● 12.14.10

● Links 14/12/2010: Richard Purdie a New Linux Foundation Fellow, Xorg-Server 1.9.3 is Out

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

Desktop

• Since the new year in almost every school in the Amur Region will the computer revolution. 31 декабря закончится действие лицензии на пакет программного обеспечения от компании Microsoft, установленного на большинстве школьных компьютеров. December 31 will end the license for the software package from Microsoft, is installed on most school computers. Его сменит свободное программное обеспечение, которое будет работать на базе операционной системы Linux. He was replaced by the free software that will operate on the basis of the operating system Linux.

• Sonakshi Pandit, studying for a doctorate in education at the University of Pune, hopes the laptop will force teachers and students to update their teaching and learning styles.

Server

• The global race for supercomputing power continues unabated: Germany’s Bavarian Academy of Science has announced that it has contracted IBM to build a supercomputer that, when completed in 2012, will be able to execute up to 3 petaflops, potentially making it the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

• To be called SuperMUC, the computer, which will be run by the Academy’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany, will be available for European researchers to use to probe the frontiers of medicine, astrophysics and other scientific disciplines. (The MUC suffix is borrowed from the Munich airport code).

Kernel Space

• Oracle’s been vigorously working on their VM VirtualBox 4.0 software and in just the past week they have delivered two public betas that bring a number of new features. Among the changes there is support for Intel HD audio / ICH9 to guest VMs, the concept of extension packs, user-interface improvements, support for limiting a virtual machine’s CPU time and I/O bandwidth, 3D acceleration fixes for guests, and a great number of bug-fixes. How though is this updated Oracle/Sun virtualization platform comparing to the older VirtualBox 3.2 release and that of the upstream Linux KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) that most Linux distributions rely upon? Here are a number of benchmarks that seek to answer this very question.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that OpenEmbedded core developer and Yocto Project maintainer Richard Purdie has been appointed to the position of Linux Foundation Fellow.

• Once tuned, Linux’s latency (and the router’s latency) can be really nice even under high load (even if I’ve not tried hard to get to the theoretical minimums). But un-tuned, I can get many second latency out of both Linux home routers and my laptop, just by heading to some part of my house where my wireless signal strength is low (I have several chimneys that makes this trivial). By walking around or obstructing your wireless router, you should be easily able to reproduce bufferbloat in either your router or in your laptop, depending on which direction you saturate.

• With an open source router on appropriate hardware and a client running Linux, you can make bufferbloat very much lower in your home environment, even when bufferbloat would otherwise cause your network to become unusable. Nathaniel Smith in a reply to “Fun with Wireless” shows what can be done when you both set the txqueuelen and change the driver (in his case, a one line patch!)

Graphics Stack

• We have just been told that the 10.0 “Dharma” release of XBMC is due out this coming week. XBMC 10.0 presents a unified add-on framework and a lot of features related to this work for providing new functionality, initial gesture support for the XBMC GUI Engine, improved mouse support, Broadcom Crystal HD decoding support, native support for unencrypted Blu-ray playback, support for Google WebM, and many other changes. While XBMC 10.0 isn’t even out the door, XBMC 11.0 “Eden” is already well into planning.

• Besides what’s already been mentioned, other XBMC 10.0 features include initial support for OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow the Linux renderer to support embedded devices, SSH file transfer protocol support, a number of new movie/video scrapers have been introduced, an improved video scanner engine, an improved meta-data scraper engine, upgrades against FFmpeg, and much more.

• Put out earlier this morning on Phoronix were Linux virtualization benchmarks comparing the native performance of a high-end Intel Core i7 system to that of the de facto standard Linux KVM virtualization method as well as Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2.12 and Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 2. These tests focused largely upon the disk and CPU performance within Ubuntu Linux virtual machines, since that’s often where enterprise users are most concerned with virtualization performance. For desktop users, there’s also the matter of 2D/3D acceleration support within virtual machines.

• xorg-server-1.9.3 is the third maintenance release of the 1.9 branch of the X11 server from X.org. It includes numerous bug fixes to address performance, stability, and correctness. This version is functionally equivalent to the second release candidate. The list below summarizes all changes since 1.9.2.

• AMD’s Toronto developers working on the ATI Catalyst Linux driver have just released their last public update of the year. The Catalyst 10.12 Linux driver (along with the Windows version) is now available for those interested in this high-performance, but proprietary, driver.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• If you are a Linux gamer there’s a lot of hopeful opportunities coming up especially with up to four Linux games coming from Unigine, but that’s still months out. Right now though if you’re looking for a new Linux native game to play, Frozenbyte is looking for testers of their Linux client port of Trine.

• There were proposals from approximately 15 game studios to this Linux game competition that was launched by this Russian company late last month.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• We’ve already covered all the new features in Clementine 0.6 (release candidate at the time) so this post is just a small update to let you know that Clementine 0.6 stable has been released. There are no new features since the RC, only bug fixes.

GNOME Desktop

• A new Haguichi version (1.0.3) has been released today which adds theme specific panel icons for Humanity, Ambiance, Radiance, Elementary and Elementary Dark.

Distributions

• It has become quite a different beast in some ways, having grown for the first time to over 200 MB size and introducing KDE 4 and 64-bit to Slax among others, like its founder had envisaged for the future of the project. At the same time it has also created a small team of developers familiar enough with the system to continue if the project is abandoned, or to help Tomas M out, should he decide to return for Slax 7. On the other hand I wonder if this is not just an operating system for a small group of hardcore fans now that it has had its time and may become increasingly irrelevant, in a day and age where almost every distribution offers a convenient graphical way to copy to a USB device and back or create spins. In any case, I am glad it’s still around, and will keep using it from time to time just for fun.

