Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Measuring Linux’s Success in 2012

  With barely two weeks left in 2012, the inundation of “year-in-review” blog posts, podcasts, videos and–if we’re really lucky–songs has begun. This week, the Linux Foundation did its part by releasing a video celebrating major accomplishments over the last year in the Linux channel. What did the Foundation think were the most important developments? Read on for a look.

• Kernel Space

  • There’s A New Linux CPU Scheduler Based Upon BFS

    A new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel was announced on Saturday. This new scheduler is based upon the controversial “Brain Fuck Scheduler” scheduler but attempts to support multiple run-queues for better CPU scaling.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Forcing Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing With Gallium3D

      With the recent improvements to MSAA Gallium3D support, if you have been wanting to benefit from anti-aliasing with the open-source Gallium3D drivers but your game/application doesn’t have options to toggle the MSAA level, it’s now a bit easier to configure.

    • Trying Out DRM-Next With Intel Sandy Bridge

    • What’s Holding Up The Free NVIDIA Tegra Driver

• Applications

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • ZFS Administration, Part IX- Copy-on-write

    • How To Install XScreenSaver And BSOD Screensaver On Ubuntu 12.10

    • How to Share Files Between Linux Systems

    • Let’s Learn Latex: Part 5

    • 8 Vim Plugins to Enhance Your Productivity

    • Schedule Alarms Or Reminders Under GNOME Shell With Remindor Shell

    • External HDD utilities, Backup Software, and Linux

    • Python script to monitor a file for changes and then mail the report with the file attached.

    • Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On CentOS 6.3 (Initiator And Target)

  • Games

    • Forsaken Fortress, a Cross-Platform (PC, Mac, Linux) Survival RPG Comes to Kickstarter

    • NetGore – Open-source online RPG engine

      NetGore is a free, open-source 2D online RPG engine written in C#. It is cross-platform and supports both top-down and sidescroller games. NetGore comes with a large amount of the fundamental MMORPG components built in which allows you to focus more on designing your game.

    • GemRB Is Still Advancing As An Open Infinity Engine

      The open-source GemRB engine is an open implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine to handle running the game assets from Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. GemRB is GPL-licensed and works on Windows, OS X, BSD, Android, iOS, and other platforms while being nearly feature-complete with the original closed-source engine. Various improvements over the original Infinity were also made like providing touch input support.

    • THQ Is Looking At Bringing Their Games To Linux

      THQ, the American game company responsible for a great deal of computer games and was the company behind the recent controversial Humble Bundle, is currently evaluating the market for bringing their titles to Linux.

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Migration season has started

      After finishing with all the work this term, including written reports, oral reports in meetings, and two rather risky academic presentations in a Congress (described here by Megatotoro), I can take some free time at last.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical adds photo functions to Ubuntu One

        • Canonical Is Feeding on the Decaying Corpse of Windows XP

          Canonical is stopping at nothing when it comes to promoting their latest operating system, Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), and the Windows platforms from Microsoft seem to be the perfect target.

          When Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) launched, Canonical used Windows 8 as a target practice and actually asked the users to avoid the pain of owning a Windows 8 operating system.

        • Mark Shuttleworth Answers Your Questions

Free Software/Open Source

• A Pillar Of The Indian FOSS Community, Raj Mathur, Passes Away

  Raj Mathur (aka OldMonk), one of the leading figures of the Indian FOSS (free and open source software) community, passed away on 12.12.12. The cause of his death was a massive heart attack. This is the second major loss for the Indian FOSS world another notable figure, Kenneth Gonsalves passed away in August this year.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla in 2012

      2012 was an incredible year for Mozilla. We mobilized. We did a better job than I have ever seen us do identifying the places where we needed to have impact, and then we focused and delivered. There’s a lot for us all to be proud of in 2012; I’ve gathered up a few of my favourites.

• Project Releases

  • GoOSe Linux 6.0 Beta Release Candidate 4 (RC4) Now Available!

  • Suricata 1.4 released!

Leftovers

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • U.S.: Toss lawsuit over al-Awlaki’s death

  • US wants suit over US-born cleric’s killing tossed

  • Why We Torture

    The last several years have found us in the midst of more catastrophes than we could ever, in our worst nightmares, have dreamed of. We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political constitutional principles in place since the 17th century.

    Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the new order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK our government’s lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War – the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention – have been deliberately avoided or ignored.

  • Egyptian protesters claim they were tortured by Muslim Brotherhood

    Opponents of President Morsi say they were detained for hours and beaten while security forces chose not to intervene

  • ‘Zero Dark Thirty’: Likely US Blockbuster Slammed for Glorifying CIA Torture

  • Why Does Obama Want to Spend $8 Trillion on Defense in the Next Decade?

  • Iraq abuse inquiry was a ‘cover-up’, whistleblower tells court

  • Journalist held in Syria faces execution by her kidnappers

    The captors of a journalist in Syria are threatening to execute her tomorrow (13 December) unless their demands for a $50m ransom are met.

  • Government pays Libyan dissident’s family £2.2m over MI6-aided rendition

  • CIA Rendition & Torture Victim Wins European Human Rights Case

• Cablegate

  • Abandoning Private Manning

  • Assange to make embassy appearance

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • China and US hold the key to a new global climate deal

  • Shale gas: a burning carbon issue

  • Texas Energy Institute Head Quits Amid Fracking Study Conflicts

    The head of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin resigned following an investigation that found conflicts of interest in a study on the risks of natural gas drilling.

    Raymond Orbach, 78, resigned as director of the institute last month, the university said in a statement released today. The study’s lead investigator, Charles Groat, 72, also retired from his faculty position, according to the statement.

  • Illegal wildlife trade ‘threatening national security’, says WWF

    Group says organised crime syndicates are ‘outgunning’ governments, leading to sharp rise in elephant and rhino deaths

  • Mother Nature belongs at bargaining table

    Throwing the nation over the climate cliff will make our current fiscal challenges look like a minor bump in the road.

    As the highly scripted stagecraft of the presidential campaign fades from the headlines, there’s a new show in Washington. ”Fiscal Cliff” stars President Barack Obama, who urges Republicans and Democrats to agree on a ”grand bargain” that would soften the economic shock of the impending across-the-board tax and spending cuts. But that bipartisan handshake would be nothing to celebrate.

  • Fracking for shale gas gets green light in UK

    The government has lifted restrictions on the controversial practice of fracking, a method of extracting gas from shale rock, giving a green light to drilling that could produce billions of pounds worth of gas.

• Finance

  • INFOGRAPHIC: We Could End Homelessness With The Money Americans Spend On Christmas Decorations

  • Wanna Smuggle Money out of Afghanistan?

    You may have heard that Afghanistan has something of a corruption problem, with billions of dollars flowing out of the country annually even as the US and international community pour money into reconstruction efforts. Instead of curbing the exodus of illicit cash, however, the Afghan government is apparently making it easier to smuggle money out of the country, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

  • Are Financial Blogs Trustworthy?

  • Dr. Al explains the so-called “so-called fiscal cliff”

  • The Case Against Taxing the Rich: Still Shaky

    The political friends of America’s rich aren’t aiming to convince us that higher taxes on the nation’s highest incomes make no sense. They’re just hoping to keep us distracted.

  • Federal Reserve Takes Another Step Toward Rule-Based Monetary Policy

    The Federal Reserve made a big announcement today, promising to keep interest rates near zero until either the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent or the inflation rate rose above 2.5 percent. The Fed had already promised to keeping interest rates near zero until 2015, so why was this announcement important?

  • Republicans complain of little progress in effort to strike fiscal cliff deal

    Republican members of Congress expressed dismay on Wednesday about the prospect of reaching a deal with the White House to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis before Christmas.

  • Robots and Robber Barons

    The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.

  • States Need to Stop Giving Subsidies to Corporations

  • Pakistan politicians engulfed by tax evasion storm

    Majority of ministers have not paid into national coffers beyond contribution taken from state salaries, alleges tax report

  • HSBC Case: Are Huge Banks Now Too Big to Indict?

    The New York Times reports this morning: “State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system. … While the settlement with HSBC is a major victory for the government, the case raises questions about whether certain financial institutions, having grown so large and interconnected, are too big to indict.”

  • Three arrested in Libor manipulation investigation

    A former UBS and Citigroup banker and two others had their homes raided early on Tuesday morning and were taken in for questioning as part of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the manipulation of Libor interest rates.

    The intervention came amid mounting speculation that the Financial Services Authority is preparing to take action against a number of banks in relation to Libor setting.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Saudi-Led Oil Lobby Group Financed Dark Money Attack Ads

    The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Investigative Fund and The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.

• Censorship

  • India awakes

    This TV program is a breakthrough. CNN IBN, a leading English-language channel, started a campaign for the freedom of Sanal Edamaruku. “Does a rationalist deserve to be jailed for questioning a religious miracle?”, asked firebrand moderator Sargarika Ghose on 4th December in CNN IBN’s flagship program Face the Nation, calling upon the public to take a stand. The response was impressive: people from all walks of life expressed unequivocal support for Sanal, on camera, on twitter and on facebook. The wave keeps running… And 87% of the viewers who participated in a public internet ballot answered the question “Are blasphemy laws out of place in a secular democracy?” with a clear Yes! The blasphemy law should go.

  • Israel must explain targeting of journalists in Gaza

    The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned that Israeli airstrikes targeted individual journalists and media facilities in the Gaza Strip between November 18 and 20. Journalists and media outlets are protected under international law in military conflict.

  • Possible censorship of Putin and Medvedev’s names on Russian television

    Here’s a somewhat curious story: The Russian TV channel NTV showed a performance by the rock band “Leningrad”, which is famous for incorporating many Russian expletives in its lyrics. The expletives were censored by beeping, which is the usual and expected practice, comparable to beeping on words like “fuck” in American TV. The surprise in this performance, however, was that the names of president Putin and prime minister Medvedev, who were mentioned in the song, were censored the same way. The name of the the Church of Christ the Savior, which recently became famous as the stage of Pussy Riot’s notorious performance, was partly censored as well, although the name “Pussy Riot” itself was not censored.

  • Peers vote to remove law banning insulting language

  • ANC tries to muzzle media coverage of leadership conference

    Security will be rigid at the African National Congress’s (ANC) elective conference in Mangaung. Most sessions are closed to the media and the party has said it will use phone-jamming technology to prevent interruptions. Journalists who stray where they shouldn’t will be given short shrift.

  • Son of Anna Politkovskaya criticises murder trial deal for policeman

• Privacy

  • Heart Gadgets Test Privacy-Law Limits

    A recent swell of digital-medical data collected on devices outside of a doctor’s office is raising some thorny questions: Who owns the rights to a patient’s digital footprint and who should control that information? WSJ’s Linda Blake reports.

    The small box inside Amanda Hubbard’s chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.

  • Private By Default

    Depending which browser you’re using, you should see a little lock or some such in the address bar. On the right are readouts from (top down) Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You can click on that readout to get some information on the privacy/security settings.

• Civil Rights

  • The rape victims who helped free their alleged attacker

  • Hacker Gary McKinnon will not face UK charges

    Computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the US was blocked, will not face charges in the UK, bringing to an end a 10-year legal battle.

  • Protests should be restricted in Hong Kong, says Jackie Chan

    Action star says Hong Kong residents ‘scold China, scold leaders, scold anything’ and calls for regulations against dissent

  • The Surveillance State Grows Another Tentacle

    After the attempted Christmas Day bombing of 2009, a Senate investigation concluded that the National Counterterrorism Center had received information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be underwear bomber, but had failed to query other government agencies about him. This allowed him to board his flight to the U.S. and nearly detonate his bomb. President Obama responded by ordering all agencies to send their leads to NCTC, which was ordered to “pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads.”

  • Jeremy Irons speaks out for the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner

  • As criminal borders fade, U.S. attorney brings world into Virginia’s Eastern District

• DRM

  • Sony’s New German Ebookstore Features Thousands Of DRM-Free Books

    DRM is becoming less and less prevalent these days as more companies are realizing that the backlash from crippling the purchases of paying customers far outweighs any perceived prevention of infringement. It’s not a wholesale conversion, but new DRM-free converts are appearing more frequently, including some surprising holdouts.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Are The Old Enablers Becoming The New Gatekeepers?

    We’ve argued, for a long time, that just railing against “middlemen” misses the point. There are always middlemen. But not all middlemen are created equal. The distinction, that we’ve discussed multiple times, is the difference between enablers and gatekeepers. That is, historically, many middlemen came to power because they were gatekeepers. If you wanted to do something — be a musician, write a book, sell a new product — you effectively had to get “approval” and support from a gatekeeper who had access to those markets. Being a gatekeeper gave them enormous power, such that the gatekeepers often became central to the market, rather than the people/companies they were working with and it also allowed them to craft ridiculous deals that were incredibly favorable to themselves, at the expense of those they were working with. That, of course, is why there tends to be so much inherent antipathy towards traditional gatekeepers.

  • Copyrights

    • French Hadopi Scheme Gutted; Other Bad Ideas To Be Introduced Instead

      France’s Hadopi graduated response approach, also known as “three strikes”, occupies a special place in the annals of copyright enforcement. It pioneered the idea of punishing users accused of sharing unauthorized copies of files, largely thanks to pressure from the previous French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who seems to have hated most aspects of this new-fangled Internet thing. Sadly, other countries took up the idea, including the UK with its awful Digital Economy Act, New Zealand, Spain and, more recently, the US.

      Hadopi hasn’t been going too well. Despite putting out some dodgy statistics, the Hadopi agency hasn’t really been able to show that the three-strike approach is doing anything to reduce the number of unauthorized downloads. In the two years that Hadopi has been running, only one person has been brought to court — and he was innocent, but fined anyway.

    • How Copyright Criminalization Threatens Online Innovation

      I’m excited that my friend Jerry Brito has pulled together an edited collection of copyright reform essays by libertarians (and one from a pair of libertarian-leaning conservatives) called Copyright Unbalanced. Several recent developments have suggested growing sympathy for copyright reform on the political right. Jerry’s book promises to be a handbook for free-market copyright reformers, pointing to some of the most serious problems with the present system and explaining how Republicans could capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the status quo.

    • It’s Not “Getting” Or “Downloading” A Copy. It’s “Making” Or “Manufacturing” One.

      In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Measuring Linux’s Success in 2012

  With barely two weeks left in 2012, the inundation of “year-in-review” blog posts, podcasts, videos and–if we’re really lucky–songs has begun. This week, the Linux Foundation did its part by releasing a video celebrating major accomplishments over the last year in the Linux channel. What did the Foundation think were the most important developments? Read on for a look.

• Readers’ Choice Awards 2012

• 2012 Linux Retrospectives Highlight a Remarkable Year

  Linux Rising. As The Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson notes, this was the year that Red Hat achieved $1 billion in revenues, and Android adoption outpaced the iPhone. You can watch The Linux Foundation’s “What a Year for Linux” video here.

  Top Linux Trends. Datamation has a good look back at some of the top trends in Linux for 2012. These included the rise of crowdsourcing, diversity in desktop environments, Ubuntu’s “Corporation vs. Community” schizophrenia, and interfaces that adjusted for multiple device form factors.

• How Last Year’s Linux Events Played Out This Year

  With the year coming to an end, here’s a look again at the prominent Linux news from last year (2011) and whether the milestones reached then still have an impact today.

  Effectively this comes down to a redux of the most popular Linux news from last year and an update on each of the topics as it stands today. The most popular Linux stories on Phoronix from 2012 will be shared at the end of December.

  The two most popular Phoronix news stories last year came down to the same topic: ending of the Linux 2.6 kernel and moving to Linux 3.0 (Say Hello To Linux 3.0; Linus Just Tagged 3.0-rc1 and Linus Talks Of Linux 2.8 Or Linux 3.0; Ending Linux 2.6). Well, there isn’t too much to add to this particular topic for 2012. Linus Torvalds continues releasing new Linux 3.x major kernel releases and after enough of them in a few years time he’ll move to Linux 4.x. This is just much cleaner than sticking to Linux 2.6.x as was done for so many years.

• Server

  • MICROSOFT RULES? Unless YOU know better…

    Microsoft haters, Apple haters, Linux Haters, time for you to put all this nonsense to end once and for all with regards the real world of business!!

    So, here’s the scenario, and it’s up to YOU to provide the solution… if you can of course…..

    A small office, with 5 computers all running the same desktop operating system.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • # The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 483

• Kernel Space

  • The 3.8 Kernel Is An Amazing Gift To Linux Users

  • AMD Radeon Performance Preview On Linux 3.8

    With word this week that there’s some performance improvements for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver to be found with the Linux 3.8 kernel as a result of the a-synchronous DMA engine support, some very early benchmarks of the “drm-next” code were done from five different AMD Radeon graphics cards. In extreme cases, the open-source graphics driver can deliver 10x higher OpenGL frame-rates with the experimental kernel.

  • Linux to add support for ARM Architectures

    Are you an Android kernel developer? If yes then we have got great news for you. Those who develop kernels for Android devices know how frustrating porting a kernel to a new device has always been. Well if you share that notion and would like this process to get easier than it is right now, you will be pleased to know that Linus Torvalds has announced ARM support in Linux.

  • What a Year for Linux: Please Join us in Celebration

  • Samsung Exynos DRM Prepares For New Kernel

  • My First Round with KVM Nested Virtualization

    During the last couple of weeks I took some time to try out the next step in virtualization tech: nested virtualization. I set the target to add to our research infrastructure a server that was capable of managing multiple layered virtualization with the aim to learn something about the current status of KVM development regarding this particular feature, while checking out the relative performance levels and finding out if managing a host such as this and its virtual siblings through our own oVirt implementation was a viable option.

  • Linux Begins To Support IBM’s Next-Gen POWER8

    The PowerPC feature pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel is significant in that it’s the first release beginning to introduce support for IBM’s next-generation POWER8 processors.

  • Linux and Intel 386 processors will part ways

  • Linux to drop i386 support in the 3.8 kernel, make us upgrade our Doom rig

  • FUSE Gets I/O Performance Improvements

    The FUSE module, which allows for file-systems to be run from user-space, can now process direct I/O a-synchronously. This a-synchronous direct I/O can lead to very noticeable performance improvements for FUSE-based file-systems like ZFS.

  • Graphics Stack

    • New Gallium3D Linux driver for modern Intel HD GPUs

      A new Gallium3D driver is in the works, supporting the integrated graphics chips of the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge generation in Linux-based operating systems. Older integrated video chips won’t be compatible with the new driver.

    • radeon drm-next-3.8

    • Wayland and Weston 1.0.3 releases out

    • Intel Finally Delivers Stable i830GM/i845G Driver

      While the Intel 830GM and 845G chipsets were first introduced more than one decade ago, their graphics driver support has been botched for much of the time. As of today though, Intel Linux driver developers think they have taken care of the longstanding stability issues with this now ancient hardware.

• Applications

  • Lightworks To Have Public Linux Beta In Q1’2013

    Lightworks, the professional-grade non-linear video editor from EditShare that’s been ported to Linux, will have a public beta release before the end of the next quarter.

  • Porteus – Another Excellent Choice for the Thumb Drive Toolbox

  • Top 6 Mobile Application Development Frameworks

    Mobile application development is the process by which software is created for handheld devices. This article focuses on tools which help developers create applications for mobile phones. The purpose of application frameworks and libraries is to enable developers to spend their time on the creative and interesting part of development, alleviating the repetitive overhead associated with common development patterns.

  • Proprietary

    • Novosoft Releases Brand New Handy Backup and Announces Advanced Linux Backup Solution

      Novosoft LLC, an international software developer, announced the release of an update to their flagship product Handy Backup. The new version expands the list of cloud storage options and moves toward a cross-platform solution for Windows and Linux.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Here’s what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions

    • How to Create a Video from Photos in Ubuntu

    • Bloody upstream

    • ZFS Administration, Part VIII- Zpool Best Practices and Caveats

    • HOWTO : Setup My Back|Track 5r3 Personal Supercomputer

    • Device Busy? –WTF!-

    • Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On CentOS 6.3

  • Games

    • War for the Overworld Spiritual Successor of Dungeon Keeper Series

      War For the Overworld is the Spiritual Successor of Dungeon Keeper series, Made by dedicated Dungeon Keeper fans from Keeper Klan. They Formed Subterranean games a team formed of professionals, Modders and Enthusiastic individuals, to recreate and improve on the old and beloved DK formula!

    • Enemy Starfighter a cool looking space shooter!

    • Roccat Reaffirms Commitment to Linux

      Linux is no longer the red-headed stepchild of PC gaming.

    • Steam Linux first impressions

      I like it. I like it a lot.

    • ‘Running with Rifles’ Top Down Shooter Coming to Linux

    • Humble Indie Bundle 7 Will Be Worst Humble Bundle Ever For Linux

      It seems that the Humble Botanical Bundle was originally referred to as “Humble Indie Bundle 7“. The games mentioned in this article are not accurate, rather the result of a drunken Google session and a “Jump To Conclusions” mat. Our apologies.

    • Steam for Linux beta coming next week to select users

      Valve’s been talking about implementing its digital distribution platform, Steam, onto Linux for quite some time. It looks like the organization is finally realizing those plans.

      Today, through a closed mailing list, Steam announced that Steam for Linux is ready to go into beta, and it will go live for beta testers next week. At launch, Steam for Linux will include a library of over 40 games, includingSerious Sam 3, Team Fortress 2, and Killing Floor.

    • Christmas Present for Linux Gamers From Valve

    • Collaborative Design with Open Design Engine

    • Kickstarter and Game Development: Highlighting Games Coming to Linux Part 6

• Desktop Environments

  • New E17 Release: LUCKY

    This beta release of E17, LUCKY RUBBER DUCKY, has a much better name than what was originally proposed.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Amarok 2.7 Beta Available For Testing

      Amarok team has released the beta version of Amarok 2.7 which is available for testing. The team has invited all users to test this beta so the final release should be available before 25th December. With this version Amarok is introducing two brand new features.

    • Kids’ size KDE

      More than a year ago I started an experiment: to bring KDE Education to the kids in Kindergarten.

      Now my son was starting exactly at the same time his own adventure in Kindergarten, so I jump at the opportunity and suggest to the educators to have a period of testing. They accepted and I installed a Kubuntu 11.10 on an old PC, the Kindergarten bought a 22″ Touchscreen, and I also installed the first alfa version of Pairs (selfcompiled) that I was working on.

    • ownCloud KDE Client Coming Soon

      ownCloud, the free and open source cloud solution, will be getting a client especially for the KDE Plasma Desktop soon. Sebastian Kügler, one of the KDE developers, announced the development of the KDE client on his blog recently.

    • An ownCloud Client for KDE Plasma

• Distributions

  • Weekend Project: Linux Distros You Never Heard Of

    Ubuntu this, Fedora that, Mint the newest Linux darling– it’s as though all those other hundreds of Linux distributions don’t exist. Let’s throw caution to the winds and seek out new distros, and boldly go where we have not gone before. Here are three I’m thinking of installing on my test machine and torture-testing this weekend.

  • After three years, Slax Linux is reborn with version 7.0

    There’s no denying 2012 has been a fruitful year for Linux distributions in general, but something about it has also seemed to favor the rebirth of distros we hadn’t heard from in years.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS 2012.08 review – A thing of the past

      Deep down, I was hoping that PCLinuxOS 2012.08 might rise again…

    • Sneak Peek at Mandriva Business Server

      Ever since the month of September, Mandriva is renewing its entire products and solutions portfolio. The next product to be unveiled this month is the Mandriva Business Server. A few words were hinted in the press as well as to our strategic partners and customers.

      Today we would like to lift the curtain on some aspects of the upcoming Mandriva Business Server. In a few words, Mandriva Business Server is complete Linux-based server platform aimed primarily at the SMB and public sector market. Mandriva Business Server is however not just another Linux server distribution. From the first moment in the installation to the regular maintenance and management tasks Mandriva Business Server offers its users with easy and beautiful management interfaces allowing them to configure and deploy services from the Mandriva Business Server in a seamless and fast way.

    • Mageia 3 beta 1: release hell strikes again!

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical adds photo functions to Ubuntu One

          Canonical has added new photo functions to its Ubuntu One cloud storage service. After users log in, the Ubuntu One web site now automatically displays thumbnails of all photos found in their cloud storage in a new “Photos” section. Users can browse the photos or display them as a slideshow.

        • Creating An Awesome LoCo Support Community

          Our LoCo Teams are a wonderful part of the Ubuntu community. They provide a fantastic place for Ubuntu users to meet other users locally and enjoy Ubuntu together either online or in person.

        • Ubuntu’s Frequently Asked Questions

        • Friends To Replace Gwibber In Raring

          Ubuntu 13.04, scheduled to be released April next year is in high pace of development currently. While a alpha release has been published for most other Ubuntu based distros, Ubuntu will only release a single beta before the final release.

          This release is targeted to improve integration in various mobile devices and will also run on some tablets like Nexus 7. Also, for developers, this will be the first release that will be shipped with an Ubuntu SDK.

        • E-book: Crunch time on the Enterprise desktop

          The enterprise desktop is ripe for change. With support for Windows XP coming to an end, it’s time to find a better way.

          This ebook is about that better way. It’s a short, easy-to-read guide to why Ubuntu is a better choice than Windows for the majority of enterprise desktops today.

        • Canonical Hunting Users of XP

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi founder has plans for a sequel in 2015

    Next generation Pis could come in at $20 price point, but existing devices to be shipping until 2020.

  • Embedded Linux Distros Follow Yocto Project Lead

    One of the classic dilemmas in embedded Linux development has been whether to do it yourself (DIY), rolling your own distribution, or invest in a soup-to-nuts solution from a commercial supplier like Wind River or MontaVista. The DIY approach, which involves cherry-picking and aligning kernels and components from open source repositories, has been eased over the years with an increasing number of board support packages (BSPs) and more up-to-date components provided by semiconductor vendors and open board projects.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Sony Yuga rumored with outlandish 3GB RAM, 128GB storage, 16-megapixel camera

        Reportedly, the Yuga will employ a Samsung Exynos 5 quad-core processor, 3GB RAM, 128 GB storage, a 16-megapixel camera, and a 3,000 mAh battery. Oh, and let’s not forget that this one has been tied to a 5-inch 1080p HD display as well. Still not sold? It’s allegedly dust-proof and waterproof.

      • HTC One SV arrives on the FCC, coming to America?

      • 30 Best Android apps this week

Free Software/Open Source

• Year 2012 in Review

  Munich finally migrated its 12000th PC. We are so relieved that the trolls no longer pronounce Limux a failure and there’s a little matter of profit, besides.

  Dell has expanded its relationship with Canonical selling GNU/Linux in more than 1000 stores in China and India and Walmart in Brazil sells more GNU/Linux desktop PCs than that other OS.

