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01.14.13

Links 14/1/2013: Desktops Market in Demise, Aaron’s Eulogies

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Found: Blueprint for a computer-literate India

    IIT Bombay professor, Kannan M Moudgalya and his team have been documenting and creating tutorials for free open source software available on Linux to popularise it in India’s schools and colleges. Hassan M Kamal visits the lab to find out more

  • Desktop

    • Review: Google Chromebook for 30 Days

      A Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebook has arrived at The VAR Guy’s doorstep. Starting January 14, our resident blogger will live on the cloud-centric notebook (running Google’s Chrome OS) for 30 days. Why should channel partners, businesses and consumers care about this niche (but promising) form factor? Here are 10 points The VAR Guy hopes to cover during his real-world, month-long review.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 6th January 2013
      • KDE Workspaces and Applications 4.10 on live images courtesy of openSUSE

        The 4.10 release for the KDE Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications is drawing nigh… as you may have read, there is now an additional release candidate in order to test some last-minute changes.

      • Alien tip: Volume change percentages in KDE

        I have felt frustrated at times, when I press the Volume Up/Down buttons on my keyboard and the sound volume in KDE becomes just too loud, or just too soft. When you are running the KDE desktop, the increments in volume change are controlled by KMix, the KDE mixer. By default, the sound volume changes with increments of 4% which means that with a few keypresses you go from almost inaudible sound to full blast. And there is no way to change that 4% increment value into something more fitting… pretty annoying.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Settings!

        Those of us who work on GNOME design have been busy with all kinds of things recently. One major area of activity has been settings (aka System Settings, aka GNOME Control Center). In total, we have produced designs for four new panels (search, notifications, privacy, and sharing) and we have redesigned four of the existing panels (power, network, display, and date & time). Some of these have already been implemented, some are being developed on, and a few more are waiting for coders to get involved.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Snowlinux 4 “Glacier” Mate Review: Fast, light and customizable

        I have been a fan of Snowlinux for quite sometime and their Debian spins have always been exceptional – Lightweight, fast and very customizable. The new year release of Snowlinux 4, codenamed “Glacier” is no exception. Based on Debian Wheezy, it has Mate 1.4 as the default desktop environment and uses Linux kernel 3.5.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu At CES

            On Sunday last weekend I flew out to CES to join the rest of my colleagues to exhibit Ubuntu at the show. We were there to show the full range of Ubuntu form-factors that we have available; desktop, TV, Ubuntu for Android, and most recently, Ubuntu for phones.

          • ‘RC Mini Racers’ December’s Top Selling Ubuntu App
          • Ubuntu Phone OS Follow-up: Jono Bacon Answers YOUR Questions!

            At CES 2013 on Wednesday, I managed to corner Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s Community Manager, for a few minutes and ask him some of the questions I saw popping up over and over again in the comments section of the Ubuntu Phone OS demonstration video I posted earlier this week. Hope you enjoy his responses!

          • Ask Ubuntu’s About Page Gets A Face Lift

            A common problem we have on Ask Ubuntu is people assuming that it’s just “another forum” and not quite grasping the concept of how the site works. Today Stack Exchange has rolled out a new About page that helps to curb this issue and educate new users with a quick start on how to use the site. You can view this page by clicking “About” at the top of the Ask Ubuntu website.

          • Mark Shuttleworth punts Ubuntu Phone OS at CES 2013

            South African millionaire and Canonical boss, Mark Shuttleworth, announced during a “virtual keynote” on 2 January 2012 that a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system (OS) would be coming to smartphones.

          • The new entrants in mobile OS segment

            The smartphone ecosystem today has two dominant players: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. A late entrant, Android, has been quick to catch up with iOS and the Open operating system only seems to be surging ahead.

            Given the success of Android, many other Open Source paradigms are being floated, most notably the Free and Open Source projects Firefox (of browser fame) and Ubuntu that are re-making their debut this year in the commercial smartphone segment. Together, these projects that have been successful in the technology segments they currently operate in could perhaps help break into the combined monopoly of Apple and Google in the smartphone segment.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 Review: Better than ever bleeding edge Ubuntu LTS!

              A bit high CPU usage aside, Bodhi 2.2.0 is a remarkable improvement over Bodhi 2.1.0, undoubtedly. Enlightenment 17 never looked so enticing on any other Linux OS and Bodhi never looked so attractive. I am sure the high CPU usage will get resolved in an update or two. Even with high CPU usage, Bodhi is buttery smooth to use, runs super fast, provide all essential functionalities and has a rich repository. Further, presentation and offline mode are two utilities which increase the functionality of the distro.

              Moreover, Bodhi is always ahead of even Ubuntu 12.10 in terms of providing the latest of the Linux packages and softwares. Even this release is not an exception and provides the latest Linux kernel and softwares to the users without compromising on stability, and possibly, one of the reasons for me to like Bodhi Linux and why any Linux enthusiast should try Bodhi out. It is truly bleeding edge Ubuntu LTS!

              I definitely rate this release of Bodhi as the best one I have seen for any E17 Linux OS. If you are looking for a lightweight distro, look no further than Bodhi Linux 2.2.0, possibly one of the best releases of 2013.

            • elementary OS luna: First impressions

              In the world of Linux distributions, it’s fairly easy to get lost trying to figure out which “flavor” of Linux fits you best. As the user, you have a plethora of desktop interfaces, default apps, package managers, and bundled services to choose from. This can be a major barrier for someone new to Linux, and an endless journey for a veteran user who hasn’t yet found their “perfect” distro. For either type of user, there’s a new distribution in town that can meet their needs: elementary OS.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Rumour: LG Stops Nexus 4 Production?

          More bad news for Nexus 4 fans who have still not got their hands on this stunning device. LG is playing the spoilsport this time and is rumoured to stop the production of Nexus 4 to give way for its future products.

          It has always been tough to book a nexus 4 for yourself with the purchase screen most of the time showing the “SOLD OUT” status. We can either assume that Nexus 4 demands were too huge to provide a constant supply or the production of the phone was flawed and could not meet the demands.

      • Android

        • Android Appliances at CES 2013

          Are you ready to hack your fridge? I expected Android-powered home appliances to have a higher profile at CES this year than they did. But still, a few manufacturers were carrying the torch for smartening up devices in your home, and trying to provide some solid reasons for you to buy them, like energy savings.

          The flashiest Android appliance at CES was definitely Dacor’s Android-powered oven, which automatically programs itself according to recipes selected from a tablet.

        • Ubuntu for smartphone Vs Google Android Jelly Bean Vs Apple iOS 6

          Along with the rapid changes in hardware, phone market is also to witness to some auspicious changes in software field in coming months. Many more new OS platforms are to join the fray. Two major new arrivals are expected to be Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Canonical’s Ubuntu for phone. The Linux-based Ubuntu for mobile has been officially announced by its maker Canonical now. It has been in news for almost a year and it is to get the first device sometime this year.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Windows 8 Means Buy (Another) New Computer

    I’m sure no one is surprised that upgrading to a new version of Windows means tossing out your old computer and buying a new one. That’s pretty much par for the course for any Windows upgrade.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Imagine N.Y. without fracking

      My husband, John Lennon, and I bought a beautiful farm in rural New York more than 30 years ago. We loved the tranquility and beauty of the area. Our son, Sean, spent many precious days there growing up. Our family still enjoys it now.
      Like the rest of our state, this peaceful farming community is threatened by fracking for gas. Giant pipelines, thousands of tractor-trailer trucks ripping up roads, loud air compressors, air pollution — and most of all, the certainty of poisoned drinking water.
      Certainty is the right word, according to the engineers, as the wells drilled for fracking will leak. According to industry documents from the gas drilling giant Schlumberger and other studies, 6 percent of the wells leak immediately, and over 60 percent of them leak over time. And no wonder they leak — the pressures of the earth thousands of feet under the ground cracks the cement well casings. The big variations in temperature along the well at various depths expand and contract the cement until it cracks and leaks.

