● 02.01.13

● Links 1/2/2013: Tablets Growth, PHP Milestone

Posted in News Roundup at 9:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It’s pretty easy to set up a desktop system with most distros. I use Debian GNU/Linux because it has been around a while and has a huge repository of software. Let’s look at doing other kinds of things with your PC.

• Glyn Moody wonders whether the car – a currently undeveloped yet important platform with great potential – can provide the inspiration for the next generation of Linux coders.

• Working in Information Technology over the last twenty years (and the last ten or so as a senior engineer or team lead in various organizations) has exposed me to a lot of resumes over that time. Over the last five years, one of the more common questions I am asked is “how can I get a Linux related job?”. I will attempt to address that in this space.

• The most important thing to remember is that your quest for a Linux position at any organization is really no different than applying for any other I.T. position. Once you have identified the company and the posting (and a great place to get an idea of who is looking for Linux talent and with what experience, is The Linux Foundation), you need to focus on the attributes and experience you have that are directly applicable to the position you want. Your resume should then be tailored to highlight that experience throughout your career as much as possible.

• As advocates press for more freedom of speech and more open platforms in general, AccuPOS’ POS software is already ahead of the game. Gone are the days of inaccessibility and clandestine operations; the most progressive POS software is now available on the Linux operating system.

Desktop

Server

• Pulls over 1000 systems onto Linux servers.

• The Jeopardy champ’s college application has been accepted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Big Blue proudly reports.

• Audio and video professionals have long had their own sets of cables and associated protocols to connect their gear. Now thanks to the Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (AVB) 802.1Q standard, some of that gear can all be converged onto Ethernet networks.

• Extreme Networks this week introduced its support of Ethernet AVB on its portfolio of networking gear, including the Summit X440, X460 and X670 switches, ushering in a new era of networking convergence.

Kernel Space

• Microsoft is still playing catchup in the world of open source software, but it turned a corner on Wednesday, announcing that its Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 developer tools will both support Git, the version control system widely used by open source projects.

Graphics Stack

• The xf86-video-ati 7.1.0 graphics driver was released today as stable with several changes.

• Highlights for xf86-video-ati 7.1.0 include adding in new Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” PCI Ids, fixing the ring count for R300 Textured Video, an X-Video fix for coordinate limits on X1000 Avivo GPUs, an R200 fix, fixing damage reporting for PRIME slave pixmaps, support for limiting the swap rate when the CRTC is in the DPMS off state, and a couple of other fixes.

Applications

• Many of my previous articles have looked at software packages that do scientific calculations and generate scientific results. But, columns of numbers are nearly impossible to make sense of—at least, by regular human beings. So what can you do? The answer is visualization. We do massive amounts of processing visually, and the easiest way for us to review information is through some graphical format. Because of the power of graphical representations, several packages have been written by different groups. In this article, I’m looking at NCL (the NCAR Command Language, http://www.ncl.ucar.edu). NCAR is the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory develops NCL. NCL is an interpreted language designed specifically for data analysis and visualization. It supports several different file formats used in scientific computations, and it also provides several data analysis functions built-in.

• In my previous article introducing the basic mechanics of Vim, I briefly mentioned some of the more advanced capabilities. The last article was intended to give the reader a cursory introduction, and leave them with the ability to be competent in editing files with Vim. Today, we are going to buckle down and get into what makes Vim the best text editor on the planet. Let’s talk plugins.

• The core functionality of Vim can be extended by adding plugins. While not strictly necessary, plugins significantly raise the bar for what a text editor, or even a word processor, must be capable of before it can be compared to Vim. Everyone’s recipe is a little different, there are so many plugins that getting just the right mix to configure Vim the way you like it can be a bit tricky, but I will go over how I use it, and what works out best for me.

• If you adopt just one security tool this year, make it KeePass. This free and open-source password manager is available for Windows, with unofficial ports for iOS, Android, Linux, and Mac OS X. A secure, lengthy, completely random password goes a long way towards improving your security–and having a separate password for each and every website and service you use is the single most important thing you can do to keep secure.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• One of the most successful open source projects ever existed is about to release another major version, and as the release candidates were made available, I thought it would be a good time to take a look on what’s coming.

• Linux has not received much attention from the major gaming houses, even though it seems a natural fit as a robust gaming platform, so the announcement of the Steam for Linux beta last December generated a lot of interest.

• Hi, my name is Jordan Brock. Our studio is called Hit the Sticks. We are a talented team of artists and engineers located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We are nearing the completion of our game called Just Tactics.

• Rolling Survival has just been unleashed on Desura under their Alpha Funding program! Rolling survival is a top down wave survival game with an upgrade tree. it really is as simple as that, you kill enemies to get experience and with that experience you can buy weapons, upgrades and additional health so that you can survive longer.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• E17, “the only software which has taken longer to develop than Duke Nukem Forever,” was released little over a month ago, but today brought clues and news that the reign of E18 has begun. It actually began weeks ago because a new snapshot was released today, as well as an update to E17.

