● 04.18.14

● Links 18/4/2014: New KDE, Kubuntu, and More

Posted in News Roundup at 5:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Linux server slinger Linode has doubled its RAM allocations per-server, and swapped out all its hard drives with SSDs allowing it to match upstart Digital Ocean on prices.

• The new gear was announced by the company in a blog post on Thursday. It contains new Ivy Bridge E5-2680 v2 processors, greater networking bandwidth, and larger memory allocations, as well as SSDs for storage.

• AMD has showcased AMD Opteron X-Series APU (Berlin) running a Linux environment based on the Fedora Project at Red Hat Summit 2014.

• Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution, providing enterprise class operating environment to developers and IT administrators, is important to companies looking to transition to x86 APU servers.

• Berlin is the first 28nm-based CPU and APU product from AMD for the Opteron server market and this APU is supposed to replace Opteron 3300 series based on 4 to 8 Piledriver cores. Berlin has four Steamroller cores, but its APU supports HSA and it theoretically should be able to run some parallel computing applications much faster.

• Chipmaker AMD has announced a major milestone in the development of its enterprise software ecosystem with the first public demonstration of its second-generation AMD Opteron X-Series APU, codenamed “Berlin,” running Fedora Linux at the Red Hat Summit 2014.

• IBM reported its first quarter fiscal 2014 results late Wednesday, once again showing weakness in its server hardware business. Big Blue however has a plan to change its hardware business fortunes.

• IBM is particularly keen on promoting Linux on Power, and Schroeter said that there are now over 800 independent software vendors whose wares are certified to run on the Power-Linux combo. Many of the hyperscale and extreme scale customers that IBM would love to sell Power-based machines to have their own variants of Linux as well as their own applications, so they can relatively easily port their code to Power should it make sense for performance reasons. This is, in fact, the bet that Big Blue is making. It may not be as bold as the bet the company made to create the System/360 mainframe 50 years ago, but the company is not walking away and remains committed to using Power machinery behind its Watson service and continuing to design processors for both Power and System z platforms into the future.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Announced last year was an open-source ARM development board running Mer with an aim of supporting X.Org and Wayland based environments and would be powerful enough to run KDE’s Plasma Active environment. The Improv is now three months past its original ship-date and there’s no indication of the low-end dual-core Cortex-A7 + 1GB RAM hardware shipping anytime soon.

Applications

• This Linux download manager application has a large inventory of features, but it is still very lightweight and low on resources. Download management for the Linux OS is not a crowded category, but with its efficient, user-friendly GUI and a few unique options, uGet excels over other download managers.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Calligra team has released a bugfix version 2.8.2 of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.8.0 and we recommend everybody to update.

• Let’s all celebrate on this release but not forget we need to keep working full steam ahead on the releases of KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 2014.06 and KDE Applications 4.14.

• Today’s news search might have been a bit of a bust if not for the release of KDE 4.1.3 yesterday. This release is said to bring major updates as well as new features and bug fixes. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols posted some tips and tricks for using Linux Mint. And finally, an orphanage is using Linux to teach children about computers and programming.

• I normally like to use Twitter straight from the browser but there are some really good Android based apps that work just as well.

• The KDE Project developers have just released the fourth maintenance version of Applications and Platform 4.13, featuring a large array of improvements and new features.

• The KDE developers don’t seem to take any time off and they are releasing one version after another. If they are not outing a maintenance version for the 4.12 branch or a new build for KDE Frameworks, they must be doing something for the 4.13 branch.

• You’ve been waiting for it, we’ve been working hard on it.. it’s the new Long Term Support release of Kubuntu!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Games is a collection of fifteen small five-minute games in a variety of styles and genres. The last 1-2 years has begun an effort to modernize them [part2] (both interface & development parts), while the gameplay has changed a lot -on some of those- over the years.

Distributions

• The RapidDisk and RapidCache modules have been updated for the 3.14 kernel. A few changes in the kernel block structures warranted a little bit of rewrite for this new kernel.

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 14.04 was released today and I am revising it after couple of years. KDE‘s Plasma desktop has become my primary desktop along with Mac OSX which I use on MacBook so I am in the position to compare Ubuntu/Unity with these two most polished and mature desktops.

• Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr is everything a Long Term Support release should be. No big changes, but a solid, stable release, with a few nips and tucks here and there.

• Canonical is making a really big push with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and, even if devs didn’t get to integrate everything they wanted, users can still test and see some of the progress that has been made for the features that weren’t included in Ubuntu.

• Canonical has released a new Ubuntu Touch version based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, along with all the flavors, on April 17.

• Long Term Support (LTS) releases, such as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ‘Trusty Tahr’, are not expected to present radical changes, as these should be made in the interim releases. Instead, an LTS release should add stability and polish to interim changes. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was suggested almost three years ago by Mark Shuttleworth as the release that would see convergence across all hardware formats. In retrospect, this goal could only have been reached if the elements required for convergence — Mir and Unity 8 — had been successfully introduced in earlier releases. Although Canonical made some effort to do this, development was eventually refocused on Ubuntu for phones and tablets and convergence is now unlikely to happen until 2015. As it stands, Ubuntu 14.04 is left running X window server and the Unity 7 shell.

• To complement the just-published Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, 13.10, and 14.04 LTS desktop benchmarks are results when running a variety of workstation and server oriented benchmarks.

• From an Intel Core i7 4960X Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system were these open-source server/workstation benchmarks being tested on clean installs of 12.04.4 LTS, 13.10, and 14.04 LTS. The stock settings and options were used.

• Ubuntu 14.04 seems to be all about refining the Ubuntu desktop. While there are not a lot of amazing new features in this release, there are quite a few very useful and needed tweaks that add up to a much better desktop experience. Canonical’s designers seem to be listening to Ubuntu users again, and they seem willing to make the changes necessary to give the users what they want. That may be the single most important thing about Ubuntu 14.04. It could be an indication of a sea change in Canonical’s attitude toward Ubuntu users.

• Yes, you can install this release on your computers and servers safely in the knowledge that you’ll be getting critical security updates and patches as and when they’re issued. Plus, every so often, a new Hardware Enablement Stack (read: Linux kernel supporting new hardware) will be issued to let you get the most our of your hardware and accessories.

• My 19-year-old daughter bought herself a new computer without any of my input. She opted to go with an ASUS running Windows 8. The second she booted up her new machine, her first reaction was “This is not good.” The Windows 8 tile interface felt like a toy (even using a touch screen). From that point on, her opinion was jaded, and she wound up returning the laptop.

• Her previous laptop ran Ubuntu 13.10.

• My point is that it only took her a few seconds to form an opinion about Windows 8. That opinion was based completely on how Windows 8 looked, and she couldn’t get beyond it.

• One glance at Ubuntu 14.04 (Figure A), and her first reaction was “Wow, that looks great!”

• Canonical eventually wants to create a single operating system that can be installed across desktops, phones, and tablets, with a different interface presented on each device. That convergence hasn’t been completed yet, so with 14.04 (codenamed “Trusty Tahr”) there will be separate downloads for the mobile editions. “Full convergence means that the same code for operating systems and applications will be running on all types of devices, from phones to tablets to desktops, and even both smaller and larger devices,” Ubuntu Engineering VP Rick Spencer told Ars in an e-mail. “Convergence is still a work in progress, and we will continue to move the code to the desktop as it is ready in each release.”

Flavours and Variants

• As it was to be expected, Kubuntu14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) is based on KDE Plasma 4.13, which got its final version only yesterday. The Kubuntu developers managed to get their new LTS version out with the stable version in the nick of time.

• Xubuntu 14.04 Available For Download [Video, Screenshots] http://m.webupd8.org/2014/04/xubuntu-1404-available-for-download.html

• The Lubuntu developers don’t usually make big changes from one version to another, and this is true for the latest build of the Linux distribution. This aspect is even more important because this is an LTS release and it’s supposed to provide a stable and fast experience.

Devices/Embedded

• The Linux-based Bluefin-21 automated mini-sub now leading the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may need to be pushed beyond its 2.8 mile depth limit.

• The massive, 40-day air and sea search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has now come down to this: one 16-foot, autonomous yellow submarine that runs on Linux.

