● 12.13.10

● Links 13/12/2010: 300,000 Activations of Android Per Day, Jolicloud 1.1

Posted in News Roundup at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• One of the best things a Windows user can do for Defensive Computing is to have a bootable copy of Linux on hand. The classic reason being to rescue a broken copy of the operating sytem, but the much more important reason is for on-line banking.

• Anyone that does online banking on a Windows machine is taking a huge risk.

• Most likely they don’t understand how sophisticated the bad guys are at writing malware. Or, perhaps, they put way too much trust in their antivirus program. Or, they may fail to appreciate how hard it is to keep all the installed software up to date with the latest patches. Perhaps the worst type of infection, a man-in-the-browser, can even defeat two factor authentication schemes.

• I went to GNU/Linux 100% of the time. The patch that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was the fourth catastrophic patch failure I’d had on XP in three years. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t say that Linux has behaved totally angelically either. But… But… with Linux, it’s usually mea culpa, not the damned update or patch.

• On a regular basis we see studies claiming that the way forward in effective IT is with open source concepts. This means open source software, Linux desktops, Linux servers, Linux embedded devices, and the list just keeps on expanding.

• At the same time, the forces behind big label proprietary software applications rail back against open source by saying the open source approach to enterprise needs will end up costing more money in the long run. And in instances where FUD doesn’t work, these same companies ride along with the old “legacy software” argument, explaining how open source solutions simply cannot match up in quality to their proprietary counterparts.

• [...]

• Closer to home, I’ve seen evidence that Canada is also embracing the Linux experience more each day.

• While fans of M$ claim market shares for M$ of 91% and more realistic webstats show 86%, Treflis has estimated the current market share is about 75% (Forbes) and has been trending down. The current web stats lag reality in the market place because current web stats are generated by PCs that have shipped years ago.

• We know Apple ships about 4% of PCs shipped per annum (still not in top 10), so the other 20% could be shipping to folks with portable licences likely for XP that they do not have to buy again, illegal installation (no licence), thin clients and GNU/Linux or other OS. That’s a huge slice of the pie in which GNU/Linux can obviously grow. Then there is the huge number of P4ish XP machines that can be installed of GNU/Linux. 50% of all on-line machines by most estimates run XP and likely most of them will not be scrapped. They can run for years more as thin clients or GNU/Linux machines.

• There is news of a “huge” roll-out in Brazil, 1.5 million notebooks running Mandriva GNU/Linux. That sounds like a huge number but in a population of 200 million people it is a drop in the bucket, about one machine per classroom. My impoverished-IT-budget school has 5 or 6 times as many GNU/Linux PCs. If the government of Brazil really wanted to make a difference they could spend a bit more and using GNU/Linux terminal servers and thin clients they could provide many more computers for students.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Yesterday we reported that AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver team lost another key developer with Piranavan Selvanandan, a senior engineer at ATI since 2003 when Matthew Tippett built-up the original ATI Linux driver team, leaving the company. While it’s unfortunate to see AMD lose another long-time Linux engineer, it appears they are hiring for both their open and closed-source Linux driver teams.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Frozenbyte the developers of Shadowgrounds and Trine series are looking for GNU/Linux gamers to test their Trine port !

• Last month the company behind the very advanced Unigine Engine launched a Linux game development competition whereby they would give away a free license to the game development team that came up with the best game idea and would provide a native Linux game client. Submissions for this contest ended on Friday.

• [...]

• Not only that, but I’ve also learned that one of Unigine’s clients is interested in partnering with the winning team to provide high-quality 3D game content/artwork.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• New KDE versions are released every six months nowadays. Roughly three months are spent on developing new features, the other three are devoted to release preparations. “What’s needed to get things ready for the release?” the curious might ask. “Why does it take that long?” the impatient. I’ll tell you from my perspective as a Marble developer.

• While nepomuk has seen improvements, I thought it was still only being used by dolphin and kontact. But then I did some poking… it can record the source of files downloaded by konqueror. It’s going to be involved in some telepathy thingy. It stores the custom icons for activities. I think there was something about koffice too, although I can’t remember it. For 4.7 we’ll hopefully have apps using it to record what resources they’re using and link them to activities n’stuff – but there hasn’t been time to do that yet. So… the second part is certainly true – even *I* don’t really know where nepomuk is – but I’m not sure if I can count the first part as true or not.