• You read that title right folks. The first showing of Enlightenment DR18 (or E18 for short) has become a reality. Sure, it is nowhere near what the final product is going to look like – but it is a start. If you would like to follow the life cycle of E18 as it develops there is a new release manager blog that can be found here.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As many other components of the Plasma Workspaces, Plasma Desktop’s default Containment is being ported to QML. A technology preview of the containment is being demoed and can be tested by a wider audience now. While the port is mainly replicating the current desktop containment in QML, its interaction scheme to position and manipulate widgets on the desktop has been improved.

• Digia has released Qt 5.0.1, the first patch release of Qt 5. This version brings more than 400 entries in changelog from Qt 5.0.0 to Qt 5.0.1. The most important changes are made to 3 packages – qtbase, qtdeclartive, and qtmultimedia.

• Developers at KDE are planning to merge the code for their Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and Plasma Active user interfaces in the not-too-distant future, according to a blog post by Aaron Seigo. As he explains, individual programs are currently responsible for each shell; their sources, however, consist of just three to ten thousand lines of code, since they otherwise make use of a common code base.

• Bellevue, WA — The ITTIA DB SQL Qt driver is now compatible with Qt 5.0.0, a major renovation of the popular application development framework. The integration of these technologies allows software developers for embedded systems and devices to take advantage of flexible embedded data management software and an elegant GUI framework. Features such as replication, data distribution, concurrency, logging, and change notification offer applications a unique competitive edge and enable rapid development of user-friendly data-driven applications with a level of performance that is only possible in native code.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• By definition, usability testing is difficult in free software. The reason is obvious: usability testing typically requires face to face observation of users, which is hard to arrange when most developers are interacting remotely. That’s why Aakanksha Gaur’s recent blogs about GNOME 3 usability caught my attention — to the best of my knowledge, the last major usability study of GNOME took place twelve years ago, although small, informal studies have been done since.

Distributions

New Releases

• PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniME 2013.02 are now available for download. These are 32bit quarterly update isos which can also be installed on 64 bit computers.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandrive, once the most popular distribution, is also giving back to the community through the work they have done on this site.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has let it be known that by this time next year it will wash its hands of the third version of its Enterprise Linux.

• Does opensource.com tell both sides of the story? The short answer is no.

• If someone had reasoned criticism of Red Hat or anything to do with free software or open source, would that be published? Again, the answer is no.

• In September last year, I wrote to Red Hat with some queries about the site. Though I received a reply from one Emily Stancil, promising answers to my questions, nothing arrived.

• Ms Stancil then wrote to say: “I appreciate you reaching out. Unfortunately, since we’re in our quiet period leading into our earnings call next week – we’re not going to be able to provide feedback at this time. Please keep us posted if we can help in the future.”

• To me this meant that Red Hat did not want what could be not-so-positive publicity in the run-up to its big day in the sun.

• Earlier this month, I renewed my correspondence with Ms Stancil. This time, after a week, she sent me replies to my queries from Jackie Yeaney, executive vice president, strategy and corporate marketing, Red Hat. I reproduce them verbatim below:

Fedora

• It shouldn’t be long now, firnsy and I are busy fixing the few remaining bugs (that we know about) and then we’ll be releasing it after some final testing. So far, so good. I’ll also be looking into a way to use FedUp to upgrade, but haven’t had time to test that yet. Our primary mirror is also currently down, so that’s causing a few issues.

• Most Linux distributions have switched over to using LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

Debian Family

• This post is about the port bootstrap build ordering tool (naming suggestions welcome) which was started as a Debian Google Summer of Code project in 2012 and continued to be developed afterwards. Sources are available through gitorious.

• In the end of November 2012, I managed to put down an approximation algorithm to the feedback arc set problem which allowed to break the dependency graph into a directed acyclic graph with only few removed build dependencies. I wrote about this effort on our mailinglist but didnt mention it here because it was still too much of a proof-of-concept. Later, in January 2013, I mentioned the result of this algorithm in an email wookey and me wrote to debian-devel mailinglist.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A new feature of Ubuntu was discussed today (which is like an announcement but without overhyping it), it is called Smart Scopes and is documented here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SmartScopes1304Spec go read that first and then I have a video for you to watch.

• According to Canonical’s Kernel Team Manager, Leann Ogasawara, it is possible that Ubuntu will get rid of the current “new release every six months” model and move to a rolling release. (You can find more info in this recent video.)

• So, just what is a “rolling release”?

• It’s exactly what it sounds like, really. As individual new/updated packages are ready, they are put up on a repository and made available to everyone. New version of Firefox? No need to wait until the next big release of your operating system…you get it right away. New improvements to the Desktop Environment (such as Ubuntu’s Unity)? BAM! No waiting until next April. Immediately available.

