● 05.29.13

● Links 29/5/2013: Humble Indie Bundle 8, Fedora 19 Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The administration of the city of Munich in Germany has completed the switch to the open source desktop, says Peter Hofmann, head of the migration project last week Wednesday. The IT department is now securing the strategy, to make sure it can be maintained by the city and to sustainably support interactions with citizens, businesses and other public authorities.

• Chromebooks: you either love them or hate them based on the constant flood of correspondence I get almost daily. They are either an expensive web browser, even at $200, or they are good hardware done cheaply with lots of utility.

• My thoughts of the utility of Chromebooks are all over ZDNet, but it’s the regular folks’ take on the laptops running Google’s OS that I find interesting.

• No roll-out in a single organization would be large enough to give this effect; crossing borders and rapid change excludes government and no business is larger than government.

Server

• Karl Triebes has been the CTO of F5 Networks since August 2004. Over the course of his tenure, he has seen some big changes in the networking market and has helped to oversee technical and product development at F5.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• AMD today released AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta Drivers for Windows and Linux users. The major new addition in these drivers is the support for the new “Richland” A10, A8, A6 and A4 APUs. It also has AMD Enduro technology enhancement, AMD wireless display for Windows 8 and AMD GPU & AMD APU OpenCL 1.2 acceleration in Adobe Premiere PRO CC. No game improvements or fixes were mentioned in the release highlights. You can download AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta drivers here.

• The AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series of graphics cards now has GL Shading Language 1.30 support exposed by default.

• With Qualcomm’s newer Snapdragon SoCs no longer having a 2D acceleration core for graphics, the Freedreno driver has implemented XA acceleration support within the reverse-engineered software for implementing 2D over the 3D engine via its Gallium3D driver.

• AMD has announced a new beta Catalyst Linux graphics driver. This time around, there are some new features to this Catalyst 13.6 Beta.

Applications

• As part of the release of Puppet 3.2.1, Puppet Labs has added a programming language aimed at providing administrators with greater flexibility for writing deployment routines. With the first public release of the 3.2 branch of the open source configuration management tool it is now also possible to integrate external certification authorities, enabling companies to use their own in-house authorisation systems within Puppet installations. The latter has been implemented in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation.

• There’s something disconcerting about using software full of features you don’t need — especially if the unwanted options are always in your face. Exaile is a music player that knows what most people want most of the time, and it gives you a great deal of flexibility in how to put its robust features to use. The result is elegant simplicity — and a great listening experience.

Proprietary

• Opera Software today released the first beta version of its flagship browser that uses the open-source WebKit rendering engine, making good on a pledge from February.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.5.31 is now available.

Games

• Awesomenauts, the 2D MOBA based on a Saturday morning cartoon that never existed, is now available on Linux. We really liked the game when it debuted a year ago on Xbox Live and PSN, and now the Steam version has seen numerous updates and extra characters.

• Painkiller Hell & Damnation, a remake and a sequel for the immensely popular Painkiller made by People Can Fly in 2004, will be arriving on Linux, soon.

• The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief is a thrilling crime adventure in three episodes from the creators of ‘The Book of Unwritten Tales’. Full of twists and turns, it immerses you in both sides of the story, combining thrill-of-the-chase whodunit with the risk and reward of a heist story.

• Paris, 1960. Europe is in the grip of the gentleman master thief The Raven. His burglaries are spectacular and he always emerges unscathed. Young hotshot investigator Nicolas Legrand stuns the public when he confronts the master thief and fatally wounds him.

• Well folks it’s that awesome time again, time to get your game on! Humble Indie Bundle 8 is live and with a really amazing selection too.

• It was in early June of last year that developers behind the ioquake3 open-source game engine announced Baseio as a new standalone Quake3-inspired game to include assets licensed under the Creative Commons. One year later, there really isn’t anything to show for this open-source game.

• The point of Baseio was to have a standalone game powered by ioquake3, the de facto open-source version of the id Software Quake 3 engine, to show off gameplay possibilities and other features. All of the games maps, audio, and other content would be put out under the Creative Commons, which is different than how many of the open-source game art assets are handled today by other projects.

