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12.09.12

Links 9/12/2012: GNOME Redo, KDE Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 12:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • New PlayStation PSN Web Store blocks Linux computers
  • A New Project To Run Mac OS X Binaries On Linux

    While there is the Wine project to run native Windows binaries on Linux (and other platforms), there’s a new open-source project that’s emerging for running Apple OS X binaries on Linux in a seamless manner.

  • Desktop

    • Dell Forges Ahead with Ubuntu and Open Source Projects

      Among major computer hardware makers, Dell continues to show growing signs of having a cohesive, far-reaching strategy surrounding open source. We’ve reported on the company’s work with Canonical to bring Ubuntu-based systems to both India and China, including an expansion of this effort. Dell also recently announced its Ubuntu laptop, part of its “Project Sputnik” effort, targeted at developers. And, Dell is offering new laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pre-loaded. According to the latest reports, we’re going to see more open source-friendly moves from Dell going forward.

  • Server

    • Scientists Create Linux Powered Virtual Human Brain

      Scientists at Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Ontario have successfully created a virtual human brain that can do some of complicated tasks like copying a drawing, image recognition, counting, answering questions etc. The brain requires 24 gigabytes of RAM to work and is powered by a Linux-based supercomputer. Even with this sheer power, the machine takes 2.5 hours of processing for one second of simulated time.

  • Kernel Space

    • SUSE Linux Says Btrfs is Ready to Rock

      The advanced Butter/Better/B-tree Filesystem, Btrfs, is still labeled as experimental in the Btrfs Wiki and on Oracle’s Btrfs page, though the Oracle page looks outdated. Btrfs is an advanced copy-on-write filesystem with a lot of great capabilities: snapshotting and rollbacks, checksumming of data and metadata, RAID, volumes and subvolumes, online defragmentation, compression, and online filesystem check and repair. Snapshots are always interesting to me; they’re not backups, but a fast way to restore a system to a previous state. With Btrfs users can manage their own snapshots in their home directories. Btrfs supports filesystems up to 16 EiB in size, and files up to 16 EiB as well. (Which may be almost enough to store all the cute kitten photos on the Internet.)

    • A NUMA Linux Kernel Performance Comparison

      For those interested in Non-Unified Memory Access performance under Linux, here’s an independent performance comparison that puts the mainline kernel against three other NUMA kernels.

    • Upstart 1.6.1 Brings New Changes

      Last month marked the release of Upstart 1.6 for the init daemon primarily used by Ubuntu. Coming out nearly one month later is Upstart 1.6.1 to deliver on some additional work.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3.7: what is happening now

        Before Thanksgiving I’ve caused some uproar and made people doubt our incurable stubbornness by first announcing the release team decision to drop fallback mode (*), and then that we’re going to be looking at supported extensions as a replacement (*). Some have been calling this ‘classic’ mode – I’m using the term ‘legacy’ here, since ‘classic’ may raise some false expectations.

      • GNOME Legacy Mode Begins to Take Shape

        A few weeks back GNOME developers announced that GNOME 3.8 would no longer include the fallback mode. When users roared up, developers found a way to co-exist peacefully with them – a fallback-like mode made mostly of specialized extensions. Matthias Clasen blogged today of some of the progress of what he now dubs GNOME Legacy.

      • Current Status Of Gnome Legacy and Gnome 3.7

        With the support of Gnome fallback going away and users backlashing to quit Gnome, developers have decided to create a separate session for those users who like old style desktop. This session, known as Gnome legacy as now, will be able to retain some design of Gnome 2.x – like drop down menus, minimize and maximize buttons and more. Gnome 3.8 will be the first release without the fallback mode, but you will be able to switch to Gnome legacy from the GDM login screen.

  • Distributions

    • ZevenOS 5.0: a lightweight Linux with a multimedia twist

      There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.

      That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.

    • ZevenOS 5.0 delivers an early Christmas present

      The ZevenOS developers have decided to bring their users an “early Christmas present” with the release of version 5.0 of their Linux distribution. ZevenOS 5.0 introduces what the developers term “a touch of BeOS” to its Xfce desktop. This mostly consists of theming Xfce with a distinct BeOS-like look. In line with this, the distribution focuses very much on multimedia applications and ships with most of the popular codecs.

    • New Releases

      • Chakra 2012.12
      • Nueva versión disponible, ComFusion4.1!! / New release available, ComFusion4.1 !!
      • ArchBang 2012.12 is out in the wild!!

        ArchBang 2012.12 is out in the wild!!! If you are already running ArchBang smoothly on your system then you don’t need to install the new release. This 2012.12 release is a full systemd version with our latest set of minimal packages and Openbox for the competent Linux user.

      • ArchBang Gets Banged Up For The Holidays

        ArchBang 2012.12 was released this weekend as the latest version of the Arch Linux derivative distribution that is very lightweight and ships with the OpenBox window manager.

        ArchBang 2012.12 is the project’s first release where there is a full systemd version following upstream Arch Linux moving with systemd back in October. Aside from the 2012.12 release using systemd, the packages have also been updated for the minimal packages shipping with the Linux OS. OpenBox continues to be the window manager on the front-end for providing a clean lightweight experience.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2013
      • Red Hat Expands Virtualisation Collaboration With SAP

        Red Hat, Inc., the global open source solutions provider, has announced the certification of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 for SAP business applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is a continuation of the companies’ joint work on virtualisation and an expansion of SAP’s certification of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 platform release. The certification marks the latest milestone in a 15-year alliance formed to help simplify deployments of SAP applications on physical Red Hat servers, in virtualised environments or in the cloud, bringing new choice to enterprises worldwide.

      • Red Hat Updates CloudForms Open Hybrid Cloud Management Platform

      • Fedora

        • MATE (Gnome 2) on the way to Fedora 18

          A while back I wrote about getting the MATE desktop (which is the fork of the widely used Gnome 2 desktop), on Fedora 17.

          It worked, but it had a couple of minor flaws, and I ended up going with Gnome 3 and tweaking it to get it like Gnome 2. It took some work, and it’s not perfect — for example, there are minor font issues where text doesn’t quite fit exactly in some window areas. Regardless, the issues are minor enough that they are hardly noticeable.

        • Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs
        • Fedora Being Talked About For “Software Collections”

          To adjust the rate at which how fast software updates are forced onto users, some Fedora and Red Hat developers have made a “Software Collections” proposal. The purpose of Software Collections is to allow users to install a package and choose between different versions of RPM-packaged software in parallel at run-time.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Will Allow Instant Purchasing, Right From The Dash
          • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 hits alpha, but details are under wraps
          • 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Alpha 1 Released!
          • Ubuntu Linux Considers Greater Usage Of zRAM

            Ubuntu developers and users have brought back up the matter of zRAM and using it as part of the default Ubuntu Linux installation in some intelligent manner.

            First of all, for those not familiar with zRAM, it’s a Linux kernel module (formerly called compcache) that tries to better system performance by using a compressed block device in RAM in an effort to avoid swapping/paging on disk. The zRAM kernel feature is intended for systems with low amounts of system memory. With the Linux 3.8 kernel, the zRAM feature will leave the kernel’s staging area.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Answers Lens for Unity

            The Ubuntu Answers Lens is an Unity Lens that allows users to easily and quickly find answers to common questions directly from Unity Dash.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux ARMHF RootFS

              If you’ve been following my blog (or my updates on Google+) then odds are you know I currently have my hands on two ARM devices (plus a third in the mail) I am working on creating Bodhi Linux images for. With this in mind I’ve decided I am going to start maintaining a generic ARMHF root file system to make creating Bodhi Linux images for new ARM devices easier for myself and others.

              You will always be able to find the latest copy of this file system on Bodhi source forge page here. The default user name is armhf and the default password is bodhilinux. The default user has sudo access by default.

            • Linux Mint Team Publish Release Candidates For Nadia KDE and XFCE

              The Linux Mint Developers have published the release candidates for Nadia’s KDE and XFCE editions. These releases are meant for testing and bug fixing. This will be followed by the stable releases of these flavors, hopefully as soon as critical bugs get fixed.

            • First Alpha Build Arrive For Kubuntu And Edubuntu 13.04

              The first alpha builds for Kubuntu and Edubuntu are now available for download. While there are test releases, the main Ubuntu branch will not release any milestone builds. This is to increase the quality of builds and reduce total milestones. Users can opt for daily builds though, which are updated everyday and may be highly unstable for use.

            • Kubuntu 12.10 Review

              Canonical will no longer be funding the Kubuntu project, Blue Systems is now the primary sponsor. Blue Systems is known for producing the Netrunner distribution which is originally based on Kubuntu. Blue Systems seems very interested in the future of Linux, and KDE in particular. Check out the links below to learn more about Blue Systems, and the exciting Netrunner operating system.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Copyright in the digital economy: a way forward

    I’ve long said that we need to modernise copyright for the digital age: many of the rules have been in place since before things like YouTube, Facebook or data-mining techniques even existed. And, no matter what perspective you bring to the debate, it is obvious that the current fragmented rules in Europe and elsewhere have created frustrations.

    It’s right to provide reward and recognition for artists: but the current copyright system sometimes doesn’t do that as well as it could. Often, in fact, it makes it harder for you to legally access your favourite content. And in many ways it closes us off from digital opportunity, whether it’s the chance to explore innovative new business models, or new ways to conduct lifesaving scientific research.

  • Five out of six developers now using or deploying open source

    Five out of six developers today use or have used open source tools or deployed open source software in their projects, a recent Forrester Research study revealed.

    But in which software categories? The top five, according to the recent survey, are operating systems, web servers, relational database management systems, IDEs and software configuration management tools.

  • Intel releases open source GraphBuilder for big data

    Intel has released an open source tool designed to improve firms’ handling and analysis of unstructured data.

    Intel said that its GraphBuilder tool would aim to fill a market void in the handling of big data for computer learning. Currently available as a beta release, the tool allows developers to construct large graphs which can then be used with big data analysis frameworks.

  • Intel graphs aim to make ‘big data inside’ easier
  • Intel GraphBuilder Good For Extracting Knowledge From Big Data
  • Building graphs with Hadoop
  • Open Source CFD International Conference 2012: Proceedings now
  • MapR and Zarafa Expand Open Source Strategy in Europe
  • What’s Dell’s Next Open Source Move?

    The Ubuntu-powered laptop recently released by Dell’s Project Sputnik has generated a lot of buzz, especially in the open source community. Now, many Linux enthusiasts are hoping to see a continued expansion of Dell’s open source hardware lineup. And according to Project Sputnik lead Barton George, they may not be disappointed. Here’s what he had to say about Dell’s future open source strategy in a recent interview.

    As longtime observers of the open source channel know, Dell’s relationship with the Linux community has been rough at times. As the only major OEM that offers Ubuntu pre-installed on consumer-class laptops and desktops, Dell has paid significant attention to the Linux demographic, which most other big-name hardware manufacturers have entirely ignored. Still, the company’s inconsistent selection of Ubuntu PCs and lack of full-scale marketing initiatives for them have left some open source fans less than ecstatic.

  • Top Ten for an Open Source Christmas
  • Open Source Initiatives Can Strengthen Cities’ Downtown Revitalization
  • Cisco Pledges Networking Innovation Built on Open Standards and Open Source

    At Cisco’s Financial Analyst meeting today, CEO John Chambers articulated his plan to innovate and grow. It’s a plan with multiple components, including leveraging more networking programmability and Software Defined Networking (SDN).

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Steps Up Outreach to Developers for Firefox OS

        Mozilla is continuing to double down its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business with the Firefox OS mobile operating system, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets. There have been many updates on the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform here, and Flickr galleries of screenshots of the young operating system have provided peeks at development.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Triumph and disaster: Two migrations to OpenOffice

      The contrast between the approach taken in the two cities is striking. Freiburg — a smaller city administration — focused on cost cutting. It recognized there would be one-off costs to pay from template and macro migration, as well as user training, but it stuck with Windows desktops, retained certain existing applications, and even allowed some staff to opt out of the migration entirely and keep using Microsoft Office. It seems there was a limited uptake of migration training, too. The result was an environment with both OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Office 2000 in use throughout the attempted migration.

      Because Office 2000 did not support the OpenDocument format standard, this guaranteed a flow of documents in the formats used by both office suites, maximizing opportunities for incompatibility. By all accounts, the city stuck with those old versions of both Office and OpenOffice.org and allowed the mixed environment to persist throughout. No two word processors can ever be 100 percent compatible with each other’s file formats; only a well-defined, standard format implemented by both stands any chance of interoperability. Unsurprisingly, staff ran into problems with document compatibility; equally unsurprising, the crew blamed the “new” software for the problems.

      Looking at the numbers (see my article in ComputerworldUK for more details), it appears that the expenditure in Freiburg was dominated by the idea of cutting licensing costs. I may be missing it in the reports, but I couldn’t find any sign of investment in the open source software itself. The report — and the subsequent PR from Freiburg — talks about the “uncertainty” of the OpenOffice.org software (forked to create LibreOffice, abandoned by Oracle, then repurposed by IBM and others at Apache) but makes no mention of investment in the software.

    • Help Make LibreOffice 4.0 Great

  • CMS

    • Why It’s Worth Noticing the White House’s Big, Wet Kiss With Drupal and GitHub

      Between pictures of the president using Twitter and Vice President Joe Biden at Costco, the White House blog recently featured a little note advocating the use of open source in government. It is interesting to see how Barack Obama uses social networks, and a post about Biden at Costco feels a little bit like the White House just scooped The Onion — a shirtless photo would have been too much to hope for, but the author may have been able to slip in at least one Pontiac reference. But the White House making a point of name-checking open-source software touchstones is also worthy of note.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source

      A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

    • UN trade body says governments should seize open source opportunities

      Governments should encourage the use of free and open source software, recommends Unctad in a report published on 28 November. The United Nation’s trade and investment body says that an increasing uptake of open source will help to develop an innovative domestic software market. It also makes public organisations less dependent on large-scale software manufacturers.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Homeroaster crafts a pumpkin spice latte the open source way

      Coffee, often cited as the second most highly traded commodity in the world, is deeply personal for many. Every coffee drinker has their favorite brand, blend, and brew method. Years ago I considered myself a coffee fan, but the coffee I was drinking was so loaded with cream and sugar that it barely resembled the beverage. I purposefully weened myself off of the additives and learned the unfortunate truth that most coffee served in the United States has gone stale before the consumer reaches for their wallet. After a long search for the freshest cup, I decided to roast my own.

    • Folger Library launches open-source digital Shakespeare
    • U.S. Department of Labor Grantees Converge to create Nation’s first Open Source Nursing Textbooks under $2 Billion Federal Grant Program

      California Community College faculty, administrators, a team of professionals and the 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM) are meeting this weekend to transform textbook production and costs, a project aimed to save students millions of dollars and revolutionize the way educational materials are compiled and delivered.

    • # Oldest open-source software kept by Army

      Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

    • # Oldest open-source software kept by Army
    • Ridiculous: SEC Boss Refused To Move Forward On Required Crowdfunding Rules To Protect Her ‘Legacy’

      Earlier this year, the JOBS Act passed Congress with widespread bipartisan support, and was signed into law by the President. There were a few different pieces involved, but one that got plenty of attention was the opening up of crowdfunding for equity (i.e., owning actual shares in a company). In the US, you can’t do a crowdfunding campaign that results in giving ownership in the company. Until the JOBS Act passed, that was considered a form of a public offering, which is a highly regulated area, in which you have to file all sorts of documents with the SEC, get an underwriter, go on a road show, all that fun stuff. But for smaller businesses looking to raise some money, this doesn’t make much sense. The JOBS Act opened up a small sliver of space in which smaller companies could raise a little bit of money in exchange for equity. The SEC actively opposed the whole thing from the beginning, but once the bill was law, it was also tasked with setting up the rules for how it would work to limit possible fraud.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • UK hospital says royal prank call appalling after nurse death

    The London hospital that treated Prince William’s pregnant wife Kate condemned on Saturday an Australian radio station that made a prank call seeking information about the duchess, after the apparent suicide of a nurse who answered the phone.

  • Google ends small-biz free ride on Google Apps
  • Over 30 Million Accounts on Facebook Belong to Dead People
  • Uber Is Really Legal in D.C. Now

    Earlier this evening, after a day of legislative bickering that seemed interminable, the D.C. Council finally delivered what urban professionals, libertarians, Megan McArdle and all the myopic little twits have demanded for months: Uber, the luxury sedan-on-demand service, is totally legal in the District of Columbia.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Zimbabwe Diamond Scandal Overlooked

      Wikileaks uncovered the story. Why didn’t we hear much about it in the news?

    • Chat Logs Show Assange-Manning Collaboration, Military Says

      The latest chat excerpts, which were presented during closing arguments, came from Manning’s personal laptop computer, reports the Washington Post. Prosecutors said they show that Manning and Assange collaborated to steal and publish over 700,000 documents filled with state secrets. The publication of those secrets caused “extreme harm” to the United States, according to the prosecution. Capt. Ashden Fein said Assange did more than simply accept documents from Manning.

    • Why we don’t need another law against intelligence leaks

      The decade-long clandestine U.S. “war on terror” has spawned a parallel, escalating campaign to stop leaks of information about intelligence activities to the news media. During the first four years of the Obama administration, investigations of spy agency employees have proliferated. Six current or former officials have been prosecuted for unauthorized disclosures of information, more than in all previous administrations combined.

      The pressure to keep quiet is intensifying. The director of national intelligence has expanded the use of lie-detector interrogations in leak investigations. His office is studying how all 16 U.S. civilian and military intelligence agencies handle “non-incidental contacts” with the news media, presumably interviews and background briefings. Pentagon officials have been ordered to monitor news media for disclosures of classified information.