• Linux is a free and open-source desktop operating system, and is recognized as the third most popular desktop operating system in the world. Unlike OS X or Windows, there are many different versions — called distributions (or distros) — that all fall under the “Linux” umbrella. Among the many flavors of Linux, the Debian Linux-based Ubuntu is the distro that tends to receive the majority of mainstream attention. Interestingly, according to the ever-popular DistroWatch, much as Ubuntu has surpassed Debian in popularity, Ubuntu has been overthrown by its own forked distribution: Linux Mint.

• THE world’s most famous and popular Linux operating system is making news with their claims to have come up with a smartphone version which it hopes will give Google and Apple a run for their money.

• Recently, during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Canonical, the company behind the Linux-based open source operating system, flagged off its intentions to challenge the might of Android and iOS with a brand new smartphone version which makes better use of gesture control and also enables a handset to double up as a PC when docked.

Flavours and Variants

• Until recently, most desktop Linux distros were about the same on the surface. What differentiated them were things like configurability. Some distros, those preferred by Linux purists or designed primarily to be used as servers, required users to open a terminal and change settings with a text editor. Others sought to be newbie friendly, and had devised schemes so that most systems settings could be done point and click, just like with that evil operating system from Redmond.

• Linux Deepin is one of my favorite desktop distributions. A Chinese distro that is based on Ubuntu Desktop, it is not just a rebranded Ubuntu desktop, but offers a desktop computing experience different from that of its parent distribution.

• Its graphical package manager, music and video players, and a cool screen shot tool, are original to it. While previous editions offered a customized GNOME Shell desktop, the next edition, Linux Deepin 12.12, will ship with a new desktop environment called Depth Desktop Environment (DDE). And the graphical package manager, music and video players, and the screen shot have been spiced up. From what I’ve seen, Deepin fans will be very pleased with DDE and everything else that comes with it.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

• The much-rumored HTC M7 will reportedly arrive on March 8 where it will be made available in two color options, indicates HTCSource. Should the details prove accurate, this means HTC will be release the handset less than three weeks after the February 19 announcement.

Android

• There are many reasons to enjoy Wi-Fi calling, from starting video chats with family far and wide, to giving your old phone a new lease on life as a Wi-Fi-only device in little Johnny’s hands. However you want to use it, you still need to know which apps are best.

• It’s no secret that Android has lots of good stuff going for it, but one of the platform’s most useful and distinguishing features is one you rarely hear discussed.

• I’m talking about Android’s system-wide sharing capability — a process built into the operating system that many people take for granted. Android’s sharing function may not sound exciting, but don’t be fooled: It’s one of the most powerful and valuable components the OS has to offer.

• Sony’s Xperia Z and Xperia ZL are so far the most interesting Android handsets of the year, but the Japanese company seems to also be working on yet-to-be-announced handsets, such as the C530X, also known as the “HuaShan”.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• There are tablets and seven-inch tablets and portable devices that wear their Android affiliation on their sleeve, but Samsung has gone and combined the best of all that has come before and pushed it someplace decidedly newer and better with their new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. As the name will tell, the two models in this line represent a second generation of Samsung’s popular Galaxy Tab, and the 7.0 iteration we tried affirms the evolution away from the ten-inch range and toward a more compact, increasingly common seven-inch screen size that is more affordable and generally easier to handle. (For those who prefer the larger form factor, Samsung does also offer a 10.1-inch second-gen model.)

• After a year or two of 100% per annum growth we are about where tablets are mature technology.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source software projects may not typically have the marketing budgets necessary to match launch events like the one Microsoft just held for Office 2013, but that doesn’t mean their products are any less valuable.

• In an age where Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is the dominant tech company and proprietary smartphones and tablets account for an ever-growing segment of the market, it can be easy to forget that not all hardware is built on closed standards. Opengear, however, reminded the channel recently that open hardware platforms can be profitable as well with the announcement of two significant achievements in the remote-management market.

• When we last checked in with Opengear, which delivers solutions for remotely accessing and managing IT infrastructure that are built using open source technology, it was making inroads in the security space. Its newest product release, Opengear Lighthouse version 4, continues the company’s focus on security professionals, among others, while also introducing new features designed to enhance the scalability and usability of the platform.

• Earlier this week I wrote about open source pragmatism and how even at an event like Linux.conf.au, there’s less evidence of one-sided tech zealotry than you might expect. Now I’m wondering: how does that actually play out in the workplaces of Lifehacker readers?

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The way Google’s Chrome OS is shaping up is brining it closer to what one would expect from a ‘desktop OS’. Google has just made the launcher of it’s Chrome OS movable. Now, you can place the launcher on either edge of the screen – right, left, top or the default bottom.