Debian Family

• My Lenovo T410s has a rather small 80 GB SSD, and with the amount of data that I need to deal with these days, something like mounting network drive isn’t fast enough for me. So I decided to try USB 3.0, since I have an open ExpressCard slot.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Hopefully this “software-properties” feature will be backported to older Ubuntu versions; meanwhile you can use Launchpad Getkeys to fix the missing GPG keys.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Earlier this year Google announced they would be switching to the EXT4 file-system on their Linux servers (previously they were still using the mature EXT2) and at the same time it was made available they had hired Ted Ts’o, the lead developer of this file-system currently in use by a majority of the new Linux desktop distributions. Google’s continuing to love the EXT4 file-system and now with their new Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” operating system for smart-phones and other mobile devices, they are switching to EXT4 there too.

• This is another reason why I’m glad to see ext4 being used on Android is that it validates my decision to keep working on ext4 2-3 years ago, even though newer filesystems like btrfs were promised to be coming down the pike. As I’ve said many times before, file systems are like fine wine, and they take many years to mature. So having ext4 ready today is a great way of giving more choices to developers and system administrators about what file system they want to use.

Free Software/Open Source

• For free software advocates, these same projects are each seen as important successes. Because every piece of free software respects its users’ freedom, advocates of software freedom argue that each piece of free software begins with an inherent ethical advantage over proprietary competitors — even a more featureful one. By emphasizing freedom over practical advantages, free software’s advocacy is rooted in a technical reality in a way that open source is often not. When free software is better, we can celebrate this fact. When it is not, we need not treat it as a damning critique of free software advocacy or even as a compelling argument against the use of the software in question.

• Getting into the middle of a discussion on the virtues of open source versus free software is about as smart as trying to reconcile the two major US political parties at this point in history–in other words, a fool’s errand.

• But I’ve been called worse, so here goes.

• Benjamin Mako Hill is a well-known and -respected free software developer and activist, whose opinions I pay attention to, even if I don’t always agree with them. In this month’s Free Software Foundation Bulletin, Hill wrote an essay entitled “When Free Software Sucks,” which he has republished for public consumption under the title “When Free Software Isn’t Better.”

• I have a kind of a fetish – the idea that source code, even old or extremely specific for a single use, may be useful for a long time. Not only for porting to some other, strange platform, but for issues like prior art in software patents, for getting inspiration for techniques or simply because you don’t know when it may be of use. For this reason, I try to create public access archives of source code I manage to get my hands on, especially when such codes may require a written license to acquire, but may then later be redistributed.

• 1. They find that open source software helps improve national sovereignty, which is a very important goal for helping the government to do its job.

• 2. Open source improves economic development.

• 3. Open source helps to grow global knowledge.

• In India, open source adoption has transitioned from mere hype to reality. It has graduated from a model driven purely by the developer’s community to one where the industry is the key driver. For CIOs, the benefits of open source software (OSS) have moved beyond cost and its usage has expanded beyond operating system to core applications.

• Cellecta, Inc., a provider of screening services for gene function analysis and therapeutic drug target discovery, announced the launch of the DECIPHER Project—an open source platform for genome-wide RNAi screening which offers reagents for running genetic knockdown screens, software tools for data analysis, and an open database of genetic knockdown screening results. Funded, in part, by several NIH grants, some jointly undertaken with collaborators at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and The Scripps Research Institute, the DECIPHER Project objective is to provide free reagents and software tools for researchers to perform and analyze comprehensive shRNA knockdown screens and to develop a standardized yet versatile platform for collecting and comparing results from different studies and labs.

Events

• Head of Strategic Initiatives, Global Technology Office, Virtusa Corporation Chamindra De Silva delivered an address titled ‘Licensing with regards to Open Source Alignment to the Cloud’ at Asia’s largest open source conference ‘Open Source India 2010′ (OSI Days).

• So what does this mean to the event this year? Only good things. We are working harder than ever to get things in place for the most memorable FOSS.IN ever, and make sure that our audiences have the time of their lives. We have always run the event with the objective of giving participants a feel of a “mega event”, the way they happen abroad (and that few people can afford going to), and we are going to make this last one precisely that – set the bar really high before we get off the stage (or fall off it )

• We have been lucky so far – sponsors have been generous, we managed to get online registration up with the help of our friends at DoAttend.com, we managed to get the venue at short notice (though only for 3 days, and right in the middle of the week), and things are going according to schedule.

• So come Wednesday, the 15th, we look forward to welcoming the many hundreds of delegates who have already registered, and the many more who will form the inevitable queue, to attend the last FOSS.IN ever.

• We’re gearing up to record our last podcast of 2010, and in this episode we’ll be looking back on a very eventful year for the Linux community. In our Open Ballot – which isn’t really an Open Ballot this time, we’ll admit – we want you to tell us: what was the biggest event in the Linux world for you? Maybe it was the Mageia fork of Mandriva, or perhaps it was the release of MeeGo 1.0. Or maybe Ubuntu’s decision to transition away from X is your killer moment of the last 12 months.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Mozilla Foundation is unabashedly committed to a free and open web. They see it as a vital part of a healthy digital ecosystem where creativity and innovation can thrive. We couldn’t agree more. And we couldn’t be prouder to have Mozilla’s generous and ongoing support. We were recently able to catch up with Mark Surman, the Foundation’s Executive Director, who talks about Mozilla and its myriad projects, and how his organization and ours are a lot like lego blocks for the open web.

SaaS

• Predicting trends in computer technology is an easy way to get into trouble, but two developments have been hyped so much over the past decade that there’s little risk in jumping on their bandwagons: free software and cloud computing. What’s odd is that both are so beloved of crystal-gazers, because on the surface they seem incompatible.