• Wait, what’s that rumble in the storage jungle? Yes, it’s Ceph

• Open source

  The pursuit of business sustainability and innovative change does not have to originate from any one, single source. It can generate from within your own company at the ground level, from the customers you service to your suppliers. Often the least recognized resources can be the greatest source of information, which can make a significant difference.

  [...]

  Evidence supports the need for executives to step outside the confines of traditional business methods and leverage the creativity of its key business stakeholders. Supporting an open innovation approach to business sustainability offers stakeholders the opportunity to become engaged in the future of a business. By recognizing that key stakeholders have a vested interest the success of the company, sustainable leadership can create openness to new ideas that promote business success and innovative ideas.

• The Elgg API: Getting Social Using an Open Source Network

• Obituary: Raj Mathur

  One of the pillars of the Indian FOSS Community passed away this week. Known for his humor, his uncompromising honesty and his generosity in sharing FOSS knowledge with like-minded individuals. His sudden passing after a massive heart attack has shocked and saddened his friends across the FOSS World.

• Events

  • Magnolia Amplify 2013: First Major US Open Source CMS Conference

    Magnolia, creator of the open source content management system (CMS) has announced its first ever “Magnolia Amplify” active learning event to be held March 6th-8th at the Mondrian South Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla’s London/New York Game Hackathon: It’s On!

      It’s already abundantly clear that 2013 will witness a rise in prominence for open source gaming, what with players like Valve and Ouya poised to leverage new open source platforms. Now, Mozilla is stirring the pot with a hackathon taking place simultaneously in London and New York this weekend, a part of the company’s Game Jam hackathon series.

    • Mozilla says “Game On” for web gaming with hackathon launch

• SaaS

  • OpenStack Set to Tackle Open Source Federated Identity in the Cloud

    The OpenStack open source cloud platform started out with only two components: Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Nova originally came from NASA and Swift came from Rackspace.

    Over the course of the last two years, OpenStack has expanded beyond NASA and Rackspace and has been embraced by many large tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, AT&T, Cisco and Intel among others. As OpenStack participation has grown, new capabilities have been added, including most recently the Cinder block storage project and the Quantum networking project. Cinder and Quantum both debuted in the recent Folsom release.

• Databases

  • The MariaDB Foundation: A turning point for MySQL

    Back when Sun Microsystems was setting, some of the programmers who had been involved with the popular and well-known open source MySQL database started a fork of the project called MariaDB.

    The new project was led and named by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the original developer of MySQL and one of the founders of the eponymous company that Sun acquired. After leaving Sun, he formed a company in his native Finland — Monty Program AB — to host development of MariaDB and made an open offer of employment to any MySQL committer. As a result, a formidable corps of developers gathered at Monty Program.

  • MariaDB Foundation

  • Open Source Couchbase 2.0 NoSQL Database Released

    Couchbase has been working on a new type of NoSQL database the melds both key-value and document data models.

    It’s an effort that began with the merger of CouchOne and Membase back in 2011 as the two companies combined to build a new joint product. Couchbase has since moved beyond its core Apache CouchDB roots though it still benefits from them.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Support the FSF: Turn your dollars into decibels

    Make a one-time donation to help us make your voice for software freedom heard. Please support us at whatever amount feels right to you. Every dollar helps us raise your voices one more decibel.

• Project Releases

  • Suricata 1.4 Brings New Security Features

    Suricata from the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), which is an Open Source Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Engine, has been updated to version 1.4.

  • Suricata 1.4 improves performance and adds experimental features

• Programming

  • LLVM 3.2 Vastly Improves Processor Support

    he soon-to-be-released LLVM 3.2 compiler infrastructure will expand upon its coverage of processor support and CPU capabilities.

    Some of the noteworthy improvements to the LLVM 3.2 processor/hardware support includes:

    - Minor code-generation improvements for x86 and x86_64.

  • Stroustrup on next-gen C++: I didn’t want to let go of my baby

Leftovers

• Science

  • Top Holiday Tech Buys… of 1983 (Gallery)

• Security

  • Japan police offers first-ever reward for wanted hacker

    Japanese police are looking for an individual who can code in C#, uses a “Syberian Post Office” to make anonymous posts online, and knows how to surf the web without leaving any digital tracks — and they’re willing to pay.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Britain’s drone air force decimated by pilot error: Twelve crashes in combat zone reduce capacity to just 14 – at a cost of £30million

    Nearly half of Britain’s top-secret military drones deployed in Afghanistan have crashed

  • RAF drone pilots to get their own wing

  • Government seeks to shut down NSA wiretapping lawsuit

    Suit over domestic surveillance will reveal state secrets, say DOJ lawyers.

  • U.S. government says wiretap lawsuit should not proceed

  • Rice meeting with Obama Friday, not expected to get NSA post

  • Rice won’t be next NSA either

    But a senior administration official tells CNN that Rice will not be chosen for the position.

  • Susan Rice Drops Out Of Secretary Of State Running Due To ‘Partisan Politics’

    In a letter to President Barack Obama, Rice voiced concern over an unnecessary and prolonged vetting due to the incessant criticism she experienced over the Benghazi, Libya, incident…

  • Human Rights Court: CIA Tortured, Sodomized German Citizen

    The European Court of Human Rights has issued an historic judgement on the case of Khaled el-Masri, the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a militant named Khalid al-Masri.

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

    The CIA is having trouble keeping its secret agents off the internet. First, it allowed the White House to publish a photograph of the man behind the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. And now the identity of the woman who runs its “Global Jihad Unit”—and who has a long (if pseudonymous) history of being associated with some of the agency’s most disastrous boondoggles—has been published online by two documentary filmmakers who sussed it out with the help of some “savvy internet research.”

  • The CIA’s Historic Friendship With Iran And Iraq

    The subtitle for the collection, of course, could be Propping Up The Peacock Throne, as the events described herein deal with the U.S. support for the Shah, and for the government of Iraq, within which Saddam Hussein was gathering power in preparation for his formal takeover in 1979. These events led to, among other things, the Iranian Revolution that got dropped on Jimmy Carter’s head, and the incredibly savage Iran-Iraq War in which the U.S. backed both sides in some of the bloodiest realpolitik in the nation’s history. Just a cursory glance through the 978 pages reveals how tight the alliance between the U.S. and the Shah’s government, and how important Iranian oil was to the U,S, as a counterweight to the rising power of OPEC among the other oil-producing states in the region. One telegram from Washington concerning the Shah’s ambitious energy policy rings a little ironic, given what’s going on today.

  • Kucinich: Throw out the NDAA, End the Wars and Start Nation Building at Home

    Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released the following statement on the NDAA:
    “Today, this House will send the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to conference. Contrary to its title, the bill does not provide for the protection of the American people. It expands war. It further indebts our nation. It encroaches on basic rights with regards to indefinite detention. It eliminates the basic tenet that due process rights apply to everyone in this country – not just American citizens…”

  • Sen. Rand Paul voted yes for the $650 billion 2013 NDAA

    Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) angered many of his father’s supporters…

  • NDAA Cybersecurity Amendment Stokes Contractor Data Fears

  • US: Pressure to Use Drones in Monitoring Missions

    Executives of US airplane manufacturing companies producing unmanned planes (drones) press the US White House to eliminate restrictions preventing to fly these devices in monitoring missions on the national airspace.

  • Unmanned at Any Speed: Bringing Drones into Our National Airspace

    Some of the most pressing air safety, security, cybersecurity, and privacy policy questions that must be addressed, policy questions that must be addressed, in order to allow for widespread domestic UAS operation under FMRA.

  • Let Constitution guide drone use

    Lawmakers across the United States will soon be eyeing the use of drones — unmanned aerial devices — for state and local police work. In the enthusiasm to deploy such devices, state lawmakers need to carefully consider the proper uses of drones in police work, firefighting, disaster relief and counter-terrorism.

  • Doubling the Threat: Drones + Lasers?

  • U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens

    Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

    Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

  • Follow Friday: Every U.S. Drone Attack

  • The Woes of an American Drone Operator

  • US: Dismiss lawsuit over Americans killed by drones

  • Berkeley Considers Becoming a No Drone Zone

  • US Think Tank: Europeans Oppose Washington’s Drone Attacks

  • Group Asks Supreme Court to Reinstate Ban on Indefinite Detention

  • Why The NDAA Bill is Even Scarier Than You Thought

  • Kucinich: Throw out the NDAA, End the Wars and Start Nation Building at Home

• Cablegate

  • Support: french political leader JL Mélenchon about J Assange

    The British have abandoned the idea of going into the embassy to take JAssange by force, a silly thing that would have dishonored them. More, this would have been a dangerous precedent for all the other embassies in the world. Mr Mélenchon explains that he is here to support the Ecuadorians, who have to withstand a big shock, while those who pretend usually protect human rights and freedom of press remain this time indifferent. The Ecuadorian are on a reasonable position, and don’t seek the arm wrestling at the contrary of the other.

  • WikiLeaks Case Draws Comparisons To Pentagon Papers

    …former government analyst Daniel Ellsberg…

• Finance

  • REPORT: Five Senior Goldman Sachs Execs Gave $130K To ‘Obama Victory Fund’ WHILE Eric Holder Was Deciding Whether To File Criminal Charges

    This is one of several, very interesting revelations from the GAI report on corruption within the Obama Justice Department. And remember, in our bought and paid for system, what you will read is completely legal.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Running Scared: ALEC Anticipating an IRS Audit?

    The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) appears to be anticipating an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit, after multiple complaints challenging the “corporate bill mill’s” charitable status, based on documents recently obtained by Bloomberg News.

  • Backgrounder: the History of the NRA/ALEC Gun Agenda

    “Meaningful action” has been thwarted, largely because of the power and wealth of the National Rifle Association (NRA). One of the key avenues it has used to exert its influence is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). For decades, the NRA has helped bankroll ALEC operations and even co-chaired ALEC’s “Public Safety and Elections Task Force,” where it secretly voted on bills alongside elected representatives. At ALEC’s annual meeting this summer, the NRA had the biggest booth at the convention in Salt Lake City and also underwrote a shooting event along with one of the largest sellers of assault weapons in the world.

• Censorship

  • ORG victory on parental controls

    Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group welcomed the Department for Education response to their consultation on parental controls.

    The response says that default filters and pre-filled forms encouraging filtering will not be pursued. Instead, parents will be asked to install filters and be given help to choose age appropriate settings.

  • After Google tweaks its algorithm, the porn-only Search.xxx sees 50% boost in traffic

    Google on Wednesday tweaked its SafeSearch setting and images search algorithm, significantly altering its search results: previously explicit searches have stopped returning explicit results. The ICM Registry contacted TNW to let us know that Search.xxx, the porn-only search engine, has seen a 50 percent increase in traffic during the last 24 hours.

  • How the law caught up with the internet

    As online freedom comes under attack from big business and governments alike, Jennifer Granick assesses the legal landscape

  • Biggest Social Media Sites Censor Alternative News

    Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by any Palestinian resistance groups.

• Civil Rights

  • ENEMIES OF THE STATE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT SECRET US GOVERNMENT POWER BECOMES A CRIME

    With the post 9/11 rise of the leviathan national security state, the rule of law in the United States under the Constitution is increasingly rule by secrecy, surveillance and executive fiat.

  • Detention law challenge fails

  • Counterterrorism Agency: Every Citizen a Suspect

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • U.S. Refuses to Sign ITU Treaty Over Internet Provisions

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Music Industry Threatens to Bankrupt Pirate Party Members

      Music industry group the BPI has threatened legal action against six members of the UK Pirate Party, after the party refused to take its Pirate Bay proxy offline. BPI seems to want to hold the individual members of the party responsible for copyright infringements that may occurs via the proxy, which puts them at risk of personal bankruptcy. Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye criticized the latest music industry threats and reiterated that blocking The Pirate Bay is a disproportionate measure.

    • Hollywood and Google Square Off Over Pirate Search Results

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux is Free and it Shows

  On Android you don’t bother which bootloader to load – grub or lilo, which DE to choose from – KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Blackbox (there’re a dozen others), how to set system initiation – systemd, sysvinit, innserv… how the sound and audio subsystems talk to the rest of the system, bla..bla..bla… Here these ugly system software work under the hood, users are unaware of it for a lot of good reasons. This is how the big G establishes order in an otherwise chaotic open source model of software development.

• Deadline looms for Linux Light project

  LAMP-powered Light project needs $700,000 kickstart.

• Web inventor to keynote at Linux conference

  The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will be the fourth keynote speaker at the 14th annual Australian national Linux conference, the organisers announced today.

• Kernel Space

  • Good-Bye 386: Linux to drop support for i386 chips with next major release

  • Sorry Intel 386-DX/SX Owners, No New Linux for You!

  • Tux Themed Boots at Auchan in Poland

    They look pretty nice, costing around $20 for a pair. Unfortunately, there is no way to order them online. Anyone from Poland can hunt for them at a Auchan hypermarket though.

  • The Linux 3.8 Kernel Can Save A Lot Of RAM

  • Thunderbolt Support Still Has Problems On Linux

    While there were some initial problems with Thunderbolt support on Linux, most of the early problems with the new technology have been worked out with recent kernel updates. Unfortunately, some problems remain with this high-speed I/O interface.

  • Linux Begins To Support Windows 8 Multi-Touch

  • Linux Audio Driver Improvements On The Horizon

    The audio/sound pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel has been sent in and it features audio driver improvements, new capabilities, clean-ups, and more.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Radeon R600 Back-End Merged Into LLVM

      After being in development for the past year, AMD’s Radeon R600 LLVM back-end has been merged into the upstream LLVM code-base.

    • X.Org Server 1.13.1 Pulls In The Fixes

    • AMD R600g HyperZ Support Is Now In Better Shape

      It was just days ago that the R300 Gallium3D driver got HyperZ support fixed-up and was finally enabled by default for bettering the OpenGL gaming performance with the open-source Linux graphics driver. Now it looks like the newer R600g driver is getting into shape for properly handling ATI/AMD HyperZ.

• Applications

  • Nitro: A Beautiful Task Management App For Linux

  • A Slew Of Performance Improvements To Hit Compiz

    While publishing this morning was a large Ubuntu 13.04 OpenGL desktop performance comparison using six desktop environments and five different GPU/driver configurations, to result in 30 different data points for multiple Linux games, also announced today were forthcoming Compiz performance improvements. To land soon will be a number of performance enhancements for the Compiz compositing window manager.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Creating a book cover with Inkscape

    • corps: bespoke text codecs

    • Bash Script – Protect your server from DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) Attack

    • UI tags make Struts look good

  • Games

    • RuneSoft Releases Another Linux Game on Desura

      RuneSoft, a company that specializes in porting games to Linux platform, has released Cultures: Northland real time strategy game on Desura.

    • Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition: one step closer to Tux

    • Steam Linux to Launch Open Beta Next Week

    • Humble Indie Bundle 7 Will Be Worst Humble Bundle Ever For Linux

      Clarification — It seems that the Humble Botanical Bundle was originally referred to as “Humble Indie Bundle 7“. The games mentioned in this article are not accurate, rather the result of a drunken Google session and a “Jump To Conclusions” mat. Our apologies.

    • ‘Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition’ Coming to Linux

      Much awaited role playing game Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition will be coming to Linux platform.

    • Steam to become an Open Beta next week!

      Considering that it also has Steam Workshop support it will be easy to keep your games alive by easily accessing new mods, maps, game modes etc. I have already personally tested the “Aliens” mod for Killing Floor (based on the James Cameron film Aliens) and it’s pretty awesome give it a look here.

• Desktop Environments

  • Cinnamon 1.6 Improves Workspace Efficiency

    The Cinnamon Desktop is becoming more impressive with every passing update. This release is the product of over 600 changes. Linux Mint 14 is the first distribution to ship with 1.6. Cinnamon 1.6 gives users a more convenient workspace management interface.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • SpaceFM Development Notes

      SpaceFM depends directly on bash, rather than just a general shell, so that custom commands and plugins are running in a well-defined, consistent environment. You can always use other kinds of script in SpaceFM, but the initial data integration is done with true bash.

      SpaceFM Dialog, a built-in feature of SpaceFM which allows custom commands to integrate dialogs into it (along the lines of zenity or yad), is also designed to have a predictable usage. Same for the socket commands which allow you to tap into and alter the GUI as its running.

      So overall, while SpaceFM may grow, or even its GUI toolkit or other key components may someday change, the goal is to provide a continuity to the user experience, and to honor the customizations the user has added. One big reason for this is that I am one of those users, and I don’t like having my stuff broken!

    • Testing GNOME 3 on family members

• Distributions

  • Archbang 2012.12 Review: Simple, light and fantastic

    My interest on Arch Linux is increasing with every passing Arch based distro review. Last week I used Bridge Linux and was fascinated by it. This week I spent considerable time in learning as well as using Archbang, another Arch Linux based operating system with Openbox window manager. It gave me performance comparable to Puppy Linux and I replaced my Lubuntu 12.10 installation with Archbang on my HP Pentium 4, 2.4 Ghz, 1.5 GB DDR RAM desktop. To say the least I am more than fascinated by its speed, versatility and ease of use.

  • New Releases

    • KDE Plasma And Applications 4.10 Beta 2 Out

    • Univention 3.1

    • Slax 7.0 released

  • Red Hat Family

    • RPM Fusion Now Available For ARM Based Devices

      RPM fusion is a unofficial RPM repository which hosts some of the restricted software that Fedora developers dont want to ship. Also, it contains some non-free software like Flash which are not available in Fedora official repos. Fedora is available for ARM devices, but unfortunately, there was no RPM fusion repo for ARM, so users couldnt listen to MP3 and other restricted formats. But from now on, you can add the repo to get non free codecs.

    • RHEV 3.1 – an overview about the new features

    • For Red Hat, Whitehurst changed his ways

      Having worked as operations chief for Delta Airlines (NYSE: DAL), Jim Whitehurst came to his role as CEO of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) with the belief that he’d give directions and they’d be followed. That’s the take Whitehurst himself shared in a recent forum.

      But when he got to the open source company, he found that some of his orders were followed while others were not. “He joked that he told his wife that he thought he might have to fire many senior leaders due to insubordination,” writes Forbes blogger Peter High.

    • Red Hat and Citrix Named In Top 50 Companies to Work for in 2013

    • Fedora

      • New Fedora Magazine for Users and Developers

        Máirín Duffy blog today of a new Fedora magazine in the works for Fedora users and developers. The idea sprang from marketing brainstorming and a desire to revive Fedora Weekly News, or revamp it as a new online publication to promote Fedora. Two guesses what it run on…

        Actually, Duffy said that the new magazine has been set up on WordPress blogging software on top of an OpenShift server. OpenShift is a platform as a service by Red Hat. She then explained briefly the mechanics of that for those interested. The skeleton is currently located at http://wp-fedoramag.rhcloud.com, but one could safely bet they’ll secure a better addy than that soon enough.

  • Debian Family

    • Star Wars Christmas Light Show Powered by Raspberry Pi and Debian

      There’s no doubt that the Raspberry Pi is an amazing little PC, but its users continue to make up new ways to show the device’s might.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Advocacy Development Kit Packaged

        • BeagleBoard XM Powered File Server Using Ubuntu

          Single Board computers like Raspberry pi and BeagleBoard have found wide range of applications among DIYers. This post tells you how to install Ubuntu headless server on a BeagleBoard single board computer and then configure it as a File Server using Samba (almost like a NAS). BeagleBoard XM is an OMAP3 board and works very well an ultra low power file server for my LAN and serves all types of media to my HTPCs running XBMC and my Raspberry Pi powered digital picture frame. So here is how to do it.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon Review Part 4

          • What To Expect From Linux Mint 15 (Cinnamon, Nemo Changes)

            Nemo (the target version for Linux Mint 15 is Nemo 1.8), the default Cinnamon file manager should get some new features as well, like an Actions API, disk management (with Mintdisk integration), a file preview feature and UI improvements (which include sidebar selection, independent path bar, better looking breadcrumbs and more).

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • New Tricks for New (and Old) Android Phones

        There’s a new crop of Android phones out there — and a new set of hidden shortcuts to make using your phone even easier. And even if you have an older model, I’ll share my favorite tools to get you the same functionality you would get with a brand-new device.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • An in-depth Nexus 10 review

      Google recently introduced its first 10-inch Nexus branded tablet, the Nexus 10, which boasts a stunning 2560×1600 (300ppi) IPS display and a slim/light/comfortable design. This in-depth review examines the Nexus 10′s hardware and user interface, and compares the Nexus 10 both to its smaller sibling, the Nexus 7, and to its 10-inch Android tablet competition.

    • Taiwanese manufacturers expect over 1 million Nexus 7 tablets to be sold in December

Free Software/Open Source

• Singapore needs Silicon Valley’s open source culture, says Meng Weng Wong of JFDI

• Video: a good year for open source in 2012

  Goldman Sachs reported late last week that Windows has gone from dominating 97% of the computing market to 20%.

• Limerick migrates to Zentyal’s open source email solution

  The city of Limerick, located in mid-west Ireland and, which at a population of about 110,000, is that country’s third largest city, has chosen Zentyal to migrate to an open source email solution.

  Zentyal is an open source solutions provider based in Zaragoza, Spain. Zentyal is the company’s main software offering, a server platform based on Ubuntu.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Organizes Competition For Open Source Online Games

      Mozilla corporation has organized the Game on competition for web based games. The goal of this competition is to demonstrate the web as a platform for game development.

    • Mozilla announces animated themes are going away in Firefox 18 for the sake of performance

      Mozilla on Tuesday revealed that it is killing support for animated themes starting with Firefox 18. The company is blaming performance issues as the reason for the decision.

    • Firefox OS simulator hits v1.0 as launch looms

      Mozilla’s in-browser Firefox OS simulator has hit version 1.0, an important milestone in the race to launch day. The foundation and its partners are expected to start offering low-cost smartphones in select markets in the coming months.

    • First Firefox builds with H.264 support appear (really)

      Back in November I ran a story that Mozilla added support for H.264 video to Firefox Nightly versions. Turned out that this was not the case after all, but a case of the NoScript plugin blocking the detection on YouTube’s HTML5 player site.

• SaaS

  • EMC Joins OpenStack Foundation, Eyes Open Source Cloud Deployments

  • Open source Q&A: OpenStack Foundation board member, Tristan Goode

    OpenStack is a collection of open source software for building public and private Clouds. It can be used either by providers that want to deliver infrastructure as a service to customers or enterprises that want a private Cloud for on-demand, self-service provisioning of compute services for departments. The roots of the project, which launched mid-2010, lie in collaboration between NASA and Rackspace. Tristan Goode is the CEO of Aptira and the only Australian on the board of the OpenStack Foundation.

  • EMC joins OpenStack, likens it to Linux development

• Databases

  • MySQL 5.6 to ship in early 2013

    Oracle’s enhanced open source database will be ready for general availability in early 2013 and the company is working on a future version with a pluggable UI, more NoSQL options and revamped architecture for web and cloud computing,

• CMS

  • What’s New in WordPress 3.5

• Funding

  • BountyOSS: A Crowd Funding Site For Free Software Projects

    We have heard about crowd funding sites for software, games and sometimes hardware ventures too. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc are leading croud funding sites in the world today. However, the world missed a site just for Free Software. This is where BountyOSS fills the gap.

• BSD

  • Linux Jails in PC-BSD

  • FreeBSD news wrap up (10 December)

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Interview with Kovid Goyal of calibre

    In this installment, I interviewed Kovid Goyal, the creator and lead developer of calibre, via email.

  • GNU Press debuts GNU beanies!

    Keep cozy this winter in our navy blue beanies with GNU embroidered in white on the side. They are 100% cotton, and the embroidered GNU logo is 2.16″H x 2.6″W. Pair the beanie with our hoodies in either the Free Software Free Society or GPLv3 designs, and you’ll stay warm this winter while representing free software!

• Project Releases

  • VLC 2.0.5 for Linux Arrives with Many Changes

• Public Services/Government

  • Open Source, Limerick City Council

• Licensing

  • What open source licensing could learn from Creative Commons

    I have been a critic as well as an admirer of Creative Commons. Last year, here on opensource.com, I noted that the CC license suite, though inspired by open source licensing, was at odds with norms of libre culture licensing by embracing, under a single legal brand, form licenses that prohibit commercal use and creation of derivative works. The result, I complained, was “a general confusing dilution of the meaning of ‘openness’ in the context of cultural works” and confusion on the part of both authors and users of CC-licensed material. Creative Commons has recognized at least some aspects of this problem in the course of its work on the 4.0 license series. (For example, there has been an interesting recent proposal to relabel the controversial NC licenses with “Commercal Rights Reserved.”)

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Make your street an open street

      The Open Streets Project should be your first stop if you’re interested in entering the open streets game. This collaborative project aims to help document Open Streets projects (so add yours to the map!), connect activists working on these projects, and provide them with the tools, resources, and facts to make projects a success. Check out their guide, click through examples of projects in communities everywhere, and reach out to learn about best practices and get help with challenges.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Team Solves Mystery Associated With DNA Repair

    ust copy its DNA. Specialized proteins unzip the intertwined DNA strands while others follow and build new strands, using the originals as templates. Whenever these proteins encounter a break — and there are many — they stop and retreat, allowing a new cast of molecular players to enter the scene.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • MI6 and CIA under scrutiny after ‘rendition’ court cases

    Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi (above) and his family have been paid a settlement of more than £2m by the British government after they were abducted and flown back to Tripoli – allegedly with the help of MI6 – where he was imprisoned and tortured by the regime of Colonel Gaddafi.

  • CIA ‘black jail’ interrogations were torture, European court rules

    He was “beaten severely” by masked men, stripped, “sodomised with an object” and placed in a “nappy”…

  • Op-Ed: German victim of CIA rendition wins case in European court

  • Report finds harsh CIA interrogations ineffective

    After a contentious closed-door vote, the Senate intelligence committee approved a long-awaited report Thursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.

    The 6,000-page document, which was not released to the public, was adopted by Democrats over the objections of most of the committee’s Republicans. The outcome reflects the level of partisan friction that continues to surround the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques four years after they were banned.

  • Drone Strikes Draw Congress’ Ire Over Lack Of White House Transparency

  • Congress outraged by the secrecy behind Obama’s drone war

  • Thirteen anti-drone protesters found guilty of trespassing

    Thirteen anti-drone protesters were convicted of trespassing Thursday night, and five were sentenced to two weeks in jail.

  • Drone protesters appear in DeWitt Town Court

  • The American Debate: Liberals quiet on drone war

    I’m amazed that so few Americans – most notably, so few liberals – have protested his secretive remote-control assassination program. Drones have killed roughly 3,000 people in Yemen and Pakistan, including collateral-damage civilians, but the actual numbers are secret. So is the process. We don’t know anything about the rules of engagement, how people wind up on Obama’s hit list, who reviews the evidence, and what criteria are applied to that evidence.

  • Drone strikes stir hatred of the U.S.

