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01.18.13

Links 18/1/2013: CentOS 5.9, Linux Revenge For The Netbook

Posted in News Roundup at 9:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Company-led Projects: Liferay

    Having been writing about commercial open source for years, I finally decided to start a new blog category at SourceForge blog to cover the business side of open source. I’ll be posting on SourceForge blog interviews to people who can tell us stories about how they combine open source and business at SourceForge blog, and I’ll comment on them here.

    Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s cofounder and actual CEO, while sharing his experience about how Liferay grew its project into a product provided me with additional information.

  • The future’s bright, the future’s open source Orange

    France Telecom-Orange’s development center in San Francisco has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) with the aim of to benefitting from its community.

    The Open Compute Project Foundation is a community of engineers whose openly stated mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and datacentre hardware designs for scalable computing.

    NOTE: The OCP says that it believes that openly sharing ideas, specifications and other intellectual property is the key to “maximising innovation and reducing operational complexity” in the scalable computing space.

  • Open Source: where does the money go?

    It seems we are not alone in being curious about how the growing number of open source businesses are making revenue.

    Kirk Wylie, of OpenGamma, has written this blog post to answer a question that he probably gets asked several times a day. In a nutshell, it seems that commercial clients of OpenGamma need a range of services to tailor OS software to their needs, services that sometimes, an open community cannot provide (Kirk will be speaking at CEO Tales: Open Source Business Models on the 6th February if you want to ask him more detailed questions).

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Minion: Mozilla’s New Community-Driven Security Testing Framework

        This week, we reported on Mozilla’s plans, in upcoming versions of Firefox, to launch Firefox Health Report (FHR) — a prototype Firefox feature that enables users to optimize their Firefox configurations and get reports on Firefox’s status similar to the kinds of diagnostic information that many cars provide. At the same time, these reports will help Mozilla tune Firefox based on information culled from the reports about causes for performance problems and more.

      • Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich Gets an Expanded Role (and it’s about time!)

        I’ve had the good fortune to talk to many CTOs as part of my day-to-day job as a tech journalist over the last decade here at InternetNews. One thing that I can say for certain is that the role of CTO is a varied one and the definition of what a CTO is or does is not definite.

        At some organizations, the CTO is a technical cheerleader and a product evangelist. In other organizations, the CTO is the person that actually leads and directs development. In the case of Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, he is now set to combine the best of all CTO worlds.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Toxic Cloud Computing, and How Open Source Can Help

      There are so many parts to the institutions running the European Union that it’s easy to lose sight of them all and their varied activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.

    • OpenStack Cloud Training: Here Comes Generation Y

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Linux 5.9 Is Out, Carries Unbreakable Kernel 2

      Version 5.9 of Oracle Linux, the company’s incarnation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9, is now available. This release also ships with Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2.

    • LibreOffice 4 call hails new branding artwork

      The members of the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice called to the larger open source community to submit artwork to be used as the new branding with the release of LibreOffice 4, which is due early in February 2013. LibreOffice itself was forked from OpenOffice back in January 2011 and the latest release candidate of version 4 was released on 10 January 2013. Early adopters can test the release candidate by downloading the package from the LibreOffice website.

    • OpenOffice Writer English Grammar Checkers

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • True Cost Of Open Source Storage Software

        Open-source storage software is software that is available for download, typically at no cost, that can provide valuable data services to traditional storage hardware. These services include features we have grown accustomed to, such as thin provisioning, snapshots and cloning. Prior to open-storage software, these services typically came with the storage array that you purchased and were specific to that vendor’s products. Open-source storage software offers the advantage of letting you use commodity storage hardware.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Linux founder talks open-source

      He doesn’t buy DVDs, doesn’t use Windows or Mac OS laptops and doesn’t use closed-source commercial software. He is not on Facebook and has never owned a car.

      But he isn’t a Luddite or computer illiterate. In fact, he loves technology and the Internet. At one point, he hoped the Internet would stop censorship around the world.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • GitHub passes 3 million users milestone

      GitHub, the code sharing site based around Linus Torvald’s distributed version control system Git, has announced that the service now has over three million registered users. The commercial service, which was founded in 2008, reached the one million user milestone in September 2011 and, less than a year later, in August 2012, the company reported reaching two million users. That GitHub has reached this third milestone in under half a year shows both its, and Git’s, rapidly rising popularity with developers.

    • jQuery Plugin Registry launched

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open standards drive needed in risk-averse public sector says govt Digital Director

      Public sector organisations need to quicken adoption of open source and open standards software in order to meet government aims for digitising services, Cabinet Office Director for Digital Mike Bracken has said.

      Speaking at the Government ICT conference in London this week, Bracken warned that a bigger push is needed in order to introduce a wave of digital services during this parliament, including digitising hundreds of thousands of transactions across government.

      Last November departments were told they must comply with Open Standards Principles (OSPs) in order to enable interoperability and reduce costs. However Bracken said more needs to be done to open the doors to innovative technologies that will enable a swift IT transformation.

    • Open standards drive needed in risk-averse public sector says govt Digital Director

      Public sector organisations need to quicken adoption of open source and open standards software in order to meet government aims for digitising services, Cabinet Office Director for Digital Mike Bracken has said.

Leftovers

01.17.13

Links 17/1/2013: Kite HD Debut, Open Access Debate Continues

Posted in News Roundup at 10:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 10 Best Open Source Programs Ever

    Open-source programs refers to the programs whose source code made available and licensed so that anyone has rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

  • Swartz’s open source cause

    Since his suicide, friends and admirers have cast free-information activist Aaron Swartz as a martyred hero hounded to his death by the government he antagonised.

    One newspaper columnist – whose piece on Swartz was accompanied by a photo showing him at his computer, his head encircled by a golden halo – even compared him to an internet-age Martin Luther King Jr.

    But those closest to the 26-year-old Swartz say the hacker prodigy wasn’t out to be a hero.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Health Reports Headed to Firefox

        Do you use the same browser across multiple devices? Have you ever been perplexed at how, say, a particular version of Firefox might offer perfect, fast performance on one computer, but the same version is pokey and prone to crashing on another comparable computer? Most browser users are familiar with these conundrums.

      • Firefox OS App Day announced for developers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Fellowship interview with Anna Morris

      Anna Morris is co-founder of FLOSSIE conference for women in Free Software, Manchester Fellowship Group Deputy Coordinator, and Co-Director of ethical-pets.co.uk. She is currently writing a book on video editing with Free Software, and volunteering with Document Freedom Day 2013 in her spare time.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • VMware Joins Open Source Software Institute

      Within the virtualization world, VMware (NYSE: VMW) can hardly claim to be more friendly to open source than competing platforms such as KVM and Xen. Nonetheless, the company has signed on as a leading member of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), a trade organization dedicated to promoting open source solutions in government. Is this a sign of renewed commitment to open source by VMware, or a more mercenary move by the company to protect its slice of the open source market? Here are some thoughts.