• The MIT Game Lab has released a new beta version of its educational game A Slower Speed of Light. The Spring 2013 Beta Release of the game now works on Linux as well as Windows and Mac OS X and the MIT developers have also open sourced the engine and game development tools used in the creation of the game. The OpenRelativity tools have been designed to help game developers create educational experiments that explain and demonstrate special relativity. OpenRelativity is licensed under the MIT License and is based on the Unity3D game engine, simulating the effects of travelling near the speed of light in a game world.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Dragon Player’s power comes from the integrated KDE media backend Phonon. What this means for the user is that it is completely compatible with all installed system codecs. Speaking of codecs, Dragon Player prompts you whenever it doesn’t recognize a new piece of media and offers the ability to automatically search and install the required codecs. This works very well and allows you to keep your system relatively free of nonsense codecs you’ll never actually use, instead installing what you need as you need it.

• For those who doesn’t know print-manager is a project I started back in 2010 (yes it’s 3 years old now!), but only got included into KDE 4.10 (the current stable release). The reason for that is that since it was meant to replace system-config-printer-kde it needed to provide at least the most used features, and that was only possible as the logic to find a good PPD for a given printer was then exposed through DBus, so we could use that but not it’s GUI.

• Since we are not using kao:ResourceScoreCache anywhere in core KDE software, Vishesh asked me to disable pushing those into Nepomuk.

• There have been 4 more student proposals (some of them very good) for Amarok that we unfortunately couldn’t accept, due to lack of mentoring manpower. You’re encouraged to keep submitting patches, an excellent preparation for the next time.

• With the 4.10 release of Nepomuk, we decided to move away from Strigi and write our own indexers. We support most of the commonly used formats. Also, the new code is faster and more importantly more maintainable and easier to contribute to. So far this decision has worked pretty well for us.

Distributions

• Since taste is such a personal thing and specific types of users are drawn to specific types of distributions, it’s almost impossible to say “Distribution A is best suited for User X” because there are too many variables to affect your opinion. When you dive into the waters of enterprise computing, however, things begin to get a little clearer. Certain distributions begin to rise to the top. I thought I’d take a moment to offer up my list of best Linux distros for large companies. This list is not based on sales numbers, Distrowatch, or marketing hype. For this list, it’s all about experience and (hopefully) a sound insight into what is to come. And I’m not going to compare feature for feature. Why? This is open source, so it’s possible to roll in whatever feature you want. Even proprietary features eventually can be reverse-engineered.

• A Linux distribution that uses Wayland’s reference compositor Weston as the default for handling its graphical user interface has been released by a developer who is only known by his screen name, “nerdopolis”. Icons in the top menu bar allow users to start a terminal and Qt 5′s demo browser, both of which run as native Wayland software components. Other icons start programs that are designed for X11 and use XWayland to run under the Wayland compositor; among these applications is KDE’s Kicker start menu, which can be launched via the icon at the left side of the top bar.

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• The Fedora developers have lifted the lid on the first beta of Fedora 19, code name “Schrödinger’s Cat”, and say they have observed it is alive. At this point, Fedora 19 is feature frozen and only critical updates will be pushed to users before the general release. The Fedora project are now looking for users prepared to test the beta and provide feedback on the state of Fedora 19 before final release.

• Fedora 18 was slow to arrive, but Fedora 19, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” Red Hat’s latest community Linux, is on schedule.

• The Fedora Project team has reached the beta release of the free Fedora 19 operating system, code-named “Schrödinger’s Cat.”

• The first beta of Schrödinger’s Cat, or more widely known as Fedora 19, is now available for testing. As usual, there’s lots of new upstream improvements incorporated into this latest Fedora Linux build.

• The following screen shots show what the latest GNOME 3 desktop looks like and a few new features it brings to the table. Also included are a few screen shots from the other desktop environments.

Debian Family

• A week ago, we started the Debian systemd survey. The goal was to figure out a few trends and answer the following two questions:

• – Do our subjective impressions from the discussions on debian-devel reflect the general sentiment about systemd?

