● 01.03.13

● Links 3/1/2013: Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled, Linux 3.8-rc2, KDE 4.9.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Global research and advisory firm, Forrester, said, “The explosion in open source projects in the HTML, mobile, cloud and big data spaces such as Android, jQuery, PhoneGap, Sencha, Hadoop and Cordova are driving a new model and a golden age of ‘app’ development.”

• Well another holiday season has come and gone, leaving more than a few jangled nerves and expanded waistlines in its wake.

Desktop

• Samsung’s Google Chromebook is outselling MacBooks and notebooks with larger screens and larger hard drives. I guess it’s the software people love or the price …

Kernel Space

• ADA, the 32-year-old programming language, had its latest 2012 version approved by the ISO this week.

• ADA 2012 and introduced contract-based programming along with the ability to specify pre/post-conditions for sub-programs, and invariants for private types. Other enhancements advanced the areas of contrainers library, expressiveness for various features, and support for multi-core platforms.

• The Tux3 project has some interesting news to report for the new year. In brief, the first time Hirofumi ever put together all the kernel pieces in his magical lab over in Tokyo, our Tux3 rocket took off and made it straight to orbit. Or in less metaphorical terms, our first meaningful benchmarks turned in numbers that meet or even slightly beat the illustrious incumbent, Ext4:

• Linus Torvalds has responded to a Linux kernel maintainer about a bug he introduced and the discussion has gone off the reservation.

• It’s a new year, people are getting back to work, and trying desperately to forget the over-eating that has been going on for the last two weeks. And hey, to celebrate, here’s -rc2!

• Intel’s Software Development Kit provides Linux support for the QST sample application, but there hasn’t been a mainline Linux kernel hwmon driver for this technology that’s found within modern Intel chipsets.

Graphics Stack

• This week the improved Radeon R600 Gallium3D HyperZ support was merged into mainline Mesa.

• After the R300g HyperZ support was sharply improved and enabled by default in Mesa at the beginning of the month, improved R600g HyperZ support also emerged.

• The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that’s necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards.

• Intel is still working on some minor xf86-video-intel driver changes to address stability issues for the very old i830GM and i845G chipsets. A new Intel X.Org driver update was released on Wednesday to take care of more changes.

• As some extra benchmarks being published before the holidays, here’s some Linux OpenGL performance results comparing the frame-rate impact of FXAA to other anti-aliasing modes as supported by the latest NVIDIA 313 Linux Beta driver on a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Kepler.

• NVIDIA released Linux kernel patches this morning for supporting their next-gen “Tegra 4″ SoC under Linux. A few details were revealed within the code commits.

• The set of nine patches for initial Linux kernel enablement of the new Tegra System-On-a-Chip provides the minimal support necessary for the Linux kernel to boot up into a shell console while the rest of the enablement code will come later.

Applications

• The humble (and often, not-so-humble) text editor. It can be a wonderful thing. I know more than a few people who are zealous about their editors, and view them in the same way that they view their toothbrushes. Yes, they’re that hardcore.

• When writing a few days ago about the GemRB project as an open-source re-implementation of the Infinity Engine for Baldur’s Gate and then OpenMW as an open-source re-implementation of the engine used by Morrowind, a Phoronix reader pointed out Xoreos.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• OUYA , the first Android based gaming console in the world, is currently shipping devices for the developers and game makers. The concept started as a Kickstarter project and raised more funds than expected. The following video shows the first look of the developer console, its unboxing and usage.

• 2012 what year! Has been full of ups for Linux this year and I think easily one of the most important years for Linux gaming, this is aimed to be a small roundup of 2012 with a reminder of interesting news, my thoughts on the year and so on.

• The ioquake3 project, the main open-source effort around the id Tech 3 engine, has announced some organizational changes concerning the popular game engine’s development.

• After releasing its Torque 3D game engine under the MIT licence in September 2012, GarageGames is now seeking crowdfunding to port it to Linux. The company had previously announced its plans to create a Linux port and the campaign on Indiegogo has been launched to fund this development. Estimating about three months of work for a single developer, GarageGames is asking for $29,487 (approximately £18,000), which it is trying to raise in just over a month.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• After more than one year of development, the Fluxbox team announced on December 30, 2012, that Fluxbox 1.3.3 is available for download and upgrade.

