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07.02.13

Links 2/7/2013: Linux 3.10, ALT Linux 7.0

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Goes To Stanford in Style

    The actual cost of the laptop is being reimbursed by a group of “RockHound” professors at UT/Austin. Since the cost of this laptop had to come from my own pocket, I am grateful to these professors who helped us out. I am simply writing this at the behest of Sanjit Patel to thank you for helping him achieve his dreams. And from the directors and volunteers of Reglue, thank you for helping us do what we do.

    Oh, and that old T60 Lenovo we gave Sanjit when he entered UT? The drive was wiped, a fresh install of Edubuntu installed and put back in the “ready” pile, waiting to be given to the next Reglue Kid.

  • Linux on Power

    Determining the best hardware for a self-hosted web environment is complicated, and fraught with danger. One of the most popular schemes in use is to purchase commodity hardware. Normally, the term “commodity hardware” is meant to include basic Intel pizza box servers that may not have the most power, and may not come with the best reputation for high mean time between failure for components, but are plentiful and cheap. The core concept is to avoid the need for larger, more expensive hardware by purchasing a lot of pizza boxes, and just adding on as you go.

  • Ubiquitous Linux: It’s Everywhere

    Sometimes I’m sitting here, trying to come up with something to write and I’m coming up dry. It’s not because there’s nothing going on with Linux. Quite the contrary. Linux is always moving, changing. It’s hard to believe just how ubiquitous Linux is. It’s literally everywhere.

  • July 2013 Issue of Linux Journal: Networking

    When our house was built a few years ago (after our house fire), one of the things I wanted was a house wired for Ethernet connectivity. Unfortunately, the contractor must not have realized that running CAT5e isn’t the same as running power lines. Although my house did in fact have RJ-45 jacks in a few rooms, opening the wall panel exposed approximately three inches of untwisted wire crammed into the wall jack. Even worse, they stapled, yes stapled, the CAT3 cable to the wall studs.

  • The Linux Setup – Igor Ljubuncic, Dedoimedo.com

    At home, I use Linux primarily for video editing and automation of tasks, and lots and lots of testing. Linux is a fairly flexible operating system, and you truly get to appreciate the power and simplicity once you start digging under the surface. That said, I also happily use other, proprietary operating systems.

  • Five Linux predictions for 2013
  • The Last Big Lie

    That makes the quoted comment a lie in 2013. It may have been true a decade ago but no longer. Folks like Munich who dug out of the hole they made by choosing M$ (as if they had a choice) years ago are laughing and the rest of the world are looking for the exits: cloud services or FLOSS. With widespread use of thin clients, corporations large and small can use whatever software they want any way they want and choosing ODF makes the office suite and the operating system a much simpler choice.

  • Desktop

    • On my movement to GRUB2

      As I wanted to install Pisi Linux Sueño (Beta) to my laptop, I had to take the leap from GRUB to GRUB2. You know, Megatotoro warned me about the fact that Pisi has a bug and therefore installs its own GRUB2 menu on the MBR regardless of what you choose.

    • GNU/Linux Is On The Move Globally

      GNU/Linux has been languishing, according to StatCounter, at below 1% share until recently and I thought I would collect data to see how it fared on different continents.

  • Kernel Space

    • What’s new in Linux 3.10

      A second SSD caching framework and support for the new Radeons’ video decoder are two of the most important enhancements in Linux 3.10, which is now out. This version also includes several new and improved drivers and a change to the network stack to speed up HTTP connections.

    • 3.10 Linux Kernel Development Rate
    • The Linux Kernel: Drivers

      Drivers are small programs that enable the kernel to communicate and handle hardware or protocols (rules and standards). Without a driver, the kernel does not know how to communicate with the hardware or handle protocols (the kernel actually hands the commands to the BIOS and the BIOS passes them on the the hardware). The Linux Kernel source code contains many drivers (in the form of source code) in the drivers folder. Each folder within the drivers folder will be explained. When configuring and compiling the kernel, it helps to understand the drivers. Otherwise, a user may add drivers to the kernel that they do not need or leave out important drivers. The driver source code usually includes a commented line that states the purpose of the driver. For example, the source code for the tc driver has a single commented line that says the driver is for TURBOchannel buses. Because of the documentation, users should be able to look at the first few commented lines of future drivers to learn their purpose.

    • Linux 3.10 officially released

      Linux 3.10 kernel has been officially released on Sunday evening which makes the 3.10-rc7 the last release candidate of the latest kernel which yields the biggest changes in years.

    • Linux 3.10

    • Benchmarks

      • XWayland 2D Performance Appears Better Than XMir

        In the past few days I delivered X.Org vs. XMir Ubuntu Unity benchmarks on Intel hardware and Nouveau / NVIDIA. The benchmarking also found that 2D was also slower with XMir than simply running an X.Org Server. Benchmarks now carried out of X.Org vs. XWayland show that the Wayland-based equivalent is generally faster, at least for 2D operations.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • ROSA 2012 R1 Desktop Fresh LXDE Review: Another super cool LXDE spin with added integrated control center!

      As I wrote in my last article about LXDE though being very efficient, is a bit tough for a Linux newbie to handle. I was very happy with the latest PCLinuxOS 2013.06 LXDE spin as it made LXDE relatively simpler by adding an integrated LXDE control center along with quite a few other customizations. This week I used another LXDE distro, ROSA 2012 R1 Desktop Fresh LXDE. Incidentally, both ROSA and PCLinuxOS are/were Mandriva based.

    • First look at Peppermint OS Four

      Peppermint OS is a project based on Lubuntu with sprinklings of Linux Mint tossed into the mix. The Peppermint project attempts to create a user friendly, fast and lightweight distribution. The project is focused on bringing web applications and services to the desktop without relying exclusively on Internet connectivity for basic functions. This makes Peppermint a bit of a hybrid, mixing the traditional desktop platform with cloud services. While Peppermint ships with a minimalist collection of packages and a LXDE desktop the project offers several software bundles to allow users to build a fully featured operating system using the Peppermint base. The latest release of Peppermint, version 4, is based on Lubuntu 13.04 and is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds.

    • New Releases

      • Manjaro 0.8.7 XFCE Preview

        I’m happy to announce a preview build of Manjaro 0.8.7 which we will release in late July. This first build is fully installable and stable. You will find only a minimalistic XFCE 4.10 Desktop on it. One of the biggest changes you might see is the use of Whisker Menu which replaces the standard XFCE menu. We fixed our Manjaro Settings Manager and updated Pamac (graphical package manager). The 32bit build will fit on a 700 MB CD, for the 64bit build you have to use a 800 MB CD.

      • OpenELEC Testing – Raspberry Pi ARM Version:3.1.1
      • Arch 2013.07.01
      • Zentyal 3.1-2
      • ALT 7.0.0
      • ALT Linux 7.0 Enterprise and Workstation Arrive

        ALT Linux has been around for quite some time, yet we rarely hear of it anymore. Some of my first impressions were of a nice desktop system that needed a bit of polish. Later ALT became available in desktop and enterprise editions. After nearly two years, today brought a new ALT Linux release.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • July 2013 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the July 2013 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT): The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

        Most people with at least basic knowledge of IT infrastructure have heard about Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). The company provides one of the most widely-used operating systems for servers. The reason why many consumers may have not heard about this operating system is because Red Hat is mainly for organizations, especially those willing to pay a premium for improved security. Therefore, Red Hat isn’t just another IT stock. The name is synonymous with security, reliability, and fast performance – three must-have success factors that many start-ups would love to possess. Although Red Hat’s cash cow resides in its open source solutions, recently the company has been giving more importance to its cloud storage and virtualization solutions, a fierce business segment where Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) has also been very actively.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora vs. Ubuntu

          So would I recommend Fedora over Ubuntu? Honestly, no, I wouldn’t. I’m more inclined to recommend one of the options listed above instead, as I can better explain how I personally have benefited from each of them myself. Nothing against Fedora—it’s fine—but it just simply doesn’t have a well-defined niche these days.

        • Fedora 18 to 19 yum upgrade

    • Debian Family

      • So wheezy is fun..

        Running a pristine operating system is fun.

      • Derivatives

        • Knoppix 7.2 Review

          You may not know about Knoppix, but before there was Ubuntu and before there was Mint there was a time when Knoppix was among the few distros that hardly needed introduction. Linux enthusiasts knew about Knoppix in the same way they knew about Debian. While Debian was the largest distro on planet (in terms of number of packages), Knoppix was the first Live distro based on Debian. Although it wasn’t the first Live distro, Knoppix popularized this concept and became the face of Live CDs. At the time when Debian was still difficult to install, especially by inexperienced or new Linux users, Knoppix gave people a way to “test” a Debian-based system before actually installing it. Knoppix even encouraged users to always use it as a Live CD, which made it popular as a rescue system that people could use to quickly salvage important files from their hard-drives and even fix their systems in the event of boot failure of the installed operating system.

        • Revisiting Knoppix

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 13 challenges Windows 8

            The latest version of Ubuntu, Raring Ringtail, is billed as business and user-friendly. There are still significant obstacles to its widespread adoption in the enterprise, but if your employees only access applications via the browser, and your company doesn’t use complex spreadsheet macros or document formats, then Ubuntu 13 might be worth considering.

          • Aakash IV to be more powerful and Ubuntu-friendly

            Undeterred by the controversies that have struck its $35 tablet project, the Government has taken the first step towards the fourth version of the low cost Aakash tablet by releasing its mandated technical specifications.

          • Ubuntu’s Mir plans cause divisions

            Ubuntu sponsor Canonical plan to switch the distribution to the company’s Mir display server sooner rather than later and this move is now causing disturbances within the wider Ubuntu ecosystem. This appears to be especially so with the developers of two of the official Ubuntu remixes, Lubuntu and Kubuntu.

          • Ubuntu 13.10 to feature Mir display server by default

            Case in point: What if the Apollo 11 astronauts, instead of shooting for the moon, were just taking a road trip to New Jersey? Even if they made it ahead of schedule, they wouldn’t exactly be making commemorative plates about it. (Though, now that I think about it, they should. I would absolutely buy a “Neil and Buzz go to Jersey” plate.)

          • Lubuntu, Kubuntu 13.10 May Not Use Mir As Their Display Server
          • Canonical and KDE/Kubuntu Developers Finally Confront Each Other

            It’s not a secret that KDE devs are not fond of Canonical’s Mir, but the two sides never really discussed it seriously, until now.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 323
          • Canonical Hiring to Advance Ubuntu Linux Smartphone, Tablet Plans

            Canonical, the company behind the open source Ubuntu Linux OS, set out earlier this year to create a radically new video display platform called Mir to help it steal a slice of the smartphone and tablet markets. Now, in a sign of just how serious the company is, it has announced a hiring push for developers to work on Mir and related projects.

          • The Ubuntu PC Case Mod Pt.4 DVD stealthing
          • Full Circle #74 hits the streets!

            Full Circle – the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community
            are proud to announce the release of our seventy fourth issue.

          • Ubuntu Alarm Clock

            I am in Florence at B and B Hotels right now. I have to leave the hotel at 12 o’clock tomorrow. I find it very hard to wake up in the morning. Who is going to guarantee me that I will wake up in time and be ready to leave the hotel?

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Coming Soon: MintBox 2 With Intel Core i5 And Linux Mint 15 Olivia

              One of the reasons for comparatively low Linux adoption rate can be blamed on the fact that very few PCs come preinstalled with Linux. However, Linux Mint tried to solve this issue and last year they teamed up with CompuLab to make MintBox.

            • Ready to run desktop Linux PC: MintBox 2

              Like Linux Mint? Want it in a plug and go PC? CompuLab may have the computer for you: the new MintBox 2.

            • Linux Mint 15 Olivia MATE – Not as refined

              Here’s the third review of the Linux Mint Olivia family. We already had two reviews of the Cinnamon version, one on a rather generic laptop with Intel graphics, plus SSD, and the other on a slightly more complex box featuring Nvidia graphics and Broadcom Wireless. So far, Olivia has shown really awesome results, near perfect in almost every sense of the way.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • HTC One Android 4.2.2 OTA Update

          HTC One customers will be rejoiced to know that their Smartphone is going get an OTA update to Android 4.2.2 soon, and if you are in Taiwan you might already have the update available. A HTC One (International Model) user in Taiwan reported that Android 4.2.2 update has arrived for his phone.

        • Android 4.3 Has New Notification Service Under The Hood

          We saw Android 4.3 build for Samsung Galaxy S4 ‘Google Edition’ getting leaked last week. It was then soon ported for the original Samsung Galaxy S4 without any hassle. Considering the leaked build to be real, we found that there were not much superficial changes, instead, many under the hood changes are being observed eventually. ‘Notification Code Service’ is the new change under the light.

        • Android’s Audacious Desktop Debut

          FOSS fans have been predicting for years that Android would ultimately come to the desktop, and last week there was concrete evidence. Following on a similar announcement from Acer earlier this month, HP has now debuted an Android-based desktop tablet of its own. “Well, it’s happening!” enthused Google+ blogger Rodolfo Saenz. “Mobile and stationary hardware and software are merging.”

        • An Oracle v. Google Trial Transcripts Page – Finally. ~pj

          I’m sorry this took so long, but I’ve finally got a dedicated page done for all the Oracle v. Google trial transcripts. So if you want to know what any of the witnesses had to say, you can find it on that page. You’ll also find the trial exhibits and the jury verdict and the judge’s order and final judgment, as well as links to Groklaw’s coverage from the courtroom. For everything else, of course you’ll find it on the Oracle v. Google Timeline page.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • The four cornerstones of open server virtualisation according to Citrix
  • Handpoint Mobile PoS Apps Goes Open Source
  • NuoDB Expands Open Source Driver Initiative
  • IRS Puts Open Source Projects Under Microscope, Spawns Nonprofit Black Hole

    In a sense, open source software is a victim of its own success.

  • Driving better governance with open source

    “Ten years ago, open source—notably Linux—was often labelled a ‘fad’ or destined for the ‘hobbyist’ market,” said Mark Bohannon, Vice President for Corporate Affairs & Global Public Policy at Red Hat.

    “Fast forward to today. Owing not only to the benefits of the technology, but also to the benefits of the collaborative innovation model, open source software has by any measure become mainstream and vital to enterprise and government IT architecture.”

    In the Public Sector, Bohannon notes that most governments now are more likely to engage on how open source can help them achieve the innovation they need to be able to serve their citizens today and in the years to come.

