● 05.24.13

● Links 24/5/2013: Fedora ‘Pidora’, CIvil Rights Debated in the US

Posted in News Roundup at 10:10 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• LinkSmart’s audience and link management platform for publishers was built with big data at its core. So when management decided to migrate the cloud-based application to their own hardware, there was no question it would be completely powered by Linux.

• Linux-based infrastructure allows the 3-year-old startup to cut costs, both by avoiding the licensing fees of proprietary systems and by tapping the community’s collective knowledge base instead of paying for expensive support contracts, said CTO Manny Puentes.

• LinkSmart’s audience and link management platform for publishers was built with big data at its core. So when management decided to migrate the cloud-based application to their own hardware, there was no question it would be completely powered by Linux.

• Linux-based infrastructure allows the 3-year-old startup to cut costs, both by avoiding the licensing fees of proprietary systems and by tapping the community’s collective knowledge base instead of paying for expensive support contracts, said CTO Manny Puentes.

• If I was the type to have heroes, Richard Stallman would be near the top of my list, not far below John Lennon and Abbie Hoffman, and way out ahead of Tom Hayden or the several-times-over reinvented Bob Dylan, though the freewheeling Bob Dylan who took it down Highway 61 will always be near the top of the list.

Desktop

• Little by little, OEMs are coming to the realization that if they don’t sell FLOSS, someone else will do it. Being an M$-only OEM is no longer good business.

• GNU/Linux had a huge double spike, doubling ~April 15 and again on May 18. What’s with that? It’s bigger than possible with most organizations. Could it possibly be Dell’s selling Ubuntu GNU/Linux? How could that shift display itself overnight like that?

Kernel Space

• Last month we held the 7th Annual Collaboration Summit and as usual, there was a lot of interest in The Yocto Project. For those who don’t know, The Yocto Project provides a multitude of templates, tools and specific methods you can follow that make it easier than ever to create a custom Linux-based system for a product, regardless of the hardware architecture (read highlights of the new Yocto release here).

• A month ago, Amanda McPherson and Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation asked me to coordinate an internship program aimed at getting more women to participate in the Linux kernel. In order to be considered for an internship, the applicants need to submit patches to the Linux kernel, and get them accepted.

Graphics Stack

• It was just last month that there was an X.Org Server security issue dealing with hot-plugging of input devices. Being announced today is a new round of security problems, this time multiple issues dealing with X.Org client libraries.

• NVIDIA released today the 319.23 Linux graphics driver, which supports the just-released GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. There’s also a couple of other changes to this certified Linux driver update, including 4K HDMI support.

• Around this time every year, a ton of action-packed movies hits the cinema that helps make summer taste just a little bit sweeter. This year, it’s Fast & Furious 6 that’s on my radar. The speed… the fun, the hot women. Actually, that reminds me of something: a new top-end graphics card, much like NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 780, priced at $649.

Applications

Proprietary

• CCE, a leader in advanced interoperability technology, announced that in response to a growing demand from customers in the CAE space, it has successfully completed porting of its 3D CAD interoperability technology to Linux platforms.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Rktcr (“rocket car”) is a physics-based action-platformer-turned-puzzle-platformer; that is, it’s an action game meant to be played thoughtfully at much slower than real-time. Rktcr is played in a side-view world consisting of zones linked by portals.

• Reptile games have announced via twitter that their game Megabyte punch will be available on Linux as well as Mac and Windows. Looking at the video it reminds me of super smash bros in multiplayer mode which is only a good thing. Megabyte punch is also a single player platformer searching for upgrades to battle other creatures.

• Welcome to another edition of The Cheapskate’s Corner. This time with significantly less stuff to tell you, as many of last week’s bundles have already ended and there’re no new ones to occupy their place. Let’s recap what happened in the last seven days, first.

• Tripwire the developers behind Killing Floor had an email chat with me recently about the possibilities of Red Orchestra 2 and Rising Storm coming to Linux and why they currently won’t. It gives us a small bit of info on Unreal Engine 2+3.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Digia has announced a new commercial endeavour that pairs a lightweight Qt stack atop an Android kernel/base operating system.

• Boot To Qt is Digia’s new solution for developing “slick user interfaces on embedded devices.” This new stack consists of a UI component driven by thr Qt Framework, ready-made developer images, full Qt Creator integration, and a VirtualBox-based simulator. Android is being used as the base layer to the OS.

• For those that didn’t hear already, KDE 4.11 will be the last Plasma Workspaces feature release in the KDE4 series and this upcoming version will be maintained for a period of two years.

