• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

In Pictures: A visual history of Linux

Tired of broken Windows? Try Linux

Rosa Guillén on Why Linux?

When I started six years ago in Linux, I didn’t know that not only would my operating system change, but also my life.

I am a basic user of Ubuntu and in these several years I have met many people using Linux, ranging from new user to Distro Developer, to those with their wallpapers or those who created the countdown banners to those who file [package] a new application.

SprezzOS Is Indeed Trying To Be A Faster Linux

SprezzOS, a Linux distribution that most people have likely not heard of, is aiming for real change with their open-source operating system. They previously claimed their ambitions were to become the “most robust, beautiful and performant Linux”, and it turns out they are indeed trying to at least live up to their performance goals.

SprezzOS was exclusively covered on Phoronix earlier this year in the aforelinked article. Many downplayed this Linux distribution that sent information to the Phoronix news box. The developers later made claims of a 120 second Linux server installation.

Desktop

• How to run Ubuntu, Android, other operating systems on the Chromebook Pixel

Kernel Space

• How to Choose an Embedded Linux Operating System, Part 2

  Embedded Linux is hard to define, but at least we know now that Linux pros say Android is not embedded Linux. (See part 1 in this series, Android vs. Embedded Linux and this week’s Q&A with Mentor Graphics’ John Cherry.) That doesn’t mean, however, that Android isn’t useful in some embedded projects. The question is: How does a developer know which operating system to choose?

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa Looks To Take Use Of C11 Threading

  • Open-Source Support For AMD “Richland” APUs

  • Intel Mesa Gets Another OpenGL 4.2 Feature

    Chris Forbes has introduced support for Mesa and specifically Intel’s DRI driver to support ARB_texture_storage_multisample, a feature that’s been apart of core OpenGL since version 4.2.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • [How To] Access Android devices in Gnome (Arch Linux)

  • Shell Game

  • CentOS 6.4 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

  • Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL

  • Understanding SELinux

  • Install and Configure Nagios in CentOS 6.4 / RHEL 6.4

  • 25 Useful Basic Commands of APT-GET and APT-CACHE for Package Management

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Scientific Linux 6.3

  • 9 Best Free Haskell Books

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.5.26 Improves ARM, OpenGL On Mac

  • Wine 1.5.25 released

• Games

  • Linux-based game handheld achieves Kickstarter funding

    A kickstarter project aimed at creating a “truly open source” Linux-based video game handheld recently achieved nearly double its funding goal. Game Console Worldwide (GCW), the enterprise formed to build and market the GCW Zero game console, says its preparing to mass-produce the device.

    Justin Barwick, who created the GCW Zero, says he did so because he was “fed up” with video game handhelds that were “incapable of accurately emulating classic gaming experiences.” In order to tap into an avid community of software developers and beta testers, he used Linux and other open-source software components and applications as the basis for the device’s operation.

  • $159 GCW-Zero is a Linux-based retro handheld console

    The GCW-Zero can best be described as a portable console designed for playing retro games, say up until the advent of the original PlayStation.

    The device – which runs an open source Linux-based operating system known as OpenDingux – features a 3.5 inch display, Vivante GC860 graphics and a 1GHz MIPS processor.

  • Skullgirls pencils in Linux port, Squigly to be voiced by Lauren Landa

    Mike Zaimont, the creator of the fighting engine powering Skullgirls, has revealed that a Linux port is currently in the works. Word came via Zaimont’s Salty Cupcakes tournament series, which he’s been hosting on a weekly basis in Los Angeles and streaming through Twitch.

  • Torque 3D Port To Linux Materializes

  • Review10 Million the game Review

  • The Humble Bundle with Android 5

  • Valve released Half-Life 2 and Day of Defeat for Linux

  • The 39 Steps a man-on-the-run thriller

    Prepare to experience the original man-on-the-run thriller in a completely new way. Be transported back to 1914 London, where Richard Hannay finds himself framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Now he must escape the Capital and stay alive long enough to solve the riddle of The 39 Steps. There are secrets to be discovered, locations to be explored and – above all – an incredible tale to be told in this ground-breaking interactive novel.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXLE extends life of ageing computers

  LXLE, the Lubuntu Extra Life Extension, is a respin of LXDE-based Lubuntu, aimed at ageing computers. Based on the last LTS release (12.04) of the official Ubuntu derivative Lubuntu, it retains drivers and utilities for older graphics and audio hardware that have been dropped from newer releases. The developers say that with the normal Lubuntu releases, “support is sometimes lost too quickly with a 6 month core release cycle” and that LXLE is designed to bridge the gap between LTS releases.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Move Over GIMP, Here Comes Krita

    GIMP isn’t the only graphics application for Linux, though you might think so since it gets all the attention. Today we turn our attention to the wonderful Krita drawing, painting, and illustration program for Linux. We’ve talked about Krita before: Demystifying Krita with Comics, Modern Art: A Look at Krita 2.3, and Calligra Suite, the Promising Not-An-Office Suite. Today we’re going to learn about the important fundamental Krita tools, Tools, Brushes, and Colors. I’m not much of an artist, but I can show you how to use the excellent Krita features.

  • Qt 5.1 Offers More OpenGL Functions

    Last year I wrote how OpenGL may take on a greater role within Qt. Thanks to work by KDAB and others, the forthcoming Qt 5.1 tool-kit will offer enhanced OpenGL support.

    With Qt 5.1 it will be easier to take advantage of specific OpenGL functionality, such as an OpenGL 4.3 Core Profile context, Qt functions for checking the existence of certain OpenGL extensions, and other helpful features.

  • Android application support is coming with Qt 5.1

  • KDE KWin Progresses With Qt 5, KDE Frameworks 5

    KDE’s KWin compositing window manager is making steady progress in supporting the Qt 5 tool-kit and KDE Frameworks 5.

    The lead developer of KWin has shared an update regarding the work he and others have been doing to bring KWin to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, for the eventual release of KDE 5.

  • Plasma Workspaces 2 Coming To Wayland, KDM Not Invited

    The first part of today’s headline is probably obvious to many of you. KDE will be moving on from Xorg to Wayland. And considering Gnome’s aggressive plans to move to it, this may happen sooner rather than later. KDE & Gnome having a mutual interest in Wayland is great, and we can’t wait to reap the benefits of it. But it seems that one technology — one that’s synonymous with KDE — will likely not be making the transition.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Gnome proposed to be ported to Wayland

    Gnome developer Matthias Clasen recently proposed to make Gnome work on Wayland, today he has proposed to set a new goal for Gnome community and ‘port GNOME to Wayland’.

    Clasen writes on the mailing list, “Wayland has reached the 1.0 milestone recently and it has already had some good success in the embedded space. Many of us have silently assumed that Wayland is the future display system on Linux, and that we will get to using it eventually. But to reach its full potential, it needs the push of a full desktop porting project. I think GNOME is the right project for this and now is the right time for us to embrace Wayland.”

  • GNOME 3.10 Might Be Ported to Wayland

    Matthias Clasen sent an email today, March 15, to the GNOME mailing list, in which he proposes the porting of the GNOME desktop environment to the Wayland display server.

    Many of us thought (read: believed) – including myself – that Wayland is the next-generation X.Org server for Linux operating systems, but in order for it to be that popular, it requires a big push from a ginormous project, such as GNOME.

Distributions

• Kali Linux 1.0 review

  Kali Linux is the latest incarnation of BackTrack Linux, an Ubuntu-based distribution for penetration testing. It is developed and maintained by Offensive Security, an outfit that provides security training and certification courses for IT professionals.

  It has been described by its developers as the “the most advanced and versatile penetration testing distribution ever created.” Whether you agree with that statement or not, this article gives you an idea of what types of applications and features are available on this first edition of Kali Linux.

• New Releases

  • APODIO 9 IS AVAILABLE NOW!!!!

  • Fermi 5.9

  • IPFire 2.13 – Core Update 67 released

  • Slax 7.0.8 is out

    Some of you will hate me for this I’ve just released yet another Slax version. This one should fix the plasma task bar finally. If not, then I’ll give up Anyway, if you do not like to download new Slax each two days, feel free to use 7.0.6 or 7.0.7 and just resize the taskbar manually to full screen width if you need.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva’s “Get a Face” Finalists Chosen

    Well the public has had its say and now it’s up to the committee. A recent OpenMandriva announcement said, “Vote for a Face! has ended, and public has pronounced its favorites. Now is time for OpenMandriva Association (OMA) to choose the Final Logo for the Association.”

  • Connecting PCLinuxOS and Mageia to a WPA2 Enterprise Network

    The University where I work has proudly put up a new network for remote access. Among its advantages, one can count that there are more access points, its has a more robust security, and that the user only needs to register once. One additional point for Linux users is that, as opossed to Windows, you do not need to download any software, install it and run it to be able to log in. It is a WPA2 Enterprise network that uses PAP for authentication.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ hits beta 1

        Fans of Ubuntu Linux may recall that the Ubuntu 13.04 development cycle is a little different from those of versions past, as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth outlined back in October.

      • Ubuntu in smartphones: opportunities and challenges

        In this guest column, Daniel Mandell, a research associate at market analyst firm VDC Research, examines Canonical’s recent efforts to morph Ubuntu into a smartphone operating system. Given the wild success of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS, and the mixed success of Limo, Meego, OpenMoko, WebOS, and other earlier attempts, how likely is it that a Ubuntu smartphone OS can successfully gain a foothold in the smartphone market?

