● 02.19.13

● Links 19/2/2013: Android Smartwatch, Canonical’s Ubuntu Tablet Effort Unveiled

Posted in News Roundup at 10:18 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Cloud storage may be on the move, but local network-attached storage (NAS) systems continue to be in hot demand, especially as they integrate cloud backup and mobile access. In the enterprise NAS, unified storage, and SAN (storage area network) world, Linux shares the pie with Unix and Windows. But in the faster-growing small and medium business (SMB), small office and home office (SoHo), and consumer NAS segments, Linux is clearly dominant.

Kernel Space

• If you have ever been on one of these types of calls, you know that they are always rather uncomfortable. The manager is upset because something went wrong, and on top of that it was something that they don’t fully understand. During such conversations I’ve found that it is normally best to keep explanations correct, but succinct. I explained that a kernel panic is what happens when the operating system encounters an error that it cannot recover from. That explanation seemed to be enough for him, but as I thought about it later, I found that it was not nearly enough for me.

• Improved graphics drivers and a new filesystem for flash disks are two of the most important changes in Linux 3.8. Kernel developers have also made improvements to btrfs and ext4 and merged a number of new drivers.

• Xen 4.3 is expected to be released in June of this year. While the developers working on this virtualization platform are only half-way through its development cycle, they already have an impressive number of features that are coming into this next open-source release.

• Linus Torvalds has released version 3.8 of the Linux kernel, which brings with it full support for the graphic cores in Intel’s upcoming processor generation Haswell and everything a system needs to use the 3D acceleration on all NVIDIA GeForce graphics chipsets. F2FS, a filesystem that is optimised for flash media as used in cameras, tablets, smartphones, USB flash drives and memory cards, is another innovation in Linux 3.8.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that BORQS, Denx, Gazzang, Genymobile, Mandriva and Seneca College are joining the organization.

Graphics Stack

• The results in yesterday’s article, AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases, were interesting but limited to OpenGL games. In this article are more test results from the same system configuration and Ubuntu Linux releases but now taking a look at the 2D performance of the open and closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

• The second release candidate of X.Org Server 1.14 is now available ahead of the official release in a few weeks time.

• RC1 came in mid-December while on Wednesday night was finally RC2 as tagged by Keith Packard. With RC2 being out, only critical bug-fixes will now be accepted ahead of the xorg-server 1.14 release. The final release of X.Org Server 1.14 is expected to happen on 5 March.

• Aside from a lot of other exciting DRM driver happenings for the Linux 3.9 kernel, it looks like the DRM “PRIME Helpers” that were conceived by NVIDIA to help them support DMA_BUF in their binary driver will be merged.

• NVIDIA can’t directly utilize the Linux kernel’s DMA_BUF buffer sharing mechanism — a zero-copy way to share buffers between different kernel drivers whether it be DRM or other sub-systems — due to GPL-only kernel symbols and bickering amongst kernel developers.

Applications

• For this new release the code has been completely rewritten and NeonView was ported to GTK+ 3. There is a rather big list of changes, some of the most important including a completely redesigned interface, two sidebar panels for thumbnail previews and image information, rewritten code for parsing the config file, redesigned settings window, and a whole bunch of new fixes and improvements. Of course, since NeonView was ported to GTK+ 3 and the code was rewritten, there are still many bugs present, which should be triaged by the time 0.8.1 will arrive. Please report any bugs found in the comments below.

• The high point of my work in this library system was when my library coworker, Stephon Gray (who has learning disabilities), and I created a two-minute multimedia video: Fannie Lou Hamer: Freedom Fighter. Stephon wrote and narrated this biography of one of the most remarkable leaders of the civil rights movement. We used the ClarisWorks Draw program and a $5 software program from Sweden called SimpleCard, a simplified color version of Apple’s HyperCard.

• We put this video up on the web in 1996, almost 10 years before YouTube was launched. Within a week, I received an email from noted literacy activist David Rosen, in Boston. His email was short: “This is good.”