• – What are the main concerns that most people have?

• Thank you all for your participation!

Derivatives

• I still am using my old Gateway machine with Crunchbang, although since Waldorf is the current stable version of Crunchbang, I’m using mostly Debian Testing (Jessie), which is eventually going to become the new Crunchbang 12 codenamed Janice.

• Crunchbang uses Muppet names for their releases based on the first letter of the equivalent Debian release codename. Thus Debian Squeeze was Statler, Wheezy is Waldorf, and Jessie will become Janice (the lead guitarist of the Muppet band “Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem”.)

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Recently we announced a contest to spot Ubuntu billboards in the wild in Russia and the Ukraine. The contest required you to take an original photograph of a billboard containing a Dell advertisement with Ubuntu. Due to extenuating circumstances, we have been informed the billboards have been taken down. In light of this news, we unfortunately have to end the Ubuntu billboard photo contest early.

• Ubuntu has been forced to axe a competition offering an Ubuntu-loaded Dell XPS laptop as a prize after just two weeks.

• While Apache is the predominant open-source web-server software currently used by Linux systems, including Ubuntu, NGINX continues to rise in popularity. NGINX continues its push with high performance while having a smaller memory footprint and carrying a BSD license. The NGINX server might be included in future releases of the Ubuntu Server and part of the Ubuntu “main” repository.

• PC maker Cirrus7 plans to ship a new fanless desktop computer by the end of June. It’s called the Nimbus, and it looks more like a heatsink than a PC, because that’s basically what the entire case is.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River announced in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) software for integrating iOS devices into IVI systems based on the company’s IVI-oriented Linux OS offering. The Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Linux enables a car’s infotainment head unit to be used for viewing and playing content streamed from late-model iPhones, iPads, and iPods.

• Transforming a bare-bones Raspberry Pi into a fully-functional portable station is a popular pastime among enterprising users, and you can easily find instructions on how to build a Kindleberry Pi, a Kindleberry Wireless, and even a Raspberry Pi Linux laptop. But if you happen to use an Android device, you can opt for a less complicated and more modular solution devised by yours truly.

Phones

Android

• The encrypted instant messaging (IM) app Threema is now available for Android. The application was previously only available for iOS and essentially works in the same way as the widely-used texting alternative WhatsApp with one crucial difference: Threema employs end-to-end encryption. Messages undergo asymmetric encryption before sending and can only be decrypted by the intended recipient.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s no surprise that many Tumblr users are less than pleased with Yahoo!’s recent acquisition of their favorite personal publishing platform. The news is a sobering reminder that creators who don’t control the tools of their trade are at the mercy of those who do.

• Frank Bergmann, founder of ]project-open[, talks with us about the open source project management solution and how the company strives for an open culture at the office. He says maintaining communication is essential, and it entails complete transparency and honesty.

• After seeing MSCEs spend hours trying to update one of my computer labs I found I was able to convert most labs to the latest installation of Debian GNU/Linux in one hour and update all the software in a few minutes for routine updates and less than an hour for migration to a new release. The rest of my time was then freed for useful business, education. With that other OS, I was a slave giving very little economic benefit to my employer because that other OS was constantly giving us trouble.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• According to Focus Taiwan, Taiwan’s Hon Hai, which trades as Foxconn, and Mozilla will be holding a press conference on Monday 3 June to announced a partnership around the Firefox OS mobile device operating system. The event will take place in Taipei in the run up to the Computex trade show and will, says the news site, be the nineteenth wireless telecomms company to form a partnership with Mozilla.

• While Mozilla has not officially taken the wraps off a specific device, The Register, CNET and other media outlets have followed up on reports regarding the Mozilla Foundation saying that it is working with Apple hardware specialist Foxconn on a tablet device that will run the new Firefox OS mobile platform. Until now, there had only been phones discussed for the operating system, which Mozilla is putting massive resources behind. Not only is the news of a tablet of interest, but Foxconn is a world-class hardware partner for Mozilla to have.

• Mozilla is working with Apple hardware-maker Foxconn to release a mobile device running Firefox OS, it told news outlets on Monday, and plans to unveil it at an event next week.