      VMware’s relationship with the open source community is a complex one. Most core commercial VMware products are not open source, but the company does maintain some open source tools. In addition, most of its virtualization solutions support Linux as well as proprietary operating systems. Still, now that open source virtualization platforms have matured to become as feature-rich and robust as many of VMware’s tools—and are also available for free—the company faces an increasingly difficult market within the open source space.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Ignorance: Old Trout Puppet Workshop used ‘open-source’ process

      Attending an adult puppet show about the evolution of human happiness created by a collective from Alberta may not be your idea of a fun way to spend an evening. But the Old Trout Puppet Workshop could alter your perspective. Their latest show, Ignorance, is witty, imaginative, and asks the big questions while indulging in loopy child’s play, some of it moderately X-rated.

    • Facebook, Intel, & Rackspace get more open-source than ever with new designs
    • Rackspace Announces Open Source Datacenter Strategy

      Rackspace launched the industry’s first OpenStack powered cloud platform of compute, storage and networking in 2012.

    • Open Access/Content

      • It’s time for transparency

        A far more urgent task for a government which has promised ”a new era” of openness would seem to be determining why the system is in such turmoil and sending an unequivocal message about what is expected of the public service. And acting to abolish those application fees wouldn’t hurt either.

      • To Make Open Access Work, We Need to Do More Than Liberate Journal Articles

        In the days since the tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research. It’s an act of solidarity with Swartz’s crusade to liberate (in most cases publicly funded) knowledge for all to read.

        While this has been a noteworthy gesture, the problem of open access isn’t just about the ethics of freeing and sharing scholarly information. It’s as much — if not more — about the psychology and incentives around scholarly publishing. We need to think these issues through much more deeply to make open access widespread.

  • Programming

    • Google Wants LLVM To Mainline x32 ABI Support

      The Google Native Client (NaCl) team is looking to upstream some of their LLVM changes such as support for Software Fault Isolation (SFI). As part of pushing forward the changes for Native Client in LLVM, they’re also looking to see mainlined the x32 ABI support. X32 is the Application Binary Interface that looks to take advantage of common x86_64 CPU features like increased CPU registers and more instruction set extensions while using 32-bit pointers.

      David Sehr of Google, part of their Native Client team, wrote a new mailing list thread on Tuesday about upstreaming x32 ABI support inside LLVM. What the NaCl team would like to work on next with their LLVM upstreaming is the x32 ABI portion, “our ABI is dependent on the existence of an ILP32 ABI on x86-64. The conventions we rely on are the same as those developed for the x32 effort, and we propose that the community begin reviewing changes to implement the x32 ABI.”

    • Software Development in the Obama Campaign

      A cobbled-together team of 40 developers built 200 apps in the cloud that could scale from hundreds to millions of users in minutes — and managed to meet their deadline with no major failure.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • North Korea accused of hacking South Korean newspaper

      South Korea has accused North Korea of carrying out a series of cyber attacks on the web sites of South Korean government and financial institutions over the past few years. North Korea denies the allegations. A few days before the cyber attack on the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper, North Korea had threatened to stage a “military attack” on the newspaper company and other media firms in Seoul. The threat came after controversial media reports were published about a children’s festival in Pyongyang.

    • Java Security Madness

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Delivery for Mr. Assange (if not trojaned by spooks)

      A parcel containing a camera is sent to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London through the Royal Mail. Through a hole in the parcel, the camera documents its journey through the postal system.

    • Assange’s mum calls for counter protest

      CHRISTINE Assange says a British student organising a protest against her son is unwittingly aiding the misuse of rape allegations as a political weapon.

      Simone Webb is gathering support for a January 23 rally at Oxford University to coincide with a video address by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the exclusive institution’s Union.

    • Punishment Before Trial: More Than 1,000 Days and Counting

      The punishment of Bradley Manning goes directly against the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s own laws, namely Section 813 article 13, which basically states, “No punishment before trial.” This law was obviously broken. People in this country are entitled to a “speedy trial,” which is normally between 100 and 120 days from the date of the crime. Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for more than 1,000 days before his trial has begun and even a United Nations investigation confirmed that Manning was being held in inhumane conditions that was tantamount to torture.

    • Judge limits Manning’s whistle-blower defense, pretrial confinement nears 1,000 days

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs And The Big Hedge Funds Are Pushing Leverage To Ridiculous Extremes
    • Revolution for Income Equality (blog)

      The transitions from feudalism and other pre-capitalist economic systems to modern capitalism have always and everywhere been celebrated for bringing a new epoch of human history. Freedom, democracy, and equality were the hallmarks of those celebrations. The French Revolution of 1789 raised the slogan of liberte, egalite, fraternite. The US has long celebrated its capitalism for producing a vast “middle class” that permanently overcame previous societies’ tendencies toward extreme inequalities of wealth and income. Yet the recent decades-long rise in such inequalities inside most capitalist economies has led many today to see in capitalism not the enemy but rather the cause of rising economic inequality. Here we take up that argument and move it a step further to show how a transition to workers self-directed enterprises is a necessary change to solve the problem of rising economic inequality. Our thesis is that the many well-intentioned efforts over the last century to overcome extreme inequalities of wealth and income failed because they left intact the capitalist system with its inherent tendency to produce economic inequality.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Vietnam admits deploying bloggers to support government

      Vietnamese propaganda officials have admitted deploying people to engage in online discussions and post comments supporting the Communist Party’s policies.

      The party has also confirmed that it operates a network of nearly 1,000 “public opinion shapers”.

    • Dennis Kucinich Joining Fox News

      Throughout his career in Congress, Dennis Kucinich has marked himself as somewhat more than a mouthpiece for left-leaning liberal counterpoints. But in his new job as contributing Fox News analyst, that’s pretty much what he’ll be.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Paperless medical records : where’s the privacy protection?

      oday’s announcement from the Health Secretary that all patient medical records will be held in electronic form by 2018 has grabbed some headlines, but the underlying privacy risks seem to have been given short shrift.

      Paperless records is a nice soundbite but the change creates significant privacy risks. The Department of Health needs to be absolutely clear who will hold our medical records, who can access them and reassure patients that their privacy will not be destroyed in another NHS IT blunder.

    • Justice Department Keeps GPS Tracking Legal Opinions Secret

      The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has received what it considers to be two key memos, which indicate how the Justice Department views when it can and cannot legally track Americans with GPS tracking devices. The memos requested after the ACLU sued the department in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request are both heavily redacted to the point where it makes it pretty much useless that the Justice Department released them.

    • Secret Government Document Reveals: German Federal Police Plans To Use Gamma FinFisher Spyware

      The German Federal Police office has purchased the commercial Spyware toolkit FinFisher of Eleman/Gamma Group. This is revealed by a secret document of the Ministry of the Interior, which we are publishing exclusively. Instead of legitimizing products used by authoritarian regimes for the violation of human rights, the German state should restrict the export of such state malware.

      In October 2011, German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club (CCC) analyzed a malware used by German government authorities. The product of the German company DigiTask was not just programmed badly and lacking elementary security, it was in breach of German law. In a landmark case, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled in 2008 that surveillance software targeting telecommunications must be technologically limited to a specific task. Instead, the CCC found that the DigiTask software took over the entire computer and included the option to remotely add features, thereby clearly violating the court ruling.

    • Planet Blue Coat: Mapping Global Censorship and Surveillance Tools
    • Spies on the corner

      A quick Google search for IntelliStreets shows that the company has attracted the attention of activists who are worried that these lighting products represent a kind of spy tool, and a spooky public monitoring system that would strip citizens of their right to privacy and bolster law enforcement activities.

