• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Today’s Linux schisms are a blessing in disguise

The Linux community is fracturing along a number of fault lines — and that’s a good thing

Turn Your Linux Ubuntu Into Windows 7

April 2013 Issue of Linux Journal: High Performance Computing

When I was in college, there was a rich kid down the hall who had a computer with 16MB of RAM. Before you scoff, you need to think back to 1993. The standard amount of RAM in a new computer was 2MB, with 4MB being “high-end”. Anyway, this kid’s computer was amazingly fast because he could create a RAM disk big enough to contain Windows 3.1 completely, so the entire OS ran from RAM. It was the 1993 rich-kid version of an SSD.

The Linux Setup – Mark Anderson, Teacher

On my main laptop, my trusty old Dell Inspiron B130, I run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. On my old Acer Aspire One netbook, I just recently switched from Ubuntu to Peppermint Linux 3, which has injected much needed speed on that machine. It has become the tool I use for writing.

Mini Maker Faires attract penguins

On Saturday, April 13, 2013, a free “mini maker faire” event will be taking place at the Cleveland Public Library, in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Modeled on the legendary Maker Faire of San Mateo, California, the mini maker faire will be a celebration of ingenuity and the do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit.

I’ll be one of the workshop presenters at this event and I’m expecting a large number of penguins will be attending. Note: “Penguins” are an affectionate name for open source enthusiasts—so named in honor of the Linux mascot,

Garry’s Mod Creator Plays Cruel Joke on Linux Fans

Why Nokia and Linux failed, so far

Before you judge me by the article title, please read carefully. I have a very important message, and it has everything to do with the commercial and public image success of Nokia, and Linux.

[...]

So we need apps.

Desktop

• Why Torvalds loves the Chromebook Pixel: It’s all about the display

• Resistance Isn’t Futile

  I’ve spent a lot of time in conversation with various people about the State of Desktop Linux. While I have my own ideas as to how we (could have) gained a larger market share on the Desktop, my firm belief is that, at this time…..

  Anything we do from now on will be too little, too late.

  That ship has sailed, it’s water under the bridge, however you wish to express it.

  Linux, as we know it, is not going to ever become a major player in the Desktop market.

  I’ve made peace with that. Since 2005, I’ve chewed my lip over how this can change, but the fact is, there are simply too many people not willing to do the things necessary to make it a reality. Whether you believe it or not, whether you like it or not…

Server

• ‘Petaflop’ supercomputer is decommissioned

  A US supercomputer called Roadrunner has been switched off by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

  The machine was the first to operate at “petaflop pace” – the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second – when it launched in 2008.

Kernel Space

• Jon Corbet Mulls Linux Kernel Changes

  Now that the Linux kernel 3.9 merge window is closed, it’s safe to say we know what features will be included in the next kernel release. What lies beyond is predictable, still, but will likely hold a surprise or two. That’s where the annual Linux kernel weather report comes in.

• Linux 3.9-rc5

  I’m like the US postal office – “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” will keep me from doing weekly -rc releases. A little holiday like Easter? Bah, humbug. It might delay the release email a
  few hours because a man gotta stuff himself with odd seasonal desserts (and the Finnish Easter desserts are odder than most), but it won’t stop the inevitable progress towards a final 3.9 release.

• Linux 3.9-rc5 Kernel Is Not Really Peculiar

• Graphics Stack

  • Hawaii Desktop Is Now Usable On Wayland/Weston

    The lead developer behind the Hawaii Desktop Environment now believes that their Qt Quick 2 desktop is now in a usable state for Wayland and can run fine on the Weston compositor.

    While Hawaii is even less well known that Xfce or LXDE, it’s gained early attention for focusing upon Wayland support and there was also work on its own Wayland compositor known as Green Island. This Wayland support isn’t too hard since the desktop and its components are being written from scratch and is designed around Qt5 and Qt Quick 2, which already has upstream Wayland support.

  • Intel Mesa Driver Gets KDE KWin Optimizations

    A number of commits to the i965 driver in Mesa today benefit the performance of KDE’s KWin window manager for those using Intel Ivy Bridge graphics hardware.

    There were a number of commits pertaining to the i965 driver’s fragment shared pushed this afternoon (i965/fs). Most notably, this should help Ivy Bridge with KWin when using the scaling-related effects using the OpenGL 2.x renderer.

  • RDP Back-End Merged For Wayland’s Weston

    One month ago a FreeRDP-based remote compositor for Wayland’s Weston was proposed. Now having undergone six code revisions, the Weston Remote Desktop Protocol back-end has been merged.

  • VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

    In years past we long heard about lofty goals out of VIA Technologies for being open-source friendly and ultimately come up with a Mesa Gallium3D driver. We haven’t heard anything officially out of VIA in a great number of months, but it turns out they do now have a Gallium3D driver for Chrome 9!

    In response to a Phoronix Forums thread about using VIA graphics under Linux on an old laptop, a Phoronix reader shared he had working VIA Linux graphics. The reported configuration was Lubuntu 12.10 with an ASRock PVR530 motherboard that boasts VX900 / Chrome 9 graphics.

  • The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now “Banned”

• Benchmarks

Applications

• Is Assembly Still Relevant To Most Linux Software?

  Steve McIntyre and the Linaro Enterprise Group recently analyzed Ubuntu and Fedora software packages to see what software was still relying upon hand-written Assembly code. This was done to see how much real Assembly is being used, to see what the code was used for, and whether it was worth porting to 64-bit ARM / AArch64 / ARMv8.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Getting started with Yocto (video)

  • Howto: Fixing unstable clocksource in virtualised CentOS

  • Random and URandom on Linux

  • How to Digitally Sign a File in Linux using GnuPg (Digital Signatures)

  • [How To] Reset Unity & Compiz in Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04

  • How To Make a Fedora Bootable USB From Ubuntu?

  • Learn the Art of Linux Troubleshooting

  • Node.js integrates with M: a tutorial, part one

  • Scheduling in Hadoop

  • Mastering The Linux Shell – Getting Permission

  • How To install and configure HP printer in Arch Linux

  • Unix commands and tools you just can’t live without

  • How to kill a process in Linux – kill, killall, pkill, xkill

  • Write your own Ant tasks

    Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool, and because it’s based on Java, it is entirely cross-platform. It comes with a huge list of available tasks that you can run simply by including them in a build.xml file, but if there’s something you want it to do and no existing task can do it, it’s easy to extend Ant just by writing a new Java class. Here’s how to write your very own Ant tasks.

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine for advanced users and developers

    While Linux has one of the largest software catalogues on the planet, there are still many software applications which are either only available for Windows or are only possible to make on Windows. For users, it means that they will miss out on some of their favourite software (for example, Microsoft Office and a lot of games). For developers it means losing a significant market to people who are using Linux. While most of the software can be written for both the platforms if you plan ahead, it becomes painfully difficult (and sometimes impossible) when the software is already written. This is where Wine comes to rescue.

• Games

  • Valve Publishes Packages For Their Linux Distribution

    For Valve’s forthcoming Linux-based Steam gaming console the first packages are starting to emerge within a package repository on the SteamPowered web-server.

    Valve’s “Steam Box” will likely be shipping with a customized version of Debian/Ubuntu Linux at its heart. I’ve already written some early details about their Linux-based hardware gaming console for the living room based upon details I’ve known of within this article since talking with Gabe Newell last year at Valve about their Linux plans. For months I have been saying that their software platform will likely be based upon Ubuntu, likely “Ubuntu Core” and obviously an LTS release.

  • Valve’s Deathmatch Classic To Arrive on Steam for Linux

  • Soul Capture 2.0.0 has now been released

    The 2.0.0 release of Soul Capture, a free software utility developed by Piga Software which can be used to capture both the video and audio playback of OpenGL applications such as games, has now been released.

  • Bleak – Explore new races, governments, religions and more in this dark steampunk style platformer!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE 4.10 Applications Get Major Overhaul

    Okular lovers should expect many improvements, including support for embedded videos inside of documents. Here are some of the other fun changes.

  • New features in Qt 5.1

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.8 Debuts New Open Source Linux Desktop

    The GNOME 3.8 also benefits from the Every Detail Matters initiative from the GNOME Foundation. Back in 2011, GNOME developer Allan Day launched the Every Detail Matters effort with GNOME 3.4 to improve the overall quality of the GNOME desktop.

    With the GNOME 3.8 release, 60 ‘Every Detail Matters’ bugs were fixed.

  • Gnome 3.8 Core Utilities

    Gnome 3.8 has been released and apart from the various Gnome libraries, services and core parts that have been upgraded, we should take a look on the applications and utilities that are also part of Gnome.

    How did the tools that we will be using every day evolved? What new exciting features and improvements consist the base for a greater Gnome experience? Let’s find out!

  • Gnome 3.8 review: it’s almost there

    The much awaited evolutionary release of Gnome — 3.8 — arrived last week. After playing with it for a while I opine that Gnome 3.8 is much closer to what Gnome team was aiming for as the ‘next’ version of this desktop environment – the successor of the 2.x branch. It’s polished (as usual), fast, responsive and a bit more mature.

Distributions

• Distrowatch Almost Got Me, April Fools’ Jokes

  Buuut, it is an awfully large database now. So, it sounded perfectly reasonable when I read Ladislav’s words, “This site’s database has swollen to a whopping 746 free operating systems and is growing every week! Clearly, this is unsustainable. As a result, we have decided to cut down on the number of distributions tracked in our database – from the current 746 to just 25.”

  He had me up until I read the “25!” Then I remembered it was April Fools’ Day. But even if I hadn’t caught on yet the next statement would surely have done it, “All superfluous distributions will be removed and no longer tracked – these include anything below number 25 in our page hit ranking statistics, such as Fuduntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo Linux, PC-BSD or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These distributions are clearly not very popular, so why bother?”

• Cookie Cutter Distros Don’t Cut It

• Standards, Trends, And Shiny Things

  Now apply this to say, Ubuntu PPA’s. Would people be using Grive if not for trends ? Of course not Lets take OMG!Ubuntu for example, we could say it’s a trend-setter in the Ubuntu world. Over time a project gains enough following through the Internet’s equivalent of the real-world word of mouth. People flock to these projects and soon they become big enough to be part of everyday Linux life. Note the “Shiny Things” rule is also applicable here.

• First looks at KANOTIX 2013 and GhostBSD 3.0

• ZevenOS 3.0 Neptune “Brotkasten” KDE Review: Refreshingly different!

  ZevenOS, a German based distro, is quite a familiar name in the Linux world. Typically they bring out two classes of distro

  * A lightweight XFCE distro based on Ubuntu, with the look and feel of BeOS, which actually never captured my imagination
  * A heavier KDE based Neptune based on Debian testing

• New Releases

  • Arch 2013.04.01

  • Slackel 3.0 Openbox

  • Emmabuntüs 12.04.2-1.04

  • Parsix 5.0-20130331

• Screenshots

  • Pardus 2013

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Inc. : The Government of the Canary Islands Migrates Telecommunications and New Technologies Platform to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

    Organization Achieves a Stable, Cost-Effective, Modern and Scalable Virtualized Platform After a Migration from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Virtual Machine: Guest and Host

        If you’d like to run an Ubuntu virtual machineon your PC, you’ll need to weigh a series of considerations. To be sure, the use of virtualization is commonplace in the IT industry these days. Still, before you decide to run an Ubuntu virtual machine, you must consider whether you fully understand the benefits of setting one up in the first place.

        In this article, I’ll explore virtual machine hosts and guests on Ubuntu, why virtualization is a better bet than relying on WINE and how to ensure that you are selecting the best virtual machine solution for your Ubuntu desktop.

      • MapR brings Hadoop support to Ubuntu

      • Think You Saw Unity In Last Night’s Doctor Who?

      • Ubuntu 13.04 To Axe The Wubi Windows Installer

        One of the less popular ways to use Ubuntu Linux has been through the “Wubi” Windows-based installer that places Ubuntu within a Windows installation just as you would any other application. However, Canonical is planning to remove Wubi from Ubuntu 13.04.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Interview with Zorin OS creator, Artyom Zorin

          Artyom Zorin: My name is Artyom Zorin and I live in Dublin, Ireland. I’m the CEO of Zorin Group as well as being a student. My parents are ethnic Russians who moved from Ukraine to Ireland many years ago, which explains why my name doesn’t sound like a normal Irish one. I first came across Ubuntu back in 2008. Believe it or not, what actually attracted me most to Linux was the Compiz desktop effects software which I thought was “cool” when I first saw it on YouTube. At the beginning, I was a little bit anxious about making the leap, but after my brother Kyrill installed Ubuntu on our computer we started to see a lot more advantages to using Linux than simply the desktop effects. We also noticed that many people coming from a Windows environment found Ubuntu rather difficult to use as it was lacking a familiarity. Advanced Linux users argue that Ubuntu is simple to use and suffices for Linux beginners coming from Windows but we saw that what this user group really needed was a familiar graphical interface. This prompted us to develop a Linux distribution that resolves this issue to make the transition from Windows to Linux entirely seamless, a distribution now known as Zorin OS.

        • Ubuntu vs. Mint: Which Linux Distro Is Better for Beginners?

          Ubuntu vs. Mint: Which Linux Distro Is Better for Beginners?There’s nothing like digging into your first Linux distribution, whether you’re a tech-savvy user looking to branch out or whether you’re installing it on a friend’s computer. But which distribution is actually better for beginners? Here, we’ll delve into the differences between Ubuntu and Mint, the two most popular beginner distros, and perform a little experiment to see what new users prefer.

        • Bodhi Linux 2.3.0 Released – Download DVD ISO Images

          Bodhi team are happy to announce the immediate availability of Bodhi Linux 2.3.0, a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu that uses by default Enlightenment Desktop (E17).

Devices/Embedded

• Powerful real-time video transcoder runs Linux

• Raspberri Pi Model A now available in the US for $25

• Phones

  • Tizen Still Alive and Kicking, Backed By Samsung and Intel

    Remember Tizen? It’s the open source mobile operating system that Samsung and Intel partnered on back in 2011 (and may be actually running on handsets this year); formerly, it was MeeGo (which was famously scrapped the same day it debuted on Nokia’s N9 handset), and before that it was called Moblin.

  • Analysis: Upstarts challenge the mobile duopoly

  • Android

    • These Android set-top boxes boast front-facing cameras

      The Chinese technology market has been on full tilt when it comes to producing Android-powered set-top boxes and mini PCs.

    • Facebook’s Android Homescreen Could Expose Apple’s Inflexibility

      The mainstream has had little reason to care that Android gives developers much more customization freedom than iOS. But if Facebook’s fabled Android homescreen is a hit, the stubbornness of Apple’s closed mobile platform could be framed as a drawback after years of its cohesive design and ease being seen as assets.

    • New Facebook phone reportedly to be unveiled

    • Ematic Genesis Prime, the $80 Google Certified Jelly Bean tablet

    • Digitimes Research: Androidbook may show up in 3Q13

      Google has already been in the notebook industry for almost three years with its Chromebook. Although the device’s shipments are still small, the volume should be able to surpass one million units in 2013 due to more promotions, Digitimes Research estimates.

    • More Reasons Why Google Won’t Merge Android and Chrome OS

      Last month, some big moves going on at Google got many people excited about the idea that Google might merge its Chrome OS and Android platforms, creating a simple and open unified operating system strategy. A number of reports appeared concluding that Chrome OS and Android are headed for a merger. Then, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt appeared to confirm that the company will develop the platforms separately (some are still arguing that he did not confirm this).

    • How to Run Linux on ODROID-U2: A Monster of an ARM Machine

      The ARM architecture offers impressive processing per watt of power. Because of this lean power draw, ARM is widely used in mobile phones and tablets. Recently ARM-based machines have been making a splash as low-power servers and desktop machines as well, with offerings such as the Raspberry Pi.

    • 3Dmark for Android separates performance champs from chumps

      With its latest version of 3DMark, Futuremark attempts to create a benchmark that allows for cross-platform comparisons among all tablets, smartphones, and PCs.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Rundown of 10 Mobile Platforms for Smartphones and Tablets (with videos)

  • The tablet the industry needs? – The Open Source Column

    Given that the general impression given of the British retail sector in particular post- christmas was one of doom and gloom, with several major chains facing well-documented problems, closer inspection revealed some interesting upward trends in the midst of the figures. And technology, not for the first time, was adding some of the fuel.

Algar Telecom develops open source equipment identity system

Brazil’s Algar Telecom has decided to develop its own open source Equipment Identity Register (EIR) platform. Speaking to local portal Teletime, the executive director of operations and technology at Algar Telecom, Luis Antonio Lima, said that this is the first EIR open source in the world and that anyone can improve it, modify it or use it in their own business. The source code of the platform can be accessed at: code.google.com/p/jeir.

Michigan Tech’s Open Source Optics

Doing science can be an expensive affair, but a new project from Michigan Technological University is trying to make science more affordable and more accessible.

In a recently published paper, professors and researchers at the university outlined their plans for creating an online, open-source library of 3D printable optics hardware. According to one of the paper’s authors, associate professor Joshua Pearce, “This library operates as a free, flexible, low-cost tool set for developing both research and teaching optics hardware.”

Open source software and start-ups

Open source software has been instrumental in the growth of many tech companies in Silicon Valley and around the world. The free and open source software enable start-ups to create something innovative at a very low cost, then give it away for free to see how customers like it. In this fashion, they can be very responsive in addressing the feedback from the market and create truly innovative products and services. Google and Facebook are great examples of tech companies that build their empire on open source software.

Open source plug-in speeds mobile app development

A plug-in intended to make it easier for mobile developers to test applications and deploy them to the cloud is available for download.

The open source plug-in, called the Soasta CloudTest Plugin for Jenkins, links the Jenkins continuous integration system to the Soasta Touchtest platform for testing multi-touch, gesture-based applications on the CloudBees Java platform-as-a-service. Applications would be deployed on CloudBees.

Press Release: Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software

10 ways to start contributing to open source

After understanding a project’s capabilities and roadmap, anyone is able to start directly hacking the source code and contributing useful extensions. Because open source is a distributed, participatory meritocracy, the upside benefit is high and the barrier to entry is low—you don’t have to move, be employed by a Valley startup, give up your day job, or wait to obtain a 4 years for a degree.

VLC Media Player

Then I saw it: the URL being provided was not the true URL for the VLC project, http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ , but rather “vlcmediaplayer” dot org. Clearly this is a “scraper” — someone who copies someone else’s web content to a new web site, and then tries to drive traffic to that new web site, to generate ad revenue. I must grudgingly credit them with a good choice, since VLC Media Player works for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android — plus lots more — and viewing media is something most users want to do.

Are you open source enough?

Is your project open source enough? Are you? Are you doing enough for your communities? Accusations like these are getting thrown around more and more, often in the simple form, “X isn’t really open.” It’s a question we’ve even asked ourselves from time to time when we post stories on opensource.com—is this a real example of openness? But what is “open enough?” And does it really matter?

There comes a point in any community’s growth where the collective consciousness starts to feel threatened by newcomers. You know it’s happened on a mailing list or web forum when you see posts that start, “I miss when this group used to be…” And if you search Google for the phrase “not really open source,” you get 1,800,000 results, suggesting that the broader open source community has officially reached that time.

Bringing Open Source Communities closer together

Apache Bloodhound Leads Open Source Trac Forward

Free and Open—and Their Opposites

Merriam-Webster defines a tenet as “a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession.” As it happens, Linux is claimed by two doctrines that are to some degree at odds: those of free software and open source. This contention began when Eric S. Raymond published “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source’”, on February 8, 1998.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Project celebrates 15 years

    The Mozilla Project is celebrating 15 years of “a better web” this week. Fifteen years ago, Netscape Communications released the source code to its web browser and mail suite and created the Mozilla Project. Netscape had been under commercial pressure as Microsoft had begun bundling Internet Explorer for free and the company took the then quite radical step of open sourcing its core software, looking to build a community around that code. Over the next few years, development continued based on that original code and in 2002, Mozilla 1.0, the first major version, was released with various improvements. Mozilla 1.0 arrived into a world where Internet Explorer had a 90 per cent share of the browser market. It was also a world in which the newly released Mozilla 1.0 would make little impact.

SaaS/Big Data

• How Does Big Data Impact the Network?

  Big Data and the hype associated with it is pervasive across IT today. In its most basic definition, Big Data is typically connected to the open source Hadoop Big Data project, though others have a broader definition. No matter how you define Big Data, it’s all about large volumes of data that need to move around a network.

• OpenStack security brief

  This video from Shmoocon 2013 is a break down of security concerns relating to OpenStack cloud software.

  OpenStack is an open source IaaS solution compatible with Amazon EC2 / S3 and Google’s GCE. The purpose of the talk is to introduce and demonstrate the working mechanics of cloud security mechanisms, or lack thereof.

• OpenStack Grizzly Rounding Third

  The big OpenStack 2013.1 (aka Grizzly) open source cloud platform release is due out this week on 4/4.

• Nebula’s OpenStack Hardware Offering Touts Plug-and-Play Simplicity

Databases

• MySQL and the forks in the road

  At the beginning of 2008 Sun Microsystems purchased MySQL AB, and ever since then there have been divisions in the ecosystem. As with any software community or ecosystem, where there are divisions there are usually forks, both in the community and the software itself.

  Just over a year after the Sun acquisition came the announcement that Sun itself was to be bought out by Oracle. It was at this point that the cracks in the ecosystem really started to show. Many inside Sun stayed quiet – not by choice – while outside things were getting very vocal and heated.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Kona’s Scott DeFusco: Open Source Advocate in a Closed Source Firm

    “When we looked at a number of different factors, open source became the obvious answer to this particular project,” said Kona vice president Scott DeFusco. “That’s not to say the proprietary platforms we were using on our other products were not good for those. For us, open source was the better choice for a couple of reasons. One is keeping the cost down so we could pass on a lot of value to our users in the free version. Also, we could maximize our values when we monetized.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 29 new GNU releases!

• GnuCash 2.4.12 released

  The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.4.12, the ninth bug fix release in a series of stable of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software. With this release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.

• How I earned a 286% return in less than 1 year investing in the Free Software Foundation

  At the FSF’s annual conference last year I pledged to donate 100BTC to the FSF, and did so on April 6. I bought about 121.95 bitcoins, for a price of about US$4.92/BTC (made easier thanks to Greg Maxwell’s vouching for me on #bitcoin-otc; thanks!) and haven’t given any thought to the remainder till today.

• Guile 100 #4: tar files

  Challenge #4 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is quite simple. Write a script that will create a tar file from a list of files. It is the fourth and final challenge in this month’s theme, which is “/bin – reimplementing common Posix tools”.

  The Guile 100 Programs Project is an attempt to collaboratively generate a set of examples of how to use the GNU Guile implementation of Scheme.

• The GNUstep Makefile Package version 2.6.4 is now available.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Source Robot Mixes A Mean Drink

  For many years now, some of the more creative work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Open source robotics platforms have flourished, and they have mostly focused on humanoid robots of the type that Willow Garage and other organizations have specialized in.

• Open Access/Content

  • US to release Aaron Swartz papers

    The US attorney’s office in Boston agreed on Friday to release documents in the Aaron Swartz case, but the officials are seeking to have some specific identities and materials withheld as the legal wrangling continues in the investigation into the federal prosecution of the Internet activist.

    In calling for redactions of names and materials, the office of US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz expressed concerns about the safety of individuals and organizations involved in the case.

  • #openaccess The current standard of “debate” is unacceptable; arrogant and ignorant

    I have my head down and am trying to write code – to liberate knowledge (and I haven’t forgotten #scholrev!) but occasionally have to break off and blog. Simply: the standard of debate (if it can be called such) in #openaccess is appalling. Either non-existent or fuelled by prejudice and ignorance. Since (a) many of the “debaters” and academics to whom we might look for clarity, fairness and guidance and (b) we are losing billions (sic) by not getting our act together.

• Open Hardware

  • ZeroTurnaround Reveals an Open Source Hardware Line

    ZeroTurnaround today announced its plans to open source the company, starting with a new line of hardware products deemed “GRM2”. This marks a significant shift in business model for the Estonian software house, who has been developing JRebel, the popular development productivity tool, since 2007.

Programming

• More Features Of C++14 Are Covered

  C++14 is the next update to the C++ programming language. While only considered a minor update over C++11, it will bring with it several new features.

• LLVM/Clang 3.3 Planned For Release In June

  An Apple developer has shared plans to see LLVM 3.3 released in June of this year, following the month of May being dedicated to testing.

  Among the improvements to be found out of LLVM 3.3 include better Intel Haswell support (improved AVX2, etc), some noted performance improvements, Clang will have better C++11 support, the long-awaited AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end, 64-bit ARM / AArch64 support, and many other features to be discussed in the coming weeks.

Facebook is still losing teens to mobile messaging apps

“Can I resell my MP3s?” redux—federal judge says no

For years, many a music fan has wondered what we first posited back in 2008: “Can I resell my MP3s?”

After all, as we’ve pointed out in the past, nearly all digital good sales are really licenses rather than sales as conventionally understood. The question here is, can such a license be bought and sold to other users?

Brackets Sprint 22 adds word wrap and community commits

Science

• Astrophysicists: Black hole awakens to swallow planet-sized object

  Astrophysicists have witnessed the rare event of a black hole awakening from its slumber to snack on a planet-sized object in a galaxy 47 million light years away, the University of Geneva said Tuesday.

  The observation made using the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL satellite project, revealed a black hole that had been slumbering for years chomping on a giant, low-mass object that had come too close.

Health/Nutrition

• NHS at ‘huge risk’ from reforms, says healthcare chief

  New head of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence says structural changes to NHS will prove major challenge

• Consumers Allege Perdue’s “Humane” Poultry Labels Are “False and Deceptive”

  Have you ever wondered what labels like “humanely raised” and “cage free” mean when you’re looking at a package of meat or eggs at the supermarket? Do corporations actually live up to the claims on the labels?

  Well, a consumer class action lawsuit in New Jersey is trying to bring a little truth to labeling when it comes to the humane treatment of animals. The lawsuit alleges that Perdue Farms, Inc. has misled consumers by advertising its Harvestland brand of chickens as “humane.” The suit was filed by two consumer members of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) on behalf of a group of consumers. The case has been cleared to move forward by a federal court in New Jersey and will be heard later this year.

• U.S. criticizes ‘unnecessary’ EU rules on genetically modified crops

  The United States on Monday criticized “unnecessary” European Union rules against genetically modified US crop imports as it prepares to enter free-trade talks with the EU.

  EU restrictions notably have resulted in delays in the approval of new GM traits “despite positive assessments by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA),” the US Trade Representative’s office said in a report on reducing trade sanitary barriers.

Security

• IT Pro confession: How I helped in the BIGGEST DDoS OF ALL TIME

  I contributed to the massive DDoS attack against Spamhaus. What flowed through my network wasn’t huge – it averaged 500Kbit/sec – but it contributed. This occurred because I made a simple configuration error when setting up a DNS server; it’s fixed now, so let’s do an autopsy.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• U.S. Lawmakers: CIA Should Keep Armed UAVs

  Pro-military lawmakers and U.S. analysts want the White House to resist shifting the CIA’s armed unmanned aircraft program to the Pentagon, citing operational and legal reasons to keep the spy agency in the targeted-killing business.

• CIA to Promote Head of “Black Site” Where Torture Occurred?

  According to media reports, the acting director of the CIA’s clandestine service has, for the last month, been an official who was “in the chain of command” in the CIA’s torture program in the years after 9/11. According to a book by Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the clandestine service, this unnamed official even headed one of the early CIA “black sites”—notorious secret prisons set up overseas to torture detainees. Media reports indicate that the unnamed career officer also reportedly signed off on the destruction of 92 videotapes documenting some of the most brutal mistreatment carried out under the CIA program.

• Are US drones ethical?

  Whether drones should be used in the US is the wrong question. Americans should be asking: Is it ethical to use drones anywhere? Is it fair to search for security for ourselves at the expense of perpetual insecurity for others?

• Drone policy hurts the U.S.’s image in Yemen

  The United States has played a significant role in Yemen’s transition, which ushered out former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, in exchange for immunity, and inaugurated a unity government and consensus president that are overseeing a national dialogue launched last month. The United States has pledged support for the dialogue, which will lead to a constitutional referendum and new elections.

• ‘Drones’ changing hands

  The Obama administration seems poised to order that all kinetic attacks on al Qaeda or affiliated bad guys be conducted by elements of the United States military, knee-capping the Central Intelligence Agency’s paramilitary capability and effectively ending its drone program in Pakistan.

• Strong American role still exists at Afghan-controlled prison

  Days after the Parwan detention center was ceremoniously transferred to Afghan control, its courtroom was full of American bailiffs, American advisers and American attorneys.

  The facility itself — renamed the Afghan National Detention Facility — is on one of the country’s most fortified American bases. When an Afghan defense attorney and prosecutor this week began arguing the case of Abdul Shakor, an alleged Taliban commander detained since 2009, all of the available evidence came from American forces.

• The drone secrets we should see – Jameel Jaffer

• US Aids Honduran Police Despite Death Squad Fears

  But The Associated Press has found that all police units are under the control of Director General Juan Carlos Bonilla, nicknamed the “Tiger,” who in 2002 was accused of three extrajudicial killings and links to 11 more deaths and disappearances. He was tried on one killing and acquitted. The rest of the cases were never fully investigated.

  Honduran law prohibits any police unit from operating outside the command of the director general, according to a top Honduran government security official, who would only speak on condition of anonymity. He said that is true in practice as well as on paper.

• MI6 ‘arranged Cold War killing’ of Congo prime minister

• Camp Nama: British personnel reveal horrors of secret US base in Baghdad

  Detainees captured by SAS and SBS squads subjected to human-rights abuses at detention centre, say British witnesses

Cablegate

• CIA employee/agent access to WikiLeaks

• Australian lawyer to run ‘serious’ Assange senate campaign

• JULIAN ASSANGE’S SENATE BID

• Assange appoints British monarchy opponent for Australian Senate bid

  Former Australian Republican Movement head and barrister Greg Barns said on Monday he would be campaign director for the WikiLeaks Party spearheading Assange’s rare absentee bid for a Senate seat in Australia’s September 14 election, which even if successful would not bring him any legal protection.

• Icelandic MP and Wikileaks volunteer goes to the US – Might get arrested

  “If I don’t come back home I hope that there will not be silence about that here at home” said Ms. Birgitta Jonsdottir, MP and volunteer for Wikileaks. She is the co-founder of a new political party called The Pirate Party Iceland. The party will be running for parliament in the upcoming elections on April 27th.

  Birgitta Jonsdottir will travel to the US this week to celebrate that there are three years since the tape from Iraq was published by Wikileaks, where the US army attacked civilians.

  Birgitta has not gone to America for almost three years. During that time the Ministry of Justice in the US has ordered Twitter to hand over all data on Birgitta. Bradley Manning has also been arrested, he is kept at an American army prison.

• New Laws Target Wikileaks

  As Julian Assange tilts at the Senate, new laws have been passed that will make it harder for organisations like Wikileaks to operate legally – and there are more to come, writes Matthew da Silva
  The Labor Government is tightening up Australian law in areas that will have a direct impact on organisations such as WikiLeaks. Only the Greens are challenging the new bills in parliament, and they are receiving scant media attention.

• The WikiLeaks Grand Jury

  As Alexa O’Brien reported Tuesday, the US Department of Justice has provided the latest confirmation that the grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks remains currently ongoing. That means it has been actively investigating the whistleblower website now for at least about 26 months (the Guardian first reported back in January 2011 that a subpoena seeking data on WikiLeaks had “appear[ed] to confirm for the first time the existence of a secret grand jury” empanelled to investigate individuals associated with the organisation. Prior to that, in late November 2010, the White House confirmed that there was an “active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks. And in July 2010, the Department of Defence stated that it had requested that the FBI help with an investigation related to WikiLeaks disclosures and that it “go wherever it needs to go”).

• Department of Justice spokesman for Eastern District of Virginia confirms grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks ‘ongoing’

• Bradley Manning’s Nobel Peace Prize

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Out of control nightmare: tremors increasing at massive 13-acre Louisiana sinkhole

  The head of Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources named 13 scientists and other experts Friday to serve on a blue-ribbon commission tasked with determining the long-term stability of the area around northern Assumption Parish’s sinkhole. The 13-acre sinkhole and consequences of its emergence and continued growth, such as methane trapped under the Bayou Corne area, have forced the evacuation of 350 residents for more than seven months.

• Low-wage nation: Seven of 10 most common jobs pay less than $30,000

  Part of the corporate-propelled race to the bottom is that we’re constantly told to expect less—if you’re a food prep worker making $18,720, at least you’re not making minimum wage, amiright? There’s this vast campaign to normalize low wages and set them up as the basic standard most of us should expect, the flip side of the increasing wealth of the top one percent.

Finance

• Dow Chemical Loses $1 Billion in Deductions in Tax Case

  Dow Chemical Co. (DOW)’s claim to $1 billion in tax deductions was based on transactions with sham partnerships promoted by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and law firm King & Spalding LLP, a federal judge ruled, throwing out the company’s bid to recover the money.

  The Internal Revenue Service correctly rejected the tax benefits created by the complex partnerships from 1993 to 2003 because the transactions were designed to exploit perceived weaknesses in the tax code and not for legitimate business purposes, U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson said in a ruling filed yesterday in federal court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,.

• David Stockman’s American Economic Horror Story

  For all this moral indignation, however, he never gets around to explaining what exactly is wrong about “printing money.” It’s certainly possible for an economy to have too much money–that’s how you get inflation, generally. But doesn’t it stand to reason that if you can have too much money, you can have too little? And maybe you might have too little if your economy has just lost $10 trillion in wealth due to the collapse of a housing bubble? (Stockman complains about how the Fed “digitally printed new money at the astounding rate of $600 million per hour”–which would replace the wealth lost in the bubble’s collapse in a less-than-astonishing two years.)

• Thousands Protest the UK Government’s Brutal Austerity

  Britain’s government has introduced sweeping changes to the country’s welfare, justice, health and tax systems, including a “bedroom tax” that will reduce housing subsidies that primarily benefit poor people. The levy ostensibly aims to “tackle overcrowding and encourage a more efficient use of social housing,” resulting in an estimated million “social housing” households losing 14-25 percent of their housing benefits.

• Outrage In UK After Conservative Politician Says He Could Live On $11.50 A Day

• Is Germany too powerful for Europe?

