● 11.28.12

● Links 29/11/2012: Dell Sells GNU/Linux Gear at Lower Cost Than Windows, Fedora 18 Reaches Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 9:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If you’re a real gamer you know just how terrifying Windows 8 can be. With the changes they’ve made there just might not be any sort of viable way for real gamers to get the kind of experience they want.

Server

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Some major changes are supposed to make drivers for Intel and NVIDIA’s graphics processors more robust. Linux 3.7 also includes a number of new DVB drivers and makes better use of modern audio chips’ power-saving features.Kernel Log – Coming in 3.7 (Part 4): Drivers

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has added infrastructure to the Linux kernel graphics drivers for Tegra SoCs (system on a chip) which supports the use of hardware-accelerated 2D on Tegra20 and Tegra30 chips. NVIDIA staff are working on integrating the extension, which is released under an open source licence, into the Linux kernel. At present, it does not look like this will be completed in time for Linux 3.8.

• For those that don’t closely follow the Mesa Git repository, there’s finally a few more “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver fixes that arrived this morning for slowly but surely bringing up the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series 3D support.

• NVIDIA has added infrastructure to the Linux kernel graphics drivers for Tegra SoCs (system on a chip) which supports the use of hardware-accelerated 2D on Tegra20 and Tegra30 chips. NVIDIA staff are working on integrating the extension, which is released under an open source licence, into the Linux kernel. At present, it does not look like this will be completed in time for Linux 3.8.

Applications

• GIMP developer Nicolas Robidoux seeks to leverage a freedom-based crowd-funding solution to bank-roll completion of the Nohalo/Lohalo/Lojaggy/Loblur suite of image resamplers for GEGL. The idea started back on Nov. 11th in the GIMP mailing list. Robidoux answers whether or not he plans to create a project on Kickstarter or not.

• Ekiga, the long-standing Linux “softphone” VoIP program for GNOME on Linux, hasn’t seen a major release since Ekiga 3.2 three years ago. Arriving today fortunately is Ekiga 4.0, which is codenamed “The Victory Release”, and packs a huge number of changes for this open-source telephony program.

• Focuswriter is a full-screen writing program. It has no option to resize or minimize. Its user interface lacks the traditional windows-control icons to minimize, maximize or close the window. This may require some personal workflow adjustments if you multitask or use numerous virtual workspaces on the Linux desktop.

Proprietary

• Netflix Finally Comes to Ubuntu in the Form of an Unofficial Desktop AppUbuntu: Watching Netflix on Linux has always been a pain, since Microsoft Silverlight isn’t available on Linux. The unofficial Netflix app for Ubuntu makes it easy to install Netflix and start watching movies right away.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Indie hit Dear Esther will be soon heading to Linux platform. The game has been made by thechineseroom, an independent game studio based in Brighton, UK.

• Hit Mac racing game ‘RC Mini Racers‘ is gearing up for an Ubuntu release.

• The racing title has proved popular on OS X, spending several weeks at #1 in the Mac App Store’s ‘Top Free Games‘ chart and 5 months in the top 10.

• Bethesda has made a major announcement through its wholly-owned id Software subsidiary: the release of the source code for Doom 3 BFG Edition under an open-source licence.

• The release, designed to allow the game to be modded on a far more fundamental level than most as well as making the latest version of the Doom 3 engine available for third-party developers to use in their games, follows id Software’s tradition of releasing older versions of its game engines for free under the GNU General Public Licence. Designed for open-source efforts, the GPL allows users to make use of id Software’s engine without paying a penny in royalties or licence fees – but only if they agree to release any modifications they make to the engine available under the same open-source licence.

• Valve’s upcoming release of Steam for Linux is the best news student and game developer Damien Levac has heard since he started using Linux three years ago. Not only will it raise the profile of Linux as a gaming platform to rival Windows and OS X, he says, it also reinforces his belief that Linux is the best programming environment for games.

• Intel has tagged their quarterly driver package for their customers looking towards the best open-source Intel graphics experience on the Linux desktop.

• For those not familiar, the quarterly Intel Linux driver package isn’t a new software release/component per se but rather the recommended versions of the key software packages making up the Intel Linux driver software stack. These packages have been released in the past days/weeks.

• The Steam for Linux beta can change the entire gaming landscape for Linux – it’s a boost for the Linux Gaming Community and Linux Games Titles. There are a lot of titles coming to Linux and there are a lot of titles that are currently being ported to Linux.

• One of these titles is a popular experimental First Person Adventure game called Dear Esther. The original game was released back in 2008 as a free mod for the Source engine.

• Once it became hugely popular it was repackaged for commercial distribution and released on Feb 14, 2012. More than 15,000 copies of the game were sold within hours after its release on Steam.

• An official update to the Sauerbraten game atop “Cube Engine 2″ is imminent while work on the Tesseract project — basically a modernized and more visually advanced version of the open-source Cube Engine 2 — is still in development.

• Thorvalla is a new RPG on Kickstarter by Guido Henkel who has worked on some big name RPG games like Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2!

• G3 Studios are looking to get $1M initial funding to make this new RPG game, considering the background this one could be an easy win. You will need to pledge at least $15 to get a copy (although that tier is limited!).

• It will be supporting Linux from the start as well which is brilliant to see so no nasty extra stretch goal for us this time folks. They are using Unity by the looks of it so it’s not surprising!

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today (November 27, 2012) is the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Tomorrow, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts. On Thursday there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.

• Fifteen years ago today, KDE began — and I, for one, am glad that it did. I run virtualized versions of all the major desktop environments, and have a few more on secondary machines. Sometimes, too, I’ll log into a desktop like Mate, Xfce, or LXDE just for a change of pace or to keep myself in touch. Yet, on my main workstation, I always return sooner or later to KDE. Of all my available choices, it’s the one whose design philosophy, communal attitudes, and vision come closest to my idea of what a desktop environment and its project should be.

