● 03.21.13

● Links 21/3/2013:Ubuntu to Halve Support Length, Valve Share for GNU/Linux Climbs

Posted in News Roundup at 12:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• For years all you could buy at Best Buy was Wintel for personal computing. Now, there’s Android/Linux and Chrome OS, both Linux operating systems and owing nothing to M$.

• Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is opening up geographic availability of the Acer, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and Samsung Chromebooks to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands to consumers, businesses and schools, according to a company blog post.

• “Many of you around the world have told us you’re eager to get your hands on a Chromebook, so we’ve been working with our partners to make this possible,” wrote Caesar Sengupta, Google Product Management director. “Today we’re happy to say we’re one step closer to making Chromebooks truly “for everyone” — or rather, pour tout le monde, für alle, and voor iedereen.”

• It’s happening. Chromebooks officially go on sale today in several countries which opens the floodgates for sales to those who thus far haven’t been able have this popular, easy to use Internet Appliance.

• Linux will soon be ‘dominating’ the consumer PC space, thanks to Google’s Chromebook (and Android) which runs Gentoo-based Chrome OS. Google is taking its’ Chromebooks globally, and these devices are now available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.

• Caesar Sengupta, Product Management Director of Google says, “Starting Tuesday, the Acer, HP and Samsung Chromebooks will begin rolling out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. To help improve computing for organizations, we’re rolling out Chromebooks to businesses and schools in these same countries as well. Learn more on our Enterprise blog.”

• So far I’ve turned it on, activated Windows (yuck), verified the correct size of RAM and hard disk, and verified that the Ethernet and sound ports work. I had a moment’s dismay when Windows reported that it could not write a DVD, but I remembered something about having to install additional software — device drivers, perhaps? — for that, so I booted Linux from a “live” USB stick, and found that Linux will happily write a DVD. I need to run a RAM test, and hard drive diagnostics, but so far the hardware looks solid.

• This weekend I hope to have time to re-partition the hard drive and install Linux…and put an end to a nearly-three-month quest.

• “Hackers have a hard enough time with a full version of Linux, let alone a pared down version with only a secured browser running as the interface,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “All the potential options from Linux? They are gone. The hackers couldn’t get in when they were there — they have no hope of getting in now.”

Server

• Linux may be reaching new heights every day in desktop and mobile computing, but if there’s any domain in which its might has long been undisputed, it’s servers.

• To wit: Linux is now used to run about a third of all websites, W3Techs reports. Linux servers in general now represent 20.4 percent of all server revenue, according to IDC. Then, of course, there’s supercomputing, in which it claims a full 94 percent of the world’s Top 500.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Chromebooks are now on sale in more places around the world than ever. In part, that may be because Google’s high-end Chromebook Pixel has a very well-known and enthusiastic fan: Linux’s inventor, Linus Torvalds.

Graphics Stack

• AMD has uploaded the Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 driver to their website for Linux x86/x86_64 users.

Benchmarks

Applications

• I’ve been trying out some useful applications in XFCE with my new webcam, a cheap but Linux friendly HP.

Proprietary

• From the deepest darkest corner of the deepest darkest dungeon of Bizarro World, Bryan Lunduke releases Linux Tycoon, his closed-source game about an open source operating system for a closed source operating system no one uses. That’s right, you thought today’s earlier headlines were a pump-fake-pass for April Fool’s Day, but this takes things one step further. Linux Tycoon, the “premier Linux Distro Building Simulator game in the universe”, is now available for DOS.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Humble Bundle organizers have announced a new weekly promotion of rotating pay-what-you-want offers on individual indie games.

• A Humble Mumble blog post reveals new deals will arrive each Tuesday, with Supergiant’s 2011 action RPG Bastion representing the debut title for the promo. For a minimum purchase of $1, buyer’s will score DRM-free digital copies of the featured game for Windows PC, Mac, and Linux.

• The good people over at Humble Indie Bundle have come up with a new plan to take your money, and the good news is it’s still for charity.

• Every month, a Steam survey is conducted about the software and hardware being used among the Steam users. In this survey the users of the gaming platform are being asked about the CPU, the graphics card, the operating system etc. they are using.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• After I install a new version of Linux, I usually take a good look at the screen. Does it have a task bar? Can you find your window after it was minimized? Lately, some developers have been struck by some sort of amnesia brought on by the stress created by the mobile sector offerings.

• Fortunately, in Linux we do have plenty of other choices. I will describe some of them in this article, and I’ll attempt to measure the RAM memory requirements. I use free command in an xterm before and after the graphic environment is started on a separate X server (Xephyr). The computer is an older 64-bit machine, running Ubuntu 12.04 with LXDE as desktop environment.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We are proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts.

