● 03.06.13

● Links 6/3/2013: HP Pavilion Has GNU/Linux, Apache OpenOffice.org Exceeds 40 Million Downloads

Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• At the beginning of last year I tested the CompuLab Trim-Slice, which was a great ARM-based Linux desktop for the time. While the hardware now shows its signs of aging in the fast-paced ARM world, modern Linux distributions can still be loaded up on the platform.

• The Trim-Slice is built around the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC, which sports a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor clocked at 1.0GHz. The device has a built-in drive and supports SHDC expansion, bears 1GB of RAM, and 802.11n WiFi. With the Tegra 3 quad-core hardware now being widespread that’s multiple times faster than the Tegra 2 and the Tegra 4 hardware being around the corner that’s much faster with its use of the ARM Cortex-A15, the Trim-Slice is no longer competitive from a hardware point of view.

• Following two years of collaborative development, the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) this week announced the availability of v1.0 of MirrorLink, which defines methods for implementing interoperable phone-centric car connectivity.

Desktop

• Linux Lord Linus Torvalds is thinking about making Google’s Chromebook Pixel his main computer – once he installs a proper Linux distribution on the machine, that is.

• Posting on Google+, Torvalds lauded Google’s newest creation, writing “… the screen really is that nice” [his emphasis] and that “I think I can lug around this 1.5kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1kg or less.”

• Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebooks, those cloud-centric notebooks, often carry low price tags that won’t generate much partner profit — at least not at first glance. But if you take a closer look at the Google Apps ecosystem, you’ll see at least five ways that channel partners can generate recurring revenues from one-time Chromebook sales. Here they are.

• Ready to take the plunge on a new all-in-one, but not super pumped about tackling Windows 8? You’re probably not alone, and it looks like HP’s got a solution.

Server

• Amazon Web Services Monday reduced its prices on its lowest cost option, reserved instances, by “up to 27%.” That means a reserved instance virtual server may cost 65% less than the comparable on-demand instance running on the AWS EC2 infrastructure at $0.06 per hour.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, March 4, the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series.

• Linux kernel 3.8.2 comprises arch fixes (x86 mostly), filesystem improvements (EXT4, FUSE, NFS, OCFS2 and UBIFS), sound improvements, as well as many updated drivers. Please check the official raw changelog for the juicy details.

• George Grey, CEO of the Linaro organization, gave a keynote speech on benefits of collaboration in Linux development at last month’s Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco.

• In his keynote, Grey expounded on the benefits of multiple companies collaborating to accelerate Linux development. Additionally, he explained the purpose and goals of Linaro and reported on the group’s recent accomplishments and current priorities. Watch the video below.

• Linux founder Linus Torvalds recently picked up a Google Chromebook Pixel, and the hardware left such a positive impression that he posed the question “Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?” on his Google Plus page.

• Google‘s design philosophy for the Pixel is decidedly unusual when stacked against the average portable PC. Chief among the differences is its 3:2 aspect ratio. Torvalds mentions that he “despises” widescreen displays and continues: “I don’t understand why people complain about ‘black bars’, when I can’t see why it would be any different to have ‘no pixels at all’, which is what the silly widescreen displays do.”

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Gaming on Linux is a very real thing right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you’re using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop?

• Not a bad deal this time around. I sure hope dungeon defenders has been fixed up though it’s launch for Linux in another bundle was riddled with show stopping bugs which is a common thing with Humble launches sadly.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today I got many questions about KWin and Mir, how it affects us, what it means for our Wayland plans and so on. I did not want to write anything about it because I think there is nothing to write about, but before answering the same question again and again I think it’s better to put down a few lines here. Wiki will be updated once Wayland wiki is updated so that we have something to link to.

• There are some news in the Plasma, Lancelot, Shelf, QML components, blah blah whoop whoop land. As some of the people have noticed from the previous screenshots, I’ve begun working on a QML port of Lancelot.

• In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributors Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Richard Hughes has been working on a new package manager for the GNOME desktop that he’s dubbed “GNOME Software.” With it, and the right plugins, a user might install software from just about any repository.

• It may not surprise folks that GNOME Software “currently uses” PackageKit. PackageKit has had the goal of providing one package manager for them all and, in their words, “to make the process suck less.”

