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02.06.13

Links 6/2/2013: Wine Becomes Handy, AMD Open Source Drivers

Posted in News Roundup at 9:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • A Conversation with the President of the Open Source Initiative (Video)
  • Open-source social-mobile games platform OpenKit goes into closed-beta test
  • Open Source Gaming Backend OpenKit Plans Private Beta Launch Tomorrow, Raises Another $100K
  • 500 devs sign up to OpenFeint co-founder Relan’s open source service platform OpenKit
  • Preferable Way to Develop Web Applications Is Open Source Development

    Open Source development is a Web Development methodology, which offers practical ownership and total accessibility to a product’s source code. It harnesses transparency of the process. The aphorism of open source development is yielding better quality and flexibility.

    It is most certainly relevant today as we tend to term attractive websites as more popular. In order to craft such an ‘attractive’ website for your business, open source is the best stage to begin with. It is a platform where the source code of the program is accessible to the community which means it is open to change. You can add, update or alter the original code; which you cannot think of doing with proprietary software!

  • Software innovation will blast monolithic hardware

    The forward “predictions for 2013″ pre-Christmas honeymoon is now thankfully over. Time enough then… for a serious look at software futures.

  • Open source

    It was a pleasure to read the excellent article drawing parallels between Mirza Ghalib’s legendary work and the mammoth achievements of the Free and Open Source Software community (Feb. 2). Computing is not just about driving a chip using a few lines of code. Unless a programmer understands the part he or she plays in the continuous and ever evolving drive for academic excellence, society cannot expect him or her to deliver a new and sophisticated tool to help humanity attain new heights. A FOSS programmer has a great sense of responsibility because of the overwhelming number of socially responsible computing geniuses involved in the community. Rahul De’ has rightly pointed out the peer review mechanism followed in the FOSS community, which results in programmers striving for logically correct and efficient programs.

  • Developer interview: DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS

    It is a terrifying thought that many people under 30 will never see a “C:\>” prompt, let alone an “A:\>”. But although as far as Microsoft is concerned DOS has been dead pretty much since Windows 95 went gold, it wasn’t quite the end of the road for the operating system.

  • What next for IcedTea?

    Six years after the launch of the IcedTea project, developer Andrew John Hughes feels that it’s time to take stock. Questions were previously raised over the role of the project, which aims to make it possible to use OpenJDK using only free software build tools for GNU/Linux platforms, when OpenJDK 7 was released.

  • 75 Top Open Source Tools for Protecting Your Privacy

    As mobile technology and social networking have become commonplace, so have concerns about privacy. In fact, nearly every day the media covers stories about identity theft, social networking “pranks” gone wrong, companies with shady privacy policies and repressive governments that censor and monitor online activities.

  • Open Source Meter Launches Products on Amazon

    Open Source Meter, Inc., announces that it now offers its industry standard transformer directly to the end customer through Amazon. By selling through Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), Open Source Meter can offer customers the lowest cost shipping and the fastest turnaround the industry has to offer, reducing product lead times from weeks to overnight. The transformers being offered are Magnelab brand Split-core transformer (SCT) series (http://amzn.to/XwrzP2). Open Source Meter offers a full suite of 38 different types of transformer options broken down into SCT-400, SCT-750, SCT-1250, SCT-2000 and SCT-3000 models.

  • Facebook deploys Opscode’s open-source-based IT management software
  • When open-source eats itself, we win

    In some markets, open source rules the roost. For example, Drupal, Joomla, my old company Alfresco and other open-source content management systems regularly duke it out for supremacy, depending on the workload. In application servers, JBoss and Tomcat spar. In cloud, Cloudstack, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and others battle.

    But web servers? That’s a market that Apache won ages ago, with no open-source competition to speak of.

    That is, until recently.

  • 23 of Netcraft’s Top 40 Hosting Sites Run GNU/Linux
  • Survey Reveals Some Open Source Surprises

    LinuxQuestions is out with results from its annual Members Choice Awards survey, which highlights favorite open source platforms and applications, ranging from favorite Linux distros to favorite new innovative hardware ideas in the open source realm. Probably, if asked to guess which Linux distro was rated the favorite, many readers would guess Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but that’s not the favorite. Here is what the survey respondents had to say.

  • Open source tackles city permit process with OpenCounter

    The City of Santa Cruz is the smallest community to ever partner with Code for America, but it had one of the largest problems to solve: how to make it easier to take an idea for a small business from conception to reality. From a concept to a permit.

    They created an online permitting portal OpenCounter. The portal launched on Wednesday January 9, after an intense year of development, testing, and refinement. So how did they do it?

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Google and Mozilla show off video chat between Chrome and Firefox thanks to WebRTC support
    • Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling!

      Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google.
      RTCPeerConnection (also known simply as PeerConnection or PC) interoperability means that developers can now create Firefox WebRTC applications that make direct audio/video calls to Chrome WebRTC applications without having to install a third-party plugin. Because the functionality is now baked into the browser, users can avoid problems with first-time installs and buggy plugins, and developers can deploy their apps much more easily and universally.

    • Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling!

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open Source OpenStack Folsom Cloud Updated for 51 Bugs

      A simple truth that many open source platform users know well is that often initial releases still have (a few) bugs. Real world usage tends to shake things out better than any beta or dev process ever could.

      With the open source OpenStack cloud platform, the most recent Folsom release debuted in September of 2012. It is now being updated to version 2012.2.3, fixing at least 51 known bugs and at least two serious security issues.

    • OpenStack, Lock-In, Support Costs, and Open Source Free Lunches
    • Top 5 Open Source Projects in Big Data – Breaking Analysis

      Big Data is a booming area that is receiving more widespread attention, especially since technology research company Gartner has projected that Big Data will drive $34 billion in IT spending in 2013. Abhishek Mehta, founder of Tresata, joined Kristin Feledy on the Morning NewsDesk Show to give his perspective on what’s happening in Big Data.

  • Databases

    • Oracle Releases Open Source MySQL 5.6 with NoSQL Features

      Over the course of the last two years, Oracle has been hard at work building and improving MySQL 5.6. Today at long last, that hard work has come to fruition with the general availability of the open source MySQL 5.6 database.

      The first MySQL 5.6 preview debuted in July of 2011, while the last official main MySQL release was version 5.5 which was released at the end of 2010.

    • MySQL 5.6 Reaches General Availability

  • Education

  • Business

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash for Android v1.1.1 is now available

      GnuCash for Android updated to version 1.1.1 today. This latest release fixes numerous bugs and adds support for double-entry accounting. Double-entry accounting allows every transaction to be a transfer from one account to another. For example, every addition to your “Expenses” account can make your “Checking” account go down by the same amount.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Industry Q&A: Open Source in Government

      With leadership from the White House, and success stories throughout the government spectrum, clearly open source solutions are gaining ground against proprietary software solutions in the public domain. Government Technology talked to Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat Public Sector, to get his perspective on the open source phenomenon. Hellekson covers the federal, state, local and education markets in the U.S. for Red Hat.

    • Levelling the playing field: open source in the public sector
    • Government to switch to open source

      The government decision to purchase Microsoft software licenses and products to upgrade government agencies at a cost exceeding $43m has triggered anger among activists and specialists, who called the decision a waste of money and asked the government to use free open source software (FOSS), instead, last December.

      Mohamed Hanafy, the spokesman of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, stated that the Microsoft deal will be the last and that the shift towards Open Source will be gradual. “We cannot shift to Open Source overnight”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source green technology farm helps the developing world

      The ECHO Farm in Southwest Florida serves a special purpose. The non-profit helps aid workers in developing countries use the best sustainable farming tools and techniques in ways that would make MacGyver proud.

    • MIT Builds An Open-Source Platform For Your Body

      MIT Media Lab’s 11-day health care hackathon pulled students and big companies together with a common goal: Healing a broken industry.

    • MIT sets sights on open-source mHealth during innovation event

      The MIT Media Lab’s eleven-day Health and Wellness Hackathon is not your average gadget exhibition. Bringing together eighty participants from around the world, the annual event, which was held in January, is designed to inspire new ways to fix an age old problem: how to use technology to prevent illnesses before they start. Focusing on the use of standardized, interoperable, open-source platforms, the six teams spent nearly two weeks thinking up apps and home medical devices that would tear down proprietary software barriers and help patients take charge of their healthcare.

    • Open-source Death Star revived on Kickstarter after White House snub
    • Open-source electrical engineering design tools

      Have you tried these, or other, EE tools? What EE tools do you prefer? Please comment below.

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • Retreating rebels burn Timbuktu’s science manuscripts

        IT IS what conservators, archivists and researchers have feared. As French and Malian troops advanced on Timbuktu in northern Mali earlier this week, retreating Islamist fighters have tried to destroy valuable scientific texts dating back to medieval times.

        The documents were housed at the city’s Ahmed Baba Institute and in a warehouse, both of which were set alight. It is unclear how many of the institute’s 30,000 or so manuscripts have been destroyed. The texts, which were being digitised, show that science was under way in Africa before European settlers arrived in the 16th century.

        George Abungu, vice-president of the executive committee of the International Council of Museums, describes the burning as “an incredible loss to Africa’s heritage, a backward move to the dark ages”. He says there is no way the Islamists “can claim to be Africans when they destroy the very foundation of our contribution to world knowledge and academia”.

      • Rebooting Computer Crime Law Part 2: Protect Tinkerers, Security Researchers, Innovators, and Privacy Seekers
      • A tribute to Aaron Swartz

        I would like to thank Senator Cash for taking up the issue of female genital mutilation with such passion. I rise to make some remarks about some of the perverse consequences that can come into play when governments-and most notably our Australian government-react or overreact to cyber threats. It makes me edgy whenever this government adds the word ‘cyber’ to anything. You tend to have to watch your back when that is occurring. I do not want to downplay the very real threats of identity theft and misappropriation, phishing attempts on people’s accounts and these sorts of things, cyber bullying and the other array of threats that people do face in the online environment. But I am also aware that we run the risk-and the Australian government is running this risk at the moment-of running these campaigns of hyperventilation and pumping up threat and fear as though this is where we are meant to transfer our fear of terrorists, that the internet is the new domain of terror and the best way to protect ourselves is to submit to perpetual ongoing, online surveillance by government policing and other agencies.

      • We Need to Think Beyond the Aaron in ‘Aaron’s Law’

        The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)’s disproportionate penalties and lack of nuance played a role in Aaron Swartz’ prosecution and likely in his subsequent suicide. So three weeks ago, California Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced “Aaron’s Law” to update the CFAA.