    • Julian Assange: the fugitive
    • French Leftist Melenchon Pays Assange a Visit
    • Assange doing ‘fine’ despite cramped space: ambassador

      Ecuadoran Ambassador Ana Alban told a small group of reporters that Assange took time to settle, but has now got used to his restricted living arrangements.
      “If you have a guest in your house, you want to make sure that he’s all right,” she said.
      “You can imagine how difficult it can be to have fresh air and to have sun and space.
      “In the beginning it was quite difficult, but now it’s fine.”
      The ambassador was speaking as French leftwing politician Jean-Luc Melenchon met with Assange.

    • New York Times Finally Shows Up to Cover Bradley Manning Proceedings (And Their Story Is Sloppy)

      Amidst growing criticism, including an editorial from the newspaper’s public editor, the New York Times sent reporter Scott Shane to cover military court proceedings in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier currently being prosecuted by the government for allegedly providing classified information to WikiLeaks.

    • Let a Thousand Public Editors Bloom: Bradley Manning and the Times Pt. 3

      The New York Times’ named Margaret Sullivan as its fifth Public Editor in September of this year. As the successful candidate for the job her duty is to investigate “matters of journalistic integrity” by working “independently” and “outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper.”

      So far, and with very few blemishes, she has done an exemplary job. She recently scrutinized her boss Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s choice to hire former BBC Director General Mark Thompson as the Times’ new CEO. Regarding the pedophilia scandal that has rocked that public institution and that Thompson oversaw for part of his career, Margaret asked “How likely is it that he knew nothing?” She also wrote that “It’s worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job.”

    • In WikiLeaks Case, Defense Puts the Jailers on Trial
    • An Empty Seat in the Courtroom

      THE lawyer David Coombs rarely speaks publicly outside the courtroom. He says that his client, Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, prefers it that way.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • WikiLeaks reveals US bribes help stop climate action

      There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, South African Professor Patrick Bond, an analyst and activist on climate change, told the Inter Press Service as the United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change met in Doha.

      The talks took place in the capital of Qatar from November 26 to December 7.

      “The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity,” Bond, the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS. “The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences … and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives.”

    • Fracking for Foreigners? New Report from Feds Backs More Natural Gas Exports

      How times have changed. Ten years ago the United States was looking at importing natural gas via massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, yet to be built. Now the country appears to be getting ready to significantly increase exports of LNG.

      A long-anticipated federal study released Wednesday for public comment concluded that the economic benefits of significant natural gas exports outweighed the potential for higher energy prices for consumers. The Obama administration has repeatedly said the study would be central to its decision on whether or not to approve expanded exports.

    • Surprise Side Effect Of Shale Gas Boom: A Plunge In U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

      Environmental activists seem elated that the Obama administration may tackle climate change in its second term. In order to determine where climate change fits into the priority ranking of our nation’s most important agenda items, it seems worthwhile to step back and take stock of the quiet but tremendous progress that the U.S. has already made in reducing carbon emissions

  • Finance

    • Another Goldman Creature Given Vital Government Post

      Big news yesterday in the United Kingdom, where the citizenry surveyed its domestic banking system and discovered that it couldn’t find a single person trustworthy enough to put in the top job at the Bank of England. So they went to Canada and stole that country’s central banker, Mark Carney, who just happens to be a former Goldman, Sachs executive – he was once Goldman’s managing director of investment banking.

      Carney’s appointment may be seen as an admission that the British banking sector is now so tainted, only an outsider can be trusted to govern them. Almost all of the major English banks have been dinged by ugly scandals. The LIBOR mess, in which banks have been caught messing around with global interest rates for a variety of sordid reasons, has most infamously implicated Barclays, but the Royal Bank of Scotland is also a cooperator in those investigations.

      Meanwhile, HSBC has been accused of laundering billions of dollars of Mexican drug money, a monstrous mess that recalls the infamous Bank of New York scandal of the late Nineties involving Russian mob money; officials have described the HSBC culture as “pervasively polluted.” And the British bank Standard Chartered is now being forced to pay $330 million to settle claims that it laundered hundreds of billions of dollars on behalf of Iran.

    • The Injustice of Justice…Judge Does Not Care About Fraud

      As promised, here is an update from Laser Haas in his diligent fight for justice. Unfortunately for him AND for ALL OF US, our judicial system as with all branches of our government does not want to take any action against those, too big to fail or those in the 1% with the money to buy lobbyists and influence government, who seem to rule our country.

    • Goldman in Mediation With CIFG to Settle Mortgage Suit

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and CIFG Assurance North America Inc. retained a mediator as the two companies seek to settle a lawsuit in New York state court in Manhattan, according to a filing.

      The insurer sued Goldman Sachs in New York State Supreme Court in August 2011, accusing the New York-based investment bank of making misrepresentations in connection with the securitization of a portfolio of 6,204 mortgage loans.

      The two sides have participated in one mediation session and have scheduled another for Dec. 19, according to a document filed in court yesterday.

    • A Wikileaks Cable Explained The Money Laundering Formula That Turned Macau Into A Gigantic Economic Success

      Shares of Macau-based casinos got slammed in the last day amid reports of the mainland cracking down on the junket operators that ferry rich players into high-roller rooms.

    • Former Anonymous Spokesman Barrett Brown Indicted For Sharing a Link to Stolen Credit Card Data

      Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today’s indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown’s in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to another. This is scary to anyone who ever links to anything.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Former Anon spokesperson indicted for allegedly linking to stolen information
    • EU Report: The ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Is Technically Impossible… So Let’s Do It Anyway

      Every few months, it seems, we hear about yet another attempt in Europe to implement the absolutely ridiculous idea of the “right to be forgotten.” We wrote about it in 2010, 2011 and again earlier this year. It’s a silly idea for a variety of reasons. The general idea is that someone, say, who has committed a crime, but is then rehabilitated / served his time / whatever, deserves a “fresh start” and the stories of the crime and punishment should be erased from publications. Europeans who support this wacky idea argue that it’s a form of a privacy right. But that’s ridiculous. It has nothing to do with “privacy” at all, as the fact that someone committed and convicted of a crime is a public fact, not private info. Telling people (and publishers) that they can’t talk about factual information, or even leave available factual stories written at the time just seems completely offensive to anyone who believes in the basic idea of free speech.

  • Privacy

    • Privacy in America continues to erode online, report says

      The Wall Street Journal has been looking at this issue, and in its latest reportit says companies are increasingly connecting consumers’ real-life identities to where they hang out online.

      The newspaper cited a Georgia man shopping for a car who input his name and contact information on a car dealer’s website.

      While this data went to the dealership, it also was transmitted to a company that tracks the online movements of people shopping for vehicles. The company then was able to pair the man’s personal information with an analysis of the automotive websites he had visited and hand over all of this data to the car dealer, which could use it to more easily land a sale.

    • Dear Journalists at Vice and Elsewhere, Here Are Some Simple Ways Not To Get Your Source Arrested

      Computer security millionaire John McAfee’s surreal flight from Belizean law enforcement came to an end this week when he was detained (and then hospitalized) in Guatemala, as has been widely reported. A piece of the story that hasn’t been included in much of the reporting is how authorities figured out that McAfee — who was wanted for questioning in the shooting death of his neighbor — had fled Belize for Guatemala. McAfee’s location was exposed after he agreed to let two reporters from Vice Magazine tag along with him. Proud to finally be in the thick of a story rife with vices — drugs, murder, prostitutes, guns, vicious dogs, a fugitive millionaire and his inappropriately young girlfriend — they proudly posted an iPhone photo to their blog of Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro standing with the source of the mayhem in front of a jungly background, saying, “We are with John McAfee right now, suckers.”

    • DVLA tackle 294 public organisations for database abuse

      In the past three years, 294 public organisations have faced action over their use of the database containing details of car registrations and driving licenses.

      In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Big Brother Watch, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) disclosed that the organisations were overwhelmingly local authorities, but included Sussex Police and Transport for London.

    • A Real Privacy Threat To Global Internet Users From The U.N. International Telecommunications Union

      The new standards outline requirements for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology in future systems — a technique for snooping into the web content with legitimate uses all too often used by repressive regimes to identify and punish dissenters or preemptively censor online communication through fear of reprisal. However, while setting technical standards, ITU made practically no mention of the user implications of the technology, nor did it outline guidelines for appropriate use.

  • Civil Rights

    • Appeals Court Sides With Bush Wiretapping

      A federal appeals court is refusing to reconsider its August ruling in which it said the federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued.

      The original decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this summer reversed the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program.

  • DRM

    • Apple Has The Tightest Digital Handcuffs: Richard Stallman

      In a recent interview with New Internationalist Magazine, Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Foundation and GNU, criticized the restrictions imposed by Apple devices on its users.When asked about the malicious features that non-free programs have, Stallman bashed Apple for spying on its users and restricting their freedom.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • GoldenEye appeal on Monday: ORG reaches £5k funding goal

        Open Rights Group has reached the funding goal of £5,000 to fund the legal case defending the decision to keep private the personal details of O2 and Be Broadband customers asssociated with over 6000 IP addresses.

      • What Creative Commons and ‘copyleft’ mean to a designer

        I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do.

        What struck me most was seeing that people have tattoos of the Creative Commons logo—it’s a passionate gesture and conveyed a social force that inspired my creation of the three images you see in the photo above. I refer to them as “Creative Commons personification,” “Share,” and “The Creative Commons Ship,” respectively.

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

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

      • Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright-reform memo

        The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of Republicans in the House of Representatives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Congress re-convenes in January. The incoming chairman of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by several Republican members of Congress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advocating reform of copyright law. They asked that Khanna not be retained, and Scalise agreed to their request.

      • 10 years of Creative Commons

        The creators of the Creative Commons licensing suite are celebrating the licences’ tenth birthday. As part of the festivities, local groups are organising events all over the world from 7 to 16 December. The organisation behind Creative Commons was founded in 2001 and produced and published the first set of licences in December of the following year. The organisation was founded by, among others, law school professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig, with the goal of giving both creators and consumers of content more freedoms than are usually afforded under traditional copyright licences.

      • Tattoo Copyright Strikes Again: Tattoo Artist Sues THQ For Accurately Representing Fighter’s Tattoo In Game
      • Sega forcing removal of Shining Force videos on YouTube

        Over the past few days, Sega has been forcing YouTube users to remove uploaded videos of the Sega Saturn RPG Shining Force III lest their entire channels get shut down. While this is not an altogether uncommon practice for a company trying to protect its IP, the fact that Sega is targeting just specific content is rather curious. In any case, it’s pretty damn heartless.

      • Sega Goes Nuclear On YouTube Videos Of Old Shining Force Game

        Well, Sega has apparently decided to buck their trend of being mildly annoying to their fans… by upping the ante and going full-blown fan-screw-crazy. They have apparently been going on a YouTube video take down blitz for anything related to their Shining Force franchise to somehow protect an upcoming PSP release in the series from being… well… maybe they think that… no, that doesn’t work… you know what? I don’t know what the hell they’re afraid of, but they’re pooping all over a bunch of fan videos.

      • Dotcom can pursue case against police, GCSB

        Details of the top secret international spy agency ring known as Echelon will have to be produced after a new judgment in the Kim Dotcom case.

        The internet tycoon was also cleared to pursue a case for damages against the police and the Government Communications Security Bureau in a judgment which has opened the Government’s handling of the criminal copyright case for its harshest criticism yet.

        The order for the GCSB to reveal top secret details came as the High Court at Auckland ruled the spy agency would now sit alongside the police in a case probing the unlawful search warrant used in the raid on Dotcom’s north Auckland mansion.

      • DMCA Fun: Movie Studios Issue Takedowns Over Their Authorized Films

        We’ve covered how often DMCA notices seem to be sent improperly, taking down others people’s work, but it’s also true that we see people send DMCA notices on their own work pretty often. TorrentFreak has done a great job detailing many cases where Hollywood’s biggest and most famous studios have been issuing DMCA takedowns on their own movies, as well as their own movie promotional pages. Among the takedowns are ones from Lionsgate taking down authorized versions of a film on iTunes, Amazon, Blockbuster and Xfinity.

      • Man charges porn trolling firm Prenda Law with identity theft

        Last week, we covered the comedy of errors that played out in the Florida courtroom of Judge Mary Scriven, where it became clear that there were no attorneys willing to put their reputations at risk by associating themselves with the porn trolling firm Prenda Law. A local Florida attorney told Judge Scriven that he had been brought into the case by Prenda, but now wanted out of the case. Prenda itself denied any involvement in the case.

      • Copyright troll Prenda Law is accused of using a stolen identity for their offshore plaintiffs

12.06.12

Links 7/12/2012: More Games and RHT News

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8: Head-to-Head at Last

    “There must be 50 reasons to prefer GNU/Linux over ’8′ — all of them sufficient for one or more groups of users,” asserted blogger Robert Pogson. “Where GNU/Linux appears on retail shelves, a significant number of consumers do choose it — we saw that all over the world when ASUS brought out its netbook with Linpus GNU/Linux, and we see it in Brazil today, where GNU/Linux outsells M$’s OS at Wal-Mart.”

  • Why Linux May Be Better For You Than What You’re Using Now

    I’m not saying Linux is the best thing to use for everyone. I am saying, however, that it may be better for you than what you’re using now.
    Linux is different from Windows or Mac OS X in some fundamental ways.
    For thousands of people, these differences are a reason to choose Linux
    over its alternatives. Are they for you? Read on to find out!

  • Desktop

    • Do Devs Need Custom Linux Laptops? Dell Thinks So

      Rumors began circulating earlier this year that Dell might be developing a laptop specifically designed for developers. Then Barton George, Dell’s Web Vertical Director, began blogging about Sputnik, a “scrappy skunkworks project” that would combine the XPS 13-inch laptop with the Ubuntu 12.04 Linux distribution.

    • Early Reviews for Low-Cost Chromebooks Are….Surprisingly Good

      In recent posts, we’ve been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Now that these systems have been in the wild for a few weeks, reliable reviews are appearing, and, users are liking them.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Changes in Gwenview for KDE SC 4.10

        I have been kept very busy during the last six months with Homerun, spending little time on Gwenview. Luckily Gwenview received several contributions from other developers during this cycle, so Gwenview 2.10 (from KDE SC 4.10) features some significant improvements.

      • KDE 4.9.4 Has Been Officially Released

        The KDE Project has announced a few minutes ago, December 5, the immediate availability for download of the fourth and last maintenance release of KDE Software Compilation 4.9.

  • Distributions

    • Puppy 5.4 Screenshots
    • Slacko Puppy 5.4 introduces installable layers

      Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.

    • The best Linux distro of 2012!

      As promised in this week’s Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here’s our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine.

      Our annual distro competition is as close to a tradition as we get here at LXF Towers. We do it because we love distributions – we love their variety and the way that so much changes over the course of a year. If you want to see what conclusions we came to last year, for example, check out our previous feature, The best Linux distro of 2011.

      But if we restricted our comparisons to the same old dominant stalwarts, our yearly parade of victors would look more like political oscillation than a reflection of Linux distribution development. Which is why this year we wanted to do something different…

    • ZevenOS 5.0: a lightweight Linux with a multimedia twist

      There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.

      That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.

    • ZevenOS 5.0 Screenshots

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 2 on Acer Inspire One

        Today I performed the easiest Mageia install ever. It was on an Acer netbook (an Inspire One D257-1408 that came pre-installed with the curse of Windows 7 Starter).

        The machine packs an Intel atom N570, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB HD. When I first saw it, my worry was the strange keyboard configuration: there are functions scattered all over the keyboard. Besides, I still had the usual concerns: Graphics server and effects, Wi-fi, sound, and the SD card reader.

    • Red Hat Family

      • ManageIQ Announces Support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1

        ManageIQ, the leading provider of IT Cloud Management ™ solutions, today announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. ManageIQ support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 provides customers with unified monitoring, management and automation capabilities that are quick-to-deploy and easy-to-use, reducing the cost and complexity of enterprise virtualization and cloud computing.

      • Red Hat Advances Hybrid Cloud and Virtualization
      • Red Hat RHEV gets storage savvy

        Less than a year after a major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, Red Hat has upgraded the software to offer more advanced storage capabilities.

        Released Wednesday, RHEV 3.1 allows administrators to make snapshots and clones of running virtual machines. And, in a technical preview mode, RHEV 3.1 supports storage migration for virtual machines (VMs), in which the backup disk image of a running VM can be moved from one SAN (storage area network) to another without stopping the running VM, said Chuck Dubuque, Red Hat product marketing senior manager for Red Hat virtualization infrastructure.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

          It was decided at today’s FESCo meeting to not disable the mounting of /tmp as a tmpfs file-system by default for the forthcoming Fedora 18 Linux release.

          For months the Fedora developers have been planning to mount /tmp with tmpfs for putting the temporary directory in RAM/SWAP volatile memory as it will lead to less disk reads/writes, potentially save power / better the performance, not preserve temporary data across reboots, and other benefits.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • My review of The Official Ubuntu Book (7th Edition)

            After reading this book I can say that I have a better understanding on how this Ubuntu operating works. The nice thing about this book compared to other books on Ubuntu that cover how to use Ubuntu, is this books covers not only these topics, but goes over why and how Ubuntu came into being and thoroughly teaches the readers how the Ubuntu community runs and operates.

          • HP Envy m4 1015dx Initial Impressions with Ubuntu 12.10

            Over the Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Cyber Week madness, I managed to pick up a new laptop that, as it turns out, is decently Linux-friendly, so I thought I’d share my findings with you! As it turns out, I have a tendency to ramble on, so enjoy this 14+ minute video! Click “Read More” to see it.

          • Foobnix Music Player Gets New Ubuntu PPA

            A quick update for our Ubuntu readers using Foobnix: the player has a new PPA, so remove the old one and add ppa:foobnix-team/foobnix-player instead.

