• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Spain’s Extremadura publishes tailored Linux distribution

The government of the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura published Linex 2013 on Monday last week. This tailored version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution was unveiled in the city of Mérida by Sergio Velázquez, secretary general for the regions department for Employment, Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation and Manuel Velardo, director of Cenatic, Spain’s open source resource centre.

Hiring managers: “A good Linux-head is hard to find”

A new report shows Linux experience is in greater demand — and, hiring managers say, harder to find — than in past years.

The 2013 Linux Jobs Report, released today by the Linux Foundation, surveyed 850 hiring managers and 2,600 Linus pros and found that Linux might be a good area of focus for aspiring techsters.

Desktop

• Dell Expands Ubuntu Developer Laptop to Europe

• Dell bringing improved Sputnik to Europe

Server

• IBM data centre fault enters second day

  IBM’s $80 million data centre in South Auckland has now been down for more than 30 hours and customers say the outage is having a serious impact on their businesses.

  One east Auckland school has been left completely stranded in the same week that it hosts a visit from the Education Review Office (ERO).

  IBM said today from Sydney that it had a team of global experts working on the outage as a high priority.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.8 ‘Unicycling Gorilla’ Accelerates Server Filesystems

  Some Linux kernel releases have more colorful names than others. Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.8 kernel on Monday, giving it the codename Unicycling Gorilla.

• Gazzang Joins The Linux Foundation

• Linux Foundation Welcomes Members From Android Community

• MTE Explains: What Is Btrfs Filesystem (and Why Is It Better Than Ext4)?

  There is more to a hard drive than its size. While the amount of disk space is all you see marketed about a hard drive on a sales page, there is actually an extensive amount of coding that goes into making a hard drive capable of handling your applications and data in the first place. Most Linux distributions currently default to using the ext4 file system, but the future for many of them lies with the B-tree file system, better known as Btrfs.

Applications

• FlightGear 2.10 gets more realistic environmental conditions

  The FlightGear project has released version 2.10 of the open source flight simulator. The most obvious improvements are in the simulation of the environment, weather and computer-controlled aircraft, but the developers have also put a lot of work into the rendering engine, the main results of which are more natural rendering of dazzle effects, restricted fields of view during night flights, and shadows.

• FlightGear review – Pilots needed, do apply

• Transmission 2.77 Is Now Available for Download

  The powerful, lightweight and extremely popular Transmission BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating system reached version 2.77 a few minutes ago.

• Proprietary

  • The NYT’s Problem With Leftist Presidents

    Someone at the paper must have seen the irony here and decided to change it; most readers saw instead “Ecuador’s President Shows Confidence About Re-election, Too Much for Some.”

    But the first headline more accurately summarized the article–and the worldview of outlets like the New York Times, which take a far more critical approach towards political leaders on the left.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Host your own document storage service with ownCloud

  • How to encrypt a partition with Cryptoloop

  • How to disable bluetooth at boot

  • Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 12.10

• Games

  • Steam now on Linux –with 60 games!

    Here’s another reason for computer users to make the switch to Linux: popular gaming service Steam has arrived on the platform.

    At least 60 supported games come bundled with Steam for Linux, along with other features like online play, achievements and friend lists, according to a report on PC World.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • control and openness

    Occasionally people ask me what I think about Plasma Active appearing on various devices, knowing that we’re working on a tablet ourselves. It’s a really good question, and gets to one of the core tensions around open culture: the interplay between control and benefit.

    The conventional wisdom is that to maximize benefit, control must also be maximized. Thus the historical emphasis on proprietary technology in the IT industry, something that has been slowly but surely shifting with time but certainly has not fully swung away from proprietary-is-better.

  • The Luminosity of Free Software, episode 4

    It’s that time of the week again already! Yes, the Luminosity of Free Software episode 4 will be broadcast live tomorrow at 20:00 UTC via Google+ Hangouts, and you’re all invited.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Porteus v2.0 final is ready

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 3 Beta 2 Review – An uncut gem

    Is this beta for one of the best community run distros around a good indicator for the full release, or a serious work in progress like last year?

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 18: Nice Tweaks to the OS, but It’s Haunted by a GNOME

      With a code name like “the Spherical Cow,” the new Fedora 18 software has to be good, right? After all, a better Linux kernel and some added features make the operating system a good choice for busy work environments. A limp GNOME 3 desktop, however, may bring users and that rotund bovine to a screeching halt.

    • Firefox 19 Comes With A Built-in PDF Viewer

      Mozilla Foundation has announced the latest version of Firefox open source Web browser. The release does bring new features including a built-in PDF viewer that allows you to read PDFs directly within the browser.

      According to Mozilla, this feature “makes reading PDFs easier because you don’t have to download the content or read it in a plugin like Reader. For example, you can use the PDF viewer to check out a menu from your favorite restaurant, view and print concert tickets or read reports without having to interrupt your browsing experience with extra clicks or downloads.” This feature is already available in Chrome for more than two years now.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 7 Progressing, Mageia 3 Delayed

    Debian 7.0 is progressing and testers were treated to Release Candidate 1 recently. On the other side of town Mageia has reported a change in the release schedule for upcoming version 3.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu unveils Linux tablet

        The company is developing a united phone, computer, TV and tablet operating system that it hopes will provide a more intuitive interface than that currently offered by Google’s Android.

        It announced a mobile phone interface using the open-source operating system in January, and has since secured a partner to make compatible silicon chips. It claims it will launch to consumers in October. Devices aimed at both the premium and budgets ends of the market will be available.

      • Ubuntu for tablets unveiled: A crazy idea that might just work

      • Ubuntu Linux Primed for Life on Tablets

      • Shuttleworth: Ubuntu tablets won’t be as “jarring” to users as Windows 8

        After today’s announcement that Canonical has created a tablet interface for Ubuntu Linux, company founder Mark Shuttleworth described his ambitions and answered questions from reporters in a conference call.

        He addressed many topics including how Ubuntu for tablets and phones will differ from Windows 8; Canonical’s discussions with hardware makers and carriers; potential release timelines for phones and tablets; whether Ubuntu devices will be “hackable”; and the chances of Canonical finally becoming profitable.

      • Ubuntu Pros and Cons

        Whether more people love Ubuntu or loathe it is an impossible question to answer. I know people who spend most of their free time promoting it as volunteers — and just as many who denounce it as a betrayal of everything free and open source software (FOSS) represents.

        The trouble is, so many hopes have been invested in Ubuntu over the years that it invites extremes. While some still hope that it will live up to its initial promise and bring Linux to the mainstream, others find the compromises for the sake of business a betrayal of those same promises.

        There is ample evidence for both these reactions — and, no doubt, for those in between.

      • Why More People Are Choosing Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu for tablets revealed with split screen multi-tasking, preview for Nexus slates coming this week

      • Ubuntu Linux Primed for Life on Tablets

      • Open Ballot: Are you excited by the Ubuntu tablet?

      • Ubuntu phones won’t ship till 2014, might be locked down by carriers

        Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that smartphones running Ubuntu Linux would ship in October of this year. Ubuntu boss Mark Shuttleworth says that’s a mistake. Today, the founder clarified that while a smartphone friendly version of the operating system — Ubuntu 13.10 — will be widely available in October with developer preview builds available this week, phones likely still won’t ship until early 2014. Though the OS will be ready for phones this year, he explained that the devices themselves would probably still need months of carrier testing.

      • Canonical to Highlight Ubuntu Cloud, Management Solutions

        As the CeBIT upcoming convention in Germany nears, Canonical has announced what it will be showcasing at the event–which, in turn, provides some clues about where the company behind one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems might be concentrating its efforts in coming months. Alas, Ubuntu tablets are not on the list. But if you’re interested in Ubuntu on servers in and the cloud, there’s going to be a lot to see in Hanover between March 5 and 9.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Tizen 2.0 operating system released to developers

    The Intel and Samsung backed operating system is seen as potential competition to Android in some markets

  • So Who’s Your Daddy? Return of the World’s Most Accurate Forecaster in Mobile. Today? Windows Phone Forecasts and Foibles

    So who’s your daddy in mobile numbers? Lets look at the forecasts made about Windows Phone, after the Nokia-Microsoft partnership was announced. If you remember, I recently examined the accuracy of the Nokia forecasts made (and found that I had once again been the most accurate forecaster in mobile. But will that reputation hold through this, very challenging Windows Phone forecasting conundrum?)

    When the world’s largest computer software company has said that the future of computers is mobile, and then sees its position in software for mobile phones (ie smartphones) fall from 12% and second biggest to 2% and 6th in the market – and at that point, promises to grow back to a ‘third ecosystem’ – it is either being brave with a cunning plan, or being foolish with forlorn hope and hype.

  • Ballnux

    • Descon Engineering Limited Maintains Global Lead with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications

  • Android

    • HTC One Announced!

      The new flagship phone from HTC has just been announced, and it’s planning to go head to head with the competitor flagship smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and the LG Optimus G.

    • Swipe Launches Android-Powered Phone Tablets In India

      After the launch of Fablet F1, Swipe Telecom has come up with two new 5-inch fablets in the Indian market – Swipe Fablet F2 and Swipe Fablet F3. Swipe Fablet F2 is claimed to be India’s first 2G dual SIM smartphone fablet. Swipe Fablet F3, on the other hand, comes with the latest 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system. These devices are set to add another dimension to the market priced at Rs 7,590 and Rs 9,290, respectively.

      Swipe Fablet F3 offers a dual 3G SIM and allows you to use your Skype account and make free video/voice calls to your contacts with the correct hardware support. Moving between home screens and switching between apps feels effortless and the browsing speed is enhanced. The Fablet F3 has a 5-inch enhanced display with 5-point multi touch Screen. It also includes 0.3 MP front facing camera and a 5 MP rear camera. For the first time, Swipe has introduced 360° Camera Technique, a camera technique which will take you to different levels of capturing images.

    • Sony Xperia Z May Get Android 4.2.2 Update In March

      If latest rumours are to be believed, Sony Mobile’s Xperia Z should get a taste of the new Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system by next month. What’s more, a leaked screenshot of the update for the Sony Xperia Z raises hopes that the newest flavour may come by late March.

      According to XperiaBlog, which got the screenshot from an anonymous tipster, the Jelly Bean update will arrive on the handset with firmware version 11.1.A.1.450 inside. “However, we are told this is a beta version, so expect the firmware version number to be in the form of 11.1.A.X.XXX by the time it is released,” the post adds.

