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02.04.13

Links 4/1/2013: Linux 3.8 RC 6, Privacy Issues Big in the News

Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • A Look Back at 2012: The Expansion of Learning on the Web

      2012 was a year of opening doors to learning on the web for more and more students each day. With the web, students and teachers are using new technology and devices to collaborate with each other in class, from home, and around the world. We want Google in Education to help open more doors and we’re pleased to announce there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education–twice as many as 3 months ago. And with several Chrome devices available today, there is a device for any school, any student, anywhere.

    • Chromebooks in Schools

      It’s a good start for Chromebooks but with 400% per annum growth expect to see global impact in nearly every use of IT very soon. The key to success of Chromebooks is that Google manages the software so schools don’t need to do that and Google, unlike M$ is not out to enslave schools making them indoctrinate students. It’s all about escaping slavery of Wintel to freedom of FLOSS.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.8-rc6
    • Tux3 File-System Gains Initial FSCK Implementation

      The Tux3 file-system has been in development for years while back on 1 January, the file-system work was resurrected. There’s now an initial fsck implementation for Tux3.

      Back on New Year’s was when a status report came out that signaled the Tux3 file-system had advanced and was now more competitive with the EXT4 file-system. Less than one month later, there’s now word of the initial fsck implementation for being able to fix the file-system in case of errors/problems.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Ladbrokes is gambling with fish extinction – and so is the government

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Meetup 2013 At DA-IICT, Gujarat; Registrations Are Open

        Largest KDE event after kde.conf.in of India, KDE Meetup 2013, is announced by the KDE community in collabration with Google Developer Group of DA-IICT. This is the first large scale open source event in Gujarat. It will be held on 23rd – 24th February at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This two day event aims to involve students from India in the KDE community and also to get them involved with Open source development.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Gnome 3 on OpenBSD 5.2

        It is no secret that I am becoming quite fond of PC-BSD: it is stabilizing nicely and offers a feature-rich BSD at one end and an amazing selection of window managers at the other. One thing it’s missing however is Gnome 3. Love it or hate it, Gnome 3 is boldly exploring “modern” desktop territory with the Gnome Shell which aggressively provides both elegant eye candy and swift navigation. Surprisingly, the best place to experience Gnome 3 on BSD is perhaps where you would least expect it: OpenBSD

  • Distributions

    • Everyday Linux User Review of Linux Lite

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2013.02 Released

        PCLinuxOS(often said as PCLOS), the distribution that “it’s so cool ice cubes are jealous” basically tries to make the best out of the other GNU/Linux distros and create an all-round good for everything distro, somewhat like Ubuntu and Mint and other Debian-based spin-offs. But PCLinuxOS feels more like Arch when it comes to updates, because it’s a semi-rolling distro, but it feels like a major distribution like Fedora or OpenSUSE.

        PCLinuxOS actually started as a bundle of RPM packages for Mandrake Linux in 2000, but in 2003 this little bundle became a fork of Mandrake Linux 9.2, eventually becoming a fully-fledged distribution.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • How I feel about GNOME 3.6 in the Fedora 18 final release

          I’m testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn’t do an install, though I’m certainly thinking about it.

          In this release’s GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications — all from GNOME proper — like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the “global” menu that pops down from the app’s icon in the upper panel.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • StormFly Wants To Childproof Your Computer With Its Ubuntu-Booting USB Bracelet

            When I was but a wee lad, I hosed my share of family computers simply because I wanted to help out — once I tried to free up space on a 6GB hard drive by deleting anything larger than 1MB. You can imagine how well that played out.

            I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the founders of Barcelona-based Now Computing went through something similar, because they’ve just recently launched a Kickstarter project for a device that should ensure it never happens again.

          • New Sync Menu Landed in Ubuntu 13.04

            With yesterday’s updates, Canonical uploaded a new Indicator Sync, updating the old Ubuntu One indicator, which was used in previous releases of Ubuntu.

            The Ubuntu development team planned this new Sync Menu for a long time now, and it appears that it will finally become reality in the upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system, due for release on April 25th, 2013.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 review

              To sum, Bodhi Linux is a good distribution, but it is not for everybody. If, like me, you like a distribution with almost everything you need installed by default, then this distribution is not for you. On the other hand, if you don’t mind a distribution with very few applications installed, one that lets you choose and pick what you what to install right from the start, without compiling source code, then welcome to Bodhi Linux.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • SCO Asks the Bankruptcy Court to Let It Destroy Its Business Records ~ pj

    SCO, now calling itself TSG, has just filed a motion [PDF] with the bankruptcy court in Delaware asking it to authorize “the abandonment, disposal, and/or destruction of certain surplus, obsolete, non-core or burdensome, property, including, without limitation, shelving, convention materials, telecommunications and computer equipment, accounting and sales documents, and business records.”

    Ah. “And business recrods.” Burdensome to whom? To whom would SCO’s business records be burdensome? Not me. I hereby volunteer to pay for storage for those records, in order to preserve them. Obsolete how? Does the bankruptcy court know that SCO has a petition [PDF] before the US District Court in Utah asking the court to reopen SCO’s litigation with IBM?

    The excuse is money. They are paying to store them, poor dears, as of January 31, I gather, since they ask the court to authorize payments nunc pro tunc back to that date. Either that, or there’s more to this story than you can find in the motion. They also ask the court to let it not inform all its creditors about this. Heh heh. Imagine how messy it could get if they all showed up asking for a computer or shelving.

  • Security

    • Apple: Would Steve Jobs Have Blocked Oracle Java?
    • Cyberwar, out of the shadows

      A PLANNED FIVEFOLD increase in the staff of the U.S. Cyber Command is indicative of how conflict is moving toward center stage for the military, a domain similar to land, sea, air and outer space. The anticipated growth, described in an article by Ellen Nakashima in The Post last week, is intended to protect the country and its private sector from attack, an urgent mission. But now that the United States is going beyond defense, expanding forces for offensive attack, there’s a crying need for more openness. So far, forces exist almost entirely in the shadows.

      The Post reported on plans for creation of three types of forces under the Cyber Command. Two are familiar: “combat mission forces” to serve in parallel with military units and “protection forces” to defend Pentagon networks. A third area is new: “national mission forces” that would seek to head off any threat to critical infrastructure in the United States, such as electrical grids, dams and other potential targets deemed vital to national security. These “national mission forces” are expected to operate outside the United States, perhaps launching preemptive strikes on adversaries preparing to take down an American bank or electric grid. However, senior defense officials told The Post that the forces might respond inside the United States if asked by an authorized agency such as the FBI.

    • Secret Rules to Let Obama Start Cyber Wars

      A secret legal review of the even more secret “rules” of the US cyberwarfare capabilities has concluded that President Obama has virtually limitless power to start cyber wars in the name of “pre-emption” of potential attacks coming out of another nation.

    • Broad Powers Seen for Obama in Cyberstrikes

      A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.

    • €10,000 Bounty On Cracking Mega Encryption

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Wars That Aren’t Meant to Be Won

      In War Is A Lie I looked at pretended and real reasons for wars and found some of the real reasons to be quite irrational. It should not shock us then to discover that the primary goal in fighting a war is not always to win it. Some wars are fought without a desire to win, others without winning being the top priority, either for the top war makers or for the ordinary soldiers.

    • Former Guantanamo Prosecutor Speaks Out Against Torture

      Retired Colonel Morris Davis was the chief prosecutor for military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay from 2005 to 2007. He resigned in objection to evidence gained by torture and political interference.

    • Ex-Gitmo Prosecutor: Obama’s Drone Surge as Damaging as Bush Torture Program

      Retired Air Force Col. Morris “Moe” Davis, once the lead government prosecutor for terrorism suspects at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, says that the US torture regime under Bush and now the drone assassination program run by the Obama administration have combined to make the world less safe and called both programs—whether they could be legally justified or not—”immoral.

    • Bin Laden’s death hasn’t stanched metastasizing of al Qaeda
    • Supervisor of Intelligence Estimate Hailed for Preventing War with Iran
    • Storm as the UK ‘justifies torture’ of the fighter who helped topple Gaddafi

      Libyan Abdel Hakim Belhadj ‘wrongly linked to Al Qaeda’

      He insists he is no terrorist and is bringing lawsuit against Britain

      Row comes days after Cameron visits Libya on ‘bridge-building’ mission

    • Mystery spook’s identity confirmed

      The identity of a United States spy who mysteriously landed in Wellington last year can be revealed as National Security Agency director General Keith Alexander.

    • CIA torture whistleblower honored after criminal sentencing

      Kiriakou and Radack also appeared on Democracy Now, where Kiriakou made clear that:

      This…was not a case about leaking; this was a case about torture….I’m going to prison because I blew the whistle on torture. My oath was to the Constitution….[a]nd to me, torture is unconstitutional.”

    • Obama Is Now America’s Hacker in Chief

      As the possibility of destructive cyberwarfare inches towards reality, the government is scrambling to figure out who holds the keys to America’s malware arsenal. Obviously, it’s President Obama.

      The New York Times just published the findings of an investigation into a secret legal review that set out to determine who actually had the power to order a cyberattack. Given his status as commander-in-chief, Obama seems to be the clear choice, but since cyberwarfare is such a new and unknown thing, the government hasn’t actually figured out the rules of engagement yet. In the past couple of decades, the power to use America’s cyberweapons has been shared between the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. With the exception of a series of strikes on the computer systems that run Iran’s nuclear enrichement facilities — an attack that Obama ordered himself — the U.S. hasn’t launched any major cyber attacks in recent memory, however.

    • Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Why It’s “Legal” When the U.S. Does It

      Credit the Arab Spring and what’s followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don’t overlook American “unilateralism.” After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there’s nothing like having a heavily armed crew dreaming about eternal global empires stomp through your neighborhood, and it’s clear enough now that whatever was let loose early in the twenty-first century won’t end soon.

    • Press Conference: Faith-based, human rights and ex-military leaders speak out against John Brennan to head CIA
    • US MILITARY EXPANDS ITS DRUG WAR IN LATIN AMERICA
    • FBI intensifies war on whistleblowers
    • The Torture Apologists Ignore the 4,000 Americans They Killed

      A bit of a row has started between Jay Rosen and Will Saletan for the latter’s attempt to “see how [the torturers] saw what they did” in this post. Frankly, I think Rosen mischaracterizes the problem with Saletan’s post. It’s not so much that Saletan parrots the euphemisms of the torturers. It’s that he accepts what John Rizzo, Michael Hayden, Jose Rodriguez, and Marc Thiessen said – in a presentation with multiple internal contradictions even before you get to the outright demonstrable lies — as the truth.

    • Why One Known Historian Is Disgusted by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick’s ‘Untold History’

      The introduction of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s book, The Untold History of the United States, declares before any history is recounted “we don’t try to tell all US history. That would be an impossible task.” It acknowledges there are things the United States has done right, but, “There are libraries full of books dedicated to that purpose and school curricula that trumpet US achievements.” The two are “more concerned with focusing a spotlight on what the United States has done wrong—the ways in which we believe the country has betrayed its mission, with the faith that there is still time to correct those errors as we move forward into the twenty-first century.”

    • The CIA’s case for torture

      Do we really understand what the CIA did and why? Was the payoff worth the moral cost? And what can we learn from it?

    • When Can the U.S. Kill Americans? The White House Won’t Say.

      The administration refuses to say why it thinks it can kill American terrorists abroad—even to the lawmakers entitled to know.

    • Backstage Glimpses of Clinton as Dogged Diplomat, Win or Lose

      Last summer, as the fighting in Syria raged and questions about the United States’ inaction grew, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred privately with David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. The two officials were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.

    • Panetta: Any Spending Cuts Would Make US a ‘Second-Rate Power’

      In an interview published over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta blasted even the notion of allowing any military budget cuts going forward, insisting that following through on the sequestration cuts, mostly just cuts in the rate of growth rather than in real dollars, would turn the United States into a “second-rate power.”

    • Why Police Lie Under Oath

      THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.”

    • Ayotte, Graham and McCain Will Participate In Hedges Oral Arguments

      Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain will have five minutes on Wednesday to explain why a lawsuit targeting the indefinite detention should be swatted down. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals granted their motion to participate in oral arguments in the Hedges v. Obama NDAA lawsuit on Thursday, setting up a court appearance for their lawyer on February 6.

    • An America cramped by defensiveness

      A week before I deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, my wife and I volunteered for a few hours at our daughter’s elementary school. As we left, her teacher told the students that I was an officer in the Marine Corps about to leave on deployment. “A nation does not survive,” he said, “without men like that.”

      [...]

      …only thing Americans agree on these days is gratitude bordering on reverence for our military.

    • CIA Whistleblower: “US is a Police State, Obama Consciously Allows Torture”
    • Barack Obama, Drone Ranger

      If you’ve seen the movie Zero Dark Thirty, you know why it has triggered a new debate over our government’s use of torture after 9/11.
      The movie’s up for an Oscar as best motion picture. We’ll know later this month if it wins. Some people leave the theater claiming the film endorses and even glorifies the use of torture to obtain information that finally led to finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Not true, say the filmmakers, but others argue the world is better off without bin Laden in it, no matter how we had to get him. What’s more, they say, there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/1 — if we have to use an otherwise immoral practice to defend ourselves against such atrocities, we’re okay with it. Or so the argument goes.

    • US Allies Aid Drone Strikes, But Hope to Ditch Legal Responsibility

      So far US officials have ditched responsibility purely on the president insisting whoever he kills must be legal, but as killings grow, various US allies the world over are finding themselves increasingly culpable by way of intelligence sharing, and fearing lawsuits.

      Noor Khan, a British citizen from Pakistan, has been trying to sue the British government over a US drone strike that killed his father, a tribal elder with no apparent militant ties.

    • Drone Strike Prompts Suit, Raising Fears for U.S. Allies
    • Waziristan tribesmen to move ICJ against drone hits

      The major tribes from Waziristan Agency have announced to move the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the US drone attacks in its rugged region bordering Afghanistan over massive collateral damage.

    • It’s govt’s duty to stop drone attacks: LHC CJ

      LAHORE: The chief justice of the Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday observed that it was the government’s duty to stop the drone attacks, adding that the court could not order a war against the US.

    • Pakistanis hate the drone war: The proof is in the data

      Writing for the Atlantic, three American academics posed a challenge in their article titled: “You Say Pakistanis All Hate the Drone War? Prove It.” I thought I did prove it a few weeks ago. But I welcome the opportunity to elaborate even further.

    • Inside the IDF: Drone wars
    • OUR OPINION: Africa drone base a first step for U.S.

      The drone base’s initial mission would be to track the movements of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and allied Islamic terrorist organizations. If the threat worsens, and it almost surely will, the drones could be armed, the base expanded and, if Niger agrees, U.S. special-operations troops based there.

    • Use of drone warfare by U.S. under attack

      This is a sort of armchair killing where drones are remotely piloted from bases in the United States. Using drones makes going into battle safer and cheaper for the attacker but not for the attacked. It’s Lethal Toy Story.

    • Pakistan army attack US drone strike retaliation
    • The Morality of Drone Strikes

      …Obama speaks the language of last resort, but his use of drones doesn’t really seem to follow that principle…

    • Amazon Users Pen Sarcastic Drone ‘Reviews’ For Children’s Unmanned Aircraft Toy

      The latest instance: a protest Amazon users are holding on the page of a children’s unmanned aircraft toy. It’s been inundated with users reviewing Obama administer’s use of military drones abroad, pointed out by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.

      The toy shares the “Predator” name with an unmanned aerial vehicle that has become a favorite of the U.S. Air Force and CIA. The use of drones — particularly in countries where the U.S. is not at war such as Yemen or Pakistan — have come under intense scrutiny in recent years for causing child casualties, with studies showing drone strikes could potentially cause unprecedented blowback.

    • Va. House panel OKs 2-year moratorium on drone use

      A House panel has approved a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on drones in Virginia while lawmakers work to craft regulations for use of the unmanned aircraft.

    • Obama’s CIA pick takes heat for calling drone attacks ‘ethical and just’

  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks reveals Icelandic FBI shennanigans

      After shooting began in Reykjavik at the end of January (Iceland Review), the organisation has revealed – completely co-incidentally, of course – an incident in August 2011 in which FBI agents were apparently booted from the Nordic country for arriving without asking first.

    • Minister: Iceland refused to help FBI on WikiLeaks
    • Assange receives Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts
    • Julian Assange receives Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts

      On 3 February 2013 at a private dinner at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, attended by more than 150 guests, Julian Assange will receive the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts 2013 for his WikiLeaks work including, amongst other releases, Collateral Murder. This award is given to people who have displayed extraordinary courage and who through their artistry have changed the world.

    • New developments in the case against Jeremy Hammond.

      Recently, Sue Crabtree of the Jeremy Hammond Support Network presented me with some very interesting new information in regards to the controversy surrounding Judge Loretta Preska’s Conflict of Interest.

      The first being that Judge Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler gave a sworn statement to the court concerning his relationship and email correspondence with the intelligence firm Stratfor. Jeremy Hammond is currently accused of hacking the Stratfor website and releasing millions of files, including the email accounts and passwords of all those in correspondence with Stratfor. Judge Preska’s husband Thomas Kavaler was corresponding with Stratfor and his business email and password were among those exposed. Though it has not yet been confirmed that Mr. Kavaler’s email account contained private messages between he and his wife Judge Preska, it would seem to be a safe assumption.

  • Finance

    • Age reporters to appeal to highest Vic court

      Two Fairfax journalists are going to Victoria’s Court of Appeal after being ordered to give evidence about their sources for a banknote bribery story.

    • Goldman, gov ‘rolled AIG’

      In his new book, “The AIG Story” (co-written with Lawrence A. Cunningham and coming out this week), Greenberg says that in the summer of 2008, the company was in contentious talks with Goldman Sachs and other investment banks to settle trillions in claims on questionable derivatives linked to debt obligations that Wall Street banks were writing.

    • Looking for Mister Goodpain: The Hopeless Search for an Austerity Success Story

      Three years ago, a terrible thing happened to economic policy, both here and in Europe. Although the worst of the financial crisis was over, economies on both sides of the Atlantic remained deeply depressed, with very high unemployment. Yet the Western world’s policy elite somehow decided en masse that unemployment was no longer a crucial concern, and that reducing budget deficits should be the overriding priority.

    • Corporate power: exposing the global 1%

      In these infographics, the Transnational Institute offers a visual insight into who dominates our planet at a time of economic and ecological crisis.

    • Goldman Sachs to improve Russia’s image for $500,000

      In a new image campaign to spur investment, the Russian government has hired the investment bank Goldman Sachs to persuade investors and ratings agencies of the country’s appeal. Officials hope the move will improve Russia’s credit rating, as well as its position in other international rankings, both of which experts say are underestimated.

    • Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Bill Gates is naive, data is not objective

      In his recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates proposed to “fix the world’s biggest problems” through “good measurement and a commitment to follow the data.” Sounds great!
      Unfortunately it’s not so simple.
      Gates describes a positive feedback loop when good data is collected and acted on. It’s hard to argue against this: given perfect data-collection procedures with relevant data, specific models do tend to improve, according to their chosen metrics of success. In fact this is almost tautological.
      As I’ll explain, however, rather than focusing on how individual models improve with more data, we need to worry more about which models and which data have been chosen in the first place, why that process is successful when it is, and – most importantly – who gets to decide what data is collected and what models are trained.
      Take Gates’s example of Ethiopia’s commitment to health care for its people. Let’s face it, it’s not new information that we should ensure “each home has access to a bed net to protect the family from malaria, a pit toilet, first-aid training and other basic health and safety practices.” What’s new is the political decision to do something about it. In other words, where Gates credits the measurement and data-collection for this, I’d suggest we give credit to the political system that allowed both the data collection and the actual resources to make it happen.

    • Lies, damned lies, and newspaper reporting… (Op-Ed)

      Last week the Sam Adams Asso ci ates for Integ rity in Intel li gence presen ted this year’s award to Dr Tom Fin gar at a cere mony jointly hos ted by the pres ti gi ous Oxford Union Soci ety.

      Dr Fin gar, cur rently a vis it ing lec turer at Oxford, had in 2007 co-ordinated the pro duc tion of the US National Intel li­gence Estim ate — the com bined ana lysis of all 16 of America’s intel li gence agen cies — which assessed that the Ira­nian nuc lear weapon isa tion pro gramme had ceased in 2003. This con sidered and author it at ive Estim ate dir ectly thwarted the 2008 US drive towards war against Iran, and has been reaf firmed every year since then.

  • Censorship

    • The Verge Hires Writer Who Quit CNET in Protest

      Greg Sandoval, the CNET senior writer who resigned in protest when the site’s parent company, CBS, interfered with its editorial coverage last month, has been hired by The Verge, the Web site that first revealed the full extent of CBS’s involvement.

