● 02.22.13

● Links 22/2/2013: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Dice Linux Jobs Survey

Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “One would be hard pressed to argue that Android wasn’t the REAL tipping point when it came to mainstream acceptance,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “Does anybody think Valve would be making a Linux client if all those Android games didn’t exist already, thus giving them ready games on tap? No question in my mind; the day Android was released trumps them all.”

• GNU/Linux is a “supported OS”, eh? This could be just M$’s attempt to milk the last cent from those truly locked-in to XP. M$ made the cell, applied the barriers and threw away the key, holding thousands of corporations’ computers hostage. One can reinforce one’s cell by migrating to “7″ or one can escape and breathe fresh air with GNU/Linux. It’s seems an easy choice to me. I am sure the consultant thinks going to “7″ is the way but any nitwit can see this will happen all over again when “7″ dies… That’s the Wintel-treadmill, folks. An infinite number of steps forward with no advance.

• Google’s new Chromebook Pixel computer is all about the cloud — but it doesn’t have to be.

• One thing I’ve heard from lots of folks in discussing the Chromebook Pixel is a desire to run a more traditional Linux OS on the system. Google’s Chrome OS certainly has its advantages, but for some users, a dual-boot option is even more appealing.

Desktop

• These could be executives going for meetings, creative people or even developers. I have seen quite a lot of developers on G+ showing interest in this device.

• Just hours after the launch of the high-resolution touchscreen laptop – the Chromebook Pixel, Benson Leung from Google is busy patching the Linux kernel to support Pixel’s hardware. These kernel patches provide support for the ISL light sensor, Atmel MXT Touchpad, and Atmel MXT Touchscreen as found on the high-end Chrome OS-powered device.

• Although it’s oriented primarily towards developers, Dell’s “Project Sputnik” Ubuntu Linux ultrabook has attracted considerable interest from Linux fans.

• When I spoke with Barton George, a Dell director, upon the North American launch last fall of the XPS 13 Developer Edition, he noted two common requests that came up during the testing process: a “big brother version” with beefier specs, and availability outside the United States.

• It’s not the first Dell notebook running Ubuntu, but the latest model that Canonical is talking up differs from past Ubuntu laptops in that this is a Dell XPS 13 packed with killer components. All too often, Ubuntu gets plopped onto lower-end notebooks (see: the entire failed netbook craze), but this one rocks an Intel Core i7-3537U chip, 8GB of DDR3-1600MHz RAM, 256GB SSD, and a 13.3-inch full HD (1080p) Gorilla Glass display; Intel HD 4000 graphics is on board, too.

• Chromebooks were designed to make computing speedy, simple and secure. For many of you, they have become the perfect, additional (and yes, affordable) computer: ideal for catching up on emails, sharing documents and chatting via Hangouts. We’re tremendously grateful to our partners—Samsung, Acer, Lenovo and HP—for their commitment. The momentum has been remarkable: the Samsung Chromebook has been #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list for laptops every day since it launched 125 days ago in the U.S., and Chromebooks now represent more than 10 percent of notebook sales at Currys PC World, the largest electronics retailer in the U.K.

• Google’s flagship Chromebook might be a solid piece of hardware, but its prohibitive $1,299-1,449 sticker price left us aching for the ability to dual-boot a more robust operating system. Lucky for us that Google’s Benson Leung has a knack for Linux — he’s already patching the Linux kernel to support Pixel’s hardware.

• Earlier this month, a video was leaked on YouTube which was created by Slinky agency. CEO of Slinky, Victor Koch wrote in his Google+ page, “Our all servers were attacked by hackers, and we apologize for the fact that many projects have been shown previously!” The video demoed a Chromebook with a 2560×1700 resolution touchscreen and an Ivybridge CPU. It certainly got the rumour mill going with the device being dubbed as the Google Link.

Kernel Space

• Here’s even more good news for IT professionals with Linux skills. Last month, we got word from IT careers site Dice that salaries in Linux jobs are going up, and on Wednesday the Linux Foundation and Dice jointly presented a report of more promising findings.

• “The 2013 Linux Jobs Report shows that there is unlimited opportunity for college graduates and technology professionals who want to pursue careers in Linux,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at the Linux Foundation.

• The not-for-profit Linaro plans to offer an open source Linux OS for ARM-based networking equipment

• Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced the formation of the Linaro Networking Group (LNG) with twelve founding member companies including AppliedMicro, ARM, Enea, Freescale, LSI, MontaVista, Nokia Siemens Networks and Texas Instruments (TI) at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC).

• If the tech skills you now put on your resume fail to impress the hiring manager, you might want to get yourself skilled in Linux. And if you are already immersed in Linux, this one goes out to you. According to the newly released Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and Dice, there is an increase in demand for Linux talent that is being met by aggressive recruitment strategies.

• LINUX PROMOTER Linaro has announced that it formed a Linux Networking Group with ARM, Freescale and Texas Instruments among others to push the development of Linux based networking infrastructure.

• Linaro, which acts as a developer and hub for firms wanting to put Linux in their products, has put together a Linux Networking Group. The group consists mainly of chip vendors, including ARM, Freescale, LSI and Texas Instruments along with network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens. Its purpose is to research and develop Linux based network infrastructure equipment.

• A senior Linux kernel developer has pointed to an instance of what he calls a lax approach to security in the Linux kernel, citing the case of a serious vulnerability that is now more than a month old and is yet to be fixed.

• Jonathan Corbet (pictured above), who is also the editor of the Linux Weekly News website, described in an article how a flaw in the kernel, which was initially discussed on a private mailing list, had been made public with a posting by a developer named Oleg Nesterov.

• The XFS file-system update for the Linux 3.9 kernel isn’t particularly exciting, but it does address some open bugs and regressions for this still very relevant and competitive Linux file-system.

• The XFS pull request for Linux 3.9 reads, “Please pull these XFS updates for 3.9-rc1. Here there are primarily fixes for regressions and bugs, but there are a few cleanups too. There are fixes for compound buffers, quota asserts, dir v2 block compaction, mount behavior, use-after-free with AIO, swap extents, an unmount hang, speculative preallocation, write verifiers, the allocator stack switch, recursion on xa_lock, an xfs_buf_find oops, and a memory barrier in xfs_ifunlock.”