    • Control Your Linux PC With Voice Commands: Siri For Linux?

      James McClain has managed to get voice recognition working on GNU/Linux. You can now open sites, ask questions and perform other tasks just by voice. While initially developed for Ubuntu it is distro agnostic and can be used by other distributions as well.

    • Samsung announces Wi-Fi version of GALAXY Camera

      Samsung today announced a Wi-Fi version of the Samsung Galaxy Camera will be offered in the coming weeks. Stopping short of giving a price or exact launch time frame, the hardware maker indicates that the camera is the exact same as the 3G/4G model. This means the same Android 4.1 Jelly Bean experience with 21x Super Long Zoom lens and a super-bright 16M BSI CMOS.

    • 51 Must-Have Android Apps

Events

• ApacheCon North America 2013 Only a Few Days Away

  ApacheCon North America 2013 (http://na.apachecon.com), the Apache Software Foundation’s (http://www.apache.org/) official conference starts this Sunday. The event will take place at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, Portland, OR from 24 February-2 March 2013 (http://na.apachecon.com/venue/).

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice and WebDAV

CMS

• Choosing an open-source CMS, part 2: Why we use Joomla

  In this, the second installment of our three-part series on finding the best open-source content management system (CMS) for your needs, we asked two organizations that use Joomla to explain why they felt that Joomla was the best choice for them, how the transition went, and whether they’re happy with the results.

Education

• openStudent replaces traditional student achievement system

  The Saanich school district of British Columbia has banded together and is funding an open source Student Information System (SIS) called openStudent. It has been licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2.0) to ensure that they have better control of the code. Yet, the decision didn’t come about easily.

Public Services/Government

• Open Source for America awards: Nominate someone today

  Open Source for America (OSFA) announced today the opening of its nomination period for the annual OSFA awards. Each year, the organization recognizes individuals, projects, and deployments that support its mission to encourage free and open source software adoption in the U.S. government.

Standards/Consortia

• Web Served 7: Wiki wiki wiki!

  This series is proving a lot more popular than I’d figured. Who would have thought so many people enjoy noodling around with Web servers? By popular demand, “Web Served” now enters the bonus round with two things I didn’t think I was going to be able to get to: MediaWiki in this piece, and Etherpad Lite in the next.

Study: All Internet Pages Connected in 19 Clicks or Less

Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási has published a new paper which claims that you can connect any two pages on the Web by 19 or fewer links. That may not seem impressive until you consider that there are more than 14 billion webpages in existence.

Slate’s Jason Bittel reported, “Everybody is familiar with ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’ right? Well, according to a Hungarian physicist, the Internet works basically the same way. Despite there being something like 1 trillion pieces of Web out there (websites, hosted images, videos, etc), you can navigate from any one of them to another in 19 clicks or fewer.”

Smitsonian’s Joseph Stromberg added, “Barabási credits this ‘small world’ of the web to human nature—the fact that we tend to group into communities, whether in real life or the virtual world. The pages of the web aren’t linked randomly, he says: They’re organized in an interconnected hierarchy of organizational themes, including region, country and subject area. Interestingly, this means that no matter how large the web grows, the same interconnectedness will rule. Barabási analyzed the network looking at a variety of levels—examining anywhere from a tiny slice to the full 1 trillion documents—and found that regardless of scale, the same 19-click-or-less rule applied.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Israel’s changing image

  The Instagram photo posted by an Israeli soldier, of a Palestinian boy’s head in crosshairs, has now become an international scandal, thanks to Ali Abunimah’s discovery of it. We are surely jaded by seeing evidence of this dehumanization all the time; but this image has demonstrated a power that other reports have lacked; and the optics of the Israeli miracle are changing before our eyes. Is this startup nation or the child-targeting nation?

• UN: Drones killed more Afghan civilians in 2012

• Drone Makers Take Aim at U.S. Market

• Armed UK Police Raid House Over Facebook Picture Showing Toy Weapon In Background

  Ubuntu phones won’t ship till 2014, might be locked down by carriers

• Is the Russia Prison System Working Pussy Riot Member to Death?

  A band member’s hospitalization offers a harrowing glimpse into Russia’s brutal prison system.

Cablegate

• RT Spanish interview with President Correa on Assange (video)

  Quito – Whilst celebrating his re-election in Ecuador yesterday, President Rafael Correa called for a resolution to the issue of political asylum in that country for Julian Assange. An interview with President Correa gives more details on the situation.

  Digital Journal reported on Monday on the call by President Correa for Europe and the UK to resolve the problems over the political asylum of Assange in Ecuador.

• Big Brother is winning – even with Facebook and Wikileaks

  Repressive regimes know how to use Facebook too. You know what your government wants you to know.

• Ecuadorian President Vows To Never Backtrack On Protecting Julian Assange

• The Goldsmith legacy: from failed coup to radicalism – unpacking the political baggage

  Jemima Goldsmith married Imran Khan, the famous Pakistani cricketer, now politician. Jemima is opposed to war and campaigned against the Iraq War in particular and, more recently, the use of drones. She is reputedly worth £20 million and when Julian Assange needed bail money to avoid extradition to Sweden, Jemima Khan was one of those who nobly obliged.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Friendly Oil–Not the Venezuelan Kind

  With the Keystone climate protests in Washington bringing climate change back into the media, we’re hearing a lot about how the Keystone pipeline will, at the very least, mean that we’ll be getting our oil from a nice country.

Finance

• Michael M. Thomas’ Solution to the Crisis

  Throw in what’s in the “stimulus” package and you’re probably at close to $3 trillion.

  So why not simply distribute $25,000 tax free to every U.S. taxpayer? There are 100 million of us, in round figures, so we’re talking about $2.5 trillion, give or take.

• Anti-austerity strike to bring Greece to a standstill

  Greek workers walk off the job on Wednesday in a nationwide anti-austerity strike that will disrupt transport, shut public schools and tax offices and leave hospitals working with emergency staff.

Privacy

• EU Parliament: Will Liberals (ALDE) Weaken Privacy in Industry Committee?

  While the “Industry” (ITRE) committee is about to vote on its opinion regarding data protection regulation, it is now clear that the outcome will depend on the Members of the liberal ALDE group. They will have to choose between allowing full-on exploitation of our personal data or imposing tough safeguards to protect our fundamental right to privacy. Citizens must act today 20 February before 4pm and urge their MEPs to defend the general interest by choosing the latter.

• Southampton Council in the dock

  Southampton Council’s attempt to justify it’s policy of requiring taxis to record audio and video of every journey took another blow yesterday when the ‘First Tier Tribunal’ ruled against it.

• Application of the DPA to surveillance activities

  The First-Tier Tribunal (“FTT”) has just issued the first ever tribunal decision concerning the application of the Data Protection Act 1998 (“DPA”) to surveillance activities: Southampton City Council v The Information Commissioner EA/2012/0171, 19 February 2013. In this case, the Council’s licensing committee had resolved in 2009 that all taxis it licensed should be fitted with digital cameras, which made a continuous audio-visual recording of passengers. The Information Commissioner (“ICO”) issued an enforcement notice against the Council under the DPA, requiring the Council to stop audio recording, because it was in breach of the Data Protection Principles in the Act (the first Data Protection Principle in particular).

Civil Rights

• Think there’s no alternative? Latin America has a few

  Not only have leaders from Ecuador to Venezuela delivered huge social gains – they keep winning elections too

• Aaron Swartz’s FBI File

  Two of the 23 pages were not released, according to the FBI, due to; privacy (U.S.C Section 552 (b)(7)(C)), sources and methods (U.S.C Section 552 (b)(7)(E)) and, curiously, putting someone’s life in danger (U.S.C Section 552 (b)(7)(F)). Putting someone’s life in danger? Typically that refers to informants. Did someone close to Swartz provide information to the FBI on him or is the FBI just being really dramatic? Or is this standard justification for not releasing the Special Agent on the case’s name? I am honestly still confused by that box being checked off.

• Aaron Swartz’s FBI File

DRM

• I Can’t Let You Do That, Dave

  In my new novel, Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, I explore what happens to people when their computers don’t listen to them anymore. Imagine a world where you tell your computer to copy a file, or to play it, or display it, and it says no, where it looks at you out of the webcam’s unblinking eye and says, “I can’t let you do that, Dave.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Wikimedia and Internet Brands settle travel wiki dispute

    The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a settlement of the legal dispute with Internet Brands, owners of Wikitravel, which began when the Foundation’s alternative travel site, Wikivoyage, was being planned. The settlement requires both parties to post on their sites a statement that they “believe there is enough room for multiple travel sites to co-exist, and for community members to contribute to multiple sites in this area.”

• Copyrights

  • Download a Fresh Copy of The Pirate Bay, With Permission

  • Verdict In Human Rights Court Would Mean Wholesale Censorship Of The Pirate Bay Is Illega

    The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has decided that a wholesale censorship of Google Sites in Turkey violates the European Convention of Human Rights, and orders Turkey to cease the censorship and pay damages. The court concludes that any wholesale web censorship is an interference with fundamental human rights, and therefore must be prescribed by law. This has direct consequences for other, similar wholesale censorship – such as that of The Pirate Bay.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Top 3: Steam, Sabayon and Ubuntu Phones Home

Top 10 Linux Networked Storage Systems Under $1,000

Cloud storage may be on the move, but local network-attached storage (NAS) systems continue to be in hot demand, especially as they integrate cloud backup and mobile access. In the enterprise NAS, unified storage, and SAN (storage area network) world, Linux shares the pie with Unix and Windows. But in the faster-growing small and medium business (SMB), small office and home office (SoHo), and consumer NAS segments, Linux is clearly dominant.

Kernel Space

• Linux file permissions and chmod

• The Kernel Panic

  If you have ever been on one of these types of calls, you know that they are always rather uncomfortable. The manager is upset because something went wrong, and on top of that it was something that they don’t fully understand. During such conversations I’ve found that it is normally best to keep explanations correct, but succinct. I explained that a kernel panic is what happens when the operating system encounters an error that it cannot recover from. That explanation seemed to be enough for him, but as I thought about it later, I found that it was not nearly enough for me.