  Twenty years ago, Germany’s economy was stagnating. Today, as the eurozone crisis deepens, this giant is keeping Europe afloat. But what does it want in return? Stuart Jeffries talks to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, who believes that his country has become a political monster

• Banks gone bad: Our evolved morality has failed us

  ROB a bank and you risk a long stretch in jail. Run a bank whose dubious behaviour leads to global economic collapse and you risk nothing of the sort, more likely a handsome pay-off.

• Millionaires’ reign: UK’s rulers ‘out of touch’ with common folk

  Britain’s new political elite is an assortment of multi-millionaires who studied at exclusive universities. But down on the streets there is a growing sentiment that those running the country are detached from those they lead.

  The latest example of how a few careless words by a millionaire in power triggers anger from the people affected by his governmental decisions comes from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. On Monday, he claimed in a live radio talk show that if he had to he could live on 53 pounds (US$80) a week.

• Egyptians Brace for Austerity as Govt. Seeks IMF Loan

  Wednesday, representatives from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will arrive in Cairo to enter into new rounds of negotiations, regarding a proposed $4bn loan to the country.
  Egypt, which has continued to struggle with social and economic difficulties since the political unrest of 2011 that resulted in the ousting of former President Hosni Mubarak, is seeking the IMF aid in the hopes of bolstering its rapidly deteriorating economy.
  Egypt’s current President Mohammed Morsi is reported to have initiated negotiations with IMF in November. However, he was forced to delay finalization of any potential initial deals until December, due to political divisions throughout the country over the extent of his executive powers. In a statement to reporters, cabinet spokesperson Alaa al-Hadidy ruled out the possibility of any emergency loans, in lieu of talks with the IMF, stating that despite its financial strains, Egypt would not experience a “crisis” in relation to the importing of essential goods.

• Everyone’s Rich Again–Problem Solved!

  Friday’s USA Today front page (3/29/13) declared, “We’re Feeling Rich Again.” A subhead, pointing to a related sidebar article, recommends that we should “show this bull some love.” That doesn’t mean what you might think.

  But the right question to ask is who precisely “we” might be.

• Worms, Pond Scum and Economists

  The effort to blame the awful plight of the young on Social Security and Medicare is picking up steam.

  In recent weeks, there were several pieces in The Washington Post and The New York Times that either implicitly or explicitly blamed older workers and retirees for the bad economic plight facing young people today. There is now a full-court press to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, ostensibly out of a desire to help young workers today and in the future.

  Just to be clear, there is no doubt that young workers face dismal economic prospects at the moment.

• It’s a stunt! Iain Duncan Smith dismisses demands to live on £53 a week

  Iain Duncan Smith dismissed demands for him to try to make ends meet on £53 a week as a “complete stunt” and insisted he had experienced life “on the breadline” as ministers confronted their critics over wider-ranging cuts to benefits.

  The Work and Pensions Secretary was backed by the Chancellor George Osborne in arguing that welfare reforms were essential to helping recipients back into work and tackling Britain’s previously burgeoning benefits bill. They believe the majority of voters – particularly lower-paid workers – back the Coalition’s moves to trim welfare spending.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• At Banks, Board Pay Soars Amid Cutbacks

  Wall Street pay, while lucrative, isn’t what it used to be — unless you are a board member.

  Since the financial crisis, compensation for the directors of the nation’s biggest banks has continued to rise even as the banks themselves, facing difficult markets and regulatory pressures, are reining in bonuses and pay.

Censorship

• Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers

  In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving a thirty-month term in federal prison for publicly identifying an intelligence operative involved in torture. It’s a pattern: the whistleblowers are punished, sometimes severely, while the perpetrators of the crimes they expose remain free.

• Saudi Arabia ‘threatens Skype ban’

  Encrypted messaging services such as Skype, Viber and WhatsApp could be blocked in Saudi Arabia, the telecommunications regulator there is reported to have warned.

• The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Wikipedia

  A month ago, Mark Donfried from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) — an organization dedicated to promoting open dialogue — sent me this letter threatening me with legal action because of contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia. Yesterday, he sent me this followup threat.

  According to the letters, Donfried has threatened me with legal action because I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that resulted in his organization’s article being deleted. It is not anything I wrote in any Wikipedia article that made Donfried so upset — although Donfried is also unhappy about at least one off-hand comment I made during the deletion discussion on a now-deleted Wikipedia process page. Donfried is unhappy that my actions, in small part, have resulted in his organization not having an article in Wikipedia. He is able to threaten me personally because — unlike many people — I edit Wikipedia using my real, full, name.

Privacy

• Congress Planning To Debate CISPA Behind Closed Doors; No Public Scrutiny Allowed

  The truth is that this is yet another way to try to hide from the public on this issue. Congress doesn’t want an open discussion on the many problems with CISPA, so it does what it does best: try to hide things away and rush them through when (hopefully) not enough people are looking. It makes you wonder just what CISPA’s supporters are so worried about. Congress is supposed to work for the public, not hide things away from the public. This isn’t a situation where they’re discussing classified info or plans — but merely a bill focused on information sharing between the government and private companies. Any markup on CISPA needs to be public.

• Bills Would Mandate Warrant for GPS Tracking, Cellphone Location Data

  Two bills introduced Thursday in the House and Senate would compel law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant before affixing a GPS tracker to a vehicle, using a cell site simulator to locate someone through their mobile device or obtaining geolocation data from third-party service providers.

• Supreme Court: Police Dog Powers Do Not Include Warrantless Searches of a Person’s Home

• US Government’s Failure To Protect Public Privacy Is Driving Business Overseas

  As we’ve covered over and over again, the US government has made it clear that it wants access to your data. With things like the FISA Amendments Act, ECPA and various other laws, law enforcement plays the FUD card repeatedly, insisting that it needs to be able to go in and see data to “protect” the public. There’s very little basis to make this claim. And, worse, by decimating online privacy, the US government may actively be driving business outside of the US to foreign countries that have stricter privacy laws that actually protect data from government snooping.

• It’s time to update online privacy

• Whistleblowing The NSA

• Government Fights for Use of Spy Tool That Spoofs Cell Towers

  The government’s use of a secret spy tool was on trial on Thursday in a showdown between an accused identity thief and more than a dozen federal lawyers and law enforcement agents who were fighting to ensure that evidence obtained via a location-tracking tool would be admissible in court.

• When a Secretive Stingray Cell Phone Tracking “Warrant” Isn’t a Warrant

  An Arizona federal court this afternoon will be the battleground over the government’s use of a “Stingray” surveillance device in a closely watched criminal case, United States v. Rigmaiden. And in an important development, new documents revealed after an ACLU of Northern California Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request should leave the government with some explaining to do.

• Facial recognition and GPS tracking: TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance

  An internationally-spread Orwellian surveillance system uncovered by RT has been linked to a software company that collects the GPS coordinates of cell phone users in over 100 major cities.

• The Dangers of Surveillance

  From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our law and literature are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and corporate practices, however, have made this problem more urgent. Although we have laws that protect us against government surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until they are discovered. And even when they are, courts frequently dismiss challenges to such programs for lack of standing, under the theory that mere surveillance creates no tangible harms, as the Supreme Court did recently in the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International. We need a better account of the dangers of surveillance.

• DOJ Emails Show Feds Were Less Than “Explicit” With Judges On Cell Phone Tracking Tool

  A Justice Department document obtained by the ACLU of Northern California shows that federal investigators were routinely using a sophisticated cell phone tracking tool known as a “stingray,” but hiding that fact from federal magistrate judges when asking for permission to do so.

• Attorney General Eric Holder: If the President Does It, It’s Legal

• Kim Dotcom Illegal Surveillance And Response: Timeline

  The surveillance by the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau) at the request of OFCANZ (Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand – an agency hosted within the New Zealand Police) was publically revealed in September 2012 and admitted to be illegal as Dotcom, his colleague Bram van der Kolk and their families were New Zealand residents.

• Mobile Phone Use Patterns: The New Fingerprint

  Mobile phone use may be a more accurate identifier of individuals than even their own fingerprints, according to research published on the web site of the scientific journal Nature.

• Data Protection Regulation Debate: 1st part

• Time for action on Google’s privacy policy

  In a statement issued today, it was announced six European data protection authorities are to launch coordinated and simultaneous enforcement actions relating to Google’s privacy policy.

Civil Rights

• Racist Hate Group To Conduct Nighttime Patrols On College Campus

  A racist hate group at Towson University has announced plans to conduct its own nighttime police patrols on campus.

• Israel set to jail teenage conscientious objector for eighth time

  Nathan Blanc has spent more than 100 days in prison over the past 19 weeks due to his refusal to enlist in Israeli army

• Detroit workers speak against emergency manager

  There is widespread opposition among workers and young people in Detroit, Michigan to the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city. Kevyn Orr, who began his tenure last week, is tasked with using virtually unlimited powers to rip up labor contracts, slash services and sell off public assets to pay off the city’s bond holders.

• Alfred Anaya Put Secret Compartments in Cars. So the DEA Put Him in Prison

• Government Control of Comsec Commerce

  Jon Callas, March 28, 2013: “Remember, the only difference between lawful access and espionage is whose jurisdiction it is.”

• HORN! REVIEWS: CYPHERPUNKS

• NYPD Officer Told Innocent 13-Year-Old To ‘Stop Crying Like A Little Girl’ During Stop And Frisk

  During the second week of testimony on New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, an officer admitted to detaining and then mocking a 13-year-old boy when he started crying.

• We do not spy on US citizens, just anti-government groups, says fusion center director

  An official from an Arkansas State Fusion Center recently spoke to the press to clear up what he called “misconceptions” about what his office actually does, with depressingly hilarious results. (For some background on fusion centers, click here.)

  “The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do,” fusion center director Richard Davis told the local press.

• Android malware now being used to target political activists

  As much as we would rather not report on yet another Android malware scare (we think security issues are overblown and that any platform is vulnerable, anyway), this one seems to be a first in the Android ecosystem. Security researchers have discovered what may be the first targeted Android malware attack, which is basically a smartly-crafted social engineering attack that specifically targeted a Tibetan activist, with the intent of spreading itself through the target’s contacts, thereby gaining access to their devices and information.

• Taxing Journalists and Watchdogs Isn’t the Solution to California’s Court Budget Woes

  A proposal under consideration in California would significantly limit access to public information by levying a $10 fee any time anyone—including members of the public and the media—wants to look at a court case record in person. While EFF is certainly sympathetic to the budgetary woes facing all levels of government in California, this measure would trade transparency, citizen engagement and the power of a free press for a short-sighted fiscal stop-gap. On the whole, such a fee would do little to fix institutional spending problems while inflicting massive damage to the public trust.

• NYPD stop-and-frisk memo revealed in civil rights court battle

  New memo sent to officers demonstrates ‘startling admission of fault’, say attorneys alleging widespread civil rights violations

• British diplomats defend Bahrain

  Human Rights Watch says it stands by its assessment of the situation in Bahrain following an attack on its findings by Britain’s ambassador in the troubled Gulf kingdom.

  At the end of a fact-finding visit last month, HRW said Bahrain’s rulers had “made no progress on key reform promises, failing to release unjustly imprisoned activists or to hold accountable high-level officials responsible for torture”.

• Congress’ New CFAA Draft Could Have Put Aaron Swartz in Jail For Decades Longer Than the Original Charges

• Law Professor Eric Goldman: The CFAA Is A Failed Experiment; It’s Time To Gut It

• The digital arms trade

  The market for software that helps hackers penetrate computer systems

• The ethics of solitary confinement

  We ask why the US holds more detainees in isolation than any other country in the democratic world.

• UN investigates human trafficking in Philippines

  For example, grants of $300,000 here, $500,000 there, hardly justify the US Embassy’s claim that “the battle against human trafficking is a high priority for the US government and the American people.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Korean Lawmakers and Human Rights Experts Challenge Three Strikes Law

    In July 2009, South Korea became the first country to introduce a graduated response or “three strikes” law. The statute allows the Minister of Culture or the Korean Copyright Commission to tell ISPs and Korean online service providers to suspend the accounts of repeated infringers and block or delete infringing content online. There is no judicial process, no court of appeal, and no opportunity to challenge the accusers.

    The entertainment industry has repeatedly pointed to South Korea as a model for a controlled Internet that should be adopted everywhere else. In the wake of South Korea’s implementation, graduated response laws have been passed in France and the United Kingdom, and ISPs in the United States have voluntarily accepted a similar scheme.

  • Stop the Secret Copyright Agenda: Don’t Trade Away Our Digital Rights

  • South Korea Considers Dumping Draconian Copyright Law Forced On It By The US

    As Mike noted a couple of days ago, international trade agreements often have the effect of constraining the power of national legislatures. Indeed, that’s doubtless one of the reasons why they have become so popular in recent years: they allow backroom deals between politicians and lobbyists to set the agenda for law-making around the world, without the need for any of that pesky democratic oversight nonsense. In particular, the trade agreement between South Korea and the US is turning out to be a key limiting factor for both TPP and what US politicians might try to do about phone unlocking. This makes two recent moves to loosen South Korea’s harsh copyright laws potentially important far beyond that country’s borders.

  • Deep Dive: Prenda Law Is Dead

    Today the Prenda Law enterprise encountered an extinction-level event. Faced with a federal judge’s demand that they explain their litigation conduct, Prenda Law’s attorney principals — and one paralegal — invoked their right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As a matter of individual prudence, that may have been the right decision. But for the nationwide Prenda Law enterprise, under whatever name or guise or glamour, it spelled doom.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural World

DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural WorldWe probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it’s so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found “survival of the fittest” acting in computer programming.

Bullseye from 1,000 yards: Shooting the $17,000 Linux-powered rifle

My photographer, Steve, squints through a computerized scope squatting atop a big hunting rifle. We’re outdoors at a range just north of Austin, Texas, and the wind is blowing like crazy—enough so that we’re having to dial in more and more wind adjustment on the rifle’s computer. The spotter and I monitor Steve’s sight through an iPad linked to the rifle via Wi-Fi, and we can see exactly what he’s seeing through the scope. Steve lines up on his target downrange—a gently swinging metal plate with a fluorescent orange circle painted at its center—and depresses a button to illuminate it with the rifle’s laser.

What’s in a Name?

Katherine Noyes over on the Linux Advocates site has resurrected the GNU/Linux vs Linux naming debate, once again. To the uninitiated, the debate centers around if we should refer to the operating system as “GNU-slash-Linux” or simply as “Linux”, with the Free Software Foundation claiming that referring to the operating system merely as Linux gives undue credit to the kernel, without proper attribution to the GNU tools that make up the majority of the OS. Personally, I find the debate to be a waste of time. It is unlikely that anyone outside of a very small group of dedicated loyalists will care about the distinction. However, it does bring up a more interesting point, what about going a layer higher? What happens when distributions stop referring to themselves as Linux derivatives, come to market only under their name?

Desktop

• Chromebook Pixel: Spoiling me for other Chromebooks

  I have been using a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook since picking it up last year. The Samsung is a great laptop that happens to run Chrome OS, something that works very well for me. I like everything about the Samsung. Then Google sent me a Chromebook Pixel and spoiled me.

  The Series 5 550 Chromebook works very well for me. It runs Chrome OS nicely and is a super work machine that meets my needs. There is not really anything I don’t like about the Samsung, but it’s no longer enough.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Another OpenGL 4 Feature For Mesa Is Published

    Earlier this morning I wrote about Chris Forbes committing texture storage multi-sample support to mainline Mesa and the Intel DRI driver. This OpenGL 4.x extension is now accompanied by a new “RFC” patch-set for providing Mesa support for another GL4 feature.

    Chris Forbes’ newly-published patches on Sunday morning are for ARB_texture_gather, a feature mandated by OpenGL 4.0 and previously not tackled within the Mesa/Gallium3D world.

  • “Substantial Progress” With Mesa Geometry Shaders

    Open-source Intel developers have advanced their OpenGL geometry shaders work for Mesa, namely for the Intel DRI driver, and call it “substantial progress and definitely a reason to celebrate.” This important GL3 feature is nearing a working state but there’s still some work ahead before it will be merged.

  • LLVM 3.3 Picks Up More Support For Intel AVX2

    Beyond LLVM 3.3 having performance optimizations, one of many other features coming to this next compiler infrastructure update is greater support for Intel’s AVX2 instruction set extensions.

    AVX2 is the first major update to the Advanced Vector Extensions. AVX2 is also known as “Haswell New Instructions” and will be found in the Intel Haswell CPUs introduced in the coming months. AVX2 tacks in gather support, expands most integer AVX instructions to 256-bits, 3-operand FMA support, vector shifts, and other new functionality.

  • An OpenGL 4.x Feature Gets Crossed Off In Mesa

    Support for the OpenGL ARB_texture_storage_multisample extension is now implemented within Mesa and is exposed by the Intel DRI driver.

• Benchmarks

  • Ivy Bridge Doesn’t Change Much With Modern Kernels

    For those wondering whether Intel “Ivy Bridge” hardware is still being made faster with each succeeding Linux kernel release, here are benchmarks from an Intel Ultrabook looking at the Ivy Bridge performance on recent kernel releases going up to the yet-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel.

    A few days back I carried out a Linux kernel performance comparison from an ASUS Ultrabook with Intel Core i3 3217U “Ivy Bridge” processor with 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hitachi HDD, and 24GB SanDisk SSD. Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64 was in use while the Linux 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 (Git) mainline/vanilla kernels were tested.

Applications

• New features in Cairo-Dock 3.2

• Instructionals/Technical

  • All About inodes, Hard Links and Soft Links

  • How to change directory and transfer files to USB with the command line

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.5.27 is now available.

• Games

  • A Thought on What Holds Linux Gaming Back

    All the talk nowadays if of “unification” or to paraphrase Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu the “availability of a single interface for all devices.” And with all this talk I began to wonder why more gaming engine’s aren’t jumping on board.

    The recent release of Unity3d 4 was all the rage because it meant that an incredibly popular engine was coming to Linux, and thus all unity3d games developed with the new engine could in fact run on Linux (granted a Linux version was released). In my personal opinion, Unity3d is great, but when compared to the more AAA engines like the Unreal, FrostBite and CDProjectRed’s RED Engine just to name a few, Unity3d falls a bit flat in my eyes.

  • Half-Life 4 added to the SteamDB for Linux!

    That’s right, you heard it here first folks, Half-Life 4 has been added to the SteamDB! It includes hints of others things too.

  • Two from icculus now on Steam: Dungeon Defenders & Postal

  • New Racing Game for Linux

  • Serious Sam 3: BFE for Linux Gets Biggest Patch Since Launch

    Serious Sam 3: BFE is a very serious first-person shooter, as the name suggests, and it has just received a major update that greatly improves its performance.

    The Croteam studio has been hard at work and it is trying its best to make Serious Sam 3: BFE one of the best shooters for Linux.

    The latest update for the game has been promoted from the Beta to stable. It’s probably one of the largest patches launched so far and the number of Linux related fixes and improvements is quite impressive.

  • Humble Troubles Again, more platform specific bundles

    They have also just launched their Mobile Bundles which are for Android only, so no Windows, Mac or Linux (I know, I know Android is part Linux that’s an argument for another day) versions, which makes me wonder just how the Windows crowd feels since they have been left out this time, too.

  • Mir, ARM & Valve Excite Linux Users This Month

    March 2013 was another interesting month for Linux users. The Mir Display Server, ARM on Linux advancements, and Valve’s continued Linux game play continued to excite readers.

    This month on Phoronix at the time of publishing there were 242 original news articles and 11 multi-page featured articles. The number of news postings and articles is down from February when there was FOSDEM plus advertising campaigns on the site were more lucrative… Phoronix.com is almost entirely ad-driven so please view this site without AdBlock or other cruft. And/or please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing as well as viewing multi-page articles on a single-page.

  • Valve Announces Half-Life 4 For Linux

    Valve has added Half-Life 4 to Steam and it will be a title for Linux without mentioning OS X or Windows support.

    As can be seen from SteamDB, Half-Life 4 was added today to Steam, well ahead of the Half-Life 3 debut. The Half-Life 4 entry also hints at binary support for the Steam Box, Valve’s forthcoming console. The Half-Life 4 entry also notes use of “Source Engine 2″ for the game.

  • Valve Releases Several New Linux Game Ports

  • There Isn’t Too Much Progress On Unigine Linux Titles

    For those that have followed Phoronix over the years know that I am a big supporter of the Unigine game/3D engine. The engine delivers absolutely beautiful graphics and there is first-rate Linux support. The developers at Unigine Corp are very Linux-friendly. Unfortunately, games and other software based upon Unigine aren’t too quick to come to the Linux gaming scene.

  • Valve Has Been Working Hard On Linux For One Year

    Today marks one year since an important milestone in the public history of Valve’s Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Bodhi Linux 2.3.0 Released

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 3 beta 4 is waiting for your tests

    After all the delays in our Mageia 3 planning, we’re very pleased to be able to announce the beta 4 release.

  • Mageia 3 beta 4

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s fourth-quarter sales dropped

    Despite the growth of Linux adoption in enterprise and business use, Red Hat, the large company that sells Linux operating-system software fell after reporting fiscal fourth-quarter sales that missed estimates as some customers stopped purchasing, due to the current global economic situation.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 19 Readies AMD “RadeonSI” Driver

      Fedora 19 will be one of the first desktop Linux distributions shipping with accelerated Radeon HD 7000 series graphics support.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Smart Scopes Get Removed From Ubuntu 13.04

        It’s been decided at the last minute that “smart scopes”, a feature of the new Unity desktop, will not ship in Ubuntu 13.04.

        Smart Scopes were supposed to be an intelligent server-side service for deciding if a search query should be pushed through a particular scope, among other benefits. Smart scopes were said to be self-learning and aimed to provide more relevant results for users of the Unity desktop.

      • Ubuntu 13.04 will disable Dash online search by default: Mark Shuttleworth

        Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has finally listened to critics and EFF and said that the much controversial online search feature of Dash will be disabled by default in Ubuntu 13.04, which will be released later this month. Canonical was working closely with EFF, FSF and the EU privacy advisors and found it in best interest of its users.

        “Users are our #1 priority and not our business interests,” said Shuttleworth in a statement, “the foundation of Ubuntu is people and if some decisions were made which put user’s privacy at risk, that would be very un-Ubuntu. We never shied away from trying out new things and we never hesitated in changing a decision for a greater good.”

      • User Interaction with Ubuntu Components

      • Ubuntu Powered Promo Booth? You Bet [Ubuntu In The Wild]

        Every day we walk past and interact with machines that run Linux, without ever noticing.

      • Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) server, 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) desktop and 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) reaching End of Life on May 9 2013

      • End of life for three Ubuntu editions on 9 May

      • Monitor ‘Zeitgeist’ Logging Activities in Ubuntu using ‘Zeitgeist Explorer’

        ‘Zeitgeist‘ is a computer based user activity logging framework for the GNU/Linux operating system that keeps a track of your frequently opened files (text, audio, videos etc), visited web links, conversations that you had with others (through ‘Chat’ apps) etc.

        The database is a semantic one and so it makes it easy to identify patters, thus improves the ability to predict user activities. And since this database can be accessed by other applications (if they support ‘Zeitgeist’), they can predict or guess the user’s needs more accurately and thus improving the user experience.

      • Experimental Compiz, Unity Work Continues

        While the future is with Mir and Unity Next, work on the short-term includes more performance optimizations for the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager.

        While Sam Spilsbury no longer works at Canonical and has some dissenting views over the future direction of Ubuntu Linux, he has dabbled with some performance optimizations recently for Compiz/Nux.

      • issue 71

      • Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Meet Sweetbox, sweet case for your Raspberry Pi

  To protect the naked Raspberry Pi and cool it when overclocked, SweetBox is a great choice for you. SweetBox is a product by Graspinghand, a group of young designers from France. And the group is having a campaign on Kickstarter to raise fund for the project.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Android Open Source: Creating New Market Competition Samsung Galaxy S4

    • Facebook on the verge of announcing HTC smartphone?

      A cryptic media invite to see the social network’s “Home on Android” gets the rumor mill running anew about an upcoming Facebook phone.

  • Android

    • Facebook Preparing More Visible Embrace of Android

      Facebook is moving to take a more prominent place on smartphones.

      The social network has been developing new software for mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system that displays content from users’ Facebook accounts on a smartphone’s home screen–the first screen visible when they turn on the device, people familiar with the situation said. Facebook will initially demonstrate the capability on smartphones from HTC, these people said, but has been working to reach similar arrangements with other device makers.

    • As the Ouya ships to backers, can a $99 console bring players and developers together?

    • Best Android tablets (April 2013 edition)

      Don’t want to give your money to Apple in exchange for an iPad or iPad mini? No problem! Here are my top 5 Android tablets for April 2013.

The Biggest Failure in Open Source Is…

I have been a self-employed technical person for the past 38 years. I my living based solely on my output. Since 1998 a major secret weapon has been the use of SR. Certainly, you can get speech recognition from the Debian pool. While some good folks over in Japan have made some major advancements over the years, it is still a toy. This is inherent in the complexity of speech recognition software.

In 1998 IBM had a Linux version of SR known as ViaVoice. It worked about as well as any other SR offering of the day. IBM dropped the product. At a conference I asked an IBM executive, Why? The answer was: “We did not get enough gross revenue to cover the cost of the box manufacturing to put the CD in it.”

In my experience the Open Source community is its own worst enemy. Putting on the rose-colored glasses, and disappointing those who just want to ‘get something done’. Let’s look at a real world example.

Events

• LibrePlanet:Conference/2013

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Tricked Out

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Firefox gets Unreal Engine 3 support – video

    The software firm has teamed up with Epic Games to bolster the browser’s gaming capabilities and bring some of the latest titles to the platform.

Funding

• U.S. Defense Agency Feeds Python

  The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given 3 million dollars to Texas-based software provider Continuum Analytics with a view to helping fund the improvement of the Python language’s data processing and visualization power for big data tasks.

BSD

• DragonFlyBSD 3.4 Coming Soon, Focuses On DPorts

  The DragonFlyBSD 3.4 release is anticipated for release in mid-April and one of the features to this next BSD operating system update is the formation of DPorts, a derivative of the FreeBSD ports collection.

  DPorts is DragonFly’s derivative of FreeBSD Ports and will ultimately replace pkgsrc and the other pkg_* tools on the operating system. These older tools also reached an end-of-life state on FreeBSD.

Project Releases

• Polkit Explorer v1.0 Released

Licensing

• Russians Selectively Blocking Internet

  The Russian government in recent weeks has been making use of a new law that gives it the power to block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children.

Openness/Sharing

• Will Ford’s open-source car API drive us to distraction?

  That’s perhaps why it wasn’t all that surprising that Ford’s EVP of Global Marketing, James Farley, didn’t use his keynote address at the opening day of the New York International Auto Show to announce some line extension or new braking system, but rather to introduce a mobile app competition.

• Urban activists hack their way toward open government

  OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to “help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web.” Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post’s description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”

• Open Access/Content

  • Entire library journal editorial board resigns, citing ‘crisis of conscience’ after death of Aaron Swartz

    In a dramatic show of support for the open access movement, the editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week. In a letter to contributors, the board singled out a conflict with owners over the journal’s licensing terms, which stripped authors of almost all claim to ownership of their work.

Standards/Consortia

• Making WebRTC Simple with conversat.io

  WebRTC is awesome, but it’s a bit unapproachable. Last week, my colleagues and I at &yet released a couple of tools we hope will help make it more tinkerable and pose a real risk of actually being useful.

The Washington Post’s “What if Google Were Evil” Idiocy

To watch the accelerating fall from grace of the once venerable Washington Post is perhaps to view traditional journalism’s quandary in a nutshell.

First, their ombudsman suggested it was unlikely that the Post would implement a paywall, for a variety of sound reasons.

Then the Post fired their ombudsman. Then they announced the availability of notorious “sponsored posts” throughout their pages.

And it’s been ever more rapidly downhill for the Post from there, with their now giving credence to serial Google hater Robert Epstein’s rambli

Chinese Couple, Wu Conghan And Wu Sognshi, Pose For Wedding Photos 88 Years After Marrying (PHOTOS)

Page Layout in the Era of Electronic Publishing

The basic design of modern word processors has its roots in the WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) revolution of the 1980s, which became possible with the introduction of the graphical user interface. Whereas people once had to use a text editor to enter markup by hand, and never really knew what their document was going to look like to readers until they printed it, WYSIWYG provided an accurate on-screen depiction of how the final print output would appear.

Alan Kay, godfather of mobile computing, bashes the iPad

Somewhere Steve Jobs isn’t smiling. Computer pioneer Alan Kay, a former Apple Fellow back in the ’80s, had some harsh things to say about the iPad and tablets in general tonight at a Silicon Valley event.

Health/Nutrition

• NHS reforms: From today the Coalition has put the NHS up for grabs

  Under the Coalition’s reforms, the NHS’s former strengths are being replaced by a fragmented service, bound not by what is best for the patient but by cost

Security

• Securing a Linux Web Server

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The message sent by America’s invisible victims

  As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression

• North Carolina’s Poorly Worded Drone Killing Privacy Bill

  A bill introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly will practically ground all future drone use in the state if it is not rewritten. The bill proposes to “regulate the use of drones to conduct searches” and is already being praised by the ACLU of North Carolina as an “opportunity to place strong safeguards and regulations on the use of drones . . . .” The bill, however, doesn’t regulate the use of drones so much as it buries their operation in ambiguities and contradictory constraints.

• Boeing Helps Kill Proposed Law to Regulate Drones

  Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.

• Wait, Did the System Just Work?

  Brennan had masterminded the program, from creating the bureaucratic processes determining which agency did what, right down to naming names for the kill list. In his new job, Brennan would have enormous sway over the CIA’s future activities, including lethal drone strikes.

  [...]

  But if the drone debate is any guide, the public part counts. A lot.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks set to unveil ‘Project K’

• WikiLeaks announces mysterious ‘Project K’

  WikiLeaks has announced a press conference scheduled for April 8, generating speculation about a possible release of a new stash of classified material or a project somehow connected to Assange’s political party in Australia.

• Zimbabwe: Wikileaks Return to Haunt Zanu-PF

  THE bare-knuckle infighting within Zanu PF has reached new heights, with WikiLeaks being resuscitated as party members try to discredit each other ahead of the party’s primary elections expected next month.

• Assange’s WikiLeaks Party opens for membership in Australia

• Wikileaks launches political party in Australia

• Assange: WikiLeaks Party opens for membership in Australia

  It is now official. WikiLeaks announced on Twitter on Saturday that Julian Assange’s new Australian political party is open for membership.

  Digital Journal reported back in January 2013 that Assange is planning to run for the Australian Senate in September this year and that he was founding the new WikiLeaks party.
  However, in order to officially register with the Australian Electoral Commission, the WikiLeaks Party must enlist 500 members.

• Ecuador in talks with UK’s Labour over Assange Sweden extradition

  The Ecuadorian government has held talks with the British Labour party to try to strike a deal to send Assange to Sweden to end the political impasse, which has seen the Australian whistleblower holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy since claiming asylum in June last year.

• Assange May Not be Able to Leave Britain Before 2015

  LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London since last June, is unlikely to be able to leave Britain before 2015 and his hosts are now hoping for a future Labour government to help break the impasse, a media report said.

• Ecuador ‘in talks’ with Labour over Julian Assange

• Hammond, Brown, Swartz, Assange, Manning: information warriors of the digital wasteland

  Information warfare is the 21st Century equivalent of class warfare, with people like Aaron Swartz (threatened with decades of imprisonment, then bullied by prosecutors into taking his own life), Barrett Brown (imprisoned, awaiting trial and threatened with life imprisonment), Jeremy Hammond (same), Julian Assange (under investigation by Grand Jury) and Bradley Manning (facing life sentence in upcoming trial) as its most notable victims whom the US Government has decided to make an example of so as to deter others from following suit.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 1,000 Dead Ducks Found In China’s Nanhe River; Pig Carcass Count Continues To Rise

  Chinese authorities have a new mystery to ponder after 1,000 duck carcases were found floating down the Nanhe river in the country’s Sichuan province on Tuesday.

Finance

• Why Are Big Banks Going To War With A Federal Judge?

  The nation’s largest banks have devised a novel way to protect their interests and save themselves from hundreds of billions of dollars in legal exposure. They’re taking a judge to court.

• Why Are Big Banks Going To War With A Federal Judge?

  Lawyers for 17 banks submitted an unusual filing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this week (just listing all the corporate lawyers involved takes up the first four pages). The banks – including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – stand accused of ripping off the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie and Freddie’s conservator, alleges that these banks improperly sold $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities without disclosing the shoddy underwriting of the underlying loans. FHFA argues the banks knew the loans in the securities were bad, yet sold them to Fannie and Freddie anyway, leading to massive losses and the need for a government bailout. So FHFA wants the banks to buy back the securities they improperly sold under false pretenses.

• Paying the Costs of Iraq, for Decades to Come

  A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war’s total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

• The Truth About Profits (blog)

  First, its clear that profits as a percentage of total US GDP have recovered from the crash of 2008. Unemployment may still be over 50% higher than it was in 2007, and real wages may be below what they were then, and the benefits and security of jobs may have fallen, but profits have come back. And with them the stock markets. Hence also the upbeat talk about “recovery” yet again.

• Why Expensify Endorsing Bitcoin Is A Really Big Deal: Social Virality

  Yesterday, news broke that the Expensify service has enabled bitcoin payments. With the rapidly expanding number of businesses accepting bitcoin as payment method, one could think that this was merely another player in the pool of bitcoin’s expanding economy (which just broke the one-billion-USD barrier, by the way). But Expensify is something much more than that.

• Depositor Haircuts Spreading

  A previous article called them the new normal. Bad ideas spread fast. Canada endorses Cypriot harshness. Its “Jobs Growth and Long-Term Prosperity: Economic Action Plan 2013″ says so.

Civil Rights

• Lords mistaken in their calls for Ofcom Internet regulation

  The Lords often make very helpful contributions to legislative debates, but this really isn’t one of them. There are huge amounts of regulation constraining Internet providers, from eCommerce to copyright, that cover the necessary ground already.

• Why It’s Important For Each Of Us To Explain And Keep Explaining The Net And Its Civil Liberties

• ‘Prison officials essentially retaliating against Gitmo inmates’

• Shane Trejo: County wrong on NDAA detention

  In fact, last summer U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest granted a permanent injunction, ruling detention provisions written into the NDAA overbroad and unconstitutional.

• MN for Marriage now “regrets” Nazi language on partner website

  The issue came to light yesterday when Minnesotans United for All Families, which is pushing to legalize same-sex marriage, criticized the group for linking same-sex marriage efforts to propaganda in Nazi Germany. The initial language was posted on the website Pastors for Marriage, which is working with Minnesota for Marriage to ban same-sex marriage. The website (which has been changed since the controversy surfaced on Thursday) included a message from Minnesota for Marriage Chair John Helmberger (who is also CEO of the Minnesota Family Council).

