• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Today’s Linux schisms are a blessing in disguise

The Linux community is fracturing along a number of fault lines — and that’s a good thing

Turn Your Linux Ubuntu Into Windows 7

April 2013 Issue of Linux Journal: High Performance Computing

When I was in college, there was a rich kid down the hall who had a computer with 16MB of RAM. Before you scoff, you need to think back to 1993. The standard amount of RAM in a new computer was 2MB, with 4MB being “high-end”. Anyway, this kid’s computer was amazingly fast because he could create a RAM disk big enough to contain Windows 3.1 completely, so the entire OS ran from RAM. It was the 1993 rich-kid version of an SSD.

The Linux Setup – Mark Anderson, Teacher

On my main laptop, my trusty old Dell Inspiron B130, I run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. On my old Acer Aspire One netbook, I just recently switched from Ubuntu to Peppermint Linux 3, which has injected much needed speed on that machine. It has become the tool I use for writing.

Mini Maker Faires attract penguins

On Saturday, April 13, 2013, a free “mini maker faire” event will be taking place at the Cleveland Public Library, in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Modeled on the legendary Maker Faire of San Mateo, California, the mini maker faire will be a celebration of ingenuity and the do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit.

I’ll be one of the workshop presenters at this event and I’m expecting a large number of penguins will be attending. Note: “Penguins” are an affectionate name for open source enthusiasts—so named in honor of the Linux mascot,

Garry’s Mod Creator Plays Cruel Joke on Linux Fans

Why Nokia and Linux failed, so far

Before you judge me by the article title, please read carefully. I have a very important message, and it has everything to do with the commercial and public image success of Nokia, and Linux.

[...]

So we need apps.

Desktop

• Why Torvalds loves the Chromebook Pixel: It’s all about the display

• Resistance Isn’t Futile

  I’ve spent a lot of time in conversation with various people about the State of Desktop Linux. While I have my own ideas as to how we (could have) gained a larger market share on the Desktop, my firm belief is that, at this time…..

  Anything we do from now on will be too little, too late.

  That ship has sailed, it’s water under the bridge, however you wish to express it.

  Linux, as we know it, is not going to ever become a major player in the Desktop market.

  I’ve made peace with that. Since 2005, I’ve chewed my lip over how this can change, but the fact is, there are simply too many people not willing to do the things necessary to make it a reality. Whether you believe it or not, whether you like it or not…

Server

• ‘Petaflop’ supercomputer is decommissioned

  A US supercomputer called Roadrunner has been switched off by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

  The machine was the first to operate at “petaflop pace” – the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second – when it launched in 2008.

Kernel Space

• Jon Corbet Mulls Linux Kernel Changes

  Now that the Linux kernel 3.9 merge window is closed, it’s safe to say we know what features will be included in the next kernel release. What lies beyond is predictable, still, but will likely hold a surprise or two. That’s where the annual Linux kernel weather report comes in.

• Linux 3.9-rc5

  I’m like the US postal office – “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” will keep me from doing weekly -rc releases. A little holiday like Easter? Bah, humbug. It might delay the release email a
  few hours because a man gotta stuff himself with odd seasonal desserts (and the Finnish Easter desserts are odder than most), but it won’t stop the inevitable progress towards a final 3.9 release.

• Linux 3.9-rc5 Kernel Is Not Really Peculiar

• Graphics Stack

  • Hawaii Desktop Is Now Usable On Wayland/Weston

    The lead developer behind the Hawaii Desktop Environment now believes that their Qt Quick 2 desktop is now in a usable state for Wayland and can run fine on the Weston compositor.

    While Hawaii is even less well known that Xfce or LXDE, it’s gained early attention for focusing upon Wayland support and there was also work on its own Wayland compositor known as Green Island. This Wayland support isn’t too hard since the desktop and its components are being written from scratch and is designed around Qt5 and Qt Quick 2, which already has upstream Wayland support.

  • Intel Mesa Driver Gets KDE KWin Optimizations

    A number of commits to the i965 driver in Mesa today benefit the performance of KDE’s KWin window manager for those using Intel Ivy Bridge graphics hardware.

    There were a number of commits pertaining to the i965 driver’s fragment shared pushed this afternoon (i965/fs). Most notably, this should help Ivy Bridge with KWin when using the scaling-related effects using the OpenGL 2.x renderer.

  • RDP Back-End Merged For Wayland’s Weston

    One month ago a FreeRDP-based remote compositor for Wayland’s Weston was proposed. Now having undergone six code revisions, the Weston Remote Desktop Protocol back-end has been merged.

  • VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

    In years past we long heard about lofty goals out of VIA Technologies for being open-source friendly and ultimately come up with a Mesa Gallium3D driver. We haven’t heard anything officially out of VIA in a great number of months, but it turns out they do now have a Gallium3D driver for Chrome 9!

    In response to a Phoronix Forums thread about using VIA graphics under Linux on an old laptop, a Phoronix reader shared he had working VIA Linux graphics. The reported configuration was Lubuntu 12.10 with an ASRock PVR530 motherboard that boasts VX900 / Chrome 9 graphics.

  • The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now “Banned”

• Benchmarks

Applications

• Is Assembly Still Relevant To Most Linux Software?

  Steve McIntyre and the Linaro Enterprise Group recently analyzed Ubuntu and Fedora software packages to see what software was still relying upon hand-written Assembly code. This was done to see how much real Assembly is being used, to see what the code was used for, and whether it was worth porting to 64-bit ARM / AArch64 / ARMv8.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Getting started with Yocto (video)

  • Howto: Fixing unstable clocksource in virtualised CentOS

  • Random and URandom on Linux

  • How to Digitally Sign a File in Linux using GnuPg (Digital Signatures)

  • [How To] Reset Unity & Compiz in Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04

  • How To Make a Fedora Bootable USB From Ubuntu?

  • Learn the Art of Linux Troubleshooting

  • Node.js integrates with M: a tutorial, part one

  • Scheduling in Hadoop

  • Mastering The Linux Shell – Getting Permission

  • How To install and configure HP printer in Arch Linux

  • Unix commands and tools you just can’t live without

  • How to kill a process in Linux – kill, killall, pkill, xkill

  • Write your own Ant tasks

    Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool, and because it’s based on Java, it is entirely cross-platform. It comes with a huge list of available tasks that you can run simply by including them in a build.xml file, but if there’s something you want it to do and no existing task can do it, it’s easy to extend Ant just by writing a new Java class. Here’s how to write your very own Ant tasks.

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine for advanced users and developers

    While Linux has one of the largest software catalogues on the planet, there are still many software applications which are either only available for Windows or are only possible to make on Windows. For users, it means that they will miss out on some of their favourite software (for example, Microsoft Office and a lot of games). For developers it means losing a significant market to people who are using Linux. While most of the software can be written for both the platforms if you plan ahead, it becomes painfully difficult (and sometimes impossible) when the software is already written. This is where Wine comes to rescue.

• Games

  • Valve Publishes Packages For Their Linux Distribution

    For Valve’s forthcoming Linux-based Steam gaming console the first packages are starting to emerge within a package repository on the SteamPowered web-server.

    Valve’s “Steam Box” will likely be shipping with a customized version of Debian/Ubuntu Linux at its heart. I’ve already written some early details about their Linux-based hardware gaming console for the living room based upon details I’ve known of within this article since talking with Gabe Newell last year at Valve about their Linux plans. For months I have been saying that their software platform will likely be based upon Ubuntu, likely “Ubuntu Core” and obviously an LTS release.

  • Valve’s Deathmatch Classic To Arrive on Steam for Linux

  • Soul Capture 2.0.0 has now been released

    The 2.0.0 release of Soul Capture, a free software utility developed by Piga Software which can be used to capture both the video and audio playback of OpenGL applications such as games, has now been released.

  • Bleak – Explore new races, governments, religions and more in this dark steampunk style platformer!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE 4.10 Applications Get Major Overhaul

    Okular lovers should expect many improvements, including support for embedded videos inside of documents. Here are some of the other fun changes.

  • New features in Qt 5.1

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.8 Debuts New Open Source Linux Desktop

    The GNOME 3.8 also benefits from the Every Detail Matters initiative from the GNOME Foundation. Back in 2011, GNOME developer Allan Day launched the Every Detail Matters effort with GNOME 3.4 to improve the overall quality of the GNOME desktop.

    With the GNOME 3.8 release, 60 ‘Every Detail Matters’ bugs were fixed.

  • Gnome 3.8 Core Utilities

    Gnome 3.8 has been released and apart from the various Gnome libraries, services and core parts that have been upgraded, we should take a look on the applications and utilities that are also part of Gnome.

    How did the tools that we will be using every day evolved? What new exciting features and improvements consist the base for a greater Gnome experience? Let’s find out!