• Fluxbox 1.3.3 is the third maintenance release from the 1.3 series of the window manager for Linux-based operating systems, bringing various improvements and bug fixes.

• “So, the world is still rotating around the sun and before our calendar hits 2013 we decided to release a new stable version of fluxbox. This is mostly a bugfix release.” was stated in the official release announcement.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• 2012 has been an important year for KDE from many perspectives. KDE e.V. turned 15 years old, Nokia finally quit Qt and a new ecosystem lead by Digia is laying on KDE to get mature. We have published our Manifesto, that is the result of long internal and very interesting conversations (I wouldn’t call them discussions) about who we are, how did we get here and what we want. ALERT, out first experience in EU R&D projects, is now a reality. KDE has broken every record in the GSoC program, our KDE 4 series is getting mature and attention is coming back little by little to our software since users are understanding that we are delivering what we promised. Plasma is way more than a crazy idea and now many people perceive how powerful can be, not in a few years, but in a few months.

• I tend to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner – Apple’s Platinum and QNX’ PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it’s-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of ’90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck’s Skulpture.

• With today’s release of KDE 4.9.5 as the latest monthly point release, it’s been decided to delay the KDE 4.10 release. Due to last minute changes, an additional 4.10 release candidate has been deemed necessary and as a result the final version is being pushed back into February.

• For several years, Nokia sponsored and organized Qt Developer Days—the premier annual Qt event. This year, the primary sponsors were Digia, KDAB and ICS. KDE e.V. was also a partner, and KDE associates played a significant part in the conferences—one held in Berlin, and one a few weeks later in Silicon Valley. Qt DevDays in Silicon Valley was organized and produced on short notice by ICS. These organizations each had a major presence there. The following report is about KDE’s participation in Qt Developer Days Silicon Valley 2012.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 2 remains king of the Linux desktop. Here’s our GNOME 2 Linux review.

• After installing openSUSE 12.2 / GNOME 3.4.2 on my new machine i found that all the context menus or right click menus were looking plain and bland. Something was missing in the menus . After a while i figured that icons were missing in the menus.

• Sometimes, privacy and open-source can seem like an odd mix. People who prioritize openness and transparency in their software might appear less likely to obsess over the privacy of their data. But in a reminder that rock-solid privacy standards and open-source software are not mutually exclusive, the GNOME community has announced a new campaign centered on making the GNOME desktop interface “one of the most secure computing environments available.”

• When it comes to basic privacy features, GNOME is already at least as robust as any other mainstream computing interface. It doesn’t do anything particularly reckless to expose user data to abuse. Furthermore, some might argue that, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Ubuntu’s Amazon.com search integration into GNOME’s competitor Unity, GNOME is the more obvious choice for Linux users concerned about keeping their personal information to themselves.

Distributions

• If you are looking for a light weight version of Ubuntu a new Linux OS called Precise Puppy might be worth more investigation, and has been specifically designed to run on USB flash drives, mini PCs and the like.

New Releases

• Sorry for the delay, was planning on releasing Ultimate Edition 3.5 prior to Xmas. Seems some hacker decided to delete my acct on sourceforge. Problem resolved those guys are awesome. Just to bring you up to date, I have Ultimate Edition 3.6 in local testing based on Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”. I am currently running Ultimate Edition 3.4 Lite based on Ubuntu 12.04 Percise Pangolin with a solo environment of Gnome 2 which is quick quite responsive.

• A new version of Slax Linux is available for download. This release adds several new features and fixes few bugs as well. Probably the most interesting feature is PXE boot support and improved X autodetection.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Charles-H. Schulz has posted of the news that “OpenMandriva Association is now fully incorporated and functional.” He’s quite excited by the news reflected not just in his words, but the number of his posts that appeared in my feeds. I found three posts just by accident.

• But Schulz’ excitement is justified. This milestone officially makes OpenMandriva a community project. As Schulz said in several ways, OpenMandriva (or whatever will be the official name of the distribution) “is now legally independent and fully autonomous.”

