● 01.22.13

● Links 22/1/2013: Linux Outpaces Market Share of Windows, Mozilla Phone, Fedora Reviews Aplenty

Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It’s always a third player who disrupts the market or changes the market equations. Valve, the popular game distributor, has made GNU/Linux a viable platform for the gaming community. While Google has already turned it’s Android and ChromeOS into household names bringing Linux to the living room, Canonial is still struggling.

• Steam is now being used by thousands of gamers running a Linux OS, and Valve has got to the point where they are happy to start urging Windows users to make the switch.

• Proof of that comes from the screenshot you see above. It’s the Steam website, and placed prominently near the top of the page is a “Join the Beta” promotion suggesting you try Steam for Linux. There’s even a download link to get Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which removes yet another barrier to entry.

• Lenovo’s announcement that it would start selling Chromebooks to schools caused quite a buzz in FOSS-Land. It’s being interpreted as a nail in Microsoft’s coffin. “I would say, What took you so long, Lenovo?” Google+ blogger Alessandro Ebersol. “Chromebooks are hot, and it’s their prime time. You see, all that BS that the netbook is dead, is, indeed, just BS.”

• You may or may not have heard of Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was visiting the secretive country North Korea. His daughter posted a blog about N-Korea which became quite popular.

• Probably the biggest event in the software wars was the evident dominance of Android/Linux v iOS in smart thingies. While Apple came to dominate this space with slick gadgets and promotion,

• When visiting Steam download page from a web browser running on a Linux based OS, you are pointed to Linux version of Steam and a promo ad about Steam Linux beta is shown.

• This is a new and interesting project that could be really useful both for companies that for private users, Guacamole is an HTML5 remote desktop gateway that provides access to desktop environments using remote desktop protocols like VNC and RDP. A centralized server acts as a tunnel and proxy, allowing access to multiple desktops through a web browser.

• Eric Schmidt blogs about his trip to the country, full of Linux and restrictions.

Server

Audiocasts/Shows

• We want to refresh it a bit, so we thought we’d ask you, dear listeners, what new category you’d like to hear. Perhaps an old on that you’d like reinstated, or something new that you think would fit in with the TuxRadar style. Or perhaps you think we’re perfect and wouldn’t change a thing.

• Whatever it is, pop it in the comments and we’ll bear it in mind when we start the new series later in the week.

Kernel Space

• Linux now supports F2fs, a filesystem that is specially designed for storage media with flash chips. The developers say that Btrfs is now faster to complete certain tasks and that Ext4 is more efficient when handling small files.

• The Linux kernel is still being ported to new hardware. One of the latest processor families that has been receiving a Linux kernel port is the Synopsys ARC700 series.

• Last year I wrote about Google becoming more involved with the Coreboot project for an open-source BIOS replacement for many motherboards/laptops. Google has been very interested in Coreboot since for their Chrome OS on the OEM Chromebooks they can achieve “super fast boot times” while being stable, secure, and can be quite customized with the open-source project. Google continues to invest heavily into the upstream Coreboot project.

• With we are only about half-way through the development of the Linux 3.8 kernel, there’s already exciting features beginning to enter the development spotlight for Linux 3.9. One of the features coming to the Linux 3.9 kernel will be grand changes to the very common “HDA Intel” audio codec drivers.

• HDA Intel is widely-used for integrated sound adapters and providing HDMI/DisplayPort audio support. The Linux driver for HDA Intel supports around 50 different controllers and 300+ different codecs. Up to this point it’s been a maintenance burden handling all of the differences in this audio kernel driver as part of ALSA, but it’s to be largely improved with Linux 3.9.

• Last week on the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for an Aggressive Low Memory Booster. This is potentially an interesting feature for Linux systems with limited amounts of RAM.

• A developer from Samsung India, Pintu Kumar, proposed introducing an “Aggressive Low Memory Booster” feature for the Linux kernel to boost the available free memory of the system when under extreme memory pressure, which should particularly benefit embedded Linux devices with limited amounts of RAM.

• On Sunday was the release of the xf86-video-intel 2.20.19 DDX driver. This is the 19th point release in the long-standing Intel X.Org 2.20 series that’s been largely led by Chris Wilson out of Intel OTC.

Graphics Stack

• Catalyst 13.1 for Linux was released on Thursday as the first AMD Linux binary blob of 2013. This driver is notable since it officially supports X.Org Server 1.13.

• It’s been quite a while since delivering any Linux graphics benchmarks of the NVIDIA ION, the platform for pairing integrated NVIDIA graphics with an Intel Atom processor for small form factor PCs. While NVIDIA’s ION is basically defunct, for those still having a nettop or netbook that’s ION-based, here’s a performance comparison of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics between the open-source Nouveau driver and the NVIDIA 310.xx binary Linux graphics driver.

• AMD is getting back in the Linux game with a huge driver release that should be able to save face on the open source platform.

• It’s not clear why AMD chose to virtually ignore the Linux platform in the last couple of years, but it seems they are back with a vengeance.

• Version 13.1 of AMD’s proprietary Linux graphics drivers apparently fixes a performance issue with Valve games. The new version of Catalyst is also said to solve a similar problem with graphics cards in the “Southern Islands” generation. Both problems are listed in the “Resolved Issues” section of the new version’s release notes, although no details are given. Some information is available in the release notes for the Catalyst 12.11 beta that preceded version 13.1 – according to this document, the driver offers significant performance improvements with the Linux variant of Left for Dead 2; however, this version of the game has yet to be released by Valve.

• A bit of new code was committed this week for Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe software driver that attempts to provide modest OpenGL performance as a software fallback by taking advantage of LLVM to exploit multiple CPU cores and the latest instruction set extensions on modern processors. Unfortunately, the rate of advancement for LLVMpipe still isn’t too fast.

• As can be seen when looking at the Mesa LLVMpipe changes through the Git web front-end, hitting mainline Mesa yesterday was enabling integer texture support, fixes for integer color buffers, and some trivial code clean-ups. Going back further, there’s been some more fixes, Automake support for LLVMpipe, and some other minor work, but unfortunately nothing too exciting.

• Intel’s Mesa DRI driver now is unconditionally enabling floating-point textures. Up to this point, the floating-point textures feature of GL3 hasn’t been enabled by default due to patent worries.

• In addition to the Intel driver now always enabling floating-point textures, a patented feature but something that’s required for GL3 compliance, the Intel DRI driver is set to play better with S3TC, the also patent-troubled but widely-used S3 Texture Compression.

• Ian Romanick sent out three new patches today on the mesa-dev list about “Enable some S3TC” for Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver. “This is mostly a re-spin of the patch that I sent out many months ago. The main change is that when on-line compression is not available, only a subset of extension strings is advertised. This was based on feedback from a developer whose application does submit uncompressed data with the expectation that the driver will compress it.”

Benchmarks

• Courtesy of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center are 13 new Linux micro-benchmarks that have been created based upon the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. These brand new test profiles provide test coverage of systemd boot performance, timing of various common system tasks, GPU residency times, PowerTop wake-up monitoring, and much more.

Applications

• flareGet is a full featured, multi-threaded and multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux. It supports in-built browser integration with all the browsers.

