● 01.11.13

● Links 11/1/2013: Linux 3.8 RC3, Firefox OS Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 8:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• CES is about technology of all kinds; while we’re busy covering cameras, TVs, and CPUs, there’s a huge number of products that fall outside our normal coverage. Austin-based startup TrackingPoint isn’t typical Ars fare, but its use of technology to enable getting just the perfect shot was intriguing enough to get me to stop by and take a look at the company’s products.

• Barclays Bank plans to slash software development costs by 90% by building a private cloud infrastructure and moving more applications to machines running the Linux open source operating system.

• Although Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop operating system popularity, Linux has become a dominant force in cloud servers and virtual private servers (VPS). Linux is not only a cheaper way to host cloud applications, but it also comes in several distribution flavors.

• The specs say it’s packed with power, but has CompuLab truly delivered an intense product in such a small package?

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• A second version of the Zswap patch-set for the Linux kernel was published this week. The Zswap patches provide compressed swap caching support to compress pages in the process of being swapped and compresses them into a dynamically allocated RAM-backed memory pool.

• The new Fast Startup feature of Windows 8 puts the filesystem’s integrity at risk if other operating systems are used to write to Windows partitions. Data loss is particularly likely with dual-boot configurations that involve Linux and Windows 8.

Graphics Stack

• VMware is still trying to push VMCI (the Virtual Machine Communication Interface) and VSOCK (VMCI Sockets) into the mainline Linux kernel. Fortunately, it looks like this virtualization code from the proprietary software vendor will make it into the Linux 3.9 kernel.

• Going back to May of last year, VMCI for the mainline Linux kernel was talked about by VMware as one of their interests. VMware has published the patches multiple times, but to date the code hasn’t landed in the kernel nor its staging area.

• For developers looking to get into Linux graphics driver programming or just wanting to know how Intel’s Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) works within the Linux kernel, here’s a guide.

• The Graphics Execution Manager is Intel’s form of memory management within the Linux kernel for use by their i915 DRM graphics driver. GEM is an alternative to using TTM, as done internally by the Radeon and Nouveau drivers.

• For the open-source Radeon and Nouveau graphics drivers on Linux, OpenCL/GPGPU support has been implemented via the “Clover” OpenCL state tracker with the Radeon/Nouveau drivers built atop the Gallium3D driver architecture. While Intel’s latest hardware supports OpenCL with its graphics core, their open-source Linux driver has lacked any support, but that is changing.

• With Intel sticking to their Mesa DRI “classic” driver rather than migrating to the Gallium3D driver architecture, they haven’t been able to tap the OpenCL state tracker and thus are stuck to coming up with their own implementation. Intel has put out their own closed-source OpenCL SDK that works on Windows and Linux but on the Linux side has been limited to using just the CPU and not integrated with their GPU driver.

• Here’s some of the improvements that the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver will see with the Linux 3.9 kernel release.

• Etnaviv is a new open-source project for building a user-space graphics driver for controlling the Vivante GPUs found in some ARM SoCs. The ultimate goal is to create a new Mesa/Gallium3D driver for this graphics core.

• A number of ARM-based processors including Freescale’s i.MX6, Marvell’s Armada 1500, and the Rockchip RK2918 use Vivante GCxxx graphics. The Freescale chips are particularly interesting to open source developers, since Freescale provides documentation necessary to run Linux and other open source software on the chip.

Benchmarks

Applications

• Nitro is simple, fast and powerful. It can synchronize your appointments on the cloud with Ubuntu One and Dropbox, so you can access them from any computer, not lose any of your tasks and you’ll never get a conflicted copy. Nitro also creates a todo.txt file so you can see or embed your tasks in plain text. Nitro is available for a variety of platforms such as Linux, Mac and as extension of Google Chrome / Chromium. And the development team is working on mobile versions and so they’ll be available in the future

• Ubuntu 12.10 is the most updated version of the Ubuntu OS. Anyways, I am not writing this post to tell you about Ubuntu 12.10. Infact, I am compiling this post to list out some of must have apps for Ubuntu 12.10.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I got an email from the developer of Forgotten Elements to announce the full official release of the free MMORPG.

• Cube was one of the very few FPS games available for linux many years ago. Although it had an active community around it, things didn’t go well and Cube was never seriously developed and updated.

• Things have now changed and Cube 2 was released a few days ago bringing tons of improvements compared to the original. Is it good enough for the 2013 linux gamer though?

