12.02.12
Links 2/12/2012: IndieCity Coming to GNU/Linux, CIA Spy Network Grows
Contents
GNU/Linux
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OS Of The Week
We have long been familiar with NetApplications’ web stats. Sorting out all the bias is tough. Today I tried a new tack. For the users who know they have choice, how many use GNU/Linux?
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Desktop Linux needs anti-virus like a fish needs a bicycle
You don’t need an anti-virus program on Linux: I’ve said it before, but Don’t Surf in the Nude started because of an interest in internet security, so I can’t resist trying out anti-virus programs in Linux.
I noticed today that Comodo has produced a Linux anti-virus program with real-time scanning. Files are checked as they are accessed or created- for example as they are downloaded from the Internet.
I couldn’t resist trying it out. They’ve created the Windows AV experience on Linux, but like crime in multi-storey car parks, it’s wrong on so many levels.
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Why Open Source Software is More Secure than Proprietary Software
If you see the immense success that Linux, Firefox, Android and other software have achieved over the years, it’s all thanks to the power of open source. What makes open-source software so great is that it is a result of selfless work of thousands of developers from around the world, who, in their free time, volunteer to create or help build their favorite applications.
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The Linux Setup – Jeremy Jongepier, Musician/Admin
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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An In-Kernel Virtio Block Device Accelerator For Linux
For the past several months there has been work on vhost-blk, an in-kernel virito-blk device accelerator. This kernel-based accelerator can provide measurable speed-ups for disk/block device access by virtualized guest machines.
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Linux.com holiday membership drive
Unfortunately, the rules stipulate only legal United States residents over the age of 18 are eligible, and that current members who renew are excluded; this promotion is only available to new members.
These caveats are disappointing but ultimately moot; the reason to join is to directly support and promote the work of the Foundation which includes direct backing of Linus Torvalds himself. Individual membership is $USD 99 and student membership is $USD 25.
Whether you win the $75 gift card or not, the Linux.com store can hook you up with t-shirts, hats, mugs and accessories relating to your favourite free open source operating system.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA L4T R16 Ubuntu 12.04 Performance
With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.
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NVIDIA L4T R16 Ubuntu 12.04 Performance
With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.
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Mesa 9.1-devel LLVMpipe With LLVM 3.1/3.2
With a number of commits made to the mainline Mesa repository recently that concern the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for pushing OpenGL onto the CPU, here are benchmarks of the very latest Mesa Gallium3D development code from and AMD FX-8350 Vishera Eight-Core CPU when using both LLVM 3.1 and LLVM 3.2 SVN.
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Wayland & Weston 1.0.2 Released
Wayland 1.0.1 was just released ten days ago but Kristian ended up deciding to release Wayland/Weston 1.0.2 ahead of schedule. The reason for the early releases are due to important bug-fixes and “stable releases are cheap.” The original plan was to release v1.0.2 after the Weston Test Suite landed.
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Coverity Uncovers More Problems In Mesa
A handful of memory-related issues were plugged up yesterday in Mesa thanks to the Coverity static code analysis tools.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ryan C. Gordon: 2013 will be Awesome for Linux Gaming
In an intervirew with Cheerful Ghost, star Linux developer Ryan “Icculus” Gordon said that Unity3D game engine and Steam coming to Linux are good foundations to an awesome 2013.
Ryan has brought numerous game projects and tools to Linux and he has also been working with Humble team. Below are some excerpts (full interview can be read from here):
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Linux Game ‘Crayon Physics Deluxe’ Free for 24 Hours
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Crayon Physics Deluxe for Linux is Now Free
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Gaming In Linux : Shatter
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Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry’s Big Bang
On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today’s tech moguls.
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Alien Arena 7.65 To Bring Huge Renderer Enhancements
The open-source Alien Arena game is going to see a major update soon that will enhance its renderer and bring other improvements. Alien Arena 7.65 is this exciting game update that’s forthcoming.
