● 02.11.13

● Links 11/2/2013: 800 Million Androids This Year, CISPA is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: KDE 4.10 has been released and includes lots of Qt Quick enhancements. Ubuntu Phones are going to be available in October. Samsung laptops are breaking after a Linux installation and the ‘Model A’ Raspberry Pi is available now. Hear our discoveries, your own opinions in our Open Ballot and our brand new old section, Challenge Us!

Kernel Space

• There’s been a lot of information scattered around the internet about these topic recently, so here’s my attempt to put them all in one place to (hopefully) settle things down and give my inbox a break.

• Last week I spent a number of days at the GNOME Developer Hackfest in Brussels, with the goal to help make the ability to distribute applications written for GNOME (and even more generally, Linux) in a better manner. A great summary of what happened there can be found in this H-Online article. Also please read Alexander Larsson’s great summary of what we discussed and worked on for another view of this.

Graphics Stack

• With the Radeon Gallium3D driver (and Mesa/Gallum3D drivers in generally) finally moving on to properly handling more visually demanding and modern OpenGL games and other workloads, it’s time for CS memory accounting to be implemented within the open-source driver.

• The nicer Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) shader disassembler that was previously talked about on Phoronix has finally been merged into mainline Mesa.

Applications

Proprietary

• So rumors are swirling right now that Microsoft is considering releasing Microsoft Office for Linux. I suppose that this might have been big news…about ten years ago. But does anybody really care at this point if Microsoft Office runs on Linux?

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.5.23 is now available.

Games

• Senscape, the people who brought Shivers to the PC world are doing a new expanded world of psychological horror : Asylum. This could be the greatest horror genre game available on Linux since Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

• Heroes of Newerth, the game that’s had a Linux client available from the start and back in 2009 excited many Linux gamers as we gave away thousands of early access keys to the game, has released a major new version of the game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Meetup will be the largest KDE event in India since conf.kde.in in 2011. It will be held February 23rd and 24th at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) in Gandhinagar. KDE Meetup will be a great opportunity for anyone who is interested in free and open software or who wants to get involved with the KDE Community.

• KDE 4.10 has been released, and I’ve upgraded my old desktop computer that sits on a shelf in the storage cupboard and runs a NoMachine server to have KDE 4.10.0 on it.

• First attempt: migrate my existing KDE 4.9.5 desktop environment.

• KDE team has released KDE 4.10.0, their latest major release which brings lots of improvements and also bug fixes scattered around the area. There are a lot of shinny things here on KDE 4.10.0 and you can see them all in the Announcement Page.

• Hard on the heels of news earlier this week that KDE has been named the best desktop environment in a recent Linux user survey, the team behind the popular project on Wednesday launched a fresh new version of the software.

• There are plenty of Linux desktop environments to choose from, but if KDE has a special place in your heartware, you’ll be pleased to know its first 2013 update is out. Making the jump from 4.9 to 4.10 brings various tweaks to Plasma Workspaces, including upped support for high-res displays, a streamlining of the default Air theme, and plenty of behind the scenes adjustments.

• The Amarok 2.7 release delivers nearly 500 bug fixes, and an impressive list of new features. Here I will be reviewing some of the latest features after experimenting with 2.7 for a few days. Installation instructions for Ubuntu 12.10 are provided for anyone who would like to try this version.

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has introduced technical account management (TAM) services for cloud computing, virtualization and storage. The consulting offerings are highly important as the open source company attempts to compete more aggressively against VMware (NYSE: VMW) and EMC (NYSE: EMC), in particular.

• Red Hat may finally get to developing a KMS/DRM driver for QXL/SPICE to be used in conjunction with QXL for virtualization. This is a stepping-stone to eventually supporting SPICE 3D for allowing Red Hat virtual machines to tap hardware graphics acceleration support.

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth has revealed that plans to bring Ubuntu to phones is on track. The OS, which will run on smartphones, is expected to be available from October 2013, but developers are already hard at work to develop apps for the platform.