• During the past few years, I’ve written about task-management systems, “get things done” digital tools and ways to keep track of to-do lists in Linux. This month, I’m sharing Wunderlist, which is a cross-platform task-management and sharing utility that is truly amazing. When I say cross-platform, I really mean it too. Wunderlist works in Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, Blackberry, the Web and probably another half-dozen interfaces I’ve yet to encounter.

• The accounting software industry is one of the most lucrative in the world. Since the appearance of personal computers users have thought of ways to track and manage their money making use of this new tool. Financial software doesn’t have to cost you a cent though, here’s some of the most popular free and open source accounting software available:

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• So looks like DOTA2 is currently in testing for Linux in some form! Could this be an indicator it is getting closer?

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma Active project leader Aaron Seigo has attacked Canonical’s claims about its forthcoming Ubuntu Mobile platform.

Distributions

• The third factor in our trio is how well the desktop of your choice is supported. In some ways this is a chicken-and-egg question for newcomers since most won’t know which desktop they want to use.

• Pretty much any Linux application can be installed on any Linux system, at least in theory. That means any desktop can be installed with any distro, but in the real world it doesn’t always work out quite that smoothly. For example, the Cinnamon desktop is a relatively new desktop interface developed by the same people who created Mint Linux, which means Cinnamon is nicely integrated with the rest of Mint. That doesn’t mean you can’t install Cinnamon on Fedora or Arch. You can and people do, but it will most likely be a bit trickier and finding solutions to your problems can be more difficult since fewer users will be using your particular setup. That’s why, to stick with the Cinnamon example, it would make more sense to use Mint if you really want to use Cinnamon.

• When I first test drove Rebellin for a section in an upcoming Linux Format, I reported that basically it seemed like a nice solid Debian respin, but many such are for free. It doesn’t seem that Linux users gravitate towards the projects that require payment before trying. When I explained this to the founder and, currently, the sole developer, he said that there are indeed reasons why folks should want to pay the $5.

• Is $5 too much to spend for a distro that you can’t test-drive first? Utkarsh Sevekar says, “people don’t realize that there are very small players (like me) out there who can’t wait till someone sponsors them or donate money to keep things going. Bills are a big thing.” He says the $5 fee, that will actually be used for broadband costs for the downloads, will also include “email support to all which lasts for the lifetime of the product. There is no monthly/yearly fee here. All included in the initial price. There are no limits to communication either. Customers can bug me as much a they want.”

New Releases

• We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2013.02, code-named ‘Grumpy Grinch’!

• This release brings the Grml tools towards the upcoming Debian stable release (AKA wheezy), provides up2date hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.

• For detailed information about the changes between 2012.05 and 2013.02 have a look at the official release announcement.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• CentOS 5.9 leaves users with a warm fuzzy and familiar feeling offering Gnome 2.16 as the primary desktop which is featured in this review. The desktop prospects for this release are not very impressive, but the server capabilities are endless. Derived from the recently released RHEL 5.9, here is what this version has to offer.

• Red Hat is updating its cloud server application technology stack with a new release of OpenShift Enterprise.

Debian Family

• * Debian Installer 7.0 RC1 released * 700,000th bug reported * Bits from the DPL * Reports from FOSDEM * Update on Clang and Debian * Other news * Upcoming events * New Debian Contributors * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Important Debian Security Advisories * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN?

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• “Mark Shuttleworth has for the first time talked about the privacy issues in Ubuntu Dash after being criticized by EFF and FSF. He mentioned some changes in the way use can ‘disable’ the search results. However the company has showed that under no circumstances they will disable the online search by default as demanded by EFF and FSF. Shuttleworth was simply spinning the wheel moving things around to give an impression that something has been done where as the core problem remains — Dash sends keystrokes by default and legally every user agrees to send such keystrokes to PRODUCT.canonical.com server to be shared with partners like Facebook.”

• There is some confusion, but the fact is no one (including Richard Stallman) has any problem with Canonical gathering user data and displaying ads when local searches are conducted. The problem is with the way it has been implemented. The feature is turned on by default and users did not even know (they were never informed) that their search queries were being sent to, and stored at, Canonical’s servers which are further shared with its partners.