  • Internet2 Announces Proposals for Open Source SDN Networking Apps
  • MITRE Unveils Open Source Software to Secure Mobile Devices; David Keppler Comments

    MITRE Corp. has unveiled new open source software that works to protect data stored in mobile devices and helps organizations develop security applications.

    MITRE built the secure virtual mobile platform to allow customers to store sensitive data in a cloud platform, as well as collaborate with the open source community to secure smartphones running on Android operating system, MITRE said June 20.

  • EU project enhances open source toolkit for the Cloud

    Announcement: OPTIMIS project now on phase three which provides service providers with plug-ins for open cloud as project nears its end

  • DESIGN West: Open source hardware searching for business model

    There’s no doubt that engineers like the idea of open-source hardware. There are an increasing number of open-source hardware board designs – Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard and many others – that enable hobbyist projects and the reuse of board designs in commercial products. And many engineers are putting a lot of time into enabling these movements via collaborative work online and through the creation of vibrant online communities.

  • Pistoia Releases HELM Biomolecular Representation Tools
  • Adventures of migrating to a new open source ecommerce website

    Well, it is time for me to update my eCommerce site. I get to play with nearly every kind of cart when writing my ecommerce user manuals, so you’d think this would be an easy decision, or that I would do it often. Not so! I’ve had an ecommerce site for over 10 years, selling downloadable user manual ebooks, and it had snowballed into a crazy mess of old files, old outdated product photos, old outdated products.

  • Engineers, hobbyists increase reliance on open source tools
  • Open Source Hoverboard Project Brings Us One Step Closer to the Real Thing

    Well, Back to the Future Part II promised us hoverboards in 2015, and that means we’re running out of time. But, there’s someone who still believes all hope is not lost, and they’re looking for $1,000,000 to make the impossibl happen. Shame they don’t have a copy of Grays Sports Almanac.

  • Today in Longshots: Hoverboards Proposed by 2015
  • DoubleTwist’s new MagicPlay service aims to be the open source version of Apple’s AirPlay

    When you want to seamlessly stream music from a mobile device or computer to a speaker or other device, it doesn’t get much easier than with Apple’s AirPlay service. While there are a myriad of other options to wirelessly stream music from non-Apple devices to speakers (Bluetooth being the most commonly-used one), none of them have been able to replicate the simplicity of AirPlay. DoubleTwist, the company behind a suite of well designed apps for Android, hopes to change that with its new open source MagicPlay service.

  • Meet the next open-source stars

    The world of open-source software, by design, is something of a collective. Instead of well-defined teams of developers working on a project for pay, open-source software is the result of an amorphous community making contributions – some good, some bad. Everyone is part of the project, everyone has a stake.

  • Contributing to FOSS Projects, a counterpoint

    Earlier this week, another “advocacy site” (which I will not link here, as I don’t believe he advocates, nor does he deserve the traffic, for his shoddy “journalism”) posited that volunteering to work on a smaller Linux distribution, such as Solyd or Cloverleaf or Crunchbang, or any other smaller distribution, was akin to pissing in the wind, and possibly career suicide. Ignoring the falsehoods he spread about my own project of choice (Cloverleaf Linux), as I don’t believe they deserve a response, since they would fall on deaf ears, I would like to offer a counterpoint to his postulate.

    [...]

    Working on smaller distributions and projects a waste of time? Hardly.

  • Events

    • Open Source Developers Conference 2013 to be hosted in Auckland

      Historically held in Australia OSDC covers a wide range of Open Source technologies from low level development and frameworks up to the business value of Open Source technologies.

    • Over 100 teams registered

      And while we’re 2 weeks within the opening of SFD 2013 registration a lot of things are happening. First we saw an amazing 103 teams registered from 39 countries! We are currently producing team packs for those early registered SFD teams i.e. the packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 21th. If you haven’t registered your SFD event yet, simply create your team page and complete the registration form. All information and links are of course available from SFD website.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Download Mozilla’s Open Source Furniture to Kit Out Your Home
      • Firefox OS launching: Spain this week for open-source Android challenger

        The first Firefox OS smartphones, the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open, will hit the market “soon” Mozilla has confirmed this morning, promising imminent launches from Duetsche Telekom and Telefonica. The two new handsets run Mozilla’s own alternative to Android, Firefox OS, taking a web-centric perspective on apps and services in order to keep costs down and make the phones more appealing to developing markets. According to Telefonica, the first device will hit this week.

      • Firefox 22 Launches With Built-In Asm.js And WebRTC Support

        Mozilla today launched Firefox 22, the first stable version of the popular browser that supports the WebRTC protocol and includes support for the organization’s asm.js JavaScript subset that offers near-native performance for web apps.

      • Firefox OS phone launches Tuesday in Spain at $3 a month
      • Mozilla and Partners Prepare to Launch First Firefox OS Smartphones!
      • Firefox vs Ubuntu: Pick Me!

        With their booths just 20 meters apart in the cavernous Shanghai New International Exhibition Center at Mobile Asia Expo, it wasn’t hard to see that open source champions Mozilla and Ubuntu share similar ambitions.

        Both are working on a low-cost mobile handset operating system (OS) aimed at helping carriers and vendors break the duopoly of the big two platforms, Apple Inc.’s iOS and Google’s Android. (See 5 Challengers to Apple & Android.)

      • Firefox OS Better Than the Rest?

        Do you think people will flock to another OS for phones? I think some will want to try it, but unsure if they will keep it. A while ago, I read Ubuntu starting a phone OS based on their wonderful Dubian Linux. I was excited to see what they had to offer. Well, for those who know more of Firefox then you might just want to try out the Firefox OS.

        A month ago or so I was sent an email to Beta Test Firefox’s new phone with their new OS. Due to not being with the carrier that the phone was being tested on, I couldn’t get my hands on one. I was excited to see another OS pop up because I love to play with Linux, really just anything new.

      • Download Mozilla’s Open-Source Furniture To Kit Out Your Home
      • Mozilla Calls for Developers to Build Around Firefox’s Social API

        Just last week, Mozilla released version 22 of the Firefox browser, and you can get the details on what is under the hood here. Already, though, in keeping with Mozilla’s rapid release cycle, the first beta version of Firefox 23 is available. With version 23, Mozilla is calling out to developers to build around its Social API, integrating social services and websites with Firefox.

      • Mozilla is a community of do-ers!

        The Mozilla Summit is coming! On June 15th, 50 Mozillians got together for a planning session and I discovered just how much Mozillians focus on getting great things done!

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Intel: the only Hadoop is secure Hadoop

      Intel’s MD of worldwide professional services Aaron Davies-Morris has been speaking at the Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose about his firm’s drive to work with the open source Hadoop Java-based programming framework.

    • Teradata expands Hadoop support

      Teradata’s enterprise customers have a fresh set of options for integrating Hadoop into their environments.

      The company this week rolled out a new “Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop,” featuring a set of products, consulting services, training and support options for customers seeking to harness Hadoop for big data applications.

    • Open source private cloud storage with OpenStack Swift

      Everyone has data. It’s always growing, and you should have ownership of everything that touches your data. You need to have the ability to see and make changes to the code managing your storage system. Having ownership of your data gives you control of your own destiny.

  • Databases

    • Couchbase 2.1 Improves Open Source NoSQL Database Health

      “Couchbase 2.0 was a huge release for us, and with that release we became a document database and we added cross data center replication, ” Couchbase CEO Bob Weiderhold told Database Journal. “A lot of this release is about refining capabilities that we first delivered in the 2.0 release.”

    • Couchbase 2.1 Scales Open Source NoSQL

      The new Couchbase 2.1 release builds on the improvements that first landed with the Couchbase 2.0 release in December 2012.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The social side of LibreOffice

      The LibreOffice Project has been building an impressively rich and strong infrastructure in just a few years’ time. Today, I’d like to highlight not so much the quirks and the processes that support the everyday development or the flow of contributions, but rather the presence of the LibreOffice community on social networks and micro-blogging services.

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • Two deep dives into open source EHR

      If you’re interested in implementing a powerful EHR environment but don’t want to pay commercial prices, this article contains some great resources.

    • NHS England mulls open source patient record systems

      NHS England is considering offering cash to trusts to develop “open source” software which it says offers flexibility and speeds up their development of electronic patient record systems.

    • Johns Hopkins APL Releases Open Source Electronic Disease Surveillance Software

      The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC) have released the Suite for Automated Global Electronic bioSurveillance (SAGES), a collection of flexible, open-source software products developed for electronic disease surveillance in all settings.

  • Semi-Open Source

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • The joint committee for the French bill on Higher Education and Research confirms the provision giving priority to Free Software

      This Wednesday, 26 June 2013, the members of the joint committee (CMP) for the French bill on higher education and research —from both the National Assembly and the Senate— confirmed the legislation that gives priority to Free Software in the Public Service for Higher Education. April especially welcomes this vote and congratulates the Deputies and Senators. April also thanks all the persons who mobilised and contacted the Parliament Members.

    • UK Government Launches “Open Government License v2.0″
    • How NSA surveillance destroys privacy and undermines our sovereignty

      The French called it the cabinet noir – the “black chamber”. Set behind the General Post Office in the Rue Coq Heron, its job was to take letters of interest, open them, read their contents and then seal them again without detection by their intended readers or disruption to the postal service. “It is in the secret holes and cellars that the unsealers of letters, like the coiners of false money, carry on their dark labour,” wrote a visitor from London in 1828, describing a room full of steam, staffed by 20 or 30 agents. Created under the monarchy, the cabinet noir survived the transition to the revolutionaries, and then Napoleon. Each railed against it in turn and then, on taking power, suddenly found it indispensable.

  • Licensing

    • Agoraphobic? Rationalising a fear of open source software

      For organisations considering procuring a solution that includes OSS, very little can be expected in the way of warranties, and a clear understanding of exactly which OSS licences apply will be needed. It may also put more pressure on contracted support services if something goes wrong, and some would argue that a supplier of OSS support services has less commercial incentive to get to the bottom of a problem than someone who has invested a lot of time and money in developing and marketing proprietary software.

    • What’s Your Take on the GPL?

      To many in this group, the difference between “copyleft” licenses such as the GPL and “permissive” open source licenses are minimal. They note the differences, and take great pains to choose a license that suits their needs, but there is no great philosophical rift between the notion of free software (FOSS) licenses and other open source software (OSS) licenses. Nor do they see the irony in the fact that “permissive” licenses may end-up producing restricted, proprietary software, such as how Apple’s closed OS X is partially built on code freely obtained from FreeBSD and NetBSD.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • EU Open Standards: We Want Actions, Not Words

      Open standards has been a recurring theme here on Open Enterprise. It’s also been the occasion of one of the most disgraceful U-turns by the European Commission. That took place in the wake of the European Interoperability Framework v1, which called for any claimed patents to be licensed irrevocably on a royalty-free basis.

      [...]

      >So that raises a crucial question: is the European Commission serious about ending lock-in in the European Union? If it is, it should lead from the front, and break that outrageous and costly 20-year monopoly that the US company has enjoyed at the heart of European power. The Commission should start immediately to deploy open source solutions throughout its many organisational units – specifically, on the desktop, and not just server-side – and draw up a plan to enable the entire IT system to break free of this egregious lock-in in the shortest time possible.

    • Who could not be against lock-in for government ICT systems?

      The European Commission (EC) recently published an important report, officially a Communication: Against lock-in: building open ICT systems using standards. The Communication introduces and explains the need for the accompanying: Guide for procurement of standards-based ICT—Elements of Good Practice, which was released at the same time.

Leftovers

  • D.C. Circuit: Defamation Suit Against Breitbart Can Proceed

    A federal appellate court today gave the green light to a defamation lawsuit filed against the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart by former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. A three-judge panel affirmed a court order denying Breitbart’s motion to dismiss the case under the District of Columbia’s law barring strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs.

    Local lawyers hoping for a conclusive ruling on whether the anti-SLAPP law applies in federal court will have to keep waiting. In the ruling this morning, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided the case on procedural grounds.

  • Nonprofit Atheist Group Built A “Monument To Nothing” In Florida

    The Monument To Nothing and The Ten Commandments will now sit side-by-side in front of the courthouse.

  • Science

    • First-ever human head transplant is now possible, says neuroscientist

      Technical barriers to grafting one person’s head onto another person’s body can now be overcome, says Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group. In a recent paper, Canavero outlines a procedure modeled on successful head transplants which have been carried out in animals since 1970.

      The one problem with these transplants was that scientists were unable to connect the animals’ spinal cords to their donor bodies, leaving them paralyzed below the point of transplant. But, says Canavero, recent advances in re-connecting spinal cords that are surgically severed mean that it should be technically feasible to do it in humans. (This is not the same as restoring nervous system function to quadriplegics or other victims of traumatic spinal cord injury.)

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Giant weed that burns and blinds spreads across Canada

      A huge, toxic plant that can burn skin and cause permanent blindness has been found for the first time in eastern Ontario, prompting calls for a federal response to contain the spread of the poisonous plant as fear grows no province is immune.

    • The EU campaigning for better, digital healthcare

      Our health system is under constant pressure: the conditions it deals with are increasingly chronic and degenerative; ever busier doctors face ever more stretched resources. That people today are living longer is positive news, and thanks to a high-quality and dedicated medical sector. But it also creates new challenges, and calls for new changes. The answer may lie in eHealth – using digital technology for health and wellbeing.

    • This terrifying chart shows we’re not growing enough food to feed the world

      It’s a question that keeps crop scientists up at night: How are we possibly going to feed the world over the next few decades?

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Ex-NSA, CIA director admits US does conduct espionage

      Former CIA and National Security Agency Director, Michael Hayden, has said the United States does conduct espionage on citizens and countries.

    • Is NSA Blackmail Inc. for the U.S. Military Industrial Complex?

      Imagine that you are a powerful player who straddles two worlds – the Dept. of Defense and the private sector where corporate defense-contractors live and flourish.

    • Soviets ‘pushed theory JFK was CIA hit’

      The Soviet Union was behind the claim the U.S. government masterminded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

    • The CIA Doesn’t Need a ‘Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade’ to Keep Secrets

      Furthermore, because of their chosen careers, CIA employees are made justifiably paranoid about “security violations” — for instance, if you absent-mindedly took a classified document from your office, placed it in your briefcase or purse, exited the building, and then remembered you had it while walking to your car, the Office of Security could slap you with a security violation. (Pro tip: Don’t take a suitcase or large purse to work.)

    • Anglo-American “Intelligence Sharing”. Britain’s “Signal Intelligence” (SIGINT) supports CIA Drone Strikes

      His comments come as the UK government is locked in a battle to avoid revealing what GCHQs policy is on providing intelligence to support CIA drone strikes.