• To me it seems, and with the Gnome Shell release this has become even more pronounced, that the situation around Gnome is like the situation around political parties in Czech Republic. They mostly lost touch with reality and majority of people either lost their interest in them, became their haters or their (almost) unconditional adorers. Pointing out an issue equals hating now (and yes there are some exceptions). I have lost faith. Sadly. In both. Does it need to happen to Fedora as well? If we gnomeifficate anaconda, we might end-up like this as well. Users aren’t as dumb as we tend to make them. People don’t want grey lives with nothing to look forward to, with nothing to choose from. With computers treating them as monkeys. I don’t want an environment where I cannot choose between grey two-colour symbolic icons and colorful normal ones. Is reaching out specifically to women making them feel equal?

• GNOME 3.8 is still a few weeks from release, but with the latest beta, users can view the new GNOME Classic for the first time. The replacement for the retiring fallback mode, GNOME Classic uses extensions to provide something of the GNOME 2 experience — but it is a strangely limited experience that fails to match Linux Mint’s Mate or Cinnamon, as though the GNOME project is reluctant to provide a “classic” experience at all.

• GNOME Classic is not included on the beta Live CD. You might find the beta in development directories for distributions such as Fedora or openSUSE, and the option of compiling from source is always available.

• However, the easiest way to view it is to download the latest version of Ubuntu 13.04, then use the command sudo add-apt-repository to add ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging as sources.

• Then running apt-get update followed by apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-shell extensions should add GNOME Classic to the selection of desktops when you log-in. Both these Launchpad sources are in rapid development, so you might have some unexpected problems (in my case, the keyboard stops working if the screen is locked).

• A new development version of the GVFS software has been announced yesterday, March 4, bringing various fixes, some new features and the usual translation updates.

Distributions

• Over the last couple of months there have been a number of discussions on the Arch boards about the forum policy of only providing support for Arch Linux, culminating in this long thread about Archbang users (login required) being denied support and having their threads summarily closed. As it emerged in the discussion, there seem to be two separate issues at play here; the question of Arch-derivatives using the Arch brand (logo, colours and even the forum style sheets), and how the wider community of GNU/Linux distributions are treated on our boards.

• The latest version of Puppy Linux could easily win best of breed; it’s got all the convenience and user-friendliness you would expect from its bloodline, but this Precise Puppy also possesses whippet-like speed. That’s impressive when you consider that it boasts an expanded software repository. Like its predecessor, it’s also a very portable option.

New Releases

• Proxmox Ve is an Open Source project developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Austria under the auspices of the Internet foundation of Austria (IPA) and it’s released under the GNU General public license 3. It is a solution based on Debian 6 Squeeze at 64 bit, which duly “customized”, allows to create a virtualization environment of type “bare metal” based on OpenVZ and KVM technologies.

• Proxmox Virtual Environment, today announced the release of version 2.3. The version brings new compelling features like KVM live backup technology as well as the integration of the Ceph RBD (RADOS Block Device) as storage plugin.

Gentoo Family

• For once you have tasted Gentoo you will compile the kernel with your eyes turned red monitor-squared, for there you have been and experiencing the raw power of Linux. There are some days I want to go back to the early ages of Linux, some days I want to use top notch packets and bleeding-edge software, but today I will debug — for this is Gentoo Bugday !

Red Hat Family

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I just wanted to post a quick blog entry thanking everyone who joined the first day of our inaugural online Ubuntu Developer Summit today. Overall we didn’t see many glitches in our plan of how to run the event, and we also gathered some fantastic feedback for things we can improve and extend upon next time.

• Not too long ago, Mark communicated the vision for Ubuntu and Unity for 2013 as “[...] Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile – bringing Ubuntu to phones and tablets [...]” and my team is responsible for taking Unity to these hardware platforms.

• What you should expect to see during this year is an overhaul of Unity in order to power a wide variety of display sizes (think phone to tablet to desktop to TV to…), input methods (touch screens & on screen keyboards, traditional keyboards & pointer devices, voice, and whatever else Tony Stark makes us think of [*]), CPUs & GPUs, external peripherals and everything else we expect from a modern OS.

• Looking closer at the problem ambitious goal, we had to take a few interesting decisions how we possibly would get to where we want to be.

• Canonical’s decision to develop Mir, their own display server not derived from X11 or Wayland, hit many as a big surprise today. Canonical previously committed to Wayland in a future Ubuntu release but now it turns out that for months they have secretly been rolling their own solution behind closed doors.

• It will be interesting to see how the Mir situation plays out on Ubuntu, but already Canonical has once again disgruntled upstream open-source developers. Aside from end-users being surprised by this decision to no longer pursue Wayland, the X.Org and Wayland developers themselves were taken for a ride.

• Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland/Weston, has posted to his Google+ page about the Canonical Mir announcement.

• After Canonical announced they are building their own display manager to replace X and to squash the Ubuntu dreams of Wayland fans, they also announced Unity Next, a new session-level shell implementation build on Qt and QML.

• When Unity was first introduced back in 2010, people didn’t like it. It caused an uproar and a lot of users were not ready to adopt a new way of navigating the operating system.

• In addition to X.Org and Wayland developers criticizing Canonical on Google+ about the Mir display server, there was a colorful discussion about this new open-source project on the Wayland IRC channel.

• Shared via this forum post is a copy of the #Wayland IRC channel that took place with exchanges was Chris Halse Rogers “RAOF”, he’s the only Canonical employee that participated in the discussion, who works on X for Wayland and is one of the Mir Canonical developers. Participating in the IRC exchange on the Wayland side were Kristian Høgsberg “krh”, David Airlie “airlied”, Daniel Stone “daniels”, and other Wayland stakeholders.

• Chris Halse Rogers, the Canonical employee, was quick to joke around that “It’s [Canonical's] turn to pull a systemd!” He admitted that he knew internally about Mir and that’s his reason for his “lack of work on the wayland system compositor branches.”

• Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

• Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.

• The Ubuntu Touch operating system, which is scheduled for October release on a range of smartphones and tablets, will struggle to find a niche in a crowded mobile marketplace.

• The Ubuntu phone represents a new ecosystem for mobile devices, but the company behind it says that it won’t be primarily focused on Africa when it launches.

• Canonical, founded by billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, plans to launch the device to the developed markets of the US and Europe first.

• The news yesterday that an Australian company called Intermatrix has begun offering pre-orders of the first dedicated Ubuntu tablet has already made waves in gadget circles – but many raised questions about the device’s legitimacy.

• In November 2010 Canonical committed to using Wayland in the post x11 world. Mark Shuttleworth had said, “There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.”

• Despite that public support for Wayland Canonical secretly started developing a display manager without communicating it to Wayland developers. It was a U-turn from that commitment as the company is now ‘chasing an alternative’. Canonical has announced that they are working on Mir, it’s own display manager which competes with Wayland instead of contributing to it and making it better.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Ubuntu, Firefox, Tizen, Sailfish, WebOS, Nokia Series 40, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone want a piece of the pie, but it won’t be a cakewalk

Ballnux

• Like the home of the US government’s gold reserves, Samsung’s KNOX project is all about keeping intruders out. Samsung’s version, however, will not protect precious metals, but business data in mobile device storage. KNOX, which was unveiled today, is based on SE Android, the Android version of SELinux that was originally developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

• These screenshots mainly confirm that Samsung’s next generation Galaxy S will indeed have the much hyped Smart Scroll and Smart Pause features. The screenshots also confirm that the Galaxy S IV will feature a Full HD 1080p panel. It also looks like that Samsung is keeping some UI elements from the Galaxy S III but we are looking forward to see Samsung’s upcoming Nature UX 2.0.

• Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that it plans to introduce a 5.9-inch handset in the latter half of the year to solidify its leading position in the rapidly-growing “phablet” market.

• ”Samsung is working on introducing a new phablet using a 5.9-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen,’’ an official told The Korea Times on condition of anonymity.

Android

• Owners of Verizon’s 4G LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset may soon receive an update to the latest version of Android, weeks after other Galaxy Nexus devices received it and fully six months after the Verizon model got its last official update.

• Twitter user @WinDroidGuy was the first to spot the update package on Monday, which so far is only available as a downloadable Zip file that must be flashed to the device by hand.

• The next development version of the CyanogenMod’s Jelly Bean spin has been released, and supports many new phones along with the Nexus family

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• An Ubuntu-powered tablet is not something that folks would camp out for, but this does not mean we should not pay closer attention to such a tablet. The Intermatrix U7 is an Ubuntu tablet which has been touted to be the “first of its kind in the world”, hailing from Australian manufacturer Intermatrix. Just what kind of hardware does the Intermatrix U7 pack underneath the hood? For starters, it is said to come with a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex A9 CPU, coupled with a quad-core Vivante GC1000+ GPU, and accompanied by 1GB RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a 7″ IPS capacitive touchscreen display as well as cameras in front and at the back.

Free Software/Open Source

• After almost three decades of development, open source software has firmly crossed over into mainstream use. Companies understand the unique value derived from software developed through open communities and are welcoming its use in mission critical settings throughout the enterprise.