  • Civil Rights

    • Obama re-election ‘not objective’ – Russian monitors
    • Uzbek Cotton Slavery Campaign

      I am delighted that a new canpaign has started today against the state enforced child slavery in the uzbek cotton industry, especially as this campaign originates in Germany, where a significant portion of society appears to have finally woken up to the reality of the German government’s appalling complicity in the Nazi style regime and atrocities of Karimov.

  • DRM

    • Pharma Companies Try ‘DRM’ For Drugs As A Ploy To Stymie Generics

      One of the striking features of the drug world is how pharma companies become noticeably more inventive immediately before their patents are due to run out and their drugs are about to enter the public domain. That’s because they need to find a way to differentiate themselves from the generic manufacturers that are then able to offer the same medicines for often vastly lower prices.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse
      • MIT’s Role as Described in Aaron Swartz’s October Motion to Suppress ~pj

        It portrays MIT as the core problem in this tragedy. In fact, there are claims that it was actually MIT who was breaking computer laws. Because not only did Aaron Swartz have JSTOR guest visitor privileges on MIT’s completely open network, it claims, but once MIT discovered Aaron’s laptop, all it had to do was disconnect it from the network and hold it, according to the filing. If Aaron showed up to claim it, they could tell him that they felt he was excessively downloading and to cut it out. And that could have been all there was to it. Instead, MIT contacted the police and the rest is the tragedy that ensued.

      • Aaron Swartz’s Politics
      • Dear Aaron Swartz, Please Save Me From Your Followers. Amen.

        In a freak legal accident straight out of the movie Brazil, Swartz, amidst his hacktivism, managed to download a bunch of free academic articles from a freely accessible website, an act which inexplicably angered somebody in the academic sausage-grinder. Then, like so many hacktivists before him and so many hacktivists that will come after him, the government proceeded to pursue Swartz as their target as this decade’s lottery-selected cybercrime scapegoat.

      • Reddit founder’s dad: Son ‘killed by government’

        The two fathers’ anguished comments came as criticism continued to mount against U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who has refused to comment. A citizen’s petition at Whitehouse.gov calling for her ouster topped 33,000 signatures last night — 8,000 more the threshold needed for an official response. A White House official said the petition is being reviewed. Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann are under fire for what critics call an overzealous prosecution of Swartz. The reddit.com co-founder was facing more than 30 years in prison on charges of hacking into MIT computers to freely post academic papers held by a subscription service.

      • New ‘Aaron’s Law’ aims to alter controversial computer fraud law
      • TOWARDS LEARNING FROM LOSING AARON SWARTZ: PART 2

        The CFAA is incredibly broad and covers swaths of online conduct that should not merit prison time. To point out that under the CFAA, Aaron’s defense was hard is not to say that I believe Aaron was guilty. Aaron was authorized to access JSTOR as a result of being on MIT’s campus. The CFAA may protect the box from unauthorized access, but it does not regulate the means or the speed of access. If you are allowed to download, and Aaron was, then it is not a crime to download really, really fast. Even if the server owner would prefer you took your time.

      • A Sad Irony: The Federal Judiciary’s PACER Pricing Is Illegal

        Most people have never heard of PACER, and those who have might not have heard of it prior to the press coverage surrounding Aaron Swartz’s untimely death on January 11th. PACER is the federal judiciary’s database of all federal court cases. It includes information on civil, criminal, and bankruptcy cases. All of the information in PACER is public.

        But it is not free. That is why Aaron was trying to download it—because he was savvy enough to understand the importance of access to information in the justice system at a remarkably young age, without being a lawyer—and because the Administrative Office of the Courts never suspected that someone like him would take incredible advantage of a short trial period in 2008 when the per-page pricing suddenly dropped to zero at a few locations nationwide.

      • “Aaron’s law,” Congressional investigation in wake of Swartz suicide

01.16.13

Links 16/1/2013: Kororaa 18 Coming, Embedded Linux Conference Videos

Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco: PX00307 and DR-DOS

    There are many anti-trust exhibits and other articles on the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco and how it went from the original SDK released at the end of 1989 to “Microsoft Munchkins” and other unethical attacks that was worse than the Joint Development Agreement between IBM and Microsoft (where they worked on OS/2 together) ever was, which is part of why it took 10 years after Intel introduced the 386 before 32-bit programming became popular.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Hollywood’s Waterboard: Review of the CIA’s “Zero Dark Thirty”
    • John Brennan- The CIA -Zbigniew Brzezinski- Columbia University and Obama

      Brezinski was deeply involved in the U.S. aspects to support Osama Bin Laden against the Russians in Afghanistan.

    • CIA has list of greatest hits

      Let’s start with the CIA’s 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, whose democratically elected government had nationalized the country’s oil industry. It couldn’t be oilier, involving BP in an earlier incarnation, the CIA, British intelligence, bribery, secretly funded street demonstrations and (lest you think there’d be no torture in the film) the installation of an autocratic regime that went on to create a fearsome secret police that tortured opponents for decades after. All of this was done in the name of what used to be called “the Free World.” That “successful” coup was the point of origin for just about every disaster and bit of “blowback” — a term first used in the CIA’s secret history of the coup — in U.S.-Iranian relations to this day. Many of the documents have been released, and what a story it is.

    • Saved by the CIA

      That the CIA became the star: Is this art or entertainment?

    • CIA Drone Wars Protested at CIA
    • Group Protests at CIA Headquarters

      The Dolley Madison Boulevard entrance to CIA Headquarters was rendered impassable the morning of Saturday, Jan. 12, as more than three dozen people in orange prison jumpsuits and black hoods over their heads lined up to protest actions taken by the intelligence agency in recent years.

      #Members of Witness Against Torture planned the rally, their third at the CIA headquarters in recent years. In addition to the protesters in prison garb, others gathered to speak and pass out information about the activities they’re against.

      #”I wish this is something we could do every day, that would shut this place down,” said Jack McHale of Burke, who had been fasting for the past week as part of the group’s protest.”

    • CIA Nominee John Brennan Draws Fire From Civil Liberties and Human Rights Advocates
    • Murder Inc.: Obama Names Head of Drone Assassination Program to Lead CIA

      In an April 30 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, he claimed that the drone strikes were legal under the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the all-purpose pseudo-legal justification for war crimes and violations of the US Constitution used repeatedly by the Bush administration.

    • CIA drones have already killed at least 40 since the start of the year
    • $190 million drone coming to Australia
    • The Fake Catch-22 of Drone War Apologists

      The “substance” behind the criticism is, among other things, the fact that the specific drone war Obama is running is utterly lacking in transparency; bereft of adequate Congressional oversight; deadly to an unknown number of people; indefensible in its broad definition of militants; making enemies of countless foreigners, and killing “countless” innocent men, women and children. How does one literally acknowledge all those facts and then call the case of drone critics “substanceless”? The scary thing is that I think I actually know the dubious answer.

      [...]

      They’ve created for themselves a fake Catch-22.