• In fact, a version of Ubuntu for the popular Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset is expected to be available for download towards the end of the month, Shuttleworth informed The Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

• If you’ve been following us for the past few weeks then you should know that at the beginning of the year Canonical has unveiled a lot of information regarding its upcoming Ubuntu OS for smartphones. Since then, the OS in question has been showcased during CES where it didn’t do so great, but the operating system has quickly improved and we’re now waiting for it to become available to developers, being a truly open source project and all that good stuff.

Flavours and Variants

• Fuduntu is a very strange distribution. It’s based on Fedora, but tries to be more user-friendly, sort of like Ubuntu. Then, the big difference between Fuduntu and other RedHat-based distributions like CentOS and Scientific is that it aims specifically for the desktop crowd, bringing you the latest kernel technologies and apps.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The latest figures from Google show that the share of Android devices running version 4.0 or later is slowly expanding. At the beginning of January, nearly 40% of Android devices that accessed the Google Play Store were running a 4.x version. Over January that grew to 42.6% with Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” slightly down at 29% and Android 4.1 and 4.2 “Jelly Bean” up from 10.2% to 13.6%.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Maybe it’s about time the tech industry gets ready for the waning of the importance of the PC?

Free Software/Open Source

• Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: “Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be”.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A little more than two years after it forked from OpenOffice.org, the free office suite LibreOffice has come out with a sleek and faster version 4.0.

• A media release described the release as the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity.

Business

BSD

• With LLVM/Clang having become the default FreeBSD x86 compiler as of last year and the recent FreeBSD 9.1 release shipping not only LLVM/Clang but also the libc++ library, new benchmarks were carried out of FreeBSD 9.1 looking at its two stock compilers.

Openness/Sharing

• What excites me about ZWheelz is the potential to improve our education system, environment, energy independence, and economy—all with what I like to call, one “EZ” project.

• It all began when I built a plane from a kit, then saw the documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car?, and decided to build an electric car. Turns out, it functioned really well, and I began wondering: “Why aren’t there more electric vehicles on the road?”

Open Access/Content

• When Aaron Swartz died, I told you that I’m no expert on criminal law, and I’m not. So I couldn’t really provide a star to guide anyone. But what I could do is research and provide information so you could be fully informed. That’s what journalists are for.

• And now I’ve come across something that I think might be helpful, a May 19, 2010 memo [PDF] by Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. to all federal prosecutors, letting them know that he wanted them to be fair and reasonable in exercising their prosecutorial discretion. He told them that he wanted them to be flexible, too, not necessarily bound by maximum/minimum guidelines, but to look at the individual circumstances of each case, stating that the “reasoned exercise of prosecutorial discretion is essential to the fair, effective, and even-handed administration of the federal criminal laws”. That raises a natural enough question, of course, about whether that policy was followed in the Swartz case, but that isn’t what struck me.

• A few years ago, software developer Stephen Schultze helped create a nifty piece of code called “RECAP” that makes some federal court documents free on the Internet.

Open Hardware

• Open-source hardware firewalls are something of a misnomer. Though these Internet protection appliances are based on open-source operating systems, their programming is often proprietary. Furthermore, security needs have forced many of these product to go beyond mere firewalling to include anti-spam filtering, intrusion protection and more.

Programming

• If you want a massive improvement in the software you use, the cheapest way to get it is to host a competition on TopCoder.

• GCC has had support for 64-bit ARM, a.k.a. AArch64, going back to last summer for using the open-source compiler with next-generation ARMv8 hardware. Being merged today is finally support for the LLVM compiler infrastructure with an experimental 64-bit ARM/AArch64 back-end target.

Leftovers

• HUNDREDS of cash-strapped Scots students have signed up to an internet dating site to meet wealthy men offering to pay their tuition.

