● 12.19.10

● Links 19/12/2010: Alien Arena 2011, Trisquel 4.5

Posted in News Roundup at 5:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Recently I have been doing a lot of network file transfers between a few PCs but the very slow transfer speed of a 100Mbps connection has been making things too time consuming.

• In a nutshell, it is asking BOA online banking users to agree that they are using specific hardware and software to do said banking. As you can see in the graphic above, Linux users are not included.

• Go figure…

Desktop

• Interestingly enough, the teachers who initially had problems locating Microsoft Word on Windows XP had no problem finding and using OpenOffice Writer.

Google

• There has been a lot of talking, lately, about Google’s Chrome OS. People didn’t take it too seriously initially; then, last week, Google started sending out demo netbooks which ran — hear hear — Google Chrome OS. Google Chrome OS is based on Google’s browser, Chrome — hence the name. The idea is that all you run on your laptop is your browser — that’s it. But this raises a lot of questions. In this article I propose a possibly interesting solution to Google’s issues, and how a possible (and not-so-painful) merge with Android should be possible.

Ballnux

• Officially unveiled just days ago, LG’s Optimus 2X Android-powered handset will be the world’s first dual-core smartphone.

Kernel Space

• So you want to compile and maybe even apply a patch to the kernel but you’ve always thought that’s too difficult? Well, it isn’t, thanks to KernelCheck, a program that automatically compiles and installs the latest Kernel for Debian based Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.).

Graphics Stack

• So, I’ve been working on multitouch on and off the past few months (which have included a solid ten weeks of holiday), but have finally posted the third patch series, which I think should be pretty close to final, to the list today.

• One year ago VIA came out with their Linux TODO list, which was disappointing. This list had a VIA TTM/GEM memory manager module for Q2’2010, a kernel mode-setting driver in the works for H2’2010, and a Gallium3D driver in-development for Q4’2010. Even meeting this TODO list would be bad as the support most Linux customers are after (3D and KMS to a lesser extent) would not be arriving until three years after VIA announced this newest Linux strategy. But, VIA has failed miserably in accomplishing any of these mile-stones for KMS and open-source 3D acceleration support. Though resulting in VIA’s Linux community being fragmented even more, new VIA X.Org (DDX) drivers seem to keep popping up. If there wasn’t already enough of these not-fully-working and rarely-touched open-source drivers, another VIA Chrome X.Org driver has been started recently that’s a fork of another open-source VIA driver.

Applications

• The folks over at Dropbox released version 1.0 yesterday. This release has been a long time coming and is a major upgrade for Windows, Mac and Linux. For Ubuntu users, the biggest changes include the introduction of selective sync, Indicator Applet support, and a much more efficient client-side engine.

• I worked a bit on some user-interface improvements for kdepim applications. So far I worked on KOrganizer and Akregator.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• While the big box stores and shopping malls run black Friday sales, and in recent years many of the online retailers have began to have black Monday sales. Leave it up to the wacky folks at Codeweavers to have a 30% off Winter Solstice Sales on CrossOver Mac and Linux.

Games

• Alien Arena 7.50 (a.k.a. Alien Arena 2011) was released yesterday and it comes with several new notable features regarding the physics engine, as well as two new maps, updated player and skins models, new music for various maps, revamped in-game IRC client, as well as several bug fixes and improvements.

• It’s now Christmas time at Phoronix with the appearance of some Linux “presents” starting to arrive. The end of 2010 started heating up for Linux gaming, but it looks like 2011 will be a fantastic year in comparison.

Distributions

• Yes, “my bestest distros!” is a overworked topic, but it’s fun and Ubuntu is not on this list.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s still a few months off but the next release of Ubuntu Linux could be an important one

• New versions of Ubuntu Linux are released every six months and most of these are incremental steps forward as Ubuntu tries to evolve into a mainstream desktop operating system. Some have been more exciting than others but on the whole these six-monthly releases are more evolutionary than revolutionary.

• A prediction in 2009 that Ubuntu usage was going to grow in the face of Red Hat’s Linux operating system dominance could easily have been laughed off. Yet that’s exactly what Ubuntu has been able to pull off, thanks in part to developers and growing adoption of cloud computing.

• [...]

• According to the 2010 Eclipse survey, Ubuntu usage on the developer desktop had increased to 18.3 percent, from 14.5 percent in 2009. Additionally, Ubuntu usage on deployment servers at 12.6 percent usage narrowly beat out Red Hat’s 12.5 percent usage.

• At the end of the day, it’s all about choice. These are my choices, and my opinions. If you think that OSX or Windows7 works better than Ubuntu for a set of functionality that you find essential, then by all means, as a supporter or Freedom I think there is nothing more important than you being able to make the decision to run whatever you want to run. I may be quite incredulous and lack complete understanding that you could feel that way – but go for it.

