• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• My Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Picks and Details on Live Video Access to Keynotes

  For The Linux Foundation, April is not the cruelest month: it’s one of the busiest. Every year, we hold our Collaboration Summit in mid-April to bring together our members, Linux and open source community developers, open source legal minds, and large scale Linux and open source users in an intimate setting. Even as The Linux Foundation has expanded its event lineup to include LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Automotive Linux Summits, and more throughout the world, this remains our original event, and because of that, as well as it’s small size and unique format, it’s special to many of us in the community.

Applications

• Games

  • Indie Royale Spring Sun Bundle Released

    Indie Royale is back with a brand new sale called the Spring Sun Bundle. The bundle contains Nifflas’ Games’ complex platformer Knytt Underground, Kitty Lambda Games’ Zelda meats Ultima mash up The Real Texas, Uber Entertainment’s MOBA meets third person shooter Monday Night Combat, ASTRO PORT’s side scrolling shooter Satazius, and Phr00t’s Metroid inspired FPS Gentrieve 2. The bundle also contains the soundtracks for Gentrieve 2 and The Real Texas. Those who pay more than $8.00 for the bundle will also receive Ben Landis’ comic book meets music album Adventures in Pixels.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • hackweek9: Lightweight KDE Desktop project – updated

    It’s Hack Week 9 at SUSE, and I’m working on a cracking project this time around. I’ve codenamed it ‘KLyDE’, for K Lightweight Desktop Environment, and it’s an effort to point KDE at the lightweight desktop market. Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan’t fit in the same sentence. I think they can.

    This project has been bouncing around my head for a couple of years now, starting on a train ride back from the KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück in 2010, then I presented it at COSCUP 2012 in Taiwan last August. But work commitments and family always got in the way of completing/finishing it. SUSE’s hack week gives me 40 hours to throw at it and this time I wasn’t going to tackle it alone, so I enlisted my bro(grammer)s Jos and Klaas.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Product President Talks OpenStack, Public Cloud

    Cloud computing is driving many disruptions to traditional technology business models these days, and open source technology is a big part of it. Through participation in initiatives such as OpenStack as well as its own deep roots with Linux, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) has been an open source trail blazer. To get a better sense of both the trends in cloud computing and the momentum behind public cloud migrations, we spoke with Paul Cormier EVP at Red Hat and president of the companies technologies and products division. Here’s what he had to say about his philosophy of open source and the state of the market today.

  • Tech firm Red Hat uses social media to ‘listen’

    When asked about the most important part of social-media engagement, Red Hat Inc.’s Stephanie Wonderlick offers a simple answer:

    “Listening.”

    Wonderlick, corporate communications director for Raleigh-based technology firm Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), says companies shouldn’t use social media just as a way to get out their own messages. They also should use it as a way to gauge how their customers are feeling.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Jolla Brings Wayland Atop Android GPU Drivers

    Jolla, the start-up company built around former Nokia N9 engineers developing the Sailfish OS for mobile phones, might be dating Wayland. Jolla’s Chief Research Engineer has made it possible to run Wayland atop Android GPU drivers. Additionally, it’s being done with glibc rather than Android’s Bionic libc derivative.

  • Android

    • Android app taps secure resources via ARM TrustZone

In Pictures: 13 hot new open source projects

Create your own apps for free with open-source LiveCode 6.0

Application development may have once been the exclusive domain of professional programmers, but today a growing number of amateur-friendly development environments invite just about anyone with an app idea to bring it to life.

In the past few years we’ve seen the arrival of BuildAnApp and Google’s App Inventor for Android on the mobile side, for example. An even longer-standing contender, however, is RunRev’s cross-platform LiveCode, a recently renamed version of the HyperCard-inspired “Revolution” development system born in the early 2000s.

[...]

LiveCode 6.0 is released under the GPL3 license

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Corporation CEO steps down

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack Grizzly showing maturity says development team

  This week sees the arrival of OpenStack Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

  Global contributors to OpenStack have now grown 45 percent in the last six months. This figure sits alongside a total of 230 new features now recorded to support cloud production operations with broad Software-Defined Networking support.

• Open Source Cloud Computing: Riak Cloud Storage Offers AWS-S3 Compatibility

  Basho was founded in 2008 by a group of executives and software engineers from Akamai Technologies. Over the last five years, the team has received $26 million ($39 million based on GigaOm’s estimates) in venture funding. While the company name may have been selected for other reasons, it seems likely that there was inspiration from Matsuo Basho, a famous Japanese poet who lived during the 1600’s. This connection to Japan may have proved useful to help the American company achieve funding from Japanese companies IDC Frontier and Tokyo Electron Device Limited, along with quite a few American ones chipping in too. The Basho logo features a face with hair styled in a Japanese-style topknot, not too unlike the look that Basho’s CTO Justin Sheehy sports.

Licensing

• Open Source License Clinic to be held May 9, 2013 in Washington, D.C.

  The Open Source Initiative (OSI) will host a small open source license clinic as part of its non-profit educational mission, in collaboration with federal agency participants and the Washington D.C. technology community.

Openness/Sharing

• With The Game D, Techdy Hopes To Fund And Build An Open-Source Game Controller Case For iPad Mini

  The iPad mini is a unique device in that it offers much more portability than the standard iPad, while still providing a much bigger screen than the iPhone for more enjoyable gaming. Techdy has recognized that as an opportunity to build a game controller specifically for Apple’s smaller tablet, which aims to turn it into a much more capable gaming rig.

• Open-source cancer diagnosis

  The Free Diagnostic Pathology Software Project uses the open source principle to give doctors access to improved cancer testing workflows

Programming

• GitHub Turns 5 – Open Source Code Rejoices

  When I first started aggressively using open source code , freshmeat and sourceforge.net were typically the first places I’d go to look.

  In 2006, Google shook up the open source code repository market with Google Code and I started to find great stuff there.

  Today, the VAST majority of all open source code that I seek, use and play with is all found on GitHub.

You know, Google, the web already had this feature.

I used to be a Google fan. I must have tried most of their services as early as possible.

But lately, they are pushing towards a version of the WWW that I don’t like. A WWW where things only happen if you use the “right” browser, where URLs are second class web citizens, where you have to have a Google account, you have to have Google+ enabled, you must be logged in and you have to notify Google of your every move and then Google decides what goes and what not.

Security

• Hacker uses an Android to remotely attack and hijack an airplane

  The Hack in the Box (#HITB2013AMS) security conference in Amsterdam has a very interesting lineup of talks [pdf]. One that jumped out was the Aircraft Hacking: Practical Aero Series presented by Hugo Teso, a security consultant at n.runs in Germany. According to the abstract, “This presentation will be a practical demonstration on how to remotely attack and take full control of an aircraft, exposing some of the results of my three years research on the aviation security field. The attack performed will follow the classical methodology, divided in discovery, information gathering, exploitation and post-exploitation phases. The complete attack will be accomplished remotely, without needing physical access to the target aircraft at any time, and a testing laboratory will be used to attack virtual airplanes systems.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Little Rock police under renewed fire over accusations of excessive force
  

  Arkansas department facing series of lawsuits over fatal shootings as victims’ families allege officers violated LRPD rules

• “We’re Witnessing a Reactivation of the Death Squads of the ‘80s” in Honduras: An Interview with Bertha Oliva of COFADEH

• The petty-bourgeois “left” promotes the CIA war in Syria

• Former CIA director recommends the U.S. threaten Russia and China for cooperation

  Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said Thursday the United States needs to pressure Russia and China to cooperate in breaking the alliance between North Korea, Syria and Iran.

• The Drone War Has More Victims Than the Bush-Era CIA Scandals

  In a must-read column, Micah Zenko of Foreign Policy notes the many ways the Obama Administration has misled Congress about its targeted-killing program, and calls for a comprehensive official history so that we’re no longer at the mercy of dishonest national-security officials. If you haven’t heard, they’ve been talking as if American drone strikes are mostly killing members of al-Qaeda who pose an imminent threat to the United States. In fact, a minority of the people they’ve killed belong to al-Qaeda far fewer than that pose an imminent threat to America, and many victims of U.S. drone strikes are killed without the CIA knowing their identity.

• How the CIA is Wrecking Polio Eradication in Pakistan

  It may sound melodramatic but one of the most tragic examples of blowback from our terror war in Pakistan is that the Taliban there are now trying to prevent Pakistani children from getting the polio vaccine, which has been available to Americans since the 1950′s and is all but gone from every corner of the earth, save for Pakistan and Nigeria where the remaining victims, and traces of the virus, linger.

• CIA Refuses to Answer Inquiry about Chavez Assassination Plans

  Washington, Apr 11 (Prensa Latina) The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refused to provide information about whether it knew or was involved in a plot to assassinate the late President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed today.

  Using the Freedom of Information Act, the organization filed a lawsuit regarding recent allegations that U.S. agencies plotted to kill Chavez.

  The CIA issued an official response which argues that it will not confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of files that respond to the request of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks’ ‘Kissinger Cables’ underline the world’s debt to Bradley Manning

  From ‘Collateral Murder’ to this latest release, his whistleblowing has laid bare US military misconduct and American realpolitik

• Oliver Stone meets Julian Assange and criticises new WikiLeaks films

  Director visits Julian Assange at Ecuadorian embassy in London and praises the Wikileaks founder’s strength of mind

• Oliver Stone Meets With Julian Assange, Rips Upcoming Films About WikiLeaks

  The Oscar-winning filmmaker met with the wanted web activist in England, then took to Twitter to slam several high-profile upcoming movies tackling the subject.

• Oliver Stone – Oliver Stone Meets Julian Assange, Then Attacks Wikileaks Movies

  Never far from controversy, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has conveniently attacked two forthcoming movies about Julian Assange after meeting the Wikileaks founder at the Ecudorian embassy in London last week. Stone tweeted a picture of himself with the political activist during the visit, saying, “A sad occasion in that Julian could not follow me out the door. He lives in a tiny room with great modesty and discipline.”

• Oliver Stone visits Julian Assange at Ecuadorian embassy

  Oscar-winning director OLIVER STONE has given a boost to WikiLeaks founder JULIAN ASSANGE by visiting him at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• INFOGRAPHIC: 13 Oil Spills in 30 Days

• Storm hits Mayflower, Arkansas site of Exxon oil spill. Contaminated water pumped into Lake Conway as citizen journalists report live.

• Olympians to Obama: climate change is jeopardising winter sports’ survival

• Toward Perpetuity: Global Solar Is Skyrocketing, Will Soon Be Net Positive Energy Source

  Say you wanted to build an industry from the ground up. On a macro level, the research, development, manufacturing, sourcing, distribution, and fueling would require a lot of energy. This is particularly true for energy industries. But the great thing about renewable energy is that it generally requires no fuel and starts to pay for itself as it scales.

• The Turkish ‘power ship’ keeping the lights on in Lebanon

  A ship moored off Beirut is helping Lebanon overcome electricity shortages – and many developing countries may follow suit

Finance

• Royal Bank apologizes to outsourced workers

  The Royal Bank of Canada will make a public apology to the workers affected by the bank’s outsourcing arrangement with a foreign company.

  The apology comes at the end of a week of drubbing from RBC customers and labour critics after the bank’s outsourcing plans were disclosed in media reports.
  RBC should have been more sensitive and helpful to the affected employees, chief executive officer Gord Nixon says in a letter to be published in newspapers Friday.

• Why New York City is writing Occupy Wall Street a six-figure check

  N
  ew York City’s raid on Occupy Wall Street that cleared the group’s Zuccotti Park encampment will cost the city more than $350,000 — and that total could still rise.

• Could a Patent Lawsuit Take Down the Bitcoin Exchanges Like MtGox?

  In a free market capitalist system ‘price signals’ are everything. Prices are determined by buyers and sellers in the free market and these prices are broadcast from the exchanges reaching all corners of the economy — where they are used to transact business. In a centrally planned economy, prices are set by fiat and implemented in a ‘top down’ approach organized by a committee; rather than by the bottoms-up, animal-spirits-driven, self-interested, individualistic, free market approach.

  But we have a problem with free market capitalism. Where free markets have failed over the past few decades is in maintaining fair and equitable ‘price discovery’ on various exchanges to compliment those animal spirits. Instead of buyers and sellers coming together and letting the ‘invisible hand’ of self-interest determine prices; more and more we see the dead hand of Wall Street monopolists and their market-rigging determining prices.

• Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Received Fed Minutes Early

  Banks including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., along with congressional staff members and trade groups, received potentially market-moving Federal Reserve information 19 hours before the public in a release the central bank called accidental.

  Brian Gross, a member of the Fed’s congressional liaison staff, distributed the March 19-20 minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting at 2 p.m. yesterday Washington time, according to an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Gross referred questions to Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith.

  Distribution List

Censorship

• Exxon Hates Your Free Speech, Tries to Censor Satirical Ad

  In the wake of a major pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, Exxon has launched a dirty tricks campaign to prevent Little Rock television stations from running a political ad titled, “Exxon Hates Your Children.” The ad, which can be viewed at exxonhatesyourchildren.com, makes an obviously over-the-top assertion about the company’s views about children, in order to call attention to the creators’ serious concerns about the company’s policies. To try to keep it off the air, Exxon is circulating a memo to television stations claiming that the commercial is “defamatory toward each of ExxonMobil’s 80,000 employees and their families.” Exxon goes on to describe good things the company does for children and the environment.

• Exxon Pressures Arkansas TV Stations To Ban Critical Ad Following Mayflower Tar Sands Spill

  Amidst reports of media intimidation at the site of the Mayflower, Arkansas tar sands oil spill, ExxonMobil has now taken to bullying local Little Rock television stations into canceling the airing of a satirical but cutting advertisement critical of their business practices.

• Thatcher funeral: activists ‘fearful of arrest’ for discussing protest

  Scotland Yard says no one has taken up its offer to facilitate lawful protests, but activists decry ‘insidious’ deterrent policing

• “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” climbing U.K. charts after Margaret Thatcher’s death

• Margaret Thatcher 1925 – 2013: Iron Lady recast as a saint

  Tory hagiographers are intent on recasting the prime minister who divided Britain as a national hero, writes Jonathan Freedland.

• EU President and, IT Staff Don’t Understand Democracy, Maths, Truth

  Last month there were revelations about the EU Parliament IT system, and the arbitrary way in which email blocks on legitimate topics can be implemented with lighting speed. Yesterday, Christian Engstrom MEP, has received a response to his complaint from EU President Martin Schulz. It states, in short, that Mr Schulz can’t do maths, and doesn’t understand technology, or the importance of being able to contact elected representatives.

• BREAKING: Greek government shuts down Indymedia (Update I, II)

  The Athens Indymedia website previously located at https://athens.indymedia.org has been shut down by the Greek government…

Privacy

• How stores spy on you

  We’re used to being watched when we shop. Cookies track our every move online, and salespeople follow us around high-end stores. But many walk-in retailers are taking spying to a new level.

• Google, Apple Lead Massive List of Companies Supporting CISPA

Civil Rights

• What We’re Up Against: Software Lobby SIIA Spends Big to Stop CFAA Reform

  To date, thousands of people have sent messages to Congress demanding reform of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act through EFF alone, not counting the ones sent through our friends at Demand Progress and elsewhere. But the citizens of the Internet will need to shout even louder if we’re going to drown out the corporate interests that have already dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence lawmakers to change the CFAA for the worst.

• 8-year-old follows Tenn. lawmaker around Capitol until he drops welfare bill

  A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol.

  On his way to vote on Thursday, state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) was confronted by 8-year-old homeschooler Aamira Fetuga, who presented him with a petition signed by people opposing his welfare bill, according to the Tennessean. Nearby, a choir of about 60 activists sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

• Clashes erupt in Chile as students protest over education reform

  Violence has broken out in Chile following a massive rally in support of calls to reform the country’s education laws.

  The clashes erupted after thousands of students, teachers and their supporters took to the streets to demand free and fair access to education for all, and not just for the rich and well-off.

• California bill to nullify NDAA unanimously passes committee

  California lawmakers are pushing a bill that would exempt the state from federal laws authorizing indefinite detention of citizens.

  The California Public Safety Committee voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of the California Liberty Preservation Act, which was introduced by Republican Assemblyman Tim Donnelly.

• Valerie Plame, outed CIA spy, urges people to hold government accountable

  Famously outed former CIA agent Valerie Plame said Thursday she is not bitter despite being “betrayed” by the government officials who exposed her identity.

  But people need to “continually hold our government to account,” she said at the Conference on World Affairs discussion.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux. Be Passionate, But Not a Fanboy

Fanboy. Tin foil hat. They are both common accusations that are thrown between fellow Linux users. Often intended as a joke, yet sometimes with some serious amount of truth behind it. The most common users that usually get this sort of words thrown at them are Linux users. The unknowing and general public are usually only aware of two primary operating systems: Windows and Mac. And they’re also usually only aware of two computer companies: Microsoft and Apple. If you introduce the words Linux, Ubuntu or Red Hat to them, you are usually presented with an odd startled look on the persons face. Usually because they have no idea what you are referring to or what any of those strange words are or mean.

Desktop

• Desktop GNU/Linux: The Dream is Alive

  The widely referenced web statistics are a poor measure of Desktop GNU/Linux adoption. They either count unique visitors which is warped by NATing firewalls in organizations or page-views which are strongly dependent on the nature of the sites being counted.

• For Malaysia: Bringing Google Apps and Chromebooks to the classroom

• Malaysia To Revamp IT in Education, Slowly

Server

• Solar VPS Unveils CentOS and Ubuntu Move

• IBM: UBS Ups to Buy, Lauds Open Source Support

  UBS’s Steve Milunovich this morning raised his rating on shares of International Business Machines (IBM) to Buy from Neutral, and raised his price target to $235 from $210, arguing that the company is “one of the better positioned IT vendors” for an era of “IT as a service,” or “ITaaS,” given its history in outsourcing and providing data center infrastructure.

• Open source helps vendors wedge into server virtualization market

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Luminosity of Free Software, episode 10

• Podcast Season 5 Episode 6

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation Unveils Project To Build Open, Programmable Network

  In an effort to develop a set of standardized interfaces for programatically controlling networking gear regardless of brand and without access to the physical hardware, The Linux Foundation, in conjunction with other industry heavyweights, Monday took the wraps off OpenDaylight Project.

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.9 (Part 2)

  From now on the help text for shown during configuration will indicate if a kernel feature is experimental. Linux now has the ability to “suspend freeze” and can throttle Intel CPUs with power napping. The KVM hypervisor now supports ARM cores.

• Linux kernel: Licence problems for old ARM FPU code

  The arch/arm/nwfpe/ directory of the ARM code in the Linux kernel includes code which has a licence that contains an indemnity clause. Russell King has pointed out that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) feels that such clauses are not compatible with section 6 of the GPLv2, which is used for the Linux kernel. King stated his intention to remove the code, which is used for emulating a floating-point unit (FPU). Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn’t see a problem with the licensing and is fighting against the removal, King later wrote.

• Benchmarks

  • Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3

Applications

• Need a Great Archive Utility? Give PeaZip a Chance

• WoodWing releases Elvis DAM 4.0 – more speed, Linux support and integration with Content Station to boost efficiency

• WoodWing Elvis DAM 4.0

• Games

  • Divinity: Original Sin confirmed for Mac, Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Linux desktop ‘mess’

  It seems nearly every pundit, every mouthpiece on the planet has decided that the Linux desktop is a “mess.” This “downfall” of the Linux desktop started with GNOME 3 and seemed to gain more momentum with Ubuntu Unity. I have a theory — and an idea for a fix.

  Linux is all about choice. It’s always been that way; from the earliest inception of the desktop, the Linux community has enjoyed CFE, AfterStep, FluxBox, XFCE, Enlightenment, KDE, LXDE, Cinnamon …

• GNOME or KDE? The Old Question Is New Today

  At first the question sounds obsolete. Where once GNOME and KDE accounted for seventy percent of Linux desktop installations, today the choice has broadened, with half a dozen environments vying for users’ attention.

  However, the change is less dramatic than it appears. GNOME 3, Linux Mint’s Cinnamon/Mate, and Ubuntu’s Unity offer different interfaces, but the same GNOME utilities and applications underneath. Add their popularity together, and the same seventy percent of the Linux users — give or take — continue to select either KDE or GNOME. So the question of which to choose remains as timely as ever.

  In fact, regardless of the percentages, the question has become even more important today because the old user loyalties have broken down. Although many are growing resigned to the changes brought about by GNOME 3, Unity, and KDE 4, many others continue to search for their ideal desktop environment.

• OMG! I’m Using One Hog Of A Window Manager!

  That’s a lot less than GNOME/KDE, around 200MB. Of course, RAM is cheap these days, but why waste it? I could use Joe’s Window Manager at just 3MB or even Rat Poison at 1MB.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Qt 5.0.2 Is Here

    Digia has announced a new version of Qt, the C++ toolkit and this revision comes with over 600 improvements. As noted from their blog, it is a big release and all users are advised to upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

  • The apps of KDE 4.10 Part II: Kontact

    Continuing on where I left off last time I decided my next order of business would be to set up my e-mail accounts and calendar. KDE provides a number of different, more or less single purpose applications to handle all of your personal information management. For example e-mail is handled by KMail, RSS feeds are pulled in via Akregator, calendars are maintained through KOrganizer, etc. Each of these applications could easily be reviewed on their own, however there is yet another application provided in KDE, Kontact, that unifies all of these distinct programs into one. For the purposes of this article I will be treating all of these as part of Kontact as a whole but will still try and focus on each individual component where needed.

  • The apps of KDE 4.10 Part I: Rekonq

    It’s been a while since I’ve used KDE, however with the recent rapid (and not always welcome) changes going on in the other two main desktop environments (GNOME 3 and Unity) and the, in my opinion, feature stagnation of environments like Xfce and LXDE I decided to give KDE another shot.

  • Exploring KDE 4.10

    KDE SC 4.10 was released six months after KDE 4.9, adding many new features. In the background, work is in full swing for the next generation, KDE Frameworks 5: a KDE based completely on Qt5 and QML.

  • KDE PIM Sprint Berlin 2013 – With Cuter Pictures

    Once most people had arrived at the KDAB offices in Berlin, the KDE PIM sprint started around 4 in the afternoon with an introduction by Till Adam. He welcomed everyone and issued a warning: there were only one-and-a-half crates of beer and all KDAB attempts at ordering more had failed. The participants would have to take care of this!

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Cinnarch drops Cinnamon for GNOME

    The developers of the Cinnarch Linux distribution have decided to move away from their nominatively definitive Cinnamon desktop. Cinnarch, which is based on Arch Linux and has thus far been packaging the desktop developed by the Linux Mint developers, is now looking to switch to the GNOME desktop environment. The developers say that the technical situation of Cinnamon makes it too hard to deploy on Arch while still staying true to the distribution’s goals of distributing cutting edge software and doing so without unnecessary duplication of packages in the repositories.

  • GNOME 3.8.0 for openSUSE 12.3

  • A look at GNOME 3.8

    I have talked many times about the things I like about KDE, to the point where many people reading my blog consider me a KDE fan. That´s not exactly true, though. In fact, in the last three Fedora releases, I have always installed KDE and GNOME side by side on the same box, so I could get an actual understanding of how they fair against each other. For several releases now, it would always be the same thing. I would like some of the concepts in GNOME Shell, but after a while, I would always end up going back to KDE. Applications were better, the overall feel was more familiar and, even if certain things worked better in GNOME, it was a trade off I was happy to accept… Until GNOME 3.6 came about, that is. GNOME 3.6 had improved significantly over the original, included several new applications that I loved, and it got cloud integration down perfectly.

  • GNOME 3.8 in a Nutshell [Video]

    GNOME 3.8 looks incredibly slick and balanced. I can’t wait to take Ubuntu GNOME Remix for a spin with latest GNOME 3.8 on it. We were in the process of reviewing the brand new GNOME 3.8. And then I saw this animated video on GNOME 3.8. Probably the best (and really quick) “what’s new” video on GNOME 3.8 I have seen yet. Take a look.

Distributions

• Snowlinux 4 Glacier – The winter is coming

  I am such an attention who … I mean, what a plucky title! So appropriate. Anyhow, I received a lot of emails, i.e. more than one, telling me I ought to review the Snowlinux distribution. And it does sound interesting. Somewhat like Mint, a combination of Debian and Ubuntu, and other fancy stuff.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 19: Chasing the perfect GNOME distro!

      Are you still trying to discover the perfect GNOME distro? You are just loosing your time! There is no such thing.. However what seems to make a difference is Arch Linux. Huge super active community, pure rolling release, native GNOME experience, unlimited packages, the very best documentation.

    • Distro Recipes 2013: Nice first !

      As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Solar VPS Becomes Official Mirror for Centos and Ubuntu

      • Linux-Based Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook Available in Hungary, Coming Elsewhere Soon?

        Acer Aspire S3Having reached the venerable age of one and a half, Acer’s Aspire S3 is no longer what you’d call a hot ultrabook. And yet its specs are not exactly dated, including such goodies as old-school Sandy Bridge processors, Intel HD Graphics 3000 and 4 gigs of RAM.

      • Ubuntu 13.04: Canonical’s Latest Linux – What’s New, What’s Not

        In many ways, the Ubuntu that Canonical will officially release on April 25 (when 13.04 will become “stable”) barely resembles the versions of the popular Linux-based desktop, server and cloud operating system that it put out just a few years ago. Ubuntu now has a new interface, Unity, and a much broader hardware footprint as Canonical seeks to “converge” its ecosystem across PCs, servers, tablets, smartphones and even TVs.

Devices/Embedded

• A Car Which Runs On Raspberry Pi And Linux

  Seems Raspberry Pi innovations are now not limited to gadgets only. Students at Norwegian University of Science and Technology have successfully modelled a car which uses the cheap $25 PC as its brain. To keep the car light, the body has been created with carbon fiber. Even the engine has been designed without using iron.

  The motor draws power of about 100 watts and capable of giving a maximum speed of 40 kilometers an hour.

• Kit aids designs based on AMD’s Embedded G-Series APUs

  MSC Vertriebs has introduced a quick-start kit for embedded Linux system designs using AMD’s single- and dual-core Embedded G-Series APUs. The kit includes one of three MSC Qseven COMs (computer-on-modules), a baseboard, bootable Linux in flash, and (optionally) an XGA-resolution LCD.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google starts selling Nexus 10 cover from Play Store

      When I ordered by Nexus 10, the first thing I was looking for was it’s case, but there was no official case being sold by Google. Now, almost 5 months later Google has started selling the Nexus 10 cases.

Thinking Of Starting A Foundation?

Open source projects are increasingly opting to form an independent entity – a “Foundation” – to form the core of their community, rather than relying on goodwill or corporate oversight. Foundations often hold shared assets such as money, trademarks and copyrights, provide infrastructure, and sometimes employ staff.

The idea is seductive, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. A Foundation can’t solve your community problems; it can only make firm the solutions you devise, by providing a canvas on which to paint the trust and governance you have all agreed and to guarantee it for future generations of your community. You need to solve the problems first.

ATEME enables open source implementation supporting HEVC

ICEsoft Ships ICEpdf 5 – its Popular Open Source Java PDF Engine with Annotation Support and 10x Speed Improvements

ICEsoft Technologies Inc., a leading global supplier of open-source technologies for enterprise, announced today that ICEpdf is shipping. ICEpdf is an open source Java PDF engine for viewing, printing, manipulating, and annotating PDF documents. The ICEpdf API is 100 percent Java-based, lightweight, fast, efficient and easy to use.

How Open-Source Software Could Help Save Endangered Animals From Poachers

No one is going to tell you we’ve been winning the battle against the illegal wildlife trade. In most cases, we’re outmanned, outgunned, and probably most of all, out-spent. That’s why an alliance of six conservation organizations have come together to build an anti-poaching tool designed to bridge the technological gap between poachers and wildlife rangers.

Web Browsers

• Rumblings in the Browser World

• Chrome

  • Chrome beta for Android gets fullscreen mode

    Google just announced version 27 of Chrome beta for Android. This release brings one of the most notable improvements to the smartphones — the ‘fullscreen’ mode which removes the address bar and gives more real estate for content.

• Mozilla

  • Could Mozilla Firefox OS Upset The Mobile ‘Apple Cart’?

  • Firefox 22.0 Alpha 2 for Linux Improves Memory Usage, Download Now

    Mozilla has officially announced that the second Alpha release in the Firefox 22.x branch is now available for download.

  • Mozilla devs plotting to put a stake in blink tag – at last

  • Gearing up for the Next Chapter

    Today we are announcing changes to our executive leadership team as we build up our pivot to mobile and build upon the foundation that’s now in place to accelerate into the opportunities in front of us.

  • Mozilla CEO exits just as Firefox mobiles roll out

    Mozilla’s chief executive is stepping down amid a re-positioning of the managerial brass after barely two years into a mission to take Firefox mobile.

  • Firefox 20.0.1 update

    Mozilla is about to release an update for the stable version of the Firefox web browser bringing the version of the program to 20.0.1 after the update. This may or may not come as a surprise for some users of the browser as Firefox 20 has just been released a week ago. Some criticize Mozilla for the lack of quality control and base that judgement on the number of updates the company releases after a new version of Firefox stable is released. Others applaud Mozilla for releasing fixes to issues that users encounter after updates in a short period of time.

  • How to switch back to Firefox’s old download manager

SaaS/Big Data

• Open source cloud tools show signs of maturity

  Open source cloud computing software CloudStack, which is developed by all-volunteer association the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has this week graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project. The move signifies the maturity of CloudStack as an open source tool for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.

Databases

• SQLAlchemy

  Although it sometimes might seem as if relational databases have gone the way of the dinosaur, making way for non-relational (NoSQL) databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, a very large number of systems still depend on a relational database. And, although there is no requirement that a relational database use SQL as its query language, it’s a rare database product that does not do so.