Proprietary

• Next month Opera will be rolling out “Opera Ice”, a new web-browser for smart-phones and tablets. This mobile Opera browser won’t be built on their Presto engine but rather the popular WebKit engine. Initially this WebKit-browser is just targeting the mobile space but it’s expected to eventually land on the desktop too.

Instructionals/Technical

• We know that the Linux community is growing. It’s getting bigger every year as it moves across industries and geographies. Our Who Writes Linux paper documents each year the increasing number of contributors, sponsors and the pace of development. Only the collaborative development model can deliver and support this kind of rapid growth.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine, the widely-known open-source software for running Microsoft Windows programs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, now weighs in at more than three million lines of code. In this article is some insight into its pace of development, how the CodeWeavers company dominates Wine’s development, and other intriguing statistics about this project that’s been around for two decades.

Games

• The word on the street seems to be that Linux is set to be a commercially viable gaming platform. And the way it looks right now, this might actually prove to be true. There’s still some uncertainty amongst both developers and gamers though. At the core of a lot of it is this: Developers are hesitant to make games for a market as small as this, and gamers are hesitant to adopt it as a gaming platform because there are so few games for it.

• Desurium, an open source Desura client, is looking for more developers. The announcement was posted in the Linux Gaming subreddit. Currently, the Desurium client on Linux outperforms the official Desura client, but there are many bugs which needs fixing and more features need to be added.

• There’s only 8 days until the end of Game Consoles Worldwide’s Kickstarter campaign for their open source handheld, GCW-Zero. With another $28,000 to go, the GCW-Zero is very close to hitting it’s funding goal of $130,000; but also dangerously close to missing it.

• Hi everyone I decided to do a wiki for Crowdfunded games instead of doing a page like our game sales page as that only needs to track “current” stuff so here’s our new wiki for it!

• Just how important has Linux become? Very. Just weeks after hearing that Steam would be launching for the world’s favorite open-source desktop OS, AMD has just announced new Catalyst drivers made specifically for — you guessed it — Linux. The Catalyst 13.1 Proprietary Linux Graphics were just let loose into the wild, and it provides budding Linux gamers with bona fide GPU support for a huge swath of AMD Radeon graphics cards. Everything from the Radeon HD 5000 series to the Radeon E6760 embedded family is supported, as well as cards that are stuffed within all-in-one PCs, integrated GPS, and AMD Mobility GPUs.

• It’s not every day that a reporter’s interview is derailed by an 85-year-old drunk woman who hits a power pole in Oakland, cuts power to a developer’s home office, and forces him to Mi-Fi on a Skype call while his laptop’s battery slowly dies.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• There’s no real way to compare how the various desktop Linux distros are doing against Windows 8, Microsoft’s newly crowned flagship product, since Linux isn’t offered preinstalled in any meaningful way by the major OEMs. What we do know is that the new Windows would seem to be failing to excite buyers; folks haven’t been rushing to the big box stores to purchase a new desktop or laptop running the new operating system.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The final KDE 4.10 release candidate is now out, with features for the final release including faster indexing, better notifications, and Qt Quick

• It turns out that KDE’s “Reject Cross-Domain Cookies” feature of the KDE Libraries has been broken since 2002 and was only fixed yesterday. Thiago Macieira dived into the problem yesterday to see why all of his web cookies would be forgotten after a kded restart. The problem originates within KDE’s KCookieJar within the HTTP KIOSlave of kdelibs.

• Amarok team has released 2.7 version of Amarok, the ‘feature rich’ music player which is part of the KDE project. This version fixes more than 500 bugs after the 2.6 release. The version is code named “minor tune” because list of new features added in Amarok are not pages long. Some of these changes were made during the Google Summer of code 2012.

• Amarok 2.7 is available on a wide range of Linux platforms; a Mac OS X port is still in development and a Windows port of 2.7 is not available yet. Download and installation instructions are available. Source code is available as a tarball or from the KDE git repository. Amarok is licensed under the GPLv2.

• KDE developers have fixed a bug which has been there for almost a decade. “Reject Cross-Domain Cookies” feature of KDE was broken since 2002 and has been fixed this week. This bug was responsible for loss of cookies after a kded restart. KDE’s KCookieJar within the HTTP KIOSlave of kdelibs was responsible for this bug.

• Qt packages in Arch Linux official repository are out of date, and it will take sometime for the packages to compile it and push it to repositories. However, if you are too impatient, you can download the packages for Arch Linux x64 from this dropbox folder. All the Qt components have been packaged, except qtdocs and qtwebkit.

• A Phoronix reader has announced his work on SDDM within the Phoronix Forums this weekend. SDDM is a very lightweight display management that takes advantage of Qt’s QML.

• SDDM doesn’t have feature parity to GDM, KDM, or LightDM, but is just focusing upon being a lightweight display manager that gets the job done for most Linux desktop users while being very slim in terms of code size and dependencies. SDDM just depends upon PAM, Xlib, and Qt but none of the KDE libraries or anything else. This new display manager forgoes any support for remote connections, XDMCP, and other advanced functionality supported by many of the alternatives albeit seldom used by a majority of Linux desktop users.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Vincent Untz will be speaking at FOSDEM early next month in Brussels to “clarify the directions the GNOME project is taking, and to explain the rationale for various decisions.” He’s hoping that after this Belgian conference people will better understand the course of the GNOME desktop and begin to rebuild trust in the project.

• The second set of 2013 interviews for the annual Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting conference were posted to the FOSDEM web-site this week. Perhaps the most interesting interview is that of Vicent Untz talking about his main track talk.

• Andrea Veri is one of the five SysAdmin of GNOME Web-Infrastructure and GNOME Foundation Membership Committee Chairman.

• For a desktop that was supposed to become defunct two years ago, GNOME 2 remains surprisingly alive. Linux Mint offers a direct fork in Mate, and recreates GNOME 2 with a series of extensions in Cinnamon. A new distribution called SolusOS now offers Consort, a fork of GNOME fallback, which resembles GNOME 2. Meanwhile, the GNOME project prepares to support a set of core extensions to reproduce the GNOME 2 experience. Hardly a week goes by without some distribution announcing a release that includes some form of GNOME 2.

• All this activity is understandable, and even admirable to a degree. It’s testimony to users’ anger over GNOME 3 and the ability of free software to empower users.

• However, increasingly I worry about the effect that these efforts will have on the future of the desktop. In the stampede to return to the past, the ability to innovate frequently seems to be trampled without anyone caring.

• The Gnome development team has announced the release of Gnome 3.7.4. This is adevelopment release, and stricrtly recommended for those who are willing to test the upcoming Gnome 3.8 features. That said, not everything has been updated in this relase. Some of the core applications such as Nautilus, Tracker and Gnome Boxes have not been updated for this release because of some build bugs and other problems.

• Gnome 3.8 is the next major release of Gnome desktop environment, and one of its lead developer, Matthias Clasen has published some interesting information about its current status. For our readers, the good news is that most apps are ready for the next release, just some minor fixes here an there. If you want to test the release now, grab the Gnome 3.7.2 sources and compile them. The 3.7.2 tarballs were released just a few days before.

Distributions

New Releases

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availablity of version 2.5.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release which contains various security fixes, fixes for the r8169 NIC driver and fixes for squid.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mageia’s creators came away from the experience of Mandriva with a firm commitment to creating a Linux distribution with strong community governance

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• After a long waiting and continuous delay, finally fedora 18 got release on 15 Jan (f18 Schedule), as per blogs/ML communications this delay is due to critical bug in Anaconda, Windows 8 secure boot, fedup (Fedora Upgrader) …etc, but it’s always good to delay instead of buggy release.