• As for me, I am a Free Software Hacker, I run Ubuntu, and I have no motivation or intention to run anything different.

• CADuntu is a 2D CAD drawing tool based on the community edition of QCad ported to Qt4 and works natively on OSX, Windows and Linux.

• Starting today, CADuntu has a new name: LibreCAD and it can easily be installed in Ubuntu, getting a PPA for Lucid, Maverick and Natty. Even though LibreCAD is quite new (and still in beta), it is already available in several languages and gives a real GPL solution to read/modify/create CAD files.

Flavours and Variants

• Let’s wrap it up. First of, Jolicloud 1.1 is an improvement over the previous version in pretty much every single aspect, from hardware support and performance via good looks and style to a smoother, more polished overall experience. No crazy bugs, no errors, good support for pretty much anything you need to do.

• Second of, a few negative points: too much social stuff and non-intuitive navigation through menus, the curse of the cloud usage model. If these can be fixed somehow, Jolicloud would probably be the most mature netbook distro out there. Compared to the competition, it seems smarter than MeeGo and Chrome OS, but it’s still one step behind Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the 10.04 working edition, not the toy Unity-flavored Maverick.

• [...]

• I think it deserves 7/10. Very good product, recommended, just ignore the useless social follow me follow you stuff and whatnot. Go out with your friends to a pub, it’s more interesting.

• After the very successful release of our latest LTS edition -more than 17.000 direct downloads so far!- we are already working on the next one. Trisquel 4.5 STS Slaine will be based on Ubuntu 10.10, and the first beta images -installable live CD- are ready for download. You can follow the development in the wiki.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The Army wants to issue every soldier an iPhone or Android cell phone — it could be a soldier’s choice.

Free Software/Open Source

• Steve Lee from Full Measure brokered an introduction – as part of his OSS Watch support activities provided to ATBar – to the folks at Southampton University who are developing the ATbar (formerly funded by TechDis). The development team of Sebastian Skuse, Dr Mike Wald and E A Draffan from the Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, have collaborated with Fix the Web to create a special Fix the Web button on the toolbar, not only making the reporting process as fast as possible, but also opening up the project to the 2 million current users of the toolbar.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has had a profound influence on everything I’ve worked on over the last decade, and a new partnership with them is a great opportunity for saying “thanks” and giving back. Today we’re announcing the launch of apache-extras.org. Much like our launch of eclipselabs.org earlier this year, we’re creating a separate instance of Project Hosting specifically for ASF-related projects to congregate around.

Events

• Olliance Group is organizing the 6th Annual Spring Edition of the Open Source Think Tank, that will be held April 7–9, 2011 in Sonoma, CA at the Sonoma Mission Inn.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The next Firefox 4 Beta is scheduled for a release next Tuesday, while the following beta is already being teased as a pre-release. Mozilla is also reacting to the accelerated release schedule of Chrome and is evaluating new release models, including the integration of a Chrome-like Flag model of beta features.

• You can download the animation demo for yourself and try it out locally – all you need is a browser that supports HTML5 video. I know – the music is not quite the same as in the movies, but at least this one is not copyright infringing and it came from the heart (5 minutes in a meeting room in the Mozilla office).

Oracle

• OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 8 is now available on the download website.

• Myriad Group AG, a Swiss software developer, sued an Oracle Corp. unit in the U.S. for at least $120 million in restitution for allegedly charging excessive license fees for the Java programming language.

• Oracle America, known as Sun Microsystems before its acquisition in January by the Redwood City, California-based company, developed Java and agreed to license it on fair terms to industry partners, lawyers for Myriad said in court papers filed Dec. 10 in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.

• Continued technology spending by large corporations helped propel Oracle’s revenue to a 47 percent gain, and profit rose 28 percent in its second quarter.

Healthcare

• U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a George W. Bush appointee (and part-owner of a Republican campaign-consulting firm that fought the health-care overhaul legislation), has, as expected, ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional. So why are reform advocates so unexpectedly pleased?

• There are two reasons, but first, let’s put this into context. Hudson’s ruling is the third from a district court so far. Previously, Judge Norman Moon found the mandate constitutional, and so did Judge George Steeh. Steeh and Norman were Clinton appointees, which is to say that the rulings have been proceeding along predictably partisan lines.

BSD

• The former OpenBSD developer who has caused a stir by claiming that the FBI had, through certain other OpenBSD developers, planted backdoors in its cryptographic code, says he raised the matter only to encourage a source code audit of the OpenBSD project.

Project Releases

• Just as expected, XBMC 10.0 “Dharma” has been officially released. New features of XBMC 10 include 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 so much more.