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ARM & Steam Continue Exciting Linux Enthusiasts
With November coming to a close, here’s some statistics on the most popular content on Phoronix this month.
During this month, while I may be stepping down from publishing roles here in the near future, on Phoronix I published 206 news articles (an average of more than six Linux/hardware/open-source news items per day) and 22 full-length featured articles. This brings the tally to more than 7,300 news articles and over 2,200 featured articles/reviews since founding the site eight years ago.
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The State Of XReaL, OpenWolf Game Engines
While this week saw the release of the Doom 3 BFG source-code and word that a Sauerbraten update and a major Alien Arena advancement advancement are forthcoming, what’s the state of the impressive XReaL open-source game engine and the similar OpenWolf engine?
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Ryan Gordon On Valve’s Steam, Linux Porting
- Ryan believes that Valve coming to Linux is specifically because of the Windows Store found in Microsoft Windows 8. This is a large part of it as when I was first to report back in April on Gabe Newell’s distaste for Windows 8.
- Also good for Linux gaming have been Humble Bundle, Unity game engine on Linux, and Kickstarter seeing lots of Linux-friendly work.
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Tip Jar Now Live, IndieCity Coming to Linux!
We’re really happy to announce that we’ll soon be opening IndieCity up to Linux systems, so we’re on the look-out for people with Linux games and applications who’d like to be a part of the launch line-up. If you are such a person, or you want to point us in the direction of someone who is you can email us at Enquiries@IndieCity.com.
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IndieCity coming to Linux!
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New Online Game Distribution Client Coming To Linux
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Ouya Consoles To Ship On December 28th
Ouya, one of the most popular Kickstarter project, has stuck to its deadlines. The team has posted an update on the official blog that the units will start shipping on scheduled date December 28th. These units are for those developers who backed the project on Kickstarter.
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Ouya gaming project announces console giveaway
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The OUYA Dev Console Giveaway
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Desktop Environments
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Arctic Sea Ice Larger Than US Melted This Year
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Going from A to B in KDE, GNOME, and Windows
As a Linux user, I’ve learned to appreciate the differences of doing things using the different desktops available.
I started thinking of how one can see going from point A to point B in KDE and GNOME and I could not help to find some amusement in this metaphor.
Ready for the ride? “How do I go to B? Let me count the ways:”
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Why KDE Is Great For Gaming On The Linux Desktop
Martin Gräßlin, the well known KWin developer, has written a new blog post explaining why if you’re wanting to play Valve’s Source Engine games or the other new native Linux games you should be using KDE Plasma.
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New E17 Release: ALPHA7
This alpha is special because it is the alpha released the day after rasterman’s birthday.
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Fallback mode in KDE Plasma Workspaces
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about non-composited fallback modes in various Desktop Shells and of course I have been asked several times about the fallback modes in KDE Plasma workspaces and whether they would be removed, too. Now instead of answering the same question again and again I decided to write a blog post to discuss the situation in more detail.
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a relaxing friday
I took some time this evening to relax in a quiet, empty house by plonking away at the Plasma Active Alarms app UI. I’m still not 100% satisfied yet, but it’s getting a lot closer.
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Friday Polishing Of KDE’s Plasma Alarm App UI
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Qt 4.8.4 Released, Brings Over 170 Improvements
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New QML components: IconItem
Last post was about a new QML component available in Plasma workspace 4.10 with an important design pattern that comes with it: Lazy loading everywhere when possible.
Next couple of posts will be about other new and old components and the UX concept behind them.
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Fifteen years of KDE e.V.
These days we are celebrating a special anniversary. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of KDE e.V., the organization behind the KDE Community.
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English Version of Plasma Active Handbook Now Available
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GNOME Desktop
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Avoiding Frame Jitter With GNOME’s Mutter, Weston
Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.
The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.
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Avoiding Frame Jitter With GNOME’s Mutter, Weston
Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.
The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.