  • SLO drone manufacturer purchased by Lockheed Martin

• Cablegate

  • Media Oddly Silent on WikiLeaks Proceedings

    Some thoughts about Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing, which concluded this week.

    Manning, of course, is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks and, at his trial in March, will be pleading guilty to certain charges while rejecting the military’s contention that he “aided the enemy” in doing so.

  • Tomana to prosecute WikiLeaks suspects

    The leaked cables released minutes of meetings held by political leaders with US government officials where they divulged sensitive information about the country and their respective parties.

    Turning to another issue, Tomana vowed to continue prosecuting people arrested for allegedly insulting Mugabe saying the President was different from any ordinary citizen.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • At ALEC Meeting, Indiana Regulator Advises Coal Companies on Delaying EPA Climate Rules

    This is the case with the recent American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting in Washington, DC. Leaked documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal that ALEC’s anti-environmental jamboree was inundated with coal money and featured an Indiana regulator advising coal utilities on delaying US Environmental Protection Agency rules to control greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous air pollution.

• Censorship

  • US and UK refuse to sign UN’s communications treaty

    The countries had objected to calls for all states to have equal rights to the governance of the internet.

    But the breaking point was the addition of text relating to “human rights”.

    It marks a setback for the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which had said it was sure it could deliver consensus.

    “It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must communicate that it’s not able to sign the agreement in the current form,” said Terry Kramer the US ambassador to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Wcit).

    “The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years.”

• Civil Rights

  • Feinstein amendment doubles down on NDAA’s assault on constitutional rights

    (NDAA), which would have allowed for the indefinite detention of Americans without charge or trial…

  • “Nothing Can Justify Torture”: An Interview With Noam Chomsky on Obama’s Human Rights Record

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Belgian Newspapers Agree To Drop Lawsuit Over Google News After Google Promises To Show Them How To Make Money Online

      As we’ve been reporting, there’s been a movement underway in many countries to argue that something like Google News — which displays headlines, brief snippets and links to full news stories on newspapers’ own websites — somehow violates newspaper copyrights. This makes no sense logically, especially given just how much those same sites likely spend on “search engine optimization” to try to get better ranked in search engines. The only explanation for it that makes sense is the most obvious one: the newspapers are struggling to find ways to make money these days, and they see that Google is making a lot. Hence: come up with a plan to force Google to fork over some of that revenue. Of course, the very first to do this — years before Germany and France and others got into the game — was a group of Belgian newspapers who sued Google for sending them traffic. Amazingly, a local court agreed with the newspapers and told Google to pay up. Following this, Google removed those newspapers from its index, leading the newspapers to freak out and demand to be put back in.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux Format on Google Play Magazines

  Sorry for the lack of updates. We’re manically trying to finish 1.5 issues before Christmas. But we just wanted to let you know that, to coincide with the launch of Google Magazines in the UK, Linux Format is now available on Google’s magazine store – £4.99 per issue, £3.99 with a rolling subscription or £44.99 for the year. As always, DVD images are freely downloadable from http://www.linuxformat.com/archives. Issue 166 (the zombie one) should also be available on the Ubuntu Software Centre.

• Video: What a Year for Linux

  It’s also hard to ignore that this holiday season’s most popular gifts, like the Chromebook and Amazon’s Kindle HD, are all powered by Linux.

  Part of the reason Linux is experiencing so much success is because of the network effect created by its collaborative development enviornment: Embedded engineers work on power savings for their devices; that same code is then used in the data center to lower power bills. The defense industry improves the real time capabilities of the Linux kernel and automakers benefit and add to it. Also, because Linux has no branding restrictions, Android (of the Kindle or a Chromebook) can be Linux without you knowing its Linux. This freedom allows companies to innovate at a pace that is simply unmatched.

• Desktop

  • $299 version of Acer’s C7 Chromebook kind of defeats the purpose

    When we reviewed Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook, we didn’t think it was perfect, but we were willing to overlook many minor flaws in the face of its $199 asking price. Today, Slashgear unearthed an upgraded model—there’s an Acer product page that lists a $299 version of the C7 with a larger battery, 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB, and a 500GB hard drive instead of a 320GB model.

• Kernel Space

  • Linus Torvalds To 386: “I’m Not Sentimental, Good Riddance.”

  • Linux Ends Support for Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s 32-bit 386 Processors

  • GCC Developers Look At Dropping i386 Support

  • Torvalds Kicks Original Linux PC Into Dustbin of History

    On Wednesday, he severed a final tie with that box. He accepted a patch from developer Ingo Molnar that dropped support for Intel’s old 386 microprocessors, the brains of the DX33 system that Torvalds had purchased all those years ago. After a 15-year run, Intel stopped shipping 386 processors in late 2007.

    In his notes explaining the patch, Molnar said that the patch “zaps quite a bit of complexity from the kernel” and that it has caused extra work for Linux kernel developers over the years.

  • Linux 3.7 Now Supports New ARM Processor

  • Loongson Hardware Is Still A Tough Find

    While the Loongson MIPS64 CPUs have been available for a while now as a Linux-friendly chip, they are still tough to find in the western countries. New benchmarks reveal that the ARM SoCs are becoming a much more compelling offer for those caring about performance.

  • Cypress Trackpad Linux Driver Still Aiming For Mainline

  • AMD Puts Out APP SDK 2.8, CodeXL 1.0

  • ACPI Power Management Gets Improved In Linux 3.8

    The ACPI and power management updates targeting the Linux 3.8 kernel were already submitted to Linus Torvalds this morning. There’s a whole lot of new work to look forward to when it comes to power management in this next kernel.

  • The Staging Pull Goes In For The Linux 3.8 Kernel

  • zswap: compressed swap caching

    Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. If this process is successful, the writeback to the swap device is deferred and, in many cases, avoided completely. This results in a significant I/O reduction and performance gains for systems that are swapping. The results of a kernel building benchmark indicate a runtime reduction of 53% and an I/O reduction 76% with zswap vs normal swapping with a kernel build under heavy memory pressure (see Performance section for more).

  • AMD’s A-Sync DMA Code Makes For Fast Performance

  • V4L2 Support For DMA-BUF Will Come In Linux 3.8

  • Linux Version 3.7 Released

  • Linux drops support for Intel’s 386 processors

  • Linux 3.8 will drop support for Intel 386 chips

  • Linux 3.7 adds major new ARM processor support

  • Debian, Ubuntu and Arch Linux triple boot

  • Graphics Stack

    • Intel Still Hacking On Atomic Mode-Setting / Flipping

    • Gallium3D Driver Comes For Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge

      In prior years there was the i965g driver that was developed independent of Intel and was targeting an open-source Gallium3D driver for Intel’s newer chipsets. But unlike the i915g that was developed similar in nature, the i965g driver really never reached a working state and was ultimately removed. There is now a brand new “i965g” Gallium3D driver that is targeting support for Intel Sandy Bridge “Gen6″ graphics and newer.

    • AMD Catalyst 12.12 For Linux Released

    • NVIDIA 313.09 Linux Driver Packs New Features

      NVIDIA has released their first binary Linux graphics driver beta in the 313.xx series. The NVIDIA 313.09 Beta has bug-fixes plus new features to make for an exciting Linux gaming experience.

      The release highlights for the just-released NVIDIA 313.09 Linux beta include display reprobing upon VT switching to X, unofficial GLX protocol support for new extensions, cursor bug-fixes, support for the GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension, improving the performance of glDrawPixels() command by up to 450%, a libnvidia-encode.so library fix, improving the performance of OpenGL frame-buffer object binds with Xinerama by up to 2000~3000%, and fixing performance issues when using some versions of HyperMesh with Quadro GPUs.

    • X Input 2.3: Pointer Barrier Events, Barrier Releases

      As written about last week, X Input 2.3 is being worked on for hopeful inclusion into X.Org Server 1.14.

      The big features to the X Input 2.3 update are pointer barrier events and barrier releases. This X Input update once again was largely developed by Peter Hutterer at Red Hat. For going through these new input features for the X.Org Server, he’s written a blog post describing pointer barrier events and barrier releases.

    • Freedreno Gallium3D Driver Begins To Work

    • Marek Further Improves Radeon Mesa Performance

      With a patch sent to the Mesa development list on Monday, Marek Olšák has made another significant performance improvement to the commonly used R600 Gallium3D driver for AMD Radeon graphics cards.

• Applications

  • 15 Greatest Open Source Terminal Applications Of 2012

    Linux on the desktop is making great progress. However, the real beauty of Linux and Unix like operating system lies beneath the surface at the command prompt. nixCraft picks his best open source terminal applications of 2012.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • A Quick Guide to Linux File Permissions

    • Fixing My CD/DVD Drive on Kubuntu 12.04

    • Linux Mint 14 / Ubuntu 12.10 Slow Wifi with Ath9k Drivers + Solution

    • MSIEXEC parameters

    • How to clone and share a Git repository over SSH

    • Installing SugarCRM Community Edition On Fedora 17

  • Wine

    • Announcing CrossOver 12.0.0!

      I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released
      CrossOver 12 for both Mac OS X and Linux.

    • CrossOver 12 Released

      Today, the software company CodeWeavers has released a new version of the Windows emulation software CrossOver for Linux and Mac OS X. The new version is based on Wine 1.5.15 and now has a better integration with the desktop systems Unity and Gnome 3 and has a better support for transparent windows with an activated compositing manager.

  • Games

    • Linux Games: Spirits the modern version of lemmings

      Perhaps someone is old enough to remember the original Lemmings game, a puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991. Originally developed for the Amiga, Lemmings was one of the most popular video games of its era, the basic objective of the game is to guide a group of humanoid lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In order to save the required number of lemmings to win, one must determine how to assign a limited number of eight different skills to specific lemmings that allow the selected lemming to alter the landscape, to affect the behavior of other lemmings, or to clear obstacles in order to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings.

    • Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition Is Coming To Linux

      Back in August I wrote that a Linux port of the Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition game was being considered. There’s now word that a native Linux port of this game is indeed coming.

      The year 2013 is looking to be the year of Linux gaming and Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition of Overhaul Games will be among the native Linux titles. Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition is a remake of the original Baldur’s Gate role-playing game and its Baldur’s Gate Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. The game was released last month for Windows while the Mac OS X port is expected this month.

    • Valve Has A Christmas Present For Linux Gamers

      Valve is becoming quite comfortable with the state of their Linux activities so beginning next week will be a more “open” beta program. If you’re a Linux gamer who wasn’t yet selected to be part of the beta program, you should be able to gain access in time for the holidays. Help them test out their Linux ports to ensure the Valve Linux-based game console will be a great success.

    • Cultures : Northland now available on Desura, another may follow

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Amarok 2.7 Beta To Be Released Soon, Try Statistics Synchronization!

    • Why Kolab Groupware uses Submission

      Kolab Groupware has a strong focus on security, and data integrity – not just your own mailbox but the flow of traffic between you and your peers as well.

      Please allow me to take the opportunity to explain to you some of the background of what Kolab Groupware does, and why. In this blog post, I’m zooming in on our use of the submission port (587).

    • 15 years of KDE e.V. – Behind the Scenes

      As reported here two weeks ago, KDE e.V. has grown up since it was founded 15 years ago on November 27, 1997. From a body handling a few thousand euros for the yearly KDE meetings governed by a dozen members, it has evolved into a lean execution machine supporting many large and small events each year, taking care of legal matters, promotion, community management and more. KDE e.V. now has a dedicated employee and many members. Today, we take you on a virtual tour around Blue Gear Headquarters, to show you what’s going on at the German registered non-profit association and how it affects the KDE community world wide.

    • Qt 5.0 RC 2 released

      We are happy to announce that the second release candidate for Qt 5.0 has just been released.

• Distributions

  • LuninuX OS 12.10 Screenshots

  • The Brightest Distro Stars of 2012

    “By taking Linux away from the devs and instituting real quality control and making it truly UI-centric and consistent, Google has managed to do in a couple of years what dozens of distros absolutely failed to do in a couple of decades,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet, “and that was bring a Linux-based OS out of the nerds’ basements and into the home of Joe and Sally Average.”

  • New Releases

    • GParted Live 0.14.1-1 Stable Release

  • Gentoo Family

    • Who Needs Ubuntu? Steam for Linux Running Under Gentoo

      In the post I made last week about some of the system requirements Valve has been applying to select Linux titles on Steam, I mentioned that I’ve been curious to know how running the official Steam client would fare on other distros. After all, Linux is Linux at the core, so where there’s a will, there should be a way.

      Well, sitting around with a bit of time on my hands late last night, I decided to fool around and see if I couldn’t get the client to run under Gentoo. Believe it or not, a guide exists on making it happen, and it’s a good one. However, the one thing to bear in mind is that because few Gentoo installs are exactly alike, you may have immediate luck getting Steam to work or none at all. You’re likely to need updated packages, and you’re even more likely to run into some trial and error. C’est la Gentoo.

  • Red Hat Family

    • CPU Scaling On DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL

    • Fedora

      • Fedora Needs Help Testing Out NetworkManager

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Linux vs. Debian kFreeBSD With Squeeze & Wheezy

      This is far from the first time doing benchmarking of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the port of the Debian operating system that pairs the GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel. The last time doing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks extensively was back in July so new tests were warranted of 6.0.6 Squeeze and using the latest Debian testing bi-weekly images. The Debian testing ISOs used of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were dated from 3 December 2012. This testing not only shows how the Linux versus FreeBSD kernel performance compares with a similar user-land but how the Debian performance has progressed in moving from 6.0 Squeeze to 7.0 Wheezy.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • New Dash Icons Proposed for Ubuntu 13.04

        • Welcome to the new Ubuntu shopping centre

          A post on the official blog of Canonical, the compnay behind the GNU/Linux distribution, said that version 12.10 had taken “another important step towards fulfilling its intended purpose of being an online, global search tool that helps users find anything, instantly, right from their home environment”.

          This would be extended in 13.04 with the use of “smart scopes” – daemons capable of presenting local or remote information within the Dash (seen above with theresults of a search for the word Beatles) which is the search window for Ubuntu’s Unity interface. These “scopes” would be category-wise; depending on the search term a particular “scope” would be triggered.

          “For example, a search for “The Beatles” is likely to trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that will contain local and online sources – with the online sources querying your personal cloud as well as other free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, etc,” said the post, written by Cristian Parrino, vice-president for online services at Canonical.

        • Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Comparison: 6 Desktops, 5 Driver/GPU Combinations

          In this article are benchmarks of six different desktops (Unity, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and LXDE) on five different GPU/driver configurations (Radeon, Catalyst, Intel, NVIDIA, and Nouveau) running the very latest Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” development packages to look at the latest state of the Ubuntu Linux gaming OpenGL performance.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • KDE Plasma, Applications 4.10 Beta 2

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • New YotaPhone will feature LCD screen on one side, E-Ink on the other

      • 6.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 3 tipped for 2013

        Samsung‘s stylus-enabled “phablets” are set to get even bigger, sources in South Korea claim, with the Galaxy Note III tipped to have a whopping 6.3-inch display when it arrives in 2013. The growing smartphone stepped up to a 5.5-inch display in its second-generation, from the 5.3-inches of the original Galaxy Note, but according to whispers to the Korea Times, Samsung plans to maximize display real-estate with a new OLED model for the new year.

      • More details emerge about high-end ZTE Grand S

      • Google Chairman Says Android Winning Mobile War With Apple: Tech

        Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android is extending its lead over Apple Inc. (AAPL) in the mobile-software market at a rate that compares with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s expansion in desktop software in the 1990s, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said.

      • The real threat that Samsung poses to Apple

        The problem that Apple is facing right now has nothing to do with their designs being copied. There is a long history of copying in the tech industry; patents being deployed in lawsuits by giants often signify desperation more than anything else. Rather, the problem that Apple faces is that it now is going up against at least one competitor that has been a beneficiary of the scale that Apple has achieved on the business side. Samsung has clearly demonstrated that, like Asus, it was not satisfied being a low-margin ODM — of doing all the menial work while somebody else made the big bucks. Suing Samsung over Android patents isn’t going to change that — if Google’s operating system gets too expensive to use, there’ll be a switch made to Microsoft. Or to another operating system altogether. It doesn’t really matter, because design in the smartphone space has been commoditized. It’s good enough. Manufacturers are now creating performance that most consumers aren’t able to absorb. Instead, as we’ve moved into a world where performance is now “good enough”, the world has flipped into one where it’s the business side — operational scale — that matters most.

      • OwnCloud Android App Review

        onwCloud is one of the most important open source projects today, considering the invasion of ‘storage/data syncing’ cloud in our day-to-day life. This invasion is also posing a new threat to our privacy and ownership of our data, especially when there are players like Microsoft. It was quite shocking when Microsoft blocked access to a user’s account on finding some nude/semi-nude images in his SkyDrive folder. What was Microsoft doing in a ‘private’ as the user claims folder? Don’t confuse SkyDrive as your ‘private’ cloud where you can store whatever data you want. It’s not like a bank. The last think I would want is Microsoft peeping inside my SkyDrive folders. So, I would strongly recommend not to touch the SkyDrive even with a stick.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • In-depth review: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

      I recently spent a month using Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, running Android 4.0. Let’s find out what the tablet’s “Note” rather than “Tab” designation means, and how it compares to its less-expensive sibling, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and to Google’s Nexus 10.

Free Software/Open Source

• Migration to open source—a personal experience

  The term open source (OS) arose in late 90’s; although, much of modern internet infrastructure predated and evolved from active code sharing between researchers after the dawn of modern computing age. It is difficult to trace its origins due to space constraints, but suffice to say that it arose out of ambiguity in “fair use doctrines”, with significant access barriers for community to examine source code or modify it. Interestingly, these ideas have spawned crowd sourcing for open source hardware, notably robotics and influenced scientific publishing for open access traditionally encumbered by copyright protection. Over the time, several unique and hybrid models of licensing have evolved for implementation.

• The most talented youth choose open source tools

  At my public library job, all day long I help people use the library’s public access computers. At the end of a long day’s work, I enjoy kicking back and listening to some YouTube music videos. One way I do this is to search YouTube for new Bob Dylan cover songs. I search YouTube for: Bob Dylan cover, this week.

  Imagine my happy surprise to come across this fabulous multitrack video of Knockin on Heaven’s Door. But wait a second, is that a Tux penguin poster hanging on the wall behind this musician? Indeed it is. Hmmm, was that poster placed there intentionally, or was it just an accident?

• Apache web server, more than “a patchy web server”

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is readying itself for the 25th outing of its ApacheCon North America official conference, training and expo event.

  The foundation describes its remit and status as a group of “all-volunteer developers, stewards and incubators” of what amounts to nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives inside Apache.

• Events

  • ApacheCon North America Announces Schedule

  • Qt Developer Days 2012 Videos Released

  • Videos Of Qt Developer Days Berlin 2012

  • 25th ApacheCon North America Conference Series Announced

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Hack This Game

      Today, we’re proud to invite game designers, developers and enthusiasts everywhere to take part in this year’s Game On competition. We’re looking for your ideas and playable protoypes for gaming experiences that push the limits of what open Web technologies can do.

    • Mozilla announces Game On Competition

    • Firefox introduces improved private browsing

      A new Firefox feature is being added to the Nightly Builds, with oft requested private browsing mode used by many other browsers to eventually reach the release version

• SaaS

  • EMC Sees OpenStack As Much Like Linux

    It seems that nearly every tech titan under the sun is throwing its support at OpenStack. EMC is the latest giant to do so, now that it is an official, corporate-level sponsor of OpenStack. Since it owns most of VMware, when VMware recently joined OpenStack it became obvious that EMC would become a sponsor, too. In commenting on the arrangement, EMC officials are likening OpenStack development to Linux development. That’s an apt analogy, and it also tells us how important support and proper documentation and training are going to become in the future of OpenStack.

  • Dell commits to open-source software for its future clouds

• Databases

  • Couchbase 2.0 Advances Open Source NoSQL Database

• CMS

  • WordPress 3.5 Elvin Drums Along Open Source CMS

    That’s right I called WordPress a CMS (Content Management System) and not a blogging platform. With WordPress 3.5, officially released on Tuesday, the CMS moves forward with some incremental features.

    I’m a user of both self-hosted as well WordPress.com sites so I’ve noticed some of the WordPress 3.5 changes roll out over the last several weeks. WordPress tends to dogfood releases on the hosted WordPress.com platform first before making the full release generally available.

• Business

  • Open Source BI Considerations and Implications

    To prepare for software selection and to put all of the pieces together in terms of business and technical open source business intelligence implementation requirements, the following checklists will help you identify the tasks and considerations involved in planning your OSBI implementation.

• BSD

  • The Grinch That Delayed FreeBSD 9.1

    Originally the plan for FreeBSD 9.1 was to release it in mid-September, but the first release candidate was one month late along with the RC2 and RC3 releases. The plan was then updated to release FreeBSD 9.1 at the end of October, but that too passed. The latest schedule set the RELEASE announcement as going out on 12 November, but that clearly didn’t work either.

• Project Releases

  • Blender 2.65 Arrives – Most Stable Yet

  • [ANNOUNCE] PulseAudio 2.99.3 (3.0 RC3)

  • First Orion 2.0 Milestone rises

    The first milestone in the development of the browser-based IDE Eclipse Orion 2.0 has been released. A major focus in the development of Orion 2.0 is to bring node.js support to the IDE and while these are described as “large scale efforts” for future builds, the developers have decided to share a prototype of a node-based Orion server. Orionode, the prototype server, is a single user deployment of Orion running on node.js. “Having all the client and server tools written in the same language also raises some new possibilities and makes the Orion architecture very flexible” say the developers, but they note that the project is not ready for prime time yet.

• Licensing

  • What management should know about open source software

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • Robotics Hacker Erects Open Source ‘Lego for Adults’

      Jasen Wang once bought a home robotics kit. He had studied aircraft design in college and spent years at an electrics engineering outfit, but he still found the instructions completely incomprehensible. And the pieces were flimsy. And after he broke two of them, he gave up entirely.

• Programming

  • Why PHP Development Shows an Upward Trend in Open Source Development

  • REBOL 3 open source code arrives

    The latest version of Carl Sassenrath’s REBOL language has been published as open source, marking a major change in how the novel language is made available to the public. REBOL, a previously proprietary language developed by Sassenrath, the primary developer of AmigaOS, was first released in 1997 and is oriented towards task-specific language dialects or domain-specific languages to be used in processing. It has a number of “dialects” for purposes such as data exchange (load), programming (do), pattern matching (parse), function and object definition (make), and GUIs (layout or display). These dialects work together with a free-form syntax to provide an intriguing language, but one which has never become mainstream.

  • Sauce Labs Gives Open Source Projects Free Access to Testing Cloud

    Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of web application testing infrastructure for software developers, today announced Sauce Free Open Source Software accounts (Open Sauce), a new program offering open source developers free unlimited use of the Sauce Labs cloud for testing web applications.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Values of science at odds with desire to turn it into a commercial product

    Scientific software tools have long lived in the conflict zone between open source ideals and proprietary exploitation. The values of science (openness, transparency, and free exchange) are at odds with the desires of individuals and organizations to transition scientific tools to a commercial product. This has been a problem in neuropsychology and neuroscience for decades, and extends outside the bounds of software.

• Security

  • Security Hole in Samsung Smart TVs Could Allow Remote Spying

    The company that made headlines in October for publicizing zero day holes in SCADA products now says it has uncovered a remotely exploitable security hole in Samsung Smart TVs. If left unpatched, the vulnerability could allow hackers to make off with owners’ social media credentials and even to spy on those watching the TV using compatible video cameras and microphones.

  • Like a Hot Knife Through Butter

    More or less recently, an interesting line of attacks against software has been revisited, namely Hash-DoS, or, in a nutshell, exploiting weak hash functions used in a hash table implementation to trigger a denial-of-service.

    To the best of my knowledge, this problematic has been exposed as early as in 1998 in Phrack by Solar Designer, then variants have been discussed by Crosby and Wallach at USENIX 2003, formally defining algorithmic complexity attacks, by Klink and Wälde during 28c3 in 2011, applying the idea on PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, etc. and more recently by Aumasson, Bernstein and Bosslet (see their slides at Appsec Forum 2012, and their upcoming talk at 29c3), showing that the proposed solutions, essentially randomizing the hash function, were not always as effective as expected.

  • A hash-based DOS attack on Btrfs

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Judge in 9/11 trial OKs audio delays, censor at Guantánamo

  • Paul Gordon: It’s time for the CIA to tell the truth in the Olson case

    Dr. Frank Olson’s death is one of the more sordid events of those days when many then-Camp Detrick decisions were made by a Special Operations Division that joined with the CIA on biowarfare. The small Frederick group had the highest security clearance.

    [...]

    An autopsy revealed visible bruises caused by blunt force but few cuts.

  • City Council to consider banning drones

    Berkeley City Council is expected to vote Tuesday on a recommendation to adopt a resolution proclaiming Berkeley a “No Drone Zone.”

    If approved, the resolution, drafted by the city’s Peace and Justice Commission, will attempt to ban the unmanned aerial vehicles from Berkeley airspace and prevent city agencies from purchasing, borrowing, leasing, testing or otherwise using drones over the city. However, the resolution provides certain exemptions, including for some hobbyist use.

  • Police flying unmanned drones in Halton skies

  • The Pentagon Hopes To Arm Drones With Laser Weapons Inside Five Years

  • The collateral damage of drones

  • Drones increasingly used for surveillance in U.S.

  • Drones To Get Aircraft Carrier Test

  • European court of human rights finds against CIA abuse

  • US: Release Report that Addresses CIA Torture

  • Senate CIA Torture Report Adopted, Provides Factual, Comprehensive Review of U.S. Torture Program

  • CIA Torture Report Approved By Senate Intelligence Committee

  • CIA ‘tortured and sodomised’ terror suspect, human rights court rules

  • Historic ruling on Europe’s role in CIA renditions

  • Crazed NY Killer Says He Was CIA Operative “Ordered to Kill Jews”

    The demented suspect accused of gunning down three Brooklyn shopkeepers execution-style told cops he was a CIA operative ordered to kills Jews by Arab men, according to court documents.

  • Paul Gordon: It’s time for the CIA to tell the truth in the Olson case

  • Disgraced CIA Head Named ‘Most Fascinating’ Person of 2012?

  • NDAA Indefinite Detention Opponents File Supreme Court Emergency Motion

  • President Obama to Veto NDAA Over Guantanamo Restrictions?

    The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is asking all Americans who value civil liberties to urge President Obama to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA), which restricts his authority to transfer or prosecute detainees held at Guantanamo or to close the facility.

  • Supreme Court asked to strike down NDAA’s indefinite detention clause

  • How NDAA impacts Americans’ human, civil rights and martial law

  • NDAA Nullification Bill passes Michigan House 107-0

    Saturday, Rep. Tom McMillin discussed his joy that his bill led to the Michigan House of Representatives unanimously voting Saturday in favor of House bill 5768, a bill opposing NDAA indefinite detention, denial of due process, and prohibiting the state government from participating.