• That wasn’t always the case. Although my first year of working in GNU/Linux was on KDE, I spent close to eight years as a die-hard GNOME user. Glances over the year suggested that KDE’s default theme looked as though it were based on plastic Fisher- Price toys, and that its organization was casual at best. The clean lines of GNOME seemed far less of a distraction from my work.

• But as my familiarity with GNU/Linux grew, GNOME’s minimalistic philosophy began to feel restrictive. Key GNOME applications such as the Evolution, which had seemed so radical a few years earlier, appeared stuck in maintenance mode.

• Appmenu support for KDE is now available in master for testing.

GNOME Desktop

• The developers of the GNOME desktop for Unix systems have released the second beta for the upcoming version 3.8 of the open source desktop. GNOME 3.7.2 drops the fallback mode as planned and the developers have completed porting all components of the desktop to GStreamer 1.0 as well.

• Why Gnome3 does a touch screen interface when you can’t actually run Gnome in any tablet -at least today ..is a typical question. A typical answer would be, because all screens will be touch-screens by 2013-2014.

• Javier Jardón has announced today, November 27, the second development release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.

• The development of the GNOME 3.8 is well under way and the developers have announced a few major changes already.

Distributions

• Many of us came to Linux via odd routes. Some of us decided that we were tired of our software and computing choices being made for us. Some of us are just adventurous or bored and want to see what other choices might be available to us.

Gentoo Family

• The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today served monetary penalties totaling £440,000 on two owners of a marketing company which has plagued the public with millions of unlawful spam texts over the past three years.

Red Hat Family

• The comprehensive agenda will include visionary keynotes along with a range of technical and business sessions, hands-on training and labs, demos, customer and partner panels, networking opportunities and partner showcases.

• The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is growing fast, as enterprises race to a more efficient cloud model for application development and deployment. While PaaS solutions enable the cloud, they don’t always have to reside outside of an enterprise’s firewall.

• Today enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat advanced its PaaS platform with a new on-site solution. The OpenShift Enterprise release builds on Red Hat’s open source OpenShift Origin platform and its existing OpenShift online service.

• Ashesh Badani, GM of the Cloud Business Unit, explained that OpenShift Enterprise is an on-premise PaaS that provides auto-scaling, self service features and is enterprise class.

• Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service started as a hosted solution for developers. It was, ostensibly, Red Hat dipping its toe into the platform-as-a-service waters. It proved successful enough to keep going. In keeping with Red Hat’s open source ethos, the product was released as an open source project called OpenShift Origin. This allowed anyone to deploy and run the Red Hat PaaS on their own hardware. Like most open source projects, though, OpenShift Origin doesn’t come with any official support.

• OpenShift is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product from Red Hat, Inc., a leading open source technology software outfit based in Raleigh, North Carolina. OpenShift is both a cloud platform and a free application that you can run on your hardware.

Fedora

• The Fedora Project on Tuesday announced the long-awaited beta release of Fedora Linux 18, complete with numerous improvements for users, developers, and systems administrators.

• After a number of delays, the beta of the Fedora 18 Linux-based distribution has been released.

• The beta release date had been extended six times over the past two months, mostly due to an underestimation of the amount of work required to rewrite the Anaconda software, which is used to install or upgrade Fedora.

• The Fedora Project team has (finally) announced the beta release of Fedora 18, code-named ‘Spherical Cow’. It was recently finalised that the beta would be released on 27th.

• Fedora 18 offers a brand-new version of the Gnome desktop, version 3.6, straight from the upstream development process. Updates have also been made to the KDE, XFCE and Sugar desktop environments; additionally, the MATE desktop is available for the first time in Fedora.

Debian Family

• Steve Langasek of Canonical has pushed their latest Upstart init daemon into Debian unstable. Debian GNU/Linux can now handle either SysVinit, systemd, and Upstart to handle a head-to-head system booting battle.

• Thanks to the ifupdown, sysvinit, and udev maintainers for their cooperation in getting upstart support in place; to the Debian release team for accomodating the late changes needed for upstart to be supported in wheezy; and to Scott for his past maintenance of upstart in Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It was only a matter of time before the proprietary software started populating in the Ubuntu Software Center. This was something Mark Shuttleworth had been promising for quite some time. Not only proprietary software, but plenty of other purchasable items would arrive:

• * Movies * Music * Magazines

• Canonical’s rigidly regular release schedule has been the subject of calls for change, but Mark Shuttleworth and plenty of others see no need. In fact, the regularity may be exactly what makes it work, satisfying the needs of both desktop and enterprise users, said Jay Lyman, senior analyst for enterprise software at The 451 Group.

• Working from my Ubuntu desktop all day has given me an interesting perspective into what works and what doesn’t when it comes to applications. In this article, I will offer you a roundup of software titles that enable me to make my day a more productive one. These applications range from productivity tools down to the Web-based tools that I use on my desktop.

• Benjamin Drung points out that Ubuntu will reach the letter Z with 17.04 and wondered in what direction would they go after. Would they just start at the beginning of the alphabet again and start with “A?” Turns out he overheard the response at the latest Ubuntu Developer Summit.

• Users can install the free Ubuntu package on their home computers, and use Splashtop’s array of mobile apps to connect remotely via an Android or iOS device. (A monthly subscription fee of $1 or a yearly price of $10 must be paid in order to do anything but connect across a LAN, however, and some tablet variants of the mobile app also cost a few bucks.)

• Can Ubuntu Linux ever pay for itself? The conventional wisdom is that it can’t, because no distribution has done so in the past. However, that doesn’t stop Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial arm, from trying hard. At the very least, Canonical is trying to defray as much of the cost as possible.

• Canonical is not a publicly traded company and does not release any financial figures. The company is quick to announce distribution deals, but the value of those deals are noticeably absent from many of its news releases. Ask its public relations directly for such information, and you are told that it is “confidential.” Nor is this lack of information surprising, since, from a traditional business perspective, Canonical has nothing to gain from transparency.

