go on sale from the second week of April now we can confirm that Samsung will release the Galaxy S IV from the beginning of April. We expect Samsung to send the invitations right after the Mobile World Congress which is in February.

    • What we expect: Samsung Galaxy S4

    • LG teases new mystery phone on Facebook

    • Samsung Galaxy Note 2: Big enough to be worth the trouble

      I like big phones I cannot lie. Even so, every phone with a giant display I’ve tried has left me cold as they are hard to carry around as easily as the smaller (normal) phones. At least that’s what I felt until buying the Galaxy Note 2. Its 5.5-inch display is big enough to yield a fantastic user experience and that additional utility makes it worthwhile to carry around every day.

    • Samsung Buys Stake in ‘S-Pen’ Collaborator

  • Android

    • Vertu Constellation Ti Runs Android: Nope, Open Source Doesn’t Make it Any Cheaper

      At the rate that I change smartphones, about once or twice a year, I could probably bankrupt myself pretty quickly if I were to buy Vertu phones instead of the brands I usually do. Recently, there was a rumor that Vertu would be using Android in its next smartphone. According to Japanese gadget site Blog of Mobile!!, the rumors are true, and Android specs have turned up in its certification testing data.

    • XOPAD open source Android USB controller gets into the game

    • Two-year-old phone receives 15-month-old software update

      If you bought Verizon’s first 4G phone, start checking for updates now: the carrier has finally approved the Android 4.0 update (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) for the HTC Thunderbolt. The only problem? The Thunderbolt has been on the market since March of 2011, and Ice Cream Sandwich came out seven months later in October—not exactly a great turn-around time.

    • Android-Based Portable Wireless Remote Control Setup for Nikon DSLR Cameras

    • More than 1 in 8 Android devices run ‘Jelly Bean’

      Google’s latest Android release, “Jelly Bean” continues to gain market share and is now powering more than one out of every eight devices.

A Conversation with the President of the Open Source Initiative (Video)

Open-source social-mobile games platform OpenKit goes into closed-beta test

Open Source Gaming Backend OpenKit Plans Private Beta Launch Tomorrow, Raises Another $100K

500 devs sign up to OpenFeint co-founder Relan’s open source service platform OpenKit

Preferable Way to Develop Web Applications Is Open Source Development

Open Source development is a Web Development methodology, which offers practical ownership and total accessibility to a product’s source code. It harnesses transparency of the process. The aphorism of open source development is yielding better quality and flexibility.

It is most certainly relevant today as we tend to term attractive websites as more popular. In order to craft such an ‘attractive’ website for your business, open source is the best stage to begin with. It is a platform where the source code of the program is accessible to the community which means it is open to change. You can add, update or alter the original code; which you cannot think of doing with proprietary software!

Software innovation will blast monolithic hardware

The forward “predictions for 2013″ pre-Christmas honeymoon is now thankfully over. Time enough then… for a serious look at software futures.

Open source

It was a pleasure to read the excellent article drawing parallels between Mirza Ghalib’s legendary work and the mammoth achievements of the Free and Open Source Software community (Feb. 2). Computing is not just about driving a chip using a few lines of code. Unless a programmer understands the part he or she plays in the continuous and ever evolving drive for academic excellence, society cannot expect him or her to deliver a new and sophisticated tool to help humanity attain new heights. A FOSS programmer has a great sense of responsibility because of the overwhelming number of socially responsible computing geniuses involved in the community. Rahul De’ has rightly pointed out the peer review mechanism followed in the FOSS community, which results in programmers striving for logically correct and efficient programs.

Developer interview: DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS

It is a terrifying thought that many people under 30 will never see a “C:\>” prompt, let alone an “A:\>”. But although as far as Microsoft is concerned DOS has been dead pretty much since Windows 95 went gold, it wasn’t quite the end of the road for the operating system.

What next for IcedTea?

Six years after the launch of the IcedTea project, developer Andrew John Hughes feels that it’s time to take stock. Questions were previously raised over the role of the project, which aims to make it possible to use OpenJDK using only free software build tools for GNU/Linux platforms, when OpenJDK 7 was released.

75 Top Open Source Tools for Protecting Your Privacy

As mobile technology and social networking have become commonplace, so have concerns about privacy. In fact, nearly every day the media covers stories about identity theft, social networking “pranks” gone wrong, companies with shady privacy policies and repressive governments that censor and monitor online activities.

Open Source Meter Launches Products on Amazon

Open Source Meter, Inc., announces that it now offers its industry standard transformer directly to the end customer through Amazon. By selling through Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), Open Source Meter can offer customers the lowest cost shipping and the fastest turnaround the industry has to offer, reducing product lead times from weeks to overnight. The transformers being offered are Magnelab brand Split-core transformer (SCT) series (http://amzn.to/XwrzP2). Open Source Meter offers a full suite of 38 different types of transformer options broken down into SCT-400, SCT-750, SCT-1250, SCT-2000 and SCT-3000 models.

Facebook deploys Opscode’s open-source-based IT management software

When open-source eats itself, we win

In some markets, open source rules the roost. For example, Drupal, Joomla, my old company Alfresco and other open-source content management systems regularly duke it out for supremacy, depending on the workload. In application servers, JBoss and Tomcat spar. In cloud, Cloudstack, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and others battle.

But web servers? That’s a market that Apache won ages ago, with no open-source competition to speak of.

That is, until recently.

23 of Netcraft’s Top 40 Hosting Sites Run GNU/Linux

Survey Reveals Some Open Source Surprises

LinuxQuestions is out with results from its annual Members Choice Awards survey, which highlights favorite open source platforms and applications, ranging from favorite Linux distros to favorite new innovative hardware ideas in the open source realm. Probably, if asked to guess which Linux distro was rated the favorite, many readers would guess Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but that’s not the favorite. Here is what the survey respondents had to say.

Open source tackles city permit process with OpenCounter

The City of Santa Cruz is the smallest community to ever partner with Code for America, but it had one of the largest problems to solve: how to make it easier to take an idea for a small business from conception to reality. From a concept to a permit.

They created an online permitting portal OpenCounter. The portal launched on Wednesday January 9, after an intense year of development, testing, and refinement. So how did they do it?

Events

• Event report: FOSDEM introduces science-focused devroom

  FOSDEM, held annually in Brussels, Belgium, is a free event for open source communities to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. It offers a mix of focused devrooms and themed main track talks, with no requirement for registration. It has a reputation of being highly developer-focused, this year brought together over 5,000 geeks from around the world.

• Computerworld Hosts Open Source Conversation in San Francisco

• Tux Does Mardi Gras: Share His Video and Win Ticket to LinuxCon/CloudOpen

Web Browsers

• Google and Mozilla show off video chat between Chrome and Firefox thanks to WebRTC support

• Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling!

  Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google.
  RTCPeerConnection (also known simply as PeerConnection or PC) interoperability means that developers can now create Firefox WebRTC applications that make direct audio/video calls to Chrome WebRTC applications without having to install a third-party plugin. Because the functionality is now baked into the browser, users can avoid problems with first-time installs and buggy plugins, and developers can deploy their apps much more easily and universally.

• Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling!

SaaS/Big Data

• Open Source OpenStack Folsom Cloud Updated for 51 Bugs

  A simple truth that many open source platform users know well is that often initial releases still have (a few) bugs. Real world usage tends to shake things out better than any beta or dev process ever could.

  With the open source OpenStack cloud platform, the most recent Folsom release debuted in September of 2012. It is now being updated to version 2012.2.3, fixing at least 51 known bugs and at least two serious security issues.

• OpenStack, Lock-In, Support Costs, and Open Source Free Lunches

• Top 5 Open Source Projects in Big Data – Breaking Analysis

  Big Data is a booming area that is receiving more widespread attention, especially since technology research company Gartner has projected that Big Data will drive $34 billion in IT spending in 2013. Abhishek Mehta, founder of Tresata, joined Kristin Feledy on the Morning NewsDesk Show to give his perspective on what’s happening in Big Data.

Databases

• Oracle Releases Open Source MySQL 5.6 with NoSQL Features

  Over the course of the last two years, Oracle has been hard at work building and improving MySQL 5.6. Today at long last, that hard work has come to fruition with the general availability of the open source MySQL 5.6 database.

  The first MySQL 5.6 preview debuted in July of 2011, while the last official main MySQL release was version 5.5 which was released at the end of 2010.

• MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability

Education

Business

• Zurmo open source CRM wins BitNami contest

  Zurmo will be added to the BitNami Application Library, where it will be packaged as an easy to install Open Source CRM BitNami stack

• Open for business report on Open Source Software now available for download

  Open Source Software has been around for the last couple of decades and its presence is now being felt across many sectors. Despite early scepticism, particularly from some corporate technologists, today open systems are making significant inroads into enterprise and critical computing systems.

Funding

• Runrev hits Kickstarter to fund open source Livecode

  EDINBURGH SOFTWARE HOUSE Runrev has started a Kickstarter project to create an open source release of Livecode, which aims to reinvent Apple’s Hypercard coding tool.

  The Livecode project already has over 500 backers that have pledged over £55,000 toward its goal of raising £350,000 and will run at Kickstarter until 4:17am EST on 28 February.

  If the project gets funded, Runrev promises to develop a version of its Hypercard programming language Livecode that’s licensed under the free, open source software (FOSS) General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3). Licensing under the GPL will mean that all users will be free to obtain and modify the source code of the Livecode implementation, contribute to it and extend the language over time.

• Piston Cloud nabs $8M to bolster open source cloud adoption

• Cisco Invests In Piston Cloud, OpenStack; Hedges Parallels Bet?

• Piston Cloud Raises $8 Million for OpenStack IaaS Distribution

• Cisco invests in open-source cloud firm

• Piston Cloud Raises $12.5 Million for OpenStack Cloud Tech

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GnuCash for Android v1.1.1 is now available

  GnuCash for Android updated to version 1.1.1 today. This latest release fixes numerous bugs and adds support for double-entry accounting. Double-entry accounting allows every transaction to be a transfer from one account to another. For example, every addition to your “Expenses” account can make your “Checking” account go down by the same amount.

Project Releases

• Krishagni Announces the Release of caTissue Plus v2.0 – Enterprise Open Source Biobanking LIMS

• eRacks Open Source Systems launches new digital storefront

• eRacks Open Source Systems launches new digital storefront

• XBMC 12.0 Released With HD Audio, PVR, Android

Public Services/Government

• Industry Q&A: Open Source in Government

  With leadership from the White House, and success stories throughout the government spectrum, clearly open source solutions are gaining ground against proprietary software solutions in the public domain. Government Technology talked to Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat Public Sector, to get his perspective on the open source phenomenon. Hellekson covers the federal, state, local and education markets in the U.S. for Red Hat.

• Levelling the playing field: open source in the public sector

• Government to switch to open source

  The government decision to purchase Microsoft software licenses and products to upgrade government agencies at a cost exceeding $43m has triggered anger among activists and specialists, who called the decision a waste of money and asked the government to use free open source software (FOSS), instead, last December.

  Mohamed Hanafy, the spokesman of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, stated that the Microsoft deal will be the last and that the shift towards Open Source will be gradual. “We cannot shift to Open Source overnight”.

Openness/Sharing

• Open-source green technology farm helps the developing world

  The ECHO Farm in Southwest Florida serves a special purpose. The non-profit helps aid workers in developing countries use the best sustainable farming tools and techniques in ways that would make MacGyver proud.

• MIT Builds An Open-Source Platform For Your Body

  MIT Media Lab’s 11-day health care hackathon pulled students and big companies together with a common goal: Healing a broken industry.

• MIT sets sights on open-source mHealth during innovation event

  The MIT Media Lab’s eleven-day Health and Wellness Hackathon is not your average gadget exhibition. Bringing together eighty participants from around the world, the annual event, which was held in January, is designed to inspire new ways to fix an age old problem: how to use technology to prevent illnesses before they start. Focusing on the use of standardized, interoperable, open-source platforms, the six teams spent nearly two weeks thinking up apps and home medical devices that would tear down proprietary software barriers and help patients take charge of their healthcare.

• Open-source Death Star revived on Kickstarter after White House snub

• Open-source electrical engineering design tools

  Have you tried these, or other, EE tools? What EE tools do you prefer? Please comment below.

• Open Data

  • OpenStreetMap gets a new map editor

  • LocationTech: The Next Step for the Open Source Geospatial Software Community

    It’s been seven years since the Open Source Geospatial Software Foundation came on the scene. This week LocationTech stepped up alongside. Is LocationTech what the open source geospatial community needs to take it to the next level?

• Open Access/Content

  • Retreating rebels burn Timbuktu’s science manuscripts

    IT IS what conservators, archivists and researchers have feared. As French and Malian troops advanced on Timbuktu in northern Mali earlier this week, retreating Islamist fighters have tried to destroy valuable scientific texts dating back to medieval times.

    The documents were housed at the city’s Ahmed Baba Institute and in a warehouse, both of which were set alight. It is unclear how many of the institute’s 30,000 or so manuscripts have been destroyed. The texts, which were being digitised, show that science was under way in Africa before European settlers arrived in the 16th century.

    George Abungu, vice-president of the executive committee of the International Council of Museums, describes the burning as “an incredible loss to Africa’s heritage, a backward move to the dark ages”. He says there is no way the Islamists “can claim to be Africans when they destroy the very foundation of our contribution to world knowledge and academia”.

  • Rebooting Computer Crime Law Part 2: Protect Tinkerers, Security Researchers, Innovators, and Privacy Seekers

  • A tribute to Aaron Swartz

    I would like to thank Senator Cash for taking up the issue of female genital mutilation with such passion. I rise to make some remarks about some of the perverse consequences that can come into play when governments-and most notably our Australian government-react or overreact to cyber threats. It makes me edgy whenever this government adds the word ‘cyber’ to anything. You tend to have to watch your back when that is occurring. I do not want to downplay the very real threats of identity theft and misappropriation, phishing attempts on people’s accounts and these sorts of things, cyber bullying and the other array of threats that people do face in the online environment. But I am also aware that we run the risk-and the Australian government is running this risk at the moment-of running these campaigns of hyperventilation and pumping up threat and fear as though this is where we are meant to transfer our fear of terrorists, that the internet is the new domain of terror and the best way to protect ourselves is to submit to perpetual ongoing, online surveillance by government policing and other agencies.

  • We Need to Think Beyond the Aaron in ‘Aaron’s Law’

    The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)’s disproportionate penalties and lack of nuance played a role in Aaron Swartz’ prosecution and likely in his subsequent suicide. So three weeks ago, California Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced “Aaron’s Law” to update the CFAA.

    Lofgren modified Aaron’s Law based on community feedback and released the updated version this past Friday. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also proposed much-needed changes to CFAA’s penalty provisions. The law has yet to go before Congress, but these efforts matter.

  • Anonymous Claims Wall Street Data Dump

    Hacktivist group publishes 4,000 passwords as part of Operation Last Resort campaign seeking revenge for the treatment of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

  • Aaron Swartz Memorial On Capitol Hill Draws Darrell Issa, Elizabeth Warren

  • Drafting Problems With the Second Version of “Aaron’s Law” from Rep. Lofgren

• Open Hardware

  • Crazyflie Nano quadcopter is a $173 open source, programmable flying machine

  • Open-source quadcopter swoops out of the shadows

  • Open-source, DIY quadcopter Crazyflie is super tiny, super speedy

  • Crazyflie Nano Open Source Quadcopter Launches For $173 (video)

  • Building my Own Laptop

    This is a lengthy project. Fortunately, ARM CPUs are getting fast enough, and Moore’s Law is slowing down, so that even if it took a year or so to complete, I won’t be left with a woefully useless design. Today’s state of the art ARM CPUs — quad-core with GHz+ performance levels — is good enough for most day-to-day code development, email checking, browsing etc.
    We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers.

  • Open-source hardware for embedded security

    Imagine you’re waiting in line, queuing to enter a major event. The ticket you have bought online is stored on your smart phone. As you swipe your phone over some designated area, an NFC connection is set up, your ticket is validated and the gates open to let you in. And the good thing is, that it all happened anonymously.

Programming

• Python gets a big data boost from DARPA

  DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has awarded $3 million to software provider Continuum Analytics to help fund the development of Python’s data processing and visualization capabilities for big data jobs.

• Perl Foundation looking to extend Improving Perl 5 grant

  Since September 2011, Nicholas Clark has been working on improving the Perl 5 Core, funded by a $20,000 grant from the Perl Foundation. The term of the work is coming to an end and Clark is now seeking another $20,000 to continue the work of the original Improving Perl 5 grant. The Foundation is consulting with the community before making the final decision whether to go ahead with the extension which would see Clark devoting another 400 hours of dedicated work to the project.

Standards/Consortia

• The Groovy Conundrum

  Groovy is one of the most-interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There’s the conundrum.

What about the elderly?

Those are some of the issues that I could think of. The list is far from being all-inclusive or comprehensive, but I think it sheds light on some of the aspects of what Linux is all about. Now, I do not say we should all make operating systems as if everyone was elderly and/or very set in their ways. After all, thirty years from now, young people of today will be the senior citizens of the future, with their own set of ideas and technologies.

But the development should be focused on making operating systems appeal to the widest cross-section of users. This also means designing products that scale well with time. If your desktop is peppered with online integration and social icons, the moment those networks go out of spotlight, your very model loses its own validity.

Read a Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit

Ordinarily I don’t discuss legal issues relating to fictional settings that are dramatically different from the real world in terms of their legal system. Thus, Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, etc. are usually off-limits because we can’t meaningfully apply real-world law to them. But the contract featured in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was just too good a topic to pass up, especially since you can buy a high-quality replica of it that is over 5 feet long unfolded.

Court Rules Icelandic “Girl” Can Use Her Own Name

The Reykjavik District Court has ruled that a 15-year-old Icelandic girl can legally use the first name “Blaer,” reversing a contrary decision by government officials. Iceland has strict naming laws that require, among other things, that names fit standard grammar and pronunciation rules and be gender-appropriate. According to the report, the relevant committee refused to approve Blaer Bjarkardottir’s first name because she is a girl and the panel viewed the name as “too masculine.”
To date, the government has referred to the girl only as “Girl.”

[...]

Whatever we may think of the country’s naming laws, Iceland gets some respect from me because their word for “email address” is the totally awesome netfang, which the rest of the world should start using immediately.

Getting rid of telemarketers with a Banana Phone

Science

• Meet Rex: the $1m bionic man with working heart, set of lungs and human face

Security

• Big Brother’s Greek Tragedy: State-Deployed Malware & Trojans

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• US Expands Military Reach in Latin America

  …deploy more troops, and keep the military industrial complex fat and happy.

• Wyden Statement on DOJ Memo on the Killing of Americans During Counterterrorism Operations

  US Senator Ron Wyden, a senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, made the following statement today regarding a Justice Department paper entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force” which was made public yesterday by NBC News:

• Center for Constitutional Rights Responds to Newly Released Targeted Killing White Paper

  In response to the release of a Justice Department white paper titled, “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,” the Center for Constitutional Rights made the statements below. Also today, the Center for Constitutional Rights will be filing a brief with the ACLU arguing against current and former administration officials’ attempt to keep out of court a case challenging the targeted killing of three American citizens, one of whom is the subject of this white paper.

• ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer on the DOJ targeted killing White Paper

  The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer joined Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman to discuss the targeted killing White Paper that was leaked to NBC news in February 2013.

• DOJ Memo: Obama Administration Claims Broader Authority To Kill Americans

  We have previously discussed the President’s “kill list” policy under which Obama claims the right to be able to kill any American based on his sole judgment and discretion. A confidential Justice Department memo now sheds more light on that policy and states a broader basis for such killings than previously suggested by the Administration. It is also not clear why this memo was kept secret by the Administration since it deals only with legal interpretations — not classified operational information.

• Assassination Rationales Then & Now–And How Awlaki Didn’t Meet Any of the Criteria

  Moreover, if propaganda videos are enough to get you on the drone target list, then the makers of Zero Dark Thirty would qualify, which demonstrates the lack of credibility of this criterion and the problem with assassinating American citizens without due process. Despite the Obama administration’s constant reassurance of, “Just trust us, we are being careful,” the facts speak otherwise.

• Rand Paul on Drone Memo: Only Lawyers “Could Define ‘Imminent’ to Mean the Exact Opposite.”

• US drone strikes kill five in NWaziristan

  At least five people were killed after six missiles hit a house in Tehsil Spain Wam of North Waziristan on Wednesday.
  The strikes by an unmanned US drone occurred after reports that militants were present in the house, official sources said.
  US drone strikes are infamous around the world, especially in Pakistan, for killing innocent people besides militants.

• Naming the Dead: New Investigation into Victims of US Drone Strikes

  At the end of January 2013, the Bureau was able to identify by name 213 people killed by drones in Pakistan who were reported to be middle- or senior-ranking militants.

• Pakistani ambassador slams US drone strikes

• Obama Drone Memo Sets Dangerous Precedent For Domestic Drone Use

• Meacham On Drone Kills: Obama Acting Like ‘American King’

• Meacham: With drone program, Obama acts like ‘an American king’

• Buchanan criticizes Obama administration over “disturbing” drone policy

• Drones are legal, ethical and wise: White House

• Drone strikes are ‘legal, ethical and wise’: US

• ALL THE KING’S DRONES

  Do “informed, high-level officials” have the power to kill their own citizens?

• White Paper Cites John Brennan Speech Defending Import of Transparency, FOIA, Declassified OLC Memos

  I’ve been out addressing an imminent toner cartridge emergency and taping Al Jazeera English (it’ll be on tonight at 7:30). So I haven’t yet done my timeline of the varying authorizations to kill Anwar al-Awlaki.

  [...]

  Brennan (who presumably is the “informed, high-level official” described as judge and jury in this white paper) to kill Americans.

• What’s Really Wrong With the Targeted Killing White Paper

  There’s certainly a lot to say about the DOJ white paper on targeted killings, much of which has been said already (and well) by others (see Raff’s “Headlines and Commentary” post for links).

  [...]

  This all leads me to what I’ve increasingly come to believe is the only real solution here: If folks are really concerned about this issue, especially on the Hill, then Congress should create a cause of action–with nominal damages–for individuals who have been the targets of such operations (or, more honestly, their heirs). The cause of action could be for $1 in damages; it could expressly abrogate the state secrets privilege and replace it with a procedure for the government to offer at least some of its evidence ex parte and in camera; and it could abrogate qualified immunity so that, in every case, the court makes law concerning how the government applies its criteria in a manner consistent with the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. This wouldn’t in any way resolve the legality of targeted killings, but it would clear the way for courts to do what courts do–ensure that, when the government really is depriving an individual of their liberty (if not their life), it does so in a manner that comports with the Constitution–as the courts, and not just the Executive Branch, interpret it. It’s not a perfect solution, to be sure, but if ever there was a field in which the perfect is the enemy of the good, this is it.

• When liberals ignore injustice

  Why isn’t there more outrage about the president’s unilateral targeted assassination program on the left?

• A Comprehensive Look at the CIA’s Rendition, Detention & Torture Program

  A major report on the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) program was released today by the Open Society Justice Initiative. It is one of the most comprehensive examinations of the program to date.

  From “credible public sources and information provided by reputable human rights organizations,” the organization was able to figure out that “as many as 54 foreign governments reportedly” hosted CIA prisons on their territories; detained, interrogated, tortured and abused individuals; assisted in the capture and transport of detainees; permitted the use of domestic airspace and airports for secret flights transporting detainees; provided intelligence leading to the secret detention and extraordinary rendition of individuals and interrogated individuals who were secretly being held in the custody of other governments.

• What Would Orwell Make of Obama’s Drone Policy?

  Consider the notion of “imminence.” Last year Eric Holder claimed that a lethal strike against an American citizen can only be made if to protect against “an imminent threat of violent attack.” But the white paper states that imminence “does not require that the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests will take place in the significant future.” Effectively, the word “imminence” has no meaning beyond “we think you’re a bad guy.”

• The Justice Department’s chilling ‘targeted killings’ memo

  The memo, rather brilliantly, calls this definition a “broader concept of imminence.” Most people, however, would call this “not imminent.” Instead, it appears that the Justice Department’s version of “imminent” is whatever they say it is.

• Chilling Legal Memo From Obama DOJ Justifies Assassination of US Citizens

  In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

• The Rule of Law or the Rule of Men?

  Furthermore, the language used to describe this detention authorization is so broad that many argue that even American citizens are now susceptible to indefinite imprisonment.

• Obama’s dicey license to kill

  Who would have surrendered such a sensitive document about the president’s “kill list” to NBC News?

• The Justice Department’s White Paper on Targeted Killing

• More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture

  Some were official U.S. adversaries, like Iran and Syria, brought together with the CIA by the shared interest of combating terrorism. “By engaging in torture and other abuses associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition,” writes chief Open Society Foundation investigator Amrit Singh in a report released early Tuesday, “the U.S. government violated domestic and international law, thereby diminishing its moral standing and eroding support for its counterterrorism efforts worldwide as these abuses came to light.”

• 20 Extraordinary Facts about CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention

  The Bush Administration referred to these methods as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” “Enhanced interrogation techniques” included “walling” (quickly pulling the detainee forward and then thrusting him against a flexible false wall), “water dousing,” “waterboarding,” “stress positions” (forcing the detainee to remain in body positions designed to induce physical discomfort), “wall standing” (forcing the detainee to remain standing with his arms outstretched in front of him so that his fingers touch a wall five four to five feet away and support his entire body weight), “cramped confinement” in a box, “insult slaps,” (slapping the detainee on the face with fingers spread), “facial hold” (holding a detainee’s head temporarily immobile during interrogation with palms on either side of the face), “attention grasp” (grasping the detainee with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, and quickly drawing him toward the interrogator), forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and dietary manipulation.

• Colin Powell: Conned or Con-Man?

  Today, of course, we know that much of what Powell said on Feb. 5, 2003, was wrong. He himself has acknowledged that the speech was a “blot” on his record.

• Mystery, Paranoia, Confusion: You Won’t Believe What’s Happening at Guantanamo

  It’s hard to imagine the week going any worse for the government. On the first day of proceedings, a previously unknown, outside entity reached into the courtroom like the hand of god and cut the audio/visual feed to the media – which is on a 40-second delay – apparently surprising even the judge. The judge and his assistant, a court security officer (CSO), have always had the authority to cut the feed, but they didn’t hit the button. Neither had the CSO’s assistants.

• US uses Tony Blair defence to justify drone killings

  In a classified memo arguing that its so-called “targeted killing” campaign is legal, the US cites remarks made in 2004 by Lord Goldsmith, then Mr Blair’s attorney-general, on why Britain’s right to defend itself should include the ability to take pre-emptive military action.

• US justifies drone hits by citing Blair defence of Iraq war

• Obama’s Memo on Killing Americans Twists ‘Imminent Threat’ Like Bush

  All hail NBC’s Michael Isikoff, who has gotten his hands on a previously undisclosed Obama Administration memo concluding that, under certain circumstances, the U.S. government can kill Americans with drones. The 16-page memo, which you can read at the bottom of this post, is going to be analyzed for days by legal experts, but I encourage you to read it so that you can understand how badly President Obama has behaved, regardless of how you feel about the legal arguments.

• Leaked Justice Department document attempts to justify assassinating Americans

  NBC News has obtained a confidential document from the Justice Department that reveals the justification for targeted assassinations of American citizens, even without any evidence to suggest that a suspect is a terrorist or planning violence, a report published on Monday reveals.

• Senate Confirmations: An Opportunity Squandered

  President Obama’s foreign policy team is undergoing a makeover, with the nominations of Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State, former Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, and the Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan as CIA Director. All three gentlemen are expected to be confirmed; Kerry already has, Hagel will likely be confirmed (following an abysmal hearing) later this week, and Brennan faces his confirmation hearing this Thursday, which will essentially be the GOP’s final chance to hold Obama accountable for broken national security policies.

• S.E. Cupp, Steve Kornacki Battle Touré For Defending Drone Strikes: ‘That Was The Argument Under Bush’

  MSNBC’s The Cycle erupted into a heated verbal battle over the ethicality of drone warfare on Tuesday. Co-hosts S.E. Cupp and Steve Kornacki expressed serious reservations over a memo leaked to NBC News by the Justice Department detailing the legal framework that allows for the targeting and killing of an American citizen abroad by an unmanned drone. Touré, however, found his fellow hosts’ objections to be misguided, and repeatedly said he was “comfortable” with the White House’s guidelines governing drone warfare.

• CIA ‘operating drone base in Saudi Arabia’

  The location of the base was first disclosed by The New York Times online.

  A drone flown from there to Yemen was used two years ago in the operation to kill Awlaki, a US-born cleric alleged to be the operations chief of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

• CIA operating drone base in Saudi Arabia, US media reveal

• US using secret airbase in Saudi Arabia to carry out drone strikes against al-Qa’ida militants in Yemen

• CIA rendition report author believes UK could face human rights court

• Report on CIA rendition reveals massive scale of European assistance

• Justice Department memo justifies targeted killing of Americans

  A confidential Justice Department memo says the United States can kill Americans thought to be Al Qaeda chiefs.

• Thailand ‘aided CIA’ in torture

• Report of Thai support for CIA torture is untrue: NSC

  The National Security Council yesterday firmly dismissed a report that Thailand was involved in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s secret detention and torture of suspected terrorists during the post-September 11, 2001 period.

  Released by the Interesting that #cia et al. (governments) #humanrights violations exposed by a billionaire George Soros-backed group, a George Soros organisation, the report identified 54 governments, including Thailand, as collaborators of the CIA.

• Rendition: How 54 nations – and ‘Axis of Evil’ – cooperated with CIA in wake of 9/11

• “Wink-and-nod” policy over CIA drone strikes in Pakistan not true – Pakistan Ambassador to US

• CIA rendition programs: responsible not held accountable

  A new report shows there is evidence that more than a quarter of the world’s countries secretly supported the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme. The New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative says that at least 54 countries – including many in Europe – cooperated with rendition, which saw people kidnapped off the streets, detained and tortured in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York in 2001.

• With CIA pick, a light on drone strikes’ hazards

  In late August, a 40-year-old cleric named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber stood up to deliver a speech denouncing al-Qaida in a village mosque in far eastern Yemen.

  It was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three members of al-Qaida came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Jaber agreed to meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection.

• CIA prisons in Poland: ‘A very high price to pay for cooperation with the USA’ – interview

• CIA used ISI centre for Osama operation

  Pakistani spy agency ISI’s detention facilities in Karachi and elsewhere were used as an initial detention and interrogation point by the CIA during America’s war on al-Qaeda which was supported by over 50 countries following 9/11 attacks, a new report has claimed.
  The report authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the US in its war against al-Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and torturing terror suspects.
  It said detention facilities in Pakistan in which detainees were held at the behest of the CIA include the ISI detention facility in Karachi, which was allegedly used as a detention and interrogation point.

• Secret CIA jails as syndrome of grave disease

• CIA Finally Allows Online Filing Of Freedom Of Information Requests

  In a strange twist of transparency, the CIA is allowing info-seekers to file online Freedom Of Information (FOIA) requests.

  Previously, requests would have to be mailed or faxed. Now one only has to fill out a few fields with relevant information and boom, the request is filed.

• ‘CIA drone attacks clear violation of sovereignty, international law’

• Report: Azerbaijan and Georgia Cooperated with the CIA’s Secret-Detention Program

  Azerbaijan was an important stopover point for secret detainees of the Central Intelligence Agency in the US war on terror, claims a new report that offers the first comprehensive look into human rights abuses under the US practice of secret detentions and extraordinary renditions of terror suspects.

  Reminiscent of a global spy conspiracy novel, the report, “Globalizing Torture,” details how, post-9/11, the US relied on countries around the world to “kick the [expletive] out of” various terror suspects wanted by the CIA.

