● 02.27.13

● Links 27/2/2013: Firefox Phone Partners, DistroRank

Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Makers of Linux-based operating systems have been letting you boot Fedora, Ubuntu, and other popular software from a removable CD, DVD, or flash drive for years. Now you can use your Android phone instead.

• The governmental IT supplier for schools in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg has committed to stop development of its in-house Linux-based school server software paedML in favour of a new solutionGerman language link based on Univention’s UCS@schoolGerman language link product. This move was originally announced by the government organisation at the end of 2012; the intention was to reduce the workload on the teachers developing and supporting the software by outsourcing this work to a commercial company. UCS@school is based on version 3.1 of the open source Univention Corporate Server.

• Free Software means nobody can stop you doing whatever you want with the software³, but this also protects the developers’ rights to do whatever they want. Nothing they change (even GNOME 3) can actually infringe that freedom, even if you don’t like it.

• So: there may be legitimate criticisms of new software like pulseaudio or juju (or GNOME 3 or the new anaconda), but any complaint along the lines of “the developers are taking our freedom/choices away!” is 100% rhetorical nonsense.

• Reglue is no different. From picking up and diagnosing donated computers to taking care of vehicles, coordinating volunteers and making sure computers get into the hands that need them, sometimes the little things can slip below the horizon.

• On my test machine table, I have Google’s brand new Chromebook Pixel. Beside it, I have what had been the fastest Chromebook before it, the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook. Is the Pixel better? Yes. No question about it. But, here’s the real question: Is it $850 better?

• For the first time, both hiring mangers (850) and Linux professionals (2,600) were surveyed in the 2013 Linux Jobs Survey & Report, which forecasts and provides a comprehensive view of the Linux career landscape, including business needs and personal incentives.

• The report also includes insights into why employers are seeking Linux talent now and what the top incentives are for Linux professionals.

Desktop

• There are plenty of reasons to not want to spend $1450 on the Chromebook Pixel, but most of them are an extension of the fact that Chrome OS hasn’t grown up enough to replace a traditional OS. Fortunately, Google’s new BIOS makes it easier to work around the native operating system than any Chrome OS hardware before it.

• The main appeal of the Samsung Chromebook and its ilk has been price. For $250, you could afford to pick one up and see if you were going to like it. You could give one as a gift to that family member who considered it a biological imperative to click on every link they came across, leaving you to scrub the shame off of their hard drive the next time you were over for a visit.

• I’m a huge fan of Dan Gillmor. As a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, he was on top of a lot of great tech stories. His book, We the Media, was an incredibly accurate prediction of where American journalism was heading in the early part of this century. And he’s been very public about his move to Linux. So I’m pretty psyched to have his participation here.

• I’ve been searching for a new laptop for a very long time. My old Dell Inspiron 6400 has served me very well for over four years, but about a year ago I decided I needed a refresh. I finally decided upon the Dell XPS but it was a hard journey coming to that decision! Read on for a little bit more background about why I picked this laptop on how Mageia runs on it!

Server

• As enterprises move to adopt private clouds in the backend, Linux will increasingly become the operating system of choice for server infrastructures in Australia, according to IDC research director Matthew Oostveen.

• In financial year 2012, AU$235.35 million was spent on Linux servers, and in the same year, one in four servers shipped in the Australian market was Linux-based. Approximately 29 percent of all the money spent on server infrastructure in Australia went towards Linux servers.

• Based on those figures, IDC believes Linux is now running more enterprise mission and business critical workloads than other OSes such as Windows Server.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Canonical launches Ubuntu Touch for tablets. Steam has been officially released for Linux. LG has bought WebOS for its televisions. Tizen SDK 2.0 has been released and Mozilla says there’s plenty of interest in its Firefox OS. Hear our discoveries and the interim results of our challenge, plus your own opinions in our internet famous Open Ballot.

Kernel Space

• Last week when benchmarking the new F2FS file-system from Samsung that was introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel its performance was compared to Btrfs, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS. For those hoping to see file-system performance results of NILFS2, those results are available today.

• The EXT4 file-system in the forthcoming Linux 3.9 kernel will support using the previously-introduced punch hole functionality for inodes not using extent maps.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The two games worthy mentioning that were pushed out to the public for Steam Linux users are Counter Strike: Condition Zero and Wargame: European Escalation. There were also some other new titles pushed, but these are the two noteworthy additions. The full list of Linux titles can be found via the Steam Store.