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You Still Have A Chance To Share Your Thoughts On GNOME
What do you think of the GNOME desktop and the recent changes? You have a chance to share your opinions on the GNOME free software project by participating in the 2012 GNOME User Survey.
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GNOME “Classic” will be a separate session in 3.8
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GNOME Fallback Mode Returns in GNOME 3.8
Well, well, well… what do you know, after all the fuss about the GNOME Fallback mode being removed from the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, it looks like the GNOME developers decided to implement a similar mode for all you GNOME 2 nostalgics out there.
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A preview of GNOME Disks 3.8
GNOME Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t bumped to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) who is also senior maintainer at udisks.
Already there are many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, though it is still far from completed.
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Distributions
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Slax 7.0 RC2 – Mini KDE 4
The portable Linux distro that you can modify yourself is getting a long awaited update, with KDE 4 and more
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New Releases
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Arch 2012.12.01
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December: time for a new install medium
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Arch Linux Install Pulls In Systemd 196, Other Updates
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Arch Linux 2012.12.01 Brings Linux Kernel 3.6.8
On December 1, Pierre Schmitz proudly informed Arch Linux users that the usual monthly release install medium, Arch Linux 2012.12.01, is now available for download.
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ALT 6.9.0-20121130
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OS4 OpenDesktop 13 Update 1 released
Today the OS4 team is pleased to announce the much anticipated update of OpenDesktop 13 with OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 . With this release we bring new features and bug fixes to OpenDesktop. OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 still continues to revolutionize the linux user experience with an excellent interface, easy to use applications and comes with new options to enhance your OS4 user experience. Superior Functionality with some great new options.
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Parted Magic 2012_11_30
After two months of upgrades and bugs fixes, a new version of Parted Magic is ready for release.
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Parted Magic 2012_11_30 Features Firefox 17
Patrick Verner announced a couple of hours ago, November 30, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_11_30 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.
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Release Notes: aptosid 2012-01
We finally have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the aptosid 2012-01 “Θάνατος” release, shipping in the following flavours:
* KDE-lite, amd64, en/ de, ≈635 MB.
* KDE-lite, i686, en/ de, ≈630 MB.
* KDE-full, amd64+i686, en/ de (cz, da, es, fr, it, ja, nl, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, uk through liveapt) ≈2.1 GB.
* XFCE, amd64, en/ de, ≈515 MB.
* XFCE, i686, en/ de, ≈510 MB.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 1 Support Terminated, Upgrade to Mageia 2
We are sorry to announce today, December 1, that the Mageia 1 operating system has reach end-of-life (EOL) and it is no longer supported.
Announced last year, on June 1, 2011, Mageia 1 was the first Mageia release and it was supported for 18 months.
Starting with December 1, the Mageia foundation stoped “feeding” its first born operating system with security/critical fixes and software updates!
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Debian Family
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Steady improvements in Debian Wheezy — and a smooth transition from Squeeze
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The future of Ubuntu revealed
Canonical is pushing Ubuntu in so many different directions. On the desktop, it has introduced Unity; on the server, it’s pursuing state-of-the-art ARM and cloud platforms; and it’s even trying to get Ubuntu on to mobile phones and televisions.
Trying to keep track of how all this is going, how it all fits together and what’s coming next is a full-time job… which is why we spoke to Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, whose job it is to keep track of everything.
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Flavours and Variants
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Mint Team Rushes out 14.1 Update
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Linux Mint Is A Better Distro Than Ubuntu For New User. What Do You Think?
I have been using Ubuntu since 2006 and I always felt that it is one of the easiest to use distro, especially for new Linux users. That was in the past. Nowadays, when people ask me for recommendation, I would certainly recommend Linux Mint over Ubuntu, and here are the reasons.
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Xubuntu 12.10 review – Very nice
I do realize Xfce is not for everyone, and I used to be one of those people. And I still think the environment is a little rough round the edges. But there are no cardinal issues, nothing that cannot be resolved in about 10 hours of quick coding. And that would truly make this release outstanding to the max. Xubuntu Quetzal is a damn fine version. It cannot get the highest mark, because it needs to work on those little quirks, but 9.8/10 is an extremely good achievement. Honestly, do try this one, you will not be disappointed.
