● 04.06.13

● Links 6/4/2013: Alienware Gaming PC With GNU/Linux, OpenStack ‘Grizzly’, Sailfish OS SDK

Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Jubilar 20th Croatian Linux Users’ Convention DORS/CLUC 2013 will be held from 15th till 17th of May 2013 in Croatia’s capital city Zagreb. Convention is going to be for the first time under Croatia’s president Dr. Ivo Josipović high sponsorship.

• According to organisers, “Whether you are a beginner or advanced user of free and open source technologies, we believe that Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 will bring you three days of interesting keynotes, workshops, vast of new information and new business contacts.”

• Croatian Linux Users’ Convention is one of the biggest conventions in region that covers free and open source technologies and gathers experts from all around the globe with the goal of knowledge and experience exchange. Harald Welte, Ivan Guštin, Theodore Ts’o, Mark Shuttleworth, Dobrica Pavlinušić, Brian Fitzgerald, Rasmus Lerdorf are only some of the names of the big experts who attended the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention so far.

• After four years of development, Micromag Systems has finally completed the Mantis Hexapod Walking Machine, claimed to be the world’s largest all-terrain operational hexapod robot. The device stands nearly three meters tall, weighs just under two tons, and is controlled by a PC/104 module stack running embedded Linux.

• I was watching The Real Story Behind Wayland and X, a talk by Daniel Stone. The way he described the X server, we had been using a terrible piece of technology for years (still are). Linux had an inferior product doing critical things for the user. There were developers trying to fix its issues but were hindered by many other issues. A fresh start was needed and Wayland it was. It could even have been Mir.

• Even as the job market has remained generally dismal for much of the working world over the past few years, there have been a few notable exceptions.

• This morning, the U.S. employment report came out, with disappointing results that have sent markets down around the world. It’s still a tough time out there for job seekers, but we’ve been steadily reporting that in the arenas of Big Data and Linux, there are not only opportunities, but many good paying ones. This week, more reports have arrived corroborating these bright spots in the weak job market.

• As I recently reported, The Linux Foundation has done extensive surveys showing that demand is very high for job seekers with Linux skills. In fact, 93 percent of respondent employers in The Linux Foundation studies say they plan to hire at least one Linux professional within the next six months. And, more than 90 percent say they are having difficulty finding people with Linux skills.

• CHIP DESIGNER ARM has said that vendors are looking to standardise on both one chip architecture and a single operating system such as Linux across their product lines.

• With many of ARM’s licensees preparing to make a big splash in the server market, the firm claimed its architecture is the only one that scales from smartphones all the way up to servers. Lakshmi Mandyam, ARM director of Server Systems and Ecosystems told The INQUIRER that the ability to stick with one chip vendor and run the same operating system throughout its product stack is something “people find very interesting”.

Desktop

• Current mobile device: Nexus 4

• People still hear something about computers and repeat it mindlessly without understanding the world around them. One such example is the support for 32-bit architecture and the bundled application base. For them a home desktop performs better on any 32-bit OS and the native 32-bit applications than their 64-bit counterparts, and the user should restrict to it. It’s true if that mythical user never goes beyond web browsers, word processors and media players. That’s very much it. If he/she jumps into some database work, media encoding and some other number-crunching CPU-intensive task, the power of 64-bit shows, almost revolves circles around 32-bit thingy.

• The many recent big moves going on at Google got many people excited about the idea that Google might merge its Chrome OS and Android platforms, creating a simple and open unified operating system strategy. I’ve weighed in on why I don’t think this merger will happen.

Server

• In case you missed it, in October of last year, Adapteva wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to build a Raspberry Pi-inspired $99 Linux supercomputer. The campaign was successful in raising $898,921 for the first versoin of the Parallella computer, a supercomputer equipped with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 16- or 64-core Adapteva floating-point accelerator. Quite a few people have questioned this idea, but it’s actually quite interesting and could usher in the era of grassroots supercomputing. Adapteva’s CEO Andreas Olofsson has recently been shedding more light on the project.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has railed frequently and loudly against kernel developers breaking user space.

• The Linux kernel has been ported to the Texas Instruments TI-Nspire. The TI-Nspire series platform powers higher-end graphing calculators in recent years from the Dallas-based company.