• Counter Strike: Condition Zero is a multi-player follow-up to the original Counter-Strike game. Condition Zero also features a single-player mission and bots. The game has been available to Windows gamers since 2004, but now nearly a decade later it’s been pushed to Linux. This is a native Linux port of another Valve “GoldSrc” engine game after Counter-Strike 1.6 and the original Half-Life.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A few weeks ago we released a brand new major version of Kolab. The feedback we received was overwhelming and we are truly happy that we see more and more people who are taking control of the cloud and escape the monopoly with Kolab 3. It is great to have such an amazing community that encourages and supports our work while providing helpful and constructive feedback to make Kolab even more awesome.

• When Google Chrome first came out sporting its process separation feature where each tab is in its own process, it was broadly hailed as the best thing ever. The idea was to increase stability and security.

• This was during a time when Plasma Desktop was still facing a number of implementation hurdles that impacted stability. So a number of well-meaning people decided that I should be informed about this revolutionary new idea in Chrome and every component in Plasma Desktop should be put into its own process.

• The second episode of KDE from the future, where we briefly talk about what happened this week in the development of Plasma and KWin is online here

• Can I thank all the Kubuntu Ninjas for their superlative efforts with Raring (amazingly stable for Alpha 2), KDE SC 4.10 and KDE Telepathy.. it is amazingly smooth and stable, and uses a lot less memory than previous releases.. very impressed..

• I was watching a film about the Pirate Bay last night on BBC’s Storyville, turns out the people who run The Pirate Bay run KDE.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Last month OpenMandriva announced a contest to solicit community contributed logo proposals. The entry deadline has come and gone and the next phase has begun. Once verification is complete, public voting commences. So, let’s take a look at some of the proposals.

Gentoo Family

• The name “Sabayon” always rings me of a very refined and extremely polished Linux operating system. As has been my experience with Sabayon 9 and 10, even the Sabayon 11 release doesn’t disappoint. Sabayon 11 is refinement exemplified and is released in four flavors: Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. I start this series of review with my preferred desktop environment, XFCE.

• To begin with, Sabayon 11 release is not be missed. At least that is the evidence I got post using the Sabayon 11 XFCE release. Hardware support is better than ever with complete EFI/UEFI and UEFI SecureBoot support, greatly improved NVIDIA Optimus support through Bumblebee, a selection of MySQL flavors, including Google MySQL and MariaDB, up to 14000 packages now available in the repositories per architecture, and much, much more. I already reviewed the XFCE release and found it to be really really good. Next in line is the KDE version.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 arrives this month as a small but beautifully formed “minor” release with several new components including scale-out data access through parallel NFS (pNFS). To provide this, Red Hat has collaborated with its partners and the upstream community on the parallel Network File System (pNFS) industry standard.

• DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 27th February 2013: Big data holds big opportunities for companies here in the Middle East. Correctly leveraged, it can enable the organization to attract and retain new customers, deliver more innovative and profitable products, improve business performance and tap unexpected revenue streams. Oil companies are using real-time data to better manage remote drilling operations. E-commerce websites are using data from their operations to personalize the shopping experience and radically improve customer support. And an ever-growing number of start-up companies are combining innovative cloud services with big data analysis to create highly targeted products and services sold directly to consumers.

• Yet harnessing the power of big data is not without challenges. The same massive volumes of structured and unstructured data that create these opportunities for innovation can confound attempts to cost-effectively contain it, let alone extract value from it. And while the strategic questions surrounding big data are indeed difficult- What data do we actually need? How should we analyze and interpret it? What value will we eventually get from it? Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is the most basic: How will we store it?

• Red Hat is the 800-kg gorilla of the commercial Linux space. SUSE is about quarter of that in terms of revenue, yet is the second biggest of the three companies that vie for business attention in the burgeoning Linux market.

• Last week, Red Hat announced its intention to get into the big data business; this week SUSE is trying to woo new businesses in Australia and keep its existing partners in the loop.

• There could not be a bigger contrast in the approach the two companies take.

• Red Hat’s presser was a webcast, with Ranga Rangachari, vice-president and general manager of the company’s storage business unit, making a presentation. I understood it to be a one-hour affair, but it ran for only 32 minutes.

Debian Family

• Kademar is Debian-based Linux distribution, with KDE as the default desktop. The first beta of what would be Kademar 5 was released a few days ago. And this beta release is my introduction to this distribution.

• As always, I’m always curious to find out what the installer looks like and if it supports the features that define a feature-complete graphical installation program for a modern Linux distribution.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The developer preview of the Linux-based OS was released for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets last week.

• At the time of this article, Canonical’s efforts with Ubuntu have done wonders for gaining new adopters for Linux. Sadly however, Canonical’s efforts have yet to make the company profitable.

• Despite their financial shortcomings thus far, Canonical is bullish about their efforts with the Ubuntu phone and the Ubuntu tablet. Recently I was given the opportunity to try both firsthand.