Phones

• Jolla, a company formed by a group of ex-Nokia engineers and one of the newest smartphone makers in the market, has released an update for its Sailfish OS.

• The update, bringing the Sailfish OS to version 1.05.16 (Update 5), is also codenamed Paarlampi. It brings new functionality to the OS, and fixes bugs.

Ballnux

• LG G3 would feature a display resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels, the company confirmed. Other details (as earlier rumoured for the Android device) include a 5.5-inch QHD display, 32GB of storage, microSD card slot (up to 64GB), Android 4.4.2 KitKat operating system, and a 13-megapixel camera.

• Research firm IHS got hold of Samsung’s new flagship smartphone and took it apart to the last bolt to figure out how much it actually costs to build. According to the teardown, the Galaxy S5 has a bill of material (BOM) of $256.

Android

• It was in October 2013 when Motorola, for the first time, introduced us to Project Ara – an attempt at making modular smartphones. The goal was to change the future of smartphones by building a smartphone system which is customisable, upgradeable and open at the hardware level. And it just might, as Google‘s modular Gray Phone (aka Project Ara) will be made available in January 2015 for around $50. (Though Motorola was later acquired by Chinese company Lenovo, Google got to keep the patents as well as Project Ara at Mountain View.)

Free Software/Open Source

• Consumer-electronics maker’s Connect SDK initially supports LG TVs, Roku, Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV

• The well-known cloud storage service, Box, is opening up some of it’s source code which includes many of its proprietary engineering tools. Box CEO Aaron Levie admitted the the role open source played in his product and he wanted to give back by contributing select code to the community. He said in a tweet – tweet which goes “Box couldn’t exist without open source projects. We’re announcing Box Open Source to now give back our own.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has been receiving positive feedback in the Latin American countries where is has launched the Firefox mobile OS given that users can access more applications on the open web than in a closed OS.

SaaS/Big Data

• Russell Pavlicek from the Xen project asks “Are Containers the Right Answer to the Wrong Question? on the Citrix Open@Citrix blog. While Russell brings up many good points, including both Mirage OS and OSv, I believe his article misses the mark about where and how Linux containers are changing the way we do IT. Its true that containers are more limited than full blown virtual machines, but the real magic is about process and management.

• ownCloud, the open source platform for deploying cloud services using internal enterprise infrastructure, said it can scale just as well as traditional public cloud environments, while keeping data much more private. That’s the company’s conclusion based on testing results of ownCloud running on Red Hat (RHT) Storage, which are on display at this week’s Red Hat Summit.

Databases

• Last month, ZDNet published an interview with MongoDB CEO Max Schireson which took the position that the document databases, such as MongoDB, are better-suited to today’s applications than traditional relational databases; the title of the article implies that the days of relational databases are numbered. But it is not, as Schireson would have us believe, that the relational database community is ignorant of or has not tried the design paradigms which he advocates, but that they have been tried and found, in many cases, to be anti-patterns. Certainly, there are some cases in which the schemaless design pattern that is perhaps MongoDB’s most distinctive feature is just the right tool for the job, but it is also misleading to think that such designs must use a document store. Relational databases can also handle such workloads, and their capabilities in this area are improving rapidly.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice offers free and open-source document, spreadsheet, presentation, vector graphics, and database creation tools, along with a mathematical formula editor. More than 750 extensions and over 2,800 templates are available for the productivity suite at SourceForge.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• The Moscone Center in San Francisco is the scene of this week’s Red Hat Summit, now in its 10th year. John Furrier and Stu Miniman welcomed the President of Products and Technology for Red Hat, Paul Cormier, to one of the final interviews for Day 1 on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A debugger plays a vital role in any software development system. Nobody can write a bug-free code all at once. During the course of development, bugs are being raised and needs to be solved for further enhancement. A development system is incomplete without a debugger. Considering the open source developers community, GNU Debugger is their best choice. It is also used for commercial software development on UNIX type platforms.

Public Services/Government

• Open source solutions are “massively cost-effective”, says Mark Dearnley, the Chief Digital & Information Officer at the UK’s tax authority, HMRC. The government department is set to increasingly use such this type of software, he announced at the ‘Open Source & Open Standards’ conference in London, on 3 April. “Open source is definitively going to change our future.”