      • Ubuntu development hits 13.04 beta 1 milestone

        The Ubuntu developers have just passed the beta 1 milestone in development of Raring Ringtail, Ubuntu 13.04. Although the milestone does not see a release of the Ubuntu distribution, it does see a release of a beta 1 version of most of the various remixes, as previously disclosed by the project’s leadership. The announcement notes that 13.04 Beta 1 images are available for Edubuntu (download), Kubuntu (download), Lubuntu (download), UbuntuKylin (download), Ubuntu Server Cloud (images), Ubuntu Studio (notes, download) and Xubuntu (download).

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu Raring Ringtail hits beta, flagship desktop and server flavors left out

          Canonical’s taken the next step in pushing Raring Ringtail out of its nest by releasing the very first beta version, but only for Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Studio and Xubuntu. Plain ol’ Ubuntu for desktops and servers will arrive with the final 13.04 beta release on March 28th, so that devs will be able to focus on the software and keep things under wraps for a little longer. These early versions aren’t for the faint of heart, but adventurous folks can download them at the source if they don’t mind some kinks. However, those who aren’t interested in tempting fate can wait for the polished release in April.

Devices/Embedded

• Toradex Announce Version V2.0 Production Release for Colibri T20 Linux BSP

  Toradex is pleased to announce the version V2.0 production release of the Colibri T20 Linux BSP.

• Bartending robot powered by Raspberry Pi met its fund-raising goal on Kickstarter

  Raspberry Pi isnt just a toy for geeks to play around, it’s also a cool tool to serve the convivial folks. Recently, a project called “Bartendro” has met its fund-raising goal – $135000- on Kickstarter.

• Phones

  • Samsung plans August release for first Tizen smartphone

    Samsung Electronics created a lot of buzz surrounding the Galaxy S4, which was finally unveiled on Thursday. But amidst this buzz, did you forget that Samsung has also been working on Tizen OS that will compete against the most prominent open source mobile OS Android?

  • Samsung to launch Tizen OS phone in 2013; DoCoMo plans to sell it

  • Samsung to release high-end Tizen smartphone in August

  • It’s Not Just Marketing. IT Is Experiencing A Shift To Mobile. Real Mobile.

    Along with this shift is a total stall in adoption of Wintel. Households with a desktop PC are stuck at 60% as the old machines cling to life but are not replaced. Meanwhile the mobile gadgets have a huge share of households. There is some life in notebooks but they grew just 37% while tablets grew 500%. This year, the contest will be over. Between the tablets and the smartphones, few will have a need for a Wintel PC. ASP has come down 12% for desktops and notebooks in one year. There’s not much room to decline further without M$ taking a big hit. Obviously the high-priced Ultrabooks are not making a dent.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung’s Galaxy S4 first to launch with B2B tool Knox

  • Android

    • Bad Move: Google Removes AdBlock Plus From Google Play Store

SendThisFile® Supports Open Source Development Community

Insert Coin finalist: smARtPULSE open source, Bluetooth oximeter hands-on

Dimitri Albino is the proudly self-proclaimed smARtMAKER #1, and he’s brought his company’s Insert Coin finalist, the smARtPULSE oximeter, here to Expand. Using photodetection tech to produce readings of oxygen levels and pulse. While this is standard functionality, the company claims its advantage is in being able to cheaply deliver the product, and stream the data via Bluetooth to a computer or mobile device.

EdX releases open source code for online learning

EdX has made publicly available source code that it built specifically to support online interactive learning, writes Sharleen Nelson for Campus Technology. The non-profit online learning platform founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting EdX course content.

XBlocks are a prototype, second-generation application programming interface for hierarchically combined EdX courseware components such as video players and learning sequences. The XBlock source code allows course developers to combine independent XBlocks to create engaging online courses such as wiki-based collaborative learning environments and online laboratories, or create integrated education tools such as a circuit simulator for an electronics course or a molecular manipulator for teaching biology.

SwiftStack Exits Stealth With Open Source Swift Software-Defined Storage

Events

• Embedded Vision Summit to be held April 25

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla’s Open Badges to Vouch for Credentials and Skills

    Mozilla has just announced Open Badges 1.0, which it is billing as “an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning.” The project has apparently been in development for two years with the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla claims that 600 leading organizations are now using Open Badges to issue badges that count toward education, careers and lifelong learning.

    “Today, we learn things in a wide variety of ways, but there are fewer opportunities to gain formal recognition,” said Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman, in an announcement. “Open Badges lets you take all those skills and show them off in one place, regardless of where you’ve earned them.”

CMS

• WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg On Working From Home, Making Money Without Ads, And More [TCTV]

  And there was quite a bit to talk about. Mullenweg has some pretty informed opinions on the recent hot topic of remote working, as 130 of the 150 people who work for Automattic (WordPress.com‘s parent company) work remotely from outside of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. And with his growing activity investing both in startups and artistic projects along with the continued success of WordPress as a publishing platform, there’s no shortage of things to discuss.

Education

• Computers For Schools Speaks

  Well. When I was teaching at my last school we had already converted to GNU/Linux when we made the first of two requests for batches of 20 CFS PCs. I asked them for GNU/Linux and they said they don’t do that. I had to re-image the machines, not a huge chore but wasted effort by CFS and myself. Can education afford to waste manpower on supporting that other OS? I don’t think so. Again, if CFS doesn’t offer GNU/Linux how do they know there is no demand? It’s just like retail shelves stocked with nothing but M$’s OS. How is the retailer to know they have choice? I took the trouble to contact CFS Manitoba to request GNU/Linux. How many computer teachers would do that?

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Open versus closed source: a delicate balance

    Today, there is still nothing like a level playing field for open source and closed source software. Even so, regulators need to think about how they will recognize it, and then maintain a delicate balance afterwards. Recent research using mathematical economics shows that a mixed market in which open source and closed source companies coexist delivers the most value to society.

    Unfortunately, analysis shows that equilibrium mixed markets consistently produce too many open source firms to maximize welfare. Many governments have turned their own major spending on software and accompanying services into a policy instrument — some more successfully than other — by establishing formal preferences (and even mandatory requirements) that systematically favour open source over closed source. Unlike the case of government provided open source code, however, this intervention could actually reduce welfare.

  • New FUD… FLOSS Too Efficient…

Funding

• Netflix Offers Cash Prizes for New Cloudy Open Source Tools

  On the cloud computing scene, there is some very interesting action going on with organizations open sourcing valuable software components designed to make cloud deployments much more efficient and secure. This week, I reported on DBSeer, a component from MIT researchers that can increase the efficiency of database-centric cloud applications and reduce the need for expensive hardware.

  It may come as a surprise to some, though, that Netflix is one of the big organizations open sourcing valuable cloud components. Netflix–which has a very robust cloud-based proprietary platform–has released Chaos Monkey and a number of other meaningful open source components in recent months. Now, the company has unveiled the Netflix OSS Cloud Prize, a contest that will reward the best cloud developers with $200,000 in prizes.

BSD

• AMD KMS/DRM Driver Moves Along For FreeBSD

  Last month I reported on the AMD Linux DRM/KMS driver being ported to FreeBSD. With the developer receiving funding from the FreeBSD Foundation, progress on this open-source AMD kernel mode-setting driver is moving in a steadfast manner.

  There’s an Intel KMS/DRM driver to FreeBSD 9.1, but that’s it as far as ports go of the Linux DRM drivers. However, the AMD KMS driver along with support for TTM memory management within the FreeBSD kernel is taking shape quickly.

• GhostBSD 3.0 Now Available

• FreeBSD Foundation announces new technical staff member

  The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Konstantin Belousov has been hired as its first full-time member of technical staff, a key milestone of the Foundation’s investment in staff for 2013.

• Handling Kernel Panic

• DesktopBSD brought back to live

  The DesktopBSD project is in the process of being revived. EchoD has brought the website and the forums back to live.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Connectivate! GNU GPL – Free Software Ecosystem

  Organizations still have a long way to go to to fully integrate the social web to connect to their customers. Here are some great examples, curated by Hult International Business School and Center for Innovation, Excellence and Leadership (IXL Center). Their book Connectivate! is a collection of real world stories from 54 innovative companies whose breakthroughs are changing the world.

• Richard Stallman turns 60, continues to fight for our freedom

  Richard M Stallman has turned 60 today. He was born to Alice Lippman and Daniel Stallman on March 16, 1953 in New York City. Popularly known as RMS, Stallman wears many hats – most notably the creation of Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, the GNU GPL licence and Emacs. Stallman has dedicated his life to software freedom. He says if you don’t control your computing, someone else will.

  I have been fortunate enough to spend quite some time with Richard in India and then here in Belgium and each time learned more about him.

• GCC 4.8.0 Release Candidate available from gcc.gnu.org

Openness/Sharing

• Stevens Professor Joins Open Source Effort to Develop Low-Cost Drugs

  In order to accelerate the development of new drugs to combat and cure major infectious diseases, Professor A.K. Ganguly of the Department of Chemistry, Chemical Biology & Biomedical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology is contributing his expertise and passion to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Open Source Drug Discovery initiative. Dr. Ganguly is focusing on new treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, which are causing millions of deaths while several drugs used to cure these diseases no longer work because of the appearance of resistant strains.

• P2P Foundation aims to collaborate with Wikisprint

  The true potential of collaborative initiatives around the world is yet to be known. However, a sneak preview will take place on March 20, when hundreds of communities, networks, and institutions from widely diverse backgrounds and hailing from over 20 countries get together and take part in a global Wikisprint.