    • Seven short stories about drones told through Twitter
    • Teju Cole: Seven short stories about drones
    • LETTER: Drones killing innocent people

      The use of drones by the U.S. to drop deadly explosives on innocent women and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan is a continuing abomination that has no place in a civilized society. These war crimes, which do nothing but create thousands of additional enemies for us, are carried out in secrecy and hidden for the most part from news broadcasts. If the people of this country could see with their own eyes the horrors being inflicted on these poor people who have never done anything against us, they would be outraged and demand that these actions end immediately.

  • Cablegate

    • Deafening Global Silence On Julian Assange – OpEd
    • Attack on Assange reveals a poor grasp of facts

      I doubt whether Henderson knows anything about Assange’s accusers’ political views. And would Henderson be putting pen to paper to criticise Assange if he was a right-wing blogger? No mention of the significant differences between the British and Swedish justice systems. Nor about the very different definitions of rape in Sweden.

      Henderson loves his left-wing conspiracy theories.
      David Hicks in my view was no left-winger but people supported him for his being denied justice in a military hell hole for five years. Nothing to do with his politics.

      Henderson’s claim that the absence of supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy early on a cold Sunday morning suggested ”his celebrity status was diminishing” was plain silly.

    • WikiLeaks pretrial hearing focuses on trial delays

      An Army private charged with sending U.S. secrets to WikiLeaks contends that lengthy delays have violated his right to a speedy trial.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs’ Bankers Bonus Tax Dodge ‘Depressing’ – BoE’s Mervyn King

      Goldman Sachs bankers delaying their bonus payments to avoid higher income tax rates have been condemned by Bank of England Governor Sir Mervyn King.

      King lashed out at the unconfirmed plans by Goldman in an appearance at the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee alongside other senior BoE staff.

    • Hitting the Debt Ceiling is Much Worse Than a “Government Shutdown”

      In recent days I’ve been tweeting critically about Republican leaders’ use of the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations. Someone asked me “In your world, how will spending ever get cut?”

      It’s a good question. I share Republicans’ (and most Americans’) concerns about our unsustainable long-term budget outlook, and so I can certainly see why people would see the GOP’s tactics as a reasonable response to a serious problem. To understand why I think the Republicans’ approach is illegitimate, it’s important to distinguish the kind of garden-variety government shutdown that occurred during the Clinton administration (and almost happened in April 2011) from what would happen if the United States government reached the debt ceiling, as it almost did in August 2011 and might do in February or March of this year.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Freedom to Innovate Network – an ‘Astroturf’ Organisation

      Modern politics is often dominated by single-issue groups and parties, as recently seen in the UK with the fuel protests. This is seen by many as a counter to the power which big business wields, often overriding elected governments

      Needless to say, big businesses are well aware of this and have tried on several occasions to use the same technique for their own ends.

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

01.15.13

Links 15/1/2013: Fedora 18 Released, Net Neutrality at Risk in France

Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.14.13

Links 14/1/2013: Desktops Market in Demise, Aaron’s Eulogies

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Found: Blueprint for a computer-literate India

    IIT Bombay professor, Kannan M Moudgalya and his team have been documenting and creating tutorials for free open source software available on Linux to popularise it in India’s schools and colleges. Hassan M Kamal visits the lab to find out more

  • Desktop

    • Review: Google Chromebook for 30 Days

      A Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebook has arrived at The VAR Guy’s doorstep. Starting January 14, our resident blogger will live on the cloud-centric notebook (running Google’s Chrome OS) for 30 days. Why should channel partners, businesses and consumers care about this niche (but promising) form factor? Here are 10 points The VAR Guy hopes to cover during his real-world, month-long review.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 6th January 2013
      • KDE Workspaces and Applications 4.10 on live images courtesy of openSUSE

        The 4.10 release for the KDE Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications is drawing nigh… as you may have read, there is now an additional release candidate in order to test some last-minute changes.

      • Alien tip: Volume change percentages in KDE

        I have felt frustrated at times, when I press the Volume Up/Down buttons on my keyboard and the sound volume in KDE becomes just too loud, or just too soft. When you are running the KDE desktop, the increments in volume change are controlled by KMix, the KDE mixer. By default, the sound volume changes with increments of 4% which means that with a few keypresses you go from almost inaudible sound to full blast. And there is no way to change that 4% increment value into something more fitting… pretty annoying.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Settings!

        Those of us who work on GNOME design have been busy with all kinds of things recently. One major area of activity has been settings (aka System Settings, aka GNOME Control Center). In total, we have produced designs for four new panels (search, notifications, privacy, and sharing) and we have redesigned four of the existing panels (power, network, display, and date & time). Some of these have already been implemented, some are being developed on, and a few more are waiting for coders to get involved.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Snowlinux 4 “Glacier” Mate Review: Fast, light and customizable

        I have been a fan of Snowlinux for quite sometime and their Debian spins have always been exceptional – Lightweight, fast and very customizable. The new year release of Snowlinux 4, codenamed “Glacier” is no exception. Based on Debian Wheezy, it has Mate 1.4 as the default desktop environment and uses Linux kernel 3.5.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu At CES

            On Sunday last weekend I flew out to CES to join the rest of my colleagues to exhibit Ubuntu at the show. We were there to show the full range of Ubuntu form-factors that we have available; desktop, TV, Ubuntu for Android, and most recently, Ubuntu for phones.

          • ‘RC Mini Racers’ December’s Top Selling Ubuntu App
          • Ubuntu Phone OS Follow-up: Jono Bacon Answers YOUR Questions!

            At CES 2013 on Wednesday, I managed to corner Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s Community Manager, for a few minutes and ask him some of the questions I saw popping up over and over again in the comments section of the Ubuntu Phone OS demonstration video I posted earlier this week. Hope you enjoy his responses!

          • Ask Ubuntu’s About Page Gets A Face Lift

            A common problem we have on Ask Ubuntu is people assuming that it’s just “another forum” and not quite grasping the concept of how the site works. Today Stack Exchange has rolled out a new About page that helps to curb this issue and educate new users with a quick start on how to use the site. You can view this page by clicking “About” at the top of the Ask Ubuntu website.

          • Mark Shuttleworth punts Ubuntu Phone OS at CES 2013

            South African millionaire and Canonical boss, Mark Shuttleworth, announced during a “virtual keynote” on 2 January 2012 that a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system (OS) would be coming to smartphones.

          • The new entrants in mobile OS segment

            The smartphone ecosystem today has two dominant players: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. A late entrant, Android, has been quick to catch up with iOS and the Open operating system only seems to be surging ahead.

            Given the success of Android, many other Open Source paradigms are being floated, most notably the Free and Open Source projects Firefox (of browser fame) and Ubuntu that are re-making their debut this year in the commercial smartphone segment. Together, these projects that have been successful in the technology segments they currently operate in could perhaps help break into the combined monopoly of Apple and Google in the smartphone segment.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 Review: Better than ever bleeding edge Ubuntu LTS!

              A bit high CPU usage aside, Bodhi 2.2.0 is a remarkable improvement over Bodhi 2.1.0, undoubtedly. Enlightenment 17 never looked so enticing on any other Linux OS and Bodhi never looked so attractive. I am sure the high CPU usage will get resolved in an update or two. Even with high CPU usage, Bodhi is buttery smooth to use, runs super fast, provide all essential functionalities and has a rich repository. Further, presentation and offline mode are two utilities which increase the functionality of the distro.