• I have done some improvements in the plugins: python_console_ipython, python_autocomplete, python_utils, js_utils, xml_pretty and django_utils. These plugins I added a month and a half ago (except python_console_ipython) to the kate repository. I have done two improvements and a new feature:

• KDE developer and Plasma team leader Aaron Seigo has announced that version 4.11 of Plasma Workspaces will be a long term support (LTS) release. Seigo says the developers are close to a feature freeze for the next version of KDE’s desktop shell and that, once Plasma Workspaces 4.11 is released, there will be no more feature developments in this branch. However, as part of their stabilisation releases, the developers will provide bug fixes and translation updates for two years after the 4.11 release.

Distributions

• A recent poll on Hacker News asking about Linux distributions of choice got me thinking, what can can we learn from a bigger picture of the distro landscape than a single HN poll? I went looking around and dug up a couple of other sources of information — Linux Journal’s annual reader’s choice awards, and data from Google Trends.

• What makes these three particular choices interesting is that they span a broad swathe of user types, from the hacker (Hacker News) to the enthusiast (Linux Journal) to the “average” Linux user (Google). That means we can learn from the trends across these three user types — considering which communities may be more predictive or more technical vs which represent broader adoption today.

• Pre-release version of Zorin OS 7 Core available for testing, the RC including Linux Kernel 3.8 and an overhauled graphical interface

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Unfortunately, while Pidora looks to be a very interesting distribution for the Raspberry Pi, with many features taking advantage of the board’s unique properties, the Fedora team made one critical error during its development: they forgot to Google their intended name.

• As it turns out, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some members of the community: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. It’s closest translation into English would be “faggot”.

• Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology released an optimized Fedora 18 Remix for the Raspberry Pi, and unveiled a new name for the remix. “Pidora 18,” based on a new build of Fedora optimized for ARMv6, features speedier performance and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set, says the Pidora project team.

• You can now add another Linux distro to the list that will run on the Raspberry Pi. The core distro for the small device is the Debian based Raspian and there is also an Arch based Linux for the Pi too.

• As the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices continue to contribute to imaginative applications, they’re also emerging as shining examples of new ways Linux can be deployed. Tinkerers have already put all flavors of Linux on the devices, and now, Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) have announced the release of Pidora 18, a custom version of Fedora specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Here is more on it.

• The Fedora Project has been supporting Raspberry Pi, the diminutive $35 computer, for some time. Today they’re making the Pidora “remix” of the core Fedora distribution available. Like the Raspbian distribution of Debian, Pidora is compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi.

• The Raspberry Pi mini-computer is to be served with new “Pidora” build of Fedora packaged for ARMv6 architecture.

• NOTE: Fedora is a free and open source Linux-based operating system sponsored by Red Hat — it is typically classed as the second-most commonly used Linux distribution, after Ubuntu.

• That is where my time with Korora 18 “Flo” KDE ended. The odd error message in the installation of Skype may cause other people to reconsider entirely, which is why I can almost but not quite recommend Korora for newbies. Given the popularity of Skype and given that the helper package in the repositories conflicts with a core system package (making it useless now), it might be good if developers in that community could come together to write a more current tutorial on how to deal with Skype. Also, the stunted nature of Mupen64Plus means I wouldn’t use this for myself. But really, it only needs a tiny bit more work before I can comfortably recommend this. You can get it here.

• It is surprising to most people who understand Linux and Unix that you are allowed to Hard Link to any file on the OS as long as it is on the same file system.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With its Distrowatch ranking falling faster than Man Utd now that Sir Alex Ferguson has departed, Ubuntu is no longer the all-conquering force that it was. So what’s happened? Has it, in fact, lost it, or is there a more subtle game afoot? We answer this conundrum (sort of) in the latest Linux Format.

• Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon discusses Ubuntu Phone and where the development is headed.

Flavours and Variants

• In some respects, the Xfce Desktop Manager looks a little bit dated. Overall though, I think the Xubuntu team has done a great job with the system theme to make the desktop look modern and sleek while maintaining a traditional desktop paradigm. In the time I spent with Xubuntu 13.04, I ran into a few small glitches, but I think it went much more smoothly than the typical fresh install of the most popular prorietary OS.

Devices/Embedded

• Who says you need a few million bucks to build a supercomputer? Joshua Kiepert put together a Linux-powered Beowulf cluster with Raspberry Pi computers for less than $2,000.

• Arduino announced the first open source Arduino hacker board with built-in WiFi, and also the first to run Linux. The $69 Arduino Yún integrates the functions of an Arduino Leonardo, featuring an ATmega32u4 microcontroller and 14 GPIO pins, with an Atheros AR9331 WiFi SOC running OpenWRT embedded Linux on a 400MHz MIPS processor.