        Lofgren modified Aaron’s Law based on community feedback and released the updated version this past Friday. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also proposed much-needed changes to CFAA’s penalty provisions. The law has yet to go before Congress, but these efforts matter.

      • Anonymous Claims Wall Street Data Dump

        Hacktivist group publishes 4,000 passwords as part of Operation Last Resort campaign seeking revenge for the treatment of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

      • Aaron Swartz Memorial On Capitol Hill Draws Darrell Issa, Elizabeth Warren
      • Drafting Problems With the Second Version of “Aaron’s Law” from Rep. Lofgren

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Python gets a big data boost from DARPA

      DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has awarded $3 million to software provider Continuum Analytics to help fund the development of Python’s data processing and visualization capabilities for big data jobs.

    • Perl Foundation looking to extend Improving Perl 5 grant

      Since September 2011, Nicholas Clark has been working on improving the Perl 5 Core, funded by a $20,000 grant from the Perl Foundation. The term of the work is coming to an end and Clark is now seeking another $20,000 to continue the work of the original Improving Perl 5 grant. The Foundation is consulting with the community before making the final decision whether to go ahead with the extension which would see Clark devoting another 400 hours of dedicated work to the project.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The Groovy Conundrum

      Groovy is one of the most-interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There’s the conundrum.

Leftovers

  • What about the elderly?

    Those are some of the issues that I could think of. The list is far from being all-inclusive or comprehensive, but I think it sheds light on some of the aspects of what Linux is all about. Now, I do not say we should all make operating systems as if everyone was elderly and/or very set in their ways. After all, thirty years from now, young people of today will be the senior citizens of the future, with their own set of ideas and technologies.

    But the development should be focused on making operating systems appeal to the widest cross-section of users. This also means designing products that scale well with time. If your desktop is peppered with online integration and social icons, the moment those networks go out of spotlight, your very model loses its own validity.

  • Read a Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit

    Ordinarily I don’t discuss legal issues relating to fictional settings that are dramatically different from the real world in terms of their legal system. Thus, Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, etc. are usually off-limits because we can’t meaningfully apply real-world law to them. But the contract featured in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was just too good a topic to pass up, especially since you can buy a high-quality replica of it that is over 5 feet long unfolded.

  • Court Rules Icelandic “Girl” Can Use Her Own Name

    The Reykjavik District Court has ruled that a 15-year-old Icelandic girl can legally use the first name “Blaer,” reversing a contrary decision by government officials. Iceland has strict naming laws that require, among other things, that names fit standard grammar and pronunciation rules and be gender-appropriate. According to the report, the relevant committee refused to approve Blaer Bjarkardottir’s first name because she is a girl and the panel viewed the name as “too masculine.”
    To date, the government has referred to the girl only as “Girl.”

    [...]

    Whatever we may think of the country’s naming laws, Iceland gets some respect from me because their word for “email address” is the totally awesome netfang, which the rest of the world should start using immediately.

  • Getting rid of telemarketers with a Banana Phone

  • Science

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • Noam Chomsky: Who Owns the World?

      World War II is when the United States really became a global power. It had been the biggest economy in the world by far for long before the war, but it was a regional power in a way. It controlled the Western Hemisphere and had made some forays into the Pacific. But the British were the world power.

      World War II changed that. The United States became the dominant world power. The U.S. had half the world’s wealth. The other industrial societies were weakened or destroyed. The U.S. was in an incredible position of security. It controlled the hemisphere, and both the Atlantic and the Pacific, with a huge military force.

    • Obama’s bankster bromance

      The White House is holding a meeting today with a number of business leaders to discuss the President’s economic agenda, including immigration. This is encouraging, as it will be important to get leaders on board with reforming immigration rules.

      What’s less encouraging is that the President continues to treat Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein like he’s royalty.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Google’s Eric Schmidt on ‘Hidden People’ and ‘Virtual Genocide’

      ‘No hidden people allowed’: “If you don’t have any registered social-networking profiles or mobile subscriptions, and online references to you are unusually hard to find, you might be considered a candidate for such a registry.”

    • EXCLUSIVE – Petraeus: The Plot Thickens

      Petraeus was suspected of having an extramarital affair nearly two years earlier than previously known.

      [...]

      According to internal emails of the Austin-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, General David Petraeus was drawing attention to his private life much earlier than previously believed. Because it was his private life that resulted in his being forced out as CIA director, alterations in our understanding of the time frame are significant.

    • Court: Gov’t Can Secretly Obtain Email, Twitter Info from Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer Jacob Appelbaum

      A federal appeals court has ruled the government can continue to keep secret its efforts to pursue the private information of Internet users without a warrant as part of its probe into the WikiLeaks. The case involved three people connected to the whistleblowing website whose Twitter records were sought by the government, including computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

    • Part 2: Daniel Ellsberg and Jacob Appelbaum on the NDAA, WikiLeaks and Unconstitutional Surveillance
    • Tor projects win two Access Innovation Awards

      In December I attended the award ceremony for the 2012 Access Innovation Awards. Their finalists included three projects that Tor maintains or co-maintains: OONI (a framework for writing open network censorship measurement tests, and for making the results available in an open way; see its git repo), Flash Proxy (a creative way to let people run Tor bridges in their browser just by visiting a website; see its git repo), and HTTPS Everywhere (a Firefox extension to force https connections for websites that support https but don’t use it by default; see its git repo). Of these, OONI and Flash Proxy ended up being winners in their respective categories.

    • The End of Privacy and Freedom of Thought?

      Telstra is implementing deep packet inspection technology to throttle peer to peer sharing over the internet.

  • Civil Rights

    • Berners-Lee’s web warning

      Another key weakness in Australia’s response to the digital economy is our habit of guarding data…

    • FBI told to leave Iceland – Took a boy with them

      Mr. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks spokesperson, said last week that representatives from the FBI came to Iceland in August 2011. The Icelandic Minister of the Interior confirmed this the same day and said that when he became aware of the FBI in Iceland he cancelled all cooperation with the FBI and told the representatives to leave.

    • orized FBI Questioning of Icelandi

      In late summer 2011, FBI agents questioned an 18-year-old Icelandic boy on matters which, according to them, concerned national security. The boy was connected to WikiLeaks. The questioning took place against the wishes of Icelandic authorities.

      On the evening of August 23, 2011, the boy, whose identity Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV decided not to reveal, came forward to the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavík with information he said concerned possible hacking into the Icelandic government offices’ computer system.

      [...]

      Kristinn Hrafnsson told RÚV that the boy had worked on some projects for WikiLeaks as a volunteer for several months.

    • Controversy over FBI Visit to Iceland Continues

      Minister for Foreign Affairs Össur Skarphéðinsson also maintains that the FBI arrived in the country without permission and without the knowledge of the Icelandic government, visir.is reports. Össur rejects the explanation of the Icelandic police that there was a connection between the visit of the FBI agents and a separate visit of FBI experts a month earlier to investigate an impending computer attack.

    • Call to Action! Appeals Court Date – Feb. 6, 2013
    • No-fly lists: A new tactic of exile?

      The counterterror list of individuals unable to fly to or from the U.S. is growing, but due process sorely lacks

    • Rllsberg: NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision Is Part of “Systematic Assault on Constitution”

      A lawsuit challenging a law that gives the government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens is back in federal court this week. On Wednesday, a group of academics, journalists and activists will present oral arguments in court against a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial. In a landmark ruling last September, Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York struck down the indefinite detention provision, saying it likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens. We’re joined by Daniel Ellsberg, a plaintiff in the case and perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

    • Court Hears Arguments On US Government’s Ability To Indefinitely Detain Citizens
    • NDAA: One Of the Most Dangerous Laws in Over a Century
    • Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”
    • Bahrain – The Forgotten Revolution

      In late 2010 we witnessed the beginning of a series of events that would radically alter the political and social landscapes of the Middle East and Northern Africa. These events, which later became known as the “Arab Spring”, began with an unprecedented wave of pro-democracy protests against the various authoritarian regimes of the region. Beginning with demonstrations in Tunisia against the 23 year rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali that soon led to the dictator fleeing the country, the spirit of revolution quickly spread to the country’s neighbors as well. In Egypt large protests broke out in the now-famous Tahrir Square against the Mubarak regime, resulting in his eventual overthrow. Libya was next, which saw an armed rebellion against Muammer Gadaffi ending with the dictator’s death in October 2011. Yemen too witnessed protests and violence causing longtime president Abdullah Saleh’s eventual resignation. These monumental power shifts captured the world’s attention and indeed still continue to dominate headlines with the descent of Syria into civil war following the Assad regime’s brutal repression of similar protests and the controversial new Islamist-led government of Egypt.

    • Former FBI official questioned on role in abuse of intelligence-gathering tools

      A senior Republican lawmaker is looking into allegations that a former general counsel of the FBI bore greater responsibility for abuses of surveillance authorities than previously known.

    • HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATIONS FILED FORMAL COMPLAINTS WITH THE OECD AGAINST SURVEILLANCE COMPANIES

      Human rights organisations file formal complaints against surveillance software firms Gamma International and Trovicor with British and German governments.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks

      The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

    • No, free Wi-Fi isn’t coming to every US city
    • No one should control Web: Berners-Lee

      The creator of the World Wide Web warned not to hand over power of his invention to the government.

      Speaking last night at a lecture hosted by Sydney’s University of Technology, Tim Berners-Lee said the Internet should remain independent in the same way as journalism.

      “If you’re going to give the government the ability to spy on people and the ability to block” websites they don’t like, “you’ve got to have a lot of trust in that government,” Berners-Lee said.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • EFF Joins 24 US Civil Society Groups in Demanding a Baseline of Transparency in TPP Negotiations

      With every coming round of negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade agreement that carries intellectual property provisions that could have hugely harmful consequences for the Internet and our digital rights—the Office of the US Trade Representative has continually whittled away at any remaining opportunity for the public to have input into the drafting process. The TPP has been under negotiation for three years and the opaqueness has only worsened.

    • Copyrights

      • Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals

        A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher’s career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, and then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

      • Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals
      • What is the government’s interest in copyright? Not that of the public.

        Like many other geeklaw & policy folks, I was baffled from the get-go by the decisions of federal prosecutors to pursue massive criminal charges against Aaron Swartz for downloading papers from JSTOR. I could understand that his activities constituted problematic behavior, but not the blustering punitive response.