• Based on the Little Red Riding Hood story mixed with Japanese folklore and myth, the action-RPG sees players hunting legendary monsters in Edo-era Japan.

• The open beta includes new developments such as” advanced character training, weapon improvements, and the “still in development” Shivering Pines area which includes a new tribe of “imps wielding frost magic.”

• Rumor has it that Blizzard is working on releasing some titles that will run on Linux without the aid of third party software like Wine. Blizzard has allegedly been running a World of Warcraft Linux server within their own HQ. According to Phoronix, Blizzard intends to release whatever it is they have up their sleeves this year. Though the rumor doesn’t point to which game is underway, it’s said to be one of Blizzard’s popular titles. Mind you, this is all speculation, but there is good reasoning why this is a likely endeavor.

• Last fall, 63,416 people donated $8.5 million to help the creation of an Android-based, open source gaming console. Ouya’s Kickstarter project had donations of $95 or more from 58,211 people who wanted the first shot at this console that didn’t yet exist. (If you weren’t one of them, you can pre-order them now at ouya.tv.)

• To celebrate Ouya’s official release (dev kits began shipping in December), Kill Screen is sponsoring a 10-day game jam called CREATE to get developers to create some great games very quickly.

• What is GearCity? It’s an automobile manufacturing business simulator. “What the hell is that?!” you might have just muttered. In essence it is a sim game where you run a car company. It’s like a tycoon game but it’s less casual. GearCity has been in production for the last three years.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Endangered blue whales are being needlessly killed by commercial ship strikes off the coast of California every year.

• The #active channel on irc.freenode.net is a place where people from a wide variety of projects that use various common bits of technology hang out. In Plasma Active we do a lot of work with Qt, QML and Mer, for instance; so we have people there from the Mer project as well as various QML focused projects.

• 2013 has already got exciting for the mobile platform space, with Jolla showing more and more demos and Ubuntu telling us about their plans of running Ubuntu on the phone. These two have something common with KDE’s Plasma Active project – and I’m sure you’ve guessed, its about using Qt and QtQuick for the platform and applications.

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Gentoo Family

• The sheer number of different ways in which Linux can be run is astounding, as there are plenty of choices to go around. While there are plenty of distributions which rely on either the .deb or .rpm package formats, there’s also a handful which use their own formats, if any at all. One of those distributions is very unique compared to most others as the distribution’s developers don’t compile software into binary packages for easy installation.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has released an unashamedly labelled ‘minor’ release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• This 5.9 version features better hardware enablement, security and certification improvements, improved developer tools and refined virtualisation technologies.

• The firm positions these so-called minor increments as part of what it calls its “10-year lifecycle” with the platform.

• The virtualisation company instructed its lawyers to take control of open-source project Vert.x from its lead developer and former VMware employee Tim Fox, after Fox left VMware for its rival Red Hat.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will update its open hybrid cloud strategy during a North America partner conference, scheduled for Jan. 14-16 in San Diego. North America Channel Chief Roger Egan, in an interview with The VAR Guy, said telcos, cloud services providers (CSPs), VARs and other types of partners are opening their arms to Red Hat’s CloudForms (IaaS) and OpenShift (PaaS) strategies. But can Red Hat really muscle aside VMware (NYSE: VMW) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) as partners seek the building blocks for public and private clouds?

Fedora

• After another delay last week, the long and drawn out release of Fedora 18 will finally happen next week.

• Fedora 18 was originally supposed to ship in early November of 2012 but was delayed eight times in the process that ultimately pushed the release back by two months. At today’s Go/No-Go meeting, it was decided that Fedora 18 is finally ready to ship next week on 15 January.

• Fedora 18 is to get no further delays, with a last minute bug fix to one of their release candidates

• Fedora 18 is to get no further delays, with a last minute bug fix to one of their release candidates

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The world of mobile OSes is totally dominated by Android and iOS, but that hasn’t kept Ubuntu from trying to sneak in. And finding a way into already dominated markets is kind of Ubuntu’s strong suit.

• We got to take a “hands-off” look at the new mobile OS running on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. While the hardware won’t hit for a year, the software’s looking pretty smooth already.

• When I first started using Ubuntu the difficulty with using it on a laptop was centered around wireless issues. Today wireless issues are much less common, but Linux laptop compatibility is still plagued with problems due to ‘optimus’ graphics and poor bios decisions from many vendors. As an IT professional I know enough to avoid certain hardware, but for people without my IT background trying to find a laptop that works well might seem an impossible task.