• Report provides evidence of CIA ‘globalising torture’

• World according to CIA ‘ambiguous’

• ISSUES WITH THE CIA, ADMINISTRATION

  As John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, is expected to answer questions on U.S. drone strike policies during his confirmation hearing Thursday, an intelligence expert suggests what the nominee means for the war on terror.

• Irish Government Facilitated CIA “Torture Flights”

  A report published today by the Open Society Justice Initiative shows that some 54 countries helped to facilitate the CIA’s secret detention,rendition and interrogation programme in the years after 9/11, including Ireland.

• Ireland offered ‘covert support’ to CIA renditions

  A report by the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) claimed the practice was covertly offered support by about 25% of the world’s governments.

  It claims 136 prisoners were secretly detained and interrogated by the CIA in prisons located outside the US, known as “black sites”, where they were subjected to torture and other abuse.

• Southern Africa: SADC States Aided Illegal CIA Renditions

  And while the report underlines the critical and well-documented role played by countries such as the United Kingdom, Egypt and Jordan, it also points the finger of blame at three countries in southern Africa that have largely escaped public attention – and criticism – until now. The three countries are Malawi, South Africa and – ironically given the ruling ZANU-PF party’s anti-imperialist and anti-Western rhetoric – Zimbabwe.

• List of Countries Cooperating with the CIA Revealed

  The NGO report identifies Sweden, Finland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Ireland, Iceland, Canada and Cyprus, among others, as collaborators.

• New report: Denmark participated in CIA rendition programme

  Denmark assisted the CIA in its worldwide program to hold, interrogate and sometimes even torture suspected terrorists, a new report reveals.

• Neil Macdonald: U.S. media complicit in Obama’s drone doctrine

• 6 concrete policy ideas for fixing America’s drone dilemma

  For years, the U.S. debate around drones and targeted killing has gone something like this: Civil rights advocates and others warn that the program is ethically dubious or outright outrageous, not to mention strategically problematic and deeply unpopular with the same populations we’re trying to deter from extremism. Counterterrorism and foreign policy analysts, whether or not they share those concerns (and many of them do), sometimes counter that the program is still necessary to fight terrorism and has produced some real successes, despite the trade-offs and risks. That conversation is resurfacing this week as John Brennan, who runs the drone program out of the White House, readies for confirmation hearings to take over the CIA.

• Virginia city becomes first to pass anti-drone resolution

• Could Charlottesville be the first US no-drone zone?

• City in Virginia passes anti-drone resolution

  Charlottesville, Va., has taken action against the use of police spy drones, ordering a two-year moratorium on the citywide use of unmanned aircraft.

  It is the first city in the nation to do so, supporters say, and its move may prompt other municipalities to act.

• Anti-Drone Laws: Town Passes First US Vote

• Secret U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia revealed ahead of CIA director’s hearing

• Brennan confirmation hearing to hit on drone policy

  The Obama administration’s use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda leaders will face scrutiny Thursday during confirmation hearings for John Brennan to head up the CIA.

• Brennan faces drone attack from senators

• White House silent over CIA drone reports as pressure builds …

• Drones ban advances despite law-enforcement protests

  Legislation that would ban the use of surveillance drones in Florida passed a second Senate committee Wednesday, despite strong opposition from law enforcement agencies.

  The bill, SB 92 by Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, originally banned all uses of surveillance drones. But it was amended to allow their use by law enforcement agencies – but only when the agency first obtains a search warrant or cites a hostage situation, a terrorist threat or other “exigent” circumstances.

• John Bolton Praises Obama’s Drone Program As ‘Sensible’ And ‘Consistent’ Extension Of Bush-Era Policies

  Appearing on Fox’s Happening Now this morning, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton took to defending President Obama‘s program of targeted assassinations of Americans abroad, calling it what it is: an extension of Bush-era policies.

• An ‘Informal Arrangement’ to Not Report the News

  Today the Washington Post (2/6/13) reported some news that it’s known for years, but had decided not tell us until now: The CIA has a drone base in Saudi Arabia.
  Their rationale for withholding this information was simple: The government didn’t want them to. And from what the Post is telling us today, they weren’t the only ones.

• When It Comes to Drones, Trust the Churchgoing CIA Director

Cablegate

• Protest Bradley’s 1,000th day in prison!

• WhoWhatWhy and WikiLeaks: Petraeus downfall began years ago

• New E-Mail Revelations: More Behind Petraeus Sacking than “Sacking”

• WikiLeaks earns $84,000 from crowdsourced campaign

  Freedom of the Press Foundation is launching its second fund-raising campaign in support of cutting-edge journalism focused on transparency and accountability, after its first six-week campaign ended on Sunday with over $196,000 in crowd-funded donations.

• ‘Real Time With Bill Maher’s’ February 8 Guests Include: Julian Assange, Tina Brown, Josh Barro, Martin Bashire And Lawrence Krauss, Highlight Hollywood News

  Bill Maher has been favorite of subscribers since his first special on the network in 1989, starring in nine solo specials, including the hour-long presentations “Bill Maher… But I’m Not Wrong,” “The Decider” and “I’m Swiss” (both nominated for an Emmy® in the Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Special category), “Victory Begins at Home,” “Be More Cynical,” “The Golden Goose Special” and “Stuff That Struck Me Funny,” and two half-hour stand-up specials, plus the specials “30 Seconds Over Washington” and “Comic Relief VI™.” He was the creator and host of “Politically Incorrect,” which was produced by HBO Downtown Productions and debuted on Comedy Central in 1993.

• Pirate Bay Founder Helped Wikileaks On Several Fronts

• Julian Assange set for ‘Real Time With Bill Maher’

  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be the top-of-the-show guest this week on “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

  The program airs live at 10 p.m. Friday on HBO and repeats immediately at 11 p.m.

  Assange is staying at Ecuador’s embassy in London while battling extradition to Sweden for questioning about sex assault allegations made by two women.

• The Pirate Bay Helped WikiLeaks Release ‘Collateral Murder’ Video; Latest Clip From ‘TPB AFK’ [VIDEO]

  Two of the biggest names in the Internet freedom debate, The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, are connected in the release of the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, it is now reported.

Finance

• Noam Chomsky: Who Owns the World?

  World War II is when the United States really became a global power. It had been the biggest economy in the world by far for long before the war, but it was a regional power in a way. It controlled the Western Hemisphere and had made some forays into the Pacific. But the British were the world power.

  World War II changed that. The United States became the dominant world power. The U.S. had half the world’s wealth. The other industrial societies were weakened or destroyed. The U.S. was in an incredible position of security. It controlled the hemisphere, and both the Atlantic and the Pacific, with a huge military force.

• Obama’s bankster bromance

  The White House is holding a meeting today with a number of business leaders to discuss the President’s economic agenda, including immigration. This is encouraging, as it will be important to get leaders on board with reforming immigration rules.

  What’s less encouraging is that the President continues to treat Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein like he’s royalty.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• Doctor Loses Defamation Case Over Online Remarks–McKee v. Laurion

  Dr. McKee treated Kenneth Laurion. Unhappy with those interactions, Kenneth’s son Dennis critiqued Dr. McKee on various doctor review websites. Dr. McKee sued Dennis for defamation (and related claims) based on 11 different statements. The district court granted summary judgment to Dennis on all counts, but the appellate court revived the lawsuit on 6 statements.

• US sanctions Iran’s state broadcaster for ‘censorship’

  The US on Wednesday sanctioned four Iranian entities, including one state sponsored broadcaster, for their alleged censorship activities.

  The US Department of the Treasury, in consultation with the US Department of State, named the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting and its director Ezzatollah Zarghami as subject to sanctions.

• 60 Minutes Plays Softball With Obama and Clinton

• Cyber Attack Floods Bulgarian Whistleblowing Site

  The independent site for investigative journalism Bivol.bg which published formerly classified documents, revealing that Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, has been a person of interest for the anti-mafia police in the 90s, became subject of a “flooding” attack.

• Freedom of the Press Foundation – Updates From Our Front

  …supporting the 1st Amendment and journalism that focuses on transparency…

• On Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Copyleft – Three Critiques of Hacktivism

Privacy

• Google’s Eric Schmidt on ‘Hidden People’ and ‘Virtual Genocide’

  ‘No hidden people allowed’: “If you don’t have any registered social-networking profiles or mobile subscriptions, and online references to you are unusually hard to find, you might be considered a candidate for such a registry.”

• EXCLUSIVE – Petraeus: The Plot Thickens

  Petraeus was suspected of having an extramarital affair nearly two years earlier than previously known.

  [...]

  According to internal emails of the Austin-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, General David Petraeus was drawing attention to his private life much earlier than previously believed. Because it was his private life that resulted in his being forced out as CIA director, alterations in our understanding of the time frame are significant.

• Court: Gov’t Can Secretly Obtain Email, Twitter Info from Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer Jacob Appelbaum

  A federal appeals court has ruled the government can continue to keep secret its efforts to pursue the private information of Internet users without a warrant as part of its probe into the WikiLeaks. The case involved three people connected to the whistleblowing website whose Twitter records were sought by the government, including computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

• Part 2: Daniel Ellsberg and Jacob Appelbaum on the NDAA, WikiLeaks and Unconstitutional Surveillance

• Tor projects win two Access Innovation Awards

  In December I attended the award ceremony for the 2012 Access Innovation Awards. Their finalists included three projects that Tor maintains or co-maintains: OONI (a framework for writing open network censorship measurement tests, and for making the results available in an open way; see its git repo), Flash Proxy (a creative way to let people run Tor bridges in their browser just by visiting a website; see its git repo), and HTTPS Everywhere (a Firefox extension to force https connections for websites that support https but don’t use it by default; see its git repo). Of these, OONI and Flash Proxy ended up being winners in their respective categories.

• The End of Privacy and Freedom of Thought?

  Telstra is implementing deep packet inspection technology to throttle peer to peer sharing over the internet.

Civil Rights

• Berners-Lee’s web warning

  Another key weakness in Australia’s response to the digital economy is our habit of guarding data…

• FBI told to leave Iceland – Took a boy with them

  Mr. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks spokesperson, said last week that representatives from the FBI came to Iceland in August 2011. The Icelandic Minister of the Interior confirmed this the same day and said that when he became aware of the FBI in Iceland he cancelled all cooperation with the FBI and told the representatives to leave.

• orized FBI Questioning of Icelandi

  In late summer 2011, FBI agents questioned an 18-year-old Icelandic boy on matters which, according to them, concerned national security. The boy was connected to WikiLeaks. The questioning took place against the wishes of Icelandic authorities.

  On the evening of August 23, 2011, the boy, whose identity Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV decided not to reveal, came forward to the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavík with information he said concerned possible hacking into the Icelandic government offices’ computer system.

  [...]

  Kristinn Hrafnsson told RÚV that the boy had worked on some projects for WikiLeaks as a volunteer for several months.

• Controversy over FBI Visit to Iceland Continues

  Minister for Foreign Affairs Össur Skarphéðinsson also maintains that the FBI arrived in the country without permission and without the knowledge of the Icelandic government, visir.is reports. Össur rejects the explanation of the Icelandic police that there was a connection between the visit of the FBI agents and a separate visit of FBI experts a month earlier to investigate an impending computer attack.

• Call to Action! Appeals Court Date – Feb. 6, 2013

• No-fly lists: A new tactic of exile?

  The counterterror list of individuals unable to fly to or from the U.S. is growing, but due process sorely lacks

• Rllsberg: NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision Is Part of “Systematic Assault on Constitution”

  A lawsuit challenging a law that gives the government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens is back in federal court this week. On Wednesday, a group of academics, journalists and activists will present oral arguments in court against a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial. In a landmark ruling last September, Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York struck down the indefinite detention provision, saying it likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens. We’re joined by Daniel Ellsberg, a plaintiff in the case and perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

• Court Hears Arguments On US Government’s Ability To Indefinitely Detain Citizens

• NDAA: One Of the Most Dangerous Laws in Over a Century

• Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”

• Bahrain – The Forgotten Revolution

  In late 2010 we witnessed the beginning of a series of events that would radically alter the political and social landscapes of the Middle East and Northern Africa. These events, which later became known as the “Arab Spring”, began with an unprecedented wave of pro-democracy protests against the various authoritarian regimes of the region. Beginning with demonstrations in Tunisia against the 23 year rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali that soon led to the dictator fleeing the country, the spirit of revolution quickly spread to the country’s neighbors as well. In Egypt large protests broke out in the now-famous Tahrir Square against the Mubarak regime, resulting in his eventual overthrow. Libya was next, which saw an armed rebellion against Muammer Gadaffi ending with the dictator’s death in October 2011. Yemen too witnessed protests and violence causing longtime president Abdullah Saleh’s eventual resignation. These monumental power shifts captured the world’s attention and indeed still continue to dominate headlines with the descent of Syria into civil war following the Assad regime’s brutal repression of similar protests and the controversial new Islamist-led government of Egypt.

• Former FBI official questioned on role in abuse of intelligence-gathering tools

  A senior Republican lawmaker is looking into allegations that a former general counsel of the FBI bore greater responsibility for abuses of surveillance authorities than previously known.

• HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATIONS FILED FORMAL COMPLAINTS WITH THE OECD AGAINST SURVEILLANCE COMPANIES

  Human rights organisations file formal complaints against surveillance software firms Gamma International and Trovicor with British and German governments.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks

  The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

• No, free Wi-Fi isn’t coming to every US city

• No one should control Web: Berners-Lee

  The creator of the World Wide Web warned not to hand over power of his invention to the government.

  Speaking last night at a lecture hosted by Sydney’s University of Technology, Tim Berners-Lee said the Internet should remain independent in the same way as journalism.

  “If you’re going to give the government the ability to spy on people and the ability to block” websites they don’t like, “you’ve got to have a lot of trust in that government,” Berners-Lee said.

Intellectual Monopolies

• EFF Joins 24 US Civil Society Groups in Demanding a Baseline of Transparency in TPP Negotiations

  With every coming round of negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade agreement that carries intellectual property provisions that could have hugely harmful consequences for the Internet and our digital rights—the Office of the US Trade Representative has continually whittled away at any remaining opportunity for the public to have input into the drafting process. The TPP has been under negotiation for three years and the opaqueness has only worsened.

• Copyrights

  • Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals

    A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher’s career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, and then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

  • Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals

  • What is the government’s interest in copyright? Not that of the public.

    Like many other geeklaw & policy folks, I was baffled from the get-go by the decisions of federal prosecutors to pursue massive criminal charges against Aaron Swartz for downloading papers from JSTOR. I could understand that his activities constituted problematic behavior, but not the blustering punitive response.

    If Aaron’s wrongful act was unauthorizedly copying articles, copyright law would seem to have been the appropriate venue for a response. JSTOR declined to bring a civil suit against Swartz. State officials had no intention of bringing criminal charges against him, either. But then the federal prosecutors stepped in, and charges blossomed all over the place. But -not copyright charges-.

  • New UK Copyright Research Center Immediately Under Attack For Daring To Ask About Evidence

    As Techdirt reported last year, some copyright maximalists in the UK seem to be against the whole idea of basing policy on evidence. Last week saw the launch of CREATe: Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, a new UK “research centre for copyright and new business models in the creative economy.” One of the things it hopes to do is to bring some objectivity to the notoriously contentious field of copyright studies by looking at what the evidence really says; so it was perhaps inevitable that it too would meet some resistance from the extremist wing of the copyright world

  • High Court in key ruling on Usenet piracy profits

    The movie industry has no rights to the profits made by the owner of Usenet-indexing website Newzbin2 by infringing on copyrights, the England and Wales High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, has ruled.

  • European Court Of Human Rights: No, Copyright Does Not Automatically Trump Freedom Of Expression

    As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control. But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright, posing very real threats to what can be said online. That’s not because their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright industry’s private police force.

  • It’s Time for a Fresh Look at Copyright Laws

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Linux Setup – Chris Knadle, Engineer/System Administrator

Open Ballot: Moment of the Millenium

With Linux continuing its steady rise to world domination, we thought we’d ask you what you think has been the greatest moment for Linux since the start of the millennium.

Leaving the Land of the Giants

The cover of the December 1st–7th 2012 issue of The Economist shows four giant squid battling each other (http://www.economist.com/printedition/2012-12-01). The headline reads, “Survival of the biggest: The internet’s warring giants”. The squid are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Inside, the story is filed under “Briefing: Technology giants at war”. The headline below the title graphic reads, “Another game of thrones” (http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game). The opening slug line reads “Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other’s throats in all sorts of ways.” (Raising the metaphor count to three.)

Linux Top 3: Secure Boot Bricks, Kernel Advances and MariaDB

Top Linux and open-source programs survey results

LinuxQuestions’ annual members choice survey is in and the top Linux distributions and open-source programs are sometimes quite surprising

Desktop

• Chromebooks vs Windows 8 certified systems

  The “freedom” issue surrounding Chromebooks is well documented, same with Windows 8 certified systems. So, which one is better? Or which one gives you less or more freedom?

• Pavilion 14 Chromebook shows HP’s ‘multi-OS approach’

• Big Hardware Heavyweights Are Welcoming Open Source Platforms

  There are more signs emerging that some of the biggest global technology players in the hardware space are warming up to open source operating systems, even as they appear to cool toward Microsoft Windows. Recently, we’ve reported on Chromebooks running the Chrome OS platform, and how they have improved dramatically, and are now available at $200 price points that challenge the laptop status quo. (The hot selling $199 Acer C7 is shown here.)

• HP’s huge Chromebook is here, costs $329

• Microsoft needs to start worrying about Chromebooks

  Here are four good reasons why Microsoft needs to worry about the rise of the Linux-powered, Chrome OS-enabled Chromebooks: Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.

• HP Officially Launches Pavilion 14 Chromebook

  Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has officially launched the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook, joining Acer, Samsung and Lenovo as core PC makers that now back Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) ChromeOS-based cloud notebooks. Is the Chromebook revolution quietly accelerating within the shadow of Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows 8 push? Hmmm…

• The ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’? That’s So 2012

• Not Surprisingly, HP’s New Chromebook Is The Biggest, Heaviest, And Most Expensive New Chromebook Available

• HP Starts Selling Google Chromebook; Is Year Of Desktop Linux Here?

  Rumors were true, HP has joined the Chromebook bandwagon and announced its first Chromebook. As the Microsoft dominated PC market is declining smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks are picking up. It’s inevitable that hard-core Microsoft partners like HP would start offering GNU/Linux powered Chromebook.

• Hewlett-Packard joins Chromebook fray with 14-inch browser-based laptop

Server

• IBM targets emerging markets, offers cheap servers

  International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is to launch a new server range specifically targeting SMBs and emerging markets.

Kernel Space

• Udev fork is a training project say eudev developers

  At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a “hate based fork”. The developers also noted that their “pet project” was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.

• RAID 5/6 code merged into Btrfs

• Graphics Stack

  • Ubuntu and Multiple Monitors – AMD Edition

    There are several ways to end up with a satisfactory experience on the desktop with Ubuntu despite their recent confusion of the user interface. We will discuss some of those another day (KDE vs. Gnome vs. Cinammon vs. Unity). Today we are going to talk about setting up your desktop environment for multiple monitors. This article assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or 12.10, however, the process should work equally well back to version 10.04 LTS unless otherwise noted.

    Assuming you have installed Ubuntu and are successfully sitting at the desktop (the window manager at this point is irrelevant), a couple of questions will now come to mind. What am I going to be using my linux desktop environment for? If you are going to be running office applications, email, basic web browsing and the occassional movie, you might be done. The default (read: Open Source) binary video drivers for both AMD (radeon) and Nvidia (nouveaux) are perfectly acceptable for all of those things. In fact, recently, they both have picked up some compositing support (so you can run the nifty 3D window effects in Compiz or KWin) as well as support for gaming. However, that support is spotty and performance still leaves a lot to be desired.

Applications

• Stellarium 0.12 released with new rendering engine!

  Another major release for the popular open source planetarium was made available today, bringing huge improvements that will excite the fans of this useful application.

  Improvements, bug fixes and lots of new features additions contribute to the Stellarium’s next major step in the mission to help people discover and understand the night skies.

• 5 Alternative Podcast Clients for Linux

  Most podcast fanatics on Windows and Mac OS X use iTunes as their main podcast client. What about Linux users? What are the podcast client that you can use?

  Here are five alternative podcast clients for Linux that I would recommend based on my own searching and experimenting.

• Evolution 3.7.5 Fixes Numerous Bugs

  The development team behind the powerful Evolution email client announced earlier today, February 3, that the fifth unstable version of the upcoming Evolution 3.8 application is now available for download and testing.

• Glances a new system-monitor tool

  Most of this post is based on the information found in the blog of Nicolargo, the author of this tool.

  Glances is a free software (licensed under LGPL) to monitor your GNU/Linux or BSD operating system from a text interface. Glances uses the library libstatgrab to retrieve information from your system and it is developed in Python.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Counting processors on your Linux box

  • How to install and use Hubot on Ubuntu Linux

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Fedora 18

  • IBM Systems Director VMControl resource lifecycle management: part 4

  • How to automatically chroot jail selected ssh user logins

  • Three tools for managing Vim plugins

  • Introduction to 389 Directory Server

  • How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On Fedora 18

• Wine or Emulation

  • John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

    John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software and lead developer of the id Tech engine for the Doom and Quake franchises, is now promoting Wine for Linux gaming rather than native Linux ports.

• Games

  • Hairy Tales to be ported to Linux if enough interest is shown

  • Wargame: European Escalation Coming Soon To Linux

    While it was speculated it would come to Linux as a key developer stated internally they were running the game on Linux, Wargame: European Escalation has now been officially announced for Linux. The game is currently undergoing closed beta testing on Linux before its official Steam debut.

    Wargame: European Escalation is a real-time strategy game that was released last year for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and its story is set in Europe during the Cold War. This game is powered by RUSE’s IRISZOOM game engine. Wargame: European Escalation was developed by Eugen Systems and is distributed digitally via Steam.

  • Unvanquished Alpha 12 Brings Lots Of Churn

    The popular Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game that promises to deliver on good quality in-game graphics and compelling game-play, is now out with its monthly alpha release.

  • Steam games in Slackware

    Valve is updating its Steam client for Linux regualarly, fixing the issues which are reported by lots of interested Linux gamers. I was a bit behind with updating my Slackware remix of the client binaries but I have overcome the flue and pushed an update, bringing the steamclient package for Slackware to the latest version, 1.0.0.22.

  • id Software Hits Linux Gamers with a Wine Bat

    id Software has habit of releasing their engines as open source, but a statement made by John Carmack, on Twitter, revealed an interesting information.

    People will remember that id Software was one of the few big game developers that thought about the Linux platform way before there were any hints that the open source platform was a valid business avenue.

  • Unvanquished Alpha 12 has hit!

  • Dyad confirmed for Steam, hitting PC, Mac, Linux

  • Jonathan Blow criticises Linux dev tools

    Linux as a games platform is being held back by chronic shortcomings with IDEs and debuggers, says Braid developer Jonathan Blow.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • What’s new with Nepomuk 4.10

    I’ve blogged about some of the more prominent changes in this new Nepomuk release. I thought it would be a good idea to document all the changes, most of which I haven’t publicly blogged about.

  • Little bits of news about Gwenview

  • building KDE software from git.kde.org the easy way

  • new plasma-framework repo

    On November 3, 2008 libplasma moved from kde-workspace to kdelibs sporting a spiffy API that used the new QGraphicsProxyWidget heavily.

    In Randa this past summer we agreed on the last few big decisions for libplasma2. We would remove QGraphicsView and move entirely to QML. In the process, libplasma would have no drawing system dependent code in it. It would be data and business logic only.

  • Alternatives to Knotes

    I am still migrating away from my old KDE tools. Most of them will run under LXDE, or any other desktop, but I’m finding that since KDE 4 came out, the accessories are all fatter, slower, and worst of all, buggy. I reported last month on replacing Korganizer. Next up: Knotes.

  • Krita 2.6 Released, Offers Better Photoshop Compatibility

    Krita 2.6 adds many performance improvements, but also new support for OpenColorIO, a color management system used by movie studios and applications like Blender, which means that Krita now fits into a movie/vfx studio workflow.

  • KDE’s Aaron Seigo Starts Weekly Hangout On Google+

    Great news for KDE users. Aason Seigo, the KDE project lead, is starting a weekly Google+ Hangout. Seigo ‘tested’ the first hangout and it went well, except for some initial glitches caused by Pulse Audio.

  • Video Guide On Building KDE

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Power management in GNOME 3.8

  • GNOME Switching to JavaScript?

    Floating out in newsfeeds today was an interesting tidbit by John Palmieri who said, “So GNOME finally chose an official language and it is JavaScript.” Now I’m not a developer, but everytime I encounter JavaScript it’s causing problems. Is this a good idea for GNOME?

  • JavaScript becoming default language for GNOME apps

    At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in.

  • GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

    The GNOME project, developers of the GNOME desktop for Linux, has decided JavaScript will be the only “first class” language it will recommend for developers cooking up new apps for the platform.

  • Dissent on Gnome’s Javascript decision

  • Why I said goodbye to the Gnome Desktop

    It’s finally time for me to leave the Gnome Desktop, thanks to Gnome 3. Fortunately for me, the MATE desktop is a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop, and as of Fedora 18, is integrated into the Fedora repository; it’s also fairly easy to install.

Distributions

• 2012 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

  Desktop Distribution of the Year – Slackware (20.59%)

• A look at UberStudent 2.0

  UberStudent is a Linux distribution which declares itself as being “Linux for learners”. The project is based on Ubuntu with UberStudent 2.0 using the latest Ubuntu long-term support release as a base. Looking over the project’s documentation we find UberStudent is designed with an eye toward education. The project is targeting people wishing to teach or learn academic computing. The project’s website refers to the distribution as a learning platform, designed to help people become fluent in computer technology. There are several editions of the latest UberStudent release. The main edition comes with the Xfce desktop environment and other editions feature the LXDE and MATE desktops. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. I opted to try the Xfce edition which can be downloaded as a 3.5 GB DVD images.

• Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” Review: Lightweight, fast and elegant Openbox distro for low spec computers!

  From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 “Ultra” Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.

• New Releases

  • Expected release list

  • New Linux distro would target disabled users

    There are more than a billion people around the globe living with some sort of disability today, yet software in general and operating systems in particular are just beginning to address their computing needs.

  • Welcome to Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0r2 Release Notes

• Screenshots

  • Linux Lite 1.0.4 screen shots

    Linux Lite is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. It is uses the Xfce desktop environment, a desktop environment known to be suitable for low-end computers. The latest update, Linux Lite 1.0.4, was released just today.

    It ships with Steam client for Linux, the popular game distribution platform, installed. Because of the memory requirements of Steam, don’t expect to run this edition of Linux Lite on a resource-starved computer, if you intend to play that game.

  • Arch 2013.02.01 Screenshots

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS quarterly rollup release: Hands on

    PCLinuxOS is an “old standard” Linux distribution. Although it doesn’t seem to have been getting as much attention recently it still seems to have a significant number of very loyal followers.

    The strength of PCLinuxOS today is in stability, and a very active and dedicated user community.

    It includes an excellent array of applications and utilities in the base distribution, so for many purposes it is ready to use right out of the box. If you try it and have problems of any kind, you can generally get very capable help from the PCLinuxOS User Forums very quickly.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Joins HP Enterprise Services Technology Alliance

  • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Trying Desperately to Excite the Market

    Red Hat provides open-source software. It is particularly famous for its Linux operating system. In the third quarter, Red Hat’s revenues increased by 18% y-o-y to hit the $344 million mark, which was in-line with expectations. Subscription revenues experienced a 19% increase that enabled them to hit the $294 million mark. Billing also grew by 18%. More importantly, in the third quarter, the company announced the acquisition of ManageIQ. ManageIQ specializes in cloud management and automation. The acquisition is expected to be a long term gain for Red Hat. It is also an attempt to take on VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) , a company that has managed to make inroads into enterprise through its vCloud platform but failed to enter the public cloud.

  • Red Hat to employees: yes, please bring new apps to work

    Bring us your cool, useful, and productivity-heightening apps and devices and we’ll look at them and work to support your efforts.

    That’s the unique view that Linux vendor Red Hat takes when it comes to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon that’s prevalent in the world of enterprise IT.

  • Cloud9 IDE Builds Online Development Environment with Red Hat OpenShift

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Cloud9 IDE has built its online development environment with Red Hat’s OpenShift Online hosted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. By integrating OpenShift Online into its original online development environment, Cloud9 IDE is able to deliver more flexibility, security and ease of use to developers.

  • HP and Red Hat Partner On Premises and In the Cloud

  • Fedora

    • I’m FedUp with Fedora!

      So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried it, so I wanted to give FedUp a try.

    • Fedora 18 review

      The latest edition of Fedora Linux was released on January 15th, after 2 months of delay. This community project is sponsored by Red Hat Linux and is one of the primary showcases for the GNOME desktop and its applications. Among the features making their debut is a much improved Samba setup (which is supposed to let you connect easily with Windows’ Active Directory). Also, the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments which got their start in Linux Mint are available, although not installed by default.

      This is my review of the KDE edition of Fedora 18, 64-bit version. After 3 reviews of their main release, I decided it was time to check out the KDE Spin edition. Fedora has several different “Spins”, produced to showcase desktops or emphasize scientific, design, gaming, or other focused interests.

    • Fedora 18 Officially Released for IBM System z 64-bit

      Dan Horák announced that the Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems is now available for download.

    • Fedora 18 for ARM released

      The Fedora 18 for ARM release includes pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3) hardware platforms. Fedora 18 for ARM also includes an installation tree in the yum repository which may be used to PXE-boot a kickstart-based installation on systems that support this option, such as the Calxeda EnergyCore (HighBank).

• Debian Family

  • Release-team Sees About 90 Bugs to Squash Before Releasing Debian Wheezy

  • Debian Project News – February 4th, 2013

  • Debian Project News – February 4th, 2013

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu: What They’re Doing Right and Wrong

        Ubuntu’s rate of evolution over the past few years is astounding. It has grown from a standard Gnome desktop distribution into a full operating system with its own desktop environment, development tools and community.

        To celebrate Ubuntu’s success, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the things Ubuntu is doing well and also mention some issues that could use improvement.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 15 Will Be Named Olivia

          Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few days ago that the codename for the upcoming Linux Mint 15 operating system will be Olivia.

          Linux Mint 15 (Olivia) will be available for download at the end of May 2013, and it will be distributed as separate Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce editions.

Devices/Embedded

• $25 Raspberry Pi, Minus Some Features, to Arrive First in Europe

  It’s been a big 2013 for the Raspberry Pi so far. As we’ve reported, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based computing device (shown) is emerging as one of the biggest open source stories of this year. While fully stocked Raspberry Pi devices have been selling briskly at the $35 price point, a new blog post confirms that the latest Model A devices, initially available only in Europe, will move back to the $25 price point–in reach of lots of schools and individuals.

• Cheaper Raspberry Pi out in Europe for $25

• New $25 Raspberry Pi Linux PC Lands in Europe; Cuts RAM, But is More Efficient

• Raspberry Pi Model A now on sale in Europe

• Raspberry Pi Model A released one year later

  Raspberry Pi’s base model release finally fulfills the promise of a $25 computer, available in Europe now

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung GALAXY Young and Samsung GALAXY Fame

      Samsung announced the Samsung GALAXY Young and Samsung GALAXY Fame. The GALAXY Young, available in white, deep blue, wine red and metallic silver, is a smart and affordable Android playmate for the younger, stylish generation of mobile users. The GALAXY Fame, available in pearl white and metallic blue, combines powerful performance with an essential suite of features and services, all packed within a stylish design.

  • Android

    • App fever: Avocado

    • Wine for Linux is going mobile: You will soon be able to run Windows apps on Android

      Wouldn’t it be great if you could run Windows applications on your Android smartphone or tablet? Well, that may one day be a reality, and the person who is working on the new project is the best man for the job. That’s right: Wine for Android is coming.