• Ex-CIA Pot Raid: Former Intelligence Employees Who Garden Indoors Claim Kansas Home Was Searched Illegally, Under Illegal Surveillance For Months

• Former CIA agents say Johnson County Sheriff’s Office searched home illegally

  Two former CIA employees whose suburban Kansas City home was unsuccessfully searched for marijuana claim they were illegally targeted, possibly because they had purchased indoor growing supplies to raise vegetables.

• Futile pot raid spurs lawsuit

• Ex-CIA agents sue Kansas police who raided their suburban home for drugs… after they bought special equipment to grow vegetables indoors

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • MPAA Chairman Former Senator Chris Dodd Joins Pirate Party, Announces 2016 Presidential Bid

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Software Company Anahata To Use InSync For Google Drive Sync on Linux

On Friday 24th of March, Pablo Rodriguez Pina, founder and co-director of the Perth (Western Australia) based software company announced the company will be InSync to sync Google Drive folders on PCs running any Linux distros.

The World IS Changing…Ask Robots

Today, I read how the United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor, started a migration from Windows to Linux here. The article includes this interesting comment by Keith Chuvala:

“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.”

My last comment on “Linux” vs “GNU/Linux”

On Linux Advocates, Katherine Noyes recently raised the old question of whether the operating system should be called Linux or GNU/Linux. It’s a topic I don’t think much about these days, although I’ve had some unusual perspectives on it over the years.

You probably know the argument: given that the operating system was originally the result of cooperation between Linux kernel developers and the members of The GNU Project, both should be given credit in the name. True, countless other projects are involved, but the reference is to the core operating system, and to mention one without the other is to write the excluded founding organization out of history. Or so free software supporters maintain, especially Richard Stallman, who has sometimes refused to be interviewed without a promise that GNU/Linux be used.

Over the years, I’ve flip-flopped on the point several times. When I was a product manager and marketing director, I favored “Linux” simply because it was shorter and less clumsy-looking than “GNU/Linux,” and therefore made for better copy.

However, as I became more involved in the community, I started having second thoughts. It wasn’t just that Stallman has a point — and Stallman, for all that he gets tiresome repeating the same ideas over and over, has an understanding of the implications of language that few of his critics can match.

Rather, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the projects I admired most, such as Debian, used “GNU/Linux”. The more I thought, the more I realized that I was a free software supporter, so using “GNU/Linux” seemed the logical thing for me to do. If nothing else, it immediately served notice about where I stood in relation to free software and open source. I was never pedantic about its use, and I never went around correcting anyone, either in person or indirectly as I transcribed an interview, but otherwise I always used “GNU/Linux” where I could.

Is Bing biased against Ubuntu?

As many of you know, part of my popularity analysis of GNU/Linux distributions includes search engine results. One thing I immediately noticed when I started analyzing the data was how fewer results Bing has compared to Google specifically for the term “Ubuntu Linux”. At first, I thought that perhaps Bing simply hasn’t indexed as much as Google and it will catch up. But over several ranking periods now, Bing is still, in my opinion, unusually low in “Ubuntu Linux” results.

Say Hi to J065514.3+540858

For the last couple of years, I have been working on building a 5 meter radio telescope for educational purposes in my free time. Its primary purpose is to map neutral hydrogen distribution in the milky way. Hydrogen, the simplest atom, shines at the radio frequency of 1.42 Ghz (or 21 cm line), and we use multistage amplifiers to boost the very weak radio signal to something that can be processed by the electronics of a spectrometer.

Server

• Linux use in enterprises jumps again: survey

  In the next five years 80 percent of organisations plan to increase Linux server use, but only 20 percent plan to purchase Windows servers

• Big Data and Cloud Drive Enterprise Linux Adoption: Report

Audiocasts/Shows

• Episode 189: Currywurst for Beginners

  This is an episode completely in “Beginners Level”, some of you have asked for such a thing. I go through the editing of an image and cover a lot of topics. Nothing really in depth, but you should be able to work your way through other material after viewing this one.

• Linux Outlaws 304 – Hummusgate

• Pinto

Kernel Space

• Production-ready ZFS offers cosmic-scale storage for Linux

  The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use.

  “Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL [ZFS on Linux] is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers,” developer Brian Behlendorf wrote in a mailing list post on Wednesday.

• Linux Kernel 3.8.5 Is Now Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, March 28, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series.

  Linux kernel 3.8.5 comprised lots of updated drivers (USB, Ethernet, i915, Radeon, etc.), filesystem improvements (EXT4, CIFSfs, JBD2, etc.), a couple of ARM fixes for Tegra chips, as well as networking (IPv4 and IPv6) and sound enhancements.

• Graphics Stack

  • Why Wayland & Weston Were Forked

    Last week, Wayland/Weston was forked by a long-time contributor, Scott Moreau. The fork of the Wayland/Weston display server ended up becoming known as Northfield/Norwood, following disagreements within the Wayland development camp. Scott Moreau was ultimately banned from the Wayland mailing list and IRC channel, so he’s written an exclusive, independent article for Phoronix to explain his actions and why he felt a fork of the Wayland display server protocol and the reference Weston compositor were necessary.

Applications

• How’s the Weather?

• weatherspect: Edutainment, I suppose

  I just mentioned asciiquarium yesterday, and I suppose it’s only fair to mention another fun text-based tool from the same author: weatherspect.

• textmaze: Let’s call it a game

• asciiquarium: Cheaper and cleaner than the real thing

• Playing w/ My Conky

  Some friends over at Scot’s Newsletter Forums – Bruno’s All Things Linux got me started playing with Conky the other night.

  I used to be a Gkrellm fan until transparency failed to display properly a while back. I didn’t feel like messing around with feh and lib workarounds, so I just quit using it. Sad. It was a wonderful system monitor app, too.

• Empower Linux Command Line With Screen Capturing Capability Through Scrot

• So you think Claws Mail is ugly and lacks features? Think again.

• 7 More Top eCommerce Software

• Proprietary

  • Netflix: Still no plans for Linux support

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Writing and reading code

  • Setup Mail Server in minutes using iRedMail in Ubuntu 12.10 / Debian 6

  • How to dual-boot Windows 8 and Linux

  • Converting ext3 to ext4 filesystem

  • Learn Raspberry Pi with Linux

  • HOWTO : Pentoo 2013.0 RC1.1 on ASUS Sabertooth X79

  • How to use anacrontab to schedule tasks

  • CentOS Post Mortem & Analysis

  • Remote Control your DSLR with Linux and Android

    Beside being a linux fan, I’m also a long time amateur photographer, since the time of film and fully manual SLR, yes, I’m used to camera controls and manual focus….

• Games

  • Starsector space combat sim gets a new trailer!

    Starsector (originally Starfarer) is a space combat sim I have been following for a long time now, it is constantly evolving and becoming more awesome, it has everything a decent space combat sim needs…including a new trailer to show it off!

  • Knights of Pen and Paper +1 heading to Linux shortly

  • Double Fine And 90,000 Friends Present A Teaser For Broken Age

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Linus Torvalds’ Subsurface planning to switch to Qt

    Subsurface, the dive-tracking program written by none other than Linus Torvalds, is considering moving to Qt.

  • Distillation

    Wow, things got crazy with my two previous posts about KDE’s Git corruption troubles.

    Unfortunately, what became obvious from the comments on this blog (and, I assume, elsewhere, although I didn’t read comments on any other sites) was that the essential message was, almost universally, completely lost. I wrote the original post because KDE is an open-source project and we’ve never been about hiding issues from the community at large, so I felt it was perfectly fair to be open and honest about the troubles we had, in the hopes that it could help other projects from encountering them. Rather than take something useful away from it, most people seemed to take the Gawker approach. That’s fine, and I take no offense from people shooting the messenger when it’s clear they didn’t actually read past the headlines, but the point was to make people – especially other open-source projects – think about their own systems and their procedures. If I helped one other project avoid data loss because they reexamined their own systems, then great.

  • Kolab: David and Goliath

    Groupware is a tough domain to break into. With competition from giants the likes of Lotus Notes and Exchange, how can an open source offering, like Kolab, ever hope to compete?

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Nautilus Tips and Tweaks,openSUSE 12.3, GNOME 3.6

    Nautilus has undergone massive changes in recent versions and it is going to be a challenge figuring out a few things. The following long winded article would be useful in figuring out various “Hidden” functionalities of Nautilus. But before doing anything, do Configure Community Repositories openSUSE 12.3

  • GNOME 3.8 Released

  • Indexing preferences in GNOME 3.8

    GNOME 3 is not quite famous about the plethora of options that gives to users to tweaking their system. However anyone with a good will won’t face many issues.

    In this part I spend a few minutes discovering the options for customizing the behavior of Tracker, the searching and indexing tool of GNOME.

  • Snappy, a cool media player with a Clutter interface

    Snappy is a media player that gathers the power and flexibility of GStreamer inside the comfort of a Clutter interface.

    It has recently become a GNOME Project, with all the important points that that means (code, bugs, mailing lists inside the gnome project).

  • GNOME 3.8 brings polish and new Classic Mode

    With GNOME 3.8, the developers of the GNOME Project have released the latest version of their open source desktop environment for Linux and Unix systems. The release brings a number of major new features, such as the new Clocks application, enhanced search functionality, new privacy settings and a number of design changes throughout the desktop environment. The redesign of the Activities and Applications interface is supposed to make finding the right application easier and the Settings application has gained four new configuration panels.

Distributions

• YUM vs. APT: Which is Best?

  Nothing stirs more debate with fellow Linux enthusiasts than their package manager.

  It’s a passionately contested issue. Which is better, YUM or APT?

  You’ll be surprised at the answers and it’s really interesting to see what people think of each.

• What is going on for Kali Linux (Full Version)?

  Kali Linux is only a collection of pentesting tools Linux distribution. All the pentesting tools can be obtained free of charge from the internet as those are freeware or open source software.

  The development team of Kali Linux do not accept any voice from their users about their weakness of their product. For example, when telling them about the Kali Linux rebuild bugs, they always stating that they have built a lot of copies and they found no problem. Later, one of the developer fixed and it can be compiled correctly. You can refer to the following bug report for details.

• Kali Linux ISO: Build a custom KDE image

• Multiboot Linux distributions from one USB key

• New Releases

  • ALT 6.9.0-20130328

  • GParted 0.15.0-3

  • Pardus 2013 Is Here!

  • Review: Pardus 2013 KDE

    Pardus is a distribution developed at least in part by the Turkish military. It used to not be based on any other distribution and used its unique PISI package management system, which featured delta upgrades (meaning that only the differences between package versions would be applied for upgrades, greatly reducing their size). Since then, though, the organization largely responsible for the development of Pardus went through some troubles. One result was the forking of Pardus into PISI Linux to further develop the original alpha release of Pardus 2013. The other result was the rebasing of Pardus on Debian, abandoning PISI in that regard. Now Pardus 2013 is a distribution based on Debian 7 “Wheezy” that uses either KDE 4.8 or GNOME 3 (whatever version is packaged in the latest version of Debian, though I’m not sure what that is).

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Earnings Said Not As Bad As First Seemed

  • Why Did Wall Street Let Red Hat Off the Hook?

  • Red Hat CEO: Employees ‘Often Call Me An Idiot To My Face’

• Debian Family

  • Return to Root: How to Get Started With Debian

    Ubuntu, Mint, and other glamorous Debian derivatives get all the attention. So why not go to the source and try Debian itself?

    Debian is currently the most influential Linux distribution. It has inspired the popular derivatives Ubuntu and Knoppix, and their derivatives including Mint, Kubuntu, Dream Studio, Bodhi, Mepis, Damn Small Linux, and Mythbuntu. (See the Linux family tree on Wikipedia.) Debian is volunteer-driven, includes more packages than any other distribution, supports more hardware architectures, supports multiple kernels (Linux, FreeBSD, and GNU Hurd) and is 100% Free. It is also free of cost, and the good Debian people came up with a simple, elegant way to meet the needs of users who want to install non-Free software on their Debian systems. They put non-Free packages in separate repositories, so controlling what goes on your system is super easy.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • MapR brings Hadoop support to Ubuntu

        MapR has announced a deal with Canonical to offer Hadoop on the Ubuntu Linux platform.

        Under the partnership agreement, the two firms will work in tandem to develop the MapR Hadoop tools for use with the latest versions of Ubuntu.

      • MapR Puts Hadoop on Ubuntu, Source Code on GitHub

        MapR and Canonical announced a partnership to put the MapR Hadoop distribution on Ubuntu. The company also put its source code on GitHub.

      • Ubuntu brings data science mainstream

        Earlier this week, Canonical and MapR teamed for an announcement that could signal a change in the way we see big data platforms.

        The pair said that the latest versions of Ubuntu would be bringing support for MapR’s Hadoop database management and development platform. Now, Ubuntu users will be able to access data from Hadoop deployments.

      • Smart Scopes Not Landing In 13.04, Will Land in 13.10

        As some of you may know the dash team has been working to get the new smart scopes functionality in the dash ready for 13.04; this functionality delivers a far more comprehensive dash experience, performing searches over 50 or more different data sources. This feature makes the dash dramatically more useful by searching a far wider range of data sources and returning more relevant results.

        The team has been working in a PPA to get the feature ready, and as we are past feature freeze, had filed a Feature Freeze Exception (FFe) to get this into 13.04. After an extensive amount of work to get the feature ready, unfortunately the dash team doesn’t consider it mature enough for 13.04 — it is nearly there, but doesn’t meet the quality needs for Ubuntu. As such the team has decided not to pursue landing in in 13.04 and to instead move it to the Ubuntu 13.10 cycle where it will be developed as soon as the archive opens. As I mentioned earlier, this feature has been developed in a PPA and has not landed in 13.04 yet, so there are no actual changes to the archive.

      • Transforming Ubuntu to Windows: Installing and Customizing Xfce

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River intros Yocto Project Compatible Carrier Grade Linux

• Module snaps 1.6GHz quad-core ARM engine into embedded apps

  Cogent Computer Systems has introduced a high-end member of its computer-on-module family, based on Marvell’s 1.6GHz quad-core, ARMv7-powered “Armada XP” system-on-chip. The SODIMM-style CSB1726 module packs high-speed SATA and Ethernet ports, PCIe expansion, video, and numerous other I/O ports, and is supported with an embedded Linux BSP.

• Power to the Raspberry PI

• SolidRun CuBox Review – A Tiny PC

• Phones

  • Tizen Developer Conference coming soon to San Francisco

    The second annual Tizen Developer Conference will be held May 22-24 in San Francisco. The event targets Tizen OS and app developers, mobile operators, hardware designers, ISVs, and open source enthusiasts.

    The goal of the conference, according to its organizers, is to bring together individuals and businesses who share the goal of developing Tizen as an open platform for use in a wide range of devices ranging from smartphones to in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.

  • Android

    • High reliability embedded database targets Android devices

      ITTIA is now supporting Android-based embedded systems and devices with its lightweight embedded database. ITTIA DB SQL for Android is said to provide advanced data management capabilities, including transactions, scalable indexing, shared access, and runtime SQL queries.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Infotainment systems: The next generation

    The product, which I’ll be more than happy to buy, and the video are cool. And I like stuff with a high coolness factor. The company also makes a tablet called Parrot ASTEROID Tablet.

Snort Founder Still Supports Open Source Security [VIDEO]

In 1998 Martin Roesch launched the open source Snort Intrustion Prevention System (IPS). Three years later, he founded Sourcefire to lead the commercial efforts around Snort and enterprise security. Today Sourcefire continues to prosper, reporting $223.1 million in fiscal 2012 earnings.

Where does that leave the open source Snort project after all these years?

Killer open source admin tools

Events

• Celebrate LibrePlanet 2013 with this commemorative shirt!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Unreal gaming from within the browser

    Having recently introduced asm.js as a way of running C/C++ applications using a highly optimisable subset of JavaScript, Mozilla has joined Epic Games to present the technology being applied to a well-known platform at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. A port of the Unreal Engine 3 game engine to JavaScript allows games to be played in the browser without a Flash plug-in. The port only uses HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript technologies, and asm.js ensures that the games are almost fast enough to meet the performance levels of native implementations.

Databases

• ArchLinux Decided to Move to 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. BothFedora (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.And finally Archlinux is following the Opensource World. :

  Bellow is Archlinux MalingList:

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Migration Needs A Plan

  Have you ever thought of migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? You don’t switch just to save on license fees; think that way and the differences in the replacement package – which can never be a drop-in replacement – will kill your migration like they did Freiburg’s.

• TDF releases White Paper to help migrations to LibreOffice

• MailMerge on OpenOffice and LibreOffice

Project Releases

• GNU gcal 3.6.3 released

• GNU Barcode 0.99 released

Licensing

• Using Open Source Software? Put a License On It

  So it was with interest that we came across this article by Simon Phipps, well known for his activities in the open source arena and his experience with open source licenses. Basically his argument revolved around the fact that most code in GitHub does not have a specific license. Moreover, there is a movement that believes “software licenses are outdated” and encourages code forking without considering the original end-result licensing aspects. Although GitHub is singled out here, the behavior is not unique to GitHub. Sourceforge has a good number of project pages with no license listing or just a mention of an “approved OSI License” against the project. Although, in all fairness, and according to our own Global IP Signatures database, GitHub is probably the biggest source of unlicensed projects.

• OSI Licensing – a year in review

Openness/Sharing

• 3D Printing Slashes Optics Lab Costs

• Open Access/Content

  • DOJ, MIT, JSTOR Seek Anonymity In Swartz Case

  • The Case for Open Access.

    A large proportion of academic research in the UK is taxpayer-funded. The money comes either via grants from the Research Councils, on which the government spends approximately £3 billion each year, or directly to universities from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which in 2011-12 distributed £1.6 billion.

    The transformative potential of world-class research is pretty clear. In the last few years alone, UK researchers have developed the wonder material graphene and discovered the body of Richard III, among other things. Yet, in a curious and inequitable twist of fate, the results of this research have for the most part never been made available to the taxpayers who funded it. Instead, research findings are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals run by private publishing companies. In the modern era, these largely take the form of PDFs behind pay-walls, tantalisingly close and yet inaccessible to those who aren’t willing to fork out $40 per view. Universities and libraries, meanwhile, can buy back-breakingly expensive subscriptions to this content. The net result of all this is that research findings are available only to the wealthy and to research institutions themselves, and even then only at great cost.

Science

• Biological Computer: Stanford Researchers Discover Genetic Transistors That Turn Cells Into Computers

  Researchers at Stanford University announced this week that they’ve created genetic receptors that can act as a sort of “biological computer,” potentially revolutionizing how diseases are treated.

  In a paper published in the journal “Science” on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.

Health/Nutrition

• 16,000 Dead Pigs In The Huangpu: Can You Still Drink Shanghai’s Water?

• Number of dead pigs found in Chinese rivers rises to 16,000

  The government in China’s financial hub said 10,570 carcasses had been pulled from its Huangpu river. That is in addition to 5,528 pigs plucked from upstream tributaries in the Jiaxing area of Zhejiang province.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Incredible North Atlantic storm spans Atlantic Ocean, coast to coast

  The storm shown here stretches west to east from Newfoundland to Portugal. Its southern tail (cold front) extends into the Caribbean and the north side of its comma head touches southern Greenland.

• Bee Deaths From Colony Collapse Disorder On The Rise As Researchers Point To Pesticides

  Honeybee deaths are on the rise across the world, and researchers are working to find the cause. With as many as 40 or 50 percent of commercial U.S. bee hives lost to colony collapse disorder, according to the New York Times, scientists are eyeing a relatively new class of pesticides as a likely culprit.

• Massive Spill from Train Derailment in MN Confirmed as Carrying Toxic Tar Sands

• Hundreds of Mayflower residents demanding answers after major oil spill

  One day after a major oil spill Mayflower residents are demanding answers.

  Hundreds of residents showed up at a press conference Saturday afternoon asking questions that local and Exxon officials struggled to answer.

  Mayflower residents filled up the cafeteria seats at Mayflower High School hoping to get an explanation that never came. Dozens of homeowners are staying in with residents and local hotels waiting until the oil mess is cleaned up. The problem is that many were initially told that it would only take a couple of days. Saturday they heard at least a week.

Finance

• Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World

  Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un. The class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise. The far-reaching power of globalization, linking the most remote corners of the planet in lucrative bonds of finance, outsourcing and “borderless” manufacturing, offered everybody from Silicon Valley tech gurus to Chinese farm girls ample opportunities to get rich. Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. Capitalism appeared to be fulfilling its promise — to uplift everyone to new heights of wealth and welfare.

• Death Of The Small Eurobusiness, In A Bank Screenshot

  With banks opening on Cyprus, many entrepreneurs realized they had been wrecked overnight by their government’s dishonesty. The so-called bank bailout was in reality a death sentence for many small businesses, who saw their operating capital confiscated to save the government’s face. This move will create an inevitable uncertainty throughout the Eurozone: who will dare put their operating capital in a bank in a troubled country, when politicians keep saying everything is fine – until one day, the money is just gone?

• ‘Grillo’ top problem for EU, says Goldman Sachs president

  The biggest problem currently facing the European Union (EU) is not the struggling economy of Cyprus but the “Grillo factor” in Italy, Jim O’Neill, president of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, told Bloomberg TV on Friday. “I don’t understand how some of the these tough guys in the north are not thinking about that issue,” said O’Neill in reference to the political ascent of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) led by Genoa comic Beppe Grillo, which took over 25% of the popular vote in recent general elections.

• Bitcoin Hits $1 Billion

  Bitcoin, the world’s first open source cryptographic currency, which has been on a tear since the beginning of this year, set a new record for itself yesterday afternoon as the price listed on the largest online exchange rose past US $92. With nearly 11 million Bitcoins in circulation*, this sets the total worth of the currency just over one billion dollars.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Gorgeous, Strange and Intense Propaganda Posters from China in the 1950s

• How a cyberwar was spun by shoddy journalism

  A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: “It’s not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for news, but what you don’t print.”

  He wasn’t talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The professionalism of the craft isn’t simply learning to write or broadcast what other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and challenge, and checking out stories you’ve discovered through your own curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.

Censorship

• Opinion: Libel Reform, And Why It Matters To Britain

  The risk of libel reform failing is not one that any Briton should find acceptable. The damage our libel laws have caused over the decades is immeasurable, and has only increased since the advent of the internet.

  Now the vastly overdue libel measures that would bring the UK out of the 19th Century, and into at least the 20th Century, are on hold and may falter, due to the intervention of Lord Puttnam, and his inclusion of statutory regulation of the press in the bill.

  Sure, there could now be a list of examples of Libel tourism, and how stupid it makes Britain look, internationally, but instead how about a real-life libel law situation, and how it restricted and hampered an attempt to participate in government?

Privacy

• The NSA Four: Blowing the Whistle on Corruption Around Boondoggle for Private Intelligence Contractors

  Timothy Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, wrote a major feature story for The Nation this week on the four whistleblowers from the National Security Agency—William Binney, Thomas Drake, William Binney, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe—who Shorrock writes were “falsely accused of leaking in 2007″ and “have endured years of legal harassment for exposing the waste and fraud behind a multibillion-dollar contract for a system called Trailblazer, which was supposed to “revolutionize” the way the NSA produced signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the digital age.”

  The program was “canceled in 2006.” It is now “one of the worst failures in US intelligence history.”Not only that, the failure is now a significant coverup in recent government history, as the Justice Department prosecuted Drake for blowing the whistle on this corruption and the total amount of money spent on privatizing this intelligence collection is still secret.

  Moreover, there was this other cheaper program, ThinThread, that was not a privatization scheme. It had the ability to “analyze trillions of bits of foreign SIGINT flowing over the Internet at warp speed.” It was “small enough to be loaded onto a laptop, and included anonymization software that protected the privacy rights of US persons guaranteed in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).” But, ThinThread was not made generally operational so that Trailblazer wouldn’t have to be scrapped.

  The story goes into much more detail on the ”toxic mix of bid-rigging, cronyism and fraud” of which “senior NSA officials and several of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors” were involved. Interviews with the “NSA Four” offer a glimpse at how the ”Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the government’s fourth-largest contractor, squandered billions of dollars on a vast data-mining scheme that never produced an iota of intelligence.” (Read the full story here.)

Civil Rights

• Jailed for Facebook ‘like’: Palestinians endure Middle-East-wide ‘social media crackdown’

  In the last week, two Palestinians have been sentenced to prison terms for online libel and slander of politicians. Meanwhile, an arrest order has been issued for a popular Egyptian satirist, raising fears of a crackdown on freedom in the region.

• Why Noam Chomsky Is the Subject of Relentless Attacks by Corporate Media and Establishment ‘Intellectuals’

  One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, “style” and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed “crazy”, as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in most cases, what is actually “crazy” are the political orthodoxiesthis tactic seeks to shield from challenge).

• IT’S ILLEGAL TO BE A CHILD IN PALESTINE

  We couldn’t help ourselves: The sight of the young, newly released detainee drove us into a paroxysm of laughter. But the laughter quickly morphed into sad embarrassment. The detainee was a boy of 8, in second grade. When we met him this week, on the streets of Hebron, he was on his way to his grandfather’s home. He wore a red sweatshirt emblazoned with an image of Mickey Mouse, and he had a shy smile. His mom had sent him to take something to Grandpa. Eight-year-old Ahmed Abu Rimaileh was not the youngest of the children, schoolbags on their backs, that Israel Defense Forces soldiers took into custody early on Wednesday, last week: His friend, Abdel Rahim, who was arrested with him, is only 7, and in first grade.

• Ahmed Errachidi: ‘We shared one thing in Guantánamo Bay – pain’

  The chef turned author on the five years he spent in Guantánamo Bay – and why his nickname is the General

Internet/Net Neutrality

• IPv6: how and why it enables Internet evolution

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Format 170 On Sale Today – Hack the Web!

Desktop

• The Linux Desktop User Experience

  The other day I wrote The Linux Desktop Mess ~ Linux Advocates and had a few interesting comments.

  Some of the comments were Pavlovian and entirely missed the point of my story, as if I am disregarding open source choice by suggesting standardization.

  Quite the opposite. I cherish choice as much as anyone else.

  The point of the story, missed by some, is that programmers follow standards and protocols all the time, some are elective and some are mandatory.

• Chromebooks Are Number 1

Server

• Cloud platforms pushing Linux adoption

  A survey from the Linux foundation has found that 80 percent of enterprises plan to increase their Linux server deployments over the next five years.

  According to the report, the adoption of the cloud in business circles is a major reason for the planned increases. The Linux Foundation says that increase deployment of Linux is starting to put a dent in Microsoft server sales.

• Greenfield Linux growth is fertile growth area

  The nonprofit Linux Foundation has this week released its 2013 Enterprise End User Report entitled “Linux Adoption: Third Annual Survey of World’s Largest Enterprise Linux Users.”

• The Croods was made with the help of Linux and it took more than 9,100 computing render-years

  The Croods, a 3D computer-animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation, took more than 9,100 computing render-years to generate images from 3-D models. And all the animation workstations and servers were run on Linux.

• Linux adoption still growing

  According to a recent report from the Linux Foundation, Linux adoption for mission-critical deployments and the cloud continues to grow in 2013. The Linux Foundation’s study sees the progeny dominating of Linux over its traditional rivals, Unix and Windows.

• Our New Report: Enterprise Linux Growth Outpaces Windows

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation hails leap in enterprises use of open source OS

  The past two years have already seen significant jumps in corporate Linux usage, but now it looks like that trend is continuing into a third year.

• Leap Motion Support Comes To Linux

  Pre-orders of the Leap Motion controller are expected to ship in mid-May and now the Leap Motion SDK has added in Linux support. The Linux support for the “Leap Linux SDK” is intended for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and newer.

• AMD Works On Linux Power Savings For Future CPUs

  New kernel patches by AMD for the Linux kernel provide “frequency sensitivity feedback” for the powersave bias in cpufreq. This hardware feedback feature is to be introduced on future AMD processors.

• ZFS on Linux is “ready for wide scale deployment”

  Developer Brian Behlendorf has announced the release of version 0.6.1 of the native ZFS on Linux port. After over two years in experimental status, the developers now say the file system “is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers.” The native ZFS on Linux is based on the Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) which emulates underlying features of Solaris in the Linux kernel.

• ZFS hits an important milestone, version 0.6.1 released

  ZFS on Linux is one of the many important open source projects and this project has reached what Brian Behlendorf calls an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release. ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager which was originally designed by Sun Microsystems.

• ZFS On Linux Is Now Set For “Wide Scale Deployment”

• Graphics Stack

  • OpenChrome Provides New VIA X.Org Driver

    The OpenChrome 0.3.2 DDX driver isn’t too exciting for Linux X.Org users but it does bring EXA 2D acceleration fixes where compositing can now be enabled again, TV-Out fixes, fixed memory detection, fixes for X.Org Server 1.14, and various other fixes.

  • Nouveau Gets Support For VRAM Compression

    The independent Nouveau contributor, Christoph Bumiller, posted a set of four patches to the Nouveau mailing list. The first patch introduces support for VRAM compression within the “NVC0″ driver component, which supports the “Fermi” and “Kepler” NVIDIA graphics hardware. This VRAM compression is only applicable to graphics cards with dedicated video memory.

  • Atari, Amiga Improvements For X.org Xfbdev

    A set of 18 patches were published on Wednesday to improve the X.Org’s Xfbdev frame-buffer device X server for old Atari and Amiga hardware.

• Benchmarks

  • Intel Ivy Bridge Optimization Benchmarks On GCC 4.8

    Our latest benchmarks of the new GCC 4.8 compiler involve running through the CPU optimizations for the latest-generation Intel “Ivy Bridge” processors.

    There have already been some Ivy Bridge benchmarks on GCC 4.8 that compared the performance to GCC 4.7 while the benchmarks in this article are to simply provide the public some new reference benchmark values when testing the different -march= compiler optimizations of the new GNU Compiler Collection.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Create a VPN with the Raspberry Pi

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 6.4

  • LibreOffice migration guide

  • Arronax – Nautilus Plugin to Create and Modify Application Launchers

  • The Perfect Desktop – OpenSUSE 12.3 (GNOME Desktop)

  • Mastering The Linux Shell : Standard In, Out, and Error

  • How to convert Apache rewrites for nginx

  • Wi-Fi Mini Honeypot

• Games

  • New Racing Game for Linux

  • Humble Troubles Again, more platform specific bundles

    So, Humble Bundle, we meet again in my Editorials. This time, I am going to be a little less harsh than previous entries, but still I thought I should write about this and see what everyone’s opinion is.

  • Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition coming to Linux on Steam!

  • Just Tactics turn based strategy 1.0 Released

  • Heavily-Upgraded Postal Hits Steam

    Ryan Gordon has released a “heavily-upgraded” version of Postal 1 to Steam Linux users along with other titles.

    Postal 1 has previously been available to Linux gamers after it was originally ported years ago. Ryan “Icculus” Gordon has now upgraded the Linux work on it and released it digitally to Linux users via Steam. Postal is a 3D shooter and was released originally in 1997 by Running with Sciessors.

  • Intel Still Works On Driver For Left 4 Dead 2

    While Left 4 Dead 2 still hasn’t been released to the general Linux gaming public, it’s coming. Intel open-source developers are also continuing to work on optimizing the Source Engine game for their Linux graphics driver.

    Left 4 Dead 2 is coming to Linux. I played L4D2 natively on Linux back when at Valve’s headquarters nearly one year ago and have mentioned the L4D2 Linux port many times since. Valve employees confirmed last week the Linux port was getting closer to release.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Plasma Desktop 4.10 Latest Features

    KDE is already the most feature filled desktop available for Linux today, but now KDE has just gotten even better. The KDE 4.10 release marks the first major stride in the KDE desktop’s conversion Qt Quick. The focus of this release is to improve integration of Qt Quick and the Plasma desktop. Here I will be taking a look at Qt Quick, and many of the changes brought by 4.10.

  • Plasma-nm preview

    If you want to try it, you can get it from our git repository git://anongit.kde.org/plasma-nm.git and you should disable the kded module from the old Plasma NM applet but we are not supporting secrets for VPN connections for now.

  • KDE Plasma Improvements For NetworkManager

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Top 10 New Features in GNOME 3.8

  • GNOME 3.8, One Day After

Distributions

• Screenshots

  • CAINE 4.0

  • ZevenOS 3.0 Neptune

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • April 2013 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine Released

  • Mandriva S.A. releases Pulse2 1.4.1, expands its reach and features

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat: Happy Linux Partners, Disappointed RHT Investors

    Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) Q4 2013 earnings disappointed investors. But here’s a riddle for channel partners: How many other software ecosystems can you find where sales are still growing nearly 20 percent annually? Plus, Red Hat is investing in storage, cloud computing, management and Big Data technologies — areas that could provide more long-term growth opportunities for channel partners — despite apparent concerns from Wall Street.

  • Scientific Linux 6.4

  • Red Hat Grows Business to $1.3 Billion as OpenStack Cloud Opportunity Looms Large

    Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat reported its full year fiscal 2013 earnings late Wednesday, showing continued growth and future opportunities. To date, Red Hat has made the bulk of its fortunes from Linux, though with an enterprise OpenStack cloud offering on the horizon, that could change.

    For the full year, Red Hat reported revenue of $1.33 billion, which is a 17 percent year-over-year gain. The full year revenue was fueled by a strong fourth quarter in which Red Hat pulled in $348 million in revenue, also a 17 percent year-over-year gain. Net Income for the full year was reported at $150 million or $0.77 per share, which is a marginal gain over the $147 million reported for fiscal 2012.

    Moving forward, Red Hat provided guidance for its fiscal 2014 for total revenue in the range of $1.51 billion to $1.54 billion for fiscal 2014, which would be a 16 percent annual growth rate.

  • RIT receives donation from Red Hat, Inc

    The Rochester Institute of Technology’s new Center for Media Arts, Games Interaction and Creativity has recently received a donation from software company Red Hat, Inc.

  • Adbusters Calls for Actions to Shut Down Goldman Sachs Offices

  • Fedora

    • Moving to Fedora 19 Alpha!

      Usually I wait until later in the pre-release cycle — a few weeks before Beta on average — before I move to the pre-release of the next Fedora operating system. But for Fedora 19, I’m too excited to see GNOME 3.8 and all the other improvements, so I tried out the Fedora 19 Test Candidate 2 (TC2) during lunch yesterday. I burned it to a USB key and was happy with what I saw. I decided it was time to move over now and fit in with the cool kids.

