● 03.09.13

● Links 9/3/2013: Ubuntu Backlash, FSF Event Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• TrueAbility, a company that tests the technical abilities of job candidates through hands-on online testing, is a finalist in the innovative web category for the fifth annual SXSW Accelerator competition taking place next week in Austin. The San Antonio-based startup, which is part of the 2013 TechStars Cloud program, beat out more than 500 companies to secure one of the finalist spots in the SXSW accelerator.

Desktop

• Their earliest numbers are March 2003 – Linux 2.2%, Mac 1.8%, Windows all the rest. By the time the first Ubuntu release was just about to show up, September 2004, Linux was up to 3.1%, with growth over that 18 month period smooth: contrary to popular belief, Linux use was growing at a constant rate prior to Ubuntu’s emergence, according to these numbers. At that time, Mandrake was the most popular Linux distribution for ‘regular desktop use’, occupying the spot Ubuntu occupies now.

• After the emergence of Ubuntu, the growth rate actually appears to decline quite a lot, from 2005 through 2008. The number at the end of 2004 is still 3.1%; by the end of 2007 it has reached only 3.3%. Growth picks up again a bit over 2008, 2009 and 2010: by the end of 2010, Linux use has hit 5.0%. Linux usage finally peaks at 5.3% in the middle of 2011.

• Just one month ago, the Chromebook Pixel was little more than a poorly sourced rumor. (And personally, while I didn’t quite dismiss it out of hand I came pretty close.) Google was releasing a high-end Chromebook with a touchscreen? And that touchscreen would boast a better pixel density than either of the Retina MacBook Pros? The rumor definitely didn’t fit in with the latest (and by all accounts, most successful) wave of Chromebooks, which have turned heads not least because they’re cheaper than any Chromebooks have been so far.

Server

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The branch of the GTK+ tool-kit being used for introducing support for client side decorations is being prepped for review and ultimately being merged to mainline.

• While there’s already the Wayland back-end within GTK3, it isn’t 100% feature complete and ready to be used by all. Among the missing functionality has been support for handling client side decorations, as used by the Weston compositor, rather than server side decorations as is common now for the Linux desktop.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• One of the great new things about Drupal 7 is that it’s now easier to customize your site content. In Drupal 6, you typically had to use the CCK (Content Construction Kit) module for fine-grained control in customizing content, but that has been folded into core for Drupal 7. Drupal 7 is now a true content management framework (CMF).

Games

• It’s long been the tradition in Humble Bundle for Linux buyers to outspend other platforms per payment, but this time Linux users have won another category; total payments by platform. How on the heels of Linux encroaching Apple’s territory in Steam usage, this is just phenomenal. But what does it mean?

• Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is probably sitting in a room right now looking over the various Linux titles available on Steam and, in his best Mr. Burns voice, saying “Excellent” with his fingers clasped together. With the introduction of Counter Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) to Valve’s Linux catalog, the number of Linux games available on Steam now sits at exactly 80 titles, Valve announced in a blog post.

• Nordic Games has announced today that Painkiller Hell and Damnation is being ported to Linux. This popular successor to the Painkiller first person shooter is powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3.

• Last year saw the release of the first Unreal Engine 3 game with a native Linux client. UE3 has been around for years but the Linux port of Unreal Tournament 3 that was done by Ryan Gordon was never released. Finally in 2012 we saw the first Unreal Engine 3 title running on Linux.

• InXile has managed to raise over $2.1 million dollars in just a few short days for its spiritual sequel to the hit RPG Planescape: Torment. Initially the company was looking to raise $900,000, but that number was surpassed in the first six hours of the crowd funding campaign. Torment: Tides of Numenera is a single-player role-playing game based on designer and writer Monte Cook’s new tabletop role-playing game, Numenera. The game will be distributed DRM-free for Windows (PC), Mac, and Linux and will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

• A small, unassuming patch was quietly released for Team Fortress 2 earlier today. The new fix has not only added a few crafting recipes and bug fixes, it also has improved performance on Linux systems.

• A link popped up on reddit here a while ago to point out the developer was looking into adding the HIB build of the game to Steam.

• Released during CeBIT this week was a special edition Kanotix 2013 release, which incorporates auto-detection of the binary NVIDIA/AMD graphics drivers and it also pre-installs Valve’s Steam Linux client.

• “Kano”, the developer behind the long-standing Debian derivative, announced the release in our forums. The binary driver auto-detection is used for the NVIDIA GeForce 9 series and later and the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, albeit users can still use the open-source Mesa stack too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Mark Shuttleworth surprised the KDE community yesterday when he said, “I’ve absolutely no doubt that Kwin will work just fine on top of Mir. And I’m pretty confident Mir will be on a lot more devices than Wayland.” It was surprising because the KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin had already made it clear, after Wayland controversy, that he won’t support Mir and veto any attempt to do so. It seems like Shuttleworth made that statement without consulting or talking to the KDE developers.

• The Qt developers at Digia have announced that they will be previewing the iOS port of Qt in Qt 5.1. The plan is to support Qt on iOS in Qt 5.2 which is due in late 2013; however, that plan is subject to change depending on resources and app store restrictions. So far the developers have a build process that works in conjunction with Xcode and working support for widgets, graphics view, Qt Quick 1, OpenGL, Touch events and orientation events.

• The KDE e.V. report for the fourth quarter of 2012 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported during that period, including reports of various sprints, conferences and projects.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Dubbed Trans-Siberia Express, the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Documents 3.8 package, the main document viewer of the GNOME desktop environment, has been released a few days ago, March 4, for testing.

• GNOME 3 is making major progress with each and every release. Six months ago, when 3.6 was close to release, I wrote about how excited I was about the improvements that were on their way. That release was a big step up from the previous version in terms of user experience. Now we’re on the cusp of GNOME 3.8, and I find myself in exactly the same position. Testing GNOME 3.8, it is a huge improvement on 3.6. It’s more effective, satisfying and polished. Basic operations like selecting a window or launching an application have seen major improvements and the overall experience feels like yet another upgrade.