• After spending some time getting to know the interface and understanding the core back-end, I was shocked to find that in many regards the Ubuntu developer preview had a ton going for it. In this article, I will share why I think this could be a winning alternative to Android on the tablet.

• Canonical has been hard at work on some very interesting projects lately. This new direction started last year when it announced Ubuntu for phones, a fully featured desktop loaded onto an Android device. More recently — and more mysteriously — they’ve been working on the Ubuntu operating system for phones and tablets as a replacement for Android.

• Ubuntu 13.04 (codenamed Raring Ringtail), apart from being a long-term release, will bring along some major changes to the Ubuntu operating system. With the proposed improvements in Dash, one of Shuttleworth’s major goals, that is bringing the web and the desktop together, will get a shot in the arm. Undoubtedly, Ubuntu 13.04 marks a crucial release for Canonical.

• Their new project on the other hand, which is bringing Ubuntu to smartphones, is in heavy development. But the busy developers at Canonical are making sure that their core product gets all the attention it deserves. Ubuntu 13.04, apart from bringing new features to the user, will also come with a more polished and refined look that will hopefully put it head-to-head with Microsoft’s convoluted Windows 8 desktop.

• While Ubuntu’s upcoming phone and tablet dominate the headlines, an existing controversy is threatening to flare up again as the 13.04 release nears. The display of Amazon search results in the dash, which first became an issue in the 12.10 release, is erupting again as Ubuntu plans to extend the feature to dozens of other websites. The company also plans to add direct payments from the dash and more suggestions.

• Ubuntu has been displaying music search results in the dash for several releases. However, the music results were drawn from Ubuntu’s own music store, and those who use the dash to search for applications on their hard drive may have never noticed them.

• Some of you may have seen the news about us transitioning to an online Ubuntu Developer Summit and running the event every three months. If you didn’t see the news, you can read it here. I just wanted to share my personal perspective on this change.

• For a long time now I have been attending Ubuntu Developer Summits as part of my work, but for the last event in Copenhagen my wife was about to give birth and so I attended the event remotely. As someone who has been heavily involved in the planning and execution of UDS for the last 10 or so events, I was intimately aware of the remote participation features of the event, but I had never actually utilized them myself. I was excited to dive into the sessions remotely and participate.

• The six-monthly Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) – held in locations such as Brussels, Orlando in Florida, Budapest, Oakland in California, and Copenhagen – will not be taking place in future, according to an announcement by Community Manager Jono Bacon. The meetings will be replaced by online events held every three months. The real world events which saw Ubuntu and Canonical developers from around the world gather at the start of an Ubuntu release cycle to plan the features of that release, are to be replaced by online gatherings using Google+ Hangouts supported by IRC, Etherpad, “Social Media sharing and links to blueprints and specs”.

Flavours and Variants

• It’s not easy to shell out $1,450 for a laptop that runs a Web-dependent operating system, especially when it has much, much cheaper counterparts. Why spend that much money on the Chromebook Pixel when you can get an Acer C7 for $200, a Samsung Series 3 for $250, or an HP Pavilion Chromebook for $330? The Chromebook Pixel does have great hardware replete with a display that can rival Apple’s Retina screen – and it does come with an amusing Konami easter egg – but the limitations brought about by Chrome OS might still deter most people from getting the device. Still, if it entices you enough that you actually want to get it, know that you can at least install Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it thanks to an extra BIOS slot.

• Ease of navigation, better battery performance, Fedora-style functionality; how can Linux users not find the fun in Fuduntu? This distro brings the open source goodness to the desktop, and provides workarounds for popular applications like Netflix, but does so in a way that’s almost an homage to classic Linux — right down to the old-school GNOME 2 desktop effects like woobly windows.

• When I first started preparing Bodhi ISO images almost two and a half years ago I set out with the goal of providing a clutter free operating system powered by the latest Enlightenment desktop. We call what we do “minimalist” meaning it doesn’t come with a whole lot by default. This ideology isn’t for everyone, though. Thankfully, the power of choice is something that greatly empowers free software development.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• BARCELONA, Spain–The chief executives from Ubuntu, Firefox and Jolla argued that the wireless industry is desperately in need of additional smartphone choices, and that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung’s dominance of the market needs to be broken.

• The head of Android praised the advent of Firefox OS, saying Mozilla’s effort can bring the Web to parts of the market that Android can’t reach.

Ballnux

Android

• Let’s start with my favorite topic, producing videos. As long as your need is only for production of short-form, nothing-fancy videos, the Nexus 7 can do it. Yes, it has only a front-facing camera. However, I was surprised to discover I had good results when I held it in the general direction of the action, without the aid of a screen to see what was captured. I used the app Camera ICS+, the plus being the pay-for $.99 version that captures 720p HD video from the Nexus 7. It also can be used for shooting high-quality still photos as well.

