● 01.26.13

● Links 26/1/2013: Half-Life for GNU/Linux, More News

Posted in News Roundup at 12:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Trinity, a system call fuzzing tester for the Linux kernel, has been updated to version 1.1, adding support in its tables for all syscalls up to Linux kernel 3.8rc4. Fuzzing is a security technique which feeds random arguments into functions to see what breaks.

• Trinity is slightly different from traditional fuzzing though, as the data it feeds into Linux system calls isn’t purely random. Creator Dave Jones had found that, after the “*really* dumb bugs” had been fixed, just passing random values would leave a fuzzer running and running. An example he gives is how system calls would reject a random file descriptor easily.

• Dice this week released it’s annual Salary Survey (2013-2012 Salary Survey) and the results were good news for everyone, showing the largest jump in tech salaries in more than a decade. But the news was especially sweet for Linux pro’s.

• While tech professionals overall saw a 5 percent jump in average salaries, Linux professionals saw nearly double that with 9 percent growth in paychecks. Dice.com VP Jennifer Bewley told PCWorld’s Katherine Noyes: “We’ve known Linux is a core skill, but it’s starting to get a bankable reputation. More Linux, more money.”

Server

• Having your datacenter audited at the office can be a painful experience. One of the toughest is known by the initialism “PCI”, which stands for Payment Card Industry. The PCI audits are in-depth, and require several layers of security, logging, and documentation. Unfortunately, many of the requirements of such audits are derived from a Windows centric environment, and make little sense in a pure Linux system. At the top of this list is the requirement for anti-virus to be installed on all servers, but how necessary is this precaution in real life?

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• It’s been over six months since last writing about Gummiboot, a simple EFI boot-loader. While there hasn’t been any major news since than on this EFI boot-loader that’s less than one year old, it continues to be actively developed.

• We recently conducted a Live Linux Q&A on Facebook, which was our first in a new series of live Q&A opportunities with Linux experts hosted on The Linux Foundation’s social channels. This debut Q&A featured Linux.com freelance contributor Carla Schroder, who answered questions about how to get started with Linux.

• Alan Cox, one of the chief contributors to the Linux kernel, has taken a step down from his volunteer duties, citing the need to attend to family matters.

• Cox has contributed to Linux in various capacities since 1991, shortly after Linus Torvalds developed the open-source variant of the Unix operating system. Most recently, Cox worked on the kernel on behalf of Intel, where he was employed.

• Cox has been one of the ‘oldest’ (not in terms of age, but involvement with Linux) members of the Linux developer team. Last year during LinuxCon when systemd maintainer Lennart Poettering asked during a panel discussion about the ‘aging’ current maintainers and getting ‘fresh blood’, Linus Torvalds joked, “we should probably retire Alan.”

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• During the recent Gentoo mudslinging about libav and FFmpeg, one of the contention points is the fact that FFmpeg boasts more “security fixes” than libav over time. Any security conscious developer would know that assessing the general reliability of a software requires much more than just counting CVEs — as they only get assigned when bugs are reported as security issues by somebody.

Games

• So, you want to play games on your Linux machine. Oh, boy. Batten down the hatches, because we’re about to show you how to do some real computing. You ever compiled something, kid? You ever compiled something like we did back in the ’90s?

• Last month I wrote how 2013 would be “the year of Linux gaming”, but it turns out already in the three weeks to this year there’s already been some surprise Linux game announcements thanks to Valve’s Linux support.

• Strike Suit Zero, Born Ready Games’ space combat title featuring transforming mechanical suits, is now available on Windows PC, and it will launch on Mac and Linux later this year, the studio announced today.

• In order for Steam to be a success on Linux it needs lots of games, and it needs games from all the major publishers going forward. But because this is Steam, Valve has a back catalog of games to call upon that everyone still wants to play. One of those games is Half-Life, and Valve has now made it available on Steam for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• While all of the talk recently in the Linux desktop world is about GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.10, or the desktop forks like Consort and Cinnamon, the Xfce desktop continues moving along vigorously. The next major release, Xfce 4.12, is due out in mid-March.

• Xfce 4.12 is due to be released in March and early on there was talk of Xfce 4.12 using GTK+3 as it’s toolkit rather than GTK2. However, it was ultimately decided that a full conversion to GTK3 won’t happen for the 4.12 release.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The next version of KDE will feature the option to move the application menu that comes standard in most applications. Martin Gräßlin, who maintains this area of the KDE Plasma Workspace, detailed this feature in a blog post yesterday.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Matthias Clasen has issued an update today concerning the progress of new features for the upcoming release of GNOME 3.8.

• Some of the updates that Clasen talks about in his mailing list post include:

Distributions

• Cinnarch is a desktop Linux distribution based on Arch Linux and using the Cinnamon as the default and only supported desktop environment. Like Arch, it follows a rolling-release development model, which is an install-once-and-update-forever model that ensures that an installed system will never need to be reinstalled, even when a new version becomes available, except for those instances when, for one reason or the other, you just need to reinstall.

• The project was started in the middle of last year and has been active since. This is my first look at this distribution, and from what I’ve seen, it is a beautiful distribution.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Being later than planned is becoming quite a tradition with Mageia3!