        If Aaron’s wrongful act was unauthorizedly copying articles, copyright law would seem to have been the appropriate venue for a response. JSTOR declined to bring a civil suit against Swartz. State officials had no intention of bringing criminal charges against him, either. But then the federal prosecutors stepped in, and charges blossomed all over the place. But -not copyright charges-.

      • New UK Copyright Research Center Immediately Under Attack For Daring To Ask About Evidence

        As Techdirt reported last year, some copyright maximalists in the UK seem to be against the whole idea of basing policy on evidence. Last week saw the launch of CREATe: Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, a new UK “research centre for copyright and new business models in the creative economy.” One of the things it hopes to do is to bring some objectivity to the notoriously contentious field of copyright studies by looking at what the evidence really says; so it was perhaps inevitable that it too would meet some resistance from the extremist wing of the copyright world

      • High Court in key ruling on Usenet piracy profits

        The movie industry has no rights to the profits made by the owner of Usenet-indexing website Newzbin2 by infringing on copyrights, the England and Wales High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, has ruled.

      • European Court Of Human Rights: No, Copyright Does Not Automatically Trump Freedom Of Expression

        As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control. But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright, posing very real threats to what can be said online. That’s not because their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright industry’s private police force.

      • It’s Time for a Fresh Look at Copyright Laws

02.05.13

Links 5/1/2013: Hewlett-Packard GNU/Linux Laptop, Linux Mint Codename

Posted in News Roundup at 8:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Chris Knadle, Engineer/System Administrator
  • Open Ballot: Moment of the Millenium

    With Linux continuing its steady rise to world domination, we thought we’d ask you what you think has been the greatest moment for Linux since the start of the millennium.

  • Leaving the Land of the Giants

    The cover of the December 1st–7th 2012 issue of The Economist shows four giant squid battling each other (http://www.economist.com/printedition/2012-12-01). The headline reads, “Survival of the biggest: The internet’s warring giants”. The squid are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Inside, the story is filed under “Briefing: Technology giants at war”. The headline below the title graphic reads, “Another game of thrones” (http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game). The opening slug line reads “Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other’s throats in all sorts of ways.” (Raising the metaphor count to three.)

  • Linux Top 3: Secure Boot Bricks, Kernel Advances and MariaDB
  • Top Linux and open-source programs survey results

    LinuxQuestions’ annual members choice survey is in and the top Linux distributions and open-source programs are sometimes quite surprising

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Udev fork is a training project say eudev developers

      At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a “hate based fork”. The developers also noted that their “pet project” was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.

    • RAID 5/6 code merged into Btrfs

    • Graphics Stack

      • Ubuntu and Multiple Monitors – AMD Edition

        There are several ways to end up with a satisfactory experience on the desktop with Ubuntu despite their recent confusion of the user interface. We will discuss some of those another day (KDE vs. Gnome vs. Cinammon vs. Unity). Today we are going to talk about setting up your desktop environment for multiple monitors. This article assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or 12.10, however, the process should work equally well back to version 10.04 LTS unless otherwise noted.

        Assuming you have installed Ubuntu and are successfully sitting at the desktop (the window manager at this point is irrelevant), a couple of questions will now come to mind. What am I going to be using my linux desktop environment for? If you are going to be running office applications, email, basic web browsing and the occassional movie, you might be done. The default (read: Open Source) binary video drivers for both AMD (radeon) and Nvidia (nouveaux) are perfectly acceptable for all of those things. In fact, recently, they both have picked up some compositing support (so you can run the nifty 3D window effects in Compiz or KWin) as well as support for gaming. However, that support is spotty and performance still leaves a lot to be desired.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • What’s new with Nepomuk 4.10

        I’ve blogged about some of the more prominent changes in this new Nepomuk release. I thought it would be a good idea to document all the changes, most of which I haven’t publicly blogged about.

      • Little bits of news about Gwenview
      • building KDE software from git.kde.org the easy way
      • new plasma-framework repo

        On November 3, 2008 libplasma moved from kde-workspace to kdelibs sporting a spiffy API that used the new QGraphicsProxyWidget heavily.

        In Randa this past summer we agreed on the last few big decisions for libplasma2. We would remove QGraphicsView and move entirely to QML. In the process, libplasma would have no drawing system dependent code in it. It would be data and business logic only.

      • Alternatives to Knotes

        I am still migrating away from my old KDE tools. Most of them will run under LXDE, or any other desktop, but I’m finding that since KDE 4 came out, the accessories are all fatter, slower, and worst of all, buggy. I reported last month on replacing Korganizer. Next up: Knotes.

      • Krita 2.6 Released, Offers Better Photoshop Compatibility

        Krita 2.6 adds many performance improvements, but also new support for OpenColorIO, a color management system used by movie studios and applications like Blender, which means that Krita now fits into a movie/vfx studio workflow.

      • KDE’s Aaron Seigo Starts Weekly Hangout On Google+

        Great news for KDE users. Aason Seigo, the KDE project lead, is starting a weekly Google+ Hangout. Seigo ‘tested’ the first hangout and it went well, except for some initial glitches caused by Pulse Audio.

      • Video Guide On Building KDE

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Power management in GNOME 3.8
      • GNOME Switching to JavaScript?

        Floating out in newsfeeds today was an interesting tidbit by John Palmieri who said, “So GNOME finally chose an official language and it is JavaScript.” Now I’m not a developer, but everytime I encounter JavaScript it’s causing problems. Is this a good idea for GNOME?

      • JavaScript becoming default language for GNOME apps

        At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in.

      • GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

        The GNOME project, developers of the GNOME desktop for Linux, has decided JavaScript will be the only “first class” language it will recommend for developers cooking up new apps for the platform.

      • Dissent on Gnome’s Javascript decision
      • Why I said goodbye to the Gnome Desktop

        It’s finally time for me to leave the Gnome Desktop, thanks to Gnome 3. Fortunately for me, the MATE desktop is a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop, and as of Fedora 18, is integrated into the Fedora repository; it’s also fairly easy to install.

  • Distributions

    • 2012 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

      Desktop Distribution of the Year – Slackware (20.59%)

    • A look at UberStudent 2.0

      UberStudent is a Linux distribution which declares itself as being “Linux for learners”. The project is based on Ubuntu with UberStudent 2.0 using the latest Ubuntu long-term support release as a base. Looking over the project’s documentation we find UberStudent is designed with an eye toward education. The project is targeting people wishing to teach or learn academic computing. The project’s website refers to the distribution as a learning platform, designed to help people become fluent in computer technology. There are several editions of the latest UberStudent release. The main edition comes with the Xfce desktop environment and other editions feature the LXDE and MATE desktops. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. I opted to try the Xfce edition which can be downloaded as a 3.5 GB DVD images.

    • Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” Review: Lightweight, fast and elegant Openbox distro for low spec computers!

      From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 “Ultra” Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

      • Linux Lite 1.0.4 screen shots

        Linux Lite is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. It is uses the Xfce desktop environment, a desktop environment known to be suitable for low-end computers. The latest update, Linux Lite 1.0.4, was released just today.

        It ships with Steam client for Linux, the popular game distribution platform, installed. Because of the memory requirements of Steam, don’t expect to run this edition of Linux Lite on a resource-starved computer, if you intend to play that game.

      • Arch 2013.02.01 Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS quarterly rollup release: Hands on

        PCLinuxOS is an “old standard” Linux distribution. Although it doesn’t seem to have been getting as much attention recently it still seems to have a significant number of very loyal followers.

        The strength of PCLinuxOS today is in stability, and a very active and dedicated user community.

        It includes an excellent array of applications and utilities in the base distribution, so for many purposes it is ready to use right out of the box. If you try it and have problems of any kind, you can generally get very capable help from the PCLinuxOS User Forums very quickly.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Joins HP Enterprise Services Technology Alliance
      • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Trying Desperately to Excite the Market

        Red Hat provides open-source software. It is particularly famous for its Linux operating system. In the third quarter, Red Hat’s revenues increased by 18% y-o-y to hit the $344 million mark, which was in-line with expectations. Subscription revenues experienced a 19% increase that enabled them to hit the $294 million mark. Billing also grew by 18%. More importantly, in the third quarter, the company announced the acquisition of ManageIQ. ManageIQ specializes in cloud management and automation. The acquisition is expected to be a long term gain for Red Hat. It is also an attempt to take on VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) , a company that has managed to make inroads into enterprise through its vCloud platform but failed to enter the public cloud.

      • Red Hat to employees: yes, please bring new apps to work

        Bring us your cool, useful, and productivity-heightening apps and devices and we’ll look at them and work to support your efforts.

        That’s the unique view that Linux vendor Red Hat takes when it comes to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon that’s prevalent in the world of enterprise IT.

      • Cloud9 IDE Builds Online Development Environment with Red Hat OpenShift

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Cloud9 IDE has built its online development environment with Red Hat’s OpenShift Online hosted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. By integrating OpenShift Online into its original online development environment, Cloud9 IDE is able to deliver more flexibility, security and ease of use to developers.

      • HP and Red Hat Partner On Premises and In the Cloud

      • Fedora

        • I’m FedUp with Fedora!

          So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried it, so I wanted to give FedUp a try.

        • Fedora 18 review

          The latest edition of Fedora Linux was released on January 15th, after 2 months of delay. This community project is sponsored by Red Hat Linux and is one of the primary showcases for the GNOME desktop and its applications. Among the features making their debut is a much improved Samba setup (which is supposed to let you connect easily with Windows’ Active Directory). Also, the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments which got their start in Linux Mint are available, although not installed by default.

          This is my review of the KDE edition of Fedora 18, 64-bit version. After 3 reviews of their main release, I decided it was time to check out the KDE Spin edition. Fedora has several different “Spins”, produced to showcase desktops or emphasize scientific, design, gaming, or other focused interests.

        • Fedora 18 Officially Released for IBM System z 64-bit

          Dan Horák announced that the Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems is now available for download.

        • Fedora 18 for ARM released

          The Fedora 18 for ARM release includes pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3) hardware platforms. Fedora 18 for ARM also includes an installation tree in the yum repository which may be used to PXE-boot a kickstart-based installation on systems that support this option, such as the Calxeda EnergyCore (HighBank).

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • FOSS+CSS: Closed Source DOS Accounting Meets Linux and DOSEMU
  • Guest Post: Patrick McGarry on Open Source Disruption

    The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February – 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here.

    In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome and Firefox demonstrate plug-in-free video chat

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla improves Firefox’s Do Not Track feature

        If you are on the Internet, chance is that you are being tracked. Advertising companies, Internet services and even Internet Service Provider track users for a variety of purposes, but most often to profile users to increase advertising revenue or sell the data to companies that do.

