● 05.09.13

● Links 9/5/2013: Facebook Exploitation of Android, Copyright and Privacy Legal Threats

Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• There are a lot of personalities out there in the Linux corner of the Internet. Some of them are developers, some are advocates and evangelists. Others are community enthusiasts. If you’re looking to stay updated on the Linux world, here’s a list of some of the most interesting people to follow, just to get you started.

• Laptops on board the International Space Station are set to switch to Linux.

• Although Linux has been a part of the orbiting outpost since launch, laptop computers have been running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

• Well it’s spring storm season in many parts of the world, so it should come as no great surprise that we’ve had some storms here in the Linux blogosphere as well.

• Just in the last few weeks we’ve had the bank that decided Windows was cheaper; we’ve had the shockingly FUD-filled FOSS survey; and we’ve had less-than-entirely-flattering words said about Linux’s waistline, to name just a few examples.

Server

• Many cloud applications are included in the roster of compatible software, such as Red Hat JBoss Application Server and others. These make Linux perfectly suited for enterprises looking for a convenient, secure, and inexpensive cloud deployment. The growing number of businesses is proof that the operating system is the right choice. Your enterprise will most likely benefit from going in this direction if your IT team hasn’t already considered or implemented the open source, secure, and technically remarkable Linux system.

• IBM’s POWER based system revenue was also down significantly during the quarter suffering a 31 percent decline.

• “Our declines were driven by both the high performance computing segment, where we had a strong performance last year, and the impact of the transition to POWER7+,” Loughridge said.

• The POWER7+ server lineup was expanded in February of this year with a new range of entry level server systems.

• Linux tends to be associated with x86 hardware in a business context, but some well-known companies are running it on mainframes.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• CHIPMAKER Intel has released its software development kit (SDK) for the OpenCL Applications XE 2013 integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows and Linux.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Spicy Horse is fresh off their Kickstarter for Akaneiro, and now they’re moving on to greener pastures with the CCG/RTS, Hell Invaders for PC, Mac, Linux and mobile tablet devices.

• The game’s beta is expected to run for about two weeks and will retail for $20 when it’s released for PC, Mac and Linux.

• Some of the best things in the world are open source — that is to say that the basic code or instructions for it are available for everyone to use for free. Google’s Android operating system, for example, is open to anyone who wants to use it. That provides companies like Amazon and Ouya with the base infrastructure they needed to create unique software for their consumer-electronic devices.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Choice has always been a hallmark of the desktop Linux world, where users can select not just the distribution they prefer but also the desktop environment, among virtually countless other features.

• Plasma Active is to tablets what KDE is to desktops and laptops. Plasma Active is a joint project by the KDE community, basysKom and open-slx, and uses much of the codebase of KDE4′s Plasma Desktop to provide a clean and polished KDE-like experience on mobile devices. If you haven’t heard of this ambitious project before, check out our story on the first look on Plasma Active 3. We also recently covered a detailed tutorial on installing Plasma Active on Nexus 7.

• KDE developer Daniel Nicoletti has announced the release of colord-kde 0.3.0. He recommends upgrading to this release as “it has lots of fixes compared to 0.2.0″.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNU/Linux is ruling the roost today – it dominates almost every aspect of our lives by powering devices that we use without consciously knowing that it’s running Linux. One area where GNU/Linux is still behind is the consumer desktop market which is dominated by Microsoft.

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• Amazon Web Services had added Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 to its list of supported Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The release, which is available in all Amazon regions, comes two months after Red Hat released 6.4 to its existing customers.

• The UK government’s love affair with open-source technology has given software house Red Hat a shot in the arm, we’re told.

• The company boasted that its government and system integrator business has grown in the “high double-digit rates” over the last three years. Red Hat, which offers various flavours of the open-source operating system Linux, said subscriptions for its software make up the majority of its revenue from Whitehall.