  • EDITORIAL: Drones over America

    In February, lawmakers on Capitol Hill passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which instructs the Federal Aviation Administration to compile rules allowing more drones to take to the skies, including for commercial purposes. The agency has forecast there could be as many as 30,000 airborne spies by 2020. The devices frequently carry high-resolution cameras capable of reading license plates, which, in combination with facial-recognition software, could recognize and track individuals, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.

    [...]

    The agency has forecast there could be as many as 30,000 airborne spies by 2020.

  • America’s covert drone war is out of control

    What is worse? Locking somebody up for years, without trial, while you try to find proof he is a terrorist? Or killing somebody whose name you don’t even know because his pattern of behaviour suggests to you that he is a terrorist?

  • The mass torture of drone strikes

  • Drones’ Body Count Reveals ‘Double Tap’ Kills

    The CIA or military drone “double tap” does more than ensure targeted militants or terrorists in Pakistan or Afghanistan end up dead — much evidence suggests that the practice also kills civilians who rush to help after the first strike. Such casualties become very apparent in a personal project by NYU student Josh Begley to tweet every reported U.S. drone strike since 2002.

  • Constitution should guide police use of drones

  • Florida state senator wants to limit drone use by police

    Drones are used by our military to spy on or even kill terrorists, but one Republican Florida lawmaker says we need to be careful on how we use them here in the United States.

  • DARPA contracts Nvidia to make drones smarter

  • Triple agent! Poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was working for British AND Spanish intelligence, says wife

  • McChrystal Working for UAE-Owned Arms Brokerage

    The firm is among the defense procurement companies owned by the Emirates Advanced Investments group, which is close to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. But unlike the other companies in the network, such as Abu Dhabi-based C4 Advanced Solutions, Knowledge International is incorporated in the United States.

• Cablegate

  • Julian Assange and Wikileaks

  • Assange plans 2013 from embassy refuge

  • The Trials of Bradley Manning

    Manning turns 25, in prison, Dec. 17, which is also the second anniversary of the day a young Tunisian set himself on fire in protest of his country’s corrupt government, sparking the Arab Spring. A year ago, as Time magazine named the protester as the “Person of the Year,” legendary Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg offered praise that rings true today: “The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as ‘Person of the Year,’ but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of ‘Person of the Year.’ And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning.”

  • Julian Assange plans to run for Senate seat in Australia

  • Julian Assange wants to run for office

  • Assange confirms bid for Senate seat

  • Julian Assange wants to start a WikiLeaks party and run for office

  • Julian Assange Eyes Australian Senate Run In 2013

  • Assange wants to run for Aussie senate as head of WikiLeaks Party

  • Julian Assange Wants to Run for Senate (in Australia)

  • WikiLeaks suspect treated as ‘zoo animal’

• Finance

  • Republican and Democratic “Remedies” Ensure More Crises, but Alternatives That Work Are Taboo

    Capitalism’s cyclical convulsions into recession/depression provoke three alternative government policy responses. The first, say Plan A, has the government do little or nothing. Corporations and the rich mostly prefer it. They believe government intervention to be counterproductive and unnecessary because private capitalism best heals itself. They also fear universal suffrage. Majorities might vote for politicians to undo the unequal income and wealth distributions produced by capitalist economies. By minimizing government interventions, Plan A protects private capitalist systems. Thus, Bush repeated in 2007-2008: The downturn was limited, would be shallow and short and would “self-correct.” European business and political leaders agreed. They were all wrong.

  • 9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

    A gang of brazen CEOs has joined forces to promote economically disastrous and socially irresponsible austerity policies. Many of those same CEOs were bailed out by the American taxpayer after a Wall Street-driven financial crash. Instead of a thank-you, they are showing their appreciation in the form of a coordinated effort to rob Americans of hard-earned retirements, decent medical care and relief for the poorest.

    Using the excuse of a phony, manufactured crisis known as the “fiscal cliff” – which isn’t a crisis at all, as economist James K. Galbraith has succinctly explained — they are gearing up to pull the wool over the public’s eyes by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The CEOs are part of the Fix the Debt campaign run by the
    -backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to unleash tens of millions pushing for a deficit reduction deal that favors the rich.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • From Capitol Hill, Rep. Hank Johnson Highlights ALEC Connection to MI Right to Work Law

    U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) took to the floor of the House of Representatives Wednesday night to criticize the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for pushing “Right to Work” in Michigan, describing it as politically motivated “crush-the-union legislation” and noting the identical language between the ALEC model and Michigan’s law.

• Privacy

  • Lebanese Internal Security Force Requests Facebook Passwords, Text Messages Of All Citizens In The Country

    Here at Techdirt, we’re used to seeing national security agencies make overly broad requests for personal data, often under the premise that the crime (or crimes) committed justifies these fishing expeditions that are as “targeted” as dropping a nuke into the ocean and keeping everything that floats to the surface. Vague assurances are usually given that any data not considered “relevant” will be discarded or ignored and, as such, couldn’t possibly be considered a violation of privacy.

    The Lebanese Internal Security Force looks like it might take the prize for Most Overreaching Data Request.

  • Facebook voting is gone, but privacy issues just get worse

• Civil Rights

  • Open Source Developer Bassel Khartabil Moved to Syrian Military Prison

    EFF has been calling since July for the immediate release of open source software engineer and Creative Commons volunteer Bassel Khartabil, detained in Syria since March of this year. Many other groups and thousands of individuals have professed support for Bassel, expressing deep concerns to the Syrian authorities and signing onto a letter of support.

  • NDAA Indefinite Detention Opponents File Supreme Court Emergency Motion

  • Number of jailed journalists sets global record

    Worldwide tally reaches highest point since CPJ began surveys in 1990. Governments use charges of terrorism, other anti-state offenses to silence critical voices. Turkey is the world’s worst jailer. A CPJ special report

  • Lords says yes to Section 5 reform

    As Baroness Smith of Basildon noted: “it is nearly a year since the Government launched their consultation on public order policing and whether the word “insulting” should be removed from Section 5 of the Public Order Act. In the Committee on this Bill-a good five months after the close of the consultation-the Minister said that he hoped that at Report stage, the Government “will be able to put forward the Government’s considered view to the House”. Since then, the Government had a further five months to come to a decision, and yet-unless the Minister is going to make an announcement this evening-even at this stage, we still have not had a public announcement from the Government about their position, or about the findings and evidence from the consultation which your Lordships’ House has asked for.”

    However, Lord Taylor responded for the Government: “the Government strongly holds the view that the word “insulting” should be retained in Section 5 of the Public Order Act. The Government have a responsibility to protect the public so that communities and law-abiding citizens can live in peace and security. The police must have the powers they need to meet this responsibility.”

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • How we can get fast broadband for all

    In its editorial last week, European Voice asked me to identify myself and what I stand for. I am delighted to have that opportunity.

    My goal is to get every European digital: improving the lives of young and old. Europe must be equipped with the right legal frameworks and broadband networks to enable huge new digital opportunities, and give us a much-needed growth boost.

    A modernised copyright system is indeed one essential element, benefiting both creators and consumers. So I am delighted that over the coming year, Michel Barnier, Androulla Vassilliou and I will be working hand in hand on the most urgent issues.

• DRM

  • Wii U’s restrictive DRM is a baffling throwback

    The new Nintendo Network ID system that debuted on the Wii U is a sign of progress for a company that has, historically, not shown a lot of savvy in setting up its online systems. The Wii U lets users connect up to 12 separate Nintendo Network IDs to a single system and use those IDs to easily connect with online friends and strangers. The new Wii U eShop includes many retail games for download on the same day they reach stores, and does away with the “Wii Points” virtual currency that characterized Nintendo’s previous console. The company has even promised to roll out a cloud save feature sometime next year.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Apple’s Classic Mac Startup Chime is now a Registered Trademark

  • Copyrights

    • Infographic: People Will Pay To Support Creators, Even When Free Is An Option

      Back when we first launched the Insider Shop, we made two PDF ebooks available at any price you choose: Mike’s Approaching Infinity (on new business models and the economics of abundance) and our Sky Is Rising report on the state of the entertainment industries. More recently, we launched three fiction titles by our own Tim Geigner—Digilife, Echelon and Midwasteland—also available on a pay-what-you-want basis. They were an instant hit, and we’re in the process of preparing new ePub versions.

    • Voltage Pictures Thinks Canada’s New Copyright Law Opens The Door For More Trolling

      You may recall Voltage Pictures not because it once made a movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture (Hurt Locker), but because it was basically the first Hollywood studio to embrace copyright trolling. This is the company whose boss, Nicolas Chartier, once said that anyone who criticizes his company for copyright trolling is a moron and a thief (and that was in response to a rather friendly and polite email to Chartier suggesting that copyright trolling might hurt the company’s reputation in the long run). While some of its earlier efforts to sue thousands of people at once (in once case it sued nearly 25,000 people in one shot) have run into difficulties, Voltage just won’t quit. A quick check of the records shows that it’s still been filing new lawsuits in the US (among smaller groups) and trying to make the case for proper joinder by using the “swarm” theory: that if all the IP addresses are a part of the same swarm, they’re all connected in the legal issue (of course, they miss the fact that this would likely also mean that the total sum that could be collected would be split among all defendants).

    • Porn trolling firm dogged by identity theft allegations

      Prenda Law, the ethically challenged law firm that specializes in mass pornographic copyright lawsuits, is facing growing pressure to answer questions about allegations of identity theft. Last week, we reported on a Minnesota federal court filing by Alan Cooper, a former caretaker for Prenda’s John Steele. Cooper has accused Prenda of naming him as the CEO, without his knowledge or consent, of two shell companies that have been filing mass copyright lawsuits around the country.

    • DMCA Copyright Takedowns To Google Increased 10x In Just The Past Six Months

      they were receiving approximately 250,000 DMCA takedowns a week. Today, it’s up to 2.5 million per week. That’s in just six months. Because that’s insane, I’m going to repeat it: in just six months, the number of DMCA takedowns that Google receives has increased by a factor of 10 from 250,000 per week to 2.5 million.

    • Supreme Court Asked to Review $222K Landmark File-Sharing Case

    • Verizon Determined to Expose BitTorrent Copyright Trolls

      It’s now apparent that Verizon is fed up with the avalanche of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits and is determined to put an end to copyright trolls’ extortion-like practices. The Internet provider is asking a Texas court to grant discovery so it can expose how these companies operate. According to Verizon, copyright trolling practices don’t belong in court and the ISP equates the companies involved with “schoolyard bullies who push and shove until firm opposition is met when they shrink away.”

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Push to develop open source software

  On December 11, Linux released a new version of its operating system (OS). The explosion of web platforms and business is in part due to Linux and the push to develop open source software.

• Chromebooks for classrooms: $99 for the holidays

  For many students and teachers, the hassles of traditional computing often prevent them from making the most of technology in the classroom. Schools that have adopted Chromebooks, however, have been able to bring the web’s vast educational resources—whether it’s conducting real-time research or collaborating on group projects—right into the classroom. Chromebooks are fast, easily sharable, and require almost no maintenance. Today more than 1,000 schools have adopted Chromebooks in classrooms, including some school districts like Richland School District Two (S.C.), Leyden High School District (Ill.), and Council Bluffs School District (Iowa) who have deployed Chromebooks to tens of thousands of students.

• Most Popular Linux Downloads and Posts of 2012

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.7 ARMs for the Future

    Linux has long been about more than just x86. With the new Linux 3.7 kernel, the open source operating system is improving its multi-architecture support with a significant improvement to the way that ARM support and development is handled.

  • XFS File-System Gets Fixed Up In Linux 3.8 Kernel

  • 64-bit ARM/AArch64 Continues To Bake In Linux 3.8

    ARM Holdings has more improvements for their ARMv8 AArch64 architecture with the Linux 3.8 kernel that just officially entered the first stages of development.

  • Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support

    Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux kernel no longer supports Intel’s 80386 processors.

  • Linux drops support for Intel’s 386 processors

  • Linux Kills Support For Intel’s 386 Processors

  • Linux 3.7 released, bringing generic ARM support with it

  • Linux Kernel 3.7 goes 64-bit for ARM

  • EMC joins OpenStack, likens it to Linux development

  • Graphics Stack

    • Radeon HyperZ R300g Performance

    • Freedreno GPU Driver Still Being Actively Developed

      While there hasn’t been much to report on with the open-source Freedreno driver in recent months — a reverse-engineered attempt at creating a free 3D driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno/Snapdragon graphics processor — it’s still being developed with new Git commits continuing to be common.

    • Intel Still Sorting Out Haswell On Linux

      Intel should finally have Haswell graphics support on Linux in shape with the Linux 3.8 kernel after earlier admitting they screwed up, not all areas of the open-source GPU driver support are polished ahead of the big Haswell CPU launch in 2013.

    • Gallium3D LLVMpipe Isn’t Yet Fit For ARM

    • OpenGL Transform Feedback For LLVMpipe

    • DarkTable 1.1 Supports OpenCL For Images

    • Gallium3D UBO/TBO Support Emerges – More GL 3.x

      In addition to pushing OpenGL transform feedback for Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe, David Airlie has released a new patch-set for Uniform Buffer Objects (UBOs) and Texture Buffer Objects (TBOs) within Mesa’s Gallium3D infrastructure.

    • X Input 2.3 Patches Bring Pointer Barrier Events

    • Marek Takes On MSAA Gallium3D Improvements

    • X.Org Server 1.14 Feature Window Closing

    • Lima GPU Driver Faces Changes, Advancements

    • Nouveau Lights Up The GK106 Kepler

      Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs pushed out new code this morning into the Nouveau DRM driver repository. In addition to some video BIOS work and other changes, initial support for the NVIDIA GK106 GPU was pushed into this reverse-engineered open-source driver.

    • A Deep Look Into GPUs & Linux Graphics Drivers

      Martin Peres, the developer who has been a longstanding contributor to the Nouveau graphics driver project, delivered two presentations at a recent French Linux event where he provided an introduction to graphics processors and the Linux graphics driver stack. The second talk focused upon GPUs and Linux drivers in much greater detail.

    • Intel Merges ETC2 Texture Compression In Mesa

• Applications

  • Fotoxx Is a Bright Photo Editing Adolescent but Its Future Is Iffy

    Fotoxx is not well known, but its obscurity is not necessarily a bad thing. It is very capable at editing and managing photo collections. What might be a problem is future development. It seems the developer has abandoned it out of frustration over the difficulty of packaging it into various Linux distro formats. So you must rely on other software centers to download Fotoxx if your distro’s repository does not include it.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to clone and share a Git repository over SSH

  • Wine

    • Wine 1.5.19 Has Performance Improvements, More C++

  • Games

    • Return to Castle Wolfenstein on GNU/Linux

      Like most iD titles, RTCW was ultimately released under the GPL, and is thus available as a GNU/Linux native game. Installing it under Gentoo is as simple as “emerge games-fps/rtcw”, but unfortunately the game itself no longer works in modern GNU/Linux systems. This is only to be expected with proprietary software that becomes abandoned, and would affect the operation of that software on any OS, but naturally it doesn’t have to be that way with Free Software, which can be revived at any time, even years later.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • A New Build Of Qt 5.0 Surfaces For Testing

      Digia has put out a new Qt 5.0 package for those interested in testing out this major tool-kit update that will hopefully be released before month’s end.

      Just days after releasing Qt 4.8.4 with 170+ improvements and sharing they hope to release Qt 5.0 by the end of the year, a new version of the Norwegian tool-kit is available for testing.

    • Qt 5.0 Release Candidate – Final In About One Week

    • Season of Giving

      For KDE, giving is always in season. In 2012, KDE community members all over the world met and collaborated with a strong desire to produce the best software possible. They’ve spent countless hours delivering new features, while supporting existing versions with timely releases and bugfixes. Working with students in programs such as the Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In and the Season of KDE, KDE mentors gave time and guidance towards developing new technical talent. Truly, the KDE Community thrives by giving all year round.

• Distributions

  • CPU Scaling On DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL

  • New Releases

    • Toorox 11.2012 Screenshots

    • 6 Linux Distros Born in 2012

  • Debian Family

    • Running Debian With The Linux x32 ABI

      /li>

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Coming in Ubuntu 13.04: Purchases from the Desktop

        • Ubuntu Accomplishments 13.04 Update

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Sony’s 2013 flagships tipped, Q4 might see a quad-core Cortex-A15 beast with a huge battery

        Sony already rose to prominence among Android manufactures this year, snatching the 2nd place from HTC, with just the almighty Samsung before it. If the rumored Sony Yuga/Odin flagships for the first half of next year are any indication, it might also carry this trend into 2013.

      • Pantech Vega IM-A860 leaks, yet another Full HD quad-core beast

        …Full HD smartphones are set to become the norm rather than the exception in a short while

      • Former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki says ‘real men use Android’

        One of the more prolific Apple figures of the 1980′s, Guy Kawasaki, loves his Android smartphones and tablets. So much so, in fact, he no longer uses Apple mobile devices.

      • Fortune Exclusive: Larry Page on Google

        The press-shy Google CEO talks about mobile computing, his tussles with Apple — and the future of search.

      • Android Won. Windows Lost. Now what? The Battle of the Century is Decided. Microsoft relegated to ever smaller PC corner as Google conquers the world

        Android Won. Windows Lost. Now what? We have passed the tipping point now, the balance has tipped and can’t be flipped. The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks – and collect consumer insights on our consumption.. Ok. The numbers for Q3 are in, inwhat I anticipated to be the “smartphone bloodbath” three years ago, that would last long into this new decade. That was then, when the battle was joined, and since have called and the battle of the century, the battle for the pocket, the battle for the platform to control the digital destiny of humanity.. that battle, the biggest race of all time – has been won. Already? But we barely got to know you? Yes.

      • Apple’s First Professional Fanboy Has Ditched The iPhone

        Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple, has jumped ship from iOS to Android.

        In an interview with Dan Lyons of ReadWrite, Kawasaki said that he’s a diehard Android fan.

        Kawasaki switched to a phone running Google’s mobile operating system about a year ago so that he could use a 4G LTE network.

        [...]

        Even after Apple released the iPhone 5, Kawasaki stuck with Android because he thinks “Android is better.”

      • Motorola Mobility Ceasing Operations In South Korea.

      • Hulu Plus for Android rolls out children’s section

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • The PengPod Linux Tablet Is Becoming A Reality

      The PengPod tablet, which allows for dual-booting Google’s Android and Ubuntu/Linaro on an ARM-based tablet, is becoming a reality after it was successfully crowd-funded.

      While the PengPod calls itself the “true Linux tablet” and it’s interesting that it will support both Android and Ubuntu/Linaro, it isn’t too interesting from just a end-user who just wants a compelling Linux tablet. The PengPod isn’t shipping until early next year and the hardware inside is already dated by the latest-generation Android/Linux tablets on the market.

    • Fuhu’s nabi XD is a quad-core 10.1-inch tablet for tweens

Free Software/Open Source

• Irish City Adopts Open Source Business Server

  The city of Limerick, Ireland, is known for a lot of things: the infamous “broken treaty” of 1691, Gaelic sports and the eponymous form of poetry. Now, the town is also aspiring to become a model for deploying open source in government. It completed the latest move in that process this week with the adoption of the Zentyal Small Business Server and Zarafa groupware suite.

  Limerick is hardly the first local administration in Europe to consider moving to open source software solutions. Plenty of other municipalities and larger government organizations have made similar migrations. The French ministry of police, for example, has adopted Ubuntu, and the city of Munich, Germany, is in the midst of a long-term effort, called LiMux, to migrate fully to open source platforms.

• Global open-source vendors gain new leg up in selling to US agencies, thanks to favorable Talend ruling

  Open-source provider Talend has received a favorable advisory ruling from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency concerning the government’s ability to purchase open-source software, opening the way for all software vendors to increase their share of business with US federal agencies.

• OpenKit to release open-source social mobile gaming services with no lock-in for developers

• Road Kill Data Tracks Animal Migration Patterns via Open Source App

• Representing women in STEAM and open source

  The figures for female developers in open source are not much different at 2-5%.

• Events

  • ApacheCon North America Announces “Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation”

  • ApacheCon North America moves south for 2013

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the program and dates for its annual ApacheCon North America conference. The main conference will take place between 26 and 28 February 2013 in Portland, Oregon under the general theme of “Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation”. The two days before the start of the main conference will be filled with training as well as barcamp and hackathon style events, beginning on 24 February. After the main conference, sprints and workshops will be held until 2 March when the event officially concludes.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox OS Simulator Hits Version 1.0

      Although it is still calling it a technical preview, Mozilla has delivered an official version 1.0 of its Firefox OS simulator, and promises that it will run on many more systems, including Linux systems that previously had problems with it. Mozilla has been making some noise about its entry into the mobile OS business, and has smartphone partners lined up to deliver phones running Firefox OS in emerging and developing markets. Here are more details on version 1.0 of the simulator.

• Databases

  • Couchbase 2.0 Advances Open Source NoSQL Database

• CMS

  • WordPress 3.5 brings new theme and media workflow

• Healthcare

  • VistA e-prescribing module is now open source

    Oroville Hospital in California has made the e-prescribing module it created for the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) open source, making it available for free to any private organization that uses VistA.

• Business

  • Asahi Technologies Announces the Launch of Open Source Implementation Services for Small Businesses in New York.

    Open source technologies play a vital role in helping small businesses achieve desired capabilities at minimal cost. To help SMBs implement open source software in their environment, Asahi Technologies has launched cost effective open source implementation services in New York.

  • Semi-Open Source

    • ForgeRock aim to bring open source stack concept to IAM

      With ‘a new approach to identity management’, the UK recently saw the launch of ForgeRock.

• Project Releases

  • QEMU 1.3.0 Picks Up Many New Features

  • Blender 2.65 Fixes 200+ Bugs, Couple New Features

  • White Source Releases New Jenkins Integration

    White Source, the leading provider of SaaS Open Source Lifecycle Management solutions, announced today the release of a new Jenkins integration.

• Public Services/Government

  • Open source’s fortunes in Poland could be about to change, thanks to education

    Open source has had a mixed reception in Poland’s public sector, with some government agencies actively blocking efforts to increase uptake of the software. But the situation could be set for a reversal, after changes in the education sector.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • OA and the UK Humanities & Social Sciences: Wrong risks and missed opportunities

      Someone once said to me that the best way to get researchers to be serious about the issue of modernising scholarly communications was to let the scholarly monograph business go to the wall as an object lesson to everyone else. After the last couple of weeks I’m beginning to think the same might be said of the UK Humanities and Social Sciences literature. I get that people are worried, even scared. I can also see some are stirring up mud behind the scenes to get academics and editors angry. But the problem is that people are focussing on the wrong problems and missing the significant opportunities to rejuvenate H&SS in the UK.

  • Open Hardware

    • The Arduino Esplora Is An Open-Source Controller Packed With Inputs

    • Arduino Esplora, the first open source gaming pad!

      Meet the Arduino Esplora, an open source Arduino Leonardo based gaming pad that can be used in DIY Gaming projects, to control robots or just about any other project where a hand held controller is needed. Sporting an Atmega32U4 AVR microcontroller with 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connection capable of acting as a USB client device, like a mouse or a keyboard.

• Programming

  • ARM Cortex-A15 GCC Compiler Tuning Performance

  • Dropbox Hires Away Google’s Guido Van Rossum, The Father Of Python

    The original open source software “Benevolent Dictator For Life” and author of Python, Guido van Rossum, is leaving Google to join Dropbox, the startup will announce later today. Van Rossum was a software engineer at Google since 2005, and should be a huge help as Dropbox is built on Python. He’s the latest big hire by the cloud storage startup that’s capitalizing on its 100 million-user milestone.

  • LLVM Developers’ Meeting 2012 Videos Posted

• Standards/Consortia

  • Intel Proposes Tool To Auto-Convert Code To C++11

    An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM’s Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner.

    Edwin Vane of Intel Canada has called for comments on his proposal to develop a Clang-based tool using the LibTooling library for automatically transforming C++ code-bases to take advantage of modern C++11 features without needing any manual code rewriting.

Leftovers

• I saw that shortly after I had posted the link

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.

• Security

  • Metasploit Goes Phishing

    The Metasploit penetration testing framework has always been about finding ways to exploit IT, in an effort to improve defense. The new Metasploit 4.5 release from security vendor Rapid7 goes a step further than its predecessors, offering a new phishing engine and updated exploit modules.

    “The phishing engine is part of a larger Social Engineering module that supports a wide range of client-side exploitation and security assessment capabilities,” said HD Moore, chief architect of Metasploit and chief security officer for Rapid7.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • YOUR CIVIL LIBERTIES: Drones and the NDAA act. Why Obama needs the NDAA

  • Keep eye on drones

    …more than 100 federal, state and local government entities to fly drones within U.S. airspace.

  • FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.

  • The DIY Armed Drone

    The video is pretty scary.

  • Picture 2012: An Israeli Drone at a Swiss Air Base

    Azerbaijan, for example, cut a $1.4 billion arms deal with Israel in February; dozens of drones were included in the package.

  • Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich try to force release of drone data

  • US congress to vote on drone attacks tomorrow

  • Josh Begley Tweets Entire History of U.S. Drone Attacks

    Drone strikes have increased exponentially under President Obama, yet the program remains shrouded in secrecy.

  • America’s drone war is out of control

    …unnamed suspects are targeted, based on their pattern of behavior.

  • Civilian deaths cause by US terror drone hits spur UN concerns

  • Paul, Kucinich Demand Holder Provide Legal Justification for Drone Deaths

  • Counting the casualties of Barack Obama’s drone wars

  • Thirteen anti-drone protesters to be tried in DeWitt court

    The 13 will defend themselves without using attorneys.

  • NATO drone crash in Helmand province of Afghanistan

  • Drone bill draws concerns

    Negron said drone surveillance is “Orwellian” and “Big Brother at its worst,” but he said the bill’s terrorism exception is reasonable. He plans to add another exception allowing for drone use with a search warrant.

    If law enforcement believes nefarious activity is afoot and it has probable cause, it could get a warrant from a judge for a set amount of time, Negron said.

  • Julian Assange: The Fugitive

    Julian Assange has been trapped in Ecuador’s embassy in London for six months. Will he ever come out? He spoke to Philip Dorling.

    [...]

    But Assange clearly finds his circumstances oppressive.

  • Ecuadorian Embassy! Thurs 20th December 6.30! See ya there! Solidarity, Songs, Speech!

  • U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects CIA’s Motion to Squash Lawsuit on Bay of Pigs History

  • Slugger George Will Strikes Out in His Column on Drones

    Even someone convinced that we need some sort of drone war ought to be alarmed at the specific one being waged.