Graphics Stack

• In one of the most prolific contributions to open-source by a hardware company ever, AMD has contributed code to enable the Unified Video Decoder on AMD Radeon GPUs using the open-source Gallium3D based driver.

• Think Tegra is only for smartphones and tablets? Think again! New third party drivers — which have been developed both with Nvidia’s blessing and assistance — will help to give the platform a foot in the server room door.

• Last month at the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC), NVIDIA and Valve shared their experiences and pitfalls in porting the Source Engine to Linux. While talking about Valve’s experiences, many of the information can apply to any game developer (or Direct3D/OpenGL application) wishing to come to Linux.

• The PDF slides in full from the GDC 2013 presentation by NVIDIA/Valve can be found in full at developer.nvidia.com. To Many Phoronix readers, this information isn’t too new. Below are a few of the highlights from these slides.

• The Gallium3D HUD that makes it very easy to show various driver/hardware related real-time performance metrics on a heads-up display drawn over OpenGL applications, has already received a few improvements.

• As a potential performance-boosting addition, the “RadeonSI” Linux driver for open-source support of the AMD Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards now has patches for supporting tiling.

Benchmarks

• Our latest benchmarks from the ASUS S56CA-WH31 Intel Ultrabook is comparing the performance of this Ivy Bridge laptop between Fedora 18 and a recent Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot under various workloads.

• The ASUS S56CA-WH31 is the laptop/ultrabook powered by an Intel Core i3 3217U “Ivy Bridge” processor with HD 4000 graphics that was used for the Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu Linux Intel OpenGL benchmarks and is also going to deliver some results from Windows 7 SP1 with Fedora and Ubuntu and other configurations later today or tomorrow. In this article are just some quick and early Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 comparison results for reference purposes.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• Pidgin is the default chat client of many Linux distros like Mint, Fuduntu, Solus … It supports many protocols, like Yahoo, Google, MSN and of course, Facebook. Here is how you set up and use facebook chat with Pidgin:

Games

• Take a deep breath: once a cult sandbox builder, Minecraft has racked up a total of more than 10 million sales across PC, Mac and Linux. Looking at the rather handy Minecraft Stats page, you can see that right this second 10,002,651 have bought the game, with 11,321 of those sales made in the last 24 hours. Those stats have probably changed by the time this post goes live, but just take that as evidence that Minecraft sells. A lot.

• It gives a good nod to SDL as well which is used for Steam and the game ports, the latest version of which improves alt-tabbing on full screen windows dramatically for me.

• The Activision and Raven Software game studios have open-sourced two of their games for “for people to learn from and play with” the code.

• The source code to the games Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy are now open-source and hosted on SourceForge.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Clean-up efforts were continuing Thursday near White River, Ont., where more than 63,000 litres of oil were spilled from a freight train after 22 cars came off the rails.

• Canadian Pacific Rail revised its estimate of how much oil was leaked. Initial reports on Wednesday said about 600 litres of oil had leaked from the tank cars.

• Early estimates are that about four barrels of crude oil were spilled when a Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd train derailed in northern Ontario on Wednesday, a company spokesman said in an emailed statement.

• Today a new cool feature arrived in Krita development version (many thanks to Boudewijn Rempt who did it): the “LayerGroupSwitcher”. Basically it’s just two little shortcuts (not assigned by default), that switch to next or previous group layer, hiding the previous group and showing the current one. With this it’s much faster to work on an animation or image sequence using group layers to separate frames.

• In their monthly stabilisation update, the KDE developers have fixed 107 bugs in the open source desktop environment and its associated applications. In particular, KDE 4.10.2 improves the desktop environment’s Personal Information Management (PIM) application, Kontact, and its window manager and compositor, KWin. The KDE Development Platform has also been updated. More information about the update can be found in the announcement from the KDE team. KDE 4.10.2 is the second stabilisation update to KDE 4.10, which was released in February.

• The Kate text editor received a large number of bug fixes for the 4.10 release, and some exciting new features. A mini-map scroll bar is now available for Kate users, and an improved notification system. If you use the Kate text editor for KDE, be sure to take advantage of the latest changes.