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Devices/Embedded
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5 reasons why the Roku is the best Internet TV streaming box choice
My bottom line: If you’re considering buying an Internet TV streaming box this holiday season, choose a Roku.
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Raspberry Pi Quadcopter
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Raspberry Pi Quadcopter
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Raspberry Pi Model A To Ship Soon, Farnell Shipped 429,000 Model B Units
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Plan 9 on the Raspberry Pi
As a research operating system, Plan 9 has a bunch of really weird, but useful features. For one, everything about a computer running Plan 9 is distributed; the memory can be running on one machine, the processor on another, and the display can run on yet another machine. This modularity gives Plan 9 the honorable title of, ‘more Unix than Unix’.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Wishtel to launch computing devices later this month
Mumbai-based Wishtel today said it will launch computing devices, tablet PC and net books, starting at $50 later this month.
The company has developed a Linux–based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablet and net book PCs, it said in a statement.
“Our objective as a technology and manufacturing company is to create affordable range of products that can contribute to society by extending education for free and without boundaries,” Wishtel CEO Milind Shah said in a statement.
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Barnes & Noble Beats Fiscal Q2 2013 Estimates, Reports $1.9 Billion In Revenue And Losses Of $0.04 Per Share
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Wishtel to launch sub-Rs 3,000 tablet
NEW DELHI: Mumbai-based Wishtel said it will launch computing devices, tablets and netbooks, starting at $50 later this month. The company has developed a Linux-based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablets and netbooks, PCs, it said in a statement.
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PengPod preps Linux+Android tablets for Jan launch
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Free Software/Open Source
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PetStore.com Rebuilds, Redesigns Website on Open Source Platform
PetStore.com revealed a new look with enhanced features and search technology last week when the online pet supply store relaunched its website on the open source Magento platform. The 13-year-old e-commerce company had previously run its online retail operations using an in-house website technology environment.
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NYSE OpenMAMA Advances Open Source Messaging
Open Source software has been at the heart of modern financial institutions and capital markets for several years. The Open Source model for developing software is now also taking root in the Financial Services sector thanks in part to the OpenMAMA collaborative effort run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
OpenMAMA is an effort to build an open source implementation of the MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API) that financial services companies use for passing data across messaging applications. OpenMAMA was first announced in 2011. The OpenMAMA project includes big names in the financial services sector such as Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan and NYSE Technologies, among others.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox for Android Now Has HTML5 H.264 Video Playback
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Will Mozilla Firefox 20 Fix Private Browsing?
All the way back in 2008, Mozilla brought Private Mode (aka Porn Mode) to Firefox 3.1. Over the last four years, not a whole lot has changed in Firefox’s implementation of private mode, but that might change with Firefox 20 in 2013.
Currently when a user enters Private Mode, a new browser window spins up in Firefox (it works the same for Google Chrome’s Incognito mode). The problem with Firefox is that the Private Browsing mode can only operate with the one Private window – that is users cannot concurrently have a regular Firefox window and a Private Browsing Firefox Window open at the same time.
Firefox 20 could change that model (maybe)
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Mozilla becomes Internet Society silver member
Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has announced on his blog that the organisation is joining the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Silver member. Aas points out that Mozilla has already been involved in several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups and that supporting ISOC is a logical next step. ISOC provides organisational and administrative backing to the IETF and other entities that are involved in the stewardship of the global network. It has 55,000 members in 90 chapters around the world and over 130 organisation members.
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SaaS
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CMS
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
Leftovers
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Surface Pro: Too much money for too little tablet?
The Surface Pro, Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet/laptop for the enterprise, may offer too little goodness for too much money.
