02.23.13
Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Office cannot sustain its dominance in a Web-dominated era when devices mostly run Android/Linux
THERE was some amazing news just before this weekend. Microsoft did not handle something as basic as renewing certificates, so “secure Azure Storage goes down WORLDWIDE,” as The Register put it:
The problems were first reported by Microsoft on Friday at 12:44pm Pacific Time on the Windows Azure Service Dashboard. An update at 1:30pm identified a problem with SSL transactions.
And Microsoft actually tries to convince businesses to rely on Microsoft for Fog Computing. Even Windows users — not just GNU/Linux users — won’t want to to rely on that. Services depend on Azure Storage as a sort of file system.
Michael Larabel spread a seemingly false rumour about Microsoft Office (native, not online) coming to GNU/Linux. I have been chatting with him over the years and I consider him a highly reliable and well-informed guy, so his source was deceitful or badly informed. Either way, irrespective of whether or not he was misinformed by someone, here is an article which covers it: ‘Case in point? Oh, it’s a juicy one: “Microsoft is having a ‘meaningful look’ at a full Linux port of Office thanks to Linux showing signs of commercial viability on the desktop,” in the words of Phoronix writer Michael Larabel, who claimed to have it on good (but unnamed) authority.’
The matter of fact is, the Office cash cow is having problems and Microsoft struggles to adapt and keep the format lock-in/monoculture [1, 2, 3, 4]. The following is definitely not the way to rescue Office:
When quizzed as to whether a Microsoft Office 2013 licence can be transferred to another machine, Microsoft told The INQUIRER, “[Microsoft] Office 2013 is a single device license”, adding that those wanting to use Microsoft Office across multiple devices will “have to purchase [Microsoft] Office 365 Home Premium” as well, which allows users to share Microsoft Office with up to five PCs, Macs or mobile devices.
We probed further and asked what will happen in the event that the original PC carrying the single Microsoft Office 2013 licence is destroyed, lost or stolen. Will Microsoft allow the original licence to be transferred then?
This won’t go down so well and already we discover that Microsoft is rapidly being dumped by the Australian government, potentially costing hundreds of millions:
Australia has reduced the amount of money it pays for Microsoft products by AU$100m (£66m, $103m), according to the nation’s Chief Technology Officer John Sheridan.
Speaking yesterday at the Kickstart conference, Sheridan explained that consolidating contracts from 42 to one and working through a single reseller has enabled the savings. One contract now covers 300,000 devices and 260,000 people across 126 entities. Work has begun on negotiations for the successor contract with Redmond.
Microsoft is demoted by Australia owing to some prudent people who seek to decrease reliance, so we are quite sure that Microsoft is sending moles over there as we speak, based on past experience. █
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 6:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ‘Security’-themed FUD against Red Hat is back, despite the fact that Microsoft admits gaming the numbers it uses to make its case
LAST WEEK we saw Trustwave, a Microsoft partner [1, 2], spreading some Linux FUD and there is still dissemination of this Linux FUD in Web sites which seem not to know the background and instead go by press releases (lazy ‘journalism’). To quote this one example which was found yesterday:
According to a recent report by the security firm Trustwave: Vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel fixed in 2012 went unpatched for more than two years on average, more than twice as long as it took to fix unpatched flaws in current Windows Operating Systems.
No, Microsoft uses the strategy of hidden patches to game the numbers, which is possible because Windows is proprietary (hidden source code). Those claims should be dismissed and the Microsoft partner treated with extreme suspicion. When Microsoft talks about “security” it does not mean real security (see what Torvalds said) but about financial security for Microsoft. UEFI is a good example of the misuse of the word security, which is more about making it inconvenient to use GNU/Linux (Dedoimedo is the latest to address the subject). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 5:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft gets its money’s worth after Microsoft’s proprietary tools get mentioned in FOSS sites, owing primarily to the openwashing by Xamarin
THE company which former Microsofters are funding, Xamarin, is still openwashing and enhancing Microsoft products. Open Source-centric Web sites fall into the trap of covering proprietary as though it is “open” and to quote this one example:
Xamarin has announced an across-the-board update to its range of products and pricing models designed to establish the company as the de facto bridge between Microsoft C# developers and Android and iOS mobile platforms. Xamarin’s speciality has been working with the Mono toolchain for C# and for mobile development; rather than abstract away platform differences, the company implements a close-as-possible version of the platform’s native APIs in C#.
The news was covered by the Microsoft booster, not a FOSS blogger, at Ars Technica. And that says a lot.
Since 2009, it’s been possible to develop iOS applications using C# and .NET, courtesy of MonoTouch. But one important detail has always been missing. If you wanted to use Visual Studio—the premier C# and .NET development environment, the one that almost every C# developer calls home—you were out of luck.
Xamarin should be treated as a Microsoft ally, extension, and booster, not a FOSS company. It does not even pretend to be about FOSS anymore. █
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Posted in Apple, Microsoft at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Not what you’d expect from the West
Credit: www.kremlin.ru
Summary: The Computer Crime Squad goes after a gag and mistreats citizens at the behest of Microsoft et al.
NOT TOO LONG ago we criticised Apple for using the already-widely-maligned police forces in California to harass people [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft has a real phobia of hackers, so even a joker is being harassed:
An Aussie hacker found out that Microsoft has no sense of humour when he leaked details of Microsoft’s new Xbox and listed a prototype on eBay as a gag.
Now, watch this prior report:
The Tech Game was provided with a copy of the search warrant served on SuperDaE by the Australian Computer Crime Squad, alleging “unlwaful use of a computer.” The warrant specifically names Microsoft, PayPal and eBay as injured parties, but SuperDaE also claims that Epic, Blizzard, Valve and Sony have joined in on the case due to case of unauthorized server access. “Yo, everyone at this point just wants a piece of me,” he told The Tech Game, adding that old computers and a cell phone were confiscated under the warrant, and a freeze was placed on his bank accounts.
Here, like in Wikileaks, we find that the police is just an extension of force for private corporations. Nothing wories the police more than threat to corpoorate intersts; it’s not about people anymore. █
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02.22.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“One would be hard pressed to argue that Android wasn’t the REAL tipping point when it came to mainstream acceptance,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “Does anybody think Valve would be making a Linux client if all those Android games didn’t exist already, thus giving them ready games on tap? No question in my mind; the day Android was released trumps them all.”
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GNU/Linux is a “supported OS”, eh? This could be just M$’s attempt to milk the last cent from those truly locked-in to XP. M$ made the cell, applied the barriers and threw away the key, holding thousands of corporations’ computers hostage. One can reinforce one’s cell by migrating to “7″ or one can escape and breathe fresh air with GNU/Linux. It’s seems an easy choice to me. I am sure the consultant thinks going to “7″ is the way but any nitwit can see this will happen all over again when “7″ dies… That’s the Wintel-treadmill, folks. An infinite number of steps forward with no advance.
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Google’s new Chromebook Pixel computer is all about the cloud — but it doesn’t have to be.
One thing I’ve heard from lots of folks in discussing the Chromebook Pixel is a desire to run a more traditional Linux OS on the system. Google’s Chrome OS certainly has its advantages, but for some users, a dual-boot option is even more appealing.
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Desktop
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These could be executives going for meetings, creative people or even developers. I have seen quite a lot of developers on G+ showing interest in this device.
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Just hours after the launch of the high-resolution touchscreen laptop – the Chromebook Pixel, Benson Leung from Google is busy patching the Linux kernel to support Pixel’s hardware. These kernel patches provide support for the ISL light sensor, Atmel MXT Touchpad, and Atmel MXT Touchscreen as found on the high-end Chrome OS-powered device.
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Although it’s oriented primarily towards developers, Dell’s “Project Sputnik” Ubuntu Linux ultrabook has attracted considerable interest from Linux fans.
When I spoke with Barton George, a Dell director, upon the North American launch last fall of the XPS 13 Developer Edition, he noted two common requests that came up during the testing process: a “big brother version” with beefier specs, and availability outside the United States.
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It’s not the first Dell notebook running Ubuntu, but the latest model that Canonical is talking up differs from past Ubuntu laptops in that this is a Dell XPS 13 packed with killer components. All too often, Ubuntu gets plopped onto lower-end notebooks (see: the entire failed netbook craze), but this one rocks an Intel Core i7-3537U chip, 8GB of DDR3-1600MHz RAM, 256GB SSD, and a 13.3-inch full HD (1080p) Gorilla Glass display; Intel HD 4000 graphics is on board, too.
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Chromebooks were designed to make computing speedy, simple and secure. For many of you, they have become the perfect, additional (and yes, affordable) computer: ideal for catching up on emails, sharing documents and chatting via Hangouts. We’re tremendously grateful to our partners—Samsung, Acer, Lenovo and HP—for their commitment. The momentum has been remarkable: the Samsung Chromebook has been #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list for laptops every day since it launched 125 days ago in the U.S., and Chromebooks now represent more than 10 percent of notebook sales at Currys PC World, the largest electronics retailer in the U.K.
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Google’s flagship Chromebook might be a solid piece of hardware, but its prohibitive $1,299-1,449 sticker price left us aching for the ability to dual-boot a more robust operating system. Lucky for us that Google’s Benson Leung has a knack for Linux — he’s already patching the Linux kernel to support Pixel’s hardware.
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Earlier this month, a video was leaked on YouTube which was created by Slinky agency. CEO of Slinky, Victor Koch wrote in his Google+ page, “Our all servers were attacked by hackers, and we apologize for the fact that many projects have been shown previously!” The video demoed a Chromebook with a 2560×1700 resolution touchscreen and an Ivybridge CPU. It certainly got the rumour mill going with the device being dubbed as the Google Link.
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Kernel Space
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Here’s even more good news for IT professionals with Linux skills. Last month, we got word from IT careers site Dice that salaries in Linux jobs are going up, and on Wednesday the Linux Foundation and Dice jointly presented a report of more promising findings.
“The 2013 Linux Jobs Report shows that there is unlimited opportunity for college graduates and technology professionals who want to pursue careers in Linux,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at the Linux Foundation.
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The not-for-profit Linaro plans to offer an open source Linux OS for ARM-based networking equipment
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Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced the formation of the Linaro Networking Group (LNG) with twelve founding member companies including AppliedMicro, ARM, Enea, Freescale, LSI, MontaVista, Nokia Siemens Networks and Texas Instruments (TI) at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC).
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If the tech skills you now put on your resume fail to impress the hiring manager, you might want to get yourself skilled in Linux. And if you are already immersed in Linux, this one goes out to you. According to the newly released Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and Dice, there is an increase in demand for Linux talent that is being met by aggressive recruitment strategies.
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LINUX PROMOTER Linaro has announced that it formed a Linux Networking Group with ARM, Freescale and Texas Instruments among others to push the development of Linux based networking infrastructure.
Linaro, which acts as a developer and hub for firms wanting to put Linux in their products, has put together a Linux Networking Group. The group consists mainly of chip vendors, including ARM, Freescale, LSI and Texas Instruments along with network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens. Its purpose is to research and develop Linux based network infrastructure equipment.
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A senior Linux kernel developer has pointed to an instance of what he calls a lax approach to security in the Linux kernel, citing the case of a serious vulnerability that is now more than a month old and is yet to be fixed.
Jonathan Corbet (pictured above), who is also the editor of the Linux Weekly News website, described in an article how a flaw in the kernel, which was initially discussed on a private mailing list, had been made public with a posting by a developer named Oleg Nesterov.
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The XFS file-system update for the Linux 3.9 kernel isn’t particularly exciting, but it does address some open bugs and regressions for this still very relevant and competitive Linux file-system.
The XFS pull request for Linux 3.9 reads, “Please pull these XFS updates for 3.9-rc1. Here there are primarily fixes for regressions and bugs, but there are a few cleanups too. There are fixes for compound buffers, quota asserts, dir v2 block compaction, mount behavior, use-after-free with AIO, swap extents, an unmount hang, speculative preallocation, write verifiers, the allocator stack switch, recursion on xa_lock, an xfs_buf_find oops, and a memory barrier in xfs_ifunlock.”
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Takashi Iwai has mailed in the sound updates for the Linux 3.9 kernel. This Git pull has the much anticipated HDA Intel audio re-work.
The biggest highlight of the sound updates for Linux 3.9 is the unification of the HD Audio codec driver so that there’s now a generic parser that is used by each HDA codec driver. This big fundamental audio change is covered in more detail in the earlier Phoronix article.
