● 01.12.11

● Links 12/1/2011: Mageia Joins OIN, Key Developer Leaves Canonical, MeeGo Spreads

Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this special episode, Dan reviews Linux Mint 10 and CyanogenMod 6.1 in detail.

• This episode is mostly about Linux and competition. We look at our challenge and the winning image and we have a look at the challenge at gimpusers.com. There you have to design a new splash screen for GIMP.

Kernel Space

• For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors.

Graphics Stack

• While VIA defenestrated its open-source Linux graphics driver strategy, there has been some recent work under-way on providing a GEM/TTM + KMS driver for VIA’s integrated graphics processors by the community. In particular, this work is being done by James Simmons, the former Google Summer of Code student developer who was working on 3Dfx kernel mode-setting support a few months back.

• With the Linux 2.6.38 kernel DRM update having been pulled into the mainline tree last night by Linus Torvalds, AMD’s Alex Deucher pushed the page-flipping support from the DDX X.Org driver side into the mainline xf86-video-ati tree.

Applications

• Aside from providing some of the most promising applications available for the Linux desktop (“Linux iLife” anyone?) they are also incredibly hard workers; barely a month has passed since the release of Shotwell 0.8 yet today sees the release of Shotwell 0.8.1.

• I started working on a chapter for the Ubuntu Developers’ Manual. The chapter will be on how to use media in your apps. That chapter will cover:

• * Playing a system sound * Showing an picture * Playing a sound file * Playing a video * Playing from a web cam * Composing media

Proprietary

• Highlights:

• * Fresh batch of mail improvements * Experimental changes to the crash logger on Mac (more) * Changed how Opera is detected during widget start-up on Mac (more) * Slow DNS responses due to IPv6 fixed on Linux/FreeBSD (more)

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Mathieu Weschler has toiled away for the last two years on his opus, The Trashmaster — a feature-length film created entirely in GTA IV about a rogue garbageman who’s looking to take out the human trash.

• Ville Heijari, Bird Whisperer, Rovio Mobile Ltd. told Muktware, “Ubuntu is another one of the platforms we are investigating, but we don’t have any details regarding any development on Ubuntu yet.”

• So, sadly we may not see Angry Birds on Ubuntu any soon. But, we do wish to see Angry Birds on the world’s third most popular operating system. Let’s think of economics. If the game is paid, will you buy it? What other games do you want to see on Ubuntu?

• Zero Ballistics is a 3D tank shooter, a mix of FPS and “tank” (if that’s a genre) that is actually rather addictive, although unrealistic.

• [...]

• Overall the game is pretty damn fun for a quick thrill, everything comes together rather nicely and presuming you can find others to play with, I’m sure some strategies would emerge.

• I could off course suggest the more then comparable Unigine engine, but then I would be passing the MacOS users. There are many FOSS tools like Ogre3D, but I’m not a programmer to say what suites for their game. Yet, there is a lot to expect this year from Winter Wolves Games, I wish them a fruitful year with lots of new titles !

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Be aware that some of the software may be unstable on Windows, but chances are good that you might find yourself quite comfortable in using some of these applications.

• There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE.

• You can’t blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.

• Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.

Distributions

• Perhaps the best part of all, of course, is that–as with most Linux distributions–there’s no commitment involved in trying it out. Particularly if you have old hardware lying around, it will be worth your while to take Puppy Linux for a tour.

• I have been waiting for this day for so long! Great to see it finally happen! Thank you to everyone who has donated and may our path to world domination continue.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Initial release of Mandriva fork Mageia is still on track for release later this month. Numerous preparations continue behind the scenes to facilitate this highly anticipated release.

• A previous report of an earlier packagers’ meeting outlined some of the procedures and personnel in place and still needed to begin the process of building Mageia software. Hardware and temporary hosting was secured and the build system was being implemented. In a more recent blog posting, Mageia representatives stated that “packaging tasks have been launched.” While the build system isn’t fully operational, the first 40 packages are expected in the coming days as letters describing the SVN upload process, which is ready, have been sent. Mentors are being paired with new developers who did not previously have an account so they can begin their work as well.