• Open Access/Content

  • Startups and Innovators Send Letter to Congress Demanding CFAA Reform

  • Testimony Before the House Judiciary Committee on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Programming

• Facebook secures open source PHP with XHP

There Was That Whole Internet Thing, Too

After 17 Months, Senate Confirms New Federal Circuit Judge

The Senate unanimously confirmed Washington lawyer Richard Taranto to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Monday, more than 17 months after he was first nominated for the position and more than a year after his confirmation hearing.

The nomination of Taranto, a name partner at the D.C. firm Farr & Taranto, never faced much opposition but got caught up in election-year politics last year. The Senate voted 91-0 for the specialist in intellectual property and patent law, who has argued 19 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and taught patent issues at Harvard Law School.

RSS inventor doesn’t see what all the fuss is about closing Google Reader

As far as Dave Winer, one of RSS’s creators, is concerned, Google turning off Google Reader isn’t a big deal. The potential for Google to control the news flow is what he finds worrisome.

Security

• Security reporter tells Ars about hacked 911 call that sent SWAT team to his house (Updated)

• Peter G. Neumann: Top cop on the hair-raising cybersecurity beat

  The threat is always there — in your car, at the office, on the table next to where you sleep at night: a near-biblical plague of worms, phisher kings, identity thieves, even cyberterrorists.

  As computer networks have been transformed into a global battlefield, where America faces what former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently called a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” security experts who understand those vast neural systems have become prized recruits in an invisible war.

  No one has stood watch on the wall holding back the hidden hordes longer than Peter G. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man). He was there at the dawn of the computer age and helped usher in its more muscular modern era with his pioneering work in Multics, an innovative operating system in the 1960s. Now, at 80, Neumann is leading an effort to rescue the computer from potentially fatal flaws encoded in its DNA.

• Giving biometric scanners the (fake) finger

  Doctors in Brazil are using phony silicon fingers to fool biometric scanners. Sneaky? Sure. But you really gotta hand it to them.

• Ubuntu: 1764-1: OpenStack Glance vulnerability

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• NYT: Odd Memories of Iran-Contra, Obama First Term

  But when exactly did a lot of Republicans stand up and criticize Obama’s drone policy in his first term?

• Alfie Meadows and Zak King found not guilty – two years, three months, and three trials later

• Are Russian killers on the streets of Britain?

  A jogger who collapsed and died in leafy Weybridge turns out to have been blowing the whistle on one of Russia’s biggest tax frauds. Mark Townsend reports on a crisis that has pitted the Kremlin against the US Senate and British police

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Enlightenment desktop – Yes or no?

  My experience with the Enlightenment desktop slash window manager hails back to 2007, when I started exploring distributions like openGEU and friends. Then, fast forward two years, I’ve had my first encounter with Bodhi Linux, which comes with E17 as its default desktop. Fast forward some more, and we enter the year 2013, with yet another review of Bodhi.

  Half a decade ago, I was rather impressed with what the desktop could do. It managed a fair share of bling-bling, smooth transitions, shadows, transparency, and other cool effects, without having to rely on an expensive graphics card. It was all done in 2D. From the purely aesthetic perspective, E17 was not the best looking, but it was not bad, nor that much different from the contemporary rivals. But then, when I tested the desktop again two years back and just now, I noticed that little has changed in the visual phase space. Which brings a question, is Enlightenment a suitable desktop environment for modern machines?

Finance

• Jaw-Dropping Crimes of the Big Banks

  Here are just some of the improprieties by big banks:

  * Funding the Nazis

  * Laundering money for terrorists

  * Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs (and see this and this) and other arms which are banned in most of the world

  * Launching a coup against the President of the United States

  * Handling money for rogue military operations

  * Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis)

  * Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

  * Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

  * Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis

• Facing Bailout Tax, Cypriots Try to Get Cash Out of Banks

  In a move that could set off new fears of contagion across the euro zone, anxious depositors drained cash from automated teller machines in Cyprus on Saturday, hours after European officials in Brussels required that part of a new 10 billion euro bailout be paid for directly from the bank accounts of ordinary savers.

• Europe Just Pissed Off A Whole Bunch Of Russian Mobsters And Oligarchs With Its Stunning Bailout Of Cyprus

• Retailer Sues Visa Over $13 Million ‘Fine’ for Being Hacked

  A sports apparel retailer is fighting back against the arbitrary multi-million-dollar penalties that credit card companies impose on banks and merchants for data breaches by filing a first-of-its-kind $13 million lawsuit against Visa.
  The suit takes on the payment card industry’s powerful money-making system of punishing merchants and their banks for breaches, even without evidence that card data was stolen. It accuses Visa of levying legally unenforceable penalties that masquerade as fines and unsupported damages and also accuses Visa of breaching its own contracts with the banks, failing to follow its own rules and procedures for levying penalties and engaging in unfair business practices under California law, where Visa is based.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Bad Move: Google Removes AdBlock Plus From Google Play Store

  Another day in which Google makes a move that leaves me scratching my head about what it’s thinking. It has decided to remove Adblock Plus from the Google Play store arguing that it interferes “with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.” Obviously, some will argue that of course Google is doing this to protect its own ad revenue, but it still surprises me. Google’s entire premise was built on the idea of building advertising that was non-intrusive and non-annoying such that it created value for people. The whole reason that Adblock exists is to fight back against bad advertising. On top of that, Adblock is a very popular tool, in part because it helps stop annoying advertising. If anything Adblock represents a useful way of exposing information about when and why people find advertising annoying.

• The ‘Nasty Effect’: How Comments Color Comprehension

  At its best, the Web is a place for unlimited exchange of ideas. But Web-savvy news junkies have known for a long time that reader feedback can often turn nasty. Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the way we interpret the news.

Censorship

• Iran cuts off ‘illegal’ VPN workaround to Internet filters

• Prof. Lawrence Schiffman’s Lawyer Demands Removal of Post Containing the Text of a Court Opinion

  Please be advised that the undersigned represents Professor Lawrence Schiffman, previously Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, now Vice Provost of Yeshiva University.
  Dr. Schiffman’s name was the subject of illegal and criminal misconduct by Raphael Golb. Your website has been provided to me as one of the locations where the criminal postings occurred.
  Please confirm that within five (5) work days of the date of this email the following will occur:
  1. Complete removal of the blog material;
  2. Removal of index entries on search engines;
  3. Cancellation of fraudulent email accounts;
  4. Removal of any other mention or reference to Dr. Schiffman by Mr. Golb or anyone responding to him.

Privacy

• Remains of the Day: White House Petition to Stop CISPA Reaches 100,000 Signatures

• The Internet is a surveillance state

  One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

• How SCOTUS wiretap ruling helps Internet privacy defendants

  I’ve spent the last two weeks vacationing out of the country, with only intermittent access to headlines from the United States. Every time I checked in, I felt as though I’d missed another huge legal story: the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling onmateriality and securities class certification in Amgen v. Connecticut Retirement Plans; oral arguments in Argentina’sappeal in the renegade bondholder litigation; a New York state court’s long-awaited holding that insurance regulators were within their rights to approve MBIA’s $5 billion restructuring in 2009; Credit Suisse throwing in the towel on Ambac’s mortgage-backed securities claims; and the slashing of Apple’sbillion-dollar patent infringement damages against Samsung. But one of the great things about legal journalism is that first-day coverage isn’t usually the end of the story, especially when it comes to judicial opinions.

• 34 Civil Liberties Groups Speak Out Against CISPA in Lead Up to Hearings

Civil Rights

• “Regulation of Social Media and Mobile Media” Talk Slides

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Don’t auction off empty TV airwaves, SXSW activists tell FCC

  Activists at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX, built a free wireless network to help publicize the power of unlicensed “white spaces” technology. The project is part of a broader campaign to persuade the FCC not to auction off this spectrum for the exclusive use of wireless carriers.

  Almost everyone agrees that until recently, the spectrum allocated for broadcasting television channels was used inefficiently. In less populous areas, many channels sat idle. And channels were surrounded by “guard bands” to prevent adjacent channels from interfering with each other. A coalition that includes technology companies such as Google and Microsoft and think tanks such as the New America Foundation has been lobbying the FCC to open this unused spectrum up to third parties.

DRM

• Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, but DRM is fine by me

  The knight who invented the World Wide Web came to SXSW to point out a few ways in which we’re still doing it wrong.

• Apple CEO Cook must testify in e-books antitrust case: judge

Intellectual Monopolies

• Cave or Cancel?: The Future (or End) of the Canada – EU Trade Agreement

  Last November, Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells wrote a piece on the Canada – EU Trade Agreement in which he expressed doubt about the ability to conclude the deal (“Everybody connected to the negotiations assures me there will be a deal. Every public sign I see makes me think there won’t.”). I was skeptical about the prospect of years of negotiations falling apart and expected the political level meetings in November to wrap things up. They didn’t. Last month, International Trade Minister Ed Fast and his European counterpart Karel de Gucht tried again. Still no deal.
  While Fast wants everyone to believe that momentum is building toward an agreement, it clearly is not. Over the last year, Canada’s lead lawyer on the negotiations resigned, Canada’s lead agricultural negotiator was re-assigned, and the EU’s lead negotiator has added the EU – Vietnam agreement to his responsibilities with rumours that he will head the EU – Japan trade talks. Fast says he won’t negotiate the agreement in the media and then proceeds to do exactly that by staking out positions on agriculture and investment. The same business groups that have been lobbying for the deal issue a public letter on the agreement that does little other than promise “future support.”

• Copyrights

  • Appeals Court: ‘Ed Sullivan’ Clip in ‘Jersey Boys’ is Fair Use

    The ruling is intended to discourage lawsuits that have a “chilling effect on creativity.”