• Red Hat is one of the many vendors and developers contributing to the evolution and success of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, and helping to lead Red Hat’s OpenStack efforts is Senior Principal Software Engineer Mark McLoughlin.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On the instructions of e-court committee Supreme Court of India and the Chief Justice, MM Kumar and Justice Mansoor Ahmad Mir, Judge Incharge e-Court Committee, High Court of Jammu & Kashmir, the continued training on “Ubuntu Linux Awareness Cum Training Programme under Change Management” for the Judicial Officers of Jammu and Samba districts was held on April 28, 2013 at J&K State Judicial Academy, Jammu.

• I have a theory (I know, I am full of them). Like most of you, as I have gotten older I have also tried to improve as a person. I am not just talking about being better at what I do with my career and hobbies, but I want to be a genuinely good person across the board; a good husband, father, son, friend, colleague, and dude who you bump your shopping cart into when buying milk. My theory is that people fundamentally improve by (a) making mistakes and (b) understanding and learning from those mistakes to not only prevent making the mistake again, but to also uncover the cause and effect of why the mistake was made, thus improving your life.

• Now, the (probably illogical) logical continuation of my theory is that to make improvements (a) you need to make more mistakes (which opens up the opportunity for learning), and (b) you need to develop CSI-like capabilities in assessing those mistakes and their root causes. Continuing the theme, if we can figure out ways to identify ways of triggering making more mistakes in a way that doesn’t get you arrested and we can identify ways to help us understand why we screw up the way we do, we should have a golden ticket for rocking our lives. Incidentally, this theory was boiled in my head while driving out to pick up Thai food on Saturday night, so this is no Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity in terms of completeness.

Devices/Embedded

• The majority of set-top boxes running XBMC are Android-powered devices. However, The Little Black Box is an Linux-powered set-top device that arrives with XBMC pre-installed.

• There’s a novel project currently raising money at Kickstarter. Called UDOO, it wants to “bridge the gap between Arduino micro-controllers and the Raspberry Pi single-board computer,” providing extra computational power and “more opportunity to your imagination.”

• The Raspberry Pi is all the rage for hobbyists in search of cheap, credit card-sized computers that can run a full PC operating system. Arduino boards have been around nearly a decade, meanwhile, powering robots and all sorts of other creative electronics projects.

• Gigahertz-class pocket-sized ARM Ubuntu rig, anyone?

• In this guest column, Linaro CEO George Grey examines the expanding ARM ecosystem, discusses emerging and “disruptive” market opportunities for ARM technology, and highlights Linaro’s recent ARM Linux software development progress, working group formation, and membership growth.

• MediaTek has already received orders for over one million units of a dual-core Cortex-A7 processor it announced May 2, says DigiTimes. Designed for affordable Android smartphones with up to qHD (960×540) displays, the 28nm-fabricated MT6572 SOC (system-on-chip) augments its dual 1.2GHz cores with integrated radios for WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, and GPS functions, as well as an HSPA+/TD-SCDMA baseband.

Phones

Ballnux

• Consumer electronics giant LG is rumoured to be going back into the tablet market, which it ditched two years ago.

• LG’s original Optimus Pad flopped quite badly. It was practically a soulless also-ran design and it was way too pricey. Since, LG has managed to regain its footing. Its phones are selling quite well, which wasn’t the case a couple of years ago. As tablets are practically just an extension of smartphone operations, it now seems poised to give them another go.

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• If what we hear from the folks at SamMobile, a news site dedicated to Samsung devices, is correct we may see an 11-inch Google Nexus soon. Not just that, Samsung seems to be working on its own Galaxy Tab 11. All that and more later this year. According to SamMobile, Samsung is planning to launch four (!) whole new tablets this year. Along with a Google Nexus 11 are Galaxy Tab 8, Galaxy Tab 11 and Galaxy Tab DUOS 7.

• While Tab 8 and Tab 11 seem to be one-inch upgrades from their 7- and 10-inch Tab 2 counterparts, Galaxy Tab DUOS is whole new category in Samsung tablets portfolio because of its dual-SIM feature. The rest of DUOS’s hardware specs seem average though. We, at Muktware, wonder about Samsung’s sudden love for 8 and 11 inches.