• Canonical is probably going to announce Ubuntu Tablet OS within 24 hours. Since they are using Qt/QML for their mobile OS it won’t be hard to run it on a tablet, as it is extremely scalable and can run on different form factor. I was actually surprised to see they did not make any announcement for tablet.

• As expected, Canonical has announced their plans for Ubuntu on tablets as well as the signing of a deal with a major mobile silicon provider to provide Ubuntu smartphone and tablet chips.

• The high-resolution XPS 13 now gets Linux Ubuntu. The specs, with the critical exception of the Ubuntu Linux, are identical to the 1080p XPS 13 for Windows 8.

• When we launched the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition at the end of November we got a lot of great press. That being said, the two complaints we heard loud and clear were 1) the resolution is too low, and 2) it needs to be available outside the US and Canada. Since that time we have been working hard to address both.

• Most Linux fans like Canonical’s plans for a unified Ubuntu for PCs, smartphones, TVs, and tablets. Some, however, such as Aaron Seigo, a leading KDE developer, have doubts about this claim.

• Canonical is planning to release the “Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu for phones” on Thursday 21 February. This release will allow developers to put images of the phone-optimised Ubuntu onto the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. The images are billed as “early previews” to allow developers to create applications for the phone operating system and, rather than being a snapshot of development, will be supplemented by daily updates.

• Not only is Canonical working on getting Ubuntu for smartphones ready for consumers, but a tablet-optimized version in in the plans as well. The company put up a teaser on its website on Monday, pointing to an announcement on Feb. 19—the same day HTC is taking the stage to announce its new flagship smartphone.

• Canonical today unveiled Ubuntu for tablets, which it said will help unify the Ubuntu experiences across phones, tablets, PCs, and TVs.

• A Touch Developer Preview will be released on Feb. 21 via developer.ubuntu.com, which will work on the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. That will come the same day as the developer preview for smartphones, which will be available for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4.

• The Preview SDK for phones will now be updated to support tablet apps, as well. Canonical said it will be “very easy” for Android developers to develop for Ubuntu.

• You can type the names of applications into Ubuntu’s equivalent of a Start Menu to search for and launch various applications. For some curious reason, Ubuntu also returns results from Amazon.co.uk in this window. In the image above, I’d typed ‘scree’ to find the screenshot application and came across some Marmot Men’s Scree Short Softshell Pants for £85. These trousers appear every time I take a screenshot, so I began to wonder if they were any good. Well the Amazon reviews for the trousers are largely positive, with one happy customer reporting:

• THE FOUNDER of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth has finally spoken out regarding the Ubuntu Linux distribution’s practice of sending users’ information to third parties, saying that in future releases there will be a “clear way” for users to disable advertising features. Shuttleworth’s firm Canonical sponsors the development of the Ubuntu Linux distribution and caused an uproar after it integrated Amazon advertising into the Dash desktop search feature, sending users’ keystrokes to Amazon to enable it to display personalised ads.

Devices/Embedded

• The open source Raspbmc media centre distribution has been released in its first stable version. Version 1.0 of the XBMC 12 based distribution transforms the $35 Raspberry Pi mini computer into an HD capable entertainment centre. According to the development team, Raspbmc can be easily installed to a USB stick or an SD card, even without prior Linux experience.

Phones

• The research firm’s latest report suggests that difficult economic conditions, shifting consumer interest and intense market competition has resulted in a worldwide drop in sales, which has not declined since 2009.

• Gartner said Wednesday that worldwide sales reached a total of 1.75 billion units in 2012, a 1.7 slump from 2011. In addition, fourth-quarter 2012 smartphone sales continued to drive overall sales, as Q4′s 38.3 percent hike based on the same period last year reveal. Smartphone sales in Q4 2012 reached record levels of 207.7 million units.

• This week developers of the Tizen 2.0 Linux based operating system designed for smartphones and tablets, has released the open source software of Tizen 2.0 together with a software developer kit.