    • Former Spymaster On Three Decades In The CIA
    • Drones, their Impact and the
Pakistani Dilemma

      “Drone attacks are violating our sovereignty as well as international laws. Drone attacks must stop. We have protested many a time. This is simply unacceptable,” Sharif was quoted as saying in a statement issued by his office on June 8.

    • Council resolution targets drones, airspace

      The resolution also takes the government to task for the “extrajudicial” use of weaponized drones overseas that have killed many innocent people.

    • Nelson Mandela’s transformation ‘from terrorist to icon’

      So revered is Nelson Mandela today that it is easy to forget that for decades he was considered a terrorist by many foreign governments, and some of his current supporters.

    • South African Lawyers Demand US President’s Arrest

      The Muslim Lawyers Association (MLA) in South Africa Sudáfrica (MLA) has filed a suit before the Supreme Court against US President Barack Obama for war crimes and acts against human rights, according to press reports.

      The MLA requested Obama’s detention for ordering the death of numerous suspects abroad, which is considered enough reason for him to be subject to investigation and judged in a South African court, according to Africa Herald Express newspaper.

    • Extremely Disturbing Video Shows Police Arresting Man Over ‘Distracting’ Loud Music Then Shooting His Dog 4 Times

      The officers are seen quickly approaching Rosby, who shows no signs of resisting and puts his hands behind his back before he is handcuffed.

    • Cop Versus Squirrel: Students Object To Police Officer Pepper Spraying Squirrel

      We have discussed cases of the use of tasers or pepper spray as first responses by police when alternatives seem obvious. This video shows a confrontation between an officer and a squirrel where the officer pepper sprays the squirrel over the objections of onlookers.

    • Government’s Chilling Arguments To Support “Aiding the Enemy” Charge Against Bradley Manning

      If the Obama administration’s case against Bradley Manning was really about “aiding the enemy,” as opposed to controlling information, then Manning would not be the government official subject to criminal prosecution. The government is biggest leaker of all, even anonymously leaking allegations that recent “leaks” about NSA domestic surveillance (which are really whistleblowing disclosures) have hurt national security. But, only government employees who reveal information the government wants to hide from the public are prosecuted under the Espionage Act or dubious charges like “aiding the enemy” by disclosure. The government’s overzealous prosecution of Manning – even after he offered a plea that could land him 20 years in prison – is very clearly NOT intended to stop all “leaks” of information, rather its purpose is to stop whistleblowers from revealing information that the government does not want the public to know.

    • Police Respond To Call Of A Dog Off Leash . . . And Proceed To Shoot The Animal In Front Of Family Home

      Village of South Holland police Officer Chad Barden and other unknown officers are being sued in federal court over another dog shooting. In this case, the police arrived at the scene of a report of a dog off its leash in a suburb of Chicago. While they had dog catching poles, one of the officers shot Randy Green’s Cane Corso dog, Grady, who was sitting on the front porch of his family home when they arrived. Green says that a videotape shows that the dog did not threaten or lunge at the officers before they and Barden shot him three times.

      Police were at the scene for 20 minutes before the shooting. Grady reported got up and walked past them a couple times. There was no report of the dog being vicious or threatening people. At no point did the officers alert the family or use the dog catching poles according to the complaint.

    • A Glimpse Inside the Wire

      It’s 2013 and Guantanamo Bay is still open, insanely. Newly released Army documents obtained by Gawker shed light on life inside America’s most infamous prison, where classified documents are burned in coffee cans, American guards are converted to Islam by the suspected terrorists they watch over, and wily detainees wage their own counterintelligence campaigns.

      Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gawker has obtained a cache of documents detailing internal U.S. military espionage investigations conducted at Guantanamo Bay from 2005-2006. These were carried out by INSCOM, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command. One of INSCOM’s duties is to protect American forces against espionage from its enemies, known in Army parlance as Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the US Army, or SAEDA.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein to join Canada’s tar sands ‘healing walk’

      Native elders to lead a spiritual gathering to heal land, air, water and all living forms harmed by world’s largest industrial project

    • The 10 Dumbest Things Ever Said About Global Warming

      In 2012, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) contended that acceptance of climate science was at odds with Christianity – never mind that many Christian leaders and institutions take climate change very seriously. “My point is, God’s still up there,” he told Voice of Christian Youth America. “The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

    • Australian-Indonesian carbon project abandoned

      Australia has effectively killed the last of its vaunted on-the-ground projects in Indonesia to restore and protect forests and peatland for the carbon dioxide they store.

      In a small note on the AusAid website, the Commonwealth government has confirmed a $47 million project to restore 25,000 hectares of peatland on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan will end before most of its major milestones are met.

    • Over 30 Million Bees Found Dead In Elmwood Canada

      Shortly after 50,000 bees were found dead in an Oregon parking lot (read more here), a staggering 37 million bees have been found dead in Elmwood, Ontario, Canada. Dave Schuit, who runs a honey operation in Elmwood has lost 600 hives. He is pointing the finger at the insecticides known as neonicotinoids, which are manufactured by Bayer CropScience Inc. This also comes after a recent report released by the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) that recorded its largest loss of honeybees ever. You can read more about that here. The European Union has stepped forward, having banned multiple pesticides that have been linked to killing millions of bees. You can view the studies and read more about that here.

    • There’s A Two-Headed Baby Turtle Named Thelma And Louise And She’s Adorable

      Several North American river turtles (also known as cooters) were born at the San Antonio Zoo last week, but Thelma and Louise were the only ones born with this rare condition.

    • Repsol to drill for oil in Amazon rainforest in Peru

      Company to operate in a region inhabited by indigenous people extremely vulnerable to any contact with outsiders

  • Finance

    • War On the Unemployed

      Is life too easy for the unemployed? You may not think so, and I certainly don’t think so. But that, remarkably, is what many and perhaps most Republicans believe. And they’re acting on that belief: there’s a nationwide movement under way to punish the unemployed, based on the proposition that we can cure unemployment by making the jobless even more miserable.

      [...]

      Nonetheless, the state’s government has just sharply cut aid to the unemployed. In fact, the Republicans controlling that government were so eager to cut off aid that they didn’t just reduce the duration of benefits; they also reduced the average weekly benefit, making the state ineligible for about $700 million in federal aid to the long-term unemployed.

    • CFTC charges Corzine, assistant treasurer in MF Global failure

      Former MF Global Chief Executive Jon Corzine was charged Thursday for his role in the failure of the futures brokerage.

      A top U.S. regulator blaed blaming the former Goldman Sachs co-chief executive with being a key actor in one of the country’s 10 biggest bankruptcies.

      The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said on Thursday it will seek in a civil case to ban Corzine and former Assistant Treasurer Edith O’Brien from the industry, and also seek penalties against the two.

      “Mr. Corzine is charged with being more than a passive actor in the downfall of MF Global,” CFTC enforcement head David Meister said on a call with journalists. “He lacked good faith and … violated his supervision obligations.”

    • Big Apple, Bigger Google

      Google has passed Apple as the most valuable technology company in the world—on one measure.

    • Farming subsidies: this is the most blatant transfer of cash to the rich

      It’s the silence that puzzles me. Last week the chancellor stood up in parliament to announce that benefits for the very poor would be cut yet again. On the same day, in Luxembourg, the British government battled to maintain benefits for the very rich. It won. As a result, some of the richest people in the country will each continue to receive millions of pounds in income support from taxpayers.

    • Latin American Countries Band Together To Fight Growing Problem Of Investor-State Disputes

      As Techdirt has observed, investor-state dispute resolution (ISDR) is turning into a major weapon that corporations can deploy against nations in order to claim damages for some alleged loss of future profits as a result of government action — for example, stricter health or environmental regulations. Last year alone, 62 new investment arbitration cases were initiated against nations, and a record award of $1.77 billion was made against Ecuador.

    • MEPs call for freezing EU-US trade talks over spying allegations

      Some EU policymakers said talks for a free trade agreement between Washington and the EU should be put on ice until further clarification from the United States over revelations that American spies wiretapped European Union buildings in Brussels and Washington.

    • 81.5% of QE Money Is Not Helping the Economy

      81.5% of Money Created through Quantitative Easing Is Sitting There Gathering Dust … Instead of Helping the Economy

    • Unsolicited advice for those entering the brave new world of work, or worse, journalism.

      It must be summer. In anticipation of fall course schedules, several people have asked what I think someone who wants to be a journalist should study.

    • Spain’s property sale of the century

      The Spanish government has approved a plan to sell a quarter of its state-owned properties in an attempt to raise hundreds of millions and fill the government’s empty coffers.

      Some 15,000 properties, from office buildings to agricultural land, will be put up for sale over the next seven years.

    • Britain turns back the clock on migrant domestic workers

      The government’s decision to end the overseas domestic worker visa has given bad employers opportunity to abuse, argues Paul Donovan.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Keystone Academy: Where Legislators Learn the Etiquette of Serving Special Interests

      In October 2012, nine U.S. state legislators went on an industry paid trip to explore the Alberta tar sands. Publicly described as an “ALEC Academy,” documents obtained by CMD show the legislators were accompanied on a chartered flight by a gaggle of oil-industry lobbyists, were served lunch by Shell Oil, dinner by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and that the expenses of the trip were paid for by TransCanada and other corporations and groups with a direct financial interest in the Alberta tar sands and the proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline.

    • Gov. Walker Vetoes Bail Bonds, Attack on Investigative Journalism

      Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has vetoed a budget provision that would have radically changed the state’s pre-trial justice system and another that would have kicked an independent journalism outfit off of University of Wisconsin campuses.

    • What Tea Party Did Tom Friedman Go To?

      That is an odd characterization of Occupy, which most of the time tried to stress that the problem with banking interests controlling the political process was bipartisan. It’s not that he’s wrong, but the emphasis seems a little off.

      But his characterization of the Tea Party is wrong about the target of their anger, as well as the political motivations behind that anger. How many people watched the Tea Party protests and thought, “Boy, are they mad at the Republicans!”? Clearly the bulk of the energy behind that movement was directed at Democrats and the Obama White House.

  • Censorship

    • Turkey heads for Twitter showdown after anti-government protests

      Government asks Twitter to set up ‘representative office’ inside Turkey in move that could presage censorship of service

    • Opinion: Why Is the UK the Most Censored Nation in Europe?

      When Claire Perry MP held her parliamentary inquiry into “Protecting Children Online”, I was invited to appear as a witness on behalf of the adult industry. I was happy to attend the inquiry and advocate against censorship – not simply because I was selling porn online, but because I have always been an ardent advocate of free speech.

      I was disturbed, shocked even, to find that the free speech advocates at that inquiry consisted of myself (a porn vendor) and one other person, Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group, a small campaigning body. Here was an all-party group of MPs considering whether it would be right to introduce Internet censorship for an entire democratic country, and the entire “free speech lobby” appeared to consist of myself and Jim. Such an inquiry in the US would have threatened the First Amendment to the Constitution, and would have provoked activism and legal action. Was Britain really so weakly defended against censorship?

  • Privacy

    • Spying ‘Out of Control’: EU Official Questions Trade Negotiations

      Senior European Union officials are outraged by revelations that the US spied on EU representations in Washington and New York. Some have called for a suspension of talks on the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement.

    • Will the Trans-Atlantic Spying Scandal Kill the Trans-Atlantic “Trade” Scandal?
    • Attacks from America: NSA Spied on European Union Offices

      America’s NSA intelligence service allegedly targeted the European Union with its spying activities. According to SPIEGEL information, the US placed bugs in the EU representation in Washington and infiltrated its computer network. Cyber attacks were also perpetrated against Brussels in New York and Washington.

    • The Absolute Joy Of The Guardian’s Sting Over PRISM And The NSA
    • US to respond to NSA spying allegations

      The United States has said it will respond to demands for answers over a report claiming the National Security Agency bugged EU institutions. US officials say they will discuss the matter directly with EU leaders.

    • Why Innocent People Should Fear the NSA’s PRISM Program

      The NSA would also obviously be able to intimidate/blackmail anyone who has had an extra-marital affair, which could be a corrupting influence on a future Bill Clinton in office.

    • The NSA’s surveillance activity snags 500 million German ‘communications connections’ each month
    • Chalk Another One Up to Free Speech Hypocrisy

      Corporate media coverage of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has enjoyed the supposed irony of his reportedly seeking asylum in Ecuador, a country that U.S. journalists depict as failing to measure up to their standards of freedom.

    • California Man Chalks Up A Victory For Free Speech In Bank Of America Case
    • NSA bugs EU embassies, infiltrates their computer networks: German media

      The disclosure triggered strong reaction from EU leaders who demanded full and speedy clarification from the US.

    • NSA’s Transatlantic Surveillance May Sabotage European Free-Trade Talks
    • Second Circuit Suggests That the Plain View Exception Should Be Applied More Narrowly to Digital Searches

      As regular readers know, I am very interested in the scope of the plain view exception for computer searches. In physical searches, if the government comes across evidence unrelated to the search it is lawfully conducting, the government can seize that evidence as long as its incriminating nature is immediately apparent. I have argued that this rule is troublesome in the context of digital searches because everything comes into plain view in computer searches. A computer warrant for anything becomes a warrant for everything, making every computer warrant a general warrant in practice. To counter that dynamic, I have argued that the plain view exception should not apply to digital searches. See Orin Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005).

    • Second Circuit Suggests That the Plain View Exception Should Be Applied More Narrowly to Digital Searches

      As regular readers know, I am very interested in the scope of the plain view exception for computer searches. In physical searches, if the government comes across evidence unrelated to the search it is lawfully conducting, the government can seize that evidence as long as its incriminating nature is immediately apparent. I have argued that this rule is troublesome in the context of digital searches because everything comes into plain view in computer searches. A computer warrant for anything becomes a warrant for everything, making every computer warrant a general warrant in practice. To counter that dynamic, I have argued that the plain view exception should not apply to digital searches. See Orin Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005).

    • Wyden and Udall to General Alexander: NSA Must Correct Inaccurate Statement in Fact Sheet

      Today, Senators Wyden and Udall wrote to General Keith Alexander urging him to correct inaccurate and misleading statements in the NSA’s recently released fact sheet on Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Survelliance Act (FISA).

    • Study Shows Many iPhone Apps Defy Apple’s Privacy Advice

      Researchers say that over a third of iPhone apps still access a device’s unique identifier.