• After much delay, the Spherical Cow graces us with its presence. How does the final version of Fedora 18 stack up?

• Fedora 18 has finally appeared in its final form after many delays. Largely responsible: a new Anaconda installer that has seen much criticism, mostly from users who like complicated manual partitioning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

• The next release of Fedora, Fedora 19 may ship with MariaDB as the default database instead of the more popular MySQL. This decision is mainly taken because Fedora developers have always strived to ship the latest and greatest open source software in Fedora Operation System, and steps taken by Oracle are making MySQL to move more towards being closed source.

• Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The file, if ran with correct permissions, will completely disable your firewall! So much for the idea that Tails always routes everything through Tor! Where this news has been posted and comments allowed, mysterious “anonymous” users have expressed their low brow intelligence leaving comments such as, “Well you need to be root to run it so it doesn’t matter, if you have root you can do anything!”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As you probably know, there will be no alpha milestones for Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail and Unity has got some minor, but interesting changes since the Raring development has begun, so I though I’d make a video showing some of these features so you can see what’s new.

• Back in October I spent 2 weeks in Ghana helping a team begin a deployment of 100 desktops shipped to Africa ICT Right in Ghana by Computer Reach based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately due to a series of unforeseen events, we weren’t able to see the deployment of all 100 systems to completion. While we were able to do a lot of useful work, when the last of the Computer Reach team left only 10 had actually been fully deployed. I summarized our trip here. In November I wrote this update which described the pickup of the systems for other regions, and the deployment of another 10 systems to Madina No.1 School.

• On Friday benchmarks were delivered of the Atom-based NVIDIA ION platform with the Nouveau driver against NVIDIA’s binary blob. Those results were favorable towards the reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA driver. For finishing off the week are more benchmarks from this aging NVIDIA ION system but this time seeing how well the low-end 64-bit Ubuntu performance is when comparing the latest 13.04 development image to the 12.10 and 12.04.1 LTS releases.

• Over the years, many people have speculated about when Ubuntu will be ready for the casual computer user. Some individuals have compared Linux distributions to other operating systems, such as OS X.

• In this article, I will be offering a unique comparison between Ubuntu 12.10 and OS X Mountain Lion. Since I have access to both operating systems in my home office, I was able to take the time to narrow down where each operating system excels and where improvement is still needed. I have also attempted to do so without bias or platform-specific hype.

• The maximize and minimize transitions for windows in the Ubuntu operating systems have been perfected over time, but now a patch has been implemented for Compiz to further refine the effects.

• If you are an Ubuntu Linux user and rely upon Intel integrated graphics, Ubuntu developers could use your help in trying out Intel’s SNA as they decide whether to enable this experimental acceleration architecture in Ubuntu 13.04.

Flavours and Variants

• My last review of Linux Mint was for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 13 “Maya”. Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” was released back on Nov. 20, 2112, but with all of the hustle and bustle of the winter holidays, I didn’t have time to install it and write up a review until now.

• My first exposure to Ultimate edition was with 3.4. I installed the 64-bit one to my newly bought Core i7 3rd gen. laptop with 8 GB RAM last year, but had to remove it bugged by it’s instability. First the default interface is devoid of much aesthetics, Second, effects are too loud and most important, third, instability – not a single day passed with something or the other crashing in the background or my laptop suddenly stopped responding and would require a hard reset. First two issues on aesthetics and too much of effects I took care myself with 24 hours of usage but I couldn’t handle the third one and replaced it with supremely stable Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon.

Devices/Embedded

• I have to give Kyle Rankin all the credit for my Raspberry Pi collection. I never really felt geeky enough to do anything with an Arduino, and for some reason I mentally lumped the RPi into the same world. Boy was I short-sighted! Thankfully Kyle showed me the light, and I managed to snag some of the new 512MB model B units. You’ll be hearing about the Raspberry Pi from Kyle as well, but this month, I want to introduce the RPi to those folks who have been hesitant to buy one, thinking they weren’t geeky enough. I had to ask a lot of dumb questions when my Raspberry Pis arrived; hopefully, I can save you that embarrassment.

Phones

Ballnux

• If you’ve been looking at your options for a new phone, and have been considering a Galaxy S3 Mini, chances are you noticed the lack of NFC support in the current model. Later this month, however, that will change, and Samsung is launching an NFC-capable version in the UK this month.

• JK Shin confirms that a midsize stylus-powered Note tab will be released as soon as February.

Android

• As everyone knows, Google’s flagship device made by LG, the Nexus 4, is a pretty hard catch. It seems that Google was a little bit skeptical about LG being able to sell the new member of the Nexus family, both parties having all kinds of rumours (like halting the production for a revmaped device) to deal with.

• So in the world of Google Nexus devices I can honestly say that yes, the Nexus 4 is still being made and is still being delivered to those who ordered them. The rumors of the phones having evaporated or production being halted are just not true. I received mine two days and and since I own other Nexus devices I couldn’t help but put it to a full comparison test against my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 to see just how it fits into the Nexus family.

• Android 4.1 and above has a nifty feature–Wi-Fi Direct–which lets you send a file from one Android device to another quickly, conveniently and free.

• Earlier this year, VIA released a tiny $49 ARM-powered motherboard it called the Android PC System (APC) in an effort to ride the wave the Raspberry Pi Foundation accidentally started with its $35 Linux computer for budding young developers. Today, it’s announcing a pair of follow-ups: the APC Rock is a $79 bare motherboard, and the APC Paper is a $99 version that is identical, except it loses the VGA port and comes in a recycled cardboard case designed to look like a small hardcover book. The Rock is available now, and the Paper has a March pre-order date. The original APC will continue to be sold with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) for $49.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Our friends in Europe have been enjoying the Archos GamePad since December, but Archos wasn’t interested in letting us US folks in on the fun at the same time. Heck, the company didn’t even give a peep as to when we might be seeing the gaming tablet in the United States at CES. We knew it’d be Q1, but had no clue which month to expect it.

• The tablet market may be saturated with Android tablets, but it’s not very often that you find a well-spec’d tablet boasting Ubuntu. Italian company DaVinci Mobile Technology has opened up pre-orders for its new 10.1 inch, full HD tablet. The tablet will feature a dual boot system with Android 4.0 installed alongside Ubuntu 12. Named, Nibbio (Kite in Italian), the tablet is available in Wifi and 3G versions, both costing €309. The cost of securing a pre-order however, is a mere €29. What’s more, placing a pre-order entitles you to an additional year on your tablet’s warranty. The tablets will begin shipment midway through March 2013.

• The Agora offers some interesting specs, including dual SIM slots and a phablet-size display. It’s scheduled to reach U.S. shores in about a month.

Free Software/Open Source

• I think it’s interesting how most people who claim to care about freedom don’t have a ham radio (amateur radio) license, especially you folks in open source.

• You reject and rebel against the Monopolists in Redmond and the Fruit Devices from Cupertino recognizing that they are dictating how you will and will not use the thing you are spending all your money on.

• It goes without saying that the open source software movement has created some amazing things in the decades it’s been active and running. Where code has been shared, random developers have come up with some great new ideas and features and the open source goal of contribution has achieved its mission.