• The first trend promises freedom, the second convenience. Both freedom and convenience inspire people to adopt new technology, so I believe the two trends will eventually coexist and happily lend power to each other. But first, the proponents of each trend will have to get jazzed up about why the other trend is so compelling.

Oracle

• While a number of small companies have been ramping up support for a file system called Lustre that Oracle acquired in its Sun Microsystems purchase earlier this year, Oracle itself has no plans to abandon the technology, a company executive told the IDG News Service in an interview.

• “Oracle is unwavering in our commitment to the Lustre technology, to the Lustre community and to the broader supercomputer community in general,” said Jason Schaffer, Oracle senior director of product management for storage. “Through the Oracle acquisition, there has been plenty of opportunity for our competitors to say things that are being a little presumptuous, if not overly presumptuous, in [terms of what] Oracle will develop or not develop,” he added.

CMS

• First impression: If you’ve used Facebook, you know that it offers a grouping feature, to help you direct your posts to the appropriate “friends” and away from inappropriate ones. This is to keep your boss from seeing photos of you puking after a night of drinking. But Facebook’s feature is difficult to use, so much that no one I know uses it, and many people aren’t even aware of it. Diaspora’s “aspects” grouping feature is right up front and easy to use. It quite naturally invites you to partition your “friends” into such groups, while making it absolutely simple to send a post to all your aspects.

Project Releases

• Python API and tools to manipulate OpenDocument files

Government

• Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude declares the era of “Major IT Projects” over.

• Few will disagree with his observation that the Government has provided “easy margins” for the incumbent IT giants, in fact most will go further and in plain language say that Public Sector IT costs far too much and fails far too often.

• Simply getting an accurate figure on the spend is apparently not possible, the best-informed estimates vary from £14bn to over £21bn per year, whatever the figure it is too much – it is more than we spend on income support, more than we spend on the Department of Transport, more than we spend the Army… Worse still, the cost of just the mechanics of the procurement process is, frankly, appalling… We spend more on the IT procurement process than we spend on the Foreign Office – only Defence costs more to procure.

Openness/Sharing

• Today a new German site launched, IGEL (“Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht”; in English, “initiative against a related right”). The site, spearheaded by German lawyer Till Kreutzer, provides information on a possible proposal for a new “related right” for press publishers. Original content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Open Data

• Much of the really useful information was hidden away in different systems around the world, and Dr Rosling found that even the biggest institutions were reluctant to share their findings. “Most public data was not made available in a licence where you were allowed to redistribute it. Neither was it in a unified structure or technological format,” he says. “It was better at a national level but at the international level it was awful. The UN, the World Bank and the IMF get free data from member countries, use taxpayers’ money to compile it and then sell it in an inefficient, stupid system. For instance, trade data makes up 80% of public statistics. This is what humans do: they produce and consume stuff. We have new software that can help poor countries understand the fragmentation of their trade but UN Comtrade (the world’s trade database) is still hoarding bulk data. We need to have that data free.”

Open Access/Content

• The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral is growing – now over 1,000 titles; over half provide OA to all articles, and nearly 60% provide immediate free access. Percentage-wise, OA mandates continue to lead in growth, with a total of 24 mandates added to ROARMAP this quarter, with the eprints OA Week Mandate Challenge a likely contributing factor. This fall’s OA Week was the biggest ever. A unique OA milestone this quarter was Jan Szczepanski’s personal OA title collection exceeding 10,000 titles. Looking forward to 2011 and beyond, clearly this is just the beginning! Suggested OA New Years’ Resolutions: adopt and implement an open access mandate policy, join the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) or both – or just keep up the good work and know that the small efforts the many thousands of us are making are adding up to all the difference in the world.

• When former President Reagan told the head of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down The Berlin Wall in 1987, he was asking for change and openness across the Eastern Bloc.

• Editor & Publisher magazine wants that same change and openness for its readers. This week, it tore down its website paywall, allowing visitors to view more of the magazine’s exclusive content.

Leftovers

• An Orange County deputy caused the crash last summer that killed a 91-year-old man who was on his way to the hospital for his daily visit with the sick and dying, the Florida Highway Patrol said Friday.

• If you’re at a job where you don’t feel like your work’s accomplishing much, business consultants Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson have a few suggestions for how to stop spinning your wheels with “fake work” and get real work done.

• UK newspapers reading age by GoogleSince Google just brought out its new reading age analysis tool, I’ve used it to compare the UK national newspaper websites. I’ve included three news aggregators – Yahoo, Newsnow and Google – to give a baseline (although Newsnow doesn’t fit the common Yahoo and Google baseline).

• No big surprises that the Sun, Mirror and News of the World sit together at the bottom of the list, or that they’re joined there by the commuter freebie Metro; nor that the FT contains almost no “basic” language pages and the most “advanced”. But the middle of the table is more interesting, with the Guardian scoring much the same reading age as the Daily Mail, and the Independent sitting at the top of the qualities isn’t necessarily what I’d have guessed.

• A national Hispanic Republican organization denounced Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s opposition to the DREAM Act on Friday and warned that the stance may hurt her re-election prospects in 2012 should she decide to run.

• “We are conservative Republicans who hold traditional military and social values,” the group Somos Republicans wrote in a letter to the senator. “We are troubled by the fact that you failed to recognize that Hispanics in Texas are overwhelmingly in support of the DREAM Act.”

• The bill would make illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. before age 16 eligible to begin a path toward citizenship.

• Britain boasts several museums devoted to the history of a single everyday object. You’ll be glad to hear, then, that there’s a museum devoted to possibly the most important everyday object of modern times. A device which didn’t exist 70 years ago, but which now pervades almost everything we do. Its story is told in the National Museum of Computing, which is based in the very building where the world’s very first digital programmable computer was operated. Block H, Bletchley Park.