    • Exclusive: Met supergrass scandal – corrupt private investigators infiltrate witness-protection programme

      Police officers knew for years about the crucial security breach – but did nothing

    • U.S. Surveillance Is Not Aimed at Terrorists

      The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens.

    • GCHQ surveillance: Germany blasts UK over mass monitoring

      Minister questions legality of mass tapping of calls and internet and demands to know extent to which Germans were targeted

    • US must not prosecute NSA whistleblower Snowden – Amnesty Intl
    • ‘Americans have no privacy left, no capacity to communicate without govt watching’

      The US government pulls out all stops to prosecute, hound, and capture those who reveal classified data. This plus constant control and surveillance makes it impossible to keep anything private or secret, Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges told RT.

    • FTC commissioner calls for way to ‘reclaim your name’

      Consumers should be able to retake control of data collected by websites and data brokers, Brill says

    • F.T.C. Member Starts ‘Reclaim Your Name’ Campaign for Personal Data
    • Meet PRISM’s little brother: Socmint

      The PRISM scandal engulfing US and UK intelligence agencies has blown the debate wide open over what privacy means in the digital age and whether the Internet risks becoming a kind of Stasi 2.0. The extent of the UK’s involvement in this type of mass surveillance—which already appears exhaustive—shows just what a potential intelligence goldmine social media data can be.

    • Obama “concerned” Edward Snowden could leak more

      President Obama said Thursday he won’t engage in “wheeling and dealing and trading” to get NSA leaker Edward Snowden extradited to the U.S., but he remains “concerned” over what other classified information Snowden may still try to disseminate.

    • The judges who preside over America’s secret court

      Twelve of the 14 judges who have served this year on the most secret court in America are Republicans and half are former prosecutors

    • Data, meet spies: The unfinished state of Web crypto

      Many large Web companies have failed to adopt a decades-old encryption technology to safeguard confidential user communications. Google is a rare exception, and Facebook is about to follow suit.

    • Baltasar Garzón has chosen not to represent Edward Snowden

      While he will still continue to represent Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Baltasar Garzón has chosen not to act on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s behalf.
      According to Spanish media, Garzón, who is a renowned former human rights “superjudge”, announced on Wednesday that his firm has declined to represent US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Snowden’s father seeks deal with US govt
    • New leak shows NSA harvests To, From, and BCC lines of e-mail data

      Metadata for non-US conversants have been collected en masse since 2001.

    • White hats reveal major holes in NSA website

      Several vulnerabilities have been found in the National Security Agency (NSA) website.

      Although now reported and fixed, a report found that there were cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the main NSA forward facing web server. The report claimed that two vulnerabilities were found in “shoddily outsourced third party software written in ColdFusion”, which Rustle Research researcher Horace Grant said could be used to impersonate NSA personnel and web traffic.

    • Daniel Ellsberg Issues Call for a New Church Committee To Probe NSA

      Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is calling for a new Church Committee to probe the “abuses of American intelligence agencies” and “restore the protections in the Bill of Rights.”

    • Norton Mobile Insight Discovers Facebook Privacy Leak

      Today we released a new version of Norton Mobile Security for Android devices that contains our new Norton Mobile Insight technology. Mobile Insight has analyzed over 4 million Android applications and processes tens of thousands of new applications every day. Through automatic and proprietary static and dynamic analysis techniques, Mobile Insight is able to automatically discover malicious applications, privacy risks, and potentially intrusive behavior. Further, Mobile Insight will tell you exactly what risky behavior an application will perform and give you specific, relevant, and actionable information.

    • Facebook stealing phone numbers: Norton
    • Germany also profits from US, British spying

      Public outcry has emerged over British and American monitoring of global communications. But the German government has so far been reserved in its criticism, partly because the country receives data from such monitoring.

    • Prism threatens ‘sovereignty’ of all EU data

      The US Prism revelations show that the sovereignty of all European Union data is under threat, argues Caspar Bowden

    • How The Indian Government’s ‘Central Monitoring System’ Makes The NSA Look Like A Paragon Of Restraint

      If the NSA’s surveillance capabilities make the Stasi’s spying seem completely underwhelming, the Indian government’s efforts in the same arena threatens to make our men and women at the NSA look as if they’re just not applying themselves.

    • Obama: US will give allies info on spying claims
    • Turkey to Show ‘Required Reaction’ over NSA Spying Revelations
    • NSA spying row: bugging friends is unacceptable, warn Germans
    • European Commission responds to NSA spying allegations – video
    • Even the online ad industry is outraged at PRISM and Tempora. But why?

      The revelations about the activities of American and British spy agencies are so egregious that even the online ad industry is up in arms. As well they should be — it threatens their livelihood.

    • Cover Story: How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe
    • Putin hints at offer for Snowden to remain in Russia

      Vladimir Putin has for the first time floated the idea of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden remaining in Russia, a move that would enrage the Washington as it continues to lobby for his extradition.

    • Blind Fear Of Cyberwar Drives Columnist To Call For Elimination Of The Internet

      Every time I think I’ve read the least well-thought out luddite argument, someone comes along to top it, and today we have columnist Robert Samuelson in the Washington post with what might be the silliest, most lacking-in-thought argument for why we should get rid of the internet. The short version: yes, the internet has provided us with some good stuff, but because there’s a yet unproven risk that it might also lead to some cyberattacks that might lead to as yet undetermined problems, we should scrap the whole thing. Oddly, the WaPo had put different titles on the piece online and in the print newspaper. Online, it’s entitled: “Beware the Internet and the danger of cyberattacks.” In the physical paper, they apparently went with the much more ridiculous: “Is the Internet Worth It?”

    • French parties call for Snowden political asylum

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be given political asylum in France, party leaders from across the political spectrum have said in the wake of the latest US spying allegations.

    • Edward Snowden breaks silence to threaten new U.S. disclosures

      Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden has broken his silence for the first time since he fled to Moscow eight days ago to say he remains free to make new disclosures about U.S. spying activity.

      In a letter to Ecuador seen by Reuters, Snowden said the United States was illegally persecuting him for revealing its electronic surveillance program, PRISM. He also thanked Ecuador for helping him get to Russia and for examining his asylum request.

    • US to EU: Quit whining about our spying on you

      European officials are even more shocked and outraged today than they were yesterday at the revelations in Der Spiegel that the US government has been spying on the EU’s offices in Washington and New York. “These are disturbing news if proven true. They demand full clarification,” the EU said in a terse statement today. French president François Hollande said that the revelations might threaten a big round of trade talks scheduled for next week in Washington. “We aren’t in the Cold War anymore,” said Steffen Seibert, chief spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel, at a news conference in Berlin.

      But while America’s European allies may be shocked, they can’t be surprised. Anyone familiar with the spy-versus-spy games in global diplomatic hubs knows that everyone has been spying on each other for decades.

      Some offices at the UN are probably being bugged by more than a dozen foreign governments, according to a former head of FBI counter-intelligence. He says governments are spying on each other so much in Washington and at the UN that it’s surprising their spooks and technicians don’t bump into each other more. At any given time, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division is investigating dozens of potential breaches of security.

      Two US officials familiar with American electronic espionage programs told Bloomberg that “multinational institutions are routine targets for both technological and human intelligence by virtually all nations that are members of them.” And the State Department cables leaked by Wikileaks show that US diplomats have essentially been required to spy on their counterparts for years.

      [...]

      If anything, Washington spies on its friends more than its enemies because it has more access, and needs to know whether it can trust them on key strategic deliberations, according to Peter Probst, a former senior CIA and defense department official.

    • Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow

      For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

      In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

    • Did Ed Snowden Actually Write His Latest ‘Statement’?

      Update: And… just as I finished this post, Manjoo tweeted that they’d changed the text to “has been.” However, that’s not what it was originally. Here’s a screenshot of it from my screen with the wrong “have been” in there.

    • GOP Maj. Leader Eric Cantor On NSA And Investing In Small Government Technology
    • Bush Defends NSA Program, Obama’s Stance

      Former president George W. Bush criticized Edward Snowden and expressed confidence that the Obama administration would appropriately handle the controversy about its surveillance tactics in an interview filmed Sunday with CNN in Zambia.

      Speaking to CNN’s Robyn Curnow, Mr. Bush said Mr. Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked classified National Security Agency information, had “damaged the security of the country.” Mr. Bush said he was sure the administration would “deal” with the aftermath of the leaks, and said he approved of the NSA’s tactics. “I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance,” he said. The full interview is airing later Monday.

    • EU Officials Angered by Fresh NSA Spying Revelations [VIDEO]
    • Rafael Correa not considering Snowden asylum: helping him was a ‘mistake’

      Ecuador is not considering Edward Snowden’s asylum request and never intended to facilitate his flight from Hong Kong, president Rafael Correa said as the whistleblower made a personal plea to Quito for his case to be heard.

    • Obama tries to ease NSA tensions and insists: Europe spies on US too

      Barack Obama sought to defuse growing international tension on Monday over fresh revelations of US surveillance programmes on its allies by claiming European countries are also spying on him.

      Amid an outcry among EU leaders at alleged diplomatic espionage including the bugging of embassies and parliament buildings, the president insisted the US was behaving no differently from other countries.

    • Julian Assange and Ecuador relations at crisis point as Edward Snowden breaks silence with letter of thanks to Quito

      Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who blew the whistle on a huge spying programme by US authorities, has accused the American government of “persecution” and thanked Ecuador for standing against it. And in a separate statement, released by WikiLeaks, he accused the US of putting pressure on world leaders over his case.

    • The NSA reimagined as a business and jobs platform

      The National Security Agency could be rejigged as a self-funded entity fulfilling its missions while saving taxpayers billions of dollars and also providing them with a host of useful services.

    • NSA Scandal: Germany Summons US Ambassador over ‘Cold War Spying’ Claims

      < Chancellor Angela Merkel accuses Washington of 'unacceptable Cold War behaviour' /blockquote>

    • The NSA : America’s ever-expanding digital spy agency

      The latest leak from Snowden alleges the NSA has been eavesdropping on US allies, including the European Union offices in Washington, which would fit in with the agency’s ability to scoop up any conversation or email relevant to “foreign targets.”

      Created after World War II to avoid another Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack, the NSA “has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created,” wrote author James Bamford, whose books helped lift the lid on the agency’s work.

    • Reddit to thwart the NSA’s tracking plans with a gift exchange? Yup.

      One of the ways the NSA is doing this is by tracking a large list of flagged key words that are pretty common to everyday conversation. Sites like Motherboard.tv’s “Hello, NSA” takes that list of terms and automatically generates a phrase using a few of them that you can then post all over the Internet. The purpose is to basically skew all of the NSA’s efforts by going out of your way to mention these terms — thus making them less unique to terrorism (I mean, if they really were unique to terrorism in the first place.)

    • Edward Snowden’s Moscow stopover became end of the line … for now

      When the NSA whistleblower melted into Hong Kong’s streets, many thought he would stay and fight his case. Instead, he ran

    • We never hand anyone over, says Vladimir Putin as Edward Snowden asks for asylum

      The whistleblower behind a series of leaks that revealed the United States was spying on its allies has applied for political asylum in Russia, it has emerged, as the French President François Hollande threatened to call off EU negotiations on a major trade deal unless the snooping stopped.

    • NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden is a gift to Russia

      Edward Snowden presents Moscow with an intriguing dilemma. On the one hand, his subversion of surveillance techniques and his role as a whistleblower go against everything that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the clique of former KGB officers around him stand for. On the other hand, of course, his leaks are aimed against the US, and thus a chorus of Russian officials who would find a Russian whistleblower doing the same thing repulsive has been lining up to praise Mr Snowden.

    • NSA PRISM snoops on European communications

      THE REACH of the US PRISM snooping scheme extends into Germany and as many as 500,000 citizens.

      According to Der Spiegel, reporters have seen more documentation about the US National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM communications surveillance programme, and found that it extends to European governments and citizens.

    • ‘Spying on allies is not unusual’: John Kerry hits back at claim US bugged 38 foreign embassies as as Hollande wades in calling for snooping on allies to ‘stop immediately’

      Microphones were put in building and computers compromised as spooks targeted EU in Washington and UN offices in New York

    • Snowden breaks silence to denounce Obama for revoking his passport, opposing his asylum requests

      The fugitive U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, believed to be in legal limbo in the Moscow airport, is expanding his requests for asylum to another 19 countries, including China, according to WikiLeaks.

    • Why Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s Fight Against Tyranny Follows in Gandhi’s Footsteps

      There is a linguistic gobbledegoo going on about what it is that Edward Snowden has committed that was made possible by the “advocacy journalism” of Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian. While many, in the US and around the world, seem to believe that Snowden committed a “heroic act” by blowing a loud whistle on the global spying by the US, the established order keeps insisting—noop, it’s “treason.”

    • James Clapper is still lying to America

      A smoking gun shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a big liar — and it’s not the first time

    • Welcome to the Post-PRISM Society: A primer.

      Questions of privacy, security and control have occupied me for a long time, both personally and professionally. In fact it was a significant aspect of my decision to switch focus from the Free Software Foundation Europe to Kolab Systems: I wanted to reduce the barriers to actually putting the principles into practice. That required a professional solution which would offer all the benefits and features people have grown accustomed to, but would provide it as high quality Open Source / Free Software with a strong focus on Open Standards.

    • Petition written by Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers
    • Snowden applies for political asylum in Russia – and 20 other countries

      Vladimir Putin has for the first time floated the idea of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden remaining in Russia, hours after the fugitive applied for political asylum in the country.

    • The NSA’s metastasised intelligence-industrial complex is ripe for abuse

      Where oversight and accountability have failed, Snowden’s leaks have opened up a vital public debate on our rights and privacy

    • Info Wars: Paranoia, Surveillance and an Empire in Decline

      These days, despite state-corporate control and manipulation of the mainstream media, many see through the charade of today’s ‘liberal democracy’ and the ‘pack of lies’ which underpin it. The more the US lacks control over ‘the message’, the more it has to resort to violence and restrictions on freedoms. The more paranoid it becomes, the more penetrating and widespread the surveillance and ‘information gathering’ is. It is the type of insecurity that derives from an empire in decline. It is the type of oppression that derives from an empire that is ideologically and militarily fighting for its continued existence (10).

    • My Creeping Concern that the NSA Leaker Edward Snowden is not who he Purports to be…

      Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive – even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times – rather than the machine itself – that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests – why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times – unless we know about it?

    • How algorithms rule the world

      The NSA revelations highlight the role sophisticated algorithms play in sifting through masses of data. But more surprising is their widespread use in our everyday lives. So should we be more wary of their power?