CMS

• Social Media Widget for WordPress a source of spam

  Researchers at Sucuri have found that version 4.0 of the WordPress Social Media Widget, also referred to as social-media-widget, has been injecting spam advertisements into sites. It is recommended that anyone using the widget, which has over 900,000 users, remove or disable it as soon as possible. The researchers believe the malicious code, which added “Pay Day Loan” spam into sites which ran the plugin, was added at the end of March when the developers released version 4.0 to the WordPress.org plugin repository.

• Local Drupal shops to host Commerce training for devs

  Drupal development shops Realityloop and Cross(Functional) have partnered with US-based Commerce Guys to deliver Australian training for Drupal Commerce, a module for the open-source Drupal Web platform.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Leaders Update – From Venice to Toxteth: We need more Pirates for Europe

  We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.0.9, the next maintenance release for the 2.0.x stable series.

  This release represents 347 commits by 15 people over 4 months.

• Why Does the Gimp Development Team Hate Gimp?

• I am a Libertarian Capitalist and I Support Free Software

  I consider Free Software to be a capitalist pursuit. I don’t say Open Source, and I do so in adherence to the distinction the author draws between the terms. My support of Free Software is moral, it is about the rights of individuals, and it is fundimentally Libertarian.

Project Releases

• Behavio Updates the Funf Open-Source Project

  In the time since our last major version update (Funf 0.3) last year, we’ve had a chance to see how the framework has been used by developers and end users. In addition, we compiled our own “to do” list of features that didn’t make it into the 0.3 release.

Public Services/Government

• Data.gov.au to move to open source platform

  The Australian government’s technology and procurement division has released a draft roadmap for moving the data.gov.au website to the open source CKAN platform. The shift will begin at the end of April.

• Solutions for government agencies to empower citizens

  Meet Kris Trujillo, Senior Software Architect at Accela. I met Trujillo at last year’s CityCamp Colorado and was curious about how Accela is advancing the open government movement with their software. I was impressed to learn about some of their solutions aimed at government agencies and how those solutions help to provide transparency into government processes and civic information.

Openness/Sharing

• NREL to create open-source solar performance database

  The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has introduced a new initiative to develop an open-source database of real-world performance from solar facilities across the US.

  The database, called Open Solar Performance and Reliability Clearinghouse (O-SPaRC), is being developed as part of the DOE’s SunShot Initiative, and is designed to improve access to low-cost financial capital by enabling credit rating agencies and potential investors to assess the underlying risk of the asset class.

Programming

• Google’s Go Readies 1.1 Release

  As Google’s Go programming language version 1.1 nears release, the developers have announced the release of the latest beta, providing a working preview of its new features. Not least among these is an estimated speed increase of 30%-40% in several use cases. Version 1.0 of Go was released a little over a year ago in March 2012, and to this point Google has released bug fixes but version 1.1 will bring new features while upholding their commitment to backwards compatibility with 1.X version. The updates affect the toolset, language features, and changes to the standard library.

McGillLeaks releases confidential documents through SSMU email

A cache of around 400 documents, most of them from the past six years, provide a look at the inner workings of McGill’s department of Development and Alumni Relations (DAR), including detailed profiles of the University’s top donors, and proposal for partnerships with some of the world’s largest companies.

With one signature, Internet cafes in Florida close

Finland’s most wanted? Putin’s biker connections put him on secret blacklist

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been placed on a list of wanted criminals in Finland for his ties to a motorcycle club. Putin reacted to the news in his trademark ironic manner, while Helsinki issued a number of apologies.

On Wednesday, Finnish TV broadcaster MTV3 exposed that Vladimir Putin’s name surfaced in a secret criminal register for his contact with the Russian motorcycle club, the Night Wolves. Being placed on the list translates to automatic detention at the Finnish border as a criminal for a possible jail term of at least six months.

Government Now Says No Deadline for CETA Completion

Ted Menzies, the Minister of State for Finance, yesterday delivered a talk on the Canada – EU Trade Agreement that marked an important shift in the government’s rhetoric on the agreement. Aside from a bizarre reference to the value of the agreement being $17 trillion dollars (total Canadian GDP is $1.8 trillion), the talk is most notable from the move away from promising swift completion of the agreement. After years of setting missed deadlines, Menzies now says there is no deadline for completion, suggesting that the government is beginning to hedge on whether there even will be a deal. I wrote about the prospect of the agreement dying altogether last month.

Science

• NASA Scientist Says Warp Drive is Doable

Health/Nutrition

• Tesco drops 11-year ban on eggs from chickens fed on GM soya diet as it blames farmers and suppliers for the decision

  Chicken and eggs sold by Tesco are to come from birds fed on a diet of GM soya as the company abandons a commitment not to use the controversial feed.

• NORTH KOREA HAS 6 TRILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF UNTAPPED RARE EARTH MINERALS

  “The value of rare earth metals and their relatively limited supply would seem to work in North Korea’s favor. Rare earth metals are used in the construction of everything from iPods to precision guided missiles. China currently produces more than 95% of the world’s output of these metals. China’s control over these minerals has regional implications for Northeast Asia. For example, in 2010 Japan alleged that China suspended its export of the minerals to Tokyo in response to a territorial dispute between the two countries. The EU, U.S., and Japan also recently brought a case against China at the WTO for unfairly inflating the prices of these minerals.”

Security

• The day I received a subpoena…

  I was utterly surprised by this for several reasons.
  First of all I should make clear that I did not actively participate in Project PM, I merely decided to host the domain with my CloudFlare account and to maintain the server the wiki was being run on.

  Examining the site one will quickly realize that its content is gathered from publicly available sources on the Internet, none of it looks illegal even by the most restrictive laws.

• Researcher: Vulnerabilities in aircraft systems allow remote airplane hijacking

  The lack of security in communication technologies used in the aviation industry makes it possible to remotely exploit vulnerabilities in critical on-board systems and attack aircraft in flight, according to research presented Wednesday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Amazon tribe threatens to declare war amid row over Brazilian dam project

  Munduruku leaders hit out at ‘betrayal’ after government pushes on with dam construction without community’s consent

• Egypt’s army took part in torture and killings during revolution, report shows

  Egypt’s armed forces participated in forced disappearances, torture and killings across the country – including in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum – during the 2011 uprising, even as military leaders publicly declared their neutrality, according to a leaked presidential report on revolution-era crimes.

• New chief: DOJ agreement improving Seattle police

  The Justice Department’s findings that Seattle police routinely used excessive force chapped many officers — including the city’s new interim chief, Jim Pugel.

• US Prosecutors Turned a Blind Eye to Drone Code Piracy

  Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist and the co-developer of popular web tools like RSS feeds and Reddit, ended his life earlier this year at the end of a long battle with federal prosecutors in Boston — who had accused him of engaging in digital piracy.

  Under the umbrella of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the prosecutors in Swartz’ case, led by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, piled multiple criminal counts on him that collectively could have locked him up for a quarter century. His alleged transgression: Stashing a laptop computer in a closet of a building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus (where Swartz was a research fellow) and using it to download several million academic articles — many the product of taxpayer funding — from the archives of a nonprofit online library called JSTOR.

• Docs Show CIA’s Mass Drone Death Strikes Killed Few al-Qaeda Leaders

  The drone campaign managed to kill 482 people, but only 6 were high-ranking members of al-Qaeda.

• Al-Qaida in Yemen claims its No. 2 is alive after officials said he was killed by US drone

  Al-Qaida in Yemen posted a statement on militant websites Monday saying that its second-most senior commander has not been killed. It was the second time the group has denied Saeed al-Shihri’s death.

• Al-Qaeda denies death of its No. 2 in Yemen, again

• Al-Qaeda denies its No. 2 in Yemen was killed

• U.S. just killed 11 children in an Afghan airstrike

• US Drone Strikes Under Scrutiny

  The United States’ use of unmanned drones to strike terrorists is coming under increasing scrutiny. Those in favor say the drone strikes have been highly effective, but critics suggest they could violate international law. The New York Times claimed Sunday it had uncovered a secret deal between the U.S. and Pakistan over the use of drones in Pakistani airspace.

• US drones target low-level militants who pose no threat

  Top secret documents show that half of those killed in a year were ‘unknown extremists’

• Classified Report Shows America’s Drones Aren’t Just Killing Al Qaeda Members

  The Obama administration’s drone attacks have not just targeted Al Qaeda leaders, but a wide variety of groups and individuals in Pakistan, according to classified intelligence documents obtained by McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay.

  “At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were ‘assessed’ as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists,” Landay writes in the story, published today.

• This Might Be the Next American to Be Killed by Drones

• Drone use remains cloaked despite Obama’s pledge for more transparency

• Drone strike ‘condolence payments’ for targets killed ‘an expression of sympathy toward a victim’: U.S. Army

• America’s Hired Death Squads and Torture Teams Are Still Operating in Iraq

  A 15-month investigation exploring war crimes long denied by the Pentagon lays out the tragic truth.

• Media Still Hype Staged Toppling of Saddam Statue as Genuine

  Tuesday was the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad by invading US troops, marked infamously by the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdous Square.

• In this nuclear standoff, it’s the US that’s the rogue state

  The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations

• Senate votes yes to gun debate after moderate Republicans show support

  Overall majority of 68 to 31 means debate cannot be filibustered while NRA hardens opposition to background checks

• Margaret Thatcher’s funeral to involve 700 armed forces personnel

• [A bit old] Windfarms break energy record in Spain

  Past three months saw windfarms produce more electricity than any other source for first time, trade body says

Cablegate

• Bradley Manning’s April Pretrial Hearing: Day 1

  4:05 PM EST The judge read a ruling on closing the proceedings and “John Doe,” the Defense Department “operator” that the government wants to testify on Al Qaeda evidence that was obtained during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. He will be allowed to testify from an undisclosed location and in disguise so long as the defense can see his demeanor. The defense must be able to see facial and eye movements.

• Sanjay Gandhi escaped three assassination attempts: WikiLeaks

  A fresh US cable exposed by WikiLeaks has revealed that three assassination attempts were made on Congress leader Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency, a leading English daily reported on Thursday.

• Wikileaks: Sanjay enjoyed exalted status among Indira’s advisors

  Precisely 40 years before Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi called India a beehive buzzing with complexity and energy, the analogy was used was by opponents of the Gandhi scion’s grand-mother Indira Gandhi to target her party.

• Indira Gandhi offered to share nuclear technology with Pak: WikiLeaks

  US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks say that late former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had written to the then Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974 offering to share nuclear technology but only if proper conditions for trust were created. The offer was rejected by Bhutto.

• Wikileaks cables: Kamal Nath company awarded contract in return of favours

  Wikileaks shows in an US embassy cable sent on September 17, 1976, Kamal Nath was described as Sanjay Gandhi’s school buddy and chief operator in West Bengal. It also said that Nath sponsored Bengal’s power and irrigation minister Ghani Khan Choudhury who was said to have awarded a very large contract to Nath’s firm (Nath manufactures power cable),” as replacement for Siddharth Shankar Ray.

• WikiLeaks cables show China dubbed Indira Gandhi a ‘hypocrite’

  The Indian government’s assertions that its first nuclear blast in 1974 was for peaceful purposes was described by Chinese diplomats as “nonsense” and that the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had “inherited the hypocrisy” of her father Jawaharlal Nehru.

  Peking also had a grouse that it was not informed about the tests by Indians.

  The latest round of disclosures of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks show that Peking had commented briefly on the Indian tests as the Pokharan explosion did not affect China and was not viewed as a “particularly important event”.

• WikiLeaks: Ex-US envoy doubted probe clearing Jack Enrile from murder of Navy officer’s son

  A former US Ambassador to the Philippines had doubted the government investigation that cleared current Cagayan lawmaker and senatorial aspirant Jack Enrile in the 1975 murder of a Navy officer’s son, but hinted of a possible conspiracy to sow intrigue between Enrile’s father, then-Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, and then-President Ferdinand Marcos during the height of Martial Law.

• Oliver Stone Meets With Julian Assange, Rips Upcoming Films About WikiLeaks

  The Oscar-winning filmmaker met with the wanted web activist in England, then took to Twitter to slam several high-profile upcoming movies tackling the subject.

• Oliver Stone visits Assange at embassy

• Oliver Stone slates forthcoming WikiLeaks films

• Two Syrians deny managing Assad’s wealth as stated by Wikileaks

• WikiLeaks’ Insight Into Arafat

  The State Department cables show that the Palestinian leader was a key asset to the U.S. during the Kissinger years

• The good ship Wikileaks

• Wikileaks releases cables on Australia’s involvement in ETimor

  A fresh set of US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks show that in 1975 just before it invaded, Indonesia suggested an international intervention into East Timor, but the suggestion wasn’t taken up by Australia.

• At Least 4 People Have Been Shot by Toddlers Since Last Weekend

  All week, official Washington is fixated on the question of whether the 14 senators who’ve promised to filibuster any gun safety legislation will succeed in their efforts to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, gun violence continues unabated in the rest of the nation.

• Evidence al-Qaida “received” WikiLeaks information permitted in Manning trial

  The military judge ordered that the government must prove the whistleblower “aided the enemy”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Ways and Memes: PA Lawmakers Seek To Ban Photography Of Gas Drilling Activity

  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.

• Arkansas Oil Spill Health Complaints Emerge In Mayflower

  Sherry Appleman awoke abruptly in the middle of the night less than 48 hours after a pipeline rupture last month sent thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil into the streets and swamps of Mayflower, Ark.

• The Antarctic Half of the Global Thermohaline Circulation Is Faltering

  The sudden cooling of Europe, triggered by collapse of the global thermohaline circulation in the north Atlantic and the slowing of the Gulf Stream has been popularized by the movies and the media. The southern half of the global thermohaline circulation is as important to global climate but has not been popularized. The global oceans’ coldest water, Antarctic bottom water forms in several key spots around Antarctica. The water is so cold and dense that it spreads out along the bottom all of the major ocean basins except the north Atlantic and Arctic. Multiple recent reports provide strong evidence that the formation of Antarctic bottom water has slowed dramatically in response to massive subsurface melting of ice shelves and glaciers. The meltwater is freshening a layer of water found between depths of 50 and 150 meters. This lightened layer is impeding the formation of Antarctic bottom water, causing the Antarctic half of the global thermohaline circulation to falter.

• Why did 28,000 rivers in China suddenly disappear?

  Startling government survey sheds new light on Chinese water crisis

• ‘Irreparable’ safety issues: All US nuclear reactors should be replaced, ‘Band-Aids’ won’t help

  All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.

  The comments, made during the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, are “highly unusual” for a current or former member of the safety commission, according to The New York Times. Asked why he had suddenly decided to make the remarks, Jaczko implied that he had only recently arrived at these conclusions following the serious aftermath of Japan’s tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear facility.

• Fukushima tank springs major leak

  Around 120 tons of contaminated water with an estimated 710 billion becquerels of radioactivity has probably leaked into the ground under the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. revealed Saturday.

Finance

• Rabinovitch in Cyprus

  Recall the classic cartoon scene of a cat who simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring that she has no longer ground under her feet – she falls down only when she looks down and notices she is hanging in the abyss. Is this not how ordinary people in Cyprus must feel these days? They are aware that Cyprus will never be the same, that there is a catastrophic fall of the standard of living ahead, but the full impact of this fall is not yet properly felt, so for a short period they can afford to go on with their normal daily lives like the cat who calmly walks in the empty air. And we should not condemn them: such delaying of the full crash is also a surviving strategy – the real impact will come silently when the panic will be over. This is why it is now when the Cyprus crisis has largely disappeared from the media that one should think and write about it.

• Cyprus Suspends Probe Into Who Withdrew Money Early

  In a day full of stunners, we next get news from Cyprus, where a few weeks after the start of the “investigation” into who pulled their cash out of the country’s doomed banking system in advance of the confiscation news on March 16 (and where even the current president was implicated in transferring over €20 milion in family money to London) the parliamentary committee tasked with tracking down the leaks, has suspended its probe.

• Bitcoin Tumbles 25% In Hours

• Bitcoin hits new high before losing $160 in value in one day

• Bitcoin exchange halts trades of digital currency after drop in value

• Bitcoin crashes, losing nearly half of its value in six hours

  Plunge happens on the same day one anonymous redditor made it rain in Bitcoin.

• The Spark of Hope

  Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government’s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

  [...]

  A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap: because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job: all the money you earn is extra income. The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. It would be financed by progressive taxation: in fact it meshes well with land value tax.

  These ideas require courage: the courage to confront the government, the opposition, the plutocrats, the media, the suspicions of a wary electorate. But without proposals on this scale, progressive politics is dead. They strike that precious spark, so seldom kindled in this age of triangulation and timidity: the spark of hope.

• Report: SEC Probing Goldman, Banks on Municipal Deals

  The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether Goldman Sachs (GS) and other banks are skirting post-crisis “role switching” rules aimed at preventing banks from giving biased investment advice to municipalities.

  According to The Wall Street Journal, regulators are probing whether banks have run afoul of Dodd-Frank regulations that prohibit banks that provide financial advice to municipalities from underwriting certain municipal bond transactions.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Google’s war against fake news

  A Forbes media reporter criticizes the company’s attack on “sponsored content.” He couldn’t be more wrong

• The Corporations Colonizing our Public Schools

  In an era of corporate aggression into the public sphere, not even the classroom is safe. As the corporate reach extends into public schools, our kids are increasingly reshaped as products, as data to be collected, as pawns in the corporate fight to rid the country of unionized jobs. In our classrooms, the humanity and education of students is gradually being replaced with corporate systems and profit-values.

  As if the only human activity with any meaning or moral relevance is the pursuit of money, corporate education transforms the entire scope of the education process into pre-employment training. Instead of investing in the future, corporate education looks to squeeze a profit from it before it arrives.

• U.S. To America: Be Afraid! The North Koreans Are Coming

Censorship

• The Fossil Fuel Resistance

  As the world burns, a new movement to reverse climate change is emerging – fiercely, loudly and right next door

• Muzzling scientists is an assault on democracy

  Access to information is a basic foundation of democracy. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms also gives us “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”

  We must protect these rights. As we alter the chemical, physical and biological properties of the biosphere, we face an increasingly uncertain future, and the best information we have to guide us comes from science. That scientists – and even librarians – are speaking out against what appear to be increasing efforts to suppress information shows we have cause for concern. The situation has become so alarming that Canada’s Information Commissioner is investigating seven government departments in response to a complaint that they’re “muzzling” scientists.

  The submission from the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre and Democracy Watch alleges that “the federal government is preventing the media and the Canadian public from speaking to government scientists for news stories – especially when the scientists’ research or point of view runs counter to current Government policies on matters such as environmental protection, oil sands development, and climate change” and that this “impoverishes the public debate on issues of significant national concern.”

• Military Officer Suggests Press at Bradley Manning Proceedings ‘Police’ Each Other to Prevent Leaks

• NC Legislators Sneak in “Ag Gag” Bill as Butterball Employee Pleads Guilty to Animal Cruelty

  A three-week investigation at a Butterball turkey farm in North Carolina by an animal welfare activist with a hidden camera documented workers beating birds with metal bars, stomping and kicking them, and throwing them violently into metal cages by their necks (video below). Mercy for Animals, the non-profit organization responsible for the investigation, turned the footage over to prosecutors in December 2011, and the police raided the facility. Five workers were charged with criminal animal cruelty, and a top-level Department of Agriculture official was convicted for obstruction of justice in February 2012.

• Court rejects release of spy records on iconic Canadian politician

Privacy

• CISPA passes House committee, angering privacy activists

  The U.S. House Intelligence Committee overwhelmingly passed a cyber-security bill on Wednesday, angering privacy advocates who believe the bill fails to protect critical personal information.

• Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight

  A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.

• CISPA’s Sponsor Can’t Even Keep His Story Straight About NSA Having Access To Your Data

  CISPA’s sponsors are doing the same thing they did last year when confronted with serious opposition to a terrible bill: they start lying about it. First, they released a “fact vs. myth” sheet about the bill that was so ridiculously misleading that the EFF had to pick apart nearly every dubious claim. A big part of this is trying to hide the fact that the bill has very broad definitions that will make it much easier for the NSA to get access to private data. No one has claimed that this automatically allows the NSA to do full “surveillance” via CISPA, but that’s what CISPA’s supporters pretend critics have said, so they can fight back against the strawman.

• Remains of the Day: Control Your Google Account After You Die

  new Google feature lets you decide what happens to your data when you die, Twitter had the sniffles this morning, and social browser Rockmelt will start working in other browsers.

Civil Rights

• EFF and ACLU team up against CISPA

  As noted here previously, a revamped version of CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), which is just as bad in terms of privacy protections as its first failed iteration, is in the “mark up” stage in the House. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU are working together to rally opposition to the bill, which would entail companies potentially handing over users’ private information and browsing histories to the government.

• CFAA: Where the computer security law is broken

  Educators and activists representing a swath of organizations and institutions — from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to George Washington University — took to Reddit Tuesday in an Ask Me Anything interview, seeking to educate the public about the controversial CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and to push for reform.

• Nearly 70 Years Later, a New Round of Auschwitz Prosecutions

• Police ask Margaret Thatcher protesters to identify themselves

  The Metropolitan Police has asked groups planning to demonstrate during or in advance of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral to make themselves known to officers so that their “right to protest can be upheld”.

  The call, which echoes similar ones made in the run-up to the Olympics, is an attempt to avoid any outbreak of violence or public order issues which might threaten to mar the funeral procession. However, the suggestion will anger those who say the right to protest should not need prior authorisation by police.

• Comcast Looms Large in Paid Sick Days Fight in Philly

  Philadelphia is the latest front in the battle over workers’ rights, with a coalition of paid sick day advocates urging city council members to override a veto by Democratic Mayor Michael Nutter against a bill passed last month that would allow almost 180,000 workers to take a sick day without losing pay or their jobs. As has been the case around the country, corporate interests associated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have lined up in opposition to the legislation.

• First emo hate crime arrests in Manchester

  Greater Manchester police receives first report of hate crime under new category connected to alternative subcultures

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Canada’s Digital Divide Likely to Widen Due to Access and Adoption Failures

  The state of Internet access in Canada has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years as consumers and businesses alike assess whether Canadians have universal access to fast, affordable broadband that compares favourably with other countries. A new House of Commons study currently being conducted by the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology offers the chance to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Canadian high-speed networks and what role the government might play in addressing any shortcomings.

  The study is ongoing, yet my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that two issues are emerging as key concerns: access and adoption.

Intellectual Monopolies

• New Monsanto Attack – Total DNA Control

• Copyrights

  • New Pirate Bay Greenland Domains (About to be) Seized

  • Leaders Update – From Venice to Toxteth: We need more Pirates for Europe

    It’s certainly never a dull moment as PP-UK Leader. Since my last update I have been busy advocating for our politics, including a lecture at the London School of Economics, meetings at the House of Commons, attending events about open data and taking part at the international “Rethinking the Internet” conference in Venice.

    Equally, I have been working on the ground for residents in Manchester- whether it’s helping to run a community consultation on possible new uses for an derelict building in Bradford ward where I stood last year, or pressing for regeneration in the East of the city. I also had an amazing visit to community projects in the Liverpool district of Toxteth. Great to see real transformation, it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. I like this combination of the visionary and the practical, that’s what politics is about for me.

  • IMAGiNE Piracy Group Founder Jailed For 23 Months

  • Oh Look, The Number Of People Employed In The Movie And Music Recording Business Just Hit An All Time High

    The common refrain coming out of the MPAA and RIAA over the past few years has really focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs!” This is a message that often works with Congress. If you can convince Congress that “jobs” are at risk, they go scrambling to protect those jobs, even if the economy would be much better off with obsolete jobs going away, and better jobs taking their place. That said, the MPAA and RIAA have a long history of making up ridiculous claims about the number of people employed in their industries, as well as the number of supposed “lost jobs.” So it’s rather noteworthy to see that the good folks over at ZeroHedge have pointed out that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industries hit an all time high in December.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Top 3: Alienware, KDE and Ubuntu 13.04

The world’s largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux

BSE slashes operational costs by adopting Linux

For an institution that is Asia’s oldest stock exchange, technology plays a pivotal role. With more than 30 million trades being executed on a monthly basis, and transactions running into billions — at no moment, can the BSE afford any performance issues related to its IT infrastructure.

“We need our IT infrastructure to be extremely dynamic in nature. Almost every day, there are requests for enhancements in existing IT applications. This is extremely challenging, as every change has to be done or released by keeping in mind the impact on integrated IT systems,” says Kersi Tavadia, CIO, BSE.

Desktop

• Interview with System76 Founder/CEO, Carl Richell

  I didn’t believe open source was properly represented by hardware companies. The big guys only flirted with open source desktops. I thought smaller companies were missing some key components to success. So, with a friend and $1,500, I founded System76 in my basement. It has worked out far better than I could have imagined.

Server

• Intel Media SDK 2013 for Linux Servers Debuts at NAB 2013

• HP unveils Atom-based cloud microserver

  Since 2011, HP has been developing microservers for cloud data centres under the code name Project Moonshot. Pilot customers are already able to use pre-release versions with systems on a chip (SoCs) from US company Calxeda. Each of these Energycore chips has four ARM processor cores, albeit 32-bit Cortex-A9s. The first commercial Moonshot devices are, however, equipped with Intel server Atom chips. Intel released its Atom S1200, also known as Centerton, in late 2012; the more powerful Avoton is scheduled for release in late 2013. In contrast to Atoms for netbooks and for smartphones, the server versions support more RAM, ECC error correction, virtualisation and PCI Express 2.0.

• HP Moonshot Debuts Low-Power Servers

• Intel: ‘Avoton’ Atom Chips for Microservers Are Sampling With OEMs

  The next generation of low-power Atom chips for microservers is due in the second half of 2013, ahead of rival ARM’s chips aimed at the data center.

• Calxeda: ARM-based HP Moonshot ‘later this year’

  HP’s Moonshot servers went into production with Intel’s Atom processor first, but expect a fast follow with an ARM system powered by Calxeda.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Full Circle Magazine #69 Audio Edition

Kernel Space

• Clear Trend Of Data Center Abstraction Continues

  Software Defined Networking (SDN) is difficult to explain, mainly because most of the parts that describe it are not quite built yet. At a 10,000 ft view, as I understand it, SDN describes a set of APIs for centrally managing network devices and being able to reconfigure them on the fly. The details of how this is accomplished are still up in the air, but now that the Linux Foundation has stepped in to create the OpenDaylight project, a standardized, hardware independent protocol and syntax may not be far behind.

• Samsung Introduces “LAB” Linux Frequency Governor

  Samsung developers last week provided patches for a new cpufreq governor dubbed “LAB”, or the “Legacy Application Boost”, for the Linux kernel.

  The Legacy Application Boost cpufreq governor uses historical cpuidle usage information for determining the number of currently active processor cores and uses that with the number of idle CPU cores for determining the next frequency dynamically.

• Kernel prepatch 3.9-rc6

• Live Chat Recap with $99 Linux Supercomputer’s Andreas Oloffson

• Graphics Stack

  • Optimus support comes to the NVIDIA Linux driver

    NVIDIA has released a beta version of its proprietary Linux graphics driver which introduces some support for its Optimus hybrid graphics technology. However, in its announcement of the changes in version 319.12 of the driver, NVIDIA only mentions the Optimus support in passing. Only the documentation goes into any detail about the feature. According to NVIDIA, users need an X server version 1.13 and version 1.4 of the XRandR command line utility xrandr. The Linux kernel used with this driver must also be able to provide a number of specific interfaces, but the documentation does not list which Linux kernel versions provide them.

  • X.Org/Mesa Might Get Better GLAMOR, GLSL, Shatter

    After a snafu yesterday with the Google Melange web-site not listing all participating organizations, it turns out that the X.Org Foundation is in for the 2013 Google Summer of Code. Here’s some of the possible X.Org/Mesa projects that might see some attention this summer.

    While it comes down to qualified students needing to apply to work on a particular project, on the X.Org Wiki is a list of 2013 ideas. While there haven’t been any X.Org student applications posted to the mailing list yet, the list of interesting items for possible work includes:

• Benchmarks

  • ODROID-U2 Part 2: Benchmarking the ARM Beast

Applications

• Fabric: a System Administrator’s Best Friend

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Download free automatic screen brightness app for Linux

  • Upgrading Slackware 13.37 to 14.0

  • HOWTO : Customize Pentoo 2013.0 RC1.1

  • How ScreenOS works when acting as a DHCP Relay agent

  • Top 10 tips to get started with R

  • Create a Bleach Bypass Effect in digiKam

  • Shell Script : Find Files Older X Days And Ask User To Delete

  • How to write CentOS initialization scripts with Upstart

  • Default Virtual Host in Apache

  • Switching the display quickly between a laptop monitor and an external monitor or projector in Linux

  • Howto: Firewalld basics

  • Exploring what the su command means

  • What is SUID and how to set SUID in Linux/Unix?

  • Setting Up Logrotate on RedHat Linux

  • New Course: High Availability Linux Architecture for Mission Critical Workloads

  • How To Run LinOTP On OpenSuSE 12.3 With PostgreSQL

• Games

  • Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter a success, Mac and Linux versions confirmed

  • Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter campaign successful, Mac & Linux confirmed, new rewards

    Self-publishing developer Larian Studios announced today that their KickStarter campaign to enhance Divinity: Original Sin reached its funding goal of $USD 400K in less than a fortnight.

    Divinity: Original Sin is an open-world, traditional RPG featuring turn-based combat and single-player and cooperative gameplay, in which the actions and choices of players have true significance and consequences. It will ship with the editor that was used by the developers to make the game, making it the first game in a long time to sport an RPG editor that supports multiplayer.

  • There are still 17 days to go in the Kickstarter campaign

  • Jedi Knight source-code liberated & Flare 0.18

  • Shovel Knight unearths Mac, Linux versions

    Shovel Knight from indie developer Yacht Club Games has surpassed yet another stretch goal on Kickstarter. As a result of its ability to continuously get dat money, the game will now be available for Mac and Linux in addition to Steam, Wii U, and 3DS.

