● 01.15.13

● Links 15/1/2013: Fedora 18 Released, Net Neutrality at Risk in France

Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Today in the age of the “brogrammer,” whose frat boy tendencies are glorified and sought after by cutting-edge online startups, women in tech often find themselves objectified and excluded — especially in communities like Wikipedia and open-source software, where women make up even less of the population (around 13 percent and 1 percent, respectively) than in more mainstream technical fields.

• [...]

• Wikipedia’s new Teahouse page is “a friendly place to help new editors,” which is designed especially to encourage women to participate. Meanwhile, women like Denise Paolucci are creating their own startups like Dreamwidth, which are based on existing open-source programming code. Unlike most “proprietary” code, it’s still free for women to do what they want with it — if they can overcome the obstacles in their way.

Server

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds is mighty upset with Red Hat developer, Mauro Carvalho Chehab as he passed on a bug while fixing some fault in Pulseaudio and other third-party applications.

• The Linux community has a long history of sharing educational resources, tips and tools, but much of this sharing is done on an ad-hoc basis online. In an effort to build new, structured and free opportunities for community members to learn about Linux, The Linux Foundation is launching a series of Live Linux Q&As on its social channels, starting this week, Wednesday, January 16, on Facebook. The Live Linux Q&As will rotate throughout several social channels, from Facebook to Google+ and Twitter to LinkedIn, “so you can connect when/where it makes the most sense for you,” according to event organizers.

• A commercial company has opened up their Linux driver that is based upon their SSD (Solid-State Drive) caching software product. This code is designed to use SSDs as cache devices for traditional rotating hard drives. This new SSD caching driver is based upon Facebook’s Flashcache.

• Flashcache is the project Facebook open-sourced in 2011 that is a kernel-level solution for providing a block cache for Linux that supports multiple caching models. Flashcache can be used to accelerate reads and writes from slower rotational media by caching the data on a solid-state drive.

Graphics Stack

• The open-source AMD “R600g” Gallium3D driver is slowly but surely closing in on OpenGL 3.3 support for this open-source Linux graphics driver that supports from the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 GPUs.

• After writing on Friday about UBO and TBO support for R600g that now allows for GLSL 1.40 compliance, the end is near for OpenGL 3.3 in this widely-used AMD open-source driver. The uniform buffer object and texture buffer object support for the R600g driver was the last major missing piece for GL Shading Language 1.40 compliance, which is the GLSL version to match OpenGL 3.1.

• The X.Org state tracker target, which allows for providing basic 2D/EXA acceleration with the X.Org Server over GPU shaders using a generic Gallium3D state tracker, is no longer supported by the R300 Gallium3D driver. Support has been eliminated and the X.Org state tracker targets for other Gallium3D drivers might also be dropped.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• wo things happened in 1993: I attended my first year of college, and I played a lot of Scorched Earth. Oddly enough, the latter seemed to have more of an effect on my later career choices.

• Posted 14 Jan 2013 by Svend Joscelyne Open Source Project Brings Oculus Rift Support to Mirror’s Edge, Skyrim The virtual reality Oculus Rift peripheral sounds like a nice bit of kit, but without games that support it the technology will surely fail to capture the imagination of PC gamers worldwide. Well, with the help of an open source community, a toolset called Vireio Perception implements VR support for games such as Mirror’s Edge and Skyrim.

• Not Pacman is a new free and open source game that redefines the classic Pacman game by adding physics and gravity.

• Oceania is a new Kickstarter-backed MMORPG game being developed atop the visually impressive Unigine Engine. Native Linux support for this massively multiplayer online role playing game is being planned.

• Replay Games has written into Phoronix to talk about two commercial game titles that they will be bringing to Linux.

• The two games coming out of Replay Games for Linux is “Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards: Reloaded” and “Fester Mudd: The Curse of the Gold” will be out soon for the penguin operating system.