Free Software/Open Source

• Finance Act 2012 introduced several retrospective amendments, purportedly ‘clarificatory’, to the Income-tax Act, 1961, with respect to non-resident taxpayers. A key amendment was the extension of ‘royalty’ to include payment toward shrink-wrapped software, connectivity charges, transponder hire charges and so on. Another significant amendment related to “indirect transfer” of capital assets located in India, thereby overcoming the Supreme Court decision in the case of Vodafone.

• A forthcoming documentary from Filament Features will feature the work of the Open Source Ecology project, which aims to produce a set of open source tools capable of building environmentally sustainable communities.

• Radio frequency (RF) signals run from about 3kHz to 300GHz. As a test and measurement designer, some of my data acquisition rates will get into the 100s of kHz, or perhaps up to 10s of MHz with a digital oscilloscope, but usually that’s all. I also typically try to use existing protocols for as much of the communication as I can, typically USB, Serial, GPIB, SPI, I2C or occasionally Ethernet, Wi-Fi or radio.

• More and more SMEs are turning to open source IT and telephony solutions for a variety of reasons, among them cost savings and the flexibility to manage systems such as scaling up or down, according to business needs.

• How fast things move from theoretical, through experimental to implementation. It was only recently that a semi-practical scheme for homomorphic encryption was invented and we already have an open source implementation in C++.

• We are pleased to announce the establishment of the Open Source Geospatial Laboratory at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

• Gluu’s open source authorization and authentication platform, OX, will enable the next generation of Toshiba Cloud TV Services to authenticate consumers and integrate with popular Internet apps.

• OSS facilitates the preservation of a wide range of information for future developments and it comes with considerable financial savings. Government institutes and PSUs are looking forward to more adoption and implementation of OSS in their IT infrastructure. The increasing awareness of open source in the public and government sector has been one of the significant developments in IT technology.

Events

• The most awaited annual event in lives of all Googlers (developers mostly) is fast approaching. Google I/O was started in 2008. The “I” and “O” stand for input/output, and “Innovation in the Open”.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chrome users can have enhanced experience with what Google calls the packaged apps which are now available throuh the Chrome Web Store. Google had announced the developer preview of Chrome packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher a few months ago. Google enabled developers to upload their packaged apps to the Chrome Web Store and test them, but there was no way for users to find those apps an install them.

SaaS/Big Data

• There’s more — much more — to the Big Data software ecosystem than Hadoop. Here are four open source projects that will help you get big benefits from Big Data.

• Cloud interoperability and portability seems to be a hot topic these days. This topic is one that I have a bit of experience with. Back in 2008, I had the fortune, or possibly misfortune, of starting one of the first groups dedicated to the discussion of Cloud interoperability, aptly titled, “The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum”. For a while this Google group was a popular forum for the discussion of various interop and standardization challenges, but it ultimately faded as politics, personalities and priorities shifted. Five years later, I thought I’d revisit the discussion.

• Opscode, the maker of Chef, an open-source automation platform, has announced it is collaborating with IBM to bring the power of Opscode Chef and the Open Source Chef Community to enterprise businesses.

• Opscode demonstrates significant momentum for its Chef open-source automation platform at its annual ChefConf event, including deals with IBM and Microsoft.

• Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu Server version 13.04 operating system is now listing as available for download.

• This latest version features high-availability (HA) for OpenStack deployments.

• When businesses buy software, they don’t expect to take what’s off the shelf. They get everything customized as they like, open to tweak and update, and with their own privacy and data kept under lock and key.

Databases

• Version 7 of TokuDB, Tokutek’s high performance MySQL Database storage engine, has been released as an open source community edition and as a new supported TokuDB Enterprise Edition. TokuDB has previously been a proprietary storage engine for MySQL which has specialised in handling write-intensive workloads. Developed orignally by researchers at MIT, Rutgers and the State University of New York, the storage engine uses Fractal Tree indexing, a technique based on cache-oblivious algorithms.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• At the moment most of the office suite are developed in C++ or in JavaScript. Joeffice is the first open source office suite in Java. Japplis has chosen the Apache license 2.0 which makes it possible to change the code without the need to share the modified code.

