● 01.28.13

● Links 28/1/2013: Galaxy S4 Rumours, Counter-Strike and Half-Life for GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• My take is that the state is recommending clothing firms use software with a licensing fee of $0. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It allows any individual to use their hardware any way they like without paying a licensing fee because the licence is included in a free download with the software. Thanks, California.

• There was a time in computing when performance increases could be had by designing a more complex processor or turning up the clock speed. Those days are largely behind us and the most common solution at present is to add more cores to a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system, but this has practical scaling limits and there are downsides to a one-size-fits-all processor architecture.

• Last year, Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS went from being an industry joke to a qualified success. That surge appears to have continued through the holidays. The ARM-based Samsung Chromebook is only a few days short of a 100-day run as Amazon.com’s best-selling laptop, and now Lenovo has joined the Chrome OS experiment, announcing a ThinkPad X131e Chromebook aimed at the education market. Meanwhile, Samsung has begun selling a new version of its Chromebox mini-PC updated with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 — making it the fastest Chrome OS system yet — and Acer is rumored to be prepping its own low-cost “Kiev” Chromebox.

Desktop

• Google Chromebook: 3 months in Summary: The Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook surprised me when I discovered how well it worked for me three months ago. The real test of a gadget is the big picture so here’s my take after three months of use.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Since we first proposed systemd for inclusion in the distributions it has been frequently discussed in many forums, mailing lists and conferences. In these discussions one can often hear certain myths about systemd, that are repeated over and over again, but certainly don’t gain any truth by constant repetition.

• Last week I pointed out how Google is contributing a lot to Coreboot since they are enjoying this open-source BIOS/UEFI because they can ship it on Chrome OS devices for allowing very fast boot times, great customization possibilities, and good security with having full source access. In this article are some development statistics surrounding Coreboot to show the most prolific contributors, the pace of development, and other traits for this open-source project formerly known as LinuxBIOS.

Applications

• Some computers users swear by their text editors. They use them for creating scripts, editing complex HTML and CSS files, or observing other people’s code. Some people just want a simple place to jot down notes. If your note-taking demands are a little more on the lighter side, you may be interested in Leafpad, a bare bones GTK+ text editor that should look right at home on any GNOME desktop.

• There are a bunch of video editors for GNU/Linux but most of them are difficult to use or fragile. Here is one that is both easy and robust while being moderately powerful. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Cinellera or LightWorks but if you’re just producing a short video for YouTube, who cares?

• Linux gets my pick as the best multi-media production platform because it is flexible, efficient, and secure. Your system resources are going to your work, rather than in supporting a bloaty operating system further bogged down by marginally-effective anti-malware software. In our previous installment we covered a range of excellent drawing and painting, photography, 3D rendering, and desktop publishing applications for Linux. And my favorite Linux distros for serious multi-media production.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• CodeWeavers announced the release of CrossOver 12.1 on Wednesday. This latest release of the popular Wine-based software gets rid of shipping Wine-Mono by default.

Games

• In the game, you play match on a tile based map in turns of 3 phases – combat, harvest and build. The goal is to destroy your opponent’s Base/City Unit.

• After Valve launched the original Half-Life on Linux, now it seems that the original Counter-Strike will also make an appearance on Steam.

• Now with a Steam page that doesn’t expressly list Mac as a supported platform, we understand your skepticism regarding the headline to this very post. Indeed Half-Life has been ported to both OS X and Linux today.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The desktop on your Linux box used to stand for something very simple. If you were a KDE user, you valued control, power and the ability to customise.

• In rough terms, if you used Gnome you wanted the desktop to get out of the way so you could get on with using your computer. If you used anything else, such as Xfce, LXDE or TekWM, you were running an ancient machine that would struggle with either of the big two of KDE and Gnome.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Suckless.org is home to several projects, most noteably is dwm, the dynamic window manager for X. dwm is very, very small, the developers claim that the source will never exceed 2000 lines of code. Because it is so small, it is fast and stable, but this window manager is not for the uninitiated.

