• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• You Can Now Avoid M$’s Tax At Best Buy

  For years all you could buy at Best Buy was Wintel for personal computing. Now, there’s Android/Linux and Chrome OS, both Linux operating systems and owing nothing to M$.

• Google Chromebook rolling out in more countries

• Google Expands Chromebooks’ Geographic Availability

  Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is opening up geographic availability of the Acer, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and Samsung Chromebooks to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands to consumers, businesses and schools, according to a company blog post.

  “Many of you around the world have told us you’re eager to get your hands on a Chromebook, so we’ve been working with our partners to make this possible,” wrote Caesar Sengupta, Google Product Management director. “Today we’re happy to say we’re one step closer to making Chromebooks truly “for everyone” — or rather, pour tout le monde, für alle, and voor iedereen.”

• Chromebooks for EVERYONE

  It’s happening. Chromebooks officially go on sale today in several countries which opens the floodgates for sales to those who thus far haven’t been able have this popular, easy to use Internet Appliance.

• Chromebooks now available globally, almost

  Linux will soon be ‘dominating’ the consumer PC space, thanks to Google’s Chromebook (and Android) which runs Gentoo-based Chrome OS. Google is taking its’ Chromebooks globally, and these devices are now available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.

  Caesar Sengupta, Product Management Director of Google says, “Starting Tuesday, the Acer, HP and Samsung Chromebooks will begin rolling out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. To help improve computing for organizations, we’re rolling out Chromebooks to businesses and schools in these same countries as well. Learn more on our Enterprise blog.”

• Tiger Direct

  So far I’ve turned it on, activated Windows (yuck), verified the correct size of RAM and hard disk, and verified that the Ethernet and sound ports work. I had a moment’s dismay when Windows reported that it could not write a DVD, but I remembered something about having to install additional software — device drivers, perhaps? — for that, so I booted Linux from a “live” USB stick, and found that Linux will happily write a DVD. I need to run a RAM test, and hard drive diagnostics, but so far the hardware looks solid.

  This weekend I hope to have time to re-partition the hard drive and install Linux…and put an end to a nearly-three-month quest.

• Chrome OS and the Cloak of Unhackability

  “Hackers have a hard enough time with a full version of Linux, let alone a pared down version with only a secured browser running as the interface,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “All the potential options from Linux? They are gone. The hackers couldn’t get in when they were there — they have no hope of getting in now.”

Server

• The Best Servers for Linux in 2013

  Linux may be reaching new heights every day in desktop and mobile computing, but if there’s any domain in which its might has long been undisputed, it’s servers.

  To wit: Linux is now used to run about a third of all websites, W3Techs reports. Linux servers in general now represent 20.4 percent of all server revenue, according to IDC. Then, of course, there’s supercomputing, in which it claims a full 94 percent of the world’s Top 500.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 302 – Black Market Enterprise Linux

Kernel Space

• Chromebook’s biggest fan: Linus Torvalds

  Chromebooks are now on sale in more places around the world than ever. In part, that may be because Google’s high-end Chromebook Pixel has a very well-known and enthusiastic fan: Linux’s inventor, Linus Torvalds.

• Xen @ Linaro Connect Asia 2013

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Releases Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 Linux Driver

    AMD has uploaded the Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 driver to their website for Linux x86/x86_64 users.

• Benchmarks

  • Compilation Times, Binary Sizes For GCC 4.2 To GCC 4.8

Applications

• Linux Systems Administrator Tools to Die For

• Some useful webcam applications in XFCE

  I’ve been trying out some useful applications in XFCE with my new webcam, a cheap but Linux friendly HP.

• New Lightworks Video Shows Off Progress on Linux Client

• Kazam Screencaster – A screencasting program created with design in mind

• Tiny Tiny RSS – The Google Reader Replacement

• JACK Up Your Apps!

• Proprietary

  • Closed-source Linux Tycoon Now Available For DOS

    From the deepest darkest corner of the deepest darkest dungeon of Bizarro World, Bryan Lunduke releases Linux Tycoon, his closed-source game about an open source operating system for a closed source operating system no one uses. That’s right, you thought today’s earlier headlines were a pump-fake-pass for April Fool’s Day, but this takes things one step further. Linux Tycoon, the “premier Linux Distro Building Simulator game in the universe”, is now available for DOS.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Automate easily your tasks on Ubuntu with Cuttlefish

  • How to install Linux speech recognition in Ubuntu

  • Howto: Sending test mails with Swaks

  • Speed Up Your Drupal Development Using Installations and Distributions

  • The Linux Filesystem Need Not Be Mysterious

  • SCP

  • SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis

  • cjots: Books, pages, notes and probably more

  • Linux 101: Easy VNC server setup

  • Hidden Linux: locate and updatedb

  • Using pstore to debug awkward kernel crashes

  • Create Network PXE Boot Server with Fedora 18

  • How to use SoX – a command line audio utility tool

  • Rip Audio CDs in Linux with Sound Juicer

  • fonts

  • HOWTO : Rebuild Kali Linux 1.0.1

  • HOWTO : nVidia Display Card on Kali Linux 1.0.1

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.4 x86_64 (Apache2, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3)

  • 9 Best Free JavaScript Books

  • Howto: Sending test mails with Swaks

  • Install Linux Kernel 3.8.4 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  • Mastering The Linux Shell

  • Automate easily your tasks on Ubuntu with Cuttlefish

  • Setup Directory Server(LDAP) in CentOS 6.4 / RHEL 6.4

  • How To Use Multiple PHP Versions (PHP-FPM & FastCGI) With ISPConfig 3 (Debian Wheezy)

  • Ada and AWS

  • How to use SoX – a command line audio utility tool

  • 4 Best Free CoffeeScript Books

• Games

  • Closed-source Linux Tycoon Now Available For DOS

  • Humble Bundle Weekly Sale kicks off with pay what you want Bastion

    Humble Bundle organizers have announced a new weekly promotion of rotating pay-what-you-want offers on individual indie games.

    A Humble Mumble blog post reveals new deals will arrive each Tuesday, with Supergiant’s 2011 action RPG Bastion representing the debut title for the promo. For a minimum purchase of $1, buyer’s will score DRM-free digital copies of the featured game for Windows PC, Mac, and Linux.

  • New Humble Indie deal a bastion of good value

    The good people over at Humble Indie Bundle have come up with a new plan to take your money, and the good news is it’s still for charity.

  • 2.5% of all Steam users use Linux

    Every month, a Steam survey is conducted about the software and hardware being used among the Steam users. In this survey the users of the gaming platform are being asked about the CPU, the graphics card, the operating system etc. they are using.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops

  After I install a new version of Linux, I usually take a good look at the screen. Does it have a task bar? Can you find your window after it was minimized? Lately, some developers have been struck by some sort of amnesia brought on by the stress created by the mobile sector offerings.

  Fortunately, in Linux we do have plenty of other choices. I will describe some of them in this article, and I’ll attempt to measure the RAM memory requirements. I use free command in an xterm before and after the graphic environment is started on a separate X server (Xephyr). The computer is an older 64-bit machine, running Ubuntu 12.04 with LXDE as desktop environment.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma Media Center – Release One

    We are proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts.

  • Comparing Qt’s QML vs. Enlightenment’s EFL

  • Simple QML vs EFL comparison

    Recently I found this blog post about complete minesweeper clone – elemines – based on Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. As EFL are designed to efficiently work even on PDAs, I came up with an idea to implement similar clone in plain QML/Javascript (QmlMiner) and perform simple comparative analysis. I wondered how the QML version would compare with the EFL one.
    Following areas were analyzed:

    1. Developer experience
    2. Source code size and used languages
    3. Memory consumption
    4. Startup time

    The comparison was concluded with a limited performance check.
    You can look at it from many angles. Just note that I was comparing virtual-machine-based runtime (Qt4/QML – QtQuick 1.1, JavaScript) with EFL app that is coded in C and compiled into a native binary to see how much advantage the low-level C programming has over more modern technology such as QML.

  • Starting preparations for Qt 5.1

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GTK+ 3.7.14 Fixes a Lot of File Chooser Button Issues

  • 3.8… clocks, gedit, more…

    gnome 3.8 is on track to be released on time as usual (the release candidate will be out later today): it’s a great incremental release with improvements all over the place, but I’ll let the release notes speak.

    For my own part, I put my fingers here and there either making patches or trying to help (annoy?) people doing the real hard work with reviews and suggestions.

  • GNOME 3.8 – Jon McCann talks of future in GNOME

    The GNOME Project is proud to announce the imminent release of GNOME 3.8 in less than two weeks. As with every release, there are many new features and technical improvements. We asked William Jon McCann, a GNOME designer, about the direction of the project and what he is anticipating for GNOME in the future.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Zentyal 3.0-2

  • SparkyLinux 2.1 Has Been Officially Released

    Paweł Pijanowski has proudly announced a few hours ago, March 19, that his SparkyLinux operating system based on the testing branch of Debian GNU/Linux has now reached version 2.1.

    Dubbed Eris, SparkyLinux 2.1 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.2.39-2 and it is based on the Debian testing repos as of March 15, 2013.

    SparkyLinux 2.1 also comes with a new set of wallpapers, a working Live system, which is now compatible with USB flash drivers, support for installing the distro from a USB stick, as well as minor bug fixes.

  • GParted 0.15.0-1

  • AsteriskNOW 3.0

  • AUSTRUMI 2.6.8

  • GNOME Disk Utility 3.8.0 Has Been Officially Released

    GNOME Disk Utility, the utility that allows users to handle storage devices, is now ready for the highly anticipated GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, as announced on March 18 by the development team behind the GNOME Project.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 3 Beta 3 Shaping Up Nicely

    The third beta of upcoming Mageia 3 was released last week, running a few days late themselves. This release brings the final version of KDE 4.10, GNOME 3.6.3, and Steam. There are two more test releases before final, so there’s still time to get your bug reports in.

  • New Mageia Board Members Elected

    The third annual Mageia elections were held during FOSDEM in Brussels recently for new Community Council and Mageia Board members. The Mageia Community Council is made up of elected team representatives such as for packagers or translators who help keep development moving along smoothly. The Board members oversee development while managing and administering the project.

• Slackware Family

  • Everyday Linux User Review of SLAX

    If you go to distrowatch.com and look down the rankings you will see at number 24 a distribution called SLAX.

    It is very hard for distro developers to make their particular distribution stand out. SLAX is not one of them.

    SLAX weighs in at 210mb and is built to run from a USB drive as opposed to being installed to the hard drive. What you end up with is a fully functional portable operating system.

  • Call for help: Slackware on an ARM Chromebook?

    Well folks, the ARM-powered Chromebook built by Samsung can finally be bought in the Netherlands, and this raises a hairy question. Should I buy one and have a real-life target for my ARM port of Slackware which has been on the backburner for a year?

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon to speak at Open Source Think Tank

  • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Announces Agenda for Red Hat Summit, the Industry’s Premier Open Source Technology Event

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 19 Kernel Testing

      I have a sekret. I know what kernel version is going to be used for the Fedora 19 release. Want to know? Well, I’ll be glad to tell you. Why would I tell you? Because we need your help! (Aside from the fact that Fedora doesn’t really have secrets and stuff.)

      So looking into the kernel release crystal ball and comparing it with the Fedora 19 schedule, we’re pretty much settled on using the 3.9 kernel as the release kernel. Fedora 19 (at the moment) is schedule to ship at the end of June, and we’ll still be in the middle of the -rc timeframe for 3.10 kernel at that point. While shipping with a non-released kernel sounds like fun for entirely inappropriate reasons, it’s not something we’re going to do. Even if F19 slips by a month, we’d be hard pressed to really get another kernel rebase in place in that timeframe. Just doesn’t make sense. So we’ll ship with whatever is the latest stable 3.9.y kernel at that point.

• Debian Family

  • Backports Integrated Into The Main Archive

    The Backports Team is pleased to announce the next important step on getting backports more integrated. People who are reading debian-infrastructure-announce will have seen that there was an archive maintenance last weekend: starting with wheezy-backports the packages will be accessible from the regular pool instead of a separate one, and all backports uploads will be processed through the regular upload queue (including those for squeeze-backports and squeeze-backports-sloppy).

  • Debian Wheezy Linux Nearing the Finish Line as 100 Bugs Remain

    Watching Debian Linux releases come together has always been aDebian long and drawn out process. Few other Linux projects (if any) have the same breadth of platform support or packages and few (if any) have the same fiercely principled approach (hurray Debian Free Software Guidelines) to development either.

  • DebConf13 matching fund

    As part of the DebConf13 fundraising effort, a generous sponsor, Brandorr Group, has proposed to start a matching fund in USD for DebConf13; in place through the end of April 30th.

  • Eaton donates hardware to Debian

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu to halve support length for non-LTS releases

        In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical’s Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) on 25 April.

      • Ubuntu Cuts Down Non-LTS Support

      • Canonical cuts support for non-LTS versions of Ubuntu, users now get nine months of bug fixes

      • Ubuntu cuts non-LTS support from 18 months to 9 months

      • Ubuntu, openSUSE and the Definition of Easy

        To hear fans talk, without Ubuntu, Linux desktops would be still be basic window managers. Even Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, recently implied that those who questioned him held the view that “Linux is supposed to be hard so it’s exclusive.”

        Such attitudes always remind me of how the Soviet Union once claimed to have invented every major scientific theory and new piece of technology in the twentieth century. True, Ubuntu did increase awareness of usability on the Linux desktop, but that does not mean that Ubuntu and its Unity desktop have a monopoly on usability.