    • Windows apps coming to Android with Wine port

    • Full-Fledged Windows Apps Could Be Coming Soon To Your Android Phone

    • Wine Will Bring Windows Apps To Android, If There Are Any

      Alexandre Julliard, the project lead for Wine, gave a mini demo of Wine for Android at FOSDEM, which will allow Android users to run Windows apps.

      Who needs Windows apps on Android when Windows mobile platform has a very tiny app ecosystem when compared with Android. On the contrary there are thousands of high-profiled Android apps which are not available for Windows 8 mobile devices.

    • NVIDIA demos Project SHIELD streaming from PC

    • OUYA Finds a Friend With Amazon

    • Ouya preorders start today; retail availability set for June

      The Android-based console will be available for $99.99. An extra controller will go for $49.99.

    • Google Play adding ‘new forms of payment,’ shuffles developer payouts

      Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is revamping its payout schedule for Android application developer partners, stating the change is designed to accommodate new Play storefront payment options.

    • Google Extends Payout Schedule For Developers By 2 Weeks, As “New Forms Of Payment” Are Added To Google Play

    • FOSDEM: Android app to control LibreOffice presentations

      Together with version 4.0 of LibreOffice, due out in the next few days, the developers plan to release the “Impress Android Remote” app that allows the office suite’s presentation features to be controlled from Android smartphones. The developers plan to release the app at the same time as, or shortly after, LibreOffice 4.0; communication with the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth. This is some of the information that LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks offered in his presentation at this year’s “Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting” (FOSDEM 2013), which ended on Sunday.

    • Android System Administration Utilities

      “Change is inevitable in a progressive society. Change is constant” Benjamin Disraeli 1867. Quite a fitting quote if I say so myself. When I started in systems administration back in the mid 90’s everything was done either remoted in from your desktop, a server, or you plugged a terminal into the back of the server. Laptops were still bulky back then and I loathed carrying around my brick of a laptop to connect into things. Thin laptops were too much for a lot of IT budgets, Palm was just getting started, and tablets were luxury items (yes we had tablets). We made do with what we had.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Linux Netbooks: Hiding in Plain Sight

FOSS+CSS: Closed Source DOS Accounting Meets Linux and DOSEMU

Guest Post: Patrick McGarry on Open Source Disruption

The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February – 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here.

In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.

Events

• New events calendar for open source conferences, meetups, and more

Web Browsers

• Chrome and Firefox demonstrate plug-in-free video chat

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla improves Firefox’s Do Not Track feature

    If you are on the Internet, chance is that you are being tracked. Advertising companies, Internet services and even Internet Service Provider track users for a variety of purposes, but most often to profile users to increase advertising revenue or sell the data to companies that do.

    While cookies are most often used for that purpose, and I’m using the term lightly so that it includes all different kinds of cookies, it is not the only option that companies have. Fingerprinting may be an option as well which tries to identify users based on factors such as their IP address, operating system, web browser and other data that is submitted automatically when connections are established.

Databases

• Monty has last laugh as distros abandon MySQL

  When the community GNU/Linux distributions Fedora and openSUSE recently announced that they would be switching their default database management system from MySQL to MariaDB, one man in Finland would have had a very hearty laugh.

• Oracle Releases MySQL 5.6 To Improve NoSQL, Performance

  While there’s many in the open-source community that remain unhappy with Oracle, including the direction of the MySQL database server to the point that Fedora will now ship MariaDB instead, MySQL 5.6 was released this morning by the software giant.

  Oracle says their general availability release of MySQL 5.6 has increased performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability over earlier releases of this open-source MySQL database software.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Microsoft Office and the Big Subscription Bet

  “LibreOffice does everything I need, and in fact I keep learning about new things I can do in LibreOffice,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I even carry it with me on USB Thumb drive in the Portable Apps version. So please explain to me why I should care about overpriced bloatware? And don’t get me started on the $%^**#%$ Ribbon.”

• LibreOffice 4.0 Release to Widen Divide with OpenOffice

  It was in September of 2010 that a group of key members of the OpenOffice.org developer team announced that they were no longer willing to wait out the uncertain future of OpenOffice, especially in the face of the lack of interest shown by Oracle, the new owner of the project following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems nine months before.

Healthcare

• Node.js integrates with M: Next big thing in healthcare IT

  Join the M revolution and the next big thing in healthcare IT: the integration of the node.js programming language with the NoSQL hierarchical database, M.

  M was developed to organize and access with high efficiency the type of data that is typically managed in healthcare, thus making it uniquely well-suited for the job.

  One of the biggest reasons for the success of M is that it integrates the database into the language in a natural and seamless way. The growth and involvement of th community of M developers however, has been below the radar for educators and the larger IT community. As a consequece it has been facing challenges for recruiting young new developers, despite the critical importance of this technology for supporting the Health IT infrastructure of the US.

Business

• The impact of open source on business and social good

  I vividly remember the time when my early opinions about open source software were built around questions that made natural (and perfect) sense to me at that point in my life, like: “Why would someone sell a software product for free?” and “Why should anyone participate in a project that does not reap financial rewards?” These formed the basis of my rationale.

  That was before I embarked on my professional journey and as a consequence had not experienced organizational life. My myopic view towards the open source methodology of developing projects, and the profound impact this methodology has on the business world in general and the organizational structure in particular, began to broaden after my first intense exposure to the Linux operating system at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. My understanding about the magnificence of this operating system and the process by which it is constantly iterated caused a 180-degree transformation. This consequently cultivated appreciation for the entire process of peer production and the impact it has on today’s businesses, both big and small.

• The Right Way To Do IT

Funding

• Can you help the Sonar Project?

  We’ve been asked to help promote what looks like an incredible initiative. The Sonar Project hopes to fund the development of a Linux distribution focused on accessibility, and the campaign is looking to raise $20,000 through Indiegogo, a crowd funding site. But the project could also benefit from people with graphic design skills as well as those who can simply help spread the word.

• Piston Cloud Gets $8 Million of Funding from OpenStack-friendly Partners

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Luminosity of Free Software

  About 5 minutes before starting the Hangout last week, I impulsively named it “The Luminosity of Free Software” as that was resonating with the thoughts in my head at the time .. and I think I’ll stick with that name for the time being. You may notice that there is no “KDE” in the title (or my name, either and that’s intentional. I want to be able to discuss larger issues in Free software, and this gives me more freedom to do so. The show will be a reflection of my interests and those who watch and participate, so there will be a good amount of discussion that relates to or is relevant for KDE, it just won’t be exclusively about it.

• Time for GNUPedia again?

  At one time, Wikipedia was a universal source for the useful programming tools and resources. If some language, framework or tool was used in general, it has been covered there. However recently Wikipedia seems raising the requirements to the level that would exclude many useful Free software projects. For instance, recently JAMWiki has been removed – reasonably popular, thousands of downloads (and that is for server side app), mentioned in near every review on Java-based wiki engines over multiple sources on the web – where it has been a problem?

• FSF licensing team’s 2012 – 400 compliance reports resolved

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Why Aaron Died

    I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

    I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.

    I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.

    [...]

    I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.

    I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.

    And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.

  • Where Does Mayor Bloomberg Stand on Academic Freedom?

    This morning, Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, issued an extraordinarily powerful statement in defense of academic freedom and the right of the political science department to co-sponsor the BDS event.

    [...]

    So that’s good. But the fight is not over. The New York City Council, as you know, has laid down a gauntlet: if this event goes forward, with my department’s co-sponsorship, the Council will withdraw funds from CUNY and Brooklyn College. As Glenn Greenwald points out this morning, this is about as raw an exercise of coercive political power —and simple a violation of academic freedom—as it gets; it is almost exactly comparable to what Rudy Guiliani did when he was mayor and pulled the funding from the Brooklyn Museum merely because some people did not like what it was exhibiting.

    So now the battle lines are clear: it’s the City Council (and perhaps the State Legislature and Congress too) against academic freedom, freedom of speech, and CUNY.

    Throughout this controversy, there has been one voice that has been conspicuously silent: Mayor Bloomberg. To everyone who is a journalist out there, I ask you to call the Mayor’s office and ask the question: Will he stand with the City Council (and follow the model of his predecessor), threatening the withholding of funds merely because government officials do not like words that are being spoken at Brooklyn College? Or will he stand up to the forces of orthodoxy and insist: an educational institution, particularly one as precious to this city as CUNY, needs to remain a haven for the full exploration of views and opinions, even about—especially about—topics as fraught as the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

  • A time for action: One student’s commitment to free and open access

    I have been a PhD student for less than two years.

Programming

• The History of Visual Development Environments: Imagine There’s no IDEs. It’s Difficult if You Try.

Social Media and the Professional: Twitter

In this series I’m looking at my experiences using social media as a business professional. In this entry I examine the rules and policies I personally use regarding Twitter.

In the introduction to this series of blog entries, I asked several questions regarding my use of particular social media services, and how I manage the intersection of my personal and professional lives in them. Here I’m going to look specifically at Twitter. This is the way I use the service and may or may not be how you do or should use it yourself.

Health/Nutrition

• Congress Is About to Introduce Legislation to Decriminalize Marijuana

  Whispers has learned that a member of Congress is about to introduce legislation today to decriminalize marijuana.

  The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2013 will be introduced by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, from Colo., whose office did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Security

• “Lucky Thirteen” attack snarfs cookies protected by SSL encryption

• Java: Where Oracle, Twitter and Black Hats Meet

• 250,000 Twitter Passwords Hacked – What Should You Do?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Now is the Winter of our Disinterment

  Monarchy is bollocks, and something we should have outgrown a long time ago. Nice to see that today’s Prince Harry retains the tradition of remorseless homicide though.

• 54 countries helped CIA after 9/11, report says

• 54 countries helped CIA to kidnap, detain and torture – report

• Someone Just Leaked Obama’s Rules for Assassinating American Citizens

  For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama’s targeted killing program.

• Senators demand secret memos on targeted killing

  Eleven senators sent a letter to President Obama on Monday demanding access to secret legal memos outlining the administration’s case for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in counterterrorism operations overseas.

• Brennan Approved Signature Strikes in Yemen because of “Personal Appeals”

  Daniel Klaidman has what must be intended as a defense of John Brennan. Given that it (once again) fails to mention Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, accepts Brennan’s claims to have opposed torture on its face, and makes no mention of Brennan’s assault on Americans’ privacy, it fails to make the case it tries to, that Brennan would rein in the war on terror at CIA.

• Legal Review of Presidential Power to Engage in Preemptive Cyber Strikes to Remain Secret

  Unnamed officials involved in the review inform that the administration is moving in the coming weeks to “approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyber attack.” These rules, according to David Sanger and Thom Shanker, will “govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States.” If the president approves a strike, the government will be able to “attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.”

• Obama Admin Enacts Right for Preemptive Cyberattacks

• Our Illegal Drone Program

  He strongly suggests we’ve been targeting all manner of alleged terrorists, including cooks and drivers. And we’ve changed that practice not because of the dubious legality of targeting non-combatants, but because cooks are easily replaced.

• Chief Prosecutor, Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions

• After Talking about Restoring Trust in CIA, Panetta Lies about the Young Woman’s Drone Death that Led to Khost

  Leon Panetta lies about the drone strike that killed Baitullah Mehsud and his wife

• Zero Dark Thirty, Manhunt and Obama Admin. Justify Use of Torture

• Targeted Killings: Obama’s Endless War

• LAWYERS: NYPD’S MUSLIM SPYING VIOLATES 1985 PACT

  Civil rights lawyers urged a judge Monday to stop the New York Police Department from routinely observing Muslims in restaurants, bookstores and mosques, saying the practice violates a landmark 1985 court settlement that restricted the kind of surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and ’70s.

• Former Military Prosecutor on How Torture Weakens America

  Morris Davis says the used of “enhanced interrogation techniques” has failed to make America safer.

• In Guantanamo, War on Human Rights Passes for War on Terror

• Why Does the Media Go Easy on Barack Obama?

  Allegations of liberal media bias are almost constant in the conservative press, but their intensity has increased since President Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared together on 60 Minutes, where interviewer Steve Kroft posed “softball” questions that were almost comically obsequious. “Mr. Kroft, as embarrassing as his interview was, is merely symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the unprecedented swooning and cheerleading by the press for Barack Obama,” Peter Wehner wrote in Commentary, echoing an argument voiced by many on the right. He posits that the rise of conservative media outlets like Fox News may have triggered a liberal backlash.

• 5 Disturbing Aspects of the DOJ White Paper on the President’s License to Kill

  More generally, the white paper fleshes out the Obama administration’s argument that U.S. citizens killed by drones are getting all the process that is appropriate in the circumstances; hence the Fifth Amendment, though implicated, is not violated. And since these targeted killings are lawful acts of self-defense, the Justice Department says, they do not violate the law against killing U.S. nationals in foreign countries or the executive order banning assassination. After all, “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” Duh.

• CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’

• Blunt words on China from US Navy

  The US trade publication Defense News last week posted a video on its blog from a US Naval Institute conference featuring an extraordinarily blunt assessment of China’s maritime strategy and ambitions from US Navy Captain James Fanell, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence and Information Operations for US Pacific Fleet. The moderator describes Fanell as the ‘top intelligence officer’ in the Pacific Fleet, which means he is advising some of the US military’s senior decision-makers on China’s military strategy and capability.

• This Isn’t the Memo You’re Looking For

  As important as it is to see the white paper DOJ gave Congress to explain its purported legal rationale, it is just as important to make clear what this white paper is not.

  First, is it not the actual legal memos used to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and who knows who else. As Michael Isikoff notes in his story, the Senators whose job it is to oversee the Executive Branch — even the ones on the Senate Intelligence Committee that are supposed to be read into covert operations — are still demanding the memos, for at least the 12th time. The release of this white paper must not serve to take pressure off of the White House to release the actual memos.

• Justice Department White Paper Details Rationale for Targeted Killing of Americans

• Who Decided U.S. Megabanks Are Too Big to Jail?

  Tom Hanks has a knack for playing the roles that define American generations. In “Saving Private Ryan,” he embodied the courage of the men who landed on the Normandy beaches under heavy fire. In “Apollo 13,” he conveyed calm and ingenuity under intense pressure: “Houston, we have a problem.” And Forrest Gump revealed much about America before, during and after the Vietnam War.

• Senators ask Obama for legal opinions OKing drone strikes

  A bipartisan group of 11 senators is appealing directly to President Barack Obama to give lawmakers his administration’s legal justification for using armed drones or other counterterrorism operations to kill American citizens.

• Bipartisan Group of Senators Seeks Legal Justifications for the Deliberate Killing of Americans

• ‘CIA used ISI’s detention centres in Pakistan during war on al Qaeda’

  The report authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the US in its war against al Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and “torturing” terror suspects.

Cablegate

• Iceland expelled FBI agents seeking to question a WikiLeaks volunteer

• Iceland Removed Two FBI Agents During Worldwide WikiLeaks Investigation

• Iceland Kicks Out FBI Wikileaks Probe

• When Truth Tried to Stop War

• WikiLeaks Founder Assange Awarded Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts

• Julian Assange awarded ‘Courage Award 2013′ by Yoko Ono Lennon

• Appeals Court Sides With Gov. Secrecy in WikiLeaks, Twitter Case

• Journalists Should Defend Whistle-Blowers

  Accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning will have spent 1,000 days in prison come Feb. 23. Manning faces a possible lifetime sentence for allegedly leaking military information to the news outlet WikiLeaks in 2010.

• BRADLEY MANNING, JOHN KIRIAKOU, AND THE SHAMAN’S WRATH

  The first trend is increasing inequality and hierarchy. Roughly speaking, early human societies evolved from relatively simple, egalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers, to more complex, hierarchical, unequal societies. Over time, as a general tendency, leaders, chiefs and kings emerged with ever stronger authority and powers.

  The second trend is increasing injustice in dispute resolution — what Betzig called “asymmetry in the resolution of conflicts”. Roughly speaking, when there are disputes, they are resolved less and less on the merits of the case, and more and more on the power and wealth of the parties. The powerful tend increasingly to win disputes even if they are in the wrong. Asymmetric rules may develop: for instance, insulting a peasant has rarely had serious consequences, but not so with insulting the king.

• Jeremy updates

  First, I regret to inform that we have received a phone call from Jeremy the other day, telling us that he has been moved into solitary confinement, ‘the hole’ for an undetermined amount of time. We are not sure why, because our phone call was cut short when the battery died on my phone. This injustice was further confirmed when we conferred with his legal team, who have been visiting him on a daily basis since he was put in solitary confinement. At this point, he will not be able to receive visits (other than his lawyers) and will have heavy restrictions on phone calls. He is still able to receive mail, although less regularly. With hope, he will not be in the hole for too long and be ‘lucky’ to return to regular prison society sooner rather than later.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Siren Song of the Robot

  The quest for cheap energy and cheap labor is a conquering human urge, one that has played out with notable ferocity starting with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of coal into British manufacturing and the more recent outsourcing of Western manufacturing to Asia have marked key thresholds in this ongoing progression.

Finance

• Visa Sued by Australian Regulator Over Currency Policy

  Visa Inc., (V) the world’s biggest payments network, contravened Australia’s consumer protection laws by preventing buyers from using a currency of their choice when shopping, the country’s competition regulator said.
  The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in an e-mailed statement that it sued Visa in federal court, claiming the company prevented the expansion of so-called dynamic currency conversion services. A copy of the claim wasn’t immediately available from the court.

• Group Launched to Support WikiLeaks, Transparency Journalism Reports Incredible Success

  A foundation dedicated to promoting and funding transparency journalism, which launched on December 16, has concluded its first round of funding for organizations. It has enjoyed incredible success and found there are a lot of people who want to support this kind of an organization.

  The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) raised nearly $200,000 for four different organizations, including WikiLeaks, which it collected donations to support because the media organization faces a banking blockade that makes it difficult for it to directly accept funds from supporters.

• Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

  AT 9:30 A.M. ON AUGUST 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market’s servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don’t see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week’s average.

• Private Prisons Will Get Totally Slammed By Immigration Reform

• Max Keiser’s unpleasant facts on UK economy (25Jan13)

  Max Keiser deliveres some unpleasant truthes on the state of the UK economy.

• FBI Monitors Occupy, Denies Violating First Amendment

  Though it should surprise no one, the FBI has been thoroughly tracking the ideas, movements, and members of Occupy Wall Street since August of 2011, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, PCJF’s executive director said in a release.

• Goldman Sachs: Doing “God’s Work” by inflicting the Wages of Sin Globally

  The central point that I want to stress as a white-collar criminologist and effective financial regulator is that Goldman Sachs is not a singular “rotten apple” in a healthy bushel of banks. Goldman Sachs is the norm for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the so-called “too big to fail” banks). Impunity from the laws, crony capitalism that degrades democracy, and massive national subsidies produce exceptionally criminogenic environments. Those environments are so perverse that they produce epidemics of “control fraud.” Control fraud occurs when the persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud. In finance, accounting is the “weapon of choice.” It is important to remember, however, that other forms of control fraud maim and kill thousands.

• Carney set for first taste of Bank of England

• Fixing ‘too-big-to-fail’

  The United States is plagued by large corporations with outsized political power. They are “too big to fail.” So if they are about to fail, they get rescued. Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.

  We need to replace them with smaller companies, but U.S. antitrust law is inadequate. It exists, but has been weakened over the past decades. Consider the proposed “Volcker Rule,” which would make many banks split into two companies, one for risky investments and one for loans based on savings, as the old Glass-Steagall law required. This would address some problems, but would not make banks small enough. Eliminating “too big to fail” banks means making sure that each is small enough that regulators, prosecutors and elected officials won’t hesitate to let it suffer the consequences of its own decisions.

• Does anybody NOT see the common sense Richard Stallman speaks here?

  It isn’t often that I feel the need to amplify Stallman’s words; he’s usually a little extreme-left for my tastes. But this is one of those times when he reminds me why I still count him as a visionary – perhaps even still ahead of his time.

  In this Reuters interview, he addresses the problem of corporations that are “too big to fail” and proposes that monopoly laws be strengthened, a return to Glass-Steagall-type regulation, and a progressive tax on corporations, where the bigger the company, the more of a percentage they pay.

  Wonderful, wonderful sense, it would fix just about every economic problem we have in this country. And you can hang your hopes on seeing unicorns fly before it actually happens.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• FCC Poised to Open the Door for Unbridled Expansion of Media Empires

  If the world can learn anything from Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, it’s a lesson about the brute force of a media empire.

  Rupert Murdoch’s conglomerate was so powerful, it was allegedly able to invade people’s privacy and pay police officials to grease its dodgy news gathering machine; all while playing kingmaker in British Parliamentary elections and gaining access to the highest reaches of state power.

• CBS To CNET: ‘Free Beer, Not Free Speech’

  Meanwhile, CNET has been fired by folks at CES. They won’t be choosing the “Best of Show” anymore and they lose credibility as an objective tech news source–at least temporarily.

Censorship

• Collateral Censorship: Oxford Union Replaces Assange Speech Backdrop, Citing ‘Copyright’ Concerns

  This is bogus on so many levels. First off, and most importantly, the video itself is a “work” of the US government, and as such is simply not protected by copyright law. Rather it is definitively in the public domain as per Section 105 of the Copyright Act. And, of course, even if it was subject to copyright, it would still be a ridiculous claim. There would be obvious fair use in merely showing a single still image from a longer video, especially given the context of the use and the speech. And, yes, this is in the UK, rather than the US, but even under UK “fair dealing” concepts, this would almost certainly be considered fair dealing.

• UPDATE: OXFORD UNION
  RESPOND TO ASSANGE

• NYC Council Threatens to Withdraw $ if Poli Sci Doesn’t Withdraw Cosponsorship

• First Into Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  At the valuable Nuclear Secrecy blog today a report, not widely-known, about one of first outside experts into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings. Local reaction amazing. My own book and video on U.S. film-makers who arrived a few weeks later, and their footage suppressed for decades.

• Greek police ‘Photoshop away’ signs of brutality from mugshots

Privacy

• The privacy cliff and how not to fall off it

  On January 25, 2012, the European Commission (EC) issued a privacy proposal to require “data controllers” (online merchants, advertisers, etc.) to provide more transparent and accessible information to data subjects (individual Internet users). The proposal asserts a right of EU citizens “to be forgotten,” thereby obliging data controllers to delete personal data on request. Data controllers would be prohibited from collecting data unless the subject gives express consent. In the meantime, the United States has proposed precisely what the EU has already vehemently rejected: voluntary industry self-regulation, subject to limited federal enforcement.

• Wikileaks and you: privacy, human rights and the rise of the surveillance state

• Guantánamo judge: defence cannot prove CIA eavesdropping on meetings

• Human rights court to declassify ‘CIA prison in Poland’ documents

  The Polish government says it is ‘disturbed’ by the European Court of Human Rights’ decision to declassify documents on the alleged existence of a CIA prison in Poland.

• ECHR rules to declassify documents on CIA prisons in Poland

• Report: Possible torture at CIA prison in Romania, infamous terrorists held in Bucharest, presidents “accountable”

• Intel Firm Paid CIA Nominee Well As He Left for White House

  When John Brennan heads to Capitol Hill on Thursday, senators are expected to grill the prospective head of the CIA about his central role in the Obama administration’s expansive “targeted killing” program. They might also want to ask him a few things about his finances.

• Did you read about CIA cooperation in Canada, trousers in Paris, and judges in Chicago?

• Justice Department Leaks Memo “Legalizing” Murdering Americans

  Here is the memo. With a few tweaks and a more creative title — like “Murder With Your Hands Clean” — this memo could sell a lot of copies.

• Leaked Memo Shows Expansive Rationale for U.S. “Kill List”

• The CIA And The Hazards Of Middle East Forecasting

  The documents show that agency analysts, down to the last minute before the outbreak of fighting, were assuring President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other policymakers that Egypt and Syria were unlikely to attack Israel.

  Those assessments, in the words of a CIA postmortem report from December 1973, “were — quite simply, obviously, and starkly — wrong.” Nearly 40 years later, the CIA analysts responsible for those judgments say they are still troubled by their mistakes.

• Report on CIA rendition reveals massive scale of European assistance

• Poland declines to answer court’s questions on CIA jail

• Former PM Miller: CIA black site accusations are ‘lies’

  “If Senator Pinior believes he saw a document with my signature on it, then he is a liar and a scoundrel,” Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) leader Leszek Miller said on Tuesday morning after the European Court of Human Rights announced it was to declassify evidence which is part of an investigation into claims that Poland hosted a CIA prison, where suspected international terrorists were held and tortured as part of the United States ‘war of terror’.

  Jozef Pinior,a senator for the ruling Civic Platform party and a member of the European Parliament committee in Poland investigating the secret CIA ‘black site’, said Tuesday morning that there is “enough accumulated evidence to show that there was a CIA prison in Poland, organized with the consent of the government under Leszek Miller”.

• Report details CIA’s rendition practices

  The report, authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the U.S. in its war against al-Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and “torturing” terror suspects.

  [...]

  Ms. Singh said she had found evidence that prisoners were held in countries like Thailand, Romania, Poland and Lithuania while Denmark facilitated CIA air operations.

• Study says 54 countries helped CIA renditions

  Fifty-four foreign governments assisted the CIA in a global campaign that included harsh interrogations of suspects, a rights advocacy group said Tuesday, as it pressed for greater accountability.

  The report by Open Society Foundations marks the most comprehensive list of countries that helped the United States in what critics saw as excesses by then president George W. Bush’s administration after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• CIA link to Dubrovnik Airport, claims Sudan source

  The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in extraordinary renditions via Dubrovnik, a newspaper has claimed.

  [...]

  But citing a report called ‘Globalizing Torture’ by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), the suspects were taken via Croatia at least twice.

• Sudan Served As a Hub for Receiving Al-Qaeda Suspects Nabbed By CIA – Report

• ‘Naming the Dead’ aims to give a voice to civilians killed in drone strikes

  If you noticed a drone strike in the news, chances are the only name that accompanies it will be the name of the target and if they’re now believed to be alive or dead. More than two thousand people — civilian and militant — have been killed in Pakistan by US drone strikes since 2004, but their identities remain often unreported and unclear. It’s hard to give emotive value to drone deaths if you can’t name the victims.

• Pakistani ambassador to U.S. calls CIA drone strikes a ‘clear violation’

  CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are “a clear violation of our sovereignty and a violation of international law” that threaten stable relations between the two governments, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday.

  Persistent reports that Pakistan has tacitly approved the strikes while publicly denouncing them are untrue, Ambassador Sherry Rehman said.z

• Drones in the US: Senators Could Derail CIA Nominee Confirmation Over Administration’s Drone Program

Civil Rights

• Police drug search intrudes on husband’s final moments with deceased wife

  A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.

• Amicus briefs in Hedges v. Obama inform indefinite detention lawsuit

  The Bill of Rights Defense Committee recently coordinated the filing of three amicus (friend of the court) briefs in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenging domestic military detention under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.

• On Rosa Parks’ 100th Birthday, Recalling Her Rebellious Life Before and After the Montgomery Bus

  Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. “Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero,” Theoharis says.

• Twitter Wikileaks Court Order – News and Background

  The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, February 15 in a hearing in a legal battle over the government’s demands for Twitter user records. The ACLU and EFF represent Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one of the Twitter users whose records were sought by the government.

  On February 8, 2011, a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia unsealed motions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, and others concerning government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. The documents were originally filed under seal late last month.

• Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”

  Washington state lawmakers will consider bipartisan legislation that would block any cooperation with attempts to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens in Washington without due process under sections written into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

  If passed, the law would also make it a class C felony for any state or federal agent to act under sections 1021 or 1022 of the NDAA.

• EFF wants a rewrite of US e-crime laws

  INTERNET ACTIVIST GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants the US to reconsider the severity of its computer crime laws and tear them up and start over.
  The Inquirer (http://s.tt/1zoHD)

• Exposed: Whole Foods’ and the Biggest Organic Foods Distributor’s Troubled Relationships with Workers

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • RIAA Set For Historic 10,000,000th Google URL Takedown

  • The EU Commission’s Outrageous Attempt to Avoid Copyright Reform

    Today starts “Licences for Europe”, an initiative by the European Commission to discuss the issues of today’s copyright regime. Instead of planning for a broad reform that would break away with full-on repression of cultural practices based on sharing and remixing, the Commission is setting up a parody of a debate. 75% of the participants to the working-group concerning “users” are affiliated with the industry1 and the themes and objectives are defined so as to ensure that the industry has its way and that nothing will change. Through this initiative, the EU Commission shows its contempt of the many citizens who participated in defeating ACTA and are still mobilized against repressive policies.

  • Even more delays to the Digital Economy Act

    The Digital Economy Act’s Sharing of Costs Order has been withdrawn – another procedural complication that will delay implementation even further.

  • Japanese Government Plants Anti-Piracy Warnings Inside Fake Downloads

    Last year saw a major upgrade in Japan’s anti-piracy legislation in an attempt to shift Internet users away from file-sharing sites and networks and towards the country’s legitimate outlets. But while the change in the law was significant, getting the legal-downloading message to users proved problematic. In response the government and rightsholders are now seeding fake files with anti-piracy messages hidden inside.

  • Researchers dive into copyrights and wrongs of the download age

    The University of Glasgow will be home to a research centre that will examine how copyright is changing and the need for new business models for distributing creative content.

  • Golden Eye write to alleged copyright infringers

    Just under 1,000 broadband subscribers in the UK received letters in December from O2 or Be Broadband, saying that the company is passing on their name and address details to a company called Golden Eye.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• A Look Back at 2012: The Expansion of Learning on the Web

  2012 was a year of opening doors to learning on the web for more and more students each day. With the web, students and teachers are using new technology and devices to collaborate with each other in class, from home, and around the world. We want Google in Education to help open more doors and we’re pleased to announce there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education–twice as many as 3 months ago. And with several Chrome devices available today, there is a device for any school, any student, anywhere.

• Chromebooks in Schools

  It’s a good start for Chromebooks but with 400% per annum growth expect to see global impact in nearly every use of IT very soon. The key to success of Chromebooks is that Google manages the software so schools don’t need to do that and Google, unlike M$ is not out to enslave schools making them indoctrinate students. It’s all about escaping slavery of Wintel to freedom of FLOSS.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.8-rc6

• Tux3 File-System Gains Initial FSCK Implementation

  The Tux3 file-system has been in development for years while back on 1 January, the file-system work was resurrected. There’s now an initial fsck implementation for Tux3.

  Back on New Year’s was when a status report came out that signaled the Tux3 file-system had advanced and was now more competitive with the EXT4 file-system. Less than one month later, there’s now word of the initial fsck implementation for being able to fix the file-system in case of errors/problems.

Applications

• Turpial: Twitter Client For Linux

  If you’re a Linux desktop user like myself you may have experienced problems finding for a decent Twitter client. In many distributions the default client is Gwibber, it’s even integrated into the Unity desktop for Ubuntu. I’ve used it on and off for years now and I’m not one to throw harsh criticism around if I can help it. However, in the case of Gwibber I think it’s well deserved. It’s monumentally slow, buggy and unstable. Even after all these years. I have no idea how it’s become so popular. Whenever I try Gwibber it hangs and I get the classic Compiz grey window while I wait for the machine to stop having a panic attack. Often all I’m trying to do is refresh my messages. You may think this is due to my machine being old or slow. Not so my friends. I last used Gwibber in Ubuntu 12.10 on an Intel Core i7 3.5ghz quad core machine with 8 gig of RAM and an SSD.