• Thousands of major — and not-so-major — websites found their traffic redirected to a Facebook error page yesterday, a phenomenon that lasted upward of an hour, according to varying accounts. Although the social networking site dismissed the event as the result of a Facebook error that was “quickly repaired,” it would be imprudent to blithely view the event as a glitch or mere inconvenience. It’s downright concerning, both from a business and a privacy perspective. First, here’s what happened: Starting at around 4 p.m. Pacific time Thursday, users attempting to visit an array of disparate websites and services — from CNN to The Sydney-Melboure Herald to Pinterest to Reddit to Hulu — were redirected to Facebook and a message reading, “An error occurred. Please try again later.” Sites were affected anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, according to reports.

Security

• Thakur said that the Bamital malware was initially delivered by a combination of methods, including in packages over peer-to-peer filesharing networks disguised as other content. But the majority of systems infected were the victim of “driveby downloads” from websites configured with malicious software intended to exploit browser security flaws. “We have evidence of [the botnet operators] polluting search engine results for certain search terms with links to servers with exploits,” he said.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The FBI is at it again, boasting about stopping another contrived terror plot of their own making. This time they nabbed a right-winger working with the Taliban which happen to be an FBI agent provocateur. “

• Similarly, when the government’s only chance of keeping an inconvenient truth out of the news media is to warn of a national security threat, it’s amazing how these threats pop up.

• This has turned out to be a powerfully effective tool. News organizations, after all, don’t want to endanger the nation’s safety, or be accused of doing so, so editors often listen to government officials when they make their case for not publishing. And, after listening, editors occasionally consent.

• [...]

• Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it.

• During the build up to and aftermath of the 2004 overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s popular priest-turned-president, the Haitian and international press reported two conflicting narratives. Even in the left-wing media office of ZNet, where Justin Podur was an editor, stories filed from Haiti just “didn’t add up.”

• For months, there have been human rights or civil liberties groups sharply condemning President Barack Obama’s targeted killing program especially because he holds all the power to decide who lives and who dies, however, up until a Justice Department “white paper” on the program was leaked by NBC News, there was little discussion by US news media about the nature of the program.

• He said his handler told him that the department considered “being a religious Muslim a terrorism indicator.”

• On 11 January, seemingly out of the blue, François Hollande announced that France would ‘respond to the request of the Malian president’ and send forces to its former colony to fight ‘terrorist elements coming from the north’. ‘Today, the very existence of this friendly nation is at stake,’ he declared. ‘Military operations will last for as long as required … Terrorists must know that France will always be there when it’s a matter not of its fundamental interests but the right of a population … to live in freedom and democracy.’ In France, though ominous warnings did the rounds, the president’s approval ratings soared from a nadir of 40 per cent to 63 per cent. Hitherto seen as weak, Hollande was suddenly perceived as a strong commander-in-chief (linguistically, it’s a small step from chef d’état to chef de guerre). Abroad, despite offers from Western allies of logistical or humanitarian support (France’s plea for military support from its European allies remains unanswered), many suspected that neocolonial ghosts were haunting Paris yet again. La Françafrique, that infamous amalgam of truncated African sovereignty and French interventionism in sub-Saharan Africa, seemed to have returned.

• The biggest problem with the recently disclosed Obama administration white paper defending the drone killing of radical clerk Anwar al-Awlaki isn’t its secrecy or its creative redefinition of the words “imminent threat.” It is the revolutionary and shocking transformation of the meaning of due process.

• Writing at the Originalism Blog, Michael Ramsey of the University of San Diego Law School examines the Obama administration’s drone policy in light of the original meaning of the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment, which forbids the government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

• Turse, who devoted 12 years to tracking down the true story of Vietnam, unlocked secret troves of documents, interviewed officials and veterans — including many accused of war atrocities — and traveled throughout the Vietnamese countryside talking with eyewitnesses to create his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

• The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance.

• The flag’s powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A “Dream Act” that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief. Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees. If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.

• In case you don’t want to read these two long posts, I want to point to two passages from the white paper that show, on two key points, the government wasn’t even claiming Anwar al-Awlaki was the “senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces” they keep saying he was when they killed him.