• Tweaking tools are often very popular software. Since Unity became the desktop on Ubuntu, a few different tweaking tools have surfaced. While some have faded, a new contender has emerged “to expose all the most needed Unity, Compiz, Appearance and Desktop settings in one interface.”

• Canonical was supposed to launch a new product and on the first working day of this year and they launched Ubuntu for Phone. It was previously thought that they would be launching Ubuntu for Android, but rumors also suggested that it could be Ubuntu for Phone, and we all were taken by surprise.

• On January 2nd Ubuntu announced that they were going to support a phone, and the announcement has been met with both congratulations and nay-sayers.

• True, Ubuntu on the phone has many obstacles in its way, but it also has many things going for it as well.

• Ubuntu 12.04.2, the first Long-Term Support point release of Ubuntu Linux where new hardware support is back-ported to the LTS release, has been delayed.

• Rounding up as many random passers-by as he can, Canonical’s community manager for Ubuntu, Jono Bacon, gets ready to demo the new Ubuntu for phones at their stand at CES 2013.

• He was not allowed to let us try the phone for ourselves, so anyone that wanted hands-on time with Ubuntu Phone (including press) would have to go through a Canonical proxy.

Flavours and Variants

• Does size matter when it comes to Linux distros? Well, it very well might when it comes to Ultimate Edition 3.5. There’s nothing subtle about this distro. Everything about it screams over the top, from the color scheme to the range of software included with it.

• Almost 2 years ago, a bit after its official release, I reviewed Elementary OS 0.1 “Jupiter”. There I said that there was a ton of hype surrounding its release, and that I had bought into the hype a little bit. Since then, there has been hype of a few more orders of magnitude surrounding version 2 “Luna”, given the higher expectations and greater promises. Even so, there hasn’t been an official release yet, so I am reviewing the first official pre-release version possible. I’ll probably review the official release when that comes out as well.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Nokia said Thursday that it sold 86.3 million mobile devices. Of those, 15.9 million were smartphones, and of those, 4.4 million were Lumias running Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. Another 9.3 million were from Nokia’s Asha portfolio — a line of handsets targeted at emerging markets. And 2.2 million were Symbian smartphones.

Ballnux

• When it comes to Samsung’s collection of large-screened phones, the Galaxy Note II (as well as the Galaxy S III) takes the bulk of the mindshare. And while that particular handset is the flagship, the company is still interested in branching out to a market segment that wants a large screen but needs to keep within a limited budget. Welcome the Galaxy Grand Duos (and Grand, a single-SIM version), a 5-inch WVGA device that will likely see most of its time in emerging markets. We had an opportunity to sit down with the Grand Duos for a few minutes, so keep your eyes peeled below for our impressions, as well as a photo gallery and video.

Android

• Google Inc.’s Android software, the most widely used smartphone operating system, is making the leap to rice cookers and refrigerators as manufacturers vie to dominate the market for gadgets controlled via the Internet.

• Apple is slowly but steadily reciding to where it rightly belongs — a tiny niche corner in the tech world. Thanks to its arrogance and nonsense attitute towards competition. Google’s open source Android is taking over the world and according to comScore’s MobiLens survey, Samsung and Google are outstripping Apple.

• The report says, “Google leads the pack in the EU5-markets, specifically in the U.K. and Germany. In Germany the number of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system rose by 138 over the year to nearly 52 percent in November 2012. For the EU5-markets as a whole, Google increased its share to 48 percent of the smartphone audience, an increase of 115 percent compared to last year.”

• The code to wayland-java has now been made public, which is a project that provides Java bindings to the Wayland back-end library. This Java support will be useful for Wayland support on Google’s Android mobile platform.

• Wayland-java provides Java bindings so that it’s now possible to interface with the Wayland back-end library (libwayland) using the Java programming language. This code is automatically generated along with the JNI bindings from the Wayland XML protocol.

• Be on guard if you are pondering an upgrade from your dumb TV to a smarter species. I discovered that not all smart TVs are created equal and use manufacturer-specific apps and features. About the only things in common when it comes to smart TVs are their reliance on an embedded Linux open source platform and their range of display screen technology.