• Linux and more Programmer Art

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Upgrade from CentOS 5.x to CentOS 5.9

  • User Data Encryption with FUSE-based EncFS filesystem

  • Tutorial 2: ELM Images, File Selector and Popups

  • Centos 6 Bonded network interfaces

  • Use an Android Device as a Wireless Remote Trigger for a DSLR Camera

  • 9 of the Best Free C Books

  • Video tutorials and promotions

  • How to get movie information and play movie trailers in Unity

  • How to get movie information and play movie trailers in Unity

  • fbcmd : Manage facebook from the Linux terminal

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine for Linux is going mobile: You will soon be able to run Windows apps on Android

    Wouldn’t it be great if you could run Windows applications on your Android smartphone or tablet? Well, that may one day be a reality, and the person who is working on the new project is the best man for the job. That’s right: Wine for Android is coming.

• Games

  • The Cave indie game delayed a week!

  • Will OUYA Spell Oh No for Nintendo Wii U?

    Most pundits blame weak Nintendo earnings and tepid Wii U sales on Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation 3 competition. In reality, Nintendo (like most home game console makers) is caught in a changing landscape where kids and adults try games for free on iPhones and Android smartphones before potentially buying mobile upgrades. Does that spell the end of at-home consoles? Certainly not. In fact, the Ouya (a $99 game console based on Google Android) could take the best of the mobile gaming model and move it into U.S. living rooms. Can traditional channel partners learn from this aspiring business strategy? Hmmm…

  • Psychonauts now available for Linux DRM-Free!

  • Wargame European Escalation is coming to Linux

    Wargame European Escalation is from the developer of R.U.S.E. and Act of War.

  • Egosoft Gets To Releasing Their Games On Linux

    Back in November, Egosoft expressed interest in bringing their games to Linux over Steam, and now this effort is becoming a reality. X3 Reunion is in beta under their in-house porting efforts.

  • More on PicarOS: Test passed!

    One week ago, I described my encounter with PicarOS, a charming spin of GALPon MiniNO targeted to children. I talked about how beautiful I had found it and how to walk the ropes of getting it installed as a dual boot with Mageia 2.

  • Humble PCGamingWiki Enhancement Initiative!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Ladbrokes is gambling with fish extinction – and so is the government

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Meetup 2013 At DA-IICT, Gujarat; Registrations Are Open

    Largest KDE event after kde.conf.in of India, KDE Meetup 2013, is announced by the KDE community in collabration with Google Developer Group of DA-IICT. This is the first large scale open source event in Gujarat. It will be held on 23rd – 24th February at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This two day event aims to involve students from India in the KDE community and also to get them involved with Open source development.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Gnome 3 on OpenBSD 5.2

    It is no secret that I am becoming quite fond of PC-BSD: it is stabilizing nicely and offers a feature-rich BSD at one end and an amazing selection of window managers at the other. One thing it’s missing however is Gnome 3. Love it or hate it, Gnome 3 is boldly exploring “modern” desktop territory with the Gnome Shell which aggressively provides both elegant eye candy and swift navigation. Surprisingly, the best place to experience Gnome 3 on BSD is perhaps where you would least expect it: OpenBSD

Distributions

• Everyday Linux User Review of Linux Lite

• New Releases

  • SprezzOS emerges, promising new-school tech with old-school gumption

    SprezzOS 1 has emerged for general use. I’ll explain here the motivations of the SprezzOS Project, how we’re unlike other new distros of note, and why you ought watch us for Linux’s most exciting developments.

• Screenshots

  • PCLinuxOS 2013.02 Screenshots

  • Linux Lite 1.0.4 Screenshots (02/02/2013)

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS 2013.02 Released

    PCLinuxOS(often said as PCLOS), the distribution that “it’s so cool ice cubes are jealous” basically tries to make the best out of the other GNU/Linux distros and create an all-round good for everything distro, somewhat like Ubuntu and Mint and other Debian-based spin-offs. But PCLinuxOS feels more like Arch when it comes to updates, because it’s a semi-rolling distro, but it feels like a major distribution like Fedora or OpenSUSE.

    PCLinuxOS actually started as a bundle of RPM packages for Mandrake Linux in 2000, but in 2003 this little bundle became a fork of Mandrake Linux 9.2, eventually becoming a fully-fledged distribution.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • How I feel about GNOME 3.6 in the Fedora 18 final release

      I’m testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn’t do an install, though I’m certainly thinking about it.

      In this release’s GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications — all from GNOME proper — like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the “global” menu that pops down from the app’s icon in the upper panel.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • StormFly Wants To Childproof Your Computer With Its Ubuntu-Booting USB Bracelet

        When I was but a wee lad, I hosed my share of family computers simply because I wanted to help out — once I tried to free up space on a 6GB hard drive by deleting anything larger than 1MB. You can imagine how well that played out.

        I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the founders of Barcelona-based Now Computing went through something similar, because they’ve just recently launched a Kickstarter project for a device that should ensure it never happens again.

      • New Sync Menu Landed in Ubuntu 13.04

        With yesterday’s updates, Canonical uploaded a new Indicator Sync, updating the old Ubuntu One indicator, which was used in previous releases of Ubuntu.

        The Ubuntu development team planned this new Sync Menu for a long time now, and it appears that it will finally become reality in the upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system, due for release on April 25th, 2013.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 review

          To sum, Bodhi Linux is a good distribution, but it is not for everybody. If, like me, you like a distribution with almost everything you need installed by default, then this distribution is not for you. On the other hand, if you don’t mind a distribution with very few applications installed, one that lets you choose and pick what you what to install right from the start, without compiling source code, then welcome to Bodhi Linux.

Devices/Embedded

• 15,000 Raspberry Pis for UK schools – thanks Google!

  Today’s been a bit unlike most Tuesdays at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Today we’re the recipients of a very generous grant from Google Giving, which will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs for schoolkids around the UK. Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, has just been to visit Cambridge, and he and Eben have been teaching a classroom of local kids to code all morning. Lucky kids.

• Phones

  • Nokia Disaster Told One Picture at a Time: Today Picture 7: When is a Platform “Burning”: The Test Of CEO Sanity (alternately titled:) Is Elop Really This Delusional?

    So we continue the Nokia management disaster, studied through a single issue, and single picture per blog. Today we examine management judgement by CEO Stephen Elop. So before I continue, this is a series of blog articles to study the Nokia mess.

  • Android

    • Intel Will Showcase Dual Core Android Smartphones At The Mobile World Congress

Democratic Party’s voter registration app is now free and open-source software

The Democratic Party initially released the source code to its online voter registration app late last summer, with the intent of making it available for all the standard reasons people and organizations choose when they open-source code: so that it can be improved, so that bugs can be fixed, so others can take it and build further new applications on top of it.

LightZone reborn as free software

One of the first high-quality raw photo editors available for Linux desktops was LightZone, but although it was (initially) free of charge, it was a proprietary product. Unfortunately the small company behind it eventually folded, and both the free and paid versions went away, as did the updates required to support newer cameras. The company shut its doors for good in 2011, but the software has made a sudden—and unexpected—comeback as an open source project. Fans of the original will be pleased, but the nascent effort still has considerable work ahead before it grows into a self-sustaining community project.

SaaS/Big Data

• Rackspace Rallies Partners Around OpenStack Private Clouds

  Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) is working Dell, HP, EMC and other technology vendors to ease large-scale private cloud deployments based on the OpenStack open source cloud platform.

• Open Source OpenStack Folsom Cloud Updated for 51 Bugs

• Rackspace changes course, won’t support third-party OpenStack distributions as part of private cloud offering

Databases

• Security updates for MariaDB

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice and CMIS

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • The political consequences of academic paywalls

    Academic paywalls unwittingly benefit oppressive regimes – at society’s expense.

  • Remembering Aaron Swartz: A Call for CFAA Reform Now

  • Inside Story Americas – What is Aaron Swartz’s legacy?

  • I’m Rep Zoe Lofgren, Here is a Modified Draft Version of Aaron’s Law Reflecting the Internet’s Input

  • Reddit review puts some teeth into “Aaron’s Law”

    Shortly after the suicide of Internet entrepreneur and activist Aaron Swartz, Silicon Valley lawmaker Zoe Lofgren proposed “Aaron’s Law.” The bill aims to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the law under which Swartz was prosecuted for mass-downloading academic documents from MIT’s network. Swartz’s family has blamed the government prosecution for contributing to his death.
    Lofgren submitted a draft of the bill to be reviewed on reddit. After its online critique, a revised version of the bill was published today, with more far-reaching reforms.
    The CFAA forbids “unauthorized access” to computer networks, and the older version of Lofgren’s reform bill would have simply changed the wording of the law so that nobody could be prosecuted under CFAA if all they had done is violate terms of service.

  • ‘Aaron’s Law’ Proposes Reining in Federal Anti-Hacking Statute

  • “Tom the Dancing Bug” on the Scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — And A Related Note from My Computer Crime Casebook

    I have been beating the drum on the need to narrow the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for a decade or so, so I was happy to see today’s cartoon for “Tom the Dancing Bug” pick

  • How MIT Can Honor Aaron Swartz

    Fight to make academic journals open to everyone.

  • James Grimmelmann on Aaron Swartz

    It was this ardent belief that led Swartz to surreptitiously download academic articles from JSTOR. Grimmelmann closely analyzes the case, providing a balanced view of both the prosecution’s and Swartz’s view of the issue. Grimmelmann additionally suggests possible policy reforms brought to light by Schwartz’s case.

SCO Asks the Bankruptcy Court to Let It Destroy Its Business Records ~ pj

SCO, now calling itself TSG, has just filed a motion [PDF] with the bankruptcy court in Delaware asking it to authorize “the abandonment, disposal, and/or destruction of certain surplus, obsolete, non-core or burdensome, property, including, without limitation, shelving, convention materials, telecommunications and computer equipment, accounting and sales documents, and business records.”

Ah. “And business recrods.” Burdensome to whom? To whom would SCO’s business records be burdensome? Not me. I hereby volunteer to pay for storage for those records, in order to preserve them. Obsolete how? Does the bankruptcy court know that SCO has a petition [PDF] before the US District Court in Utah asking the court to reopen SCO’s litigation with IBM?

The excuse is money. They are paying to store them, poor dears, as of January 31, I gather, since they ask the court to authorize payments nunc pro tunc back to that date. Either that, or there’s more to this story than you can find in the motion. They also ask the court to let it not inform all its creditors about this. Heh heh. Imagine how messy it could get if they all showed up asking for a computer or shelving.

Security

• Apple: Would Steve Jobs Have Blocked Oracle Java?

• Cyberwar, out of the shadows

  A PLANNED FIVEFOLD increase in the staff of the U.S. Cyber Command is indicative of how conflict is moving toward center stage for the military, a domain similar to land, sea, air and outer space. The anticipated growth, described in an article by Ellen Nakashima in The Post last week, is intended to protect the country and its private sector from attack, an urgent mission. But now that the United States is going beyond defense, expanding forces for offensive attack, there’s a crying need for more openness. So far, forces exist almost entirely in the shadows.

  The Post reported on plans for creation of three types of forces under the Cyber Command. Two are familiar: “combat mission forces” to serve in parallel with military units and “protection forces” to defend Pentagon networks. A third area is new: “national mission forces” that would seek to head off any threat to critical infrastructure in the United States, such as electrical grids, dams and other potential targets deemed vital to national security. These “national mission forces” are expected to operate outside the United States, perhaps launching preemptive strikes on adversaries preparing to take down an American bank or electric grid. However, senior defense officials told The Post that the forces might respond inside the United States if asked by an authorized agency such as the FBI.

• Secret Rules to Let Obama Start Cyber Wars

  A secret legal review of the even more secret “rules” of the US cyberwarfare capabilities has concluded that President Obama has virtually limitless power to start cyber wars in the name of “pre-emption” of potential attacks coming out of another nation.

• Broad Powers Seen for Obama in Cyberstrikes

  A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.

• €10,000 Bounty On Cracking Mega Encryption

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Wars That Aren’t Meant to Be Won

  In War Is A Lie I looked at pretended and real reasons for wars and found some of the real reasons to be quite irrational. It should not shock us then to discover that the primary goal in fighting a war is not always to win it. Some wars are fought without a desire to win, others without winning being the top priority, either for the top war makers or for the ordinary soldiers.

• Former Guantanamo Prosecutor Speaks Out Against Torture

  Retired Colonel Morris Davis was the chief prosecutor for military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay from 2005 to 2007. He resigned in objection to evidence gained by torture and political interference.

• Ex-Gitmo Prosecutor: Obama’s Drone Surge as Damaging as Bush Torture Program

  Retired Air Force Col. Morris “Moe” Davis, once the lead government prosecutor for terrorism suspects at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, says that the US torture regime under Bush and now the drone assassination program run by the Obama administration have combined to make the world less safe and called both programs—whether they could be legally justified or not—”immoral.

• Bin Laden’s death hasn’t stanched metastasizing of al Qaeda

• Supervisor of Intelligence Estimate Hailed for Preventing War with Iran

• Storm as the UK ‘justifies torture’ of the fighter who helped topple Gaddafi

  Libyan Abdel Hakim Belhadj ‘wrongly linked to Al Qaeda’

  He insists he is no terrorist and is bringing lawsuit against Britain

  Row comes days after Cameron visits Libya on ‘bridge-building’ mission

• Mystery spook’s identity confirmed

  The identity of a United States spy who mysteriously landed in Wellington last year can be revealed as National Security Agency director General Keith Alexander.

• CIA torture whistleblower honored after criminal sentencing

  Kiriakou and Radack also appeared on Democracy Now, where Kiriakou made clear that:

  This…was not a case about leaking; this was a case about torture….I’m going to prison because I blew the whistle on torture. My oath was to the Constitution….[a]nd to me, torture is unconstitutional.”

• Obama Is Now America’s Hacker in Chief

  As the possibility of destructive cyberwarfare inches towards reality, the government is scrambling to figure out who holds the keys to America’s malware arsenal. Obviously, it’s President Obama.

  The New York Times just published the findings of an investigation into a secret legal review that set out to determine who actually had the power to order a cyberattack. Given his status as commander-in-chief, Obama seems to be the clear choice, but since cyberwarfare is such a new and unknown thing, the government hasn’t actually figured out the rules of engagement yet. In the past couple of decades, the power to use America’s cyberweapons has been shared between the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. With the exception of a series of strikes on the computer systems that run Iran’s nuclear enrichement facilities — an attack that Obama ordered himself — the U.S. hasn’t launched any major cyber attacks in recent memory, however.

• Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Why It’s “Legal” When the U.S. Does It

  Credit the Arab Spring and what’s followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don’t overlook American “unilateralism.” After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there’s nothing like having a heavily armed crew dreaming about eternal global empires stomp through your neighborhood, and it’s clear enough now that whatever was let loose early in the twenty-first century won’t end soon.

• Press Conference: Faith-based, human rights and ex-military leaders speak out against John Brennan to head CIA

• US MILITARY EXPANDS ITS DRUG WAR IN LATIN AMERICA

• FBI intensifies war on whistleblowers

• The Torture Apologists Ignore the 4,000 Americans They Killed

  A bit of a row has started between Jay Rosen and Will Saletan for the latter’s attempt to “see how [the torturers] saw what they did” in this post. Frankly, I think Rosen mischaracterizes the problem with Saletan’s post. It’s not so much that Saletan parrots the euphemisms of the torturers. It’s that he accepts what John Rizzo, Michael Hayden, Jose Rodriguez, and Marc Thiessen said – in a presentation with multiple internal contradictions even before you get to the outright demonstrable lies — as the truth.

• Why One Known Historian Is Disgusted by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick’s ‘Untold History’

  The introduction of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s book, The Untold History of the United States, declares before any history is recounted “we don’t try to tell all US history. That would be an impossible task.” It acknowledges there are things the United States has done right, but, “There are libraries full of books dedicated to that purpose and school curricula that trumpet US achievements.” The two are “more concerned with focusing a spotlight on what the United States has done wrong—the ways in which we believe the country has betrayed its mission, with the faith that there is still time to correct those errors as we move forward into the twenty-first century.”

• The CIA’s case for torture

  Do we really understand what the CIA did and why? Was the payoff worth the moral cost? And what can we learn from it?

• When Can the U.S. Kill Americans? The White House Won’t Say.

  The administration refuses to say why it thinks it can kill American terrorists abroad—even to the lawmakers entitled to know.

• Backstage Glimpses of Clinton as Dogged Diplomat, Win or Lose

  Last summer, as the fighting in Syria raged and questions about the United States’ inaction grew, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred privately with David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. The two officials were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.

• Panetta: Any Spending Cuts Would Make US a ‘Second-Rate Power’

  In an interview published over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta blasted even the notion of allowing any military budget cuts going forward, insisting that following through on the sequestration cuts, mostly just cuts in the rate of growth rather than in real dollars, would turn the United States into a “second-rate power.”

• Why Police Lie Under Oath

  THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.”

• Ayotte, Graham and McCain Will Participate In Hedges Oral Arguments

  Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain will have five minutes on Wednesday to explain why a lawsuit targeting the indefinite detention should be swatted down. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals granted their motion to participate in oral arguments in the Hedges v. Obama NDAA lawsuit on Thursday, setting up a court appearance for their lawyer on February 6.

• An America cramped by defensiveness

  A week before I deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, my wife and I volunteered for a few hours at our daughter’s elementary school. As we left, her teacher told the students that I was an officer in the Marine Corps about to leave on deployment. “A nation does not survive,” he said, “without men like that.”

  [...]

  …only thing Americans agree on these days is gratitude bordering on reverence for our military.

• CIA Whistleblower: “US is a Police State, Obama Consciously Allows Torture”

• Barack Obama, Drone Ranger

  If you’ve seen the movie Zero Dark Thirty, you know why it has triggered a new debate over our government’s use of torture after 9/11.
  The movie’s up for an Oscar as best motion picture. We’ll know later this month if it wins. Some people leave the theater claiming the film endorses and even glorifies the use of torture to obtain information that finally led to finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Not true, say the filmmakers, but others argue the world is better off without bin Laden in it, no matter how we had to get him. What’s more, they say, there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/1 — if we have to use an otherwise immoral practice to defend ourselves against such atrocities, we’re okay with it. Or so the argument goes.

• US Allies Aid Drone Strikes, But Hope to Ditch Legal Responsibility

  So far US officials have ditched responsibility purely on the president insisting whoever he kills must be legal, but as killings grow, various US allies the world over are finding themselves increasingly culpable by way of intelligence sharing, and fearing lawsuits.

  Noor Khan, a British citizen from Pakistan, has been trying to sue the British government over a US drone strike that killed his father, a tribal elder with no apparent militant ties.

• Drone Strike Prompts Suit, Raising Fears for U.S. Allies

• Waziristan tribesmen to move ICJ against drone hits

  The major tribes from Waziristan Agency have announced to move the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the US drone attacks in its rugged region bordering Afghanistan over massive collateral damage.

• It’s govt’s duty to stop drone attacks: LHC CJ

  LAHORE: The chief justice of the Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday observed that it was the government’s duty to stop the drone attacks, adding that the court could not order a war against the US.

• Pakistanis hate the drone war: The proof is in the data

  Writing for the Atlantic, three American academics posed a challenge in their article titled: “You Say Pakistanis All Hate the Drone War? Prove It.” I thought I did prove it a few weeks ago. But I welcome the opportunity to elaborate even further.

• Inside the IDF: Drone wars

• OUR OPINION: Africa drone base a first step for U.S.

  The drone base’s initial mission would be to track the movements of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and allied Islamic terrorist organizations. If the threat worsens, and it almost surely will, the drones could be armed, the base expanded and, if Niger agrees, U.S. special-operations troops based there.

• Use of drone warfare by U.S. under attack

  This is a sort of armchair killing where drones are remotely piloted from bases in the United States. Using drones makes going into battle safer and cheaper for the attacker but not for the attacked. It’s Lethal Toy Story.

• Pakistan army attack US drone strike retaliation

• The Morality of Drone Strikes

  …Obama speaks the language of last resort, but his use of drones doesn’t really seem to follow that principle…

• Amazon Users Pen Sarcastic Drone ‘Reviews’ For Children’s Unmanned Aircraft Toy

  The latest instance: a protest Amazon users are holding on the page of a children’s unmanned aircraft toy. It’s been inundated with users reviewing Obama administer’s use of military drones abroad, pointed out by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.

  The toy shares the “Predator” name with an unmanned aerial vehicle that has become a favorite of the U.S. Air Force and CIA. The use of drones — particularly in countries where the U.S. is not at war such as Yemen or Pakistan — have come under intense scrutiny in recent years for causing child casualties, with studies showing drone strikes could potentially cause unprecedented blowback.

• Va. House panel OKs 2-year moratorium on drone use

  A House panel has approved a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on drones in Virginia while lawmakers work to craft regulations for use of the unmanned aircraft.

• Obama’s CIA pick takes heat for calling drone attacks ‘ethical and just’

Cablegate

• Wikileaks reveals Icelandic FBI shennanigans

  After shooting began in Reykjavik at the end of January (Iceland Review), the organisation has revealed – completely co-incidentally, of course – an incident in August 2011 in which FBI agents were apparently booted from the Nordic country for arriving without asking first.

• Minister: Iceland refused to help FBI on WikiLeaks

• Assange receives Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts

• Julian Assange receives Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts

  On 3 February 2013 at a private dinner at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, attended by more than 150 guests, Julian Assange will receive the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts 2013 for his WikiLeaks work including, amongst other releases, Collateral Murder. This award is given to people who have displayed extraordinary courage and who through their artistry have changed the world.

• New developments in the case against Jeremy Hammond.

  Recently, Sue Crabtree of the Jeremy Hammond Support Network presented me with some very interesting new information in regards to the controversy surrounding Judge Loretta Preska’s Conflict of Interest.

  The first being that Judge Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler gave a sworn statement to the court concerning his relationship and email correspondence with the intelligence firm Stratfor. Jeremy Hammond is currently accused of hacking the Stratfor website and releasing millions of files, including the email accounts and passwords of all those in correspondence with Stratfor. Judge Preska’s husband Thomas Kavaler was corresponding with Stratfor and his business email and password were among those exposed. Though it has not yet been confirmed that Mr. Kavaler’s email account contained private messages between he and his wife Judge Preska, it would seem to be a safe assumption.

Finance

• Age reporters to appeal to highest Vic court

  Two Fairfax journalists are going to Victoria’s Court of Appeal after being ordered to give evidence about their sources for a banknote bribery story.

• Goldman, gov ‘rolled AIG’

  In his new book, “The AIG Story” (co-written with Lawrence A. Cunningham and coming out this week), Greenberg says that in the summer of 2008, the company was in contentious talks with Goldman Sachs and other investment banks to settle trillions in claims on questionable derivatives linked to debt obligations that Wall Street banks were writing.

• Looking for Mister Goodpain: The Hopeless Search for an Austerity Success Story

  Three years ago, a terrible thing happened to economic policy, both here and in Europe. Although the worst of the financial crisis was over, economies on both sides of the Atlantic remained deeply depressed, with very high unemployment. Yet the Western world’s policy elite somehow decided en masse that unemployment was no longer a crucial concern, and that reducing budget deficits should be the overriding priority.

• Corporate power: exposing the global 1%

  In these infographics, the Transnational Institute offers a visual insight into who dominates our planet at a time of economic and ecological crisis.

• Goldman Sachs to improve Russia’s image for $500,000

  In a new image campaign to spur investment, the Russian government has hired the investment bank Goldman Sachs to persuade investors and ratings agencies of the country’s appeal. Officials hope the move will improve Russia’s credit rating, as well as its position in other international rankings, both of which experts say are underestimated.

• Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Bill Gates is naive, data is not objective

  In his recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates proposed to “fix the world’s biggest problems” through “good measurement and a commitment to follow the data.” Sounds great!
  Unfortunately it’s not so simple.
  Gates describes a positive feedback loop when good data is collected and acted on. It’s hard to argue against this: given perfect data-collection procedures with relevant data, specific models do tend to improve, according to their chosen metrics of success. In fact this is almost tautological.
  As I’ll explain, however, rather than focusing on how individual models improve with more data, we need to worry more about which models and which data have been chosen in the first place, why that process is successful when it is, and – most importantly – who gets to decide what data is collected and what models are trained.
  Take Gates’s example of Ethiopia’s commitment to health care for its people. Let’s face it, it’s not new information that we should ensure “each home has access to a bed net to protect the family from malaria, a pit toilet, first-aid training and other basic health and safety practices.” What’s new is the political decision to do something about it. In other words, where Gates credits the measurement and data-collection for this, I’d suggest we give credit to the political system that allowed both the data collection and the actual resources to make it happen.

• Lies, damned lies, and newspaper reporting… (Op-Ed)

  Last week the Sam Adams Asso ci ates for Integ rity in Intel li gence presen ted this year’s award to Dr Tom Fin gar at a cere mony jointly hos ted by the pres ti gi ous Oxford Union Soci ety.

  Dr Fin gar, cur rently a vis it ing lec turer at Oxford, had in 2007 co-ordinated the pro duc tion of the US National Intel li­gence Estim ate — the com bined ana lysis of all 16 of America’s intel li gence agen cies — which assessed that the Ira­nian nuc lear weapon isa tion pro gramme had ceased in 2003. This con sidered and author it at ive Estim ate dir ectly thwarted the 2008 US drive towards war against Iran, and has been reaf firmed every year since then.

Censorship

• The Verge Hires Writer Who Quit CNET in Protest

  Greg Sandoval, the CNET senior writer who resigned in protest when the site’s parent company, CBS, interfered with its editorial coverage last month, has been hired by The Verge, the Web site that first revealed the full extent of CBS’s involvement.

  Mr. Sandoval will be a senior reporter for The Verge when he starts in a couple of weeks. He said in a blog post that he had received a “written guarantee from management that nobody from the business side of the company will ever have any authority over my stories.” The post, which he published Sunday night, also said, “Long before I arrived, The Verge committed itself to editorial independence.”

• Breaking: Wikileaks Takes on Oxford Union

  Julian Assange is back in the headlines after WikiLeaks accuses the Oxford Union of censorship.

• WikiLeaks accuses Union of “censorship”

  WikiLeaks has accused the Oxford Union of “censor[ing]” footage of Julian Assange’s address to the debating society in January.

  It alleged on Twitter that the Union had replaced the backdrop of the video, which was personally selected by Assange, with a plain still of the Oxford Union logo.

  The footage that Assange selected came from a controversial video released by the whistleblowing organisation in 2010. Popularly known as ‘Collateral Murder’, it shows the gun crew of a US Apache helicopter firing on Reuters journalists and civilians in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007.

• 4 House Members Slam College’s Anti-Israel Event

  A scholar and a political commentator are about to let fly to some very, very dangerous speech at a New York college next week. It’s so dangerous, in fact, that four Democratic members of Congress are getting involved.

Privacy

• Google, Facebook And Twitter Celebrate Data Privacy Day

  Google also took aim at the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 on Monday, writing in its update: “This law was passed in 1986, before the web as we know it today even existed. It has failed to keep pace with how people use the Internet today. That’s why we’ve been working with many advocacy groups, companies and others, through the Digital Due Process Coalition, to seek updates to this important law so it guarantees the level of privacy that you should reasonably expect when using our services.”

• Jill and Scott Kelley on the Petraeus scandal and loss of privacy

• Google Leads Fight to Limit Government Access to E-Mail on Cloud

  Google Inc. (GOOG), which says it gets about 1,400 requests a month from U.S. authorities for users’ e- mails and documents, is organizing an effort to press for limits on government access to digital communications.

• Nothing happens if a bus hits Facebook

  I agree with that list — except Facebook. We need to cross it off. And it’s because the bus number question goes deeper than the joke that eliminating Facebook “would boost national productivity” and to the heart of the way the company seems to view the future.

• Facebook Aligns With Apple While Taking A Dig At Google

  Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may just be the company Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) needs to have as one of their closest allies.
  According to the company’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has far more in common with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) than they do with Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). In a recent earnings call that took place earlier this week, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook and Google are no longer on speaking terms.

• City Council to Vote on Anti-Drone Resolution Monday

  The fear of big government and the invasion of privacy by drones brought one group to the Downtown Mall on Sunday to support Charlottesville City Council’s proposed resolution banning drone use.

• Anti-drone rally held before Monday consideration of resolution

  A hardy few concerned citizens spent the early afternoon on Super Bowl Sunday opposing the domestic use of unmanned aerial drones, which at least one opponent billed as “killer robots.”

• Privacy worries may stall commercial use of drone aircraft

• No drone use in Stark County

• Yes, U.S. authorities can spy on EU cloud data. Here’s how

Civil Rights

• To Resist, To Join Together, Occasionally To Win

  It was three years ago that we lost Howard Zinn, teacher, historian, activist, optimist, speaker of truth to power. He is missed.

  “If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future, without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past, when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than its solid centuries of warfare.”

• The Real News Network Whistleblower Special

• Help Protect The Next Aaron Swartz

  On Jan 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old internet pioneer and defender of online freedom, tragically took his own life. Aaron was facing 35 years in prison and relentless persecution for downloading too many articles, too fast from an online library of academic journals.

• Aaron’s Law 2.0: Major Steps Forward, More Work to Be Done

  Representative Zoe Lofgren has posted on Reddit a modified draft of Aaron’s Law, a proposal to update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and wire fraud law in honor of our friend Aaron Swartz and to make sure that the misguided prosecution that happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else. We’re very pleased with the proposal’s progress and we’re hopeful about the future of this important bill.

• ‘Homeland,’ by Cory Doctorow

  Last month, a 26-year-old Internet activist named Aaron Swartz killed himself. He had worked on many widely used online tools that, among other things, enable Web sites to syndicate their content. He had also been politically active, helping to drive the campaign that blocked the Stop Online Piracy Act. At the time of his death, he was under threat of prosecution — and decades in jail — for downloading millions of academic journal articles via the MIT network in hopes of making them freely available. In a statement, his family said they thought that his death was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Former RIAA VP Named 2nd In Command Of Copyright Office

    We’ve talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public (“promoting the progress of science”) it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players — the RIAA and MPAA — happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office. Just a few months ago we wrote about how the Copyright Office’s General Counsel, David Carson, had jumped ship to go join the IFPI (the international version of the RIAA).

  • CBS and CNET Protest Looming BitTorrent Client Ban

    CBS and CNET have asked a Californian federal court not to grant a ban on the distribution of file-sharing software through Download.com. They responded to a request for a preliminary injunction from a coalition of artists and billionaire Alki David who claim that CBS induces piracy. According to the media conglomerate this is not the case, and CBS argues that there are many non-infringing uses for BitTorrent.

  • Valve Sued In Germany Over Right To Resell Games

    Valve’s Steam platform has certainly been one highlight on competing with piracy here at Techdirt. As something of the iTunes of PC gaming, it provides a wonderful example of how a great platform and added value can give those who could otherwise be pirates a real reason to part with their gaming dollar. This isn’t to say that the platform hasn’t been associated with some issues, but Valve seems to be among those folks that get it right more often than they get it wrong.

  • Prince George’s considers copyright policy that takes ownership of students’ work

    A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

  • THE SECRET TO BEING CREATIVE

    It’s not nice to steal. Unless you are a poet, an artist, a musician, an architect, a writer, or you do anything that requires even a modest amount of creativity. Then it’s not IF you steal, but HOW you steal, that makes all the difference in the world.

  • Obama Administration Considers Joining Publishers In Fight To Stamp Out Fair Use At Universities

    In digging into this, we’ve heard from a few sources that it’s actually the US Copyright Office that has asked the DOJ to weigh in on the side of the publishers and against the interests of public univerisities and students. Yes, the same Copyright Office that just promoted a former RIAA VP to second in command. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

What’s the next big platform for Linux?

Glyn Moody wonders whether the car – a currently undeveloped yet important platform with great potential – can provide the inspiration for the next generation of Linux coders.