• What’s new in Linux 3.8

  Improved graphics drivers and a new filesystem for flash disks are two of the most important changes in Linux 3.8. Kernel developers have also made improvements to btrfs and ext4 and merged a number of new drivers.

• The Non-Babble Intro to Cloud Computing on Linux

• Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.8 (Stable) in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

• umockdev: record and mock hardware for debugging and testing

• Xen 4.3 Is Running Heavy On New Features

  Xen 4.3 is expected to be released in June of this year. While the developers working on this virtualization platform are only half-way through its development cycle, they already have an impressive number of features that are coming into this next open-source release.

• Linux 3.8 released

  Linus Torvalds has released version 3.8 of the Linux kernel, which brings with it full support for the graphic cores in Intel’s upcoming processor generation Haswell and everything a system needs to use the 3D acceleration on all NVIDIA GeForce graphics chipsets. F2FS, a filesystem that is optimised for flash media as used in cameras, tablets, smartphones, USB flash drives and memory cards, is another innovation in Linux 3.8.

• Linux Foundation Welcomes Members From Android, Embedded and Cloud Communities

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that BORQS, Denx, Gazzang, Genymobile, Mandriva and Seneca College are joining the organization.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Radeon 2D Performance On Linux Remains Mixed

    The results in yesterday’s article, AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases, were interesting but limited to OpenGL games. In this article are more test results from the same system configuration and Ubuntu Linux releases but now taking a look at the 2D performance of the open and closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

  • X.Org Server 1.14 Is Being Readied For Release Soon

    The second release candidate of X.Org Server 1.14 is now available ahead of the official release in a few weeks time.

    RC1 came in mid-December while on Wednesday night was finally RC2 as tagged by Keith Packard. With RC2 being out, only critical bug-fixes will now be accepted ahead of the xorg-server 1.14 release. The final release of X.Org Server 1.14 is expected to happen on 5 March.

  • NVIDIA’s PRIME Helpers Are Ready For Linux 3.9

    Aside from a lot of other exciting DRM driver happenings for the Linux 3.9 kernel, it looks like the DRM “PRIME Helpers” that were conceived by NVIDIA to help them support DMA_BUF in their binary driver will be merged.

    NVIDIA can’t directly utilize the Linux kernel’s DMA_BUF buffer sharing mechanism — a zero-copy way to share buffers between different kernel drivers whether it be DRM or other sub-systems — due to GPL-only kernel symbols and bickering amongst kernel developers.

  • An SDK Is Being Developed For Wayland’s Weston

Applications

• NeonView 0.8.0 Released With Many New Features

  For this new release the code has been completely rewritten and NeonView was ported to GTK+ 3. There is a rather big list of changes, some of the most important including a completely redesigned interface, two sidebar panels for thumbnail previews and image information, rewritten code for parsing the config file, redesigned settings window, and a whole bunch of new fixes and improvements. Of course, since NeonView was ported to GTK+ 3 and the code was rewritten, there are still many bugs present, which should be triaged by the time 0.8.1 will arrive. Please report any bugs found in the comments below.

• Can Inkscape reduce the number of incarcerated people?

  The high point of my work in this library system was when my library coworker, Stephon Gray (who has learning disabilities), and I created a two-minute multimedia video: Fannie Lou Hamer: Freedom Fighter. Stephon wrote and narrated this biography of one of the most remarkable leaders of the civil rights movement. We used the ClarisWorks Draw program and a $5 software program from Sweden called SimpleCard, a simplified color version of Apple’s HyperCard.

  We put this video up on the web in 1996, almost 10 years before YouTube was launched. Within a week, I received an email from noted literacy activist David Rosen, in Boston. His email was short: “This is good.”

• Wunderlist

  During the past few years, I’ve written about task-management systems, “get things done” digital tools and ways to keep track of to-do lists in Linux. This month, I’m sharing Wunderlist, which is a cross-platform task-management and sharing utility that is truly amazing. When I say cross-platform, I really mean it too. Wunderlist works in Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, Blackberry, the Web and probably another half-dozen interfaces I’ve yet to encounter.

• Top Accounting and Financial Software For Linux

  The accounting software industry is one of the most lucrative in the world. Since the appearance of personal computers users have thought of ways to track and manage their money making use of this new tool. Financial software doesn’t have to cost you a cent though, here’s some of the most popular free and open source accounting software available:

• Proprietary

  • Unified Communication with Microsoft Lync on IGEL Linux Thin Clients

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Short Tip: Copy SSH-Identity

  • Building basic packages in GNU R

  • Schools run by states have always been political animals (indocrination as decided by panel) but increasingly corporate animals, too.

  • WordPress and OpenX integration

  • Monitoring Linux And Unix Server Temperatures With Opsview

  • How To Install KDE Plasma Active On Nexus 7

• Games

  • DOTA2 looks to be coming to Linux!

    So looks like DOTA2 is currently in testing for Linux in some form! Could this be an indicator it is getting closer?

  • SuperTuxKart is nominated for SourceForge’s project of the month

  • Running With Rifles release 0.8 with boats!

  • H4cked Off: Valve’s Team Fortress 2 freebies are good news for Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Linux wars: KDE project leader attacks Canonical’s “ethically weak” Ubuntu Mobile claims

    KDE Plasma Active project leader Aaron Seigo has attacked Canonical’s claims about its forthcoming Ubuntu Mobile platform.

Distributions

• Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We’ll find you the right Linux to swallow

  The third factor in our trio is how well the desktop of your choice is supported. In some ways this is a chicken-and-egg question for newcomers since most won’t know which desktop they want to use.

  Pretty much any Linux application can be installed on any Linux system, at least in theory. That means any desktop can be installed with any distro, but in the real world it doesn’t always work out quite that smoothly. For example, the Cinnamon desktop is a relatively new desktop interface developed by the same people who created Mint Linux, which means Cinnamon is nicely integrated with the rest of Mint. That doesn’t mean you can’t install Cinnamon on Fedora or Arch. You can and people do, but it will most likely be a bit trickier and finding solutions to your problems can be more difficult since fewer users will be using your particular setup. That’s why, to stick with the Cinnamon example, it would make more sense to use Mint if you really want to use Cinnamon.

• First look at SparkyLinux 2.1 “Ultra” edition

• Does Rebellin have a Cause?

  When I first test drove Rebellin for a section in an upcoming Linux Format, I reported that basically it seemed like a nice solid Debian respin, but many such are for free. It doesn’t seem that Linux users gravitate towards the projects that require payment before trying. When I explained this to the founder and, currently, the sole developer, he said that there are indeed reasons why folks should want to pay the $5.

  Is $5 too much to spend for a distro that you can’t test-drive first? Utkarsh Sevekar says, “people don’t realize that there are very small players (like me) out there who can’t wait till someone sponsors them or donate money to keep things going. Bills are a big thing.” He says the $5 fee, that will actually be used for broadband costs for the downloads, will also include “email support to all which lasts for the lifetime of the product. There is no monthly/yearly fee here. All included in the initial price. There are no limits to communication either. Customers can bug me as much a they want.”

• New Releases

  • First Release Candidate of Grml version 2013.02 released

    We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2013.02, code-named ‘Grumpy Grinch’!

    This release brings the Grml tools towards the upcoming Debian stable release (AKA wheezy), provides up2date hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.

    For detailed information about the changes between 2012.05 and 2013.02 have a look at the official release announcement.

  • Clonezilla 2.1.0-22

  • IPFire 2.13 – Core 66 released

• Screenshots

  • Sabayon 11 Screenshots

• Red Hat Family

  • CentOS 5.9 Gnome Desktop Review

    CentOS 5.9 leaves users with a warm fuzzy and familiar feeling offering Gnome 2.16 as the primary desktop which is featured in this review. The desktop prospects for this release are not very impressive, but the server capabilities are endless. Derived from the recently released RHEL 5.9, here is what this version has to offer.

  • Red Hat Updates OpenShift PaaS

    Red Hat is updating its cloud server application technology stack with a new release of OpenShift Enterprise.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project News – February 18th, 2013

    * Debian Installer 7.0 RC1 released
    * 700,000th bug reported
    * Bits from the DPL
    * Reports from FOSDEM
    * Update on Clang and Debian
    * Other news
    * Upcoming events
    * New Debian Contributors
    * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
    * Important Debian Security Advisories
    * Work-needing packages
    * Want to continue reading DPN?

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Never Say Never To A HTC Ubuntu Tablet

      • Ubuntu tablet announcement coming tomorrow?

      • Ubuntu to Unveil Its Operating System for Tablets on Tuesday

      • Ubuntu teasing a tablet product for tomorrow’s HTC launch

      • Mark Shuttleworth Addresses Ubuntu Privacy Issues

        “Mark Shuttleworth has for the first time talked about the privacy issues in Ubuntu Dash after being criticized by EFF and FSF. He mentioned some changes in the way use can ‘disable’ the search results. However the company has showed that under no circumstances they will disable the online search by default as demanded by EFF and FSF. Shuttleworth was simply spinning the wheel moving things around to give an impression that something has been done where as the core problem remains — Dash sends keystrokes by default and legally every user agrees to send such keystrokes to PRODUCT.canonical.com server to be shared with partners like Facebook.”

      • Mark Shuttleworth Addresses Ubuntu Privacy Issues: Is It Enough?

        There is some confusion, but the fact is no one (including Richard Stallman) has any problem with Canonical gathering user data and displaying ads when local searches are conducted. The problem is with the way it has been implemented. The feature is turned on by default and users did not even know (they were never informed) that their search queries were being sent to, and stored at, Canonical’s servers which are further shared with its partners.

      • Is Ubuntu Announcing Tablet Made By HTC?

        Canonical is probably going to announce Ubuntu Tablet OS within 24 hours. Since they are using Qt/QML for their mobile OS it won’t be hard to run it on a tablet, as it is extremely scalable and can run on different form factor. I was actually surprised to see they did not make any announcement for tablet.

      • Canonical reveals Ubuntu tablet plans

        As expected, Canonical has announced their plans for Ubuntu on tablets as well as the signing of a deal with a major mobile silicon provider to provide Ubuntu smartphone and tablet chips.

      • Bills to Label Genetically Engineered Foods Introduced in Illinois and Iowa

      • Dell’s thin, high-res XPS 13 laptop does Linux

        The high-resolution XPS 13 now gets Linux Ubuntu. The specs, with the critical exception of the Ubuntu Linux, are identical to the 1080p XPS 13 for Windows 8.

