● 01.08.13

● Links 9/1/2013: Valve’s GNU/Linux Gaming PC, Android Massive at CES

Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• A hackable new Linux robot will be ready to roll late this summer, not to mention walk, crawl, and slither. The Lego Mindstorms EV3 is the first major revamp of the Lego Group’s programmable robot kit since 2006, and the first to run embedded Linux.

• Unveiled at the CES Show in Las Vegas yesterday, with the first public demos starting today at the Kids Play Summit at the Venetian Hotel, the $350 robot is built around an upgraded “Intelligent Brick” computer. Lego swapped out the previous microcontroller for a 300MHz ARM9 processor capable of running new Linux-based firmware. As a result, the kids-oriented Mindstorms EV3 offers far more programmability than the NXT series, which was last updated in 2009, says Lego.

• . . . oh, never mind. No, it’s not the year of the Ubuntu phone, so let’s not even start that nonsense.

• There used to be a time when Microsoft Windows ruled the operating system world. But in recent years, the free and open source Linux operating system has taken a big bite out of Windows’ dominance. But Linux has always had an image problem of seeming too difficult and unwieldy to install and learn, with a steep learning curve attached. Take a look at the latest Linux “How-To” tutorials.

Server

Kernel Space

• We’re back! It’s 2013 and we have three more profiles to share with you in our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series. We’ll be introducing another series a little later in the year that we hope can further help to illustrate the inspiring community of individuals that build Linux. If you have ideas and/or feedback on these kinds of series, please let us know in the comments section.

Graphics Stack

• The Radeon LLVM back-end, which is more than 19,000 lines of code, was dropped from Mesa with this commit on Friday.

• Sam Spilsbury, lead developer of the Compiz window manager, has written a blog post declaring that he does not see much of a future in porting the project to the Wayland architecture. The developer says he is disillusioned with what he calls fragmentation in the open source community, referring to the many compositing engines available under the current X11 implementation. He thinks that porting Compiz to Wayland would be too much work with only little gain for end users. Spilsbury recently quit his job at Canonical, where he was responsible for maintaining Unity’s underlying Compiz-based components, to concentrate on finishing his university studies.

• One of the best decisions we ever made for Compiz was to invest in a solid automated testing framework late last year. Today, and likely by our 0.9.9 release we will have about 1163 tests running in continuous-integration, and just under 1200 tests total. Unity has about 700 or so tests, and Nux has about 300.

• David Airlie has announced work on “Reverse Optimus”, which is a new approach he’s taking for poking laptops with multiple GPUs, namely the NVIDIA Optimus laptops with a discrete NVIDIA GPU and integrated Intel graphics.

• With the Linux 3.8 kernel that’s presently under development, the open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver for supporting NVIDIA graphics processors has seen some significant changes. One of the late changes was enabling Kepler acceleration support. While there is now an “out of the box” open-source GPU driver that supports the GeForce 600 GPUs with 3D/OpenGL acceleration, it’s incredibly slow.

• Two performance-related commits were made today to Mesa for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.

• While VMware and Oracle VM VirtualBox have guest 3D drivers for exposing OpenGL acceleration to guest virtual machines by passing the drawing calls onto the host for processing by the host’s drivers and graphics card, KVM/QEMU hasn’t advanced in this area although with SPICE they hope to eventually have a Gallium3D solution. Nothing in this area is unfortunately imminent for better guest graphics support with QEMU/KVM.

Applications

Proprietary

• Bricsys, a global provider of dwg engineering design software brought to market under the BricsCAD brand, announced the immediate availability of BricsCAD V13 for the Linux operating system. This release further extends the BricsCAD software with new 2D features and with assembly modeling for the mechanical CAD market.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• More than two years after the previous version, the developers of the open source multi-player shooter Cube 2: Sauerbraten have provided a new major release. The latest version is code-named the “Collect Edition” and includes 45 new maps as well as three new game modes called “collect”, “insta collect” and “efficiency collect”.

• Free and open source multiplayer first person shooter game Cube 2: Sauerbraten has received a major update after 2 years.

• Codenamed ‘Collect Edition’, this release features 45 new multiplayer maps, new sounds, collect game modes, international character sets, faster cubescript interpreter, improved minimap etc. Full changelog can be found here.