        The truth is, long before Ubuntu, other distributions were stumbling towards usability. Although Ubuntu’s ability to grab headlines accelerated their progress, other modern distributions have arrived at very different usability philosophies than Unity.

      • Canonical to halve Ubuntu support lifetime

        Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning a change to how it supports its operating system that will see each major release updated for just nine months after release.

        Founded as a fork of the Debian distribution following dissatisfaction with the length of time between releases, Ubuntu has stuck to a rigid six-month release cycle since it was founded. When released, each six-monthly version – given a release number of the year plus the month of release, along with an alliterative animal-themed codename – was guaranteed to receive software updates for eighteen months, or three full version releases. The exception was the Long Term Support (LTS) releases, designed for corporate and enterprise use, which enjoyed a full three years of guaranteed updates.

      • On the Ubuntu Community (reprise)

      • Wayland

      • Sweet Ubuntu Device QtCreator Integration

        I spent a bit of today using the Ubuntu Device integration features in Qt. It’s fresh software, but it’s really easy and fun. Here is the development version of the game I am running running on my desktop. Noticed that I set the size of the window and therefore the play area very intentionally. But, I had to think to myself “will the touch interactions work ok on my tablet?” “What about the sizes?”. Fortunately, getting it onto my tablet is pretty easy.

      • Ubuntu 13.04 Default Wallpapers Released [Download Link Included]

      • Ubuntu Technical Board Looks at Shuttleworth’s Proposal for Release Management Methodology

      • The Coolest Ubuntu Business Cards Ever

      • Changes in Ubuntu releases decided by the Ubuntu Technical Board

      • Can You Help Ferret Out Ubuntu’s Bugs?

        Everyone has their favorite Linux distro and mine happens to be Ubuntu. After years of using the OS, I appreciate the ease with which I can run lots of applications that I can’t run on other platforms, Ubuntu’s security, and more. I also have a long wish list of things that I wish Ubuntu could do better.

        If you have a similar wish list, you may want to keep track of Canonical’s UbuntuBugDays and Hug Days. The next Hug Day is Thursday of this week, and is a community event that anyone can participate in, but Canonical is also serious about inviting developers to find meaningful bugs in Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu Technical Board Meeting Decisions Regarding The New Release Proposals

        It was also decided to implement the above changes “to the maintenance schedule effective in 13.04 and later”.

      • There is Ubuntu, There is Linux and Then There are Others

        The Microsoft Windows users of the world are beginning to experience the pain of the new release of the Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows 8.

        While there are some users that are happy with the new release, a lot of them are not satisfied and some even very bitter. Microsoft are pushing the marketing for Windows 8 pretty hard. There is advertising on Facebook, banners on all of the popular websites and also TV commercials. And it’s also in newspapers and magazines everywhere you read. Microsoft does always markets a new Windows operating system release pretty heavily, but more so with Windows 8. Why? Because Microsoft have accepted the fact that the strong and viable competition can actually effect their bottom-dollar. And there’s public evidence of this when you look at the share price for MST. It has flat-lined and has been this way for quite some time. They are facing stiff competition from both Apple and Linux operating systems alike.

      • Review: Sidebar Pro and Lite, multitasking the Ubuntu Touch way [VIDEO]

        The greatest part about Android is the sheer flexibility developers have with the platform. Sometimes we see a rival OS come out with some pretty interesting ideas and features and as Android users, we don’t have to mope around wondering when Google will introduce something similar to their mobile OS. No. A random developer from the Play Store can create an app with much of the same functionality.

      • Ubuntu unveils its next-generation shell and display server

        Ubuntu publicly announced its plan for the future of its Unity graphical shell on March 4, a plan that includes a new compositing window manager designed to run on the distribution’s device platforms as well as on desktop systems. The plan will reimplement the Unity shell in Qt and replace Compiz with a new display stack called Mir that will incorporate a compositor, input manager, and several other pieces. Mir is not designed to use the Wayland display protocol (although the Ubuntu specification suggests it could be added later), a decision that raised the ire of developers in several other projects.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Trisquel 6.0 Review: High performing and extremely elegant! Free Software advocate or not – a definitely recommended distro for all Linux lovers!

Devices/Embedded

• SODIMM-like COMs snap ARM SoCs into embedded apps

• RasPlex – Plex on Raspberry Pi, Beta out now

  Plex comes to Raspberry Pi, threatening to usurp XBMCs throne by adding a server functionality to a Pi HTPC

• Android vs Linux in automotive apps: a role for each?

  The role of Android as an alternative to embedded Linux has been a subject of quite a bit of discussion recently. As the use of open source software in automotive gains momentum there are differing opinions on the subject of using Android, Linux or both. The Linux Foundation recently wrote a post summarizing a discussion during a panel at the Android Builders Summit as well as some interviews from a number of experts. The post attempts to define Android vs. Embedded Linux and brings up some interesting points on the subject.

• More Raspberry Pi manufacturing moves back to the UK

  UK distributor Premier Farnell, which owns Raspberry Pi-maker element14, announced on Friday that 100 percent of element14′s manufacturing is now back in the UK, marking the completion of a transition away from Chinese manufacturing it began last September. To bring production to the UK, Premier Farnell signed a deal with Sony to build the device at a contract electronic manufacture facility in Pencoed, South Wales.

• Newly purchased Raspberry Pi is not booting? Defective unit? Sending it back….

  The Raspberry Pi team is noticing an increase in the returns of the unit where the customers claim that its not booting up. If you are one such customer who received a ‘defective’ Raspberry Pi and are planning to send it back, read this before you do that.

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made a public announcement clarifying what could be the cause of non-booting units.

• Tiny $50 ARM-based COM runs Linux, Android

  BDD Group is readying a tiny, sub-$50, SODIMM-style computer module powered by an SOC (system-on-chip) containing a single ARM Cortex A8 core along with a Mali-400 GPU, among other functions. The business card-sized “A10 COM” will be supported with Android and Linux BSPs.

  BDD’s CEO, Rowdy VanCleave, says the A10 COM was created to enable rapid design and development of a wide range of “industrial embedded” products.

• Software Company Anahata to Explore Development on ARM Linux

• Phones

  • Why Tizen will be a game-changer

    bada. LiMo. Maemo. Moblin. MeeGo. At one time or another, these Linux-based mobile platforms were expected to have a significant impact on the smartphone market. In each case, however, potential and promise never became reality. Some were abandoned, some were merged. Partner organizations came and went. OEMs changed course. I’m not sure Apple or Google even noticed, let alone cared.

  • Ballnux

    • A demo of Samsung’s multi-window Android extensions (video)

  • Android

    • Whitepaper probes Android’s suitability for embedded apps

    • XBMC 12.1 improves Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi performance

      The XBMC team has released an updated version of the popular cross-platform media center application. While it brings bug fixes and improvements to Windows, Mac, and Linux, XBMC 12.1 also includes a number of improvements for mobile and low power devices such as the Raspberry Pi, Apple TV, and Android and iOS devices.

    • Android/Linux Getting Mind-Share

    • Digitimes Research: More software developers join Android camp

    • 7 Editors for the Android — for Free or Cheap

    • Chrome OS and Android are not going to merge: Google chairman

      Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt is in India these days and was attending the high profile The Guardian Big Tent Activate India event taking place in New Delhi. During the event he made it clear that the Chrome OS and Android are not going to be merged and will continue to evolve as ‘separate’ entities.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Ubuntu For Tablets: Hot or Not?

    This year, Ubuntu has been in the news more than it’s ever been. Week after week, a new announcement from Canonical inundates tech sites and blogs. And this time, it’s not just the Linux-based news sites that are covering them. 2013 is all about Ubuntu going mainstream. Coming from the Linux world, the word mainstream has many connotations, but when compared to what Apple, Microsoft, and Google are doing, Ubuntu is a relatively unknown player. Going head-to-head with these giants is probably what mainstream means at this moment.

Taking Control: Interview with FLIRC Creator Jason Kotzin

We’ve covered a lot of hardware projects here on “The Powerbase”, from completely open source creations such as the OsciPrime, to 2012′s incredible influx of Kickstarter campaigns. But none of them have kept our attention as closely as Jason Kotzin’s FLIRC.

Jason has managed to achieve a delicate balance between the obsessive attention to detail that comes from a one-man project and the high production quality you would expect from a commercial product. But what makes FLIRC really special is that Jason didn’t just create this project for his own personal gains, but instead did it as a way to raise money for Dr. Heinz Lenz at the USC Cancer Research Center, the oncologist who helped him through his 6 month battle with cancer.

Documenting Your Work With Liferay

I’m generally adverse to large software bundles, especially ones that are aimed at businesses. All too often they are a cludgy mess of disjointed and barely related applications that have been thrown together. Not so with Liferay, Liferay is an open source portal that actually makes sense.

Open Source Ubuntu Speech Recognition App is Shaping up Nicely, Already Installable in Ubuntu!

Ubuntu Speech Recognition app is shaping up nicely. During the first video preview of the Ubuntu Speech Recognition software, author did promise open sourcing of the app. He has kept his promise. Ubuntu Speech Recognition is now open source and is licensed under GNU General Public License Version 3 aka GPLV3. See github page for more information. Installation instructions for Ubuntu Speech Recognition app can be found below.

EdX Releases Open Source Tool For Building Interactive MOOC Courseware

EdX has released source code to the general public that supports interactive learning built specifically for the Internet.

The nonprofit online learning platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has released XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting EdX course content.

Netflix Invites Open Source Cloud App Development

Netflix‘s lack of official support for Linux may not do much to help its popularity within the open source world. Yet in a sign that the company does remain eager to wield stronger influence in this space–especially where it intersects with the cloud–it has announced a contest for open source developers “to build something cool using or modifying our open source software.” And it has committed a fair amount of cash to seeing the initiative through.

Vagrant 1.1 adds first paid plugin for VMware Fusion

Open Source Project Mimics Yahoo Pipes on Your Own Machine

When you move your life onto the web, you lose control of your data. And — who knows? — your web app of choice may even vanish from the face of the Earth while you’re still using it. Think Google Reader.

The growing Indie Web Movement hopes to alleviate these problems, working to give web users more control over their online data and identity. The latest example is an open source software tool called Huginn.

The Fourth Dimension of Open Source

In 2006, I wrote at ZDNet about what I called the open source incline, the idea being that the more even-handed the license, the more likely it was people would contribute code and other help to a project.

The news peg here was a company called Appcelerator, which was then gaining significant developer support by licensing its mobile app code under the General Public License, or GPL. This requires that companies offer back their contributions to the code, while the Apache or Eclipse licenses let companies make enhancements proprietary.

Why your future PC may be disaggregated

The Math of FOSS Freeloaders

oncerns are raised every once in a while in the broader free and open source software community about freeloaders. The attitude expressed is that if you’re getting the benefit of FOSS, you should contribute. Building a business on a FOSS project you don’t own, whether you’re providing a service or product around a FOSS project should in return garner some sort of quid pro quo. In reality, freeloaders are desirable.

Wikimedia adopts Lua for page generation

Wikimedia has activated Lua-based templating on several of its sites including English Wikipedia. Driven by a new MediaWiki extension called Scribunto which allows scripting languages to be embedded in MediaWiki, it is hoped that the Lua templating will help improve performance where editors take advantage of its capabilities.

Lua code is stored in module pages like Module:Bananas and is then referred to in pages with {{#invoke:modulename|functionname}} like this example page. Lua offers a more powerful, and much less obscure, way of performing complex tasks which are reused within pages. There is already a queue of requests to get existing templates converted to Lua.

Kenya: Open Source

Does open source have a place in the enterprise outside experimenters? find out how Radio Africa group is running almost entirely on open source and how Madison insurance has blended in the open “sauce’ to derive the best benefits of both worlds.

Radio Africa is a media company that invests in radio, television and print. The group operates 5 radio stations, a single TV station and a newspaper and employs just under 500 employees. The group has offices in Mombasa as well as sales and correspondence offices in Nakuru, Kisumu, Eldoret and Meru. Other operations include a printing press in Nairobi’s Industrial area.

Business Usage of FLOSS Increasing in Kenya

Open eCard releases open source eID middleware

Open eCard has released the sources of the ISO/IEC 24727-based Open eCard app, as an alternative to proprietary eID middleware solutions.

“In order to use national eID cards and electronic health cards on the internet, a corresponding software application running on the computer system of each citizen is required,” the company said in an announcement on its website. “Interoperability across borders is achieved by supporting the international standard ISO/IEC 24727.”

Open eCard releases open source eID middleware

Design in open source projects and my experiences

Events

• Videos and slides from Linaro’s Hong Kong conference

• Experts Demystify Open Source Technologies at Open Source Conference, Pune

• 10 Killer Open Source Networking Tools

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox DevTools Get an Overhaul

    Firefox has always been a popular browser with developers, and we’ve covered some of the extensions and tools available for development with Firefox, such as the Firebug extension. Recently, Mozilla’s Paul Rouget surveyed developers about what they would like to see in terms of Firefox DevTools. The developers provided feedback, and now Rouget has an update on what to expect in the future. Here are details.

  • Happy Birthday, Mozilla!

  • Is Firefox Too Customizable for its Own Good?

    Alex Limi, who heads up product design for Mozilla, asks an interesting question in a new blog post: “If I told you that a company is shipping a product to hundreds of millions of users right now, and included in the product are several prominent buttons that will break the product completely if you click them, and possibly lock you out from the Internet — can you guess which product it is?”