Red Hat Family

• On January 7, the Administration issued a succinct, clear message to Executive Branch IT leaders: Don’t discriminate between proprietary and open source solutions when it currently spends almost $80 billion dollars to buy information technology (IT). In fact, in its message on Technology Neutrality, it goes even further, urging agencies to “analyze alternatives that include proprietary, open source, and mixed source technologies. This allows the Government to pursue the best strategy to meet its particular needs.”

• Editors’ rating:

• 8.2 out of 10

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Sadly I never kept that original e-mail, but I tried to replicate it from memory for Canonical’s 5th birthday:

• Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon discuss Unity, the new desktop environment for Ubuntu with David Barth, one of the key developers behind the interface on everyone’s lips.

• Nor is Unity a complete departure from GNOME. As Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon emphasizes, “Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME.” If anything, Shuttleworth insists, Unity is part of the diversity that “makes GNOME stronger.” Users will even be able to select another GNOME-based interface if they prefer.

• 3 months after the successful launch as permanent Q&A site in our new Ubuntu design, we have reached the 6000 question threshold. Those 6000 questions have been asked and answered to 91% almost 14000 answers by 8600 users. 60000 votes have been cast for the questions and answers.

Flavours and Variants

• The first release of elementary OS – a new Ubuntu-based operating from the elementary-project – has been made available for pre-order ahead of its March release date.

• Given that ZaReason already offers a variety of different Linux distributions — including the big names like Fedora and Ubuntu — as OS options, it’s not too surprising to see Trisquel added to the lineup. What is worth noting, however, is that Ubuntu-based Trisquel stands out as a brand of Linux whose main mission is to remain 100 percent free of “binary blobs” and other bits of proprietary software that most mainstream Linux distributions use, often because they’re essential for supporting certain hardware.

• wattOS R3 has been released. The lightweight Linux distro is now based on the latest Ubuntu 10.10 and also comes with updated packages for most of its core applications.

• Some changes include a new lightweight music player, foobnix, and a new photo editor, Fotoxx. The usual selection of LXDE, OpenBox and PCManFM continues to be the basis of wattOS.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• The world will see one billion mobile broadband subscribers this year, doubling from the 500 million mobile web users in 2010, according to Ericsson, a provider of global telecom equipment. An increasing rate of smartphone adoption is the key driver, although connected laptops, tablets, USB data sticks and mobile hotspots will also add to the mobile subscriber numbers to a lesser extent. By the end of 2011, Ericsson estimates 400 million mobile broadband subscribers will be from the Asia-Pacific region, while Western Europe and North America will follow with 200 million each.

Nokia/MeeGo

• While we’ve seen MeeGo running on devices such as the Nokia N900, we haven’t had a play with it on a netbook – until now. Here it’s running on an MSI unit.

• Here is one brilliant application created by Dany-69. You can download it from the Maemo.Org. It’s called MaeModder and basically one can modify a whole bunch of things on your N900 with very little effort. In a way Dany-69 has made modding your N900 a lot less stressful because beforehand one would need to run a lot of scripts via the x-terminal window. There will still be a lot of people who prefer to run scripts (myself included), but this application makes life a lot easier.

• This slate would be the first MeeGo/Android dual boot and dual core tablet and that it can also boot with Winodws 7.

• Other analysts have pointed out that, now that AT&T has lost its exclusive, they’ll certainly be promoting Android phones more.

Android

• The list of sensors and gizmos and odds and ends inside of mobile devices keeps growing, and the latest addition might have you scratching your head in terms of usefulness. It looks like Android 2.3 and higher supports a hardware barometer, and the Motorola Xoom tablet with Honeycomb (3.0) features one inside. The use isn’t immediately clear, but let’s speculate.

• Android 3.0 is not just another version of Android like the recently released Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”. Instead, Android 3.0 codenamed “Honeycomb” is built from scratch to suit the needs of devices with bigger screen sizes, tablets to be specific(in the current context). Google officially previewed Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. And from the initial looks of it, Android 3.0 powered tablets are going to be spectacular. Here is nice little video preview of Android 3.0.

• Google didn’t have a booth of its own at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year in Las Vegas, but signs of the search giant’s broad reach were apparent throughout the event. It seems as if practically every major consumer electronics company has adopted Google’s Android mobile operating system in some capacity.