      Mr. Sandoval will be a senior reporter for The Verge when he starts in a couple of weeks. He said in a blog post that he had received a “written guarantee from management that nobody from the business side of the company will ever have any authority over my stories.” The post, which he published Sunday night, also said, “Long before I arrived, The Verge committed itself to editorial independence.”

    • Breaking: Wikileaks Takes on Oxford Union

      Julian Assange is back in the headlines after WikiLeaks accuses the Oxford Union of censorship.

    • WikiLeaks accuses Union of “censorship”

      WikiLeaks has accused the Oxford Union of “censor[ing]” footage of Julian Assange’s address to the debating society in January.

      It alleged on Twitter that the Union had replaced the backdrop of the video, which was personally selected by Assange, with a plain still of the Oxford Union logo.

      The footage that Assange selected came from a controversial video released by the whistleblowing organisation in 2010. Popularly known as ‘Collateral Murder’, it shows the gun crew of a US Apache helicopter firing on Reuters journalists and civilians in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007.

    • 4 House Members Slam College’s Anti-Israel Event

      A scholar and a political commentator are about to let fly to some very, very dangerous speech at a New York college next week. It’s so dangerous, in fact, that four Democratic members of Congress are getting involved.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • To Resist, To Join Together, Occasionally To Win

      It was three years ago that we lost Howard Zinn, teacher, historian, activist, optimist, speaker of truth to power. He is missed.

      “If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future, without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past, when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than its solid centuries of warfare.”

    • The Real News Network Whistleblower Special
    • Help Protect The Next Aaron Swartz

      On Jan 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old internet pioneer and defender of online freedom, tragically took his own life. Aaron was facing 35 years in prison and relentless persecution for downloading too many articles, too fast from an online library of academic journals.

    • Aaron’s Law 2.0: Major Steps Forward, More Work to Be Done

      Representative Zoe Lofgren has posted on Reddit a modified draft of Aaron’s Law, a proposal to update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and wire fraud law in honor of our friend Aaron Swartz and to make sure that the misguided prosecution that happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else. We’re very pleased with the proposal’s progress and we’re hopeful about the future of this important bill.

    • ‘Homeland,’ by Cory Doctorow

      Last month, a 26-year-old Internet activist named Aaron Swartz killed himself. He had worked on many widely used online tools that, among other things, enable Web sites to syndicate their content. He had also been politically active, helping to drive the campaign that blocked the Stop Online Piracy Act. At the time of his death, he was under threat of prosecution — and decades in jail — for downloading millions of academic journal articles via the MIT network in hopes of making them freely available. In a statement, his family said they thought that his death was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Former RIAA VP Named 2nd In Command Of Copyright Office

        We’ve talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public (“promoting the progress of science”) it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players — the RIAA and MPAA — happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office. Just a few months ago we wrote about how the Copyright Office’s General Counsel, David Carson, had jumped ship to go join the IFPI (the international version of the RIAA).

      • CBS and CNET Protest Looming BitTorrent Client Ban

        CBS and CNET have asked a Californian federal court not to grant a ban on the distribution of file-sharing software through Download.com. They responded to a request for a preliminary injunction from a coalition of artists and billionaire Alki David who claim that CBS induces piracy. According to the media conglomerate this is not the case, and CBS argues that there are many non-infringing uses for BitTorrent.

      • Valve Sued In Germany Over Right To Resell Games

        Valve’s Steam platform has certainly been one highlight on competing with piracy here at Techdirt. As something of the iTunes of PC gaming, it provides a wonderful example of how a great platform and added value can give those who could otherwise be pirates a real reason to part with their gaming dollar. This isn’t to say that the platform hasn’t been associated with some issues, but Valve seems to be among those folks that get it right more often than they get it wrong.

      • Prince George’s considers copyright policy that takes ownership of students’ work

        A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

      • THE SECRET TO BEING CREATIVE

        It’s not nice to steal. Unless you are a poet, an artist, a musician, an architect, a writer, or you do anything that requires even a modest amount of creativity. Then it’s not IF you steal, but HOW you steal, that makes all the difference in the world.

      • Obama Administration Considers Joining Publishers In Fight To Stamp Out Fair Use At Universities

        In digging into this, we’ve heard from a few sources that it’s actually the US Copyright Office that has asked the DOJ to weigh in on the side of the publishers and against the interests of public univerisities and students. Yes, the same Copyright Office that just promoted a former RIAA VP to second in command. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

02.02.13

Links 2/2/2013: Android Apps on BB, Fedora Reviews

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What’s the next big platform for Linux?

    Glyn Moody wonders whether the car – a currently undeveloped yet important platform with great potential – can provide the inspiration for the next generation of Linux coders.

  • Don’t Write an Obituary for the PC
  • Friday Linux Potpourri

    It’s been another interesting week in the world of Linux and Open Source development. Several items have caught my attention today, so I thought I’d just do a round-up. Red Hat on another hiring spree, New Mandriva enterprise website, and the Free Software Foundation achievements are among the topics.

  • LPI Certification Exams Exceed 350,000 Worldwide

    The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that in 2012 the organization surpassed two significant milestones: delivering over 350,000 exams and 120,000 certifications worldwide since the organization’s inception.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • New ARM X.Org Driver Promises Better Performance

        While xf86-video-sunxifb sounds like an old X.Org driver from the Sun Microsystems days for some obscure SPARC system, this driver is a fork of the xf86-video-mali DDX driver. What makes this ARM X.Org graphics driver interesting is that it promises better performance on the Allwinner A10/A13 SoC compared to the ARM vendor’s official driver.

    • Benchmarks

      • Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Gaming Performance Comparison

        In this article are some early benchmark results comparing the OpenGL gaming performance of the Unity, Xfce, Openbox, LXDE, KDE, GNOME Shell, and Enlightenment desktops when running on a recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04. As many earlier benchmarks have shown, the OpenGL frame-rate for Linux games can sway quite greatly depending upon the desktop in use and more specifically the desktop’s compositing window manager.

        Back in September there was Ubuntu 12.10 testing done of the different desktops when Ubuntu’s Unity provided very slow to KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and the LXDE desktops. The 2D performance was also poor for Unity. Fortunately, with Ubuntu 13.04, there are new versions for most of the major Linux desktop environments plus the open-source graphics drivers continue to be improved.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME outreach programme attracts 25 women

        Twenty-five women have been accepted for participation in the GNOME-led Outreach Programme for Women which runs from January 2 to April 2, according to a media release from the GNOME Foundation.

  • Distributions

    • Weekend project: Check out ROSA Linux 2012

      With all the excellent Linux distributions available today, it can be easy to focus exclusively on the few that dominate the headlines, such as Ubuntu Linux, Linux Mint, Fedora, and Mageia Linux, to name just a few.

    • What do You Get when Trying to Burn a PARDUS Cat?

      The answer is simple: an active community that raises PARDUS ANKA from its ashes!

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s Crag Muzilla Joins The New ownCloud Board

        Craig Muzilla is vice president, Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat where he is responsible for the overall middleware and JBoss product business.

      • BLOG: Red Hat’s top 10 IT predictions for 2013

        In 2012, CIOs and IT teams in enterprises worldwide leveraged cloud computing architectures while they designed their data centres to best manage the explosive amount of structured and unstructured data. Red Hat envisions even more significant movement in the data centre in 2013 in cloud, middleware, storage, and virtualisation technologies. Here are our top predictions for enterprise IT.

      • Fedora

        • A new Fedora web magazine – Folio

          Folio is a new web magazine of Fedora Online community (fedoraonline.it also named FOL) focused on Fedora and Fedora Project. It is completely written in Italian by FOL’s guys.

        • Ubuntu vs Fedora

          Two of the biggest names in desktop Linux are Ubuntu and Fedora. Both have a huge and sometimes emotionally charged following and will defend one against the other vehemently.

        • Using Fedora Rawhide

          There were some comments asking how to upgrade Fedora 18 to Fedora Rawhide. Instead of answering one by one, I am writing this sort intro for using next Fedora.

          Fedora Rawhide is not a panacea to use the very latest GNOME, and it will give you some hard times. Using it with caution ;)

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Why I’m Leaving Ubuntu for Debian

            I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary operating system since 2005. Back then it was truly amazing. Before I started using Ubuntu I tried out Red Hat, Mandrake (and later Mandriva), Slackware, Gentoo, and even Debian. In all of them, something didn’t work. Usually it was wifi, but sometimes it was audio or video, or weird X config problems. But when I switched to Ubuntu, all of that went away. Rather than being frusturated that I was still a Linux noob and couldn’t even connect to the internet, Ubuntu helped me get past the initial barriers so I could really dive in. I’m eternally grateful to Ubuntu for this, and I’m very impressed at how successful they’ve has been at fixing bug #1 (though there’s still a long way to go).

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 2.2 review – Square peg for round hole

              Despite overwhelmingly warm feedback from pretty much everyone to my first review of Bodhi Linux almost two years ago, which pretty much sealed the deal, I decided to give it another shot. My label as an idiot, so to speak, notwithstanding, Bodhi has changed quite a bit since version 0.15. Now at increment 2.2, it continues its mission as a minimalist distribution based on Ubuntu.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Microsoft: Old Internet Explorer is terrible and ‘we want to help’

    As every web developer knows, one of the biggest headaches of building modern, standards-compliant web pages is getting them to look and work right in Internet Explorer. Well, coders, apparently Microsoft feels your pain, because it has released a new set of free tools to help you do just that.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Vicki Divoll and Vincent Warren on Drones and Democracy

      Bill explores the moral and legal implications of using drones to target our enemies — both foreign and American — as well as other intelligence issues with Vicki Divoll, a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, and Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

    • US drones targeted Pak with ‘renewed intensity’ in Jan 2013: Report
    • When the drones come home

      A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on one hand; an overseer of a weekly “kill list,” on the other.

    • American Drones Over Africa: New US Military Bases in West Africa
    • Prosecutors want more time to probe CIA prison in Poland claim
    • Chronicles of carnage: US ‘war’ in Pakistan regains intensity, states report
    • Obama channels George W. Bush in CIA pick

      John Brennan’s been a key player in the president’s possibly illegal drone attacks. Now he’s up for a promotion

    • Letters: CIA injustice

      The Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officials who approved or conducted “enhanced interrogations,” and yet it goes after the man who blew the whistle on these practices.

    • Exclusive: CIA Drug Money Plot to Overthrow Ecuador’s President Correa

      WikiLeaks Central presents an exclusive interview with Chilean journalist Patricio Mery, who claims the CIA has been actively plotting to destabilise or even assassinate Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, after US anger over decisions such as the granting of political asylum to Julian Assange and the termination of the US lease on a military base in Manta.

      Mery claims the CIA is running an Iran-Contra style drug operation in Chile, trafficking “about 200 kilos of cocaine per month” from Bolivia in order to fund anti-Correa operations. Early last year, Italian police discovered 40 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador’s diplomatic mail. Mery alleges senior Chilean officials were involved, and he has a dossier of proof for the Ecuadorian government.

    • US needs to keep up drone war against Qaeda: Panetta

      The United States will have to keep up an open-ended drone war against Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan and elsewhere to prevent another terror attack on America, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.

    • New Report Warns That Drones Could Be Used for Stalking, Voyeurism

      The sight of a drone in flight is likely to become a regular occurrence in the United States within the next few years. But the rise of unmanned technology could lead to new crimes like “drone stalking” and “drone trespassing,” lawmakers are being told.

    • Oliver Stone vs. the Empire

      Why he’s as tough on Truman and Obama as Nixon and Bush

    • Military Commissions Version 3.0: Legitimacy Still Lacking

      Yesterday, Judge James Pohl ordered the government to disconnect any outside censors to the courtroom, stating that he is the only person with the authority to decide whether the proceedings should be closed to the public. Judge Pohl’s orders followed a confusing episode on Monday in which an unknown government agency cut the audio feed during a pre-trial hearing in the 9/11 case.

    • The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

      Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

    • Drug Offenders, Not Violent Criminals Fill up Federal Prisons

      Almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is locked up in one country: the United States.

      For years, the U.S. has held the infamous reputation of having the highest per capita rate of incarcerated individuals on the planet, dwarfing that of other comparable industrialized nations. There were 1.6 million state and federal prisoners in the country as of 2011, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reports 492 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents were sentenced to more than 12 months in prison that year.

    • Meet the contractors turning America’s police into a paramilitary force

      They can already learn a lot about you with their spy technologies

    • The Case for Torture

      What really happened in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogations? Three former officials tell their stories.

    • Did Zero Dark Thirty Accidentally Tell the Most Dangerous Truth?
    • Seeing Torture for What It Is

      The critical outcry over the depictions of torture in the film Zero Dark Thirty has led to a series of interviews with the film’s director Kathryn Bigelow, in which she has addressed the negative reactions to this provocative subject. Despite her public condemnation of torture, Bigelow takes little responsibility for her film’s potentially harmful influence on public opinion.

    • Not Just Another Movie

      Zero Dark Thirty lies. End of story

    • Silenced

      Beneath the headlines, out of sight of most Americans, a critical war is being fought between those who would reveal the starkest truths about the United States’ national security policies, and a federal government ever more committed to shrouding its activities in secrecy.

    • Dirty Wars is as Bold as It Gets

      The documentary is rooted in an investigation on the surreptitious Joint Special Operations Command, a branch responsible for finding and killing targets that make a “Kill List,” some of whom are American citizens. Like the quotidian protagonist of a frenetic militia novel, Scahill is drawn into a world of clandestine operations implemented by men so furtive, they don’t exist on paper.

    • THE OMINOUS U.S. PRESENCE IN NORTHWEST AFRICA

      The point is that intervention is ultimately self-defeating, because it creates the enemies the government says it seeks to defeat. The way to obtain resources is through peaceful market purchases.

    • U.S. Drone Strikes Breed Hatred; Serve as Recruitment Tool for America’s Enemies

      In the days just before Barack Obama took the oath of office to begin his second term as president, the U.S. launched drone strikes in Yemen that reportedly killed 15 people. The administration’s escalation of America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles in its targeted killing of suspected terrorists across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa is provoking increased opposition at home and abroad. During the inauguration ceremonies in Washington D.C., the group Code Pink Women for Peace protested against the U.S. drone program and called on the Senate to reject President Obama’s nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Brennan, who is currently deputy bational security advisor and assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, is the architect of Obama’s drone program and is referred to by some as the nation’s “assassination czar.”

    • A RED LIGHT AT GUANTÁNAMO
    • Former prosecutor says treatment of Guantanamo detainees puts U.S. soldiers at risk
    • Terror Tuesday: Calling the shots in Yemen

      Dominating the skyline of Yemen’s capital of Sana’a is the fortress-like Mövenpick Hotel, which serves as a visual marker for what Yemenis term the city’s “Green Zone.” The nearby Sheraton Hotel is now used to lodge US Marines, while the adjacent British and US embassies hunker down behind blast walls, check points and razor wire. According to local residents, the buildings in the zone are being connected with tunnels as an added security measure.

    • Whistleblower John Kiriakou: For Embracing Torture, John Brennan a “Terrible Choice to Lead the CIA”

      Days after he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, John Kiriakou — the first CIA official to be jailed for any reason relating to the torture program — denounces President Obama’s appointment of John Brennan to head the CIA. “I’ve known John Brennan since 1990,” Kiriakou says. “I worked directly for John Brennan twice. I think that he is a terrible choice to lead the CIA. I think that it’s time for the CIA to move beyond the ugliness of the post-September 11th regime, and we need someone who is going to respect the Constitution and to not be bogged down by a legacy of torture.” [includes rush transcript]

    • Harry Reid On Guantanamo: ‘Nobody’s Fault’ Prison Camp Hasn’t Closed
    • CIA Chief-in-Waiting John Brennan ‘Knew of Waterboarding Interrogation Technique’

  • Cablegate

    • Iceland denies aid to FBI in WikiLeaks investigation

      Iceland refused to cooperate with an FBI investigation into WikiLeaks two years ago. The Icelandic Interior Minister said he ordered police to cease contact with the FBI, and made it clear their presence was not “well-seen” in Iceland.
      Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson informed the AP of his displeasure upon discovering that FBI agents had arrived in the country in August 2011.

    • FBI agents expelled from Iceland over Wikileaks probe

      Angered that agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) traveled to his country unannounced in an attempt to investigate the whistleblower website Wikileaks, Iceland’s interior minister had the Americans deported.

    • The International Manhunt for WikiLeaks

      One of the things DOJ is protecting from FOIA in Electronic Privacy Information Center’s suit is information other governments have shared with the US on the investigation.

    • As US Advances Toward Surveillance State, Iceland Reportedly Kicked Out FBI Agents Prying Into WikiLeaks
    • WikiLeaks: ‘Prabhakaran Thinks We’re As Monolithic As He Is’ – Dhanapala To US

      “In separate meetings with Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse and Peace Secretariat head Jayantha Dhanapala on September 15, the Ambassador discussed prospects for resumed negotiations between the Government of Sri Lanka (GSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While Rajapakse expressed guarded optimism, Dhanapala offered a bleaker assessment, noting that in the lack of movement tensions between the Tigers and GSL security forces have increased in Trincomalee and Nagarkovil, while the small but vocal ‘anti-peace’ lobby in the South had become more strident. Dhanapala does not expect the visit of Norwegian Special Envoy Erik Solheim to alleviate the situation, since he has returned to Sri Lanka with no new proposals from the LTTE. Dhanapala asked the Embassy to raise LTTE encroachments in Trincomalee with the ceasefire monitors. Both Rajapakse and Dhanapala agreed that the LTTE seems to have dropped the March defection of Eastern military commander Karuna as a pretext for refusing to negotiate.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

  • Finance

    • Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer on Whistleblowers and Prosecuting Bankers for Fraud (Satire)
    • Terrorism as economic stimulus for US
    • GM of Inter-American Investment Corporation Fails to Appear for DC Deposition, Leaves for Mexico

      The Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), the private sector lending arm of the multilateral Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), continues to display its contempt for the U.S. justice system, despite the fact that the United States government is the IIC’s largest single donor.

      Jacques Rogozinski, former General Manager of the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), failed to appear at a deposition in Washington, D.C. earlier this month on Tuesday, Jan. 15, in the case of Vila vs IIC. The Plaintiff’s counsel, Douglas Hartnett of Elitok & Hartnett, has been requesting Rogozinski’s appearance since October 2012. But the former IIC official left for Mexico immediately after he resigned as General Manager on Dec. 31, 2012. Although Rogozinski had been subpoenaed by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia he did not indicate if or when he would return to the U.S. for a future deposition.

  • Censorship

    • WHAT DOES THE GUARDIAN CENSOR?
    • CES tells CNET: You’re fired!

      Now, CES itself has put out a press release slamming CNET’s behavior and announcing that CNET won’t be allowed to produce the “Best of CES” awards anymore. Those awards are produced by CNET under contract with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which puts on CES. CEA said it will work to identify a new partner to run the Best of CES awards.

      “We are shocked that the ‘Tiffany’ network which is known for its high journalistic standards would bar all its reporters from favorably describing classes of technology the network does not like,” said CEA President Gary Shapiro in the statement.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Jury Finds Former College President Personally Liable for $50,000 in Victory for Student Rights

      A federal jury today found former Valdosta State University (VSU) President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for $50,000 for violating the due process rights of former student Hayden Barnes in the case of Barnes v. Zaccari. In May 2007, Zaccari expelled Barnes for peacefully protesting Zaccari’s plan to construct two parking garages on campus, calling a collage posted by Barnes on his personal Facebook page a “threatening document” and labeling Barnes a “clear and present danger” to VSU. Barnes first came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help in October 2007.

    • How The NRA Became The Most Powerful Special Interest In Washington

      The National Rifle Association is considered one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.
      The way it operates — including how it recruits and maintains an active membership — have given it outsize influence over lawmakers at the state and federal level.

    • Human Rights Watch decries U.S. prison system

      The NGO’s World Report criticizes mass incarceration and U.S. record of torture and extrajudicial killing

    • Bernie Sanders on the Independent in Politics

      Bill talks with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent in Congress for 21 years — longer than anyone in American history. In 2010, Sanders made national news when he delivered an eight-and-a-half-hour speech attacking the agreement President Obama and the Republicans had made to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

    • IBM Security Tool Can Flag ‘Disgruntled Employees’

      A new International Business Machines Corp. security tool uses Big Data to help CIOs detect internal and external security threats in new ways—and can even scan email and social media to flag apparently “disgruntled” employees who might be inclined to reveal company secrets, according to Sandy Bird, chief technology officer of IBM’s security systems division.