• If the world of Linux distributions has ever had a rising star, it’s Mageia. Launched roughly two years ago as a fork of Mandriva Linux by former employees and contributors to that French distro, Mageia sprinted up the page-hit rankings on DistroWatch, where it has sat at No. 2 for many months.

• At the end of 2011, Mandriva was No. 10, and Mageia was nowhere to be found. Today, Mageia is behind only Linux Mint; Ubuntu Linux, Fedora, and openSUSE round out the top five. Mandriva, meanwhile, has dropped to No. 36.

• It’s times like these that make me wish I had been the source of my son’s artistic abilities, but alas, those must have come from his father’s side. Since my images rarely resemble what I’m attempting, OpenMandriva is going to have to rely upon you to design and create their new logo. So, a new competition has begun.

• “The competition will be open for 30 days, ending on 22nd of February. The theme of this competition is based on our core values: freedom, openness and collaboration.”

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora has been one of the most popular Linux distributions around. The Red Hat-owned project is known for its inclusion of the latest and the best applications this platform has to offer. Moreover, the distro serves as a great example to the FOSS community by always sticking to its principle of being completely open-source inside out.

• Thanks to its mission to provide the bleeding edge in open-source software, Fedora has a relatively short release cycle. You’ll find a new version of the distribution coming up every 6 months and that too packed with the latest and greatest software. And also, there is brand-new artwork that is one of the finest Linux has to offer. This release offers all that and much more to its users.

• Alan Cox, the venerable Linux kernel developer presently employed by Intel and an avid open-source enthusiast, has lashed out against the recent release of Fedora 18. Cox calls the new Fedora release, “the worst Red Hat distro I’ve ever seen.” Alan ended up switching to Ubuntu as a result of his disastrous experience with Fedora 18.

• After yesterday running some Intel Ivy Bridge graphics tests on Fedora 18 as a preview of future extensive benchmarks coming from the “Spherical Cow” release, here’s some tests of the AMD Radeon R600 Gallium3D on this week-old Fedora Linux release compared to its “Beefy Miracle” predecessor from 2012.

• Alan Cox, the legendary British programmer and one of the most important figures on the Linux scene, has announced he is leaving the developer community and his job at Intel, citing “family reasons”.

• Cox informed the public of his resignation on Google+ on Wednesday. Several days earlier, he blasted Fedora 18, managed by his former employer Red Hat, calling it “the worst Red Hat distro” he had ever seen. Cox said he would use the Ubuntu distribution as his main system instead.

• Alan Cox’s resignation note is a welcome change from the sterility, plain dishonesty of CEO departure statements

• It was lobbying by the GNOME devs that made GNOME 3 the default on Fedora, but now it seems that somebody has had enough. That somebody has proposed making the Cinnamon the default desktop environment on Fedora 19.

• In addition to open-source graphics driver benchmarking, another area being explored with the recent release of Fedora 18 is the boot performance. Here’s some initial results from three systems compared to the Spherical Cow’s predecessor.

• The latest proposals include:

• First-Class Cloud Images – Right now Fedora is offered on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, but this feature proposal is to overhaul the cloud image production. There’s a desire to have cloud images made for EC2 and the other popular cloud platforms, but just not for the final release. Cloud images would now also come for the alpha and beta process too — perhaps even daily/weekly image builds of Rawhide. Aside from EC2, other clouds being looked at are OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Thanks to Matthew Paul Thomas’s specification and work by Dylan McCall and myself, there is a proposed patch to change the Software Updater’s details panel.

• For the longest time Canonical has slapped an LTS (“long term support”) moniker on some of their Ubuntu releases. Currently, a new major release of the operating system happens every six months, and is supported for 18 months after release. Whereas in the past when LTS versions received two years support or more, the current model — starting with 12.04 — supports new LTS releases for five years. However, a recent public Google Hangouts session revealed that Canonical has been thinking about switching from the venerable LTS model to a rolling release, starting with version 14.04.

• Canonical is looking to its community of developers to help make the core apps for its upcoming Ubuntu smartphone platform.

• One of the major reason that led to mobile device revolution for Android and iOS is their focus on creating an app driven ecosystem. Creating a secure and reliable system of providing hassle free apps (especially iOS) has made these mobile giants retain more than 90% of the smartphone market. However the dominance of these two mobile operating system has made the mobile carriers wary of their shrinking profits. Carriers are hinting an inclination towards other platforms to ensure the power balance. Ubuntu mobile that was released recently is posed as a substantial contender but android app development and iPhone app development experts argue, that their respective mobile operating system has undergone massive development in the last few years and mobile OSs making an entry at this phase is less likely to grab attention of mobile app development companies.

• When Canonical officially announced Ubuntu for phones just a few weeks ago, it demonstrated an attractive interface but was otherwise light on specifics regarding the hardware, carriers, or apps that might be involved in actual devices.

• Canonical CEO Jane Silber has told PC Pro that proposals to release a new version of Ubuntu only once every two years are merely “very, very early stage discussions”.

• Ubuntu has been on a six-monthly release cycle since 2004, with Long Term Support (LTS) versions of the OS being released every two years. However, Canonical developers earlier this week discussed the possibility of scrapping those interim releases, with new features being introduced in rolling updates as and when they’re ready.

• The upcoming release of Ubuntu 13.04, also known as Raring Ringtail, is in full pace of development. In order to ensure that Unity gets more sleek and this release becomes the best release for mobile devices, developers are also concentrating on other areas of Ubuntu software.