  • Homeland Security increasingly lending drones to local police

    Far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, a Predator drone was summoned into action last year to spy on a North Dakota farmer who allegedly refused to return a half dozen of his neighbor’s cows that had strayed onto his pastures.
    The farmer had become engaged in a standoff with the Grand Forks police SWAT team and the sheriff’s department. So the local authorities decided to call on their friends at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy a multimillion dollar, unarmed drone to surveil the farmer and his family.

  • This Time, Trust Anonymous WMD Claims–They’ve Got ‘Specific Intelligence’

  • US uses rumours of chemical weapons to underpin threat of action in Syria

  • U.S. Commandos’ New Landlord in Afghanistan: Blackwater

    U.S. Special Operations Forces have a brand new home in Afghanistan. It’s owned and operated by the security company formerly known as Blackwater, thanks to a no-bid deal worth $22 million.

  • Former Thai PM charged over deadly crackdown on red-shirt protests

    The Thai authorities have charged the former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva over the use live ammunition that led to civilian deaths during a military crackdown on an anti-government protests in 2010.

  • TSA: They Confiscate Your Personal Property And Then Sell It At A Profit

    [TS] confiscate your personal property, acquired for nothing, then sell it for a profit

  • Retired Military Leaders Call on SSCI to Adopt CIA Torture Report

    Washington, DC – Twenty-six of the nation’s most respected retired military leaders today urged the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) to adopt a report on CIA interrogation and detention practices and to make it public with as few redactions as possible. The Committee is planning to vote on the report’s adoption tomorrow, December 13.

  • Pressure on Barack Obama over CIA rendition of innocent car salesman

    America has never apologised for accidental rendition of Khalid el-Masri, a German car salesman of Lebanese birth who was arrested by Macedonian border guards in December 2003 and handed over to the CIA and flown to a detention centre in Afghanistan known as the “salt pit”.

  • U.S. judge orders 9/11 suspects’ CIA experience kept secret

  • Testimony on CIA’s treatment of 9/11 suspects at Guantanamo to remain secret

  • Sept. 11 Judge Limits Disclosure of U.S. Sources, Methods

    The military judge overseeing the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks granted a U.S. government request to limit disclosure of classified information about “sources, methods and activities” used in fighting terrorism.

  • Judge Rules Torture Testimony at Guantanamo Military Commission Can Be Censored

  • Senate Unanimously Passes 2013 NDAA; Power to Arrest Americans Remains

    Just after 5:00 p.m. Tuesday, the Senate did it again. By a vote of 98-0 (two senators abstained) lawmakers in the upper chamber approved the Fiscal Year 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Not a single senator objected to the passage once again of a law that purports to permit the president, supported by nothing more substantial than his own belief that the suspect poses a threat to national security, to deploy the U.S. military to arrest an American living in America.

  • Sublime and Ridiculous Items on CNN

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Rare note of harmony at Doha as action agreed on black carbon

  • Biodiversity offsetting will unleash a new spirit of destruction on the land

  • South Korea drops plans to resume whaling

    Proposals to conduct ‘scientific’ whale hunts similar to those carried out by Japan provoked storm of international criticism

• Finance

  • Wall Street Bank Cuts 11,000 Jobs After Paying Ousted Executives $14 Million

  • Former Defense Officials Call For Military Spending Cuts

    Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen is going on the offensive once more, this time in pursuit of cuts to military spending.

    Mullen, who has previously called the national debt the “most significant threat to our national security,” is heading the new Coalition for Fiscal and National Security along with several other foreign policy luminaries. The group, operating out of the Peter G Peterson Foundation, is seeking to influence the debate surrounding the fiscal cliff by lending th

  • Digital Rights Groups Shut Out of Secret TPP Negotiations

    Right now, EFF representatives in Auckland, New Zealand are being shut out of the 15th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe. Hundreds of delegates and private representatives from the 11 participating nations are gathering at an Auckland casino to discuss this contentious trade agreement. EFF joins KEI, the Stop the Trap Coalition, Derechos Digitales and many other organizations representing public interest concerns to sound the alarm over the TPP’s intellectual property chapter.

  • Secrecy the Standard as Canada Enters Trans Pacific Partnership Talks

    Despite growing opposition in Canada, the Canadian government has begun formal participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, aimed at establishing one of the world’s most ambitious trade agreements. As nearly a dozen countries – including the United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Mexico and Vietnam – gathered in New Zealand last week for the 14th round of talks, skeptics here have already expressed doubts about the benefits of the proposed deal.

    Canada has free-trade agreements with the United States, Mexico, Chile and Peru, leaving just six countries – currently representing less than 1 per cent of Canadian exports – as the net gain. Moreover, the price of entry may be high, since leaked documents suggest the deal might require a major overhaul of Canadian agriculture, investment, intellectual property and culture protection rules.

  • The Obscenely Rich Men Bent on Shredding the Safety Net

    The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a huge, and growing, coalition of powerful CEOs, politicians and policy makers on a mission to lower taxes for the rich and to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the cover of concern about the national debt. The group was spawned in July 2012 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, architects of a misguided deficit reduction scheme in Washington back in 2010. By now, the “fixers” have collected a war chest of $43 million. Private equity billionaire Peter G. Peterson, longtime enemy of the social safety net, is a major supporter.

  • Goldman Sachs’ Global Coup D’etat

    Steadily – and stealthily – Goldman Sachs is carrying out a global coup d’etat.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Despite Super PACs Finding Limited Success in 2012, Money in Politics Will Escalate

    With final receipts tallied, spending on the 2012 federal elections has topped $6 billion, making it the most expensive election in the history of the world — and absent reform, election spending is certain to escalate in coming cycles.

• Privacy

  • Facebook nation — privacy loses to indifference

  • They Know What You’re Shopping For

    Georgia resident Andy Morar is in the market for a BMW. So recently he sent a note to a showroom near Atlanta, using a form on the dealer’s website to provide his name and contact information.
    His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.

  • Facebook blames policy changes on low user vote

    Despite claiming to offer its users some semblance of democracy, Facebook has made the changes it wants to its policies – blaming users themselves for not bothering to vote on a topic which received little promotion from the company.

    Last week, the site opened the polls to give its users the chance to vote on how Facebook handles people’s data, and, ironically, a plan to get rid of the site’s policy to let users vote in the first place. But it has now said that participation was not high enough to reach a consensus from its users.

  • Get Ready for Ads that Follow You from One Device to the Next

    A former Google advertising scientist is behind a service that matches people across devices to serve more targeted advertisements, while promising to protect their privacy.

  • Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans’ text messages

  • This is out of hand now: Apple attempts to trademark the LEAF

    Specifically, Apple wants to protect the leaf on its company logo. Apple applied for to the European Trademark Registry on 3 December, with the help of London lawyers from Edwards Wildman.

• Civil Rights

  • Soul and the city – words from graffiti artist Mohammed Ali

  • Journalists attacked while covering protests in Egypt

    New York, December 7, 2012–CPJ condemns a series of attacks on journalists covering protests in Cairo over the proposed constitution and calls on authorities to investigate the assaults and bring an immediate end to the anti-press violence. At least five journalists were struck by rubber bullets, leaving one in critical condition, and several others were assaulted, according to news reports.

  • State media regulation? Ask the reporters in Turkey’s jails how it works

    When journalists make trouble for the PM in Istanbul, the tax inspectors or counter-terrorism officials soon appear in the newsroom. So now almost no one makes trouble

  • Speak Justice campaign fights impunity in press murders

    The tortured and decapitated body of 39-year-old María Elizabeth Macías Castro was found on a Saturday evening in September 2011. It had been dumped by the side of a road in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican border town ravaged by the war on drugs. Macías, a freelance journalist, wrote about organized crime on social media under the pseudonym “The Girl from Laredo.” Her murder, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, was the first in which a journalist was killed in direct relation for reporting published on social media. It remains unsolved.

  • Washington state admits “sex trafficking” law is unconstitutional

    The state of Washington has abandoned its defense of legislation passed earlier this year that could have exposed website operators to legal liability if they inadvertently hosted advertisements for child prostitution. The Internet Archive, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, challenged the legislation in June. They argued that the law was unconstitutionally broad and that it conflicted with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants website providers broad immunity against liability for hosting material posted by third parties.

  • Julian Assange: Nabeel Rajab is a prisoner of conscience and he must be released

    “I last saw Nabeel Rajab, the President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, in March 2012. Nabeel flew to the United Kingdom, where I interviewed him for my television programme The World Tomorrow. While he had been on the plane, his house had been surrounded by armed police.

  • Come along to our MP Lobby Day

    On Monday December 17 Open Rights Group will be at Parliament letting MPs know that the Comms Data Bill must go back to the drawing board and calling for a review of digital surveillance.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • UN internet regulation talks in Dubai threaten web freedom

  • WCIT-12 leak shows Russia, China, others seek to define ‘government-controlled Internet’

    Leaked proposals from the U.N. WCIT-12 summit show Russia, China, and similar regimes are making a bid to define the Internet as a system of government-controlled networks

  • Authoritarian regimes push for larger ITU role in DNS system

  • U.S. ambassador on WCIT: Keep the Internet out of this conference

  • UN proposal to grant all governments equal ‘rights’ in managing the Internet has been withdrawn

    In a key victory for the United States’ delegation at the ITU moot in Dubai, a proposal backed by Arab states, China, and Russia has been beaten back. Or, put another way, it has been pulled from discussion, rendering it over for the time being.

  • US prepared to walk out of ITU talks over internet regulation

  • WCIT – China And Russia Withdraw Bid For Greater Control Of Internet

  • Verizon attack on Internet misguided

    According to Verizon’s third-quarter reports, net income rose 15%, to $1.59 billion (56 cents per share), up from $1.38 billion (49 cents a share) a year ago. According to Verizon Communications Inc., its wireless business reported record high margins and improved revenue and still on pace to meet its 2012 financial goals. SAN FRANCISCO – OCTOBER 04: A pedestrian walks by a Verizon Wireless retail store on October 4, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Verizon Wireless is set to give refunds to 15 million of its subscribers who complained of “mystery fees” on bills for services that they did not initiate. The total could end up being over $90 million in compensation.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Who’s Following Your Family?

  • Copyrights

    • The British have no fight in them any more

      In the summer of 1981, I sneaked out of my parents’ home in Altrincham to sit on the wall of a churchyard and have a smoke. A police car roared up. The officer ordered me to get indoors and stay there. You will find this hard to believe, but I was an argumentative young man. I replied that the police had no right to order a British citizen to do anything when he was not committing a crime or – and I added this caveat carefully – giving the constabulary reasonable grounds to suspect that he might commit a crime.

    • Google Files Another Motion to Dismiss Viacom’s YouTube Lawsuit

      In the ongoing fight over whether YouTube owes Viacom billions of dollars for hosting copyrighted material, Google gets cute with a 1373-page filing.

    • Copyright clampdown

      How we use the internet and access to music, books, and films are at risk in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, sector groups claim. Geoff Cumming hears their concerns

    • Oracle v. Google: Java API Copyrightability Put to the Test in Smartphone Technology Battle

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• For Shaadi.com, Ubuntu Scores Over Windows

  For all CTOs and IT managers, bringing costs down and deploying easy-to-use technology is the biggest challenge. Shaadi.com has addressed this issue by relying on the open source model. Over a year, more than 50 per cent of the users in the company have migrated to Ubuntu from proprietary software.

• Consequences of Dell Embracing Ubuntu

  Desktop Linux for brand new computers has come a long way. Not too many years ago, consumers had fairly limited options in this space, but today we have more options than I could have ever imagined.

  One company offering desktop Linux on new systems is Dell. After seeing mixed success with its first line of Ubuntu PCs, Dell dumped Ubuntu almost entirely. But now Ubuntu is back with Dell’s new ultrabook offering.

• New PlayStation PSN Web Store blocks Linux computers

  Sony again snubs Linux users with a PS3 by refusing access to the new SEN Web Store, with a generic error message giving no rhyme or reason

• Top 5 Linux Predictions for 2013

  Linux has grown its dominance on the list of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers, now owning the top 10 positions and 93.8 percent of the OS share among the Top500 systems. That’s up from 91 percent two years ago. Based on the technology behind these top systems, there does not seem to be any slowing for Linux, certainly not in 2013.

• GNU/Linux Desktop Predictions for 2013

• Top Linux Trends 2012-2013

• A Linux USB Loader with EFI Support [Mac Only]

  SevenBits has written a new Mac Linux USB Loader tool that allows you to take an ISO of a Linux distribution and make it boot using EFI on Mac.

• Server

  • Fujitsu Selects Wind River Portfolio for RAID Next-Generation Disk Storage System

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.7

  • Linux 3.7 arrives

  • Linux Works Towards True CPU Hotplug Support

  • An Overview Of The Linux 3.7 Kernel

    With the release of the Linux 3.7 kernel being imminent (it might even be out today), here’s an overview of the features and highlights of this 2012 holiday release of the Linux kernel.

  • What’s new in Linux 3.7

    Linux 3.7 has more robust Intel and NVIDIA graphics drivers, support for ARM64, can handle NAT for IPv6 and has better Btrfs performance. These are just some of the enhancements in the latest version of the Linux kernel.

  • Linux 3.7 arrives, ARM developers rejoice

    Only months after the arrival of Linux 3.6, Linus Torvalds has released the next major Linux kernel update: 3.7. The time between releases wasn’t long, but this new version includes major improvements for ARM developers and network administrators. The 3.7 source code is now available for downloading.

    Programmers for ARM, the popular smartphone and tablet chip family, will be especially pleased with this release. ARM had been a problem child architecture for Linux. As Torvalds said in 2011, “Gaah. Guys, this whole ARM thing is a f**king pain in the ass.” Torvalds continued, “You need to stop stepping on each others toes. There is no way that your changes to those crazy clock-data files should constantly result in those annoying conflicts, just because different people in different ARM trees do some masturbatory renaming of some random device. Seriously.”

  • Linux Kernel 3.6.10 Is Available for Download

  • Freescale and others join Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation has announced five new members today including embedded processor maker Freescale. Freescale say that the Linux Foundation hosts important embedded work such as the Yocto Project and collaboration with OpenEmbedded, so its membership and an increase in contributions to the ecosystem is a natural move. Consultancy Amarula Solutions has also joined, bringing its “extensive experience in mainlining patches, drivers and machine-layer code in the Linux kernel” to the group, and is looking to collaborate more widely.

  • New Linux Foundation Members involved with Telecoms

    The Linux Foundation has announced that new members have joined the foundation, which include Telecom and Web Storage firms

  • New Members Join Linux Foundation, Prioritize Linux Investments for 2013

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Amarula Solutions, Freescale, SIM Technology Group, Superb Internet and Symphony Teleca are joining the organization.

    Linux has emerged as the dominant operating system in a variety of markets over the last decade. It has seen major advancements this year in its role for embedded development and cloud computing. An accelerated pace of development to support these areas is expected for 2013. The Linux Foundation’s newest members are joining the organization now to maximize their investments in Linux for these areas as they prepare for the New Year.

  • There’s Another Linux Kernel Power Problem

    After last year discovering a major Linux kernel power regression that was widely debated until the Phoronix test automation software bisected the problem to get to the bottom of the situation, there’s more active power regressions today on the Linux desktop. As I’ve mentioned on Twitter and in other articles in weeks prior there’s a few regressions, but one of them for at least some notebooks is causing a very significant increase in power consumption. This situation that remains unresolved as of the Linux 3.7 kernel can cause the system to be going through about 20% more power.

  • Graphics Stack

    • AMD Releases New Radeon Code: A-Sync DMA Engines

      A second update to the Radeon DRM driver has been released that will be pulled into the Linux 3.8 kernel. This second Direct Render Manager update for the Radeon kernel driver provides new code from AMD that was kept internally for months but is now permitted for open-sourcing.

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Novosoft Launches New Handy Backup along with Linux Solution

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Control Dash Search Results in Ubuntu

    • How to Change CPU Affinity of CPU Intensive Multithreaded Applications (Ubuntu)

    • Monitoring your server with tmux

    • du Know How Big Your Linux Files Are?

    • How to customize the GRUB 2 in Ubuntu

    • Web Served, part 4: Get your database on

    • Reditr Beta Arrives, DEB Package Makes Installation Super Easy in Ubuntu

    • Tags take Struts beyond the basics

    • The state of low-level, system programming

    • How to Change CPU Affinity of CPU Intensive Multithreaded Applications (Ubuntu)

    • How To Install XFCE On Linux Mint 14

    • Installing KVM Guests With virt-install On Ubuntu 12.10 Server

  • Wine

    • Darling – Wine for Mac Apps

  • Games

    • Valve confirms Steam Box coming in 2013, says it will compete with next-gen consoles

      Hot on the heels of the surprisingly-well-received Big Picture mode, Valve has confirmed that it will release a “Steam Box” video game console sometime in 2013.

    • Gabe Talks More About Valve’s Next-Gen Linux Console

      The Video Game Awards happened on Friday night in California. During the event, Gabe Newell of Valve commented a bit more on their next-generation console / living room PC plans. To no surprise, Linux plays a big role.

    • Valve’s New Games Hardware not as Open Source as Expected

    • Valve’s Linux Based Console May Arrive Next Year

      Earlier, there had been some rumors that Valve’s support for Linux has been due to the fact that they are going to ship their own Linux-based console. However, they were mostly rumors and we had no proof or evidence. Now, Gabe Newell has made some comments which show that Linux based console may be a reality soon. According to Kotaku.com, Valve’s next step is to get Steam Linux out of beta and to get Big Picture on that operating system, which would give Valve more flexibility when developing their own hardware.

    • Valve Confirms They are Working on a Steam Box

      Gabe Newell confirms the company is working on hardware to compete with next generation consoles.

    • Could Valve Join Ouya in the FOSS Game Platform Fray?

      A few weeks ago, we reported that after several years of slim pickings for Linux gamers, things really began to heat up on the Linux and open source gaming front. Valve, which has delivered very attractive game bundles through its Steam service on non-Linux platforms, has been driving lots of progress, and has delivered the beta version of Steam for Linux.

      Valve has also taken its Big Picture mode–a couch-friendly user interface for games and content consumption–out of beta testing. And now, there are reports that Big Picture mode and the Steam for Linux beta may be teamed up for a new type of gaming platform for living rooms everywhere.

    • ‘Legends of Aethereus’ Linux Version Ready, New Trailer Launched

    • Sidescroller Run Off: Bit.Trip Runner Vs Canabalt [Review]

      Amongst the mélange of Humble Indie Bundle titles are two side-scrollers with similar, yet unique takes on well-timed spacebar mashing: Canabalt and Bit.Trip Runner.

    • Corsix-TH Theme hospital open source engine updated!

    • Revenge of the Titans updates!

      Revenge of the Titans which is quite frankly an awesome game and my complete favourite from the Humble Bundles 2&3 has received an update which you can find either on your Humble Accounts if you purchased those bundles or via their own website of course which will enable you to use this new mode.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Time to refresh some air

    • Glow with the power of Awesome

      That reminded me of the fact I forgot to blog about the new version of Slim Glow that will be in 4.10.

      The most noticeable change is that the system tray icons, share-like-connect icons, and others are now based on the awesome Font Awesome by Dave Gandy (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome)

    • KDE Welcomes Trojitá, Offers Multiple E-Mail Clients

• Distributions

  • Manjaro Linux Review – Linux Distro Reviews

  • Bridge Linux 2012.12 Review: Arch Linux a bit simplified

    I haven’t tried out Arch Linux yet but I plan to do so next year. Mostly my experience is concentrated on Ubuntu, Fedora and their derivatives. Now with every passing release all these distributions are getting heavier and resource consuming. Puppy is a definite saving grace, no doubt. But, as an user I want to create my own lightweight all purpose operating system using Arch. Further, the rolling release of Arch is a definite advantage, once you set your system, you don’t need to re-install every alternate year.

  • ZevenOS 5.0 Review: Is it better than Xubuntu 12.10?

    With Ubuntu 12.10 out, Ubuntu derivatives are releasing their final version as well. ZevenOS and OS4 are couple of such distros, both provide a cocktailed version of Xubuntu with some added benefits, of course. In this review I’ll provide insights of ZevenOS and in my next review will take on OS4. They offer more or less similar proposition and could have reviewed them together as well.

  • OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 Review: What’s the difference with ZevenOS?

    It is kind of a peculiar feeling to use Linux distros who look and feel very similar. I am talking of ZevenOS 5.0 and OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1. Both got released in 5 days apart and have striking similarities, at least at a high level. Same Xubuntu fork with a BeOS theme, it is difficult to distinguish them from each other.

  • New Design for Slax.org, Preparing Final Release

    Just in time for the expected final release of Slax 7.0 on Monday after all this time the web site has had a makeover as well to serve as a visual reminder that a new age for Slax has truly arrived. This is the first release using KDE 4, and possibly Blackbox as low resource alternative, and also the first one since a sponsor was secured. Slax 7.0 will be available to order on 16 GB USB flash drive for $25.-, and there are now localized versions in the download section. There’s a new page with all relevant documentation to get you up and running, and the developer has moved his personal blog over.

  • ROSA Desktop 2012 preview

    The first and last Release Candidate of ROSA Desktop 2012 was announced last week. This means, of course, that the stable edition will be hitting a download mirror near you very soon, likely before Xmas. ROSA Desktop, an end-user edition, is published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia, which also publishes ROSA Desktop Enterprise.

    In real terms, the difference between ROSA Desktop and ROSA Desktop Enterprise is that the former will ship and always have the latest and greatest editions of the Linux kernel and software, bleeding edge, if you like, while the later will ship with Debian-style stable versions of applications and the Linux kernel.

  • DragonFlyBSD, CentOS, Ubuntu, Solaris Benchmarks

  • New Releases

    • Webconverger 16.0

    • [LuninuX OS] Well, Hello… – Release 12.10 Stable

    • SMS version 2.0.2 Released!

    • Slax is revived after three years of silence

      After what the main developer calls “more than three years of silence”, the Slax project is back under active development and its developer has released version 7.0 of the small Linux distribution aimed at live usage. The project now sports a redesigned web site which will host a new module catalogue that will tie in with the Slax Software Center in future.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • OpenMandriva: It’s Almost a Done Deal

      Today Charles-H. Schulz blogged to share that “the statutes of the “OpenMandriva Association” have been sent to the French authorities and the incorporation process has thus started.” Schulz admits originally being skeptical that Mandriva would ever be truly open, that was until he spoke personally with Mandriva SA CEO Jean-Manuel Croset.

      Schulz continued by saying that the transition to the new community directed project and migrating all the infrastructure is “somewhere around 80%” complete and that none of it would have been possible without the commitment from Jean-Manuel Croset. He said, “It is not everyday you see an example of a community who gains its independence with the blessing and dedication of its former steward.”

    • OpenMandriva becoming fully independent

    • The December 2012 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst Opens Up

      Jim Whitehurst, the President and CEO of Red Hat has had an interesting career to date. He was a consultant for a number of years, joined Delta Air Lines right around September 11, 2001, and played a big role in securing the future of that company as its Chief Operating Officer, and now is the President and CEO of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s first billion dollar open source company. Whitehurst and I recently spoke as part of my Forum on World Class IT podcast series, and hearing him compare his time at Delta to his current role at Red Hat struck me as an interesting case example in how older generation businesses and newer technology firms differ in terms of culture, hierarchy, collaboration, and the like.

    • Red Hat’s New OpenShift Enterprise looks to make PaaS an On-Premise Solution

      Red Hat, world leaders in open source solutions to provide high-performing cloud, virtualisation, storage, Linux® and middleware technologies, have launched OpenShift Enterprise, their new product designed specifically for installation as an on-premise solution within private, public and hybrid cloud data centre.

    • Red Hat Speeds Up Open Source Virtualization Race

    • Fedora

      • Bye bye, Miracle Beefy, Welcome Spherical Cow

        Every new Fedora release, is a good time to test and see new features, normally I start testing on Alfa, but now after installing it on a test machine did not have to much time to play with it.

        Another thing that change on my test is was I installed instead of using preupgrade, the main reason, Fedora 18 has a new installer so I wanted to see how good it was.

      • The Future Of Fedora Gets Debated, Again

        Being hotly discussed this weekend within the Fedora development camp is in regards to the future direction of the Linux distribution.

        Tomas Radej, a developer at Red Hat issuing a statement from the position of a Fedora contributor/community member rather than his employer, volleyed a long message on the Fedora devel list about “where are we going?”

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 295

        • Ubuntu One ‘Referral Space’ Goes AWOL

        • Coming in Ubuntu Linux 13.04: instant purchases from the desktop

        • Desktop Zoom, Animations in Ubuntu 12.04/12.10 Makes it Look Flashier, More Functional

        • Meet Ubuntu Linux 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’: Pictures

        • Canonical will turn Ubuntu 13.04 into an Amazon shopping trolley

          SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Canonical is set to anger its longstanding users once again by saying that Ubuntu 13.04 will offer users the opportunity to shop at Amazon from their desktop.

          Canonical has done a very good job of alienating large parts of its user base in the past two years through its decision to push the Unity window manager and then foisting an opt-out system on them in which local system search terms are sent to Amazon. Now the firm has said it will offer users the chance to buy products from Amazon directly from the control panel on the Unity desktop, which is called the Dash.

        • Ubuntu 13.04 To Allow Purchases From the Dash

        • Shuttleworth: Ubuntu’s goal is one OS from phones to supercomputers

        • Canonical founder hopes Ubuntu on mobile devices will lure more desktop users

        • Kicking Off The Ubuntu Advocacy Developer Kit

          This content would make it easier for advocates to get going, instead of navigating the wealth of unorganized content on the wiki and variety of promotional materials. The ADK provides a set of curated content that gets someone up and running quickly.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Elementary OS Luna Review

            I remember those days when the name elementary used to refer themes, now we are looking at a review of a distribution developed by the same team. I must note that this is the review of the beta release of elementary OS Luna. Any minor annoyances or rough edges will probably be fixed before the final release. That said, I have no idea when the final release of Luna will be available.

          • Linux Mint 14 OEM Has Been Released

            Clement Lefebvre proudly announced a minutes ago, December 10, the immediate availability for download of the OEM installation images of the recently released Linux Mint 14 operating system.

          • Linux Mint 14 OEM released!

          • Review: Linux Mint 14.1 “Nadia” MATE + GNOME 3/Cinnamon

            Wow. It’s been a really long time since I’ve had the time to sit down and do a review like this. The reason for that is because this semester has been incredibly busy in pretty much every way, and today was finally the last day to turn in problem sets and other assignments. Now, I can finally do this review.

          • Elementary OS 0.2 Luna Beta 1 Review

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi for Schools – The Free Software Column with Richard Hillesley

    The Raspberry Pi can be the affordable route to teaching schoolchildren the lost idea that computer programming can be fun

  • 4 things I have learned since I was given a Raspberry PI

  • Phones

    • Can HP’s webOS Rise from the Ashes?

      Forget Android and iOS—a team of enthusiasts plans to bring HP’s much-admired webOS back from the scrap heap.