    • Statement by the European Commission on alleged surveillance of EU premises

      As soon as the media reports about alleged spying and eavesdropping on EU premises and delegations were made known, the Commission asked the European External Action Service to immediately raise the matter with the US authorities in Washington DC and in Brussels to verify the veracity of these reports.

    • Roundup: NSA, UK Fallout Persists

      Even the weekend news cycle is not immune to new developments in U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and UK spying allegations, with headlines upon headlines of new news and reactions to Edward Snowden’s revelations.

      The New York Times’ Kevin O’Brien writes, “Europe was in an uproar Sunday over a magazine’s charge that Washington bugged European Union offices in the United States,” but adds that, “the backlash on another type of intrusion has been surprisingly muted, namely the disclosure that U.S. technology leaders…may have shared EU citizens’ personal data with an American surveillance program called PRISM.”

    • Whistleblower debunks claim that the NSA is keeping you safe

      Thomas Drake, a whistleblowing predecessor of Snowden, published a written testimony in the Guardian news explaining how the information that Snowden is releasing is exactly what he saw during his time working at the NSA.

    • NSA joint author on OpenStack Security Guidebook
    • Letter to the President and People of Ecuador

      There are few world leaders who would risk standing for the human rights of an individual against the most powerful government on earth, and the bravery of Ecuador and its people is an example to the world.

      I must express my deep respect for your principles and sincere thanks for your government’s action in considering my request for political asylum.

      The government of the United States of America has built the world’s largest system of surveillance. This global system affects every human life touched by technology; recording, analysing, and passing secret judgment over each member of the international public.

    • The price of truth

      While the international press plays up the information leaked by Edward Snowden as a revelation concerning the PRISM surveillance program, feigning to have discovered what everyone should already have known for a long time, Thierry Meyssan is particularly curious about the meaning of this rebellion. From this perspective, he attaches more importance to the case of General Cartwright, who has also been indicted for espionage.

    • Will US General Be Spared Obama’s (Selective) Wrath Against Leakers?

      Could the latest target of President Obama’s aggressive war against leakers of government secrets be a recent, and very high-level, member of the country’s military power structure?

    • Press Latched On to Snowden’s ‘Dropout’ Status

      Edward Snowden has been characterized as many things in recent weeks, but journalists’ discounting him as a “high-school dropout” speaks volumes about media portrayals of education.

    • Prism event in Parliament

      Around 70 people attended our PRISM and Tempora event in Parliament last Thursday…

    • Poland to demand explanation over allegations of U.S. spying

      Poland, among the staunchest U.S. allies in Europe, said on Tuesday it will demand an explanation from Washington about allegations from ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that U.S. agencies spied on European Union communications. – See more at: http://www.tidewaterreview.com/news/national-world-news/sns-rt-us-usa-security-snowden-sikorski-20130702,0,688495.story#sthash.Bi8J50Lu.dpuf

    • Turkey and Japan Tighten Screws on Washington over NSA Spying

      Turkey and Japan have joined other countries in tightening the screws on Washington over the latest NSA leaks which suggested that the American agency extensively spied on its allies.

    • Warrantless Surveillance? The NSA Did It Before, At Least Three Times

      The National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance of communications by Americans may have caused a scandal when it was revealed last month, but it was hardly the first time the sprawling, super-secret entity was caught snooping on American citizens. In fact, the NSA was caught spying on Americans, for decades, long before the 2001 attacks on the U.S. persuaded authorities to create mass eavesdropping programs in an attempt to catch terrorists.

    • Barack Obama seeks to soothe relations with EU over NSA spying – video
    • Europe must get tough with the US over NSA spying revelations

      The EU must stop cosying up to the US, protect its citizens and investigate the possibility of espionage by a foreign power

    • Have the NSA revelations made you change your online habits?
    • Prism leak indicates real-time surveillance, says paper

      Fresh details about Prism have emerged after the Washington Post published four more leaked slides detailing the US internet surveillance programme.

      The paper says the documents indicate the FBI has installed equipment on the property of certain US-based tech firms and passes on retrieved data to the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA).

    • Reding: ‘I am still awaiting a written response’ over US, UK spying allegations

      European Commission requests for clarification from the American and British governments relating to espionage allegations remain unanswered as more revelations continue to stoke European political indignation.

      German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday (29 June) that the US National Security Agency (NSA) bugged EU offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks.

    • Obama defends U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics

      President Obama defended U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics Monday in the wake of a report that the United States conducted electronic monitoring of European Union offices and computer networks.

    • US government declares hacking an act of war, then hacks allies

      Revelations from European leaders on Monday that the National Security Agency bugged European Union offices in Washington and hacked into its computer network bring to light hypocrisy on the part of the U.S. government.

      In 2011, the Pentagon released its first formal cyber strategy, which called computer hacking from other nations an “act of war,” according to the Wall Street Journal. In late June of this year, WSJ reported that Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, released information alleging the U.S. government was hacking Chinese targets “that include the nation’s mobile-phone companies and one of the country’s most prestigious universities.”

    • Allies turn on US over Snowden

      U.S. allies are turning on the Obama administration over the latest revelations from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

      French politicians from the right and the left and a leader of Germany’s Green Party called for their countries to grant amnesty to Snowden on Monday amid continental outrage over reports America bugged offices of the European Union.

    • All about Prism, Internet privacy and — wait! — squirrel!

      Some people are deeply upset about the latest incursions into our privacy. But as a society, we don’t seem to care all that much.

  • Civil Rights

    • Journalism, Even When It’s Tilted

      In a refracted media world where information comes from everywhere, the line between two “isms” — journalism and activism — is becoming difficult to discern. As American news media have pulled back from international coverage, nongovernmental organizations have filled in the gaps with on-the-scene reports and Web sites. State houses have lost reporters who used to provide accountability, so citizens have turned to digital enterprises, some of which have partisan agendas.

    • On the freedom to speak

      In the course of both, I referred to one example I had recently learned of created by Palantir. The specific technology essentially builds an audit trail to the core, so any use of data by, say, a gov’t official, is perfectly tractable.

    • Renowned Security Expert Bruce Schneier Joins EFF Board of Directors

      San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce the newest member of its Board of Directors: renowned security expert Bruce Schneier.

    • House vs. Senate on the NDAA

      Raffaela has already posted on both the House of Representatives‘s and the Senate‘s versions of this year’s NDAA–highlighting their differences with regards to Guantanamo detentions and transfers. But I wanted to emphasize the point, which seems to me both very important and potentially offering a major breakthrough in the politics of Guantanamo.

    • Center for Internet and Society Launches “Cookie Clearinghouse” to Enable User Choice for Online Tracking
    • Germans Loved Obama. Now We Don’t Trust Him.

      IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting.

      The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored. The reason this information had been preserved for six months was because of Germany’s implementation of a 2006 European Union directive.

    • Edward Snowden submits asylum applications

      On 30th June 2013 WikiLeaks’ legal advisor in the Edward Snowden matter, Sarah Harrison, submitted by hand a number of requests for asylum and asylum assistance on behalf of Edward J. Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

    • Wikileaks Files for Snowden Asylum in India, Other Countries

      Snowden, a former defense contractor in the United States, has been charged with treason by America for leaking secret documents on the country’s massive surveillance program.

      The other countries to which Wikileaks has applied for asylum include: Austria, Bolivia, China, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela, Ecuador and Ireland.

    • Tell EU Member States: Save Greek “undesirables” from internment camps!
    • Ohio Police Threaten Unconstitutional Searches To Stop Citizens Who React “Suspiciously”

      The police in Mayfield Heights, Ohio are clearly put out that the Supreme Court has ruled out checkpoints for drugs. They have come up with what they believe is the next best thing: fake drug checkpoints. They are effectively threatening an unconstitutional stop to see which drivers flee . . . and then searching their vehicles. It turns out that Police Chief Fred W. Bittner has support from the local prosecutors in threatening police abuse as a basis to stop cars.

    • Egypt’s Army Issues Ultimatum to Morsi
    • Egypt’s President Morsi rebuffs army 48-hour ultimatum and says presidency will go forward on it’s ‘previously plotted path’

      Egypt set for a military coup if Muslim Brotherhood President clings to power

    • Thirty-Three MILLION People. Egypt Rises WITH UPDATES. Morsi Has 48 Hours

      That’s an unofficial number, of course. But that’s the unofficial number of people who are out protesting against the government of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood today. Thirty-three million all over Egypt. The largest protest in the history of the world.

    • San Diego Jury Acquits on All Counts Occupy Chalk Protestor Targeted by Bank of America

      Bank of America pushed for the prosecution of Olson on vandalism charges for writing his First Amendment opinions on public sidewalks (and in one case on Bank of America pavement). In fact the elected conservative SD City Attorney, Jan Goldsmith, didn’t even initiate charges against Olson until months after he wrote in chalk on sidewalks in front of three Bank of America branches in SD. It was only after the local security officer for Bank of America relentlessly prodded the City Attorney’s office that Olson was charged with the 13 counts of vandalism.

    • San Diego jury finds protester not guilty in chalk-vandalism case
    • Understanding Evil

      When we start talking about his war crimes, we might as well be talking about a figure from a history textbook, for all the emotion we show. If we were on a television program and you were watching us with the mute button pressed, you would imagine I was asking about his grandchildren. Instead I am asking about how he murdered other people’s grandchildren.

  • DRM

    • W3C Chief: To Prevent Parts Of The Web From Being Walled Off, We Need To Wall It Off Ourselves

      But here’s the problem: DRM itself is what allows “walled gardens” and “closed apps.” So, if they truly believe that’s not good, they should be against adding DRM to HTML 5. The argument made here is truly bizarre. It also presupposes that the web needs content companies more than the content companies need the web. That’s almost certainly incorrect. Whenever the content companies have chosen to go in the other direction and to wall off things and lock them up, that’s when you see the content flow through to the open web in an unauthorized manner. The way to stop that is for content companies to learn to embrace the web and to recognize, as many in the music world finally did, that DRM is a waste of time. It doesn’t stop or even slow down copyright infringement. It just acts as a huge pain in the ass for those who acquired the works in a legitimate and authorized manner.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Patented Drug Turns to Gold (With lots of Government Help)

      The question for Jazz now becomes whether competitors will be induced to compete, lowering prices, once the 7-year tax cut expires. Price competition seems unlikely, since it currently has only 10,500 customers and a competitor would have to gamble that it can take market share from Jazz.

      Question for taxpayers: how long will this ripoff continue?

    • Copyrights

IRC Proceedings: June 23rd-June 29th, 2013

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: June 23rd, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: June 24th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: June 25th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: June 26th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: June 27th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: June 28th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: June 29th, 2013

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Enter the IRC channels now

07.01.13

Software Patents and the FTC’s Red Herring

Posted in Patents at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Red herring

Summary: The core problem with the USPTO remains unchallenged because the wrong problem — or a symptom rather — is being described and slowly addressed

The USPTO has been harbouring a culture of patenting, motivated for the most part by large corporations’ desire to have mechanisms of protectionism in place, barring or weighing down emerging competition (sometimes domestic but especially foreign). The illusion of a ‘free market’ should be warped to speak of unregulated markets where large corporations are free to do as they please, always assured that the government that they pay will protect them when the need arises, be it by patent monopolies or even espionage overseas (see Cablegate on Boeing for examples). In this culture where offices like the patent office are run by people who came from large corporations (revolving doors) it is not surprising that even so-called ‘reforms’ are structured to benefit large corporations.

According to this report from the corporate media, the US government (a branch of it) “said it created a pilot program in which its six administrative judges will in some cases determine within 100 days if companies that sue for infringement have adequate U.S. production, research or licensing to use the court.”

“In this culture where offices like the patent office are run by people who came from large corporations (revolving doors) it is not surprising that even so-called ‘reforms’ are structured to benefit large corporations.”This is not the right thing to do [1, 2, 3, 4]. What they need to do is assess the quality and especially the scope of the patents, irrespective of the plaintiff. They are doing a sort of ad hominem disservice by looking at a real issue which is nevertheless not the core issue.

Well, citing the pro-software patents blog that lobbies on scope and defends trolls, Groklaw names David Kappos, former head of the USPTO and an IBM faithful. Pamela Jones writes: “This is why Kappos failed. He misunderstood what the criticism of the patent system is about. It has *nothing* to do with a reluctance to pay. It’s about protecting innovation in a system that has allowed such broad functional claiming, blocking off entire areas of software development, that no one can innovate safely any more. That damages the patent system and the economy and it brings innovation to a halt. The rest is ideology and daydreams.”

The FTC is not going to resolve the overall problem even if it tackles patent trolls. The problem is not correctly identified, just a symptom of this problem. As some wise person noted the other day, there is no good understanding of these issues, so the commission will fail. To quote:

First, it notes that the chairwoman of the FTC is expected to recommend an investigation of patent trolls (or “frivolous patent lawsuits” as specified in the headline). The promised further action has not been confirmed, so we will have to wait and see.

The Times then slid around the “patent troll” name and henceforth called them by the less pejorative “patent-assertion entity” or PAE. Still, adding some weight to the promise of action was the “several executive orders” from President Obama “directing executive agencies to take steps to take steps to ‘protect innovators from frivolous litigation.’”

The article goes on to describe patent trolls as typically having no operations other than collecting royalties on patents and says that they accounted for more than 60 percent of the roughly 4,000 patent lawsuits filed last year, up from 29 percent two years earlier.

But then the article notes one company that calls itself a “patent-licensing company,” raising the question of “what’s in a name”.

In any case, the Times expects the full commission (two Democrats and two Republicans, with one seat empty), to approve a study.

What they fail to see is that a large company like Microsoft is also engaged in patent assertion. Some say Microsoft makes billions of dollars this way, at the expense of those who actually sell products that customers want. It makes Microsoft not all that different from patent trolls. Sometimes Microsoft uses a proxy like Vringo, which Troll Tracker describes as follows today:

But is that really what Vringo is doing? Are they taking someone’s IP and making something useful out of it, because that person/company cannot? Or are they taking patents that were sold to them by, oh, I dunno, Microsoft just for instance, and using them as a bully stick with which to beat other companies who have already manufactured something of good use and likely didn’t even infringe but will settle so they don’t have to litigate? That’s what would be a bad thing, right?

To get an example of classic patent trolls, see this new article from Joe Mullin, who says that “With so many patents out there claiming rights to basic Web-based technologies, at this point there aren’t many businesses in America that are unaffected by so-called “patent trolls.” But one troll, ArrivalStar, found a fresh set of targets that earned it serious scorn: public transit systems.”