    On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on an issue that always causes trouble — when it is permissible to use a short clip of copyrighted material.

  • Judge “came in like a tornado” at Prenda Law lawyers

    Porn-trolling firm Prenda Law is getting dressed down in federal court today. Ars will have a more thorough update when our own reporter gets out of court, but some basics about what is happening are becoming clear based on early tweets.

    Brett Gibbs, the former Prenda lawyer who was first told to show up and explain himself, is there. So too is his attorney, who has been “awfully quiet” according to Adam Steinbaugh. (Steinbaugh tweeted several observations during a break in the proceedings.) Gibbs has been distancing himself from the firm’s actions recently; it’s John Steele and Paul Hansmeier who are seen as the brains behind the operation.

  • Brett Gibbs Gets His Day In Court — But Prenda Law Is The Star

  • Appeals court rejects record label’s effort to neuter DMCA safe harbor

    A federal appeals court has rejected a major record label’s effort to undermine the legal safe harbor provided to user-generated content sites by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Under that 1998 legislation, sites like YouTube and Flickr are immune from copyright liability as long as they promptly respond to takedown requests by copyright holders. The safe harbor has become a foundation of the Internet economy, allowing entrepreneurs to build new user-generated content sites without worrying about being held responsible for their users’ infringing uploads.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Real-Time Messaging

Want to send messages to all the browsers connected to your site? The pub-sub paradigm, run through Web sockets, might be just the solution.

Comment: Fragments of win

Fragmentation is this month’s word of the day, whether it be related to Canonical’s plan to develop and launch its own Mir display server fragmenting a consensus around Wayland or to Miguel de Icaza’s tale of his journey away from a fragmented desktop Linux world. But if we step back and look at the bigger picture, fragmentation isn’t just a part of the Linux story, it is in many ways core to its power to bring free software to the world.

Server

• Cisco Details Plans for Internet of Things

  The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept where everything in the world is connected to everything else via an IP address. The IoT is no longer the dream of futurists, it’s soon to become a reality in the view of networking vendor Cisco Systems.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 5 Episode 4

  In this episode: OpenSUSE 12.3 is out, Red Hat takes ownership of Java 6, SecureBoot is coming to FreeBSD and Ubuntu ditches Wayland for Mir. We report back on our challenge from a couple of episodes ago, come up with a new challenge, and discuss IT education in our Open Ballot.

Kernel Space

• Intel Puts Out New THP Cache Code For Linux Kernel

  Kirill Shutemov of Intel has published his second version of the work that’s going on for Transparent Huge Page (THP) Cache support within the Linux kernel.

• Linux Kernel Gets A Wait-Free Concurrent Queue

  Introduced to the world on Monday and already revised today is the Linux Kernel Wait-Free Concurrent Queue Implementation.

• Five Years Later, Intel Poulsbo Is Still A Linux Mess

  Next month marks five years already since Intel released their Atom “Silverthorne” processors for netbooks and nettops in conjunction with the Intel “Poulsbo” SCH bearing PowerVR-derived GMA 500 graphics. To this day, aging Intel hardware with PowerVR-based graphics continue to be a big problem for the Linux desktop.

• Linux Kernel 3.8.3 Is Now Available for Download

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland’s Weston With Bubble-Style Notifications

    For those using Wayland’s Weston compositor with the stock shell, a patch was proposed today for implementing “bubbles list” style notifications.

    This basic “wl_notification_daemon” interface also allows for user-configurable attributes of the anchor corner, margin, and order for these Weston desktop notifications.

  • Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Drivers On Quadro Laptop

    For starting off Friday’s benchmarking at Phoronix are some numbers when looking at the Nouveau driver with Ubuntu 13.04 against NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux graphics driver when both are controlling a Quadro GPU found on a ThinkPad laptop.

    In the lead-up to releasing Phoronix Test Suite 4.4.1-Forsand, a wide variety of hardware is always benchmarked to ensure there are no last minute bugs or other snafus concerning the Phoronix Test Suite client itself, the Phoronix Device Interface (Phodevi) library for hardware/software detection, or any other problems. One of the combinations tested was the NVIDIA and Nouveau drivers from a Quadro NVS 140M laptop since it hasn’t been tested in a while at Phoronix.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Change network adapter name in Ubuntu

  • Change network adapter name in Linux Mint

  • Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.8.3 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  • Upgrading from CentOS 6.x to CentOS 6.4

  • How To Use Multiple PHP Versions (PHP-FPM & FastCGI) With ISPConfig 3 (CentOS 6.3)

  • How to Boot Into Linux from Your Android Phone

  • Short Tip: Test TLS connections on command line

  • Draw a sunset with tree silhouette landscape scene using Inkscape and the Gimp

  • Understanding SELinux

  • GIMP Magazine: motion photography and more

  • How To Use Multiple PHP Versions (PHP-FPM & FastCGI) With ISPConfig 3 (CentOS 6.3)

  • How to install Icinga (Nagios Fork) in Ubuntu 12.10 server

  • Make Your Computer Talk with Festival [Linux]

  • Use the dracut shell to troubleshoot filesystems

  • [How to] Make LibreOffice look good in KDE

• Games

  • GameMaker engine opens for Linux development

  • Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Now On Linux

  • Humble Android Bundle 5 gets new games

    A new game bundle called the Humble Bundle 5 was recently launched for Android users. At the time of its launch, the game offered six games and five soundtracks. And now the bundle has been upgraded with the addition of three new games: Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP, Splice and Crayon Physics Deluxe.

  • Legend of Dungeon ‘Nearly Beta’ to hit 15th March!

  • Day of Defeat and Day of Defeat: Source beta on Steam for Linux!

    Can’t wait to get back into some Day of Defeat: Source! I used to play a lot of this game , it’s easily now one of the more interesting FPS games on Linux!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • logging into Plasma Workspaces 2

    You’re probably wondering what I was doing at 1am last night. I get asked that all the time. Well, mostly by people I live with, now that I think about it. “What were you doing on your computer at one in the morning?” they ask. The answer is usually quite exciting. Take last night, for instance: I was having a meeting with people to discuss display managers. Yes, the wonderful world of login screens.

  • An update on KWin on 5

    I realized I haven’t written a blog post to highlight the latest changes in KWin for quite some time. The reason for this is that we currently are mostly focused on getting KWin to work on Qt 5/KDE Frameworks 5. As I have mentioned already in the past KWin is a little bit special in the transition to Qt 5 as we used the low level native, non-portable functions provided by Qt (last week I found one usage of a native function which is not even documented). For us it mostly means that we transit from XLib to XCB and remove code which uses methods which got removed or replaced.

  • KDE’s wonderful usability

Distributions

• The 2013 Top 7 Best Linux Distributions for You

  There have been several shifts and shakeups on the lists presented since then, of course, and -– as you’ll soon see – this year’s offering holds true to that pattern. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the past year has seen so much upheaval in the desktop world – particularly where desktop environments are concerned – that 2013′s list could come as a surprise to some.

• For a fully free desktop OS, try Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0

• New Releases

  • Slax 7.0.6 is now available for download

    I’d like to announce the next update of Slax Live Linux version 7.0.6. The main change is new Linux kernel 3.8.2 and updated KDE to 4.10.1. It was a bit harder than I expected, mostly due to some really odd changes made by KDE developers, which I had to work around to get the same functionality like we are used to.

• Screenshots

  • Kali Linux screen shots

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva returns, challenges Microsoft in small and medium enterprise segment

    Mandriva was once one of the most popular GNU/Linux distribution. It has been around since 1998, but the company and the project went through hard times in the last two years. The company got forked then reached the brink of being sold. However, this resilient company faced hardship bravely and is now making a comeback with a concrete business plan. Could this be the ‘Red Hat’ move by Mandriva, turning the company into a ‘billion’ dollar revenue earning company?

• Red Hat Family

  • JBoss Fuse and JBoss A-MQ join Red Hat’s middleware

    Red Hat has added JBoss Fuse and JBoss A-MQ to its enterprise middleware portfolio. The products are based on technologies acquired from FuseSource in September 2012. According to the company, these are designed to enhance Red Hat’s enterprise integration and messaging capabilities.

    Red Hat JBoss Fuse is a flexible open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based on popular Apache projects such as Camel, an enterprise integration pattern framework, which enable faster time-to-solution integration implementations.

  • Red Hat shares fall after Citi downgrade

    Shares of Red Hat Inc. fell Tuesday after a Citi analyst downgraded the software maker citing concerns about slowing growth.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Mir Code Moves Along, Branches Begin Appearing

        There’s code being committed to the new Mir Display Server every few hours. There’s also numerous Bazaar code branches appearing too that show early work on other functionality.

      • Canonical’s Bazaar Still In Stagnant State

        With Canonical allocating its resources elsewhere, the Bazaar revision control system has fallen stagnant.

        While Bazaar was promising in its early days, the open-source distribution revision control system has seen better times. The original developer of Bazaar, Martin Pool, left Canonical last year and the company ended up shuffeling around the other developers formerly working on the project. Bazaar isn’t a money-maker for Canonical and the control system in its current form is good enough for the company while most other free software projects prefer Git or even SVN over Bzr.

      • Ubuntu Offspring Go Forth With Their 13.04 Beta

        While Canonical no longer does a beta release of Ubuntu itself, many of the Ubuntu derivatives are doing their first 13.04 beta today.

      • Ubuntu Unity 7 Coming Soon

        Unity 7, the latest release of Unity which is currently in development, should be available for user testing via a PPA in a few days. According to Michael Hall’s blog post, it will be available there for 2 weeks, before it lands.