• This time i would like to write about a very underestimated feature of the KDE Community Forums, because i am pretty sure most of you don’t even know what it can do for you.

• Another week is gone and my KWin-GLES branch got further polishing. All developing on the OpenGL ES code is nowadays happening on my notebook using KWin-GLES. So it is already so useable that I can develop on it without real problems. Most of the effects are already ported and can be used. Today I added the first 3D effects, that is CoverSwitch and FlipSwitch and a (locally) half finished Cube Desktop Switch animation. Quite nice to see the new code working as expected Only eleven effects are not yet ported, but these include some effects which won’t be ported, such as FPS, Sharpen or Shadow effect.

• I have been dreaming of this feature for ages, and then I bought a tablet PC a few days before it get implemented in Krita when I do not need it anymore But it is still an extremelly cool feature, that was started by Lukáš Tvrdý and finished by Dmitry Kazakov.

GNOME Desktop

• According to its creator, Synapse is essentially a search tool, which goes through many sources of information to present contents right at the user’s fingertips. I know, it does sound vague, but a few examples really help in understanding how Synapse works.

Distributions

Reviews

• Finally, a quick link to an interesting interview with NetBSD’s Amitai Schlair, a member of a committee that oversees the development of pkgsrc and the maintainer of the official NetBSD Wiki: “Originally, the official Wiki wasn’t intended to replace the unofficial one. People who wanted to contribute to a NetBSD Wiki had been doing just fine without us. That’s no longer the case. We want these people to be able to keep contributing to NetBSD as they have, so we’re adapting our Wiki plans to make room for everyone. This entails some careful rethinking — every other official project resource is, by design, writeable only by developers — followed by a fresh batch of integration work. We’d hoped to have time to prepare for a smooth transition from wiki.netbsd.se; alas, it’s not in the cards. Instead, we’re working as quickly as we can to make it possible for everyone to participate in the official NetBSD Wiki. A smooth transition would also, at minimum, involve moving worthwhile content to the new Wiki and providing HTTP redirects at the old URLs for a while. Of course, these require a modicum of assistance from the administrators of wiki.netbsd.se. For users’ sake, I hope assistance will be forthcoming.”

Red Hat Family

• The government cloud services market just heated up a bit more. Red Hat’s recently announced acquisition of Makara, a platform-as-a-service firm, indicates that the open-source technology provider is ready to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google. Analysts note that the bottom line of the acquisition is that federal, state and local agencies have more choices for cloud service providers.

• At a time when many Americans are expressing grave concerns about the country’s economic future, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the glass as half full.

• Whitehurst said Thursday that the U.S. is well situated to prosper in a global economy where success is increasingly tied to the ability to access, understand and share vast amounts of information.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Just saw Kyle Baker tweet about this. Knowing so many readers are already helping test Ubuntu 11.04 the return of drag and drop ordering of launcher items can’t come soon enough for many…

• The Ubuntu Software Center will reach the 3.1 milestone sometime before the new year and according to the Software Center Wiki it will gain a software review feature. Users will be able to rate and review applications in the center.

Flavours and Variants

• Ubuntu’s Maverick Desktop edition was, to me, a great success. It’s fast, secure, and slick. Linux-Mint Julia, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution was, however, a total success. Julia surpassed Maverick in ease of installation and use.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The source management strategy above includes a code-line that Google will keep private.

• [...]

• We recognize that many contributors will disagree with this approach.

• Years ago, the “tipping point” for GNU/Linux was discussed as a possibility. We could see the tipping point in 2011 if Android keeps growing and ARM begins to eat into thin clients, desktops, tablets and notebooks. All the ducks are in a row. The final blow to Wintel will be the acceptance of GNU/Linux in all OEM and retail channels.

Free Software/Open Source

• YafaRay is a free and open source raytracing engine. Raytracing is a rendering technique for generating realistic images by tracing the path of light through a 3D scene. I have no idea what a raytracing engine means or how critical a client it is to Blender. But this video showcasing different capabilities of YafaRay is an absolute delight to watch.

• What’s useful here is that Netflix is a very different company from either Google or Facebook, say; and so its message of support for open source confirms the latter’s ability to serve a wide spectrum of users. Moreover, the list of open source programs it uses and contributes to extends well beyond the classical LAMP stack that many associate might with free software, which confirms its breadth in a different, but equally important way.

