● 03.22.13

● Links 22/3/2013: Chinese Government Chooses GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Of course, “one of the problems you have in discussing this is that people who looked at Linux or open source programs even as recently as five years ago may not realize how much things have changed,” noted Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien.

• “Linux desktops are perfectly usable right now as is, out-of-the-box,” O’Brien explained. “But a lot of people who looked at one years ago still think you have to recompile your kernel on the command line every other day. We who use it every day know that isn’t so.”

• So, “for a refugee from Mac OS, a distro like Mint with the Cinnamon desktop might be pretty familiar and give you that ‘it just works’ feeling,” he suggested.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws, according to their page, talks about anything that runs on Linux, about open source software on other platforms and many other things. Dan Lynch and Fabian Scherschel are the hosts of Linux Outlaws, and the pair go into great detail on the news and other happenings in the Linux/FOSS world. As described on the site, listening to the show is very much like listening to two friends sitting in a pub, having fun and talking about things they find interesting — and thanks to the modern miracle of podcasts, it’s like you’re there with them, pint in hand.

• There is gratuitous swearing and neither Dan nor Fabian pull any punches when describing shortcomings or stupidity, intentional or not, and calling people out for it. Ranting seems to be par for the course — again, in a good way, and Dan tends to be low-key and methodical in his analysis while Fabian positions himself on opposite side of that spectrum, sometimes redlining the needle on the rant tachometer. It’s all thought-provoking and informative, punctuated with humor and hilarity.

Kernel Space

• Stout is their codenane for the Lenovo X131e notebook shipped as a Chromebook. The Lenovo X131e Chromebook features a 1366×768 display, Intel Celeron CPU, and 7.5 hour battery life. For a $450+ notebook, it isn’t too impressive but at least it’s another Coreboot-enabled product.

• Is the Tux3 file-system alive and well for Linux or will it face a fate like Reiser4 where it may never see a mainline state?

• Tux3 is the file-system that warranted attention a few years prior as an open-source versioning file-system to succeed the Tux2 file-system that was challenged by licensing issues. While promising at first, Tux3 virtually disappeared for a few years time.

• On March 21, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the immediate availability for download of the forth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8.x kernel series.

Graphics Stack

• Announced at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2013 event today was the “Kayla” ARM development board.

• NVIDIA shared at GTC 2013 that they will bring their CUDA GPGPU OpenCL-competitor to their Tegra ARM platform in early 2014 with their Tegra 5 “Logan” SoC. The Tegra “Logan” is to have a Kepler-based GPU and aside from supporting CUDA it will also be able to handle OpenGL 4.3.

• Kayla meanwhile is a new development board that’s based around Tegra 3 but has a Kepler-based GPU on the board. NVIDIA Kayla is basically meant as a development board for developers to jump-start their CUDA on ARM and other GPGPU on ARM Tegra work ahead of Logan’s availability next year. The Cortex-A9 on the Tegra 3 isn’t impressive, which has already been surpassed by the Cortex-A15 Tegra 4, but its GPU will be fun to play with in the ARM space.

Benchmarks

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• So games not finished can now be setup for sale on Steam, so games that get Greenlit or games from known developers they already accept don’t have to wait until their official version to sell it on Steam.

• Keen Software House, developers of Miner Wars 2081 and owners of a fantastic company name, have opened up the source code to their “action-survival space-shooter simulation-game”, dishing out the code to both the game and its engine – providing it’s used to create mods for Miner Wars, and you own the game on Steam. They haven’t quite made it open source – they still own the rights to the code – but if you’re the sort that enjoys poking around in the guts of games to make new and interesting things, this could be very good news. Miner Wars 2081 is currently 75% off in the Steam Spring sale, until March 29th.

• The collection includes first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D and three expansion packs – Duke Caribbean: Life’s a Beach, Duke: Nuclear Winter, and Duke It Out in D.C. The game has been refined with improved OpenGL based visuals, SteamPlay and SteamCloud support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Enlightenment is starting to take shape on Wayland with its own compositor.