              Moreover, Bodhi is always ahead of even Ubuntu 12.10 in terms of providing the latest of the Linux packages and softwares. Even this release is not an exception and provides the latest Linux kernel and softwares to the users without compromising on stability, and possibly, one of the reasons for me to like Bodhi Linux and why any Linux enthusiast should try Bodhi out. It is truly bleeding edge Ubuntu LTS!

              I definitely rate this release of Bodhi as the best one I have seen for any E17 Linux OS. If you are looking for a lightweight distro, look no further than Bodhi Linux 2.2.0, possibly one of the best releases of 2013.

            • elementary OS luna: First impressions

              In the world of Linux distributions, it’s fairly easy to get lost trying to figure out which “flavor” of Linux fits you best. As the user, you have a plethora of desktop interfaces, default apps, package managers, and bundled services to choose from. This can be a major barrier for someone new to Linux, and an endless journey for a veteran user who hasn’t yet found their “perfect” distro. For either type of user, there’s a new distribution in town that can meet their needs: elementary OS.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Rumour: LG Stops Nexus 4 Production?

          More bad news for Nexus 4 fans who have still not got their hands on this stunning device. LG is playing the spoilsport this time and is rumoured to stop the production of Nexus 4 to give way for its future products.

          It has always been tough to book a nexus 4 for yourself with the purchase screen most of the time showing the “SOLD OUT” status. We can either assume that Nexus 4 demands were too huge to provide a constant supply or the production of the phone was flawed and could not meet the demands.

      • Android

        • Android Appliances at CES 2013

          Are you ready to hack your fridge? I expected Android-powered home appliances to have a higher profile at CES this year than they did. But still, a few manufacturers were carrying the torch for smartening up devices in your home, and trying to provide some solid reasons for you to buy them, like energy savings.

          The flashiest Android appliance at CES was definitely Dacor’s Android-powered oven, which automatically programs itself according to recipes selected from a tablet.

        • Ubuntu for smartphone Vs Google Android Jelly Bean Vs Apple iOS 6

          Along with the rapid changes in hardware, phone market is also to witness to some auspicious changes in software field in coming months. Many more new OS platforms are to join the fray. Two major new arrivals are expected to be Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Canonical’s Ubuntu for phone. The Linux-based Ubuntu for mobile has been officially announced by its maker Canonical now. It has been in news for almost a year and it is to get the first device sometime this year.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Windows 8 Means Buy (Another) New Computer

    I’m sure no one is surprised that upgrading to a new version of Windows means tossing out your old computer and buying a new one. That’s pretty much par for the course for any Windows upgrade.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Imagine N.Y. without fracking

      My husband, John Lennon, and I bought a beautiful farm in rural New York more than 30 years ago. We loved the tranquility and beauty of the area. Our son, Sean, spent many precious days there growing up. Our family still enjoys it now.
      Like the rest of our state, this peaceful farming community is threatened by fracking for gas. Giant pipelines, thousands of tractor-trailer trucks ripping up roads, loud air compressors, air pollution — and most of all, the certainty of poisoned drinking water.
      Certainty is the right word, according to the engineers, as the wells drilled for fracking will leak. According to industry documents from the gas drilling giant Schlumberger and other studies, 6 percent of the wells leak immediately, and over 60 percent of them leak over time. And no wonder they leak — the pressures of the earth thousands of feet under the ground cracks the cement well casings. The big variations in temperature along the well at various depths expand and contract the cement until it cracks and leaks.

  • Finance

    • The Welfare Bill: A government of millionaires just made the poor poorer – and laughed as they did it

      A brutal assault from ideologically-crazed demagogues comes down to this: you have been mugged and therefore your less deserving neighbour should be mugged too.

    • SEC Gives JP Morgan and Other Big Banks License to Manipulate Commodities

      An SEC action that appears likely to do considerable harm to companies and individuals in the US and abroad appears to have gone completely unnoticed, save for an important piece in The New Republic by Linda Khan.

      [...]

      The SEC is undermining provisions in Dodd Frank calling for the CFTC to rein in undue speculation in critical commodities. Readers may recall that commodities prices moved up in a coordinated manner in 2008. It looked like a speculative bubble, and was, since prices collapsed in the second half of the year (we were pretty sure that oil was a bubble, and called it and even traded it well; there was similar behavior in other commodities, but bad harvests and ethanol subsidies made the price rises arguably influenced by fundamentals in the grains complex).

    • Wall Street thanks you for your service, Tim Geithner

      The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a second major investment bank, started a run on the three remaining investment banks that would have led to the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs if the Fed, FDIC, and treasury had not taken extraordinary measures to save them. Citigroup and Bank of America both needed emergency facilities established by the Fed and treasury explicitly for their support, in addition to all the below market-rate loans they received from the government at the time. Without this massive government support, there can be no doubt that both of them would currently be operating under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge.

      Of the six banks that dominate the US banking system, only Wells Fargo and JP Morgan could conceivably have survived without hoards of cash rained down on them by the federal government. Even these two are questionmarks, since both helped themselves to trillions of dollars of below market-rate loans, in addition to indirectly benefiting from the bailout of the other banks that protected many of their assets.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • FreedomWorks Putting Its War Chest to Work for ALEC’s Anti-Union Agenda in the States

      The Tea Party-affiliated group FreedomWorks — the right-wing organization that helps connect “Tea Party” groups with talking points, rallies, and more — is gearing up to direct its sizeable war chest towards advancing anti-union initiatives in the states, supporting an agenda set by groups like David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This strongly suggests that the battle for the future of private and public sector unions in America is beginning a new phase of combat.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Fight Over French ISP Blocking Ads Really Just A New Perspective On Net Neutrality Debate

      At the beginning of the year, some folks in France, who used the popular ISP Free (whose name is a bit misleading, as it is not, in fact, free), discovered that the company had started providing a service in which it blocked all internet banner ads. There was no whitelist. It was either all or nothing (and if you went “all,” you were trusting that it wouldn’t over-filter). This quickly raised an awful lot of questions — with the biggest among them being “can they do that?” According to the French Digital Economy minister, the answer apparently is no. Free was quickly told to turn off its ad blocking software.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Aaron Swartz commits suicide

        The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

      • RIP, Aaron Swartz

        My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I’m still digesting it — I suspect I’ll be digesting it for a long time — but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

        I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

        [...]

        Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

        Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

      • Prosecutor as bully

        Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer that morning. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

        The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist…

        [...]

        But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

        Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

      • Tech world mourns suicide of Aaron Swartz: Internet folk hero dead at 26

        The Internet activist committed suicide in New York on Friday. He was 26. “The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” Swartz’s attorney Elliot R. Peters confirmed in an email to The Tech, which broke the news.

        Swartz is being remembered today for co-authoring RSS code at age 14. He created DemandProgress.org to campaign against SOPA/PIPA and the website theinfo.org. In July 2011, he was arrested for stealing some four million academic documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit digital archive.

      • Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26

        Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

      • Remembering Aaron Swartz

        It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses, and helped build the movement that has carried us so far. Before Creative Commons, he had coauthored RSS. After Creative Commons, he co-founded Reddit, liberated tons of government data, helped build a free public library at Archive.org, and has done incredibly important work to reform and make good our political system. (DemandProgress.org, his most recent org, was instrumental in blocking the SOPA/PIPA legislation one year ago.)

      • Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz (Remember Aaron Swartz

        Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

      • Naming and shaming a bully
      • The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz
      • Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
      • The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”

        The facts:

        MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.
        In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.
        MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices.
        At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.

      • Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist
      • MIT president calls for “thorough analysis” of school’s involvement with Swartz

        Less than 48 hours after Aaron Swartz’s tragic suicide, the institution involved in his high-profile JSTOR incident (that eventually lead to federal charges) has issued a statement.

        MIT President Rafael Reif e-mailed the members of the university community this morning to address the situation, despite Swartz never having a formal affiliation with the school. Reif emphasized he was compelled to comment not only because of MIT’s role in the JSTOR incident, but also because Swartz was beloved by many within the MIT community. The president’s tone was clear throughout: “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”

      • MIT to conduct internal probe in wake of Aaron Swartz’s suicide
      • Family blames US attorneys for death of Aaron Swartz
      • Copyright Vampires Attempt to Suck the Lifeblood Out of Fair Use Video

01.11.13

Links 11/1/2013: Linux 3.8 RC3, Firefox OS Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 8:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.09.13

Links 9/1/2013: Mageia Moves Ahead, Fedora 18 Beta for ARM

Posted in News Roundup at 9:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Want to understand open source? Live with its developers

    Let’s say you want to understand what makes free and open source software (FOSS) so vital today—and what makes those who write it so committed to their difficult work. How would you do this? You might crack a few books on the cultural history of coding, like Levy’s Hackers or Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, both pivotal explorations of the values that seem to guide open source programming (what we might call “the hacker ethic”). You might pore over the seminal tracts that give voice to these values—Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar or Stallman’s GNU Manifesto, perhaps. You might even peruse key documents from the projects themselves—maybe the Debian Social Contract or the Fedora Licensing Guidelines.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS finds a new way to app
      • Find out what’s new in Firefox 18

        Mozilla is currently in the process of releasing new versions of the Firefox web browser. Stable channel users will be moved from Firefox 17.0.1 to Firefox 18 via automatic updated if the browser has not not been configured otherwise. The new release is already on Mozilla’s ftp server but not on the main site which means that there is still a slim chance that it will be replaced by another version. Most of the time though that is not happening and if you are experiencing issues with Firefox 17.0.1 you may want to upgrade right away. Download portals such as Softpedia already list the new version for download on their sites.

      • Mozilla Firefox 18 Boosts Performance with IonMonkey

        Mozilla is out with its first Firefox release of 2013 today, accelerating the open source web browser with a new engine.

        Firefox 18 includes the IonMonkey JavaScript engine that Mozilla first started testing in September of 2012. IonMonkey can improve performance by as much as 25 percent for JavaScript heavy pages, by introducing an extra layer of JavaScript optimization known as intermediate representation (IR).

      • Firefox 18 Launches With Faster IonMonkey-Enabled JavaScript, Built-In PDF Viewer
      • Firefox 18 Features Major Update to JavaScript Engine: Ion Monkey

        On Tuesday, Mozilla pushed out version 18 of the Firefox browser. Unlike your average browser update, this one includes an overhauled JavaScript engine, Ion Monkey, which you can find complete details on here. Ion Monkey speeds up JavaScript tasks by translating them to intermediate representations, optimizing them, and then translating them to machine code. It should have a big impact on web apps, and also on games.

      • Mozilla Firefox 18 Boosts Performance with IonMonkey

  • Public Services/Government

    • Greek government asked to adapt enquiry form to accommodate open source

      Eel/lak, a Greek open source advocacy group wants the Greek administration to change one its enquiry forms, to accommodate users of free and open source software solutions. The form is used by the Greek government’s Financial and Economic Crime Unit when requesting companies and organisations to provide an inventory of their software licences along with the corresponding invoices.

    • Study Finds Free Trade With China Lowered American Manufacturing By 29.6 Percent

      Around 2001, the raw number of manufacturing jobs in the United States plummeted from just over 17 million to just over 14 million. After leveling off for a few years, it collapsed to around 11.5 million due to the Great Recession. It’s since seen a small rebound under President Obama’s tenure, but the continuing depression has put the long-term fate of manufacturing back on the national radar.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Full Show: Ending the Silence on Climate Change
  • 1998’s most intriguing OS, 15 years later: Hands-on with Haiku alpha 4

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Does It Matter if John Brennan Was Complicit in Illegal Torture?

      In nominating John Brennan to head the CIA, President Obama has made it more urgent that the report be declassified. It is one of several sources that could help us to answer an important question: Are the American people being asked to entrust our clandestine spy agency and its killing and interrogation apparatuses to a man who was complicit in illegal torture?

    • New CIA boss plans to retire in Ireland once his term ends

      The new head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hopes to retire to Ireland when his term is completed, his family have revealed.

      John Brennan, whose family come from Co Roscommon, was this week nominated by US President Barack Obama to lead the CIA. The former counter-terrorism adviser paid an unplanned visit to these shores last November when he visited his Irish relations.

    • ‘CIA turns into military force, targets countries it’s not at war with’
    • Was a Reporter’s Role in a Government Prosecution a Reason to Recuse Him?

      Some readers found fault with Mr. Shane’s writing of the story, given his involvement. One was James Savage, a former longtime investigations editor with The Miami Herald.

      [...]

      I’ve been writing recently about the debate over reportorial impartiality and its role in the truth-telling that makes journalism worthwhile. One crucial element when impartiality comes into question is transparency.

    • U.S. Spy Law Authorizes Mass Surveillance of European Citizens: Report

      Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you.

      That’s according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes “purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data” if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

    • Excusing Torture, Again

      The neocon Washington Post let ex-CIA official Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw waterboarding and other torture and then destroyed the videotaped evidence, make his case that there was no torture, just effective interrogation that helped get Osama bin Laden. But ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern disagrees.

      [...]

      Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer in the early 60s and then served in CIA’s analysis division for 27 years.

    • Two Former US Officials Criticize Obama’s Counter-Productive Drone War

      The study concludes that the Obama administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” downward by counting all military-age males they kill as combatants. Civilian casualties are likely to be far higher than so far acknowledged, Boyle said, and government claims to the contrary are ”based on a highly selective and partial reading of the evidence.”

    • NSA Whistleblower Compares Case to CIA Officer Convicted of First Classified Leak

      On Sunday, New York Times journalist Scott Shane published a feature story on the Justice Department’s prosecution of John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) by revealing the name of an undercover officer. It was the first successful conviction of someone for a disclosure since President Barack Obama was elected president.

      Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower who the Obama administration tried to prosecute for a “leak” until the case collapsed, joined me for a conversation about the parallels between his prosecution and Kiriakou’s prosecution.

    • Terror Tuesday: Impunity surges in New Year
    • The FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism

      Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI became a self-perpetuating myth-making machine carved out of Hoover’s battle against communism, organized crime, and his war on civil rights and anti-war activists (Cointelpro). Now, in the post-Hoover, post-9/11 period, the war on terrorism allows the myth making to continue.