• This guest column by BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner introduces the BeagleBone Black’s cutting-edge Linux 3.8 kernel, up from the original BeagleBone’s 3.2 kernel. The new kernel incorporates a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver architecture, as well as full support for the Device Tree data structure introduced in Linux 3.7 in order to streamline ARM Linux development and hardware support.

• BeagleBoard.org has begun shipping its faster, cheaper “BeagleBone Black” SBC with a Linux 3.8 kernel, supporting Device Tree technology for more streamlined ARM development. The $45 BeagleBone Black runs Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3359 SOC, doubles the RAM to 512MB, and adds a micro-HDMI port.

Phones

Ballnux

• Modders and ROMmers rejoice, almost as soon as it reached the hands of consumers, Verizon’s Galaxy S4 has been rooted.

Android

• The creation of new Android-related open source projects picked up in a big way in 2012, radically outpacing new iOS projects, according to data released by Black Duck Software. Black Duck manages and secures implementations of open source software, and has large samples of real-world data on open source software in use and in development. Its latest study shows that new Android mobile projects outstripped iOS projects by a factor of four in 2012, expanding by at least 96 percent in each year since 2007. New iOS project growth, by comparison, was 32 percent from 2011 to 2012.

• Many people will be quick to point out that it Google is a technology Company with lot of products. However, Google at heart is Advertising Company.

• Google always wants developers to build apps for Android first and not iOS. Google I/O 2013 was developer’s paradise which showed that the company is committed to making tools that make things easy for developers.

• To attract developers into choosing Android as the first option, Google is striving to help them take full advantage of the Android Ecosystem to generate monetary profits for themselves. Android apps have come a long way and are at par with its iOS counterparts, therefore Google can now focus on optimising the ecosystem and innovate.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Tizen, the open-source Linux software platform aiming to power everything from smartphones to smart TVs, is seemingly coming to laptops.

• Intel demoed a Tizen laptop experience at the Tizen Conference 2013 in San Francisco, USA, earlier this month. And it wasn’t demoed on any old heap of hardware, either: Intel were showing off the OS newcomer on an i7 Ivybridge Ultrabook.

• The Tizen OS experience is powered by ‘Tizen Shell’ – a UI built upon GNOME-Shell.

Free Software/Open Source

• Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said.

• ProjectLibre is an open source project management solution ready to give Microsoft Project a run for their money.

• In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing “Talk” platform with a new one called “Hangouts” that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users.

• The first open source office suite written in Java has been released by Japplis, a company based in the Netherlands.

• Macker, the second plugin, allows specific dependencies between packages to be defined and those rules to be automatically verified. The plugin is the result of observations by the company that targets for dependencies between packages set at the beginning of a project are often not met. Macker is a fork of software of the same name from Codehaus that hasn’t been updated since 2003. The forked plugin from andrena objects has been adapted to current versions of Java.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• This week’s release of the Google Chrome 27 web-browser was made known by its faster load-times. While now in beta form, Chrome 28 will also bring greater speed improvements to Google’s web-browser.

Mozilla

• Keeping track of where Firefox is going is difficult given you have at least two horizons to keep your eyes on. Here we have a brief look at what to expect in Firefox 22, currently in beta and close to being rolled out.

• The big news in Firefox 22 is either WebRTC or asm.js depending on your particular interests.

• WebRTC isn’t new but now it is deemed stable enough to be on by default.

SaaS/Big Data

• Big Data is becoming a big deal beyond the United States, and it’s time for the international channel to pay attention. The latest evidence: DataStax, which provides enterprise database management services based on open-source software. The company is making an aggressive push into the European market in what may be the first move toward a greater presence throughout the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region as a whole.

• DataStax, which is based in California and counts 20 Fortune 100 companies among its customers, distributes an integrated Big Data platform based on the open-source technologies Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr, all of which are developed by the Apache Foundation. It focuses on database scalability and reliability, and has been particularly innovative in the NoSQL trend.

Databases

• The grudge match between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his former protege Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has reached legendary proportions in recent years. Ellison and Benioff pepper their speeches and interviews with not so subtle digs at each other’s companies, and Oracle even went so far as to cancel Benioff’s scheduled keynote at the Oracle Open World conference in 2011.

Funding

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Single-board computers (SBCs) are computers delivered as one circuit board that are powerful enough to run a real operating system. SBCs are typically inexpensive and versatile, making them an exciting tool for a wide range of applications, from education to scientific research. But there’s a problem; all of the SBCs currently available have major flaws — hardware that doesn’t work without running a nonfree program.