• The current Software Updater has some changes in looks that will definitely make it more easier to use.

• Canonical is currently following an interim release strategy, with a new operating system popping out every six months, but this strategy is about to change.

• oday marks the beginning of the end of me having an Ubuntu machine at home, and I have mixed feelings about that. By the weekend the last machine that I do have, my network file server and general dogsbody machine, will have been replaced and its replacement will not be running Ubuntu.

Flavours and Variants

• Designed to fit somewhere between Fedora and Ubuntu, this fork of Fedora is a fully functional and easy to use distribution

Devices/Embedded

• We all know really that Pi has one flavour and that’s Raspberry. The Raspberry Pi which has turned out to be a celebrity in the computing world with its credit card size and low price. This has spawned an interest far beyond what the designers dreamed about.

• Originally there was only one operating system for this piece of technological marvelry however, that did not last too long. For just as there is no one way to bake an edible raspberry pi there is now no one way to run the electronic one.

• For all the interesting DSP functions locked away in the Raspberry Pi, it’s still hard to imagine using the Raspberry Pi as an eminently capable software synthesizer, tracker, or sequencer. Running any of the usual Linux digital audio programs means – surprise – running Linux, and the performance penalty associated with that.

• Small computer pioneer Via Technologies has announced a 12×12.5x3cm ARM Cortex-A8-based machine.

• ARMTiGO A800 is “the world’s smallest ARM system for embedded applications, including hotel automation, digital signage and, surveillance as well as for medical and healthcare applications”, claimed the firm.

• Taiwanese chip maker WonderMedia’s latest low power processor is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 chip called the PRIZM WM8980. It runs at speeds up to 1.2 GHz and features ARM Mali 4 dual-core graphics.

• Gumstix, Inc., the premier provider of Linux computers-on-modules (COMs), today announced official support for ROS, the open source Robot Operating System originally created by Willow Garage, on its ARM-based line of Overo COMs. ROS provides a software framework for robot software development on Unix-like systems, with official support for Ubuntu and a large community of users.

Phones

Android

• Before Apple swooped in to purchase Siri, U.S. carrier Verizon was working on a deal that would make the intelligent voice-controlled assistant exclusive to Android devices on its network.

• With news of Apple reporting slightly less-than-impressive quarterly numbers for its iPhone business, many people are taking note of the continuing success of Android smartphones, and Samsung’s in particular. Sure enough, according to market research numbers from ABI Research, released yesterday, Samsung dominated handset shipments during Q4 of 2012, with 31 percent of total shipments. That’s not the only area where Samsung is posting winning results.

Free Software/Open Source

• BusyBox, the lightweight open-source project that provides several Unix/Linux tools in a single executable for POSIX systems, had its first unstable release in the 1.21 series on Monday.

• Since first emerging early last year, Boston-based startup Boundless has been on a mission to give students a free alternative to the financial and physical costs of bulky backpacks brimming with pricey hard-copy textbooks. Co-founders Ariel Diaz, Brian Balfour and Aaron White believe that the incumbents, the old-school textbook publishers (the top four of which still control the market) have been driving up the cost of educational content for years, so Boundless has been fighting the Powers That Be by offering a free, digital alternative culled from existing, open educational resources.

• Sharing software code via free open source has been around since the 1980s and has enjoyed much success. Open source has been applied to content, websites, technological parts, and other materials. Can and should an open source platform be monetized?

• The online betting industry is adopting enterprise level open source technologies where there is still come reticence among perhaps more traditional firms.

• Youwin has been using open-source big-data technology MongoDB to improve its business outcomes — the firm has:

• • Halved its bounce rate and increased turnover by 10 per cent • Cut its project costs • Boosted active player numbers by 22 per cent

• NOTE: The term “bounce rate” is part of web analytics terminology and refers to the number of website visitors who will leave a site after only visiting one page. The inference here is that the landing page a user sees first is therefore not relevant to them.

• Ernst Publishing Company, a provider of technology and closing cost data for the real estate and home finance industries for the past 20 years, has announced that the company’s technology development team has begun leveraging the power and capabilities presented by the communities of Open-Source software.

• FOSDEM is the most important meeting ground for the world’s open source developers, and you can attend free of charge. Will you be there?

• At the start of every new year resolutions on diet and health abound. Yet there seems to be little discussion on schoolchildren’s health and nutrition, and taking a more open education approach to it. This is remarkable since childhood obesity and diabetes are at record levels in the US. Today there are 12.5 million obese children—three times as many as there were in the 1980s—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• App stores have their roots in open source — and they can return to those roots with scant business disruption. Just ask … Microsoft?

• Three years ago today we flipped the switch on at opensource.com. Technically, we removed the htaccess file to allow anyone to access the site. Since that point, we’ve been steadily providing stories that highlight how open source is having a positive impact on the world and building a community around that mission.

• Amid rumors that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) may invest in Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), a massive question has emerged: If such an investment occurs, will Dell maintain its extremely close relationships with Canonical (Ubuntu), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), SUSE and other open source providers? Hmmm… Here’s The VAR Guy’s spin.

• First, a little background. As you may have heard, Dell may go private. Investors could include Silver Lake Partners (a private equity firm), Microsoft, Michael Dell and others. If Microsoft pumps money into Dell, the software giant could strain relationships with Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Acer and other PC makers. Acer has already been critical of Microsoft’s Windows Surface RT and Surface Pro tablet launches.

