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04.09.13

Links 9/4/2013: Linux 3.9 RC 6, Darktable 1.2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • BULL : launches its high-end Linux server offering for the modernization of critical IT infrastructures
  • Getting the masses on-side: openSUSE’s community manager speaks

    There are community managers for Linux distributions who spend their whole time spinning this or that and trying to influence opinion without dealing with the reality.

    There are others in similar roles who spend all their time contradicting people on mailing lists and discussion forums and flinging mud at anybody who says the smallest thing negative about their distribution.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • HP Moonshot Servers: Intel Atom Beats ARM (For Now)

      When HP Moonshot servers launched today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) was quick to note that the new Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) servers will leverage Atom processors — though HP does eventually plan to offer ARM-based support as well. It’s a significant near-term win for Intel, which hopes to defeat potential rivals like ARM in the emerging market for so-called “microservers.”

      According to an Intel spokesperson, Atom is an ideal choice for the HP servers because the architecture can run excisting operating systems (Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.) with no porting requirements.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.9-rc6

      Things seem to be on track, and it’s been a mostly boring week. Lots of small fixes, a few reverts. Networking, some small arch fixes (arm, mips, s390, alpha, tile, x86), drivers, minor filesystem updates (gfs2, ext4, tiny reiserfs xattr fix). Nothing really exciting stands out, I think the appended ShortLog gives a good overview for people who want to wallow in the details..

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Linux fatware? These distros need to slim down

      As I prepped a new virtual server template the other day, it occurred to me that we need more virtualization-specific Linux distributions or at least specific VM-only options when performing an install. A few distros take steps in this direction, such as Ubuntu and OEL jeOS (just enough OS), but they’re not necessarily tuned for virtual servers.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Exploring Linux Mint’s “Debian” edition

        All in all Mint’s Debian branch offers a pleasant experience with a friendly graphical installer, useful tools and lots of software all in a convenient package. The one detractor Mint’s Debian Edition may have is, oddly enough, Mint’s own Main Edition. While the Debian branch of Mint is a fine distribution its technology base prevents users from having access to certain helpful features available in other Mint editions. For example Mint’s Debian Edition isn’t able to use Ubuntu PPAs, it is missing some third-party software packages built for Ubuntu, and One storage & store support is missing. It would also appear as though the kernel which ships with Mint’s Debian Edition doesn’t have all the hardware support available in the Main Edition. These features tend to be edge cases and many people will probably get along fine without them, but I still suspect the strongest competitors to Mint Debian Edition are Mint’s other flavours.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 13.04 goes beta
          • Second Beta Release of Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Is Available for Download

            Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Beta 2 was also released today, April 5, along with all the others Linux distributions that are part of the Ubuntu family.

            Ubuntu Kylin is a new flavor of Ubuntu Linux, and Raring Ringtail (version 13.04) will be its first ever stable release. Today’s final testing version fixes last minute bugs, such as an updated PM2.5 API in the China Weather Indicator, and saving note issue with the Chinese Calendar.

          • Ubuntu File Sharing

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Trying Linux Mint 14

              My wife now has a new desktop computer. Her netbook computer (Acer Aspire One) works fine, but its Linux distro (Fedora 11) is getting positively antiquated. I’ve just upgraded the hard drive in my laptop (Compaq Presario 2170CA), so it needs a Linux. And the “hand-me-down” process means I have upgrades for my other two PCs (audio processing and ham radio); they also need Linux upgrades. Ideally I’d like to put the same Linux on all five of them. Which Linux?

              Although I like Debian on my desktop, I must admit that it is difficult for a novice to administer. (Hell, it’s difficult for me to administer.) And while I like the economy of LXDE, I confess that its tools are still a work in progress; it’s a bother to administer, too.

            • Fuduntu 2013.2 Linux released, comes in full and “lite” editions

              Fuduntu is a Linux-based operating system that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu. The OS uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but takes design and usability cues from Ubuntu.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Spotlight on Linux-ready embedded ARM modules

      In a post at Linux.com, Eric Brown, former editor of LinuxDevices.com, presents a slideshow of 10 new ARM-powered COMs. The current boom in ARM boards is, in part, fueled by the continuing growth of ARM-friendly Linux, and more recently Android, in the general embedded market, he suggests.

    • Software adds motion-awareness to TV STBs

      Movea’s motion-processing software now supports TV set-top boxes (STBs) built with STMicroelectronics “Orly Platform” STB SOCs (system-on-chips). The “SmartMotion Server” software can add gesture-based user interface features to TV STBs running Linux and Android.

      The SmartMotion Server motion-processing software is intended to ease the process of developing intuitive motion-based user interfaces for TV STBs and other connected home systems, according to Movea. The SmartMotion framework provides gesture-based interaction support for applications such as web browsing, video-on-demand catalogs, media center and social media navigation, and gaming.

    • Phones

      • BlackBerry 10, Windows 8 Phone, Ubuntu And More vs Android, iOS: Can It Mean Good Things For Apple And Google?

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung Expects 1Q2013 Earnings Of $7.7B, Up 53% Thanks To Smartphone Sales

          Samsung said that it expects to post first quarter operating profit of about 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion USD), up 53 percent from the 5.7 trillion won operating profit it earned a year earlier. The South Korean tech giant also said that its sales likely rose to between 51 trillion won and 53 trillion won from 45.3 trillion won a year earlier.

      • Android

        • YouTube employee Eileen Rivera supposedly ‘leaked’ the screenshot of the ‘new’ Google Play Store, version 4.0.

          Is the brand new Google Play Store coming? Timed for I/O summit?

        • OUYA: The initial impressions

          This past week at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a big one for third party publishers like Electronic Arts and Konami. It was also the place where supporters for the OUYA system got a first look at what they invested in. The company held a private event Thursday evening for a number of its KickStarter backers and other guests, providing plenty of food, drink and hands-on time with the system before it ships in June. We managed to go a few rounds with it to see what it was like.

        • Facebook Home: Brilliant Stroke or Desperate Measure?

          Facebook Home “is an idea that deserves to be copied,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “If your primary use for a smartphone is some activity, why not have it front and center of your Android experience rather than buried in an app or widget somewhere? Flipboard, Twitter, Edomondo, Max MP, Gameloft, Androidslide and other Android developers should explore this avenue.”

        • UNSW researchers push open source, Android for archaeology

          Researchers at the University of NSW are preparing to launch a public beta of a new open source system that could drive a digital revolution in the field of archaeology.

          the Federated Archaeological Information Management System (FAIMS) Project, led by UNSW’s Dr Shawn Ross, a senior lecturer at UNSW’s UNSW’s School of Humanities, received funding from the federal government’s the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program.

        • Chameleon OS First Look: An Open Source MIUI-esque ROM
        • RedReader for Android: Open Source Reddit application
        • Tips to avoid Android spyware

          If you own an Android the chances are you’ve heard, or experienced, one horror story after another about data theft and privacy invasion that comes as first nature to malware meant for Android phones. Android spyware is nothing new and the platform is home to a plethora of cell phone spy apps. There are apps that will pretend to be games (like the Drop.dialer fiasco earlier this year) and steal your information and cost you a buck load of money you never knew you were spending, and then there are apps that other people can use to spy on you, using your own phone. Sure the Jelly Bean is slated to slash all security issues to pieces, but just because it’s coming out doesn’t mean your phone will be compatible with it – unless you can easily jump from one phone to another.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Check Cyrus : DIY open source 3D printer
  • Profound Framework Moves to Open Source

    Application development tool vendor Profound Logic has taken its user interface framework open source citing benefits such as increased capability for users to control their own software, improved integration between the IBM i and other platforms, no-cost opportunities for companies and developers to test the application modernization waters, and a route to development that avoids vendor lock-in. It’s Profound’s latest step in providing IBM midrange shops with an RPG tool that is more open and transparent.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Will Mozilla Firefox 21 Be a Healthy Open Source Browser?

        Firefox 21 is now in Beta and it introduces a number of new features that will become generally available inside of the next 6 weeks.

        At the top of the list is a new Health Reporting feature that Mozilla first publicly started talking about in September of 2012.

      • Mozilla pulls tracking trigger for Firefox 22, ignores ad industry attacks

        Mozilla has added automatic third-party cookie-blocking to a preview version of Firefox 22, a move that will put the feature in most users hands by late June and the company on a collision course with the online ad industry.

      • Future Firefox to Offer More Social, Privacy Choices

        The recent release of Firefox 20 means that Mozilla has also updated the various Firefox testing channels — Beta, Aurora and Nightly.

        If you’d like to see what’s coming in future versions of Firefox you can grab pre-release versions from Mozilla’s channel downloads page. If you’d like to try out the bleeding edge, you can grab a copy of Firefox Nightly.

      • Mozilla: the Next 15 Years

        That is, there were two key aspects to Mozilla’s previous work: hacking code, and hacking the system. Both will be important in the years to come. The following comment from Baker in her post shows how the two are intertwined:

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

  • Education

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash 2.5.0 (Unstable) released

      PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.

    • FTP 0.4
    • Guile meets PHP

      Challenge #5 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a CGI script that serves up HTML pages with embedded Scheme, a la PHP. It is the first challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Condopedia Launches As Open-Source Wiki For NYC Buildings

      There are a lot of websites out there that can tell you everything you want to know about a residential building in New York City. StreetEasy can show you floorplans and amenities. The Department of Buildings can tell you how a place is zoned or what its roof is used for. The library can give you a detailed history. But there’s no resource that brings all these elements together. Enter, Condopedia, a wiki for condo and co-op buildings. Founded by real estate agent Laurence Putnam, the site provides all of the above, plus more, in the easy-to-use Wikipedia format that people are familiar with.

    • Is training to become a better contributor worth considering?

      Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012.

      As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.

    • Open Data

      • Medicine’s ‘Hard Drive’ Is Crashing

        Medicine’s evidence base — our hard drive — is corrupt, in all senses of that word.

        She was 86 years old, frail, with limited income. Her aching and fever had started two days ago. Although she had gotten the flu shot like I had asked her to, this was still most likely the flu. Ads for Tamiflu came immediately to mind, but like Ben Goldacre, I knew that the published data on Tamiflu has been as cherry-picked as your weekend bounty from the farmers’ market. My patient asked me: “Should I be on Tamiflu?” Should she, indeed. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know because I don’t trust the hallowed literature. I don’t trust PubMed, or highly cited articles in prominent journals, or the glossy circulars in my mailbox. Sitting across from her, at that moment, I felt my desire to practice evidence-based medicine completely undercut by the systematic suppression of “unfavorable” studies. The corruption of the evidence by publication bias isn’t theoretical. It’s there every day in our clinics and bedsides, affecting every patient and every doctor, breeding cynicism and distrust.