    • War Profiteers Still Finishing First

      So who’s the fool? The outfit that turned its business of peddling useless propaganda to U.S. occupied countries onto America itself – by smearing journalists that dared criticize it – or the government that hired them for hundreds of millions in the first place?

    • Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)

      Remember rendition? Many people believe the practice of having terrorism suspects interrogated overseas was supposed to end when George W. Bush left office. But President Barack Obama said he’d end torture, not renditions—and last week, the Washington Post reported that they’re still happening. That’s true in some sense, but as Mother Jones and others have reported, the Obama administration’s use of foreign regimes to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects has avoided Bush-style renditions in favor of a different practice known as proxy detention.

    • Former Guantanamo Prosecutor to Speak about Torture and Intelligence

      Colonel Morris Davis, anti-torture and humanitarian law advocate, will speak about “Confronting Torture: How it Makes America Less Safe” on Thursday, Jan. 31, at 12 p.m. in Rm. 5042 at the UNC School of Law. The lecture — free and open to the public — is sponsored by The Immigration & Human Rights Policy Clinic at UNC School of Law.

    • 5 terrifying facts about John Brennan
    • The CIA’s Hypocrisy on Secrets

      On Thursday, ex-CIA deputy director Jose Rodriguez publicly protested that agents had only used water bottles when waterboarding detainees, not the buckets shown in Zero Dark Thirty. Disclosures like that must chafe John Kiriakou, the ex-agent facing 30 months in prison for passing info to a reporter. “The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy,” namely, the agency itself, author Ted Gup writes in the New York Times. “The CIA invokes secrecy to serve its interests, but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.”

    • As Brennan Tapped for CIA, Case of Somali Detainees Highlights Obama’s Embrace of Secret Renditions
    • Obama names head of drone assassination program to lead CIA
    • Republican senator threatens to block Obama’s CIA nominee
    • Senator threatens to block CIA nominee
    • John Brennan Wrong for CIA, CODEPINK Says

      Once CODEPINK heard about the coming nomination, we decided to protest in front of the white house. Within just a couple of hours banners were made, the press was called, and other CODEPINKers were alerted.

    • Secret Double Standard

      The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.

      Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.

    • Kuwaiti police tear-gas opposition protesters

      Kuwaiti riot police on Sunday fired tear gas and stun grenades at hundreds of opposition protesters who demanded that the new parliament be dissolved and controversial electoral legislation be scrapped.

      Police arrested several protesters including Osama al-Shaheen, a member of the previous opposition-dominated parliament, as they chased demonstrators through a residential area south of the capital, Kuwait City.

    • US drones killed 25 in a single day

      As usual, all of the casualties were claimed to be militants. But a recent study by one of President Obama’s former counter-terrorism advisors concludes the administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” downward by counting all military-age males they kill as combatants.

    • DRONES DRAW MORE CONTROVERSY AS BERKELEY TRIES TO KEEP THEM OUT OF THEIR SKIES
    • Why You Won’t Hear About Drones at John Brennan’s Confirmation Hearing

      Alas, don’t hold your breath. The hearings will be run by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is slated to remain chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Despite leaking information regarding covert drone strikes in Pakistan, the senator strongly endorses targeted killings — and, more generally, executive branch secrecy– and will assuredly place strict limits on the discussion of drones in open session. Although drones and targeted killings were never raised in the confirmation hearings for previous CIA directors Michael Hayden or Leon Panetta, they were during successor David Petraeus’ testimony in June 2011. See below for the brief exchange between Senator Roy Blunt and Petraeus (where you read “(CROSSTALK)” that is Feinstein trying to interrupt the discussion.) Do not expect much more from John Brennan’s confirmation hearing.

    • nnan Needs to Correct the Record on Dro
    • Czar of the Drones

      …both boys were instantly vaporized—only a few chunks of flesh remained.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • What Will Scott Walker Lift from the ALEC Agenda in 2013?

      Wisconsin’s 2011-2012 legislative session saw the introduction of 32 bills or budget provisions reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation — including Governor Scott Walker’s contentious attack on public sector collective bargaining, voter ID legislation, and bills that make it harder for Americans to hold corporations accountable when their products injure or kill — and 19 of those proposals became law.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing

      In the “national security” area of the government–the White House, the departments of state and defense, the armed services and the “intelligence community,” along with their contractors–there is less whistleblowing than in other departments of the executive branch or in private corporations. This despite the frequency of misguided practices and policies within these particular agencies that are both more well-concealed and more catastrophic than elsewhere, and thus even more needful of unauthorized exposure.

      The mystique of secrecy in the universe of national security, even beyond the formal apparatus of classification and clearances, is a compelling deterrent to whistleblowing and thus to effective resistance to gravely wrongful or dangerous policies. In this realm, telling secrets appears unpatriotic, even traitorous. That reflects the general presumption–even though it is very commonly false–that the secrecy is aimed not at domestic, bureaucratic or political rivals or the American public but at foreign, powerful enemies, and that breaching it exposes the country, its people and its troops to danger.

    • Student Loses Lawsuit Challenging Texas School’s RFID Tracking Program

      A Texas public school district’s controversial pilot program to keep track of its students on campus with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips has survived a legal challenge in federal court. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia dismissed a request for a preliminary injunction from Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio who refused to wear the school’s ID cards on religious grounds.

    • Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear RFID Tracker Loses Lawsuit
    • As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared

      Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho, is a retired logger, a former science teacher and now a federal criminal thanks to his arrowhead-collecting hobby.

    • Minn. driver’s license data snoopers are difficult to track

      Driver’s license info is readily accessible, but finding out who’s checking it out is not easy. Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek challenges state to justify its secrecy.

    • John Brennan pick revives leaks dispute
    • On Civil Liberties, John Brennan Is No Worse Than Barack Obama

      Four years ago, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan withdrew his name from consideration to run the Central Intelligence Agency. On Monday, President Barack Obama announced Brennan was his pick for the job, following the resignation of David Petraeus over an extramarital affair.

    • War Powers Reversal

      Perhaps the greatest irony of the Obama Presidency is how much it has vindicated the antiterror strategy of its predecessor. The latest example is President Obama’s vexed statement in signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013.

    • China: Fully Abolish Re-Education Through Labor

      The Chinese government’s announcement today that it will sometime this year “stop using” the notorious Re-Education Through Labor (RTL) system is a rare positive response to the system’s growing unpopularity, Human Rights Watch said today. While suspending use of RTL would be an important step, the government should aspire to fully abolish the RTL system.

    • Paying a high price for cheap fashion

      Young women are mistreated in some Indian textile factories in the Tamil Nadu state. German companies are among those who work with factories in that region. But there is no obligation to disclose the commodity chain.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Response to Nominet direct.uk consultation

      Our response offers general comments on the proposals set out in the consultation document, rather than addressing the consultation questions specifically.

      We understand the interest in improving security online, and the consequent benefits for the confidence people have in online encounters.

      However, we do not believe that the proposed solution fits the problem. It is unclear that a .uk domain is the answer to the problems identified in the consultation document. We believe there are better ways to address a need to improve security and consequently help boost the confidence people have in online transactions.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The Google Shortcut to Trademark Law

        The strength of a trademark — the extent to which consumers view the mark as identifying a particular source — is difficult to evaluate in practice. Assessments of “inherent distinctiveness” are highly subjective, survey evidence is expensive and unreliable, and other “commercial strength” factors such as advertising spending are poor proxies for consumer perceptions. Courts often fall back on heuristics and intuition rather than precise logical analysis.