• Sometimes I read comic books. I would hope that some of you do as well. I collected the paper version of comic books when I was a kid (Mostly Superman and Spiderman) and I’ve graduated up to the digital version now. Comic books in digital format usually use the .cbz or .cbr file extension. To read these in Windows or on my Linux desktop (I was running XFCE for the year or so) I had to use a specialized application…a comic reader…to do this.

• The program I used in Linux was called Comix and it did a great job when I used XFCE. I know you can also use Evince and I’m sure it does every bit a good job as Comix does. Both are GTK applications though. Since I now use KDE 4 on my primary workstation, I wanted to see if there was a Qt application that I could use and I was very disappointed when I didn’t find any. So, there I was with comics in my Home Directory collecting dust with nothing preferable (read: Qt based) to open them up to read them. I double clicked on one of them in frustration….and I was surprised when it opened right up.

• KDE team has finally decided to drop subversion. Currently KDE provides subversion and git access to source repository, but maintaining both repos was hard task to do for developers and admins. They have plans to shut down svn servers before January 2014 step by step.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We all know the plans of GNOME to release a more classic desktop that mimics the old GNOME2. So I gave it a try. I would like to screencasting it but GNOME’s video recorder is bugged in 3.7.4, so I just go with screenshots for now.

• playgroundGnome’s design playground is a happy place where everyone is allowed and encouraged to make a design proposal, discuss the possible problems of the idea or the implementation, and finally collaborate with others.

Distributions

• The PicUntu project team announced the release of an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, specifically developed to run on RK3066 chipset devices. The download weighs in at a mere 170MB (for Linux users, 23KB), but it packs quite a punch. According to the PicUntu team, it can run a company web server, corporate email server, central database server, or content management portal.

• My 2 year old daughter is very fond of computers. Therefore, I have been searching for options to make her desktop environment more appealing for her. After all, anyone can use Linux these days. And there are options for children, too.

• I tried Qimo and Doudou. Unfortunately, despite their beauty and functionality, they are not what I was looking for. I wanted a OS that supports Spanish flawlessly.

• The new version of Solus OS will come with a lot of changes. one of those changes being the Consort Desktop Environment. To find out more informations about the development I’ve talked to Ikey Doherty.Below you can read a short interview.

• 1) Lately I’ve been following your Google Plus profile and I saw you are working hard on Solus OS 2.Is the development going the way you’ve planned?

• Exactly how I wanted. Sometimes I wish things could go a bit faster, but you can only go at one pace I guess.

New Releases

• The minimalist linux distribution Tiny Core team announced a new release “Tiny Core 4.7.4″. Check the release notes and Download options down below.

• Today we are releasing OS4 OpenDesktop 13.2.1. In this release we fix an issue with OS4 installation on Intel Based Macs and Windows 8 PC’s. This has the same new features as OS4 OpenDesktop 13.2

• Netrunner Dryland – Third Edition 12.12.1 has been released.

Screenshots

• Pear Linux is an stable, fast and powerful open source operating system based on Ubuntu Desktop distribution. The latest release was Pear Linux 6.1 code named (Bartlett) was created by David Tavares. The outcome of Pear Linux is to create an Ubuntu based Linux operating system with much simple, but powerful desktop interface. It provides an impressive Pear Appstore repository that gives you a thousands of apps to select and install by one click of mouse with powerful multi-threaded download manager.

Arch Family

• After writing a post about Archlinux removing the installer I promised I would take a look at one of the Archlinux derived distributions, to see if they would make Archlinux available for a larger public. A name mentioned often on several websites was Manjaro and when they recently announced a new release, I decided to have a go with it. So I downloaded the latest KDE-version, 0.8.3., and placed the DVD in my laptop.

Slackware Family

• It was the operating system I was waiting for a long time, simply because I felt nostalgic about it.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora has always intrigued me to keep track of the latest happenings in the Linux world and especially what’s brewing at the RHEL stable! Also, if I think of a comparable distro to Ubuntu, Fedora is the only legitimate choice! Just like Ubuntu, Fedora also inspires innumerable spins (like Kororaa, Fuduntu, of which I am a big fan now!). So, when the release note of Fedora came on 15th Jan, I was quick to download all the four versions (Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE). I have already covered the Gnome, KDE and XFCE spins in my earlier reviews. The final review is on one of my favorite desktop environments – the LXDE.

• It was just last week that Fedora Linux 18 “Spherical Cow” made its official debut, but since then the Red Hat-supported distribution has been all over the news for a variety of reasons, not all of them complimentary.

• First came the news that the Fedora Linux project is considering ousting the MySQL database management system (DBMS).

Debian Family

• Wheezy, the imminent release of Debian GNU/Linux, is in great shape. I apt-get dist-upgraded the last PC in my home still running Squeeze this morning and it was uneventful. All my customizations survived except a few desktop icons. One package hung up and I had to remove it in order to finish. Afterwards I added it back in. The Little Woman did not notice anything different except the lost icons. I did the dist-upgrade remotely, too. Great fun.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu will not be switching to a ‘Rolling Release’ model anytime soon, despite recent reports to the contrary.

• But Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon has revealed that pieces are being put into place‘ to allow such a decision to be made at a later date.

• LTS to LTS

• A rolling release model would see Ubuntu continually updated with new apps and features as it ‘rolled’ along rather than, as is the case at present, them only arriving in one go every 6 months.

• You hopefully recovered from your migraine on reading yesterday’s blog post on the insight of daily release and are hungry for more. What’s? That’s not it? Well, mostly, but we purposely dismissed one of the biggest point and consequences on having stacks: they depends on each other!

• Canonical’s Ubuntu handsets are expected to be upon us very, very soon, and given that some say a phone is only as good as its apps, the firm wants to make sure the experience is indeed a great one right out of the box. To help accomplish that, Canonical has announced the CoreApps project, setting its sights on about a dozen default applications which should give Ubuntu devices ample functionality from day one; this, of course, includes essential ones such as a calendar, calculator, clock / alarm, weather and email client.

• Canonical is all set to break new grounds with its Ubuntu Phone, which the company was developing in utter secrecy for couple of months. The announcement got a mixed response. It excited the hard-core Ubuntu users who look forward to the idea of running Ubuntu on their phones; it excited a typical user due to the refreshing and well polished inter face.

• There could be major changes coming in how Ubuntu is released next year if the Ubuntu kernel developers have their way. In a broadcast conversation between Ubuntu Kernel Team Manager Leann Ogasawara and Canonical developer liaison Daniel Holbach, Ogasawara talked about discussions that the Ubuntu kernel developers had been having concerning switching the distribution’s release cycle to a rolling methodology with Ubuntu 14.04.

• When we announced Ubuntu for phones on the 2nd January, we also had a call for volunteers to help create the core applications that would be part of the platform. Like any phone OS we need to provide a calendar, calculator, email, social media apps and more. Ubuntu has long been an open community project and we wanted to work with our community from the outset to work on a set of apps that we can all be proud of.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi team launched the Pi Store few weeks ago, and it is filled with content from community and commercial companies. Raspberry Pi team just has approved OpenArena game in Pi Store.

Phones

• So here we go.. Nokia surprised a lot of Nokia-watchers by releasing its official smartphone shipments numbers today, well before the final Q4 results are due. So we can do the Nokia part of Q4 Bloodbath analysis and also the full year for Nokia. As Nokia is the last vendor left providing Symbian, we can do Symbian for Q4 and full year, and as Nokia does the vast majority of Windows Phone, we can also do preliminary estimate for Q4 and Full Year 2012 results for Microsoft’s Windows Phone ecosystem. Is it the promised ‘third ecosystem’…

Ballnux

• Former President Bill Clinton is the ultimate scene-stealer.

• Samsung Digital Solutions President Stephen Woo talked new tech at the company’s keynote on Wednesday morning, but a new processing chip and flexible display prototypes didn’t make people leap to their feet the way Clinton’s on-stage appearance did.

Android

• As for the actual phone, it runs a version of Android 4.1 that seemed pretty smooth in my hands-on time, though it did suffer the occasional app crash that I assume was just prototype blues. The tech specs are respectable, with a 4.3-inch 720p display, a dual-core 1.4 GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, a 13-megapixel camera, 2 GB of RAM and a minimum 32 GB of storage. The phone’s curved shape gets a bit chunky at its thickest point, where it measures 0.38 inches thick, but that’s to be expected given the extra E-Ink screen, and the curviness helps to add comfort at least.

• And as far as that goes, he was right. The building blocks of an Android powered smartphone are there for everyone, but that’s not what makes the Android ecosystem tick. Once you have the foundations of your device, you have to address a number of equally important area. Which are all controlled by Google, including the permission to call your smartphone an Android smartphone.

• One of Android’s strengths (perhaps its main strength) is the volume of applications that are available for Android devices. To be classed as Android compatible and join in the ecosystem your device is going to need to pass the compatibility test. This is a subtle one, but this makes sure that you follow Google’s vision for a modern smartphone OS, without much deviation. The need to have access to the applications will bind you to Google’s roadmap.

• Unfortunately, it has taken quite a while for Android market share to reflect the fact that users were adopting the newest flavors of Android. Even now, nearly 50% of Android users are running some variant of Android 2.3, which is now more than two years behind the latest version of the OS. With Android 4.1, things have finally started to lean towards the more modern user experience, and app developers are adopting the new toolset in droves.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Chrome

SaaS/Big Data

• CloudStack is an open source cloud computing platform. It allows CSPs and businesses to create, manage and deploy infrastructure cloud services. Citrix in April 2012 donated CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation, and the software platform is widely viewed as an alternative to OpenStack.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation will be releasing LibreOffice 4.0 in the beginning of February. It is a big and important release for us, and a major symbolic milestone. We have received questions and comments, however, that were basically about our reasons to change the major number, from the 3.x to the 4.x . I believe it’s important to explain why we are doing this, and what the 4.0 release is all about.

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• 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. Nevertheless, the main reason for writing this article is the following:

Public Services/Government

Openness/Sharing

• I recently co-founded an organization called OpenOakland with Code for America alumni Eddie Tejeda. One of our passions was that we both believe that government can and should be much more than a vending machine. It’s no secret that current local governments have a ton of changing to do, but we think it is unlikely that these changes will come about swiftly without all of us being involved and engaged; and supporting our government staff and leaders to make these changes.

Open Access/Content

• Aaron Swartz was threatened with criminal trial for downloading millions of academic articles. Although he may have employed questionable methods, the data-access principles he fought for are becoming widely embraced

• Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has agreed to serve at the helm of the U.S. Justice Department as President Barack Obama prepares to begin his second term, the White House said today.

• As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.

• This was a touching tribute: a collective effort to complete the task Swartz had tried – and many people felt died trying – to accomplish himself. But it is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive.

• ON JANUARY 1st each year the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University fetes Public Domain Day. It is a joyous occasion, celebrating the end of copyright protection for works that at long last leave the bosom of legal monopoly for the commonweal. The centre does, however, temper the elation with an important caveat: while much of the rest of the world may take cheer from mass migration of material to the public domain each year, America has not seen one since the 1970s, nor will it until 2019. The public domain is a catch-all term for material outside of the strictures of reproductive limits, or for which rights were formally foresworn. The centre promotes a balance between a creator’s and the public’s interest, says Duke’s James Boyle. Mr Boyle, one of the drafters of the set of liberal copyright assignment licences known as Creative Commons, invokes countless studies arguing that tight copyright makes sense over short periods, to encourage creative endeavour, but can be counterproductive if extended too far. Yet rightsholders lobby for greater control (and legislators often oblige them) “even when it turns out that it hurts their interest,” says Mr Boyle.

• He did so through his work on the RSS (Rich Site Summary) Web-syndication protocol, building essential technology for the copyright open-licensing project, Creative Commons, and his activism against the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have authorized blocking access to Internet sites that were alleged to be hosting infringing materials. He faced quite a hurdle in opening access to academic works: For almost all academic and scientific research, the public is asked to pay for it essentially twice. First, when government agencies or public universities sponsor the research, and a second time, when users must pay for access to the article, often via subscribing to a journal. Subscription fees often amount to tens of thousands of dollars. And most of those journals do not pay the authors; instead, they keep the fees as profits.

Open Hardware

• InMoov is an open-source DIY printable robot that can obey voice commands. It’s slightly creepy, but at least it’s cheap.

Programming

• Control conditions are the basic building blocks of C programming language. In this tutorial, we will cover the control conditions through some easy to understand examples.

Leftovers

• I’m a full visually-able user and I love looking at websites. I know though, that not everyone experiences websites in the same way. Browsing websites at different screen sizes is a hot topic at the moment, but lets not forget that it’s not just mobile users that experience websites differently, blind users experience them in a way you might not even realise.

Hardware

• Western technology companies’ view of China as the biggest pool of potential customers ever is looking less accurate than ever, after the Chinese government called for the formation of up to eight super-companies through mergers and acquisition by 2015.

Security

• Aaron Swartz was a well known author and founder of Demand Progress, who launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA which now has over a million members. He was also well known for his frequent television appearances and articles on a variety of topics, particularly the corrupting influence of big money on institutions and politics. He is best now known as the first martyr of the internet freedom fight after committing suicide to avoid what most would call unjust prosecution for victimless crimes.

• In the world of Hacktavism it would appear that they seldom have a dull moment or minute to spare. Just hours after hijacking and defacing USSC.gov in the United States in response to Aaron Swarz suicide, Anonymous turned their attention to the government of Turkey. Once again attacking and defacing a government sites in what they are calling “OPBigBrother”.

• Security researcher S. Viehboeck from SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab discovered that the /etc/shadow and /etc/password files on the appliances had user accounts with names such as product, support and websupport. These accounts were protected with weak passwords and the researcher says he produced a usable list of passwords in a short time. It is not possible to delete these accounts easily as they appear to be used for remote maintenance.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Federal investigators looking into disclosures of classified information about a cyberoperation that targeted Iran’s nuclear program have increased pressure on current and former senior government officials suspected of involvement, according to people familiar with the investigation.

• A disturbing report in Saturday’s Washington Post describes an FBI investigation of a large number of government officials suspected of leaking classified information to the press, engulfing an unknown group of reporters along the way. The investigation includes data-mining officials’ personal and professional communications to find any contact with journalists. Just to be clear: It seems officials are being targeted for just talking to the press.

• While the Obama administration has already shamefully prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined, this investigation—given its unprecedented scope and scale—has the potential to permanently chill both press freedom and the public’s right to kno

• Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich will not serve a jail sentence following his guilty plea in the killing of 24 Iraqis in 2005, a military judge said Tuesday.

• The announcement by Lt. Col. David Jones came after Wuterich took responsibility during his sentencing hearing at Camp Pendleton for the killings in the Euphrates River town of Haditha and expressed remorse to the victims’ families.

• …2.3 million people behind bars in America…

• The judge excoriated the city for flagrant indifference to the Fourth Amendment. The amendment has been interpreted by the courts to mean that police officers can legally stop and detain a person only when they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is committing, has committed or is about to commit a crime.

• The Pentagon has just approved a major expansion for its cybersecurity force, increasing the headcount from 900 to 4,900 over the next several years, reports The Washington Post. While yet to be formally announced, the enlargement is said to come at the request of Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the Defense Department’s head of Cyber Command, and director of the NSA.

• The story behind Mossad’s bungled bid to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

• A federal judge has sentenced former CIA officer John Kiriakou to 30 months in jail, making him the first officer to be sent to jail for leaking classified secrets. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports on the case and Kiriakou says he leaked the information to speak out against torture, calling himself a “whistleblower.”

• Contradictory reports of an explosion at Iran’s uranium enrichment site have been emerging. Iran denies it ever happened, calling it “Western propaganda” while Israel confirms it, putting tensions around upcoming nuclear talks.

• Iranian dissident-turned CIA operative Reza Kahlili told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that an alleged blast at the Fordow nuclear installation in Iran is “the largest case of sabotage in decades.”

• Reportedly, the results of this investigation could link some of Poland’s most senior politicians with illegal detention and torture, as well as impact negatively on the relationship between Poland and its key ally, the US, according to Reuters.

• The news agency’s sources, including lawyers and human rights activists, reveal that the investigation was halted after the original investigators were taken off the case early last year.

• In late 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, Matthew Jones, a Reader in International History, at London’s Royal Holloway College, discovered “frighteningly frank” documents:1957 plans between then UK Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and then President, Dwight Eisenhower, endorsing: “a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion (of Syria) by Syria’s pro-western neighbours.” (ii)

• At the heart of the plan was the assassination of the perceived power behind then President Shukri al-Quwatli. Those targeted were: Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, Head of Military Intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, Chief of Syrian General Staff: and Khalid Bakdash, who headed the Syrian Communist Party.

• The document was drawn up in Washington in the September of 1957:

• “In order to facilitate the action of liberative (sic) forces, reduce the capabilities of the regime to organize and direct its military actions … to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals.

• When he receives an expected sentence of 30 months in federal prison later this week, John Kiriakou will pay the price for a catastrophic error in judgment. But he shouldn’t suffer alone: The Obama administration, too, needs to do a little penance if it hopes to live up to the president’s famous promise to “usher in a new era of open government.”

Cablegate

• Civil activists, in collaboration with the Human Rights Institute, launched the Slovak version of WikiLeaks to mark the first anniversary of the Gorilla protest. On the same day they also organised a peaceful protest held in front of the US Embassy to Slovakia on January 26 attended by about 30 people, the TASR newswire.

• Assange will be assassinated if freed, expert says.

• Ecuador will seek judicial help to ensure the safe passage from Britain of WiliLeaks founder Julian Assange. The activist is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London fighting extradition to Sweden over sex assault charges.

• On 3 February, 2013, Julian Assange will receive the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award in absentia. Each year, Yoko Ono chooses recipients to honor their work as an expression of courage.

• By not allowing passage to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from London to Latin America, where he was granted asylum, Britain infringes same international documents it vigorously lobbied for, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino tells RT.

• A federal appeals court ruled Friday that prosecutors can demand Twitter account information of certain users in their criminal probe into the disclosure of classified documents on WikiLeaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• China’s smog problem is reaching historically high levels, with air quality in parts of the country now 40 times higher than standards set by the WHO.

Finance

• Greg Smith ’01 is a former executive director and vice president of investing banking firm Goldman Sachs. In March 2012, he resigned from the firm in an op-ed in The New York Times decrying the firm’s change in culture and loss of client focus. He has since written “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story.” Smith spoke to The Stanford Daily about his time at the firm, Stanford students on Wall Street and the difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

• “Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches?” is the rhetorical question that Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar Grimson asks (and answers) in this truly epic three minutes of truthiness from the farce that is the World Economic Forum in Davos. Amid a week of back-slapping and self-congratulatory party-outdoing, as John Aziz notes, the Icelandic President explains why his nation is growing strongly, why unemployment is negligible, and how they moved from the world’s poster-child for banking crisis 5 years ago to a thriving nation once again. Simply put, he says, “we didn’t follow the prevailing orthodoxies of the last 30 years in the Western world.” There are lessons here for everyone – as Grimson explains the process of creative destruction that remains much needed in Western economies – though we suspect his holographic pass for next year’s Swiss fun will be reneged…

• It is fitting that Goldman Sachs is the recipient of this year’s “Public Eye” designation, but it is even more fitting that it is being announced during the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. Goldman Sachs exemplifies the travesty that WEF has created. It is not the worst of the worst. It is representative of the financial world of systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) that are spreading crony capitalism through the West. The SDIs are the so-called “too big to fail (or prosecute)” banks.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A CNET reporter has quit in the wake of CNET parent CBS ’ statement that it blocked the technology news website from considering Dish Network ’s controversial ad-skipping device for its annual Consumer Electronics Show awards. “Sad to report that I’ve resigned from CNET,” CNET senior writer Greg Sandoval announced via Twitter Monday morning. “I no longer have confidence that CBS is committed to editorial independence.” CBS Interactive, which owns CNET, said Friday that Dish’s device, “Hopper with Sling,” was “removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp,” as the Journal reported at the time. The device is the latest version of Dish’s digital video recorder that makes it easy for viewers to skip over television commercials.

Censorship

• Yesterday, a French court decided that people on Twitter have no right to anonymity when posting xenophobic comments. This is deeply troubling: the court says that unpopular opinions don’t have the same protection from freedom of speech as popular ones. Further, and more troubling still, this is a pan-European trend.

• The White House is defending the right of Piers Morgan to speak out on gun control. The forum: A formal response to a White House petition calling on President Obama to deport the CNN host for advocating new restrictions on guns after the Dec. 14 mass killing at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. “Let’s not let arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First,” said the response written by White House press secretary Jay Carney.

• Today, a Facebook spokesman reached out to Wired to reverse its previous stance on imagery that promoted violence toward women, stating that a photo it had previously deemed acceptable for the social networking site “should have been taken down when it was reported to us and we apologize for the mistake.”

• Burma (Myanmar) announced that it has dissolved the press censorship board which was officially known as Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), the state-run New Light of Myanmar said Friday. The termination of PSRD has been approved during Thursday’s cabinet meeting, the newspaper said.

• “The division under the Printing and Publishing Enterprise has stopped functioning since 20 August, 2012 to pave ways for freedom of press,” according to the report. However, in place of PSRD, “Copyrights and Registration Division” will be shaped under the Information and Public Relations Department, NLM newspaper said.

Privacy

• No fix yet for attack that allows eavesdropping on private conversations.

• Internet companies such as Facebook and Google may have to get more permission to use information if European Union lawmakers give users more control over their personal data.

• A mere day after Facebook extolled the benefits of integrating Facebook Login as a user registration option for developers’ apps, the social networking giant also managed to highlight the risks of relying on third-party platforms by blocking two apps that had integrated Facebook data.

• While the policies are somewhat reassuring, they don’t have the full force of the law yet

• At their yearly conference the Dutch The National Cyber ​​Security Center stated this week they want to listen more to the hacker community. It is fine that the government will at last listen to the people who have been ahead of the curve for decades, although the question remains – why it has waited to do this until 2013? Even if this had been done as recently as 5 or 10 years ago it would have saved an incredible amount of trouble and public money. I sincerely hope that the consultations with the hack(tivist) community are about more than just technical tricks, because most benefits to society are derived from discussing policy. For purely technical issues the usual consulting companies can always be hired and then simply pay hackers for their knowledge and advice, just like any other experts.

Civil Rights

• The education minister has repeated remarks that Bahais cannot enroll in public schools, saying it violates the Constitution.

• After more than a year of closed-door consultations, the government has finally released an updated draft proposal for those long-awaited anti-spam regulations.

• The latest proposed rules, which were published in the Canada Gazette over the weekend, would add several new exemptions to the law, including inter-organizational email — messages sent by one employee to another, for instance, or to a contractor or franchisee.

• The last two weeks have brought two important decisions in the ongoing litigation over behavioral advertising firm NebuAd’s alleged use of a device to intercept data from ISP networks. Several ISPs allegedly permitted NebuAd to install an “appliance” on their networks in order to collect and analyze subscriber data for ad targeting purposes. In lawsuits that began to be filed in 2008, plaintiffs have alleged that NebuAd–and the ISPs with which it allegedly partnered– violated Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (i.e., the Wiretap Act) as well as other federal and state laws. Plaintiffs have sued the ISPs in separate suits around the country. Two of these suits–against ISPs Embarq and WideOpen West (“WOW”)–yielded decisions in favor of the ISPs last week.

• This week, Big Brother Watch submitted our response to the consultation on Judicial Review. In conclusion, we say:

• “An overwhelming number of points in the consultation document are anecdotal and unsubstantiated; indeed many are contradicted by official figures. This consultation is absolutely not a document that should be relied upon when embarking on reform of one of our most fundamental legal rights.”

• Rape victims in Iran usually stay quiet in order to protect the honour of their family but at the time when journalists based in the country are facing strict restrictions, these letters have become one of the only sources of information about the situation of hundreds of imprisoned activists.

• The feds mandate fidelity between carriers and users: New rule under DMCA outlaws unlocking new handsets without carrier permission.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Zero regulation for telcos could endanger neutrality, Internet co-creator says.

Drones

• Wednesday, Jon Stewart welcomed Mary “Missy” Cummings, an MIT associate professor of aeronautics to the Daily Show to help promote a PBS documentary called Rise of the Drones.

• Cummings appears as a technical expert in Rise of the Drones, and Stewart questioned her on drone technology, its commercial applications and their purpose. Unfortunately, the entire segment focused mainly on the non-combat and non-assassination use of drones, including theoretical commercial applications, rather than a discussion of the ethical quandaries posed by their use in warfare and targeted killings. Throughout the program, both host and guest vaguely joked about the dystopian nature of drone strikes and surveillance but failed to critique it as such.

• Why would the U.N. begin investigating, as Emmerson puts it, “drone strikes and other forms of remotely targeted killing,” as directed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Obama and his administration, to determine “whether there is a plausible allegation of unlawful killing”?

• …does not need to provide evidence to anyone to show that the killings are warranted.

• Contracts valued at up to $73,952,510 and $74,878,971 were awarded in July 2011 for the development and use of surveillance unmanned aerial systems and Helios unmanned air systems. The contracts show 5 percent of each project to be done in Johnstown.

• 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.

• A rising death toll in Afghanistan, another round of army cuts and a new front opening on the war on terror. Is this the next phase in the decade of the drone?

Intellectual Monopolies

• India’s generic industry received a windfall on November 2 when the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) withdrew a patent granted to Pegasys (pegylated interferon alfa-2a; IFN-alpha2a), marketed by the multinational Roche of Basel, for use in combination with ribavirin (Rebetol, Virazole, Copegus) in treating hepatitis C virus (HCV). The board ruled, after hearing an appeal by Mumbai-based Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust, a patient advocacy group, that the drug is not a new invention, as the process by which polyethylene glycol (PEG) is added to IFN-alpha2a was already known at the time of the patent grant. The appellate board also cited the drug’s high cost (over $8,000 for a 6-month course) as a reason for revocation. The decision makes it possible for generic drugmakers to introduce low-cost copies of Pegasys. It also sets a precedent for advocacy groups to challenge the validity of previously granted patents on the grounds of patients’ rights to affordable access to lifesaving treatments.

Copyrights

• …connections to Wikileaks may have strengthened the government’s interest.

• The ill-considered prosecution leading to the suicide of computer prodigy Aaron Swartz is the most recent in a long line of abusive prosecutions coming out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, representing a disastrous culture shift. It sadly reflects what’s happened to the federal criminal courts, not only in Massachusetts but across the country.

• “The door outside Senator Ron Wyden’s office says, ‘The Senator from Oregon,’” said the speaker who introduced him at a packed morning CES discussion. “It should also say, ‘The Senator from the Internet!’” Cheers abounded.

• Courts adopt aggressive approach in cross-border Internet jurisdiction cases.

• Many readers will recall that nearly one year ago, the U.S. government launched a global takedown of Megaupload.com, with arrests of the leading executives in New Zealand and the execution of search warrants in nine countries. Canada was among the list of participating countries as the action included seizure of Megaupload.com servers located here. While the failed attempt (thus far) to extradite Megaupload mogul Kim Dotcom to the U.S. has attracted the lion share of attention, the U.S. government has quietly been working to obtain access to all the data stored on seized computers in other jurisdictions.

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