• We’ve already brought you a lengthy interview and expansive rundown on the new additions of Crusader Kings 2′s Republic DLC expansion. But in the wake of its release, there’s some CK2 news housekeeping to be done. The big news is the addition of a Linux version, but instead I think we’ll kick off with the patch notes. They contain the sentence “Constantine de Hauteville is no longer female,” which is just too good to pass up.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Marble shows the subsolar point on the globe which changes according to the time of the day

• A number of interesting features have been merged into KDE’s KWin compositing window manager for the next KDE release. One of the features just added is support for merging the menu buttons into the menu/title bar, in order to save vertical screen real estate.

• Martin Gräßlin, the main KWin developer, has written about the changes in the past week for the compositing window manager.

Distributions

• I am a little late but the latest release of GCompris (version 12.11) is out! It’s great to see the 5 space and color activities I developed this summer integrated into GCompris, all thanks to my mentor +Bruno Coudoin for all the help and guidance. There are also activities added by +Beth Hadley for music lovers and more.. Here is a link to the wiki page for the new activities added in this release – http://gcompris.net/wiki/12.11-en.

• Back in December I wrote an article in which I briefly touched on three different Linux distributions. One of those distributions was Manjaro Linux, a young project based on Arch Linux. At the time I was quickly proceeding through the three projects I had on my list and, when I ran into a dead end early on I decided to cut my losses and move on to the next project on the list. As it turned out, where I had run into problems was not, as I first thought, due to a malfunction, but rather to a misunderstanding of the project’s documentation and editions. What I had thought was the project’s Xfce edition was, in fact, their net-install disc. Following my review appearing on DistroWatch one of the developers left a comment explaining what had happened and suggesting Manjaro hadn’t been given its due consideration. After some reflection, I found I agreed with the developer, my decision to move on was rash. It’s one thing to abandon or criticize a project for technical faults, limitations or documentation errors, it is another to criticize a project over a simple misunderstanding. I offer my apologies to the Manjaro developers and community. I hope you will bear with me now as I return to explore this young distribution in greater detail.

New Releases

• Manjaro welcomes another addition to the family in the form of our brand-new Openbox flavour!

• Designed and built exclusively by the Manjaro team, this lightweight, sleek, and super-fast flavour comes with a unique twist – traditional menus are not used to find and launch applications!

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• The Fedora team has eventually announced the release of Fedora 18, aka “Spherical Cow”. Fedora leads the innovation in the GNU/Linux world and introduces new technologies which are used by the rest of the Linux players. This release, which was delayed again and again, brings some brand new features to Fedora.

• After the pleasant experience of running the Fedora 17 LXDE spin, I decided to give the Xfce Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle spin a try considering that the next iteration of Fedora was yet again delayed (which is not a big deal since 17 is an excellent release). Unlike Qt and the Englightenment desktop, Xfce gets plenty of coverage on the Internet. Linus Torvalds somewhat endorsed Xfce after the Gnome 3 debacle in 2011 and the awesome hosts of The Linux Action Show agreed that Xfce was a desktop environment worthy of Gnome 2 fans back in May 2012. Xfce is strongly supported by the majority of Linux distributions. I must admit my favoritism towards LXDE, the other lightweight desktop environment, stems from my poor experience trying out a Mandriva 2010 Xfce spin and Xubuntu a few years back. So it’s time to give the popular desktop another chance with Fedora on the backend.

• Linux fans hope that the interface changes in Windows 8 will drive more users to Linux. But the open source operating system is facing interface challenges of its own. Part of the problem is that — after so much controversy within the Linux community — there are so many interfaces to chose from. But the new version of Fedora — a desktop focused version of Red Hat’s distribution of Linux — is offering users an easier way to choose between the many flavors of Linux GUI.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• When we announced Ubuntu for phones on the 2nd January we also announced the developer preview of the SDK. The SDK includes QML and the Ubuntu Phone Components that provides a set of controls for building applications. It includes a comprehensive development environment.