• Recently I found this blog post about complete minesweeper clone – elemines – based on Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. As EFL are designed to efficiently work even on PDAs, I came up with an idea to implement similar clone in plain QML/Javascript (QmlMiner) and perform simple comparative analysis. I wondered how the QML version would compare with the EFL one. Following areas were analyzed:

• 1. Developer experience 2. Source code size and used languages 3. Memory consumption 4. Startup time

• The comparison was concluded with a limited performance check. You can look at it from many angles. Just note that I was comparing virtual-machine-based runtime (Qt4/QML – QtQuick 1.1, JavaScript) with EFL app that is coded in C and compiled into a native binary to see how much advantage the low-level C programming has over more modern technology such as QML.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• gnome 3.8 is on track to be released on time as usual (the release candidate will be out later today): it’s a great incremental release with improvements all over the place, but I’ll let the release notes speak.

• For my own part, I put my fingers here and there either making patches or trying to help (annoy?) people doing the real hard work with reviews and suggestions.

• The GNOME Project is proud to announce the imminent release of GNOME 3.8 in less than two weeks. As with every release, there are many new features and technical improvements. We asked William Jon McCann, a GNOME designer, about the direction of the project and what he is anticipating for GNOME in the future.

Distributions

New Releases

• Paweł Pijanowski has proudly announced a few hours ago, March 19, that his SparkyLinux operating system based on the testing branch of Debian GNU/Linux has now reached version 2.1.

• Dubbed Eris, SparkyLinux 2.1 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.2.39-2 and it is based on the Debian testing repos as of March 15, 2013.

• SparkyLinux 2.1 also comes with a new set of wallpapers, a working Live system, which is now compatible with USB flash drivers, support for installing the distro from a USB stick, as well as minor bug fixes.

• GNOME Disk Utility, the utility that allows users to handle storage devices, is now ready for the highly anticipated GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, as announced on March 18 by the development team behind the GNOME Project.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The third beta of upcoming Mageia 3 was released last week, running a few days late themselves. This release brings the final version of KDE 4.10, GNOME 3.6.3, and Steam. There are two more test releases before final, so there’s still time to get your bug reports in.

• The third annual Mageia elections were held during FOSDEM in Brussels recently for new Community Council and Mageia Board members. The Mageia Community Council is made up of elected team representatives such as for packagers or translators who help keep development moving along smoothly. The Board members oversee development while managing and administering the project.

Slackware Family

• If you go to distrowatch.com and look down the rankings you will see at number 24 a distribution called SLAX.

• It is very hard for distro developers to make their particular distribution stand out. SLAX is not one of them.

• SLAX weighs in at 210mb and is built to run from a USB drive as opposed to being installed to the hard drive. What you end up with is a fully functional portable operating system.

• Well folks, the ARM-powered Chromebook built by Samsung can finally be bought in the Netherlands, and this raises a hairy question. Should I buy one and have a real-life target for my ARM port of Slackware which has been on the backburner for a year?

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• I have a sekret. I know what kernel version is going to be used for the Fedora 19 release. Want to know? Well, I’ll be glad to tell you. Why would I tell you? Because we need your help! (Aside from the fact that Fedora doesn’t really have secrets and stuff.)

• So looking into the kernel release crystal ball and comparing it with the Fedora 19 schedule, we’re pretty much settled on using the 3.9 kernel as the release kernel. Fedora 19 (at the moment) is schedule to ship at the end of June, and we’ll still be in the middle of the -rc timeframe for 3.10 kernel at that point. While shipping with a non-released kernel sounds like fun for entirely inappropriate reasons, it’s not something we’re going to do. Even if F19 slips by a month, we’d be hard pressed to really get another kernel rebase in place in that timeframe. Just doesn’t make sense. So we’ll ship with whatever is the latest stable 3.9.y kernel at that point.

Debian Family

• The Backports Team is pleased to announce the next important step on getting backports more integrated. People who are reading debian-infrastructure-announce will have seen that there was an archive maintenance last weekend: starting with wheezy-backports the packages will be accessible from the regular pool instead of a separate one, and all backports uploads will be processed through the regular upload queue (including those for squeeze-backports and squeeze-backports-sloppy).

• Watching Debian Linux releases come together has always been aDebian long and drawn out process. Few other Linux projects (if any) have the same breadth of platform support or packages and few (if any) have the same fiercely principled approach (hurray Debian Free Software Guidelines) to development either.

• As part of the DebConf13 fundraising effort, a generous sponsor, Brandorr Group, has proposed to start a matching fund in USD for DebConf13; in place through the end of April 30th.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical’s Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) on 25 April.

• To hear fans talk, without Ubuntu, Linux desktops would be still be basic window managers. Even Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, recently implied that those who questioned him held the view that “Linux is supposed to be hard so it’s exclusive.”

• Such attitudes always remind me of how the Soviet Union once claimed to have invented every major scientific theory and new piece of technology in the twentieth century. True, Ubuntu did increase awareness of usability on the Linux desktop, but that does not mean that Ubuntu and its Unity desktop have a monopoly on usability.

• The truth is, long before Ubuntu, other distributions were stumbling towards usability. Although Ubuntu’s ability to grab headlines accelerated their progress, other modern distributions have arrived at very different usability philosophies than Unity.

• Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning a change to how it supports its operating system that will see each major release updated for just nine months after release.