• In line with ITA’s efforts in spreading a Free and Open Source software culture for the past two years, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in support of the Open Source Intel Global Challenge in Oman was signed here recently between the Information Technology Authority (ITA) and Intel Corporation.

• The future home of Vert.x will most likely be at the Eclipse Foundation. Project leader Tim Fox recommended that the JVM-polyglot asynchronous event-driven framework should look to the Eclipse Foundation as a “little more ‘business friendly’” home for the project’s assets and governance. Mike Millinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, welcomed Fox’s recommendation. A call for a +1/-1 vote from the original Vert.x community, seems so far to be predominantly +1, with no serious objections.

• On the Wikimedia Foundation’s tech blog, Technical Communications Manager Guillaume Paumier has announced that Wikipedia and other services will move from Tampa, Florida to the company’s new primary data centre in Ashburn, Virginia over the coming days. With this move, the company aims to “improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites”. Paumier said that service limitations are expected during the transition: “Our sites will be in read-only mode for some time, and may be intermittently inaccessible.” Migration will begin on 22 January and is scheduled to be completed by 24 January.

• I’ve mentioned the reported decline in Wikipedia contributors, and wondered out loud whether the organization sees the dip as an acceptable price to pay for heightening the standards for content contributions to its open source encyclopedia. “Our No. 1 strategic priority, as a movement,” she continues, tapping the table for emphasis, “is to increase contributorship.”

• I think we can all agree that R2-D2 is one of the most lovable robots ever created. Compared to his more terrifying contemporaries, the little guy just oozes charm. Now one man has made his very own R2-D2 using a Raspberry Pi linux computer.

• Whisper Systems, the mobile security startup Twitter acquired in late 2011, is now an open source project which has a new official home outside the microblogging service.

Events

• Here in the District of Columbia, a loosely-knit group comprised of social workers, librarians, technologists, environmentalists, disability rights advocates, and educators has come together in the past few years. This coalition, known as the Broadband Bridge, sees digital justice and digital inclusion as a cornerstone towards self-determination in traditionally underserved communities.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Three major players are battling for a spot in the highly competitive smartphone market with their open source operating systems — Jolla, Mozilla and Canonical. While Jolla has some deals to bring their devices to the market, Mozilla has a lead here.

• Three major players are battling for a spot in the highly competitive smartphone market with their open source operating systems — Jolla, Mozilla and Canonical. While Jolla has some deals to bring their devices to the market, Mozilla has a lead here.

• Three major players are battling for a spot in the highly competitive smartphone market with their open source operating systems — Jolla, Mozilla and Canonical. While Jolla has some deals to bring their devices to the market, Mozilla has a lead here.

• The Mozilla Foundation is developing an open source security framework called Minion and plans to release a beta version in the first quarter of 2013. Minion will allow developers to subject their web applications to a security check. The framework will target applications with well-established pen testing tools such as OWASP’s Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), Skipfish and NMAP. Further testing tools are planned to be incorporated into the framework as plugins.

• Mozilla has released Firefox 18.0.1, a first update to Firefox 18, which was released ten days ago. According to the release notes, and the lack of any additional entries on the security advisories page, the release is a stability update addressing three issues.

• He’s taking over as Mozilla fights for the hearts and minds of devs who might once have defaulted to Firefox, but are now being dazzled with open-source choices.

SaaS/Big Data

• Worried about draconian Internet laws? Creeping surveillance? The inability to share with others without being criminalized? The Internet is still a tool of tremendous power, but a deep rot has set in. We have caught it early and we are fighting to stop this rot, but there are other options we can begin exploring to hedge our bets, enhance our current efforts of fighting against corporate monopolies, and eventually, build an Internet of the people, by the people, for the people – big-telecom monopolies not welcomed.

• The Open Compute Project, backed by Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), is gaining momentum, as evidenced by the increasing attendance at the Open Compute Summit. This week, the summit attracted more than 1,900 attendees that were interested in checking out the latest and greatest in Open Compute Project technologies, innovations and products. There has been a bit of buzz about some of the innovations unveiled at the show, and this can only mean good things for the open source cloud computing market.

Databases

• Jetair, the expanding Belgian arm of the Tui Group, is bringing in open source database technology supplier SkySQL.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• It’s hard to believe LibreOffice has only been around about two years, so thoroughly has it come to dominate as the leading free and open source productivity suite, but late last week a release candidate for its next major version appeared.

BSD

• FreeBSD and NetBSD are UNIX variants that are known for their stability and performance. If you are using a GNU/Linux distro in Raspberry Pi for sometime, and want to try something new, you can now download these images from the Raspberry Pi site and try them. Make sure you have a 4 gB or more SD card to dd these images into. Also, as they are bleeding edge releases, be sure to expect some bugs and crashes.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Since last week when writing about the LLVM/Clang compiler being ported to GNU Hurd, readers have asked via the forums, email, etc about the state of this open-source kernel backed by the Free Software Foundation. GNU Hurd and its Mach micro-kernel continue to be developed, just not at a rapid pace like the Linux kernel.

• Version 0.8.2 of the cross-platform accounting and bookkeeping package Gnuaccounting has been released. The Java-based application supports the creation of invoices, shipping notices and receipts with OpenOffice and LibreOffice and can interface with online banking accounts through FinTS (formerly HBCI) as well as store data in MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Project Releases

• OpenCart v1.5.5, a free PHP shopping cart system, released with a lot of new features and fixed issues.

Public Services/Government

• Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government.

• The Norwegian free software association for municipalities, Friprogforeningen, is starting to offer cloud-based open source applications. This means municipalities can use open source tools such as the Redmine project management and bug-tracking tool and the OTRS service management and helpdesk software, without having to install and maintain the applications. The cloud itself is running free and open source software.

Openness/Sharing

• Electrical engineer Gary Krysztopik has been driving his self-built, open-framed, three-wheeled electric “hotrod” on the roads and highways of San Antonio (TX) for over three years now, but folks still can’t help staring as he zooms past. While also working on gas-to-electric conversions (including a VW Bug and a Porsche Carrera), he’s been busy refining and tweaking the design for his “battery box on wheels” and is now preparing to release the EZ-EV car as open source plans, build-it-yourself kits and complete vehicles.

Open Access/Content

• As a scientist your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal’s paywall is unacceptable

• The visitor was clever — switching identifications to avoid being blocked by M.I.T.’s security system — but eventually the university believed it had shut down the intrusion, then spent weeks reassuring furious officials at Jstor that the downloading had been stopped.

• [...]

• He described attending two meetings with the chancellor of M.I.T., Eric Grimson. Each time there also was a representative of the general counsel’s office. At both meetings, he said, members of M.I.T.’s legal team assured him and the chancellor that the government had compelled M.I.T. to collect and hand over the material. In that first meeting, he recalled, “I said to the chancellor, ‘Why are you destroying my son?’ He said, ‘We are not.’ ”

• Dolan has since deleted his entire account after he either came to his senses or someone suggested strongly that he think better of it. While you can understand his desire to defend his wife’s efforts, the tweets aren’t just somewhat offensive following Aaron’s suicide, but misleading as well. To argue that the prosecution was fair because they offered him a 6 month plea deal is complete and utter hogwash. As many have pointed out, it doesn’t appear that Aaron should have been facing any federal charges at all. The 35 years is completely relevant, because that’s part of the hammer that his wife was using to pressure him into taking the 6 month plea deal so that she and her assistant could get a big headline about another “guilty” plea. To act like the 6 month offer is some sort of “leniency” is insane when you know the details of the case and everything else that came with it.