      • Dell upgrades its developer edition Ubuntu Linux laptop

      • Dell’s Ubuntu dev laptop gets much-needed display boost

        >

      • Sputnik 2 is here: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition goes 1080p and lands in Europe

        When we launched the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition at the end of November we got a lot of great press. That being said, the two complaints we heard loud and clear were 1) the resolution is too low, and 2) it needs to be available outside the US and Canada. Since that time we have been working hard to address both.

      • Canonical answers Ubuntu phone critics

        Most Linux fans like Canonical’s plans for a unified Ubuntu for PCs, smartphones, TVs, and tablets. Some, however, such as Aaron Seigo, a leading KDE developer, have doubts about this claim.

      • Developer preview for Ubuntu Phone due this week – Update

        Canonical is planning to release the “Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu for phones” on Thursday 21 February. This release will allow developers to put images of the phone-optimised Ubuntu onto the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. The images are billed as “early previews” to allow developers to create applications for the phone operating system and, rather than being a snapshot of development, will be supplemented by daily updates.

      • Canonical Will Show Off Ubuntu for Tablets on Feb. 19

        Not only is Canonical working on getting Ubuntu for smartphones ready for consumers, but a tablet-optimized version in in the plans as well. The company put up a teaser on its website on Monday, pointing to an announcement on Feb. 19—the same day HTC is taking the stage to announce its new flagship smartphone.

      • Canonical teases Ubuntu tablet announcement for 19 February

      • Ubuntu tablets: Canonical teases important “tablet time” announcement tomorrow

      • Mark Shuttleworth Introduces The Ubuntu Tablet OS

      • Ubuntu for Tablets Coming to Nexus 7, 10

        Canonical today unveiled Ubuntu for tablets, which it said will help unify the Ubuntu experiences across phones, tablets, PCs, and TVs.

        A Touch Developer Preview will be released on Feb. 21 via developer.ubuntu.com, which will work on the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. That will come the same day as the developer preview for smartphones, which will be available for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4.

        The Preview SDK for phones will now be updated to support tablet apps, as well. Canonical said it will be “very easy” for Android developers to develop for Ubuntu.

      • [Update: Ubuntu tablet?] Could HTC also be bringing a tablet to New York City? [PICS]

      • If Linux is the future then the future is awful (or How To Install Linux Alongside Windows)

        You can type the names of applications into Ubuntu’s equivalent of a Start Menu to search for and launch various applications. For some curious reason, Ubuntu also returns results from Amazon.co.uk in this window. In the image above, I’d typed ‘scree’ to find the screenshot application and came across some Marmot Men’s Scree Short Softshell Pants for £85. These trousers appear every time I take a screenshot, so I began to wonder if they were any good. Well the Amazon reviews for the trousers are largely positive, with one happy customer reporting:

      • Mark Shuttleworth says users can easily disable Amazon ads in Ubuntu

        THE FOUNDER of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth has finally spoken out regarding the Ubuntu Linux distribution’s practice of sending users’ information to third parties, saying that in future releases there will be a “clear way” for users to disable advertising features.
        Shuttleworth’s firm Canonical sponsors the development of the Ubuntu Linux distribution and caused an uproar after it integrated Amazon advertising into the Dash desktop search feature, sending users’ keystrokes to Amazon to enable it to display personalised ads.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspbmc turns the Raspberry Pi into a media centre

  The open source Raspbmc media centre distribution has been released in its first stable version. Version 1.0 of the XBMC 12 based distribution transforms the $35 Raspberry Pi mini computer into an HD capable entertainment centre. According to the development team, Raspbmc can be easily installed to a USB stick or an SD card, even without prior Linux experience.

• Phones

  • Gartner: Worldwide mobile phone sales fall, Apple and Samsung stay on top

    The research firm’s latest report suggests that difficult economic conditions, shifting consumer interest and intense market competition has resulted in a worldwide drop in sales, which has not declined since 2009.

    Gartner said Wednesday that worldwide sales reached a total of 1.75 billion units in 2012, a 1.7 slump from 2011. In addition, fourth-quarter 2012 smartphone sales continued to drive overall sales, as Q4′s 38.3 percent hike based on the same period last year reveal. Smartphone sales in Q4 2012 reached record levels of 207.7 million units.

  • Tizen 2.0 Linux Based Smartphone And Tablet OS Source Code Released

    This week developers of the Tizen 2.0 Linux based operating system designed for smartphones and tablets, has released the open source software of Tizen 2.0 together with a software developer kit.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Galaxy S4 debut now rumored for March 14

  • Android

    • Archos Launches Free Version Of Android Video Player

      The free version of the Archos media player is supported by ads. Besides offering the excellent feature set as that of its premium cousin worth $4.99, the free version includes hardware accelerated video decoding support for most devices and video formats, and also the ability to play content from any computer/network storage in your local network (SMB and UPnP) or from an external USB storage device. It also features automatic online retrieval of movie and TV show information with poster and backdrop for both local and network content.

    • Say Hello To Androidly: An All-In-One Smartwatch

      After the much talked about Pebble, the new Androidly by an Indian start-up wants a piece of the smart watch pie too. The company claims that Androidly is better than the likes of Sony’s Live View, Motorola’s MotoACTV as well as Pebble, I’m Watch and Meta Watch presently available in the market.

      All of these watches offer features such as displaying your social network feeds, Caller ID, and the time. Yes, there are some brands which have their own app stores with around one to twenty applications available, but that’s the limit. According to Apurva Sukant, one of the partners in the company, Androidly enables the smart watch to do all that a smartphone can do by making optimal use of technology.

    • New Sony C680X device in the works? 1080p screen running Android 4.2

    • Google will have retail presence by end of year, rumor suggests

    • This Week In Android: Feb 11th-17th

    • Android 4.2.2: A better Jelly Bean rolls into the wild

    • Google Now for Android updated: Now it “gets” me

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • iPad to face greater challenges for market share, says analyst

What Does the FOSS Community Need?

What does the FOSS community really need? We’ve tackled that question from a few different angles here on OStatic. We’ve pondered whether Linux could benefit from a united, community fund and wondered whether the FOSS community simply needs better evangelists.

On Slashdot today, there is a lively discussion going on about what the FOSS world needs. Some of the ideas from readers are off the cuff, like this one: “Better hygiene. Less beards. More women.” Quite a few of the idea are good, though.

GitHub’s Boxen open sourced

GitHub , the Git-centric project hosting and collaboration company, has announced the open sourcing of Boxen, its management and automation tool used within the company for managing Mac systems. The project, which was originally named “The Setup”, was designed to allow developers to go from a new laptop to a system ready to hack the GitHub.com source within thirty minutes with a single command. They then ditched “The Setup” and wrote Boxen to replace it, so that any company could use it.

Events

• Interview: Roy Sutton

  Roy Sutton is the community manager for HP’s Open webOS. He supports developers in porting Open webOS to new platforms and is a contributor to the Enyo project. Roy too a few minutes for an interview with the SCALE Team about his presentation “From Closed to Open: The Open webOS Story,” which will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24, in room Los Angeles B.

• SCALE 11X update

  An update on events and happenings at SCALE 11x coming next weekend in Los Angeles.

• SCALE 11X: Game on

  With more than 100 exhibitors and about 95 speakers at SCALE 11X this weekend, there’s a lot to do and see. But when the sun goes down, the sessions end and the expo hall closes, the fun really begins for the attendees.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Report on the activity of companies in the WebKit project

    Today Bitergia presents the first of a series on analytics for the WebKit project. After the preview we published some weeks ago, we finally have more detailed and accurate numbers about the evolution of the project. In this case, we’re presenting a report on the activity of the companies contributing to WebKit based on the analysis of reviewed commits.

• Mozilla

  • Download Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac and Linux

    Firefox 19 is slated for an official release on Tuesday, it will be released in few hours. If you can’t wait to grab the download you can do so through the Mozilla FTP servers. Downloads are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Browse the FTP folder and identify your platform file and download.

  • Mozilla Won’t Join Opera at the WebKit Party

    Last week, Opera Software announced that its browser has reached 300 million active users, and dropped the news that the browser will move away from the longstanding Presto rendering engine and moving to WebKit. As noted here, this means that the number of browsing rendering engines to take seriously moves down to only three players, and WebKit–already legendary in the open source world–gets even more momentum and community involvement. But many observers are noting that the move isolates Mozilla, which remains focused on its Gecko Web rendering engine and SpiderMonkey Javascript engine for the Firefox browser.

  • Chrome OS Was Originally Based On……Firefox?

    Former Google engineer Jeff Nelson has a blog post up that is generating lots of buzz due to the inside details it supplies about the origin of Google’s Chrome OS platform. The cloiud-focused operating system has drawn lots of headlines lately as more individual users, schools and businesses adopt Chromebooks.

    It’s well-known that the Chromium core of Chrome OS was based on Linux, and Canonical even helped Google shape the operating system. But among the details that Nelson recalls, the first versions of Chrome OS were actually based on Mozilla Firefox.

SaaS/Big Data

• Ernst & Young: Cloud, SaaS dominating tech industry acquisitions

• Rackspace lands Staples as cloud customer, OpenStack pilots ramp

  During Rackspace’s third quarter, the company had a bevy of high-level conversations with technology executives about OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier noted the fourth quarter turned many of those OpenStack conversations into pilots.

• Open source education program, CanDo, handles big data

  In 2005, Arlington Career Center teacher David Welsh had an unmanagable list of 77 Video and Media Technology competencies to evaluate for each student in his classes. A Yorktown High School computer science teacher Jeff Elkner was teaching his students to program in Python and bursting with enthusiam for engaging students and teachers in open source processes. I had a new job leading the SchoolTool project with a charge from entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Shuttleworth to create open source administrative software for schools around the world.

Databases

• How the co-creator of MySQL came to love databases

  Monty Widenius, the co-creator of the MySQL database, became a multimillionaire when MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008. But Monty subsequently left MySQL just before Sun was acquired by Oracle, and hired many of the original developers to work on his fork, MariaDB.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• How to affordably own your office software

  If you take a close look at Microsoft’s new Office licensing, it’s crystal clear: Microsoft no longer wants you to own your office software. They want you to rent it. So, why not get LibreOffice for free instead?