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Average salaries for Linux pros come in at $90,853, compared with $85,619 for tech pros nationwide, according to a Dice survey.
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Applications
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Musique Player for Ubuntu: Not the ideal player if you have a large music collection or if you expect a lot of functionality similar to what you see in a music player like Clementine or Banshee, for example. But it looks great, has last.fm scrobbling support, and even though scanning speed leave a lot to be desired, it works.
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This has to be the find of the day. I was skeptical about the relevance of a full-fledged voice recognition application in a desktop OS like Ubuntu. But all that changed once I saw the video demonstration of the same. Not only does the app looks awesome, it is tightly integrated with Ubuntu’s default notification system. If the app is going to be even half as good as shown in this demo video, that itself is a good enough reason to be excited about it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Terry Cavanagh’s reorientation-oriented platformer VVVVVV is now available on Linux by way of Steam, Cavanagh announced earlier today. The port requires Ubuntu version 12.04 LTS (aka “Precise Pangolin”) running on a machine only slightly more advanced than a George Foreman grill, so chances are good that your box can handle it.
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Life, or indeed business, without Steam must now seem utterly alien to most middling to major PC developers, but X3 developers Egosoft are used to having to justify their presence on the service to resistant pockets of their community. They’ve been doing so for the past seven years, but today revealed a host of new Steam-based features for the series – alongside a few good reasons to consider a “leap of faith” to Valve country.
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Perhaps this is really the year of gaming on Linux, if you are reading this post probably you are interested in gaming and Linux, and I’ve got a good news for you : there is a big sale of games for Linux on Steam until FEB 21, 10AM PST.
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After the official release of Steam for Linux, the next wave of new games for Linux has been launched on this gaming platform.
The first new game is the adventure game The Cave, from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert. The game has full gamepad support, and is therefore perfectly suited for Steam Big Picture.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Sony, the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music has pirated KDE artwork. The preferences-system.png icon from Oxygen is on their Choose your Vaio webpages (next to configure) but impressively is also on the UEFI firmware should you boot up into Assist mode.
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Participation and open access are key themes in Free software. It encourages dynamic community structures that blur the line between technology consumer and creator. This has been so successful that echoes of it can be found throughout the technology world from mobile app user engagement to game community content creation. Bringing such interaction patterns into the mainstream is perhaps one of Free software’s great social accomplishments. That is not to say that all is well: the topic of user empowerment and participation in Free software is often a contentious one. Depending on the day of the week and whom you ask, you may hear that Free software is an empowering agent for users with low barriers and high levels of interaction with developers .. or that there is a growing disconnect between users and the technology projects. Reality lies somewhere between those two poles, but few doubt that improvements could be made. How to do that is a question that floats in the air without many compelling answers. It turns out that there is another challenge facing Free software which could become a terrific opportunity for improving and even redefining user-developer interaction.
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For the next few weeks on mondays we’ll post an hangout-based mini podcast that will cover what to expect from the next iteration of Plasma workspaces, what’s happening in the development of KDE Frameworks 5 and the new Qt5 based goodness that is coming in KDE.
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KDE’s Spark Tablet running Plasma Active user interface was quite a phenomenon during CES 2012, though there was no trace of it during the just concluded CES 2013. Only recently, we showcased a video of Ubuntu 13.04 running on a multi-touch device, now here comes a new one featuring KDE Plasma Active running smoothly on a Nexus 7 tablet.
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It’s just one of my side projects and was an experiment to test how good libfm and Qt are. Since the core library of PCManFM, libfm, is carefully separated from its Gtk+ UI code, theoratically it can be ported to other GUI toolkits. To give it a test, I played with Qt recently. The result is quite satisfactory and impressive. I must admit that working with Qt is quite pleasant.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Categories have now been removed (I personally had this extension that also removes them in 3.6) and instead there are grouped applications. That doesn’t affect people that only were using search.
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Last time around, I had mentioned that I have been able to put down two research questions for my thesis project, where the first was to do a usability test for GNOME3.
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While wandering around trying to see what news catches my eye today, I spotted the release of Porteus 2.0. Porteus is a live distro based on Slackware, featuring a variety of desktop and software choices. Version 2 is based on Slackware 14 and offers of KDE 4, LXDE, Razor-qt and Xfce desktops.
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The KDE 4 desktop is attractive and unobtrusive
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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From time to time we get a trickle of information from the Mandriva camp and a couple of days ago we found out that OpenMandriva Linux is cooking. It was sandwiched in a post updating folks on the state of the OpenMandriva Project.
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LAST AUTUMN I encountered and wrote about a serious glitch in a software maintenance upgrade distributed by Mageia Linux, the popular fork of Mandriva Linux that I’ve had installed on my desktop PC for about a year. Now the Mageia Linux distribution has permanently resolved that problem.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 11 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a multi-purpose Linux distribution based on Gentoo. Installation images for GNOME 3, KDE, MATE, and Xfce desktop environments were made available for download, besides those for CoreCDX, HardenedServer, ServerBase and SpinBase.
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Red Hat Family
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6WIND, the gold standard for data plane processing in software-defined networks, today announced the release of the 6WINDGate software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading open source platform for enterprises, providing a high-performance networking software solution for applications such as mobile infrastructure, network appliances and data center networking. The 6WINDGate networking software deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables equipment manufacturers to accelerate the development time for networking equipment that delivers critical CAPEX and OPEX improvements for service providers. 6WIND will be discussing the solution at two upcoming conferences: in booth #7A87 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and in booth #854 at RSA Conference in San Francisco.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its big data direction and solutions to satisfy enterprise requirements for highly reliable, scalable, and manageable solutions to effectively run their big data analytics workloads. In addition, Red Hat announced that the company will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the ApacheTMHadoop open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments, and that Red Hat is building a robust network of ecosystem and enterprise integration partners to deliver comprehensive big data solutions to enterprise customers. This is another example of Red Hat’s strategic commitment to big data customers and its continuing efforts to provide them with enterprise solutions through community-driven innovation.
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Zadara™ Storage, the innovator in cloud block storage that brought Private Storage to the Cloud , announced today their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based storage AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are now available in the AWS Marketplace. The inclusion of the Zadara Red Hat AMIs in the AWS Marketplace makes Enterprise-class, Storage-as-a-Service a viable and attractive solution for Network Attached Storage (NAS) users and database users requiring shared storage. This advancement provides Native Red Hat Cluster Services with MySQL, and easy, preconfigured access to Enterprise-class NAS on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Zadara Red Hat AMIs provide users the benefits of a pure cloud storage solution, plus the ease of implementation that comes with preconfigured images.
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Raleigh-based open source software company Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has announced a new data direction, with new products and new ways to deliver big data solutions to customers.
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Red Hat’s “Community Gardener” Karsten Wade is a SCALE veteran: A former keynoter and presenter, Karsten is an 18-year IT industry veteran, and has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, developer advocate, and open source specialist. Karsten will be giving the presentation “How to build an open community infrastructure of participation” on Friday, Feb. 22, at 1:30 p.m. in room Los Angeles C.
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vb-news.net, an investment community with a special focus on updating investors with recent news on the U.S. stock market, issues news alert on the following stocks:-
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) shares fell 0.75% and is trading at $51.32. Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat) is engaged in providing open source software solutions to the enterprise, including its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat operates primarily on the basis of three geographic business units: the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific.
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Fedora
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Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat may be getting ready to start the Enterprise Linux 7 cycle later this year, but the pace of updates to the current RHEL 6 stack continues apace with the rollout of RHEL 6.4.
Enterprise Linux 6.4 went into beta back in December and is now ready for prime time, according to Shadowman, so if you have your RHEL support contracts in place and you want to use some of the new features, “Gentleman, start your downloads!”
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Debian Family
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I now have a system that will distribute a customized operating system in a few minutes, something impossible with Microsoft without paying for the privilege of using your own hardware or keeping the distribution in-house. I have defaults which are closer to my idea of what a PC should be than Canonical’s choice. With hundreds of distros available, the possibilities via installation and configuration are endless. So, don’t suffer in silence if your OS will not do what you want the way you want to do it. Install GNU/Linux!
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Ten years ago, this very day, my first Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository. It was an addon for Mozilla Composer, Daniel Glazman’s Cascades.
On the same day, my second Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository as well. It was an addon for Mozilla Browser, Checky.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Windows 8′s tile-based interface puts a bold new spin on the familiar Windows interface—so bold that many long-time Windows users are threatening to jump ship to another operating system rather than learn Microsoft’s “modern” UI. Of course, you’ll still find yourself in foreign territory even if you actually follow through and make the jump. Installing a new operating system is easy, but wrapping your head around an alien environment can be more difficult, even if you’re using a comparatively user-friendly OS like Ubuntu Linux.
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That’s right folks after over four years of desktop, server and cloud innovation and talk – Shuttleworth is still not actually making money from Linux. If you were to look back and see how long it took Shuttleworth to make money on his first company — Thawte (for SSL certificates)- I strongly suspect the road was not as long.
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Canonical is the most interesting company in the technology industry today. They are the bleeding edge. Even though I left the Ubuntu fold a few years ago, I’m always drawn in by curiosity to see what they are up to next. The Ubuntu portfolio has recently expanded to cover nearly the entire spectrum of computing, and now offer a single platform for the cloud, servers, desktops, tablets, phones, and television. I can see what they are building, and I love the concept, but previous experience with Ubuntu leave me wary of the experience they’ll be able to deliver.
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The early and surprisingly nice version bodes well for Canonical’s Linux smartphone — but you may not want to install it yourself
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Canonical’s preview of a smartphone- and tablet-friendly flavor of Ubuntu has finally arrived for folks willing to flash a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 or a Nexus tablet. Shuttleworth and friends stress that the release is intended for developers and enthusiasts — not those eyeing it as a daily driver, mind you — and that it’s not yet kitted out with its complete functionality. As of now, the Ubuntu touch dev preview contains the shell, core applications,
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Furthering its plans to broaden the reach of the Ubuntu Linux distribution from PCs and servers to mobile devices, Canonical on Tuesday unveiled its new user “experience” layer for tablets.
The fondleslab-friendly UI follows on from the version of Ubuntu for smartphones, which Canonical announced last week.
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Flavours and Variants
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Simply put, it has become really boring to review any Linux Mint distro as I need to write the same words again and again. Things work so perfect with Mint and honestly, I haven’t seen any other Linux distro better than Mint in terms of stability and performance. Last year when I reviewed Linux Mint 13 XFCE (the long term support one), I coined the release as the best of the year for any XFCE distro. Same words go for Linux Mint 14 XFCE as well, it just only got better from the last release.
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As the PC Industry is having trouble achieving growth, transformation has become a new trend among the industry players, Wistron chairman Simon Lin has told Digitimes in a recent interview. Dell’s privatization is just a start, and PC brand vendors are seemingly driving faster and faster on a steep, narrow, winding mountain road. If Taiwan’s PC supply chain players fail to keep up, they may be left behind or fall off the cliff at a sharp turn trying to catch up; however, such crises may turn out to be new opportunities for the Taiwan players, Lin believes.
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Phones
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For I.B.M., mobile computing has come of age. At least, smartphones and tablets may be popular enough to make I.B.M. several billion dollars.
The company is announcing a major mobile initiative involving software, services and partnerships with other large vendors. I.B.M. plans to deploy consultants to give companies mobile shopping strategies, write mobile apps, crunch mobile data and manage a company’s own mobile assets securely.
Thousands of employees have been trained in mobile technologies, I.B.M. says, and corporate millions will be spent on research and acquisitions in coming years. I.B.M. also announced a deal with AT&T to offer software developers access to mobile applications from AT&T’s cloud.
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The men and women behind the open source Tizen mobile OS platform have stated an early claim to win developer hearts and minds ahead of Mobile World Congress next week with the official release of Tizen 2.0 source code and SDK.
After a particularly slow start since its launch in by the Linux Foundation in September 2011, the platform received a massive boost when the world’s largest handset maker Samsung confirmed last month that it would launch devices based on the OS.
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Ballnux
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The Samsung Galaxy S4 is widely anticipated to be announced at a Samsung Unpacked event in March, so it’s no surprise that we’ve started to see leaked information about the device. Today, we’ve got a few images from a trusted Chinese accessory manufacturer that show two different cases for the Samsung Galaxy S4.
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Android
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Accellion, a California based mobile file sharing supplier, has introduced a Mobile Productivity Suite which it says combines mobile content creation and editing with secure file sync and sharing.