• F4A 1.3 is now avaiable for download, with two significant updated (unrEVOked 3.32 and AlphaRev 1.8), plus some other under-the-hood tweaks.

Sub-notebooks

• The XO-3 will have a larger screen when it comes out in 2012, and will shave off another significant fraction of power – possibly up to another full Watt.

Free Software/Open Source

• People outside the free software movement frequently ask about the practical advantages of free software. It is a curious question.

• These are numbered for reference and not for priority.

• 1. Charles Smutz recently announced his Ruminate IDS, whose goal is to “demonstrate the feasibility and value of flexible and scalable analysis of objects transferred through the network.” Charles is also author of the Vortex prohect, a “a near real time IDS and network surveillance engine for TCP stream data.”

• 2. Doug Burks just released a new version of SecurityOnion, an Ubuntu-based live CD to facilitate network security monitoring. You’ll find many of the tools on this list in SO and I expect those missing will be included at some point!

• 3. Over at Berkeley, development of the Bro IDS project is kicking into high gear with Seth Hall’s new role as a full-time developer. We miss you Seth!

• [...]

• During the ‘Integration’ phase, source code and assets from various contributors are integrated into a deployable build which is then tested as a single unit. Issues are logged, fixed, and retested, all in the open source platform. The ‘Implementation and Improvement’ phase closes the loop and provides feedback to the entire lifecycle.

Web Browsers

• Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

• How I rank ‘em

• From best to worst, this is how I rank the above browsers:

• 1. Google Chrome (actually Chromium) 2. Konqueror 3. Firefox 4. Arora 5. Opera 6. Lynx 7. Midori 8. NetSurf 9. Dooble 10. Epiphany

Mozilla

• As Firefox 4 Beta 9 enters the freeze phase, Mozilla is posting the first nightly builds of Firefox 4 Beta 10 , which is expected to be the final beta of the new browser.

SaaS

• More seriously though, I’ve been growing increasingly alarmed by stories like this: the US government subpoenaing Twitter (and reportedly Gmail and Facebook) users over their support of Wikileaks. The casual use of subpoenas, including against foreign citizens is worrying enough – the New York Times says over 50,000 “national security letters” are sent each year – but even more concerning is the fact that often these subpoenas are sealed, preventing the companies from notifying the users they affect.

• It used to be that if the US government wanted access to documents or letters in my possession they’d have to subpoena me directly. As a foreign citizen there are all sorts of ways I could fight the request – and it was at least my choice whether to do so. As someone living in the US I also had the whole weight of the 4th Amendment on my side. Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands. And unless, as happened with Twitter, the company storing my data decides to fight for openness on my behalf, there’s every possibility that I won’t even hear about the request until it’s too late. That’s just not how things should work in a free society.

Oracle

• Since the java.net migration problems, Oracle and representatives from the Hudson community have been involved in talks on the future of the project in a number of areas. The Hudson representatives have been myself, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, and Sacha Labourey (CEO of CloudBees and Kohsuke’s boss), who was brought in to help provide experience with discussions on a corporate/executive level which neither Kohsuke nor I have, with Alan Harder and R. Tyler Croy advising on the side.

• [..]

• First, we rename the project – the choice for a new name is Jenkins, which we think evokes the same sort of English butler feel as Hudson. We’ve already registered domains, Twitter users, etc for the new name, and have done our best to verify that there are no existing trademarks which would conflict with it. Kohsuke will be registering the trademark for Jenkins in his name, with the intent of transferring ownership of the trademark to the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy once the Jenkins project has been admitted to it (which, I should add, is very much our plan, hopefully in their next round of new projects in a few months – we’ve already had preliminary contacts with SFC). We still invite Oracle to remain involved with the project, on equal terms with all other contributors, and hope they’ll take us up on this invitation.

• Over the next few months I saw the community start to grow at a decent pace. The first opensolaris books (OpenSolaris Bible and Pro Opensolaris) were published, Solaris internals was updated to take Solaris 10 and opensolaris into account and every major trade magazine was writing something about opensolaris. Additionally, our local OpenSolaris users group was starting to grow in size, and I was beginning to make a number of good friends in the community. All of these things got me crazy excited about the opensolaris community, and I wanted to jump in and start helping out any way I could.

Education

• The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on a workshop by the Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder (VREP) programme. VREP is an educational initiative to teach high school students how to use virtual reality.