    • Android

      • Android Candy: Never Plug In Your Phone Again!

        Last month, I showed you an awesome audiobook player app for Android, but I didn’t share my frustration in getting the audio files on to my phone. When I plugged my phone in to the computer, I couldn’t get the SD card to mount, no matter what settings I changed. It was very frustrating and forced me to come up with a better way. Enter: FolderSync.

      • LG Working On Optimus G2 with 5.5″ Full HD Display?

        The year 2012 has not been a good year for android manufacturers, with an exception of Samsung which hit success with high volume sales. While Samsung captued the largest smartphone market share, other manufactures failed to report profits.

        Surprisingly LG is on the path of turning things around. Everything changed for the South Korean company after the significant success of LG Optimus G and then the runaway hit of LG manufactured Google Flagship device Nexus 4, which still has a huge backorder.

      • Samsung Galaxy Camera gets an open-source bootloader

        There is certainly no shortage of dedicated devs and modders working on hacking Android-powered devices to make them more useful and customizable.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Allwinner introduces dual and quad-core tablets

      The Allwinner A10 single-core chip has been a relatively popular chip with Chinese device makers due to its low price and decent performance.

      That’s the processor that powers the original MK802 Android 4.0 Mini PC and a number of other mini PCs. It’s proven popular with tinkerers, because Android isn’t the only supported operating system. Users have been installing Ubuntu and other Linux-based software on Allwinner A10 devices for months, and the PengPod line of tablets are expected to ship soon with a desktop Linux operating system preloaded.

    • 9 Android Tablet for Kids these Holidays

      That’s not to say LeapPad or similar tablets are any lesser in quality but Android tablets you get more flexibility and choice. Additionally, if you are doubtful if your toddler is big enough to handle a tablet or benefit from it completely you can get a cheap one and try it! Now let’s move on to the top nine Android based children tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open Source into 2013; 10 Predictions

• Revamping the first open source groupware solution

  Many heroes will remain unsung because there is no-one to tell their story. I first came across this story over eight years ago, and three years ago it became connected with my own. The hero in our story is an unlikely candidate for heroism: a public sector body in Germany, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

• Samba Team Releases Samba 4.0 – 1st Free Software Active Directory Compatible Server

  Do you remember when the Samba team won against Microsoft before the EU Commission, and they won the right to buy the documentation and use it like this? This result is part of that story, as the work was created using the official protocol documentation published by Microsoft. But times have changed, and Microsoft helped make this happen. That means it’s legal. So go ahead and use it. They even got a nice quotation from Microsoft for the press release.

  Samba is one of 11 open source projects that leading software integrity vendor Coverity has certified as “secure” and has reached Coverity “Integrity Rung 2″ certification. What I like the best about the Samba team is that it’s proven to be a no-sellout zone. “If you want to become a member of the team then the first thing you should do is join the samba-technical mailing list and start contributing to the development of Samba,” it says on the site.

  This is FOSS history, so it belongs right here in our archives. I lived that whole Samba-Microsoft saga, and it feels so right to see it bear such fruit. It’s what courts are for, and it’s why I am very grateful to the EU Commission, the Samba guys for not wimping out when everyone else did, and to the lawyers, especially Carlo Piana, for making it happen.

• DSD releases resilient open source forensics tool

  Security boffins within the Defence Signals Directorate have released an open source forensics tool that improves the process of “carving out” target data stored within other file formats.

• Defence researchers create open source forensics tool

• Open Source Software Used by Majority of Developers, Survey Reveals

  The term “open source” was tossed around like any other tech buzzword some time ago. Many predicted the philosophy’s eventual demise or, at best, relegation to hobbyists. Few expected open source software to take hold in the enterprise, citing security concerns and lack of technical support beyond the community of developers itself. Now, however, open source has graduated from idealist’s dream to a ubiquitous presence in the toolkit of most software developers.

• Ten to the dozen: number of developers using open source

• The secret ingredient in open source

• GraphBuilder is open sourced

• Events

  • OpenStack India Event

  • Digit at Foss.in – India’s largest free and open source conference

    About a week ago, Foss.in, India’s largest free and open source conference completed another successful year in the running. If you weren’t there at the event, then read our day-by-day round up of the proceedings to catch-up.

  • Inspirations from FOSS.in 2012

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Google Accidentally Transmits Self-Destruct Code to Army of Chrome Browsers

      The problems were short-lived, but widespread. Over at Hacker News — a news discussion site that tends to attract Silicon Valley’s most knowledgeable software developers — a long thread quickly filled up with dozens of crash reports. “My Chrome has been crashing every ten minutes for the last half hour,” wrote one poster.

      This may be a first. Bad webpage coding can often cause a browser to crash, but yesterday’s crash looks like something different: widespread crashing kicked off by a web service designed to help drive your browser.

      Think of it as the flip side of cloud computing. Google’s pitch has always been that its servers are easier to use and less error-prone than buggy desktop software. But the Sync problem shows that when Google goes down, it can not only keep you from getting your e-mail — it can knock desktop software such as a browser offline too.

    • Google Chrome May Be Set for Next-Gen Features in Working with Displays, TVs

      Next-generation browsers may be built to connect with external displays and devices in brand new ways, and there are signs that the Google Chrome team may lead some of these efforts. According to a new set of posts, Chrome may take on new protocols and an API for communicating with “first screen devices,” and more. Here are the details.

• SaaS

  • This CEO Is Creating The Next Billion Dollar Open Source Company

    As part, of UC Santa Barbara’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Eucalyptus Systems’ CEO, Marten Mickos shared his advice regarding what it takes to be a serially successful entrepreneur.

  • In-Q-Tel an Investor in Big Data Open Source Provider Cloudera

    In-Q-Tel is investing in big data firm Cloudera as part of that company’s newest venture capital round, All Things D reports.

    Cloudera raised $65 million in its latest round from IQT, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.

  • Is Cloud Computing Killing Open Source Software

    The best thing about open source software systems has always been the fact that it is freely available and any programmer or company can use it to develop its own version of that software. For the longest time they have been the best solution for people willing to go outside the box in order to get the best results in their respective IT departments. Of course these systems have never been without profit and it came from two sources that are now getting to be absolute because of the emergence of cloud computing and the level of affordability most of its components come from.

• Databases

  • What Is INDECT, And Why Is It Bad For The American People?

  • Proposal to Allow Police Internet Monitoring Shot Down in UK Parliament

  • The Police State Advances Daily: Warrantless, Sophisticated Audio Surveillance On Buses

  • Big Brother’s Listening

  • Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones to Record Passenger Conversations

  • No Warrant, No Problem: How The Government Can Still Get Your Digital Data

    Listening to your phone calls without a judge’s warrant is illegal if you’re a U.S. citizen. But police don’t need a warrant — which requires showing “probable cause” of a crime — to get just the numbers you called and when you called them, as well as incoming calls, from phone carriers. Instead, police can get courts to sign off on a subpoena, which only requires that the data they’re after is relevant to an investigation — a lesser standard of evidence.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Help improve LibreOffice 4.0 in a ‘test marathon’ this month

    If you’ve ever used free and open source software for any length of time, you’re probably already aware that much of the work done to develop, test, and maintain that software is accomplished by what’s typically a global community of developers and volunteers.

• CMS

  • Acquia flies flag for Drupal downunder

    Acquia has set its sights on accelerating adoption of the open source Drupal content management system by large organisations. The company, which was founded by the CMS’s creator, Dries Buytaert, opened a Sydney office last month and plans on expanding its sales and business development operations in Australia.

    Australia is already home to elements of Acquia’s tri-continental 24/7 support setup, and the company’s Asia Pacific regional director, Chris Harrop, said he plans to boost the company’s local headcount to about 15 over the next 12 months, bringing on board field sales and business development staff in Sydney.

  • Senator Lundy to be DrupalCon Sydney headliner

  • WordPress Reaches 3.5, Rides The Coltrane

• Healthcare

  • Why You Need Open Source for Health Exchange Success

    With the national election over there’s an expectation for greater bipartisanship between Republicans and Democrats, but in terms of programs with potential for cooperation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is one of the least likely. The ACA has been a significant point of contention between the parties, and despite the President’s reelection and therefore, the mandate to pursue ACA, it seems the conflict may continue, particularly around implementing a Health Insurance Exchange (HIX) website portal in each state. Luckily, open source may be the answer to overcoming some of the conflict.

• BSD

  • The Grinch That Delayed FreeBSD 9.1

    Originally the plan for FreeBSD 9.1 was to release it in mid-September, but the first release candidate was one month late along with the RC2 and RC3 releases. The plan was then updated to release FreeBSD 9.1 at the end of October, but that too passed. The latest schedule set the RELEASE announcement as going out on 12 November, but that clearly didn’t work either.

    It’s been more than one month since the last test release (FreeBSD 9.1-RC3) and there’s still no sign of an imminent release. Asked on the mailing list this weekend was Will we get a RELEASE-9.1 for Christmas? There’s FreeBSD stakeholders delaying new server rollouts until the FreeBSD 9.1 availability, but there’s been no clear communication from FreeBSD developers when the release will happen.

  • FreeBSD veteran confident of reaching fund-raising goal

    Veteran BSD hacker Marshall Kirk McKusick has played down fears that the FreeBSD project will fall short of its target of raising $US500,000 through donations for this year.

  • FreeBSD end-of-year fund raiser on target

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Free Software Leader Richard Stallman: Amazon Search Integration In Ubuntu Amounts To Spyware

    Free software leader Richard Stallman claims Ubuntu amounts to spyware with Amazon search integrated into the “dash” of its Unity interface. He is calling for developers to shun the open-source operating system.

  • Ubuntu Community Manager apologises to Stallman

    Canonical has yet to make an official statement…

  • Sorry RMS Says Jono Bacon

    On the issue that Stallamn raised Jono Bacon still maintains a view “that referring to the Ubuntu dash as malicious software that collects information about users without their knowledge (spyware) and as a result that Ubuntu should be shunned for “spying”, somewhat over-sensationalizes the issue”.

    It is good in part of Jono Bacon to come up with a apology but the post does not deal with concers that Stallman initially raised regarding user privacy. This post could mean that those question could remain unanswered.

  • Linux Top 3:Ubuntu Roaring, RMS Not Impressed

  • Ubuntu Community Manager apologises to Stallman

    Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has apologised to Richard Stallman for calling Stallman’s position on Ubuntu “childish”. Last week, Richard Stallman wrote an article describing Ubuntu 12.10′s Amazon Shopping Lens as spyware. In “Ubuntu Spyware: What to do”, Stallman said that the sending of search terms being entered into the desktop by users on to Canonical’s servers, where they are then searched for on Amazon, is simple surveillance and without the users’ consent. Even though the Amazon searching can be turned off, “the existence of that switch does not make the surveillance feature ok” because its default state is on, he says. Stallman called on the free software community to “remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend” and said that “it behooves us to give Canonical whatever rebuff is needed to make it stop this”.

  • [Mono booster/GNU hater:] Morals? Forbidding stuff?

    It isn’t freedom to have to choose for Richard Stallman’s world view. It isn’t ‘freedom’ to be called immoral just because you choose another ethic. It isn’t freedom when a single person or group with a single view on morality tries to forbid you something based on just their point of view.

    For example, Stallman has repeatedly said about Trusted Computing (which he in a childish way apparently calls Treacherous Computing) that it ‘should be illegal’ (that’s a quote from official FSF and GNU pages). I also recall Stallman trying to forbid blog posts about proprietary software (it was about VMWare) on planet-gnome (original thread here).

• Project Releases

  • Blender 2.65 Out, Brings New Features

    Popular video editing and 3d animation software Blender has recieved a new update.

  • Suricata 1.3.5 Available!

  • Smoke brings fire to Blender 2.65

• Public Services/Government

  • White House Steps Up Open Source Activities

    Web developers in the White House also collaborate with the open source community on Github, offering White House mobile apps. The White House website offers a page for developers interested in using their open source tools at whitehouse.gov/developers. Developers can also track the White House’s open source activity through the White House’s Github profile.

  • Swiss City Mandates Use Of Open Source, Banishes Microsoft Officially

    In an overwhelming majority vote, the city council in Bern, Switzerland has moved to implement all future infrastructure with open source technologies. The “Party Motion”, as it is called in Switzerland, was submitted over a year ago, and has finally been realized. Plans to move forward with open source design, strategy and implementation should begin immediately.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • RuuviTracker: Open Source GPS tracking system

      The new project aims to develop a new GSM/GPS-enabled tracking system for a wide variety of uses. On the hardware side, the project aims to develop an affordable, water-proof, robust, high-quality and state-of-the-art device, capable of operating in temperatures as low as -40C.

    • Arduino launches Esplora open source controller

      Tinkerers take note, because Arduino has launched its new Esplora controller, which just so happens to be customizable and open source. The Esplora is derived from the Arduino Leonardo, but unlike its predecessors, it comes equipped with a number of sensors and buttons out of the box. That means it should be at least relatively easy to just jump in once your Esplora arrives.

    • Burrito Bomber: open source hardware-based drone autonomously delivers Mexican food

    • Making it real with 3D printing

      With a 3D printer that costs less than $3,000, you can start your own mini manufacturing operation — and use open source software to create surprisingly complex designs

• Programming

  • Python creator Guido van Rossum joins Dropbox

    Dropbox has announced that Python creator Guido van Rossum will be joining the company. According to a tweet by van Rossum, he has already quit his job at Google and will be starting at the company behind the popular synchronisation software in January. Van Rossum says he is “leaving Google as the best of friends” in a later tweet, where he shared a link to his redecorated office.

Leftovers

• IOS 6 Wi-Fi problems keep hanging on

• Security

  • 25-GPU cluster cracks every standard Windows password in [less than] 6 hours

    A password-cracking expert has unveiled a computer cluster that can cycle through as many as 350 billion guesses per second. It’s an almost unprecedented speed that can try every possible Windows passcode in the typical enterprise in less than six hours.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Assange looks to contest Senate election

    WIKILEAKS publisher Julian Assange has confirmed his intention to run as a Senate candidate in the 2013 federal election and will announce the formation of a WikiLeaks political party early next year.

  • People Who Edited Al Qaeda Out of CIA Benghazi Talking Points Predict Islamic Terrorism Will End By 2030, Warn of Christian Terrorists

  • United States: The NSA And Cybersecurity

    NSA also has an interest in being able to compromise the software running on servers and end-user devices at the “edges”…

  • Indefinite Detention and the NDAA: The rise of America’s imperial presidency

  • The NDAA and Cybersecurity

  • George Will on Drones, Assassination, and Targeted Killing

    Is “targeted killing” just a polite, antiseptic phrase for assassination?

  • Understanding the NDAA, a US law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial

  • Britain to probe use of spy drones by untrained pilots

  • Leaked probe exposes drone war ‘chaos’

  • UK Minister covers up drone operations

  • California law enforcement moves to buy drones, draws controversy

  • US detains Afghan teenagers: UN

  • ‘NYT’ Public Editor Again Hits Paper Over Coverage of Bradley Manning Hearing

    If any news outlet should feel a responsibility to cover the ongoing hearing in the case of Bradley Manning, accused of leaking countless US government and military documents (and an infamous video) via WikiLeaks to the worldwide media—it would seem to be The New York Times.

  • REPORT: The US Is Openly Sending Heavy Weapons From Libya To Syrian Rebels

    The Obama administration has decided to launch a covert operation to send heavy weapons to Syrian rebels, Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times of London reports.
    Diplomatic sources told the Sunday Times that the U.S. “bought weapons from the stockpiles of Libya’s former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.”

  • Did CIA and State Department Run Illegal Arms Trafficking in Benghazi?

    New details have emerged that shed light on the chaos that embroiled the Benghazi mission on 9/11/2012 that led to the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the hands of the very anti-Qaddafi rebels that Stevens formally liaised with for the CIA.

    It wasn’t a secret that Ambassador Christopher Stevens played a key role in Libya’s “Arab Spring.” During the course of the revolution that ultimately toppled Muammar Qaddafi, Stevens’ built a relationship with the Libyan rebels and it’s this experience that made him the frontrunner for the Libyan ambassadorship. Stevens’ history of working with Libyan radicals provided the perfect opportunity for the Obama administration to covertly move newly purchased weapons from Libya’s freedom fighters to Syrian insurgents via ships through Turkey.

  • Moral issue: are drones worse than torture?

  • Review: ‘The Secret Drone War’

    This is a long overdue documentary, in half an hour, the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ team ventures into the hinterland of American drone strikes, and puts a human face to this so-called war.

  • Homeland’s Anti-Drone Message Hits Obama at Home

    However Homeland ends its amazing second season next week, I’m already anticipating its real-life cliffhanger: How does President Obama react to Brody assassinating the vice president for killing scores of children by drone?

  • The threat of drones ushering in ‘invisible wars’

  • US drones killing civilians in Afghanistan

  • The ethics of American drone strikes

  • Rachel Marsden: When terrorists ‘killed’ in drone strikes aren’t really dead

    Is “killed by a drone strike” the new “alive and well”? If you pay close enough attention, it makes you wonder what’s really going on.

  • Drones propel hate in Pakistan for the U.S.

    Israel’s use of military force is scrutinized, while the U.S.’s use of armed drones in Pakistan barely registers. But these drones and their civilian casualties are strengthening Pakistani and Taliban extreme Islamism and anti-Americanism – this international footprint is how the U.S. is being judged.

  • Student Tweets Entire History of US Drone Strikes

  • Obama May Need The NDAA To Justify Widespread Use Of Drones

    We’ve covered how President Obama needs the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to justify detention powers he has used for the past four years, but there’s another reason he needs it: drones.
    At the heart of both issues is the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gives the president authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those … [who] aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.”

  • Exclusive: UK military in talks to help Syria rebels

  • New York Times Bradley Manning Coverage Continues To Be Criticized

  • Key Details on Bradley Manning’s Confinement Were Kept from Army Commander Who Visited Regularly

    A company commander in Pfc. Bradley Manning’s Army chain of command, who made multiple visits to see Manning while he was imprisoned at Quantico Marine Brig, took the stand as a government witness today to provide testimony on Manning’s treatment. He did not initially appear to have any notion that Manning was mistreated while he was held there, but in the final moments of his testimony he indicated he did not agree with some of the decisions. He also had not been informed of the fact that mental health officers were recommending Manning be taken off prevention of injury (POI) status. And when he finished testifying, he stood up and walked over to shake Manning’s hand.

  • Latif Letter About Guantanamo Speaks From the Grave: “I Am Being Pushed Toward Death Every Moment”

    On September 8, Latif was found “motionless and unresponsive” by guards in a cell in the very same Camp 5 cellblock he had cited in his letter. Two months later, the military produced a report that said he committed suicide.

    The mystery surrounding the death of the eldest son of a Yemeni merchant who, by all accounts, did not belong at the offshore prison for suspected terrorists, is underscored by the almost prophetic nature of this singular letter.

  • Bradley Manning: a tale of liberty lost in America

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Germany’s Wind Power Revolution in the Doldrums

    The construction of offshore wind parks in the North Sea has hit a snag with a vital link to the onshore power grid hopelessly behind schedule. The delays have some reconsidering the ability of wind power to propel Germany into the post-nuclear era.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC’s So-Called “Right to Work” Bill as Political Revenge in Michigan

    As concerned workers come together across Michigan in protest, partisan politicians are poised to make one of the strongholds for America’s blue-collar worker rights into a so-called “Right to Work” (RTW) state — in accordance with the ALEC blueprint to change to state laws at the behest of some of the biggest corporations in the world. Yet, 42 corporations, including General Motors, have distanced themselves from ALEC this year after ALEC’s role in controversial and divisive legislation was exposed.

  • Michigan Passes “Right to Work” Containing Verbatim Language from ALEC Model Bill

• Privacy

  • You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.

  • Public Buses That Listen To Passengers’ Conversations Have Been Around For Five Years

    The Daily had an interesting report this week — picked up by Wired — about “government officials quietly installing sophisticated audio surveillance systems on public buses across the country to eavesdrop on passengers.” I know what you’re thinking: “Woo! More epic bus fight scenes that come with audio.”

  • WikiLeaks editor denounces mass internet surveillance and US attacks on democratic rights

    “The Internet,” Assange declares in the introduction, “has led to revolutions across the world but a crackdown is now in full swing. As whole societies move online, mass surveillance programs are being deployed globally. Our civilization has reached a crossroads.”
    In line with the Obama administration’s campaign against WikiLeaks, most of the mainstream media has largely ignored the book. Others, such as the American television network CNN, have brushed aside the book’s themes while claiming that Assange’s principled defence of press freedom is hypocritical. CNN journalist Erin Burnett, who hosts the network’s prime time nightly news program—“Erin Burnett: OutFront”—attempted this approach in late November.

  • Facebook privacy poll closes (turns out you didn’t care about privacy)

  • CIA’s venture arm backs mobile banking, NFC developer

    In-Q-Tel, the technology investment arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), will invest in Tyfone, a small developer of mobile banking, identity management and near-field communication systems.

    The size of the investment was not disclosed.

  • Once Again With Feeling: You Have Absolutely No Privacy Online

• Civil Rights

  • Not so noble: EU’s Peace Prize win sparks debate over legitimacy

  • Congratulations. Tell No One.

    An inspiration for the hero of Zero Dark Thirty, a CIA agent who was celebrated with a prestigious award for helping to track down Osama Bin Laden, seemingly has had a less glorious career in the mission’s aftermath, according to the Washington Post. A former CIA official says she bashed her fellow honorees over email, essentially telling them, “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.” How does the CIA give awards to secret agents?

  • Senate kills Pentagon’s ‘alternative CIA’

  • Judge Mulls Whether to Keep Alive Former CIA Officer’s Suit

    A former covert CIA officer who claims the agency disseminated false information about him, thwarting an employment opportunity with a defense contractor, could get a chance to further probe his allegations.

    A federal trial judge in Washington said at a recent hearing in the case that he was inclined to allow the officer—identified in court papers only as “Peter B.”—the opportunity to conduct limited discovery in his lawsuit.

  • San Francisco District Attorney subpoenas Twitter feeds in Columbus Day riot case

    Twitter says it “provides a voice for liberty around the globe” — an image the microblogging service promoted during the populist uprisings of the Arab Spring. But it remains to be seen how it reacts to activist controversies right here at home.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Revealed: ITU’s deep packet snooping standard leaks online

  • WCIT – China And Russia Withdraw Bid For Greater Control Of Internet

    Controversial proposals handed to the ITU on Friday have now been withdrawn

  • Committee says no to draft Communications Data Bill

    The draft Communications Data Bill has today been roundly criticised by the committee of MPs and Peers, who make clear that the draft Bill is not fit for purpose and unacceptable in its current form. The report makes clear tinkering and minor changes are nowhere near enough – this draft bill is unacceptable to Parliament and if there is to be legislation, it is back to the drawing board for the Home Office.

  • Joint Committee slams Home Office’s Snoopers’ Charter

  • Snoopers Charter Report Summary

    A non-partisan, well-informed cross-Parliamentary committee has found the draft Communications Data Bill is so badly – almost abusively – drafted that it must not be allowed to proceed without substantial revision. Here’s my summary.

  • EU bringing positive momentum – update on WCIT conference in Dubai

    The EU is bringing a positive momentum. Some examples are debates on roaming, transparency, accessibility, and energy efficiency. These are issues of interest and importance not just to European citizens, but to all those who would be affected by a new ITR treaty. And what is new at this conference is that Europe speaks with one voice, thanks to a joint decision Member States took before going to Dubai, based on a European Commission proposal.

    On other issues the EU has suggested compromises that have been rejected.

  • EU Parliament Calls For Action Against Net Access Restrictions

    Today, the EU Parliament adopted two important resolutions underlining its commitment to protecting and promoting rights and freedoms on the Internet, especially on the issue of Net neutrality. La Quadrature du Net welcomes this vote by EU lawmakers, and urges the EU Commission as well as Member States to follow suit by enacting legislation to protect freedoms online and foster democracy as well as innovation.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Who Ever Thought APIs Were Copyrightable, Anyway?

      Back in the summer, there was a widely covered story about Judge Alsup’s decision regarding copyrightablity in the Oracle v. Google case. Oracle has appealed the verdict so presumably this will enter the news again at some point. I’d been meaning to write a blog post about it since it happened, and also Karen Sandler and I had been planning an audcast to talk about it.

    • Top 10 articles celebrating Creative Commons’ very uncommon last 10 years

      To a lot of people all over the world, Creative Commons is more than a license. The organization and their mission is a shining copyleft-light for work rendered by artists, designers, writers, and the list goes on. Here at Opensource.com all of our original content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) which means that you are welcome to share (copy, distribute, and transmit the work), to remix (to adapt the work), or to make commercial use of the work. And many of our contributors choose to attribute thier work under the same license. Why?

    • How Do You Find Usenet Files?

    • Jammie Thomas asks Supreme Court to take file-sharing case

      Acting on her promise, Jammie Thomas-Rasset has finally fought her music uploading case all the way to the Supreme Court. Her lawyers announced today that they have filed an official petition asking the Supreme Court to review her long-running case, which has moved up through the courts over the past five years.

      In 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) accused Thomas-Rasset of copyright infringement for sharing 1,700 copyrighted songs — the equivalent of 150 CDs. But the RIAA whittled down the number to 24. A jury heard the evidence against her and rendered a $222,000 verdict.

    • Antivirus guru John McAfee sells rights for movie about his life

      Currently fighting deportation efforts in Guatemala, the antivirus-software pioneer sells life-story rights to a Montreal-based TV production company.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Pocket Desktop Protects Your Files, Privacy When Using PCs

  It’s a customized Linux OS on a bootable drive so that you can surf the internet without leaving a trace on the host PC.

• Server

  • Proprietary Servers Take Their Lumps, Linux Servers Float On Cloud 9

    If you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone.

• Kernel Space

  • The Cortex-A15 Continues Running Strong On Linux

    Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I’ve grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor.

  • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: James Bottomley

• Applications

  • 5 ways to check your disk usage on Linux

    In the past I’ve wrote an article about the commands du and df that can respectively give you information about the Disk Usage and the Disk Free of your Linux computer.
    I personally use both of these commands a lot of times at work to check file system and/or directory, but I also understand that on a desktop with Linux you could use something more graphical to see the status of your partitions or directories, so today I’ll show you some programs that can achieve this goal: baobab, cdu, ncdu, JDiskReport and Filelight.

  • Proprietary

    • Darling project aims to get OS X apps working on Linux

    • New Project Aims to Bring Mac Apps to Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to install Ubuntu on Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook

    • ChrUbuntu Transforms $199 Acer C7 Chromebook Into a Cheap Linux Laptop

    • Regular expreesion in Linux Bash and KSH Shells

  • Games

    • Star Shipping released for Linux!