• Companies that adopt open source are in a prime position to contribute back to the open source communities on which they depend. For example, most of the Linux kernel is developed and maintained by employees from companies like IBM and RedHat. However, corporate culture in many companies (and particularly in small businesses) tends to lean strictly toward consumption of open source and away from contribution. For example, in a recent survey of the Liferay community we discovered almost 75% of companies that responded do not reward or encourage open source contribution.

• What is known as ZIP to most of us, is actually the DEFLATE algorithm, and Google has made it slightly better.

• The search giant announced Zopli today, which is a new compression algorithm that is compatible with existing DEFLATE decoders, and produces slightly smaller files at the cost of increased CPU load during compression.

• Twitter has open sourced a Java library for its Streaming API. The Hosebird Client (hbc) supports OAuth and automatic reconnections with appropriate wait periods and Twitter says it has been “battle-tested in production” by its internal teams.

Web Browsers

• I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine. But perhaps I’m in the minority among geeks on this topic.

• The anxiety about the possibility of a “WebKit monoculture” is based on past events that many of us remember all too well. Someday, starry-eyed young web developers may ask us, “You fought in the Web Standards Wars?” (Yes, I was once a Zeldi Knight, the same as your father.) In the end, we won.

SaaS/Big Data

• Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, “The Cloud.” When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, “let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud.”

• Then, finally, the concept started to solidify into offering specific services or entire software applications as a commodity removed from the server infrastructure. Honestly, I think that was the intent from the beginning, but it took several years before anyone really implemented anything useful in, “the cloud.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Education

• When I think back, I can’t remember my first involvement in the Koha community. I remember talking to Chris Cormack on Instant Messenger nearly everyday before ever really communicating with the community has a whole. I remember trying to find a job working with Koha when it was time for me to move on from my first job, but I still don’t remember really being involved in the community. I read a great post by Siobhan Mckeown about participating in the WordPress community and I highly recommend reading it, but I thought maybe I should do a Koha variation for those who want to get involved.

BSD

• PC-BSD, the popular desktop FreeBSD-based operating system that’s rather friendly towards conventional end-users, has now become a rolling release platform.

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• You see, Pete is not only motivated by what open source and open thinking can do to change our world, he is moved by it. He tell us that his passions change every few years, but always revolve around open source.

• Right now, he’s working on an open source project called: Smarter Safer Better, a study and research (what he calls, neuro-hacking) on trust. Read more about his work on the subject: What They Don’t Teach You in “Thinking Like the Enemy” Classes and Mind Control.

• In addition to Norton’s revelation that the prosecution seemed surprised when she first mentioned the Guerilla Manifesto, that seems to be another significant revelation implicitly included in her article. She’s not the source of whatever Googlegroup conversations the government got. At least according to the government, someone else turned this material over willingly.

• Hacker Aaron Swartz is dead. It is reported that he hung himself.

• I’m having some real trouble with the way this story is being spread. Very early on, accusatory fingers got pointed in two directions:

• (1) Swartz allegedly “wrestled with depression”, a vague suggestion that he was killed by some impersonal (but psychologically devastating) illness.

• (2) Swartz was driven to suicide by a mean, self-promoting prosecutor and her accomplices in the administration of MIT.

• In either event we’re encouraged to regard his death as a kind of martyrdom for some vaguely specified “information wants to be free” agenda. (This may or may not be how he himself thought of dying; it doesn’t matter to my point.)

• I hate this popular telling of the story because is it completely ignores the middle aged male svengalis who brought the pretty 13 year old boy to the dance of tech industry celebrity, only to turn their back on him, defame him, and even drive him out of a job as soon as the blush was off the rose.

• Going down his Wikipedia page and adding some notes of my own:

• At the very crest of the dot-com boom there is Philip Greenspun, emerging millionaire. The company he founded was building “community backed” web sites for clients, just before the big crash. That company, ArsDigita, spun off a publicity generating competition with cash money prizes encouraging teenagers to crank out their own “community backed” web sites.

Programming

• The developers of Eclipse Orion have announced that version 2.0 of the web-technology-based editor and development platform has been released. Eclipse Orion 2.0 focused on making the editor technology easier to consume by other projects; library dependencies have been removed, the process for embedding the Orion editor has been simplified, and the Orion Shell has been enhanced.

Standards/Consortia

• So, to summarize: Google forces others to use open standards which they do not support themselves.