• If you want to play with the developer preview, go and get it, then follow the tutorial, and be sure to ask questions if you get stuck.

Devices/Embedded

• As we’ve reported, the tiny $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi has continued to attract developers and tinkerers, has its very own app store, and is showing up in multiple types of usage scenarios. Earlier this month, we reported that the Raspberry Pi Education Manual is available. A group of teachers produced it, taking note of the fact that the Raspberry Pi could have a bright future in the educational system. Now, there is an official guide to the Raspberry Pi: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, from O’Reilly and the folks behind Make.

• I recently got a Raspberry Pi from RS online store. I wanted one so bad and it took so long before I got to play with it that by the time I got it, I was pretty much drooling over it. I started off by installing Raspbian which worked out of the box (what fun it is! ). I then moved on to try Arch and the fun began. Arch Linux install guide at elinux is pretty good but it only helps you to get bare bones Arch up and running. After that you are on your own. So here I am going to discuss how I managed to get Arch up and running with XFCE, a login manager and a web browser.

Phones

Ballnux

Android

• Tizen, a Linux-based OS, is fast gaining momentum than recently thought, with South Korean smartphone empire, Samsung Electronics, confirming that the new rival will roll out a series of Tizen-based gadgets for 2013.

• Today in international tech news: Android still rules in China, Google’s Eric Schmidt reminds Chinese developers. Also, RIM is flooded with app submissions, a judge acquits former Nortel execs after their lucrative mistake, China’s top browser strikes a deal to expand to Africa and the Middle East, and Norway plans to discuss new anti-piracy legislation.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Out of the countless gadgets on display at this past week’s International Consumer Electronics Show, a tablet came out on top.

Free Software/Open Source

• I know this might sound like an odd question. It first came up in a conversation I had with Gary Hamel, the eminent business thinker and one of the first people to recognize the importance of distributed co-creation and that it will change management in the 21st century. We were discussing how the power of participation could replace traditional management for purposes of coordination and what it’s limits might be. We ended up using the analogy of building a jetliner as our best example of where tight coordination is required. This question has been nagging on my mind ever since.

• Airplanes are truly modern marvels of tight coordination on a massive scale. A well designed airplane is the result of tens of thousands of small design tradeoffs that are perfectly balanced and tightly managed. The end product is an engineering marvel that is a modern jetliner.

• I am inclined to think that VLC media player is the most popular software in Zimbabwe. Few people outside the tech circles know, however, that it is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Even fewer people know what FOSS is let alone its advantages especially to SMEs and Startups with their tight budgets. I am still to meet anyone who does not love the player; it is robust, has a simple interface, extensive functionality, a trivial learning curve and modest memory footprint – beauty in code. Most other FOSS, I find lovable. Why is it then, that Free and Open Source Software remains unpopular in Zimbabwe despite all the progress that has been made elsewhere?

• Netflix has made a name for itself by open-sourcing tools to fill gaps in Amazon Web Services’ cloud and make deployment easier to manage. Now it wants to show off the other goodies it has in the pipeline — and recruit open-source development whizzes in the process. The company will host an Open Source Open House at its Los Gatos, Calif. headquarters February 6, which will feature talks by Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix cloud architect, and Ruslan Meshenberg, director of cloud platform engineering.

• So-called “pre-invention assignment agreements” are a rite of passage when joining a company. For an open-source developer, they may also be giving away the keys to an open-source project, as VMware’s recent legal action against the founder of the Vert.x project shows.

• This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Dr Shay David, co-founder of the Kaltura “first and only” open source online video platform. David co-author’s this piece with Zohar Babin, Kaltura’s senior director of community who currently heads up the firm’s 50,000 members strong developer group.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Document Foundation has announced the first of three planned release candidates for version 4.0 of LibreOffice, its open source office suite. RC1 includes 70 bug fixes since the release of LibreOffice 4.0.0 Beta2 from the end of December. The code base has been in feature freeze since 3 December and the hard code freeze will occur in the week beginning 21 January, with the final release expected in the week beginning 4 February.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Business

Semi-Open Source

• UK open source firm Alfresco has revealed its plans to go public in the US, choosing the nation over the UK because of a less vibrant stock market in its home nation.