      In Star shipping Inc. you take the role of the captain of of a cargo ship traveling between star systems to trade goods and commodities in strive to become the richest star ship captain in the galaxy.

    • The Legends of Aethereus Game Is Coming to Linux

      The Legends of Aethereus developers announced a few days ago that the upcoming Legends of Aethereus RPG game will be available for Linux-based operating systems.

    • Linux system requirements pop up on some Steam games

    • Valve: Linux, Big Picture to power ‘turnkey’ living room PCs

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Contest To Revamp KDE Mascot

      Konqui, the cute and friendly dragon has been the KDE mascot for the last 10 years. The dragon is shy and you won’t see him often on KDE systems. KDE forum admin Neverendingo is planning to give the shy dragon an image makeover. He is organizing a design contest with the Krita community.

    • New KDE Theme Slim Glow With Awesome Fonts

      Slim Glow is one of the top five themes for the KDE Plasma desktop which has been in development since KDE 4.0. Developer Ivan Čukić has released a new version of this theme which is currently available on kde-look.org and will be part of the KDE 4.10.

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd December 2012

• Distributions

  • ComFusion 4.1 Screenshots

  • RamDisk on Linux : what it is and how to use it.

    In the computer there is a precise hierarchy with regard to the memory, according to their speed and size.
    On a computer there are basically three types of memory: the hard drive, the RAM and the processor cache. These memories can be ordered according to the characteristics above, and then, in a hypothetical pyramid, we find at the bottom the hard drive (slow but with a lot of space, in the order of terabytes) in the center there is the RAM (fast, but with little space in the order of gigabytes) and the top there is the cpu-cache (fast but extremely small, ranging from kiloByte to megabytes).

  • Build a Killer Customized Arch Linux Installation (and Learn All About Linux in the Process)

    Don’t like Windows 8′s new interface? Sick of Ubuntu Unity and the new ads that come along with it? Maybe it’s time to create your own, ideal operating system with just the features you want. Arch Linux can make it happen: it lets you build your own personal, killer Linux distro from the ground up.

  • New Releases

    • Clonezilla 2.0.1-12

    • [Toorox] 11.2012 “GNOME”

    • Release Notes: Release Notes for siduction 2012.2 – Riders on the Storm

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva takes off

        The OpenMandriva community is moving on. The statutes of the “OpenMandriva Association” have been sent to the French authorities and the incorporation process has thus started. At the same time, preparations are ongoing to migrate both the actual development environment of the distribution and the entire community infrastructure. On top of this, the development environment is not just migrated to another server, it is being upgraded to ABF and Git.

        We have thus embarked into an ambitious migration plan and I would like to thank all the teams of developers, sysadmins, infrastructure and communication of the OpenMandriva project who are working hard towards making this a reality.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Nominations Now Open For 2013 Red Hat Innovation Awards

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is now accepting nominations for its seventh annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, which will be presented at Red Hat Summit taking place June 10-14, 2013 in Boston.

      • Enterprise Linux 6.4 beta released by Red Hat

      • RBC Capital Reiterates Outperform on Red Hat (RHT)

        RBC Capital reaffirmed their outperform rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in a research note released on Monday morning. They currently have a $64.00 price target on the stock.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – December 10th, 2012

        * Record number of participants for Mini DebConf Paris
        * Debian on smartphones: a feasibility analysis
        * Official Debian images on Amazon Web Services
        * Reports from latest BSPs
        * Other news
        * New Debian Contributors
        * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
        * Important Debian Security Advisories
        * New and noteworthy packages
        * Work-needing packages
        * Want to continue reading DPN?

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Introducing Ubuntu Filesystem Tree Lens for Unity

            The Ubuntu Filesystem Tree Lens is an Unity Lens that enables users to easily and quickly find files and folder in their filesystem, directly from Unity Dash.

          • Ubuntu Increases Reach with Language Translations

            English may be the uncontested lingua franca of most development communities in our (post-?) Pax Americana age. But for developers who prefer working in other languages, the Ubuntu world has taken a big step toward making it easier to contribute without understanding English. That’s a particularly smart move for an open source project such as Ubuntu. Here’s why.

          • 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Alpha 1 Released!

          • Introducing Ubuntu Minecraft Lens for Unity

            The Ubuntu Minecraft Lens is an Unity Lens that allows Minecraft players to easily and quickly search most items and tools found in the game.

            Right clicking the results will display a recipe and some other handy information. At the moment, the Lens has various issues that you should check out here.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 enters alpha, but only for Edubuntu and Kubuntu users

              Even as Ubuntu Linux 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” continues to make headlines following its release back in October, work is proceeding in earnest on its successor, Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail.”

              On Thursday, in fact, version 13.04 of the popular Linux distribution entered alpha – a stage that typically gives fans of the open source operating system an early glimpse at what’s to come.

            • Linux Mint 14 “MATE”

            • review of mint 14 part

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Sailfish: the first real competitor to iPhone and Android?

        Right now, it seems that iPhone and Android phones are the main kinds of mobile phones and will be forever.

        After all, Microsoft has spent billions to develop and promote the Windows phone, but it’s not exactly selling like hotcakes (four million in the third quarter this year, as opposed to Apple’s 23 million and Android’s 123 million).

      • Android

        • XBMC 12.0 Beta 3 Brings Support for Android 4.2

        • Xperia™ and Box® renew partnership through 2013

          In an official press release Sony Mobile have confirmed that they will be extending partnership with Box until 31st December 2013. They have also confirmed that almost all the Xperia smartphone and Sony tablet users can now grab free 50GB cloud storage for life,

        • $50 Android Smartphones Are Disrupting Africa Much Faster Than You Think, Says Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales

          While the majority of Africa’s mobile phones are more basic talk-plus-text feature phones — recent figures from analyst ABI Research suggest 3G connectivity accounts for 11 percent of the continent’s overall mobile subscriptions vs. GSM’s 62.7 percent – 300,000 of these $50 Android smartphones have been sold in Kenya, according to Wales and African carrier Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore. The pair were speaking at Vodafone’s Mobile for Good summit taking place in London today.

  Free Software/Open Source

  • Four reasons I like developing with open source code

    I have been a developer for a number of years (yes, it’s a large-ish number) and I’ve worked on teams that have developed software on commercial platforms, on teams that have used a mixture of open source and commercial components, and on teams that have used primarily open source. Overall, I’ve developed (no pun intended) a preference for using open source tools and components whenever it’s feasible. Here are some of the reasons why I prefer to develop with open source code:

  • Events

    • 10 Conferences To Attend If You Are Looking To Meet Developers

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Urging Developers to Build Apps For Firefox OS

        Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of products, has explained why developers should have an interest in Firefox OS.

        “If you’re looking to build and develop mobile software without the 30 percent toll [Apple charges], Firefox OS will appeal to you,” he told a room filled with about 75 developers.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Richard Stallman and Jono Bacon Differ on Ubuntu’s Amazon Search

    • On Being Childish; An Apology

      On Friday I wrote an article responding to a post by Richard Stallman. Over the weekend both posts caused quite a flurry of discussion; thank-you to everyone who contributed constructive feedback.

      In my post I referred to Richard’s position as seeming a bit ‘childish‘ to me.

      As with every post that I write, I reflect carefully over the words I write before and after I press the publish button. In all of our writing our words affect the thoughts and feelings of others, and I think this resonates even more-so in the Free Software and Open Source world where we all put so much passion and time into what we do as volunteers as well as for those lucky enough to do this as a career too.

    • Stallman’s Attack on Ubuntu Linux is Bad News for Canonical

      Richard Stallman (RMS),the Father of Free Software doesn’t like Ubuntu Linux. Stallman posted a scathing diatribe against Ubuntu on Friday.

      “If you ever recommend or redistribute GNU/Linux, please remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute,” Stallman wrote. “In your install fests, in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.”

  • Project Releases

    • Third Beta Released For XBMC 12 Frodo

  • Public Services/Government

    • To migrate or not to migrate to open source

      Since Microsoft Office price per seat per year for businesses is around $75 two public administrations in the German cities of Freiburg and Munchen decided to switch to OpenOffice. One of them went well while other one did not do so well. The Unsuccessful transition occurred in Freiburg. Their calculations went like this – $75 per year per computer for public administration, which for as many as 2,000 users per year is $ 150,000. However, after five years, although they saved on the prices for licenses, they have spent $600,000, with a disgruntled employee who complained about the incompatibility of file formats. To make things worse, they returned to Microsoft Office, which was at the first year cost of at least half a million dollars.

    • Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions

      A clear majority 36 to 20 councilors and city councilors in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

    • A proud day for peace and freedom in Europe

      I am very proud today to call myself a European, and to be here in Oslo for the EU’s Nobel Peace prize ceremony. The European Commission is collecting information and updates here. What I want to say is that when I started school in 1946 – yes! – just after the end of the Second World War, I could never imagine that we as a continent would be in this position today. A family, united in democratic values, and more prosperous that seemed possible throughout most of our lives.

    • Is Something Rotten in the State of Freiburg?

      There are “many good examples of municipalities, states, and countries’ ministries changing expensive, heavy and closed proprietary software for free and open-source software,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. This move by Freiburg, then, “is more than odd. 100 percent of the people that commented on the Internet have said: ‘Why didn’t they move to the newest LibreOffice or OpenOffice!? It’s insane!’”

  Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Obama Writing “Rules” for Killing People with Drones

    • Drone use will only grow domestically

    • Former US President Carter slams drone attacks

      Former US President Jimmy Carter has slammed American drone strikes in other countries, stating that killing civilians in such attacks would infact nurture terrorism.

    • Was CIA financier-turned Wall Street banker assassinated by the bearded bag lady? New evidence may solve mystery of 1985 shooting

      Nearly 30 years after a former CIA money changer was murdered by a homeless bag lady, new details have emerged that suggest he may actually have been assassinated.

    • Is the U.S. Government Really A Spy Machine?

  • Cablegate

    • Assange: Police Docs Published in Swedish MSM

      ‘Now I understand why the Swedish police and prosecutors don’t travel to the UK to interrogate Assange’, writes Paragraf editor-in-chief Dick Sundevall. ‘They’d have to close the case and declare that no crime has been committed.’

    • What the New York Times Missed in Its 1st Article on Manning’s Torture Hearing

      Barnes elaborated later on that she thought Manning stood for count naked on purpose, to be provocative, despite his record of consistent good conduct throughout his chilling stay at Quantico. If Shane had bothered to stay for the next 6 hours, he would have seen a haughty low-rank Chief Warrant Officer with a chip on her shoulder (she was the most junior person to ever run a brig; if anything bad happened to Manning, it would ruin her career; etc.), who flouted prison regulations in favor of her own “personal opinion.”

    • WikiLeaks Tapes shows up corporate media, celebrates citizen journalists

      One of the first things that will strike you about The Wikileaks Tapes is the unique style that citizen journalist Cathy Vogan brings to interviews.

      The two-disc DVD The WikiLeaks Tapes brings together a wide range of interviews by Vogan with dozens of people on the subject of WikiLeaks.

      From a sound base of knowledge on the subject matter, Vogan delves in to what matters most, the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks by Western governments, including Australia’s.

      There really are some quite amazing interviews here, especially when you consider the filmmak

    • Wikileaks protest in foreign affairs office

    • From Assange to Kejriwal: Understanding media hostility

      There was a time, not long ago, when Arvind Kejriwal was being billed as the ‘Julian Assange of India’. Perhaps this was born of the sense that Kejriwal’s record of launching high-decibel ‘exposes’ of alleged corruption, which were lapped up by the media, echoed Assange’s periodic WikiLeaks exposes of US cables that chronicled in merciless detail the diplomats’ observations on the ways of the world, and the shadowy side to American and foreign governments’ dealings.

    • Assange is still holed in…

      This is a small working embassy. It has managed to provide one room about 15 feet by twelve feet for Assange to live and work in. He eats and sleeps there. It has little natural light so he looks pale and thinner than he was a few months ago. He presents a confident, optimistic front to visitors but the strain of constant confinement must be telling on him. There have been reports that he has a chronic breathing problem. He keeps busy running WikiLeaks, fighting legal actions and planning for his and WikiLeaks’s future. In one-way it is worse than imprisonment, for there is no telling when it will end.

      All right then. Why doesn’t Assange end it himself? Why doesn’t he hand himself over to the Swedish authorities and return to Sweden and fight the allegations against him. Not so simple. Assange has every reason to fear that once they got their hands on him, Swedish authorities would turn him over to the US. The evidence that the US seeks to extradite and prosecute Assange is substantial.

  • Finance

    • A ‘puny’ fine for GS goof

      An outspoken regulator lashed out at a $1.5 million settlement between Goldman Sachs and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — calling the deal a steal for the Wall Street bank.

      Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, described the cash amount as “puny” and “a slap on the wrist” when compared to the whopping $8.3 billion trade at the center of the case.

      In 2007, a Goldman trader hid the outsize trade as the market unraveled.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Time Gives Up on Factchecking: Corporate Media Can’t Find a Way to Tell the Truth

      In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.

      “Who Is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars,” read Time’s October 15 cover. With a setup like that, one might have hoped for a bold break from the campaign pack, an acknowledgment that facts matter, and that politicians who run on a record of resisting reality should be exposed.

  • Privacy

    • Verizon Files Patent For DVR That Watches Viewers, Delivers Targeted Ads Based On What It Sees

  • Civil Rights

    • Petraeus Punished For Making Love, Not War

      Scahill cites several former intelligence officers to make this point. “A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying, it’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program,” he quotes retired career CIA case officer Philip Giraldi as saying. The CIA, adds Giraldi, “is a killing machine now.” (Q: When wasn’t it?) And retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang opined Petraeus “wanted to drag them (CIA) in the covert action direction and to be a major player.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Leaked: ITU’s secret Internet surveillance standard discussion draft

      Yesterday morning, I wrote about the closed-door International Telecommunications Union meeting where they were working on standardizing “deep packet inspection” — a technology crucial to mass Internet surveillance. Other standards bodies have refused to touch DPI because of the risk to Internet users that arises from making it easier to spy on them. But not the ITU.

    • Kim Dotcom: Mega Will Turn Encryption into a Mass Product

      Over the past several months a group of coders have been working hard on the new “Mega” which is scheduled to launch January 20 2013, exactly one year after Megaupload was shut down.

      Today, Dotcom revealed the look of the new Mega, showing off the new encryption feature, the registration screen and a new file manager.

      Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom says the new site is the result of many years’ expertise in the file-storage business.

      “It’s special because seven years of experience have been turned into the perfect cloud storage solution. It scales infinitely. It provides up- and download acceleration and resume in the browser thanks to the latest HTML5 technology,” he says.

      The encryption part pictured below is perhaps the most exciting feature unveiled thus far. Before users upload their files to Mega they will be encrypted using the AES algorithm. Advanced security, but based on code that will be open source.

      “File transfers and storage are encrypted with military strength and you don’t have to take our word for it, that part of the code is open,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

    • EU digs trenches in ‘real battle’ over the future of the internet

      The European Union has set out its position in the looming fight over control of the internet, arguing that it should ‘stay open and global’.

  • DRM

    • Richard Stallman: ‘Apple has tightest digital handcuffs in history’

      Q It’s nearly 30 years since you started work on the GNU operating system, which went on to become GNU/ Linux, one of the leading examples of free and open source software collaboration. Yet Apple and Microsoft still loom large. How do you feel the free software movement is faring?

      The free software movement has advanced tremendously but proprietary user-subjugating software has also spread tremendously. I would say the free software movement has gone about half the distance it has to travel. We managed to make a mass community but we still have a long way to go to liberate computer users.

      Those companies are very powerful. They are cleverly finding new ways to take control over users. Nowadays people who use proprietary software [programs whose source code is hidden, and which are licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder] are almost certainly using malware. The most widely used non-free programmes have malicious features – and I’m talking about specific, known malicious features.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • CA to app devs: get privacy policies or risk $2500-per-download fines

        They had a month—and now it’s over. Any California mobile-app developers who don’t have a privacy policy obviously available to consumers need to get one and fast. If they don’t, they could be facing potentially massive fines: up to $2,500 per app download.

      • Something really scary is going on in Germany

        Major German publishers with Axel Springer AG as the leader of the gang have for years demanded a law that would force all commercial web services such as search engines or aggregators like the German-Techmeme equivalent Rivva to pay a license fee for automatically processing and displaying headlines or snippets.

      • Pirate Bay Founder Released From Solitary Confinement

        After three months in solitary confinement Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be released from custody. The prosecutor suspects Gottfrid of being involved in several hacking and fraud cases but he has yet to be charged in any of these cases. The Pirate Bay founder will now be transferred to a new prison which he will leave as a free man in five months if no new charges are brought against him.

      • Doe’s motion to proceed anonymously granted in In re BitTorrent

        In In re BitTorrent Adult Film Copyright Infringement Cases, defendant Doe 1′s motion for leave to continue to proceed anonymously was granted.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• New PlayStation PSN Web Store blocks Linux computers

• A New Project To Run Mac OS X Binaries On Linux

  While there is the Wine project to run native Windows binaries on Linux (and other platforms), there’s a new open-source project that’s emerging for running Apple OS X binaries on Linux in a seamless manner.

• Desktop

  • Dell Forges Ahead with Ubuntu and Open Source Projects

    Among major computer hardware makers, Dell continues to show growing signs of having a cohesive, far-reaching strategy surrounding open source. We’ve reported on the company’s work with Canonical to bring Ubuntu-based systems to both India and China, including an expansion of this effort. Dell also recently announced its Ubuntu laptop, part of its “Project Sputnik” effort, targeted at developers. And, Dell is offering new laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pre-loaded. According to the latest reports, we’re going to see more open source-friendly moves from Dell going forward.

• Server

  • Scientists Create Linux Powered Virtual Human Brain

    Scientists at Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Ontario have successfully created a virtual human brain that can do some of complicated tasks like copying a drawing, image recognition, counting, answering questions etc. The brain requires 24 gigabytes of RAM to work and is powered by a Linux-based supercomputer. Even with this sheer power, the machine takes 2.5 hours of processing for one second of simulated time.

• Kernel Space

  • SUSE Linux Says Btrfs is Ready to Rock

    The advanced Butter/Better/B-tree Filesystem, Btrfs, is still labeled as experimental in the Btrfs Wiki and on Oracle’s Btrfs page, though the Oracle page looks outdated. Btrfs is an advanced copy-on-write filesystem with a lot of great capabilities: snapshotting and rollbacks, checksumming of data and metadata, RAID, volumes and subvolumes, online defragmentation, compression, and online filesystem check and repair. Snapshots are always interesting to me; they’re not backups, but a fast way to restore a system to a previous state. With Btrfs users can manage their own snapshots in their home directories. Btrfs supports filesystems up to 16 EiB in size, and files up to 16 EiB as well. (Which may be almost enough to store all the cute kitten photos on the Internet.)

  • A NUMA Linux Kernel Performance Comparison

    For those interested in Non-Unified Memory Access performance under Linux, here’s an independent performance comparison that puts the mainline kernel against three other NUMA kernels.

  • Upstart 1.6.1 Brings New Changes

    Last month marked the release of Upstart 1.6 for the init daemon primarily used by Ubuntu. Coming out nearly one month later is Upstart 1.6.1 to deliver on some additional work.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Intel Ivy Bridge Acceleration Of UXA vs. SNA

    • NVIDIA Publishes PRIME Helper Patches

      NVIDIA is still working on a way to implement buffer-sharing for their closed-source Linux graphics driver.

      NVIDIA still isn’t permitted to properly use DMA-BUF for buffer sharing between their binary driver and the open-source graphics drivers for being able to properly support the NVIDIA Optimus technology. GPL-only kernel symbols are blocking NVIDIA from tapping DMA-BUF and there’s a few kernel developers who don’t want these symbols to be used by NVIDIA’s blob.

    • Radeon On Linux 3.8: Minor For Now, New Code Coming

    • Intel Merges ETC2 Texture Compression In Mesa

• Applications

  • To Do, or Not To Do: Revisited

    Two years ago, looking for a Linux “to do list” manager that met my needs, I settled on Korganizer. It worked well, until the upgrade to KDE 4. I find the new Korganizer is more clumsy to use, presents less information on screen, and is unappealing to my eye. But the final straw was last month, when I tried to print a to-do list…and found out that it would only print the first page of the to-do list, no matter what I tried.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • An introduction to SQLite for developers and sysadmins

    • Download Google Earth 7 With Fixed “Signal 11″ Issue For Ubuntu

    • How to make a Raspberry Pi solar-powered FTP server

    • How To Integrate ClamAV Into PureFTPd For Virus Scanning On Ubuntu 12.10

    • HOWTO: Start an SSH Session from ChromeOS

    • Seventh installment: imagemagick trick 1 of (?)

  • Games

    • Valve updating select Steam games with system requirements for Linux users

      Linux for Steam might not be ready for mass consumption just yet, but we’re now able to get an idea of what system requirements will be for some of the platform’s games. Valve has updated select titles with Tux-friendly specifications.

    • Kickstarter and Game Development: Highlighting Games Coming to Linux Part 5

    • Valve Prepping Custom PC Hardware To Compete With Next-Gen Game Consoles

      Numerous events this year have foreshadowed Valve directly entering the PC hardware game, but boss Gabe Newell made it official during a red carpet interview at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards. The software developer and proprietor of digital distribution store Steam has a plan to sell custom PC gaming machines to geared toward competing with next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft.

    • iBomber games coming to Steam for Linux! Steam also expands the Beta!

    • Valve Source Engine Linux Benchmarks Are Imminent

      While I’ve been part of the Valve Linux beta program from the beginning, I had to refrain from sharing any benchmarks and other performance-related figures while the Valve Linux developers worked out any early bugs. With the huge expansion of their Linux beta program this week, Valve is now getting fairly comfortable with the state of their Linux binaries. As such, I was informed last night by Valve that I’m now allowed to go ahead and begin publishing the performance data on Phoronix.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Contest: Create Konqi with Krita

      Konqui the friendly dragon has been KDE’s mascot for over ten years. It’s time for a new look!

    • Trojita becomes a part of the KDE project

      I’m happy to announce that Trojitá, a fast IMAP e-mail client, has become part of the KDE project. You can find it below extragear/pim/trojita.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3.7: what is happening now

      Before Thanksgiving I’ve caused some uproar and made people doubt our incurable stubbornness by first announcing the release team decision to drop fallback mode (*), and then that we’re going to be looking at supported extensions as a replacement (*). Some have been calling this ‘classic’ mode – I’m using the term ‘legacy’ here, since ‘classic’ may raise some false expectations.

    • GNOME Legacy Mode Begins to Take Shape

      A few weeks back GNOME developers announced that GNOME 3.8 would no longer include the fallback mode. When users roared up, developers found a way to co-exist peacefully with them – a fallback-like mode made mostly of specialized extensions. Matthias Clasen blogged today of some of the progress of what he now dubs GNOME Legacy.

    • Current Status Of Gnome Legacy and Gnome 3.7

      With the support of Gnome fallback going away and users backlashing to quit Gnome, developers have decided to create a separate session for those users who like old style desktop. This session, known as Gnome legacy as now, will be able to retain some design of Gnome 2.x – like drop down menus, minimize and maximize buttons and more. Gnome 3.8 will be the first release without the fallback mode, but you will be able to switch to Gnome legacy from the GDM login screen.

• Distributions

  • ZevenOS 5.0: a lightweight Linux with a multimedia twist

    There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.

    That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.

  • ZevenOS 5.0 delivers an early Christmas present

    The ZevenOS developers have decided to bring their users an “early Christmas present” with the release of version 5.0 of their Linux distribution. ZevenOS 5.0 introduces what the developers term “a touch of BeOS” to its Xfce desktop. This mostly consists of theming Xfce with a distinct BeOS-like look. In line with this, the distribution focuses very much on multimedia applications and ships with most of the popular codecs.

  • New Releases

    • Chakra 2012.12

    • Nueva versión disponible, ComFusion4.1!! / New release available, ComFusion4.1 !!

    • ArchBang 2012.12 is out in the wild!!

      ArchBang 2012.12 is out in the wild!!! If you are already running ArchBang smoothly on your system then you don’t need to install the new release. This 2012.12 release is a full systemd version with our latest set of minimal packages and Openbox for the competent Linux user.

    • ArchBang Gets Banged Up For The Holidays

      ArchBang 2012.12 was released this weekend as the latest version of the Arch Linux derivative distribution that is very lightweight and ships with the OpenBox window manager.

      ArchBang 2012.12 is the project’s first release where there is a full systemd version following upstream Arch Linux moving with systemd back in October. Aside from the 2012.12 release using systemd, the packages have also been updated for the minimal packages shipping with the Linux OS. OpenBox continues to be the window manager on the front-end for providing a clean lightweight experience.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2013

    • Red Hat Expands Virtualisation Collaboration With SAP

      Red Hat, Inc., the global open source solutions provider, has announced the certification of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 for SAP business applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is a continuation of the companies’ joint work on virtualisation and an expansion of SAP’s certification of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 platform release. The certification marks the latest milestone in a 15-year alliance formed to help simplify deployments of SAP applications on physical Red Hat servers, in virtualised environments or in the cloud, bringing new choice to enterprises worldwide.

    • Red Hat Updates CloudForms Open Hybrid Cloud Management Platform

    • Fedora

      • MATE (Gnome 2) on the way to Fedora 18

        A while back I wrote about getting the MATE desktop (which is the fork of the widely used Gnome 2 desktop), on Fedora 17.

        It worked, but it had a couple of minor flaws, and I ended up going with Gnome 3 and tweaking it to get it like Gnome 2. It took some work, and it’s not perfect — for example, there are minor font issues where text doesn’t quite fit exactly in some window areas. Regardless, the issues are minor enough that they are hardly noticeable.

      • Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

      • Fedora Being Talked About For “Software Collections”

        To adjust the rate at which how fast software updates are forced onto users, some Fedora and Red Hat developers have made a “Software Collections” proposal. The purpose of Software Collections is to allow users to install a package and choose between different versions of RPM-packaged software in parallel at run-time.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 13.04 Will Allow Instant Purchasing, Right From The Dash

        • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 hits alpha, but details are under wraps

        • 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Alpha 1 Released!

        • Ubuntu Linux Considers Greater Usage Of zRAM

          Ubuntu developers and users have brought back up the matter of zRAM and using it as part of the default Ubuntu Linux installation in some intelligent manner.

          First of all, for those not familiar with zRAM, it’s a Linux kernel module (formerly called compcache) that tries to better system performance by using a compressed block device in RAM in an effort to avoid swapping/paging on disk. The zRAM kernel feature is intended for systems with low amounts of system memory. With the Linux 3.8 kernel, the zRAM feature will leave the kernel’s staging area.