• There are a lot of things that we will implement in MATE Desktop releases after 1.6…

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Digia, the largest Qt contributor, is the 2013 Platinum Sponsor for the co-hosted Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit in Bilbao. Digia is responsible for all Qt activities including product development and commercial licensing and, together with the Qt Project, open source licensing under the open governance model.

• Digia, the company that acquired Qt from Nokia, is the 2013 Platinum Sponsor for the co-hosted Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit. The annual Akademy conference brings the KDE community together each year. KDE is one of the largest free and open source communities in the world which creates free and open source technologies including khtml which is the mother of WebKit which is today used by Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome and Opera browsers.

• After nearly twelve years of using KDE with basically the same ole Kmix, Trever Fischer, Fedora Ambassador and KDE hacker, has today announced that his herculean quest of rewriting Kmix has yielded some results. It’s still considered pre-alpha, but Fischer has posted the code and a screenshot!

• The new mixing interface is inspired by PulseAudio mixer, but Fischer is redesigning the way it actually operates as well. In fact, he says it’s working on his desktop fairly well. His design sounds like a major improvement and Kmix is way overdue.

• One of Fischer’s ideas is stop all the collisions that commonly happen behind the GUI. All the different sound component tend to do their own thing despite other mixing controls doing theirs. So, Fischer says he’s using one autoloaded daemon to control the different backends. This should help minimize conflicts and allow for the elimination of some old code.

• 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.

• Appmenu support for KDE is now available in master for testing.

Distributions

• I’ve done some testing before, but this time I want to document it here, so I can come back later and remind myself of some of the critical steps, and so others new to testing can get the confidence to start contributing in this way as well. I’m mainly using Kubuntu as an example here, but applications and desktops need testing as well. If you are using a non-Debian distribution, the commands I use will not work. Consult your documentation for equivalents.

New Releases

• Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix. It uses the excellent Salix tools and Salix packages. Many thanks to Salix team members and packagers for this great work of developing.

Red Hat Family

• The collaboration brings Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to CfA Fellows and partner communities free-of-charge

• Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ) is set to report its fourth quarter 2013 results on Mar 27. In the previous quarter, the company’s earnings matched the Zacks Consensus Estimate. Let’s see how things are shaping up for the company in this quarter.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Things have been a little quiet around my blog of the late. At the beginning of last month I started a full time position doing some IT related tasks for a major insurance company where I live in central IL. Between the new job, playing Magic, spending time keeping Bodhi things up to date, and preparing to get married in less than a month – I haven’t had time to post as much as I’d like to on here.

• Today I would like to take a moment to discuss a topic that has received much attention on Linux blogs/news sites in recent weeks – Ubuntu’s concept for the Mir display server. I would like to start by pointing out I’ve said the concept of Mir. That is right folks – at this point it is just a concept, nothing more. Not long ago Ubuntu announced they’d be moving to Wayland. We all know exactly how much came from this announcement. Because of this history I’m going to reserve my judgment of Mir until we see it actually created and put into use.

• More progress was made by Canonical and the Ubuntu development community on the Ubuntu Touch project for Linux on smart-phones and tablets.

• Ubuntu is a powerful, versatile and full-fledged operating system that offers security, stability, user-friendliness and reliability.

• Canonical, across the latest years, has progressively pushed Ubuntu in numerous countries, organizations, state departments, etc, actions expressed through partnerships with serious, solid partners.

• Ubuntu maker Canonical has signed a deal with the Chinese government to create a new version of Ubuntu. For China, this is widely seen as an attempt “to wean its IT sector off Western software in favour of more home-grown alternatives,” the BBC reported.

• China has picked Canonical’s Linux-based Ubuntu OS as the reference architecture to establish a standardised operating system in the nation that could end up in PCs, servers, tablets and smartphones.