• The firm has now opened up a Silicon Valley office and appointed a US chief executive, Doug Dennerline. Dennerline was the president of SuccessFactors before its $3.4bn acquisition by SAP last year.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Aaron Swartz was a friend, a Bostonian, and a Mystery Hunter. Codex would like to invite members of the community and participants in the Mystery Hunt (that’s you!) to remember our friend, collaborator, and teammate with stories, jokes, discussions, and pictures. He touched many who did not know him personally, and we hope you join us to celebrate his life and mourn his death. Ice cream generously provided with the help of the Free Software Foundation.

Project Releases

• The Independent JPEG Group (IJG) at the German Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) has released a new version of the libjpeg library. The developers say it can compress photos in JPEG format in a lossless way and, apparently, libjpeg 9 outputs lossless JPEG files that are smaller than the equivalent PNG file of the same image.

Public Services/Government

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• “Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So, let’s stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data out there and it’s other people’s job to figure out how to use it. Let’s decide that our job is to fight for good in the world.” —Aaron Swartz

Open Access/Content

Programming

Leftovers

• Do not adjust your screen – we bring good news from the Home Office.

• From Lord Leveson’s report to the increasingly heavy-handed arrests for social media, freedom of speech was a major issue for Big Brother Watch in 2012 and we were at the fore of calls to change the law.

• Today we had a glimmer of hope 2013 will be the year the tide turns and freedom of speech is enhanced and protected.

• Speaking as the Crime and Courts Bill returned to the Commons for its second reading, the Home Secretary confirmed the Government would accept Lord Dear’s amendment to the legislation and support amending the Public Order Act 1986 to remove the word ‘insulting’ from Section 5 of the Act.

• The debut of Google’s new Nexus 4 phone has been a less than smooth experience for the internet giant, from minute one of day one. To the no-doubt embarrassment of the management of a company that is the embodiment of “big computing”, their public-facing ecommerce systems were totally incapable of meeting the initial demand for the new Nexus 4. Play.google.com servers crashed under load in the first few minutes after the phone went up for sale on November 12, 2012, and stayed down for most of the day.

• The phone apparently sold out at some point during that day, but potential buyers couldn’t tell because Google’s servers kept crashing under the load of people continuing to try to buy it.

Health/Nutrition

• Use it or lose it. A UK politician is urging the National Health Service (NHS) to increase use of the antiplatelet drug ticagrelor (trade name Brilinta in the US, Brilique and Possia in the EU) in order to prevent the loss of British jobs.

Security

• Law Professor and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act expert Orin Kerr wrote today in his usual thorough and well-informed fashion about the legal claims in Aaron Swartz’s case. While his analysis of the law is, as usual, spot on, I nevertheless disagree with its treatment of Aaron’s case as routine and, by implication, unremarkable. I am in the process of explaining why , but want to address here a few of Orin’s arguments.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In the “national security” area of the government — the White House, the departments of state and defense, the armed services and the “intelligence community,” along with their contractors — there is less whistleblowing than in other departments of the executive branch or in private corporations. This despite the frequency of misguided practices and policies within these particular agencies that are both more well-concealed and more catastrophic than elsewhere, and thus even more needful of unauthorized exposure.

• A Florida Senate panel says police should be banned from using drones to spy on citizens.

• Yesterday, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai boasted that the U.S. was about to give him his own fleet of drones, you may have been tempted to see the mercurial leader with his hand on the joystick of an armed Predator. Please disabuse yourself of that notion. The Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday that it’s in talks to sell the Afghans drones. But the drones will be tiny, low-flying, and unarmed.