Gentoo Family

• Nowadays I see lots of new blog posts about how to contribute in open source projects and I decided to write a blog post about how to contribute to Gentoo Linux and become a vital part of the project.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora 18 hasn’t even been released yet, but feature planning for Fedora 19 is well underway.

• Fedora 19 should be released in late May under the codename of Schrödinger’s Cat.

Debian Family

• The port of Debian GNU/Linux for the Motorola 68000 processors has been revived, which now allows for a working Debian OS to run once again on computers like the Amiga 3000/4000 and Atari.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• While there has been a Wayland back-end within GTK+ 3.x, Canonical won’t be enabling the Wayland support within their GTK+ tool-kit package anytime soon.

• Wayland can run GTK applications when using GTK+ 3.x where there is the Wayland back-end and is in very good shape and GTK+ can handle multiple back-ends. GTK’s Wayland support is just a matter of passing –enable-wayland-backend while configuring GTK+ for building.

• When it comes to cloud computing — which Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has earmarked as a major focus for Canonical in 2013 — one of the Ubuntu ecosystem’s most innovative projects is JuJu, a solution for deploying cloud services. JuJu is already mature and useful, but Ubuntu developers envision expanding on it in major ways in the new year, as evidence from mailing archives and Canonical announcements reveals.

• My college professor wanted to install Ubuntu in our labs and use it as the default operating system for students. There were some 20 machines, and it was quite a hard task (or to say, impossible) to install Ubuntu and the required software (Codeblocks, bluefish, LAMP etc) one by one on all those machines. While I was searching for a solution, I came across Booster, which makes it easier to install Ubuntu on multiple machines.

• After work, school, finishing a project, etc, movies are definitely a way of relaxing ourselves, artistic expressions that, especially nowadays, feature a wide and diverse range of topics, such as comedies, thrillers, fantasy, etc.

• The Web is a rich source of movie details, including pictures, actors, cast, money budget, descriptions, etc, details usually searched by users in order to select a movie and/or decide if going to a theater to watch a specific movie, as well as for broadening our knowledge on what, who, where, why, etc, related to the film industry.

• There tends to be varying opinions about what Canonical has done in the Linux world over the last few years. Some users love the easier to use and more “pretty” design of Unity, the UI behind the popular Ubuntu OS. Others hate what Ubuntu has become with a passion.

• 2012 was the year Microsoft finally unveiled its touch-friendly new operating system to the world, signalling where the computing industry is at and where it’s heading.

• Indeed, touchscreen tablets and smartphones are very much the order of the day, something that Microsoft was clearly mindful of with its Windows 8 launch. And at Canonical‘s headquarters in central London this afternoon, The Next Web got wind of the latest version of its flagship operating system…Ubuntu. For smartphones.

• Ubuntu Linux is coming to smartphones. Canonical — the British outfit that oversees Ubuntu — has built a new version of the open source operating system for touchscreens, and unlike other smartphone operating systems, it will work as a full desktop OS when connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

• “We are confident that Ubuntu will ship on phones from large manufacturers in 2013,” says Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

• Despite the looming presence of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, Canonical and Samsung will bring new smartphone operating systems to market.

• The Ubuntu Phone OS is no doubt the hottest topic in the OS space right now (if you missed it, we talked about it here). However, whats even more interesting is the SDK that is offered to developers to write apps for it. With an option to write apps using HTML5, the SDK offers developers a chance to use the Qt cross platform application development toolkit.

• The reason this is interesting for developers is that they have freedom to use all the native features of the platform, thanks to Qt applications not depending on a intermediate layer (like JVM on Android). And if that isn’t enough, the UI designer will have absolute flexibility of prototyping and designing the UI using QML (or otherwise known as QtQuick) which is a JSON-like declarative language that allows you to design a fluid and modern user experience.

• As you’ve probably seen, Canonical has just announced Ubuntu on phones. We’re all very excited about it, especially since so many of us have been working hard on this project. Here’s an insight into the design of the new phone pages on ubuntu.com.

• Looking past the irony that QML will be available for all platforms but WP8 in the short-term, and Nokias previous involvement in the development of QML, it is nice to see the platforms being created.

• anonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has announced a new version of Ubuntu designed specifically for smartphones.

• Ubuntu for phones is based on the Linux kernel and uses the same Unity user interface that Canonical has developed for the desktop, which the company says should make it immediately familiar to anyone who has used Ubuntu before.

• First, the good news — Ubuntu, the most popular Linux operating system on desktops and laptops, just announced they’re unveiling a smartphone that they call a “superphone that’s also a full PC”. In other words, this smartphone will be able to run desktop apps on a mobile phone, and can be hooked up to a monitor and operate as a full-fledged computer.

• In surprising news from jolly old England, Canonical announces that Ubuntu has developed an Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. We’ll be able to switch out Android for Ubuntu on many existing devices. The company also hopes that manufactures will ship devices with it pre-installed.

• Same drill, new distros. Just like six months ago, I want to tell you all about the boot times of the latest Ubuntu family, named Quantal Quetzal. While you may argue that this is a trivial segment of the overall computing business, you cannot deny the fact companies are placing quite a bit of emphasis on it, plus a lot of people seem to like reading about this kind of stuff. Well, it’s easily measured and can create a lot of buzz. So let us buzz.

• No hardware.

• No code.

• No e-mails to community mailing list.”

Flavours and Variants

• The mainline Bodhi desktop repositories recently received the gift of stable E17 packages and this same present isn’t far off for our ARMHF branch. In the mean time however I have prepared and shared new ARMHF images for the Raspberry PI and Samsung Chromebook.

• I recently took a look at Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon. Now it’s time to review its counterpart Linux Mint 14 MATE. The MATE desktop environment is a fork of GNOME 2. It offers a more traditional desktop experience than Cinnamon. Please see the MATE about page for some background information.

Devices/Embedded

• Whether you have a new Raspberry Pi and are just figuring out what you can do with it or don’t have your hands on one yet but want to get started learning more about programming and other computer science topics, the free Raspberry Pi Education Manual is a wonderful 172-page resource.

• Been staring at that Raspberry Pi trying to figure out where to start? You’re hardly alone. We’ve spent some time with the diminutive Linux machine and even tried to point you in the right direction when booting up your Pi for the first time. If you’re looking for something a little more in depth than our own tutorial however, its worth checking out the just released Raspberry Pi Education Manual. The book, drafted by a team of teachers from Computing at School (CAS) and released under the Creative Commons licence, is available for free either through the Pi Store or at the source link in PDF form. It’s a little more education-focused than say a tome like Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, but it’s certainly an excellent introduction to the platform.

• The $100 Zealz GK802 is powered by an ARM-based Freescale i.MX6 quad-core processor paired with 1GB Of RAM and 8GB of storage.

Phones

• Samsung, which became a market leader thanks to Android, is reportedly working on a smartphone powered by Linux-based Tizen operating system. H-Online reports that Samsung is working with Docomo to create a Tizen powered smartphone. “Apparently, the devices are scheduled to come on the market in Japan and other countries during 2013. As well as Docomo, other mobile telephony providers including Vodafone and France Telecom and manufacturers such as Panasonic and NEC have also reportedly been contributing to the development of Tizen devices.”

• After HTC kicked off the trend with its “Butterfly,” there is a great deal of momentum around the adoption of Full HD (FHD; 1920×1080) displays in smartphones. Like the Butterfly, many of these devices will use 5” FHD displays, with a stunning 441 ppi (pixels per inch) resolution.

• The developers behind the Open webOS project have brought the mobile operating system to Google’s Nexus 7 tablet.

Ballnux

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The Indian government, along with Indian Institutes of Technology and C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing) launched an upgraded version of Aakash 2 last November. The device shipped with a capacitive touch screen, upgraded 1 Ghz processor with 512 MB of RAM and Android Ice Cream Sandwich. According to a Times of India report, the makers are planning to make it more open by including Linux as the default operating system in its next edition, Aakash 3.

• Remember when netbooks were the hottest item in PC land? You could hardly go a week without being buried under an avalanche of new netbook announcements. My, how things have changed. Strictly speaking, the netbook category is no more. Asus is reportedly ending its Eee PC line, and Acer hasn’t announced plans to launch any new netbook models. The same goes for MSI and all the other netbook players. So, what happened?