Don’t Write an Obituary for the PC

Friday Linux Potpourri

It’s been another interesting week in the world of Linux and Open Source development. Several items have caught my attention today, so I thought I’d just do a round-up. Red Hat on another hiring spree, New Mandriva enterprise website, and the Free Software Foundation achievements are among the topics.

LPI Certification Exams Exceed 350,000 Worldwide

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that in 2012 the organization surpassed two significant milestones: delivering over 350,000 exams and 120,000 certifications worldwide since the organization’s inception.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 490

• Auphonic

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • New ARM X.Org Driver Promises Better Performance

    While xf86-video-sunxifb sounds like an old X.Org driver from the Sun Microsystems days for some obscure SPARC system, this driver is a fork of the xf86-video-mali DDX driver. What makes this ARM X.Org graphics driver interesting is that it promises better performance on the Allwinner A10/A13 SoC compared to the ARM vendor’s official driver.

• Benchmarks

  • Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Gaming Performance Comparison

    In this article are some early benchmark results comparing the OpenGL gaming performance of the Unity, Xfce, Openbox, LXDE, KDE, GNOME Shell, and Enlightenment desktops when running on a recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04. As many earlier benchmarks have shown, the OpenGL frame-rate for Linux games can sway quite greatly depending upon the desktop in use and more specifically the desktop’s compositing window manager.

    Back in September there was Ubuntu 12.10 testing done of the different desktops when Ubuntu’s Unity provided very slow to KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and the LXDE desktops. The 2D performance was also poor for Unity. Fortunately, with Ubuntu 13.04, there are new versions for most of the major Linux desktop environments plus the open-source graphics drivers continue to be improved.

Applications

• Last.fm Desktop Scrobbler Released!

  Hello, scrobble fans! Were you wondering where your desktop app updates had gone? Well wonder no longer! With the last major version released back in 2007 (those were the days, eh?) you’d be forgiven for thinking there weren’t any more coming, but we’ve actually been hard at work on an update to bring us crashing into 2008, a little late.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Dealing with insecure runpaths

  • How to Charge your iPad/iPhone/iPod in Ubuntu

  • How To Run The Vice Commodore 64 Emulator Using Wine On Ubuntu 12.10

  • Smart Scopes

• Games

  • An In-depth Look at Steam for Linux

    Though still in beta, Valve’s Steam client for Linux is stable, fast, and from what we can tell, matches the feature-set of the Windows and OS X clients 1:1. That being the case, there felt like no better time than the present to dive in, give a tour and relay our experiences with both the client and a slew of games.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME outreach programme attracts 25 women

    Twenty-five women have been accepted for participation in the GNOME-led Outreach Programme for Women which runs from January 2 to April 2, according to a media release from the GNOME Foundation.

Distributions

• Weekend project: Check out ROSA Linux 2012

  With all the excellent Linux distributions available today, it can be easy to focus exclusively on the few that dominate the headlines, such as Ubuntu Linux, Linux Mint, Fedora, and Mageia Linux, to name just a few.

• What do You Get when Trying to Burn a PARDUS Cat?

  The answer is simple: an active community that raises PARDUS ANKA from its ashes!

• Screenshots

  • Porteus 2.0 RC2 Screenshots (01/31/2013)

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Producing XFCE Live iso for Mandriva

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s Crag Muzilla Joins The New ownCloud Board

    Craig Muzilla is vice president, Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat where he is responsible for the overall middleware and JBoss product business.

  • BLOG: Red Hat’s top 10 IT predictions for 2013

    In 2012, CIOs and IT teams in enterprises worldwide leveraged cloud computing architectures while they designed their data centres to best manage the explosive amount of structured and unstructured data. Red Hat envisions even more significant movement in the data centre in 2013 in cloud, middleware, storage, and virtualisation technologies. Here are our top predictions for enterprise IT.

  • Fedora

    • A new Fedora web magazine – Folio

      Folio is a new web magazine of Fedora Online community (fedoraonline.it also named FOL) focused on Fedora and Fedora Project. It is completely written in Italian by FOL’s guys.

    • Ubuntu vs Fedora

      Two of the biggest names in desktop Linux are Ubuntu and Fedora. Both have a huge and sometimes emotionally charged following and will defend one against the other vehemently.

    • Using Fedora Rawhide

      There were some comments asking how to upgrade Fedora 18 to Fedora Rawhide. Instead of answering one by one, I am writing this sort intro for using next Fedora.

      Fedora Rawhide is not a panacea to use the very latest GNOME, and it will give you some hard times. Using it with caution

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Why I’m Leaving Ubuntu for Debian

        I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary operating system since 2005. Back then it was truly amazing. Before I started using Ubuntu I tried out Red Hat, Mandrake (and later Mandriva), Slackware, Gentoo, and even Debian. In all of them, something didn’t work. Usually it was wifi, but sometimes it was audio or video, or weird X config problems. But when I switched to Ubuntu, all of that went away. Rather than being frusturated that I was still a Linux noob and couldn’t even connect to the internet, Ubuntu helped me get past the initial barriers so I could really dive in. I’m eternally grateful to Ubuntu for this, and I’m very impressed at how successful they’ve has been at fixing bug #1 (though there’s still a long way to go).

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux 2.2 review – Square peg for round hole

          Despite overwhelmingly warm feedback from pretty much everyone to my first review of Bodhi Linux almost two years ago, which pretty much sealed the deal, I decided to give it another shot. My label as an idiot, so to speak, notwithstanding, Bodhi has changed quite a bit since version 0.15. Now at increment 2.2, it continues its mission as a minimalist distribution based on Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola posts X Phone product manager job listing

      The Motorola X Phone is rumored to be the first Android device jointly developed by Google and Motorola in the post-acquisition era, but its existence has been mostly speculation…until now. A job listing posted to LinkedIn by Motorola Mobility is looking for a Senior Director of Product Management to work directly on the X Phone project. And, yes, they indeed refer to it by that name.

    • More claims about Google’s Motorola X phone: huge battery, Sony camera sensor and Kevlar

    • How BlackBerry 10 Runs 28,000 Android Apps Without a Back Button

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Apple iPad market share falls as tablet market booms

    Tablet shipments worldwide grew by more than expected in the final three months of last year, with more than 50 million units being shipped worldwide.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox to restrict all plug-ins except latest Flash with Click to Play

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• JCache will not make Java EE 7

• Apple patch blocking Java hits Associated Press where it hurts

  Dear Users:

  Please be advised AP has been effected by the automated system patch released by Apple this morning, blocking java based applications on mac computers. This may slow down the publishing of some AP photos. AP Engineers are working on a solution. We will keep you updated.

  Should you have any questions or issues, please contact AP Customer Support.

Funding

• Open Source Gaming Backend OpenKit Plans Private Beta Launch Tomorrow, Raises Another $100K

  After being announced in December, mobile gaming backend service OpenKit plans to bring in the first 50 developers into its private beta program tomorrow.

  Co-founder Peter Relan told me that when the team first publicized the project last month, “not a single line of code” had been written. Instead, it was sussing out developer interest, with plans to focus on the project if more than 100 developers signed up. In fact, 160 developers signed up on day one, and that number is now up to 500.

• Foolish Investing in a New Open Source Order

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Open Source Pushes 3D Printers to Success

    Whether or not desktop 3D printing is the forerunner of the “third industrial revolution,” as Jeremy Rifkin and Chris Anderson have suggested, it’s definitely one of the hottest tech trends around. Open source DIY hacker engineers, artists, and craft designers have led the surge on the low end while higher-end models are already being used in rapid prototyping and short-run, custom manufacturing.

Microsoft: Old Internet Explorer is terrible and ‘we want to help’

As every web developer knows, one of the biggest headaches of building modern, standards-compliant web pages is getting them to look and work right in Internet Explorer. Well, coders, apparently Microsoft feels your pain, because it has released a new set of free tools to help you do just that.

Security

• Etherpad 1.2.7 fixes vulnerability that crashes the server

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Vicki Divoll and Vincent Warren on Drones and Democracy

  Bill explores the moral and legal implications of using drones to target our enemies — both foreign and American — as well as other intelligence issues with Vicki Divoll, a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, and Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

• US drones targeted Pak with ‘renewed intensity’ in Jan 2013: Report

• When the drones come home

  A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on one hand; an overseer of a weekly “kill list,” on the other.

• American Drones Over Africa: New US Military Bases in West Africa

• Prosecutors want more time to probe CIA prison in Poland claim

• Chronicles of carnage: US ‘war’ in Pakistan regains intensity, states report

• Obama channels George W. Bush in CIA pick

  John Brennan’s been a key player in the president’s possibly illegal drone attacks. Now he’s up for a promotion

• Letters: CIA injustice

  The Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officials who approved or conducted “enhanced interrogations,” and yet it goes after the man who blew the whistle on these practices.

• Exclusive: CIA Drug Money Plot to Overthrow Ecuador’s President Correa

  WikiLeaks Central presents an exclusive interview with Chilean journalist Patricio Mery, who claims the CIA has been actively plotting to destabilise or even assassinate Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, after US anger over decisions such as the granting of political asylum to Julian Assange and the termination of the US lease on a military base in Manta.

  Mery claims the CIA is running an Iran-Contra style drug operation in Chile, trafficking “about 200 kilos of cocaine per month” from Bolivia in order to fund anti-Correa operations. Early last year, Italian police discovered 40 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador’s diplomatic mail. Mery alleges senior Chilean officials were involved, and he has a dossier of proof for the Ecuadorian government.

• US needs to keep up drone war against Qaeda: Panetta

  The United States will have to keep up an open-ended drone war against Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan and elsewhere to prevent another terror attack on America, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.

• New Report Warns That Drones Could Be Used for Stalking, Voyeurism

  The sight of a drone in flight is likely to become a regular occurrence in the United States within the next few years. But the rise of unmanned technology could lead to new crimes like “drone stalking” and “drone trespassing,” lawmakers are being told.

• Oliver Stone vs. the Empire

  Why he’s as tough on Truman and Obama as Nixon and Bush

• Military Commissions Version 3.0: Legitimacy Still Lacking

  Yesterday, Judge James Pohl ordered the government to disconnect any outside censors to the courtroom, stating that he is the only person with the authority to decide whether the proceedings should be closed to the public. Judge Pohl’s orders followed a confusing episode on Monday in which an unknown government agency cut the audio feed during a pre-trial hearing in the 9/11 case.

• The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

  Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

• Drug Offenders, Not Violent Criminals Fill up Federal Prisons

  Almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is locked up in one country: the United States.

  For years, the U.S. has held the infamous reputation of having the highest per capita rate of incarcerated individuals on the planet, dwarfing that of other comparable industrialized nations. There were 1.6 million state and federal prisoners in the country as of 2011, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reports 492 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents were sentenced to more than 12 months in prison that year.

• Meet the contractors turning America’s police into a paramilitary force

  They can already learn a lot about you with their spy technologies

• The Case for Torture

  What really happened in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogations? Three former officials tell their stories.

• Did Zero Dark Thirty Accidentally Tell the Most Dangerous Truth?

• Seeing Torture for What It Is

  The critical outcry over the depictions of torture in the film Zero Dark Thirty has led to a series of interviews with the film’s director Kathryn Bigelow, in which she has addressed the negative reactions to this provocative subject. Despite her public condemnation of torture, Bigelow takes little responsibility for her film’s potentially harmful influence on public opinion.

• Not Just Another Movie

  Zero Dark Thirty lies. End of story

• Silenced

  Beneath the headlines, out of sight of most Americans, a critical war is being fought between those who would reveal the starkest truths about the United States’ national security policies, and a federal government ever more committed to shrouding its activities in secrecy.

• Dirty Wars is as Bold as It Gets

  The documentary is rooted in an investigation on the surreptitious Joint Special Operations Command, a branch responsible for finding and killing targets that make a “Kill List,” some of whom are American citizens. Like the quotidian protagonist of a frenetic militia novel, Scahill is drawn into a world of clandestine operations implemented by men so furtive, they don’t exist on paper.

• THE OMINOUS U.S. PRESENCE IN NORTHWEST AFRICA

  The point is that intervention is ultimately self-defeating, because it creates the enemies the government says it seeks to defeat. The way to obtain resources is through peaceful market purchases.

• U.S. Drone Strikes Breed Hatred; Serve as Recruitment Tool for America’s Enemies

  In the days just before Barack Obama took the oath of office to begin his second term as president, the U.S. launched drone strikes in Yemen that reportedly killed 15 people. The administration’s escalation of America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles in its targeted killing of suspected terrorists across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa is provoking increased opposition at home and abroad. During the inauguration ceremonies in Washington D.C., the group Code Pink Women for Peace protested against the U.S. drone program and called on the Senate to reject President Obama’s nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Brennan, who is currently deputy bational security advisor and assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, is the architect of Obama’s drone program and is referred to by some as the nation’s “assassination czar.”

• A RED LIGHT AT GUANTÁNAMO

• Former prosecutor says treatment of Guantanamo detainees puts U.S. soldiers at risk

• Terror Tuesday: Calling the shots in Yemen

  Dominating the skyline of Yemen’s capital of Sana’a is the fortress-like Mövenpick Hotel, which serves as a visual marker for what Yemenis term the city’s “Green Zone.” The nearby Sheraton Hotel is now used to lodge US Marines, while the adjacent British and US embassies hunker down behind blast walls, check points and razor wire. According to local residents, the buildings in the zone are being connected with tunnels as an added security measure.

• Whistleblower John Kiriakou: For Embracing Torture, John Brennan a “Terrible Choice to Lead the CIA”

  Days after he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, John Kiriakou — the first CIA official to be jailed for any reason relating to the torture program — denounces President Obama’s appointment of John Brennan to head the CIA. “I’ve known John Brennan since 1990,” Kiriakou says. “I worked directly for John Brennan twice. I think that he is a terrible choice to lead the CIA. I think that it’s time for the CIA to move beyond the ugliness of the post-September 11th regime, and we need someone who is going to respect the Constitution and to not be bogged down by a legacy of torture.” [includes rush transcript]

• Harry Reid On Guantanamo: ‘Nobody’s Fault’ Prison Camp Hasn’t Closed

• CIA Chief-in-Waiting John Brennan ‘Knew of Waterboarding Interrogation Technique’

Cablegate

• Iceland denies aid to FBI in WikiLeaks investigation

  Iceland refused to cooperate with an FBI investigation into WikiLeaks two years ago. The Icelandic Interior Minister said he ordered police to cease contact with the FBI, and made it clear their presence was not “well-seen” in Iceland.
  Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson informed the AP of his displeasure upon discovering that FBI agents had arrived in the country in August 2011.

• FBI agents expelled from Iceland over Wikileaks probe

  Angered that agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) traveled to his country unannounced in an attempt to investigate the whistleblower website Wikileaks, Iceland’s interior minister had the Americans deported.

• The International Manhunt for WikiLeaks

  One of the things DOJ is protecting from FOIA in Electronic Privacy Information Center’s suit is information other governments have shared with the US on the investigation.

• As US Advances Toward Surveillance State, Iceland Reportedly Kicked Out FBI Agents Prying Into WikiLeaks

• WikiLeaks: ‘Prabhakaran Thinks We’re As Monolithic As He Is’ – Dhanapala To US

  “In separate meetings with Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse and Peace Secretariat head Jayantha Dhanapala on September 15, the Ambassador discussed prospects for resumed negotiations between the Government of Sri Lanka (GSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While Rajapakse expressed guarded optimism, Dhanapala offered a bleaker assessment, noting that in the lack of movement tensions between the Tigers and GSL security forces have increased in Trincomalee and Nagarkovil, while the small but vocal ‘anti-peace’ lobby in the South had become more strident. Dhanapala does not expect the visit of Norwegian Special Envoy Erik Solheim to alleviate the situation, since he has returned to Sri Lanka with no new proposals from the LTTE. Dhanapala asked the Embassy to raise LTTE encroachments in Trincomalee with the ceasefire monitors. Both Rajapakse and Dhanapala agreed that the LTTE seems to have dropped the March defection of Eastern military commander Karuna as a pretext for refusing to negotiate.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

Finance

• Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer on Whistleblowers and Prosecuting Bankers for Fraud (Satire)

• Terrorism as economic stimulus for US

• GM of Inter-American Investment Corporation Fails to Appear for DC Deposition, Leaves for Mexico

  The Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), the private sector lending arm of the multilateral Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), continues to display its contempt for the U.S. justice system, despite the fact that the United States government is the IIC’s largest single donor.

  Jacques Rogozinski, former General Manager of the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), failed to appear at a deposition in Washington, D.C. earlier this month on Tuesday, Jan. 15, in the case of Vila vs IIC. The Plaintiff’s counsel, Douglas Hartnett of Elitok & Hartnett, has been requesting Rogozinski’s appearance since October 2012. But the former IIC official left for Mexico immediately after he resigned as General Manager on Dec. 31, 2012. Although Rogozinski had been subpoenaed by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia he did not indicate if or when he would return to the U.S. for a future deposition.

Censorship

• WHAT DOES THE GUARDIAN CENSOR?

• CES tells CNET: You’re fired!

  Now, CES itself has put out a press release slamming CNET’s behavior and announcing that CNET won’t be allowed to produce the “Best of CES” awards anymore. Those awards are produced by CNET under contract with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which puts on CES. CEA said it will work to identify a new partner to run the Best of CES awards.

  “We are shocked that the ‘Tiffany’ network which is known for its high journalistic standards would bar all its reporters from favorably describing classes of technology the network does not like,” said CEA President Gary Shapiro in the statement.

Privacy

• In the Brave New America, little brother could be listening, too

  It’s extremely difficult for us to imagine the full extent to which our electronic communications and other transactions are monitored and collated in secret government databases and office parks. Most people don’t even think about the pervasive and ever growing monitoring — it’s too big, too scary, too unfathomable. And that unimaginable-ness is a huge part of why: even if we regularly think about the problem, the omnipresent and yet invisible surveillance regimes operate in the background, like malware on our computers. We don’t realize they are there because we cannot see them, touch them, smell them.

• Report: Obama’s plan to harvest and store US persons’ data faced objections at DHS privacy office

• High School To Collect Students’ Hair For Mandatory Drug Testing

  A Kansas City high school will begin collecting hair from students to conduct mandatory drug tests.

  KSHB-TV reports that Rockhurst High School will start the random drug testing during the 2013-14 school year.

• The Oath to Defend the Constitution vs. the Forced Pledge to Protect Government Secrecy

  In the debate on reducing the national debt, members of Congress have focused on two options–tax increases and entitlement cuts—both considered unhelpful to restarting a stalled economy. Congress seemingly has forgotten that it has another option for reducing the debt: eliminating waste, fraud and corruption in government programs. Perhaps, Congress knows that the success of such a plan would correspond with the effectiveness of whistleblower protections—protections it has been reluctant to provide to the thousands of whistleblowers who hold security clearances.

• Meet the American Company Helping Governments Spy on “Billions” of Communications

• Maybe John Brennan Didn’t Want to Talk about CIA Lying to Congress?

• “Principles of Control”: Military civil disorder operations, then and now

  The above video was produced by the US military in 1968, and describes how the Defense Department and civil law enforcement agencies should disrupt and crush civil “disturbances,” or protests. Mostly, protesters just want to “let of steam,” after which they’ll go home. But there are others — “professional agitagors” — against whom the police and military must deploy “more force”; in the video, they look an awful lot like Black Panthers.

• EU Citizens Warned Not To Use US Cloud Services Over Spying Fears

Civil Rights

• Jury Finds Former College President Personally Liable for $50,000 in Victory for Student Rights

  A federal jury today found former Valdosta State University (VSU) President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for $50,000 for violating the due process rights of former student Hayden Barnes in the case of Barnes v. Zaccari. In May 2007, Zaccari expelled Barnes for peacefully protesting Zaccari’s plan to construct two parking garages on campus, calling a collage posted by Barnes on his personal Facebook page a “threatening document” and labeling Barnes a “clear and present danger” to VSU. Barnes first came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help in October 2007.

• How The NRA Became The Most Powerful Special Interest In Washington

  The National Rifle Association is considered one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.
  The way it operates — including how it recruits and maintains an active membership — have given it outsize influence over lawmakers at the state and federal level.

• Human Rights Watch decries U.S. prison system

  The NGO’s World Report criticizes mass incarceration and U.S. record of torture and extrajudicial killing

• Bernie Sanders on the Independent in Politics

  Bill talks with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent in Congress for 21 years — longer than anyone in American history. In 2010, Sanders made national news when he delivered an eight-and-a-half-hour speech attacking the agreement President Obama and the Republicans had made to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

• IBM Security Tool Can Flag ‘Disgruntled Employees’

  A new International Business Machines Corp. security tool uses Big Data to help CIOs detect internal and external security threats in new ways—and can even scan email and social media to flag apparently “disgruntled” employees who might be inclined to reveal company secrets, according to Sandy Bird, chief technology officer of IBM’s security systems division.

• Asymmetric Extradition — the American Way

  Richard O’Dwyer is the Shef field stu dent who is cur rently wanted by the USA on copy­right infringe ment charges. Using a bit of old-fashioned get-up-and-go, he set up a web­site called tvshack​.com, which appar ently acted as a sign-posting ser vice to web sites where people could down load media. Put ting aside the simple argu ment that the ser vice he provided was no dif fer ent from Google, he also had no copy righted mater ial hos ted on his website.

  Richard has lived all his life in the UK, and he set up his web site there. Under UK law he had com mit ted no crime.

  How ever, the Amer ican author it ies thought dif fer ently. O’Dwyer had registered his web­site as a .com and the US now claims that any web site, any where in the world, using a US-originated domain name (com/org/info/net etc) is sub ject to US law, thus allow ing the Amer ican gov ern ment to glob al ise their legal hege mony. The most notori ous recent case was the illegal US intel li gence oper a tion to take down Megaup load and arrest Kim Dot com in New Zea l and earlier this year.

• Meet the first head of state to head to trial in the Americas for genocide

  Rios Montt will be the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide.

• Saluting Bradley Manning

• Judge Questions DOJ Over Secrecy in Author’s First Amendment Case

  A U.S. Justice Department lawyer faced sharp questions today from a Washington judge over the government effort to restrict an author’s ability to challenge whether certain details in his book about the Afghan war should remain secret.

  Retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who penned a memoir titled “Operation Dark Heart,” is pursuing a First Amendment case in Washington’s federal trial court over the government’s insistence that passages in the book contain classified information that cannot be publicly disclosed. In late 2010, Shaffer sued the CIA, the Defense Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Shaffer’s case presents thorny legal issues regarding the control and disclosure of classified information in civil litigation. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, at a hearing in the case today to discuss procedural issues, expressed concern that DOJ’s litigation stance will hinder Shaffer’s ability to present his contentions by restricting the information he’s allowed to tell the court.

• Tell President Obama to Appoint a Permanent State Department Inspector General

• NYPD Handcuffed 7-Year-Old & Interrogated Him For Hours Over Missing $5, Family Claims

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • 7 Places to Find Creative Commons Images Online

    If you’re a journalist, blogger, or any other type of written content producer, you have likely found yourself hunting for images to use in your publications. It is important when using stock imagery that you make sure the images are licensed for your use. Simply performing a Google image search and grabbing the first file you find might be easy, but you face the risk of stealing someone else’s non-freely licensed work – which not only can be considered unethical, but can also damage your reputation.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

A good week

It’s pretty easy to set up a desktop system with most distros. I use Debian GNU/Linux because it has been around a while and has a huge repository of software. Let’s look at doing other kinds of things with your PC.

What’s the next big platform for Linux?

Glyn Moody wonders whether the car – a currently undeveloped yet important platform with great potential – can provide the inspiration for the next generation of Linux coders.

Linux Format 168 On Sale Today – Linux vs Windows 8: The verdict

How to Get a Linux (Related) Job

Working in Information Technology over the last twenty years (and the last ten or so as a senior engineer or team lead in various organizations) has exposed me to a lot of resumes over that time. Over the last five years, one of the more common questions I am asked is “how can I get a Linux related job?”. I will attempt to address that in this space.

The most important thing to remember is that your quest for a Linux position at any organization is really no different than applying for any other I.T. position. Once you have identified the company and the posting (and a great place to get an idea of who is looking for Linux talent and with what experience, is The Linux Foundation), you need to focus on the attributes and experience you have that are directly applicable to the position you want. Your resume should then be tailored to highlight that experience throughout your career as much as possible.

GNU/Linux Inside

February 2013 Issue of Linux Journal: System Administration

With Open Arms, AccuPOS Embraces the Linux Platform

As advocates press for more freedom of speech and more open platforms in general, AccuPOS’ POS software is already ahead of the game. Gone are the days of inaccessibility and clandestine operations; the most progressive POS software is now available on the Linux operating system.

Desktop

• Chromebooks on the Rise As Big Hardware Players Announce Devices

Server

• Defence bets big on Linux

  Pulls over 1000 systems onto Linux servers.

• IBM’s Watson heads to school

  The Jeopardy champ’s college application has been accepted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Big Blue proudly reports.

• Extreme Brings Ethernet Audio Video Bridging to the Network

  Audio and video professionals have long had their own sets of cables and associated protocols to connect their gear. Now thanks to the Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (AVB) 802.1Q standard, some of that gear can all be converged onto Ethernet networks.

  Extreme Networks this week introduced its support of Ethernet AVB on its portfolio of networking gear, including the Summit X440, X460 and X670 switches, ushering in a new era of networking convergence.

• AWS cuts price of Linux EC2 instances across the globe

Kernel Space

• 2013 Tizen Developer Conference CFP and registration are now open!

• Microsoft Cradles Linus Torvalds’ (Other) Baby

  Microsoft is still playing catchup in the world of open source software, but it turned a corner on Wednesday, announcing that its Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 developer tools will both support Git, the version control system widely used by open source projects.

• Passionate Facebook Linux Community Edges Towards 100,000th Fan

• Graphics Stack

  • Open-Source AMD Graphics Driver 7.1.0 Released

    The xf86-video-ati 7.1.0 graphics driver was released today as stable with several changes.

    Highlights for xf86-video-ati 7.1.0 include adding in new Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” PCI Ids, fixing the ring count for R300 Textured Video, an X-Video fix for coordinate limits on X1000 Avivo GPUs, an R200 fix, fixing damage reporting for PRIME slave pixmaps, support for limiting the swap rate when the CRTC is in the DPMS off state, and a couple of other fixes.

Applications

• Scientific Visualization with NCL

  Many of my previous articles have looked at software packages that do scientific calculations and generate scientific results. But, columns of numbers are nearly impossible to make sense of—at least, by regular human beings. So what can you do? The answer is visualization. We do massive amounts of processing visually, and the easiest way for us to review information is through some graphical format. Because of the power of graphical representations, several packages have been written by different groups. In this article, I’m looking at NCL (the NCAR Command Language, http://www.ncl.ucar.edu). NCAR is the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory develops NCL. NCL is an interpreted language designed specifically for data analysis and visualization. It supports several different file formats used in scientific computations, and it also provides several data analysis functions built-in.

• Digging Deeper With Vim

  In my previous article introducing the basic mechanics of Vim, I briefly mentioned some of the more advanced capabilities. The last article was intended to give the reader a cursory introduction, and leave them with the ability to be competent in editing files with Vim. Today, we are going to buckle down and get into what makes Vim the best text editor on the planet. Let’s talk plugins.

  The core functionality of Vim can be extended by adding plugins. While not strictly necessary, plugins significantly raise the bar for what a text editor, or even a word processor, must be capable of before it can be compared to Vim. Everyone’s recipe is a little different, there are so many plugins that getting just the right mix to configure Vim the way you like it can be a bit tricky, but I will go over how I use it, and what works out best for me.

• Review: KeePass makes strong passwords and keeps them safe

  If you adopt just one security tool this year, make it KeePass. This free and open-source password manager is available for Windows, with unofficial ports for iOS, Android, Linux, and Mac OS X. A secure, lengthy, completely random password goes a long way towards improving your security–and having a separate password for each and every website and service you use is the single most important thing you can do to keep secure.

• Proprietary

  • [Opera] 2.13 Final released

  • Time to drop flash

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Reinstall Android on Nexus 7, Removing Ubuntu

  • How to connect to remote server via SSH using Dolphin

  • Tutorial 1: Hello Elementary

  • How to anonymize the programs from your terminal with torify

  • A quick GNU R tutorial to basic operations, functions and data structures

  • How to Reinstall Android on Nexus 7, Removing Ubuntu

  • Installing Nagios 3.4.4 On CentOS 6.3

  • How to log the correct Ip having Varnish and Nginx

  • Setting Up A Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS And Samba On Debian Squeeze

  • Configuration of High-Availability Storage Server Using GlusterFS

  • 9 of the Best Free Prolog Books

  • [How to] Get Initial Git Integration In Gedit

• Games

  • FlightGear 2.10 at landing altitude!

    One of the most successful open source projects ever existed is about to release another major version, and as the release candidates were made available, I thought it would be a good time to take a look on what’s coming.

  • The Uncertain Age of Steam on Linux

    Linux has not received much attention from the major gaming houses, even though it seems a natural fit as a robust gaming platform, so the announcement of the Steam for Linux beta last December generated a lot of interest.

  • Blizzard will release a game for Linux this year

  • Interview with Jordan Brock of Hit the Sticks developers of Just Tactics

    Hi, my name is Jordan Brock. Our studio is called Hit the Sticks. We are a talented team of artists and engineers located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We are nearing the completion of our game called Just Tactics.

  • Rolling Survival a new Alpha Funded game on Desura

    Rolling Survival has just been unleashed on Desura under their Alpha Funding program! Rolling survival is a top down wave survival game with an upgrade tree. it really is as simple as that, you kill enemies to get experience and with that experience you can buy weapons, upgrades and additional health so that you can survive longer.

  • Counter Strike 1.6, how to actually get playing

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Just 12 More Years to Go: Enlightenment 18 Begins

  E17, “the only software which has taken longer to develop than Duke Nukem Forever,” was released little over a month ago, but today brought clues and news that the reign of E18 has begun. It actually began weeks ago because a new snapshot was released today, as well as an update to E17.

• New E17 Stable Snapshot and the First of E18

  You read that title right folks. The first showing of Enlightenment DR18 (or E18 for short) has become a reality. Sure, it is nowhere near what the final product is going to look like – but it is a start. If you would like to follow the life cycle of E18 as it develops there is a new release manager blog that can be found here.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • # Plasma Active 4

  • Desktop Containment moving to Plasma Quick

    As many other components of the Plasma Workspaces, Plasma Desktop’s default Containment is being ported to QML. A technology preview of the containment is being demoed and can be tested by a wider audience now. While the port is mainly replicating the current desktop containment in QML, its interaction scheme to position and manipulate widgets on the desktop has been improved.

  • KTouch fun

  • First Patch Release Of Qt 5.0

    Digia has released Qt 5.0.1, the first patch release of Qt 5. This version brings more than 400 entries in changelog from Qt 5.0.0 to Qt 5.0.1. The most important changes are made to 3 packages – qtbase, qtdeclartive, and qtmultimedia.

  • KDE plans to merge Plasma desktops

    Developers at KDE are planning to merge the code for their Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and Plasma Active user interfaces in the not-too-distant future, according to a blog post by Aaron Seigo. As he explains, individual programs are currently responsible for each shell; their sources, however, consist of just three to ten thousand lines of code, since they otherwise make use of a common code base.

  • ITTIA DB SQL Leverages New Features of Qt 5.0

    Bellevue, WA — The ITTIA DB SQL Qt driver is now compatible with Qt 5.0.0, a major renovation of the popular application development framework. The integration of these technologies allows software developers for embedded systems and devices to take advantage of flexible embedded data management software and an elegant GUI framework. Features such as replication, data distribution, concurrency, logging, and change notification offer applications a unique competitive edge and enable rapid development of user-friendly data-driven applications with a level of performance that is only possible in native code.