• Takashi Iwai has mailed in the sound updates for the Linux 3.9 kernel. This Git pull has the much anticipated HDA Intel audio re-work.

• The biggest highlight of the sound updates for Linux 3.9 is the unification of the HD Audio codec driver so that there’s now a generic parser that is used by each HDA codec driver. This big fundamental audio change is covered in more detail in the earlier Phoronix article.

• Average salaries for Linux pros come in at $90,853, compared with $85,619 for tech pros nationwide, according to a Dice survey.

Applications

• Musique Player for Ubuntu: Not the ideal player if you have a large music collection or if you expect a lot of functionality similar to what you see in a music player like Clementine or Banshee, for example. But it looks great, has last.fm scrobbling support, and even though scanning speed leave a lot to be desired, it works.

• This has to be the find of the day. I was skeptical about the relevance of a full-fledged voice recognition application in a desktop OS like Ubuntu. But all that changed once I saw the video demonstration of the same. Not only does the app looks awesome, it is tightly integrated with Ubuntu’s default notification system. If the app is going to be even half as good as shown in this demo video, that itself is a good enough reason to be excited about it.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Terry Cavanagh’s reorientation-oriented platformer VVVVVV is now available on Linux by way of Steam, Cavanagh announced earlier today. The port requires Ubuntu version 12.04 LTS (aka “Precise Pangolin”) running on a machine only slightly more advanced than a George Foreman grill, so chances are good that your box can handle it.

• Life, or indeed business, without Steam must now seem utterly alien to most middling to major PC developers, but X3 developers Egosoft are used to having to justify their presence on the service to resistant pockets of their community. They’ve been doing so for the past seven years, but today revealed a host of new Steam-based features for the series – alongside a few good reasons to consider a “leap of faith” to Valve country.

• Perhaps this is really the year of gaming on Linux, if you are reading this post probably you are interested in gaming and Linux, and I’ve got a good news for you : there is a big sale of games for Linux on Steam until FEB 21, 10AM PST.

• After the official release of Steam for Linux, the next wave of new games for Linux has been launched on this gaming platform.

• The first new game is the adventure game The Cave, from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert. The game has full gamepad support, and is therefore perfectly suited for Steam Big Picture.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Sony, the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music has pirated KDE artwork. The preferences-system.png icon from Oxygen is on their Choose your Vaio webpages (next to configure) but impressively is also on the UEFI firmware should you boot up into Assist mode.

• Participation and open access are key themes in Free software. It encourages dynamic community structures that blur the line between technology consumer and creator. This has been so successful that echoes of it can be found throughout the technology world from mobile app user engagement to game community content creation. Bringing such interaction patterns into the mainstream is perhaps one of Free software’s great social accomplishments. That is not to say that all is well: the topic of user empowerment and participation in Free software is often a contentious one. Depending on the day of the week and whom you ask, you may hear that Free software is an empowering agent for users with low barriers and high levels of interaction with developers .. or that there is a growing disconnect between users and the technology projects. Reality lies somewhere between those two poles, but few doubt that improvements could be made. How to do that is a question that floats in the air without many compelling answers. It turns out that there is another challenge facing Free software which could become a terrific opportunity for improving and even redefining user-developer interaction.

• For the next few weeks on mondays we’ll post an hangout-based mini podcast that will cover what to expect from the next iteration of Plasma workspaces, what’s happening in the development of KDE Frameworks 5 and the new Qt5 based goodness that is coming in KDE.

• KDE’s Spark Tablet running Plasma Active user interface was quite a phenomenon during CES 2012, though there was no trace of it during the just concluded CES 2013. Only recently, we showcased a video of Ubuntu 13.04 running on a multi-touch device, now here comes a new one featuring KDE Plasma Active running smoothly on a Nexus 7 tablet.

• It’s just one of my side projects and was an experiment to test how good libfm and Qt are. Since the core library of PCManFM, libfm, is carefully separated from its Gtk+ UI code, theoratically it can be ported to other GUI toolkits. To give it a test, I played with Qt recently. The result is quite satisfactory and impressive. I must admit that working with Qt is quite pleasant.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Categories have now been removed (I personally had this extension that also removes them in 3.6) and instead there are grouped applications. That doesn’t affect people that only were using search.

• Last time around, I had mentioned that I have been able to put down two research questions for my thesis project, where the first was to do a usability test for GNOME3.

Distributions

• While wandering around trying to see what news catches my eye today, I spotted the release of Porteus 2.0. Porteus is a live distro based on Slackware, featuring a variety of desktop and software choices. Version 2 is based on Slackware 14 and offers of KDE 4, LXDE, Razor-qt and Xfce desktops.

• [...]

• The KDE 4 desktop is attractive and unobtrusive

New Releases

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• From time to time we get a trickle of information from the Mandriva camp and a couple of days ago we found out that OpenMandriva Linux is cooking. It was sandwiched in a post updating folks on the state of the OpenMandriva Project.

• LAST AUTUMN I encountered and wrote about a serious glitch in a software maintenance upgrade distributed by Mageia Linux, the popular fork of Mandriva Linux that I’ve had installed on my desktop PC for about a year. Now the Mageia Linux distribution has permanently resolved that problem.

Gentoo Family

• Sabayon 11 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a multi-purpose Linux distribution based on Gentoo. Installation images for GNOME 3, KDE, MATE, and Xfce desktop environments were made available for download, besides those for CoreCDX, HardenedServer, ServerBase and SpinBase.