Programming

• Google has announced that it will in future not allow direct file downloads from its Google Code hosting service. The company says that “increasing misuse” of the service has forced it to take the step in the interest of keeping the platform’s community “safe and secure”.

Leftovers

• Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year’s annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service.

• More than 26,000 people were surveyed internationally for the poll.

Health/Nutrition

• On May 25, 2013, there will be a worldwide March against Monsanto, protesting the giant pesticide company’s attempts to take over the world’s food supply. Vandana Shiva speaks about the movement against Monsanto and why it is necessary.

• According to a report released today by GMWatch, China destroyed three shipments of GM corn imported from the US.

• The United States Senate decided again Thursday that it simply does not want to let states tell people whether or not they are eating genetically modified food.

• The Senate voted overwhelmingly — 71 to 27 — against an amendment to the sweeping farm bill, squashing a measure that would not have required labeling of genetically modified organisms, but merely would have let states decide if they wanted to require such labeling.

Security

• While not all of the details were shared publicly, Ilja van Sprundel did recommend using dietlibc or uClibc over glibc, which he found to be “super bloated” yet the default for most Linux distributions.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Faced with growing questions over the legality and scope of his counterrorism policy from Congress and elsewhere, President Barack Obama said Thursday that he has codified the process his administration goes through before launching a drone strike.

• hursday’s speech at the National War College, which was twice interrupted by a Code Pink heckler, marks a dramatic change in how the country will wage war in the future. Obama dismissed the “large war” tactics employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said the United States now faces threats from small groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and individuals like the ones who committed the Boston Marathon attack.

• What definition of the term includes this horrific act of violence but excludes the acts of the US, the UK and its allies?

• In a dramatic exchange during the final moments of a much anticipated foreign policy speech by President Obama on Thursday, CodePink activist Medea Benjamin rose from the audience and directly confronted the US commander-in-chief by challenging him on several of the government’s most controversial policies.

• Investigation by British groups on the U.S. government’s terrorist detention activities has shed new light on the CIA’s methods, researchers said.

• The website of The Rendition Project documents details of the rendition program secretly operated by the CIA in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the British newspaper The Guardian reported Wednesday.

• Crofton Black from Reprieve said: “This unprecedented database shows how false route filings, tarmac transfers, shell companies and the plausible deniability of executive jets masked a systematic programme of secret detention and torture run by the US with the active complicity of the UK and other European countries.”

• In a classified hearing, a House panel is trying to figure out how the attack transpired. Did the attackers know that secret location, or did they learn it that night? By Eli Lake.

• Most people who follow the Benghazi saga know that the State Department and the CIA got in an epic battle over who was going to accept responsibility for the attacks on Benghazi.

• So the talking points had to be just right for each agency to walk away satisfied. They were of utmost importance. So important, in fact, that the CIA used emoticons in its email traffic (some of which was just recently made available to the public).

• Among the questions are whether CIA missteps contributed to the security failure in Benghazi and, more importantly, whether the Agency’s Benghazi operation had anything to do with reported heavy weapons shipments from the local port to Syrian rebels.

• A U.S. Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia anonymously ruled that photos of the corpse of al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden can continued to be kept as classified, rejecting Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to release them for public.

• The spy scandal involving U.S. diplomat Ryan Fogle reveals some interesting points about relations between the U.S. and Russia.

• “For the same reasons, it is hard to determine with any precision the strategic impact of the drone campaign,” the report said. “While reported signature strikes may in particular fuel local alienation, at the same time, the deaths of senior, highly experienced commanders are certainly a hard blow for the militants.”

• Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a native of Denver, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.

• An AFP story reports that “the truck was carrying grenades and explosive belts” and that all the ordnance was destroyed by the missiles.

• [...]

• “suspected militants” are officially defined as “all military-age males in a strike zone.”

Cablegate

• Wanted WikiLeaks founder JULIAN ASSANGE pleaded with actor BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH to drop out of the Hollywood adaptation of his story after objecting to an early version of the film’s script.

• Senior BJP leader L.K. Advani has said he was greatly impressed by the revelations contained in the secret documents accessed by WikiLeaks that were serialised in The Hindu. He expressed concern at the continued confinement of Julian Assange, Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, at the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

• On the eve of the international release of Alex Gibney’s WikiLeaks documentary We Steal Secrets, the organization is blasting the film, leaking a complete, annotated transcript reporting dozens of factual errors and instances of “sleight of hand” from the Oscar-winning director. In the transcript, WikiLeaks points to, among other things, the use of a “crude gay caricature” to paint Bradley Manning’s decision to leak US military and diplomatic documents as “a failure of character, rather than a triumph of conscience.”