        While cookies are most often used for that purpose, and I’m using the term lightly so that it includes all different kinds of cookies, it is not the only option that companies have. Fingerprinting may be an option as well which tries to identify users based on factors such as their IP address, operating system, web browser and other data that is submitted automatically when connections are established.

  • Databases

    • Monty has last laugh as distros abandon MySQL

      When the community GNU/Linux distributions Fedora and openSUSE recently announced that they would be switching their default database management system from MySQL to MariaDB, one man in Finland would have had a very hearty laugh.

    • Oracle Releases MySQL 5.6 To Improve NoSQL, Performance

      While there’s many in the open-source community that remain unhappy with Oracle, including the direction of the MySQL database server to the point that Fedora will now ship MariaDB instead, MySQL 5.6 was released this morning by the software giant.

      Oracle says their general availability release of MySQL 5.6 has increased performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability over earlier releases of this open-source MySQL database software.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Microsoft Office and the Big Subscription Bet

      “LibreOffice does everything I need, and in fact I keep learning about new things I can do in LibreOffice,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I even carry it with me on USB Thumb drive in the Portable Apps version. So please explain to me why I should care about overpriced bloatware? And don’t get me started on the $%^**#%$ Ribbon.”

    • LibreOffice 4.0 Release to Widen Divide with OpenOffice

      It was in September of 2010 that a group of key members of the OpenOffice.org developer team announced that they were no longer willing to wait out the uncertain future of OpenOffice, especially in the face of the lack of interest shown by Oracle, the new owner of the project following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems nine months before.

  • Healthcare

    • Node.js integrates with M: Next big thing in healthcare IT

      Join the M revolution and the next big thing in healthcare IT: the integration of the node.js programming language with the NoSQL hierarchical database, M.

      M was developed to organize and access with high efficiency the type of data that is typically managed in healthcare, thus making it uniquely well-suited for the job.

      One of the biggest reasons for the success of M is that it integrates the database into the language in a natural and seamless way. The growth and involvement of th community of M developers however, has been below the radar for educators and the larger IT community. As a consequece it has been facing challenges for recruiting young new developers, despite the critical importance of this technology for supporting the Health IT infrastructure of the US.

  • Business

    • The impact of open source on business and social good

      I vividly remember the time when my early opinions about open source software were built around questions that made natural (and perfect) sense to me at that point in my life, like: “Why would someone sell a software product for free?” and “Why should anyone participate in a project that does not reap financial rewards?” These formed the basis of my rationale.

      That was before I embarked on my professional journey and as a consequence had not experienced organizational life. My myopic view towards the open source methodology of developing projects, and the profound impact this methodology has on the business world in general and the organizational structure in particular, began to broaden after my first intense exposure to the Linux operating system at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. My understanding about the magnificence of this operating system and the process by which it is constantly iterated caused a 180-degree transformation. This consequently cultivated appreciation for the entire process of peer production and the impact it has on today’s businesses, both big and small.

    • The Right Way To Do IT

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Luminosity of Free Software

      About 5 minutes before starting the Hangout last week, I impulsively named it “The Luminosity of Free Software” as that was resonating with the thoughts in my head at the time .. and I think I’ll stick with that name for the time being. You may notice that there is no “KDE” in the title (or my name, either :) and that’s intentional. I want to be able to discuss larger issues in Free software, and this gives me more freedom to do so. The show will be a reflection of my interests and those who watch and participate, so there will be a good amount of discussion that relates to or is relevant for KDE, it just won’t be exclusively about it.

    • Time for GNUPedia again?

      At one time, Wikipedia was a universal source for the useful programming tools and resources. If some language, framework or tool was used in general, it has been covered there. However recently Wikipedia seems raising the requirements to the level that would exclude many useful Free software projects. For instance, recently JAMWiki has been removed – reasonably popular, thousands of downloads (and that is for server side app), mentioned in near every review on Java-based wiki engines over multiple sources on the web – where it has been a problem?

    • FSF licensing team’s 2012 – 400 compliance reports resolved

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Why Aaron Died

        I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

        I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.

        I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.

        [...]

        I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.

        I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.

        And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.

      • Where Does Mayor Bloomberg Stand on Academic Freedom?

        This morning, Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, issued an extraordinarily powerful statement in defense of academic freedom and the right of the political science department to co-sponsor the BDS event.

        [...]

        So that’s good. But the fight is not over. The New York City Council, as you know, has laid down a gauntlet: if this event goes forward, with my department’s co-sponsorship, the Council will withdraw funds from CUNY and Brooklyn College. As Glenn Greenwald points out this morning, this is about as raw an exercise of coercive political power —and simple a violation of academic freedom—as it gets; it is almost exactly comparable to what Rudy Guiliani did when he was mayor and pulled the funding from the Brooklyn Museum merely because some people did not like what it was exhibiting.

        So now the battle lines are clear: it’s the City Council (and perhaps the State Legislature and Congress too) against academic freedom, freedom of speech, and CUNY.

        Throughout this controversy, there has been one voice that has been conspicuously silent: Mayor Bloomberg. To everyone who is a journalist out there, I ask you to call the Mayor’s office and ask the question: Will he stand with the City Council (and follow the model of his predecessor), threatening the withholding of funds merely because government officials do not like words that are being spoken at Brooklyn College? Or will he stand up to the forces of orthodoxy and insist: an educational institution, particularly one as precious to this city as CUNY, needs to remain a haven for the full exploration of views and opinions, even about—especially about—topics as fraught as the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

      • A time for action: One student’s commitment to free and open access

        I have been a PhD student for less than two years.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Social Media and the Professional: Twitter

    In this series I’m looking at my experiences using social media as a business professional. In this entry I examine the rules and policies I personally use regarding Twitter.

    In the introduction to this series of blog entries, I asked several questions regarding my use of particular social media services, and how I manage the intersection of my personal and professional lives in them. Here I’m going to look specifically at Twitter. This is the way I use the service and may or may not be how you do or should use it yourself.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Congress Is About to Introduce Legislation to Decriminalize Marijuana

      Whispers has learned that a member of Congress is about to introduce legislation today to decriminalize marijuana.

      The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2013 will be introduced by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, from Colo., whose office did not immediately respond to request for comment.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Siren Song of the Robot

      The quest for cheap energy and cheap labor is a conquering human urge, one that has played out with notable ferocity starting with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of coal into British manufacturing and the more recent outsourcing of Western manufacturing to Asia have marked key thresholds in this ongoing progression.

  • Finance

    • Visa Sued by Australian Regulator Over Currency Policy

      Visa Inc., (V) the world’s biggest payments network, contravened Australia’s consumer protection laws by preventing buyers from using a currency of their choice when shopping, the country’s competition regulator said.
      The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in an e-mailed statement that it sued Visa in federal court, claiming the company prevented the expansion of so-called dynamic currency conversion services. A copy of the claim wasn’t immediately available from the court.

    • Group Launched to Support WikiLeaks, Transparency Journalism Reports Incredible Success

      A foundation dedicated to promoting and funding transparency journalism, which launched on December 16, has concluded its first round of funding for organizations. It has enjoyed incredible success and found there are a lot of people who want to support this kind of an organization.

      The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) raised nearly $200,000 for four different organizations, including WikiLeaks, which it collected donations to support because the media organization faces a banking blockade that makes it difficult for it to directly accept funds from supporters.

    • Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

      AT 9:30 A.M. ON AUGUST 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market’s servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don’t see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week’s average.

    • Private Prisons Will Get Totally Slammed By Immigration Reform
    • Max Keiser’s unpleasant facts on UK economy (25Jan13)

      Max Keiser deliveres some unpleasant truthes on the state of the UK economy.

    • FBI Monitors Occupy, Denies Violating First Amendment

      Though it should surprise no one, the FBI has been thoroughly tracking the ideas, movements, and members of Occupy Wall Street since August of 2011, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, PCJF’s executive director said in a release.

    • Goldman Sachs: Doing “God’s Work” by inflicting the Wages of Sin Globally

      The central point that I want to stress as a white-collar criminologist and effective financial regulator is that Goldman Sachs is not a singular “rotten apple” in a healthy bushel of banks. Goldman Sachs is the norm for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the so-called “too big to fail” banks). Impunity from the laws, crony capitalism that degrades democracy, and massive national subsidies produce exceptionally criminogenic environments. Those environments are so perverse that they produce epidemics of “control fraud.” Control fraud occurs when the persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud. In finance, accounting is the “weapon of choice.” It is important to remember, however, that other forms of control fraud maim and kill thousands.

    • Carney set for first taste of Bank of England
    • Fixing ‘too-big-to-fail’

      The United States is plagued by large corporations with outsized political power. They are “too big to fail.” So if they are about to fail, they get rescued. Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.

      We need to replace them with smaller companies, but U.S. antitrust law is inadequate. It exists, but has been weakened over the past decades. Consider the proposed “Volcker Rule,” which would make many banks split into two companies, one for risky investments and one for loans based on savings, as the old Glass-Steagall law required. This would address some problems, but would not make banks small enough. Eliminating “too big to fail” banks means making sure that each is small enough that regulators, prosecutors and elected officials won’t hesitate to let it suffer the consequences of its own decisions.

    • Does anybody NOT see the common sense Richard Stallman speaks here?

      It isn’t often that I feel the need to amplify Stallman’s words; he’s usually a little extreme-left for my tastes. But this is one of those times when he reminds me why I still count him as a visionary – perhaps even still ahead of his time.

      In this Reuters interview, he addresses the problem of corporations that are “too big to fail” and proposes that monopoly laws be strengthened, a return to Glass-Steagall-type regulation, and a progressive tax on corporations, where the bigger the company, the more of a percentage they pay.

      Wonderful, wonderful sense, it would fix just about every economic problem we have in this country. And you can hang your hopes on seeing unicorns fly before it actually happens.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • FCC Poised to Open the Door for Unbridled Expansion of Media Empires

      If the world can learn anything from Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, it’s a lesson about the brute force of a media empire.

      Rupert Murdoch’s conglomerate was so powerful, it was allegedly able to invade people’s privacy and pay police officials to grease its dodgy news gathering machine; all while playing kingmaker in British Parliamentary elections and gaining access to the highest reaches of state power.

    • CBS To CNET: ‘Free Beer, Not Free Speech’

      Meanwhile, CNET has been fired by folks at CES. They won’t be choosing the “Best of Show” anymore and they lose credibility as an objective tech news source–at least temporarily.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Police drug search intrudes on husband’s final moments with deceased wife

      A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.