Business

• This looks like a really foolish move by Salesforce. If we have learned anything in the last 15 years, it is that having an enthusiastic, vibrant community behind a product brings all kinds of benefits in terms of feedback, bug-fixing, marketing and so on. To throw that away, as Salesforce seems to be doing, is shortsighted and retrogressive – even Microsoft is moving to embrace free software and its communities.

• It also tends to confirm my suspicion that Salesforce is not actually a modern software company, despite its claim to be in the currently-trendy category of “enterprise cloud computing company”. It’s more of an old-style, closed-source, command-and-control outfit that happens to deliver its wares over the Internet. I’d be interested to know if it supports/contributes to any open source at all – I can’t think of or find anything (anyone else know?)

• I suspect that in the light of the company’s recent indifference towards its community, culminating in this sale and the abandonment of the free software version altogether, Dimdim will become a by-word for how not to build a sustainable business around open source. At least they chose a good name…

BSD

• As you all know, PC-BSD is a free, open-source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD, focusing on ease-of-use and and double-click package installation (PBI). The PC-BSD project is now part of iXsystems, a company that builds storage solutions, pre-configured servers, and customised servers utilizing open source hardware and software.

• Today Kris Moore, the project’s founder, announced PC-BSD 8.2RC1 and with regards to his plans for 2011 he writes:

• “For 8.2, it is mainly a release to include the latest FreeBSD 8.2 / KDE 4.5.4. Also some bug fixes are present for advanced partitioning, letting the user select between MBR/GPT, and easily toggle between UFS+S/ZFS.

• The PC-BSD Team has announced the availability of the first Release Candidate for PC-BSD 8.2.

• Version 8.2-RC1 contains a number of enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes in response to previous 8.2 testing snapshots. Some of the notable changes are:

• * Updated to FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 * Fixed issue detecting the proper video card driver * Fixed some crashes when adding new users / groups * Added /sbin/nologin as a shell choice in the user manager * Let created users have a homedir of /nonexistant via the GUI * Fix customizing desktop languages when using a () in the description

Project Releases

• The Mule team is very pleased to announce the general availability of Mule ESB 3.1. This release packs a lot of new shiny awesomeness.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Cassandra v0.7, the highly-scalable, second generation Open Source distributed database.

Programming

• Sometime later today some very exciting new code is going to show up in the e4 git repository at Eclipse. “Orion” is a brand new adventure for Eclipse, and one which we hope will interest and excite a whole new community: web developers.

• Orion is not a set of Java plug-ins which run in the existing Java IDE. It is browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the web, in the web. Tools are written in JavaScript and run in the browser. Unlike other attempts at creating browser-based development tools, this is not an IDE running in a single tab. Links work and can be shared. You can open a file in a new tab. Great care has been taken to provide a web experience for development.

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 needs spokespeople to work. There are a lot of people out there who took on this role, and here at Mozilla we thought it is a good idea to introduce some of them to you with a series of interviews and short videos. The format is simple – we send the experts 10 questions to answer and then do a quick video interview to let them introduce themselves and ask for more detail on some of their answers.

• The following chart shows the percentage of documents on the web that are in OOXML format, as a percentage of all MS Office documents. Note carefully the scale of the chart. It is peaking at less than 3%. So 97+% of the Microsoft Office documents on the web today are in the legacy binary formats, even four years after Office 2007 was released.

• [...]

• Of course, for any given organization these numbers may vary. Some are 100% on the XML formats. Some are 0% on them. If you look at just “gov” internet domains, the percentage today is only 0.7%. If you look at only “edu” domains, the number is 4.5%. No doubt, within organizations, non-public work documents might have a different distribution. But clearly the large number of existing legacy binary documents on government web sites alone is sufficient to prove my point. DOC is not going away.

• I call “FUD” on this one.

• Funded by the Research Information Network (RIN), the aim of this project is to investigate the extent to which Web 2.0 tools represent useful means of communicating, sharing and disseminating research ideas and outputs for researchers across different disciplines, with a view to exploring implications for the future of scholarly communications.