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Author Andrew Piper: Turning Pages Is Important, Therefore Reading Ebooks Isn’t Reading
Every technological advance is greeted as some point during its life cycle (usually as it approaches ubiquity) by the disgruntled arguments of people who prefer older things or methods. Never has this been more prevalent than in the digital era. People diss mp3s for their sonic limitations, which is fine, but then they go a step further, claiming the “real” way to listen to music involves using other, older technology. There’s an emphasis on the physicality of the product, as if it were somehow more “real” simply because you can leave greasy fingerprints on it, thus lowering its resale value.
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Health/Nutrition
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DOJ Mysteriously Quits Monsanto Antitrust Investigation
popular announcements when no one’s listening—like, you know, the days leading up to Thanksgiving. That’s when the Obama administration sneaked a tasty dish to the genetically modified seed/pesticide industry.
This treat involves the unceremonious end of the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the US seed market, which it had begun in January 2010. It’s not hard to see why DOJ would take a look. For the the crops that cover the bulk of US farmland like corn, soy, and cotton, the seed trade is essentially dominated by five companies: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow. And a single company, Monsanto, supplies nearly all genetically modified traits now so commonly used in those crops, which it licenses to its rivals for sale in their own seeds.
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Australia smokers given plain packs
Australia has become the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
From now, all tobacco company logos and colours will be banned from packets.
They have been replaced by a dreary, uniform, green/brown, colour accompanied by a raft of anti-smoking messages and photographs.
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Security
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New Kernel Vulnerabilities Affect Four Ubuntu OSes
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Here We Go Again: Latest Draft Of White House Cybersecurity ‘Executive Order’ Is Leaked
Back in September, we posted a leaked version of a draft for a cybersecurity executive order that the White House had been passing around, mainly to try to force Congress into passing a cybersecurity law. With the last ditch attempt by Senator Harry Reid to move that process forward failing, it took exactly a week for the White House to revise its draft exec order, and start passing it around on November 21st. And, today, that new draft leaked as well. You can see the full draft here or embedded below.
It’s basically more of the same. It insists that there’s a problem without providing any real evidence of that. Much of the order focuses on increasing information sharing among and between different government agencies. As expected, it’s designed to encourage private companies, who are “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” to “participate, on a voluntary basis, in the Enhanced Cybersecurity initiative.” This is part of what had people so concerned about the various bill proposals: whether or not companies would get broadly defined as “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” and then be forced or pressured into sharing private information, all in the name of “cybersecurity!”
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Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms
Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The NSA Tells Congress What to Think And Say About the NSA: Checks and Balances in Action
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Profile: Gen. Keith Alexander, NSA and Cybercom Lead
At Cybercom, a component of Strategic Command, he is responsible for planning, coordinating and conducting operations and defense of the Defense Department’s computer networks.
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“Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed” by Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille
The man was Aldrich Ames, the CIA mole who had been spying for the KGB for six years. Grimes didn’t know it then, but she came to suspect Ames as the investigation went on. When the group was scrutinizing lists of people for who might be the mole, their choices in an informal straw poll were weighted by points. Of everyone on their list, Ames got the highest score as the most likely candidate. Eventually, the FBI opened a full investigation, Ames was arrested in 1994, pleaded guilty and is now serving a life term in prison. His motivation appears to have been simple greed.
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Bill Maher targets drone ‘terrorism’
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Court upholds sentence of ex-CIA station chief
He pleaded guilty to abusive sexual contact and a gun charge.
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Keep the drones zapping
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McManus: Doubts about drones
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Prototype of European combat drone makes maiden flight
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The Syrian Military Just Did Something No Other Force On The World Will Do Anymore
The Syrian regime was the only government in the world to lay new landmines this year, campaigners said Thursday as they issued an annual report on the use and effect of the devastating weapons.