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Canonical has introduced the Ubuntu tablet interface, which will compete with Android, iOS and Windows with its own take on multitasking. The launch is the next step in Canonical’s quest to unify phones, tablets, PCs and TVs.
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Archos is all set to enter the mobile arena with the launch of three new Android-powered smartphones later this year. According to a report by Russian publication Hi-Tech, the French consumer electronics company will soon add a range of Platinum handsets running Android to its portfolio.
The company recently announced three “Platinum” tablets that come equipped with high-definition IPS displays, 1.2GHz quad-core processors, microSD ports, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.1 at a low price tag.
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CONFESSION time. We were wrong! And a few readers have taken the trouble to set us straight on the matter of photo file transfer from iPad to computer.
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote: ”Android tablets are better than Apple iOS devices for this process because when you get home you can connect them to your PC and transfer the photo files without having the torment of iTunes.”
We were basing our assertion on experience with a first-generation iPad and a Windows PC. It turns out that newer iPads, running iOS 6, can be connected to a PC and they show up in the device list under My Computer.
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When Android 4.2.2 quietly debuted last week, most users were left guessing about what exactly had been included in the software update. Helpful community sites like AndroidPolice had put together a thorough listing of some of the new features in Android 4.2.2, but any official listing of updates had yet to be made. Today, Google published its official changelog for its Android 4.2.2 update, along with listing everything else that comes as a part of the Jelly Bean package.
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HP has decided to take another hack at tablets, this time using Android as the operating system. I don’t expect the results to be much different from last time.
For those of you who don’t remember — and HP’s foray into tablets was so brief you would be forgiven if you’ve forgotten — HP bought Palm in April, 2010 for $1.2 billion. The idea at the time was take webOS, Palm’s mobile operating environment and build an HP line of tablets and mobile phones.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In the run up to Mobile World Congress next week, Canonical has presented what it plans to offer with its tablet experience. The company’s aim is to have a range of convergent devices, with phones, tablets, desktops and TVs all running the same code base and offering optimised Unity-based user interfaces. Ubuntu for TV was unveiled at CES in January 2012. Next, it launched Ubuntu for Phones at the start of January 2013. But the third of the range of Ubuntu devices, tablets, had yet to be shown – now, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth has presented the company’s concept for tablets in a video:
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Slowly but surely, Ubuntu is heading in many new directions. Last year, Ubuntu TV ramped up, this year Ubuntu phones are upon us, and Canonical is also introducing features in Ubuntu designed for enterprises that may be tired of paying heavy licensing fees for proprietary software. This week, Canonical announced Ubuntu for Tablets (see the video here), which the company says will offer “unique multitasking productivity, effortless navigation and defense-ready security.”
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Long known as the standard-bearer for open source operating system (OS) Linux, Ubuntu today faces an existential crisis. These days, Linux has permeated everywhere in the sense that it still remains as a core layer beneath the Android OS. Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not find itself in that equation. Mostly, smartphones are all locked-down – enthusiast open source does not exist unless drivers are available.
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If you happen to journey over to the Ubuntu home page these days you see a notice that alerts you to the fact that the Mobile World Congress will be graced by tablets that are driven by Ubuntu’s Linux operating system.
Under the moniker of Tastefully Tactile it is pushing it as a solid alternative in the post-PC era, a multitasking tool that provides the flexibility and functionality that modern users are seeking in their tablets.
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SmartQ appear to still be trucking, selling rather more polished products these days. However, I learned my lesson last time. For my next venture into the tablet world, I won’t be going with that pretty-much-unknown Chinese box-shipper.
No, no. I’m going with a completely different pretty-much-unknown Chinese box-shipper!
After returning the RedEye – yeah, I returned it, after re-configuration the 880 is just working too well to keep fiddling with the RedEye – I had a couple hundred bucks languishing in my Amazon account, and that’s not enough for a new NAS box, so I figured I’d spend it on a Ainol Novo7 Flame (also known as the Fire – apparently they are the same hardware, but sold as the ‘Fire’ in Asia with Chinese-localized firmware, and ‘Flame’ in the rest of the world with English-localized firmware). The last one in stock at amazon.ca in fact, so sorry if anyone else wanted one.
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Well M$ and many others claimed smart thingies were a “flash in the pan” but it’s not looking that way to me. Huge growth sustained over years is not a fad but a movement to smaller cheaper computers. Apple lost dominance in smartphones last year and look to lose dominance in tablets this year. Meanwhile, M$ rides a sinking ship.
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In the last months and years I had to deal with various requirements people have regarding groupware ecosystems. Open Source solutions have matured in this area and this article highlights some needs, but also some common pitfalls.
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The VAR Guy has long-respected Zimbra, the open-source email platform that VMware (NYSE: VMW) acquired from Yahoo in 2010. VMware has been pretty silent about Zimbra in recent months, and VMware’s decision in January 2013 to deemphasize certain products has triggered rumors that Zimbra may be in trouble. But is it?
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There are many in the FOSS community who pay lip service to the cause of women’s involvement in technology. It is a nice soapbox from which to grandstand and gain prominence. Raising funds is also easy when one promotes such a cause.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google’s Chrome team has ported a new app launcher to the Chrome browser dev channel on Windows. The new feature enables users to quickly open apps when outside of the browser. As of now, the launcher experience is only available on Windows, but it will soon be coming to OS X and Linux.
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Chromebooks have had the luxury of an app launcher for quite a while, but now Windows users can get in on the action too, provided they download the latest version of Chrome from the browser’s dev channel. In order for the launcher to appear in the taskbar, however, those running the fresh release will need to install a Chrome packaged app — an application written in HTML,
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Mozilla
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The latest release of Mozilla’s Firefox open source web browser, version 19, brings few new features but does close four critical security holes. The release notes list only the arrival of PDF.js, the PDF viewer written in JavaScript, as a new feature. This, it is hoped, should reduce users’ exposure to malicious PDF documents which exploit third party PDF reader plugins to get access to the underlying operating system.
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Mozilla has released Firefox Beta 20.0b1, the first public beta of a landmark release.
Like its predecessor, Firefox 19 FINAL, which debuted the new inline PDF viewer, Firefox Beta 20.0b1 looks set to unveil another major new feature to the Firefox armoury: a redesigned, panel-based download manager.
Version 20 also includes a major refresh of the Developer toolbar, providing tweaked and redesigned access to all of the major components, plus an option to view the tools in a separate window. A new Javascript benchmarking tool has also been added.
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Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux introduces a built-in browser PDF viewer that allows you to read PDFs directly within the browser, making reading PDFs easier because you don’t have to download the content or read it in a plugin like Reader. For example, you can use the PDF viewer to check out a menu from your favorite restaurant, view and print concert tickets or read reports without having to interrupt your browsing experience with extra clicks or downloads.
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When surfing a website, encountering a PDF file is one of those minor annoyances I wish I did not have to deal with. That’s because it interrupts the Web experience. With the release of a built-in PDF reader for Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation, such interruptions are now history.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack cloud computing platform, which already has its own foundation and about 150 tech companies–many of them heavy hitters–supporting it, is starting to get support from key infrastructure players. On Wednesday, Seagate said that it will become a new corporate sponsor of both OpenStack and the Open Compute Project. The company announced that it “will help cloud builders to develop more scalable, customizable solutions using open platforms while reducing operating costs and providing benefits for consumers in the marketplace.”
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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Healthcare
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The NOSH ChartingSystem v1.3 was released on December 27th and is available for download via Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/~shihjay2. More details about the project are available at http://noshemr.wordpress.com.
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Business
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I’ve not tried a document management system before, but these videos of LibreOffice checking documents in & out of document management systems via the new CMIS interfaces added in LibreOffice 4.0 make it look really easy. I’d like to try a group collaboration using one of these systems.
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Funding
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Open-source search provider Elasticsearch has secured $24 million in Series B venture funding, showing business demand for free and simple big-data analytics. Mike Volpi of Index Ventures led the funding round, which included contributions from Benchmark Capital and SV Angel.
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Project Releases
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The Blender Foundation has announced the release of version 2.66 of the truly awesome 3D graphics and design application Blender. Among new features in this release are: rigid body physics simulation; dynamic topology sculpting; and matcap display. Other new features include Cycles hair rendering, support for high pixel density displays, much better handling of premultiplied and straight alpha transparency, a vertex bevel tool, a mesh cache modifier and a new SPH particle fluid dynamics solver.
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Public Services/Government
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After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we’re immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills, and much more.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow.
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Thank you for your participation in the We the People platform. The Obama Administration agrees that citizens deserve easy access to the results of research their tax dollars have paid for. As you may know, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been looking into this issue for some time and has reached out to the public on two occasions for input on the question of how best to achieve this goal of democratizing the results of federally-funded research. Your petition has been important to our discussions of this issue.
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Open Hardware
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Chip maker Marvell has notched up its third public design win for an ARM server, this one at Baidu, one of the two big search engine giants in China.
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Reid Serozi (@reidserozi), founder of TriangleWiki, explains how the project was created from the structure of LocalWiki, a platform and storage hub for events, people, places, and things in an area. Information like this is put on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook regularly, but only lasts for a few seconds, a few minutes, or if we’re lucky, a few days. LocalWikis are created to capture this content for the longterm.
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Pope Benedict XVI resigned after an internal investigation informed him about a web of blackmail, corruption and gay sex in the Vatican, Italian media reports say.
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I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that SCO Group, now calling itself TSG, has been granted its wish by its most reliable fairy godmother, the Delaware bankruptcy court, and will be allowed to destroy or dispose of its remaining business records and computers. Nobody cared enough to intervene to block, not that the outcome would have been any different,
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Science
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The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.
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Health/Nutrition
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Today the nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana released the results of the largest seafood fraud survey to date. Findings indicated that consumers need to be concerned with more than just horse meat in hamburgers or meat glue in steaks and other products.
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Security
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Data captured by smartphone sensors could help criminals guess codes used to lock the gadgets, say security researchers.
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Alleged “hacktivist” Barrett Brown, the 31-year old mislabeled “spokesman” for the shadowy hacker collective known as Anonymous, faces federal charges that could put him away for over a hundred years. Did he engage in a spree of murders? Run a child-sex ring? Not quite. His crime: making leaked e-mails accessible to the public—documents that shine a light on the shadowy world of intelligence contracting in the post-9/11 era.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Oscar-nominated film resurrects questions about the Al Qaeda leader’s death—all six versions of it.
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President Obama announced Friday that about 100 U.S. troops have been deployed to the West African country of Niger, where defense officials said they are setting up a drone base to spy on al-Qaeda fighters in the Sahara
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Every four years, we elect a new criminal because that’s become the precise job description.
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Lessening the need to “send our troops into harm’s way” may actually increase the odds of future military interventions.
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My client, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, will begin his thirty-month prison sentence on February 28 in Loretto, Pennsylvania. But even though Kiriakou has already been sentenced, the government still monitors him. And while the government continues to complain about John’s public appearances and the events held in his honor, tonight we will send him off in style at a gala reception at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, DC.
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What would Washington say if Vladimir Putin asserted the right to use drones to take out anyone he secretly determined was an enemy of Russia?
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“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
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It was most surprising to come across the following entry at the website for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses for Terrorism (known by the acronym START), which is run by the Department of Homeland Security out of the University of Maryland. According to DHS, START is one of their “centers of excellence,” an academic center sponsored by the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate.
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The secret to commiting the perfect murder, killing someone and getting away with it, is to become a celebrity first. The media wave yesterday and today is that Pistorius is suddenly vindicated by the inarticulate policeman who could not cope with a very glib defence lawyer. It is like watching “Chicago” for real.
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The BBC has used “Bigger than 7/7″ as the strapline for every alleged Muslim terror plot these past years…
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Beijing has said in its continued retaliation against allegations that the People’s Liberation Army is behind large-scale cyber attacks.
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Former CIA agent John Kiriakou, 48, is heading to prison for 30 months for whistleblowing on torture.
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RALEIGH, N.C. – The federal prosecution of five former employees of the private security firm Blackwater has crumbled after the defendants said they were acting at the behest of the CIA by providing five guns as gifts to King Abdullah II of Jordan.
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The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was motivated, in part, by the 2008 “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” the internet activist had penned advocating for civil disobedience against copyright law, Swartz’s attorney confirmed Friday.
The revelation underscores that the hacking charges against the former director of Demand Progress were bolstered by the 26-year-old’s philosophy of a world unhindered by copyright law, a world in which he said it was a “moral imperative” to unshackle the “privatization of knowledge.”