• “In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than 50 aerial drones; 10 years later, it had nearly 7,500″

• But now, our government is attempting to justify its use of drones in other nations by defining the legal justification for doing so after the fact. That would be akin to an accused murderer drafting laws on homicide after committing the act.

• The United States continues the constant pounding of the tribal region of North Waziristan in Pakistan.

• On January 10, AFP reports that six “militants” allegedly working for al-Qaeda were killed in a drone strike.

• Joe Iosbaker, the anti-war organizer who helped lead the massive protest at the NATO summit last year, condemns the French/U.S war on the people of Mali. Numerous press sources indicate the use of U.S. drones in Mali.

• I remember how, in my village, a drone attack killed my brother-in-law and four of his friends.

• The head of the New York City Police Department announced this week that the largest local law enforcement agency in the United States might soon rely on spy drones for conducting surveillance.

• Every year, Congress passes the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which makes appropriations for the defense budget. This is mandated under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which delegates powers to Congress, here stating: “The Congress shall have Power … To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” However, like much of the legislation that comes out of Washington, each years bill is stuffed with other provisions.

Cablegate

• It was in Union-occupied Alexandria in 1863 that Pvt. Henry Vanderwater, a member of the 1st District of Columbia Volunteers stationed there to defend Washington, got himself in trouble. He gave a military roster to a local newspaper, which promptly printed it. For the offense of aiding the enemy — the roster would indicate how well or poorly the town was protected — he faced a court-martial, was found guilty and received a sentence of three months hard labor and a dishonorable discharge.

• Like the New York Times got from Ellsberg -he was the third party

• Oxford University students planning to protest against the appearance of Julian Assange at the union have been branded “a gang of rabid, irrational frenzied feminists”, by the WikiLeaks’ founder’s mother.

• The WikiLeaks founder is due to speak via videolink next week and his appearance has prompted students to organise demonstrations, as The Huffington Post UK revealed on Wednesday. Reacting angrily at the proposed demonstrations, Christine Assange publicly attacked Oxford students on Twitter, branding them “wilfilly uninformed, reactionary and libellous”.

• If the impulse to live inside Julian Assange’s head should ever strike you, here is a relatively painless way of doing it. Little brother, by Cory Doctorow. And you can get out any time by just putting the book down.

• Some time in the latter days of Bush W the Oakland Bay bridge in San Francisco has been bombed. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are dead, and a city’s economic life disrupted. Who’s responsible? It doesn’t matter, because the real villain in Cory Doctorow’s fiction is the US Department of Homeland Security, who pull a group of four teenage friends off the chaotic streets, for no plotted reason, and subject them to harsh detention. Homeland Security seems to have unlimited personnel, their reach into the lives of the innocent population, guided by ubiquitous surveillance and data mining, is also unlimited. Yet not one of the solid citizenry of San Francisco finds out about “Gitmo on the Bay”.

Finance

• We recently told you about how investors are turning German real estate into a new flight-t0-safety trade as they scour global markets for investments that are a) relatively safe and b) pay some sort of return, or yield.

• [...]

• The fight against what has been dubbed “rent shock” is forcing its way onto the political agenda. Germany will hold national parliamentary elections in September 2013, and no party wants to be accused of not taking voters’ concerns about housing seriously. About half of German voters rent their houses or apartments. And even those who own their homes have often heard stories from family members or friends about skyrocketing costs, brazen brokers and overpriced hovels.

• Those rising rents that are causing such consternation in Germany are precisely the returns on investment that international investors—likely far less sophisticated to the ins and outs of German property than Goldman Sachs—are after. So the fact that Goldman Sachs seems to be lightening up its holdings of such assets suggest that they may indeed be getting out while the getting is—as they say in Germany—gut.

• Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

• The largest Democratic Party organization in the nation has called on Congress to support a 25% cut in Pentagon spending. The California Democratic Party — which includes more than 2,000 representatives of the state’s more than seven million Democrats — adopted this policy in the past year in the face of threats by Republicans in Congress to refuse to allow the U.S. to increase its credit limit.