• More than five years after it began selling PCs with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled in the United States, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has compiled a lackluster record in the eyes of many Linux advocates when it comes to promoting open source alternatives to Windows. Yet as a Canonical employee recently pointed out, Dell is now offering a $70 markdown on one laptop model when customers purchase it with Ubuntu instead of a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) OS. Is this a mistake, or a sign of changes to come on Dell’s part?

• As the only big name OEM that provides Ubuntu preinstalled on certain PCs and laptops in developed markets, Dell can hardly be called anti-Linux. But since introducing Ubuntu computers in 2007, the company has taken flack for failing to market them aggressively, burying Ubuntu options on its website and charging the same prices whether users order machines with Ubuntu, which is free, or with Windows.

• As we’ve noted before, Canonical and giant PC maker Dell Computer have already found new horizons for Ubuntu in China in India. And, Dell deserves praise for being one of the few big hardware makers to offer Linux options on its computers over the years. Now, as Canonical employee Rick Spencer reports in a blog post, on Cyber Monday, Dell was listing the very same Vostro notebook for $369 with Windows 7 pre-loaded versus $299 for it with Ubuntu pre-loaded. The real news here is that you can actually get a solid portable computer with Ubuntu or any Linux distro pre-loaded for much less than $299.

• With the Election in the rear-view mirror for Americans we are starting to learn about the tools, assets and people that helped President Barack Obama win re-election.

• Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign’s IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linux—particularly Ubuntu—was used as the server operating system of choice. “We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose,” VanDenPlas said. “Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js.”

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint returns with updates all round, but has it addressed the minor issues we had with Mint 13 along the way?

• Hot off the press, we are welcomed with a new version of Linux Mint codenamed Nadia. This released is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and comes with Cinnamon 1.6 desktop environment and features significant upgrades in the GUI alone since version 13.

• As always Linux Mint is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit and comes in the form of a Live Media CD which can be installed if you enjoy Linux MintThis new fresh Linux Mint has quite a number of improvements under the hood and for those who used the previous version there’s no drastic changes where one would have to relearn things. With Cinnamon 1.6 comes a new file manager called Nemo which features shortcuts on the left hand side and displays the contents on the right. It is quite sleek and it is easy for a user to add a shortcut to one of their folders if need be.

Devices/Embedded

• Earlier this month, Texas Instruments (TI) announced it was cutting 1,700 jobs and dropping its consumer mobile processors to focus on the general embedded market. TI cited the reduced profitability of the consumer mobile business, which is marked by intense competition and short lifecycles.

• Others noted the growing competition from device vendors like Apple and Samsung, which now design their own ARM processors. In addition, pricing pressures have grown sharply, due in part to one of TI’s chief customers, Amazon. The online retail giant, which uses OMAP chips in its Kindle Fire tablets, considered buying the mobile, Android-focused portion of TI’s OMAP processor business before negotiations broke down.

• Advantech (2395.TW), the leading embedded platform and integration services provider, announces the release of the Linux version of SUSIAccess 2.0, an innovative remote device management software preloaded in all Advantech embedded solutions, allowing efficient remote monitoring, quick recovery & backup, and real-time remote configuration. The launch of the Linux version of SUSIAccess 2.0 provides System Integrators more flexible options for creating a more intelligent and interconnected embedded computing solution.

• Raspberry Pi, the bargain micro PC released earlier this year, has fertilised the imaginations of the public, bringing with it a boom in inventive approaches to computing not seen since the good old days of 8-bit.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation, maker of the $35 mini computer, is on a mission to get more kids to learn to code – and what better way to get children excited about the power of programming than by involving virtual block-builder game Minecraft? An official Mojang produced port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition was announced for Pi at the weekend – known as Minecraft: Pi Edition. Now the Foundation has put up a video showing how Minecraft gameplay on Pi can be combined with programming commands so kids can use text commands to control the world

Phones

Android

• For users who chose Android over competing mobile operating systems because it was released under a free and open source license (Apache), or because they didn’t like the overbearing control exerted on them from certain smartphone manufacturers, it’s not hard to see how the existing Android marketplaces would leave a lot to be desired. These markets are full of applications which are closed source, have unclear licensing, contain advertisements, track their users, and other manners of nefarious deeds.

• A report from Taiwan states that Google is working on its own house-brand Nexus Chromebook with a touch screen. This, in turn, suggests that it might run a mixture of Android and Chrome OS.

• The story of a bug in Google’s People app got lot of press when it was found that it had the whole December missing. Google is quickly looking to fix this bug and others (Gtalk bug, broken Bluetooth and battery issues) by rolling out a 4.2.1 update before December arrives. As indicated by the size of the update i.e. 1.1 MB it is only to patch up the bugs that were found in the Jelly Bean 4.2.

• Powered by Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” and offering a data-plan option (via AT&T), the Samsung Galaxy Camera is the idea of an Android camera fully realized, and puts to rest any doubts about whether or not the Android software — with its robust ecosystem of apps — even belongs in cameras. Absolutely, it does. And it can thrive.

• The latest rumor from Asia is that ZTE is working on a smartphone codenamed “Apache”, equipped with 8-core CPU from Mediatek. According to MyDrivers.com, Mediatek beat Qualcomm and NVIDIA in the battle for the heart&brains of the next ZTE flagship with, as yet unannounced, ARM15 MT6599 chip manufactured with TSMC’s 28nm tech.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Technology writer Prasanto K Roy tests the upgraded version of the world’s cheapest tablet computer Aakash 2 and discovers a significantly improved product.

• Google has started sending out notifications to potential customers that their flagship device Nexus 4 will be (re)available on Google Play Store today. These emails are being sent to those customers who signed up to be notified whenever the device is made available.

• This continually updated screenshot tour demonstrates more than 50 of DeviceGuru’s favorite Android tablet apps. They span device customization and management; text, voice, and video communications; productivity; news, weather, maps, and navigation; music, video, games, and e-books entertainment; and more.