  • QtWeb: Not Quite Ready For Full Time Browsing

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Gets Formal, Public Usability Testing

    By definition, usability testing is difficult in free software. The reason is obvious: usability testing typically requires face to face observation of users, which is hard to arrange when most developers are interacting remotely. That’s why Aakanksha Gaur’s recent blogs about GNOME 3 usability caught my attention — to the best of my knowledge, the last major usability study of GNOME took place twelve years ago, although small, informal studies have been done since.

  • 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women

Distributions

• New Releases

  • PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniME 2013.02

    PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniME 2013.02 are now available for download. These are 32bit quarterly update isos which can also be installed on 64 bit computers.

  • Arch 2013.02.01

  • Lite 1.0.4

• Screenshots

  • Commodore OS Vision 1.0 Beta 9 Screenshots

  • Linux Deepin 12.12 Alpha Screenshots

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Updated Their Website, Now Based On Mezzanine

    Mandrive, once the most popular distribution, is also giving back to the community through the work they have done on this site.

• Red Hat Family

  • Support for RHEL 3 ends one year from … now!

    Red Hat has let it be known that by this time next year it will wash its hands of the third version of its Enterprise Linux.

  • Propaganda, Red Hat-style

    Does opensource.com tell both sides of the story? The short answer is no.

    If someone had reasoned criticism of Red Hat or anything to do with free software or open source, would that be published? Again, the answer is no.

    In September last year, I wrote to Red Hat with some queries about the site. Though I received a reply from one Emily Stancil, promising answers to my questions, nothing arrived.

    Ms Stancil then wrote to say: “I appreciate you reaching out. Unfortunately, since we’re in our quiet period leading into our earnings call next week – we’re not going to be able to provide feedback at this time. Please keep us posted if we can help in the future.”

    To me this meant that Red Hat did not want what could be not-so-positive publicity in the run-up to its big day in the sun.

    Earlier this month, I renewed my correspondence with Ms Stancil. This time, after a week, she sent me replies to my queries from Jackie Yeaney, executive vice president, strategy and corporate marketing, Red Hat. I reproduce them verbatim below:

  • Fedora

    • Kororaa 18 beta progressing well, final touches

      It shouldn’t be long now, firnsy and I are busy fixing the few remaining bugs (that we know about) and then we’ll be releasing it after some final testing. So far, so good. I’ll also be looking into a way to use FedUp to upgrade, but haven’t had time to test that yet. Our primary mirror is also currently down, so that’s causing a few issues.

    • Fedora 18 Gnome 3.6 Desktop Review

    • Fedora To Look At Reviving Apache OpenOffice

      Most Linux distributions have switched over to using LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

    • Fedora 19: MariaDB instead of MySQL, but no Btrfs

• Debian Family

  • Bootstrappable Debian – New Milestone

    This post is about the port bootstrap build ordering tool (naming suggestions welcome) which was started as a Debian Google Summer of Code project in 2012 and continued to be developed afterwards. Sources are available through gitorious.

    In the end of November 2012, I managed to put down an approximation algorithm to the feedback arc set problem which allowed to break the dependency graph into a directed acyclic graph with only few removed build dependencies. I wrote about this effort on our mailinglist but didnt mention it here because it was still too much of a proof-of-concept. Later, in January 2013, I mentioned the result of this algorithm in an email wookey and me wrote to debian-devel mailinglist.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Smart Scopes

        A new feature of Ubuntu was discussed today (which is like an announcement but without overhyping it), it is called Smart Scopes and is documented here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SmartScopes1304Spec go read that first and then I have a video for you to watch.

      • Ubuntu’s rolling release: Pros and cons

        According to Canonical’s Kernel Team Manager, Leann Ogasawara, it is possible that Ubuntu will get rid of the current “new release every six months” model and move to a rolling release. (You can find more info in this recent video.)

        So, just what is a “rolling release”?

        It’s exactly what it sounds like, really. As individual new/updated packages are ready, they are put up on a repository and made available to everyone. New version of Firefox? No need to wait until the next big release of your operating system…you get it right away. New improvements to the Desktop Environment (such as Ubuntu’s Unity)? BAM! No waiting until next April. Immediately available.

      • 5 Ubuntu alternatives worth checking out

        Linux is a free and open-source desktop operating system, and is recognized as the third most popular desktop operating system in the world. Unlike OS X or Windows, there are many different versions — called distributions (or distros) — that all fall under the “Linux” umbrella. Among the many flavors of Linux, the Debian Linux-based Ubuntu is the distro that tends to receive the majority of mainstream attention. Interestingly, according to the ever-popular DistroWatch, much as Ubuntu has surpassed Debian in popularity, Ubuntu has been overthrown by its own forked distribution: Linux Mint.

      • Ubuntu’s challenge to Android
        and iOS

        THE world’s most famous and popular Linux operating system is making news with their claims to have come up with a smartphone version which it hopes will give Google and Apple a run for their money.

        Recently, during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Canonical, the company behind the Linux-based open source operating system, flagged off its intentions to challenge the might of Android and iOS with a brand new smartphone version which makes better use of gesture control and also enables a handset to double up as a PC when docked.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Achieves Bodhi Enlightenment

          Until recently, most desktop Linux distros were about the same on the surface. What differentiated them were things like configurability. Some distros, those preferred by Linux purists or designed primarily to be used as servers, required users to open a terminal and change settings with a text editor. Others sought to be newbie friendly, and had devised schemes so that most systems settings could be done point and click, just like with that evil operating system from Redmond.

        • Have some fun with Deepin 12.12 alpha

          Linux Deepin is one of my favorite desktop distributions. A Chinese distro that is based on Ubuntu Desktop, it is not just a rebranded Ubuntu desktop, but offers a desktop computing experience different from that of its parent distribution.

          Its graphical package manager, music and video players, and a cool screen shot tool, are original to it. While previous editions offered a customized GNOME Shell desktop, the next edition, Linux Deepin 12.12, will ship with a new desktop environment called Depth Desktop Environment (DDE). And the graphical package manager, music and video players, and the screen shot have been spiced up. From what I’ve seen, Deepin fans will be very pleased with DDE and everything else that comes with it.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi’s Momentum Picks Up, and Google Pitches In

• Raspberry Pi Foundation receives Google grant for Schools

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung launches red Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 Android tablet for $219.99

    • White Nexus 4 shows off on camera [pics]

    • HTC M7 reportedly due March 8 with two color options

      The much-rumored HTC M7 will reportedly arrive on March 8 where it will be made available in two color options, indicates HTCSource. Should the details prove accurate, this means HTC will be release the handset less than three weeks after the February 19 announcement.

  • Android

    • Five great Android Wi-Fi calling apps

      There are many reasons to enjoy Wi-Fi calling, from starting video chats with family far and wide, to giving your old phone a new lease on life as a Wi-Fi-only device in little Johnny’s hands. However you want to use it, you still need to know which apps are best.

    • Android’s (quiet) killer feature

      It’s no secret that Android has lots of good stuff going for it, but one of the platform’s most useful and distinguishing features is one you rarely hear discussed.

      I’m talking about Android’s system-wide sharing capability — a process built into the operating system that many people take for granted. Android’s sharing function may not sound exciting, but don’t be fooled: It’s one of the most powerful and valuable components the OS has to offer.

    • Sony C530X ‘HuaShan’ smartphone leaks

      Sony’s Xperia Z and Xperia ZL are so far the most interesting Android handsets of the year, but the Japanese company seems to also be working on yet-to-be-announced handsets, such as the C530X, also known as the “HuaShan”.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 Review

    There are tablets and seven-inch tablets and portable devices that wear their Android affiliation on their sleeve, but Samsung has gone and combined the best of all that has come before and pushed it someplace decidedly newer and better with their new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. As the name will tell, the two models in this line represent a second generation of Samsung’s popular Galaxy Tab, and the 7.0 iteration we tried affirms the evolution away from the ten-inch range and toward a more compact, increasingly common seven-inch screen size that is more affordable and generally easier to handle. (For those who prefer the larger form factor, Samsung does also offer a 10.1-inch second-gen model.)

  • Tablets Mature

    After a year or two of 100% per annum growth we are about where tablets are mature technology.

10 open source projects to watch this year

Open source software projects may not typically have the marketing budgets necessary to match launch events like the one Microsoft just held for Office 2013, but that doesn’t mean their products are any less valuable.

Opensource.com adds community moderators to team

Opengear Expands Open Source Remote Management

In an age where Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is the dominant tech company and proprietary smartphones and tablets account for an ever-growing segment of the market, it can be easy to forget that not all hardware is built on closed standards. Opengear, however, reminded the channel recently that open hardware platforms can be profitable as well with the announcement of two significant achievements in the remote-management market.

When we last checked in with Opengear, which delivers solutions for remotely accessing and managing IT infrastructure that are built using open source technology, it was making inroads in the security space. Its newest product release, Opengear Lighthouse version 4, continues the company’s focus on security professionals, among others, while also introducing new features designed to enhance the scalability and usability of the platform.

How Does Your Workplace Use Open Source Software?

Earlier this week I wrote about open source pragmatism and how even at an event like Linux.conf.au, there’s less evidence of one-sided tech zealotry than you might expect. Now I’m wondering: how does that actually play out in the workplaces of Lifehacker readers?

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Makes Chrome OS Launcher More Customizable

    The way Google’s Chrome OS is shaping up is brining it closer to what one would expect from a ‘desktop OS’. Google has just made the launcher of it’s Chrome OS movable. Now, you can place the launcher on either edge of the screen – right, left, top or the default bottom.

• Mozilla

  • At Mobile World Congress, Expect Firefox OS Phones

    Mobile World Congress–one of the biggest events showcasing mobile devices and platforms and applications for them–is coming up in February, and among the sights and sounds slated for the event, you can expect Firefox OS phones. Among several previews of the conference, Computerworld notes that Chinese phone maker ZTE wil deliver a Firefox OS phone in Barcelona, even as TelefA3nica and Geeksphone are also preparing phones. It looks like these Firefox OS phones will end up serving larger markets than the niche ones that Mozilla initially discussed.

    Notably, Mobile World Congress 2009 was expected to be the big rollout for the first group of phones based on Android. As we noted in this post, the phones didn’t show up there, which caused a lot of confusion.

  • Accepting drones admission of US aggression: Saeed

SaaS/Big Data

• ownCloud Rides High on the Wings of FOSS

  If ever there was any doubt about the business value of free and open source software, a quick glance at the Linux Foundation’s list of supporting memberswill surely suffice to lay any remaining questions to rest.

  Many of the world’s largest and most successful enterprises are using Linux and other free software to run and advance their businesses, and that usage is on an upward trend.

• Rackspace Extends “Fanatically Supported” Cloud Tools via Certification, Compatibility Programs

Databases

• Oracle who? Fedora & openSUSE will replace MySQL with MariaDB

  For years, MySQL has been fundamental to many server applications, especially those using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software stack. Those days may be ending. Both Fedora (Red Hat’s community Linux) and openSUSE (SUSE’s community Linux) will be switching out MySQL to MariaDB for their default database management system (DBMS) in their next releases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Why I contribute my changes to Libreoffice and won’t re-license them to a non-copyleft license?

  So after reading several times on another mailing list that Libreoffice developers should relicense their patches to make them available to other descendents in the OpenOffice.org ecosystem I’m indirectly responding in this blog post and explaining why I contribute to the Libreoffice project and license my changes only as LGPLv3+/MPL. This reflects of course only my personal opinion.

• A good week

  It’s been a good and busy week so far, and it’s not over yet with FOSDEM starting in Brussels on Saturday. It started with something I’m quite excited about: I got elected at the Board of Silicon Sentier. Silicon Sentier is the Parisian hub of innovation, collaboration and start-up incubation. Among other initiatives, it runs La Cantine , one of the most famous co-working spaces in the world located in the heart of Paris and Le Camping, the Parisian start-up incubator located in the old stock-exchange building. I feel it’s a true honour , a mark of trust and I look foward to the future discussions and actions of the board with excitement.

• LibreOffice 3.6.5 Finishes off 3.6

  Today The Document Foundation announced the release of their final 3.6 update, LibreOffice 3.6.5. “This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software.”

• LibreOffice 3.6.5 arrives ahead of FOSDEM

Education

• Can open source save STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics) graduate figures?

Business

• LOCKON Co. Ltd: Japan’s Number One Open Source E-Commerce System Is Coming Your Way!

• Semi-Open Source

  • Alfresco Snaps-up Open Source WeWebU For Hybrid Cloud Content and Mobile Management

Funding

• EZ-EV Open Source Trike Kit Seeks Funding

  An electrical engineer by trade, Krysztopik built his three-wheeled hot rod in-between other gas-to-electric conversions like a Porsche Carrera and a Volkswagen New Beetle. His EZ-EV uses 24 deep-cycle lead-acid batteries powering a MES-DEA 200-250 AC electric motor that can take it up to 100 miles, with a top speed of 60 mph. Krysztopik, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, also plans on release open-source plans and kits, so people can make their own designs based on his work.

• Help Fund “Producing Open Source Software” 2nd Edition

Project Releases

• XBMC 12 open source media centre adds Live TV and Android support

  The team that develops the open source, platform-independent XBMC media centre software has released version 12 of its software, code-named “Frodo”. Among the most important new features are the platform-independent support for live TV, complete with recording feature, the option to use HD surround formats (DTS Master Audio and Dolby True HD), and a wider choice of supported operating systems, including initial support for Android devices.

• XBMC 12 released – includes Raspberry Pi and Android support

Public Services/Government

• Polish Defence Ministry moving to open source email and groupware

  Poland’s Defence Ministry will move to an email and groupware solution based on free and open source, according to the specification in the tender documents, published last November. The document calls for software that can handle between 15,000 and 50,000 users. The ministry wants to “eliminate licensing fees”, it explains in the request for tender.

• Danish municipalities using open source to innovate and collaborate

  Danish municipalities are increasingly using free and open source software for collaboration and innovation of ICT solutions. More than 10% of the country’s municipalities last year joined the newly founded Open Website Community OS2. The group has already delivered a Drupal-based municipal content management system (OS2Web) as well as an application offering paperless meetings (OS2dagsorden).

  The twelve municipalities in the OS2 consortium are supported by 19 Danish open source service providers. The group in December started the development of the two next applications, OS2kontactcenter and OS2kle, says Jon Badstue Pedersen, head of section at the Syddjurs municipality.

• Army C4ISR portal uses open-source software for faster upgrades

  The Army has upgraded its Single Interface to the Field (SIF) web portal using open-source software to make it easier for users to find information and documents.

• Japan economy ministry launches data site under Creative Commons license

  Japan’s conservative economy ministry has launched a new site that offers its data for download under a Creative Commons license.

  The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s “Open DATA METI” project has gone public under what the government is calling a trial beta version, currently available only in Japanese. The website currently offers data on Japan’s energy use, industrial manufacturing, and intellectual property, as well as government white papers on topics such as small and medium businesses.

Licensing

• VLC Multimedia Player Shows Changing Open Source License Is Hard, But Possible

  Licenses lie at the heart of open source — and many other kinds of “open” too. That’s because they are used to define the rights of users, and to ensure those rights are passed on — that the intellectual commons is not enclosed. Their central importance explains in part the flamewars that erupt periodically over which license is “best” — many people have very strong feelings on the subject.

Openness/Sharing

• Open source initiatives can strengthen cities’ downtown revitalization

  The open government movement in the United States is well underway, though still brand new in terms relative to the pace of the workings of government. Change tends to be delivered slowly, as evident during President Obama’s re-election campaign this year when many of us had to remind ourselves that though some change has trickled down over the past four years, much of it has yet to come to pass due to the inherent processes of government bodies. And yet, it still astonishes me how quickly ‘open’ ideas are being accepted, built, and implemented into city governments from east to west coast.

• To honor Aaron Swartz‘s transparency fight, supporters submit over 150 public records requests

  MuckRock has begun processing 153 free FOIA requests submitted in honor of Internet pioneer and transparency activist Aaron Swartz, who died earlier this month at age 26.

• How Aaron Swartz paved way for Jack Andraka’s revolutionary cancer test

• EU Court annuls EU freezing orders on Iranian bank – and Wikileaks again

  In October 2009, Bank Mellat, an Iranian bank, was effectively excluded from the UK financial market by an Order made by the Treasury, on the basis that it had or might provide banking services to those involved in Iran’s nuclear effort. The Bank challenged the Order, and the challenge failed in the Court of Appeal, albeit with a dissent from Elias LJ: see Rosalind English’s post and read judgment. The Bank’s appeal to the Supreme Court is due to be heard in March 2013; it raises some fascinating issues about common law unfairness, Article 6, and the right to property under A1P1 , given that the Bank was not told of the intention to make the Order prior to its making.

• ‘Github for recipes’ brings open source into the kitchen

• Open Access/Content

  • Checking out open access

    Montreal, January 20, 2013 – From Wikipedia to shareware, the Internet has made information and software more widely available than ever. At the heart of this explosion is the simple idea that information should be open and free for anyone. Yet with publishers charging exorbitant fees for subscriptions to academic journals, university libraries are struggling to keep up.

• Open Hardware

  • The State of Free Hardware for Robotics

    FreeIO.org is currently running a poll to determine what sort of free hardware project the community would most like to see developed. At present the poll is leaning heavily towards robots. So I thought it would be worthwhile to do a quick survey of existing free/open hardware robot projects to see what there is to work with and improve on. There are a lot of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) robotics projects out there too but this article will focus on hardware projects that are under free hardware licenses. See the FreeIO.org “about page” to learn more about the concepts of free / open hardware.

Programming

• Linux Foundation Gits Growth

  This week, development firm Perforce joined the Linux Foundation which is of interest for a number of reasons. Perforce build enterprise-grade Git version management software solutions via the Git Fusion solution. For years, I’ve been told by ‘other’ enterprise development firms that Git is all fine and nice but it’s not for enterprise developers (yeaah I know,FUD!).

• This Old (Open Source) House: Man Renovates Home on GitHub

  When Mark Wainwright visited his friend Francis Irving in Liverpool last May, he nearly locked himself in his small guest room just beneath the attic. The door was missing a knob, but it could still latch shut. Wainwright, a community coordinator with a U.K. non-profit group, wanted to let his host know about the problem. So he filed a bug report on GitHub.

  “The almost-attic room has no handle on the door,” Wainwright wrote. “It would be simple to add a handle and would prevent someone getting locked in the room – quite easy at the moment as the sprung latch is working fine.”

• Open Source PHP Usage Tops 244 Million Sites

  When I first started building websites in the late 90′s, PHP was my tool of choice. Though many things have change on the web since then, PHP’s popularity has not changed, it has grown.

  A new report from Netcraft puts the current tally as of January 2013 for PHP sites on the web at a staggering 244 million sites. In context that’s nearly 40 percent of the 630 million total sites on the web today.

• Rubygems site recovers from compromise

  The volunteers that run the Rubygems.org repository of components for Ruby applications are checking those components to ensure they haven’t been tampered with after the platform was compromised. Attackers uploaded a gem to the site which had a metadata file that used the Rails YAML flaws to copy initialisation and configuration information to the Pastie clippings site.

WikiMedia Foundation Releases GeoData For Geotagging Wikipedia

The WikiMedia Foundation has added a new extension to MediaWiki, the foundation for Wikipedia, that adds geographic data for individual wiki articles. Aimed primarily at mobile users, GeoData will make finding information about your present location easy and fun.

Security

• A smart phone that’s rugged, submersible and NSA-secure

• NSA certification for encryptor

• Hacking: The New National Pastime?

• RubyGems is compromised

• Kaspersky Lab Cyber Secure Operating System: It’s Real

  Kaspersky Lab continues to develop a cyber secure operating system project. It’s designed to protect utilities, nuclear reactors, transportation systems and other mission-critical infrastructure from hackers, malware and state sponsored cyber warfare. So what’s the latest? CEO Eugene Kaspersky offered our resident blogger some updated sound bytes during the Kaspersky Cyber Security Summit in New York. Here’s a recap, paraphrased by The VAR Guy.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Arkansas town’s martial law plan

  Backlash met plan for officers with AR-15s to patrol Paragould, stopping everyone out walking for their ID

• Lawmakers talk about drones and privacy

• Drones Are a Local Issue

  I write from Charlottesville, Va., but am hopeful that this message applies to your city, town, or county as well.

• CRS Report on Domestic Drones

• Covert Drone Warfare, By the Numbers

• Ex-CIA Agent, Whistleblower John Kiriakou Sentenced to Prison While Torturers He Exposed Walk Free

  Former CIA agent John Kiriakou speaks out just days after he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, becoming the first CIA official to face jail time for any reason relating to the U.S. torture program. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. Supporters say Kiriakou is being unfairly targeted for having been the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. Kiriakou joins us to discuss his story from Washington, D.C., along with his attorney, Jesselyn Radack, director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project. “This … was not a case about leaking; this was a case about torture. And I believe I’m going to prison because I blew the whistle on torture,” Kiriakou says. “My oath was to the Constitution. … And to me, torture is unconstitutional.” [inlcudes rush transcript]

• What would an anti-drone, anti-surveillance city look like?

  For all the talk about “privacy by design” online, it takes a quixotic student project to show us what a place built on the principle of defeating surveillance could actually look like. “Shura City” by Asher Kohn, posted at Chapati Mystery, is a kind of anti-Panopticon: every facet of it is built to (theoretically) disrupt cameras, heat sensors, or flying intruders with things like radio-equipped minarets or color-changing LEDs backlighting windows, inspired by the Arc En Ciel seen above.

• Meet the Contractors Turning America’s Police Into a Paramilitary Force

  The national security state has an annual budget of around $1 trillion. Of that huge pile of money, large amounts go to private companies the federal government awards contracts to. Some, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, are household names, but many of the contractors fly just under the public’s radar. What follows are three companies you should know about (because some of them can learn a lot about you with their spy technologies).

• Machine Gun Fire From Military Helicopters Flying Over Downtown Miami

• NDAA: February Hearing Over the Act Will Help Determine the Fate Of the Constitution

  As Barack Obama entered his second term in office, after a inauguration thoroughly reported by the media, there was one thing that the media failed to report on — namely Obama’s gross violation of the Constitution and the rule of law under the National Defense Authorization Act for both fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

• CIA Chief-in-Waiting John Brennan ‘Knew of Waterboarding Interrogation Technique’

• CIA “Black Sites” Discussion Muted At Gitmo Hearing

  Observers viewed a video feed of the proceedings from behind soundproof glass, with a 40-second audio delay so that authorities could mute any classified information.

• Dissent in 2013: Subversively Reviewing Predator Drones on Amazon.com

  In the online retailer’s product-review section, an impromptu challenge to President Obama’s kill list and “signature strikes.”

• Op-Ed: PBS broadcast on drones funded by drone-maker Lockheed-Martin

• Predator Drones Stalk US Borders Without Budget or Strategy

  The Department of Homeland Security’s drone program isn’t classified, unlike the highly secretive CIA and military drone programs outside the United States.

  Nonetheless, information about the DHS program to “secure the borders” with unmanned aerial systems is guarded, except for the self-serving press releases occasionally issued by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the DHS agency that includes the Border Patrol.

• The Legal and Ethical Case Against Drones

• Time magazine sees drone as threat to U.S. moral authority

  Interesting piece in the most recent issue of Time magazine on the growing prominence of drones – over the battlefields and over lots of other types of terrain here at home. I first learned of the ubiquitous presence of drones several years ago while driving with a friend from Washington to the Virginia suburbs. One of his co-workers at the Federal Aviation Administration worked in a department that registers and licenses the unmanned flying whatevers, and they apparently come in various shapes and sizes and are employed for an increasingly long list of reasons by everyone from hobbyists to weather forecasters, law enforcement personnel to war pilots who fly their “sorties” by remote control at a distance of thousands of miles from the target.

• Kerry, Drones and Cultural Diplomacy

  However, it will probably reinforce the perception of ingratitude among Americans when apparently well-meaning cultural endeavors are met with hostility in the countries where drones or military interventions are mixed with them. Kerry’s statements above may be read as a plea: “don’t forget we Americans also do a lot of good work.” Yet all the good work and all the good will in the world will achieve nothing if they are coupled with “counter terrorism initiatives” which kill innocents.

• WATCH: The Case Against Drones

• MACHINE GUN STOLEN, UNDERCOVER AGENTS’ NAMES EXPOSED AFTER BOTCHED ATF STING — NOW LAWMAKERS DEMAND ANSWERS

  For 10 months, ATF agents in Milwaukee ran a storefront operation meant to bust criminals for gun and drug violations. But the operation inside the phony store “Fearless Distributing” didn’t take down any major drug dealers or gang members — instead, the store was robbed of $35,000 worth of merchandise, an agent’s machine gun was stolen, and a document with the names and phone numbers of undercover agents was left behind after the operation was shut down, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

• Milan court convicts 3 Americans in CIA kidnapping

  Milan: A Milan appeals court has convicted a former CIA station chief in Rome and two other Americans in the 2003 rendition kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric.

• Italy convicts ex-CIA head over kidnap

  THE former head of the CIA in Italy has been sentenced to seven years in prison in absentia for the kidnapping of a radical imam in Milan in 2003 as part of the US “extraordinary rendition” program.

• Torture becoming ‘normal business’ in US – CIA vet

  One of the first American officers to prove that the US used water-boarding against inmates, John Kiriakou is waiting for a summons to go to jail for 2.5 years after he blew the cover of an agent involved in torturing prisoners.

• CIA free to snoop on private data of Irish cloud users

  US authorities could be able to access information stored by Irish citizens on popular cloud services under a new law being enacted in the States.

  Cloud computing has grown in popularity as it allows companies and individuals to save files such as pictures or documents without having to spend money on expensive hard drives or computer server systems.

  Instead, people effectively rent space on clouds such as Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud and take advantage of Amazon’s Cloud Drive.

• Udall blasts Brennan after meeting with Obama’s CIA director nominee

  Colorado Sen. Mark Udall isn’t known in Washington circles as a lawmaker with a deep contrarian streak.
  Just Wednesday, Udall announced his annual bipartisan gimmick, asking lawmakers to sit by members of the opposite party during the president’s State of the Union Address in two weeks.

• BETWEEN THE LINES: CIA agent foils terror plot in Flynn’s new book

• World human rights report criticizes Romania on political crisis, secret CIA prisons and Roma rights

• Gitmo detainee seeks ECHR ruling on CIA prison

Cablegate

• HP’s first Chromebook revealed in leaked spec sheet

  Update: HP responded to our request with a simple “no comment,” but we also noticed that the PDF has an Ad Embargo date of February 17th of this year — we expect we’ll hear the full story right around then.

• The Game of Drones: Sahel edition

• With Assange in Diplomatic Limbo, Sweden in No Rush to Press Rape Charges

• Video: Watch Julian Assange’s address to the Oxford Union

  WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange’s address to the Oxford Union is now viewable on the video below.

  The Union last month invited Mr Assange to speak during the Sam Adams Award ceremony that recognsies people who show devotion to the truth.

• The New Fourth Estate: Anonymous, Wikileaks, and –archy

  As government and industry collude, the interests of the powerful trample the rights of the multitude. Technology has granted invasive new eyes and ears to government agencies, spurning the right to privacy. Felicitously, the individual has also been empowered with two new tools to check the corporate state: hacktivism and leaks. The press has been captured by a handful of news corporations that are generally uncritical of government and fail to expose corporate injustice. The techno-libertarian culture has birthed the do-it-yourself fourth estate—usurping the illegitimate media and furnishing a viable alternative to the cartelized press. Two entities, Wikileaks and Anonymous, have emerged under this banner. This inquiry seeks to understand their history, methods, and to ascertain whether use of the discrete figurehead is efficacious.

• Postcards from Sweden

  “Assange has been hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is accused of sex crimes.”

  “Hiding”! A man holding speeches from the Embassy’s balcony, covered by media all around the world! “Accused”! To anybody’s knowledge he is not officially accused of anything; he is absurdly suspected for “sex crimes” against consenting women and wanted for interrogation by a prosecutor.

• FBI Came to Investigate Wikileaks in Iceland

  ..as revealed by Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson on RÚV’s news magazine Kastljós…

• Minister: Iceland refused to help FBI on WikiLeaks

• FBI Banned from Iceland

  FBI agents landed in Reykjavík without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations in the country, but Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson found out about the visit and forced them to leave the country, with the Icelandic government then issuing a formal protest to US authorities, according to Islandsbloggen.

• Minister: Iceland refused FBI aid over WikiLeaks investigation in 2011

  Iceland’s interior minister says he ordered the country’s national police not to cooperate with FBI agents sent to investigate secret-busting site WikiLeaks and that it escalated into a diplomatic spat.

  Ogmundur Jonasson told The Associated Press that the FBI agents were sent to the country to interview an unidentified WikiLeaks associate in August of 2011.

• Saluting Bradley Manning

  I am in Berkeley, California, for an event tonight sponsored by KPFA Radio & Courage to Resist called, “Saluting Bradley Manning.” I’ll be speaking with Daniel Ellsberg and Patricia Ellsberg.

• Update 1/21/13: Defense mounts over-classification defense, Daniel Ellsberg & Kevin Gosztola to speak in Berkeley

• Lies, Damned Lies, and Newspaper Reporting

  But really, Ms Hill – if you are indeed the same reporter who was threatened with prosecution in 2011 under the OSA – examine your conscience.

  How can you write a hit-piece focusing purely on Assange – a man who has designed a publishing system to protect potential whistleblowers from precisely such draconian secrecy laws as you were hyperbolically threatened with? And how could you, at the same time, airbrush out of history the testimony of so many whistleblowers gathered together, many of whom have indeed been arrested and have faced prosecution under the terms of the OSA or US secrecy legislation?

• Meteorology class uses UN studies to guide classroom discussions

  Students and professors find the reports online after they have been leaked, then use them to guide the class, Richman said. Sometimes, students are able to get their hands on Wikileaks-type information, or information that hasn’t yet been given to the public, to further their understanding of the issue.

• WikiLeaks documents used in courts: The case of the Iranian bank

• Prosecuting Whistleblowers Instead of Criminals

  Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.

• Assange’s allies

  If the Guardian could “find no allies” of Julian Assange (Report, 24 January), it did not look very hard. They could be found among the appreciative audience at the Oxford Union, and in our group seated at the front: the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

• Assange’s running for office may affect his asylum claims

• Ecuador Seeking Legal Way To Free Assange

  While he did not go into specifics about what legal steps would be taken, Patino quoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which allows individuals to be granted asylum, and several other international treaties, indicating the issue may be brought up at the United Nations or the Hague.

• DOJ Tells Judge WikiLeaks Investigation Details Should Remain Secret

  The U.S. Justice Department today urged a judge in Washington to allow the government to keep secret internal documents and correspondence that would reveal investigative techniques, confidential sources and potential targets of the ongoing WikiLeaks criminal investigation.

• Defense mounts over-classification defense, Daniel Ellsberg to speak in Berkeley

  Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg, Kevin Goztola, will be speaking about Bradley Manning in Berkeley on January 31st.Kevin Gosztola reports that the government is now attempting to block discussion of materials being inappropriately classified. The government argues that overclassification of documents has no relevance to the charges.

• Report: FBI Agents Flew to Iceland to Investigate WikiLeaks

• Iceland Kicked Out FBI Agents Who Flew in Unannounced to Investigate WikiLeaks Operations in the Country

  According to the RUV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, FBI agents landed in Reykjavík in August 2011 without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations within the country. However, their plan was interupted when Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson learned about the FBI’s visit and sent them packing. The Icelandic government then formally protested the FBI’s activities with U.S. authorities.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Chinese Millionaire Fights Pollution with Fresh Air in a Can

  A Chinese tycoon has taken it upon himself to fight China’s air-pollution problem with a tongue-in-cheek campaign: soda-pop-size cans of fresh air.