Leftovers

Security

• It’s only March, but 2013 has not been a good year so far for Oracle Java security. On the negative side, Java has been repeatedly shamed and blamed for being at the root cause of big name exploits. On the positive side, Oracle is continuing to swim upstream issuing fixes as rapidly as it can.

• Late Monday, Oracle’s upstream swim continued with its fifth major update to Java this year for security fixes. Java 7 Update 15 provides two fixes for vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild today. Both vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without user authentication, and both carry the highest possible CVSS (Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System) rating of 10.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• If you’ve checked out the news these past few (or many) months, you’ve probably noticed some news about drones. Drones used by the CIA to vaporize suspected terrorists. Drones used by the United States military. Drones that deliver food. Drones used by cops. Drones possibly violating the US Constitution. Drones protecting wildlife. Drones in pop culture. Maybe this has left you with some burning questions about these increasingly prominent flying robots. Here’s an easy-to-read, nonwonky guide to them—we’ll call it Drones for Dummies.

• I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.

• Seven Lib Dem rebelled to support public interest test amendment

• Ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw also backed the legislation

• Chakrabarti: ‘History teaches that politicians abandon ancient legal principles at their peril’

• Hacking Team’s software was allegedly used by repressive regimes to track down citizens for torture. We ask their lawyer Eric Rabe to explain

• The US government has the right to use military force on American citizens, even at home – but only in “extraordinary circumstances,” the attorney general has stated in a letter to Senator Rand Paul.

• Paul had threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s pick for CIA director, “until [Obama] answers the question of whether or not the President can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on US soil.”https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/309174502129029120

• General David Petraeus and ‘dirty wars’ veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse

Cablegate

• In a cable dated April 3, 2006, Mexican cardinal Juan Sandoval appears worried about left winged leaders in Latin America, and asks for Bush’s “help”.

• Over two years ago, in January of 2011, Amnesty USA told me they were “investigating” if Bradley Manning qualified as a “Prisoner of Conscience”. They told me they weren’t sure about his motivations and they’d have to look at his employment contract. I was then dismayed to see that the LA Times editorial board, hardly a revolutionary group, came out with a strong denunciation of Manning’s barbaric pre-trial detention before Amnesty had made any public statement in his defence.

• I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.

• Julian Assange has confirmed that WikiLeaks still holds classified United States government documents that it is yet to publish. However the transparency website will not release this material during the court martial of its source, US Army private Bradley Manning.

• New Delhi: Whistleblower website WikiLeaks on Monday claimed to have in possession ‘millions’ of Stratfor mails that establish its links with Dow Chemicals, one of the prime accused in the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. Stratfor is a US-based intelligence firm. WikiLeaks alleged that it had proof that Stratfor monitored and analysed online activities of the Bhopal activists, reportedly on Dow’s asking.

• Please consider donating to my out of pocket expenses covering United States v. Private First Class Bradley Manning.

• We discuss Private Bradley Manning’s motives for leaking thousands of classified US documents.

• It’s the first anniversary of the day Jeremy Hammond was arrested for the last time. Since his March 5, 2012 arrest, he’s been in Federal custody, and currently resides in “The Hole”—solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The State Department’s recent conclusion that the Keystone XL pipeline “is unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the rate of Canada’s oil sands development was based on analysis provided by two consulting firms with ties to oil and pipeline companies that could benefit from the proposed project.

• That’s the question Ecojustice hoped to help answer when we undertook our latest research. What we uncovered was unsettling, to say the least. Our research showed that toxic emissions from oilsands facilities in Northern Alberta are polluting the nearby Athabasca River, contaminating a waterway that’s home to more than half of the province’s fish species.

• The Athabasca River is Alberta’s longest and only major free-flowing river, and it holds ecological, cultural and commercial significance for the people that live along its shores. It is also a vital life source for many wildlife species.

Finance

• Bill Moyers explores how America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered.

• Bitcoin’s value is at an all-time high again. Following the hype peak and crash in 2011, many seemed to have thought it was just another dotcom fluke. But bitcoin was much more than that, and it has returned with a vengeance – its market cap is now twice what it was in the 2011 peak, and it is nowhere near its potential, which is four orders of magnitude above today’s value.

• As sequester cuts start to bite a little harder, the Fix the Debt gang is pushing for a “grand bargain,” deep cuts to earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare in exchange for some vague promises about “tax reform.”

• They may have a powerful ally in the White House. Rather than barnstorming the country demanding that Congress cancel the sequester (Representative John Conyers, Jr. wrote the one sentence bill to do this) and address our jobs deficit (now topping 9 million), President Obama seems ready to make a deal on the deficit, which is already in a steep decline.