Events

• Paul Jay, senior editor of The Real News Network, will moderate a virtual panel discussion promoting a dialogue for the technology community about the technological and legal ramifications of the WikiLeaks shutdown.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle

• Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF’s importance to Java’s future.

• The ASF announced its departure from the committee on Wednesday in a blog post, saying Oracle has too much control over Java. “The commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem,” reads the ASF blog.

• Other resignations include Tim Peierls and of course Apache. Google will probably follow shortly. They have all realised that they were giving their work and IP to improve a proprietary Oracle product… for nothing.

• ASF will obviously not let Harmony go to the waste-bin. Harmony will be an appropriate name for a replacement Free Software project for Java. A whole industry based on Harmony will emerge in the next year with all kinds of growth opportunities for ambitious people. Oracle will become a life-boat for the truly locked-in. Java being designed to be portable can almost instantly be ported to Harmony under a truly open organization. Expect ASF to announce a new direction in weeks. There is no rush and they will want to get it right.

CMS

• We are proud to present to you the second release candidate of Drupal 7.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the last release candidate two weeks ago, we have fixed upgrade path bugs, improved styling in the default “Bartik” theme, numerous bug fixes and improvements to strings, and fixed a critical bug preventing default Views from working. For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Francisco Garcia-Moran, director-general of the European Commission’s directorate of informatics, refuted a claim made by the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) that the contract had discriminated in favour of proprietary software suppliers.

• In a letter sent last week, Garcia-Moran told FSFE president Karsten Gerloff he had been “totally misleading” when he accused the EC of operating in “direct contradiction” of its own rules on the promotion and use of open source software.

• The director-general disputed the lobbyist’s accusation that the contract had been a bad deal for European taxpayers.

• [...]

• The commission already used 250 open source products, he said. It operated 350 Linux servers and 800 open source web servers. The EC’s open source social collaboration system, called the Flexible Platform, hosted 400 wikis and blogs for 400 commissioners.

• * Open source authentication protected more than 300 web applications used by more than 60,000 users. * It used an open source content management system, and did its invoicing and ordering on open source software as well. * The EC’s 2,000 software developers were working on more than 600 projects on an open source collaboration platform.

Licensing

• I’ve been a bit over a week in Taipei, mainly to co-present (with Armijn Hemel) the GPL compliance engineering workshop at Academia Sinica. The workshop was attended by more than 100 representatives of the local IT industry in Taiwan, from both legal and engineering departments.

• I think even only the sheer number of attendees is a great sign to indicate how important the subject of Free Software license compliance has become in the IT industry, and specifically in the embedded consumer electronics market.

• Open source software is (of course) distributed (for the most part) under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which grants the right to modify and redistribute the software code itself. There are rules and stipulations covering combined works, combined libraries and conventions covering every element of application structure from object code, to headers and libraries.

Leftovers

• Emoticons first appeared — in rudimentary fashion — over a century ago, but the online infestation of signifiers has definitely reached epidemic status. Nauseated by that scourge of smileys and winks, two valiant enemies of the emoticon have launched a campaign that urges everyone to — at least temporarily — spurn the annoying and inappropriate use of emotionally indicative symbols.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Over the last 24 hours Gawker Media’s network of sites have been under attack from a group who have identified themselves “Gnosis,” a seemingly mysterious collective of hackers who has been falsely considered part of the 4chan-related group of renegade vigilantes knows as Anonymous. Via several private email exchanges with Mediaite, an individual claiming to represent “Gnosis” has explained both the reasoning and methodology of his actions, which has led to a compromised commenter database and a content management system.

• As much of the world on Friday focused their eyes on the empty seat in Oslo that starkly represented the absence of the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, a lone Chinese blogger posted the image of a chair on the country’s most popular microblogging site.

• In one narrative of the “War on Terror,” President Bush scrapped the protections of the Geneva Conventions — including Common Article 3, which prohibits “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” — for prisoners at Guantánamo, and established the prison as an offshore interrogation center to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks. This narrative is distressing enough, as it involves a deliberate attempt to discard domestic and international laws and treaties so that prisoners seized in wartime — mixed up with a handful of terrorist suspects — could be held indefinitely and subjected to torture, but it is not, in fact, the most compelling explanation of the purpose of the detention policies implemented in the “War on Terror.”