          • Ubuntu 12.10
          • Dell Ubuntu Laptop Developer Speaks About Future Plans

            Project Sputnik, Dell‘s innovative initiative for building a high-end, open source laptop, launched a week ago with the release of an XPS 13 “Developer Edition” laptop powered by Ubuntu Linux. But Dell’s far from done on this front, according to Barton George, the brain behind the project. In an interview, he explained where Project Sputnik — and Dell’s open source channel strategy more broadly–might be headed next. Read on for what he had to say.

            The Sputnik laptop released last week was the product of an effort that began about six months ago, when George floated the concept of creating a laptop tailored for programmers to the Dell Innovation Program. Sputnik was the inaugural project for the Innovation Program, which Dell established earlier this year to help inspire innovative product ideas from company employees.

          • First “alpha” arrives for Ubuntu Raring Ringtail 13.04

            The Ubuntu development cycle moves up a notch as the first alpha release of what is to become Ubuntu 13.04, Raring Ringtail, and images for Edubuntu 13.04 and Kubuntu 13.04, are released to the public. A decision has been made by the developers to reduce the number of milestone builds and switch to daily and fortnightly quality tests. Raring Ringtail will be continuously updated and new daily images will be released over the coming months to test it. There will not be a milestone release of Ubuntu 13.04 until 28 March 2013, and that will be a “FinalBetaRelease”. Rather than there being an Alpha 1 image, users should download the most recent daily image and use that.

          • Introducing Ubuntu PyPi Lens for Unity

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 14 for KDE Users is Almost Ready

              Every release KDE users are treated like red-headed stepchildren over there at Linux Mint. We wait and wait… Fortunately, Clem announced the Release Candidate today, which means version 14 with KDE should be along any time now. It comes with most of goodies outlined earlier and we’ll miss the showstopppers that prompted a quick update.

              Clement Lefebvre today announced Linux Mint 14 RC with KDE 4.9.2. Like the others, this release is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and includes Linux 3.5, Xorg X Server 1.13.0, and GCC 4.7.2. KDE 4.9.2 in Mint includes improvements such as enhanced Dolphin metadata, New “Change Directory To” upon drop in a Konsole, and Kwin got lots of quality and performance improvements. Kontact received many bugfixes and performance improvements too and Workspaces now have MPRIS2 support.

            • Linux Mint 14 Review
            • Linux Mint 14 RC KDE Edition Has Been Released

              Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • ODROID Boards Offer High-End Raspberry Pi Alternatives

      There’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite ARM development board right now: it’s cheap, silent, and exceptionally power efficient. The Raspberry Pi makes an excellent choice for low-energy applications like personal servers, routers, firewalls, environmental monitoring setups, etc, etc.

    • TI rolls open-source RTOS for MCUs

      Texas Instruments released a real-time operating system developed entirely in-house for its microcontrollers. TI will offer the code for on a royalty-free, open source basis, aiming to ease the path to market for its customers.

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • $120 tablet that runs both Android and Linux to launch in early 2013

        For anyone who has ever used his or her Android tablet and wished that it could double as a desktop-style device, PengPod has a product just for you. Ars Technica reports that the new PengPod tablet, which runs both Android and Linux, has met its crowd-sourced fundraising goals and will so on sale in January for $120 a 7-inch model and $185 for a 10-inch model. According to Ars, the tablet will be able to “dual-boot Android 4.0 and a version of Linux with the touch-friendly KDE Plasma Active interface.” Overall, the tablet received funding of nearly $73,000, or around 49% more than the $49,000 that the company had been seeking.

      • Archos GamePad Goes On-Sale In Europe

        The Archos GamePad is now available in Europe for €149.99, with a North American release scheduled for early Q1 2013. As the name suggests it combines physical gaming button controls and a patented mapping tool that allows you to link the virtual controls of any game to physical controls.

Free Software/Open Source

  • GWT: No future without the community

    Vaadin, the company behind the GWT-based web framework of the same name, has published a report on the future of Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based web framework that includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. Google had appeared to scale back its own GWT development efforts following its shift in focus towards Dart as an alternative to JavaScript and, earlier this year, had promised to create a more open development process. This resulted in the formation of a steering committee, which includes Google representatives as well as developers from Red Hat and Vaadin and which will be responsible for the future development of GWT.

  • Oldest open-source software kept by Army

    Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
    But during the decades of providing support to the nation, BRL quickly became involved in the move toward modern computing. Indeed, nearly 70 years ago, BRL unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — ENIAC, the world’s first operational, digital computer.
    The development of this computer was driven by the Army’s need to speed calculation of firing tables. And ever since the development of the ENIAC, ARL has provided the U.S. military with unprecedented scientific computational capabilities.

  • RFID News Roundup

    Transcends upgrades Rifidi open-source RFID software, introduces new appliances, reader; Napa Valley’s AuburnJames Winery to test RFID-enabled pallets; ADR’s Automated Workforce Monitor service initiated at Texas construction sites; Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ parking lot uses TagMaster RFID tags; Toshiba certifies Omni-ID UltraThin IQ 400 and IQ 600 RFID labels; Intellitix intros RFID MiniPortal.

  • U.S. Department of Labor Grantees Converge to create Nation’s first Open Source Nursing Textbooks under $2 Billion Federal Grant Program

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Art meets the open web

        Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

  • Databases

    • 1 million euros pledged to new MariaDB Foundation

      SkySQL’s CEO Patrick Sallner, Percona’s co-founder Peter Zaitsev and MySQL AB co-founders Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson have come together to announce the creation of the MariaDB Foundation. “The time is right for an independent organisation to safeguard the interests of MariaDB users and developers as we head towards MariaDB 10″, said Axmark. According to the announcement made at the Percona Live conference in London, the organisation has secured a pledge of one million euros from the foundations two initial sponsors and is seeking other sponsors.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.6.4 Is Now Available for Download

      The Document Foundation announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.6 open source office suite is now available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.

    • LibreOffice 3.6.4 fixes over 60 bugs

      The LibreOffice developers from The Document Foundation have released LibreOffice 3.6.4, an incremental update to the open source office suite that fixes over 60 bugs. The fixed bugs include problems with the office suite’s RTF support, display problems with Hebrew font symbols, and several crashing problems. Bugs in the LibreOffice UI were also addressed, such as check boxes that would not retain their state, resetting configuration dialogs, and sorting of tables in the Calc spreadsheet application that did not work correctly.

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

    • The Picket Project: Innovative Open Source Effort Seeks Funding For New Collaborative Online Community

      The Picket Project, an open source effort to create a new crowdsourcing software, launched on Indiegogo this week with the goal of funding their initial software release. This is the final push in the launch of their platform. The software was developed to tackle large, complex political problems in a new, innovative way. The Picket Project Platform allows engaged citizens to build their own solutions by connecting and building on related, similar ideas.

  • Project Releases

    • Ekiga 4.0 offers a fresh, open source Skype alternative

      Longtime users of Ubuntu Linux may already be familiar with open source Ekiga, which used to be the default Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) client in that popular Linux distribution, but late last month the telephony software got a major update.

  • Public Services/Government

    • U.S. Customs and Border Protection Decision Boosts Open Source Software for Government Procurement

      Talend, a global open source software leader, announced today it has received a favorable advisory ruling from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency around the government’s ability to purchase open source software. The CBP has determined that software products are compliant with the Trade Agreement Act (TAA) when that software is manufactured in a designated country through numerous, complex and significant activities including key product research, writing the specification and architecture, and the actual software build – even if the majority of its source code was created in a non-designated country.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open science spreads with new version of mMass spectrometry tool

      Over the last months, I became more and more aware of the “open” movement. “Open” as in open access, open source, open data, open science.

    • Can open source technology save music?

      We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Say Goodbye to Presentation Software With Reveal.js
    • Amazon connects node.js to AWS services
    • GRAILS: An open source framework for rapid app development

      You might get confused with the name of a musical band group but here we will talk about a serious technology. The framework is inspired by Ruby on Rails that makes use of Groovy language which is a dynamic and agile scripting language. The syntax is somewhat very similar to that of Java. In fact, you can use groovyc just like javac to produce bytecode files. Also, Groovy integrates with Bean scripting framework, which allows you to embed any scripting engine into your Java code. It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the “coding by convention” paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer.

  • Standards/Consortia

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

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

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

Leftovers

12.05.12

Links 6/12/2012: White House on FOSS, Drones Backlash Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 4 Alternatives to Google Drive for Linux

    We’ve covered using Google Drive on Linux with third-party software, but why bother jumping through those hoops? You can use a cloud storage service that officially supports Linux instead – several of Google Drive’s competitors do.

    Google may be leaving Linux users out, but other services like Dropbox, Ubuntu One, SpiderOak, and Wuala don’t ignore Linux users. They even offer more storage and other useful features, such as local encryption of your files.

  • Linux Top 3: Sputnik, Spherical Cow and Secure Boot

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • [E17] Alpha Is Go

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Spaceship Earth viewed through Marble

        Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps. He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer. He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center. Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce. The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map. Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.

        I remember when Google Earth got big. I was already into Linux so I went through the rigmarole of getting it to work on Linux. In actuality, it wasn’t much work although it wasn’t installed in the usual manner. I played with it for a few days, but I was already past the age of caring too much about geography. I would have loved Google Earth when I was in elementary school and I used to marvel at my globe and peruse atlases. It certainly would have been interesting to grab the update on the day the Soviet Union collapsed. Rather than have an out of date globe or map I’d have an up-to-date resource. Of course, that does go back into the whole political thing – when Google decides to show this or that disputed region as belonging to someone they are, in a sense, making a political statement. And they make another one – they tend to show country names as written in that country in addition to English.

      • New QML components: Know thy dialogs
      • KDE Ships December Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform
      • KDE 4.10 Beta 2 Is Now Available for Testing
      • KDE 4.9.4 Update Released Kor Kubuntu

        The two most recent releases of Kubuntu, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, have both received a new update for KDE, pushing the version number up to 4.9.4.

        The announcement was made today on kubuntu.org and lists 71 bug-fixes, major improvements to Dolphin file manager and Kontact PIM as well as stability improvements. Improvements to the 55+ available translations have also made this release.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME’s Next Step

        The GNOME project took an important step when Matthias Clasen announced that it would support a set of extensions that would re-create the GNOME 2 desktop. Many observers, including me, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Katherine Noyes immediately interpreted the news as proof that GNOME was turning itself around and finally starting to listen to users.

      • Privacy Panel lands in GNOME Control Center 3.7.x

        Privacy Panel arrived today in GNOME Control Center, and is one of the three new Panel (Privacy, Search, Notifications) we will get on the next GNOME. But there is also a re-designed Power Panel, and there are many improvements for Wacom, Users (added History Logs), Wireless, Bluetooth..

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Slacko Puppy 5.4 introduces installable layers

        Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.

      • ZevenOS 5.0 – Early christmas present

        I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0 and thank you all for funding this release.
        In this release we made the switch from our deskbar tool to the xfce4-panel ‘deskbar’ mode which introduces many new features just like extensible plugin support and the ability to more flexibly configure your desktop.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 1 EOL

        Mageia 1 has now reached EOL (end of life) and will not receive any further security or bugfix updates.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Avnet and Red Hat Partner On Open-Source Embedded Software
      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Set to Improve Microsoft Interoperability

        RHEL 6.4 provides users with improved security enhancements as well as a number of new Microsoft-enabling features. The new RHEL beta update follows RHEL 6.3, which debuted in June and provided users with enhanced virtualization scalability.

      • Red Hat Delivers Beta of RHEL 6.4, Improves Virtualization
      • Red Hat Launches Open Source Solutions for Hybrid Clouds

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Sneak Peek

          The beta of Fedora 18 has been released, and here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find in it. This release has been dubbed “Spherical Cow.” Apparently, the Fedora developers have decided to follow in the footsteps of Apple and Ubuntu by using cute animal names for their operating system releases.

        • The heroes of Fedora 18 Alpha/Beta testing
        • Can a 7 year old install Fedora 18?

          There have been a number of threads about how the new Anaconda UI is unintuitive or hard to use. So many that I thought maybe there was something to the claims. Maybe working on Fedora for the past many years and being involved constantly for the past year and a half has skewed my opinion so much that I wouldn’t even recognize something being hard to use. So I decided to find a couple people that don’t work on Fedora and have never done a Fedora install at all. That is to say, I used my family as guinea pigs.

          Now, before you shout and rant about this, I am not claiming this is a scientific study. I’m not pretending this is somehow valid User Experience interaction data. This is is just me wanting to observe what happens when you sit someone down in front of a newUI screen and ask them to complete a default install. I found it interesting. If you don’t, then that’s cool with me. That’s why I gave the short answer at the top. OK, onto my experiment.

    • Debian Family

      • Amnesiac Incognito: Tails Secure Distro

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Is Ubuntu Software Management User Friendly?

            Many people believe Ubuntu revolutionized dpkg package management with its Ubuntu Software Center. And there is no question, Software Center is certainly user friendly by most people’s standards.

            But is it truly good enough for the masses?

            In this article, I will look at the current state of Ubuntu software management, how far software management has come since Ubuntu first came out, plus where I think Ubuntu software is headed.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 294
          • ZFS Administration, Part I- VDEVs

            So, I’ve blogged a few times randomly about getting ZFS on GNU/Linux, and it’s been a hit. I’ve had plenty of requests for blogging more. So, this will be the first in a long series of posts about how you can administer your ZFS filesystems and pools. You should start first by reading how to get ZFS installed into your GNU/Linux system here on this blog, then continue with this post.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope for Unity

            The Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope is an Unity Scope that allows users to easily search the Thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms or words. It uses the same API as the Dictionary app.

            The best part is that Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope allows you to search words right from Unity home, without accessing a Lens first.

          • The Shoreline Ubuntu Desktop

            If you’re running Ubuntu and want the same look and feel for your system, it won’t take much to make it happen

          • Introducing Ubuntu Medicines Lens for Unity

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi hack event sees Spooks team crowned winners

      Husband and wife-led team developed a board game offering customisation abilities which encourages players to experiment with programming at 24-hour hackathon in Leeds

      [...]

      …Dhajan developed a Pi operating system to replace the Pi’s Linux.

    • Raspberry Pi: One of the Top Linux Innovations of 2012

      It’s a rare product indeed that surpasses expectations as utterly and thoroughly as the Raspberry Pi did this year.

      Conceived as an educational tool that would be used in teaching kids to program, the device has since gone on to inspire countless new uses that must surely boggle the minds even of its creators.

    • Phones

      • Nokia dispels Android rumors, says Linux hire is for Here

        There was certainly a loud buzzing on the internet regarding Nokia’s recent moves. Nokia is certainly on the spotlight since people are watching what they will do next. After all, the company practically vowed revenge and plans to take the number 1 spot in mobile phones once more.

      • Android

        • Android Review: Zookeeper Battle

          After accepting a phone upgrade from my service provider, I decided to embark on a mission of investigating some new Android software and for the first time found myself genuinely keen to download a game. The game in question – Zookeeper. Why? Because its probably the one game I wasted months of my life to on the Nintendo DS (before giving over ownership of aforementioned DS to my kids)

          So now I’m presented with the “adult” version of the same DS title. I say adult because by my reckoning anything that goes on my phone is just as acceptable for adults to play as anyone else and I can fully justify wasting hours of time on a tile matching game featuring cute animals as long as its on my phone.

        • Half of all app store revenue goes to just 25 developers
        • Google now lets businesses build private Android app stores

          Announced on Tuesday for Google Apps customers, the Google Play Private Channel lets IT shops build their own applications and distribute them to employees on the Google Play store without making the apps available to the general public. “Whether you’ve built a custom expense reporting app for employees or a conference room finder, the Google Play Private Channel is designed to make your organization’s internal apps quick and easy for employees to find,” Google Play Product Manager Ellie Powers wrote in a blog post. “Once your company has loaded these internal apps using the Google Play Developer Console, users just need to log in with their company email address to browse the Private Channel and download apps.”

        • Toshiba Releases Android App for FlashAir SDHC Card
        • Has Google Android’s Open Source Business Model Failed?

          Yesterday’s WSJ.com video “Tablet Wars: How Are People Using Tablets?” had a shocking statistic: 98% of the web traffic from tablets comes from Apple’s iPad. Further, most of mobile commerce is from Apple’s iPhone:

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Most Popular Android Tablet: Nexus 7

        There are plenty of great Android tablets on the market now that weren’t around even a year ago. If you’re looking for one to wrap up for someone special, get your game on, or get some work done, you have plenty of options. Earlier last week, we asked you which models you thought were the top of the class, and then we took a closer look at the five best Android tablets. Now we’re back to crown the overall winner.

      • Amazon’s Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, For The Kids

        Amazon has introduced Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a special bundle available only on the new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD that brings books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows—into one easy-to-use service for kids ages 3-8.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The open source advantage: Executives learn how to stay competitive

    Let’s say you’re a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive.

    You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.

  • Easy, Real-Time Big Data Analysis Using Storm

    Conceptually straightforward and easy to work with, Storm makes handling big data analysis a breeze.

  • Open source Java projects: Storm

    Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm’s API with a small demonstration app.

  • Events

    • open2012 to introduce open innovation to Silicon Valley

      open2012, Maven’s upcoming conference at the Computer History Museum on December 11th, 2012, seeks to bridge that gap. open2012 will bring leaders of the Open Innovation movement to Silicon Valley to highlight their successes and discuss areas of pain. The event will feature keynote addresses by Venture2 and Procter & Gamble, Open Innovation case studies by Intel, Strategyn, Boston Consulting Group, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, panel discussions including Roche, SAP, Agilent, Wrigley, GSV Capital, and Citi Ventures, and company presentations by BrightIdea, NetBase, Spigit, Inno360, competIQ, and many more.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Run Firefox OS in Gnome ;)

        I guess you all know about the upcoming Firefox OS, but what you might don’t know is how easily you can run it in GNOME and play with it.