• ASUS has launched a 7-inch FonePad with built-in phone functionality at Mobile World Congress. You may have already heard about the tablet before its official launch but here are a few more details to share.

• Samsung Electronics Co. and Google Inc. together have stemmed Apple Inc.’s dominance in smartphones, but there is new tension in their partnership.

• As rumored 10 days ago, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is climbing back into the tablet business with an Android-based, consumer-targeted, mobile device the vendor will showcase today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

• The HP Slate 7, which runs Jelly Bean 4.1, features a 7-inch screen–the same size as Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle Fire–housed in a stainless steel frame measuring 10.7mm by 197mm by 116mm. It weighs 13 ounces and is powered by an ARM Dual Core Cortex-A9 1.6 GHz processor. The device comes with 8GB of storage. The unit’s display resolution is only 1024×600, although it features a wide viewing panel.

• In less than two months, April (2013) to be exact, you will be able to buy a Slate 7 Android tablet from HP for $169 USD.

• Announced at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, the Slate 7 Android tablet is HP’s first consumer-level tablet device since the failed webOS-powered Touchpad.

• But for that price, what will you be getting?

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• “The fact that we are open source is critical to most of our customers. The fact that it is absolutely transparent, that they can inspect the code if they want to, that they can pack up and move to self support is the ultimate alignment of our customers’ interest in our business model. And what they really care about more than anything else is that our business model must remain in radical alignment with theirs .”

• Free whitepaper – Cern and FuseSource Case Study

• A group of Adelaide researchers has released an open-source tool that helps identify document authorship by comparing texts.

• While their own test cases – and therefore the headlines – concentrated on identifying the authors of historical documents, it seems to The Register that any number of modern uses of such a tool might arise.

• No matter what technology exists, the wrong people seem to be in charge of turning the taps, argues Simon

• School budgets never seem to get any larger, but one way educational institutions may be able to cut costs is by deploying open source software. The open source community has developed applications that educators can use directly in the classroom, apps that are great for use at home and tools that administrators can use for school management.

• DoubleTwist, an iTunes alternative for the Android ecosystem, has teamed up with chipmaker Qualcomm on the release of “MagicPlay,” which the two companies are describing as an open-source, media-streaming platform meant to challenge Apple’s AirPlay. The technology is built on Qualcomm’s AllJoyn protocol, a mesh networking platform that has been in development for several years, but which has yet to achieve serious OEM or consumer adoption.

Events

• The Southern California Linux Expo turned their annual event up to 11 this year in more ways than one.

• SCALE 11X, celebrating its 11th year as the first-of-the-year Linux/Open Source expo in North America, played host to more than 2,300 attendees visiting more than 100 exhibitors and hearing more than 90 speakers giving a wide variety of presentations during the course of the three-day event.

• Many of the sessions had full attendance, and some were in overflow status. A testament to the quality of the presentations during the course of SCALE 11X is that some of the final presentations on Sunday afternoon were also full.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• So, which is the best? Well, for my money, Chrome seems the easy best pick. Not only does it tend to be faster, usually far faster, than IE, it runs on almost every desktop platform you’re ever likely to use and it’s more HTML5 compatible. That said, if you’re running Windows 7and you must use IE, this latest Microsoft browser is a good choice.

Mozilla

• After recently announcing the final version of Firefox 19, the Mozilla team is now focussing on the beta version of Firefox 20. The latest release of Firefox for Android Beta is ready for download and testing.

• We recently reported that the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open are the first Firefox OS phones shipping this summer. You might think that there is not much to boast on the specs-front for these devices, but their availability does provide consumers with a different platform to choose from (especially with the likes of Android and iOS becoming pretty popular as well as common these days).

• In the wake of Mozila’s announcements regarding Firefox OS at Mobile World Congress, lots more details about its mobile operating system are emerging. Sony has joined several other hardware makers and said that it intends to deliver Firefox OS phones in 2014. The initial telcos that will deliver phones and services for it are now known. LG Electronics, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch will all ship Firefox OS phones in the coming months. Chinese company Huawei is on board as well, and ZTE has a strong presence in China.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle no doubt got the bang for the big bucks it paid for MySQL via its Sun acquisition. But the original developers of MySQL won’t let it die and as developers and customers begin to defect to their increasingly popular MySQL Fork — MariaDB.

• LibreOffice can only exist since people are working on it: so please, tell us a bit about yourself.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I hear he was here last time in the mid-90ies, but that happened ages ago and very few people know it ever happened, so when Richard Stallman came to Bucharest it was quite an event for the local FOSS community, many traveled long distance to see him talking. For me it was obvious to go there, I never attended one of his talks and it was a perfect opportunity to take some photos.