    • Amicus briefs in Hedges v. Obama inform indefinite detention lawsuit

      The Bill of Rights Defense Committee recently coordinated the filing of three amicus (friend of the court) briefs in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenging domestic military detention under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.

    • On Rosa Parks’ 100th Birthday, Recalling Her Rebellious Life Before and After the Montgomery Bus

      Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. “Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero,” Theoharis says.

    • Twitter Wikileaks Court Order – News and Background

      The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, February 15 in a hearing in a legal battle over the government’s demands for Twitter user records. The ACLU and EFF represent Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one of the Twitter users whose records were sought by the government.

      On February 8, 2011, a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia unsealed motions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, and others concerning government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. The documents were originally filed under seal late last month.

    • Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”

      Washington state lawmakers will consider bipartisan legislation that would block any cooperation with attempts to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens in Washington without due process under sections written into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

      If passed, the law would also make it a class C felony for any state or federal agent to act under sections 1021 or 1022 of the NDAA.

    • EFF wants a rewrite of US e-crime laws

      INTERNET ACTIVIST GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants the US to reconsider the severity of its computer crime laws and tear them up and start over.
      The Inquirer (http://s.tt/1zoHD)

    • Exposed: Whole Foods’ and the Biggest Organic Foods Distributor’s Troubled Relationships with Workers

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • RIAA Set For Historic 10,000,000th Google URL Takedown
      • The EU Commission’s Outrageous Attempt to Avoid Copyright Reform

        Today starts “Licences for Europe”, an initiative by the European Commission to discuss the issues of today’s copyright regime. Instead of planning for a broad reform that would break away with full-on repression of cultural practices based on sharing and remixing, the Commission is setting up a parody of a debate. 75% of the participants to the working-group concerning “users” are affiliated with the industry1 and the themes and objectives are defined so as to ensure that the industry has its way and that nothing will change. Through this initiative, the EU Commission shows its contempt of the many citizens who participated in defeating ACTA and are still mobilized against repressive policies.

      • Even more delays to the Digital Economy Act

        The Digital Economy Act’s Sharing of Costs Order has been withdrawn – another procedural complication that will delay implementation even further.

      • Japanese Government Plants Anti-Piracy Warnings Inside Fake Downloads

        Last year saw a major upgrade in Japan’s anti-piracy legislation in an attempt to shift Internet users away from file-sharing sites and networks and towards the country’s legitimate outlets. But while the change in the law was significant, getting the legal-downloading message to users proved problematic. In response the government and rightsholders are now seeding fake files with anti-piracy messages hidden inside.

      • Researchers dive into copyrights and wrongs of the download age

        The University of Glasgow will be home to a research centre that will examine how copyright is changing and the need for new business models for distributing creative content.

      • Golden Eye write to alleged copyright infringers

        Just under 1,000 broadband subscribers in the UK received letters in December from O2 or Be Broadband, saying that the company is passing on their name and address details to a company called Golden Eye.

USPTO Shows That It Wants to Go Global

Posted in America, Patents at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Protectionists’ imperialism

Napoleon in His Study

Summary: Unitary patent and the ever-increasing patent imperialism noted while the US patent system announces intention to coerce countries overseas

B

logs of patent lawyers celebrate patents, but they are not alone; plutocrat press Bloomberg, which has been promoting “intellectual property” nonsense for quite some time (we called it out on it many times), has an entire blog with 4 people currently dedicated to advancing software patents, with people like this guy calling himself “an inventor listed on seven U.S. patents.” Bloomberg makes it more apparent what it stands for. It’s for corporations, not people. Globalists want multinationals to have unlimited powers without borders.

Over in New Zealand, which experienced US lobbying similar to what we had experienced in the EU, a patent profiteer from AJ Park [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] says that “Pitney Bowes denied printing patent”. To quote: “The Examiner considered this a close case as merely printing something in general is insignificant post solution activity. Ignoring the printing aspect leaves you with only an abstract idea which is not patentable.

“Pitney Bowes argued that these claims are directed to more than an abstract idea. These claims automatically select an advertisement and then actually print that advertisement on a mail piece.

“The Board agreed with Pitney Bowes that the whole invention is automatically putting the appropriate advertisement on an actual mail piece. In this context, the Board found this to be more than an abstract concept and hence patentable subject matter.”

But lawyers in NZ, like this writer’s employer, lobby to make abstract ideas patentable in NZ. This risks spreading patent trolls from the United States, as one writer in NZ warns:

Incentives to troll the system are also likely to be high. Many software companies when hit with a lawsuit are likely to settle out of court in order to avoid legal costs and the negative publicity/share price impacts associated with a legal bun-fight. Given the money likely to be involved, it is possible that many arcane yet widely significant aspects of application coding could be patented with a view to making a fast buck.

Once again the long term loser is New Zealand whilst multinationals grow fat at our expense.

We’ve all seen the insanity that is the US patent system, and how it led to those shameful Apple VS. Samsung courtroom brawls. The big question is how badly do we want something similar for New Zealand?

There are trolls too, hitting both Android and iOS (Samsung and Apple), the most dominant mobile operating systems. Owing to free and open sharing, my Android application was recently picked up by another British developer (my application is Free software) who wants to try to port it to iOS. But with more Lodsys lawsuits, as shown here, even application developers are not safe anymore. Companies like Lodsys go after the small developers too. Some European companies already got hit by these trolls, barring them from distribution in the US (which in the case of global app stores may mean overall ban).

Groklaw takes note of a”Notice of Public Hearing USPTO: Asks for Comments on International Harmonization of Patent Law” and this reminds us of Cablegate lessons on global patent system, as covered here many times before. Here it is:

Notice of Public Hearing and Request for Comments on Matters Related to the Harmonization of Substantive Patent Law

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is seeking stakeholder input on certain matters relating to international harmonization of substantive patent law, in particular, information and views on: (1) The grace period; (2) publication of applications; (3) the treatment of conflicting applications and (4) prior user rights. To assist in gathering this information, the USPTO is holding a public hearing at which interested members of the public are invited to testify on the issues outlined above. In addition, interested members of the public are encouraged to complete an electronic questionnaire relating to the above-identified issues. Separate written comments may be provided through electronic mail, though completion of the questionnaire is strongly preferred in lieu of separate comments. Additional details may be found in the supplementary information section of this notice.

So basically the US wants to do to the world what Brussels did to Europe. The FSFE expresses concerns about what the unitary patent can do to Europe in its latest newsletter. It’s the top issue:

We want software as a tool to help society. Software patents are a threat to this as they add legal and financial risks to software development and distribution by giving the patent holders legal power to completely prohibit software developers from using patented ideas.

In December the European Parliament has adopted a proposal to create a patent with unitary effect for Europe (henceforth the “unitary patent”). In adopting the proposal, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) chose to disregard intense criticism of the proposal from all sides of the debate. Already before the vote patent lawyers, legal experts, SMEs and civil society groups such as FFII as well as FSFE all voiced their concerns to MEPs. With the adoption, the European Parliament has given up part of its power to shape Europe’s innovation policy. That power will instead fall to the European Patent Office (EPO), which has a track record of awarding monopoly powers on the widest possible range of subject matter.

According to the European Parliament’s website, “the international agreement creating a unified patent court will enter into force on 1 January 2014 or after thirteen contracting states ratify it, provided that UK, France and Germany are among them. With your ongoing help, FSFE will continue to inform companies and politicians about the danger of software patents.

The FSFE’s head very recently noted that “Amazon patents trade in “used” digital objects http://ur1.ca/cpaq3 The next one-click?” Amazon is hostile towards GNU/Linux 1, 2, 3] (at last as a free platform) and it also pushed its software patents into Europe.

The next stage is for the USPTO to merge in a sense with the EPO, making a patent globalisation that Microsoft lobbied for out in the open. We must oppose it like many opposed ACTA in Europe. Judging by passage for the unitary patent, we are not strong enough yet. █

Former Novell Employees in Microsoft’s Fight Against GNU/Linux Adoption

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Mono, Open XML at 3:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Trash sign with Mono

Summary: UEFI, Mono and OOXML recalled along with their role in suppressing GNU and Linux adoption

The other day we named SJVN (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) for publishing “Linux on Windows 8 PCs: Some progress, but still a nuisance” and the context was spin that said Microsoft liked Linux while attacking its booting rights. Groklaw‘s Pamela Jones wrote something similar to us: “What’s clear to me is that Microsoft hates Linux, it would like it to die, and it throws tacks in its roadway perpetually at every opportunity.”

“What’s clear to me is that Microsoft hates Linux, it would like it to die, and it throws tacks in its roadway perpetually at every opportunity.”
      –Pamela JonesThe media spin which says Microsoft likes Linux often cites or quotes former Novell employees (we will abstain from naming some in order to keep this impersonal), i.e. people who were paid by Microsoft to work on stuff like Hyper-V, Mono, Moonlight, and OOXML.

UEFI is a similar story and former Novell staff maintains it. The same goes for Mono backer Xamarim and some elements of LibreOffice (the Go-OO component, which was made obliged by Microsoft money to promote OOXML). We previously explained how OOXML helped impede FOSS adoption in Germany, e.g. in Freiburg [1, 2, 3].

Behind the scenes in Munich [1, 2, 3] Microsoft worked to lobby against it too, using a study which the The H says is nonsense, based on what Munich itself is saying:

Talking to The H’s associates at heise open, the head of the Press and Information Office at Munich City Hall, Stefan Hauf, said that it was not possible to conduct a thorough analysis of the study based on the published summary and that many of the study’s assumptions could not be verified due to the lack of detail. Hauf said that, for example, the study factors in support costs for 12,000 clients from the start of the project, although the number of clients gradually rose to 13,000 over the duration of the project. Additionally, workplace maintenance and support is only a minor work aspect for the 1,000 IT staff that are listed in the study, he added.

HP’s calculation completely omits hardware costs as the study assumes that Linux and Windows systems have “roughly the same hardware requirements”. Hauf disagrees: this approach ignores “the experience that Linux clients have lower hardware requirements than Windows clients”, he said. The official added that the study does not differentiate between migration and regular life cycle management costs, and that regular updates of the same operating system were rated as migrations.

HP is worth boycotting over this, but since Red Hat relies on HP servers and both are UEFI backers we find those two sharing a bed, more so this week. █

02.04.13

Links 4/1/2013: Linux 3.8 RC 6, Privacy Issues Big in the News

Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • A Look Back at 2012: The Expansion of Learning on the Web

      2012 was a year of opening doors to learning on the web for more and more students each day. With the web, students and teachers are using new technology and devices to collaborate with each other in class, from home, and around the world. We want Google in Education to help open more doors and we’re pleased to announce there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education–twice as many as 3 months ago. And with several Chrome devices available today, there is a device for any school, any student, anywhere.