• “While the top 1 percent of taxpayers will bear the biggest burden, many other families, affluent and poor, will pay more as well,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Saunders in a story about the effect the “fiscal cliff” agreement would have on taxpayers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The National Rifle Association (NRA) is threatening legal action if the Tucson Police Department tries to destroy the guns it acquired through a voluntary gun buyback program — thanks to legislation advanced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and then passed in Arizona.

• In the wake of the Sandy Hook, Connecticut massacre, cities around the country held voluntary gun buybacks: community-wide events where local law enforcement offers small incentives like gift cards or cash in exchange for citizens turning in their unwanted guns. Tucson officials offered $50 Safeway grocery store gift cards (funded by private donors) and collected 206 firearms. But the NRA wants those guns back in circulation.

Privacy

• The watchful eye of the German surveillance state may need something of a patch soon as a radical group of activists have launched a campaign to destroy as many CCTV surveillance cameras as possible ahead of the 19 February European Police Congress in Berlin.

Civil Rights

• China’s unexpected surge in exports last month renewed concern from analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS AG and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. that statistics from the nation can be unreliable.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The blocking of ads by French ISP Free serves as a strong reminder of the urgent necessity to ban Net access restrictions by operators. As a presidential candidate, François Hollande promised to guarantee Net neutrality and all evidence of immediate need for action is now on the table. Will Minister Fleur Pellerin commit to quickly presenting a draft law during tomorrow’s roundtable on the issue?

• The disappointment after the round table organized by the French Minister Fleur Pellerin on Net Neutrality was predictable. The debate only served to cover up the Minister’s inaction. Evading the issue by referring it to an obscure committee, the Minister postpones again any ambitions for a draft law protecting citizens.

Intellectual Monopolies

Aaron Swartz

• Aaron Swartz, founder of Demand Progress, killed himself.

• Swartz faced the threat of years in prison for what must have been a scheme to liberate scholarly articles published behind a paywall.

• I didn’t know Swartz personally, so I have no knowledge about the extent to which he was depressed, independent of his legal situation. But apparently that alone wasn’t enough to kill him.

• Having a tendency for depression does not mean one is impervious to reality. The reality of the US attack against him surely contributed to how depressed he felt.

• So we have reason to think the US government drove Swartz to it. This was not murder; the US did not aim to kill him, only to ruin his life on behalf of the copyright industry. But it probably did kill him.

• In this sense, Swartz must be compared to two other eccentric geniuses, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who, in the nineteen-seventies, committed crimes similar to, but more economically damaging than, Swartz’s. Those two men hacked A.T. & T.’s telephone system to make free long-distance calls, and actually sold the illegal devices (blue boxes) to make cash. Their mentor, John Draper, did go to jail for a few months (where he wrote one of the world’s first word processors), but Jobs and Wozniak were never prosecuted. Instead, they got bored of phreaking and built a computer. The great ones almost always operate at the edge.

• That was then. In our age, armed with laws passed in the nineteen-eighties and meant for serious criminals, the federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz approved a felony indictment that originally demanded up to thirty-five years in prison. Worse still, her legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar prosecution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative, refused to read the law in a way that would make a criminal of “everyone who uses a computer in violation of computer use restrictions—which may well include everyone who uses a computer.” Ortiz and her lawyers relied on that reading to target one of our best and brightest.

• Outpourings of grief and calls for change continue to flood the Internet after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, only 26 years old.

• Aaron was one of our community’s best and brightest, and he acheived great heights in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to major technological developments (like RSS), and an all-around Internet freedom rock star. As Wired noted, the world will miss out on decades of magnificent things Aaron would have accomplished had his time not been cut short.

• Legal experts agree that nothing Swartz was charged with was likely to be proven. It probably wasn’t even a crime.