Ballnux

Android

• The free version of the Archos media player is supported by ads. Besides offering the excellent feature set as that of its premium cousin worth $4.99, the free version includes hardware accelerated video decoding support for most devices and video formats, and also the ability to play content from any computer/network storage in your local network (SMB and UPnP) or from an external USB storage device. It also features automatic online retrieval of movie and TV show information with poster and backdrop for both local and network content.

• After the much talked about Pebble, the new Androidly by an Indian start-up wants a piece of the smart watch pie too. The company claims that Androidly is better than the likes of Sony’s Live View, Motorola’s MotoACTV as well as Pebble, I’m Watch and Meta Watch presently available in the market.

• All of these watches offer features such as displaying your social network feeds, Caller ID, and the time. Yes, there are some brands which have their own app stores with around one to twenty applications available, but that’s the limit. According to Apurva Sukant, one of the partners in the company, Androidly enables the smart watch to do all that a smartphone can do by making optimal use of technology.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• What does the FOSS community really need? We’ve tackled that question from a few different angles here on OStatic. We’ve pondered whether Linux could benefit from a united, community fund and wondered whether the FOSS community simply needs better evangelists.

• On Slashdot today, there is a lively discussion going on about what the FOSS world needs. Some of the ideas from readers are off the cuff, like this one: “Better hygiene. Less beards. More women.” Quite a few of the idea are good, though.

• GitHub , the Git-centric project hosting and collaboration company, has announced the open sourcing of Boxen, its management and automation tool used within the company for managing Mac systems. The project, which was originally named “The Setup”, was designed to allow developers to go from a new laptop to a system ready to hack the GitHub.com source within thirty minutes with a single command. They then ditched “The Setup” and wrote Boxen to replace it, so that any company could use it.

Events

• Roy Sutton is the community manager for HP’s Open webOS. He supports developers in porting Open webOS to new platforms and is a contributor to the Enyo project. Roy too a few minutes for an interview with the SCALE Team about his presentation “From Closed to Open: The Open webOS Story,” which will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24, in room Los Angeles B.

• An update on events and happenings at SCALE 11x coming next weekend in Los Angeles.

• With more than 100 exhibitors and about 95 speakers at SCALE 11X this weekend, there’s a lot to do and see. But when the sun goes down, the sessions end and the expo hall closes, the fun really begins for the attendees.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Today Bitergia presents the first of a series on analytics for the WebKit project. After the preview we published some weeks ago, we finally have more detailed and accurate numbers about the evolution of the project. In this case, we’re presenting a report on the activity of the companies contributing to WebKit based on the analysis of reviewed commits.

Mozilla

• Firefox 19 is slated for an official release on Tuesday, it will be released in few hours. If you can’t wait to grab the download you can do so through the Mozilla FTP servers. Downloads are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Browse the FTP folder and identify your platform file and download.

• Last week, Opera Software announced that its browser has reached 300 million active users, and dropped the news that the browser will move away from the longstanding Presto rendering engine and moving to WebKit. As noted here, this means that the number of browsing rendering engines to take seriously moves down to only three players, and WebKit–already legendary in the open source world–gets even more momentum and community involvement. But many observers are noting that the move isolates Mozilla, which remains focused on its Gecko Web rendering engine and SpiderMonkey Javascript engine for the Firefox browser.

• Former Google engineer Jeff Nelson has a blog post up that is generating lots of buzz due to the inside details it supplies about the origin of Google’s Chrome OS platform. The cloiud-focused operating system has drawn lots of headlines lately as more individual users, schools and businesses adopt Chromebooks.

• It’s well-known that the Chromium core of Chrome OS was based on Linux, and Canonical even helped Google shape the operating system. But among the details that Nelson recalls, the first versions of Chrome OS were actually based on Mozilla Firefox.

SaaS/Big Data

• During Rackspace’s third quarter, the company had a bevy of high-level conversations with technology executives about OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier noted the fourth quarter turned many of those OpenStack conversations into pilots.