• Software giant Microsoft has gone to Munich with a piece of paper claiming that the city wasted a fortune dumping its software in favour of Linux. However, the company refused to tell the world what it has on its piece of paper so you will just have to take its word for it.

• Microsoft and its chum HP insist that the German city of Munich had its numbers wrong when it calculated switching from Windows to Linux saved the city millions.

• Montcheuil’s full title for his thoughts here was fully entitled “Working for a Common Good” – Why Community is Key to Open Source’s Success.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Have you ever had a friend over who wanted to use your computer to look something up on the Internet? Or did you use your laptop for a presentation at work or school and had to use the Firefox browser as part of it? These situations can become embarrassing if the browsing history reveals more about you than you are normally willing to share. I’m not talking about the obvious here, NSFW sites that you have visited, but regular sites as well. Maybe you have visited a support group website, a political site or a religious site; the sheer fact that you visited such a site may reveal personal information about you that you may not want to share.

• It hardly seems likely that an open source mobile OS upstart could make any waves in a market dominated by Android and iOS. Windows Phone and BlackBerry may find a following, but Firefox OS? Not likely — at least, not in the developed world. Firefox may be able to sink its teeth into emerging markets, however, which are hungry for lower-cost devices.

• Mozilla, the nonprofit that created Firefox OS, plans to further its mission to make the web accessible to everyone with two new open-source smartphones. The company will leverage Firefox OS, along with the power of open standards and an open community, to launch a rival to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, and it is inviting web developers to join in its mission.

SaaS/Big Data

• It’s now been a full year since ownCloud, the open source data syncing platform, launched as a commercial entity. I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical back then that the company would be able to succeed in a market already inundated with competing products. But ownCloud managed to hold its own and more in 2012, and has its sights set on continued expansion in 2013, according to recent statements from the company.

• How secure is your sensitive data online? If you ask Richard Stallman and many others, they’ll tell you that it’s probably not very secure. And, of course, few organizations on the planet would be better equipped to answer the question than Google. That’s why Google’s latest semi-annual Internet transparency report is worth taking note of. Disturbingly, it shows that Internet surveillance on a global basis is steadily rising, and the United States leads all other nations in demands for user data. Meanwhile, Google itself has clarified how it handles law enforcement requests for sensitive personal data online.

• As we reported earlier this month, Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, recently announced that it has received $10 million in funding from Dell, Intel and WestSummit. The small firm has a big and impressive list of customers working with it on OpenStack projects. The customers include AT&T, PayPal and The Gap. For IT professionals or individuals interested in picking up OpenStack skills quickly, Mirantis offers notable two-day Boot Camp events that are worth considering. Here are more details.

Databases

• MySQL may still be the “most popular open-source database” for now, but its day may be ending. Just like Fedora, which is considering switching out MySQL for the MySQL fork MariaDB, openSUSE is also considering making MariaDB its default database management system (DBMS).

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• For several years I have been very fond of clip arts from the Open Clipart Library (OCAL) and when LibreOffice now has built in usage of SVG files I was very happy. Now I could use these exelent cliparts in scalable format. Until then the only way was to convert to bitmap (png or jpg) format first.

• LibreOffice 4.0 is right around the bend and today Charles H. Schulz wrote why this particular version is “an existential release.” Folks were wondering why the big jump in version numbers, but Schulz says there are two big reasons why the time is now. Besides the additions that will be seen by the users, his reasons go a bit deeper.

Business

• Automattic, most well known for WordPress, has acquired Simperium, creators of the popular iOS note taking application Simplenote. Simplenote is backed by Simperium’s primary product, a cloud syncing architecture intended to provide developers an easy way to ensure their applications data is consistent between devices.

Funding

• Attitudes towards open source software have changed so much in recent years, some outfits are now swimming in venture capital. Code hosting service GitHub grabbed $100 million dollars from Andreessen-Horowitz this past July. 10gen — maker of the MongoDB database — has raised $81 million. Cloudera — one of several companies developing the open source big data system Hadoop — has stuffed $141 million into its war chest.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Join the FSF and friends, today, Friday January 25th, from 2:00pm to 5pm EDT (19:00 to 22:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

• We received an email from Richard M. Stallman (RMS), after publishing the article about the Egyptian demonstration calling for the government to adopt Free Software. I can’t deny that one of the motives behind writing this article is to show off that someone as important to the history of computers as RMS is reading what we write here.

• In the book “Access to Knowledge in Egypt“, Nagla Rizk (@naglarzk) and Sherif El-Kassas dedicated a chapter to the software industry in Egypt and the role F/OSS play there. They started by highlighting that just like any other economy, there are the two opposing forces that characterise the growth of the digital economy.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• One of President Obama’s advantages in the 2012 presidential race – besides running against a horrible candidate – was his campaign’s technology. While the Romney campaign had epic technology failures the President sailed to re-election with a fully functioning and innovative data management system.

• The Democratic Party is fighting with coders over the fate of President Obama’s revolutionary fundraising software from the 2012 campaign.

• Right after the election, we noted the stories showing how Obama’s technology advantage was impressive, while the get-out-the-vote technology that the Romney campaign built up appeared to fail spectacularly. However, there’s an interesting post mortem to this, which shows how techies and politicians still usually come from very, very different worlds.