• Free software projects heavily rely on user feedbacks, especially bug reports. Filing bug reports is one of the best ways for a user to contribute to his favorite app and make it better. However at times lack of proper bug report makes it harder for a developer to understand what problems a user is facing. So as important as it is to file a bug report, it’s more important to file it correctly. Incorrect bug report irritates a user as he feels that no one pays attention to his report and discourages him to file a report in future. At the same time it irritates a developer because he wants to know what’s wrong, help the user and make the application better he doesn’t even understand what the problem is.

Distributions

• Linpus has informed us via email that the second maintenance release of the Linpus Lite 1.9 Linux Live operating system is now available for download and upgrade (for existing users only).

New Releases

• David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system, proudly announced a few hours ago (April 4) that the server edition of the highly anticipated Pear OS 7 Linux distribution is now available for download.

Arch Family

• I have used almost every major GNU/Linux based distribution out there whether it be Debian, Xandros, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Linux Mint, Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu. Each of those distributions have their own pros and cons. After using Debian for a while I switched to Ubuntu in 2005 and had been using it as my sole distro till 2011 when Unity happened. I was not just a user but also an advocate and a very strong supporter of Ubuntu. However, things changed with Ubuntu lately and online integration was the last straw on the camels back. I switched to openSUSE running KDE on it.

Slackware Family

• It is well known that Slackware ships with KDE4 and codecs for various types of audio and video. However, MP4 and a few other codecs are not supported OOB. I spent some time mucking around with different phonon backends for KDE4 in an attempt to get some of my audio files to play in Amarok. Unfortunately, nothing like that worked for me. It finally occurred to me to check into gstreamer codecs packs. I discovered that GST has ffmpeg support. These are the things I needed to install to make this work:

Red Hat Family

• Hosting company Peak 10 on Thursday revealed that it would provide colo services to popular open source and enterprise Linux provider Red Hat.

• In addition to general availability of its data center network, Peak 10 is also providing Red Hat with a private test lab for the company to scrutinize its applications preceding full release.

Fedora

Debian Family

• The Debian Project has announced that Bytemark Hosting has donated a fully populated 16 server blade HP BladeSystem with HP Modular Storage Arrays containing 57TB of storage. The new server, which will make its home at Bytemark’s new data centre in York, is said to be worth £150,000 per annum in commercial terms. Bytemark said that they have relied on Debian on their servers since they started the company in 2002 and said it “was always an embarrassingly good deal”.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• PC gaming is steadily finding new footing in the living room. Valve has pushed the movement along recently, announcing plans for the Steam Box and adding controller functionality with Steam Big Picture Mode. The company has also championed Linux as an alternative platform, and as reported by Engadget, PC manufacturer Alienware is now following suit with an Ubuntu-powered X51 gaming rig.

• Dell is one of the few PC makers that attempts to cater to Linux users with its computers. The company’s “Project Sputnik” laptop, a developer-centric version of its XPS 13 that comes with Ubuntu, is one such effort. PC gamers can also get in on the fun with the Linux version of Dell’s Alienware X51 slimline desktop, which as of today can be purchased running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Flavours and Variants

• Fuduntu is a pretty awesome distribution. Rarely do I give a perfect ten to one, and so far, only Linux Mint managed that accolade. But then recently, I tested the last edition of Fuduntu, and it turned out to be magnificent. So much, in fact, that I had it committed in my production setup, where it failed just short of the 10/10 mark, but still exhibited fairly great results.

Devices/Embedded

• Developers of embedded Linux- and embedded Android-based system software are well aware of the benefits of open-source software and its collaborative community of developers. One key resource is the growing abundance of free video tutorials and demonstrations amassed on the websites and YouTube channels of embedded-Linux and embedded-Android oriented projects, organizations, and companies.

• Denx Computer Systems has introduced a second member of its SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) product line. The M53 module is available with Freescale’s i.MX535 or i.MX537 SOCs (system-on-chip processors), which integrate an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core, graphics engines, and numerous other functions.

• The micro computer Raspberry Pi has become a real hit among tech fans all over the world. The model A was sold out in the US just within a few hours. Everybody wants this credit-card sized computer. And of course, being cute and cheap isnt the main reason behind its success. It is because with Raspberry Pi, people can create a lot of amazing things. And if you wonder what these amazing things are, here is a list of 10 awesome projects created with Raspberry Pi.