• It might not be the strongly-rumoured Steambox games console itself, but on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show 2013 a physical prototype of a Steam-powered mini-PC has been on show.

• It took a while to cook, but the major update to Sauerbraten (a.k.a. “Cube 2″) has finally shipped.

• The Sauerbraten 2013-01-04 “Collect Edition” update to the open-source first person shooter features many new maps, new game modes, improved art/sound assets, GLSL (the OpenGL Shading Language) as the default rendering path, new visual features, server improvements, a CubeScript compiler, and a variety of other improvements.

• While id Software isn’t supporting Doom 3 BFG on Linux, thanks to releasing the Doom 3 BFG engine source-code, it’s been successfully ported to Linux via the open-source development community.

• Last month I wrote about a developer having ported Doom 3 BFG to Linux. With the original Doom 3 (id Tech 4) engine being well-supported under Linux since its inception and still being maintained well, the Doom 3 BFG open-source code was merged with the original Linux support code plus other necessary changes made.

• The latest monthly alpha release of the visually-advanced Unvanquished open-source game has been released. Unvanquished Alpha 11 features faster generation of OpenGL GLSL shaders and many other user-facing improvements over last month’s alpha release.

• Unvanquished Alpha 11 as the January 2013 update features a map that has been completely redone from scratch, various map updates, bloom support, refined bot support, GLSL updates, library changes, and new translations.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Every so many months we roll a new Plasma Active release. We’ve done three big releases so far and are working on a fourth for release in the early Spring. These releases are great for people using Plasma Active on a device or for device integrators looking to make a releasable product.

• There has been lots of news about improvements in Kate – KDE’s text editor. While there were lots of improvements, here are the few major ones-

• KWin, KDE’s window manager, in version 4.11 is moving along with being ported to using XCB rather than Xlib.

• Back in November I wrote that KWin was being ported to XCB and that with the KDE 4.10 feature window closing that this was a candidate for merging. Besides moving from Xlib to XCB, other KWin action items for the 4.11 window are AppMenu support, color correction work, performance improvements in compositing environments, improving window decorations, and more.

Distributions

• As we welcome in a new year that many are saying will finally be “the year of the Linux desktop,” we want to take a look at some of the up-and-coming Linux distros for 2013. The mainstream tech media has already covered distro giants like Mint and Ubuntu in great depth and breadth, so we won’t reiterate what you’ve already heard a kazillion times. Read on to learn about some newer distros that we expect to continue rising in popularity, maybe even to the level of stardom, over the year.

• It’s no secret that mobile-style interfaces such as Unity, GNOME 3, and even Windows 8′s Modern UI have met with only a lukewarm reception among many desktop PC users.

New Releases

• Developers behind a new Linux distribution set to be released in the coming days claim that their SprezzOS operating system is “the most robust, beautiful, and high-performance Linux ever to be distributed.” Here’s some details on this new Linux distribution.

• Nick Black of Sprezzatech, a two-year-old Unix and HPC consulting & system design / custom engineering firm, has written into Phoronix about the company’s new Linux OS. The company claims SprezzOS is “the most robust, beautiful, and high-performance Linux ever to be distributed.”

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Arch Family

• First, yes, I am well aware that this is an ubuntu-related blog, monitored on planet ubuntu, etc… This is not a “XYZ is better than ubuntu” post, but rather a “Consider XYZ too” post.

• I have been a loyal ubuntu user for around 5 years, and I have also tried my best to help the community for around 3 years (and still am). I never plan on leaving the community, as I find ubuntu is sort of like a gateway for windows/mac users to the open source world, and all of us need to make sure that each user can have the best experience in that gateway so that they can explore deeper and, in their turn, help out too.

Red Hat Family

• Upon leaving VMware at the end of December and starting at Red Hat, Fox had expected to continue administering the Vert.x project after he left their employment. It appears though, that VMware’s lawyers had a different plan and turned up on Fox’s door in person with a letter demanding he gave up all administrative rights of the Vert.x GitHub project, Google group, vertx.io domain and Vert.x blog. Fox says the company refused his proposal that it grant him a licence to continue to use the Vert.x trademark and domain.