Licensing

• Lawyers are probably the last to know this, but there is a parallel universe of computer technology out there, a universe that, so far, has had little intersection with the law. Free and Open Source Software — or FOSS – the stuff that runs much of the Web, the Internet, growing segments of telecommunications, commerce and the military — is a type of computer code that is both “free” in the monetary sense and “free” in the sense of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Although only a tiny percentage of personal computers run Free and Open Source Software in the U.S., it has already taken root in legal systems in Asia, Europe and South America.

Openness/Sharing

• Last month, I blogged about OpenVizsla, a Kickstarter project aimed at raising funds to create an open, hackable USB protocol sniffer (a great boon to reverse engineers trying to write libraries for proprietary music players, cameras, game peripherals, etc).

Open Access/Content

• We are in a prisoner’s dilemma. It’s clear that universal Open Access is superior for humanity in general (except for shareholders of some companies who will start to miss out). But there is no easy smooth path there. Change puts greater financial pressure on all players.

Programming

• This is all just food for thought, not a judgement against any form of desktop or usage pattern. For reference, I am still running Ubuntu on my desktop, and being wildly unproductive on the tasks I want to finish.

Standards/Consortia

• On December 8, the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) issued a public Request for Information on behalf of the recently formed Sub-Committee on Standards of the National Council of Research and Technology. The titular goal of the RFI is to assist the Sub-Committee in assessing the “Effectiveness of Federal Agency Participation in Standardization in Select Technology Sectors.” Although the publication of the RFI gave rise to not a single article in the press, this event was none the less extremely consequential.

• Why consequential? To begin with, one could count on one hand the occasions upon which the federal government has undertaken an assessment of the efficacy of the ill-defined public-private partnership that constitutes the U.S. standards development infrastructure. And yet, since the passage of the Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995, the government has by law put almost all of its standards-related eggs in that single basket.

• Google showed off the app at the WebGL Camp. WebGL is a cross-platform low-level 3D graphics API that is designed to bring plugin-free 3D to the web. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element and does not require Flash, Java or other graphical plugins to run.

Leftovers

• Google has recently landed a USD $10 million investment from the Jordanian government in online advertisement & training to be spent over the next 3 years to advertise and promote Jordan as a destination for tourists and investors.

• The deal also holds in it folds a reciprocal investment on Google’s part, where the search giant plans on investing at least %25 of that amount back into the local Jordanian tech scene.

• It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper.

• 1. Google Bookmarks is one of the most popular bookmarking tools that is incredibly easy to use. It lets you sort by date and title and organize your bookmarks into lists.

• 2. Pinboard.in, while not free like the others ($6.98) is one of the most popular bookmarking sites out there, in which users are guaranteed to never lose their data.

• 3. Diigo is better known as “social bookmarking 2.0″ because it’s both a collaborative research tool and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site.

• In the end, Adam Wheeler, a 24-year-old who conned his way into Harvard and benefited from more than $40,000 (£26,000) in grants and prizes, flew too close to the sun. Not content with having bragged his way into one of the world’s most prestigious universities, he felt driven to apply – equally fraudulently – for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships.

• This book was written in 2006, halfway through George W. Bush’s second term as president. A great deal was wrong with America then, and I thought the research on authoritarian personalities could explain a lot of it. Since then a new administration has been elected, and although it has had to deal with a very serious economic crisis brought on by others, it is taking steps to correct some of what is wrong.

• However, the forces that largely caused the problems have remained on the scene, and are more active today than ever before. As I try to show in the “Comment on the Tea Party Movement” (link to the left), the research findings in this book apply at least as strongly to America today as they did four years ago. Indeed, the events of 2009 and 2010 have confirmed conclusion after conclusion in The Authoritarians. I wrote in 2006 that the authoritarians in America were not going to go away if they lost the 2008 election, that they would be infuriated if a new president tried to carry out his mandate. That has certainly been the case.

• Jonathan Lee Riches’ rambling lawsuit against the record-holding institution and several others is just the latest in his growing stash of outrageous court filings against everyone from New England Patriot’s coach Bill Belichick to Martha Stewart.

• The Vatican wanted an Irish priest to serve 10 years in a monastery for abusing children rather than force him out of the Catholic Church, a report has revealed.

• The urge to anthropomorphise our computers and software can be irresistible, especially when systems run slow, or are difficult to manage.

• The operating system on a computer, say Microsoft Windows XP or Linux, is the interface you look at every day.

Science

• The eclipse begins on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st, at 1:33 am EST (Monday, Dec. 20th, at 10:33 pm PST). At that time, Earth’s shadow will appear as a dark-red bite at the edge of the lunar disk. It takes about an hour for the “bite” to expand and swallow the entire Moon. Totality commences at 02:41 am EST (11:41 pm PST) and lasts for 72 minutes.