Leftovers

• Leaders of the opposition National Liberal Party (PNL) and Conservative Party (PC) Crin Antonescu and Daniel Constantin respectively on Monday will sign a protocol by which the two parties set up the Centre-Right Alliance (ACD), which they might register in court that very day.

• Over the weekend many news organizations reported, erroneously, that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was dead. These reports don’t seem to have originated on Twitter. But many spread there — and now they’re occasioning a round of head-scratching over how to handle retractions and corrections in this new communications format.

• [...]

• This might be a useful tactic to curtail the spread of bad info. But it still flattens the record a bit, since the original message’s timestamp (and possibly other contextual data) would vanish.

• We asked readers last week whether what influential bloggers said was true—that Google was losing the war against search result spam. Your response? More than three quarters found Google prone to spam, with one-third tagging the decline as significant.

• I saw this link pop up on Twitter today. Now, Syed is a great guy, and he works hard to make money and to teach others how to make money, but sometimes, even he is wrong.

• To start with, go to WPBeginner.com and read his article. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

• Did you see it? He’s talking about creating a viral campaign. A viral campaign is not created. It takes off on its own. It is like an infection that hops from person to person. So every article you read about creating viral campaigns is automatically wrong. What they are talking about is a fungal campaign.

• What is a fungal campaign, you may ask. A fungal campaign is based around trying to create an infection, the way that rubbing your wet athlete’s foot infected toes on my wet feet is your attempt to infect me. Commonly, a fungal campaign will use youth-oriented imagery, fonts, and graphics. It will go to great pains to try to conceal its pushy character, but as you can read in the article, the idea behind it is that friend A will inadvertently help push friend B, who will inadvertently help push friend C. In the article, the topic is the Facebook “like” button and its privacy-invading feature of telling one’s “friends” where you clicked the button.

Science

• At the same time, as we’ve written previously, the goal is not inexpensive genomics, but personal genomics. What matters is not how much it costs to generate a genome sequence (i.e., raw data), but what you can do with that genome once you have it. Thus, genomics is only personal once both the data and the interpretation are individually tailored.

Health/Nutrition

• Plastic surgery may look pretty good to us who are unbeautiful. Maybe plastic surgery is a conduit to a pleasant, superficial life. But what lies behind the dark doors of that profession?

• There is no undo button on plastic surgery. If you get an operation you might have some scars. If you try to undo the operation you might look the same as you started only with two operations worth of scars.

• That’s looking at it from your perspective. Perhaps there’s an undo button from the surgeon’s perspective. There just might be but it’s macabre. I don’t believe I’m the first to think of this. I believe many surgeons have thought of what I’m going to relay. And the human species being what it is, it’s even probable that some surgeon has acted on the idea.

• This is a big win for law enforcement and the prison industry. Look for even more restrictive cold medicine laws in the future.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• ‘Much of the delay in concluding asylum and other immigration cases stems from poor quality decision-making when the application is initially considered,’ says Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee whose latest report on the UK Border Agency’s work is published today.

• Two cheers for Vaz and the HASC! It might be three if only they were clearer and more forceful in their criticism of an agency whose deficiencies are systemic and rooted in a culture characterised by denial and deceit.

• The automatic disbelief that greets asylum seekers from their first moment of arrival, coupled with a shocking disregard for human rights, compounded by the lack of legal services that might check official incompetence have created a Kafkaesque nightmare for vulnerable people who come to these shores seeking sanctuary.

• Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy has rejected reports in the weekend press that she had “led calls” for the DNA testing of the entire 1-million-resident-strong Bristol area.

• A reporter on the Sunday Express, where the story originated, also wrote that McCarthy had said that men should be singled out for testing. Click here to find out more!

• This resulted in a barrage of online criticism, with questions raised about the practicality of such a measure, its impact on civil liberties, as well its target. Yesterday, Avon and Somerset police told El Reg that they were not considering such measures at this moment in time.

• UPDATE: I just got an email from some fellow Dems I work with who are wondering if this was satire. I have no idea. If it is, then it shows as big a lapse in judgment as the Palin Facebook page comment that I posted here.

• I put this out on Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth a post, too. Please run over and read all of it, but essentially, it’s a remarkable post about the speed with which only certain comments were deleted from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:

• Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more — presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.

• [...]