• Polaroid’s newish image as a digital media company got one more boost today, with the launch of a new, $150 Android tablet aimed specifically at children. Simply/obviously branded the “Polaroid kids tablet,” the 7-inch device has sidestepped the holiday shopping rush to try its luck instead launching among the throng at the CES show later this month in Las Vegas.

Free Software/Open Source

• If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was or if they had heard of Koha, I heard “no” a lot more than I do now. Now, people call me up and ask me to come to their libraries to speak about open source and help them find the right products for their library. Now, I hardly ever hear, “We can’t pick open source because it’s too immature.” Instead people contact me to ask what they have to do to get their hands on the latest and greatest release of Koha. It’s because of these changes that I’m seeing in the library professionals I meet that I proclaim 2012 the year of open source in libraries!

• I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year on behalf of the entire LQ team. 2012 has been another great year for LQ and we have quite a few exciting developments in store for 2013, including a major code update that we originally had planned for late 2012.

• Unfortunately, 2012 has been another quiet year from a blogging perspective, but I do regularly post to the LQ twitter account. Posting more lengthy commentary here is something I’ll try to be more cognizant of this year.

• [...]

• Operating Systems Windows 53.56% Linux 35.54%

• Despite the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.

• Genetic networks control cellular functions. Aberrations in normal cellular function arecaused by mutations in genes that disrupt the fine tuning of genetic networks and causedisease or disorder.

• However, the large number of signalling molecules, genes and proteinsthat constitute such networks, and the consequent complexity of interactions, has restrainedprogress in research elucidating disease mechanisms. Hence, carrying out a systematicanalysis of how diseases alter the character of these networks is important.

Events

SaaS/Big Data

Education

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Open-source enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Alfresco has become the latest to sign on board with Amazon’s cloud services. For the IT community at midsize firms, this marks another step in Amazon’s establishment in the enterprise cloud space. It also marks another small step in the growth and mainstreaming of the open-source movement.

BSD

• First of all we tried switching default cache type from write-through to write-back type. It should have increased performance but instead opened a can of worms. Memory corruption debugging led to L2 cache driver on Pandaboard, EHCI driver code and subsequently to busdma code. Whole process took quite a few days full of hair-pulling and nagging various people and ended up in committing USB fixes and Ian Lepore’s busdma patches. PL310 (L2 cache controller) driver is being tested at this very moment. Original issue (WB caches) still stands and postponed till next year.

• For those of you currently on NetBSD 6.0 or are using NetBSD 5.x as your operating system but have been wanting a reason to upgrade, the first NetBSD 6.0.x point release has surfaced.

• While just released on Friday, FreeBSD has already pulled LLVM/Clang 3.2 into its “head” repository and will be pushing it into the FreeBSD 9/Stable series in the weeks ahead.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• Cassandra, the distributed, column-oriented NoSQL database, has been updated to version 1.2, says the Apache Software Foundation. Version 1.2 of Cassandra sees the official release of CQL3, which was introduced in beta in April 2012′s Cassandra 1.1 release. CQL is the modelling and query language for Cassandra that borrows, syntactically, from SQL to offer a more familiar database environment for developers. CQL3 allows for multi-column primary keys and many other changes, which are now established.

• The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Cassandra. Version 1.2 of the Cassandra big data “NoSQL” distributed database introduces several new features to the open-source project.

Public Services/Government

• A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

• The new IT strategy on Thursday evening got 36 votes in favour and 20 against, reports one of the city council members, Matthias Stürmer. He described the new approach as “ground breaking”. One year ago, the city council adopted a motion for Bern to develop an open source strategy. The council now takes a further step, asking for an IT strategy that increases the use of open source and that aims to achieve long-term cost savings.