    • Fedora 19 Readies AMD “RadeonSI” Driver

• Debian Family

  • The official Debian Project blog is here: bits.debian.org

  • Elive 2.1.33 development released

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Mark Shuttleworth ‘Most Disruptive Name in Computing’ Says Forbes

        Mark Shuttleworth has been named as one American magazine Forbes‘ ’12 Most Disruptive Names in business’

        The list comprises of a dozen folk across industries as diverse as healthcare and credit who, the magazine say, are ‘dramatically shaking up their fields’.

      • End of life for three Ubuntu editions on 9 May

        The desktop edition of Lucid Lynx, 10.04 LTS, is also seeing its support end on the same day, three years after its release. Support for the server edition will continue for another two years. Upgrading to 12.04 LTS, it is worth noting, means an upgrade to the first Ubuntu release with five year support for server and desktop; previously it has been three years for desktop and five for server.

      • MapR, Canonical Team To Offer Hadoop On Ubuntu Linux

        MapR Technologies is teaming up with Ubuntu Linux developer Canonical for a version of the Hadoop big data platform that runs on Ubuntu.

        The Ubuntu/MapR package will include the MapR M3 edition of Hadoop supporting Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 12.10. The software will be available through Canonical’s Ubuntu Partner Archive starting April 25, the companies said Thursday.

      • MapR Brings Open Source Hadoop to Github and Ubuntu Linux

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Deepin 12.12 preview

          Linux Deepin is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop. Its releases tend to come 2 months after the release of the version of Ubuntu they are based on, but Linux Deepin 12.12 is about three months overdue.

          I think that’s because it will be shipping with a new desktop environment called Depth desktop environment, which is being developed by the Deepin development team. From what I’ve seen, it looks better than the customized GNOME Shell that shipped with previous versions of Deepin.

Devices/Embedded

• Roku finally gets a 2D facelift

• Finally! Roku gets a 2D facelift (video)

• Wind River Linux goes Carrier Grade under Yocto Project

  Wind River has introduced its first Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) profile for its Linux OS software offering.

  Formally registered for the CGL 5.0 specification with the Linux Foundation, the profile is the first delivery of Carrier Grade Linux functionalities on top of a Yocto Project Compatible product, said the company.

  In networking systems, the CGL requirements are designed to make systems more reliable and resistant to attacks

• Phones

  • Android

    • PlayJam’s GameStick Joins the Battle of the Android Consoles (Hands-on)

      The portable Android gaming console GameStick proved to be a hit when it reached its $10,000 Kickstarter goal in just two days — and here at GDC 2013 PlayJam is showing off the the developer version that will be shortly shipping out to some early backers.

an Open Source Software Enhance Collaboration?

A multistate criminal justice group is using open source software to develop plug-and-play solutions for functions like incident reporting, searching criminal histories and single sign-on.

The newly formed Open Justice Broker Consortium (OJBC) — dedicated to collaborating on open source, justice-related information sharing — includes Hawaii, Maine and Vermont. The group is using a shared Apache platform and toolkit to develop open source solutions for common criminal justice functions that can be quickly deployed by public safety agencies.

BBC releases open source toolkit for creating smart TV apps

The BBC has released a toolkit as open source software that will allow the television industry to build apps for smart TVs.

Developers working at the BBC built the TV Application Layer (TAL). It stemmed from the organisations drive to build the BBC iPlayer, News and Sport applications for Connected TVs on as many different devices as possible.

BBC details iPlayer’s open source TV Application Layer

With Switch Light, Big Switch Looks to Boost Open Source SDN

Range Networks: Burning Man’s open source cellular network touted for commercial rural use

Inside Palaver: Linux Speech Recognition that Taps Google’s Voice Technology

Despite efforts to advance Linux speech recognition, there is still no reliable, fully-baked open source competitor to Dragon Systems’ proprietary Naturally Speaking. Lately, however, instead of trying to mimic Dragon’s technology, which is only available to Linux users via Wine emulation, some developers are cueing off simpler, yet in many ways more widely useful mobile natural language engines. Last week, a De Anza College student named James McClain released a public beta of an open source GNU/Linux speech recognition program called Palaver that uses Google’s voice APIs on the back end.

BBC makes iPlayer TV App Layer open source

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), a public service broadcasting corporation based in London, announced yesterday that it’s TV Application Layer (TAL) is being shared on open source. The purpose: to simplify the building of connected TV applications, and “to benefit the rest of the industry.”

Top 10 open source projects

Open source has grown to become a major force in the IT industry and already in 2013 we’ve seen moves from the likes of Ubuntu and Mozilla to take this further into the mobile world.

Thanks to the movement’s philosophy of openness, emphasis on collaboration, and its encouragement for end users to adapt and improve on a product, unlike the “closed” development approach taken with most commercial software.

Adobe Launches Blank, An Open Source Fallback Font You Can’t See

Adobe today launched Adobe Blank, a new open-source OpenType font that, at first glance, does absolutely nothing. Indeed, the whole point of the font, as its creator Ken Lunde writes today, is to render every Unicode character as a “non-spacing and non-marking glyph.”

Events

• LPI Hosts Exam Labs at FOSSCOMM 2013 Greek Open Source Communities Summit

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Web-based spell checking comes to Chrome 26

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming

  • Mozilla Brings Unreal Engine 3 To Firefox

    For showing off the power of its JavaScript engine with Firefox, Mozilla collaborated with Epic Games to bring a JavaScript-based version of Unreal Engine 3 for the web.

    Mozilla engineers for a while have been toying with porting games/engines to the web browser using WebGL and Emscripten. Last month Mozilla announced they brought the Unigine Engine to the web while their most recent porting effort revolved around Unreal Engine 3.

SaaS/Big Data

• HP Cloud Team Invading OpenStack Summit

• CloudStack Ups ‘Enterprise Credibility’ with Apache Top-Level Status

  It’s been less than a year since Citrix submitted CloudStack for incubation at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), but already the open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform has been named a Top-Level Project.

  “Apache CloudStack has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles,” the foundation announced on Monday.

Databases

• MariaDB is conquering the “desktop” distributions

  This required more time if compared to Libreoffice versus Open Office, but it seem that the critical mass of users of another piece of open source software is moving away from Oracle, I’m talking about Mysql versus MariaDB.

  Mysql is probably the most used open source database, it’s used in most of the more successful LAMP applications, such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, after all the M of LAMP was an acronim for Mysql until today.

• Arch Linux Replaces MySQL With MariaDB

  The latest Linux distribution outting of MySQL is Arch Linux, which has replaced the database solution with MariaDB.

  Fedora has decided to replace MySQL with MariaDB as have other Linux distributions while Arch Linux is now following suit. Many Linux distribution vendors are not satisfied with how Oracle is maintaining the open-source, community version of MySQL. With that in mind, many are turning to the MariaDB fork of the community project.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice on every desk: A 10-step plan

  Document Foundation has good advice for companies migrating to open, interoperable document formats and open source tools

• TAZ receives German Document Freedom Award

  As part of the annual Document Freedom Day, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) have presented their Freedom Germany Award to the German newspaper die tageszeitungGerman language link (TAZ). Subscribers to the newspaper can receive its issues in a range of DRM-free, open formats. Explaining the motivation behind choosing the winner, Stephan Uhlmann of the FFII said: “we congratulate TAZ for their firm stance on the usage of Open Standards”.

• Migrating to LibreOffice? Here’s Help

  Migrating to LibreOffice may seem like an easy task, but it can be a major undertaking for businesses and organizations. Several elements stand in the way of an easy migration and The Document Foundation has released a white paper to assist. It covers topics such as pilot programs, neutralizing resistance, identifying early adopters, and training.

• Migration to Document Freedom Isn’t As Easy As It Seems

  In case you missed it, March 27 was Document Freedom Day, and The Document Foundation released a whitepaper in honor of the day. The whitepaper provides a 10-step migration plan on how to standardize on Open Document Format (ODF). In the report, there is detailed discussion of LibreOffice and the benefits of its support for ODF. There is just one problem with this otherwise noble effort: Document compatibility isn’t good enough between free and open office suites and proprietary office application suites.

  The 10-step plan for migrating to Libre Office includes very brusque and breezy discussion of the value of proprietary components that real offices use and share — components that make it nearly impossible in some cases to consider moving to a suite like LibreOffice. Consider this quote from the 10-step plan: “…before migrating any existing Visual Basic macros, it is better to determine if the macros are still needed, in order to discard those that are no longer useful and re-engineer the remaining ones.”

CMS

• Alert: What’s Coming Up for Open Source CMS in April 2013

  Welcome to this month’s wrap up of what’s to come in open source CMS projects when we offer some highlights of what to look forward to in the open source world in April.

  It’s not comprehensive, so please feel free to let us know in the comments or drop a line to pr@cmswire.com if there’s a worthy project we’ve neglected here. Because everyone loves videos, we’ll lead off with an update on Umbraco’s relaunch of its Umbraco.tv tutorials site.

Education

• Open source in higher education: how far have we come?

  Universities are ahead of the curve in adopting open source, says Scott Wilson – we should now lead the public sector in exploring its full potential

Business

• FLOSS Pays

  So, everyone with a decent business-plan gets cost-effective IT and sales from FLOSS. It’s obvious that no licensing fees and software shared cooperatively among millions of programmers reduces the cost of IT, the essential element of any business these days.

  Google uses Linux everywhere and adds it’s own code on top of that to provide wonderfully popular services and opportunities to earn revenue through advertising. There has never been software so popular so fast as Android/Linux, not even M$’s stuff. They took decades to do what Google has done in five years and Google’s stuff is growing while M$’s is stagnant. This is not a blip but a major shift in how IT and business is done.

Funding

• Crowdfunding, Micro-Patronage, And The Future Of Free Software

• Open source video editing program needs help on Kickstarter, offers immortality in return

  Forget having kids. Forget mind-transfers. Real immortality lies in naming a video transition after yourself. No, seriously. To make eternity happen, you simply need to donate $500 to Jonathan Thomas’s Kickstarter project and in return he’ll let you create and name a transition effect in a new cross-platform version of his free, open source video editing program, called OpenShot.

Project Releases

• GNU Serveez 0.2.1 available

Openness/Sharing

• Does lyric-sharing contribute to a more open music industry?

  Recently, The Beatles made history again in January 2013, as “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You” entered the public domain in Europe. As lyrics to songs and musical compositions become available to the public, do you think they contribute to a more open music industry?

• TMI? Newest Entrepreneurs Advocate Open Source Culture

• Open-source 3D-printable optics to slash lab costs

  An American researcher hopes to slash optics laboratory costs by releasing a library of open-source, 3D-printable components.

• Drone Makers Get Help From the Open-Source, DIY Crowd

  The Federal Aviation Administration isn’t expected to approve unmanned aerial vehicles for commercial use until at least 2015. Even so, manufacturers are already preparing to jump into the market—relying on the open-source movement for free research and development. Amateur designers and manufacturers are building prototypes at home, then e-mailing or posting the results, often with how-tos that can be completed using part-making 3D printers.

• Open Data

  • Opening product data for a more responsible world

    Data on the products we buy is rarely viewed as something to be opened. But in fact, the international standards that make it possible for products to be traded across borders can be used by consumers for their own ends—to help improve information—sharing and choice across the planet. There is currently no public database of this information, but we’re working to change that at Product Open Data.

Standards/Consortia

• Many Features Proposed For C++14

  C++14 is the next update for the C++ programming language. While slated as only a minor extension to C++11, there are several new features being proposed.

Health/Nutrition

• COPD: Sainsbury and Tesco conceal tobacco health warnings

Security

• Amazon announces new security tool for its cloud services

• That Internet War Apocalypse Is a Lie

  You might’ve read some headlines today—in very reputable publications—saying that there’s an online attack underway. The biggest in history. Enough to slow down the internet. This would be exciting and scary, except it’s just not true.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• US ex-soldier ‘fought in Syria with terror group’

  A former US soldier has been charged with using a weapon outside the US as he fought against Syrian government forces, prosecutors say.

  Eric Harroun, 30, served in the US Army from 2000-2003, and allegedly fought in Syria with the al-Nusra Front.

• Agency of Fear

  It’s nearing dusk on November 26, 2010. More than 25,000 people have gathered in a light rain at Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, Oregon to watch the annual lighting of the holiday tree, a 100-foot-tall Douglas-fir logged from the Willamette National Forest.

  Three men in a nearby hotel room have just finished eating a take-out pizza. The TV turned to a local news channel, which is covering holiday celebration. The men spread towels on the floor and say an Islamic prayer, asking that Allah bless their operation. The men pat each other on the back, leave the room and walk to their vehicle, a white van.

• Defense Companies Cash in on Gov’t Hyped ‘Cyber-Security’ Threat

  Amidst the daily hype over the increased threat of cyber attacks and enhanced need for internet security, private defense companies are cashing in on the new stream of defense dollars and trove of “classified” personal cyber data.

• Shockingly Unshocking: ‘Cybersecurity’ FUD Has Been Big Big Business For Contractors

• ‘Phoenix jihadist’s’ dad claims son worked in Syria for CIA

  As US Army veteran Eric Harroun awaits trial in Virginia for allegedly fighting alongside al-Qaeda supporters, the man’s father claims he was working for the CIA and was reporting back to the agency from Syria.

• Alfreda Frances Bikowsky Head of CIA Darkside?

  Several recent news reports (1, 2, 3) claim the new head of CIA clandestine service is a woman, first female to head the darkside division. None publicly name her, although her identity is said to be known to journalists. She is said to be a formerly top member of the CIA bin Laden hunt team, former COS in New York City and London, an advocate of destroying CIA torture tapes as assistant to Deuce Martinez and an esteemed briefer of Presidents of the United States.

• Retired CIA employee attempts voodoo to kill estranged wife, gets jail time

  Raymond E. Bradshaw Jr., a former CIA employee, was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday for soliciting his wife’s murder when voodoo didn’t do the job.

  Bradshaw first attempted to use voodoo to save his marriage, reports the Washington Post, before resorting to spells he hoped would just flat-out kill the woman. When that also failed to take her out, Bradshaw bought a gun and asked his nephew to shoot McLaughlin for a grand total of $2,500.

• A public indictment could shed light on CIA’s secret program

  Human rights researchers years ago identified a man who may have been held secretly by the CIA, and whose whereabouts were unknown. It appears that man is now in custody in New York

• Afghan villagers flee homes, blame U.S. drones

• Are Drone Strikes Killing Terrorists or Creating Them?

  There’s been a lot of chatter recently about “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” a new online infographic which shows a chilling visualization of all estimated deaths in Pakistan caused by U.S. drone strikes, including children and civilians, based on estimates from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and New America Foundation. Whether you agree with the numbers, or the politics, behind this particular project (put together by the data visualization firm Pitch Interactive), at least it’s sparking debate. And that’s got to be a good thing — there’s still so much we don’t know about this highly controversial issue.
  To say that the use of drone strikes is a polarizing topic would be a vast understatement. In U.S. policy circles, it’s projected as an effective counter-terrorism tactic, whereas globally, it is often seen as tacit abuse of state sovereignty. And that’s before you get to the debate over potential international law and human rights violations.

• Pakistani officials: US drone kills 3 militants

  The secret nature of the program makes it difficult to determine how many civilians are being killed.

• Pakistani officials say US drone kills 3 militants

  Two Pakistani intelligence officials say a U.S. drone targeting a vehicle has killed three suspected militants near the Afghan border.

• ACLU, Congress Await Obama’s Next Action on Overseas Drone Strikes

• Seeking Daylight on U.S. Drone Policy

• Activists Organize Nationwide Series of Drone Surveillance Protests

  A variety of activist groups are organizing a series of nationwide protests in April in an attempt to stop the integration of domestic drones into American airspace.

  The protests will occur in at least 18 states at facilities that research drone technology, drone command centers, drone manufacturing plants, universities that have drone programs and the White House, according to Nick Mottern, founder of Known Drones, a website that tracks unmanned aircraft activity in the United States and abroad.

• Drone industry could crash into public opposition

  Unmanned drone aircraft that would be built and operated by private business for domestic use are seen as a promising industry in Colorado and elsewhere — but that promise is threatened by a potential public backlash and moves by state officials to limit their use.

• Drone Operators: Soldiers or Civilians?

  International law does not allow combatants to kill in the morning and enjoy dinner with their children later in the evening.

• DEPRIEST: Don’t drone me, bro

  As science fiction turns to fact, many college students are noticing the striking resemblance that the modern era has begun to bear to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The technological world continues to evolve, presenting new challenges to some of the oldest tenets of American government, and the youngest among the American people are rising up in force to confront them. Skepticism has moved from conspiracy theorists’ basements to the walls of Facebook, the halls of universities, and recently, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the floor of the Senate.

• Why Mayor Bloomberg’s vision of a drone-filled city doesn’t fly

  Taking a break from his crusade against sugary soft drinks, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg took some time during his weekly radio broadcast last week to downplay an issue that’s been at the forefront of privacy concerns in a growing number of US states: the use of unmanned aerial drones for ubiquitous police surveillance. “What’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building?” asked an incredulous Bloomberg, now in the final months of his heavily-lobbied third term in office. “I mean, intellectually I have trouble making that distinction.”

Cablegate

• Ecuadorean government holds talks with Labour over Julian Assange embassy impasse

  The Ecuadorean government believes there is so little prospect of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange leaving its London embassy in the near future that it has held talks with the Labour Party in a bid to strike a deal that would see him sent to Sweden, where he faces rape charges, after the 2015 election.

  Officials at the London embassy want to see an end to the legal and political impasse which has seen Mr Assange holed up inside the building ever since his asylum claim in June last year.

  Yet the South Americans believe they could still be housing him for years to come, having failed so far to negotiate a resolution with the Coalition. As a result, Ecuadorean officials are hoping to persuade a future Labour government to offer assurances that Mr Assange will not be onward-extradited from Sweden to the US and thus persuade the Australian to leave.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• For NPR, Fracking Fight Is Between Farmers & Movie Stars

  So many people believe fracking–a method of releasing oil or gas from rock–to be unsafe that hundreds of U.S. communities have voted to ban it. If you’re unsure how to feel about it, NPR would like to help with that.

  The network–which receives funding from America’s Natural Gas Alliance, a pro-fracking industry group–ran a report March 20 that began by explaining that despite “all the money coming out of the ground in some places,” New York doesn’t allow fracking, which “causes landowners to feel they’re being left behind.”

• Summer Melt Season Getting Longer On Antarctic Peninsula

  The Antarctic Peninsula — a mountainous region extending northwards towards South America — is warming much faster than the rest of Antarctica. Temperatures have risen by up to 3 oC since the 1950s — three times more than the global average. This is a result of a strengthening of local westerly winds, causing warmer air from the sea to be pushed up and over the peninsula. In contrast to much of the rest of Antarctica, summer temperatures are high enough for snow to melt.

• Israel faces geopolitical tangle with natural gas

  The Israel-Turkey rapprochement is on the minds of Cypriot authorities as future gas revenues are seen as the country’s best hope to pull it out of the economic morass that has decimated its banking sector.

  “I assure you that we are monitoring the situation and we will act accordingly to protect the country’s sovereign rights,” Cyprus’ Commerce Minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis recently said. He said the country’s president, Nicos Anastasiades, is planning a trip to Israel to discuss energy cooperation matters.

Finance

• Lanny Breuer Cashes in After Not Prosecuting Wall Street Execs, Will Receive Approximate Salary of 4 Million Dollars

  It’s official, and former Department of Justice (DOJ) Criminal Division Chef Lanny Breuer is bragging about it. He’ll return for the third to time the white collar (now expanding its clients internationally) legal defense firm of Covington & Burling, but this time at a whopping salary.

  According to the New York Times: “Mr. Breuer is expected to earn about $4 million in his first year at Covington. In addition to representing clients, he will serve as an ambassador of sorts for the firm as it seeks to grow overseas.”

• Whistleblowing at the NSA: Daily Whistleblower News

  The NSA Four worked on and advocated for another program – ThinThread – that was inexpensive and more respectful of privacy rights, which was ultimately tossed by NSA officials.

• NSA begins building world’s largest data collecting system

• NSA Backs CISPA-Like Information Sharing

  The NSA wants to help stop the next cyber attack on Wall Street, Facebook, or Twitter, and the agency’s director thinks information sharing between the feds and private companies is a good place to start.
  “Right now, the ability to share real-time information is complicated and there are legal barriers. We have to overcome that,” Gen Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said during a Thursday appearance at Georgia Tech’s Cyber Security Symposium.

• NSA Director: Information-Sharing Critical To U.S. Cybersecurity

  Information-sharing and visibility into the threat landscape are vital for the public and private sectors to defend cyberspace, National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander told an audience at The Georgia Tech Cyber Security Symposium yesterday.

  The key to this is crafting legislation that protects privacy while facilitating sharing between intelligence agencies, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and critical infrastructure, explained Alexander at the two-day event at Georgia Tech University.

• Greece arrests three young neo-Nazis over bank vandalism

  …neo-Nazi militants accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at a Bank of Cyprus subsidiary.

• New rules allow banks to reopen in Cyprus

  Banks in Cyprus are to open for the first time in more than a week today, operating for six hours from noon, but restrictions will be in place on financial transactions to prevent people from draining their accounts.

• BitCoin subject to US money-laundering rules

  Amid growing worries that new forms of cash bought online is used to fund illicit activities, the US says it’s applying money laundering rules to virtual currencies.

Privacy

• Anonymized Phone Location Data Not So Anonymous, Researchers Find

  Anonymized mobile phone location data produces a GPS fingerprint that can be easily used to identify a user based on little more than tracking the pings a phone makes to cell towers, a new study shows.

  Analyzing 15 months of anonymized mobile phone data for about 1.5 million users, researchers at MIT and the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium found that it took very few pieces of data to uniquely identify 95 percent of the users — that is, trace the activity to a specific anonymous individual.

• The List Of Government Agencies That Can Get Your Data Under CISPA

Civil Rights

• USA Today Covers ‘Lonely Battle’ of Equality Opponents

  Who is this rainbow coalition, described in the lead of USA Today’s March 22 front-pager? They are, it turns out, opponents of same sex marriage, and the piece is part of what looks like a wavelet of media efforts to “put a human face” on that opposition. Theirs, readers are told, is “a lonely battle”: “Outspent and lately out-hustled by highly organized gay rights organizations, opponents have struggled to get their story out.”

  That’s a curious premise, given that “their story” is the law of the land, and that’s why we’re talking about it in the first place. But the premise is never challenged, because the paper’s Richard Wolf doesn’t talk to anyone who would challenge it.

• Maldives Rape Victim’s Flogging Sentence Touches Off Anti-Tourism Campaign

  Global outrage is growing against a Maldives court’s verdict announced on February 26, 2013 to flog a 15-year-old girl who was originally a victim of rape and sexual abuse. She now faces 100 lashes in public which will be administered when she turns 18.

  More than one million people have signed a petition created by the campaign website Avaaz.org, urging Maldivian authorities to protect the girl and end the practice of flogging of women and children for sex outside marriage. The petition also threatens to hit at the country’s tourism industry until President Mohamed Waheed acts.

• NYPD on Trial: Police Say They Are Forced to Harass Kids in Order to Meet Quotas

  Last week, NYPD whistleblowers Adhyl Polanco and Pedro Serrano, who secretly recorded supervisors demanding that officers fill quotas, testified in federal court that they were forced to violate the law to meet numbers. “We were handcuffing kids for no reason,” Polanco testified. The two officers are testifying in a class-action suit targeting the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• DDoS attack against Spamhaus was reportedly the largest in history

  A DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack of unprecedented scale that targeted an international spam-fighting organization last week ended up causing problems for Internet users around the world, experts say.

DRM

• Even USA Today Is Wondering Why Copyright Law Is So Broken That It Locks Up Mobile Phones

  You know the issue of the broken anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA are going mainstream when even USA Today is writing editorials condemning the whole thing as an archaic bit of copyright law that makes little sense today. I

• EA Labels President Calls DRM a “Failed, Dead-End Strategy,” Says SimCity “Plays Like an MMO”

  At GDC, GamesIndustry.biz had the opportunity to talk to EA Labels president Frank Gibeau about SimCity and its always-online requirement, which caused a considerable amount of grief to many players at the game’s launch. Gibeau acknowledged this, but insisted that what SimCity had wasn’t DRM.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Canada Denies Patent For Drug, So US Pharma Company Demands $100 Million As Compensation For ‘Expropriation’

  An increasingly problematic aspect of free trade agreements (FTAs) is the inclusion of investor-state provisions that essentially allow companies — typically huge multinationals — to challenge the policies of signatory governments directly. The initial impulse behind these was to offer some protection against the arbitrary expropriation of foreign investments by less-than-democratic governments.

• World Economic Forum Warns That Patents Are Making Us Lose The Race Against Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

  Back in June last year, Techdirt reported on the warning from the World Health Organization’s Director-General that we risked entering a “post-antibiotic era”. That was in part because the current patent system was not encouraging the right kind of research by pharma companies in order to develop the new antibiotics that we desperately need.

• Copyrights

  • The Chilling Effects of the DMCA

    The outdated copyright law doesn’t just hurt consumers—it cripples researchers.

  • Georgia State Court Issues Censorship Order Blocking Free Speech On Anti-Copyright Troll Message Board

    The EFF has a blog post about a very troubling ruling in a Georgia state court that effectively orders the censoring of an anti-copyright trolling blog including user comments. The blog in question, ExtortionLetterInfo.com, is run by a guy named Matt Chan. He recently took up the cause of people who have been hit by copyright infringement demands from Linda Ellis, a poet who is somewhat infamous for going after lots of people, demanding payments after they posted her sappy poem “the Dash.” She apparently threatens people (ridiculously) with the statutory maximum awards of $150,000 per infringement, but will “settle” for a mere $7,500 — often going after non-profits, charities and churches who want to share the “positive message” of the poem. Yes, she demands $7,500 for posting her poem to a website.

  • EU Copyright: We Need Actions, Not Consultations!

    Two years after a first consultation, the European Commission is conducting yet-another public consultation on the “Civil enforcement of intellectual property rights”, essentially on the IPRED directive1. Many aspects of this new consultation are similar to the previous one, and call for similar answers. La Quadrature du Net therefore re-sent its previous submission and denounces a process aiming at buying time to delay any debate on the urgent need to reform copyright.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Early April Fools Joke By Infoworld: M$ and Lenovo in Love

As Lenovo clearly ships a lot of GNU/Linux and Chrome OS PCs even in China and as far as I know Lenovo has never shipped unlicensed software, I think this is InfoWorld making its own news or playing an early April Fools joke. It’s probably the latter… Whether it’s just a renewal of the old agreement from 2006 to “recommend” that other OS, I don’t know, but it’s a very bad joke.

Linux Foundation Training Prepares the International Space Station for Linux Migration

It’s hard to get tech support 400 kilometers away from the Earth, which is why Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor deeply involved in Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) operations, decided to migrate to Linux. As leader of the Laptops and Network Integration Teams, Chuvala oversees the developers in charge of writing and integrating software for the Station’s “OpsLAN” – a network of laptops that provide the ISS crew with vital capabilities for day-to-day operations, from telling the astronauts where they are, to inventory control of the equipment used, to interfacing with the cameras that capture photos and videos.

You are not safe

Linux is the perfect platform for this kind of experimentation. The reason why the operating system is so secure, for example, is because any developer can look at the source code and work out what’s happening. The arcane and hidden data transfers that make up the World Wide Web should be no different. In this issue, we investigate some of the tools that can reveal this hidden world, as well as showing you how easy it can be for these tools to be turned against us. And just like with Linux, the solution to these weaknesses are increased transparency, awareness and education. It’s like debugging the internet!

Linux Format 170 On Sale Today – Hack the Web!

The internet is full of unpleasant people who would love nothing more than to steal your passwords, crack into your WordPress site and generally make a nuisance of themselves at your expense. So we learned their black arts so that you can protect yourself against them, and in the process we discovered that protection rackets have moved online through the power of DDOS attacks.

Big business buys into big Linux

That shouldn’t come as any surprise. IDG, for example, found in the last quarter of 2012 that while overall server revenue is only growing at 3.1 percent year over year, Linux experienced 12.7 percent year-over-year growth for the quarter, while Windows only increased 3.2 percent and Unix was down 24.1 percent.

Linux Foundation Report Shows Enterprises Warming Up to Linux

Just this week I did a post on how much in demand Linux skills are in the job market. They are in demand, of course, because Linux is increasingly being used in enterprises–and not just at the server level. New research from The Linux Foundation in its report “Linux Adoption: Third Annual Survey of World’s Largest Enterprise Linux Users” confirms this fact.

“We see the growing success of Linux adoption in the enterprise, especially as it’s used for the most important areas of business, leading to the rise of Linux and collaborative development across many industries,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services, The Linux Foundation, in a statement. “Having a realistic understanding of where Linux is gaining traction in the enterprise helps to inform vendors and users about how they can work together to advance Linux and the technologies it supports.”

Linux Adoption Continues to Grow

Linux adoption for mission-critical deployments and the cloud continues to grow in 2013. That’s the top-line finding from a new Enterprise End User Report from the Linux Foundation.

Desktop

• The Linux Desktop Mess

  Today something struck home and really punctuates the current state of affairs we now have with Linux Desktops.

• The Linux Desktop Mess – Well, There’s Your Problem Right There…..

Server

• DreamWorks Animation The Croods Tops 9,100 Linux Render-Years

  The Croods, which took #1 in the box office this weekend with an estimated $44.7 million, used a powerful Linux render farm to create the film

• Shotwell developers aim to solve Linux’s e-mail problems

  The developers behind the Shotwell photo manager for Linux-based operating systems are setting their sights on a weak spot of the Linux desktop: e-mail.

  Yorba, the creator of Shotwell, has turned to crowdfunding site Indiegogo in an attempt to raise $100,000 toward the e-mail client, named “Geary.” After two days, Yorba has raised about $8,000.

• Is a New Approach to Email Just What Linux Needs?

  This week, some surprisingly positive data arrived about Linux’s growing volume of welcome in enterprises. But if you ask many people why Linux isn’t more entrenched at enterprises, they might cite compatibility issues with widely used platforms such as Microsoft Office, support concerns, and more. One longstanding concern about Linux in the enterprise has surrounded the fact that email has never been really enterprise-grade on Linux platforms.

  As a matter of fact, some of the more promising efforts to pull off smart open source email have been left in the gutter. Mozilla, for example, has pulled way back on its efforts with Thunderbird. That’s why it’s interesting to note that some of the respected developers behind the Shotwell photo manager application are working on an email idea called Geary.

  We’ve covered Shotwell many times and it is very popular with Linux users. The developers behind it are talented.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 5 Episode 5

• Luminosity of Free Software, Episode 9

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.9 (part 1)

  The Linux kernel can now be set up to use SSDs as cache for hard drives; Btrfs has native RAID 5 and 6 support. The kernel development team has also resolved two performance problems caused by previous changes.

  On Sunday, Linus Torvalds released the fourth pre-release version of Linux kernel 3.9. In his release notes, he noted that development has not yet settled down and called for testing of the RC.

• Linux Foundation Becomes Sponsor

Applications

• Speedy Synapse Fires Up Searches and Launches

  Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro’s menu,

• Pass – A perfect shell based password manager

• Instructionals/Technical

  • KDE Plasma Media Center Released – Install on Fedora 17/18 and Ubuntu 12.10

  • First steps in Arch Linux

  • MariaDB replaces MySQL in repositories

  • How to Connect XBMC Linux to Synology Diskstation NAS @ OCModShop

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 6.4

  • Configuring One-Time Password Authentication with OTPW

  • I made a module!

  • How to disable IPV6 in debian

  • How to Install fonts on openSUSE 12.3, GNOME 3.6 ?

  • How to use scrot – a command line tool to take screenshot

  • How to dual-boot Windows 8 and Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE developers working on a new network manager based on QML

    KDE developers are working on a brand new network manager for this most advanced ‘desktop environment’. One of the reasons behind this new network manager, as the developer Jan Grulich explains is “Because the source code of the old one is complicated and it’s not simple to fix or add something, so we decided to start writing the new one from scratch.”

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Top 10 New Features in GNOME 3.8

    The latest iteration of the popular GNOME desktop, version 3.8, sees release today – but what are notable changes and improvements should you be looking out for?

    Here’s a list of our 10 favourite changes – in no specific order – new to this release.

  • GNOME 3.8 Released – See What’s New [Video, Screenshots]

    GNOME 3.8 has been released today, the new version bringing many new features and enhancements, including a new application view and overhauled window layout for GNOME Shell, new setting panels for privacy, search and notifications and of course, many updates to the core GNOME apps like Web (Epiphany), Boxes, Documents and more.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • New features in Cairo-Dock 3.2

    The developers of the popular panel launcher application Cairo-Dock have updated it to version 3.2. Following around six months of work, the new version offers improved multi-display support and includes a new application for producing screenshots which should eventually be able to replace gnome-screenshot. The new Sound-Effects plugin adds sounds to some dock actions. Remote folders (such as through Samba or FTP) and encrypted drives can now be managed via the Shortcuts applet.

  • Cairo-Dock 3.2 release!

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva releases Pulse2 1.4.1

  • The GRUB Battle Again: Getting Mageia to Coexist with AntiX

    Regardless of what people say about netbooks, their portable factor is very convenient for teaching. However, I wanted to change some of the distros on the HD of my Dell Inspiron Mini 10. It formerly sported

    1. Mandriva 2010.2 (main production distro)
    2. Pardus 2011
    3. Mepis 11
    4. Mageia 2
    5. Mandriva 2011

• Arch Family

  • First steps in Arch Linux

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat reports record $1.3 billion in revenues

    The leading open source company Red Hat has once again reported the impressive revenues of US$ 1.3 billion for the fiscal year 2013. It was 17% up year-over-year. The company reported fourth quarter subscription revenue revenue of $348 million.

    Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said, “We continued to see momentum with large deals in Q4, closing a record number of deals in excess of $5 million and $10 million. We now provide solutions to over 90o/o of Fortune 500 companies as well as tens of thousands of smaller companies. New customer additions coupled with renewing and up-selling our existing customer base enabled us to exceed the billion dollar milestone in both subscription revenue and deferred revenues for the first time.”

  • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Oracle Corporation (ORCL), and the Evolution of OpenStack

  • Red Hat’s Q4: Misses revenue but wins on earnings

    Shares drop in after hours trading as the open source software provider squeaked out solid earnings but missed the revenue target.

• Debian Family

  • The Future of Debian

    Interesting insights into the future of Debian can be seen in interviews with candidates for Debian Project Leader in Debian’s new official blog.