Project Releases

Licensing

• With the cost of forking reduced or eliminated entirely, software development is parellelized; much as bacteria evolve more quickly because they iterate in peer to peer fashion, so too can software projects innovate along multiple parallel tracks rather than a single serial development path. DVCS-enabled forking, then, is an enormous step forward for software development.

• What is less clear, however, is the impact of forking on platform compatibility in an age of permissively licensed software. In his counterpoint to Schuller’s original blog post, VMware’s Patrick Chanezon pointed to this timeline of the various Linux forks, saying in part that there would be “No Linux of the Cloud without forking.” This assertion is likely correct; certainly it’s difficult to imagine Linux evolving as quickly or successfully without its decentralized – and fork-friendly – development model. As many are aware, in fact, Git – the most popular DVCS tool in use today – was originally written to manage the Linux kernel.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.

• I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.

• The Obama administration is right to direct federal agencies to make public, without charge, all scientific papers reporting on research financed by the government. In a memorandum issued on Friday, John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to develop plans for making the published results of almost all the research freely available to everyone within one year of publication.

• A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

• Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”

• The White House responded last week to the petition: Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research. It was posted to the We the People petition site and got 65,704 signatures (the minimum required is 25,000).

Programming

• Oracle has released version 7.3 of its NetBeans open source IDE; this is mainly used in Java development, but also works with PHP and C/C++. The new release’s features cater predominantly to the needs of programmers who increasingly need to include HTML5, JavaScript and CSS in their desktop and mobile applications. As a consequence, the majority of new features affect the web development and mobile capabilties of the IDE. The highlight of these enhancements is the new JavaScript editor and debugger that is based on the Nashorn project; Nashorn is the new JavaScript implementation for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Leftovers

• Microsoft had the embarrassment of seeing its Azure flagship cloud storage system crash for 12 hours on Friday because it forgot to renew an SSL certificate. Before laughing yourself silly, are you sure that a similar disaster couldn’t happen to your internet presence?

Health/Nutrition

• Japanese and American officials discussed taking action to weaken a prominent anti-whaling group, with Tokyo insisting that Sea Shepherd’s confrontations on the high seas actually hurt efforts to reduce whaling, U.S. diplomatic cables show.

• The U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission, Monica Medina, discussed revoking the U.S.-based conservation group’s tax-exempt status during a meeting with senior officials from the Fisheries Agency of Japan in November 2009, according to the documents released by WikiLeaks on Monday.

Security

• …Bank of America is paying contractors to discredit journalist and sabotage their work…

• The inventor who co-founded visual PIN company GrIDsure has become involved with another pattern-based authentication start-up in the hopes that the shoulder-surfer proof technology could replace two-factor authentication.

• His new company, Brit firm’s PinPlus, does away with passwords and PINs by combining a method for securely delivering one-time codes to users, with an architecture for storing users’ login “secrets” on servers.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Just how many classified opinions has the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued since President Barack Obama took office four years ago? The department won’t say.

• Back in December, before disclosure of a Justice Department “white paper” on the legal justification for targeted killings set off a drumbeat of calls for the Obama administration to provide Congress with all OLC memos on the drone strike program, this reporter asked the Office of Legal Counsel for a list of every opinion it had issued during the Obama years.

• I think my patience broke with the revelation that the Obama administration was more willing to give Butters some bullshit info on Benghazi than to give any ground on releasing the full, complete, original memos used to justify the assassination of Americans who have joined the Jihadist enemy. The cynicism was staggering. Those of us who supported Obama need to express our disgust and anger at this – especially those of us who have defended the drone program as, within key judicial and congressional constraints, sometimes the least worst option in keeping us safe.

• This cannot be regarded as somehow a state secret. It divulges no plans; it just explains to American citizens the criteria by which their own president can kill them from the sky without any due process. If the torture memos could be released by this administration, as they were, so can these. And not just to some Congressional Committee – to all of us.

• Let’s hope that newly minted Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will live up to some of our expectations and not be afraid to tell it like it is. Let’s start with Afghanistan. We just found out today that an alleged data entry glitch in the Pentagon program that spits out regular assessments like the number of Taliban attacks on our forces prompted the Department of Defense to issue too-rosy proclamations on the progress of the war there.

• President Barack Obama’s administration is looking at easing the secrecy around the drone war against al-Qaida by shifting control for some air strikes from the CIA to the U.S. military, officials say.

• The nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director has prompted intense debate on Capitol Hill and in the media about U.S. drone killings abroad. But the focus has been on the targeting of American citizens – a narrow issue that accounts for a miniscule proportion of the hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in recent years.