• Founded as a fork of the Debian distribution following dissatisfaction with the length of time between releases, Ubuntu has stuck to a rigid six-month release cycle since it was founded. When released, each six-monthly version – given a release number of the year plus the month of release, along with an alliterative animal-themed codename – was guaranteed to receive software updates for eighteen months, or three full version releases. The exception was the Long Term Support (LTS) releases, designed for corporate and enterprise use, which enjoyed a full three years of guaranteed updates.

• I spent a bit of today using the Ubuntu Device integration features in Qt. It’s fresh software, but it’s really easy and fun. Here is the development version of the game I am running running on my desktop. Noticed that I set the size of the window and therefore the play area very intentionally. But, I had to think to myself “will the touch interactions work ok on my tablet?” “What about the sizes?”. Fortunately, getting it onto my tablet is pretty easy.

• Everyone has their favorite Linux distro and mine happens to be Ubuntu. After years of using the OS, I appreciate the ease with which I can run lots of applications that I can’t run on other platforms, Ubuntu’s security, and more. I also have a long wish list of things that I wish Ubuntu could do better.

• If you have a similar wish list, you may want to keep track of Canonical’s UbuntuBugDays and Hug Days. The next Hug Day is Thursday of this week, and is a community event that anyone can participate in, but Canonical is also serious about inviting developers to find meaningful bugs in Ubuntu.

• It was also decided to implement the above changes “to the maintenance schedule effective in 13.04 and later”.

• The Microsoft Windows users of the world are beginning to experience the pain of the new release of the Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows 8.

• While there are some users that are happy with the new release, a lot of them are not satisfied and some even very bitter. Microsoft are pushing the marketing for Windows 8 pretty hard. There is advertising on Facebook, banners on all of the popular websites and also TV commercials. And it’s also in newspapers and magazines everywhere you read. Microsoft does always markets a new Windows operating system release pretty heavily, but more so with Windows 8. Why? Because Microsoft have accepted the fact that the strong and viable competition can actually effect their bottom-dollar. And there’s public evidence of this when you look at the share price for MST. It has flat-lined and has been this way for quite some time. They are facing stiff competition from both Apple and Linux operating systems alike.

• The greatest part about Android is the sheer flexibility developers have with the platform. Sometimes we see a rival OS come out with some pretty interesting ideas and features and as Android users, we don’t have to mope around wondering when Google will introduce something similar to their mobile OS. No. A random developer from the Play Store can create an app with much of the same functionality.

• Ubuntu publicly announced its plan for the future of its Unity graphical shell on March 4, a plan that includes a new compositing window manager designed to run on the distribution’s device platforms as well as on desktop systems. The plan will reimplement the Unity shell in Qt and replace Compiz with a new display stack called Mir that will incorporate a compositor, input manager, and several other pieces. Mir is not designed to use the Wayland display protocol (although the Ubuntu specification suggests it could be added later), a decision that raised the ire of developers in several other projects.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Plex comes to Raspberry Pi, threatening to usurp XBMCs throne by adding a server functionality to a Pi HTPC

• The role of Android as an alternative to embedded Linux has been a subject of quite a bit of discussion recently. As the use of open source software in automotive gains momentum there are differing opinions on the subject of using Android, Linux or both. The Linux Foundation recently wrote a post summarizing a discussion during a panel at the Android Builders Summit as well as some interviews from a number of experts. The post attempts to define Android vs. Embedded Linux and brings up some interesting points on the subject.

• UK distributor Premier Farnell, which owns Raspberry Pi-maker element14, announced on Friday that 100 percent of element14′s manufacturing is now back in the UK, marking the completion of a transition away from Chinese manufacturing it began last September. To bring production to the UK, Premier Farnell signed a deal with Sony to build the device at a contract electronic manufacture facility in Pencoed, South Wales.

• The Raspberry Pi team is noticing an increase in the returns of the unit where the customers claim that its not booting up. If you are one such customer who received a ‘defective’ Raspberry Pi and are planning to send it back, read this before you do that.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made a public announcement clarifying what could be the cause of non-booting units.

• BDD Group is readying a tiny, sub-$50, SODIMM-style computer module powered by an SOC (system-on-chip) containing a single ARM Cortex A8 core along with a Mali-400 GPU, among other functions. The business card-sized “A10 COM” will be supported with Android and Linux BSPs.

• BDD’s CEO, Rowdy VanCleave, says the A10 COM was created to enable rapid design and development of a wide range of “industrial embedded” products.

Phones

• bada. LiMo. Maemo. Moblin. MeeGo. At one time or another, these Linux-based mobile platforms were expected to have a significant impact on the smartphone market. In each case, however, potential and promise never became reality. Some were abandoned, some were merged. Partner organizations came and went. OEMs changed course. I’m not sure Apple or Google even noticed, let alone cared.

Ballnux

Android

• The XBMC team has released an updated version of the popular cross-platform media center application. While it brings bug fixes and improvements to Windows, Mac, and Linux, XBMC 12.1 also includes a number of improvements for mobile and low power devices such as the Raspberry Pi, Apple TV, and Android and iOS devices.

• Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt is in India these days and was attending the high profile The Guardian Big Tent Activate India event taking place in New Delhi. During the event he made it clear that the Chrome OS and Android are not going to be merged and will continue to evolve as ‘separate’ entities.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• This year, Ubuntu has been in the news more than it’s ever been. Week after week, a new announcement from Canonical inundates tech sites and blogs. And this time, it’s not just the Linux-based news sites that are covering them. 2013 is all about Ubuntu going mainstream. Coming from the Linux world, the word mainstream has many connotations, but when compared to what Apple, Microsoft, and Google are doing, Ubuntu is a relatively unknown player. Going head-to-head with these giants is probably what mainstream means at this moment.

Free Software/Open Source

• We’ve covered a lot of hardware projects here on “The Powerbase”, from completely open source creations such as the OsciPrime, to 2012′s incredible influx of Kickstarter campaigns. But none of them have kept our attention as closely as Jason Kotzin’s FLIRC.

• Jason has managed to achieve a delicate balance between the obsessive attention to detail that comes from a one-man project and the high production quality you would expect from a commercial product. But what makes FLIRC really special is that Jason didn’t just create this project for his own personal gains, but instead did it as a way to raise money for Dr. Heinz Lenz at the USC Cancer Research Center, the oncologist who helped him through his 6 month battle with cancer.

• I’m generally adverse to large software bundles, especially ones that are aimed at businesses. All too often they are a cludgy mess of disjointed and barely related applications that have been thrown together. Not so with Liferay, Liferay is an open source portal that actually makes sense.

• Ubuntu Speech Recognition app is shaping up nicely. During the first video preview of the Ubuntu Speech Recognition software, author did promise open sourcing of the app. He has kept his promise. Ubuntu Speech Recognition is now open source and is licensed under GNU General Public License Version 3 aka GPLV3. See github page for more information. Installation instructions for Ubuntu Speech Recognition app can be found below.

• EdX has released source code to the general public that supports interactive learning built specifically for the Internet.

• The nonprofit online learning platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has released XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting EdX course content.

• Netflix‘s lack of official support for Linux may not do much to help its popularity within the open source world. Yet in a sign that the company does remain eager to wield stronger influence in this space–especially where it intersects with the cloud–it has announced a contest for open source developers “to build something cool using or modifying our open source software.” And it has committed a fair amount of cash to seeing the initiative through.

• When you move your life onto the web, you lose control of your data. And — who knows? — your web app of choice may even vanish from the face of the Earth while you’re still using it. Think Google Reader.

• The growing Indie Web Movement hopes to alleviate these problems, working to give web users more control over their online data and identity. The latest example is an open source software tool called Huginn.

• In 2006, I wrote at ZDNet about what I called the open source incline, the idea being that the more even-handed the license, the more likely it was people would contribute code and other help to a project.

• The news peg here was a company called Appcelerator, which was then gaining significant developer support by licensing its mobile app code under the General Public License, or GPL. This requires that companies offer back their contributions to the code, while the Apache or Eclipse licenses let companies make enhancements proprietary.

• oncerns are raised every once in a while in the broader free and open source software community about freeloaders. The attitude expressed is that if you’re getting the benefit of FOSS, you should contribute. Building a business on a FOSS project you don’t own, whether you’re providing a service or product around a FOSS project should in return garner some sort of quid pro quo. In reality, freeloaders are desirable.

• Wikimedia has activated Lua-based templating on several of its sites including English Wikipedia. Driven by a new MediaWiki extension called Scribunto which allows scripting languages to be embedded in MediaWiki, it is hoped that the Lua templating will help improve performance where editors take advantage of its capabilities.

• Lua code is stored in module pages like Module:Bananas and is then referred to in pages with {{#invoke:modulename|functionname}} like this example page. Lua offers a more powerful, and much less obscure, way of performing complex tasks which are reused within pages. There is already a queue of requests to get existing templates converted to Lua.

• Does open source have a place in the enterprise outside experimenters? find out how Radio Africa group is running almost entirely on open source and how Madison insurance has blended in the open “sauce’ to derive the best benefits of both worlds.

• Radio Africa is a media company that invests in radio, television and print. The group operates 5 radio stations, a single TV station and a newspaper and employs just under 500 employees. The group has offices in Mombasa as well as sales and correspondence offices in Nakuru, Kisumu, Eldoret and Meru. Other operations include a printing press in Nairobi’s Industrial area.

• Open eCard has released the sources of the ISO/IEC 24727-based Open eCard app, as an alternative to proprietary eID middleware solutions.

• “In order to use national eID cards and electronic health cards on the internet, a corresponding software application running on the computer system of each citizen is required,” the company said in an announcement on its website. “Interoperability across borders is achieved by supporting the international standard ISO/IEC 24727.”

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox has always been a popular browser with developers, and we’ve covered some of the extensions and tools available for development with Firefox, such as the Firebug extension. Recently, Mozilla’s Paul Rouget surveyed developers about what they would like to see in terms of Firefox DevTools. The developers provided feedback, and now Rouget has an update on what to expect in the future. Here are details.