• John Kiriakou, the Greek-American CIA analyst who was sentenced last month to more than two years in jail for revealing the identity of a covert operative, has revealed to Kathimerini his thoughts about the possible emergence of new terrorist activity in Greece and his concerns about the future of the US intelligence agency.

• Kiriakou told Sunday’s Kathimerini that he would differentiate the activity of urban guerrilla groups in Greece today and the actions of the November 17 terrorist organization.

• John Brennan’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday was a microcosm of the Obama administration’s approach to counterterrorism: The right assurances, with little transparency.

• Brennan said the United States should publicly disclose when American drone attacks kill civilians. He called waterboarding “reprehensible” and vowed it would never occur under his watch. And he said that countering militancy should be “comprehensive,” not just “kinetic,” and involve diplomatic and development efforts as well.

• Secret, unaccountable no-fly lists are one of many weapons the US government uses to extra-judicially punish American Muslims

• How low must the number of Muslim-American ‘terror plots’ go before Congress thinks again about giving the FBI an annual $3 billion of our tax dollars –nearly half the FBI’s budget – just for its counterterrorism work?

• And to what lengths is the FBI prepared to go to manufacture plots and suspects in order to keep those dollars flowing?

• In his fourth annual survey of Muslim-American terrorism, Charles Kurzman, of North Carolina’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, found that the number of Muslim-Americans indicted as terrorists has been in steady decline over the past three years and no deaths or injuries were caused by their actions.

• …more than 6,000 pages and 35,000 footnotes…

• A former CIA contractor involved in a fatal shootout in Pakistan is due in court in Colorado on Monday over a fight over a parking space.

• A judge will consider a plea agreement for Raymond Allen Davis, who is charged with felony assault and misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the fight outside a suburban Denver bagel shop.

• Secret bases, targeted killings, leaked memos and elaborate cover-ups – the latest developments in an ongoing controversy involving the Obama administration and CIA with a question at its core that has been asked for generations: “How far are we willing to go to protect the citizens of the United States?”

• The marked increase in numbers at the US embassy in Asunción over the past year is being necessitated by the need to maintain control over the Paraguayan government. The pre-election campaign is in full swing and in order to «manage it by hand», the intelligence apparatus operating under the roof of the US embassy need staff reinforcements. Political forces potentially hostile to the interests of the United States must not be allowed to come to power. Federico Franco, the acting president of Paraguay who, in June 2012, ensured the CIA-scripted «constitutional removal» of the legally elected president, Fernando Lugo, has fulfilled his mission. His successor needs to be just as reliable and just as manageable.

• Moscow hopes that an investigation into the CIA’s secret prisons abroad will be completed and all suspects will be brought to court, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

• The release of a Justice Department white paper defending the legality of the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in foreign countries outside areas of active hostilities is an opportunity for every American to reflect on how our government conducts its armed conflict against al-Qaeda and associated forces, especially since the man who is at the center of such targeting decisions, John Brennan, might soon be confirmed as CIA Director.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has waded into the row over American drone strikes, urging the leak of confidential government guidelines on drones during an interview with US talk show host Bill Maher.

• Those following the saga of Julian Assange, the founder (also editor-in-chief) of the transparency organization Wikileaks will be well aware of the long-running feud with the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Initially partners in the explosive release of US diplomatic cables in 2010, the two suffered a very public falling-out. The period since then has been characterized by smear after hit piece after smear, and given that The Guardian’s website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with millions of unique visitors every day, any misleading or negative article on Mr. Assange or his organization is certain to adversely influence public opinion on an enormous scale.

• It’s a serious thing to have the Government of the USA for an enemy. If it continues for very long, you’ll notice friends crossing the street to avoid you. Jemima Khan has this week used a rather rambling article in the New Statesman to announce that she will be keeping to the far side of Julian Assange’s street from now on.

