Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

02.14.13

Links 15/2/2013: PengPod Tablets Are Out, HelenOS Update

Posted in News Roundup at 9:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Palantir: An Open Source Development Success Story

    In late 2007 Palantir launched Gotham, a new geospatial and comprehensive analytics platform designed to meet the challenges of their vast array of customers. This article provides more information on Gotham that enables data integration, search and discovery, knowledge management, secure collaboration, and algorithmic analysis across a wide variety of data sources.

  • Kaltura Finds its Groove with Open Source Video Play
  • 5 Popular Open Source Test Management Tools
  • Robot Operating System heading to foundation

    ROS, the open source Robot Operating System created by Willow Garage, is now in the process of moving under the governance and ownership of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. The move comes after Willow Garage, which also manufactures the PR2 robot, announced it was pivoting into a “self-sustaining company” and looking for commercial opportunities.

  • HelenOS Micro-Kernel OS Still Marching On

    While not one of the most well known multi-server micro-kernel operating systems compared to GNU Hurd and others, HelenOS continues to move forward as a general purpose BSD-licensed operating system that dances to its own beat.

  • Events

    • Interview: Bob Reselman

      Tech documentation writer Bob Reselman will give a talk entitled “How to Make Technical Documentation Work in Your Organization” at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24, in the LaJolla Room. The SCALE Team caught up with Bob for a brief interview.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome stops declaring Linux systems obsolete

        Badly chosen warning messages caused some consternation with Google recently as its Chrome browser began declaring supported Linux systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 obsolete. The problem was brought to public attention by Red Hat evangelist Jan Wildeboer in a Google+ posting when his browser announced “Google Chrome is no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete”.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Database Integrity and Web Applications

      NoSQL, the catchall phrase for non-relational databases, is all the rage among Web developers. However, it’s somewhat unfair and unhelpful to use the term NoSQL to describe them, given the variety of technologies involved. Even so, there are some fundamental differences between traditional relational databases and their NoSQL counterparts. For one, as the name implies, NoSQL databases don’t use the standard SQL query language, and use either their own SQL-like language (for example, MongoDB) or an object-oriented API. Another difference is the lack of two-dimensional tables; whereas SQL databases operate solely with such tables, NoSQL databases eschew them in favor of name-value pairs or hash-like objects. And finally, NoSQL databases typically lack the features that led to the development of relational databases, namely transactions and data integrity.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Open source community heckles Oracle Linux update
    • LibreOffice 4.0 And The Power of Brands

      LibreOffice 4.0 was launched last week, and the news reports and activity on social media were massive, more than any release of LibreOffice or OpenOffice before, with better coverage than many of Microsoft’s well-funded introductions. There were numerous links sent around to the usual sites like LinuxToday.com, but also TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Time Magazine, etc. A fair amount of the chatter was people wondering what the difference is between the two versions. Some have basic questions like whether LibreOffice can import their OpenOffice documents.

    • Coming soon: Open source JavaFX for iOS, Android

      Oracle says it plans to open source the Android and iOS implementations of its JavaFX UI platform “over the next couple months,” which it says will allow Java developers to use the technology to write cross-platform smartphone apps for the first time.

    • Open source JavaFX coming for iOS and Android

  • CMS

  • Education

    • eScholar’s Mike Gargano: Nothing Can Stop Open Source

      “Even though the educational market is slow to adopt new things, I think it is inevitable that open source is going to work its way into education. There is no reason for the education field to stop it. There is really nothing wrong with it. People no longer see open source as a problem. I think as more people continue to use open source, it will work its way into the education field.”

  • Healthcare

    • ONC posts Connect 4.0 open source HIE tool

      Continuing to advance its health information exchange offerings, ONC posted Connect 4.0 on Monday and the latest iteration brings the HIE platform closer to a day when ONC might turn it over to the open source community.

      Connect is essentially gateway and adapter software designed, in conjunction with Direct and Exchange, to enable secure health information exchange.

  • Business

    • 6 Reasons to Pay for Open Source Software

      Last year, Red Hat announced that it plans to offer OpenStack on a subscription basis as a commercial, enterprise-grade product. OpenStack is an open source software project for building private and public clouds.

      Red Hat’s engineers contribute to the OpenStack project, and the company is an old-hand at productizing open source projects and offering them on a subscription basis. It is probably best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), a productized version of the open source Fedora Linux operating system, as well its JBoss Enterprise Middleware, based on JBoss community projects.

  • Project Releases

    • Chef 11 adds a serving of Erlang

      Opscode’s Chef, the open source, cloud-focused, configuration management framework, has received a major update in the recently announced Chef 11 and now sports a core API server written in Erlang. Erchef, as the new core API server is known, was created using the experiences Opscode had running its hosted Chef offerings. The company set out to make a server that was API-compatible with the Ruby version of the Chef server, but faster and more scalable. To that end, the developers have been working on API endpoints where they could get the most benefit from scaling and performance and have been deploying it with their private Chef customers. The Chef 11 release marks the point where the Erchef server is incorporated into Chef’s open source code base.

    • The Past, Present and Future of GIS: PostGIS 2.0 Is Here!
    • Slick 1.0 simplifies database access with Scala
    • Cairo 1.12.14 Fixes Various Issues
    • More Rails security fixes released

      The Ruby on Rails Developers have released updates to Rails 3.2, 3.1 and 2.3 and made users aware of an update to the JSON gem to close an important security flaw. Most notable of the problems is CVE-2013-0277, another problem with serialised attributes in YAML. The flaw, which only affects Rails 2.3 and 3.0, can be exploited so that a crafted request would deserialize arbitrary YAML inside the server with the risk of denial of service or remote code execution. The Rails developers have released a fix for Rails 2.3, 2.3.17, but there will be no fix for Rails 3.0 in line with maintenance policy. The advisory contains patches for various versions of Rails for use where users cannot upgrade easily.

    • Pidgin 2.10.7 Brings Numerous Fixes and Improvements

      Pidgin 2.10.7 has been released a few hours ago, February 13, and it brings numerous fixes, improvements, and a few new features, especially to MSN, Gadu-Gadu, MXit, Sametime, IRC and Yahoo! protocols.

  • Public Services/Government

    • City of Munich stands by its calculation: open source saves millions

      The City of Munich stands by its November 2012 cost estimates, which concluded that using free and open source software for desktops and office productivity for its 15,500 PCs is over 11 million euro cheaper, compared to the ubiquitous proprietary alternative. “There is no reason to correct this information”, the city’s IT department comments on 11 February to claims to the contrary.

    • Please explain prices: Parliament subpoenas Apple, Microsoft, Adobe

      Federal Parliament has issued documents formally compelling major technology vendors Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to compulsorily appear before its committee investigating price hikes on technology products sold in Australia, in a move that finally ends months of stalling by the vendors, who have proven unwilling to voluntary discuss their pricing strategies in public.

    • Bring openness to your local government with Code Across America

      Code Across America is scheduled for February 22-24. It will be a weekend of community building and moving the needle for more openness in local governments across the United States.

      Code Across America is a multi-day event that any municipality or community can join. Individuals and groups can participate through virtual and in-person activities around the country. The initiative is organized by Code for America and coincides with International Open Data Day on February 23.

    • Open Source Government & Engaged Citizens: Death Star Inspiration

  • Licensing

    • Creative Commons license liberates knowledge of ESIP community

      Erin Robinson, the Information and Virtual Community Director for the Foundation for Earth Science, the management arm of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (@ESIPFed), says that earth science matters to all of us. For example, when Hurrican Sandy devastated areas of the country, responders needed information on flood zones and what hospitals were available.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Why I Use Perl…and Will Continue to Do So

      It was alarming to read in the recent article The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 by Dr. Dobb’s editor, Andrew Binstock, that Perl was “continuing its long decline” and was in”an irretrievable tailspin,” based on statistics from Google searches. Nothing in the article discussed what was lacking feature-wise in the language that might be behind this decline. While I am not an authority on programming languages, I thought it was only appropriate to reflect on the strengths of Perl that I’ve relied on during my 14-year affair with the language.

    • Wine 1.6: This Year With These Interesting Features

      It’s going on two years since the release of PCC 1.0, but there hasn’t been any follow-on Portable C Compiler release nor is there much public-facing development activity happening.

      In writing recently about new GCC features, a new PathScale EKOPath compiler, and other compiler-related advancements, I was curious to see what was going on within the Portable C Compiler camp. I was also reminded of the compiler yesterday when seeing its being used within the HelenOS micro-kernel OS project.

    • Zend Server 6 puts Zend in DevOps movement

      Zend Enterprise, a company that has been among the main developers of PHP for many years, has released new versions of Zend Server and Zend Studio. New features in version 6 of Zend Server focus on handling the challenges that can arise in ensuring cooperation between developer teams and system operators.

      These new features position the company as a member of the DevOps movement, which aims to provide techniques and processes to improve communication, cooperation and integration between developers and system operators. These techniques are now more important than ever, as there is a trend towards companies having to release increasingly smaller changes more often and having to test their applications on an ongoing basis. To remain competitive, companies no longer focus on major annual releases, instead issuing updates and patches at short intervals.

Leftovers

  • Lawsuit: Student committed at St. Luke’s for 30 days after cursing at professor

    After cursing at a professor during a Spanish final, former Columbia-Juilliard student Oren Ungerleider was involuntarily committed to St. Luke’s Hospital and kept there against his will for 30 days, according to a lawsuit he filed against the University this month.

  • Security

    • When Security is Justice: Because the Bible Told Me So

      We humans constantly are telling ourselves stories about moral and immoral behavior. Many of the most memorable — if only because of repetition — are from the Bible. From them we learn about moral courage and cowardice, about wisdom and folly, about when to obey and when to rebel. And, of course, most Bible stories tell us to believe in God. But God — He/She/It — is so many things at once: God is Love, God is Nature, God is Truth. How can I believe in all these things at the same time? I’m more comfortable with each of those declarations about what God IS when the formula is reversed. For example, I prefer Nature is God. If that identifies me as a pagan, so be it. But the Bible stories still move me profoundly, especially when I try to apply them to the world around me.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • FAA seeks proposals to create 6 drone test sites
    • Obama: Americans need to know more about drone program
    • At Least We’re Not Measles: Rationalizing Drone Attacks Hits New Low
    • Giving president sole power to kill by drone is wrong
    • Drones of Death; Licensed to Kill With Apparent Impunity.
    • LIVE CHAT: THE ETHICS OF DRONE WARFARE
    • Hate Obama’s Drone War?
    • Would-Be Head of CIA Ready for War on All Fronts
    • Rand Paul threatens to hold nomination of CIA director over drone killings
    • Rand Paul Threatens To Block John Brennan’s CIA Nomination
    • Graphic: The Extraordinary Renditions – 54 Suspected Nations include Canada
    • Phuket: Panetta affirms ‘Tony Soprano’ as CIA boss
    • Unmanned killers: Details on drone strikes ‘incomplete’
    • PHC seeks details of collateral damage in drone attacks
    • Drone proponents promote blind faith in militarism

      In my years reporting on the intentional narrowing of political vernacular to guarantee specific outcomes, I have encountered no better example of Orwellian newspeak than that which now dominates the conversation about America’s drone war. Given that, it’s worth reviewing the situation because it is so illustrative of how militarist propaganda operates in the 21st century.

    • On The Execution of Christopher Dorner

      As we write, Christopher Dorner is most likely dying or dead, as the cabin in which he was trapped burns around him. A huge manhunt involving local, state and federal officials has culminated in what can only be described as an extrajudicial execution. We condemn Dorner’s murder at the hands of the state.

      People cheer Dorner because, whatever his motivations, he exposed the workings of a vicious white supremacist system that goes quietly unacknowledged most of the time. He declared war on a system that has waged an undeclared war on us, every day, for years; a system that holds millions of poor people and people of color in prisons, and guns them down in the street. He did what every young person of color in Los Angeles dreams of, when he or she comes home after getting fucked with by the cops, and starts a shootout on GTA V. He was celebrated for doing what many of us could not.

    • How Law Enforcement and Media Covered Up the Plan to Burn Christopher Dorner Alive

      At approximately 7 PM ET, I listened through a police scanner as San Bernardino Sheriffs gave the order to burn down the cabin where suspected murderer Christopher Dorner was allegedly hiding. Deputies were maneuvering a remote controlled demolition vehicle to the base of the cabin, using it to tear down the walls of the cabin where Dorner was hiding, and peering inside.

    • Israel assured Australia on prisoner’s rights, Carr says

      According to a statement on Wednesday from the Israel’s Justice Ministry, Ben Zygier’s Melbourne family was notified after he was detained. Zygier was reportedly known as ”prisoner X” in the high-security jail.

    • The Unending Gitmo Nightmare

      Conspicuously absent from Obama’s State of the Union was any mention of Guantanamo Bay or the 166 detainees still stuck there.

    • The ‘trust me’ administration
    • A READER’S WAR

      …C.I.A., and the Joint Special Operations Command have so far killed large numbers of people.

    • State of the Union Defends Targeted Killings

      The Senate and House armed services committees also receive briefings on drone strikes conducted by the U.S. military. However, the Senate foreign relations and House foreign affairs committees—who are supposed to provide oversight of all U.S. foreign policy—have repeatedly been refused general briefings about targeted killings by the White House, even though all relevant staffers have security clearances. As these committee members point out, it is impossible to exercise oversight over a country or region without insight into how the CIA or military conducts targeted killings. If President Obama wants to “continue to engage” with Congress, agreeing to hold closed-door briefings with these committees would be a good start.

    • Obama Still Clinging to 352,000 Afghan National Security Force Size Myth

      Before the outbreak of green on blue killings that eventually led to a significant interruption in the training of Afghan security forces last September, it was impossible to read a statement from the US military or NATO regarding future plans without encountering a reference to a required 352,000 force size for combined Afghan National Security Forces. It was our training of the ANSF that was touted as our primary reason for remaining in Afghanistan because we need those trained troops available to take over security responsibility as we withdraw. I have been insisting since the interruption that it will be impossible to continue to claim that a functional ANSF force size of 352,000 can be achieved, as the known high rate of attrition continued during the training interruption. No new troop size prediction has emerged, but it was significant to me that references to the 352,000 force size claim had seemed to disappear.

    • Obama’s State of the Union: Afghanistan Drawdown & the Covert Drone War

      President Barack Obama delivered his “State of the Union” address on Tuesday night. And though he suggested there may be minimal reductions to wartime spending, he jingoistically declared, “We will maintain the best military the world has ever known.”

      The speech renewed the US government’s commitment to a permanent war on terrorism. While it signaled the country would no longer be engaging in full-scale occupations or nation-building efforts while Obama was president, there was no indication that America’s dominance in the world would be reduced. America’s global military footprint of around 1,000 bases would be preserved.

    • New Al-Qaeda Generation May Be Deadliest One

      Despite Osama of bin Laden’s death, al-Qaeda has exploited the Arab Awakening to create is largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaeda yet. And at the center of the new al-Qaeda remains the old al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri still hiding in Pakistan and still providing strategic direction to the global jihad.

    • The Iranians Are Coming – Aaaaargggh!

      The undertow of anti-Iranian fearmongering becomes stronger.

    • Kuwaiti report: Zygier took part in Mabhouh hit

      Western sources tell Kuwait’s Al-Jarida newspaper ‘Prisoner X’ took part in 2010 mission to kill top Hamas terrorist in Dubai. Attorney who met Zygier: There were no signs he was going to commit suicide

    • Congress Considers Special Drone Court; UN Investigates Deadly Drone Strikes

      During last week’s confirmation hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan, senators discussed the establishment of a federal court with jurisdiction over the president’s death-by-drone program.

      As proposed by lawmakers, the so-called “drone court” would be tasked with approving the targeting (and, by extension, the assassination) of people on President Obama’s or the CIA’s respective kill lists.

    • Newsic Release: Think Humanity

      Siraj is currently rallying for a young man named Ziyad Yaghi who was taken away by U.S. authorities under the dreaded anti-American legislation known as the NDAA, or ‘National Defense Authorization Act’ which allows the United States to arbitrarily arrest and detain Americans without granting them due process, the NDAA is a torch hovering near our Constitution which guarantees protection from such diabolic actions.

    • The Appalling Sir Daniel Bethlehem

      Bethlehem first came to the attention of the general public as the man who advised the Israeli government that it was legal to build their “security” wall slicing through the West Bank and disrupting Palestinian communications and access to fields and water resources. Bethlehem was then the counsel to the Israeli government at the resulting case before the International Court of Justice.