• For all the appeal that comes with a $100-$150 Android tablet, experienced users are often quick to point out the omissions and holes. One particular detail that often comes up is the lack of Google Play and the growing library of apps. E FUN is no stranger to this as they have announced a number of devices over time, all of which are inexpensive options that don’t have Google Play. That is not the case with the new 7-inch model, the Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP.

• Apple’s share of the tablet market continued to best all others with 55% unit shipment share in the period, reveals new data from market intelligence firm ABI Research. Despite maintaining its lead for 10 straight quarters, competition from tablets powered by Google’s Android OS continue to eat away at Apple’s success. Fifty-five percent is the lowest share Apple has ever had since launching the iPad in 2010.

Free Software/Open Source

• Black Friday first spread to Cyber Monday, then Grey Thursday. Now the week-long spending frenzy has turned charitable with Giving Tuesday.

• New York’s 92nd Street Y teamed up with the United Nations Foundation to gather a growing group of companies and non-profits “to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season [and to] celebrate and encourage charitable activities that support nonprofit organizations.”

• Many within the open source community have recently bemoaned the lack of open source apps for mobile devices. However, their contention that open source has ignored the ongoing transition to a post-PC world isn’t entirely accurate.

• While it’s true that the number open source mobile apps haven’t kept pace with the exponential growth of mobile apps in general, open source developers are slowly but steadily adding to the library of open source apps for smartphones and tablets.

• Netflix has moved on from just releasing the tools it uses to test the resilience of the cloud services that power the video streaming company, and has now open sourced a library that it uses to engineer in that resilience. Hystrix is an Apache 2 licensed library which Netflix engineers have been developing over the course of 2012 and which has been adopted by many teams within the company. It is designed to manage how distributed services interact and give more tolerance to latency within those connections and the inevitable failures that can occur.

• Beyond the most radically geeky segments of society, few Americans are likely to have thought of software when they counted their blessings this Thanksgiving. For most people, computers are hardly in the same category as food, shelter and loving friends and family. That said, a recent blog post got me thinking about the software projects and people to whom I do owe personal gratitude. My list comes a bit belatedly, since Thanksgiving 2012 has come and gone, but here are the five items that top it.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 18 is now officially in Beta and it is likely to be the fastest browser ever released by Mozilla.

• The reason of the speed boost is a new tech that I first wrote about back in September called IonMonkey. It’s the latest iteration of Mozilla’s JavaScript engine and follows in the footsteps of JaegerMonkey/SpiderMonkey.

SaaS

• Open-source cloud platform Eucalyptus Systems is rolling out its 3.2 release in December in a move that aims to provide admins with greater visibility into cloud operations and expand storage options.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• Open source content management system (CMS) Joomla has announced that it has surpassed 36 million downloads worldwide two months after the launch of Joomla 3.0.

• The company reports downloads grew an impressive 27% compared to November 2011, while more than 1,500 extensions for the CMS were introduced by its community in this period of time.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Some vendors want you to think you’re benefiting from open source when you’re not. Keep an eye out for potential traps

Funding

• Fred Wilson is not alone in claiming that patterns of venture funding are shifting away from consumer startups towards enterprise oriented alternatives. Industry chatter has been concerned with this trend for some time, amplified in part by an industry analyst industry that has historically been over concerned with the enterprise at the expense of consumer technology trends.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The city has now migrated over 80 percent of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux, it’s own distribution of Linux.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• I became aware of the Arduino Project from occasional media reports and a presentation at Atlanta LinuxFest 2009. I was impressed with what the Arduino community was doing, but at that time, I saw no personal use for it. It took a grandson who is heavily involved in a high-school competitive robotics program to change things for me. During a 2011 Thanksgiving family gathering, he asked me some questions about robotics-related electronics, and I told him to google Arduino. He did. Arduino ended up on his Christmas list, and Santa delivered.

• Just a few clarifications: Arduino is not suing anybody. We never intended to do that in the slightest. We love Kickstarter and , as I said in the post, we think they are important to Makers. We are now in contact with Kickstarter to make sure that in the future the communication between us are more direct and clear. Our manufacturing partner in Italy has issues with some statements made in the Kickstarter campaign and they are getting in touch directly with the project creator to clear the situation.

Programming

Leftovers

• Microsoft is the next Research in Motion.

Health/Nutrition

• The coalition has been accused of presiding over a sham “listening exercise” on NHS reform last year, as a leaked document reveals how the private health lobby worked with Downing Street behind the scenes to ensure that the new legislation went ahead.

• Dr. Latisha Smith, an expert in decompression sicknesses afflicting deep sea divers, has cleared criminal background checks throughout her medical career. Yet someone searching the Web for the Washington State physician might well come across an Internet ad suggesting she may have an arrest record.

Security

• These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• At the bottom of the sandy dunes sit wide turquoise craters, looked over by gritty hills where haphazard tents made from tarpaulins and thatch serve as shelters for the men descending into the hollowed-out pools with pickaxes and buckets. Fifteen metres deep, they scavenge for tin, cutting into the sand with their hands and feet, just like Suge used to do, until one day in August his pit collapsed, burying him alive and snapping his left shin in half. His cries of “Longsor! Longsor!” – Landslide! – were drowned by the mud that killed the three friends who had been working beside him.

• The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal of a controversial Illinois law prohibiting people from recording police officers on the job.

• By passing on the issue, the justices left in place a federal appeals court ruling that found that the state’s anti-eavesdropping law violates free-speech rights when used against people who audiotape police officers.

• The Salt Lake City police chief said Wednesday that he hopes to eventually replace the department’s dashboard cameras with new light-weight ones that officers will wear at eye level.

• “I think this is the way of the future,” said Chief Chris Burbank during a presentation about the cameras at the city Main Library. “It is a technology that is coming very quickly.”

• The Foreign Ministry has concealed death toll in drone attacks and submitted a confusing reply and report to the Lahore High Court

• (Washington, DC) – Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.