    • Chromebooks in Schools

      It’s a good start for Chromebooks but with 400% per annum growth expect to see global impact in nearly every use of IT very soon. The key to success of Chromebooks is that Google manages the software so schools don’t need to do that and Google, unlike M$ is not out to enslave schools making them indoctrinate students. It’s all about escaping slavery of Wintel to freedom of FLOSS.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.8-rc6
    • Tux3 File-System Gains Initial FSCK Implementation

      The Tux3 file-system has been in development for years while back on 1 January, the file-system work was resurrected. There’s now an initial fsck implementation for Tux3.

      Back on New Year’s was when a status report came out that signaled the Tux3 file-system had advanced and was now more competitive with the EXT4 file-system. Less than one month later, there’s now word of the initial fsck implementation for being able to fix the file-system in case of errors/problems.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Ladbrokes is gambling with fish extinction – and so is the government

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Meetup 2013 At DA-IICT, Gujarat; Registrations Are Open

        Largest KDE event after kde.conf.in of India, KDE Meetup 2013, is announced by the KDE community in collabration with Google Developer Group of DA-IICT. This is the first large scale open source event in Gujarat. It will be held on 23rd – 24th February at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This two day event aims to involve students from India in the KDE community and also to get them involved with Open source development.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Gnome 3 on OpenBSD 5.2

        It is no secret that I am becoming quite fond of PC-BSD: it is stabilizing nicely and offers a feature-rich BSD at one end and an amazing selection of window managers at the other. One thing it’s missing however is Gnome 3. Love it or hate it, Gnome 3 is boldly exploring “modern” desktop territory with the Gnome Shell which aggressively provides both elegant eye candy and swift navigation. Surprisingly, the best place to experience Gnome 3 on BSD is perhaps where you would least expect it: OpenBSD

  • Distributions

    • Everyday Linux User Review of Linux Lite

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2013.02 Released

        PCLinuxOS(often said as PCLOS), the distribution that “it’s so cool ice cubes are jealous” basically tries to make the best out of the other GNU/Linux distros and create an all-round good for everything distro, somewhat like Ubuntu and Mint and other Debian-based spin-offs. But PCLinuxOS feels more like Arch when it comes to updates, because it’s a semi-rolling distro, but it feels like a major distribution like Fedora or OpenSUSE.

        PCLinuxOS actually started as a bundle of RPM packages for Mandrake Linux in 2000, but in 2003 this little bundle became a fork of Mandrake Linux 9.2, eventually becoming a fully-fledged distribution.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • How I feel about GNOME 3.6 in the Fedora 18 final release

          I’m testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn’t do an install, though I’m certainly thinking about it.

          In this release’s GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications — all from GNOME proper — like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the “global” menu that pops down from the app’s icon in the upper panel.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • StormFly Wants To Childproof Your Computer With Its Ubuntu-Booting USB Bracelet

            When I was but a wee lad, I hosed my share of family computers simply because I wanted to help out — once I tried to free up space on a 6GB hard drive by deleting anything larger than 1MB. You can imagine how well that played out.

            I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the founders of Barcelona-based Now Computing went through something similar, because they’ve just recently launched a Kickstarter project for a device that should ensure it never happens again.

          • New Sync Menu Landed in Ubuntu 13.04

            With yesterday’s updates, Canonical uploaded a new Indicator Sync, updating the old Ubuntu One indicator, which was used in previous releases of Ubuntu.

            The Ubuntu development team planned this new Sync Menu for a long time now, and it appears that it will finally become reality in the upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system, due for release on April 25th, 2013.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 review

              To sum, Bodhi Linux is a good distribution, but it is not for everybody. If, like me, you like a distribution with almost everything you need installed by default, then this distribution is not for you. On the other hand, if you don’t mind a distribution with very few applications installed, one that lets you choose and pick what you what to install right from the start, without compiling source code, then welcome to Bodhi Linux.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • SCO Asks the Bankruptcy Court to Let It Destroy Its Business Records ~ pj

    SCO, now calling itself TSG, has just filed a motion [PDF] with the bankruptcy court in Delaware asking it to authorize “the abandonment, disposal, and/or destruction of certain surplus, obsolete, non-core or burdensome, property, including, without limitation, shelving, convention materials, telecommunications and computer equipment, accounting and sales documents, and business records.”

    Ah. “And business recrods.” Burdensome to whom? To whom would SCO’s business records be burdensome? Not me. I hereby volunteer to pay for storage for those records, in order to preserve them. Obsolete how? Does the bankruptcy court know that SCO has a petition [PDF] before the US District Court in Utah asking the court to reopen SCO’s litigation with IBM?

    The excuse is money. They are paying to store them, poor dears, as of January 31, I gather, since they ask the court to authorize payments nunc pro tunc back to that date. Either that, or there’s more to this story than you can find in the motion. They also ask the court to let it not inform all its creditors about this. Heh heh. Imagine how messy it could get if they all showed up asking for a computer or shelving.

  • Security

    • Apple: Would Steve Jobs Have Blocked Oracle Java?
    • Cyberwar, out of the shadows

      A PLANNED FIVEFOLD increase in the staff of the U.S. Cyber Command is indicative of how conflict is moving toward center stage for the military, a domain similar to land, sea, air and outer space. The anticipated growth, described in an article by Ellen Nakashima in The Post last week, is intended to protect the country and its private sector from attack, an urgent mission. But now that the United States is going beyond defense, expanding forces for offensive attack, there’s a crying need for more openness. So far, forces exist almost entirely in the shadows.

      The Post reported on plans for creation of three types of forces under the Cyber Command. Two are familiar: “combat mission forces” to serve in parallel with military units and “protection forces” to defend Pentagon networks. A third area is new: “national mission forces” that would seek to head off any threat to critical infrastructure in the United States, such as electrical grids, dams and other potential targets deemed vital to national security. These “national mission forces” are expected to operate outside the United States, perhaps launching preemptive strikes on adversaries preparing to take down an American bank or electric grid. However, senior defense officials told The Post that the forces might respond inside the United States if asked by an authorized agency such as the FBI.

    • Secret Rules to Let Obama Start Cyber Wars

      A secret legal review of the even more secret “rules” of the US cyberwarfare capabilities has concluded that President Obama has virtually limitless power to start cyber wars in the name of “pre-emption” of potential attacks coming out of another nation.

    • Broad Powers Seen for Obama in Cyberstrikes

      A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.

    • €10,000 Bounty On Cracking Mega Encryption

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Wars That Aren’t Meant to Be Won

      In War Is A Lie I looked at pretended and real reasons for wars and found some of the real reasons to be quite irrational. It should not shock us then to discover that the primary goal in fighting a war is not always to win it. Some wars are fought without a desire to win, others without winning being the top priority, either for the top war makers or for the ordinary soldiers.

    • Former Guantanamo Prosecutor Speaks Out Against Torture

      Retired Colonel Morris Davis was the chief prosecutor for military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay from 2005 to 2007. He resigned in objection to evidence gained by torture and political interference.

    • Ex-Gitmo Prosecutor: Obama’s Drone Surge as Damaging as Bush Torture Program

      Retired Air Force Col. Morris “Moe” Davis, once the lead government prosecutor for terrorism suspects at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, says that the US torture regime under Bush and now the drone assassination program run by the Obama administration have combined to make the world less safe and called both programs—whether they could be legally justified or not—”immoral.

    • Bin Laden’s death hasn’t stanched metastasizing of al Qaeda
    • Supervisor of Intelligence Estimate Hailed for Preventing War with Iran
    • Storm as the UK ‘justifies torture’ of the fighter who helped topple Gaddafi

      Libyan Abdel Hakim Belhadj ‘wrongly linked to Al Qaeda’

      He insists he is no terrorist and is bringing lawsuit against Britain

      Row comes days after Cameron visits Libya on ‘bridge-building’ mission

    • Mystery spook’s identity confirmed

      The identity of a United States spy who mysteriously landed in Wellington last year can be revealed as National Security Agency director General Keith Alexander.

    • CIA torture whistleblower honored after criminal sentencing

      Kiriakou and Radack also appeared on Democracy Now, where Kiriakou made clear that:

      This…was not a case about leaking; this was a case about torture….I’m going to prison because I blew the whistle on torture. My oath was to the Constitution….[a]nd to me, torture is unconstitutional.”

    • Obama Is Now America’s Hacker in Chief

      As the possibility of destructive cyberwarfare inches towards reality, the government is scrambling to figure out who holds the keys to America’s malware arsenal. Obviously, it’s President Obama.

      The New York Times just published the findings of an investigation into a secret legal review that set out to determine who actually had the power to order a cyberattack. Given his status as commander-in-chief, Obama seems to be the clear choice, but since cyberwarfare is such a new and unknown thing, the government hasn’t actually figured out the rules of engagement yet. In the past couple of decades, the power to use America’s cyberweapons has been shared between the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. With the exception of a series of strikes on the computer systems that run Iran’s nuclear enrichement facilities — an attack that Obama ordered himself — the U.S. hasn’t launched any major cyber attacks in recent memory, however.

    • Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Why It’s “Legal” When the U.S. Does It

      Credit the Arab Spring and what’s followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don’t overlook American “unilateralism.” After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there’s nothing like having a heavily armed crew dreaming about eternal global empires stomp through your neighborhood, and it’s clear enough now that whatever was let loose early in the twenty-first century won’t end soon.

    • Press Conference: Faith-based, human rights and ex-military leaders speak out against John Brennan to head CIA
    • US MILITARY EXPANDS ITS DRUG WAR IN LATIN AMERICA
    • FBI intensifies war on whistleblowers
    • The Torture Apologists Ignore the 4,000 Americans They Killed

      A bit of a row has started between Jay Rosen and Will Saletan for the latter’s attempt to “see how [the torturers] saw what they did” in this post. Frankly, I think Rosen mischaracterizes the problem with Saletan’s post. It’s not so much that Saletan parrots the euphemisms of the torturers. It’s that he accepts what John Rizzo, Michael Hayden, Jose Rodriguez, and Marc Thiessen said – in a presentation with multiple internal contradictions even before you get to the outright demonstrable lies — as the truth.