The Huffington Post first revealed the matter Friday, citing anonymous sources familiar with a closed-door briefing between the Justice Department and members and staff of the House Oversight Committee.
Swartz, who had also written about his own depression, was found dead at his Brooklyn apartment last month after committing suicide. He was under indictment (.pdf) in Massachusetts for more than a dozen counts of computer hacking and wire fraud in connection to the downloading of millions of academic articles from a subscription database at MIT. An internet sensation who helped develop the Creative Commons and was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Wired parent company Condé Nast, Swartz had apparently planned to release to the public the millions of JSTOR academic papers he downloaded.
His attorney, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors were “very focused” on the manifesto Swartz penned from Italy.
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Cablegate
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Guatemalan officials are still trying to confirm if Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, one of the world’s most powerful drug lords, died during a gunfight in Peten, Guatemala near the Mexican border.
“Residents who witnessed the clashes have told authorities that one of the two dead men resembled the Mexican drug baron,” reports Sky News, while The Los Angeles Times reported late last night that forensic teams were headed to Peten to get confirmation of Guzman’s death. There are conflicting reports from the Guatemalan government whether bodies were actually found on the scene.
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The White House warned today of the threat posed by WikiLeaks, LulzSec, and other “hacktivist” groups that have the ability to target U.S. companies and expropriate confidential data.
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The accused hacker condemns persecution of Aaron Swartz and others, while justice system flaws dog his own case
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Hammond’s words echo those of, among others, Swartz’s family…
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Amid a growing call for new cybersecurity protections in the United States, the US government has issued a report that reconfirms Washington’s interest in shutting down WikiLeaks and other underground information-sharing organizations.
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Hacker Jeremy Hammond has been in prison for over a year after being embroiled in an FBI/Wikileaks scandal. We’re joined by Michael Ratner, of Hammond’s legal team.
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New Obama administration strategy says WikiLeaks might perform “economic espionage against US companies”
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The tragic death of internet freedom fighter Aaron Swartz reveals the government’s flawed “cyber security strategy” as well as its systematic corruption involving computer crime investigations, intellectual property law, and government/corporate transparency. In a society supposedly based on principles of democracy and due process, Aaron’s efforts to liberate the internet, including free distribution of JSTOR academic essays, access to public court records on PACER, stopping the passage of SOPA/PIPA, and developing the Creative Commons, make him a hero, not a criminal. It is not the “crimes” Aaron may have committed that made him a target of federal prosecution, but his ideas – elaborated in his “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” – that the government has found so dangerous. The United States Attorney’s aggressive prosecution, riddled with abuse and misconduct, is what led to the death of this hero. This sad and angering chapter should serve as a wake up call for all of us to acknowledge the danger inherent in our criminal justice system.
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Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events — among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s celebrated leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters — undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, open sources — each of these constitutes a path out of the government’s informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish.
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Since President Obama took office, his administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, invoking the Espionage Act to prosecute more people under the law than all previous presidents combined. One of those defendants is Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence officer accused of leaking tens of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Since his arrest, Manning has spent nearly 1,000 days (that milestone date comes this Saturday) in prison without being tried, a significant amount of that time under deplorable conditions at the Quantico Marine base in Virgina. Meanwhile, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, remains hunkered down at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fearful that if he leaves to face sex crime questioning in Sweden he will be extradited to the United States to also face espionage charges.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Sea Shepherd is claiming victory after Japan temporarily suspended its annual whale hunt in the Southern Ocean.
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The SSS Bob Barker and SSS Steve Irwin have been rammed by the Japanese whaling fleet’s massive factory vessel, the Nisshin Maru. The floating slaughter-house is eight times the mass of the Steve Irwin.
The Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin were behind Sun Laurel, Steve Irwin on portside, Bob Barker on starboard.
On loudspeaker, the Shonan Maru No. 2 ordered Sea Shepherd’s Australian flagged ship, the SSS Sam Simon, which is located in the Australian Antarctic Territory, to leave the area on the orders of the Government of Japan. Concussion grenades were thrown at the Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin by the crew of the Nissin Maru.
Captain Peter Hammarstedt radioed the whaling fleet’s factory vessel, the Nisshin Maru, and told them that the Bob Barker intended to maintain course and speed, that the moral and legal obligation to avoid the collision was on the Nisshin Maru.
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This wave of “ag-gag” bills would criminalize whistleblowers, investigators, and journalists who expose animal welfare abuses at factory farms and slaughterhouses. Ten states considered “ag-gag” bills last year, and Iowa, Missouri, and Utah approved them. Even more are soon to follow.
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NASA climatologist James Hansen has tried to explain to Nocera why he’s so wrong about the tar sands, but Nocera’s account of their argument makes it seem like explaining anything to him would be an uphill battle.
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Foreign Minister Bob Carr’s decision not to raise Julian Assange’s case with his Swedish counterpart next week appears to contradict an undertaking he gave to the Australian Greens a fortnight ago.
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Finance
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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) task force received ample attention from news and activist organizations alike following its dramatic announcement at last year’s State of the Union Address. The task force was supposed to investigate and prosecute Wall Street fraud that led to the housing bubble and the eventual collapse of the broader economy. FDL alum David Dayen’s recent piece in Salon reminds us that, one year later, the “new” task force has essentially amounted to what the “old” task force always was: “a conduit for press releases about investigative actions already in progress.”
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It is a little bit interesting that the New York Times never loses its enthusiasm for Big Government. They publish articles lauding proposals by politicians to spend billions in taxpayer money on something that is supposed to do a lot of good. Then a year later the newspaper will publish an article about how great it is that the do-gooding is actually happening. Then a year or two later the newspaper will do a follow-up about how much or most of the money turned out to be wasted, funneled into the pockets of cronies, etc. These cycles continue, usually about 50 of them in parallel, without the Times ever running an article on how government spending tends to be wasteful and to result in the enrichment of cronies.
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Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski (4/12/12) showed how Apple keeps an office in Nevada to avoid millions in California state taxes…
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Now, you can argue about what “wealthy” is, but I think you would find pretty widespread agreement on what wealthy isn’t: $50,000 a year. If you sent the New York Times an op-ed outlining your plan to balance the budget by raising taxes on “wealthy” people who make 50k a year or more, it would be put in the same pile that gets the submissions about Elvis’s UFO diet. But when you’re talking about cutting entitlements, if you want to call those people “wealthy,” that’s perfectly reasonable.
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Israel has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild.
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Day after day, whenever anyone challenges the TBTF banks’ scale, they are slammed down with a mutually assured destruction message that limitations would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance. So what if you were to discover, based on Bloomberg’s calculations,
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On television, in interviews and in meetings with investors, executives of the biggest U.S. banks — notably JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon — make the case that size is a competitive advantage. It helps them lower costs and vie for customers on an international scale. Limiting it, they warn, would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Last week, Obama issued an executive order on cybersecurity…
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Madison, WI — One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless urgent action is taken. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you.
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Fix the Debt is the most hypocritical corporate PR campaign in decades, an ambitious attempt to convince the country that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner and that urgent action is needed. Its strategy is pure astroturf: assemble power players in business and government under an activist banner, then take the message outside the Beltway and give it the appearance of grassroots activism by manufacturing an emergency to infuse a sense of imminent crisis.
Behind this strategy are no fewer than 127 CEOs and even more “statesmen” pushing for a “grand bargain” to draw up an austerity budget by July 4. With many firms kicking in $1 million each on top of Peterson’s $5 million in seed money, this latest incarnation of the Peterson message machine must be taken seriously.
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Fix the Debt financier Peter G. Peterson knows a thing or two about debt: he’s an expert at creating it. Peterson founded the private equity firm Blackstone Group in 1985 with Stephen Schwarzman (who compared raising taxes to “when Hitler invaded Poland”). Private equity firms don’t contribute much to the economy; they don’t make cars or milk the cows. Too frequently, they buy firms to loot them. After a leveraged buyout, they can
leave companies so loaded up with debt they are forced to immediately slash their workforce or employees’ retirement security.
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The U.S. Supreme Court could open the door to even more money in politics than it did in the disastrous 2010 decision Citizens United v FEC as it considers a new case challenging limits on how much wealthy donors can give directly to federal candidates and political parties. If the court sides with the challengers in McCutcheon v FEC, political power and influence in America would be further concentrated in the hands of just a few wealthy donors.
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I WATCHED “Zero Dark Thirty” not as a former F.B.I. special agent who spent a decade chasing, interrogating and prosecuting top members of Al Qaeda but as someone who enjoys Hollywood movies. As a movie, I enjoyed it. As history, it’s bunk.
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[by] A former F.B.I. special agent who interrogated Qaeda detainees and the author of “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.”
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The National Intelligence Service (NIS) dismissed an employee for informing the Democratic United Party of allegations that the NIS was manipulating public opinion prior to the presidential election.
The agency went further and reported the employee to the prosecution on charges of violating the National Intelligence Service Act. Civic organizations are denouncing the NIS for attempting to hide the truth instead of trying to right their wrongs.
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Censorship
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A quick glance might give you the impression Wilentz’s grudge is all about a seemingly obscure, dusty corner of history (Henry Wallace and the 1948 election) that doesn’t affect anyone’s life today one way or the other. But it’s not. Wilentz is pissed off because he understands Untold History is a damning indictment of an entire worldview – that of his political patrons and all comfortable establishment historians like him. And that worldview is genuinely a matter of life and death for all Americans in 2013. If you’d prefer that the plane you’re taking next week not get hit by an surface-to-air missile liberated by Islamists from Libya’s stockpile, and that you not personally get torn into several large chunks at 7,000 feet, you really should pay attention to this.
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Privacy
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One month after the terrible opinion vote of the “Consumers” (IMCO) Committee, MEPs from the “Industry” (ITRE) committee, and to a lesser extent from the “Employment” (EMPL) one, have also voted to weaken protection of EU citizens’ privacy. In the ITRE committee, because of the support of Members of the liberal (ALDE) group, conservatives’ amendments lifting restrictions on the collection, processing and resale of citizens’ personal data by companies have been adopted. Before the “Legal Affairs” (JURI) committee’s opinion vote1 and the main, crucial, “Civil Liberties” (LIBE) committee’s report vote2, citizens should act and urge their MEPs to break away from big corporations’ lobbying and to protect their fundamental right to privacy.
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The shared nightmare of the later 20th century was totalitarian governments taking over under the pretense of offering their citizens security: “Big Brother,” in Orwell’s phrase. Five years ago, Cory Doctorow’s novel “Little Brother” seemed to say that we could stop worrying about all that.
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The PBS series NOVA, “Rise of the Drones,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip, the system is capable of high-resolution monitoring and recording of an entire city. (The clip was written about in DefenseTech and in Slate.)
In the clip, the developer explains how the technology (which he also refers to with the apt name “Wide Area Persistent Stare”) is “equivalent to having up to a hundred Predators look at an area the size of a medium-sized city at once.”
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Civil Rights
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Craig Murray may be Britain’s most controversial former Ambassador. He was dismissed from his post in Uzbekistan in 2004 amid lurid allegations about his personal life, and medically evacuated from there after becoming dangerously ill. He concludes he was poisoned and suspects CIA involvement.
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“I considered myself very fortunate to be accused of treason and not of terrorism. When The National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA) was signed into law by the President on New Year’s Eve, 2012, it empowered the Armed Forces to engage in civilian law enforcement and to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus, along with the 1st, 5th, 6th and 14th Amendment rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. In the history of America, this insidious law posed the greatest threat to civil freedoms.
“The war on terror isn’t a war on a country or a people; it’s a war on a tactical operation. Therefore, it has no restrictions and is endless. Subsequently, anyone alleged to be a threat to the nation’s stability or security, suspected of sympathizing with or supporting a person or group that the U.S. government designates a terrorist organization or an affiliate, may be imprisoned without charge or trial eternally.
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Actually, this time I think it matters more than usual. On the Five (2/19/13), a discussion of rape on college campuses included what you might call a skeptic’s take: Maybe there’s not really any such thing.
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In our diverse student body, there are voices that have expressed their distaste for the American military and foreign policy. Many argue that America is imperialistic or that it uses its military for personal gain behind a façade of righteousness.