SaaS/Big Data

• Rackpace’s Open Cloud Academy Offers OpenStack Certification

  For months now, data from recruitment organizations has shown that skills with the OpenStack cloud computing platform commands power in the job market. Rackspace Hosting, which has been focused on OpenStack-based cloud computing, has announced a number of training initiatives. For example, the company has announced a strategic agreement with Hortonworks, which provides Apache Hadoop development, support and training, to empower customers with an enterprise-ready Hadoop platform targeted to be easy to use in the cloud.

• OpenStack Certified Professionals: New Cloud Pros Coming

• Amazon Cloud Storage Clone Goes Open Source

  Riak CS started life as a proprietary version of the open source NoSQL database Riak. But unlike many other “open core” systems, Riak CS wasn’t a souped up version of the open source version, but a purpose-built application with new features specifically designed for large scale storage. Riak CS added support for “objects” — i.e., files — of up to 5 GB each, and tools for billing individual users or departments for resource use. And of course, an S3-compatible API that let you plug applications into it in much the same way you’d plug them into Amazon’s online service.

Databases

• MongoDB refines load balancing

  The MongoDB data store can now randomize placement of data on different shards to smooth load balancing

• NoSQL Database MongoDB Reaches Beyond Software Coders

  But the company that develops Mongo — 10gen — is hoping to reach beyond the developers and into big businesses. On Tuesday, with this in mind, the company unveiled a the “enterprise edition” of the database that’s specifically designed for use in the business world.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Open-Xchange to launch open-source, browser-based office suite

  Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents.

  The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced on Wednesday.

Education

• Open source eliminates lack of resources at inner city schools

  Fifty years ago, on January 17, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC. And it is worthwhile to reflect on how much or little has changed in terms of education. His belief that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” still resonates today. Five years later, in 1968, King was assassinated as he was working on his Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial effort to gain economic justice and alleviate poverty regardless of race. His underlying concern had been social justice and altering the balance of power in society by reforming society, which remains controversial today.

Healthcare

• AHRQ: Open source EHR improves care in developing nations

  Global nonprofit Partners in Health (PIH) helped develop an open source electronic health record system that is improving care in developing countries, as well as in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, according to an announcement from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Business

• Stick A (Open Source) Fork In It: camunda BPM Splits From Activiti

• Semi-Open Source

  • Open Source BPM: camunda forks Activiti

  • Open source BPM platform from camunda

    Berlin-based BPM (Business Process Management) experts camunda have renamed their camunda fox product to camunda BPM and have also released its source code under the open source Apache License 2. The product is based on the Activiti BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation).

Funding

• Award-Winning Video Editor Hits Kickstarter, Supports Windows, Mac, and Linux

  OpenShot, a leading open-source video editor for Linux, has turned to crowd-funding site Kickstarter to bring its popular application to Windows and Mac, along with many new professional-level features.

BSD

• flirtations with FreeBSD 9.1

• FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-x64.iso

• Intel KMS/DRM Driver Readied For OpenBSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Watch LibrePlanet live this weekend

  If you can’t be in Cambridge in person, you can tune in live on March 23rd and 24th to catch all the action.

  We’ll be streaming every session in each of the three program tracks.

• MediaGoblin sprint on the 24th: At LibrePlanet, and on the Internet!

Project Releases

• MongoDB 2.4 Released

• Etherpad 1.2.9 fixes “massive security issue”

  Etherpad Lite was recently security audited by Mozilla. The developers say the result of that audit was an urgent effort from them to fix “gaping loopholes” in the collaborative editor’s security and, in turn, release version 1.2.9 of Etherpad Lite. Issues addressed include a major security problem where an attacker could submit content as another user and a problem with unescaped user input.

• OpenSMTPD 5.3 released

  It will also be shipping with OpenBSD 5.3.

Public Services/Government

• Time to be open-minded about open source contact centres?

  Following news that the UK government has mandated open source software, James Passingham, Technical Services Director for independent managed communications provider, Foehn, explains why more organisations are opening their eyes to open source.

  This week, the UK government mandated a preference for using open source software for future digital developments. The new Government Service Design Manual, released as a beta version on the 14th of March and effective from April, lays out standards that must be used for all new digital public services. For the first time, the UK government has expressed a formal preference for open source over proprietary software.

• Newark Mayor Cory Booker Says Government Must Embrace Tech, Be Open Source

  Monday afternoon Newark Mayor Cory Booker crossed the Hudson River to chat at the OnMedia NYC conference about changes he believes government can make through technology. His administration uses social media to get residents more active in improving their community. “I could crowdsource my entire city,” Booker said, “and involve them in empowering Newark.”

• April publishes English translation of France’s free software policy

  The French government policy on free software is now available in English. The translation was published earlier today by April, a French advocacy organisation. It is not an official translation. However, experts involved in the creation of the original French text have not found misinterpretations, the advocacy group commented. The group hopes other public administrations will use the guideline to their benefit.

Licensing

• One year on OSI’s board (aka one year in OSI’s licensing)

  Since it has been roughly one year since Mozilla nominated me to sit on the OSI board, I thought I’d recap what I’ve done over the course of the year. It hasn’t been a perfect year by any stretch, but I’m pretty happy with what we’ve done and I think we’re pointed in the right direction. Because my primary public responsibility on the board has been chairing the license committee, this can also sort of double as a review of the last year in license-discuss/license-review (though there is lots of stuff done by other members of the community that doesn’t show up here yet).

Openness/Sharing

• STC Announces Open ImmuCast™, an Open Source Immunization Forecasting Web Service

  Scientific Technologies Corporation (STC) is excited to announce the release of Open ImmuCast™, a free and open source immunization forecasting web service now available to public health entities in the United States. Open Immucast™ is the open source version of STC’s commercial Stand Alone Forecasting algorithm that has been integrated with production immunization registries since 1999. Open ImmuCast™ is backed by STC’s more than twenty years of experience in developing immunization evaluation and forecasting solutions. STC’s Clinical Decision Support Specialist is a nationally recognized subject matter expert and an invited panelist for CDC’s Clinical Decision Support Logic Specification Panel. The significant implementation history of the forecasting algorithm and STC’s expertise combine to make Open ImmuCast™ a tried and proven product.

• How do you start fixing the GOP? Open source the platform

  The Republican Party must engage its members in an open and collaborative process to discuss exactly what the party should stands for and believes in. In so doing, they will effectively create a new Party platform and update the concept of the platform for the 21st century. Such a platform is proposed, written, and ratified in an open process should be the foundation behind which the GOP rallies and will the beginning of a real effort to establish a modern social media presence.

• Guardian of open source

• Open Access/Content

  • Startups are about to blow up the textbook

    A raft of startups is using open-source materials in an attempt to transform learning – terrifying traditional publishers.

  • The American Library Association Has Given Aaron Swartz Its First Ever Posthumous Award

    Famed Internet activist Aaron Swartz was honored Friday by the American Library Association. He became the first person to posthumously receive the association’s James Madison Award.

  • Plans for releasing Swartz evidence

    In a letter this morning, MIT’s president announced plans to make requested Swartz-related evidence public, with names redacted to “protect the privacy and safety of those members of our community.” However, much of this information is already publicly known and has been published by The Tech and the New York Times, among others.

  • Neanderthal Genome Published As Open Source

    A high-quality full Neanderthal genome has been sequenced for the first time, and the open source data is now available to everyone. That’s the exciting announcement today from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

    The team, led by paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo, used material from a toe bone found in 2010 in a cave in southern Siberia. They had previously released information about the Neanderthal genome that same year including evidence of inbreeding between the Neanderthals and modern humans. The Neanderthal species (or subspecies, according to some scientists who place it in our own species) died out about 28,000 years ago.

Programming

• Open Source GCC 4.8 Compiler Including Address Sanitizer Security

Standards/Consortia

• Google Public DNS Now Supports DNSSEC Validation

The CIA, Amazon, and the Fast Trajectory of Cloud Computing

Although the CIA is certainly not going to confirm or deny on the topic, there has been a lot of buzz this week about a report in Federal Computer Weekly that says that the CIA has approached Amazon about building a private cloud infrastructure for it. While there is no confirmation, the idea makes sense. The CIA has contracted with numerous technology companies for private platforms before, and as all things move toward the cloud, the CIA is probably heading there as well. If the report is true, it’s more evidence of how much clout the cloud has taken on in a very short period of time.

Health/Nutrition

• FDA Ready to Approve Frankenfish Despite Fishy Science

  Some day soon, you might tuck into a plate of salmon without knowing that the fish you are eating was genetically engineered. The so-called AquAdvantage salmon, a salmon genetically engineered to grow faster than normal salmon, just moved one step closer to legalization. If so, it will be the first genetically engineered (GE) animal allowed for consumption in the United States. Thus, every part of the regulatory process related to the GE salmon sets a precedent for all future GE animals in the United States – and so far, according to experts, that precedent is a sloppy, inadequate one.

Security

• Hillary Clinton’s hacked Benghazi emails sent to RT

• SSL Co-Author Reflects on Crypto Success and Failure [VIDEO]

  What’s wrong and what’s right with SSL? Nearly two decades after he helped write SSL 3.0, Paul Kocher is looking to hardware for security.

• New Kernel Vulnerabilities Affect Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04 LTS

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Scarborough Remembers Some Iraq Words–But Not His Own

• NYPD Spent 1 Million Hours Over Last Decade On Marijuana Arrests, Analysis Finds

• Why We Won’t Learn From Iraq

  1) Avoidance. After Pearl Harbor, after Vietnam, after World War II, after the 9/11 attacks, even after civilian disasters like the Challenger explosion or Katrina, there were official efforts, of varying seriousness and success, to find out what had gone wrong, and why, and to yield “lessons learned.”

• New report on CIA: Rendition and torture on a global scale

  A report released in early February by the Open Society Justice Initiative titled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition” establishes that the Central Intelligence Agency, acting under the direction of the highest levels of the US government, has utilized a global network of secret prisons, foreign intelligence agents, and interrogation and torture centers to send detainees to without any legal protections.
  This arrangement is worldwide and includes the involvement of at least 54 different countries touching almost every continent.

• The FBI’s anticipatory prosecution of Muslims to criminalize speech

  A court ruling in one of the most abusive prosecutions yet highlights the dangers posed by this familiar tactic

• Looking Back at Iraq With…Michael Gordon?

  New York Times reporter Michael Gordon was the lead author on that infamous tubes article, but his record goes deeper than that. A few days into the U.S. bombing (3/25/13), Gordon appeared on CNN to endorse the bombing of Iraqi TV’s offices, calling it “an appropriate target,” since “we’re trying to send the exact opposite message.”

Cablegate

• Update 3/19/13: Correcting dangerous errors in the press about Bradley Manning

  Until recently, with Bradley Manning’s historic statement in court taking responsibility for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, mainstream media outlets had largely ignored or paid only passing attention to the biggest leak case in U.S. history. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that when they do report on it, in addition to typically taking government arguments as fact, they frequently get basic information about Manning and his legal proceedings wrong.

  These pernicious mistakes can malign Manning’s character and obscure the public’s understanding of his case. It’s left to lesser-known but far more attentive writers and legal experts who’ve been following this case more closely (some since its inception) to correct their mistakes to keep the record straight.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Animal Cruelty for Profits is More Pervasive Than Imagined

  “The Greatness of a nation, and its moral progress, can be judged by the manner in which its animals are treated.” Mahatma Gandhi.

• EXCLUSIVE: State Dept. Hid Contractor’s Ties to Keystone XL Pipeline Company

  Late on a Friday afternoon in early March, the State Department released a 2,000-page draft report downplaying the environmental risks of the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But when it released the report, State hid an important fact from the public: Experts who helped draft the report had previously worked for TransCanada, the company looking to build the Keystone pipeline, and other energy companies poised to benefit from Keystone’s construction. State released documents in conjunction with the Keystone report in which these experts’ work histories were redacted so that anyone reading the documents wouldn’t know who’d previously hired them. Yet unredacted versions of these documents obtained by Mother Jones confirm that three experts working for an outside contractor had done consulting work for TransCanada and other oil companies with a stake in the Keystone’s approval.

• BP accused of rewriting environmental record on Wikipedia

  A British Petroleum representative allegedly rewrote 44 percent of the oil giant’s Wikipedia page, including the environmental sections. Some Wikipedia editors are crying foul.

Finance

• GOLDMAN: The Bailout Could Be A Great Deal For Cyprus

  Goldman Sachs is out with a reaction to the Cyprus bailout deal negotiated over the weekend, the most controversial part of which entails a haircut on bank deposits, something that hasn’t yet been seen until now in the euro crisis saga.

  Goldman analyst Francisco Garzarelli says that while the deal could cause some short-term volatility, the fallout from Cyprus will likely be contained, assuming the controversial measures are able to survive a vote in the Cypriot parliament this week (which remains an open question).

• Why yes, a global agricultural corporation acting like a monopoly *IS* evil, thanks for asking.

  Around here, we Linux geeks tend to focus on technology, its place in society, and why monopolizing it into the iron fists of a few global corporations is a Bad Thing. The reasoning is that technology is central to all of our lives, cradle to grave, school to office, and we dare not allow a tiny oligarchy of billionaires to control everything that technology does.

  What could be more dastardly than monopolizing the world’s computers? Monopolizing the world’s food.

  Monsanto, in the emerging science of biotechnology, has become the Microsoft of food. Here in Iowa (a state with no small interest in agriculture) I get to witness the struggle firsthand; Monsanto commercials aimed at farmers dominate much of local television. Very few non-Monsanto companies manage to get equal billing.