CMS

• Webmaking with trainee teachers

  This year’s programmes now include:

  * Plenty of blogging – we’ve a Drupal powered bespoke blog/portfolio system, so trainees quickly get used to adding links, uploading images and embedding media; we also showcase The 100 Word Challenge and a few sign up for the team.

Education

• Why libraries are intrinsically open and should adopt open source solutions
  

  Sharing is a fundamental part of the open source philosophy, and the same goes for libraries. Spreading, disseminating, and breaking down barries to gaining knowledge is a core mission of most library systems and their staff.

  That that end, libraries—which are essentially hubs of knowledge and gathering places for learning and continuing daily education—may choose to implement open source tools and software.

  An advocate for “open libraries”, Nicole Engard, is one of our new opensource.com community moderators, a long-time contributor, and a 2013 People’s Choice Award winner. She has a passion for libraries and wants libraries’ core operations to run on open source.

Funding

• Kolab Systems wins Swiss security specialist Dreamlab Technologies as new Investor

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Gnuplot—the Grandfather of Graphing Utilities

  In these columns, I have covered several different scientific packages for doing calculations in many different areas of research. I also have looked at various packages that handle graphical representation of these calculations. But, one package that I’ve never looked at before is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info). Gnuplot has been around since the mid-1980s, making it one of the oldest graphical plotting programs around. Because it has been around so long, it’s been ported to most of the operating systems that you might conceivably use. This month, I take a look at the basics of gnuplot and show different ways to use it.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Using open data for regional collaboration

    I have a regional, collaborative philosophy of open data initiatives and municipalities. In North Carolina, the cities of Cary, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill all share the economic engine that is the Research Triangle Park. They also share the innovation engine of five, top universities.

• Open Access/Content

  • LIVE WEBCAST: Lessig discusses Aaron’s Law

    A long time friend and mentor of Swartz, who helped develop RSS as a teen, co-owned the popular website Reddit, and was a key architect of the Creative Commons, Lessig has written about Swartz on his personal blog and the Huffington Post, and he spoke about Schwartz’s life and achievements on the radio show Democracy Now. Swartz is the inspiration for “Aaron’s Law,” a draft bill, introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), which would limit the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

  • Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist

• Open Hardware

  • ROS Moving to Open Source Robotics Foundation

    he open source Robot Operating System created by Willow Garage is in the process of moving to the Open Source Robotics Foundation. What does this mean for its future?

Reinstalling — gasp! — Windows

I love my Compaq Presario 2170CA laptop. It has every peripheral that I use in my multifarious adventures, being one of the last laptops made with both a floppy disk drive and a “real” parallel port. But I’m preparing to travel with it, and its 40 GB hard drive was full. So rather than buy a new laptop, I decided to upgrade the hard drive. I found a new 120 GB drive on eBay, and installed it with no problems.

That Mitchell & Webb Crook

he has now found a way to channel his hatred of the anti-necon movement into “comedy”, by making a sitcom poking fun at me, and making light of our government’s alliance with the Uzbek dictatorship.

Our Men, commissioned by the BBC, is a hilarious comedy about the drunken and incompetent British Ambassador in Tazbekistan [which the BBC says does not represent Tashkent, Uzbekistan] and the jolly despot President Kairat [No relation, says the BBC, to President Karimov].

Security

• There’s No Protection In High Ports Anymore. If Indeed There Ever Was.

• Feds’ IT Security Performance a Bit Less Dismal

  Though it is showing some improvement, the U.S. government is still earning low marks overall in IT security. An annual report card indicates that the performances of some agencies have actually declined in the past year — notably the Department of Commerce and NASA.

• Defence industry looks to cash in on soaring cyber-spend

  With governments around the world preparing to spend unprecedented amounts on cyber weapons this year, major defence contractors are seeking increased involvement in the production and selling of digital arms.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Israeli soldier posts Instagram image of Palestinian child in crosshairs of rifle

• Georgia Set to Execute Man with IQ of 70 Today

  Warren Hill has an IQ of 70 and placed in the third percentile on his middle-school standardized test. Doctors have found him to be “mildly mentally retarded.” But even though the US Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that executing the mentally handicapped is unconstitutional, Hill will be put to death today, barring a late intervention by the courts.

• The Undetectable Firearms Act and 3D-printed guns (FAQ)

  They might come for your plastic gun, but they’re not coming for your 3D printer just yet.

• Warning – Disturbing Images: The Last Hours Of The Son Of Prabhakaran

  A series of photographs taken a few hours apart and on the same camera, show Balachandran Prabhakaran, son of Villupillai Prabhakaran, head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). One of them shows the boy sitting in a bunker, alive and unharmed, apparently in the custody of Sri Lankan troops. Another, a few hours later, shows the boy’s body lying on the ground, his chest pierced by bullets.

  [...]

  The photographs will place additional pressure on David Cameron to announce whether or not he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM), e in Sri Lanka in November. A Downing Street official with Mr Cameron on his visit to India said on Monday that no decision had yet been taken.

  NGOs and organisations, among them the cross-party Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, have called on him to boycott the meeting.

• An Attempt to Take Tools From Tyrants

  Mr. Muhafdha continues to fight for human rights even though the Bahraini government has clamped down on any opposition, intensifying its electronic surveillance. “No matter how I communicate, they know,” Mr. Muhafdha said in an interview. “The regime has sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment allowing it to spy on everything we do by social media, e-mail and phone.”

• German Prosecutor Would Have Filed Indictments for CIA Rendition Had US Provided Information

  The German newspaper Spiegel has an interview with a German prosecutor, who ultimately decided not to file indictments in the case of Egyptian Muslim cleric Abu Omar. Omar was kidnapped in a CIA operation in Italy and rendered to Germany and then Egypt, where he was tortured.

  Last week, according to Reuters, a Milan appeals court in Italy sentenced the country’s foreign military intelligence chief, Niccolo Pollari, to 10 years in jail for his role. Pollari’s former deputy, Marco Mancini, was sentenced to 9 years. The sentencing followed a move by the court to sentence the American former CIA station chief to seven years in absentia for his involvement. And the court awarded 1 million Euros in damages to Omar along with one half a million Euros to his wife.

• Amazon sacks ‘neo-Nazi’ security firm

  Amazon has ended its relationship with a security firm in Germany following accusations that guards in neo-Nazi uniforms were intimidating foreign workers at the online retailer’s distribution centres.

• Amazon Fires ‘Neo-Nazi’ Guards In Germany

• German president meets neo-Nazi victims’ families

  German President Joachim Gauck has received the families of Turks who were killed by Neo-Nazis in Germany and said he wanted societal prejudices to be tackled as well as problems within institutions.

• Terror Tuesday: why kill list courts are not the answer

  If you were surprised to hear one particular rhetorical flourish in the President’s State of the Union address, imagine how Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) felt. For well over a year he and a handful of other Senators had been trying to obtain the government’s legal justification for its targeted killing program without getting any response from the Justice Department.

• Don’t even think of proposing new gun-control laws, legislator says

• Carrie Cordero on FISA Court Lessons for a “Drone Court”

• John Kiriakou Orange Ball | Fresh Juice Party

  Disgruntled Heiress teams up with Code Pink and Fresh Juice Party to throw posh prison send-off for
  CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou

• Is the FBI’s Community Outreach Program a Trojan Horse?

  In December 2011, the ACLU released FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, which showed that San Francisco FBI agents were exploiting community outreach programs for intelligence-gathering purposes. Now it appears FBI agents in Minneapolis have adopted this ruse, and may be using it in even more sinister ways.

• The Softball Question That Wasn’t

  During a Google+ Hangout yesterday, conservative commentator Lee Doren asked President Obama whether he claims the authority to kill a U.S. citizen suspected of being associated with al Qaeda or associated forces on U.S. soil. Notice the question was restricted to only a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil (our concerns are, of course, broader and apply to the White House’s illegitimate claim of authority to kill people it unilaterally deems a threat, even if they are far from any battlefield, abroad).

• The Lesser Evil

  What the Obama administration isn’t telling you about drones: The standard rule is capture, not kill.

• The Civil War and World War II: The Worst Guides in the War on Terrorism

  Obama’s defenders keep citing sui generis conflicts to justify his actions in radically different circumstances.

• Like a Swarm of Lethal Bugs: The Most Terrifying Drone Video Yet

• Why a `Drone Court’ Won’t Work

  President Barack Obama’s drone war is in danger of becoming an Abu Ghraib-style public-relations nightmare, drawing criticism at home from left and right (and, it seems, even many U.S. troops), spurring angry protests in Pakistan and Yemen, and becoming a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

• Obama, the puppet master

  The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

• As Automatic Defense Cuts Near, Defense Contractors Keep Congress At Arm’s Length

  Nearly half of the $1.2 trillion federal budget reduction would come from defense spending.

• Hubris Isn’t the Half of It

  As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air. The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week, and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world, as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people.

• Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Why Latin America Didn’t Join Washington’s Counterterrorism Posse

  There was a scarcely noted but classic moment in the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” to become the next CIA director. When Senator Carl Levin pressed him repeatedly on whether waterboarding was torture, he ended his reply this way: “I have a personal opinion that waterboarding is reprehensible and should not be done. And again, I am not a lawyer, senator, and I can’t address that question.”

• Racial Profiling, Islamophobia, and Whistleblowers: Targeting the Unruly Threat

• The AUMF Fallacy

  All of them claim the Administration is operating exclusively within the AUMF, and based on that assumption conclude certain things about what the Administration has done.

  There is abundant evidence to refute that. After all, the Administration invokes self-defense about as many times as it does AUMF in the white paper. The white paper actually situates the authority to kill an American in “constitutional responsibility to protect the country” — that is, Article II authority — and inherent right to self-defense even before it lists the AUMF.

• BATRAVILLE AND LEW: DoD plans are shortsighted, unethical

• Combatant Immunity and the Death of Anwar al-Awlaqi

  The importance of the combatant-civilian distinction was apparent when the Pentagon prepared the latest version of the Manual for Military Commissions [PDF], the rulebook for the trials of some of the alleged unlawful enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. The 2007 version of the Manual for Military Commissions, which made rules implementing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, said that “[f]or the accused to have been acting in violation of the law of war, the accused must have taken acts as a combatant without having met the requirements for lawful combatancy.” It went on to add that such persons “do not enjoy combatant immunity because they have failed to meet the requirements of lawful combatancy under the law of war.” That language was removed when the current manual was drafted because of concerns among senior US government officials that the language on lawful combatancy and combatant immunity could be viewed as an acknowledgment that CIA civilian drone operators are committing war crimes.