Here is another article about it. “For several years now,” it says, “a curious company called ArrivalStar – which has no website, appears to produce nothing, and is oddly registered in Luxembourg – has been systematically suing public transit agencies in the United States. As we wrote last April, the company holds a collection of dubious patents tied to the technology of tracking vehicles in motion. And it has been using them to claim patent infringement by transit agencies that … track vehicles in motion.”

“At the end of the day the largest corporations will benefit and everyone else will suffer even more.”This is starting to get a lot of national coverage.Public transit agencies across US say they’re being squeezed by questionable patent lawsuits, according to the Washington Post. Another article says that “A patent holding company has filed eight lawsuits against U.S. banking institutions in recent weeks, claiming patent infringement on products and services related to security and electronic banking.”

What makes this troll a problem is that it hurts the rich, and therefore politicians will go after it with great passion. To Quote further: “In some cases, the patents mentioned in these suits are alleged to cover basic banking functions and features used in ATM and online-banking transactions. In other cases, even cryptography methods used to conform to security standards, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, have been brought into question, Denaro says.”

A simple ban on software and business method patents would resolve this, but the government goes after those entities not because of their patents but because of their business model. What a red herring this is. At the end of the day the largest corporations will benefit and everyone else will suffer even more. █

Apple Bites the Bullet

Posted in Apple, Patents at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Apple Sued by Company Partly Owned by Apple’s Peripheral Lawyers

Bullets

Summary: Apple’s aggressive patent plot against Android is breaking to pieces and Apple is getting sued even by some of its own teams

Apple is unable to stop Android domination and the ITC now threatens to embargo Apple products, not Android products. To quote a report about the ruling:

Earlier this month, the ITC issued a landmark decision and exclusion order, ruling that certain Apple products should be excluded from entry into the United States because they infringe a Samsung 3G-essential patent. As we explained in a follow-up post, the ITC doesn’t have the final word, though — by law, the President has the power to disapprove of an exclusion order for public policy reasons. (This power has since been delegated to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).) In a high-stakes, high-profile case such as Samsung-Apple, you’d expect the parties to continue the fight at every level — and sure enough, that’s what has happened.

It sure looks like in 2013 Apple finally lost it altogether and its patent chief left. There is no hope of embargoing the best-selling Linux/Android devices any time soon as a “California judge [last] week denied Apple’s request to add the Galaxy S4 to an ongoing patent case it is fighting against Samsung.”

“Maybe if enough lawsuits of this kind get file, Apple will finally decide to fight against patents, not to fight against Android.”Meanwhile, says this report from a reliable journalist, “an array of documents from a patent lawsuit over Apple’s iPhone became public, revealing a stunning scheme: FlatWorld Interactives, a patent-holding company demanding a royalty on nearly every iOS device, is partly owned by an attorney at one of Apple’s go-to law firms for patent work.”

This is great news because it helps show loyalty to Apple declining not just on the customers’ side but also employees’/contractors’ side. Maybe if enough lawsuits of this kind get file, Apple will finally decide to fight against patents, not to fight against Android. █

CAFC Impedes Progress and Helps Extortion Against Linux/Android

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

CAFC

Summary: The role played by software patents at the CAFC (United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, seen above) and how this affects ongoing fights over the future of free operating systems

The software patenting boosters (led by Dennis Crouch) cover some developments regarding the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), a prominent booster of software patents in the US (and one of the culprit behind their very existence). According to Mark Lemley, who has a weaker position on software patents (he wants reform but won’t promote abolishing software patents), functional claiming may have just been adopted through the back door at the CAFC. Rader, who played a role in all this (Rader has been Chief Judge at CAFC since 2010 and may reign until 2017) does not want real reform (just bogus ones) and as long as that is the case we will continue to treat both him and the CAFC as foes of progress in software. They help endorse a system where extortion is prevalent. Rader’s position actually goes a long way back and the Bilski case is just one example. These are urgent matters because Linux/Free software cannot co-exist with software patents.

“These are urgent matters because Linux/Free software cannot co-exist with software patents.”According to this article, as we noted the other day, B & N is collapsing after Microsoft extortion and a deal/bribe. Pamela Jones writes: “Linux vendors who partner with Microsoft don’t know where up is. Linux customers, however, do. That is the simple explanation. That and Microsoft trying to kill Linux for over a decade now. I have a Nook. And I loved it. In fact, I used it more than the iPad I was given as a gift. I don’t use that any more either, actually. But the day Microsoft announced its settlement with Barnes & Noble’s litigation and its investment in Nook Media, I stopped using it and I’ll never buy another. To most Linux users, a partnership with Microsoft is the kiss of death and we leave the vicinity.”

Todd Bishop, a longtime Microsoft booster, continues to promote Microsoft’s patent agenda while big patent disputes from Microsoft (aimed at Google/Motorola) are trying to destroy Android. If the platform cannot stay free in the cost sense, then it becomes hard to (re)distribute. Microsoft and Apple use patent-stacking against it and the next post will deal with Apple in isolation. █

Ingesting Microsoft Traps: FAT and Restricted Boot

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Patents at 10:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Eating the bait like it’s candy

Sweet tooth

Summary: Acceptance of notorious vectors for patent extortion and denial of booting for free operating systems

Several years ago Tuxera signed an obscure Microsoft deal and began promoting Microsoft tax in Linux. “Tuxera is still pushing Microsoft products and patents into Linux,” says a reader to us.

“Further,” he adds, “it is injecting them *as closed source* into Linux”

According to TomTom, this will be trouble. Even TomTom is exiting this trap. This new promotion of Tuxera says “Tuxera announced a new FAT filesystem for embedded Linux- and Android-based devices claimed to deliver faster data transfers than previous FAT implementations. The Tuxera FAT technology offers improved application responsiveness and power savings, while providing features including fail-safe operation.”

This is not news, it is rehashed PR. Tuxera and Paragon do this all the time because new version are out, advancing Microsoft file systems at the expense of Linux ones. Over at Michael Larabel’s site, another exFAT booster is shown:

A Linux developer has released a native Linux kernel module for implementing Microsoft exFAT file-system support within the Linux kernel. This is different than earlier exFAT Linux modules that were implemented via FUSE in user-space.

Appearing on GitHub is a new exfat-nofuse project. This is a Linux non-FUSE read/write kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT file-system.

This should not be embraced, it is a patent trap. A lot — if not all — Linux and Android patent deals that Microsoft signs involve FAT. The OIN told this to us.

Speaking of Microsoft traps in software, there is also UEFI restricted boot, which Debian and other freedom-respecting distributions are shunning (for UEFI shunning by Debian see [1, 2, 3]), excepting lesser-free derivatives like Knoppix or Ubuntu (on the Red Hat camp there is Fedora).

One reader told us: “There still is some conflation of Restricted Boot and UEFI. Have the UEFI people even begun steps to undo that?”

“Here is one example,” he says, pointing to Slashdot where not OpenBSD but FreeBSD is again being used to advance the UEFI agenda. To quote: “Microsoft has implemented secure boot for Windows 8, using cryptographic keys for authenticating the kernel that is being loaded. This means that any other operating system looking to load itself on a secure boot-enabled Windows 8 system has to also be able to authenticate itself.”

FreeBSD plays along:

FreeBSD will soon support secure boot, as per a report from itwire. Most new computers that come pre-loaded with Windows 8 have UEFI secure boot enabled which makes it difficult to install other operating systems. Some GNU/Linux distributions have found a workaround and are able to run on Windows 8 machines. However, this will be the first time a BSD derivative is being developed to support secure boot.

This is not good. Restricted boot need to be antagonised, not caught up with. The same goes for FAT, which is technically inferior to what Linux already offers and definitely helps Microsoft engage in racketeering against Linux and Android. █

The British Military Gives the United States Back Doors Into All of Its Computers

Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 9:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The British “army/navy/RAF have surrendered sovereignty again” –Glyn Moody

Ministry of Defence

Summary: National security of the UK still in the hands of the NSA and other intelligence branches of the United States, new software procurement deals teach us

Microsoft gives the NSA back doors, as we recently learned. Last week we could called that espionage threat, but this week we know it is not just a threat but a reality, as the European Parliament got cracked by the NSA (see our daily links for many reports on this). The former chief of the NSA and the CIA publicly goes on the record admitting this, based on this weekend’s reporting.

“MoD signs Microsoft mega licensing deal for 180,000 PCs,” says a new headline from Paul Kunert in the Microsoft ads-filled British news site (a police deal too got signed not too long ago). For those who are not familiar with the MoD, we wrote about it some years ago, almost concurring with the time Techrights seemingly got infiltrated by British police. When our government pays almost $10,000 per Windows desktop per year we are left assuming these are inherently corrupt deals. Here is the latest: “The Ministry of Defence renewed a three-year Microsoft Enterprise Agreement late on Friday with Software Box Ltd (SBL) for 180,000 seats in a deal that sources value at roughly £15m per year.

“SBL has held the Microsoft EA with the MoD for the past nine years and channel folk are not surprised the Large Account Reseller won the latest tender, which had been issued to nine suppliers on Lot 3 of the Commodity IT Hardware & Software framework weeks ago.”

It is quite a clever way to subsidise Microsoft at taxpayers’ expense, leaving the international surveillance apparatus in place. And “so the army/navy/RAF have surrendered sovereignty again,” writes Glyn Moody in Twitter.

The incestuous relationship between the US war machine and that of the British, including surveillance at the wire level, e.g. on Germany and other EU members, sure is troubling. Given the ‘special’ Anglo-Saxon relationship, this is not shocking though. A lot of people knew about it for years and now we have many documents to show this.

For those who still think that security spin in The H can somehow suggest that Microsoft cares about security, it is important to explain that to Microsoft security means national (US) security, not security for computer users. With proprietary software this is easy to attain. The H shows how Opera (proprietary) became a security compromise only in Windows (proprietary). To quote: “Windows users seem to have been hit the hardest, since not all Windows versions check the certificate. Wilton-Jones tries to reassure users saying the malware did not affect the Opera installation itself; the autoupdate delivered trojan was
installed directly onto the operating system.” Here is the word from Opera.

For those who insist that the MoD chose Windows because it’s better, well, there is no actual reason for choosing Microsoft, definitely no technical reasons. Vista 8 is an utter disaster and even the same publication as above wrote some days ago that “Microsoft partners seriously underwhelmed by Windows 8.1″, providing the following as backing for what can be seen as generalisation:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised a flood of touch-enabled devices to fill the market as he previewed Windows 8.1, but is the technology channel raring to snap them up? Not really, it seems.

Redmond’s very own bald eagle last night said the “rapid release” upgrade – which comes with a revolutionary Start button – will blend “desktop and modern computing experiences”, and the market should expect “literally an outpouring” of touch devices.

Major changes are expected amid Microsoft’s market decline and ZDNet, another Microsoft-friendly site, says that Windows is broken:

When the ecosystem is broken, you gotta blame the platform

[...]

This is another aspect of the broken Windows ecosystem. Microsoft makes a big splash with consumers building up the availability of Windows 8.1 and enticing mainstream customers to install it. The warning above was buried in a blog post and nowhere near the promotional material pushing customers to install the pre-release version.

Microsoft apparently knew that hardware partners might not be ready to handle the new Windows, but released it anyway. There’s no telling what will happen to owners of the devices listed above who install the new version, and I’m not going to find out, given the warning.

“Buyer beware” is always appropriate, but if you can’t trust the platform maker, then who can you trust to watch your back?

In this writer’s opinion, this is a clear example of Microsoft not putting the customer first and handling things in a way to guarantee a smooth experience. It’s another instance of Microsoft releasing an update to its own product, yet not allowing partners to get ready for it so customers have no problems. In a way, this instance is even worse than usual, as it’s obvious that given the warning statement above, Microsoft knew that owners of these popular devices should exert caution with the update installation.

To summarise, there is no reason for the British army to commit to Windows for years to come, neither for security-centric reasons nor for technical reasons. This seems like yet another sellout associated with people who reign over society and want to control/dominate. Isn’t that, after all, what militaries are about?

No intelligence apparatus should be complacent about working with NSA-controlled software. As the NSA already cracked ‘allies’ like the European Union, the NSA just cannot be trusted by anyone. Having spoken to some friends about it today, they too agree that the UK should foster its own IT companies and only ever deploy Free software whose integrity is assured domestically. █

06.30.13

Links 30/6/2013: Fedora 19 Days Away, Fedora 20 Feature Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.10 (Part 4)

      Linux 3.10 will be able to use the video acceleration features offered by Radeon graphics cores. Systems with Intel graphics will wake from standby faster. Linux now has an input device driver for Apple’s infrared receiver.

    • A New DRM Driver Is Coming To Linux 3.11 Kernel

      Beyond the exciting Radeon DRM driver changes that includes the long-awaited dynamic power management support and also initial support for the HD 8000 “Sea Islands” hardware, there will also be a new DRM driver to premiere with the Linux 3.11 kernel.

    • AMD A10-6800K Richland APU On Linux

      Earlier this month AMD unveiled their Richland desktop APUs as an upgraded version of Trinity. While still based upon Piledriver CPU cores, the AMD A10-6800K APU under Linux is a modest upgrade until the arrival of the Jaguar-based APUs. For starting off our Linux testing of the A10-6800K are Ubuntu Linux benchmarks of this high-end Richland APU compared against the A10-5800K Trinity APU.

    • LLDB 3.3 Grows In Use For Linux Developers

      While the innovative LLVM compiler infrastructure is mentioned extremely often on Phoronix along with its Clang C/C++ compiler, receiving less coverage is LLDB. However, with LLVM 3.3, the LLVM Debugger has grown in functionality and is growing in usefulness.

    • Samsung Continues Advancing Its Exynos DRM

      Samsung has added S3C64XX SoC support to their Exynos DRM graphics driver, updated their DeviceTree support, and has begun utilizing the Common Clock Framework.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Radeon In Linux 3.11 Is Fantastic With PM, Sea Islands

        The pull request for the Radeon DRM graphics driver changes for the Linux 3.11 kernel has been submitted. The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver changes in this next kernel development cycle include dynamic power management (including ASPM) and support for Radeon HD 8000 “Sea Islands” graphics processors as the most prominent changes.

      • Nouveau Gets H.264/MPEG2 Decoding From VP2

        Patches published this week allow for H.264 and MPEG2 video decoding on certain NVIDIA GeForce GPUs via the VP2 PureVideo HD hardware engine.