  The parallels between Microsoft and Monsanto are plain. Just the Wikipedia page on legal actions involving Monsanto reaps bold examples: Monsanto has filed patents on numerous genetically engineered specimens. They have filed suit against 145 individual U.S. farmers for violating those patents. The Public Patent Foundation has blown the whistle on some Monsanto patents. The U.S. Justice Department in 2009 has also opened investigations against Monsanto for anti-trust; that’s still pending. And the legal battles outside North America are even more telling; stories abound of farmers being driven out of business, markets controlled, and even child labor. Oh, and Monsanto is a political lobbyist – a really, really big one – in the US, UK, and continental Europe. And corporate food patents, litigation, and fallout damage has been the subject of at least one documentary name of Food, Inc.

• The Best Of The Internet’s Reaction To George Osborne Joining Twitter

  1. This is Osborne’s first, and so far only, tweet

• Capitalism efficient? We can do so much better

  For all its vaunted efficiency, capitalism has foisted wasteful inequality and environmental ruin on us. There is an alternative

• On implications of Cyprus

• Bill Maher Urges Vilification of Bill Maher

  On his last HBO show (3/15/13), Bill Maher complained about how much he and his wealthy cohort pay in taxes: “You know what? Rich people–I’m sure you’d agree with this–actually do pay the freight in this country.”

  Maher added that wealthy Californians pay nearly 40 percent to the federal government and nearly 15 percent to the state: “I just want to say liberals: You could actually lose me. It’s outrageous what we’re paying–over 50 percent. I’m willing to pay my share, but yeah, it’s ridiculous.”

• When You Weren’t Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives

• Strikes across UK as George Osborne delivers budget speech

• In Spain, The Bitcoin Run Has Started

  Something extreme is happening in Europe. Since Sunday, Bloomberg Businessweek reports a trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain’s download charts, coinciding with news that cash-strapped Cyprus was planning to raid domestic savings accounts to pay off a $13 billion bailout tab. “This is an entirely predictable and rational outcome for what’s happening in Cyprus,” says ConvergEx’s Nick Colas. “If you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.”

  The value of the virtual currency has soared almost 30 percent in the last two days. “One hundred percent of that is due to Cyprus,” says Colas. “It means the Europeans are getting involved.” As German economist Peter Bofinger warned in an interview with Spiegel Online: “European citizens must now fear for their money.”

• French authorities raid IMF chief Christine Lagarde’s home in ‘embezzlement’ probe

  French magistates and anti-fraud police have raided the Paris home of the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) chief, Christine Lagarde, as part of an investigation into alleged misuse of public office and “embezzlement” when she was French finance minister in 2008.

• Manila, March 18-22: Week of ‘Black Protest’ after Student Suicide triggered by inability to pay for Tuition Fees

  A week of ‘Black Protest’ at public and private colleges and universities across the Philippines takes place between March 18 and 22. It commemorates the death of Kristel Tejada who committed suicide, because she couldn’t pay for tuition fees in time. The ‘Black Protest’ is marked by walk-outs and is also directed against another possible increase in tuition fees.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Sen. Sanders and Rep. Deutch Press for New Democracy Amendment

  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) have introduced a new constitutional amendment to overturn the damage done by Citizens United, Buckley v. Valeo, and other judicial decisions that have diluted the role of ordinary people in American democracy.

  “The Democracy is for People Amendment will stop corporations and their front groups from using their profits and dark money donations to influence our elections while reaffirming the right of the American people to elections that are fair and representatives that are accountable,” Rep. Deutch said in a statement.

• Two Peoples, Two Pictures

Privacy

• Two clicks for more privacy

  More and more web pages incorporate “Like” buttons for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and this was also on the to do list for both The H and our associates at heise online; however, implementing these buttons means that data will be transmitted to the operators of a networking platform when the page is loaded – without any user interaction. In addition to the URL of the current page, that information also includes an ID that is directly connected to a person, at least if the user has an account with these platforms. This allows companies such as Facebook to create full browsing profiles of their users. As this doesn’t harmonise with our idea of data protection and privacy, heise online developed a two-stage solution that will only transmit data with the user’s permission.

• City Council stumbles upon warrantless surveillance by police unfit for public discussion and unqualified for private discussion

• Demand A Proper Consultation

  The UK’s Home Office continues to push for maximum surveillance powers with minimum accountability in the latest adjustments to the Communications Data Bill. I decided to find out just how much consultation with non-corporates there had been before the Bill was introduced originally.

• Is the tide turning in the fight for our privacy rights?

  The latest vote on the EU Data Protection Regulation suggests MEPs are starting to realise why privacy protections are important. We need your help now to get the message across.

• Visualizing Google’s Transparency Report, Part 3: What Countries Ask For The Biggest Share of Netizen Data?

  India is ranked at number two by total number of data requests but if you take into account its large Internet population, its ranking falls. Neighboring countries can vary a great deal. The U.K. and France demand a disproportionate amount of user information, compared to Ireland and the Netherlands.

Civil Rights

• Pentagon Papers lawyer on Obama, secrecy and press freedoms: ‘worse than Nixon’

  …James Goodale sounds the alarm about the current president

• James Goodale: It’s a bad time for press freedoms

  James Goodale has a message for journalists: Wake up. In his new book, Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Goodale, chief counsel to The New York Times when its editors published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, argues that President Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was.

  The Obama administration has prosecuted more alleged leakers of national security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, a course critics say is overly aggressive. Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a March op-ed that the administration “has a particular, chilling intolerance” for those who leak. If the Obama administration indicts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, Goodale argues, the president will have succeeded where Nixon failed by using the act to “end-run” the First Amendment.

• How Weev’s Long Prison Term Makes You More Vulnerable

• EFF Joins Andrew Auernheimer Case on Appeal

  Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer today was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for revealing to media outlets that AT&T had configured its servers to allow the harvesting of iPad owners’ unsecured email addresses. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining Auernheimer’s legal team to litigate his appeal before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that fundamental problems with computer crime law result in unfair prison sentences like the one in this case.

• Angela Davis: making waves since 1961

  Once on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list, the civil rights activist has no intention of slowing down. She talks to Frank Barat about her inspiration.

• Meeting Hacked Off

  The explosive revelations that websites will be included in the post-Leveson press regulation arrangements this weekend led to a flurry of analysis — and a meeting between Hacked Off, bloggers and free speech groups yesterday.

• The 21st-Century Version of Slavery Is Widespread In America

  A 21st-century version of slavery—captive labor—is rampant at the bottom of the U.S. economy, and Washington politicians and business lobbies want to keep it that way, or even expand it as part of the immigration reform talks now in Congress.

• The Steubenville Case: Social Media Plays Role in the Prosecution of a Rape Case

  From the outset of the now widely publicized Steubenville rape case, social media has played an integral role in the local grassroots action, growing media buzz, and prosecution. Local bloggers and Internet activists helped bring the case to national attention.

• Less than 48 hours before we are part of the Leveson regulation

  3pm Friday is the deadline for amendments to be submitted to the Crime and Courts Bill, which is in the Lords on Monday. The clauses being considered include those for various parts of the Leveson “deal” (Of course, given this isn’t statutory regulation of the press we may well be imagining it.)

• U.K. police hope to sniff out pot growers with marijuana-scented cards

  Thousand of houses in the United Kingdom are being sent marijuana-scented “scratch and sniff” cards in a new bid to track down marijuana growers.

  In a press release, the charity group Crimestoppers explained the cards were designed to educate residents about the smell of marijuana. They hope once people can recognize the smell of cannabis plants, they will be able to help law enforcement officials identify illegal growing operations.

DRM

• Digital Restrictions Malware and Proprietary Software Make Local Libraries Less Useful

  With Digital Restrictions Malware and proprietary software, Amazon’s Swindle and similar devices are the “gift that keeps on taking”.

• DRM Strikes Again: Digital Comics Distributor JManga Closing Down… And Deleting Everyone’s Purchases

  DRM is rearing its malformed head again and biting the hands that feed it. Rather than simply making an otherwise useful product useless unless requirements x, y and z are met, this time DRM is issuing a clawback on purchased rented digital goods.

• WHSmith Putting DRM In EBooks Without Permission From the Authors

Intellectual Monopolies

• France draws red lines for EU-US free trade negotiations

  ood safety, GMO cultivation and France’s cherished “cultural exception” for audiovisual services are non-negotiable areas in view of upcoming EU-US free trade talks, the French stressed. The message was apparently well received by the European Commission in Brussels.
  Speaking at the conclusion of a two-day European summit on 15 March, French President François Hollande said he was “in favour of opening a negotiation” with the US to lift trade barriers and “promote growth” in Europe.

• Patents, Trademarks And Copyrights Have No Place In Trade Agreements
  

  As we’ve discussed before, one of the sneakier moves of the content industry (and, later, the pharmaceutical industry) was to jump into the international trade process, to circumvent national governments and to effectively force them into passing laws that they liked. We’ve been raising concerns about this whole process, and it appears that many public interest/civil service groups agree. With the US and Europe getting ready to start negotiations on a “trans-atlantic free trade agreement” (TAFTA), a large group of public interest/civil service groups have teamed up to issue a declaration that “intellectual property” has no place in free trade agreements. It also demands much more transparency in any negotiation.

• First Sale Doctrine Upheld by US Supreme Court ~pj

  This is the one you have been waiting for: Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [PDF]. Mr. Kirtsaeng has prevailed. Hugely. I’ll work on a text version for you next, but I didn’t want you to have to wait one second longer to hear the news.

• Supreme Court reaffirms resale of copyright works

  Justices say a prohibition on the resale of products made overseas would cause multiple problems

• Supreme Court upholds first-sale doctrine in textbook resale case

  The importation of copyrighted goods made abroad has been an increasingly contentious issue in recent years. Easy access to Internet resale markets like eBay and Amazon have made it possible for a new breed of entrepreneurs to buy low and sell high in a wide array of areas. The Supreme Court handed these resellers a major victory today, issuing a decision [PDF] that makes it clear that the “first sale” doctrine protects resellers, even when they move goods across national boundaries.

• Trademarks

  • Python Settles Trademark Dispute

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) have announced they have reached a settlement with POBox Hosting Ltd of the UK over their trademark application for the term ‘Python’ in connection with cloud hosting and their application for a figurative trademark incorporating the word “Python”. While the PSF own the trademark for Python within the United States, it did not have an equivalent filing within the European Union.

  • Settlement reached in Python trademark dispute

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced that it has reached a settlement with PO Box Hosting, who also trade as Veber, over the latter’s use of the name Python and application to trademark Python. The Python Software Foundation called for help in fighting the application in February.

• Copyrights

  • NEW EUROPEAN COMMISSION REPORT FINDS THAT ‘PIRACY’ DOESN’T HURT, AND IN FACT HELPS, MUSIC SALES

    The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, just published a new working paper entitled “Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data.” This report demonstrates that online ‘piracy’ does not have a negative effect on sales, and often, in fact, has a positive impact. As they put it, their research suggested “a stimulating effect of [online streaming] on the sales of digital music.”

    One key part of the paper was their finding that “much of what is consumed illegally would not have been purchased if piracy was not available.” In other words, each illegal download should not be perceived as being equivalent to a lost sale. For better or for worse, the music industry has (d)evolved into being singles-driven rather than being album-driven; now consumers can download just the songs they want, rather than having to download an album filled with bad songs.

  • Google Further Highlights Wrongful DMCA Takedowns

  • Head of US Copyright Office wants to shorten terms, just barely

    US Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante is about to give testimony (PDF) to part of the House Judiciary Committee, in which she proposes that the US government do something it hasn’t done, ever—shorten copyright terms.

    “You may want to consider alleviating some of the pressure and gridlock brought about by the long copyright term for example, by reverting works to the public domain after a period of life plus fifty years unless heirs or successors register their interests with the Copyright Office,” Pallante’s written testimony states.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux can read optical discs, Windows can’t

Taking Stock of Linux Security and Antivirus Needs

Open source fans like to brag that Linux needs no antivirus software. Yet as executives at security vendor ESET were keen to remind me in a recent interview, that truism holds true only to a certain extent. In an age where Linux commands greater market share, and where a growing number of threats are platform-agnostic, demand for security enhancements may well be on the rise. Is the channel ready?

That is, of course, what one would expect ESET representatives to say. As a major developer of security software for all operating systems, with a strong presence in the MSP world and about 2,500 VARs in North America alone, the company stands to grow along with demand for antivirus and other security products for Linux.

Fusion-io gobbles Brit Linux SCSI gurus ID7

Fusion-io flogs software to turn a server fitted with its PCIe flash cards into a shared storage appliance. It turns out that the software is based on UK developer ID7′s code and Fusion-io has just bought the company.

Ubuntu Gets New Display Server, Goes Rolling Release? openSUSE 12.3 Released

Cheap Linux webcam

Sainsbury’s in the UK is selling the HP HD-2200 Webcam for a very cheap price…

Jaguar Land Rover Seeks Automotive Leadership With Linux

The automotive industry is undergoing a major technological shift and Jaguar Land Rover is at the forefront. The UK-based JLR has embraced Linux as the operating system underlying its next generation In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. The company has also taken a leadership role in advocating for open source development within the automotive industry.

The Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent is “Revolution OS”

After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement.