• UN Committee Criticizes Obama Administration’s Use Of Child Soldiers’ Waivers

  As the conflict in Mali wages on, reports from the frontlines reveal that the al-Qaeda linked Northern Mali rebels have conscripted child soldiers into their ranks. These reports reflect the persistence of a gross human rights violation in military conflict.

  And Mali is not alone. Child soldiers are used by non-state groups and government forces alike. American soldiers around the world have come under attack from forces using child soldiers, a complex challenge for the U.S. military. However, the United States has also provided military assistance to governments using child soldiers within their ranks or within government-supported armed groups. Child Soldiers International (CSI), an international NGO committed to preventing the recruitment and use of child soldiers, has found evidence of child soldiers in government militaries and government supported armed groups with which the US military maintains key military-aid relationships, such as Afghanistan Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan, Thailand and Yemen.

• The premises and purposes of American exceptionalism

  …insufficient to claim the mere mantle of Greatest Country on the Planet

• Don’t Trust the Government on Drones

Cablegate

• A defiant message from Assange and the Ecuadorians: we shall not be moved

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Village mascot deer killed in Romagna

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Back To Hurting Clients As Firm Is Targeted In Insider Trading Probe

  Goldman Sachs is apparently back to it’s old tricks despite the $550 million settlement with the SEC over hurting clients in the mortgage securities market. Acting on what may have been inside information (more on that later) the firm decided it wanted to heavily invest in Heinz (HNZ), which later would announce it was in talks to be bought out by Warren Buffet. So Goldman Sachs started buying up shares ahead of the merger.

• Goldman Sachs says cooperating with Heinz probe

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc is cooperating with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe into insider options trading in H.J. Heinz…

• DC’s quest to silence Elizabeth Warren

  No, what’s important here is what Politico actually got right in its story: namely, that the assumption in Washington is, indeed, that silence is a virtue – that, in other words, the best thing for a newly elected liberal senator to do is shut her mouth, go along to get along, play by the club’s rules and not make any waves. Summing up that Beltway conventional wisdom, Politico writes that only by “flying under the radar” can a liberal “star” like Warren develop a “reputation as a serious legislator.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Official City of Melbourne IP address used for biased edits to Wikipedia page for Occupy Melbourne prior to local election

  Someone using the City of Melbourne’s IP block has been introducing biased edits to the Wikipedia page for Occupy Melbourne, attempting to erase the record of council’s resolve to remove Occupy, and trying to smear the Occupy protest by removing the adjective “peaceful” from the page. The edits were made anonymously, but Wikipedia publishes IP addresses for anonymous contributors, and the IP address in question, 203.26.235.14, is registered to the city.

• Climate Change Rally Largest in U.S. History

  An estimated 40,000 rallied on a cold day in Washington, DC yesterday to urge President Obama to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline and destructive energy extraction practices, such as fracking.

  “All I ever wanted was to see a movement of people to stop climate change and now I see it,” said Bill McKibben, a Middlebury College professor, author and activist, and the movement’s Pied Piper.

• Things only a zillionaire could do to save America

• Smoking Gun For Foreign Office/BBC Propaganda

  An incredible Smoking Gun! Big Talk’s Kenton Allen tweets “Now off to the Foreign Office for a historic read through”. The exposure of Mitchell & Webb’s Our Men as state sponsored propaganda for the alliance with Uzbekistan is thoroughly confirmed. That the BBC is a party to this kind of insidious propaganda is disgusting.

• Is the Obama administration really the ‘most transparent’ ever?

  In other ways, the administration has not been so transparent.

Censorship

• White House Tasks Itself With Controlling Speech On The Internet

  The War of on Terror continues with a new grave threat – people writing things on the internet. The government is now trying to find ways to counter “online radicalization to violence” a phrase so broad it could mean practically anything.

• FBI destroyed file on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, ‘Times’ publisher behind the Pentagon Papers

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation has destroyed its file on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the late New York Times publisher who defied the federal government in the twilight of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, Capital has learned.

• Falsely Shouting Fire in a Theater: How a Forgotten Labor Struggle Became a National Obsession and Emblem of Our Constitutional Faith

• *VIDEO* IS MOUNT RUSHMORE BULLSH**?

  Penn & Teller’s Bullsh** was a Showtime special running for eight seasons with the express intent of murdering every sacred cow known to man. The libertarian duo’s show was an amazing tour de force that expressed the individualist arguments of free thinkers in America whose voices are often squashed by political correctness in modern society.

Privacy

• Can Police Be Trusted With Drones?

  Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern wants to buy a surveillance drone, or, as he prefers to call it, a “small Unmanned Aerial System.” At a meeting before the county’s Board of Supervisors last week, he claimed that he’d only use the drone for felony cases, not to spy on people or monitor political activists. But a few minutes later he’d seemed to change his mind, adding: “I don’t want to lock myself into just felonies.”

  Catcalls and hisses erupted from a crowd of some 100 anti-drone activists. One man later called the proposal “an assault on my community.”

• Should drones be used to spy on Americans?

  Drones aren’t just for fighting the war on terror in the Middle East anymore – they might be watching you.

• Ask the Expert: Is the Government Really Trying to Get Access to Websites for Surveillance Purposes?

• Washington State Residents Say “No!” to Police Surveillance Drones

  Last February, President Obama signed a bill allowing up to 30,000 police drones to be flown by police departments and the Department of Homeland Security within the United States to keep an eye on “we the people.”

• Logic of surveillance and problems of the enforcer class

  Ian Welsh’s piece on the “logic of surveillance” makes several good points, but this one really smacked me in the face: “The enforcer class…is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people.”

• The Logic of Surveillance

• Your Own Smart Phone, Turned Against You

  My day starts out normally enough: I drop the kids at school and head to the Starbucks, where I use my Smart Phone to pay for my tall Caffé Mocha soy because that’s how I roll: I save one minute not having to reach into my wallet to physically pull out my credit card, it’s logged into the app.

  After “checking in” with Foursquare, which tells me a couple of moms from the school have already been there this morning, and then my Facebook, which tells me another “friend” is headed there now, I dash to the Safeway, where I get discounts on my feta cheese, avocados, organic yogurt and Fat Bastard chardonnay because I logged it all in the store’s Just for U program. Again, that’s how we roll.

• First interview in 57 years for chief of Germany’s most secretive spy agency

  The head of the German military’s counterintelligence service, which is widely seen as the country’s most secretive intelligence organization, has given the first public media interview in the agency’s 57-year history. Most readers of this blog will be aware of the Federal Republic of Germany’s two best-known intelligence agencies: the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), tasked with domestic intelligence, and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the country’s primary external intelligence agency. Relatively little is known, however, about the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), which has historically been much smaller and quieter than its sister agencies. As part of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, the MAD is tasked with conducting counterintelligence and detecting what it terms “anti-constitutional activities” within the German armed forces. It is currently thought to consist of around 1,200 staff located throughout Germany and in at least seven countries around the world, including Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Djibouti.

Civil Rights

• Japanese Internment Camps Began 71 Years Ago Today

• Statement by Chris Hedges in support of Jeremy Hammond’s call for a fair trial

  The security and surveillance state is creating a hermetically closed system of power. It is doing this by rewriting laws to subvert the Constitution and grant itself the ability to criminalize all forms of dissent. The FISA Amendment Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the enhanced terrorism laws, the misuse of the Espionage Act to silence whistle blowers, and the National Defense Authorization Act, section 1021, which empowers the government to use the military to seize and detain U.S. citizens, strip citizens of due process and hold them in indefinite detention, are chilling examples of a new America, an America where liberty and freedom have become a hollow cliché.

• Guantánamo trials plunge into deeper discord as confidence in court’s legitimacy wanes

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Russian internet laws could make ISPs liable for user’s crimes

  New amendment that would make internet service providers disclose the identity of users who commit crimes online. If providers refuse they will become suspects in criminal cases instead of the users.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Bills to Label Genetically Engineered Foods Introduced in Illinois and Iowa

  California Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of GE foods in that state, failed in November 2012 by a very narrow margin, despite massive spending by the food and biotechnology industries and their lobbying groups. The European Union already requires labeling of all food, animal feeds, and processed products with GE content. And 50 countries require labeling for the GE products they import from the United States. A 2012 Mellman Group Study showed that 91 percent of U.S. voters favored having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require labels on GE foods and ingredients.

• Trademarks

  • Python Trademark Filer Ignorant Of Python?

    How could the company trying to file a trademark for “Python” have been unaware of the open source programming language?

  • Python trademark battle stirs backlash as Foundation appeals for help

    An Internet storm has broken out after an obscure UK-based cloud hosting firm apparently gained the upper hand in a battle with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) over which organisation should have rights to use the programming language’s famous name.

• Copyrights

  • Hyperlinking Is Not Copyright Infringement EU Scholars Say in EU court case

  • The Pirate Bay Reports Anti-Piracy Outfit to the Police

  • BPI set to block three more BitTorrent sites

    The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) will ask the UK’s six biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block three more sites accused of piracy at a court hearing tomorrow.

  • Anti-Piracy Groups Want Google to Lift DMCA Takedown Cap

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Price of Wintel

So, for about half the capital cost and half the cost of operation giving the same performance, you should use GNU/Linux rather than that other OS. It makes sense. When you add to these obvious advantages, which alone are sufficient to make the choice, the advantages of freedom from M$’s EULA, and the freedom to run the code, examine, modify and distribute the code under a FLOSS licence, it’s a no-brainer. Use FLOSS. Use GNU/Linux. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 15 Basic ‘ls’ Command Examples in Linux

  • Monitor your wireless network with Wireshark

  • Some useful command with iproute2

  • Installing And Using OpenVZ On Scientific Linux 6.3

• Wine or Emulation

• Games

  • How the Liberated Pixel Cup changed gaming on Linux

    Humans may be the most creative species on the planet, but we spend a lot of time doing tedious things.

    Look at the internet: it’s a revolutionary and disruptive technology, with the potential to change education, governments and scientific research, yet most people use it to post comments on YouTube videos of mobile phones being unboxed.