• The subject says it all. Since Gnome3 was released, or even in the works, all I’ve read about it is negative. I assume there must be posts that compliment it too, but forever reason, I’ve only run into what is now termed “Gnome bashing”. I’m not going analyse why people don’t like the new design; neither am I going to summarize why people should like it; I’m going to write down why it works for me.

Distributions

• Yesterday, Mechatotoro gave me a very surprising news: Pardus-Anka, the fork of the Turkish distro named Pardus, is gone.

• That news was shocking! How come the Phoenix Pardus (“anka” means “phoenix”) died? And so soon?

• Well, actually, what happened (as explained in Spanish here) was that Anka community decided to drop the name “Pardus” altogether to follow a totally independent path. Since they kept PiSi, the packaging system that made Pardus unique, they adopted PiSi as their distro’s new name (and identity). in other words, Pardus-anka died to give birth to PiSi LinuX!

• Portable Linux computing has received an upgrade as the newest Porteus is released, now with an even lighter desktop environment

New Releases

• Kanotix is a Debian-based desktop distribution originally designed to support a wider selection of hardware and provider newer packages than Debian. Started in 2003, Kanotix has had a rocky history with at least two declared deaths and rebirths. Now today a new release was announced with Steam installed by default.

• Kanotix 2013 ships with Linux 3.8.2, Xorg X Server 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, Grub 2, KDE 4.8.4, and NVIDIA 313.18. Some of the applications include LibreOffice 4.0, Amarok 2.7.0, VLC 2.0.3, GIMP 2.8.2, and Iceweasel 19.

• As a little surprise there is a new Kanotix ISO during CeBIT time (I am there as visitor) with some special features not found in normal releases. The main difference is that a newer libc6 2.17 is used (from Debian Experimental) which has the effect that self-compiled binaries can not be shared with Debian Wheezy users. If that does not affect you you can enjoy the new features…

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Lots been going on within the infra team lately. We recently got a couple of brand new servers, courtesy Mr. Leonid Reiman, and have been busy at work configuring them in order to get them ready to host the main website and all associated webservices. Thanks to all infra team members, we are in a very good position to finally migrate the existing website from the old servers, gracefully donated by Alessandro Sironi, to these new ones. The migration should be over by this weekend, with minimal downtime.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• Following recent news that Oracle would no longer maintain Java 6, Red Hat announced its commitment to sustaining the open source OpenJDK 6 project. It’s stepping into the project leader role vacated by Oracle, and with the help of the OpenJDK community — including newly arrived IBM, as well as the existing community members — it hopes to be able to keep the widely used code maintained.

• Real Time Linux, that is Linux with a deterministic timing component for an action to occur, is big deal for a lot of industries (military among them). Red Hat first announced it’s production grade Real Time Linux platform, dubbed MRG back in 2007. Back then, Real Time enhancement were not part of the mainline Linux kernel, but that has changed over the years.

• Red Hat has instituted changes at platform-as-a-service OpenShift that put outside contributors on more equal footing with Red Hat employees.

• The Linux kingpin and cloud-wannabe announced a set of features designed to increase community participation in its PaaS in a blog post by the OpenShift Team on Thursday.

• The most significant change is moving to a pure GitHub pull request format for code contributions, so internal Red Hat developers will have to submit changes in the same way as community participants.

• Red Hat has announced that it is assuming the leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, just days after Oracle issued what it said would be the final patch for version 6 of its commercial Java SE 6 Development Kit.

• Oracle posted JDK 6 Update 43 on Monday as an emergency patch for the latest in a series of severe vulnerabilities that have plagued the Java browser plugin. But although Oracle is already investigating other flaws, it said that this would be the last set of public fixes for Java SE 6.

• “Oracle recommends that users migrate to JDK 7 in order to continue receiving public updates and security enhancements,” the database giant said in the update’s formal release notes.

• As Oracle brings to an end public updates of Java 6, Red Hat says it has assumed leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community. OpenJDK is the open source implementation of the Java specification and Red Hat has been active within the community, especially since 2007 when it came to an agreement with Sun Microsystems to collaborate around the then newly open sourced Java. Oracle is now the owner of Java and posted Java 6 Update 43 on Monday, as what it says is the last public update of Java 6. The company is now encouraging users to migrate to Java 7 or buy support for Java 6. The end of public updates for Java 6 also means the end of Oracle security updates for OpenJDK 6.

• Red Hat has announced that it is reorienting the OpenShift Origin project to make it transparent to developers wanting to contribute to it. OpenShift Origin, released as open source in May 2012, is the community edition of Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), OpenShift Online and OpenShift Enterprise. Although the Origin project is looking to emulate Red Hat’s work with the Fedora Linux community, it hasn’t been widely perceived as a community project in the same way. Red Hat is therefore making a number of changes that it hopes will boost the Origin project’s open source community vitality.

Fedora

Debian Family

• Xda-developers forum member exception13 has been working to port Debian Linux to run on the Note for a few months. While some features (including GPS and the camera) aren’t fully functional yet, the tablet does support WiFi, Bluetooth, sound, and digital pen input when running Debian.

• Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, that is built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy, with minimal hardware requirements, is now at version 2.1.32 Alpha.

• I had a little extra time today, so I did a ritual backup of my standard Arch Linux framebuffer system, and installed the full Gnome suite to the Solo.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu isn’t for “leets” – or “elite” users – but for mainstream users, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical.

• Reacting to community criticism over rolling releases and wider moves to extend the open-source OS to mobile devices and mainstream users, Shuttleworth took aim at so-called “leets”, saying the attitude that Linux OSes should be difficult to use is “dumb”.

• Ubuntu, the user-friendly Linux distro, has seen a multitude of changes and transformations over the last few months. It has sprouted wings and became a fully functional multi-platform operating system. With these changes Canonical has taken a lot of flak and now founder Mark Shuttleworth is speaking out about how he feels.

• Ubuntu founder has shot-down the uncertainty around to-roll-or-not-to-roll for Ubuntu by stating that he is not convinced. In a blog post, after evaluating all the possibilities Mark concluded that “rolling releases are not real releases.”