        Its Apps and Interface is made totally by WEB Technologies (CSS JavaScript, HTML) and I think it could easily catch up with Apple’s and Google App Stores. Besides we all have bored to listen and talk about Google ;)

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • MariaDB Gets a Foundation
    • MariaDB steps out from MySQL’s shadow

      The MySQL community in exile made a significant announcement yesterday in London at the Percona Live conference. The three main companies investing in the MariaDB fork of MySQL joined with leaders of the MySQL development community to unveil the MariaDB Foundation, intended as a home for serious, commercially backed development of future versions of the popular open source SQL database. Already enjoying substantial commercial backing, the new foundation is seeking further participants and aims to elect a representative board in two months.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Revealed: The gift that keeps on giving to Oracle … is dying

      Even as traditional enterprise IT vendors come under pressure from modern cloud and open-source applications, these old-school businesses have one strategy that is the gift that keeps on giving: Enterprise licence agreements.

      Not only do ELAs help to shield vendors from pricing pressure from open-source alternatives, they also increase friction for those anxious to swap out ageing applications and infrastructure for better alternatives. But how long can ELAs block customers from embracing the future of IT?

      [...]

      Matt Asay is vice president of corporate strategy at 10gen, the MongoDB company.

  • Healthcare

    • VA sets Gold Disk VistA as EHR baseline

      The Veterans Affairs Department will establish a separate repository for its fully open source Gold Disk version of its VistA electronic health record system to assure a common software baseline compared with the 133 instances of VistA operating at its hospitals and clinics across the country.

      VA also will put in place a software testing platform, standards supporting open source development and documentation of open source community outreach planning, according to a Nov. 27 announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.

  • Business

    • Open vs. Closed Clouds: What’s Best For Business?

      As an end consumer looking at the cloud space, there are two major types of clouds to choose from: open source clouds, championed by the likes of Citrix and Rackspace, and closed clouds, characterized by Amazon, HP and Google. There are reasons that the two types of cloud technology are differentiated, whether from a functional or marketing perspective, but in the end which is better for an end consumer’s business?

    • Open Source Entrepreneurship

      One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • OpenACC Still Not Loved By Open Compilers

      The OpenACC 1.0 API has been public for more than one year as an open standard to simplify parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs, but to this point it’s basically only backed by commercial compilers. OpenACC is similar to OpenMP in terms of using PRAGMA compiler directives and special functions for tapping multiple CPU cores in an easy and straight-forward manner with C/C++ and Fortran code, but unlike OpenMP, OpenACC is also aware of GPUs.

  • Public Services/Government

    • What does open government mean to you?

      Open government means different things to different people. Is it about transparency, collaboration, or participation? Maybe it’s a combination of all three? If you listen to Tim O’Reilly speak about open government, he’ll tell you about his vision of government as a platform.

    • Open Source and the Power of Community

      You say sure. When she returns the screwdriver a couple days later, your friend mentions that she made an improvement: now it works with both Phillips and flat head screws. Another friend hears this and asks if he can take a look, too. When he returns the screwdriver, it’s been upgraded again: now it’s a power screwdriver. Then a third friend gets excited and adds some extra speeds and a better battery.

      This situation sounds improbable, but it’s how open source software development takes place.

    • Issa open source language comes under criticism

      Draft legislation proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to overhaul federal information technology has drawn opposition for its section on open source software adoption.

      The draft (.pdf) would require the Federal Chief Information Officers Council to issue guidance that mostly reaffirms open source’s status as a commercial item under federal acquisition regulations, but it would also create a governmentwide open source software approval process to address “issues such as security and redistribution rights.”

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

12.04.12

Links 5/12/2012: NetBSD 5.2, Linux 3.7 RC8, New KDE Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Circuit Design?
  • OpenSUSE’s Jos Poortvliet: Collaborate or Become Obsolete

    Last month, Jos Poortvliet’s job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle.

  • 4 open source software to analyse big quantity of log files

    Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.

  • Web Browsers

    • Browser battle: Chrome vs. Firefox vs. IE vs. Opera

      After a long, quiet period of Microsoft dominance, the PC browser market has been broken wide-open again in recent years, with Firefox and Chrome challenging Internet Explorer, and Opera sniffing at the margins.

      Earlier this year, in fact, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer in one major measurement of browser market share, in what was hailed as a watershed moment for the new browser wars.

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome Stands Out at Beating Phishing Attempts

        Quick, which major Internet browser does the best job of weeding out attempts from phishers to take control of your personal information? The answer is Google Chrome, according to a new report from NSS Labs. In addition to finding that Chrome stood out at foiling phishers, the report also found that the number of malicious, phishing-connected links online is growing very rapidly.

    • Mozilla

      • Moodle 2.4 is now available!
      • Mozilla’s WebRTC Marries Video Calls and More with Firefox Browsing
      • Mozilla demos WebRTC-based Social API in Firefox

        Mozilla has presented a demonstration of what it hopes to achieve with future social features in Firefox that make use of the new WebRTC capabilities in the browser. The Social API and its sidebar interface were integrated into Firefox 17 and the latest beta version of the browser adds WebRTC functionality which gives the browser the ability to transmit voice, video and data. Mozilla’s demonstration shows how the Social API, working with WebRTC, allows for richer video-, audio- and image-based social networking and collaboration.

      • Firefox 17.0.1 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Mozilla and Google Rally Against New Challenge to a Free Internet

        Top officials from both Google and Mozilla are loudly objecting to proposed changes to international telecommunication rules, slated to be discussed this week in Dubai as part of an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference. In a piece published on CNN.com, Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet freedom guru and considered by some to be a “father of the Internet,” writes: “Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn’t even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba…Some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas.”

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • MariaDB fixes zero day vulnerability in MySQL

      A recently published security vulnerability in the MySQL open source database has been met with fixes by the developers of the open source MariaDB fork. The updates take care of the CVE 2012-5579 buffer overflow problem, which an attacker could use to crash the database server or execute arbitrary shell code with the same privileges as the database process. The MariaDB developers say that another vulnerability (CVE 2012-5611), despite being reported separately, is just a duplicate of CVE 2012-5579.

    • Open-source MariaDB, a MySQL fork, challenges Oracle

      MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.

      Specifically, “the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities.”

  • CMS

    • Rules for Drones

      The Obama administration has recently announced that it is developing a legal framework for drone warfare. It is now technically possible for a “pilot” sitting behind a computer terminal in Nevada or Virginia, with a few keystrokes, to eliminate virtually any person on the planet. But simply because it is technically possible does not make it a good idea, or a legal one. What legal principles should govern the use of drones to kill people?

    • Crimes in Yemen: Militancy, Regime Attacks, and US Drones

      t…arget rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.

  • Funding

    • Who wants to be an (open source venture capitalist) millionaire?

      Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm’s ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.

      The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over £18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as “Investor Growth Capital” as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 5.2 Released!

      The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.2 is the second feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Users running NetBSD 5.0.3 or earlier are encouraged to upgrade to either NetBSD 5.2 or NetBSD 6.0, depending upon their specific requirements.

    • NetBSD 5.2 Brings Small Updates

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Philadelphia Announce Mobile App To Access L&I Property Data

      The City is also releasing the app’s underlying source code as part of an open source project in order to encourage others to build on it. The new app is the latest way L&I is striving to be a more transparent, accountable, and customer friendly agency.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • International Open Data Day — An Update

        Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.

    • Open Hardware

      • Sometimes Being an Open Source / Open Hardware Evangelist Really Stinks

        My evangelism brings about positive change, but as much of it is done despite the community as is done with their cooperation. It’s emotionally difficult, it leaves me in a bad mood, and it uses up what would otherwise be paid time. Why am I doing this to myself? I care deeply about Open Source. But I am increasingly unconvinced that my involvement in it is good for me.

      • The first open-source 3D-printed gun

        In its continuing mission to build a “Wiki Weapon,” Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 assault rifle and tested it to failure — on video (embedded below). The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun.

      • Toward An FSF-Endorsable Embedded Processor

  • Programming

    • A code hosting comparison for open source projects

      If you’re starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you’ll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you’re not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here’s an overview of some of the more popular options.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Tobacco companies ordered to admit they lied over smoking danger

      US judge says tobacco firms must spend their own money on a public campaign admitting deception about the risks of smoking

    • The Year According to Monsanto: A GMO ‘Roundup’

      Monsanto’s marketing efforts pull imagery of an idyllic world of cooperation, support…downright hippy-esque harmony between the largest seed and pesticide company in the world and millions of struggling farmers. But the controversial manufacturer known for the toxic glyphosate-based Roundup and widespread genetically modified and hybrid seeds, paints a much different picture than what’s really going on in the fields.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Senators’ effort to add Internet sales tax to defense bill falls short

      An effort by three U.S. senators to add an Internet sales tax amendment to a military spending bill has failed, at least for now.

    • Corporate profits are highest-ever share of GDP, while wages are lowest-ever

      Corporations are doing well. Workers, not so much. That could be the opening of just about any discussion of the American economy at least over the past couple years since corporations recovered from the great recession while workers didn’t. But that’s because there are always new specifics coming out to illustrate the point. Like this: after-tax corporate profits were a record share of the gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012. Wages were the smallest share of GDP they’ve ever been.

    • Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror

      In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst of a major natural disaster. But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1 Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity.

    • How Boehner’s counteroffer raises taxes on the middle class

      The “fiscal cliff” plan Republicans offered today could hit the middle class to preserve tax breaks for the rich

    • Starbucks to slash paid lunch breaks and sick leave

      Coffee chain sparks fresh concern over business practices amid fears low-paid staff will bear cost of potentially increased tax bill

    • WaMu Trustees Seek Goldman Probe

      Trustees for creditors left unpaid after the biggest banking failure in U.S. history say they suspect Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) of targeting Washington Mutual Inc., in a naked short-selling scheme.

      If those suspicions prove out, the alleged wrongs could translate into a damage award for those still looking for money from Washington Mutual’s Chapter 11 case, according to papers filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Where Did All those Super PAC Dollars Go? 1/3 of All Outside Money Moved Through Handful of Media Firms

      In 2012, the total spending of outside groups — the Super PACs and dark money nonprofits which spend money to influence elections, but do so separately from campaigns — amounted to about $1.3 billion.

    • Common Cause WI: Incoming Senate Majority Leader Launches Nonsensical Attack on the Non-Partisan Elections Board

      The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore, vindictive winner. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like creating the promised 250,000 jobs and improving Wisconsin’s economy? Apparently not.

      Yesterday, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), who will again become the State Senate Majority Leader in January, inexplicably launched a vicious attack on the under-funded and under-staffed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.). Why? Because he disagreed with some of their rulings and said the non-partisan board, composed of six retired judges (two of whom were at one time Republican legislators and two others who were appointed to the board by Republican Governor Scott Walker), delegated too much authority to the professional staff whom he said issued opinions in favor of Democrats.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights/Sppoks

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN Agency’s Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty

      he International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.

  • Copyrights

    • Top BitTorrent Sites Have Domains Put On Hold Pending Legal Action

      Several BitTorrent sites including Torrentz and Fenopy have had their .EU domains put on hold by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. The new status for the domains, forcibly applied by EURid within seconds of each other yesterday afternoon, suggests that legal action against them might be pending and prevents the owners from making changes.

      [...]

      Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.

    • HBO Has A Distribution Problem, But Just ‘Going Without’ Does Nothing To Push Them To Solve It

      Many, many posts and discussions have taken place here at Techdirt about content providers and their love of windowed releases. A point frequently made is that there would likely be a lot less piracy and a lot more purchasing if these 30/60/90 day rental/PPV/premium cable windows were eliminated on new releases. Another frequent target are premium cable providers and their original offerings, which suffer from long delays between original airings and their appearance on retail shelves.

    • A hearing transcript or a comedy screenplay? A must-read for those who think about settling
    • Porn trolling case thrown out for “attempted fraud on the court”

      Porn trolling has never been a glamorous business. But as judges, bar associations, and others have gotten wind of just how sleazy the porn-trolling business model is, trolling law firms have faced more and more obstacles. One trolling firm hit a new low on Tuesday, when an exasperated federal judge in Tampa, FL, threw out its copyright infringement case.

      In a surreal court session, Judge Mary Scriven grilled several individuals with ties to Prenda Law, a law firm that specializes in copyright trolling, and its alleged client, a porn company called Sunlust Pictures. (We say “alleged” because Prenda now claims, unconvincingly, that it was never involved in the case.) It quickly became obvious that no one in the courtroom had any significant ties to the supposed plaintiffs, or even knowledge of who they were. So Judge Scriven dismissed the case for, among other things, “attempted fraud on the Court” for sending a “representative” to court who knew next to nothing about the company he was representing.

    • Editorial: How piracy changed my life

      lately about piracy and how to combat it, including some pretty radical measures. But I believe most people glance over some of the positive effects that piracy has. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging it and I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. Piracy is only a symptom of something more: whether it’s bad business models, restrictive markets, or economic problems. And I think my own story proves this point.

      I was born in Romania, a country that had just gone through a revolution and was re-becoming a democracy. We, as a society, were just remembering what democracy was and how a free market works. We were just seeing what major technological breakthroughs had happened in the last 30 years in the west while our own country and populace had remained uninformed and technologically inept.

    • UK ISPs Block Pirate Bay’s Artist Promotions

      Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.

    • Stop BT, Virgin Media and BE from blocking The Promo Bay: Let customers access promobay.org.
    • First Amendment Concerns About Internet Radio Bill Not Just Overblown But Completely Backwards

      I’ve been tossing around a longish blog post about some of the controversy concerning the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) over the past month or so, but haven’t had a chance to put it all down in a blog post. I did, however, wish to pick up on a small thread that got a brief spark of attention from some people who don’t seem to understand legal stuff in the slightest. It started with musician David Lowery (you may remember him from past nonsensical rampages) claiming that Section 5 of the bill muzzled free speech and thus violated the First Amendment. This isn’t just wrong. It’s completely backwards. But the language and history here is a bit complex, so let’s dig in a bit.

    • BitTorrent Book Promotion Drives 40% Of Downloaders To Book’s Amazon Page

      Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it’s run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and… doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute “an exclusive bundle” of extra, related, content. That’s still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.

    • News Corp Is Shutting Down iPad-Only Newspaper The Daily

      The latest News Corp press release says that the Daily, its standalone daily iPad newspaper, will “cease standalone publication”.

      The newspaper had a high profile launch in February 2011, but had apparently struggled to pay its way — recent reports suggested the losses were looking like $30 million a year, and rumors that Rupert Murdoch would kill the publication have been around since at least early summer.

    • Unauthorized Remix Improves On Landmark Unauthorized Mashup, The Grey Album

      Jay-Z has since referred to it as “genius” and expressed how honored he was to see it happen. EMI, which controlled the Beatles’ rights, felt differently, sending cease-and-desist letters to tons of sites that had the mp3s. In response, folks on the internet planned Grey Tuesday for February 24th, 2004 — a day of digital civil disobedience, where lots of sites would distribute the mashup album. EMI, still not understanding what it was dealing with, sent off more cease-and-desist letters to any site that had indicated that it would participate. End result? Even more interest in the whole thing.

      Of course, since then, Danger Mouse has gone on to be an in-demand guy in the recording industry (among other things, he’s one-half of Gnarls Barkley, who of course had a massive hit with the song “Crazy” a few years ago). EMI later admitted that The Grey Album didn’t “harm” them at all, but still defended the decision arguing, pointlessly, “it’s not a question of damage, it’s a question of rights.”

    • Homeless Man Who Got Free Boots From Cop Now ‘Wants His Cut’ Of YouTube Attention

      Ah, this is what you get when you build up ideas around the idea that every bit of content must be “owned.” You may have heard the somewhat heartwarming story last week of NYPD Officer Lawrence DePrimo, seeing a homeless man in NYC without any shoes on, buying the man some boots and giving them to him. Without either man being aware of it, a tourist from Arizona, Jennifer Foster, saw this happening and took a photo of the situation.

    • Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia

      In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?

12.03.12

Links 4/12/2012: Tiny PengPod is Coming, More Games Coming to GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 10:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How open source is outliving the hype 13 years later

    Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as “SOA,” but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source’s demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being “faux-open source” with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code).

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Comment: OpenOffice’s Tale of Two Cities

      Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn’t be more different. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this, it’s “go the whole hog or not at all”.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • DARPA Project Using LLVM For Better Code Security

      A software research project being funded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with its Cyber Fast Track program is looking at ways for providing a flexible and integrated security infrastructure by using LLVM for dynamic and static security tasks.

Leftovers

  • Making the web more accessible for people with disabilities
  • Dear journalists: grow up

    Please stop saying “This is the thin end of the wedge. Once legislation is introduced, it will grow.” You are possibly the best informed and, if not the most powerful, certainly the most vocal lobby in this country. It’s not like additional legislation will slip past you.

    Please stop saying “There is already adequate protection in the law.” You know full well this protection is only available to those with money, time, knowhow and connections. I was having a beer with a buddy last night, who used to work in the tabloid press. He tells me that the single deciding factor in running or not running a less than well founded story is usually the subject’s financial ability to sue.

    Please stop saying “We are special. We perform a vital public service. We should be protected.” The same applies to doctors, pharma companies, lawyers, police, farmers, the fire service, pilots. They are all, quite rightly, regulated. A badly put together article might leave me dissatisfied. A badly put together gas boiler can leave me dead. The imposition of professional standards in a fact of modern life.

    Please stop saying “We have already changed. It will be different this time.” You sound like a recalcitrant abusive alcoholic begging his wife in hospital not to press charges.

  • Two examples why we don’t need the draft Communications Data Bill
  • Don’t Promise $1 Million For Your Lost Laptop Via YouTube & Twitter If You’re Not Prepared To Pay

    The Hollywood Reporter has the somewhat amusing cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t use various social media tools to make promises you can’t back up. Hip hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie apparently lost his laptop recently while on tour in Germany. He then went on YouTube and posted a video offering $20,000 if anyone returned the laptop. He noted that the laptop contained music and videos that he wanted back. Another video was posted later with a message that reads: “In the interest of retrieving invaluable intellectual property contained on his laptop and hard drive, Mr. Leslie has increased the reward offer from $20,000 USD to $1,000,000 USD. He also tweeted the same info directly, saying: “I raised the reward for my intellectual property to $1mm.”