• The same idea has been developed systematically in a number of bestsellers, from Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. There is also a more down-to-earth version that one often hears in the media, especially those of non-European countries: crisis, what crisis? Look at the so-called Bric countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, or at Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states – they are all progressing. The losers are western Europe and, up to a point, the US, so we are not dealing with a global crisis, but simply with the shift of progress away from the west. Is a potent symbol of this shift not the fact that, recently, many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonisers?

• This week, BitCoin (BTC), the virtual cryptocurrency that is not supported by any national bank or government, reached an all-time trading record, selling at $33.22 for a single BTC.

• Kim Dotcom’s cloud hosting website Mega has recently started accepting BitCoins as a form of payment, following the example set by WordPress, Reddit and countless other online businesses. But how do you begin working with BitCoins?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The BBC just said that Venezuela is a dictatorship, and the election will be close between left and right. They missed the irony. The incongruity and imbalance of the Chavez demonisation is ridiculous. Sky News did a five minute piece in which the evidence of him being evil and demented was that he called George Bush a devil and declared the age of imperialism over; he did however reduce poverty and improve housing, they added. I am not sure they left their audience with the same certainty as their presenters that he was a bad thing.

• …accusing him of “proposing destabilizing plans”

• Documents purporting to show extensive links between MI6 and the British media during the Cold War have been authenticated, a BBC documentary is to claim. The documents, which were passed to a state-controlled newspaper in the Soviet Union and published towards the end of the 1960s, listed Fleet Street publications and the journalist or editor that MI6 had as its contact.

Censorship

• We just recently wrote about the RIAA bitching about how Google wasn’t living up to its promise to “downrank” so-called “pirate” sites. The issue was that the RIAA could still find sites that it didn’t like ranked relatively highly in the index. Well, the folks at TorrentFreak have noticed that, at least in the UK, if you do a search for “pirate bay,” you no longer get the actual TPB website as one of the top 100 results. Of course, you do get a variety of proxies, instead, and perhaps that makes sense, given the decision last year by a court that ISPs must block access to TPB. Perhaps Google is just reflecting, accurately, that clicking directly to TPB will fail.

Privacy

• BAE Systems has won a $127 million, multiyear contract from the National Security Agency to furnish infrastructure and software development support to the agency’s High Performance Computing Infrastructure Group, the company said March 6. Through the agreement, BAE Systems will furnish architecture, installation and administration for a networking environment that supports multiple enclaves and high-speed data center access, the company said.

• A newly established government privacy oversight board said Tuesday that it has begun investigating the National Counterterrorism Center’s ability to scrutinize massive amount of information about innocent Americans.

Civil Rights

• THE head of the Crime and Misconduct Commission says an “administrative error” is to blame for thousands of sensitive files relating to the Fitzgerald inquiry becoming publicly accessible.

• The error gave the public access to sensitive files at the State Archives about murder suspects, secret informants, undercover agents, drug operations and police corruption.

DRM

• The legality of unlocking one’s cell phone to run on any network has flipped back and forth in the past several years. It was deemed illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—then it was made legal by the Library of Congress in an exception to the DMCA passed in 2006. The Library chose not to renew the exemption in 2012, however, and it expired in January of this year. That inspired a petition to the White House, which a few weeks ago passed the 100,000 signature mark. The White House then promised to respond.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• David Mason (@dcm) and Heather LaGarde (@heatherlagarde) were interested in expressing open source in other ways and wanted to help spread mobile and open technologies across developing worlds at IntraHealth. They combined these two goals by remixing a song.

• The Pirate Bay (TPB) has revealed that the claim that it had been offered “virtual asylum” in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by its leader, Kim Jong-un, was a hoax.

• The world’s most popular peer-to-peer sharing resource revealed that the announcement, carried by a number of websites, was false, and made fun of the gullible readers who would think it would partner “with the most hated dictatorship in the world”.

• Missed this when it first came out, but Bloomberg ran a fantastic report at the beginning of February, highlighting how piracy and fraud were key components to helping America catapult into the industrial revolution. In fact, there are reasonable arguments to be made that if the US was not a “pirate” nation, it would not have had the kind of success that it has had as the industrial world leader. We’ve discussed some of this in the past, and have highlighted how Eric Schiff’s research showed how other countries (the Netherlands and Switzerland) industrialized by explicitly rejecting patents. The US didn’t go that far, but it did involve quite frequent copying of the efforts of others and then improving on them, without fear of repercussions.

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