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• “The question shouldn’t be, What language should I pick up?” says one senior engineer. “Instead, it should be, What type of developer do I want to become?”

Leftovers

Security

• The OpenSSL flaw is serious, but the four horsemen of the apocalypse aren’t coming for the Internet — or your smartphone

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato enlargement project. Reneging on the Reagan administration’s promise to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet caucuses, Nato’s military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.

• The truck owners’ strike was the final blow. Because of the wild geography of the country, the Chilean economy is at the mercy of its transport. To paralyse trucking is to paralyse the country. It was easy for the opposition to co-ordinate the strike, for the truckers’ guild was one of the groups most affected by the scarcity of replacement parts and, in addition, it found itself threatened by the government’s small pilot programme for providing adequate state trucking services in the extreme south of the nation. The stoppage lasted until the very end without a single moment of relief because it was financed with cash from outside. “The CIA flooded the country with dollars to support the strike by the bosses and . . . foreign capital found its way down into the formation of a black market,” Pablo Neruda wrote to a friend in Europe. One week before the coup, oil, milk and bread had run out.

• Thank God we live in America, where this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

• Tomorrow, 14 April, the Metropolitan police and CPS will prosecute five anti-fascists arrested on 1 June 2013 while trying to stop the British National party from marching on the Cenotaph. Police decided the anti-fascist protest was a “threat to public safety” and imposed a dispersal order under section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986; 59 people were arrested. A few months later 286 protesters against the English Defence League, which had declared its intention to march on a park named after Altab Ali, who was murdered in a racist attack, were arrested in Tower Hamlets.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Since 1973, the closest any previous April has come to this amount of ice coverage remaining was 1994, when 23 percent of the lakes were still frozen, according to the Weather Channel.

• Oklahoma residents who produce their own energy through solar panels or small wind turbines on their property will now be charged an additional fee, the result of a new bill passed by the state legislature and expected to be signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin (R).

• Humans can survive weeks without food, but only days without water — in some conditions, only hours. It may sound clichéd, but it’s no hyperbole: Water is life. So what happens when private companies control the spigot? Evidence from water privatization projects around the world paints a pretty clear picture — public health is at stake.

Finance

• Seattle’s corporations were blindsided, it all happened so fast. Socialist candidate Kshama Sawant’s successful City Council campaign tore through Seattle politics like a tornado, leaving the 1% devastated, unable to cope with a storm they didn’t see coming. The Seattle elite had no way to counter her arguments, silence her supporters, or keep her from gathering a tidal wave of support for the $15 campaign. The establishment was paralyzed, powerless.

• “What I can’t understand is, why aren’t people rioting in the streets?” I hear this, now and then, from people of wealthy and powerful backgrounds. There is a kind of incredulity. “After all,” the subtext seems to read, “we scream bloody murder when anyone so much as threatens our tax shelters; if someone were to go after my access to food or shelter, I’d sure as hell be burning banks and storming parliament. What’s wrong with these people?”

• It’s a good question. One would think a government that has inflicted such suffering on those with the least resources to resist, without even turning the economy around, would have been at risk of political suicide. Instead, the basic logic of austerity has been accepted by almost everyone. Why? Why do politicians promising continued suffering win any working-class acquiescence, let alone support, at all?

• I think the very incredulity with which I began provides a partial answer. Working-class people may be, as we’re ceaselessly reminded, less meticulous about matters of law and propriety than their “betters”, but they’re also much less self-obsessed. They care more about their friends, families and communities. In aggregate, at least, they’re just fundamentally nicer.

• Living in America has taught Matt Taibbi that we as a society have “a profound hatred of the weak and the poor.”

• That’s one claim the former Rolling Stone writer makes in his new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” Taibbi defended this statement in a HuffPost Live interview on Tuesday.

• It’s tax time again, April 15, when our minds turn toward paying the taxes we owe or possibly getting a tax refund. But what we don’t think about enough is whether our tax system is fair. The richest 1 percent of Americans are now getting the largest percent of total national income in almost a century. So you might think they’d pay a much higher tax rate than everyone else.