• Dolan also — conveniently — ignores that the government supposedly told Aaron’s lawyers that if he didn’t take the deal, the next one they’d come back with would be worse, and that if the case actually got to court, they’d try to get the judge (notorious for strict sentences) to throw the book at Swartz.

Programming

• Learning the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) programming language from scratch can be an arduous affair. Fortunately, budding developers that want to code in this language have a good range of introductory texts available to read, both in-print and to download. There are also many quality books that help programmers that have reached an intermediate level deepen their understanding of the language.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C announces Beihang University as a new center for W3C technical staff and leadership activities in China. W3C anticipates that a dedicated presence in China will enhance opportunities for collaboration among Chinese companies, Web developers, and research institutes, and W3C’s full international community, including Members from more than 40 countries.

• “China is in the midst of an innovation boom,” said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “In IT, Chinese companies have excelled in instant messaging, online games, smartphones, and search, and there is a flourishing Chinese browser ecosystem. In the past two years W3C has benefited from greater Chinese participation, and we look forward to that trend accelerating through the efforts of local industry and Beihang University. Global participation in W3C enables our community to identify global needs for the Web, and drive solutions.”

• In its new capacity, Beihang University invites Chinese Web developers, industry, and academia to assume a greater role in global Web innovation.

Leftovers

• Is Facebook Graph Search A Concerning Matter? Syn Waker’s picture Posted by Syn Waker on20Jan2013

• As we all heard about, Facebook started to roll out a beta version of its Graph Search, a feature that “gives people the power and the tools they need to search through the content on the site”. At what cost?

• We’ve already seen how Facebook “handles” the privacy of the humble Facebook users (see face recognition and social web), but now, Mark’s social network has made a bold step by making impossible to hide your timeline from being indexed in the ‘walled’ search results (altough individual posts can be hidden), and those who opted out before this feature would be disabled, they would still be forced to change the privacy settings for every single post they wanted to be hidden from curious eyes.

• I am delighted to have read over the weekend, and to have been officially presented today, with a keenly awaited report into the practice of media freedom and pluralism in the European Union. The lead author is Prof. Vaire Vike Freiberga (The other members were Professor Herta Däubler-Gmelin, Professor Luís Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro and Ben Hammersley)

• It is remarkably wide-ranging; it touches on the work of many of my Commission colleagues.

• Since we launched Google Handwrite last summer for smartphones and tablets, we’ve been improving recognition quality and also working on a number of features to make it easier and faster to handwrite your searches on Google. You can now distinguish between ambiguous characters, overlap your characters, and write multiple characters at a time in Chinese.

• No matter how you mix it, it’s better to go with Value-Added, student surveys, or both: As Dropout Nation noted last year, the accuracy of classroom observations is so low that even in a multiple measures approach to evaluation in which value-added data and student surveys account for the overwhelming majority of the data culled from the model (72.9 percent, and 17.2 percent of the evaluation in one case), the classroom observations are of such low quality that they bring down the accuracy of the overall performance review. This point is raised again in the latest group of models floated by Gates in its final MET study. Only one model matches the level of accuracy Value-Added has on its own — and that’s because observations only account for two percent of the data in the model. The usefulness of the next model, one of the three Gates prefers because observations account for a quarter of the data used (while Value-Added accounts for half), declines by nine-hundreds of a standard deviation based on Dropout Nation‘s analysis of the MET report’s data; another model, in observations, Value-Added and student surveys account for one-third each, the loss of accuracy is nearly two-tenths of a standard deviation.

• Yet the Gates Foundation insists on pushing a “multiple measures approach” that is useless to teachers, school leaders, families, and children alike:

Science

Health/Nutrition

• Has the day come when access to basic health care is worse in Canada than in a refugee camp? It has, thanks to cuts to the Interim Federal Health Program. Refugee claimants from 27 designated countries of origin, announced on Dec. 15, will now be denied almost all health care services.

Security

• There are reports of the discovery of a remote code execution flaw in the Spring Framework, but many are not mentioning that the flaw in question was fixed over a year ago and that what has been found is actually a new way to exploit that old flaw. In 2011, a “variable” severity flaw, identified as CVE-2011-2730, was discovered by two researchers in versions 3.0.0 to 3.0.5, 2.5.0 to 2.5.6SEC02 and 2.5.0 to 2.5.7SR01. The flaw involved Expression Language (EL) and its use in JSP; EL expressions were evaluated by default and in some circumstances were evaluated twice, which could lead to information disclosure to an attacker if there was a location in an application where an unfiltered parameter was placed in a tag that would be evaluated. A paper covered the details.

• Security is a very important factor in my choice of distributions and software solutions, and I tend to hold a very strict view of what it means from a modern computing standpoint. In one sentence, my stance on security is this: A sound and complete security posture has to take both physical and network security into account.

• Anything less will not fly. So when I came across an article that attempts to sell that view short for the sole purpose of promoting a product, it didn’t sit well with me. The offending article was written by Frank Karlitschek, founder and CTO of Owncloud, a cloud storage service and solution.

• In More to Security than Encryption, he takes this skewed stance that it is (somewhat) ok to say something is secure even though it lacks encryption. He then makes several points to support that stance.

• Every year at the end of December, computer hackers from all over the world gather in Germany – this time in Hamburg – for the Chaos Communication Congress, four days of talks, meetings and workshops.

• With “Not my department,” as the theme of the year – a tongue in cheek reminder that hackers should accept their responsibilities when it comes to politics and social justice – 29c3, short for 29th Chaos Communication Congress, reveals the growing influence of a certain type of hacker, one increasingly aware of its political role.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• On Monday, President Obama will talk about protecting children during his speech. But he knows that over the next four years he will be asked to make decisions that will result in the killing of the children, not because he is an evil man but rather because he has readily and rationally accommodated himself to the necessity of evil.

• Yemeni military officials say eight people have been killed in two suspected U.S. drone strikes in Abieda valley in central Marib province.

• Residents contacted by The Associated Press say that at least two of the eight people killed in Saturday evening’s strikes were known al-Qaida militants of Saudi nationality. They identified one as Ismail bin Jamil.

• They say at least three of the bodies were charred beyond recognition.

• Four suspected al-Qaeda militants in Marib province were killed by an American drone strike early this evening. An earlier drone strike in the same area had missed the target.

• [...]

• The first attack that missed the militants was in a populated area, and angered the locals.

• …CIA’s controversial drone operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan would effectively be given an exemption…

• Among the subjects covered in the playbook are the process for adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when U.S. citizens can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or U.S. military conduct drone strikes outside war zones.

• US Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson said Saturday the US respects Pakistan’s integrity and will not leave Pakistan alone.

• The US has been using armed drones in the ‘War on Terror’ since the year 2001. Though they are used in targeted killing, civilian casualties cannot be prevented. This raises legal and ethical questions.