• If the typical beach vacation – the one where you spend several days on the beach reading bad fiction and soaking up sun – has lost its allure, the Ukraine would like to make a suggestion: come soak up radiation and some real human drama at Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. Starting in 2011, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site and the surrounding “exclusion zone” will be opened to tourists for the first time since the plant’s reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, blanketing the area in radiation.

Health/Nutrition

• Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer hired investigators to find evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general to pressure him to drop a $6 billion lawsuit over fraudulent drug tests on Nigerian children.

• Raw milk raids are happening all over the United States. The Food and Drug Administration warns that raw milk consumption can cause health problems, but a growing community of raw foods enthusiasts are ignoring government recommendations and claiming that they are getting tastier, more nutritious food by going raw.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Yesterday, groups of masked and hooded demonstrators rampaged through the capital attacking police, smashing windows, setting fire to vehicles and throwing up barricades.

• [...]

• One of the participants in this week’s rioting was photographed hurling a dustbin at members of the revenue guard and wielding a long shovel. But in other shots, he appears to be standing with the guards raising a truncheon in one hand and holding a pair of handcuffs in the other.

• The federal government very often seems to say one thing when it comes to privacy and civil liberties, while doing exactly the opposite. The Commerce Department has come out with a new report calling for a Privacy Policy Office that will look at commercial use of personal information, to make sure that privacy is protected. At the same time, President Obama has nominated Jim Dempsey to serve on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which is supposed to “review the civil liberties impact of anti-terrorism policies and programs.” There are few people who I think would be better for the job. For a while now, Dempsey has been president for public policy of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that has fought, quite strongly, for civil liberties in the technology arena. Apparently, President Bush also nominated Dempsey for the same board… but the Senate never bothered to confirm him (or anyone that Bush nominated for the board).

• 3. The convictions and sentencing of Aqsa Parvez’s father and her brother should send a chilling message that honour killings are murder pure and simple. In a world where some parents and brothers seek to control their children and sisters as if they were mere chattels we need to send a strong message. Life sentences with no chance of parole for 18 years should show our repugnance for these killings. There’s no honour in these cowardly acts.

• Ships remained docked at ports, hospitals were working with a skeleton staff and ministries were shut down as civil servants and private sector workers stayed away.

• There was no television or radio news as journalists were on strike.

• Geoffrey Bercarich was beaten by police. Sean Salvati was strip searched and left naked in a cell. Swathi Sekhar saw a teenager pepper sprayed so badly he was left twitching on the ground.

• Yesterday I attended court at 2201 Finch to set a trial date for a client arrested on a G20 matter. These administrative appearances are occurring in courtroom #205 and are now mixed-in with regular “practice court” proceedings. There is a separate Crown present to deal with G20 proceedings from the “guns & gangs” unit. These appearances occur on Fridays. This court is presided over by a Judge. In most cases these adminstrative appearances would be presided over by a Justice of the Peace.

• [...]

• This will be very interesting as it will be the first time, to my knowledge, police officers will be making statements in the public domain about their G20 experiences.

• The other officials named in the complaint are David Addington, former counsel to, and chief of staff for, former vice president Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, former under secretary of defense for policy, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales and former Defense Department general counsel William Haynes.

Cablegate

• Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization, would like to share with you its concern about reports that the Department of Justice is preparing a possible criminal prosecution against Julian Assange and other people who work at WikiLeaks.

• We regard the publication of classified information by WikiLeaks and five associated newspapers as a journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment. Prosecuting WikiLeaks’ founders and other people linked to the website would seriously damage media freedom in the United States and impede the work of journalists who cover sensitive subjects.

• But the original demonstration was set for noon Thursday at the Powell Street BART station — so, opting to go low-tech, MacKerel, a self-described “organizer,” stood around at the station with a sign informing all who cared to look of the change of plans.

• A small group of protesters gathered outside the British Consulate in San Francisco’s financial district Dec. 16 to speak out against the recent crackdown on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is out on bail after being imprisoned for nine days by British authorities.

• Thankfully, unlike his colleagues in the Air Force, Prendergast can still access sites like the New York Times and FP that report on the cables. Overall, the Pentagon and the State Department’s efforts to keep their employees from knowing the things that the rest of us can read in the paper every day has to be one of the most baffling responses to the WikiLeaks debacle.

• UPDATE: Michael Moore responds here. In short, he says Sicko was not banned in Cuba, and describes the cable referenced below as “[A] stunning look at the Orwellian nature of how bureaucrats for the State spin their lies and try to recreate reality.” A spokesperson from Moore’s production company tells Boing Boing, “The online references are clear, it really did play on national Cuban TV, and it really is still playing on a Cuba website.”

• The previously unpublished police documents provide “the first complete account of the allegations against the WikiLeaks founder,” and include the phrase “the worst sex ever.”

• Officials in Washington, DC and abroad have widely condemned the publishing of secret documents by the WikiLeaks website. With its latest document dispatches in November, the site initiated the simultaneous publishing of State Department confidential cables with foreign embassies in the New York Times and four European newspapers.

• Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee said in a Fox News interview that WikiLeaks should be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act. Regarding the New York Times and other news outlets, Lieberman added “whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”

• The US government will face significant legal and diplomatic hurdles if it attempts to prosecute Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in connection with the massive internet dump of secret US documents, legal scholars, defence lawyers and former prosecutors say.

• Progressive organizations have praised the Wikileaks endeavor. Our own website Global Research has provided extensive coverage of the Wikileaks project.

• The leaks are heralded as an immeasurable victory against corporate media censorship.

• But there is more than meets the eye.

• Even prior to the launching of the project, the mainstream media had contacted Wikileaks.

• MARK Arbib says he is disappointed with the “serious factual errors” made by Fairfax in its reporting of WikiLeaks cables that alleged he was a US informer.

• The Labor powerbroker and federal Sports Minister decided to break his silence about an article – headlined “Yank in the ranks”- which highlighted his position as a “protected” source for the US embassy after Fairfax finally posted online the cable it had used as the basis for the newspaper article.

• Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

• US authorities have stepped up their efforts to prosecute Julian Assange by offering Bradley Manning, the American soldier allegedly responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of government documents, the possibility of a plea bargain if he names the Wiki-Leaks founder as a fellow conspirator.

• The development follows claims by Mr Assange’s supporters that a grand jury has been secretly empanelled in northern Virginia to consider indicting the WikiLeaks chief. But the US Justice Department has refused to comment on any grand jury activity.

• Socrates was, I think, a scapegoat for Athens’s disappointment. When the city was feeling strong, the quirky philosopher could be tolerated. But, overrun by its enemies, starving, and with the ideology of democracy itself in question, the Athenians took a more fundamentalist view. A confident society can ask questions of itself; when it is fragile, it fears them. Socrates’s famous aphorism “the unexamined life is not worth living” was, by the time of his trial, clearly beginning to jar.

• PFC Manning is currently being held in maximum custody. Since arriving at the Quantico Confinement Facility in July of 2010, he has been held under Prevention of Injury (POI) watch.

• His cell is approximately six feet wide and twelve feet in length.

• The cell has a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet.

• The guards at the confinement facility are professional. At no time have they tried to bully, harass, or embarrass PFC Manning. Given the nature of their job, however, they do not engage in conversation with PFC Manning.

• And yet none of this is as disturbing as the report, in today’s Times, that the Justice Department is trying to come up with some theory that will allow them to prosecute Assange for espionage. The idea is that he would count as what the Times calls “a conspirator in the leak” if the government could show that he had spoken to Bradley Manning, the soldier alleged to have taken the files, before everything was downloaded and gave him “a secure server” to put it on. Can someone explain how that is different from a reporter cultivating a government source—for years, maybe—and then, when he wants to hand you something, designating a certain P.O. Box or flower pot or hole in a tree for him to leave it in or under? Glenn Greenwald is right in saying that this is a really alarming theory that could be used against any number of journalists, including ones at this magazine. And, given how lax the security around the files seems to have been, it doesn’t even strike one as the most practical spot to focus on, if the Obama Administration’s aim is truly to secure secrets whose release might cause some actual harm to our national security (as opposed to embarrassment to our government, which is not at all the same thing). The Times says that Administration officials said that one rationale was that this would “make an example” of Assange. An example, exactly, of what?

Finance

• Indeed, the derivatives market today reminds some experts of the Nasdaq stock market in the 1990s. Back then, the Justice Department discovered that Nasdaq market makers were secretly colluding to protect their own profits. Following that scandal, reforms and electronic trading systems cut Nasdaq stock trading costs to 1/20th of their former level — an enormous savings for investors.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. told a U.S. panel examining the financial crisis that the company wasn’t responsible for toppling two Bear Stearns & Co. hedge funds in early 2007.

• In dozens of pages of documents submitted to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Goldman detailed its valuation of mortgage securities underwritten by the New York company, some of which were held in two Bear hedge funds managed by Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin.

• Goldman Sachs admitted that its software manipulates the economy for insider profits. European & American state aid is interlocked into the International Bank of Settlements, which is tied to World Bank, which is tied into the IMF, which is like all things: Tied into Goldman Sachs!

• Deception in the financial markets is not always costly, but it is rarely remunerative. Investors cannot afford to ignore this tendency.

• Recent disclosures from the Federal Reserve reveal that honesty was one of the earliest casualties of the 2008 financial crisis. These disclosures contain a number of juicy tidbits, like the fact that Goldman Sachs received tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect succor from the Fed.

• The SEC subpoenaed Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo last week over their processes during the early stages of securitizing home loans, Reuters reported.