    Here in the free software world, we’re familiar with the collaboration opportunities that the internet brings, and many great applications have been developed by teams of programmers around the globe.

  • Natural Selection 2′s Lua-based IDE released as open source, use it to make your own game

    The very cool tones of Blues News bring word that Natural Selection 2 developers Unknown Worlds have released their ‘Decoder’ IDE – their Integrated Development Environment, or Thing Wot They Used To Program The Game – for free, taking the exciting decision to make it open source as well. The team created Decoder in 2007 using the programming language Lua, and until now they’ve been licensing it out to other developers, using the money to fund the company. Now that NS2 is out, Unknown Worlds have decided to not only remove the licensing fee but to open its innards to the public, with the intention of making it “the best IDE out there!”

  • 3 Linux games on the Be Mine Anniversary bundle

    There’s also music on this $1 tier: Be Mine Anniversary Special EP, Recalibrated Vol. 1 (unlocked bonus) and Square Tactics (unlocked bonus)

  • Dagon engine that poweres the horror game Asylum is open sourced

    …they need just under $20,000 more to hit their target with 12 days to go.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Comparison of Linux Desktops OpenGL Performance

  With Steam officially being released for Linux I took some time out this evening to run a few benchmarks on my Ubuntu 12.04 based Bodhi system to see how a few of the different modern Linux desktops compare in terms of OpenGL performance with the source engine. Please do not take my numbers to be anything super scientific or precise. I simply recorded a short demo using Team Fortress 2, loaded TF2 from Steam under each of the Linux desktops with no other background applications running and ran the demo through a built in source engine bench marking tool.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 27th January 2013

Distributions

• Precise Puppy 5.4.3 – Linux At It’s Very Best!

• This Week in Linux: Mageia, *Ubuntu, and Korora

  Several cool Linux items have popped up this week that deserved a mention. Someone over at Mageia is quite excited about the formation of a new documentation team. Just in case one person out there missed it, the Ubuntu family of distros released developemental versions of their upcoming 13.04s and the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS got an update. And for some strange reason, Chris Smart changed the name of Kororaa Linux to Korora Project.

• Five Best System Rescue Discs

  When your computer starts behaving strangely, won’t boot, or you start getting strange errors that you can’t pin down, a great way to troubleshoot the problem is to boot to a rescue disc and see if you can isolate the problem. It might be your operating system, it could be hardware, but you’ll never know until you boot to some other media to take a look. That said, there are tons of great system rescue discs to check out if you want a tool to save your ailing system. This week we’re looking at five of the best, nominated by you, our readers.

• New Releases

  • New Manjaro MATE Community Edition released!

    “Community Editions” of Manjaro Linux are released as bonus flavours in addition to those officially supported and maintained by the Manjaro Team, provided that the time and resources necessary are available to do so.

    Due to popular demand from members of the Manjaro community, this now includes a special new release of the MATE flavour for both 32 and 64-bit systems.

  • SystemRescueCd 3.4.0

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Virtualbox and USB support in Mageia 2

    For those people who use Mageia 2 and like to test other OSs or need to keep another OS for work purposes, installing Virtualbox from the Mageia repositories might lead them to a disappointment. The distro seems to only support Virtualbox OSE (as it is the only package in the repos), which does not allow one to enable USB support. Therefore, you end up with a Virtual Machine that cannot read your flash drive.

    To solve this pesky problem, you must understand that the situation springs from having installed a Virtualbox version that does not do what you need or want. You must, then uninstall it and grab the Virtualbox PUEL version package from the Oracle site here.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Bugday Strikes Back

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Picks Up Another Graphics Driver Developer

    Red Hat has hired another well known name from the open-source Linux graphics driver community.

    Rob Clark, the graphics driver developer from Texas Instruments that was part of the OMAP team and also collaborated with Linaro, has joined Red Hat. Rob Clark was the one largely responsible for the TI OMAP DRM/KMS driver, he’s also proposed DRI2 Video, worked on Wayland video playback, and most recently began the Freedreno driver.

  • OpenShift gears up with Enterprise 1.1 release

  • Fedora

    • rawhide: 2013-02-05 to 2013-02-12

      One rough spot was the boost rebuild. Boost has a cycle similar to Fedora, so a new major version comes along about every 6 months or so and requires rebuilding all the packages that use it. In Fedora thats around 170ish packages or so. I communicated with the Boost maintainers and we decided the best way forward was to just commit the new Boost and rebuild everything in one day and then fix up the parts that broke.

    • Fedora 16 end of life, Fedora 19 coming in June

      Fedora 16 reached its official end of life at the beginning of the week. This means that the release was maintained for 16 months as opposed to the usual 13 months. In most cases, Fedora discontinues support for a release when the next version over has been released for a month. The three-month delay in the release of Fedora 18 explains the longer support cycle in this case.

Devices/Embedded

• Fractal Design Node 304 Review – From NAS to Mini PC Box

  Last month saw the review of the Define R4, a big ATX tower that could easily double up as a small server case, with a lot of bells and whistles. This month we’re looking at the Node 304, also from Fractal Design, a small, Mini ITX case with a very minimal aesthetic. Don’t let appearances deceive you though, the Node can do a lot more than you’d think at a cursory glance.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung reportedly plans to sell 100M Galaxy S IV phones, could pull resources away from Apple

  • Android

    • MTV Launches Android Powered Phone In India

    • Google To Open Retail Stores?

    • EXCLUSIVE: Motorola Google Smartphone A ‘Game Changer’

      Motorola is set to launch a brand new smartphone in Australia which one senior Telstra executive has described as a “game changer”.

    • Black HTC One render leaks

    • HP’s Mobile Revival May Include Android

      CEO Meg Whitman may be directing HP to get back in the tablet game, and the first example could be an Android device. The move to go with Google’s OS is getting tongues wagging in Silicon Valley, but HP apparently wants in on an OEM trend to offer different operating systems as companies look to stay competitive in a changing computing environment.

    • Frosty attack on Android encryption

      Two researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany have demonstrated a way of accessing an encrypted Android smartphone using a freezer. To access the cryptographic key stored in the phone’s memory, they placed the phone in the freezer compartment for an hour, with the result that the memory content remained – almost literally – frozen. They used a special tool to read the cryptographic key from the phone’s memory (cold boot attack).

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • ARCHOS Introduces the New Platinum Range

    ARCHOS, an award-winning innovator in consumer electronics, introduces the Platinum range, a new line of tablets that feature a sleek aluminum design combined with the best high-definition IPS displays, quad-core processors and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. There will be three tablets in the range including an 8-inch, 9.7-inch and 11.6-inch, all of which deliver true vivid colors, sharper text and amazingly fast performance.

  • What about the PengPod tablet?

    So instead of just running a pure Android tablet, you get the option to run your favorite Linux distribution and Android in dual-boot fashion, provided your Linux distribution has an edition for the hardware.

Ease of Use is Key in New Zarafa WebApp Release

DataSift Launches Open Source Query Builder, Aims To Embed Social Monitoring In Enterprise Tools

PeerJS enables WebRTC browser-to-browser banter

PeerJS is a new open source JavaScript library and associated server which is designed to allow web applications running on different systems to contact each other. The developers say that PeerJS completes WebRTC, as the video connection protocol says nothing about how WebRTC-based clients should locate users to connect with.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Flicks Video Competition Returns with Familiar and New Hollywood Faces; and an Once-In-A-Lifetime Grand Prize for the Winner

    We are proud to announce that Firefox Flicks will welcome back: Edward Norton (Oscar Nominated Actor), Shauna Robertson (Producer of hit comedies, including Superbad & Knocked Up) and Couper Samuelson (We Own the Night and Sundance Winning short, Whiplash ), to the judging panel, along with new judges Bob Harvey (EVP Global Sales and Marketing for Panavision), Franklin Leonard (founder of the Black List) and Catherine Ogilvie (EMEA Marketing for Dolby).

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A free substitute for Microsoft Office

• Kim Komando Blesses LibreOffice

  The growth of FLOSS seems to be growing exponentially with few corners of the world remaining ignorant of FLOSS and therefor having choice in IT. What a refreshing time in which we live.

Business

• Open Source ERP software

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • DOJ To Brief Congress On Aaron Swartz Prosecution

    Justice Department officials will give a congressional briefing Friday afternoon on DOJ’s handling of the case against Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was facing years in prison when he took his own life, a congressional aide tells The Huffington Post.

    The aide said that Steven Reich, an associate deputy attorney general at DOJ, is expected to brief House Oversight Committee staffers, and potentially members, on Friday afternoon. A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

Programming

• Building basic packages in GNU R

• 9 of the Best Free R Books

  R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and visualization. The R language is frequently used by statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. The language is mature, simple, and effective. R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. It offers a large collection of intermediate tools for data analysis. R supports procedural programming with functions and, for some functions, object-oriented programming with generic functions. It includes conditionals, loops, user-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.

• More Perl in Texinfo 5.0

  Version 5.0 of the Texinfo GNU documentation format is now available and is designed to be more extendable thanks to the new Perl-based converter. According to the developers’ announcement, texi2any can convert Texinfo files to any format that is supported by texi2dvi and makeinfo. To use it, Perl 5.7.3 and its standard Encode module are required.

The meat scandal shows all that is rotten about our free marketeers

Digital capitalism produces few winners

Science

• Machiavelli arrest proclamation unearthed in Italy

  A British academic has unearthed a 500-year-old proclamation calling for the arrest of the Renaissance political writer Niccolo Machiavelli.

Health/Nutrition

• Israeli growers use CIA technology on vegetables
  

  The crops under the association’s authority undergo their testing through an Israeli firm called Lab Path, which imports the same equipment used by the FBI and the CIA. Unlike the American intelligence organizations, the Ein Yahav association does not actually use the technology to check for chemical terror in the crops, but the incredibly expensive, sophisticated equipment allows Israeli agriculturists to ensure that the vegetables they sell are entirely residue free and safe to eat, Sade explained.

Security

• A world of hurt after McAfee mistakenly revokes key for signing Mac apps

  A McAfee administrator accidentally revoked the digital key used to certify desktop applications that run on Apple’s OS X platform, creating headaches for customers who want to install or upgrade Mac antivirus products.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• New anti-NDAA bill would ban indefinite detention in Montana

• So, this is the office that will investigate Afghanistan’s Kam Air?