Red Hat Family

• 6WIND, the gold standard for data plane processing in software-defined networks, today announced the release of the 6WINDGate software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading open source platform for enterprises, providing a high-performance networking software solution for applications such as mobile infrastructure, network appliances and data center networking. The 6WINDGate networking software deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables equipment manufacturers to accelerate the development time for networking equipment that delivers critical CAPEX and OPEX improvements for service providers. 6WIND will be discussing the solution at two upcoming conferences: in booth #7A87 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and in booth #854 at RSA Conference in San Francisco.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its big data direction and solutions to satisfy enterprise requirements for highly reliable, scalable, and manageable solutions to effectively run their big data analytics workloads. In addition, Red Hat announced that the company will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the ApacheTMHadoop open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments, and that Red Hat is building a robust network of ecosystem and enterprise integration partners to deliver comprehensive big data solutions to enterprise customers. This is another example of Red Hat’s strategic commitment to big data customers and its continuing efforts to provide them with enterprise solutions through community-driven innovation.

• Zadara™ Storage, the innovator in cloud block storage that brought Private Storage to the Cloud , announced today their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based storage AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are now available in the AWS Marketplace. The inclusion of the Zadara Red Hat AMIs in the AWS Marketplace makes Enterprise-class, Storage-as-a-Service a viable and attractive solution for Network Attached Storage (NAS) users and database users requiring shared storage. This advancement provides Native Red Hat Cluster Services with MySQL, and easy, preconfigured access to Enterprise-class NAS on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Zadara Red Hat AMIs provide users the benefits of a pure cloud storage solution, plus the ease of implementation that comes with preconfigured images.

• Raleigh-based open source software company Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has announced a new data direction, with new products and new ways to deliver big data solutions to customers.

• Red Hat’s “Community Gardener” Karsten Wade is a SCALE veteran: A former keynoter and presenter, Karsten is an 18-year IT industry veteran, and has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, developer advocate, and open source specialist. Karsten will be giving the presentation “How to build an open community infrastructure of participation” on Friday, Feb. 22, at 1:30 p.m. in room Los Angeles C.

• vb-news.net, an investment community with a special focus on updating investors with recent news on the U.S. stock market, issues news alert on the following stocks:-

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) shares fell 0.75% and is trading at $51.32. Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat) is engaged in providing open source software solutions to the enterprise, including its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat operates primarily on the basis of three geographic business units: the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific.

Fedora

• Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat may be getting ready to start the Enterprise Linux 7 cycle later this year, but the pace of updates to the current RHEL 6 stack continues apace with the rollout of RHEL 6.4.

• Enterprise Linux 6.4 went into beta back in December and is now ready for prime time, according to Shadowman, so if you have your RHEL support contracts in place and you want to use some of the new features, “Gentleman, start your downloads!”

Debian Family

• I now have a system that will distribute a customized operating system in a few minutes, something impossible with Microsoft without paying for the privilege of using your own hardware or keeping the distribution in-house. I have defaults which are closer to my idea of what a PC should be than Canonical’s choice. With hundreds of distros available, the possibilities via installation and configuration are endless. So, don’t suffer in silence if your OS will not do what you want the way you want to do it. Install GNU/Linux!

• Ten years ago, this very day, my first Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository. It was an addon for Mozilla Composer, Daniel Glazman’s Cascades.

• On the same day, my second Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository as well. It was an addon for Mozilla Browser, Checky.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Windows 8′s tile-based interface puts a bold new spin on the familiar Windows interface—so bold that many long-time Windows users are threatening to jump ship to another operating system rather than learn Microsoft’s “modern” UI. Of course, you’ll still find yourself in foreign territory even if you actually follow through and make the jump. Installing a new operating system is easy, but wrapping your head around an alien environment can be more difficult, even if you’re using a comparatively user-friendly OS like Ubuntu Linux.

• That’s right folks after over four years of desktop, server and cloud innovation and talk – Shuttleworth is still not actually making money from Linux. If you were to look back and see how long it took Shuttleworth to make money on his first company — Thawte (for SSL certificates)- I strongly suspect the road was not as long.

• Canonical is the most interesting company in the technology industry today. They are the bleeding edge. Even though I left the Ubuntu fold a few years ago, I’m always drawn in by curiosity to see what they are up to next. The Ubuntu portfolio has recently expanded to cover nearly the entire spectrum of computing, and now offer a single platform for the cloud, servers, desktops, tablets, phones, and television. I can see what they are building, and I love the concept, but previous experience with Ubuntu leave me wary of the experience they’ll be able to deliver.

• The early and surprisingly nice version bodes well for Canonical’s Linux smartphone — but you may not want to install it yourself

• Canonical’s preview of a smartphone- and tablet-friendly flavor of Ubuntu has finally arrived for folks willing to flash a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 or a Nexus tablet. Shuttleworth and friends stress that the release is intended for developers and enthusiasts — not those eyeing it as a daily driver, mind you — and that it’s not yet kitted out with its complete functionality. As of now, the Ubuntu touch dev preview contains the shell, core applications,

• Furthering its plans to broaden the reach of the Ubuntu Linux distribution from PCs and servers to mobile devices, Canonical on Tuesday unveiled its new user “experience” layer for tablets.

• The fondleslab-friendly UI follows on from the version of Ubuntu for smartphones, which Canonical announced last week.

Flavours and Variants

• Simply put, it has become really boring to review any Linux Mint distro as I need to write the same words again and again. Things work so perfect with Mint and honestly, I haven’t seen any other Linux distro better than Mint in terms of stability and performance. Last year when I reviewed Linux Mint 13 XFCE (the long term support one), I coined the release as the best of the year for any XFCE distro. Same words go for Linux Mint 14 XFCE as well, it just only got better from the last release.

Devices/Embedded

• As the PC Industry is having trouble achieving growth, transformation has become a new trend among the industry players, Wistron chairman Simon Lin has told Digitimes in a recent interview. Dell’s privatization is just a start, and PC brand vendors are seemingly driving faster and faster on a steep, narrow, winding mountain road. If Taiwan’s PC supply chain players fail to keep up, they may be left behind or fall off the cliff at a sharp turn trying to catch up; however, such crises may turn out to be new opportunities for the Taiwan players, Lin believes.

Phones

• For I.B.M., mobile computing has come of age. At least, smartphones and tablets may be popular enough to make I.B.M. several billion dollars.

• The company is announcing a major mobile initiative involving software, services and partnerships with other large vendors. I.B.M. plans to deploy consultants to give companies mobile shopping strategies, write mobile apps, crunch mobile data and manage a company’s own mobile assets securely.