    • Asymmetric Extradition — the American Way

      Richard O’Dwyer is the Shef field stu dent who is cur rently wanted by the USA on copy­right infringe ment charges. Using a bit of old-fashioned get-up-and-go, he set up a web­site called tvshack​.com, which appar ently acted as a sign-posting ser vice to web sites where people could down load media. Put ting aside the simple argu ment that the ser vice he provided was no dif fer ent from Google, he also had no copy righted mater ial hos ted on his website.

      Richard has lived all his life in the UK, and he set up his web site there. Under UK law he had com mit ted no crime.

      How ever, the Amer ican author it ies thought dif fer ently. O’Dwyer had registered his web­site as a .com and the US now claims that any web site, any where in the world, using a US-originated domain name (com/org/info/net etc) is sub ject to US law, thus allow ing the Amer ican gov ern ment to glob al ise their legal hege mony. The most notori ous recent case was the illegal US intel li gence oper a tion to take down Megaup load and arrest Kim Dot com in New Zea l and earlier this year.

    • Meet the first head of state to head to trial in the Americas for genocide

      Rios Montt will be the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide.

    • Saluting Bradley Manning
    • Judge Questions DOJ Over Secrecy in Author’s First Amendment Case

      A U.S. Justice Department lawyer faced sharp questions today from a Washington judge over the government effort to restrict an author’s ability to challenge whether certain details in his book about the Afghan war should remain secret.

      Retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who penned a memoir titled “Operation Dark Heart,” is pursuing a First Amendment case in Washington’s federal trial court over the government’s insistence that passages in the book contain classified information that cannot be publicly disclosed. In late 2010, Shaffer sued the CIA, the Defense Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

      Shaffer’s case presents thorny legal issues regarding the control and disclosure of classified information in civil litigation. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, at a hearing in the case today to discuss procedural issues, expressed concern that DOJ’s litigation stance will hinder Shaffer’s ability to present his contentions by restricting the information he’s allowed to tell the court.

    • Tell President Obama to Appoint a Permanent State Department Inspector General
    • NYPD Handcuffed 7-Year-Old & Interrogated Him For Hours Over Missing $5, Family Claims

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • 7 Places to Find Creative Commons Images Online

        If you’re a journalist, blogger, or any other type of written content producer, you have likely found yourself hunting for images to use in your publications. It is important when using stock imagery that you make sure the images are licensed for your use. Simply performing a Google image search and grabbing the first file you find might be easy, but you face the risk of stealing someone else’s non-freely licensed work – which not only can be considered unethical, but can also damage your reputation.

02.01.13

Links 1/2/2013: Tablets Growth, PHP Milestone

Posted in News Roundup at 9:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A good week

    It’s pretty easy to set up a desktop system with most distros. I use Debian GNU/Linux because it has been around a while and has a huge repository of software. Let’s look at doing other kinds of things with your PC.

  • What’s the next big platform for Linux?

    Glyn Moody wonders whether the car – a currently undeveloped yet important platform with great potential – can provide the inspiration for the next generation of Linux coders.

  • Linux Format 168 On Sale Today – Linux vs Windows 8: The verdict
  • How to Get a Linux (Related) Job

    Working in Information Technology over the last twenty years (and the last ten or so as a senior engineer or team lead in various organizations) has exposed me to a lot of resumes over that time. Over the last five years, one of the more common questions I am asked is “how can I get a Linux related job?”. I will attempt to address that in this space.

    The most important thing to remember is that your quest for a Linux position at any organization is really no different than applying for any other I.T. position. Once you have identified the company and the posting (and a great place to get an idea of who is looking for Linux talent and with what experience, is The Linux Foundation), you need to focus on the attributes and experience you have that are directly applicable to the position you want. Your resume should then be tailored to highlight that experience throughout your career as much as possible.

  • GNU/Linux Inside
  • February 2013 Issue of Linux Journal: System Administration
  • With Open Arms, AccuPOS Embraces the Linux Platform

    As advocates press for more freedom of speech and more open platforms in general, AccuPOS’ POS software is already ahead of the game. Gone are the days of inaccessibility and clandestine operations; the most progressive POS software is now available on the Linux operating system.

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Just 12 More Years to Go: Enlightenment 18 Begins

      E17, “the only software which has taken longer to develop than Duke Nukem Forever,” was released little over a month ago, but today brought clues and news that the reign of E18 has begun. It actually began weeks ago because a new snapshot was released today, as well as an update to E17.

    • New E17 Stable Snapshot and the First of E18

      You read that title right folks. The first showing of Enlightenment DR18 (or E18 for short) has become a reality. Sure, it is nowhere near what the final product is going to look like – but it is a start. If you would like to follow the life cycle of E18 as it develops there is a new release manager blog that can be found here.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • # Plasma Active 4
      • Desktop Containment moving to Plasma Quick

        As many other components of the Plasma Workspaces, Plasma Desktop’s default Containment is being ported to QML. A technology preview of the containment is being demoed and can be tested by a wider audience now. While the port is mainly replicating the current desktop containment in QML, its interaction scheme to position and manipulate widgets on the desktop has been improved.

      • KTouch fun
      • First Patch Release Of Qt 5.0

        Digia has released Qt 5.0.1, the first patch release of Qt 5. This version brings more than 400 entries in changelog from Qt 5.0.0 to Qt 5.0.1. The most important changes are made to 3 packages – qtbase, qtdeclartive, and qtmultimedia.

      • KDE plans to merge Plasma desktops

        Developers at KDE are planning to merge the code for their Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and Plasma Active user interfaces in the not-too-distant future, according to a blog post by Aaron Seigo. As he explains, individual programs are currently responsible for each shell; their sources, however, consist of just three to ten thousand lines of code, since they otherwise make use of a common code base.

      • ITTIA DB SQL Leverages New Features of Qt 5.0

        Bellevue, WA — The ITTIA DB SQL Qt driver is now compatible with Qt 5.0.0, a major renovation of the popular application development framework. The integration of these technologies allows software developers for embedded systems and devices to take advantage of flexible embedded data management software and an elegant GUI framework. Features such as replication, data distribution, concurrency, logging, and change notification offer applications a unique competitive edge and enable rapid development of user-friendly data-driven applications with a level of performance that is only possible in native code.

      • QtWeb: Not Quite Ready For Full Time Browsing

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Support for RHEL 3 ends one year from … now!

        Red Hat has let it be known that by this time next year it will wash its hands of the third version of its Enterprise Linux.

      • Propaganda, Red Hat-style

        Does opensource.com tell both sides of the story? The short answer is no.

        If someone had reasoned criticism of Red Hat or anything to do with free software or open source, would that be published? Again, the answer is no.

        In September last year, I wrote to Red Hat with some queries about the site. Though I received a reply from one Emily Stancil, promising answers to my questions, nothing arrived.

        Ms Stancil then wrote to say: “I appreciate you reaching out. Unfortunately, since we’re in our quiet period leading into our earnings call next week – we’re not going to be able to provide feedback at this time. Please keep us posted if we can help in the future.”

        To me this meant that Red Hat did not want what could be not-so-positive publicity in the run-up to its big day in the sun.

        Earlier this month, I renewed my correspondence with Ms Stancil. This time, after a week, she sent me replies to my queries from Jackie Yeaney, executive vice president, strategy and corporate marketing, Red Hat. I reproduce them verbatim below:

      • Fedora

        • Kororaa 18 beta progressing well, final touches

          It shouldn’t be long now, firnsy and I are busy fixing the few remaining bugs (that we know about) and then we’ll be releasing it after some final testing. So far, so good. I’ll also be looking into a way to use FedUp to upgrade, but haven’t had time to test that yet. Our primary mirror is also currently down, so that’s causing a few issues.

        • Fedora 18 Gnome 3.6 Desktop Review
        • Fedora To Look At Reviving Apache OpenOffice

          Most Linux distributions have switched over to using LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

        • Fedora 19: MariaDB instead of MySQL, but no Btrfs

    • Debian Family

      • Bootstrappable Debian – New Milestone

        This post is about the port bootstrap build ordering tool (naming suggestions welcome) which was started as a Debian Google Summer of Code project in 2012 and continued to be developed afterwards. Sources are available through gitorious.

        In the end of November 2012, I managed to put down an approximation algorithm to the feedback arc set problem which allowed to break the dependency graph into a directed acyclic graph with only few removed build dependencies. I wrote about this effort on our mailinglist but didnt mention it here because it was still too much of a proof-of-concept. Later, in January 2013, I mentioned the result of this algorithm in an email wookey and me wrote to debian-devel mailinglist.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Smart Scopes

            A new feature of Ubuntu was discussed today (which is like an announcement but without overhyping it), it is called Smart Scopes and is documented here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SmartScopes1304Spec go read that first and then I have a video for you to watch.

          • Ubuntu’s rolling release: Pros and cons

            According to Canonical’s Kernel Team Manager, Leann Ogasawara, it is possible that Ubuntu will get rid of the current “new release every six months” model and move to a rolling release. (You can find more info in this recent video.)

            So, just what is a “rolling release”?

            It’s exactly what it sounds like, really. As individual new/updated packages are ready, they are put up on a repository and made available to everyone. New version of Firefox? No need to wait until the next big release of your operating system…you get it right away. New improvements to the Desktop Environment (such as Ubuntu’s Unity)? BAM! No waiting until next April. Immediately available.

          • 5 Ubuntu alternatives worth checking out

            Linux is a free and open-source desktop operating system, and is recognized as the third most popular desktop operating system in the world. Unlike OS X or Windows, there are many different versions — called distributions (or distros) — that all fall under the “Linux” umbrella. Among the many flavors of Linux, the Debian Linux-based Ubuntu is the distro that tends to receive the majority of mainstream attention. Interestingly, according to the ever-popular DistroWatch, much as Ubuntu has surpassed Debian in popularity, Ubuntu has been overthrown by its own forked distribution: Linux Mint.

          • Ubuntu’s challenge to Android
            and iOS

            THE world’s most famous and popular Linux operating system is making news with their claims to have come up with a smartphone version which it hopes will give Google and Apple a run for their money.

            Recently, during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Canonical, the company behind the Linux-based open source operating system, flagged off its intentions to challenge the might of Android and iOS with a brand new smartphone version which makes better use of gesture control and also enables a handset to double up as a PC when docked.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Achieves Bodhi Enlightenment

              Until recently, most desktop Linux distros were about the same on the surface. What differentiated them were things like configurability. Some distros, those preferred by Linux purists or designed primarily to be used as servers, required users to open a terminal and change settings with a text editor. Others sought to be newbie friendly, and had devised schemes so that most systems settings could be done point and click, just like with that evil operating system from Redmond.

            • Have some fun with Deepin 12.12 alpha

              Linux Deepin is one of my favorite desktop distributions. A Chinese distro that is based on Ubuntu Desktop, it is not just a rebranded Ubuntu desktop, but offers a desktop computing experience different from that of its parent distribution.

              Its graphical package manager, music and video players, and a cool screen shot tool, are original to it. While previous editions offered a customized GNOME Shell desktop, the next edition, Linux Deepin 12.12, will ship with a new desktop environment called Depth Desktop Environment (DDE). And the graphical package manager, music and video players, and the screen shot have been spiced up. From what I’ve seen, Deepin fans will be very pleased with DDE and everything else that comes with it.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi’s Momentum Picks Up, and Google Pitches In
    • Raspberry Pi Foundation receives Google grant for Schools

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

      • Android

        • Five great Android Wi-Fi calling apps

          There are many reasons to enjoy Wi-Fi calling, from starting video chats with family far and wide, to giving your old phone a new lease on life as a Wi-Fi-only device in little Johnny’s hands. However you want to use it, you still need to know which apps are best.

        • Android’s (quiet) killer feature

          It’s no secret that Android has lots of good stuff going for it, but one of the platform’s most useful and distinguishing features is one you rarely hear discussed.

          I’m talking about Android’s system-wide sharing capability — a process built into the operating system that many people take for granted. Android’s sharing function may not sound exciting, but don’t be fooled: It’s one of the most powerful and valuable components the OS has to offer.

        • Sony C530X ‘HuaShan’ smartphone leaks

          Sony’s Xperia Z and Xperia ZL are so far the most interesting Android handsets of the year, but the Japanese company seems to also be working on yet-to-be-announced handsets, such as the C530X, also known as the “HuaShan”.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 Review

        There are tablets and seven-inch tablets and portable devices that wear their Android affiliation on their sleeve, but Samsung has gone and combined the best of all that has come before and pushed it someplace decidedly newer and better with their new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. As the name will tell, the two models in this line represent a second generation of Samsung’s popular Galaxy Tab, and the 7.0 iteration we tried affirms the evolution away from the ten-inch range and toward a more compact, increasingly common seven-inch screen size that is more affordable and generally easier to handle. (For those who prefer the larger form factor, Samsung does also offer a 10.1-inch second-gen model.)

      • Tablets Mature

        After a year or two of 100% per annum growth we are about where tablets are mature technology.

Free Software/Open Source

  • 10 open source projects to watch this year

    Open source software projects may not typically have the marketing budgets necessary to match launch events like the one Microsoft just held for Office 2013, but that doesn’t mean their products are any less valuable.

  • Opensource.com adds community moderators to team
  • Opengear Expands Open Source Remote Management

    In an age where Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is the dominant tech company and proprietary smartphones and tablets account for an ever-growing segment of the market, it can be easy to forget that not all hardware is built on closed standards. Opengear, however, reminded the channel recently that open hardware platforms can be profitable as well with the announcement of two significant achievements in the remote-management market.

    When we last checked in with Opengear, which delivers solutions for remotely accessing and managing IT infrastructure that are built using open source technology, it was making inroads in the security space. Its newest product release, Opengear Lighthouse version 4, continues the company’s focus on security professionals, among others, while also introducing new features designed to enhance the scalability and usability of the platform.

  • How Does Your Workplace Use Open Source Software?

    Earlier this week I wrote about open source pragmatism and how even at an event like Linux.conf.au, there’s less evidence of one-sided tech zealotry than you might expect. Now I’m wondering: how does that actually play out in the workplaces of Lifehacker readers?

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Makes Chrome OS Launcher More Customizable

        The way Google’s Chrome OS is shaping up is brining it closer to what one would expect from a ‘desktop OS’. Google has just made the launcher of it’s Chrome OS movable. Now, you can place the launcher on either edge of the screen – right, left, top or the default bottom.

    • Mozilla

      • At Mobile World Congress, Expect Firefox OS Phones

        Mobile World Congress–one of the biggest events showcasing mobile devices and platforms and applications for them–is coming up in February, and among the sights and sounds slated for the event, you can expect Firefox OS phones. Among several previews of the conference, Computerworld notes that Chinese phone maker ZTE wil deliver a Firefox OS phone in Barcelona, even as TelefA3nica and Geeksphone are also preparing phones. It looks like these Firefox OS phones will end up serving larger markets than the niche ones that Mozilla initially discussed.

        Notably, Mobile World Congress 2009 was expected to be the big rollout for the first group of phones based on Android. As we noted in this post, the phones didn’t show up there, which caused a lot of confusion.

      • Accepting drones admission of US aggression: Saeed

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Oracle who? Fedora & openSUSE will replace MySQL with MariaDB

      For years, MySQL has been fundamental to many server applications, especially those using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software stack. Those days may be ending. Both Fedora (Red Hat’s community Linux) and openSUSE (SUSE’s community Linux) will be switching out MySQL to MariaDB for their default database management system (DBMS) in their next releases.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Why I contribute my changes to Libreoffice and won’t re-license them to a non-copyleft license?

      So after reading several times on another mailing list that Libreoffice developers should relicense their patches to make them available to other descendents in the OpenOffice.org ecosystem I’m indirectly responding in this blog post and explaining why I contribute to the Libreoffice project and license my changes only as LGPLv3+/MPL. This reflects of course only my personal opinion.

    • A good week

      It’s been a good and busy week so far, and it’s not over yet with FOSDEM starting in Brussels on Saturday. It started with something I’m quite excited about: I got elected at the Board of Silicon Sentier. Silicon Sentier is the Parisian hub of innovation, collaboration and start-up incubation. Among other initiatives, it runs La Cantine , one of the most famous co-working spaces in the world located in the heart of Paris and Le Camping, the Parisian start-up incubator located in the old stock-exchange building. I feel it’s a true honour , a mark of trust and I look foward to the future discussions and actions of the board with excitement.

    • LibreOffice 3.6.5 Finishes off 3.6

      Today The Document Foundation announced the release of their final 3.6 update, LibreOffice 3.6.5. “This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software.”

    • LibreOffice 3.6.5 arrives ahead of FOSDEM

  • Education

  • Business

  • Funding

    • EZ-EV Open Source Trike Kit Seeks Funding

      An electrical engineer by trade, Krysztopik built his three-wheeled hot rod in-between other gas-to-electric conversions like a Porsche Carrera and a Volkswagen New Beetle. His EZ-EV uses 24 deep-cycle lead-acid batteries powering a MES-DEA 200-250 AC electric motor that can take it up to 100 miles, with a top speed of 60 mph. Krysztopik, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, also plans on release open-source plans and kits, so people can make their own designs based on his work.

    • Help Fund “Producing Open Source Software” 2nd Edition

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Polish Defence Ministry moving to open source email and groupware

      Poland’s Defence Ministry will move to an email and groupware solution based on free and open source, according to the specification in the tender documents, published last November. The document calls for software that can handle between 15,000 and 50,000 users. The ministry wants to “eliminate licensing fees”, it explains in the request for tender.

    • Danish municipalities using open source to innovate and collaborate

      Danish municipalities are increasingly using free and open source software for collaboration and innovation of ICT solutions. More than 10% of the country’s municipalities last year joined the newly founded Open Website Community OS2. The group has already delivered a Drupal-based municipal content management system (OS2Web) as well as an application offering paperless meetings (OS2dagsorden).

      The twelve municipalities in the OS2 consortium are supported by 19 Danish open source service providers. The group in December started the development of the two next applications, OS2kontactcenter and OS2kle, says Jon Badstue Pedersen, head of section at the Syddjurs municipality.

    • Army C4ISR portal uses open-source software for faster upgrades

      The Army has upgraded its Single Interface to the Field (SIF) web portal using open-source software to make it easier for users to find information and documents.

    • Japan economy ministry launches data site under Creative Commons license

      Japan’s conservative economy ministry has launched a new site that offers its data for download under a Creative Commons license.

      The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s “Open DATA METI” project has gone public under what the government is calling a trial beta version, currently available only in Japanese. The website currently offers data on Japan’s energy use, industrial manufacturing, and intellectual property, as well as government white papers on topics such as small and medium businesses.

  • Licensing

    • VLC Multimedia Player Shows Changing Open Source License Is Hard, But Possible

      Licenses lie at the heart of open source — and many other kinds of “open” too. That’s because they are used to define the rights of users, and to ensure those rights are passed on — that the intellectual commons is not enclosed. Their central importance explains in part the flamewars that erupt periodically over which license is “best” — many people have very strong feelings on the subject.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source initiatives can strengthen cities’ downtown revitalization

      The open government movement in the United States is well underway, though still brand new in terms relative to the pace of the workings of government. Change tends to be delivered slowly, as evident during President Obama’s re-election campaign this year when many of us had to remind ourselves that though some change has trickled down over the past four years, much of it has yet to come to pass due to the inherent processes of government bodies. And yet, it still astonishes me how quickly ‘open’ ideas are being accepted, built, and implemented into city governments from east to west coast.

    • To honor Aaron Swartz‘s transparency fight, supporters submit over 150 public records requests

      MuckRock has begun processing 153 free FOIA requests submitted in honor of Internet pioneer and transparency activist Aaron Swartz, who died earlier this month at age 26.

    • How Aaron Swartz paved way for Jack Andraka’s revolutionary cancer test
    • EU Court annuls EU freezing orders on Iranian bank – and Wikileaks again

      In October 2009, Bank Mellat, an Iranian bank, was effectively excluded from the UK financial market by an Order made by the Treasury, on the basis that it had or might provide banking services to those involved in Iran’s nuclear effort. The Bank challenged the Order, and the challenge failed in the Court of Appeal, albeit with a dissent from Elias LJ: see Rosalind English’s post and read judgment. The Bank’s appeal to the Supreme Court is due to be heard in March 2013; it raises some fascinating issues about common law unfairness, Article 6, and the right to property under A1P1 , given that the Bank was not told of the intention to make the Order prior to its making.

    • ‘Github for recipes’ brings open source into the kitchen

    • Open Access/Content

      • Checking out open access

        Montreal, January 20, 2013 – From Wikipedia to shareware, the Internet has made information and software more widely available than ever. At the heart of this explosion is the simple idea that information should be open and free for anyone. Yet with publishers charging exorbitant fees for subscriptions to academic journals, university libraries are struggling to keep up.