  • Conquest Of Elysium 3 – Fantasy Game Comes to Linux

  • Consortium: an original Sci-Fi RPG, partly crowdfunding

    In Consortium, you play the game as yourself. “You are you (as in you can speak as yourself, a man/woman from our world) and you’re being given the opportunity to physically control a man from a parallel world. This man is first day Consortium field agent Bishop Six, operative for a powerful peacekeeping force in a not-quite-utopia future of 2042.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE accepted as Google Summer of Code 2013 mentor

    KDE has been, for the nineth consecutive year, accepted as a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2013. The KDE project will also be hosting Season of KDE 2013 (more details will come soon).

  • The new KDE Telepathy arrives with new features

    The KDE Telepathy team has released version 0.6.0 of KDE Telepathy (KTp), KDE’s instant messaging suite. This release brings many, as usual, bug fixes and new features. Telepathy allows a user to interact with users from different services such as Gtalk or Facebook. Since it’s a KDE project it offers great integration with the desktop by providing plasmoids and runner interfaces as well as providing the traditional contact list and chatting application.

  • New KDE Telepathy brings Better Text Editing and Improved Notifications

  • Qt 5.1 Alpha Is Out With iOS, Android, New Features

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • MediaGoblin joins GNOME Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code 2013

    I’m extremely proud to announce that MediaGoblin is in for a summer of awesome… we’re participating in both GSOC 2013 (under the GNU umbrella) and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women 2013! (Yes, you might notice we’re not a GNOME project, but the super awesome people at GNOME have extended the program to other free software projects.) Are you a student looking for a summer job contributing to free software? Or maybe you are a woman interested in contributing to free software, something like MediaGoblin maybe? Then you should apply! (Maybe you are both… we encourage you to apply to both programs then, actually!)

  • GSoC names mentors, GNOME seeks internship applicants

    Google has announced the mentoring organisations for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013. After reviewing 417 applications, the company has selected 177 open source projects to participate in this year’s cycle of the program that brings together organisations and students to foster development of open source code. Google pays the students a stipend while they work on projects chosen by the mentoring organisations, which provide guidance and training to the participating students.

    The application period for students will open on 22 April and conclude on 3 May, at which point the mentoring organisations will pick among student’s proposals. Google says interested students should use the time until the application period opens to familiarise themselves with prospective mentoring organisations’ ideas pages to discover which areas the various organisations are interested in. As with previous GSoCs, the mentoring organisations will decide for themselves which student proposals interest them most. In the previous eight cycles of the program, more than 6000 students from over 100 countries have taken part. Last year’s completion rate among the 1200 participating students was 88 per cent.

Distributions

• Long-Term Review: Chakra 2013.02 “Benz”

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core 4.7.6

  • Clonezilla 2.1.1-18

• Screenshots

  • Slackel 3.0 Openbox

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS 2013.04 out, comes in three flavors

    PCLinuxOS (PCLOS, for short), the once popular Mandriva-derived Live distribution, came up with a shiny new release a couple days back. Unlike in its glory days, when a minor release would set the whole Linux world abuzz, this one came out quitely with its usual set of goodies. Featuring latest versions of all major included apps, PCLinuxOS 2013.04 comes in 3 flavors — the usual KDE, the fits-on-CD MiniMe, and the extravagant FullMonty.

  • Update to PCLinuxOS KDE 2013.04 successful

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat releases JBoss Data Grid 6.1

    Red Hat has released version 6.1 of in-memory database JBoss Data Grid. It is based on grid computing platform Infinispan and supports programming languages including Java, C# and the Spring and .NET frameworks. JBoss Data Grid was developed for enterprise and cloud use and provides a distributed, highly scalable cache which, by caching data, reduces response times and increases reliability of applications using it.

  • Fedora

    • YUM: A Breed Apart

      It just so happens that yum while performing updates is simultaneously running a journal transaction set recording your update to a transaction id along with all of the excruciatingly painful package update and dependency information you’d ever want to know. Most of the time, you’ll never care about it. In some situations however, you may encounter a post-update problem.

      The good news with yum is you have a recourse. If you need to or at the direction of your Distro’s technical support team, you may be called upon to perform a rollback.

• Debian Family

  • SprezzOS Still Trying For A Faster Debian APT

    Last month I wrote about the work being done by a small Linux distribution that most users likely have never heard of, SprezzOS, trying to rewrite Debian’s APT utilities. Reported last month were significant performance gains out of rewriting the APT utilities, but work hasn’t let up. There’s more progress to share.

  • Derivatives

    • Tails 0.17.2 is out

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 311

      • Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) 13.05 announced

        The second edition of Ubuntu’s online developer summit, UDS 13.05, was announced yesterday. The virtual developer summit will run through May 14-16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. The summit is divided into five tracks – App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.

      • Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ drops Wubi in final beta

      • Ubuntu 13.04: Canonical’s Latest Linux – What’s New, What’s No

        Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) is nearly here. Ah, April: Cruel though it may be, it’s the month where spring finally comes to stay, and I get my tax return. Even better, it does markCanonical’s unveiling of Ubuntu 13.04. And with the final beta release now out, it’s time to take stock of what the latest and greatest iteration of Ubuntu has in store.

      • Ubuntu Apps Charts for March 2013

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Fuduntu 2013.2 Released!

        • Fuduntu 2013.2 out now

          The second 2013 release of Fuduntu is here, and 2013.2 now comes with a light install for users that want a base system, and updated LibreOffice

Devices/Embedded

• Tiny Pico-ITX board packs dual-core Atom punch

  Advantech has introduced a tiny, fanless embedded motherboard based on 1.6 or 1.86GHz dual-core N2000 Series “Cedarview” Atom processors. Constructed in Advantech’s unique “MI/O-Ultra” version of the Pico-ITX form-factor, the MIO-2262 simplifies system integration by providing three internal headers for all I/O, expansion, and power connections.

• Planning a DIY Linux device project? Read this first!

  Are you thinking about rolling your own Linux-powered device as part of a start-up, or through a Kickstarter project? Before you go that route, it’s best to understand what’s ahead of you, suggests Opengear co-founder Tony Merenda in this LinuxGizmos guest column.

• Meet Mantis, a 2-ton robot with a Linux brain

• Phones

  • SailfishOS SDK arrives

    The developers at Jolla have released the SDKs for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for SailfishOS, their continuation of the ideas behind Maemo and Meego. Those two operating systems were the basis for Nokia’s operating system strategy until it switched over to Windows Phone. The Jolla team have been working on SailfishOS, which combines Mer, a fork and refinement of Meego, with the Nemo project and Qt to provide a UI framework for mobile devices. SailfishOS is destined to power the company’s mobile devices which are expected to debut in the second half of the year.

  • Ballnux

    • Confirmed details for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Mega series

      Both the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and 6.3 will run on Android Jelly Bean and will use Samsung’s own TouchWiz Nature UX interface.

  • Android

    • Quick Thoughts on Miscellaneous Smartphone Developments Awaiting Q1 Results

      Talking about numbers. Huawei posted its annual report and admitted it only sold 32 million smartphones all of last year, far less than its target of 60 million, the number that the management had been promoting as recently as February of this year. I mentioned in my final 2012 numbers that there were a lot of discrepancies with Huawei numbers from various sources and I had adjusted my Huawei annual number downward due to this, but not enough. Still, its good to know now officially.

      Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was revealed, all signs point to another hit smartphone and big growth for the Sammy. They keep expanding the Galaxy series as was expected and the juggernaut should continue to roll on. I found it funny that the Galaxy Camera only now arrived to American shores, we’ve had it here in Asia since last year. Samsung’s Q1 financial guidance said massive growth in smartphones, driving up their profits.. yeah, this ‘surprised’ some after the Christmas season, but not our readers, we know China’s gift-giving season is in January for Q1 and as Samsung is China’s top-selling smartphone nowadays (used to be Nokia) that means big good sales for the Samster…

    • 7-inch Asus MeMO Pad now available in the US for $149

      The 7-inch Asus MeMO Pad tablet can now be purchased in the US. It is one of the cheapest brand-name Android tablets ever made, as it can be yours for just $149. As you’d expect though, for that price there are a few pretty big caveats.

    • Facebook Home: lockpicking Android for fun and profit

      Mark Zuckerberg’s landgrab on the open source space of Android poses problems for Google: given that both companies want user data, it can’t afford to sit back and watch

    • Facebook Home on Android is a non-starter

    • Facebook Home beta apps leak, can be installed on Nexus 4 and 7 (update)

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • OLPC shuns Indian founder after anti-tablet screed

    The One Laptop Per Child Association has posted a statement distancing itself from Satish Jha, an entrepreneur who founded the Association in India.

    The Association’s beef with Mr Jha relates to what it describes as “certain recent statements”.

  • Back to the Future: Pwn Pad Review

    It was nearly one year ago that we took an in-depth look at the Pwnie Express Pwn Plug, a security appliance that absolutely exploded its way onto the scene. By combining an off the shelf hardware platform that was well supported by open source software, custom software front-end, and the experience and knowledge of their team of security researchers, Pwnie Express managed to create something totally unique.

Software defined networks snare open source spotlight

Eighteen mainly large communications and software companies have created the Open Daylight Project in the Linux Foundation to develop open source code for software-defined networks (SDNs). The group will develop a wide range of software including an SDN controller and an applications interface for it with the first elements slated for release this fall.

Software defined networks snare open source spotlight

UNStudio will in June relaunch as an “open-source architecture studio” inspired by technology start-ups, the Dutch firm announced today.

Web Browsers

• Mobile trend hurts IE, Firefox

  The growing popularity of Web browsing from tablet devices and smart phones has been a boon for Apple’s Safari and Google’s Android, but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are having a hard time maintaining a hold on usage share, according to a recent report.

• Chrome

  • Chrome OS may get redesigned windows buttons

    Google’s Chrome OS and Android are heading in the direction where they look and feel identical.

    While the company executives have denied merging of Android and Chrome OS they have hinted at convergence and if you are monitoring the Chrome OS development for a while you can notice how the design and layout of Chrome OS is shaping up.

  • Five reasons I really love the Chromebook Pixel

    The other day, while indicating how much I loved the Chromebook Pixel, I wrote a piece on what I would change. Therefore, it only seems fair to more detail what I really liked.

  • Some useful Chrome links

• Mozilla

  • On Antarctica 80% of users use Firefox

    The project started out as a release of the Netscape browser and email client/suite back on March 31 1998, at which point Netscape Communications Foundation formally created Mozilla.

  • Mozilla Stands Firm on Firefox Cookie Blocking, Despite Protests

    You have to hand it to Mozilla — the company really does pursue policies that favor users even when commercial interests cry foul. Case in point: Last month, I wrote about the fact that The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has accusied Mozilla of “undermining American small business” with its plan to block advertising cookies by default in the Firefox browser. Fast-forward to today, and the pre-release version of Firefox version 22 does indeed proceed with the plan, which will make many users happy.

  • Mozilla Firefox 23 Will Block Mixed SSL Content

SaaS/Big Data

• Rackspace, Magenta Partner on Open Source Ecommerce eCloud Hosting

  What can online retailers do that their brick-and-mortar can’t? Besides not charging sales tax (in many instances, at least, and for the time being), they can leverage the cloud to expand into new geographic markets and handle fluctuations in sales volume in particularly effective ways. And a partnership announced this week between Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and Magento is designed to make it easier to do exactly that.

  Rackspace, which provides cloud hosting services based on flexible open source technologies that it touts as protection against lock-in, already has a strong presence among ecommerce sites. It is the most popular hosting provider for Magento deployments across the world, according to BuiltWith, and is also the No. 1 host for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites.

  The partnership between Rackspace and Magento, which the companies announced Monday, will expand the former’s reach into the online retailer space even further. According to a statement, the collaboration aims to provide ecommerce sites with “a low-cost entry into new markets around the world without the cost of establishing a physical presence.”

• OpenStack Gives the Open Source Cloud a Lift

  The OpenStack project itself is not even three years old, but thanks to maturing technology, a growing membership, and the OpenStack Foundation formed last year, OpenStack has matured to the point that it is getting attention from large service provider and enterprise users, including companies in telecommunications, retail and research.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LLVM/Clang Makes Progress On Building LibreOffice

  LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler has been making much progress in recent months on being able to build high-priority open-source/Linux software packages. When using the latest LLVM/Clang compiler, it appears to be in good shape for handling LibreOffice.

Education

• A guide to free and open source education

  Nearly every week, if not every day, there are more and more open source and open educational resources available and accessible to us. It’s impossible to ignore. It also seems impossible to keep pace with the sheer volume.

Business

• Building a scalable open source business model in the 90s

  Brothers Aleksander and Bård Farsted founded eZ Systems with a strong belief in open source in 1999. At that time, there were no scalable open source business models, so they developed and pioneered their own while developing eZ Publish, an Enterprise Content Management System.

Funding

• How to increase donations to an open source project

  Lots of open source projects raise money from their user communities by soliciting donations. Most open source projects will have the ‘Support’ or ‘Make a Donation’ button on their home page or download page. At Eclipse we have had the Friend of Eclipse program for a number of years to solicit financial support for our community.

  Earlier this year, we started looking for ways to increase the number of users making donations. We have millions of people downloading Eclipse but very few making donations. Inspired by Ubuntu’s new donation page and Mozilla’s download page we changed where and how we asked users to make the donation.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Photos and numbers from LibrePlanet

  The involvement and energy of the free software community make LibrePlanet what it is: brilliant and passionate people coming together around software freedom, drinking lots of coffee and forging the future of our movement. This year, we particularly appreciated your contributions to the theme of “Commit Change”: a focus on making connections to other movements and building diversity within free software.

Public Services/Government

• Open Source for America Announces New Leadership

  Open Source for America (OSFA), an organization promoting the use of open source technologies in the U.S. federal government, today announced the election of Deb Bryant and Kane McLean as co-chairs of the organization.

Openness/Sharing

• Le Monde adds MapBox’s open source maps to its new website to highlight where news is happening

  MapBox, a service used to design and publish custom maps, has announced that Le Monde, one of France’s largest newspapers, has unveiled a brand new paid website and used MapBox’s interactive maps.

• First UTx classes added; Stanford joins work on edX open-source system

• Prometheus Research awarded $700,000 NIH SBIR grant to improve open source tools for Autism research

• 6WIND Announces dpdk.org Open-Source Project to Accelerate Development of Intel Architecture-Based Networking Products

• Open Hardware

  • Pimp your 3D printer with Cyrus: the open source 3D printer

    Cyrus is an open source 3D printer currently funding on Kickstarter designed to “close the gap between consumers and makers.”

    Its frame is built from the construction tool designed for the maker revolution, MakerBeam– which also started its life as a kickstarter project.

Programming

• VB or Qt Whats the difference?

  So back to the title of this article. VB or Qt Whats the difference? As far as I am concerned one is based on BASIC and one is based on C++. Apart from that they are both as easy to use and program with and both are very graphically rich. Oh, one more thing. Qt is cross platform while VB is not. This means that your program done with Qt can work on Linux, Windows, MacOSx, Android, IOs (iPhone, etc.), Symbian, Maemo, Unix or even different CPU architectures like ARM and x86 platforms. VB can only work on Windows.

Disunited in mourning: police fear Thatcher funeral may turn into security nightmare

Fears of civil disorder in capital as plans are revealed for partially state-funded ceremonial funeral. Meanwhile lawyers warn against pre-emptive arrests as police scan social media to identify likely protesters

Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean

On Thatcher, What’s the Difference Between PBS & Fox News?

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death yesterday brought waves of mostly flattering coverage of the divisive right-wing leader. It was striking to see the parallels between the way Thatcher was covered on the PBS NewsHour and Fox News Channel’s most popular show, the O’Reilly Factor. Though some people like to think that PBS and Fox couldn’t be further apart, they were basically singing the same tune.

Crass

In the week they took hundreds of pounds from people in severe poverty, MPs and Lords claim up to £3,750 each to return from their luxury holidays to spout off in honour of Margaret Thatcher. Meantime the media are busy classifying any potential protest or expression of opinion at the taxpayer funded funeral jamboree as “potential terrorism”.

Science

• How Margaret Thatcher destroyed public sector science. The case of Plant Breeding Institute at Cambridge.

  Margaret Thatcher, 87, died yesterday. She is being hailed as the Iron Lady who transformed Britain. Every newspaper across the globe has paid rich tributes to her. Some have even carried her obituary on the front page, which is quite a rare honour.

  I only know that she had a steely resolve. Whatever she thought of doing, she did it. That’s what I have read over the years. And knowing the determination with which she destroyed public sector science, I can understand why and how she earned the title Iron Lady. Nevertheless, let me share this story of how Britain’s only woman Prime Minister, the unyielding Margaret Thatcher, eclipsed one of the world’s best known research centre in plant sciences, which was emerging as a global leader in plant molecular biology and genomics.

• College Kid Forced To Remind Know-It-All Economist That He’s Actually Not A Scientist

  Stephen Moore, libertarian economist and Wall Street Journal columnist learned the hard way that spin doesn’t work in the face of facts. At 1:16, 19-year-old Zack Kopplin, science advocate and history student, offers up the only response one should give whenever a pundit starts talking about cutting science. And at 2:25, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Bill Maher both pile on and fact-check Mr. Moore’s spin again.

Security

• U.S. Air Force designates six cybertools as weapons

  Six cybertools have been designated as weapons by the U.S. Air Force, allowing the programs to better compete for increasingly scarce Pentagon funding, an Air Force official said on Monday.

  Lt. Gen. John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told a conference held in conjunction with the National Space Symposium that the new designations would boost the profile of the military’s cyberoperations as countries grapple with attacks originating from the Internet.

• Using a Linksys Wi-Fi router? It could be ripe for remote takeover

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Obama’s drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders

  Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

  The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

• CIA prison will haunt Poland

• Obama administration lied about drone targets

• New Evidence That Team Obama Misled Us About the Drone War

• Leaked Paper Reveals Wide Reach of America’s Drone Killings

  A leaked top-secret Justice Department white paper reveals the true extent of US drone killings—and lays bare the fact that unmanned aircraft are targeting far more than just Al-Qaeda terrorists.

• The Way of the Knife: NYT’s Mark Mazzetti on the CIA’s Post-9/11 Move from Spying to Assassinations

• CIA claims no electronic data mining thanks to legal loophole

  It appears that the Central Intelligence Agency has been taking advantage of a legal loophole to avoid submitting reports on cyber surveillance, based on a 2007 definition of “data mining” established during the last Bush administration.

• The CIA’s “Mystery Man” in Baghdad: Salvador-Style Death Squads in Iraq

  Official Washington has long ignored the genocide and terrorism that Ronald Reagan inflicted on Central America in the 1980s, making it easier to genuflect before the Republican presidential icon. That also helped Reagan’s “death squad” tactics resurface in Iraq last decade.

  A recent British documentary Death squads, torture, secret prisons in Iraq, and General David Petraeus are among the featured atrocities in a new British documentary – “James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq” – the result of a 15-month investigation by Guardian Films and BBC Arabic, exploring war crimes long denied by the Pentagon but confirmed by thousands of military field reports made public by WikiLeaks.

• Tibet: The CIA’s Cancelled War

  For much of the past century, US relations with Tibet have been characterized by kowtowing to the Chinese and hollow good wishes for the Dalai Lama. As early as 1908, William Rockhill, a US diplomat, advised the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that “close and friendly relations with China are absolutely necessary, for Tibet is and must remain a portion of the Ta Ts’ing [Manchu] Empire for its own good.” Not much has changed with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama one hundred years later. After a meeting in 2011 with President Obama in the White House Map Room—the Oval Office being too official—the Dalai Lama was ushered out the back door, past the garbage cans. All this, of course, is intended to avoid condemnation from Beijing, which regards even the mildest criticism of its Tibet policy as “interference.”

Cablegate

• Documents released by Wikileaks suggest there was a plot to assassinate the country’s Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu

• Wikileaks Party says: “We will stand for truth”

• WikiLeaks ‘Kissinger Cables’ Reveal How Much Russians Loved Joni Mitchell

• Tunisia:Wikileaks,jihadist head was Ben Ali police informant

• WikiLeaks and the War on Whistleblowers

• Video: WikiLeaks Birgitta Jónsdóttir interview on Democracy Now!

• WikiLeaks: US blamed Israel for peace delay in 1975

• WikiLeaks US cables: After Pokharan blast, Indira Gandhi offered nuclear technology to Pak

• WikiLeaks: Ex-US envoy doubted probe clearing Jack Enrile from murder of Navy officer’s son

• WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Launches ‘Google Rival’

  Bangalore: Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder has launched a new search engine, which is a portal to an archive of 1.7 million US diplomatic cables, reports Times of India.

  Named as PLUS D (The Public Library of United States Diplomacy), the search engine includes 2, 50, 000 leaked State Department cables that were publicized during Cablegate, a time when memos of Henry Kissinger as U.S. Secretary of State were made public in U.S. history.

• US spent years sizing-up France’s future presidents

• WikiLeaks reveals how America thought of destroying communism with Rock ‘n’ Roll

  The US Government had suggested musicians Bod Dylan, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor as part of a plan to undermine communism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

• Wikileaks Publish US Plans to Destabilize Chavez Government

• Wikileaks: Rajiv Gandhi ‘a middleman’ for Sweden’s Saab-Scania

• WikiLeaks: U.S. Cable Calls Margaret Thatcher ‘Frightfully English,’ ‘A Trifle Patronizing’

  In what appears to be a pretty remarkable coincidence, a 1970s–era cable in which a U.S. diplomat shares his early impressions of Margaret Thatcher was released by the website WikiLeaks, just hours before the death of the former British Prime was announced.

• WikiLeaks cable reveals US surprise over Thatcher’s rise

• Wikileaks Reveals Vatican’s Support in Overthrow of Allende

• Wikileaks Blows the Lid off the 1970s

• WikiLeaks Publishes ‘Kissinger Cables’: Revelations from Day Two

• Wikileaks releases trove of secret US cables

• Gough Whitlam’s ‘indifference’ led to East Timor occupation – WikiLeaks

• Gough Whitlam’s ‘indifference’ led to East Timor occupation – WikiLeaks

  THREE months before Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975, Gough Whitlam dismissed an Indonesian proposal to send a joint international military force to restore peace to the civil-war-torn colony.

• Wikileaks Shows PoK as Part of Pakistan

• Wikileaks shows AJK as part of Pakistan, no LoC

• WikiLeaks cables reveal Bob Hawke thought Gough Whitlam was stupid

• Kissinger and tell: WikiLeaks scrapes 1.7m US diplomatic reports from the ’70s

  WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange, who is languishing in self-imposed confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has kept himself busy by scraping more than one million documents from the US national archives.

• Believe It or Not, WikiLeaks Can Be an Organization That Accepts Leaks & Archives Information

• Wikileaks show US concern over Ireland’s “complacency” in dealing with terrorists

• Assange and WikiLeaks win 2013 People’s Choice Award

  The votes are in, with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks winning the People’s Choice Award for 2013. Noam Chomsky won the 2013 Human Rights Award and the 2013 Grassroots Award Honoree is Crystal Lameman, member of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation.

  Global Exchange organize and run the voting for these prestigious Human Rights awards and this year they are celebrating their 25th anniversary. The Human Rights Awards honor the achievements of groups and individuals whose work embodies the principles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: peace, justice, and equality.

• WikiLeaks: Philippine military chiefs forced to dress in drag

• Wikileaks: US envoy disgusted with Marcos b-day party

• WikiLeaks’ cables suggest Imelda Marcos forced generals to dress in drag

• WikiLeaks: Philippine dictator Marcos staged military drag show

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• U.S. Navy ship removed from reef

Finance

• Web Extra: Read an Excerpt of David Stockman’s New Book: The Great Deformation, The Corruption of Capitalism in America

  Not surprisingly, the Goldman Sachs “occupation” of the US Treasury coincided almost exactly with the Fed’s embrace of financialization, leverage, and speculation as crucial tools of monetary management. Its legates in Washington during this era, Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, never once agonized over violating free market rules. They simply assumed that the good of the nation depended upon keeping the Wall Street game up and running.

• Winner Takes All: The Super-Priority Status of Derivatives
  

  Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the “new normal.”

• Noam Chomsky attacks European austerity and says taxpayers are bailing out ‘criminals’

• Stiglitz: Thatcher Squandered Opportunity, Promoted ‘Inequality’

• World From Berlin: ‘Thatcher’s Dogma Paved Way for Financial Crisis’

  Margaret Thatcher enforced essential reforms to revive the British economy, but the nation paid a heavy price for her rigorous laissez-faire dogma, German editorialists write on Tuesday. Thatcherism no longer provides solutions to today’s problems. In fact, they argue, it even caused some of them.

• Why zero-hours contracts remind me of the horrors of 1990s Russia

  The latest wheeze to come to light is the rapid growth of people, mostly young and desperate, trapped in what are euphemistically called zero-hours contracts. The number doubled between 2004 and 2011, and rose 50% last year.

• EXPOSED: THE DISASTER BANKERS BUYING THEIR WAY OUT OF JUSTICE

  According to the National Audit Office, The UK National Debt rose by £1.5trn as a result of the Bank Bailout. This is twice the nation’s total annual budget. For this amount, the UK could have funded the health service (£106.7bn a year) for fourteen years , the entire education system for forty years (£42bn a year) or over three hundred years of Job Seekers Allowance (£4.9bn a year). Not a single banker has gone to court, let alone to jail. Instead bankers are being let off with fines and the removal of honours, effectively buying their way out of justice.

• DOCUMENT: CANADA CONSIDERING CYPRUS-STYLE ‘BAIL-IN REGIME’

  Even as news is surfacing that the Cypriot bank “bail-in” will now confiscate up to 62.5% of depositor funds, a new budgetary document from Canada’s finance minister suggests that America’s neighbor to the north may be considering a Cyprus-like bail-in system of its own.

Censorship

• Follow-up questions to the EU Parliament President on #mepblock

  This Monday, I received a reply from the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, where he confirmed that a decision to block certain emails from citizens to members of the parliament was taken on March 7, and said that this decision was ”justified”.

• Telegraph shuts reader comments on Thatcher stories following abuse

• Mr. Zuck’s Magical Algorithmic Censor

• Detained journalist’s wife asks why publishing articles has ‘become so dangerous in Libya’

  The wife of a hunger-striking Libyan journalist has told Amnesty International of her disbelief that her husband has been imprisoned and denied bail for ‘offending’ the judiciary under an al-Gaddafi-era law.

  Amara al-Khattabi, the editor-in-chief of al-Umma newspaper, was arrested last December and has been on hunger strike since 28 February in protest at his detention. He was arrested a month after his newspaper published a list of 84 judges allegedly involved in corruption.

Privacy

• Investigation Into Illegal Spying On Kim Doctom Reveals NZ Intelligence Illegally Spied On 85 People

  But wait… there’s more. The report also found that it’s likely GCSB violated other laws as well, including the Privacy Act and the Defence Act. Not surprisingly, the report also finds a mess of an agency with terrible management, poor record-keeping and little oversight. Shocking, isn’t it, that such conditions would lead to abuse of power and illegal surveillance, huh?

• Secret report unveils extensive illegal spying

• Data Protection Regulation Debate

Civil Rights

• Jailed Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to continue activism

  Anti-Kremlin punk band member gives defiant first interview with western media since being sent to prison eight months ago

• Charlie Sykes Defends Sampling of Atrocious Video, A Fave of Neo-Nazis

  Journal Communication’s right-wing talker Charlie Sykes (WTMJ Radio 620), delights in stirring controversy. But last week he went too far. In a segment discussing whether food stamp recipients should be allowed to buy unhealthy food, Sykes played a clip of an incredibly offensive video that is a favorite of neo-Nazi websites.

  Dwelling on a popular Sykes topic the “growing gigantic culture of dependent people” or “moocher culture,” Sykes slips in a long clip (at 29.20) where the voice of an African American woman can be heard listing all the fast food joints — even liquor stores — where one can allegedly use an electronic benefits (EBT) card. Sykes did not explain the clip or where it originated. The full song portrays women as having kids in order to receive food stamps to fund a party lifestyle. (For the record, you can’t buy booze with food stamps.)

• Arizona Bill Nullifies the NDAA, Protecting Citizens’ Civil Liberties

  The Arizona House of Representatives will not cooperate with the federal government in denying due process to citizens of the Grand Canyon State.

  By a vote of 34 to 24, the House passed HB 2573, a bill that would, among other things, prevent state officials from participating in the indefinite detention of Americans by the president as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA).

  The measure would amend Title 41 of the Arizona code by adding a section prohibiting state governmental compliance with unconstitutional federal mandates.

  A majority of Arizona’s state lawmakers recognize that Arizona is, along with her 49 sister states, a sovereign entity endowed with what James Madison described as “numerous and indefinite powers.” The federal government, on the other hand, possesses only “few and defined” powers, Madison wrote in The Federalist, No. 45.

• Snow removal driver fired after making Nazi gestures

  “He said, ‘Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler,’ said Harvey, who did not want to give his last name.

• Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Thugs Clash with Roma in Kalamata Hospital Raid

• Last of Warsaw Ghetto Survivors Calls for Rebellion Against Israeli Occupation

  On Yom Ha-Shoah, one of the few remaining living survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Chavka Fulman-Raban, delivered a fierce denunciation of evil and injustice, including the Israeli Occupation. Her speech was offered to guests at the ceremony of Beit Lohamey Ha-Getaot (the Ghetto-Fighters House).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Protests planned across Canada against genetically engineered alfalfa

  When it comes to picking issues that bring protesters out onto the street, alfalfa probably isn’t the first one to jump to mind.

  But plans to allow a genetically engineered variety of the crop to be planted in Ontario has activists readying to rally across the country Tuesday, including in London, Sarnia, Stratford, Goderich, Kitchener, Guelph, Brantford and Toronto.

  The London protest is planned for noon hour in front of the office of London West Conservative MP Ed Holder.