• Weeks after they were rebuffed by the Sept. 11 trial judge, civil liberties and media groups have appealed to the Pentagon’s Court of Military Commissions Review for more transparency at the Guantánamo war court.

• At issue is whether the world can hear the accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators talk about what the CIA did to them during their years of secret custody before they got to Guantánamo. Government officials already have acknowledged that CIA agents waterboarded Mohammed 183 times.

• Kiriakou, who also served as a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he feels “oddly optimistic” about his upcoming prison sentence and wears his “conviction as a badge of honor.”

• “I believe my case was about torture, not about leaking. I’m right on the torture issue, the administration is wrong, and I’m just going to carry that with me,” he says.

• Its depiction of torture ruined its Oscars chances, but that’s the very reason this film will live on: Pop culture’s portrayals of military practices can shape real ones.

• The Air Force has some bad news for the pilots of its F-22 Raptor stealth fighters: Your planes are going to make you feel crappy and there’s not much anyone can do about it. And the message to the maintainers of the radar-evading jet is even more depressing. Any illness they feel from working around the Raptor is apparently all in their heads, according to the Air Force.

• “There have been a few tentative steps on accountability for crimes allegedly committed by Sri Lankan troops and civilian officials during the war with the LTTE. President Rajapaksa named a committee to make recommendations to him on the U.S. incidents report by April, and candidate Fonseka has discussed privately the formation of some form of ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission. Otherwise, accountability has not been a high-profile issue — including for Tamils in Sri Lanka. While Tamils have told us they would like to see some form of accountability, they have been pragmatic in what they can expect and have focused instead on securing greater rights and freedoms, resolving the IDP question, and improving economic prospects in the war-ravaged and former LTTE-occupied areas. Indeed, while they wanted to keep the issue alive for possible future action, Tamil politicians with whom we spoke in Colombo, Jaffna, and elsewhere said now was not time and that pushing hard on the issue would make them ‘vulnerable.’” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

• Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has come under fire for paying almost a quarter of a million dollars to a neo-Nazi informer linked to a far-right terror group.

• The chairman of Dutch neo-nazi party Nederlandse Volks-Unie has been given 40 hours community service and a two-week suspended jail sentence for his role in an anti-foreigner demonstration in 2011.

• The court in Almelo said Constant Kusters and three others were guilty of insulting foreigners and discrimination at the rally in the southern city of Enschede.

• HoRa (People-against-Racism) warns: nationalist and neo-Nazi tendencies made provocations during today’s (Feb. 24, 2013) procession, which started officially from the Ministry of Economics in protest of high electricity bills.

• Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, confirmed at the weekend it had halted public subsidies to the neo-Nazi party NPD over an unpaid fine.

Cablegate

• Sensitive witnesses to testify behind closed doors about harm to US from WikiLeaks as Manning denied right to present evidence

• Decision to post 84 documents provides first crack in the army’s public information blackout during WikiLeaks trial

• The thrilling development in the trial of Bradley Manning is that Manning has acknowledged he is the source of the leaked materials, but employed a whistleblower defence. His case is that he was exposing illegal acts and trying to arouse legitimate public debate. However in the kangaroo court trial the prosecution has objected to Manning’s proposed evidence, and claims that Manning’s detailed references to specific war crimes are irrelevant and should not be allowed to be made in court. In other words, the state is seeking to prevent Bradley Manning from presenting his defence, and doubtless the military “judge” will comply with the state.

• One of the signature traits of LGBT subculture in the United States is its adoration of celebrity. If a well-known person voices the most milk-toast notion that gays are human beings, let alone deserving of legal equality, banner headlines in the gay press are guaranteed. If the celebrity comes out as gay, even more effusive coverage is given.

• Any number of fading stars and starlets, and non-entities on the make, from Lady Gaga to Chaz Bono to Ricky Martin, have mined the LGBT community to support their careers. Our community’s eager rush to embrace just about any celebrity who deigns to notice our existence is emblematic of our lack of self-esteem, our internalized homophobia.

• Australian diplomats in Washington have continued to report to Canberra about an “ongoing criminal investigation” by United States authorities into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

• However US Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich and Foreign Minister Bob Carr last night dismissed any suggestions the US may wish to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher as ludicrous” and “sheer fantasy”.

• Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier who the United States military is prosecuting for providing classified information to WikiLeaks, will read from or refer to a typed thirty-five page statement on February 28 when he gives his proposed plea. The statement will include his understanding of why he is guilty of committing elements of the original charges or lesser-included offenses, along with why he decided to provide information to WikiLeaks.

• David Coombs, Manning’s defense lawyer, said during proceedings at the military court at Fort Meade that Manning himself had typed it up and signed it. He said the court agreed to allow Manning to read the statement aloud.

