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04.19.12

Links 19/4/2012: Linux 3.4 RC3, GNOME Shell 3.4.1, Fedora 17 Almost Done

Posted in News Roundup at 2:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Why Apple Will Get Rich While Losing Market Share

  • Security

    • The TSA’s mission creep is making the US a police state

      Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that “If we can’t feel your nipples, they must be a bomb”, the agency’s craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra “If you don’t like it, don’t fly!”

      [...]

      Anyone who rode the bus in Houston, Texas during the 2-10pm shift last Friday faced random bag checks and sweeps by both drug-sniffing dogs and bomb-sniffing dogs (the latter being only canines necessary if “preventing terrorism” were the actual intent of these raids), all courtesy of a joint effort between TSA VIPR nests and three different local and county-level police departments. The new Napolitano doctrine, then: “Show us your papers, show us everything you’ve got, justify yourself or you’re not allowed to go about your everyday business.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • North America Takes Further Steps to Export its Natural Gas

      North America has a number of LNG export projects underway, mostly in Kitimat, British Columbia. But yesterday the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the first application for such a facility in the lower 48. Until these projects are operational, North American natural gas will continue to be trapped by geography. And, given that prices here are near $2.00 per million btu, I thought it would be enlightening to pull the most recent data chart from FERC, showing what customers pay for the same amount of NG, in liquified form, around the world. | see: World LNG Estimated April 2012 Landed Prices.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Danish Presidency on the scrounge – Future Internet Assembly

      Die Danish EU Presidency is on the scrouge. For the EU Future Internet Assembly they raise fees from lobbyists. Makes me wonder if they fear EU presidency conferences become the new food stamps. I find it unpleasant that even a low walled garden would exclude parts of the Dutch population e.g. students from participation.

  • DRM

    • International Day Against DRM — May 4, 2012

      While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They’ve even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission. It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Encouraging Draft ACTA Report, Still Under Copyright Lobbies Influence

          David Martin, the rapporteur of ACTA at the EU Parliament, has issued his draft report recommending the Parliament to reject ACTA. This is an important step toward effectively killing this dangerous agreement. But while denouncing ACTA, the rapporteur nevertheless supports the 15 year-long war on culture sharing. He also carefully avoid to stress the need for a positive reform of copyright, so as to protect fundamental freedoms online and fostering access to culture and knowledge.

        • ACTA Mobilization, And Beyond

          In the next few weeks, the EU Parliament will continue to work on ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, ahead of its final vote around the summer. This is a crucial moment for the citizen mobilization against ACTA, which will have to resist the growing pressure that the copyright lobbies put on the Parliament. Beyond the rejection of ACTA, the whole EU copyright enforcement policy needs to be revised. Only a reform of copyright can protect once and for all fundamental rights online of EU citizens and push the online creative economy in a new direction, away from blind repression. Here is a state of play on the next steps of the mobilization in the European Parliament.

Links – CISPA threatens US Citizens. Death to Word

Posted in Site News at 1:58 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • How LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word: 12 Features

    It amazes me that anyone would consider using Word or Windows but here are some technical reasons not to.

  • Death to Word. It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor
  • Google Chrome OS Review: Heading Towards Microsoft Market?
  • Behind the Scenes at Instagram: Tools for Building Reliable Web Services

    how do you build a service and scale it to the size and success of Instagram? At least part of the answer lies in choosing your tools wisely.

    Hint: they don’t use IIS.

  • An effort to upgrade SSH, from MIT

    This paper describes Mosh, a mobile shell application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and provides speculative local echo of user keystrokes. Mosh is built on the State Synchronization Protocol, a new UDP-based protocol that securely synchronizes client and server state, even across client IP address changes.