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Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s prosecutorial style of questioning Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, came so close to innuendo that it raised eyebrows in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Cruz’s inquiry into Hagel’s past associations “out of bounds, quite frankly.” The Times reported that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, rebuked Cruz for insinuating, without evidence, that Hagel may have collected speaking fees from North Korea. Some Democrats went so far as to liken Cruz, who is a newcomer to the Senate, to a darkly divisive predecessor, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusades devolved into infamous witch hunts. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, stopped short of invoking McCarthy’s name, but there was no mistaking her allusion when she talked about being reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.”
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It’s rare that we want strangers pawing through our digital devices, giving them the opportunity to peruse emails, private messages, photos, Twitter DMs, Facebook pokes, and all the other myriad bits of our personal life captured by the digital umbilical cords that are our smartphones. And when I say “rare,” I mean that it’s something we hope never, ever happens to us. But if you’re crossing the border, it’s something that could happen to you; it happens to thousands of people each year. It even happens to nominally-famous types.
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A German government minister called Sunday for a thorough probe into allegations that foreign seasonal workers hired in Germany by US online retail giant Amazon were harassed and intimidated.
Labour Minister Ursula von der Leyen told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that any proof of wrongdoing could result in serious consequences for the temporary employment agency used by Amazon.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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A few years ago the EU agreed a package of measures for the EU telecoms market. Those delivered important new rules and rights for people who use landlines, mobiles and the Internet – and that means you!
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DRM
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That qualification reflects the uncertainty of the times. As volumes printed on paper evolve to newer media – at some point, a printed volume seems likely to become a luxury item – we’re obliged to think about what constitutes a book in the digital age. I used to think I knew the answer, but I’m no longer remotely sure. Two recent events have not cleared things up. After listening to smart and well-informed speakers at a “Future of Publishing” panel in California late last year, as well as at last week’s “O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing” conference in New York City, I found myself, if anything, less certain.
It was easy, not so long ago, to say, “This is a book, and this isn’t.” From the early Codex to hand-penned Bibles (created by “scribes”), Gutenberg’s printing press through the late 20th century, a book was a collection of bound pages. But as has happened with other media forms, digital technology has blurred the lines we once took for granted.
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DRM, also known as Digital Repression Management, is one of the most dangerous technologies with insecure media company want to use for their ‘works’ such as online movies, games and books. While companies like Apple succeeded in getting rid of DRM from their ‘music’, now HTML5 is heading in the same direction, Google has implemented DRM in its Chrome OS with support for WebM.
Google pushed an updated for the stable channel of Chrome OS bringing it up to the version 25.0.1364.87 for Samsung Chromebooks. One of the most notable ‘features’ of this update is HTML5 on Chrome OS has been restricted with DRM.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The phrase “my kingdom for a horse” has become something of a cliche, depicting politics as the ultimate zero sum game. Trade negotiations, on the other hand, are all about ambit claims concerning which, over time, concessions are made.
The Australian team, led by the Trade Minister, Mark Vaile, which negotiated the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), was never likely to insist on a “sugar access for an FTA” line. Just as the US team, under trade representative Bob Zoellick, was unlikely to demand an “abandon Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme or no FTA” outcome.
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Trademarks
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Over the Python Software Foundation’s protests, POBox Hosting called its service ‘Python Cloud’ — and saw a harsh reaction from the global open source developer community
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Copyrights
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We’ve talked before about rich guy Alki David’s “revenge” lawsuit against CBS for its lawsuit against his internet TV service. He and some musicians he’s convinced to join the lawsuit are alleging, ridiculously, that CBS should be liable for infringement itself, based on a convoluted copyright liability theory (and by “convoluted” we mean “totally bogus”) involving the fact that CNET, which is owned by CBS Interactive, offers downloads of file sharing software on its Download.com platform, while its News.com news and reviews site have published news stories and reviews about using file sharing software. Late last year, they took the case to another level seeking an injunction against all BitTorrent downloads from CBS Interactive sites.
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s
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The winner, “It’s Your Birthday,” was selected by a panel of judges that included Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, Bloomberg Law reports. Radio station WFMU teamed with the Free Music Archive to replace the copyrighted song with one in the public domain.
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Posted in FSF, Ubuntu, Videos at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Stallman speaks about Canonical’s distribution of GNU/Linux in new interview
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02.20.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The government of the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura published Linex 2013 on Monday last week. This tailored version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution was unveiled in the city of Mérida by Sergio Velázquez, secretary general for the regions department for Employment, Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation and Manuel Velardo, director of Cenatic, Spain’s open source resource centre.
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A new report shows Linux experience is in greater demand — and, hiring managers say, harder to find — than in past years.
The 2013 Linux Jobs Report, released today by the Linux Foundation, surveyed 850 hiring managers and 2,600 Linus pros and found that Linux might be a good area of focus for aspiring techsters.
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Desktop
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Server
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IBM’s $80 million data centre in South Auckland has now been down for more than 30 hours and customers say the outage is having a serious impact on their businesses.
One east Auckland school has been left completely stranded in the same week that it hosts a visit from the Education Review Office (ERO).
IBM said today from Sydney that it had a team of global experts working on the outage as a high priority.
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Kernel Space
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Some Linux kernel releases have more colorful names than others. Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.8 kernel on Monday, giving it the codename Unicycling Gorilla.
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There is more to a hard drive than its size. While the amount of disk space is all you see marketed about a hard drive on a sales page, there is actually an extensive amount of coding that goes into making a hard drive capable of handling your applications and data in the first place. Most Linux distributions currently default to using the ext4 file system, but the future for many of them lies with the B-tree file system, better known as Btrfs.
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Applications
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The FlightGear project has released version 2.10 of the open source flight simulator. The most obvious improvements are in the simulation of the environment, weather and computer-controlled aircraft, but the developers have also put a lot of work into the rendering engine, the main results of which are more natural rendering of dazzle effects, restricted fields of view during night flights, and shadows.
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The powerful, lightweight and extremely popular Transmission BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating system reached version 2.77 a few minutes ago.
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Proprietary
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Someone at the paper must have seen the irony here and decided to change it; most readers saw instead “Ecuador’s President Shows Confidence About Re-election, Too Much for Some.”
But the first headline more accurately summarized the article–and the worldview of outlets like the New York Times, which take a far more critical approach towards political leaders on the left.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Here’s another reason for computer users to make the switch to Linux: popular gaming service Steam has arrived on the platform.
At least 60 supported games come bundled with Steam for Linux, along with other features like online play, achievements and friend lists, according to a report on PC World.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Occasionally people ask me what I think about Plasma Active appearing on various devices, knowing that we’re working on a tablet ourselves. It’s a really good question, and gets to one of the core tensions around open culture: the interplay between control and benefit.
The conventional wisdom is that to maximize benefit, control must also be maximized. Thus the historical emphasis on proprietary technology in the IT industry, something that has been slowly but surely shifting with time but certainly has not fully swung away from proprietary-is-better.
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It’s that time of the week again already! Yes, the Luminosity of Free Software episode 4 will be broadcast live tomorrow at 20:00 UTC via Google+ Hangouts, and you’re all invited.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Is this beta for one of the best community run distros around a good indicator for the full release, or a serious work in progress like last year?
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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With a code name like “the Spherical Cow,” the new Fedora 18 software has to be good, right? After all, a better Linux kernel and some added features make the operating system a good choice for busy work environments. A limp GNOME 3 desktop, however, may bring users and that rotund bovine to a screeching halt.
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Mozilla Foundation has announced the latest version of Firefox open source Web browser. The release does bring new features including a built-in PDF viewer that allows you to read PDFs directly within the browser.
According to Mozilla, this feature “makes reading PDFs easier because you don’t have to download the content or read it in a plugin like Reader. For example, you can use the PDF viewer to check out a menu from your favorite restaurant, view and print concert tickets or read reports without having to interrupt your browsing experience with extra clicks or downloads.” This feature is already available in Chrome for more than two years now.
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Debian Family
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Debian 7.0 is progressing and testers were treated to Release Candidate 1 recently. On the other side of town Mageia has reported a change in the release schedule for upcoming version 3.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The company is developing a united phone, computer, TV and tablet operating system that it hopes will provide a more intuitive interface than that currently offered by Google’s Android.
It announced a mobile phone interface using the open-source operating system in January, and has since secured a partner to make compatible silicon chips. It claims it will launch to consumers in October. Devices aimed at both the premium and budgets ends of the market will be available.
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After today’s announcement that Canonical has created a tablet interface for Ubuntu Linux, company founder Mark Shuttleworth described his ambitions and answered questions from reporters in a conference call.
He addressed many topics including how Ubuntu for tablets and phones will differ from Windows 8; Canonical’s discussions with hardware makers and carriers; potential release timelines for phones and tablets; whether Ubuntu devices will be “hackable”; and the chances of Canonical finally becoming profitable.
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Whether more people love Ubuntu or loathe it is an impossible question to answer. I know people who spend most of their free time promoting it as volunteers — and just as many who denounce it as a betrayal of everything free and open source software (FOSS) represents.
The trouble is, so many hopes have been invested in Ubuntu over the years that it invites extremes. While some still hope that it will live up to its initial promise and bring Linux to the mainstream, others find the compromises for the sake of business a betrayal of those same promises.
There is ample evidence for both these reactions — and, no doubt, for those in between.
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Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that smartphones running Ubuntu Linux would ship in October of this year. Ubuntu boss Mark Shuttleworth says that’s a mistake. Today, the founder clarified that while a smartphone friendly version of the operating system — Ubuntu 13.10 — will be widely available in October with developer preview builds available this week, phones likely still won’t ship until early 2014. Though the OS will be ready for phones this year, he explained that the devices themselves would probably still need months of carrier testing.
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As the CeBIT upcoming convention in Germany nears, Canonical has announced what it will be showcasing at the event–which, in turn, provides some clues about where the company behind one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems might be concentrating its efforts in coming months. Alas, Ubuntu tablets are not on the list. But if you’re interested in Ubuntu on servers in and the cloud, there’s going to be a lot to see in Hanover between March 5 and 9.
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Phones
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The Intel and Samsung backed operating system is seen as potential competition to Android in some markets
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So who’s your daddy in mobile numbers? Lets look at the forecasts made about Windows Phone, after the Nokia-Microsoft partnership was announced. If you remember, I recently examined the accuracy of the Nokia forecasts made (and found that I had once again been the most accurate forecaster in mobile. But will that reputation hold through this, very challenging Windows Phone forecasting conundrum?)
When the world’s largest computer software company has said that the future of computers is mobile, and then sees its position in software for mobile phones (ie smartphones) fall from 12% and second biggest to 2% and 6th in the market – and at that point, promises to grow back to a ‘third ecosystem’ – it is either being brave with a cunning plan, or being foolish with forlorn hope and hype.
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Ballnux
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Android
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The new flagship phone from HTC has just been announced, and it’s planning to go head to head with the competitor flagship smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and the LG Optimus G.
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After the launch of Fablet F1, Swipe Telecom has come up with two new 5-inch fablets in the Indian market – Swipe Fablet F2 and Swipe Fablet F3. Swipe Fablet F2 is claimed to be India’s first 2G dual SIM smartphone fablet. Swipe Fablet F3, on the other hand, comes with the latest 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system. These devices are set to add another dimension to the market priced at Rs 7,590 and Rs 9,290, respectively.
Swipe Fablet F3 offers a dual 3G SIM and allows you to use your Skype account and make free video/voice calls to your contacts with the correct hardware support. Moving between home screens and switching between apps feels effortless and the browsing speed is enhanced. The Fablet F3 has a 5-inch enhanced display with 5-point multi touch Screen. It also includes 0.3 MP front facing camera and a 5 MP rear camera. For the first time, Swipe has introduced 360° Camera Technique, a camera technique which will take you to different levels of capturing images.
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If latest rumours are to be believed, Sony Mobile’s Xperia Z should get a taste of the new Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system by next month. What’s more, a leaked screenshot of the update for the Sony Xperia Z raises hopes that the newest flavour may come by late March.
According to XperiaBlog, which got the screenshot from an anonymous tipster, the Jelly Bean update will arrive on the handset with firmware version 11.1.A.1.450 inside. “However, we are told this is a beta version, so expect the firmware version number to be in the form of 11.1.A.X.XXX by the time it is released,” the post adds.
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James McClain has managed to get voice recognition working on GNU/Linux. You can now open sites, ask questions and perform other tasks just by voice. While initially developed for Ubuntu it is distro agnostic and can be used by other distributions as well.
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Samsung today announced a Wi-Fi version of the Samsung Galaxy Camera will be offered in the coming weeks. Stopping short of giving a price or exact launch time frame, the hardware maker indicates that the camera is the exact same as the 3G/4G model. This means the same Android 4.1 Jelly Bean experience with 21x Super Long Zoom lens and a super-bright 16M BSI CMOS.