• (Breitbart) An obscure November 2012 Wikileaks email dump points to former White House counterterrorism adviser and now-CIA chief John Brennan as the person behind the “witch hunt” of journalists who reported unflattering Obama administration leaks.

• Military lawyers tell last hearing before trial they have dropped one of 22 counts but will still press most serious accusation

• A coalition of activists and journalists, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Department of Defense and the military judge overseeing the case of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. The suit aims to open up access to the military trial, in which Manning is fighting to avoid a life sentence after admitting to leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to Wikileaks.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed that “spies” at one of the UK’s intelligence agencies openly discussed his predicament over instant messenger, with one suggesting allegations against him were a “fit-up”.

• Staff working at GCHQ, the government’s communications intelligence agency, have been scolded for saying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may have been framed over rape charges.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said messages he got from a British agency included speculation he was framed by Swedish officials seeking his extradition.

• GCHQ acknowledges that the messages are real, but, “The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ’s policies or views in any way.”

Finance

• Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) agitated against food aid for poor Americans included in the Farm Bill during last week’s House Agricultural Committee debate, accusing the government of stealing “other people’s money.” Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already been decimated in both the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill, cutting off nearly 2 million working families, children, and seniors from food assistance.

• Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Governor Scott Walker seeks to “radically” overhaul Wisconsin’s education system using several pieces of American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation, and to do it through the budget process, meaning this privatization agenda could be enacted with minimal public discussion or debate.

• …protest government intrusions on press freedom and to condemn bad journalism…

• …the odds that you will suffer any kind of violent attack are thankfully pretty remote.

Privacy

• The data center itself is coming up over 1 million square feet and should be running up a bill of around $40 million every year on energy bills. Add to this is the fact that there is a 6% tax and the NSA is not a happy customer right now.

Civil Rights

• As detailed in “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” through 2011 and 2012, “fusion centers” and other “counter terrorism” agencies engaged in widespread monitoring of Occupy Wall Street activists. This article examines some instances of this counter terrorism monitoring of activists.

• Adam Jaskowiak was one of the men targeted and said he pleaded with police to be able to keep his things but was ignored.

• He was sleeping with eight other people finding shelter for the night in the former Ilford Baths in High Road, Ilford.

• All of their belongings were bundled into a police car leaving the men, one in his 60s, stunned.

• A police chief told the Recorder the operation was carried out to “reduce the negative impact of rough sleepers”.

• This week, four House Armed Services Subcommittees begin their markups of the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act. And thus begins the debate over how to program the American war machine.

• portions of the annual NDAA are crafted behind closed doors

• The liberal press was so caught-up in this cult of personality that was so much a part of the Obama phenomenon, it did not see or choose to ignore that the Obama administration’s approach to civil liberties turned his administration into act three of the Bush administration. So While the Obama administration used the espionage act to clamp down on whistle-blowers, its’ Department of Homeland Security coordinated the national repression of Occupy Wall street and its’ lawyers defended the Bush administration’s position that opposed allowing individual suites against the government agencies and telecom companies accused of engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance, the only voices of concern came from the marginalized radical press.

• During the 2013 legislative session, we saw an explosion of state nullification bills dealing with issues ranging from heath care, to the Second Amendment, to NDAA detention.

• Out of this renewed interest in nullification, a grassroots movement continues to grow and flex its muscles. Realizing they need to bring more pressure to bear on reticent state lawmakers, nullification advocates have taken the movement down to the local level.

• Over the last several months, led by grassroots activists across America, city councils and county commissions have passed resolutions and ordinances in support of the Second Amendment and blocking NDAA detention provisions. Some bodies have passed legally binding legislation prohibiting local cooperation with unconstitutional acts. Others have approved non-binding resolutions supporting state efforts. Both strategies send strong messages to state lawmakers and will increase pressure to pass state-level nullification bills in the next legislative session.

• Thought experiment: Rip Van Winkle falls asleep sometime around George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech and wakes up in early March.

• Rip would have awakened in time to see Rand Paul’s 13-hour “Don’t drone me, bro” filibuster. He would have also witnessed the president’s firmly pro-drone counter-terrorism speech.

• While Code Pink remains the same, a lot seems to have changed. Most Republicans, including the leading tea party senators, proclaimed their intention to “Stand with Rand.” What happened to the party of Dick Cheney?

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS’ “unlimited” data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. reports that the new advertising option in the popular BitTorrent client generates billions of ad impressions per month. Although users initially revolted against the idea of making uTorrent ad-supported, the new stats show that not too many of them turned the feature off. The next challenge for BitTorrent Inc. is to attract premium advertisers in addition to the lower tier poker and PC performance ads that are showing up now.

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