• In Peter Watkins’ remarkable BBC film, The War Game, which foresaw the aftermath of an attack on London with a one-megaton nuclear bomb, the narrator says: “On almost the entire subject of thermo-clear weapons, there is now practically total silence in the press, official publications and on TV. Is there hope to be found in this silence?” The truth of this statement was equal to its irony. On 24 November, 1965, the BBC banned The War Game as “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.

• A new report found lawmakers received drone-related campaign funds and pushed through an agenda despite problems

• human rights violations by US armed forces, particularly his unadulterated admiration for drone attacks involving untenable collateral damage

• Earlier this month, at China’s biennial air show in Zhuhai, an imposing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles was seen on the tarmac — drones bearing a striking resemblance to the American aircraft that have proved so deadly in attacks on insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

• Israel, Britain and the United States have pretty much had a corner on the global drone market, but the recent Chinese air show and a Pentagon report have exploded that notion.

• “In a worrisome trend, China has ramped up research in recent years faster than any other country,” said the unclassified analysis published in July by the Defense Science Board. “It displayed its first unmanned system model at the Zhuhai air show five years ago, and now every major manufacturer for the Chinese military has a research center devoted to unmanned systems.”

• The United States has a long history of violating international law when its leaders believe foreign policy objectives justify doing so. The belief in the right of the United States to overthrow democratically elected governments (Guatemala, Iran, Congo), to train and arm insurgencies (Nicaragua), and to launch aggressive wars (Iraq) free of the inconvenience of the law grows out of the nationalistic fervor of “American Exceptionalism.”

• With drones from the beginning there has been a kind of technological determinism associated with the idea that since the United States possesses this relatively new technology it should use it. Facing the uncertainty of reelection, President Obama became so concerned about the lawlessness of his drone killings he sought hastily to codify the rules governing their use. What began in the Bush era as a means for targeting al Qaeda leaders hiding in remote areas has become a vast “amorphous” death machine targeting suspected “militants” in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Now we’ve learned that, in addition to “personality strikes” aimed at individuals deemed enemies of the United States, there are now what’s called “signature strikes” where any congregation of suspicious looking military-age men is open game.

• According to a report published Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans to establish a more systematic and regular program of using unmanned drones to kill people selected by the White House for death.

• The Navy said that sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman took delivery of the drone on Monday from Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, where it had been undergoing tests.

• Came the end, though, and Bashir asked him about the “moral justification” for the use of drones. O’Hanlon answered him by saying, essentially, that only American lives count.

Cablegate

• “…has a chronic lung condition that could worsen at any time”

• Yet a European arrest warrant stands ready to whisk Assange to Sweden, where consensual sex without a condom can – for reasons I’ll never understand – count as rape, where he can be locked in solitary without charge or extradited to America.

• Some of the milestones of Madman Joe Lieberman’s illustrious career:

• The ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010′. Madman Joe was coauthor. The bill would have facilitated the ‘kill switch’ for the US president to shut down the Internet. Opposition to WikiLeaks which Glenn Greenwald called ‘one of the most pernicious acts by a US senator in quite some time’. Greenwald compared Lieberman to ‘Chinese dictators’ and accused him of having abused his position as chair of homeland security ‘to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host – and more importantly what you can and cannot read on the Internet’. A suggestion that ‘the New York Times and other news organisations publishing the US embassy cables being released by WikiLeaks could be investigated for breaking US espionage laws’. A ‘bill to amend the Espionage Act in order to facilitate the prosecution of folks like Wikileaks’. Some things aren’t legal. But that’s OK – you pass a new law to make them legal. No worries, dictator dude. The Enemy Expatriation Act which would allow the US government to strip US citizenship without requiring a criminal conviction.

• …confinement in the Quantico brig amounted to illegal punishment.

• Bradley Manning is being punished – and tortured – for a crime that amounts to believing one’s highest duty is to the American people and not the American government

• President Barack Obama signed new whistleblower protections into law, the White House said Tuesday.

• The law, known as the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (pdf), expands protections for federal workers who blow the whistle on misconduct, fraud and illegality.

• Coombs asked Choike if he believed joking about the underwear was something that an officer should have done. Choike then said something to the effect that he realized this could be brought up by Manning with his attorney and it might become “another media issue.”

• The legal issue is that if this treatment was seen as punitive then that’s a problem. People can be held pre-trial, but they’re not supposed to be “punished” as part of the process. The Defense Department has been trying to claim that the treatment of Manning had to do with fears that he would harm himself, and the latest hearings were to figure out which version of the story is really accurate. The details look pretty damning for the Defense Department.

• The soldier charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history, was appearing before a military court at Fort Meade, Md., Tuesday, seeking to avert a trial by arguing that he has been subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment” and “unduly onerous confinement conditions.”

• Two “hard right” politicians, Joseph Lieberman and Peter King, went directly to the transnational credit card corporation MasterCard and arranged an extrajudicial financial blockade of Wikileaks, according to heavily redacted European Commission documents.

• Credit card companies that blocked WikiLeaks a couple of years ago didn’t do anything wrong, the European Union’s European Commission said today. Last year, donation collection gateway DataCell complained to the commission that it was unfair for MasterCard Europe, Visa Europe, and American Express to have blocked donations to WikiLeaks. DataCell provided payment gateway services to WikiLeaks, accepting donations for the controversial organization. It was able to facilitate those transactions by operating its datacenter in Iceland — away from legal prying eyes.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century’s end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action by sharing devastating scenarios of flood, famine, drought and cyclones. Meanwhile, a report from the US National Research Council, commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies, says the consequences of climate change–rising sea levels, severe flooding, droughts, fires, and insect infestations–pose threats greater than those from terrorism ranging from massive food shortages to a rise in armed conflicts.

• The evidence of climate change is clearer than ever. The poor countries have done everything asked of them. Now the rich nations must face their responsibilities

• An effort to stomp out state renewable energy mandates across the country has roots in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As reported by The Washington Post, the Heartland Institute wrote the bill, had it passed through ALEC, and is now targeting the 29 states and the District of Columbia, which have passed renewable energy requirements in some form.