      The International Court of Justice – along with the vast majority of reputable international lawyers – disagreed with Daniel Bethlehem, and Bethlehem and the Israeli government lost the case. The Israeli government however disregarded the court’s judgement and continued its illegal activity.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Waning Commitment to Government Transparency Evident in Obama’s ‘State of the Union’ Speeches

      In President Barack Obama’s first days as president, he pledged to have his administration create an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” His chief of staff, Jack Lew, has contended the administration is the “most transparent administration ever.” At a rally in 2010, he told the public, “We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history.”

      Despite the stated commitments and professions on transparency, the Sunlight Foundation found talk of “government integrity, transparency, and influence” was mostly absent in his “State of the Union” speech last night.

    • Are liberals being hypocrites about Obama’s wars?

      American liberalism has always been pro-intervention

    • The ACLU’s Pizza Video: 10 Years Later

      In 2004, the ACLU produced a satiric video called “Ordering Pizza in 2015” that has become the single most-downloaded piece of content we’ve ever produced (at least we believe in the absence of complete stats). I won’t describe it—you can watch it here if you haven’t seen it—but like many successful viral products, it combined humor with a biting commentary on an all-too-real set of trends. We got the idea from a humorous email someone sent us, and the voiceovers were performed by an entry-level ACLU staffer and a friend of our then-communications director.

    • As Obama Touts Pathway to Citizenship, Record Deportations Leave Undocumented Immigrants in Fear
    • NDAA resolution introduced in San Francisco, CA
    • More Guantanamo Hijinks: First Secret Censorship, Now Eavesdropping on Atty-Client Communications
    • Do You Live In The Constitution-Free Zone Of The US?

      Earlier this week, we wrote about the latest defense by Homeland Security of their laptop search policies that (they claim) give them broad coverage to search laptops within 100 miles of the border. The latest bit of news was that an internal review found that there was minimal benefits to one’s civil liberties in not searching their laptops, so it was okay (think about that sentence for a bit).

    • NDAA – A Young Man from Virginia Takes a Stand Against Autocracy in New York City
    • States Join the Fight to Nullify Indefinite Detention Under NDAA

      President Barack Obama signed the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on January 2, renewing the power to apprehend and detain Americans indefinitely granted in the previous year’s version.

      In order to protect their citizens from being grabbed and imprisoned under the provisions of the NDAA, many state lawmakers are standing up to the federal government, proposing resolutions nullifying this unconstitutional power at the state borders.

    • Words Don’t Matter, Actions Do

      In the not-too-distant future, Congress passes a draconian, UK-style ban on all weapons. Or, maybe the Senate does it through an international treaty. Or, instead of Congress, maybe the president follows in the footsteps of FDR, who whipped up an executive order requiring people to turn in their gold.

      The method wouldn’t really matter. The end result would easily be one of the greatest attacks on liberty in American history.

    • San Francisco Opposes Federal Indefinite Detention Law

      A resolution introduced Tuesday at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors stands in opposition to a federal defense law that many fear undermines constitutional rights by allowing the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial.
      The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed by Congress in 2007 and renewed each year, contains provisions authorizing the U.S. military to indefinitely jail terrorist suspects and those aiding them.

    • Daniel Ellsberg: Obama committed ‘impeachable crimes’
    • Nonbinding Resolution Opposing Indefinite Detention Of Americans Introduced At Board Of Supes Meeting

      A resolution was introduced at today’s meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors opposing provisions of a federal law that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens on U.S. soil without due process.

      The National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, signed by President Barack Obama in January after its approval by Congress, includes provisions that would permit indefinite military detentions without trial.

      Board of Supervisors president David Chiu, who authored the resolution against the NDAA, joined a few dozen people who gathered for a rally about the legislation outside City Hall prior to this afternoon’s board meeting.

    • Obama Continues War On Our Civil Liberties

      President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address contained very few surprises in the realm of national security and merely marked the continuation of the Bush-era war on terror policies despite their extraordinary fiscal toll, even as the American economy faces incredible duress under the deficit and the threat of congressionally-imposed sequestration.

      Despite the fact that the U.S. spends almost as much on its military as every other country in the world combined, Obama stated that the cuts would “jeopardize our military readiness.” In fact, U.S. military spending has never been higher than in the post-9/11 era, which saw rises in spending greater than Vietnam and the entirety of the Cold War. Furthermore, the 31% in defense cuts would be less than the 43%, 36%, and 33% cuts that came with the end of the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam wars respectively. In this light, the defense sequestration cuts are perfectly reasonable, and indeed necessary to alleviate our country’s economic crisis.

    • Going too far?

      They voted for him, yet a growing number of American liberals are angry over President Barack Obama’s reliance on the use of drones and his support for the National Defense Authorization Act. They argue that the president’s embrace of these policies is even more extreme and conservative than that pursued by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

      “If Bush had done the same things as Obama, then more people would have been upset about it,” Daniel Ellsberg observed. “He is a Democrat, though, and to an extent can get away with it.”

      Ellsberg, who is famous (or notorious, depending on one’s political preferences) for having leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, is among the plaintiffs in a court case challenging the NDAA. He and others have accused the Obama administration of using the law to grant itself unconstitutional new powers.

    • Is Obama’s use of drones to kill Americans unconstitutional?

      The rationale behind the administration’s “assassination by drone” program sounds eerily reminiscent to former V.P. Dick Cheney’s “one-percent doctrine.”

    • If There’s a ‘War Against Boys,’ Why Are Men Still Winning?

      Sommers labels as “understandable but misguided” the attitude, “Isn’t it time for women and girls to enjoy the advantages?” A more pertinent question to ask Sommers, though, is what advantages are women enjoying that suggest boys deserve an extra boost?

      After all, women who work full-time still make only 81 percent of what men do. And women own only 36 percent as much wealth as men do.

      Only 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, as are 17 percent of directors on Fortune 500 boards. Women are 18 percent of U.S. representatives and 20 percent of U.S. senators.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Bizarre ‘Attribution’ Troll Bullies Twitter Users Into Compliance With Baseless Legal Threats

      This post deals with a strange copyright troll, which bullies people into properly attributing a quoted poem. The troll runs across multiple social media platforms but does a bulk of its “work” at Twitter, where it can receive instantaneous feedback. Along the way, we’ll deal with the poet himself, a company called On Press Inc. and some other connections which seem to indicate the poet himself is behind the trolling, along with a threatened lawsuit against me for copyright infringement, defamation and false claims.

    • Copyrights

      • Obama Administration Sides With Music Industry In Seeking To Uphold Draconian Award Against Minnesota Mother For Sharing Songs

        We have previously discussed how President Obama has repeatedly yielded to the “copyright hawks” who have steadily increased the penalties for copyright and trademark violations, including criminal penalties. Despite the abuse of average citizens by thuggish law firms and prosecutors, the Obama Administration continues to support draconian measures against citizens. Even after the abuse and death of Aaron Swartz by the Justice Department, the Obama Administration has decided to double down in a case of a young mother in Northern Minnesota who was hit with grotesque penalties for simply sharing 24 songs. She was told to pay $222,000 — over 100 times the actual damages for the songs. The Obama Administration has intervened before the Supreme Court to ask for it to allow the penalty to stand as lawful and correct.

      • Keep the pressure on the White House and US Copyright Office to fix anti-circumvention provisions

        When the Copyright Office announced its updated DMCA exemptions list, we were saddened to find that the office had abdicated its duty on multiple fronts. While that sad result was announced back in October, the downgraded exemptions list has just now come into effect. We need your voice in this fight.

02.13.13

Links 13/2/2013: Vivaldi KDE Tablet Still on Its Way

Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux-based Lernstift Smartpen Corrects Errors and Makes You Write Well

    Writing is not a thing of the past, with several technological advancements happening in this arena too. The latest development corresponds to Lernstift, a company destined to create smart-products for a better living and they have just rolled out a pen of the same name as them.

  • Linux Top 3: KDE 4.10, LibreOffice 4 and Secure Boot Loader Shim
  • Is 2013, the year of Linux gaming?

    For a long time the Linux gaming scene was stagnating, relegated to a limited number of open source games and a few popular but very old closed source games such as Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 2004 and whatever game you could force to run using WINE, an open source software for running Windows applications on Linux. Let’s face it, most gamers who have attempted to run games on Linux in the past probably spent more time wrestling with installers and searching for the right drivers than actually playing the game on their specific Linux configuration.

  • Seven Features I Fantasize About Seeing on the Linux Desktop
  • HP And “MultiOS”
  • Reports Emerge Regarding Chrome’s Malware Warnings
  • Perforce: Linux, Open Source Commitment High

    Should companies that produce mostly proprietary software invest in Linux development? In one sense, that seems as illogical as the artisanal-organic bread guy from the local farmers’ market buying shares in Wonder Bread. But in a move that reveals the growing influence of open source beyond its traditional space, Perforce has joined the Linux Foundation and is very committed to supporting and protecting open-source code. Here’s what Don Marti, technical marketing manager, had to say.

  • Computer whiz

    “The computer came back two days later. The computer started up in less than a minute in Ubuntu where it used to take up to five minutes in Windows Vista. It had all the software we needed – word processor, spreadsheet and more and it is all legal without licence payments,” said Mr Mullen.

  • Small Business Thrives With GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Newegg

      My wife needs a new PC. Her old machine is quite competent, if dated — a 1 GHz Athlon 64, with 1 GB of RAM. Running Debian Linux with LXDE it is quite fast, and indeed she has no problem with OpenOffice or Thunderbird or any application save one: web browsing with Firefox. And I don’t think it’s Firefox’s fault. The problem is, for her work she needs to visit a lot of websites, and as I’ve commented before, too many websites are now larded up with the crappiest Javascript code you can imagine. Sure, she has NoScript installed, but she needs to enable Javascript to view these sites, and they’re sites she can’t avoid. (Like CNN.com, and several other news sites.)

      So about a month ago we decided she needs a computer fast enough to run CNN’s pig-awful Javascript. I missed a great post-Christmas deal at Staples, but I found the same deal at Newegg.ca: a refurbished HP DC5850 desktop for $209. It has a dual-core 2.3 GHz Athlon 64, and 4 GB of RAM — I always like to upgrade by a factor of 4 when I can — and a monster 750 GB hard drive. It’s capable of running Windows 7, so it should fly under Linux.

  • Server

    • Patching Servers Still An Issue

      I don’t know about your environment, but in mine, keeping up to date with available patches is hard. It is tempting to just ignore the patches and keep the server up for as long as possible, but doing so might leave your system open to attacks, or cumulative bugs in the running daemons. On the other hand, patching means an interruption in service, and introducing a change into the environment, which further means that the patches need to be tested before production. But, test for too long, and by the time the patches are applied to production, they might be an entirely new batch of patches.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Vivaldi Linux tablet gets a hardware upgrade
      • Vivaldi KDE open source Linux tablet gets new hardware, could launch this spring
      • New KDE Vivaldi Tablet May Be Announced In March

        Aaron Seigo tried to break into the tablet space with the KDE powered ‘Sparks’ tablet, which due to trademark issues was re-christened as Vivaldi. When he announced the tablet, there as a huge demand for the devices but the devices never saw the light of the day due to problems with supply chain.

        The OEM changed some hardware which made it impossible for the OS to run on those device. There was a long silence and Seigo has started talking about it. He gave me hints about some big announcement around Vivaldi when I asked him about meeting at FOSDEM and he said that he was canceling the FOSDEM trip due to Vivaldi.

      • LoFS Episode 3 .. tomorrow!

        It’s been a silly busy week for me, and I’ll be working into the night to get reasonably through my “must be done by today” list .. but I finally got to this one: blog about tomorrows Luminosity of Free Software Google Hangout. This will be the third one and hopefully the best yet.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Classic Fights to Win Users Back

        A few months ago GNOME announced that they would be dropping the fallback mode, but met with a bit of resistance. To appease the peasants, developers said they would start supporting extensions that mimicked classic GNOME 2 features. Well, Matthias Clasen announced the early results of their efforts.

      • A Quick Look At The New GNOME Classic Session (Now Available In The GNOME Testing PPA)

        As you probably know, the fallback mode will be dropped with GNOME 3.8 and instead, users will be able to use a set of GNOME Shell extensions that provide a GNOME2-like layout. Recently, these changes have landed in the GNOME Testing PPA for Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04.

  • Distributions

    • Recent Linux Happenings: openSUSE, ROSA, and Frugalware
    • Chakra Linux 2013.02 delivers KDE 4.10

      The latest release of Chakra Linux brings the recently released KDE 4.10 to the users of the Arch Linux based distribution. Chakra Linux 2013.02, code-named “Benz”, also includes updates to the distribution’s own tools such as its installation assistant and its theme. Chakra was originally aimed at providing a live CD that allowed for easy uptake by new users but still maintained the powerful roots and extensive package selection of Arch. The distribution can be installed and provides a modern Linux desktop; although it is still based on Arch Linux, it now uses its own repositories.

    • New Releases

      • Snowlinux 4 Cinnamon & E17 non-PAE released!

        Snowlinux 4 Cinnamon & E17 non-PAE are based upon Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 “Wheezy”. There are two ISO images available, one with Cinnamon, the other with E17 non-PAE. While the Cinnamon edition is using Linux 3.5, the E17 edition is using Linux 3.2 non-PAE to support older PCs, too. The Cinnamon edition is using Cinnamon 1.6.7 and the E17 edition is using E17.1. There were introduced much new features like snowMount, the Snowlinux mount tool for drives. We changed the default color of our Snowlinux-Metal-Theme from green to blue and updated our Icon set.

      • ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME

        Traditionally, original versions of ROSA Desktop operating system are provided with KDE desktop environment which includes a lot of design modifications and functionality enhancements. A nice-looking ROSA theme and a set of brand-name applications highly integrated with KDE (TimeFrame, StackFolder, RocketBar, KLook, KDM) have already become recognizable ROSA features and made ROSA familiar to Linux users.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia’s upgrade script vs FedUp

        If you are running a rolling-release distribution, this short article will likely be of no use to you, but if you are running an installation of Mageia 2, you’ll learn that is brings good tidings, when it comes to upgrading an existing installation of Mageia.

    • Arch Family

      • Arch Linux (Day 6 of 20 days of SCALE)

        In today’s post in my prep for my yearly weekend at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) I’m going to cover the subject of Arch Linux.

        I’m going to have to admit to a little bias on this one. I’ve never really cared for Arch Linux. I gave it a try when I used to listen to a popular Linux podcast I liked called the Linux Link Tech Show. They loved this Linux distribution and I felt exactly the opposite. I discussed in an earlier blog post what a package manager is. Well, this one uses one called pacman. I can not show how much I don’t like this package manager. I had to struggle with a media system I had hooked to my computer that I absolutely loved. Mythtv (well actually a MythTV variant call Linhes). Don’t get me wrong. I really liked that system a lot HOWEVER, whenever I tried to go deep into the guts and update stuff it would either make it crash or break. I hated that. I had to backup often. I ended up just not trying to add features to it because I was scared to touch it. I’m not one to be scared of touching any technology.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Google Says Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Is Obsolete [Updated]

        Chrome, the browser in question here, is based on the open source project Chromium. Chromium developers seems to prefer the new C++11 for the obvious security reasons and ease of maintenance but it also means adopting a new toolchain and upgrading to GCC 4.6. This makes it hard to support those operating systems that ship with older C++ standard libraries. RHEL 6, among many others, is one such operating system.

        That’s the reason why such operating systems won’t be supported by the newer versions of Chrome. Chrome will continue to work on such distributions but it won’t get any updates for the above mentioned reasons. So, the notification WildeBoer saw was Google telling such users that their OS won’t be supported unless they are upgraded to newer toolchains and GCC.

        I think Google and Red Hat can work together to solve this issue.

      • Red Hat Prognostications Focus on Big Data and OpenStack

        Red Hat and its top officials have recently come out with some technology predictions that are worth taking note of. To begin with, the company has released its Top 10 IT Predictions for 2013, including some big possible shifts in cloud computing norms and data storage practices. And, CEO Jim Whitehurst is quoted in a widely read story predicting that Big Data won’t just transform how we yield meaningful results from data but will also shake up the way that upper management structures at many companies work.