• Go for Windows 7 if you need a mainstream OS and Ubuntu 12.10 if you don’t.

Phones

Android

• The chief developer of the popular alternative Android firmware CyanogenMod thought that requiring devices to report unique smartphone and tablet data would be an unqualified blessing. They reckoned without their users.

• The CyanogenMod developers have reversed a change in how the alternative open source firmware for Android devices transmits anonymised development information about its users to the project maintainer after users protested about the change.

Free Software/Open Source

• We’re all still reeling from Disney’s shuttering of LucasArts yesterday, and tributes to the once-indomitable game studio are sprouting up all over the Web. One such tribute sure to bring a smile to programmer geeks everywhere comes from development house Raven, which has this morning released the source code for its two Star Wars titles: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. The two FPS titles were released in 2002 and 2003 and continued the story of Kyle Katarn, the bounty hunter and Jedi first introduced in 1995′s Dark Forces.

• Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

Web Browsers

• The latest NetMarketShare browser numbers are in for March 2013. They reveal a three-way battle for the hearts and minds of PC web browser users, but on tablets and smartphones, Safari is leading by a wide margin. StatCounter, however, has Chrome and the Android native browser leading respectively.

Chrome

• There’s some more interesting web-browser related news. Google has pushed out the beta of their Chrome 27 browser and it comes with several new user-facing features.

Mozilla

• When it comes to making payments, lots of us still turn to credit cards, checks and other longstanding ways to get the job done, but the race is on to have most payments made via “digital wallets.” You can already make electronic payments via your smartphone using PayPal, Square, Google payments and other solutions, although the number of places you can do so is limited. Now, Mozilla is taking a big step forward in the digital wallet space by developing a mobile electronic payment platform that is likely to be standard in the company’s Firefox OS.

• Mozilla has released an early draft version of a payment service API, enabling Firefox OS app developers to process purchases. The API design is in part based on Google Wallet, but the WebPayment API will remain open to being used for a wide range of payment service providers.

SaaS/Big Data

• If you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation hIf you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation has just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

• OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors. as just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

• OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors.

• Roughly six months after the launch of its “Folsom” release last fall, OpenStack on Thursday unveiled version 2013.1 “Grizzly,” the seventh and latest release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

• I have news for him. Folks who have choices and know they have choices do open their eyes and look at what’s available. Further, they like FLOSS because is does allow the flexibility people want. Non-Free software is advantageous to some. Free Software works for everyone else.

• I guess it takes time. Only a few years ago Gartner gave FLOSS no chance at all. Some of Gartner’s staff are still in denial but they will surely evolve faced with such overwhelming popularity of FLOSS with Gartner’s customers.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Business

• Getting data out of one app and into another is big business. It’s a business that enterprise integration firm Mulesoft is now growing with new funding and products.

• Mulesoft announced this week $37 million in new funding, bringing total investment in the company to $81 million.

• Mulesoft is not a new company, having started out under the name Mulesource in 2003.The company originated as a commercial effort around the open source Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) created by Mulesoft founder Ross Mason.

BSD

• More of the Radeon kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver stack being ported to FreeBSD from Linux is beginning to function.

• For the past few months, the open-source Linux Radeon KMS driver has been ported to Linux. It’s shown signs of life but still isn’t fully working or in a state where it will be merged to the mainline code-base in the near future.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• The latest version of the GNOME 2 fork, MATE, is now out. MATE 1.6 includes updates to Caja, the panel and the control center

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

Open Hardware

• To many, “open source” refers to software that is usually (though not always) nonproprietary, easily modifiable, and free. The term “open source” can also be applied to hardware — for example, optical-mounting hardware, as recently introduced by a lab at Michigan Technological University (MTU).1

• In a further twist, the hardware comes in software form, as downloadable files to be used with a 3D printer to build the final product. These 3D-printable mounting and other devices include lens holders, customizable chopper wheels, lab jacks, and optical rails — and even optics, in the form of a liquid-filled lens.