Leftovers

  • Ken Loach: Bring back the Spirit of ‘45

    Who or what inspires you?

    People who fight back.

  • Facebook starts charging users up to £11 to contact celebrities

    Trial charge for messages to people outside users’ social circle, from 71p for Robert Peston to £10.68 for Tom Daley

    [...]

    Facebook was ridiculed for setting a $100 (£61) fee to contact founder Mark Zuckerberg. He has previously said he would like Facebook messaging to become an alternative to email. The network rolled out @facebook.com email addresses to all users last June.

  • Owen Jones: Thatcherism was a national catastrophe that still poisons us

    We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade

  • Margaret Thatcher

    So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.

  • Margaret Thatcher: CNN in Jimmy Savile picture gaffe

    CNN has drawn unwanted attention on the internet after broadcasting a picture of Margaret Thatcher with Jimmy Savile.

  • Science

    • Polynesian DNA mysteriously shows up in a Brazilian tribe

      The Polynesians’ epic voyages of exploration and colonization across the Pacific are one of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments (even if the local bird life wasn’t likely to have enjoyed it). Having most probably started in Taiwan, the explorers reached and settled on islands across most of the Pacific, as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand. And recent evidence shows that they also stopped in South America, where they stayed long enough to pick up food crops that eventually wound up distributed across the Pacific as well.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Threatens to Sue Vermont if Legislators Pass a Bill Requiring GMO Food to Be Labeled

      Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.

    • “American Dream”: Food loaded into Dumpsters while Hundreds of Hungry Americans Restrained by Police

      Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.

      The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

    • Cutting Social Security and Medicare? That’s the ‘Middle’

      The new White House budget proposal is getting a lot of attention because it explicitly connects the Obama administration to an agenda that includes cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. As the New York Times (4/5/13) put it, Obama “will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” Apparently the most important risk is to the one to him, and not to millions of people whose benefits will be cut.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Iraq executing more people than it has for almost a decade, says Amnesty report

      Iraq is executing more people than it has done for almost a decade. The country now has the third highest number of executions in the world, according to a report to be published this week.

    • Fernandes ‘sought CIA funding’ during Emergency

      At the height of Emergency, fiery Socialist labour leader George Fernandes sought to get funding from the American Central Intelligence Agency and the French government while he was underground organising sabotage activities.

      Mr. Fernandes, who liked to project himself as a sworn enemy of American imperialism and foreign capital, said in November 1975 that “he was even now prepared to accept money from the CIA,” according to a new set of U.S. diplomatic cables from the Henry Kissinger era obtained by WikiLeaks and accessed by The Hindu.

    • CIA Iran Agents Allegedly Exposed by SSL CA Hack

      A group of Iranians reported to be involved in a sophisticated operation involving a deal with Chinese intelligence and involvements of Huawei have been able to obtain information about the certificate authority infrastructure produced and operated by Equifax at first, then sold to GeoTrust, Verisign and finally Symantec.

    • Terror camps targeting India spared from drone strikes in ISI-CIA deal

      US media on Sunday repo rted that Pakistan’s ISI and CIA made a secret pact to facilitate drone strikes against selective terrorist targets. Citing excerpts of a soon-to-be released book, American media said Pakistan gave access to US drone strikes on condition they would not target nuclear facilities and terrorist camps where Kashmiri militants underwent training for attacks against India.

    • CIA Does Not Submit Congressionally Mandated Data Mining Report

      Despite the CIA chief technology officer’s stunning claim last month that “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” the agency does not submit a congressionally mandated report on data mining, The Huffington Post has learned.

      That’s because under the CIA’s reading of the law, it doesn’t do any data mining at all. A legal loophole allows it to skip submitting the report even though other agencies, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, do.

    • ‘Way Of The Knife’ Explains CIA Shift From Spying To Killing

      When the CIA came into being in 1947, its mandate was to keep tabs on events around the world. Gather intelligence about foreign governments. Spy. But the agency has evolved away from this original mission, as Mark Mazzetti reports in a new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.

    • CIA-ISI deal: When will Delhi speak up?

      This does raise the question that the US fight against terrorism is self-centred, and that its rhetoric against international terrorism is one-sided and need hardly be taken at face value (as many here tend to do). Evidently, the US agreed to Pakistan’s terms on drones in their self-interest. That is not surprising.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Seven State Keystone XL Resolutions, Where Are the Environmentalists?

      The cleanup is still underway from a massive pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, but you don’t hear anything about it at public hearings across the nation dealing with the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Resolutions supporting the controversial KXL pipeline have now been introduced in seven states, but while TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Chamber of Commerce have been lobbying in force for the bills to pass, there have been few opposing voices by either Democrats or environmentalists at public hearings dealing on the measures. The massive pipeline project will transport tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for processing and export and once underway, the project will be a major contributor to global warming.

    • Reporters Say Exxon Is Impeding Spill Coverage in Arkansas

      Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they’ve been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.

    • Activists claim Arkansas oil spill diverted into wetland

  • Finance

    • Spain’s youth rally against unemployment
    • The MF fraud: As bad as you thought

      Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, led MF Global, a futures broker and bond dealer that collapsed in 2011. MF Global investors lost as much as $2.1 billion. At the time MF ran into trouble, Corzine was eligible for as much as a $12.1 millon golden parachute. However, Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, told me this afternoon that Corzine didn’t take any compensation when he stepped down. He also said Corzine has been unemployed since then, spending time with his family and doing philanthropic work.

    • Just Say Nao

      Sorry about the silence — I spent yesterday being human (the High Line in NYC is all it’s cracked up to be!), and then had a hellishly busy day today. If I had more energy left I’d plunge into the next stage in the European crisis; the moving finger of instability has now reached Portugal, with the government, of course, proposing to cure matters with More Austerity. But it will have to hold until tomorrow.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • French Intelligence Agency Forces Wikipedia Volunteer to Delete Article; Re-Instated, It Becomes Most-Read Page On French Wikipedia
    • Ways and Memes: PA Lawmakers Seek To Ban Photography Of Gas Drilling Activity

      A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.

      In February, 2013 PA House Bill 683 was proposed by nine Pennsylvania lawmakers – Reps. Gary Haluska [D-73rd], Carl Metzgar [R-69th], Stephen Barrar [R-160th], M. K. Keller [R-86th], Dick Hess [R-78th], Dan Moul [R-91st], Mike Fleck [R-81st], C. Adam Harris [R-82nd] and Tom Murt [R-152nd]. Steve Todd was among the first to report on it in his February 26 post, PA State House Judiciary Committee: NO on HB683. This bill would prohibit people from photographing oil and gas operations because they are occurring on agricultural lands. By fracking farmland, gas drillers would gain new impunity under a piece of anti-whitsle blower legislation, commonly known as an “Ag-gag.”

    • President of the European Parliament defends treating emails from citizens as spam

      On March 7, 2013, a large number of citizens tried to email members of the European Parliament to express their views on the ”Report on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report had attracted public attention on the internet and in media, since it called for ”a ban on all forms of pornography in the media”.

      One of the bloggers writing about this was the Pirate Party’s founder Rick Falkvinge, who asked citizens to email members of the European Parliament to let their views be heard, and set up a simple internet service to make it easy to find the addresses to the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).

      Around noon on March 7, approximately 350 emails from concerned citizens had arrived, but then they suddenly stopped appearing.

    • Manchester police to record attacks on goths, emos and punks as hate crimes

      Decision follows campaign by Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up in memory of girl fatally attacked in 2007

    • Twitter account suspended after mocking Exxon’s response to oil spill

      A Twitter account called @ExxonCares has been suspended after tweeting about Ninja Turtles and finding the men who built the Pegasus pipeline 65 years ago.

      The parody account was created last week in response to the Arkansas pipeline rupture that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, a suburb 25 miles outside Little Rock.

  • Privacy

    • Email: A Fundamentally Broken System

      Phil Zimmerman has always been a privacy advocate, and while he developed PGP, others fortunately saw fit to follow and extend his work and developed an open source and compatible equivalent, called Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG).

      Today, GnuPG or GPG is the linch-pin for the vast majority of Linux Distributions (Distros) and provides a ‘keyring’ feature to ensure that software obtained from a Distro’s repository will be guaranteed to be safe from tampering (trojan horses, viral code insertions). So, too, GPG is compatible with PGP email and allows users to encrypt (envelope) their email correspondences to guarantee privacy.

      Thus far, however, the implementation of low-cost or free, ‘easy-to-use’ email systems with standard encryption have been few, so there truly is a huge unmet need here–world-wide.

      As more users embrace the Internet and become comfortable incorporating it into their daily lives, they have also come to understand the crucial importance of privacy. In fact, many feel that such privacy is their given right. I agree with that. The right to privacy is implicit and incorporated into our nation’s Bill of Rights. It’s no different than the paper mail envelope analogy I gave above.

    • Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet

      It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.

    • CIA keeping tab on Goa casinos?

      Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar Tuesday dodged a query from a legislator who asked if US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials are in the state to probe casinos and their alleged links to terrorist activities.

  • Civil Rights

    • Opinion: Cameron Wants to Forget The Right to be Forgotten

      Online privacy is something I feel very strongly about, and when I heard about the current government’s plans to opt out of new EU social media laws, I decided enough was enough and it was time to take bigger stand. I won’t get into the depths of my views in this post but here is a brief idea of the situation.

    • Today, we save the Internet (again): fix the CFAA!

      When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he’d been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn’t the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely — even though the website didn’t want to press the matter — the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to “exceed your authorization” on any online service.

    • Fix the CFAA
    • Help Us Remember Aaron Swartz By Participating in Our Week-of-Action, Demanding Congress Reform the CFAA

      Today, EFF and a host of organizations across the political spectrum are launching a week-of-action imploring Congress to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the expansive law used to prosecute the late activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz.

    • New figures suggest Scottish CCTV is spiralling out of control

      Local authorities in Scotland have rushed to install even more CCTV cameras, which are proved to be an expensive and evidentially unsuccessful means of surveillance.

      The public would be far safer if the money was spent on street lighting, proper policing and actually punishing criminals when they are caught, rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and putting them back on the streets. In too many towns we now have a CCTV on every street corner, yet never see a police officer there.