• The increasing resort to drones by President Barack Obama will over the long term usher in “a new arms race and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent, destabilized and polarized between those who have drones and those who are victims of them”, a leading terrorism expert has warned. One of the distinctive elements of President Obama’s approach to counterterrorism has been his embrace of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to target terrorist operatives abroad, says Michael J Boyle in an article for International Affairs, a British journal published every two months.

• Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta can see a world in which the use of drones is no longer a staple in the United States’ counterterrorism toolkit, according to an interview with ABC News.

• 1. Take 30 seconds to join 60,000 others in pushing for a ban on weaponized drones.

• The leader of Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish party survived a brazen attack after a man jumped onstage and leveled a gas pistol at him while he was delivering a speech during a party gathering in the capital Saturday.

• Why aren’t film director Kathryn Bigelow’s claimed government sources, including employees of the CIA, in jail like Pfc. Bradley Manning? Or, at the very least, being investigated for their role in one of the most damaging leaks of national security information in U.S. history?

• One’s got to love the sound of a Frenchman’s Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like… a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

• Apparently, it’s a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people – with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years – in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

• Torture remains a serious concern in numerous detention facilities across Afghanistan, despite significant efforts by the Government and international partners to address the problem, according to a new United Nations report released on Sunday.

• The report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) states that more than half of 635 conflict-related detainees interviewed experienced ill-treatment and torture, particularly in 34 facilities of the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS) between October 2011 and October 2012.

• A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in the shut-down of the military’s notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal bodies and sharing some degree of blame for the attacks. Shaffer also adds to a picture emerging of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit as having actively prevented other areas of intelligence, law enforcement and defense from properly carrying out their counterterrorism functions in the run-up to September 2001.

• Zero Dark Thirty is a spy thriller about the tracking and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Good police work did it, the film says, and it aims to show what (in the extraordinary circumstances) good police work amounts to. Action movies have been the director Kathryn Bigelow’s métier, and Zero Dark Thirty is tense and well-paced. It has the kind of proficiency one associates with, say, The Hunt for Red October. It does not mean to compete with a film like The Battle of Algiers. There is no question here of taking up a complex historical subject and exploring it with a semblance of human depth. Rather, the movie accepts the ready prejudices and fears of its American audience, and builds up pressure for two hours to prepare the thrill and relief at the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The first two hours skip forward selectively to cover the trajectory of ten years. The final twenty-five minutes of action are portrayed almost in real time.

• Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

• We’ve all been over-inundated with coverage of war, whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan for a decade. We see the stories on television and in the movies and read the articles in magazines. Slowly, a portion of the populace becomes desensitized to the violence. It is a sad casualty of a seemingly never-ending struggle, and an indictment on our ability to compartmentalize and put our heads in the sand.

• Why the hurry? Pentagon insiders say that he rubbed civilian officials the wrong way — not because he went all “mad dog,” which is his public image, and the view at the White House, but rather because he pushed the civilians so hard on considering the second- and third-order consequences of military action against Iran. Some of those questions apparently were uncomfortable. Like, what do you do with Iran once the nuclear issue is resolved and it remains a foe? What do you do if Iran then develops conventional capabilities that could make it hazardous for U.S. Navy ships to operate in the Persian Gulf? He kept saying, “And then what?”

• Over a week ago, a federal judge ruled documents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was ordered to produce in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit could not be subjected to a protective order.

• The development has received minimal attention, but the case seems important, as the government sought to use an innovative tactic to provide documents it owed an organization while at the same time preventing the public from reading the documents. Had the judge allowed the protective order or “clawback,” it would have been a complete perversion of FOIA.

• The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) submitted a FOIA request on July 26, 2011, for documents “regarding a joint National Security Agency (“NSA”) and Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) pilot program, which has not been publicly named, designed to monitor all internet traffic routed to several defense contractors and attempts to detect whether there are malicious programs within this internet traffic designed to compromise the defense contractor security.”

• A diverse coalition of organizations and lawmakers said Tuesday that the use of drones by police and government agencies must be regulated to protect Virginians’ privacy rights.

• “These strikes have not reduced militancy; in fact are a major stimulant to terrorism,” said PTI Chairman Imran Khan.

• Shortly after the election last November a striking–yet quickly pushed under the rug–report came out that the Obama administration had hastily put together a “rules of engagement” manual for a potential Romney administration as they relate to the president’s extensive use of drones strikes in countries that harbor terrorists.

• The drone technology realized in Iraq and Afghanistan may be further exploited by the US navy troops, as it follows from a release made public on January 11 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a federal agency responsible for the development of new technologies. Interested vendors are invited to sign up for a research “in the area of distributed unmanned sensors and systems for maritime applications”.

• Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the activist group CODEPINK, recently returned from Pakistan, where she traveled with families of the victims of U.S. drone strikes. Speaking at Sunday night’s Peace Ball in Washington, D.C., Benjamin urged progressives to remember the plight of U.S. victims abroad.

• …“military aged males” who are killed in a drone-strike target to likely be a militant until proven otherwise.

• US assassination drone attacks amount to “war crime” against innocent civilians by a government that claims moral leadership of the world, a political analyst tells Press TV.

• France and Germany are set to renew efforts to work on a joint unmanned aerial vehicle, supporting European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. (EAD) in its attempt to compete in a market now dominated by Israeli and U.S. companies.

• Robert Naiman, policy director of Just Foreign Policy, was at DePaul University last week to talk about U.S. policy on drones.

• “The bodies of the four dead were charred,” he said, requesting anonymity, adding that only the body of Ismail bin Jamil, a local Al-Qaeda chief, was identified.

• The CIA and the Pentagon pulled out all the stops for the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty,” staging interviews with officials and a Navy SEAL for an inside account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

• Critics praised the movie’s gritty and gripping feel but, with the film due for release in major European markets this week, controversy has erupted over claims that it justifies US agents’ use of torture on detainees.

• The access granted to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal has turned the Oscar-nominated movie into the most detailed public account that exists of the May 2011 raid on a Pakistani compound to kill Bin Laden.

Cablegate

• Fast forward three years, and it would appear the Australian government has had a road to Damascus experience. Leaks it appears aren’t all bad, especially when they damage foreign governments threatening Australian corporate interests. Indeed so profound is the conversion that the Gillard government is now in the Wikileaks game itself.

• Let me provide the political context. In 2001 Australian mining giant BHP Billiton signed over its shares in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) copper mine, Ok Tedi, to a charitable trust, PNG Sustainable Development Program (PNGSDP). In return, the PNG government agreed to indemnify BHP over the environmental disaster its mine had caused.

• Aaron Swartz may have been a WikiLeaks source, the group said on its Twitter feed over the weekend. In a series of tweets, WikiLeaks said that activist and hacker Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this month while awaiting trial on computer fraud charges, “assisted” the organization and “was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011,” Mashable reports. But the tweets did not go so far as to name Swartz as a WikiLeaks source, only saying, “We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that” he was.

• Across the world, authorities are wildly overreacting to the threat posed by online activism. History says it won’t work. Expect more Aaron Swartzs, Bradley Mannings and Kim Dotcomes in coming years.