        One of the most prominent changes in Unity 7 is the Smart Scopes service. Currently, Dash searches are processed on the local system by installed lenses. In future, Dash searches will be sent to the Canonical servers for processing by the Smart Scopes service. This service will determine which scopes are most relevant for the entered keywords, and return the search results from those scopes to the user’s system. In short terms this should mean more relevant search results and less system resources will be used.

      • Why I support Ubuntu

        Today, on Linux blogs everywhere and on Google+, it’s open warfare between Ubuntu supporters and those who who believe it is committing free software heresy. Muktware’s own Swapnil Bhartiya suggested on this site that the company was morphing into a new Apple, with Shuttleworth in the roll of Steve Jobs.

        And there’s not much worse you could call an open source company than Apple.

        I get the criticism and the discomfort with many of Ubuntu’s decisions. I appreciate that the heads of various open source projects feel betrayed in many ways and that longtime users feel that they’ve been left out of the loop. Decisions are now made at the top not the bottom. The community opportunities at Ubuntu are no longer up to the standards of many free software advocates that once championed the distro.

      • Ubuntu development hits 13.04 beta 1 milestone

        The Ubuntu developers have just passed the beta 1 milestone in development of Raring Ringtail, Ubuntu 13.04. Although the milestone does not see a release of the Ubuntu distribution, it does see a release of a beta 1 version of most of the various remixes, as previously disclosed by the project’s leadership. The announcement notes that 13.04 Beta 1 images are available for Edubuntu (download), Kubuntu (download), Lubuntu (download), UbuntuKylin (download), Ubuntu Server Cloud (images), Ubuntu Studio (notes, download) and Xubuntu (download).

      • Canonical Targets Mobile Market with Ubuntu Mir

        In what appears to be a growing penchant among open source developers for naming things after Soviet spacecraft, Canonical recently announced a new project called Mir. And while it doesn’t actually have much (or anything) to do with outer space, it could have major implications for open source user interfaces throughout the channel–not to mention for Canonical itself as it strives to “converge” its Ubuntu offerings across a range of hardware devices.

        Quite unlike the space station of the same name, the Mir project exists to create a new display server for Linux. It will replace the venerable X.org implementation of the X Window System, which comprises one of the core components of virtually every major Linux distribution out there today.

        Mir, according to Canonical, will offer a number of improvements over X that will prove particularly beneficial for tablets, phones and other touch-enabled mobile devices. But it is being designed to work across all hardware platforms, and–if it gains wide adoption by other Linux distributions besides Ubuntu–it could help to drive innovation in interface design across the open source channel.

      • Is Canonical Heading In Apple’s Direction?

        I have been a huge supporter of Canonical and Ubuntu from its early days and have done my share of spreading the word about Ubuntu and invested hours and hours in converting people and installing Ubuntu on their systems. Canonical spent a lot of money and resources in making Ubuntu popular. Ubuntu was one such distribution which was putting the users ahead of anything else. The company created an awesome community which was ‘driven’ by the code of conduct, which made a very welcoming community.

      • Celebrate Ubuntu (but keep an eye on what they’re up to…)

        Ubuntu has come under a decent amount of flack over the past few months, particularly over their decision to use the ‘Dash Search’ to return results from Amazon by default in their most recent release.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • From US Soldier to IT Manager… with Linux Mint

          During my earlier years, I was in the US military as an enlisted soldier. Money was extremely tight for my wife and I, but I had a passion for computers.

          I couldn’t afford a new system, and certainly couldn’t afford to pay for Microsoft Windows. So, I purchased a used computer from a yard sale that had no operating system on it.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-powered soundbar also streams Internet music

  Sonos, a well-known maker of Linux-powered, WiFi-mesh networked, streaming audio systems, has added an HDTV soundbar to its line. The “Playbar” aims to bring “immersive HiFi sound” to home entertainment centers — not just from TV content, but streamed from Internet and local sources as well.

• GCW-Zero $159 Linux-based retro gaming handheld coming in May

  The GCW-Zero is a portable gaming device designed for playing retro games — basically anything up until the era of the original PlayStation. It packs a 3.5 inch display, a 1 GHz MIPS processor, and and an open source Linux-based operating system called OpenDingux.

  Thanks to that operating system, you’ll be able to run a range of apps on the platform, including emulators for classic gaming consoles.

• Raspberry Pi-powered open-source bartending robot nearly funded on Kickstarter

  Who wouldn’t want a Raspbery Pi-powered open source bartending that you control with your phone or tablet?

  For at least 353 people who have tossed $134,551 in tip money towards the project on Kickstarter, that question has an easy answer: everyone. And with a project goal of just a little more, $135,000, it seems certain that “Bartendro” will see the bright lights of night-time parties.

• Windows Embedded Expert Jumps Into Open Source

  Sean Liming, Owner of Annabooks, has been heavily involved with Windows embedded for years, dating all the way back to 1995. With the growth of Linux and open source, Sean decided that he’d like to beef up his Linux knowledge in-order to create a new book to help people transition from Windows to an open software solution. He decided to attend a Linux Foundation event in 2012 and has taken two Linux Foundation courses, which he says helped with the development of his new book: Open Software Stack for the Intel Atom Processor.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • LG Optimus G Pro gets eye recognition tech

      LG has announced a ‘Value Pack’ update for the Optimus G Pro smartphone. Packing a feature called Smart Video, the update will be served up in Korea in April.

      According to the electronics giant, Smart Video takes viewing videos on mobile devices to a whole new level of convenience with eye recognition that eliminates the need to manually control playback during the viewing experience.

    • Samsung Will Release Tizen-Based Smartphone This Year

    • Samsung Galaxy S 4: Moving further from Android

      The Galaxy S 4 was revealed by Samsung and it’s clear the company is distancing itself further from Android.

    • Samsung GALAXY S 4

    • Samsung launches Galaxy S 4, leaves the iPhone decades behind

      Samsung has eventually launched its Galaxy S4 smartphone with features with would make the iPhone shy. Some of the new features of Galaxy S4 makes the latest iPhone look like the good old TV set of 80′s compared to today’s 3D 4K televisions. No, I am not exaggerating. iPhone’s innovation has stagnated and most of it’s energies are getting wasted on suing competitors instead of improving their own product.

    • Hands On: Samsung Galaxy S4 [Video]

  • Android

    • Android expected to dominate tablets, too

      After having its way with the smartphone market, Android is now poised for a repeat performance in the tablet market, according to market anlyst firm IDC.

    • Android Builders Summit 2013 videos now available

      Videos from keynotes and presentation sessions at the Android Builders Summit 2013 held last month in San Francisco are now available for free viewing, courtesy of the Linux Foundation, which held the event. The videos cover a wide range of embedded Linux development, deployment, and marketing topics.

    • Android plus Chrome OS equals Google’s future operating system

      We still don’t know where Google is going with Android and Chrome OS, but putting Chrome’s top executive in charge of Android is a big, honking hint.

    • Why Google Won’t Merge Chrome OS and Android

      There are big moves going on at Google, with possible implications for the company’s operating systems Chrome OS and Android. Longtime Android chief Andy Rubin is stepping aside, although he is staying at Google. Meanwhile, Sundar Pichai, VP of Chrome and Apps, is a star on the rise. Pichai has been overseeing the delivery of Google’s well-recieved Chromebooks, and many of its very slick apps, in addition to steering Chrome OS forward.

    • Intel Atom Z240-powered X1000 lands in India

      XOLO has officially launched the new X1000 smartphone, powered by an Intel CPU, in India. Featuring Android 4.0.4, the X1000 phone hits online stores for Rs 19,999 ($369).

    • Do You Know What’s Inside Android App Code? Bluebox Does

      For many types of applications, in order to accurately understand what is going on within them, access to source code is typically required. When it comes to Android Apps, a new effort from startup Bluebox Security is set to make access and visibility into mobile code easier than ever before.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Benchmarking Ubuntu Linux On The Google Nexus 7

    Last month I delivered extensive benchmarks of Ubuntu Linux on the Google Nexus 10 using the recently released Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview. In that article were benchmarks from the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (Cortex-A15) tablet against a range of ARM Cortex and Intel/AMD x86 systems. This article builds upon those earlier Ubuntu Linux x86/ARM results by now adding in the results from Ubuntu on the Google Nexus 7 plus more comparison processors have been tossed into the mix as well. This article offers Ubuntu Linux performance results for a dozen different Intel, AMD, and ARM systems. The ARM SoCs represented are from Texas Instruments OMAP, NVIDIA Tegra, and ARM Exynos families.

  • Pwnie Express Releases Pwn Pad Ahead of Schedule

    The team at Pwnie Express seems to have a lot of trouble standing still, as it doesn’t seem more than a few months go by before they are talking about yet another disruptive open source product that they are about to unleash on the security community.

The “Linux” of online learning? edX takes big step toward open source goal

edX MOOC Software Goes Open Source

The non-profit pioneer in the phenomenon of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is releasing a core element of its platform for offering online courses as open-source software.

Video: Open-Source Oximeter Prototype Is Bluetooth Connected

Do you know how much oxygen you have in your blood? You may not be worried about knowing since you’re alive and thus can infer you have enough. But, visiting high altitudes can be made safer, and implementing a new workout regimen can be made more effective, with an oximeter.