Mozilla

• Mobile World Congress–one of the biggest events showcasing mobile devices and platforms and applications for them–is coming up in February, and among the sights and sounds slated for the event, you can expect Firefox OS phones. Among several previews of the conference, Computerworld notes that Chinese phone maker ZTE wil deliver a Firefox OS phone in Barcelona, even as TelefA3nica and Geeksphone are also preparing phones. It looks like these Firefox OS phones will end up serving larger markets than the niche ones that Mozilla initially discussed.

• Notably, Mobile World Congress 2009 was expected to be the big rollout for the first group of phones based on Android. As we noted in this post, the phones didn’t show up there, which caused a lot of confusion.

SaaS/Big Data

• If ever there was any doubt about the business value of free and open source software, a quick glance at the Linux Foundation’s list of supporting memberswill surely suffice to lay any remaining questions to rest.

• Many of the world’s largest and most successful enterprises are using Linux and other free software to run and advance their businesses, and that usage is on an upward trend.

Databases

• For years, MySQL has been fundamental to many server applications, especially those using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software stack. Those days may be ending. Both Fedora (Red Hat’s community Linux) and openSUSE (SUSE’s community Linux) will be switching out MySQL to MariaDB for their default database management system (DBMS) in their next releases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• So after reading several times on another mailing list that Libreoffice developers should relicense their patches to make them available to other descendents in the OpenOffice.org ecosystem I’m indirectly responding in this blog post and explaining why I contribute to the Libreoffice project and license my changes only as LGPLv3+/MPL. This reflects of course only my personal opinion.

• It’s been a good and busy week so far, and it’s not over yet with FOSDEM starting in Brussels on Saturday. It started with something I’m quite excited about: I got elected at the Board of Silicon Sentier. Silicon Sentier is the Parisian hub of innovation, collaboration and start-up incubation. Among other initiatives, it runs La Cantine , one of the most famous co-working spaces in the world located in the heart of Paris and Le Camping, the Parisian start-up incubator located in the old stock-exchange building. I feel it’s a true honour , a mark of trust and I look foward to the future discussions and actions of the board with excitement.

• Today The Document Foundation announced the release of their final 3.6 update, LibreOffice 3.6.5. “This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software.”

Education

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• An electrical engineer by trade, Krysztopik built his three-wheeled hot rod in-between other gas-to-electric conversions like a Porsche Carrera and a Volkswagen New Beetle. His EZ-EV uses 24 deep-cycle lead-acid batteries powering a MES-DEA 200-250 AC electric motor that can take it up to 100 miles, with a top speed of 60 mph. Krysztopik, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, also plans on release open-source plans and kits, so people can make their own designs based on his work.

Project Releases

• The team that develops the open source, platform-independent XBMC media centre software has released version 12 of its software, code-named “Frodo”. Among the most important new features are the platform-independent support for live TV, complete with recording feature, the option to use HD surround formats (DTS Master Audio and Dolby True HD), and a wider choice of supported operating systems, including initial support for Android devices.

Public Services/Government

• Poland’s Defence Ministry will move to an email and groupware solution based on free and open source, according to the specification in the tender documents, published last November. The document calls for software that can handle between 15,000 and 50,000 users. The ministry wants to “eliminate licensing fees”, it explains in the request for tender.

• Danish municipalities are increasingly using free and open source software for collaboration and innovation of ICT solutions. More than 10% of the country’s municipalities last year joined the newly founded Open Website Community OS2. The group has already delivered a Drupal-based municipal content management system (OS2Web) as well as an application offering paperless meetings (OS2dagsorden).

• The twelve municipalities in the OS2 consortium are supported by 19 Danish open source service providers. The group in December started the development of the two next applications, OS2kontactcenter and OS2kle, says Jon Badstue Pedersen, head of section at the Syddjurs municipality.

• The Army has upgraded its Single Interface to the Field (SIF) web portal using open-source software to make it easier for users to find information and documents.

• Japan’s conservative economy ministry has launched a new site that offers its data for download under a Creative Commons license.

• The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s “Open DATA METI” project has gone public under what the government is calling a trial beta version, currently available only in Japanese. The website currently offers data on Japan’s energy use, industrial manufacturing, and intellectual property, as well as government white papers on topics such as small and medium businesses.

Licensing

• Licenses lie at the heart of open source — and many other kinds of “open” too. That’s because they are used to define the rights of users, and to ensure those rights are passed on — that the intellectual commons is not enclosed. Their central importance explains in part the flamewars that erupt periodically over which license is “best” — many people have very strong feelings on the subject.

Openness/Sharing

• The open government movement in the United States is well underway, though still brand new in terms relative to the pace of the workings of government. Change tends to be delivered slowly, as evident during President Obama’s re-election campaign this year when many of us had to remind ourselves that though some change has trickled down over the past four years, much of it has yet to come to pass due to the inherent processes of government bodies. And yet, it still astonishes me how quickly ‘open’ ideas are being accepted, built, and implemented into city governments from east to west coast.