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WPEA Signed into Law, Protecting Federal Food Safety Employees

      Today, the Government Accountability Project’s (GAP) Food Integrity Campaign (FIC) is praising President Obama for signing into law the strongest federal whistleblower protections in history. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) passed the House of Representatives in late September and the Senate earlier this month. This long overdue legislation overturns many loopholes and provides critically important upgrades to weak, current protections.

      This law’s enactment plays a significant role in food safety oversight, as it better protects those workers charged with enforcing food safety laws – including U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarians and inspectors, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees. Over the past several years, FIC has heard from countless federal whistleblowers who desperately want to expose food industry wrongdoing or threats to public health, but chose to stay silent for fear that existing whistleblower protections will not effectively shield them from retaliation.

    • The Toxic Legacy of Depleted Uranium Weapons

      We all should be aware of the dangers posed by the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The eight countries known to possess nuclear weapons have 10,000 plus nuclear warheads. And, especially post-Fukushima, we now understand firsthand the potential danger of nuclear power plants, many which are aging and highly vulnerable to natural disasters. As of August 2012, 30 countries are operating 435 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. Sixty-six new nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries.

      But how many of us know about the current manufacturing and active use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons? DU (Uranium 238) is a radioactive waste by-product of the uranium enrichment process. It results from making fuel for nuclear reactors and the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.

      In a frightening adaptation of the “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy in manufacturing, which seeks to use waste in the manufacturing process to create other “useful” products, militaries around the world have come up with the “brilliant” idea of taking DU and making “conventional” weapons with it.

    • Meet Monsanto’s number one lobbyist: Barack Obama

      During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.

      These activists weren’t just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said: “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.”

      Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.

      Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business in “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”

      Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037310_Barack_Obama_Monsanto_lobbyist.html#ixzz2Dv0TB5GX

    • The Day I Blundered Into The Nuclear Facility

      I am at a loss to explain how, even in the 60′s or 70′s, an unsupervised kid was able to walk into anyplace where one could see Cherenkov radiation with their own eyes, at such a short distance. I understand that water is a good radiation shield, and don’t believe that I received any significant radiation exposure. This experience left me, for my lifetime, more sanguine than the average person regarding radiation hazards.

    • Your Couch May Be Killing You
    • Where oil and gas development goes, health problems often follow.
    • Tax the Rich, Take Your Hands Off Medicare: Overwhelming US Majority

  • Security

    • The Woman Behind CryptoParty

      In August, the Australian Parliament passed a new cybercrime bill that increased the powers of law enforcement to require Internet service providers to monitor and store their users’ data.

      The country’s privacy advocates were up in arms. One of them was Asher Wolf (a pseudonym), a 32-year-old who had built up a following on Twitter for tweeting news about WikiLeaks and the Occupy movement and who cared deeply about online privacy. A friend of hers, @m1k3y, tweeted that in light of the new legislation, maybe now was the time to have an “install-the-crypto-apps party,” referring to the programs for computers that help protect a user’s privacy. Wolf half-jokingly agreed: “Let’s get together in the backyard with some chips,” she said, “let’s have a CryptoParty.”

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • The Wikileaks, Julian Assange Diplomatic Standoff — Animated
    • Whistleblower’s treatment exposes dark side of Obama

      OVER the past 2½ years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed late last week, when the 23-year-old US army private, who is accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, testified at his court martial about the conditions of his detention.
      The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures he endured, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced them as ”cruel and inhuman”. President Barack Obama’s State Department spokesman, retired air force colonel P.J. Crowley, resigned after condemning Manning’s treatment. A prison psychologist testified last week that Manning’s conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantanamo Bay.

    • Quantico Psychiatrist: Military’s Mistreatment of Pfc. Manning ‘Unprecedented’

      The government psychiatrist charged with evaluating Pfc. Bradley Manning during his early detention at the military brig at Quantico told the judge at a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday that his recommendations for the Manning’s treatment were repeatedly ignored by the Marine guard unit responsible for him.

    • Two Years of Cablegate and Bradley Manning Still Awaits Trial

      Thursday, November 29th, Bradley Manning testified for the first time since his arrest two and a half years ago in Baghdad. Today also marks the two-year anniversary of the first front pages around the world from Cablegate, an archive of 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables — messages sent between the State Department and its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions around the world. In collaboration with a network of more than 100 press outlets we revealed the full spectrum of techniques used by the United States to exert itself around the world. The young intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was detained as an alleged source.

    • WikiLeaks suspect’s guards describe him crying in jail

      FORT MEADE, United States / Maryland: Two of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning’s former prison guards have denied abusing him in custody, and described an incident in which the US Army private suddenly burst into tears.

    • Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too

      For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.

    • Bradley Manning: Prisoners of conscience

      Obama said that Manning’s treatment was “appropriate and meeting our basic standards.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Tax paid by some global firms in UK ‘an insult’
    • Students Seize Cooper Union Room to Protest Possible Tuition

      Twelve students barricaded themselves inside an eighth-floor room at the top of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at noon on Monday to urge the school not to begin charging tuition to undergraduates.

    • Dollar-Less Iranians Discover Virtual Currency

      Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.

    • Morgan Stanley Trader Faces Inquiry on Possible Manipulation

      On paper, Glenn Hadden seemed to be the ideal person to run a large bond trading operation at Morgan Stanley when he was hired in early 2011. Mr. Hadden, a former Goldman partner, was one of the most profitable bond traders on Wall Street.

      But there was more to his story than just stellar financial results. He had left his previous employer, Goldman Sachs, after questions about his trading activity. And now, Mr. Hadden is under investigation over his trading in Treasury futures while at Goldman, according to a regulatory filing.

    • 9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare
    • Mark Carney’s ‘shock’ appointment means more of the same

      Today the chancellor confirmed that there will be no real change at the Bank of England. There will be no change to the Treasury and Bank of England’s obsession with inflation targeting and “price stability”. Above all, he confirmed that there will be no reining-in of the banks; that banks will not be re-structured – to separate the retail and investment arms, and ensure that banks are no longer too big to fail.

    • It’s a Great Time To Be a Banker in America

      Matt Yglesias passes along this remarkable chart from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Parker showing that 88 percent of all the profit growth in the S&P 500 this year has been concentrated in ten firms in a grand total of two industries: technology and finance. In particular, seven of the ten firms are financial companies. Keep this firmly in mind the next time some Wall Street titan complains yet again that Obama hates banks and is out to destroy them. This is not a sign that Obama has done anything serious to hurt the financial industry; it’s a sign that America’s bankers are comically thin-skinned whiners.

    • Shameless Disaster Capitalism: How Companies Are Already Planning to Get Rich Off Superstorm Sandy
    • Israel halts Palestinian tax transfer over UN bid

      Israel will not transfer tax and tariff funds its collects for the Palestinians this month in response to their successful bid for upgraded UN status, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Sunday.

    • Sen. Sanders: Wall Street CEOs are the ‘Faces of Class Warfare’

      Incredulous that Wall Street investment bankers and billionaire CEOs have descended on Washington in the midst of ongoing budget talks to tell Americans that they should “lower their expectations” when it comes to the security of their retirement and future health care, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday to call out the audacity of corporate-minded millionaires and billionaires, calling them the new “face of class warfare” in the United States.

      “I find it literally beyond comprehension, that we have folks from Wall Street who received huge bailouts from the people of our country—from working families in this country—because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior, which Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits.”

    • Publicly auditing debts owed to the UK

      It seems outrageous that powerful, ruthless “vulture funds” can threaten action which may result in “an end to Argentina’s recovery” and a fresh round of turmoil in the global financial market (Comment, 26 November). Another aspect is the legitimacy of debt incurred by regimes that are not democratically elected. If an individual borrows vast sums of money and spends it on the high life and doesn’t repay it in their lifetime, it is right that creditors can use the law to go after all the funds and assets of the estate. It would not be right if they could use the law to go after the children and grandchildren of the debtor, forcing them to live in penury to pay back money they did not borrow nor benefit from. It seems the same logic applies when vast sums are borrowed by a corrupt dictator and the citizens of the country are forced to pay back the debt.

    • Greeks turn to the forests for fuel as winter nears

      It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.

    • Who Really Crashed the Economy?

      In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.

      Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.

      The reason that we suddenly got large deficits was the economic downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance. We also had temporary measures that included tax cuts such as the payroll tax holiday and various spending programs that further raised the deficit.

    • Offshore secrets revealed: the shadowy side of a booming industry

      A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies

    • City of London Corporation: ‘last rotten borough’ faces calls for reform

      A campaign to radically reform and open up the secretive workings of the powerful local authority governing the City of London has been launched by a diverse group whose supporters include activists from the Occupy movement, clerics and the Tory MP David Davis.

    • McJobs Should Pay, Too: Inside Fast-Food Workers’ Historic Protest For Living Wages

      As low-wage service jobs become the new normal for millions of families, we should rethink the balance of power between fast-food workers and their corporations

    • 10 Corporations That Still Get New Government Contracts, Despite Alleged Misconduct

      The EPA surprised quite a few people on Wednesday when it announced sanctions on BP related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP won’t be allowed to get any new government contracts until it cleans up its act, the agency said.

      This was announced in a short press release that wasn’t really very specific about what that penalty means in practice. It could bar the company from new contracts for as long as 18 months—and potentially longer, if there are ongoing legal proceedings against the company. And it’s not just BP’s Gulf of Mexico affiliate—this suspension applies to all of BP’s affiliates, barring the company from billions of dollars in potential future contracts.

    • MI6 told agent they could not kill al-Qaeda leader

      MI6 passed up an opportunity to kill a senior leader of al-Qaeda because lawyers advised them they would be breaking the law, it can be disclosed.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Access to private net, phone use up by 20% – without warrants

      AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.

    • The Government is Profiling You
    • Mediator Joins Contentious Effort to Add a ‘Do Not Track’ Option to Web Browsing

      Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.

    • Assange: Google, Facebook run “side projects” for US spooks

      …nations now posses “turnkey totalitarianism”.

    • Senate committee takes an important step towards protecting your inbox

      In the wake of former CIA Director David Petraeus’ sex scandal—uncovered largely through the disclosure of explicit e-mails between him and his mistress—the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a new amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on Wednesday.

      The bill as it stands now (PDF) would require a warrant by law enforcement agencies before they can go digging through e-mail, social networking posts, and other data stored on cloud-based services. If it passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the president, it would mark an important shift in privacy protection for electronic communications. As we’ve reported for some time now, those protections (or lack thereof) are woefully out of date.

    • What does your cyber signature say about you?

      Changing the behaviour of citizens to reduce the demand placed on public services is now a top priority for both central and local government. From voting or volunteering more, to simply accessing council services online, new habits must be developed to meet the financial challenges the government faces.

      With direct human-to-human contact being replaced with human-to-screen interaction, local government websites have a central role to play in delivering that change in behaviour. But behaviour change is fundamentally a soft skilll; you do it with emotions, not excel spreadsheets. So how do you put the human back into that virtual relationship?

    • City Is Amassing Trove of Cellphone Logs

      When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.

    • Video: NSA Whistleblower William Binney Explains How All Americans are Under Gov. Surveillance

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The Internet Isn’t Broken; So Why Is The ITU Trying To ‘Fix’ It?

      We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.

    • The Real Threat to Internet Freedom Isn’t the United Nations

      This article arises from Future Tense, a joint effort of Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate that looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and for society. On Thursday, Nov. 29, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of Internet governance. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation’s website. The event will also be streamed live.

      The Internet is often seen as a place of chaos and disorder, a borderless world in which anonymous trolls roam free and vigilante hackers wreak havoc. But as a crucial United Nations conference on the future of telecommunications looms next week, there are fears governments are secretly maneuvering to restructure and rein in the anarchic Web we have come to know and love, perhaps even ushering in a new era of pervasive surveillance. So just how real is the threat of change and what might it mean?

    • Former spy chief says U.S. has had its cyber ’9/11 warning’

      The United States faces “the cyber equivalent of the World Trade Center attack” unless urgent action is taken, a former U.S. intelligence chief warns.
      John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of the National Security Agency under President Clinton and then as director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush and President Obama, told the Financial Times (subscription required) that such an attack would cripple the nation’s banking system, power grid, and other essential infrastructure.

    • Julian Assange: The Web can create revolutions — or jail revolutionaries
    • Tales of the Unexpected: the Communications Data Bill

      We await with interest the report from the joint committee on the draft Communications Data Bill, and trust the committee has properly considered the substantial evidence submitted. The debate is hotting up, with Theresa May pitching hard in the Sun.

      We are very interested to see if the Committee took a look at the submission by Caspar Bowden on page 102 of the written evidence highlighting the testimony given by Peter Davies (Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre), in support of the draft Bill. Mr Davies gave an example of a murder case in Lincolnshire in which increased data retention could have helped.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Editorial: NZ must not settle for less than golden deal on TPP

      Auckland has seldom hosted a more globally important meeting than the nine days of negotiations that start today on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
      The TPP offers the most promising advance of free trade since the failure of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round. Regional free trade treaties are a poor substitute for a global agreement but when they are based on the same principles and open to all countries that can meet their standards, they are the next best thing.

    • Copyrights

      • How the Hobbit dispute was used to justify curbs to the actors’ union

        Guardian readers may have followed the industrial dispute that played out in New Zealand over The Hobbit. This dispute arose because a union of performers (Equity) sought to exercise its members’ internationally recognised rights to collectively bargain. It was nothing more and nothing less. What played out was an unexpected journey of misrepresentation, led partly by the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers, but particularly by the New Zealand government.

      • Congressional group briefly opens up on radical copyright reform, then takes it back

        Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source licenses as “copyleft” licenses. Indeed, the idea of a license that grants perpetual rights to copy, modify, and distribute a work—and requires licensees to attach the same terms to any downstream work—certainly feels like the antithesis of copyright law’s protectionist character.

        Yet open source licenses (in their current forms) rely on copyright law. Copyright law supplies the bundle of statutory rights that empower the “keep it open” requirement of an open source license. Without copyright law, an author would have to find another legal theory to prevent others from, for example, taking a developer’s code and hiding it behind technological walls. And what do you sue for when someone violates the terms of an open source license? Copyright infringement (among other things).

      • PromoBay block

        Reports from TorrentFreak that the legitimate website PromoBay.org is being blocked by several UK ISPs highlights some of the problems with website blocking as a strategy and practice.

12.02.12

Links 2/12/2012: IndieCity Coming to GNU/Linux, CIA Spy Network Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • OS Of The Week

    We have long been familiar with NetApplications’ web stats. Sorting out all the bias is tough. Today I tried a new tack. For the users who know they have choice, how many use GNU/Linux?

  • Desktop Linux needs anti-virus like a fish needs a bicycle

    You don’t need an anti-virus program on Linux: I’ve said it before, but Don’t Surf in the Nude started because of an interest in internet security, so I can’t resist trying out anti-virus programs in Linux.

    I noticed today that Comodo has produced a Linux anti-virus program with real-time scanning. Files are checked as they are accessed or created- for example as they are downloaded from the Internet.

    I couldn’t resist trying it out. They’ve created the Windows AV experience on Linux, but like crime in multi-storey car parks, it’s wrong on so many levels.

  • Why Open Source Software is More Secure than Proprietary Software

    If you see the immense success that Linux, Firefox, Android and other software have achieved over the years, it’s all thanks to the power of open source. What makes open-source software so great is that it is a result of selfless work of thousands of developers from around the world, who, in their free time, volunteer to create or help build their favorite applications.

  • The Linux Setup – Jeremy Jongepier, Musician/Admin

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • An In-Kernel Virtio Block Device Accelerator For Linux

      For the past several months there has been work on vhost-blk, an in-kernel virito-blk device accelerator. This kernel-based accelerator can provide measurable speed-ups for disk/block device access by virtualized guest machines.

    • Linux.com holiday membership drive

      Unfortunately, the rules stipulate only legal United States residents over the age of 18 are eligible, and that current members who renew are excluded; this promotion is only available to new members.

      These caveats are disappointing but ultimately moot; the reason to join is to directly support and promote the work of the Foundation which includes direct backing of Linus Torvalds himself. Individual membership is $USD 99 and student membership is $USD 25.

      Whether you win the $75 gift card or not, the Linux.com store can hook you up with t-shirts, hats, mugs and accessories relating to your favourite free open source operating system.

    • Graphics Stack

      • NVIDIA L4T R16 Ubuntu 12.04 Performance

        With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.

      • NVIDIA L4T R16 Ubuntu 12.04 Performance

        With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.

      • Mesa 9.1-devel LLVMpipe With LLVM 3.1/3.2

        With a number of commits made to the mainline Mesa repository recently that concern the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for pushing OpenGL onto the CPU, here are benchmarks of the very latest Mesa Gallium3D development code from and AMD FX-8350 Vishera Eight-Core CPU when using both LLVM 3.1 and LLVM 3.2 SVN.

      • Wayland & Weston 1.0.2 Released

        Wayland 1.0.1 was just released ten days ago but Kristian ended up deciding to release Wayland/Weston 1.0.2 ahead of schedule. The reason for the early releases are due to important bug-fixes and “stable releases are cheap.” The original plan was to release v1.0.2 after the Weston Test Suite landed.

      • Coverity Uncovers More Problems In Mesa

        A handful of memory-related issues were plugged up yesterday in Mesa thanks to the Coverity static code analysis tools.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Arctic Sea Ice Larger Than US Melted This Year
    • Going from A to B in KDE, GNOME, and Windows

      As a Linux user, I’ve learned to appreciate the differences of doing things using the different desktops available.