        On the NV84 (GeForce 8600) through NV96 (GeForce 9400~9600~9700) GPUs and NVA0 (GT 200) graphics processors is a V2 engine that is now supported by the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. The NVIDIA VP2 engine is a bit-stream processor for decoding H.264 and a video processor to take care of certain video operations on MPEG/H.264/VC-1 streams.

      • AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D Performance Has A Long Way To Go

        With Fedora 19 presenting a nice “out of the box” experience for AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, benchmarks of the open-source driver were done and compared to previous generations of AMD hardware. Sadly, there’s still much work ahead for the Radeon HD 7000 series driver in being able to catch up with the hardware supported under the mature R600 Gallium3D driver.

      • AMD Sea Islands Support Comes To Radeon Gallium3D

        Two days after AMD’s massive Radeon DRM driver patch-set that provided initial dynamic power management support as well as initial Radeon HD 8000 “Sea Islands” graphics processor support, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been updated on the user-space side.

      • AMD Southern Islands vs. NVIDIA Fermi/Kepler On Gallium3D

        Yesterday I posted benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver looking at the open-source driver performance for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards. The performance is comparatively very poor right now compared to earlier generations of AMD Radeon hardware that is better supported. But how does the open-source performance compare between the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series and the NVIDIA GeForce 400/500/6000 “Fermi” and “Kepler” on Nouveau? Here’s benchmarks.

      • AMD graphics cards, Linux basic power management

        If you buy a new laptop with Intel processors and AMD graphics cards, you by default run into this long running dual, hybrid graphics problem under Linux. This post is targeted towards new Linux users, who haven’t dealt with such kinds of problems before.

      • Intel Still Working On “Fastboot” Linux Graphics

        While there’s been many Linux-related projects using the “Fastboot” coin, the Intel Linux graphics team have been working on Fastboot support in terms of a faster start process by eliminating some useless mode-sets.

      • Intel Readies Its Last Graphics Changes For Linux 3.11

        After having already prepared a number of changes for the Intel graphics driver in the upcoming Linux 3.11 kernel, Intel OTC has now published their last batch of changes they hope to see merged into this next kernel merge window.

      • NVIDIA Releases Its ARM Linux Graphics Driver

        Earlier this month we found out NVIDIA was bringing their driver to ARM — following an announcement that NVIDIA would begin licensing Kepler graphics to SoC vendors — and now they have done their first public release of the ARMv7 binary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

      • VA-API Has New H.264, MPEG-2 Encoding

        Intel released version 1.2.0 of libva and libva-intel-driver over the night. The updated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) now has support for MPEG-2 encoding along with new H.264 profile encoding API support.

    • Benchmarks

      • The First Benchmarks Of Unity On XMir: There’s A Performance Hit

        With Thursday’s announcement that Mir will ship by default in Ubuntu 13.10 on the desktop, many Ubuntu users were caught by surprise that this experimental display server will be ready by October. Up to now, Ubuntu 13.10 was expected to continue using an X.Org Server by default on the desktop (with only an experimental option for Mir) while the new Ubuntu Touch project would be using Mir on mobile devices, until next year. With the pressed timeline for the migration to Mir, at Phoronix we have already carried out our first Mir benchmarks. In this article are the first benchmarks of Intel graphics when running on Ubuntu 13.10 with a native X.Org Server (as done now on current Ubuntu Linux releases) and then when deploying the same Unity desktop environment atop XMir with the Mir unity-system-compositor.

      • 2D Performance Also Impacted By Unity On XMir

        Earlier today I delivered the first benchmarks of Ubuntu’s Unity 7 running over XMir to run the current X11 desktop atop the Mir Display Server via this compatibility layer. These benchmarks documented the performance impact of running OpenGL games when having to deal with XMir rather than just a clean X.Org Server running on the hardware. The extra step in the rendering process did result in a measurable performance impact, especially when the performance of the open-source Linux graphics drivers is already lower than their proprietary brethren. The benchmarks to now show illustrate that the 2D rendering performance also takes a hit when running Unity on XMir.

      • LLVM Clang 3.4 Already Has Some Performance Changes

        While LLVM 3.3 was released last week, there are already some performance changes for the latest LLVM 3.4 and Clang 3.4 SVN development code for this C/C++ compiler stack.

      • Running GCC 4.9 With Intel’s Core i7 “Core-AVX2″

        I’ve already delivered GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler benchmarks on Intel’s Core i7 4770K “Haswell” platform and tested the “core-avx2″ optimizations offered by the latest compilers. That previous testing was done from the stable releases of LLVM Clang 3.1/3.2 and GCC 4.7/4.8 releases, but looking ahead, here’s some benchmarks of the latest GCC 4.9 development snapshot.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Features Coming In The Xfce 4.12 Desktop

      Xfce 4.12 still hasn’t been released yet and it’s running months behind schedule. Xfce 4.12 will be a major update to the lightweight desktop that’s becoming an increasingly used alternative to Unity and the GNOME Shell. Here’s an update on some of the completed features.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt OpenCL Module May Be Revived
      • Qt For Tizen Adds In More Features, Functionality

        Launched in May was the Qt for Tizen project to bring the vibrant Qt5 tool-kit to the Tizen open-source Linux platform. After its first alpha release last month, the Qt for Tizen developers have made a heck of a lot of progress and already released Qt for Tizen Alpha 2.

      • KDE 4.11 Beta 2 Is Now Available For Testing

        For those interested in testing out KDE 4.11, the feature-rich Linux desktop environment, the second beta is out ahead of the final release in mid-August.

      • KDE, the present and present+1
      • Muon Suite 2.1 alpha released

        I am proud to announce the first alpha release for Muon Suite 2.14. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies. Packages for Kubuntu 13.10 “Raring Ringtail” are available in the QApt Experimental PPA. Here’s what’s new:

      • 13.10 Alpha 1 Available for Testing
      • A glimpse at the future of Kontact Touch Mail

        Kontact Touch was the one application that stood out when I tried Plasma Active for the first time. But not in a good way. It looked alien, the interaction was different from the other touch optimized applications and it just felt flawed. Custom buttons and other UI components, slide out context menus, widget based dialogs and a weird bar at the top show clearly that this application was not designed for Plasma Active.

      • Amarok MTP (Android) GSoC: week 2

        Heya, this is my second weekly report describing my work on my Google Summer of Code project to rewrite MTP (Android) support in Amarok from scratch. This week I’ve done a lot of work on MtpCollection class regarding device initialization.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • One Week With GNOME 3 Classic: Twenty-Eight Days Later

        True to my word, I have spent the last twenty-eight days running GNOME 3 Classic. For the most part, I have been very happy with it. As I said in my last entry in the original series, I originally expected that I would ultimately decide to switch back to KDE when the experiment was over. Twenty days after my final entry, I have decided to stop using GNOME Classic, but not in favor of KDE.

      • Genius Math Tool gets updated!

        The magnificent Genius mathematics tool for calculation and plotting, used for research and education has just been updated bringing a lot of plot-related improvements, libraries updating and bug fixing.

  • Distributions

    • More PXE Magic

      In this article, I’ve decided to follow up on a topic I wrote about not in my column directly, but as a feature article called “PXE Magic” in the April 2008 issue. In that article, I talk about how to set up a PXE server from scratch, including how to install and configure DHCP and TFTP. Ultimately, I even provide a basic pxelinux configuration to get you started. Since then, PXE menus with pxelinux have become more sophisticated and graphical and could seem a bit intimidating if you are new to it. In this column, I explain how to piggyback off of the work the Debian and Ubuntu projects have done with their PXE configuration to make your own fancy PXE menu without much additional work. I know not everyone uses Debian or Ubuntu, so if you use a different distribution, hold off on the angry e-mail messages; you still can use the PXE configuration I’m showing here for your distro, provided it gives some basic examples of how to PXE boot its installer. Just use these steps as a launching off point and tweak the PXE config to work for you.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • This month (June) in Red Hat KDE

        So what kept us[1] busy while working on KDE in Red Hat this month?

      • Fedora

        • AMD HD 7000 “RadeonSI” Runs Well With Fedora 19

          Fedora 19 is the first tier-one Linux distribution shipping with decent “out of the box” support for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” series graphics cards with the out-of-the-box Linux graphics driver and Gallium3D-based acceleration.

        • Fedora 19 is go for release

          In an on-line meeting of Fedora developers today, the unanimous decision was reached to approve “Release Candidate RC3″ as the final Fedora 19 which has been dubbed “Schrödinger’s Cat”.

        • Fedora vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks On Intel Haswell

          Our latest Intel Core i7 4770K “Haswell” Linux benchmarks come in the form of comparing the performance of Ubuntu 13.04, an Ubuntu 13.10 development snapshot, and Fedora 19.

        • Fedora 20 Will Have A Security/Performance Change

          With Fedora 19 being released soon, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has begun evaluating potential changes/features for Fedora 20. One of the features that was approved today is a build change for the RPMs that can yield greater code security but at the potential cost of performance.

          The change that was approved today is a GCC flag change for now using “-fstack-protector-strong” on building Fedora RPM packages rather than just the “-fstack-protector” argument. The -fstack-protector flag has the compiler generate extra code automatically to check for buffer overflows. If a guard check fails — meaning a potential buffer overflow occurred within the application — there’s an error message and the program exits. Fedora has been using -fstack-protector but now they are looking to use -fstack-protector-strong.

        • Fedora 19 Release Candidate 1 Is Ready
        • The Best Features Of Fedora 19, Schrödinger’s Cat

    • Debian Family

      • 10 things to do after installing Debian Wheezy XFCE

        Debian Wheezy is a great operating system, and XFCE is a great desktop environment- especially for older computers, and for people who prefer a traditional desktop paradigm- but it does have a few quirks. I’ve just installed it on my old Presario 900 laptop, and I’m going to mention a few things I did after installing to make the computer more usable and nicer looking.

      • Derivatives

        • AV Linux 6.0.1 Review – Audio Visual Perfection

          A highly customised Debian designed for video and audio professionals, how exactly does it differ from other distros, and does it deliver?

        • Knoppix 7.2 Released, Uses LXDE By Default

          While there wasn’t a public Knoppix 7.1 release beyond their annual Linux Magazine CeBIT edition, Knoppix 7.2 was released instead to all users. Knoppix 7.2 is based on Debian “Wheezy” with newer desktop packages from Debian/testing and Debian/unstable Jessie.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical To Introduce Mir In Ubuntu 13.10

            Canonical is all set to introduce its Mir display server technology in the upcoming Ubuntu 13.10. Olli Ries, engineering director for Unity and Mir at Canonical, has revealed the roadmap for Mir’s deployment.

          • Ubuntu Rushes Mir, XMir Into Ubuntu 13.10
          • Canonical to push for Mir in Ubuntu 13.10
          • Next Ubuntu release to have Mir as default
          • Kubuntu v Ubuntu: looks like the house is dividing

            Just a day before Ubuntu announced that it would be making its Mir display server the default from the next release, in October, the chief Kubuntu developer, Jonathan Riddell, announced that Kubuntu would not be using Mir or XMir.

          • Mir 0.0.5 Released; Kubuntu Will Stick To X/Wayland

            More Mir news today besides the surprise announcement that Canonical is now planning to use the Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 13.10, there’s some other interesting news involving Mir benchmarking, the Mir 0.0.5 release, and Kubuntu avoiding Mir/XMir and reaffirming their commitment to X.Org and Wayland.

          • LXDE-Based Lubuntu Will Not Ship Mir Display Server
          • Saucy Salamander 13.10 Alpha 1 Released

            While Ubuntu Linux no longer participates in alpha releases, other members of the Ubuntu family did their first 13.10 “Saucy Salamander” alpha releases today. Coming out today in 13.10 Alpha 1 form is Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, and Ubuntu Kylin.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux-Powered SFF MintBox 2 Coming Soon for $600

              Last year, CompuLabs and the developers behind the Linux Mint operating system put together a small form factor PC called the MintBox. It seems that the project was successful enough to warrant a updated offering, because specifications were recently posted online for the MintBox 2. The MintBox 2 is a router sized, passively cooled PC that will be available later this year for $600.

            • Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon review

              Summary: Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon review takes a detailed look at the Cinnamon editions of the latest release of the popular desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop. Cinnamon is a new desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint team, and is built atop GNOME 3 technologies.

              Linux Mint 15, the latest edition of the desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, was released at the end of last month (May 2013). It features the latest versions of the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. MATE is a fork of what used to be the GNOME 2 desktop environment, and it is, in a sense, based on old technology. Cinnamon is a new desktop environment built atop the latest GNOME (GNOME 3) technology, but presenting a traditional desktop interface, rather than the GNOME Shell that ships with GNOME 3.

            • DreamStudio Unity 12.04.3 Official Release

              We’re proud to announce the official release of DreamStudio Unity 12.04.3. Now with over 100,000 downloads, our latest release makes this the best open source software suite for graphics, audio, and especially video editing. Here are some of the latest features:

  • Devices/Embedded

    • JW-11 is a cheap, Linux-friendly ARM PC with a 2.5″ drive bay

      Like the idea of using a small ARM-based device as a low-power desktop or media center computer, but don’t want to rely on the 4GB to 16GB of storage that usually comes with an Android TV box?

    • What Is The True Cost Of Running a Raspberry Pi?

      The Raspberry Pi – a small, compact and versatile computer, capable of processing HDMI and MPEG-2 being the central component of any number of weekend projects from retro gaming stations and media centres to smart TVs, Internet radios and low budget space programs.

      Since its release in 2012 the Raspberry Pi has proved something of a phenomenon. We’ve featured it at length here on MakeUseOf, and even chatted with its creator, Eben Upton. Costing less than $40, the Raspberry Pi is a hugely successful computer, largely due to its low price. But is it really as low-budget as you think? Could it be that the true cost of a Raspberry Pi is in fact much more?

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

      • Android

        • Google Reportedly Developing an Android Games Console

          According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is actively developing an Android-based games console, which could arrive as soon as this fall. Citing anonymous sources, the report claims that the console is part of a bevy of secret projects, including a new smartwatch and a revamped version of its failed Nexus Q set-top streaming device. Additional details are sparse, but given the recent influx of Android gaming platforms, like the Ouya, Project Shield, GameStick, and others, a Google-produced gaming product isn’t outside the realm of reason.

        • Slate 21: HP’s Android-powered All-in-One computer

          First came the Slate 7, HP’s Android-powered tablet computer. Now HP is about to release a 21.5 inch sibling – the Slate 21. This was what I hoped that HP will do with webOS, but that hope died when HP abandoned webOS in favor of Android.