    The candidates are distinguishing themselves with new ideas to expose the glory of Debian GNU/Linux to the world or to improve operations or to involve a wider community in the production, testing, distribution and promotion of Free Software. It seems to me that no matter who wins the most support, Debian is ready to take a bigger role at the centre of the FLOSS world.

  • SparkyLinux 2.1 “GameOver” is out

    Brand new, two egged SparkyLinux 2.1 ‘GameOver’ is out.
    It’s the second, special edition of SparkyLinux ‘GameOver” released for Easter 2013.

    It has been directly built on SparkyLinux 2.1 ‘Eris’ and Debian testing ‘Wheezy’.
    All packages have been synchronized with Debian testing repos of 24/03/2013.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • MapR, Canonical bring Hadoop to Ubuntu

        MapR, a “Big 3″ Hadoop provider, is partnering with Canonical to make Hadoop an even bigger phenomenon than it is already. Specifically, the companies are making an Ubuntu-integrated MapR M3 distribution available for download.

Devices/Embedded

• First Yocto compatible Carrier Grade Linux

  Wind River announced today that it has registered the Wind River Linux Carrier Grade (CG) profile for compliance with the Linux Foundation’s Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) v5.0 requirements. Accordingly, the company claims Wind River Linux to be the first Yocto Compatible CGL-registered Linux distribution.

• Power-stingy SODIMM-style module runs ARM Linux

• Leap Motion Controller now Linux compatible

• Yocto compatible carrier grade Linux from Wind River

  Wind River has introduced the Wind River Linux Carrier Grade (CG) Profile for the latest version of Wind River Linux. Formally registered for the CGL 5.0 specification with the Linux Foundation, the profile is the first delivery of Carrier Grade Linux functionalities on top of a Yocto Project Compatibleproduct, says Wind River.

• Phones

  • Small Cheap Computers Never Looked So Good

    Oh my. 8 cores in an ARMed CPU/SoC, 4 at 1.2-1.8gHz and 4 at 1.2gHz with 2gB RAM… 28nm allows all that computing power to sip juice from the battery. It’s certainly competitive with legacy PCs of just a few years ago and it can fit in a pocket or tablet. Linux makes all this run. Android makes it fit on tiny screens with fingers and do amazing things with hundreds of thousands of “apps” and Samsung tweaks that a bit to make it even more useful. Quit drooling on your keyboard!

  • Automotive infotainment gains TIZEN rich-media support

    PathPartner Technology has joined the GENIVI Alliance with an eye toward marketing its embedded multimedia software and design services to developers of next-generation automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) devices.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Galaxy S4: User Interface Walkthrough

  • Android

    • Amazon smartphone reported to feature 4.7-inch display

      The rumored Amazon smartphone will feature a 4.7-inch display, according to a new DigitTimes report. Yeah – we know that the source is not always that accurate, but whatever…we’re passing along.

    • Amazon Kindle Fire tablets get X-Ray for TV

      Amazon today announced that its popular and rather cool X-Ray service has expanded into the realm of television. Ever find yourself watching a TV show and wondering, “Where have I seen that guy before”? This is the sort of app and feature that answers those questions.

      Tied to IMDb, the X-Ray service runs on Kindle and Wii U devices and enables Amazon Instant Video viewers to quickly ID actors and learn more about them. Sorry guys, it won’t work on your standard phone or tablet; you must purchase and watch through Amazon’s Instant Videos.

    • An introduction to using Android as an embedded OS

      An extensive slide presentation on using Android in embedded systems is available for free download on the website of Free Electronics. The presentation provides an efficient technical introduction and overview of the process of developing embedded Android software, on both the OS and application levels.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • 8.0” FHD AMOLED tablet upcomming 10.1” FHD AMOLED display delayed

    Samsung want to introduce a 8” AMOLED display to fight against the new upcomming NEXUS 7 and iPad mini. Samsung’s new AMOLED tablet will follow-up the Galaxy Tab 7.7, Samsung’s first AMOLED tablet.

OpenKM Teams with Standing Cloud to Bring Open Source Web-based Document Management to the Cloud

OpenKM, a leading developer of open source, web-based enterprise document management solutions, today announced the launch of OpenKM Cloud, a new cloud-based offering that makes deploying and managing OpenKM fast, simple and affordable in the cloud.

75 Open Source Apps To Replace Popular Security Software

Hackers seem to be successfully attacking almost everyone these days. Already this year, the news has included high-profile cyberattacks targeting Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Chase, Evernote, The Federal Reserve, Twitter, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, The New York Times and other companies.

While no security software can provide complete protection from every cyberattack, the open source community has developed a variety of tools that home users, small businesses and enterprises can use to improve their security profile. Many of these open source projects are of a very high quality—in fact, many have won awards and some have been incorporated into commercial applications.

Big Switch Shines a Switch Light on Open Source OpenFlow Switching

At the core of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution is the OpenFlow protocol. Enabling OpenFlow on physical switches is something that multiple vendors have been working toward. Enabling OpenFlow on virtual switches is now Switch Lightsomething that Big Switch, a startup led by the creators of OpenFlow, is now pushing forward.

Interview with Emil Ivov about Jitsi, a VoIP softphone supporting IPv6 and DNSSEC

Thinking about Code Review in Free Software

Code review can be a bit of a recipe for drama. There was a large-ish amount of drama in a close project quite recently that stemmed from patch review, and it got me thinking about how we handle this in free software.

In free software code review, along with other practices that we call “agile practices” (such as continuous integration, unit testing, behavior driven design, test driven development) is a relatively new thing in some projects, especially those on the desktop stack.

Events

• Openmobility 2013 to spotlight growing DIY, Maker trends

• Luminaries to Tackle the Tech Skills Crisis on International Flight

  Can a group of 100 certified tech innovators, including Silicon Valley CEOs, venture capitalists and analysts, sit down together for a few hours and solve the world’s crisis in tech skills? That’s the question that a British Airways program called UnGrounded is asking, and the way the program intends to get an answer is quite swashbuckling. Through Ungrounded, 100 tech luminaries will board a flight on June 12 in San Francisco, headed for London, where they will tackle the tech skills problem in a challenge sponsored by Ideo, a technology design firm.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Ad industry threatens Firefox users with more ads if Mozilla moves on tracking plans

    The online ad industry has attacked Mozilla over its decision to block third-party cookies in a future release of Firefox, calling the move “dangerous and highly disturbing,” and claiming that it will result in more ads shown to users.

  • Firefox getting smarter about third-party cookies

    https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2013/02/25/firefox-getting-smarter-about-third-party-cookies/

  • Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” for smartphones

    Launching a new mobile OS is a difficult project since the market leaders, Android and iOS, have such a big lead. Even Microsoft, with its near-infinite financial resources and vast ecosystem of complementary products, has struggled to gain traction. And new entrants face a chicken-and-egg problem: developers don’t want to write apps for a platform without many users, while users don’t want to buy a phone without many apps.

  • Firefox and Ubuntu go Mobile

    A major announcement this year at Mobile World Congress was the Firefox Operating System (OS), built by Mozilla, the same company that brought you the world’s leading browser until Google claimed the throne with its web browser, Chrome.

    Firefox OS runs on HTML 5 through the Firefox browser’s engine, which handles demands more efficiently in weaker phones. It features the typical grid of apps set on top of a four app bar at the bottom.

  • Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” for smartphones

    The default mapping app bundled with the Geeksphone is HERE Maps, which was developed by Nokia. The application has improved steadily since we started using it. It’s gone from unusable to functional but bare-bones.

  • Mozilla Open Source Effort Accelerates Browsers for Gaming and More

    Gaming is among the most resource-consuming and complex of all computing tasks. Historically gaming has been the realm of native code running on bare metal operating systems, but thanks to a new effort from Mozilla, real gaming via a web browser is now a reality.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack Open Source Cloud Project Setup Set for a Shakeup?

• What is Open Source Cloud?

  For all the talk about cloud, it might come as a surprise to many in the industry that “cloud” is not a well-understood term. It’s often perceived as “just a buzzword” or something without a lot of substance. While the term can be abused, it’s actually an important concept and it’s certainly not just a passing fad.

  In talking to people following the Apache CloudStack graduation, and meeting with the local Linux User Group (LUG), it dawned on me that cloud still bears some explanation. Let’s take a look the standard definition, some types of clouds, and why it matters.

Databases

• Dead database walking: MySQL’s creator on why the future belongs to MariaDB

  Oracle’s treatment of MySQL and its community since its purchase of Sun has proved Widenius’ original fears correct, the developer says. Not mincing words, Widenius says that Oracle has made it clear “that they have no love for open source, working with the community, or MySQL in general”.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice adoption soaring, but OpenOffice still open source king

Funding

• The ‘Love Linux’ Campaign: The TuxDrive & The TuxPoster

• First Ouya Consoles Shipping to Backers

  The early bird gets the worm, or in this case, the new portable home gaming system. Ouya’s $99 Android-based console is now shipping to early backers, and is expected to hit shelves this summer for all consumers.
  Ouya games include action, sports, arcade, and indie, played directly on your TV. Big-name publishers like Square Enix and Namco Bandai have already signed on with the company, which also snagged independent developers like Tripwire Interactive and Adam Saltsman.
  The Ouya may seem like the underdog in the established console market, but the little machine is aiming to disrupt the entire home gaming platform.

• Mini Android PC hitches a ride on a Kickstarter rocket

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Document Freedom Day 2013 celebrated in 30 countries

  The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is running its annual Document Freedom Day campaign today to raise awareness of the importance of open standards. This year’s Document Freedom Day involves over 50 groups from 30 countries and focuses on open standards in web-based streaming technologies, especially on increasing the awareness and usage of HTML5. This year’s campaign is sponsored by Google and openSUSE.

• Document Freedom Day from Brussels to Taiwan: Open Standards celebrated in 30 countries

  In 30 countries around the world, activists are celebrating Open Standards on today’s Document Freedom Day, an annual campaign to promote Open Standards. More than 50 groups are hosting events around the world, from Brussels to Nicaragua to Nepal.

  Open Standards are crucial to ensure that different computer systems can work together, and that users can access documents regardless of the computing platform or device they use. They are the foundation of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Project Releases

• Denemo – News: Release 1.0.0 is out now.

Public Services/Government

• Antiword: Read MS Word Documents in Your Terminal [Linux]

• Open source and Latvian Geospatial Information Agency intertwined

  At the Latvian Geospatial Information Agency in Riga, all parts of the organisations use open source. Linux, to begin with, provides a stable operating system for its databases, both proprietary and the open source alternative Postgresql. Naturally the agency uses all kinds of open source solutions for its Geographic Information Systems, including Postgis and Quantum Gis.

• Winning a presidential election the open source way

  One of the ways Obama won the 2012 election was with technology. It wasn’t the only way, but technology offered one thing that feet on the street couldn’t: a force multiplier effect. The technology used during the campaign to accept donations and manage volunteers was based on open source and open standards. Open source helped the campaign accomplish several things. It enabled the team building the technology to create a culture of code, innovate faster, and solve problems the open source way.

Openness/Sharing

• Olympus to showcase open source microscopy

• April Fools’ Day pranks the open source way

  April Fools’ Day is not a national holiday, so no, you don’t get to stay at home and play with your Raspberry Pi or read Hacker News all day. But, you do get to the opportunity to join a community of pranksters around the globe who will invariably succeed in some knee-slapping, good humor.

• Tasktop Offers Open-Source Effort To Link And Sync The API Economy

• Open Data

  • Help stop the government selling off the postcodes

    Despite claims that the UK is a world leader in open data, detailed UK addresses are still locked down. But worse is about to happen. The government is thinking about flogging off this data as part of the Royal Mail privatisation, making it impossible for it to be made open data.

• Open Access/Content

  • Advocacy: How to hasten open access

    Three advocates for a universally free scholarly literature give their prescriptions for the movement’s next push, from findability to translations.

  • Open access: The true cost of science publishing

    Cheap open-access journals raise questions about the value publishers add for their money.

  • Licence restrictions: A fool’s errand

• Open Hardware

  • Join the first Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam

    We always thought the power of open source hardware lies in the ability to build upon others’ work and, when it comes to hardware, good documentation is the key to making this happen.

    As the number of open source projects continue to grow, it’s important to generate clearly-findable, modular, remixable documentation that can not only improve the quality of projects—but can also enhance cross-project collaboration. Quality documentation is essential to boosting the true spirit of open innovation.

Programming

• Eclipse Community Awards winners announced

  On the opening day of EclipseCon 2013, the Eclipse Foundation handed out the annual awards to the top individuals, projects and technologies in the Eclipse ecosystem. The individual and project awards were selected in an online vote of peers, while a judging panel selected the winners of the technology awards.

• Perl: Jewel in the Rough or Scourge of IT?

  Perhaps it’s the rapid pace of change here in the tech world, but it seems scarcely a day can go by without someone declaring some technology or another “dead.”

  Take the netbook, for example. People have been saying for years it’s dead; today, however, we have the Chromebook phenomenon.

  The command line is another popular target, of course, but few can compete with the Linux desktop itself, the death of which has been trumpeted so many times now that Linux Girl has lost count. Amazing how something that’s “dead” can keep on satisfying so many users!

  Well, recently in the Linux community there’s been occasion to discuss another purported “death” — or at least one that’s often wished for. The “victim” this time? None other than Perl.

Standards/Consortia

• Google starts using HTML5 and WebM for premium content

“For Lawyers, Joining the Supreme Court Bar is a Vanity Trip”

The Associated Press has this story on what it means for lawyers to join the U.S. Supreme Court bar. As the article suggests, being a member of the Supreme Court bar doesn’t mean much. Pretty much any lawyer who pays the $200 is admitted, at least if they have been in good standing in a state bar for three years and get two other bar members to sign on.

Security

• Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse

  So, you know all that talk about things like Aaron’s Law and how Congress needs to fix the CFAA? Apparently, the House Judiciary Committee has decided to raise a giant middle finger to folks who are concerned about abuses of the CFAA. Over the weekend, they began circulating a “draft” of a “cyber-security” bill that is so bad that it almost feels like the Judiciary Committee is doing it on purpose as a dig at online activists who have fought back against things like SOPA, CISPA and the CFAA. Rather than fix the CFAA, it expands it. Rather than rein in the worst parts of the bill, it makes them worse. And, from what we’ve heard, the goal is to try to push this through quickly, with a big effort underway for a “cyberweek” in the middle of April that will force through a bunch of related bills. You can see the draft of the bill here (or embedded below. Let’s go through some of the pieces.

• Aaron Swartz case an issue in Mass. Senate race

  The federal prosecution and suicide of Aaron Swartz has galvanized Internet activists and prompted attacks by hackers. Now it’s dividing candidates in Massachusetts’ special U.S. Senate campaign.
  Among the toughest critics of the case against Swartz is Republican Senate candidate Daniel Winslow, a Norfolk state representative and former judge. Winslow said the case shows the dangers of allowing prosecutors unchecked authority.

• Draft House Judiciary cybersecurity bill would stiffen anti-hacking law

  A draft cybersecurity bill circulating among House Judiciary Committee members would stiffen a computer hacking law used to bring charges against Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

  The bill draft would tighten penalties for cyber crimes and establish a standard for when companies would have to notify consumers that their personal data has been hacked, according to a copy obtained by The Hill.

• Three Things You May Not Get About the Aaron Swartz Case

• Anti-spam group at epicenter of one of worst cyberassaults in history

• Massive cyberattack hits Internet users

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The trouble with using police informants in the US

  Some law enforcement agencies in the US use informants in as many as 90% of their drug cases. But there are surprisingly few rules on how informants are used and a groundswell of calls for the system to be reformed.

• Guantanamo detainee sues Poland in European human rights court over alleged CIA black site

  A Guantanamo detainee who allegedly revealed valuable information about 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed is suing Poland in a European court.

  Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers say he was held in a CIA black site in Poland, which they say has withheld critical information needed to investigate his case. He was allegedly held in Poland between 2002 and 2003.

• The CIA Has Been Taking A Beating Over The Last Two Years

  …arming obscure rebel groups is, in part, the CIA’s bread and butter — it’s just that they’re not supposed to get caught.

• CIA’s Ad-Campaign to Promote Another Torturer

  WaPo reports that newly-confirmed CIA director John Brennan (who was also involved in the CIA’s torture program and has since moved on to writing an assassination-without-due-process “playbook”) has tapped three former senior officials to oversee the appointment of the former chief of staff to brazen torture apologist Jose Rodriguez to head the CIA’s clandestine service. The group consists of John McLaughlin (CIA deputy director during the CIA’s torture heyday), Stephen Kappes (another rendition, torture, and interrogation (RDI) supervisor – read about his covering up a prisoner’s death here) and Mary Margaret Graham (whose problematic professional history you can read about in Steve Coll’s recent New Yorker piece on CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou). Does anyone not see the problem with RDI daddy Brennan assigning RDI supervisors to promote the RDI queenpin?

• Huffington Post Live: CIA Gives Obstructor of Torture Evidence a Promotion & Petraeus’ Apology

• Clark Magnet Club peeks inside CIA

  A group of Clark Magnet students learned firsthand Wednesday which U.S. presidents worked best with the CIA over the years and what it’s like to take part in various intelligence roles.

  Admiral Bobby Inman, former deputy director of the CIA, spoke with students in the school’s Geopolitics Club, which is known for snagging interviews with military/political figures via Skype.

• U.S. Steps up War on Syria: CIA is the Anchor of a Coordinated Secret Operation

  Under the CIA’s supervision, more than 160 military cargo flights have delivered weapons to anti-government armed units in Syria. (The New York Times, March 25)

• CIA-Contra Cocaine Scandal: The Tragic Saga of Gary Webb

  While there was the usual glitz and glamour at this year’s Oscars, the star not strolling down the red carpet was actually an intelligence arm of the U.S. government. By bestowing “Argo” with its top award, the Academy gave props to the CIA for the forgotten heroic mission to save six Americans trapped in Iran. “Zero Dark Thirty,” also up for best picture, portrayed CIA analysts as heroes ridding the planet of a psychopathic murderer.

• CIA director promotes woman who approved destruction of CIA “harsh interrogation” videos

• The CIA’s Moral Abyss

• Former CIA agent gives ‘Argo’ high marks for accuracy

  Tony Mendez told hundreds who filled an auditorium in Rudder Theater that he would give the movie Argo a grade of “90 percent” for realism in its portrayal of the 1979 operation that resulted in the successful rescue of six U.S. diplomats hiding in Iran.

  The retired CIA operative was invited to Texas A&M by the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation to participate in a question-and-answer session that accompanied a special screening of Argo.

• Obama’s Drone Killing Program Slowly Emerges from the Secret State Shadows

  Should we be happy or worried that the CIA may, someday soon, no longer be able to order a drone pilot to shoot a Hellfire missile in some faraway land?

• Anti-drones activists plan month of protest over Obama’s ‘kill’ policy

  Organisers keen to build on renewed focus of president’s targeted killing programme by holding series of protests in April

• Afghan villagers flee U.S. drone strikes

  An inside look at two villages ravaged by American aerial assaults

Cablegate

• Could WikiLeaks, Not Spamhaus, Be the Target of Cyber Attacks?

  According to reports, there’s a beef between anti-spam operation Spamhaus and Cyberbunker, a Dutch Web host. Spamhaus claims Cyberbunker unleashed a barrage of spambots that is pounding the Internet at an alleged 300GB/s, apparently at enough choke points to slow everything down.

  [...]

  Assange’s various stinks with large government organizations, including the United States, changes the story drastically if you ask me.

  Three links sit at the bottom of the page: City Hall Fights Back, Spamhaus Blackmail War, and Swat Team Raids Bunker. All are worth reading—if you have the time to wait for the pages to load. It’s as if Cyberbunker was the one suffering from a denial of service attack.

• Top Swedish prosecutor leaves Assange case

  The top Swedish prosecutor pursuing sexual assault charges against Julian Assange has abruptly left the case and one of Mr Assange’s accusers has sacked her lawyer.

  The turmoil in the Swedish Prosecution Authority’s effort to extradite Mr Assange comes as another leading Swedish judge prepares to deliver an unprecedented public lecture in Australia next week on the WikiLeaks publisher’s case.

• Assange legal shakeup: Prosecutor walks, Supreme Court judge to speak out on case

• Assange sex crimes accuser fires her lawyer

  Australian media reported on Thursday that the woman was not happy with how her lawyer Claes Borgström had handled the case when speaking with the media.

  While her application to a Swedish court to change lawyer is not available to the public, Borgström addressed the report in a statement.

  “It has been impossible to avoid contact with the media in this case. When I have been in contact with the media it has been with the approval of my client, sometimes she has asked me to do so,” he wrote.

  Borgström, Sweden’s former equality ombudsman (Jämställdhetsombudsmannen), is no stranger to taking on controversial cases.

  His former client has reportedly asked that lawyer Elisabeth Massi Fritz take over.

• Top state prosecutor dropped from Assange case as accuser sacks lawyer

  Marianne Nye, a high-profile Swedish prosecutor, has left the case unexpectedly and been replaced by a less seasoned collaegue, Ingred Isgren. The reasons for the departure have not been disclosed.

• The War Against Bradley Manning — A War Against All Who Speak Out Against Injustice

  Time and again, throughout America’s history, individuals with a passion for truth and a commitment to justice have opted to defy the unjust laws and practices of the American government in order to speak up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. Even when their personal safety and freedom were on the line, these individuals spoke up, knowing they would be chastised, ridiculed, arrested, branded traitors and even killed.

Finance

• IT’S PRIVATE DEBT, NOT PUBLIC DEBT, THAT GOT US INTO THIS MESS

  PRIVATE DEBT NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED MUCH MORE THAN PUBLIC DEBT — PRIVATE DEBT IS NOW BEING DESTROYED BY SELLING IT TO THE PUBLIC

• Historic Events Are Unfolding In Europe: Cyprus Is No Longer A Full Member Of The Eurozone, Savings Accounts In Spain & Italy May Be Raided To Save Banks, Russia Has Started Raids On Several German Organizations Based In Moscow, And Economy Now Expected To Sink Even Deeper Into Recession

  MORGAN STANLEY: Cyprus Is No Longer A Full Member Of The Eurozone!

  Yesterday we brought you some commentary from various economists and pundits who were arguing that in a sense, Cyprus has just left the Eurozone.

  The reasoning with this: In order to reopen Cypriot banks (tentatively scheduled for Thursday) Cyprus will need to impose strict capital controls to prevent a bank run. In other words, there will be limits on how much money you can take out, move to another bank, etc.

• Bitcoin Now Worth ONE. BILLION. DOLLARS.

  As the price of Bitcoin peeked its head over $90 this morning, we reached a historic milestone: Bitcoin is worth a billion dollars.

  I’m talking about Bitcoin as a whole here. The market cap (price times number of coins in existence) as I’m writing this is at $1,035,238,115, just over a billion (or as my Euro friends often say, thousand million) U.S. dollars.

  Of course from a market perspective this doesn’t mean all that much – if we were a stock instead of a currency we’d still be considered “small cap” until about 2 billion, and a billion dollars is about the annual GDP of Micronesia but a nice big round number does feel good, doesn’t it?

• World’s First Bitcoin ATM Is Announced First Location: Cyprus

• The Global Elite Are Very Clearly Telling Us That They Plan To Raid Our Bank Accounts

  Well, as depositors in Cyprus just found out, there is a risk that you could lose 40 percent (and that is the best case scenario) of your money if you put it in the bank. Why would anyone want to take that risk – especially in a nation that is already experiencing very serious financial troubles such as Greece, Italy or Spain?

• Cyprus: Austerity Test-Case is ‘Biggest Experiment in Financial History’

  After being shuttered for nearly two weeks, Cyprus banks reopened on Thursday but not without tight new restrictions in place that put limits on the manner and amount of funds that depositors can withdraw.

• Bitcoin prices surge post-Cyprus bailout

  Shares of the cyber-currency bitcoin have surged in the past week as investors seek safe havens following the unprecedented bailout of Cyprus’ banks.

• US Congress bans buying Chinese IT

  The US Congress has installed a new cyber-espionage review process for government technology purchases which effectively pushes Chinese companies out into the cold.

  The funding law signed this week by President Barack Obama is part of growing US paranoia over Chinese cyber attacks.

• Shareholder proposes Goldman Sachs run for office as a person

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• How ‘Unlikely’ Is Mark Sanford’s Comeback Really?

  A South Carolina Republican primary for an open congressional seat leaves former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford the favorite to win an April 2 GOP runoff.

  Sanford’s return to politics, after an extramarital affair and elaborate lies to cover it up, has prompted discussion about how unlikely such a comeback is for a staunch Republican in a party steeped in so-called “family values.”

Censorship

• Twitter sued £32m for refusing to reveal anti-semites

  The case revolves around a hashtag — #unbonjuif (“a good Jew”) — which became the third-most popular on the site in October 2012. The UEJF took Twitter to court, demanding that those who had tweeted anti-semitic remarks using the hashtag be named by Twitter so the police could prosecute them for hate speech.

• Washington Post Agreed To Withhold Acting Clandestine Service Chief’s Name At CIA’s Request

  The Washington Post revealed Wednesday in a front-page story that a woman currently running the clandestine service had signed off on a controversial 2005 decision “to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture.”

  The woman, the first to hold the position in the agency’s history, replaced John Bennett last month on an acting basis. Bennett’s name wasn’t kept secret when he was promoted to chief in July 2010. But the Washington Post didn’t identify the woman, noting that the high-ranking official “remains undercover and cannot be named.”

• German court stirs racial tensions in neo-Nazi murder trial

• Turkish Media Exclusion in Neo-Nazi Trial a ‘Global Embarrassment’

  A scandal is brewing in Germany over the refusal of a Munich court to provide the Turkish media with reserved seats at an upcoming neo-Nazi murder trial. German editorialists claim bureaucracy is getting in the way of needed transparency and could damage the country’s image.

• Neo-Nazi trial harms Germany’s image in Turkey

  Criticism is growing in Turkey that Turkish media have not been admitted to the forthcoming trial of the NSU terror group, eight of whose victims were Turks. Experts are warning of damage to Germany’s image.

Privacy

• Debate Continues Over Whether FBI Should Monitor Cloud Conversations

  It could be that Stallman has a point. There are widespread reports this week, after a public address from FBI officials, that the FBI has made Gmail surveillance a top priority for this year. Surveillance efforts like these could start extending to Google Voice, Dropbox and other applications as well.

• Google’s Google problem

  GOOGLE is killing Google Reader. That may not matter much to many of you; use of Google Reader [a tool, by the way, for reading online content via RSS] was concentrated among a small group of relatively intense users. As it happens, that small group includes quite a lot of people who write for or as part of their living (it’s the second tab I open most days, after Gmail). And so Google Reader has been mourned over, angrily at times, a bit more than the many other Google services that have come and gone with little ado.

• Google never forgets: Seventh Circuit finds no right to force search engines to block access to embarrassing public records

• The Story of the ‘NSA Four’; Whistleblower Tour Rolls Through Indiana: Daily Whistleblower News

  This article details the story of the ‘NSA Four’ – including GAP clients Tom Drake, J. Kirk Wiebe and William Binney – featuring insight from their attorney, GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack. The four tried to expose multi-billion dollar waste and fraud – involving a highly unethical, invasive and illegal information surveillance system called Trailblazer – while at the NSA. Over the course of the next decade, they endured intense legal harassment as the NSA attempted to cover its tracks and save itself from the embarrassing exposure for closing down a separate program – this one legal, ethical, and inexpensive – that could have potentially prevented the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

• CISPA Author Rogers

  When it was originally introduced in November 2011, CISPA would have allowed companies to pass information to the National Security Agency. The bill was reintroduced this February. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which strongly opposes the bill, CISPA would have allowed companies to “hand ‘cyber threat information’ to any government agency with or without limitations on what agency can receive the information.”

• Internal NSA magazine ‘Cryptolog’ gets limited declassification

• Can You Crack The NSA’s Top-Secret Crossword Puzzles?

• The social media shaped hole in surveillance law

  Over the last decade there has been an increasing change in the nature of surveillance – particularly the ability to search online, through social networks and through semi-public sources of information, reinforcing the need for the law to be reformed to protect the public from unwarranted surveillance.

  What needs to be made very clear is that just because information is on the internet, it does not necessarily follow that the police should collect and analyse it. It is essential that it the gathering of information is proportionate, necessary, balanced against the need of police to do their job, allows for a free and open internet and meets the public’s expectations of privacy.

• FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013

  Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.

  Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI’s efforts to address what it calls the “going dark” problem—how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It’s no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it’s a different story.

Civil Rights

• AUMF Hunger Strike Called to Demand Repeal of 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force PL 107-40

  …military force to detain and hold indefinitely without charge or trial American citizens on American soil

• Larry Grathwohl: An Extraordinary Life from the Weather Underground to the FBI and beyond

  Regarding what portions of my book are as significant today as they were in the past I would suggest the readers of “:Bringing Down America” arrive at their own conclusions. As for myself, I see the objectives and goals of the weatherman to be the same today as they were 30 years ago and the only difference is the use of politics versus violence.

• The Natural Selection of American Citizens

  These are the same people who are clueless to the existence of various legislation such as the NDAA, the military commissions act of 2006, and the Patriot Act, among others, that legalize the indefinite detention of terror suspects, that eliminate habeas corpus and give the prosecutor the power to incarcerate someone AFTER acquittal, as some examples. They think that applies only to terrorists (are you too, or will you be, a terror suspect?). They also don’t know or care about the executive orders Bush, Obama, and other presidents have signed, designed, in one way or another, to implement martial law in Amerika if Americans resist the tyranny.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Egypt arrests as undersea internet cable cut off Alexandria

• Please read: an announcement from Wikimedia Foundation ED Sue Gardner

  Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Wikimedia Foundation’s mailing lists, letting people there know that I’m planning to leave my position as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. The purpose of this post is to get the news out to a somewhat larger group.

Intellectual Monopolies

• ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ Sneaks Through Senate

  When the Senate passed a budget resolution Wednesday that appears to prevent some of the potential damage from sequestration, the Continuing Resolution included several food- and agriculture-related earmarks.
  But one inclusion in particular is especially controversial. The “biotech rider” would require the USDA to approve the harvest and sale of crops from genetically modified seed even if a court has ruled the environmental studies on the crop were inadequate. This aspect of the bill infuriated many sustainable food and agriculture groups, who nicknamed the bill the “Monsanto Protection Act.”

• Copyrights

  • Writing Open Source Software? Make Sure You Know Your Copyright Rights

  • Lawsuit claiming MMS services are like Napster finally fails

    Luvdarts LLC created a kind of MMS advertising that was designed to be forwarded to friends’ cell phones, a sort of digital “greeting card” that often included discounts. But the company only wanted its ads forwarded exactly one time—and Luvdarts really meant it. When the cards were forwarded more than once, that was copyright infringement in the company’s view. In 2010, it filed a lawsuit saying that cell phone companies should actually take responsibility for their users’ alleged infringement. Today, that lawsuit finally fell apart at an appeals court.

  • Prenda lawyer has a history of unusual class action clients

    Paul Hansmeier, widely regarded as a ringleader for the prolific copyright trolling firm Prenda Law, has been having a rough year. After a Minnesota man accused his firm of identity theft, Hansmeier gave remarkably evasive answers to questions posed by defense attorneys. Upon reading the transcript, a judge declared that “someone has a lot to hide.” The judge has since ordered Hansmeier and his Prenda colleagues to his courtroom on April 2. Prenda has begun to backpedal, dismissing pending copyright cases around the country.

  • Government Can Keep Key Emails With Hollywood Lobbyists About ‘Six Strikes’ Secret

    While we keep hearing folks in the entertainment industry and their supporters in DC talk about how great it is that the “six strikes” “Copyright Alert System” (CAS) was a “voluntary” agreement between industry players, one of the worst kept secrets in the world was that the White House was heavily involved. They basically helped Hollywood out and at least hinted strongly at the fact that if no “voluntary” agreement came through, legislation might have to be put in place (creating a novel definition of “voluntary”). Specifically, it came out that Victoria Espinel, the White House’s IP Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), had been emailing with people about the program.

  • Copyright Lobby: The Public Has ‘No Place In Policy Discussions’

    “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” That is the purpose of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, which is sometimes referred to as the “copyright clause” (or “the patent clause”), which enables both areas of law to be created via Congress. It’s also the part that is most often ignored. As we’ve discussed, the whole purpose of this clause is to make it clear that the public are the sole stakeholders when it comes to proper policy making decisions regarding these laws. However, with this new push for comprehensive copyright reform, it appears that the copyright lobby is already working on ways to make sure that the public is marginalized in the discussion.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Skills Still in High Demand in the Job Market

Have you been looking for a job, or extra work on the side, and getting ever more frustrated even though the job market is turning up? While the market is improving, it’s still a tough environment out there, especially for college graduates who have little experience on their resumes. The good news is that a number of recent surveys and studies show that open source skills are in increasing demand at many organizations.

Career Watch: Linux pros are in demand

Linux Top 3: Ubuntu Kaylin, Debian Wheezy and Linux Mint

Fragmentation is not killing Linux

There are thousands of charities. Aids Research, Cancer Research, the British Heart Foundation. This fragmentation is killing our chances of actually curing Cancer. If you funnel all the money from Aids prevention, Comic Relief, Leukaemia and so forth there is no doubt in my mind we’d have cured Cancer by now. If we coerce the scientists working on making Shampoo into curing Cancer we’d have an even better shot. We might even save more lives in the long run. Don’t question how useful Shampoo scientists are to curing Cancer, just accept they are scientists and trust me.

[Ubuntu In The Wild] Unity In Use By Norwegian Military

GNU/Linux Continues to Grow in Venezuela

The huge rate of growth of GNU/Linux noticed for February is continuing in March. The increase from February to March was almost 1%, a growth rate of 11% per month. It’s taking share from that other OS and even with a slow-down the share may reach ~10% soon. Any system-wide changeover likely will go in stages so this may just be the beginning of something much larger. There are well over 1 million computers in Venezuela so 1% of share is over 10K PCs. Munich, eat your heart out…

4 gui applications for installing Linux from USB key

The traditional and most common method of installing Linux is by burning the installation ISO image to a CD or DVD. But with many laptops, notebooks, ultra notebooks, subnotebooks shipping without an optical drive, installation via USB flash stick has become the most common method for installing Linux on these types of computers. That’s were a Linux USB installer come into play.

Desktop

• Linux Pre-installed on Laptops in Chinese Supermarket

Server

• Live Twitter Q&A Thursday with Adapteva CEO on the $99 Linux Supercomputer

  Back in October Adapteva wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to build a Raspberry Pi-inspired $99 Linux supercomputer. Next month the company expects the first Parallela boards to be in production — just in time to show off at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.