Desktop

• The Linux Setup – Dolores Portalatin, Admin/Designer

  Dolores has an interesting setup, especially her window manager, but I’m really most impressed by the amount of outreach she does in the Linux and Free and Open Source communities. I found Dolores through Arch Linux Women, as I was trying to diversify the kind of people I interview here. Linux is an amazing concept that speaks to lots of different people, but the public face can be a bit homogenous. Dolores and her work helps to more accurately represent the typical Linux users, which seems to be getting less typical—both demographically and in terms of technical skill—all of the time.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 5 Episode 4

  In this episode: OpenSUSE 12.3 is out, Red Hat takes ownership of Java 6, SecureBoot is coming to FreeBSD and Ubuntu ditches Wayland for Mir. We report back on our challenge from a couple of episodes ago, come up with a new challenge, and discuss IT education in our Open Ballot.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 496

Kernel Space

• The Kernel Column – Linux Kernel 3.8

  Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel community, including the closing of the development ‘merge window’ for the 3.8 kernel

• What Are We Breaking Now?

  End of February devconf.cz took place in Brno, Czech Republic. At the conference Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer and I did two presentations about our work on systemd and about the systemd Journal. These talks were taped and the recordings are now available online.

  First, here’s our talk about What Are We Breaking Now?, in which we try to give an overview on what we are working on currently in the systemd context, and what we expect to do in the next few months. We cover Predictable Network Interface Names, the Boot Loader Spec, kdbus, the Apps framework, and more.

• Linux 3.9-rc3 Kernel Brings More Changes

• Linux 3.9-rc3

  Not as small as -rc2, but that one really was unusually calm. So there
  was clearly some pending stuff that came in for -rc3, with network drivers and USB leading the charge. But there’s other misc drivers, arch updates, btrfs fixes, etc etc too.

• Graphics Stack

  • The X.Org Foundation Is Undecided About Mir

    The X.Org Foundation hasn’t firmly decided on their position of Canonical’s Mir Display Server versus Wayland.

    The meeting logs for an X.Org Foundation Board of Directors’ IRC meeting from earlier this month have finally been published to the X.Org Wiki.

Applications

• yocto-reader, Will it Replace Google Reader?

  I came upon Yocto-reader in the Debian repositories in my search for a replacement of Google Reader. The front-end is fine, it feels comfortable and familiar. People who live in their browsers and want to keep up with numerous of news should love it.

• KDE File Manager, Hamsi Manager 1.2, Gets New Tools

  Hamsi Manager, a file manager that can process multiple files at once and that aims to be really simply to use, is now at version 1.2.

• Migrating to KDE Telepathy

  Last Friday I decided to migrate from Kopete to Telepathy. Believe it or not it was Microsoft that convinced me to migrate. I explain, I used to use Kopete for gtalk, jabber, Windows Live Messenger (wlm), skype and icq. I have just a few contacts in the alternative (to gtalk) jabber server and icq and most of them I can contact using other protocols. Now that wlm contacts are migrating to skype and Kopete’s skype support is kind of broken* I used to use Kopete only for gtalk, so there was no need to wait for the metacontact bug to be fixed anymore.

• Gaming tip for KDE users

  I am really enjoying playing some of my long-time favorite games under Linux now, and I hope every day when I open Steam that I will see that Valve has ported Counter Strike: Global Offensive. I’m still waiting though

• Looks like Lightworks for Linux Beta is Almost here!
  Tweet

  Video editing software are not a rarity in Linux. OpenShot and Kdenlive are two good examples. But when it comes to professional grade video editing software, Linux lacks good alternatives. But according to redshark news, that is all going to end now. Lightworks for Linux is not a distant dream anymore. It seems like the first beta release of Lightworks for Linux is almost here. Here’s a live video demo of Lightworks running on Ubuntu.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Hidden Linux: locate and updatedb

  • The Latest Resources for Mastering Blender for 3D Animation

  • Using MariaDB on CentOS 6

  • Using Separate Drive Partitions for MySQL Databases

  • Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL

  • Replacing MySQL with MariaDB

  • The Pipe-Pipe-Equals

  • Use the dracut shell to troubleshoot filesystems

  • Change network adapter name in Linux Mint

  • Bonus: slmenu, and some seriously wicked console wizardry

  • fd: Old, yet new, yet old, yet …

  • How to Annotate PDF Documents in Ubuntu Linux

  • Imprisioned Contributor, 1 Year Later

  • Install Steam on Ubuntu and Linux Mint

  • # Me and a RaspberryPi: Cross-linking

  • How to fix Krita on Ubuntu

  • Fedora 18, Xorg, GLX and the Nvidia installer

  • fIcy: Streaming at the console

  • Bash script self-updates from github

  • Mastering the Linux Shell

    This is one of several articles I will be writing on the subject of the Linux command shell. In Windows-land, you had “CMD” or what some might remember as the DOS prompt. In Linux, we call it a command shell, or simply “a shell”. There are many types of shells, each of which works similarly (e.g. they all allow you to run commands) but each sports many different capabilities. The default on Linux is called bash, or the GNU Bourne Again Shell, so named because it is based on the UNIX Bourne shell.

  • Design Your Own Rocket

    A lot of the software packages I’ve covered in recent articles have been focused strictly on doing computations on your machine, separate from the real world. So in this article, I explore how to use your computer to design something you can build and use in the real world: your own model rocket. Let’s take a look at the OpenRocket utility and see how it can help you design your own rockets. OpenRocket even can run simulations on your designs to show how they should behave in flight.

    Most distributions should include a package for OpenRocket. For example, in Ubuntu, you would install it with apt-get install openrocket. It is actually a Java program, so you always can download the jar file directly from the Web site. To run it, you need to have a reasonably up-to-date Java VM installed as well.

• Games

  • Kickstarted Legend of Dungeon Game On Now On PC, Mac, Linux (video)

  • Kickstarter overachiever Legend of Dungeon out now for PC, Mac, Linux

    Don’t expect to survive in Legend of Dungeon – at least, that’s what the creepy announcer in the above video warns. From developer Robot Loves Kitty, Legend of Dungeon is a roguelike action RPG beat-em-up with dynamic lighting and soundtrack systems, featuring more than 240 responsive music tracks. Legend of Dungeon is available now for PC, Mac and Linux in “nearly beta,” for $10.

  • Steam’s hardware survey now shows many distro’s

    So the Steam Hardware Survey got updated again, this time they are now including lots of Linux distro’s so we can see just how popular they are!

    It’s good to see see them do it, but we really need a Linux only category like they have for Mac.

  • Skullgirls pencils in Linux port, Squigly to be voiced by Lauren Landa

    Mike Zaimont, the creator of the fighting engine powering Skullgirls, has revealed that a Linux port is currently in the works. Word came via Zaimont’s Salty Cupcakes tournament series, which he’s been hosting on a weekly basis in Los Angeles and streaming through Twitch.

    Skullgirls is currently seeking donations through Indiegogo, having already successfully funded the DLC characters Squigly and Big Band. During his weekly stream, Zaimont also revealed that Squigly will be voiced by Lauren Landa, the voice actress perhaps best known for her voice work as Kasumi from Dead or Alive. Squigly’s sidekick Leviathan will be voiced by Liam O’Brien, who has belted out lines as Rig in Dead or Alive 5 and himself every other time he says anything.

  • The Castle Doctrine Alpha

    Jason Rohrer of Passage fame has released his first Alpha build of The Castle Doctrine. He describes it as A massively-multiplayer game of burglary and home defense.”

  • Kerbal Space Program released for Linux

    KSP is a game where the players create and manage their own space program. Build spacecraft, fly them, and try to help the Kerbals to fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space.

    The game is currently under heavy development. This means the game will be improved on a regular basis, so be sure to check back for new updates. Right now, KSP is in Sandbox Complete state, but we want you to try it out and have fun with it. The first versions are free to download and play, and will remain so forever.

  • Valve Reveals More Steam Linux Distribution Details

    Valve’s hardware/software survey for Steam that shows details about their user-base, is now showing a lot more Linux distribution details.

    At the beginning of March, the February details were revealed that showed overall about ~2% Linux usage and about one percent behind the Apple OS X adoption levels. Only Ubuntu and a few other distributions were shown but now in an updated version of the list are a whole lot more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Enlightenment Starts Taking Shape On Wayland

  Enlightenment is starting to take shape on Wayland with its own compositor.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • what’s going on in plasma workspaces 2?

    While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you’ll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture.

  • Digikam 3.0 Receives Highly Desired Features

    Digikam has released a new version of their popular photo management software. Exciting new features and plug-ins are now available for users to try. Unfortunately 3.1 has also just been released, though the changes are not as significant. I still wanted to look back to make sure nothing important was overlooked. Here I will investigate some of the most important changes offered with the Digikam 3.0 release.

  • KDE sets its sights on Wayland

    Following the GNOME developers’ decision to focus on porting their desktop environment to the Wayland display server, the KDE project has also indicated that it will go ahead with a Wayland port of its own project. Currently, the developers are debating which display manager will be used in the port. KDM, the display manager the project is using currently, has apparently already been discounted in favour of LightDM or possibly the QML-based SDDM.

  • Slax 7.0.6 Has KDE 4.10.1

    Slax, a modern, portable, small and fast Linux operating system with a modular approach and outstanding design, is now at version 7.0.6.

  • News and answers (Plasma, Lancelot, etc.)

    Me again. I haven’t been online for a week – went on some pub crawls in Dublin : ) – so I haven’t been able to reply to the comments to my last post which showed some nice things coming to Plasma.

  • # Plasma Workspaces 2 Coming To Wayland, KDM Not Invited

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Artistic Differences: Wayland, Mir, and X

  • GNOME 3.10 Might Be Ported to Wayland

    Matthias Clasen sent an email today, March 15, to the GNOME mailing list, in which he proposes the porting of the GNOME desktop environment to the Wayland display server.

    Many of us thought (read: believed) – including myself – that Wayland is the next-generation X.Org server for Linux operating systems, but in order for it to be that popular, it requires a big push from a ginormous project, such as GNOME.

  • Moving from Unique to GtkApplication

  • GNOME 3.8 is Nearly Ready

    GNOME 3.8 is due March 27 and developer Giovanni Campagna says it’s looking good. Campagna is proud of how many bugs and details were addressed this cycle describing the detail board color coding as eco-friendly because of all the green. This evening he spoke of several in particular.

    Campagna reports that “OSDs and global keybindings work in the overview, the screen lock and when a modal dialog is up” in addition to addressing a number of little “annoyances and inconsistencies in the shell.” Campagna also worked quite a bit on adding filters and toggles to Notifications, and with this the Panel can be tidied up a bit. He continues to discuss his work on a new application framework, so see the rest of his post for that.

  • GTK+ Support Merged For Wayland CSD

    For a fair amount of time now there’s been work on client side decorations for Wayland so that the Weston compositor with GTK+ can do the window decorations on the client-side rather than server-side as done with the X.Org Server. That work has now been merged to master.

Distributions

• openSUSE shows how to promote a release

• Skolelinux 6 got a video review from Pcwizz

  Via twitter I just discovered that Pcwizz have done a video review on Youtube of Skolelinux / Debian Edu version 6. He installed the standalone profile and the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of a few programs and his view of our distribution.

• New Releases

  • Manjaro 0.8.4

  • CAINE and NBCAINE 4.0 – PULSAR are out!

  • SparkyLinux 2.1

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon to speak at Open Source Think Tank

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon will be a featured keynote speaker at Open Source Think Tank on March 21, 2013. Open Source Think Tank brings leading global industry experts and visionaries together to discuss the future of open source. This year’s event will focus on building the bridge to innovation with open source in the enterprise.

  • Taking on a new job at Red Hat

    [Christian Schaller:] So I assume most of you have read Jonathan Blanfords blog post about leaving Red Hat and me taking over for him as head of the Red Hat desktop team. First of all I would like to thank Jonathan for both his contributions to GNOME and Red Hat, but also for being a good friend for over a decade now. Luckily Linux is also a major piece of his new job, so I am certain we have not seen the last of Jonathan in the community.

  • Fedora

    • How to improve the Fedora experience

    • Another week of rawhide with fun on either end (2013-03-12)

    • The New Anaconda Installer in Fedora 18

      If you have tried to install Fedora 18 you’ll have seen the new Anaconda installer. Many have found major issues with its design and function. I also had some trouble with it. To learn more about it, you can watch a demo presented at FUDCon 2013: An intro to the new Fedora 18 installer (YouTube). One thing that caught my attention was that until you click “Begin Installation” no actual changes are made. Instead, as you go through the installer, steps before you click “Begin Installation” are written to a Kickstart file. This Kickstart file does the actual installation when you click “Begin Installation”.

    • Submit your wallpapers for Fedora 19

• Debian Family

  • Six Weeks to Wheezy?

    I’ve been using Debian 7/Wheezy for more than a year but Debian is still working at getting the bug-count down to meet the high standards for Debian Stable:

  • The newsletter for the Debian community

    Holger Levsen announced the first update of Debian Edu Squeeze since its initial release. “This update contains all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7, as well as Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements”, explained Holger. The updated installer images are available for downloading.

  • Debian Project News – March 18th, 2013

    Welcome to this year’s sixth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

    * Debian Edu Squeeze updated
    * DPL election campaign
    * A deeper look inside the freeze
    * Kali Linux: a new Debian derivative for penetration tests
    * Other news
    * Upcoming events
    * 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?

  • Ideas from the -vote@ DPL election discussions

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • What’s really important

        So . . . I had written a blog post addressing the remote hope that I’d at least get a postcard from the vacation from reality that Canonical’s self-appointed hubris-monger Mark Shuttleworth has recently taken, while urging those in the various *buntu communities do some soul searching when your project leader says, “If you’ve done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on.”

        Then I sat on the blog post for a few days, wondering if it was too incendiary. I took walks. I had coffee with friends. I bounced the theme of what I was writing off a few people. I embarrassingly lost a huge Tetris smackdown to my darling daughter at the arcade at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

      • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ hits beta 1

        Fans of Ubuntu Linux may recall that the Ubuntu 13.04 development cycle is a little different from those of versions past, as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth outlined back in October.