• Will Ubuntu switch to a rolling release ? This is the big question that is playing in the minds of Ubuntu users and developers alike.

• A rolling release model refers to a continually developing software system. In a rolling release, the user will never have to install a new version of the software. Rather, the updates to the software and the system will be pushed to the user as and when the changes are made.

• As hard as it may be to believe, there are times when even I am speechless.

• I keep the goings-on of Canonical and the Ubuntu community at an arm’s length — the real reason is to keep my blood pressure down. But actually, the gravity with which Canonical pulls Ubuntu further from its original FOSS orbit is nothing short of tragic, and it’s something that weighs heavily on any FOSS advocate.

• I have been reading the recent posts on Ubuntu Planet with mixed feelings of disappointment but mostly with excitement, and always with keen interest in searching for a pattern that would assist us in understanding change.

• Rather than analyse or critique individual posts, I would like to present a visual model of what I think just happened, as an engineer(1) and a manager.

• Responding to ongoing discussions and speculation about the future for Ubuntu’s release cadence, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth published a blog post today, detailing his thoughts on the issue. Shuttleworth, who holds the position of “Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life” of the Ubuntu project, has in the past publicly stated his opinion on cadence and the importance of regular releases for the Ubuntu project. In his latest post, Shuttleworth is of the opinion that “rolling releases are not real releases” and are therefore not the right method for Ubuntu to adopt, but that he is considering accelerating Ubuntu’s release cycle.

• Canonical and I had a long, wonderful relationship. They brought a lot of wonderfully smart and committed individuals in, paid them great, and let them build really awesome free software. We all loved Canonical back then. They were the best sugar daddy anyone could want.

• I loved them so much I did a ton of boring work, even! I triaged over 1000 bugs! For free! Granted, I did most of it when I was in grad school with nothing better to do (I was procrastinating when writing papers). But, it was great because I loved the community that was around me and supporting me. Brian Murray was especially awesome. Along with persia and many others I can’t remember right now. Pete, the people who were active back in 2007 were so amazingly helpful, caring, and committed. We all worked together so well because we all saw each other as equals.

• I am concerned with the current status of Ubuntu, not because of the tension on the community or the new software being put out. I am concerned because I feel my time and contributions might go to waste and fall on deaf ears. As leader of a LoCo, how do I know if the work I am putting in is even going to matter in two months when 13.04 comes out? Is my work still relevant because it has nothing to do with a cell phone, nothing to do with a display server, and nothing that in any way is a direct profit source for the Canonical.

• So, Mark, let us take a step back and look at what actually happened.

• Kubuntu has always taken pride in being the link between the Ubuntu and KDE communities, and looking out for each’s best interest in order to facilitate the creation of exciting and revolutionary free software products. Jonathan personally has been a great advocate of the Ubuntu way even at times when KDE did not find it appealing; right now appears to be such a time.

• With Ubuntu preparing itself to land on tablets, smart-phones, and other consumer devices, Canonical is beginning to look at ways to support multimedia content protected by Digital Rights Management.

• For Ubuntu to be successful on mainstream consumer electronic devices, it will need to be capable of protecting DRM-protected content. Yesterday during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit was a session on hardware-accelerated video decode and rendering support. This video decode/rendering session was mostly about Ubuntu Touch and providing full hardware support for video playback. Right now Ubuntu Touch is using libhybris through Android Media Player while eventually they want to support GStreamer. Since GStreamer is currently used on the Ubuntu desktop, they want GStreamer on the Android-based Ubuntu Touch.

• At the first day of the inaugural online Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), the developer community discussed several topics regarding the next release of the Linux distribution, Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail”. The discussion attracting the most outside interest was undoubtedly the session titled: “Should Ubuntu adopt a monthly cadence/rolling release?” Ubuntu developers also discussed the new Mir display stack, the planned Ubuntu SDK and several cloud-computing-related topics. Alongside the UDS proceedings, Canonical announced a Mir backend for Mesa, and the developers of Ubuntu’s social media client Gwibber unveiled a new version of the application based on QML and targeted at Ubuntu on mobile devices.

• After trying Ubuntu/Unity 13.04 and GNOME 3.8 and Fedora 19, I have to confess that both those desktops have gone to the next level. Yes, there are complains, but if you choose to look at the big picture..

• The competition to those, are Mac OS X, Windows 8 and Chrome OS, three totally different OSs by the three software – and not only- giants.

• I have been a huge fan, supporter, and promoter of Ubuntu since about 2006. All the things that attracted me initially were: gratis, free/libre, community, just one CD to install. As I used it more I liked the technical merits as well, things such as timely releases, hardware support, server version, application availability, and LTS. I used it at home and work whenever I could. But things were not always perfect. Things popped up here and there that made Canonical’s direction for Ubuntu more important than the community’s. Things such as CLA, proprietary Landscape, Launchpad, bzr, Unity (initial releases; I love it now), Upstart, Amazon-in-Dash, etc. There was a visible Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome in Ubuntu, which was good to some extent but then became overwhelmingly powerful. In an effort to control all the things they cared about, Canonical started deviating from the wider Linux ecosystem.

• Some of the X/Mesa plans for Ubuntu 13.04 and the future of Ubuntu graphics were announced today. Mesa 9.1 is coming but Ubuntu 13.04 won’t be getting X.Org Server 1.14, in part due to Canonical’s focus on Mir.

• Mir wasn’t the exclusive subject of today’s Ubuntu X mailing list message, but rather the status and plans for the X.Org Server and Mesa. Bryce Harrington of Canonical wrote X.org 1.14 and RR / 13.04 (un-)plans.

• The smartphone segment will by the end of the year, or early next year, have three new platforms (Firefox OS, Tizen OS, and Ubuntu Mobile OS) competing with the big names in the business (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone).

• This will undoubtedly be an exciting time to be a smartphone enthusiast, with so many options available. Major manufacturers have already expressed interest in the Firefox and Tizen mobile operating system, and it seems (at least according to our poll results) users are expressing much interest in the third.