  Chen Guangbiao, a Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist, has launched a line of fresh-air soft-drink cans that retail for about 80¢ and come in a variety of “flavors,” including, according to the Huffington Post, “pristine Tibet” and “post-industrial Taiwan.”

Finance

• Former UK tax chief who ‘lied to MPs’ to advise HSBC bank about honesty

  Sensitive: The controversial appointment had to be rubber-stamped by the Prime Minister David Cameron

  Sensitive: The controversial appointment had to be rubber-stamped by the Prime Minister David Cameron

  Britain’s top taxman – who stepped down after he was accused by MPs of lying – has been hired by HSBC to advise it on honesty, it emerged last night.

• Spanish prime minister Rajoy accused of hiding secret income

  Mariano Rajoy’s government reeling from claims that he received €250,000 in money that had been hidden from tax authorities

• Corporate America has Messed with the Wrong People

• It’s Good to Be a Goldman

  Here’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, and while we’re at it, take this obscenely huge bonus for having wrecked the economy. As the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program pointed out in a devastating report this week, “excessive” compensation was approved by the Treasury Department for the executives of the three companies that required the largest taxpayer bailouts to survive.

  In a stinging rebuke of Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department, the report “found that once again, in 2012, Treasury failed to rein in excessive pay.” Whopping pay packages of $5 million or more were allowed by the Treasury Department for a quarter of the top executives at AIG, General Motors and Ally Financial, the former financial arm of GM.

  But that’s nothing compared with the $21 million for last year’s work garnered by Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, which is now free of TARP supervision. In addition to his paltry $2 million in salary, Blankfein received a $19 million bonus for his efforts. Not quite the $67.9 million bonus he got in 2007 before the market crash that his firm did so much to engineer, but times are still hard.

Censorship

• Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months

  For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

• Government internet snooping takes more than it gives, says web founder

• Pirate Party applauds Berners-Lee’s anti-retention comments

  Pirate Party Australia applauds comments made by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, warning of the potential pitfalls of data retention.

  This week Berners-Lee raised concerns that data retention would needlessly compromise Internet users’ privacy while failing to actually assist in reducing serious crime.[1] His comments come as a result of proposals contained within the Attorney-General’s National Security Inquiry discussion paper which has been met with widespread criticism.

Privacy

• Chinese Hackers Hit U.S. Media

• Experts warn the cloud’s privacy dangers

  The Government’s use of the Cloud may be put on hold after Members of Parliament raised concerns that the service allows sensitive personal information about British citizens to be spied on by the US authorities.

  A European Commission report highlights how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act (FISAA) allows US authorities to spy on cloud data. This could include services such as Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud and Google Drive.

• Big brother to log your drinking habits and waist size as GPs are forced to hand over confidential records

• German armed forces to acquire armed drones – Defence Minister

• Dell sees demand for cloud rise as ‘CIA anxiety’ fades

  “And I didn’t say I was with the CIA, I didn’t say I was going to give data to the CIA! I didn’t even know how to respond, but there was that very aggressive posture.”
  Fewer and fewer enterprises now have such reservations, and Dell is seeing increased demand for its cloud solutions.

• In America Drones Are a Local Issue: In Violation of Fourth Amendment

  In the absence of state or federal laws, localities around the United States are proceeding to put unmanned aerial vehicles in our skies as they see fit. The federal government has authorized the flight of 30,000 drones, and the use of drones up to 400 feet by police departments, at least 300 of which already have surveillance drones in operation.

• Lawmakers talk about drones and privacy

• Electronic Frontier Foundation Maps Drones in the U

  Using a Freedom of Information lawsuit aimed at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, has obtained data that shows drones, or unmanned aircraft, are being flown throughout the United States right now, for a variety of purposes. The data, including who is purchasing them, what they are being used for and where they are being deployed, is coming slowly, but enough information has been obtained so far to create an interactive map of drone use in the US.

• Workshop addresses life with drones

• Experts warn on wire-tapping of the cloud

  Leading privacy expert Caspar Bowden has warned Europeans using US cloud services that their data could be snooped on.

  In a report, he highlights how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act (FISAAA) allows US authorities to spy on cloud data.

• DOJ: We Can’t Tell Which Secret Application of Section 215 Prevents Us From Telling You How You’re Surveilled

  As Mike Scarcella reported yesterday, the government has moved for summary judgment in an Electronic Privacy Information Center FOIA suit for details on the government’s investigation into WikiLeaks. EPIC first FOIAed these materials in June 2011. After receiving nothing, they sued last January.

• Super Bowl plans to handle 30,000 Wi-Fi users at once—and sniff out “rogue devices”

  In Stewart’s words, the goal is to prevent any “rogue access points or rogue equipment from attempting to operate in the same frequency” as the stadium Wi-Fi network (“rogue” as in “not under the control of the system administrators”).

Civil Rights

• Multinational miners: magnanimous or malevolent?

  Human Rights Watch recommends implementing legal frameworks, such as a local independent ombudsman, that allow government institutions to monitor the human rights performance of domestic companies when they operate abroad in areas that carry serious human rights risks; to take steps to regulate the human rights conduct of domestic companies operating abroad in complex environments, such as requiring companies to carry out human rights due diligence activity, and to communicate an expectation to the government of Eritrea that companies investing in the mining sector there should be able to implement the outlined recommendations.

• Washington state’s anti-NDAA bill introduced with viral support

  The “Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act” introduced on Wednesday condemns and criminalizes the use of the 2013 NDAA’s provision purportedly authorizing the indefinite detainment of U.S. citizens.

  After news of H.B. 1581′s introduction caught wind, an Internet campaign went viral asking activists to contact their Washington state representatives to co-sponsor the legislation.

  It worked.

  In less than 24 hours the number of the bill’s co-sponsors tripled.

  Many believe the bill’s success hinges on bipartisanship. While only one of the original sponsors of the bill is a Democrat, Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, eight of the later co-sponsors are also House Democrats, making for a fairly even split of nine to 12.

• Tactical Chat: How the U.S. Military Uses IRC to Wage War

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Google Decides Smartphone Market Share Is More Important Than Net Neutrality

  As a recent post noted, net neutrality is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years, this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if Orange is now getting paid to carry Google’s traffic, why shouldn’t every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering Google’s services?

Intellectual Monopolies

• French National Library Privatizes Public Domain Materials

  Copyright is sometimes described as a bargain between two parties: creators and their public. In return for receiving a government-backed monopoly on making copies, creators promise to place their works in the public domain at the end of the copyright term. The problem with that narrative is that time and again, the public is cheated out of what it is due.

• Don’t Put a Fork in It: On the Perils of Genetically Engineered Salmon

  While most Americans were enjoying the holiday season or stressing out over the nation’s imminent leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, the Food and Drug Administration delivered some big news as quietly as possible.Fishy Genes.

  On December 21, the agency announced that AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon had cleared the final hurdle before clinching FDA approval.

• Copyrights

  • NZ Copyright Tribunal: Accusations Are Presumed Infringement, Despite Denials

    A few weeks ago, we noted that the first “three strikes” case of infringement in New Zealand was set to go to the Copyright Tribunal (an earlier case was dropped after the recording industry (RIANZ) realized it had screwed up). The Tribunal has now issued its first ruling, demanding that the accused pay a grand total of $616.57 NZ (about $515 US). The person was accused of downloading and sharing Rihanna’s Man Down twice, and Hot Chelle Rae’s Tonight Tonight once. The tribunal noted that the first song retailed for $2.39 and the latter at $1.79, so it doubled the first one, and started with $6.57 (all NZ dollars). Then it added $50 to pay for infringement notices being sent out. Another $200 covers the fee that RIANZ paid to bring the case, and then it tacked on a “deterrent sum” of $360 — or $120 per song. Add it all up and you’ve got $616.57.

  • HAVE YOU COMMITTED THE CRIME OF OUTSMARTING?

    Because of the tragic and untimely death of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while awaiting trial on charges he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by mass downloading academic journal articles, we have an opportunity to amend the CFAA, a federal law that interferes with important and socially beneficial computer security research. We want to revise the CFAA to decriminalize the computer security profession.

  • House puts Spotify on mute

    Spotify apparently hit a wrong note with the House’s Internet overlords, who recently blocked the chamber’s Web users from listening to the famed music-streaming service.

    While Spotify isn’t a peer-to-peer program along the lines of Napster, its inner workings appear subject to the longstanding ban on so-called P2P technology — a blockade lawmakers erected to thwart illegal file-sharing and prevent downloads from infecting computers with malware.

  • Hollywood Lobby Applauds Spain’s Copyright Law

    At a time when news about Spain tends to be pretty bad, the head of the Hollywood lobby came to Madrid to say the country is doing something right–when it comes to efforts to stop illegal file-sharing.

  • Music pirates: $250k reaps $616.57

    Rianz says it has sent out around 6000 notices to alleged pirates, for which the music industry body must pay a $25 fee each for internet companies to send on to their customers.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Professional Audio Production on Linux

And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don’t get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be. Look for USB audio interfaces that don’t need custom proprietary drivers, but stick to the USB spec like they’re supposed to. The hardy FFADO developers toil away developing and improving drivers for Firewire audio interfaces. No, Firewire is not dead, and you can easily add a Firewire card to almost any PC if it doesn’t already have one. I use FFADO for my cherished old Saffire Pro 26 I/O, and neither have let me down.

HTG Explains: Why You Don’t Need an Antivirus On Linux (and When You Do)

Believe it or not, there are antivirus programs targeted at desktop Linux users. If you have just switched to Linux and started looking for an antivirus solution, don’t bother – you do not need an antivirus program on Linux.

There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them. You would only want an antivirus program to scan for Windows malware.

Desktop

• Chromebooks on the Rise As Big Hardware Players Announce Devices

  When Google began promoting its Chrome OS platform a couple of years ago, there was lots of criticism. For one thing, Google hadn’t quite ironed out some of the “cloud-only” issues that the operating system imposes on users, many of whom are used to using local applications. Since then, of course, Chromebooks running the operating system have improved dramatically, and are now available at $200 price points that challenge the laptop status quo (a $199 example from Acer is shown here).

Server

• SprezzOS: Linux On A Server In 120 Seconds

  Earlier this month I wrote about SprezzOS, a new Linux distribution where its developers boasted it’s the most robust, beautiful, and performant Linux. Well, SprezzOS is now out in the while. The developers are now boasting they can install a Linux server in 120 seconds with their operating system.

• Cisco Brings Unified Access to Catalyst Switching

  For the most part, wired and wireless networks on the enterprise campus have been two separate entities controlled by different technologies. That’s about to change, thanks to a new suite of Unified Access technologies announced today by Cisco.

Kernel Space

• QEMU 1.3.1 Brings In A Bunch Of Fixes

  The first (and only planned) point release to QEMU 1.3 is now available. The QEMU 1.3.1 release fixes just over two dozen bugs, including critical issues for OpenBSD guests.

• Systemd Dreams Up New Feature, Makes It Like Cron

  Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers at Red Hat hope to work on a handful of new systemd features as part of the Fedora 19 development cycle. One of the features includes work to make systemd have its own time-based job scheduler that’s similar in nature to cron.

• A wait and see approach that worked

  Wilcox’s first kernel patch was submitted in 1997; he wanted to move some files from his Acorn Archimedes system to a Linux system and he couldn’t do it as the ISO format did not support the necessary extensions.

  The patch was accepted, after a few comments that he deems to be “on target” and his career was more or less decided.

  But things did not fall into place for a while; he was hired as a Java programmer by a bio-informatics start=-up after he graduated. Wilcox then got involved in porting Linux to the PA-RISC platform and he ended up getting hired by LinuxCare.

• Perforce joins the Linux Foundation

  Enterprise management company Perforce has joined the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of the Linux operating system.

  Perforce see its membership as part of its commitment to encourage collaborative software development on both sides of the firewall.

• Perforce Joins Linux Foundation, Increases Commitment to Open Source Collaboration

• KVM: Linux Virtualization That’s Halfway There

  While the KVN infrastructure is built into the Linux OS, you need a modern version of the Linux kernel to use this virtual machine. KVM requires machine extensions. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux as of version 2.6.20. Even if your Linux distro has the stuff inside, your hardware configuration might not be cooperating. Intel VT or AMD-V support could be disabled by default.

• Toradex Announce Release of V2.0 Alpha1 Linux BSP for Colibri T30

  Toradex have announced the release of V2.0 Alpha1 Linux BSP for their Colibri T30 Computer on Module. This product is based on the NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and ARM architecture.

• Intel Begins Publishing Linux Patches For “Avoton”

• Intel Still Tidying Up Linux Support For Haswell

  Intel will be introducing their Haswell processors in the coming months. If using the Linux 3.8 kernel, GCC 4.7/4.8, Mesa 9.1, and other recent open-source Linux packages, you should be mostly set for experiencing the full benefits of the Ivy Bridge successor. However, there’s still a few pieces of Haswell’s Linux support still being worked out.

• Multi-Threading Cairo-Image For Better Performance

  In terms of Chris Wilson’s benchmark results when comparing the threaded cairo-image, UXA with the Intel driver, and his experimental SNA acceleration architecture for the Intel driver, he concludes, “For the cases that are almost entirely GPU bound (for example the firefox-fishbowl, -fishtank, -paintball, -particles), we have virtually eliminated all the previous advantage that the GPU held. In a notable couple of cases, we have improved the image backend to outperform SNA, and for all cases now the threaded image backend beats UXA. However, as can be seen there is still plenty of room for improvement of the image backend, and we can’t let the hardware acceleration be merely equal to a software rasteriser…”

• Lennart Poettering Takes To Battling Systemd Myths

• Graphics Stack

  • Running OpenCL On The GPU With Gallium3D

    With all of the recent improvements going into Mesa/Gallium3D, along with some work advancements to the AMD GPU LLVM back-end, it’s slowly becoming a suitable time for enthusiasts wishing to experiment with OpenCL on the open-source Linux graphics stack through Gallium3D and the “Clover” state tracker.

    OpenCL support in Gallium3D is still far from complete and not yet comparable to the proprietary OpenCL/GPGPU offerings bundled within the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. In reality, it will probably be at least another year before open-source OpenCL is in good shape for the Linux desktop. At this point, there’s just some simple OpenCL demos working for select graphics processors on Nouveau and Radeon.

  • Intel SNA Continues To Be Tweaked

    SNA, Intel’s newest acceleration architecture for their open-source X.Org graphics driver, continues to receive improvements on a near daily basis.

    Intel SNA is what most of the xf86-video-intel driver changes have been about since this 2D acceleration architecture was introduced back in 2011. SNA is the pet project of Chris Wilson at Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center and is the one responsible for a majority of the work.

  • Wayland/Weston 1.0.4 Released; Per-Output Workspaces

    Wayland 1.0.4 was released this week along with an adjoining update to its Weston reference compositor. Separately, a new patch-set has emerged for supporting per-output workspaces.

    The Wayland/Weston 1.0.4 release was a bit behind schedule due to Kristian Høgsberg being ill, but the point releases are out now for those interested. The main 1.0.4 change is for Weston and it’s to address a “CPU eating bug” within the compositor’s plane code. There’s also been a few documentation fixes. With Wayland 1.0.4, destroy signal APIs were added and a more robust version of the event loop test case.

  • Mesa 9.1 Release Reaffirmed For Late February

    Mesa 9.1 should be released by the end of February as the latest version of this bi-annual open-source OpenGL implementation that continues to slowly but surely pickup new functionality for most major graphics drivers.

  • VESA BIOS Extension DRM Kernel Driver Released

    David Herrmann, the open-source developer that has made it a personal crusade to kill the Linux kernel console and to replace it with a user-space solution, has published the code to a new DRM kernel mode-setting driver. This new kernel driver is a generic VESA BIOS Extension DRM implementation like the vesafb VESA frame-buffer driver.

• Benchmarks

  • Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks

    As the next chapter after the Fedora 17 vs. Fedora 18 benchmarks for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, here are benchmarks comparing Fedora 18 to Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 13.04 on two separate PCs.

    The performance between the latest Fedora and Ubuntu Linux releases aren’t incredibly surprising with many of the key components being the same (or similar) versions, but nevertheless I ran a bunch of benchmarks on a Core i7 3770K “Ivy Bridge” and Core i7 3960X “Sandy Bridge” Extreme Edition system with Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 13.04 using the 64-bit Linux releases. Benchmarks in full are on OpenBenchmarking.org.

  • A Number Of New & Updated Linux Benchmarks

    After yesterday writing about recent benchmarking improvements, including over a dozen new open-source benchmarks graciously provided by Intel and then ongoing improvements to the Phoronix Test Suite client, there’s more to talk about this morning for those interested in open-source benchmarking.

Applications

• State of the CLI

• Now that Kaptan has been ported, YALI’s waiting

  Borrowing code or programs written by others is an accepted practice in the Free Software community. It is perfectly legal, being one of the core principles that defines Free Software. For open source or free software coders, it makes sense. Why write something from scratch when somebody else has already written it? Just take it and run, or take it and extend it.

  One area I think that distro developers are overlooking with regards to reusing code concerns installation programs. Many distributions, especially those that are based on Ubuntu, have very easy-to-use, but plain-vanilla installers. Even the latest edition of Ubuntu’s installer is still not good enough (see Note to EFF: FDE implementation in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity is only at 50% and The state of manual LVM and full disk encryption configuration in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity).

• Linux Alternatives to Popular Windows Apps [Part 1]

  The desktop computing landscape is rapidly changing all around us. Microsoft is now pushing Windows 8, the biggest change Microsoft has made to the desktop since Windows 95. This means that whether a Windows user chooses to switch to Mac OS X, Linux, or stick with Windows, he/she is in for a new learning experience. A transition to Linux may just be more familiar than making the jump to Window 8, and there are many open source alternatives to popular Windows applications. This large list of open source alternatives could make your transition to Linux easier than you thought possible.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install Apache on Linux

  • How to Mount and Unmount Filesystem / Partition in Linux (Mount/Umount Command Examples)

  • Enable or Disable Desktop Icons using a GNOME shell Extension

  • Get your private and public IP from the Linux terminal

  • Striping Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 12.10

  • How to make Chromium/Chrome open magnet links in Linux Mint

  • How one parent fosters open source at home through DIY projects

  • Back up your system with Clonezilla – Tutorial

  • Learning Linux Commands: export

  • Correct Lens Distortion in GIMP with GimpLensfun

  • Using PHP5-FPM With Apache 2.4 (+ mod_proxy_fcgi Module) On Fedora 18

  • Install Razor-qt on Ubuntu 12.10

  • Install Live Wallpaper in Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop

  • 5 Books Every Linux Enthusiast Should Read

  • Display back and forward buttons all the time in Firefox

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Benchmarks Get Updated Too

    On Wednesday I wrote about the improvements in Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand and yesterday I noted many more new and updated benchmarks. Today there’s news to pass along in the Linux benchmarking world of updated WINE benchmarks courtesy of CodeWeavers.

  • Serious Sam 3: BFE Receives Another Major Update on Steam for Linux

• Games

  • Desktop Linux – Steam as a new Chance

    I enjoy running my Desktop under Linux. And while I am a long-term KDE supporter, my desktop diverges from the standard KDE setup quite drastically: There are no “Activities”, no noticeable Plasmoids and nothing on the desktop except one folder view. This flexibility is exactly Linux greatest strength, but the average users neither needs nor want this. Wikipedia claims 1.19% desktop market share – a stagnation at best. I do not want it to go down. So who will give Linux Desktop a new push?

  • Counter-Stike and X3: Reunion Support Linux

  • Aeon command now 64bit native on Linux and my thoughts

  • ScrumbleShip 0.20 released the spaceship building game

  • Valve quietly ports Half-Life to OSX and Linux

  • Valve Pushes Out Half-Life For Linux

  • Counter-Strike 1.6 Also Native To Linux

  • First Look At Games Created For The New Ouya Open Source Android Console (video)

    After breaking all expectations and blasting past its $950,000 pledging goal raising over $8.5 million, the first crop of games for the Ouya have been revealed, from this month’s 10-day online Ouya “game jam”.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma.next()?

    Sebastian wrote a pair of blog entries in the last week about where we are heading with Plasma in the near future. The first was an overview of the pathway to Frameworks 5 and what we’re provisionally referring to as Plasma Workspaces 2. The second entry covered his work on making it possible to write widget layouts (aka Containments) in QML.

  • Kdenlive 0.9.4 Is Here

    Kdenlive, an advanced video editor for the KDE desktop has been updated to a new version. This version fixes bugs which made the software to crash, so all users are highly advised to install this release as soon as possible. Some other new features of this release has been summarized below:

    * A rewritten DVD wizard
    * Improved clip markers
    * Rewritten Screen Capture
    * Support for multiple streams clips
    * Clip analysis feature
    * Stability and Performance improvements
    * Over 124 bugs fixed

  • Kdenlive 0.9.4 information page

    The DVD Wizard was mostly rewritten, now allowing 16:9 menus. It now also autodetects the format of your videos and proposes a trandcoding if it is necessary. In fact, you can now drop any video in the Wizard and just click transcode to get it in the correct DVD format.

  • What’s Being Brewed For KDE’s Plasma Active

    Aaron Seigo wrote this morning about some of what’s happening next for KDE’s Plasma Active, which reveals some interesting future endeavours.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Is GNOME’s Open Source Web Browser Ready for the Masses?

    From Internet Explorer (IE) to Firefox to Google Chrome, there’s no shortage of Web browsers to choose from these days–a luxury that can be easy to take for granted for those who have forgotten what things were a number of years ago, after Netscape collapsed and IE was the only game in town. But GNOME, the open source development community, thinks it can offer a better browser than these bigger-name alternatives in the form of Web, formerly known as Epiphany. Is it right?

  • Researching the GNOME3 experience: Question by Question

    The work that has happened ever since I wrote the last post, is actually the work which would take atleast 5 posts, but it has to start somewhere, so I am starting it off with this post.

  • GNOME 3: A new perspective

    GNOME 3: A desktop that brings a certain level of ire to the hearts and minds of many a Linux user. When this desktop first arrived, my opinion was fairly high. Why? It was new, fresh, and seemed like it could easily take the desktop world by storm. But then the developers stopped listening to the users and things seemed to fall apart.

  • Epiphany Web Browser may ditch tabs

  • Running in the office with Gnome!

Distributions

• Slax 7.0 – Slax Is Back

  December 2012 saw the final release of Slax 7.0 after more than three years without an update, quickly followed by several bug-fix point releases. In 7.0.3 the ability to act as PXE server was re-introduced, which had been present in earlier versions but was missing from the early 7.0 branch. I tried it in VMware Player, VirtualBox, from Live CD as intended and installed to external USB connected to an Acer 5551 laptop with ATI graphics, 4 GB Ram and a Phenom II X3 processor.

• New Releases

  • SparkyLinux 2.1 “Eris” Ultra Edition

    The system is built as all 2.x releases on Debian testing “Wheezy”.
    All packages have been synchronized with Debian testing repositories of 23/01/2013.
    It features customized ultra light and fast Openbox desktop.

  • Clonezilla 2.1.0-12

  • Linux Deepin 12.12

  • New Products

    ROSA Desktop 2012

    The fact that Russia’s ROSA Labs once collaborated with Mandriva is evident in the company’s latest release, ROSA Desktop 2012. Nevertheless, since breaking from Mandriva, ROSA Labs has forked the distro onto its own unique development path. ROSA Desktop 2012 is an LSB-compliant distro that features a customized KDE desktop. The free edition sports only free software; the Extended Edition includes nonfree components and proprietary software, such as codecs. ROSA Labs says that by developing ROSA Desktop 2012 with its own software development and build environment—ROSA ABF—the company is able to achieve unmatched technological independence, high quality and up to five years of technical support. Examples of new features include EFI/UEFI support, improved hardware detection and improved compatibility with Windows 8. Supported languages include English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

  • Parted Magic 2013_01_29

• Screenshots

  • OWASP Mantra-OS 12.04 Screenshots

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Some random thoughts while waiting

    And Mandriva, or OpenMandriva, or MoonDrake (or any other name that they end up calling it) is also in my list of awaited releases. Yes, I know many people think that the Mandriva ship has sunk. The fact is, OpenMandriva.org is buzzing with mail list activity underneath the Web site posts.

  • Membership subscriptions open and Extraordinary General Meeting

  • The February 2013 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

  • Time for tests! Mageia 3 beta 2 is out

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Inc. : Cloud9 IDE Builds Online Development Environment with Red Hat OpenShift

  • Fedora

    • Fedora To Look At Reviving Apache OpenOffice

      Most Linux distributions have switched over to using LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

    • My Fedora 18 Review, part 2

      In my previous post, I talked briefly about Fedora 18 features and then reviewed the new installer. Now, lets review the installed OS.

    • The Last Round Of Fedora 19 Feature Proposals

      Tonight is the deadline for submitting new feature proposals to be considered for the release of Fedora 19.

• Debian Family

  • New Linux Brings Spark to Debian

    A new distribution popped up on my radar last month when it was added to the Distrowatch.com database. It probably helped that its newest release was codenamed “GameOver” and featured lots and lots of games. Yesterday its team released 2.1 “Eris” Ultra.

  • Mozilla Redically Changes Approach to Handling Firefox Extensions

    In February of last year, Mozilla announced that it was moving to a rapid release cycle for new versions of the Firefox browser. That has turned out to work well for some users, but others have complaints, as you can see from comments at the bottom of this post. Among those who have complained about newer versions of Firefox, problems with extensions have loomed large. Some extensions simply cause performance drag, and some are actually built as malware and can even cause problems when users visit an infected website.

    Mozilla has been steadily overhauling its process of handling extensions in Firefox. And now, in the company’s most two-fisted move yet, Mozilla is radically changing the way Firefox loads third party plug-ins such as Flash, Java and Silverlight. Here’s how.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Raring Ringtail Dash To Become More Powerful With In-Built Scopes

        People at Ubuntu are making sure that the Raring Ringtail release is one the best Ubuntu releases till date. One of the most important things that they heve been working on is the dash, which is one of the most powerful tools in the Ubuntu desktop.

      • Raring Wallpaper Contest open for submissions

      • Pros and Cons of a Ubuntu Rolling Release

        Recently, many people have speculated that Ubuntu might be rethinking its current development cycle. Basically, the word is that Ubuntu might find itself evolving into a rolling release distribution.

      • Chance to contribute to the Ubuntu 13.04 Wallpaper

      • First Ubuntu smartphone won’t have an app store

      • Ubuntu Considering Switch To Rolling-Release Model

      • Ubuntu 13.04 Enables The Wayland Support For GTK+

      • Grandma Reviews Ubuntu 12.10

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi on MK802 and other ARM Updates

        • Bodhi Linux is up and running on the MK802 mini PC

          Bodhi can best be described as a lightweight Linux flavor coded to run across a wide range of hardware.

        • 20% off MintBox Basic

Devices/Embedded

• Google Donates 15,000 Raspberry Pis To UK Schools

  Google does a lot of good things for the society, the company has given a grant to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to give 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model B for schoolkids around the UK. The grant was made by Google Giving, the philanthropist arm of the company.

  Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt was visiting Cambridge where he spent time teaching school kids along with Raspberry Pi’s Eben.

• Bodhi Linux Now Available For MK802 Android Stick

  Jeff Hoogland, the chief developer and architect behind Bodhi Linux has been successful in porting Bodhi Linux to run on ARM based Android Mini PC MK802. The images are now public and you can download them from this web page.

• XBMC 12.0 Released, Now Runs On Android And Raspberry Pi

• Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi

  After six years of development, founder Eben Upton and the other members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation are finally seeing the results of their efforts.

• 15,000 Raspberry Pi’s heading to UK school children

• Phones

  • Luidia Demonstrates New eBeam Solutions for Mobile and Linux Devices at BETT SHOW 2013 in London, UK

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Plus P8200 with Nexus 10-like display could be announced at MWC 2013

    • Alleged Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 pics appear ahead of MWC

    • HTC M7 parts shown off in video

    • Sprint debuts rugged, waterproof Kyocera Torque

      Sprint today announced the next Android smartphone to offer 4G LTE service on the Now Network, introducing the rugged and waterproof Kyocera Torque. Pricing and exact availability is still unknown however the carrier expects it to show up in the “coming weeks”.

    • Samsung GALAXY Express

  • Android

    • Programming Android Motion Sensors

      One of the really neat features of coding for a portable platform like a phone is that you can use its motion sensors to control the UI. How useful this is in a particular app varies from “neat gimmick” to “UI perfection” — admittedly the example here is more on the “gimmick” end of the spectrum, but it’ll get you started with using the Android motion sensors. We’ll carry on using the code from the previous three tutorials, but this time, we’re going to add a detector which enables you to start the timer by shaking the phone.

    • A Nexus or Motorola phone with multiple LED flashes? New Google patent says that’s likely

    • New ZTE Blade C (V807) with Android Jelly Bean coming soon

      ZTE’s Blade series of Android smartphones is quite successful, as it’s offering decent performance at an affordable price. The Chinese company has sold millions of Blade handsets around the world since the first model was launched (back in late 2010).

    • Android and Apple iOS Capture a Record 92 Percent Share of Global Smartphone Shipments in Q4 2012

      According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service, global smartphone shipments grew 38 percent annually to reach 217 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012. Android and Apple iOS together accounted for a record 92 percent share of all smartphones shipped worldwide.<

    • Open Garden app review

      Face it, you don’t want to pay for a tethering app and you’re not in a hurry to add another $10 a month to your data plan. Many of you don’t even want to bother with “rooting” a phone. Why bother spending extra money for a tablet that only needs a data connection every once in a while?

    • Android Support Removed From Wayland’s Weston

      The Android back-end for Wayland’s Weston compositor is being dropped thereby losing support for Google’s mobile operating system on Wayland.

      Going back several months there was active support for Google’s Android on Wayland. A Collabora employee created a Weston back-end for Android, which after weeks of work, was running on a Google Nexus phone.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Kindle Fire Nabs 33 Percent of Android Tablet Market

    The U.S. is dominating the Android tablet race, and consumers here seem particularly enamored with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

    Approximately 59 percent of the Android tablets equipped with Localytics-integrated apps are from the U.S. About 5 percent of Android tablets were based in Great Britain, while Korea and Spain had 2 percent of the market each. Localytics assigned the additional 31 percent to the “other” category.

  • 8-inch ZTE V81 Android tablet gets unveiled with dual-core 1.4 GHz CPU, HSPA connectivity

    The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 apparently won’t be the only 8-inch tablet from a Top 5 smartphone manufaturer to be launched in the near future.

    That’s because ZTE has an eight-incher of its own headed to a store near you. The company officially introduced the V81 tablet today.

  • Google to cooperate with Asustek for second-generation Nexus 7

    Google is set to announce its second-generation Nexus 7 tablet in May with the cooperation of Asustek Computer. The combined shipments of the company’s first- and second-generation Nexus 7s are expected to reach 10 million units in 2013, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

  • 5 Reasons Chromebooks Win After Linux Netbooks Lost

    Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebooks are generating more and more buzz. Acer, Lenovo and Samsung already offer the low-cost, cloud-centric notebooks. And Hewlett-Packard could join the Chromebook party soon. So why might Chrome OS devices succeed where Linux netbooks ultimately failed? Here’s The VAR Guy’s spin on the situation.

  • Revolt of the Retailer

  • ZTE’s 5.7-inch, 8mm-thick Grand Memo teased ahead of MWC launch, we go hands-on

    Huawei may have its 6.1-inch Ascend Mate for the convenience of hiding your face, but ZTE’s also prepping its very own tabletphone to go head to head with its main rival. Dubbed the Grand Memo (V9815), this 5.7-inch 720p device made a surprise appearance at a ZTE event in Hong Kong today, and we got to snap some photos of it. The device looks identical to the P945 leaked earlier this month but packs some slightly different specs: 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro (same as the more premium Grand S), 13-megapixel camera, 8mm-thick body and Android 4.1.2.