• Red Hat announced today an update of its leading enterprise Linux distribution that keeps pace with hardware, security, developer, interoperability and virtualization improvements.

Fedora

Debian Family

• * wiki.debian.org security breach: global passwords reset * Bits from the DPL * Other news * New Debian Contributors * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Important Debian Security Advisories * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN?

• I don’t think anybody who likes the minimalism of Gnome is going to feel entirely at home in the configuration heaven of KDE, and the other way round. However, this is a matter of taste: I prefer Gnome’s minimalism, but if you enjoy configuration options, you’ll enjoy KDE. I’ve been trying the latest Debian beta version from a Debian Wheezy Live USB available now.

• The last time I tried KDE, the Task Manager icon previews were not working with my graphics card; now they are. This was the main feature I wanted to take a look at.

• There are plenty of Linux users out there who are using distributions such as Ubuntu or one of the many distributions which are based from Ubuntu, including Linux Mint. However, no matter what you’re using, as long as it uses .deb packages, there’s one main distribution where it all comes from – Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It also appears that women are choosing to leave the IT profession to pursue other careers…

• We want a good, clean fight. No lawsuits, patent trolls, or being inspired by Apple products. Let’s get it on!

• There’s enormous opportunity for a new competitor to step into the race—but it will need to be really special in order to succeed where everyone else has failed.

• You are at the heart of the most important bastion of free software today – giving the world a genuinely free platform for innovation and everyday computing. We can all be very proud of what we have built together.

• South African entrepreneur, philanthropist, space tourist and Canonical Ltd founder Mark Shuttleworth announced last week that the company would be launching ‘Ubuntu for Phones’ at the end of 2013 or early 2014.

• Love your carrier — and your huge monthly bill? Then read no further. But if you’d jump at a better deal, Ubuntu might just fit the bill.

Flavours and Variants

• I am really hooked. All the applications I depend on run smoothly in Bodhi Linux. Java, Flash player, media files, all work flawlessly once you download and install the required packages from its App Center. Till date I haven’t found any fault while using this cute little Linux distribution. Bodhi Linux promises to be an ideal choice to run on both old and modern computers, and other devices alike. I suggest you download Bodhi Linux and give it a try.

• Unity Dark 2, a distribution based on Ubuntu 12.04.1 (Precise Pangolin) featuring various Compiz effects and the Cinnamon desktop environment, has been launched.

Devices/Embedded

• Netgear, most commonly known as a quality provider of networking equipment for your home and their line of streaming box tops. Netgear announced some big news today at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada. They have a new addition to their streaming box tops called NeoTV Prime. What’s the difference? Well this one comes fully loaded with Google TV! Just connect it between your existing cable/satellite receiver and the TV, and get all the goodness that Google TV has to offer.

Phones

• While we must acknowledge the dominance of Samsung via Android along with Apple in the smartphone market, Tizen serves as an alternative for handset makers, chipmakers, developers and other technology organizations interested in tapping the growing and lucrative mobile software market.

• Open source software is among the most high-minded ideas in technology, and there are times that it’s a smash hit. The internet loves to embrace open platforms — it’s done wonders for Mozilla and Google. But aside from Google’s market-dominating Android platform, open source hasn’t seen a lot of success in mobile.

Android

• Android and Linux were at the core of NVIDIA’s launch of its new Tegra 4 chipset, and a handheld gaming console prototype based on it, at the CES conference in Las Vegas, with the new chipset and console already running Android and its Linux kernel.

• The specifications for the new chipset itself are no surprise and are almost identical to information leaked about it in December. The chipset features four Cortex A15 CPU cores, a low power companion core to save power when the tablet is idling and 72 GeForce GPU cores for graphics acceleration. For wireless connectivity, a software modem designed by the company can provide 3G and 4G LTE access; it is unclear if any open source tools will be available for the software modem though.

• NVIDIA has introduced Tegra 4 processors for mobiles devices which are company says will bring ‘record-setting performance and battery life’ to smartphones and tablets, gaming devices, auto infotainment and navigation systems, and PCs.