• Ubuntu — possibly the most popular distribution of the open source Linux operating system — is striking out on its own. Canonical, the commercial company that oversees Ubuntu, has made a habit of building new Linux components from scratch, moving away from tools built and used by the larger open source community. That’s rubbing many Linux developers and users the wrong way, and now Canonical may have finally alienated these hard-core open sourcers.

• Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult.

• Ubuntu, you’ve changed, yes, but we were never closer to our goal of bringing free software to all of the world! Let’s work together to make this happen!

• Mark Shuttleworth hadn’t written on his blog — where he posts just a few times per year — since last December. That changed this morning though where he’s already written two separate blog posts to come to the defense about Ubuntu rolling releases and saying criticism is misplaced about Canonical not taking care of the Ubuntu community.

• Mark’s first post was about Ubuntu as a rolling release distribution. He says that rolling releases aren’t releases at all so he hasn’t given it much thought over the years as members of the community have written proposals. This year though he approved the Canonical engineering team doing a deep assessment about turning Ubuntu into a rolling release model.

• Canonical is receiving quite a flack from the free software community as they are transforming from community based distro to a company product. Most of the development now happens in-house, in secret behind the closed doors without any inputs from the community that made Ubuntu the success it is today. After pissing on off the veteran Wayland, X, KDE developers, the company has now lost it’s ex-employee and Compiz contributor Sam Spilsbury.

• Sam Spilsbury worked as a Canonical employee between 2010 to 2012 as a software engineer mainly working on Compiz.

Flavours and Variants

• Back in 2010 I was looking for jobs and I´ve always had a hobby interest in computer and found out that some work ads were asking for basic Linux skills.

• Kubuntu may not be the best implementation of KDE but definitely one of the most followed. For me, Kubuntu has been always a judicious mix of KDE and Gnome applications along with a boring default interface. Of course, with a change of wallpaper, KDE widgets and bringing in some KDE themes made it really shiny and attractive. Even Kubuntu 12.10 had a real boring and plain-vanilla default interface.

• Linux Mint is one of the most important open source projects which cater to the needs of users by proving what users want. Linux Mint has been around for a while but it rose in popularity when Unity happened and Canonical started to drift away from the core Linux and open source communities and began doing their own things secretly, behind the closed doors. What Canonical is doing is fine for protecting a company’s interests but many see it as unhealthy for open source.

Devices/Embedded

• Karim Yaghmour, founder of OperSys founder and a well-known luminary in the real-time and embedded Linux market, led a panel discussion on this topic at the Android Builders Summit in San Francisco last month.

• “The idea ignited a lively debate among embedded Linux pros with three of the four panelists ultimately siding with Yaghmour,” writes Libby Clark in a post at Linux.com. “What seemed to be their litmus test? If Android can conceivably be used in ‘classic’ embedded projects, it is embedded Linux.”

Phones

• Ubuntu wants to make a home for itself on your smartphone and tablet. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu open-source operating system, is working on a mobile version called Ubuntu Touch that the British company hopes will hit the market in late 2013. Although the software is still in beta, Canonical has made an early developer preview available for download, giving app makers and potential users a glimpse at what the operating system will offer.

Ballnux

• The first dual display smartphone was presented at the NEC booth that got a lot of traffic and buzz. As illustrated below, Samsung is another smartphone player with designs in this category of smart device and others are working on this as well. On the other hand, there’s no sign of Apple even thinking of such an entry at this point in time. It’s this kind of design diversification in the smartphone sector over time that could hurt future iPhone sales.

Android

• Poking fun at Google’s popular mobile OS, Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller recently tweeted a link to F-Secure’s latest Mobile Threat Report, paired with a ‘Be safe out there’ warning message.

• The F-Secure report mentions that around 96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered in the fourth quarter of 2012 alone. Stats reveal that Android’s share of mobile threats rose to 79 percent in 2012 compared to 66.7 percent in 2011, while iOS’ share was just 0.7 percent.

• Chinese telecom giant Huawei is looking to challenge Apple and Samsung in consumer products by leveraging its dominance in network infrastructure.

• Remember Sony announced the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean upgrade schedule for Xperia smartphones back in December? It mentioned in a blog post that Sony Xperia P, Sony Xperia J, Sony Xperia go will receive the Android 4.1 upgrade “from the end of March”, followed by Sony Xperia S, Sony Xperia SL, Sony Xperia ion and Sony acro S, which “will follow in the subsequent weeks”.

• So the news of Sony Xperia J getting Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean upgrade should come as a pleasant surprise for many users as the company delivers the roll-out ahead of schedule.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Takeaway: Patrick Gray takes a look at the upcoming Ubuntu tablet and explains why he’ll wait for their second generation device.

• A couple months ago, I wrote about the potential for open source tablets, with an adapted version of Linux powering some sort of generic tablet hardware. At that time, there was some movement toward creating a tablet-optimized version of Linux, but the efforts were scattershot at best, with no major Linux player throwing their hat into the tablet ring. That changed recently when Ubuntu announced a tablet-centric version of its eponymous Linux distribution targeted toward tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

• Rackspace Hosting has announced a new version of its free and open source Private Cloud Software, powered by OpenStack and supported by its own Fanatical Support services.

• Key among the new functionality in the latest release is OpenCenter, a single interface for deploying, configuring and operating clouds at scale in an enterprise datacenter.

• Rock the Vote needed a way to manage the fast growth of the data handled by its Web-based voter registration application. The organization turned to GlusterFS replicated volumes to allow for filesystem size upgrades on its virtualized hosting infrastructure without incurring downtime.

• Making robots that are able to localize, track and separate multiple sound sources, even in noisy places, is essential for their deployment in our everyday environments. This could for example allow them to process human speech, even in crowded places, or identify noises of interest and where they came from. Unlike vision however, there are few software and hardware tools that can easily be integrated to robotic platforms.

• Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, kicked off the last day of ApacheCon with a keynote on Growing Authentic Communities. Despite being early on the final day of a conference, Kanies managed to draw a respectable crowd at ApacheCon eager to hear about techniques for growing a community.