  “We know that genetically modified alfalfa will contaminate farmers’ field. This is a huge problem that no one appears to be addressing,” said Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, which is organizing the protests in partnership with the National Farmers Union.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

BULL : launches its high-end Linux server offering for the modernization of critical IT infrastructures

Getting the masses on-side: openSUSE’s community manager speaks

There are community managers for Linux distributions who spend their whole time spinning this or that and trying to influence opinion without dealing with the reality.

There are others in similar roles who spend all their time contradicting people on mailing lists and discussion forums and flinging mud at anybody who says the smallest thing negative about their distribution.

Desktop

• Could the Chromebook spark a desktop Linux revival?

  Is Linux on the desktop worth a second look if Chrome gives an old PC a new lease of life?

Server

• HP Moonshot Servers: Intel Atom Beats ARM (For Now)

  When HP Moonshot servers launched today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) was quick to note that the new Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) servers will leverage Atom processors — though HP does eventually plan to offer ARM-based support as well. It’s a significant near-term win for Intel, which hopes to defeat potential rivals like ARM in the emerging market for so-called “microservers.”

  According to an Intel spokesperson, Atom is an ideal choice for the HP servers because the architecture can run excisting operating systems (Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.) with no porting requirements.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.9-rc6

  Things seem to be on track, and it’s been a mostly boring week. Lots of small fixes, a few reverts. Networking, some small arch fixes (arm, mips, s390, alpha, tile, x86), drivers, minor filesystem updates (gfs2, ext4, tiny reiserfs xattr fix). Nothing really exciting stands out, I think the appended ShortLog gives a good overview for people who want to wallow in the details..

• Graphics Stack

  • Nvidia releases open source 3D drivers

Applications

• One of the best apps for photographers, Darktable 1.2 released

  The Darktable team has announced the release of version 1.2 which brings some new features, supports for more cameras and bug fixes. Darktable is one of the most important free software apps (along with GIMP) which is must have for someone like me who shoots in RAW from his DSLR camera. This apps is the first stage of my post-processing and does a great job when compared with Adobe’s Lightroom.

• Darktable 1.2 introduces Lightroom import

  The latest release of the open source photo workflow package darktable adds de-noising profiles for camera sensors, support for using the same plugin multiple times on one photo and the ability to import workflow data from Adobe’s Lightroom. Additionally, darktable 1.2 includes a number of other improvements, bug fixes and an improved user manual.

• One of the best apps for photographers, Darktable 1.2 released

• Kdenlive 0.9.6 released

  We are happy to announce the immediate release of Kdenlive 0.9.6.

  This version fixes several bugs and crashes, including a very annoying bug that caused project files to seem corrupted. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

• Xtreme Download Manager: Alternative Internet Download Manager for Linux

• 5 Top Linux Anti-Spam Tools

• For Literary Penguins: 4 Great Writing Tools [Linux]

  A great amount of productivity comes from writing tasks, whether it be for school assignments, articles for your blog, or much more. While full-featured office applications tend to be the norm for such tasks, it may sometimes be a good idea to go in the opposite direction and use some simpler or specialized tools, depending on what you’re working on. Often, this can either help you focus more on the work that’s ahead, or simply improve your overall workflow to save some time.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Website editor showdown: CKEditor vs. TinyMCE

  • So you want to be a Unix sysadmin?

  • Install rednotebook diary and journal software on Ubuntu Debian Fedora

  • Protect your network with Snort

  • Ubuntu After Install – Easy way to install Multimedia codecs,flash,google chrome etc after fresh ubuntu 13.04/12.10/12.04 desktop installation

  • Mastering The Linux Shell – Finding Anything

• Games

  • Crimsonland hardcore shooter on greenlight

    Thousands of aliens, giant spiders, mutant lizards, and more are on the attack – can you survive the onslaught? You will consistently unlock new and better perks that improve your ability to use a devastating arsenal. Crimsonland features 3 modes of play, online high scores, and endless hours of pressure packed fun.

  • Shovel Knight’s trowels and tribulations also playable on Mac and Linux

    Shovel Knight has dug a tunnel to the Mac and Linux platforms, lined with Kickstarter money, in a tortured metaphor for which we apologize. The point is that Shovel Knight’s fundraiser has passed the stretch goal required to ensure ports to those two platforms.

  • Kinetic Void 3D space adventure will be hitting Linux soon!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE PlasMate Software Development Toolkit

Distributions

• Linux fatware? These distros need to slim down

  As I prepped a new virtual server template the other day, it occurred to me that we need more virtualization-specific Linux distributions or at least specific VM-only options when performing an install. A few distros take steps in this direction, such as Ubuntu and OEL jeOS (just enough OS), but they’re not necessarily tuned for virtual servers.

• New Releases

  • Frugalware 1.9pre1 (Arcturus) released

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat: Application Software Company Perfect Example Of Cloud Bubble

• Debian Family

  • Exploring Linux Mint’s “Debian” edition

    All in all Mint’s Debian branch offers a pleasant experience with a friendly graphical installer, useful tools and lots of software all in a convenient package. The one detractor Mint’s Debian Edition may have is, oddly enough, Mint’s own Main Edition. While the Debian branch of Mint is a fine distribution its technology base prevents users from having access to certain helpful features available in other Mint editions. For example Mint’s Debian Edition isn’t able to use Ubuntu PPAs, it is missing some third-party software packages built for Ubuntu, and One storage & store support is missing. It would also appear as though the kernel which ships with Mint’s Debian Edition doesn’t have all the hardware support available in the Main Edition. These features tend to be edge cases and many people will probably get along fine without them, but I still suspect the strongest competitors to Mint Debian Edition are Mint’s other flavours.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 13.04 goes beta

      • Second Beta Release of Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Is Available for Download

        Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Beta 2 was also released today, April 5, along with all the others Linux distributions that are part of the Ubuntu family.

        Ubuntu Kylin is a new flavor of Ubuntu Linux, and Raring Ringtail (version 13.04) will be its first ever stable release. Today’s final testing version fixes last minute bugs, such as an updated PM2.5 API in the China Weather Indicator, and saving note issue with the Chinese Calendar.

      • Ubuntu File Sharing

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Trying Linux Mint 14

          My wife now has a new desktop computer. Her netbook computer (Acer Aspire One) works fine, but its Linux distro (Fedora 11) is getting positively antiquated. I’ve just upgraded the hard drive in my laptop (Compaq Presario 2170CA), so it needs a Linux. And the “hand-me-down” process means I have upgrades for my other two PCs (audio processing and ham radio); they also need Linux upgrades. Ideally I’d like to put the same Linux on all five of them. Which Linux?

          Although I like Debian on my desktop, I must admit that it is difficult for a novice to administer. (Hell, it’s difficult for me to administer.) And while I like the economy of LXDE, I confess that its tools are still a work in progress; it’s a bother to administer, too.

        • Fuduntu 2013.2 Linux released, comes in full and “lite” editions

          Fuduntu is a Linux-based operating system that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu. The OS uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but takes design and usability cues from Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Spotlight on Linux-ready embedded ARM modules

  In a post at Linux.com, Eric Brown, former editor of LinuxDevices.com, presents a slideshow of 10 new ARM-powered COMs. The current boom in ARM boards is, in part, fueled by the continuing growth of ARM-friendly Linux, and more recently Android, in the general embedded market, he suggests.

• Software adds motion-awareness to TV STBs

  Movea’s motion-processing software now supports TV set-top boxes (STBs) built with STMicroelectronics “Orly Platform” STB SOCs (system-on-chips). The “SmartMotion Server” software can add gesture-based user interface features to TV STBs running Linux and Android.

  The SmartMotion Server motion-processing software is intended to ease the process of developing intuitive motion-based user interfaces for TV STBs and other connected home systems, according to Movea. The SmartMotion framework provides gesture-based interaction support for applications such as web browsing, video-on-demand catalogs, media center and social media navigation, and gaming.

• Phones

  • BlackBerry 10, Windows 8 Phone, Ubuntu And More vs Android, iOS: Can It Mean Good Things For Apple And Google?

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Expects 1Q2013 Earnings Of $7.7B, Up 53% Thanks To Smartphone Sales

      Samsung said that it expects to post first quarter operating profit of about 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion USD), up 53 percent from the 5.7 trillion won operating profit it earned a year earlier. The South Korean tech giant also said that its sales likely rose to between 51 trillion won and 53 trillion won from 45.3 trillion won a year earlier.

  • Android

    • YouTube employee Eileen Rivera supposedly ‘leaked’ the screenshot of the ‘new’ Google Play Store, version 4.0.

      Is the brand new Google Play Store coming? Timed for I/O summit?

    • OUYA: The initial impressions

      This past week at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a big one for third party publishers like Electronic Arts and Konami. It was also the place where supporters for the OUYA system got a first look at what they invested in. The company held a private event Thursday evening for a number of its KickStarter backers and other guests, providing plenty of food, drink and hands-on time with the system before it ships in June. We managed to go a few rounds with it to see what it was like.

    • Facebook Home: Brilliant Stroke or Desperate Measure?

      Facebook Home “is an idea that deserves to be copied,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “If your primary use for a smartphone is some activity, why not have it front and center of your Android experience rather than buried in an app or widget somewhere? Flipboard, Twitter, Edomondo, Max MP, Gameloft, Androidslide and other Android developers should explore this avenue.”

    • UNSW researchers push open source, Android for archaeology

      Researchers at the University of NSW are preparing to launch a public beta of a new open source system that could drive a digital revolution in the field of archaeology.

      the Federated Archaeological Information Management System (FAIMS) Project, led by UNSW’s Dr Shawn Ross, a senior lecturer at UNSW’s UNSW’s School of Humanities, received funding from the federal government’s the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program.

    • Chameleon OS First Look: An Open Source MIUI-esque ROM

    • RedReader for Android: Open Source Reddit application

    • Tips to avoid Android spyware

      If you own an Android the chances are you’ve heard, or experienced, one horror story after another about data theft and privacy invasion that comes as first nature to malware meant for Android phones. Android spyware is nothing new and the platform is home to a plethora of cell phone spy apps. There are apps that will pretend to be games (like the Drop.dialer fiasco earlier this year) and steal your information and cost you a buck load of money you never knew you were spending, and then there are apps that other people can use to spy on you, using your own phone. Sure the Jelly Bean is slated to slash all security issues to pieces, but just because it’s coming out doesn’t mean your phone will be compatible with it – unless you can easily jump from one phone to another.

Check Cyrus : DIY open source 3D printer

Profound Framework Moves to Open Source

Application development tool vendor Profound Logic has taken its user interface framework open source citing benefits such as increased capability for users to control their own software, improved integration between the IBM i and other platforms, no-cost opportunities for companies and developers to test the application modernization waters, and a route to development that avoids vendor lock-in. It’s Profound’s latest step in providing IBM midrange shops with an RPG tool that is more open and transparent.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Will Mozilla Firefox 21 Be a Healthy Open Source Browser?

    Firefox 21 is now in Beta and it introduces a number of new features that will become generally available inside of the next 6 weeks.

    At the top of the list is a new Health Reporting feature that Mozilla first publicly started talking about in September of 2012.

  • Mozilla pulls tracking trigger for Firefox 22, ignores ad industry attacks

    Mozilla has added automatic third-party cookie-blocking to a preview version of Firefox 22, a move that will put the feature in most users hands by late June and the company on a collision course with the online ad industry.

  • Future Firefox to Offer More Social, Privacy Choices

    The recent release of Firefox 20 means that Mozilla has also updated the various Firefox testing channels — Beta, Aurora and Nightly.

    If you’d like to see what’s coming in future versions of Firefox you can grab pre-release versions from Mozilla’s channel downloads page. If you’d like to try out the bleeding edge, you can grab a copy of Firefox Nightly.

  • Mozilla: the Next 15 Years

    That is, there were two key aspects to Mozilla’s previous work: hacking code, and hacking the system. Both will be important in the years to come. The following comment from Baker in her post shows how the two are intertwined:

SaaS/Big Data

• Grizzly release scales up OpenStack’s open source cloud

  The latest release of the OpenStack cloud orchestration software adds support for large scale clouds spread across multiple datacentres.

CMS

• MAII Switches from an Open Source LMS to LoudCloud’s Groundbreaking Behavioral Learning Platform

  Mumbai, Maharashtra, India : LoudCloud Systems has taken an important step forward in brining next generation technology oriented teaching and learning in India. Mumbai based company has been selected as the Learning partner by Delhi based Modi Academic International Institute (MAII) for all of their education programs.

Education

• US Universities embrace open source online learning platform

• Free education on a hard drive to boost Kenya in a tech-driven world

Business

• Tips To Build Your Open Source Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • SugarCRM Gets BPM, Workflow Suite With Open Source ProcessMaker

    This year’s SugarCRM annual gathering starts today and like every year there are vendors lining up to announce the good things they are doing with SugarCRM either now, or in the coming year. First off the market this year is Colosa, which has just announced the release of ProcessMaker SugarCRM Edition.

  • Pentaho and Think Big Analytics Partner on Machine-Generated Big Data

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GnuCash 2.5.0 (Unstable) released

  PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.

• FTP 0.4

• Guile meets PHP

  Challenge #5 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a CGI script that serves up HTML pages with embedded Scheme, a la PHP. It is the first challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.

Openness/Sharing

• Condopedia Launches As Open-Source Wiki For NYC Buildings

  There are a lot of websites out there that can tell you everything you want to know about a residential building in New York City. StreetEasy can show you floorplans and amenities. The Department of Buildings can tell you how a place is zoned or what its roof is used for. The library can give you a detailed history. But there’s no resource that brings all these elements together. Enter, Condopedia, a wiki for condo and co-op buildings. Founded by real estate agent Laurence Putnam, the site provides all of the above, plus more, in the easy-to-use Wikipedia format that people are familiar with.

• Is training to become a better contributor worth considering?
  

  Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012.

  As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.

• Open Data

  • Medicine’s ‘Hard Drive’ Is Crashing

    Medicine’s evidence base — our hard drive — is corrupt, in all senses of that word.

    She was 86 years old, frail, with limited income. Her aching and fever had started two days ago. Although she had gotten the flu shot like I had asked her to, this was still most likely the flu. Ads for Tamiflu came immediately to mind, but like Ben Goldacre, I knew that the published data on Tamiflu has been as cherry-picked as your weekend bounty from the farmers’ market. My patient asked me: “Should I be on Tamiflu?” Should she, indeed. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know because I don’t trust the hallowed literature. I don’t trust PubMed, or highly cited articles in prominent journals, or the glossy circulars in my mailbox. Sitting across from her, at that moment, I felt my desire to practice evidence-based medicine completely undercut by the systematic suppression of “unfavorable” studies. The corruption of the evidence by publication bias isn’t theoretical. It’s there every day in our clinics and bedsides, affecting every patient and every doctor, breeding cynicism and distrust.

Ken Loach: Bring back the Spirit of ‘45

Who or what inspires you?

People who fight back.

Facebook starts charging users up to £11 to contact celebrities

Trial charge for messages to people outside users’ social circle, from 71p for Robert Peston to £10.68 for Tom Daley

[...]

Facebook was ridiculed for setting a $100 (£61) fee to contact founder Mark Zuckerberg. He has previously said he would like Facebook messaging to become an alternative to email. The network rolled out @facebook.com email addresses to all users last June.

Owen Jones: Thatcherism was a national catastrophe that still poisons us

We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade

Margaret Thatcher

So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.

Margaret Thatcher: CNN in Jimmy Savile picture gaffe

CNN has drawn unwanted attention on the internet after broadcasting a picture of Margaret Thatcher with Jimmy Savile.

Science

• Polynesian DNA mysteriously shows up in a Brazilian tribe

  The Polynesians’ epic voyages of exploration and colonization across the Pacific are one of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments (even if the local bird life wasn’t likely to have enjoyed it). Having most probably started in Taiwan, the explorers reached and settled on islands across most of the Pacific, as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand. And recent evidence shows that they also stopped in South America, where they stayed long enough to pick up food crops that eventually wound up distributed across the Pacific as well.

Health/Nutrition

• Monsanto Threatens to Sue Vermont if Legislators Pass a Bill Requiring GMO Food to Be Labeled

  Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.

• “American Dream”: Food loaded into Dumpsters while Hundreds of Hungry Americans Restrained by Police

  Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.

  The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

• Cutting Social Security and Medicare? That’s the ‘Middle’

  The new White House budget proposal is getting a lot of attention because it explicitly connects the Obama administration to an agenda that includes cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. As the New York Times (4/5/13) put it, Obama “will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” Apparently the most important risk is to the one to him, and not to millions of people whose benefits will be cut.

Security

• ’1337 hacker’ scrawls all over careless coders’ SourceForge sites

  Someone claiming to be a “1337 hacker” has defaced programming projects hosted by SourceForge.net

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Iraq executing more people than it has for almost a decade, says Amnesty report

  Iraq is executing more people than it has done for almost a decade. The country now has the third highest number of executions in the world, according to a report to be published this week.

• Fernandes ‘sought CIA funding’ during Emergency

  At the height of Emergency, fiery Socialist labour leader George Fernandes sought to get funding from the American Central Intelligence Agency and the French government while he was underground organising sabotage activities.

  Mr. Fernandes, who liked to project himself as a sworn enemy of American imperialism and foreign capital, said in November 1975 that “he was even now prepared to accept money from the CIA,” according to a new set of U.S. diplomatic cables from the Henry Kissinger era obtained by WikiLeaks and accessed by The Hindu.

• CIA Iran Agents Allegedly Exposed by SSL CA Hack

  A group of Iranians reported to be involved in a sophisticated operation involving a deal with Chinese intelligence and involvements of Huawei have been able to obtain information about the certificate authority infrastructure produced and operated by Equifax at first, then sold to GeoTrust, Verisign and finally Symantec.

• Terror camps targeting India spared from drone strikes in ISI-CIA deal

  US media on Sunday repo rted that Pakistan’s ISI and CIA made a secret pact to facilitate drone strikes against selective terrorist targets. Citing excerpts of a soon-to-be released book, American media said Pakistan gave access to US drone strikes on condition they would not target nuclear facilities and terrorist camps where Kashmiri militants underwent training for attacks against India.

• CIA Does Not Submit Congressionally Mandated Data Mining Report

  Despite the CIA chief technology officer’s stunning claim last month that “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” the agency does not submit a congressionally mandated report on data mining, The Huffington Post has learned.

  That’s because under the CIA’s reading of the law, it doesn’t do any data mining at all. A legal loophole allows it to skip submitting the report even though other agencies, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, do.

• ‘Way Of The Knife’ Explains CIA Shift From Spying To Killing

  When the CIA came into being in 1947, its mandate was to keep tabs on events around the world. Gather intelligence about foreign governments. Spy. But the agency has evolved away from this original mission, as Mark Mazzetti reports in a new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.

• CIA-ISI deal: When will Delhi speak up?

  This does raise the question that the US fight against terrorism is self-centred, and that its rhetoric against international terrorism is one-sided and need hardly be taken at face value (as many here tend to do). Evidently, the US agreed to Pakistan’s terms on drones in their self-interest. That is not surprising.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks: Was Chavez Right About U.S. Meddling?

  That strategy was, according to the cable, to be carried out via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).

  The cable has received almost no media coverage. I wonder why.

• ‘The quintessential suburban matron and frightfully English’: What Washington thought of Margaret Thatcher revealed in WikiLeaks ‘Kissinger cables’

• Latest Wikileaks cables show US concerns about Ireland

  The whistleblower website this morning published more than 1.7 million American diplomatic records dating between 1973 and 1976.
  According to Wikileaks, the cables include “significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.”
  The documents also include many references to Ireland. In one document dated October 9th, 1973, the US embassy in Dublin assesses Ireland-US relations.
  Describing them as “excellent”, the cable says “those in the power queue of both major parties are generally well-disposed toward the United States”.

• Wikileaks Cable From 1974 Refers to Thatcher As The ‘Best Man’ in the Conservative Party

  A 1974 diplomatic cable, released by Wikileaks Monday, points to the enormous respect and attention Margaret Thatcher drew both in and outside of her party and from the press, even before she became leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.

• ‘WikiLeaks release to hurt ‘Mr. Death Squad’ Kissinger’

• Wikileaks opens Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD), searchable repository of 1970s US diplomatic and intel documents

• Freedom of the Press Foundation is Now Pleased to Accept Bitcoin

• Assange, new Wikidata released

  Julian Assange – currently a fugitive from justice in the Ecuadorean embassy in London – has released a new batch of information on the internet. Published by ‘Wikileaks’ the data covers almost two million records from the USA relating to diplomatic information – some of it potentially embarrassing.

• “The Kissinger Cables”: Three Years After “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks Explores U.S. Diplomacy

• Icelandic Lawmaker Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Challenging Gov’t Secrecy from Twitter to Bradley Manning

• ‘Illegal we do immediately; unconstitutional takes a little longer’: Kissinger in new mass WikiLeaks document release

  WikiLeaks has published the ‘Kissinger Cables’: its largest public release of documents in nearly a year, totaling some 1.7 million classified files, including information on the US’s secret diplomatic history.

  A variety of files have been collected and collated, including from congressional correspondence, intelligence reports, and cables.

  Julian Assange, who heads the organization, told the Press Association that the documents were illustrative of the “vast range and scope” of global US influence. He is to present and mark the release of the documents on Monday in a mass-press conference.

• WikiLeaks revelations: George Fernandes’s wife says no question of him asking for funds from CIA as he was anti-American

• WikiLeaks publishes 1.7m US diplomatic records

• Kissinger Cables: Wikileaks publishes 1.7m US diplomatic documents from 1970s

  Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s.

• WikiLeaks’ “PLUS D” Aims To Digitize America’s Secret Diplomatic History

  Not so long ago, WikiLeaks represented the world’s most radical group of investigative journalists. Lately, Julian Assange‘s organization has been acting more like radical librarians.

• WikiLeaks reveals Bob Carr as long-term intelligence source to US

• WikiLeaks publishes 1.7m+ United States records as it launches new ‘PlusD’ searchable repository

• Secrets of Gough Whitlam era out in the open after WikiLeaks disclosures

  GOUGH Whitlam was a proud, “even arrogant” leader who hoped to abolish the Senate and cool relations with the US, but lent a sympathetic ear to an ageing Mao Zedong who confided in the visiting prime minister that he had a looming “appointment with God”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Seven State Keystone XL Resolutions, Where Are the Environmentalists?

  The cleanup is still underway from a massive pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, but you don’t hear anything about it at public hearings across the nation dealing with the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Resolutions supporting the controversial KXL pipeline have now been introduced in seven states, but while TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Chamber of Commerce have been lobbying in force for the bills to pass, there have been few opposing voices by either Democrats or environmentalists at public hearings dealing on the measures. The massive pipeline project will transport tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for processing and export and once underway, the project will be a major contributor to global warming.

• Reporters Say Exxon Is Impeding Spill Coverage in Arkansas

  Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they’ve been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.

• Activists claim Arkansas oil spill diverted into wetland

Finance

• Spain’s youth rally against unemployment

• The MF fraud: As bad as you thought

  Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, led MF Global, a futures broker and bond dealer that collapsed in 2011. MF Global investors lost as much as $2.1 billion. At the time MF ran into trouble, Corzine was eligible for as much as a $12.1 millon golden parachute. However, Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, told me this afternoon that Corzine didn’t take any compensation when he stepped down. He also said Corzine has been unemployed since then, spending time with his family and doing philanthropic work.

• Just Say Nao

  Sorry about the silence — I spent yesterday being human (the High Line in NYC is all it’s cracked up to be!), and then had a hellishly busy day today. If I had more energy left I’d plunge into the next stage in the European crisis; the moving finger of instability has now reached Portugal, with the government, of course, proposing to cure matters with More Austerity. But it will have to hold until tomorrow.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• To NYT, Nuclear Facts Become Iranian Claims

  Huh. Anything else U.S. officials want you to share with the public, absent even a shred of skepticism?

Censorship

• French Intelligence Agency Forces Wikipedia Volunteer to Delete Article; Re-Instated, It Becomes Most-Read Page On French Wikipedia

• Ways and Memes: PA Lawmakers Seek To Ban Photography Of Gas Drilling Activity

  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.

  In February, 2013 PA House Bill 683 was proposed by nine Pennsylvania lawmakers – Reps. Gary Haluska [D-73rd], Carl Metzgar [R-69th], Stephen Barrar [R-160th], M. K. Keller [R-86th], Dick Hess [R-78th], Dan Moul [R-91st], Mike Fleck [R-81st], C. Adam Harris [R-82nd] and Tom Murt [R-152nd]. Steve Todd was among the first to report on it in his February 26 post, PA State House Judiciary Committee: NO on HB683. This bill would prohibit people from photographing oil and gas operations because they are occurring on agricultural lands. By fracking farmland, gas drillers would gain new impunity under a piece of anti-whitsle blower legislation, commonly known as an “Ag-gag.”

• President of the European Parliament defends treating emails from citizens as spam

  On March 7, 2013, a large number of citizens tried to email members of the European Parliament to express their views on the ”Report on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report had attracted public attention on the internet and in media, since it called for ”a ban on all forms of pornography in the media”.

  One of the bloggers writing about this was the Pirate Party’s founder Rick Falkvinge, who asked citizens to email members of the European Parliament to let their views be heard, and set up a simple internet service to make it easy to find the addresses to the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).

  Around noon on March 7, approximately 350 emails from concerned citizens had arrived, but then they suddenly stopped appearing.

• Manchester police to record attacks on goths, emos and punks as hate crimes

  Decision follows campaign by Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up in memory of girl fatally attacked in 2007

• Twitter account suspended after mocking Exxon’s response to oil spill

  A Twitter account called @ExxonCares has been suspended after tweeting about Ninja Turtles and finding the men who built the Pegasus pipeline 65 years ago.

  The parody account was created last week in response to the Arkansas pipeline rupture that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, a suburb 25 miles outside Little Rock.

Privacy

• Email: A Fundamentally Broken System

  Phil Zimmerman has always been a privacy advocate, and while he developed PGP, others fortunately saw fit to follow and extend his work and developed an open source and compatible equivalent, called Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG).

  Today, GnuPG or GPG is the linch-pin for the vast majority of Linux Distributions (Distros) and provides a ‘keyring’ feature to ensure that software obtained from a Distro’s repository will be guaranteed to be safe from tampering (trojan horses, viral code insertions). So, too, GPG is compatible with PGP email and allows users to encrypt (envelope) their email correspondences to guarantee privacy.

  Thus far, however, the implementation of low-cost or free, ‘easy-to-use’ email systems with standard encryption have been few, so there truly is a huge unmet need here–world-wide.

  As more users embrace the Internet and become comfortable incorporating it into their daily lives, they have also come to understand the crucial importance of privacy. In fact, many feel that such privacy is their given right. I agree with that. The right to privacy is implicit and incorporated into our nation’s Bill of Rights. It’s no different than the paper mail envelope analogy I gave above.

• Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet

  It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.

• CIA keeping tab on Goa casinos?

  Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar Tuesday dodged a query from a legislator who asked if US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials are in the state to probe casinos and their alleged links to terrorist activities.

Civil Rights

• Opinion: Cameron Wants to Forget The Right to be Forgotten

  Online privacy is something I feel very strongly about, and when I heard about the current government’s plans to opt out of new EU social media laws, I decided enough was enough and it was time to take bigger stand. I won’t get into the depths of my views in this post but here is a brief idea of the situation.

• Today, we save the Internet (again): fix the CFAA!

  When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he’d been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn’t the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely — even though the website didn’t want to press the matter — the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to “exceed your authorization” on any online service.

• Fix the CFAA

• Help Us Remember Aaron Swartz By Participating in Our Week-of-Action, Demanding Congress Reform the CFAA

  Today, EFF and a host of organizations across the political spectrum are launching a week-of-action imploring Congress to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the expansive law used to prosecute the late activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz.

• New figures suggest Scottish CCTV is spiralling out of control

  Local authorities in Scotland have rushed to install even more CCTV cameras, which are proved to be an expensive and evidentially unsuccessful means of surveillance.

  The public would be far safer if the money was spent on street lighting, proper policing and actually punishing criminals when they are caught, rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and putting them back on the streets. In too many towns we now have a CCTV on every street corner, yet never see a police officer there.

• Four race-crime convictions for neo-Nazi website

  Four men were convicted of inciting race hatred Monday from the Italian website of the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. The four, aged 23 to 42 and from various towns across Italy, were sentenced to terms ranging from 30 months to three years for “promoting and directing a group whose purpose was the instigation to ethnic, religious and racial discrimination and violence”. A Rome judge found the four guilty of targeting “Jews and immigrants, advocating the supremacy of the white race and instigating racism and Holocaust-denial”. The four, who were placed under house arrest Monday, were arrested November 16 after police shut down the website, which had regularly posted anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • In our digital world you don’t own stuff, you just license it

    Corporations and lawmakers have put us on course for a world where consumers do not own the things they buy

  • The Pirate Bay Moves to .GL Domain in Anticipation of Domain Seizure

  • Pirate Party evangelist Rick Falkvinge vows that the copyright cartels won’t grind him down

    PIRATE PARTY FOUNDER Rick Falkvinge is a travelling evangelist for the political group and its ideals, and he says that Pirate Parties will spring up when and where they are needed and that they are becoming needed more and more often.
    Falkvinge founded the Pirate Party when he realised that political change needed to come from the inside.
    “I realised activism isn’t enough. Politicians won’t care about an issue if their job isn’t on the line over it; they’ll look at all the activists and remember their own time on the barricades nostalgically, then go back to serving corporate interests,” he said. “My key insight was that votes beat all the money in the world when it comes to getting politicians’ attention.”
    The Pirate Party won its place in the European Parliament in 2009 after gaining success in the Swedish elections, and Falkvinge said that gave it credibility that previously it had been lacking. “Well, we certainly got credibility we didn’t have before,” he said. “Kicking the first politicians out of office forced them to take the threat to their power – us, not their incomprehension of the issues – seriously.”