        • Introducing Ubuntu Answers Lens for Unity

          The Ubuntu Answers Lens is an Unity Lens that allows users to easily and quickly find answers to common questions directly from Unity Dash.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Bodhi Linux ARMHF RootFS

            If you’ve been following my blog (or my updates on Google+) then odds are you know I currently have my hands on two ARM devices (plus a third in the mail) I am working on creating Bodhi Linux images for. With this in mind I’ve decided I am going to start maintaining a generic ARMHF root file system to make creating Bodhi Linux images for new ARM devices easier for myself and others.

            You will always be able to find the latest copy of this file system on Bodhi source forge page here. The default user name is armhf and the default password is bodhilinux. The default user has sudo access by default.

          • Linux Mint Team Publish Release Candidates For Nadia KDE and XFCE

            The Linux Mint Developers have published the release candidates for Nadia’s KDE and XFCE editions. These releases are meant for testing and bug fixing. This will be followed by the stable releases of these flavors, hopefully as soon as critical bugs get fixed.

          • First Alpha Build Arrive For Kubuntu And Edubuntu 13.04

            The first alpha builds for Kubuntu and Edubuntu are now available for download. While there are test releases, the main Ubuntu branch will not release any milestone builds. This is to increase the quality of builds and reduce total milestones. Users can opt for daily builds though, which are updated everyday and may be highly unstable for use.

          • Kubuntu 12.10 Review

            Canonical will no longer be funding the Kubuntu project, Blue Systems is now the primary sponsor. Blue Systems is known for producing the Netrunner distribution which is originally based on Kubuntu. Blue Systems seems very interested in the future of Linux, and KDE in particular. Check out the links below to learn more about Blue Systems, and the exciting Netrunner operating system.

• Devices/Embedded

  • A Sneak-peek Into Raspberry Pi Factory Process [Video]

    The YouTube video shows how the Raspberry Pis are assembled on an assembly line. A pick and place machine, capable of placing 25000 parts in an hour, starts the work. The PoP assembly then places the connectors, RAM and the processor in the boards — 6 boards at a time. All this is done mechanically, and finally inspected by a human being through a computer.

  • Mentor Graphics launches GENIVI 3.0 compliant Infotainment product

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Over Three Times More Smartphones Shipped Than PCs in 2012 Q3 in the PRC, Says IDC

      • Google enables private Play stores

        Organisations planning to give users access to curated collection of Android apps can now do so with their Google Apps account, after the advertising giant quietly threw the switch on what it has poetically dubbed “The Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps”.

      • CM Team Member Releases aeGis Open Source Security App – Remotely Lock, Wipe, Locate Or Alarm Your Phone With A Text

      • aeGis open source security app can locate, wipe, lock your phone

      • Android 4.2, JellyBean Update Improves on Google Now

        The latest build of Android 4.2 has brought a considerable amount of improvements to Google Now functionality.

      • XBMC 12 Beta 2 is out now and adds Android support

        XBMC 12 is getting closer and closer, with the latest beta adding on the Raspberry Pi support from the previous one

      • Android Appalooza: Download good apps for nothing

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Ubuntu Continues Focusing On The Nexus 7 Tablet

      Ubuntu developers continue investing a great deal of time and resources on ensuring the Linux distribution runs smoothly on the Google Nexus 7 tablet.

      The latest achievement announced on Friday for the Ubuntu Linux developers working on the Nexus 7 port is that the new Google tablet can now handle running the latest Ubuntu 13.04 state. Ubuntu 12.10 previously ran on the Nexus 7 tablet, but now Ubuntu 13.04 is up to par. This announcement was made on the ubuntu-devel list.

Free Software/Open Source

• Copyright in the digital economy: a way forward

  I’ve long said that we need to modernise copyright for the digital age: many of the rules have been in place since before things like YouTube, Facebook or data-mining techniques even existed. And, no matter what perspective you bring to the debate, it is obvious that the current fragmented rules in Europe and elsewhere have created frustrations.

  It’s right to provide reward and recognition for artists: but the current copyright system sometimes doesn’t do that as well as it could. Often, in fact, it makes it harder for you to legally access your favourite content. And in many ways it closes us off from digital opportunity, whether it’s the chance to explore innovative new business models, or new ways to conduct lifesaving scientific research.

• Five out of six developers now using or deploying open source

  Five out of six developers today use or have used open source tools or deployed open source software in their projects, a recent Forrester Research study revealed.

  But in which software categories? The top five, according to the recent survey, are operating systems, web servers, relational database management systems, IDEs and software configuration management tools.

• Intel releases open source GraphBuilder for big data

  Intel has released an open source tool designed to improve firms’ handling and analysis of unstructured data.

  Intel said that its GraphBuilder tool would aim to fill a market void in the handling of big data for computer learning. Currently available as a beta release, the tool allows developers to construct large graphs which can then be used with big data analysis frameworks.

• Intel graphs aim to make ‘big data inside’ easier

• Intel GraphBuilder Good For Extracting Knowledge From Big Data

• Building graphs with Hadoop

• Open Source CFD International Conference 2012: Proceedings now

• MapR and Zarafa Expand Open Source Strategy in Europe

• What’s Dell’s Next Open Source Move?

  The Ubuntu-powered laptop recently released by Dell’s Project Sputnik has generated a lot of buzz, especially in the open source community. Now, many Linux enthusiasts are hoping to see a continued expansion of Dell’s open source hardware lineup. And according to Project Sputnik lead Barton George, they may not be disappointed. Here’s what he had to say about Dell’s future open source strategy in a recent interview.

  As longtime observers of the open source channel know, Dell’s relationship with the Linux community has been rough at times. As the only major OEM that offers Ubuntu pre-installed on consumer-class laptops and desktops, Dell has paid significant attention to the Linux demographic, which most other big-name hardware manufacturers have entirely ignored. Still, the company’s inconsistent selection of Ubuntu PCs and lack of full-scale marketing initiatives for them have left some open source fans less than ecstatic.

• Top Ten for an Open Source Christmas

• Open Source Initiatives Can Strengthen Cities’ Downtown Revitalization

• Cisco Pledges Networking Innovation Built on Open Standards and Open Source

  At Cisco’s Financial Analyst meeting today, CEO John Chambers articulated his plan to innovate and grow. It’s a plan with multiple components, including leveraging more networking programmability and Software Defined Networking (SDN).

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Steps Up Outreach to Developers for Firefox OS

      Mozilla is continuing to double down its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business with the Firefox OS mobile operating system, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets. There have been many updates on the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform here, and Flickr galleries of screenshots of the young operating system have provided peeks at development.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Triumph and disaster: Two migrations to OpenOffice

    The contrast between the approach taken in the two cities is striking. Freiburg — a smaller city administration — focused on cost cutting. It recognized there would be one-off costs to pay from template and macro migration, as well as user training, but it stuck with Windows desktops, retained certain existing applications, and even allowed some staff to opt out of the migration entirely and keep using Microsoft Office. It seems there was a limited uptake of migration training, too. The result was an environment with both OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Office 2000 in use throughout the attempted migration.

    Because Office 2000 did not support the OpenDocument format standard, this guaranteed a flow of documents in the formats used by both office suites, maximizing opportunities for incompatibility. By all accounts, the city stuck with those old versions of both Office and OpenOffice.org and allowed the mixed environment to persist throughout. No two word processors can ever be 100 percent compatible with each other’s file formats; only a well-defined, standard format implemented by both stands any chance of interoperability. Unsurprisingly, staff ran into problems with document compatibility; equally unsurprising, the crew blamed the “new” software for the problems.

    Looking at the numbers (see my article in ComputerworldUK for more details), it appears that the expenditure in Freiburg was dominated by the idea of cutting licensing costs. I may be missing it in the reports, but I couldn’t find any sign of investment in the open source software itself. The report — and the subsequent PR from Freiburg — talks about the “uncertainty” of the OpenOffice.org software (forked to create LibreOffice, abandoned by Oracle, then repurposed by IBM and others at Apache) but makes no mention of investment in the software.

  • Help Make LibreOffice 4.0 Great

• CMS

  • Why It’s Worth Noticing the White House’s Big, Wet Kiss With Drupal and GitHub

    Between pictures of the president using Twitter and Vice President Joe Biden at Costco, the White House blog recently featured a little note advocating the use of open source in government. It is interesting to see how Barack Obama uses social networks, and a post about Biden at Costco feels a little bit like the White House just scooped The Onion — a shirtless photo would have been too much to hope for, but the author may have been able to slip in at least one Pontiac reference. But the White House making a point of name-checking open-source software touchstones is also worthy of note.

• Public Services/Government

  • Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source

    A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

  • UN trade body says governments should seize open source opportunities

    Governments should encourage the use of free and open source software, recommends Unctad in a report published on 28 November. The United Nation’s trade and investment body says that an increasing uptake of open source will help to develop an innovative domestic software market. It also makes public organisations less dependent on large-scale software manufacturers.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Homeroaster crafts a pumpkin spice latte the open source way

    Coffee, often cited as the second most highly traded commodity in the world, is deeply personal for many. Every coffee drinker has their favorite brand, blend, and brew method. Years ago I considered myself a coffee fan, but the coffee I was drinking was so loaded with cream and sugar that it barely resembled the beverage. I purposefully weened myself off of the additives and learned the unfortunate truth that most coffee served in the United States has gone stale before the consumer reaches for their wallet. After a long search for the freshest cup, I decided to roast my own.

  • Folger Library launches open-source digital Shakespeare

  • U.S. Department of Labor Grantees Converge to create Nation’s first Open Source Nursing Textbooks under $2 Billion Federal Grant Program

    California Community College faculty, administrators, a team of professionals and the 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM) are meeting this weekend to transform textbook production and costs, a project aimed to save students millions of dollars and revolutionize the way educational materials are compiled and delivered.

  • # Oldest open-source software kept by Army

    Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

  • # Oldest open-source software kept by Army

  • Ridiculous: SEC Boss Refused To Move Forward On Required Crowdfunding Rules To Protect Her ‘Legacy’

    Earlier this year, the JOBS Act passed Congress with widespread bipartisan support, and was signed into law by the President. There were a few different pieces involved, but one that got plenty of attention was the opening up of crowdfunding for equity (i.e., owning actual shares in a company). In the US, you can’t do a crowdfunding campaign that results in giving ownership in the company. Until the JOBS Act passed, that was considered a form of a public offering, which is a highly regulated area, in which you have to file all sorts of documents with the SEC, get an underwriter, go on a road show, all that fun stuff. But for smaller businesses looking to raise some money, this doesn’t make much sense. The JOBS Act opened up a small sliver of space in which smaller companies could raise a little bit of money in exchange for equity. The SEC actively opposed the whole thing from the beginning, but once the bill was law, it was also tasked with setting up the rules for how it would work to limit possible fraud.

• Programming

  • Lambda calculus boolean functions implemented in PHP

  • Looping Through LLVM’s New Loop Vectorizer

Leftovers

• UK hospital says royal prank call appalling after nurse death

  The London hospital that treated Prince William’s pregnant wife Kate condemned on Saturday an Australian radio station that made a prank call seeking information about the duchess, after the apparent suicide of a nurse who answered the phone.

• Google ends small-biz free ride on Google Apps

• Over 30 Million Accounts on Facebook Belong to Dead People

• Uber Is Really Legal in D.C. Now

  Earlier this evening, after a day of legislative bickering that seemed interminable, the D.C. Council finally delivered what urban professionals, libertarians, Megan McArdle and all the myopic little twits have demanded for months: Uber, the luxury sedan-on-demand service, is totally legal in the District of Columbia.

• Security

  • Report: CIA ‘officials’ behind Benghazi talking points

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Top CIA lawyer considered for Pentagon

  • Pollux: Subcritical Underground US Nuclear Explosion Test

    On December 6, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) posted on their website that a day earlier it had conducted ‘Pollux,’ the U.S.’s 27th subcritical nuclear experiment since signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Pollux was a first-of-its-kind subcritical test involving a scale model nuclear warhead primary (this fact wasn’t mentioned in their press release, see Annex below).

  • Bradley Manning: A Window into the American Soul

    The three branches of our government have united to destroy US civil liberties in the name of a hoax, “the war on terror.”

  • Marine brig officials face tough questions about treatment of Army GI in WikiLeaks case

  • Brig chief denies punishing GI in WikiLeaks case

  • The Senate report on CIA interrogations you may never see

    A Senate committee is close to putting the final stamp on a massive report on the CIA’s detention, interrogation and rendition of terror suspects. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, called the roughly 6,000-page report “the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted.”

  • US senators to vote on probe of CIA interrogation program

  • ‘Catfish’ caught impersonating CIA agent

  • Report: CIA ‘officials’ behind Benghazi talking points

  • An Appeal to President Obama’s Better Side

    … killed Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also an American citizen.

• Cablegate

  • Zimbabwe Diamond Scandal Overlooked

    Wikileaks uncovered the story. Why didn’t we hear much about it in the news?

  • Chat Logs Show Assange-Manning Collaboration, Military Says

    The latest chat excerpts, which were presented during closing arguments, came from Manning’s personal laptop computer, reports the Washington Post. Prosecutors said they show that Manning and Assange collaborated to steal and publish over 700,000 documents filled with state secrets. The publication of those secrets caused “extreme harm” to the United States, according to the prosecution. Capt. Ashden Fein said Assange did more than simply accept documents from Manning.

  • Why we don’t need another law against intelligence leaks

    The decade-long clandestine U.S. “war on terror” has spawned a parallel, escalating campaign to stop leaks of information about intelligence activities to the news media. During the first four years of the Obama administration, investigations of spy agency employees have proliferated. Six current or former officials have been prosecuted for unauthorized disclosures of information, more than in all previous administrations combined.

    The pressure to keep quiet is intensifying. The director of national intelligence has expanded the use of lie-detector interrogations in leak investigations. His office is studying how all 16 U.S. civilian and military intelligence agencies handle “non-incidental contacts” with the news media, presumably interviews and background briefings. Pentagon officials have been ordered to monitor news media for disclosures of classified information.

  • Julian Assange: the fugitive

  • French Leftist Melenchon Pays Assange a Visit

  • Assange doing ‘fine’ despite cramped space: ambassador

    Ecuadoran Ambassador Ana Alban told a small group of reporters that Assange took time to settle, but has now got used to his restricted living arrangements.
    “If you have a guest in your house, you want to make sure that he’s all right,” she said.
    “You can imagine how difficult it can be to have fresh air and to have sun and space.
    “In the beginning it was quite difficult, but now it’s fine.”
    The ambassador was speaking as French leftwing politician Jean-Luc Melenchon met with Assange.

  • New York Times Finally Shows Up to Cover Bradley Manning Proceedings (And Their Story Is Sloppy)

    Amidst growing criticism, including an editorial from the newspaper’s public editor, the New York Times sent reporter Scott Shane to cover military court proceedings in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier currently being prosecuted by the government for allegedly providing classified information to WikiLeaks.

  • Let a Thousand Public Editors Bloom: Bradley Manning and the Times Pt. 3

    The New York Times’ named Margaret Sullivan as its fifth Public Editor in September of this year. As the successful candidate for the job her duty is to investigate “matters of journalistic integrity” by working “independently” and “outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper.”

    So far, and with very few blemishes, she has done an exemplary job. She recently scrutinized her boss Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s choice to hire former BBC Director General Mark Thompson as the Times’ new CEO. Regarding the pedophilia scandal that has rocked that public institution and that Thompson oversaw for part of his career, Margaret asked “How likely is it that he knew nothing?” She also wrote that “It’s worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job.”

  • In WikiLeaks Case, Defense Puts the Jailers on Trial

  • An Empty Seat in the Courtroom

    THE lawyer David Coombs rarely speaks publicly outside the courtroom. He says that his client, Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, prefers it that way.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • WikiLeaks reveals US bribes help stop climate action

    There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, South African Professor Patrick Bond, an analyst and activist on climate change, told the Inter Press Service as the United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change met in Doha.

    The talks took place in the capital of Qatar from November 26 to December 7.

    “The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity,” Bond, the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS. “The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences … and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives.”

  • Fracking for Foreigners? New Report from Feds Backs More Natural Gas Exports

    How times have changed. Ten years ago the United States was looking at importing natural gas via massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, yet to be built. Now the country appears to be getting ready to significantly increase exports of LNG.

    A long-anticipated federal study released Wednesday for public comment concluded that the economic benefits of significant natural gas exports outweighed the potential for higher energy prices for consumers. The Obama administration has repeatedly said the study would be central to its decision on whether or not to approve expanded exports.

  • Surprise Side Effect Of Shale Gas Boom: A Plunge In U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    Environmental activists seem elated that the Obama administration may tackle climate change in its second term. In order to determine where climate change fits into the priority ranking of our nation’s most important agenda items, it seems worthwhile to step back and take stock of the quiet but tremendous progress that the U.S. has already made in reducing carbon emissions

• Finance

  • Another Goldman Creature Given Vital Government Post

    Big news yesterday in the United Kingdom, where the citizenry surveyed its domestic banking system and discovered that it couldn’t find a single person trustworthy enough to put in the top job at the Bank of England. So they went to Canada and stole that country’s central banker, Mark Carney, who just happens to be a former Goldman, Sachs executive – he was once Goldman’s managing director of investment banking.

    Carney’s appointment may be seen as an admission that the British banking sector is now so tainted, only an outsider can be trusted to govern them. Almost all of the major English banks have been dinged by ugly scandals. The LIBOR mess, in which banks have been caught messing around with global interest rates for a variety of sordid reasons, has most infamously implicated Barclays, but the Royal Bank of Scotland is also a cooperator in those investigations.

    Meanwhile, HSBC has been accused of laundering billions of dollars of Mexican drug money, a monstrous mess that recalls the infamous Bank of New York scandal of the late Nineties involving Russian mob money; officials have described the HSBC culture as “pervasively polluted.” And the British bank Standard Chartered is now being forced to pay $330 million to settle claims that it laundered hundreds of billions of dollars on behalf of Iran.

  • The Injustice of Justice…Judge Does Not Care About Fraud

    As promised, here is an update from Laser Haas in his diligent fight for justice. Unfortunately for him AND for ALL OF US, our judicial system as with all branches of our government does not want to take any action against those, too big to fail or those in the 1% with the money to buy lobbyists and influence government, who seem to rule our country.

  • Goldman in Mediation With CIFG to Settle Mortgage Suit

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and CIFG Assurance North America Inc. retained a mediator as the two companies seek to settle a lawsuit in New York state court in Manhattan, according to a filing.

    The insurer sued Goldman Sachs in New York State Supreme Court in August 2011, accusing the New York-based investment bank of making misrepresentations in connection with the securitization of a portfolio of 6,204 mortgage loans.

    The two sides have participated in one mediation session and have scheduled another for Dec. 19, according to a document filed in court yesterday.

  • A Wikileaks Cable Explained The Money Laundering Formula That Turned Macau Into A Gigantic Economic Success

    Shares of Macau-based casinos got slammed in the last day amid reports of the mainland cracking down on the junket operators that ferry rich players into high-roller rooms.

  • Former Anonymous Spokesman Barrett Brown Indicted For Sharing a Link to Stolen Credit Card Data

    Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today’s indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown’s in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to another. This is scary to anyone who ever links to anything.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC-Inspired Union-Busting Bill Narrowly Passes in Michigan as Koch Group Cheers

    Today in Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder and his GOP controlled lame-duck legislature pulled a fast one, introducing and then ramming through the House and the Senate so-called “right to work” legislation. The bill was introduced at 11 a.m., passed the House at 5 p.m. by a narrow margin and the Senate at around 6:00 p.m. When the process is complete and the bill is signed, Michigan will become the 24th right to work state.

  • Will Wisconsin Follow Minnesota’s Lead and Ban ALEC “Scholarships?”

• Censorship

  • Former Anon spokesperson indicted for allegedly linking to stolen information

  • EU Report: The ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Is Technically Impossible… So Let’s Do It Anyway

    Every few months, it seems, we hear about yet another attempt in Europe to implement the absolutely ridiculous idea of the “right to be forgotten.” We wrote about it in 2010, 2011 and again earlier this year. It’s a silly idea for a variety of reasons. The general idea is that someone, say, who has committed a crime, but is then rehabilitated / served his time / whatever, deserves a “fresh start” and the stories of the crime and punishment should be erased from publications. Europeans who support this wacky idea argue that it’s a form of a privacy right. But that’s ridiculous. It has nothing to do with “privacy” at all, as the fact that someone committed and convicted of a crime is a public fact, not private info. Telling people (and publishers) that they can’t talk about factual information, or even leave available factual stories written at the time just seems completely offensive to anyone who believes in the basic idea of free speech.

• Privacy

  • Privacy in America continues to erode online, report says

    The Wall Street Journal has been looking at this issue, and in its latest reportit says companies are increasingly connecting consumers’ real-life identities to where they hang out online.

    The newspaper cited a Georgia man shopping for a car who input his name and contact information on a car dealer’s website.

    While this data went to the dealership, it also was transmitted to a company that tracks the online movements of people shopping for vehicles. The company then was able to pair the man’s personal information with an analysis of the automotive websites he had visited and hand over all of this data to the car dealer, which could use it to more easily land a sale.

  • Dear Journalists at Vice and Elsewhere, Here Are Some Simple Ways Not To Get Your Source Arrested

    Computer security millionaire John McAfee’s surreal flight from Belizean law enforcement came to an end this week when he was detained (and then hospitalized) in Guatemala, as has been widely reported. A piece of the story that hasn’t been included in much of the reporting is how authorities figured out that McAfee — who was wanted for questioning in the shooting death of his neighbor — had fled Belize for Guatemala. McAfee’s location was exposed after he agreed to let two reporters from Vice Magazine tag along with him. Proud to finally be in the thick of a story rife with vices — drugs, murder, prostitutes, guns, vicious dogs, a fugitive millionaire and his inappropriately young girlfriend — they proudly posted an iPhone photo to their blog of Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro standing with the source of the mayhem in front of a jungly background, saying, “We are with John McAfee right now, suckers.”

  • DVLA tackle 294 public organisations for database abuse

    In the past three years, 294 public organisations have faced action over their use of the database containing details of car registrations and driving licenses.

    In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Big Brother Watch, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) disclosed that the organisations were overwhelmingly local authorities, but included Sussex Police and Transport for London.

  • A Real Privacy Threat To Global Internet Users From The U.N. International Telecommunications Union

    The new standards outline requirements for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology in future systems — a technique for snooping into the web content with legitimate uses all too often used by repressive regimes to identify and punish dissenters or preemptively censor online communication through fear of reprisal. However, while setting technical standards, ITU made practically no mention of the user implications of the technology, nor did it outline guidelines for appropriate use.

• Civil Rights

  • Appeals Court Sides With Bush Wiretapping

    A federal appeals court is refusing to reconsider its August ruling in which it said the federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued.

    The original decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this summer reversed the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program.

• DRM

  • Apple Has The Tightest Digital Handcuffs: Richard Stallman

    In a recent interview with New Internationalist Magazine, Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Foundation and GNU, criticized the restrictions imposed by Apple devices on its users.When asked about the malicious features that non-free programs have, Stallman bashed Apple for spying on its users and restricting their freedom.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • GoldenEye appeal on Monday: ORG reaches £5k funding goal

      Open Rights Group has reached the funding goal of £5,000 to fund the legal case defending the decision to keep private the personal details of O2 and Be Broadband customers asssociated with over 6000 IP addresses.

    • What Creative Commons and ‘copyleft’ mean to a designer

      I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do.

      What struck me most was seeing that people have tattoos of the Creative Commons logo—it’s a passionate gesture and conveyed a social force that inspired my creation of the three images you see in the photo above. I refer to them as “Creative Commons personification,” “Share,” and “The Creative Commons Ship,” respectively.

    • It’s Not “Getting” Or “Downloading” A Copy. It’s “Making” Or “Manufacturing” One.

      In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties.

    • Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright-reform memo

      The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of Republicans in the House of Representatives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Congress re-convenes in January. The incoming chairman of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by several Republican members of Congress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advocating reform of copyright law. They asked that Khanna not be retained, and Scalise agreed to their request.

    • 10 years of Creative Commons

      The creators of the Creative Commons licensing suite are celebrating the licences’ tenth birthday. As part of the festivities, local groups are organising events all over the world from 7 to 16 December. The organisation behind Creative Commons was founded in 2001 and produced and published the first set of licences in December of the following year. The organisation was founded by, among others, law school professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig, with the goal of giving both creators and consumers of content more freedoms than are usually afforded under traditional copyright licences.

    • Tattoo Copyright Strikes Again: Tattoo Artist Sues THQ For Accurately Representing Fighter’s Tattoo In Game

    • Sega forcing removal of Shining Force videos on YouTube

      Over the past few days, Sega has been forcing YouTube users to remove uploaded videos of the Sega Saturn RPG Shining Force III lest their entire channels get shut down. While this is not an altogether uncommon practice for a company trying to protect its IP, the fact that Sega is targeting just specific content is rather curious. In any case, it’s pretty damn heartless.

    • Sega Goes Nuclear On YouTube Videos Of Old Shining Force Game

      Well, Sega has apparently decided to buck their trend of being mildly annoying to their fans… by upping the ante and going full-blown fan-screw-crazy. They have apparently been going on a YouTube video take down blitz for anything related to their Shining Force franchise to somehow protect an upcoming PSP release in the series from being… well… maybe they think that… no, that doesn’t work… you know what? I don’t know what the hell they’re afraid of, but they’re pooping all over a bunch of fan videos.

    • Dotcom can pursue case against police, GCSB

      Details of the top secret international spy agency ring known as Echelon will have to be produced after a new judgment in the Kim Dotcom case.

      The internet tycoon was also cleared to pursue a case for damages against the police and the Government Communications Security Bureau in a judgment which has opened the Government’s handling of the criminal copyright case for its harshest criticism yet.

      The order for the GCSB to reveal top secret details came as the High Court at Auckland ruled the spy agency would now sit alongside the police in a case probing the unlawful search warrant used in the raid on Dotcom’s north Auckland mansion.

    • DMCA Fun: Movie Studios Issue Takedowns Over Their Authorized Films

      We’ve covered how often DMCA notices seem to be sent improperly, taking down others people’s work, but it’s also true that we see people send DMCA notices on their own work pretty often. TorrentFreak has done a great job detailing many cases where Hollywood’s biggest and most famous studios have been issuing DMCA takedowns on their own movies, as well as their own movie promotional pages. Among the takedowns are ones from Lionsgate taking down authorized versions of a film on iTunes, Amazon, Blockbuster and Xfinity.

    • Man charges porn trolling firm Prenda Law with identity theft

      Last week, we covered the comedy of errors that played out in the Florida courtroom of Judge Mary Scriven, where it became clear that there were no attorneys willing to put their reputations at risk by associating themselves with the porn trolling firm Prenda Law. A local Florida attorney told Judge Scriven that he had been brought into the case by Prenda, but now wanted out of the case. Prenda itself denied any involvement in the case.

    • Copyright troll Prenda Law is accused of using a stolen identity for their offshore plaintiffs