Devices/Embedded

• When embedded projects call for for a real-time operating system, Linux developers often turn to PREEMPT-RT, the real-time kernel patch, to get it done.

• “The PREEMPT_RT patch (aka the -rt patch or RT patch) makes Linux into a real-time system,” said Steven Rostedt, a Linux kernel developer at Red Hat and maintainer of the stable version of the real-time Linux kernel patch.

Phones

• Huawei Technologies are concerned about technology development in Africa. The company finds its way to partnerships that share their dreams for Africa. They will be the main sponsors of the fifth BRICS Summit, to be held on 26th and the 27th of March 2013 at the Durban International Convention Centre (ICC) in South Africa.

Android

• While some called the first Android phones “iPhone killers” other pundits saw its shaky beginnings, and claimed it would never beat Apple’s ascendant iPhone. Today, Android commands 70% of the global smartphone market, and even more outside the US, which remains Apple’s stronghold.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The new human resource development (HRD) minister Mr Pallam Raju told reporters in New Delhi that the Government isn’t going to “obsess about the hardware” and focus on how to enable students, reports Livemint.

Free Software/Open Source

• Deployment of new and advanced technologies, support for an increasing number of devices, increasing virtualization and the general expansion of business have dramatically altered the volume and nature of the workloads beings handled by data storage systems.

• Many software providers encrypt their software code through a special compiling program. The source code is hidden behind the actually complied ready to run version of commercial software. It is really a bonus that commercial organizations have in their product – competitors cannot even think of copying the code and use it in their merchandise. This helps commercial software establishments to gain control over their programming and they don’t need to worry about their rivals stealing their cerebral property for their benefit.

• “The value proposition is open source, where you never get locked in,” Relan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It is true cross-platform. That is central to the OpenKit strategy, and it is validated by the interest in it.”

• Riak Cloud Storage (Riak CS) is a storage software which can be used to build public or private Cloud storage systems. It is built atop Riak, a distributed database system developed by Basho Technologies, a outfit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA).

• Yesterday, the company announced that Riak CS has been released under the Apache 2 license and scheduled a webcast for April 2 (2013).

• Riak CS offers a highly available, fault-tolerant storage, with support for large objects (up to 5 GB) and multipart uploading, an API and authentication system that is S3-compatible, multi-tenancy and per-user reporting.

Events

• Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013.

• For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

Web Browsers

SaaS/Big Data

• The next major release of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, code named ‘Grizzly’ is nearing release. By the end of this week, all the core projects within OpenStack should be at the Release Candidate (RC) 1 stage.

• By killing Reader, Google may have done us a favor, focusing attention on the power of open standards and open source in protecting us against the whims of service providers

Education

• In today’s data driven world, the need for accurate data and informed analysis is paramount for innovation and progress. Data and statistics that are collected and aggregated have a huge impact on a country’s education initiatives which can reform a country’s polices and decision-making.

• However, accurate data can be hard to find in undeveloped countries where education measures can suffer from limitations in collection and reporting mechanisms, or can even be skewed to meet political needs. This data is vital in determining the allocation of resources to schools that are in dire need for the right teachers and school supplies. This situation is particularly true in Haiti, where data collection systems are weak.

• Given a school where M$’s stuff is the only way to do IT and one that embraces FLOSS, guess which students learn more and faster? The students using FLOSS. The world can make its own software quite easily using FLOSS techniques. There is absolutely nothing big corporations have to contribute to that. Just look at M$’s issues with H1B visas. M$ is importing talent because it can’t find enough in the education IT system that it spread through the USA. There are many more clever people around the world than are found in big US corporations.

Business

• In the second major news item this week involving corporate growth at an open source Big Data vendor, Pentaho has announced three new executive hires. Their addition, the company says, will help it to expand development of its Big Data analytics products as well as drive increased revenue growth.