• Platforms are everything these days. They drive users in specific, and well structures ways and can make or break different ways of production. Take for instance the World Wide Web, it’s a platform that allows anarchy and it fundamentally breaks the traditional media’s economic model of charging for content per user. The World Wide Web does this by delivering content not just more cheaply, but more quickly and more succinctly than ever before.

Events

• BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Friday, March 8, 2013 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the line-up for its upcoming LibrePlanet 2013 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Harvard Science Center on March 23-24.

Web Browsers

• Who do you love, a browser that fixes discovered problems in hours or in months? The answer is that you love FLOSS, folks, software that works for you and not some corporation hiding bugs so that salesmen can claim they don’t exist…

• Linux, once again, proved to be far more secure than most other operating systems as Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS shrugged off its attackers at the $3.14-million Pwnium cracking competition.

Chrome

• Google’s latest beta of Chrome for Android, version 26, has added an experimental feature designed to improve the performance of mobile browsing. The new “proxy browsing” feature has to be turned on manually and, when activated, directs mobile users’ connections to HTTP sites through a SPDY connection to a Google-run proxy server. SPDY is Google’s reworking of the HTTP protocol that multiplexes many connections into one, which, combined with other enhancements, gives a faster web experience. SPDY is being used as the basis for the next generation of HTTP, HTTP 2.0.

• RealVNC has come up with VNC Viewer for Google Chrome, which lets users connect to a remote computer and display the desktop within a Google Chrome Web browser window. The software is aimed at ensuring users can simply access their computers wherever they are in the world, according to the company.

• VNC Viewer for Google Chrome contains a range of features including a virtual keyboard that enables users to perform operations such as Ctrl-Alt-Delete, as well as sending other controls that may not be available on the machine running the browser, making it simpler for cross-platform connections.

• It also automatically optimises colour quality and responsiveness giving users the best performance according to their network speed.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack Summit 2013 is set to start April 15 in Portland, Ore. The open source platform seems to be gaining momentum with cloud services providers (CSPs). IBM (NYSE: IBM) has just placed a huge bet on OpenStack. Plus, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have each built their public clouds on the emerging software platform.

• IBM is betting big on OpenStack, deeply rooted in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s ingenuity

Business

Project Releases

• The OISF development team is pleased to announce Suricata 1.3.6. This the last maintenance release of Suricata 1.3 with some important fixes.

• Performance improvements in terms of software rendering as well as fixes for touch devices and hybrid graphics systems are among the major new features of X.org’s just released X Server 1.14. The new X Server also includes modifications that affect the pointer barriers. GNOME 3.8 will use these pointer barriers to establish from what distance and at what speed a user has moved the mouse pointer to the bottom screen edge; if the values are big, GNOME will display the notification panel straight away instead of waiting for a second.

Openness/Sharing

• Crowdsourcing, posing a question, problem, or idea on the internet with the hope of soliciting responses from other web-users, has emerged as a valuable new method of soliciting ideas and solutions in the medical field, according to a case study conducted jointly by researchers at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, London Business School, and web-based innovation company TopCoder. “The beauty of crowdsourcing is that it provides access to people that you would never normally meet,” said Ramy A. Arnaout, an assistant professor of pathology at the Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Arnaout, who co-authored the study, examined the impact of providing cash prizes to software developers and programmers on the web to encourage responses to a computational biological problem.

Open Access/Content

• A company that offered free “alternatives” to three popular college textbooks has rewritten its controversial offerings following a lawsuit by major textbook publishers.

• Boston-based Boundless, which has become a darling of the open educational resources movement seen as threatening traditional textbook publishers, offered versions of textbooks that would normally cost scores if not hundreds of dollars. It pitched what it offered as “textbook replacement,” created by essentially reverse engineering popular textbooks. Boundless attracted considerable attention, including an $8 million round of venture capital funding led by Venrock, an investment group started by the Rockefellers. (Boundless currently generates no revenue, its co-founder and CEO, Ariel Diaz, said Thursday.)

Programming

Leftovers

• I just received an email about Jolidrive, a new offering from Jolicloud, a technology outfit based in Paris, France. As you can tell from the name, Jolicloud has something to do with cloud computing.

• It started life as a provider of Joli OS, a kinda (Linux) distribution for the cloud. I signed up when it was launched just to see what it had to offer, but was not very impressed. I like most or all my computing to be done locally. But that’s another story.

Hardware

• This week Qualcomm‘s CEO Dr. Paul E Jacobs let it be known that with AllJoyn technology and the company’s dedication to open source development, their newly promised Internet of Everything would become a reality. This chat was had during the Mobile World Congress 2013 set of keynotes entitled Vertical Disruption and had Jacobs letting the world know that it wasn’t a disruption he’d be talking about, it was a bit more positive angle on the whole situation. With the mobile universe advancing as it is today, Jacobs let it be known that wireless connectivity was in bloom, and AllJoyn was – and is – at the center of it all.

• iFixit on Thursday published a list of the best and worst tablets based on their respective repairability scores. While no slate scored a perfect 10, the company found that the Dell (DELL) XPS 10 was the easiest tablet to repair thanks to its accessible case, color-coded screws and labeled cables. At the bottom of the list was Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface Pro and Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and iPad mini. The Surface Pro scored a 1 out of 10 and was said to be difficult to open without shearing the display cables, while the iPad scored a 2 out of 10 for its excessive amounts of adhesive. The Surface RT didn’t fare much better and scored a mere 4 out of 10, compared to Android tablets such as the Nexus 7, which scored a 7 out of 10, and the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, which garnered at score of 8 out of 10.

Security

• The White House threatened China and other countries with trade and diplomatic action over corporate espionage as it cataloged more than a dozen cases of cyberattacks and commercial thefts at some of the U.S.’s biggest companies.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Nowhere does Time’s Massimo Calabresi mention one rather inconvenient fact: There is no evidence that Iran is actually pursuing a nuclear weapon. Regular inspections have failed to turn up any evidence of that. Instead, we read things like this: “Iran itself has slowed down its efforts, converting some enriched uranium to a form that can be used only in research, not in weapons.” This is treated as evidence that Iran is heading towards its nuclear weapons more slowly.