      I started thinking of how one can see going from point A to point B in KDE and GNOME and I could not help to find some amusement in this metaphor.

      Ready for the ride? “How do I go to B? Let me count the ways:”

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Avoiding Frame Jitter With GNOME’s Mutter, Weston

        Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.

        The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.

      • Avoiding Frame Jitter With GNOME’s Mutter, Weston

        Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.

        The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.

      • You Still Have A Chance To Share Your Thoughts On GNOME

        What do you think of the GNOME desktop and the recent changes? You have a chance to share your opinions on the GNOME free software project by participating in the 2012 GNOME User Survey.

      • GNOME “Classic” will be a separate session in 3.8
      • GNOME Fallback Mode Returns in GNOME 3.8

        Well, well, well… what do you know, after all the fuss about the GNOME Fallback mode being removed from the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, it looks like the GNOME developers decided to implement a similar mode for all you GNOME 2 nostalgics out there.

      • A preview of GNOME Disks 3.8

        GNOME Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t bumped to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) who is also senior maintainer at udisks.

        Already there are many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, though it is still far from completed.

  • Distributions

    • Slax 7.0 RC2 – Mini KDE 4

      The portable Linux distro that you can modify yourself is getting a long awaited update, with KDE 4 and more

    • New Releases

      • Arch 2012.12.01
      • December: time for a new install medium
      • Arch Linux Install Pulls In Systemd 196, Other Updates
      • Arch Linux 2012.12.01 Brings Linux Kernel 3.6.8

        On December 1, Pierre Schmitz proudly informed Arch Linux users that the usual monthly release install medium, Arch Linux 2012.12.01, is now available for download.

      • ALT 6.9.0-20121130
      • OS4 OpenDesktop 13 Update 1 released

        Today the OS4 team is pleased to announce the much anticipated update of OpenDesktop 13 with OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 . With this release we bring new features and bug fixes to OpenDesktop. OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 still continues to revolutionize the linux user experience with an excellent interface, easy to use applications and comes with new options to enhance your OS4 user experience. Superior Functionality with some great new options.

      • Parted Magic 2012_11_30

        After two months of upgrades and bugs fixes, a new version of Parted Magic is ready for release.

      • Parted Magic 2012_11_30 Features Firefox 17

        Patrick Verner announced a couple of hours ago, November 30, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_11_30 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.

      • Release Notes: aptosid 2012-01

        We finally have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the aptosid 2012-01 “Θάνατος” release, shipping in the following flavours:

        * KDE-lite, amd64, en/ de, ≈635 MB.
        * KDE-lite, i686, en/ de, ≈630 MB.
        * KDE-full, amd64+i686, en/ de (cz, da, es, fr, it, ja, nl, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, uk through liveapt) ≈2.1 GB.
        * XFCE, amd64, en/ de, ≈515 MB.
        * XFCE, i686, en/ de, ≈510 MB.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 1 Support Terminated, Upgrade to Mageia 2

        We are sorry to announce today, December 1, that the Mageia 1 operating system has reach end-of-life (EOL) and it is no longer supported.

        Announced last year, on June 1, 2011, Mageia 1 was the first Mageia release and it was supported for 18 months.

        Starting with December 1, the Mageia foundation stoped “feeding” its first born operating system with security/critical fixes and software updates!

    • Debian Family

      • Steady improvements in Debian Wheezy — and a smooth transition from Squeeze

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The future of Ubuntu revealed

            Canonical is pushing Ubuntu in so many different directions. On the desktop, it has introduced Unity; on the server, it’s pursuing state-of-the-art ARM and cloud platforms; and it’s even trying to get Ubuntu on to mobile phones and televisions.

            Trying to keep track of how all this is going, how it all fits together and what’s coming next is a full-time job… which is why we spoke to Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, whose job it is to keep track of everything.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mint Team Rushes out 14.1 Update
            • Linux Mint Is A Better Distro Than Ubuntu For New User. What Do You Think?

              I have been using Ubuntu since 2006 and I always felt that it is one of the easiest to use distro, especially for new Linux users. That was in the past. Nowadays, when people ask me for recommendation, I would certainly recommend Linux Mint over Ubuntu, and here are the reasons.

            • Xubuntu 12.10 review – Very nice

              I do realize Xfce is not for everyone, and I used to be one of those people. And I still think the environment is a little rough round the edges. But there are no cardinal issues, nothing that cannot be resolved in about 10 hours of quick coding. And that would truly make this release outstanding to the max. Xubuntu Quetzal is a damn fine version. It cannot get the highest mark, because it needs to work on those little quirks, but 9.8/10 is an extremely good achievement. Honestly, do try this one, you will not be disappointed.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Surface Pro: Too much money for too little tablet?

    The Surface Pro, Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet/laptop for the enterprise, may offer too little goodness for too much money.

  • Author Andrew Piper: Turning Pages Is Important, Therefore Reading Ebooks Isn’t Reading

    Every technological advance is greeted as some point during its life cycle (usually as it approaches ubiquity) by the disgruntled arguments of people who prefer older things or methods. Never has this been more prevalent than in the digital era. People diss mp3s for their sonic limitations, which is fine, but then they go a step further, claiming the “real” way to listen to music involves using other, older technology. There’s an emphasis on the physicality of the product, as if it were somehow more “real” simply because you can leave greasy fingerprints on it, thus lowering its resale value.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • DOJ Mysteriously Quits Monsanto Antitrust Investigation

      popular announcements when no one’s listening—like, you know, the days leading up to Thanksgiving. That’s when the Obama administration sneaked a tasty dish to the genetically modified seed/pesticide industry.

      This treat involves the unceremonious end of the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the US seed market, which it had begun in January 2010. It’s not hard to see why DOJ would take a look. For the the crops that cover the bulk of US farmland like corn, soy, and cotton, the seed trade is essentially dominated by five companies: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow. And a single company, Monsanto, supplies nearly all genetically modified traits now so commonly used in those crops, which it licenses to its rivals for sale in their own seeds.

    • Australia smokers given plain packs

      Australia has become the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.

      From now, all tobacco company logos and colours will be banned from packets.

      They have been replaced by a dreary, uniform, green/brown, colour accompanied by a raft of anti-smoking messages and photographs.

  • Security

    • New Kernel Vulnerabilities Affect Four Ubuntu OSes
    • Here We Go Again: Latest Draft Of White House Cybersecurity ‘Executive Order’ Is Leaked

      Back in September, we posted a leaked version of a draft for a cybersecurity executive order that the White House had been passing around, mainly to try to force Congress into passing a cybersecurity law. With the last ditch attempt by Senator Harry Reid to move that process forward failing, it took exactly a week for the White House to revise its draft exec order, and start passing it around on November 21st. And, today, that new draft leaked as well. You can see the full draft here or embedded below.

      It’s basically more of the same. It insists that there’s a problem without providing any real evidence of that. Much of the order focuses on increasing information sharing among and between different government agencies. As expected, it’s designed to encourage private companies, who are “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” to “participate, on a voluntary basis, in the Enhanced Cybersecurity initiative.” This is part of what had people so concerned about the various bill proposals: whether or not companies would get broadly defined as “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” and then be forced or pressured into sharing private information, all in the name of “cybersecurity!”

    • Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

      Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Debating the ethics of drones

      But the one foremost on some people’s minds was: How will the U.S. react when other countries with drones start taking out American targets?

    • U.S. Drone Strikes Are Causing Child Casualties: Video and Report
    • CIA-operated drones protect drug lords in Pakistan: Duff
    • Drone Double Standard

      Question: Why is it OK for the U.S. to not only have a drone program, but also to use it, often times illegally, to bomb the crap out of folks (suspected terrorists as well as civilians) in Central Asia, but it’s not at all cool for China to develop the same technology?

    • ‘Al Qaeda-linked’ Yemeni among four Pakistan drone strike dead

      It is difficult for journalists to verify the casualties from drone strikes since the government forbids foreign journalists from travelling to the area without a military escort and the Taliban often seal off the sites of strikes.

    • A Second Drone War Won By Cyberattack
    • Why “Drone Attacks” is not a helpful term
    • Pfc. Manning’s trial delayed in WikiLeaks case
    • Bradley Manning: how keeping himself sane was taken as proof of madness
    • Review: Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
    • Julian Assange on Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and the Emerging Surveillance State

      Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, may testify today at a pretrial proceeding for the first time since he was arrested in May 2010. Manning could face life in prison if convicted of the most serious of 22 counts against him. His trial is expected to begin in February.

    • Julian Assange Attorney Michael Ratner: Were “Rumsfeld Techniques” Used on Bradley Manning to Turn Him on Assange?

      Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights is an FDL contributor and also Julian Assange’s lawyer. He was in court for Bradley Manning’s testimony this week, and appears on The Real Network News with Paul Jay today to discuss it.

    • A Conversation With Julian Assange

      We’ve called him a “seed-spilling sex creep,” a “pale nerd king,” and “a real-life The Matrix extra,” so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a phone interview on the condition that we speak only about the book. I agreed, which was a lie.

    • Wikileaks Suspect Bradley Manning Chokes Up at Hearing

      PFC Bradley Manning choked back tears during a second day of testimony at a hearing before his military trial as he claimed he didn’t tell his family about the conditions of his confinement at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., because he did not want them to worry.
      He also expressed concern that doing so could lead to an end to visiting privileges for his family.

    • Blanking Bradley Manning: NYT and AP Launch Operation Amnesia

      That story — itself considered of such little importance by AP that it didn’t even by-line the piece (perhaps the agency didn’t send a reporter either, but simply picked up snippets from other sources) — reduced the entire motion, and the long, intricate, systematic government attack on Manning’s psyche, to a matter of petty petulance on Manning’s part, a whiner’s attempt to weasel out of what’s coming to him.

    • Assange vows to continue exposing secret documents

      During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.

    • WikiLeaks Founder Assange Dodges CNN Subterfuge

      During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.

      Burnett moved quickly from an opening discussion of Assange’s new book, Cypherpunks, to the subject of his relationship to Manning. For allegedly passing cables to WikiLeaks, Manning “could end up spending the rest of his life in jail,” Burnett said. “Do you feel any guilt about that since the information the U.S. government says he stole was published by you?” she asked Assange.

      “The case [that was heard this week] is not about whether Bradley Manning allegedly stole cables or not,” Assange said. “The case is about the abuse of Bradley Manning” during his 2-year-long detainment, a portion of which United Nations investigator Juan Mendez described in March after a 14-month investigation as “cruel” and “inhuman.”

      “Why was he treated that way?” Assange asked. “Well, his lawyer argues, and many others who have followed the case argues [sic] it was ordered to coerce him into a confession that would bring down me or bring down WikiLeaks… That’s the case that’s ongoing now. And that case is a reflection of the decay in the rule of law.”

    • Assange defends WikiLeaks

      “Since 2010, Western governments have tried to portray WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation, enabling a disproportionate response from both political figures and private institutions,” he wrote in the Huffington Post.

      “It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better,” he said, citing some of the once secret State Department cables that his site disclosed.

    • Bradley Manning speaks of ordeal in US jail

      Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg praised the Wikileaks release…

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • New study on rising sea levels likely confirms existence of global warming

      A newly released study finds that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are disappearing three times faster than they were two decades ago, the latest evidence supporting the existence of global warming.
      The study was published in the journal Science and is considered an extremely accurate portrayal of ice melts in these polar regions. According to the paper’s authors, the rapid polar ice melting has caused an increase in sea level that may become problematic to low coastal regions.

  • Finance

    • How Wall Street “Privatized” Money Creation

      Regulators are worried about the explosive growth of shadow banking, and they should be. Shadow banks were at the heart of the last financial crisis and they’ll be at the heart of the next financial crisis as well. There’s no doubt about it. It’s simply impossible to maintain a system where unregulated, non-bank financial institutions are able to create their own money (credit) without oversight or supervision. The money they create–via off-balance sheets operations, securitization, repo or other unmonitored mega-leveraging activities–feeds into the economy, creates artificial demand, lowers unemployment, and fuels growth. But when the cycle slams into reverse (and debts are no longer serviced on time), then thinly-capitalised shadow banks begin to default one-by-one, creating a daisy-chain of counterparty bankruptcies that push stocks into a nosedive while the economy slips into a long-term slump.

    • Goldman Wins Again As European Union Court Rules To Keep ECB Involvement In Greek Debt Fudging A Secret

  • Censorship

    • Tor operator charged for child porn transmitted over his servers

      An Austrian operator of Tor servers—that were used to anonymously route huge amounts of traffic over the Internet—has been charged with distributing child pornography. This comes after police detected illegal images traversing one of the nodes he maintains.

    • Tor Exit Node Operator Charged With Distributing Child Porn

      Obviously, there are reasons to investigate possible child porn distribution, but it still seems ridiculous that law enforcement still seems skeptical of tor exit nodes and assumes that they must be used for nefarious intent. This isn’t the first time of course. Last year, here in the US, ICE seized a tor exit node as well. While it eventually returned the equipment, it warned the guy that “this could happen again.” And, of course, just this week, we wrote about a German case where a court actually held someone responsible for the transmission of encrypted traffic on a tor-like system.

    • Comparison pictures of before and after the raid
    • United Airlines Sues Passenger Complaint Site Untied

      I had really thought that we’d reached the point where lawyers working for large, well-known companies recognize just how incredibly stupid it is to file lawsuits against websites that criticize them. Sure, a decade ago or so, it was common for big companies to go after so called “sucks sites” or “complaints sites,” often alleging trademark infringement. But, at some point, many of them realized that (a) trademark complaints were a dead end since there was no confusion and (b) that these lawsuits only drew a lot more attention to the sites in question. Apparently, however, there are still some throwback lawyers working for United Continental, and they’ve decided to go after a popular passenger complaints site that goes by the creative domain Untied.com.

    • In Wake Of NewsCorp Scandal, UK Says Press Must Be Regulated… But Free… But Not Exactly
    • Inquiry: ‘Reckless’ UK press needs new regulator

      The UK government must legislate to establish a new press “self-regulation” body — independent of both publishers and politicians but overseen by media regulator Ofcom — because newspapers have “wreaked havoc” in the lives of innocents, says the nine-month inquiry report in to the culture, practice and ethics of the business.

      Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • FACEBOOK MAKES IT OFFICIAL: YOU HAVE NO SAY

      Late on Wednesday, just as Americans were taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced its intention to change the feedback process for the policies which govern use of its service.
      For the last few years, as I’d mentioned in Wired a few months ago, Facebook held sham elections where people could ostensibly vote on its policy changes. Despite lots of responses (the most recent Site Governance vote got far more people participating than signed the secession petitions on the White House website), Facebook never promoted these policy change discussions to users, and the public has never made a substantive impact on site governance.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Main Airport and Internet Are Disrupted in Syria

      Syria lost two major links with the outside world on Thursday as the largest commercial airport in the capital canceled flights because of fighting nearby and Internet access disappeared across the country, perhaps signaling an impending escalation by the government against the uprising, opponents of the Syrian government said.

    • Bitter struggle over Internet regulation to dominate global summit

      An unprecedented debate over how the global Internet is governed is set to dominate a meeting of officials in Dubai next week, with many countries pushing to give a United Nations body broad regulatory powers even as the United States and others contend such a move could mean the end of the open Internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Universal Sues Over ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Porn Adaptation

        After snapping up film rights for $5 million, Universal is upset over a porn movie it says is a “rip-off, plain and simple.”

      • Universal Studios Sues Over Porn Parody Of ’50 Shades Of Grey’; Ignoring 50 Shade’s Own History As Fan Fiction

        Still, the thing that strikes me about this — and which isn’t mentioned in the filing at all — is that Fifty Shades, itself, actually came out of a “pornographic adaptation” of the Twilight series. In fact, while those behind Fifty Shades have sought to erase this history, it does seem like a relevant point. Fifty Shades was pornographic Twilight “fan fiction,” which was later rewritten to scrub it of references to Twilight. While Fifty Shades’ author, EL James, her agent and publisher all like to claim that the Twilight fan fic James wrote and the eventual Fifty Shades book are really different works, someone compared the two using a plagiarism checker and found them to be 89% similar.

      • Editor’s Letter: What matters in OfCom’s piracy stats

        Almost half of the UK’s internet users aged twelve and over cannot say with confidence whether or not the sources of online content they use are legal or not, according to new research by OfCom. The study is the latest in an ongoing series of reports by the government’s media regulator attempting to identify trends in online copyright infringement before the ‘graduated response’ system for tackling online piracy set out in the Digital Economy Act is enacted.

        Of the 5099 people surveyed between May and July this year, 47% weren’t able to distinguish with certainty between legal and illegal services, while only 16% actually admitted to accessing unlicensed content, and only 8% said they relied on illegal sources of music.

      • Recording Industry Could Catch More Flies With Honey, But Keeps Betting On Vinegar

        Malt points out that there are several legal services, most of which are inexpensive, including ad-funded streaming services which give listeners access to thousands of tracks for free. (“Inexpensive” is, of course, relative. Ofcom’s study shows that music retailers and streaming services would convert a majority of casual infringers by cutting prices 50-70%. resulting in 2-3x the number of purchases.)

      • Is the pending German Copyright Bill good or bad for the Web?

        A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.

      • Innocence Of Muslims Maker Produces Acting Waiver Signed By Cindy Garcia

        The saga of Cindy Garcia and her attempt to get The Innocence Of Muslims trailer off of YouTube continues. If you’ll recall, Garcia is one of the actresses who performed in the controversial almost-film “Innocence of Muslims”, which sparked protests throughout the Arab world. Since the protests and media blitz began (as opposed to since the flim’s trailer was released), Garcia has been trying to get the YouTube video taken down by throwing the proverbial legal kitchen sink at proverbial legal kitchen-everyone, including claims that she was duped by the flimmakers and that she owned a copyright on her portion of her performance. Buttressing her argument was her claim that she never signed any kind of release for the film.