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks neither supports nor condemns the cyber attacks that have targeted its critics, it said Friday, just as it appears the attackers are mounting a fresh operation against Moneybookers.com.

• The whistleblowing website wrote on its Twitter feed that it is not affiliated with Anonymous, a group of online activists that have attacked websites of companies that cut off services to WikiLeaks.

• On its website, WikiLeaks went further.

• The controversy created after the release of hundreds of US secret diplomatic cables have raised many important legal issues about national security and freedom of the press under U.S. law, according to Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

• Journalists and government officials have suggested that either WikiLeaks or The New York Times (NYT) might face legal liability for publishing the contents of diplomatic cables and other leaked documents.In order to find either WikiLeaks/Julian Assange or the NYT liable, the government would need to prove two things – first that a law had been broken, and second that enforcement of the law was constitutional under the First Amendment,” Richards said.

• Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has defended the legal rights of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s preparing to face court in London.

• Mr Rudd said yesterday he’s prepared to intervene to have a laptop computer provided for Mr Assange in London’s Wandsworth prison to help the Australian prepare his defence and obtain bail at his appearance at Westminster Magistrates Court on Tuesday.

• But so far, WikiLeaks has shown a remarkable amount of responsibility and discretion.

• It has released only 1,000 of the more than 250,000 cables it possesses, and has worked with various other media outlets to redact names and decide which information not to release for reasons of national security.

• Attorney Daniel Klau, a First Amendment expert, particularly on press protections, takes issue with U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman’s suggestion the New York Times should be investigated for printing stories based on documents released by WikiLeaks.

• “I certainly believe that WikiLeaks has violated the Espionage Act, but then what about the news organizations — including The Times — that accepted it and distributed it? To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department,” Lieberman, I-Conn., said on Fox News.

• Klau, a partner with Pepe and Hazard in Hartford and president of the Connecticut Foundation for Open Government, said the Supreme Court has been clear in several cases where it defined the role newspapers play in this scenario.

• Outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva threw his support behind WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and questioned how the Australian’s arrest squared with international protestations about freedom of expression and of the press.

• Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

• Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

• Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

• Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

• Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

• Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

• Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

• Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

• Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

• The Justice Department would kind of like to prosecute Julian Assange, who most recently leaked a list of “vital” U.S. facilities worldwide. All it has to do is figure out what crime the WikiLeaks founder has committed. Prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 might proving tricky: The government has never successfully prosecuted someone for receiving leaked information, and it’s never even tried to prosecute a journalist, which Assange claims to be. Thus, government lawyers are looking at approaching the affair from other angles, as well. Other potential crimes include “trafficking in stolen property” and conspiracy, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports.

• After I highlighted the multiple factual inaccuracies in Time’s WikiLeaks article yesterday (see Update V) — and then had an email exchange with its author, Michael Lindenberger — the magazine has now appended to the article what it is calling a “correction.” In reality, the “correction” is nothing of the sort; it is instead a monument to the corrupted premise at the heart of American journalism.

• The House Judiciary Committee is planning a Dec. 16 hearing on the legal issues surrounding WikiLeaks, making it the first congressional committee to do so since the organization began releasing U.S. diplomatic cables last month.

• They have, but they have also published actual (in some cases redacted) cables. Thus far, WikiLeaks has really just posted the same cables the news organizations it worked with have, with the same redactions. There is not that much of a difference between what WikiLeaks has done and what the Times and the others have done. That doesn’t mean that the Times, in doing so, did anything wrong.

• There are likely few people reading the State Department cables released by Wikileaks with greater interest than students of international relations, who have every personal, academic, and professional reason to explore the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy. So it must have surprised the would-be diplomats of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to receive an email last week from the Office of Career Services warning that — according to an unnamed Columbia alum in the State Department — any student who so much as tweeted about the cables could jeopardize his or her hopes of getting any job with the federal government that requires security clearance. “The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents,” the email read. “He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter.”

• But isn’t there such a thing as free speech in America?

• But Assange has portrayed himself as a crusading journalist: He told ABC News by e-mail that his latest batch of State Department documents would expose “lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.” He told Time magazine he targets only “organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior.”

• Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness held lengthy negotiations with the former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern to save the Northern Ireland peace process in the full knowledge that the IRA was planning to carry out the biggest bank robbery in its history, according to leaked US cables passed to WikiLeaks.