• MuckRock has begun processing 153 free FOIA requests submitted in honor of Internet pioneer and transparency activist Aaron Swartz, who died earlier this month at age 26.

• In October 2009, Bank Mellat, an Iranian bank, was effectively excluded from the UK financial market by an Order made by the Treasury, on the basis that it had or might provide banking services to those involved in Iran’s nuclear effort. The Bank challenged the Order, and the challenge failed in the Court of Appeal, albeit with a dissent from Elias LJ: see Rosalind English’s post and read judgment. The Bank’s appeal to the Supreme Court is due to be heard in March 2013; it raises some fascinating issues about common law unfairness, Article 6, and the right to property under A1P1 , given that the Bank was not told of the intention to make the Order prior to its making.

Open Access/Content

• Montreal, January 20, 2013 – From Wikipedia to shareware, the Internet has made information and software more widely available than ever. At the heart of this explosion is the simple idea that information should be open and free for anyone. Yet with publishers charging exorbitant fees for subscriptions to academic journals, university libraries are struggling to keep up.

Open Hardware

• FreeIO.org is currently running a poll to determine what sort of free hardware project the community would most like to see developed. At present the poll is leaning heavily towards robots. So I thought it would be worthwhile to do a quick survey of existing free/open hardware robot projects to see what there is to work with and improve on. There are a lot of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) robotics projects out there too but this article will focus on hardware projects that are under free hardware licenses. See the FreeIO.org “about page” to learn more about the concepts of free / open hardware.

Programming

• This week, development firm Perforce joined the Linux Foundation which is of interest for a number of reasons. Perforce build enterprise-grade Git version management software solutions via the Git Fusion solution. For years, I’ve been told by ‘other’ enterprise development firms that Git is all fine and nice but it’s not for enterprise developers (yeaah I know,FUD!).

• When Mark Wainwright visited his friend Francis Irving in Liverpool last May, he nearly locked himself in his small guest room just beneath the attic. The door was missing a knob, but it could still latch shut. Wainwright, a community coordinator with a U.K. non-profit group, wanted to let his host know about the problem. So he filed a bug report on GitHub.

• “The almost-attic room has no handle on the door,” Wainwright wrote. “It would be simple to add a handle and would prevent someone getting locked in the room – quite easy at the moment as the sprung latch is working fine.”

• When I first started building websites in the late 90′s, PHP was my tool of choice. Though many things have change on the web since then, PHP’s popularity has not changed, it has grown.

• A new report from Netcraft puts the current tally as of January 2013 for PHP sites on the web at a staggering 244 million sites. In context that’s nearly 40 percent of the 630 million total sites on the web today.

• The volunteers that run the Rubygems.org repository of components for Ruby applications are checking those components to ensure they haven’t been tampered with after the platform was compromised. Attackers uploaded a gem to the site which had a metadata file that used the Rails YAML flaws to copy initialisation and configuration information to the Pastie clippings site.

Leftovers

• The WikiMedia Foundation has added a new extension to MediaWiki, the foundation for Wikipedia, that adds geographic data for individual wiki articles. Aimed primarily at mobile users, GeoData will make finding information about your present location easy and fun.

Security

• Kaspersky Lab continues to develop a cyber secure operating system project. It’s designed to protect utilities, nuclear reactors, transportation systems and other mission-critical infrastructure from hackers, malware and state sponsored cyber warfare. So what’s the latest? CEO Eugene Kaspersky offered our resident blogger some updated sound bytes during the Kaspersky Cyber Security Summit in New York. Here’s a recap, paraphrased by The VAR Guy.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Backlash met plan for officers with AR-15s to patrol Paragould, stopping everyone out walking for their ID

• I write from Charlottesville, Va., but am hopeful that this message applies to your city, town, or county as well.

• Former CIA agent John Kiriakou speaks out just days after he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, becoming the first CIA official to face jail time for any reason relating to the U.S. torture program. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. Supporters say Kiriakou is being unfairly targeted for having been the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. Kiriakou joins us to discuss his story from Washington, D.C., along with his attorney, Jesselyn Radack, director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project. “This … was not a case about leaking; this was a case about torture. And I believe I’m going to prison because I blew the whistle on torture,” Kiriakou says. “My oath was to the Constitution. … And to me, torture is unconstitutional.” [inlcudes rush transcript]

• For all the talk about “privacy by design” online, it takes a quixotic student project to show us what a place built on the principle of defeating surveillance could actually look like. “Shura City” by Asher Kohn, posted at Chapati Mystery, is a kind of anti-Panopticon: every facet of it is built to (theoretically) disrupt cameras, heat sensors, or flying intruders with things like radio-equipped minarets or color-changing LEDs backlighting windows, inspired by the Arc En Ciel seen above.

• The national security state has an annual budget of around $1 trillion. Of that huge pile of money, large amounts go to private companies the federal government awards contracts to. Some, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, are household names, but many of the contractors fly just under the public’s radar. What follows are three companies you should know about (because some of them can learn a lot about you with their spy technologies).