• Alex Limi, who heads up product design for Mozilla, asks an interesting question in a new blog post: “If I told you that a company is shipping a product to hundreds of millions of users right now, and included in the product are several prominent buttons that will break the product completely if you click them, and possibly lock you out from the Internet — can you guess which product it is?”

SaaS/Big Data

• For months now, data from recruitment organizations has shown that skills with the OpenStack cloud computing platform commands power in the job market. Rackspace Hosting, which has been focused on OpenStack-based cloud computing, has announced a number of training initiatives. For example, the company has announced a strategic agreement with Hortonworks, which provides Apache Hadoop development, support and training, to empower customers with an enterprise-ready Hadoop platform targeted to be easy to use in the cloud.

• Riak CS started life as a proprietary version of the open source NoSQL database Riak. But unlike many other “open core” systems, Riak CS wasn’t a souped up version of the open source version, but a purpose-built application with new features specifically designed for large scale storage. Riak CS added support for “objects” — i.e., files — of up to 5 GB each, and tools for billing individual users or departments for resource use. And of course, an S3-compatible API that let you plug applications into it in much the same way you’d plug them into Amazon’s online service.

Databases

• The MongoDB data store can now randomize placement of data on different shards to smooth load balancing

• But the company that develops Mongo — 10gen — is hoping to reach beyond the developers and into big businesses. On Tuesday, with this in mind, the company unveiled a the “enterprise edition” of the database that’s specifically designed for use in the business world.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents.

• The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced on Wednesday.

Education

• Fifty years ago, on January 17, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC. And it is worthwhile to reflect on how much or little has changed in terms of education. His belief that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” still resonates today. Five years later, in 1968, King was assassinated as he was working on his Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial effort to gain economic justice and alleviate poverty regardless of race. His underlying concern had been social justice and altering the balance of power in society by reforming society, which remains controversial today.

Healthcare

• Global nonprofit Partners in Health (PIH) helped develop an open source electronic health record system that is improving care in developing countries, as well as in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, according to an announcement from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Berlin-based BPM (Business Process Management) experts camunda have renamed their camunda fox product to camunda BPM and have also released its source code under the open source Apache License 2. The product is based on the Activiti BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation).

Funding

• OpenShot, a leading open-source video editor for Linux, has turned to crowd-funding site Kickstarter to bring its popular application to Windows and Mac, along with many new professional-level features.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• If you can’t be in Cambridge in person, you can tune in live on March 23rd and 24th to catch all the action.

• We’ll be streaming every session in each of the three program tracks.

Project Releases

• Etherpad Lite was recently security audited by Mozilla. The developers say the result of that audit was an urgent effort from them to fix “gaping loopholes” in the collaborative editor’s security and, in turn, release version 1.2.9 of Etherpad Lite. Issues addressed include a major security problem where an attacker could submit content as another user and a problem with unescaped user input.

• It will also be shipping with OpenBSD 5.3.

Public Services/Government

• Following news that the UK government has mandated open source software, James Passingham, Technical Services Director for independent managed communications provider, Foehn, explains why more organisations are opening their eyes to open source.

• This week, the UK government mandated a preference for using open source software for future digital developments. The new Government Service Design Manual, released as a beta version on the 14th of March and effective from April, lays out standards that must be used for all new digital public services. For the first time, the UK government has expressed a formal preference for open source over proprietary software.

• Monday afternoon Newark Mayor Cory Booker crossed the Hudson River to chat at the OnMedia NYC conference about changes he believes government can make through technology. His administration uses social media to get residents more active in improving their community. “I could crowdsource my entire city,” Booker said, “and involve them in empowering Newark.”

• The French government policy on free software is now available in English. The translation was published earlier today by April, a French advocacy organisation. It is not an official translation. However, experts involved in the creation of the original French text have not found misinterpretations, the advocacy group commented. The group hopes other public administrations will use the guideline to their benefit.

Licensing

• Since it has been roughly one year since Mozilla nominated me to sit on the OSI board, I thought I’d recap what I’ve done over the course of the year. It hasn’t been a perfect year by any stretch, but I’m pretty happy with what we’ve done and I think we’re pointed in the right direction. Because my primary public responsibility on the board has been chairing the license committee, this can also sort of double as a review of the last year in license-discuss/license-review (though there is lots of stuff done by other members of the community that doesn’t show up here yet).

Openness/Sharing

• Scientific Technologies Corporation (STC) is excited to announce the release of Open ImmuCast™, a free and open source immunization forecasting web service now available to public health entities in the United States. Open Immucast™ is the open source version of STC’s commercial Stand Alone Forecasting algorithm that has been integrated with production immunization registries since 1999. Open ImmuCast™ is backed by STC’s more than twenty years of experience in developing immunization evaluation and forecasting solutions. STC’s Clinical Decision Support Specialist is a nationally recognized subject matter expert and an invited panelist for CDC’s Clinical Decision Support Logic Specification Panel. The significant implementation history of the forecasting algorithm and STC’s expertise combine to make Open ImmuCast™ a tried and proven product.