Programming

• For years now, RedMonk has argued that programming language usage and overall diversity is growing rapidly. With developers increasingly empowered to select the best tool for the job rather than having to content themselves with the one they are given, the fragmentation of runtimes in use has unsurprisingly been heavy. Where enterprises used to be at least superficially built on a small number of approved programming languages, today’s enterprise is far more heterogeneous than in years past, with traditional compiled languages (C/C++) coexisting along with managed alternatives (C#/Java) as well as a host of dynamic options (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby).

Standards/Consortia

• On Tuesday, OASIS made an extremely rare announcement for an information technology consortium: that it has successfully completed the process of becoming accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). As a result, it is now able to submit its standards to ANSI for recognition as American National Standards (ANS). And also to directly submit its standards for adoption by ISO and IEC. This is a milestone that’s worthy of note, despite the fact that over 200 standards setting organizations (SSOs) have achieved a similar status in the past.

Leftovers

• It aims to ”harvest” the entire UK web domain to document current events and record the country’s burgeoning collection of online cultural and intellectual works. Billions of web pages, blogs and e-books will now be amassed along with the books, magazines and newspapers which have been stored for several centuries.

Science

Health/Nutrition

• Every Sunday from noon to 4pm, volunteers gather at their “mobile clinic” to make a difference, and offer free healthcare in downtown Eugene, Ore. What started as a temporary first aid tent along the Occupy Eugene movement in October 2011 became the Occupy Medical clinic in February 2012.

• These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

• It is made of trash, is as large as maybe even Texas and is in the middle of the ocean. Oh, and it’s severely under-populated. Actually, no one lives in Garbage Patch, no man, no animal.

• Okay, Garbage Patch is not really a country but to focus on monumental examples of man-made pollution, the United Nations’ cultural and science agency UNESCO will designate the conglomerations of rubbish a veritable territory of its own.

Security

• Reading the news should be an essential habit, especially for students and children, yet anyone under 18 found browsing through the news online could hypothetically face jail time under the latest draft of proposed changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is supposed to be “rushed” to Congress during its “cyber week” in the middle of April.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• As much as our leaders would like them to have taken the bait, North Korea has not declared war on the South or the U.S. in response to our unprecedented provocations. So when all else fails, leave it to yellow journalism like this piece of work from the New York Times or this obviously Photoshopped image that came out this past week.

• The much touted “state of war” declaration is not a declaration of war from Kim Jung Un but rather a statement of support for whatever decision he has too make from the “the government, political parties and organizations of the DPRK.” It claims only they will declare themselves in a state of war WHEN their leader makes that decision showing they are completely behind him. It is a statement of support from the people and perhaps a warning to the South that the North will not fold under their attack. But not a declaration of war from Kim Jung Un.

• There is a need to create a culture of panic in the United States and, arguably, everywhere else where the major media conglomerates have established news outlets. This arises from the ebb and flow of world events and our collective need to move on from one event to the next. What was once headline news will not be for long, so a headline blitz is needed to make things feel urgent, relevant and pertinent to our personal lives.

• Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has pardoned a US Air Force colonel convicted in absentia over the rendition of an Egyptian imam in 2003.

• Italy’s president on Friday pardoned a US Air Force colonel convicted in absentia by Italian courts in the CIA-conducted abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street in a move he hoped would keep American-Italian relations strong.

• The first striking paradox of this conference is that it is being held in Qatar, a country where women’s rights remain limited, to say the least. In mid-March, the Qatar government even expressed concerns “about references to women’s sexual and reproductive rights“ which are contained in the UN Declaration of the Commission on the Status of Women called Elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.

• [...]

• Were a US proxy regime to be installed in Damascus, the rights and liberties of Syrian women might well be following the same “freedom-threatening path” as that of Afghan women under the US-backed Taliban regime and continuing under the US-NATO occupation.

• Drones are proving the best recruiters for the Taliban, writes Ben Doherty in Islamabad.

• The story is odd, because such high-ranking CIA officials are normally named in news reports about their activities. So why is the media concealing her identity in this case? Because the CIA asked them to–that’s apparently all it takes.

• The real question is: Why did the CIA ask? The Agency reportedly wants her identity concealed because they say she is undercover, suggesting that disclosure could be a matter of national security or safety. But FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola (3/28/13) casts doubt on that claim, pointing out her high rank and the fact that her name is well-known to establishment reporters.