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Events
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ApacheCon North America 2013 (http://na.apachecon.com), the Apache Software Foundation’s (http://www.apache.org/) official conference starts this Sunday. The event will take place at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, Portland, OR from 24 February-2 March 2013 (http://na.apachecon.com/venue/).
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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In this, the second installment of our three-part series on finding the best open-source content management system (CMS) for your needs, we asked two organizations that use Joomla to explain why they felt that Joomla was the best choice for them, how the transition went, and whether they’re happy with the results.
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Education
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The Saanich school district of British Columbia has banded together and is funding an open source Student Information System (SIS) called openStudent. It has been licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2.0) to ensure that they have better control of the code. Yet, the decision didn’t come about easily.
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Public Services/Government
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Open Source for America (OSFA) announced today the opening of its nomination period for the annual OSFA awards. Each year, the organization recognizes individuals, projects, and deployments that support its mission to encourage free and open source software adoption in the U.S. government.
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Standards/Consortia
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This series is proving a lot more popular than I’d figured. Who would have thought so many people enjoy noodling around with Web servers? By popular demand, “Web Served” now enters the bonus round with two things I didn’t think I was going to be able to get to: MediaWiki in this piece, and Etherpad Lite in the next.
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Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási has published a new paper which claims that you can connect any two pages on the Web by 19 or fewer links. That may not seem impressive until you consider that there are more than 14 billion webpages in existence.
Slate’s Jason Bittel reported, “Everybody is familiar with ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’ right? Well, according to a Hungarian physicist, the Internet works basically the same way. Despite there being something like 1 trillion pieces of Web out there (websites, hosted images, videos, etc), you can navigate from any one of them to another in 19 clicks or fewer.”
Smitsonian’s Joseph Stromberg added, “Barabási credits this ‘small world’ of the web to human nature—the fact that we tend to group into communities, whether in real life or the virtual world. The pages of the web aren’t linked randomly, he says: They’re organized in an interconnected hierarchy of organizational themes, including region, country and subject area. Interestingly, this means that no matter how large the web grows, the same interconnectedness will rule. Barabási analyzed the network looking at a variety of levels—examining anywhere from a tiny slice to the full 1 trillion documents—and found that regardless of scale, the same 19-click-or-less rule applied.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Quito – Whilst celebrating his re-election in Ecuador yesterday, President Rafael Correa called for a resolution to the issue of political asylum in that country for Julian Assange. An interview with President Correa gives more details on the situation.
Digital Journal reported on Monday on the call by President Correa for Europe and the UK to resolve the problems over the political asylum of Assange in Ecuador.
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Repressive regimes know how to use Facebook too. You know what your government wants you to know.
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Jemima Goldsmith married Imran Khan, the famous Pakistani cricketer, now politician. Jemima is opposed to war and campaigned against the Iraq War in particular and, more recently, the use of drones. She is reputedly worth £20 million and when Julian Assange needed bail money to avoid extradition to Sweden, Jemima Khan was one of those who nobly obliged.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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With the Keystone climate protests in Washington bringing climate change back into the media, we’re hearing a lot about how the Keystone pipeline will, at the very least, mean that we’ll be getting our oil from a nice country.
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Finance
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Throw in what’s in the “stimulus” package and you’re probably at close to $3 trillion.
So why not simply distribute $25,000 tax free to every U.S. taxpayer? There are 100 million of us, in round figures, so we’re talking about $2.5 trillion, give or take.
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Greek workers walk off the job on Wednesday in a nationwide anti-austerity strike that will disrupt transport, shut public schools and tax offices and leave hospitals working with emergency staff.
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Privacy
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While the “Industry” (ITRE) committee is about to vote on its opinion regarding data protection regulation, it is now clear that the outcome will depend on the Members of the liberal ALDE group. They will have to choose between allowing full-on exploitation of our personal data or imposing tough safeguards to protect our fundamental right to privacy. Citizens must act today 20 February before 4pm and urge their MEPs to defend the general interest by choosing the latter.
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Southampton Council’s attempt to justify it’s policy of requiring taxis to record audio and video of every journey took another blow yesterday when the ‘First Tier Tribunal’ ruled against it.
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The First-Tier Tribunal (“FTT”) has just issued the first ever tribunal decision concerning the application of the Data Protection Act 1998 (“DPA”) to surveillance activities: Southampton City Council v The Information Commissioner EA/2012/0171, 19 February 2013. In this case, the Council’s licensing committee had resolved in 2009 that all taxis it licensed should be fitted with digital cameras, which made a continuous audio-visual recording of passengers. The Information Commissioner (“ICO”) issued an enforcement notice against the Council under the DPA, requiring the Council to stop audio recording, because it was in breach of the Data Protection Principles in the Act (the first Data Protection Principle in particular).
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Civil Rights
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Not only have leaders from Ecuador to Venezuela delivered huge social gains – they keep winning elections too
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Two of the 23 pages were not released, according to the FBI, due to; privacy (U.S.C Section 552 (b)(7)(C)), sources and methods (U.S.C Section 552 (b)(7)(E)) and, curiously, putting someone’s life in danger (U.S.C Section 552 (b)(7)(F)). Putting someone’s life in danger? Typically that refers to informants. Did someone close to Swartz provide information to the FBI on him or is the FBI just being really dramatic? Or is this standard justification for not releasing the Special Agent on the case’s name? I am honestly still confused by that box being checked off.
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DRM
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In my new novel, Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, I explore what happens to people when their computers don’t listen to them anymore. Imagine a world where you tell your computer to copy a file, or to play it, or display it, and it says no, where it looks at you out of the webcam’s unblinking eye and says, “I can’t let you do that, Dave.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a settlement of the legal dispute with Internet Brands, owners of Wikitravel, which began when the Foundation’s alternative travel site, Wikivoyage, was being planned. The settlement requires both parties to post on their sites a statement that they “believe there is enough room for multiple travel sites to co-exist, and for community members to contribute to multiple sites in this area.”
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Copyrights
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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has decided that a wholesale censorship of Google Sites in Turkey violates the European Convention of Human Rights, and orders Turkey to cease the censorship and pay damages. The court concludes that any wholesale web censorship is an interference with fundamental human rights, and therefore must be prescribed by law. This has direct consequences for other, similar wholesale censorship – such as that of The Pirate Bay.
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02.19.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Cloud storage may be on the move, but local network-attached storage (NAS) systems continue to be in hot demand, especially as they integrate cloud backup and mobile access. In the enterprise NAS, unified storage, and SAN (storage area network) world, Linux shares the pie with Unix and Windows. But in the faster-growing small and medium business (SMB), small office and home office (SoHo), and consumer NAS segments, Linux is clearly dominant.
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Kernel Space
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If you have ever been on one of these types of calls, you know that they are always rather uncomfortable. The manager is upset because something went wrong, and on top of that it was something that they don’t fully understand. During such conversations I’ve found that it is normally best to keep explanations correct, but succinct. I explained that a kernel panic is what happens when the operating system encounters an error that it cannot recover from. That explanation seemed to be enough for him, but as I thought about it later, I found that it was not nearly enough for me.
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Improved graphics drivers and a new filesystem for flash disks are two of the most important changes in Linux 3.8. Kernel developers have also made improvements to btrfs and ext4 and merged a number of new drivers.
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Xen 4.3 is expected to be released in June of this year. While the developers working on this virtualization platform are only half-way through its development cycle, they already have an impressive number of features that are coming into this next open-source release.
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Linus Torvalds has released version 3.8 of the Linux kernel, which brings with it full support for the graphic cores in Intel’s upcoming processor generation Haswell and everything a system needs to use the 3D acceleration on all NVIDIA GeForce graphics chipsets. F2FS, a filesystem that is optimised for flash media as used in cameras, tablets, smartphones, USB flash drives and memory cards, is another innovation in Linux 3.8.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that BORQS, Denx, Gazzang, Genymobile, Mandriva and Seneca College are joining the organization.
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Graphics Stack
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The results in yesterday’s article, AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases, were interesting but limited to OpenGL games. In this article are more test results from the same system configuration and Ubuntu Linux releases but now taking a look at the 2D performance of the open and closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics drivers.
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The second release candidate of X.Org Server 1.14 is now available ahead of the official release in a few weeks time.
RC1 came in mid-December while on Wednesday night was finally RC2 as tagged by Keith Packard. With RC2 being out, only critical bug-fixes will now be accepted ahead of the xorg-server 1.14 release. The final release of X.Org Server 1.14 is expected to happen on 5 March.
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Aside from a lot of other exciting DRM driver happenings for the Linux 3.9 kernel, it looks like the DRM “PRIME Helpers” that were conceived by NVIDIA to help them support DMA_BUF in their binary driver will be merged.
NVIDIA can’t directly utilize the Linux kernel’s DMA_BUF buffer sharing mechanism — a zero-copy way to share buffers between different kernel drivers whether it be DRM or other sub-systems — due to GPL-only kernel symbols and bickering amongst kernel developers.
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Applications
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For this new release the code has been completely rewritten and NeonView was ported to GTK+ 3. There is a rather big list of changes, some of the most important including a completely redesigned interface, two sidebar panels for thumbnail previews and image information, rewritten code for parsing the config file, redesigned settings window, and a whole bunch of new fixes and improvements. Of course, since NeonView was ported to GTK+ 3 and the code was rewritten, there are still many bugs present, which should be triaged by the time 0.8.1 will arrive. Please report any bugs found in the comments below.
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The high point of my work in this library system was when my library coworker, Stephon Gray (who has learning disabilities), and I created a two-minute multimedia video: Fannie Lou Hamer: Freedom Fighter. Stephon wrote and narrated this biography of one of the most remarkable leaders of the civil rights movement. We used the ClarisWorks Draw program and a $5 software program from Sweden called SimpleCard, a simplified color version of Apple’s HyperCard.
We put this video up on the web in 1996, almost 10 years before YouTube was launched. Within a week, I received an email from noted literacy activist David Rosen, in Boston. His email was short: “This is good.”
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During the past few years, I’ve written about task-management systems, “get things done” digital tools and ways to keep track of to-do lists in Linux. This month, I’m sharing Wunderlist, which is a cross-platform task-management and sharing utility that is truly amazing. When I say cross-platform, I really mean it too. Wunderlist works in Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, Blackberry, the Web and probably another half-dozen interfaces I’ve yet to encounter.
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The accounting software industry is one of the most lucrative in the world. Since the appearance of personal computers users have thought of ways to track and manage their money making use of this new tool. Financial software doesn’t have to cost you a cent though, here’s some of the most popular free and open source accounting software available:
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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So looks like DOTA2 is currently in testing for Linux in some form! Could this be an indicator it is getting closer?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Plasma Active project leader Aaron Seigo has attacked Canonical’s claims about its forthcoming Ubuntu Mobile platform.
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The third factor in our trio is how well the desktop of your choice is supported. In some ways this is a chicken-and-egg question for newcomers since most won’t know which desktop they want to use.
Pretty much any Linux application can be installed on any Linux system, at least in theory. That means any desktop can be installed with any distro, but in the real world it doesn’t always work out quite that smoothly. For example, the Cinnamon desktop is a relatively new desktop interface developed by the same people who created Mint Linux, which means Cinnamon is nicely integrated with the rest of Mint. That doesn’t mean you can’t install Cinnamon on Fedora or Arch. You can and people do, but it will most likely be a bit trickier and finding solutions to your problems can be more difficult since fewer users will be using your particular setup. That’s why, to stick with the Cinnamon example, it would make more sense to use Mint if you really want to use Cinnamon.
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When I first test drove Rebellin for a section in an upcoming Linux Format, I reported that basically it seemed like a nice solid Debian respin, but many such are for free. It doesn’t seem that Linux users gravitate towards the projects that require payment before trying. When I explained this to the founder and, currently, the sole developer, he said that there are indeed reasons why folks should want to pay the $5.
Is $5 too much to spend for a distro that you can’t test-drive first? Utkarsh Sevekar says, “people don’t realize that there are very small players (like me) out there who can’t wait till someone sponsors them or donate money to keep things going. Bills are a big thing.” He says the $5 fee, that will actually be used for broadband costs for the downloads, will also include “email support to all which lasts for the lifetime of the product. There is no monthly/yearly fee here. All included in the initial price. There are no limits to communication either. Customers can bug me as much a they want.”