Licensing

• One disturbing trend is the posting of FOSS modules without licenses. Simon Phipps focused on this problem in his recent blog, particularly on the problems raised by the terms of service at Github. James Governor, the founder of analyst Red Monk, is quoted by Simon as stating: “”younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github” http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046. Ironically, this approach will undercut the major desire of most FOSS developers: the broad use of their code. The lack of a license ensures that the software will be removed from any product meant to be used by corporations. Corporations are very sensitive about ensuring that all software that they use or which is incorporated in their products is properly licensed. I have worked on hundreds of FOSS analysis and the response to software without a clear license is almost always “rip it out”.

Programming

• To succeed the feature-rich Git 1.8 release, Git 1.8.1 was released on New Year’s Eve with a few new features.

Leftovers

• Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed graves and shrines associated with Sufism this year. Ancient manuscripts are not directly threatened, but some fear they are next.

• Q: There has been much coverage of the hunger strike by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. I’m not interested in the politics — instead, I want to address the ethics of a hunger strike. Look at what it really is: a person slowly commits suicide to pressure others into giving what he or she wants. The most unethical part is that thousands of Canadians are encouraging Spence in her suicide by supporting her. It’s one thing for a child who didn’t get a toy to swear never to eat again, but we should expect more from a community leader.

• Users of Apple’s iPhone will have to wait until Monday for its latest bug to fix itself.

• MorphOS, the Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system, is still being experimented with on PowerPC hardware. The latest effort out of the MorphOS camp is to make the operating system work on the IBM PowerPC G5.

• Fox Broadcasting, having lost a key court ruling last month, is more eager than ever to kick Dish Network’s new ad-skipping Hopper DVR off the market. Last month, a federal judge found that Dish’s DVRs probably don’t break copyright law, ruling that the Hoppers can stay on the market and operate normally while Fox proceeds with its lawsuit. Fox is arguing that it can’t wait, and it says that Dish’s product has the potential to do serious damage to various aspects of the ad-supported TV business. As promised, it appealed the lower court decision and has now filed its opening brief at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (PDF via Deadline.com).

• “They were very hardworking,” he said. “They dug down surprisingly deeply. They spent a lot of time going through documentary evidence.”

• European regulators appear headed toward a dramatically different conclusion to their antitrust probe of Google than their American counterparts — a binding agreement that could cost the search company dearly if violated.

Security

• For those interested in cryptography, BLAKE2 has been announced as a new alternative for MD5 and SHA-2/3 algorithms. The benefits of BLAKE2 is better security than MD5 while being higher performance in software.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

• The Special Investigations Unit has closed an investigation into a police brutality complaint because of the Toronto Police Services “refusal to disclose” the statement from an alleged victim, according to SIU director Ian Scott.

• Just one day before last month’s elementary-school killings in Newtown, Conn., Canada offered its gun merchants “new market opportunities” to export banned assault weapons to Colombia, one of the world’s most violent countries.

• Canada quietly eased its ban on the export of assault-style weapons to Colombia after Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird recommended an order amending the Automatic Firearms Country Control List.

• A federal judge on Wednesday rejected The New York Times’ bid to force the U.S. government to disclose more information about its targeted killing of people it believes have ties to terrorism, including American citizens.

• A federal judge dismissed most of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which sought records on the United States government’s targeted killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, Anwar’s son who were US citizens. It also dismissed a narrower lawsuit filed by the New York Times.

• Despite several news reports of CIA involvement during the Benghazi attacks, there is no mention of the intelligence agency in a special report that was released yesterday by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

• On Sept. 11, 2012, at about 9:40 p.m., Ambassador Chris Stevens and his security team came under attack at a diplomatic facility in Benghazi. One mile away was a secret facility used by the CIA, according to various media reports. The facility is discussed in the report, but it doesn’t say who it was used by or what it was used for.

• A German criminal who worked for the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September has revealed in a new book that the CIA recruited him following the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to thwart anti-Israel activities.

• In the years since the Afghanistan invasion, the CIA, long a covert intelligence gathering body, entered a phase of growing militancy that has rendered headline after headline in U.S. mainstream media — and that’s due in no small part to its relationship with military operators.

• Two U.S. drone strikes on northwest Pakistan killed a senior Taliban commander who fought American forces in Afghanistan but had a truce with the Pakistani military, intelligence officials said Thursday.