  • Play the eyballing game

  • Hardware

    • ESR: Making simple connections

      It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem. … In effect, I became the lead designer on a new electronics product by email. Just me. No corporate-backing, no million-dollar development budget, one guy saying “Hey, if you connect this to that, cool things will happen!” – negotiating directly with people on the other side of the planet who’ll never meet me face to face. … Wow…it really is the 21st century! …

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report
    • Cop Watcher Jailed Twice

      Cop watching — the act of turning a camera on police — is not illegal. But in areas policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it can still land you in jail. … She spent a hellish night in a cell with no bed, forced to sleep on a cold floor. “They kept the air-conditioning running full blast like they wanted to punish me,” she says … when the jailers returned her belongings, her camcorder footage had been erased — an act that First Amendment attorneys say is illegal. It also violates department policy. She was told the obstruction charge had been dropped and was handed a written citation for being “under the influence of a controlled substance.”

    • What local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records

      The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?

      Drug use seems to be a catch all accusation thrown against people the police don’t like.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule

      You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening.

    • Excerpt: At Goldman Sachs Servicer, ‘Total Disaster’

      “Had companies changed their philosophy and said, ‘You know what? We’re not going to beef up our collections staff; we’re going to beef up our loss mitigation staff.’ Had they done that and come up with loan modification scenarios that were reasonable and put people into more affordable payments early on, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

    • Five Reasons Why The Very Rich Have NOT Earned Their Money

      Ongoing anti-competitive business and government granted monopolies are not even mentioned.

  • Anti-Trust

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.

      Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act’s expanded police powers — and win. … His recipe for Calyx was inspired by those six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that’s stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can’t read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year.

    • ACLU: Kicking off “Stop Cyber Spying Week”

      The bill would create a loophole in all existing privacy laws, allowing companies to share Internet users’ data with the National Security Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and the biggest spy agency in the world — without any legal oversight. If CISPA passes, companies like Google and Facebook could pass your online communications to the military, just by claiming they were motivated by “cybersecurity purposes.” CISPA would give the companies immunity from lawsuits if you want to challenge what they are doing. Once the government has the information, the bill allows them to use it for any legal purpose other than regulation, not just for stopping cybersecurity threats.

      This bill would complete the public/private cooperation started by the U SAP AT RIOT ACT and legalize the worst abuses.

    • Revealed: CISPA — Internet Spying Law — Pushed by For-Profit Spy Lobby

      defense contractors, many already working with the National Security Agency on related data-mining projects, are lobbying to press forward. Like many bad policy ideas, entrenched government contractors seem to be using taxpayer money to lobby for even more power and profit.

      Microsoft, of course, is on the list but so are other big hitters like Lockheed Martin. Richard Stallman, in his political notes, says, “The Internet defeated SOPA with the help of many of the same businesses that are ready to acquiesce to CISPA. CISPA is the test for whether the users of the Internet can block an oppressive law.”

  • Civil Rights

    • An economic recovery that leaves workers further behind

      American workers have lost all their bargaining power. … First, American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. Second, with the rate of private-sector unionization down to a microscopic 6.9 percent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay. Employers can serenely blow them off — and judging by the data, that’s exactly what employers are doing.

  • Education Watch

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why one in five U.S. adults don’t use the Internet

      Expensive and ratty networks keep US citizens off the internet. Big publishers try to convince us all those without don’t want it by quoting people who don’t know any better and can’t tell us if they have been misrepresented.

  • DRM

  • Copyrights

    • Yes, Copyright’s Sole Purpose Is To Benefit The Public

      to claim that the protections of the author are greater than or even equal to the benefits to the nation, is a clear flip-flopping of the method with the purpose. Of course, in doing so, it not only flip flops the method and the purpose, but it completely distorts the nature of copyright law, and leads to maximalist-style positions, where absolutely no consideration is given to how the public benefits (or, more importantly, is hurt) from specific changes to copyright law.

    • The case was thrown out but Goldman Sach’s programmer spent a year in jail and the judges recommended changes to law that would criminalize what he did.

    • Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He’s Not Monetizing

      The propaganda machine is failing as artists succeed.

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