• It’s no more a secret that government is all set to bring Aakash-3 tablets with faster processors supporting both Linux and Android operating systems including advanced memory. After defining the hardware premise of the low cost tablet, government is attempting to develop a software ecosystem, which will continuously release applications for Aakash, primarily related to learning and education.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• With Acer it’s all about ‘family.’ with their latest Android Tablet, the 7” Acer Iconia B1-A71 squarely marketed as an ‘entry level’ (budget) device for families, ‘ opting for a 2nd tablet for their children’ and for first time tablet users.

• A member of the WebOS Ports team has ported Open webOS to the Nexus 7. The hardware of the Google tablet is supported quite well according to the developer’s wiki with working Wi-Fi and brightness controls for the screen functional and accessible through a new Enyo 2 based settings app.

• Nvidia, which has made its name providing high-powered graphics chips, introduced the new generation of its Tegra processor and also announced its own Android-based gaming device and said it will sell it direct to consumers.

Free Software/Open Source

• Barclays bank has managed to cut its IT expenses by 90 percent after moving infrastructure into a purpose-built cloud, claims The Sunday Times.

• It has been some time since I last wrote about Adobe Flex, which now has gained new status at the Apache Software Foundation.

• Flex first came to my full attention back in 2007 when Adobe decided to open source the Rich Application Framework. Adobe had been building flex since at least 2004 so the move to open source was not part of the original design.

• For all of you free and open source creative tool fans out there, plenty of exciting developments happened over the past year—and there’s some pretty awesome new things in the pipeline for 2013 as well! Here’s a sampling of the good news:

• Although cloud computing platforms make headlines every day now, including leading open source platforms, it’s still true that cloud computing is a young science, and there is a premium on reliable, mature tools for the cloud. Also, it’s true that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox’s mobile operating system showed up on a mystery phone tonight at a pre-CES event ahead of its unveiling later this year, carrying no branding and looking light on features. Sadly, the WiFi in the event space didn’t give us much of a chance to explore the OS’ inner workings, and the phone was dubbed a “mystery” device by Mozilla reps, but we did snap some pictures of it. We also know that it’s got at least an ARMv6 CPU and 256MB of RAM, and likely more power than that. Mozilla’s planning a 2013 launch of the Chrome OS — an OS powered entirely by HTML5 — in partnership with Telefonica, Qualcomm, and “a long list of industry supporters.

• There are more open source smartphones coming this year than you can shake a stick at, ranging from Ubuntu phones to Tizen Linux-based handsets. But among the most eagerly awaited phones are new handsets based on Mozilla’s open Firefox OS. Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone business. The partners are aiming to deliver their initial phones at low price points in emerging markets.

• Mozilla Firefox 18.0 is now available. The main feature of this open-source web-browser update is the introduction of IonMonkey, a faster JavaScript compiler.

• Firefox’s new JavaScript compiler, IonMonkey, makes Web apps and games perform up to 25 percent faster. To see how exciting Firefox makes playing games or using apps on the Web, check out BananaBread, a fun 3D Web game created by the Mozilla Developer Network and powered exclusively by HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript.

SaaS/Big Data

• Those are the findings of the latest report by a Chinese blogger who monitors the activity of open source cloud computing projects each month. Qingye (John) Jiang tracks four open source cloud computing projects in his blog using a Java program he created that pulls in records for every new discussion feed in the project’s ecosystem, as well as on mailing lists and responses to comments.

• The term “Big Data” has been around for a long time, but has obtained buzzphrase status only in the last two years. Although much that can be said about Big Data is positive and harmless (better medicine, better science, better analytic fodder for countless good purposes), one unspoken motivation behind the buzz is obtaining high degrees of market leverage. And much of that leverage is not in harmony with the constructive motivations and practices behind free software, open source and Linux. Because, behind many of the big APIs are vast jungles of exclusive and patent-protected functionalities and restrictions around use. Such as, for example, the spoken turn-by-turn directions Google wouldn’t allow Apple to use. It can be dispiriting to see platform leverage exceeded by large proprietary databases and exclusive services made available through APIs. But it’s important to bring attention to what’s going on, so here we are.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Libreoffice, the cross platform office suite, participated in Google summer of code. Libreoffice had 10 students for Google summer of code, nine of them were able to complete their projects related to Libreoffice and they improved performance and usability of Libreoffice.