      • RHEL 6 Is Not Obsolete: Google Chrome

        Google generated quite a lot of heat recently when its Chrome started showing “Google Chrome is no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete.” message on those GNU/Linux based systems which were using older C++ standard libraries. We covered the story in detail here.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Minecraft Now Available On Raspberry Pi For Free

      Raspberry Pi users have another reason to rejoice; the popular game Minecraft is now available for Raspberry Pi. Good news is this game is available for free to download.

    • N900 with a Slice of Raspberry Pi

      It may not come as a surprise to anyone who regularly reads my column that I tried to be first in line to order the Raspberry Pi. I mean, what’s not to like in a $35, 700MHz, 256MB of RAM computer with HDMI out that runs Linux? In the end, I didn’t make the first batch of 10,000, but I wasn’t too far behind either. So, now that I’ve had a Raspberry Pi for a week, I’ve already found a number of interesting uses for it. You can expect more Raspberry Pi columns from me in the future (possibly including an update to my beer fridge article), but to start, in this article, I talk about a combination of two of my favorite pocket-size Linux computers: the Raspberry Pi and my Nokia N900.

      At first you may wonder why combine the two computers. After all, both are around the same size and have similar initial hardware specs. Each computer has its own strengths, such as cellular networking and a touchscreen on the N900 and an Ethernet port and HDMI video output on the Raspberry Pi. In this article, I explain how to connect the N900 to the Raspberry Pi in a private USB network, share the N900′s cellular connection, and even use the N900 as a pocket-size display. In all of the examples, I use the default Debian Squeeze Raspberry Pi image linked off the main http://www.raspberrypi.org page.

    • Mojang releases Minecraft: Pi Edition for the Raspberry Pi Linux computer

      Before our sun collapses and goes supernova, Minecraft developer Mojang will probably release its brick-building games on all available platforms — and then some that aren’t available, like toasters and cats.

    • The Raspberry Pi rival has arrived; Odroid U2 available worldwide

      The main Raspberry Pi rival that was announced last year is now available! It’s called Odroid U2, and it’s powered by a 1.7GHz Exynos4412 Prime quad-core CPU and an also quad-core Mali-400 GPU that clocks at 440MHz! And the price for this baby is $89, worldwide shipping being available (so about $110 with the shipping).

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source economic model: Sell the license or charge a consulting fee?

    The kernel of the two stories is: “Software is not a manufacturing industry” and therefore, “software is not a product.” As Eric Raymond rightly pointed out a long time ago in his book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: “Software is a service industry” and to be more precise, software itself is only a platform for delivering services. Just like highways, waterways, the power grid, the phone network, and the piping of the water supply.

    Once we understand that what matters in the software industry is simply to have robust software that supports the delivery of the services that flow through it, then it becomes clear that the economics of software cannot possibly be based on one-time payments for licenses, nor “selling software by the unit.”

    Software is built and maintained through a very labor intensive process. Therefore, to properly account for its cost, we must use an approach based on the hourly cost of professional services that developers dedicate to building and maintaining such service.

    This is nothing new. Charging an hourly rate for professional services is how lawyers, doctors, accountants, mechanics, pilots, and nurses have operated in the economic system for many decades (and some for centuries).

  • Robotic latex tentacle code open sourced, at last!

    The majority of robotic latex tentacle users have, up until this point, had to make do with locked in proprietary software code to power their mechanical rubber appendages.

    Users have had no other option than to opt for a pre-boxed heavily corporate-registered code base.

    Many who want to be able to operate a potentially mentally disturbing rubber arm on either their workplace desk… or, alternatively, as some part of a decorative piece and talking point inside a home dwelling have had to go proprietary when it comes to management code.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Opera Switches To WebKit, Chromium
    • 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

      Today, we announced that Opera has reached 300 million active users. At the same time, we made the official announcement that Opera will move from Presto to WebKit as the engine at the core of the browser.

      With this, Opera will be the first major browser to switch to a completely new rendering engine.

    • Opera commits to Chromium and WebKit
    • Opera, Until Now a Holdout, Dumps Presto and Standardizes on WebKit

      Today, Opera has announced that its browser has reached 300 million active users, but perhaps the biggest news is that the browser will be dropping the longstanding Presto rendering engine and moving to WebKit.This means that the number of browsing rendering engines to take seriously moves down to only three players, and WebKit–already legendary in the open source world–gets even more momentum and community involvement.

    • Mozilla

      • Early Apps for Mozilla’s Firefox OS Are Taking Shape

        For several weeks now, Mozilla has been aggressively sponsoring events–including a series of hack days–to woo app developers to its emerging Firefox OS for mobile devices. Called “Firefox OS App Days,” hack day events took place in more than 25 locations around the world, starting on 19 January in Mountain View, California and ending on 2 February in Berlin, Germany.

      • Interview: Brandon Burton

        Brandon Burton of Mozilla will be speaking on Simple Patterns for Scaling Websites: Some lessons learned at Mozilla with Chris Turra on Friday, Feb. 22, at 4:30 p.m. in the La Jolla room. Here is a Q-and-A from a member of the SCALE Publicity Team:

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Cloud Babble

      I have yet to meet a sysadmin who is happy about the proliferation of the marketing term known as “The Cloud”. Perhaps it is because we are too close to the metal, because we see how the sausage is made. Maybe it is because we share a common dislike for non-descriptive marketing terminology. Whatever the cause, and if we are happy about it or not, the cloud is here, and it is important to understand its implications.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenClipart – Part II
    • $21 Million per Day

      Apache OpenOffice is a project within the Apache Software Foundation, a non-profit organization. We don’t charge for Apache OpenOffice; we make it available to all for free. We don’t pay developers; we rely on volunteers.

      People need office productivity software. Among our users are students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, public servants, and business people from all industries. Perhaps 20 years ago it was only businesses that needed this kind of software. In 1992 the price of a spreadsheet application alone, not even a complete suite, was $595. Only business could afford it at that price. But today almost everyone with a computer needs a word processor, a spreadsheet and/or a presentation editor. Office productivity applications are used in the home, at school and in the office.

    • New LibreOffice turns up the heat on Microsoft
    • LibreOffice 4.0: First Take
    • Working For Yourself Or Being Enslaved By M$

  • CMS

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • NASA open source project back on track

      NASA’s shift to open-source content management is back on after the incumbent contractor withdrew a bid protest on Feb. 4.

      The withdrawal of the protest, filed by e-Touch Federal Systems on Dec. 28 after NASA awarded Rockville-Md.-based InfoZen a $40 million blanket purchase agreement, allows InfoZen to begin replacing NASA’s existing content management system with open source architecture to run its 140 websites and 1,600 web assets and applications.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Next Generation of Open Source Smart Grid

      Open source software — code that’s free for anyone to use, as long as they share what they’re doing with it — plays a small, but growing, role in the smart grid. Examples include OpenADR, a Berkeley Labs-California Energy Commission-backed standard for automating demand response, and OpenPDC, a Tennessee Valley Authority’s Hadoop-based data management tool for transmission grid synchrophasor data.

    • OnRamp, A Free, Open Source Ad Server From OpenX, Gets Shut Down After Getting Besieged By Hackers

      Another victory for ill-intentioned hackers and a blow for the security of open source systems: OpenX, the online and mobile advertising company that announced a $22.5 million fund raising just last month, says that it is closing down its OnRamp open source ad serving platform, after the service was hacked on February 9, and the company determined that it would be too risky and costly to continue using it securely.

    • This Open-Source, Robotic Tentacle Will Haunt Your Dreams
    • Open-source EE design tools
    • Open-source unites the innovative

      With the cost of software programs such as Photoshop and antivirus suites rising, many people turn to alternative software they can legally download from the Internet for free.

      But penny-pinching students are not the only people turning to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Many software developers use these programs to study and improve their peers’ programs, which cannot be done with licensed software.

    • Open Data

      • Europe’s ‘Database Right’ Could Throttle Open Data Moves There

        One of the more benighted moves by the European Union was the introduction of a special kind of copyright for databases in 1996: not for their contents, but for their compilation. This means that even if the contents are in the public domain, the database may not be. Thanks to a recent court judgment in France, this “database right” now threatens to become a real danger for the burgeoning open data movement in Europe (original in French).

    • Open Access/Content

      • White House Owes Response To Petition To Fire Prosecutor Of Aaron Swartz And Other Hackers

        Over the weekend, a petition on Whitehouse.gov calling for the dismissal of Heymann reached 25,000 signatures, the threshold that requires a response from the administration under the rules outlined on the site. The outcry follows the suicide of activist Aaron Swartz last month, who was being prosecuted by Heymann for allegedly violating computer crime laws in his downloading of millions of academic papers from the website JSTOR.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Google Summer of Code 2013 announced

      The annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is now preparing for the 2013 cycle of the program which sees Google offer student developers stipends to write code for a wide range of open source projects. Google is assisted by a number of mentoring organisations around the world who help the students achieve their goal of completing enhancements and improvements to open source projects. This will be the ninth year that GSoC has run; over the past eight years, six thousand students have completed the program.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • One Step Closer to the Open eBook Tipping Point: O’Reilly Joins the EPUB 3.0 Ecosystem

      Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.

Leftovers

  • Why Police Lie Under Oath
  • Repairing the rungs on the ladder

    “MERITOCRACY” tends to be spoken of approvingly these days. Its ascendancy is seen as a measure of progress. In the dark ages, the dumb scions of the aristocracy inherited their seats on cabinets and on the boards of great companies. These days, people succeed through brains and hard work.

  • State of the Union: Will Obama Tell Young People He’s Screwing Them Big Time?

    For at least the next 36 hours, the political media will be talking about President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address (SOTU) as if it’s a meaningful event. Will Obama go bold or timid into this good night, will he make the case for more taxes and fewer guns, for engaging North Korea or ignoring the Hermit Kingdom, for stuffing versus potatoes? – that sort of thing. As my colleague Matt Welch pointed out yesterday, SOTUs are equal parts WTF and completely forgettable, so it’ll all be over soon except for the ardent declarations that we can make lifesaving machines more quickly in a zero-gravity environment.

  • Hardware

    • Processor Whispers: About ups and downs

      Is the PC market collapsing or is that not true at all and the ARM hype is on the retreat? In either case, the PC manufacturers have to reorientate themselves – Dell, for instance, went public 25 years ago and now intends to go private again – lots of movement in the IT scene.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • The Moral Order

      Nor will it. There is no record of a dying civilization reassessing its values (or lack of values, in our case) and altering its trajectory. Whether the type of moral order that Professor Barber has in mind actually exists, or might someday exist somewhere on the planet, is certainly worth debating. But what is not worth debating is whether such a moral order might make an appearance on American soil. History is about many things, but one thing it is not about is miracles.

    • Back-to-work scheme breached laws, says Court of Appeal

      A university graduate has won a legal challenge on appeal, claiming that a government scheme forces people to work without pay.

      Cait Reilly, 24, claimed that requiring her to work for free at a Poundland store breached laws banning slavery and forced labour.

      The University of Birmingham geology graduate lost her original case at the High Court, but has now won on appeal.

    • Ethical Markets: Transforming Finance Still Top Priority
    • Minimum Wage (Blog)

      The argument for an increase in the minimum wage ought not to rely on or focus on economics. The political, ethical, and social reasons for higher minimum wages make the case better, more clearly and more definitively.

      Economists have accumulated a vast literature on the minimum wage. That literature is divided into two opposing schools. The first, comprised of paid spokespersons for business and their various allies in politics, media and the academy, strives to establish the following sort of argument. Raising minimum wages will reduce the number of jobs available to those earning the pre-rise minimum wage. This is because of the “law” of supply and demand which holds that demand for anything fall as its price rises. Raise the price of labor power, less will be demanded. In short, raising the minimum wage will push more workers out of jobs into unemployment. It is thus bad for just those in whose name the minimum wage is to be raised.

    • The Futures of Farming

      Just off of Country Road 518 in Hopewell, New Jersey, sits Double Brook Farm. It’s run by a self-exiled New Yorker but it’s not one of those now-standard upstart farms, with roving bands of earnest college kids tending rocket and a hearty couple of ex-Brooklynites overseeing the whole grass-fed operation. Double Brook’s turn-of-the-century-barn, its grazing cattle, and its hundreds of Rhode Island Reds clucking and strutting about all belong to Jon McConaughy, a 46-year-old with an all-American face, a football player’s build, money to blow, and a beautiful wife. Last year, McConaughy exchanged a two-decade long career as a commodities trader on Wall Street for these two hundred acres.

      Double Brook, a small farm specializing in grass-fed meat, free range poultry, and various vegetables symbolizes one of the most unexpected turns the American economy has taken in recent years. For decades, banks have shied away from granting loans to farmers because, like restaurants, farms are considered risky investments. But the tides might be turning as the price of nearly every commodity on the face of the earth is on the rise.

    • OCCUPIED GREEK FACTORY BEGINS PRODUCTION UNDER WORKERS CONTROL. OCCUPY, RESIST, PRODUCE!
    • Graduate’s Poundland victory leaves government work schemes in tatters

      The government’s employment strategy lies in tatters after judges declared that almost all work-for-your-benefit schemes were unlawful due to a lack of basic information given to the unemployed.

    • Students oppose university reform

      Scantily dressed male students from Kasetsart University gathered at the entrance to parliament on Wednesday to protest against a privatisation plan, demanding all parties involved first be consulted.

      Some of the students were clad in only boxer shorts, with protest banners wrapped around the lower half of their body. They also held up written messages opposing the privatisation of their university.

    • The ‘Politically Divisive’ Minimum Wage

      It’s important to step back and figure out what “divisive” means here. As Annie Lowrey reports, Republicans and corporate interests are opposed to this idea, and there is some research that suggests that raising the wage floor might hurt more than it helps (as well as research that says the opposite; I guess we call it a tie?).

    • The Pentagon’s Budget Crunch: No Dissenting Views

      We’ve noted many times that when it comes to corporate media coverage of the so-called budget “sequester”–the immediate cuts to military and social spending set to hit in a matter of weeks–what matters most is what will happen to the military. The Washington Post had a whole piece (2/13/13) devoted to yet another round of complaints from military leaders–without a single comment from anyone who might take the view that cutting military spending would not be such a disaster.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • EU Data Protection: Proposed Amendments Written by US Lobbyists

      It’s becoming clear that the lobbying around the proposed EU directive on Data Protection is some of the most intense ever seen – some activists have said it’s even worse than during ACTA, while on the US side there’s mutterings about starting a “trade war” if it’s passed in its present form.

      Given that pressure to water down protection for our privacy, a key issue is: who is fighting our corner? The obvious answer would be the MEPs, since they are our elected representatives in the European Parliament. Their job is exactly that: to represent and defend us in just these circumstances. And some, like the Green MEP Jan Albrecht, are certainly doing their best, as I noted in a previous column. But what about the rest – what exactly are they up to?

    • We Can Fix This? In SOTU, Obama Shoves Voting Reform into ‘Sock Drawer,’ Leaving Many Disappointed

      President Obama announced plans for a nonpartisan commission to “improve the Election Day experience” in his State of the Union address, a response to the long lines and heavy burdens that states imposed on voters during the 2012 elections. But his proposal — which some have called “the policy equivalent of a sock drawer” — falls short of what many had hoped.

    • PBS Goes to Israel and Palestine–Mostly Israel

  • Censorship

    • China Tightens Concert Rules After Elton John Incident

      Prominent artists touring in China may be stuck between a rock critic and a hard place: between censure from China for making “disrespectful” political gestures, and Western condemnation for failing to. Bob Dylan faced harsh criticism in 2011 for alleged self-censorship at Chinese concerts, which according to Maureen Dowd at The New York Times was “a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than […] Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.”

    • UCC sued over sim card registration

      Journalists under the Human Rights Network for Journalists Uganda – Chapter (HRNJ-U) have gone to Court to block the planned switching off of unregistered sim cards by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC).

      Through Web Advocates and Legal Brain Trust (LBT), HRNJ-U on Thursday filed a civil suit seeking, among other things, a declaration that the UCC order to switch off unregistered SIM-cards by March 1, 2013 or any other deadline set without obtaining parliamentary approval is inoperative, null and void.

    • Obama keeps newspaper reporters at arm’s length

      Albuquerque radio station KOB-FM’s “Morning Mayhem” crew interviewed him in August. The last time the Wall Street Journal did so was in 2009.

      America’s newspapers have trouble enough these days, what with shrinking ad revenue and straying readers. But the daily print-and-pixel press also hasn’t gotten much love lately from the biggest newsmaker in the business: President Obama.