• The Republican Party must engage its members in an open and collaborative process to discuss exactly what the party should stands for and believes in. In so doing, they will effectively create a new Party platform and update the concept of the platform for the 21st century. Such a platform is proposed, written, and ratified in an open process should be the foundation behind which the GOP rallies and will the beginning of a real effort to establish a modern social media presence.

Open Access/Content

• A raft of startups is using open-source materials in an attempt to transform learning – terrifying traditional publishers.

• Famed Internet activist Aaron Swartz was honored Friday by the American Library Association. He became the first person to posthumously receive the association’s James Madison Award.

• In a letter this morning, MIT’s president announced plans to make requested Swartz-related evidence public, with names redacted to “protect the privacy and safety of those members of our community.” However, much of this information is already publicly known and has been published by The Tech and the New York Times, among others.

• A high-quality full Neanderthal genome has been sequenced for the first time, and the open source data is now available to everyone. That’s the exciting announcement today from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

• The team, led by paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo, used material from a toe bone found in 2010 in a cave in southern Siberia. They had previously released information about the Neanderthal genome that same year including evidence of inbreeding between the Neanderthals and modern humans. The Neanderthal species (or subspecies, according to some scientists who place it in our own species) died out about 28,000 years ago.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• Although the CIA is certainly not going to confirm or deny on the topic, there has been a lot of buzz this week about a report in Federal Computer Weekly that says that the CIA has approached Amazon about building a private cloud infrastructure for it. While there is no confirmation, the idea makes sense. The CIA has contracted with numerous technology companies for private platforms before, and as all things move toward the cloud, the CIA is probably heading there as well. If the report is true, it’s more evidence of how much clout the cloud has taken on in a very short period of time.

Health/Nutrition

• Some day soon, you might tuck into a plate of salmon without knowing that the fish you are eating was genetically engineered. The so-called AquAdvantage salmon, a salmon genetically engineered to grow faster than normal salmon, just moved one step closer to legalization. If so, it will be the first genetically engineered (GE) animal allowed for consumption in the United States. Thus, every part of the regulatory process related to the GE salmon sets a precedent for all future GE animals in the United States – and so far, according to experts, that precedent is a sloppy, inadequate one.

Security

• What’s wrong and what’s right with SSL? Nearly two decades after he helped write SSL 3.0, Paul Kocher is looking to hardware for security.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• 1) Avoidance. After Pearl Harbor, after Vietnam, after World War II, after the 9/11 attacks, even after civilian disasters like the Challenger explosion or Katrina, there were official efforts, of varying seriousness and success, to find out what had gone wrong, and why, and to yield “lessons learned.”

• A report released in early February by the Open Society Justice Initiative titled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition” establishes that the Central Intelligence Agency, acting under the direction of the highest levels of the US government, has utilized a global network of secret prisons, foreign intelligence agents, and interrogation and torture centers to send detainees to without any legal protections. This arrangement is worldwide and includes the involvement of at least 54 different countries touching almost every continent.

• A court ruling in one of the most abusive prosecutions yet highlights the dangers posed by this familiar tactic

• New York Times reporter Michael Gordon was the lead author on that infamous tubes article, but his record goes deeper than that. A few days into the U.S. bombing (3/25/13), Gordon appeared on CNN to endorse the bombing of Iraqi TV’s offices, calling it “an appropriate target,” since “we’re trying to send the exact opposite message.”

Cablegate

• Until recently, with Bradley Manning’s historic statement in court taking responsibility for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, mainstream media outlets had largely ignored or paid only passing attention to the biggest leak case in U.S. history. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that when they do report on it, in addition to typically taking government arguments as fact, they frequently get basic information about Manning and his legal proceedings wrong.

• These pernicious mistakes can malign Manning’s character and obscure the public’s understanding of his case. It’s left to lesser-known but far more attentive writers and legal experts who’ve been following this case more closely (some since its inception) to correct their mistakes to keep the record straight.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• “The Greatness of a nation, and its moral progress, can be judged by the manner in which its animals are treated.” Mahatma Gandhi.

• Late on a Friday afternoon in early March, the State Department released a 2,000-page draft report downplaying the environmental risks of the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But when it released the report, State hid an important fact from the public: Experts who helped draft the report had previously worked for TransCanada, the company looking to build the Keystone pipeline, and other energy companies poised to benefit from Keystone’s construction. State released documents in conjunction with the Keystone report in which these experts’ work histories were redacted so that anyone reading the documents wouldn’t know who’d previously hired them. Yet unredacted versions of these documents obtained by Mother Jones confirm that three experts working for an outside contractor had done consulting work for TransCanada and other oil companies with a stake in the Keystone’s approval.

• A British Petroleum representative allegedly rewrote 44 percent of the oil giant’s Wikipedia page, including the environmental sections. Some Wikipedia editors are crying foul.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs is out with a reaction to the Cyprus bailout deal negotiated over the weekend, the most controversial part of which entails a haircut on bank deposits, something that hasn’t yet been seen until now in the euro crisis saga.

• Goldman analyst Francisco Garzarelli says that while the deal could cause some short-term volatility, the fallout from Cyprus will likely be contained, assuming the controversial measures are able to survive a vote in the Cypriot parliament this week (which remains an open question).