• In 2005, Arlington Career Center teacher David Welsh had an unmanagable list of 77 Video and Media Technology competencies to evaluate for each student in his classes. A Yorktown High School computer science teacher Jeff Elkner was teaching his students to program in Python and bursting with enthusiam for engaging students and teachers in open source processes. I had a new job leading the SchoolTool project with a charge from entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Shuttleworth to create open source administrative software for schools around the world.

Databases

• Monty Widenius, the co-creator of the MySQL database, became a multimillionaire when MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008. But Monty subsequently left MySQL just before Sun was acquired by Oracle, and hired many of the original developers to work on his fork, MariaDB.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• If you take a close look at Microsoft’s new Office licensing, it’s crystal clear: Microsoft no longer wants you to own your office software. They want you to rent it. So, why not get LibreOffice for free instead?

CMS

• This year’s programmes now include:

• * Plenty of blogging – we’ve a Drupal powered bespoke blog/portfolio system, so trainees quickly get used to adding links, uploading images and embedding media; we also showcase The 100 Word Challenge and a few sign up for the team.

Education

• Sharing is a fundamental part of the open source philosophy, and the same goes for libraries. Spreading, disseminating, and breaking down barries to gaining knowledge is a core mission of most library systems and their staff.

• That that end, libraries—which are essentially hubs of knowledge and gathering places for learning and continuing daily education—may choose to implement open source tools and software.

• An advocate for “open libraries”, Nicole Engard, is one of our new opensource.com community moderators, a long-time contributor, and a 2013 People’s Choice Award winner. She has a passion for libraries and wants libraries’ core operations to run on open source.

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• In these columns, I have covered several different scientific packages for doing calculations in many different areas of research. I also have looked at various packages that handle graphical representation of these calculations. But, one package that I’ve never looked at before is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info). Gnuplot has been around since the mid-1980s, making it one of the oldest graphical plotting programs around. Because it has been around so long, it’s been ported to most of the operating systems that you might conceivably use. This month, I take a look at the basics of gnuplot and show different ways to use it.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• I have a regional, collaborative philosophy of open data initiatives and municipalities. In North Carolina, the cities of Cary, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill all share the economic engine that is the Research Triangle Park. They also share the innovation engine of five, top universities.

Open Access/Content

• A long time friend and mentor of Swartz, who helped develop RSS as a teen, co-owned the popular website Reddit, and was a key architect of the Creative Commons, Lessig has written about Swartz on his personal blog and the Huffington Post, and he spoke about Schwartz’s life and achievements on the radio show Democracy Now. Swartz is the inspiration for “Aaron’s Law,” a draft bill, introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), which would limit the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Open Hardware

• he open source Robot Operating System created by Willow Garage is in the process of moving to the Open Source Robotics Foundation. What does this mean for its future?

Leftovers

• I love my Compaq Presario 2170CA laptop. It has every peripheral that I use in my multifarious adventures, being one of the last laptops made with both a floppy disk drive and a “real” parallel port. But I’m preparing to travel with it, and its 40 GB hard drive was full. So rather than buy a new laptop, I decided to upgrade the hard drive. I found a new 120 GB drive on eBay, and installed it with no problems.

• he has now found a way to channel his hatred of the anti-necon movement into “comedy”, by making a sitcom poking fun at me, and making light of our government’s alliance with the Uzbek dictatorship.

• Our Men, commissioned by the BBC, is a hilarious comedy about the drunken and incompetent British Ambassador in Tazbekistan [which the BBC says does not represent Tashkent, Uzbekistan] and the jolly despot President Kairat [No relation, says the BBC, to President Karimov].

Security

• Though it is showing some improvement, the U.S. government is still earning low marks overall in IT security. An annual report card indicates that the performances of some agencies have actually declined in the past year — notably the Department of Commerce and NASA.

• With governments around the world preparing to spend unprecedented amounts on cyber weapons this year, major defence contractors are seeking increased involvement in the production and selling of digital arms.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Warren Hill has an IQ of 70 and placed in the third percentile on his middle-school standardized test. Doctors have found him to be “mildly mentally retarded.” But even though the US Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that executing the mentally handicapped is unconstitutional, Hill will be put to death today, barring a late intervention by the courts.