    • Open Hardware

      • The State of Free Hardware for Robotics

        FreeIO.org is currently running a poll to determine what sort of free hardware project the community would most like to see developed. At present the poll is leaning heavily towards robots. So I thought it would be worthwhile to do a quick survey of existing free/open hardware robot projects to see what there is to work with and improve on. There are a lot of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) robotics projects out there too but this article will focus on hardware projects that are under free hardware licenses. See the FreeIO.org “about page” to learn more about the concepts of free / open hardware.

  • Programming

    • Linux Foundation Gits Growth

      This week, development firm Perforce joined the Linux Foundation which is of interest for a number of reasons. Perforce build enterprise-grade Git version management software solutions via the Git Fusion solution. For years, I’ve been told by ‘other’ enterprise development firms that Git is all fine and nice but it’s not for enterprise developers (yeaah I know,FUD!).

    • This Old (Open Source) House: Man Renovates Home on GitHub

      When Mark Wainwright visited his friend Francis Irving in Liverpool last May, he nearly locked himself in his small guest room just beneath the attic. The door was missing a knob, but it could still latch shut. Wainwright, a community coordinator with a U.K. non-profit group, wanted to let his host know about the problem. So he filed a bug report on GitHub.

      “The almost-attic room has no handle on the door,” Wainwright wrote. “It would be simple to add a handle and would prevent someone getting locked in the room – quite easy at the moment as the sprung latch is working fine.”

    • Open Source PHP Usage Tops 244 Million Sites

      When I first started building websites in the late 90′s, PHP was my tool of choice. Though many things have change on the web since then, PHP’s popularity has not changed, it has grown.

      A new report from Netcraft puts the current tally as of January 2013 for PHP sites on the web at a staggering 244 million sites. In context that’s nearly 40 percent of the 630 million total sites on the web today.

    • Rubygems site recovers from compromise

      The volunteers that run the Rubygems.org repository of components for Ruby applications are checking those components to ensure they haven’t been tampered with after the platform was compromised. Attackers uploaded a gem to the site which had a metadata file that used the Rails YAML flaws to copy initialisation and configuration information to the Pastie clippings site.

Leftovers

  • WikiMedia Foundation Releases GeoData For Geotagging Wikipedia

    The WikiMedia Foundation has added a new extension to MediaWiki, the foundation for Wikipedia, that adds geographic data for individual wiki articles. Aimed primarily at mobile users, GeoData will make finding information about your present location easy and fun.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • HP’s first Chromebook revealed in leaked spec sheet

      Update: HP responded to our request with a simple “no comment,” but we also noticed that the PDF has an Ad Embargo date of February 17th of this year — we expect we’ll hear the full story right around then.

    • The Game of Drones: Sahel edition
    • With Assange in Diplomatic Limbo, Sweden in No Rush to Press Rape Charges
    • Video: Watch Julian Assange’s address to the Oxford Union

      WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange’s address to the Oxford Union is now viewable on the video below.

      The Union last month invited Mr Assange to speak during the Sam Adams Award ceremony that recognsies people who show devotion to the truth.

    • The New Fourth Estate: Anonymous, Wikileaks, and –archy

      As government and industry collude, the interests of the powerful trample the rights of the multitude. Technology has granted invasive new eyes and ears to government agencies, spurning the right to privacy. Felicitously, the individual has also been empowered with two new tools to check the corporate state: hacktivism and leaks. The press has been captured by a handful of news corporations that are generally uncritical of government and fail to expose corporate injustice. The techno-libertarian culture has birthed the do-it-yourself fourth estate—usurping the illegitimate media and furnishing a viable alternative to the cartelized press. Two entities, Wikileaks and Anonymous, have emerged under this banner. This inquiry seeks to understand their history, methods, and to ascertain whether use of the discrete figurehead is efficacious.

    • Postcards from Sweden

      “Assange has been hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is accused of sex crimes.”

      “Hiding”! A man holding speeches from the Embassy’s balcony, covered by media all around the world! “Accused”! To anybody’s knowledge he is not officially accused of anything; he is absurdly suspected for “sex crimes” against consenting women and wanted for interrogation by a prosecutor.

    • FBI Came to Investigate Wikileaks in Iceland

      ..as revealed by Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson on RÚV’s news magazine Kastljós…

    • Minister: Iceland refused to help FBI on WikiLeaks
    • FBI Banned from Iceland

      FBI agents landed in Reykjavík without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations in the country, but Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson found out about the visit and forced them to leave the country, with the Icelandic government then issuing a formal protest to US authorities, according to Islandsbloggen.

    • Minister: Iceland refused FBI aid over WikiLeaks investigation in 2011

      Iceland’s interior minister says he ordered the country’s national police not to cooperate with FBI agents sent to investigate secret-busting site WikiLeaks and that it escalated into a diplomatic spat.

      Ogmundur Jonasson told The Associated Press that the FBI agents were sent to the country to interview an unidentified WikiLeaks associate in August of 2011.

    • Saluting Bradley Manning

      I am in Berkeley, California, for an event tonight sponsored by KPFA Radio & Courage to Resist called, “Saluting Bradley Manning.” I’ll be speaking with Daniel Ellsberg and Patricia Ellsberg.

    • Update 1/21/13: Defense mounts over-classification defense, Daniel Ellsberg & Kevin Gosztola to speak in Berkeley
    • Lies, Damned Lies, and Newspaper Reporting

      But really, Ms Hill – if you are indeed the same reporter who was threatened with prosecution in 2011 under the OSA – examine your conscience.

      How can you write a hit-piece focusing purely on Assange – a man who has designed a publishing system to protect potential whistleblowers from precisely such draconian secrecy laws as you were hyperbolically threatened with? And how could you, at the same time, airbrush out of history the testimony of so many whistleblowers gathered together, many of whom have indeed been arrested and have faced prosecution under the terms of the OSA or US secrecy legislation?

    • Meteorology class uses UN studies to guide classroom discussions

      Students and professors find the reports online after they have been leaked, then use them to guide the class, Richman said. Sometimes, students are able to get their hands on Wikileaks-type information, or information that hasn’t yet been given to the public, to further their understanding of the issue.

    • WikiLeaks documents used in courts: The case of the Iranian bank
    • Prosecuting Whistleblowers Instead of Criminals

      Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.

    • Assange’s allies

      If the Guardian could “find no allies” of Julian Assange (Report, 24 January), it did not look very hard. They could be found among the appreciative audience at the Oxford Union, and in our group seated at the front: the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

    • Assange’s running for office may affect his asylum claims
    • Ecuador Seeking Legal Way To Free Assange

      While he did not go into specifics about what legal steps would be taken, Patino quoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which allows individuals to be granted asylum, and several other international treaties, indicating the issue may be brought up at the United Nations or the Hague.

    • DOJ Tells Judge WikiLeaks Investigation Details Should Remain Secret

      The U.S. Justice Department today urged a judge in Washington to allow the government to keep secret internal documents and correspondence that would reveal investigative techniques, confidential sources and potential targets of the ongoing WikiLeaks criminal investigation.

    • Defense mounts over-classification defense, Daniel Ellsberg to speak in Berkeley

      Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg, Kevin Goztola, will be speaking about Bradley Manning in Berkeley on January 31st.Kevin Gosztola reports that the government is now attempting to block discussion of materials being inappropriately classified. The government argues that overclassification of documents has no relevance to the charges.

    • Report: FBI Agents Flew to Iceland to Investigate WikiLeaks
    • Iceland Kicked Out FBI Agents Who Flew in Unannounced to Investigate WikiLeaks Operations in the Country

      According to the RUV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, FBI agents landed in Reykjavík in August 2011 without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations within the country. However, their plan was interupted when Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson learned about the FBI’s visit and sent them packing. The Icelandic government then formally protested the FBI’s activities with U.S. authorities.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Chinese Millionaire Fights Pollution with Fresh Air in a Can

      A Chinese tycoon has taken it upon himself to fight China’s air-pollution problem with a tongue-in-cheek campaign: soda-pop-size cans of fresh air.

      Chen Guangbiao, a Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist, has launched a line of fresh-air soft-drink cans that retail for about 80¢ and come in a variety of “flavors,” including, according to the Huffington Post, “pristine Tibet” and “post-industrial Taiwan.”

  • Finance

    • Former UK tax chief who ‘lied to MPs’ to advise HSBC bank about honesty

      Sensitive: The controversial appointment had to be rubber-stamped by the Prime Minister David Cameron

      Sensitive: The controversial appointment had to be rubber-stamped by the Prime Minister David Cameron

      Britain’s top taxman – who stepped down after he was accused by MPs of lying – has been hired by HSBC to advise it on honesty, it emerged last night.

    • Spanish prime minister Rajoy accused of hiding secret income

      Mariano Rajoy’s government reeling from claims that he received €250,000 in money that had been hidden from tax authorities

    • Corporate America has Messed with the Wrong People
    • It’s Good to Be a Goldman

      Here’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, and while we’re at it, take this obscenely huge bonus for having wrecked the economy. As the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program pointed out in a devastating report this week, “excessive” compensation was approved by the Treasury Department for the executives of the three companies that required the largest taxpayer bailouts to survive.

      In a stinging rebuke of Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department, the report “found that once again, in 2012, Treasury failed to rein in excessive pay.” Whopping pay packages of $5 million or more were allowed by the Treasury Department for a quarter of the top executives at AIG, General Motors and Ally Financial, the former financial arm of GM.

      But that’s nothing compared with the $21 million for last year’s work garnered by Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, which is now free of TARP supervision. In addition to his paltry $2 million in salary, Blankfein received a $19 million bonus for his efforts. Not quite the $67.9 million bonus he got in 2007 before the market crash that his firm did so much to engineer, but times are still hard.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Multinational miners: magnanimous or malevolent?

      Human Rights Watch recommends implementing legal frameworks, such as a local independent ombudsman, that allow government institutions to monitor the human rights performance of domestic companies when they operate abroad in areas that carry serious human rights risks; to take steps to regulate the human rights conduct of domestic companies operating abroad in complex environments, such as requiring companies to carry out human rights due diligence activity, and to communicate an expectation to the government of Eritrea that companies investing in the mining sector there should be able to implement the outlined recommendations.

    • Washington state’s anti-NDAA bill introduced with viral support

      The “Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act” introduced on Wednesday condemns and criminalizes the use of the 2013 NDAA’s provision purportedly authorizing the indefinite detainment of U.S. citizens.

      After news of H.B. 1581′s introduction caught wind, an Internet campaign went viral asking activists to contact their Washington state representatives to co-sponsor the legislation.

      It worked.

      In less than 24 hours the number of the bill’s co-sponsors tripled.

      Many believe the bill’s success hinges on bipartisanship. While only one of the original sponsors of the bill is a Democrat, Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, eight of the later co-sponsors are also House Democrats, making for a fairly even split of nine to 12.

    • Tactical Chat: How the U.S. Military Uses IRC to Wage War

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google Decides Smartphone Market Share Is More Important Than Net Neutrality

      As a recent post noted, net neutrality is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years, this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if Orange is now getting paid to carry Google’s traffic, why shouldn’t every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering Google’s services?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • French National Library Privatizes Public Domain Materials

      Copyright is sometimes described as a bargain between two parties: creators and their public. In return for receiving a government-backed monopoly on making copies, creators promise to place their works in the public domain at the end of the copyright term. The problem with that narrative is that time and again, the public is cheated out of what it is due.

    • Don’t Put a Fork in It: On the Perils of Genetically Engineered Salmon

      While most Americans were enjoying the holiday season or stressing out over the nation’s imminent leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, the Food and Drug Administration delivered some big news as quietly as possible.Fishy Genes.

      On December 21, the agency announced that AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon had cleared the final hurdle before clinching FDA approval.

    • Copyrights

      • NZ Copyright Tribunal: Accusations Are Presumed Infringement, Despite Denials

        A few weeks ago, we noted that the first “three strikes” case of infringement in New Zealand was set to go to the Copyright Tribunal (an earlier case was dropped after the recording industry (RIANZ) realized it had screwed up). The Tribunal has now issued its first ruling, demanding that the accused pay a grand total of $616.57 NZ (about $515 US). The person was accused of downloading and sharing Rihanna’s Man Down twice, and Hot Chelle Rae’s Tonight Tonight once. The tribunal noted that the first song retailed for $2.39 and the latter at $1.79, so it doubled the first one, and started with $6.57 (all NZ dollars). Then it added $50 to pay for infringement notices being sent out. Another $200 covers the fee that RIANZ paid to bring the case, and then it tacked on a “deterrent sum” of $360 — or $120 per song. Add it all up and you’ve got $616.57.

      • HAVE YOU COMMITTED THE CRIME OF OUTSMARTING?

        Because of the tragic and untimely death of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while awaiting trial on charges he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by mass downloading academic journal articles, we have an opportunity to amend the CFAA, a federal law that interferes with important and socially beneficial computer security research. We want to revise the CFAA to decriminalize the computer security profession.

      • House puts Spotify on mute

        Spotify apparently hit a wrong note with the House’s Internet overlords, who recently blocked the chamber’s Web users from listening to the famed music-streaming service.

        While Spotify isn’t a peer-to-peer program along the lines of Napster, its inner workings appear subject to the longstanding ban on so-called P2P technology — a blockade lawmakers erected to thwart illegal file-sharing and prevent downloads from infecting computers with malware.

      • Hollywood Lobby Applauds Spain’s Copyright Law

        At a time when news about Spain tends to be pretty bad, the head of the Hollywood lobby came to Madrid to say the country is doing something right–when it comes to efforts to stop illegal file-sharing.

      • Music pirates: $250k reaps $616.57

        Rianz says it has sent out around 6000 notices to alleged pirates, for which the music industry body must pay a $25 fee each for internet companies to send on to their customers.

01.30.13

Links 30/1/2013: Android Market Share at 70%

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Professional Audio Production on Linux

    And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don’t get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be. Look for USB audio interfaces that don’t need custom proprietary drivers, but stick to the USB spec like they’re supposed to. The hardy FFADO developers toil away developing and improving drivers for Firewire audio interfaces. No, Firewire is not dead, and you can easily add a Firewire card to almost any PC if it doesn’t already have one. I use FFADO for my cherished old Saffire Pro 26 I/O, and neither have let me down.

  • HTG Explains: Why You Don’t Need an Antivirus On Linux (and When You Do)

    Believe it or not, there are antivirus programs targeted at desktop Linux users. If you have just switched to Linux and started looking for an antivirus solution, don’t bother – you do not need an antivirus program on Linux.

    There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them. You would only want an antivirus program to scan for Windows malware.

  • Desktop

    • Chromebooks on the Rise As Big Hardware Players Announce Devices

      When Google began promoting its Chrome OS platform a couple of years ago, there was lots of criticism. For one thing, Google hadn’t quite ironed out some of the “cloud-only” issues that the operating system imposes on users, many of whom are used to using local applications. Since then, of course, Chromebooks running the operating system have improved dramatically, and are now available at $200 price points that challenge the laptop status quo (a $199 example from Acer is shown here).

  • Server

    • SprezzOS: Linux On A Server In 120 Seconds

      Earlier this month I wrote about SprezzOS, a new Linux distribution where its developers boasted it’s the most robust, beautiful, and performant Linux. Well, SprezzOS is now out in the while. The developers are now boasting they can install a Linux server in 120 seconds with their operating system.

    • Cisco Brings Unified Access to Catalyst Switching

      For the most part, wired and wireless networks on the enterprise campus have been two separate entities controlled by different technologies. That’s about to change, thanks to a new suite of Unified Access technologies announced today by Cisco.

  • Kernel Space

    • QEMU 1.3.1 Brings In A Bunch Of Fixes

      The first (and only planned) point release to QEMU 1.3 is now available. The QEMU 1.3.1 release fixes just over two dozen bugs, including critical issues for OpenBSD guests.

    • Systemd Dreams Up New Feature, Makes It Like Cron

      Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers at Red Hat hope to work on a handful of new systemd features as part of the Fedora 19 development cycle. One of the features includes work to make systemd have its own time-based job scheduler that’s similar in nature to cron.

    • A wait and see approach that worked

      Wilcox’s first kernel patch was submitted in 1997; he wanted to move some files from his Acorn Archimedes system to a Linux system and he couldn’t do it as the ISO format did not support the necessary extensions.

      The patch was accepted, after a few comments that he deems to be “on target” and his career was more or less decided.

      But things did not fall into place for a while; he was hired as a Java programmer by a bio-informatics start=-up after he graduated. Wilcox then got involved in porting Linux to the PA-RISC platform and he ended up getting hired by LinuxCare.

    • Perforce joins the Linux Foundation

      Enterprise management company Perforce has joined the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of the Linux operating system.

      Perforce see its membership as part of its commitment to encourage collaborative software development on both sides of the firewall.

    • Perforce Joins Linux Foundation, Increases Commitment to Open Source Collaboration
    • KVM: Linux Virtualization That’s Halfway There

      While the KVN infrastructure is built into the Linux OS, you need a modern version of the Linux kernel to use this virtual machine. KVM requires machine extensions. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux as of version 2.6.20. Even if your Linux distro has the stuff inside, your hardware configuration might not be cooperating. Intel VT or AMD-V support could be disabled by default.

    • Toradex Announce Release of V2.0 Alpha1 Linux BSP for Colibri T30

      Toradex have announced the release of V2.0 Alpha1 Linux BSP for their Colibri T30 Computer on Module. This product is based on the NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and ARM architecture.

    • Intel Begins Publishing Linux Patches For “Avoton”
    • Intel Still Tidying Up Linux Support For Haswell

      Intel will be introducing their Haswell processors in the coming months. If using the Linux 3.8 kernel, GCC 4.7/4.8, Mesa 9.1, and other recent open-source Linux packages, you should be mostly set for experiencing the full benefits of the Ivy Bridge successor. However, there’s still a few pieces of Haswell’s Linux support still being worked out.

    • Multi-Threading Cairo-Image For Better Performance

      In terms of Chris Wilson’s benchmark results when comparing the threaded cairo-image, UXA with the Intel driver, and his experimental SNA acceleration architecture for the Intel driver, he concludes, “For the cases that are almost entirely GPU bound (for example the firefox-fishbowl, -fishtank, -paintball, -particles), we have virtually eliminated all the previous advantage that the GPU held. In a notable couple of cases, we have improved the image backend to outperform SNA, and for all cases now the threaded image backend beats UXA. However, as can be seen there is still plenty of room for improvement of the image backend, and we can’t let the hardware acceleration be merely equal to a software rasteriser…”

    • Lennart Poettering Takes To Battling Systemd Myths

    • Graphics Stack

      • Running OpenCL On The GPU With Gallium3D

        With all of the recent improvements going into Mesa/Gallium3D, along with some work advancements to the AMD GPU LLVM back-end, it’s slowly becoming a suitable time for enthusiasts wishing to experiment with OpenCL on the open-source Linux graphics stack through Gallium3D and the “Clover” state tracker.

        OpenCL support in Gallium3D is still far from complete and not yet comparable to the proprietary OpenCL/GPGPU offerings bundled within the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. In reality, it will probably be at least another year before open-source OpenCL is in good shape for the Linux desktop. At this point, there’s just some simple OpenCL demos working for select graphics processors on Nouveau and Radeon.

      • Intel SNA Continues To Be Tweaked

        SNA, Intel’s newest acceleration architecture for their open-source X.Org graphics driver, continues to receive improvements on a near daily basis.

        Intel SNA is what most of the xf86-video-intel driver changes have been about since this 2D acceleration architecture was introduced back in 2011. SNA is the pet project of Chris Wilson at Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center and is the one responsible for a majority of the work.

      • Wayland/Weston 1.0.4 Released; Per-Output Workspaces

        Wayland 1.0.4 was released this week along with an adjoining update to its Weston reference compositor. Separately, a new patch-set has emerged for supporting per-output workspaces.

        The Wayland/Weston 1.0.4 release was a bit behind schedule due to Kristian Høgsberg being ill, but the point releases are out now for those interested. The main 1.0.4 change is for Weston and it’s to address a “CPU eating bug” within the compositor’s plane code. There’s also been a few documentation fixes. With Wayland 1.0.4, destroy signal APIs were added and a more robust version of the event loop test case.

      • Mesa 9.1 Release Reaffirmed For Late February

        Mesa 9.1 should be released by the end of February as the latest version of this bi-annual open-source OpenGL implementation that continues to slowly but surely pickup new functionality for most major graphics drivers.

      • VESA BIOS Extension DRM Kernel Driver Released

        David Herrmann, the open-source developer that has made it a personal crusade to kill the Linux kernel console and to replace it with a user-space solution, has published the code to a new DRM kernel mode-setting driver. This new kernel driver is a generic VESA BIOS Extension DRM implementation like the vesafb VESA frame-buffer driver.

    • Benchmarks

      • Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks

        As the next chapter after the Fedora 17 vs. Fedora 18 benchmarks for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, here are benchmarks comparing Fedora 18 to Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 13.04 on two separate PCs.