  • Gnome 3.8 review: it’s almost there

    The much awaited evolutionary release of Gnome — 3.8 — arrived last week. After playing with it for a while I opine that Gnome 3.8 is much closer to what Gnome team was aiming for as the ‘next’ version of this desktop environment – the successor of the 2.x branch. It’s polished (as usual), fast, responsive and a bit more mature.

Distributions

• Distrowatch Almost Got Me, April Fools’ Jokes

  Buuut, it is an awfully large database now. So, it sounded perfectly reasonable when I read Ladislav’s words, “This site’s database has swollen to a whopping 746 free operating systems and is growing every week! Clearly, this is unsustainable. As a result, we have decided to cut down on the number of distributions tracked in our database – from the current 746 to just 25.”

  He had me up until I read the “25!” Then I remembered it was April Fools’ Day. But even if I hadn’t caught on yet the next statement would surely have done it, “All superfluous distributions will be removed and no longer tracked – these include anything below number 25 in our page hit ranking statistics, such as Fuduntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo Linux, PC-BSD or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These distributions are clearly not very popular, so why bother?”

• Cookie Cutter Distros Don’t Cut It

• Standards, Trends, And Shiny Things

  Now apply this to say, Ubuntu PPA’s. Would people be using Grive if not for trends ? Of course not Lets take OMG!Ubuntu for example, we could say it’s a trend-setter in the Ubuntu world. Over time a project gains enough following through the Internet’s equivalent of the real-world word of mouth. People flock to these projects and soon they become big enough to be part of everyday Linux life. Note the “Shiny Things” rule is also applicable here.

• First looks at KANOTIX 2013 and GhostBSD 3.0

• ZevenOS 3.0 Neptune “Brotkasten” KDE Review: Refreshingly different!

  ZevenOS, a German based distro, is quite a familiar name in the Linux world. Typically they bring out two classes of distro

  * A lightweight XFCE distro based on Ubuntu, with the look and feel of BeOS, which actually never captured my imagination
  * A heavier KDE based Neptune based on Debian testing

• New Releases

  • Arch 2013.04.01

  • Slackel 3.0 Openbox

  • Emmabuntüs 12.04.2-1.04

  • Parsix 5.0-20130331

• Screenshots

  • Pardus 2013

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Inc. : The Government of the Canary Islands Migrates Telecommunications and New Technologies Platform to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

    Organization Achieves a Stable, Cost-Effective, Modern and Scalable Virtualized Platform After a Migration from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Virtual Machine: Guest and Host

        If you’d like to run an Ubuntu virtual machineon your PC, you’ll need to weigh a series of considerations. To be sure, the use of virtualization is commonplace in the IT industry these days. Still, before you decide to run an Ubuntu virtual machine, you must consider whether you fully understand the benefits of setting one up in the first place.

        In this article, I’ll explore virtual machine hosts and guests on Ubuntu, why virtualization is a better bet than relying on WINE and how to ensure that you are selecting the best virtual machine solution for your Ubuntu desktop.

      • MapR brings Hadoop support to Ubuntu

      • Think You Saw Unity In Last Night’s Doctor Who?

      • Ubuntu 13.04 To Axe The Wubi Windows Installer

        One of the less popular ways to use Ubuntu Linux has been through the “Wubi” Windows-based installer that places Ubuntu within a Windows installation just as you would any other application. However, Canonical is planning to remove Wubi from Ubuntu 13.04.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Interview with Zorin OS creator, Artyom Zorin

          Artyom Zorin: My name is Artyom Zorin and I live in Dublin, Ireland. I’m the CEO of Zorin Group as well as being a student. My parents are ethnic Russians who moved from Ukraine to Ireland many years ago, which explains why my name doesn’t sound like a normal Irish one. I first came across Ubuntu back in 2008. Believe it or not, what actually attracted me most to Linux was the Compiz desktop effects software which I thought was “cool” when I first saw it on YouTube. At the beginning, I was a little bit anxious about making the leap, but after my brother Kyrill installed Ubuntu on our computer we started to see a lot more advantages to using Linux than simply the desktop effects. We also noticed that many people coming from a Windows environment found Ubuntu rather difficult to use as it was lacking a familiarity. Advanced Linux users argue that Ubuntu is simple to use and suffices for Linux beginners coming from Windows but we saw that what this user group really needed was a familiar graphical interface. This prompted us to develop a Linux distribution that resolves this issue to make the transition from Windows to Linux entirely seamless, a distribution now known as Zorin OS.

        • Ubuntu vs. Mint: Which Linux Distro Is Better for Beginners?

          Ubuntu vs. Mint: Which Linux Distro Is Better for Beginners?There’s nothing like digging into your first Linux distribution, whether you’re a tech-savvy user looking to branch out or whether you’re installing it on a friend’s computer. But which distribution is actually better for beginners? Here, we’ll delve into the differences between Ubuntu and Mint, the two most popular beginner distros, and perform a little experiment to see what new users prefer.

        • Bodhi Linux 2.3.0 Released – Download DVD ISO Images

          Bodhi team are happy to announce the immediate availability of Bodhi Linux 2.3.0, a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu that uses by default Enlightenment Desktop (E17).

Devices/Embedded

• Powerful real-time video transcoder runs Linux

• Raspberri Pi Model A now available in the US for $25

• Phones

  • Tizen Still Alive and Kicking, Backed By Samsung and Intel

    Remember Tizen? It’s the open source mobile operating system that Samsung and Intel partnered on back in 2011 (and may be actually running on handsets this year); formerly, it was MeeGo (which was famously scrapped the same day it debuted on Nokia’s N9 handset), and before that it was called Moblin.

  • Analysis: Upstarts challenge the mobile duopoly

  • Android

    • These Android set-top boxes boast front-facing cameras

      The Chinese technology market has been on full tilt when it comes to producing Android-powered set-top boxes and mini PCs.

    • Facebook’s Android Homescreen Could Expose Apple’s Inflexibility

      The mainstream has had little reason to care that Android gives developers much more customization freedom than iOS. But if Facebook’s fabled Android homescreen is a hit, the stubbornness of Apple’s closed mobile platform could be framed as a drawback after years of its cohesive design and ease being seen as assets.

    • New Facebook phone reportedly to be unveiled

    • Ematic Genesis Prime, the $80 Google Certified Jelly Bean tablet

    • Digitimes Research: Androidbook may show up in 3Q13

      Google has already been in the notebook industry for almost three years with its Chromebook. Although the device’s shipments are still small, the volume should be able to surpass one million units in 2013 due to more promotions, Digitimes Research estimates.

    • More Reasons Why Google Won’t Merge Android and Chrome OS

      Last month, some big moves going on at Google got many people excited about the idea that Google might merge its Chrome OS and Android platforms, creating a simple and open unified operating system strategy. A number of reports appeared concluding that Chrome OS and Android are headed for a merger. Then, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt appeared to confirm that the company will develop the platforms separately (some are still arguing that he did not confirm this).

    • How to Run Linux on ODROID-U2: A Monster of an ARM Machine

      The ARM architecture offers impressive processing per watt of power. Because of this lean power draw, ARM is widely used in mobile phones and tablets. Recently ARM-based machines have been making a splash as low-power servers and desktop machines as well, with offerings such as the Raspberry Pi.

    • 3Dmark for Android separates performance champs from chumps

      With its latest version of 3DMark, Futuremark attempts to create a benchmark that allows for cross-platform comparisons among all tablets, smartphones, and PCs.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Rundown of 10 Mobile Platforms for Smartphones and Tablets (with videos)

  • The tablet the industry needs? – The Open Source Column

    Given that the general impression given of the British retail sector in particular post- christmas was one of doom and gloom, with several major chains facing well-documented problems, closer inspection revealed some interesting upward trends in the midst of the figures. And technology, not for the first time, was adding some of the fuel.

Algar Telecom develops open source equipment identity system

Brazil’s Algar Telecom has decided to develop its own open source Equipment Identity Register (EIR) platform. Speaking to local portal Teletime, the executive director of operations and technology at Algar Telecom, Luis Antonio Lima, said that this is the first EIR open source in the world and that anyone can improve it, modify it or use it in their own business. The source code of the platform can be accessed at: code.google.com/p/jeir.

Michigan Tech’s Open Source Optics

Doing science can be an expensive affair, but a new project from Michigan Technological University is trying to make science more affordable and more accessible.

In a recently published paper, professors and researchers at the university outlined their plans for creating an online, open-source library of 3D printable optics hardware. According to one of the paper’s authors, associate professor Joshua Pearce, “This library operates as a free, flexible, low-cost tool set for developing both research and teaching optics hardware.”

Open source software and start-ups

Open source software has been instrumental in the growth of many tech companies in Silicon Valley and around the world. The free and open source software enable start-ups to create something innovative at a very low cost, then give it away for free to see how customers like it. In this fashion, they can be very responsive in addressing the feedback from the market and create truly innovative products and services. Google and Facebook are great examples of tech companies that build their empire on open source software.

Open source plug-in speeds mobile app development

A plug-in intended to make it easier for mobile developers to test applications and deploy them to the cloud is available for download.