• They might come for your plastic gun, but they’re not coming for your 3D printer just yet.

• A series of photographs taken a few hours apart and on the same camera, show Balachandran Prabhakaran, son of Villupillai Prabhakaran, head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). One of them shows the boy sitting in a bunker, alive and unharmed, apparently in the custody of Sri Lankan troops. Another, a few hours later, shows the boy’s body lying on the ground, his chest pierced by bullets.

• [...]

• The photographs will place additional pressure on David Cameron to announce whether or not he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM), e in Sri Lanka in November. A Downing Street official with Mr Cameron on his visit to India said on Monday that no decision had yet been taken.

• NGOs and organisations, among them the cross-party Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, have called on him to boycott the meeting.

• Mr. Muhafdha continues to fight for human rights even though the Bahraini government has clamped down on any opposition, intensifying its electronic surveillance. “No matter how I communicate, they know,” Mr. Muhafdha said in an interview. “The regime has sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment allowing it to spy on everything we do by social media, e-mail and phone.”

• The German newspaper Spiegel has an interview with a German prosecutor, who ultimately decided not to file indictments in the case of Egyptian Muslim cleric Abu Omar. Omar was kidnapped in a CIA operation in Italy and rendered to Germany and then Egypt, where he was tortured.

• Last week, according to Reuters, a Milan appeals court in Italy sentenced the country’s foreign military intelligence chief, Niccolo Pollari, to 10 years in jail for his role. Pollari’s former deputy, Marco Mancini, was sentenced to 9 years. The sentencing followed a move by the court to sentence the American former CIA station chief to seven years in absentia for his involvement. And the court awarded 1 million Euros in damages to Omar along with one half a million Euros to his wife.

• Amazon has ended its relationship with a security firm in Germany following accusations that guards in neo-Nazi uniforms were intimidating foreign workers at the online retailer’s distribution centres.

• German President Joachim Gauck has received the families of Turks who were killed by Neo-Nazis in Germany and said he wanted societal prejudices to be tackled as well as problems within institutions.

• If you were surprised to hear one particular rhetorical flourish in the President’s State of the Union address, imagine how Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) felt. For well over a year he and a handful of other Senators had been trying to obtain the government’s legal justification for its targeted killing program without getting any response from the Justice Department.

• Disgruntled Heiress teams up with Code Pink and Fresh Juice Party to throw posh prison send-off for CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou

• In December 2011, the ACLU released FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, which showed that San Francisco FBI agents were exploiting community outreach programs for intelligence-gathering purposes. Now it appears FBI agents in Minneapolis have adopted this ruse, and may be using it in even more sinister ways.

• During a Google+ Hangout yesterday, conservative commentator Lee Doren asked President Obama whether he claims the authority to kill a U.S. citizen suspected of being associated with al Qaeda or associated forces on U.S. soil. Notice the question was restricted to only a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil (our concerns are, of course, broader and apply to the White House’s illegitimate claim of authority to kill people it unilaterally deems a threat, even if they are far from any battlefield, abroad).

• What the Obama administration isn’t telling you about drones: The standard rule is capture, not kill.

• Obama’s defenders keep citing sui generis conflicts to justify his actions in radically different circumstances.

• President Barack Obama’s drone war is in danger of becoming an Abu Ghraib-style public-relations nightmare, drawing criticism at home from left and right (and, it seems, even many U.S. troops), spurring angry protests in Pakistan and Yemen, and becoming a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

• The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

• Nearly half of the $1.2 trillion federal budget reduction would come from defense spending.

• As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air. The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week, and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world, as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people.

• There was a scarcely noted but classic moment in the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” to become the next CIA director. When Senator Carl Levin pressed him repeatedly on whether waterboarding was torture, he ended his reply this way: “I have a personal opinion that waterboarding is reprehensible and should not be done. And again, I am not a lawyer, senator, and I can’t address that question.”