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New Releases
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We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2013.02, code-named ‘Grumpy Grinch’!
This release brings the Grml tools towards the upcoming Debian stable release (AKA wheezy), provides up2date hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2012.05 and 2013.02 have a look at the official release announcement.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS 5.9 leaves users with a warm fuzzy and familiar feeling offering Gnome 2.16 as the primary desktop which is featured in this review. The desktop prospects for this release are not very impressive, but the server capabilities are endless. Derived from the recently released RHEL 5.9, here is what this version has to offer.
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Red Hat is updating its cloud server application technology stack with a new release of OpenShift Enterprise.
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Debian Family
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* Debian Installer 7.0 RC1 released
* 700,000th bug reported
* Bits from the DPL
* Reports from FOSDEM
* Update on Clang and Debian
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“Mark Shuttleworth has for the first time talked about the privacy issues in Ubuntu Dash after being criticized by EFF and FSF. He mentioned some changes in the way use can ‘disable’ the search results. However the company has showed that under no circumstances they will disable the online search by default as demanded by EFF and FSF. Shuttleworth was simply spinning the wheel moving things around to give an impression that something has been done where as the core problem remains — Dash sends keystrokes by default and legally every user agrees to send such keystrokes to PRODUCT.canonical.com server to be shared with partners like Facebook.”
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There is some confusion, but the fact is no one (including Richard Stallman) has any problem with Canonical gathering user data and displaying ads when local searches are conducted. The problem is with the way it has been implemented. The feature is turned on by default and users did not even know (they were never informed) that their search queries were being sent to, and stored at, Canonical’s servers which are further shared with its partners.
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Canonical is probably going to announce Ubuntu Tablet OS within 24 hours. Since they are using Qt/QML for their mobile OS it won’t be hard to run it on a tablet, as it is extremely scalable and can run on different form factor. I was actually surprised to see they did not make any announcement for tablet.
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As expected, Canonical has announced their plans for Ubuntu on tablets as well as the signing of a deal with a major mobile silicon provider to provide Ubuntu smartphone and tablet chips.
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The high-resolution XPS 13 now gets Linux Ubuntu. The specs, with the critical exception of the Ubuntu Linux, are identical to the 1080p XPS 13 for Windows 8.
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When we launched the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition at the end of November we got a lot of great press. That being said, the two complaints we heard loud and clear were 1) the resolution is too low, and 2) it needs to be available outside the US and Canada. Since that time we have been working hard to address both.
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Most Linux fans like Canonical’s plans for a unified Ubuntu for PCs, smartphones, TVs, and tablets. Some, however, such as Aaron Seigo, a leading KDE developer, have doubts about this claim.
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Canonical is planning to release the “Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu for phones” on Thursday 21 February. This release will allow developers to put images of the phone-optimised Ubuntu onto the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. The images are billed as “early previews” to allow developers to create applications for the phone operating system and, rather than being a snapshot of development, will be supplemented by daily updates.
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Not only is Canonical working on getting Ubuntu for smartphones ready for consumers, but a tablet-optimized version in in the plans as well. The company put up a teaser on its website on Monday, pointing to an announcement on Feb. 19—the same day HTC is taking the stage to announce its new flagship smartphone.
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Canonical today unveiled Ubuntu for tablets, which it said will help unify the Ubuntu experiences across phones, tablets, PCs, and TVs.
A Touch Developer Preview will be released on Feb. 21 via developer.ubuntu.com, which will work on the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. That will come the same day as the developer preview for smartphones, which will be available for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4.
The Preview SDK for phones will now be updated to support tablet apps, as well. Canonical said it will be “very easy” for Android developers to develop for Ubuntu.
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You can type the names of applications into Ubuntu’s equivalent of a Start Menu to search for and launch various applications. For some curious reason, Ubuntu also returns results from Amazon.co.uk in this window. In the image above, I’d typed ‘scree’ to find the screenshot application and came across some Marmot Men’s Scree Short Softshell Pants for £85. These trousers appear every time I take a screenshot, so I began to wonder if they were any good. Well the Amazon reviews for the trousers are largely positive, with one happy customer reporting:
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THE FOUNDER of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth has finally spoken out regarding the Ubuntu Linux distribution’s practice of sending users’ information to third parties, saying that in future releases there will be a “clear way” for users to disable advertising features.
Shuttleworth’s firm Canonical sponsors the development of the Ubuntu Linux distribution and caused an uproar after it integrated Amazon advertising into the Dash desktop search feature, sending users’ keystrokes to Amazon to enable it to display personalised ads.
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The open source Raspbmc media centre distribution has been released in its first stable version. Version 1.0 of the XBMC 12 based distribution transforms the $35 Raspberry Pi mini computer into an HD capable entertainment centre. According to the development team, Raspbmc can be easily installed to a USB stick or an SD card, even without prior Linux experience.
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Phones
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The research firm’s latest report suggests that difficult economic conditions, shifting consumer interest and intense market competition has resulted in a worldwide drop in sales, which has not declined since 2009.
Gartner said Wednesday that worldwide sales reached a total of 1.75 billion units in 2012, a 1.7 slump from 2011. In addition, fourth-quarter 2012 smartphone sales continued to drive overall sales, as Q4′s 38.3 percent hike based on the same period last year reveal. Smartphone sales in Q4 2012 reached record levels of 207.7 million units.
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This week developers of the Tizen 2.0 Linux based operating system designed for smartphones and tablets, has released the open source software of Tizen 2.0 together with a software developer kit.
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Ballnux
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Android
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The free version of the Archos media player is supported by ads. Besides offering the excellent feature set as that of its premium cousin worth $4.99, the free version includes hardware accelerated video decoding support for most devices and video formats, and also the ability to play content from any computer/network storage in your local network (SMB and UPnP) or from an external USB storage device. It also features automatic online retrieval of movie and TV show information with poster and backdrop for both local and network content.
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After the much talked about Pebble, the new Androidly by an Indian start-up wants a piece of the smart watch pie too. The company claims that Androidly is better than the likes of Sony’s Live View, Motorola’s MotoACTV as well as Pebble, I’m Watch and Meta Watch presently available in the market.
All of these watches offer features such as displaying your social network feeds, Caller ID, and the time. Yes, there are some brands which have their own app stores with around one to twenty applications available, but that’s the limit. According to Apurva Sukant, one of the partners in the company, Androidly enables the smart watch to do all that a smartphone can do by making optimal use of technology.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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What does the FOSS community really need? We’ve tackled that question from a few different angles here on OStatic. We’ve pondered whether Linux could benefit from a united, community fund and wondered whether the FOSS community simply needs better evangelists.
On Slashdot today, there is a lively discussion going on about what the FOSS world needs. Some of the ideas from readers are off the cuff, like this one: “Better hygiene. Less beards. More women.” Quite a few of the idea are good, though.
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GitHub , the Git-centric project hosting and collaboration company, has announced the open sourcing of Boxen, its management and automation tool used within the company for managing Mac systems. The project, which was originally named “The Setup”, was designed to allow developers to go from a new laptop to a system ready to hack the GitHub.com source within thirty minutes with a single command. They then ditched “The Setup” and wrote Boxen to replace it, so that any company could use it.
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Events
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Roy Sutton is the community manager for HP’s Open webOS. He supports developers in porting Open webOS to new platforms and is a contributor to the Enyo project. Roy too a few minutes for an interview with the SCALE Team about his presentation “From Closed to Open: The Open webOS Story,” which will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24, in room Los Angeles B.
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An update on events and happenings at SCALE 11x coming next weekend in Los Angeles.
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With more than 100 exhibitors and about 95 speakers at SCALE 11X this weekend, there’s a lot to do and see. But when the sun goes down, the sessions end and the expo hall closes, the fun really begins for the attendees.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Today Bitergia presents the first of a series on analytics for the WebKit project. After the preview we published some weeks ago, we finally have more detailed and accurate numbers about the evolution of the project. In this case, we’re presenting a report on the activity of the companies contributing to WebKit based on the analysis of reviewed commits.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 19 is slated for an official release on Tuesday, it will be released in few hours. If you can’t wait to grab the download you can do so through the Mozilla FTP servers. Downloads are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Browse the FTP folder and identify your platform file and download.
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Last week, Opera Software announced that its browser has reached 300 million active users, and dropped the news that the browser will move away from the longstanding Presto rendering engine and moving to WebKit. As noted here, this means that the number of browsing rendering engines to take seriously moves down to only three players, and WebKit–already legendary in the open source world–gets even more momentum and community involvement. But many observers are noting that the move isolates Mozilla, which remains focused on its Gecko Web rendering engine and SpiderMonkey Javascript engine for the Firefox browser.
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Former Google engineer Jeff Nelson has a blog post up that is generating lots of buzz due to the inside details it supplies about the origin of Google’s Chrome OS platform. The cloiud-focused operating system has drawn lots of headlines lately as more individual users, schools and businesses adopt Chromebooks.
It’s well-known that the Chromium core of Chrome OS was based on Linux, and Canonical even helped Google shape the operating system. But among the details that Nelson recalls, the first versions of Chrome OS were actually based on Mozilla Firefox.
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SaaS/Big Data
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During Rackspace’s third quarter, the company had a bevy of high-level conversations with technology executives about OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier noted the fourth quarter turned many of those OpenStack conversations into pilots.
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In 2005, Arlington Career Center teacher David Welsh had an unmanagable list of 77 Video and Media Technology competencies to evaluate for each student in his classes. A Yorktown High School computer science teacher Jeff Elkner was teaching his students to program in Python and bursting with enthusiam for engaging students and teachers in open source processes. I had a new job leading the SchoolTool project with a charge from entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Shuttleworth to create open source administrative software for schools around the world.
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Databases
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Monty Widenius, the co-creator of the MySQL database, became a multimillionaire when MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008. But Monty subsequently left MySQL just before Sun was acquired by Oracle, and hired many of the original developers to work on his fork, MariaDB.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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If you take a close look at Microsoft’s new Office licensing, it’s crystal clear: Microsoft no longer wants you to own your office software. They want you to rent it. So, why not get LibreOffice for free instead?
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CMS
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This year’s programmes now include:
* Plenty of blogging – we’ve a Drupal powered bespoke blog/portfolio system, so trainees quickly get used to adding links, uploading images and embedding media; we also showcase The 100 Word Challenge and a few sign up for the team.
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Education
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Sharing is a fundamental part of the open source philosophy, and the same goes for libraries. Spreading, disseminating, and breaking down barries to gaining knowledge is a core mission of most library systems and their staff.
That that end, libraries—which are essentially hubs of knowledge and gathering places for learning and continuing daily education—may choose to implement open source tools and software.
An advocate for “open libraries”, Nicole Engard, is one of our new opensource.com community moderators, a long-time contributor, and a 2013 People’s Choice Award winner. She has a passion for libraries and wants libraries’ core operations to run on open source.
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In these columns, I have covered several different scientific packages for doing calculations in many different areas of research. I also have looked at various packages that handle graphical representation of these calculations. But, one package that I’ve never looked at before is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info). Gnuplot has been around since the mid-1980s, making it one of the oldest graphical plotting programs around. Because it has been around so long, it’s been ported to most of the operating systems that you might conceivably use. This month, I take a look at the basics of gnuplot and show different ways to use it.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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I have a regional, collaborative philosophy of open data initiatives and municipalities. In North Carolina, the cities of Cary, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill all share the economic engine that is the Research Triangle Park. They also share the innovation engine of five, top universities.
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Open Access/Content
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A long time friend and mentor of Swartz, who helped develop RSS as a teen, co-owned the popular website Reddit, and was a key architect of the Creative Commons, Lessig has written about Swartz on his personal blog and the Huffington Post, and he spoke about Schwartz’s life and achievements on the radio show Democracy Now. Swartz is the inspiration for “Aaron’s Law,” a draft bill, introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), which would limit the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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Open Hardware
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he open source Robot Operating System created by Willow Garage is in the process of moving to the Open Source Robotics Foundation. What does this mean for its future?
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I love my Compaq Presario 2170CA laptop. It has every peripheral that I use in my multifarious adventures, being one of the last laptops made with both a floppy disk drive and a “real” parallel port. But I’m preparing to travel with it, and its 40 GB hard drive was full. So rather than buy a new laptop, I decided to upgrade the hard drive. I found a new 120 GB drive on eBay, and installed it with no problems.
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he has now found a way to channel his hatred of the anti-necon movement into “comedy”, by making a sitcom poking fun at me, and making light of our government’s alliance with the Uzbek dictatorship.