• Corporate lobbyists and right-wing legislators of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) will be gathering in Washington, DC today for ALEC’s annual States and Nation Policy Summit. Today also marks the release of an in-depth report on the failure of ALEC’s economic recommendations for the states. The report claims that “states that were rated higher on ALEC’s Economic Outlook Ranking in 2007,” the first year the ranking was published, “have actually been doing worse economically in the years since, while the less a state conformed with ALEC policies the better off it was.”

• Assange and his “cypherpunk” compatriots believe the solution is for everyone to master encryption. That’s simply not going to happen. We are addicted to convenience and desperate to belong. This is a world where the head of the CIA was caught using Gmail to share illicit messages and professional politicians can’t resist sending naughty pictures via Twitter. Assange doesn’t have an answer to the human fear of missing out which drives so many to join social networks and remain there.

Finance

• In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

• For about twenty-four hours, Walmart workers, union members and a slew of other activists pulled off the largest-ever US strike against the largest employer in the world. According to organizers, strikes hit a hundred US cities, with hundreds of retail workers walking off the job (last month‘s strikes drew 160). Organizers say they also hit their goal of a thousand total protests, with all but four states holding at least one. In the process, they notched a further escalation against the corporation that’s done more than any other to frustrate the ambitions and undermine the achievements of organized labor in the United States.

• Huh. So Blankfein–who was paid $16 million last year, and owns $210 million worth of his company’s stock–thinks that people can retire on Social Security after working for 25 years? As Gene Lyons pointed out, that would mean that people are getting their first paychecks when they’re 42–or, assuming they’re willing to take the severe benefit cuts that come with early retirement, at 37. Or possibly he mistakenly believes Social Security allows you to retire at 41.

• He also thinks people typically live to be 92 or 97, depending. In real life, of course, most people start working as early as 16, so they reach retirement age after 51 years of labor, when they have a life expectancy of 17 years–or 14 years if they’re an African-American man.

• Colonialism is back. Well, at least according to leading politicians of the two most famous debtor nations. Commenting on the EU’s inability to deliver its end of the bargain despite the savage spending cuts Greece had delivered, Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the opposition Syriza party, said last week that his country was becoming a “debt colony”. A couple of days later, Hernán Lorenzino, Argentina’s economy minister, used the term “judicial colonialism” to denounce the US court ruling that his country has to pay in full a group of “vulture funds” that had held out from the debt restructuring that followed the country’s 2002 default.

• Argentinian politicians and global debt campaigners have responded with fury to a US court judgment that risks plunging the country back into default.

• New research found that while median wealth plummeted, the top 1 percent increased wealth by 71 percent

• The Boston-bred Birkenfeld was a banker for UBS, a Swiss financial behemoth with major US operations. His specialty: devising tax shelters in the form of offshore shell companies and peddling them to the superrich. According to court documents, 85 to 90 bankers in UBS’s wealth-management divisions drummed up business at high-roller events like the America’s Cup yacht race and Miami’s prestigious Art Basel exhibition; Birkenfeld took pains to keep his customers happy, going so far for one client as to purchase diamonds overseas and smuggle them into the US in a toothpaste tube to avoid taxes and duties.

• It was one of Birkenfeld’s biggest clients who would prove his undoing—Igor Olenicoff, a Forbes 400 billionaire (forbes.com) and major developer in Florida, Illinois, Nevada, and the Southwest. Olenicoff’s fortunes took a dive in 1994, when the Internal Revenue Service, in the course of monitoring fund transfers, noticed large sums moving from Olenicoff’s accounts to countries with a reputation as tax havens. The suspicious IRS agents eventually called in the Justice Department; Olenicoff, they discovered, had stashed some $200 million in unreported assets in UBS accounts offshore. In 2007, Olenicoff agreed to pay $52 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties for tax evasion, and for lying about his accounts.

• Paul Joseph Watson: The “surprise” announcement that Canadian Mark Carney is to be appointed Governor of the Bank of England means that the 2012 Bilderberg attendee completes Goldman Sachs’ virtual domination over all the major economies of Europe. Carney’s appointment has come as a shock to many who expected current BoE deputy governor Paul Tucker to get the nod, but it’s not a surprise for us given that we forecast back in April Carney would be headhunted for the position.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Judge wants tobacco companies to say they deliberately deceived the American public about smoking’s dangerous effects

• [...]

• Each corrective ad is to be prefaced by a statement that a federal court has concluded that the defendant tobacco companies “deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking.” Among the required statements are that smoking kills more people than murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol combined, and that “secondhand smoke kills over 3,000 Americans a year.”

• An unsettling trend appears to be underway in Arizona: the use of private prison employees in law enforcement operations.

• The state has graced national headlines in recent years as the result of its cozy relationship with the for-profit prison industry. Such controversies have included the role of private prison corporations in SB 1070 and similar anti-immigrant legislation disseminated in other states; a 2010 private prison escape that resulted in two murders and a nationwide manhunt; and a failed bid to privatize nearly the entire Arizona prison system.

Censorship

• Google has fought in courtrooms around the world in recent years, arguing that it is not responsible for the content in its search results, and this month it lost a battle in Australia. The Supreme Court of Victoria ruled on November 12th that Google is responsible for having published search results leading to a defamatory page which contained rumors that Michael Trkulja, a music promoter, was linked to murder and organized crime. Google argued, as it has in the past, that it’s not responsible for offensive material that other people host on the web — a defense that’s been met with mixed results internationally. In January, a French court fined Google and ordered it to change unfavorable search results that linked a French insurance company to the words “crook” and “con man” in autocomplete results.

• Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the Italian Senate’s approval of a contradictory amendment to a bill designed to decriminalize defamation. Under the Senate’s amendment, reporters would continue to be exposed to the possibility of imprisonment.

• A 36-year-old financial worker who helps his daughter with her homework every night was taken away by Chinese security forces after he made a quip about the Communist Party’s recently concluded leadership conclave on Twitter.