CMS

• 4. There is no training or support if you choose open source.

• Um, no. Any developer who has spent time honing his open source craft can tell you that this is untrue. Just because some well-funded proprietary CMS hosts an annual conference doesn’t mean that the open source users lacks support. Open source users can find online help, forums, paid classes, local meet ups, YouTube how-tos, expensive manuals, more expensive consultants, and whizz-bang contract developers. The support and training are there; they just don’t get packaged into some monthly fee along with the CMS itself.

• Victoria Legal Aid has gone live with a new Web presence based on Drupal. Previously the organisation, which provides legal aid to disadvantaged Victorians, used the proprietary RedDot content management system.

• With a nod to the open government movement, the Arlington County Board this weekend unanimously approved making portions of the programming behind the county website publicly available.

• Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.1. The biggest feature of Joomla 3.1 is Tags, a built-in tagging system that allows dynamic tagging across content-types. Tags hasn’t been created for articles only, but rather Joomla integrated tagging into other areas of its core that made sense (e.g. contacts, feeds, etc). For example, Tags allow end-users to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles with other content types any way they like. These tags can be dynamically created from the content, without having to navigate to the Tags component, thus bringing both power and simplicity.

• Administrators of the Joomla blogging platform and content management system can now tag their content so it will be better indexed and automatically routed to the correct locations on their websites.

Education

Healthcare

• When the Healthcare.gov website re-launches in June, users may not notice much of a change, but on the back end, there is a lot of open-source magic going on that will make content generation and the sharing of information more seamless than it is on perhaps any other government site operating today.

Business

• Freedom OSS is a recognized industry leader and a technology advisor to Fortune 500 companies, offering a wide range of consulting and implementation services. In partnership with some of the pioneers of the professional open source, Freedom OSS delivers consulting services and creates platforms that help clients reduce costs and improve quality of their systems and overall business outcomes by leveraging license and royalty free software solutions. Virtually all engagements of Freedom OSS are handled on a managed delivery/fixed cost basis, which we and Freedom OSS believe is another strong positive for clients, striving to optimize expenses and increase transparency and predictability of their cost structures.

Semi-Open Source

• Developers of the Zurmo Open-Source Customer Relationship Management application today announced the release of Zurmo 1.5, an expanded version of its software with advanced reporting, a workflow engine, new marketing automation capabilities, and enhanced mobile access. All these new features are available in the Open-Source Edition of the application.

• Pedro Alves has been an active member of the Pentaho community, adding wisdom and code to the open source business intelligence software since he founded his company Webdetails five years ago.

Funding

• With the recent high profile success of hardware and software projects raising millions of dollars through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Fabian Scherschel looks at what it takes for open source software projects to duplicate this success and the unique challenges these projects will face.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• 35 new GNU releases this month (as of April 30, 2013)

• Do you believe that control over our computers is important to a free society? Do you want to help people learn why proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management are harmful? Do you want to fight for software freedom?

Project Releases

• For about 2 years, the Blender open source 3D modelling package has included Cycles, a render engine that uses path tracing. This engine can be used to produce photorealistic images with little effort. Until now, those who wanted to render a graphical or cartoon-like image for a 3D model had to use Blender’s internal render engine for such Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR). However, this engine is quite old and doesn’t always produce convincing results. The new version 2.67 of Blender closes the gap by offering the Freestyle cartoon render engine. Freestyle uses 3D geometry to calculate lines that can either be used on their own or combined with the surface rendering results from other engines.

Public Services/Government

• The US government is also a vocal supporter of open source software. Examples of recent initiatives include whitehouse.gov, the Federal Register and data.gov. Much of the internet is run using open source tools such as Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, while a plethora of companies have found good business cases for using open source software. Don Smith, director of technology at Dell SecureWorks, says the main reason businesses would pick free and open source software (FOSS) over proprietary technology is to save money. He also suggests that open source software frequently offers greater innovation than proprietary systems.