  Here, CEO Andreas Olofsson gives us a preview of his talk at Collab, the benefits of parallel processing, and his company’s quest to make parallel computing available to the masses. Have a burning question he doesn’t answer here? Join us for a live Twitter chat with Andreas (@adapteva) Thursday, March 28 at 11 a.m. PST. Follow the conversation and submit questions with the hash tag #LiveLinuxQA.

• Global Enterprises Increase Linux Adoption in Critical Growth Areas Including Cloud Computing

  Annual Survey of World’s Largest Enterprise Linux Users Shows Strong and Consistent Growth Due to Demand for Supporting Cloud Initiatives, Greenfield Deployments and Mission-Critical Workloads

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 303 – Disappointed!

Kernel Space

• Defragmentation

  Defragfs optimizes files on a system, allowing videos to load faster and large archives to open in the blink of an eye.

• Linux 3.9-rc4

• Systemd 199 Has Its Own D-Bus Client Library

  Released shortly after Upstart 1.8 is systemd 199. Features of systemd 199 include systemd-python gaining an API to expose the libsystemd daemon, SMACK setup logic improvements, behavior changes to several components, a few kernel sysctl variables being set by default, new tunables, a new libsystemd-bus module that implements a near-complete D-Bus client library, journald improvements, and much more.

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland/Weston Fork Now Called Northfield/Norwood

    Yesterday I reported on Wayland and Weston being forked as “GH-Next” as a new project that sought to drive new Linux desktop innovations. Now today, enter Northfield/Norwood.

    The GH-Next initiative was announced by Scott Moreau as basically a playground to experiment with future Wayland/Weston developments and to particularly focus on “desktop bling” and other graphical desktop effects. After one year of working on Wayland with little to show, Moreau decided to do this GH-Next project.

  • VIA KMS Driver Now Supports HDMI Output

    The VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver, which has long been in development but has yet to reach the mainline Linux kernel, now supports HDMI.

    Displays can now be driven over HDMI with this open-source VIA KMS/DRM driver that’s largely developed by just James Simmons of the Linux kernel community.

  • Gallium3D Gets A Heads-Up Display For Information

    The latest accomplishment of Marek Olšák is developing a “heads-up display” for Gallium3D DRI2 drivers for showing off various attributes of the current system state like the frame-rate and CPU load.

    Marek developed a new Gallium3D module to draw transparent graphs and data on top of whatever OpenGL applications are running. This allows an overlay of system vitals like the frame-rate, CPU load, number of pixels rendered, and other interesting technical information over any application. The work also allows for drivers to expose driver-specific information too.

  • Is Wayland the New X?

    Display server expert Daniel Stone explains what is really happening with the future of graphical display protocols on Linux.

  • Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As “GH-Next”

  • Adventures in Wayland

    I’ve spent the last two weekends with the GTK+ Wayland backend, trying to make some progress towards day-to-day usability. While there are still some big gaps, things are looking pretty ok now.

  • GTK+ Is Becoming Very Usable With Wayland

    The state of the GTK+ tool-kit for the Wayland Display Server is now ready for day-to-day use.

    Matthias Clasen of Red Hat has been one of several developers recently working on the Wayland back-end to the GTK+3 tool-kit. Clasen spent most of the past two weeks working on Wayland GTK+ support and getting it into shape for “day-to-day usability” by Linux desktop users.

  • Unigine Engine Works On Panorama, OpenGL

    Another round of updates have gone into the impressive multi-platform multi-renderer Unigine Engine.

    Unigine’s AppProjection plug-in has seen some love, which is used to create multi-projector setups for virtual training and simulation systems. The plug-in supports geometry distortion correction, soft-edge blending, color correction, and other features. Within the latest development blog posting by Unigine are some really nifty photos showing off Unigine on multi-projector curved screens. The AppProjection plug-in now supports panorama, linear, and fisheye rendering.

  • Intel Valley View Still Being Tuned For Linux

    The drm-intel-testing Git branch has been updated with new code that’s ready for testing and eventual merging into the Linux 3.10 kernel.

  • AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta 3 Available For Linux Users

    It was just one week ago that AMD released the Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 driver while now it has been succeeded by Catalyst 13.3 Beta 3.

  • You Can Now Overclock Your Intel GPU Under Linux

    The Intel Linux graphics driver should now work better when overclocking your Intel graphics core thanks to a new Linux kernel patch.

  • Geometry Shaders For Gallium3D LLVM

    Geometry shaders are one of the few remaining features to be implemented before Mesa can officially declare itself in compliance with the OpenGL 3.2 specification. Fortunately, work on the Gallium3D side is ongoing.

    Support for OpenGL Geometry Shaders within Mesa/Gallium3D has been a work-in-progress for many months by numerous developers from different organizations. The most recent “GS” patches to be published were by Zack Rusin this morning at VMware. Zack is one of the developers to be working on Gallium3D/Mesa Geometry Shaders support for the longest time.

• Benchmarks

  • LLVM/Clang 3.3 Offers Performance Improvements

    Recent compiler testing of the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 SVN code-base has yielded some significant performance boosts for some common C/C++ benchmarks against LLVM/Clang 3.2.

    With running some new Phoronix benchmarks for comparing against the recently released GCC 4.8, I’ve been tossing some LLVM/Clang Linux x86_64 compiler configurations in the mix too. Interestingly, there’s some very notable rises with LLVM/Clang 3.3 SVN over LLVM/Clang 3.2 stable.

  • Intel Core i7 Benchmarks On GCC 4.8.0

  • Intel Ivy Bridge Benchmarks On The GCC 4.8 Compiler

Applications

• OpenShot could round out open source media production suite

  (5 votes)

  OpenShot, a very popular video editor for Linux, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to hasten its next phase of development, which will include a Macintosh and Windows port of the program.

  Jonathan Thomas, the lead designer and programmer for the project, is eager to hire some extra programmers to assist with this phase of the program’s development. As an open source advocate, I’m thrilled about it.

• Important Update About Lightworks

• GStreamer OpenMAX IL Wrapper 1.0 Released

  Collabora has announced the release of their GStreamer OpenMax IL wrapper plug-in for the GStreamer 1.x multimedia framework.

  Open Media Acceleration, a.k.a. OpenMAX, is the royalty-free set of programming interfaces for audio/video/image processing. OpenMAX is maintained by the Khronos Group and provides some similar functionality to video APIs like VDPAU and X-Video for hardware processing.

  The new plug-in release by Collabora supports the stable GStreamer 1.x API/ABI with a generic OpenMAX IL implementation as well as special support for the OpenMAX features of the Raspberry Pi.

• Free & Open Source Rootkit and Malware Detection Tools

• Cairo-Dock 3.2 Improves Multi-Screen Support

  Cairo-Dock 3.2 has been released and it improves multi-screen support for the animated application launch bar/dock. There’s also a new applet and plug-in.

  Cairo-Dock 3.2 was announced on Friday with improved multi-screen support, a new screenshot applet, a new sound effects plug-in, and distant folders (e.g. FTP and Samba) as well as encrypted disks are handled in the shortcuts applet.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The JSON API: An Example

  • Howto: Sort spam mails to the junk folder in Zarafa

  • Monitoring Drupal With Opsview

  • Dual-boot Windows 7 and Kali Linux

  • KDE Plasma 4.10 Ubuntu 12.10 Installation Instructions

  • Mastering The Linux Shell : Making Things Disappear

  • Mastering The Linux Shell : Making Things Disappear

  • How to Automatically Dress Up Your Linux Desktop with Awesome Wallpapers

  • Install nginx with PHP and MySQL in CentOS 6.4 / RHEL 6.4

  • Log Into Ubuntu with Your Fingerprint

  • [How-to] Upgrade to Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” from Ubuntu 12.10 Right Now!

  • Get Your Fingerprint Reader Working in Ubuntu

  • Ubuntu’s Chinese Spin ‘Kylin’ Adds Custom Icons, Tweaked Theme

  • How to change your privacy settings in Ubuntu’s Unity Dash

  • How to Deploy A Server

  • Free Resource: How to Give a Great Tech Talk Tutorial at CollabSummit

  • Howto: Sort spam mails to the junk folder in Zarafa

  • Three ways to integrate Tomcat and Apache for best performance and features

  • Linux processes explained – Part1

  • Unix: When pipes don’t make sense

  • How To Use Multiple PHP Versions (PHP-FPM & FastCGI) With ISPConfig 3 (Ubuntu 12.10)

  • Pass – A perfect shell based password manager

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.5.26 Fixes Windows Media Player 9 Installation

• Games

  • Monster RPG 2 major new version 2.0 is out!

    There are masses of changes, far too many to list here but here are a few interesting/important ones!

  • Urban Terror 4.2.010 Brings Improvements Throughout

    The Urban Terror open-source first person shooter has been updated to version 4.2.010, with the new version bringing a variety of improvements throughout the game.

  • The End Is Nigh For the Linux Game Tome

  • A Look at Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition

  • FSGamer: Simple OpenSource Tool to Create Fullscreen Linux Gaming Experience that Doesn’t Suck

  • GameLaunched, a new game-specific crowdfunding platform

    GameLaunched went live last week and so far is featuring only 4 projects, but surely more will follow in the next days.

  • Red Eclipse 1.4 Brings Many Game Changes

    Aside from the Urban Terror game update, there’s also a new version of Red Eclipse this weekend.

  • What we learned from building our $500 Steam Box

    A few weeks ago, we built our own Steam Box with several goals in mind. We wanted to publish a clear, comprehensive guide to help our readers build their own Steam Box – but we also wanted to learn more about the hardware, the pricing, and how well Steam works on Linux. This is why we focused on a conservative, low-end gaming computer rather than a powerhouse.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Enlightenment’s Terminal Brings In Fancy Features

  Terminology 0.3 has been released, which is the Enlightenment project’s own terminal emulator built atop EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Library) components. Terminology is written from scratch and with its v0.3 release it boasts some truly original and innovative features for this terminal emulator. There’s embedded support for previewing videos/images and other new inline capabilities.

  Enlightenment’s Terminology 0.3 introduces support for splits, tabs, and inlined videos and images. Besides just videos and image files, there’s also support within this terminal emulator for SVG and PDF files.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE narrowly avoids disaster

    KDE contributor Jeff Mitchell has written a blog post on what he says “almost became The Great KDE Disaster Of 2013″ – the project narrowly avoiding the loss of all of its Git repositories. The KDE Project hosts 1500 code repositories for a number of open source applications that are affiliated with the desktop environment and all of them were nearly wiped out last week due to a combination of a software fault and a problematic mirroring setup. The KDE developers are now looking into ways of avoiding such a potential disaster in the future.

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 10th February 2013

  • Too Perfect a Mirror

  • KDE Almost Lost All Of Their Git Repositories

    There was almost “The Great KDE Disaster Of 2013″ when the KDE project almost lost all of their 1,500+ Git repositories.

    Last week the virtual machine running git.kde.org was taken down for security updates. When the host came back up, which handles the 1,500+ Git repositories for the project, there was EXT4 file-system corruption. The KDE back-up system mirrors the Git trees of this server, but it turns out that these mirrors were also pulling in the corrupted Git repositories.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • The Incremental GNOME 3.8: Doing What the Project Does Best

    If you dislike the GNOME 3 release series, the new 3.8 version of the popular desktop environment won’t change your mind. However, if you do use GNOME 3, you’ll appreciate the enhancements. Essentially, 3.8 is an incremental release, in which the project does what it has always done best — making dozens of tweaks that affect the user experience (generally for the better) without making any major changes to how it works.

    GNOME 3.8 should be making its way to the package repositories of major distributions later this week. Those who want to satisfy their curiosity sooner can download the release candidate image. Alternatively, they can download the still-in-development Ubuntu 13.04, add the repositories ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging as sources, and then enter apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-shell-extensions. Release notes are available so that you know what to look for.

  • GTK+ 3.8.0 Supports Wayland 1.0, Better Performance

    GTK+ 3.8.0 has been released ahead of this week’s GNOME 3.8 desktop release. GTK+ 3.8 supports the Wayland 1.0 protocol, provides Broadway HTML5 server advancements, performance improvements, and much more.

Distributions

• Fenrus Linux: A Distro For Performance, Developers

  Fenrus Linux is a new Linux distribution being led by a well known Intel Linux developer. Goals of Fenrus Linux include focusing upon an optimal developer experience rather than world domination and also maximizing the performance and power management of the open-source operating system.

  Fenrus Linux is largely the work of Arjan van de Ven, a well known Linux developer from the Netherlands who is employed by Intel and its Open-Source Technology Center. Arjan has made — and continues to make — many upstream Linux contributions while Fenrus Linux is a new pet project.

• How the websites of popular Linux distros looked in the past

  Today, when I checked the archives of the websites of the Linux distros, I was really surprised to see how different these sites looked back then. Here are the screenshots of the websites of some popular Linux distros when everything just started.

• What is going on for Kali Linux?

  Today, I experienced an upset incident which Kali Linux freenode channnel banned me for I just told them the truth about the fact that one of the developers (he is muts) to delete some of the bug reports.

  In my opinion, why they not rated the entries as invalid instead of deleting it. However, I was banned. Therefore, I deleted what I posted in the forum of Kali Linux (http:www.kali.org). Later learnt that I was also banned for the Kali forum.

• calamariOS, Huh, What?

  When one hears the word calamari, they usually think “yuk!” …or I do anyway. Others will still inevitably think “fried squid.” So, when such an unusual name for a Linux distribution popped up on distrowatch.com, it caught my attention. Then when I saw it was based on openSUSE, I had to give it a boot.

  It’s not often you see a distribution based on openSUSE. But, as it turns out, it was built using SUSE Studio. With that one can design an installable live CD or USBs as well as a cloud system. You can pick and choose whatever software your heart desires and, like a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle, your distro magically appears. So, it doesn’t feel quite like a “real distro” compiled from scratch while your better half threatens divorce, buuut, it’s close enough to get on Distrowatch’s waiting list. So, let’s take a peek.

• New Releases

  • Pardus 2013

  • Clonezilla 2.1.1-9

  • Neptune 3.0 “Brotkasten” Release is ready

  • OpenELEC 3.0.0 released

  • OpenELEC 3.0 Brings In XBMC 12.1 Frodo

    Version 3.0.0 of OpenELEC has been released, which is a Linux distribution with a multimedia bent that is shipping with XBMC 12.1 Frodo.

    OpenELEC 3.0.0 is designed around XBMC Frodo 12.1 while other key parts of the Linux distribution’s stack has also been updated.

  • OpenELEC 3.0 Linux distro gets official, supports ‘more hardware than ever’

    The OpenELEC Linux distro came out of beta with its official 3.0.0 version this week, and according to its makers nearly every part has been upgraded since the 2.0 release last year. This release of the media center package is based on XBMC 12.1 and as such includes its assortment of updates, as well as specific improvements for the Raspberry Pi, MC001 devices, Apple TV and AMD hardware. If you’re on 2.0 you’ll need to manually update to the new version, hit the source link for a full changelog and instructions on how to get it all working.

• Slackware Family

  • Slackware Linux switches to MariaDB

    The next version of Slackware Linux will drop MySQL in favour of MariaDB. The change was announced on the front page of the site and in the project’s change log by Patrick Volkerding. Slackware is following a trend within Linux distributions of switching away from Oracle’s MySQL to the MariaDB Foundation’s MariaDB, a fork of MySQL created when Oracle acquired Sun and, with it, MySQL. Community fears of Oracle closing MySQL or charging licence fees for the community edition have prompted distributions such as Fedora and also openSUSE to switch to MariaDB as their default database. Slackware appears, though, to be going further – it is completely replacing MySQL with MariaDB rather than just selecting it as a default.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Inc. Lower On Analyst Comments Citing Slower Future Growth

  • European Commission digital agenda and cloud strategy

    The European Commission (EC), the central governing body of the EU, has in the past several years pursued ICT policies that increasingly have been good for “openness” in the areas of standards, data, and software. Its recent announcements on cloud computing have continued this theme.

  • News Recap: Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • Red Hat’s Core Linux Business Key To Q4 Earnings

    Red Hat (RHT) will continue to be a growth story as long as its core business of migrating companies from older Unix servers to its open source Linux operating system continues to flourish.

    That’s the conclusion from some analysts who follow the enterprise software company, which is set to release its fiscal Q4 numbers after the market close on Wednesday.

  • Red Hat shares fall after analyst downgrade

  • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Q4 Earnings Preview: History Hints At Something BIG!

    Wall Street anticipates that RHT will earn $0.30 according to Yahoo and 21 cents according to Zacks.com for the quarter. iStock expects the application software company to report earnings that will meet Wall Street’s consensus number. The iEstimate is $0.30 or $0.21 based on the source.

• Debian Family

  • Linux distro update: Ubuntu slashes support, Debian 7.0 draws near

    It wasn’t all that long ago that Canonical extended the support period for Long Term Support (LTS) releases of its Ubuntu Linux from three years to five, but last week it made a move in the opposite direction for its non-LTS software.

  • Review: Linux Mint MATE 201303

    For those of you who have been waiting for a review, I think I may have said before that my writing would shift more to science-y stuff and away from distribution reviews. However, that does not mean that reviews will stop entirely. I’m on spring break now and have a little more time to do these reviews, so today I am reviewing Linux Mint MATE 201303, which came out earlier this week.

  • The SprezzOS Rewrite Of Debian’s APT Continues

    One of the more peculiar Linux distributions to emerge recently has been SprezzOS, which debuted with claims of being the most robust, performant, and beautiful Linux. When it launched it didn’t generate much attention, but recently the SprezzOS developers began rewriting Debian’s APT software.

    Earlier this month I reported on the SprezzOS Raptorial project that is rewriting Debian APT with a focus on performance. Raptorial is meant to be a drop-in replacement to APT that focuses on parallelism and project art. The initial program to be published was “rapt-show-versions”, which was much faster than apt-show-versions on modern hardware.

  • Derivatives

    • A look at Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 201303

      Let’s start this off with a brief review of what Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is and what it isn’t, followed by what this release is and what it isn’t.

      LMDE is a Linux Mint distribution, containing all of the nice Mint tools (installer, updater, menus and other utilities), plus lots of preloaded and preconfigured packages, but built on top of Debian GNU/Linux, rather than Ubuntu as the numbered/named Mint distributions (currently 14/Nadia).

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Richard Stallman says Ubuntu Linux is ‘spyware’

      • Stallman Calls Ubuntu Spyware; Asks FLISOL Not to Recommend It at Events in South America ~pj

        Richard Stallman sent to Lista Nacional de FLISOL, the FLISOL mailing list. He asks them not to promote or distribute Ubuntu at their events, and it’s in Spanish…

      • Richard Stallman Slams Ubuntu Over Amazon Integration, Calls It “Spyware”

      • OpenSUSE 12.3 vs. Ubuntu 13.04

        I’m among the first to admit that when I find a Linux distribution that I like, it takes a lot for me to be impressed with any of the alternatives. I’ve looked into countless distros, such as Arch, Fedora and Linux Mint, among others. Yet at the end of the day, I kept finding myself coming back to Ubuntu. And in many ways, I find this comical since I was one of the early naysayers about their use of Unity and other controversial decisions. But something happened over time – I found myself growing comfortable with the way Ubuntu does things. With my busy schedule, a distro that “just works” appeals to me.

      • Official Twitter app for Ubuntu Touch canceled

      • Ubuntu Kylin to become reference OS in China

      • Ubuntu to power China as operating system reference design

      • Canonical Ubuntu Basis of National, Open Source OS for China

        Canonical, in concert with the Chinese government and local developers, is building an Ubuntu-based, open source operating system for China.

        China, with a population of some 1.3 billion people, is without doubt the mother lode of operating system markets in terms of number of potential users, with the potential to cascade a dramatic expansion in reach for Ubuntu and Linux. In other words, this could be big.

      • China building its own Ubuntu-based national operating system

      • China, Canonical to collaborate on Ubuntu-based national OS

      • China to create its own open-source OS, based on Ubuntu

      • People’s Republic of Open Source: Chinese government embraces Linux

      • 4 Simple Tweaks to Increase Unity Performance

        Unity has serious performance issues. Improvements are slowly starting to trickle in, but even then, the current state of affairs leaves a lot to be desired. Making Unity faster and slicker should be Canonical’s top priority in my opinion, and that is why I am still a big proponent of “Project Butter” for Ubuntu. Let’s just hope that, Unity’s performance will get the deserved attention it needs to compete with the best out there. In the meantime, here are some nice little tweaks to significantly improve performance of Unity in Ubuntu.

      • Goodbye Ubuntu

        Today marks the beginning of the end of me having an Ubuntu machine at home, and I have mixed feelings about that. By the weekend the last machine that I do have, my network file server and general dogsbody machine, will have been replaced and its replacement will not be running Ubuntu.

        The primary purpose of the machine is to be a point of backup for my laptop and other devices, as well as a host for the large and valuable content collections such as my photos, music, purchased TV shows, movies, etc.

      • More Regular, Open, and Transparent Planning

        Continuing with the work to refine and improve how we build Ubuntu in an open, transparent, and collaborative way, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some work going on to improve the regularity of our planning and the benefits this brings.

      • Ubuntu OS on Nexus 10 review

        A mobile OS which scales up to the full desktop. But does the beta work?

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 309

      • Ubuntu to become the official OS of China – an anti-freedom move by Ubuntu?

      • Ubuntu Touch Improves, Comes To More Hardware

        A weekly status update on Ubuntu Touch has been shared that illustrates more work on their key applications and more ports of this phone/tablet-oriented Ubuntu Linux heading to more hardware.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • elementary OS Gets Its Own AppCenter

          The elementary OS team has released the first version of AppCenter, a tool used to install and remove software, designed to be beautiful, fast and lightweight.

        • Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right

          The changes to Ubuntu Unity and Gnome3 set me into motion in search of a replacement Distro. Last year I tried many Distros looking yet something was missing. I didn’t realize what it was until I tried Fuduntu in its 2013.1 version released in January.

          I tried it and truthfully, I didn’t expect what I found. That name just threw me because it’s not a silly Distro. Quite the opposite, in fact, I discovered a ‘sleeper’. This product, developed by +Andrew Wyatt, has all the earmarkings of a thorough-bred commercial grade Distro, yet is community-based managed by a small dedicated collective team who understand the ‘fundamentals’.

        • Linux Mint 14 Nadia Gets Penguin Peted

          Linux Mint is beautiful, beautiful beyond words. Not only is it well-thought out, stable, and well-behaved, but it looks damned good while its at it.

        • The Linux Mint Debian Edition 201303 released

          The Linux Mint team has announced the release of its Debian based edition of the popular GNU/Linux based operating system. LMDE comes in two flavors – Cinnamon and MATE. This edition brings MATE 1.4 and Cinnamon 1.6.

          The version also brings installer improvements (graphical timezone and keyboard selection, support for installation on multiple HDD, slideshow, webcam and face picture support). It also brings improved Device Driver Manager and Plymouth splash screen among many other.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Ballot: Your questions for Eben Upton/Raspberry Pi

  As usual, we’re rushed off our feet and we don’t think we’ll have enough time to arrange a live podcast this week. We’ll try our best to make it happen next time.

• Media Centre Linux OpenELEC now on Raspberry Pi

  The OpenELEC developers have released version 3.0 of their minimalist multimedia Linux distribution. The Linux system serving as the basis of the “Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center” – or OpenELEC for short – has been completely updated and now supports even more hardware. The system only comes to between 90 to 130 megabytes, and there are now ISO images specifically for the Raspberry Pi and Arctic MC001 barebones computers.

• Celebrating the Life of Pi

  We celebrate the first birthday of the Raspberry Pi with an exclusive interview with its creators covering its first year on sale and goals for 2013

• Meet MiiPC – Raspberry Pi American style

  The trend of mini computers is still going on. A new kid just showed up into the family of cheap, mini computers. MiiPC, a mini-Android based PC aimed to provide a safe environment for children to use the internet under the watchful eye of their parents.

  This little device is designed for large screen connectivity and is optimized to provide a true keyboard and mouse experience, essentially offering your kids a basic PC experience. And the price is quite affordable, under $100.

• big.LITTLE ARM embraces automotive infotainment

• Music and Game Resources Surface for the Raspberry Pi

• Wind River Introduces Yocto Project Compatible Carrier Grade Linux

• ACCESS Joins Readium Foundation, Open Source Consortium for Digital Publishing

• Phones

  • Firefox OS, Ubuntu, Tizen getting ready to take on Android, iOS

    A handful of new smartphone platforms are expected to become available this year, challenging the stranglehold of the two market leaders, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

    Android and Apple account for more than 90 percent of the surging smartphone market, and third place is being contested by BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

  • Ballnux

    • SPOTTED: Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini GT-I9190

    • HTC plans second-generation Butterfly phone

    • First details and images surface for HTC Desire P, Desire Q

    • HTC One ‘coming soon’ to T-Mobile for just $99

  • Android

    • Mini Android PC hitches a ride on a Kickstarter rocket

      A company developing a low-cost personal computer based on Android launched a Kickstarter project yesterday, to help get the device into production. After just one day, the MiiPC project has already achieved Kickstarter pledges of more than $10,000 beyond its $50,000 goal.

    • Steve Kondik, CyanogenMod Android founder, leaves Samsung

    • CyanogenMod Founder Steve Kondik Leaves Samsung, Criticizes TouchWiz on Way Out

    • CyanogenMod founder leaves Samsung

      Steve Kondik, founder of the CyanogenMod project and creator of its popular alternative ROM for Android devices, has left Samsung. Kondik revealed that he is no longer employed by the company as an aside in a Google+ post concerning the Galaxy S4 hardware. The well-known Android hacker, who also goes by the online name Cyanogen, started at Samsung’s mobile division in August 2011 to work on “making Android more awesome”. It is not currently known what Kondik’s future plans are; when queried he replied “ask me in a couple of months”.

    • Cyanogenmod founder Steve Kondik quits Samsung

      Cyanogenmod founder Steve Kondik has quit Samsung after spending almost two years with the Korean giant. Steve joined Samsung in August 2011. Steve’s G+ profile now says that he works at Cyanogenmod.

    • Update on OsciPrime: an open-source Android oscilloscope

    • Tiny ARM Cortex A9-based motherboard runs Linux, Android

      Wave Systems has released a Pico-ITX motherboard based on Freescale’s single- and dual-core i.MX 6 processors, which integrate ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs plus 2D and 3D GPUs. Unlike SODIMM-style COMs (computer-on-modules), iWave’s i.MX6 Pico ITX SBC offers easy connection of audio, video, Ethernet, and USB I/O, without requiring a custom baseboard.

    • Android Candy: Pocket

    • First targeted attack to use Android malware discovered

    • Motorola X Phone render surfaces, some more specs added

    • Latest rumored Motorola X specs: 4.8 inch screen, Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, November launch

Coverity Expands Free Access to Development Testing Service within Open Source Community, Launches Coverity Scan for Java

Two Viable Open Source NAS Solutions

But choosing open source as a platform does offer some help in solving both budget and user needs. In the case of NAS solutions, you get to pick what hardware to use, and you have lots of options when it comes to customization.

The two options under consideration in this article are FreeNAS and OpenFiler. Both have been around for a while and have many of the features you would expect in a business-class storage system. While FreeNAS is completely open source, OpenFiler has taken the approach of offering a base system for free but charging a fee for some additional features. You can still put together a usable system with the free version, but you might want to consider some of the paid options for the improvements they offer.

New Kid on the FOSS Block: OX Documents

“There is definitely a place for OX Documents — if anything, we need more choices,” said Google+ blogger Brett Legree. “Would I use OX Documents? Yes, I would. I like the design and overall user experience, and since it can be used with a wide range of file formats, as well as with local files via what they call ’round-trip editing,’ I could use it everywhere.”

OX Text Offers Open Source Rival To Google Docs

Managing Big Data Storage: unified platform and intelligent open source software to rescue

Deployment of new and advanced technologies, support for an increasing number of devices, increasing virtualization and the general expansion of business have dramatically altered the volume and nature of the workloads beings handled by data storage systems.

Big Switch open-sources software to ease the move to commodity switches

Hot off a new round of funding, Big Switch Networks says it now has open-source and commercial software to help companies scale out networks more easily and cheaply with commodity switches, further threatening the likes of legacy network gear sellers.

Opengear Announces Revenue, Reseller Partner Growth

In yet another recent example of the increasing global reach of open source solutions, Opengear, which develops remote management solutions based on open source technology, has posted impressive growth figures for 2012–while also bragging about other major achievements in the realms of awards, product innovation and channel engagement. And partners seem to be taking notice.

BBC makes TV Application Layer open source

The BBC is to share its TV Application Layer (TAL) with the connected TV sector at large through the open source repository GitHub.

Unraveling the Emerging Open Source Technologies at Open Source Conference 2013, Pune

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Browser ver26 Released For Windows, Mac and Linux

SaaS/Big Data

• Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

• OpenStack Open Source Cloud Project Setup Set for a Shakeup?

• Mirantis Open Sources Its Fuel Component Library for OpenStack

  As we’ve reported several times, Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, is gaining prominence in the cloud computing world. Now, Mirantis has open sourced its own library of configuration and deployment tools for OpenStack under an Apache 2.0 license. The library is called Fuel, and should be of interest to many people doing cloud deployments.

• Mirantis Open-Sources OpenStack Deployment Library

• In A Dangerous Sign For VMware, PayPal Chooses Rival OpenStack

• OpenStack Deployment Tool Goes Open Source

• Building the Cloud: Notes on Apache CloudStack (incubating)

• Apache CloudStack Advances Open Source Cloud Efforts

  A year ago, Citrix walked away from its open source OpenStack effort called Project Olympus, instead putting its CloudStack technology into the Apache Software Foundation.

  For the past year, CloudStack has been in the Apache Incubator, a preliminary process for new projects at the Foundation that aims to validate that a project can follow the ‘Apache Way’ of getting things done. CloudStack has now officially graduated from the Incubator and is now a Top-Level Project at Apache.

• Apache Software Foundation Upgrades CloudStack to Top-Level Project

• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache CloudStack Has Become A Top-Level Project

• Apache CloudStack Becomes a Top-level Project 37

• Apache helps free CloudStack from Citrix fetters

  Apache has approved CloudStack as a top-level project, showing how the project is moving beyond the control of Citrix

• Tribeca Cloud Launches Turnkey Solution for Deploying Open Source Platforms In The Cloud

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Celebrate Open Standards and Document Freedom on the 27th of March !

• Happy Document Freedom Day!

  Why? Because we need to improve the interoperability between software in order to communicate better and give everyone the opportunity to use the software they want to use to produce documents.

• Does the Oracle SPARC Update Leave Linux Behind?

  During the live event, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison proclaimed the new SPARC servers to be the fastest computers in the world.

  It’s a claim we’ve heard before from him – in reference to his company’s x86/Linux based Exa-class systems.

Business

• Latest BonitaSoft BPM Update Builds on Success of ‘Open Source’ Democratized Vision

Funding

• OpenShot Reaches Halfway In Kickstarter Campaign

BSD

• NetBSD turns 20 years old

• NetBSD on RPi: Minimizing Disk Writes

  I recently installed NetBSD on my RaspberryPi. Although not all the hardware is fully supported, enough is there to make it a usable system. It’s nice to have my RPi provide the same system experience (configuration, organization, etc.) as other NetBSD machines I maintain. A big “Thank you!” to the developers that made this possible.

  One concern I have, however, is that the boot drive is an SD card. Solid state cards have limited write cycles and I worry that, since most Unix systems assume a mechanical drive which allow essentially infinite writes, my SD card will not last very long. To measure this, I monitored the disk writes using ‘iostat’ and was disappointed in how many writes were occurring on an otherwise idle system.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free Software Awards for IPython and OpenMRS

  In a ceremony at last weekend’s LibrePlanet 2013, FSF president Richard Stallman presented the Free Software Award 2012. The Free Software Award is given out each year by the Free Software Foundation to one person for their contribution to Free Software and to one open source organisation or project for its social benefit.

Project Releases

• Upstart 1.8 reports file modifications

  The new version, 1.8, of event daemon Upstart, which is used by Ubuntu and other distributions as an alternative to SysV init and launches the various system services during the boot-up process, can now also monitor files and directories. If a particular file or directory is created, modified or deleted, Upstart starts a related job. This means, for example, that services can be automatically restarted when their configuration file is changed; until now, administrators had to manually restart the service using initctl. The Upstart Cookbook has examples of how the new function can be used.

• Upstart 1.8 Release Brings Two Changes

• Cairo-Dock 3.2 release!

• GWorkspace 0.9.2

Public Services/Government

• Renewed push for free software in German states of Berlin and Lower Saxony

  Politicians in the German states of Berlin and Lower Saxony are again pushing for the use of free and open source software solutions by the states’ public administration, the IT trade press reports.

• Obama’s tech team members to attend Palmetto Open Source Software Conference

  Next week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — has tapped into the White House.

  Two members of President Barack Obama’s technology team will highlight the annual conference, which has grown into a national event over the past five years.

Licensing

• SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

  At SCALE 11x in Los Angeles, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy presented a unique look at the peculiar origin of the Affero GPL (AGPL). The AGPL was created to solve the problem of application service providers (such as Web-delivered services) skirting copyleft while adhering to the letter of licenses like the GPL, but as Kuhn explained, it is not a perfect solution.

  The history of AGPL has an unpleasant beginning, middle, and end, Kuhn said, but the community needs to understand it. Many people think of the AGPL in conjunction with the “so-called Application Service Provider loophole”—but it was not really a loophole at all. Rather, the authors of the GPLv2 did not foresee the dramatic takeoff of web applications—and that was not a failure, strictly speaking, since no one can foresee the future.

Openness/Sharing

• Student conference experiments with Open Badges

  By using badges, we hoped to extend the life of the conference, reveal important exchanges that often go unnoticed at large professional development events, and encourage new behaviors and exchanges among participants. In order to accomplish this, we took advantage of Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure, and created badges on badg.us that could then be easily displayed and shared using Mozilla’s Open Badge Backpack management platform.

• Tasktop Offers Open-Source Effort To Link And Sync The API Economy

• Meet Sea Leveler: the open source water level gauge that wants you to talk about #sealevelrise

• Open Data

  • Gov 2.0 rises to the next level: Open data in action

    For many, Gov 2.0 is about putting government in the hands of citizens. Whether it’s a mobile app alerting residents to a local meeting or checking social media networks to see which roads are clear for the morning commute. The term should be defined primarily by its utility in helping citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the commons, according to a recent article on the subject by Alex Howard on GovFresh.