• Around here, we Linux geeks tend to focus on technology, its place in society, and why monopolizing it into the iron fists of a few global corporations is a Bad Thing. The reasoning is that technology is central to all of our lives, cradle to grave, school to office, and we dare not allow a tiny oligarchy of billionaires to control everything that technology does.

• What could be more dastardly than monopolizing the world’s computers? Monopolizing the world’s food.

• Monsanto, in the emerging science of biotechnology, has become the Microsoft of food. Here in Iowa (a state with no small interest in agriculture) I get to witness the struggle firsthand; Monsanto commercials aimed at farmers dominate much of local television. Very few non-Monsanto companies manage to get equal billing.

• The parallels between Microsoft and Monsanto are plain. Just the Wikipedia page on legal actions involving Monsanto reaps bold examples: Monsanto has filed patents on numerous genetically engineered specimens. They have filed suit against 145 individual U.S. farmers for violating those patents. The Public Patent Foundation has blown the whistle on some Monsanto patents. The U.S. Justice Department in 2009 has also opened investigations against Monsanto for anti-trust; that’s still pending. And the legal battles outside North America are even more telling; stories abound of farmers being driven out of business, markets controlled, and even child labor. Oh, and Monsanto is a political lobbyist – a really, really big one – in the US, UK, and continental Europe. And corporate food patents, litigation, and fallout damage has been the subject of at least one documentary name of Food, Inc.

• 1. This is Osborne’s first, and so far only, tweet

• For all its vaunted efficiency, capitalism has foisted wasteful inequality and environmental ruin on us. There is an alternative

• On his last HBO show (3/15/13), Bill Maher complained about how much he and his wealthy cohort pay in taxes: “You know what? Rich people–I’m sure you’d agree with this–actually do pay the freight in this country.”

• Maher added that wealthy Californians pay nearly 40 percent to the federal government and nearly 15 percent to the state: “I just want to say liberals: You could actually lose me. It’s outrageous what we’re paying–over 50 percent. I’m willing to pay my share, but yeah, it’s ridiculous.”

• Something extreme is happening in Europe. Since Sunday, Bloomberg Businessweek reports a trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain’s download charts, coinciding with news that cash-strapped Cyprus was planning to raid domestic savings accounts to pay off a $13 billion bailout tab. “This is an entirely predictable and rational outcome for what’s happening in Cyprus,” says ConvergEx’s Nick Colas. “If you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.”

• The value of the virtual currency has soared almost 30 percent in the last two days. “One hundred percent of that is due to Cyprus,” says Colas. “It means the Europeans are getting involved.” As German economist Peter Bofinger warned in an interview with Spiegel Online: “European citizens must now fear for their money.”

• French magistates and anti-fraud police have raided the Paris home of the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) chief, Christine Lagarde, as part of an investigation into alleged misuse of public office and “embezzlement” when she was French finance minister in 2008.

• A week of ‘Black Protest’ at public and private colleges and universities across the Philippines takes place between March 18 and 22. It commemorates the death of Kristel Tejada who committed suicide, because she couldn’t pay for tuition fees in time. The ‘Black Protest’ is marked by walk-outs and is also directed against another possible increase in tuition fees.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) have introduced a new constitutional amendment to overturn the damage done by Citizens United, Buckley v. Valeo, and other judicial decisions that have diluted the role of ordinary people in American democracy.

• “The Democracy is for People Amendment will stop corporations and their front groups from using their profits and dark money donations to influence our elections while reaffirming the right of the American people to elections that are fair and representatives that are accountable,” Rep. Deutch said in a statement.

Privacy

• More and more web pages incorporate “Like” buttons for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and this was also on the to do list for both The H and our associates at heise online; however, implementing these buttons means that data will be transmitted to the operators of a networking platform when the page is loaded – without any user interaction. In addition to the URL of the current page, that information also includes an ID that is directly connected to a person, at least if the user has an account with these platforms. This allows companies such as Facebook to create full browsing profiles of their users. As this doesn’t harmonise with our idea of data protection and privacy, heise online developed a two-stage solution that will only transmit data with the user’s permission.

• The UK’s Home Office continues to push for maximum surveillance powers with minimum accountability in the latest adjustments to the Communications Data Bill. I decided to find out just how much consultation with non-corporates there had been before the Bill was introduced originally.

• The latest vote on the EU Data Protection Regulation suggests MEPs are starting to realise why privacy protections are important. We need your help now to get the message across.

• India is ranked at number two by total number of data requests but if you take into account its large Internet population, its ranking falls. Neighboring countries can vary a great deal. The U.K. and France demand a disproportionate amount of user information, compared to Ireland and the Netherlands.

Civil Rights

• …James Goodale sounds the alarm about the current president

• James Goodale has a message for journalists: Wake up. In his new book, Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Goodale, chief counsel to The New York Times when its editors published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, argues that President Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was.

• The Obama administration has prosecuted more alleged leakers of national security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, a course critics say is overly aggressive. Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a March op-ed that the administration “has a particular, chilling intolerance” for those who leak. If the Obama administration indicts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, Goodale argues, the president will have succeeded where Nixon failed by using the act to “end-run” the First Amendment.

• Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer today was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for revealing to media outlets that AT&T had configured its servers to allow the harvesting of iPad owners’ unsecured email addresses. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining Auernheimer’s legal team to litigate his appeal before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that fundamental problems with computer crime law result in unfair prison sentences like the one in this case.

• Once on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list, the civil rights activist has no intention of slowing down. She talks to Frank Barat about her inspiration.

• The explosive revelations that websites will be included in the post-Leveson press regulation arrangements this weekend led to a flurry of analysis — and a meeting between Hacked Off, bloggers and free speech groups yesterday.

• A 21st-century version of slavery—captive labor—is rampant at the bottom of the U.S. economy, and Washington politicians and business lobbies want to keep it that way, or even expand it as part of the immigration reform talks now in Congress.

• From the outset of the now widely publicized Steubenville rape case, social media has played an integral role in the local grassroots action, growing media buzz, and prosecution. Local bloggers and Internet activists helped bring the case to national attention.

• 3pm Friday is the deadline for amendments to be submitted to the Crime and Courts Bill, which is in the Lords on Monday. The clauses being considered include those for various parts of the Leveson “deal” (Of course, given this isn’t statutory regulation of the press we may well be imagining it.)

• Thousand of houses in the United Kingdom are being sent marijuana-scented “scratch and sniff” cards in a new bid to track down marijuana growers.

• In a press release, the charity group Crimestoppers explained the cards were designed to educate residents about the smell of marijuana. They hope once people can recognize the smell of cannabis plants, they will be able to help law enforcement officials identify illegal growing operations.

DRM

• With Digital Restrictions Malware and proprietary software, Amazon’s Swindle and similar devices are the “gift that keeps on taking”.

• DRM is rearing its malformed head again and biting the hands that feed it. Rather than simply making an otherwise useful product useless unless requirements x, y and z are met, this time DRM is issuing a clawback on purchased rented digital goods.

Intellectual Monopolies

• ood safety, GMO cultivation and France’s cherished “cultural exception” for audiovisual services are non-negotiable areas in view of upcoming EU-US free trade talks, the French stressed. The message was apparently well received by the European Commission in Brussels. Speaking at the conclusion of a two-day European summit on 15 March, French President François Hollande said he was “in favour of opening a negotiation” with the US to lift trade barriers and “promote growth” in Europe.

• As we’ve discussed before, one of the sneakier moves of the content industry (and, later, the pharmaceutical industry) was to jump into the international trade process, to circumvent national governments and to effectively force them into passing laws that they liked. We’ve been raising concerns about this whole process, and it appears that many public interest/civil service groups agree. With the US and Europe getting ready to start negotiations on a “trans-atlantic free trade agreement” (TAFTA), a large group of public interest/civil service groups have teamed up to issue a declaration that “intellectual property” has no place in free trade agreements. It also demands much more transparency in any negotiation.

• This is the one you have been waiting for: Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [PDF]. Mr. Kirtsaeng has prevailed. Hugely. I’ll work on a text version for you next, but I didn’t want you to have to wait one second longer to hear the news.

• Justices say a prohibition on the resale of products made overseas would cause multiple problems

• The importation of copyrighted goods made abroad has been an increasingly contentious issue in recent years. Easy access to Internet resale markets like eBay and Amazon have made it possible for a new breed of entrepreneurs to buy low and sell high in a wide array of areas. The Supreme Court handed these resellers a major victory today, issuing a decision [PDF] that makes it clear that the “first sale” doctrine protects resellers, even when they move goods across national boundaries.

Trademarks

• The Python Software Foundation (PSF) have announced they have reached a settlement with POBox Hosting Ltd of the UK over their trademark application for the term ‘Python’ in connection with cloud hosting and their application for a figurative trademark incorporating the word “Python”. While the PSF own the trademark for Python within the United States, it did not have an equivalent filing within the European Union.

• The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced that it has reached a settlement with PO Box Hosting, who also trade as Veber, over the latter’s use of the name Python and application to trademark Python. The Python Software Foundation called for help in fighting the application in February.

Copyrights

• The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, just published a new working paper entitled “Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data.” This report demonstrates that online ‘piracy’ does not have a negative effect on sales, and often, in fact, has a positive impact. As they put it, their research suggested “a stimulating effect of [online streaming] on the sales of digital music.”

• One key part of the paper was their finding that “much of what is consumed illegally would not have been purchased if piracy was not available.” In other words, each illegal download should not be perceived as being equivalent to a lost sale. For better or for worse, the music industry has (d)evolved into being singles-driven rather than being album-driven; now consumers can download just the songs they want, rather than having to download an album filled with bad songs.

• US Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante is about to give testimony (PDF) to part of the House Judiciary Committee, in which she proposes that the US government do something it hasn’t done, ever—shorten copyright terms.

• “You may want to consider alleviating some of the pressure and gridlock brought about by the long copyright term for example, by reverting works to the public domain after a period of life plus fifty years unless heirs or successors register their interests with the Copyright Office,” Pallante’s written testimony states.

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