• My colleague Graeme Philipson has already spoken glowingly of Aaron Swartz and expressed the iTWire team’s sadness at his passing, seemingly by his own hand this past weekend.

• I was saddened to hear the news of Aaron Swartz death last night. Aaron wasn’t really a mentor to me in any way. I was never really a big follower of the free culture and free software movement. What bothered me the most, was how the death occurred.

• The funeral of Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old internet activist who killed himself last week, is taking place today. The activist’s death has led to calls for reform of internet law and more open access to publicly held information. Swartz was due to go to court in April to face thirteen charges including wire fraud and computer fraud after he downloaded 4.8 million scientific and literary papers from the subscription service JSTOR via MIT’s open campus network and MIT’s JSTOR subscription.

• The felony charges could have led to thirty-five years in prison. Although the authorities were, according to the Wall Street Journal, only seeking seven years and were prepared to plea bargain down to six to eight months if Swartz pleaded guilty to all charges, he was not prepared to do any time in jail. Many feel that the threat of decades in jail may have contributed to Swartz’s state of mind; he had previously documented his depression.

• The federal prosecutor who reportedly insisted on jail time for the late Aaron Swartz was “very, very difficult to deal with,” Swartz’s lawyer told The Huffington Post.

• In a phone interview Monday, Swartz’s attorney Elliot Peters accused Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney Stephen Heymann of pursuing federal charges against Swartz to gain publicity.

• On Friday, Internet pioneer and open information activist Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26. At the time of his death, Swartz was under indictment for logging into JSTOR, a database of scholarly articles, and rapidly downloading those articles with the intent to make them public. If Swartz had lived to be convicted of the charges against him, he faced 50 years or more in a federal prison.

• Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been blamed for contributing to Swartz’s suicide. Back in 2008, young hacker Jonathan James killed himself in the midst of a federal investigation led by the same prosecutor.

• Mr. Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time.

• Mr. Peters said he spoke to Mr. Heymann again last Wednesday in another attempt to find a compromise. The prosecutor, he said, didn’t budge

• Swartz, 26, was found dead of an apparent suicide in his New York apartment Friday. Andrew Good, a Boston attorney who represented Swartz in the case last year, said he told federal prosecutors in Massachusetts that Swartz was a suicide risk.

• “Their response was, put him in jail, he’ll be safe there,” Good said.

• MIT’s cooperation with authorities in the case has been controversial on campus.

• Lawrence Lessig wrote a really important post about Aaron. I agree with him on the most parts, but I don’t agree on the morality issue of the data liberation; I think that what Aaron did was morally correct. And this is one of many reasons I’m going to miss Aaron, because he took action.

• aul Graham, the founder of angel investing firm Y Combinator, has mentored generations of Silicon Valley whiz kids. In an essay about hackers and the role they’ve played driving technology forward, he wrote that “hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness.” Those three sentences are a perfect description of one of Graham’s mentees in particular: Aaron Swartz.

• We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it and hope that somewhere in the heart of a reader, they have the strength and the magic to resurrect it. I can only say I love him. That I will always love him, and that I known for years I would. Aaron was a boy, not big, who cast a shadow across the world. But for me, he will always be that person who made me love him. He was so frustrating, and we fought. But we fought like what we were: two difficult people who couldn’t escape loving each other.

• Few people close to him doubt that an overzealous federal prosecution team contributed to Aaron Swartz’s suicide last Saturday. And quite tragically, he wasn’t the first to find himself in that position. On Monday night, BuzzFeed dug up the case of Jonathan James, a young hacker who was implicated in the largest personal identity hack in history. Not only was the same department involved in James’s case as in Swartz’s, but it was also the same prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann, who pursued each of the young men.

• Today I have shed tears over Aaron Swartz, when his name was popping up everywhere. [Yes, I am Oscar Swartz, but there is no relation that I know of]. He apparently hanged himself at the age of 26 in his Brooklyn apartment.

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