  • Finance

    • The Welfare Bill: A government of millionaires just made the poor poorer – and laughed as they did it

      A brutal assault from ideologically-crazed demagogues comes down to this: you have been mugged and therefore your less deserving neighbour should be mugged too.

    • SEC Gives JP Morgan and Other Big Banks License to Manipulate Commodities

      An SEC action that appears likely to do considerable harm to companies and individuals in the US and abroad appears to have gone completely unnoticed, save for an important piece in The New Republic by Linda Khan.

      [...]

      The SEC is undermining provisions in Dodd Frank calling for the CFTC to rein in undue speculation in critical commodities. Readers may recall that commodities prices moved up in a coordinated manner in 2008. It looked like a speculative bubble, and was, since prices collapsed in the second half of the year (we were pretty sure that oil was a bubble, and called it and even traded it well; there was similar behavior in other commodities, but bad harvests and ethanol subsidies made the price rises arguably influenced by fundamentals in the grains complex).

    • Wall Street thanks you for your service, Tim Geithner

      The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a second major investment bank, started a run on the three remaining investment banks that would have led to the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs if the Fed, FDIC, and treasury had not taken extraordinary measures to save them. Citigroup and Bank of America both needed emergency facilities established by the Fed and treasury explicitly for their support, in addition to all the below market-rate loans they received from the government at the time. Without this massive government support, there can be no doubt that both of them would currently be operating under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge.

      Of the six banks that dominate the US banking system, only Wells Fargo and JP Morgan could conceivably have survived without hoards of cash rained down on them by the federal government. Even these two are questionmarks, since both helped themselves to trillions of dollars of below market-rate loans, in addition to indirectly benefiting from the bailout of the other banks that protected many of their assets.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • FreedomWorks Putting Its War Chest to Work for ALEC’s Anti-Union Agenda in the States

      The Tea Party-affiliated group FreedomWorks — the right-wing organization that helps connect “Tea Party” groups with talking points, rallies, and more — is gearing up to direct its sizeable war chest towards advancing anti-union initiatives in the states, supporting an agenda set by groups like David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This strongly suggests that the battle for the future of private and public sector unions in America is beginning a new phase of combat.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Fight Over French ISP Blocking Ads Really Just A New Perspective On Net Neutrality Debate

      At the beginning of the year, some folks in France, who used the popular ISP Free (whose name is a bit misleading, as it is not, in fact, free), discovered that the company had started providing a service in which it blocked all internet banner ads. There was no whitelist. It was either all or nothing (and if you went “all,” you were trusting that it wouldn’t over-filter). This quickly raised an awful lot of questions — with the biggest among them being “can they do that?” According to the French Digital Economy minister, the answer apparently is no. Free was quickly told to turn off its ad blocking software.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Aaron Swartz commits suicide

        The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

      • RIP, Aaron Swartz

        My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I’m still digesting it — I suspect I’ll be digesting it for a long time — but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

        I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

        [...]

        Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

        Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

      • Prosecutor as bully

        Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer that morning. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

        The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist…

        [...]

        But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

        Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

      • Tech world mourns suicide of Aaron Swartz: Internet folk hero dead at 26

        The Internet activist committed suicide in New York on Friday. He was 26. “The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” Swartz’s attorney Elliot R. Peters confirmed in an email to The Tech, which broke the news.

        Swartz is being remembered today for co-authoring RSS code at age 14. He created DemandProgress.org to campaign against SOPA/PIPA and the website theinfo.org. In July 2011, he was arrested for stealing some four million academic documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit digital archive.

      • Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26

        Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

      • Remembering Aaron Swartz

        It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses, and helped build the movement that has carried us so far. Before Creative Commons, he had coauthored RSS. After Creative Commons, he co-founded Reddit, liberated tons of government data, helped build a free public library at Archive.org, and has done incredibly important work to reform and make good our political system. (DemandProgress.org, his most recent org, was instrumental in blocking the SOPA/PIPA legislation one year ago.)

      • Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz (Remember Aaron Swartz

        Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

      • Naming and shaming a bully
      • The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz
      • Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
      • The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”

        The facts:

        MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.
        In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.
        MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices.
        At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.

      • Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist
      • MIT president calls for “thorough analysis” of school’s involvement with Swartz

        Less than 48 hours after Aaron Swartz’s tragic suicide, the institution involved in his high-profile JSTOR incident (that eventually lead to federal charges) has issued a statement.

        MIT President Rafael Reif e-mailed the members of the university community this morning to address the situation, despite Swartz never having a formal affiliation with the school. Reif emphasized he was compelled to comment not only because of MIT’s role in the JSTOR incident, but also because Swartz was beloved by many within the MIT community. The president’s tone was clear throughout: “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”

      • MIT to conduct internal probe in wake of Aaron Swartz’s suicide
      • Family blames US attorneys for death of Aaron Swartz
      • Copyright Vampires Attempt to Suck the Lifeblood Out of Fair Use Video

01.11.13

Links 11/1/2013: Linux 3.8 RC3, Firefox OS Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 8:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.09.13

Links 9/1/2013: Mageia Moves Ahead, Fedora 18 Beta for ARM

Posted in News Roundup at 9:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Want to understand open source? Live with its developers

    Let’s say you want to understand what makes free and open source software (FOSS) so vital today—and what makes those who write it so committed to their difficult work. How would you do this? You might crack a few books on the cultural history of coding, like Levy’s Hackers or Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, both pivotal explorations of the values that seem to guide open source programming (what we might call “the hacker ethic”). You might pore over the seminal tracts that give voice to these values—Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar or Stallman’s GNU Manifesto, perhaps. You might even peruse key documents from the projects themselves—maybe the Debian Social Contract or the Fedora Licensing Guidelines.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS finds a new way to app
      • Find out what’s new in Firefox 18

        Mozilla is currently in the process of releasing new versions of the Firefox web browser. Stable channel users will be moved from Firefox 17.0.1 to Firefox 18 via automatic updated if the browser has not not been configured otherwise. The new release is already on Mozilla’s ftp server but not on the main site which means that there is still a slim chance that it will be replaced by another version. Most of the time though that is not happening and if you are experiencing issues with Firefox 17.0.1 you may want to upgrade right away. Download portals such as Softpedia already list the new version for download on their sites.

      • Mozilla Firefox 18 Boosts Performance with IonMonkey

        Mozilla is out with its first Firefox release of 2013 today, accelerating the open source web browser with a new engine.

        Firefox 18 includes the IonMonkey JavaScript engine that Mozilla first started testing in September of 2012. IonMonkey can improve performance by as much as 25 percent for JavaScript heavy pages, by introducing an extra layer of JavaScript optimization known as intermediate representation (IR).

      • Firefox 18 Launches With Faster IonMonkey-Enabled JavaScript, Built-In PDF Viewer
      • Firefox 18 Features Major Update to JavaScript Engine: Ion Monkey

        On Tuesday, Mozilla pushed out version 18 of the Firefox browser. Unlike your average browser update, this one includes an overhauled JavaScript engine, Ion Monkey, which you can find complete details on here. Ion Monkey speeds up JavaScript tasks by translating them to intermediate representations, optimizing them, and then translating them to machine code. It should have a big impact on web apps, and also on games.

      • Mozilla Firefox 18 Boosts Performance with IonMonkey

  • Public Services/Government

    • Greek government asked to adapt enquiry form to accommodate open source

      Eel/lak, a Greek open source advocacy group wants the Greek administration to change one its enquiry forms, to accommodate users of free and open source software solutions. The form is used by the Greek government’s Financial and Economic Crime Unit when requesting companies and organisations to provide an inventory of their software licences along with the corresponding invoices.