  • YouTube’s Deal With Universal Blocks DMCA Counter Notices

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

What’s GNU/Linux Worth To You?

I was browsing the website of one of my favourite suppliers when I came accross an ad for VMware Desktop. Even though it was an old version they asked $177 for it. I poked around VMware’s site and found that it was available for GNU/Linux or that other OS so, if you used “7″ you have to pay an additional ~$100.

Five months in: Windows 8′s market share finally surpasses desktop Linux

I am, of course, being sarcastic. Windows 7, after five months of public availability, had captured 10.5% of the market. Even the much-maligned Windows Vista did better than Windows 8 at release — and in fact, to this day, still has a larger share of the market than Windows 8 (5%). Manufacturers aren’t celebratorily cutting the price of Windows RT tablets; they’re discounting the devices in a desperate attempt to shift unwanted stock. There’s really no other way to look at it: For a new version of Windows to grow by just 0.4 or 0.5% per month is simply atrocious. As you see in the graph below, Windows 8′s growth rate shows no signs of accelerating. At this rate, Windows 8 probably won’t break 10% before the end of the year. Eventually, having failed to reach critical mass, Windows 8 runs the risk of being eclipsed by Microsoft’s other OSes, just like Vista.

Desktop

• As much as I love the Chromebook Pixel, here’s what I would change

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 3.8.6 Is Now Available for Download

• Alien’s ARM sources and git

  I have been writing regular updates to the Alien’s ARM page on this blog which can be found in the top of left sidebar. Readers of this blog who only visit the blog’s front page, will probably not have noticed, so I decided to write a more visible status update on the main page.

• Graphics Stack

  • LLVM May Get A TGSI Gallium3D Compiler Back-End

    A proposal has been made to develop a new LLVM compiler back-end that would generate TGSI instructions, the intermediate representation used by Mesa’s Gallium3D drivers.

    Francisco Jerez, the open-source developer that has long been involved with Nouveau and did an X.Org EVoC project to work on Gallium3D OpenCL, is the developer proposing this LLVM TGSI back-end. During his “Endless Vacation of Code” project for the X.Org Foundation, the student made the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker nearly work. Well, it does work for OpenCL on Nouveau to some extent.

  • Wayland’s Weston Gets Color Management Framework

    Richard Hughes, the free software developer that has been quite involved within GNOME’s color management areas, wrote a set of patches providing an initial color management framework for Weston.

  • AMD RadeonSI Driver Officially Gets Compute Support

    AMD’s open-source “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards and newer now has early compute/GPGPU support.

  • Intel Driver Update Supports OpenBSD KMS

    The xf86-video-intel 2.21.6 driver has been released, which among other changes, supports kernel mode-setting on OpenBSD.

    OpenBSD finally received Intel KMS support and due to slight differences in the interfaces, there were some small changes needed to the Intel X.Org driver to support the BSD operating system.

  • Mesa Gets Support For GL4′s Separate Shader Objects

  • Watch How NVIDIA & Valve Ported Source To Linux

    Curious how NVIDIA Corp and Valve Software brought the Source Engine to Linux and their game porting lessons learned?

    Earlier this week I wrote about the NVIDIA and Valve sharing their lessons in porting Source to Linux. That article drew a fair amount of interest from the many Linux enthusiasts and Linux gamers reading Phoronix. Questions were raised whether there was a video recording of the presentation to shed additional light on the matter.

  • Nvidia’s 3D Tegra driver now open sourced

• Benchmarks

  • Intel Graphics: Windows 7 & Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 & Fedora 18

Applications

• An Early Look at OpenShot’s New Timeline!

  One of the most important features of a video editor is its timeline interface. The timeline allows users to arrange, trim, and position video clips over time. The next version of OpenShot will feature a new timeline, built from the ground up using modern web development technologies, such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Implement Open-Source Solutions: Thin Clients

  • Running PrestaShop 1.5.x On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Wheezy/Ubuntu 12.10

• Games

  • A lot of improvements in 0 A.D. Magadha

  • Is Valve’s Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?

    When I exclusively reported last year that Valve would be releasing their Steam client for Linux and Source Engine, most Linux desktop users and gamers were filled with joy. However, now that the Steam client is out in the wild and more and more games are coming to Linux via this digital distribution system, it seems not everyone is happy.

    For the past week within the Phoronix Forums has been a very active thread entitled Is Valve’s Steam antithetical to Linux and the very core of the open source spirit?

    The thread has sparked dozens of responses. The original poster’s views are that Steam is anti-ethical to Linux because developers must sign an NDA not to discuss their Valve contracts, Valve has some say over which games are distributed/promoted, control over some game pricing, reduces rights of the game developers, etc.

  • The Humble Weekly Sale: Red Orchestra, Red Orchestra 2 and Killing Floor

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Where does your window manager place new windows?

Distributions

• New Releases

  • OS4 OpenDesktop 13.4 Released

    Today we are pleased to announce the release of OS4 OpenDesktop 13.4. With this releases we bring in a lot of updates as well as some new functionality to enhance one of the most popular linux distributions around.

  • Release of GSRC 2013.04.06

• Screenshots

  • Pear 7

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva Delayed, Mageia Releases Beta

    The OpenMandriva team today announced that infrastructure delays are being addressed. The OpenMandriva Web presence was due to be in place by the end of March, but progress has only slowed – not stopped. In fact, Anurag Bhandari said they were picking up steam again. In other news, Mageia is pressing onward, sans live images again.

• Debian Family

  • A Bytemark donation boosts reliability of Debian’s core infrastructure

    Earlier this week, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services which will be hosted in a new data centre in York, UK. The hardware, generously donated and hosted by Bytemark Hosting, consists of a fully-populated HP BladeSystem (containing 16 server blades) and several HP Modular Storage Arrays (providing a total of 57 TB).

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Three Ubuntu Linux versions will reach end of life in May

      • Subject: Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Beta 2 released

      • Ubuntu’s Unity Next Running On Mir Display Server

        Canonical developers have hit the milestone of being able to run their “Unity Next” desktop atop the Mir Display Server. The work is still very early, but it shows for Ubuntu Touch they can swap out Android’s SurfaceFlinger for Mir.

      • Is Ubuntu really an alternative to Windows?

        To get the most out of Ubuntu, a user must either be just comfortable enough to adapt without caring about specific features and apps, or so advanced that customization and under-the-hood tweaks are a cinch. And this ideal user must not own a laptop, or a touchscreen PC, as Ubuntu is not at its best on those systems.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Upgrading Bodhi Linux to 2.3.0

          Some time after midnight Thursday morning, after getting home from my “day” job, I upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Bodhi Linux, numbered 2.3.0, which was announced on Easter Sunday by the project’s Lead Developer, Jeff Hoogland, on his blog Thoughts on Technology.

          This isn’t a major upgrade. I’m sure there are some bug fixes and minor enhancements, but it mainly upgrades some essential software, such as the Linux Kernel, Enlightenment window manager, Midori browser, Terminology terminal emulator and Ubiquity, the Ubuntu default installer used by Bodhi. In addition, this update adds eCcess, a new system tool, and includes a slew of new themes for dressing-up the desktop.

        • Lubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 Comes with New Artwork

          Canonical announced today the release of the last testing version for its upcoming *buntu Linux operating systems, including Lubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail).

          Just like the other Ubuntu flavours, Lubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 is powered by kernel 3.8.0-16.26, which is based on the upstream Linux 3.8.5 kernel.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi makes video walls cheap and energy efficient

  According to Wikipedia, “A video wall consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include LCD panels, LED arrays, DLP tiles, and rear projection screens.”

• Phones

  • Jolla’s Sailfish OS SDK installers are now out for Windows, OS X and Linux

    Sailfish OS screens

    Software development kit (SDK) installers for the Sailfish smartphone operating system are now out, Jolla has announced on Twitter. The SDK was previously demoed at Mobile World Congress in February.

    Jolla, which is led by ex-Nokians, has taken the abandoned MeeGo OS and wrangled it into a new, slicker version called Sailfish. The Linux-based OS will in theory be available for a number of device types, but the first commercially-available version will be on a smartphone sold through the Chinese distributor D.Phone and the Finnish carrier DNA.

  • Jolla Adds Sailfish SDK Installers For Windows, OS X, Linux To Push More Developers To Build Native Apps For Its MeeGo Platform

  • Ballnux

    • How Samsung Became the World’s No. 1 Smartphone Maker

      I’m in a black Mercedes-Benz (DAI) van with three Samsung Electronics PR people heading toward Yongin, a city about 45 minutes south of Seoul. Yongin is South Korea’s Orlando: a nondescript, fast-growing city known for its tourist attractions, especially Everland Resort, the country’s largest theme park. But the van isn’t going to Everland. We’re headed to a far more profitable theme park: the Samsung Human Resources Development Center, where the theme just happens to be Samsung.

    • HTC First photo gallery

    • Samsung Electronics forecasts jump in quarterly profit

  • Android

    • Android Version History: A Visual Timeline [Infographic]

    • Android Jelly Bean with an external Wi-Fi antenna

      Most Android-powered PCs-on-a-stick lack an external antenna, meaning Wi-Fi connectivity can be significantly hampered.

      Earlier this year, we saw a DIY modification allowing users to add an external antenna to their sticks. However, cracking open an electronic device and pulling out the trusty soldering iron is probably just slightly more than most users would be willing to do.

    • RedReader for Android: Open Source Reddit application

      There is certainly no shortage in regards to apps for Reddit on Google Play. In fact, if you search for Reddit apps in the store you end up with more than 1000 results. While not all have been designed for Reddit exclusively, it is fair to say that you’d spend days going through all of them even if you’d limit the apps to those with a rating at least four stars.

    • Russian video shows one phone running two versions of Android

      If you’ve ever flashed an Android ROM before, you know it can either be a great experience or send you screaming back to your stock experience. What if you could just run that ROM in a service like Parallels and switch to it whenever you wanted to try something new? If you believe the video above, that’s exactly what a couple of St. Petersburg Academy students have created.

Bringing Open Source Communities closer together

Web Browsers

• High five

  Time for Midori 0.5.0. I’ll say upfront the big number 5 doesn’t convey any major amazements or surprises. What this number does mean is two things that will unfold their true meaning in the near future: We’re adding support for WebKit2 behind the scenes, much of which didn’t make the feature freeze. Another behind the scenes feature is improved extension loading, which will enable extensions in private browsing or in app mode.

• STICK A FORK IN THAT BROWSER-BREAKUP STORY, IT’S DONE

  On Wednesday, Google announced it would change a part of its Chrome browser that users never touch directly, with differences that might take months or years to surface. The result was predictable: stories about Google’s “divorce” from Apple, underscored in some quarters with the claim that this is really Google sticking a shiv into Apple’s back.

• Chrome

  • OpenChrome Driver Is Far From Feature Complete

    After writing earlier this week about VIA quietly having a Gallium3D driver unknown to most of the Linux desktop community, I was digging a bit deeper to see if there’s any other hidden mysteries for VIA on Linux. To not much surprise, the OpenChrome open-source VIA graphics driver is far from being feature-complete by any means.

    For those unfortunate souls stuck with VIA x86 hardware, the FreeDesktop.org OpenChrome support matrix was coincidentally updated this week. This Wiki page reflects the state of OpenChrome for both its user-space mode-setting and kernel mode-setting drivers.

SaaS/Big Data

• 6 Top Data Analysis Tools for Big Data

Business

• Open Source leader xTuple ERP “tips-off” Wholesale Distribution Software

  xTuple vice president Wally Tonra, account executive Stacey Pandeloglou and software engineer Tom Atkins are suiting up for the big game. That ‘big game’ – in the world of industrial distribution – is the IMARK Showcase, an annual marketing conference and trade show that gives the group’s members an inside track on the latest products for wholesale distributors.

• Open Source leader xTuple ERP “tips-off” Wholesale Distribution Software

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• autoconf-archive @ Savannah: Noteworthy changes in release 2013.04.06

• Where The Free Software Movement Went Wrong (And How To Fix It)]

  According to Morozov, O’Reilly hijacked Richard Stallman’s free software movement and turned it into the more corporate-friendly open source movement. From there, O’Reilly would go on to redefine web freedom as freedom for companies like Google to do whatever they want online, and to redefine open government not as a movement for transparency and accountability but as the need to give free data sets to for-profit companies.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • MIT Files Court Papers “Partially” Opposing Release Of Documents About Aaron Swartz Investigation

    …role MIT played in Swartz’s prosecution and the vigilance of the U.S. Attorney General in the case.

  • Who Polices Prosecutors Who Abuse Their Authority? Usually Nobody

  • LETTER TO GOODLATTE CRITICIZES CFAA ANTI-REFORM LANGUAGE

Programming

• R version 3.0.0

Bill Maher, Bernie Sanders, And A Solid Smackdown Of The Right Wing (VIDEO)

Hardware

• ARM On The Cutting Edge Of Technology

  While Intel will surely have a role in the future of all IT, profits are sure to be reduced as Moore’s Law cannot eclipse the advantages of ARM and the cost of development, production and operation of x86 will always be higher than ARM. M$ will have revenue capped and probably cut by more than half. Within a few years every human on the planet will know they have a choice and M$ and Intel will have to compete on price/performance. Gone will be the days when either of them was the default choice. IT has outgrown being locked in a dark closet of exclusive deals.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• WikiLeaks Spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson Demands Justice for “Collateral Murder” Victims

• While pardoning US colonel, Italy hopes India will do same to its marines

  Italy, which has pardoned a US air force officer convicted in a CIA abduction case, has hoped that India will follow the same example. While pardoning Colonel Joseph Romano, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said that the decision was inspired by hope that India would do the same for the Italian marines – Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone – accused of killing two Indian fishermen, BBC reported on its website.

• Chief of CIA’s ‘Global Jihad Unit’ Revealed Online

  Her name is Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and, according to independent reporters Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, she is a CIA analyst who is partially responsible for intelligence lapses that led to 9/11. The two reporters recently released a “documentary podcast” called “Who Is Richard Blee?” about the chief of the agency’s bin Laden unit in the immediate run-up to the 9/11 attacks and featuring interviews with former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, former CIA agent Bob Baer, Looming Tower author Lawrence Wright, 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Keane, and others. In it, Nowosielski and Duffy make the case that Bikowsky and another CIA agent named Michael Anne Casey deliberately declined to tell the White House and the FBI that Khalid al-Mihdhar, an Al Qaida affiliate they were tracking, had obtained a visa to enter the U.S. in the summer of 2001. Al-Mihdhar was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77. The CIA lost track of him after he entered the U.S.

  [...]

  Bikowsky was also, according to Nowosielski and Duffy, instrumentally involved in one of the CIA’s most notorious fuck-ups—the kidnapping, drugging, sodomizing, and torture of Khalid El-Masri in 2003 (El-Masri turned out to be the wrong guy, and had nothing to do with terrorism). As the Associated Press’ Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported earlier this year, an analyst they described only by her middle name—”Frances”—pressed for El-Masri to be abducted even though some in the agency weren’t convinced he was the terrorist that Frances suspected he was. Instead of being punished or fired for the error, “Frances” was eventually promoted to running the Global Jihad Unit by then-CIA director Michael Hayden. According to Goldman and Apuzzo’s story, “Hayden told colleagues that he gave Frances a pass because he didn’t want to deter initiative within the counterterrorism ranks.”

• Guantanamo Hunger Strike Grows As Military Locks Out Press

  In the midst of an ongoing hunger strike, the military is denying reporters access to the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.

  The military is telling reporters it will be over a month before there’s even a possibility of a tour of the detention facilities that house most of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners. A military spokeswoman based in Guantanamo told HuffPost on Friday that there would be no opportunity for press to access any of the prison facilities until May 6 at the earliest. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage had been trying to fly down for a visit next week, but told HuffPost that he was informed Friday afternoon the trip wasn’t happening.

• Amy Goodman: Corporate media is ‘an extreme media beating the drums for war’

• Police teach tactics for handling ‘sovereign citizens’

  The FBI classifies such people, who refuse to recognize government authority in virtually any form, as part of a domestic terrorist movement.

• UK Neo-Nazi Darren Clifft Arrested after KKK-Style Mock Hanging at Rally

  A notorious British neo-Nazi has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after he was accused of posting racist and inflammatory material on the internet.

  Darren Clifft, 23, from Walsall, West Midlands is believed to have been one of the ringleaders behind last month’s far-right rally in Swansea, when around 50 white supremacists were confronted by a crowd of around 500 anti-racism campaigners.

  Clifft, who also goes by the name Daz Christopher, is known to police having previously voiced support for the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree in Norway in 2011.

• Book review: ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ By Mark Mazzetti

  Yet isn’t the CIA’s real job to steal other countries’ secrets, rather than to carry out targeted killings?

• Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence

  Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.

  Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a “changed man” and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to “find the intelligence” that he wanted to use to justify going to war.

• Two Months Ago: FAA Releases New Drone List—Is Your Town on the Map?

  The Federal Aviation Administration has finally released a new drone authorization list. This list, released in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, includes law enforcement agencies and universities across the country, and—for the first time—an Indian tribal agency. In all, the list includes more than 20 new entities over the FAA’s original list, bringing to 81 the total number of public entities that have applied for FAA drone authorizations through October 2012.

Cablegate

• US embassy planned to topple Chavez’ government says new WikiLeaks cable

• Leaked Cable Discloses Bush Administration’s Plans to Aid Opposition to Hugo Chávez

  WikiLeaks released a State Department cable from 2006 detailing the efforts of former president George W. Bush’s administration to aid opposition to Venezuela’s now-deceased president Hugo Chávez.

• Senator Assange?

  The Wikileaks Party’s campaign director says Julian Assange is a real chance to win a Senate seat in September, but what then?

• America’s Man in Caracas: Wikileaks Reveals OTI Plot to Bring Down Chávez

  Documents released by WikiLeaks explain in detail former US ambassador’s strategy to undermine Chávez’s regime.

  After the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) in 2002, in the best tradition of the Cold War, the US Embassy in Venezuela launched a plan to put an end to Chavismo (the name given to Hugo Chávez’s left-wing political ideology), as revealed in secret documents released by WikiLeaks.

  An investigation carried out and published on March 18 by Pública — the independent Brazilian Agency of Investigative Reporting and Journalism— exposed the five-point strategy implemented between 2004 and 2006 by the former US ambassador, William Brownfield.

• Bradley Manning: ‘New York Times’ Endorsed Source, or Traitor?

  “By this logic, Woodward’s sources are aiding the enemy.”

  Despite the seemingly ominous potential consequences Manning’s case could have on future whistleblowers and the ability of journalists to conduct high-profile investigations using anonymous sources, many news outlets are only now picking up on the broader implications of Manning’s case.

  “It is troubling to see how much the mainstream media has ignored the Manning case,” says Timm. “Manning gave the media a treasure trove of information that they have been using for the past two years. Almost every day you see a story that originated from Manning’s leak. It has enriched the public’s knowledge of what the government is doing in their name. Yet many in the press have been ignoring the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge and how it could affect their work going forward.”

  Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers, is revered in media circles and among government transparency and First Amendment advocates as a paragon of virtue. Why not Manning? Especially after news broke last year that the military was virtually torturing him in captivity.

  The reason may be simple generational pettiness and old media snobbery.

• PJ Crowley: US Military Risks Making Bradley Manning a ‘Martyr’

  Former State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has written a column for The Guardian that argues the United States military should not give America’s enemies and rivals a “propaganda victory” by taking Pfc. Bradley Manning’s case to trial. He suggests the military may be “martyring” Manning and the military should accept his guilty plea and send him to prison for 20 years.

• WikiLeaks activist in New York to protest US whistleblowers clampdown

  “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”; “Keep shoot’n, keep shoot’n”; “Light ‘em up, come on fire!” the captions say.

  Jónsdóttir is struck by the fact that the only person who has been prosecuted as a result of the video was its alleged leaker, Manning. “None of the individuals responsible for the war crimes shown in Collateral Murder have been put on trial. Only him.”

  In Jónsdóttir’s view, the heavy-handed approach of the US government towards those she considers internet whistleblowers has started to taint the reputation of America around the world. “It’s like China, the surveillance state. When the US government ordered its employees not to look at WikiLeaks, that was like the Chinese regime telling its people not to look at internet material on Tibet – I don’t see any difference.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest

• World’s Largest Solar Boat Announces Trans-Atlantic Trip to Conduct Climate Change Experiments

  In 2010, PlanetSolar’s Tûranor solar-powered boat completed a 19-month voyage around the world. Now the eco-vessel is set to set sail again over the Atlantic Ocean in order to conduct experiments along the Gulf Stream in a project known as PlanetSolar DeepWater. The 115-foot Swiss catamaran, whose name means ‘power of the sun’ in Elvish, will take measurements on behalf of the University of Geneva.

• ExxonMobil spills chemicals in Louisiana while cleaning spilled oil in Arkansas

  Even as ExxonMobil was mopping up after its disgusting tar-sands oil spill in Arkansas on Wednesday, it spilled an unknown amount of unknown chemicals — possibly hydrogen sulfide and cancer-causing benzene — during an accident at a riverfront refinery in Louisiana.

• Canada to U.S.: About that Keystone pipeline …

  More recently, Canadians introduced North America’s first economy-wide carbon tax in British Columbia (The Economist called it “a winner”), and the continent’s first true feed-in-tariff program, in Ontario. As a result of the latter policy, by the end of this year Ontario will unplug from coal power forever. We also have cleantech sectors that have spurred cool innovations, like CO2-sequestering concrete.

  It’s getting tougher for many of us to square these accomplishments, and our national character, with the vision of those who insist, in this age of accelerating climate change, that it is our destiny to become the world’s gas pump — with Keystone XL serving as one of the hoses.

• Dispatches From Exxon’s Spill Zone, Days 3 and 4

• Beavers Suffer Severe Burns After Helping to Stop Oil Spill

  Six beavers at Utah’s Willard Bay State Park are being called superheroes after helping to contain an oil leak from pouring into the bay and marsh land. Sadly, three of the beavers were severely burned while the family built a dam that blocked a large portion of the spill.

• Energy board changes pipeline complaint rules

  Canadians who want to tell the National Energy Board what they think about proposed pipeline projects – either in person or in writing – must now complete a 10-page application form proving they would be directly affected by the development or that they have relevant expertise.

Finance

• Time Is Not Money, and Cash Doesn’t Talk

  The expression “Time is money” was coined by Benjamin Franklin. It is a relatively new saying, among countless others, that represents the rot that started to eat at the core of our global social edifice during the industrial revolution. With the exchange of clock hours for money began the notion of time as being an entity independent of any natural phenomenon. Such a concept is still absent from some cultures, like that of the Amondawa, a rare Amazonian tribe that had the luck to remain isolated from modernity. Of course, the Amondawa understand the idea of meeting somebody at sunset, or tomorrow, but time as something with a value per hour that may be traded for goods and services is unknown to them.

• Zombie foreclosures: 300,000 ‘undead’ properties stalk ex-owners

  Zombie foreclosure: (noun) A home whose owner has abandoned the property but which the bank never finished foreclosing upon, leaving the owner legally and financially responsible for the decaying building.

• Offshore Tax Havens Cost Average Taxpayer $1,026 a Year, Small Businesses $3,067

  U.S. PIRG, Sen. Levin, Small Business Leaders Release “Picking up the Tab 2013: Average Citizens and Small Business Owners Pay the Price for Offshore Tax Havens”

• With Bruce Heyman, Another Local Obama Bundler Just Got an Ambassadorship

  So word is out, if not officially from the White House, that mega-bundler and Goldman Sachs partner Bruce Heyman, and his wife, Vicki, are off to Ottawa, assuming he makes it through his senate confirmation. True, it’s not London or Paris—those are already occupied, for the time being, by other Chicago bundler ambassadors. But Ottawa is considered to be a lovely posting, and the ambassador does not have to worry much about speaking any language except English.

• Offshore Leaks set to reveal more embarrassing tax dodging

  The list detailing the identities of thousands of people hiding money in offshore accounts could reveal 160 times more data than Wikileaks.

  Analysing the details of what is now become known as Offshore Leaks will take some time, according to Catherine Boss, a journalist at Swiss paper Sonntagszeitung, who worked on the investigation to track the hidden cash.

  “It’s just the beginning. We have only looked at about 10 percent of the Swiss businessmen and women involved and we’ll continue to work on it.”

• The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Is a Failed Experiment

• How Worker-Owned Companies Work

  Economist Richard Wolff is a proponent of democracy at work: an alternative capitalism that thrives on workers directing their own workplaces. In the documentary film Shift Change, producers Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young tell the stories of successful cooperative businesses from Spain to San Francisco. We caught up with Dworkin and Young to find out what makes cooperative businesses work.

• Whining About Unpaid Writing Gigs Isn’t Going To Increase Writers’ Incomes

  Nate Thayer’s whiny post about the Atlantic asking for permission to run one of his articles for free has attracted a lot of online attention. As usual, I agree with Matt Yglesias’s take. And like Matt my career as a professional writer was made possible because I wrote for free for a number of years before people started paying me. I contributed daily to a group blog called the Technology Liberation Front for more than two years before I started getting paid opportunities to write about tech policy. And this blog (for which I get paid based on the traffic I generate) began its life as a personal blog in 2009. It took almost 2 years before Forbes approached me about moving it to their site.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Huckabee: It’s the ‘truth’ that Obama on guns is like Nazi dictatorship

Censorship

• French Intelligence Forces Volunteer Sysop to Delete Wikipedia Article

• “I made some stupid posts”: Anti-troll site gagged after threats against poet

• Wikipedia editor allegedly forced by French intelligence to delete “classified” entry

  On Saturday, Wikimedia France posted a press release regarding the recent deletion of a Wikipedia entry titled “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute.” According to the foundation, France’s Homeland Intelligence agency had demanded “classified” information taken down from Wikipedia.fr, and when the Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts Wikipedia) refused, it allegedly sought out a volunteer systems operator with the power to delete articles, brought him to the agency’s office, and demanded that he take the article down there or face legal charges.

• Is Google liable for Autocomplete results? Italian court says ‘no’

  Can Google be liable for content displayed on its Autocomplete service?

  This question has been raised quite often and a bit everywhere in the past few years.

  As Kate reported some time ago, courts in Germany, France, Japan, Argentina, Ireland, and Italy (just to name but a few) have been asked to determine whether a provider like Google can be considered liable for potentially defamatory terms associated with a particular term searched for on its platform.

• Wikimedia Announcement

  And I feel that although we’re in good shape, with a promising future, the same isn’t true for the internet itself. (This is thing number two.) Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development, and who is not. Last year we at Wikimedia raised an alarm about SOPA/PIPA, and now CISPA is back. Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we’re –increasingly, I think– seeing important decisions made by unaccountable non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based internet to one that’s consumption-based. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online — what’s good for ordinary people — but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that’s what I want to do next.

• SEC Embraces Social Media

  Executives with itchy Twitter fingers can rest easier after federal securities regulators blessed the use of social-media sites to broadcast market-moving corporate news.

Privacy

• Sprint, Softbank to shun Chinese networking equipment

  US officials have accused Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE of having close ties with the Chinese government and military. They claim the companies’ equipment raises the threat of “cyber-espionage” or attacks on US communications networks, although a White House review last year found no clear evidence that Huawei spied for China.

• Apple’s iMessage encryption trips up feds’ surveillance

• Untappable Apple or DEA Disinformation?

  Tech news site CNET has an interesting, but I suspect somewhat misleading, story today suggesting that text messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service—an Internet-based alternative to traditional cell phone SMS text messages—are “impossible to intercept” by law enforcement. Yet that is not quite what the document on which the story is based—an “intelligence note” distributed to law enforcement by the Drug Enfrocement Administration—actually says.

• The Real Reason The Feds Can’t Read Your iMessages

• ‘Going Dark’: What’s So Wrong with the Government’s Plan to Tap Our Internet?

  We know it’s open season on our data. Simply by examining your online interactions, your trades of email or gender in exchange for access, it’s not that difficult for big companies, government agencies or unscrupulous persons to establish a profile of who you are—political affiliations, religious beliefs, relationships, consumer habits, job history, schools you attended, locations you frequent, and in some cases, even your home address. It’s not dead, but privacy will never be the same.

• Google’s Alma Whitten to step down

  Google’s first privacy director, Alma Whitten, is to step down after three years in the role.

Civil Rights

• Emails Detail Northern District’s Use of Controversial Surveillance

  In 2011 federal prosecutors were working with magistrate judges in the Northern District to resolve concerns about the government’s use of sophisticated surveillance technology known as a stingray to track people using their cellphone signals.

• Google Fights U.S. National Security Probe Data Demand

  It “appears” to be the first time a major communications company is pushing back after getting a so-called National Security Letter, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group. The challenge comes three weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that NSLs, which are issued without a warrant, are unconstitutional.

  “The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google,” said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman, who represented an unidentified service provider that won the March 14 ruling. “So far no one has really stood up for their users” among large Internet service providers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Report: US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple’s iPad Mini Trademark Application, Deemed “Merely Descriptive

    Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant’s goods.”

    The letter was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’

• Copyrights

  • Joe Biden Pushed For “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Plan, IFPI Says

    IFPI wants governments worldwide to facilitate plans to tackle online piracy, whether voluntary or not. The music group’s CEO Frances Moore mentions the U.S. six-strikes program as a prime example. On paper the agreement between copyright holders and ISPs was voluntary, but Moore reveals that Vice President Joe Biden was one of the driving forces behind it.

  • Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws

  • U.S. Government’s Anti-Piracy ‘Six Strike’ Conversations Remain Secret

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

    For years, many a music fan has wondered what we first posited back in 2008: “Can I resell my MP3s?”
    After all, as we’ve pointed out in the past, nearly all digital good sales are really licenses rather than sales as conventionally understood. The question here is, can such a license be bought and sold to other users?