• As Barack Obama entered his second term in office, after a inauguration thoroughly reported by the media, there was one thing that the media failed to report on — namely Obama’s gross violation of the Constitution and the rule of law under the National Defense Authorization Act for both fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

• Observers viewed a video feed of the proceedings from behind soundproof glass, with a 40-second audio delay so that authorities could mute any classified information.

• In the online retailer’s product-review section, an impromptu challenge to President Obama’s kill list and “signature strikes.”

• The Department of Homeland Security’s drone program isn’t classified, unlike the highly secretive CIA and military drone programs outside the United States.

• Nonetheless, information about the DHS program to “secure the borders” with unmanned aerial systems is guarded, except for the self-serving press releases occasionally issued by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the DHS agency that includes the Border Patrol.

• Interesting piece in the most recent issue of Time magazine on the growing prominence of drones – over the battlefields and over lots of other types of terrain here at home. I first learned of the ubiquitous presence of drones several years ago while driving with a friend from Washington to the Virginia suburbs. One of his co-workers at the Federal Aviation Administration worked in a department that registers and licenses the unmanned flying whatevers, and they apparently come in various shapes and sizes and are employed for an increasingly long list of reasons by everyone from hobbyists to weather forecasters, law enforcement personnel to war pilots who fly their “sorties” by remote control at a distance of thousands of miles from the target.

• However, it will probably reinforce the perception of ingratitude among Americans when apparently well-meaning cultural endeavors are met with hostility in the countries where drones or military interventions are mixed with them. Kerry’s statements above may be read as a plea: “don’t forget we Americans also do a lot of good work.” Yet all the good work and all the good will in the world will achieve nothing if they are coupled with “counter terrorism initiatives” which kill innocents.

• For 10 months, ATF agents in Milwaukee ran a storefront operation meant to bust criminals for gun and drug violations. But the operation inside the phony store “Fearless Distributing” didn’t take down any major drug dealers or gang members — instead, the store was robbed of $35,000 worth of merchandise, an agent’s machine gun was stolen, and a document with the names and phone numbers of undercover agents was left behind after the operation was shut down, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

• Milan: A Milan appeals court has convicted a former CIA station chief in Rome and two other Americans in the 2003 rendition kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric.

• THE former head of the CIA in Italy has been sentenced to seven years in prison in absentia for the kidnapping of a radical imam in Milan in 2003 as part of the US “extraordinary rendition” program.

• One of the first American officers to prove that the US used water-boarding against inmates, John Kiriakou is waiting for a summons to go to jail for 2.5 years after he blew the cover of an agent involved in torturing prisoners.

• US authorities could be able to access information stored by Irish citizens on popular cloud services under a new law being enacted in the States.

• Cloud computing has grown in popularity as it allows companies and individuals to save files such as pictures or documents without having to spend money on expensive hard drives or computer server systems.

• Instead, people effectively rent space on clouds such as Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud and take advantage of Amazon’s Cloud Drive.

• Colorado Sen. Mark Udall isn’t known in Washington circles as a lawmaker with a deep contrarian streak. Just Wednesday, Udall announced his annual bipartisan gimmick, asking lawmakers to sit by members of the opposite party during the president’s State of the Union Address in two weeks.

Cablegate

• Update: HP responded to our request with a simple “no comment,” but we also noticed that the PDF has an Ad Embargo date of February 17th of this year — we expect we’ll hear the full story right around then.

• WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange’s address to the Oxford Union is now viewable on the video below.

• The Union last month invited Mr Assange to speak during the Sam Adams Award ceremony that recognsies people who show devotion to the truth.

• As government and industry collude, the interests of the powerful trample the rights of the multitude. Technology has granted invasive new eyes and ears to government agencies, spurning the right to privacy. Felicitously, the individual has also been empowered with two new tools to check the corporate state: hacktivism and leaks. The press has been captured by a handful of news corporations that are generally uncritical of government and fail to expose corporate injustice. The techno-libertarian culture has birthed the do-it-yourself fourth estate—usurping the illegitimate media and furnishing a viable alternative to the cartelized press. Two entities, Wikileaks and Anonymous, have emerged under this banner. This inquiry seeks to understand their history, methods, and to ascertain whether use of the discrete figurehead is efficacious.

• “Assange has been hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is accused of sex crimes.”

• “Hiding”! A man holding speeches from the Embassy’s balcony, covered by media all around the world! “Accused”! To anybody’s knowledge he is not officially accused of anything; he is absurdly suspected for “sex crimes” against consenting women and wanted for interrogation by a prosecutor.

• ..as revealed by Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson on RÚV’s news magazine Kastljós…

• FBI agents landed in Reykjavík without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations in the country, but Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson found out about the visit and forced them to leave the country, with the Icelandic government then issuing a formal protest to US authorities, according to Islandsbloggen.