    • Study Finds Free Trade With China Lowered American Manufacturing By 29.6 Percent

      Around 2001, the raw number of manufacturing jobs in the United States plummeted from just over 17 million to just over 14 million. After leveling off for a few years, it collapsed to around 11.5 million due to the Great Recession. It’s since seen a small rebound under President Obama’s tenure, but the continuing depression has put the long-term fate of manufacturing back on the national radar.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Full Show: Ending the Silence on Climate Change
  • 1998’s most intriguing OS, 15 years later: Hands-on with Haiku alpha 4

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Does It Matter if John Brennan Was Complicit in Illegal Torture?

      In nominating John Brennan to head the CIA, President Obama has made it more urgent that the report be declassified. It is one of several sources that could help us to answer an important question: Are the American people being asked to entrust our clandestine spy agency and its killing and interrogation apparatuses to a man who was complicit in illegal torture?

    • New CIA boss plans to retire in Ireland once his term ends

      The new head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hopes to retire to Ireland when his term is completed, his family have revealed.

      John Brennan, whose family come from Co Roscommon, was this week nominated by US President Barack Obama to lead the CIA. The former counter-terrorism adviser paid an unplanned visit to these shores last November when he visited his Irish relations.

    • ‘CIA turns into military force, targets countries it’s not at war with’
    • Was a Reporter’s Role in a Government Prosecution a Reason to Recuse Him?

      Some readers found fault with Mr. Shane’s writing of the story, given his involvement. One was James Savage, a former longtime investigations editor with The Miami Herald.

      [...]

      I’ve been writing recently about the debate over reportorial impartiality and its role in the truth-telling that makes journalism worthwhile. One crucial element when impartiality comes into question is transparency.

    • U.S. Spy Law Authorizes Mass Surveillance of European Citizens: Report

      Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you.

      That’s according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes “purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data” if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

    • Excusing Torture, Again

      The neocon Washington Post let ex-CIA official Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw waterboarding and other torture and then destroyed the videotaped evidence, make his case that there was no torture, just effective interrogation that helped get Osama bin Laden. But ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern disagrees.

      [...]

      Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer in the early 60s and then served in CIA’s analysis division for 27 years.

    • Two Former US Officials Criticize Obama’s Counter-Productive Drone War

      The study concludes that the Obama administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” downward by counting all military-age males they kill as combatants. Civilian casualties are likely to be far higher than so far acknowledged, Boyle said, and government claims to the contrary are ”based on a highly selective and partial reading of the evidence.”

    • NSA Whistleblower Compares Case to CIA Officer Convicted of First Classified Leak

      On Sunday, New York Times journalist Scott Shane published a feature story on the Justice Department’s prosecution of John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) by revealing the name of an undercover officer. It was the first successful conviction of someone for a disclosure since President Barack Obama was elected president.

      Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower who the Obama administration tried to prosecute for a “leak” until the case collapsed, joined me for a conversation about the parallels between his prosecution and Kiriakou’s prosecution.

    • Terror Tuesday: Impunity surges in New Year
    • The FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism

      Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI became a self-perpetuating myth-making machine carved out of Hoover’s battle against communism, organized crime, and his war on civil rights and anti-war activists (Cointelpro). Now, in the post-Hoover, post-9/11 period, the war on terrorism allows the myth making to continue.

    • War Profiteers Still Finishing First

      So who’s the fool? The outfit that turned its business of peddling useless propaganda to U.S. occupied countries onto America itself – by smearing journalists that dared criticize it – or the government that hired them for hundreds of millions in the first place?

    • Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)

      Remember rendition? Many people believe the practice of having terrorism suspects interrogated overseas was supposed to end when George W. Bush left office. But President Barack Obama said he’d end torture, not renditions—and last week, the Washington Post reported that they’re still happening. That’s true in some sense, but as Mother Jones and others have reported, the Obama administration’s use of foreign regimes to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects has avoided Bush-style renditions in favor of a different practice known as proxy detention.

    • Former Guantanamo Prosecutor to Speak about Torture and Intelligence

      Colonel Morris Davis, anti-torture and humanitarian law advocate, will speak about “Confronting Torture: How it Makes America Less Safe” on Thursday, Jan. 31, at 12 p.m. in Rm. 5042 at the UNC School of Law. The lecture — free and open to the public — is sponsored by The Immigration & Human Rights Policy Clinic at UNC School of Law.

    • 5 terrifying facts about John Brennan
    • The CIA’s Hypocrisy on Secrets

      On Thursday, ex-CIA deputy director Jose Rodriguez publicly protested that agents had only used water bottles when waterboarding detainees, not the buckets shown in Zero Dark Thirty. Disclosures like that must chafe John Kiriakou, the ex-agent facing 30 months in prison for passing info to a reporter. “The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy,” namely, the agency itself, author Ted Gup writes in the New York Times. “The CIA invokes secrecy to serve its interests, but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.”

    • As Brennan Tapped for CIA, Case of Somali Detainees Highlights Obama’s Embrace of Secret Renditions
    • Obama names head of drone assassination program to lead CIA
    • Republican senator threatens to block Obama’s CIA nominee
    • Senator threatens to block CIA nominee
    • John Brennan Wrong for CIA, CODEPINK Says

      Once CODEPINK heard about the coming nomination, we decided to protest in front of the white house. Within just a couple of hours banners were made, the press was called, and other CODEPINKers were alerted.

    • Secret Double Standard

      The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.

      Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.

    • Kuwaiti police tear-gas opposition protesters

      Kuwaiti riot police on Sunday fired tear gas and stun grenades at hundreds of opposition protesters who demanded that the new parliament be dissolved and controversial electoral legislation be scrapped.

      Police arrested several protesters including Osama al-Shaheen, a member of the previous opposition-dominated parliament, as they chased demonstrators through a residential area south of the capital, Kuwait City.

    • US drones killed 25 in a single day

      As usual, all of the casualties were claimed to be militants. But a recent study by one of President Obama’s former counter-terrorism advisors concludes the administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” downward by counting all military-age males they kill as combatants.

    • DRONES DRAW MORE CONTROVERSY AS BERKELEY TRIES TO KEEP THEM OUT OF THEIR SKIES
    • Why You Won’t Hear About Drones at John Brennan’s Confirmation Hearing

      Alas, don’t hold your breath. The hearings will be run by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is slated to remain chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Despite leaking information regarding covert drone strikes in Pakistan, the senator strongly endorses targeted killings — and, more generally, executive branch secrecy– and will assuredly place strict limits on the discussion of drones in open session. Although drones and targeted killings were never raised in the confirmation hearings for previous CIA directors Michael Hayden or Leon Panetta, they were during successor David Petraeus’ testimony in June 2011. See below for the brief exchange between Senator Roy Blunt and Petraeus (where you read “(CROSSTALK)” that is Feinstein trying to interrupt the discussion.) Do not expect much more from John Brennan’s confirmation hearing.

    • nnan Needs to Correct the Record on Dro
    • Czar of the Drones

      …both boys were instantly vaporized—only a few chunks of flesh remained.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • What Will Scott Walker Lift from the ALEC Agenda in 2013?

      Wisconsin’s 2011-2012 legislative session saw the introduction of 32 bills or budget provisions reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation — including Governor Scott Walker’s contentious attack on public sector collective bargaining, voter ID legislation, and bills that make it harder for Americans to hold corporations accountable when their products injure or kill — and 19 of those proposals became law.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing

      In the “national security” area of the government–the White House, the departments of state and defense, the armed services and the “intelligence community,” along with their contractors–there is less whistleblowing than in other departments of the executive branch or in private corporations. This despite the frequency of misguided practices and policies within these particular agencies that are both more well-concealed and more catastrophic than elsewhere, and thus even more needful of unauthorized exposure.