• “We are very disappointed with this ruling by the Supreme Court. There are many basic consumer issues at stake, and having the Court uphold the lower ruling on a tie vote leaves many of those issues up in the air.

• “Because of this ruling, the critical “first sale” doctrine U.S. copyright law is severely limited for goods manufactured outside of the U.S. but sold here. It applies even, as in this case, to goods that have copyrighted logos on them. That means that anyone, from a single person, to a giant corporation, which resells goods made abroad, could find themselves sued under copyright law unless they determine where a product was made and purchase the licensing rights.

• AVAST Software says only 1.8% of people using its Avast! antivirus program have paid for a user license, and that the original 14 – the only ones it’s sold – have been used in over 200 countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – even Vatican City.

• A 26-year-old New Jersey man has plead guilty to stealing and illegally selling an Internet domain in a first-of-its-kind case.

• Daniel Goncalves of Union Township entered a guilty plea earlier today in New Jersey state Superior Court for stealing the “P2P.com” domain from Mark Ostrofsky, Albert Angel and Lesli Angel. Prosecutors will recommend that he serves a five-year prison term and pay restitution for his crimes.

Science

• In research that further bridges the biological and digital world, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have created bacteria that can be programmed like a computer.

• Researchers built “logic gates” – the building blocks of a circuit – out of genes and put them into E. coli bacteria strains. The logic gates mimic digital processing and form the basis of computational communication between cells, according to synthetic biologist Christopher A. Voigt.

• The 45-year-old patient, Jane Todd Crawford, had been misdiagnosed as being pregnant with twins. McDowell, who ran a surgical practice in Danville, Kentucky, offered a different diagnosis — a large ovarian tumor. He decided to risk the previously untried surgery and set Christmas Day for the operation.

• No one works well when tired, and insects are no exception. Just like us, sleepy bees make shoddy dancers and poor communicators.

Health/Nutrition

• A Virginia federal judge on Monday found a key part of President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care reform law unconstitutional, setting the stage for a protracted legal struggle likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.

• U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson struck down the “individual mandate” requiring most Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014. The Justice Department is expected to challenge the judge’s findings in a federal appeals court.

Security

• Not so long ago, we reported on a paper that purported to blow a hole in quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. Now, researchers at Toshiba have struck back with findings that show that the attack doesn’t really work. To which the original authors have replied, “Well, it depends.”

• First, a quick refresher course in QKD (click the link for more detail). Basically, the rules of quantum mechanics allow things like photons to be in two states at once, called a superposition state. But, when we make a measurement, we see only one of these two states, and the photon stays in that state until we do something to it. We can’t tell before we make a measurement if a photon is in one state or a mixture of two, but by making many measurements on similarly prepared photons, we can tell whether a given source produces photons that are in a superposition.

• Yesterday Gawker Media denied reports that their database of 1.5 Million usernames, emails and passwords had been hacked. Comments broadcast via the apparently compromised Twitter feed of Gawker Media’s tech and gadget site Gizmodo strongly suggested a security compromise. Gawker Editorial Director Scott Kidder claimed through his own Twitter feed that “No evidence to suggest any Gawker Media’s user accounts were compromised, and passwords encrypted anyway.”

• 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.

• You may have seen a number of tweets circulating over the first few hours mentioning “Acai Berries”. Users are reporting that their accounts are tweeting out spam messages containing these words without their consent.

• The attack, first reported as a ‘worm’ by Mashable, may actually, it appears, be related to this weekend’s hacking of Gawker Media’s database. @Delbius, leader of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team says: “Got a Gawker acct that shares a PW w/your Twitter acct? Change your Twitter PW. A current attack appears to be due to the Gawker compromise.”

Defence/Police/Aggression

• As of last week, this CCTV camera remained in place at Queen and Peter, despite media reports that the security cameras erected for the G20 summit last June had been taken down.

• Although Toronto Police announced the 71 CCTV cameras acquired for the G20 would be removed upon “the completion of the event, when there’s no longer an issue of security,” research has shown that mega-events such as the Olympics and global summits typically leave a security legacy. Equipment purchased and installed on an ostensibly temporary basis become incorporated into the permanent infrastructure, altering in subtle and obvious ways the physical and psychological terrain of the city.

• In case you were wondering whether pornoscanners are harder on the vast majority of innocent, non-terrorist fliers, or the minuscule minority of terrorists, wonder no more.

• Police have been accused of attempting to prevent seriously injured protesters being treated at the same hospital as officers hurt during last week’s tuition fees demonstration, igniting claims that one student’s life could have been put at risk.

• The anti-fascist protester Blair Peach was almost certainly killed by police at a demonstration in 1979, according to a secret report released today.

• Documents published on the Metropolitan police’s website shed new light on the death of Peach, a 33-year-old teacher from New Zealand, whose death marked one of the most controversial events in modern policing history.

• I assumed I was finished, but a female Transportation Security officer yelled at me for “trying to get away from her.” She told me I had to stand in front of her – while I was still barefoot and trying to watch out for my stuff, which had gone through a different scanner – until my scan was read.

• I told her I had never undergone this process and was a bit afraid, and she laughed at me and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

• The woman grabbed my wrist and said she had to look at my plastic watch. I tried to take it off and hand it to her, and she yelled at me not to interfere with her search.

• Then, with no explanation, she pulled up my shirt, exposing my stomach and the top of my underwear, and stuck the top half of her fingers inside the waistband of my pants. I yanked my shirt down and told her she was not showing the top of my underwear and my naked stomach to anyone.

• Thailand’s department of special investigation (DSI) is refusing to release the full report on the death of Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto following a leak that he was killed by a Thai soldier.

• DSI chief Tharit Pengdit said the continuing investigation into the death of Muramoto during the Bangkok red-shirt protests in May could be affected by disclosure.