• The US government is believed to be preparing to put a Navy Seal on the witness stand to testify that secret files published by WikiLeaks were discovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound.

• People shouldn’t fear their government; government should fear its people. Publishers and journalists will not be intimidated nor silenced. Now entering day 626 of the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, Julian Assange sits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London awaiting safe passage.

Finance

• The West Virginia auditor found that the State Office of Technology used a purchasing process which is unauthorized by West Virginia statute or legislative rule to purchase the Cisco 3945 routers under the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) grant. The Office of Technology used a “Secondary Bid Process” on an existing contract approved by the State Purchasing Division, instead of a competitive bid process open to non-Cisco vendors, as required by law.

• But does that folklore about French workers hold up? No. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (1/28/11) recently noted that worker productivity is basically the same as the United States. What’s different? The French work fewer hours, likely because they have more vacation time.

• To those who would argue that the notion of a perpetual motion machine is impossible, we give you the revolving door — that ever-spinning entrance and exit between public service in government and the hugely profitable private sector. It never stops.

• Yes, we’ve talked about the revolving door until we’re red or blue in the face (the door is bipartisan and spins across party lines) but this mantra bears its own perpetual repetition, a powerful reason for our distrust of the people who make and enforce our laws and regulations.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Guardian columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Tuesday and railed against what he called “reckless and irresponsible” journalism by BuzzFeed reporter Tessa Stuart.

• Stuart wrote a story Monday claiming that Michael Moore had overhyped the recent detention of Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat at LAX as an attempt to seek publicity for Burnat’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “5 Broken Cameras.” Her story was based on a single government source, and she was forced to issue a correction after initially presenting it as based on multiple sources.

• One year ago today, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman. On average, 30 people are killed by firearms each day, so Trayvon Martin could have become just another faceless statistic. But the tragedy soon gained national attention as a result of the injustice wrought by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which was cited to protect Zimmerman from prosecution because he claimed to have felt threatened by the unarmed African-American teenager.

• Speaking of which: How many civilians died in the U.S.-led war in Iraq? CBS Evening News told viewers in December of 2011 that it was 50,000. It wasn’t until FAIR activists pointed out that this was woefully incomplete–as was even acknowledged by the source of that 50,000 figure–that the broadcast did an update, now telling viewers that over twice as many Iraqi civilians were killed.

• But those Iranians and their clunky Photoshop skills, right?

• Standing with co-producers, including George Clooney, director Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award for a quirky film that stands as a humanist rejection of what has dominated Hollywood of late. How many films open, like Argo, with a voiced historical vignette admitting to a moment of American infamy in the Middle East? The U.S.-engineered 1953 coup in Iran began the Shah’s reign and set the country into a vortex of repression and violence, chaos that would ultimately result in American hostages.

• Grounded in this context, Argo tells the story of a nonviolent rescue mission driven by a fantastical science-fiction film fantasy, instead of a mission that fills movie screens with Black Hawk helicopters and post-9/11 tropes that dictate mass murder of stereotyped enemies who so richly deserve to die.

• Still, he concludes by agreeing with the conservative reader. Without citing any examples of what he considers to be unfair treatment of opponents of marriage equality, Pexton writes: “The Post should do a better job of understanding and conveying to readers, with detachment and objectivity, the beliefs and the fears of social conservatives.”

• In Ontario, 465 union workers used to make locomotive engines. Then Indiana passed ALEC’s anti-union legislation, and Caterpillar moved the works to Muncie. And that’s bad for everybody.

• It’s an anniversary London, Ontario, did not celebrate. It’s been a year, and the shock has yet to wear off in the Canadian city just an hour’s drive east of Detroit. All that remains is the hardship of carrying on through mass joblessness, and its hand-in-hand partners, surges in poverty, mental health crises and addiction.

• Officials were angered further on Sunday night when the US First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Best Movie gong via live video link from the White House. The film, which recounts the 1979-81 US hostage crisis in Tehran, was denounced as “an advertisement for the CIA” by state TV. Iran’s culture minister Mohammad Hosseini said Hollywood had “distorted history” as part of a “soft war” of cultural influence against his country.

• Iran’s state television has dismissed the Oscar-winning film “Argo” as an “advertisement for the CIA” and the semiofficial Mehr news agency called the Oscar “politically motivated” because First Lady Michelle Obama helped to present the best picture prize.

• That quiet punctuation mark ended a noisy past few months, during which committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, along with Senate colleagues John McCain and Carl Levin, loudly criticized the film, which dramatizes the 10-year hunt for and assassination of Osama bin Laden. In December, the three senators called “Zero Dark Thirty” “grossly misleading and inaccurate,” accused screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow of suggesting that torture led directly to Bin Laden and called on Sony Pictures Entertainment to add a disclaimer to the film emphasizing that torture played no role in the hunt.

• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that she sees “no need to request further information” from the CIA on the assistance it gave to the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and denied that the Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry was an investigation of the film itself. Screenwriter Mark Boal has been particularly critical of the Senate inquiry, saying that it raises questions of free speech and whether it will put a “chill” on future projects if movies are put under the microscope on how their creators gathered facts. He also said that he may be subpoenaed to testify.

Censorship

• Charges in WikiLeaks case will not be dismissed as judge rules soldier’s right to a speedy trial has not been violated

• The Australian Federal Police has sought to prevent the public from ascertaining the identities of ISPs participating in the Federal Government’s voluntary filter scheme for child abuse materials, through redacting the ISPs’ details from relevant documents released under Freedom of Information laws.

• In November last year, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy formally dumped the Government’s highly controversial mandatory Internet filtering scheme, instead throwing his support behind a much more limited scheme which sees Australian ISPs voluntarily implementing a much more limited filter which Telstra, Optus and one or two other ISPs had already implemented. Vodafone is also believed to be implementing the filter, and the process is also believed to be under way at other ISPs such as iiNet.

• The ‘voluntary’ filter only blocks a set of sites which international policing agency Interpol has verified contain “worst of the worst” child pornography — not the wider Refused Classification category of content which Conroy’s original filter had dealt with. The instrument through which the ISPs are blocking the Interpol list of sites is Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act. Under the Act, the Australian Federal Police is allowed to issue notices to telcos asking for reasonable assistance in upholding the law. It is believed the AFP has issued such notices to Telstra and Optus to ask them to filter the Interpol blacklist of sites.

Privacy

• You may think of your iPhone as a friendly personal assistant. But once it’s alone in a room full of law enforcement officials, you might be surprised at the revealing things it will say about you.

• Since 2005, the nonprofit data privacy group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has counted more than 3,000 separate incidents resulting in the exposure of more than 600 million records containing Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or credit card numbers.

• According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady’s new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have grown, since 9/11.

• …version of Android developed by the National Security Agency

Civil Rights

• Court’s conservatives say there’s no evidence plaintiffs, including Amnesty International, were harmed by controversial law allowing wholesale surveillance of international communications.

• In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled today that clients of the American Civil Liberties Union lack standing to challenge a broad surveillance law enacted by Congress in 2008 because they cannot prove that surveillance of their communications is “certainly impending.” The lawsuit challenged the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international emails and phone calls without identifying its targets to any court.

• The five right-wing justices hand Obama a victory by accepting his DOJ’s secrecy-based demand for dismissal

• This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the Supreme Court has completely shot down the ACLU (and some activists and journalists’) attempt to invalidate the part of the FISA Amendments Act that “legalized” warrantless wiretapping. As we guessed at the time of the oral hearings, it seemed like it was going to be difficult to convince a majority of the court that the plaintiffs had any standing to complain, since they couldn’t show that they had been directly impacted. And, indeed the court ruled 5 to 4 that there was no standing here. So, basically, there is simply no way to challenge the constitutionality of warrantless wiretaps.

• Legislation advances in three states aimed at protecting citizens from indefinite detention as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

• 1. Obama Says Goodbye to Freedom and Democracy In the NDAA Bill (Areej Elahi-Siddiqui, @andareejsays) – The NDAA bill is riddled with abstract and ambiguous terms making it easy to detain just about anyone. [18 Mics, 14 Comments, 121 Shares]

• 2. Organizing For Action Sends President Down a Dark Path (Sal Bommarito, @SalBommarito) – The goal of the new OFA group is to support Obama’s second-term policies, including curbing gun control and overhauling immigration. There is no precedent for this presidential lobbying power. [16 Mics, 47 Comments, 65 Shares]

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

Copyrights

• It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is finally launching. CAS is an agreement between Big Content and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer to peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe—via everything from from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds.

• Hadopi, the French “three strikes” administration, released yesterday a report [fr] on the fight against streaming and direct download sites. It advocates for the establishment of measures bearing a close resemblance to those of ACTA and the US SOPA bill, both shelved following a strong citizen mobilization for the defense of fundamental freedoms. Currently confined to the fight against file sharing between individuals, Hadopi now wants to extend its control to Internet intermediaries such as hosting services, search engines, Internet service providers or online payment services. Doing so, could only lead them to actively monitor content shared on the Net, with unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression, the protection of privacy and the right to a fair trial.

• This week marks the rollout of the long delayed “Copyright Alert System” aka the six strike anti-piracy program. It’s a bit confusing at a glance, but it’s not nearly as powerful as you’d think. Here’s how the system works, how it’ll affect you, and everything else you need to know.

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