    • Copyrights

      • RapidShare: Traffic and Piracy Dipped After New Business Model Kicked In

        Under continued pressure to take additional anti-piracy measures, file-hosting site RapidShare introduced a new business strategy last year. The model restricted the ability of all users to engage in third party public distribution, the most popular way of sharing copyrighted material. As a result the company experienced a significant drop in traffic and, according to a spokesman, a significant drop in copyright infringement too.

      • The Problem of “International Orphan Works” (Guest Blog Post)

        The U.S. Copyright Office recently extended the deadline by which the public may submit comments on issues related to orphan works until February 4, 2013. The Office is gathering suggestions for shaping future U.S. legislation and taking other actions to address the issues of works whose copyright has not expired, yet the owner of the copyright cannot be identified or located. However, legislating on orphan works at the national level cannot solve an important problem: the problem of establishing the status of an orphan work internationally. The solution to this problem is crucially important for anyone hoping to use orphan works on the internet – particularly entities that are among the most active lobbyists for orphan works legislation.

      • Anti-Piracy Company Seeks Patent On Automated Copyright Trolling

01.08.13

Links 9/1/2013: Valve’s GNU/Linux Gaming PC, Android Massive at CES

Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Cloud/Linux is behind the success of Barclays’ Pingit app
  • Barclays’ Linux programme not a snub to suppliers
  • Barclays To Save ‘Billions’ With Own Cloud And Open Source

    Barclays bank has managed to cut its IT expenses by 90 percent after moving infrastructure into a purpose-built cloud, claims The Sunday Times.

  • Open Source Flex Gets Top Project Status at Apache

    It has been some time since I last wrote about Adobe Flex, which now has gained new status at the Apache Software Foundation.

    Flex first came to my full attention back in 2007 when Adobe decided to open source the Rich Application Framework. Adobe had been building flex since at least 2004 so the move to open source was not part of the original design.

  • A look back at open source creative tools in 2012

    For all of you free and open source creative tool fans out there, plenty of exciting developments happened over the past year—and there’s some pretty awesome new things in the pipeline for 2013 as well! Here’s a sampling of the good news:

  • Netflix Open Sources Janitor Monkey Cloud Computing Utility

    Although cloud computing platforms make headlines every day now, including leading open source platforms, it’s still true that cloud computing is a young science, and there is a premium on reliable, mature tools for the cloud. Also, it’s true that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud.

  • As ISPs Like Cablevision Cozy Up To Its Open Source CDN, Netflix Makes 3D And “Super HD” Video Available
  • Five awesome open-source front-end frameworks
  • ICEsoft Ships ICEmobile — Open Source Platform for Mobile Java EE
    Apps

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS shows up on a mystery phone, we go hands-on (update: now with video!) Mobile

        Firefox’s mobile operating system showed up on a mystery phone tonight at a pre-CES event ahead of its unveiling later this year, carrying no branding and looking light on features. Sadly, the WiFi in the event space didn’t give us much of a chance to explore the OS’ inner workings, and the phone was dubbed a “mystery” device by Mozilla reps, but we did snap some pictures of it. We also know that it’s got at least an ARMv6 CPU and 256MB of RAM, and likely more power than that. Mozilla’s planning a 2013 launch of the Chrome OS — an OS powered entirely by HTML5 — in partnership with Telefonica, Qualcomm, and “a long list of industry supporters.

      • Firefox OS Reportedly Nearing Completion and Coming to CES

        There are more open source smartphones coming this year than you can shake a stick at, ranging from Ubuntu phones to Tizen Linux-based handsets. But among the most eagerly awaited phones are new handsets based on Mozilla’s open Firefox OS. Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone business. The partners are aiming to deliver their initial phones at low price points in emerging markets.

      • Firefox 18.0 Lets Loose IonMonkey Compiler

        Mozilla Firefox 18.0 is now available. The main feature of this open-source web-browser update is the introduction of IonMonkey, a faster JavaScript compiler.

      • Download Mozilla Firefox 18.0 for Linux
      • Firefox Makes Web Games and Apps Speedier

        Firefox’s new JavaScript compiler, IonMonkey, makes Web apps and games perform up to 25 percent faster. To see how exciting Firefox makes playing games or using apps on the Web, check out BananaBread, a fun 3D Web game created by the Mozilla Developer Network and powered exclusively by HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open source cloud battles: OpenStack leveling off as CloudStack interest gains

      Those are the findings of the latest report by a Chinese blogger who monitors the activity of open source cloud computing projects each month. Qingye (John) Jiang tracks four open source cloud computing projects in his blog using a Java program he created that pulls in records for every new discussion feed in the project’s ecosystem, as well as on mailing lists and responses to comments.

    • Biggest Data

      The term “Big Data” has been around for a long time, but has obtained buzzphrase status only in the last two years. Although much that can be said about Big Data is positive and harmless (better medicine, better science, better analytic fodder for countless good purposes), one unspoken motivation behind the buzz is obtaining high degrees of market leverage. And much of that leverage is not in harmony with the constructive motivations and practices behind free software, open source and Linux. Because, behind many of the big APIs are vast jungles of exclusive and patent-protected functionalities and restrictions around use. Such as, for example, the spoken turn-by-turn directions Google wouldn’t allow Apple to use. It can be dispiriting to see platform leverage exceeded by large proprietary databases and exclusive services made available through APIs. But it’s important to bring attention to what’s going on, so here we are.

    • OpenStack vs CloudStack: The Latest Score

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Semi-Open Source

  • BSD

    • # Reviews: Making computing easier with PC-BSD 9.1

      I would like to begin the new year by talking about a project which I had the chance to play with in the final weeks of 2012. This project is PC-BSD, an effort sponsored by iXsystems which places a polished desktop layer on top of the FreeBSD operating system. Though at first glance it might appear as though PC-BSD 9.1 is a simple point release over last year’s 9.0 release, the project’s blog paints a very different picture. Some of the key features to PC-BSD’s 9.1 release include the introduction of TrueOS, a server edition of PC-BSD. Basically, TrueOS is FreeBSD with a nice graphical installer, PBI tools and various modern conveniences which we will get to later. The new release of PC-BSD includes support for ZFS pools that include swap space, this allows users to create installs that are exclusively ZFS based and we will also touch on the benefits of this later.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source smallsats in Russia

      Modern trends in satellite development make us believe that the use of open source will not be limited to purely engineering solutions to prepare an in-flight software package for a dedicated hardware installation. Instead, there is a new paradigm of a “public satellite” as available to any user with access to an open hardware-software platform.

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap: the Open Source of the Mobile Age

        One reason why its future looks rosy is the shift to mobile. By definition, smartphones are things you carry around, which makes geographical location a crucial piece of information for their users – and maps indispensable infrastructure for mobile services. Just as the availability of free open source powered an entire generation of Net startups, so OpenStreetMap will enable new companies serving the mobile sector to get going for minimal costs, but without compromising on quality. Indeed, in many respects, OpenStreetMap is the open source of the mobile world.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

Leftovers

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