5 Awesome Open Source Projects You Should Know About

The amount of free content on the Internet is partially a result of horrid copyright infringement and partially a product of the open source movement, an umbrella term that applies to any kind of software that allows for its source code to be openly copied, edited, and distributed. Many of these programs are often quite amazing and frequently very cost-effective so, for your consideration, here are five really awesome products of the open source movement.

Olympus to showcase open source microscopy

Web Browsers

• Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 25, Firefox 19, And IE10

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Delivers New Version 3.0 Preview of Firefox OS

    Three months ago, the folks at Mozilla rolled out the 1.0 version of the Firefox OS Simulator, which provided folks–especially developers–an opportunity to try out the company’s promising new mobile operating system. Mozilla has been making lots of noise about its entry into the mobile OS business, and early Firefox OS phones (a couple of them seen here) are arriving. Now, Mozilla has rolled out a preview version 3.0 of the simulator, which can provide a lot of the mobile operating system’s flavor.

    Mozilla has warned that the version 3.0 simulator is “a little rough around the edges,” but can still be experimented with. All three of the preview versions do reflect the fact that Mozilla means to develop this new mobile OS fully out in the open.

  • Mozilla launches Open Badges 1.0, delivers virtual kudos for real skills

  • Introducing Open Badges 1.0

  • Mozilla releases Open Badges 1.0

    Mozilla has announced the launch of Open Badges 1.0—a new way to recognise and verify learning. The free, open source software will allow users and institutions to digitally recognize and verify learning that happens anywhere, and use it to get a job, further education, or add to a growing skillset.

    In other words, a digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned. Open Badges takes that concept one step further, by creating an online ecosystem where users can verify, display, and combine badges.

SaaS/Big Data

• SwiftStack Exits Stealth With Open Source Swift Software-Defined Storage

• A new look for private cloud ownCloud 5.0

• Did EMC Just Say Fork You To The Hadoop Community?

  In Derrick Harris’ article on GigaOM entitled “EMC to Hadoop competition: See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.”, EMC unveiled their new Pivotal HD offering which effectively re-architects the Greenplum analytic database so it sits on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Scott Yara, Greenplum cofounder, is excited about the new product. Since a key focus for us at Hortonworks is to deeply integrate Hadoop with other data systems (a la our efforts with Teradata, Microsoft, MarkLogic, and others), I’m always excited to see data system providers like Greenplum decide to store their data natively in HDFS. And I can’t argue with Scott Yara’s sentiment that “I do think the center of gravity will move toward HDFS”.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle’s Nimbula IaaS buy sparks open source speculation

  Oracle has acquired Nimbula, an IaaS software provider with ties to OpenStack, which could signal a move toward open source cloud. Oracle’s reputation, however, has industry watchers predicting otherwise.

• LibreOffice for Android “frustratingly close” to release

Education

• Open Education: Take Back The Curriculum

  Education technology consultant Karen Fasimpaur sounds like a revolutionary when she gets fired up talking about the potential of open educational resources (OER), the textbooks and other educational tools made available as free downloads or interactive Web experiences.

  “We have an opportunity to take back the curriculum!” she told educators at last week’s SXSWedu event. “What if we took the $5 billion annually spent on textbooks and invested that in teachers and their work?”

• US States Rebel

  That’s from a request for proposals developed jointly by Maine and other states. Another request for proposals by Los Angeles Unified School District explicity excludes “RT” and includes Linux in the acceptable list of OS. It also includes, “Proposer does not have a reputation for practices including, but not limited to, unethical business practices, discrimination, and unfair labor practices.”

Business

• How an Open-Source Software Based Company Can Succeed

Funding

• Netflix cracks wallet to spur open source cloud development

  Netflix wants its open source software to become the preferred platform for massive cloud-based applications, so it has launched a cash-conferring contest to generate developer enthusiasm for its technology.

• Netflix to give $100,000 in prizes to developers who best improve the

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?

  According to a public mailing list thread, Google is doing this on purpose, to handle a spam problem. We sympathize; we spend a disappointing amount of energy combating similar problems on the services we provide for the free software community. But the solution can’t be something that breaks legitimate communication channels, and especially not in a way that enhances Google’s disproportionate control of the network. While Google is offering to whitelist servers whose operators write to them, this just accentuates the inequality and doesn’t realistically solve the problem.

  We hope that Google will retract this change and find a solution that does not undermine the distributed nature of the Internet. We have already reached out to them toward this end.

Project Releases

• ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

  Today we released ownCloud 5, a very important milestone for the ownCloud community and perhaps the most important release so far. But before going into the details I want to take a step back and look at what the original idea of ownCloud was at the beginning.

• OwnCloud 5.0 Released With New Design

  OwnCloud 5.0 was released this morning, the latest major update to the popular open-source cloud storage software suite.

• Open Source ownCloud Gains Key Features with New Release

• GNU/EDMA 0.18.6. Official Release

• Sinatra 1.4 flying in soon – Update – Landed

  Version 1.4 of Sinatra, the domain specific language (DSL) for creating web applications in Ruby, is imminent, according to a blog post by its current maintainer, Konstantin Haase. The new version will be the first release with new features since October 2011′s 1.3.0 release. Those new features include support for new HTTP methods, updated templates, an improved classic mode, better parsing of routes, MIME-type parameters and more supported servers.

Public Services/Government

• Open government and civic engagement at SXSW

Licensing

• German court case confirms validity of the LGPL

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Publishers Have A New Strategy For Neutralizing Open Access — And It’s Working

    Over the last few years, Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of victories for open access. Along the way publishers have tried various counter-attacks, which all proved dismal failures. But there are signs that they have changed tack, and come up with a more subtle — and increasingly successful — approach.

  • #ami2 liberating science; more SpringerGate: I have to ask their permission to re-use CC-BY 2.0

  • Details Come Out On US Attorneys Withholding Evidence In Aaron Swartz Case

    Last week, we wrote about Aaron Swartz’s girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, releasing a statement accusing the DOJ of a variety of things that hadn’t really been covered before, including lying, seizing evidence without a warrant and withholding exculpatory evidence. That resulted in an interesting discussion in the comments, in which a few DOJ defenders suggested that since there were no details, we were probably making this up (as if we don’t have better things to do). Now, however, the details have come out. In a letter that was sent at the end of January (but just now leaked to the press), Swartz’s lawyers highlight how Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann was responsible for the charges above.

    The key issue is the search of Aaron’s laptop. Cambridge police seized the laptop on January 6, 2011. The Secret Service did not obtain a warrant until February 9, 2011, even though it had clearly been involved since before the arrest and was leading the investigation. Swartz’s legal team, quite reasonably, argued that the evidence from the laptop should be suppressed due to the massive delay in obtaining the necessary warrant. Heymann hit back that it was the Cambridge Police who had the laptop, so the Secret Service had nothing to do with it until it got the warrant. There was a court hearing about all of this, and Heymann again insisted that the Secret Service had no responsibility until after the warrant.

Programming

• Perl: The Language Everybody Wants to Declare Dead

The Pope and Politics

Argentine cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was chosen as the new pope this week. But coverage often glossed over the most intense political controversies about him.

Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Mass. Legal System In Turmoil

A scandal in a Massachusetts crime lab continues to reverberate throughout the state’s legal system. Several months ago, Annie Dookhan, a former chemist in a state crime lab, told police that she messed up big time. Dookhan now stands accused of falsifying test results in as many as 34,000 cases.

A Fool and His Money

It turns out that the cause of my problem was not technical, but disciplinary.

RIP Google Reader. RSS is Not Dead No Matter What Google Says

Why I love RSS and You Do Too

Matthew Keys: ‘I Am Fine’

Former Web Producer Indicted in California for Conspiring with “Anonymous” Members to Attack Internet News Site

Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to counteract ‘Facebook fatigue’

CNN: Unlike – Why I’m Leaving Facebook

14 March 2013: International Day to Defend Apostates and Blasphemers

Countless individuals accused of apostasy and blasphemy face threats, imprisonment, and execution. Blasphemy laws in over 30 countries and apostasy laws in over 20 aim primarily to restrict thought, expression and the rights of Muslims, ex-Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Science

• Here’s my paper on evidence and teaching for the education minister.

  I was asked by Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Education) and the Department for Education to look at how to improve the use of evidence in schools. I think there are huge, positive opportunities for teachers here, that go way beyond just doing a few more trials. Pasted below is the briefing note from DfE press office, and then the text of a paper I wrote for them, which came out this week. You can also download a PDF from the DfE website here.

Security

• Treacherous backdoor found in TP-Link routers

  Security experts in Poland have discovered a treacherous backdoor in various router models made by TP-Link. When a specially crafted URL is called, the router will respond by downloading and executing a file from the accessing computer, reports Michał Sajdak from Securitum.

• Kaspersky fixes IPv6 problem in Internet Security Suite

  Security researcher Marc Heuse discovered that the firewall in Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 has a problem with certain IPv6 packets. The researcher said that he publicly disclosed the details of the problem because Kaspersky didn’t respond when he reported it. Shortly after his disclosure, Kaspersky did release a fix.

• Brian Krebs gets SWATted

  Brian Krebs got a visit from a SWAT team today, after having his site DDOSed and served with a fake takedown notice, possibly in retaliation for this article.

• Researchers resurrect and improve CRIME attack against SSL

  Two researchers from security firm Imperva have devised new techniques that could allow attackers to extract sensitive information from users’ encrypted Web traffic.

  The new methods build on those used in an attack called CRIME revealed last year that abuses the compression feature of SSL to achieve the same goal.

  CRIME decrypts authentication information stored in headers sent during HTTP requests, in particular the session cookies. It works by tricking the victims into loading a malicious piece of JavaScript that forces their browsers to make specifically crafted requests to SSL-enabled websites where they’re already logged in.