• There is a lot of talk about Android and gaming systems these days in the world of Kickstarter. Most being about OUYA and the release of their development systems and the various other clip on systems that turn your phone into a portable gaming device. There is one system however that turns any HDMI capable monitor or TV into a gaming and entertainment system. It truly does bring new meaning to portable gaming and it’s called GameStick.

• It was only a few days ago that AT&T launched a fairly attractive looking handset from Pantech — the Discover — which happens to be that company’s first 720p device in the States. Now the Korean manufacturer looks to spread 720p offerings to other US carriers, with Verizon slated to pick up the Pantech Perception this quarter.

• FAVI has brought out an Android stick that turns “any TV into a Smart TV”, that’s the pitch, and it’s not far wrong as long as your TV has HDMI, you have a nearby port where you can juice up the dongle via mini-USB – and if you don’t mind pushing an arrow around the screen every now and then.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPCA) has announced the next generation of its Linux-based XO laptop and a new XO Tablet design at CES in Las Vegas. According to a report on The Verge, chip manufacturer Marvell demonstrated the XO 4.0 Touch laptop at the conference but did not show the XO Tablet which is being developed by Sakar International.

Free Software/Open Source

• While you were out over Christmas, things kept happening in the open source community of communities. Here’s a round-up of some of the stories that caught my eye.

• For years, Jeremy Allison has been one of the better known names in free software development. The lead developer of Samba’s implementation of the SMB file server protocol, he is also generally credited as the project’s co-creator. True, he jokes that description means that “Tridg [Andrew Tridgell] did all the hard bits, but I was there,” and claims not to be current with all aspects of the project — yet, all the same, few have more of an overview of Samba. Recently, Allison took time to give his personal view of the challenges involved in the recent Samba 4.0 release, and of the directions in which Samba might be heading next.

• Given Ubuntu’s recent glitzy and fanfare-accompanied debut on the world’s mobile stage, it’s beginning to look like limelight and red carpets will increasingly be a part of FOSS’ future.

• Globe Telecom has partnered with the Mozilla Philippines Community (MozillaPH) for the Manila leg of Firefox OS App Days to showcase Mozilla’s open source operating system for the mobile web and to teach Filipino tech developers how to create mobile applications for the Firefox OS.

• The Firefox OS App Days is a worldwide set of over 20 hack days to be hosted by 24 cities from January 19 through February 2, 2013. Philippines and Indonesia are the only Southeast Asian countries included in the list.

• Ford today announced the launch of its OpenXC vehicle application research platform. Open-source hardware and software toolkits are now available to anybody who’s interested in building hardware and on the OpenXC platform. It is a joint effort with BugLabs (what a great name!).

• Lightworks, the professional non-linear video editing software that has been talked about for years as coming to Linux, is re-opening its Linux Alpha program to solicit additional testing.

• We’ve been waiting nearly three years for Lightworks on Linux but the company behind the professional-grade video editing software, EditShare, hasn’t been too open with their Linux alpha/beta program.

• When you think of hotbeds of open source innovation, Canada’s Treasury Board typically doesn’t make the cut. But over the past three years, coders at this slightly obscure Canadian tax-collecting agency have produced something that’s pretty rare in government: a hit open source project.

• We’re not talking about the next Linux here, but this summer, the Treasury Board of Canada hosted a CodeFest to invite hackers — mostly government staffers — to hack its Web Experience Toolkit, or WET — a set of open-source tools that the Treasury Board uses for building websites.

• Reviewing the product for PCWorld was Mark O’Neill, who thought this program was as peachy keen as it gets. Not only would it remove toolbars and plugins for those who couldn’t figure out how to do it themselves, it would also let the user tick away anything unwanted that’s scheduled to run at start-up, even though it offered no hints about which apps might be necessary and which are not.

• Xen Orchestra is an open-source project that gives a web-interface to the Xen virtualization platform via XCP and its API (XAPI).

• Most open source developers like to think about the quality of the software they build, but the quality of the documentation is often forgotten. Nobody talks about how great a project’s docs are, and yet documentation has a direct impact on your project’s success. Without good documentation, people either do not use your project, or they do not enjoy using it. Happy users are the ones who spread the news about your project – which they do only after they understand how it works, which they learn from the software’s documentation.

