● 05.09.14

● Links 9/5/2014: LXQt Introduced, New Debian Release

Posted in News Roundup at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Hiring Tux is a smart move for both small and large businesses. Linux once was considered a hobbyist’s operating system, but it has come a long way and now is considered enterprise class. It is considered very stable and secure. Linux can easily be customized, and there is a huge community eager to help out. Those are just some of the reasons to migrate to the Linux desktop.

Desktop

• A plethora of new Intel-powered Chrome OS devices were announces at a press conference hosted Wednesday by tech giant Google and chip manufacturer Intel. The event, which featured Caesar Sengupta from Google, and Navin Shenoy, vice president and general manager of mobile computing at Intel, announced, among other things, Chromebooks powered by Intel’s low-energy Bay Trail chipset, which will enable the lightweight computers running the Linux-based, web-centric operating system from Google to reportedly have 11 hours of battery life. Other devices announced include Intel’s Haswell and Core i3 chips.

• The LG Chromebase, the first all-in-one Chrome OS PC, has been announced to be made available to US customers on May 26. With 2 GB of memory, a 16GB SSD (solid state drive), and a dual-core Intel Haswell CPU, LG has followed the usual specifications found on most Chromebooks. For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, these specifications would probably be seem insufficient. However, what makes Chromebooks and the Chromebase stand out, is that they run Google‘s Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based upon Linux, so is very light and does not need many resources. In addition, since it only runs internet applications, it does not need many resources.

• The LG Chromebase, the first all-in-one Chrome OS PC, has been announced to be made available to US customers on May 26. With 2 GB of memory, a 16GB SSD (solid state drive), and a dual-core Intel Haswell CPU, LG has followed the usual specifications found on most Chromebooks. For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, these specifications would probably be seem insufficient. However, what makes Chromebooks and the Chromebase stand out, is that they run Google‘s Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based upon Linux, so is very light and does not need many resources. In addition, since it only runs internet applications, it does not need many resources.

• Part of what’s driving Chromebooks forward is that Google is on a rapid release cycle with Chrome OS. And, very importantly, Google has relaxed the fiercely cloud-centric vision it originally had for Chrome OS, so that applications for Chromebooks can be used offline.

• Google is adding more features to Chromebook applications so that they can be used without accessing the Web, addressing a common complaint among users who want the laptops to function more like traditional PCs.

• Although Web use remains a central feature of Chromebooks, Google recently added the ability to edit videos and watch full movies offline, for instance. A shorter update cycle means that the company can be more responsive to user demand.

• While the share of page-views from Ethiopia that StatCounter sees for GNU/Linux has been impressive lately, take a look at the peaks:

Kernel Space

• Now that kernel development activity is settling down for the Linux 3.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks of the EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems compared to the stable Linux 3.14 kernel performance.

Graphics Stack

• Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center is presenting this week at LinuxTag 2014 about the state of their Linux kernel graphics driver.

• While there’s many changes to Wayland 1.5, it doesn’t look like there should be much fallout from the many new features. When releasing the Wayland 1.5 RC, Kristian Høgsberg mentioned they’re at “a historic low in terms of open bug” with just 15 open bugs covering Wayland/Weston. The overall state of Wayland appears to be very good.

• The SteamOS Update 105 includes the AMD Catalyst 14.4 Linux driver, updates to the Iceweasel web browser, upstream Debian 7.5 package updates, new packages included in the SteamOS repository, and support for newer network adapters. The new network hardware supported is the Realtek R8168 and handling for more Intel WiFi chipsets.

Applications

• 1976 was a good year for text editors. At MIT, Richard Stallman and Guy Steele wrote the first version of Emacs. And over at Berkeley, Bill Joy wrote vi (though it wouldn’t be called that for a few years yet).

• Want to coloring your folder in nautilus or nemo file manager? here’s the simple way to make you folder have different color in nautilus and nemo file manager using folder color .