• Thousands of employees have been trained in mobile technologies, I.B.M. says, and corporate millions will be spent on research and acquisitions in coming years. I.B.M. also announced a deal with AT&T to offer software developers access to mobile applications from AT&T’s cloud.

• The men and women behind the open source Tizen mobile OS platform have stated an early claim to win developer hearts and minds ahead of Mobile World Congress next week with the official release of Tizen 2.0 source code and SDK.

• After a particularly slow start since its launch in by the Linux Foundation in September 2011, the platform received a massive boost when the world’s largest handset maker Samsung confirmed last month that it would launch devices based on the OS.

Ballnux

• The Samsung Galaxy S4 is widely anticipated to be announced at a Samsung Unpacked event in March, so it’s no surprise that we’ve started to see leaked information about the device. Today, we’ve got a few images from a trusted Chinese accessory manufacturer that show two different cases for the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Android

• Accellion, a California based mobile file sharing supplier, has introduced a Mobile Productivity Suite which it says combines mobile content creation and editing with secure file sync and sharing.

• Canonical has introduced the Ubuntu tablet interface, which will compete with Android, iOS and Windows with its own take on multitasking. The launch is the next step in Canonical’s quest to unify phones, tablets, PCs and TVs.

• Archos is all set to enter the mobile arena with the launch of three new Android-powered smartphones later this year. According to a report by Russian publication Hi-Tech, the French consumer electronics company will soon add a range of Platinum handsets running Android to its portfolio.

• The company recently announced three “Platinum” tablets that come equipped with high-definition IPS displays, 1.2GHz quad-core processors, microSD ports, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.1 at a low price tag.

• CONFESSION time. We were wrong! And a few readers have taken the trouble to set us straight on the matter of photo file transfer from iPad to computer.

• A couple of weeks ago, we wrote: ”Android tablets are better than Apple iOS devices for this process because when you get home you can connect them to your PC and transfer the photo files without having the torment of iTunes.”

• We were basing our assertion on experience with a first-generation iPad and a Windows PC. It turns out that newer iPads, running iOS 6, can be connected to a PC and they show up in the device list under My Computer.

• When Android 4.2.2 quietly debuted last week, most users were left guessing about what exactly had been included in the software update. Helpful community sites like AndroidPolice had put together a thorough listing of some of the new features in Android 4.2.2, but any official listing of updates had yet to be made. Today, Google published its official changelog for its Android 4.2.2 update, along with listing everything else that comes as a part of the Jelly Bean package.

• HP has decided to take another hack at tablets, this time using Android as the operating system. I don’t expect the results to be much different from last time.

• For those of you who don’t remember — and HP’s foray into tablets was so brief you would be forgiven if you’ve forgotten — HP bought Palm in April, 2010 for $1.2 billion. The idea at the time was take webOS, Palm’s mobile operating environment and build an HP line of tablets and mobile phones.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• In the run up to Mobile World Congress next week, Canonical has presented what it plans to offer with its tablet experience. The company’s aim is to have a range of convergent devices, with phones, tablets, desktops and TVs all running the same code base and offering optimised Unity-based user interfaces. Ubuntu for TV was unveiled at CES in January 2012. Next, it launched Ubuntu for Phones at the start of January 2013. But the third of the range of Ubuntu devices, tablets, had yet to be shown – now, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth has presented the company’s concept for tablets in a video:

• Slowly but surely, Ubuntu is heading in many new directions. Last year, Ubuntu TV ramped up, this year Ubuntu phones are upon us, and Canonical is also introducing features in Ubuntu designed for enterprises that may be tired of paying heavy licensing fees for proprietary software. This week, Canonical announced Ubuntu for Tablets (see the video here), which the company says will offer “unique multitasking productivity, effortless navigation and defense-ready security.”

• Long known as the standard-bearer for open source operating system (OS) Linux, Ubuntu today faces an existential crisis. These days, Linux has permeated everywhere in the sense that it still remains as a core layer beneath the Android OS. Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not find itself in that equation. Mostly, smartphones are all locked-down – enthusiast open source does not exist unless drivers are available.

• If you happen to journey over to the Ubuntu home page these days you see a notice that alerts you to the fact that the Mobile World Congress will be graced by tablets that are driven by Ubuntu’s Linux operating system.

• Under the moniker of Tastefully Tactile it is pushing it as a solid alternative in the post-PC era, a multitasking tool that provides the flexibility and functionality that modern users are seeking in their tablets.

• SmartQ appear to still be trucking, selling rather more polished products these days. However, I learned my lesson last time. For my next venture into the tablet world, I won’t be going with that pretty-much-unknown Chinese box-shipper.

• No, no. I’m going with a completely different pretty-much-unknown Chinese box-shipper!

• After returning the RedEye – yeah, I returned it, after re-configuration the 880 is just working too well to keep fiddling with the RedEye – I had a couple hundred bucks languishing in my Amazon account, and that’s not enough for a new NAS box, so I figured I’d spend it on a Ainol Novo7 Flame (also known as the Fire – apparently they are the same hardware, but sold as the ‘Fire’ in Asia with Chinese-localized firmware, and ‘Flame’ in the rest of the world with English-localized firmware). The last one in stock at amazon.ca in fact, so sorry if anyone else wanted one.

• Well M$ and many others claimed smart thingies were a “flash in the pan” but it’s not looking that way to me. Huge growth sustained over years is not a fad but a movement to smaller cheaper computers. Apple lost dominance in smartphones last year and look to lose dominance in tablets this year. Meanwhile, M$ rides a sinking ship.

Free Software/Open Source

• In the last months and years I had to deal with various requirements people have regarding groupware ecosystems. Open Source solutions have matured in this area and this article highlights some needs, but also some common pitfalls.

• The VAR Guy has long-respected Zimbra, the open-source email platform that VMware (NYSE: VMW) acquired from Yahoo in 2010. VMware has been pretty silent about Zimbra in recent months, and VMware’s decision in January 2013 to deemphasize certain products has triggered rumors that Zimbra may be in trouble. But is it?