    • Four race-crime convictions for neo-Nazi website

      Four men were convicted of inciting race hatred Monday from the Italian website of the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. The four, aged 23 to 42 and from various towns across Italy, were sentenced to terms ranging from 30 months to three years for “promoting and directing a group whose purpose was the instigation to ethnic, religious and racial discrimination and violence”. A Rome judge found the four guilty of targeting “Jews and immigrants, advocating the supremacy of the white race and instigating racism and Holocaust-denial”. The four, who were placed under house arrest Monday, were arrested November 16 after police shut down the website, which had regularly posted anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • In our digital world you don’t own stuff, you just license it

        Corporations and lawmakers have put us on course for a world where consumers do not own the things they buy

      • The Pirate Bay Moves to .GL Domain in Anticipation of Domain Seizure
      • Pirate Party evangelist Rick Falkvinge vows that the copyright cartels won’t grind him down

        PIRATE PARTY FOUNDER Rick Falkvinge is a travelling evangelist for the political group and its ideals, and he says that Pirate Parties will spring up when and where they are needed and that they are becoming needed more and more often.
        Falkvinge founded the Pirate Party when he realised that political change needed to come from the inside.
        “I realised activism isn’t enough. Politicians won’t care about an issue if their job isn’t on the line over it; they’ll look at all the activists and remember their own time on the barricades nostalgically, then go back to serving corporate interests,” he said. “My key insight was that votes beat all the money in the world when it comes to getting politicians’ attention.”
        The Pirate Party won its place in the European Parliament in 2009 after gaining success in the Swedish elections, and Falkvinge said that gave it credibility that previously it had been lacking. “Well, we certainly got credibility we didn’t have before,” he said. “Kicking the first politicians out of office forced them to take the threat to their power – us, not their incomprehension of the issues – seriously.”

      • YouTube’s Deal With Universal Blocks DMCA Counter Notices

04.07.13

Links 7/4/2013: Linux Kernel 3.8.6, OS4 OpenDesktop 13.4

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What’s GNU/Linux Worth To You?

    I was browsing the website of one of my favourite suppliers when I came accross an ad for VMware Desktop. Even though it was an old version they asked $177 for it. I poked around VMware’s site and found that it was available for GNU/Linux or that other OS so, if you used “7″ you have to pay an additional ~$100.

  • Five months in: Windows 8′s market share finally surpasses desktop Linux

    I am, of course, being sarcastic. Windows 7, after five months of public availability, had captured 10.5% of the market. Even the much-maligned Windows Vista did better than Windows 8 at release — and in fact, to this day, still has a larger share of the market than Windows 8 (5%). Manufacturers aren’t celebratorily cutting the price of Windows RT tablets; they’re discounting the devices in a desperate attempt to shift unwanted stock. There’s really no other way to look at it: For a new version of Windows to grow by just 0.4 or 0.5% per month is simply atrocious. As you see in the graph below, Windows 8′s growth rate shows no signs of accelerating. At this rate, Windows 8 probably won’t break 10% before the end of the year. Eventually, having failed to reach critical mass, Windows 8 runs the risk of being eclipsed by Microsoft’s other OSes, just like Vista.

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel 3.8.6 Is Now Available for Download
    • Alien’s ARM sources and git

      I have been writing regular updates to the Alien’s ARM page on this blog which can be found in the top of left sidebar. Readers of this blog who only visit the blog’s front page, will probably not have noticed, so I decided to write a more visible status update on the main page.

    • Graphics Stack

      • LLVM May Get A TGSI Gallium3D Compiler Back-End

        A proposal has been made to develop a new LLVM compiler back-end that would generate TGSI instructions, the intermediate representation used by Mesa’s Gallium3D drivers.

        Francisco Jerez, the open-source developer that has long been involved with Nouveau and did an X.Org EVoC project to work on Gallium3D OpenCL, is the developer proposing this LLVM TGSI back-end. During his “Endless Vacation of Code” project for the X.Org Foundation, the student made the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker nearly work. Well, it does work for OpenCL on Nouveau to some extent.

      • Wayland’s Weston Gets Color Management Framework

        Richard Hughes, the free software developer that has been quite involved within GNOME’s color management areas, wrote a set of patches providing an initial color management framework for Weston.

      • AMD RadeonSI Driver Officially Gets Compute Support

        AMD’s open-source “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards and newer now has early compute/GPGPU support.

      • Intel Driver Update Supports OpenBSD KMS

        The xf86-video-intel 2.21.6 driver has been released, which among other changes, supports kernel mode-setting on OpenBSD.

        OpenBSD finally received Intel KMS support and due to slight differences in the interfaces, there were some small changes needed to the Intel X.Org driver to support the BSD operating system.

      • Mesa Gets Support For GL4′s Separate Shader Objects
      • Watch How NVIDIA & Valve Ported Source To Linux

        Curious how NVIDIA Corp and Valve Software brought the Source Engine to Linux and their game porting lessons learned?

        Earlier this week I wrote about the NVIDIA and Valve sharing their lessons in porting Source to Linux. That article drew a fair amount of interest from the many Linux enthusiasts and Linux gamers reading Phoronix. Questions were raised whether there was a video recording of the presentation to shed additional light on the matter.

      • Nvidia’s 3D Tegra driver now open sourced

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva Delayed, Mageia Releases Beta

        The OpenMandriva team today announced that infrastructure delays are being addressed. The OpenMandriva Web presence was due to be in place by the end of March, but progress has only slowed – not stopped. In fact, Anurag Bhandari said they were picking up steam again. In other news, Mageia is pressing onward, sans live images again.

    • Debian Family

      • A Bytemark donation boosts reliability of Debian’s core infrastructure

        Earlier this week, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services which will be hosted in a new data centre in York, UK. The hardware, generously donated and hosted by Bytemark Hosting, consists of a fully-populated HP BladeSystem (containing 16 server blades) and several HP Modular Storage Arrays (providing a total of 57 TB).

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Three Ubuntu Linux versions will reach end of life in May
          • Subject: Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Beta 2 released
          • Ubuntu’s Unity Next Running On Mir Display Server

            Canonical developers have hit the milestone of being able to run their “Unity Next” desktop atop the Mir Display Server. The work is still very early, but it shows for Ubuntu Touch they can swap out Android’s SurfaceFlinger for Mir.

          • Is Ubuntu really an alternative to Windows?

            To get the most out of Ubuntu, a user must either be just comfortable enough to adapt without caring about specific features and apps, or so advanced that customization and under-the-hood tweaks are a cinch. And this ideal user must not own a laptop, or a touchscreen PC, as Ubuntu is not at its best on those systems.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Upgrading Bodhi Linux to 2.3.0

              Some time after midnight Thursday morning, after getting home from my “day” job, I upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Bodhi Linux, numbered 2.3.0, which was announced on Easter Sunday by the project’s Lead Developer, Jeff Hoogland, on his blog Thoughts on Technology.

              This isn’t a major upgrade. I’m sure there are some bug fixes and minor enhancements, but it mainly upgrades some essential software, such as the Linux Kernel, Enlightenment window manager, Midori browser, Terminology terminal emulator and Ubiquity, the Ubuntu default installer used by Bodhi. In addition, this update adds eCcess, a new system tool, and includes a slew of new themes for dressing-up the desktop.

            • Lubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 Comes with New Artwork

              Canonical announced today the release of the last testing version for its upcoming *buntu Linux operating systems, including Lubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail).

              Just like the other Ubuntu flavours, Lubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 is powered by kernel 3.8.0-16.26, which is based on the upstream Linux 3.8.5 kernel.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi makes video walls cheap and energy efficient

      According to Wikipedia, “A video wall consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include LCD panels, LED arrays, DLP tiles, and rear projection screens.”

    • Phones

      • Jolla’s Sailfish OS SDK installers are now out for Windows, OS X and Linux

        Sailfish OS screens

        Software development kit (SDK) installers for the Sailfish smartphone operating system are now out, Jolla has announced on Twitter. The SDK was previously demoed at Mobile World Congress in February.

        Jolla, which is led by ex-Nokians, has taken the abandoned MeeGo OS and wrangled it into a new, slicker version called Sailfish. The Linux-based OS will in theory be available for a number of device types, but the first commercially-available version will be on a smartphone sold through the Chinese distributor D.Phone and the Finnish carrier DNA.

      • Jolla Adds Sailfish SDK Installers For Windows, OS X, Linux To Push More Developers To Build Native Apps For Its MeeGo Platform

      • Ballnux

      • Android

        • Android Version History: A Visual Timeline [Infographic]
        • Android Jelly Bean with an external Wi-Fi antenna

          Most Android-powered PCs-on-a-stick lack an external antenna, meaning Wi-Fi connectivity can be significantly hampered.

          Earlier this year, we saw a DIY modification allowing users to add an external antenna to their sticks. However, cracking open an electronic device and pulling out the trusty soldering iron is probably just slightly more than most users would be willing to do.

        • RedReader for Android: Open Source Reddit application

          There is certainly no shortage in regards to apps for Reddit on Google Play. In fact, if you search for Reddit apps in the store you end up with more than 1000 results. While not all have been designed for Reddit exclusively, it is fair to say that you’d spend days going through all of them even if you’d limit the apps to those with a rating at least four stars.

        • Russian video shows one phone running two versions of Android

          If you’ve ever flashed an Android ROM before, you know it can either be a great experience or send you screaming back to your stock experience. What if you could just run that ROM in a service like Parallels and switch to it whenever you wanted to try something new? If you believe the video above, that’s exactly what a couple of St. Petersburg Academy students have created.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Bill Maher, Bernie Sanders, And A Solid Smackdown Of The Right Wing (VIDEO)

  • Hardware

    • ARM On The Cutting Edge Of Technology

      While Intel will surely have a role in the future of all IT, profits are sure to be reduced as Moore’s Law cannot eclipse the advantages of ARM and the cost of development, production and operation of x86 will always be higher than ARM. M$ will have revenue capped and probably cut by more than half. Within a few years every human on the planet will know they have a choice and M$ and Intel will have to compete on price/performance. Gone will be the days when either of them was the default choice. IT has outgrown being locked in a dark closet of exclusive deals.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • WikiLeaks Spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson Demands Justice for “Collateral Murder” Victims
    • While pardoning US colonel, Italy hopes India will do same to its marines

      Italy, which has pardoned a US air force officer convicted in a CIA abduction case, has hoped that India will follow the same example. While pardoning Colonel Joseph Romano, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said that the decision was inspired by hope that India would do the same for the Italian marines – Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone – accused of killing two Indian fishermen, BBC reported on its website.

    • Chief of CIA’s ‘Global Jihad Unit’ Revealed Online

      Her name is Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and, according to independent reporters Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, she is a CIA analyst who is partially responsible for intelligence lapses that led to 9/11. The two reporters recently released a “documentary podcast” called “Who Is Richard Blee?” about the chief of the agency’s bin Laden unit in the immediate run-up to the 9/11 attacks and featuring interviews with former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, former CIA agent Bob Baer, Looming Tower author Lawrence Wright, 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Keane, and others. In it, Nowosielski and Duffy make the case that Bikowsky and another CIA agent named Michael Anne Casey deliberately declined to tell the White House and the FBI that Khalid al-Mihdhar, an Al Qaida affiliate they were tracking, had obtained a visa to enter the U.S. in the summer of 2001. Al-Mihdhar was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77. The CIA lost track of him after he entered the U.S.