11.30.12

Links 1/12/2012: Qt 4.8.4 Released, Nokia Recruiting Android Talent

Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • KEMP Adds Support for Open Source KVM

    Whether you prefer open source or proprietary technology, there’s no shortage of virtualization hypervisors to choose from these days. With so many options, which solutions are enterprises selecting, and where will momentum in this channel lead in the future? I recently spoke with virtualization expert Jon Braunhut, who offered a lot of interesting observations and predictions on this topic based on his experience as chief scientist at KEMP Technologies.

  • HTG Explains: What Is Open-Source Software and Why You Should Care

    Geeks often describe programs as being “open source” or “free software.” If you’re wondering exactly what these terms mean and why they matter, read on. (No, “free software” doesn’t just mean that you can download it for free.)

  • Wireless Generation To Spearhead Open Source System for Common Core Assessment Results
  • Post-Thanksgiving Roundup: Counting Open Source Blessings

    Beyond the most radically geeky segments of society, few Americans are likely to have thought of software when they counted their blessings this Thanksgiving. For most people, computers are hardly in the same category as food, shelter and loving friends and family. That said, a recent blog post got me thinking about the software projects and people to whom I do owe personal gratitude. My list comes a bit belatedly, since Thanksgiving 2012 has come and gone, but here are the five items that top it.

  • 40+ Open Source and Free Software

    Whether you want to monitor your network bandwidth, secure your network against malware, or setup a simple mail server, there’s an open source or free software available for the job. Presented here are more than 40+ of them

  • Open source software policy is better without open source

    Here’s a fun experiment (if, like me, you’re a huge nerd): take an open source policy from your agency, company, whatever, and strike out the words “open source.” Bam, you now have a much more sensible and reasonable “software” policy.

  • Web Browsers

    • Securing your Web server with SSL/TLS

      Using HTTPS doesn’t just mean that your traffic is encrypted—encryption is only half of the story and it’s useless without authentication. What good is it to encrypt something between two parties if you can’t be sure of the identity of the person to whom you’re talking? Consequently, being able to serve HTTPS traffic means you must posses a cryptographic certificate attesting to your identity. Acquiring such a certificate requires you prove your identity to one of many Certificate Authorities, or CAs.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Seamonkey Internet suite review – Hmm

        Seamonkey is not the first name that comes to mind when you talk about browsers. Nor is it a fourth. In fact, it’s not even a browser. But then, in those terms, neither is Opera. Seamonkey is an all-in-one cross-platform Internet suite, a collection of Web-facing programs all bundled into a single product. Worth your time? Perhaps, we will discover today.

      • Mozilla investing in Everything.me
      • Mozilla Invests in Mobile Startup

        hroughout its history, Mozilla has supported innovation on the web by investing in people and its own development. Today Mozilla is moving to the next stage in its evolution, formally investing in a mobile startup that could help to enable its nascent FirefoxOS platform.

        Mozilla is participating in a $25 million series C funding round for Everything.me, which is an HTML5-focused mobile startup. Mozilla is joining the venture team of Telefonica Digital as well as SingTel Innov8 in the funding round.

      • How to integrate -better- Firefox in Gnome3
      • Ramblings about Firefox OS

        While the phone Firefox OS was running on couldn’t take advantage of a mobile data network, the developer was able to tether that phone to another one. Obviously, this being pre-alpha software, things didn’t work as well or as smoothly as in the final version. But even in that early form and running on underpowered hardware, Firefox OS showed promise.

      • Mozilla Brings H.264 Playback Support To Firefox for Android

        Mozilla is trying to fix a problem that’s bugging its Android users running Firefox. Since Adobe doesn’t support Flash for Android or any other mobile devices, Firefox users were not able to play H.264 encoded videos.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Developer Interview: KOHEI YOSHIDA

      Kohei Yoshida is a well-known individual on the LibreOffice project. To many, he is considered as one of the core group of developers who have contributed to the steady development and code improvement of the project, and one of the leaders of the calc component. Kohei takes a little time out from his busy schedule to let us know a little more about himself and why the LibreOffice project appeals to him.

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • How VA’s Open Source Community is Improving Veteran Health Care

      VA is continually evolving the health care we deliver to Veterans, from enhancing treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to enabling clinicians and patients to use mobile devices to improve care. The VA Innovation Initiative (VAi2) supports this constructive evolution by tapping the talent and expertise of individuals inside and outside of government for creative solutions and providing a method for new ideas to be evaluated, tested, and deployed.

  • Business

    • Open Source CRM Zurmo Releases Version 0.8.0

      The Open Source CRM project Zurmo has released Zurmo Version 0.8.0, which allows users to send emails directly from within the application.

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Don’t fall for “Faux-pen Source”

        Ah, open source … so free, so transparent, so egalitarian, but not always. Increasingly, vendors are slapping the label “open source” on products that do not offer customers the freedom and control originally intended and instead lock them in, reports Simon Phipps at InfoWorld.

  • Funding

    • Open source software firm Acquia raises $30 mln

      Acquia, a U.S. startup that advises enterprises on open source content management system Drupal, said it has raised $30 million from Investor Growth Capital and other venture firms to finance its expansion.

    • Please Support Open Source Projects

      So, please consider supporting one or two of your favorites projects. On my side, I’m installing Ubuntu, just to buy Uberwriter, and I have contributed a little with Ubuntu at the time of downloading it. And I have already made my very small contribution to the Debian Handbook.

    • Drupal Sponsor Acquia Brings in $68.5 Million of Funding

      New round of funding will help build and expand the operations of open source enterprise content management system vendor Acquia.

    • Google creates open source contest for young people

      A focus on young people in the open source world is just starting to become a priority, and we’re also starting to see more larger corporations demonstrating their commitment to open source. Open source is indeed spreading as more and more people understand the value of the open source way.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • A Basic Look At How The LLVM Compiler Works

      The LLVM compiler infrastructure is frequently talked about on Phoronix whether it be about its Clang C/C++ compiler or one of the innovative use-cases for LLVM such as with the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver or as a JIT engine within some free software projects like Mono. However, for those that don’t understand much of the internals of LLVM, here’s a brief overview.

    • GitHub needs to take open source seriously

      Some of the would-be cool kids of software say we are in the “post open source” world. Several weeks ago, James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, put it this way on Twitter: “younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github.”

      But as Outercurve Foundation’s CTO Stephen Walli replied, “promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software transmitted diseases.” Since then, I have heard more and more people mention this trend of regarding the copyright and collaboration terms of a project as irrelevant bureaucracy. Appealing as it may be to treat the wisdom of the years as pointless, doing so creates a problem for the future.

    • Unified Parallel C (UPC) Comes To LLVM/Clang
    • Using AddressSanitizer & ThreadSanitizer In GCC 4.8

Leftovers

  • Former Attorney General Bill Baxley’s ‘Kiss My A**’ Letter To Ku Klux Klan ‘Grand Dragon’ Goes Viral (PHOTO)
  • Genode OS 12.11 Is Now Self-Hosting

    Genode OS, the very interesting research operating system, is out with a new release that boasts some interesting features.

    Genode OS is one of the early non-Linux operating systems that ported Gallium3D and GEM for its graphics drivers, provided a Gallium3D LiveCD, and then grew ambitions to become a general purpose OS. In its latest release it was ported to ARM and picked up other features, but now it’s been even more improved.

  • New Products for November
  • German Chancellor Says Only Print Media Can Teach You ‘Real’ Reading
  • Data Nerds Revolt! PeopleBrowsr Takes Twitter to Court Over Alleged Anticompetitive Actions.

    If there’s one valuable thing Twitter holds, it is the company’s vast treasure trove of billions of tweets. It is an opus of thoughts and utterances, all made in real time, that make up the company’s most precious asset — the “interest graph.”

    Twitter knows this. And for years now the company has had agreements with a number of third-party companies, giving them access to the “firehose,” or the raw stream of Twitter data flowing through the company’s pipes. These companies comb through the scores of tweets to find meaningful insights, and resell that information to companies across multiple industries. It’s a “big data” economy, built entirely around Twitter’s never-ending flow of information.

  • Hardware

    • OEMs Confirm Intel’s Broadwell CPU Won’t Be Sold In Interchangeable Sockets

      In a piece called Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it SemiAccurate reports that Japan’s PC Watch has reliable, but unidentified reports that Intel has told OEM’s that Intel will decline to offer pluggable processors for the Broadwell architecture (which will appear after 2013′s Haswell architecture.) Instead OEMs will recieve ball grid array multi-chip modules (BGM MCM). These modules will be installed onto the motherboard by soldering, effectively making the CPU part of the motherboard.

      Readers please remember that this isn’t an Intel press release. This news is only off-the record reports from manufacturers who have been talking to Intel. Intel also has a history of changing their plans.

      It could all be speculation because it would be silly to solder a very expensive processor onto a cheap motherboard. What’s more likely is that in 2014 Intel will focus on delivering hi-frequency Haswell chips for the desktop, while it reserves the next-generation Broadwell chips for low-power applications. This would explain the rumors of why there will be no socketable Broadwell chips. So, Intel simply skips a single generation for the Desktop sockets. No more, no less.

    • Dell, Intel eye investment in Sharp, report says

  • Health/Nutrition

    • New Study Reveals Widespread and Copious Use of Toxic Flame Retardants

      A study published this week in the Environmental Science & Technology journal, “Novel and High Volume Use Flame Retardants in US Couches Reflective of the 2005 PentaBDE Phase Out,” reveals that 85% of couches purchased in the United States between 1985 and 2010 contain chemical flame retardants. The most prevalent include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), tris (1-3-dichloroisopropyl) phosphate (TDCPP), and the newer Firemaster 550 (FM 550) mixture, as well as tris (4-butylphenyl) phosphate (TBPP), which according to the study has not been reported to be used as a flame retardant until now.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Greens leader accuses Tories of sabotaging climate talks

      When it comes to progress on climate change negotiations, the best thing for Canada to do is to stay home and stop sabotaging the process, says the leader of the Green Party.

      “Canada continues to be a country that pushes other countries to do less. Our role is not just an embarrassment, it’s reckless and brings our once good national reputation into disrepute,” argued Elizabeth May at a news conference in Ottawa today.

      World governments are in Doha, Qatar working out a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of this year. Canada announced it was pulling out of the Kyoto process last year but is still officially involved in the Kyoto process until Dec. 15.

    • Wikileaks suspect tells of despair in ‘cage’

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Web of Berman Front Groups Subject of IRS Complaint

      Five registered non-profits run by super-lobbyist Rick Berman’s for-profit PR firm, Berman & Co., are the target of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint filed this month by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).

    • Why is State Farm Involved in Education Policy? Conservative Think Tank Exposes ALEC as Exchange of Dollars rather than Ideas

      A press release from a conservative think tank criticizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provides crucial insight into how the organization works — and helps illustrate that while ALEC says its purpose is to facilitate an exchange of “practical, state-level public policy issues,” it sells access by the private sector to lawmakers and essentially sells policymaking to the highest bidders. The release documents how the “exchange” that happens at ALEC is more like a stock exchange rather than a free marketplace of ideas.

  • Censorship

    • Miami Heat Owner Wins Injunction Against Blogging Critic; Asks For Contempt After She Blogs More About The Case
    • Miami Blogger Continues Battle with Miami Heat Tycoon

      As a Russian immigrant whose grandparents were killed by Nazis, Irina Chevaldina appreciates the First Amendment better than many Americans.

      That is why she is refusing to back down against one of the richest men in Miami, Raanan Katz, a minority owner of the Miami Heat who also owns more than 6,000,000 square feet of retail space in Miami.

    • If Parliament votes on the press, the press is not free

      If Parliament votes on the press, the press isn’t free. To split hairs between statutory underpinning and statutory regulation is not an acceptable distinction in a free and democratic country.

    • Syrian Internet Is Off The Air

      Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.

    • The ITU and You

      The Internet has always been guided forwards by collaborative, open approaches. We believe that these approaches are one of the reasons why the Web has become and remained the wonderful, powerful and empowering place we know today. In the coming weeks, this successful model of governing and shaping the future of the Web will be at risk.

      Today, we’re launching a kit of tools and resources to inform and mobilize the Internet community about what’s happening at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and support people in taking grassroots action. Mozilla stands behind transparency in Internet governance, but a free and open Internet depends on you.

      On December 3rd, nations from around the world will be meeting in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a meeting of the ITU. These governments will be meeting behind closed doors to determine if an old treaty will be amended to allow countries the power to more fully regulate and control the structure of the Web.

    • Miami Heat Owner Wins Injunction Against Blogging Critic; Asks For Contempt After She Blogs More About The Case

      Remember Raanan Katz? The Florida real estate mogul and part-owner of the Miami Heat, made some news earlier this year for suing Google and a blogger for copyright infringement after the blogger posted an “unflattering” photo of Katz. Katz, who was clearly annoyed at the blogger — a former Katz tenant who is (to put it mildly) not a fan of Katz — for blogging critical stories about Katz (including highlighting some earlier lawsuits Katz had been involved with and posting the related legal documents). In addition to suing for defamation, Katz purchased the rights to the “unflattering” photo the blogger, Irina Chevaldina, had posted of him, and then sued for copyright infringement. Google was included on the case for refusing to take down the photo. While Google was later dropped from the case (one assumes that someone somewhere finally realized that, perhaps that end of the suit wasn’t going to end well), Katz has continued his case against Chevaldina.

      Earlier this month, the judge in the case signed off on a ridiculously broad injunction against Chevaldina, that not only says that she can’t “trespass” on Katz’s properties, but that she can’t blog anything that is intended to “otherwise cause harm” to Katz. That doesn’t seem even remotely constitutional. Criticizing someone is protected speech, even if it may (or is intended) to cause harm to someone’s business. And the “trespass” injunction may seem like no big deal, especially since trespassing is already illegal. But, in this case, the court has indicated that by “trespassing” they mean that Chevaldina cannot even go to any of the properties that Katz owns — which includes stores and shopping malls.

  • Privacy

    • Facebook ‘Likes’ Considered Key Evidence In ‘Terrorist’ Plot

      We’ve written a few times about how the FBI has been doing a bang up job foiling its own terrorist plots, so we’re a bit skeptical every time we see headlines of some giant “terrorist bust.” Almost every time, once you dig into the details, it involves some gullible, confused suckers who had no actual connection to terrorists, but were led along by FBI agents and informers until they were “convinced” to take part in a “plot” that was entirely concocted by the FBI. The latest headline-grabbing case of “arrested terrorists” actually appears like it may have slightly more substance, however, in that they may have actually had some sort of connection to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

    • Don’t be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous Email Accounts
    • NSA embarrassment: spy agency censors their own talking points in FOIA response
    • Three Men Who Wouldn’t Let the NSA Get Away With It

      The trial of former CIA agent and whistle-blower John Kiriakou has prompted many Americans to strongly criticize the Obama administration and its lack of oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Kiriakou, who uncovered the torture program that was started under President Bush and continued under President Obama, will face 30 months in jail and lose his government pension. Since his trial began in April, whistle-blowers such as Kirk Wiebe and William Binney, both of whom worked at the National Security Agency and then left because of mismanagement and corruption, have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar data processing and analysis systems.

  • Civil Rights

    • NSA Releases Heavily Redacted Talking Points: Say It’s Hard To Watch Public Debate On Its Efforts

      The only reason to redact is embarrassment.

    • Senate Committee Approves Bill Requiring Warrants for E-Mail

      A Senate committee on Thursday unanimously backed sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.

    • Shakil Afridi hunger strike: US demands safety, release of CIA spy

      nited States (US) State Department spokesperson on Thursday demanded Pakistan to release Dr. Shakil Afridi, a CIA spy who helped in locating al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in Abbotababad, a garrison town of Pakistan.

    • Data protection debate at MoJ

      Yesterday I attended the first of the Department of Justice’s Advisory panel meetings on the new Data Protection regulation laws being proposed at the EU.

      The new laws are already the subject of intense lobbying and pressure. The key changes are designed to strengthen the privacy rights of citizens, in several ways:

    • Justice Department Uses Red Tape To Delay Release Of Required Information On Domestic Spying Until Well After It Matters

      A couple of months ago, Julian Sanchez wrote about the ridiculous situation in which he filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to reveal the latest semi-annual report from the Justice Department concerning how it was implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. As we’ve been discussing, for a while, how the FISA Amendments Act broadly expanded the ability of federal law enforcement, in particular the NSA, to spy on everyone. While there is some language that suggests it’s only supposed to be used on foreigners, it’s been revealed that there is a secret interpretation of the bill, that likely allows them to use a loophole (plus the secret interpretation) to collect and review tons of data on Americans. The FAA is up for renewal, and it’s likely that Congress will rush through a five year extension — despite overwhelming evidence that many in Congress don’t know how the NSA is interpreting the bill (and even making statements that directly contradict the evidence of how the bill is being used).

      [...]

      Once again, this seems to raise questions about the process here — and how much of it really has to do with law enforcement officials being careful… and how much of it is purely political, seeking to hide damaging information that might impact the FAA renewal.

    • Adventures in FOIA-Land (or: Red Tape Is Not Transparent)

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Assange to RT: Entire nations intercepted online, key turned to totalitarian rule

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way.

    • Syria Cut Off From The Internet Again

      Earlier this summer, we wrote about Syria briefly deleting itself from the internet. We wondered about the logic behind this, seeing as other countries who attempted this — namely, Egypt and Libya — had regime change follow quite closely after such a decision. Furthermore, not too long ago, reports were that the Syrian government was trying to use the internet to get its own story out. Of course, a lot has happened in Syria in the interim. So perhaps views have changed.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Kevin Durant Sued Over ‘Durantula’ Trademark Despite Not Using It

        It turns out that this holy grail of nicknames is apparently worth suing over, at least in the eyes of a musician. Apparently Mark Durante, a man that the TMZ link describes as a “1980s musician” (meaning he made his bones before Kevin Durant could tie his own shoes), claims he had trademarked the term “Durantula” long ago and has been using it to sell mechandise for years. As such, he is taking Durant, along with Durant’s private company, Nike, and Panini America Inc. (ostensibly so that the trial will be catered with delicious sandwiches), to court over the mark.