• There are many in the FOSS community who pay lip service to the cause of women’s involvement in technology. It is a nice soapbox from which to grandstand and gain prominence. Raising funds is also easy when one promotes such a cause.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google’s Chrome team has ported a new app launcher to the Chrome browser dev channel on Windows. The new feature enables users to quickly open apps when outside of the browser. As of now, the launcher experience is only available on Windows, but it will soon be coming to OS X and Linux.

• Chromebooks have had the luxury of an app launcher for quite a while, but now Windows users can get in on the action too, provided they download the latest version of Chrome from the browser’s dev channel. In order for the launcher to appear in the taskbar, however, those running the fresh release will need to install a Chrome packaged app — an application written in HTML,

Mozilla

• The latest release of Mozilla’s Firefox open source web browser, version 19, brings few new features but does close four critical security holes. The release notes list only the arrival of PDF.js, the PDF viewer written in JavaScript, as a new feature. This, it is hoped, should reduce users’ exposure to malicious PDF documents which exploit third party PDF reader plugins to get access to the underlying operating system.

• Mozilla has released Firefox Beta 20.0b1, the first public beta of a landmark release.

• Like its predecessor, Firefox 19 FINAL, which debuted the new inline PDF viewer, Firefox Beta 20.0b1 looks set to unveil another major new feature to the Firefox armoury: a redesigned, panel-based download manager.

• Version 20 also includes a major refresh of the Developer toolbar, providing tweaked and redesigned access to all of the major components, plus an option to view the tools in a separate window. A new Javascript benchmarking tool has also been added.

• Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux introduces a built-in browser PDF viewer that allows you to read PDFs directly within the browser, making reading PDFs easier because you don’t have to download the content or read it in a plugin like Reader. For example, you can use the PDF viewer to check out a menu from your favorite restaurant, view and print concert tickets or read reports without having to interrupt your browsing experience with extra clicks or downloads.

• When surfing a website, encountering a PDF file is one of those minor annoyances I wish I did not have to deal with. That’s because it interrupts the Web experience. With the release of a built-in PDF reader for Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation, such interruptions are now history.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack cloud computing platform, which already has its own foundation and about 150 tech companies–many of them heavy hitters–supporting it, is starting to get support from key infrastructure players. On Wednesday, Seagate said that it will become a new corporate sponsor of both OpenStack and the Open Compute Project. The company announced that it “will help cloud builders to develop more scalable, customizable solutions using open platforms while reducing operating costs and providing benefits for consumers in the marketplace.”

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Education

Healthcare

• The NOSH ChartingSystem v1.3 was released on December 27th and is available for download via Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/~shihjay2. More details about the project are available at http://noshemr.wordpress.com.

Business

• I’ve not tried a document management system before, but these videos of LibreOffice checking documents in & out of document management systems via the new CMIS interfaces added in LibreOffice 4.0 make it look really easy. I’d like to try a group collaboration using one of these systems.

Funding

• Open-source search provider Elasticsearch has secured $24 million in Series B venture funding, showing business demand for free and simple big-data analytics. Mike Volpi of Index Ventures led the funding round, which included contributions from Benchmark Capital and SV Angel.

Project Releases

• The Blender Foundation has announced the release of version 2.66 of the truly awesome 3D graphics and design application Blender. Among new features in this release are: rigid body physics simulation; dynamic topology sculpting; and matcap display. Other new features include Cycles hair rendering, support for high pixel density displays, much better handling of premultiplied and straight alpha transparency, a vertex bevel tool, a mesh cache modifier and a new SPH particle fluid dynamics solver.

Public Services/Government

• After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we’re immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills, and much more.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow.

• Thank you for your participation in the We the People platform. The Obama Administration agrees that citizens deserve easy access to the results of research their tax dollars have paid for. As you may know, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been looking into this issue for some time and has reached out to the public on two occasions for input on the question of how best to achieve this goal of democratizing the results of federally-funded research. Your petition has been important to our discussions of this issue.

Open Hardware

• Chip maker Marvell has notched up its third public design win for an ARM server, this one at Baidu, one of the two big search engine giants in China.

Leftovers

• Reid Serozi (@reidserozi), founder of TriangleWiki, explains how the project was created from the structure of LocalWiki, a platform and storage hub for events, people, places, and things in an area. Information like this is put on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook regularly, but only lasts for a few seconds, a few minutes, or if we’re lucky, a few days. LocalWikis are created to capture this content for the longterm.

• Pope Benedict XVI resigned after an internal investigation informed him about a web of blackmail, corruption and gay sex in the Vatican, Italian media reports say.

• I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that SCO Group, now calling itself TSG, has been granted its wish by its most reliable fairy godmother, the Delaware bankruptcy court, and will be allowed to destroy or dispose of its remaining business records and computers. Nobody cared enough to intervene to block, not that the outcome would have been any different,

Science

• The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

Health/Nutrition

• Today the nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana released the results of the largest seafood fraud survey to date. Findings indicated that consumers need to be concerned with more than just horse meat in hamburgers or meat glue in steaks and other products.

Security

• Data captured by smartphone sensors could help criminals guess codes used to lock the gadgets, say security researchers.

• Alleged “hacktivist” Barrett Brown, the 31-year old mislabeled “spokesman” for the shadowy hacker collective known as Anonymous, faces federal charges that could put him away for over a hundred years. Did he engage in a spree of murders? Run a child-sex ring? Not quite. His crime: making leaked e-mails accessible to the public—documents that shine a light on the shadowy world of intelligence contracting in the post-9/11 era.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Oscar-nominated film resurrects questions about the Al Qaeda leader’s death—all six versions of it.

• President Obama announced Friday that about 100 U.S. troops have been deployed to the West African country of Niger, where defense officials said they are setting up a drone base to spy on al-Qaeda fighters in the Sahara

• Every four years, we elect a new criminal because that’s become the precise job description.

• Lessening the need to “send our troops into harm’s way” may actually increase the odds of future military interventions.