• Political scientists show that average American has “near-zero” influence on policy outcomes, but their groundbreaking study is not without problems.

• It’s not every day that an academic article in the arcane world of American political science makes headlines around the world, but then again, these aren’t normal days either. On Wednesday, various mainstream media outlets — including even the conservative British daily The Telegraph — ran a series of articles with essentially the same title: “Study finds that US is an oligarchy.” Or, as the Washington Post summed up: “Rich people rule!” The paper, according to the review in the Post, “should reshape how we think about American democracy.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• America’s mainstream media still pretends it is the custodian of “serious journalism,” but that claim continues to erode as the corporate press shies away from its duty to challenge propaganda emanating from various parts of the U.S. government, as Danny Schechter describes.

Censorship

• According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the latest report documents 52 instances of censorship during the first three months of 2014 compared with 45 during the same period last year. The most notable example is the abrupt blackout of a live telecast on the final moments of parliamentary deliberations and voting on a controversial bill to create the new state of Telangana. While the government claims the blackout was due to a technical glitch, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) insists it was a tactical move by the ruling Congress party to ram through the vote to shore up support during an election in which its prospects look grim. Other parties also slammed the blackout as “undemocratic.”

• Hollywood’s habit of allowing Chinese censors to cut offending material from blockbuster movies has led to accusations of artistic surrender from some critics. But at least one US film-maker has clearly not been reading the script: Oliver Stone has told an audience in Beijing that the world’s most populous nation desperately needs to confront its past on the big screen if its burgeoning film industry is to be taken seriously.

• Twitter might not be banned in Turkey anymore, but the country’s government isn’t quite done putting it through the censorship wringer yet. In fact, Turkish Communications Minister Lütfi Elvan just released a written statement that says: “We [Twitter and Turkey] have reached a consensus to ‘neutralize’ malicious content that is the object of court decisions by pixelating.” He didn’t expound on what he means by “pixelating,” but it’s typically associated with the mosaic-like classic approach to censorship. If Turkish authorities can indeed blur out tweets, then this saga might have taken an even crazier turn. Since that’s bordering on the absurd, though, it’s possible that “pixelating” might have just been the term Lütfi used for Twitter’s Country Withheld Tool, which the website uses to hide tweets and accounts from a whole nation.

Privacy

• “We took every document in the office, and shared the evidence we found of illegal FBI activity with the American public. The documents we found exposed COINTELPRO for the first time, a massive program of domestic surveillance intended to intimidate dissenters and infringe on our right to free speech,” he said at the beginning of the AMA session.

• Some of the items I bought — a $230 service that encrypted my data in the Internet cloud; a $35 privacy filter to shield my laptop screen from coffee-shop voyeurs; and a $420 subscription to a portable Internet service to bypass untrusted connections — protect me from criminals and hackers. Other products, like a $5-a-month service that provides me with disposable email addresses and phone numbers, protect me against the legal (but, to me, unfair) mining and sale of my personal data.

• …so many are paying attention to how their rights are being violated….

• WaPo – in addition to running a story about Putin with Snowden’s picture, implying completely incorrectly and without evidence that the two are in cahoots – gives commentator Steven Stromberg a platform to resurrect the long-disproven “Russian spy” narrative while attempting to tarnish Snowden with a tired list of negative personality traits like “contemptible” and lacking “a shred of dignity.”

• On Thursday, I questioned Russia’s involvement in mass surveillance on live television. I asked Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, a question that cannot credibly be answered in the negative by any leader who runs a modern, intrusive surveillance program: “Does [your country] intercept, analyse or store millions of individuals’ communications?”

• The small-scale Stellar communications company in Germany is reeling from revelations that it may have been hacked by GCHQ and the NSA. DW travels to the Cologne suburb of Hürth to try and find out why.

• This news follows Dropbox’s long-term efforts to enter the photo storing and sharing game. Most recently, Dropbox launched Carousel, a galley for photos and videos. When it launched, Dropbox called Carousel a “place for all your memories.”

• Abby Martin reports on the announcement that the NYPD is disbanding its ‘Demographic Unit’, responsible for the surveillance of Muslim communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut following 9/11.