• [...]

• So, good reasons to go for open source software, but what about security? Many people view open source software as something that can be changed or edited by anybody, much like a Wikipedia entry. That generally isn’t the case, however, as open source communities usually have mechanisms in place to prevent such random tinkering – for example, submitting new code to a peer review before it is entered into a particular project. Furthermore, Smith says one of the most common misconceptions about FOSS is the belief that it is written by amateur coders – again, typically untrue.

• “The vast majority of FOSS is written by software professionals, very often employed by a company that is making money from that same software, either through subscriptions, support or professional services. It is obviously in the interest of these businesses to ensure their software works well and their coding is of high quality,” he says.

• Government departments can improve competitiveness in procurement by increasing use of open source software in an increasingly commoditised IT market, according to Tariq Rashid , head of IT reform at the Cabinet Office.

• The second Open Gov Summit took place yesterday April 25th at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, in the heart of Westminster. London-based open source consultancy Zaizi hosted the fully-booked Summit, which attracted IT professionals from central and local government and third sector organisations. The Summit revealed encouraging progress for open source in the public sector, helped by the government’s decision to adopt open standards last November. This year’s debate also emphasised the growing relevance of Cloud as organisations migrate to more open, flexible architectures and deliver applications through a wider range of devices.

• Public administrations in Greece would benefit from a campaign to increase their knowledge on open source, including how to best procure such solutions, recommends a study published on Joinup yesterday. In procurement, public administrations should request experience in managing open source projects.

• Pham Hong Quang, Chair of the Vietnam Free and Open Source Software Association (VFOSSA) has confirmed that the quality of products is the greatest concern of the agencies and enterprises planning to use open source software.

• In a victory for the free software movement, the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has started to switch more than 40,000 government PCs to open source.

• We caught up with Gavin Beckett, chief enterprise architect at Bristol city council, to discuss open data and designing smart cities

Openness/Sharing

• An international programming project aims to create virtual nematode life.

• Biologists have counted and sorted each of the 959 cells in the millimeter-long, see-through roundworm. Now a group of coders and neuroscientists are using that data to bring that worm to life.

• Seeds might seem far from the world of high tech and free software, but they have much in common. Seeds contain DNA, which is a (quaternary) digital code much like a binary program. Just as there is free software that anyone may use and share, there are free seeds – those that are part of the ancient seeds commons, created over thousands of years, available for use by anyone. And just as free software is threatened by software patents, so seeds are equally endangered by seed patents.

Voting

• Opposition senatorial candidate former Sen Richard Gordon asked the Supreme Court to order the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to open the source code of the 2013 ballot-counting machines for review by local groups.

• Gordon filed through his lawyers on Friday, May 3, a Petition for Mandamus before the high court to allow political parties to examine and review the source code.

Open Access/Content

• “GitHub has been inspiring, and we want to bring that in over hardware and product development,” said Nitin Rao, co-founder of Sunglass, a cloud-based collaboration platform that makes it possible for designers, architects, engineers and the like to work together on 3D models from all pockets of the world.

Open Hardware

• Don’t ask why, but Christian Carlberg has created an open-source, hackable flashlight with a powerful, compact light beam. He says the HexBright is the world’s first open-source flashlight. We haven’t checked that claim, but we’ll take his word for it for now, as we aren’t sure why flashlights belong on the list of the “Internet of things.”

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Today (8 May 2013) major European retailers from five countries, including Germany’s REWE Group, EDEKA and LIDL have released the Brussels Soy Declaration in which they have pledged support for the non-GMO soy production system of Brazil.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Jehovah’s Witnesses’ current exemption from military service could extend to other groups with strong convictions, if one proposal in a new report on the matter is accepted. Alternatively, they could be required to perform civil, rather than military, service.

• Others in the Donilon-Deputy Alumni Club include Denis McDonough, who’s now Obama’s chief of staff, and CIA Director John Brennan, who was Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. (And it’s worth noting that Donilon himself was the Deputy NSA before becoming the head honcho.)