Semi-Open Source

• SugarCRM, the market-leading customer relationship management (CRM) company that enables effective customer engagement enterprise-wide, announced today that the company has been named one of the most successful open source projects of 2012 by Network World Magazine.

BSD

• I would like to begin the new year by talking about a project which I had the chance to play with in the final weeks of 2012. This project is PC-BSD, an effort sponsored by iXsystems which places a polished desktop layer on top of the FreeBSD operating system. Though at first glance it might appear as though PC-BSD 9.1 is a simple point release over last year’s 9.0 release, the project’s blog paints a very different picture. Some of the key features to PC-BSD’s 9.1 release include the introduction of TrueOS, a server edition of PC-BSD. Basically, TrueOS is FreeBSD with a nice graphical installer, PBI tools and various modern conveniences which we will get to later. The new release of PC-BSD includes support for ZFS pools that include swap space, this allows users to create installs that are exclusively ZFS based and we will also touch on the benefits of this later.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The tender is looking for a maximum of five suppliers to provide services over a four year period to support DECC’s UK Energy Portal

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

• Modern trends in satellite development make us believe that the use of open source will not be limited to purely engineering solutions to prepare an in-flight software package for a dedicated hardware installation. Instead, there is a new paradigm of a “public satellite” as available to any user with access to an open hardware-software platform.

Open Data

• One reason why its future looks rosy is the shift to mobile. By definition, smartphones are things you carry around, which makes geographical location a crucial piece of information for their users – and maps indispensable infrastructure for mobile services. Just as the availability of free open source powered an entire generation of Net startups, so OpenStreetMap will enable new companies serving the mobile sector to get going for minimal costs, but without compromising on quality. Indeed, in many respects, OpenStreetMap is the open source of the mobile world.

Open Hardware

• The first devices that take advantage of the new standard’s 10Gbps data-transfer speed should arrive in 2014. Too bad for Thunderbolt.

• Another hardware announcement from the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas is Qualcomm announcing the Snapdragon 600 and 800 series processors.

Programming

Leftovers

Hardware

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Obama administration legal team is divided over whether to drop two terrorism cases originally prosecuted in a military commission at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a decision that could have far-reaching consequences by significantly reducing the number of other prisoners who can receive tribunal trials.

• Whistleblower advocates often view President Obama as a friend, but that doesn’t mean they always see eye to eye.

• Without whistleblowers, Congress can’t effectively perform constitutionally implied oversight obligations…

• John Brennan’s nomination may say more about changing American attitudes towards torture than anything else. Four years ago, Brennan withdrew from consideration for the job because he had served as a senior C.I.A. official during the Bush years, when the agency was waterboarding suspected terrorists, chaining them naked in uncomfortable positions in cold rooms, using dogs against them, and employing other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Brennan’s association with the C.I.A. torture regime made him too hot to touch in a Senate confirmation hearing.

• Two former US officials, one military general and another top counter-terrorism advisor for President Obama, have publicly denounced the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen, saying they disproportionately kill civilians and generate anti-American sentiments that aid al-Qaeda recruitment efforts.

• The CIA has fought all efforts at transparency by groups like the ACLU in court. In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, it has refused to confirm or deny the existence of records on the targeted killing program.

• Americans ‘unaware of the scale of the drone program … and the destruction it has caused in their name’

• A contentious issue between the U.S. and Pakistan with the latter describing drone attacks as illegal and a violation of its sovereignty, this step up in bombardments by the unmanned Predators/Reapers since last Thursday coincided with information trickling out of the General Headquarters that terrorists had replaced India as the biggest threat to Pakistan in the Army Doctrine. That details of the 2011-vintage doctrine were leaked out at this juncture was interpreted by analysts as indicative of the military deciding to take a harder line on terrorism.

• The US drones then fired several more missiles at a compound in the nearby village of Eissu Khel. Three people were reported killed in the strike, but it is unclear if they were militants or civilians.

• I’m confident that once the drone’s proved its worth, we’ll order thousands. The cops could then assign one to hover over the house of every known or suspected burglar, drug-pusher, gang member, finance company fraudster, kiddy fiddler or, indeed, anyone who’s a bit iffy.

• The US seems to be looking to get back to the old levels, however, as multiple attacks have killed 38 people the first week of 2013 already.

• Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations has just published this important report on U.S. drones policy. I disagree with Zenko on some aspects of it, but for now I want to summarize several of his main points and highlight some especially important ones.

• The civilian casualty issue is surely what pisses the world off the most. Even Americans were shocked to learn a few months ago that the White House doesn’t even know how many people they’ve killed with drones strikes, and the number of civilian deaths that the administration had said was in the single digits last May was actually closer to 500. A report on the casualty count told the story of one strike that killed a man selling fruit and his entire family, one of many outrageous stories that lead to the kind of visceral hatred McChrystal is now talking about. “The secrecy surrounding the drone program, combined with its operation in many areas that are inaccessible, has meant that civilians harmed by drones have no recourse and no point of contact to hold accountable for the sudden devastation they face,” reads the report. “This vacuum of accountability can lead to anger, despair, and even hatred, directed at their own government or at the U.S.”

• President Obama this afternoon nominated his counterterrorism advisor John Brennan to become the next director of the CIA. Despite media reports that Brennan continually raised civil liberties concerns within the White House, Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said that before confirming Brennan, the Senate should assess the legality of his actions in past leadership positions in the CIA during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, as well as his current role in the ongoing targeted killing program.

• New U.S. sanctions have broadened the front in the West’s escalating economic conflict with Iran, targeting large swaths of the country’s industrial infrastructure even as Iranian leaders are indicating a willingness to resume negotiations on the country’s nuclear program.

• Ironic that Brennan’s star rises because of his ties to “enhanced interrogation” even as whistleblower John Kiriakou, who never tortured anybody, becomes the only CIA officer to go to jail for torture.

• The discomfort bred a narrative that “torture doesn’t work” as a response to those who maintained the need for torture in the “ticking bomb scenario” where a terrorist is caught and a bomb he knows about will explode in several hours. This was the subject of the 2010 film Unthinkable, in which Samuel L. Jackson must torture a terrorist to find a nuclear bomb that is about to explode.

• The idea behind the “it doesn’t work” argument is that it defangs the critics who want to torture and also gives the anti-torture people an argument that seems hard-nosed and intelligent. Of course it ignores the moral issue of torture; if torture did work, would it be justified? The US Constitution has said no, in denying “cruel and unusual punishment” and providing a host of rights to defendants. The senators and others cling to the “it doesn’t work” argument out of fear that people know, in the back of their minds, that maybe it does work.

• Bolivia has “concrete evidence” that the US is plotting to destabilize the Latin American nation, Minister Juan Ramon Quintana said. Proof of US “harassment” of the Bolivian government will be handed over to President Obama, he added.The Bolivian government is “scrupulously following” US activity in Bolivia, Minister for the Bolivian Presidency Quintana said in a press conference.

• “There is so much evidence to hand over to the President of the USA to say to him: Stop harassing the Bolivian government, stop politically cornering and ambushing us!” Quintana stressed. He added that investigations into drug-trafficking and human rights abuses would reveal a “permanent battle” waged by the US to impede progress in Bolivia.

• THE CIA plane used to transport a German citizen to a notorious US-run torture centre in Afghanistan known as “The Salt Pit” was in Shannon Airport just six days before it was used in the abduction of Khaled El-Masri from Macedonia.

• …judging from all available information it is almost a given that he is right.

• More than 6,000 followers of the governmental PAIS Alliance Movement met in the Ecuadorian capital to support the group’s presidential candidate, Rafael Correa, and the deputies to the National Assembly. “We can lose everything we have achieved if we do not support the citizens’ revolution process in the elections next February 17,” said President Correa, who is running for re-election. “We had a homeland of despair,” he said.

• Four years after vowing to close Guantánamo and 11 years after it opened, President Obama has signed the National Defense Authorization Act, barring the use of federal funds to transfer detainees from the notorious prison to U.S. soil.

• Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed an amicus curiae brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Hedges v. Obama, a case which challenges the indefinite detention of Americans by the armed forces under a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA).

• A laser weapons system that can shoot down two drones at a distance of over a mile has been demonstrated by Rheinmetall Defence.