• British police on Sunday searched a house in connection with the alleged terrorist who blew himself up and injured two others in a busy shopping area in Stockholm – the first jihad-inspired suicide bombing in the Nordic country.

• A property in Bedfordshire, north of London, was searched in connection with two blasts which occurred on Saturday afternoon, the Metropolitan Police said.

• The watchdog over the RCMP is urging the police force to clearly tell officers not to hog-tie people after finding the generally forbidden technique was used in 40 per cent of cases in which someone died after being hit with a Taser stun gun.

• A new report by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP also reveals “a number of instances” among the 10 deaths where members who fired the Taser were not certified to use the powerful weapon.

• Chris Selley, Jonathan Goldsbie and Matt Gurney debate whether Police Chief Bill Blair can regain Torontonians’ trust, and how best to hold his political masters to account.

Cablegate

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been called a traitor by some critics for posting confidential U.S. government documents on the Internet. This week, The List, looks at other characters who have been labeled traitors in the past.

• The journalist Suelette Dreyfus collaborated qlwith Julian Assange to create Underground, a 1997 book about hackers in Australia and around the globe. Here she reveals the inside story on Assange, the geek who founded WikiLeaks and became the scourge of world governments.

• Wikileaks’ Congressional opponents are recharging their batteries, and while Julian Assange has bigger legal fish to fry in Europe, he could soon be facing the consequences of breaking U.S. law by outing foreign intelligence sources. One of the senators behind the legal push, John Ensign, debated vocal Wikileaks ally Judge Andrew Napolitano on Freedom Watch on Friday, and while he made clear who he was protecting, he had a hard time defining “journalists”– and why Assange doesn’t count.

• The Republican Sen. Ensign, along with Senators Scott Brown (R) and Joe Lieberman (I), will introduce a bill in the Senate that would bar journalists from leaking the names of government informants whose lives may be jeopardized by their outing. This would any newswire publishing the information in as much trouble as Wikileaks, though Ensign argued that most news outlets had declined to put out as many names as Wikileaks had.

• Can the government still keep a secret? In an age of WikiLeaks, flash drives and instant Web postings, leaks have begun to seem unstoppable.

• Even as some government officials contend that the release of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange jeopardizes U.S. national security, legal experts, Pentagon officials and Justice Department lawyers concede any effort to prosecute him faces numerous hurdles.

• Among them: Prosecutors apparently have had difficulty finding evidence that Assange ever communicated directly with Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, 23, an intelligence specialist who’s widely thought to be the source of the documents, but is charged only with misusing and illegally downloading them.

• The truth? There’s nothing in Swedish law about “sex by surprise” or broken condoms. (Here’s the penal code, see for yourself.) And despite reports to the contrary, Assange’s accusers have always said that this was not consensual sex.

• So what are actually very serious charges are being diminished by shoddy reporting and victim-blaming — and it all starts with AOL News. All of the news sources and blogs reporting that the Assange charges are simply “sex by surprise” cite this piece from Dana Kennedy at AOL News.

• Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback’s initial target was America’s recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback’s anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

• “Operation Black Face” is an event scheduled on 18th December 2010. People around the internet would display a black profile pic across the major social networking websites to protest against the state’s hostility against whistle blowers (Wikileaks and Julian Assange).

• Jeff Jarvis makes the same argument, suggesting that nothing in the documents is that bad anyway: “the revelation of these secrets has not been devastating. America’s and Germany’s relationship has not collapsed because one undiplomatic diplomat called Angela Merkel uncreative.”

• The United States tried to stop delivery of Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009 amid concerns it could pass them on to Marxist guerrillas in Colombia or Mexican drug gangs, The Washington Post said on Sunday, citing diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks.

• As revelations of U.S. government coercive “diplomacy” continue flowing from the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, much to the consternation of official Washington, ruling class circles are working feverishly to downplay the seriousness of the leaks.

• On the one hand, senior State Department and intelligence officials claim the cables offer “few surprises” and, at least according to The New York Times, the disclosures “have been more embarrassing than revelatory or harmful to national security.”

• It’s come to the attention of some observers that there isn’t much the US can charge Julian Assange with that it can’t charge the New York Times with as well.

• After all, the founder of WikiLeaks and the US’s pre-eminent major daily both basically did the same thing: They published confidential State Department cables allegedly stolen by Pfc. Bradley Manning.

• Credit card companies that prevented card-holders from donating money to the secrets outlet WikiLeaks could have their operating licenses taken away in Iceland, according to members of the Icelandic Parliamentary General Committee.

• Representatives from Mastercard and Visa were called before the committee Sunday to discuss their refusal to process donations to the website, reports Reykjavik Grapevine.

• “People wanted to know on what legal grounds the ban was taken, but no one could answer it,” Robert Marshall, the chairman of the committee, said. “They said this decision was taken by foreign sources.”

• Lawmakers might be getting anxious to wrap up business before the holiday recess, but the House Judiciary panel is pulling the full committee together Thursday to delve into options to tackle the WikiLeaks scandal.

• The Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder are faced with difficult legal questions as they decide the best course of action to pursue against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange even as the Capitol Hill drumbeat to charge the WikiLeaks founder under the Espionage Act grows louder.

• Because nothing makes people feel all warm and fuzzy like a live rendition of “Wonderful Tonight”, right?

• If there is anything that the WikiLeaks’ cablegate has shown us, it’s that sometimes world leaders have some pretty out there ideas. Case in point: one of the leaked cables has revealed that North Korean officials were campaigning to have Eric Clapton play a concert in Pyongyang.

• The world honey bee population has plunged in recent years, worrying beekeepers and farmers who know how critical bee pollination is for many crops. A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined–electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.

• Speculation is flying fast and furious over the details of the upcoming WikiLeaks release, fueled in no small part by US official warnings to a number of its allies about how hugely damaging the release could be.