• “When a government becomes invisible, it becomes unaccountable. To expose its lies, errors, and illegal acts is not treason, it is a moral responsibility. Leaks become the lifeblood of the Republic.”—Daniel Ellsberg and John Perry Barlow

• The note is dated 25 July 2012 and was submitted in two versions, Spanish and English.

• ‘The embassy has been informed that Mr Julian Assange, through his lawyers, has made known to the Swedish Prosecution’s Office his availability to be interrogated in the facilities of the Embassy of Ecuador in London. In this context, the Embassy of Ecuador makes patent the National Government willingness to provide the cooperation that would be necessary accordingly with the decision of the relevant Swedish authorities.’

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• As people are coming to understand, Asian economic growth over the past two decades—despite its great adoption of oil—essentially runs on electricity, most of which is supplied by the burning of coal. Here is the night sky over Asia twenty years ago, as captured in a still photograph from a film loop provided by NOAA’s national geophysical data center.

Finance

• The Government’s higher education policy is supposedly about cutting red tape, yet it requires a new army of six-figure-salaried bureaucrats to outsource existing jobs.

• The UK’s super-rich, the top 1% of earners, now pocket 10 pence in every pound, while the bottom half have seen their share of the nation’s wealth drop in the last 15 years. Middle earners have also seen their earning power stagnate.

• Barclays misled shareholders and the public about one of the biggest investments in the bank’s history, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.

• Austerity policies include various combinations primarily of government spending cuts and secondarily of general tax increases. Republicans and Democrats have endorsed austerity since 2010. Austerity was the result of their deal on taxes last December 31: increasing the payroll tax on wages and salaries from 4.2 to 6.2 percent. Austerity is what they are negotiating now in regard to federal spending cuts.

• In worker self-directed enterprises (WSDEs), workers democratically run the affairs of the enterprise. They make the decisions whose consequences shape their lives. Their job descriptions require them to perform some specific tasks within the enterprise’s division of labor, but their job descriptions also obligate their participation in directing the enterprise.

• To perform their specific tasks, workers in WSDEs must learn how to do the required work, must be trained and educated, first in schools before employment and afterwards on the job as well. The same applies to the other part of their job description that concerns participation in directing their WSDE. School curricula must provide everyone with the broad-based, liberal arts education that builds flexibility and the capacity for creative enterprise adjustments to an ever-changing world. In short, establishing an economy based on widespread WSDEs will exert profound and effective pressures for educational changes. Democratizing the workplace will help democratize education.

• Apple Inc on Thursday confronted its first major challenge from an activist shareholder in years as hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital filed suit against the company and demanded that it dole out a bigger piece of its $137 billion cash pile to investors.

• Einhorn is asking management to sell that call/put option straddle now, and forgo the ability to capitalize on future opportunities while running naked against margin compression at the same time that Apple’s competition has surpassed it in technical ability (product/service wise) while Apple has shown ineptitude in competing in the cloud (see the maps fiasco), the next battle ground for the end user. This option sale will be had for the one time premium of a cash distribution. Wise, eh?

Censorship

• A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world.

• Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying the film, which he described as “offensive to Islam and the Prophet (Muhammad).” He made the ruling in the Egyptian capital where the first protests against the film erupted last September before spreading to more than 20 countries, killing more than 50 people.

• The ruling however can be appealed, and based on precedent, might not be enforced. A spokeswoman for YouTube’s parent company, Google, said in a statement that the firm had “received nothing from the judge or government related to this matter.”

• This Saturday, a Cairo court ordered to block access to the most popular video-sharing website on the Internet, Youtube, for one month(30 days to be more precise), because on this very website an anti-Islam film was posted, apparently becoming the cause for deadly riots across the globe.

Privacy

• A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

• Under existing laws, collecting or making documents likely to facilitate terrorists acts carry a maximum 15-year jail term.

• But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, and the states’ Joint Counter-Terrorist Teams want new criminal offences to net those looking up assassination manuals and other terrorist material on computers.