      [...]

      Bikowsky was also, according to Nowosielski and Duffy, instrumentally involved in one of the CIA’s most notorious fuck-ups—the kidnapping, drugging, sodomizing, and torture of Khalid El-Masri in 2003 (El-Masri turned out to be the wrong guy, and had nothing to do with terrorism). As the Associated Press’ Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported earlier this year, an analyst they described only by her middle name—”Frances”—pressed for El-Masri to be abducted even though some in the agency weren’t convinced he was the terrorist that Frances suspected he was. Instead of being punished or fired for the error, “Frances” was eventually promoted to running the Global Jihad Unit by then-CIA director Michael Hayden. According to Goldman and Apuzzo’s story, “Hayden told colleagues that he gave Frances a pass because he didn’t want to deter initiative within the counterterrorism ranks.”

    • Guantanamo Hunger Strike Grows As Military Locks Out Press

      In the midst of an ongoing hunger strike, the military is denying reporters access to the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.

      The military is telling reporters it will be over a month before there’s even a possibility of a tour of the detention facilities that house most of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners. A military spokeswoman based in Guantanamo told HuffPost on Friday that there would be no opportunity for press to access any of the prison facilities until May 6 at the earliest. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage had been trying to fly down for a visit next week, but told HuffPost that he was informed Friday afternoon the trip wasn’t happening.

    • Amy Goodman: Corporate media is ‘an extreme media beating the drums for war’
    • Police teach tactics for handling ‘sovereign citizens’

      The FBI classifies such people, who refuse to recognize government authority in virtually any form, as part of a domestic terrorist movement.

    • UK Neo-Nazi Darren Clifft Arrested after KKK-Style Mock Hanging at Rally

      A notorious British neo-Nazi has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after he was accused of posting racist and inflammatory material on the internet.

      Darren Clifft, 23, from Walsall, West Midlands is believed to have been one of the ringleaders behind last month’s far-right rally in Swansea, when around 50 white supremacists were confronted by a crowd of around 500 anti-racism campaigners.

      Clifft, who also goes by the name Daz Christopher, is known to police having previously voiced support for the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree in Norway in 2011.

    • Book review: ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ By Mark Mazzetti

      Yet isn’t the CIA’s real job to steal other countries’ secrets, rather than to carry out targeted killings?

    • Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence

      Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.

      Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a “changed man” and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to “find the intelligence” that he wanted to use to justify going to war.

    • Two Months Ago: FAA Releases New Drone List—Is Your Town on the Map?

      The Federal Aviation Administration has finally released a new drone authorization list. This list, released in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, includes law enforcement agencies and universities across the country, and—for the first time—an Indian tribal agency. In all, the list includes more than 20 new entities over the FAA’s original list, bringing to 81 the total number of public entities that have applied for FAA drone authorizations through October 2012.

  • Cablegate

    • US embassy planned to topple Chavez’ government says new WikiLeaks cable
    • Leaked Cable Discloses Bush Administration’s Plans to Aid Opposition to Hugo Chávez

      WikiLeaks released a State Department cable from 2006 detailing the efforts of former president George W. Bush’s administration to aid opposition to Venezuela’s now-deceased president Hugo Chávez.

    • Senator Assange?

      The Wikileaks Party’s campaign director says Julian Assange is a real chance to win a Senate seat in September, but what then?

    • America’s Man in Caracas: Wikileaks Reveals OTI Plot to Bring Down Chávez

      Documents released by WikiLeaks explain in detail former US ambassador’s strategy to undermine Chávez’s regime.

      After the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) in 2002, in the best tradition of the Cold War, the US Embassy in Venezuela launched a plan to put an end to Chavismo (the name given to Hugo Chávez’s left-wing political ideology), as revealed in secret documents released by WikiLeaks.

      An investigation carried out and published on March 18 by Pública — the independent Brazilian Agency of Investigative Reporting and Journalism— exposed the five-point strategy implemented between 2004 and 2006 by the former US ambassador, William Brownfield.

    • Bradley Manning: ‘New York Times’ Endorsed Source, or Traitor?

      “By this logic, Woodward’s sources are aiding the enemy.”

      Despite the seemingly ominous potential consequences Manning’s case could have on future whistleblowers and the ability of journalists to conduct high-profile investigations using anonymous sources, many news outlets are only now picking up on the broader implications of Manning’s case.

      “It is troubling to see how much the mainstream media has ignored the Manning case,” says Timm. “Manning gave the media a treasure trove of information that they have been using for the past two years. Almost every day you see a story that originated from Manning’s leak. It has enriched the public’s knowledge of what the government is doing in their name. Yet many in the press have been ignoring the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge and how it could affect their work going forward.”

      Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers, is revered in media circles and among government transparency and First Amendment advocates as a paragon of virtue. Why not Manning? Especially after news broke last year that the military was virtually torturing him in captivity.

      The reason may be simple generational pettiness and old media snobbery.

    • PJ Crowley: US Military Risks Making Bradley Manning a ‘Martyr’

      Former State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has written a column for The Guardian that argues the United States military should not give America’s enemies and rivals a “propaganda victory” by taking Pfc. Bradley Manning’s case to trial. He suggests the military may be “martyring” Manning and the military should accept his guilty plea and send him to prison for 20 years.

    • WikiLeaks activist in New York to protest US whistleblowers clampdown

      “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”; “Keep shoot’n, keep shoot’n”; “Light ‘em up, come on fire!” the captions say.

      Jónsdóttir is struck by the fact that the only person who has been prosecuted as a result of the video was its alleged leaker, Manning. “None of the individuals responsible for the war crimes shown in Collateral Murder have been put on trial. Only him.”

      In Jónsdóttir’s view, the heavy-handed approach of the US government towards those she considers internet whistleblowers has started to taint the reputation of America around the world. “It’s like China, the surveillance state. When the US government ordered its employees not to look at WikiLeaks, that was like the Chinese regime telling its people not to look at internet material on Tibet – I don’t see any difference.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest
    • World’s Largest Solar Boat Announces Trans-Atlantic Trip to Conduct Climate Change Experiments

      In 2010, PlanetSolar’s Tûranor solar-powered boat completed a 19-month voyage around the world. Now the eco-vessel is set to set sail again over the Atlantic Ocean in order to conduct experiments along the Gulf Stream in a project known as PlanetSolar DeepWater. The 115-foot Swiss catamaran, whose name means ‘power of the sun’ in Elvish, will take measurements on behalf of the University of Geneva.

    • ExxonMobil spills chemicals in Louisiana while cleaning spilled oil in Arkansas

      Even as ExxonMobil was mopping up after its disgusting tar-sands oil spill in Arkansas on Wednesday, it spilled an unknown amount of unknown chemicals — possibly hydrogen sulfide and cancer-causing benzene — during an accident at a riverfront refinery in Louisiana.

    • Canada to U.S.: About that Keystone pipeline …

      More recently, Canadians introduced North America’s first economy-wide carbon tax in British Columbia (The Economist called it “a winner”), and the continent’s first true feed-in-tariff program, in Ontario. As a result of the latter policy, by the end of this year Ontario will unplug from coal power forever. We also have cleantech sectors that have spurred cool innovations, like CO2-sequestering concrete.

      It’s getting tougher for many of us to square these accomplishments, and our national character, with the vision of those who insist, in this age of accelerating climate change, that it is our destiny to become the world’s gas pump — with Keystone XL serving as one of the hoses.

    • Dispatches From Exxon’s Spill Zone, Days 3 and 4
    • Beavers Suffer Severe Burns After Helping to Stop Oil Spill

      Six beavers at Utah’s Willard Bay State Park are being called superheroes after helping to contain an oil leak from pouring into the bay and marsh land. Sadly, three of the beavers were severely burned while the family built a dam that blocked a large portion of the spill.

    • Energy board changes pipeline complaint rules

      Canadians who want to tell the National Energy Board what they think about proposed pipeline projects – either in person or in writing – must now complete a 10-page application form proving they would be directly affected by the development or that they have relevant expertise.

  • Finance

    • Time Is Not Money, and Cash Doesn’t Talk

      The expression “Time is money” was coined by Benjamin Franklin. It is a relatively new saying, among countless others, that represents the rot that started to eat at the core of our global social edifice during the industrial revolution. With the exchange of clock hours for money began the notion of time as being an entity independent of any natural phenomenon. Such a concept is still absent from some cultures, like that of the Amondawa, a rare Amazonian tribe that had the luck to remain isolated from modernity. Of course, the Amondawa understand the idea of meeting somebody at sunset, or tomorrow, but time as something with a value per hour that may be traded for goods and services is unknown to them.

    • Zombie foreclosures: 300,000 ‘undead’ properties stalk ex-owners

      Zombie foreclosure: (noun) A home whose owner has abandoned the property but which the bank never finished foreclosing upon, leaving the owner legally and financially responsible for the decaying building.

    • Offshore Tax Havens Cost Average Taxpayer $1,026 a Year, Small Businesses $3,067

      U.S. PIRG, Sen. Levin, Small Business Leaders Release “Picking up the Tab 2013: Average Citizens and Small Business Owners Pay the Price for Offshore Tax Havens”

    • With Bruce Heyman, Another Local Obama Bundler Just Got an Ambassadorship

      So word is out, if not officially from the White House, that mega-bundler and Goldman Sachs partner Bruce Heyman, and his wife, Vicki, are off to Ottawa, assuming he makes it through his senate confirmation. True, it’s not London or Paris—those are already occupied, for the time being, by other Chicago bundler ambassadors. But Ottawa is considered to be a lovely posting, and the ambassador does not have to worry much about speaking any language except English.

    • Offshore Leaks set to reveal more embarrassing tax dodging

      The list detailing the identities of thousands of people hiding money in offshore accounts could reveal 160 times more data than Wikileaks.

      Analysing the details of what is now become known as Offshore Leaks will take some time, according to Catherine Boss, a journalist at Swiss paper Sonntagszeitung, who worked on the investigation to track the hidden cash.

      “It’s just the beginning. We have only looked at about 10 percent of the Swiss businessmen and women involved and we’ll continue to work on it.”

    • The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Is a Failed Experiment
    • How Worker-Owned Companies Work

      Economist Richard Wolff is a proponent of democracy at work: an alternative capitalism that thrives on workers directing their own workplaces. In the documentary film Shift Change, producers Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young tell the stories of successful cooperative businesses from Spain to San Francisco. We caught up with Dworkin and Young to find out what makes cooperative businesses work.