• The footage, taken outside a youth project center, appears to capture the world-famous graffiti artist Banksy at work. The new artwork, called “Mobile Lovers,” shows two lovers cuddling with their phones in hand.

• Section 702 of FISA fails each of these requirements.

• The three billion phone calls made in the US each day are snatched up by the agency, which stores each call’s metadata (phone numbers of the parties, date and time, length of call, etc) for five years. Each day telecom giants turn over metadata on every call they have processed.

• Pulitzers Awarded At The ‘Taj Majal” of Journalism for Snowden Leaks Stories While TV Networks Grumble and Keep Their Distance….

Civil Rights

• Sgt. Star is the U.S. Army’s dedicated marketing and recruitment chatbot, and he isn’t going to turn whistleblower any time soon. There’s no use threatening him for answers either—he’s programmed to report that kind of hostility to the Army Criminal Investigation Division.

• Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “Not too long ago, Boing Boing covered EFF’s (at the time) unsuccessful attempt to retreive records about Sgt. Star (the Army’s recruiter-bot) using the Freedom of Information Act. We’ve now received the files and compiled our research: It turns out Sgt. Star isn’t the only government chatbot — the FBI and CIA had them first.

• Over the past few months, we covered the bizarre trial concerning Rahinah Ibrahim and her attempt to get off the no fly list. In January, there was an indication that the court had ordered her removed from the list, but without details. In February, a redacted version of the ruling revealed that the whole mess was because an FBI agent read the instructions wrong on a form and accidentally placed her on the no fly list, though we noted that some of the redactions were quite odd.

• A four-day hearing meant to edge legal arguments closer to an actual 9/11 trial ended in uncertainty Thursday as the war crimes prosecutor named a special outside counsel to probe for possible FBI spying on defense lawyers.

• But at the last minute, Hosseinzadeh’s mother, Samereh Alinejad, forgave him, after giving a speech to the crowd and then slapping Bilal in the face. Hosseinzadeh’s father helped take the noose off of Bilal, whose weeping mother hugged Alinejad in thanks, as seen in the photos.

• Speech to the People’s University of the Occupy Movement

• Yesterday morning the police cleared Zuccotti Park, but today the people are back. The police should know that this protest is not a battle for territory. We’re not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there. We are fighting for Justice. Justice, not just for the people of the United States, but for everybody. What you have achieved since September 17, when the Occupy Movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language, into the heart of Empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerized into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfillment. As a writer, let me tell you, this is an immense achievement. I cannot thank you enough.

• Among the problems that got us here is that the federal government asserts we have no Fourth Amendment rights at the border, and claims that the border extends a full 100 miles inside the country. That extremely broad definition of “the border” means two-thirds of Americans live in the Constitution Free Zone. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this assertion, consider that both the Bay Area and the entire state of Massachusetts fall within this 100-mile rights-swallowing vortex.

DRM

• CTIA and participating wireless companies today announced the “Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment,” which is the most recent effort by the industry to deter smartphone thefts in the U.S. The safety and security of wireless users remain the wireless industry’s top priority, and is why this commitment will continue to protect consumers while recognizing the companies’ need to retain flexibility so they may constantly innovate, which is key to stopping smartphone theft.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) has come into the focus of critics since the start of negotiations on a free trade agreement with the US (TTIP). ISDS means that foreign investors can sue the states hosting their investments in front of international courts when they see their rights and profit expectations violated. Often it is environmental or social legislation of a state which investors claim to be in violation of their investment expectations. Currently, for example, Vattenfall is suing the German federal government for 3 billion euros because of the German nuclear phase-out. Since Lisbon, the EU has gained the competence on investment policy, and thus also on ISDS policy. This Regulation establishes rules on whether EU or Member States act as a defendant in ISDS proceedings and who pays in the case of successful investor claims.

Copyrights

• At one year old, DPLA makes some big partnerships and looks back on its growth.

• When the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) opened last year, Carolyn Fox covered it’s progress after one month in her article: Review of the new Digital Public Library of America. In it she explained that the purpose of the Library is “to provide a large-scale, national public digital library of America’s archives, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions into one portal.”

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