• All of them claim the Administration is operating exclusively within the AUMF, and based on that assumption conclude certain things about what the Administration has done.

• There is abundant evidence to refute that. After all, the Administration invokes self-defense about as many times as it does AUMF in the white paper. The white paper actually situates the authority to kill an American in “constitutional responsibility to protect the country” — that is, Article II authority — and inherent right to self-defense even before it lists the AUMF.

• The importance of the combatant-civilian distinction was apparent when the Pentagon prepared the latest version of the Manual for Military Commissions [PDF], the rulebook for the trials of some of the alleged unlawful enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. The 2007 version of the Manual for Military Commissions, which made rules implementing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, said that “[f]or the accused to have been acting in violation of the law of war, the accused must have taken acts as a combatant without having met the requirements for lawful combatancy.” It went on to add that such persons “do not enjoy combatant immunity because they have failed to meet the requirements of lawful combatancy under the law of war.” That language was removed when the current manual was drafted because of concerns among senior US government officials that the language on lawful combatancy and combatant immunity could be viewed as an acknowledgment that CIA civilian drone operators are committing war crimes.

• As the conflict in Mali wages on, reports from the frontlines reveal that the al-Qaeda linked Northern Mali rebels have conscripted child soldiers into their ranks. These reports reflect the persistence of a gross human rights violation in military conflict.

• And Mali is not alone. Child soldiers are used by non-state groups and government forces alike. American soldiers around the world have come under attack from forces using child soldiers, a complex challenge for the U.S. military. However, the United States has also provided military assistance to governments using child soldiers within their ranks or within government-supported armed groups. Child Soldiers International (CSI), an international NGO committed to preventing the recruitment and use of child soldiers, has found evidence of child soldiers in government militaries and government supported armed groups with which the US military maintains key military-aid relationships, such as Afghanistan Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan, Thailand and Yemen.

• …insufficient to claim the mere mantle of Greatest Country on the Planet

Cablegate

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• Goldman Sachs is apparently back to it’s old tricks despite the $550 million settlement with the SEC over hurting clients in the mortgage securities market. Acting on what may have been inside information (more on that later) the firm decided it wanted to heavily invest in Heinz (HNZ), which later would announce it was in talks to be bought out by Warren Buffet. So Goldman Sachs started buying up shares ahead of the merger.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc is cooperating with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe into insider options trading in H.J. Heinz…

• No, what’s important here is what Politico actually got right in its story: namely, that the assumption in Washington is, indeed, that silence is a virtue – that, in other words, the best thing for a newly elected liberal senator to do is shut her mouth, go along to get along, play by the club’s rules and not make any waves. Summing up that Beltway conventional wisdom, Politico writes that only by “flying under the radar” can a liberal “star” like Warren develop a “reputation as a serious legislator.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Someone using the City of Melbourne’s IP block has been introducing biased edits to the Wikipedia page for Occupy Melbourne, attempting to erase the record of council’s resolve to remove Occupy, and trying to smear the Occupy protest by removing the adjective “peaceful” from the page. The edits were made anonymously, but Wikipedia publishes IP addresses for anonymous contributors, and the IP address in question, 203.26.235.14, is registered to the city.

• An estimated 40,000 rallied on a cold day in Washington, DC yesterday to urge President Obama to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline and destructive energy extraction practices, such as fracking.

• “All I ever wanted was to see a movement of people to stop climate change and now I see it,” said Bill McKibben, a Middlebury College professor, author and activist, and the movement’s Pied Piper.

• An incredible Smoking Gun! Big Talk’s Kenton Allen tweets “Now off to the Foreign Office for a historic read through”. The exposure of Mitchell & Webb’s Our Men as state sponsored propaganda for the alliance with Uzbekistan is thoroughly confirmed. That the BBC is a party to this kind of insidious propaganda is disgusting.

• In other ways, the administration has not been so transparent.

Censorship

• The War of on Terror continues with a new grave threat – people writing things on the internet. The government is now trying to find ways to counter “online radicalization to violence” a phrase so broad it could mean practically anything.