• CIA and the FBI is investigating President Obama’s financial condition / US News

  The website Exposed.su posted the Social Security Numbers, home addresses and phone numbers to an array of influential Americans on Monday, including President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, actor Mel Gibson, US Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Robert Mueller and others. Additionally, the hackers have posted documents that they perpetrate to be legitimate credit reports for many of the victims, including singer Beyoncé, rap artist Jay-Z and Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck, among others.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Mothers of gun victims kicked out of NRA headquarters by armed security

  The National Rifle Organization (NRA) on Thursday used armed security to force mothers of victims of gun violence to leave the organization’s headquarters.

  The groups MomsRising.org and the Reston-Herndon Alliance to End Gun Violence traveled to NRA headquarters in Virginia on Thursday to deliver a petition with over 150,000 signatures calling for universal background checks, a ban on high-capacity magazines, a ban on military-style assault rifles and new laws to crack down on gun trafficking.

• Md. General Assembly repeals death penalty

  The House of Delegates voted 82-56 to repeal Maryland’s death penalty on Friday, making the state the sixth in as many years to abolish executions and delivering a major legislative victory to Gov. Martin O’Malley.

  The bill, which passed the Senate last week, now heads to the governor for his signature. O’Malley (D) has lobbied lawmakers for years to end capital punishment, and he put the full weight of his office behind it this session.

• Schily accepts political responsibility for neo-Nazi murders

• Greek neo-Nazi MP can be prosecuted for attacking left-wing rivals on live TV

  Greece’s parliament has voted to allow the prosecution of a leading neo-Nazi politician for assaulting two female left-wing politicians on a live TV talkshow.

• Hackers leak CIA Director John Brennan’s financial records

  CIA Director John Brennan’s credit records were allegedly published by hackers Friday on the website Exposed.Su, according to Russia Today.

• Hackers publish CIA Director Brennan’s financial records

• CIA must say if it has secret drone strike documents, DC court rules

  The Central Intelligence Agency must publicly declare whether or not it has documents on drone strikes carried out by the US government, and if so, must explain why it can keep those documents hidden from the public, according to a new ruling today by an appeals court in Washington, DC. The ruling, which was made in response to a three-year-old Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, doesn’t mean that the CIA will have to turn over any drone documents themselves, but it does force the agency to at least acknowledge that it has intelligence on US drone strikes, which it’s been reluctant to do so far in official court filings.

• ACLU Suit for CIA Drone Data Revived by Appeals Court

• CIA must admit existence of drone programme, appeals court rules

  In a rebuke of government secrecy, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the CIA must give a fuller response to a lawsuit seeking the spy agency’s records on drone attacks.

• The CIA has Attempted to Assassinate 50 Foreign Leaders Including Chavez

  Blum: I cannot prove it of course, but I believe he was. It would be totally in keeping with the entire history of the CIA and its attitude towards people like Hugo Chavez.

  The CIA has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders and successfully at least half the time. And very few of them were as despised by the US government as Chavez was, I would say. So, there would be no reason at all to expect that the CIA would not at least plan on killing, and the nature of his ailment is very odd.

• US spies learning lessons from Iraq WMD disaster

  US spy agencies still live under the shadow of disastrous intelligence failures that paved the way for the Iraq war, and now face a crucial test as they track Iran’s nuclear program.

• CIA begins sizing up Islamic extremists in Syria for drone strikes

• CIA-operated drone attacks violate Pak’s sovereignty: UN

  A UN special rapporteur investigating US drone strikes has concluded after a secret trip to Pakistan that the attacks by CIA-operated spy planes violate the country’s sovereignty.

• U.N. Investigator: U.S. Drones Violate Sovereignty of Pakistan

  The United States drone strikes in Pakistan are a violation of that nation’s sovereignty, the head of a U.N. team investigating the legality of the U.S. drone program said, after he made a secret fact-finding trip to Pakistan and met with officials there.
  Back in January, Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, held a news conference in London to announce his inquiry into the impact on civilians of the targeted killing program, as well as the legal underpinnings.
  That investigation took him to Pakistan, where he said his findings were clear after meetings with officials.

• UN: Pakistan ‘does not sanction’ US drone strikes

• Op-Ed: Capriles, the CIA, and their War against Chavez and Venezuela

  As Hugo Chavez is mourned and remembered by the people of Venezuela and the world, Henrique Capriles, the CIA and the IMF lie in wait, ready to snatch up Venezuela’s resources.

• CIA predicted data mining and big data back in 1962

  Last week the CIA published a 1962 internal document that seems to show it was contemplating some very advanced data techniques half a century ago. Titled “some Far-Out Thoughts on Computers” the document was authored by one Orrin Clotworthy, an intelligence analyst and self described “computer hobbyist”. Apparently that’s what geeks called themselves back in the early sixties.

• Revealed: The 1962 CIA Paper That Predicts the Big Deal With Big Data

• Former CEO reveals Blackwater worked as ‘virtual extension of the CIA’

• Exclusive: Court Docs Reveal Blackwater’s Secret CIA Past

  But the most noteworthy thing about the largely failed prosecution wasn’t the outcome. It was the tens of thousands of pages of documents—some declassified—that the litigation left in its wake. These documents illuminate Blackwater’s defense strategy—and it’s a fascinating one: to defeat the charges it was facing, Blackwater built a case not only that it worked with the CIA—which was already widely known—but that it was in many ways an extension of the agency itself.

• Blackwater was CIA’s extension, founder Erik Prince admits

  Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater – now known as Academi – claims his firm “became a virtual extension of the CIA,” taking orders from the agency.

• Was Blackwater The CIA?

• Court Documents Reveal How Blackwater Served As Effective Extension Of CIA: Daily Beast

  Last month a three-year-long federal prosecution of Blackwater collapsed. The government’s 15-felony indictment–on such charges as conspiring to hide purchases of automatic rifles and other weapons from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives–could have led to years of jail time for Blackwater personnel. In the end, however, the government got only misdemeanor guilty pleas by two former executives, each of whom were sentenced to four months of house arrest, three years’ probation, and a fine of $5,000. Prosecutors dropped charges against three other executives named in the suit and abandoned the felony charges altogether.

• In The 1960s, The CIA Turned Cats Into Bionic Spies

• The CIA’s secret experiments to turn cats into spies

• US war paradigm still useful – former CIA head

• “Scientific Assassinations” Are Part of the CIA’s Modus Operandi

  Carroll also wrote that Chavez, himself, believed that the cancers that befell former leftist leaders of Latin America, including Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, diagnosed with colon cancer and Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva, treated for throat cancer, were part of a CIA plot directed against left-wing leaders. Curiously, Carroll suggests that Uruguay’s former leftist president, Tabare Vazquez, also recovered from cancer.

Cablegate

• Bildt accused of leaking secrets to the US

  On Friday, the Aftonbladet tabloid reported that Bildt, at the age of 27, reported to the United States about details of closed-door government coalition talks in 1976.

  That information was then sent on to the CIA, the paper claimed.

  “He was well informed. I reported on everything he told us,” US envoy Ronald E Woods told the paper.

• Dokumenten bevisar: Carl Bildt gav hemliga uppgifter – till USA

• Leaking sites struggle to emerge from shadow of Wikileaks

  On 3 February, 2013, Balkanleaks released the “Buddha dossier,” a massive trove of secret documents from the national police archive.

  The cache was the Bulgaria-based transparency site’s most significant release so far this year. It underscored suspicions that the country’s prime minister, Boyko Borisov, had ties to organised crime.

• Wikileaks published US Embassy-Vatican cable on Pope Francis

  Wikileaks has a cable that the US Embassy-Vatican wrote about then-Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, among other possible papal candidates, in 2005, shortly before Ratzinger was chosen to be the new pope.

• Wikileaks published US Embassy-Vatican cable on Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis

• Pope Francis’ Junta Past: Argentine Journalist on New Pontiff’s Ties to Abduction of Jesuit Priests

• Assange threatens the USA with sensational expose

  «Manning’s trial is a public beating of all those who is trying to open people’s eyes. This is also proved by the degrading circumstances of keeping him under arrest. Not one single prisoner in the US has spent so much time in jail before the verdict», says Assange recalling that Manning was arrested back in 2010.

• Ecuadorian minister visits Assange in London embassy

  Ecuador’s secretary of state for planning and development, Fander Falconi, met the former computer hacker during a brief visit to Britain.

  “He is in very good health and good spirits,” Falconi told reporters at the embassy.

  “He is very proud of Ecuador’s foreign policy and the very professional way the government of Ecuador is dealing with this issue.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A Lost Renoir? River in China Looks Like an Oil Painting

  The Chinese government has reportedly spent 7.4 billion yen (about 77 million US dollars) in an effort to restore life to the lake shown here.

  Comments posted on the Internet in reference to the top photo include, “it looks like a piece by Van Gogh,” “it resembles a green tea latte,” and “it’s like a landscape painting.” We in Japan cannot be too smug, however, as our own country experienced a plethora of similar environmental issues during its rapid growth stage in the 60s and 70s. Hopefully those experiences can be leveraged to help improve the situation in China and we can work together in creating and sustaining a better global environment.

Finance

• After Watering Down Financial Reform, Ex-Senator Scott Brown Joins Goldman Sachs’ Lobbying Firm

  During his nearly three years in the U.S. Senate, Scott Brown (R-MA) frequently came to the aid of the financial sector — watering down the Dodd-Frank bill and working to weaken it after its passage — and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the industry. Now, the man Forbes Magazine called one of “Wall Street’s Favorite Congressmen” will use those connections as counsel for Nixon Peabody, an international law and lobbying firm.