• If I added up all of the hours I’ve lost at my desktop simply by doing nothing of note I’d likely be eligible for honorary Time Lord status from Gallifrey.

• Most of us encounter parts of our workday where we must write or document something. Whether for building out the plan of a project, for the documentation of a project, or for the creation of the project itself, like an article or blog post, writing is a part of many of our daily lives regardless of industry or field.

• Open source tools can be used to get writing done, and freely available resources can be used to supplement and enhance that work. As a content manager here at Opensource.com, there are seven open source tools and resources that I use everyday.

• flareGet 3.1-36, a full-featured, advanced, multi-threaded, multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux, has been released and is now available for download.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Following hot on the footsteps on the last update, Valve just released another Beta update for Steam. This time however it is targeted towards Linux. This beta update brings a slew of much needed updates and most importantly various performance fixes for Linux.

• Leszek Godlewski, the former developer at The Farm 51 who has ported games like Painkiller Hell and Damnation and Deadfall Adventures to Linux / SteamOS, has given another presentation on porting games to Linux.

• 8BitMMO, a retro-style 2D massively multiplayer game developed and published by Archive Entertainment, will get a Linux version soon.

• Over the years I’ve looked at DosBox many times, I’ve covered it when it was included as part of the Puppy Arcade distro and I’ve covered it as a package in its own right.

• To say the package is impressive is to grossly understate this piece of software.

• Indie exploration titles Stranded and Spirit will be released on Steam courtesy of Curve Digital, it has been announced.

• Something that Epic Games teased earlier in the week has now come true – Unreal Tournament is back, and is completely free. Unreal Tournament 2014 is a sequel to the famous first-person shooter, and is not just free-to-play, but is completely free. It is being built for PC and Mac only, with Linux support also making it in. This ain’t no console dumbed down first-person shooter, folks!

• Leszek Godlewski is the man behind porting Deadfall Adventures and Painkiller Hell & Damnation to Linux, he now works for Nordic Games on an unannounced project that should hopefully see Linux support.

• I knew Tripwire weren’t stupid! Killing Floor 2 was a given when you look at how popular it is, it needs a refresh and I am glad to say it will be on Linux.

• Remember when we got confirmation for you that Unreal Engine will have all the tools native on Linux? Well their roadmap is now public and it’s on it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The LXDE and Razor-qt teams are proud to announce LXQt 0.7.0, the first release of LXQt, the Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment. This beta release is considered a stable continuation of the Razor desktop. It has been almost a year since the Razor-qt project and the LXDE-Qt project decided to merge. Since then, the LXQt desktop has been under active development by 13 developers and dozens of contributors and translators.

• Today in Linux news a new desktop environment saw its first release. A joint effort from the LXDE and Razor-qt clans brings LXQt 0.7.0. In other news, several outlets are covering the US Navy’s plans to move drones from Solaris to Linux. And finally today, Jack Germain covers the ins and outs of deploying Linux.

• Besides being stable and versatile, Linux-based operating systems are very customizable too. You see, most distributions allow you to customize the UI by selecting different environments. While GNOME, KDE and Unity are a few of the popular environments, there are many others as well.

• ‘May the fork be with you’ is a term we often hear in the free software community as it’s extremely easy to take the code and fork it to scratch your etch. What’s really difficult (and that’s something really counts) is to actually come together, collaborate and merge code-base to create something which helps more people, which is not just about scratching your own itch, but to do something which benefits more and more people.

• The Linux platform is actually the base for a multitude of operating systems, but a part of the community feels that there are too many distributions. The truth is that there are probably too few of them.

• One of the points of contention that usually arise in the Linux community is the fact that there seem to be too many Linux distributions and too many desktop environments. If we were to compare Linux with any other platform that would be true, but such a comparison would be incorrect.

• Linux is the only platform that allows this kind of freedom, so making a comparison with other operating systems is actually incorrect because they do not incorporate the same kind of philosophy and openness.