Events

• I recently came back from the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference held in San Diego, California, and it was an interesting experience.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The Google Chrome team has released version 24 of the browser for Windows, the Mac and Linux. This is the first release with support for MathML (an application of XML for describing mathematical notations), and it also contains an update to Flash as well as improved JavaScript performance that coincides with Mozilla’s release of a new JavaScript engine in the Firefox browser. One of the first things that users will notice is that the browser now starts up much faster.

Mozilla

• While Canonical may have wowed the crowds with its impressive Ubuntu for Phones demonstration, the company is struggling to get the software out of the door and into users’ hands – and looks like it is going to be beaten to market by a rival product from Mozilla, the creator of the Firefox web browser.

SaaS/Big Data

• Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, has announced that it has received $10 million in funding from Dell, Intel and WestSummit. The small firm has taken care of its own funding until now, but has an impressive list of customers working with it on OpenStack projects. The customers include AT&T, PayPal and The Gap. If you’re working with OpenStack or thinking of doing so, you may also be interested in the online educational resources for the platform that Mirantis makes available.

• When it comes to building out servers to deploy an OpenStack cloud, services are key. That’s where privately-held systems integrator Mirantis comes into play. Mirantis has been helping some of the biggest (and smallest) names in IT, including Dell and Cisco, build and deploy OpenStack clouds.

• A jurisdictional dispute has broken out over Vert.x, an open-source application framework. The protagonists have pledged cooperation, in the open-source spirit.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Bjoern Balazs is described by blip.tv as “a usability consultant with a psychology background” but for The Document Foundation he’s working with the LibreOffice User Experience group to enhance the usability of LibreOffice. And he says, “a statistical analysis shows that icons with less detail score better in terms of usability.”

CMS

• The open source WordPress 3.5 was released in December and so its now time for WordPress developers to turn their attention to WordPress 3.6.

• While it’s still early in the development process, one new feature that is likely to land in WordPress 3.6 is Edit Flow. With EditFlow, the evolution of WordPress from being a simple blogging platform to being a robust large enterprise-class Content Management System will take a giant leap forward.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• John Newton, co-founder of one of the largest open source companies in the world, tells TechWeekEurope about his career

BSD

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• On Wednesday, the Veterans Affairs Department launched a contest with $3 million in prizes for development of a new patient scheduling system based on open source software. The new system will replace 25-year-old technology.

• In March 2009, after spending $167 million over eight years with no viable software to show for it, VA cancelled its previous replacement system for scheduling new patients. The department tacitly acknowledged the debacle today when it said the contest “will allow it to reduce the risks inherent in procurement and deployment of a replacement medical scheduling product.”

• The US Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to upgrade the 25-year-old software that powers its nationwide health care system, and it’s betting real money that open source is the way to do it.

• To that end, the agency is sponsoring a contest in which three entrants will be awarded prizes of up to $3m each, provided they can demonstrate software based on open source code and open APIs (application programming interfaces) that can successfully replace components of the VA’s current systems.

• Although this is a very particular case, it raises crucially important issues that are likely to crop increasingly frequently. Essentially, any electronic device that has built-in digital capabilities is a fully-fledged computer these days. That means – potentially – code that allows forbidden behaviour might be shipped with it. The only sure way to catch this problem is to insist upon the source code being made available – and for inspectors to check that it really is the code being run in units in the wild.

Openness/Sharing

• Almost exactly one year to the day after Chegg introduced a platform for online textbooks, its HTML5 eTextbook Reader that can be read on any Internet-connected device, it announced that it will begin offering open source e-textbooks through OpenStax College and the 20 Million Minds Foundation. Beginning this month, students will be able to access eTextbook Reader tools for open source digital titles, including community q & a, social highlighting, and note taking. They will also be able to use Chegg’s homework help platform.

Open Hardware

Programming

• The LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end are being ported to the GNU/Hurd operating system.

• Thomas Schwinge of CodeSourcery works as a a GNU/Hurd maintainer in his spare time and lately he’s been working on porting LLVM/Clang to the Free Software Foundation’s operating system.

Leftovers

• The competition is organised in partnership with The Next Web . There will be a public round of voting to select the 5 final nominees from your short list and the awards will be presented at an unforgettable award show in April. So please send your nominations now. We need to celebrate the success of our tech Europioneers who will inspire future generations.

• Hearing a capital appeal last month, the California Supreme Court justice seemed troubled that the trial judge had quickly rejected jurors who held strong anti-death penalty views, but seated pro-death penalty jurors so long as they promised to follow the law.