• The 2009 crash of a stolen plane near the capital city of Brasilia exposed Brazil’s vulnerability to terrorist acts, said a U.S. diplomatic cable released Sunday by WikiLeaks.

• On March 12, 2009, a man kidnapped his 5-year-old daughter, hijacked a small plane, and flew around of the city of Goiania for two hours before crashing into the parking lot of a shopping mall, killing himself and the girl. The crash “highlighted a vulnerability to potential terrorist actions,” then-Ambassador Clifford Sobel wrote in a memo.

• Brazilian authorities considered shooting down the plane, which had no flight plan and was viewed as a threat, according to the March 28, 2009, report. Air defense authorities followed the country’s shootdown procedure, illustrating “the extreme caution with which a possible shootdown is approached, the broad understanding of the shootdown policy among air traffic controllers and the fact that the procedures are executed as written,” Sobel said.

• The Foreign Office stands accused of misleading the public over the plight of thousands of islanders who were expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland to make way for a large US military base.

• More than 2,000 islanders – described privately by the Foreign Office as “Man Fridays” – were evicted from the British colony of Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 70s. The Foreign Office, backed by the US, has fought a long legal battle to prevent them returning home.

• So with this context, I’ve been watching the Wikileaks attack with great interest. It has been suffering a pretty big network attack (Wikileaks claims about 10Gbps, which is big enough to take down all but a couple dozen or less ISPs in the world; arbor claims about 2-4 Gbps, which is still big enough to cause the vast majority of ISPs in the world major disruption). The attack successfully took its site offline at its main hosting ISP. Wikileak’s textbook response was to move to Amazon’s web services, one of those core Internet services capable of defending against big network attacks.

• Qatar is using the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera as a bargaining chip in foreign policy negotiations by adapting its coverage to suit other foreign leaders and offering to cease critical transmissions in exchange for major concessions, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks claim.

• AMERICAN diplomats secretly sent uranium on a commercial airliner, in violation of US government rules about the abuse of the diplomatic bag system, and laws governing the air transportation of hazardous materials.

• The metallic powder was sent from the US Embassy in Burma, according to a cable published by WikiLeaks.

• For the past 300 years, the relationship between the press and the state has been straightforward: the press tries to publish, the state uses its various mechanisms to thwart those efforts. This has produced a cat-and-mouse steady-state, a balance where selection pressures kept the press tamed and the state – in many circumstances – somewhat accountable to the governed. There are, as always, exceptions.

• In the last few months, the press has become ‘hyperconnected’, using this extreme connectivity to pierce the veil of secrecy which surrounds the state. The press now uses that same connectivity to distribute those secrets to everyone, everywhere who wants them. The press has suddenly become incredibly powerful, unlike anything ever experienced before.

• WikiLeaks is the press, but not the press as we have known it. This is the press of the 21st century, the press that comes after we’re all connected. Suddenly, all of the friendliest computers have become the deadliest weapons, and we are fenced in, encircled by threats – which are also opportunities.

• To the United States, Julian Assange may now be Public Enemy Number One. Some American politicians have even called for his execution.

• But less than a year ago, the founder of WikiLeaks was officially entertained at a US Embassy cocktail party by one of the very diplomats whose secrets he would soon spill to the world.

• It is not clear if the mistake first appeared on a blog or flitted around in a Twitter message. But whatever its source, it swept Mark Jeftovic and his company, EasyDNS, into both sides of the storm over corporate support, or the lack thereof, for WikiLeaks.

• Access to Wikileaks.org has returned after members of its consortium worked with Mark Jeftovic, founder of EasyDNS, to help them get their domains back online.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s lawyer says he has seen secret police documents that prove the whistleblower is innocent of rape claims made against him by two women in Stockholm.

• Björn Hurtig, who is representing Mr Assange in Sweden, said the papers, which form part of the official Swedish investigation, reveal both women had ‘hidden agendas’ and lied about being coerced into having sex with Mr Assange, 39.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Concentrations of the main greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached their highest level since pre-industrial times, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said today.

• The chances of northern Europe facing a new ice age, or of catastrophic sea-level rises of almost four metres that swamp the planet over the next century, have been ruled out by leading scientists.

• But the risk of tropical forests succumbing to drought brought on by climate change as well as the acceleration of methane emissions from melting permafrost, is greater, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre, in its latest climate change review.