The open source plug-in, called the Soasta CloudTest Plugin for Jenkins, links the Jenkins continuous integration system to the Soasta Touchtest platform for testing multi-touch, gesture-based applications on the CloudBees Java platform-as-a-service. Applications would be deployed on CloudBees.

Press Release: Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software

10 ways to start contributing to open source

After understanding a project’s capabilities and roadmap, anyone is able to start directly hacking the source code and contributing useful extensions. Because open source is a distributed, participatory meritocracy, the upside benefit is high and the barrier to entry is low—you don’t have to move, be employed by a Valley startup, give up your day job, or wait to obtain a 4 years for a degree.

VLC Media Player

Then I saw it: the URL being provided was not the true URL for the VLC project, http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ , but rather “vlcmediaplayer” dot org. Clearly this is a “scraper” — someone who copies someone else’s web content to a new web site, and then tries to drive traffic to that new web site, to generate ad revenue. I must grudgingly credit them with a good choice, since VLC Media Player works for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android — plus lots more — and viewing media is something most users want to do.

Are you open source enough?

Is your project open source enough? Are you? Are you doing enough for your communities? Accusations like these are getting thrown around more and more, often in the simple form, “X isn’t really open.” It’s a question we’ve even asked ourselves from time to time when we post stories on opensource.com—is this a real example of openness? But what is “open enough?” And does it really matter?

There comes a point in any community’s growth where the collective consciousness starts to feel threatened by newcomers. You know it’s happened on a mailing list or web forum when you see posts that start, “I miss when this group used to be…” And if you search Google for the phrase “not really open source,” you get 1,800,000 results, suggesting that the broader open source community has officially reached that time.

Bringing Open Source Communities closer together

Apache Bloodhound Leads Open Source Trac Forward

Free and Open—and Their Opposites

Merriam-Webster defines a tenet as “a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession.” As it happens, Linux is claimed by two doctrines that are to some degree at odds: those of free software and open source. This contention began when Eric S. Raymond published “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source’”, on February 8, 1998.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Project celebrates 15 years

    The Mozilla Project is celebrating 15 years of “a better web” this week. Fifteen years ago, Netscape Communications released the source code to its web browser and mail suite and created the Mozilla Project. Netscape had been under commercial pressure as Microsoft had begun bundling Internet Explorer for free and the company took the then quite radical step of open sourcing its core software, looking to build a community around that code. Over the next few years, development continued based on that original code and in 2002, Mozilla 1.0, the first major version, was released with various improvements. Mozilla 1.0 arrived into a world where Internet Explorer had a 90 per cent share of the browser market. It was also a world in which the newly released Mozilla 1.0 would make little impact.

SaaS/Big Data

• How Does Big Data Impact the Network?

  Big Data and the hype associated with it is pervasive across IT today. In its most basic definition, Big Data is typically connected to the open source Hadoop Big Data project, though others have a broader definition. No matter how you define Big Data, it’s all about large volumes of data that need to move around a network.

• OpenStack security brief

  This video from Shmoocon 2013 is a break down of security concerns relating to OpenStack cloud software.

  OpenStack is an open source IaaS solution compatible with Amazon EC2 / S3 and Google’s GCE. The purpose of the talk is to introduce and demonstrate the working mechanics of cloud security mechanisms, or lack thereof.

• OpenStack Grizzly Rounding Third

  The big OpenStack 2013.1 (aka Grizzly) open source cloud platform release is due out this week on 4/4.

• Nebula’s OpenStack Hardware Offering Touts Plug-and-Play Simplicity

Databases

• MySQL and the forks in the road

  At the beginning of 2008 Sun Microsystems purchased MySQL AB, and ever since then there have been divisions in the ecosystem. As with any software community or ecosystem, where there are divisions there are usually forks, both in the community and the software itself.

  Just over a year after the Sun acquisition came the announcement that Sun itself was to be bought out by Oracle. It was at this point that the cracks in the ecosystem really started to show. Many inside Sun stayed quiet – not by choice – while outside things were getting very vocal and heated.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Kona’s Scott DeFusco: Open Source Advocate in a Closed Source Firm

    “When we looked at a number of different factors, open source became the obvious answer to this particular project,” said Kona vice president Scott DeFusco. “That’s not to say the proprietary platforms we were using on our other products were not good for those. For us, open source was the better choice for a couple of reasons. One is keeping the cost down so we could pass on a lot of value to our users in the free version. Also, we could maximize our values when we monetized.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 29 new GNU releases!

• GnuCash 2.4.12 released

  The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.4.12, the ninth bug fix release in a series of stable of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software. With this release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.

• How I earned a 286% return in less than 1 year investing in the Free Software Foundation

  At the FSF’s annual conference last year I pledged to donate 100BTC to the FSF, and did so on April 6. I bought about 121.95 bitcoins, for a price of about US$4.92/BTC (made easier thanks to Greg Maxwell’s vouching for me on #bitcoin-otc; thanks!) and haven’t given any thought to the remainder till today.

• Guile 100 #4: tar files

  Challenge #4 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is quite simple. Write a script that will create a tar file from a list of files. It is the fourth and final challenge in this month’s theme, which is “/bin – reimplementing common Posix tools”.

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

• The GNUstep Makefile Package version 2.6.4 is now available.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Source Robot Mixes A Mean Drink

  For many years now, some of the more creative work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Open source robotics platforms have flourished, and they have mostly focused on humanoid robots of the type that Willow Garage and other organizations have specialized in.

• Open Access/Content

  • US to release Aaron Swartz papers

    The US attorney’s office in Boston agreed on Friday to release documents in the Aaron Swartz case, but the officials are seeking to have some specific identities and materials withheld as the legal wrangling continues in the investigation into the federal prosecution of the Internet activist.

    In calling for redactions of names and materials, the office of US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz expressed concerns about the safety of individuals and organizations involved in the case.

  • #openaccess The current standard of “debate” is unacceptable; arrogant and ignorant

    I have my head down and am trying to write code – to liberate knowledge (and I haven’t forgotten #scholrev!) but occasionally have to break off and blog. Simply: the standard of debate (if it can be called such) in #openaccess is appalling. Either non-existent or fuelled by prejudice and ignorance. Since (a) many of the “debaters” and academics to whom we might look for clarity, fairness and guidance and (b) we are losing billions (sic) by not getting our act together.

• Open Hardware

  • ZeroTurnaround Reveals an Open Source Hardware Line

    ZeroTurnaround today announced its plans to open source the company, starting with a new line of hardware products deemed “GRM2”. This marks a significant shift in business model for the Estonian software house, who has been developing JRebel, the popular development productivity tool, since 2007.

Programming

• More Features Of C++14 Are Covered

  C++14 is the next update to the C++ programming language. While only considered a minor update over C++11, it will bring with it several new features.

• LLVM/Clang 3.3 Planned For Release In June

  An Apple developer has shared plans to see LLVM 3.3 released in June of this year, following the month of May being dedicated to testing.

  Among the improvements to be found out of LLVM 3.3 include better Intel Haswell support (improved AVX2, etc), some noted performance improvements, Clang will have better C++11 support, the long-awaited AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end, 64-bit ARM / AArch64 support, and many other features to be discussed in the coming weeks.

Facebook is still losing teens to mobile messaging apps

“Can I resell my MP3s?” redux—federal judge says no

For years, many a music fan has wondered what we first posited back in 2008: “Can I resell my MP3s?”

After all, as we’ve pointed out in the past, nearly all digital good sales are really licenses rather than sales as conventionally understood. The question here is, can such a license be bought and sold to other users?

Brackets Sprint 22 adds word wrap and community commits

Science

• Astrophysicists: Black hole awakens to swallow planet-sized object

  Astrophysicists have witnessed the rare event of a black hole awakening from its slumber to snack on a planet-sized object in a galaxy 47 million light years away, the University of Geneva said Tuesday.

  The observation made using the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL satellite project, revealed a black hole that had been slumbering for years chomping on a giant, low-mass object that had come too close.

Health/Nutrition

• NHS at ‘huge risk’ from reforms, says healthcare chief

  New head of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence says structural changes to NHS will prove major challenge

• Consumers Allege Perdue’s “Humane” Poultry Labels Are “False and Deceptive”

  Have you ever wondered what labels like “humanely raised” and “cage free” mean when you’re looking at a package of meat or eggs at the supermarket? Do corporations actually live up to the claims on the labels?

  Well, a consumer class action lawsuit in New Jersey is trying to bring a little truth to labeling when it comes to the humane treatment of animals. The lawsuit alleges that Perdue Farms, Inc. has misled consumers by advertising its Harvestland brand of chickens as “humane.” The suit was filed by two consumer members of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) on behalf of a group of consumers. The case has been cleared to move forward by a federal court in New Jersey and will be heard later this year.

• U.S. criticizes ‘unnecessary’ EU rules on genetically modified crops

  The United States on Monday criticized “unnecessary” European Union rules against genetically modified US crop imports as it prepares to enter free-trade talks with the EU.