• I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness — and oh yes, it was madness — not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

• India on Wednesday expressed its “deep concern” on the security situation in Syria and the continuing spiral of violence in the civil war-torn country that has claimed about 70,000 lives and resulted in one million refugees since 2011. India’s views were conveyed to Bouthaina Shaaban, political and media advisor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is on a visit to India. “We also expressed our concern about the plight of the people of Syria arising out of intense fighting and conflict,” an Indian foreign ministry statement said after talks between Shaaban and Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid and others in New Delhi.

• The recent controversy surrounding the film Zero Dark Thirty only proves the debate surrounding torture isn’t over. There are some who continue to make the false claim that torture worked, and seek to reinstate the practice.

• Two leading figures within the Obama administration now insist that the president of the United States does not have the authority to launch drone strikes on US soil.

• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) received a response from the Obama administration on Thursday afternoon after spending 13 hours demanding answers about the possible use of drones inside of the United States.

• During a briefing Thursday afternoon, White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “The president has not and would not use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil.”

• Mr. Carney also elected to read a statement penned by Attorney General Eric Holder earlier that day that had been sent to Sen. Paul. Mr. Holder’s entire statement, only 43 words, confirmed Mr. Carney’s remark.

• You’d never know from his writings over the past few years, but New York Times pundit David Brooks was a full-throated hawk for the tragic U.S. invasion of Iraq and swallowed all of the Bush administration claims about WMD whole. He attempted to muddy the waters, long ago, after WMD were not found and the “liberation” proved to be a disaster by blaming the post-invasion disaster all on Rumsfeld, perhaps figuring that if he became known as a war critic folks would forget that he’d promoted the conflict from the beginning. Not a chance, in my case. Brooks, meet elephant.

• For over 1000 days, Private Manning has been held in military detention, in Iraq, Kuwait, Quantico, Virginia and Leavenworth, Kansas. Reports from these facilities and the media depicted Manning as unstable, depressed, weak, and worse. While imprisoned, he has endured some of the worst treatment imaginable at the hands of his own government, notably characterized by the UN special rapporteur for torture as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” possibly amounting to torture. Worse yet, this abuse comes in response to actions which Manning believed, and continues to believe, were in the service of both his country and international human rights law. Given all that he has endured, if the characterizations about his mental state were accurate, it would hardly come as a surprise.

• wo senior figures at the Simon Wiesenthal Center have met with Hungarian political leaders to express concern about growing anti-Semitism in the country, including the ongoing failure to bring Hungarian Nazi war criminal László Csatáry to justice.

• An Austrian survey has found that 42 per cent of respondents said that “not everything was bad under Adolf Hitler,” whose Nazi government had annexed Austria 75 years ago.

• The survey also found that 54 per cent of the 502 respondents said a Nazi party would have some success in democratic elections today, and that 61 per cent support the concept of a “strong man” as leader.

• The poll was commissioned by the Der Standard newspaper and reported on by the Austria Press Agency on Friday, a day before publication by the paper.

• Rand Paul filibuster shines light on Democrats’ reluctance to question Barack Obama’s controversial targeted killing policy

• Should a federal judge review the government’s decision to launch a lethal drone attack against a suspected terrorist? A recently released Justice Department white paper on the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen has prompted calls for judicial intervention. While the instinct is right, any review scheme must strike the correct balance between liberty and security.

• Most discussion is focused on creating a new court modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). Congress enacted FISA following revelations that the government had been eavesdropping on Americans’ private communications for decades. FISA created a special court to review requests to conduct electronic surveillance of American citizens for national security purposes.

• Sen. Rand Paul made some dubious warnings about drone strikes on San Francisco cafes in his filibuster last week against the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director. But his larger argument for clearer limits on drones is absolutely right.

• Paul’s battle isn’t with Brennan, who said that as CIA director he wouldn’t have any legal power to authorize domestic drone strikes. Brennan, who has been trying to sort out legal rules for drone warfare, deserved to be confirmed, as he was Thursday. Nor is this battle simply with Attorney General Eric Holder, though he used troubling language in responding to Paul’s queries.

• The first drone strike President Obama ever ordered in Yemen was a deadly disaster, but it illustrated a larger issue with drones — they often create more trouble than they prevent.

• While he was speaking, some of those following along on Twitter wondered if this was the lengthiest discussion of drones that had ever occurred in Congress. Searching the official transcript of Congressional business reveals that it was, by far.

• The Pew Research Center said 56 percent of respondents to a February survey, conducted before Rand’s filibuster, expressed concern about drone strikes on U.S. citizens. Pew said it didn’t consider whether strikes were on U.S. or foreign soil, but found a divided nation from rival polls.

• Nearing the Iraq War’s tenth anniversary, an overriding truth is that few of the key participants – in government, media or think tanks – have faced accountability commensurate with the crime. Indeed, many of these Mideast “experts” are still go-to people for advice.

• One regularly hears much talk in Washington about accountability, but also regularly sees examples of how the concept of accountability gets applied in this town in an inconsistent and warped way. There are the inevitable calls for heads to roll after any salient untoward event, and huzzahs to senior managers who do roll heads in response.

• Quietly and without much notice, the Air Force has reversed its policy of publishing statistics on drone strikes in Afghanistan as the debate about drone warfare hits a fever pitch in Washington. In addition, it has erased previously published drone strike statistics from its website.

• Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks said the department was not involved in the decision to remove the statistics. AFCENT did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

• Who Will Stand Up Against the Military-Oil-Banker Mafia?

• During the Justice Department’s oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder engaged in a lot of clunky tap dancing.

• [...]