  • Prenda Law’s Attorneys Take The Fifth Rather Than Answer Judge Wright’s Questions

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

  • Judge Ends Hearing In 12 Minutes

    Well that happened much faster than expected. While Judge Otis Wright apparently had cleared his entire schedule today for the Prenda hearing, the actual hearing lasted all of 12 (count ‘em) minutes, with Judge Wright declaring “we’re done” before storming out. We’ll have a more detailed writeup from Ken White, who was in the courtroom, shortly, but here’s a quick summary of what happened. Unlike last time, everyone actually showed up (well, except for the imaginary Alan Cooper of AF Holdings who does not appear to exist) and promptly pleaded the fifth.

  • Transcript Of The 12 Minute ‘We’re Done’ Prenda Hearing Released

    We had Ken White’s awesome analysis of what happened at the Prenda Law hearing earlier this week, but now the full transcript of the hearing has been released so you can read along (or figure out how to incorporate it into the necessary movie script).

  • Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet

    Theresa May: determined to spy on everything we do on the internet.

  • A “Hollywood Ambassador” Would Make Bad Copyright Trade Policy Even Worse

    Copyright laws that represent the one-sided concerns of Hollywood at the expense of the broader public interest do not belong in trade agreements. Period.

    Yet just days after dozens of public interest groups around the world issued called on the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to keep copyright and patent regulations out of a new international trade agreement, a Senator with longstanding ties to the entertainment industry introduced a misguided bill that would create a new position for a “Chief Innovation and Intellectual Property Negotiator” — in other words, an Ambassador from Hollywood, paid for by the general public.

  • Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 Announced

Jubilar 20th Croatian Linux Users’ Convention DORS/CLUC 2013 will be held from 15th till 17th of May 2013 in Croatia’s capital city Zagreb. Convention is going to be for the first time under Croatia’s president Dr. Ivo Josipović high sponsorship.

According to organisers, “Whether you are a beginner or advanced user of free and open source technologies, we believe that Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 will bring you three days of interesting keynotes, workshops, vast of new information and new business contacts.”

Croatian Linux Users’ Convention is one of the biggest conventions in region that covers free and open source technologies and gathers experts from all around the globe with the goal of knowledge and experience exchange. Harald Welte, Ivan Guštin, Theodore Ts’o, Mark Shuttleworth, Dobrica Pavlinušić, Brian Fitzgerald, Rasmus Lerdorf are only some of the names of the big experts who attended the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention so far.

Inside Mantis: a 2-ton hexapod robot with a Linux brain

After four years of development, Micromag Systems has finally completed the Mantis Hexapod Walking Machine, claimed to be the world’s largest all-terrain operational hexapod robot. The device stands nearly three meters tall, weighs just under two tons, and is controlled by a PC/104 module stack running embedded Linux.

Inside Mantis: a 2-ton hexapod robot with a Linux brain

Linux Ecosystem is Less About Technology More About Ideas

I was watching The Real Story Behind Wayland and X, a talk by Daniel Stone. The way he described the X server, we had been using a terrible piece of technology for years (still are). Linux had an inferior product doing critical things for the user. There were developers trying to fix its issues but were hindered by many other issues. A fresh start was needed and Wayland it was. It could even have been Mir.

It’s an ideal time to have Linux skills, SUSE exec says

Even as the job market has remained generally dismal for much of the working world over the past few years, there have been a few notable exceptions.

Job Market Still Ripe for Those with Big Data, Linux Skills

This morning, the U.S. employment report came out, with disappointing results that have sent markets down around the world. It’s still a tough time out there for job seekers, but we’ve been steadily reporting that in the arenas of Big Data and Linux, there are not only opportunities, but many good paying ones. This week, more reports have arrived corroborating these bright spots in the weak job market.

As I recently reported, The Linux Foundation has done extensive surveys showing that demand is very high for job seekers with Linux skills. In fact, 93 percent of respondent employers in The Linux Foundation studies say they plan to hire at least one Linux professional within the next six months. And, more than 90 percent say they are having difficulty finding people with Linux skills.

HTML5 and Qt, Two Popular Tools for Embedded Linux Application Development

ARM says its chips and Linux will sweep the industry

CHIP DESIGNER ARM has said that vendors are looking to standardise on both one chip architecture and a single operating system such as Linux across their product lines.

With many of ARM’s licensees preparing to make a big splash in the server market, the firm claimed its architecture is the only one that scales from smartphones all the way up to servers. Lakshmi Mandyam, ARM director of Server Systems and Ecosystems told The INQUIRER that the ability to stick with one chip vendor and run the same operating system throughout its product stack is something “people find very interesting”.

Gartner Predicts The Decline Of Wintel

Tablets expected to surpass desktop, laptop sales by 2015

Desktop

• I’m Cory Doctorow, and This Is How I Work

  Current mobile device: Nexus 4

• 32-bit Ghost Still Haunts on Linux Desktop

  People still hear something about computers and repeat it mindlessly without understanding the world around them. One such example is the support for 32-bit architecture and the bundled application base. For them a home desktop performs better on any 32-bit OS and the native 32-bit applications than their 64-bit counterparts, and the user should restrict to it. It’s true if that mythical user never goes beyond web browsers, word processors and media players. That’s very much it. If he/she jumps into some database work, media encoding and some other number-crunching CPU-intensive task, the power of 64-bit shows, almost revolves circles around 32-bit thingy.

• Are Androidbooks Upon Us?

  The many recent big moves going on at Google got many people excited about the idea that Google might merge its Chrome OS and Android platforms, creating a simple and open unified operating system strategy. I’ve weighed in on why I don’t think this merger will happen.

Server

• Adapteva’s $99 Supercomputer Is Closer to Fruition

  In case you missed it, in October of last year, Adapteva wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to build a Raspberry Pi-inspired $99 Linux supercomputer. The campaign was successful in raising $898,921 for the first versoin of the Parallella computer, a supercomputer equipped with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 16- or 64-core Adapteva floating-point accelerator. Quite a few people have questioned this idea, but it’s actually quite interesting and could usher in the era of grassroots supercomputing. Adapteva’s CEO Andreas Olofsson has recently been shedding more light on the project.

Kernel Space

• A kernel change breaks GlusterFS

  Linus Torvalds has railed frequently and loudly against kernel developers breaking user space.

• Linux Kernel Port To TI-Nspire Graphing Calculators

  The Linux kernel has been ported to the Texas Instruments TI-Nspire. The TI-Nspire series platform powers higher-end graphing calculators in recent years from the Dallas-based company.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD enables video decoding on their open source drivers
    

    In one of the most prolific contributions to open-source by a hardware company ever, AMD has contributed code to enable the Unified Video Decoder on AMD Radeon GPUs using the open-source Gallium3D based driver.

  • Open source Linux drivers for Tegra chips unlock 3D capability

    Think Tegra is only for smartphones and tablets? Think again! New third party drivers — which have been developed both with Nvidia’s blessing and assistance — will help to give the platform a foot in the server room door.

  • Open-Source 3D Support For NVIDIA’s Tegra

  • NVIDIA, Valve Share Lessons In Porting To Linux

    Last month at the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC), NVIDIA and Valve shared their experiences and pitfalls in porting the Source Engine to Linux. While talking about Valve’s experiences, many of the information can apply to any game developer (or Direct3D/OpenGL application) wishing to come to Linux.

    The PDF slides in full from the GDC 2013 presentation by NVIDIA/Valve can be found in full at developer.nvidia.com. To Many Phoronix readers, this information isn’t too new. Below are a few of the highlights from these slides.

  • Gallium3D’s “Heads-Up Display” Gets Some Early Love

    The Gallium3D HUD that makes it very easy to show various driver/hardware related real-time performance metrics on a heads-up display drawn over OpenGL applications, has already received a few improvements.

  • Tiling Support For AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver

    As a potential performance-boosting addition, the “RadeonSI” Linux driver for open-source support of the AMD Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards now has patches for supporting tiling.

• Benchmarks

  • Intel Ultrabook: Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 Tests

    Our latest benchmarks from the ASUS S56CA-WH31 Intel Ultrabook is comparing the performance of this Ivy Bridge laptop between Fedora 18 and a recent Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot under various workloads.

    The ASUS S56CA-WH31 is the laptop/ultrabook powered by an Intel Core i3 3217U “Ivy Bridge” processor with HD 4000 graphics that was used for the Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu Linux Intel OpenGL benchmarks and is also going to deliver some results from Windows 7 SP1 with Fedora and Ubuntu and other configurations later today or tomorrow. In this article are just some quick and early Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 comparison results for reference purposes.

Applications

• Fehlstart: a simple, quick application launcher written in C

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install Arch Linux, while keeping it simple

  • MATE 1.6 Released, Install It In Ubuntu [GNOME 2 Fork]

  • fbcmd: I can give you no guidance

  • Top 7 Linux Tips And Tricks For Beginners

  • How to install XenServer Tools on a Turnkey Linux appliance

  • Mastering The Linux Shell – Advanced Permissions

  • quote: Stock info at the cli

  • Terminology: More Than A Terminal Emulator (Ubuntu Installation Instructions)

  • How to Install and Setup Monit (Linux Process and Services Monitoring) Program

  • Linux Booting Process

  • How to measure the speed of SATA devices from the command line on Linux

  • VirtualBox 4.2.10 released and ubuntu installation instructions included

  • Running Redaxo 4.4.x On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Wheezy/Ubuntu 12.10

  • Installing WordPress on the devio.us OpenBSD system

  • How to Tweak And Perfect The Unity Desktop With Unity Tweak Tool [Linux/Ubuntu]

  • Installing And Using OpenVZ On CentOS 6.4

  • Mandriva: 2013:054: sudo

  • How to write CentOS initialization scripts with Upstart

  • Running PrestaShop 1.5.x On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Wheezy/Ubuntu 12.10

  • How to install Ubuntu Touch on the Google Nexus 7

  • How to install KDE 4.10.2 in openSUSE 12.3

  • How to use Facebook chat with Pidgin

    Pidgin is the default chat client of many Linux distros like Mint, Fuduntu, Solus … It supports many protocols, like Yahoo, Google, MSN and of course, Facebook. Here is how you set up and use facebook chat with Pidgin:

• Games

  • Humble Weekly Sale surprises with AAA Titles

  • Minecraft hits 10 million sales milestone; will probably get horses soon

    Take a deep breath: once a cult sandbox builder, Minecraft has racked up a total of more than 10 million sales across PC, Mac and Linux. Looking at the rather handy Minecraft Stats page, you can see that right this second 10,002,651 have bought the game, with 11,321 of those sales made in the last 24 hours. Those stats have probably changed by the time this post goes live, but just take that as evidence that Minecraft sells. A lot.

  • Red Orchestra 2 Coming to Linux?

  • Black Annex action strategy game announced and heading to Linux!

  • Valve’s GDC slides on porting Source to Linux!

    It gives a good nod to SDL as well which is used for Steam and the game ports, the latest version of which improves alt-tabbing on full screen windows dramatically for me.

  • Activision & Raven Open-Source Two Games

    The Activision and Raven Software game studios have open-sourced two of their games for “for people to learn from and play with” the code.

    The source code to the games Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy are now open-source and hosted on SourceForge.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE SC 4.10.2 moved to stable repositories.

  • CP discovers more oil spilled in White River, Ont., derailment

    Clean-up efforts were continuing Thursday near White River, Ont., where more than 63,000 litres of oil were spilled from a freight train after 22 cars came off the rails.

    Canadian Pacific Rail revised its estimate of how much oil was leaked. Initial reports on Wednesday said about 600 litres of oil had leaked from the tank cars.

  • CP Rail train derails in Ontario, spills crude oil

    Early estimates are that about four barrels of crude oil were spilled when a Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd train derailed in northern Ontario on Wednesday, a company spokesman said in an emailed statement.

  • Animation in Krita: one more step!

    Today a new cool feature arrived in Krita development version (many thanks to Boudewijn Rempt who did it): the “LayerGroupSwitcher”.
    Basically it’s just two little shortcuts (not assigned by default), that switch to next or previous group layer, hiding the previous group and showing the current one.
    With this it’s much faster to work on an animation or image sequence using group layers to separate frames.

  • KDE releases April stabilisation update

    In their monthly stabilisation update, the KDE developers have fixed 107 bugs in the open source desktop environment and its associated applications. In particular, KDE 4.10.2 improves the desktop environment’s Personal Information Management (PIM) application, Kontact, and its window manager and compositor, KWin. The KDE Development Platform has also been updated. More information about the update can be found in the announcement from the KDE team. KDE 4.10.2 is the second stabilisation update to KDE 4.10, which was released in February.

  • Kate Text Editor Gains Mini-Map Scrolling Ability

    The Kate text editor received a large number of bug fixes for the 4.10 release, and some exciting new features. A mini-map scroll bar is now available for Kate users, and an improved notification system. If you use the Kate text editor for KDE, be sure to take advantage of the latest changes.

  • Kubuntu 13.04 Beta 2

  • How to file bug-free bug report in KDE

    Free software projects heavily rely on user feedbacks, especially bug reports. Filing bug reports is one of the best ways for a user to contribute to his favorite app and make it better. However at times lack of proper bug report makes it harder for a developer to understand what problems a user is facing. So as important as it is to file a bug report, it’s more important to file it correctly. Incorrect bug report irritates a user as he feels that no one pays attention to his report and discourages him to file a report in future. At the same time it irritates a developer because he wants to know what’s wrong, help the user and make the application better he doesn’t even understand what the problem is.

Distributions

• Clonezilla Live

• Linpus Lite 1.9.2 Brings Better Support for Intel Graphics

  Linpus has informed us via email that the second maintenance release of the Linpus Lite 1.9 Linux Live operating system is now available for download and upgrade (for existing users only).

• New Releases

  • Pear OS 7 Server Has Been Officially Released

    David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system, proudly announced a few hours ago (April 4) that the server edition of the highly anticipated Pear OS 7 Linux distribution is now available for download.

• Arch Family

  • Moving to Arch from Ubuntu!

    I have used almost every major GNU/Linux based distribution out there whether it be Debian, Xandros, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Linux Mint, Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu. Each of those distributions have their own pros and cons. After using Debian for a while I switched to Ubuntu in 2005 and had been using it as my sole distro till 2011 when Unity happened. I was not just a user but also an advocate and a very strong supporter of Ubuntu. However, things changed with Ubuntu lately and online integration was the last straw on the camels back. I switched to openSUSE running KDE on it.

• Slackware Family

  • MP4 and other Codecs in Slackware KDE4

    It is well known that Slackware ships with KDE4 and codecs for various types of audio and video. However, MP4 and a few other codecs are not supported OOB. I spent some time mucking around with different phonon backends for KDE4 in an attempt to get some of my audio files to play in Amarok. Unfortunately, nothing like that worked for me. It finally occurred to me to check into gstreamer codecs packs. I discovered that GST has ffmpeg support. These are the things I needed to install to make this work:

• Red Hat Family

  • Peak 10’s IT Infrastructure Bolsters Red Hat’s Global Operations

  • Red Hat Achieves World-record Java Benchmark Result with OpenJDK

  • Powering Open Source: Peak 10 Hosts Red Hat

    Hosting company Peak 10 on Thursday revealed that it would provide colo services to popular open source and enterprise Linux provider Red Hat.

    In addition to general availability of its data center network, Peak 10 is also providing Red Hat with a private test lab for the company to scrutinize its applications preceding full release.

  • Fedora

    • This week in rawhide, the bonus 2 weeks edition…

• Debian Family

  • Debian gets served by Bytemark

    The Debian Project has announced that Bytemark Hosting has donated a fully populated 16 server blade HP BladeSystem with HP Modular Storage Arrays containing 57TB of storage. The new server, which will make its home at Bytemark’s new data centre in York, is said to be worth £150,000 per annum in commercial terms. Bytemark said that they have relied on Debian on their servers since they started the company in 2002 and said it “was always an embarrassingly good deal”.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Dell now offering Ubuntu Linux OS as option for Alienware X51 gaming PC

      • Alienware X51 Gaming PC with Ubuntu OS Available for $600

        PC gaming is steadily finding new footing in the living room. Valve has pushed the movement along recently, announcing plans for the Steam Box and adding controller functionality with Steam Big Picture Mode. The company has also championed Linux as an alternative platform, and as reported by Engadget, PC manufacturer Alienware is now following suit with an Ubuntu-powered X51 gaming rig.

      • Alienware X51 Now Shipping with Ubuntu Linux, Starts at $599

      • Alienware’s latest gaming PC has Linux on it, plays “over 25 games”

        Dell is one of the few PC makers that attempts to cater to Linux users with its computers. The company’s “Project Sputnik” laptop, a developer-centric version of its XPS 13 that comes with Ubuntu, is one such effort. PC gamers can also get in on the fun with the Linux version of Dell’s Alienware X51 slimline desktop, which as of today can be purchased running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

      • Game on! Ubuntu comes to Alienware

      • Alienware offers Ubuntu gaming rig

      • 10 New Features and Changes in Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail [Screenshots Tour]

      • Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ drops Wubi in final beta

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Fuduntu 2013.1 battery life – What gives?

          Fuduntu is a pretty awesome distribution. Rarely do I give a perfect ten to one, and so far, only Linux Mint managed that accolade. But then recently, I tested the last edition of Fuduntu, and it turned out to be magnificent. So much, in fact, that I had it committed in my production setup, where it failed just short of the 10/10 mark, but still exhibited fairly great results.

        • Ubuntu “Raring Ringtail” hits beta, disables Windows dual-boot tool

Devices/Embedded

• Embedded Linux video repositories

  Developers of embedded Linux- and embedded Android-based system software are well aware of the benefits of open-source software and its collaborative community of developers. One key resource is the growing abundance of free video tutorials and demonstrations amassed on the websites and YouTube channels of embedded-Linux and embedded-Android oriented projects, organizations, and companies.

• SODIMM-style modules run Linux on ARM Cortex-A8 CPUs

  Denx Computer Systems has introduced a second member of its SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) product line. The M53 module is available with Freescale’s i.MX535 or i.MX537 SOCs (system-on-chip processors), which integrate an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core, graphics engines, and numerous other functions.

• 8 awesome things created with Raspberry Pi

  The micro computer Raspberry Pi has become a real hit among tech fans all over the world. The model A was sold out in the US just within a few hours. Everybody wants this credit-card sized computer. And of course, being cute and cheap isnt the main reason behind its success. It is because with Raspberry Pi, people can create a lot of amazing things. And if you wonder what these amazing things are, here is a list of 10 awesome projects created with Raspberry Pi.

• Matrox Announces Linux Software Development Kit for SDI Video Cards

• Matrox Announces Linux Kit for SDI Video Cards, 4K Output Cards

• Small stable, low horsepower

  Go for Windows 7 if you need a mainstream OS and Ubuntu 12.10 if you don’t.

• 10 Hot New Linux-Ready Embedded ARM Modules (Gallery)

• 10 Hot New Linux-Ready Embedded ARM Modules

• Phones

  • Jolla Adds Sailfish SDK Installers For Windows, OS X, Linux To Push More Developers To Build Native Apps For Its MeeGo Platform

  • Sailfish OS SDK released for Linux, Windows and Mac

  • Android

    • CyanogenMod Android privacy vs. developer wars

      The chief developer of the popular alternative Android firmware CyanogenMod thought that requiring devices to report unique smartphone and tablet data would be an unqualified blessing. They reckoned without their users.

    • Travel Apps: 50 Android Apps to Ease Your Journey

    • CyanogenMod disables statistics opt-out, reverses decision

      The CyanogenMod developers have reversed a change in how the alternative open source firmware for Android devices transmits anonymised development information about its users to the project maintainer after users protested about the change.

    • Ouya review: can an indie console take on Sony and Microsoft?

Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Source Code Released

Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast Source Code Now Available To The Public

After LucasArts closure, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy go open source

We’re all still reeling from Disney’s shuttering of LucasArts yesterday, and tributes to the once-indomitable game studio are sprouting up all over the Web. One such tribute sure to bring a smile to programmer geeks everywhere comes from development house Raven, which has this morning released the source code for its two Star Wars titles: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. The two FPS titles were released in 2002 and 2003 and continued the story of Kyle Katarn, the bounty hunter and Jedi first introduced in 1995′s Dark Forces.

Apache OpenMeetings hits first Open Source Top Level Project Release

Have spare time, dev skills? See what open-source projects need your help with this flowchart

Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

Web Browsers

• Web browser war: The early 2013 report

  The latest NetMarketShare browser numbers are in for March 2013. They reveal a three-way battle for the hearts and minds of PC web browser users, but on tablets and smartphones, Safari is leading by a wide margin. StatCounter, however, has Chrome and the Android native browser leading respectively.

• Chrome

  • WebKit fracture puts a pinch on open-source browser efforts

  • Chromium announces new open source rendering engine project Blink

  • Chrome 27 Beta: ~5% Faster, New HTML5 Inputs

    There’s some more interesting web-browser related news. Google has pushed out the beta of their Chrome 27 browser and it comes with several new user-facing features.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Introduces Promising Payments API

    When it comes to making payments, lots of us still turn to credit cards, checks and other longstanding ways to get the job done, but the race is on to have most payments made via “digital wallets.” You can already make electronic payments via your smartphone using PayPal, Square, Google payments and other solutions, although the number of places you can do so is limited. Now, Mozilla is taking a big step forward in the digital wallet space by developing a mobile electronic payment platform that is likely to be standard in the company’s Firefox OS.

  • Open payment system for Firefox OS

    Mozilla has released an early draft version of a payment service API, enabling Firefox OS app developers to process purchases. The API design is in part based on Google Wallet, but the WebPayment API will remain open to being used for a wide range of payment service providers.

  • Firefox 20 Officially Lands in Ubuntu

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack Grizzly Open Source Cloud Platform Debuts

• There’s a new bear in the clouds: OpenStack releases Grizzly

  If you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation hIf you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation has just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

  OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors. as just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

  OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors.

• OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ Debuts with More Than 200 New Features

  Roughly six months after the launch of its “Folsom” release last fall, OpenStack on Thursday unveiled version 2013.1 “Grizzly,” the seventh and latest release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

• OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ Debuts with More Than 200 New Features

• Gartner Analyst Surprised That Developers Love FLOSS Clouds

  I have news for him. Folks who have choices and know they have choices do open their eyes and look at what’s available. Further, they like FLOSS because is does allow the flexibility people want. Non-Free software is advantageous to some. Free Software works for everyone else.

  I guess it takes time. Only a few years ago Gartner gave FLOSS no chance at all. Some of Gartner’s staff are still in denial but they will surely evolve faced with such overwhelming popularity of FLOSS with Gartner’s customers.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 4.0.2 Fixes Small Bugs and Glitches

Business

• Mulesoft Raises $37 Million for App Integration

  Getting data out of one app and into another is big business. It’s a business that enterprise integration firm Mulesoft is now growing with new funding and products.

  Mulesoft announced this week $37 million in new funding, bringing total investment in the company to $81 million.

  Mulesoft is not a new company, having started out under the name Mulesource in 2003.The company originated as a commercial effort around the open source Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) created by Mulesoft founder Ross Mason.

BSD

• AMD Kernel Mode-Setting Progresses For FreeBSD

  More of the Radeon kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver stack being ported to FreeBSD from Linux is beginning to function.

  For the past few months, the open-source Linux Radeon KMS driver has been ported to Linux. It’s shown signs of life but still isn’t fully working or in a state where it will be merged to the mainline code-base in the near future.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

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

• Shishi 1.0.2

• RCS 5.8.2 available

Project Releases

• MATE 1.6 Released

  The latest version of the GNOME 2 fork, MATE, is now out. MATE 1.6 includes updates to Caja, the panel and the control center

Openness/Sharing

• Open Source Mobile Payment Innovation in the Middle East Generates Arabic Language Interface on the Fly

• Open Access/Content

  • The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is broken. Tell Congress to fix it.

• Open Hardware

  • Open-source 3D printing of optical mounts cuts costs and permits customization

    To many, “open source” refers to software that is usually (though not always) nonproprietary, easily modifiable, and free. The term “open source” can also be applied to hardware — for example, optical-mounting hardware, as recently introduced by a lab at Michigan Technological University (MTU).1

    In a further twist, the hardware comes in software form, as downloadable files to be used with a 3D printer to build the final product. These 3D-printable mounting and other devices include lens holders, customizable chopper wheels, lab jacks, and optical rails — and even optics, in the form of a liquid-filled lens.

Programming

• Academia and Programming Language Preferences

  For years now, RedMonk has argued that programming language usage and overall diversity is growing rapidly. With developers increasingly empowered to select the best tool for the job rather than having to content themselves with the one they are given, the fragmentation of runtimes in use has unsurprisingly been heavy. Where enterprises used to be at least superficially built on a small number of approved programming languages, today’s enterprise is far more heterogeneous than in years past, with traditional compiled languages (C/C++) coexisting along with managed alternatives (C#/Java) as well as a host of dynamic options (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby).

Standards/Consortia

• OASIS Breaks the Traditional Standards Accreditation Barrier

  On Tuesday, OASIS made an extremely rare announcement for an information technology consortium: that it has successfully completed the process of becoming accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). As a result, it is now able to submit its standards to ANSI for recognition as American National Standards (ANS). And also to directly submit its standards for adoption by ISO and IEC. This is a milestone that’s worthy of note, despite the fact that over 200 standards setting organizations (SSOs) have achieved a similar status in the past.

British Library to begin web harvest

It aims to ”harvest” the entire UK web domain to document current events and record the country’s burgeoning collection of online cultural and intellectual works.
Billions of web pages, blogs and e-books will now be amassed along with the books, magazines and newspapers which have been stored for several centuries.

Science

• CIA’S VENTURE CAPITALISTS INVEST IN RADIATION DETECTORS

Health/Nutrition

• Occupy Medical: ‘If you need help – you get help’

  Every Sunday from noon to 4pm, volunteers gather at their “mobile clinic” to make a difference, and offer free healthcare in downtown Eugene, Ore. What started as a temporary first aid tent along the Occupy Eugene movement in October 2011 became the Occupy Medical clinic in February 2012.

• One of Us

  These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

• Garbage Patch, the newest country

  It is made of trash, is as large as maybe even Texas and is in the middle of the ocean. Oh, and it’s severely under-populated. Actually, no one lives in Garbage Patch, no man, no animal.

  Okay, Garbage Patch is not really a country but to focus on monumental examples of man-made pollution, the United Nations’ cultural and science agency UNESCO will designate the conglomerations of rubbish a veritable territory of its own.

Security

• CFAA 2013: Congress’ New Draft Could Incarcerate Teenagers That Read News Online

  Reading the news should be an essential habit, especially for students and children, yet anyone under 18 found browsing through the news online could hypothetically face jail time under the latest draft of proposed changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is supposed to be “rushed” to Congress during its “cyber week” in the middle of April.

• New CFAA Could Subject Teens To Jail For Reading Online News

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Crimes against Humanity in Guatemala: How the CIA and the Pentagon Supported the Military Dictatorship

• A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood

• 2004 secret deal with Pakistan on drones shifted CIA mission

• What We Didn’t Know About the Start of America’s Drone War Killed Thousands

• North Korean “state of war” declaration is a faulty translation and NOT official policy statement from Kim Jung Un

  As much as our leaders would like them to have taken the bait, North Korea has not declared war on the South or the U.S. in response to our unprecedented provocations. So when all else fails, leave it to yellow journalism like this piece of work from the New York Times or this obviously Photoshopped image that came out this past week.

  The much touted “state of war” declaration is not a declaration of war from Kim Jung Un but rather a statement of support for whatever decision he has too make from the “the government, political parties and organizations of the DPRK.” It claims only they will declare themselves in a state of war WHEN their leader makes that decision showing they are completely behind him. It is a statement of support from the people and perhaps a warning to the South that the North will not fold under their attack. But not a declaration of war from Kim Jung Un.

• New WikiLeaks cable reveals US embassy strategy to destabilize Chavez government

• NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ‘wanted to instil fear’ in black and Latino men

• North Korea News is All Hype

  There is a need to create a culture of panic in the United States and, arguably, everywhere else where the major media conglomerates have established news outlets. This arises from the ebb and flow of world events and our collective need to move on from one event to the next. What was once headline news will not be for long, so a headline blitz is needed to make things feel urgent, relevant and pertinent to our personal lives.

• Italy Abu Omar rendition: Col Romano pardoned in CIA case

  Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has pardoned a US Air Force colonel convicted in absentia over the rendition of an Egyptian imam in 2003.

• Italy pardons US officer for CIA abduction

  Italy’s president on Friday pardoned a US Air Force colonel convicted in absentia by Italian courts in the CIA-conducted abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street in a move he hoped would keep American-Italian relations strong.

• Italy pardons U.S. pilot convicted in CIA rendition case

• Italy pardons US officer in CIA rendition case

• From Afghanistan to Syria: Women’s Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA

  The first striking paradox of this conference is that it is being held in Qatar, a country where women’s rights remain limited, to say the least. In mid-March, the Qatar government even expressed concerns “about references to women’s sexual and reproductive rights“ which are contained in the UN Declaration of the Commission on the Status of Women called Elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.

  [...]

  Were a US proxy regime to be installed in Damascus, the rights and liberties of Syrian women might well be following the same “freedom-threatening path” as that of Afghan women under the US-backed Taliban regime and continuing under the US-NATO occupation.

• Zombie Drones

• N.Y. Grannies Protest U.S. Drone Strikes

• ‘Drones fly, children die’: US activists launch massive anti-drone campaign

• ‘Drones fly, children die’

• A weapon failing to keep peace on any side

  Drones are proving the best recruiters for the Taliban, writes Ben Doherty in Islamabad.

• American activists launch big anti-drone campaign

• Protesters rally against drones in La Jolla

• Local protesters rally against drones

• Activists Scheduled to Fly Drones Over La Jolla Friday Morning

• Anti-drone protests hit CEO’s home

• Group protests drones at BAE Systems Plant

• North Korea’s Attack Plan: Apocalypse Never Mind

• Keeping Yet Another Government Secret

  The story is odd, because such high-ranking CIA officials are normally named in news reports about their activities. So why is the media concealing her identity in this case? Because the CIA asked them to–that’s apparently all it takes.