  EU restrictions notably have resulted in delays in the approval of new GM traits “despite positive assessments by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA),” the US Trade Representative’s office said in a report on reducing trade sanitary barriers.

Security

• IT Pro confession: How I helped in the BIGGEST DDoS OF ALL TIME

  I contributed to the massive DDoS attack against Spamhaus. What flowed through my network wasn’t huge – it averaged 500Kbit/sec – but it contributed. This occurred because I made a simple configuration error when setting up a DNS server; it’s fixed now, so let’s do an autopsy.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• U.S. Lawmakers: CIA Should Keep Armed UAVs

  Pro-military lawmakers and U.S. analysts want the White House to resist shifting the CIA’s armed unmanned aircraft program to the Pentagon, citing operational and legal reasons to keep the spy agency in the targeted-killing business.

• CIA to Promote Head of “Black Site” Where Torture Occurred?

  According to media reports, the acting director of the CIA’s clandestine service has, for the last month, been an official who was “in the chain of command” in the CIA’s torture program in the years after 9/11. According to a book by Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the clandestine service, this unnamed official even headed one of the early CIA “black sites”—notorious secret prisons set up overseas to torture detainees. Media reports indicate that the unnamed career officer also reportedly signed off on the destruction of 92 videotapes documenting some of the most brutal mistreatment carried out under the CIA program.

• Are US drones ethical?

  Whether drones should be used in the US is the wrong question. Americans should be asking: Is it ethical to use drones anywhere? Is it fair to search for security for ourselves at the expense of perpetual insecurity for others?

• Drone policy hurts the U.S.’s image in Yemen

  The United States has played a significant role in Yemen’s transition, which ushered out former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, in exchange for immunity, and inaugurated a unity government and consensus president that are overseeing a national dialogue launched last month. The United States has pledged support for the dialogue, which will lead to a constitutional referendum and new elections.

• ‘Drones’ changing hands

  The Obama administration seems poised to order that all kinetic attacks on al Qaeda or affiliated bad guys be conducted by elements of the United States military, knee-capping the Central Intelligence Agency’s paramilitary capability and effectively ending its drone program in Pakistan.

• Strong American role still exists at Afghan-controlled prison

  Days after the Parwan detention center was ceremoniously transferred to Afghan control, its courtroom was full of American bailiffs, American advisers and American attorneys.

  The facility itself — renamed the Afghan National Detention Facility — is on one of the country’s most fortified American bases. When an Afghan defense attorney and prosecutor this week began arguing the case of Abdul Shakor, an alleged Taliban commander detained since 2009, all of the available evidence came from American forces.

• The drone secrets we should see – Jameel Jaffer

• US Aids Honduran Police Despite Death Squad Fears

  But The Associated Press has found that all police units are under the control of Director General Juan Carlos Bonilla, nicknamed the “Tiger,” who in 2002 was accused of three extrajudicial killings and links to 11 more deaths and disappearances. He was tried on one killing and acquitted. The rest of the cases were never fully investigated.

  Honduran law prohibits any police unit from operating outside the command of the director general, according to a top Honduran government security official, who would only speak on condition of anonymity. He said that is true in practice as well as on paper.

• MI6 ‘arranged Cold War killing’ of Congo prime minister

• Camp Nama: British personnel reveal horrors of secret US base in Baghdad

  Detainees captured by SAS and SBS squads subjected to human-rights abuses at detention centre, say British witnesses

Cablegate

• CIA employee/agent access to WikiLeaks

• Australian lawyer to run ‘serious’ Assange senate campaign

• JULIAN ASSANGE’S SENATE BID

• Assange appoints British monarchy opponent for Australian Senate bid

  Former Australian Republican Movement head and barrister Greg Barns said on Monday he would be campaign director for the WikiLeaks Party spearheading Assange’s rare absentee bid for a Senate seat in Australia’s September 14 election, which even if successful would not bring him any legal protection.

• Icelandic MP and Wikileaks volunteer goes to the US – Might get arrested

  “If I don’t come back home I hope that there will not be silence about that here at home” said Ms. Birgitta Jonsdottir, MP and volunteer for Wikileaks. She is the co-founder of a new political party called The Pirate Party Iceland. The party will be running for parliament in the upcoming elections on April 27th.

  Birgitta Jonsdottir will travel to the US this week to celebrate that there are three years since the tape from Iraq was published by Wikileaks, where the US army attacked civilians.

  Birgitta has not gone to America for almost three years. During that time the Ministry of Justice in the US has ordered Twitter to hand over all data on Birgitta. Bradley Manning has also been arrested, he is kept at an American army prison.

• New Laws Target Wikileaks

  As Julian Assange tilts at the Senate, new laws have been passed that will make it harder for organisations like Wikileaks to operate legally – and there are more to come, writes Matthew da Silva
  The Labor Government is tightening up Australian law in areas that will have a direct impact on organisations such as WikiLeaks. Only the Greens are challenging the new bills in parliament, and they are receiving scant media attention.

• The WikiLeaks Grand Jury

  As Alexa O’Brien reported Tuesday, the US Department of Justice has provided the latest confirmation that the grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks remains currently ongoing. That means it has been actively investigating the whistleblower website now for at least about 26 months (the Guardian first reported back in January 2011 that a subpoena seeking data on WikiLeaks had “appear[ed] to confirm for the first time the existence of a secret grand jury” empanelled to investigate individuals associated with the organisation. Prior to that, in late November 2010, the White House confirmed that there was an “active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks. And in July 2010, the Department of Defence stated that it had requested that the FBI help with an investigation related to WikiLeaks disclosures and that it “go wherever it needs to go”).

• Department of Justice spokesman for Eastern District of Virginia confirms grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks ‘ongoing’

• Bradley Manning’s Nobel Peace Prize

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Out of control nightmare: tremors increasing at massive 13-acre Louisiana sinkhole

  The head of Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources named 13 scientists and other experts Friday to serve on a blue-ribbon commission tasked with determining the long-term stability of the area around northern Assumption Parish’s sinkhole. The 13-acre sinkhole and consequences of its emergence and continued growth, such as methane trapped under the Bayou Corne area, have forced the evacuation of 350 residents for more than seven months.

• Low-wage nation: Seven of 10 most common jobs pay less than $30,000

  Part of the corporate-propelled race to the bottom is that we’re constantly told to expect less—if you’re a food prep worker making $18,720, at least you’re not making minimum wage, amiright? There’s this vast campaign to normalize low wages and set them up as the basic standard most of us should expect, the flip side of the increasing wealth of the top one percent.

Finance

• Dow Chemical Loses $1 Billion in Deductions in Tax Case

  Dow Chemical Co. (DOW)’s claim to $1 billion in tax deductions was based on transactions with sham partnerships promoted by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and law firm King & Spalding LLP, a federal judge ruled, throwing out the company’s bid to recover the money.

  The Internal Revenue Service correctly rejected the tax benefits created by the complex partnerships from 1993 to 2003 because the transactions were designed to exploit perceived weaknesses in the tax code and not for legitimate business purposes, U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson said in a ruling filed yesterday in federal court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,.

• David Stockman’s American Economic Horror Story

  For all this moral indignation, however, he never gets around to explaining what exactly is wrong about “printing money.” It’s certainly possible for an economy to have too much money–that’s how you get inflation, generally. But doesn’t it stand to reason that if you can have too much money, you can have too little? And maybe you might have too little if your economy has just lost $10 trillion in wealth due to the collapse of a housing bubble? (Stockman complains about how the Fed “digitally printed new money at the astounding rate of $600 million per hour”–which would replace the wealth lost in the bubble’s collapse in a less-than-astonishing two years.)

• Thousands Protest the UK Government’s Brutal Austerity

  Britain’s government has introduced sweeping changes to the country’s welfare, justice, health and tax systems, including a “bedroom tax” that will reduce housing subsidies that primarily benefit poor people. The levy ostensibly aims to “tackle overcrowding and encourage a more efficient use of social housing,” resulting in an estimated million “social housing” households losing 14-25 percent of their housing benefits.

• Outrage In UK After Conservative Politician Says He Could Live On $11.50 A Day

• Is Germany too powerful for Europe?

  Twenty years ago, Germany’s economy was stagnating. Today, as the eurozone crisis deepens, this giant is keeping Europe afloat. But what does it want in return? Stuart Jeffries talks to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, who believes that his country has become a political monster

• Banks gone bad: Our evolved morality has failed us

  ROB a bank and you risk a long stretch in jail. Run a bank whose dubious behaviour leads to global economic collapse and you risk nothing of the sort, more likely a handsome pay-off.

• Millionaires’ reign: UK’s rulers ‘out of touch’ with common folk

  Britain’s new political elite is an assortment of multi-millionaires who studied at exclusive universities. But down on the streets there is a growing sentiment that those running the country are detached from those they lead.