• In recent months, there has been a string of news stories about the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Google for antitrust violations. These reports invariably cited anonymous sources. Now Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wants to know whether FTC staffers were responsible for these leaks. In a letter sent to the FTC’s inspector general last week, he noted such leaks would be a violation of federal law and he urged an investigation. “The FTC Act and the Commission’s Operating Manual preclude the Commission and its staff from disclosing nonpublic information to the public and the media,” Issa wrote. “Moreover, information that may be disclosed must be ‘for attribution and on the record.’ Unfortunately, unnamed and anonymous sources have provided the media with nonpublic developments in the investigation of Google.”

Science

• Those of us concerned about the decaying credibility of Big Science were dismayed to learn that the whistleblower site Science Fraud has been shut down due to a barrage of legal threats against its operator. With billions of dollars in federal science funding hinging on the integrity of academic researchers, and billions more in health care dollars riding on the truthfulness of pharmaceutical research claims, the industry needs more websites like this, not fewer.

Hardware

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington. The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians. Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall

• Long-standing Guantanamo Bay detainee Wali Mohammed will have his day in court, at least to the extent that the military tribunal system counts as “court,” but the evidence exonerating him of the allegations against him will not, according to Judge Rosemary Collyer.

• It is not unusual for filmmakers to try to inject authenticity into a movie’s first frames by flashing onscreen words such as “based on real events.” Yet the language chosen by the makers of Zero Dark Thirty to preface their film about events leading to the death of Osama bin Laden is distinctively journalistic: “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” As those words fade, “September 11, 2001” appears against a black screen and we hear genuine emergency calls made by victims of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center. One caller describes flames spreading around her and says that she is “burning up”; she pleads against death and then her voice disappears. Before any actor speaks a single fictional line, then, Zero Dark Thirty makes two choices: it aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during the last several decades.

• Brennan’s wrong for America

• During President Obama’s 100 or so campaign trail speeches this past year, he usually received the biggest applause for mentioning the killing of Osama Bin Laden. The lines were real crowd pleasers. Zero Dark Thirty picks up where the cheers from the Obama rallies died off. Rather than casting Obama and the White House as heroes, though, the film lets the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency play the protagonists with the true claim to Bin Laden’s scalp.

• A long-read you may have missed in the New York Times by Scott Shane, on the story of John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst and case officer who is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 25 to 30 months in prison for leaking classified government info to a reporter. With this sentencing, the Obama administration reaffirms its role as one of the most staunchly anti-leak administrations in history.

• The existence of multiple, overlapping and inconsistent definitions of the term “homeland security” reflects and reinforces confusion in the homeland security mission, according to a newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service.

• The best picture nominee is a celebration of George W. Bush’s most destructive policies

• The CIA is being sued for withholding information about its cooperation on domestic spying as part of the New York Police Department’s counter-terrorism surveillance program.

• CIA operation destroyed the trust established between vaccinators and Pakistanis.

• President Obama recently signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, proving once again that, in foreign policy, the Bush Doctrine reigns. To be sure, Obama made a stellar choice in appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. However, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and his decisions to pursue detainment powers under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force act are missteps.

• The Guantanamo Bay detention facility is arguably one of the most egregious affronts to our nation’s principles. It contradicts our most fundamental beliefs of civil and political human rights, and sends a message to other nations to disregard them as well. Yet, there has been consistent backtracking on the judicial oversight that finally arrived for Guantanamo Bay detainees in 2004 when the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners had rights to due process.

• To be clear, Obama could have vetoed the NDAA. Others, such as President Reagan, Clinton, W. Bush and Carter, vetoed such acts during their terms. If there were any reason to veto a bill, denying individuals a fair trial has to be among the top 10.

• McMahon’s reasoning aside, the government’s argument that the drone memo should stay in a locked drawer is not convincing. Between Holder’s speech and a front-page account in the New York Times after Awlaki’s death, the rules the administration has set for itself are extant.

• Still, there’s legitimate concern about the precedent set by succumbing to FOIA requests for information on covert action. The way out of the puzzle is clear: The administration should voluntarily release the memo. If there are national security secrets involved, they can be redacted. Alternatively, the White House can issue a document to Congress that clearly delineates its legal thinking, just as the George W. Bush administration did with its warrantless wiretapping operation in 2005. The current administration has been far too quiet on its drone war for far too long.

• Make that seven U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan during the first 10 days of 2013.