      The mystique of secrecy in the universe of national security, even beyond the formal apparatus of classification and clearances, is a compelling deterrent to whistleblowing and thus to effective resistance to gravely wrongful or dangerous policies. In this realm, telling secrets appears unpatriotic, even traitorous. That reflects the general presumption–even though it is very commonly false–that the secrecy is aimed not at domestic, bureaucratic or political rivals or the American public but at foreign, powerful enemies, and that breaching it exposes the country, its people and its troops to danger.

    • Student Loses Lawsuit Challenging Texas School’s RFID Tracking Program

      A Texas public school district’s controversial pilot program to keep track of its students on campus with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips has survived a legal challenge in federal court. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia dismissed a request for a preliminary injunction from Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio who refused to wear the school’s ID cards on religious grounds.

    • Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear RFID Tracker Loses Lawsuit
    • As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared

      Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho, is a retired logger, a former science teacher and now a federal criminal thanks to his arrowhead-collecting hobby.

    • Minn. driver’s license data snoopers are difficult to track

      Driver’s license info is readily accessible, but finding out who’s checking it out is not easy. Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek challenges state to justify its secrecy.

    • John Brennan pick revives leaks dispute
    • On Civil Liberties, John Brennan Is No Worse Than Barack Obama

      Four years ago, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan withdrew his name from consideration to run the Central Intelligence Agency. On Monday, President Barack Obama announced Brennan was his pick for the job, following the resignation of David Petraeus over an extramarital affair.

    • War Powers Reversal

      Perhaps the greatest irony of the Obama Presidency is how much it has vindicated the antiterror strategy of its predecessor. The latest example is President Obama’s vexed statement in signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013.

    • China: Fully Abolish Re-Education Through Labor

      The Chinese government’s announcement today that it will sometime this year “stop using” the notorious Re-Education Through Labor (RTL) system is a rare positive response to the system’s growing unpopularity, Human Rights Watch said today. While suspending use of RTL would be an important step, the government should aspire to fully abolish the RTL system.

    • Paying a high price for cheap fashion

      Young women are mistreated in some Indian textile factories in the Tamil Nadu state. German companies are among those who work with factories in that region. But there is no obligation to disclose the commodity chain.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Response to Nominet direct.uk consultation

      Our response offers general comments on the proposals set out in the consultation document, rather than addressing the consultation questions specifically.

      We understand the interest in improving security online, and the consequent benefits for the confidence people have in online encounters.

      However, we do not believe that the proposed solution fits the problem. It is unclear that a .uk domain is the answer to the problems identified in the consultation document. We believe there are better ways to address a need to improve security and consequently help boost the confidence people have in online transactions.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The Google Shortcut to Trademark Law

        The strength of a trademark — the extent to which consumers view the mark as identifying a particular source — is difficult to evaluate in practice. Assessments of “inherent distinctiveness” are highly subjective, survey evidence is expensive and unreliable, and other “commercial strength” factors such as advertising spending are poor proxies for consumer perceptions. Courts often fall back on heuristics and intuition rather than precise logical analysis.

    • Copyrights

      • RapidShare: Traffic and Piracy Dipped After New Business Model Kicked In

        Under continued pressure to take additional anti-piracy measures, file-hosting site RapidShare introduced a new business strategy last year. The model restricted the ability of all users to engage in third party public distribution, the most popular way of sharing copyrighted material. As a result the company experienced a significant drop in traffic and, according to a spokesman, a significant drop in copyright infringement too.

      • The Problem of “International Orphan Works” (Guest Blog Post)

        The U.S. Copyright Office recently extended the deadline by which the public may submit comments on issues related to orphan works until February 4, 2013. The Office is gathering suggestions for shaping future U.S. legislation and taking other actions to address the issues of works whose copyright has not expired, yet the owner of the copyright cannot be identified or located. However, legislating on orphan works at the national level cannot solve an important problem: the problem of establishing the status of an orphan work internationally. The solution to this problem is crucially important for anyone hoping to use orphan works on the internet – particularly entities that are among the most active lobbyists for orphan works legislation.

      • Anti-Piracy Company Seeks Patent On Automated Copyright Trolling

01.08.13

Links 9/1/2013: Valve’s GNU/Linux Gaming PC, Android Massive at CES

Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Cloud/Linux is behind the success of Barclays’ Pingit app
  • Barclays’ Linux programme not a snub to suppliers
  • Barclays To Save ‘Billions’ With Own Cloud And Open Source

    Barclays bank has managed to cut its IT expenses by 90 percent after moving infrastructure into a purpose-built cloud, claims The Sunday Times.

  • Open Source Flex Gets Top Project Status at Apache

    It has been some time since I last wrote about Adobe Flex, which now has gained new status at the Apache Software Foundation.

    Flex first came to my full attention back in 2007 when Adobe decided to open source the Rich Application Framework. Adobe had been building flex since at least 2004 so the move to open source was not part of the original design.

  • A look back at open source creative tools in 2012

    For all of you free and open source creative tool fans out there, plenty of exciting developments happened over the past year—and there’s some pretty awesome new things in the pipeline for 2013 as well! Here’s a sampling of the good news:

  • Netflix Open Sources Janitor Monkey Cloud Computing Utility

    Although cloud computing platforms make headlines every day now, including leading open source platforms, it’s still true that cloud computing is a young science, and there is a premium on reliable, mature tools for the cloud. Also, it’s true that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud.

  • As ISPs Like Cablevision Cozy Up To Its Open Source CDN, Netflix Makes 3D And “Super HD” Video Available
  • Five awesome open-source front-end frameworks
  • ICEsoft Ships ICEmobile — Open Source Platform for Mobile Java EE
    Apps

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS shows up on a mystery phone, we go hands-on (update: now with video!) Mobile

        Firefox’s mobile operating system showed up on a mystery phone tonight at a pre-CES event ahead of its unveiling later this year, carrying no branding and looking light on features. Sadly, the WiFi in the event space didn’t give us much of a chance to explore the OS’ inner workings, and the phone was dubbed a “mystery” device by Mozilla reps, but we did snap some pictures of it. We also know that it’s got at least an ARMv6 CPU and 256MB of RAM, and likely more power than that. Mozilla’s planning a 2013 launch of the Chrome OS — an OS powered entirely by HTML5 — in partnership with Telefonica, Qualcomm, and “a long list of industry supporters.

      • Firefox OS Reportedly Nearing Completion and Coming to CES

        There are more open source smartphones coming this year than you can shake a stick at, ranging from Ubuntu phones to Tizen Linux-based handsets. But among the most eagerly awaited phones are new handsets based on Mozilla’s open Firefox OS. Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone business. The partners are aiming to deliver their initial phones at low price points in emerging markets.

      • Firefox 18.0 Lets Loose IonMonkey Compiler

        Mozilla Firefox 18.0 is now available. The main feature of this open-source web-browser update is the introduction of IonMonkey, a faster JavaScript compiler.

      • Download Mozilla Firefox 18.0 for Linux
      • Firefox Makes Web Games and Apps Speedier

        Firefox’s new JavaScript compiler, IonMonkey, makes Web apps and games perform up to 25 percent faster. To see how exciting Firefox makes playing games or using apps on the Web, check out BananaBread, a fun 3D Web game created by the Mozilla Developer Network and powered exclusively by HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open source cloud battles: OpenStack leveling off as CloudStack interest gains

      Those are the findings of the latest report by a Chinese blogger who monitors the activity of open source cloud computing projects each month. Qingye (John) Jiang tracks four open source cloud computing projects in his blog using a Java program he created that pulls in records for every new discussion feed in the project’s ecosystem, as well as on mailing lists and responses to comments.

    • Biggest Data

      The term “Big Data” has been around for a long time, but has obtained buzzphrase status only in the last two years. Although much that can be said about Big Data is positive and harmless (better medicine, better science, better analytic fodder for countless good purposes), one unspoken motivation behind the buzz is obtaining high degrees of market leverage. And much of that leverage is not in harmony with the constructive motivations and practices behind free software, open source and Linux. Because, behind many of the big APIs are vast jungles of exclusive and patent-protected functionalities and restrictions around use. Such as, for example, the spoken turn-by-turn directions Google wouldn’t allow Apple to use. It can be dispiriting to see platform leverage exceeded by large proprietary databases and exclusive services made available through APIs. But it’s important to bring attention to what’s going on, so here we are.