        The performance between the latest Fedora and Ubuntu Linux releases aren’t incredibly surprising with many of the key components being the same (or similar) versions, but nevertheless I ran a bunch of benchmarks on a Core i7 3770K “Ivy Bridge” and Core i7 3960X “Sandy Bridge” Extreme Edition system with Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 13.04 using the 64-bit Linux releases. Benchmarks in full are on OpenBenchmarking.org.

      • A Number Of New & Updated Linux Benchmarks

        After yesterday writing about recent benchmarking improvements, including over a dozen new open-source benchmarks graciously provided by Intel and then ongoing improvements to the Phoronix Test Suite client, there’s more to talk about this morning for those interested in open-source benchmarking.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma.next()?

        Sebastian wrote a pair of blog entries in the last week about where we are heading with Plasma in the near future. The first was an overview of the pathway to Frameworks 5 and what we’re provisionally referring to as Plasma Workspaces 2. The second entry covered his work on making it possible to write widget layouts (aka Containments) in QML.

      • Kdenlive 0.9.4 Is Here

        Kdenlive, an advanced video editor for the KDE desktop has been updated to a new version. This version fixes bugs which made the software to crash, so all users are highly advised to install this release as soon as possible. Some other new features of this release has been summarized below:

        * A rewritten DVD wizard
        * Improved clip markers
        * Rewritten Screen Capture
        * Support for multiple streams clips
        * Clip analysis feature
        * Stability and Performance improvements
        * Over 124 bugs fixed

      • Kdenlive 0.9.4 information page

        The DVD Wizard was mostly rewritten, now allowing 16:9 menus. It now also autodetects the format of your videos and proposes a trandcoding if it is necessary. In fact, you can now drop any video in the Wizard and just click transcode to get it in the correct DVD format.

      • What’s Being Brewed For KDE’s Plasma Active

        Aaron Seigo wrote this morning about some of what’s happening next for KDE’s Plasma Active, which reveals some interesting future endeavours.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Is GNOME’s Open Source Web Browser Ready for the Masses?

        From Internet Explorer (IE) to Firefox to Google Chrome, there’s no shortage of Web browsers to choose from these days–a luxury that can be easy to take for granted for those who have forgotten what things were a number of years ago, after Netscape collapsed and IE was the only game in town. But GNOME, the open source development community, thinks it can offer a better browser than these bigger-name alternatives in the form of Web, formerly known as Epiphany. Is it right?

      • Researching the GNOME3 experience: Question by Question

        The work that has happened ever since I wrote the last post, is actually the work which would take atleast 5 posts, but it has to start somewhere, so I am starting it off with this post.

      • GNOME 3: A new perspective

        GNOME 3: A desktop that brings a certain level of ire to the hearts and minds of many a Linux user. When this desktop first arrived, my opinion was fairly high. Why? It was new, fresh, and seemed like it could easily take the desktop world by storm. But then the developers stopped listening to the users and things seemed to fall apart.

      • Epiphany Web Browser may ditch tabs
      • Running in the office with Gnome!

  • Distributions

    • Slax 7.0 – Slax Is Back

      December 2012 saw the final release of Slax 7.0 after more than three years without an update, quickly followed by several bug-fix point releases. In 7.0.3 the ability to act as PXE server was re-introduced, which had been present in earlier versions but was missing from the early 7.0 branch. I tried it in VMware Player, VirtualBox, from Live CD as intended and installed to external USB connected to an Acer 5551 laptop with ATI graphics, 4 GB Ram and a Phenom II X3 processor.

    • New Releases

      • SparkyLinux 2.1 “Eris” Ultra Edition

        The system is built as all 2.x releases on Debian testing “Wheezy”.
        All packages have been synchronized with Debian testing repositories of 23/01/2013.
        It features customized ultra light and fast Openbox desktop.

      • Clonezilla 2.1.0-12
      • Linux Deepin 12.12
      • New Products

        ROSA Desktop 2012

        The fact that Russia’s ROSA Labs once collaborated with Mandriva is evident in the company’s latest release, ROSA Desktop 2012. Nevertheless, since breaking from Mandriva, ROSA Labs has forked the distro onto its own unique development path. ROSA Desktop 2012 is an LSB-compliant distro that features a customized KDE desktop. The free edition sports only free software; the Extended Edition includes nonfree components and proprietary software, such as codecs. ROSA Labs says that by developing ROSA Desktop 2012 with its own software development and build environment—ROSA ABF—the company is able to achieve unmatched technological independence, high quality and up to five years of technical support. Examples of new features include EFI/UEFI support, improved hardware detection and improved compatibility with Windows 8. Supported languages include English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

      • Parted Magic 2013_01_29

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Ann Coulter Refuses to Board Airplane With Black Pilot

    Conservative commentator and author Ann Coulter refused to stay on board a Miami to New York commercial airline flight today after learning the pilot was a woman of African-American descent.

    According to witness reports Coulter was concerned the experienced, decorated pilot in question may have gained her position as a result of affirmative action and wasn’t fully qualified to fly.

  • Is Egypt on the Brink of Collapse? Sharif Abdel Kouddous Reports from Restive City of Port Said

    Ongoing mass protests have led the Egyptian government to declare a state of emergency and the country’s defense minister to warn of the potential “collapse of the state.”

  • the real wikipedia of maps

    In the wake of Google’s CEO Schmidt going to North Korea on an official visit, American media has been abuzz with stories. Yesterday, CNN carried a story about how Google Maps is expanding in North Korea thanks to “a community of citizen cartographers” (that is Google’s claim) allowing it work “in a similar way to Wikipedia, allowing users to add, edit and review information” (that is CNN’s take on it).

  • Security

    • Latest VLC version has dangerous hole

      The developers of the VLC video player have warned of a crashing bug in the latest 2.0.5 version of the application, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The issue is a problem in the ASF demuxer (libasf_plugin.*), which can be tricked into overflowing a buffer with a specially crafted ASF movie. The developers note that users would have to open that specially crafted file to be vulnerable and advise users to not open files from untrusted third parties or untrusted sites.

    • Unseen, all-out cyber war on the U.S. has begun

      There’s a war going on, and it’s raging here at home — not in the streets or the fields, but on the Internet. You can think of it as a war on the digital homeland. If you work for a power company, bank, defense contractor, transportation provider, or other critical infrastructure type of operation, your organization might be in the direct line of fire. And everyone can become collateral damage.

    • Oracle: ‘We Have to Fix Java’
    • Disable This Buggy Feature On Your Router Now To Avoid A Serious Set Of Security Vulnerabilities.
    • Pentagon’s New Massive Expansion of ‘Cyber-Security’ Unit is About Everything Except Defense

      Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State

    • A Line Has Been Crossed: Anonymous Hacks DOJ

      Launching “Operation Last Resort,” Anonymous twice hacked the Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission this weekend to protest the death of Aaron Swartz and a legal system “wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control (and) power.” The group threatened to release Justice Department data if the government fails to reform flawed cyber crime laws that allow almost unfettered prosecutorial power, and then turned the website into a videogame and Guy Fawkes mask proclaiming, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Amelia Hill is a Dirty Liar

      The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.

      [...]

      Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.

    • Step inside the Ecuadorian Embassy with Julian Assange

      It’s just been announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will run for a seat in the Australian Senate during this year’s elections. He is currently avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian Embassy and a little while ago I photographed a note held by a police officer detailing the lengths they would go to in order to arrest him. Including what to do if he came out ‘in a diplomatic bag’… This photograph made news around the world because it appeared to show police would ignore any laws governing diplomatic immunity. What it didn’t do was shed any more light on the conditions inside the Embassy for Assange himself.

    • Ellsberg at Berkeley Salute to US Soldier Accused of Aiding WikiLeaks

      A “Salute to Bradley Manning,” the Army Pfc. accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, will be held in Berkeley Thursday with Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg and Kevin Gosztola, co-author of a book on the Manning case.

    • Assange confirms Senate run

      Julian Assange will run for a Senate seat in the 2013 federal election and his mum reckons he’ll be awesome.

      Christine Assange confirmed her son’s candidacy on Wednesday after WikiLeaks tweeted the news.
      “He will be awesome,” she said.

    • Julian Assange to run for Senate seat as his mother says he will be ‘awesome’

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will run for a seat in the Australian Senate during this year’s elections, his organisation announced Wednesday, with his mother saying he would be “awesome” in the role.

    • Prosecuting Whistleblowers Instead of Criminals

      Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.

      Under an ostensibly liberal, Democratic president, government prosecutors have ushered in a new era of targeting whistleblowers. Prosecuting those responsible for the wrongdoings, meanwhile, has been made no such priority. The recent sentencing of former CIA officer John Kiriakou represents the latest example in the crackdown on leaks to the media and public.

    • Stand Up for Julian Assange

      Last month, on December 13th, 2012, I visited Julian Assange, Australian founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, in the Ecuadorian embassy, in Knightsbridge, London.

      It’s been seven months now since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy and was given political asylum.

      He entered the embassy after the British Courts shamefully refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning about sexual molestation (no criminal charges have been made against him). Julian Assange has said he is willing to answer questions in the U.K. relating to accusations against him, or alternatively, to go to Sweden, provided that the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the U.S. where plans are being made to try him for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuses to give such assurances.

      [....]

      Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book,

    • Chagos cable chronology
    • Judge orders cross-examination of officials over WikiLeaks documents

      Unprecedented step in Chagos Islands case is first time one of the WikiLeaks cables has featured in a UK court case

    • The Guardian’s obsession with sullying the reputation of Julian Assange

      After Julian Assange gave a speech at the Oxford Union on January 23, 2012, The Guardian published an article criticizing his appearance, saying “he refused to be gracious”. At the time, video had not been uploaded of the event, so it was impossible to contradict The Guardian’s claims. Now that the Oxford Union has uploaded the full speech and Q&A session (albeit only after editing out footage of “Collateral Murder” due to copyright fears), The Guardian’s blatant smear tactics can be revealed.

    • Assange’s allies
    • Farewell to McClelland, a ministerial cipher for the security state

      But more than ASIO has changed. Between Murphy’s raids on ASIO in search of information about Croatian terrorism he believed the agency was hiding from him, and Robert McClelland expanding ASIO’s powers via the “WikiLeaks amendment”, something has changed in Labor’s relationship with the national security apparatus of the country.

    • FBI Investigation into Leaks & the Threat to Press Freedom (VIDEO)

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Rupert Murdoch links sympathy for Palestinians to anti-Semitism. The truth is more complex

      In a futile bid to preempt the allegation that automatically follows an article of this nature, I begin with a clarification. It is lifted from the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where a man in a cinema queue berates Larry David as “a self-hating Jew” for whistling an aria from Wagner. I certainly do hate myself, is Larry’s reply, but it has absolutely nothing to do with being a Jew.

      There was a time when a writer could address the spirited disputes sparked by World Holocaust Day in a tone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause without feeling the need to absolve himself of any form of anti-Semitism, though it feels like a distant age now. It is more than 10 years since the Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman, for decades as passionate a friend of Israel as parliament knew, was jostled at St John’s Wood synagogue, on Yom Kippur, by congregants enraged by his criticisms of Ariel Sharon.

    • The 50 million dollar lie

      Bill Gates has spent $50 million for a three year project known as the MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) project. They just concluded the study and released a final report which can be found here. In the final report they conclude that teacher evaluations have an ideal weighting of 33% value-added, 33% principal observations, and 33% student surveys. They justify the 33% value-added because they have analyzed the data and found, contrary to everyone else’s analysis of similar data, that teachers DO have similar value-added scores from one year to the next. To prove their point, they print on page 8 this very compelling set of graphs.

      [...]

      As even a ‘paint ball’ produces such a nice line when subjected to the principle of averaging, we can safely assume that the Gates data, if we were to see it in its un-averaged form would be just as volatile as my first graph.

      It seems like the point of this ‘research’ is to simply ‘prove’ that Gates was right about what he expected to be true. He hired some pretty famous economists, people who certainly know enough about math to know that their conclusions are invalid.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Porn trolling firm accused of colluding with defendant in sham lawsuit

      Every time we think Prenda Law can’t get in any more hot water, the firm behind dozens of mass copyright lawsuits proves us wrong. In recent months we’ve written about a Florida judge blasting Prenda for “attempted fraud on the court.” We’ve covered a Minnesota man’s charge that Prenda named him the head of one of its shell companies without his knowledge or permission. And we’ve covered Prenda’s efforts to avoid answering questions about these allegations by claiming that California defense lawyer Morgan Pietz invented his “John Doe” client. Prenda also unsuccessfully sought the dismissal of a California judge who started asking questions about Prenda’s alleged misconduct.

    • Copyrights

      • Meet the money behind Dotcom

        Who is the mysterious millionaire, who left school at age 15, who is now listed as the new CEO of Kim Dotcom’s latest venture? Geraldine Johns gets a glimpse into the world of the elusive Tony Lentino.

      • Anita Busch, Michael Ovitz At War in Anthony Pellicano Civil Case

        Hollywood’s most powerful figures had ordered the intimidation attempt.

      • Court Says Trial Needed To Determine If Universal Music Violated DMCA With Dancing Baby Takedown

        We’ve covered the Stephanie Lenz / dancing baby / fair use case for years — but now it looks like there’s finally going to be a trial to consider if Universal Music can be punished for sending a DMCA takedown notice on a video of Lenz’s infant son dancing to 29 seconds of a song by Prince, which Lenz asserts was clearly fair use. If you haven’t followed the case, it’s been argued back and forth for years. At one point, the court ruled that a copyright holder does need to take fair use into account before sending a DMCA takedown, but that there needs to be “subjective bad faith” by Universal Music in sending the takedown. In other words, Lenz (and the EFF, who is representing her) needs to show, effectively, that Universal knew that it was sending bogus takedowns. The EFF has argued that willful blindness by Universal meant that it had knowledge (amusingly, using precedents in copyright cases in the other direction, where copyright holders argue that willful blindness can be infringement).

      • Dealing With Aaron Swartz in the Nixonian Tradition: Overzealous Overcharging Leads to a Tragic Result
      • Government Persecution, From Aaron Swartz to Bradley Manning

        The Justice Department’s legal assault on Swartz is of a vindictive piece with the prosecution of others who have carried important information into the public realm. Front and center is 25-year-old Bradley Manning, the Iraq War enlistee accused of being WikiLeaks’s source in the military. The restricted foreign policy documents that Manning allegedly released don’t amount to even 1 percent of the 92 million items the government classified last year, but the young private faces life in prison at his court-martial in June for the charge, among twenty-one others, of “aiding the enemy.” Then there’s Jeremy Hammond, age 28, who in his freshman year at the University of Illinois hacked the computer science department’s home page, then told them how they could fix its problem. He got thrown out of school for that; now he’s in a federal prison facing thirty-nine years to life, charged with various hacks and leaks (all apparently led by an FBI informant) including the 5 million internal e-mails of Stratfor, a private security firm hired by corporations to surveil private citizens, among other activities.

      • Critical Fixes for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
      • Human Rights Lawyer Explains Why He’s Working For Kim Dotcom: Exposing American Corruption

        We recently wrote about how Kim Dotcom has retained famed human rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam to explore whether or not there’s a human rights angle to his case, specifically alleging “contract prosecution” by the entertainment industry. I’m still somewhat skeptical that such an argument could go anywhere, but Amsterdam himself has put up a rather detailed blog post, explaining why he’s taking the case, which may seem quite different than his usual fare: taking on corruption and human rights violations in far flung parts of the world, including Africa and Latin America. After highlighting the many problems with the case (and the continued failures in court to date), as well as the close ties prosecutor Neil MacBride has with big copyright holders, he points out that he sees some serious similarities to what’s happening here with the kind of corruption he’s witnessed in third world nations.

      • Picking up Aaron Swartz’s dropped flags

        My first quality time with Aaron Swartz was at the last Comdex, in the Fall of 2002. He had just turned 16, but looked about 10. His old Mac laptop featured a screen with no working backlight. Only he could read it, which he rationalized, with a smile, as a “security precaution.” When I asked him about school, he said he had moved on. He was still learning all kinds of stuff, but he didn’t need school for that. And hey, there was work to be done, and he was too busy with that.

      • Congress Demands Justice Department Explain Aaron Swartz Prosecution
      • Memorial for Aaron Swartz at the Internet Archive
      • Part 2: EFF’s Additional Improvements to Aaron’s Law

        Now we present part two: suggestions to address the CFAA’s penalty structure. The CFAA, which is the primary federal computer crime law, allows for harsh punishments and makes too many offenses felonies. The statute is also structured so that the same behavior can violate multiple provisions of the law, which prosecutors often combine to beef up the potential penalties.

      • O’Brien blasts feds for dusting off statutes used on mafia

        The lawyers for disgraced former Probation commissioner John O’Brien blasted prosecutors in a filing yesterday, calling their decision to charge O’Brien and two of his top deputies as if they were greedy mobsters “breathtaking” while accusing them of not turning over key evidence.

        The attorneys, writing in a 29-page motion requesting documents from the US Attorney’s office, said their clients are confident they will beat the accusations they created a “rigged” hiring system catering to the requests of state lawmakers and others.

      • Triumphant motel owner slams Carmen Ortiz

        …latest critic to accuse the Hub’s top fed of prosecutorial bullying.

      • the next words: A Lecture on Aaron’s Law

        When a law professor is given a “chair” s/he gives a lecture in honor of the honor. I am the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership. On February 19, at 5pm @ HLS, I was scheduled to give my chair lecture. After Aaron’s death, I asked the Dean to let me reschedule the lecture. But after some more thought, I’ve decided to make the lecture about Aaron, and about how we need to honor his work. Anyone is invited. More details to follow. And the event will be webcast.

      • Aaron’s Army

        Aaron wasn’t a lone wolf, he was part of an army, and I had the honor of serving with him for a decade.

      • Feds Hounded ‘Net Activist Aaron Swartz, Says EFF’s Parker Higgins
      • How to honor Aaron Swartz

        Rarely does the name of one person, lacking political office or seat of power, echo across the internet so thoroughly as it did in the wake of Aaron Swartz’s death. How was the work of one person revered by so many, from the front page of every major paper in the US, to radical communities working against various axis of oppression?

      • Aaron’s Law, Drafting the Best Limits of the CFAA, And A Reader Poll on A Few Examples
      • More Thoughts on the Six CFAA Scenarios About Authorized Access vs. Unauthorized Access

01.29.13

Links 30/1/2013: Axis Communications, D-Link, O.S. Systems and Perforce Join Linux Foundation

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Top 3: Alan Cox, CloudForms and KDE
  • 5 Dilemmas of Linux Evangelists

    Stereotyping on the Internet is almost unavoidable due to the opacity of the medium and there are now hundreds of types of “fanbois” online since the dawn of the Internet. For tech enthusiasts with plenty of time on their hands, it’s easy to troll for the occasional MacOSX, Microsoft, Android, iOS, and Apple fanboi (and yes, Apple has several categories on its own). I’m an unabashed Linux user and Linux evangelist despite being platform agnostic (the industry where I work in requires a certain level of MacOSX and Windows proficiency). Although Linux evangelists make up a small percentage (even smaller than the alleged percentage of Linux desktop users) of computer users out there, there are still hazards to attempting to promote Linux. The difficulties aren’t always associated with the freakishly crazy Mac worshipers who would skewer you at any negative comment about their beloved Apple devices:

  • Desktop

    • Chrome OS gains on Windows 8′s pains

      After only a few months Acer’s Chromebook already accounts for 5 to 10 percent of Acer’s US shipments and HP will soon be launching its own Chromebook. In the meantime, Windows 8 PC sales remain anemic.

    • M$ Drives More To GNU/Linux and FLOSS

      News: You can get a great desktop or server operating system for $0 from Debian and a great office suite for $0 from The Document Foundation. Buy pizzas with your savings or whatever you want to boost the economy locally.

    • User Abuse

      At some point, I discovered Linux. I can recall the thrill of getting my mouse to work when I stumbled across a RedHat 5.0 book with the disks in the back. I always thought Another Level was a great desktop, if lacking the highly integrated functions of Windows. I surfed with Netscape Navigator 3.06 for several months before I discovered updates. Nor can I forget buying Applix 4, then the thrill of getting my hands on the retail box of WordPerfect 8 for Linux. Despite the occasional crash with it on RedHat 6.3, I thought it was wonderful, a real advancement over 6.1 on Windows. Applix 5 was cool, too. I still have the boxed sets for WP8, Applix 5, and RH 6.3. I’m currently running WP8 on Ubuntu Hardy in a virtual machine with VMware.

  • Server

    • R.I.P. Boxee Box: 2010-2013

      When Boxee announced its new Boxee TV product last October, it also stated that the original Boxee Box, which had already ceased being manufactured, would soon transition into “maintenance mode.” Additionally, the company promised one last firmware update, which would “update the Flash player and fix some key bugs.”