• The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to groundbreaking innovations in new technologies. Many of those advances came in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. In February of 2012, President Barack Obama signed a mandate that will open the skies over the U.S. to commercial UAVs in 2015. The move launched a multi-billion dollar industry as manufacturers meet the growing demands of privately owned UAVs. Some wonder, however, if the nation’s laws can keep up with the UAV boom.

• When President Obama pledged to close the Guantánamo Bay prison on his first day in office as president in 2009, I believed the country had shifted direction. I was wrong. Four years later, President Obama has not only institutionalized Guantánamo and all the horrors it symbolizes, but he has initiated new extrajudicial programs, like the president’s secret kill list.

• …more than 150 men since 9/11 who have been caught in FBI terrorism stings…

• “The medical examiner concluded that the death was a suicide. Mr. Latif died of a self-induced overdose of prescription medication,” the statement said.

• Today is the 11th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and like the past three anniversaries, it comes with President Barack Obama’s campaign promises to close it unmet.

• With hardly any mention in the media, today marks the shameful, pathetic and tragic 11th anniversary of the opening of Gitmo–universally regarded as a human rights cesspool where 166 detainees are still held in an extra-legal blackhole even though 86 of them have been cleared for release.

• “I’m tired of people telling me Obama is a good guy.”

• It was the fifth American drone strike reported in Pakistan in a week, the heaviest concentration since last August, according to an AFP tally.

• The effect of these so-called “targeted” strikes should not be underestimated. The US claims that they target only militants – but extends the definition of “militants” so widely that it becomes almost meaningless. Officially, the US says that any military-age males in a strike zone are combatants, and grants itself the authority to kill from the sky.

Cablegate

• The prosecutors also said they would present logs of Internet chats in February 2010 between Private Manning and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, including one in which the two men appeared to be “laughing” together about a New York Times article. The March 17, 2010, article said that the Pentagon had listed WikiLeaks as a threat to military operations and security.

• In a process where the military judge can allow facts to be introduced into evidence for trial which are well known or can be proven, the government asked the judge to take notice of multiple pieces of evidence that show how the government intends to tie Manning’s alleged leaks to aiding terrorism.

• Al Qaeda and its affiliates—Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)—are all listed as terrorist organizations and “are in fact enemies of the United States,” military prosecutor Cpt. Joe Morrow stated.

• There are other charges against Manning—twenty-two in all—and he has indicated that he would be willing to plead guilty to seven of them. (His trial, which was supposed to start in March, has now been delayed until June.) But aiding the enemy is a charge of a different degree than simply exposing classified information. It involves intent and carries heavier penalties. It is also the sort of charge that, in wartime, or anytime, almost invites overreach. Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government? In that case, who is aiding the enemy—the whistle-blower or the perpetrators themselves?

• The only reason to drag Bradley Manning’s case out, and to engage in the conduct that was described, was to coerce him into implicating other people.

• A CO-FOUNDER of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and two other militants have been found shot dead in Paris, a day after Turkey and the jailed leader of the banned group reportedly agreed on a peace plan.

Finance

• President Barack Obama’s choice to lead the White House budget office oversaw a Citigroup unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual subprime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the U.S. government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs.

• Jacob Lew, named Tuesday as Obama’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget to replace departing OMB chief Peter Orszag, served as chief operating officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments in 2008. He has served as a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton since the administration came into office.

• Few are better equipped than economist Richard Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, to address the massive failings and inequalities of capitalism as he does in his latest book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.

• Few companies truly live up to their reputations. In 2007, as we launched our firm, Galliant Capital, we were introduced to a number of highly regarded investment banks. Based on our experience, only The Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) met and even exceeded our expectations as it excelled in all areas, including prime brokerage, research and trade execution. The firm is best-of-breed in the financial services sector and we believe that its stock will continue to be a strong performer.

• When institutional investors start taking a hard look at their allocations to alternative investments, they often hire consultants to get color and advice on where they should place their money. Most of these consultants offer a quantitative analysis of blue chip, high-performing hedge funds and sometimes, a few emerging managers to keep an eye on. Yet, according to one research professional, many investors are overlooking qualitative factors which can provide critical information.

• Blood, torture, assassination and death — beyond the exploits in ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ there are other CIA plots and fiascoes that would make compelling cinema.