• My client, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, will begin his thirty-month prison sentence on February 28 in Loretto, Pennsylvania. But even though Kiriakou has already been sentenced, the government still monitors him. And while the government continues to complain about John’s public appearances and the events held in his honor, tonight we will send him off in style at a gala reception at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, DC.

• What would Washington say if Vladimir Putin asserted the right to use drones to take out anyone he secretly determined was an enemy of Russia?

• “Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

• It was most surprising to come across the following entry at the website for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses for Terrorism (known by the acronym START), which is run by the Department of Homeland Security out of the University of Maryland. According to DHS, START is one of their “centers of excellence,” an academic center sponsored by the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate.

• The secret to commiting the perfect murder, killing someone and getting away with it, is to become a celebrity first. The media wave yesterday and today is that Pistorius is suddenly vindicated by the inarticulate policeman who could not cope with a very glib defence lawyer. It is like watching “Chicago” for real.

• The BBC has used “Bigger than 7/7″ as the strapline for every alleged Muslim terror plot these past years…

• Beijing has said in its continued retaliation against allegations that the People’s Liberation Army is behind large-scale cyber attacks.

• Former CIA agent John Kiriakou, 48, is heading to prison for 30 months for whistleblowing on torture.

• RALEIGH, N.C. – The federal prosecution of five former employees of the private security firm Blackwater has crumbled after the defendants said they were acting at the behest of the CIA by providing five guns as gifts to King Abdullah II of Jordan.

• The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was motivated, in part, by the 2008 “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” the internet activist had penned advocating for civil disobedience against copyright law, Swartz’s attorney confirmed Friday.

• The revelation underscores that the hacking charges against the former director of Demand Progress were bolstered by the 26-year-old’s philosophy of a world unhindered by copyright law, a world in which he said it was a “moral imperative” to unshackle the “privatization of knowledge.”

• The Huffington Post first revealed the matter Friday, citing anonymous sources familiar with a closed-door briefing between the Justice Department and members and staff of the House Oversight Committee.

• Swartz, who had also written about his own depression, was found dead at his Brooklyn apartment last month after committing suicide. He was under indictment (.pdf) in Massachusetts for more than a dozen counts of computer hacking and wire fraud in connection to the downloading of millions of academic articles from a subscription database at MIT. An internet sensation who helped develop the Creative Commons and was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Wired parent company Condé Nast, Swartz had apparently planned to release to the public the millions of JSTOR academic papers he downloaded.

• His attorney, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors were “very focused” on the manifesto Swartz penned from Italy.

Cablegate

• Guatemalan officials are still trying to confirm if Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, one of the world’s most powerful drug lords, died during a gunfight in Peten, Guatemala near the Mexican border.

• “Residents who witnessed the clashes have told authorities that one of the two dead men resembled the Mexican drug baron,” reports Sky News, while The Los Angeles Times reported late last night that forensic teams were headed to Peten to get confirmation of Guzman’s death. There are conflicting reports from the Guatemalan government whether bodies were actually found on the scene.

• The White House warned today of the threat posed by WikiLeaks, LulzSec, and other “hacktivist” groups that have the ability to target U.S. companies and expropriate confidential data.

• The accused hacker condemns persecution of Aaron Swartz and others, while justice system flaws dog his own case

• [...]

• Hammond’s words echo those of, among others, Swartz’s family…

• Amid a growing call for new cybersecurity protections in the United States, the US government has issued a report that reconfirms Washington’s interest in shutting down WikiLeaks and other underground information-sharing organizations.

• Hacker Jeremy Hammond has been in prison for over a year after being embroiled in an FBI/Wikileaks scandal. We’re joined by Michael Ratner, of Hammond’s legal team.

• New Obama administration strategy says WikiLeaks might perform “economic espionage against US companies”

• The tragic death of internet freedom fighter Aaron Swartz reveals the government’s flawed “cyber security strategy” as well as its systematic corruption involving computer crime investigations, intellectual property law, and government/corporate transparency. In a society supposedly based on principles of democracy and due process, Aaron’s efforts to liberate the internet, including free distribution of JSTOR academic essays, access to public court records on PACER, stopping the passage of SOPA/PIPA, and developing the Creative Commons, make him a hero, not a criminal. It is not the “crimes” Aaron may have committed that made him a target of federal prosecution, but his ideas – elaborated in his “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” – that the government has found so dangerous. The United States Attorney’s aggressive prosecution, riddled with abuse and misconduct, is what led to the death of this hero. This sad and angering chapter should serve as a wake up call for all of us to acknowledge the danger inherent in our criminal justice system.

• Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events — among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s celebrated leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters — undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, open sources — each of these constitutes a path out of the government’s informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish.

• Since President Obama took office, his administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, invoking the Espionage Act to prosecute more people under the law than all previous presidents combined. One of those defendants is Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence officer accused of leaking tens of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Since his arrest, Manning has spent nearly 1,000 days (that milestone date comes this Saturday) in prison without being tried, a significant amount of that time under deplorable conditions at the Quantico Marine base in Virgina. Meanwhile, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, remains hunkered down at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fearful that if he leaves to face sex crime questioning in Sweden he will be extradited to the United States to also face espionage charges.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Sea Shepherd is claiming victory after Japan temporarily suspended its annual whale hunt in the Southern Ocean.

• The SSS Bob Barker and SSS Steve Irwin have been rammed by the Japanese whaling fleet’s massive factory vessel, the Nisshin Maru. The floating slaughter-house is eight times the mass of the Steve Irwin.

• The Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin were behind Sun Laurel, Steve Irwin on portside, Bob Barker on starboard.

• On loudspeaker, the Shonan Maru No. 2 ordered Sea Shepherd’s Australian flagged ship, the SSS Sam Simon, which is located in the Australian Antarctic Territory, to leave the area on the orders of the Government of Japan. Concussion grenades were thrown at the Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin by the crew of the Nissin Maru.

• Captain Peter Hammarstedt radioed the whaling fleet’s factory vessel, the Nisshin Maru, and told them that the Bob Barker intended to maintain course and speed, that the moral and legal obligation to avoid the collision was on the Nisshin Maru.