• ‘A women’s university group have organized to protest Julian’s speech at the Sam Adam’s awards, with one key organizer stating that his inclusion is ‘inappropriate’ and contributes to the ‘casualness with which rape allegations and accusations are treated in our society’. As co-founders of WACA (WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance), as women, mothers and feminists we respect the right of all to protest but urge those considering attending this protest to not be blinded by statements that are, in the light of clear and indisputable facts, inflammatory and inaccurate. Here are just a few of those facts for people to consider:Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks have revealed a myriad of war crimes, human rights abuses, corporate and government collusion and corruption that ultimately impacts millions of women and children around the world on a daily basis and this is why Julian Assange has been asked to speak this year.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• International effort to address mercury-a notorious heavy metal with significant health and environmental effects-was today delivered a significant boost with governments agreeing to a global, legally-binding treaty to prevent emissions and releases.

• Violent attacks by right-wing groups and individuals have increased by 400% since 1990, and dramatically in the last five years, according to a new report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.

• When examined side-by-side with FBI reports on domestic terrorism, the data from this study shows that the FBI has been either grossly miscalculating, or intentionally downplaying, murders and violent attacks by right-wing extremists while exaggerating the threat posed by animal rights activists and environmentalists, who have only destroyed property.

Finance

• The 100 richest people in the world earned enough last year to end extreme poverty suffered by the poorest on the planet four times over, Oxfam has said.

• Ahead of next week’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the charity urged world leaders to tackle inequality.

• Extreme wealth was “economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive”, the report said.

• [...]

• “From tax havens to weak employment laws, the richest benefit from a global economic system which is rigged in their favour.”

• Ever since the news broke last week that Hugo Chávez wanted to transport 211 tons of physical gold from Europe to Caracas, I’ve been wondering how on earth he possibly intends to do such a thing.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) boosted Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s stock bonus 90 percent to $13.3 million, topping JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Jamie Dimon for the first time in five years, as profit climbed (GS).

• Banks manipulated the LIBOR interest rate, which affects financial transactions worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. They foisted risky assets on customers and became involved in money laundering and tax fraud. Traders like Kweku Adoboli (UBS), Jérôme Kerviel (Société Générale) and Bruno Iksil (JPMorgan Chase) gambled away billions through risky transactions, either on their own or with their departments.

• Goldman Sachs made up to an estimated £251 million (US$400 million) in 2012 from speculating on food including wheat, maize and soy, prompting campaigners to accuse the bank of contributing to a growing global food crisis. Goldman Sachs is recognised as the leading global player in financial speculation on food and other commodities, and created the first commodity index funds which allow huge amounts of money to be gambled on prices.

• The corrosive influence of money in politics was amplified in 2012 by the fact that in many cases we don’t know which individuals or which corporations actually provided much of the funding to affect election results. “Dark money” — election spending where we don’t know the source of the funds — played a bigger role in 2012 than in any other presidential election since Richard Nixon’s.

• A new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG) has helped expose more about what we call “the swiss bank account” of American elections, where wealthy elites attempt to secretly influence the outcome of our elections through non-profit groups that keep their donations hidden, and increasingly, through “straw” or “shell” corporations that appear to exist for no reason other than to anonymously pour millions into elections.

• Walmart, your gigantic company, is increasingly being challenged by your workers, government prosecutors, civil lawsuits, communities (that do not want a Walmart), taxpayers learning about your drain on government services and corporate welfare, and small businesses and groups working with unions such as SEIU and UFCW. Thus far, Walmart is successfully playing rope-a-dope, conceding little while expecting to wear down its opposition.

• Goldman Sachs made more than a quarter of a billion pounds last year by speculating on food staples, reigniting the controversy over banks profiting from the global food crisis.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• University of Arkansas education professor Jay P. Greene has weighed in on the BIll and Melinda Gates Foundation’s conclusions about its teacher evaluation study.

• Greene says the foundation’s conclusions were based on the politics of convincing teachers and school districts of the merits of evaluations, and not data.

• But the folks at the Gates Foundation, afflicted with PLDD, don’t see things this way. They’ve been working with politicians in Illinois, Los Angeles, and elsewhere to centrally impose teacher evaluation systems, but they’ve encountered stiff resistance. In particular, they’ve noticed that teachers and others have expressed strong reservations about any evaluation system that relies too heavily on student test scores.

• How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

Censorship

• Douglas Carswell, the Conservative MP for Clacton, attacked the report for making an “extraordinary, and deeply disturbing proposal”. “Having EU officials overseeing our free press – and monitoring newspapers to ensure they comply with “European values” – would be quite simply intolerable,” he said. “This is the sort of mind-set that I would expect to find in Iran, not the West. This kooky idea tells us little about the future of press regulation. It does suggest that the European project is ultimately incompatible with the notion of a free society.”

Privacy

• E.U. justice ministers reacted coolly on Friday to a plan that would give consumers the ability to expunge the personal details Internet businesses have collected on them, essentially allowing individuals to block most kinds of online ads.

• During an informal meeting in Dublin, the ministers expressed reservations about elements of the proposal, which would impose new limits on data collection and profiling and give national regulators the ability to levy hefty fines equal to 2 percent of sales on companies that failed to comply.

• According to his indictment, Aaron Swartz was charged with wirefraud for concealing/changing his “true identity”. It sent chills down my back, because I do everything on that list (and more).

• It turns out as much as half of the links between objects and interests contained in FB are dirty—i.e. there is no true affinity between the like and the object or it’s stale. Never mind does the data not really represent user intent… but the user did not even ‘like’ what she was liking. How is this possible? Let me explain.

Civil Rights

• In what appears to be a more-and-more common occurrence, Ahmed Al-Khabez has been expelled from Dawson College in Montreal after he discovered a flaw in the software that the college (and apparently all other colleges across Quebec) uses to track student information.

• Firebrand black activist Dr. Cornel West gave a speech at the Tavis Smiley Presents Poverty In America series on Thursday that may surprise libertarians – in how much they agree with the “socialist radical.”

• Decrying the erosion of civil liberties today, Dr. West loudly lamented the “crypto-fascist” state developing in America – contrasting the federal government to crack addicts, whom he said at least “are honest about their addiction. The White House is addicted to power!”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For years the cable industry insisted that they imposed usage caps because network congestion made them necessary. You’ll recall that Time Warner Cable insisted that if they weren’t allowed to impose caps and overages the Internet would face “brown outs.” Cable operators also paid countless think tanks, consultants and fauxcademics to spin scary yarns about a looming network congestion “exaflood,” only averted if cable operators were allowed to raise rates, impose caps, eliminate regulation or (insert pretty much anything here).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Vernon Hugh Bowman is the rare Indiana soybean farmer destined for immortality as a U.S. Supreme Court caption. Bowman had the temerity to attempt to outwit Monsanto, the giant agriculture company that, as you surely know, invested hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research in the creation of soybean seeds that are genetically modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, which Monsanto markets as Roundup. The genetically modified seeds, according to the Supreme Court brief Monsanto filed Wednesday, have been such a hit with farmers that more than 90 percent of the U.S. soybean crop begins with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds. Given that every soybean plant produces enough seeds to grow 80 more plants — and that soybeans grown from Roundup Ready seeds contain the genetic modification of glyphosate resistance — Monsanto has insisted that farmers sign licensing agreements with strict restrictions. Soybean producers are only supposed to use the Roundup Ready seeds they buy to grow crops in a single season, and they’re forbidden from planting second-generation seeds harvested from first-generation crops.

• The Federal Trade Commission staff report [pdf] found that drug companies made 40 potential pay-for-delay deals in FY 2012 (1 October 2011 through 30 September 2012).