Finance

• In a rare moment of candor last week, the third-ranking Republican in the House admitted the failure of the Bush tax cuts. “You know, I think it’s fair to say, if the current tax rates were enough to create jobs and generate economic growth we’d have a growing economy,” Mike Pence acknowledged, adding, “It’s not working now.”

• Tomorrow, on high streets across the country, there are likely to be sit-ins in Topshop, blockades of BHS, flash mobs in Dorothy Perkins, and occupations of Miss Selfridge. Why? Because Sir Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia Group of retailers, ninth richest man in Britain and a government adviser, is a tax avoider.

• While Green lives and works in the UK, the Arcadia Group is registered in the name of his wife, Tina, who is resident in Monaco and so enjoys a 0% income-tax rate. In 2005 this arrangement allowed the Greens to bank £1.2bn, the biggest paycheck in British corporate history, without paying a penny in tax. This completely legal dodge cost the British taxpayer £285m, enough to pay the salaries of 9,000 NHS nurses or the £9,000 fees of close to 32,000 students. In an age of austerity, the link between tax avoidance and public sector cuts becomes crystal clear.

• Janet Tavakoli talked about the federal government’s role in regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She also responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.

• Do not forget: Virtually all the major players who brought us into the crisis are still there: the government officials, the CEOs, the investment bankers. The permanent plutocracy has survived unscathed. At a minimum, American citizens are entitled to know what happened.

• For two years, the two sons of jailed financier Bernard Madoff portrayed themselves as honest whistleblowers of their father’s historic fraud. A court-appointed trustee depicted them as bungling money managers who did nothing to protect investors.

• The suicide of Mark Madoff leaves unanswered questions for investors seeking payback for the billions of dollars his father siphoned – and for criminal investigators who continued to pursue charging Madoff’s family for knowing participation in the fraud.

• President Barack Obama’s plan to cut payroll taxes for a year would provide big savings for many workers, but makes Social Security advocates nervous that it could jeopardize the retirement program’s finances.

• The plan is part of a package of tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits that Obama negotiated with Senate Republican leaders. It would cut workers’ share of Social Security taxes by nearly one-third for 2011. Workers making $50,000 in wages would get a $1,000 tax cut; those making $100,000 would get a $2,000 tax cut.

• BRIAN MOYNIHAN isn’t one to look back. And as the chief executive of Bank of America, he has plenty of reasons not to.

• His company is staggering under the weight of his predecessors’ decisions, and each day seems to bring more bad news. More than 1.3 million of the bank’s customers are behind on their home loans, all 50 state attorneys general are investigating the industry’s foreclosure practices and Bank of America has become a leading symbol of the mortgage mess.

• Some people are doing fine. Others are barely getting by and still trapped in a deep recession. A 9.8% unemployment rate is unacceptable … something to remember this time of year. Best to all.

• Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has been attacked for failing to foresee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recovery a boost.

• The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

• Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The Korean Communications Commission [official website] generally criticised [ITProPortal report] Facebook’s privacy policy, handling of personal information and the use of personal data of third parties. In particular, Facebook is said to be in breach of Article 22 [text, PDF] of the South Korean Act on Promotion of Information and Communication Network Utilization and Information Protection, which states “If an information and communications service provider intends to gather user personal information, they shall obtain user consent.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• You’re bored on a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon, so you settle onto your divan and call up a streaming movie on Netflix—Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death, say. What happens then? You might imagine that the film gets shuttled to your house from a server in Netflix’s California headquarters. If every Netflix customer accessed the same data center, however, it would get overwhelmed with streaming requests and the network along the way would likely become clogged with Netflix traffic. Your movie, meanwhile, would look glitchy and terrible.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Back in September the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed that it was investigating a major data breach at ACS:Law, after the unencrypted details of thousands of broadband users, who reportedly signed up to BSkyB services and were thought to be illegally sharing pornography, was leaked on its website. This website is still not operational months later.

• That breach could see the ICO hitting ACS:Law with a maximum penalty of £500,000.

• Prosecuting the criminals that steal content is one way of fighting piracy. Over at Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX), they’re adopting a more opportunistic attitude, closely tracking pirates in hopes of converting them into consumers.

ACTA

• Following the release of the final, legally-verified version of ACTA (dated December 3rd), we have updated our analysis of the most worrying provisions of this dangerous anti-counterfeiting agreement. ACTA AS A BULLYING WEAPON FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES

• By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.

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