• A Pakistani court on Thursday declared that US drone strikes in the country’s lawless tribal belt were illegal and directed the Foreign Ministry to move a resolution against the attacks in the United Nations.

• PESHAWAR: Branding drone attacks on Pakistani territory as war crimes, the Peshawar High Court on Thursday ordered the foreign ministry to move a resolution in the United Nations against the strikes.

• The armed drone is being heralded as the next generation of American military technology. It can fly overheard with its unblinking eye, almost invisible to its targets below. Without warning, its missiles will strike, bringing certain death and destruction on the ground. All the while, the military pilot, sitting in a cushioned recliner in an air-conditioned room halfway across the world, is immune from the violence wrought from his or her single keystroke.

• Yemen has quickly become one of the most active theaters of operations for America’s drone fleet, though the killing of a local anti Al-Qaeda cleric underscores the rising collateral damage of the unmanned attacks.

• Sheik Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a prominent cleric within his small village in Yemen, was known for preaching of the evils of the al-Qaida network, warning villagers to stay out of the group and renounce their military ideology.

• Drone Strikes Fuelling Anti-U.S Hatred as Fear Spreads in Middle East

• After the Ministry of Defence confirmed the UK’s use of armed drones in Afghanistan, anti-war protestors are set to gather outside an RAF base in Lincolnshire.

• The RAF began remotely operating its Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles deployed to Afghanistan from the Lincolnshire airbase earlier this week.

• While the lethal drone strikes carried out by the U.S. in Afghanistan (where Britain is also operating armed drones), Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, get the vast majority of media attention, and rightly so, when it comes to the issue of drones being used to carry out extrajudicial killings, other countries are also engaged in the practice. On Tuesday an Israeli drone attack on Gaza City killed 29-year-old Haitham al-Mishal and wounded another Palestinian man. The attack was the “the first targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip since an Egyptian-brokered truce went into effect on Nov. 22, 2012.”

• Afghan president Hamid Karzai says the director of the CIA has assured him that regular funding his government receives from the agency will not be cut off.

• No organization in U.S. history has amassed a reputation quite like that of the Central Intelligence Agency. Often referred to by its acronym, CIA, or simply just “the Agency,” it is often regarded as the long and shadowy arm of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. It can be tempting to see the agency as force for good in the world, or at the very least a necessary evil, especially when publicly vaunted heroes like Mike Spann join because in doing so they believed they “would be able to make the world a better place to live in.” The problem is that the CIA really does not do that. In fact, most of the agency’s activities are underhanded and dishonest when they are not misguided or simply futile. Even with a poor reputation at home and abroad, the CIA has done some things that actually resulted in long-term benefits to the rest of the world, mainly by publicly failing to carry out an operation to its intended end and exposing its misdeeds to the rest of the world.

• Western diplomats, politicians and analysts have combined to float quite a few options to supposedly resolve the two-year civil war engulfing much of Syria right now.

• Talk of everything from a no-fly zone to an all-out intervention has flown around the digital media and political sphere, and yet, it seems a very few have stated the obvious option: do nothing.

• It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Justice Department’s versatile and hard-working anti-bribery law. On April 22, Ralph Lauren paid an $882,000 penalty in a non-prosecution agreement that resolved FCPA allegations of bribing a customs official in Argentina to permit the import of Ralph Lauren products. On May 7, prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a criminal complaint accusing two Florida brokers of paying kickbacks to a Venezuelan state bank official who directed the bank’s financial trading business to them. The FCPA has taken some recent lumps from judges, and last year prosecutions fell off slightly from their blistering pace in 2009, 2010 and 2011. But as Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher noted in its January report on FCPA enforcement, bribery prosecution has become routine. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” the report said, warning businesses not to let down their guard.

Cablegate

• In these audio excerpts from their extended conversation in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Chris Hedges asks Julian Assange about legal strategy and the WikiLeaks founder’s thoughts on Pfc. Bradley Manning.