    • Why One Known Historian Is Disgusted by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick’s ‘Untold History’

      The introduction of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s book, The Untold History of the United States, declares before any history is recounted “we don’t try to tell all US history. That would be an impossible task.” It acknowledges there are things the United States has done right, but, “There are libraries full of books dedicated to that purpose and school curricula that trumpet US achievements.” The two are “more concerned with focusing a spotlight on what the United States has done wrong—the ways in which we believe the country has betrayed its mission, with the faith that there is still time to correct those errors as we move forward into the twenty-first century.”

    • The CIA’s case for torture

      Do we really understand what the CIA did and why? Was the payoff worth the moral cost? And what can we learn from it?

    • When Can the U.S. Kill Americans? The White House Won’t Say.

      The administration refuses to say why it thinks it can kill American terrorists abroad—even to the lawmakers entitled to know.

    • Backstage Glimpses of Clinton as Dogged Diplomat, Win or Lose

      Last summer, as the fighting in Syria raged and questions about the United States’ inaction grew, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred privately with David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. The two officials were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.

    • Panetta: Any Spending Cuts Would Make US a ‘Second-Rate Power’

      In an interview published over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta blasted even the notion of allowing any military budget cuts going forward, insisting that following through on the sequestration cuts, mostly just cuts in the rate of growth rather than in real dollars, would turn the United States into a “second-rate power.”

    • Why Police Lie Under Oath

      THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.”

    • Ayotte, Graham and McCain Will Participate In Hedges Oral Arguments

      Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain will have five minutes on Wednesday to explain why a lawsuit targeting the indefinite detention should be swatted down. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals granted their motion to participate in oral arguments in the Hedges v. Obama NDAA lawsuit on Thursday, setting up a court appearance for their lawyer on February 6.

    • An America cramped by defensiveness

      A week before I deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, my wife and I volunteered for a few hours at our daughter’s elementary school. As we left, her teacher told the students that I was an officer in the Marine Corps about to leave on deployment. “A nation does not survive,” he said, “without men like that.”

      [...]

      …only thing Americans agree on these days is gratitude bordering on reverence for our military.

    • CIA Whistleblower: “US is a Police State, Obama Consciously Allows Torture”
    • Barack Obama, Drone Ranger

      If you’ve seen the movie Zero Dark Thirty, you know why it has triggered a new debate over our government’s use of torture after 9/11.
      The movie’s up for an Oscar as best motion picture. We’ll know later this month if it wins. Some people leave the theater claiming the film endorses and even glorifies the use of torture to obtain information that finally led to finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Not true, say the filmmakers, but others argue the world is better off without bin Laden in it, no matter how we had to get him. What’s more, they say, there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/1 — if we have to use an otherwise immoral practice to defend ourselves against such atrocities, we’re okay with it. Or so the argument goes.

    • US Allies Aid Drone Strikes, But Hope to Ditch Legal Responsibility

      So far US officials have ditched responsibility purely on the president insisting whoever he kills must be legal, but as killings grow, various US allies the world over are finding themselves increasingly culpable by way of intelligence sharing, and fearing lawsuits.

      Noor Khan, a British citizen from Pakistan, has been trying to sue the British government over a US drone strike that killed his father, a tribal elder with no apparent militant ties.

    • Drone Strike Prompts Suit, Raising Fears for U.S. Allies
    • Waziristan tribesmen to move ICJ against drone hits

      The major tribes from Waziristan Agency have announced to move the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the US drone attacks in its rugged region bordering Afghanistan over massive collateral damage.

    • It’s govt’s duty to stop drone attacks: LHC CJ

      LAHORE: The chief justice of the Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday observed that it was the government’s duty to stop the drone attacks, adding that the court could not order a war against the US.

    • Pakistanis hate the drone war: The proof is in the data

      Writing for the Atlantic, three American academics posed a challenge in their article titled: “You Say Pakistanis All Hate the Drone War? Prove It.” I thought I did prove it a few weeks ago. But I welcome the opportunity to elaborate even further.

    • Inside the IDF: Drone wars
    • OUR OPINION: Africa drone base a first step for U.S.

      The drone base’s initial mission would be to track the movements of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and allied Islamic terrorist organizations. If the threat worsens, and it almost surely will, the drones could be armed, the base expanded and, if Niger agrees, U.S. special-operations troops based there.

    • Use of drone warfare by U.S. under attack

      This is a sort of armchair killing where drones are remotely piloted from bases in the United States. Using drones makes going into battle safer and cheaper for the attacker but not for the attacked. It’s Lethal Toy Story.

    • Pakistan army attack US drone strike retaliation
    • The Morality of Drone Strikes

      …Obama speaks the language of last resort, but his use of drones doesn’t really seem to follow that principle…

    • Amazon Users Pen Sarcastic Drone ‘Reviews’ For Children’s Unmanned Aircraft Toy

      The latest instance: a protest Amazon users are holding on the page of a children’s unmanned aircraft toy. It’s been inundated with users reviewing Obama administer’s use of military drones abroad, pointed out by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.

      The toy shares the “Predator” name with an unmanned aerial vehicle that has become a favorite of the U.S. Air Force and CIA. The use of drones — particularly in countries where the U.S. is not at war such as Yemen or Pakistan — have come under intense scrutiny in recent years for causing child casualties, with studies showing drone strikes could potentially cause unprecedented blowback.

    • Va. House panel OKs 2-year moratorium on drone use

      A House panel has approved a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on drones in Virginia while lawmakers work to craft regulations for use of the unmanned aircraft.

    • Obama’s CIA pick takes heat for calling drone attacks ‘ethical and just’

  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks reveals Icelandic FBI shennanigans

      After shooting began in Reykjavik at the end of January (Iceland Review), the organisation has revealed – completely co-incidentally, of course – an incident in August 2011 in which FBI agents were apparently booted from the Nordic country for arriving without asking first.

    • Minister: Iceland refused to help FBI on WikiLeaks
    • Assange receives Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts
    • Julian Assange receives Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts

      On 3 February 2013 at a private dinner at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, attended by more than 150 guests, Julian Assange will receive the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts 2013 for his WikiLeaks work including, amongst other releases, Collateral Murder. This award is given to people who have displayed extraordinary courage and who through their artistry have changed the world.

    • New developments in the case against Jeremy Hammond.

      Recently, Sue Crabtree of the Jeremy Hammond Support Network presented me with some very interesting new information in regards to the controversy surrounding Judge Loretta Preska’s Conflict of Interest.

      The first being that Judge Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler gave a sworn statement to the court concerning his relationship and email correspondence with the intelligence firm Stratfor. Jeremy Hammond is currently accused of hacking the Stratfor website and releasing millions of files, including the email accounts and passwords of all those in correspondence with Stratfor. Judge Preska’s husband Thomas Kavaler was corresponding with Stratfor and his business email and password were among those exposed. Though it has not yet been confirmed that Mr. Kavaler’s email account contained private messages between he and his wife Judge Preska, it would seem to be a safe assumption.

  • Finance

    • Age reporters to appeal to highest Vic court

      Two Fairfax journalists are going to Victoria’s Court of Appeal after being ordered to give evidence about their sources for a banknote bribery story.

    • Goldman, gov ‘rolled AIG’

      In his new book, “The AIG Story” (co-written with Lawrence A. Cunningham and coming out this week), Greenberg says that in the summer of 2008, the company was in contentious talks with Goldman Sachs and other investment banks to settle trillions in claims on questionable derivatives linked to debt obligations that Wall Street banks were writing.

    • Looking for Mister Goodpain: The Hopeless Search for an Austerity Success Story

      Three years ago, a terrible thing happened to economic policy, both here and in Europe. Although the worst of the financial crisis was over, economies on both sides of the Atlantic remained deeply depressed, with very high unemployment. Yet the Western world’s policy elite somehow decided en masse that unemployment was no longer a crucial concern, and that reducing budget deficits should be the overriding priority.

    • Corporate power: exposing the global 1%

      In these infographics, the Transnational Institute offers a visual insight into who dominates our planet at a time of economic and ecological crisis.

    • Goldman Sachs to improve Russia’s image for $500,000

      In a new image campaign to spur investment, the Russian government has hired the investment bank Goldman Sachs to persuade investors and ratings agencies of the country’s appeal. Officials hope the move will improve Russia’s credit rating, as well as its position in other international rankings, both of which experts say are underestimated.

    • Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Bill Gates is naive, data is not objective

      In his recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates proposed to “fix the world’s biggest problems” through “good measurement and a commitment to follow the data.” Sounds great!
      Unfortunately it’s not so simple.
      Gates describes a positive feedback loop when good data is collected and acted on. It’s hard to argue against this: given perfect data-collection procedures with relevant data, specific models do tend to improve, according to their chosen metrics of success. In fact this is almost tautological.
      As I’ll explain, however, rather than focusing on how individual models improve with more data, we need to worry more about which models and which data have been chosen in the first place, why that process is successful when it is, and – most importantly – who gets to decide what data is collected and what models are trained.
      Take Gates’s example of Ethiopia’s commitment to health care for its people. Let’s face it, it’s not new information that we should ensure “each home has access to a bed net to protect the family from malaria, a pit toilet, first-aid training and other basic health and safety practices.” What’s new is the political decision to do something about it. In other words, where Gates credits the measurement and data-collection for this, I’d suggest we give credit to the political system that allowed both the data collection and the actual resources to make it happen.

    • Lies, damned lies, and newspaper reporting… (Op-Ed)

      Last week the Sam Adams Asso ci ates for Integ rity in Intel li gence presen ted this year’s award to Dr Tom Fin gar at a cere mony jointly hos ted by the pres ti gi ous Oxford Union Soci ety.

      Dr Fin gar, cur rently a vis it ing lec turer at Oxford, had in 2007 co-ordinated the pro duc tion of the US National Intel li­gence Estim ate — the com bined ana lysis of all 16 of America’s intel li gence agen cies — which assessed that the Ira­nian nuc lear weapon isa tion pro gramme had ceased in 2003. This con sidered and author it at ive Estim ate dir ectly thwarted the 2008 US drive towards war against Iran, and has been reaf firmed every year since then.

  • Censorship

    • The Verge Hires Writer Who Quit CNET in Protest

      Greg Sandoval, the CNET senior writer who resigned in protest when the site’s parent company, CBS, interfered with its editorial coverage last month, has been hired by The Verge, the Web site that first revealed the full extent of CBS’s involvement.

      Mr. Sandoval will be a senior reporter for The Verge when he starts in a couple of weeks. He said in a blog post that he had received a “written guarantee from management that nobody from the business side of the company will ever have any authority over my stories.” The post, which he published Sunday night, also said, “Long before I arrived, The Verge committed itself to editorial independence.”