• The Salon blogger and civil libertarian (and sometime POLITICO critic) Glenn Greenwald has quit his post on the board of the liberal ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over the group’s criticism of WikiLeaks.

• Traditional lines of communication between the people and the press have fallen into such disrepair in America that a whole new approach is necessary to challenge the military-industrial-governmental complex, according to a former CIA analyst sympathetic to WikiLeaks.

• “The Fourth Estate is dead,” Ray McGovern, of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview. “The Fourth Estate in his country has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus. Captive! So, there is no Fourth Estate.”

• Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all enable donations to be made to US-registered groups funding illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank in defiance of international law.

• It appears at least one of the major credit cards also enables donations to an extremist Jewish group that has placed a bounty on the lives of Palestinians.

• All three have in the last week ceased enabling donations to WikiLeaks. Neither Mastercard nor Visa have explained the basis for their decision to do so. PayPal has backed away from its initial claim that the US State Department told PayPal WikiLeaks had broken the law after the claim was discredited. This is the third occasion on which PayPal has suspended payment services for WikiLeaks.

• Now that Julian Assange is in jail and and Wikileaks has been shut down out of the streets it is time to get the word out. We have created a simple stencil kit for you to download, remix, and do what you will.

• Indoleaks was recently launched as Indonesia’s answer to Wikileaks.

• The former right-hand man to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has created a rival online whistleblowing site that is to launch Monday.

• The site, called OpenLeaks, is an alternative model of promoting transparency that Daniel Domscheit-Berg envisioned after leaving the WikiLeaks organization over personal differences with Assange in September.

• Among the hundreds of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in recent weeks were a number pertaining to extraordinary rendition—the practice of effectively kinapping a suspected terrorist in one country and transporting him to another, usually Arab, nation for interrogation that almost invariably invovles torture. Most of the time, renditions happen quietly; CIA operatives swoop in and out and no one’s the wiser. Then came the February 2003 kidnapping of a cleric named Abu Omar in Milan, Italy. The operation was bungled (the American operatives used unencrypted, trackable cell phones, for starters), and, in a major embarassment to the US, the 23 CIA agents involved were eventually tried by an Italian court. In 2009, they were convicted in absentia of violating Italian law. (Peter Bergen wrote about the case, and interviewed Abu Omar himself, for the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones.) Recently, I spoke to Steve Hendricks, a freelance journalist and author whose most recent work is the just-released A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial, about Abu Omar, renditions, and the impact of the Wikileaks disclosures.

• Robertson’s first case was the Oz trial in 1971, in which the magazine was accused of ”corrupting public morals”. The Oz editors were actually convicted under the Obscene Publications Act. But they were acquitted on appeal. And such was the outcry over the original trial result that police more or less gave up trying to bring such cases against subversive magazines. The verdict did not go Robertson’s way, but it ultimately turned into an important victory against state censorship.

• In 1995, Robertson was involved in the prosecution of the former Malawian dictator Hastings Banda, who was accused of ordering the murder of opposition politicians. Banda was acquitted. But the case helped to establish the principle that repressive national leaders should not be immune from prosecution. Seven years later, in 2002, the International Criminal Court, which Robertson had long pressed for, was established.

• Since 9/11, press freedom in the West has come under attack as governments argue that national security is more important than transparency. But the hunt for WikiLeaks is a greater danger to democracy than any information that WikiLeaks might reveal.

• It’s not an exaggeration to say that the recent Wikileaks scandal has shaken the Internet to its core. Regardless of where you stand on the debate, various services have simply refused to handle Wikileaks’ business–everything from domain-name providers to payment services–and this has led to many questioning how robust the Internet actually is.

• “Pakistan’s Floods” came third and in fourth was “Korea’s Conflict.” “WikiLeaks Cablegate” came in at No 8.

• The real reason he was worried wasn’t that he thought law enforcement might find out. He was worried about other people in Anonymous finding out – because in that group, to stand up and identify yourself is seen as the worst thing you can do. Stripping off the Anonymous mask is viewed as a form of betrayal by the wider group.

• The Jester, a hacktivist who is normally known for short term denial of service attacks against Jihadist web forums and who recently claimed responsibility for an outage at Wikileaks in the middle of Cablegate (Wikileaks publication of U.S. diplomatic cables) has himself become the target of the large scale hacktivist protest called Operation Payback.

• As Wikileaks continues to run the headlines and release once classified documents, Gillibrand teamed up with Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology, to advocate laws that will examine cyber criminals with a closer eye.

• Some of Australia’s most senior media professionals, including bosses of major newspapers, television networks and websites, have written to Prime Minister Julia Gillard to express their support for WikiLeaks.

• The letter was initiated by the board of the Walkley Foundation, Australia’s professional journalism organisation.

• The letter said the leaking of 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables was the most astonishing leak of official information in recent history and its full implications were yet to emerge.

• A secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, is meeting to consider criminal charges in the WikiLeaks case, an attorney for the site’s founder, Julian Assange, told the Al-Jazeera network in an interview.

• “We have heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly empaneled grand jury in Alexandria. … They are currently investigating this,” Mark Stephens told Al-Jazeera’s Sir David Frost on Sunday, referring to WikiLeaks. The site, which facilitates the disclosure of secret information, has been slowly releasing a trove of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables since November 28.

• On the other side are those who believe fundamentally that the world should remake the Web in its own image. This side believes that the Internet at its heart is simply a tool, something that should be shaped to serve the demands of existing institutions. Each side seeks to mold the technology and standards of the Web to suit its particular vision.

• Suharto said: “Indonesia will not use force against the territory of other countries. With respect to Timor, we support carrying out decolonization through the process of self-determination.”

• But Suharto convinced Ford of the importance of integrating East Timor into Indonesia, using the threat of communism as his main argument.