      • Putting Dell’s Ubuntu Ultrabook to the test

        Our very first keypress after turning on the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (running Ubuntu 12.04) drew no response from the Unity desktop. And with that we thought our test of Dell’s Ubuntu Ultrabook for developers was set to go the way of most Linux laptop tests – Linux kind of works, but not really.

      • Unity Tweak Tool gets added to Raring repository

        Good news for Ubuntu fans. Unity Tweak Tool is now available in the Ubuntu 13.04 repository. The tool brings a lot of customization to Ubuntu’s Unity shell and allows users to manage everything – from fonts to Web Apps.

      • Unity Tweak Tool Available In The Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Repositories

      • Like Ubuntu Linux? This week, help make it better

      • Recent Ubuntu Community Refinements

      • Ubuntu SDK Days: Day 2 is just around the corner

        We had a spectacular response to the Ubuntu SDK Days yesterday. Lots of people showed up, asked their questions and found out how their app for Ubuntu might work best.

      • You can help the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter!

      • First Ubuntu SDK Days kick off today

      • [Ubuntu QML] Writting a game.. Alpha Version

      • ‘New Unity Stack’ Approved for Ubuntu 13.04, Will Bring ‘Smarter’ Search to the Desktop

      • Some Programs I Tested On Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Build

      • Top Things to do After Installing Ubuntu 13.04

        There will always be a lot of things to do after a fresh Ubuntu installation. Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail was scheduled to be released on April 25th. Here are some steps may help after installing Ubuntu 13.04.

        1. Select Best Download Server: The default server may not be the “Best Server” which will speed up your regular update and software installation by apt command or software center.

      • Ubuntu to halve support length for non-LTS releases

        In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical’s Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) on 25 April.

      • Dispelling FUD About Ubuntu

        It seems like every time Ubuntu makes any sort of change, the Linux community finds itself up in arms as if the world is about to end. First, they expressed concern over Unity, then the Amazon search results inclusion and now Mir vs Wayland. Admittedly, I don’t personally use Unity as my default desktop these days, as I don’t use any of its features. That said, however, I’m a big fan of the Ubuntu base that I run with XFCE. This desktop environment serves me well, and my experience with the Ubuntu base has never given me any serious problems.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 307

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 308

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu vUDS

          Kubuntu held it’s own mid-release cycle virtual meeting today. The primary technical output was an agreed community position on the latest release management proposal. Rather than quote the whole thing here, I’ll provide a link to the message I sent on behalf of Kubuntu to the Ubuntu Technical Board. The bottom line is that this is a pretty good proposal from our point of view.

Devices/Embedded

• Book helps Windows Embedded developers transition to Linux

• New Nvidia quad-core SoC packs 60 GPUs, 4G LTE modem

• ARMBRIX Zero SBC’s bubble bursts

  A project to develop a low-cost ARM Cortex A15-based single-board computer (SBC) reportedly has been abandoned. Initially named “ARMBRIX Zero,” the $145 board got as far as its prototype debug phase when the company behind it abruptly shuttered its doors.

• Turn your TV into a smart TV for just $27: RapPlex for Raspberry Pi

  We were having dinner with our friends at their place when our friends asked my advice on getting a hard-drive which he can connect to his TV to watch the media he has on it; it was non-networked TV. I looked around and saw they had an iPad two Android smartphones, 3 PCs and to watch movies or listen to music they used the traditional method of copying the media on the device they wanted to play it on. He wanted a hard-drive which had a build-in PC. Well, I think he never heard of a media server; just like the most of us.

• Building an always available Linux terminal: Shell-In-A-Box on Raspberry Pi

  Recently I was looking for a way to SSH from a network that blocked my outgoing SSH connection. I’d be nice to have a way around firewalls and be able to access your private Linux terminal. To be able to debug a problem from an remote location, for example.

  A collegue suggested a tool called ‘Shell In A Box‘. Shell In A Box implements a web server that can export arbitrary command line tools to a web based terminal emulator using just JavaScript and CSS without any additional browser plugins. This means: connecting your browser via HTTPS to your own hosted Shell In A Box web site, and access a Linux terminal from there.

• Phones

  • Preview of the Smartphone Wars: Bloodbath Year 4: Smartphones Galore. This year will be pretty ‘stable’ within the context of this industry

    So we’re up to the Smartphone Wars, Bloodbath Year 4, Smartphones Galore. We’ve seen the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4. We’ve seen Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8. We’ve seen announcements from Tizen and Firefox and Sailfish and Ubuntu. What will this year bring? I do think this year brings ‘stability’ and ‘predictability’ to what has been the most volatile industry in economic history of any 100 Billion dollar annual business or bigger (the handset industry is worth $240 Billion dollars annually and the vast majority of that revenue is from the smartphone side). And within the context of smartphones, that is ‘relative’ stability, less volatile than the past three years.

  • Motorola Device Codenames: “Yeti” and “Sasquatch” to AT&T, “Ghost” to All Carriers

    Last week, a never-before-seen Motorola device surfaced that caught most of us by surprise. The device, sort of deemed “mid-range” is actually far from being mid-range. In fact, the more you look at the specs, the more you can see that it’s as good as the Nexus 4, just not necessarily where the Galaxy S4 or HTC One sit because it lacks the newest processor available and a 1080p screen. But that device with model number XT912A could be our first preview at a new Google-powered Motorola. Gone was the kevlar backing and RAZR styling – in was a more rounded Nexus design. If this is Motorola’s next, though, will it be good enough to compete with Samsung and HTC’s newest? Or does Motorola have something else in the works. It appears as if they do.

  • Ballnux

    • Rumor: Is this the LG Nexus 5?

  • Android

    • Sony intros Xperia SP and Xperia L for Q2

USC starts a web hub for DIY, open source virtual reality projects USC starts a web hub for DIY, open source virtual reality projects

For the sheer variety of virtual reality headsets available, there’s been few resources available for those who want to craft their own devices. USC wants to save us the effort of searching around. Its MxR Lab has just launched a showcase of creations and modifications that DIY enthusiasts can build, including open source code for both the devices and integrating full-body motion control through Kinect for Windows or OpenNI. The most ambitious is Socket HMD, a complete 1,280 x 800 headset that involves a 3D-printed shell and custom-assembled electronics. If your own ambitions don’t stretch that far, you can still build the VR2GO viewer, which uses iPhones and iPod touch players as the eyepieces, as well as mods for the Oculus Rift developer kit that add stereo cameras or increase the field of view. Yes, you’ll need a 3D printer and a knack for programming to get most of these projects going, but you won’t have to wait for someone to make them for you — a big help when many ready-made VR displays are either in development or priced out of reach for the average person.

The freedoms, concerns of an ‘open source’ society

Google’s Open Source YouTube Channel — Worth a Look

If you’ve followed Google for any length of time, you already know that the company has donated many open source projects and leverages a lot of open source code internally. But did you know that the company has a dedicated video channel for information on open source topics? If you haven’t explored it, it’s worth visiting, found here. Here is more on what’s available there, and other good open source resources from Google.

The spread of open source at SXSW

If you need evidence of the spread of interest in open source, look to the history of SXSW Interactive schedules. Just between this year and last, the number of talks tagged with “open source” grew from 17 to 26, and that doesn’t include the growth in relevant book readings, meetups, sponsors, and parties. Even one of this year’s keynotes was delivered by Julie Uhrman, founder and CEO of OUYA.

And it’s not just about the code, though there’s plenty of that, from sessions on APIs and datacenters to (of course), the cloud. Daniel Buckley, a design researcher at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design talked about his work studying interpersonal connection and what it means to be human, which he titled, “open source empathy.”

Don’t blame security breaches on open source technology – the problem is lack of oversight

Open source software is an easy punching bag when security breaches arise. But getting rid of open source isn’t the answer — it is too valuable. Instead, we need to take some key steps to ensure the security of components throughout development.

Developer releases source code of Linux speech recognition program

Independent developer James McClain has developed a program which uses Google Voice API in the back-end to conduct various tasks on a GNU/Linux machine, just the way Siri does on the iDevices. The program allows a user to open sites, ask questions and perform other tasks just by voice. While initially developed for Ubuntu it is distro agnostic and can be used by other distributions as well.

Only our name is changed

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before that SourceForge has been acquired by Dice Holdings back in Septmeber 2012. As a result the name of our parent company has been changed in Slashdot Media. As you could easily guess the name comes from the heritage of Slashdot, one of the three Geeknet media properties bought by Dice (namely FreeCode, Slashdot and SourceForge).

Open source genealogy with Gramps

Genealogy is a fun hobby for many people around the globe. While there are lots of programs for Windows, Linux options have been lacking. Gramps helps fill this gap

Quick looks aLinux 15.0 and MINIX 3.2.1

Main reason to use open source software: customizability

Open source culture: Do you vote with your code or participation?

CTO of Getable, Mikeal Rogers, talks open source and the Github generation. What’s the next big thing on the innovation horizon? And who’s leading the charge? Find out in this interview.

Rolling Release – w/ Upstream Stable Cadenblah blah blah

The freedoms, concerns of an ‘open source’ society

Imagine a large vault that houses everyone’s personal information: medical records, financial data, Facebook pictures, etc. Now imagine everyone in the world has a key to that vault.

That’s how several students at Coahulla Creek High School describe an extreme version of an “open source society” where digital coding blueprints are freely accessible and easily understood to the point where all digital information can be accessed and redistributed.

Events

• ESC to feature dozens of embedded Linux, Android sessions

  Next month’s Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) to be held April 22-25 in San Jose, Calif. will offer embedded developers a sumptuous menu of embedded Linux, Android, and open source session topics. ESC, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, is now part of UBM’s big Design West show.

  UBM describes Design West as “the world’s only technical conference and expo for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals.” In addition to the venerable ESC event, Design West now also includes Black Hat and Android design summits.

• Live from PyCon 2013

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome OS and the Cloak of Unhackability

    “Hackers have a hard enough time with a full version of Linux, let alone a pared down version with only a secured browser running as the interface,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “All the potential options from Linux? They are gone. The hackers couldn’t get in when they were there — they have no hope of getting in now.”

  • Google’s Chrome OS partially hacked

    While the Linux-based operating system wasn’t really cracked at Pwnium, Google has decided to award a hacker $40,000 for finding an unreliable Chrome OS exploit.

  • Google Chrome OS Linux WAS Exploited at Pwnium 2013 for $40,000

• Mozilla

  • Imprisioned Contributor, 1 Year Later

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle VDI Supports Windows 8, Ubuntu 12.04 (But That’s Not All)

• VirtualBox 4.2.10 Adds Initial Support for Linux Kernel 3.9

  Oracle announced a few minutes ago, March 15, that a new stable version (4.2.10) of its VirtualBox virtualization software for end users and enterprises is now available for download.

BSD

• GhostBSD 3.0 Review: Complete operating system and FreeBSD on steroids!

  For quite sometime I was thinking of trying out a Unix operating system, something a bit different from the usual Linux distros I try out every week. I didn’t want to jump directly to FreeBSD and hence, I chose the Gnome derivative of FreeBSD, GhostBSD. Eric Turgeon announced the release of GhostBSD 3.0 on 10th March 2013. The reason for my choice of GhostBSD over FreeBSD is obvious – I wanted to use something easier and ready-to-use over FreeBSD.

GNU/Project Releases

• gv 3.7.4 released

• March 2013 GNU Toolchain Update

  It has been a very quiet month this month. The GCC sources are still closed to new features, pending the creation of the 4.8 branch.

  The binutils sources now have support for a 64-bit cygwin target called x86_64-cygwin. Patches for GCC are currently under development and a full gcc port should be ready soon.

• Guile 100 Programs Project Challenge #2, ls

  Challenge #2 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a version of the Posix program ls. ls is a program that lists the files in a directory, and it is the second challenge in this month’s theme, which is “/bin – reimplementing common Posix tools”.
  The completed version need only support the standard flags -a -l and -R

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

• Announce: NoZone 1.0 – a Bind DNS zone generator

Openness/Sharing

• Death Star petition inspires citizen collaboration

  In October, I used “We the People” as an example of how to get citizens engaged with government in an open manner. In November, those engaged citizens petitioned the government to consider building a Death Star. By January, enough signatures had been gathered to garner the administration’s consideration and, in my mind, a well authored response. The exercise may have been a geeky back and forth which you may see as a joke, but I feel any citizen engagement is good engagement. You may also think that’s the end of the story, however, someone who read my earlier post sent me a link to the Death Star Kickstarter page.

• Open Data

  • Please sign our petition for open access to ALL govt information

• Open Access/Content

  • FIXING THE WORST LAW IN TECHNOLOGY

    On the opening day of this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, an audience gathered in a giant conference hall to remember the life and tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, spoke of Swartz’s curious and restless mind. Swartz’s girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman described him as a man who was constantly asking whether what he was doing was the most important thing that he could be doing. (A quality extensively documented by Larissa MacFarquhar in “>her profile of Swartz.) The proceedings were yet another reminder that Swartz’s suicide was heartbreaking beyond belief, and that something must be done about the law that he was aggressively prosecuted under, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Washington Post latest newspaper to put faith in paywalls

Post’s parent company last month announced losses of $45.4m as newspaper asks readers to ‘help support our news-gathering’

9 Google Reader alternatives

Disruptions: Stuck With a Provider Over the Long Haul

If dating were like the cellphone industry, you would have to sign a contract when you entered a relationship stating that you would remain monogamous for two years, even if you wanted to break up. That’s what cellular carriers have pulled off by successfully lobbying for a recent government ruling that you cannot take the phone you paid for and switch to another provider.