Mark Hiznay, the editor of the report for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), said the finding is a significant change from last year, when four governments laid mines, and represents the lowest number since the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty was signed in 1997. -
NYPD Proves Street Artist Right by Tracking Him Down and Arresting Him
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Bahrain police deploy teargas at anti-Kim Kardashian protest
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Jeh Johnson, Drone War, and the Tipping Point
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Bill Maher calls U.S. military drones a form of ‘terrorism’
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European stealth-combat test drone flies in France
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Attack of the drones
More than 3,000 people have been killed in Pakistan by drone strikes.
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Drone Makers Push Congress to Move Up Domestic Deployment Date
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Flying into trouble? Drones to use US airspace as safety record questioned
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Doubts about drones
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AP’s dangerous Iran hoax demands an accounting and explanation
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Senate strips ‘indefinite detention’ for Americans from 2012 NDAA
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Bulletin: DIA will rival CIA in espionage networks
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Pentagon’s enlarged spy ring to rival CIA
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Pentagon Plans New Spy Network As Big As CIA
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Cablegate
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Debating the ethics of drones
But the one foremost on some people’s minds was: How will the U.S. react when other countries with drones start taking out American targets?
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U.S. Drone Strikes Are Causing Child Casualties: Video and Report
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CIA-operated drones protect drug lords in Pakistan: Duff
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Drone Double Standard
Question: Why is it OK for the U.S. to not only have a drone program, but also to use it, often times illegally, to bomb the crap out of folks (suspected terrorists as well as civilians) in Central Asia, but it’s not at all cool for China to develop the same technology?
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‘Al Qaeda-linked’ Yemeni among four Pakistan drone strike dead
It is difficult for journalists to verify the casualties from drone strikes since the government forbids foreign journalists from travelling to the area without a military escort and the Taliban often seal off the sites of strikes.
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A Second Drone War Won By Cyberattack
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Why “Drone Attacks” is not a helpful term
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Pfc. Manning’s trial delayed in WikiLeaks case
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Bradley Manning: how keeping himself sane was taken as proof of madness
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Review: Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
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Julian Assange on Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and the Emerging Surveillance State
Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, may testify today at a pretrial proceeding for the first time since he was arrested in May 2010. Manning could face life in prison if convicted of the most serious of 22 counts against him. His trial is expected to begin in February.
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Julian Assange Attorney Michael Ratner: Were “Rumsfeld Techniques” Used on Bradley Manning to Turn Him on Assange?
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights is an FDL contributor and also Julian Assange’s lawyer. He was in court for Bradley Manning’s testimony this week, and appears on The Real Network News with Paul Jay today to discuss it.
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A Conversation With Julian Assange
We’ve called him a “seed-spilling sex creep,” a “pale nerd king,” and “a real-life The Matrix extra,” so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a phone interview on the condition that we speak only about the book. I agreed, which was a lie.
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Wikileaks Suspect Bradley Manning Chokes Up at Hearing
PFC Bradley Manning choked back tears during a second day of testimony at a hearing before his military trial as he claimed he didn’t tell his family about the conditions of his confinement at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., because he did not want them to worry.
He also expressed concern that doing so could lead to an end to visiting privileges for his family. -
Blanking Bradley Manning: NYT and AP Launch Operation Amnesia
That story — itself considered of such little importance by AP that it didn’t even by-line the piece (perhaps the agency didn’t send a reporter either, but simply picked up snippets from other sources) — reduced the entire motion, and the long, intricate, systematic government attack on Manning’s psyche, to a matter of petty petulance on Manning’s part, a whiner’s attempt to weasel out of what’s coming to him.
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Assange vows to continue exposing secret documents
During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.
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WikiLeaks Founder Assange Dodges CNN Subterfuge
During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.
Burnett moved quickly from an opening discussion of Assange’s new book, Cypherpunks, to the subject of his relationship to Manning. For allegedly passing cables to WikiLeaks, Manning “could end up spending the rest of his life in jail,” Burnett said. “Do you feel any guilt about that since the information the U.S. government says he stole was published by you?” she asked Assange.