• Iceland’s interior minister says he ordered the country’s national police not to cooperate with FBI agents sent to investigate secret-busting site WikiLeaks and that it escalated into a diplomatic spat.

• Ogmundur Jonasson told The Associated Press that the FBI agents were sent to the country to interview an unidentified WikiLeaks associate in August of 2011.

• I am in Berkeley, California, for an event tonight sponsored by KPFA Radio & Courage to Resist called, “Saluting Bradley Manning.” I’ll be speaking with Daniel Ellsberg and Patricia Ellsberg.

• But really, Ms Hill – if you are indeed the same reporter who was threatened with prosecution in 2011 under the OSA – examine your conscience.

• How can you write a hit-piece focusing purely on Assange – a man who has designed a publishing system to protect potential whistleblowers from precisely such draconian secrecy laws as you were hyperbolically threatened with? And how could you, at the same time, airbrush out of history the testimony of so many whistleblowers gathered together, many of whom have indeed been arrested and have faced prosecution under the terms of the OSA or US secrecy legislation?

• Students and professors find the reports online after they have been leaked, then use them to guide the class, Richman said. Sometimes, students are able to get their hands on Wikileaks-type information, or information that hasn’t yet been given to the public, to further their understanding of the issue.

• Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.

• If the Guardian could “find no allies” of Julian Assange (Report, 24 January), it did not look very hard. They could be found among the appreciative audience at the Oxford Union, and in our group seated at the front: the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

• While he did not go into specifics about what legal steps would be taken, Patino quoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which allows individuals to be granted asylum, and several other international treaties, indicating the issue may be brought up at the United Nations or the Hague.

• The U.S. Justice Department today urged a judge in Washington to allow the government to keep secret internal documents and correspondence that would reveal investigative techniques, confidential sources and potential targets of the ongoing WikiLeaks criminal investigation.

• Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg, Kevin Goztola, will be speaking about Bradley Manning in Berkeley on January 31st.Kevin Gosztola reports that the government is now attempting to block discussion of materials being inappropriately classified. The government argues that overclassification of documents has no relevance to the charges.

• According to the RUV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, FBI agents landed in Reykjavík in August 2011 without prior notification in an attempt to investigate WikiLeaks operations within the country. However, their plan was interupted when Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson learned about the FBI’s visit and sent them packing. The Icelandic government then formally protested the FBI’s activities with U.S. authorities.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A Chinese tycoon has taken it upon himself to fight China’s air-pollution problem with a tongue-in-cheek campaign: soda-pop-size cans of fresh air.

• Chen Guangbiao, a Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist, has launched a line of fresh-air soft-drink cans that retail for about 80¢ and come in a variety of “flavors,” including, according to the Huffington Post, “pristine Tibet” and “post-industrial Taiwan.”

Finance

• Sensitive: The controversial appointment had to be rubber-stamped by the Prime Minister David Cameron

• Sensitive: The controversial appointment had to be rubber-stamped by the Prime Minister David Cameron

• Britain’s top taxman – who stepped down after he was accused by MPs of lying – has been hired by HSBC to advise it on honesty, it emerged last night.

• Mariano Rajoy’s government reeling from claims that he received €250,000 in money that had been hidden from tax authorities

• Here’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, and while we’re at it, take this obscenely huge bonus for having wrecked the economy. As the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program pointed out in a devastating report this week, “excessive” compensation was approved by the Treasury Department for the executives of the three companies that required the largest taxpayer bailouts to survive.

• In a stinging rebuke of Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department, the report “found that once again, in 2012, Treasury failed to rein in excessive pay.” Whopping pay packages of $5 million or more were allowed by the Treasury Department for a quarter of the top executives at AIG, General Motors and Ally Financial, the former financial arm of GM.

• But that’s nothing compared with the $21 million for last year’s work garnered by Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, which is now free of TARP supervision. In addition to his paltry $2 million in salary, Blankfein received a $19 million bonus for his efforts. Not quite the $67.9 million bonus he got in 2007 before the market crash that his firm did so much to engineer, but times are still hard.

Censorship

• For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

• Pirate Party Australia applauds comments made by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, warning of the potential pitfalls of data retention.

• This week Berners-Lee raised concerns that data retention would needlessly compromise Internet users’ privacy while failing to actually assist in reducing serious crime.[1] His comments come as a result of proposals contained within the Attorney-General’s National Security Inquiry discussion paper which has been met with widespread criticism.

Privacy

• The Government’s use of the Cloud may be put on hold after Members of Parliament raised concerns that the service allows sensitive personal information about British citizens to be spied on by the US authorities.

• A European Commission report highlights how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act (FISAA) allows US authorities to spy on cloud data. This could include services such as Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud and Google Drive.