    • Whining About Unpaid Writing Gigs Isn’t Going To Increase Writers’ Incomes

      Nate Thayer’s whiny post about the Atlantic asking for permission to run one of his articles for free has attracted a lot of online attention. As usual, I agree with Matt Yglesias’s take. And like Matt my career as a professional writer was made possible because I wrote for free for a number of years before people started paying me. I contributed daily to a group blog called the Technology Liberation Front for more than two years before I started getting paid opportunities to write about tech policy. And this blog (for which I get paid based on the traffic I generate) began its life as a personal blog in 2009. It took almost 2 years before Forbes approached me about moving it to their site.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • French Intelligence Forces Volunteer Sysop to Delete Wikipedia Article
    • “I made some stupid posts”: Anti-troll site gagged after threats against poet
    • Wikipedia editor allegedly forced by French intelligence to delete “classified” entry

      On Saturday, Wikimedia France posted a press release regarding the recent deletion of a Wikipedia entry titled “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute.” According to the foundation, France’s Homeland Intelligence agency had demanded “classified” information taken down from Wikipedia.fr, and when the Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts Wikipedia) refused, it allegedly sought out a volunteer systems operator with the power to delete articles, brought him to the agency’s office, and demanded that he take the article down there or face legal charges.

    • Is Google liable for Autocomplete results? Italian court says ‘no’

      Can Google be liable for content displayed on its Autocomplete service?

      This question has been raised quite often and a bit everywhere in the past few years.

      As Kate reported some time ago, courts in Germany, France, Japan, Argentina, Ireland, and Italy (just to name but a few) have been asked to determine whether a provider like Google can be considered liable for potentially defamatory terms associated with a particular term searched for on its platform.

    • Wikimedia Announcement

      And I feel that although we’re in good shape, with a promising future, the same isn’t true for the internet itself. (This is thing number two.) Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development, and who is not. Last year we at Wikimedia raised an alarm about SOPA/PIPA, and now CISPA is back. Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we’re –increasingly, I think– seeing important decisions made by unaccountable non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based internet to one that’s consumption-based. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online — what’s good for ordinary people — but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that’s what I want to do next.

    • SEC Embraces Social Media

      Executives with itchy Twitter fingers can rest easier after federal securities regulators blessed the use of social-media sites to broadcast market-moving corporate news.

  • Privacy

    • Sprint, Softbank to shun Chinese networking equipment

      US officials have accused Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE of having close ties with the Chinese government and military. They claim the companies’ equipment raises the threat of “cyber-espionage” or attacks on US communications networks, although a White House review last year found no clear evidence that Huawei spied for China.

    • Apple’s iMessage encryption trips up feds’ surveillance
    • Untappable Apple or DEA Disinformation?

      Tech news site CNET has an interesting, but I suspect somewhat misleading, story today suggesting that text messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service—an Internet-based alternative to traditional cell phone SMS text messages—are “impossible to intercept” by law enforcement. Yet that is not quite what the document on which the story is based—an “intelligence note” distributed to law enforcement by the Drug Enfrocement Administration—actually says.

    • The Real Reason The Feds Can’t Read Your iMessages
    • ‘Going Dark’: What’s So Wrong with the Government’s Plan to Tap Our Internet?

      We know it’s open season on our data. Simply by examining your online interactions, your trades of email or gender in exchange for access, it’s not that difficult for big companies, government agencies or unscrupulous persons to establish a profile of who you are—political affiliations, religious beliefs, relationships, consumer habits, job history, schools you attended, locations you frequent, and in some cases, even your home address. It’s not dead, but privacy will never be the same.

    • Google’s Alma Whitten to step down

      Google’s first privacy director, Alma Whitten, is to step down after three years in the role.

  • Civil Rights

    • Emails Detail Northern District’s Use of Controversial Surveillance

      In 2011 federal prosecutors were working with magistrate judges in the Northern District to resolve concerns about the government’s use of sophisticated surveillance technology known as a stingray to track people using their cellphone signals.

    • Google Fights U.S. National Security Probe Data Demand

      It “appears” to be the first time a major communications company is pushing back after getting a so-called National Security Letter, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group. The challenge comes three weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that NSLs, which are issued without a warrant, are unconstitutional.

      “The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google,” said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman, who represented an unidentified service provider that won the March 14 ruling. “So far no one has really stood up for their users” among large Internet service providers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Report: US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple’s iPad Mini Trademark Application, Deemed “Merely Descriptive

        Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant’s goods.”

        The letter was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’

    • Copyrights

      • Joe Biden Pushed For “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Plan, IFPI Says

        IFPI wants governments worldwide to facilitate plans to tackle online piracy, whether voluntary or not. The music group’s CEO Frances Moore mentions the U.S. six-strikes program as a prime example. On paper the agreement between copyright holders and ISPs was voluntary, but Moore reveals that Vice President Joe Biden was one of the driving forces behind it.

      • Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws
      • U.S. Government’s Anti-Piracy ‘Six Strike’ Conversations Remain Secret
      • “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?

      • Prenda Law’s Attorneys Take The Fifth Rather Than Answer Judge Wright’s Questions

        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.

      • Judge Ends Hearing In 12 Minutes

        Well that happened much faster than expected. While Judge Otis Wright apparently had cleared his entire schedule today for the Prenda hearing, the actual hearing lasted all of 12 (count ‘em) minutes, with Judge Wright declaring “we’re done” before storming out. We’ll have a more detailed writeup from Ken White, who was in the courtroom, shortly, but here’s a quick summary of what happened. Unlike last time, everyone actually showed up (well, except for the imaginary Alan Cooper of AF Holdings who does not appear to exist) and promptly pleaded the fifth.

      • Transcript Of The 12 Minute ‘We’re Done’ Prenda Hearing Released

        We had Ken White’s awesome analysis of what happened at the Prenda Law hearing earlier this week, but now the full transcript of the hearing has been released so you can read along (or figure out how to incorporate it into the necessary movie script).

      • Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet

        Theresa May: determined to spy on everything we do on the internet.

      • A “Hollywood Ambassador” Would Make Bad Copyright Trade Policy Even Worse

        Copyright laws that represent the one-sided concerns of Hollywood at the expense of the broader public interest do not belong in trade agreements. Period.

        Yet just days after dozens of public interest groups around the world issued called on the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to keep copyright and patent regulations out of a new international trade agreement, a Senator with longstanding ties to the entertainment industry introduced a misguided bill that would create a new position for a “Chief Innovation and Intellectual Property Negotiator” — in other words, an Ambassador from Hollywood, paid for by the general public.

      • Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request

04.06.13

Links 6/4/2013: Alienware Gaming PC With GNU/Linux, OpenStack ‘Grizzly’, Sailfish OS SDK

Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Source Code Released
  • Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast Source Code Now Available To The Public
  • After LucasArts closure, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy go open source

    We’re all still reeling from Disney’s shuttering of LucasArts yesterday, and tributes to the once-indomitable game studio are sprouting up all over the Web. One such tribute sure to bring a smile to programmer geeks everywhere comes from development house Raven, which has this morning released the source code for its two Star Wars titles: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. The two FPS titles were released in 2002 and 2003 and continued the story of Kyle Katarn, the bounty hunter and Jedi first introduced in 1995′s Dark Forces.

  • Apache OpenMeetings hits first Open Source Top Level Project Release
  • Have spare time, dev skills? See what open-source projects need your help with this flowchart

    Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

  • Web Browsers

    • Web browser war: The early 2013 report

      The latest NetMarketShare browser numbers are in for March 2013. They reveal a three-way battle for the hearts and minds of PC web browser users, but on tablets and smartphones, Safari is leading by a wide margin. StatCounter, however, has Chrome and the Android native browser leading respectively.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Introduces Promising Payments API

        When it comes to making payments, lots of us still turn to credit cards, checks and other longstanding ways to get the job done, but the race is on to have most payments made via “digital wallets.” You can already make electronic payments via your smartphone using PayPal, Square, Google payments and other solutions, although the number of places you can do so is limited. Now, Mozilla is taking a big step forward in the digital wallet space by developing a mobile electronic payment platform that is likely to be standard in the company’s Firefox OS.

      • Open payment system for Firefox OS

        Mozilla has released an early draft version of a payment service API, enabling Firefox OS app developers to process purchases. The API design is in part based on Google Wallet, but the WebPayment API will remain open to being used for a wide range of payment service providers.

      • Firefox 20 Officially Lands in Ubuntu

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Grizzly Open Source Cloud Platform Debuts
    • There’s a new bear in the clouds: OpenStack releases Grizzly

      If you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation hIf you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation has just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

      OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors. as just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

      OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors.

    • OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ Debuts with More Than 200 New Features

      Roughly six months after the launch of its “Folsom” release last fall, OpenStack on Thursday unveiled version 2013.1 “Grizzly,” the seventh and latest release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

    • OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ Debuts with More Than 200 New Features
    • Gartner Analyst Surprised That Developers Love FLOSS Clouds

      I have news for him. Folks who have choices and know they have choices do open their eyes and look at what’s available. Further, they like FLOSS because is does allow the flexibility people want. Non-Free software is advantageous to some. Free Software works for everyone else.

      I guess it takes time. Only a few years ago Gartner gave FLOSS no chance at all. Some of Gartner’s staff are still in denial but they will surely evolve faced with such overwhelming popularity of FLOSS with Gartner’s customers.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • Mulesoft Raises $37 Million for App Integration

      Getting data out of one app and into another is big business. It’s a business that enterprise integration firm Mulesoft is now growing with new funding and products.

      Mulesoft announced this week $37 million in new funding, bringing total investment in the company to $81 million.

      Mulesoft is not a new company, having started out under the name Mulesource in 2003.The company originated as a commercial effort around the open source Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) created by Mulesoft founder Ross Mason.

  • BSD

    • AMD Kernel Mode-Setting Progresses For FreeBSD

      More of the Radeon kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver stack being ported to FreeBSD from Linux is beginning to function.

      For the past few months, the open-source Linux Radeon KMS driver has been ported to Linux. It’s shown signs of life but still isn’t fully working or in a state where it will be merged to the mainline code-base in the near future.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • MATE 1.6 Released

      The latest version of the GNOME 2 fork, MATE, is now out. MATE 1.6 includes updates to Caja, the panel and the control center

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Academia and Programming Language Preferences

      For years now, RedMonk has argued that programming language usage and overall diversity is growing rapidly. With developers increasingly empowered to select the best tool for the job rather than having to content themselves with the one they are given, the fragmentation of runtimes in use has unsurprisingly been heavy. Where enterprises used to be at least superficially built on a small number of approved programming languages, today’s enterprise is far more heterogeneous than in years past, with traditional compiled languages (C/C++) coexisting along with managed alternatives (C#/Java) as well as a host of dynamic options (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby).

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OASIS Breaks the Traditional Standards Accreditation Barrier

      On Tuesday, OASIS made an extremely rare announcement for an information technology consortium: that it has successfully completed the process of becoming accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). As a result, it is now able to submit its standards to ANSI for recognition as American National Standards (ANS). And also to directly submit its standards for adoption by ISO and IEC. This is a milestone that’s worthy of note, despite the fact that over 200 standards setting organizations (SSOs) have achieved a similar status in the past.