• Terrorists have been stopped since 2001 and plots prevented, but always by other means. After the Nigerian “underwear bomber” of Christmas Day 2009 was foiled, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed “the system worked” — but the bomber was caught by a passenger, not the feds. Richard Reid, the 2001 shoe bomber, was undone by an alert stewardess who smelled something funny. The 2006 Heathrow Airport plot was uncovered by an intelligence tip. Al Qaeda’s recent attempt to explode cargo planes was caught by a human intelligence source, not an X-ray machine. Yet the TSA responds to these events by placing restrictions on shoes, liquids, and now perhaps printer cartridges.

• It is ironic that a major anti-secrecy reform was thwarted by a single senator’s secret “hold” just before Congress adjourned in December. Perhaps some good will come of this double-edged attack on the public’s right to know — if it sparks reform.

• The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act — which would have offered expanded protection for federal employees against retaliation for reporting waste, fraud and abuse — had passed unanimously, first in the Senate and then a week later, on Dec. 22, in the House. The White House had made an unrestrained effort to deliver on this campaign pledge. It was supported by more than 400 organizations of all political stripes, with 80 million members. The National Taxpayers Union announced that support for the act would receive the highest priority on its legislative scorecard. Republicans had just changed the political landscape with election victories based on a mantra of cracking down against deficits, fraud, waste and abuse — the point of whistle-blower laws. Congress was poised to give the taxpayers a major legislative Christmas present.

• So what happened?

• After the lame duck session of Congress ended a few days before Christmas, watchdog groups were disappointed to learn that a bill expanding protections for government whistleblowers died in the Senate.

• The bill was a product of a 12-year lobbying effort and had bipartisan support. An earlier form of it had passed the Senate unanimously, and it passed in the House after undergoing some changes. When the bill went back to the Senate for a final vote, a lone senator put an anonymous hold on the bill, effectively killing it. Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project explains how the manuever worked…

Cablegate

• The private sector has now jumped on board with respect to using the term “responsible disclosure”. Media and US officials attacked wikkileaks for the lack of “responsible disclosure” when the site started releasing US diplomatic cables.

• The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes.

• “WikiLeaks: treat incitement seriously or expect more Gabrielle Gifford killing sprees.”

• Wikileaks today offered sympathy and condolences to the victims of the Tucson shooting together with best wishes for the recovery of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords, a democrat from Arizona’s 8th district, was the target of a shooting spree at a Jan 8 political event in which six others were killed.

• Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, leading the investigation into the Gifford shooting, said that “vitriolic rhetoric” intended to “inflame the public on a daily basis … has [an] impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.” Dupnik also observed that officials and media personalities engaging in violent rhetoric “have to consider that they have some responsibility when incidents like this occur and may occur in the future.”

• Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of providing documents to WikiLeaks, can’t reasonably complain that the military has him in custody. But the conditions under which he is being held at the Marine detention center at Quantico, Va., are so harsh as to suggest he is being punished for conduct of which he hasn’t been convicted.

• Manning has been charged with unlawfully downloading classified information and transmitting it “with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States.” He has been incarcerated at Quantico for five months and has yet to receive the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing.

• [...]

• Some see Manning as a whistle-blower who deserves leniency for exposing official duplicity; others believe that, like anyone who engages in civil disobedience, Manning, if guilty, should accept punishment for his actions. But regardless of one’s view of his alleged conduct, the conditions under which he is being held are indefensible.

• Robertson said Assange’s legal team is collecting evidence from further witnesses in Sweden, but the judge said the Swedish authorities are likely to take the view that the extradition warrant will stand nevertheless.

• Media interest in Assange remained as journalists from around the world filled 100 seats in the court and an annex connected by video link. High profile supporters of Assange who turned up today included Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan and Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

• An ex-WikiLeaks volunteer has hired American lawyers to oppose the U.S. government’s efforts to obtain the contents of her Twitter account, CNET has learned.

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who helped with WikiLeaks’ release of a classified U.S. military video, is being represented by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• The disturbed young woman who registered the julianassangemustdie.com domain name is Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) acording to her Twitter Profile:

• As a mother myself, I have difficulty understanding a mind set that would allow a mother to advocate killing anyone. Is this not also a criminal offense?

• Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at “real risk” of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.