Our Men, commissioned by the BBC, is a hilarious comedy about the drunken and incompetent British Ambassador in Tazbekistan [which the BBC says does not represent Tashkent, Uzbekistan] and the jolly despot President Kairat [No relation, says the BBC, to President Karimov].
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Security
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Though it is showing some improvement, the U.S. government is still earning low marks overall in IT security. An annual report card indicates that the performances of some agencies have actually declined in the past year — notably the Department of Commerce and NASA.
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With governments around the world preparing to spend unprecedented amounts on cyber weapons this year, major defence contractors are seeking increased involvement in the production and selling of digital arms.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Warren Hill has an IQ of 70 and placed in the third percentile on his middle-school standardized test. Doctors have found him to be “mildly mentally retarded.” But even though the US Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that executing the mentally handicapped is unconstitutional, Hill will be put to death today, barring a late intervention by the courts.
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They might come for your plastic gun, but they’re not coming for your 3D printer just yet.
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A series of photographs taken a few hours apart and on the same camera, show Balachandran Prabhakaran, son of Villupillai Prabhakaran, head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). One of them shows the boy sitting in a bunker, alive and unharmed, apparently in the custody of Sri Lankan troops. Another, a few hours later, shows the boy’s body lying on the ground, his chest pierced by bullets.
[...]
The photographs will place additional pressure on David Cameron to announce whether or not he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM), e in Sri Lanka in November. A Downing Street official with Mr Cameron on his visit to India said on Monday that no decision had yet been taken.
NGOs and organisations, among them the cross-party Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, have called on him to boycott the meeting.
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Mr. Muhafdha continues to fight for human rights even though the Bahraini government has clamped down on any opposition, intensifying its electronic surveillance. “No matter how I communicate, they know,” Mr. Muhafdha said in an interview. “The regime has sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment allowing it to spy on everything we do by social media, e-mail and phone.”
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The German newspaper Spiegel has an interview with a German prosecutor, who ultimately decided not to file indictments in the case of Egyptian Muslim cleric Abu Omar. Omar was kidnapped in a CIA operation in Italy and rendered to Germany and then Egypt, where he was tortured.
Last week, according to Reuters, a Milan appeals court in Italy sentenced the country’s foreign military intelligence chief, Niccolo Pollari, to 10 years in jail for his role. Pollari’s former deputy, Marco Mancini, was sentenced to 9 years. The sentencing followed a move by the court to sentence the American former CIA station chief to seven years in absentia for his involvement. And the court awarded 1 million Euros in damages to Omar along with one half a million Euros to his wife.
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Amazon has ended its relationship with a security firm in Germany following accusations that guards in neo-Nazi uniforms were intimidating foreign workers at the online retailer’s distribution centres.
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German President Joachim Gauck has received the families of Turks who were killed by Neo-Nazis in Germany and said he wanted societal prejudices to be tackled as well as problems within institutions.
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If you were surprised to hear one particular rhetorical flourish in the President’s State of the Union address, imagine how Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) felt. For well over a year he and a handful of other Senators had been trying to obtain the government’s legal justification for its targeted killing program without getting any response from the Justice Department.
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Disgruntled Heiress teams up with Code Pink and Fresh Juice Party to throw posh prison send-off for
CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou
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In December 2011, the ACLU released FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, which showed that San Francisco FBI agents were exploiting community outreach programs for intelligence-gathering purposes. Now it appears FBI agents in Minneapolis have adopted this ruse, and may be using it in even more sinister ways.
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During a Google+ Hangout yesterday, conservative commentator Lee Doren asked President Obama whether he claims the authority to kill a U.S. citizen suspected of being associated with al Qaeda or associated forces on U.S. soil. Notice the question was restricted to only a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil (our concerns are, of course, broader and apply to the White House’s illegitimate claim of authority to kill people it unilaterally deems a threat, even if they are far from any battlefield, abroad).
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What the Obama administration isn’t telling you about drones: The standard rule is capture, not kill.
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Obama’s defenders keep citing sui generis conflicts to justify his actions in radically different circumstances.
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President Barack Obama’s drone war is in danger of becoming an Abu Ghraib-style public-relations nightmare, drawing criticism at home from left and right (and, it seems, even many U.S. troops), spurring angry protests in Pakistan and Yemen, and becoming a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.
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The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
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Nearly half of the $1.2 trillion federal budget reduction would come from defense spending.
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As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air. The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week, and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world, as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people.
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There was a scarcely noted but classic moment in the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” to become the next CIA director. When Senator Carl Levin pressed him repeatedly on whether waterboarding was torture, he ended his reply this way: “I have a personal opinion that waterboarding is reprehensible and should not be done. And again, I am not a lawyer, senator, and I can’t address that question.”
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All of them claim the Administration is operating exclusively within the AUMF, and based on that assumption conclude certain things about what the Administration has done.
There is abundant evidence to refute that. After all, the Administration invokes self-defense about as many times as it does AUMF in the white paper. The white paper actually situates the authority to kill an American in “constitutional responsibility to protect the country” — that is, Article II authority — and inherent right to self-defense even before it lists the AUMF.
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The importance of the combatant-civilian distinction was apparent when the Pentagon prepared the latest version of the Manual for Military Commissions [PDF], the rulebook for the trials of some of the alleged unlawful enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. The 2007 version of the Manual for Military Commissions, which made rules implementing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, said that “[f]or the accused to have been acting in violation of the law of war, the accused must have taken acts as a combatant without having met the requirements for lawful combatancy.” It went on to add that such persons “do not enjoy combatant immunity because they have failed to meet the requirements of lawful combatancy under the law of war.” That language was removed when the current manual was drafted because of concerns among senior US government officials that the language on lawful combatancy and combatant immunity could be viewed as an acknowledgment that CIA civilian drone operators are committing war crimes.
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As the conflict in Mali wages on, reports from the frontlines reveal that the al-Qaeda linked Northern Mali rebels have conscripted child soldiers into their ranks. These reports reflect the persistence of a gross human rights violation in military conflict.
And Mali is not alone. Child soldiers are used by non-state groups and government forces alike. American soldiers around the world have come under attack from forces using child soldiers, a complex challenge for the U.S. military. However, the United States has also provided military assistance to governments using child soldiers within their ranks or within government-supported armed groups. Child Soldiers International (CSI), an international NGO committed to preventing the recruitment and use of child soldiers, has found evidence of child soldiers in government militaries and government supported armed groups with which the US military maintains key military-aid relationships, such as Afghanistan Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan, Thailand and Yemen.
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…insufficient to claim the mere mantle of Greatest Country on the Planet
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs is apparently back to it’s old tricks despite the $550 million settlement with the SEC over hurting clients in the mortgage securities market. Acting on what may have been inside information (more on that later) the firm decided it wanted to heavily invest in Heinz (HNZ), which later would announce it was in talks to be bought out by Warren Buffet. So Goldman Sachs started buying up shares ahead of the merger.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc is cooperating with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe into insider options trading in H.J. Heinz…
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No, what’s important here is what Politico actually got right in its story: namely, that the assumption in Washington is, indeed, that silence is a virtue – that, in other words, the best thing for a newly elected liberal senator to do is shut her mouth, go along to get along, play by the club’s rules and not make any waves. Summing up that Beltway conventional wisdom, Politico writes that only by “flying under the radar” can a liberal “star” like Warren develop a “reputation as a serious legislator.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Someone using the City of Melbourne’s IP block has been introducing biased edits to the Wikipedia page for Occupy Melbourne, attempting to erase the record of council’s resolve to remove Occupy, and trying to smear the Occupy protest by removing the adjective “peaceful” from the page. The edits were made anonymously, but Wikipedia publishes IP addresses for anonymous contributors, and the IP address in question, 203.26.235.14, is registered to the city.
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An estimated 40,000 rallied on a cold day in Washington, DC yesterday to urge President Obama to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline and destructive energy extraction practices, such as fracking.
“All I ever wanted was to see a movement of people to stop climate change and now I see it,” said Bill McKibben, a Middlebury College professor, author and activist, and the movement’s Pied Piper.
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An incredible Smoking Gun! Big Talk’s Kenton Allen tweets “Now off to the Foreign Office for a historic read through”. The exposure of Mitchell & Webb’s Our Men as state sponsored propaganda for the alliance with Uzbekistan is thoroughly confirmed. That the BBC is a party to this kind of insidious propaganda is disgusting.
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In other ways, the administration has not been so transparent.
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Censorship
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The War of on Terror continues with a new grave threat – people writing things on the internet. The government is now trying to find ways to counter “online radicalization to violence” a phrase so broad it could mean practically anything.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has destroyed its file on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the late New York Times publisher who defied the federal government in the twilight of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, Capital has learned.
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Penn & Teller’s Bullsh** was a Showtime special running for eight seasons with the express intent of murdering every sacred cow known to man. The libertarian duo’s show was an amazing tour de force that expressed the individualist arguments of free thinkers in America whose voices are often squashed by political correctness in modern society.
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Privacy
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Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern wants to buy a surveillance drone, or, as he prefers to call it, a “small Unmanned Aerial System.” At a meeting before the county’s Board of Supervisors last week, he claimed that he’d only use the drone for felony cases, not to spy on people or monitor political activists. But a few minutes later he’d seemed to change his mind, adding: “I don’t want to lock myself into just felonies.”
Catcalls and hisses erupted from a crowd of some 100 anti-drone activists. One man later called the proposal “an assault on my community.”
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Drones aren’t just for fighting the war on terror in the Middle East anymore – they might be watching you.
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Last February, President Obama signed a bill allowing up to 30,000 police drones to be flown by police departments and the Department of Homeland Security within the United States to keep an eye on “we the people.”
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Ian Welsh’s piece on the “logic of surveillance” makes several good points, but this one really smacked me in the face: “The enforcer class…is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people.”
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My day starts out normally enough: I drop the kids at school and head to the Starbucks, where I use my Smart Phone to pay for my tall Caffé Mocha soy because that’s how I roll: I save one minute not having to reach into my wallet to physically pull out my credit card, it’s logged into the app.
After “checking in” with Foursquare, which tells me a couple of moms from the school have already been there this morning, and then my Facebook, which tells me another “friend” is headed there now, I dash to the Safeway, where I get discounts on my feta cheese, avocados, organic yogurt and Fat Bastard chardonnay because I logged it all in the store’s Just for U program. Again, that’s how we roll.
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The head of the German military’s counterintelligence service, which is widely seen as the country’s most secretive intelligence organization, has given the first public media interview in the agency’s 57-year history. Most readers of this blog will be aware of the Federal Republic of Germany’s two best-known intelligence agencies: the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), tasked with domestic intelligence, and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the country’s primary external intelligence agency. Relatively little is known, however, about the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), which has historically been much smaller and quieter than its sister agencies. As part of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, the MAD is tasked with conducting counterintelligence and detecting what it terms “anti-constitutional activities” within the German armed forces. It is currently thought to consist of around 1,200 staff located throughout Germany and in at least seven countries around the world, including Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Djibouti.
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Civil Rights
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The security and surveillance state is creating a hermetically closed system of power. It is doing this by rewriting laws to subvert the Constitution and grant itself the ability to criminalize all forms of dissent. The FISA Amendment Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the enhanced terrorism laws, the misuse of the Espionage Act to silence whistle blowers, and the National Defense Authorization Act, section 1021, which empowers the government to use the military to seize and detain U.S. citizens, strip citizens of due process and hold them in indefinite detention, are chilling examples of a new America, an America where liberty and freedom have become a hollow cliché.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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New amendment that would make internet service providers disclose the identity of users who commit crimes online. If providers refuse they will become suspects in criminal cases instead of the users.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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California Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of GE foods in that state, failed in November 2012 by a very narrow margin, despite massive spending by the food and biotechnology industries and their lobbying groups. The European Union already requires labeling of all food, animal feeds, and processed products with GE content. And 50 countries require labeling for the GE products they import from the United States. A 2012 Mellman Group Study showed that 91 percent of U.S. voters favored having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require labels on GE foods and ingredients.
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Trademarks
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How could the company trying to file a trademark for “Python” have been unaware of the open source programming language?
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An Internet storm has broken out after an obscure UK-based cloud hosting firm apparently gained the upper hand in a battle with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) over which organisation should have rights to use the programming language’s famous name.
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Copyrights
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The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) will ask the UK’s six biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block three more sites accused of piracy at a court hearing tomorrow.
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Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
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