  Key questions about the credibility of the Afghan attorney general’s office as it prepares to investigate accusations that Kam Air is involved in drug-smuggling.

• Zygier ‘did not commit treason,’ was arrested because he ‘might’ have leaked info

  Mossad man was not a senior agent and did not do anything ‘iniquitous,’ writes leading Israeli security analyst, blaming Australian intelligence for putting media on his trail

  [...]

  Zygier was not a senior Mossad agent, Ben-Yishasi stressed, but rather filled a role as more of a “support operative.”

  Ben-Yishai speculated that an officer or officers in the ASIO, which called in Zygier and two other suspected Australian-Israeli Mossad agents for questioning months before his arrest — reportedly suspecting espionage activities and abuse of Australian passports — may have leaked the names of the trio out of frustration that the suspects hadn’t cracked, or injured professional pride, or anti-Israeli sentiment. Later, another factor may have been anger at Israel’s reported use of Australian passports in the alleged Mossad assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the Hamas weapons dealer, in January 2010 in Dubai. (A Kuwaiti claim that Zygier was himself involved in the alleged Mossad hit in Dubai has been widely discredited.)

• US Media to Palestinian Hunger Striker: We Don’t Care If You Die

  Palestinian prisoner Samer Issawi, 33, embarked on a hunger strike over 203 days ago to protest Israel’s inhumane treatment of detainees, making it one of the longest hunger strikes in human history.

• Florida Prisoner Who Escaped in Texas Is Killed

  A Florida prisoner who escaped in Texas after stabbing a detective with his eyeglasses was shot and killed by law enforcement officers early Saturday after police officers responded to a report of a home burglary near Dallas, the authorities said.

• The War and Intelligence behind Anwar al-Awlaki’s Targeting

  Believe it or not, there’s a fascinating debate going on over at NRO. First, Charles Krauthammer points to the muddle of the Administration’s white paper, which could have (he argues) just authorized Awlaki’s killing under the laws of war.

• Game of drones

  What are the implications of US news outlets concealing the truth about drones in the interest of national security?

• I Will Not Fight For Queen and Country

• The justice and security bill is a chilling affront to British justice

  It pays to ask a simple question when confronted with a piece of legislation such as the justice and security bill, which has become so complicated that probably no more than 100 people in the country fully understand it.

• The lonely soldier and the moral scars of war

  Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan find little ethical defence in the ‘just war’. Each of us struggles to make peace with our actions

• CIA nominee met with ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ filmmaker

  President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the CIA met for an hour with one of the filmmakers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the movie about the agency’s effort to find and kill Osama bin Laden.

• Why a Secret Court Won’t Solve the Drone Strike Problem

  In our system, courts don’t grant indulgences or offer absolution; they decide cases, and they don’t advise the president.

• [2012] No-Fly List Of Suspected Terrorists More Than Doubled In Past Year

• The paranoia of the superrich and superpowerful

  …special ops are blindly pushing the process of destabilisation forward.

• Zygier ‘bragged about killings’

• BATRAVILLE AND LEW: DoD plans are shortsighted, unethical

  As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.

  [...]

  But who is to say we should align ourselves with U.S. foreign policy? Though its goals are at times morally defensible, they can also be appalling. The techniques soldiers learn at Yale might be used, for example, to identify candidates for President Obama’s “kill list,” which is itself unethical and likely illegal. If someone lies to protect their friend from ending up on that kill list, is that a lie it is moral to detect? By training soldiers to perform these interrogations, Yale would be complicit in achieving these goals.

• Colleen McMahon: The Covert Op that Killed Anwar al-Awlaki Was Illegal

  But I’m not aware of anyone commenting at length on the section she titles, “Constitutional and Statutory Concerns about Targeted Killings,” a 5-page discussion of assessing targeted killing in terms of due process, treason, and other laws.

• Dumb and dumber: A secret CIA drone base

• Prosecutor on Rendition Case: Kidnapping a ‘Disgrace And Should Be Prosecuted’

• At Least 20 CIA Prisoners Still Missing

• CIA Finds More Photos Of Osama Bin Laden’s Corpse, But We Still Can’t See Them

• Could the Senate Intelligence Committee Do Oversight of CIA Drone Strikes?

  Different US Senate committees are supposed to do oversight of different federal agencies. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to oversee the Department of Justice. The Senate Armed Services committee is supposed to do oversight of the Pentagon. And the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to do oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the CIA is conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and since this is, to say the least, a controversial policy, the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be doing oversight of that.

Cablegate

• Ecuador election: President Rafael Correa wins

  Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has been re-elected for a third term with more than 50% of the vote. His main challenger has admitted defeat.

• Correa calls for resolution of Assange

  ECUADORAN President Rafael Correa has called on Europe to quickly settle the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has been holed up in the country’s embassy in Britain for eight months.

• Julian Assange: Women Are ‘Braver Than Men’

• Julian Assange: Wikileaks Party will attract female voters

• Westwood supports Assange on London catwalk

• Westwood supports Assange on London catwalk

• Westwood wears Julian Assange T-shirt on the catwalk

• ‘WikiLeaks Party will attract the support of many women’: Assange

• Tea with the ‘high-tech terrorist’

  That should be enough to slingshot him from Knightsbridge to Canberra. Set aside the cheap diatribes and what you think of Julian Assange as a person, or whether he’s done this or not achieved that. The fact is that electoral victory for him later this year would be one of those rare political miracles that make life as a citizen worth living. In a country weighed down by sub-standard politicians, sub-standard journalists and sub-standard freedom of information laws, the political triumph would be great. It would breathe badly-needed life into Australian democracy. And, yes, if the miracle happened, from that very moment the fun party down under would begin.

• John Keane: Julian Assange, from leaker to senator?

  WikiLeaks didn’t unleash the end to government secrecy some feared (or hoped for). But Julian Assange, holed up in a London embassy, is planning his next act: running for the Australian Senate.

• Lunch and dinner with Julian Assange, in prison

• Stratfor and Sri Lanka: An initial study of ‘The Global Intelligence Files’

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Billionaires Secretly Funded Vast Climate Denial Network

  Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

  The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives.

• A Debate: Should the U.S. Approve TransCanada’s Massive Keystone XL Tar Sands Oil Pipeline?

  Thousands of environmental activists from across the continent plan to gather in Washington, D.C., tomorrow to launch a two-week protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive pipeline would cross the Yellowstone River, as well as the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest freshwater aquifer in the United States.

Finance

• Report: Facebook paid no income tax last year

• America’s bail system: one law for the rich, another for poor

• Senator to watchdogs: bring more banks to trial

  A senator critical of Wall Street took regulators to task on Thursday for failing to take banks to court over misconduct, coming out swinging in her first public appearance as a member of the Senate Banking Committee.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• CNN’s Anderson Cooper Caught Faking Interview In Front Of Blue Screen Background

  The next scenes feature backstage shots of the Saudi Arabia “set” – an entire news crew, complete with fake props.

  Turns out Jaco, Rochelle and their crew aren’t in Saudi Arabia at all. They are on a sound set near the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, a faked broadcast that the cable news channel eventually had to quietly admit.

  The video contains clips of Jaco and crew clowning around. Jaco holds up a mock SCUD missile with a rag attached to its tail that acts as a rocket “plume.” The CNN reporter goes on to joke about how “they always call an ‘all clear’” when he orders his “burger and fries.” He clowns around about other things as well.

Privacy

• Philip Vermeer speaks to European legislators

  Ambassador Philip Verveer addresses internet governance and casts water on European cloud privacy concerns.

Civil Rights

• WHY BREACH OF CONTRACT SHOULD NEVER BE A CRIME

  In the face of efforts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), some buinesses have told lawmakers that the CFAA should be used to punish breach of contract where the breacher acted “for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. Such a proposal does not fix the ability of prosecutors to go after people for disregarding terms of service.

• NDAA & Incarceration of Japanese Americans

  The 2012 NDAA authorizes the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens on U.S. soil, without a warrant or due process if the military simply suspects them of supporting terrorism. This is exactly what the U.S government did in 1942 to 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, and who spent years in prisons without notice of charges, the right to an attorney, or the right to a trial.

• Progress and the NDAA

  Compare what Hirabayashi was fighting in 1942 with what is now legally codified under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Obama threatened to veto until it included language allowing U.S. citizens to potentially be indefinitely detaine

• Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker’s New Ambitious Feature Documentary on War on Whistleblowers

• Washington legislature considering a bill to challenge NDAA’s unconstitutional detention provisions

  The Washington State House is considering bill HB1581, which would create “the Washington state preservation of liberty act condemning the unlawful detention of United States citizens and lawful resident aliens under the National Defense Authorization Act.” There are 21 co-sponsors, with representatives from both major parties: Representatives Overstreet (R), Santos (D), Shea (R), Taylor (R), Buys (R), Condotta (R), Scott (R), Upthegrove (D), Fitzgibbon (D), Blake (D), MacEwen (R), Crouse (R), Wylie (D), Pollet (D), Pike (R), Harris (R), Kagi (D), Moscoso (D), Warnick (R), Magendanz (R), and Stonier (D).

• STATES PILE ON AGAINST FEDERAL DETENTION PLAN

  Indiana, South Carolina both bucking idea of arresting, holding Americans

• Fighting the NDAA: Hedges vs. Obama

  Chris Hedges, a former correspondent for the New York Times and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is lead plaintiff in a suit brought by a group of reporters and activists against the Obama Administration over the NDAA provision authorizing indefinite detentions without trial. He was one of a group of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the New York Times’ coverage of global terrorism.

• NDAA: Pre-emptive prosecution coming to a town near you

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • The Python Foundation Asks For Help Re PYTHON Trademark in EU ~pj

    The Python Software Foundation is in the midst of a trademark battle. A UK company is trying to trademark the name Python for software, services and servers everywhere in Europe. If successful, that would make it impossible for Python to continue to use the name in Europe, despite using it now for some 20 years. They have issued a call for help, which I’ll reproduce here to make sure everyone knows exactly how you can help.

  • Python trademark at risk in Europe: We need your help!

  • Firm moves to trademark ‘Python’ name out from under the language

  • Python v. Python: Software foundation fights for trademark in EU

• Copyrights

  • Pirate Bay Proxy Crowdfunds Legal Fight Against Hollywood Group