• Pentaho, which develops a variety of solutions for accessing, integrating, interpreting and analyzing data that are based on open source technology, announced the hires on Wednesday.

• Customers and value-added resellers (VARs) of a particular legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company may have received an over-size postcard recently with haunting images – an eerie graveyard full of tombstones.

Funding

BSD

• The second release candidate of NetBSD 6.1 is now available for download at: http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1_RC2/

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

• Version 4 of the Wakanda platform for developing JavaScript business applications for the web and mobile devices has been released. The project encompasses a database server, a JavaScript framework and an integrated development environment.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The U.K. national government issued March 14 a beta version of its Government Services Design Manual, which formalizes a preference for open source technology for digital services. The comprehensive document, which becomes mandate April 1, includes everything from guides for accessible design and the approved color pallet for gov.uk websites, to measuring the cost per transaction for digital services.

• “Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages,” instructs the manual.

• The UK government has mandated its public service should use open source software in preference to proprietary apps in its latest Government Services Design Manual.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

Leftovers

Science

• Last month, University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest the election to the group of Napoleon Chagnon, a peer whose specious arguments in favor of a natural human tendency toward violence have helped militarize the discipline and legitimize wars of aggression.

• It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.

Security

• On Monday, Andrew Auernheimer was sentenced to serve 41 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Auernheimer’s case has received a lot of press attention, and I think that attention is merited: I think the case against Auernheimer is deeply flawed, and that the principles the case raises are critically important for civil liberties online. For that reason, I have agreed to represent Auernheimer pro bono in his appeal before the Third Circuit. (I will be joined by the trial counsel Tor Ekeland and his colleagues Nace Naumoski and Mark Jaffe, together with Marcia Hofmann and Hanni Fakhoury of EFF.) In this post, I want to explain some of the issues in play in this case that I think make it so important.

• Some people figure they must have that other OS on their PC even if they have a mess of servers. There’s evidence of malware for that other OS that targets GNU/Linux machines and wipes them… “The dropper for Trojan.Jokra contains a module for wiping remote Linux machines. We do not normally see components that work on multiple operating systems, so it is interesting to discover that the attackers included a component to wipe Linux machines inside a Windows threat.”

• Twenty years ago, you became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and hired me as a minor staff functionary. I never thanked you properly. I needed that job. Included in the benefits package was the chance to hobnob with luminaries who gathered at SAIS every few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski for an off-the-record discussion of foreign policy. From five years of listening to these insiders pontificate, I drew one conclusion: people said to be smart — the ones with fancy résumés who get their op-eds published in the New York Times and appear on TV — really aren’t. They excel mostly in recycling bromides. When it came to sustenance, the sandwiches were superior to the chitchat.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Crowley argues that “in political terms, it’s getting hard to tell the difference” between Obama and Dick Cheney. In the last few months, “his drone war has turned from asset to headache,” thanks to dogged criticism from human rights groups, international lawyers and a few politicians, including Republican Sen. Rand Paul.

• Crowley writes that the program “is increasingly straining against its legal authority” and that “a big practical problem with the drone war is that the rest of the world hates it.” He runs through various ideas that could introduce accountability or new legal mechanisms to constrain or refine the program–or “it might seem easier to simply wind down the drone war entirely.”

• Amazing story today out of Maine, where the Portland daily paper has published an account of a prisoner being pepper-sprayed by prison staffers in June 2012–despite already being restrained in a chair. And: They have the two-hour video to prove it. And: They have posted the entire video on their site. Now the law wants to find out how they got the leak

• The Maine Department of Corrections is investigating to determine how the press obtained video and documents about a captain’s treatment of an inmate last year.

• [...]

• James Mackie, spokesman for the union that represents corrections officers, said he is not surprised that the department is investigating.

• “The number of investigations since (Ponte) has taken over have just increased exponentially,” he said.

• Mackie said he was surprised that the incident, which happened on June 10, took so long to come to light. Welch was disciplined in August and September.