Leftovers

  • British Library to begin web harvest

    It aims to ”harvest” the entire UK web domain to document current events and record the country’s burgeoning collection of online cultural and intellectual works.
    Billions of web pages, blogs and e-books will now be amassed along with the books, magazines and newspapers which have been stored for several centuries.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Occupy Medical: ‘If you need help – you get help’

      Every Sunday from noon to 4pm, volunteers gather at their “mobile clinic” to make a difference, and offer free healthcare in downtown Eugene, Ore. What started as a temporary first aid tent along the Occupy Eugene movement in October 2011 became the Occupy Medical clinic in February 2012.

    • One of Us

      These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

    • Garbage Patch, the newest country

      It is made of trash, is as large as maybe even Texas and is in the middle of the ocean. Oh, and it’s severely under-populated. Actually, no one lives in Garbage Patch, no man, no animal.

      Okay, Garbage Patch is not really a country but to focus on monumental examples of man-made pollution, the United Nations’ cultural and science agency UNESCO will designate the conglomerations of rubbish a veritable territory of its own.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First ASIC-Based Miner

      A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.

      Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM.

    • Why Bitcoin Is Poised To Change Society Much More Than The Internet Did
    • Company profits depend on the ‘welfare payments’ they get from society

      The free market is a myth. From drug patents to quantitative easing, businesses make money because of state help

    • Obama picks Goldman Sachs exec for ambassador to Canada

      U.S. President Barack Obama has selected a partner at the investment firm of Goldman Sachs in Chicago to be the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, CBC News has learned.

      Sources tell CBC News Network’s Power & Politics that Bruce Heyman has accepted the job but still has to pass a vetting process in order to be be formally nominated. His confirmation will be up to the U.S. Congress.

      If he is approved, Heyman would replace David Jacobson, who has held the position since 2009. Jacobson is also from Chicago.

    • Wall St Burdens the Public Debt

      As the effects of the sequester agreement ripple through the American economy–massive cuts, that is, to social programs, and the military to some extent–one thing is clear: both sides–President Obama and the leadership of the Republican Party–seem to think that public debt is the biggest challenge facing the American economy. Well, our next guest begs to differ.

      Now joining us in the studio is Michael Hudson. He was a Wall Street financial analyst, is now a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His recent books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.

    • Laiki Bank: The Cyprus bank staff hit worst of all
    • Exposed: A Global Offshore Money Matrix of Up to $32 Trillion

      The covert handling of huge amounts of money away from public accountability has fueled the global austerity crisis by shifting tax burdens onto average citizens…

    • Ex-Goldman trader charged in $7.6 billion rogue trade

      A former trader at Goldman Sachs pleaded guilty Wednesday to fraud linked to a scheme to hide an unauthorised $US8 billion ($7.6 billion) futures bet he made at the US banking giant.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • AP Ditches ‘Illegal’ Label

      The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to “illegal immigrants,” except in direct quotes. The term “illegal,” AP’s new rules state, refers only to actions, and not to people.

      Though they say it’s just the result of an ongoing in-house effort to rid the Stylebook of “labels,” the change is undoubtedly a victory for activists, who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term. Not only because it’s dehumanizing. As AP’s executive editor Kathleen Carroll points out, it’s also bad reporting, a “lazy device” that obscures meaningful distinctions.

    • New Report Exposes Extreme ALEC Agenda in Arizona

      Seventeen bills introduced in the Arizona legislature in 2013 can be tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and every member of the Republican leadership in the state are current or recent ALEC members, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and its allies “ALEC in Arizona: The Voice Of Corporate Special Interests In The Halls Of Arizona’s Legislature.”

      “ALEC is a secretive but powerful force in Arizona politics,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director. “This report exposes how corporations and Arizona legislators, have worked together to keep citizens in the dark about ALEC’s extreme agenda.”

  • Censorship

    • New Evidence: Homeland Security Spied On Peaceful Protestors; Worried About Protests Getting News Coverage

      We just recently had a post on the head of one of Homeland Security’s “Fusion Centers” (the same Fusion Centers found by a Congressional investigation to be a near total waste of time and money, finding no terrorists, but violating the public’s civil liberties) who claimed that the DHS centers did not spy on Americans, and then immediately admitted that they spied on “anti-government” Americans.

      The definition of “anti-government” was mostly left as an exercise to the reader. However, in a bout of good timing, the Partnership for Civil Justice has released some new DHS documents it received via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showing that DHS regularly spied on peaceful demonstrators and activists.

    • ‘Strong Lack of Instinct’: Turkish Paper Threatens to Sue over Trial Access
    • Turkish media to challenge exclusion from neo-Nazi trial

      Eight of the 10 victims of the neo-Nazi NSU underground organisation killed between 2000 and 2007 were Turkish citizens but no Turkish media organisation has been granted guaranteed seats for this month’s trial of suspected NSU member Beate Zschäpe.

      Yesterday Sabah said it was going to the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe to demand a seat reservation. The mass-market Hürriyet is considering joining the complaint.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • 6-y.o. Who Walked Alone to Post Office May be Removed from Her Home

      Dear Free-Range Kids: A few days ago CPS served my wife and me with a complaint alleging that we are neglectful. They want to take custody. Here is the chain of events that has led to this:

    • Azerbaijan Government Worried by Facebook Activism
    • Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama

      Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

    • Liberty Preservation: The states say ‘NO’ to NDAA

      Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.

    • Opponents Label Nullification “Nuts” and a “Bizarre Fad”

      Nullification is not the right of states to nullify any federal act. Rather, it is the right to choose to not enforce any federal act that fails to conform to the constitutionally established limits on its authority. Nullification presupposes that there are myriad (albeit limited) areas over which the Constitution has given purview to the federal government: defense, naturalization, foreign relations, interstate commerce, etc.

    • Bush Redux?

      Not only has the president ignored his promised platform planks, he’s actually reinforced and strengthened some of the most egregious portions of Bush-era abuses of power.

    • Abortion debate leads to comparisons with Nazi infanticide

      THE murder of infants with a disability in Nazi Germany was recalled during a highly charged debate on abortion, as doctors voted to reject radical calls for changes in the law.

    • Google Challenges U.S. National Security Letter in Court

      Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the U.S. government, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acknowledging it is one of the first firms to do so.

      Google took the unusual step last month of revealing, albeit in vague terms, the number of NSLs it received from the US government. At the time the company said it was working with the authorities to improve transparency around the subject, but according to court filings it is also fighting against handing over users’ data.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Opinion: £53 and the Problem With UK Politics

        No-one forced, or compelled, Duncan Smith to make that statement. The assertion that it’s possible is one that rankles many people, however. Of course not everyone is feeling the pinch of recession and csuts, and that includes the former Conservative Party leader. While he may have been on unemployment benefits in the ’80s, he’s had steady employment for the last twenty years, all on public funds. Now asking him to try living on the same solutions he’s proposing for others isn’t really that big a stretch. In fact, given his experiences being a ward of the welfare state, and his military service, it shouldn’t be that difficult for him to survive, adapt, and overcome.

        However, the speed with which he’s back-pedalled and tried to move away from his initial position shows how promises trip lightly off the tongue when you’re a politician defending your party base. It’s ‘a stunt’ he claimed, ignoring the simple fact that after 20+ years as an MP, one currently earning significantly more (£134,565/year) than the average wage (£28,700 for UK males, according to the BBC in November) he may be a bit out of touch, and a bit clueless about the realities of his policies. Sure it looks good on paper, but without experiencing it first-hand, he’s not going to understand why it doesn’t work. At the time of writing, over 400,000 people have already said they’d like him to re-acquaint himself with that area of his job, to help him perform better.

      • YouTube Won’t Put Your Video Back Up, Even If It’s Fair Use, If It Contains Content From Universal Music
      • Film studios request removal of takedown notices

        Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.

        Google receives 20 million “takedown” requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.

      • Icelandic Píratar On Final Approach To Election Victory

        A new poll today places the Icelandic Pirate Party in parliament, with their election three weeks out. This follows a continuous and rapid ascent for the Icelandic Pirate Party. The poll will probably have the additional effect of putting the media spotlights on the party, further accelerating its growth.

04.04.13

Links 4/4/2013: KDE 4.10.2 Released, Pear 7 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What Is Our Goal Here?

  • Desktop

    • Linux in the Real World – A View from the Trenches

      Even among our ranks within Linux Advocate, there are “lively” debates on what our goals should be. But I will argue, given the current state of the Linuxphere…..

      That’s not going to happen either. Our biggest strength is also our greatest weakness. Fragmentation.

      Let’s break it down.

      First off, and not to get lost in semantics, I consider myself a Linux Mentor as well as an Advocate. Advocating is all well and good but without follow through, we’re not getting the job done.

      Everyone who enters the Linux Advocate fold does so with their own motivation and expectations. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. That’s just a fact of life. I can’t expect a natural introvert to do what I do any more than (s)he can demand I code to their level of proficiency.

  • Server

    • Algo-Logic Presenting 10 Gbps Market Data Filter at HPC Linux Wall Street

      SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 3 — Algo-Logic Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in providing hardware-accelerated, deterministic, real-time, ultra-low-latency products, systems and solutions for accelerated finance, packet processing and embedded system industries, announces that it will present live demonstration of its newest FPGA-accelerated Market Data Filtering (MDF) application. This live demo will be showcased on Mon., April 8, at the HPC Wall Street Conference at Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

  • Kernel Space

    • Another EXT4 Corruption Bug Gets Fixed

      A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.

    • Another EXT4 Corruption Bug Gets Fixed

      A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD offers open-source Linux driver for hardware video decoding

        AMD’s Unified Decoder has been the object of envy in the open-source community for some time. The silicon, which ships on the company’s Radeon graphics cards, offers hardware-accelerated video decoding — but thanks to legal and DRM issues, couldn’t be used on Linux machines.

      • X and Wayland

        For me, networking of displays is the most important feature of GNU/Linux operating systems. Perhaps X became too fragile/complex/limited. Perhaps Wayland is the way forward, but without networking Wayland is pathetic. Now that it is coming together it is time for Canonical to get behind Wayland and share the load of generating good FLOSS with the rest of the world. Going it alone will mean serious fragmentation of GNU/Linux. OEMs, consumers, system administrators will have to choose which way to go. I can already see OEMs hanging back by using older releases of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. How long will it take Canonical to wake up to that?

      • NVIDIA Has New Driver Update To Fix Security Flaw
      • Intel Linux Driver Brings In Better Overclock Support

        Introduced last month was the ability to overclock Intel graphics under Linux while presented hours ago is a new Intel Linux kernel driver patch to provide better GPU overclocking support.