    • Obama Drones Memo Disclosure Could Change FOIA Cases

      Until last week, the Obama administration’s official position was that it had never technically acknowledged the existence of a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel laying out the legal framework for the targeted killing of an American citizen.

      “The very fact of the existence or nonexistence of such documents is itself classified,” the Justice Department wrote in a previous letter, despite wide discussion from members of the administration on the general principles of the targeted killing program.

      Even a broader document — a so-called “white paper” — that spelled out the less-specific legal basis for targeted killings was “protected by the deliberative process privilege” though it was turned over to select members of Congress, a Justice Department official wrote late last month to a reporter from The New York Times who had requested that document.

      But once the white paper was disclosed by Michael Isikoff of NBC News, the government had a change of heart. Jason Leopold, a reporter for Truthout who had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the white paper in August, contacted DOJ after the leak, reminding them he was granted expedited processing. An official called to tell him it would take three months to disclose the already-public paper but wound up turning over the document in an email to Leopold late Friday as a matter of “agency discretion.” Other requestors got the same document on Friday.

  • Privacy

    • As Secretive “Stingray” Surveillance Tool Becomes More Pervasive, Questions Over Its Illegality Increase

      A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool being used by the FBI in cases around the country commonly referred to as a “Stingray.” Recently, more information on the device has come to light and it makes us even more concerned than before.

    • The intelligence establishment’s dream supercomputer will make Raytheon’s RIOT program seem like child’s play

      The US intelligence community is obsessed with data. The NSA wants it all, and is prepared to keep it for as long as 100 years. The National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) last year told us it’s now dipping into or collating every bit of information we give to federal government agencies under one roof, to mine it for ‘suspicious’ information that may be linked to terrorism. State and local law enforcement, with help from the Department of Homeland Security, have established so-called intelligence “fusion centers” in most states nationwide — little spy centers of their own, where they can view surveillance camera feeds and access intelligence databases. United States surveillance drones at home and abroad collect impossibly enormous quantities of data. Satellites do, too.

    • Here’s how governments might stalk you via social media
    • Big Brother, Big Data and you
    • CISPA Claws Back to Life

      The House cybersecurity bill that allows the National Security Agency (NSA) and the military to collect your private internet records is scheduled for an encore appearance on Wednesday. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) will reintroduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which news reports say will be the same bill that passed the House of Representatives last year.

    • CISPA creeps back to the House
    • Obama to ‘bypass Congress’ on CISPA with cybersecurity executive order

      Unable to reach a deal with Congress, President Obama plans to use his power to exert executive actions against the will of lawmakers. The president will issue orders addressing controversial topics including cybersecurity.

      Although President Obama has issued fewer executive orders than any president in over 100 years, he is making extensive plans to change that, Washington Post reports quoting people outside the White House involved in discussions on the issues. Due to conflicts with a Congress that too often disagrees on proposed legislation, Obama plans to act alone and is likely “to rely heavily” on his executive powers in future, according to the newspaper.

    • CISPA creeps back to the House
    • Government killing online surveillance bill

      Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson says the controversial Bill C-30, known as the online surveillance or warrantless wiretapping bill, won’t go ahead due to opposition from the public.

      The bill, which was known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, was designed to help police combat child pornography. But civil liberties and privacy groups — even the federal privacy commissioner — said the bill violated the rights of Canadians.

      Opponents lobbied strenuously against C-30, saying it was an overly broad, “Big Brother” piece of legislation that would strip all Canadians of the right to privacy.

    • Federal government kills Internet-snooping bill
    • Leaking Classified Information to Resurrect ‘Cybersecurity Bill’ That Will Further Endanger Privacy
    • They really don’t know clouds at all

      Every new computing technology seems to bring with it a privacy flap. Cloud computing is going through that phase right now, at least outside the United States. Canadian and European elites fear that putting data in the cloud will somehow let the US government paw through it at will, a fear that usually centers on Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.

    • Raytheon Riot: Defense spying is coming to social networks

      Multi-national defense company Raytheon is getting ready to ship a big data social networking spy system. But they are far from the only ones tracking you.

    • At Guantanamo, microphones hidden in attorney-client meeting rooms

      A military lawyer at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, acknowledged Tuesday that microphones are hidden inside devices that look like smoke detectors in the rooms where defense lawyers meet detainees, but he said the government does not listen in on attorney-client communications.

      Both civilian and military defense lawyers at Guantanamo Bay meet their clients at a facility known as Echo 2, a camp that has about eight meeting huts.

    • Attorney-client meeting room was bugged, Navy lawyer testifies at Guantánamo

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Sources: White House to issue cybersecurity order Wednesday

      The White House is poised to release an executive order aimed at thwarting cyberattacks against critical infrastructure on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told The Hill.

    • House panel to reintroduce controversial cyber bill, setting up White House fight

      The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee plan to re-introduce on Wednesday a controversial cybersecurity bill that has faced pushback from the White House.

      House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said Friday that they plan to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) next week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The bill is aimed at improving information-sharing about cyber threats between government and industry so cyberattacks can be thwarted in real time.

    • Obama signs long-awaited cybersecurity executive order

      President Obama invoked the pageantry of his State of the Union address this evening to announce a long-anticipated executive order on cybersecurity, a move that caps months of discussions with technology companies and could reduce pressure on Congress to move forward with controversial new legislation.

    • Full Show: Who’s Widening America’s Digital Divide?

      Internet scholar Susan Crawford explains how media conglomerates put profit ahead of the public interest, and author Nick Turse shares what we never knew about the Vietnam War.

    • Is your MP on the naughty list?

      The Government claims the bill is necessary to address three data types: Reconcile IP addresses, capture weblogs and to deal with third party data.

      In practice, what would this mean? Well, the first data type is required to give the police “the ability to reconcile an Internet Protocol (IP) address to an individual”

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • iPhone Brand Not Exclusive In Brazil Anymore

        Brazil’s Institute of Industrial Property has decided that Apple cannot hold exclusive rights to the “iPhone” trademark in the country. Apple lost the trademark after a long fight with Gradiente, the company that registered the iPhone trademark seven years before the Apple device came out.

    • Copyrights

        Following in the steps of other courts around Europe, Finland’s Court of Appeal has now confirmed that two ISPs previously ordered to block The Pirate Bay must continue doing so. With another ISP’s appeal to the Supreme Court just rejected it now seems likely that anti-piracy company CIAPC has succeeding in its quest to deny 80% of the country direct access to the world’s most infamous torrent site. But still the downloading continues.

      • Canadian anti-privacy bill didn’t pass

        The already controversial Bill C-30, that’s actually more known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, didn’t passed because of the public opposition. The bill, as its known name says, was designed to aid in solving the child pornography problem, but at what cost?

      • The Pirate Bay still banned in Finland
      • U.S. Govt: Harsh Punishments Needed to Deter File-Sharers
      • Music Publishers: We Need Strong Copyright Laws Because We Don’t Like The Consumer Electronics Association
      • Obama administration defends $222,000 file-sharing verdict

        The Obama Administration has stepped into a long-running file-sharing lawsuit in Minnesota, urging the United States Supreme Court not to get involved in a six-figure verdict against a young mother from Northern Minnesota. The feds don’t buy the woman’s argument that the massive size of the award makes it unconstitutional.

      • Bad cyber security bill CISPA heading back to the House

        Rumors of CISPA’s demise were apparently greatly exaggerated, according to various privacy rights advocates and organizations today.

        CISPA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, initially sought to give American companies more legal breathing room (protection against lawsuits) when collecting and sharing consumer/user data for the purpose of preventing massive Internet security threats. It passed a House vote with few guarantees that it wouldn’t grossly violate a person’s privacy rights (even in the face of a presidential veto threat). The White House eventually put a stamp of approval on the bill, pending certain amendments. But the Senate vote failed, and the president resorted to other methods for the time being.

      • TPB AFK and why I started Flattr
      • Five Basic Misconceptions About The Copyright Monopoly And Sharing Of Culture

        Five erroneous assertions have kept appearing in the public debate since 1990 about file-sharing vs. the copyright monopoly. These assertions have persisted for 25 years, despite being obviously false. This is a reference article to link to and point at whenever one of them pops up the next time.

      • Getting the most from online films

        In so many areas, I see digital tools disrupt longstanding practices. That disruption brings challenges – but many opportunities, too, with new innovative ways suddenly available to meet specialised consumer needs. The overall effect is a benefit for consumers, for our economy, and our society – as long as you can adapt properly to digital developments.

        The film sector is a very good example. Currently some rules and practices in that sector restrict flexibility – like rigid ‘release windows’. (‘Release windows’ set out when films can be released in cinemas, on DVD, online and so on – so that, for example, a film can’t be shown online until a certain number of weeks after the cinema release. Such “windows” can be based on regulation, public funding conditions, industry practice or individual negotiations). For me, while such “exclusive” periods may be important to finance some films, or get the most out of them, rigid and uniform rules can make it harder for the sector to capture digital benefits.

      • European Court Of Human Rights: No, Copyright Does Not Automatically Trump Freedom Of Expression

        As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control. But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright, posing very real threats to what can be said online. That’s not because their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright industry’s private police force.

02.11.13

Links 11/2/2013: 800 Million Androids This Year, CISPA is Back

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opensource.com announces 2013 community award winners
  • Asylum a new horror game

    Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: “Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be”.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.1: LLVM/Clang Battling GCC

      With LLVM/Clang having become the default FreeBSD x86 compiler as of last year and the recent FreeBSD 9.1 release shipping not only LLVM/Clang but also the libc++ library, new benchmarks were carried out of FreeBSD 9.1 looking at its two stock compilers.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 3D printing an open source electric car

      What excites me about ZWheelz is the potential to improve our education system, environment, energy independence, and economy—all with what I like to call, one “EZ” project.

      It all began when I built a plane from a kit, then saw the documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car?, and decided to build an electric car. Turns out, it functioned really well, and I began wondering: “Why aren’t there more electric vehicles on the road?”

    • Open Access/Content

      • The Eric Holder Memo on the “Reasoned Exercise of Prosecutorial Discretion” & the Swartz Affair ~pj

        When Aaron Swartz died, I told you that I’m no expert on criminal law, and I’m not. So I couldn’t really provide a star to guide anyone. But what I could do is research and provide information so you could be fully informed. That’s what journalists are for.

        And now I’ve come across something that I think might be helpful, a May 19, 2010 memo [PDF] by Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. to all federal prosecutors, letting them know that he wanted them to be fair and reasonable in exercising their prosecutorial discretion. He told them that he wanted them to be flexible, too, not necessarily bound by maximum/minimum guidelines, but to look at the individual circumstances of each case, stating that the “reasoned exercise of prosecutorial discretion is essential to the fair, effective, and even-handed administration of the federal criminal laws”. That raises a natural enough question, of course, about whether that policy was followed in the Swartz case, but that isn’t what struck me.

      • Memorials for Aaron Swartz Turn to Discussion of How to Honor His Legacy
      • Software Developer Lobbies For Free Court Documents

        A few years ago, software developer Stephen Schultze helped create a nifty piece of code called “RECAP” that makes some federal court documents free on the Internet.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open-Source Hardware Firewalls

        Open-source hardware firewalls are something of a misnomer. Though these Internet protection appliances are based on open-source operating systems, their programming is often proprietary. Furthermore, security needs have forced many of these product to go beyond mere firewalling to include anti-spam filtering, intrusion protection and more.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Sleazy Sugar Daddies offer to pay tuition fees on dating site

    HUNDREDS of cash-strapped Scots students have signed up to an internet dating site to meet wealthy men offering to pay their tuition.

  • Facebook Connect issue wreaks havoc on the Web
  • Facebook error that hijacks thousands of websites isn’t just an ‘inconvenience’

    Thousands of major — and not-so-major — websites found their traffic redirected to a Facebook error page yesterday, a phenomenon that lasted upward of an hour, according to varying accounts. Although the social networking site dismissed the event as the result of a Facebook error that was “quickly repaired,” it would be imprudent to blithely view the event as a glitch or mere inconvenience. It’s downright concerning, both from a business and a privacy perspective.
    First, here’s what happened: Starting at around 4 p.m. Pacific time Thursday, users attempting to visit an array of disparate websites and services — from CNN to The Sydney-Melboure Herald to Pinterest to Reddit to Hulu — were redirected to Facebook and a message reading, “An error occurred. Please try again later.” Sites were affected anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, according to reports.

  • Security

    • Massive search fraud botnet seized by Microsoft and Symantec

      Thakur said that the Bamital malware was initially delivered by a combination of methods, including in packages over peer-to-peer filesharing networks disguised as other content. But the majority of systems infected were the victim of “driveby downloads” from websites configured with malicious software intended to exploit browser security flaws. “We have evidence of [the botnet operators] polluting search engine results for certain search terms with links to servers with exploits,” he said.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Report: Ex-Cop Christopher Dorner Is Now a Target for Drones
    • Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front
    • Another FBI Patsy Arrested in Fake Bomb Plot to Start a Civil War

      The FBI is at it again, boasting about stopping another contrived terror plot of their own making. This time they nabbed a right-winger working with the Taliban which happen to be an FBI agent provocateur.
      “

    • Julian Assange Bill Maher Interview: WikiLeaks Founder Slams Drones, Targeted Killings
    • Keeping Secrets

      Similarly, when the government’s only chance of keeping an inconvenient truth out of the news media is to warn of a national security threat, it’s amazing how these threats pop up.

      This has turned out to be a powerfully effective tool. News organizations, after all, don’t want to endanger the nation’s safety, or be accused of doing so, so editors often listen to government officials when they make their case for not publishing. And, after listening, editors occasionally consent.

      [...]

      Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it.

    • Sullivan: More Light Still Needed on Drone Strikes
    • Drone spotted hovering over West Oakland
    • Sovereignty vs. Intervention: A Review of Haiti’s New Dictatorship

      During the build up to and aftermath of the 2004 overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s popular priest-turned-president, the Haitian and international press reported two conflicting narratives. Even in the left-wing media office of ZNet, where Justin Podur was an editor, stories filed from Haiti just “didn’t add up.”

    • Push to Expand U.S. ‘Kill List’
    • What If an Assassination Court Reviewed Placement of US Citizens on the President’s Kill List?

      For months, there have been human rights or civil liberties groups sharply condemning President Barack Obama’s targeted killing program especially because he holds all the power to decide who lives and who dies, however, up until a Justice Department “white paper” on the program was leaked by NBC News, there was little discussion by US news media about the nature of the program.

    • Letters: Targeted death
    • US’ Betrayal of Truth
    • Spying on Law-Abiding Muslims

      He said his handler told him that the department considered “being a religious Muslim a terrorism indicator.”

    • NDAA Lawsuit- Hedges v. Obama -Pt. 5
    • NDAA Lawsuit- Hedges v. Obama -Pt. 6
    • In Search of Monsters

      On 11 January, seemingly out of the blue, François Hollande announced that France would ‘respond to the request of the Malian president’ and send forces to its former colony to fight ‘terrorist elements coming from the north’. ‘Today, the very existence of this friendly nation is at stake,’ he declared. ‘Military operations will last for as long as required … Terrorists must know that France will always be there when it’s a matter not of its fundamental interests but the right of a population … to live in freedom and democracy.’ In France, though ominous warnings did the rounds, the president’s approval ratings soared from a nadir of 40 per cent to 63 per cent. Hitherto seen as weak, Hollande was suddenly perceived as a strong commander-in-chief (linguistically, it’s a small step from chef d’état to chef de guerre). Abroad, despite offers from Western allies of logistical or humanitarian support (France’s plea for military support from its European allies remains unanswered), many suspected that neocolonial ghosts were haunting Paris yet again. La Françafrique, that infamous amalgam of truncated African sovereignty and French interventionism in sub-Saharan Africa, seemed to have returned.

    • Obama’s Drone Attack on Your Due Process

      The biggest problem with the recently disclosed Obama administration white paper defending the drone killing of radical clerk Anwar al-Awlaki isn’t its secrecy or its creative redefinition of the words “imminent threat.” It is the revolutionary and shocking transformation of the meaning of due process.

    • How Obama’s Drone Strike Policy Violates the Original Meaning of the Constitution

      Writing at the Originalism Blog, Michael Ramsey of the University of San Diego Law School examines the Obama administration’s drone policy in light of the original meaning of the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment, which forbids the government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

    • Nick Turse Describes the Real Vietnam War

      Turse, who devoted 12 years to tracking down the true story of Vietnam, unlocked secret troves of documents, interviewed officials and veterans — including many accused of war atrocities — and traveled throughout the Vietnamese countryside talking with eyewitnesses to create his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

    • Article II or AUMF? “A High Level Official” (AKA John Brennan) Says CIA Can Murder You
    • Drones and Our National Religion

      The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance.