• A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

• [...]

• If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.

• The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantánamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part.

Cablegate

• It was the video that put WikiLeaks on the map: “Collateral Murder” turned the tide of war in Iraq and landed Private first class Bradley Manning in military detention. But for Army veteran Ethan McCord, it was just another day on duty.

• JULIAN Assange cannot even look out of the windows of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, but his confinement has not dampened his work ethic, his father says.

• Julian Assange – seen here in London’s Ecuadorian embassy where he has claimed diplomatic asylum – has a new voice of support.

• The Wikileaks founder is fighting extradition to Sweden in connection with sexual assault allegations which the Australian says are trumped up charges.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• It’s been gone since 1983, but the Lazarus Project has brought it back to life.

• Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 barrels had been lost, amounting to almost 30,000 gallons of crude oil.

• According to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry of Japan, this year was a record low for the whaling fleet, with only 103 Antarctic minke whales and no fin whales caught for its “research whaling” program. Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi blames the “unforgivable sabotage” by activists, particularly by the militant environmentalist group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

• The oil giant can deny permission to journalists, observers in fly zone over tar sands disaster

• Often described as “uncontacted,” isolated groups living deep in the South American forest resist the ways of the modern world—at least for now

Finance

• A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.

• Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM.

• The free market is a myth. From drug patents to quantitative easing, businesses make money because of state help

• U.S. President Barack Obama has selected a partner at the investment firm of Goldman Sachs in Chicago to be the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, CBC News has learned.

• Sources tell CBC News Network’s Power & Politics that Bruce Heyman has accepted the job but still has to pass a vetting process in order to be be formally nominated. His confirmation will be up to the U.S. Congress.

• If he is approved, Heyman would replace David Jacobson, who has held the position since 2009. Jacobson is also from Chicago.

• As the effects of the sequester agreement ripple through the American economy–massive cuts, that is, to social programs, and the military to some extent–one thing is clear: both sides–President Obama and the leadership of the Republican Party–seem to think that public debt is the biggest challenge facing the American economy. Well, our next guest begs to differ.

• Now joining us in the studio is Michael Hudson. He was a Wall Street financial analyst, is now a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His recent books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.

• The covert handling of huge amounts of money away from public accountability has fueled the global austerity crisis by shifting tax burdens onto average citizens…

• A former trader at Goldman Sachs pleaded guilty Wednesday to fraud linked to a scheme to hide an unauthorised $US8 billion ($7.6 billion) futures bet he made at the US banking giant.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to “illegal immigrants,” except in direct quotes. The term “illegal,” AP’s new rules state, refers only to actions, and not to people.

• Though they say it’s just the result of an ongoing in-house effort to rid the Stylebook of “labels,” the change is undoubtedly a victory for activists, who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term. Not only because it’s dehumanizing. As AP’s executive editor Kathleen Carroll points out, it’s also bad reporting, a “lazy device” that obscures meaningful distinctions.

• Seventeen bills introduced in the Arizona legislature in 2013 can be tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and every member of the Republican leadership in the state are current or recent ALEC members, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and its allies “ALEC in Arizona: The Voice Of Corporate Special Interests In The Halls Of Arizona’s Legislature.”

• “ALEC is a secretive but powerful force in Arizona politics,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director. “This report exposes how corporations and Arizona legislators, have worked together to keep citizens in the dark about ALEC’s extreme agenda.”

Censorship

• We just recently had a post on the head of one of Homeland Security’s “Fusion Centers” (the same Fusion Centers found by a Congressional investigation to be a near total waste of time and money, finding no terrorists, but violating the public’s civil liberties) who claimed that the DHS centers did not spy on Americans, and then immediately admitted that they spied on “anti-government” Americans.

• The definition of “anti-government” was mostly left as an exercise to the reader. However, in a bout of good timing, the Partnership for Civil Justice has released some new DHS documents it received via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showing that DHS regularly spied on peaceful demonstrators and activists.

• Eight of the 10 victims of the neo-Nazi NSU underground organisation killed between 2000 and 2007 were Turkish citizens but no Turkish media organisation has been granted guaranteed seats for this month’s trial of suspected NSU member Beate Zschäpe.