• “We were all aware of the issue at MCC. There was no way it was going to be kept secret,” Mackie said.

• Breton said she does not know whether investigations have increased under Ponte.

• The newspaper’s story and the accompanying video offered a rare glimpse inside the prison and into a confrontation between officers and a medicated, mentally ill inmate.

• Paul Schlosser had received hospital treatment for a gouge he inflicted on his left arm, but had repeatedly removed the dressing in an effort to get medication and a book to distract him.

• Inmates who hurt themselves to manipulate staff are among the most difficult to deal with, Ponte said last week.

• I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

• The NDAA and the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans

• Michael Ratner: The NYT and other “liberal” commentators led the way in selling the WMD myth and justified the Iraq war; their mea culpas ring hollow.

• John Brennan, the new CIA director and architect of Mr Obama’s expanded “targeted killing” campaign, is believed to be preparing to transfer more control of the programme to the Pentagon.

• Mark Rossini, was then an FBI counter-terrorism agent detailed to the CIA. He was assigned the task of evaluating a Czech intelligence report that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attack on the World Trade Towers.

• The three CIA officials, Assistant Sub-Inspector Shakeel Ahmed Butt, Constables Muhammad Ahsan and Mahboob Elahi, are accused of custodial killing of a father of seven, Niamat, by third degree torture.

• There is enormous diversity among the countries involved. They include Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and Jordan, which carried out the torture on suspects that the CIA rendered to them. Poland, Lithuania, Romania and Thailand hosted secret prisons operated by the CIA where detainees could be held clandestinely and have interrogations or torture conducted directly by American intelligence operatives.

• European nations such as Macedonia, Georgia, and Sweden detained and delivered suspects to the CIA to be tortured. Larger countries such as Britain or Germany conducted some of the interrogations themselves while smaller countries such as Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, or Greece provided intelligence, logistical support, use of airspace, etc.

• US drones fired two missiles at a vehicle in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt Thursday, killing four militants, security officials said.

• Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) told the National Journal on Wednesday that no Americans were currently on President Barack Obama’s so-called “kill list.”

• Rogers said as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he reviews every drone strike on a suspected terrorist after it has been conducted. Though no Americans are currently being targeted overseas, the Republican congressmen described how that situation could change.

• In evidence to Ben Emmerson QC, UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, the Foreign Ministry has said that the US drones have killed at least 2,200 people in the country, including at least 400 civilians. This is close to the bureau’s low range estimate of 411.

Cablegate

• I’ll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we’re headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.

• We’ve seen the battle lines forming for years now. It’s increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

• This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially the real subject of Gibney’s film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.

• In media mythology, the years from the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.

• Mainstream journalism marinated in adversarialism. Little Southern newspapers infuriated their own readers by staring down segregation. Foreign correspondents forced upon an unwilling public the realities of a brutal war. Network news ignored official disdain and showed the bottomless suffering the war inflicted on the innocents it was supposed to save. With the Pentagon Papers, newspapers defied secrecy rules to expose government lies. With Watergate, reporters forced out a corrupt president.

• That’s what the US Marine Bradley Manning said on Thursday, March 01 in military court at Fort Meade, Maryland. He pled guilty to unauthorized possession of certain information, to willfully communicating that information to an unauthorized person, WikiLeaks, and that the conduct was “service discrediting” or prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the military.

Finance

• When European Union leaders gathered at their economic summit meeting in Brussels, they were confronted by thousands of protesters who denounced them and their austerity policies. Working people and labor union representatives from all over Europe demonstrated at the European Commission and Council headquarters on March 14.

• At least 10,000 demonstrators denounced the “Troika” — the International Mone tary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission — which has imposed draconian cuts in jobs, wages, benefits and public services in several southern eurozone countries as conditions for loans. Protesters demanded that the Troika stop all austerity plans, provide jobs and end the crises their policies have created.