    • OpenStack vs CloudStack: The Latest Score

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Semi-Open Source

  • BSD

    • # Reviews: Making computing easier with PC-BSD 9.1

      I would like to begin the new year by talking about a project which I had the chance to play with in the final weeks of 2012. This project is PC-BSD, an effort sponsored by iXsystems which places a polished desktop layer on top of the FreeBSD operating system. Though at first glance it might appear as though PC-BSD 9.1 is a simple point release over last year’s 9.0 release, the project’s blog paints a very different picture. Some of the key features to PC-BSD’s 9.1 release include the introduction of TrueOS, a server edition of PC-BSD. Basically, TrueOS is FreeBSD with a nice graphical installer, PBI tools and various modern conveniences which we will get to later. The new release of PC-BSD includes support for ZFS pools that include swap space, this allows users to create installs that are exclusively ZFS based and we will also touch on the benefits of this later.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source smallsats in Russia

      Modern trends in satellite development make us believe that the use of open source will not be limited to purely engineering solutions to prepare an in-flight software package for a dedicated hardware installation. Instead, there is a new paradigm of a “public satellite” as available to any user with access to an open hardware-software platform.

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap: the Open Source of the Mobile Age

        One reason why its future looks rosy is the shift to mobile. By definition, smartphones are things you carry around, which makes geographical location a crucial piece of information for their users – and maps indispensable infrastructure for mobile services. Just as the availability of free open source powered an entire generation of Net startups, so OpenStreetMap will enable new companies serving the mobile sector to get going for minimal costs, but without compromising on quality. Indeed, in many respects, OpenStreetMap is the open source of the mobile world.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

Leftovers

01.07.13

Links 7/1/2013: Arch 2013.01.04, Fuduntu 2013.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • LWN’s 2013 Predictions

    The 3.12 kernel release will happen on November 20, 2013, or, at worse, by the beginning of December. The kernel development process has become a well-tuned machine with a highly predictable cycle; the longest cycle in 2012 (3.3) was only twelve days longer than the shortest (3.5). In the absence of significant externally imposed stress, it is hard to see anything changing that in 2013.

  • 3 Predictions on Linux World for 2013

    Bangalore: It’s 2013 and the entire tech world is anticipating something new for the year. The same holds for the Linux world that did great the past year and there’s no better time to look ahead. People are predicting so much about the tech and the Linux platform, such that they have realized the fact that Linux is the real deal. With that in mind, here are 5 predictions on the Linux platform for 2013, as reported by CIO.com.

  • Desktop

    • Tribal Desktop

      Things seem to have suddenly changed in terms of my available resources thanks to some generous supporters, and now I am thinking rather seriously for the first time of producing a more supportable and sustainable desktop distro image for general use based off debian wheezy gnu/linux, xfce4, some interesting tinkering, and some of my own odd aesthetics, which would work well anywhere from an arm chromebook or raspberrypi to a netbook, laptop, or desktop, whether very old or new. This should give an idea of what I have in mind…

    • Amazon’s top selling laptop doesn’t run Windows or Mac OS, it runs Linux

      We all know now that Windows 8 sales have been…. disappointing. You can blame the hardware. You can blame Windows 8′s mixed-up interfaces. You can blame the rise of tablets and smartphones. Whatever. The bottom line is Windows 8 PC and laptop sales have been slow. So, what, according to Amazon, in this winter of Windows 8 discontent has been the best selling laptop? It’s Samsung’s ARM-powered, Linux-based Chromebook.

    • Happy Sitting at the Kid’s Table?

      “Why does Google refuse to reference that Android or Chromebooks are Linux-based?”

      He took a pull on his Shiner Bock and did something I didn’t really expect.

      He answered me. And I’m not going to use quotes because I didn’t write it down but this is awful close:

      Because Linux Users can’t be trusted to behave if they are taken out into public.

      He went on to explain that the powers that be (of which he is not one but within that circle) simply don’t want anything getting in the way of Google’s march to their phone, tablet and computer market supremacy. Their Chromebook slayed the numbers this Christmas season and many within the marketing effort at Google believe NOT associating their brand with Linux may have helped tremendously.

      Is Linux mentioned anywhere in the Android Marketing?

      No.

      Is Linux mentioned anywhere in Chromebook Marketing?

      No.

  • Kernel Space

    • Major Network Performance Regressions In Linux

      Affecting the latest Linux kernel release, Linux 3.7, are “multiple apparently unrelated network performance issues.” The major network performance problems were reported by a well-known Linux kernel developer.

      Willy Tarreau, a Linux kernel developer and the one that was the maintainer of the Linux 2.4 kernel series, wrote a new mailing list thread to kernel developers on Saturday that was entitled “Major network performance regression in 3.7.” The problems also seem unresolved by the current Linux 3.8 kernel.

    • ARM CoreSight Support Published For Linux
    • Linux Kernel Still Picking Up AVX Optimizations

      Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) have been present in Intel and AMD hardware since last year with Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer processors, respectively, but their use isn’t too very widespread at this point. Fortunately, the Linux kernel has been receiving some AVX1/AVX2 optimizations.

    • Intel TurboStat Can Now Read CPU Temp, Wattage

      Intel’s TurboStat utility that’s part of the Linux kernel is now capable of reading the wattage and temperature for modern Intel processors.

      The Turbostat utility with the Linux 3.8 kernel will be able to read CPU temperatures for hardware that has either a Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS) or Package Thermal Monitor (PTM) hardware.

    • Linux Dynticks Being Extended For Performance Wins

      Dynticks, the Dynamic Tick Timer for allowing the Linux kernel to skip ticks while idling and resume to running at full HZ when encountering load, is in the process of being extended. Developers are working on making Dynticks work even under select workloads in order to enhance the performance of CPU-intensive tasks.

    • Balance NUMA Merged For Linux 3.8 Kernel

    • Graphics Stack

      • ARM 64-Bit Support For The X.Org Server (AArch64)

        Support for AArch64, the 64-bit ARM architecture, is being prepped for the X.Org Server.

        For the AArch64 Linux enablement, support was added to the Linux 3.7 kernel, has been merged for the next release of the GCC compiler, and other GNU/Linux components are beginning to see this ARMv8 support work.

      • A Software-Based Pixman Renderer For Wayland’s Weston

        There hasn’t been too many new Wayland/Weston developments to report on recently, but being published this weekend for review and comments is a new Pixman renderer for Weston. This Pixman renderer allows for pure software rendering with the Weston reference compositor and adds MIT-SHM support to the X11 back-end.

      • MSAA Anti-Aliasing Finally Comes To Radeon R300g

        While the AMD Radeon “R300g” Gallium3D driver has been effectively “done” for a while, only this weekend has multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support come to this open-source graphics driver that supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) GPUs and older hardware.

      • Radeon Kernel Driver Deprecates UMS Mode-Setting

        The open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack has been deprecating the user-space mode-setting (UMS) code for a while and is now finally making the kernel-space mode-setting (KMS) support the default Radeon interface for the Linux kernel.

      • TI OMAP5 Support Comes To Their DRM Driver
      • X.Org Server 1.14 Development Closed, RC1 Released
      • AMD Made OpenCL A Bit Faster This Year On Linux

        To be published on Thursday and Friday of this week is the annual “year in review” articles for the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. While those articles are looking at the OpenGL performance for all driver releases made in the past year, some OpenCL benchmarks were also conducted.