• Although would-be dronees would not be in custody, their rights (or lack thereof) would be more extreme than for current terror detainees: death with no due process whatsoever. The government brags that at least 50 home-grown terror plots have been foiled since 9/11. Under the new definition embraced by Holder, here are some of the people who could have been droned: everyone on the flight with “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, once the plane entered American air space; “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, the “Lackawanna Six,” the 11 Virginia “Paintball” network, and those who proved to be “mistakes,” like Brandon Mayfield. I’m trying to picture drones dropping bombs or Hellfire missiles in Chicago, New York, Virginia.

• As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

• Several buildings in a police officers’ club complex in the Egyptian capital were in flames on Saturday, an AFP reporter said.

• According to a senior security official, hardcore football fans known as the Ultras stormed the complex and set fire to the buildings.

• Residents of the affluent island where the club is situated were using garden hoses to try to extinguish the flames. Other buildings in the complex had their windows smashed.

• [...]

• The unrest comes hours after an Egyptian court upheld death sentences for 21 defendants over a deadly football riot in Port Said last year and handed down life sentences to five defendants, with 19 receiving lesser jail terms and another 28 exonerated.

• That means, when Brennan vowed to protect and defend the Constitution, he was swearing on one that did not include the First, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments — or any of the other Amendments now included in our Constitution. The Bill of Rights did not become part of our Constitution until 1791, 4 years after the Constitution that Brennan took his oath on.

Cablegate

• Anyone losing sleep over Bob Woodward’s relationship with the White House can finally rest easy. The éminence grise of access journalism has made his peace with the Obama administration. After a spat with economic adviser Gene Sperling over an op-ed he was writing about the sequester, Woodward received an apologetic e-mail from Sperling, who said “as a friend” he thought Woodward would “regret” his comments. Woodward took to the airwaves, casting it as a veiled threat. But by Sunday, order was restored: Sperling called him a “legend” on ABC’s This Week. “I’m going to invite him over to my house,” Woodward said on Face the Nation, adding magnanimously, “Hopefully, he’ll bring others from the White House, or maybe the president himself.”

• Who designed the WikiLeaks logo? According to this Metahaven interview, a designer named Aśka. She created the WikiLeaks hourglass in 2006, and her story is most interesting.

• With the Wikileaks hoopla a few years ago and the recent leaking of government documents concerning President Obama allegedly targeting American citizens for assassinations, a lot of attention is now being paid to how and where reporters, bloggers, etc receive the information they use to inform their reports, posts and articles. Nowhere has this been more paralyzing than in the current events/news blogging niche.

• An ‘Heir to an Execution’ speaks out for Manning, 60 years after his parents’ death at the hands of the state.

• A week ago today, Pfc. Bradley Manning surprised both detractors and supporters by reading a thirtysomething-page statement articulating the specific Whats, Hows and—most importantly—Whys of his disclosures to the popular media site WikiLeaks. In the week since Manning’s dramatic statement, media coverage of the case has shifted from a trickle to a steady storm as even mainstream outlets such as the Guardian, X and Y now echo the message of the 25-year-old army private’s supporters. With no public record or transcript of court proceedings, it is indeed these grassroots supporters who have kept an important faith, serving as a bridge in between the mainstream media’s rare spikes of coverage and its more frequent lulls.

• Bradley’s 35-page testimony last week detailed his time as an intelligence analyst in Iraq and how he concluded that the American public needed to see the United States’ secret abuses in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He deserves thanks, not jail time.

• Khan took a role on Universal’s $2.5m budget documentary “We Steal Secrets”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest — in just one century.

Finance

• Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy.

• The Bush Tax cuts were an unaffordable bribe, decreasing tax receipts while increasing spending. Meanwhile, representatives of the Clinton and Bush Whitehouse actively blocked regulation of the derivatives markets which were destined to implode, crashing the global economy, on Bush’s watch.

• Shoddy political theater distracts people with vague demons called debt ceiling, fiscal cliff and now, sequester. Party leaders posture for major donors, media boosters and the faithful. They claim to save us from the demons. Meanwhile, backstage they all agree on austerity as the “necessary” response to “our major problem,” namely federal budget “imbalance.” “We” are spending “beyond our means,” accumulating “government debts.” So “we” must raise taxes and cut spending – impose austerity – to regain balance. On January 1, payroll taxes rose (from 4.2 to 6.2 %) for 150 million Americans. Their checks shrank as that regressive tax became more so. Obama’s hyped “tax increase for the rich” was comparatively trivial. It affected only the very few Americans earning over $450,000, raising their top tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. Our leaders hope we forgot the 1950s and 1960s, when the top tax rate was 91 percent. On March 1, the sequester hit, unleashing federal spending cuts.

• When the state government of West Virginia ordered Cisco routers to upgrade their networks in 2010, they did not calculate that dealing with Cisco would lead them to losses in tune to $7.88 million. Apart from the fact that the secondary bid process was legally unauthorized (instead of competitive bid process as required by law), the West Virginia legislative auditor has uncovered that Cisco supplied equipment that are extremely high-end and not at all required for the current state of affairs. Moreover, Cisco sold the state another $6.6 million worth of services like upgraded software licenses and extra security features.

• Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Wall Street executive, is joining Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.) to introduce legislation that would undercut one of the most meaningful elements of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.

• Tonight, millions of people will enjoy a beer. What the vast majority of them probably won’t realize is that the variety of brands they see in the stores come from just two foreign-based multinational companies that control 80 percent of the market here in the U.S.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Beyond doubt, a significant number of Scottish citizens are disturbed at what they perceive as a systemic bias in the BBC against Scottish independence. I have read some sixty internet articles to the same effect in the last 24 hours. There is a citizens internet revolt against the mainstream here.

• It’s possible to debate the Chavez legacy, of course. But in a region that saw a wave of democratic elections usher in leftist governments after Chavez came to power in Venezuela–where Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic all declared periods of national mourning to mark his death–it sure seems odd to suggest there’s not much to be said for his legacy.

Censorship

• Though Google is a U.S. company, its American rights don’t transpose across the pond. A court case will determine whether Google has to comply with EU law, which could have far-reaching consequences for European users.

• THE IT DEPARTMENT at the European Parliament has denied that it is deliberately blocking emails that it does not want its members to see.