Programming

• Guile 100 #3: LZW Compression

Prime Minister Stephen Harper faces revolt as Conservative backbenchers complain of muzzlings

Conservative MP Mark Warawa (pictured) asked the Speaker of the House to intervene Tuesday after party whip Gordon O’Connor struck him from the list of backbenchers who were scheduled to deliver a member’s statement last Thursday.

Google pressured Sweden to drop the word ungoogleable [Updated]

Security

• Can the Lords salvage something from the Justice and Security Bill?

  Today Andrew Tyrie MP and Anthony Peto QC have published their follow-up paper on the Justice and Security Bill for the Centre for Policy Studies. It makes for harrowing reading.

  The Bill now heads back to the Lords today, where it started. The House of Lords voted for major amendments, introducing more discretion for judges and making the use of CMPs a last resort. The Government removed most of these amendments during Committee stage, in most cases by a single vote, despite repeated warnings that the Bill’s proposals constitute a radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles.

  As Andrew Tyrie MP says: “The Lords did good repair work on the Bill, but the Government has undone much of it. The Lords now have a final chance to restore their original sensible amendments and further improve the Bill. I very much hope that they will do take it.”

• What is the Network Control Point for Security? [VIDEO]

  Martin Roesch, founder of IPS vendor SourceFIRE, discusses the need for network visibility, web application firewalls and what it should all be called.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Media Didn’t Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media

  You know what, Paul Farhi? Skeptics are aware that it was possible to “connect the dots,” because they did so, in real time–citing the same exceptional journalists whom you now cite to prove that the media as a whole were doing their job.

  But the real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense of what reality is like. By this basic standard, the corporate media failed.

• Long-lost Nazi submarine U-486 found off coast of Norway

  The wreck of a long-lost Nazi submarine, the U-486, has been found off the west coast of Norway, more than 60 years after it was sunk.

  The remains were first spotted north of the port of Bergen last year but have only now been confirmed as the missing U-boat, the Bergen Maritime Museum announced today.

  The U-486 last sailed on April 12, 1945, when she came under attack from a British submarine. A torpedo broke the German vessel in two, sending her and all 48 crew onboard to the bottom of the seabed.

• THE SPY WHO SAID TOO MUCH

  In 2007, John Kiriakou was settling into a lucrative life as a former spy. His fourteen-year career as a C.I.A. officer had included thrilling, if occasionally hazardous, tours as a specialist in counterterrorism. In Athens, in 1999 and 2000, he recruited several foreign agents to spy for the United States, and at one point was nearly assassinated by leftists. In Pakistan, in 2002, he chased Al Qaeda members, and when Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda logistics leader, was wounded and captured, Kiriakou guarded his bedside. (Kiriakou recounted many of his exploits in a colorful memoir, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror.”) In 2004, he retired, and soon took a job with the accounting and consulting firm DeLoitte. He worked in the field of corporate intelligence and advised Hollywood filmmakers on the side.

• CIA Chief advises you to ask: What are your rights? Who owns your data?

  The cloud is old news, it’s “so three years ago,” and Big Data “was so last year,” but according to the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, this year is about “how to get value” from Big Data. At the GigaOM Structure Data conference, Hunt presented, “The CIA’s ‘Grand Challenges” with Big Data” and I highly recommend that you take about 30 minutes to personally listen to it.

• DOD Urged to Cut Ties with Russian Enabler of Syrian Atrocities

  Human Rights First today joined with Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Kay Granger (R-TX) to call on the Department of Defense to uphold its legal responsibility to end its business relationship with Russian-state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, an enabler of the mass atrocities in Syria. Russia, through Rosoboronexport, has served as the chief arms supplier of weapons to the Bashar al-Assad regime since the beginning of the two-year Syrian conflict that has left more than 70,000 dead.

• Man Speaks of Escape From Nazi Rule at Holocaust Remembrance Service

  Guest speaker Josef Korngruen will tell his story of escape from Nazi rule as a child. Korngruen was born in Austria to Polish parents. It was only after his parents renounced their Polish citizenship and became stateless that they were issued papers that allowed his sisters and him to travel—one sister to Israel, one to America and Josef to England on the Kindertransport.

• Delays in Poland’s CIA jails case “endangering evidence”

  Delays in Poland’s investigation into whether the CIA ran secret jails on its soil could have caused evidence to be lost and given security services time to cover their tracks, according to a submission to the European Court of Human Rights.

• Obama’s drone killing program slowly emerges from the secret state shadows

  How much difference does it make for a Pentagon finger to fire a Hellfire missile, rather than the CIA’s? Some, but not enough

• President Obama: The drones don’t work, they just make it worse

  As the Obama Administration looks to reform its drone program, it should focus on assessing its actual success rate.

• Woman who helped run CIA torture may get major promotion

• First female CIA director appointed

• Obama Appoints First Female Secret Service (Not CIA) Director

• CIA’s interrogation program deserves public airing

  Americans should assess whether Langley engaged in torture in its war against al-Qaida. The country’s honor is at stake, not just the competence of its primary intelligence service. Neither the CIA nor national security is likely to be harmed if the behemoth were released with the necessary camouflage for operatives, tradecraft and foreign intelligence services.

• US drones kill 4 in NWA

  The number of drone strikes has decreased dramatically in recent months. The last drone strike took place on March 10. Drone strikes by the United States are deeply resented in the country and considered a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

• Commission says no to drones

  County commissioners made it loud and clear Tuesday they want no part of drone testing at the airport.

• The More Americans Know About Drones, the Less They Like Them

  The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza gave his most recent “Worst Week in Washington Award” to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose assault weapons ban got stripped from a Democratic gun control package last Tuesday for lack of support. Fair enough, but if nonhumanoids can be eligible for the award (and why discriminate?), I’d say that drones had the “worst week in Washington” last week.

• Game of drones

  Federal regulators still have until 2015 to come up with drone rules, but some local and state governments don’t want to wait that long. In February, Charlottesville in Virginia, became the first US city to ban drones for two years.
  While these bans are mostly symbolic and would be overruled by a federal drone law, they highlight the anxiety that surrounds drones and doubts whether the FAA – an agency much more experienced in dealing with safety than privacy issues – can produce drone legislation that addresses privacy concerns.
  Those concerns are real, agrees Joanne Gabrynowicz, director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. “But we can come up with a regulatory system. If we did it for satellites I am confident we can do it for drones. But it will be difficult and there a lot of interests involved.”

• Mayor Bloomberg admits police drones may be coming to NYC

  New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s been on a roll lately. First he announced he wanted to ban super-size sodas, then it was ear-buds and cigarettes. Now the mayor has announced he may actually allow something. Look up; the Big Apple may soon be called the big brother.

  “What’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building?” Bloomberg asked when comparing aerial drones to the thousands of security cameras already placed around New York City.

• A 50-Point Swing Against Targeted Drone Killings of U.S. Citizens

  A year ago, as the presidential race was taking shape, The Washington Post’s pollster asked voters whether they favored the use of drones to kill terrorists or terror suspects if they were “American citizens living in other countries.” The net rating at the time was positive: 65 percent for, 26 percent against.
  Today, after a month of Rand Paul-driven discussion of drone warfare, Gallup asks basically the same question: Should the U.S. “use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against U.S. citizens living abroad who are suspected terrorists?” The new numbers: 41 percent for, 52 percent against.

Cablegate

• Of Wikileaks, Wikitreats, invisibility and Jack the Giant Slayer

• Julian Assange’s mother to speak at Murwillumbah

• WikiLeaks reveals how West’s Iran war drive was undermined

  Former chairperson of the US National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, received the 2013 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence on January 23 for his role overseeing the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

  The NIE report’s finding that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program gave lie to years of US-Israeli anti-Iran rhetoric, and has been credited with preventing a pre-emptive war against Iran.

  US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show that the NIE also hampered Western efforts to pass a fourth United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution against Iran.

• WikiLeaks trial criticized as opaque and “chilling” to freedom of speech

  New York Times media critic David Carr blasted the United States military’s “eyedropper” approach to releasing information about Pfc. Bradley Manning’s public pretrial in a column on Sunday, March 24. Chronicling the hurdles reporters have faced covering the trial, Carr observed, “A public trial over state secrets was itself becoming a state secret in plain sight.”

  According to Carr, the military has released only 84 documents out of nearly 400 requested under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents released were so redacted the critic wrote they were “mystifying at best and at times almost comic.” Carr also noted that the court did not provide written transcripts from the proceedings.

• Whistle blowers guard democracy

  The late I. F. “Iffy” Stone was a talented and insightful columnist whose beat was the Washington political arena, and he operated on a premise that every investigative reporter would do well to emulate.

• ‘Pentagon Papers’ whistleblower defends WikiLeaks ‘hero’ Manning

• Vietnam War whistleblower defends WikiLeaks ‘hero’

  Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg waited decades for someone like Bradley Manning to follow in his footsteps.

  He hails the US Army private accused of spilling secrets to website WikiLeaks as a champion of truth and not a betrayer of his country

• Wikileaks, free speech and Assange’s message to Australia

  Wikileaks has had a transformative effect on global politics and our attitudes to government power and responsibility.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 19 year old develops plan to clean up ocean trash vortexes

• Chemical Industry Clout Delays EPA Regulation of Hexavalent Chromium

  The hit 2000 film Erin Brockovich, which tells the story of how a novice legal clerk holds a huge corporation liable for contaminating a town’s drinking water with the carcinogenic chemical hexavalent chromium, or chromium (VI), ends in justice for those harmed. But as it turns out, Hinkley, California, the real-life town featured in the movie, is still contaminated.

Finance

• Corporate Land Grabs Reveal a Hidden Agenda: Controlling the Water

  Reports on land grabbing reveal that investors target control of both the land and the water beneath. Today’s “water barons”- multi-billionaires, financial institutions and corporate multinationals- are increasingly investing in water resources globally. Over-extraction and large land purchases in the Ogallala Aquifer and Great Lakes region in the US are proof that water scarcity is a growing problem not just in the Global South. Furthermore, efforts to track the water footprint of companies and other water-related risks, such as the “water disclosure project,” could actually backfire by providing information to investors interested in water-grabbing. Thus, regulatory mechanisms at the national and international level are needed to control large-scale land (and water) investments threatening the lives and livelihoods of local communities dependent on these resources.

• IT’S OFFICIAL: Banks In Europe May Now Seize Deposits To Cover Their Gambling Losses

  Although deposits under 100,000 euros will be spared, deposits over 100,000 euros will be seized and subjected to an as-yet undetermined haircut–with the confiscated money going to bail out the gambling losses of the aforementioned reckless idiots who run some of Cyprus’s banks.
  This seizure, needless to say, will dampen the enthusiasm of rich depositors for keeping money in banks that get themselves into financial trouble.
  And because many, many banks in Europe have gotten themselves into financial trouble, this will create a general state of unease among rich depositors throughout the Eurozone.
  And it should wig out some bank lenders, as well.
  After all, never before in the history of this global financial crisis has a major banking system allowed depositors to lose money, no matter how reckless and stupid and greedy their bank managers have been. And only rarely have bank lenders–those who hold bank bonds–been asked to pony up.

• CYPRUS’ BANKS TO REMAIN CLOSED UNTIL THURSDAY

• Detroit’s First Day Under an Emergency Financial Manager

  As of today, Detroit is under the control of a governor-appointed Emergency Financial Manager (EFM). The Motor City is the largest district in the nation to have its voters and elected officials sidelined by this new experiment in “crisis management.”

• JP Morgan Gets an Award for London Whale Fiasco, Will Schneiderman Harpoon the Corruption?

  A JPMorgan Chase employee stepped onstage at a black-tie gala on Wall Street last week to accept a “best crisis management” award given by an investor relations magazine. The bank, which was recently the subject of a U.S. Senate investigative hearing and an ongoing FBI probe into $6.2 billion in trading losses known as the “London Whale” fiasco, is not the subject of ridicule — but praise – from its cronies on Wall Street.

• WORLD’S FIRST BITCOIN ATM IS ANNOUNCED – FIRST LOCATION: CYPRUS

• Goldman Rejects Proposal That Firm Run for Elected Office

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the investment bank nicknamed “Government Sachs” because of senior executives who have moved into public posts, won’t be entering politics itself.

  A shareholder proposal that the New York-based company run for office instead of funding political campaigns was discarded, according to a letter last month from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which agreed the firm can exclude the measure from its annual meeting.

• Bill O’Reilly Gets Smacked By Economics Professor – Nanny States Actually Do Better (VIDEO)

  Fox News can afford to have economists to give its opinion masters factual information. It is obvious they have no interest in that. O’Reilly could not possibly believe what he is saying. Not only is there evidence from Europe as was stated by Professor Wolff, but it was true here in America.

• Russian Leader Warns, “Get All Money Out Of Western Banks Now!”

  A Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) “urgent bulletin” being sent to Embassies around the world today is advising both Russian citizens and companies to begin divesting their assets from Western banking and financial institutions “immediately” as Kremlin fears grow that both the European Union and United States are preparing for the largest theft of private wealth in modern history.
  According to this “urgent bulletin,” this warning is being made at the behest of Prime Minister Medvedev who earlier today warned against the Western banking systems actions against EU Member Cyprus by stating:

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• As Supreme Court Hears Challenge to ALEC Voting Bill, Two More States Introduce It

  Within days of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a challenge to an Arizona voting registration law that had been adopted as a “model” by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), two more states advanced bills that appear to track the ALEC/Arizona template.

  On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (ITCA), which will decide whether Arizona’s refusal to register voters that do not provide proof of citizenship is in conflict with federal law.

• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has political ambitions

  PEOPLE WATCHER Mark Zuckerberg has political ambitions to shake up the US immigration system.
  Zuckerberg is rallying a posse of technology politicos to help him create a lobbying group that will campaign – that is, throw money at – liberalising the US immigration and visa system.

• Journalist claims Washington Post killed article on Iraq war media failures

  The Washington Post has been accused by a journalist of spiking a piece he was commissioned to write about the US media’s failures in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

  Greg Mitchell, a veteran journalist and author (see here), claims his assigned piece for the Post was killed and replaced by an article that defended the media’s coverage.

Censorship

• Will bloggers be protected? Maybe – if your blog is “small”

• State Investigates Complaint about Dietrich Science Teacher’s Human Reproduction Lesson

  A Dietrich science teacher is being investigated by the state’s professional standards commission after a complaint from parents over his teaching methods.

  Tim McDaniel is being investigated after a complaint was filed by a handful of parents who objected to how McDaniel taught the reproductive system, Dietrich Superintendent Neil Hollingshead said.

  “It is highly unlikely it would end with his dismissal,” Hollingshead said. “Maybe a letter of reprimand from the school board.”

  According to McDaniel, four parents were offended that he explained the biology of an orgasm and included the word “vagina” during his lesson on the human reproductive system in a tenth-grade biology course.

  “I teach straight out of the textbook, I don’t include anything that the textbook doesn’t mention,” McDaniel said. “But I give every student the option not attend this class when I teach on the reproductive system if they don’t feel comfortable with the material.”

Privacy

• Microsoft discloses online data to the police

  Microsoft handed over online user account details of 2000 Australians to law enforcement agencies last year. Google and other software companies do the same thing.

• Under CISPA, Who Can Get Your Data?

  Under CISPA, companies can collect your information in order to “protect the rights and property” of the company, and then share that information with third parties, including the government, so long as it is for “cybersecurity purposes.” Companies aren’t required to strip out personally identifiable information from the data they give to the government, and the government can then use the information for purposes wholly unrelated to cybersecurity – such as “national security,” a term the bill leaves undefined.

• Privacy groups urge Baroness Ludford to support stronger data rights

  In response to her letter to the Financial Times, ORG and Privacy International have written to Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Sarah Ludford urging her to support stronger privacy rights in the upcoming and crucial LIBE Committee vote.

• NSA Facility In Utah To Help Fight Against Cyber-Attacks

• US Government To Scan Private Firms’ Emails And Web Use

  The US government is planning to scan private firms’ web use and email communications, as part of a bid to prevent cyber-attacks which has been requested by President Obama.

  The government is proposing to extend existing powers, so it can analyse the communications of organisations such as banks, utility providers and transport companies, to prevent online attacks on the country’s infrastructure, according to US security officials.

  The move is in response to an executive order signed by President Obama in February that calls upon the owners and operators of critical US infrastructure to “improve cyber-security information sharing and collaboratively develop and implement risk-based standards”.

• The Department of Homeland Security Would Like to Talk to Your Hacker Teens

  It’s hard being the Department of Homeland Security. Foreign agents are constantly trying to slip inside the D.H.S.’s computer systems. But America’s hotshot hackers either go for the private sector ($$$) or somewhere you can go on the offensive, like the N.S.A. (which, let’s face it, sounds super-badass).

  So, according to the New York Times, the agency, desperate for recruits, is now making like a college football program and hunting for recruits at high school hacking competitions

• Calling All High School Hackers

• To Combat China’s Hacker Army, the U.S. Is Copying Its Methods

• Government uses video games to recruit teen hackers

• U.S. government steps up hacker recruiting

Civil Rights

• 102 Years After Triangle Fire, Media Still Wonder How Workers Keep Dying

• Conscript facing jail again for refusing to go against his conscience

  A handful of Israeli teenagers go to prison every year because they refuse to serve in their country’s army on grounds of conscience.

  Nineteen-year old Natan Blanc from Haifa has been through this seven times in four months.

• NYC Mayor Bloomberg: Government has right to ‘infringe on your freedom’

  New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Sunday: Sometimes government does know best. And in those cases, Americans should just cede their rights.

• “Congress has the gall to discretely slip another clause into the #NDAA 2013 that repeals the World War II-era legislation”

  Congress has the gall to discretely slip another clause into the #NDAA 2013 that repeals the World War II-era legislation…

• Las Vegas City Council Passes NDAA Nullification Resolution

  The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will not be enforced in Las Vegas. Rejection of the unconstitutional provisions of that controversial federal act was the purpose of a resolution passed by the city council just after noon on March 20.

  By a vote of 5-2, the council passed R-18-2013. The resolution, offered by Ward 2 Councilman Bob Beers, will now be presented to the Clark County (Nevada) Commission.

• Turns Out The One ‘Good’ Change In CFAA Reform… May Actually Be Bad Too

  So yesterday we broke the news about a proposed CFAA reform bill that, rather than fix the problems of the CFAA made the law much, much worse. It added computer crimes as a racketeering issue, increased sentences and made just talking about a potential CFAA violation the equivalent of having committed it. Bad stuff all around. There was one section, however, that we said was slightly good. We noted that they ever so slightly rolled back what would constitute a crime for “exceeding authorized access” listing out a few qualifications that needed to be met — including that the information obtained was valued over $5,000, that you had to be targeting private information and that the access was done in furtherance of a crime. Based on the bill as written, I had assumed that all of those elements needed to be present to qualify.

• From the Left: The American Republic has become the American Empire

  The USA Patriot Act codified many of the wishes of statists into law. Whether it is the act’s regulation of bank accounts, the broadening of the government’s authority to deport citizens, or the authorization of roving wiretaps and non-consenting business record searches, the act is only the first brick in the construction of the modern police state. We have also had the unfortunate passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which appropriates and divides up defense and war spending, but contains a blatantly unconstitutional clause that gives the government the authority to indefinitely detain American citizens. And now – even after the intense political backlash against the NDAA 2012 – our Congress has the gall to discretely slip another clause into the NDAA 2013 that repeals the World War II-era legislation that prevents the government from using state-approved propaganda, and would make Washington immune to any court cases challenging them.

• Obama rape and plunder of America

  All that Americans have held on to and relied on is being assaulted. Obama won’t stop until America is forced into submission to his dictatorship plans and the rest of us locked up or killed. What survives the Obama battering rams will be taxed and redistributed to his seduced worshipers. They will be slaves and controlled like mutant little toys, but they will thank Obama and give him their worship.

Intellectual Monopolies

• France Not Eager for U.S.-Europe Trade Agreement

• ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ slips silently through US Congress

• Copyrights

  • BitTorrent ‘s Bram Cohen Patents Revolutionary Live Streaming Protocol

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

UMass Boston Should Save Money by Switching to Linux and Other Source Software

Campus fees just keep rising, like our ever-mysterious “educational operations fee,” which really is just tuition under another name. Parking fees, health insurance fees (if you opt for UMass Boston’s Aetna plan). This gets all the more frustrating with the knowledge that we can make smart choices which would drop costs without sacrificing the quality of education.

I propose we first equip our UMass Boston computers with Linux: a free, enterprise-level, secure operating system perfectly suited for a large educational institution like ours, and replace costly, slow software like Microsoft Word with free, comprehensive office suites like OpenOffice.

First–Linux? What?

Money Wasted

I consider money paid to M$ for permission to run the computers owned by the government a huge waste since GNU/Linux is available to manage resources on computers for $0 + the cost of installation. Really, the default software should be GNU/Linux just for the savings. $millions is a lot of money to waste. I expect if I had a complete picture the total would be closer to many hundreds of millions annually and then there are licences for the non-free applications on top of that. It’s all a waste considering the government could hire a few developers to keep all computers up to date using GNU/Linux for a fraction of the cost.

Desktop

• Chromebook pixel count spurs Apple marketing shift

Applications

• OpenShot Video Editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux

• Top 4 Linux Diary Software

  Keeping a diary of your daily life is an activity that is held dear by many people. It represents a good way of storing personal or business information on a day-to-day-basis. Keep track of notes and thoughts through the day, organize and secure memories, ideas, business transactions, emails, accounts, future plans, contact lists, and even secret information.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • JSON: The Undisputed King of Web Interchange APIs

  • Create a VPN with the Raspberry Pi

  • 4 Simple Tweaks to Increase Unity Performance

  • Easily Change ‘CPU Affinity’ in Ubuntu using ‘procexp’

  • Using mod_spdy With Apache2 On CentOS 6.4

  • 5 handy tips with GIMP everybody should know

  • Install Cinnamon on Kali Linux

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (CentOS 6.3 x86_64)

• Games

  • Let’s Play: PCSXR

  • Lord of Xulima

    Numantian Games have announced Lord of Xulima, a turn-based rpg in the good old 2D isometric style. It will appear on Windows first and after that on Mac & Linux.

  • Planet Explorers a voxel sandbox rpg adventure

  • Planet Explorers a voxel sandbox rpg adventure

    Plethea Games are currently seeking $100000 on Kickstarter to help fund this unique voxel based sandbox, adventure rpg. This one looks to be pretty damn exciting with crafting, building etc kinda like Minecraft on steroids. They plan to release on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Pantheon desktop environment – A beginning

  I almost feel tempted to start with a quote from the Wheel of Time series, something like there are no beginnings and ends, but it was a beginning. Indeed, the guys behind the elementary OS have created their own version of what the next, future desktop for Linux ought to be.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE’s Coffice now available on Google Play Store, supports ODT

    KDE’s Calligra Office team has been working on the Android port of the app for a while. There were test builds available in .apk format which can be installed on the Android devices, now the app in available in the Google Play store as Coffice.

  • KDE to participate in the Outreach Program for Women

    KDE will be participating in Gnome’s “Outreach Program for Women (OPW)” this year. Women participation in the FLOSS development has always been a major concern and Gnome Foundation started the program to encourage more women developers to participate in the open source development.

    The OPW is inspired by Google Summer of Code and offers internship to those female developers who are newcomers and or are relatively new to the FOSS community.

  • KDE joins the Outreach Program for Women

    KDE will – for the first time this year – participate in the “Outreach Program for Women”. This was originally started by GNOME, but has also other participating organisations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fedora and others.

    With KDAB as our sponsor we will be offering one internship. This is in no way only limited to coding, but includes user experience design, graphic design, documentation, web development, marketing, translation and other types of tasks needed to sustain a Free Software project.

  • freedom abhors singularity

    Ignoring that it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny (there have been many “truly free software operating systems”), this brought to mind a spectacular feature of freedom: it abhors singularity. Indeed, monopoly positions are exceedingly rare in free systems.

    [...]

    Free software intrinsically exists in a free society: it is mandated in the licenses. The only ways around this are to artificially create singularities by monopolizing the talent pool (hiring all the developers) or keeping all decision making power in one central place that is guarded by veils of inscrutability and a lack of accountability. People who think this way are not the sort of people I would like to see directing free software; it is a recipe to curb the intrinsic freedom brought by free software.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • What GTK 3.8 will bring for developers

    Looking, testing, discussing and analyzing Gnome-Shell 3.8 new features is fun for everyone, but apart from what you see and use directly there are many improvements and new things that happen in the infrastructure of Gnome that is GTK and GLib.

  • Music in development…

    So I will keep this short… I assembled a task force to work on GNOME Music based on https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Music. Development is really coming along nicely.

    Cesar Garcia Tapia had started a Vala development of it. We used lots of it in the new re-implementation which is in JS, this is due to the fact that.

Distributions

• Kali Linux: The Next BackTrack

• New Releases

  • SystemRescueCd 3.5.0
    

  • OpenELEC 3.0.0

• Screenshots

  • LXLE 12.04 Screenshots (03/14/2013)

  • Ubuntukylin 13.04 Beta 1 Screenshots (03/20/2013)

  • Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Beta1 Screenshots

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Council meeting#6 report and new Build System

  • Review: Sidebar Pro and Lite, multitasking the Ubuntu Touch way [VIDEO]

• Slackware Family

  • Slackware switching to the MariaDB database

• Red Hat Family

  • Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    In preparation for this year, a total of 25 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of -14% from one quarter earlier. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully.

    [...]

    Due to the fact that Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has witnessed a declination in interest from the smart money, we can see that there was a specific group of fund managers who sold off their full holdings in Q4. Interestingly, Brett Barakett’s Tremblant Capital dropped the biggest investment of all the hedgies we key on, worth an estimated $40 million in call options. Daniel Benton’s fund, Andor Capital Management, also sold off its stock, about $28 million worth. These moves are important to note, as total hedge fund interest fell by 4 funds in Q4.

  • Fedora

    • A peek at Fedora Rawhide

      Rawhide is the development version of Fedora which includes the latest upstream packages. At some point in the Fedora release schedule a fork (called branched release) is created to become the next stable Fedora and the rawhide version continues on its own.

      As of today Fedora Rawhide contains packages that will be part of both Fedora 19 and Fedora 20. If you want to take a peek at the next Fedora version, Rawhide is what you need, but bare in mind though that it can be unstable so in the event of a system crash you should know what to do to recover it.

    • This week in rawhide (and a bonus branched), the late edition (2013-03-21)

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Tails 0.17.1 is out

      Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 0.17.1, is out.

    • Linux Mint 201303 “Debian” Cinnamon Review: Debian simplified and offers impressive performance!

      One thing I really like about Linux Mint is the refinement and completeness they render to each and every release. I have been using Linux Mint since 2009 and except for the repetitive art-work, I have never been disappointed so far. Normally Linux Mint releases mimic Ubuntu and mostly require fresh installation. I tried upgrading a few but with no luck and hence, had to do a fresh installation to make things work. However, in 2012, Linux Mint deviated from convention and brought a semi-rolling release LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). LMDE is based on Debian testing and doesn’t require ever to re-install the OS. I tried the Mate version in 2012 and was highly impressed with aesthetics as well as performance.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Teams With China to Create National OS

      • Canonical Partners with China for Ubuntu Kaylin Linux

      • China chooses Ubuntu for a national reference OS coming in April

      • Chinese Government Picks Ubuntu As Official Operating System

      • China Taps Ubuntu To Build National Operating System

      • China building a national operating system based on Ubuntu

      • Canonical teams up with Chinese agencies on Ubuntu Kylin

      • Ubuntu support periods slashed

        Non-LTS releases to get only nine months after version 2014′s 13.04

      • First Community Leadership Meeting Summary

      • Twitter Core App Cancelled for Ubuntu Touch

        Canonical today through software engineer Robert Bruce Park confirmed plans to cancel the Twitter app for Ubuntu Touch.

      • Install Classic Menu Indicator in Ubuntu 13.04

      • Three main types of user behaviour found in ubuntu.com testing

      • The Negative Ubuntu Effect

        Let’s face it, Ubuntu cops a lot of criticism. From beginners, Linux veterans, developers and even Ubuntu enthusiasts. We’ve all been critical to Ubuntu Linux at some point. Whether the Ubuntu Developers pump out a good, bad or average release; the online criticism comes in thick and fast from all angles of the internet. With the current release of Ubuntu 12.10, the overall consensus seems to be negative. I have to admit, this shocks me a little. I found 12.10 to be a fast, clean and very good release.

      • Ubuntu After Install

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Small Cheap Legacy PCs Eat Big Expensive Legacy PCs’ Lunch

  • Android

    • MiiPC is an $89 Android-powered family computer

      MiiPC has taken to Kickstarter in an effort to gain backing for what it describes as an $89 Android-powered family computer.

      Designed by Young Song, the founder of eMachines, the MiiPC is hoping to redefine the PC market by launching the first (mainstream) family computer on Android, which will supposedly allow parents to give their young children access to the Internet under their supervision from a companion mobile app.

    • How NASA got an Android handset ready to go into space

      It’s what science fiction dreams are made of: brightly colored, sphere-shaped robots that float above the ground, controlled by a tiny computer brain. But it isn’t fiction: it’s the SPHERES satellite, and its brain is an Android smartphone.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Linux, Mozilla eye smartphone market

  • Linux and Mozilla’s Firefox: New smartphone platforms eye inroads in hot market

  • Linux, Mozilla to bring smartphones to markets this year

    operating systems based on the open-source platforms Linux and Mozilla’s Firefox will be hitting the market this year, challenging the stranglehold of the two market leaders, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

    Android and Apple account for more than 90 percent of the surging smartphone market, and third place is being contested by BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, reports the Herald Sun.

SaaS/Big Data

• Web-based version of OpenOffice to rival Microsoft and Google Office

Business

• BonitaSoft Named SIIA Software CODiE Award Finalist for Best Open Source Innovation

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• 2012 Free Software Award winners announced

  Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 23rd, held during the LibrePlanet 2013 conference at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two awards were given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

• LibrePlanet 2013 off to a great start

Project Releases

• BatMon 0.7

• diffutils-3.3 released [stable]

• DataBasin 0.6

  Select Identify is now vastly improved. Supporting multiple columns and LIMIT, coupled together with the other improvements of this release, makes it an invaluable tool during support and maintenance of a Salesforce org. How else could you check the status of a lot of objects, say Cases or Accounts?
  The object inspector is always handy too.

Openness/Sharing

• Open source citrus

• Open Access/Content

  • Al Franken Sends Eric Holder Letter Over ‘Remarkably Aggressive’ Aaron Swartz Prosecution

    Microsoft said the Federal Bureau of Investigation is secretly spying on its customers with so-called National Security Letters that don’t require a judge’s approval, a revelation Thursday that mirrors one Google announced two weeks ago.

    Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft announced that the type of accounts the feds are targeting with National Security Letters, warrants or court orders include Hotmail/Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365.

Programming

• The many things programmers optimize for

• Natural Sort Order in C

Hardware

• Thinking aloud: The Price of Hardware Quality

  Some years ago, we had (one may say) good, classic brands of computers, and others not so good. The price of ones and others vary. An original IBM PC was very expensive (all computers were, at the beginning), but clones came cheaper.

  Quality was also quite well divided by boundaries, and followed the quality and durability of the equipment. A Toshiba, or HP, Compaq, etc., machine was considered of good (hardware) quality, and last as long as what you expected for the money you had paid. Maybe some of you still have one of those running a minimal GNU/Linux distribution today because the hardware lasted. (Image Credit: http://www.whitesettlement.lib.tx.us)

Health/Nutrition

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

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

Security

• Windows Malware Takes Advantage of Weak Linux Setups

• NSA Critiques Public Key Cryptography

  Revelation of the early public key cryptography work of James Ellis, Malcolm Williamson and Cliff Cocks at GCHQ occurred in 1997, eleven years after this secret 1986 review cites them. Whitfield Diffie, one of the inventors or PKC, commented in 1999 on the British precursors:

• NSA INFOSEC Excitement

  Some time ago, while I was having lunch with the Director of Security of one of our NATO allies and we were discussing the rash of books on intelligence agencies such as the CIA and Britain’s MI-5 and MI-6 that were flooding bookstores, he asked, “Why aren’t there more best selling books on INFOSEC?” I replied, “It’s because the best days we have in INFOSEC are when nothing exciting happens in the outside world. When we are successful, which we are most ofthe time, the result is a non-event.”

• CMU, NSA search for student hackers

  …participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the challenge.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Massive far-right network aided neo-Nazi gang

  Citing classified security authority documents, the Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday that 129 members of the far-right scene aided the so-called National Socialist Underground (NSU) over the years.

• German Neo-Nazi Cell Bigger Than Previously Thought

  According to a report in the Bild newspaper on Sunday, security officials have compiled a list of 129 people who are suspected of helping the group, accused of murdering eight ethnic Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.

  The existence of the cell, which called itself the Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU), only came to light by chance in late 2011 after two members committed suicide in the aftermath of a botched bank robbery and a female accomplice set fire to an apartment used by the gang.

• Officials powerless to stop neo-Nazi party

  The Hammered Music Festival, organised by an Australian white supremacist group called the Southern Cross Hammerskins, will be held at a secret, private location in Carrara on May 4.

• BBC-Guardian Exposé Uses WikiLeaks to Link Iraq Torture Centers to U.S. Col. Steele & Gen. Petraeus

• The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian – review

  ‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country.

  British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense. It claimed they were best understood as ‘unwilling to subordinate personal interests to communal ones’, ‘ready to do most things for money’ and ‘ready to blame other people’. A memorandum entitled ‘The Persian Character’, issued by the Persian Oil Working Company the same year, defined Iranians as dishonest, vain, unprincipled and motivated by personal gain.

• Graphic new visualisation for CIA’s drone war in Pakistan

  A new interactive graphic, which uses the Bureau’s drone data, has brought a fresh perspective to the CIA’s nine-year drone campaign in Pakistan.

  A team of developers has pulled together every known drone strike and casualty from data provided by the Bureau and New America Foundation. This data has been represented in an interactive timeline which allows the viewer to see how the campaign builds over time, as well as the number of people killed.

• CIA Helping Syria Rebels Amass Arms: Report

• CIA aids huge arms smuggling to Syria – report

• Report: CIA Helping Boost Arms Shipments to Syrian Rebels

• Proposed Site For New FBI HQ Turns Out To Be A Classified CIA Warehouse

  In January 2012 officials from Fairfax County, Va., proposed that the FBI move it’s headquarters to “a half-empty warehouse” in the area.
  The government-owned site, which lies just outside of Washington D.C., could handle a planned $1.2 billion complex and would bring nearly 12,000 jobs to the area. But the plan has hit a snag: the CIA already lives there.