      The flag’s powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A “Dream Act” that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief. Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees. If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.

    • Dick Cheney blasts Obama’s ‘second-rate’ national security team
    • They Knew the Evidence against Anwar al-Awlaki Was Weak When They Killed Him

      In case you don’t want to read these two long posts, I want to point to two passages from the white paper that show, on two key points, the government wasn’t even claiming Anwar al-Awlaki was the “senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces” they keep saying he was when they killed him.

    • Bill Moyers Essay: When We Kill Without Caring
    • CIA’s Kiriakou expresses doubts about agency, Greek terrorism

      John Kiriakou, the Greek-American CIA analyst who was sentenced last month to more than two years in jail for revealing the identity of a covert operative, has revealed to Kathimerini his thoughts about the possible emergence of new terrorist activity in Greece and his concerns about the future of the US intelligence agency.

      Kiriakou told Sunday’s Kathimerini that he would differentiate the activity of urban guerrilla groups in Greece today and the actions of the November 17 terrorist organization.

    • Obama’s legacy of secrecy

      John Brennan’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday was a microcosm of the Obama administration’s approach to counterterrorism: The right assurances, with little transparency.

      Brennan said the United States should publicly disclose when American drone attacks kill civilians. He called waterboarding “reprehensible” and vowed it would never occur under his watch. And he said that countering militancy should be “comprehensive,” not just “kinetic,” and involve diplomatic and development efforts as well.

    • US Air Force Veteran, Finally Allowed to Fly Into US, Now Banned From Flying Back Home

      Secret, unaccountable no-fly lists are one of many weapons the US government uses to extra-judicially punish American Muslims

    • Three billion dollars a year for this boondoggle?

      How low must the number of Muslim-American ‘terror plots’ go before Congress thinks again about giving the FBI an annual $3 billion of our tax dollars –nearly half the FBI’s budget – just for its counterterrorism work?

      And to what lengths is the FBI prepared to go to manufacture plots and suspects in order to keep those dollars flowing?

      In his fourth annual survey of Muslim-American terrorism, Charles Kurzman, of North Carolina’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, found that the number of Muslim-Americans indicted as terrorists has been in steady decline over the past three years and no deaths or injuries were caused by their actions.

    • Why a “Drone Court” Won’t Work–But (Nominal) Damages Might
    • Barack Obama is pushing gun control at home, but he’s a killer abroad
    • CIA report must be declassified

      …more than 6,000 pages and 35,000 footnotes…

    • CIA contractor due in court for plea hearing

      A former CIA contractor involved in a fatal shootout in Pakistan is due in court in Colorado on Monday over a fight over a parking space.

      A judge will consider a plea agreement for Raymond Allen Davis, who is charged with felony assault and misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the fight outside a suburban Denver bagel shop.

    • Graham moves to delay defense, CIA confirmations
    • Obama And The CIA Must Come Clean On Drones, Killings

      Secret bases, targeted killings, leaked memos and elaborate cover-ups – the latest developments in an ongoing controversy involving the Obama administration and CIA with a question at its core that has been asked for generations: “How far are we willing to go to protect the citizens of the United States?”

    • The CIA Orchestrates a Pre-Election Campaign in Paraguay

      The marked increase in numbers at the US embassy in Asunción over the past year is being necessitated by the need to maintain control over the Paraguayan government. The pre-election campaign is in full swing and in order to «manage it by hand», the intelligence apparatus operating under the roof of the US embassy need staff reinforcements. Political forces potentially hostile to the interests of the United States must not be allowed to come to power. Federico Franco, the acting president of Paraguay who, in June 2012, ensured the CIA-scripted «constitutional removal» of the legally elected president, Fernando Lugo, has fulfilled his mission. His successor needs to be just as reliable and just as manageable.

    • Moscow hopes for completion of probe into CIA secret prisons

      Moscow hopes that an investigation into the CIA’s secret prisons abroad will be completed and all suspects will be brought to court, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

    • Op-ed: The slippery slope of drone warfare

      The release of a Justice Department white paper defending the legality of the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in foreign countries outside areas of active hostilities is an opportunity for every American to reflect on how our government conducts its armed conflict against al-Qaeda and associated forces, especially since the man who is at the center of such targeting decisions, John Brennan, might soon be confirmed as CIA Director.

    • Ajami: Barack Obama and the silence of the U.S. drone war

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Night Sky Over Asia 1992-2010

      As people are coming to understand, Asian economic growth over the past two decades—despite its great adoption of oil—essentially runs on electricity, most of which is supplied by the burning of coal. Here is the night sky over Asia twenty years ago, as captured in a still photograph from a film loop provided by NOAA’s national geophysical data center.

  • Finance

    • Barclays closes controversial tax avoidance unit
    • As the Sussex Uni occupation shows, Government may see education as a market, but students do not

      The Government’s higher education policy is supposedly about cutting red tape, yet it requires a new army of six-figure-salaried bureaucrats to outsource existing jobs.

    • UK inequality rises sharply in 15 years – report

      The UK’s super-rich, the top 1% of earners, now pocket 10 pence in every pound, while the bottom half have seen their share of the nation’s wealth drop in the last 15 years. Middle earners have also seen their earning power stagnate.

    • HuffPo Attacks, then Partners with, Goldman Sachs
    • Barclays misled shareholders about source of £3bn

      Barclays misled shareholders and the public about one of the biggest investments in the bank’s history, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.

    • Austerity, US Style, Exposed

      Austerity policies include various combinations primarily of government spending cuts and secondarily of general tax increases. Republicans and Democrats have endorsed austerity since 2010. Austerity was the result of their deal on taxes last December 31: increasing the payroll tax on wages and salaries from 4.2 to 6.2 percent. Austerity is what they are negotiating now in regard to federal spending cuts.

    • Democracy Realized

      In worker self-directed enterprises (WSDEs), workers democratically run the affairs of the enterprise. They make the decisions whose consequences shape their lives. Their job descriptions require them to perform some specific tasks within the enterprise’s division of labor, but their job descriptions also obligate their participation in directing the enterprise.

      To perform their specific tasks, workers in WSDEs must learn how to do the required work, must be trained and educated, first in schools before employment and afterwards on the job as well. The same applies to the other part of their job description that concerns participation in directing their WSDE. School curricula must provide everyone with the broad-based, liberal arts education that builds flexibility and the capacity for creative enterprise adjustments to an ever-changing world. In short, establishing an economy based on widespread WSDEs will exert profound and effective pressures for educational changes. Democratizing the workplace will help democratize education.

    • Greenlight’s Einhorn sues Apple, wants bigger payout for investors

      Apple Inc on Thursday confronted its first major challenge from an activist shareholder in years as hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital filed suit against the company and demanded that it dole out a bigger piece of its $137 billion cash pile to investors.

    • Apple, Big Hedge Fund Stars & The Sell Side/Vaudeville Act To Burn Your Hard Earned Money As A Punchline That’s Just Not Funny

      Einhorn is asking management to sell that call/put option straddle now, and forgo the ability to capitalize on future opportunities while running naked against margin compression at the same time that Apple’s competition has surpassed it in technical ability (product/service wise) while Apple has shown ineptitude in competing in the cloud (see the maps fiasco), the next battle ground for the end user. This option sale will be had for the one time premium of a cash distribution. Wise, eh?

  • Censorship

    • Egypt court orders YouTube blocked for a month

      A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world.

      Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying the film, which he described as “offensive to Islam and the Prophet (Muhammad).” He made the ruling in the Egyptian capital where the first protests against the film erupted last September before spreading to more than 20 countries, killing more than 50 people.

      The ruling however can be appealed, and based on precedent, might not be enforced. A spokeswoman for YouTube’s parent company, Google, said in a statement that the firm had “received nothing from the judge or government related to this matter.”

    • Iran’s Press TV taken off air in N America
    • YouTube banned in Egypt for one month

      This Saturday, a Cairo court ordered to block access to the most popular video-sharing website on the Internet, Youtube, for one month(30 days to be more precise), because on this very website an anti-Islam film was posted, apparently becoming the cause for deadly riots across the globe.

    • Twitter’s dangerous lack of transparency on terrorism

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Apple warns users against jailbreaking following evasi0n hack

      Although unlocking a phone that’s still tied to a contract was recently deemed illegal in the US, jailbreaking isn’t, according to the latest review of exceptions to the DMCA in October. But that doesn’t mean the practice isn’t frowned upon by the likes of Apple, which has issued a warning in response to the Evasi0n unthethered jailbreak for iOS 6.1 devices.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • In the Future, All Space Marines Will Be Warhammer 40K Space Marines

        To engage a lawyer to defend me from this spurious claim would cost more money than I have, certainly more than the book has ever earned me. Rather than earning money for my family, I’d be taking money from them, when previously my writing income paid for my daughter’s schooling. And I’d have to use the little time I have to write novels to fight a protracted legal battle instead.

    • Copyrights

      • Two Famous Journalism Institutions Shame Themselves By Not Standing Up For Basic Fair Use

        Two of the most respected and forward looking schools for journalism are the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and the Poynter Institute. I’ve long been a fan of both, but I’m now quite disappointed in both of them too. Last week, we had a few stories concerning a woman named Teri Buhl, who (to put it mildly) had some “unique” (and, by that we mean “totally wrong”) legal theories concerning whether or not someone could quote her public statements on Twitter, as well as basic copyright and fair use rules. By the end of the week, she was threatening to sue us and others as well.

      • Judge denies MPAA attempt to seize profits from copyright infringement

        A high court in the United Kingdom has ruled that a copyright owner does not have the right to claim profits from copyright infringement.
        “A copyright owner does not have a proprietary claim to the fruits of an infringement of copyright. I shall not, therefore, grant proprietary injunctions,” wrote judge Guy Newey of the England and Wales High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, in a ruling published on Tuesday.

      • ‘STELA’: Hollywood’s Next Big Legislative Fight?

        An analyst suggests that the renewal of an obscure satellite-TV law could command the attention of the major broadcasters, big pay-TV distributors and giant tech companies.

      • Copyright vs Freedom of Expression Judgment

        Earlier this month, the Court issued an important judgment, Ashby Donald and others v France (judgment in French), on the tensions between copyright law and the freedom of expression. It is my great pleasure to put online a guest post about this judgment by professor Dirk Voorhoof of Ghent University and Inger Høedt-Rasmussen of Copenhagen Business School. Thanks to both!

02.10.13

Links 10/2/2013: Ubuntu on Phones This Month, Linux Year on Desktop

Posted in News Roundup at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Shock! Horror! Some People Want To Change The Linux Console

  • Desktop

    • Chromebooks Pick Up Steam with CDW Deal
    • Winning The Desktop Wars

      Chris Hall over at Foss Force wrote an article that I’ve been mulling over writing myself for quite some time. Chris claims that Linux has won the “war for the desktop”, and on top of that, won it a long time ago with Android. However, I’m not quite as enthusiastic about his claims of open source superiority. Did open source really win, or have we been hijacked?

      Let’s take a second and think about the nature of the open source movement for a few minutes. There are several reasons why we would want the software we use to be open to examination: fewer bugs, control of the machines we own, the ability to modify and redistribute programs, the list goes on. However, I believe that the core ideal of open source is not actually freedom per se, but control. We want to be able to control when and how our machines are used, and when and how our data is used, and to ensure that control access to the source code is necessary.

  • Kernel Space

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

      • Rethinking the office suite

        I’ve spent much of the last week exploring the recent releases of Calligra Suite and LibreOffice, and listening to the unlikely rumors of a Linux version of Microsoft Office. I haven’t concentrated on office suites so intensely for years, and, as I examined Calligra Suite’s and LibreOffice’s very different layouts and approaches to productivity, I found myself thinking: What should a modern office suite consist of?

      • If Office Suites Are Not Broken, Why Change Them?

        He has some reasonable observations but IMHO office suites work well. They are more or less perfected. There’s no reason at all for restructuring or slapping on rafts of new features. That’s M$’s business-plan to force constant updates/new licence-sales. We don’t need that with LibreOffice. Improving its efficiency, fixing bugs and making small changes to UI/features make sense. Rethinking to the extent of adding “the ribbon” or linking to clouds is not needed and not useful. We can run an office suite as a thin client already. What more do we need?

    • Funding

    • BSD

      • BSDs Struggle With Open-Source Graphics Drivers

        While there’s plenty of code pouring into the Linux world for bettering open-source graphics drivers from desktop graphics cards to ARM SoCs, in the *BSD world they are struggling with their graphics driver support. Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation on the (rather poor) state of graphics on Unix-like platforms outside of Linux.

    • Project Releases

    • Public Services/Government

    • Openness/Sharing

      • Open Access/Content

        • Aaron Swartz and the Corrupt Practice of Plea Bargaining

          If Ortiz thought Swartz only deserved to spend 6 months in jail, why did she charge him with crimes carrying a maximum penalty of 50 years? It’s a common way of gaining leverage during plea bargaining. Had Swartz chosen to plead not guilty, the offer of six months in jail would have evaporated. Upon conviction, prosecutors likely would have sought the maximum penalty available under the law. And while the judge would have been unlikely to sentence him to the full 50 years, it’s not hard to imagine him being sentenced to 10 years.

          In this hypothetical scenario, those 10 years in prison would, practically speaking, have consisted of six months for his original crime (the sentence Ortiz actually thought he deserved) plus a nine-and-a-half-year prison term for exercising his constitutional right to a trial.

        • The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings

          And how his allies are trying to finish the job by tearing down a big paywall.

    Leftovers

    • Security

    • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Cablegate

    • Finance

      • Governments Save By Paying Down Their Debts

        I think this over-states the case against the US government buying equities, but the deeper problem is that it ignores the government’s $11 trillion in national debt. If a heavily indebted individual wanted to save for the future, a financial advisor would probably tell him the first step is to pay off some of his debts. And the same point applies to the United States. It will be a long, long time before we run out of bonds to retire—so long that it’s silly to worry about what we’d do if we retired the national debt and still had more money we wanted to save.

      • Goldman Sachs hedging its bets: Is more economic pain on the way?

        Investment bankers – can’t live with ‘em, and can’t live without ‘em.

        At least that’s how it seems in these tough economic times. We tend to hang on their every word, as if they truly know how big money intends to manipulate financial markets in the foreseeable future. But we also tend to blame these financial powerhouses for creating the worst recession since the Great Depression.

        [...]

        …1 trillion flowed out of equities during the month of January.

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • The Gates Foundation and Coca Cola at Odds or Legitimate Bedfellows?

        Sanjay Basu, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, recently wrote a blog post that caught our eye about public and nonprofit leaders who sit on the corporate boards of major soda companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Using one of the tools that make such information readily available, NNDB Mapper, he argues that there appear to be institutional conflicts of interest occurring. In particular, Basu calls out Cathleen Black, chancellor of New York City Schools, and several key Gates Foundation leaders, for sitting on Coca-Cola’s board. In addition, he notes that the former president of the Ford Foundation and the CEO of Duke Health System sit on the board of Pepsi.

    • Censorship

      • Russia blacklists site hosting blogs of prominent journalists

        The Russian government has blocked access to a blog-hosting site that publishes reports from at least two prominent independent journalists often critical of the Kremlin. The site has been added to the country’s recently established official “internet blacklist.”

        LJRossia.org, also known as InsaneJournal, is “a non-profit project created to support freedom of speech, civil society and encourage the free exchange of ideas.” The site was censored today, reportedly over two posts that contained “child pornography elements.” But instead of blocking or removing the two posts in question, the entire site is inaccessible on at least one Russian ISP, RosTelekom.

    • Civil Rights

    • DRM

      • A Brilliant Parody of DRM

        But this post, in which he defends his decision to disallow cutting and pasting from his website, brings to mind another theory: Quinn is secretly an advocate of copyright reform, and has adopted the cartoonish “IP Watchdog” persona as an act of satire. Disabling cutting and pasting is such a ludicrous idea that it can’t be a serious business decision. But it brilliantly lampoons the fallacies that have caused major content companies to employ similar (and similarly ineffective) copy protection schemes.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

02.08.13

Links 9/2/2013: Linux Said to Have Won, LibreOffice 4.0 Arrives

Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Beyond Cost-Cutting: Why Open Source Software Is Gaining Traction on Wall Street

    Financial firms need to take an active role in adopting and governing OSS’s broader usage, according to Black Duck Software’s CEO.