  The Boston Globe noted Monday that while Brown himself will not be a lobbyist — Senators may not lobby their former colleagues for the first two years after leaving office, under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 — “he will be leaning heavily on his Washington contacts to drum up business for the firm.” The position will also allow him “to begin cashing in on his contacts with the financial services industry, which he helped oversee in the Senate.”

• Fed Rebukes Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase Over Capital Plans

  Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, the Wall Street giants that emerged from the financial crisis in a position of strength, are now facing questions about their ability to withstand future market shocks.

• Washington Post’s Austerity Backer, Still Trying

  If you read enough Paul Krugman columns, you know that there are politicians–in this country and elsewhere–who continue to assert that the best way to turn around slumping economies is to slash government spending. The problem, as Krugman has written countless times, is that there’s no evidence that this works in the real world–and plenty of evidence that it does not.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Google Takes the Dark Path, Censors AdBlock Plus on Android

  In a shocking move, Google has recently deleted AdBlock Plus from the Android Play Store. This is hugely disappointing because it demonstrates that Google is willing to censor software and abandon its support for open platforms as soon as there’s an ad-related business reason for doing so.

  Until now, the Internet and software development communities have relied on Google to be safely on their side when it comes to building open platforms, encouraging innovation, and giving users maximum choice about how their computers will function. But with today’s news, that commitment to openness suddenly looks much, much weaker.

• Google Blocks Adblock Plus, Puts Revenue Before Users

  Adblock Plus, the popular free ad blocking tool for PCs and smartphones, was removed by Google from its Google Play store for Android apps. Though the app will no longer be available through Google Play, Adblock Plus has made a downloadable version of the app available directly from its website. Of course, it’s still available for PC and Mac computer users, while it has never been an option for iPhone and iPad users.

• Google Kills Adblock Plus from Google Play Store; Open Source Tool Releases Statement

• Sunshine “Weak:” Wisconsin Leaders Failing State’s Open Government Traditions

  “If Wisconsin were not known as the Dairy State it could be known, and rightfully so, as the Sunshine State,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court observed in 2010. “All branches of Wisconsin government have, over many years, kept a strong commitment to transparent government.”

  But just in time for Sunshine Week 2013, GOP leaders in the state are showing how they are failing that proud tradition.

• ALEC Corporate Bill Mill Posts (Some) Model Bills Online for First Time; Watchdogs Say Move Falls Far Short on Transparency

  A two-year campaign by a coalition of public interest groups has pushed the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to release hundreds of pieces of “model” state legislation secretly developed and pushed into law by corporate interests. The coalition includes the Center for Media and Democracy, ColorOfChange, Common Cause, Greenpeace, People For the American Way, Progress Now, Voters Legislative Transparency Project, and a variety of labor organizations.

Censorship

• Venezuela: Twitter user detained for spreading “destabilizing” information

  In the wake of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s death last week, government authorities in Venezuela seem to have resumed taking action against freedom of expression online. On March 14, 2013, Lourdes Alicia Ortega Pérez was detained by the Scientific Penal and Criminal Investigation Corps (CICPC, by its Spanish acronym), for allegedly having “usurped the identity of an official of the Autonomous Service of Registries and Notaries” and having sent Tweets that authorities deemed “destabilizing [to] the country.”

Privacy

• Who’s snooping on your relationship status?

• Snoopers’ Charter: we must be consulted

• Blankenhorn: Has Google’s Larry Page Lost The Plot?

• EU super spies to get right to snoop on your emails, website visits, medical data and police records

  A European super-spying agency is to be granted draconian powers to access a vast range of our personal information, including medical data, criminal records, emails and website visits.

  The controversial move, demanded by Brussels in an EU directive, will sweep aside British privacy laws that protect UK citizens from intrusion into their personal lives.

• Carnegie Mellon, NSA seek high school hackers

  Bored with classes? Carnegie Mellon University and one of the government’s top spy agencies want to interest high school students in a game of computer hacking.

• NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake at National Press Club

• NSA Approves General Dynamics Encryptor for Top Secret Use on Vehicles, Data Centers, Remote Command Posts

Civil Rights

• Of This I Am Proud

• Dispute over high-risk prisoners threatens to disrupt U.S.-Afghan talks

  A dispute over the fate of about three dozen militants held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan has disrupted negotiations over a long-term security agreement to leave U.S. troops in the country after 2014.

  The United States has refused to turn over the prisoners — deemed especially dangerous compared with more than 3,000 already transferred to Afghan control — unless President Hamid Karzai guarantees they will not be released. He has so far decline

• ‘Britons are manipulating the justice’: Displaced Chagos Islanders’ bitter reality

  The people of the Chagos Islands, displaced from their homes by the British government several decades ago, have been fighting for their right to return to their homeland ever since.

• Mapping: Surveillance and its impact on American Muslims

• One Year Later: EFF Honors Jailed Syrian Blogger Bassel Khartabil

  I can not find words to describe my feelings about everything you did for me. What you did saved me and changed my situation to better. Thank you all and big love!

• Michigan Senate Unanimously Passes NDAA Nullification Bill

• NH House Overwhelmingly Votes to Block NDAA Indefinite Detention and Supports Hemp Freedom Act

• County commission deadlocks on voicing opposition to NDAA

  Lenawee County commissioners deadlocked 4-4 Wednesday on a motion to take sides on controversial citizen detention provisions of last year’s federal National Defense Authorization Act.

• Letter: NDAA is a wake-up call to America

  Today I am writing this to wake up America. Obama and his cronies have passed a law called the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This sounds like a good thing, but in reality it is a law against patriotic American citizens. The NDAA authorizes indefinite detention of American citizens without charge. This law has provisions that effectively abolish the U.S. Bill of Rights. It grants dictatorial power to the president to order the military arrest of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and detain them for an indefinite period.

• Rand Paul lashes out at Obama over NDAA at conservative conference

  Fresh off the heels of last week’s sure-to-be-historic filibuster, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) gave a rousing speech at Thursday’s Conservative Political Action Conference that once again ripped into US President Barack Obama.

  Speaking on day one of the annual CPAC conference near Washington, DC, the libertarian-leaning senator briefly rehashed his arguments from last week’s 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor by once again voicing his concern with Pres. Obama’s interpretation with the US Constitution.

• Anti-marijuana New York assemblyman busted for weed possession

  A Republican lawmaker in New York who has a record of voting against medical marijuana legalization has been arrested and charged with possession of marijuana.

  State police said that a suspicious odor was noticed in Assemblyman Steve Katz’s vehicle when they pulled him over for driving around 80 mph in a 75 mph zone at around 10 a.m. Thursday morning.

• New York Cops will Arrest you for Carrying Condoms

  She wore jean shorts and a tight red shirt and had stood outdoors for half an hour. She’d had a conversation with a passing man. When Officer Hill searched her bag, he found a condom and $1.25.
  He arrested her for “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” On the supporting deposition, he filled in the blanks for what she was wearing and how many condoms she had.

DRM

• HTML5 DRM comes to all Chrome OS devices

  Google updated the dev channel of Chrome OS to version 27.0.1438.8 for all Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of stability fixes and feature enhancements. But the most important update is the arrival of ‘kind of’ HTML5 DRM to all Chrome OS devices (earlier HMTL5 was DRMed only on ARM based devices).

Intellectual Monopolies

• US ambassador says renegotiation of free trade deal with Seoul possible

• Copyrights

  • Takeover Panel claims copyright on regulatory information

    The Takeover Panel (which regulated mergers and takeovers inn the UK) has sent me an email telling me that reproducing the list of takeover offers (i.e. a list of company names and dates) would be a breach of copyright, and that they would be unlikely to allow commercial reproduction except though “official news channels”.

  • Veoh Wins Important Case Against Universal Music Over DMCA Safe Harbors Again; But Is Still Dead Due To Legal Fees

    We’ve written a few times about the sad case of Veoh. Veoh was a YouTube-like site, funded by Hollywood insiders like Michael Eisner, but who got sued by Universal Music Group, claiming copyright infringement (using more or less the same theories used by Viacom against YouTube). Technically, Veoh sued first (filing for declaratory judgment after receiving a threat letter from UMG, but UMG quickly followed with its own lawsuit). UMG played dirty, not just suing the company but directly suing its investors as well. This was a pure intimidation technique, designed to scare major investors into either pulling investment or ordering the company to change course, even if what they were doing was legal. While the court dismissed the charges against the investors (and scolded UMG in the process), the intimidation might have worked. In the middle of all of this, Veoh shut down, because it ran out of money, mainly due to the lawsuit. It sold off its assets to another party, and somehow scraped together a little money to keep the lawsuit, and just the lawsuit, going.

  • Surprise: Register Of Copyrights Expected To Call For Reduction In Copyright Term

    For a long time now, the idea of an overhaul of copyright law in the US has mostly been seen as a pipedream. However, it appears that the Register of Copyright, Maria Pallante, may actually be angling for a major bit of copyright reform. Coming up next Wednesday, she’s going to be testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on her supposed “Call for Updates to U.S. Copyright Law.” Apparently, on March 4th, she gave a talk at Columbia University which has remained amazingly under the radar until now, in which she proposed a long list of possible copyright reforms, which are likely to headline the hearings next week. It’s fairly impressive, given how much attention copyright law has been getting lately, that she could present a surprising call for massive changes to the law, and not have a single person report on it immediately after the event ended. However, that is the case.