Cablegate

• After more than two weeks of intense litigation by Bradley Manning’s defense, and hearing how Quantico brig staff blatantly disregarded Navy Rules, military Judge Denise Lind has confirmed that Bradley was punished unlawfully before trial by awarding 112 days credit. Instead of awarding 10-for-1 credit (or dismissing the charges altogether), which would severely reprimand the military and significantly impact Bradley’s potential sentence, Judge Lind gave 1-to-1 credit for selected portions of his Quantico confinement.

• [...]

• …Barnes removed Bradley’s underwear for suicidal reasons but didn’t put him on Suicide Risk…

• …aids Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda has access to the internet.

• A military judge has ruled that the US soldier accused of handing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks was imprisoned under illegal conditions but refused to dismiss charges against him.

• Christine Assange is hopeful her son will not have to spend too much longer holed up in a London embassy as support grows for his cause.

• Screenwriter Josh Singer has consulted with former WikiLeaks volunteer and MP for the Movement Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

• “I hope this will not be a totally Hollywood movie,” Birgitta said.

• Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, of the BBC adaptation series Sherlock, is said to play Assange. It has yet to be decided who will play Birgitta’s part.

• The next hearing for PFC Bradley Manning may not appear to have to the same dramatic flair that the Article 13 hearing had – with long hours of vital testimony, courtroom presentations of Bradley’s tiny cell and coarse blanket, and Bradley himself taking the stand – but it could have a major impact on the remainder of the trial. At Fort Meade, MD, from January 8-11, the government will argue multiple motions that could change the way Bradley is allowed to defend himself in court.

Finance

• Get ready, the Bipartisan Policy Center has predicted that on February 15, 2013, the U.S. Treasury will take in an estimated $9 billion in revenue, but is committed to pay out $52 billion.

• Sitting onstage in Washington’s Ronald Reagan Building in July, Lloyd C. Blankfein said Goldman Sachs Group Inc. had stopped using its own money to make bets on the bank’s behalf.

• “We shut off that activity,” the chief executive officer told more than 400 people at a lunch organized by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., slicing the air with his hand. The bank no longer had proprietary traders who “just put on risks that they wanted” and didn’t interact with clients, he said.

Censorship

Privacy

• You are walking down the street minding your own business when a police officer taps you on the shoulder from behind. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he says, “Could I see some identification?” You know your rights and you say no. “You don’t really have a choice, ma’am. We have a positive identification of you from a camera that says you are Jill Stokes. Are you Ms. Stokes?” You nod, confused. “You owe the city $500 in parking tickets, ma’am.”

• We don’t expect news reports to exhibit the tightest legal reasoning, of course, but Sunday’s New York Times story on location privacy made a runny omelet of some important legal issues relating to privacy.

• John Brennan’s career spans from the dark days of Bush’s torture program to Obama’s secretive ‘kill list’

• WITH the resignation of David H. Petraeus, President Obama now has a chance to appoint a new C.I.A. director. Unfortunately, one of the leading candidates for the job is John O. Brennan, who is largely responsible for America’s current flawed counterterrorism strategy, which relies too heavily on drone strikes that frequently kill civilians and provide Al Qaeda with countless new recruits. Rather than keeping us safe, this strategy is putting the United States at greater risk.

• The FBI documents are not only a chilling example of how widespread this surveillance and obstruction has become, they are an explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent. Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect. These documents are part of the plan to make us fearful, compliant and disempowered. They mark, I suspect, a government attempt to end peaceful mass protests by responding with repression to the grievances of Americans. When the corporate-financed group FreedomWorks bused in goons to disrupt Democratic candidates’ town hall meetings about the federal health care legislation in August 2009, Eric Zuesse of the Business Insider notes, “there was no FBI surveillance of those corporate-organized disruptions of legitimate democratic processes. There also were no subsequent FreedomWorks applications for Freedom of Information Act releases of FBI files regarding such surveillance being used against them—because there was no such FBI campaign against them.”

Civil Rights

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

• A cyber-attacker suspected of stealing more than 3,000 documents from the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry looked for specific information through a keyword search, according to government sources.

• It is feared that ministry information, including data from highly confidential documents, has fallen into foreign hands as a result of the cyber-attack.

• Among the documents thought highly likely to have been compromised, more than 20 were related to negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement. The documents were prepared before a summit meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in November 2011.

Copyrights

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