The Open Source Column – The Windows status quo

I’ve worked out why Microsoft made Windows 8. Well, one of the reasons anyway. Aside from the fact that it’s got designs on the tablet and mobile market, and that it’s gleefully chasing the tail of wherever Apple chooses to lead, the introduction of Windows 8 already seems to be having some of a side effect: it’s making Windows 7 more popular.

I’m not going to be the first to notice that the new interface that Microsoft has introduced for Windows 8 has little place on a desktop PC. Clearly designed for a touch-screen device, its pride of place in a desktop environment is a real oddity. Likewise, the two tiers of applications. What the desktop PC has been crying out for, after all, has been ‘apps’ rather than programs. Smaller pieces of code, basically, with price tags that you apparently barely notice.

10 ways to get started with open source

Process Film Negatives with digiKam

Indian tech firm targets UK with open source travel system

UK operators and agents are being targeted by an Indian technology company claiming to offer the ability to develop their own travel systems.

Open source system Trabacus was launched this month, appointing Travel Systems Associates (TSA) as its European general sales agency.

Events

• Speaker Roundup: Gazzang to Present at The Southern California Linux Expo, ApacheCon North America and MongoDB Austin

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google challenges hackers to take on Chrome OS

    So you think you’re a big-time hacker, huh? Well, Google is inviting you to show up at the CanSecWest security conference on March 7 in Vancouver, Canada, to see if you can crack your way into Chrome OS. And, to make it worth your time, Google is offering a pi worth of cash rewards. That’s a total prize package of $3.14159 million. I thought that would get your attention.

  • Google offers $3.14159 MILLION in prizes for hacking Chrome OS

  • Google Calls Out Qualified Chrome Hackers for Pwnium 3

  • Google Open Source Program Manager Chris DiBona: Best of Both Worlds

    “You are not going to get malware on a Chrome OS. You are not going to get security problems on a Chrome OS that has the developer’s switch,” said Google’s Chris DiBona. “But at the same time, if you are a developer, that sort of locking down stops you from innovating. It stops you from developing very quickly. So we wanted to make it possible to have the best of both worlds there.”

  • Google offers exploit bounties for Pwn2Own and Pwnium

  • Google Formally Brings Native Client To ARM

    With the Chrome 25 web-browser, Google is bringing Native Client (NaCl) support to the ARMv7 architecture. Native Client allows for “high performance” C/C++ code to be run within the web-browser.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Recognized as Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy

    I’m very happy to share that Mozilla has been named the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy in 2012, according to a study performed by the Ponemon Institute.

SaaS/Big Data

• Hybrid Cloud Management a $3.6 Billion Business by 2016

• What Will Follow OpenStack Grizzly into the Open Source Cloud?

  One of the interesting idiosyncrasies of open source projects can communities is the desire to choose release names – often following some kind of logical (alphabetical in some cases) order.

• Attunity Integrates Hadoop Big Data Transfer Features

• DreamObjects Cloud Storage Platform Hits Production

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Nine Improvements Overdue in LibreOffice Writer

• Oracle President: Sun Acquisition Absolutely Paid for Itself

• Not ready for Office 2013? Here are five open alternatives

  Between Microsoft’s October launch of Windows 8 and Tuesday’s rollout of Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365, there’s no denying that it’s been a decision-filled few months for PC users.

Business

• Get your business in open source shape

  It should not surprise you that year after year the most common resolution people make is a combination of lose weight, eat healthier, and get in better shape. This, along with my own resolutions, prompted me to think about what it means to get a company in open source shape.

  There are many parallels to a person getting themselves in better physical shape and getting their company in a better position to use open source. Let’s take a look at a few of these ways while pulling lessons from exercise and athletic training that can be applied to any enterprise.

• Zurmo Open Source CRM Wins Community Contest, to Be Added to BitNami Application Library

Funding

• RunRev launches Kickstarter campaign to create open source version of LiveCode

• RunRev Launches First Kickstarter Campaign for an Open Source Programming Language, Empowering Everyone to Code

BSD

• Starch Linux: OpenBSD Atop Arch’s Linux Kernel

  Earlier this week I wrote about Arch BSD: a new operating system that is based upon Arch Linux but in place of the Linux kernel is FreeBSD’s kernel. To talk about today is Starch Linux, a distribution also derived from Arch but its approach is the opposite. Starch Linux still runs off Arch’s Linux kernel but it has an OpenBSD user-space.

• FreeBSD Kernel May Come As Option In Fedora 19

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• C++11 & The Long-Term Viability Of GCC Is Questioned

Public Services/Government

• NASA launches open source space app event

  NASA is urging people to help contribute to space exploration missions as part of the second International Space Apps Challenge.

  Along with government agencies worldwide NASA will host the event from April 20 top 21, with events across all seven continents and in space.

• Why Obama Should Open Source His Campaign Code Now, Not Later

Licensing

• Connectors, controversy and the LGPL

  With the release of LGPL licensed C and Java connectors for MariaDB and MySQL in November 2012, a number of questions were raised in the community over the drivers’ provenance and appropriateness of the LGPL licence. The H went looking for answers…

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • World wide web creator sees open access future for academic publishing

    Activists pushing for free, open access to academic papers will eventually defeat publishers who seek to lock scholarly findings behind paywalls, the founder of the world wide web said today.

  • Open-source textbooks promise college cost cutting

    The average college student can pay upwards of $1,000 on textbooks in a single semester, many of them outdated or used.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Compute: 64-bit ARM server evolution is open source

    Before the Open Compute Summit in the Silicon Valley earlier this month, the world thought it was still more than a year away from seeing 64-bit ARM servers. A Sunnyvale, California, chipmaker changed that perception at the Facebook-led open-source-hardware conference.

Programming

• Perl isn’t going anywhere — for better or worse

• This Old (Open Source) House: Man Renovates Home on GitHub

• Python for Kids helps adults teach programming to youth

  Computer programming can be a fun hobby, as I learned when I programmed Apple II computers last century. Back then, I’d lie on my bed and dream up some educational game, then run over to my Apple //c to bring the game to life. Sometimes in less than two hours I could go from raw idea to working prototype. The most fun part was sharing the programs I created with friends and having them suggest improvements.

Ann Coulter Refuses to Board Airplane With Black Pilot

Conservative commentator and author Ann Coulter refused to stay on board a Miami to New York commercial airline flight today after learning the pilot was a woman of African-American descent.

According to witness reports Coulter was concerned the experienced, decorated pilot in question may have gained her position as a result of affirmative action and wasn’t fully qualified to fly.

Is Egypt on the Brink of Collapse? Sharif Abdel Kouddous Reports from Restive City of Port Said

Ongoing mass protests have led the Egyptian government to declare a state of emergency and the country’s defense minister to warn of the potential “collapse of the state.”

the real wikipedia of maps

In the wake of Google’s CEO Schmidt going to North Korea on an official visit, American media has been abuzz with stories. Yesterday, CNN carried a story about how Google Maps is expanding in North Korea thanks to “a community of citizen cartographers” (that is Google’s claim) allowing it work “in a similar way to Wikipedia, allowing users to add, edit and review information” (that is CNN’s take on it).

Security

• Latest VLC version has dangerous hole

  The developers of the VLC video player have warned of a crashing bug in the latest 2.0.5 version of the application, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The issue is a problem in the ASF demuxer (libasf_plugin.*), which can be tricked into overflowing a buffer with a specially crafted ASF movie. The developers note that users would have to open that specially crafted file to be vulnerable and advise users to not open files from untrusted third parties or untrusted sites.

• Unseen, all-out cyber war on the U.S. has begun

  There’s a war going on, and it’s raging here at home — not in the streets or the fields, but on the Internet. You can think of it as a war on the digital homeland. If you work for a power company, bank, defense contractor, transportation provider, or other critical infrastructure type of operation, your organization might be in the direct line of fire. And everyone can become collateral damage.

• Oracle: ‘We Have to Fix Java’

• Disable This Buggy Feature On Your Router Now To Avoid A Serious Set Of Security Vulnerabilities.

• Pentagon’s New Massive Expansion of ‘Cyber-Security’ Unit is About Everything Except Defense

  Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State

• A Line Has Been Crossed: Anonymous Hacks DOJ

  Launching “Operation Last Resort,” Anonymous twice hacked the Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission this weekend to protest the death of Aaron Swartz and a legal system “wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control (and) power.” The group threatened to release Justice Department data if the government fails to reform flawed cyber crime laws that allow almost unfettered prosecutorial power, and then turned the website into a videogame and Guy Fawkes mask proclaiming, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• America in Recline

  The centuries-long dispute over whether and how much the United States should intervene in world affairs may at last be headed toward a resolution. A prominent early view, held by many of the founding fathers and aptly summarized by John Quincy Adams, enjoined Americans not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

• Obama Focuses on Status Quo, Not Left, in Battle With G.O.P.

• US Action in Mali is Another Undeclared War

• US Official: Mali Intervention ‘Could Take Several Years’

• US official: Mali intervention ‘could take years’; militants were trained by Gadhafi’s Libya

• John Brennan, Obama Nominee For CIA Director, Had Detailed Knowledge Of Torture

  John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, had detailed, contemporaneous knowledge of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on captured terrorism suspects during an earlier stint as a top spy agency official, according to multiple sources familiar with official records.

• CIA nominee had detailed knowledge of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’

• Obama CIA nominee hedged on Hezbollah terrorists in 2006: ‘You can’t divide the world into good and evil’

• Preview: Are Drones Destroying our Democracy?

  In the fight against terrorism, the American military’s escalating drone program has become the face of our foreign policy in Pakistan, Yemen and parts of Africa. And while the use of un-manned drones indeed protects American soldiers, the growing number of casualties — which include civilians as well as suspected terrorists — has prompted a United Nations investigation into both the legality and the deadly toll of these strikes.

• PBS Drone Coverage Brought to You by Drone Makers

• Germany acquiring drones for military use

But the technology for drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — is rapidly being reformulated and repackaged for domestic use, spurring debate over the significant potential benefits on the home front versus grave concerns for personal privacy.

• ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is the most vile and immoral war film I’ve seen in years

• Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Crashed Just Outside the Compound

  The Oscars will likely go for a Middle East story that ends on a definitively happy note. With Americans and their collaborators (the short-changed Canadians) looking like heroes, including two Hollywood film producers. It’s the stuff of Oscar dreams. As is, potentially, the well-acted romantic comedy with some “difficult” subject matter that’s handled frankly enough to earn potential Best Picture status, but also cavalierly enough to actually win. (No one really wants to talk about bipolar disorder that can’t be cured with dance competitions.) But that terrorism drama that shows Americans at their worst (and best, in some respects) and ends with a big shadowy sigh? Yeah, maybe we were crazy to think that ever had a chance.

• Drones on the home front: Freedom or security?

• U.N. Drone Investigator: If Facts Lead to U.S. War Crimes, So Be It

  Ben Emmerson wants to be clear: He’s not out to ban flying killer robots used by the CIA or the U.S. military. But the 49-year-old British lawyer is about to become the bane of the drones’ existence, thanks to the United Nations inquiry he launched last week into their deadly operations.

• New ethics of 21st-century unmanned war

• Legality of drones

  If the government of Pakistan has allowed these drone attacks, it has violated the fundamental rights of citizens.

• Why defense spending plunged 22% last quarter — and killed GDP

  On Wednesday, the government announced that the economy had shrunk at a 0.1 percent annual pace between October and December. That came as a surprise to most economists, who were expecting at least modest growth. So what happened?

• Amy Davidson on the Guantánamo Red Light Mishigas

  Although our own coverage of this week’s pre-trial proceedings in the 9/11 military commission trial at Guantánamo already covered the issue in some detail, I couldn’t help but be taken by Amy Davidson’s post on the New Yorker‘s Daily Comment blog on “Red-Light-Gate”–the question of who, other than the presiding judge, has the ability to immediately censor statements made on the record at the 9/11 pre-trial hearings, and what that question says more generally about the specter (if not the reality) of these hearings.

• Investigate This

• Guantanamo judge declines to explain mysterious censoring

  The military judge presiding over the trial of the five men accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks declined Tuesday to explain a mysterious episode in which the audio and video feeds of the proceedings were severed.

  The feeds to the public gallery and media centers were stopped for a few minutes during pretrial arguments Monday at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, apparently startling the judge, Army Col. James Pohl.

• Guantánamo judge says ‘external body’ was wrong to censor war court

Cablegate

• Amelia Hill is a Dirty Liar

  The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.

  [...]

  Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.

• Step inside the Ecuadorian Embassy with Julian Assange

  It’s just been announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will run for a seat in the Australian Senate during this year’s elections. He is currently avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian Embassy and a little while ago I photographed a note held by a police officer detailing the lengths they would go to in order to arrest him. Including what to do if he came out ‘in a diplomatic bag’… This photograph made news around the world because it appeared to show police would ignore any laws governing diplomatic immunity. What it didn’t do was shed any more light on the conditions inside the Embassy for Assange himself.

• Ellsberg at Berkeley Salute to US Soldier Accused of Aiding WikiLeaks

  A “Salute to Bradley Manning,” the Army Pfc. accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, will be held in Berkeley Thursday with Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg and Kevin Gosztola, co-author of a book on the Manning case.

• Assange confirms Senate run

  Julian Assange will run for a Senate seat in the 2013 federal election and his mum reckons he’ll be awesome.

  Christine Assange confirmed her son’s candidacy on Wednesday after WikiLeaks tweeted the news.
  “He will be awesome,” she said.

• Julian Assange to run for Senate seat as his mother says he will be ‘awesome’

  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will run for a seat in the Australian Senate during this year’s elections, his organisation announced Wednesday, with his mother saying he would be “awesome” in the role.

• Prosecuting Whistleblowers Instead of Criminals

  Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.

  Under an ostensibly liberal, Democratic president, government prosecutors have ushered in a new era of targeting whistleblowers. Prosecuting those responsible for the wrongdoings, meanwhile, has been made no such priority. The recent sentencing of former CIA officer John Kiriakou represents the latest example in the crackdown on leaks to the media and public.

• Stand Up for Julian Assange

  Last month, on December 13th, 2012, I visited Julian Assange, Australian founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, in the Ecuadorian embassy, in Knightsbridge, London.

  It’s been seven months now since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy and was given political asylum.

  He entered the embassy after the British Courts shamefully refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning about sexual molestation (no criminal charges have been made against him). Julian Assange has said he is willing to answer questions in the U.K. relating to accusations against him, or alternatively, to go to Sweden, provided that the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the U.S. where plans are being made to try him for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuses to give such assurances.

  [....]

  Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book,

• Chagos cable chronology

• Judge orders cross-examination of officials over WikiLeaks documents

  Unprecedented step in Chagos Islands case is first time one of the WikiLeaks cables has featured in a UK court case

• The Guardian’s obsession with sullying the reputation of Julian Assange

  After Julian Assange gave a speech at the Oxford Union on January 23, 2012, The Guardian published an article criticizing his appearance, saying “he refused to be gracious”. At the time, video had not been uploaded of the event, so it was impossible to contradict The Guardian’s claims. Now that the Oxford Union has uploaded the full speech and Q&A session (albeit only after editing out footage of “Collateral Murder” due to copyright fears), The Guardian’s blatant smear tactics can be revealed.

• Assange’s allies

• Farewell to McClelland, a ministerial cipher for the security state

  But more than ASIO has changed. Between Murphy’s raids on ASIO in search of information about Croatian terrorism he believed the agency was hiding from him, and Robert McClelland expanding ASIO’s powers via the “WikiLeaks amendment”, something has changed in Labor’s relationship with the national security apparatus of the country.

• FBI Investigation into Leaks & the Threat to Press Freedom (VIDEO)

Finance

• Swartz case prompts debate over cyber law

• Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other

• Aaron Swartz, Financial Fraud and the Justice Department

  It is clear that the Justice Department opted to not pursue the sort of investigations that could have landed many high-level people at places like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup behind bars.

• Debt Collectors Posing as Facebook Friends Spur Watchdogs

  Kathryn Haralson had already fielded calls from debt collectors at her home and work. They even phoned her daughter at college.

• It’s True: The Fed Really Can Print All the Money It Wants To

  How great is that to be an agency that can just twiddle a few bits in its computer system whenever it needs to cover its budget? Sure, you knew already that the Fed could print money, but this makes it all a little bit more concrete, doesn’t it?

• Lanny Breuer Now Blames 94 US Attorneys for Immunizing Banksters

  Lanny has, in the past, clearly admitted to actions that led directly to amnesty for banksters.

• UPDATE 1-Two U.S. senators press Justice Department on bank prosecutions

• Justice Department’s Lanny Breuer oversaw some of largest criminal cases in U.S. history

• ‘I’d Do Her’: A Brief History of Michael Bloomberg’s Public Sexism

  When the latest New York magazine cover story on leading New York City mayoral candidate Christine Quinn came out this week, it quoted current Mayor Michael Bloomberg as telling a reporter to “look at the ass on her” while gesturing toward a woman at a holiday party.

• Unemployment At 4.6%

  Statistics Iceland reports that the last quarter of 2012 showed a total natoinal unemployment rate of 4.6%. In exact numbers, this means a decline in the number of people without work but seeking employment from 10,600 in the last quarter of 2011 to 8,400 today.

• Goldman Sachs, Shell ‘Named and Shamed’ in Public Eye ‘Award’

  As leaders from the world’s top banks and corporations continue to meet this week at the World Economic Forum, protesters also gathered in Davos to announce this year’s Public Eye “Shame Awards.” And the winners are…Goldman Sachs and Shell.

• Libor Lies Revealed in Rigging of $300 Trillion Benchmark

  Every morning, from his desk by the bathroom at the far end of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s trading floor overlooking London’s Liverpool Street station, Paul White punched a series of numbers into his computer.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rupert Murdoch links sympathy for Palestinians to anti-Semitism. The truth is more complex

  In a futile bid to preempt the allegation that automatically follows an article of this nature, I begin with a clarification. It is lifted from the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where a man in a cinema queue berates Larry David as “a self-hating Jew” for whistling an aria from Wagner. I certainly do hate myself, is Larry’s reply, but it has absolutely nothing to do with being a Jew.

  There was a time when a writer could address the spirited disputes sparked by World Holocaust Day in a tone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause without feeling the need to absolve himself of any form of anti-Semitism, though it feels like a distant age now. It is more than 10 years since the Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman, for decades as passionate a friend of Israel as parliament knew, was jostled at St John’s Wood synagogue, on Yom Kippur, by congregants enraged by his criticisms of Ariel Sharon.

• The 50 million dollar lie

  Bill Gates has spent $50 million for a three year project known as the MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) project. They just concluded the study and released a final report which can be found here. In the final report they conclude that teacher evaluations have an ideal weighting of 33% value-added, 33% principal observations, and 33% student surveys. They justify the 33% value-added because they have analyzed the data and found, contrary to everyone else’s analysis of similar data, that teachers DO have similar value-added scores from one year to the next. To prove their point, they print on page 8 this very compelling set of graphs.

  [...]

  As even a ‘paint ball’ produces such a nice line when subjected to the principle of averaging, we can safely assume that the Gates data, if we were to see it in its un-averaged form would be just as volatile as my first graph.

  It seems like the point of this ‘research’ is to simply ‘prove’ that Gates was right about what he expected to be true. He hired some pretty famous economists, people who certainly know enough about math to know that their conclusions are invalid.

Privacy

• The Massive Hypocrisy of Facebook, AT&T Celebrating “Data Privacy Day”

  oday is Data Privacy Day in the United States and Canada. To mark the occasion, Twitter has launched a new transparency-focused website to tell users about how governments are snooping on them.
  Twitter’s latest figures show government data requests increased in the second part of 2012, in keeping with a trend reported last week by Google. The popular social networking site says it received 1,009 requests for user data between July and December 2012, up 18.8 percent from the first part of the year. Of the total 1,858 requests made over the full 12-month period, 80 percent came from authorities in the United States. (This presumably reflects the fact that the United States has more Twitter users than any other country, by quite a significant margin.)

• Facebook’s privacy payout: how you’ll get $10, $5 — or nothing

  Did you get a mysterious email from Facebook about a lawsuit? You’re eligible for some money but, alas, chances are the lawyers and privacy groups will keep it instead. Here’s the odds.

• The Government Is Still Trying to Spy on a Lot of Your Twitter and Google Data

  On the occasion of Data Privacy Day, Twitter has released its second biannual Transparency Report and — what do you know? — Twitter is still giving away more user information requested by the U.S. government than ever, and without a warrant. It’s the continuation of a frightening trend that’s as frightening as it is growing; as the likes of Google and Twitter tell us more about how we’re being spied on, we’re still not sure how much of our data the government’s actually getting back.

• Massive electronic wiretap proposal pushed by Massachusetts officials

• Aussie data retention so dangerous it’s ‘dynamite’: Berners-Lee

  Sir Tim Berners-Lee has branded the Australian government’s data retention proposals as “fraught with massive danger,” and containing the possibility to hold every Australian to ransom if data logs are stolen.

• British internet users’ personal information on major ‘cloud’ storage services can be spied upon routinely by US authorities

  All personal information stored by British internet users on major “cloud” computing services including Google Drive can be spied upon routinely without their knowledge by US authorities under newly-approved legislation, it can be disclosed.

• No, that “Most Trusted Company for Privacy Award” does not compute

  I think most people read about the “Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy Award” via a blog post from the Mozilla Foundation, publisher of the Firefox Web browser. The title of the blog post is “Mozilla Recognized as Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy.”

  It’s important to note that the keyword term here is “Internet Company,” because the study is published as the “Most Trusted Company for Privacy Award.” The company that took home the overall honor is American Express. Mozilla ranked 20 overall, but ranked at the top of the Internet & Social Media subgroup.

  The thing that caught my attention as I read the report (pdf), is that Verizon and Microsoft also made the Top 20. Verizon was actually number 1 in the Communications subgroup. I think that’s interesting because a key finding of the study revealed that “the number one privacy-related concern expressed by 61 percent of respondents is identity, closely followed by an increase in government surveillance (56 percent).”

• ‘Dynamite’: web inventor warns about dangers of government snooping

  The founder of the world wide web has sounded a warning about the dangers posed by governments intent on increasing the level of monitoring and filtering of the online activity of its citizens.

  Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that while it was important to fight serious organised crime and for a state to defend itself against cyber attack, there were enormous negatives associated with excessive government oversight of the internet…

• Months after Intelligence Community IG Accepts Budget Cut, He Pleads Resource Limitations on Oversight Request

• International Privacy Day: Anti-Surveillance Success Stories

• SpiderOak To Release Open Source ‘Zero Knowledge’ Privacy Framework For The Cloud

  Framework can be applied on top of any existing application

Civil Rights

• “Legal Minds Agree” that CRB is a breach of human rights

  In a landmark ruling, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the law which requires people to disclose all previous convictions to certain employers is a breach of human rights.

  In this case, a 21 year old man wanted cautions to be removed from his criminal record. His crime, being accused of stealing two bicycles at aged 11. Information about the cautions had been flagged up when applying for a part-time job at a local football club at the age of 17 and later when he applied for a university course in sports studies.

• Obama Heads the Worst of Rogue Governance

  Freedom in America is endangered. Truth telling and dissent increasingly aren’t tolerate. Whistleblowers are called threats to national security.

• New term to settle Obama legacy on leaks, whistleblowers

• Israel boycotts UN forum, first state in history to ignore human rights review

• Lawsuit Plaintiffs & Hundreds of Activists will ‘Flood’ 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Fight Against NDAA Indefinite Detention

• Rise in Federal Prison Population is “Unprecedented,” Says CRS

  A number of secondary problems are attributable to the rapid growth in incarceration, CRS said, including rising financial costs, overcrowding, and deteriorating prison infrastructure.

• Obama’s non-closing of GITMO, kind NYT headlines, and US government irony

  The excuse used to justify Obama’s failure to close GITMO is incomplete and misleading. Plus: multiple other items

• Office Working to Close Guantánamo Is Shuttered

• Man Detained By TSA For Writing 4th Amendment On His Chest Wins 1st Amendment Argument In Court

  Nearly two years ago, we wrote about how Aaron Tobey was suing the US government after he was detained by the TSA for trying to go through airport security without his shirt on, but with a paraphrased version of the 4th Amendment on his chest:

• If You Thought “The Game” Was Terrifying, Consider the “Hole” Where Michael Douglas’ Son is Currently Locked Alone

• With New Constitution, Post-Collapse Iceland Inches Toward Direct Democracy

  When the global financial system crumbled over four years ago, Iceland played host to one of the most dramatic economic collapses in modern history. Its three largest banks were unable to refinance debt roughly ten times the size of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), causing one of the world’s wealthiest nations to limp with hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The island became a symbol for capitalism’s systemic failure.

• No, General Martins Has Not “Gone Rogue”

  They particularly don’t do so when they believe that the court decision that would push them in that direction was wrong—and that an appeal to a higher authority and the resulting ability to clarify the law in a positive direction is available to them. What Martins, according to Charlie’s own reporting, was asking for here, in other words, would have been a dramatic step. I think it would have been the right step, for reasons Bobby and I explained in the post linked to above, but nobody should be too surprised when the Justice Department errs on the side of defending a completed conviction.

DRM

• The Most Ridiculous Law of 2013 (So Far): It Is Now a Crime to Unlock Your Smartphone

  When did we decide that we wanted a law that could make unlocking your smartphone a criminal offense? The answer is that we never really decided.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Porn trolling firm accused of colluding with defendant in sham lawsuit

  Every time we think Prenda Law can’t get in any more hot water, the firm behind dozens of mass copyright lawsuits proves us wrong. In recent months we’ve written about a Florida judge blasting Prenda for “attempted fraud on the court.” We’ve covered a Minnesota man’s charge that Prenda named him the head of one of its shell companies without his knowledge or permission. And we’ve covered Prenda’s efforts to avoid answering questions about these allegations by claiming that California defense lawyer Morgan Pietz invented his “John Doe” client. Prenda also unsuccessfully sought the dismissal of a California judge who started asking questions about Prenda’s alleged misconduct.

• Copyrights

  • Meet the money behind Dotcom

    Who is the mysterious millionaire, who left school at age 15, who is now listed as the new CEO of Kim Dotcom’s latest venture? Geraldine Johns gets a glimpse into the world of the elusive Tony Lentino.

  • Anita Busch, Michael Ovitz At War in Anthony Pellicano Civil Case

    Hollywood’s most powerful figures had ordered the intimidation attempt.

  • Court Says Trial Needed To Determine If Universal Music Violated DMCA With Dancing Baby Takedown

    We’ve covered the Stephanie Lenz / dancing baby / fair use case for years — but now it looks like there’s finally going to be a trial to consider if Universal Music can be punished for sending a DMCA takedown notice on a video of Lenz’s infant son dancing to 29 seconds of a song by Prince, which Lenz asserts was clearly fair use. If you haven’t followed the case, it’s been argued back and forth for years. At one point, the court ruled that a copyright holder does need to take fair use into account before sending a DMCA takedown, but that there needs to be “subjective bad faith” by Universal Music in sending the takedown. In other words, Lenz (and the EFF, who is representing her) needs to show, effectively, that Universal knew that it was sending bogus takedowns. The EFF has argued that willful blindness by Universal meant that it had knowledge (amusingly, using precedents in copyright cases in the other direction, where copyright holders argue that willful blindness can be infringement).

  • Dealing With Aaron Swartz in the Nixonian Tradition: Overzealous Overcharging Leads to a Tragic Result

  • Government Persecution, From Aaron Swartz to Bradley Manning

    The Justice Department’s legal assault on Swartz is of a vindictive piece with the prosecution of others who have carried important information into the public realm. Front and center is 25-year-old Bradley Manning, the Iraq War enlistee accused of being WikiLeaks’s source in the military. The restricted foreign policy documents that Manning allegedly released don’t amount to even 1 percent of the 92 million items the government classified last year, but the young private faces life in prison at his court-martial in June for the charge, among twenty-one others, of “aiding the enemy.” Then there’s Jeremy Hammond, age 28, who in his freshman year at the University of Illinois hacked the computer science department’s home page, then told them how they could fix its problem. He got thrown out of school for that; now he’s in a federal prison facing thirty-nine years to life, charged with various hacks and leaks (all apparently led by an FBI informant) including the 5 million internal e-mails of Stratfor, a private security firm hired by corporations to surveil private citizens, among other activities.

  • Critical Fixes for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

  • Human Rights Lawyer Explains Why He’s Working For Kim Dotcom: Exposing American Corruption

    We recently wrote about how Kim Dotcom has retained famed human rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam to explore whether or not there’s a human rights angle to his case, specifically alleging “contract prosecution” by the entertainment industry. I’m still somewhat skeptical that such an argument could go anywhere, but Amsterdam himself has put up a rather detailed blog post, explaining why he’s taking the case, which may seem quite different than his usual fare: taking on corruption and human rights violations in far flung parts of the world, including Africa and Latin America. After highlighting the many problems with the case (and the continued failures in court to date), as well as the close ties prosecutor Neil MacBride has with big copyright holders, he points out that he sees some serious similarities to what’s happening here with the kind of corruption he’s witnessed in third world nations.

  • Picking up Aaron Swartz’s dropped flags

    My first quality time with Aaron Swartz was at the last Comdex, in the Fall of 2002. He had just turned 16, but looked about 10. His old Mac laptop featured a screen with no working backlight. Only he could read it, which he rationalized, with a smile, as a “security precaution.” When I asked him about school, he said he had moved on. He was still learning all kinds of stuff, but he didn’t need school for that. And hey, there was work to be done, and he was too busy with that.

  • Congress Demands Justice Department Explain Aaron Swartz Prosecution

  • Memorial for Aaron Swartz at the Internet Archive

  • Part 2: EFF’s Additional Improvements to Aaron’s Law

    Now we present part two: suggestions to address the CFAA’s penalty structure. The CFAA, which is the primary federal computer crime law, allows for harsh punishments and makes too many offenses felonies. The statute is also structured so that the same behavior can violate multiple provisions of the law, which prosecutors often combine to beef up the potential penalties.

  • O’Brien blasts feds for dusting off statutes used on mafia

    The lawyers for disgraced former Probation commissioner John O’Brien blasted prosecutors in a filing yesterday, calling their decision to charge O’Brien and two of his top deputies as if they were greedy mobsters “breathtaking” while accusing them of not turning over key evidence.

    The attorneys, writing in a 29-page motion requesting documents from the US Attorney’s office, said their clients are confident they will beat the accusations they created a “rigged” hiring system catering to the requests of state lawmakers and others.

  • Triumphant motel owner slams Carmen Ortiz

    …latest critic to accuse the Hub’s top fed of prosecutorial bullying.

  • the next words: A Lecture on Aaron’s Law

    When a law professor is given a “chair” s/he gives a lecture in honor of the honor. I am the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership. On February 19, at 5pm @ HLS, I was scheduled to give my chair lecture. After Aaron’s death, I asked the Dean to let me reschedule the lecture. But after some more thought, I’ve decided to make the lecture about Aaron, and about how we need to honor his work. Anyone is invited. More details to follow. And the event will be webcast.

  • Aaron’s Army

    Aaron wasn’t a lone wolf, he was part of an army, and I had the honor of serving with him for a decade.

  • Feds Hounded ‘Net Activist Aaron Swartz, Says EFF’s Parker Higgins

  • How to honor Aaron Swartz

    Rarely does the name of one person, lacking political office or seat of power, echo across the internet so thoroughly as it did in the wake of Aaron Swartz’s death. How was the work of one person revered by so many, from the front page of every major paper in the US, to radical communities working against various axis of oppression?

  • Aaron’s Law, Drafting the Best Limits of the CFAA, And A Reader Poll on A Few Examples

  • More Thoughts on the Six CFAA Scenarios About Authorized Access vs. Unauthorized Access