“The case [that was heard this week] is not about whether Bradley Manning allegedly stole cables or not,” Assange said. “The case is about the abuse of Bradley Manning” during his 2-year-long detainment, a portion of which United Nations investigator Juan Mendez described in March after a 14-month investigation as “cruel” and “inhuman.”
“Why was he treated that way?” Assange asked. “Well, his lawyer argues, and many others who have followed the case argues [sic] it was ordered to coerce him into a confession that would bring down me or bring down WikiLeaks… That’s the case that’s ongoing now. And that case is a reflection of the decay in the rule of law.”
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Assange defends WikiLeaks
“Since 2010, Western governments have tried to portray WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation, enabling a disproportionate response from both political figures and private institutions,” he wrote in the Huffington Post.
“It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better,” he said, citing some of the once secret State Department cables that his site disclosed.
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Bradley Manning speaks of ordeal in US jail
Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg praised the Wikileaks release…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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New study on rising sea levels likely confirms existence of global warming
A newly released study finds that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are disappearing three times faster than they were two decades ago, the latest evidence supporting the existence of global warming.
The study was published in the journal Science and is considered an extremely accurate portrayal of ice melts in these polar regions. According to the paper’s authors, the rapid polar ice melting has caused an increase in sea level that may become problematic to low coastal regions.
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Finance
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How Wall Street “Privatized” Money Creation
Regulators are worried about the explosive growth of shadow banking, and they should be. Shadow banks were at the heart of the last financial crisis and they’ll be at the heart of the next financial crisis as well. There’s no doubt about it. It’s simply impossible to maintain a system where unregulated, non-bank financial institutions are able to create their own money (credit) without oversight or supervision. The money they create–via off-balance sheets operations, securitization, repo or other unmonitored mega-leveraging activities–feeds into the economy, creates artificial demand, lowers unemployment, and fuels growth. But when the cycle slams into reverse (and debts are no longer serviced on time), then thinly-capitalised shadow banks begin to default one-by-one, creating a daisy-chain of counterparty bankruptcies that push stocks into a nosedive while the economy slips into a long-term slump.
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Goldman Wins Again As European Union Court Rules To Keep ECB Involvement In Greek Debt Fudging A Secret
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Censorship
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Tor operator charged for child porn transmitted over his servers
An Austrian operator of Tor servers—that were used to anonymously route huge amounts of traffic over the Internet—has been charged with distributing child pornography. This comes after police detected illegal images traversing one of the nodes he maintains.
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Tor Exit Node Operator Charged With Distributing Child Porn
Obviously, there are reasons to investigate possible child porn distribution, but it still seems ridiculous that law enforcement still seems skeptical of tor exit nodes and assumes that they must be used for nefarious intent. This isn’t the first time of course. Last year, here in the US, ICE seized a tor exit node as well. While it eventually returned the equipment, it warned the guy that “this could happen again.” And, of course, just this week, we wrote about a German case where a court actually held someone responsible for the transmission of encrypted traffic on a tor-like system.
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Comparison pictures of before and after the raid
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United Airlines Sues Passenger Complaint Site Untied
I had really thought that we’d reached the point where lawyers working for large, well-known companies recognize just how incredibly stupid it is to file lawsuits against websites that criticize them. Sure, a decade ago or so, it was common for big companies to go after so called “sucks sites” or “complaints sites,” often alleging trademark infringement. But, at some point, many of them realized that (a) trademark complaints were a dead end since there was no confusion and (b) that these lawsuits only drew a lot more attention to the sites in question. Apparently, however, there are still some throwback lawyers working for United Continental, and they’ve decided to go after a popular passenger complaints site that goes by the creative domain Untied.com.
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In Wake Of NewsCorp Scandal, UK Says Press Must Be Regulated… But Free… But Not Exactly
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Inquiry: ‘Reckless’ UK press needs new regulator
The UK government must legislate to establish a new press “self-regulation” body — independent of both publishers and politicians but overseen by media regulator Ofcom — because newspapers have “wreaked havoc” in the lives of innocents, says the nine-month inquiry report in to the culture, practice and ethics of the business.
Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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FACEBOOK MAKES IT OFFICIAL: YOU HAVE NO SAY
Late on Wednesday, just as Americans were taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced its intention to change the feedback process for the policies which govern use of its service.
For the last few years, as I’d mentioned in Wired a few months ago, Facebook held sham elections where people could ostensibly vote on its policy changes. Despite lots of responses (the most recent Site Governance vote got far more people participating than signed the secession petitions on the White House website), Facebook never promoted these policy change discussions to users, and the public has never made a substantive impact on site governance.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Main Airport and Internet Are Disrupted in Syria
Syria lost two major links with the outside world on Thursday as the largest commercial airport in the capital canceled flights because of fighting nearby and Internet access disappeared across the country, perhaps signaling an impending escalation by the government against the uprising, opponents of the Syrian government said.
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Bitter struggle over Internet regulation to dominate global summit
An unprecedented debate over how the global Internet is governed is set to dominate a meeting of officials in Dubai next week, with many countries pushing to give a United Nations body broad regulatory powers even as the United States and others contend such a move could mean the end of the open Internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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Universal Sues Over ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Porn Adaptation
After snapping up film rights for $5 million, Universal is upset over a porn movie it says is a “rip-off, plain and simple.”
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Universal Studios Sues Over Porn Parody Of ’50 Shades Of Grey’; Ignoring 50 Shade’s Own History As Fan Fiction
Still, the thing that strikes me about this — and which isn’t mentioned in the filing at all — is that Fifty Shades, itself, actually came out of a “pornographic adaptation” of the Twilight series. In fact, while those behind Fifty Shades have sought to erase this history, it does seem like a relevant point. Fifty Shades was pornographic Twilight “fan fiction,” which was later rewritten to scrub it of references to Twilight. While Fifty Shades’ author, EL James, her agent and publisher all like to claim that the Twilight fan fic James wrote and the eventual Fifty Shades book are really different works, someone compared the two using a plagiarism checker and found them to be 89% similar.
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Editor’s Letter: What matters in OfCom’s piracy stats
Almost half of the UK’s internet users aged twelve and over cannot say with confidence whether or not the sources of online content they use are legal or not, according to new research by OfCom. The study is the latest in an ongoing series of reports by the government’s media regulator attempting to identify trends in online copyright infringement before the ‘graduated response’ system for tackling online piracy set out in the Digital Economy Act is enacted.
Of the 5099 people surveyed between May and July this year, 47% weren’t able to distinguish with certainty between legal and illegal services, while only 16% actually admitted to accessing unlicensed content, and only 8% said they relied on illegal sources of music.
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Recording Industry Could Catch More Flies With Honey, But Keeps Betting On Vinegar
Malt points out that there are several legal services, most of which are inexpensive, including ad-funded streaming services which give listeners access to thousands of tracks for free. (“Inexpensive” is, of course, relative. Ofcom’s study shows that music retailers and streaming services would convert a majority of casual infringers by cutting prices 50-70%. resulting in 2-3x the number of purchases.)
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Is the pending German Copyright Bill good or bad for the Web?
A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.
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Innocence Of Muslims Maker Produces Acting Waiver Signed By Cindy Garcia
The saga of Cindy Garcia and her attempt to get The Innocence Of Muslims trailer off of YouTube continues. If you’ll recall, Garcia is one of the actresses who performed in the controversial almost-film “Innocence of Muslims”, which sparked protests throughout the Arab world. Since the protests and media blitz began (as opposed to since the flim’s trailer was released), Garcia has been trying to get the YouTube video taken down by throwing the proverbial legal kitchen sink at proverbial legal kitchen-everyone, including claims that she was duped by the flimmakers and that she owned a copyright on her portion of her performance. Buttressing her argument was her claim that she never signed any kind of release for the film.
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