• The European Parliament was accused of this by Christian Engström, MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party, who called the news an “absolute disgrace” in a blog post about the discovery. He said that he had been receiving a steady stream of emails about a vote, due on Tuesday, on whether or not the European Parliament will accept a report called “Eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report is contentious because it suggests a ban on all types of pornography in the media.

Privacy

• Appeals court slaps down Obama administration’s claim that customs agents can peruse Americans’ electronic devices for evidence — without having even a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

• After the US Supreme Court upheld the right of the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans’ communications with foreigners without a warrant, the White House seeks to quash a similar lawsuit citing the plaintiff’s inability to provide evidence.

• Can the irascible, voluble and sizable founder of Megaupload.com blow the lid off the National Security Agency’s global spying network? Kim Dotcom sure thinks so. In a series of tweets on Thursday, the sometimes bombastic internet entrepeneur claimed a lawsuit he is pursuing against New Zealand’s spy agency will reveal that it passed intelligence illegally gathered on him to the NSA.

• Though FBI agents are held to a high standard of conduct, some fall short—far short. Take, for instance, an incident in 2007 when an FBI employee “drove past a felony traffic stop, yelled ‘Rodney King’ out his car window and momentarily lost control of his vehicle, swerving into the oncoming lane and almost striking a police officer,” according an account of an internal FBI investigation. (When cops pulled him over, the employee claimed he had yelled, “Geeze Louise.”)

• Thanks to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which rounds up accounts of these infractions and distributes the cautionary tales to employees each quarter, we get glimpses of the seedier side of life inside the agency. CNN has obtained a recent set of these memos (after obtaining earlier ones last year) that show employees sexting, breaking e-readers, viewing pornography in the office, improperly accessing databases, and even shoplifting “two ties from a local retailer.”

Civil Rights

DRM

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, for the latest installment in the popular SimCity video game franchise, which was released this week to massive sales, and then just as quickly, an epic fail as the paying customers were unable to play the game they just bought. The culprit isn’t the game itself, which by most accounts is pretty good; no, the problem is the game’s DRM scheme.

• That software requires each user to maintain an “always online” connection to the publisher’s authentication server—even for single player mode—but the publisher, Electronic Arts, is having trouble keeping that server available. Even if you connected, the double helping of fail continued: all cities are saved to the cloud, and if the servers bug out, hours of work can go up in smoke faster than Godzilla can decimate a metropolis. No more local saves, lest you mange to defeat the DRM.

• Following an online uproar over a law banning the unlocking of cell phones, the Federal Communications Commission will investigate whether the ban is harmful to economic competitiveness and if the executive branch has any authority to change the law. The “ban raises competition concerns; it raises innovation concerns,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told me last night at a TechCrunch CrunchGov event at our San Francisco headquarters.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Would you rather pay $12 a dose for malaria drugs or $2.40 – and potentially boost your country’s economy at the same time?

• The Ugandan government faced an easy choice when it decided to start producing its own version of a key malaria treatment, rather than continuing to rely on expensive imports. Since the country began making its own medicine in 2007, Uganda has produced not only anti-malarials, but also antiretrovirals (ARVs) used to treat HIV. The public-private company, Quality Chemicals, plans to roll out more ARVs, anti-malarials and antibiotics in the coming months and years.

• The venture, a shining example of African pharmaceutical manufacturing, was made possible in part because Uganda is considered a “least-developed country”. As such, it doesn’t yet have to respect international intellectual property laws, set out through the World Trade Organisation’s trade-related aspects of intellectual property agreement, or “Trips”. All countries are required to adopt the agreement’s measures into their laws if they want to be part of the organisation.

• China and the European Union could start investment talks in the coming months, the Chinese ambassador to the EU said.

• China has also submitted a proposal on launching a feasibility study on a free-trade agreement with the EU, said Wu Hailong, who is also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

• China does not want to be left behind while EU-US trade negotiations are under way. The EU and Japan are also expected to enter into trade negotiations.

• The EU has been a major source of China’s foreign direct investment and has been an attractive destination for China’s outbound direct investment.

• In light of the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz, there is a need to reconsider intellectual property enforcement standards in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

• The 16th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations are taking place in Singapore until March 13. There have been concerns that the Intellectual Property Chapter would “ratchet up IP enforcement at the expense of digital rights”. Maira Sutton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation fears that “the Trans-Pacific Partnership could turn Internet Service Providers into copyright cops, prompt ever-higher criminal and civil penalties for sharing content, and expand protections for Digital Rights Management”.

Copyrights

• Someone in DC thought they had snuffed out an official Republican report on radical intellectual property reform by convincing the authoring agency to erase the document from the Internet and fire the staffer charged with writing it. The shadowy politicking backfired. The young fall-boy, Derek Khanna, instantly became a front-page living martyr against the entertainment and telecommunication lobbies, who have long been villainized for pushing aggressive anti-piracy laws at the expense of innovation.

• Just 3 months later, Khanna led a massive 100,000-person petition to give consumers more rights over their cell phone carriers, convincing the White House and Congress to publicly prioritize consumer choice and uphold the principles first laid out in the now non-existent committee document. A day later, legislation was introduced to codify the White House’s support into law, with an official hat-tip to Khanna.

• An injunction is denied because a judge says there’s no evidence that CBS Interactive purposely encourages infringement “now or in the foreseeable future.”An injunction is denied because a judge says there’s no evidence that CBS Interactive purposely encourages infringement “now or in the foreseeable future.”

• After months of delay, the “Copyright Alert System,” (also known as “six strikes”) is ready for its “implementation phase.” Participating ISPs will be rolling out the system “over the course of the next several days.” As we’ve reported previously, six strikes was conceived of by Center for Copyright Information (CCI)—an umbrella group representing major ISPs across the US and representatives from the recording and film industries. The group agreed in 2011 to come up with a six-stage warning scheme that would progressively warn—and eventually penalize—alleged online copyright infringers. (Here’s the CCI’s new video explaining the process and its new promo video.)

• The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.

• The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.

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