    • Copyrights

      • The music cartel needs to back off its fight against ‘piracy’

        HONEY OBSESSED anthropomorphic bear Winnie the Pooh made headlines this month for all the wrong reasons.
        Pooh, of Pooh Corner, the Hundred Acre Wood, has apparently carved out something of a niche for himself as a model and no longer stresses about honey, attempts to cheer up a donkey, or takes an interest in the machinations of a piglet. Nay, instead he is lending his face to children’s laptops these days.

        One of those laptops was confiscated from a nine year old girl this month, simply because she might have downloaded one CD.

      • Leeds copyright event, RSA: What users say and do about intellectual property

        About ORG: a digital rights campaigning organisation. We care about the impact of technology and technology policy on our rights, on society and the public. We work across privacy, government surveillance, open data, and freedom of expression.

        We were founded in 2005 and are sustained by around 1,500 paying supporters and grants from institutions like Open Society Foundation, Sigrid Rausing and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

      • Newzbin dies
      • Members Of The Republican Study Committee Do Twitter Q&A, Ignore Every Single Question About Fixing Copyright
      • Kenyan Filmmaker Looking To Cuts Costs By Using ‘Pirates’ As His Distributors
      • Hardware vendors sue Dutch government over copyright levies

        Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.

        “The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies,” the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague.

      • Outdated European Copyright Levy System Descends Further Into Disarray
      • Open Letter To Human Synergistics International In Response To Your Accusation That Techdirt Is Infringing

        Thank you for your letter on November 23rd, 2012, (which we have reposted below in its entirety, minus your contact info) in which you mistakenly suggest that Techdirt has infringed the copyrights of your company, Human Synergistics, via its post from October 5th, 2012, entitled Copyright As Censorship: Author Removes Blog Post After Being Threatened For Quoting 4 Sentences. First of all, it is astounding that you do not appear to recognize the irony of threatening us over a blog post that goes into detail as to why someone else’s use of a tiny snippet of your company’s work was quite clearly fair use under US copyright law. In fact, it leads one to wonder if you even read the post in question before sending your letter.

        Even if we ignore the question of whether or not that original blog post by Patti O’Shea constituted fair use, I can assure you that Techdirt’s use is fair use. Furthermore, your claim that a lack of permission to quote your silly exercise (solely for the purpose of explaining your overaggressive use of copyright law to censor people against your own best interests) is somehow “a direct violation of our copyright” is absolutely false. It is not just false, but an exaggeration of the rights you hold under copyright law — a situation called “Copyfraud” by legal scholar Jason Mazzone.

      • Chris Dodd: Bogus Facebook ‘Copyright’ Declaration Proves Everyone Loves Copyright

        Over the past few days, a post concerning copyright claims began making the rounds on Facebook, presumably written in response to the news that Facebook would no longer be letting its users vote on site policies. This announcement arrived with the news that Facebook would also be combining profiles across various other services like Instagram.

        [...]

        The simple fact that this semi-viral post is completely wrong shows how colossally screwed up our current copyright system is. People are still under the impression that copyright needs to be “declared” (usually with the © symbol). Many also seem to think that if they “declare” copyright and trot out a million limitations, everyone approaching their copyrighted content is obliged to follow every stipulation. Facebook users are picking up the clues that maximalists are dropping and cobbling together legal-sounding threats with nothing behind them. What Facebook users really want isn’t the same thing maximalists want. Behind this flawed statement is the feeling that Facebook “gave” users a place to share their photos, etc. with friends and family, but now it wants to turn uploaded content into marketing tools.

      • UK Recording Industry Doesn’t Want Google To Reduce Piracy Until It Reduces Piracy

        We know that when music streaming services became available in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, illegal downloads were halved. The BPI’s obsession with punishing illegal download sites blinds it to the fact that Google plans to launch a far better way of dealing with them: not through extrajudicial censorship in the form of doctored search results, but simply by offering something that people are happy to pay for. The UK recording industry should be embracing new ventures like Google Play Music wholeheartedly, not using them as bargaining chips in its pointless fight over search results.

11.29.12

Links 29/11/2012: Splashtop, 15 Years of KDE

Posted in News Roundup at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Splashtop introduces remote Ubuntu to Android and iPhone

    Ever been 500 miles away from your Ubuntu Linux server and the only computing device you had to manage it was an Android smartphone or an Apple iPad? Splashtop is working on the program. for you: Splashtop Streamer for Linux.

    The beta Splashtop Streamer, when used with Splashtop 2 a remote desktop app. for Android devices, iPad, and iPhone and iPod Touch, will enable you to connect remotely to Ubuntu 12.04 systems. It does not support, at this time, other versions of Linux or Ubuntu. Splashtop 2 already supports Mac OS X and Windows.

  • Splashtop For Linux Claims 10x Performance Advantage

    Splashtop for Ubuntu Linux is being released today and it claims to be 10x faster than VNC plus offering a host of other features.

  • Linux Users Get Remote Desktop Boost from Splashtop
  • Splashtop for Ubuntu Delivers 10x Performance over VNC
  • Splashtop comes to Ubuntu Linux with a speedy remote desktop option

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel Developers and the Mystery of Slower Mounts

      In Linux it is often said that every device is a file. To most of us a file is something just there. The kernel boys and girls actually tweak the bits right down to the hardware to make the magic of a file somewhere becoming accessible to the system, mounting the file.

      Last week, one developer found a recent version of Linux mounted files considerably slower than it usually did. He noticed because he mounted a lot of file-systems. When careful timing was done the difference was measured. Indeed mounts were an order of magnitude slower. By repeating the measurements for several versions and finally versions with and without certain patches/changes, the cause was found. Then discussion broke out about how to fix both issues, why the change had been made and how to do it differently.

    • Linux Kernel Development Is Slow On The Xbox 360

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Back Story On The Open NVIDIA Tegra Driver
      • Mesa State Tracker Now Handles GL 3.1 Core Profiles

        The Mesa state tracker as used by the Gallium3D hardware drivers has support for handling the creation of OpenGL 3.1 Core Profiles.

      • ARM Cortex-A15 vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3 vs. Intel x86

        Last week I shared some early benchmarks of the Samsung Chromebook while running Ubuntu Linux. The Samsung Chromebook is very interesting since it’s one of the few readily available computers on the market employing an ARM Cortex-A15 processor rather than Cortex-A9 or other models. The Cortex-A15 found in the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC proved to be very powerful and this Chromebook was quite a good deal with it being trivial to load Ubuntu Linux (and other distributions) while costing only $250 USD for this ARM-based laptop. In the past week I have carried out additional ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks, including a comparison of its performance the the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ARM “Cardhu” tablet and several Intel Atom/Core x86 systems.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Innovative New Appmenu Support Coming To KDE 4.10

        Ubuntu and even Windows have been moving away from the traditional drop down menus which appear in application windows. Ubuntu borrowed the concept of Global Menus from OSX and integrates the menu items with the top panel. These menus appear, for the corresponding application or window, when a user takes the mouse to the top panel. Windows has split these menu items between what they call ribbon. Even applications like Google’s Chrome has switched from the traditional menus.

      • 15 years of KDE e.V. – Growing Up

        Yesterday (November 27, 2012) was the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We published interviews with two of the founding members (Matthias Ettrich and Kalle Dalheimer) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Today, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts in the video interview (transcript included). Tomorrow there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.

      • The K Desktop Environment is 15

        My favorite desktop environment just turned 15. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) has come a long way. There were good times and bad times, and I temporarily abandoned it during one of those bad times. But like many KDE users at that time, I was convinced that I had a good reason to.

      • Qt 5.0 Release Still Planned By Year’s End

        Lars Knoll has laid out his plans for branching the Qt 5.0 code-base and seeing the long-awaited update to the popular open-source toolkit see the light of day before year’s end.

        “Qt 5.0 is getting closer, and we’re still working to get the final release out before the end of the year. To make this easier and also allow new development towards 5.1 to happen again, we’ll branch the qt repositories during this weekend in preparation for the Release Candidate,” begins a new mailing list message by Knoll.

  • Distributions

    • Amazon EC2 Linux OS Comparison

      In preparation for the imminent release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.2-Randaberg, final validation testing was done on a variety of Linux operating systems in Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud. Many of the official Linux images were benchmarked from the c1.xlarge High-CPU Extra Large Instance, including Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat brings new hybrid cloud solutions
      • Red Hat Builds on PaaS With Partner Program
      • Middle East companies can amoothly transition to the ‘Cloud’ by following Five Top Tips, says Expert

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 19 May Release In May 2013

          Fedora 18 release may have been stuck by a lot of delays, but developers are already planning to release Fedora 19 in May next year. Fedora 18 beta was released just a few days back and it’s currently in testing stage. After some major bugs have been fixed, the final Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” will be is expected to be released in January 2013.

        • Fedora 18 Beta adds MATE and Cinnamon desktops

          After almost two months’ delay, the Fedora Project has released the first and final beta of Fedora 18. The distribution, which is code-named “Spherical Cow”, includes the MATE desktop – a continuation of the classic GNOME 2 interface – in its repositories for the first time. Fedora 18′s default edition uses GNOME 3.6.2 as its interface and a separate KDE Spin provides the KDE Software Collection 4.9.3; Xfce 4.10 and version 1.6.7 of Linux Mint’s Cinnamon are also available from the distribution’s repositories.

        • GNOME alternatives in Fedora 18

          There is a significant amount of people unhappy with the direction of GNOME 3 who do not enjoy KDE and find LXDE too weak in features or who just like the look and feel of the old GNOME 2 desktop. Here are their options in Fedora 18, as they can be seen in the recently released Beta.

        • Fedora 18 KDE and GNOME preview

          Fedora 18 was not released on schedule, but knowing how the Fedora project operates, this was no surprise, because unlike other distributions, a new Fedora edition is almost never released until all major issues have been fixed.

          What makes this delay unique is the stable release will not hit public download mirrors until next year. And I think this marks the first time that a Fedora edition has been pushed back this far. But now that a beta edition has been released, here are some screen shots from test installations of the KDE and GNOME 3 editions.

        • Fedora Linux 18 Is Here – With New Features

    • Debian Family

      • Run-up to Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

            Last week was Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, but for the last few weeks I have been on paternity leave, so I didn’t get a chance to blog about it. I just wanted to take a few minutes to offer some thanks.

            Choosing people for Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day is always tough as we have so many wonderful people who actively participate in our community. From our developers to docs writers to translators to testers to advocates and more, everyone puts their brick in the wall to build a strong, competative, and proficiant Ubuntu. We would be nothing without your contributions.

          • Compiz Patch Improves Gaming Performance In Ubuntu

            Ubuntu may be lucky enough to become the first Linux distribution ready for gaming, thanks to Windows 8 and move from companies like Valve. Valve’s move inspired Nvidia to improve performance of Ubuntu with their driver updates. To improve the performace of Ubuntu itself (which is slow and sluggish due to Unity) , an Ubuntu developer Timo Jyrinki has written a patch for Compiz that will allow better full screen performance of games in Unity.

          • Compiz To Unredirect Fullscreen Windows By Default

            The Compiz 0.9.8.6 update soon coming to Ubuntu 12.10 will enable “Unredirect Fullscreen Windows” by default in an effort to boost the OpenGL gaming performance of the Linux distribution when using the Unity desktop.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • HTC turns to new marketing chief

          Coming off an abysmal quarter and generally lackluster performance of late, the phone maker could use a good marketing push.

        • WISE TIVI offers three Android-powered Smart TV options
        • Android seven-inchers swipe rug from under Apple

          The question is, does Apple’s tablet market share – or Android’s for that matter – actually matter? Apple is certainly selling more of the darn things, but after a brief year’s relief, sales of Android alternatives are rising even more quickly.

          According to ABI Research, a market watcher, Apple’s share of the world tablet market fell in Q3 2012 to 55 per cent, the lowest share Apple has ever had since launching the iPad in 2010.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Which 10-inch Android tablet is best?

        As you’ll see in a moment, the answer to the question of which tablet is best is highly dependent on your own personal priorities relative to price, performance, screen resolution, and other issues. To get the ball rolling, let’s compare the four tablets’ out-of-box homescreens.

      • iPad And Android Tablet Market Share Margin Narrows Much Faster Than Originally Predicted

        Shortly after the iPad’s introduction in 2010, there were predictions that Android would eventually overtake Apple’s market share in the tablet market the same way that Android smartphones had done with the iPhone. But early predictions tended to favor 2015 or 2016 as the crossover point at which Android tablets (from a variety of OEMs) would actually overtake iPad sales in terms of broad market share. Others still saw Apple dominating even longer – a 2011 Gartner study suggested Apple would keep 47 percent of the market in 2015, with Android coming up with just 38 percent.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • EFSA’s final report on Seralini fans flames of controversy

      EFSA has now released its final assessment of the Seralini study. It has not changed any of its initial critical responses to the study, which Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) rightly characterizes in its new report (see the extracts below) as resembling “more a compilation of other’s criticisms than an attempt to clarify the issue in the public interest; more like a prosecution than an evaluation.”

      CEO also notes that the final report’s conclusions are in stark contrast with the conclusions of at least two of the national regulatory agencies that were also involved in the assessement of Seralini’s study which have called for additional research and a review of current risk assessment guidelines.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The New Future of Energy Policy

      Volatility in climate has drawn the attention of policy makers for a decade. But as so often is the case, a dramatic event like superstorm Sandy – the largest storm to hit New York since the colonial era – has punctured the psyche of the densely populated East Coast, including the New York-Washington, DC axis where U.S. policy is made.

  • Finance

    • Meet the Man Who Has Been Battling Romney and Bain’s Bankruptcy Fraud for 12 Years

      There is something appealing to human beings about a small individual taking on a powerful adversary, and most people are aware of the David and Goliath story where a small insignificant boy took on and defeated a powerful giant because his unwavering faith gave him courage and conviction that right would overcome might. For the past eleven-and-a-half years, one American with unwavering faith in the judicial system has taken on a modern day giant without respite based on a belief that justice is due diligence and that in America, right overcomes might. However, in this circumstance, the system that exists to ensure justice prevails has conflated power with right and gave an already powerful giant a wall of separation from the law, and yet one small individual continues battling for justice against a behemoth.

    • Censored: Poverty Report in Germany

      On September 17, the German Labor Ministry sent a draft report “on Poverty and Wealth” to the other ministries to be rubber-stamped. Only the final report, once sanctified by Chancellor Angela Merkel, would be made public. The draft was supposed to remain hidden. But it seeped to the surface almost immediately. And it was hot. Too hot.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Wisconsin Legislators Jetting Off on Corporate-Funded Trip to Develop Special Interest Legislation

      Several Wisconsin legislators are attending this week’s conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) at the Grand Hyatt in Washington D.C., and likely doing so on corporate-funded “scholarships,” which the Center for Media and Democracy believes violate state ethics and lobbying laws. The three-day meeting, held November 28-30, will bring state legislators together with corporate lobbyists and special interests to craft “model” bills – many of which will likely be introduced in the ALEC-majority Wisconsin legislature in the session that begins in January.

    • Fox News Skewered by Guest for “Operating as a Wing of the Republican Party”

      Fox News was publicly skewered and filleted this week by one of their own guests, Thomas E. Ricks, an expert on military and defense policy and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. His interview was abruptly and unceremoniously ended after he calmly tagged Fox as “a wing of the Republican Party.”

    • Taxpayer-Enriched Companies Back Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, its Buddy ALEC, and Their “Reforms”

      This week in Washington, DC, Jeb Bush’s “Foundation for Excellence in Education” (FEE) is meeting just five blocks away from the post-election conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the controversial corporate bill mill working on profitizing public education among other legislative changes, but the ties between the two groups are even closer.

  • Censorship

    • Iran’s Latest Move To Stifle Dissent: Requiring ID Cards To Go Online

      For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran’s continuing efforts to throttle its citizens’ access to troublesome materials online. These have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily. But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Newzbin2, the MPAA’s Usenet Enemy #1, Calls it Quits

        After a long battle with the international arm of the MPAA, Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has called it quits. The site had been operating under adverse conditions, not least almost total censorship by a court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK. Add to this a climate of fear driving individuals providing vital services away from the site, plus legal action against PayPal aimed at Newzbin2′s UK-based payment provider, and the site’s operators have decided to shut down.

      • Canada prepares for crackdown on BitTorrent movie pirates

        If you’re watching an illegally downloaded movie, someone could be watching you.

        A forensic software company has collected files on a million Canadians who it says have downloaded pirated content.

        And the company, which works for the motion picture and recording industries, says a recent court decision forcing Internet providers to release subscriber names and details is only the first step in a bid to crack down on illegal downloads.

      • Celebrating 10 years of Creative Commons

        Creative Commons is celebrating 10 years of helping artists, writers, technologist, and other creators share our knowledge and creativity with the world. We’ve been able to maximize our digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. For example, governments are using Creative Commons for their open data portals.

      • Is the pending German Copyright Bill good or bad for the Web?

        A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.

      • TorrentFreak Trolls a Copyright Troll

        Prenda Law, one of the law firms involved in the ongoing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US, is using a recent TorrentFreak article to threaten alleged BitTorrent downloaders. While we generally encourage people to promote our content, being used as a tool in extortion-type letters is not something we’re happy with. As a result we saw no other option than to troll the copyright troll.

      • Six Strikes Delayed Until ‘Early Part’ Of 2013

        We heard rumors of this a couple weeks ago from people involved in some of the six strikes program at various ISPs, but the six strikes effort, already delayed from its original planned starting date of July until around now, has been pushed back again until “the early part of 2013.”

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