SaaS/Big Data

• The current OpenStack open source cloud platform release is named Grizzly – due to the fact that OpenStack had a Summit in San Diego, which is in California, which has a Grizzly bear on its flag.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Last weekend Thorsten Behrens announced LibreOffice 4.10 Beta1 on the LibreOffice developers mailing list saying it comes with a nice set of new features. It also included the obligatory “not ready for production use” warning, but we don’t need a warning to scope out documentation. Let’s see what new features are coming.

Business

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.2, the third release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.

Project Releases

• A new version of xine-lib was released today, which is the library that powers the Xine multimedia playback engine. The xine-lib 1.2.3 release brings numerous features including VA-API hardware video decoding and support for OpenGL 2.0 output.

Public Services/Government

• I’ve been thinking a bit too much lately about GitHub and Drupal.org. More broadly, I’ve had my mind on open source + community. Sometimes this is called social coding.

• More than six years after Cabinet approved a policy for free and open source software (FOSS) in government, little has been achieved.

• This was conceded by chairman of the State IT Agency’s (SITA’s) board, Jerry Vilakazi, at the Government Information Technology Officers (GITO) Council Summit yesterday.

• Following their overall Free Software and Open Standards strategy, the public schools in the Swiss city of Basel are providing the Open Source Kolab Groupware Solution to their teachers, students and administrative staff. This enables them to coordinate their work and collaborate as efficiently as possible. The students are learning early to make use of modern information and communication technologies. Markus Bäumler head of the responsible ICT Media department in Basel says “We are delighted to have a Free Software solution that we can deploy for this purpose which reliably meets our professional requirements.”

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• One aspect of the feds’ new Open Data Policy presents both an opportunity and a challenge. It specifically calls for improved interoperability as a way to advance open data implementation. “Right now, standards setting for interoperability seems to be nobody’s job — and the federal government has the opportunity to take the lead here,” said Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition.

Programming

• The developers behind the EclipseLink persistence libraries have now delivered a reference implementation of JPA (Java Persistence API) 2.1, JSR338, in the form of the newly released EclipseLink 2.5.0. The JPA 2.1 support means that EclipseLink now supports performing bulk updates using the Criteria API with the addition of CriteriaUpdate and CriteriaDelete classes.

Standards/Consortia

• oogle is feeling the heat over its decision to build its new Hangouts IM and audio/video chat product with proprietary technology that doesn’t support server federation via the XMPP industry standard, but the company is defending its move.

• Specifically, Google maintains that XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) industry support is weak, which dilutes its purpose as a common protocol, and that its technology hasn’t kept up with the times.

Leftovers

• It’s more good than bad that a lot of mainstream reporters are speaking openly about the chilling effect of the Obama White House’s investigations into leaks of classified material. But this willingness to talk about how the White House operates can lead some journalists to make some rather strange arguments.

• A Columbia high school student faces a possible felony charge after her arrest for changing a classmate’s name in the school yearbook to a sexually suggestive term.

• The 17-year-old Hickman High School junior was arrested May 14 after she allegedly changed a student’s last name from Mastain to “masturbate” in the 100th edition of the Hickman Cresset yearbook. She could be charged with first-degree property damage, a felony, and harassment.

Science

• Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal.

• Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the “underclasses” from multiplying.

Security

• 17-year old German schoolboy Robert Kugler has posted information on a cross-site scripting vulnerability in payment processing service PayPal to the Full Disclosure mailing list. Kugler wanted to report the bug to PayPal as part of its official Bug Bounty Program, but the program only pays out to participants who are 18 or over. To vent his frustration, he has now gone public with the bug.

• Individuals claiming to be part of international hacktivist group Anonymous have published phone numbers and addresses for supporters of the English Defence League (EDL) as part of what they said was the first phase of a campaign to destroy the far-right street protest movement.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The economic crisis in Greece has led to a rise in support for the far-right Golden Dawn and an increase in racist attacks. Jamal Osman talks to one man who is fighting back.