• This wave of “ag-gag” bills would criminalize whistleblowers, investigators, and journalists who expose animal welfare abuses at factory farms and slaughterhouses. Ten states considered “ag-gag” bills last year, and Iowa, Missouri, and Utah approved them. Even more are soon to follow.

• NASA climatologist James Hansen has tried to explain to Nocera why he’s so wrong about the tar sands, but Nocera’s account of their argument makes it seem like explaining anything to him would be an uphill battle.

• Foreign Minister Bob Carr’s decision not to raise Julian Assange’s case with his Swedish counterpart next week appears to contradict an undertaking he gave to the Australian Greens a fortnight ago.

Finance

• New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) task force received ample attention from news and activist organizations alike following its dramatic announcement at last year’s State of the Union Address. The task force was supposed to investigate and prosecute Wall Street fraud that led to the housing bubble and the eventual collapse of the broader economy. FDL alum David Dayen’s recent piece in Salon reminds us that, one year later, the “new” task force has essentially amounted to what the “old” task force always was: “a conduit for press releases about investigative actions already in progress.”

• It is a little bit interesting that the New York Times never loses its enthusiasm for Big Government. They publish articles lauding proposals by politicians to spend billions in taxpayer money on something that is supposed to do a lot of good. Then a year later the newspaper will publish an article about how great it is that the do-gooding is actually happening. Then a year or two later the newspaper will do a follow-up about how much or most of the money turned out to be wasted, funneled into the pockets of cronies, etc. These cycles continue, usually about 50 of them in parallel, without the Times ever running an article on how government spending tends to be wasteful and to result in the enrichment of cronies.

• Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski (4/12/12) showed how Apple keeps an office in Nevada to avoid millions in California state taxes…

• Now, you can argue about what “wealthy” is, but I think you would find pretty widespread agreement on what wealthy isn’t: $50,000 a year. If you sent the New York Times an op-ed outlining your plan to balance the budget by raising taxes on “wealthy” people who make 50k a year or more, it would be put in the same pile that gets the submissions about Elvis’s UFO diet. But when you’re talking about cutting entitlements, if you want to call those people “wealthy,” that’s perfectly reasonable.

• Israel has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild.

• Day after day, whenever anyone challenges the TBTF banks’ scale, they are slammed down with a mutually assured destruction message that limitations would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance. So what if you were to discover, based on Bloomberg’s calculations,

• On television, in interviews and in meetings with investors, executives of the biggest U.S. banks — notably JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon — make the case that size is a competitive advantage. It helps them lower costs and vie for customers on an international scale. Limiting it, they warn, would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Last week, Obama issued an executive order on cybersecurity…

• Madison, WI — One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless urgent action is taken. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you.

• Fix the Debt is the most hypocritical corporate PR campaign in decades, an ambitious attempt to convince the country that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner and that urgent action is needed. Its strategy is pure astroturf: assemble power players in business and government under an activist banner, then take the message outside the Beltway and give it the appearance of grassroots activism by manufacturing an emergency to infuse a sense of imminent crisis.

• Behind this strategy are no fewer than 127 CEOs and even more “statesmen” pushing for a “grand bargain” to draw up an austerity budget by July 4. With many firms kicking in $1 million each on top of Peterson’s $5 million in seed money, this latest incarnation of the Peterson message machine must be taken seriously.

• Fix the Debt financier Peter G. Peterson knows a thing or two about debt: he’s an expert at creating it. Peterson founded the private equity firm Blackstone Group in 1985 with Stephen Schwarzman (who compared raising taxes to “when Hitler invaded Poland”). Private equity firms don’t contribute much to the economy; they don’t make cars or milk the cows. Too frequently, they buy firms to loot them. After a leveraged buyout, they can leave companies so loaded up with debt they are forced to immediately slash their workforce or employees’ retirement security.

• The U.S. Supreme Court could open the door to even more money in politics than it did in the disastrous 2010 decision Citizens United v FEC as it considers a new case challenging limits on how much wealthy donors can give directly to federal candidates and political parties. If the court sides with the challengers in McCutcheon v FEC, political power and influence in America would be further concentrated in the hands of just a few wealthy donors.

• I WATCHED “Zero Dark Thirty” not as a former F.B.I. special agent who spent a decade chasing, interrogating and prosecuting top members of Al Qaeda but as someone who enjoys Hollywood movies. As a movie, I enjoyed it. As history, it’s bunk.

• [...]

• [by] A former F.B.I. special agent who interrogated Qaeda detainees and the author of “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.”

• The National Intelligence Service (NIS) dismissed an employee for informing the Democratic United Party of allegations that the NIS was manipulating public opinion prior to the presidential election.

• The agency went further and reported the employee to the prosecution on charges of violating the National Intelligence Service Act. Civic organizations are denouncing the NIS for attempting to hide the truth instead of trying to right their wrongs.

Censorship

• A quick glance might give you the impression Wilentz’s grudge is all about a seemingly obscure, dusty corner of history (Henry Wallace and the 1948 election) that doesn’t affect anyone’s life today one way or the other. But it’s not. Wilentz is pissed off because he understands Untold History is a damning indictment of an entire worldview – that of his political patrons and all comfortable establishment historians like him. And that worldview is genuinely a matter of life and death for all Americans in 2013. If you’d prefer that the plane you’re taking next week not get hit by an surface-to-air missile liberated by Islamists from Libya’s stockpile, and that you not personally get torn into several large chunks at 7,000 feet, you really should pay attention to this.

Privacy

• One month after the terrible opinion vote of the “Consumers” (IMCO) Committee, MEPs from the “Industry” (ITRE) committee, and to a lesser extent from the “Employment” (EMPL) one, have also voted to weaken protection of EU citizens’ privacy. In the ITRE committee, because of the support of Members of the liberal (ALDE) group, conservatives’ amendments lifting restrictions on the collection, processing and resale of citizens’ personal data by companies have been adopted. Before the “Legal Affairs” (JURI) committee’s opinion vote1 and the main, crucial, “Civil Liberties” (LIBE) committee’s report vote2, citizens should act and urge their MEPs to break away from big corporations’ lobbying and to protect their fundamental right to privacy.