• Last November, in an act of sheer monetary desperation, the ECB issued an exhaustive, and quite ridiculous, pamphlet titled “Virtual Currency Schemes” in which it mocked and warned about the “ponziness” of such electronic currencies as BitCoin. Why a central bank would stoop so “low” to even acknowledge what no “self-respecting” (sic) PhD-clad economist would even discuss, drunk and slurring, at cocktail parties, remains a mystery to this day. However, that it did so over fears the official artificial currency of the insolvent continent, the EUR, may be becoming even more “ponzi” than the BitCoins the ECB was warning about, was clear to everyone involved who saw right through the cheap propaganda attempt. Feel free to ask any Cypriot if they would now rather have their money in locked up Euros, or in “ponzi” yet freely transferable, unregulated BitCoins.

• The economic news this week highlights what happens when governments are unable to confront the root cause of the financial collapse – the risky speculation and securities fraud of the big banks. What happens? They blame the people, cut their benefits, tax their savings and demand they work harder for less money.

• During last year’s presidential election, Dr. Willard M. Romney diagnosed a previously unrecognized epidemic illness that is eating away at the moral foundations of our country. Romney was the first medical scientist to grasp that 47% of our citizens have been transformed into an army of zombie parasites now known to the experts as “moochers.” The moochers have been infected with DES, Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome, a 21st century plague whose victims live lives solely devoted to sucking funds from the bank accounts of decent people. Not one to sit idly by while an invasive undead horde saps and impurifies our precious bodily fluids, Dr. Romney attempted to sound the national alarm about the moocher scourge. But alas, he was ahead of his time. The country was not yet ready to hear his bracing but prescient DES warning.

• Moochers might appear normal, but don’t be fooled by appearances! While these bloodsuckers are seemingly busy changing bedpans, waxing the floor at your office, serving up stacks of pancakes at Denny’s and standing in long lines to beg abjectly for “jobs’, they are all the while draining our hard-won and well-merited wealth. A tell-tale symptom of DES is that while moochers pay all kinds of sales taxes, payroll taxes and government fees just like the rest of us, they don’t pay any income taxes. Imagine! No income taxes! The DES sufferer will tell you that the absence of income tax obligations is somehow related to the moocher’s extreme deficiency in actual income. A likely story!

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• So is the Times, in its own way, telling us not to trust the officials speaking on the record? That’s certainly one way to read the piece.

• Elsewhere in the paper we learn that part of Barack Obama’s visit to Israel includes a look at the country’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system, which is funded by the U.S. government.

• A Nevada politician has introduced a bill that would bar the city of Las Vegas from enacting tougher gun laws than the state as a whole, including language that would specifically protect “machine guns” from being barred on the Las Vegas strip if the state did not bar machine guns across the state. At the last known meeting of the “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association proposed amendments to the ALEC “Consistency in Firearms Regulation Act” to add “machine guns” to ALEC’s model bill prohibiting local governments from adopting different rules for guns and ammo than a state has as a whole. On March 18, a Nevada state legislator introduced a bill in the statehouse that is almost a word-for-word copy from that ALEC bill, which ALEC has since attempted to distance itself from while doing nothing to stop or repeal such bills.

Privacy

Civil Rights

• The CIA’s chief technology officer outlined the agency’s endless appetite for data in a far-ranging speech on Wednesday.

• Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos — and that the agency wants all of it.

• “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” Hunt said. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”

• UPDATE: Lourdes Alicia Ortega Perez, the Venezuelan woman who was arrested last week after mocking Hugo Chavez on Twitter, was released from police custody on March 16. Ortega was taken to court on charges of spreading false information and committing fraud. She has since been granted her freedom [es], but will be required to appear before the court every 30 days.