  The latest example of how a few careless words by a millionaire in power triggers anger from the people affected by his governmental decisions comes from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. On Monday, he claimed in a live radio talk show that if he had to he could live on 53 pounds (US$80) a week.

• Egyptians Brace for Austerity as Govt. Seeks IMF Loan

  Wednesday, representatives from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will arrive in Cairo to enter into new rounds of negotiations, regarding a proposed $4bn loan to the country.
  Egypt, which has continued to struggle with social and economic difficulties since the political unrest of 2011 that resulted in the ousting of former President Hosni Mubarak, is seeking the IMF aid in the hopes of bolstering its rapidly deteriorating economy.
  Egypt’s current President Mohammed Morsi is reported to have initiated negotiations with IMF in November. However, he was forced to delay finalization of any potential initial deals until December, due to political divisions throughout the country over the extent of his executive powers. In a statement to reporters, cabinet spokesperson Alaa al-Hadidy ruled out the possibility of any emergency loans, in lieu of talks with the IMF, stating that despite its financial strains, Egypt would not experience a “crisis” in relation to the importing of essential goods.

• Everyone’s Rich Again–Problem Solved!

  Friday’s USA Today front page (3/29/13) declared, “We’re Feeling Rich Again.” A subhead, pointing to a related sidebar article, recommends that we should “show this bull some love.” That doesn’t mean what you might think.

  But the right question to ask is who precisely “we” might be.

• Worms, Pond Scum and Economists

  The effort to blame the awful plight of the young on Social Security and Medicare is picking up steam.

  In recent weeks, there were several pieces in The Washington Post and The New York Times that either implicitly or explicitly blamed older workers and retirees for the bad economic plight facing young people today. There is now a full-court press to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, ostensibly out of a desire to help young workers today and in the future.

  Just to be clear, there is no doubt that young workers face dismal economic prospects at the moment.

• It’s a stunt! Iain Duncan Smith dismisses demands to live on £53 a week

  Iain Duncan Smith dismissed demands for him to try to make ends meet on £53 a week as a “complete stunt” and insisted he had experienced life “on the breadline” as ministers confronted their critics over wider-ranging cuts to benefits.

  The Work and Pensions Secretary was backed by the Chancellor George Osborne in arguing that welfare reforms were essential to helping recipients back into work and tackling Britain’s previously burgeoning benefits bill. They believe the majority of voters – particularly lower-paid workers – back the Coalition’s moves to trim welfare spending.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• At Banks, Board Pay Soars Amid Cutbacks

  Wall Street pay, while lucrative, isn’t what it used to be — unless you are a board member.

  Since the financial crisis, compensation for the directors of the nation’s biggest banks has continued to rise even as the banks themselves, facing difficult markets and regulatory pressures, are reining in bonuses and pay.

Censorship

• Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers

  In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving a thirty-month term in federal prison for publicly identifying an intelligence operative involved in torture. It’s a pattern: the whistleblowers are punished, sometimes severely, while the perpetrators of the crimes they expose remain free.

• Saudi Arabia ‘threatens Skype ban’

  Encrypted messaging services such as Skype, Viber and WhatsApp could be blocked in Saudi Arabia, the telecommunications regulator there is reported to have warned.

• The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Wikipedia

  A month ago, Mark Donfried from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) — an organization dedicated to promoting open dialogue — sent me this letter threatening me with legal action because of contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia. Yesterday, he sent me this followup threat.

  According to the letters, Donfried has threatened me with legal action because I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that resulted in his organization’s article being deleted. It is not anything I wrote in any Wikipedia article that made Donfried so upset — although Donfried is also unhappy about at least one off-hand comment I made during the deletion discussion on a now-deleted Wikipedia process page. Donfried is unhappy that my actions, in small part, have resulted in his organization not having an article in Wikipedia. He is able to threaten me personally because — unlike many people — I edit Wikipedia using my real, full, name.

Privacy

• Congress Planning To Debate CISPA Behind Closed Doors; No Public Scrutiny Allowed

  The truth is that this is yet another way to try to hide from the public on this issue. Congress doesn’t want an open discussion on the many problems with CISPA, so it does what it does best: try to hide things away and rush them through when (hopefully) not enough people are looking. It makes you wonder just what CISPA’s supporters are so worried about. Congress is supposed to work for the public, not hide things away from the public. This isn’t a situation where they’re discussing classified info or plans — but merely a bill focused on information sharing between the government and private companies. Any markup on CISPA needs to be public.

• Bills Would Mandate Warrant for GPS Tracking, Cellphone Location Data

  Two bills introduced Thursday in the House and Senate would compel law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant before affixing a GPS tracker to a vehicle, using a cell site simulator to locate someone through their mobile device or obtaining geolocation data from third-party service providers.

• Supreme Court: Police Dog Powers Do Not Include Warrantless Searches of a Person’s Home

• US Government’s Failure To Protect Public Privacy Is Driving Business Overseas

  As we’ve covered over and over again, the US government has made it clear that it wants access to your data. With things like the FISA Amendments Act, ECPA and various other laws, law enforcement plays the FUD card repeatedly, insisting that it needs to be able to go in and see data to “protect” the public. There’s very little basis to make this claim. And, worse, by decimating online privacy, the US government may actively be driving business outside of the US to foreign countries that have stricter privacy laws that actually protect data from government snooping.

• It’s time to update online privacy

• Whistleblowing The NSA

• Government Fights for Use of Spy Tool That Spoofs Cell Towers

  The government’s use of a secret spy tool was on trial on Thursday in a showdown between an accused identity thief and more than a dozen federal lawyers and law enforcement agents who were fighting to ensure that evidence obtained via a location-tracking tool would be admissible in court.

• When a Secretive Stingray Cell Phone Tracking “Warrant” Isn’t a Warrant

  An Arizona federal court this afternoon will be the battleground over the government’s use of a “Stingray” surveillance device in a closely watched criminal case, United States v. Rigmaiden. And in an important development, new documents revealed after an ACLU of Northern California Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request should leave the government with some explaining to do.

• Facial recognition and GPS tracking: TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance

  An internationally-spread Orwellian surveillance system uncovered by RT has been linked to a software company that collects the GPS coordinates of cell phone users in over 100 major cities.

• The Dangers of Surveillance

  From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our law and literature are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and corporate practices, however, have made this problem more urgent. Although we have laws that protect us against government surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until they are discovered. And even when they are, courts frequently dismiss challenges to such programs for lack of standing, under the theory that mere surveillance creates no tangible harms, as the Supreme Court did recently in the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International. We need a better account of the dangers of surveillance.

• DOJ Emails Show Feds Were Less Than “Explicit” With Judges On Cell Phone Tracking Tool

  A Justice Department document obtained by the ACLU of Northern California shows that federal investigators were routinely using a sophisticated cell phone tracking tool known as a “stingray,” but hiding that fact from federal magistrate judges when asking for permission to do so.

• Attorney General Eric Holder: If the President Does It, It’s Legal

• Kim Dotcom Illegal Surveillance And Response: Timeline

  The surveillance by the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau) at the request of OFCANZ (Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand – an agency hosted within the New Zealand Police) was publically revealed in September 2012 and admitted to be illegal as Dotcom, his colleague Bram van der Kolk and their families were New Zealand residents.

• Mobile Phone Use Patterns: The New Fingerprint

  Mobile phone use may be a more accurate identifier of individuals than even their own fingerprints, according to research published on the web site of the scientific journal Nature.

• Data Protection Regulation Debate: 1st part

• Time for action on Google’s privacy policy

  In a statement issued today, it was announced six European data protection authorities are to launch coordinated and simultaneous enforcement actions relating to Google’s privacy policy.

Civil Rights

• Racist Hate Group To Conduct Nighttime Patrols On College Campus

  A racist hate group at Towson University has announced plans to conduct its own nighttime police patrols on campus.

• Israel set to jail teenage conscientious objector for eighth time

  Nathan Blanc has spent more than 100 days in prison over the past 19 weeks due to his refusal to enlist in Israeli army

• Detroit workers speak against emergency manager

  There is widespread opposition among workers and young people in Detroit, Michigan to the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city. Kevyn Orr, who began his tenure last week, is tasked with using virtually unlimited powers to rip up labor contracts, slash services and sell off public assets to pay off the city’s bond holders.

• Alfred Anaya Put Secret Compartments in Cars. So the DEA Put Him in Prison

• Government Control of Comsec Commerce

  Jon Callas, March 28, 2013: “Remember, the only difference between lawful access and espionage is whose jurisdiction it is.”

• HORN! REVIEWS: CYPHERPUNKS

• NYPD Officer Told Innocent 13-Year-Old To ‘Stop Crying Like A Little Girl’ During Stop And Frisk

  During the second week of testimony on New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, an officer admitted to detaining and then mocking a 13-year-old boy when he started crying.

• We do not spy on US citizens, just anti-government groups, says fusion center director

  An official from an Arkansas State Fusion Center recently spoke to the press to clear up what he called “misconceptions” about what his office actually does, with depressingly hilarious results. (For some background on fusion centers, click here.)