• “And I didn’t say I was with the CIA, I didn’t say I was going to give data to the CIA! I didn’t even know how to respond, but there was that very aggressive posture.” Fewer and fewer enterprises now have such reservations, and Dell is seeing increased demand for its cloud solutions.

• In the absence of state or federal laws, localities around the United States are proceeding to put unmanned aerial vehicles in our skies as they see fit. The federal government has authorized the flight of 30,000 drones, and the use of drones up to 400 feet by police departments, at least 300 of which already have surveillance drones in operation.

• Using a Freedom of Information lawsuit aimed at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, has obtained data that shows drones, or unmanned aircraft, are being flown throughout the United States right now, for a variety of purposes. The data, including who is purchasing them, what they are being used for and where they are being deployed, is coming slowly, but enough information has been obtained so far to create an interactive map of drone use in the US.

• Leading privacy expert Caspar Bowden has warned Europeans using US cloud services that their data could be snooped on.

• In a report, he highlights how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act (FISAAA) allows US authorities to spy on cloud data.

• As Mike Scarcella reported yesterday, the government has moved for summary judgment in an Electronic Privacy Information Center FOIA suit for details on the government’s investigation into WikiLeaks. EPIC first FOIAed these materials in June 2011. After receiving nothing, they sued last January.

• In Stewart’s words, the goal is to prevent any “rogue access points or rogue equipment from attempting to operate in the same frequency” as the stadium Wi-Fi network (“rogue” as in “not under the control of the system administrators”).

Civil Rights

• Human Rights Watch recommends implementing legal frameworks, such as a local independent ombudsman, that allow government institutions to monitor the human rights performance of domestic companies when they operate abroad in areas that carry serious human rights risks; to take steps to regulate the human rights conduct of domestic companies operating abroad in complex environments, such as requiring companies to carry out human rights due diligence activity, and to communicate an expectation to the government of Eritrea that companies investing in the mining sector there should be able to implement the outlined recommendations.

• The “Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act” introduced on Wednesday condemns and criminalizes the use of the 2013 NDAA’s provision purportedly authorizing the indefinite detainment of U.S. citizens.

• After news of H.B. 1581′s introduction caught wind, an Internet campaign went viral asking activists to contact their Washington state representatives to co-sponsor the legislation.

• It worked.

• In less than 24 hours the number of the bill’s co-sponsors tripled.

• Many believe the bill’s success hinges on bipartisanship. While only one of the original sponsors of the bill is a Democrat, Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, eight of the later co-sponsors are also House Democrats, making for a fairly even split of nine to 12.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As a recent post noted, net neutrality is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years, this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if Orange is now getting paid to carry Google’s traffic, why shouldn’t every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering Google’s services?

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyright is sometimes described as a bargain between two parties: creators and their public. In return for receiving a government-backed monopoly on making copies, creators promise to place their works in the public domain at the end of the copyright term. The problem with that narrative is that time and again, the public is cheated out of what it is due.

• While most Americans were enjoying the holiday season or stressing out over the nation’s imminent leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, the Food and Drug Administration delivered some big news as quietly as possible.Fishy Genes.

• On December 21, the agency announced that AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon had cleared the final hurdle before clinching FDA approval.

Copyrights

• A few weeks ago, we noted that the first “three strikes” case of infringement in New Zealand was set to go to the Copyright Tribunal (an earlier case was dropped after the recording industry (RIANZ) realized it had screwed up). The Tribunal has now issued its first ruling, demanding that the accused pay a grand total of $616.57 NZ (about $515 US). The person was accused of downloading and sharing Rihanna’s Man Down twice, and Hot Chelle Rae’s Tonight Tonight once. The tribunal noted that the first song retailed for $2.39 and the latter at $1.79, so it doubled the first one, and started with $6.57 (all NZ dollars). Then it added $50 to pay for infringement notices being sent out. Another $200 covers the fee that RIANZ paid to bring the case, and then it tacked on a “deterrent sum” of $360 — or $120 per song. Add it all up and you’ve got $616.57.

• Because of the tragic and untimely death of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while awaiting trial on charges he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by mass downloading academic journal articles, we have an opportunity to amend the CFAA, a federal law that interferes with important and socially beneficial computer security research. We want to revise the CFAA to decriminalize the computer security profession.

• Spotify apparently hit a wrong note with the House’s Internet overlords, who recently blocked the chamber’s Web users from listening to the famed music-streaming service.

• While Spotify isn’t a peer-to-peer program along the lines of Napster, its inner workings appear subject to the longstanding ban on so-called P2P technology — a blockade lawmakers erected to thwart illegal file-sharing and prevent downloads from infecting computers with malware.

• At a time when news about Spain tends to be pretty bad, the head of the Hollywood lobby came to Madrid to say the country is doing something right–when it comes to efforts to stop illegal file-sharing.

• Rianz says it has sent out around 6000 notices to alleged pirates, for which the music industry body must pay a $25 fee each for internet companies to send on to their customers.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.