      • DRM Render Nodes Published, Better Graphics Security

        A complete but experimental implementation of “render nodes” for the open-source Linux graphics stack has been published. After being discussed in months prior for advancing the Linux graphics stack to take care of some security holes, this render node implementation is slowly but surely nearing a state for merging to mainline.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu mobile: too little, far too late

            Wise words those, from the bard of Avon. They come to mind as one ponders the situation that Canonical is in, after its announcement a few days ago of a concept for a mobile running Ubuntu.

            Briefly put, the company has missed the boat. The announcement is too little. And it is far too late. Any announcement of vapourware in the mobile space at this time is a waste of time and space.

          • Ubuntu’s Merry Mobile Machinations

            “The most interesting feature that Ubuntu Phone brings is the ability to plug it into a laptop dock or monitor and keyboard and run the full x86 PC version of Ubuntu,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “But how many people really want to run Ubuntu? Canonical has been offering this under its Ubuntu for Android project for nearly a year, and there seem to be no takers.”

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Voyager 12.10 Review: Xubuntu spiced up and overkilled!

              Make no mistake, I really like Xubuntu – for it’s simplicity and efficiency! But, the looks of default Xubuntu bore me a lot and most of the time I resort to making transparent panel, adding a nice conky, replacing the bottom panel with a docky, etc. to make it palatable. Functionally, though, I don’t have anything to fret about and Xubuntu works as good as any other Linux distro.

            • Fuduntu 2013.1 Released

              Well, December 21 came and went with little fanfare. When the dust settled, the world didn’t end and the Fuduntu Team was told that they did, in fact, have to finish the 2013.1 release. So, after realizing that they weren’t going to get out of work, the team put their collective noses to the grindstone and are now proud to present Fuduntu 2013.1, the first quarterly release of the new year!

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Limpag: Open source for the win

    ON Christmas Eve, I cobbled together a network-attached storage (NAS) at home to enable everyone in our house to have a shared directory for school, work and personal files. This shared directory is also accessible from outside the house – like a rudimentary personal “cloud” for our family.

  • 2012 was ace!

    Last year was awesome for Linux and free software. Android grew much stronger, more people than ever understood the ideas behind open source and the Raspberry Pi helped to erase any last vestige of ‘hacker-elite’ from preconceptions of Linux…

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.2.6 Carries Many Virtualization Fixes

      It’s been two months since the last update to Oracle’s cross-platform VirtualBox software but yesterday evening a new point release was made available that has a plethora of fixes and other minor improvements.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 Benchmarked Against Linux, Solaris, BSD

      While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 “Isotope” release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.

  • Project Releases

    • e(fx)clipse leaps to 0.8.0

      In its latest release, e(fx)clipse’s version number has been bumped from 0.1.1, as released in September 2012, to 0.8.0 to reflect the IDE for JavaFX’s maturity and stability. The system provides an Eclipse-based development environment, tools, and runtime for JavaFX 2.x and later as a framework for building rich client applications.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • 1 million OpenStreetMappers

        OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That’s a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world.

    • Open Hardware

      • MakerPlane: Open source takes flight in aviation

        I spoke with John Nicols at MakerPlane about their passionate team of contributors from all over the world who are designing and building a full-sized two seat Light Sport Aircraft. Their mission is to “create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them.”

  • Programming

    • You Can Now Run LLVM Assembly In Your Web-Browser

      Thanks to some experimental and innovative work done on LLVM, it’s now possible to parse and execute LLVM Assembly within your web-browser. This Assembly code from the LLVM compiler infrastructure is then translated to JavaScript using EmScripten.

Leftovers

  • If you tell others about this page, you owe me 1000 Dollars!

    Yes, you owe me 1000 Dollars. Please do follow and carefully read the links in the following paragraphs, otherwise it may be hard to believe that I am not making this up. It looks like some “National Newspapers of Ireland” is trying to get permission to force people who merely link to a page on a newspaper website to both get permission and pay that newspaper first, as if they had wanted to copy the actual text of that page.

  • Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing

    O’Reilly: Apple. They’re clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim that nobody else can make a device with multitouch. But they didn’t invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball forward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, “OK, we got value from someone else, but it stops now.” That attitude creates lockup in the industry. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo precisely because they try to own too much.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Food and Commerce

      Author Frederick Kaufman talked about the influence of the financial industry, large food corporations and federal policy upon how food is treated as a form of commerce.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CoalSwarm: A Clearinghouse for Shared Information on King Coal

      The article below was written by Ted Nace, who founded Coalswarm. Since 2008, the Center for Media and Democracy has been hosting the CoalSwarm wiki project on CMD’s SourceWatch.org website. SourceWatch is a sister site of this site, PRWatch.org, and other sites of CMD, which include ALECexposed.org and Foodrightsnetwork.org.

  • Finance

    • Secret and Lies of the Bailout

      The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

    • Inside the Hostess Bankery

      Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in 5 years if I took their offer.
      It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.
      That $3+ per hour they steal totaled $50 million last year that they never paid us. They sold $2.5 BILLION in product last year. If they can’t make this profitable without stealing my money then good riddance.

      I keep hearing how this strike forced them to liquidate. How we should just take it and be glad to have a job. What an unpatriotic view point. The reason these jobs provided me with a middle class opportunity is because people like my father in law and his father fought for my Union rights. I received that pay and those benefits because previous Union members fought for them. I won’t sell them, or my coworkers, out.

    • Portugal warns EU-IMF troika to back off on austerity demands

      President Anibal Cavaco Silva called for urgent action to halt the “recessionary spiral”, warning Europe’s leaders that the current course had become “socially unsustainable”.

  • Censorship

    • To Avoid Controversy, ‘Realtime’ Microblogging In China Now Delayed By 7 Days
    • Chinese journalists strike after propaganda department rewrites New Year editorial

      Protests have erupted in southern China after the Guangdong propaganda department rewrote a New Year editorial for the Southern Weekend newspaper.

      The government has an escalated situation on its hands now that the publication’s journalists have gone on strike and have received support from students and netizens.

    • Kuwait Twitter ‘insult’ brings 2-year prison sentence

      Authorities across the Western-allied Gulf Arab states have sharply increased crackdowns on perceived dissent among bloggers and others using social media. The sentence passed Sunday in Kuwait is not the harshest in region, but is likely to bring further denunciations from international rights groups.

    • Kuwaiti gets two years for insulting emir on Twitter
    • Kuwaiti gets 2 years for insulting emir on Twitter
    • Mounting costs for the default model of trust production in American newsrooms

      The outlines of the new system are now coming into view. Accuracy and verification, fairness and intellectual honesty–traditional virtues for sure–join up with transparency, “show your work,” the re-voicing of individual journalists, fact-checking, calling BS when needed and avoiding false balance.

      [...]

      Truth telling is more important that a ritualized demonstration of viewlessness…

    • When Reporters Get Personal

      BILL GRUESKIN remembers being an editor at The Wall Street Journal in 2004 when Farnaz Fassihi’s e-mail, meant for a few friends’ eyes only, began to circle the globe. Ms. Fassihi, an Iranian-American, was a reporter for The Journal, and the exposure of her views about the deteriorating situation in Iraq, provocative and incisive, was shocking. Published outside the normal bounds of painfully balanced journalism, her missive gave readers an unfiltered blast of reality.

      [...]

      Pushing back are editors like Philip B. Corbett, The Times’s associate managing editor for standards. “I flatly reject the notion that there is no such thing as impartial, objective journalism — that it’s some kind of pretense or charade, and we should just give it up, come clean and lay out our biases,” he said. “We expect professionals in all sorts of fields to put their personal opinions aside, or keep them to themselves, when they do their work — judges, police officers, scientists, teachers. Why would we expect less of journalists?”

      [...]

      ¶The idea that “transparency is the new objectivity,” as the author David Weinberger puts it, has merit. Journalists can let readers get to know their backgrounds, their personalities and how they do their jobs. The Times has embraced that move toward transparency, through social media, Web-based chats with journalists, and even its employment of a public editor who explains the paper to readers.