• The commander, Maulvi Nazir, was among nine people killed in a missile strike on a house in the village of Angoor Adda in the South Waziristan tribal region near the border with Afghanistan late Wednesday night, five Pakistani security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

• Nazir and his followers have been the targets of numerous US drone strikes in the past several years. Of the 328 strikes since 2004, 81 have hit targets in South Waziristan. Several of Nazir’s deputies and commanders have been killed in those strikes.

• Saudi Arabia has provided fighter jets to assist the United States with its drone strikes against Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, the London Times reported on Friday.

• US drones are backing Yemeni forces combating militants of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The group’s Yemen branch is considered by Washington to be the most active and deadliest franchise of the global jihadist network.

• American drones have claimed three lives in Yemen and between nine and 15 lives in Pakistan since Jan. 1.

• Drone strikes are the weapon of choice in the current phase of the endless “war on terror.” They have become the trademark instrument of the Obama presidency, which has dedicated itself to eliminating any Islamic jihadi who may now or in the future constitute a threat to the United States. That category includes all those who identify themselves as members of an al-Qaeda affiliate whether in Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya or Pakistan; the Taliban in either Afghan or Pakistani variant; anyone placed on the White House’s secret “kill list” not an explicit member of the above mentioned groups; as well as anyone who is seen as providing material or ideological support to these groups and/or persons. American citizens outside the United States are also subject to summary execution by drone, as occurred with Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son in Yemen last year.

• Whatever our respective views are on the subject of drone strikes, it is undeniably the case that they are an incredibly effective method of targeting terrorists in unfriendly, or uncontrolled territory.

• Of the many successful drone strikes in 2012, the following are – according to CNN’s Security Clearance blog – the most pertinent. June 4th saw al Qaeda strategist Abu Yahya al-Libi meet the ‘business end of a drone‘ in Pakistan, an occurrence that I argued should both be celebrated and mourned. Fahd Mohammad Ahmed al-Quso, another senior al Qaeda operative (wanted for his role in the USS Cole bombing), was killed in Yemen on May 6th. And lastly Badar Mansoor, considered the most senior Pakistani in al Qaeda, was assassinated on February 9th in Waziristan.

• In the latest sign that President Obama’s targeted killing program may be forever shrouded in secrecy, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon has denied a Freedom of Information Request from the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times over the death of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old American-born son of former Al-Queda heavy Anwar al-Awlaki who was killed by a drone strike.

Cablegate

• Zanu PF has warned its bigwigs to watch their mouths when meeting with American envoys amid revelations that party “stalwarts” last week clandestinely met United States ambassador Bruce Wharton.

• “Major Sri Lankan Papers April 15 have head lined a report (First published in the April 3 London Observer) which quotes both Indian High Commissioner J.N. Dixit and an LTTE spokesman in Madras that Indian Prime Minister Gandhi agreed in late July to pay the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a monthly stipend to compensate for lost Tax revenues following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

• This week, I was proud to join the board and help launch the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a new organization which plans on crowd-funding for a variety of independent journalism outlets whose prime mission is to seek transparency and accountability in government. You can read about the first group of four organizations — which includes the National Security Archive, MuckRock News, and The UpTake and WikiLeaks — here.

• Recently, I sat down with George Washington Law School professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and my close friend Kevin McCabe to discuss WikiLeaks’ impact on transparency, the government’s response, and the comparison to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (also a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation). (And see a previous conversation with Jonathan Turley here.)

• WikiLeaks was extralegally cut off from funding after two Congressmen successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard and PayPal into refusing to do business with the journalism organization in late 2010. We hope that the Freedom of the Press Foundation will become a bulwark against these types of unofficial censorship tactics in the future.

Finance

• Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

• For better or worse, a bill passed Congress in the wee hours of 2013 averting the much-hyped “fiscal cliff” for now and raising taxes on couples making over $450,000 and extending a lifeline of unemployment benefits to 2 million Americans.

• But the vote is not so much an ending as a beginning to the austerity battles of 2013.

• As the economy continues to stagger, the search for a “grand bargain” on taxes and critical social programs is likely to roll from fiscal cliff to debt ceiling negotiations into the annual budget battles. While some feel that a “grand bargain” is less likely than “death by 1,000 cuts,” the ongoing debate will continue to pose serious risks for average Americans who will need to stay engaged.