• Free licensing lowers the barrier of entry to creating cultural works, which unlocks a dynamic where people can realize their ideas much easier – and where culture can actually live, creating memes, adjusting them to new situations and using new approaches with old topics.

• But for that to really take off, people have to be able to make a living from their creations – which build on other works. Then we have people who make a living by reshaping culture again and again – instead of the current culture where only a few (rich or funded by rich ones) can afford to reuse old works and all others have to start from scratch again and again.

• CNET asked the leaders of the congressional committees that write U.S. copyright law, plus the groups that backed the controversial legislation a year ago, to tell us what will happen next.

Copyrights

• They demurred on prosecuting war criminals (hey, they’re all government buddies and what’s a few prisoners tortured to death among friends?), but they sure as hell hounded Aaron Swartz to his death. It really speaks to how justice is so often these days a weapon of the powerful, not a defense for the powerless. The petition to hold Carmen Ortiz accountable for her bullying has now reached 38,000. Please sign it – and let the Obama administration know that this attack on dissemination of academic information is not acceptable.

• Swartz’s case may not be as black-and-white as his loved ones suggest; no one person or entity “killed” Swartz. Suicide is caused by mental illness. But in bringing such tough charges against him, prosecutors do seem to have wrongly used their discretion. There is still more to be learned about how the Boston U.S. Attorney’s office made the choices it did, and Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has announced that his committee is investigating. Swartz’s actions were not above reproach. He appears to have been in the middle of a plan to “liberate” and disseminate privately owned articles. But the offense he was engaged in was not crime of violence or greed. It seems, rather, to have been an act of civil disobedience, or lawbreaking in the service of Swartz’s (and many people’s) idea of a more just world. That does not mean that Swartz had a right to do what he did or not to be punished. But his motives should have been an important part of the government’s calculus.

• On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, “it was not an important failure”, as Auden put it in Musée des Beaux Arts.

• About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

• Friends, family, and colleagues share their stories of the activist’s life and work

• The much anticipated rebirth of Megaupload took place in the last few hours with interest living up to expectations. In less than one hour the site picked up 100,000 new registrations, going on to 500,000 and beyond just a few hours later. As the site struggled to cope with demand it became unresponsive in the face of an unprecedented flood of users eager to test out the new file-hosting site. Just a few minutes ago the launch party at Kim Dotcom’s mansion began, with some interesting reveals.

• The Internet superhero Kim Dotcom has returned with MEGA, after the US government – under the influence of Hollywood — seized Megaupload servers and took ownership of legit user data. After initially hiccups (where under US influence the government of the African nation of Gabon seized Me.ga domain) Dotcom has released MEGA with a lavish and mega launch party.

• Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about.

• Congress prepares to slap down prosecutors linked to the suicide of Aaron Swartz

• The World According to Dick Cheney, a new documentary by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton, will make its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The film boasts hours of exclusive interviews with the ex–vice president, who remains unapologetic about his legacy—including CIA torture and the Iraq War.

• If, as WikiLeaks claims, Aaron Swartz:

• Assisted WikiLeaks Communicated with Julian Assange in 2010 and 2011 May have contributed material to WikiLeaks Then it strongly indicates the US government used the grand jury investigation into Aaron’s JSTOR downloads as a premise to investigate WikiLeaks. And they did so, apparently, only after the main grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks had stalled.

• As I noted back in December 2010, as soon as Eric Holder declared WikiLeaks’ purported crime to be Espionage, it opened up a whole slew of investigative methods associated with the PATRIOT Act. It allowed the government to use National Security Letters to get financial and call records. It allowed them to use Section 215 orders to get “any tangible thing.” And all that’s after FISA Amendments Act, which permits the government to bulk collect “foreign intelligence” on a target overseas–whether or not that foreign target is suspected of Espionage–that includes that target’s communications with Americans. The government may well be using Section 215 to later access the US person communications that have been collected under an FAA order, though that detail is one the government refuses to share with the American people.

• Taren insists Swartz killed himself because he was ‘tired’ of facing up to a merciless justice system that has ‘lost all sense of mercy’ and is driven by ‘vindictiveness’

• Nearly one year after Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload storage site was shuttered on criminal charges filed by the United States government, the big man is back with a new cloud storage service, called simply Mega.

• It’s been an up and down week for Pirates, as official party status has been decided in two countries. In Australia it’s a big G’day to their Pirate Party, while the Russians yet again heard ‘Nyet’ from their Ministry of Justice.

• There is a certain level of symmetry to the world. When one part of the world has day, the other half has night. And more importantly, when one hemisphere gets summer, the other has winter. Right now it’s summer in the southern hemisphere and the sun is certainly shining on Australian Pirates.

• The Pirate Party officially becomes an Australian political organisation, stating that it “passed all tests by the Australian Electoral Commission”. For those who don’t know, a Pirate Party is, according to Wikipedia, a label adopted by political parties in different countries that supports civil rights, direct democracy and participation, free sharing of knowledge and freedom of information, advocating network neutrality and universal Internet access.

• We’ve been talking a lot today about Internet Freedom Day, and the anniversary of the SOPA/PIPA blackout. The folks at Fight for the Future noticed the proximity of Internet Freedom Day to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and decided an interesting form of celebrating internet freedom would be to share a video of MLK’s famous “I have a dream…” speech. As you may or may not know, Martin Luther King Jr.’s heirs have been ridiculously aggressive in claiming copyright over every aspect of anything related to MLK — and they seek large sums of money from people for doing things like quoting him. When the MLK Memorial was recently built in Washington DC, the family was able to get nearly $800,000 just to use his words and likeness.

• We’ve been discussing the ridiculousness of the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, including the fact that if a federal prosecutor decides to take you down, it’s not at all difficult to find something they can try to pin on you, especially when it comes to “computer” crimes. Law professor James Grimmelmann explains how it’s quite possible that prosecutors could go after him under the same laws as it went after Swartz. He notes that he used to run the (excellent) blog LawMeme (which we used to link to frequently). After it died, he wanted to preserve many of the articles, and so he wrote a script to pull the articles off of the Internet Archive.

• IsoHunt, one of the oldest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, turns 10 years old today. The site has been fighting Hollywood in court for more than seven years but has not backed down. IsoHunt founder Gary Fung is determined to protect and facilitate people’s right to share culture legitimately. “One would think the people of the Internet are losing to the copyright cartels, but I think different,” he says.

• If Swartz had knocked over a bookstore with the intent of depositing the books in a library, he’d have received a mental health evaluation and been threatened with less time. Moreover, if he was caught in the act of knocking over the bookstore, he’d be guilty of an attempted crime and face even lesser penalties. But for some reason, cyber crime is considered deadly serious. He was facing 35 years. You could murder someone and get less time.

• Brilliant young hackers, striving to build tools to change the world, are killing themselves. Just last week: Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and fierce open access activist, took his life at 26. There have been other high-profile suicides in the tech world in recent years: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder of the distributed social network Diaspora, dead at 22. Len Sassaman, a highly-regarded cypherpunk who believed in cryptography and privacy as tools of freedom, dead at 31. Dan Haubert, co-founder of the Y-Combinator funded startup Ticketstumbler, dead at 25. If these young men were like the 100 people who kill themselves in this country every day, the biggest factor contributing to their deaths was likely under-treated depression.

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