It’s the latest reminder that owning a cellphone on one of the biggest United States providers can sometimes feel like an unhappy relationship. Time and again, in the minds of many customers, these companies take advantage of us and there isn’t much we can do about it.

Science

• Roadkill Forcing Cliff Swallows To Evolve

Security

• Crooks Spy on Casino Card Games With Hacked Security Cameras, Win $33M
  

  A high-roller and hacker accomplices made off with about $33 million after they gamed a casino in Australia by hacking its surveillance cameras and gaining an advantage in several rounds of high-stakes card games.

• JOIN US – Tor Project Boston Hack Day Event – March 20, 2013 – Hosted by Boston University’s Department of Computer Science

• AT&T Hacker ‘Weev’ Sentenced to 3.5 Years in Prison

  A hacker charged with federal crimes for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T’s publicly accessible website was sentenced on Monday to 41 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

  The judge handed down the sentence following a minor skirmish in the courtroom when the defendant, Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, was pinned and cuffed. Auernheimer was reportedly asked to hand the court a mobile phone he had with him during the hearing, and after handing it to his defense attorney instead, court agents cuffed him.

• Kickstarter overachiever Legend of Dungeon out now for PC, Mac, Linux

  Don’t expect to survive in Legend of Dungeon – at least, that’s what the creepy announcer in the above video warns. From developer Robot Loves Kitty, Legend of Dungeon is a roguelike action RPG beat-em-up with dynamic lighting and soundtrack systems, featuring more than 240 responsive music tracks. Legend of Dungeon is available now for PC, Mac and Linux in “nearly beta,” for $10.

• Rep. Gohmert Wants A Law That Allows Victims To Destroy The Computers Of People Who Hacked Them

  Last week, we had talked about some concerns about how various cybersecurity provisions would allow those hit by malicious hackers to “hack back” or, as some call it, engage in an “active defense.” There were significant concerns about this, but as Marvin Ammori briefly mentioned in last week’s favorites post, Rep. Louis Gohmert seems to not only think hacking back is a good idea, but that it should be explicitly allowed under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).

• Telenor reports industrial espionage

  Norwegian telecoms firm Telenor has, for the the first time, reported a case of serious industrial espionage to the national police unit Kripos. Newspaper Aftenposten reported Sunday that high tech-spies managed to infiltrate Telenor’s extensive security network and empty the contents of top executives’ personal computers.

• SSH – Can It Be More Secure?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Cops handcuff and interrogate boy, 7, for hours over missing $5: family

• Newly Released Secret Tapes Reveal LBJ Knew but Never Spoke Out About Nixon’s ‘Treason’

  Rumors and whispers of Richard Nixon’s ‘treason’ — sabotaging Vietnam peace talks to help his Presidential campaign — have floated around for years, but newly released tapes from Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency confirm that LBJ knew about Nixon’s behaviour and didn’t bother to report it.

  In previously released tapes from Johnson’s Presidency, we had heard about Johnson having a substantial body of evidence showing Nixon schemed to keep the South Vietnamese away from the negotiating table at the 1968 Paris peace talks. Johnson recorded all of his conversations held inside the White House while he was President. (Where do you think Nixon got the idea?) Nixon was accused or dispatching Anna Chennault, a senior advisor, to convince the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal if they didn’t agree to peace, effectively ending the Vietnam war, until after the U.S. Presidential election. Chennault confirmed she spoke with the Vietnamese in her autobiography, The Education of Anna, but nothing more than that. If true, the charge would likely amount to treason.

• As drone monopoly frays, Obama seeks global rules

  President Barack Obama, who vastly expanded U.S. drone strikes against terrorism suspects overseas under the cloak of secrecy, is now openly seeking to influence global guidelines for their use as China and other countries pursue their own drone programs.

• Swiss tourist gang raped in India

  The gang rape of a 39-year-old Swiss tourist while on a camping trip with her husband has further ratcheted up the spotlight on sexual violence in India.

• US secrecy policy run as though formed by Orwell and Kafka – top official

  Successive US presidents, including Barack Obama, have abused the system for handling classified information to expand their executive powers, the former senior official who oversaw state secrecy under George W Bush has claimed.

  William Leonard, who was entrusted with ensuring proper treatment of state secrets by government agencies in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, said that over the past decade both the Obama and the previous Bush administrations had manipulated their classification authority to create new executive powers without congressional oversight or judicial review.

• In Effort to Try Dictator, Guatemala Shows New Judicial Might

  A judge had just ruled that the military dictator, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, now 86, should stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed under his rule in the 1980s, a decision Mr. Utuy and other Maya survivors of Guatemala’s 34-year civil war had gathered in the courtroom to hear in person.

• FBI’s ‘National Security Letters’ Demands Ruled Unconstitutional

  A federal judge in California ruled today that the FBI cannot secretly demand data from banks and phone companies in national security cases. The judge said orders that keep those requests secret violate the First Amendment.

• National Security Letters Are Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules

• Judge Strikes Down Secretive Surveillance Law

• Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them

  Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday.

• Victory in Court: CIA Can No Longer Refuse to “Confirm or Deny” on Drones

  In an important victory for transparency, a federal appeals court today put an end to the CIA’s absurd claims that it “cannot confirm or deny” whether it has information about the government’s use of drones to carry out targeted killings.

• CIA drones freely kill civilians under pretext of ‘war on terror’: Edward Corrigan

  An analyst says Washington’s so called ‘war on terrorism’ is in actual fact nothing but a permit to murder whoever they wish at times under such a flimsy excuse as disapproving of the victim’s associates.

• RCMP, Drones and You

  Back in June of last year I requested everything the RCMP had on drones from the past three years, including agreements with the DHS. What I got back was a large 79.8 MB PDF talking about various drone studies and all the current plans the RCMP have for drones. It seems that the main use for drones is currently for traffic accidents. It details the various drones that certain divisions are using.

• Iraq War 10 years later: was it worth it?

  The Iraq War will ultimately cost US taxpayers at least $2.2 trillion.

• Pope Francis, CIA and ‘Death Squads’

  It appears that Bergoglio, who was head of the Jesuit order in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s grim “dirty war,” mostly tended to his bureaucratic rise within the Church as Argentine security forces “disappeared” some 30,000 people for torture and murder from 1976 to 1983, including 150 Catholic priests suspected of believing in “liberation theology.”

• Undoing Chavez’s Humanitarian Efforts: Will the CIA Rig the Election for Control of Venezuela’s Oil?

  The Bush administration’s Iraq war has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion so far and with interest could swell to more than $6 trillion, according to a study released Thursday.

• Venezuelan leader: Pentagon, CIA involved in plot against country

• Nicolás Maduro asks Obama to stop CIA and Pentagon attacks on Caracas

  Venezuela’s acting president Nicolás Maduro said that US officials may be advising Venezuelan dissenters “to withdraw from or sabotage” the presidential election to be held next April 14 in an attempt “to avoid defeat”

• enezeula Elections: Maduro Says CIA Plotting To Kill Capriles To ‘Create Chaos’

  Venezuela’s interim president, Nicolas Maduro, has claimed the U.S. government is plotting to assassinate his political rival in order to sew unrest before the April 14 elections.

• Britain’s MI6 Paid $136,000 to Poisoned Ex-Russian Spy – Paper

  Britain’s secret intelligence service MI6 paid at least 90,000 pounds ($136,000) to former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died after being poisoned in London in 2006, The Sunday Times has reported.

• Howard Fineman Looks Back on Iraq

  There’s a sense that many in the media have never come to terms with their Iraq War failures.

• Two Sides to Every Drone Death

• AUDIO: New York’s Police Union Worked With the NYPD to Set Arrest and Summons Quotas

  Audio obtained by The Nation confirms an instance of New York City’s police union cooperating with the NYPD in setting arrest quotas for the department’s officers. According to some officers and critics of quotas, the practice has played a direct role in increasing the number of stop-and-frisk encounters since Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to office. Patrolmen who spoke to The Nation explained that the pressure from superiors to meet quota goals has caused some officers to seek out or even manufacture arrests to avoid department retaliation.

• MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD

  BBC’s Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief

• The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon’s ‘treason’

  Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations – he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks… but said nothing.

• Icons Of The Iraq War: Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen And Battlefield Secrets

  When Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen rushed to the scene of a battle in eastern Baghdad on July 12, 2007, he had no idea the story eventually would introduce the world to a new online publisher of secret information.

• Tomas Young, Dying Iraq War Veteran, Pens ‘Last Letter’ To Bush, Cheney On War’s 10th Anniversary

  Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan — where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated — but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by insurgents. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again, and in fact, for the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks that allowed him to survive only with the help of extensive medical procedures and the care of his wife, Claudia.

  The incident turned Young into one of the most vocal veteran critics of the Iraq War. He has, however, saved his most powerful criticism for what he claims will be his last. Young says he’ll die soon, but not before writing a letter to Bush and former Vice President Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.

• NSA had cyber-attack authority since 1997

  You wouldn’t really know it from reading press accounts about cyber-warfare, but the National Security Agency has been the executive agent for precisely that capability since 1997, according to newly declassified documents. “Executive agent” is the government’s term for “the entity that does the stuff.” “Capability” is the government’s way of saying “weapon.”

• Carnegie Mellon, NSA Seek High School Hackers

• NSA sponsors competition for high school computer hackers

• University, spy agency sponsor high school hacking competition

• NSA-Sponsored Contest Seeking Student Computer Hackers

• NSA seeks high-school kids for cyber hacking competition

• Hearing set for boy who killed neo-Nazi father

  The boy, who was 10 years old at the time, shot his father point-blank with a .357 Magnum while the man slept on a sofa in the family’s Riverside home on May 1, 2011. Jeff Hall, 32, was a regional leader for the National Socialist Movement.

• 
  BBC: CIA and MI6 knew Iraq’s WMD ‘Evidence’ was based on Lies and Fabrications

• CIA and MI6 were told Iraq had no active WMDs: Report

  Vital intelligence used to justify Iraq invasion ten years ago was based on “fabrication”, a media report has claimed, citing that CIA and MI6 were told that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

Cablegate

• Update 3/18/13: Recap of Bradley Manning’s statement and audio coverage

• On the Tenth Anniversary of the US Invasion of Iraq: When WikiLeaks Exposed the ‘War Logs’

  The release of the Iraq documents, some 391,000 in number, was originally set for August. But a week before that happened, Julian Assange told The Guardian’s David Leigh that he wanted a more diverse group of partners for this round, “and asked that Leigh delay publication to give the other outlets time to prepare programs,” Sarah Ellison would recount in Vanity Fair.

  Leigh said he’d agree to a six-week delay if Assange handed over so-called “package three,” the biggest leak of all (which would become Cablegate). According to Leigh, Assange said, “You can have package three tonight, but you have to give me a letter signed by The Guardian editor saying you won’t publish package three until I say so.” Leigh agreed.

• The New York Times’ Bill Keller smears Bradley Manning

  On February 28, at his pretrial hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, Private Bradley Manning revealed that before releasing government files to WikiLeaks, he contacted major newspapers, including the New York Times, in an effort to pass on the documents in his possession. Manning did so, he explained, because the files contained “some of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare.” These files exposed government crimes and atrocities, including the deliberate murder of civilians by the US military.

• Correcting the Error-Riddled Wall Street Journal Column on WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, and Press Freedom

  Since the audio of whistleblower Bradley Manning’s statement to the court leaked last week, it’s becoming clear how much of a threat the government’s “aiding the enemy” charge against Manning threatens all whistleblowers. Famed law professor Yochai Benkler and First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams wrote an op-ed in the New York Times denouncing the unprecedented charge, and this past weekend, On The Media dedicated its whole program to Manning’s trial.

• WSJ Claims That Wikileaks Is Not Journalism But Espionage By Taking A Bunch Of Quotes Out Of Context

  Um, might that have something to do with the fact that the US government went absolutely apeshit over the release and charged Manning with a variety of offenses that have the possibility of capital punishment? We’ve already discussed the fact that the administration’s reaction likely created massive chilling effects for whistleblowers around the world. Pointing to the lack of anyone willing to step into that breach doesn’t mean Manning was necessarily an “outlier.” It just means the government’s intimidation campaign against whistleblowers may have been quite effective.

• More Iran lies exposed by WikiLeaks, honest intelligence

  Former US National Intelligence Council chairperson Thomas Fingar received the 2013 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence on January 23 for his role overseeing the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

  The NIE finding’s that all 16 US intelligence agencies judged “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” removed the immediate threat of a US-Israeli military attack on Iran.

  It contradicted the previous NIE report from 2005, which had judged with “high confidence” that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure”.

• WikiLeaks reveals US fury at Chavez’s legacy of solidarity

  Tens of thousands of Haitians spontaneously poured into the streets of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on the morning of March 12, 2007. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had just arrived in Haiti all but unannounced.

  A multitude, shrieking and singing with glee, joined him in jogging alongside the motorcade of Haiti’s then President Rene Preval on its way to the National Palace (later destroyed in the 2010 earthquake).

  There, Chavez announced that Venezuela would help the impoverished Caribbean half-island by building power stations, expanding electricity networks, improving airports, supplying garbage trucks, and supporting widely-deployed Cuban medical teams.

• Legal Errors in Wall Street Journal’s Dangerous Manning Article

  The Wall Street Journal has an article about Bradley Manning that is self-serving and dangerously wrong on the facts and law–including the assertion that he aided the enemy.