• The controversial WikiLeakS.org website (no longer the current website, this now only redirects to a partial mirror of the original website) is still no longer accepting any submissions of leaked documents from ordinary, local or regional whistleblowers.

• They and their mainstream media collaborators, have instead, been busy milking the vast amount of secret information which seems to have come from the imprisoned, but as yet unconvicted, low level US Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, Bradley Manning and they have survived various legal and illegal attacks on their computer and internet infrastructure as a result.

• On Aug. 4, Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate sponsor of the Free Flow of Information Act, announced that he intended to include in the proposed law new language specifying that WikiLeaks and organizations like it would not be able to use the act to protect the identities of confidential sources.

• But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.

• The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will try to win his release from prison tomorrow, a week after being held on remand after Sweden requested his arrest over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women.

• Even if the judge at Westminster magistrates court in London grants Assange bail, he could still be held.

• It’s becoming clear as the weeks go on, that the US government’s massive overreaction to the latest Wikileaks releases is doing much more harm to the US’s standings abroad than anything in the documents themselves. So far, most of the reaction from various politicians and diplomats concerning the actual content of the documents was that some of it might be slightly embarrassing, but there’s been nothing all that surprising. Some foreign diplomats have joked back: “you should see what we say about you.” And yet, we’re still hearing claims that Julian Assange needs to be put on trial or (worse) executed, and other forms of “attacks” should be made on Wikileaks itself. All this has done has been to have foreign governments and diplomats start mocking the US for not living up to its claims of supporting freedom of the press and freedom of expression. This will make it much, much harder any time the US tries to stop any form of censorship in other countries, as they’ll immediately point back at how many of our politicians flipped out over Wikileaks.

• The man behind WikiLeaks has won the most votes in this year’s Person of the Year poll.

• Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place. He was 148,383 votes over the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey.

• So, who is this latest unknown to come out of nowhere to shape the national debate around a major issue? Bady is a seventh-year PhD student in African literature at the University of California, Berkeley who studies “the literature of empire and colonialism in the last two centuries.” He’s finishing up his dissertation on white Americans in Africa between the civil war and the civil rights movement.

• In this clip from his forum at UC Berkeley, Julian Assange admitted that sources of his had been caught in the past, but argued that “the chances of your source being run over a car are vastly higher” than that of a source of a leaked document being caught…

• Invitations to a secretive inner circle where maintaining confidences is the password for entry can be very seductive. The magnetic effects of power are very effective tools of socialisation and politicians know just how to deploy them to advantage.

• Some journalists, however, don’t need to be socialised because they are pre-programmed for obeisance. For those whose natural instinct is collaboration with the state, “don’t tell me, I don’t want to know and shouldn’t be told” is the media ethic of the moment. It’s a form of self-censorship based on the belief that the public cannot be trusted with diplomatic confidences. The challenge, as they see it, is not how to ensure that the public stays better informed but rather how governments around the world can improve their capacity to withhold information.

• Barack Obama has made his strongest condemnation yet of WikiLeaks, as supporters of Julian Assange demonstrated for his release.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Sting operations by wildlife activists in central Africa have broken up highly organised smuggling rings sending endangered species abroad, leading to the arrest of key dealers and the recovery of hundreds of kilos of ivory, turtle shells and animal skins.

• The clampdown took place across four neighbouring countries: Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.Observers said the arrests last week, co-ordinated by the Last Great Ape Organisation (Laga), a wildlife law-enforcement NGO, in Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville, marked a big step towards regional enforcement of the laws protecting endangered species.

• The extreme warmth in Northeast Canada is undoubtedly related to the fact that Hudson Bay was practically ice free. In the past, including the GISS base period 1951-1980, Hudson Bay was largely ice-covered in November. The contrast of temperatures at coastal stations in years with and without sea ice cover on the neighboring water body is useful for illustrating the dramatic effect of sea ice on surface air temperature. Sea ice insulates the atmosphere from ocean water warmth, allowing surface air to achieve temperatures much lower than that of the ocean. It is for this reason that some of the largest positive temperature anomalies on the planet occur in the Arctic Ocean as sea ice area has decreased in recent years.

• Like all crazy theories, this one has an ounce of truth at the bottom of it. Although the initial target of WikiLeaks publications was the U.S. government, the first victims were corrupt government leaders, like the heads of the Persian Gulf states, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• According to diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Putin is the richest man in Russia — and in Europe as well — with $40 billion in secret off-shore accounts. He is reputed to be the co-owner of Gunvor, which exports Russian oil. If that didn’t make Putin angry, the derogatory nickname “alfa-dog” given to him in one of the cables must have sent him up the wall. A highly placed anonymous source in the Foreign Ministry seemed to reflect that anger when he warned WikiLeaks that Russia “has a way of turning off this resource forever.”

• The City of Toronto has declared an extreme cold alert aimed at protecting the homeless and other vulnerable people.

• The warning was issued Monday as temperatures plunged in the city to a low of – 13 C. With windchill, it feels like – 25C.

Finance

• The EU plans to make private lenders cover the losses of any future eurozone debt crisis, the BBC has learned.

• The decision may significantly raise the future cost of borrowing for over-indebted eurozone governments.

• It is part of a new permanent scheme – to be funded by eurozone governments, but not the UK – to replace existing bail-out funds that expire in 2013.

• What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn’t cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That’s what we are about to find out.

• I understand the importance of the new WikiLeaks documents. However, we must not let them distract us from the new information the Federal Reserve was forced to release. Even if WikiLeaks reveals documents from inside a large American bank, as huge as that could be, it will most likely pale in comparison to what we just found out from the one-time peek we got into the inner-workings of the Federal Reserve. This is the Wall Street equivalent of the Pentagon Papers.