• Four days before the Party’s 18th Congress, when a new set of Chinese leaders was sworn in to rule China, Zhai Xiaobing mocked the event by suggesting it was the latest installment in the Final Destination film franchise. The 2000 supernatural horror movie depicts a teenager whose plane explodes, killing all but a few survivors, who then begin mysteriously dying.

Privacy

• Irish regulators are seeking “urgent” clarifications from Facebook Inc. (FB) after the social media company informed users of changes to its privacy policy overnight. Facebook, which is overseen by Irish data protection regulators in the European Union, said that it recently proposed changes to its data-use policy and its statement of rights and responsibilities. The changes give users more detailed information about shared data including “reminders about what’s visible to other people on Facebook.”

• Facebook moved last week to eliminate the ability of users to vote on data use and privacy policy changes, according to posts in several languages on its site governance page on November 21. Both the timing (immediately before the Thanksgiving holiday in America) and the content changes have raised eyebrows with the entities who have worked to keep Facebook in check, but the company may have a point in eliminating its voting mechanisms. Does this simply give users the democracy they deserve—that is, none at all?

• The Internet has become one of the most important resources in the world in just a few decades, but the governance mechanism for such an important international resource is still dominated by a private sector organization and a single country.

• The U.S. government said in a statement on July 1, 2005 that its Commerce Department would continue to support the work of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet’s 13 root servers.

Civil Rights

• The report also details allegations that U.S. officials physically and mentally abused the suspects in Kampala, and that the United Kingdom also took part in their interrogations.

• Even if ECPA is tweaked to protect email privacy, does that mean if you use Tor, with an IP that appears as if you are on foreign soil, that your real-time communications are being spied upon also by the NSA thanks to FISA?

• Can using privacy-enhancing tools (such as Tor or a Virtual Private Network) actually expose you to warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency? This week, the ACLU sent off four FOIA requests to federal agencies in order to try and answer this question.

• To understand why we think that may be the case, we have to go back to the passage of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in 2008. That act was not a high-point for civil liberties or the rule of law. It included a provision giving immunity to the telecom companies that violated the law by assisting the NSA with its warrantless wiretapping program. Although the get-out-of-jail-free card given to the phone companies is the most well-known aspect to the FAA, there is much more to the law, and many other things that give privacy advocates reason to worry.

• Under the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the government was required to provide specific, targeted requests aimed at foreign powers or their agents before lawful surveillance was permissible. But the FAA created an additional, broader surveillance system, enabling the government to conduct surveillance without particularized suspicion where a “significant purpose” is to obtain “foreign intelligence” and where the surveillance is targeted against persons “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.”

• Although the FAA defined several key terms, it did not provide a definition for a person “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” In that ambiguity lies the source of our concern.

• Possible promotions for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and acting CIA Director Michael Morell remain in jeopardy after the two officials met Tuesday with three of their Republican critics regarding how the Obama administration responded to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya.

• More than 50 years ago, my resignation from the Central Intelligence Agency was effectuated. The Company, as it had always been known, had become a bit too militarized and was not what some of its founders such as Allan Dulles envisioned.

• Intelligence was collected but rarely analyzed coherently so as to contribute to enlightened policies. Much of what was collected by the Company lay unused, some of us feeling it is too expensive to collect this data, not to mention the risk involved.

• A US government scientist was drugged by CIA agents and then thrown to his death from the 13th floor of a Manhattan hotel after he learned about secret torture sites in Europe, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

• Nearly 60 years after the death of a government scientist who had been given LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency without his knowledge, his family says it plans to sue the government, alleging that he was murdered and did not commit suicide as the C.I.A. has long maintained.

• The family of a US government scientist who reportedly jumped to his death nearly 60 years ago now plans to sue the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that secretly gave him hallucinogenic drugs, claiming the man was murdered and that the CIA has long covered up the truth about his death, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Today, the European Parliament passed a resolution that condemns the upcoming attempt from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to assert control over the Internet, and instructed its 27 Member States to act accordingly. This follows an attempt from the ITU to assert itself as the governing body and control the Internet. The Pirate Party was one of the parties drafting the resolution.

• The EU Parliament recently joined the US government in speaking out against the ITU’s upcoming WCIT event, which we’ve been discussing. This is where the ITU — an ancient organization designed to deal with telegraphs, and whose relevance today has been widely questioned — is seeking to take over certain aspects of internet governance, well outside its mandate. Certain countries — Russia and China in particular — and certain large telcos (including many EU ones) are looking at this as a way to advance very specific interests, either for increased control and censorship over the internet, or in forcing successful internet companies to fork over money to telcos who have failed to innovate

• The meeting is still a week away, yet the U.N.’s 11-day World Conference on International Communications in Dubai has been seeing opposition for months already. Among thousands of proposals on the table are those that tech companies, some governments and advocates for a free, open Internet think could lead to broad U.N. authority over Internet regulations.

• In its latest effort to bring attention to government action it considers threatening to the open web, Google is warning German citizens and lawmakers of the potential dangers posed by copyright changes being considered in Germany’s parliament.

• The campaign and petition is called Verteidige Dein Netz, German for “Defend Your Net.” Its target? A proposed law which would allow German publishers to charge Google for the short excerpts seen on sites such as Google News or remove content from the search engine entirely.

• A commercial and ideological clash is set for next week, when representatives of more than 190 governments, along with telecommunications companies and Internet groups, gather in Dubai for a once-in-a-generation meeting.

• Tim covered the story of ICE doing its annual censorship binge in seizing domain names without adversarial hearings (as we still believe is required under the law). However, there were a couple of additional points worthy of a followup. First off, if you remember, one of the key reasons why we were told SOPA was needed was that for all of ICE’s previous domain takedowns it was “impossible” for it to take down foreign domains. Except… as ICE’s own announcement here shows that was completely untrue. It seems to have had no difficulty finding willing law enforcement partners around the globe to seize websites without any due process:

DRM

• DRM rears its ugly, malformed, malignant, cross-eyed head again. Despite the fact that, as Cory Doctorow so aptly put it, no one has ever purchased anything because it came with DRM, an ever-slimming number of content providers insist on punishing paying customers with idiotic “anti-piracy” schemes.