• However disappointing, the Wikileaks founder’s new book offers a fascinating — and discomfiting — thesis

• But context matters, too. How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran? If Bradley Manning, the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ materials about the United States government and military, had been a North Korean border guard or a defector from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, how differently would politicians and pundits in the United States have viewed him? Were a string of whistle-blowing websites dedicated to exposing abuses within those countries to appear, surely the tone of the Western political class would shift. Taking into account the precedent President Barack Obama set in his first term in office— a clear “zero tolerance” approach toward unauthorized leaks of classified information from U.S. officials— we would expect that future Western governments would ultimately adopt a dissonant posture toward digital disclosures, encouraging them abroad in adversarial countries, but prosecuting them ferociously at home.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Sonora has become the first Mexican state to ban bullfighting, recently passing the long-awaited Animal Protection Law addressing cruelty to animals.

• In a statement on Formato 21 radio, Perez Rubio hailed the unanimous vote on May 2 by the legislature of Mexico’s northwestern border state.

• “It has caused quite a stir because we are the first state of the republic to pass this law. I really didn’t expect–I say this with all the honesty in the world–I didn’t expect the repercussion this would have, nationally and internationally,” said local lawmaker of the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico, or PVEM, Vernon Perez Rubio, the Global Post reports.

Finance

• Where media define the “center” or the “middle” tells you a lot about the worldview they are promoting. The “center” doesn’t usually indicate where most of the public is, but rather where elites have determined an appropriate middle between opposing arguments. Confusing the two concepts is common (and not an accident).

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc must face fraud claims brought by CIFG Assurance North America over insurance it provided for $275 million (177 million pounds) in mortgage-backed securities, a New York state appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

• People over 65, a growing share of the US population, are suffering a crisis-ridden capitalist system. High unemployment, reduced private pensions, fewer job benefits, less job security, high personal debt levels, and falling real wages make Social Security payments more important than ever. Yet President Obama and Congress recently agreed to bargain over how much to reduce Social Security payments from current levels. That would not only hurt seniors – but also the children who help them.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Web has put a wealth of good information within closer reach than ever before—but as any Internet user knows, it’s done the same for all the heaps of misinformation out there.

• In a bizarre television and spatial anomaly on CNN this morning, the blanket coverage of two true-crime stories led two news anchors to conduct an odd “satellite” interview from the very same parking lot, background traffic and all.

• Beautiful spring weather has gardeners outside seeding lettuce and transplanting tomatoes. Community gardens are ramping up for a growing season full of hot peppers and trailing squash vines. The sewage sludge “composting” industry wants in on the action. May 6 to May 12 has been declared “International Compost Awareness Week” by the sewage sludge industry trade group the U.S. Composting Council (USCC).

Privacy

• The 643-page tome, called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf), was just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others.

• The book was published by the Center for Digital Content of the National Security Agency, and is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled “Google Hacking.”

• Cats are good at lots of things, like sleeping on windowsills for multiple hours at a time, scratching upholstery and pretending not to know their own names. Cats, however, are not good at being spies.

Civil Rights

• An Arizona judge has denied a motion to suppress evidence collected through a spoofed cell tower that the FBI used to track the location of an accused identity thief.

• The ruling means that the government may use not only evidence gathered through its fake cell tower to locate an air card that Daniel David Rigmaiden was using to access the internet, but also evidence gathered from the apartment to which they tracked him through the air card and evidence collected from a storage space and computer hard drives found in the apartment and storage locker.

• The case of a Sikh bus driver banned from wearing his turban on the job sparked animated exchanges about the right to wear religious clothing on Yle’s A-studio programme Wednesday night.

• An FBI investigation manual updated last year, obtained by the ACLU, says it’s possible to warrantlessly obtain Americans’ e-mail “without running afoul” of the Fourth Amendment.

DRM

• A handful of myths have become common defenses of the W3C’s plan for “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME), a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) scheme for HTML5, the next version of the markup language upon which the Web is built.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Social media feeds have been full links to alarmist stories about a recent change to UK copyright law that allows for the licensing of orphan works.

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