• [...]

• Wait, what? Did you say $12.3 TRILLION tax dollars were thrown around in secrecy by unelected bankers… and Congress didn’t know any of the details?

• Yes. The Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves. The original copy of the Constitution spontaneously burst into flames. The ghost of Tom Paine went running, stark raving mad screaming through the halls of Congress.

• Banks are important. The world economic crisis is due for a good part to insufficient transparency in banks. Wikileaks next document drop may target banks. And a small group of activists is trying to solve those bank problems in a (Open Source) way that may make Wikileaks less necessary.

• I already wrote about real openness at the last Open World Forum, but during that conference I also met Simon Redfern of the Open Bank Project (OBP). We only had a few minutes, so Simon could give me only an extra-short explanation, but it was enough to let me eager to know more.

• German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said his country is willing to discuss greater harmonisation of eurozone tax policy, adding that the next decade is likely to see Europe take significant steps towards closer political union.

• The ongoing evolution of the American suburbs into slums will not be denied. Malls are dying. Now, the classic suburban office park is dying too.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Wikileaks spin-off Brussels Leaks launched out of the blue last Thursday to much excitement in the European capital and Twittersphere beyond.

• The European Journalism Centre’s exclusive email interview with an anonymous representative is amongst the very first media contact with the fledgling European whistleblower organisation.

• So let me get this straight. Philip Morris – and all the other tobacco companies – make hefty profits by selling highly addictive substances to people that the company knows will probably give them cancer and/or a host of other life-threatening and painful diseases. Their deaths will cause huge losses not just personally, but economically – to their families, and to the state.

• The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK is making good on its threat to punish companies that purchase coverage online without public disclosure. The OFT says it has “received undertakings” from at least one company for violating the UK’s fair trading laws—a warning to others that might pay for blog or Twitter posts without admitting to doing so.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has announced a review of the impact of Transparency on Privacy to inform the Government’s approach to the release of data as part of the Transparency agenda.

• The Review will enable Government to ensure that on-going releases of data are done in a way that provides maximum transparency of data consistent with the appropriate level of privacy protection.

• Specifically the Review will:

• * Support the Government in striking the right balance between transparency and data protection safeguards, and between the interests of wider society and the interests of the individual or corporate body. * Identify the nature of the risk to privacy of the individual posed by transparency of public data, in particular the potential for ‘jigsaw’ identification. * Advise the Government on practical approaches to take

• Venezuela plans to include the Internet in a law that regulates the media, under a proposed bill presented to parliament on Thursday that the opposition claims will result in censorship.

• Manuel Villalba, a lawmaker from President Hugo Chavez’s Socialist Party, said the law was aimed at protecting citizens.

• “Nowhere is the restriction of access to the Internet suggested. There should just exist protection of citizens’ moral and ethical honor,” said Villalba, who heads the National Assembly’s media commission.

Intellectual Monopolies

• On Friday, 26 November 2010, the 6th session of the WIPO Committee on Development Agenda and Intellectual Property approved a project entitled “Project on Open Collaborative Projects and IP-Based Models”.

Copyrights

• Washington got high level, detailed briefings on France’s 3-strikes law – also known as the Hadopi law – and the Telecoms Package. With the Motion Picture Association and the RIAA in the loop.

• We always thought it, but somehow the leaked cables, released by the Wikileaks website from the American Embassy in Paris, are interesting even in their confirmation of our suspicions. In particular, they reveal how the American entertainment industry lobbied for 3-strikes measures in Europe.

• On Friday, we pointed out that Sherman Fredericks, the former CEO of Stephens Media and publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal (who lost his job last month), seemed to have a rather hypocritical view on copyright infringement, embedding an infringing Saturday Night Live video on his blog. This was the same guy who famously announced that as CEO, he had Stephens Media “grubstake” (i.e., “fund”) Righthaven, the company that has sued bloggers for quoting even snippets of LVRJ articles. He was quoted as saying that it was no different than stealing a Corvette out of his driveway. So, according to Mr. Fredericks, reposting 4 paragraphs out of a 34-paragraph article — or about 12% (as Righthaven did in at least one case) is just like stealing a Corvette. Ok.

• As part of an article investigating the growing phenomenon of eBook piracy, a Scandinavian news outlet interviewed a 19 year-old self-confessed pirate who bragged about his activities. To counter his viewpoint a well known author contributed to the piece, stating that she abhors book piracy since it costs her huge amounts of money. However, her moral stance took a bit of a beating when her son let an embarrassing fact slip out.

• As an example, the coalition cited the litigation against the company behind the LimeWire file-sharing network, which concluded this year with a federal district court ordering the company to shut down the network. The coalition wrote that though the four largest recording companies prevailed in the case, “the LimeWire defendants were able to drag out the litigation for four years. Such massive civil cases do not provide a scalable solution to the full scope of the problem.”

• Over the summer, we had pointed out how disappointing it was that the press relied on an obviously bogus research report from the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, about how much infringing content was being shared on BitTorrent. As we noted at the time, the folks over at TorrentFreak carefully picked apart the study and showed how it appeared to have been done by folks who didn’t actually understand how BitTorrent and torrent trackers worked. Apparently, the TorrentFreak guys sent a note to the authors offering to help them fix the problems in their study methodology, and all they got back was a sarcastic email from one of the researchers saying that he’d gladly send the Torrentfreak guys a complimentary copy of O’Reilly’s Statistics in a Nutshell, as it “might give further insight into statistical methodology.” Snarky!

• Rogers, one of Canada’s largest Internet providers, has upset many customers with a recent change in their network management systems. Since mid-September both up and downstream BitTorrent traffic has been severely degraded in certain areas, which goes against the company’s network management policy. In addition, the new throttling technology has also slowed down non-P2P traffic in many cases.

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