  • BitRock’s BitNami enables OS X to run popular open source CMS’s

    OS X has a massive following of web developers who constantly used Linux based web server stacks to run their CMS stacks – it’s actually a pretty common trend at the moment. Within Apple’s OS X App Store, users can now find four of the most popular CMS’s that run inside BitNami – Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and a generic MAMP stack (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

  • Time for the financial industry to contribute more to open source projects
  • Open source pioneers next generation chat and forums

    Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: “Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be”.

  • Netflix Promises To Make Its Open Source Cloud Management Tools More Portable

    Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Switching to Chrom(ium)

        For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla’s Firefox was my default browser.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0
    • LibreOffice Gets A Brand New Home

      The team has revamped the LibreOffice.org, bidding goodbye to the ‘boring’ and aged design. The new design is jazzy and reflects how aggressive the ‘new’ LibreOffice community is, shedding the old brand image it inherited from the doomed OpenOffice. This change also gives a hint that the UI of this popular open source office suite may also get the same make-over

    • LibreOffice 4.0 Has Arrived
    • LibreOffice 4: A new, better open-source office suite

      LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.

    • Highlights of LibreOffice 4.0

      With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.

    • LibreOffice 4 released
    • LibreOffice 4 Sweeter Than Ever

      I love the new LibreOffice 4 even though I’ve only kissed her once.

    • New LibreOffice turns up the heat on Microsoft

      Today saw the release of a landmark update of LibreOffice, the community successor to OpenOffice.org that’s developed by TDF (The Document Foundation) and its global volunteer community. LibreOffice version 4 looks fresh, includes new enterprise features, and offers improved performance.

      TDF is a nonprofit that allows a wide range of corporate sponsors to join with individual volunteers to build, localize, and test LibreOffice. I spent some time with core developer Michael Meeks of Suse to understand the highlights of the new release.

  • CMS

    • Good or Bad? The Verdict on Open Source CMS

      We’re going to tip our hand here at the start by admitting that the question is unanswerable. The answer depends on who you are and why you’re asking. This is sort of like the question, “What’s better — chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream?” There’s no right answer. It all depends on whom you’re asking. Unfortunately, the open vs. closed debate engenders more negative emotions than choosing ice cream flavors.

  • BSD

    • What the future holds for PC-BSD

      PC-BSD is a multi-purpose distribution of FreeBSD. The last stable release is PC-BSD 9.1. Development and releases tend to be slow and infrequent, and it does not get as much press coverage as Linux distributions.

      I have been reviewing its major releases since this website was launched, though I’m yet to review the last stable edition.

  • Licensing

    • Law Review Helps to Keep Your Practices on the FOSS Fairway

      Not only are open source applications and platforms continuing to raise their profiles, but many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so. All of which means that it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Next Generation of Open Source Smart Grid

      Open source software — code that’s free for anyone to use, as long as they share what they’re doing with it — plays a small, but growing, role in the smart grid. Examples include OpenADR, a Berkeley Labs-California Energy Commission-backed standard for automating demand response, and OpenPDC, a Tennessee Valley Authority’s Hadoop-based data management tool for transmission grid synchrophasor data.

    • The Death Star Ain’t Dead Yet: Open Source Death Star Has A Kickstarter

      A White House petition to build the death star from Star Wars received the 25,000 necessary signatures to warrant an official response. The official White House response was essentially a no, citing the estimated $852 quadrillion dollar cost of building a death star as the reason. Hey, that’s only 13,000 times the entire world’s yearly GDP and a redonkulous amount of steel. No biggie.

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • Darrell Issa Praises Aaron Swartz, Internet Freedom At Memorial

        One of the staunchest Republicans in Congress, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), attended a Capitol Hill memorial on Monday for progressive activist Aaron Swartz, praising the fallen Internet icon’s political courage and saying he has common ground with much of Swartz’s legacy.

        “He and I probably would have found ourselves at odds with lots of decisions, but never with the question of whether information was in fact a human right,” Issa said at the memorial.

        Swartz, who was one of the earliest minds behind Reddit, took his own life in January after fighting federal hacking charges for two years. He had long been an advocate for both an open Internet and the democratization of knowledge. Prosecutors pursued him for downloading millions of academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR, but Swartz had devoted much of his activist energy to liberating information. At age 14, he helped develop the Creative Commons license, an alternative to copyright that allows works to be shared freely, so long as they are not used for profit. The license is used heavily by Flickr and many other websites. Later, Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public.

      • ‘Open source’ texts best for poor students

    • Open Hardware

Leftovers

02.07.13

Links 7/2/2013: October Release for Ubuntu Phones, New Chromebooks

Posted in News Roundup at 9:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

02.06.13

Links 6/2/2013: Wine Becomes Handy, AMD Open Source Drivers

Posted in News Roundup at 9:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • A Conversation with the President of the Open Source Initiative (Video)
  • Open-source social-mobile games platform OpenKit goes into closed-beta test
  • Open Source Gaming Backend OpenKit Plans Private Beta Launch Tomorrow, Raises Another $100K
  • 500 devs sign up to OpenFeint co-founder Relan’s open source service platform OpenKit
  • Preferable Way to Develop Web Applications Is Open Source Development

    Open Source development is a Web Development methodology, which offers practical ownership and total accessibility to a product’s source code. It harnesses transparency of the process. The aphorism of open source development is yielding better quality and flexibility.

    It is most certainly relevant today as we tend to term attractive websites as more popular. In order to craft such an ‘attractive’ website for your business, open source is the best stage to begin with. It is a platform where the source code of the program is accessible to the community which means it is open to change. You can add, update or alter the original code; which you cannot think of doing with proprietary software!

  • Software innovation will blast monolithic hardware

    The forward “predictions for 2013″ pre-Christmas honeymoon is now thankfully over. Time enough then… for a serious look at software futures.

  • Open source

    It was a pleasure to read the excellent article drawing parallels between Mirza Ghalib’s legendary work and the mammoth achievements of the Free and Open Source Software community (Feb. 2). Computing is not just about driving a chip using a few lines of code. Unless a programmer understands the part he or she plays in the continuous and ever evolving drive for academic excellence, society cannot expect him or her to deliver a new and sophisticated tool to help humanity attain new heights. A FOSS programmer has a great sense of responsibility because of the overwhelming number of socially responsible computing geniuses involved in the community. Rahul De’ has rightly pointed out the peer review mechanism followed in the FOSS community, which results in programmers striving for logically correct and efficient programs.

  • Developer interview: DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS

    It is a terrifying thought that many people under 30 will never see a “C:\>” prompt, let alone an “A:\>”. But although as far as Microsoft is concerned DOS has been dead pretty much since Windows 95 went gold, it wasn’t quite the end of the road for the operating system.

  • What next for IcedTea?

    Six years after the launch of the IcedTea project, developer Andrew John Hughes feels that it’s time to take stock. Questions were previously raised over the role of the project, which aims to make it possible to use OpenJDK using only free software build tools for GNU/Linux platforms, when OpenJDK 7 was released.

  • 75 Top Open Source Tools for Protecting Your Privacy

    As mobile technology and social networking have become commonplace, so have concerns about privacy. In fact, nearly every day the media covers stories about identity theft, social networking “pranks” gone wrong, companies with shady privacy policies and repressive governments that censor and monitor online activities.

  • Open Source Meter Launches Products on Amazon

    Open Source Meter, Inc., announces that it now offers its industry standard transformer directly to the end customer through Amazon. By selling through Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), Open Source Meter can offer customers the lowest cost shipping and the fastest turnaround the industry has to offer, reducing product lead times from weeks to overnight. The transformers being offered are Magnelab brand Split-core transformer (SCT) series (http://amzn.to/XwrzP2). Open Source Meter offers a full suite of 38 different types of transformer options broken down into SCT-400, SCT-750, SCT-1250, SCT-2000 and SCT-3000 models.

  • Facebook deploys Opscode’s open-source-based IT management software
  • When open-source eats itself, we win

    In some markets, open source rules the roost. For example, Drupal, Joomla, my old company Alfresco and other open-source content management systems regularly duke it out for supremacy, depending on the workload. In application servers, JBoss and Tomcat spar. In cloud, Cloudstack, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and others battle.

    But web servers? That’s a market that Apache won ages ago, with no open-source competition to speak of.

    That is, until recently.

  • 23 of Netcraft’s Top 40 Hosting Sites Run GNU/Linux
  • Survey Reveals Some Open Source Surprises

    LinuxQuestions is out with results from its annual Members Choice Awards survey, which highlights favorite open source platforms and applications, ranging from favorite Linux distros to favorite new innovative hardware ideas in the open source realm. Probably, if asked to guess which Linux distro was rated the favorite, many readers would guess Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but that’s not the favorite. Here is what the survey respondents had to say.

  • Open source tackles city permit process with OpenCounter

    The City of Santa Cruz is the smallest community to ever partner with Code for America, but it had one of the largest problems to solve: how to make it easier to take an idea for a small business from conception to reality. From a concept to a permit.

    They created an online permitting portal OpenCounter. The portal launched on Wednesday January 9, after an intense year of development, testing, and refinement. So how did they do it?

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Google and Mozilla show off video chat between Chrome and Firefox thanks to WebRTC support
    • Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling!

      Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google.
      RTCPeerConnection (also known simply as PeerConnection or PC) interoperability means that developers can now create Firefox WebRTC applications that make direct audio/video calls to Chrome WebRTC applications without having to install a third-party plugin. Because the functionality is now baked into the browser, users can avoid problems with first-time installs and buggy plugins, and developers can deploy their apps much more easily and universally.

    • Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling!

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open Source OpenStack Folsom Cloud Updated for 51 Bugs

      A simple truth that many open source platform users know well is that often initial releases still have (a few) bugs. Real world usage tends to shake things out better than any beta or dev process ever could.

      With the open source OpenStack cloud platform, the most recent Folsom release debuted in September of 2012. It is now being updated to version 2012.2.3, fixing at least 51 known bugs and at least two serious security issues.

    • OpenStack, Lock-In, Support Costs, and Open Source Free Lunches
    • Top 5 Open Source Projects in Big Data – Breaking Analysis

      Big Data is a booming area that is receiving more widespread attention, especially since technology research company Gartner has projected that Big Data will drive $34 billion in IT spending in 2013. Abhishek Mehta, founder of Tresata, joined Kristin Feledy on the Morning NewsDesk Show to give his perspective on what’s happening in Big Data.

  • Databases

    • Oracle Releases Open Source MySQL 5.6 with NoSQL Features

      Over the course of the last two years, Oracle has been hard at work building and improving MySQL 5.6. Today at long last, that hard work has come to fruition with the general availability of the open source MySQL 5.6 database.

      The first MySQL 5.6 preview debuted in July of 2011, while the last official main MySQL release was version 5.5 which was released at the end of 2010.

    • MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability

  • Education

  • Business

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash for Android v1.1.1 is now available

      GnuCash for Android updated to version 1.1.1 today. This latest release fixes numerous bugs and adds support for double-entry accounting. Double-entry accounting allows every transaction to be a transfer from one account to another. For example, every addition to your “Expenses” account can make your “Checking” account go down by the same amount.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Industry Q&A: Open Source in Government

      With leadership from the White House, and success stories throughout the government spectrum, clearly open source solutions are gaining ground against proprietary software solutions in the public domain. Government Technology talked to Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat Public Sector, to get his perspective on the open source phenomenon. Hellekson covers the federal, state, local and education markets in the U.S. for Red Hat.

    • Levelling the playing field: open source in the public sector
    • Government to switch to open source

      The government decision to purchase Microsoft software licenses and products to upgrade government agencies at a cost exceeding $43m has triggered anger among activists and specialists, who called the decision a waste of money and asked the government to use free open source software (FOSS), instead, last December.

      Mohamed Hanafy, the spokesman of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, stated that the Microsoft deal will be the last and that the shift towards Open Source will be gradual. “We cannot shift to Open Source overnight”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source green technology farm helps the developing world

      The ECHO Farm in Southwest Florida serves a special purpose. The non-profit helps aid workers in developing countries use the best sustainable farming tools and techniques in ways that would make MacGyver proud.

    • MIT Builds An Open-Source Platform For Your Body

      MIT Media Lab’s 11-day health care hackathon pulled students and big companies together with a common goal: Healing a broken industry.

    • MIT sets sights on open-source mHealth during innovation event

      The MIT Media Lab’s eleven-day Health and Wellness Hackathon is not your average gadget exhibition. Bringing together eighty participants from around the world, the annual event, which was held in January, is designed to inspire new ways to fix an age old problem: how to use technology to prevent illnesses before they start. Focusing on the use of standardized, interoperable, open-source platforms, the six teams spent nearly two weeks thinking up apps and home medical devices that would tear down proprietary software barriers and help patients take charge of their healthcare.

    • Open-source Death Star revived on Kickstarter after White House snub
    • Open-source electrical engineering design tools

      Have you tried these, or other, EE tools? What EE tools do you prefer? Please comment below.

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • Retreating rebels burn Timbuktu’s science manuscripts

        IT IS what conservators, archivists and researchers have feared. As French and Malian troops advanced on Timbuktu in northern Mali earlier this week, retreating Islamist fighters have tried to destroy valuable scientific texts dating back to medieval times.

        The documents were housed at the city’s Ahmed Baba Institute and in a warehouse, both of which were set alight. It is unclear how many of the institute’s 30,000 or so manuscripts have been destroyed. The texts, which were being digitised, show that science was under way in Africa before European settlers arrived in the 16th century.

        George Abungu, vice-president of the executive committee of the International Council of Museums, describes the burning as “an incredible loss to Africa’s heritage, a backward move to the dark ages”. He says there is no way the Islamists “can claim to be Africans when they destroy the very foundation of our contribution to world knowledge and academia”.

      • Rebooting Computer Crime Law Part 2: Protect Tinkerers, Security Researchers, Innovators, and Privacy Seekers
      • A tribute to Aaron Swartz

        I would like to thank Senator Cash for taking up the issue of female genital mutilation with such passion. I rise to make some remarks about some of the perverse consequences that can come into play when governments-and most notably our Australian government-react or overreact to cyber threats. It makes me edgy whenever this government adds the word ‘cyber’ to anything. You tend to have to watch your back when that is occurring. I do not want to downplay the very real threats of identity theft and misappropriation, phishing attempts on people’s accounts and these sorts of things, cyber bullying and the other array of threats that people do face in the online environment. But I am also aware that we run the risk-and the Australian government is running this risk at the moment-of running these campaigns of hyperventilation and pumping up threat and fear as though this is where we are meant to transfer our fear of terrorists, that the internet is the new domain of terror and the best way to protect ourselves is to submit to perpetual ongoing, online surveillance by government policing and other agencies.

      • We Need to Think Beyond the Aaron in ‘Aaron’s Law’

        The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)’s disproportionate penalties and lack of nuance played a role in Aaron Swartz’ prosecution and likely in his subsequent suicide. So three weeks ago, California Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced “Aaron’s Law” to update the CFAA.

        Lofgren modified Aaron’s Law based on community feedback and released the updated version this past Friday. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also proposed much-needed changes to CFAA’s penalty provisions. The law has yet to go before Congress, but these efforts matter.

      • Anonymous Claims Wall Street Data Dump

        Hacktivist group publishes 4,000 passwords as part of Operation Last Resort campaign seeking revenge for the treatment of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

      • Aaron Swartz Memorial On Capitol Hill Draws Darrell Issa, Elizabeth Warren
      • Drafting Problems With the Second Version of “Aaron’s Law” from Rep. Lofgren

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Python gets a big data boost from DARPA

      DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has awarded $3 million to software provider Continuum Analytics to help fund the development of Python’s data processing and visualization capabilities for big data jobs.

    • Perl Foundation looking to extend Improving Perl 5 grant

      Since September 2011, Nicholas Clark has been working on improving the Perl 5 Core, funded by a $20,000 grant from the Perl Foundation. The term of the work is coming to an end and Clark is now seeking another $20,000 to continue the work of the original Improving Perl 5 grant. The Foundation is consulting with the community before making the final decision whether to go ahead with the extension which would see Clark devoting another 400 hours of dedicated work to the project.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The Groovy Conundrum

      Groovy is one of the most-interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There’s the conundrum.

Leftovers

  • What about the elderly?