• The US Central Intelligence Agency monitors activity on Facebook and other social media outlets through companies its investment arm has stakes in.

• President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, was about as cagey as they come last week at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Asked right off the bat by the committee chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whether he would be more forthcoming than his predecessors in apprising committee members of covert U.S. military operations abroad — particularly the administration’s secret drone program of targeted killings — he vigorously affirmed that to be his intention. Then, for the next 31/2 hours, he politely declined to say virtually anything else of substance on the subject.

• The powerful Democratic senator says that fewer than 10 civilians per year are typically killed by America’s targeted killing program — despite extensive evidence to the contrary.

• There’s widespread resentment against drone strikes in Pakistan, says the former commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal.

Civil Rights

• The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

• This month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security published the executive summary for their civil liberties assessment of U.S. Customs searches of traveler’s electronic devices. To put it briefly, DHS has concluded that additional civil liberties safeguards to protect traveler’s privacy either are not needed or would not be effective. However, they have decided not to publish the reasoning behind these conclusions.

• In the absence of an explanation, all we can do is speculate as to what their reasoning might be, but if the kind of safeguards that DHS considered in their assessment would not be effective, perhaps this means that it is time to reconsider the framework of Constitutional safeguards that are available.

• It’s been nearly eight months since the last of the Occupy D.C. protesters cleared out of public parks around downtown Washington, but they scored a victory yesterday in federal court.

• On Wednesday a few hundred activists crowded into the courtroom of the Second Circuit, the spillover room with its faulty audio feed and dearth of chairs, and Foley Square outside the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan where many huddled in the cold. The fate of the nation, we understood, could be decided by the three judges who will rule on our lawsuit against President Barack Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection act (CISPA) will be reintroduced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) before the US House next week.

• CISPA would’ve allowed any company to give away all the data its collected on you if asked by the government and The bill that plan to introduce next week will be identical to the version of CISPA that passed the House last spring.

• Europe’s economic slowdown and the introduction of caps on mobile data usage have slightly damped growth of mobile data traffic despite more mobile users, devices and machine-to-machine connections, according to Cisco Systems

DRM

• Although unlocking a phone that’s still tied to a contract was recently deemed illegal in the US, jailbreaking isn’t, according to the latest review of exceptions to the DMCA in October. But that doesn’t mean the practice isn’t frowned upon by the likes of Apple, which has issued a warning in response to the Evasi0n unthethered jailbreak for iOS 6.1 devices.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• To engage a lawyer to defend me from this spurious claim would cost more money than I have, certainly more than the book has ever earned me. Rather than earning money for my family, I’d be taking money from them, when previously my writing income paid for my daughter’s schooling. And I’d have to use the little time I have to write novels to fight a protracted legal battle instead.

Copyrights

• Two of the most respected and forward looking schools for journalism are the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and the Poynter Institute. I’ve long been a fan of both, but I’m now quite disappointed in both of them too. Last week, we had a few stories concerning a woman named Teri Buhl, who (to put it mildly) had some “unique” (and, by that we mean “totally wrong”) legal theories concerning whether or not someone could quote her public statements on Twitter, as well as basic copyright and fair use rules. By the end of the week, she was threatening to sue us and others as well.

• A high court in the United Kingdom has ruled that a copyright owner does not have the right to claim profits from copyright infringement. “A copyright owner does not have a proprietary claim to the fruits of an infringement of copyright. I shall not, therefore, grant proprietary injunctions,” wrote judge Guy Newey of the England and Wales High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, in a ruling published on Tuesday.

• An analyst suggests that the renewal of an obscure satellite-TV law could command the attention of the major broadcasters, big pay-TV distributors and giant tech companies.

• Earlier this month, the Court issued an important judgment, Ashby Donald and others v France (judgment in French), on the tensions between copyright law and the freedom of expression. It is my great pleasure to put online a guest post about this judgment by professor Dirk Voorhoof of Ghent University and Inger Høedt-Rasmussen of Copenhagen Business School. Thanks to both!

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