• A Public Indictment Could Shed Light on CIA’s Secret Program

  Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts.

• The CIA’s interrogation program deserves a public airing

• CIA Strategy: Collect All Data and Keep it Forever

  Holding up his own CIA smartphone, he reminded the audience that “Even if you turn off your cell phone you can be tracked.”

Cablegate

• Wikileaks: Power and Consent. Raimond Gaita

• ‘Pentagon Papers’ whistleblower defends WikiLeaks ‘hero’ Manning

  Sydney, Mar 25 (ANI): Former American military analyst and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has backed US Army private accused Bradley Manning for spilling secrets to website WikiLeaks.

• Vietnam whistleblower defends WikiLeaks

  PENTAGON Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg waited decades for someone like Bradley Manning to follow in his footsteps.

  He hails the US Army private accused of spilling secrets to website WikiLeaks as a champion of truth and not a betrayer of his country.

• In Leak Case, State Secrecy in Plain Sight

• New York Times Understand Historical Import of Manning Trial – FINALLY

• Only a Few Reporters Have Bothered to Truly Confront Secrecy in Bradley Manning’s Court Martial

  Just over one year ago, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) sent a letter to the military judge presiding over Pfc. Bradley Manning’s court martial that decried the “lack of openness” in proceedings. It condemned the fact that “documents and information filed in the case” were “not available to the public anywhere.” It complained about the failure to give the public proper “notice of issues to be litigated in the case.”

  The US Army did not respond appropriately to the letter. The military court at Fort Meade rebuffed an attempt by a CCR attorney to make a statement on press and public access to proceedings on April 24. The same day the military judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, issued a ruling that invoked Nixon v. Time Warner, a case involving press access to the Watergate tapes, to justify secrecy in the proceedings, and she said the Freedom of Information Act was available to the press if they wanted records. CCR filed a lawsuit in May about a month later (which I signed on to as a plaintiff).

Finance

• Russian Billionaire In Exile Boris Berezovsky Commits Suicide – The First Cyprus Casualty?

  Just your ordinary run of the mill Russian billionaire oligarch in exile who had so much money he was terminally depressed… or just the opposite, and the first tragic casualty of the Cyprus capital controls which are about to eviscerate a whole lot of Russian wealth (and ultraluxury Manhattan real estate prices)?

• The Cyprus Cartoon Catalog

• The future of the NHS—irreversible privatisation?

  JILL MOUNTFORD: Lucy, can you explain to us what is going on right now? The Health and Social Care Act has been law now for almost a year, and we thought surely that’s all going to go ahead. All of a sudden there is a lot of movement, a lot of anxiety and a lot of agitation around something that’s happening in parliament that’s going to have a big effect on the National Health Service. What is it and why?

• Will Goldman Sachs Celebrate Its Latest Victory at a Strip Club?

  Goldman Sachs won a huge victory yesterday. A federal court ruled that Lisa Parisi, a former managing director, must take her gender-discrimination lawsuit against the firm to arbitration.

  With the ruling, Parisi — who had sued Goldman in 2010, along with two other women — can kiss her chances of victory goodbye. Arbitration is where plaintiffs’ dreams go to die, which is probably why it was in her Goldman Sachs employment contract.

  These plaintiffs aren’t renegade feminists. They’re mainstream financial types who played by the rules and hoped to reap the rewards. The men who fought them are simply corporate types who prefer to keep Wall Street an old boys’ club.

  Some of the allegations in the suit are straight out of “Mad Men.” During their work at Goldman Sachs, the women were subject to sexual banter, which is what passes for conversation among traders, as well as to come-ons and sexual assaults. They were passed over for promotions and bonuses, excluded from some male outings and included in others designed to embarrass them. A celebration for new managing directors was held at a topless bar. Afterwards, a married male colleague pinned one of the plaintiffs to a wall and sexually assaulted her.

• Goldman gets go-ahead for ‘banking factory’

  Goldman Sachs has been granted approval to build a new “banking factory” in the City, ending a protracted bid to develop the site that was held up by protected murals on the existing building.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• On corporate persons

  And like other giant corporations it already has personhood.

  What makes Google so all-powerful? So Visible? So very Google?

  Are various administrations and Yes, I’m thinking Obama’s, simply afraid of it and the people who run it?

  Is it grandiose?

  Is it a part of the Gobal Elite?

  If Google was Good …

  Google could be everything it touts itself as being — a good company providing genuine services, constantly trying to improve the ‘user experience’.

  It could revolutionise the world of business by being completely transparent in all respects, completely open in its dealings with the people it depends on — you and I — and completely up-front about what it does and how it does it.

  It certainly has enough in the way of hard cash and other reso

• O’Reilly Demands Respect for the Pagan Goddess Eostre

  Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 3/21/13), claiming victory in the “War on Christmas,” declares that the new battle is the “War on Easter.”

Censorship

• Groups unite to condemn Leveson law

  The Leveson Inquiry was set up to address “the culture, practices and ethics of the press, including contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police”. Our views diverge on whether the outcome of the Leveson process — and the plans for a new regulator — are the best way forward. But where we all agree is that current attempts at regulating blogs and other small independent news websites are critically flawed.

Privacy

• Another Reason Google Reader Died: Increased Concern About Privacy and Compliance

  Under CEO Larry Page, Google has made a practice of “spring cleaning” throughout all the seasons so it can narrow its focus. Reader was just a another bullet point on the latest closure list.

• Google Shut Down Reader Because It Was Scared of More Screw-Ups

Civil Rights

• “Gaming” can be avoided: bloggers can be protected from the Crime and Courts Bill

  We’re told that politicians are concerned, exempting small and medium size businesses from the Bill could lead to “gaming”. That is, a large publisher could create small subsidiaries to avoid the Leveson sticks applying to them. We believe this can be avoided. The Companies Act anticipates “gaming”, and includes protections against it.

• Constable wants tougher stance on US defense act

  The American Civil Liberties Union describe the 2012 NDAA as “codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president – and all future presidents – to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield,” it continues. “The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

  Quiggle made it a written policy last May that he would not cooperate with this portion of the NDAA in his position as constable.

• Letter: An affront to freedom

  Even the U.S. secretary of defense has expressed misgivings about the NDAA.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Google sued for trademark infringement by ‘Android’ watchmaker company

    It seems suing for trademark infringement is really a prevalent game in the business world. Oko International, the maker of a wide range of watches and timepieces sold under the brand name ‘Android,’ is suing the giant Google for trademark infringement.

    A recent rumor in many tech sites is that Google is reportedly building a smartwatch to compete with Apple and Samsung.

• Copyrights

  • Spanish Government Bows Down To US Pressures Again, Pushes SOPA-Like Law To Appease Hollywood

    While Spain actually has a fairly vibrant culture and entertainment industry, Hollywood has really had it in for the country for some time, in part because Spanish courts had a more evolved recognition of secondary liability protections, such that they ruled that linking is not infringement, and that neither was basic file sharing. Hollywood flipped out, said all sorts of nasty things about Spain, and US diplomats basically handed the Spanish government a new copyright law. The first few attempts to pass the bill failed, after the public spoke out, economists explained how it would hurt the economy rather than help and even the head of the Spanish Film Academy noted that the American movie industry seemed to be fighting the internet and the public.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux or GNU/Linux: Is the Distinction Worth Preserving?

I also realize that it’s technically more accurate to call it GNU/Linux.

Desktop

• GNU/Linux in Venezuela

  GNU/Linux share according to Statcounter has been hovering around a few percent for a long time but in 2012 it took off with 40% increase in share in one year. It’s probably too soon to be some effect of the death of Chavez so it’s likely a result of something his government set in motion.

• Google’s Already Working On Haswell Chromebooks

  Intel hasn’t yet even released their Haswell processors to the general public for use within notebooks, ultrabooks, and desktops, but Google engineers are already hard at work on prepping Haswell Chromebooks.

Server

• The Best Servers for Linux in 2013

  Linux may be reaching new heights every day in desktop and mobile computing, but if there’s any domain in which its might has long been undisputed, it’s servers.

  To wit: Linux is now used to run about a third of all websites, W3Techs reports. Linux servers in general now represent 20.4 percent of all server revenue, according to IDC. Then, of course, there’s supercomputing, in which it claims a full 94 percent of the world’s Top 500.

  There are numerous excellent Linux distributions available for use on servers, of course, and their relative merits are frequently debated here on Linux.com and beyond. What’s less commonly seen, however, is a discussion of hardware.

  Which of the many servers on the market are best for Linux? That, like so many such “best of” comparisons, lies largely in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, there have been a number of exciting new advances over the past year that bring a few particular vendors and machines to the fore. Here are the ones we think look best in 2013.

Kernel Space

• Linux Standard Base: Misnomer and Misconception

  By the same token, there is a corresponding perceived risk that inconsistencies and incompatibilities may arise born of the need to make changes driven by special interests and the need to make functional improvements. There is also in addition to natural variation an increased possibility for introduction of unintended errors, the result of neglect of implied standards of one kind or another that should be adhered to, but go unnoticed until after production general release.

• PCI-SSD maker Fusion-io acquires Linux SCST developer ID7

  Fusion-io has announced that it has acquired the UK-based storage technology company ID7, the leading developer of the open source SCSI Target Subsystem (SCST) for Linux. Fusion-io specialises in acceleration technology including high performance and capacity PCIe SSD cards and is also known for employing Steve Wozniak as Chief Scientist. It supplies companies such as Facebook, Apple and HP with its cache technology, though it did note in its 2012 Annual Report that its top ten customers were responsible for 91% of its $359 million revenue and is therefore working to widen its customer base.

• Graphics Stack

  • The X.Org Foundation Is Undecided About Mir

    The X.Org Foundation hasn’t firmly decided on their position of Canonical’s Mir Display Server versus Wayland.

    The meeting logs for an X.Org Foundation Board of Directors’ IRC meeting from earlier this month have finally been published to the X.Org Wiki.

  • Lima Driver Makes Progress With Shaders

    The open-source Lima driver project that has been working on a reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver is still advancing.

  • Differences Between X.Org, Wayland & Mir

    Canonical’s Christopher Halse Rogers has blogged some more about their views on the Mir Display Server and its design relative to X11/X.Org and Wayland.

    Rogers has already written a lot about Mir in Canonical’s attempt to promote the Wayland alternative and their views for designing it rather than using Wayland or forking it.

  • New VA-API Library Supports Wayland 1.0 Protocol

    VA-API, the video acceleration API preferred by Intel and implemented by their open-source Linux graphics driver, now works with the stable Wayland 1.0 series. There was already VA-API Wayland support since last year to expose this hardware-accelerated video decode/encode process on the X.Org successor while now it’s finally been updated to work with the stable 1.0 protocol.

  • Mesa 9.1.1 release

  • Intel 2.21.5 Driver Brings Fixes For Haswell, GLAMOR

    The xf86-video-intel 2.21.5 DDX driver was released this morning with a handful of fixes by Chris Wilson for the Intel X.Org driver.

    The prominent change warranting the xf86-video-intel 2.21.5 release addresses a crashing problem for Intel’s forthcoming “Haswell” hardware. “Haswell reintroduces a command to load the scanline window from the command stream and so requires its own specialised wait-for-vsync routine – failure to do so was then causing hangs when trying to do tearfree video or use a compositor.”

  • QXL Gallium3D Wrapper Driver Is Brought Up

  • SDDM Display Manager Sees Its First Release

    Mentioned a few times in recent months on Phoronix has been SDDM, a lightweight Qt/QML-based display manager. The good news now is that the Simple Desktop Display Manager has seen its first official release.

  • The State Of OpenGL 3/4 Support In Mesa/Gallium3D

  • PRIME Sharing Comes To GLAMOR

    Michel Dänzer of AMD has provided a patch so that PRIME multi-GPU sharing will work with the GLAMOR 2D acceleration architecture, as needed for the Radeon HD 7000 series support and optionally for other generations of AMD and Intel GPUs.

Applications

• Goodbye Google Reader, Linux Has Its Own RSS Aggregators

• Top 8 Tools To Search Memory Under Linux / Unix [ Forensics Analysis ]

• tmux – terminal multiplexer

• Proprietary

  • Three Free Alternatives to Photoshop

    As our devices deliver a glut of digital images — whether from our smartphones, tablet PCs or desktop units — the need to process, catalogue and edit all those photos becomes more pressing than ever.

    But not everyone wants or needs the high-grade image editing software that Adobe offers through its Photoshop application. So what does a regular Joe with an interest in image editing do if he doesn’t want to hand over bucks for a powerful image editor? This is especially important as an ultrabook device, a tablet or a PC can provide you with excellent high screen resolution. Here are several alternatives to Photoshop for your devices:

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Introduction to Blender

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.4

  • The fastest TCP connection with Multipath TCP

  • How to deploy Piwik Web Analytics on OpenShift Online

  • How to Code a Touchscreen Event on Android

• Wine or Emulation

  • PlayOnLinux – Run Windows Applications and Games on Linux

• Games

  • Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Is Getting Ported To Linux

    Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition is one of the newest game titles being ported to Linux that’s worth mentioning and is being distributed via Steam.

  • Humble Bundle Gets Into Weekly Game Sales

    The company behind the Humble Indie Bundle is now trying to promote weekly sales of DRM-free cross-platform games.

  • Left 4 Dead 2 Getting Closer To Release On Linux

    While Left 4 Dead 2 was the first Valve game I saw natively running on Linux when meeting with Valve to talk about their Linux plans early last year, the Source Engine game still hasn’t been publicly released. Fortunately, the public release is getting closer.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • like an avalanche coming down the mountain

    When looking over the KDE landscape this week I was felt a similar Spring feeling in the air. There are new maintainers for Qt/KDE integration of PolicyKit and KMix. Sebas updated us recently on the huge progress being made for Plasma Workspaces 2, featuring a working shell on top of libplasma2 and QtQuick2. This itself is just a small part of the larger Frameworks 5 effort, and that is receiving more attention such as the recent sprint in Spain that Albert wrote about. Krita continues to amaze, Ingo has made a breakthrough in taming our web presence continuity and there is even work happening on Akregrator!

  • Plasma Media Center, aka KDE TV, out now

    The Plasma Media Center, built on KDE, offers a “rich experience” in its first release as a competitor to many other open source HTPC offerings

  • KDE Releases Plasma Media Center 1.0

  • QtWayland Shows Signs Of Progress, Plans Features

    A status update has been issued on QtWayland, which allows Qt applications to run on Wayland, and details about what’s being planned for Wayland with Qt 5.2 has been shared.

  • Qt Creator 2.7 Released With Improved C++11

    Version 2.7 of the Qt Creator integrated development environment has been released. There’s better support for BlackBerry development, improved C++11 language handling, and much more.

    Qt Creator 2.7.0 offers a wealth of C++11 improvements, QML support was improved for Qt Quick 2 development, there’s better BlackBerry support, experimental support for the QBS build tool, Android enhancements, and much more.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.7.92 Release Candidate!

Distributions

• Have an older PC? Try the new Ubuntu Linux-based LXLE

  For users of Microsoft Windows, frequent hardware upgrades tend to be a fact of life in order to keep each new iteration of the resources-hungry operating system running smoothly.

• Favorite Distributions for Spring 2013

  Folks sure do enjoy trying to figure out which is most popular or the favorite Linux distribution. For years it was Ubuntu and lately, it’s been Mint. Mageia shows second at Distrowatch.com’s Page Hit Ranking, but others are desputing their ranking reflects real usage. A new Website has begun to try and tract actual popularity, but nothing is as fun me as a poll. Yes, it’s time once again for Your Favorite Distributions, Spring 2013 edition.

• Clonezilla vs. FOG: The clone wars

  Computer cloning, also referred to as ghosting or imaging, involves setting up the operating system, drivers, software, and data on one computer, then automatically replicating the same setup on other computers. Clonezilla Server Edition and FOG are the most popular open source cloning systems. While both do similar jobs – clone and restore machines over the network using tools and services such as partimage, tftp, and PXE – they go about it very differently. Which is right for you depends on your network’s configuration and composition.

• Screenshots

  • Kali 1.0 Screenshots

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 11 Review – Usability Upgrades

  • Sabayon 11 Xfce – Still no love for me

    Perhaps the Sabayon dev team did not invest sufficient resources to make the Xfce version shine just as well as their mainstream edition. However, somehow, I doubt it. Given my past experience, the overall behavior and feel appear to be a part of a longer trend. For some reason, Sabayon is losing its charm, and this version is no exception.

    Sabayon 11 is fairly fast, robust, relatively free of errors, and comes with a much improved package manager. But then, it’s also buggy, not really attractive, totes a meager app selection, and has a few really nasty problems, like Samba, multimedia and printing. The friendly tone is gone, and you’re facing a rather somber, unforgiving Gentoo distro that does not favor noobs. If you must then please do, but there are many simpler, more attractive alternatives. Xfce wise, Xubuntu leads the way, by far. And to sum it all up nicely, Sabayon 11 deserves around 6/10. And I want that Italian passion back.

• Arch Family

  • Arch Linux Enables Wayland GTK+

    For those Arch Linux users looking to play with Wayland/Weston, the GTK+ package available within the distribution now enables support for the Wayland back-end.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Wheezy Now Has Less Than 100 Critical Bugs

    Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” is now under 100 release-critical bugs. The release of Debian Wheezy is now not too far out.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Chinese Government Chooses Ubuntu As Country’s Standardized OS

        >

      • People’s Republic of Open Source: China Preps National Linux
        Distro

        The British Linux company Canonical is teaming with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to create Ubuntu Kylin, a Linux distribution specifically for China.

        Kylin will include support for Chinese characters and input methods, and it will integrate with Chinese web services, including music services, online banking tools, and the mapping service operated by local web giant Baidu. The plan is to release the distribution next month.

      • Chinese government builds national OS around Ubuntu

      • China plans to standardize around local version of Ubuntu

      • Mir Now Allows Multi-Threaded Compositing

        Canonical’s Mir Display Server for Ubuntu has received some interesting commits in the past day.

        The changes noted by Anzwix for the Mir trunk code are:

        Rev 511 – Mir now supports multi-threaded compositing where there is one thread per output frame-buffer (DisplayBuffer).

      • Open Ubuntu is the way out for Shuttleworth

      • My new Ubuntu Laptop Windows Free

        This one is a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and it is made in Portugal, at Inforlândia (Insys).

Devices/Embedded

• Adding real-time to Linux with Preempt-RT

  Linux.com has published a short Q&A with Steven Rostedt, kernel developer at Red Hat and maintainer of the stable Linux real-time patch. Rostedt discusses issues such as “hard” vs “soft” real-time, what the Preempt-RT patch can and can’t do, and how to get started using it.

• $250 ARM Linux project kit includes LCD

  Gumstix shocked the embed-o-sphere today by unveiling a new board-level computer that’s neither the shape nor size of a gum stick. The “Pepper” board is based on a 720MHz TI Sitara ARM processor and is supplied in a bundle that includes a Yocto-built Linux filesystem on microSD, a 4.5-inch touchscreen LCD, and a DC power supply.

• Samsung VP: We are building a smart watch

• Google’s Android unit reportedly building a smartwatch

• ARM CEO retires, leaves mobile revolution to Simon Segars

• Intro to Real-Time Linux for Embedded Developers

  When embedded projects call for for a real-time operating system, Linux developers often turn to PREEMPT-RT, the real-time kernel patch, to get it done.

  “The PREEMPT_RT patch (aka the -rt patch or RT patch) makes Linux into a real-time system,” said Steven Rostedt, a Linux kernel developer at Red Hat and maintainer of the stable version of the real-time Linux kernel patch.

  The thing is, in most cases real-time requirements on embedded projects can be met without turning to a real-time operating system, he said via email. To developers, a real-time system “does what you expect it to do when you expect it to do it.” That’s all.

• Phones

  • big.LITTLE: coming soon to a smartphone near you

    In this guest post, David Laing, a senior analyst at VDC Research, examines the emergence of ARM’s “big.LITTLE” processor architecture, whereby a single chip integrates multiple high-performance CPU cores along with a power-efficient core, enabling it to deliver greater performance at lower power-points than before.

  • Linux-powered CD player attempts audio perfection

    Parasound, a purveyor of fanatically high-end consumer audio equipment, has introduced a CD player that’s controlled by an internal Mini-ITX computer running embedded Linux. Using a CD-ROM drive for playing CDs, the “Halo CD 1″ sucks in the CD’s contents at 4x normal speed, giving its CPU time to detect and eliminate disc errors before outputting near-perfect audio.

  • Ballnux

    • RUMOUR: Samsung to follow up Galaxy Tab 7.7 with 10.1 or 11.6 Full HD AMOLED display

  • Android

    • Google’s Schmidt: Android, Chrome Won’t Be Combined

      As for Android and Chrome, it’s a stretch even to call them birds of the same feather, so Schmidt clearly has a point. Chrome wants to makes its bones based on web applications in the cloud while Android’s cloth is cut from native apps installed in the mobile device. But the lines between the two will be blurred more, as evidenced by Google’s Chromebook Pixel, which features touch-screen technology.

New Atlassian Bamboo Add-On for Open Source License Management By White Source

Basho open sources Riak CS

Open Source Project Mimics Yahoo Pipes on Your Own Machine

When you move your life onto the web, you lose control of your data. And — who knows? — your web app of choice may even vanish from the face of the Earth while you’re still using it. Think Google Reader.

The growing Indie Web Movement hopes to alleviate these problems, working to give web users more control over their online data and identity. The latest example is an open source software tool called Huginn.

Events

• Oracle Technical Experts at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo

  I’m pleased to announce that Oracle is sending some of their top technical people to speak at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. The conference takes place April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox: To Configure Or Not To Configure

SaaS/Big Data

• Big Data Open Source App Framework Gets Funded

  Concurrent raises $4 million and gets a new CEO, as it pushes the Cascading open source project used for building Big Data apps into the enterprise.

Business

• Community Version vs. Enterprise Edition of Open Source

Funding

• Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013!

• Mentor organisations sought for Google Summer of Code 2013

  Open source projects and organisations that wish to mentor student developers taking on programming tasks during Google’s Summer of Code 2013 have until 29 March to submit their applications.

BSD

• FreeNAS 8.3.1 introduces full disk ZFS encryption

  The FreeNAS developers have released the first point update to FreeNAS 8.3, which introduced version 28 of the ZFS filesystem and FreeBSD 8.3. FreeNAS 8.3.1 introduces the ability to set up full disk encryption on ZFS volumes and several other smaller improvements. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) distribution that enables users to easily set up and control their own storage and file servers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• C++ Doesn’t Change The Speed Of GCC

  With GCC 4.8 using C++ as its implementation language of the compiler, some have questioned whether the compiler is as fast as when written in C. Here’s some benchmarks showing C vs. C++ performance with GCC.

Project Releases

• Pharo 2.0 shines light on hundreds of improvements

  The developers of the Pharo Smalltalk fork have released version 2.0 of the language. Pharo was originally forked from the Squeak open source Smalltalk implementation with a goal to remove unneeded code from Squeak. It also serves as the reference implementation of the Seaside web application framework. Pharo 2.0 closes over 1,300 bugs, including three bugs with the rather lively category of “Horrible Error”.

Licensing

• The Fourth Open Source Incline?

  One of my earliest pieces for ZDNet theorized the existence of such an incline–the idea being that the more even-handed the license, the more likely it was people would contribute code and other help to a project. You might call this the Open Source License Incline.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Court sides with student in case over textbooks

    The Supreme Court has sided with a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher’s permission, a decision with important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores.

• Open Hardware

  • Open-source robotic software advances at kickoff meeting

    ROS-Industrial Consortium (RIC) kickoff meeting included 25 people representing 14 organizations interested in fostering advanced manufacturing technologies enabled by ROS-Industrial open-source software.

Programming

• Atlassian extends Git graphical client to Windows

• C Language Modules For LLVM Still Being Tackled

  Last year at the LLVM developers’ meeting it was proposed by an Apple engineer the concept of “modules” for C code in LLVM/Clang to replace the common development approach for C/C++ languages of including header files and passing the library to the linker. LLVM modules seek to take a different approach.

  For those that didn’t see the original presentation by Apple’s Doug Gregor about his proposal to introduce “modules” to C/C++, there are still PDF slides available. This is still considered experimental work, but he views C family headers as being a fundamentally broken design and sees a new for a module system for the C family and building better tools.

• PHP 5.5 Beta Brings New Accelerator

• GCC 4.8 Release Brings Improved C++11, Optimizations

Mass. U.S. Attorney Won’t Appeal Tewksbury Motel Ruling

“A handful of people have done some drug stuff over the years and they try to use that to steal my property without ever accusing me of a single thing,” he said.

Health/Nutrition

• North Dakota Inching Ever Closer to Being First State to Enact Personhood Abortion Law

  The North Dakota House passed a bill this afternoon that would define life as beginning at conception, effectively moving one step closer to banning all abortion in the state without exception for rape or incest. Approved by the state Senate last month, the bill will now go to voters as a ballot initiative. This latest restrictive measure comes only a week after North Dakota legislators approved bills that would ban abortion beyond six weeks into pregnancy and ban abortion in the case of genetic abnormality, like Downs Syndrome.

• Internet innovations in India will come from Indians solving local issues: Eric Schmidt

  Google boss Eric Schmidt is currently in India, and while speaking on the nature of Internet in the country, Schmidt stated that it is time now that India decided what kind of Internet it wants – an advantageous open Internet or a regressive closed o

Security

• When Technology Overtakes Security

  A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

• Cisco switches to weaker hashing scheme, passwords cracked wide open

• THE TRAGEDY OF JAILING WEEV, THE INTERNET PROPHET OF DISCORD.

Finance

• Cyprus Protesters and Bank Employees Clash With Police; Europe and Russia Reject Bailout

  Local news in Cyprus is reporting an escalation in the protests that have begun in the wake of attempts by EU chiefs to confiscate the savings of depositors. The news of possible bank closures has enraged the public. It appears that in order to keep things under control, the Central Bank is discussing a possible bank merger rather than a full shut down.

• Moyers & Company Part II

  Richard Wolff’s smart, blunt talk about the crisis of capitalism on his first Moyers & Company appearance was so compelling and provocative, we asked him to return. This time, the economics expert answers questions sent in by our viewers, diving further into economic inequality, the limitations of industry regulation, and the widening gap between a booming stock market and a population that increasingly lives in pove

• Jobcentre sanctions: ‘Your money is stopped, you go into freefall’ – video

• MasterCard stings PayPal with payment fee hike

  PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC makes public hundreds of “model” bills

  The shady lobby group has published pre-written legislation under pressure from watchdog coalition

• Bribery Allegations Surfaced Against WSJ in China

  The Justice Department last year opened an investigation into allegations that employees at The Wall Street Journal’s China news bureau bribed Chinese officials for information for news articles.

• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg eyes D.C. push

• FTC Says Tweet Ads Need Some Fine Print

  Whether it is including the average effectiveness of a weight-loss shake or noting that a celebrity was paid to push a product in a Twitter post, marketing company need to apply the same standards to online ads as they long have to older media, according to guidelines released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission.

  That means making room for full disclosure even in a 140-character tweet on Twitter.

Censorship

• In India, Google’s Eric Schmidt Explains Why He Went to North Korea

  After first making a joke about playing basketball—a reference to the strange visit by Dennis Rodman a few weeks after Schmidt’s trip—the Google executive explained he went to Pyongyang on a mission to spread the good news about the power of the Internet. North Korea “is the last really closed country in the world,” he said. “This is a country that has suffered from lack of information. The Internet was built for everyone, including North Koreans. The quickest way to get economic growth in North Korea is to open up the Internet. I did my best to tell them this.”

• Press regulation: newspapers bridle at ‘historic’ deal

  Protests from industry as David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband agree to create powerful regulator in late-night talks

• U.K. to Create New Press Regulator

Privacy

• Google’s Wi-Fi Snooping Settlement is Really, Really Awful

  The recent settlement [PDF] between 38 states and Google over the company’s Wi-Fi snooping fiasco sure is puzzling. While the settlement, called an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance, does little to punish Google for accidentally slurping up massive amounts of content from wireless networks using its roaming Street View vehicles, it does require the company to carry out a gratuitous and poorly thought out song and dance.

• Cops: U.S. law should require logs of your text messages

  Silicon Valley firms and privacy groups want Congress to update a 1986-era electronic privacy law. But if a law enforcement idea set to be presented today gets attached, support for the popular proposal would erode.

Civil Rights

• Inquest to open into death of prisoner convicted of stealing gingerbread man

  Foster family say courts should have considered James Best’s history of mental and physical problems

• Human rights must be something we own

  Right now, in writing this, I am exercising my freedom of speech, which is a sovereign right, I own it. I can be silenced, either through being censored or physically silenced, but that silencing always requires an exercise of power, it cannot be removed in any other way or can it? What if I have learned to fear to speak out? Therein lies what I think is the problem of our times. We now live in a world where we have been coerced into fearing consequences such that we have learnt to silence ourselves. We haven’t lost the ability to speak out, but our will and determination has been eroded to such an extent that we have given up the right of our own volition, albeit through insidious coercion.

  With the widespread use of CCTV cameras, something that I find an affront to my human dignity, we’ve been fed the line, ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about’. Actually I think we have a great deal to worry about in which the good they might be considered to do does not outweigh the greater harm they give rise to. Being a watched society is an insidious evil in which we are not party to those who make the rules nor those who watch and by whom we are observed and who watch us with suspicion. I feel it daily, in a very personal way which I can in no way put down to an overblown sense of paranoia.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Internet pioneers win engineering prize

  Pioneers of the internet are the first recipients of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

DRM

• Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own

  While Congress is working on legislation to re-legalize cellphone unlocking, let’s acknowledge the real issue: The copyright laws that made unlocking illegal in the first place. Who owns our stuff? The answer used to be obvious. Now, with electronics integrated into just about everything we buy, the answer has changed.

• HERE’S HOW TO LEGALIZE PHONE UNLOCKING

Intellectual Monopolies

• Monsanto’s Death Patents

  Despite this unfortunate posture, the case does provide another opportunity for critical inquiry regarding the unprecedented and perverse level of control Monsanto is asserting over the food supply. It is estimated that 90 percent of the soybeans in the U.S. are genetically modified and thus subject to potential patents. A random handful of soybeans procured anywhere is likely to contain at least some Monsanto-altered beans. Such a near-monopoly effectively gives Monsanto the right to control access to a staple food item that is found in a wide range of consumer products.

• Trademarks

  • Python Software Foundation Reaches Settlement, Ends Trademark Dispute

• Copyrights

  • The Pirate Bay Is A Trailblazer In Technical Resilience

  • Prenda Law Continues To Dismiss Lawsuits

  • Lawyer Suggests That Prenda Law May Have Only ‘Released’ Movies It Sued Over As A Honeypot For Lawsuits

    Another day, another story having to with Prenda Law (the hits just keep on coming). Found via FightCopyrightTrolls, we discover some research done by lawyer Graham Syfert, who has taken on Prenda/John Steele in a number of cases, including the infamous Florida case that was tossed out for fraud on the court following an Abbott & Costello-worthy transcript involving John Steele, Mark Lutz, and a variety of guest appearances from others on Team Prenda (despite Prenda claiming to both have nothing to do with the case… and with hiring the lawyers for the case, who were all trying to get off the case).

  • Did Prenda try to intimidate ID theft victim into dropping charges?

    After a Minnesota man named Alan Cooper accused Prenda Law of stealing his identity, the porn trolling firm responded with a defamation lawsuit. The lawsuit targeted Cooper, his attorney Paul Godfread, and numerous anonymous Internet commenters. On Thursday, Cooper and Godfread filed a 24-page response alleging that Prenda’s lawsuit amounts to an illegal SLAPP suit under Minnesota law, that Prenda can’t prove any of the allegedly defamatory statements are actually false, and that Prenda had invaded Cooper’s privacy by stealing his signature.

  • U.S. Congressmen Told About ‘Next Great Copyright Act’ at Hearing

    Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante puts a foot forward towards embracing changes to the music marketplace, cable and satellite transmissions, “bold adjustments” to the copyright term and more.

  • AP v. Meltwater: Disappointing Ruling for News Search

    A federal district judge in New York City issued a troubling ruling today holding that an electronic news clipping service infringed copyright when it republished excerpts of news stories in search results for its clients seeking news coverage based on particular keywords.

  • WOMAN WHO LOST DOWNLOADING CASE SAYS SHE CAN’T PAY

    A Minnesota woman at the center of a long-running court fight over the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted music said there’s still no way she can pay record companies the $222,000 judgment she owes after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal Monday.

  • Opinion analysis: Justices reject publisher’s claims in gray-market copyright case

    The Court at last seems to have reached a consensus on a seemingly intractable problem of copyright law: whether a U.S. copyright holder can prevent the importation of “gray-market” products manufactured for overseas markets. When the Court tried to address this question two Terms ago – in Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Omega, S.A. – the Court was equally divided (with Justice Kagan recused). However, in today’s opinion in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Justice Breyer, writing for a strong majority of six, emphatically rejected the publisher’s control over the importation of such products.

  • Righthaven Copyrights ‘Sold’ Back To Stephens Media For $80k To Pay Legal Fees

    Sure, sure, this year we’ve all moved on to the crazy stories about the Charles Carreons and Prenda Laws of the world, but let’s not forget that last year there was just as much focus on Righthaven’s copyright trolling operation collapsing after judges realized that it was all effectively a sham in which the real copyright holder (mainly newspaper publisher Stephens Media) had not really sold off its copyrights to Righthaven, meaning that Righthaven had no actual standing to sue. Technically, Stephens Media tried to give the copyright to Righthaven, but since it retained all of the listed rights under copyright law, it was clearly not an actual transfer. In one of those cases, concerning a guy named Wayne Hoehn, who fought back against a Righthaven lawsuit filed against him, Hoehn’s lawyer, Marc Randazza fought for and won a request for legal fees. Righthaven stalled and complained and bullied, but the court told Righthaven to pay up.

  • Appeals Court Hands Veoh Another Win in Important Copyright Ruling

    The Ninth Circuit rejects Universal Music Group’s challenges on why the video-sharing site didn’t qualify for safe harbor from copyright claims.

  • Documentary Filmmaker Sues AP for Stealing Footage

  • UMG Loses Round Two in Veoh Copyright Case

    The video-sharing website Veoh is not liable for any copyright infringing material posted by its users, the 9th Circuit ruled Thursday for a second time.

  • Surprise: Register Of Copyrights Expected To Call For Reduction In Copyright Term