• In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange’s legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition”, “where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is feeling pretty optimistic this afternoon. His Fish Fight campaign has scored a major victory the day before the first TV programme highlighting it is broadcast; Tesco has announced plans to switch to 100% pole and line caught fish for its own brand canned tuna.

• Critics of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas often say that the acronym ICCAT might better stand for the “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.” At its most recent meeting, ICCAT lived up to that derisive nickname by setting 2011 catch levels for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) at basically the same levels as 2010 — 12,900 tons, down from 13,500 – despite the pleas of conservation scientists and the bluefin’s place on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered or critically endangered species (Western stock and Eastern stock).

• From the Sunshine Coast 150km north of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, an extraordinary week of drenching rains refuses to let up. Thunder and lightning buffet me as I write at 4:30pm on Tuesday January 11. It has been like this all day. The unthinkable is happening.

• Unprecedented and fatal flash floods at Toowoomba on the top of the mountain range west of Brisbane is like the first domino for what is unfolding. Then came Grantham and the death toll this morning was officially 9 drowned and 66 missing. But “the missing” is hard statistic to deal with since the weather and the water levels prohibited attempts at discovery all day.

• Go further upstream and you will find this frightening sight. Huge areas covering several mountains have been drilled to prospect minerals here. I hope I am wrong but this is most likely the Qulong Copper Deposit, which was reported by the China Geological Survey in 2009 to contain at least 9 million tonnes of copper, plus molybdenum and silver. The Gyama mine, by comparison, has proven reserves of 2.2 million tonnes of copper. According to the International Mining, February 2010 issue (page 40): “In copper, the most famous deposit is Qulong, according to Chen Renyi and Xue Yingxi of the China Geological Survey. They say “With proved reserves of nearly 9 Mt, Qulong will soon be the largest copper deposit in China, and the perspective reserves are over 14-18 Mt.””

• Tim was almost certainly talking about the Oyu Tolgoi mine, or “Turquoise Hill,” a copper and gold ore deposit in Southern Mongolia that’s larger than the state of Florida. Oyu Tolgoi is the world’s largest mining exploration project, a joint venture between a Canadian company named Ivanhoe and the Mongolian government, with significant financing from Chilean mining giant Rio Tinto. Together, they plan to invest $5 billion into operations in the next few years, making Oyu Tolgoi the largest foreign investment in Mongolian history. Over the forecast 65-year lifespan of the mine, its revenues are expected to become a third of Mongolia’s gross domestic product. It’s a big deal, and the discovery of it and a wealth of untapped deposits of coal, gold, silver, tin, uranium, and “rare earth minerals” used in most of today’s advanced electronics has mining-industry shills proclaiming Mongolia the next “Saudi Arabia of insert-name-of-precious-metal-here.”

• Despite projections that the mining boom is expected to triple or quadruple the size of Mongolia’s economy in the next five years, times are tough for most Mongolians, and the relationship between the country’s great natural resources and the wealth of its people is still to be determined. The United Nations estimates that 27 percent of Mongolia’s urban population lives below the poverty line. In rural areas, nearly fifty percent of people live in poverty. During the past decade, a series of unusually severe zuds – storms that turn winter snow cover into solid ice, causing the mass starvation of livestock – has had a devastating effect on a country where a quarter of the people make their living (or attempt to make their living) raising livestock.

• Pollution machine Koch Industries is taking to court to defend its reputation as a cesspool of global warming denial. Brad Johnson has the bizarre story.

• The right-wing carbon industry giant, owned by Tea Party billionaires David and Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit in Utah to punish anonymous pranksters who claimed on the company’s behalf that it was discontinuing funding to climate denial front groups.

Finance

• The Great Depression hit Vancouver like a hammer. The city already suffered chronic high unemployment owing to the seasonal nature of BC’s resource-based economy, and even in the supposedly prosperous 1920s, Vancouver was known as a “Mecca for the unemployed.” After the economic collapse, people who couldn’t find work at home drifted to Terminal City in unprecedented numbers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• * This is a fact-checking operation, not an opinion-checking operation. We are interested only in verifiable facts, though on occasion we may examine the roots of political rhetoric.

• * · We will focus our attention and resources on the issues that are most important to voters. We cannot nitpick every detail of every speech.