• Wall Street Journal Publishes Weird Hit Piece On Wikileaks

  Crovitz has a history of being fact-challenged…

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Flashback: Scientists Find $1240 TRILLION In Climate Impacts On Current CO2 Path, So We Must Mitigate To Under 450 PPM

• Business lobby moves to criminalize filming animal abuse on factory farms

  Bills being shopped in six states by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) would make it a crime to film animal abuse at factory farms or lie on job applications, in hopes of shutting down animal rights activists who infiltrate slaughterhouses to expose ghastly conditions.

  “The meat industry’s response to these exposes has not been to try to prevent these abuses from taking place, but rather it’s really just been to prevent Americans from finding out about those abuses in the first place,” Paul Shapiro, spokesperson for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), told Raw Story. “What they’re doing is trying to pass laws throughout the country that don’t just shoot the messenger, they seek to imprison the messenger.”

Finance

• The Bankers’ New Clothes

  What is wrong with today’s banking system? The past few years have shown that risks in banking can impose significant costs on the economy. Many claim, however, that a safer banking system would require sacrificing lending and economic growth. The Bankers’ New Clothes examines this claim and the narratives used by bankers, politicians, and regulators to rationalize the lack of reform, exposing them as invalid.

  The book argues that we can have a safer and healthier banking system without sacrificing any of the benefits of the system, and at essentially no cost to society. Banks are as fragile as they are not because they must be, but because they want to be–and they get away with it. Whereas this situation benefits bankers, it distorts the economy and exposes the public to unnecessary risks.

• Faced With A Lawsuit, J.P. Morgan Chase Claims Plaza is Private

  A year and a half after the fences first went up around Chase Manhattan Plaza, new court filings show the fight over public access to the space is still heated.
  We’ve written extensively about the fight over the fences, which were first erected the day before Occupy Wall Street protesters first gathered in Lower Manhattan. Open space activists initially challenged Chase’s unilateral closure of a treasured downtown plaza on the grounds that the fencing violated prohibitions against altering the exterior of landmarked buildings. Chase countered that the fencing was only temporary, and was needed not to keep out the bank’s critics, but rather to protect the public during scheduled maintenance on the plaza. The landmarks challenge fizzled, and the fences stayed up, though neighborhood residents saw little if any maintenance work being performed behind the fences.

• Supreme Court Rejects Goldman Sachs Appeal in Mortgage-Backed Securities Case

  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider an appeal by subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) that sought to derail a class-action lawsuit alleging the company provided false and misleading information about mortgage-backed securities it underwrote and issued.

• UPDATE: Riots Hit Cyprus After Bank Accounts Frozen

  Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades agreed to the deal, which completely reversed his previous assurances that it would not happen. It sets a very dangerous precedent for future bailouts. As if brutal austerity wasn’t enough, the EU is now demanding a bailout tax making citizens and expat depositors alike personally liable for government and private bank debts. Reuters also notes that according to a draft of the legislation, criminal penalties of up to 3 years in jail and 50,000 euros could be imposed upon anyone who doesn’t comply.

• Cyprus bailout: crisis deepens as MPs reject savings tax – live

• Former Cyprus Central Bank Head Slams ‘Blackmailing’ European Leaders

  In a brief 30-second clip during a Bloomberg TV interview, none other than Anthanasios Orphanides, the former Central Bank of Cyprus Governor, explains the terrible reality of what just happened in Europe: “What we have seen in the last few days is a very serious blunder by the European governments that are essentially blackmailing the government of Cyprus to confiscate the money that belongs rightfully to the depositors in the banking system in Cyprus.” He then concludes quite clearly, “It is not clear how this can affect in a positive manner the European project going forward.” The Cypriot then goes on to explain how the EU is making a mockery of the idea of a banking union…

• National planning Cyprus-style solution for New Zealand

• The Great Cyprus Bank Robbery Shows That No Bank Account, No Retirement Fund And No Stock Portfolio Is Safe

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• British journalists need to take responsibility for press reform

• WellPoint and Bristol-Myers Squibb Cut Ties to ALEC, Making 44 Corporations Out

• U.S. Supreme Court Considers ALEC Voting Bill; Could Have Broader Implications for Voting Rights

  The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments on March 18 to decide whether an Arizona statute that imposes restrictions on voter registration conflicts with federal law. The case could potentially decide the balance between the state and federal governments when it comes to elections and voting rights. After becoming law in Arizona, the bill at issue was adopted as a “model” by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

• George Will & Theoretical Liberal Media Bias

  While one could argue what event would qualify as a liberal/left alternative to CPAC, it’s safe to say that none of them get as much media attention as CPAC.

Censorship

• Royal Charter or Star Chamber For Stars?

  Alec Muffett points out that the new Royal Charter being rushed through the UK Parliament includes some drafting that appears to drag blogs, Twitter and other social media into the penalty net. This is an extremely worrying development that needs rapid response from the meshed society of citizen creator-consumers (that almost certainly means you).

• Outstanding questions about Leveson’s Royal Charter

  The Lib/Lab version amended the test for third party reduced the threshold for ‘representative’ groups to make complaints to the new regulatory body. Will this remain?

  The amended version was: “b) where there is an alleged breach of the code and there is substantial public interest in the Board giving formal consideration to the complaint from a representative group affected by the alleged breach”

  Why do we need ‘representative’ bodies making complaints to a press regulator? If so much harm is done to individuals and we have a regulator with a simple and accessible process, what is wrong with having a test of a substantial public interest? Will the EDL use this loophole to complain about its coverage? How about

• Royal Charter or Star Chamber For Stars?

  The new Royal Charter being rushed through the UK Parliament includes some drafting that appears to drag blogs, Twitter and other social media into the penalty net. This is an extremely worrying development that needs rapid response from the meshed society of citizen creator-consumers (that almost certainly means you).

Privacy

• Report: AWS gets $600m contract to build CIA spook cloud

  Amazon has signed a contract with the CIA that will see Bezos and Co. help the intelligence agency build a big yellow cloud, according to reports.

• Report: The CIA and Amazon are in cahoots over secret cloud

• The CIA Is About To Sign A Game-Changing $600 Million Deal With Amazon

• How liberal Hollywood fell in love with the CIA

  The new icon of Hollywood is not a celebrity or a movie franchise — it’s the CIA.

• Boom in private investigators risks avoiding surveillance regulation

  Our latest report highlights the growing use of private investigators by local and public authorities, particularly the number of times they are used without RIPA authorisation.

  The law in the UK, particularly the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, is broadly drawn to allow evidence to be introduced in court that in other jurisdictions would not be deemed admissible. Contrasted with the fruit of the poisonous tree provisions in the US, and broader protection offered by the Fourth Amendment, UK law risks failing to join up the evidential admissibility process and the regulation of surveillance.

• Location Tracking and Biometrics conference: Roundup of Grits posts

• CIA should not control drone strikes, says former Pentagon legal chief

• CIA’s Paranoid Response on Drones

• Parents of British man killed by US drone blame UK government

• CIA Must Release Some Drone Info, But Don’t Expect Much

  A Federal appeals court last week ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency must comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for details on the agency’s drone program filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

• Ex-CIA officer on the strike that could have averted Iraq War

• Domestic Drones Stir Imaginations, and Concerns

  On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway here, the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.

• NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake on the US Secrecy State as Predator of the First Amendment

• Researchers Find 25 Countries Using Surveillance Software

  Last May, two security researchers volunteered to look at a few suspicious e-mails sent to some Bahraini activists. Almost one year later, the two have uncovered evidence that some 25 governments, many with questionable records on human rights, may be using off-the-shelf surveillance software to spy on their own citizens.

• Servers in Canada linked to FinFisher spyware program

  University of Toronto researchers have discovered a new group of servers in several countries, including Canada, linked to an elusive espionage campaign.

  The research by the Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, is providing new details about a German-made, high-tech piece of spy software that some fear may be used to target dissidents by oppressive regimes.

• Will You Let Protection of Your Data Go Down the Drain?

  The “Legal Affairs” (JURI) Committee, the fourth and last one on this matter, had just voted its opinion on the European Commission’s proposal of data protection regulation, led by Marielle Gallo (France – EPP). With this latest opinion vote, slightly less catastrophic than the previous ones, the European Parliament weakened once again the protection of citizen’s personal data. Members of the four committees who gave their opinion chose to side with giant US corporations such as Facebook and Google that collect, process and trade data about our everyday life. Citizen mobilization is slowly starting to bear fruit, yet it must be tremendously amplified before the crucial vote of the main “Civil Liberties” (LIBE) Committee -scheduled for 24-25 April, but likely to be postponed- on its report.

• Seattle City Council pass ordinance restricting surveillance equipment after Councilmember Harrell slips in a gift for police

  On Monday, March 18, 2013, Seattle City Council passed C.B. 117730, which restricts City all departments’ acquisition and use of surveillance equipment. This is generally a good thing, but there are games being played, and the public are losing.

• City Council Passes Bill Defining Drone, Surveillance Use

  “Before this city buys any [more] surveillance equipment or drones, [we're saying] they cannot do this without prior council approval,” explained Seattle City Council member Nick Licata before the council unanimously approved new legislation governing how and when the city can use and operate surveillance equipment or ariel unmanned drones.

• Feds: No Warrant Needed to Track Your Car With a GPS Device

  The President Barack Obama administration is claiming that authorities do not need court warrants to affix GPS devices to vehicles to monitor their every move.

• Stop CISPA: A Week of Action to Oppose Broad Cybersecurity Legislation

  A coalition of Internet advocacy organizations and individuals are launching a week of action to combat the CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.

  Viewing CISPA as one of the greatest threats to Internet users since SOPA, the coalition intends to leverage popular outrage to oppose the dangerously broad cybersecurity bill.

• Weev sentenced to 41 months for exposing AT&T security flaw

  Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer was sentenced today to 41 months in prison for figuring out a security flaw in AT&T’s website, writes Matt Brian.

Civil Rights

• ACLU finds domestic drones the Worst. Thing. Evah.

  One of the stable of writers at Huffpo is getting the Left all up in arms over the latest complaint from the ACLU. This week, the new topic of outrage is drones, but not the ones flying over Afghanistan. (At least not today.) They’re more concerned with the idea of domestic law enforcement using the new technology to fight crime. Because they’re way worse than helicopters or something.

• Matthew Keys Was An Undercover Journalist, Attorney Says

  Matthew Keys, the Reuters deputy social media editor charged with helping Anonymous attack the website of his former employer, acted as an “undercover” journalist when he communicated with members of the hacker group, his attorneys told The Huffington Post Friday.

• Settlements, cell phones, and red tape: challenges to Palestine’s mobile market

  Israeli settlements within the West Bank are connected by a highly regulated road system. Palestinians are unable to access some roads within the West Bank, and forced through checkpoints on many others. The International Court of Justice concluded in 2004 that “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law.” An independent UN inquiry has also called for a halt to all settlement activity due to resulting human rights violations in the region.

• Prison Profiteers Are Neo-Slaveholders and Solitary Is Their Weapon of Choice

  If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

• The Shame of America’s Gulag

  If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

  [...]

  The bodies of poor, unemployed youths are worth little on the streets but become valuable commodities once they are behind bars.

• At Putin’s Order, FSB Now Using Social Networks to Target Opposition

  At the direction of President Vladimir Putin, the FSB is not only monitoring social networks but using one of their features to create problems for those opponents of the regime who use them by posting statements on their sites and then invoking the appearance of those materials to intimidate or even bring charges against them.

  This disturbing new development is documented by Irina Borogan, a researcher on Russia’s security services who writes for the Agentura.ru site. In an article last week entitled “Social Networks as a Field for Provocations,” she describes how FSB has begun to operate in this regard (agentura.ru/projects/identification/provocation/).

  When Putin met with the FSB leadership a month ago, Borogan says, he called on the security service to act “decisively to block the attempts of radicals to use the possibilities of information technologies and he resources of the Internet and social networks for their propaganda (kremlin.ru/transcripts/17516).

• Challenge To NYPD’s Stop-And-Frisk Policy Begins In Federal Court

  A class-action suit challenging the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy got under way Monday with a lawyer saying that officers have been wrongly stopping tens of thousands of young men based solely on their race.

  Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the policy is legal, but the department is doing stops illegally. Changes must be ordered by a federal judge to ensure the department stops wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men, he said.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Python Software Foundation wins a battle for the Python name

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) announced it has reached a settlement with POBox Hosting Ltd. of the United Kingdom over the latter’s trademark application for the term “Python” in connection with cloud hosting and its application for a figurative trademark in Europe incorporating the word “Python.” While the PSF owns the trademark for Python within the United States, it did not have an equivalent filing within the European Union.

• Copyrights

  • No Copyright in EU-US Trade Agreement

    Last year, millions of Americans told their government not to undermine the open internet. We sent the SOPA and PIPA bills down to defeat.

    Soon after, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Europe to protest against ACTA, a secretive trade agreement that would have violated our rights online and chilled generic drug competition.

    Meanwhile, leaked trade texts revealed US and EU threats to access to affordable medicines, which significantly disrupted trade talks in India and the Pacific.

  • Kim “Billy Big Steps” Dotcom Still Causing Headaches For Spy Agency

    Yet more embarrassing information on the Kim Dotcom spying fiasco has surfaced in New Zealand. Documents show that in December 2011 when the spying began, police already had information which stated that Dotcom – codenamed “Billy Big Steps” – was a NZ resident. As those deemed responsible are held accountable, the GCSB spy agency’s deputy director has become the first high-profile casualty, and the Prime Minister is warning of more “big changes” to come.