Licensing

• A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out how a decision in Norway involving cash registers emphasised one of the advantages of open source – its natural auditability. Here’s another interesting situation that points out a further reason for choosing openness.

Openness/Sharing

• I always tell inventors: “It is better to undersell and over-deliver, than the other way around.” (Though I tend, myself, to oversell things in my news reporting, falling into that same trap. So keep that in mind, even as you read this story. My exuberance is very high, and when I write while in that mode, I tend to overdo things.)

Open Hardware

• The world of 3D printing has enjoyed a good deal of innovation, but most amateur fabricators have mostly stuck with outputting tiny models and design prototypes. Now one model maker has upped the stakes by releasing an open source project that allows anyone to print their own robot components.

• It was April 2011, and Heiliger — the man who oversaw all the hardware driving Facebook’s online empire — was announcing the creation of something Facebook called the Open Compute Project. As Google, Amazon, and other online giants jealously guarded the technology inside their massive computing facilities — treating data center design as the most important of trade secrets — Heiliger and Facebook took the opposite tack, sharing their hardware designs with the rest of the world and encouraging others to do the same. The aim was to transform competition into collaboration, Heiliger said — to improve computer hardware using the same communal ethos that underpins the world of open source software.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Bet the Farm, a recent book by Frederick Kaufman, is a deeper look at the subject of Kaufman’s 2010 article in Harper’s Magazine, “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It.” That article, which, as someone who isn’t a Wall Street trader or multi-millionaire investor I had to read a number of times, looked at the exploding cost of wheat in 2008. That year, the price of the world’s most basic foods doubled, and then doubled again. In response, hunger and food riots broke out across the world. Since then, the cost of food has continued to rise, reaching a new pinnacle in 2011. In Bet the Farm, Kaufman makes the case that it’s the financialization of food that has led to this new era of escalating commodity prices, and hence, ever escalating food prices. As he explains, “Food had become an investment, equivalent to oil, gold, silver, or any other commodity, equity, or derivative. The higher the price, the better the investment. The better the investment, the most costly the food. And those who cannot pay the price pay with hunger.”

• New technology can do a huge amount for healthcare. From telecare that helps the vulnerable be cared for without leaving home—to simple smartphone apps that let people take control of their own healthy living.

Security

• That’s one version of the story. The hacker is celebrated as a hero because he did something useful: exposed a security flaw that could have been used by someone malicious for nefarious purposes. We generally want to celebrate those who spot danger and warn people away from it. And the school is being pilloried because it expelled this person.

• With the possibility of a massive cyberattack hitting the U.S. in the near future, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urges the government to pass cybersecurity legislation.

• The intelligence operative sits in a leather club chair, laptop open, one floor below the Hilton Kuala Lumpur’s convention rooms, scanning the airwaves for spies. In the salons above him, merchants of electronic interception demonstrate their gear to government agents who have descended on the Malaysian capital in early December for the Wiretapper’s Ball, as this surveillance industry trade show is called.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I just wanted to put this on record. I will do what I can to support “gun control” but I don’t believe it goes far enough.

• Raymond Davis, who was charged with killing two men in Pakistan as a CIA contractor but was later released, was arrested in October of 2011 a fistfight at a shopping center in Denver.

• As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. “Dirty Wars,” along with Scahill’s forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.

• An unarmed, mentally ill Ohio man who died during a confrontation with police was shocked with a Taser stun gun seven times, kicked and repeatedly hit with a baton, all mostly after he had fallen face-first onto cement and stopped moving, according to newly released court documents obtained by The Associated Press.

• The last people you might expect to want to see the CIA’s secret torture prisons kept intact are the people who were tortured there. But the defense lawyers for the 9/11 co-conspirators are arguing that the CIA’s so-called “black sites” need to remain open, untouched and exactly as they were when top al-Qaida operatives were abused.

• The first Central Intelligence Agency officer to face prison for disclosing classified information, was sentenced on Friday to 30 months in prison by a judge at the federal courthouse here.

• Pakistanis should be more supportive of having their national sovereignty violated by Americans, according to US-based political scientists who favor drone strikes in Pakistan. I am trying hard not make this sound like an Onion article, even though it does.

• The new White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, was a key figure in the Senate Democrats’ vote for the Iraq War.

• First shocking interview with Mahdi Hashi from his New York cell Told how he was made to watch a Swedish detainee being beaten He was stripped and blindfolded, and told he would be sexually abused Was forced to sign a confession agreeing to waive his right to silence

• John Kiriakou is the first current or former CIA officer convicted of leaking classified information.

• Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for leaking classified information about the identity of a former colleague involved in waterboarding detainees.

• The government has said the black site evidence isn’t relevant, but has deemed its written response to the court classified. In other words, it doesn’t want to have to preserve the evidence, AND it doesn’t want to say publicly why it shouldn’t have to.

• Alexandria – John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who blew the whistle on CIA torture practices, was sentenced to more than two years in prison for leaking the name of a covert officer to a reporter. US district judge of the court in Alexandria Virginia, Leonie Brinkema, said she would have given Kiraikou a much longer sentence if she could. A plea deal in which Kiriakou pleaded guilty last year required the judge to sentence him to 2 and a half years. The judge rejected arguments that he was acting as a whistleblower when he leaked the officer’s name.