    Those are some of the issues that I could think of. The list is far from being all-inclusive or comprehensive, but I think it sheds light on some of the aspects of what Linux is all about. Now, I do not say we should all make operating systems as if everyone was elderly and/or very set in their ways. After all, thirty years from now, young people of today will be the senior citizens of the future, with their own set of ideas and technologies.

    But the development should be focused on making operating systems appeal to the widest cross-section of users. This also means designing products that scale well with time. If your desktop is peppered with online integration and social icons, the moment those networks go out of spotlight, your very model loses its own validity.

  • Read a Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit

    Ordinarily I don’t discuss legal issues relating to fictional settings that are dramatically different from the real world in terms of their legal system. Thus, Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, etc. are usually off-limits because we can’t meaningfully apply real-world law to them. But the contract featured in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was just too good a topic to pass up, especially since you can buy a high-quality replica of it that is over 5 feet long unfolded.

  • Court Rules Icelandic “Girl” Can Use Her Own Name

    The Reykjavik District Court has ruled that a 15-year-old Icelandic girl can legally use the first name “Blaer,” reversing a contrary decision by government officials. Iceland has strict naming laws that require, among other things, that names fit standard grammar and pronunciation rules and be gender-appropriate. According to the report, the relevant committee refused to approve Blaer Bjarkardottir’s first name because she is a girl and the panel viewed the name as “too masculine.”
    To date, the government has referred to the girl only as “Girl.”

    [...]

    Whatever we may think of the country’s naming laws, Iceland gets some respect from me because their word for “email address” is the totally awesome netfang, which the rest of the world should start using immediately.

  • Getting rid of telemarketers with a Banana Phone

  • Science

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • Noam Chomsky: Who Owns the World?

      World War II is when the United States really became a global power. It had been the biggest economy in the world by far for long before the war, but it was a regional power in a way. It controlled the Western Hemisphere and had made some forays into the Pacific. But the British were the world power.

      World War II changed that. The United States became the dominant world power. The U.S. had half the world’s wealth. The other industrial societies were weakened or destroyed. The U.S. was in an incredible position of security. It controlled the hemisphere, and both the Atlantic and the Pacific, with a huge military force.

    • Obama’s bankster bromance

      The White House is holding a meeting today with a number of business leaders to discuss the President’s economic agenda, including immigration. This is encouraging, as it will be important to get leaders on board with reforming immigration rules.

      What’s less encouraging is that the President continues to treat Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein like he’s royalty.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Google’s Eric Schmidt on ‘Hidden People’ and ‘Virtual Genocide’

      ‘No hidden people allowed’: “If you don’t have any registered social-networking profiles or mobile subscriptions, and online references to you are unusually hard to find, you might be considered a candidate for such a registry.”

    • EXCLUSIVE – Petraeus: The Plot Thickens

      Petraeus was suspected of having an extramarital affair nearly two years earlier than previously known.

      [...]

      According to internal emails of the Austin-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, General David Petraeus was drawing attention to his private life much earlier than previously believed. Because it was his private life that resulted in his being forced out as CIA director, alterations in our understanding of the time frame are significant.

    • Court: Gov’t Can Secretly Obtain Email, Twitter Info from Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer Jacob Appelbaum

      A federal appeals court has ruled the government can continue to keep secret its efforts to pursue the private information of Internet users without a warrant as part of its probe into the WikiLeaks. The case involved three people connected to the whistleblowing website whose Twitter records were sought by the government, including computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

    • Part 2: Daniel Ellsberg and Jacob Appelbaum on the NDAA, WikiLeaks and Unconstitutional Surveillance
    • Tor projects win two Access Innovation Awards

      In December I attended the award ceremony for the 2012 Access Innovation Awards. Their finalists included three projects that Tor maintains or co-maintains: OONI (a framework for writing open network censorship measurement tests, and for making the results available in an open way; see its git repo), Flash Proxy (a creative way to let people run Tor bridges in their browser just by visiting a website; see its git repo), and HTTPS Everywhere (a Firefox extension to force https connections for websites that support https but don’t use it by default; see its git repo). Of these, OONI and Flash Proxy ended up being winners in their respective categories.

    • The End of Privacy and Freedom of Thought?

      Telstra is implementing deep packet inspection technology to throttle peer to peer sharing over the internet.

  • Civil Rights

    • Berners-Lee’s web warning

      Another key weakness in Australia’s response to the digital economy is our habit of guarding data…

    • FBI told to leave Iceland – Took a boy with them

      Mr. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks spokesperson, said last week that representatives from the FBI came to Iceland in August 2011. The Icelandic Minister of the Interior confirmed this the same day and said that when he became aware of the FBI in Iceland he cancelled all cooperation with the FBI and told the representatives to leave.

    • orized FBI Questioning of Icelandi

      In late summer 2011, FBI agents questioned an 18-year-old Icelandic boy on matters which, according to them, concerned national security. The boy was connected to WikiLeaks. The questioning took place against the wishes of Icelandic authorities.

      On the evening of August 23, 2011, the boy, whose identity Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV decided not to reveal, came forward to the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavík with information he said concerned possible hacking into the Icelandic government offices’ computer system.

      [...]

      Kristinn Hrafnsson told RÚV that the boy had worked on some projects for WikiLeaks as a volunteer for several months.

    • Controversy over FBI Visit to Iceland Continues

      Minister for Foreign Affairs Össur Skarphéðinsson also maintains that the FBI arrived in the country without permission and without the knowledge of the Icelandic government, visir.is reports. Össur rejects the explanation of the Icelandic police that there was a connection between the visit of the FBI agents and a separate visit of FBI experts a month earlier to investigate an impending computer attack.

    • Call to Action! Appeals Court Date – Feb. 6, 2013
    • No-fly lists: A new tactic of exile?

      The counterterror list of individuals unable to fly to or from the U.S. is growing, but due process sorely lacks

    • Rllsberg: NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision Is Part of “Systematic Assault on Constitution”

      A lawsuit challenging a law that gives the government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens is back in federal court this week. On Wednesday, a group of academics, journalists and activists will present oral arguments in court against a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial. In a landmark ruling last September, Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York struck down the indefinite detention provision, saying it likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens. We’re joined by Daniel Ellsberg, a plaintiff in the case and perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

    • Court Hears Arguments On US Government’s Ability To Indefinitely Detain Citizens
    • NDAA: One Of the Most Dangerous Laws in Over a Century
    • Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”
    • Bahrain – The Forgotten Revolution

      In late 2010 we witnessed the beginning of a series of events that would radically alter the political and social landscapes of the Middle East and Northern Africa. These events, which later became known as the “Arab Spring”, began with an unprecedented wave of pro-democracy protests against the various authoritarian regimes of the region. Beginning with demonstrations in Tunisia against the 23 year rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali that soon led to the dictator fleeing the country, the spirit of revolution quickly spread to the country’s neighbors as well. In Egypt large protests broke out in the now-famous Tahrir Square against the Mubarak regime, resulting in his eventual overthrow. Libya was next, which saw an armed rebellion against Muammer Gadaffi ending with the dictator’s death in October 2011. Yemen too witnessed protests and violence causing longtime president Abdullah Saleh’s eventual resignation. These monumental power shifts captured the world’s attention and indeed still continue to dominate headlines with the descent of Syria into civil war following the Assad regime’s brutal repression of similar protests and the controversial new Islamist-led government of Egypt.

    • Former FBI official questioned on role in abuse of intelligence-gathering tools

      A senior Republican lawmaker is looking into allegations that a former general counsel of the FBI bore greater responsibility for abuses of surveillance authorities than previously known.

    • HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATIONS FILED FORMAL COMPLAINTS WITH THE OECD AGAINST SURVEILLANCE COMPANIES

      Human rights organisations file formal complaints against surveillance software firms Gamma International and Trovicor with British and German governments.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks

      The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

    • No, free Wi-Fi isn’t coming to every US city
    • No one should control Web: Berners-Lee

      The creator of the World Wide Web warned not to hand over power of his invention to the government.

      Speaking last night at a lecture hosted by Sydney’s University of Technology, Tim Berners-Lee said the Internet should remain independent in the same way as journalism.

      “If you’re going to give the government the ability to spy on people and the ability to block” websites they don’t like, “you’ve got to have a lot of trust in that government,” Berners-Lee said.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • EFF Joins 24 US Civil Society Groups in Demanding a Baseline of Transparency in TPP Negotiations

      With every coming round of negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade agreement that carries intellectual property provisions that could have hugely harmful consequences for the Internet and our digital rights—the Office of the US Trade Representative has continually whittled away at any remaining opportunity for the public to have input into the drafting process. The TPP has been under negotiation for three years and the opaqueness has only worsened.

    • Copyrights

      • Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals

        A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher’s career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, and then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

      • Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals
      • What is the government’s interest in copyright? Not that of the public.

        Like many other geeklaw & policy folks, I was baffled from the get-go by the decisions of federal prosecutors to pursue massive criminal charges against Aaron Swartz for downloading papers from JSTOR. I could understand that his activities constituted problematic behavior, but not the blustering punitive response.

        If Aaron’s wrongful act was unauthorizedly copying articles, copyright law would seem to have been the appropriate venue for a response. JSTOR declined to bring a civil suit against Swartz. State officials had no intention of bringing criminal charges against him, either. But then the federal prosecutors stepped in, and charges blossomed all over the place. But -not copyright charges-.

      • New UK Copyright Research Center Immediately Under Attack For Daring To Ask About Evidence

        As Techdirt reported last year, some copyright maximalists in the UK seem to be against the whole idea of basing policy on evidence. Last week saw the launch of CREATe: Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, a new UK “research centre for copyright and new business models in the creative economy.” One of the things it hopes to do is to bring some objectivity to the notoriously contentious field of copyright studies by looking at what the evidence really says; so it was perhaps inevitable that it too would meet some resistance from the extremist wing of the copyright world

      • High Court in key ruling on Usenet piracy profits

        The movie industry has no rights to the profits made by the owner of Usenet-indexing website Newzbin2 by infringing on copyrights, the England and Wales High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, has ruled.

      • European Court Of Human Rights: No, Copyright Does Not Automatically Trump Freedom Of Expression

        As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control. But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright, posing very real threats to what can be said online. That’s not because their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright industry’s private police force.

      • It’s Time for a Fresh Look at Copyright Laws

02.05.13

Links 5/1/2013: Hewlett-Packard GNU/Linux Laptop, Linux Mint Codename

Posted in News Roundup at 8:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Chris Knadle, Engineer/System Administrator
  • Open Ballot: Moment of the Millenium

    With Linux continuing its steady rise to world domination, we thought we’d ask you what you think has been the greatest moment for Linux since the start of the millennium.

  • Leaving the Land of the Giants

    The cover of the December 1st–7th 2012 issue of The Economist shows four giant squid battling each other (http://www.economist.com/printedition/2012-12-01). The headline reads, “Survival of the biggest: The internet’s warring giants”. The squid are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Inside, the story is filed under “Briefing: Technology giants at war”. The headline below the title graphic reads, “Another game of thrones” (http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game). The opening slug line reads “Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other’s throats in all sorts of ways.” (Raising the metaphor count to three.)

  • Linux Top 3: Secure Boot Bricks, Kernel Advances and MariaDB
  • Top Linux and open-source programs survey results

    LinuxQuestions’ annual members choice survey is in and the top Linux distributions and open-source programs are sometimes quite surprising

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Udev fork is a training project say eudev developers

      At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a “hate based fork”. The developers also noted that their “pet project” was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.

    • RAID 5/6 code merged into Btrfs

    • Graphics Stack

      • Ubuntu and Multiple Monitors – AMD Edition

        There are several ways to end up with a satisfactory experience on the desktop with Ubuntu despite their recent confusion of the user interface. We will discuss some of those another day (KDE vs. Gnome vs. Cinammon vs. Unity). Today we are going to talk about setting up your desktop environment for multiple monitors. This article assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or 12.10, however, the process should work equally well back to version 10.04 LTS unless otherwise noted.

        Assuming you have installed Ubuntu and are successfully sitting at the desktop (the window manager at this point is irrelevant), a couple of questions will now come to mind. What am I going to be using my linux desktop environment for? If you are going to be running office applications, email, basic web browsing and the occassional movie, you might be done. The default (read: Open Source) binary video drivers for both AMD (radeon) and Nvidia (nouveaux) are perfectly acceptable for all of those things. In fact, recently, they both have picked up some compositing support (so you can run the nifty 3D window effects in Compiz or KWin) as well as support for gaming. However, that support is spotty and performance still leaves a lot to be desired.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • What’s new with Nepomuk 4.10

        I’ve blogged about some of the more prominent changes in this new Nepomuk release. I thought it would be a good idea to document all the changes, most of which I haven’t publicly blogged about.

      • Little bits of news about Gwenview
      • building KDE software from git.kde.org the easy way
      • new plasma-framework repo

        On November 3, 2008 libplasma moved from kde-workspace to kdelibs sporting a spiffy API that used the new QGraphicsProxyWidget heavily.

        In Randa this past summer we agreed on the last few big decisions for libplasma2. We would remove QGraphicsView and move entirely to QML. In the process, libplasma would have no drawing system dependent code in it. It would be data and business logic only.

      • Alternatives to Knotes

        I am still migrating away from my old KDE tools. Most of them will run under LXDE, or any other desktop, but I’m finding that since KDE 4 came out, the accessories are all fatter, slower, and worst of all, buggy. I reported last month on replacing Korganizer. Next up: Knotes.

      • Krita 2.6 Released, Offers Better Photoshop Compatibility

        Krita 2.6 adds many performance improvements, but also new support for OpenColorIO, a color management system used by movie studios and applications like Blender, which means that Krita now fits into a movie/vfx studio workflow.

      • KDE’s Aaron Seigo Starts Weekly Hangout On Google+

        Great news for KDE users. Aason Seigo, the KDE project lead, is starting a weekly Google+ Hangout. Seigo ‘tested’ the first hangout and it went well, except for some initial glitches caused by Pulse Audio.

      • Video Guide On Building KDE

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Power management in GNOME 3.8
      • GNOME Switching to JavaScript?

        Floating out in newsfeeds today was an interesting tidbit by John Palmieri who said, “So GNOME finally chose an official language and it is JavaScript.” Now I’m not a developer, but everytime I encounter JavaScript it’s causing problems. Is this a good idea for GNOME?

      • JavaScript becoming default language for GNOME apps

        At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in.

      • GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

        The GNOME project, developers of the GNOME desktop for Linux, has decided JavaScript will be the only “first class” language it will recommend for developers cooking up new apps for the platform.

      • Dissent on Gnome’s Javascript decision
      • Why I said goodbye to the Gnome Desktop

        It’s finally time for me to leave the Gnome Desktop, thanks to Gnome 3. Fortunately for me, the MATE desktop is a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop, and as of Fedora 18, is integrated into the Fedora repository; it’s also fairly easy to install.

  • Distributions

    • 2012 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

      Desktop Distribution of the Year – Slackware (20.59%)

    • A look at UberStudent 2.0

      UberStudent is a Linux distribution which declares itself as being “Linux for learners”. The project is based on Ubuntu with UberStudent 2.0 using the latest Ubuntu long-term support release as a base. Looking over the project’s documentation we find UberStudent is designed with an eye toward education. The project is targeting people wishing to teach or learn academic computing. The project’s website refers to the distribution as a learning platform, designed to help people become fluent in computer technology. There are several editions of the latest UberStudent release. The main edition comes with the Xfce desktop environment and other editions feature the LXDE and MATE desktops. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. I opted to try the Xfce edition which can be downloaded as a 3.5 GB DVD images.

    • Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” Review: Lightweight, fast and elegant Openbox distro for low spec computers!

      From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 “Ultra” Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

      • Linux Lite 1.0.4 screen shots

        Linux Lite is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. It is uses the Xfce desktop environment, a desktop environment known to be suitable for low-end computers. The latest update, Linux Lite 1.0.4, was released just today.

        It ships with Steam client for Linux, the popular game distribution platform, installed. Because of the memory requirements of Steam, don’t expect to run this edition of Linux Lite on a resource-starved computer, if you intend to play that game.

      • Arch 2013.02.01 Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS quarterly rollup release: Hands on

        PCLinuxOS is an “old standard” Linux distribution. Although it doesn’t seem to have been getting as much attention recently it still seems to have a significant number of very loyal followers.

        The strength of PCLinuxOS today is in stability, and a very active and dedicated user community.