• My point is that even if Linux seems to be the home of many operating systems and desktop environments, the reality is that, in fact, there aren’t actually enough. The reason why I pick OSes and desktop environments is because they are the most visible, but the same is true for any other component.

• One of the best things about Linux is that there’s literally a distribution for everybody. Linux offers users the greatest range of choices of any desktop operating system. But do we need even more options? Softpedia thinks that we do and explains the advantages of having more desktop environments and distros.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE tries to be as much customizable as possible: All freedom to the user! This leads to an extended configuration that might be confusing to new users. Additionally, modules from different sources are aggregated in a way that not necessarily fits the mental representation of users. For instance, the distinction between ‘workspace appearance’ and ‘window appearance’ is not common in other desktop environments.

• Here’s your chance to see your favorite snap beautifying the next release of KDE Plasma! KDE’s Visual Design Group (VDG) announced a wallpaper competition for its next release of Plasma and submissions are live for the entire month of May 2014.

• More than 800 people participated in our online sorting of the KDE Network Manager details. In this article we present the results.

• [...]

• To achieve this we doubled some information into a tool-tip. This will of course only be an advantage for non-touch-users. We replaced the ‘connected’-statement in the current interface by the IP address and information about the current connection speed. Also, seeing the large amount of different information available for a single wireless connection we propose to split this information up into the sections ‘My computer’, ‘Speedgraph’, ‘Connection’ and ‘Router’.

• One of the first things people think of when talking visual design is icons. Now as “design” this is a very tight definition since a large chunk of it is so much bigger. But icons is a part of it all and it is something that is the most obvious change visually. Icons are also something very very difficult to do well as there is not only several very strict rules and concepts to consider while doing them, there is also a very large amount of work involved (thousands of icons for starters). Beyond that there are issues that make it even trickier. As icons are very direct visually – they are often victim of harsh criticism (or downright harassment) but further than that the BASE theme of a distro have to follow even stricter rules if it want to be accessible to as many as possible.

• Now we using Plasma do not have the huge wealth of icon themes as the boys and girls over at GTK, but we are getting there ever so slowly and today I would like to present one of the latest icon themes to get ported to KDE – Moka by Sam Hewitt.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Wayland change for Fedora 21 is about better supporting GNOME Wayland sessions. Fedora 20 already brought experimental GNOME Shell Wayland support while Fedora 21 is building upon more polished support thanks to upstream improvements landing with GNOME 3.14 due out in September.

• The GNOME developers are presenting at the Google Summer of Code their new ebook management application, called intuitively GNOME Books, which will be part of GNOME 3.14, the first desktop environment with official support for Wayland, Red Hat’s new system compositor.

Distributions

• Say you want to move from Windows to Linux… but there are a few Windows apps that you can’t give up, and they don’t work well under WINE. The developer of Robolinux offers a Debian-based GNU/Linux operating system designed to let you run Windows XP or Windows 7 in a virtual machine.

• But the latest version of Robolinux goes a step further: It includes a tool that lets you create a virtual machine by cloning your Windows C: Drive, which means it takes just minutes to create a version of Windows that you can run in virtualization in Linux, and it will already have all of your existing programs and data.

• With audio and video applications, you often need more than one package, and the assembled collection of multimedia packages in AV Linux is huge. The range of software offerings is a bonus. You do not get lightweight ware that leaves you yearning for more powerful features. The audio-visual tools are mature. Many of the productive apps are custom builds that enhance what you can do with them.

• Six years after its last release, GoboLinux is back, with the 015 release of the distribution that is best-known for a total rearrangement of the traditional Linux filesystem hierarchy. More information about the distribution is available, as are release notes for 015.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• I guess that the main question is: after seeing those problems, do I intend to keep OpenMandriva Lx 2014?