• A man staying at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre Hotel used his Blackberry to video-record police who were arresting another guest. The police objected and several of them piled onto him, beating him savagely while screaming “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” They broke two of his ribs. The whole thing was captured on the man’s phone and on hotel CCTV. He’s suing.

• In case you missed it, Senator John McCain took the opportunity this Memorial Day to cross the Turkey-Syria border and hang out with Syrian rebels. These are the same rebels with ties to Al Qaeda. These are the same rebels cutting out and eating the hearts of dead soldiers. According to reports, Senator McCain wanted to go further into combat but was not allowed.

• Last week, the California Liberty Preservation Act, AB351, was passed unanimously by the Assembly Appropriations Committee and sent to the full State Assembly for a vote.

• The bill would play a big part in nullifying the “indefinite detention” provisions of both the NDAA and the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).

• On Monday the Washington Post published a classified list compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board of military systems and technologies allegedly compromised by Chinese hacking. Though the previously undisclosed report does not present any evidence for these claims, it is being used to escalate charges against China that it is hacking US secrets.

• LAW profs deem force-feeding “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”

• Our political strategy brings to mind the definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein..

• I’ve been reading a few articles on the “alternative” media which really have me thinking. One, by Chris Hedges entitled “Rise Up or Die” made me think about just how bad things really are nowadays here in the USA. The other article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, “You are The Hope” was also a particularly dark piece.

• It’s not that I don’t agree with what the two have said…I do; still, I don’t think they quite accurately reflect the growing dis-connects between what many Americans and the mainstream media, along with the Powers That Be would have us believe.

• One of the world’s leading terrorism experts has branded the government’s proposals to muzzle Islamist hate preachers and crack down on violent extremism in the wake of the Woolwich attack as “a waste of time”.

• Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operations officer who worked with the Afghan mujahedin in the late 1980s, says that “a good [counter-extremism] policy should be based on an understanding on what’s happening on the ground.

• “The notion that there is any serious process called ‘radicalisation’, or indoctrination, is really a mistake. What you have is some young people acquiring some extreme ideas – but it’s a similar process to acquiring any type of ideas. It often begins with discussions with a friend.”

• As promised in his speech this week, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is largely assuming control of the embattled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) combat operations in the Middle East. The program had been run over the past several years by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and was responsible for death strikes on four Americans, only one of which was an intended target for death.

• In response to the hacking to death of Lee Rigby, a young off-duty British soldier killed on a London street in broad daylight, Britain’s Home Office plans measures to prevent the radicalization of Muslim youth which include censorship of jihadist Internet websites, a crackdown on extremist organizations and the cleansing of mosques and place of learning from preachers promoting “a poisonous narrative.” That’s all very well but unless the government acknowledges the root of the problem those steps will constitute a mere band-aid covering a suppurating sore.

• Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood held a press conference last Thursday to declare his department’s innocence in the death of David Silva. This claim is based on the coroner’s report prepared by the Kern County Coroner’s office, which reports to the Sheriff’s Office. David Silva’s death has been declared “accidental,” with the official cause of death listed as “cardiac hypertension.”

Cablegate

• Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in Guwahati, AGP secretary Durga Das Boro said that the party was contemplating legal action against Rahul Gandhi for making such a comment on the Assam’s regional party, which formed the government in the state for three terms since 1986. Boro said that the WikiLeaks had recently revealed that “(Gandhi) had said that AGP leaders were insurgents and India allowed separatists to form the government in Assam and the United States should also allow Hamas.”

• Ecuador has accused the UK of violating Julian Assange’s human rights by refusing to allow the WikiLeaks founder to take shelter in South America, which granted him political asylum nearly a year ago.

• Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond agrees to “non-cooperating plea agreement” as alternative to endless court battle and decades of prison time

• In yet another Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case, in which the DOJ piled on charge after charge after charge until the person they were pressuring accepted a plea bargain, Jeremy Hammond has officially accepted a plea deal for helping LulzSec/Anonymous hack Stratfor. He admits that he did it, and given that, it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that some punishment is warranted, but it still seems troubling the amount of pressure that the DOJ used to get him to take a plea bargain.