        It includes an excellent array of applications and utilities in the base distribution, so for many purposes it is ready to use right out of the box. If you try it and have problems of any kind, you can generally get very capable help from the PCLinuxOS User Forums very quickly.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Joins HP Enterprise Services Technology Alliance
      • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Trying Desperately to Excite the Market

        Red Hat provides open-source software. It is particularly famous for its Linux operating system. In the third quarter, Red Hat’s revenues increased by 18% y-o-y to hit the $344 million mark, which was in-line with expectations. Subscription revenues experienced a 19% increase that enabled them to hit the $294 million mark. Billing also grew by 18%. More importantly, in the third quarter, the company announced the acquisition of ManageIQ. ManageIQ specializes in cloud management and automation. The acquisition is expected to be a long term gain for Red Hat. It is also an attempt to take on VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) , a company that has managed to make inroads into enterprise through its vCloud platform but failed to enter the public cloud.

      • Red Hat to employees: yes, please bring new apps to work

        Bring us your cool, useful, and productivity-heightening apps and devices and we’ll look at them and work to support your efforts.

        That’s the unique view that Linux vendor Red Hat takes when it comes to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon that’s prevalent in the world of enterprise IT.

      • Cloud9 IDE Builds Online Development Environment with Red Hat OpenShift

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Cloud9 IDE has built its online development environment with Red Hat’s OpenShift Online hosted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. By integrating OpenShift Online into its original online development environment, Cloud9 IDE is able to deliver more flexibility, security and ease of use to developers.

      • HP and Red Hat Partner On Premises and In the Cloud

      • Fedora

        • I’m FedUp with Fedora!

          So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried it, so I wanted to give FedUp a try.

        • Fedora 18 review

          The latest edition of Fedora Linux was released on January 15th, after 2 months of delay. This community project is sponsored by Red Hat Linux and is one of the primary showcases for the GNOME desktop and its applications. Among the features making their debut is a much improved Samba setup (which is supposed to let you connect easily with Windows’ Active Directory). Also, the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments which got their start in Linux Mint are available, although not installed by default.

          This is my review of the KDE edition of Fedora 18, 64-bit version. After 3 reviews of their main release, I decided it was time to check out the KDE Spin edition. Fedora has several different “Spins”, produced to showcase desktops or emphasize scientific, design, gaming, or other focused interests.

        • Fedora 18 Officially Released for IBM System z 64-bit

          Dan Horák announced that the Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems is now available for download.

        • Fedora 18 for ARM released

          The Fedora 18 for ARM release includes pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3) hardware platforms. Fedora 18 for ARM also includes an installation tree in the yum repository which may be used to PXE-boot a kickstart-based installation on systems that support this option, such as the Calxeda EnergyCore (HighBank).

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • FOSS+CSS: Closed Source DOS Accounting Meets Linux and DOSEMU
  • Guest Post: Patrick McGarry on Open Source Disruption

    The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February – 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here.

    In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome and Firefox demonstrate plug-in-free video chat

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla improves Firefox’s Do Not Track feature

        If you are on the Internet, chance is that you are being tracked. Advertising companies, Internet services and even Internet Service Provider track users for a variety of purposes, but most often to profile users to increase advertising revenue or sell the data to companies that do.

        While cookies are most often used for that purpose, and I’m using the term lightly so that it includes all different kinds of cookies, it is not the only option that companies have. Fingerprinting may be an option as well which tries to identify users based on factors such as their IP address, operating system, web browser and other data that is submitted automatically when connections are established.

  • Databases

    • Monty has last laugh as distros abandon MySQL

      When the community GNU/Linux distributions Fedora and openSUSE recently announced that they would be switching their default database management system from MySQL to MariaDB, one man in Finland would have had a very hearty laugh.

    • Oracle Releases MySQL 5.6 To Improve NoSQL, Performance

      While there’s many in the open-source community that remain unhappy with Oracle, including the direction of the MySQL database server to the point that Fedora will now ship MariaDB instead, MySQL 5.6 was released this morning by the software giant.

      Oracle says their general availability release of MySQL 5.6 has increased performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability over earlier releases of this open-source MySQL database software.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Microsoft Office and the Big Subscription Bet

      “LibreOffice does everything I need, and in fact I keep learning about new things I can do in LibreOffice,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I even carry it with me on USB Thumb drive in the Portable Apps version. So please explain to me why I should care about overpriced bloatware? And don’t get me started on the $%^**#%$ Ribbon.”

    • LibreOffice 4.0 Release to Widen Divide with OpenOffice

      It was in September of 2010 that a group of key members of the OpenOffice.org developer team announced that they were no longer willing to wait out the uncertain future of OpenOffice, especially in the face of the lack of interest shown by Oracle, the new owner of the project following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems nine months before.

  • Healthcare

    • Node.js integrates with M: Next big thing in healthcare IT

      Join the M revolution and the next big thing in healthcare IT: the integration of the node.js programming language with the NoSQL hierarchical database, M.

      M was developed to organize and access with high efficiency the type of data that is typically managed in healthcare, thus making it uniquely well-suited for the job.

      One of the biggest reasons for the success of M is that it integrates the database into the language in a natural and seamless way. The growth and involvement of th community of M developers however, has been below the radar for educators and the larger IT community. As a consequece it has been facing challenges for recruiting young new developers, despite the critical importance of this technology for supporting the Health IT infrastructure of the US.

  • Business

    • The impact of open source on business and social good

      I vividly remember the time when my early opinions about open source software were built around questions that made natural (and perfect) sense to me at that point in my life, like: “Why would someone sell a software product for free?” and “Why should anyone participate in a project that does not reap financial rewards?” These formed the basis of my rationale.

      That was before I embarked on my professional journey and as a consequence had not experienced organizational life. My myopic view towards the open source methodology of developing projects, and the profound impact this methodology has on the business world in general and the organizational structure in particular, began to broaden after my first intense exposure to the Linux operating system at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. My understanding about the magnificence of this operating system and the process by which it is constantly iterated caused a 180-degree transformation. This consequently cultivated appreciation for the entire process of peer production and the impact it has on today’s businesses, both big and small.

    • The Right Way To Do IT

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Luminosity of Free Software

      About 5 minutes before starting the Hangout last week, I impulsively named it “The Luminosity of Free Software” as that was resonating with the thoughts in my head at the time .. and I think I’ll stick with that name for the time being. You may notice that there is no “KDE” in the title (or my name, either :) and that’s intentional. I want to be able to discuss larger issues in Free software, and this gives me more freedom to do so. The show will be a reflection of my interests and those who watch and participate, so there will be a good amount of discussion that relates to or is relevant for KDE, it just won’t be exclusively about it.

    • Time for GNUPedia again?

      At one time, Wikipedia was a universal source for the useful programming tools and resources. If some language, framework or tool was used in general, it has been covered there. However recently Wikipedia seems raising the requirements to the level that would exclude many useful Free software projects. For instance, recently JAMWiki has been removed – reasonably popular, thousands of downloads (and that is for server side app), mentioned in near every review on Java-based wiki engines over multiple sources on the web – where it has been a problem?

    • FSF licensing team’s 2012 – 400 compliance reports resolved

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Why Aaron Died

        I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

        I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.

        I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.

        [...]

        I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.

        I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.

        And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.

      • Where Does Mayor Bloomberg Stand on Academic Freedom?

        This morning, Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, issued an extraordinarily powerful statement in defense of academic freedom and the right of the political science department to co-sponsor the BDS event.

        [...]

        So that’s good. But the fight is not over. The New York City Council, as you know, has laid down a gauntlet: if this event goes forward, with my department’s co-sponsorship, the Council will withdraw funds from CUNY and Brooklyn College. As Glenn Greenwald points out this morning, this is about as raw an exercise of coercive political power —and simple a violation of academic freedom—as it gets; it is almost exactly comparable to what Rudy Guiliani did when he was mayor and pulled the funding from the Brooklyn Museum merely because some people did not like what it was exhibiting.

        So now the battle lines are clear: it’s the City Council (and perhaps the State Legislature and Congress too) against academic freedom, freedom of speech, and CUNY.

        Throughout this controversy, there has been one voice that has been conspicuously silent: Mayor Bloomberg. To everyone who is a journalist out there, I ask you to call the Mayor’s office and ask the question: Will he stand with the City Council (and follow the model of his predecessor), threatening the withholding of funds merely because government officials do not like words that are being spoken at Brooklyn College? Or will he stand up to the forces of orthodoxy and insist: an educational institution, particularly one as precious to this city as CUNY, needs to remain a haven for the full exploration of views and opinions, even about—especially about—topics as fraught as the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

      • A time for action: One student’s commitment to free and open access

        I have been a PhD student for less than two years.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Social Media and the Professional: Twitter

    In this series I’m looking at my experiences using social media as a business professional. In this entry I examine the rules and policies I personally use regarding Twitter.

    In the introduction to this series of blog entries, I asked several questions regarding my use of particular social media services, and how I manage the intersection of my personal and professional lives in them. Here I’m going to look specifically at Twitter. This is the way I use the service and may or may not be how you do or should use it yourself.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Congress Is About to Introduce Legislation to Decriminalize Marijuana

      Whispers has learned that a member of Congress is about to introduce legislation today to decriminalize marijuana.

      The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2013 will be introduced by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, from Colo., whose office did not immediately respond to request for comment.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Siren Song of the Robot

      The quest for cheap energy and cheap labor is a conquering human urge, one that has played out with notable ferocity starting with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of coal into British manufacturing and the more recent outsourcing of Western manufacturing to Asia have marked key thresholds in this ongoing progression.

  • Finance

    • Visa Sued by Australian Regulator Over Currency Policy

      Visa Inc., (V) the world’s biggest payments network, contravened Australia’s consumer protection laws by preventing buyers from using a currency of their choice when shopping, the country’s competition regulator said.
      The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in an e-mailed statement that it sued Visa in federal court, claiming the company prevented the expansion of so-called dynamic currency conversion services. A copy of the claim wasn’t immediately available from the court.

    • Group Launched to Support WikiLeaks, Transparency Journalism Reports Incredible Success

      A foundation dedicated to promoting and funding transparency journalism, which launched on December 16, has concluded its first round of funding for organizations. It has enjoyed incredible success and found there are a lot of people who want to support this kind of an organization.

      The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) raised nearly $200,000 for four different organizations, including WikiLeaks, which it collected donations to support because the media organization faces a banking blockade that makes it difficult for it to directly accept funds from supporters.

    • Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

      AT 9:30 A.M. ON AUGUST 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market’s servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don’t see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week’s average.

    • Private Prisons Will Get Totally Slammed By Immigration Reform
    • Max Keiser’s unpleasant facts on UK economy (25Jan13)

      Max Keiser deliveres some unpleasant truthes on the state of the UK economy.

    • FBI Monitors Occupy, Denies Violating First Amendment

      Though it should surprise no one, the FBI has been thoroughly tracking the ideas, movements, and members of Occupy Wall Street since August of 2011, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, PCJF’s executive director said in a release.

    • Goldman Sachs: Doing “God’s Work” by inflicting the Wages of Sin Globally

      The central point that I want to stress as a white-collar criminologist and effective financial regulator is that Goldman Sachs is not a singular “rotten apple” in a healthy bushel of banks. Goldman Sachs is the norm for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the so-called “too big to fail” banks). Impunity from the laws, crony capitalism that degrades democracy, and massive national subsidies produce exceptionally criminogenic environments. Those environments are so perverse that they produce epidemics of “control fraud.” Control fraud occurs when the persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud. In finance, accounting is the “weapon of choice.” It is important to remember, however, that other forms of control fraud maim and kill thousands.

    • Carney set for first taste of Bank of England
    • Fixing ‘too-big-to-fail’

      The United States is plagued by large corporations with outsized political power. They are “too big to fail.” So if they are about to fail, they get rescued. Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.

      We need to replace them with smaller companies, but U.S. antitrust law is inadequate. It exists, but has been weakened over the past decades. Consider the proposed “Volcker Rule,” which would make many banks split into two companies, one for risky investments and one for loans based on savings, as the old Glass-Steagall law required. This would address some problems, but would not make banks small enough. Eliminating “too big to fail” banks means making sure that each is small enough that regulators, prosecutors and elected officials won’t hesitate to let it suffer the consequences of its own decisions.

    • Does anybody NOT see the common sense Richard Stallman speaks here?

      It isn’t often that I feel the need to amplify Stallman’s words; he’s usually a little extreme-left for my tastes. But this is one of those times when he reminds me why I still count him as a visionary – perhaps even still ahead of his time.

      In this Reuters interview, he addresses the problem of corporations that are “too big to fail” and proposes that monopoly laws be strengthened, a return to Glass-Steagall-type regulation, and a progressive tax on corporations, where the bigger the company, the more of a percentage they pay.

      Wonderful, wonderful sense, it would fix just about every economic problem we have in this country. And you can hang your hopes on seeing unicorns fly before it actually happens.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • FCC Poised to Open the Door for Unbridled Expansion of Media Empires

      If the world can learn anything from Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, it’s a lesson about the brute force of a media empire.

      Rupert Murdoch’s conglomerate was so powerful, it was allegedly able to invade people’s privacy and pay police officials to grease its dodgy news gathering machine; all while playing kingmaker in British Parliamentary elections and gaining access to the highest reaches of state power.

    • CBS To CNET: ‘Free Beer, Not Free Speech’

      Meanwhile, CNET has been fired by folks at CES. They won’t be choosing the “Best of Show” anymore and they lose credibility as an objective tech news source–at least temporarily.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Police drug search intrudes on husband’s final moments with deceased wife

      A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.

    • Amicus briefs in Hedges v. Obama inform indefinite detention lawsuit

      The Bill of Rights Defense Committee recently coordinated the filing of three amicus (friend of the court) briefs in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenging domestic military detention under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.

    • On Rosa Parks’ 100th Birthday, Recalling Her Rebellious Life Before and After the Montgomery Bus

      Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. “Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero,” Theoharis says.

    • Twitter Wikileaks Court Order – News and Background

      The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, February 15 in a hearing in a legal battle over the government’s demands for Twitter user records. The ACLU and EFF represent Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one of the Twitter users whose records were sought by the government.

      On February 8, 2011, a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia unsealed motions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, and others concerning government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. The documents were originally filed under seal late last month.

    • Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”

      Washington state lawmakers will consider bipartisan legislation that would block any cooperation with attempts to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens in Washington without due process under sections written into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

      If passed, the law would also make it a class C felony for any state or federal agent to act under sections 1021 or 1022 of the NDAA.

    • EFF wants a rewrite of US e-crime laws

      INTERNET ACTIVIST GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants the US to reconsider the severity of its computer crime laws and tear them up and start over.
      The Inquirer (http://s.tt/1zoHD)

    • Exposed: Whole Foods’ and the Biggest Organic Foods Distributor’s Troubled Relationships with Workers

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • RIAA Set For Historic 10,000,000th Google URL Takedown
      • The EU Commission’s Outrageous Attempt to Avoid Copyright Reform

        Today starts “Licences for Europe”, an initiative by the European Commission to discuss the issues of today’s copyright regime. Instead of planning for a broad reform that would break away with full-on repression of cultural practices based on sharing and remixing, the Commission is setting up a parody of a debate. 75% of the participants to the working-group concerning “users” are affiliated with the industry1 and the themes and objectives are defined so as to ensure that the industry has its way and that nothing will change. Through this initiative, the EU Commission shows its contempt of the many citizens who participated in defeating ACTA and are still mobilized against repressive policies.

      • Even more delays to the Digital Economy Act

        The Digital Economy Act’s Sharing of Costs Order has been withdrawn – another procedural complication that will delay implementation even further.

      • Japanese Government Plants Anti-Piracy Warnings Inside Fake Downloads

        Last year saw a major upgrade in Japan’s anti-piracy legislation in an attempt to shift Internet users away from file-sharing sites and networks and towards the country’s legitimate outlets. But while the change in the law was significant, getting the legal-downloading message to users proved problematic. In response the government and rightsholders are now seeding fake files with anti-piracy messages hidden inside.

      • Researchers dive into copyrights and wrongs of the download age

        The University of Glasgow will be home to a research centre that will examine how copyright is changing and the need for new business models for distributing creative content.

      • Golden Eye write to alleged copyright infringers

        Just under 1,000 broadband subscribers in the UK received letters in December from O2 or Be Broadband, saying that the company is passing on their name and address details to a company called Golden Eye.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts