● 01.29.13

● Links 30/1/2013: Axis Communications, D-Link, O.S. Systems and Perforce Join Linux Foundation

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Stereotyping on the Internet is almost unavoidable due to the opacity of the medium and there are now hundreds of types of “fanbois” online since the dawn of the Internet. For tech enthusiasts with plenty of time on their hands, it’s easy to troll for the occasional MacOSX, Microsoft, Android, iOS, and Apple fanboi (and yes, Apple has several categories on its own). I’m an unabashed Linux user and Linux evangelist despite being platform agnostic (the industry where I work in requires a certain level of MacOSX and Windows proficiency). Although Linux evangelists make up a small percentage (even smaller than the alleged percentage of Linux desktop users) of computer users out there, there are still hazards to attempting to promote Linux. The difficulties aren’t always associated with the freakishly crazy Mac worshipers who would skewer you at any negative comment about their beloved Apple devices:

Desktop

• After only a few months Acer’s Chromebook already accounts for 5 to 10 percent of Acer’s US shipments and HP will soon be launching its own Chromebook. In the meantime, Windows 8 PC sales remain anemic.

• News: You can get a great desktop or server operating system for $0 from Debian and a great office suite for $0 from The Document Foundation. Buy pizzas with your savings or whatever you want to boost the economy locally.

• At some point, I discovered Linux. I can recall the thrill of getting my mouse to work when I stumbled across a RedHat 5.0 book with the disks in the back. I always thought Another Level was a great desktop, if lacking the highly integrated functions of Windows. I surfed with Netscape Navigator 3.06 for several months before I discovered updates. Nor can I forget buying Applix 4, then the thrill of getting my hands on the retail box of WordPerfect 8 for Linux. Despite the occasional crash with it on RedHat 6.3, I thought it was wonderful, a real advancement over 6.1 on Windows. Applix 5 was cool, too. I still have the boxed sets for WP8, Applix 5, and RH 6.3. I’m currently running WP8 on Ubuntu Hardy in a virtual machine with VMware.

Server

• When Boxee announced its new Boxee TV product last October, it also stated that the original Boxee Box, which had already ceased being manufactured, would soon transition into “maintenance mode.” Additionally, the company promised one last firmware update, which would “update the Flash player and fix some key bugs.”

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Canonical is to launch a phone. Fedora 18 has been released. Friends of Gnome are looking for money and Valve is to make a Linux-powered games console. Hear our first discoveries of 2013 and how you’d like the podcast to improve in season 5.

• Tech Geeks from around the world are meeting in the nation’s capital this week for the Linux Conference.

• It’s a five-day love-in for fans of open source software—non-commercial software where the source code can be modified and redistributed for free.

Kernel Space

• Another bug-fix pull request was sent in on Tuesday for the Btrfs file-system in the yet-to-be-released Linux 3.8 kernel. Chris Mason notes that he’s still working out an older CRC corruption issue.

• A Google engineer has proposed “Fast Queue Spinlocks” for the Linux kernel as an alternative in select cases to the default ticket spinlock.

• There’s a number of ACPI updates that are being shown off and will likely make their debut in the Linux 3.9 kernel for improving the power management support.

• Axis Communications, D-Link, O.S. Systems and Perforce

Graphics Stack

• A set of seven patches published today allow Wayland’s Weston compositor with its DRM back-end to support rendering through Pixman.

• Earlier this month I wrote about the work being done on software rendering in Weston using Pixman. The pixel manipulation library was used to achieve “pure software rendering” and was combined with work on MIT-SHM shared memory support for the X11 back-end. This work allows for Wayland/Weston to run better in non-hardware-accelerated environments.

• For most Phoronix readers out there that are Linux enthusiasts into hardware tweaking, performance optimizations, and getting the most out of your Linux box, Mesa 9.0.2 is rather boring. It’s just the usual bug-fixing and stable changes that were back-ported from Git master. Most of you reading Phoronix are likely already on Mesa 9.1-devel from Mesa Git master, which is where the exciting work happens.

• The open-source Radeon R600 LLVM back-end has finally received support for indirect memory addressing.

Benchmarks

• With the Intel Haswell product launch coming up soon, here’s a look at how the Intel “Ivy Bridge” HD 4000 graphics support has matured on the seven most recent Linux kernel releases. This benchmarking shows how the performance of the Intel DRM driver has changed between the Linux 3.2 kernel and the Linux 3.8 kernel that’s presently under development when using the integrated graphics found on the latest-generation Core i7 CPU.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• Lisp (derives from “LISt Processing”) is one of the oldest programming languages. It was invented in 1958, with the language being conceived by John McCarthy and is based on his paper “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine”. Over the years, Lisp has evolved into a family of programming languages. The most commonly used general-purpose dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme. Other dialects include Franz Lisp, Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp, XLISP and Zetalisp. The majority of Lisp implementations offer a lot more than simply a programming language. They include an entire environment such as debuggers, inspectors, tracing, and other tools to add the Lisp developer.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• One Late Night is a short immersive horror-game experience, released for free for Linux, Mac and WIndows, the basic idea of this game is to put the gamer in a situation similar to something that it could have been in, and also the scenario is just an office, with standard things (and an android figurine), the idea is that the players will relate themselves to the game setting and scenario and become immersed. Even if you can’t relate to the game storyline, you will still get a good experience.

• Spearmint is another open-source game engine project. The objective of Spearmint is to build upon the ioquake3 game engine with further improvements. While it adds in some features, Spearmint has yet to see any widespread adoption.

• This coming week marks one year since there was the big shake-up at Linux Game Publishing where Michael Simms, the founder and CEO of twelve years, stepped down. A new CEO stepped in, and there were promises of future work, but so far there’s been any major announcements and LGP continues to fade away.

• Over the weekend Valve release a couple of classic games to its Steam games network for Linux and Mac systems, unveiling the addition of Half Life and Countersrike 1.6.

• Half Life was originally launched back in 1998, and recently received a graphic make over from the team over at Black Mesa. However the one released by Valve contain all the retro graphics of the original.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Let us be non-mainstream. In the world of Linux desktop environments, Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) is not your typical first or second choice. Most people will mention Gnome, KDE, perhaps Unity. You may have heard of Cinnamon and MATE lately, and Xfce is also a solid, longtime niche player. LXDE keeps slipping under the radar.

• The thing is, without decent financial backing by the big names, it is very hard creating and maintaining a robust and bug-free desktop environment that can address the needs of the common user, if a Linux user can ever be classified as common in any way. Still, deviating from the usual formula is very tricky, and few distributions manage to balance beauty and functionality well. And the more exotic the desktop environment gets, the more difficult the challenge. For example, in the world of Xfce, Dreamlinux was one of the few players to tackle it properly. Even the big shot struggle, Gnome 3 and KDE being no exceptions. So what happens when you take LXDE and skin your desktop with it?

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• At the end of March, we will be releasing Plasma Active 4. Since Plasma Active 3, We’ve made improvements to the Files, eBook reader (Okular), Settings and Alarms applications along with a large number of bug fixes and performance improvements. We’re also in the middle of moving to the KDE Platform 4.10 release as well as getting closer in line with other Mer based efforts, such as sharing the description files with Nemo that are used when building images for different device targets and adapting to a systemd driven user session. These two changes introduced a relatively large number of regressions that are being ironed out. In fact, we paused on the feature development and turned focus to fit and finish work before continuing on.

• Less than one month after the release of the Rekonq 2.0 web-browser for the KDE desktop as an alternative to Konqueror, Rekonq 2.1 has surfaced and it brings more features to this open-source WebKit-powered project.

• KScreen, the new way of managing monitors/outputs on Linux when running the KDE Plasma desktop, saw its first alpha release this weekend.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Last week, I suggested that the continued interest in GNOME 2 handicaps desktop innovation. Since then, a proposal has been made that Fedora’s next release should default to Cinnamon, Linux Mint’s GNOME 2-like shell. My guess is that the proposal will find many in favor.

Distributions

• One of the biggest draw backs of Linux adoptions for home users is that it looks so clunky and fearfully difficult to use. Pear Linux is one promising distro that is out to change that perception. And so far, it is doing an outstanding job.

New Releases

• We appreciate your feedbacks about the overall speed/lightness of the system compared to last stable version of Elive. You can say something in our chat channel directly from the running system. If you detect any lagging in the system please consider different setups like disabling composite (which you can select on the startup of the graphical system) in order to report improvements. We would also appreciate feedbacks about composite enabled or disabled in old computers, suggestions for better performances, and memory usage compared to Topaz.

• The developers of Groovy have announced the release of Groovy 2.1. The new release of the JVM-based language now has full support for Java 7′s “invoke dynamic” byte code and API, which allows dynamic languages on the JVM to make dynamic method calls as efficiently as Java programs make static method calls. Groovy 2.0 had support for most method calls using “invoke dynamic”, but now all method calls make use of it. The GPars concurrency framework is also now bundled with Groovy 2.1.

• Announced last week was a new fork of GNOME Classic as the Consort Desktop. Released today by the Linux distribution behind this project, SolusOS, is the first alpha version of their next Linux release that integrates this forked GNOME desktop.

Screenshots

• Netrunner is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with a focus on options that won’t make it into mainline Ubuntu and alternatives to some mainline Ubuntu decisions. Some features are WINE included by default, some selected Qt/KDE applications in the GNOME desktop, and no Mono.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mageia 3 Beta 2 was announced a wee bit late last Friday with some major version jumps. The team say they’re in the final run, but they still have time to clean up those bugs before Final. The live image returned a release or two ago, but today it finally worked on my hardware.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• During my week with Fedora there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind and it took a while to figure out what it was that bothered me about this release. What I think was troubling me is that the components of this release don’t feel integrated nor coordinated. Perhaps Fedora is going through a more tumultuous stage than usual as will happen from time to time with an experimental distribution. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that some applications use the GNOME Shell integrated menu and some do not; the system admin tools have distinctly different styles of interface when compared side-by-side and even parts of the installation process feel like they were designed by different people. This approach is in contrast to other mainstream distributions such as Ubuntu, openSUSE and Mageia where system components tend to hold to a central, integrated design. This feeling of disunity added to the overall impression that Fedora 18 feels very experimental and not yet finished. There were a lot of little bugs and a few big ones in this release and it led me to believe that even with the two month delay Fedora 18 was released too early.

Debian Family

• CANBERRA: When Bdale Garbee talks about the future of the Linux desktop, it is not so much a visionary view as a view of how he would like computing to evolve.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• One of the most exciting announcements of the beginning of the year is the Ubuntu phone – not to be confused with Ubuntu for Android. Canonical is ready to make a serious play for the mobile business – at least part of it – that’s dominated by Android and iOS, with Windows Phone and BlackBerry left to battle for third place.

• And the Ubuntu phone certainly looks like an interesting alternative. The new mobile platform will surely appeal to current PC users that choose Ubuntu as their desktop OS, but not only.

• As you already know, any Android device that runs Google’s OS will be able to run Ubuntu, as long as you’ll be willing to perform the installing part, and the Galaxy Nexus could soon get its first Ubuntu phone code.

• 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.

• While still a ways from being comparable to the proprietary graphics drivers in terms of features and OpenGL performance, the open-source GPU drivers found by default in the forthcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release are a big improvement over the out-of-the-box graphics drivers found in earlier Ubuntu Linux releases. The Ubuntu desktop is also faster thanks to improvements to its Unity desktop environment and Compiz compositing window manager. In this article are Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and a preliminary Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot. In this first article, the OpenGL performance of Intel and Radeon graphics are being benchmarked.

• The terminal isn’t the kind of thing casual users will get a lot of use out of, and that’s true of the terminal in the desktop version of Ubuntu as well. I’m not an experienced or particularly skilled Linux user, but the times I’ve needed to do anything in the terminal I’ve been glad it’s there, and I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the few terminal commands I do know. Instead of digging through menus or utilities, with a few lines in the terminal you can do just about anything in Linux.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint team has announced the codename of Linux Mint 15 and future plans on Github. Linux Mint 15 is named as “Olivia” – pronounced as “oh-LIV-ee-ah” – Latin origin. Meaning of Olivia is “olive tree”. The olive tree is a symbol of fruitfulness, beauty, and dignity. As name suggests this release will focus on beauty and user interface, as well as improvements in Cinnamon, Nemo, MDM, Live installer, Mint tools.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• So yes, when we add the severe dissatisfaction with the Windows Phone operating system and Lumia by their first owners, almost two thirds want to get rid of their Lumia and take some other, any other operating system based smartphones instead of their Windows smartphones, on both sides of the Atlantic, then yes, this strategy is utterly doomed, not just failing now, but into the future. Because, look at the ‘real picture’ ie taking market growth into consideration, the right side graph – market share. Stephen Elop’s mad Microsoftian misery has managed to migrate from totally satisfied Symbian Nokia users – Nokia grew smartphone sales 53% from 2009 to 2010 – to now, only one in 20 loyal Nokia Symbian users who were tricked into converting to Windows Phone, both arrived there and is intending to stay. 17 of those 20 have already been scared away and 2 of the remaining 3 are already decided, they will not remain with Lumia series longer. This is the very definition of textbook strategy failure.

Ballnux

• When the iPhone launched in 2007, Jobs proclaimed when it came to phones, Apple was likely, at that time, five years ahead of the competition. Well, those five years are up, and all of a sudden, as if on cue, many of the Valley’s smartest technology minds and observers have begun to slowly split up their attention between their primary mobile devices (iPhones) and the most recent Samsung lines of Android phones. How will the growth of Android affect the priorities of developers, which mobile platforms they chose to launch on, and the monetization formula for hardware (with Samsung’s ability to capture value) and software (apps) in a state of flux?

Android

• A new USB stick-sized Android SmartTV from Sanko Co., Ltd of Japan features a quad-core 1.2 GHz Freescale i.mx6 processor. I think that’s more power than any other device of its type that I’ve come across.

• With it, you can turn any TV with the right connectivity into an Android device or TV.

• It supports Google Play, Japanese input (it’s from a Japanese company), plays most popular audio and video files, and comes with all the accessories you need, all for ¥14,800 or $167.00 USD.

• Whether you use your Android device for business or for personal endeavors, storing some of that data on the limited memory of a handset or a tablet is not always sufficient. Not to mention it’s nice to be able to access those files from either a tablet, a smartphone, or a computer.

• We could have made some nice jokes or puns with the name of the new Android smartphone introduced Thursday by Lenovo. With the Acer Liquid E1 being unveiled, we could have said that the handset is all washed up, or is a drop in the bucket, or used some other connotation to liquid. But, no, we decided not to do that with this model. Instead, it is all about the specs which might have wowed the crowd back in 2010, but now three years later, seem dated.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• In the more than 30 years that I have been involved with the tech industry I have seen a lot of strange things but none stranger than the events of today at the Linux Conference Australia. iTWire senior Linux writer Sam Varghese has been ejected from the conference. Why? Well, you may ask and then wonder what the Linux community in Australia has come to.

SaaS/Big Data

• As 2013 begins, there is continued momentum for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing framework. As we reported last September, OpenStack has its very own foundation, which is packed with heavy-hitting technology titans among its members. And now, the newest member of the OpenStack Foundation is Hortonworks, which provides an enterprise-class Hadoop distribution and resources for Hadoop. As a member of the foundation, Hortonworks has an opportunity to marry open source Big Data crunching with cutting-edge cloud computing.

• OpenNebula, the European answer to the likes of Eucalyptus and OpenStack that counts CERN and China Mobile among its customers, is moving to differentiate itself from competitors by freely releasing OpenNebulaApps, a suite of cloud application management tools that sit on top of its traditional infrastructure management toolkit.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• There’s a new major version of open-source LibreOffice office suite on its way, but developers, not end-users, will be the ones who will notice the real changes.

CMS

• The WordPress developers have announced a maintenance update to the popular open source blogging software. WordPress 3.5.1 fixes 37 bugs and addresses three security issues, including two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Users running WordPress on IIS might run into a problem that prevents the upgrade; the developers have prepared documentation to help users work around this problem.

BSD

• The Arch BSD operating system is moving forward, an attempt at a BSD platform that’s inspired by the Arch Linux distribution and using its package-set.

• An email arrived at Phoronix this morning that the ArchBSD.net web-site is now online. This new site looks just like ArchLinux.org, but Linux references are replaced by BSD. Right now there isn’t too much information available on Arch BSD, but the news from this week states that a test ISO should be available shortly.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

• What’s going on? They are accepting FLOSS to do the lion’s share of the IT in government and small businesses to work on smaller slices of IT instead of getting some large business to slap Wintel and “partners” into a pig barn. The plan is to replace the web presence with FLOSS and not just to add a server. They are cutting through paperwork wherever they can from top to bottom.

• The UK developed a “Fix My Street” web application as FLOSS. Source code is on GitHub (GNU Affero General Public License). It’s now being copied by Switzerland and Norway is using it to allow citizens to report potholes and such, giving government the ability to respond quickly and to keep on top of the overall situation with roads. Beautiful.

• The distance between government policy favoring open source technology and solicitations that don’t actively discriminate against it can be great.

• According to a report on the EC’s open source portal, Joinup, Sweden is following the example of Norway in using the “Fix My Street” open source software that was developed in the UK. The software enables citizens to easily report problems and helps authorities identify and prioritise them. A pilot version of the national service, “Fixa Min Gata”Swedish language link, is expected to become operational in March or April and will allow citizens to report such things as potholes, broken pavements, graffiti or non-functional street lighting.

Openness/Sharing

• Tristan sez, “Open Source Ecology founder Marcin Jakubowski and the OSE team explain the philosophy behind their work and the open source movement as a whole. We’re always looking for remote collaborators to pick up and run with our designs. If you’re interested in building or improving on our work, please visit the OSE wiki.”

Open Data

• When I asked whether the push to free up government data was resulting in economic activity and startup creation, I started to receive emails from people around the United States and Europe. I’ll be publishing more of what I learned in our ongoing series of open data interviews and profiles over the next month, but two responses are worth sharing now.

Open Hardware

• We had a chance to sit down with Kyle Rankin, SCALE 11x keynote speaker, to discuss his upcoming keynote as well as a host of other topics including 3D printing, Linux desktops and whether Jorge Castro is the barometer for cool technology.

Programming

• January 25, 2013 at 07:40 AM | categories: Sysadmin, Tips, Unix, Linux | View Comments

• The Microsoft translator provides an API that you can use for automated translation. It currently supports about 39 languages.

• True to the nature of open source i found that someone had already written a python wrapper to the API. I extended the wrapper to use the requests and pofile packages.

Leftovers

Security

• The Dawson College computer science student who was expelled after discovering a security breach in a system used by students across Quebec has been offered a scholarship by the company behind the software.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• “Hollywood has done as much as anybody to coarsen and diminish America’s prestige in the world,” the ex-media baron… “The CIA has not got anything right in Iran since Eisenhower…”

• Three former top-ranking Central Intelligence Agency officials picked apart plot lines of Zero Dark Thirty Tuesday, including the film’s depiction of enhanced interrogation, which the former officials say failed to accurately chronicle how the events played out during the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

• Incidentally, the people who operate drones hate the word “drone”. Last year, speaking to the MOD, I asked to speak to their “drone expert”, and was told in very sniffy tones, “We don’t fly drones. We fly unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles.”

• The United States is expanding its fleet of killer drones, President Barack Obama’s favorite weapon of war, despite widespread international resentment of assassinations by air and unanswered questions on the legality and long-term utility of the practice.

• drones quietly have been entering the arsenal of Canadian police departments.

• Wikileaks revealed that former president Ali Abdullah Saleh had agreed to take responsibility for US attacks.

• “Fazlullah is a priority — stalked by spies on the ground and squarely in the sights of armed drones,” a senior US Special Operations official told the Post. “He is very high on the leader board. We have assets focused on killing him.”

• There are no drones buzzing around Iowa City’s skies — not officially, anyway.

• And authorities say neither the Iowa City Police Department nor other city departments have even considered using unmanned aircraft, like the ones a few law enforcement agencies around the country have started using.

• Since these murders are presumably done for our national security, shouldn’t We The People know who is being killed in our name?

• Drones have become popular recently. Not with the American people, but with the government. During the Obama years, drone strikes have grown by as much as 200%. Frustrating as this is for much of his base, it is entirely consistent with the purported goals of his foreign policy: i.e. to keep America safe while drawing down wars abroad and reducing the military budget.

Cablegate

• Kevin Gosztola reports that the government is now attempting to block discussion of materials being inappropriately classified.

• On Monday 7 January, Foreign Minister Bob Carr announced that Australia has been chosen to head the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions committees on Iran, and on the Taliban al-Qaeda. The committees are tasked with monitoring the implementation of UNSC sanctions and recommending further measures.

• Carr trumpeted the news as a “big vote of confidence” in Australia’s “diplomatic pull” in the area of weapons non-proliferation. The Murdoch-owned The Australian echoed Carr’s tone, describing Iran as a “rogue state” with an “undeclared program to develop nuclear weapons”.

• …raised by a 2010 WikiLeaks cable …

• The head of a former Chiadzwa based mining company, who was sued over information contained in a previously confidential diplomatic report, is being described as a ‘sacrificial lamb’ after losing his case.

• [...]

• …silence any dissenting voices in Zimbabwe.

• A press release from Wikileaks aid that the U.S could possibly have had a secret indictment against Julian Assange and those associated with Wikileaks for more than the last 12 months.

• UK police have said he will be arrested and deported to Sweden to answer alleged sexual-offence charges and then perhaps be sent on to the US for “unstated crimes” against the US, under secret EU-US arrangements.

• Bonyongwe is not the first ZANU PF individual to file a lawsuit over WikiLeaks revelations.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, says he believes banks serve a social purpose and are “doing God’s work.”

• There is a new twist in the London Whale trading scandal that cost JPMorgan Chase $6.2 billion in trading losses last year. Some of the firm’s own traders bet against the very derivatives positions placed by its chief investment office, said three people familiar with the matter.

• Iceland has won a legal battle over its reponsibilities to British and Dutch savers who lost money when an online savings bank collapsed.

• The European Free Trade Association court said Iceland did not have to guarantee minimum levels of compensation when Icesave went bust.

• Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, the country’s prime minister said: “It is quite clear that this judgement will add force to the economic rebuilding in Iceland. Possibly the ratings agencies will revise their results. This will also have a positive influence on the lifting of capital controls.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Virginia’s governor has come out against a partisan effort to reallocate electoral college votes by Congressional district, but the plan is far from dead in other states, with governors in Wisconsin and Michigan voicing support for similar measures. The split between Virginia and other states on this issue may not be explained entirely by cooler heads prevailing — it might be part of a political calculation about how best to elect a Republican president in 2016.

Censorship

Privacy

• Happy Data Privacy Day! To mark the day the Market Research Society (MRS) has launched ‘Fair Data, a new ethical mark they claim will help members of the public to easily identify between those organisations which collect, use and retain personal data properly and ethically, and those that do not.

• MRS hope that all organisations that collect and use personal data will be able to use the Fair Data mark which will become the instantly recognisable standard for an organisation that can be trusted to do the right think with all individuals’ data.

• Facebook’s Graph Search has certainly caused quite a stir since it was first announced two weeks ago. We wrote earlier about how Graph Search, still in beta, presents new privacy problems by making shared information discoverable when previously it was hard—if not impossible—to find at a large scale. We also put out a call to action—and even created a handy how-to guide—urging people to reassess their privacy settings.

Civil Rights

• An edict from the Library of Congress is about to make phone unlocking illegal for the first time in 6 years. The decision, issued in October, is part of a triennial process whereby the Librarian of Congress hands out exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

• Last week, we warned about the impending deadline if you wanted to unlock your phone “legally.” That’s because the Librarian of Congress took away the DMCA anti-circumvention exemption that allowed phone unlocking. If you’re wondering why we even have the Librarian of Congress deciding such things, that’s a much longer discussion. In the meantime, though, Derek Khanna has written an interesting piece of at The Atlantic, in which he points out that, not only is it illegal now to unlock your phone, it’s possibly criminal thanks to some broad and ridiculous readings of today’s copyright law. Until now, most people had been regarding this as purely a civil matter — and one where it seemed (mostly) unlikely that companies would take too many people to court.

DRM

• While the e-book market has certainly skyrocketed in recent years, it’s still not always easy to get digital books from your local library. Yet unlike physical books, which obviously degrade over time—digital books won’t. So publishers have figured out that they need to start selling a license to the book, rather than the book itself, to our venerable institutions of public learning.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Center for Food Safety argues that extending patent exhaustion to progeny seeds will benefit farmers by curtailing Monsanto’s patent enforcement actions targeting farmers. The Center also claims that extending the patent exhaustion doctrine in this way will benefit scientific research and innovation in agriculture, and lower the cost of farming. The Center further contends the Federal Circuit’s decision is contrary to Quanta, and reiterates petitioner’s argument that producing progeny seed constitutes use of the patented seed, not making it, and hence falls within the scope of patent exhaustion. The amici voice is concerned that farmers whose fields have been “contaminated” by Monsanto’s patented seeds could be subject to infringement lawsuits.

Trademarks

• Man, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sure loves its trademarks. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many cases of the IOC’s fierce brand protection have been detailed here, including taping over non-sponsor logos and seeking the power to enter homes to remove “unapproved signage.” This has also rubbed off on a few Olympians, triggering trademark office filings to protect made-up words stolen from middling hip hop artists and self-given nicknames.

• [...]

• So, with the kind of efficiency you only find in the most brutal of trademark bullies, the IOC has trademarked a number many people were planning to use starting next January, nine years in advance. And the IOC isn’t leaving anything to chance. It has staked a claim on all 45 of the possible registration classes, including (but good god, certainly not limited to) chemicals, pharmaceuticals, metals/alloys, machines, tools, scientific equipment, surgical instruments, lighting, heating, vehicles, firearms, musical instruments, furniture, ropes, tarps, string, textiles, toys, coffee, fresh fruits and vegetables, beer, other alcoholic beverages, tobacco, insurance, conferences and seminars, design and development of computer programs, restaurant services, asbestos and security.

Copyrights

• During a meeting in Geneva today the World Trade organization (WTO) authorized Antigua’s request to suspend U.S. copyrights. The decision confirmed the preliminary authorization the Caribbean island received in 2007, and means that the local authorities can move forward with their plan to start a download portal which offers movies, music and software without compensating the American companies that make them.

• U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said her office is weighing an appeal against a Tewksbury motel owner who criticized her for prosecutorial bullying last week after he won his battle in the feds’ three-year bid to seize his business, citing drug busts on the property.

• Letter to Attorney General Eric Holder says committee has “many questions” about the Justice Department’s handling of prosecution of the Internet activist, who committed suicide earlier this month.

• Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux kernel, says that prosecutor Carmen Ortiz “zealously prosecuted” the 26 years old hacker-activist Aaron Swartz, pushing him to the suicidal path that ended mid-January.

• Carmen Ortiz is not having a good month. The US Attorney who was in charge of the ridiculous Aaron Swartz prosecution — and now has over 50,000 people asking the White House to fire her — now will have to deal with an official investigation by Congress into that particular case. A bipartisan pair of Congressional representatives, Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings — who are basically the top dogs from each party on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee — have officially kicked off their investigation.

• The suicide last Friday of information activist, computer hacker and technical wunderkind Aaron Swartz has focused attention on Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, whose overzealous prosecution may have led to his death. Swartz, co-founder of a website later acquired by Reddit as well as a prime developer of the online publishing infrastructure known as Rich Site Summary (RSS), was under federal indictment for logging into JSTOR—a database of scholarly articles accessible from universities across the country—and downloading its content with the intent to distribute the articles online free of charge.

• Aaron Swartz’s former roommate, Peter Eckersley, says the late activist started Demand Progress because from D.C.’s perspective, it “doesn’t matter” if their laws break the Internet.

• Digital rights advocate’s death places spotlight on more open access to info.

• “However, it was extremely funny that in such a formal setting, with imposing red drapes surrounding the room and the Justices sitting high above the supplicants in big chairs that the Justices were so informal. They interrupted each other, spun around and tipped back and forth in their chairs, and some even pretended to go to sleep with their head on their desks. The whole thing looked like a bunch of kids and school, all of which would almost certainly be diagnosed with ADD for their curiosity and inability to resist asking questions. Macki mentioned that Justice Clarence Thomas looked like he was chewing gum, trying hard to hide it from the teacher.

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