• The SEC wants to know more about so-called “master servicers” – firms that specialize in administering the selection and maintenance of the huge pool of home loans that are packaged together for every mortgage-backed bond.

• Oil prices rose above $88 a barrel Friday in Asia as a weaker U.S. dollar made crude cheaper for investors with other currencies.

• European Union leaders capped the euro’s year of pain with renewed resolve to protect their battered common currency. But even after their seventh summit in a chaotic year, markets failed to take heed, leaving the leaders baffled. Again.

• A gauge of future economic activity rose in November, at the fastest pace since March, suggesting the economy will strengthen early next year.

• The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.

• A liberal uprising over House procedures on Thursday was delaying a final vote on a far-reaching tax compromise brokered by the White House and Republican leaders.

• The Obama administration said Wednesday that two days of talks with a high-level delegation from China produced results that should benefit U.S. companies ranging from manufacturers of computer software and wind turbines to beef producers.

• The financial sector does two things: it provides a medium of exchange for buyers and sellers (cash, checks, credit cards, money orders, etc.) and a matcher for borrowers and lenders. It is wholly appropriate that interchange fees, fees that are some of the highest in the world and increasing, be subject to regulation, as this medium of exchange function drives all the other parts of the economy. In the same way that checks are regulated by the Federal Reserve, debit cards, the 21st century equivalent of checks, should have the same regulation to encourage them to trade at par.

• World markets mostly fell Friday as a sharp downgrade of Irish debt highlighted how an EU deal to avoid future debt crises is not relieving the region’s immediate market turmoil.

• Shoppers who are looking for something sparkly to put under the Christmas tree can skip the jewelry and go straight to the source: an ATM that dispenses shiny 24-carat gold bars and coins.

• A German company installed the machine Friday at an upscale mall in Boca Raton, a South Florida paradise of palm trees, pink buildings and wealthy retirees.

• This tax “reform” bill is as stunning for what it ignores as for what it proposes.

• Many people have rightly criticized the bill’s lavish tax breaks for the super-rich, especially the needless estate tax cuts that will benefit only America’s wealthiest 6,600 families. We’ve also been wringing our hands over the way this bill only worsens our hugely distorted distribution of income and wealth. Even Ben Bernanke is worried: The income gap, he said recently, is “creating two societies. And it’s based very much, I think, on educational differences.”

• The familiar blue-and-white logo above more than 2,500 High Street shops remains as it has for decades. The chain of chemists started by John Boot 161 years ago continues to dish out medicines and sell everything from cold remedies to corn pads.

• Boots, surely, is a quintessentially British business. It was founded in Nottingham, where its headquarters remain. Although it merged with pan-European pharmacy business Alliance UniChem in 2006 to become Alliance Boots, it is still outwardly British, a national corporate treasure.

• WikiLeaks asked customers to close accounts with Bank of America after the Charlotte bank said it wouldn’t process payments intended for the anti-secrecy organization.

• The Observer reported Friday evening that Bank of America was joining other financial institutions in declining to process payments intended for WikiLeaks. Soon after, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to the story and encouraged supporters to make donations.

• In a later tweet, WikiLeaks asked “all people who love freedom close out their accounts at Bank of America.” After that, the group sent this message: “Does your business do business with Bank of America? Our advise is to place your funds somewhere safer.”

• A Bank of America spokesman on Saturday declined to comment further about WikiLeaks.

• Bank of America Corp. said Friday evening that it was joining other financial institutions in declining to process payments intended for WikiLeaks.

• “Bank of America joins in the actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others and will not process transactions of any type that we have reason to believe are intended for WikiLeaks,” the bank said in a statement.

• “This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

• Are you one of the lucky ones? Have a good job, live in a nice neighborhood, enjoy your cozy home? Think foreclosure only impacts the reckless or the unemployed?

• Think again.

• George Mahoney worked and saved and built his cozy colonial-style home in Lynnfield, Massachusetts in 1981. There, he and his wife raised three lovely daughters. For many years, the Mahoneys paid down their relatively small mortgage with their local bank — a division of Bank of America (BofA). In 2007, they took out a second mortgage to help a daughter start a small business. Two wage earners, a great credit record — the loan was a breeze. That was when the trouble began.

• MasterCard, Visa Europe, PayPal and now Bank of America. Add another to the list of financial businesses that are now refusing to process payments directed toward Wikileaks support. The bank chooses an interesting way of stating its actions, based on what we’re reading from The Kansas City Star, saying that it will refuse payments that it believes to be supporting Wikileaks.

• Four people were arrested on charges of leaking secrets about technology companies to hedge funds, including details about Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) iPad ahead of its launch, in a widening U.S. probe into insider trading.

• The arrests of three technology company workers who allegedly sold secrets about Apple Inc., Dell Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. signal the U.S. may be closing in on the hedge funds that paid for their expertise.

• The men, who worked at AMD, Flextronics International Ltd. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., were arrested yesterday on securities fraud and conspiracy charges for a scheme that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said operated from 2008 to early 2010.

• Four executives at publicly traded technology companies have been arrested on charges they sold inside information about their employers, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• The executives allegedly pocketed hefty consulting fees for selling data to Primary Global, a Mountain View, California, market research company. Primary Global recruits experts from a number of industries, including the technology sector, to provide information about trends that it then sells to money managers. But according to the U.S. Department of Justice, one of the firm’s salesmen — James Fleishman — crossed the line and sold insider information to hedge funds.

• Wiretaps. It’s really all about the wiretaps.

• As the big insider-trading case launched out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan unfolds, that much is becoming ever so clear. To make their case, federal prosecutors are relying heavily on tapes of recorded phone calls.

• And some of the results, at least those alleged by the government, are rather vivid. Click here for a story on some of the possible evidence unveiled on Thursday, by Dow Jones Newswires reporter Liz Moyer. Click here for the latest story on Thursday’s arrests; here for the criminal complaint.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Did you hear the latest outrage about Fox News?

• A memo was leaked from Fox News’ managing editor, Bill Sammon, instructing Fox journalists never to report on global warming without IMMEDIATELY questioning the prevailing scientific consensus.

• We all know that Fox News is biased and not a legitimate news organization. But Fox News tries to deflect criticism by distinguishing between its “straight news” reporting and its commentary.

• Something similar is going on now with WikiLeaks. The American public is being softened up for another Administration ‘coup’. The Fox News poll suggests that this time it’ll be even easier to pull it off.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.

• Establishment of such a group has the backing of several countries, spearheaded by Brazil.

• It’s no surprise to EFF members that the Internet is full of security flaws, some of them severe. Yet many Internet companies try to deal with these problems internally, or not at all. They don’t encourage outsiders to report flaws discovered when using or testing a website, and may even be hostile toward those who reveal facts they don’t want to hear. Well-meaning Internet users are often afraid to tell companies about security flaws they’ve found — they don’t know whether they’ll get hearty thanks or slapped with a lawsuit or even criminal prosecution. This tension is unfortunate, because when companies learn what needs to be fixed, their services will be better and their users safer.

• Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner’s real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

• These phones don’t keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

• The social networking site YouTube, a subsidiary of California-based Google, says it will let users decide if videos posted on YouTube promote terrorism.

• Lawmakers have long wanted the company to pre-screen militant speeches and propaganda videos, but the company wants to protect First Amendment rights, the Los Angeles Times reported.

• Reporting from Washington — Nudity. Sexual activity. Animal abuse. All are reasons YouTube users can flag a video for removal from the website. Add a new category: promotes terrorism.

• YouTube and its parent company, Google, have been criticized by lawmakers for refusing to prescreen militant speeches and propaganda videos that have been cited in more than a dozen terrorism investigations over the last five years.

• But rather than submit to policies that many argue would amount to an erosion of 1st Amendment rights, particularly in an open-access environment such as the Internet, YouTube is taking a decidedly more democratic path — let the customers decide.

• Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn’t a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

• Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., told the Times that the new flagging option was a “good first step.”

• Over the past five years, while Facebook has grown dramatically, it has been linked to an astonishing number of crimes, according to a report in y the Daily Mail.

• Facebook was linked to over 100,000 crimes in the UK, according to high-ranking police officers in 16 forces, who responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from the Mail. Since January this year, 7,545 calls from the public expressed concerns with the social networking site. The figures mark a substantial increase from the 1,411 calls received in 2005 when Facebook’s popularity first began to grow.

• In a reversal of the federal government’s hands-off approach to Internet privacy regulation over the past decade, the Obama administration said Americans should have a “privacy bill of rights” to help regulate the commercial collection of consumer data online.

• When the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery removed a video by the late David Wojnarowicz from its exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” two weeks ago, it had no idea that giving in to a protest — by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League and incoming House Speaker John Boehner — would become bigger news than an entire exhibit devoted to analyzing society’s “changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire and romantic attachment.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The Internet’s second biggest BitTorrent site is dumping its .COM domain. In an apparent response to the US Government’s Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement recent seizures of domain names, the site moved to a new home. Despite being only a meta-search engine, Torrentz.com appears to be taking no chances with an immediate .EU domain migration.

• Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” has been out for a few weeks now and has already become one of those books that prognosticators and opinionators feel obliged to respond to. It’s also a substantial and well-written account of the five major communications industries that have shaped the world as we know it: telephony, radio, movies, television and the Internet. Wu believes that all of these industries have moved through cycles of diversity and consolidation, and that if we think the Internet is immune to a takeover by some massive monopoly promising a more perfect (and more profitable) experience for users (and itself), then we should look to history, and think again.