  “The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do,” fusion center director Richard Davis told the local press.

• Android malware now being used to target political activists

  As much as we would rather not report on yet another Android malware scare (we think security issues are overblown and that any platform is vulnerable, anyway), this one seems to be a first in the Android ecosystem. Security researchers have discovered what may be the first targeted Android malware attack, which is basically a smartly-crafted social engineering attack that specifically targeted a Tibetan activist, with the intent of spreading itself through the target’s contacts, thereby gaining access to their devices and information.

• Taxing Journalists and Watchdogs Isn’t the Solution to California’s Court Budget Woes

  A proposal under consideration in California would significantly limit access to public information by levying a $10 fee any time anyone—including members of the public and the media—wants to look at a court case record in person. While EFF is certainly sympathetic to the budgetary woes facing all levels of government in California, this measure would trade transparency, citizen engagement and the power of a free press for a short-sighted fiscal stop-gap. On the whole, such a fee would do little to fix institutional spending problems while inflicting massive damage to the public trust.

• NYPD stop-and-frisk memo revealed in civil rights court battle

  New memo sent to officers demonstrates ‘startling admission of fault’, say attorneys alleging widespread civil rights violations

• British diplomats defend Bahrain

  Human Rights Watch says it stands by its assessment of the situation in Bahrain following an attack on its findings by Britain’s ambassador in the troubled Gulf kingdom.

  At the end of a fact-finding visit last month, HRW said Bahrain’s rulers had “made no progress on key reform promises, failing to release unjustly imprisoned activists or to hold accountable high-level officials responsible for torture”.

• Congress’ New CFAA Draft Could Have Put Aaron Swartz in Jail For Decades Longer Than the Original Charges

• Law Professor Eric Goldman: The CFAA Is A Failed Experiment; It’s Time To Gut It

• The digital arms trade

  The market for software that helps hackers penetrate computer systems

• The ethics of solitary confinement

  We ask why the US holds more detainees in isolation than any other country in the democratic world.

• UN investigates human trafficking in Philippines

  For example, grants of $300,000 here, $500,000 there, hardly justify the US Embassy’s claim that “the battle against human trafficking is a high priority for the US government and the American people.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Korean Lawmakers and Human Rights Experts Challenge Three Strikes Law

    In July 2009, South Korea became the first country to introduce a graduated response or “three strikes” law. The statute allows the Minister of Culture or the Korean Copyright Commission to tell ISPs and Korean online service providers to suspend the accounts of repeated infringers and block or delete infringing content online. There is no judicial process, no court of appeal, and no opportunity to challenge the accusers.

    The entertainment industry has repeatedly pointed to South Korea as a model for a controlled Internet that should be adopted everywhere else. In the wake of South Korea’s implementation, graduated response laws have been passed in France and the United Kingdom, and ISPs in the United States have voluntarily accepted a similar scheme.

  • Stop the Secret Copyright Agenda: Don’t Trade Away Our Digital Rights

  • South Korea Considers Dumping Draconian Copyright Law Forced On It By The US

    As Mike noted a couple of days ago, international trade agreements often have the effect of constraining the power of national legislatures. Indeed, that’s doubtless one of the reasons why they have become so popular in recent years: they allow backroom deals between politicians and lobbyists to set the agenda for law-making around the world, without the need for any of that pesky democratic oversight nonsense. In particular, the trade agreement between South Korea and the US is turning out to be a key limiting factor for both TPP and what US politicians might try to do about phone unlocking. This makes two recent moves to loosen South Korea’s harsh copyright laws potentially important far beyond that country’s borders.

  • Deep Dive: Prenda Law Is Dead

    Today the Prenda Law enterprise encountered an extinction-level event. Faced with a federal judge’s demand that they explain their litigation conduct, Prenda Law’s attorney principals — and one paralegal — invoked their right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As a matter of individual prudence, that may have been the right decision. But for the nationwide Prenda Law enterprise, under whatever name or guise or glamour, it spelled doom.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural World

DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural WorldWe probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it’s so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found “survival of the fittest” acting in computer programming.

Bullseye from 1,000 yards: Shooting the $17,000 Linux-powered rifle

My photographer, Steve, squints through a computerized scope squatting atop a big hunting rifle. We’re outdoors at a range just north of Austin, Texas, and the wind is blowing like crazy—enough so that we’re having to dial in more and more wind adjustment on the rifle’s computer. The spotter and I monitor Steve’s sight through an iPad linked to the rifle via Wi-Fi, and we can see exactly what he’s seeing through the scope. Steve lines up on his target downrange—a gently swinging metal plate with a fluorescent orange circle painted at its center—and depresses a button to illuminate it with the rifle’s laser.

What’s in a Name?

Katherine Noyes over on the Linux Advocates site has resurrected the GNU/Linux vs Linux naming debate, once again. To the uninitiated, the debate centers around if we should refer to the operating system as “GNU-slash-Linux” or simply as “Linux”, with the Free Software Foundation claiming that referring to the operating system merely as Linux gives undue credit to the kernel, without proper attribution to the GNU tools that make up the majority of the OS. Personally, I find the debate to be a waste of time. It is unlikely that anyone outside of a very small group of dedicated loyalists will care about the distinction. However, it does bring up a more interesting point, what about going a layer higher? What happens when distributions stop referring to themselves as Linux derivatives, come to market only under their name?

Desktop

• Chromebook Pixel: Spoiling me for other Chromebooks

  I have been using a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook since picking it up last year. The Samsung is a great laptop that happens to run Chrome OS, something that works very well for me. I like everything about the Samsung. Then Google sent me a Chromebook Pixel and spoiled me.

  The Series 5 550 Chromebook works very well for me. It runs Chrome OS nicely and is a super work machine that meets my needs. There is not really anything I don’t like about the Samsung, but it’s no longer enough.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Another OpenGL 4 Feature For Mesa Is Published

    Earlier this morning I wrote about Chris Forbes committing texture storage multi-sample support to mainline Mesa and the Intel DRI driver. This OpenGL 4.x extension is now accompanied by a new “RFC” patch-set for providing Mesa support for another GL4 feature.

    Chris Forbes’ newly-published patches on Sunday morning are for ARB_texture_gather, a feature mandated by OpenGL 4.0 and previously not tackled within the Mesa/Gallium3D world.

  • “Substantial Progress” With Mesa Geometry Shaders

    Open-source Intel developers have advanced their OpenGL geometry shaders work for Mesa, namely for the Intel DRI driver, and call it “substantial progress and definitely a reason to celebrate.” This important GL3 feature is nearing a working state but there’s still some work ahead before it will be merged.

  • LLVM 3.3 Picks Up More Support For Intel AVX2

    Beyond LLVM 3.3 having performance optimizations, one of many other features coming to this next compiler infrastructure update is greater support for Intel’s AVX2 instruction set extensions.

    AVX2 is the first major update to the Advanced Vector Extensions. AVX2 is also known as “Haswell New Instructions” and will be found in the Intel Haswell CPUs introduced in the coming months. AVX2 tacks in gather support, expands most integer AVX instructions to 256-bits, 3-operand FMA support, vector shifts, and other new functionality.

  • An OpenGL 4.x Feature Gets Crossed Off In Mesa

    Support for the OpenGL ARB_texture_storage_multisample extension is now implemented within Mesa and is exposed by the Intel DRI driver.

• Benchmarks

  • Ivy Bridge Doesn’t Change Much With Modern Kernels

    For those wondering whether Intel “Ivy Bridge” hardware is still being made faster with each succeeding Linux kernel release, here are benchmarks from an Intel Ultrabook looking at the Ivy Bridge performance on recent kernel releases going up to the yet-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel.

    A few days back I carried out a Linux kernel performance comparison from an ASUS Ultrabook with Intel Core i3 3217U “Ivy Bridge” processor with 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hitachi HDD, and 24GB SanDisk SSD. Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64 was in use while the Linux 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 (Git) mainline/vanilla kernels were tested.

Applications

• New features in Cairo-Dock 3.2

• Instructionals/Technical

  • All About inodes, Hard Links and Soft Links

  • How to change directory and transfer files to USB with the command line

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.5.27 is now available.

• Games

  • A Thought on What Holds Linux Gaming Back

    All the talk nowadays if of “unification” or to paraphrase Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu the “availability of a single interface for all devices.” And with all this talk I began to wonder why more gaming engine’s aren’t jumping on board.

    The recent release of Unity3d 4 was all the rage because it meant that an incredibly popular engine was coming to Linux, and thus all unity3d games developed with the new engine could in fact run on Linux (granted a Linux version was released). In my personal opinion, Unity3d is great, but when compared to the more AAA engines like the Unreal, FrostBite and CDProjectRed’s RED Engine just to name a few, Unity3d falls a bit flat in my eyes.

  • Half-Life 4 added to the SteamDB for Linux!