  • Privacy

    • Ministry unveils plan to spy on Internet users
    • Outrage at illegal SIM card penalties

      The Consumers Federation of Kenya (Cofek) has condemned a decision by the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) to fine subscribers KES300,000 (USD3,426) or jail them for three years for using unregistered SIM cards. CapitalFM.co.ke quotes Cofek secretary general Stephen Mutoro as suggesting that the only penalty customers should face for using unregistered SIM cards is disconnection from their service provider. Once disconnected, subscribers will have 90 days to recover their numbers, but Mutoro emphasised that the failure by providers to disconnect noncompliant customers should not be placed with the subscribers themselves.

    • There’s No Avoiding Google+

  • Civil Rights

    • The Big Chill

      The Obama administration is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know.

    • NDAA: The Civil Liberties We’re Giving Up For This Controversial Defense Bill

      President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on December 31, 2012, ushering in the New Year with a controversial law, which may impede civil liberties in its current form. As this New York Times article points out, President Obama signed this rather reluctantly, while being aware that the non-budgetary components were not entirely constitutional, and bordered on infringing on the president’s authority. I believe that that this is a pragmatic step taken by the president and while it binds his hands when it comes to closing down Guantanamo Bay (GITMO), it may have been a necessary evil to get work done. But we may be giving up more than what we had bargained for, considering the provisions of the Act in its current form.

    • New NDAA Keeps Indefinite Detention, Blocks Guantanamo Closure
    • Regulating the use of drones

      The debate will be interesting to listen to, for sure, whether or not the Legislature adopts new laws governing the use of drones. But there should be room for lawmakers to find proper balance between using drones when the technology would make police work safer and more effective and using them in an intrusive manner.

    • Drones killing our allies

      Militant commander Mullah Nazir was killed in a US drone strikes in South Waziristan, killing him is astonishing news as he was the only commander who was supporting our government’s efforts against militant groups, and he was considered the government’s biggest supporter in the area. Only weeks ago he survived a suicide attack from his rival Hakimullah Mehsud.

    • Stop the drones

      I am writing today because I am tremendously concerned about your use of remote controlled drones to kill people all over the world, depriving them of all their rights and violating every principle our great nation is founded on.
      It is hard to listen to you speak about the dead kids in Connecticut knowing you have killed lots of kids too. Kids who had no chance, no warning and no reason to be dead.
      Everybody deserves a trial and a chance to defend themselves against their accusers. It is the American way. Please stop setting such a monstrous bad example and stop the drone killings. Law enforcement follows your example and kills dangerous people rather than arresting them. You really do set the example for every chief executive in America.

    • The Booming Business of Drones
    • Emma Watson Stopped by Immigration

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Banana Republic Justice: Behind The Scenes Of The Pirate Bay Trial

        Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person that it’s hard to get a bird’s-eye view. This trial was characterized by first deciding that the operations were criminal, then finding somebody to punish, and finally trying to determine a criminal act they could be held accountable to. In any civilized country where process of law works, the exact reverse order is followed.

      • Tom Bell on copyright reform
      • The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain

        In 2003, many of those who rely on the public domain had their hopes dashed by Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case that upheld the 20-year extension to the copyright term. (The effects of repeated term extensions are explored in more detail below.) The Constitution declares that copyrights must only be “for limited times” and that Congress can only create exclusive rights to “promote the progress” of knowledge and creativity. Despite those limitations, in Eldred, the Supreme Court held that Congress could retrospectively lengthen copyright terms – something that seemed neither “limited” nor aimed at promoting progress. (It is hard to incentivize dead authors!) But 2012 was to hold in store an even more grievous blow to the public domain. In Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court held that Congress can remove works from the public domain without violating the Constitution. Yes, that is right – even if the public now enjoys unfettered access to a work, Congress is allowed to take that work out of the public domain and create a new legal monopoly over it. What’s more, the Court declared, Congress can do so even when it is clear that the new right “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work”!

      • Is The Copyright Industry Really Shooting Itself In The Foot?
      • ISP Walks Out of Piracy Talks: “We’re Not The Internet Police”

        A leading Australian Internet service provider has pulled out of negotiations to create a warning notice scheme aimed at reducing online piracy. iiNet, the ISP that was sued by Hollywood after refusing to help chase down alleged infringers, said that it can’t make any progress with righthsolders if they don’t make their content freely available at a reasonable price. The ISP adds that holding extra data on customers’ habits is inappropriate and not their responsibility.

      • 2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web

01.06.13

Links 6/1/2013: Steam Extending Games Sale, CIA Whistleblower Blown

Posted in News Roundup at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Miriam Ruiz, Debian Developer/Engineer

    Another Debian developer! Miriam has a low-drama setup. She simply uses Debian to do what she needs to do. I find it interesting that she desktop hops a bit (she’s now working with GNOME), but at the same time, it’s very cool that she’s open to trying new desktop environments. In general, her setup seems to be evolving over time, which is inspiring to those of us who are a bit entrenched in our own workflows.

  • Desktop

    • How Windows 8 has opened up a Window for Linux World Domination

      Earlier this year, Windows 8 was launched with great expectations. Microsoft banked on it to be a game-changer both for the tablet world as well as the desktop computer world. According to Redmond, the latest iteration of the most popular operating system in the world is a bridge between the tablet and the desktop. With a sleek, redesigned, and touch-friendly interface, Windows 8 was all set to become yet another milestone for Microsoft.

      However, Steve Ballmer’s expectations were crushed when the early reviews didn’t turn out to be that good. Windows 8, along with its contentious Metro interface, was criticized for its lack of usability and confusing design. Many users posted videos of their friends and family having a hard time figuring out how to use the software. In fact, the dramatic departure from the familiar Start-button oriented user interface has irked many users.

    • The Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Edition

      Over the last year or so I’ve managed to divest myself of most of my Apple products in a project I call #noapple. The last remaining piece of Apple equipment I used frequently was an 11-inch MacBook Air (MBA) that I would dual boot with OS X and Ubuntu.

      I was able to use it mainly booted to Ubuntu, but there were certain things that were a little bothersome. For example, the trackpad driver under Ubuntu wasn’t nearly as smooth as it was under OS X, and it was extremely sensitive, having little of what is called “palm detection”. Quite frequently, in the middle of typing something, the cursor would jump to some random part of the document when my palm barely brushed the trackpad.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Phone Spotted in a Bar, Supposedly

            Ubuntu on phones is a bold move from Canonical and they will need a lot of money for the marketing campaign. They can also start by forgetting or taking pictures of their phones in a bar, somewhere.

            This is a really old tactic and it’s not really effective anymore. Forgetting or spotting a phone in a bar might have been interesting a few years ago, but so many other companies did it that it’s no longer an effecting tool.

          • Android Central 121: CES preview, Ubuntu is back(ish)
          • Saturday’s Big Question: Is the Ubuntu phone for you?
          • Ubuntu Phone System Requirements

            Ubuntu Phone OS has been unveiled and it has received pretty stellar response so far. If you didn’t see it in action yet, check out the video below.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Netrunner 12.12 review – Starts low, ends high

              Netrunner 12.12 is not a perfect distro. But it is so much better than what its live session can give you. In fact, this is probably the most critical part, because people often judge distributions and decide whether to use them based on the few minutes of live CD testing. And considering what Netrunner can offer you, you might almost be tempted to give it a pass. But do not.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • The CuBox Pro Is An Open-Source Computer That Measures 2-inches Cubed

      If you’re a computer enthusiast and you’re not content with buying ready-to-use computers off the shelf and you don’t mind tinkering around the operating system, then open-source computer systems are probably the sort of device you’re after. Well if you are you might be interested to learn that SolidRun has taken the wraps off their latest offering, the CuBox Pro which is an upgrade over its predecessor and comes with 2GB of DDR3 RAM on board, which according to its creators makes it the world’s first ARM-based open source development platform to support 2GB of DDR3 RAM. The CuBox Pro will measure 2-inches cube and weighs 91grams and comes in either high polish or matte finish.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android Appalooza: Take note

          Now that the new year is here, you might be feeling a little crazy trying to organize all of those resolutions in your head. I’ve always found that jotting down those thoughts helps with the process of putting goals into action. Fortunately, there are plenty of apps available in the Google Play Store that offer this sort of thing: a place for Android users to put down their streams of consciousness, store photos that haven’t been archived, or leave a mental note.