• For Internet pundits (whether amateur or professional), Wu’s book is required reading, but the average citizen may find it even more revelatory and rewarding. Maybe you know a little bit about the rise and fall of the studio system in Hollywood, or you get misty-eyed over the crazy but creative early years of radio, before major broadcasting networks took over. Anyone past the age of 30 probably has at least a hazy memory of Ma Bell being smashed into Baby Bells by the Department of Justice in 1984, and may even be aware that some people still regard this as a crying shame. And, of course, you all know that the Internet is radically, uncontrollably decentralized by virtue of its very structure: It was designed to survive a nuclear war, right?

Intellectual Monopolies

• Now how about protecting the Canadian taxpayer from abuse of non-existent IP rights, needless legal expenditures, and the wasting of a lot of peoples’ time?

• The U.S. Supreme Court divided evenly in a clash over the multibillion-dollar “gray market,” leaving intact a ruling that lets manufacturers use copyright laws to keep some products out of U.S. discount stores.

• The 4-4 high court split, which doesn’t set a nationwide precedent, upholds a federal appeals court decision favoring Swatch Group AG’s Omega unit in a dispute with Costco Wholesale Corp. over discounted Seamaster watches.

• The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Glider bot, which automatically kills enemies and performs other Warcraft functions while you’re away from your computer, is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provision banning the marketing of products that circumvent a technological measure that “effectively controls access to a copyrighted work.”

• The 9th Circuit on Tuesday partially vacated a $6.5 million judgment and an injunction against a programmer who created software that helps World of Warcraft players advance quickly to the higher levels of the popular online role-playing game. The federal appeals court in Seattle said that Michael Donnelly did not violate copyright law by selling his Glider software, which allows a player to automatically move through World of Warcraft’s (WoW) early levels. But the court did find that Donnelly’s company, MDY Industries, violated part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A district court will now determine Donnelly’s personal liability. Blizzard Entertainment, which created WoW in 2004, claims that Glider interferes with its contracts, and that gamers who use Glider may pay fewer subscription fees since they get through the 70 levels in fewer weeks than manual players.

• As books follow music and video onto the internet, Dylan Horrocks warns that the law may end up stealing the rights of both writers and readers

• A spectre is haunting the world of publishers and authors – the spectre of the ebook. The iPad, Kindle, Google Book Search, digital piracy – if the prophets of doom are to be believed, these new technological developments herald the imminent death of all we hold dear: books, writing and civilisation itself. In reality, of course, we simply don’t know what these new technologies will mean in the long run. Perhaps it’s that very uncertainty that has us so worried. Some of us are already mourning the smell of paper, the spidery cracks along an old book’s spine, dog-eared pages and marginal notes.

• [...]

• From this, I learned the central problem with how copyright works: it’s treated as a form of property. And like any property, it can be bought, sold or stolen. And as often as not, it ends up in the hands of corporations whose sole purpose is to exploit their property portfolio for maximum profit. Even when the author still ‘owns’ the copyright, he or she may be obliged to license the management of that property to a syndicate or publisher, who will often behave like a ruthless slum landlord, doing their best to fleece both the author and their readers.

Copyrights

• It’s no secret that the US government has used its annual Special 301 Report to intimidate other countries into adopting more stringent copyright and patent laws by singling out particular countries for their “bad” intellectual property policies, and naming them on a tiered set of “watch lists”. Listing results in heightened political pressure and in some cases, the potential for trade sanctions, which encourages foreign trading partners to change their laws to mirror those in the US. But now some of the cables provided by WikiLeaks to Spanish newspaper El Pais confirm that the US government has pushed other countries to adopt measures that go beyond US law, unleashing the fury of Spanish Internet users.

• A set of cables reported on by El Pais make clear that the US government played a key role in Spain’s controversial website blocking law – the 2009 Sustainable Economy Bill, which the Spanish government is now trying to sneak it through a Committee in a pre-holiday session on 21st December. (Spanish readers, please see Action you can take below).

• If you’ve ever installed or used the ultra-popular blogging platform software WordPress, you’re quite familiar with the Hello Dolly plugin that is part of the default install. If it’s enabled, then you get a short lyric from the song in the corner of the admin-only dashboard. It was basically just a fun simple plugin, mostly used to demonstrate the plugin functionality of WordPress.

• Dividing 4-4, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court’s denial of a discount retailer’s right to buy overseas a consumer item that is protected by copyright — in this case, a Swiss watch — and then bring it back into the U.S. for re-sale without the copyright owner’s consent. Such an even split among the Justices has the effect of upholding the lower court decision at issue, without setting a nationwide precedent. The division came about since Justice Elena Kagan was recused from the case – Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Omega S.A. (08-1423). The case involved the so-called “first-sale doctrine” in copyright law. In new orders issued Monday, the Court granted no further cases.

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