    That’s right, you heard it here first folks, Half-Life 4 has been added to the SteamDB! It includes hints of others things too.

  • Two from icculus now on Steam: Dungeon Defenders & Postal

  • New Racing Game for Linux

  • Serious Sam 3: BFE for Linux Gets Biggest Patch Since Launch

    Serious Sam 3: BFE is a very serious first-person shooter, as the name suggests, and it has just received a major update that greatly improves its performance.

    The Croteam studio has been hard at work and it is trying its best to make Serious Sam 3: BFE one of the best shooters for Linux.

    The latest update for the game has been promoted from the Beta to stable. It’s probably one of the largest patches launched so far and the number of Linux related fixes and improvements is quite impressive.

  • Humble Troubles Again, more platform specific bundles

    They have also just launched their Mobile Bundles which are for Android only, so no Windows, Mac or Linux (I know, I know Android is part Linux that’s an argument for another day) versions, which makes me wonder just how the Windows crowd feels since they have been left out this time, too.

  • Mir, ARM & Valve Excite Linux Users This Month

    March 2013 was another interesting month for Linux users. The Mir Display Server, ARM on Linux advancements, and Valve’s continued Linux game play continued to excite readers.

    This month on Phoronix at the time of publishing there were 242 original news articles and 11 multi-page featured articles. The number of news postings and articles is down from February when there was FOSDEM plus advertising campaigns on the site were more lucrative… Phoronix.com is almost entirely ad-driven so please view this site without AdBlock or other cruft. And/or please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing as well as viewing multi-page articles on a single-page.

  • Valve Announces Half-Life 4 For Linux

    Valve has added Half-Life 4 to Steam and it will be a title for Linux without mentioning OS X or Windows support.

    As can be seen from SteamDB, Half-Life 4 was added today to Steam, well ahead of the Half-Life 3 debut. The Half-Life 4 entry also hints at binary support for the Steam Box, Valve’s forthcoming console. The Half-Life 4 entry also notes use of “Source Engine 2″ for the game.

  • Valve Releases Several New Linux Game Ports

  • There Isn’t Too Much Progress On Unigine Linux Titles

    For those that have followed Phoronix over the years know that I am a big supporter of the Unigine game/3D engine. The engine delivers absolutely beautiful graphics and there is first-rate Linux support. The developers at Unigine Corp are very Linux-friendly. Unfortunately, games and other software based upon Unigine aren’t too quick to come to the Linux gaming scene.

  • Valve Has Been Working Hard On Linux For One Year

    Today marks one year since an important milestone in the public history of Valve’s Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Bodhi Linux 2.3.0 Released

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 3 beta 4 is waiting for your tests

    After all the delays in our Mageia 3 planning, we’re very pleased to be able to announce the beta 4 release.

  • Mageia 3 beta 4

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s fourth-quarter sales dropped

    Despite the growth of Linux adoption in enterprise and business use, Red Hat, the large company that sells Linux operating-system software fell after reporting fiscal fourth-quarter sales that missed estimates as some customers stopped purchasing, due to the current global economic situation.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 19 Readies AMD “RadeonSI” Driver

      Fedora 19 will be one of the first desktop Linux distributions shipping with accelerated Radeon HD 7000 series graphics support.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Smart Scopes Get Removed From Ubuntu 13.04

        It’s been decided at the last minute that “smart scopes”, a feature of the new Unity desktop, will not ship in Ubuntu 13.04.

        Smart Scopes were supposed to be an intelligent server-side service for deciding if a search query should be pushed through a particular scope, among other benefits. Smart scopes were said to be self-learning and aimed to provide more relevant results for users of the Unity desktop.

      • Ubuntu 13.04 will disable Dash online search by default: Mark Shuttleworth

        Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has finally listened to critics and EFF and said that the much controversial online search feature of Dash will be disabled by default in Ubuntu 13.04, which will be released later this month. Canonical was working closely with EFF, FSF and the EU privacy advisors and found it in best interest of its users.

        “Users are our #1 priority and not our business interests,” said Shuttleworth in a statement, “the foundation of Ubuntu is people and if some decisions were made which put user’s privacy at risk, that would be very un-Ubuntu. We never shied away from trying out new things and we never hesitated in changing a decision for a greater good.”

      • User Interaction with Ubuntu Components

      • Ubuntu Powered Promo Booth? You Bet [Ubuntu In The Wild]

        Every day we walk past and interact with machines that run Linux, without ever noticing.

      • Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) server, 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) desktop and 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) reaching End of Life on May 9 2013

      • End of life for three Ubuntu editions on 9 May

      • Monitor ‘Zeitgeist’ Logging Activities in Ubuntu using ‘Zeitgeist Explorer’

        ‘Zeitgeist‘ is a computer based user activity logging framework for the GNU/Linux operating system that keeps a track of your frequently opened files (text, audio, videos etc), visited web links, conversations that you had with others (through ‘Chat’ apps) etc.

        The database is a semantic one and so it makes it easy to identify patters, thus improves the ability to predict user activities. And since this database can be accessed by other applications (if they support ‘Zeitgeist’), they can predict or guess the user’s needs more accurately and thus improving the user experience.

      • Experimental Compiz, Unity Work Continues

        While the future is with Mir and Unity Next, work on the short-term includes more performance optimizations for the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager.

        While Sam Spilsbury no longer works at Canonical and has some dissenting views over the future direction of Ubuntu Linux, he has dabbled with some performance optimizations recently for Compiz/Nux.

      • issue 71

      • Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Meet Sweetbox, sweet case for your Raspberry Pi

  To protect the naked Raspberry Pi and cool it when overclocked, SweetBox is a great choice for you. SweetBox is a product by Graspinghand, a group of young designers from France. And the group is having a campaign on Kickstarter to raise fund for the project.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Android Open Source: Creating New Market Competition Samsung Galaxy S4

    • Facebook on the verge of announcing HTC smartphone?

      A cryptic media invite to see the social network’s “Home on Android” gets the rumor mill running anew about an upcoming Facebook phone.

  • Android

    • Facebook Preparing More Visible Embrace of Android

      Facebook is moving to take a more prominent place on smartphones.

      The social network has been developing new software for mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system that displays content from users’ Facebook accounts on a smartphone’s home screen–the first screen visible when they turn on the device, people familiar with the situation said. Facebook will initially demonstrate the capability on smartphones from HTC, these people said, but has been working to reach similar arrangements with other device makers.

    • As the Ouya ships to backers, can a $99 console bring players and developers together?

    • Best Android tablets (April 2013 edition)

      Don’t want to give your money to Apple in exchange for an iPad or iPad mini? No problem! Here are my top 5 Android tablets for April 2013.

The Biggest Failure in Open Source Is…

I have been a self-employed technical person for the past 38 years. I my living based solely on my output. Since 1998 a major secret weapon has been the use of SR. Certainly, you can get speech recognition from the Debian pool. While some good folks over in Japan have made some major advancements over the years, it is still a toy. This is inherent in the complexity of speech recognition software.

In 1998 IBM had a Linux version of SR known as ViaVoice. It worked about as well as any other SR offering of the day. IBM dropped the product. At a conference I asked an IBM executive, Why? The answer was: “We did not get enough gross revenue to cover the cost of the box manufacturing to put the CD in it.”

In my experience the Open Source community is its own worst enemy. Putting on the rose-colored glasses, and disappointing those who just want to ‘get something done’. Let’s look at a real world example.

Events

• LibrePlanet:Conference/2013

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Tricked Out

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Firefox gets Unreal Engine 3 support – video

    The software firm has teamed up with Epic Games to bolster the browser’s gaming capabilities and bring some of the latest titles to the platform.

Funding

• U.S. Defense Agency Feeds Python

  The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given 3 million dollars to Texas-based software provider Continuum Analytics with a view to helping fund the improvement of the Python language’s data processing and visualization power for big data tasks.

BSD

• DragonFlyBSD 3.4 Coming Soon, Focuses On DPorts

  The DragonFlyBSD 3.4 release is anticipated for release in mid-April and one of the features to this next BSD operating system update is the formation of DPorts, a derivative of the FreeBSD ports collection.

  DPorts is DragonFly’s derivative of FreeBSD Ports and will ultimately replace pkgsrc and the other pkg_* tools on the operating system. These older tools also reached an end-of-life state on FreeBSD.

Project Releases

• Polkit Explorer v1.0 Released

Licensing

• Russians Selectively Blocking Internet

  The Russian government in recent weeks has been making use of a new law that gives it the power to block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children.

Openness/Sharing

• Will Ford’s open-source car API drive us to distraction?

  That’s perhaps why it wasn’t all that surprising that Ford’s EVP of Global Marketing, James Farley, didn’t use his keynote address at the opening day of the New York International Auto Show to announce some line extension or new braking system, but rather to introduce a mobile app competition.