      • Digging Deeper Into AMD’s UVD Code Drop

        Yesterday it was exclusively announced on Phoronix that AMD was releasing open-source UVD code so that their open-source Linux graphics driver can finally benefit from GPU hardware-accelerated video playback. Here’s some more details.

        Now with the Linux kernel and Mesa/Gallium3D code having been published and having time to go through this code myself, after Fatima’s article earlier, here’s some more details. Of course, if you didn’t already, first read AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support for the overview.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kate: Search & Replace Notifications in KDE 4.11

        In KDE 4.10, the “Find All” and “Replace All” highlights all matches and at the same time shows a passive notification in a bar below the view. This bar is animated, and takes quite a lot of place in addition to the search & replace bar.

        Since some days, Kate Part can also show passive notifications floating in the view. Hence, we’ve changed the passive notification to appear on the bottom right as a small info message, showing the number of matches. However, in order to make this passive notification as small as possible, we removed the “Close” button, since the notification is hidden after 3 seconds anyway. Further, we removed the “Keep Highlighting” button. If you want to keep the highlights, just do not close the search & replace bar. The following video demonstrates this behavior, first for KDE 4.10, then how it currently will be in KDE 4.11 (watch the video in 720p):

      • KDE 4.10.2 Fixes Annoying and Dangerous Bugs

        KDE announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment today, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.2. This is an update/stabilization release that brought over 100 fixes. Some bugs were annoying, but one particular nasty bugger was also fixed.

      • KDE 4.10.2 Released, Fixes 100+ Bugs

        The KDE 4.10.2 point release is said to have over 100 bug-fixes. Reported improvements within the KDE 4.10.2 release include the Kontact Personal Information Management Suite, the KWin window manager, and others.

      • KDE 4.10.2 Brings over 100 Bugfixes

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • MATE 1.6 supports systemd login

        The MATE developers have released version 1.6 of their desktop environment. Originally derived from the source code of the last GNOME 2 release, the desktop environment offers a similar user interface. MATE 1.6 now works with the login manager of systemd, which has largely replaced ConsoleKit for user and session tracking in several distributions, and is also due to be used in the, as yet unnamed, Ubuntu 13.10.

  • Distributions

    • Chakra: A Simple, Strong Energy Center for Your Desktop
    • Sorting Out the Linux Desktop Mess

      Standardization in Linux is “not going to happen,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “What should be done instead is to stop lumping all the Linux distributions under the name ‘Linux,’ and just call them Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint and so on,” Lim offered. “They are that diverse.” In fact, “if we woke up tomorrow and only one desktop Linux distribution was left in development, we would all be better for it.”

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO Runs His Billion-Dollar Company From This Uber-Modest Office

        We’ve told you that Red Hat is one of the world’s biggest “meritocracies,” where employees can, and do, call the CEO an idiot to his face, if they don’t like his ideas.

        CEO Jim Whitehurst is proud of that.

        He might be the boss, but in a meritocracy, people have power based on the respect they earn from their peers and once respected, they are entitled to speak their minds.

        We also told you that Red Hat is hiring like crazy. It just moved into a new headquarters building in downtown Raleigh, N.C.

      • Red Hat Is Still On Target To Nearly Triple Revenues In Three Years, CEO Says

        Red Hat, the first and only open source software company to reach over $1 billion in revenue, is still on track to nearly triple its revenue to $3 billion by 2016, CEO Jim Whitehurst said in an interview.

      • Analysts unleash the bears on Red Hat

        Nearly a week after Raleigh’s Red Hat released its earnings, the price cuts are rolling in.

        Just in the past few days, reports began to roll in on price-target cuts for Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) stock from about $60 a share to the low $50s.

        BMO Capital Markets cut its price target to $54 from $60 and MKM Partners made a similar cut to $53. Pacific Crest followed Monday by cutting its target from $60 to $55.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Growing the community – the case for a jumpstart

    There are several projects that can boast a clear track record of attracting, building and growing a community. LibreOffice is one of them, and so was his parent, OpenOffice.org . I’m not specifically speaking about the developers’ community, but rather about the worldwide community of localizers, QA testers, documentation writers and translators, local volunteers contributing their time to marketing and users support, designers… We had come up with a name back then : the Native-Lang projects. It simply meant the « native-language projects », communities working on the basis of their common language rather than on a country affiliation, which would have resulted often in politically complex and difficult situations.

  • SOS Open Source Has a New Face!

    I am proud to announce that finally SOS Open Source has found a new steward in the person of Raffaella Corona. Raffaella has over 5 years experience in the IT industry, she has been at the forefront in selling high value training courses about open source languages and applications.

  • ATEME Enables Industry First Open Source Implementation Supporting HEVC
  • ARM says most ARM powered servers will run open source software

    CHIP DESIGNER ARM says it expects its server chips to be deployed on servers that run open source software stacks.

    ARM has been a vocal and active supporter of open source software for many years and has taken a major role in a number of Linaro working groups in recent years. According to the firm open source software stacks will run on most of its upcoming server chips, with the firm citing market demand.

  • Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software

    Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.

    The Community Edition software is designed for programmers, consultants, and do-it-yourselfers. For the first time the open source community has access to a full featured multi-store e-commerce solution for Java that is optimized for speed for both the EC2 Cloud and Data Center deployments. David Sopuch, CEO and eBusiness Director of Avetti.com Corporation said, “Finally the open source community now has a free fast solution that is full featured and can handle high volumes.”

  • Open source community best fit for new wave of industrial development

    Open source is used just about everywhere, but when it comes to “safety-critical” systems, like software that flies planes or controls medical equipment, most of us assume that open source just doesn’t fit the bill. The regulations and requirements are rigorous, and ill-suited to the usual “fail faster” approach of open source.

    Then, we learned about an initiative called Open-DO, which shows that FLOSS has a critical role to play, even in this specialized, highly regulated environment.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • 7 Search Engines for Big Data

      Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • NxtGen Saves Millions Using Open Source

      NxtGen Data Center and Cloud Services has saved in excess of Rs 4 lakh per server by using free and open source software (FOSS).

      The company has saved more than $4,000 per server in licensing costs for setting up private clouds by using the open source based OpenStack cloud virtualization platform.

    • Headaches for Small Businesses

      Here’s where FLOSS can help. A small business can migrate to FLOSS in a day or two, often over a weekend, and have software that just keeps on working. Problems that drop off the radar:

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.0 Reached End-Of-Life on March 31, 2013

      Even though it was known by most of FreeBSD users that the 9.0 release of the best BSD operating system will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on March 31, 2013, we feel obliged to announce users that FreeBSD 9.0 is no longer supported.

      Originally released on January 10, 2012, FreeBSD 9.0 was a short-term supported release (one year), as opposed to the FreeBSD 8.3 release, which is still supported until April 30, 2014.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open Source ‘preference’ mandate: overcoming government impasse in the public sector

      The Open Source industry have been waiting the best part of ten years for the UK Government to mandate a ‘preference’ for Open Source Software (OSS) over proprietary or closed-source alternatives.

    • Open government beyond open data and transparency

      The term “Open Government” (OG, hereafter) has been used since the 70s to refer to the effort to reduce bureaucratic opacity and open up governments to public scrutiny. Current notions of OG are thus the result of more than four decades of endeavours to increase the transparency of government actions. These efforts materialized mainly in the enactment of legislation on access to information, privacy, data protection and administrative procedures, and by creating ombudsman offices and supreme audit institutions.

    • Malaysian Government Adoption of FLOSS

      So far, only 9 agencies report using FLOSS desktop or client OS but that should change rapidly when more of the applications are FLOSS. 9 ministries have been declared self-reliant in FLOSS. Two hundred people participated in a conference on self-reliance in FLOSS for governmental agencies recently.

    • IRC clients for Linux

      Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely-used nowadays as a communication method on the internet. On IRC, you will connect to IRC servers in which there will be individual chatrooms called channels. By joining a IRC server, you will be able to chat with other users who have connected to the same server, you can either chat on a channel with many other peeps or make a person-to-person conversation. Most Linux distros have official irc channels on freenode.net for users to come to ask questions and help other people. There are in fact many IRC clients in Linux but in this article, I will show you several IRC clients that I personally know and have used. All these clients are available in the repository of most distros I think you know how to install them already.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

04.03.13

Links 3/4/2013: MATE 1.6, US Justice Department Versus Online News

Posted in News Roundup at 4:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software

    Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.

  • How Netcore Built Rs 50 Crore Biz With Open Source

    The Mumbai-based solutions provider, which focuses on email, messaging and e-marketing solutions, has saved $2 million on licensing costs with free and open source software (FOSS)

  • New marketplace connects open source contractors with clients

    In any field, a major challenge can be finding the right talent. For open source projects looking for contractors, it’s hard to organize possible candidates from all over the web. Flossmarket hopes to fill that void.

    A platform for connecting contractors and businesses/individuals, Flossmarket allows each party to search for and find like-minded partners faster for their projects. Contractors build a profile and are able to advertise their services on their page. And, anyone who needs contract open source work done can review candidates based on criteria they set in their search.

  • Crossing the Chasm

    Are you winning if you own ninety-nine percent of a moribund market ? I don’t think so. Linux and Open Source/Free Software has crossed the chasm now. It has become the mainstream. Every Android tablet or phone out there is a Linux and Open Source/Free Software platform, and in the next few years I fully expect this to become the most common form of computing for most people worldwide (disclaimer, I do work for Google so please take such predictions with the pinch of salt they deserve).

    For Free Software advocates like myself this is a tremendously positive change. The dirty secret of Samba, my own Free Software project, is that for a while the developers only ever run Windows ourselves in order to test Samba (which is an interoperability solution). Mostly everyone uses a different variety of Free Software desktops and servers (with the odd Mac or Solaris/Illumos user thrown into the mix). The default at least for us has become Free Software.

    So have we won ? Should we just pack up the advocacy tent and go home ? Unfortunately not. Most of the applications running on these devices are still proprietary. Most people using mobile devices, although they might be running a Free Software operating system underneath, still don’t realize why Free Software is important.

  • BBC sharing its TV application layer as open source

    Britain’s public service broadcasting corporation BBC is making available as open source the code for building HTML-based TV software solutions, called TAL. “Sharing the TV Application Layer should make building applications on TV easier for others, helping to drive the uptake of this nascent technology”, the organisation explains.

  • BBC Almost “Gets” FLOSS…

    Nothing in FLOSS restricts use of FLOSS in commercial products. You can charge money for services instead of charging for licences and GPL, for instance, permits charging per copy or whatever. Much FLOSS is commercial, like Linux, the kernel, worth $billions, FireFox, the web browser, worth $hundreds of millions and RedHat makes a $billion in revenue on FLOSS annually.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Celebrates 15 Years with Firefox 20

        Mozilla captured many a headline today as Mitchell Baker blogged about 15 years of “a better web.” Mozilla began life as Netscape’s Open Source branch of development in 1998 and has since changed the Web many times, if sometimes by accident. But as Mozilla celebrates this milestone, Firefox 20 is already making the rounds.