  The real question is: Why did the CIA ask? The Agency reportedly wants her identity concealed because they say she is undercover, suggesting that disclosure could be a matter of national security or safety. But FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola (3/28/13) casts doubt on that claim, pointing out her high rank and the fact that her name is well-known to establishment reporters.

• The Duty to Avoid a War in Korea

  A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

  [...]

  If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.

• Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

  The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantánamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part.

Cablegate

• The Message of MLK, Bradley Manning and the Collateral Murder Video

• Award the Nobel Peace Prize to Bradley Manning

• WikiLeaks activist in New York to protest US whistleblowers clampdown

• Bradley Manning: ‘New York Times’ Endorsed Source, or Traitor?

• Surviving ‘Collateral Murder’: Soldier relives infamous WikiLeaks video

  It was the video that put WikiLeaks on the map: “Collateral Murder” turned the tide of war in Iraq and landed Private first class Bradley Manning in military detention. But for Army veteran Ethan McCord, it was just another day on duty.

• Work keeps confined Assange sane: dad

  JULIAN Assange cannot even look out of the windows of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, but his confinement has not dampened his work ethic, his father says.

• Top Swedish judge defends Wikileaks’ Assange

• Swedish Judge Supports Assange

  Julian Assange – seen here in London’s Ecuadorian embassy where he has claimed diplomatic asylum – has a new voice of support.

  The Wikileaks founder is fighting extradition to Sweden in connection with sexual assault allegations which the Australian says are trumped up charges.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Scientists Resurrect Bonkers Extinct Frog That Gives Birth Through Its Mouth

  It’s been gone since 1983, but the Lazarus Project has brought it back to life.

• Third major oil spill in a week: Shell pipeline breaks in Texas

  Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 barrels had been lost, amounting to almost 30,000 gallons of crude oil.

• Record low catch for Japan whaling season, Sea Shepherd blamed

  According to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry of Japan, this year was a record low for the whaling fleet, with only 103 Antarctic minke whales and no fin whales caught for its “research whaling” program. Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi blames the “unforgivable sabotage” by activists, particularly by the militant environmentalist group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

• Exxon won’t pay into cleanup fund because oil spilled in Arkansas isn’t “oil”

• Exxon controls skies over Arkansas oil spill

  The oil giant can deny permission to journalists, observers in fly zone over tar sands disaster

• The Lost Tribes of the Amazon

  Often described as “uncontacted,” isolated groups living deep in the South American forest resist the ways of the modern world—at least for now

Finance

• Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First ASIC-Based Miner

  A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.

  Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM.

• Why Bitcoin Is Poised To Change Society Much More Than The Internet Did

• Company profits depend on the ‘welfare payments’ they get from society

  The free market is a myth. From drug patents to quantitative easing, businesses make money because of state help

• Obama picks Goldman Sachs exec for ambassador to Canada

  U.S. President Barack Obama has selected a partner at the investment firm of Goldman Sachs in Chicago to be the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, CBC News has learned.

  Sources tell CBC News Network’s Power & Politics that Bruce Heyman has accepted the job but still has to pass a vetting process in order to be be formally nominated. His confirmation will be up to the U.S. Congress.

  If he is approved, Heyman would replace David Jacobson, who has held the position since 2009. Jacobson is also from Chicago.

• Wall St Burdens the Public Debt

  As the effects of the sequester agreement ripple through the American economy–massive cuts, that is, to social programs, and the military to some extent–one thing is clear: both sides–President Obama and the leadership of the Republican Party–seem to think that public debt is the biggest challenge facing the American economy. Well, our next guest begs to differ.

  Now joining us in the studio is Michael Hudson. He was a Wall Street financial analyst, is now a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His recent books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.

• Laiki Bank: The Cyprus bank staff hit worst of all

• Exposed: A Global Offshore Money Matrix of Up to $32 Trillion

  The covert handling of huge amounts of money away from public accountability has fueled the global austerity crisis by shifting tax burdens onto average citizens…

• Ex-Goldman trader charged in $7.6 billion rogue trade

  A former trader at Goldman Sachs pleaded guilty Wednesday to fraud linked to a scheme to hide an unauthorised $US8 billion ($7.6 billion) futures bet he made at the US banking giant.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• AP Ditches ‘Illegal’ Label

  The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to “illegal immigrants,” except in direct quotes. The term “illegal,” AP’s new rules state, refers only to actions, and not to people.

  Though they say it’s just the result of an ongoing in-house effort to rid the Stylebook of “labels,” the change is undoubtedly a victory for activists, who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term. Not only because it’s dehumanizing. As AP’s executive editor Kathleen Carroll points out, it’s also bad reporting, a “lazy device” that obscures meaningful distinctions.

• New Report Exposes Extreme ALEC Agenda in Arizona

  Seventeen bills introduced in the Arizona legislature in 2013 can be tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and every member of the Republican leadership in the state are current or recent ALEC members, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and its allies “ALEC in Arizona: The Voice Of Corporate Special Interests In The Halls Of Arizona’s Legislature.”

  “ALEC is a secretive but powerful force in Arizona politics,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director. “This report exposes how corporations and Arizona legislators, have worked together to keep citizens in the dark about ALEC’s extreme agenda.”

Censorship

• New Evidence: Homeland Security Spied On Peaceful Protestors; Worried About Protests Getting News Coverage

  We just recently had a post on the head of one of Homeland Security’s “Fusion Centers” (the same Fusion Centers found by a Congressional investigation to be a near total waste of time and money, finding no terrorists, but violating the public’s civil liberties) who claimed that the DHS centers did not spy on Americans, and then immediately admitted that they spied on “anti-government” Americans.

  The definition of “anti-government” was mostly left as an exercise to the reader. However, in a bout of good timing, the Partnership for Civil Justice has released some new DHS documents it received via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showing that DHS regularly spied on peaceful demonstrators and activists.

• ‘Strong Lack of Instinct’: Turkish Paper Threatens to Sue over Trial Access

• Turkish media to challenge exclusion from neo-Nazi trial

  Eight of the 10 victims of the neo-Nazi NSU underground organisation killed between 2000 and 2007 were Turkish citizens but no Turkish media organisation has been granted guaranteed seats for this month’s trial of suspected NSU member Beate Zschäpe.

  Yesterday Sabah said it was going to the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe to demand a seat reservation. The mass-market Hürriyet is considering joining the complaint.

Privacy

• The ATF Wants ‘Massive’ Online Database to Find Out Who Your Friends Are

• Nsa Electronic Eavesdropping Operation Near Yakima Closes

  The National Security Agency is closing a secretive listening post it has quietly operated near Yakima since the early 1970s, a newspaper reported Thursday.

  #The electronic eavesdropping operation, located within the U.S. Army’s Yakima Training Center, has been linked to Echelon, a global surveillance network operated by the NSA.

• NSA to close Yakima Training Center facility

• NSA closing secretive listening post north of Yakima

  The National Security Agency is closing a secretive listening post it has quietly operated north of Yakima since the early 1970s, The Yakima Herald reported Thursday.

• Utah Already Hosts NSA Compound; Wants to be Home of a Drone Test Site

  Utah Governor Gary Herbert is lobbying the Obama administration for his state to become one of the six drone testing sites to be established next year by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

  In a story published by the Deseret News, the Governor’s Office of Economic Development is identified as playing a lead role in convincing the FAA to choose Utah from among the other sites in 37 states vying for this distinction.

  While the exact location of the site is “under wraps,” Herbert’s office is promoting the idea by publicizing the economic benefits to the Beehive State.

• Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy

• St. Bonifacius says no to drones

  Worried that its citizens might be spied upon by eyes in the sky, a Twin Cities-area community has become one of the nation’s first cities to stand up against drones.

• Missouri House passes bill targeting drones

• Missouri Lawmakers Advance Bans On Drones, UN Program

  Missouri lawmakers advanced two bills this week that would outlaw the government use of drones — though they are rare in the state — and the implementation of Agenda 21, the United Nation’s program promoting sustainability, though it simply makes recommendations.

• California city to vote on banning drones

• Rancho Mirage delays vote on aerial drones

• My divorce from Google – One year later

• Google Reader: Google Giveth and Google taketh away. Keep Calm and Carry On

  Learn to programme and assert your independence or resign yourself to being incarcerated in a digital prison, albeit one with wall-to-wall carpet, television and central heating..It’s an open prison but it’s still a prison. Google Reader is dead. Long live RSS.

Civil Rights

• 6-y.o. Who Walked Alone to Post Office May be Removed from Her Home

  Dear Free-Range Kids: A few days ago CPS served my wife and me with a complaint alleging that we are neglectful. They want to take custody. Here is the chain of events that has led to this:

• Azerbaijan Government Worried by Facebook Activism

• Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama

  Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

• Liberty Preservation: The states say ‘NO’ to NDAA

  Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.

• Opponents Label Nullification “Nuts” and a “Bizarre Fad”

  Nullification is not the right of states to nullify any federal act. Rather, it is the right to choose to not enforce any federal act that fails to conform to the constitutionally established limits on its authority. Nullification presupposes that there are myriad (albeit limited) areas over which the Constitution has given purview to the federal government: defense, naturalization, foreign relations, interstate commerce, etc.

• Bush Redux?

  Not only has the president ignored his promised platform planks, he’s actually reinforced and strengthened some of the most egregious portions of Bush-era abuses of power.

• Abortion debate leads to comparisons with Nazi infanticide

  THE murder of infants with a disability in Nazi Germany was recalled during a highly charged debate on abortion, as doctors voted to reject radical calls for changes in the law.

• Google Challenges U.S. National Security Letter in Court

  Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the U.S. government, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acknowledging it is one of the first firms to do so.

  Google took the unusual step last month of revealing, albeit in vague terms, the number of NSLs it received from the US government. At the time the company said it was working with the authorities to improve transparency around the subject, but according to court filings it is also fighting against handing over users’ data.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Opinion: £53 and the Problem With UK Politics

    No-one forced, or compelled, Duncan Smith to make that statement. The assertion that it’s possible is one that rankles many people, however. Of course not everyone is feeling the pinch of recession and csuts, and that includes the former Conservative Party leader. While he may have been on unemployment benefits in the ’80s, he’s had steady employment for the last twenty years, all on public funds. Now asking him to try living on the same solutions he’s proposing for others isn’t really that big a stretch. In fact, given his experiences being a ward of the welfare state, and his military service, it shouldn’t be that difficult for him to survive, adapt, and overcome.

    However, the speed with which he’s back-pedalled and tried to move away from his initial position shows how promises trip lightly off the tongue when you’re a politician defending your party base. It’s ‘a stunt’ he claimed, ignoring the simple fact that after 20+ years as an MP, one currently earning significantly more (£134,565/year) than the average wage (£28,700 for UK males, according to the BBC in November) he may be a bit out of touch, and a bit clueless about the realities of his policies. Sure it looks good on paper, but without experiencing it first-hand, he’s not going to understand why it doesn’t work. At the time of writing, over 400,000 people have already said they’d like him to re-acquaint himself with that area of his job, to help him perform better.

  • YouTube Won’t Put Your Video Back Up, Even If It’s Fair Use, If It Contains Content From Universal Music

  • Film studios request removal of takedown notices

    Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.

    Google receives 20 million “takedown” requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.

  • Icelandic Píratar On Final Approach To Election Victory

    A new poll today places the Icelandic Pirate Party in parliament, with their election three weeks out. This follows a continuous and rapid ascent for the Icelandic Pirate Party. The poll will probably have the additional effect of putting the media spotlights on the party, further accelerating its growth.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

What Is Our Goal Here?

Desktop

• Linux in the Real World – A View from the Trenches

  Even among our ranks within Linux Advocate, there are “lively” debates on what our goals should be. But I will argue, given the current state of the Linuxphere…..

  That’s not going to happen either. Our biggest strength is also our greatest weakness. Fragmentation.

  Let’s break it down.

  First off, and not to get lost in semantics, I consider myself a Linux Mentor as well as an Advocate. Advocating is all well and good but without follow through, we’re not getting the job done.

  Everyone who enters the Linux Advocate fold does so with their own motivation and expectations. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. That’s just a fact of life. I can’t expect a natural introvert to do what I do any more than (s)he can demand I code to their level of proficiency.

Server

• Algo-Logic Presenting 10 Gbps Market Data Filter at HPC Linux Wall Street

  SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 3 — Algo-Logic Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in providing hardware-accelerated, deterministic, real-time, ultra-low-latency products, systems and solutions for accelerated finance, packet processing and embedded system industries, announces that it will present live demonstration of its newest FPGA-accelerated Market Data Filtering (MDF) application. This live demo will be showcased on Mon., April 8, at the HPC Wall Street Conference at Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

Kernel Space

• Another EXT4 Corruption Bug Gets Fixed

  A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.

• Another EXT4 Corruption Bug Gets Fixed

  A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD offers open-source Linux driver for hardware video decoding

    AMD’s Unified Decoder has been the object of envy in the open-source community for some time. The silicon, which ships on the company’s Radeon graphics cards, offers hardware-accelerated video decoding — but thanks to legal and DRM issues, couldn’t be used on Linux machines.

  • X and Wayland

    For me, networking of displays is the most important feature of GNU/Linux operating systems. Perhaps X became too fragile/complex/limited. Perhaps Wayland is the way forward, but without networking Wayland is pathetic. Now that it is coming together it is time for Canonical to get behind Wayland and share the load of generating good FLOSS with the rest of the world. Going it alone will mean serious fragmentation of GNU/Linux. OEMs, consumers, system administrators will have to choose which way to go. I can already see OEMs hanging back by using older releases of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. How long will it take Canonical to wake up to that?

  • NVIDIA Has New Driver Update To Fix Security Flaw

  • Intel Linux Driver Brings In Better Overclock Support

    Introduced last month was the ability to overclock Intel graphics under Linux while presented hours ago is a new Intel Linux kernel driver patch to provide better GPU overclocking support.

  • Digging Deeper Into AMD’s UVD Code Drop

    Yesterday it was exclusively announced on Phoronix that AMD was releasing open-source UVD code so that their open-source Linux graphics driver can finally benefit from GPU hardware-accelerated video playback. Here’s some more details.

    Now with the Linux kernel and Mesa/Gallium3D code having been published and having time to go through this code myself, after Fatima’s article earlier, here’s some more details. Of course, if you didn’t already, first read AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support for the overview.

Applications

• New major release of Linux Video Disk Recorder

  After five years in development and 43 developer versions, version 2 of the VDR Linux video recorder has been released by its author Klaus Schmidinger. The new software offers full HDTV support. TV images are processed either by a plugin using the graphics card or by a DVB card’s hardware decoder; however, only TechnoTrend’s S2 6400 DVB card, which is mostly unavailable at present, currently supports rendering images in HD.

• Open-source video recorder adds full HD support

• Linux Video Disk Recorder 2.0 Supports HDTV

• Proprietary

  • Opera Will Switch To Blink Engine Too

• Instructionals/Technical

  • My Ultimate Desktop Script

  • How To Add Su To FreeBSD

  • How To Delete A Gmail Address

  • How to Install Asterisk 11 in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian/Linux Mint

  • Using Linux in a Windows world

  • Create a Bleach Bypass Effect in digiKam

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.4 x86_64 (nginx, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3)

• Games

  • Divinity: Original Sin Mac Version Delayed

  • IT – A game/demo that takes 4D realism to the next level

  • Continuing Native App Rollout, Group Communication Tool HipChat Launches Beta Client For Linux

    Atlassian’s HipChat is stepping up to its commitment to roll out native clients for its real-time group chat and private messaging tool, with a beta release of the Linux client. The Linux client couldn’t come fast enough: Adobe AIR no longer supports the open-source operating system, which means the new native app adds to the web-based client as another option for Linux-based users.

  • Video look: Gaming on a Chromebook Pixel: Linux and Steam make it easy

    I recently purchased a Chromebook Pixel with LTE, but it hasn’t yet arrived. When it does, I plan to do some casual video gaming on the new hardware. No, I’m not talking about web apps; I mean native, third party video games. How’s that? I’ve shared part of the secret before: Simply run a script to install Linux so it runs side-by-side with Chrome OS. I can instantly jump over to it as needed. The rest of the solution is Steam, the video game distribution service that now supports Linux.

  • 0 A.D. “Magadha” Provides New Game Features

    Wildfire Games has released 0 A.D. Alpha 13 “Magadha”, the latest development installment of this popular open-source ancient warfare game.

    0 A.D. is the open-source real-time strategy game that’s been in development by Wildfire Games for more than one decade that was later open-sourced.

  • Project Zomboid RC3 has officially entered testing!

  • Valve continues pushing adding 5 new titles!

    Valve has done another push and put up 5 new games to Linux! All in Beta though so be warned there will be bugs! The titles are Ricochet, Deathmatch Classic, Team Fortress Classic, Half Life: Blue Shift and Half Life: Opposing Force!

    It’s great to see since to my knowledge that’s all (or almost all) their older titles now at least in Beta, which can only pave the way for newer titles like DOTA2 and Counter Strike: GO (two of my favourites) to be ported over!

  • FSgamer, a software to improve Game performance under Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kate: Search & Replace Notifications in KDE 4.11

    In KDE 4.10, the “Find All” and “Replace All” highlights all matches and at the same time shows a passive notification in a bar below the view. This bar is animated, and takes quite a lot of place in addition to the search & replace bar.

    Since some days, Kate Part can also show passive notifications floating in the view. Hence, we’ve changed the passive notification to appear on the bottom right as a small info message, showing the number of matches. However, in order to make this passive notification as small as possible, we removed the “Close” button, since the notification is hidden after 3 seconds anyway. Further, we removed the “Keep Highlighting” button. If you want to keep the highlights, just do not close the search & replace bar. The following video demonstrates this behavior, first for KDE 4.10, then how it currently will be in KDE 4.11 (watch the video in 720p):

  • KDE 4.10.2 Fixes Annoying and Dangerous Bugs

    KDE announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment today, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.2. This is an update/stabilization release that brought over 100 fixes. Some bugs were annoying, but one particular nasty bugger was also fixed.

  • KDE 4.10.2 Released, Fixes 100+ Bugs

    The KDE 4.10.2 point release is said to have over 100 bug-fixes. Reported improvements within the KDE 4.10.2 release include the Kontact Personal Information Management Suite, the KWin window manager, and others.

  • KDE 4.10.2 Brings over 100 Bugfixes

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • MATE 1.6 supports systemd login

    The MATE developers have released version 1.6 of their desktop environment. Originally derived from the source code of the last GNOME 2 release, the desktop environment offers a similar user interface. MATE 1.6 now works with the login manager of systemd, which has largely replaced ConsoleKit for user and session tracking in several distributions, and is also due to be used in the, as yet unnamed, Ubuntu 13.10.

Distributions

• Chakra: A Simple, Strong Energy Center for Your Desktop

• Sorting Out the Linux Desktop Mess

  Standardization in Linux is “not going to happen,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “What should be done instead is to stop lumping all the Linux distributions under the name ‘Linux,’ and just call them Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint and so on,” Lim offered. “They are that diverse.” In fact, “if we woke up tomorrow and only one desktop Linux distribution was left in development, we would all be better for it.”

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat CEO Runs His Billion-Dollar Company From This Uber-Modest Office

    We’ve told you that Red Hat is one of the world’s biggest “meritocracies,” where employees can, and do, call the CEO an idiot to his face, if they don’t like his ideas.

    CEO Jim Whitehurst is proud of that.

    He might be the boss, but in a meritocracy, people have power based on the respect they earn from their peers and once respected, they are entitled to speak their minds.

    We also told you that Red Hat is hiring like crazy. It just moved into a new headquarters building in downtown Raleigh, N.C.

  • Red Hat Is Still On Target To Nearly Triple Revenues In Three Years, CEO Says

    Red Hat, the first and only open source software company to reach over $1 billion in revenue, is still on track to nearly triple its revenue to $3 billion by 2016, CEO Jim Whitehurst said in an interview.

  • Analysts unleash the bears on Red Hat

    Nearly a week after Raleigh’s Red Hat released its earnings, the price cuts are rolling in.

    Just in the past few days, reports began to roll in on price-target cuts for Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) stock from about $60 a share to the low $50s.

    BMO Capital Markets cut its price target to $54 from $60 and MKM Partners made a similar cut to $53. Pacific Crest followed Monday by cutting its target from $60 to $55.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu: Riding HP Moonshot Into Hyperscale Server Market?

        When Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) unveils HP Moonshot servers on April 8, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution could be along for the ride. How does The VAR Guy know? And what are the implications for channel partners? Here are the answers.

        Canonical back in August 2011 vowed to make Ubuntu Server support ARM processors. Building on that statement, Canonical in November 2011 vowed to support HP Moonshot servers– which are also called microservers. Canonical has similar Ubuntu microserver work under way with Dell.

      • MapR Partners with Canonical to Ease Ubuntu, OpenStack Deployments

      • In-Dash Music Purchasing Proposed for Ubuntu 13.04

      • Ubuntu Studio, new leadership, and future plans

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 310

      • OpenSUSE – A real alternative to Ubuntu?

      • Three Ubuntu Linux versions will reach end of life in May

        Hard on the heels of Canonical’s decision last month to halve the support life for non-LTS releases of Ubuntu Linux, the company late last week announced that three versions of its popular Linux distribution will reach end of life in May.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Pear 7 [is out]

        • Second Beta of Pear OS 7 Is Available for Testing

          David Tavares announced last week that the second Beta release of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Linux operating system was made available for download and testing.

          Pear OS 7 Beta 2 fixes even more bugs found in the previous Beta release, cleans the entire system, fixes bugs in CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), and fixes issues and bugs found in locales.

Devices/Embedded

• Analysis of assembly code in Linux packages published

  Former Debian Project Leader and Linaro developer Steve McIntyre has surveyed a large number of Ubuntu and Fedora packages as part of a detailed study on the use of assembly code in Linux applications. This work was undertaken to identify packages that need porting to the new AArch64 architecture for 64-bit ARM processors. McIntyre generated a list of packages and then checked those that use assembly as part of their code to see what that assembly code was actually used for.

• Different and cheap, new $25 Raspberry Pi is selling

• U.S. swallows first $25 Raspberry Pi batch in one gulp

  The Raspberry Pi’s $25 “Model A” made a brief appearance this week on the website of Allied Electronics, its U.S. distributor. Compared to its $35 sibling, the lower end Linux-fired SBC (single board computer) sports half the RAM, one USB port instead of two, and lacks an Ethernet spigot.

• Raspberry Pi Devices Selling Well, Arriving in Global Classrooms

• $99 SBC runs Linux on 1GHz dual-core ARM SOC

  Embest is accepting pre-orders for a $99 single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1GHz dual-core Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip (SOC). The compact “MarS Board” provides interfaces for Gig-Ethernet, high-speed USB, HDMI, camera, and more, and it’s supported with ready-to-use embedded Linux and Android OS images.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Ubuntu for Android: Everything You Need To Know

    • Jelly Bean powers one in four Android devices

    • Android Jelly Bean on the rise, thanks to Google’s new math

    • Google to sell second-gen Nexus 7 tablet from July: sources

      Google Inc will launch a new version of its Nexus 7 tablet powered by Qualcomm Inc’s Snapdragon processor around July, two sources told Reuters, as the software giant pushes deeper into the cut-price mobile hardware market.

    • Google’s next Nexus 7 could arrive in July, report says

    • One year later, Android accounts for nearly half of all Instagram users

      One year after it made its debut on the platform, Android users make up nearly half of all Instragram users. A post on the Instagram blog tells us that Android now accounts for roughly fifty percent of all users but stopped short of providing any hard numbers.

    • OUYA – the new open-source gaming platform from Yves Behar

      Yves Behar’s Fuseproject consultancy has developed the OUYA games console, which was funded using the Kickstarter platform and aims to capitalise on the growing popularity for cheap, ‘open-sourced’ gaming.

Growing the community – the case for a jumpstart

There are several projects that can boast a clear track record of attracting, building and growing a community. LibreOffice is one of them, and so was his parent, OpenOffice.org . I’m not specifically speaking about the developers’ community, but rather about the worldwide community of localizers, QA testers, documentation writers and translators, local volunteers contributing their time to marketing and users support, designers… We had come up with a name back then : the Native-Lang projects. It simply meant the « native-language projects », communities working on the basis of their common language rather than on a country affiliation, which would have resulted often in politically complex and difficult situations.

SOS Open Source Has a New Face!

I am proud to announce that finally SOS Open Source has found a new steward in the person of Raffaella Corona. Raffaella has over 5 years experience in the IT industry, she has been at the forefront in selling high value training courses about open source languages and applications.

ATEME Enables Industry First Open Source Implementation Supporting HEVC

ARM says most ARM powered servers will run open source software

CHIP DESIGNER ARM says it expects its server chips to be deployed on servers that run open source software stacks.

ARM has been a vocal and active supporter of open source software for many years and has taken a major role in a number of Linaro working groups in recent years. According to the firm open source software stacks will run on most of its upcoming server chips, with the firm citing market demand.

Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software

Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.

The Community Edition software is designed for programmers, consultants, and do-it-yourselfers. For the first time the open source community has access to a full featured multi-store e-commerce solution for Java that is optimized for speed for both the EC2 Cloud and Data Center deployments. David Sopuch, CEO and eBusiness Director of Avetti.com Corporation said, “Finally the open source community now has a free fast solution that is full featured and can handle high volumes.”

Open source community best fit for new wave of industrial development

Open source is used just about everywhere, but when it comes to “safety-critical” systems, like software that flies planes or controls medical equipment, most of us assume that open source just doesn’t fit the bill. The regulations and requirements are rigorous, and ill-suited to the usual “fail faster” approach of open source.

Then, we learned about an initiative called Open-DO, which shows that FLOSS has a critical role to play, even in this specialized, highly regulated environment.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google goes on the Blink in WebKit fork FURORE

    When Opera Software killed its web browser’s rendering engine Presto, and announced it will instead use WebKit, the company did so with the best intentions.

  • Google Blink Leaves Open Source WebKit Behind – Will Security Suffer?

    Google is moving away from WebKit. Google is now going its own way with a new rendering engine called – Blink

    Shocking isn’t it?

  • Chromium announces new open source rendering engine project Blink

    WebKit makes the web go ’round, and yet it is soon to be joined by a new kid on the block: Blink, which was announced on Chromium’s blog earlier today. Says Chromium, the decision to create a new rendering engine “was not an easy” one, but ultimately good will come from it. Developers don’t need to worry, as the announcement reassures that little will change for them during the initial rounds of work.

  • Mozilla, Google Reveal New Rendering Engine Projects

  • Google Forks WebKit As Blink Rendering Engine

    Just earlier today was word that Mozilla is developing Servo, a new web-browser engine, and now comes a similar action out of Google. The search giant announced this afternoon they are forking the WebKit code-base for their Chrome/Chromium web-browser to form the “Blink” engine.

• Mozilla

  • Download Mozilla Firefox 20 for Linux with New Download Manager

  • Firefox 20 has per-window privacy and fixes three critical bugs

  • Mozilla Firefox 20 Improves Browser Privacy

  • Mozilla Open Source Servo Moves Away from Gecko for Next Gen Mobile Browser

  • Mozilla & Samsung Develop “Servo” Browser Engine

  • Samsung and Mozilla Collaborating on ‘Next Generation’ Android Browser Engine

  • Mozilla Research is on a roll

  • Here’s to 15 Years of a Better Web

SaaS/Big Data

• 7 Search Engines for Big Data

  Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Law Librarian Creates LibreOffice, gscan2PDF How-to Videos for 100 Linux Tutorials Campaign

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.2

  Use LibreOffice. It’s a great value. Most people will save more than the cost of their hardware using it if they use LibreOffice instead of the “pro” licences from M$. It has all the most-used features of office suites and few of its own that maximizes the value of your hardware.

Business

• NxtGen Saves Millions Using Open Source

  NxtGen Data Center and Cloud Services has saved in excess of Rs 4 lakh per server by using free and open source software (FOSS).

  The company has saved more than $4,000 per server in licensing costs for setting up private clouds by using the open source based OpenStack cloud virtualization platform.

• Headaches for Small Businesses

  Here’s where FLOSS can help. A small business can migrate to FLOSS in a day or two, often over a weekend, and have software that just keeps on working. Problems that drop off the radar:

BSD

• FreeBSD 9.0 Reached End-Of-Life on March 31, 2013

  Even though it was known by most of FreeBSD users that the 9.0 release of the best BSD operating system will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on March 31, 2013, we feel obliged to announce users that FreeBSD 9.0 is no longer supported.

  Originally released on January 10, 2012, FreeBSD 9.0 was a short-term supported release (one year), as opposed to the FreeBSD 8.3 release, which is still supported until April 30, 2014.

Project Releases

• Graphos 0.4

Public Services/Government

• Open Source ‘preference’ mandate: overcoming government impasse in the public sector

  The Open Source industry have been waiting the best part of ten years for the UK Government to mandate a ‘preference’ for Open Source Software (OSS) over proprietary or closed-source alternatives.

• Open government beyond open data and transparency

  The term “Open Government” (OG, hereafter) has been used since the 70s to refer to the effort to reduce bureaucratic opacity and open up governments to public scrutiny. Current notions of OG are thus the result of more than four decades of endeavours to increase the transparency of government actions. These efforts materialized mainly in the enactment of legislation on access to information, privacy, data protection and administrative procedures, and by creating ombudsman offices and supreme audit institutions.

• Malaysian Government Adoption of FLOSS

  So far, only 9 agencies report using FLOSS desktop or client OS but that should change rapidly when more of the applications are FLOSS. 9 ministries have been declared self-reliant in FLOSS. Two hundred people participated in a conference on self-reliance in FLOSS for governmental agencies recently.