• Torture brings forth unreliable information and false confessions, apart from the fact that it is a serious violation of all manner of international agreements, former CIA officer Ray McGovern told RT.

• Former CIA officer John Kiriakou is expected to serve over two years in prison for allegedly blowing the cover of an agent, involved in prison tortures.

• A British man who was handed over to the CIA under the suspicion of having links to the Somali armed group, Al-Shabaab, said he was severely tortured by collaborators of the intelligence agency and forced to sign a confession.

• Defence firms, police forces and fire services are among more than 130 organisations that have permission to fly small drones in UK airspace, the Guardian can reveal.

• The UN inquiry into the use of armed drones for targeted killing, announced yesterday by London-based UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson, is very much to be welcomed.

• Undertaken at the direct request of several states, the inquiry is also in response to what Mr Emmerson called “the increasing international concern surrounding the issue of remote targeted killing through the use of UAVs.”

• The Onion strikes again. A radio host fell for a fake story from the satirical website that showed a doctored image of a “drone flyover” on President Barack Obama’s inauguration day.

• The post on the Facebook page of KFAI host Andy Driscoll was surfaced by City Pages, which pointed out that Driscoll, who hosts “TruthToTell” on the community radio station in St. Paul, Minn., had written “ugly” underneath an image that showed what appeared to be three remote-controlled drones hovering ominously over the enormous crowds.

• Pentagon is still using drone strikes far more widely than President Bush did

• A United Nations expert has launched an investigation of drone attacks and targeted killings, scrutinizing a deeply controversial tool in the United States’ battle against Al Qaeda.

• “The plain fact is that this technology is here to stay,” U.N. special rapporteur Ben Emmerson announced Thursday in London, “and its use … is a reality with which the world must contend.”

• Drones are not the only way to carry out targeted killings, but the relative ease with which they are used and their devastating effects have spotlighted the legal unease around them, the U.N. expert said. The world urgently needs ways to regulate their use and keep it in line with international law, which has yet to settle how to handle such killings, he stated.

• A Parrot AR Drone 2.0 is seen flying during a demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show recently in Las Vegas. The drone has a built in camera and can be controlled with a smart phone. (AP Photo)

• As Barack Obama renews his lease on the White House for another four years, his administration is debating how best to respond to a growing internal and public controversy over his first term’s non-battlefield counter-terrorist weapon of choice: armed drones.

• In case you missed it, last night’s episode of NOVA, “Rise of the Drones”, provides a fascinating look at the technology behind unmanned aircraft and the impact it will have on the future of warfare. Drones are about to become much more sophisticated (and probably more deadly) through the use of robotics and artificial intelligence. Watch it in advance of next week’s Moyers & Company, in which Bill will be speaking with Vince Warren and Vicki Divoll about the legal and moral implications of drone strikes, and, more broadly, civil liberties and executive power during a time of terrorism.

• According to Pakistan’s The Express Tribune report, at a meeting with Richard Olson, the US ambassador in Islamabad, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar has expressed her concern over the continued US drone policy.

• It takes a little while to get to that point, though. “Rise Of The Drones” seems most problematic early on, particularly in an introduction that seems like it might have been written by American military P.R., starting with video of a fighter jet and narration like “This is the ultimate melding of man and machine… and pilots like Matt McDonagh have long been our heroes” followed by Terminator 3 clips shown to represent the potential “negative” side of drone use.

• Yemen Human Rights Minister, Hooria Mashour openly criticized and condemned the use of drones – unmanned planes – in targeting al-Qaeda hideouts and militants in the country, arguing the collateral loss of lives much out-weighted the benefits of such a policy.

Cablegate

• Two men have been jailed and a third given a suspended prison sentence for their involvement in cyber attacks by the Anonymous hacking group against companies it saw as enemies of Wikileaks.

• As pundits debate how Barack Obama will tackle guns, climate change, immigration, and the debt ceiling in his newly inaugurated second term, press freedom advocates are left questioning how the U.S. president will handle another, no-less-controversial issue: the treatment of whistleblowers and officials who leak information to the media.

• John C. Kiriakou became the first Central Intelligence Agency officer sentenced to prison for leaking classified information to the media, reported The New York Times on Friday, Jan. 25. According to the Times, Kiriakou will serve 30 months in prison for releasing the name of an undercover CIA agent to a reporter and information about the intelligence agency’s use of waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique.

• A Leaked ‘Confidential’ US diplomatic cable, dated September 18, 2009, updated the Secretary of State regarding Ambassador Patricia Butenis’s credentialing ceremony and a private meeting she had with the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The Colombo Telegraph found the related leaked cable from the WikiLeaks database. The cable is signed by the US Ambassador to Colombo Patricia Butenis.

• WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange says a film about his whistle-blowing website is propaganda designed to fan the flames of a war against Ira

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says a film about his whistle-blowing website is propaganda designed to fan the flames of a war against Iran.

• Assange, facing renewed criticism over his handling of sexual assault allegations against him, on Wednesday night turned his sights on the film The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

• The film isn’t due to be released until November, but WikiLeaks has managed to get hold of a copy of the script.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has hit out at a Hollywood film about his organisation as a “massive propaganda attack” against the whistle-blowing website.