• Darrell Issa Wants a Dumb Two-Year Ban on New Internet Laws Today in things that will never happen, Republican Representative Darrell Issa has proposed a new bill called the Internet American Moratorium Act (IAMA) that would put a stop to any internet-related lawmaking for the next two years.

• Another day, another story of DRM gone wrong. Just recently, Tim Geigner posted a story about a rather expensive dictionary app that hijacked users’ Twitter accounts to shame them as pirates — even if the inadvertent tweeters had shelled out $25 for the program.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Given what is at stake, there needs to be an open debate and consultation before an agreement is reached (which is no longer a certainty) and Canada should be considering whether a scaled down version of CETA – one that focuses primarily on a reduction of tariffs for trade in goods – is a better model. A closer look at the some of the remaining issues is posted below.

• The House of Commons Committee on Industry, Science and Technology has spent the past few months hearing from a myriad of companies on the Canadian intellectual property system. With few public interest groups invited to appear, one of the primary themes has been the call for more extensive patent protections, as witnesses link the patent system to innovation and economic growth.

• There has been much talk about the government’s apparent willingness to bring an end to supply management for dairy products as a (pre?) condition of negotiation of a trade agreement with the European Community or access to the trans-Pacific Partnership. If only it were so simple.

• New Zealand will not sign a Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement unless it removes tariffs on dairy products and allows the state-owned drug-buying agency to stay, Prime Minister John Key said yesterday.

• “We are not prepared to see dairy excluded,” he said.

• “In the end, New Zealand can’t sign up to the TPP if it excludes our biggest export.” Mr Key said it was standard in free trade deals to have a phasing out of tariffs but he wouldn’t comment on the timeframe.

• He was commenting ahead of the 15th round of TPP negotiations, in Auckland next week, when hundreds of negotiators from 11 countries will continue talks.

Trademarks

• Remember outdoor clothing company The North Face’s ridiculously counterproductive war against The South Butt parody line of clothes? That involved a bogus lawsuit with a variety of twists and turns, eventually leading to a settlement. There was an epilogue, however, as the guy who had started The South Butt reformed as Butt Face. And, of course, all this did was make The North Face look silly and unable to take a joke.

• It appears that the company has not developed a sense of humor yet. Jake Rome points us to a story of how The North Face has filed takedown notices to Flickr/Yahoo, because a guy had posted some photos of parody patches for “Hey Fuck Face.” You can see the main image here.

Copyrights

• Following an important court ruling last week, thousands of Canadians are now at risk of being exposed to mass BitTorrent lawsuits. That’s the message from the boss an anti-piracy outfit who says is company has been monitoring BitTorrent networks for infringements and has amassed data on millions of users. The court ruling involved just 50 Canadians but another case on the horizon involves thousands of alleged pirates.

• Brussels, 27 November – La Quadrature du Net is distributing to each Member of the European Parliament a “datalove USB drive”, loaded with music, movies and books urging them to adapt copyright to our cultural practices. After the historic victory against ACTA, it is now time to break away from the repressive logic that harms our freedoms and the way we build and share culture, and reform copyright.

• Over the past couple of days, there have been multiple reports about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada, with fears that thousands of Canadians could be targeted. While it is possible that many will receive demand letters, it is important to note that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less – perhaps as little as $100 – if the case went to court as even the government’s FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians “will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement.”

• Just a few days after Joe Karaganis posted his response to the RIAA’s favorite researcher, Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, who suggested that Karaganis must be drunk and have little knowledge of statistics to publish a study showing that pirates tend to buy more — and then revealing his own numbers that showed the exact same thing — UK regulatory body Ofcom has come out with a study saying the same exact thing again (found via TorrentFreak).

• Copyright issues don’t often become “mainstream” stories. SOPA was the exception, not the rule, and it only really went fully mainstream at the very end with the January 18th blackouts. But it’s always nice to see when big copyright issues get some mainstream love. Stephen Colbert actually has covered copyright (and other IP) issues a few times on his show (perhaps because his brother is an IP lawyer).

• Three of the bigger porn copyright trolls out there, Patrick Collins, Malibu Media and Third Degree Films, have teamed up to make a court filing arguing that Verizon should be held in contempt of court for failing to cough up the names of account holders based on the trolls’ list of IP addresses. As you’re probably aware by now, hundreds of thousands of people have been “sued” by copyright trolls, but not actually taken to court. The strategy is just to file a lawsuit and force ISPs to identify account holders, then bombard those account holders with threatening letters (and calls and emails) saying that they will be sued if they don’t pay up (often a few thousand dollars). Verizon, like many other ISPs, has fought back against these demands for info on a variety of grounds — including improper joinder (i.e., that the cases improperly lump together multiple people who had nothing to do with one another in an attempt to keep costs to the trolls down). These claims of improper joinder have been somewhat effective in getting a lot of these cases thrown out — but usually those claims are raised by the account holders themselves, rather than the ISPs.

• For a few years now, we’ve been following attempts in Germany — mainly driven by newspaper publishers — to create a bizarre new copyright-like right (specifically a “neighbor right”) in “linking” such that a site like Google would have to pay sites that it links to. The bizarre and nonsensical argument is that because a site like Google makes some of its money by linking to sites, those sites “deserve” part of the money. This is problematic for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is it’s fundamentally backwards economically. If sites like Google are making money from directing people to other sites, they’re making money because they provide a valuable service in helping people find the content, not because of the content itself. It’s up to the sites themselves to figure out how to monetize the traffic — not to run to the government to force others to pay. And, if you think this is just a Google issue, you’re wrong. Among the proposals was one that would impact many others, including people posting links on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sites.

• A student facing trial and possible imprisonment in the United States has struck a deal to avoid extradition, the High Court has been told.

• A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.

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