• WikiLeaks released an enormous treasure-trove of classified US government documents in 2010. It included US military logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 250,000 diplomatic cables, and Collateral Murder, a video depicting the killing of 12 civilians by a US helicopter gunship in Iraq.

• The source of the leaks, US Private Bradley Manning, acted on his conscience. He believed that people have a right to see the information he had been privy to as an army intelligence analyst. He was prepared to risk his life and liberty to reveal that information.

• Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney held a special screening for his new documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, in Washington, DC, on May 21. Gibney also participated in a question and answer session after the film that was moderated by POLITICO‘s Josh Gerstein.

• First, the title reinforces widespread perceptions created by the United States government that the WikiLeaks organization is out to “steal” secrets. Gibney has claimed that the title is “ironic.” Actually, the US government steals secrets. Former NSA director Michael Hayden says this in the film, but this aspect of US government operations takes up only a few seconds of the film. He does not explore how US government agencies are actually the ones engaged in stealing so the “irony” does not come through at all.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• But in Haiti’s Central Plateau, the flow of energy is intermittent at best. Consider that in Mirebalais, located 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the power goes out for an average of three hours each day. This poses an enormous challenge to running any hospital; surgeries are jeopardized, neonatal ventilators stall, the cold chain is interrupted, and countless everyday tasks get derailed. As Partners In Health co-founder Paul Farmer noted during a recent lecture at the Harvard School of Public Health, “It’s not great if you’re a surgeon and you have to think about getting the generator going.”

• By 2020, 1.5 percent of the energy that public utilities in Minnesota generate will have to come from solar. It’s estimated that this new requirement, signed into law last week by Gov. Mark Dayton, will result in a 32-fold increase in solar capacity in the state, up to 450 megawatts.

Finance

• Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that “inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve,” with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.

• Digital currency Liberty Reserve has been shut down after U.S. and Costa Rican authorities arrested founder Arthur Budovsky Belanchuk in Spain.

• On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years, which distorts the natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia. Two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking due to pumping out groundwater, oil and gas. Some deltas are falling at a rate four times faster than global sea level is rising.

Censorship

• Company agrees to update policies in response to protest by more than 100 advocacy groups

• PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is incensed over an article in the Huffington Post that details that organization’s unsettling practice of euthanizing animals in a Virginia facility that many have assumed is a no kill shelter.

• According to the New York Post, PETA wants to sue some of the people who have left comments on the article. The problem is that, following the practice of many on the Internet, many of the comments are under assumed names or are anonymous. PETA is attempting to discover the true identities of their critics so that it can sue them for defamation.

• Cameron D’Ambrosio, the Massachusetts teen arrested and charged with “communicating terroristic threats” (or “bomb threats,” depending on who’s doing the reporting) via a Facebook post (in the form of rap lyrics — CammyDee has aspirations), has been denied bail by the state’s Superior Court.

• There’s been a big push around the globe to ramp up data retention rules, which require various online services to keep all sorts of data on their users for a long time, just in case it’s possible that law enforcement officials might need that data at some later date. That this only adds to the pile of data, and often makes it more difficult to find useful data, is never discussed. That this likely puts more people’s private data at risk of being hacked or accidentally revealed is never discussed. Also, almost never discussed: whether or not such data retention laws actually help solve crimes.

Privacy

• What does the Woolwich murder teach us about the need for the Communications Data Bill? Nothing at all; the security services seem to have known all about the suspect using existing powers.

• While reform languishes in Congress, Austin moves to protect Texans’ inboxes.

• The Madras high court on Wednesday ordered notice to the state government on a petition filed by Vanniyar Sangam state president Kaduvetti Guru challenging his detention under the National Security Act. A division bench comprising Justice B Rajendran and K Ravichandra Baabu also admitted the habeas corpus petition filed by Guru and posted further hearing of the case after six weeks.

• Remember the gigantic data-center that the NSA is building in Utah in order to (illegally) process the electronic communications of the whole world? Turns out that the state of Utah plans on taxing the titanic amounts of electricity it will consume at 6%. The NSA is pissed.