• Delivering a speech to the Oxford Union from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he revealed he had acquired a script of the film, which stars British actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

• Holding a copy of the script, he said the film, being released in the United States in November, was also an attack on Iran.

• Publicity photographs released earlier shows the actor as Assange in the movie, The Fifth Estate, which has now begun filming. It traces the early days of the WikiLeaks site as he sought to bring confidential information into the public domain.

• Let’s state upfront that a lot of what’s in this post is conjecture based on a few pieces of information out there. I’m not convinced that it presents enough evidence of an actual connection. However, a bunch of folks have been talking about this (and submitting it here), so we wanted to raise the issue to see what people thought, and if there was any other information that could confirm or deny some of the conjectures in the piece. As far as we can tell, some of the timing is a bit odd, but it could very well be a coincidence. We’d love to have the full story if there was one, but federal prosecutors — especially those under media scrutiny — aren’t known for suddenly opening up about these sorts of things. Given that, we thought we’d post some of the details of the discussion for the sake of continuing the discussion and seeing if anyone had anything more conclusive, either showing a connection between Aaron Swartz’s prosecution and Wikileaks… or debunking it.

• Julian Assange on asylum, sexual assault allegations and what it is like being played in a film by Benedict Cumberbatch.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has hit out at a Hollywood film about his organisation as a “massive propaganda attack” against the whistle-blowing website.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A salvage firm in Grand Bahama is calling oil spill estimates by the government “misguided,” insisting that Sunday’s incident was far worse than portrayed in a report.

• Overseas Marine Group claims that it was still cleaning up the mess as of Monday afternoon. The company set up barriers offshore and caught what was drifting away during the night.

• The only challenge now, according to Raymond Darville, the head of the company, is getting paid for its services.

Finance

• The number of jobless people around the world rose by 4 million in 2012 to 197 million and is expected to grow further, the UN labour agency warns.

• “Goldman Sachs is the global leader in a trade that is driving food prices up while nearly a billion people are hungry,” said WDM’s Christine Haigh.

• With the nation still grappling with high unemployment and depressed tax revenues, many states are stepping up efforts to lure jobs from neighboring states — paying firms a fortune to jump state lines. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, for instance, is actively trying to poach jobs from Illinois and changed the Wisconsin welcome signs to proclaim “Wisconsin — open for business.”

• This “business recruitment strategy” is nothing more than job piracy — a practice that is highly costly to taxpayers, disruptive to workers and has almost no effect on job creation, according to a new report by the public interest group Good Jobs First.

• The government encouraged fraud, and helped cover it up.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) chapter in Wisconsin is throwing its support behind a proposed mine in the state’s far North. A mining bill — almost identical to the one that failed last year in the Wisconsin State Senate — was reintroduced this week in the state legislature. What changed? Republicans picked up two more Senate seats in 2012, which may give mining supporters the slim margin they need.

• The fallout from CBS’s ridiculously short-sighted interference with CNET’s editorial process, concerning staffers awarding Dish’s new DVR “best of show” at CES, continues to cause problems. Whle one of CNET’s best reporters quit in protest, and Dish has turned the whole thing into a marketing opportunity, now any news article about any company that CBS is in a legal fight with has become suspect.

• Note this recent article about the updated Aereo app. While it kicks off by saying that Aereo “just became a much more potent alternative to traditional cable TV” stuck right smack in the middle of the article is a big “disclosure”:

• In other words, “HEY EVERY BODY, YOU CAN’T TRUST US TO REPORT FAIRLY ON THIS BECAUSE OUR CORPORATE OVERLORDS INTERFERE WITH EDITORIAL!” The whole thing is a joke. As Rob Pegoraro correctly noted, CNET’s claims that “news” reporting won’t be impacted because these bans just apply to “reviews” is simply wrong, wrong, wrong.

• The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has actively lobbied against state plans to implement a national popular vote for president, urging state legislators to preserve the Electoral College — which GOP legislators are now trying to rig to ensure the the next president is a Republican. In late 2011, ALEC officially changed its policy on the Electoral College to implicitly support allocating electoral votes by congressional district.

Censorship

• “Germany, France, Spain and Finland, have already de-funded the I.T.U. Likewise, right-thinking American companies like I.B.M., Cingular, Microsoft, Fox, Agilent, Sprint, Harris, Loral and Xerox, and others, have already withdrawn their private-sector contributions from the I.T.U.”

• Now it seems there is a very real danger that the Government will abandon this reasonable policy (which is barely a month old) and look at default on censorship. Ed Vaizey MP yesterday gave a speech suggesting that ‘Protection will automatically be on if parents don’t make choices’. He promised a white paper later in the year that could be the vehicle for this policy.

• A little background. In December the Department for Education published its response to the consultation about online parental controls. In it they set out a pretty reasonable position, broadly supporting the idea that parents are best placed to make decisions about the protections necessary in their household, and should be supported in doing so.

• We were quite pleased that the Government had seemingly listened to the views of the consultation respondents, looked at the available evidence and come to a decent policy position. They would not be mandating ‘on by default’ Internet filtering.

Privacy

• It often seems as though Facebook’s main purpose is to continually remind us of how much we have chosen to share with the world about our online behavior — whether we realize it or not. The latest lesson along those lines comes from the social network’s new “graph search,” which sounds at first like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers. Like much of what Facebook does, however, it is also a warning sign: if you were counting on certain things about yourself staying not so much private as obscure or hidden from view, those days are effectively over.