        • Top 5 weirdest Android apps
        • Android 4.3 allegedly caught on Google Play Galaxy S4

          New screenshots reportedly show an early build of Android 4.3 taken from the Google Play Edition of the Galaxy S4, says blog site Sammobile.

        • New MIPS processors coming, may target Android

          Imagination Technologies announced a MIPS “Warrior” family of 32/64-bit processors designed for everything from high-end networking equipment to Android tablets, and also announced updates to its embedded-focused MIPS Aptiv 32-bit processor line. The Warrior IP will feature multi-core hardware virtualization and multi-threading, MIPS SIMD architecture, and Imagination’s security framework.

        • Report: Google developing a smart watch to challenge Apple

          When rumors surfaced that Apple was developing a smart watch all of the big players jumped into the fray. WSJ reports that Google is developing a smart watch to follow to its smart glasses.

        • Where are all the Android laptops?

          PC OEMs seem obsessed with making complicated, high-cost, Windows 8-baed devices. Why are none of them trying to make cheap Android laptops?

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source projects aren’t tax scams

    IRS is eyeing open source projects and Tea Party groups as possible tax scams, raising a real question: Do open source foundations need nonprofit status?

  • XenServer Is Now Fully Open-Source

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open Source PaaS Cloud Computing Stacks That Pack a Punch

      Cloud systems offer low cost access to huge computational, storage, and network resources. These systems offer per-user and per-application isolation and customization via a service interface that is often implemented using high-level language technologies, well-defined Application Programming Interfaces, and web services.

    • Hortonworks previews new Data Platform and Hadoop 2.0

      Hortonworks have announced a community preview of Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0 as a self-contained VM with a pre-installed Hadoop 2.0 cluster. HDP 2.0 uses Hadoop 2.0 technology, introduces Apache Hadoop’s YARN architecture and, Hortonworks hopes, will get more developers and partners to use the next generation of Hadoop architecture.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • How to get a class involved with an open source project

      We talk about “community” a lot when it comes to open source, but it’s important to remember that just like local communities within a city, town, state, and country, each community has its own culture. One community is not just like another. Each has its own ways of communication and tracking and decision-making. Processes for code submission differ—perhaps two communities both use Bugzilla, but with different flags. Others require you to also alert a mailing list. A large software project may even have smaller sub-communities within it with their own customs and quirks.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Two Open Source Strategies

        There are two strategic reasons why a company would want to sponsor its software as open source. One is good for investors, the other is not good.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.9 Is Friendly Toward Intel’s Silvermont

      The GCC 4.9 compiler that’s still in early stages of development can generate binaries optimized for Intel’s forthcoming Atom “Silvermont” hardware via the new “slm” CPU type.

    • Stallman, Swartz among 32 inductees to the Internet Hall of Fame

      FSF founder Richard Stallman, Mosaic co-author Marc Andreessen and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow are among 32 inductees to the Internet Hall of Fame this year. The Internet Hall of Fame was founded at the Internet Society’s Global INET conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 2012 and holds annual awards to publicly honour individuals “who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global Internet.”

    • The FSF Has A New High Priority Project

      The new addition to the FSF high priority project page is coming up with an open-source solution for BitTorrent Sync. “Bittorrent Sync is a peer-to-peer, two-way file synchronization utility with fine-grained access controls. We need a free software version of this client or free software that can be used for the same purpose.”

  • Project Releases

    • Piwigo 2.5.2 Released

      Piwigo is photo gallery software for the web, built by an active community of users and developers.

      Piwigo version 2.5.2 is available, for a fresh install and for upgrade. Thanks to reporters, this version fixes many bugs, see full details on the Piwigo 2.5.2 Release Notes.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming

    • Adobe Open-Sources Flash C/C++ Compiler

      Adobe announced yesterday it’s open-sourcing FlasCC, a C/C++ compiler they developed for bringing C/C++ more easily to the web via Flash and AIR.

    • Eclipse Kepler Orbits 71 Open Source Projects and 58 million lines of code

      In the open source development world, the influence of the Eclipse Foundation cannot be underestimated.

      While Eclipse started off as ‘just’ an IDE over the years it has evolved with its coordinated release train effort that sees piles of project all released on the same day.

    • Eclipse Kepler enters public orbit

      The Eclipse Foundation’s annual release train, dubbed Eclipse Kepler this year, is now available. This year, the release train synchronised 71 different projects, 420 developers and 54 organisations to ensure that they release their projects together at the end of June in one large-scale release.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Google plans for a QUICker web with UDP connections

      Google hopes that Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), recently added to Chrome Canary, will help speed up HTTP traffic on the internet. The goal here is not to compete with SPDY, the protocol introduced four years ago, but to work in tandem with it by replacing TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), the current transport method, with UDP (User Datagram Protocol).

Leftovers

  • The ABCs Of The Surveillance State: Six Gun Toting Alcohol Agents Pounce On College Kid Buying Bottled Water

    University of Virginia student Elizabeth Daly thought she was doing a good thing buying some La Croix bottled water and cookie dough ice cream from the Harris Teeter Supermarket to share at a charity event. It was 10:15 p.m. and the twenty-year-old, along with her female roommate were trying get to a police sponsored “Take Back The Night” event where she thought she would be listening to stories from sexual assault victims and developing strategies to combat the scourge of most college towns. Instead, as she crossed the dark parking lot and got into her vehicle, she was set upon by six people, one of whom jumped on the hood of her SUV and another who pulled a gun.

  • Science

    • Species Alteration: Is GMO Rewiring our DNA?

      New studies in cell research are bringing up some alarming new questions concerning GMOs, and one of them in particular makes liver failure or cancer seem like child’s play compared to the garish possibilities that arise when we start to look at how genetically modified foods likely affect our DNA.

  • Security

    • Ruby update fixes SSL man-in-the-middle vulnerability

      The OpenSSL implementation bundled with Ruby has been found to be vulnerable to having its hostname check bypassed. The flaw, rooted in the lack of proper handling of alternate X509 names with null bytes in them, could allow an attacker to present a certificate for “www.ruby-lang.org\0example.com” which when read by the Ruby client library, would be interpreted as “www.ruby-lang.org”. That result would be handed over to the certificate verfication routines which would cause the certificate would be identified as coming from “www.ruby-lang.org”. If an attacker could get a certificate where the subjectAltName included such a null byte, they could use that certificate to interpose themselves between a victim and the site.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Leaked Recording Leads to Allegations of Plot to Provoke a Crisis in Venezuela

      Mérida, 27th June 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – The Venezuelan government released a recording that allegedly shows that one of the leaders head of the country’s opposition coalition discussed a possible coup with U.S. State Department officials.

      On Wednesday morning the Minister of Communication and Information, Ernesto Villegas and Caracas mayor Jorge Rodriguez released an audio recording that they alleged showed opposition legislator Maria Corina Machado speaking to a Venezuelan academic, Germán Carrera Damas.

    • CIA cloud battle redux? U.S. defense agency puts cloud work out to bid

      With a new $450 million federal cloud computing contract up for bid, will we see tech giants Amazon and IBM duke it out again?

    • BOOK REVIEW: Drone Warfare
    • Freedom: The Big American Lie

      Why is it so unlikely that Americans will take action to stop the outrageous electronic surveillance programs of the National Security Agency? The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act.

    • A General Gets Knifed

      The Obama administration’s infighting suddenly goes public.

      [...]

      Usually, the Obama administration and the Pentagon do their bureaucratic knife fighting in private. Not so in the latest investigation of a national security leak.

    • Armed Forces of the Philippines plans to build 30 Hectare Air, Naval bases ASAP in Subic for American Forces

      The Philippine military has revived plans to build new air and naval bases at Subic Bay, a former U.S. naval base that American forces could use to counter China’s creeping presence in the disputed South China Sea, senior navy officials said.

    • Iranian turned CIA operative honored

      Former Iranian Revolutionary Guard member-turned-CIA spy Reza Kahlili, who has pulled back the curtain on some of the innermost secrets of the Islamic regime, has been honored by the Endowment for Middle East Truth at its “Rays of Light in Darkness” dinner.

    • Amazon’s $600 Million CIA Deal Really Is For A Game-Changing ‘Private’ Cloud

      Then IBM, who had put in a competitive bid, protested the CIA award. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigated and found that Amazon’s bid was a whopping $54 million higher than IBM’s. It asked the CIA to go back through the bidding process again. The CIA has 60 days to respond.

    • In 1962 CIA information led to arrest of Nelson Mandela

      In an article published in January of 2005, Historian William Blum sets the background of the CIA’s involvement in the arrest of Mandela. Ultimately, Mandela was convicted and jailed for a total of 28 years. By the time Mandela was released in February 1990, his stature had changed dramatically and then-President George Bush Sr. telephoned Mandela to say Americans rejoiced in his release. Blum pointed out that this was the same Bush who once headed the CIA and who was second in power during an administration that worked closely with South African intelligence services to provide information about Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). The ANC was seen by the US as part of the “international communist conspiracy.”

    • Britain’s problems with a veto on Syria go right back to Yalta

      Where Bush threatened the UN with the irrelevance of the old League of Nations – without realising that the US had fatally weakened the League by refusing to join it – Rice has been condemning the UN Security Council’s inaction on Syria as “a moral and strategic disgrace”, without appreciating that it was Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt who insisted on the future UN’s veto powers during the great Allied World War II conference at Yalta.

    • CIA rebuffs Congress on ‘torture’ findings

      The CIA is expected to deliver a report to senators on Thursday that rebuffs a congressional probe into the agency’s interrogation methods.

      CIA Director John Brennan is slated to deliver the CIA’s contradictory findings to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and ranking member Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in a private meeting on Thursday, the senators said.

      Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/308161-cia-rebuffs-congress-on-torture-findings#ixzz2XjPjhBjq
      Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

  • Cablegate

    • Who’s a Journalist? A Question With Many Facets and One Sure Answer

      So, who’s a journalist? I could explore the legislative and legal questions, and that may be something worth returning to in this space. (Decisions that have been made in interpreting New Jersey’s strong shield law are of particular interest, as is the language before the Senate now on the proposed federal law.)

      But for now, I’ll offer this admittedly partial definition: A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn’t shy away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press – the very tension that America’s founders had in mind with the First Amendment.

      Those who fully meet that description deserve to be respected and protected — not marginalized.

    • ‘Tensions don’t exist’: WikiLeaks refutes media reports about ‘Ecuadorean disarray’

      WikiLeaks says there are no tensions between Julian Assange and Ecuadorean government as it responded to media reports claiming Assange’s role in Edward Snowden’s case “has raised hackles” among Ecuadorean officials.

    • FBI came to Iceland for Wikileaks – Not for Imminent Computer Attacks

      New York Times states that FBI agents that came to Iceland in August 2011 were here for Wikileaks and Julian Assange but not for alleged computer attacks on the Government Offices.

      The FBI agents said that they were going to investigate a computer attack on the Government Offices of Iceland but then they spent five days on interrogating a former volunteer of Wikileaks, who is an Icelandic citizen.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Over 30 tons of explosives to be detonated in Manu National Park buffer zone

      A consortium of gas companies headed by Pluspetrol and including Hunt Oil plans on detonating approximately 38 tons of explosives in the south-east Peruvian Amazon in one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.

      The detonations are part of 2D and 3D seismic tests planned by Pluspetrol in its search for new gas deposits in the Camisea region—plans that are currently pending approval by Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM).

    • Peru peasant squads rally against U.S. firm’s $5 billion gold mine

      Forty years ago, peasants in rural Peru banded together as “ronderos” – Spanish for “people who make the rounds” – to curb cattle rustling.

      Today, squads of these ronderos are working toward a different aim – thwarting an American mining company’s planned $5 billion gold mining project that they contend would spoil lakes vital to the local population high in the Andes.

  • Finance

    • John Lanchester on the banks’ barely believable behaviour

      …eye-catchingly called for senior bankers to face jail

    • Some Datapoints on Global Political Risk
    • Former Top Regulators Tell Congress to Rein in Big Banks
    • Ireland: Bankers joke about their €7 billion bailout scam

      The conversations provide an insight into the reckless, sneering cynicism of the ruling elite as they proceeded to swindle the working people to the tune of trillions of euros.

      The conversations focussed on the Anglo-Irish Bank board’s attempt to stem the massive losses it suffered following the collapse of the Irish property bubble out of which it had made billions. The board’s sting was to downplay the scale of the bank’s mounting losses and sucker the authorities into offering large sums of cash. The hope was that, once committed, the Irish government and central bank would be unable to back out of further support.

    • World Bank Whistleblower Karen Hudes Arrainged to Federal Court on 13 Jun

      On 13 June, two month after her illegal arrest, World Bank whistleblower Karen Hudes has to appear the Superior Court of the District of Colombia. Hudes, who reported improper accounting at the World Bank, and threats against members of the Board of Executive Directors, was arrested for trespass in the World Bank headquarters building, handcuffed, left one hour in a police cruiser outside the building, and thrown to jail but subsequently released on 13 May.

    • 13 mindblowing facts about US tax-dodging corporations

      Abusive offshore tax havens cost the US $150 billion in lost tax revenue every year (via FACT Coalition). That’s $1.5 trillion over the next ten years.

    • New Breed of Banking Malware Hijacks Text Messages

      Out of band authentication — communicating with a customer outside of his mobile banking app to verify his identity or a specific transaction — is a generally respected means of deflecting mobile banking fraud.

      But RSA’s Anti-Fraud Command Center on Monday found and reported on a Trojan called Bugat that has been updated to hijack out-of-band authentication codes sent to bank customers via SMS. This doesn’t mean out-of-band authentication via text messaging is useless, but it can be compromised using a dated, unsophisticated piece of malware.

    • House committee: IRS official waived rights in denying wrongdoing

      The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved a resolution Friday asserting that the woman at the center of the IRS scandal waived her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when she came before the committee last month.

      The 22-17 vote came after a charged meeting that cut sharply along partisan lines, with Republicans saying they deserve answers out of Lois Lerner, director of tax-exempt organizations for the IRS, and Democrats arguing that the process was being rushed through.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Prize awarded to inventors of internet

      The Royal Academy of Engineering hopes that its Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, funded by several large companies, will become a kind of Nobel Prize for engineers, with a prize awarded every two years. The winners were announced in March with the actual award ceremony taking place this month. At the award ceremony, Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, warned against letting governments and corporations have too much control over the internet saying “When you make something universal…it can be used for good things or nasty things…we just have to make sure it’s not undercut by any large companies or governments trying to use it and get total control”.

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