    • HP Extends Serviceguard to Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 5 Episode 1

      In this episode: Canonical is to launch a phone. Fedora 18 has been released. Friends of Gnome are looking for money and Valve is to make a Linux-powered games console. Hear our first discoveries of 2013 and how you’d like the podcast to improve in season 5.

    • Linux Outlaws 295 – Veneering the Planet
    • Tech Tuesday: Open Source Software

      Tech Geeks from around the world are meeting in the nation’s capital this week for the Linux Conference.

      It’s a five-day love-in for fans of open source software—non-commercial software where the source code can be modified and redistributed for free.

  • Kernel Space

    • Torvalds slams prosecutor for Swartz’s suicide
    • 32 bit Vs 64 bit OS architecture in Linux
    • Btrfs Still Working To Address Corruption Issue

      Another bug-fix pull request was sent in on Tuesday for the Btrfs file-system in the yet-to-be-released Linux 3.8 kernel. Chris Mason notes that he’s still working out an older CRC corruption issue.

    • Google Wants Fast Queue Spinlocks For The Linux Kernel

      A Google engineer has proposed “Fast Queue Spinlocks” for the Linux kernel as an alternative in select cases to the default ticket spinlock.

    • ACPI Support Continues To Be Improved In Linux

      There’s a number of ACPI updates that are being shown off and will likely make their debut in the Linux 3.9 kernel for improving the power management support.

    • Linux Foundation Announces New Members

      Axis Communications, D-Link, O.S. Systems and Perforce

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland’s Weston DRM Back-End Now Supports Pixman

        A set of seven patches published today allow Wayland’s Weston compositor with its DRM back-end to support rendering through Pixman.

        Earlier this month I wrote about the work being done on software rendering in Weston using Pixman. The pixel manipulation library was used to achieve “pure software rendering” and was combined with work on MIT-SHM shared memory support for the X11 back-end. This work allows for Wayland/Weston to run better in non-hardware-accelerated environments.

      • Mesa 9.0.2 Officially Released

        For most Phoronix readers out there that are Linux enthusiasts into hardware tweaking, performance optimizations, and getting the most out of your Linux box, Mesa 9.0.2 is rather boring. It’s just the usual bug-fixing and stable changes that were back-ported from Git master. Most of you reading Phoronix are likely already on Mesa 9.1-devel from Mesa Git master, which is where the exciting work happens.

      • R600 LLVM Back-End Gets Indirect Addressing Support

        The open-source Radeon R600 LLVM back-end has finally received support for indirect memory addressing.

    • Benchmarks

      • Linux 3.2 To 3.8 Kernels With Intel Ivy Bridge Graphics

        With the Intel Haswell product launch coming up soon, here’s a look at how the Intel “Ivy Bridge” HD 4000 graphics support has matured on the seven most recent Linux kernel releases. This benchmarking shows how the performance of the Intel DRM driver has changed between the Linux 3.2 kernel and the Linux 3.8 kernel that’s presently under development when using the integrated graphics found on the latest-generation Core i7 CPU.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Introducing LXDE

      Let us be non-mainstream. In the world of Linux desktop environments, Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) is not your typical first or second choice. Most people will mention Gnome, KDE, perhaps Unity. You may have heard of Cinnamon and MATE lately, and Xfce is also a solid, longtime niche player. LXDE keeps slipping under the radar.

      The thing is, without decent financial backing by the big names, it is very hard creating and maintaining a robust and bug-free desktop environment that can address the needs of the common user, if a Linux user can ever be classified as common in any way. Still, deviating from the usual formula is very tricky, and few distributions manage to balance beauty and functionality well. And the more exotic the desktop environment gets, the more difficult the challenge. For example, in the world of Xfce, Dreamlinux was one of the few players to tackle it properly. Even the big shot struggle, Gnome 3 and KDE being no exceptions. So what happens when you take LXDE and skin your desktop with it?

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma Active 4

        At the end of March, we will be releasing Plasma Active 4. Since Plasma Active 3, We’ve made improvements to the Files, eBook reader (Okular), Settings and Alarms applications along with a large number of bug fixes and performance improvements. We’re also in the middle of moving to the KDE Platform 4.10 release as well as getting closer in line with other Mer based efforts, such as sharing the description files with Nemo that are used when building images for different device targets and adapting to a systemd driven user session. These two changes introduced a relatively large number of regressions that are being ironed out. In fact, we paused on the feature development and turned focus to fit and finish work before continuing on.

      • rekonq 2.1
      • Rekonq 2.1 Web-Browser Brings More Features

        Less than one month after the release of the Rekonq 2.0 web-browser for the KDE desktop as an alternative to Konqueror, Rekonq 2.1 has surfaced and it brings more features to this open-source WebKit-powered project.

      • KScreen Sees Its First Alpha Release

        KScreen, the new way of managing monitors/outputs on Linux when running the KDE Plasma desktop, saw its first alpha release this weekend.

      • KScreen Sees Its First Alpha Release

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Pear Linux 6.1 – Review

      One of the biggest draw backs of Linux adoptions for home users is that it looks so clunky and fearfully difficult to use. Pear Linux is one promising distro that is out to change that perception. And so far, it is doing an outstanding job.

    • New Releases

      • Elive 2.1.27 development released

        We appreciate your feedbacks about the overall speed/lightness of the system compared to last stable version of Elive. You can say something in our chat channel directly from the running system. If you detect any lagging in the system please consider different setups like disabling composite (which you can select on the startup of the graphical system) in order to report improvements. We would also appreciate feedbacks about composite enabled or disabled in old computers, suggestions for better performances, and memory usage compared to Topaz.

      • Groovy 2.1.0 arrives ready to invoke dynamically

        The developers of Groovy have announced the release of Groovy 2.1. The new release of the JVM-based language now has full support for Java 7′s “invoke dynamic” byte code and API, which allows dynamic languages on the JVM to make dynamic method calls as efficiently as Java programs make static method calls. Groovy 2.0 had support for most method calls using “invoke dynamic”, but now all method calls make use of it. The GPars concurrency framework is also now bundled with Groovy 2.1.

      • SolusOS 2 Alpha 7 Previews Its GNOME Fork

        Announced last week was a new fork of GNOME Classic as the Consort Desktop. Released today by the Linux distribution behind this project, SolusOS, is the first alpha version of their next Linux release that integrates this forked GNOME desktop.

    • Screenshots

      • Netrunner 12.12.1 Screenshots (01/24/2013)

        Netrunner is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with a focus on options that won’t make it into mainline Ubuntu and alternatives to some mainline Ubuntu decisions. Some features are WINE included by default, some selected Qt/KDE applications in the GNOME desktop, and no Mono.

      • Descent OS 3.0.2 Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 3 Beta 2 Released

        Mageia 3 Beta 2 was announced a wee bit late last Friday with some major version jumps. The team say they’re in the final run, but they still have time to clean up those bugs before Final. The live image returned a release or two ago, but today it finally worked on my hardware.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • The fashionably late Fedora

          During my week with Fedora there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind and it took a while to figure out what it was that bothered me about this release. What I think was troubling me is that the components of this release don’t feel integrated nor coordinated. Perhaps Fedora is going through a more tumultuous stage than usual as will happen from time to time with an experimental distribution. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that some applications use the GNOME Shell integrated menu and some do not; the system admin tools have distinctly different styles of interface when compared side-by-side and even parts of the installation process feel like they were designed by different people. This approach is in contrast to other mainstream distributions such as Ubuntu, openSUSE and Mageia where system components tend to hold to a central, integrated design. This feeling of disunity added to the overall impression that Fedora 18 feels very experimental and not yet finished. There were a lot of little bugs and a few big ones in this release and it led me to believe that even with the two month delay Fedora 18 was released too early.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian guru’s plea for sane computing future

        CANBERRA: When Bdale Garbee talks about the future of the Linux desktop, it is not so much a visionary view as a view of how he would like computing to evolve.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu smartphone to launch without app store, won’t support Android apps

            One of the most exciting announcements of the beginning of the year is the Ubuntu phone – not to be confused with Ubuntu for Android. Canonical is ready to make a serious play for the mobile business – at least part of it – that’s dominated by Android and iOS, with Windows Phone and BlackBerry left to battle for third place.

            And the Ubuntu phone certainly looks like an interesting alternative. The new mobile platform will surely appeal to current PC users that choose Ubuntu as their desktop OS, but not only.

            As you already know, any Android device that runs Google’s OS will be able to run Ubuntu, as long as you’ll be willing to perform the installing part, and the Galaxy Nexus could soon get its first Ubuntu phone code.

          • Canonical Wants Help With Ubuntu Phone Apps
          • Ubuntu phones to come with a terminal—prepare your command line skills
          • Things You Should Know About Ubuntu Phone

            Canonical is all set to break new grounds with its Ubuntu Phone, which the company was developing in utter secrecy for couple of months. The announcement got a mixed response. It excited the hard-core Ubuntu users who look forward to the idea of running Ubuntu on their phones; it excited a typical user due to the refreshing and well polished inter face.

          • This Week’s Ubuntu Q&A
          • issue 69
          • Ubuntu 13.04 Will Improve Gaming On Open-Source GPU Drivers

            While still a ways from being comparable to the proprietary graphics drivers in terms of features and OpenGL performance, the open-source GPU drivers found by default in the forthcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release are a big improvement over the out-of-the-box graphics drivers found in earlier Ubuntu Linux releases. The Ubuntu desktop is also faster thanks to improvements to its Unity desktop environment and Compiz compositing window manager. In this article are Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and a preliminary Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot. In this first article, the OpenGL performance of Intel and Radeon graphics are being benchmarked.

          • Ubuntu Phone Will Come Complete With a Terminal App, If You’re Into That Sort of Thing

            The terminal isn’t the kind of thing casual users will get a lot of use out of, and that’s true of the terminal in the desktop version of Ubuntu as well. I’m not an experienced or particularly skilled Linux user, but the times I’ve needed to do anything in the terminal I’ve been glad it’s there, and I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the few terminal commands I do know. Instead of digging through menus or utilities, with a few lines in the terminal you can do just about anything in Linux.

          • Canonical Commits to Regular Updates for Ubuntu Cloud

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 15 Codenamed “Olivia”, Will Be Available In May

              Linux Mint team has announced the codename of Linux Mint 15 and future plans on Github. Linux Mint 15 is named as “Olivia” – pronounced as “oh-LIV-ee-ah” – Latin origin. Meaning of Olivia is “olive tree”. The olive tree is a symbol of fruitfulness, beauty, and dignity. As name suggests this release will focus on beauty and user interface, as well as improvements in Cinnamon, Nemo, MDM, Live installer, Mint tools.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Closed minds of “Open Source” eject iTWire from Linux conference

      In the more than 30 years that I have been involved with the tech industry I have seen a lot of strange things but none stranger than the events of today at the Linux Conference Australia. iTWire senior Linux writer Sam Varghese has been ejected from the conference. Why? Well, you may ask and then wonder what the Linux community in Australia has come to.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hortonworks Signs on to OpenStack Foundation

      As 2013 begins, there is continued momentum for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing framework. As we reported last September, OpenStack has its very own foundation, which is packed with heavy-hitting technology titans among its members. And now, the newest member of the OpenStack Foundation is Hortonworks, which provides an enterprise-class Hadoop distribution and resources for Hadoop. As a member of the foundation, Hortonworks has an opportunity to marry open source Big Data crunching with cutting-edge cloud computing.

    • OpenNebula open-sources service management layer with enterprise in mind

      OpenNebula, the European answer to the likes of Eucalyptus and OpenStack that counts CERN and China Mobile among its customers, is moving to differentiate itself from competitors by freely releasing OpenNebulaApps, a suite of cloud application management tools that sit on top of its traditional infrastructure management toolkit.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • WordPress 3.5.1 tightens security and stops HTML from disappearing

      The WordPress developers have announced a maintenance update to the popular open source blogging software. WordPress 3.5.1 fixes 37 bugs and addresses three security issues, including two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Users running WordPress on IIS might run into a problem that prevents the upgrade; the developers have prepared documentation to help users work around this problem.

  • BSD

    • Arch BSD: Arch Linux Atop The FreeBSD Kernel

      The Arch BSD operating system is moving forward, an attempt at a BSD platform that’s inspired by the Arch Linux distribution and using its package-set.

      An email arrived at Phoronix this morning that the ArchBSD.net web-site is now online. This new site looks just like ArchLinux.org, but Linux references are replaced by BSD. Right now there isn’t too much information available on Arch BSD, but the news from this week states that a test ISO should be available shortly.

    • NetBSD is here!

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Using Technology To Transform Government

      What’s going on? They are accepting FLOSS to do the lion’s share of the IT in government and small businesses to work on smaller slices of IT instead of getting some large business to slap Wintel and “partners” into a pig barn. The plan is to replace the web presence with FLOSS and not just to add a server. They are cutting through paperwork wherever they can from top to bottom.

    • FLOSS In Action In Government

      The UK developed a “Fix My Street” web application as FLOSS. Source code is on GitHub (GNU Affero General Public License). It’s now being copied by Switzerland and Norway is using it to allow citizens to report potholes and such, giving government the ability to respond quickly and to keep on top of the overall situation with roads. Beautiful.

    • Open source policy no guarantee governments will actually use open source

      The distance between government policy favoring open source technology and solicitations that don’t actively discriminate against it can be great.

    • Sweden follows Norway with open source “Fix My Street”

      According to a report on the EC’s open source portal, Joinup, Sweden is following the example of Norway in using the “Fix My Street” open source software that was developed in the UK. The software enables citizens to easily report problems and helps authorities identify and prioritise them. A pilot version of the national service, “Fixa Min Gata”Swedish language link, is expected to become operational in March or April and will allow citizens to report such things as potholes, broken pavements, graffiti or non-functional street lighting.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source ecology explained

      Tristan sez, “Open Source Ecology founder Marcin Jakubowski and the OSE team explain the philosophy behind their work and the open source movement as a whole. We’re always looking for remote collaborators to pick up and run with our designs. If you’re interested in building or improving on our work, please visit the OSE wiki.”

    • Open Data

      • Open data economy: Eight business models for open data and insight from Deloitte UK

        When I asked whether the push to free up government data was resulting in economic activity and startup creation, I started to receive emails from people around the United States and Europe. I’ll be publishing more of what I learned in our ongoing series of open data interviews and profiles over the next month, but two responses are worth sharing now.

    • Open Hardware

      • Interview: Kyle Rankin

        We had a chance to sit down with Kyle Rankin, SCALE 11x keynote speaker, to discuss his upcoming keynote as well as a host of other topics including 3D printing, Linux desktops and whether Jorge Castro is the barometer for cool technology.

  • Programming

    • Automating translation of software using the Microsoft Translator and Python

      January 25, 2013 at 07:40 AM | categories: Sysadmin, Tips, Unix, Linux | View Comments

      The Microsoft translator provides an API that you can use for automated translation. It currently supports about 39 languages.

      True to the nature of open source i found that someone had already written a python wrapper to the API. I extended the wrapper to use the requests and pofile packages.

Leftovers

  • On Data Tagging

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs Proof that God hates its Customers

      The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, says he believes banks serve a social purpose and are “doing God’s work.”

    • JPMorgan bet against itself in “Whale” trade

      There is a new twist in the London Whale trading scandal that cost JPMorgan Chase $6.2 billion in trading losses last year. Some of the firm’s own traders bet against the very derivatives positions placed by its chief investment office, said three people familiar with the matter.

    • Iceland wins legal battle over failed bank

      Iceland has won a legal battle over its reponsibilities to British and Dutch savers who lost money when an online savings bank collapsed.

      The European Free Trade Association court said Iceland did not have to guarantee minimum levels of compensation when Icesave went bust.

      Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, the country’s prime minister said: “It is quite clear that this judgement will add force to the economic rebuilding in Iceland. Possibly the ratings agencies will revise their results. This will also have a positive influence on the lifting of capital controls.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • GOP Vote Rigging Stalls in Virginia and Florida but Pushes On in Wisconsin and Michigan — Why?

      Virginia’s governor has come out against a partisan effort to reallocate electoral college votes by Congressional district, but the plan is far from dead in other states, with governors in Wisconsin and Michigan voicing support for similar measures. The split between Virginia and other states on this issue may not be explained entirely by cooler heads prevailing — it might be part of a political calculation about how best to elect a Republican president in 2016.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Happy Data Privacy Day!

      Happy Data Privacy Day! To mark the day the Market Research Society (MRS) has launched ‘Fair Data, a new ethical mark they claim will help members of the public to easily identify between those organisations which collect, use and retain personal data properly and ethically, and those that do not.

      MRS hope that all organisations that collect and use personal data will be able to use the Fair Data mark which will become the instantly recognisable standard for an organisation that can be trusted to do the right think with all individuals’ data.

    • Facebook Graph Search: Privacy Control You Still Don’t Have

      Facebook’s Graph Search has certainly caused quite a stir since it was first announced two weeks ago. We wrote earlier about how Graph Search, still in beta, presents new privacy problems by making shared information discoverable when previously it was hard—if not impossible—to find at a large scale. We also put out a call to action—and even created a handy how-to guide—urging people to reassess their privacy settings.

    • How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook’s Graph Search

  • Civil Rights

    • Unlocking new cell phones to become illegal on Saturday

      An edict from the Library of Congress is about to make phone unlocking illegal for the first time in 6 years. The decision, issued in October, is part of a triennial process whereby the Librarian of Congress hands out exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

    • How Unlocking Your Phone May Now Be A Crime: $500,000 Fines And 5 Years In Prison For First Offense

      Last week, we warned about the impending deadline if you wanted to unlock your phone “legally.” That’s because the Librarian of Congress took away the DMCA anti-circumvention exemption that allowed phone unlocking. If you’re wondering why we even have the Librarian of Congress deciding such things, that’s a much longer discussion. In the meantime, though, Derek Khanna has written an interesting piece of at The Atlantic, in which he points out that, not only is it illegal now to unlock your phone, it’s possibly criminal thanks to some broad and ridiculous readings of today’s copyright law. Until now, most people had been regarding this as purely a civil matter — and one where it seemed (mostly) unlikely that companies would take too many people to court.

    • Israel Stays Away from U.N. Human Rights Review

  • DRM

    • Macmillan will sell e-books to libraries in pilot program at $25 per title

      While the e-book market has certainly skyrocketed in recent years, it’s still not always easy to get digital books from your local library. Yet unlike physical books, which obviously degrade over time—digital books won’t. So publishers have figured out that they need to start selling a license to the book, rather than the book itself, to our venerable institutions of public learning.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Briefs Filed by Petitioner and His Amici in Bowman v. Monsanto

      Center for Food Safety argues that extending patent exhaustion to progeny seeds will benefit farmers by curtailing Monsanto’s patent enforcement actions targeting farmers. The Center also claims that extending the patent exhaustion doctrine in this way will benefit scientific research and innovation in agriculture, and lower the cost of farming. The Center further contends the Federal Circuit’s decision is contrary to Quanta, and reiterates petitioner’s argument that producing progeny seed constitutes use of the patented seed, not making it, and hence falls within the scope of patent exhaustion. The amici voice is concerned that farmers whose fields have been “contaminated” by Monsanto’s patented seeds could be subject to infringement lawsuits.

    • US Government Brief: Farmer who Purchases Commodity Soybeans Cannot Replant Those Beans Without Committing Patent Infringement

    • Trademarks

      • The International Olympic Committee Has Already Staked A Trademark Claim On The Number ’2014′

        Man, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sure loves its trademarks. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many cases of the IOC’s fierce brand protection have been detailed here, including taping over non-sponsor logos and seeking the power to enter homes to remove “unapproved signage.” This has also rubbed off on a few Olympians, triggering trademark office filings to protect made-up words stolen from middling hip hop artists and self-given nicknames.

        [...]

        So, with the kind of efficiency you only find in the most brutal of trademark bullies, the IOC has trademarked a number many people were planning to use starting next January, nine years in advance. And the IOC isn’t leaving anything to chance. It has staked a claim on all 45 of the possible registration classes, including (but good god, certainly not limited to) chemicals, pharmaceuticals, metals/alloys, machines, tools, scientific equipment, surgical instruments, lighting, heating, vehicles, firearms, musical instruments, furniture, ropes, tarps, string, textiles, toys, coffee, fresh fruits and vegetables, beer, other alcoholic beverages, tobacco, insurance, conferences and seminars, design and development of computer programs, restaurant services, asbestos and security.

    • Copyrights

      • Antigua’s Legal “Pirate Site” Authorized by the World Trade Organization

        During a meeting in Geneva today the World Trade organization (WTO) authorized Antigua’s request to suspend U.S. copyrights. The decision confirmed the preliminary authorization the Caribbean island received in 2007, and means that the local authorities can move forward with their plan to start a download portal which offers movies, music and software without compensating the American companies that make them.