• * · We will stick to the facts of the issue under examination and are unmoved by ad hominem attacks. The identity or political ties of the person or organization making a charge is irrelevant: all that matters is whether their facts are accurate or inaccurate.

• * · We will adopt a “reasonable man” standard for reaching conclusions. We do not demand 100 percent proof.

• * · We will strive to be dispassionate and non-partisan, drawing attention to inaccurate statements on both left and right.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• When Stephen Harper and his Conservatives first took the reins of government in 2006, it was on an “explicit promise to reform the Access to Information Act dramatically”, says the Canadian Press.

• As I wrote to the Hungarian authorities in my letter of 23 December, the recently adopted Hungarian Media Act raises specific concerns regarding its compliance with the EU Audiovisual and Media Services (AVMS) Directive and, more generally, regarding the respect for the fundamental media freedoms such as freedom of expression and media pluralism.

• Since then, the Commission has been active. I went to Budapest already last Thursday to discuss with the competent minister. The Commission President raised the Media law with Prime Minister Orban the following day.

• A large number of commentators have alleged that the Hungarian Media Law risks jeopardizing fundamental rights in a number of ways:

• * by requiring registration of all media, including online media such as forums, blogs and so on; * by requiring all media to engage in balanced coverage of national and European events; * by making the Media Authority subject to political control through the appointment process.

• Schöpflin believes there was no real overhaul in Hungarian politics after the fall of Communism in 1989, and said Fidesz had a “once-in-a-generation – perhaps once-in-a-century – opportunity to recast the entire system of political, social and economic governance”.

• [...]

• He accused the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), in power from 1994-1998 and 2002-2010, of governing as though the one-party rule of the communist days still existed.

• Internet blocking is a form of unacceptable censorship, and I believe it will do far more harm than good. Censorship inevitably does. But it’s a thorny issue, particularly when it comes done to some heinous perpetrators. It may seem like a good idea, but blocking a domain does not pull the plug, it simply turns out the light.

• Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed emergency legislation Tuesday that bars protests within 300 feet of a funeral and within an hour from its beginning or end.

• Earlier in the day, the state legislature passed the measure, which targets a Kansas church whose members announced they plan to picket the funerals of the victims of Saturday’s shootings in Tucson.

• “Such despicable acts of emotional terrorism will not be tolerated in the State of Arizona,” Brewer said in a statement announcing she had signed the bill. “This legislation will assure that the victims of Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson will be laid to rest in peace with the full dignity and respect that they deserve.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus, calls overage fees an “economic disincentive for internet use” since the charges levied by Bell Canada are “many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.”

• Last May, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave Bell Canada, Canada’s largest telephone and telecommunications company, the green light to proceed with the “economic Internet traffic management practice (ITMP),” i.e. consumption-based billing, and there’s a growing consensus that the plan has nothing to do with recovering costs from excessive usage, and rather everything to do with disincentivizing Internet usage.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Record labels finally will have to face an antitrust lawsuit that dates back to the early days of digital music, thanks to a Supreme Court order today. The high court declined to hear an appeal from the four major recorded music labels, asking the high court to throw out a lawsuit that claims the labels broke antitrust laws when they set a “wholesale price floor” of about 70 cents per track for two digital music stores that they created almost a decade ago, Pressplay and MusicNet.

• RapidShare, the file-hosting giant, recently hired a Washington lobbying firm to combat legislative attempts to place penalties on companies that don’t adequately protect domestic copyright. This is its first attempt at adding U.S. legislative muscle to its ongoing copyright fights – which most recently included Atari’s failed bid to combat RapidShare in a German court.

• The dispute concerns something called “pending lists” maintained privately by the major labels. Since 1988, it has become increasingly common for the labels to simply issue CDs (often compilation albums) without actually locking down the copyright permission and pay arrangements with the music’s creators. Instead, the music is offered for sale, the labels collect the money, and they put the songwriters on the “pending list” to clear up the details later.

• But in many cases, there was no “later.” The pending lists have climbed to around CAN$50 million in money that was due to artists but never paid out, something that the musicians describe as a “systematic ‘exploit now, pay later, if at all’ approach.”

• Those interested might also be interested these blogs about studies on online copyright enforcement vs data protection/privacy in UK, Netherlands and Poland and in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden.

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