• Washington • Gov. Gary Herbert and National Security Agency officials are confident they can work out an agreement to avert taxing the new Utah Data Center on millions of dollars in electricity it needs to run the mammoth computer farm.

• Journeyman Pictures’ short documentary “Naked Citizens” is an absolutely terrifying…

• President Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech yesterday on national security policy, where he unexpectedly touched on the recent AP and Fox News press freedom scandals. While he condemned leaks, he emphasized that “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs,” and that he’s “troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”

• The President’s words are long overdue, given, as media lawyer Ted Boutrous writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “The Justice Department has completely lost sight of the First Amendment.” But Obama’s supposed remedy is to have Eric Holder review Justice Department policy, the same man who has overseen the Justice Department prosecute leakers to the press at a record rate.

Civil Rights

• Around 350 workers have been dismissed from their jobs at a factory in Alexandria on Sunday morning, without adequate justification, according to the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR).

• Mohamed Adel, a lawyer at ECESR said that between 350 and 400 workers at the Hi Tech Textile factory in Alexandria were relieved of their duties because they demanded higher wages. According to Adel, the owner of the factory laid off the Egyptian workers in favour of foreign workers because their wage demands are lower than the Egyptian workers.

• An Illinois community is rallying around a teacher who is reportedly up against disciplinary action for informing his students of their rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment before the high-schoolers answered a survey regarding their personal behavior.

• The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time.

• The new details are revealed in a court filing detailing a back and forth between the Justice Department and the federal judges who oversaw the request to search a Gmail account belonging to Rosen, a reporter for Fox News. A 2009 article Rosen had written about North Korea sparked an investigation; Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department adviser who allegedly leaked classified information to Rosen, insisted that the reporter should not be notified of the search and seizure of his e-mails, even after a lengthy delay.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• There was plenty of attention paid to the failed WCIT meeting last year, in which some countries effectively sought greater control over the internet, leading many countries to refuse to sign on. There has since been plenty of reasonable concern that the end result of this is a fragmented internet, with one internet for those who believe in internet freedom and openness… and one for those who don’t.

• And, of course, the whole ITU WCIT process was never going to be the end of such discussions. Eli Dourado, who has been following this stuff closely for a while, recently had a good report about how various authoritarian governments made a bit of a power play for more control over internet governance. The issue may seem bureaucratic and messy, but that’s also why it’s important to pay attention. Because mixed in with all that bureaucracy are some key decisions.

• So… we’d already taken a stab at debunking Jaron Lanier’s “gobbledygook economics” a few weeks back when it started appearing, but since then there’s been more Lanier everywhere (obviously, in coordination with his book release), and each time it seems more ridiculous than the last. Each time, the focus is on the following economically ridiculous concepts: (1) there should be micropayments for anyone doing anything free online because someone benefits somewhere (2) modern efficiency via technology has destroyed the middle class. Both of these claims make no sense at all.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A bunch of folks have been sending in variations on a report that came out last week, grandly titled “The IP Commission Report” as if it were some sort of official body. In the subhead, we find out that it’s actually by the even more ridiculously named “The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.” Who put together this “commission”? Well, it’s the National Bureau of Asian Research, which also is not an official government organization as you might think, but a private think tank that more or less was spun out of the University of Washington, and was originally the National Bureau of Asian and Soviet Research, put together at the behest of Senator Henry Jackson, who believed strongly that America should intervene around the globe to promote American interests, often at the expense of those where we were intervening. He supported interning Japanese Americans during WWII. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He’s considered the spiritual father of today’s neoconservatives. As you may have guessed, the “National Bureau of Asian Research” is not exactly about figuring out the best way to understand and improve relationships between the US and Asia. It’s about how US interests can dominate Asia.

• For the last few months, Techdirt has been following the surprisingly rapid embrace on both sides of the Atlantic of the proposed transatlantic free trade agreement, known variously as TAFTA or TTIP. Coming out of nowhere, the agreement is being talked about as if its success and benefits are more or less guaranteed.

• …they patented the virus…

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