        Baker said, “Looking back, Mozilla’s plan was as radical as the Web itself: use open source and community to simultaneously create great software and build openness into the key technologies of the Internet itself. This was something commercial vendors weren’t doing and could not do. A non-profit, community-driven organization like Mozilla was needed to step up to the challenge.”

      • Firefox 20.0: Find out what is new

        Mozilla will upgrade the stable channel of its desktop browser to Firefox 20.0 today. The front page at the time of writing is still linking to a download of version 19.0.2, but you can use this link to download the new version of the browser right away. Make sure you change its url if you need a different localized version, this one downloads the US version of Firefox.

      • Celebrating 15 Years of a Better Web
      • Firefox 20 Drops In New Private, Download Features

        Mozilla has announced Firefox 20 with several prominent new features to the open-source web-browser.

        As shared on the Mozilla blog, prominent features of Firefox 20 include:

        - Support for starting private browsing in a new tab of an already existing web-browser session. Firefox for Android also now supports private browsing on a per-tab basis.

      • Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

  • Education

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • On Data Science with Open Data

        In a previous blog post I offered up two interpretations of the term ‘data science’. These amounted to 1) ‘the science of data’ and 2) ‘doing science with data’. If you read the earlier post you’ll probably detect my mild irritation with the term when coupled with the second of these interpretations. Perhaps it’s the redundancy, or maybe the implication that plain ‘science’ is somehow devoid of data. It may be both.

    • Open Access/Content

Leftovers

  • The Meme Hustler

    Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

  • Science

  • Hardware

    • Pie-in-the-sky or Real Growth in PC Shipments?

      Wait a bit… New hardware is something that might drive unit shipments and M$’s cutting of licensing fees might help if people actually wanted to buy M$’s OS, but M$ is cutting the prices because people don’t want to buy M$’s OS, so this is wishful thinking. Manufacturers should be shipping GNU/Linux if they want sales to pop. People are desperate to escape the clutches of M$ and the consumers who are a big piece of the pie cannot unless they find GNU/Linux on retail shelves.

  • Security

    • Exclusive: Ongoing malware attack targeting Apache hijacks 20,000 sites
    • EU data-protection authorities launch joint action against Google

      Data-protection authorities of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands have launched a joint action against the Google for violating the European Union privacy rules.

      The joint action is the first co-ordinated and formal procedure by EU member countries against a single company on privacy.

      Currently, the European authorities can impose only fines below €1m. However, the new EU privacy rules, expected to be approved by the end of 2013, could allow the authorities to inflict on companies penalties up to 2 per cent of their global annual turnover.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Greek Nazi link group ‘set up here’

      A Greek political party with links to neo-Nazis say they have established themselves in Melbourne, but have no interest in Australian politics.

      Golden Dawn, which was founded by a Holocaust denier and whose members have been linked to dozens of violent protests in Greece, claims to have set up a group in Melbourne filled with Greek-Australians who will ”fight and defend both of our countries with pride and honour”.

      The group sent an email to Fairfax Media criticising the ”lies” of reporters, politicians and Greek community leaders since controversial Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris announced plans for a Melbourne office and a visit from MPs on a Melbourne radio station in February.

    • German Pastor Faces Trial Over Anti-Nazi Protest

      A German pastor due to stand trial for allegedly inciting violence at an anti-Nazi demonstration said Tuesday that authorities risk deterring people from standing up to right-wing extremists if he is convicted.

    • Is The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas about to Launch a Neo-Nazi Counter-Revolution?
    • Capitol Hill hawks object stripping CIA of drones
    • Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama

      Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

    • ‘Americans’ taps creator’s work at CIA

      When he was training to be a case officer for the CIA in the early 1990s, Joseph Weisberg soon learned that deception was a crucial skill — one that involved lying to his family regularly.

    • The Shift in the Drone Debate

      When a forum as hawkish at The Washington Post‘s editorial page starts running pieces arguing the drone war is creating more enemies than it is eliminating, you know the dialogue is beginning to shift.

    • An Urgent Proposal to Protect People From Domestic Drones
    • Drones: Secrets in our skies

      Hundreds of unmanned aerial vehicles – known as drones – are aloft in our skies, many owned and built by recreational users. But safety and security issues alarm the CAA, which oversees our aviation system.

    • Officials want ‘drones’ buzzing over Utah
    • North Korea: Not Crazy but Very Misunderstoods

      It seems scary, even crazy: talk of a “sea of fire” and an “arc of destruction,” nuclear missiles slamming into distant shores. North Korea, an “isolated state,” as we’re constantly told by media reports, hurls invective at the world while its people, abused, hungry and cold, are led by an apparently well-fed young man, Kim Jong-un, who sits in front of shabby-looking computers running nuclear programs that are going, literally, ballistic.

      But is it all true?

      “Public discourse about the North in most of our enlightened world is crippled, condescending, irrelevant, and, like heartburn, episodic,” says James Church, the pseudonymous author of a series of novels about the country, in an article titled: “NK and Pluto.” He insists on anonymity because of the nature of his past intelligence work.

      As the rhetoric ratchets up again on the Korean peninsula with talk of mobilization, attack and counterattack, Mr. Church’s view is deeply counterintuitive and very valuable. His authorial name is a pseudonym for a former Western intelligence officer who has been in the country dozens of times and now, retired from government, writes about it through the eyes of a fictional North Korean policeman called Inspector O. (Full disclosure – I have met Mr. Church and he is definitely real.) In fact, the novels offer a superb demonstration of the idea that fiction tells the truth better than fact.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 350.org Calls for Public Comment on Keystone XL Pipeline

      After the recent tar sands pipeline spill in Arkansas, where thousands of gallons of toxic oil ran through the streets of a small community, the climate change organization 350.org is asking Americans to join in the public commenting process for the Keystone XL pipeline.

      The U.S. State Department is reviewing applications for permits needed for the international pipeline to advance. The State Department is soliciting public comment on the issue until April 22.

  • Finance

    • Taking back City College from the corporations – by any means necessary

      Like the Monsanto Protection Act, the support for all of this corporate destruction of our communities’ schools…

    • When America Came ‘This Close’ to Establishing a 30-Hour Workweek

      The April 15, 1933 issue of Newsweek, one of the first in the magazine’s history, contains a remarkable cover headline: Bill cutting work week to 30 hours startles the nation. Indeed only nine days earlier, on April 6th, the Black-Connery Bill had passed in the United States Senate by a wide margin. The bill fixed the official American work week at five days and 30 hours, with severe penalties for overtime work.

    • Pope to review Vatican bureaucracy, bank scandal

      …bank which has regularly damaged the Vatican’s image over three decades…

    • Food stamps and the database state…

      The latest proposal for ‘food stamps’ has aroused a good deal of anger. It’s a policy that is divisive, depressing and hideous in many ways – Suzanne Moore’s article in the Guardian is one of the many excellent pieces written about it. She hits at the heart of the problem: ‘Repeat after me: austerity removes autonomy’.

    • The Great British class calculator

      People in the UK now fit into seven social classes, a major survey conducted by the BBC suggests.

    • Bitcoin price goes on wild ride

      The price of the virtual currency bitcoin, already volatile in recent weeks, went through wild swings in overnight trading Tuesday and Wednesday.

      According to prices quoted on Mt.Gox, the main trading exchange for bitcoins, the value of one bitcoin ricocheted from $106 to as high as $147, then back down to $125, then to $141. They were trading around $139 per bitcoin in afternoon trading Wednesday.

    • Paulson Applies for Lawsuit Dismissal – Analyst Blog

      Paulson & Co applied for dismissal of a lawsuit made by ACA Financial Guaranty related to Abacus – a collateralized debt obligation (CDO). The plaintiffs accused the company of joining banking major The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( GS ) to obtain guaranteed payments from bond insurers on risky investments.

      In 2011, ACA Financial filed a $120 million lawsuit against Goldman and later in January, added Paulson & Co along with its hedge fund unit – Paulson Credit Opportunities Master II Ltd as the accused. The modified lawsuit claimed that Goldman and Paulson tricked ACA Financial into believing that Paulson was investing in the CDO. However, Paulson had taken a short position on it.

  • Privacy

    • NSA Chief Wants Companies to Share More Info With the Government

      Speaking at a conference at Georgia Tech, Director of the U.S. National Security Agency General Keith Alexander pressed Congress last week pass legislation creating a more effective information-sharing regime between government and businesses to help protect the nation’s security. Just as past legislative efforts such as the proposed Cyber Intelligence Protection Act (CISPA) have faced widespread backlash for imposing high regulatory costs on businesses while risking infringing basic rights, the fear remains that Alexander’s proposals simply suggest more of the same.

    • California Law Would Require Companies To Disclose All Consumer Data Collected

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • Safe-harbor compliance for FOSS projects

      “DMCA” is a four-letter word among free and open source software developers, and for good reason: the 1998 act criminalized an entire category of programs and has been grossly misused in numerous cases. It’s in the news yet again this week, as activists are fighting to make it legal to carrier-unlock cellphones despite the Librarian of Congress’s decision not to exempt unlocking from the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules.

      But the anti-circumvention rules are only one part of the DMCA—it also put in place the safe harbors that protect online services from liability for their users’ activity. These too have been the subject of some controversy, as large content owners have routinely abused the notice-and-takedown process to censor materials protected by fair use. But they’ve also done a lot of good. Before, it was difficult for service providers dealing with user-uploaded content to predict their potential liability for the infringing activity of their users. The safe harbors provide clear rules for avoiding secondary liability related to user content.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Opinion: Rethinking the Internet

        Sharing knowledge, growing inclusion, increasing participation. The other benefits, economic and social will flow from these principles. Now that sounds like a good place to start to me.

04.02.13

Links 3/4/2013: Valve GNU/Linux Distribution

Posted in News Roundup at 7:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 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

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 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

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • 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

Free Software/Open Source

  • 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.

Leftovers

  • 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

  • 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.

04.01.13

Links 1/4/2013: April First Headlines and More

Posted in News Roundup at 7:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 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

    • Wine or Emulation

    • 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

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • 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

    • 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

Free Software/Open Source

  • 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

  • Web Browsers

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

Leftovers

03.31.13

Links 31/3/2013: Linux 3.8.5 Out, B0ng Bias Against Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 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

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • 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

  • 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

    • 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

Free Software/Open Source

  • 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

  • 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

  • Project Releases

  • 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.

Leftovers

  • 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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • 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

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