• What happens when you place a mix of journalists, technologists, human rights lawyers, digital rights activists, and victims of surveillance from around the world in a room to map the problems of electronic surveillance? What emerges is a complicated story made up of a number of complicated stories. Each participant brings a particular expertise to bear on the larger surveillance puzzle. Taken as a whole, these voices paint a portrait of state surveillance that is far more contextual and diverse than most people could imagine. More than anything else, what one learns is the critical role that context—the unique political histories and conflicts, socio-cultural expectations, and surrounding foreign and national policies—plays in shaping how state surveillance programs and practices are being carried out. This includes who can be surveilled and the ability of citizens to challenge surveillance. In spite of these disparate conditions, some surveillance practices are common to Latin America and continue to reappear amidst very different contexts.

Civil Rights

• While Google’s transparency report released in late 2012 revealed that the U.S. continues to demand far more user information than any other nation, the newest report reveals a new dimension: the majority of the requests are submitted without probable cause warrants.

• The tech giant drops a manufacturer after dozens of underage workers discovered

• An appeal requesting that all orders or court documents relating to three individuals under investigation because of their association with WikiLeaks be unsealed or publicly listed was denied by a federal appeals court in Virginia.

• On Friday, a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled (PDF) that three activists involved in a WikiLeaks investigation have no right to find out what companies the government sought information from other than Twitter.

• In November 2011, a district court judge found that prosecutors could compel Twitter to give up specific information on the three accounts, including IP addresses, direct messages, and other data.

• A federal appeals court in Virginia ruled today that the government can keep hidden its efforts to obtain internet users’ private information without a warrant. The appeal stems from the legal battle over the records of three Twitter users sought by the government in connection with its investigation into WikiLeaks.

• A federal appeals court has ruled that three suspects targeted in a WikiLeaks investigation have no right to know from which companies, other than Twitter, the government sought to obtain their records.

• In Virginia today, a federal appeals court has ruled that the government can maintain secrecy around its efforts to obtain the private information of internet users, without a warrant. The appeal originated from a legal battle over the Twitter user records of three activists the government is investigating for connections to WikiLeaks: security researcher Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp (@rop_g), and Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir (@birgittaj).

• Most Americans know of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than 1,200 lives during the Holocaust by hiring Jews to work in his factories and fought Nazi efforts to remove them.

• But fewer know about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who disobeyed his government’s orders and issued visas that allowed 6,000 Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied territories via Japan.

DRM

• o the world of Open Source, freedom and logic will be dealt another blow by the United States government. Come Saturday the 26th of January it will be illegal to unlock and use any mobile device without the direct consent of the carrier from which you purchased the device. So in layman’s terms if you buy a device from a carrier it can never be used on another carrier without consent. Not only does this essentially remove your ownership of the device it means you essentially lease it and have to ask before using it elsewhere.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• And I have been thinking about the We the People petitions. I think the best would be one that quotes Ms. Kroes and simply asks that there be a review of US computer laws and copyright laws that protect copyright and other “intellectual property” rights to ensure that they are rebalanced to reflect the importance to the public of openness as well.

• At some point in the near future I plan to join some of the important campaigns already being waged in his name.

• The YouTube “dancing baby” takedown case, made Internet-famous by lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation back in 2007, looks like it will actually go to a jury about six years after it was filed.

• In yet another bizarre twist to the Mega story, for the second time in less than two years a video belonging to Kim Dotcom has been booted offline following an apparent bogus copyright infringement takedown request. After the video of the Mega launch party was taken down by music rights group GEMA overnight, Dotcom says the German outfit will be hearing from his lawyers.

• Internet activists in Finland, upset with the country’s strict copyright laws, are ready to take advantage of the country’s promise to vote on any citizen-proposed bill that reaches 50,000 signatures.

• TorrentFreak has a good post about how copyright holders have been effective in moving copyright into a modern form of “witch trials” in which you are guilty based on accusations, and then have to go through a long, arduous and often biased-against-you process of proving your innocence. The article points out two examples of this. First, the Kafka-esque process that Jonathan McIntosh went through to keep his mashup video (one cited by the Library of Congress as a quintessential example of fair use) from being taken off YouTube. Of course, it actually was off for quite some time, because YouTube’s ContentID system is also based on a “guilt by accusation” system — after which you have to convince everyone (including, initially, your accuser) that you’re really innocent.

• As Techdirt has reported over the last ten days, the death of Aaron Swartz has provoked an outpouring of grief from friends and colleagues, who understandably wish to express their shock and anger at what happened. You’d expect that. What you might not expect is for a Vice-President of the European Commission to add her voice…

• Things just keep looking worse and worse in the Carmen Ortiz/Stephen Heymann vendetta against Aaron Swartz. Now it’s come out that state prosecutors, who were originally looking into the case had no interest in pursuing felony charges or prison time… until Carmen Ortiz and her team showed up. Instead, state prosecutors had focused on the initial charges: “breaking and entering in the daytime” which they expected “would be continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner.”

• The late Internet activist was facing a stern warning from local prosecutors. But then the U.S. Attorney’s office, run by Carmen Ortiz, chose to make an example of Aaron Swartz, a new report says.

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