• The shared nightmare of the later 20th century was totalitarian governments taking over under the pretense of offering their citizens security: “Big Brother,” in Orwell’s phrase. Five years ago, Cory Doctorow’s novel “Little Brother” seemed to say that we could stop worrying about all that.

• The PBS series NOVA, “Rise of the Drones,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip, the system is capable of high-resolution monitoring and recording of an entire city. (The clip was written about in DefenseTech and in Slate.)

• In the clip, the developer explains how the technology (which he also refers to with the apt name “Wide Area Persistent Stare”) is “equivalent to having up to a hundred Predators look at an area the size of a medium-sized city at once.”

Civil Rights

• Craig Murray may be Britain’s most controversial former Ambassador. He was dismissed from his post in Uzbekistan in 2004 amid lurid allegations about his personal life, and medically evacuated from there after becoming dangerously ill. He concludes he was poisoned and suspects CIA involvement.

• “I considered myself very fortunate to be accused of treason and not of terrorism. When The National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA) was signed into law by the President on New Year’s Eve, 2012, it empowered the Armed Forces to engage in civilian law enforcement and to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus, along with the 1st, 5th, 6th and 14th Amendment rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. In the history of America, this insidious law posed the greatest threat to civil freedoms.

• “The war on terror isn’t a war on a country or a people; it’s a war on a tactical operation. Therefore, it has no restrictions and is endless. Subsequently, anyone alleged to be a threat to the nation’s stability or security, suspected of sympathizing with or supporting a person or group that the U.S. government designates a terrorist organization or an affiliate, may be imprisoned without charge or trial eternally.

• Actually, this time I think it matters more than usual. On the Five (2/19/13), a discussion of rape on college campuses included what you might call a skeptic’s take: Maybe there’s not really any such thing.

• In our diverse student body, there are voices that have expressed their distaste for the American military and foreign policy. Many argue that America is imperialistic or that it uses its military for personal gain behind a façade of righteousness.

• Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s prosecutorial style of questioning Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, came so close to innuendo that it raised eyebrows in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Cruz’s inquiry into Hagel’s past associations “out of bounds, quite frankly.” The Times reported that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, rebuked Cruz for insinuating, without evidence, that Hagel may have collected speaking fees from North Korea. Some Democrats went so far as to liken Cruz, who is a newcomer to the Senate, to a darkly divisive predecessor, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusades devolved into infamous witch hunts. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, stopped short of invoking McCarthy’s name, but there was no mistaking her allusion when she talked about being reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.”

• It’s rare that we want strangers pawing through our digital devices, giving them the opportunity to peruse emails, private messages, photos, Twitter DMs, Facebook pokes, and all the other myriad bits of our personal life captured by the digital umbilical cords that are our smartphones. And when I say “rare,” I mean that it’s something we hope never, ever happens to us. But if you’re crossing the border, it’s something that could happen to you; it happens to thousands of people each year. It even happens to nominally-famous types.

• A German government minister called Sunday for a thorough probe into allegations that foreign seasonal workers hired in Germany by US online retail giant Amazon were harassed and intimidated.

• Labour Minister Ursula von der Leyen told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that any proof of wrongdoing could result in serious consequences for the temporary employment agency used by Amazon.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• A few years ago the EU agreed a package of measures for the EU telecoms market. Those delivered important new rules and rights for people who use landlines, mobiles and the Internet – and that means you!

DRM

• That qualification reflects the uncertainty of the times. As volumes printed on paper evolve to newer media – at some point, a printed volume seems likely to become a luxury item – we’re obliged to think about what constitutes a book in the digital age. I used to think I knew the answer, but I’m no longer remotely sure. Two recent events have not cleared things up. After listening to smart and well-informed speakers at a “Future of Publishing” panel in California late last year, as well as at last week’s “O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing” conference in New York City, I found myself, if anything, less certain.

• It was easy, not so long ago, to say, “This is a book, and this isn’t.” From the early Codex to hand-penned Bibles (created by “scribes”), Gutenberg’s printing press through the late 20th century, a book was a collection of bound pages. But as has happened with other media forms, digital technology has blurred the lines we once took for granted.

• DRM, also known as Digital Repression Management, is one of the most dangerous technologies with insecure media company want to use for their ‘works’ such as online movies, games and books. While companies like Apple succeeded in getting rid of DRM from their ‘music’, now HTML5 is heading in the same direction, Google has implemented DRM in its Chrome OS with support for WebM.

• Google pushed an updated for the stable channel of Chrome OS bringing it up to the version 25.0.1364.87 for Samsung Chromebooks. One of the most notable ‘features’ of this update is HTML5 on Chrome OS has been restricted with DRM.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The phrase “my kingdom for a horse” has become something of a cliche, depicting politics as the ultimate zero sum game. Trade negotiations, on the other hand, are all about ambit claims concerning which, over time, concessions are made.

• The Australian team, led by the Trade Minister, Mark Vaile, which negotiated the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), was never likely to insist on a “sugar access for an FTA” line. Just as the US team, under trade representative Bob Zoellick, was unlikely to demand an “abandon Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme or no FTA” outcome.

Trademarks

• Over the Python Software Foundation’s protests, POBox Hosting called its service ‘Python Cloud’ — and saw a harsh reaction from the global open source developer community

Copyrights

• We’ve talked before about rich guy Alki David’s “revenge” lawsuit against CBS for its lawsuit against his internet TV service. He and some musicians he’s convinced to join the lawsuit are alleging, ridiculously, that CBS should be liable for infringement itself, based on a convoluted copyright liability theory (and by “convoluted” we mean “totally bogus”) involving the fact that CNET, which is owned by CBS Interactive, offers downloads of file sharing software on its Download.com platform, while its News.com news and reviews site have published news stories and reviews about using file sharing software. Late last year, they took the case to another level seeking an injunction against all BitTorrent downloads from CBS Interactive sites.

• The winner, “It’s Your Birthday,” was selected by a panel of judges that included Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, Bloomberg Law reports. Radio station WFMU teamed with the Free Music Archive to replace the copyrighted song with one in the public domain.

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