• Urban activists hack their way toward open government

  OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to “help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web.” Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post’s description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”

• Open Access/Content

  • Entire library journal editorial board resigns, citing ‘crisis of conscience’ after death of Aaron Swartz

    In a dramatic show of support for the open access movement, the editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week. In a letter to contributors, the board singled out a conflict with owners over the journal’s licensing terms, which stripped authors of almost all claim to ownership of their work.

Standards/Consortia

• Making WebRTC Simple with conversat.io

  WebRTC is awesome, but it’s a bit unapproachable. Last week, my colleagues and I at &yet released a couple of tools we hope will help make it more tinkerable and pose a real risk of actually being useful.

The Washington Post’s “What if Google Were Evil” Idiocy

To watch the accelerating fall from grace of the once venerable Washington Post is perhaps to view traditional journalism’s quandary in a nutshell.

First, their ombudsman suggested it was unlikely that the Post would implement a paywall, for a variety of sound reasons.

Then the Post fired their ombudsman. Then they announced the availability of notorious “sponsored posts” throughout their pages.

And it’s been ever more rapidly downhill for the Post from there, with their now giving credence to serial Google hater Robert Epstein’s rambli

Chinese Couple, Wu Conghan And Wu Sognshi, Pose For Wedding Photos 88 Years After Marrying (PHOTOS)

Page Layout in the Era of Electronic Publishing

The basic design of modern word processors has its roots in the WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) revolution of the 1980s, which became possible with the introduction of the graphical user interface. Whereas people once had to use a text editor to enter markup by hand, and never really knew what their document was going to look like to readers until they printed it, WYSIWYG provided an accurate on-screen depiction of how the final print output would appear.

Alan Kay, godfather of mobile computing, bashes the iPad

Somewhere Steve Jobs isn’t smiling. Computer pioneer Alan Kay, a former Apple Fellow back in the ’80s, had some harsh things to say about the iPad and tablets in general tonight at a Silicon Valley event.

Health/Nutrition

• NHS reforms: From today the Coalition has put the NHS up for grabs

  Under the Coalition’s reforms, the NHS’s former strengths are being replaced by a fragmented service, bound not by what is best for the patient but by cost

Security

• Securing a Linux Web Server

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The message sent by America’s invisible victims

  As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression

• North Carolina’s Poorly Worded Drone Killing Privacy Bill

  A bill introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly will practically ground all future drone use in the state if it is not rewritten. The bill proposes to “regulate the use of drones to conduct searches” and is already being praised by the ACLU of North Carolina as an “opportunity to place strong safeguards and regulations on the use of drones . . . .” The bill, however, doesn’t regulate the use of drones so much as it buries their operation in ambiguities and contradictory constraints.

• Boeing Helps Kill Proposed Law to Regulate Drones

  Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.

• Wait, Did the System Just Work?

  Brennan had masterminded the program, from creating the bureaucratic processes determining which agency did what, right down to naming names for the kill list. In his new job, Brennan would have enormous sway over the CIA’s future activities, including lethal drone strikes.

  [...]

  But if the drone debate is any guide, the public part counts. A lot.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks set to unveil ‘Project K’

• WikiLeaks announces mysterious ‘Project K’

  WikiLeaks has announced a press conference scheduled for April 8, generating speculation about a possible release of a new stash of classified material or a project somehow connected to Assange’s political party in Australia.

• Zimbabwe: Wikileaks Return to Haunt Zanu-PF

  THE bare-knuckle infighting within Zanu PF has reached new heights, with WikiLeaks being resuscitated as party members try to discredit each other ahead of the party’s primary elections expected next month.

• Assange’s WikiLeaks Party opens for membership in Australia

• Wikileaks launches political party in Australia

• Assange: WikiLeaks Party opens for membership in Australia

  It is now official. WikiLeaks announced on Twitter on Saturday that Julian Assange’s new Australian political party is open for membership.

  Digital Journal reported back in January 2013 that Assange is planning to run for the Australian Senate in September this year and that he was founding the new WikiLeaks party.
  However, in order to officially register with the Australian Electoral Commission, the WikiLeaks Party must enlist 500 members.

• Ecuador in talks with UK’s Labour over Assange Sweden extradition

  The Ecuadorian government has held talks with the British Labour party to try to strike a deal to send Assange to Sweden to end the political impasse, which has seen the Australian whistleblower holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy since claiming asylum in June last year.

• Assange May Not be Able to Leave Britain Before 2015

  LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London since last June, is unlikely to be able to leave Britain before 2015 and his hosts are now hoping for a future Labour government to help break the impasse, a media report said.

• Ecuador ‘in talks’ with Labour over Julian Assange

• Hammond, Brown, Swartz, Assange, Manning: information warriors of the digital wasteland

  Information warfare is the 21st Century equivalent of class warfare, with people like Aaron Swartz (threatened with decades of imprisonment, then bullied by prosecutors into taking his own life), Barrett Brown (imprisoned, awaiting trial and threatened with life imprisonment), Jeremy Hammond (same), Julian Assange (under investigation by Grand Jury) and Bradley Manning (facing life sentence in upcoming trial) as its most notable victims whom the US Government has decided to make an example of so as to deter others from following suit.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 1,000 Dead Ducks Found In China’s Nanhe River; Pig Carcass Count Continues To Rise

  Chinese authorities have a new mystery to ponder after 1,000 duck carcases were found floating down the Nanhe river in the country’s Sichuan province on Tuesday.

Finance

• Why Are Big Banks Going To War With A Federal Judge?

  The nation’s largest banks have devised a novel way to protect their interests and save themselves from hundreds of billions of dollars in legal exposure. They’re taking a judge to court.

• Why Are Big Banks Going To War With A Federal Judge?

  Lawyers for 17 banks submitted an unusual filing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this week (just listing all the corporate lawyers involved takes up the first four pages). The banks – including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – stand accused of ripping off the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie and Freddie’s conservator, alleges that these banks improperly sold $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities without disclosing the shoddy underwriting of the underlying loans. FHFA argues the banks knew the loans in the securities were bad, yet sold them to Fannie and Freddie anyway, leading to massive losses and the need for a government bailout. So FHFA wants the banks to buy back the securities they improperly sold under false pretenses.

• Paying the Costs of Iraq, for Decades to Come

  A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war’s total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

• The Truth About Profits (blog)

  First, its clear that profits as a percentage of total US GDP have recovered from the crash of 2008. Unemployment may still be over 50% higher than it was in 2007, and real wages may be below what they were then, and the benefits and security of jobs may have fallen, but profits have come back. And with them the stock markets. Hence also the upbeat talk about “recovery” yet again.

• Why Expensify Endorsing Bitcoin Is A Really Big Deal: Social Virality

  Yesterday, news broke that the Expensify service has enabled bitcoin payments. With the rapidly expanding number of businesses accepting bitcoin as payment method, one could think that this was merely another player in the pool of bitcoin’s expanding economy (which just broke the one-billion-USD barrier, by the way). But Expensify is something much more than that.

• Depositor Haircuts Spreading

  A previous article called them the new normal. Bad ideas spread fast. Canada endorses Cypriot harshness. Its “Jobs Growth and Long-Term Prosperity: Economic Action Plan 2013″ says so.

Civil Rights

• Lords mistaken in their calls for Ofcom Internet regulation

  The Lords often make very helpful contributions to legislative debates, but this really isn’t one of them. There are huge amounts of regulation constraining Internet providers, from eCommerce to copyright, that cover the necessary ground already.

• Why It’s Important For Each Of Us To Explain And Keep Explaining The Net And Its Civil Liberties

• ‘Prison officials essentially retaliating against Gitmo inmates’

• Shane Trejo: County wrong on NDAA detention

  In fact, last summer U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest granted a permanent injunction, ruling detention provisions written into the NDAA overbroad and unconstitutional.

• MN for Marriage now “regrets” Nazi language on partner website

  The issue came to light yesterday when Minnesotans United for All Families, which is pushing to legalize same-sex marriage, criticized the group for linking same-sex marriage efforts to propaganda in Nazi Germany. The initial language was posted on the website Pastors for Marriage, which is working with Minnesota for Marriage to ban same-sex marriage. The website (which has been changed since the controversy surfaced on Thursday) included a message from Minnesota for Marriage Chair John Helmberger (who is also CEO of the Minnesota Family Council).

• Ex-CIA Pot Raid: Former Intelligence Employees Who Garden Indoors Claim Kansas Home Was Searched Illegally, Under Illegal Surveillance For Months

• Former CIA agents say Johnson County Sheriff’s Office searched home illegally

  Two former CIA employees whose suburban Kansas City home was unsuccessfully searched for marijuana claim they were illegally targeted, possibly because they had purchased indoor growing supplies to raise vegetables.

• Futile pot raid spurs lawsuit

• Ex-CIA agents sue Kansas police who raided their suburban home for drugs… after they bought special equipment to grow vegetables indoors

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • MPAA Chairman Former Senator Chris Dodd Joins Pirate Party, Announces 2016 Presidential Bid