      • Ortiz to motel owner: We’re not done yet

        U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said her office is weighing an appeal against a Tewksbury motel owner who criticized her for prosecutorial bullying last week after he won his battle in the feds’ three-year bid to seize his business, citing drug busts on the property.

      • House panel demands answers regarding Swartz prosecution

        Letter to Attorney General Eric Holder says committee has “many questions” about the Justice Department’s handling of prosecution of the Internet activist, who committed suicide earlier this month.

      • Linus Blames Prosecutor For Aaron Swartz’ Suicide

        Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux kernel, says that prosecutor Carmen Ortiz “zealously prosecuted” the 26 years old hacker-activist Aaron Swartz, pushing him to the suicidal path that ended mid-January.

      • BitTorrent Launches Private and Secure Dropbox Alternative
      • Bad Week For Carmen Ortiz: Admits To Botched Gang Arrest As Congress Kicks Off Swartz Investigation

        Carmen Ortiz is not having a good month. The US Attorney who was in charge of the ridiculous Aaron Swartz prosecution — and now has over 50,000 people asking the White House to fire her — now will have to deal with an official investigation by Congress into that particular case. A bipartisan pair of Congressional representatives, Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings — who are basically the top dogs from each party on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee — have officially kicked off their investigation.

      • Ortiz says suicide will not change handling of cases
      • Carmen Ortiz’s Sordid Rap Sheet

        The suicide last Friday of information activist, computer hacker and technical wunderkind Aaron Swartz has focused attention on Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, whose overzealous prosecution may have led to his death. Swartz, co-founder of a website later acquired by Reddit as well as a prime developer of the online publishing infrastructure known as Rich Site Summary (RSS), was under federal indictment for logging into JSTOR—a database of scholarly articles accessible from universities across the country—and downloading its content with the intent to distribute the articles online free of charge.

      • Glenn Reynolds: “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime”
      • How Aaron Swartz helped to defeat Hollywood on SOPA

        Aaron Swartz’s former roommate, Peter Eckersley, says the late activist started Demand Progress because from D.C.’s perspective, it “doesn’t matter” if their laws break the Internet.

      • Senator disputes Aaron Swartz’s SOPA, Protect IP role
      • Honouring Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist

        Digital rights advocate’s death places spotlight on more open access to info.

      • Memory to myth: tracing Aaron Swartz through the 21st century

        “However, it was extremely funny that in such a formal setting, with imposing red drapes surrounding the room and the Justices sitting high above the supplicants in big chairs that the Justices were so informal. They interrupted each other, spun around and tipped back and forth in their chairs, and some even pretended to go to sleep with their head on their desks. The whole thing looked like a bunch of kids and school, all of which would almost certainly be diagnosed with ADD for their curiosity and inability to resist asking questions. Macki mentioned that Justice Clarence Thomas looked like he was chewing gum, trying hard to hide it from the teacher.

01.28.13

Links 28/1/2013: Galaxy S4 Rumours, Counter-Strike and Half-Life for GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Cool thing Thursday: Contribute to opensource without leaving your browser

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The meaning of the 4.0

      The Document Foundation will be releasing LibreOffice 4.0 in the beginning of February. It is a big and important release for us, and a major symbolic milestone. We have received questions and comments, however, that were basically about our reasons to change the major number, from the 3.x to the 4.x . I believe it’s important to explain why we are doing this, and what the 4.0 release is all about.

    • Will Oracle Wake Up & Smell the Java?

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Making Your Code Walk: GNU Autotools
    • Understanding Free and Open Source Software

      We received an email from Richard M. Stallman (RMS), after publishing the article about the Egyptian demonstration calling for the government to adopt Free Software. I can’t deny that one of the motives behind writing this article is to show off that someone as important to the history of computers as RMS is reading what we write here. Nevertheless, the main reason for writing this article is the following:

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • OpenOakland: Another city learns the value of open communication

      I recently co-founded an organization called OpenOakland with Code for America alumni Eddie Tejeda. One of our passions was that we both believe that government can and should be much more than a vending machine. It’s no secret that current local governments have a ton of changing to do, but we think it is unlikely that these changes will come about swiftly without all of us being involved and engaged; and supporting our government staff and leaders to make these changes.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Digital Activist’s Suicide Casts Spotlight on Growth of Open Access Movement

        Aaron Swartz was threatened with criminal trial for downloading millions of academic articles. Although he may have employed questionable methods, the data-access principles he fought for are becoming widely embraced

      • AG Eric Holder Agrees to Stick Around (At Least for Now)

        Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has agreed to serve at the helm of the U.S. Justice Department as President Barack Obama prepares to begin his second term, the White House said today.

      • How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz

        As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.

        This was a touching tribute: a collective effort to complete the task Swartz had tried – and many people felt died trying – to accomplish himself. But it is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive.

      • Access denied

        ON JANUARY 1st each year the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University fetes Public Domain Day. It is a joyous occasion, celebrating the end of copyright protection for works that at long last leave the bosom of legal monopoly for the commonweal. The centre does, however, temper the elation with an important caveat: while much of the rest of the world may take cheer from mass migration of material to the public domain each year, America has not seen one since the 1970s, nor will it until 2019.
        The public domain is a catch-all term for material outside of the strictures of reproductive limits, or for which rights were formally foresworn. The centre promotes a balance between a creator’s and the public’s interest, says Duke’s James Boyle. Mr Boyle, one of the drafters of the set of liberal copyright assignment licences known as Creative Commons, invokes countless studies arguing that tight copyright makes sense over short periods, to encourage creative endeavour, but can be counterproductive if extended too far. Yet rightsholders lobby for greater control (and legislators often oblige them) “even when it turns out that it hurts their interest,” says Mr Boyle.

      • Aaron Swartz: Opening access to knowledge

        He did so through his work on the RSS (Rich Site Summary) Web-syndication protocol, building essential technology for the copyright open-licensing project, Creative Commons, and his activism against the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have authorized blocking access to Internet sites that were alleged to be hosting infringing materials.
        He faced quite a hurdle in opening access to academic works: For almost all academic and scientific research, the public is asked to pay for it essentially twice. First, when government agencies or public universities sponsor the research, and a second time, when users must pay for access to the article, often via subscribing to a journal. Subscription fees often amount to tens of thousands of dollars. And most of those journals do not pay the authors; instead, they keep the fees as profits.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

    I’m a full visually-able user and I love looking at websites. I know though, that not everyone experiences websites in the same way. Browsing websites at different screen sizes is a hot topic at the moment, but lets not forget that it’s not just mobile users that experience websites differently, blind users experience them in a way you might not even realise.

  • Hardware

    • China wants eight new Lenovos by 2015

      Western technology companies’ view of China as the biggest pool of potential customers ever is looking less accurate than ever, after the Chinese government called for the formation of up to eight super-companies through mergers and acquisition by 2015.

  • Security

    • Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death
    • Hackers take over gov’t website to avenge Swartz
    • Hacktavist Group Anonymous Defaced USSC Site

      Aaron Swartz was a well known author and founder of Demand Progress, who launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA which now has over a million members. He was also well known for his frequent television appearances and articles on a variety of topics, particularly the corrupting influence of big money on institutions and politics. He is best now known as the first martyr of the internet freedom fight after committing suicide to avoid what most would call unjust prosecution for victimless crimes.

    • Anonymous Strikes Again

      In the world of Hacktavism it would appear that they seldom have a dull moment or minute to spare. Just hours after hijacking and defacing USSC.gov in the United States in response to Aaron Swarz suicide, Anonymous turned their attention to the government of Turkey. Once again attacking and defacing a government sites in what they are calling “OPBigBrother”.

    • Backdoors in many Barracuda appliances

      Security researcher S. Viehboeck from SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab discovered that the /etc/shadow and /etc/password files on the appliances had user accounts with names such as product, support and websupport. These accounts were protected with weak passwords and the researcher says he produced a usable list of passwords in a short time. It is not possible to delete these accounts easily as they appear to be used for remote maintenance.

    • Github Search Exposes Passwords

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Kiriakou and Stuxnet: the danger of the still-escalating Obama whistleblower war
    • FBI is increasing pressure on suspects in Stuxnet inquiry

      Federal investigators looking into disclosures of classified information about a cyberoperation that targeted Iran’s nuclear program have increased pressure on current and former senior government officials suspected of involvement, according to people familiar with the investigation.

    • Talking to Reporters Is Not A Crime: New Leak Investigation Threatens Press Freedom

      A disturbing report in Saturday’s Washington Post describes an FBI investigation of a large number of government officials suspected of leaking classified information to the press, engulfing an unknown group of reporters along the way. The investigation includes data-mining officials’ personal and professional communications to find any contact with journalists. Just to be clear: It seems officials are being targeted for just talking to the press.

      While the Obama administration has already shamefully prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined, this investigation—given its unprecedented scope and scale—has the potential to permanently chill both press freedom and the public’s right to kno

    • Marine gets no jail time in killing of 24 Iraqi civilians

      Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich will not serve a jail sentence following his guilty plea in the killing of 24 Iraqis in 2005, a military judge said Tuesday.

      The announcement by Lt. Col. David Jones came after Wuterich took responsibility during his sentencing hearing at Camp Pendleton for the killings in the Euphrates River town of Haditha and expressed remorse to the victims’ families.

    • David Hicks Tells His Story
    • Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets

      …2.3 million people behind bars in America…

    • When Police Violate the Constitution

      The judge excoriated the city for flagrant indifference to the Fourth Amendment. The amendment has been interpreted by the courts to mean that police officers can legally stop and detain a person only when they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is committing, has committed or is about to commit a crime.

    • Pentagon cybersecurity force to grow fivefold under multi-year expansion

      The Pentagon has just approved a major expansion for its cybersecurity force, increasing the headcount from 900 to 4,900 over the next several years, reports The Washington Post. While yet to be formally announced, the enlargement is said to come at the request of Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the Defense Department’s head of Cyber Command, and director of the NSA.

    • Pentagon Announces Cyber Force Expansion As Anonymous Hacks Government Websites
    • Report: Cyber Command to Expand to Nearly 5,000
    • Kill Him Silently

      The story behind Mossad’s bungled bid to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

    • Preserve CIA prisons as evidence, lawyers for 9/11 suspects ask
    • Former CIA officer: Jail sentence a ‘badge of honor’

      A federal judge has sentenced former CIA officer John Kiriakou to 30 months in jail, making him the first officer to be sent to jail for leaking classified secrets. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports on the case and Kiriakou says he leaked the information to speak out against torture, calling himself a “whistleblower.”

    • Explosion at Fordow: Israeli propaganda or Iran’s biggest secret?

      Contradictory reports of an explosion at Iran’s uranium enrichment site have been emerging. Iran denies it ever happened, calling it “Western propaganda” while Israel confirms it, putting tensions around upcoming nuclear talks.

    • Ex-CIA man: Iran blast largest sabotage in decades

      Iranian dissident-turned CIA operative Reza Kahlili told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that an alleged blast at the Fordow nuclear installation in Iran is “the largest case of sabotage in decades.”

    • The CIA’s Secret Prisons in Poland

      Reportedly, the results of this investigation could link some of Poland’s most senior politicians with illegal detention and torture, as well as impact negatively on the relationship between Poland and its key ally, the US, according to Reuters.

      The news agency’s sources, including lawyers and human rights activists, reveal that the investigation was halted after the original investigators were taken off the case early last year.

    • Three Days of the Condor: 1975 – The CIA in the movies
    • CIA Thriller ‘Argo’ Leads SAG Awards
    • SYRIA: CIA-MI6 Intel Ops and Sabotage

      In late 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, Matthew Jones, a Reader in International History, at London’s Royal Holloway College, discovered “frighteningly frank” documents:1957 plans between then UK Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and then President, Dwight Eisenhower, endorsing: “a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion (of Syria) by Syria’s pro-western neighbours.” (ii)

      At the heart of the plan was the assassination of the perceived power behind then President Shukri al-Quwatli. Those targeted were: Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, Head of Military Intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, Chief of Syrian General Staff: and Khalid Bakdash, who headed the Syrian Communist Party.

      The document was drawn up in Washington in the September of 1957:

      “In order to facilitate the action of liberative (sic) forces, reduce the capabilities of the regime to organize and direct its military actions … to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals.

    • White House keeps its secrets as CIA agent goes to prison

      When he receives an expected sentence of 30 months in federal prison later this week, John Kiriakou will pay the price for a catastrophic error in judgment. But he shouldn’t suffer alone: The Obama administration, too, needs to do a little penance if it hopes to live up to the president’s famous promise to “usher in a new era of open government.”

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Greg Smith: On Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and students entering finance

      Greg Smith ’01 is a former executive director and vice president of investing banking firm Goldman Sachs. In March 2012, he resigned from the firm in an op-ed in The New York Times decrying the firm’s change in culture and loss of client focus. He has since written “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story.” Smith spoke to The Stanford Daily about his time at the firm, Stanford students on Wall Street and the difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

    • How Iceland Overthrew The Banks: The Only 3 Minutes Of Any Worth From Davos

      “Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches?” is the rhetorical question that Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar Grimson asks (and answers) in this truly epic three minutes of truthiness from the farce that is the World Economic Forum in Davos. Amid a week of back-slapping and self-congratulatory party-outdoing, as John Aziz notes, the Icelandic President explains why his nation is growing strongly, why unemployment is negligible, and how they moved from the world’s poster-child for banking crisis 5 years ago to a thriving nation once again. Simply put, he says, “we didn’t follow the prevailing orthodoxies of the last 30 years in the Western world.” There are lessons here for everyone – as Grimson explains the process of creative destruction that remains much needed in Western economies – though we suspect his holographic pass for next year’s Swiss fun will be reneged…

    • Bill Black: Why the World Economic Forum and Goldman Sachs are Capitalism’s Worst Enemies

      It is fitting that Goldman Sachs is the recipient of this year’s “Public Eye” designation, but it is even more fitting that it is being announced during the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. Goldman Sachs exemplifies the travesty that WEF has created. It is not the worst of the worst. It is representative of the financial world of systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) that are spreading crony capitalism through the West. The SDIs are the so-called “too big to fail (or prosecute)” banks.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • A CNET Reporter Resigns Amid CBS-Dish Tussle

      A CNET reporter has quit in the wake of CNET parent CBS ’ statement that it blocked the technology news website from considering Dish Network ’s controversial ad-skipping device for its annual Consumer Electronics Show awards.
      “Sad to report that I’ve resigned from CNET,” CNET senior writer Greg Sandoval announced via Twitter Monday morning. “I no longer have confidence that CBS is committed to editorial independence.”
      CBS Interactive, which owns CNET, said Friday that Dish’s device, “Hopper with Sling,” was “removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp,” as the Journal reported at the time. The device is the latest version of Dish’s digital video recorder that makes it easy for viewers to skip over television commercials.

  • Censorship

    • Freedom Of Speech Is Primarily The Right For Stupid People To Say Dumb Things (And That’s A GOOD Thing)

      Yesterday, a French court decided that people on Twitter have no right to anonymity when posting xenophobic comments. This is deeply troubling: the court says that unpopular opinions don’t have the same protection from freedom of speech as popular ones. Further, and more troubling still, this is a pan-European trend.

    • WH: Piers Morgan has free speech rights

      The White House is defending the right of Piers Morgan to speak out on gun control.
      The forum: A formal response to a White House petition calling on President Obama to deport the CNN host for advocating new restrictions on guns after the Dec. 14 mass killing at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
      “Let’s not let arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First,” said the response written by White House press secretary Jay Carney.

    • Facebook Apologizes for Tolerating Violent Imagery Toward Women

      Today, a Facebook spokesman reached out to Wired to reverse its previous stance on imagery that promoted violence toward women, stating that a photo it had previously deemed acceptable for the social networking site “should have been taken down when it was reported to us and we apologize for the mistake.”

    • Buffy vs Edward Remix Unfairly Removed by Lionsgate
    • Burma dissolves censorship office, but needs to do more for press freedom

      Burma (Myanmar) announced that it has dissolved the press censorship board which was officially known as Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), the state-run New Light of Myanmar said Friday. The termination of PSRD has been approved during Thursday’s cabinet meeting, the newspaper said.

      “The division under the Printing and Publishing Enterprise has stopped functioning since 20 August, 2012 to pave ways for freedom of press,” according to the report. However, in place of PSRD, “Copyrights and Registration Division” will be shaped under the Information and Public Relations Department, NLM newspaper said.

  • Privacy

    • Hack turns the Cisco phone on your desk into a remote bugging device

      No fix yet for attack that allows eavesdropping on private conversations.

    • EU lawmakers seek to limit use of data by internet firms

      Internet companies such as Facebook and Google may have to get more permission to use information if European Union lawmakers give users more control over their personal data.

    • Facebook Blocks Vine, Wonder Apps

      A mere day after Facebook extolled the benefits of integrating Facebook Login as a user registration option for developers’ apps, the social networking giant also managed to highlight the risks of relying on third-party platforms by blocking two apps that had integrated Facebook data.

    • Berlin activists create CCTV-smashing street game
    • Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook say they require warrants to give over private content

      While the policies are somewhat reassuring, they don’t have the full force of the law yet

    • Dining with spies

      At their yearly conference the Dutch The National Cyber ​​Security Center stated this week they want to listen more to the hacker community. It is fine that the government will at last listen to the people who have been ahead of the curve for decades, although the question remains – why it has waited to do this until 2013? Even if this had been done as recently as 5 or 10 years ago it would have saved an incredible amount of trouble and public money. I sincerely hope that the consultations with the hack(tivist) community are about more than just technical tricks, because most benefits to society are derived from discussing policy. For purely technical issues the usual consulting companies can always be hired and then simply pay hackers for their knowledge and advice, just like any other experts.

  • Civil Rights

    • Bahais cannot enroll in public schools, education minister says

      The education minister has repeated remarks that Bahais cannot enroll in public schools, saying it violates the Constitution.

    • Ottawa’s anti-spam proposals prohibit secret monitoring software

      After more than a year of closed-door consultations, the government has finally released an updated draft proposal for those long-awaited anti-spam regulations.

      The latest proposed rules, which were published in the Canada Gazette over the weekend, would add several new exemptions to the law, including inter-organizational email — messages sent by one employee to another, for instance, or to a contractor or franchisee.

    • Two New Decisions on the Wiretap Act and Secondary Liability

      The last two weeks have brought two important decisions in the ongoing litigation over behavioral advertising firm NebuAd’s alleged use of a device to intercept data from ISP networks. Several ISPs allegedly permitted NebuAd to install an “appliance” on their networks in order to collect and analyze subscriber data for ad targeting purposes. In lawsuits that began to be filed in 2008, plaintiffs have alleged that NebuAd–and the ISPs with which it allegedly partnered– violated Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (i.e., the Wiretap Act) as well as other federal and state laws. Plaintiffs have sued the ISPs in separate suits around the country. Two of these suits–against ISPs Embarq and WideOpen West (“WOW”)–yielded decisions in favor of the ISPs last week.

    • Evidence of things not seen

      This week, Big Brother Watch submitted our response to the consultation on Judicial Review. In conclusion, we say:

      “An overwhelming number of points in the consultation document are anecdotal and unsubstantiated; indeed many are contradicted by official figures. This consultation is absolutely not a document that should be relied upon when embarking on reform of one of our most fundamental legal rights.”

    • Iran giving out condoms for criminals to rape us, say jailed activists

      Rape victims in Iran usually stay quiet in order to protect the honour of their family but at the time when journalists based in the country are facing strict restrictions, these letters have become one of the only sources of information about the situation of hundreds of imprisoned activists.

    • Unauthorized unlocking of smartphones becomes illegal Saturday

      The feds mandate fidelity between carriers and users: New rule under DMCA outlaws unlocking new handsets without carrier permission.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Drones

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • India flouts patent for blockbuster biologic

      India’s generic industry received a windfall on November 2 when the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) withdrew a patent granted to Pegasys (pegylated interferon alfa-2a; IFN-alpha2a), marketed by the multinational Roche of Basel, for use in combination with ribavirin (Rebetol, Virazole, Copegus) in treating hepatitis C virus (HCV). The board ruled, after hearing an appeal by Mumbai-based Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust, a patient advocacy group, that the drug is not a new invention, as the process by which polyethylene glycol (PEG) is added to IFN-alpha2a was already known at the time of the patent grant. The appellate board also cited the drug’s high cost (over $8,000 for a 6-month course) as a reason for revocation. The decision makes it possible for generic drugmakers to introduce low-cost copies of Pegasys. It also sets a precedent for advocacy groups to challenge the validity of previously granted patents on the grounds of patients’ rights to affordable access to lifesaving treatments.