    • Breaking: Wikileaks Takes on Oxford Union

      Julian Assange is back in the headlines after WikiLeaks accuses the Oxford Union of censorship.

    • WikiLeaks accuses Union of “censorship”

      WikiLeaks has accused the Oxford Union of “censor[ing]” footage of Julian Assange’s address to the debating society in January.

      It alleged on Twitter that the Union had replaced the backdrop of the video, which was personally selected by Assange, with a plain still of the Oxford Union logo.

      The footage that Assange selected came from a controversial video released by the whistleblowing organisation in 2010. Popularly known as ‘Collateral Murder’, it shows the gun crew of a US Apache helicopter firing on Reuters journalists and civilians in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007.

    • 4 House Members Slam College’s Anti-Israel Event

      A scholar and a political commentator are about to let fly to some very, very dangerous speech at a New York college next week. It’s so dangerous, in fact, that four Democratic members of Congress are getting involved.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • To Resist, To Join Together, Occasionally To Win

      It was three years ago that we lost Howard Zinn, teacher, historian, activist, optimist, speaker of truth to power. He is missed.

      “If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future, without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past, when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than its solid centuries of warfare.”

    • The Real News Network Whistleblower Special
    • Help Protect The Next Aaron Swartz

      On Jan 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old internet pioneer and defender of online freedom, tragically took his own life. Aaron was facing 35 years in prison and relentless persecution for downloading too many articles, too fast from an online library of academic journals.

    • Aaron’s Law 2.0: Major Steps Forward, More Work to Be Done

      Representative Zoe Lofgren has posted on Reddit a modified draft of Aaron’s Law, a proposal to update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and wire fraud law in honor of our friend Aaron Swartz and to make sure that the misguided prosecution that happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else. We’re very pleased with the proposal’s progress and we’re hopeful about the future of this important bill.

    • ‘Homeland,’ by Cory Doctorow

      Last month, a 26-year-old Internet activist named Aaron Swartz killed himself. He had worked on many widely used online tools that, among other things, enable Web sites to syndicate their content. He had also been politically active, helping to drive the campaign that blocked the Stop Online Piracy Act. At the time of his death, he was under threat of prosecution — and decades in jail — for downloading millions of academic journal articles via the MIT network in hopes of making them freely available. In a statement, his family said they thought that his death was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Former RIAA VP Named 2nd In Command Of Copyright Office

        We’ve talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public (“promoting the progress of science”) it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players — the RIAA and MPAA — happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office. Just a few months ago we wrote about how the Copyright Office’s General Counsel, David Carson, had jumped ship to go join the IFPI (the international version of the RIAA).

      • CBS and CNET Protest Looming BitTorrent Client Ban

        CBS and CNET have asked a Californian federal court not to grant a ban on the distribution of file-sharing software through Download.com. They responded to a request for a preliminary injunction from a coalition of artists and billionaire Alki David who claim that CBS induces piracy. According to the media conglomerate this is not the case, and CBS argues that there are many non-infringing uses for BitTorrent.

      • Valve Sued In Germany Over Right To Resell Games

        Valve’s Steam platform has certainly been one highlight on competing with piracy here at Techdirt. As something of the iTunes of PC gaming, it provides a wonderful example of how a great platform and added value can give those who could otherwise be pirates a real reason to part with their gaming dollar. This isn’t to say that the platform hasn’t been associated with some issues, but Valve seems to be among those folks that get it right more often than they get it wrong.

      • Prince George’s considers copyright policy that takes ownership of students’ work

        A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

      • THE SECRET TO BEING CREATIVE

        It’s not nice to steal. Unless you are a poet, an artist, a musician, an architect, a writer, or you do anything that requires even a modest amount of creativity. Then it’s not IF you steal, but HOW you steal, that makes all the difference in the world.

      • Obama Administration Considers Joining Publishers In Fight To Stamp Out Fair Use At Universities

        In digging into this, we’ve heard from a few sources that it’s actually the US Copyright Office that has asked the DOJ to weigh in on the side of the publishers and against the interests of public univerisities and students. Yes, the same Copyright Office that just promoted a former RIAA VP to second in command. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

USPTO Approves Another ‘Slide to Unlock’ Sham

Posted in Law, Patents at 5:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gates

Summary: New lows for the USPTO as public opinion shifts against it and patent lawyers, the rising robber barons in technology, struggle to keep the status quo

The patent lawyers crowd finds that “Micron has just received its own patent covering a “system and method for controlling user access to an electronic device.” U.S. Patent No 8,352,745 issued in January 2013 but claims priority to an original application filed in February 2000 and lists Jim McKeeth as inventor.”

But Apple insists it has invented the concept.

Pamela Jones suggests: “This is why the solution to the software patent problem is to get rid of all software patents. We can’t just have the USPTO pick better ones to grant while denying the silly ones. Clearly, they have no clue which is which.”

The USPTO is under a lot of pressure these days and it does feel the heat based on its actions. Another lawyers’ site touches the subject by saying that “Fed. Circ. Aims For Clear Rules On Software Patents”. Mark Cuban’s views on the subject are quickly spreading to more outlets:

Outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban is not happy with the current state of the American patent system and he is speaking out against its current state.

In an interview with TechCrunch Cuban says the current patent system is full of “dumb*ss patents [that] are crushing small businesses.”

Mark Cuban feels so passionate about his patent fight that he has teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to “eliminate stupid patents” that leave company’s shelling out millions of dollars for the right to use basic technology advances.

According to Cuban he is simply trying to “get the message to politicians that patent trolls are costing taxpayers… and small businesses money that could otherwise be used for innovation and creating jobs.”

Cuban [1, 2, 3] gave money to the cause, which he deserves credit for. He did this out of self interest, but many share his pain, so his battle of self interest is the opposite of patent lawyers’.

Over in New Zealand, Matt Adams from pro-software patents firm AJ Park [1, 2, 3, 4] keeps promoting the other side’s ’cause’ (so-called “patent buff” is just a patent profiteer) because just some months ago when
Craig Foss stuck his nose in matters he does not seem to understand the lawyers thought they had gotten the upper hand. Let’s fight to ensure they never get their way. █

Black Duck, Founded by Microsoft Marketing Guy and Seemingly Funded by Microsoft (in Part), is Openwashing Microsoft Again

Posted in FUD, GPL, Microsoft at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Duck

Summary: Microsoft proxies openwash Microsoft and help suppress adoption of copyleft licences such as the GPL

The creation of Mr. Levin is appalling and it is becoming more blatant about it all. Black Duck, a PR front for many purposes and somewhat of a Microsoft proxy, is openwashing Microsoft and attacking the GPL, especially after entering an agreement with Microsoft (in public) around 2009. Watch this latest nonsense that Levin’s company paid to flood news wires with. Perhaps it pushed journalists too, generating puff pieces like “Microsoft, Yahoo Among Open Source ‘Rookies of the Year’”. It says:

Each year, Black Duck unveils what it calls the Rookie Open Source Projects of the Year. The Massachusetts company sells software for managing open source projects, and its annual list is a way of promoting both itself and the wider open source software community. But the list is also good reading.

This year, Microsoft made a surprise appearance, as did Yahoo, which fell down a bit in terms of developer relations last year, thanks to heavy layoffs and its widely panned patents policy.

Mac Asay wrote this:

It’s déjà vu all over again for Microsoft, as Black Duck Software has named Redmond’s TypeScript project among its 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year – despite Microsoft spending nearly a decade trying to figure out this crazy communist software manifesto.

Back in 2001, Microsoft labeled open source a “cancer,” “un-American,” and a threat to rich software capitalists everywhere. By 2003, however, it was limping along the right track with the introduction of its Shared Source Initiative, and not long after started releasing open-source code of its own and creating its own open-source software lab.

So why is Microsoft still considered an open-source rookie in 2013, 10 years later?

Asay has had some connections and interactions with Levin et al. so it’s sensible to suspect they pushed him to it (e.g. by E-mail, just like Microsoft Florian). Using prophecies Black Duck has been trying to take companies off the GPL, just like other Microsoft moles (e.g. Walli). Asay helps those people, having himself publicly chastised the GPL (after he had promoted it but then got lobbied). Here we see another Microsoft proxy, OpenLogic, promoting a move out of GPL. And guess who Microsoft hired after many payouts? Apache leadership, which we wrote about before. Microsoft uses Apache againzt GNU GPL. Those who are familiar with history or chronology here will know that it’s evident, and Microsoft hopes to consume FOSS so that it doesn’t use GNU licenses and instead runs on Microsoft stacks, such as Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc. █

Apple Keeps Losing Patent Cases, Now Pursues Trademarks on Designs!

Posted in Apple, Patents at 5:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Brands flood

Summary: The USPTO, a vassal to aggressive US brands, continues to enable abuse and bullying rather than open innovation

Groklaw does a great job covering Apple’s attacks on Android as Jones declares:

Apple just lost another round. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has denied Apple’s petition for en banc review of Judge Lucy Koh’s decision not to order a permanent injunction against Samsung. The court also denied Apple’s motion asking for permission to file a reply brief.

Apple’s war on Linux (using software patents) goes back to when Apple threatened Palm with lawyers — a period not covered by this interesting new infographic. Muktware says:

In one of the most dramatic and closely watched court-battle (after Oracle-Google), judge Lucy Koh has issued four rulings on post-trial briefs.

In a nutshell there won’t be a new trial, as Samsung wanted, because the judge thinks that the trial was fair despite allegations that the jury foreman could have been biased. She also ruled that there won’t be any more money for Apple as the iPhone maker failed to prove they were ‘undercompensated’ by the jury. The most important ruling was that she also found that ‘Samsung did not willfully’ infringe’.

Here is more and an update from Jones, who writes: “Apple and Samsung must be groaning. The trouble with Tribbles, of course, is that there’s no seeming end to them — “they are born pregnant” and threaten to consume all the onboard supplies, but Judge Grewal, like Spock, is immune to their effects, so he refuses most of the requests, saying over and over that the parties have failed to show in a particularized way how revealing the materials would be harmful.”

Here is what this one pro-Apple site says, as spotted by Jones:

OS X is degrading into a base for an entertainment platform.

How true. And notice what Apple does with trademarks now:

Apple has been granted a trademark on the design of its Apple Stores by the US Patent & Trademark Office.

The USPTO might be simpler to stop than Apple, which is very wealthy and has successfully brainwashed a lot of people. Monopolies on store design are a ridiculous concept. So much for free market… █

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