• Recent accounts from Guantánamo paint a more chilling picture still: since February 6, 2013, the prisoners have been engaged in a peaceful, mass hunger-strike to protest deteriorating camp conditions and religious provocations by Guantánamo staff, including offensive searches of the prisoners’ Qur’ans. Ghaleb al-Bihani, a severe diabetic, is among the scores of men hunger-striking. He spoke to his lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights recently and explained that he has lost more than 20 pounds in a matter of weeks. His blood-sugar levels are fluctuating so wildly that Guantánamo physicians have told him they fear for his life. Other prisoners have lost consciousness; some are reportedly coughing up blood. This is to say nothing of the less visible, but equally grave health risks produced by years of indefinite detention. As Physicians for Human Rights explained to the IACHR, arbitrary, indefinite detention creates existential uncertainty that can destroy the body and mind. It can even be lethal. The story of Adnan Latif, the most recent prisoner to die at Guantánamo, is a heart-breaking reminder of this.

• The journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism

DRM

• A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: “We’re not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Back in January, I wrote about what I called the “Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement”, by analogy with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, TPP, whose negotiations have already dragged on for several years. The formal announcement of what is now variously called the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), took place just over a month ago, but already Mexico has stated that it wishes to join, and there are rumours Canada might tag along too.

• This would then turn the EU-US agreement into a EU-NAFTA agreement – that is between the EU and the whole North American Free Trade Agreement area. If that happens, it’s quite possible that South American countries will start trying to join too, for fear of being “left out” (although they might do better to consider whether being in is actually better for them, given their limited ability to influence the negotiations between the two main partners.)

• Last month, U.S. President Barack Obama announced the launch of a new trade deal between the United States and the European Union. This transatlantic free trade agreement (TAFTA)—or what government leaders are touting as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—is likely to carry copyright provisions that would pose a serious threat to digital rights. Past and currently negotiated trade agreements have enacted rules that would force ISPs to turn into copyright police, place harsh and disproportionate criminal penalties on file sharers, and seriously impair users’ ability to innovate and access content on the Internet.

Trademarks

• The Python Software Foundation recently went public with a battle against a company in Europe that was trying to claim a trademark over the name used for more than two decades by one of the world’s most popular programming languages.

Copyrights

• The Motion Picture Association is somewhat notorious for flipping out over every new technology and how it will, without doubt, mean death for them. Most famously, of course, the prediction that the VCR would be the “Boston Strangler” to the movie industry a mere six years before home video revenues outstripped box office revenues. However, this seems to be somewhat instinctual behavior. Everything new must automatically be classified as a threat, and the best response is to kill it outright. The latest version of this appears to be the threat of (gasp!) “cloud computing.” At a get together in Hong Kong, in which the movie industry was supposed to be talking about “protecting the screen community in the cloud era” apparently there was the typical predictions of doom with little in the way of suggestions. But there were some.

• Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante told a House congressional subcommittee Wednesday that everything from anticircumvention provisions and fair use to length of copyright and performance royalties should be on the table.

• Last week, the European Court of Human Rights (European Court) rejected the complaint of the ‘The Pirate Bay’ (‘TPB’) co-founders against their criminal conviction for facilitating copyright infringement. ARTICLE 19 is concerned at the Court’s apparent reluctance to become the next battleground for advancing the right to freedom of expression against copyright claims.

• The Competition Authority in Brazil (CADE) convicted om March 20th the country’s six major collecting societies and their central office (ECAD) – responsible for the collection of music royalties for public performance in Brazil – of formation of cartel and abuse of dominant position in fixing prices. According CADE, the Ecad and its associations not only organized to abusively fix prices, but also created barriers of entry for new associations to join the entity.

• With the possibility of comprehensive copyright reform in the US in the air, we warned that lobbyists from all sides were about to be very, very busy on Capitol Hill, and it has already begun. We’ve heard from very reliable sources that the MPAA has basically been blanketing Congress with the attached document, visiting as many offices as possible and leaving it behind as their talking points on why copyright is just freaking awesome.

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