Leftovers

01.05.13

Links 5/1/2013: Fedora 18 Delayed; Civil Rights Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Netflix makes cloud Janitor Monkey open source

    Netflix, the popular online video service that makes extensive use of public-cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has made code for one of the tools it developed to make its cloud-using life easier open source.

    Netflix developers built Janitor Monkey to automate clean-up of unused cloud resources, such as virtual-machine (VM) instances and cloud-storage volumes, or “Elastic Block Storage” (EBS) volumes in AWS parlance.

  • Another Satisfied Customer of FLOSS

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • A simulated FirefoxOS experience

        Your editor has frequently written that, while Android is a great system that has been highly beneficial to the cause of open mobile devices, it would be awfully nice to have a viable, free-software alternative. Every month that goes by makes it harder for any such alternative system to establish itself in the market, but that does not keep people from trying. One of the more interesting developments on the horizon has been FirefoxOS — formerly known as Boot2Gecko — a system under development at Mozilla. In the absence of any available hardware running this system, the recent 1.0 release of the FirefoxOS simulator seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for what the Mozilla folks are up to.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OPENNEBULA 2012: YEAR IN REVIE

      Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.
      As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

  • Licensing

    • Different Software Licenses

      There are times where one might be inclined to use a different license, e.g. the BSD license or even a license similar to the openmotif license. At least that’s the theory since what I really did was release source code with no license mentioned at all, kind of an ad hoc free/open software release. So I’m going to mellow a bit and say if someone wants to use a different but still open/free type license then I’ll accept that and not argue about it.

Leftovers

  • Why I Hate Microsoft

    It’s still not time to treat M$ as a normal business. They don’t yet work for a living, making $hundreds of thousands per employee per annum doing little more than shipping licensing agreements to OEMs. Certainly their OS is not worth what people are paying for it and M$ still attacks other businesses, most recently spreading FUD about Google at FTC, which dropped the matter after Google agreed to make a few changes. Google makes far more per employee per annum but they do work for it making huge server-farms do much of the work. That’s smart and does not harm competition. It’s time the rest of the world became smarter and dropped M$ as a “partner” in anything.

  • Journalism Is Not Narcissism

    Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation’s college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.

  • Italian authorities fine Apple another $264K over product warranties

    Apple’s changes to its product warranty policies in Italy have been enough to satisfy investigators, but not before the company was slapped with one final fine totaling $264,000.

  • Apple Must Pay Chinese Authors for Copyright Infringement
  • Google Muscles in on Microsoft’s Turf

    Google is muscling in on Microsoft ’s turf as it wins over more business customers with its cloud-based software.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell ship wreck debacle

      Shell has admitted that the Kulluks generators are wrecked. The weather forecast for today is strong winds and high seas.

  • Finance


    • Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness

      At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting.

    • What is behind the US fiscal cliff standoff?

      The phrase ‘fiscal cliff’ invokes images of an economy spiralling to the bottom.

      It was that image that was supposed to force politicians on Capitol Hill to work together to avoid the simultaneous expiration of tax cuts as well as the implementation of deep spending cuts.

    • Fiscal Cliff Follies: Political Theater Distracts From Key Problems With the Fix

      Extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income continue to enable the richest and largest individuals and enterprises to manipulate the economy and control the political parties. The result is an economic structure disinterested in a democratically focused way out of crisis and decline.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Perks of Being an American

      In the final days of the 112th Congress, President Obama signed two last minute bills. Both were extensions of highly controversial Bush-era policies. Both were scheduled to expire January 1, 2013. And both owe their passage largely to calamitous predictions that the sky would fall if they weren’t reauthorized in time.

    • Lawyers For The One Case Where There’s Proof Of Warrantless Wiretapping Decide Not To Appeal To Supreme Court

      Now, the lawyers representing Al-Haramain have decided that they will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, on the belief that the “current composition” of the court works against them. In other words, they believe that the current Justices on the court would side with the appeals court in rejecting their case, and then that would be precedent across the country (unless Congress changed the law, which it’s unlikely to do). The “hope” then is that somehow, down the road, someone else somehow gets evidence that they, too, were spied upon without a warrant, and it happens in a different district, and (hopefully) that circuit’s appeals court rules differently, setting up a circuit split. Oh, and that by the time that happens, the “composition” of the court shifts enough that the court actually respects the 4th Amendment. In other words: none of this is likely. Instead, the feds retain their ability to spy on people without warrants in direct violation of the 4th Amendment.

    • DHS TO PICK UP $6 BILLION TAB FOR CYBER SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS AT EVERY DEPARTMENT

      The Homeland Security Department is footing a potentially $6 billion bill to provide civilian agencies with the technology and expertise needed for near real-time threat detection, DHS officials said this week. The White House has demanded so-called continuous monitoring since 2010, but many agencies did not have the resources or know-how to initiate such surveillance.

    • Score one for the thicket

      WHILE everyone was watching the fiscal-cliff debacle, Congress and Barack Obama decided that they could still eavesdrop on Americans’ putatively private conversations without putting themselves to the trouble of obtaining a warrant.

    • The 2013 NDAA Signing Statement: No Better Than the 2012 Version
    • European Court orders damages for CIA torture victim

      In mid-December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg awarded damages of €60,000 to Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. The judges accepted that Macedonian security services had illegally seized El-Masri at the end of 2003, subjected him to abuse and finally handed him over to agents from the CIA.

    • Activist clear trash near NC CIA contractor’s base

      Stop Torture Now has committed to collect trash from the road outside the airport under the state’s “Adopt-a-Highway” program.

    • Obama may pick Pentagon, CIA heads next week

      President Barack Obama may round out his new national security leadership team next week, with a nomination for defense secretary expected and a pick to lead the CIA possible.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet”

      In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It’s a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.

    • REBUILDING THE WEB WE LOST

      We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It’s become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written and has inspired great responses.
      But the most important question we can ask is: How do we rebuild the positive aspects of the web we lost? There are a few starting points, building on conversations we’ve been having for years. Let’s look at the responsibilities we must accept if we’re going to return the web to the values that a generation of creators cared about.

    • China’s legislature adopts online info rules to protect privacy

      The decision bans service providers, as well as government agencies and their personnel, from leaking or damaging users’ digital information, as well as from selling or illegally providing this information to others.

    • China requires Internet users to register names
    • China closing Web loophole

      Michael Anti, a Beijing-based critic of Web censorship, believes the current pushback on the Web reflects paranoia over incoming President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on official corruption. Local officials could be pressuring propaganda departments to curb freedom of speech online, he said. “Officials hate the Internet,” Anti said. “They’re afraid of being victims of the anti-corruption campaign.

    • China’s New Internet Law Legalizes Deletion of “Illegal” Content, Bad News for Sina Weibo

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Tough Times for Trolls and their “Copyright Negligence” Scheme

        Despite at least five smackdowns by federal judges, copyright trolls are still accusing Internet subscribers of “negligently” allowing someone else to download porn films without paying. Last week, subpoena defense attorney Morgan Pietz fought back by asking the Northern California federal courts to put all of the open “negligence” cases filed by a prolific troll firm in front of a single judge – a judge who already ruled that the “negligence” theory is bogus.

01.04.13

Links 4/1/2013: Bodhi 2.2.0, Semplice Linux 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

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