• Search giant’s Indian arm accused of misleading tax authorities by underdeclaring revenue from AdWords and evading taxes through international transactions, but Google India denies the claim.

• Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund, was named as a defendant in a proposed revised lawsuit by ACA Financial Guaranty Corp. (MANF) against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) over a collateralized debt obligation called Abacus.

• Paulson and Goldman Sachs conspired to induce ACA to provide financial guaranty insurance for the Abacus deal, which was “doomed to fail,” the firm said in papers filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. ACA, which sued Goldman Sachs in 2011, is seeking court permission to file a revised complaint adding Paulson as a defendant.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Several high-powered senators are continuing their fight against “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film many see as vindicating the use of enhanced interrogation tactics in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

• New details are emerging about how a multi-millionaire used shell corporations to funnel money to the Super PAC associated with embattled Tea Party group FreedomWorks for America — and how those laundered contributions may have violated federal law.

Censorship

• This is an online shop – meaning the block was affecting their ability to sell their products. The block was spotted and reported to Virgin Mobile in early December. The problem has not yet been fixed. So the block was in effect over Christmas, and will have affected the site’s ability to reach their market in one of the more important retail periods of the year.

Privacy

• Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s policy changes for its Internet products including Hotmail and Bing are being formally examined by European data protection regulators for potential privacy issues. Updates to Microsoft’s services agreement, which took effect Oct. 19, are being formally reviewed, EU privacy regulators wrote to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and the head of Microsoft Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s and France’s data protection commissions are leading the examination, according to the Dec. 17 letter, obtained by Bloomberg News.

• Microsoft made the policy changes on October 19

• Microsoft just can’t catch a break from the European Commission.

• The EU now plans to investigate the tech giant’s recent policy changes and how they may affect the privacy of its users. The policy changes were in regards to Microsoft’s Internet services like Bing and Hotmail.

Civil Rights

• Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch would be inclined to make light of concerns about illegal wiretapping, but surely it’s not that mysterious why someone might be more comfortable with a duly authorized surveillance statute that preserves a role for the courts, however anemic and symbolic, than with a president’s unilateral decision to simply ignore federal law and bypass the courts entirely. Still, they do have a point: Substantively the FISA Amendments Act is at least arguably more problematic than the Bush program, because the surveillance programs it authorizes are potentially much more sweeping than Bush’s was, at least on the basis of public reporting. And it really is telling that many people who expressed outrage over the Bush program seem totally uninterested in scrutinizing the track record of its successor now that we have a Democrat in the White House.

• TSA agents were also on duty outside of the stadium. A special division called VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) was there to conduct searches.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Not content with dedicated treaties developed under the aegis of WIPO, the copyright industries saw such general trade agreements as yet opportunity to impose their maximalist agendas. This led to chapters dealing with intellectual monopolies like copyright and patents not only being added to such agreements, but becoming the tail that wagged the dog. That can be seen from the fact that ACTA was killed in the European Parliament last year precisely because the chapter dealing with copyright and patents was regarded as so flawed that it vitiated the entire treaty, which had to be rejected despite other sections that were viewed very favourably by many MEPs.

• Moreover, in the current negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is a kind of ACTA for the Pacific rim, it is once more the disproportionate demands of the copyright and patent world that threaten to scupper the entire treaty as countries rebel at the onerous terms the US is trying to impose.

• That means the otherwise welcome trade agreement between EU and US is bound to have a similar chapter that attempts to push through many or most of the bad ideas that infected ACTA. There’s already a precedent for this in CETA, the Canada-European Union Trade Agreement that I wrote about back in October last year. As I noted, the criminal sanctions there were directly modelled on ACTA’s.

Copyrights

• Vince Cable, the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable outlined several different measures, including a sped-up patent processing service that can deliver patents in just three months — it currently can take years — as well as informational campaigns aimed at younger individuals that are more likely to engage in pirating copyrighted material. Cable also said that a special crime unit, aimed specifically at illegal downloaders, would be created in partnership with the City of London police.

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