• Since his first appearance in the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willy, there has been no greater American ambassador than Mickey Mouse, the cartoon character who sparked the launch of the media empire of the Walt Disney Co.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Near the outset of his rant on Piers Morgan Tonight on Monday, conspiracy peddler Alex Jones warned that the Second Amendment is all that stands between democracy and dictatorship. “Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chávez took the guns, and I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!” he screamed.

Censorship

• A court in central Vietnam convicted 14 bloggers, writers and political and social activists on Wednesday of plotting to overthrow the government and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 3 to 13 years in what human rights groups said was the largest subversion case to be brought in years.

• Collateral victims of war in Vietnam and Afghanistan share one thing in common–they’re invisible

• Al-Harbi wrote several tweets critical of the Emir and the oppression practiced against protesters

• Most Westerners have no idea where N’Djamena is. Al Jazeera English operates a news bureau there (it’s the capital of Chad).

• AJE also has correspondents in Juba, Diyarbakir, Harare, Khartoum, Nouakchott, Skopje, and about 65 other cities, including a North American metropolis all but ignored by big U.S. media: Toronto.

• The network, owned and operated by the Emirate of Qatar, no longer has anything to prove about the quality of its journalism. It has won all sorts of prestigious awards and broken all sorts of stories.

Privacy

• Nokia has rejected claims it might be spying on users’ encrypted Internet traffic, but admitted it is intercepting and temporarily decrypting HTTPS connections for the benefit of customers.

• A security professional alleged Nokia was carrying out so-called man-in-the-middle attacks on its own users. Gaurang Pandya, currently infrastructure security architect at Unisys Global Services India, said in December he saw traffic being diverted from his Nokia Asha phone through to Nokia-owned proxy servers.

• The renewed FISA allows for warrantless U.S. surveillance of foreign citizens with information in the cloud

• The FBI calls it a “sensitive investigative technique” that it wants to keep secret. But newly released documents that shed light on the bureau’s use of a controversial cellphone tracking technology called the “Stingray” have prompted fresh questions over the legality of the spy tool.

• The researchers could identify 8 out of 100 future murderers. That means the algorithm has an 8% success rate, which means it fails to predict who will murder someone 92% of the time.

Civil Rights

• Fourteen-year old Kaleb Winston was wearing a “graffiti-patterned backpack” when the Salt Lake City police’s gang unit rounded him and more than a dozen other students up one December school day in 2010. The bi-racial freshman, who at the time held down jobs in the school cafeteria and as a basketball referee, was questioned and then photographed holding a sign reading: “My name is Kaleb Winston and I am a gang tagger.” Found guilty of nothing, the students’ personal information was nonetheless added to a “gang database.”

• With the push of a button by a pilot at a US base thousands of miles away, both boys were instantly vaporized – only a few chunks of flesh remained.

• Kelly said the eyes in the sky — which have worried civil rights activists — could prove useful when sizing-up demonstrations, adding to an NYPD arsenal that already includes 3,000 cameras and high-powered anti-aircraft rifles that can shoot down planes.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• We welcome the ‘license exempt’ approach to white space exploitation taken by Ofcom. This should help encourage innovative use of the newly available spectrum that could bring significant economic and social benefits. Our submission offers general comments focused on the implications of the proposals for privacy, rather than addressing the specific questions in the consultation document.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The ban was put in place in September last year after a study linked Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup and the NK603 strain of maize genetically modified to be resistant to the herbicide, to cancer in lab rats.

Copyrights

• This morning at CES, Senator Ron Wyden laid out a broad and detailed agenda for how Congress can and should promote internet freedom and increase innovation — mainly by focusing on knocking down the barriers presented by legacy players who don’t want to adapt or compete. Among other things, he talked about increasing access, pushing back on data caps, dealing with the harm of software patents, greater privacy protections and more.

• It’s a post-SOPA world. But the question is, what does that mean for the future?

• Content companies used to getting their way on Capitol Hill got humbled last January when an unprecedented wave of public protest shut down the SOPA and PIPA proposals that would have regulated online copyright. Now that the public has been awakened to the issue, those interested in a more balanced copyright system are thinking over their strategy.

• When the Republican Study Committee, an influential group of Republicans within the House of Representatives, released and then retracted a controversial memo on copyright reform in November, its author declined to talk to us on the record. A month later, when news of his firing over the memo broke, Derek Khanna stuck to his “no comment” line. At the time, he was still officially on the RSC’s payroll until the end of the 112th Congress.

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