• IRC clients for Linux

  Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely-used nowadays as a communication method on the internet. On IRC, you will connect to IRC servers in which there will be individual chatrooms called channels. By joining a IRC server, you will be able to chat with other users who have connected to the same server, you can either chat on a channel with many other peeps or make a person-to-person conversation. Most Linux distros have official irc channels on freenode.net for users to come to ask questions and help other people. There are in fact many IRC clients in Linux but in this article, I will show you several IRC clients that I personally know and have used. All these clients are available in the repository of most distros I think you know how to install them already.

Licensing

• International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (new issue)

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • De Gruyter, Unglue.it Work Together to Crowdfund Open Source Textbooks

    When Unglue.it first launched its platform to strip the copyright status of books once a crowdfunded, pre-determined amount of money had been raised, skeptics spoke out. Not against that concept of “ungluing” a book, of course, but against the idea that ordinary readers would be willing to donate money to a publisher to make a book permanently public domain. Happily, Unglue.it has already enjoyed the fruits of their labors and announced a number of open source books, thanks to the donations and promotional efforts of its followers.

  • Stanford to collaborate with edX to develop a free, open source online learning platform

  • Stanford teaming with edX for on an open source, online education platform

  • Stanford joins edX – edX to be completely open source by June

  • edX to be completely open source by June

    FLOSS and education certainly go together. FLOSS software is being developed for on-line education by major educational institutions. It seems to be making waves…

Programming

• Zend Betting PHP Will Follow Linux’s Path in the Channel

  It’s an open-source technology that has grown a solid backing in many parts of enterprise IT, but is largely done on a “do-it-yourself” basis with little vendor or channel support behind it. That could describe Linux a decade ago. Or, Zend Technologies is betting, it could describe PHP today.

• Open source plug-in speeds mobile app development

• LLVM Pushing Out Daily Compilers For Ubuntu

Health/Nutrition

• Almost third of US West Coast newborns hit with thyroid problems after Fukushima nuclear disaster

• Monsanto announces huge profits despite public backlash

• Italy asks EU to halt GM maize cultivation

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Misreporting Israel/Gaza Cease-Fire

  As the Palestine Center’s Yousef Munayyer pointed out, this is true only in a very narrow sense–this would be the first Israeli airstrike. But Israel has violated the cease fire a number of times, as his organization has documented in a very helpful timeline–tacks that appear to have killed four Palestinians. In fact, the first incident occurred within 24 hours of the “cease fire.”

• North Korea ‘Rattles Sabres’; Meanwhile, U.S. Pretends to Drop Nuclear Bombs on Them

  It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on with North Korea. We hear that new leader Kim Jong-Un is making threats to attack the United States, South Korea or both–and that’s leading to some rather alarming, and alarmist, coverage.

• N.Y. Grannies Protest U.S. Drones Strikes

• Anti-Drone Demo Held in New York

• Ellison: Public needs to pressure Congress on drones

• Protestors target drones

  “There is no ethical or legal rational for attacking people in countries we are not currently at war with,” said Rick Greenblatt with San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice.

• Act against drones and military spending

  This month, FOR members across the country are working to stop military and surveillance drones and reduce military spending. Will you join them?

• UK PM pushes nuclear ‘deterrent’ in face of N. Korea threat

  Prime Minister David Cameron has said it would be ‘foolish’ for British to renounce its nuclear program in the face of threats from North Korea and Iran. His call to arms comes despite harsh criticism that Trident is too costly and unnecessary.

  British Prime Minister Cameron stated that the UK needs an “ultimate weapon” to combat the growing threat of nuclear attack which he said had “increased” since the end of the Cold War.

Cablegate

• Swedish Judge Backs Julian Assange: “It Should Never be a Crime to Make Known [a] Crime of a State”

• ‘Not a crime to make known crime of a state’: Senior Swedish judge backs Assange

• “A bombshell bigger than Wikileaks”: 260GB of data from Britain’s offshore financial industry leaked

• Comment: WikiLeaks and the senate candidate who isn’t here

  Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks party is going to turn heads. But turning attention into votes is going to be an even harder job for a candidate who may not be able to enter the country, let alone take his seat, writes Michelle Grattan.

• Swedish judge tells Australian forum sex crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder ‘a mess’

• Crikey says: threat to Assange confirmed (again)

  It was “sheer fantasy” that Julian Assange was in danger of being extradited from Sweden to the United States, Bob Carr declared in February. If anything, it was even less likely Assange could be extradited from Sweden than the United Kingdom.

• Top Swedish judge defends Wikileaks’ Assange

  Supreme Court chief calls sex charges against Julian Assange “a mess” and praises him for leaking secret US documents.

• Swedish judge explains big obstacles to US Assange extradition

• Ecuador repeats Assange quiz offer

  The Ecuadorian government has reiterated its offer to Swedish prosecutors to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its embassy in London following a “significant” speech by a senior Scandinavian judge.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• High School Students Debate Climate Change: Adapt or Geoengineer?

• Canadian mining companies subject of worldwide protests

• Where is Spring? Frustrated farmer spells it out as Britons continue to shiver

  Beef farmer Nicholas Stokes, 57, used his quad bike to etch out the giant letters on his land in Ellesmere, Shropshire, as temperatures plunged to -4 over the Easter weekend.

• Adding Fuel to the Fire: The Climate Consequences of Arctic Ocean Drilling

• Keystone Polling and an Oil Spill Time Machine

  What’s really noteworthy is the subhead about the “new oil spill” not seeming to have a big impact–a reference to the ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline leak in Arkansas. As the paper noted, “The numbers come amid continuing efforts to clean up a major new oil spill in Arkansas.”

• After Oil Spill in Arkansas, Weighing Risks of Keystone Pipeline Extension

Finance

• Bank of Japan Unveils Massive Stimulus Plan

  The Bank of Japan unleashed the world’s most intense burst of monetary stimulus on Thursday, promising to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years, a radical gamble that sent the yen reeling and bond yields to record lows.

• Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant with Three-Year Strike

• SECRECY FOR SALE: INSIDE THE GLOBAL OFFSHORE MONEY MAZE

• Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact

• Where the robber barons stash their loot

  “They sought the utmost secrecy in offshore tax havens,” says the CBC, going on:.

  “But now some of the world’s wealthiest citizens are having their undisclosed financial records laid bare.

  “An unprecedented leak of documents is revealing the closely guarded investment information of more than 100,000 people around the world, including hundreds of Canadians.”

  It says it says it “partnered with the ICIJ to gain exclusive Canadian access to the information,” adding:

  “Thirty-seven media outlets in 35 other countries are also involved.”

• Massive data leak exposes offshore financial secrets

• Offshore Leaks: Vast Web of Tax Evasion Exposed

  Oligarchs and dictators’ daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In Wisconsin, Voters Reject ALEC/Walker Education Agenda

  Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, easily won reelection on Tuesday. Unconfirmed official results have Evers beating opponent State Representative Don Pridemore by 61 percent to 39 percent. Pridemore, who has served in the Wisconsin State Assembly since 2004, supported a far right education agenda, including placing armed volunteers at schools in response to the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Pridemore was also known for telling a Tea Party group in 2011 that he would back a law that would throw federal officials in jail if they tried to implement the federal health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act, in Wisconsin.

• Efforts to Deliver “Kill Shot” to Paid Sick Leave Tied to ALEC

  In a victory for working families, New York is poised to become the largest U.S. city to require businesses offer paid sick days to workers. Community activists and labor leaders struck a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to allow a vote on a paid sick leave ordinance that would cover almost 1 million people. But workers in more than 700 other large American cities must choose between spreading their illness and getting paid.

• A Reporters’ Guide to the “State Policy Network” — the Right-Wing Think Tanks Spinning Disinformation and Pushing the ALEC Agenda in the States

Censorship

• Copyright As Censorship: University Threatens Own Faculty With Copyright Infringement For Campus Survey

  This story is incredible. Saint Louis University is threatening a faculty member with copyright infringement claims for his decision to take a survey of his colleagues. It appears that the faculty and the administration have been battling with each other recently, leading to a “no confidence” vote by students and faculty of the University provost. In response, the Board of Trustees sent around a “climate survey” to faculty, staff and students — but some had complained that the questions were not useful and only asked one question about the leadership of that provost, Lawrence Biondi. In response, some of the faculty designed their own “supplemental survey” for other faculty members that included more questions, specifically about Biondi’s relationship with the faculty itself.

Privacy

• Not just for the CIA

  Sheriff’s office exploring use of drones

• Domestic drones gain ground

• California city to vote on banning drones

  City Council here is set to vote on a proposal Thursday to ban drones in residential areas, what could be the first law of its kind in California.

  The proposed ordinance bans the flying of “unmanned aircraft that can fly under the control of a remote pilot or by a geographic positions system (GPS) guided autopilot mechanism” up to 400 feet above areas zoned residential. Anything flying higher is in Federal Aviation Administration jurisdiction.

• Missouri House Endorses Ban On Drones, Critics Say It Goes Too Far

• Can Voters Fight Domestic Drones at the Ballot Box?

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn OK for corporate disclosures, SEC says, but companies are wary

  The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday gave explicit permission for companies to use media such as Twitter and Facebook to announce key nuggets of information, but it turns out that many public companies still aren’t sure about what they are allowed to do.

• Hey app developers, here’s a way to monitor your users for free!

  Compuware’s latest foray into mobility is a free bundle of cloudy code for dropping into mobile apps, which it will then monitor and measure for developers’ (and Compuware’s) benefit.

  Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) lurks quietly in the corner of an app, reporting back every now and then but mostly watching for a show-stopping event to let the app’s developer know what went wrong and how it might be avoided next time.

• Firefox Gives You More Control Over Your Privacy

Civil Rights

• Associated Press Drops ‘Illegal Immigrant’ From Stylebook

  The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”

• Anger Over Plan to Sell Site of Wounded Knee Massacre

  Ever since American soldiers massacred men, women and children here more than a century ago in the last major bloodshed of the American Indian wars, this haunted patch of rolling hills and ponderosa pines has embodied the combustible relationship between Indians and the United States government.

• Settlers accuse ‘Haaretz’ of calling for violence against them

  Fallout from Amira Hass’s article on Palestinian stone-throwing shows that as far as Israelis are concerned, any and every form of resistance against the occupation is illegitimate.

• DOJ Trying To Hide Secret Interpretations Of The Law Because You’d All DIE!!!!

  It’s kind of sad that anyone could possibly think that it’s okay for the government to have secret interpretations of the law in a free and open society. “The law” is more than just the legislation itself, but the collection of caselaw and interpretations, combined with the legislation, that make up the overall “law.” If some of those interpretations are kept secret, then how can the public obey the law? The answer is that they can’t — which is why secret interpretations shouldn’t be allowed. The Justice Department, however, prefers to keep some things secret, and it’s asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the EFF seeking to find out how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is interpreting parts of the FISA Amendments Act, after it was revealed (late on a Friday) that the court found at least one situation in which the feds collected info in violation of the 4th Amendment.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

A Linux-Powered Gun With Lasers And Wi-Fi

Everything’s getting smarter as computers get smaller. A company in Austin, Texas called TrackingPoint built a gun that runs Linux. It has lasers and Wi-Fi to connect with an app for precise shooting at long distances (up to 1,200 feet).

TrackingPoint calls the riffle a “Precision Guided Firearm” (PGF).

Linux on Film: Coupling episode “Faithless”

Audiocasts/Shows

• Going Linux Apr 05: #204 Listener Feedback

• LB – Episode 76 – PAX Troll

Kernel Space

• Intel Releases New “RAPL” Linux Driver Code

  Jacob Pan of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center published the “RAPL” Linux kernel driver patches on the kernel mailing list Tuesday. Running Average Power Limit is a feature found on Sandy Bridge and newer for enforcing power consumption limits on processors, among other power-related features.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support

Applications

• Hands on With New Linux Twitter App ‘Birdie’

• Audience Media Player Getting Close To A New Release, Help Test It!

• Proprietary

  • Storix Announces Disaster Recovery Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4

Desktop Environments/WMs

• w3m: This is not an April Fools joke

  Look closely at these two screenshots. Very closely.

• MATE 1.6 released

  The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6.

• MATE Desktop 1.6 Brings New Features To GNOME 2

  The MATE fork of the GNOME 2.x Desktop has now been upped to version 1.6 with some new features for vintage Linux desktop users.

  In the release announcement, MATE 1.6 is described as “a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE.”

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.8 in moving pictures

Distributions

• My Current Setup: Distros

  I mentioned recently that I am no longer confortable with switching distros day in and day out. I have settled with a few things I love and my setup hasn´t really changed in months. Some people were curious of what my setup looks like, so this is the first article in a series that will be covering what I use, which distros, DMs, etc.

• Slackware Family

  • First update on April

    Pat decided to push some updates on April 1st and some of them are quite interesting in my opinion. One of them is OpenSSH which is now at 6.2p1. This version was released few weeks ago and now we already have it on -Current.

• Debian Family

  • Nine Myths That Shouldn’t Stop You From Trying Debian

    These days, Debian seems to be enjoying a modest comeback among experienced users. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear on social networking sites of two or three people giving Debian another look.

    This renewed interest may reflect a growing disillusionment with Ubuntu, the Debian derivative that has partly replaced Debian in popularity among Linux users. Almost certainly, it reflects a growing willingness to experiment with distros after the last two years of user revolts against GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity. As one of the oldest distributions—and one specifically focused on user choice—Debian looks reliable in the middle of such uncertainty.

  • Debian releases used by popcon participants

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • MapR Shares its Code, Cuddles Up with Canonical’s Ubuntu

        Open Source is sexy in a cloudy, big data world, but if you want your commercial-grade Hadoop distribution to be speedy, reliable and secure, you’ll be better off parting with a few dollars and buying a proprietary solution like ours.

Devices/Embedded

• QorIQ-based AMC board does Linux, U-Boot, Snort, FreeNAS

  Mobiveil has released an AMC form-factor board based on Freescale’s quad-core QorIQ P3041 communications processor. The AMCP3041 can support mixed control plane and data plane requirements in wireless and wireline networking equipment, and is supported with embedded Linux, U-Boot, Snort, and FreeNAS software.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Sprint taps $199 HTC One with April 19 debut

Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software

Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.

How Netcore Built Rs 50 Crore Biz With Open Source

The Mumbai-based solutions provider, which focuses on email, messaging and e-marketing solutions, has saved $2 million on licensing costs with free and open source software (FOSS)

New marketplace connects open source contractors with clients

In any field, a major challenge can be finding the right talent. For open source projects looking for contractors, it’s hard to organize possible candidates from all over the web. Flossmarket hopes to fill that void.

A platform for connecting contractors and businesses/individuals, Flossmarket allows each party to search for and find like-minded partners faster for their projects. Contractors build a profile and are able to advertise their services on their page. And, anyone who needs contract open source work done can review candidates based on criteria they set in their search.

Crossing the Chasm

Are you winning if you own ninety-nine percent of a moribund market ? I don’t think so. Linux and Open Source/Free Software has crossed the chasm now. It has become the mainstream. Every Android tablet or phone out there is a Linux and Open Source/Free Software platform, and in the next few years I fully expect this to become the most common form of computing for most people worldwide (disclaimer, I do work for Google so please take such predictions with the pinch of salt they deserve).

For Free Software advocates like myself this is a tremendously positive change. The dirty secret of Samba, my own Free Software project, is that for a while the developers only ever run Windows ourselves in order to test Samba (which is an interoperability solution). Mostly everyone uses a different variety of Free Software desktops and servers (with the odd Mac or Solaris/Illumos user thrown into the mix). The default at least for us has become Free Software.

So have we won ? Should we just pack up the advocacy tent and go home ? Unfortunately not. Most of the applications running on these devices are still proprietary. Most people using mobile devices, although they might be running a Free Software operating system underneath, still don’t realize why Free Software is important.

BBC sharing its TV application layer as open source

Britain’s public service broadcasting corporation BBC is making available as open source the code for building HTML-based TV software solutions, called TAL. “Sharing the TV Application Layer should make building applications on TV easier for others, helping to drive the uptake of this nascent technology”, the organisation explains.

BBC Almost “Gets” FLOSS…

Nothing in FLOSS restricts use of FLOSS in commercial products. You can charge money for services instead of charging for licences and GPL, for instance, permits charging per copy or whatever. Much FLOSS is commercial, like Linux, the kernel, worth $billions, FireFox, the web browser, worth $hundreds of millions and RedHat makes a $billion in revenue on FLOSS annually.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Celebrates 15 Years with Firefox 20

    Mozilla captured many a headline today as Mitchell Baker blogged about 15 years of “a better web.” Mozilla began life as Netscape’s Open Source branch of development in 1998 and has since changed the Web many times, if sometimes by accident. But as Mozilla celebrates this milestone, Firefox 20 is already making the rounds.

    Baker said, “Looking back, Mozilla’s plan was as radical as the Web itself: use open source and community to simultaneously create great software and build openness into the key technologies of the Internet itself. This was something commercial vendors weren’t doing and could not do. A non-profit, community-driven organization like Mozilla was needed to step up to the challenge.”

  • Firefox 20.0: Find out what is new

    Mozilla will upgrade the stable channel of its desktop browser to Firefox 20.0 today. The front page at the time of writing is still linking to a download of version 19.0.2, but you can use this link to download the new version of the browser right away. Make sure you change its url if you need a different localized version, this one downloads the US version of Firefox.

  • Celebrating 15 Years of a Better Web

  • Firefox 20 Drops In New Private, Download Features

    Mozilla has announced Firefox 20 with several prominent new features to the open-source web-browser.

    As shared on the Mozilla blog, prominent features of Firefox 20 include:

    - Support for starting private browsing in a new tab of an already existing web-browser session. Firefox for Android also now supports private browsing on a per-tab basis.

  • Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

Education

• ‘Linux of online learning’ gets stronger: edX and Stanford team up to build open source platform

  In its mission to become the “Linux of online learning,” edX just got a powerful new partner. On Wednesday, the Harvard and MIT-backed non-profit is set to announce that it’s teaming up with Stanford to collaboratively develop the open-source edX platform.

• Class2Go to merge with edX in open source online learning platform

• Stanford to Work With EdX Open-Source Learning Platform

• Anesthesia Illustrated Tests Open-Source Education Model

  In its first year, Anesthesia Illustrated, an open-source repository of anesthesia video lectures, attracted users from more than 150 countries who downloaded videos 94,213 times, according to an assessment presented at the 2013 Society for Technology in Anesthesia meeting.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNUstep Base Library, version 1.24.4, is now available.

• Version 0.23.1 of the GNUstep GUI library (`gnustep-gui’)

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • On Data Science with Open Data

    In a previous blog post I offered up two interpretations of the term ‘data science’. These amounted to 1) ‘the science of data’ and 2) ‘doing science with data’. If you read the earlier post you’ll probably detect my mild irritation with the term when coupled with the second of these interpretations. Perhaps it’s the redundancy, or maybe the implication that plain ‘science’ is somehow devoid of data. It may be both.

• Open Access/Content

  • I’m going to attend the Boston rally for Aaron Swartz

The Meme Hustler

Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

Science

• An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay

Hardware

• Pie-in-the-sky or Real Growth in PC Shipments?

  Wait a bit… New hardware is something that might drive unit shipments and M$’s cutting of licensing fees might help if people actually wanted to buy M$’s OS, but M$ is cutting the prices because people don’t want to buy M$’s OS, so this is wishful thinking. Manufacturers should be shipping GNU/Linux if they want sales to pop. People are desperate to escape the clutches of M$ and the consumers who are a big piece of the pie cannot unless they find GNU/Linux on retail shelves.

Security

• Exclusive: Ongoing malware attack targeting Apache hijacks 20,000 sites

• EU data-protection authorities launch joint action against Google

  Data-protection authorities of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands have launched a joint action against the Google for violating the European Union privacy rules.

  The joint action is the first co-ordinated and formal procedure by EU member countries against a single company on privacy.

  Currently, the European authorities can impose only fines below €1m. However, the new EU privacy rules, expected to be approved by the end of 2013, could allow the authorities to inflict on companies penalties up to 2 per cent of their global annual turnover.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Greek Nazi link group ‘set up here’

  A Greek political party with links to neo-Nazis say they have established themselves in Melbourne, but have no interest in Australian politics.

  Golden Dawn, which was founded by a Holocaust denier and whose members have been linked to dozens of violent protests in Greece, claims to have set up a group in Melbourne filled with Greek-Australians who will ”fight and defend both of our countries with pride and honour”.

  The group sent an email to Fairfax Media criticising the ”lies” of reporters, politicians and Greek community leaders since controversial Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris announced plans for a Melbourne office and a visit from MPs on a Melbourne radio station in February.

• German Pastor Faces Trial Over Anti-Nazi Protest

  A German pastor due to stand trial for allegedly inciting violence at an anti-Nazi demonstration said Tuesday that authorities risk deterring people from standing up to right-wing extremists if he is convicted.

• Is The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas about to Launch a Neo-Nazi Counter-Revolution?

• Capitol Hill hawks object stripping CIA of drones

• Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama

  Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

• ‘Americans’ taps creator’s work at CIA

  When he was training to be a case officer for the CIA in the early 1990s, Joseph Weisberg soon learned that deception was a crucial skill — one that involved lying to his family regularly.

• The Shift in the Drone Debate

  When a forum as hawkish at The Washington Post‘s editorial page starts running pieces arguing the drone war is creating more enemies than it is eliminating, you know the dialogue is beginning to shift.

• An Urgent Proposal to Protect People From Domestic Drones

• Drones: Secrets in our skies

  Hundreds of unmanned aerial vehicles – known as drones – are aloft in our skies, many owned and built by recreational users. But safety and security issues alarm the CAA, which oversees our aviation system.

• Officials want ‘drones’ buzzing over Utah

• North Korea: Not Crazy but Very Misunderstoods

  It seems scary, even crazy: talk of a “sea of fire” and an “arc of destruction,” nuclear missiles slamming into distant shores. North Korea, an “isolated state,” as we’re constantly told by media reports, hurls invective at the world while its people, abused, hungry and cold, are led by an apparently well-fed young man, Kim Jong-un, who sits in front of shabby-looking computers running nuclear programs that are going, literally, ballistic.

  But is it all true?

  “Public discourse about the North in most of our enlightened world is crippled, condescending, irrelevant, and, like heartburn, episodic,” says James Church, the pseudonymous author of a series of novels about the country, in an article titled: “NK and Pluto.” He insists on anonymity because of the nature of his past intelligence work.

  As the rhetoric ratchets up again on the Korean peninsula with talk of mobilization, attack and counterattack, Mr. Church’s view is deeply counterintuitive and very valuable. His authorial name is a pseudonym for a former Western intelligence officer who has been in the country dozens of times and now, retired from government, writes about it through the eyes of a fictional North Korean policeman called Inspector O. (Full disclosure – I have met Mr. Church and he is definitely real.) In fact, the novels offer a superb demonstration of the idea that fiction tells the truth better than fact.

Cablegate

• Julian Assange appoints republican lawyer to run Wikileaks Party campaign in Australia

• Birgitta Jonsdottir, MP and Wikileaks volunteer, posts the agenda for her visit to NYC

• Top Swedish judge backs WikiLeaks

  JULIAN Assange may be safe from extradition to the United States even if he returns to Sweden, suggests one of the Scandinavian country’s top judges.

• Julian Assange’s Australian Senate campaign to be led by anti-monarchist

• Chance of Julian Assange going to US

• Julian Assange safe from extradition to US, says Justice Stefan Lindskog

  JULIAN Assange may be safe from extradition to the United States even if he returns to Sweden, suggests one of the Scandinavian country’s top judges.

  In a rare public lecture delivered in Adelaide, Justice Stefan Lindskog defended the leaking of classified information, saying the case against the WikiLeaks founder was “a mess”, and raised many questions over the legality of the US ever being able to extradite Assange via Sweden.

• Julian Assange Case: Top Prosecutor Quits Case, While Assange Continues to Hide in Ecuadorian Embassy

• Julian Assange determined to win Senate seat – Greg Barns

• Judge’s Assange comment unusual: expert

  A LECTURE on the Julian Assange case by a top Swedish judge is unusual but not unprecedented, a leading human rights and constitutional law expert says.

• Senate run must be more than a get-out-of-jail card for Assange

  Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks Party is gathering momentum ahead of this year’s federal election. Prominent barrister and political figure Greg Barns has been announced as the party’s national campaign director, while it has secured a Melbourne-based headquarters and attracted donations of up to A$100,000.

  But what could a man like Julian Assange achieve within the orthodox structures of parliament?

  When Professor John Keane spent the day with Assange recently, Assange briefly discussed his plans to run for the Senate. He predicts that if successful, the US will drop its grand jury espionage investigation in order to avoid a diplomatic row. He might still be extradited to Sweden, but winning a Senate seat in September could secure his freedom from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. It is probably his best chance.

  Through WikiLeaks, Assange built his reputation as an outsider, using technologically enabled anonymous leaks to “speak truth to power”. But as a senator, Assange will find himself working within formal democratic structures. For many, this will make him an insider, privy to the world he has sought to expose. There is no certainty that Assange’s presence in the Senate would improve public accountability, but the presence of his radical ideas in our highest political forum will force us all to have a conversation about what we think we should and shouldn’t know.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 350.org Calls for Public Comment on Keystone XL Pipeline

  After the recent tar sands pipeline spill in Arkansas, where thousands of gallons of toxic oil ran through the streets of a small community, the climate change organization 350.org is asking Americans to join in the public commenting process for the Keystone XL pipeline.

  The U.S. State Department is reviewing applications for permits needed for the international pipeline to advance. The State Department is soliciting public comment on the issue until April 22.

Finance

• Taking back City College from the corporations – by any means necessary

  Like the Monsanto Protection Act, the support for all of this corporate destruction of our communities’ schools…

• When America Came ‘This Close’ to Establishing a 30-Hour Workweek

  The April 15, 1933 issue of Newsweek, one of the first in the magazine’s history, contains a remarkable cover headline: Bill cutting work week to 30 hours startles the nation. Indeed only nine days earlier, on April 6th, the Black-Connery Bill had passed in the United States Senate by a wide margin. The bill fixed the official American work week at five days and 30 hours, with severe penalties for overtime work.

• Pope to review Vatican bureaucracy, bank scandal

  …bank which has regularly damaged the Vatican’s image over three decades…

• Food stamps and the database state…

  The latest proposal for ‘food stamps’ has aroused a good deal of anger. It’s a policy that is divisive, depressing and hideous in many ways – Suzanne Moore’s article in the Guardian is one of the many excellent pieces written about it. She hits at the heart of the problem: ‘Repeat after me: austerity removes autonomy’.

• The Great British class calculator

  People in the UK now fit into seven social classes, a major survey conducted by the BBC suggests.

• Bitcoin price goes on wild ride

  The price of the virtual currency bitcoin, already volatile in recent weeks, went through wild swings in overnight trading Tuesday and Wednesday.

  According to prices quoted on Mt.Gox, the main trading exchange for bitcoins, the value of one bitcoin ricocheted from $106 to as high as $147, then back down to $125, then to $141. They were trading around $139 per bitcoin in afternoon trading Wednesday.

• Paulson Applies for Lawsuit Dismissal – Analyst Blog

  Paulson & Co applied for dismissal of a lawsuit made by ACA Financial Guaranty related to Abacus – a collateralized debt obligation (CDO). The plaintiffs accused the company of joining banking major The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( GS ) to obtain guaranteed payments from bond insurers on risky investments.

  In 2011, ACA Financial filed a $120 million lawsuit against Goldman and later in January, added Paulson & Co along with its hedge fund unit – Paulson Credit Opportunities Master II Ltd as the accused. The modified lawsuit claimed that Goldman and Paulson tricked ACA Financial into believing that Paulson was investing in the CDO. However, Paulson had taken a short position on it.

Privacy

• NSA Chief Wants Companies to Share More Info With the Government

  Speaking at a conference at Georgia Tech, Director of the U.S. National Security Agency General Keith Alexander pressed Congress last week pass legislation creating a more effective information-sharing regime between government and businesses to help protect the nation’s security. Just as past legislative efforts such as the proposed Cyber Intelligence Protection Act (CISPA) have faced widespread backlash for imposing high regulatory costs on businesses while risking infringing basic rights, the fear remains that Alexander’s proposals simply suggest more of the same.

• California Law Would Require Companies To Disclose All Consumer Data Collected

Civil Rights

• Gender segregation now mandatory in Gaza schools

  Gaza boys and girls in middle and high school will be breaking the law if they study side by side.

• Commissioners sidetrack plea to disobey defense law

  All the commissioners listened politely as Tom McKirgan of Coquille and Shawn Ozbun of Eugene asked them to spurn the NDAA. An audience of about 40 supporters applauded the pair equally politely.

• Are You A Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the Justice Department, You May Be a Criminal

• It’s a Crime for 12-Year-Olds to Read The New York Times Online

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a word of warning: many teenagers are wantonly breaking the law every day by reading news sites on the web because the Department of Justice’s weird implementation of vague laws has left a number of media outlets with odd age-based legal prohibitions for their web sites.

DRM

• Safe-harbor compliance for FOSS projects

  “DMCA” is a four-letter word among free and open source software developers, and for good reason: the 1998 act criminalized an entire category of programs and has been grossly misused in numerous cases. It’s in the news yet again this week, as activists are fighting to make it legal to carrier-unlock cellphones despite the Librarian of Congress’s decision not to exempt unlocking from the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules.

  But the anti-circumvention rules are only one part of the DMCA—it also put in place the safe harbors that protect online services from liability for their users’ activity. These too have been the subject of some controversy, as large content owners have routinely abused the notice-and-takedown process to censor materials protected by fair use. But they’ve also done a lot of good. Before, it was difficult for service providers dealing with user-uploaded content to predict their potential liability for the infringing activity of their users. The safe harbors provide clear rules for avoiding secondary liability related to user content.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Opinion: Rethinking the Internet

    Sharing knowledge, growing inclusion, increasing participation. The other benefits, economic and social will flow from these principles. Now that sounds like a good place to start to me.