    • Copyrights

01.26.13

Links 26/1/2013: Half-Life for GNU/Linux, More News

Posted in News Roundup at 12:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • BusyBox 1.21.0 Is Busy With Many Changes

    BusyBox, the lightweight open-source project that provides several Unix/Linux tools in a single executable for POSIX systems, had its first unstable release in the 1.21 series on Monday.

  • Free, Open-Source Digital Textbook Provider, Boundless, Releases Its Content Under Creative Commons

    Since first emerging early last year, Boston-based startup Boundless has been on a mission to give students a free alternative to the financial and physical costs of bulky backpacks brimming with pricey hard-copy textbooks. Co-founders Ariel Diaz, Brian Balfour and Aaron White believe that the incumbents, the old-school textbook publishers (the top four of which still control the market) have been driving up the cost of educational content for years, so Boundless has been fighting the Powers That Be by offering a free, digital alternative culled from existing, open educational resources.

  • United States: Monetizing Open Source Platforms – Something New?

    Sharing software code via free open source has been around since the 1980s and has enjoyed much success. Open source has been applied to content, websites, technological parts, and other materials. Can and should an open source platform be monetized?

  • Less bounce with Mongo for Youwin gamblers

    The online betting industry is adopting enterprise level open source technologies where there is still come reticence among perhaps more traditional firms.

    Youwin has been using open-source big-data technology MongoDB to improve its business outcomes — the firm has:

    • Halved its bounce rate and increased turnover by 10 per cent
    • Cut its project costs
    • Boosted active player numbers by 22 per cent

    NOTE: The term “bounce rate” is part of web analytics terminology and refers to the number of website visitors who will leave a site after only visiting one page. The inference here is that the landing page a user sees first is therefore not relevant to them.

  • GCW-Zero Open Source Gaming Handheld: Straight out of Pandora’s Box
  • Open Source Software Movement Supported by Ernst Publishing

    Ernst Publishing Company, a provider of technology and closing cost data for the real estate and home finance industries for the past 20 years, has announced that the company’s technology development team has begun leveraging the power and capabilities presented by the communities of Open-Source software.

  • Open Source Nexus You Can Visit

    FOSDEM is the most important meeting ground for the world’s open source developers, and you can attend free of charge. Will you be there?

  • Is open source the missing building block to improved nutrition for schoolkids?

    At the start of every new year resolutions on diet and health abound. Yet there seems to be little discussion on schoolchildren’s health and nutrition, and taking a more open education approach to it. This is remarkable since childhood obesity and diabetes are at record levels in the US. Today there are 12.5 million obese children—three times as many as there were in the 1980s—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  • How to make app stores open source-friendly

    App stores have their roots in open source — and they can return to those roots with scant business disruption. Just ask … Microsoft?

  • Three great years of sharing the open source story

    Three years ago today we flipped the switch on at opensource.com. Technically, we removed the htaccess file to allow anyone to access the site. Since that point, we’ve been steadily providing stories that highlight how open source is having a positive impact on the world and building a community around that mission.

  • Microsoft Potential Dell Investment: Bad for Linux, FOSS?

    Amid rumors that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) may invest in Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), a massive question has emerged: If such an investment occurs, will Dell maintain its extremely close relationships with Canonical (Ubuntu), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), SUSE and other open source providers? Hmmm… Here’s The VAR Guy’s spin.

    First, a little background. As you may have heard, Dell may go private. Investors could include Silver Lake Partners (a private equity firm), Microsoft, Michael Dell and others. If Microsoft pumps money into Dell, the software giant could strain relationships with Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Acer and other PC makers. Acer has already been critical of Microsoft’s Windows Surface RT and Surface Pro tablet launches.

  • Microsoft claims Munich’s jump to Linux wasted cash

    Software giant Microsoft has gone to Munich with a piece of paper claiming that the city wasted a fortune dumping its software in favour of Linux. However, the company refused to tell the world what it has on its piece of paper so you will just have to take its word for it.

    Microsoft and its chum HP insist that the German city of Munich had its numbers wrong when it calculated switching from Windows to Linux saved the city millions.

  • Why “community” is key to open source’s success

    Montcheuil’s full title for his thoughts here was fully entitled “Working for a Common Good” – Why Community is Key to Open Source’s Success.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Presentation Mode protects you from embarrassing situations in Firefox

        Have you ever had a friend over who wanted to use your computer to look something up on the Internet? Or did you use your laptop for a presentation at work or school and had to use the Firefox browser as part of it? These situations can become embarrassing if the browsing history reveals more about you than you are normally willing to share. I’m not talking about the obvious here, NSFW sites that you have visited, but regular sites as well. Maybe you have visited a support group website, a political site or a religious site; the sheer fact that you visited such a site may reveal personal information about you that you may not want to share.

      • Remove duplicate bookmarks in Firefox
      • Firefox OS Gets Developer Preview Phones
      • Open-source Firefox phone to launch this year
      • Mozilla Lures Devs to Firefox OS With Shiny New Toys

        It hardly seems likely that an open source mobile OS upstart could make any waves in a market dominated by Android and iOS. Windows Phone and BlackBerry may find a following, but Firefox OS? Not likely — at least, not in the developed world. Firefox may be able to sink its teeth into emerging markets, however, which are hungry for lower-cost devices.

      • Mozilla Launching Open-Source Smartphones to Challenge Apple’s iPhone

        Mozilla, the nonprofit that created Firefox OS, plans to further its mission to make the web accessible to everyone with two new open-source smartphones. The company will leverage Firefox OS, along with the power of open standards and an open community, to launch a rival to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, and it is inviting web developers to join in its mission.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • On First Anniversary, ownCloud Boasts Strong Growth

      It’s now been a full year since ownCloud, the open source data syncing platform, launched as a commercial entity. I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical back then that the company would be able to succeed in a market already inundated with competing products. But ownCloud managed to hold its own and more in 2012, and has its sights set on continued expansion in 2013, according to recent statements from the company.

    • Hey Big Brother, Get Off of My Cloud

      How secure is your sensitive data online? If you ask Richard Stallman and many others, they’ll tell you that it’s probably not very secure. And, of course, few organizations on the planet would be better equipped to answer the question than Google. That’s why Google’s latest semi-annual Internet transparency report is worth taking note of. Disturbingly, it shows that Internet surveillance on a global basis is steadily rising, and the United States leads all other nations in demands for user data. Meanwhile, Google itself has clarified how it handles law enforcement requests for sensitive personal data online.

    • Mirantis Extends Its OpenStack Boot Camp Instructional Series

      As we reported earlier this month, Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, recently announced that it has received $10 million in funding from Dell, Intel and WestSummit. The small firm has a big and impressive list of customers working with it on OpenStack projects. The customers include AT&T, PayPal and The Gap. For IT professionals or individuals interested in picking up OpenStack skills quickly, Mirantis offers notable two-day Boot Camp events that are worth considering. Here are more details.

  • Databases

    • OpenSUSE also considers switching from MySQL to MariaDB

      MySQL may still be the “most popular open-source database” for now, but its day may be ending. Just like Fedora, which is considering switching out MySQL for the MySQL fork MariaDB, openSUSE is also considering making MariaDB its default database management system (DBMS).

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice and OpenClipart.org

      For several years I have been very fond of clip arts from the Open Clipart Library (OCAL) and when LibreOffice now has built in usage of SVG files I was very happy. Now I could use these exelent cliparts in scalable format. Until then the only way was to convert to bitmap (png or jpg) format first.

    • LibreOffice 4.0: An Existential Release

      LibreOffice 4.0 is right around the bend and today Charles H. Schulz wrote why this particular version is “an existential release.” Folks were wondering why the big jump in version numbers, but Schulz says there are two big reasons why the time is now. Besides the additions that will be seen by the users, his reasons go a bit deeper.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Open Source Outfit Bags $30M in Funding — And That Seems Small

      Attitudes towards open source software have changed so much in recent years, some outfits are now swimming in venture capital. Code hosting service GitHub grabbed $100 million dollars from Andreessen-Horowitz this past July. 10gen — maker of the MongoDB database — has raised $81 million. Cloudera — one of several companies developing the open source big data system Hadoop — has stuffed $141 million into its war chest.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

      Join the FSF and friends, today, Friday January 25th, from 2:00pm to 5pm EDT (19:00 to 22:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

    • Free and Open Source Software

      We received an email from Richard M. Stallman (RMS), after publishing the article about the Egyptian demonstration calling for the government to adopt Free Software. I can’t deny that one of the motives behind writing this article is to show off that someone as important to the history of computers as RMS is reading what we write here.

    • Egypt: Why Open Source Software?

      In the book “Access to Knowledge in Egypt“, Nagla Rizk (@naglarzk) and Sherif El-Kassas dedicated a chapter to the software industry in Egypt and the role F/OSS play there. They started by highlighting that just like any other economy, there are the two opposing forces that characterise the growth of the digital economy.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open Source Battle Over Obama’s Reelection Software

      One of President Obama’s advantages in the 2012 presidential race – besides running against a horrible candidate – was his campaign’s technology. While the Romney campaign had epic technology failures the President sailed to re-election with a fully functioning and innovative data management system.

    • The War Over Obama’s Election Tech

      The Democratic Party is fighting with coders over the fate of President Obama’s revolutionary fundraising software from the 2012 campaign.

    • Obama’s Techies Want To Open Source Their Work, But Politicians Want To Keep It Secret

      Right after the election, we noted the stories showing how Obama’s technology advantage was impressive, while the get-out-the-vote technology that the Romney campaign built up appeared to fail spectacularly. However, there’s an interesting post mortem to this, which shows how techies and politicians still usually come from very, very different worlds.

  • Licensing

    • Another Reason to Use Open Source: Sane Licensing

      A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out how a decision in Norway involving cash registers emphasised one of the advantages of open source – its natural auditability. Here’s another interesting situation that points out a further reason for choosing openness.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

01.23.13

Links 23/1/2013: Cinnarch 2013.01.23, BackBox 3.01

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux pros saw a giant salary leap in 2012: Dice

    Following up on its January 2012 study that found tech salaries had finally started to climb again, IT careers site Dice today published an annual update showing not just a continuing trend in that respect, but also a huge boost for those in the Linux field.

  • Will 2013 finally be the Year of Linux ?

    There has been some debate and consideration in recent years about when the Linux gaming platform will officially gain ground? Critics and market skeptics have wondered when it will really take off and it will be Linux’s turn to procure large portions of the market share. New games and gaming consoles geared toward this system have left many asserting that 2013 will finally be the “year of Linux.” But why?

  • OpenArtist Is a Linux Distro Prodigy

    Despite its youth, openArtist is the picture of a full-fledged Linux distro with a slew of specialty features for graphics production. Among its strong points is the universal approach it takes toward bundling software. If it’s useful to graphic artists, openArtist makes it accessible. Open source, freeware, public domain, abandonware, commercial, even — gasp — Windows programs are included.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Puts Out Linux 3.4 “LTSI” Kernel

      From the Linux Foundation’s Consumer Electronics Workgroup is a Linux 3.4 kernel that’s part of their Long-Term Support Initiative. The LTSI Linux 3.4 kernel will be maintained for two years while back-porting some of the features of newer Linux kernel releases.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Nouveau Can Beat NVIDIA With Cairo In Select Cases

        Chris Wilson has shared his testing experience of Cairo with NVIDIA ION hardware on the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source NVIDIA blob. In certain situations, the Cairo performance does better with Nouveau than the official NVIDIA Linux driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • The many Profiles of Enlightenment’s E17

      There are many desktop environments in active development, but none is as customizable as the E or Enlightenment Desktop Environment. But of all those desktop environments, its development (or public releases) has been comparatively slow.

      Enlightenment is one of those projects that caught my attention years ago, but which I decided, after playing with it for sometime, that it was not yet ready for prime time. I’ve been quietly tracking its development since.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • NetworkManager in GNOME beta supports AP operation

        In the latest GNOME 3.8 beta, NetworkManager makes the transition from version 0.9.6.4 to a pre-release version of NetworkManager 0.9.8. In addition to setting up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, where the Wi-Fi hardware and drivers support it, it is now able to set up an access point. The next major release of the network configuration program, which is used in many other desktop environments, also supports 4G LTE network modes, bridge master devices and bridge ports. It is also able to automatically activate a VPN for certain network connections. The recently released Fedora 18 already uses a pre-release version of NetworkManager 0.9.8 which includes these features.

  • Distributions

    • Kali Linux – A Teaser into the Future.

      Originally, BackTrack Linux was developed for our personal use but over the past several years, it has grown in popularity far greater than we ever imagined. We still develop BackTrack for ourselves because we use it every day. However, with growth and a huge user base, we have an obligation to ourselves, our users, and the open source community to create the best distribution we possibly can.

      With this in mind, about a year ago a bunch of us at Offensive Security started thinking about the future of BackTrack and brainstormed about the features and functionality we’d like to see in the next and future revisions. One of our main topics of conversation was the option of swapping out our custom development environment for a fully fledged Debian-compliant packaging and repository system.

    • BackTrack rebuilt as Kali Linux

      Penetration testing platform BackTrack has been relaunched as Kali Linux after a major restructure.

      The creators of Backtrack told SC details of the new Debian platform are being kept under wraps, adding the system is a “fully fledged Debian-compliant packaging and repository system”.

    • Exe GNU/Linux, New Distro with Trinity

      No three letters look any more strange to Linux users than exe, which is why a new distro named Exe GNU/Linux caught me by surprise in today’s Distrowatch Weekly. Ladislav Bodnar, our exalted Keeper of the Record, recently added Exe to the Distrowatch.com database and that was my cue to boot it up.

    • SolusOS Shows off GNOME Fork in New Alpha

      It’s hardly been a week since the developers at SolusOS announced their fork of GNOME Classic. Dubbed Consort, it set the Linux world abuzz last week. Today the team announced the first release with that new desktop: SolusOS 2 Alpha 7.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat expands cloud management services

        Today, anyone can set up a cloud. Managing it, though, is another story. So it came as no surprise last year, when Linux-giant Red Hat announced updates to its open hybrid cloud solutions portfolio, following the acquisition of ManageIQ, a leading provider of enterprise cloud management and automation solutions.

      • Red Hat Strengthens Its Presence In Cloud With ManageIQ

        Cloud is the future and depending on who you are and how you use it, it can be good or bad for you. Talking strictly about enterprises cloud is the way to go. Red Hat, the most successful open source company continues to strengthen it’s cloud portfolio and signed an agreement to acquire ManageIQ last moth.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Linux considering switching out MySQL for MariaDB
        • Blu Ray Ripping on Fedora 18

          After doing so searching on Blu Ray ripping on Linux I found that no one seemed to have a good how to for Blu Ray Ripping on Fedora 18. I also was not finding a method that worked consistently for free, or close to free. I found a great piece of software called MakeMKV. I was able to get Blu Ray ripping working fast and easy.

          MakeMKV is free to try for 30 days, after that the ask for 50$ for the purchase. I really think this is a good buy. It was one of the better programs I have found for Blu Ray ripping and they support Linux.

        • Fedora 18 revisited: Cinnamon, Xfce, LXDM, and a ‘wow’ for anaconda
        • Gnome 3.6 System Settings Changes for Fedora 18

          The system settings manager has received some attention for the release of Gnome 3.6. The settings manager itself has been improved with larger and more visible icons. Many of the settings modules have been upgraded as well. There are now several new options and preferences to choose from, so be sure to look around.

        • Fedora 18 Spherical Cow Gnome Review: Stable and efficient with professional looks but has Gnome 3 agonies!

          Fedora has always intrigued me to keep track of the latest happenings in the Linux world and especially what’s brewing at the RHEL stable! Also, if I think of a comparable distro to Ubuntu, Fedora is the only legitimate choice! Just like Ubuntu, Fedora also inspires innumerable spins (like Kororaa, Fuduntu, of which I am a big fan now!). So, when the release note of Fedora came on 15th Jan, I was quick to download all the four versions (Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE). This is the first review of the series and I start with the Gnome spin.

        • Weekend Project: Setting up MythTV on Fedora 18
        • Anaconda “fun” moment
        • End Of MySQL Begins? Fedora Linux Switches To MariaDB

          There is serious time ahead for Oracle owned technologies such as MySQL, Java and many more. MySQL’s open source nature was questioned recently and now Fedora seems to be putting the first nail as the project is planning to switch to MariaDB. Jaroslav Reznik (Red Hat’s Fedora project manager) stated that “MariaDB, which was founded by some of the original MySQL developers, has a more open-source attitude and an active community. We have found them to be much easier to work with, especially in regards to security matters.”

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Fifty shades of open source

    To many, open source is black and white — software is either open or not. Jack Wallen sees the new world order in shades of gray and begs the open source community to be more open in their attitude.

  • Monetizing open source platforms — something new?

    Sharing software code via free open source has been around since the 1980s and has enjoyed much success. Open source has been applied to content, websites, technological parts, and other materials. Can and should an open source platform be monetized?

  • element22 Launches φmod Open Source Conceptual Data Model Project
  • 9 Things That Are Never Admitted About Open Source

    You might think that a group of intelligent people like the members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community would be free of hidden taboos. You might expect that such a group of intellectuals would find no thought forbidden or uncomfortable—but if you did, you would be wrong.

    Like any sub-culture, FOSS is held together by shared beliefs. Such beliefs help to create a shared identity, which means that questioning them also means questioning that identity.

  • Open Source Camera On Its Way

    Because when we talk about software, we don’t talk about something made of physical objects, we talk about basically ideas and concepts, that never get out of the digital realm (or don’t usually get out). Making hardware is not easy — there are so many external factors over which you have no control – and usually it requires decent financial investment. So it’s a really big thing when someone actually makes open source hardware.

  • Open Source Skills Continue to Have Clout in the Job Market

    Career site Dice.com is out with results from its 2013-2012 Salary Survey, which confirms that times are getting much better for people seeking technology-focused jobs. And, in particular, the results reflect a trend that we saw gaining pace last year, which is that skills with open source platforms and tools can greatly increase your likelihood of getting hired and commanding a top salary. Here is more on what Dice found.

  • 2013-2012 Dice Salary Survey

  • Events

    • PowerLinux Users Group: Founding Meeting

      Every renaissance starts with one thing that you can point your finger at and say “that’s where it all began.” Sometimes you realize that moment while you are right in the middle of it, but most times you can’t define it until well after it happens.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Unveils Firefox OS Developer Phones

        Mozilla today unveiled two new developer preview phones that feature the browser maker’s Firefox OS.

        The phones – dubbed Keon and Peak – are being developed via Spanish phone maker GeeksPhone in partnership with Telefonica.

        “This week we are announcing our new Firefox OS developer preview phones because we believe that developers will help bring the power of the web to mobile,” Mozilla said in a blog post.

      • Mozilla unveils open source Firefox smartphone
      • Mozilla Unveils First Two Firefox OS Phones

        After news of its development throughout all of last year, Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform for smartphones has made an official debut on two phones that will ship to developers working on apps. The phones will ship to developers in February, but won’t become available to everybody until later this year. As we’ve reported, Mozilla is primarily targeting emerging markets with the phones, but there have been signs that they may be marketed throughout Europe and in the U.S. Here are more details.

        You can find Mozilla Hacks’ post on the new phones here. According to the post, the phones have the following specs and names:

  • Business

    • Small Business Trends: Linux & Open Source in 2013

      A lot of small businesses are reluctant to try Linux because they think it means moving away from Microsoft Windows, and you can’t blame them. Change is disruptive, and while a lot of software applications are cross-platform, most aren’t, so leaving Windows often means leaving favorite software behind.

  • Funding

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Design Tools for Human Rights Activists

      The world’s premier human rights organizations often have entire communications teams with dedicated graphic designers to celebrate their work. But not every organization can afford to have a designer. Even those organizations that do have design gurus may decide, for strategic reasons, to keep tight control over their workflow so that they are not bombarded with too many requests. Not to worry! There are several open source design tools that allow anyone to create killer flyers, posters, icons, or campaign — the only limit is your imagination. More importantly, learning basic design allows you to approach your human rights work more creatively and reach audiences with more diverse forms of storytelling.

    • Open Hardware

      • Interview with Jenn Karson, co-founder of Vermont Makers

        I am the founder of two small studios, Sesamedia and Studio Ju Ju. I’m also a co-founder of Vermont Makers. I was introduced to open source technologies and Arduino (and SparkFun) in 2007 when I was working toward an MFA in Design and Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute. I mainly use the Arduino to build interactive sound installations and sound art pieces, and I also help creative and community initiatives use open-source software like Joomla! and WordPress.

      • How Electric Vehicles Could Gain From Open Sourcing

        Can carmakers learn from the open source industry? Yes, if they build a strong business model around it and throw away discarded business practices.

  • Programming

Leftovers

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