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation has destroyed its file on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the late New York Times publisher who defied the federal government in the twilight of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, Capital has learned.

• Penn & Teller’s Bullsh** was a Showtime special running for eight seasons with the express intent of murdering every sacred cow known to man. The libertarian duo’s show was an amazing tour de force that expressed the individualist arguments of free thinkers in America whose voices are often squashed by political correctness in modern society.

Privacy

• Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern wants to buy a surveillance drone, or, as he prefers to call it, a “small Unmanned Aerial System.” At a meeting before the county’s Board of Supervisors last week, he claimed that he’d only use the drone for felony cases, not to spy on people or monitor political activists. But a few minutes later he’d seemed to change his mind, adding: “I don’t want to lock myself into just felonies.”

• Catcalls and hisses erupted from a crowd of some 100 anti-drone activists. One man later called the proposal “an assault on my community.”

• Drones aren’t just for fighting the war on terror in the Middle East anymore – they might be watching you.

• Last February, President Obama signed a bill allowing up to 30,000 police drones to be flown by police departments and the Department of Homeland Security within the United States to keep an eye on “we the people.”

• Ian Welsh’s piece on the “logic of surveillance” makes several good points, but this one really smacked me in the face: “The enforcer class…is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people.”

• My day starts out normally enough: I drop the kids at school and head to the Starbucks, where I use my Smart Phone to pay for my tall Caffé Mocha soy because that’s how I roll: I save one minute not having to reach into my wallet to physically pull out my credit card, it’s logged into the app.

• After “checking in” with Foursquare, which tells me a couple of moms from the school have already been there this morning, and then my Facebook, which tells me another “friend” is headed there now, I dash to the Safeway, where I get discounts on my feta cheese, avocados, organic yogurt and Fat Bastard chardonnay because I logged it all in the store’s Just for U program. Again, that’s how we roll.

• The head of the German military’s counterintelligence service, which is widely seen as the country’s most secretive intelligence organization, has given the first public media interview in the agency’s 57-year history. Most readers of this blog will be aware of the Federal Republic of Germany’s two best-known intelligence agencies: the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), tasked with domestic intelligence, and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the country’s primary external intelligence agency. Relatively little is known, however, about the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), which has historically been much smaller and quieter than its sister agencies. As part of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, the MAD is tasked with conducting counterintelligence and detecting what it terms “anti-constitutional activities” within the German armed forces. It is currently thought to consist of around 1,200 staff located throughout Germany and in at least seven countries around the world, including Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Djibouti.

Civil Rights

• The security and surveillance state is creating a hermetically closed system of power. It is doing this by rewriting laws to subvert the Constitution and grant itself the ability to criminalize all forms of dissent. The FISA Amendment Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the enhanced terrorism laws, the misuse of the Espionage Act to silence whistle blowers, and the National Defense Authorization Act, section 1021, which empowers the government to use the military to seize and detain U.S. citizens, strip citizens of due process and hold them in indefinite detention, are chilling examples of a new America, an America where liberty and freedom have become a hollow cliché.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• New amendment that would make internet service providers disclose the identity of users who commit crimes online. If providers refuse they will become suspects in criminal cases instead of the users.

Intellectual Monopolies

• California Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of GE foods in that state, failed in November 2012 by a very narrow margin, despite massive spending by the food and biotechnology industries and their lobbying groups. The European Union already requires labeling of all food, animal feeds, and processed products with GE content. And 50 countries require labeling for the GE products they import from the United States. A 2012 Mellman Group Study showed that 91 percent of U.S. voters favored having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require labels on GE foods and ingredients.

Trademarks

• How could the company trying to file a trademark for “Python” have been unaware of the open source programming language?

• An Internet storm has broken out after an obscure UK-based cloud hosting firm apparently gained the upper hand in a battle with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) over which organisation should have rights to use the programming language’s famous name.

Copyrights

• The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) will ask the UK’s six biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block three more sites accused of piracy at a court hearing tomorrow.

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