• Yesterday Sabah said it was going to the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe to demand a seat reservation. The mass-market Hürriyet is considering joining the complaint.

Privacy

• The National Security Agency is closing a secretive listening post it has quietly operated near Yakima since the early 1970s, a newspaper reported Thursday.

• #The electronic eavesdropping operation, located within the U.S. Army’s Yakima Training Center, has been linked to Echelon, a global surveillance network operated by the NSA.

• The National Security Agency is closing a secretive listening post it has quietly operated north of Yakima since the early 1970s, The Yakima Herald reported Thursday.

• Utah Governor Gary Herbert is lobbying the Obama administration for his state to become one of the six drone testing sites to be established next year by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

• In a story published by the Deseret News, the Governor’s Office of Economic Development is identified as playing a lead role in convincing the FAA to choose Utah from among the other sites in 37 states vying for this distinction.

• While the exact location of the site is “under wraps,” Herbert’s office is promoting the idea by publicizing the economic benefits to the Beehive State.

• Worried that its citizens might be spied upon by eyes in the sky, a Twin Cities-area community has become one of the nation’s first cities to stand up against drones.

• Missouri lawmakers advanced two bills this week that would outlaw the government use of drones — though they are rare in the state — and the implementation of Agenda 21, the United Nation’s program promoting sustainability, though it simply makes recommendations.

• Learn to programme and assert your independence or resign yourself to being incarcerated in a digital prison, albeit one with wall-to-wall carpet, television and central heating..It’s an open prison but it’s still a prison. Google Reader is dead. Long live RSS.

Civil Rights

• Dear Free-Range Kids: A few days ago CPS served my wife and me with a complaint alleging that we are neglectful. They want to take custody. Here is the chain of events that has led to this:

• Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

• Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.

• Nullification is not the right of states to nullify any federal act. Rather, it is the right to choose to not enforce any federal act that fails to conform to the constitutionally established limits on its authority. Nullification presupposes that there are myriad (albeit limited) areas over which the Constitution has given purview to the federal government: defense, naturalization, foreign relations, interstate commerce, etc.

• Not only has the president ignored his promised platform planks, he’s actually reinforced and strengthened some of the most egregious portions of Bush-era abuses of power.

• THE murder of infants with a disability in Nazi Germany was recalled during a highly charged debate on abortion, as doctors voted to reject radical calls for changes in the law.

• Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the U.S. government, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acknowledging it is one of the first firms to do so.

• Google took the unusual step last month of revealing, albeit in vague terms, the number of NSLs it received from the US government. At the time the company said it was working with the authorities to improve transparency around the subject, but according to court filings it is also fighting against handing over users’ data.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• No-one forced, or compelled, Duncan Smith to make that statement. The assertion that it’s possible is one that rankles many people, however. Of course not everyone is feeling the pinch of recession and csuts, and that includes the former Conservative Party leader. While he may have been on unemployment benefits in the ’80s, he’s had steady employment for the last twenty years, all on public funds. Now asking him to try living on the same solutions he’s proposing for others isn’t really that big a stretch. In fact, given his experiences being a ward of the welfare state, and his military service, it shouldn’t be that difficult for him to survive, adapt, and overcome.

• However, the speed with which he’s back-pedalled and tried to move away from his initial position shows how promises trip lightly off the tongue when you’re a politician defending your party base. It’s ‘a stunt’ he claimed, ignoring the simple fact that after 20+ years as an MP, one currently earning significantly more (£134,565/year) than the average wage (£28,700 for UK males, according to the BBC in November) he may be a bit out of touch, and a bit clueless about the realities of his policies. Sure it looks good on paper, but without experiencing it first-hand, he’s not going to understand why it doesn’t work. At the time of writing, over 400,000 people have already said they’d like him to re-acquaint himself with that area of his job, to help him perform better.

• Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.

• Google receives 20 million “takedown” requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.

• A new poll today places the Icelandic Pirate Party in parliament, with their election three weeks out. This follows a continuous and rapid ascent for the Icelandic Pirate Party. The poll will probably have the additional effect of putting the media spotlights on the party, further accelerating its growth.

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