• The answer is yes. I find the distro responsive, beautiful, and functional for pretty much all I need (except printing or typing in Japanese so far ).

• Those, however, are very specific problems that other users should not expect to find, I suppose, and I can live with them.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is one of the top contributors to Open Stack development, so it was no surprise to see Open Stack was a popular topic of discussion at this year’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The CUBE hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman sat down with Red Hat’s GM of Virtualization and Open Stack, Radhesh Balakrishnan, to discuss the future of Red Hat and Open Stack in the cloud.

Fedora

• It’s official. Fedora 21, using GNOME 3.14 (scheduled for release on September 2014) will be the first Linux system to use the Wayland system compositor as default, instead of the good old X11 server. The Fedora developers have approved the change yesterday at their FESCo meeting.

Debian Family

• Ben Hutchings began extrapolating data of stable kernel releases and around the time of the Debian Jessie freeze will likely be the Linux 3.17 release, but that might be too close for comfort. However, at the same time, the earlier the Jessie kernel is frozen the more hardware enablement back-porting and other fixes that will need to queue up for this next major Debian GNU/Linux release.

• When a new point release of Debian is made available, the Live CD version of that distro is not accessible to users right away. It usually takes about a week for the Debian Live CD team to put together the new releases.

• As you may know, Debian 8.0 Jessie will be the first Debian system that will be using Red Hat’s systemd as the default init event manager. While it is in it’s early development stages, only the first Alpha version being available until now, new information about the future generation Debian system has been released.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• One of the best reasons to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is by far the new Linux kernel stack that comes with the new version. Ubuntu 14.04 includes the 3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the v3.13.9 upstream stable Linux kernel, which is one of the newest ones made available.

• Ubuntu AIO DVD (all-in-one), a collection of the most important Ubuntu 14.04 LTS flavors made available on April 17, 2014, is now ready for download.

• Canonical released its latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS distribution back in April, and along with it all the other famous flavors were also offered. There is a single problem with this launch, namely that the distros come as separate operating systems and you will have to download five ISOs, including the original, if you want to have all of them.

• Ubuntu for phones and tablets was announced more than a year and a half ago and the developers are working hard to make that October deadline when the first Ubuntu powered phones are supposed to arrive, although this is not a date set in stone.

• As you may know, Canonical has updated the kernels of all the supported Ubuntu systems: Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, due to the fact that it had some security issues, allowing unprivileged users to cause denial of service to the system and get root access.

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that uses the popular KDE desktop environment. According to information from the development team, this version offers more stability and also brings the latest apps for KDE.

• As Xubuntu 14.04 and Lubuntu 14.04, Kubuntu 14.04 come with long term support. The long term support means it comes with the promise of at least 5 years of support, including patches and bug fixes.

• With all the security and anonymity issues that are now affecting the online community, a Linux distribution that promises to keep users secure is not something out of the ordinary. In fact, there already is a number of OSes that seem to fit into this category, like Tails for example, and Ubuntu Privacy Remix is just one of them.

Devices/Embedded

• Together with Linux.com, the Linux Foundation’s community website, we have set up a survey on SurveyMonkey with 32 open spec single-board computers. Pick your favorite three boards and answer a few questions about what you’re looking for in an open, hacker SBC and enter the optional drawing for a chance to win cool Tux, embedded Linux, and Android gear. Five randomly selected winners will receive a T-shirt, sweatshirt, hat, mug, or USB drive.

• Of all the nerdy Linux gadgets out there, these take the cake.

• The systems used to fly the MQ-8 Fire Scout, the robotic helicopter developed by Northrop Grumman for the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships, are about to get an upgrade—one that’s based on the Linux operating system. Raytheon has been awarded a $15.8 million contract to deploy a new version of the Vertical Takeoff and Landing Unmanned Air Vehicle Tactical Control System (VTUAV TCS) that takes the operator’s console off its legacy Sun Microsystems Solaris 8 platform and brings it in line with military standards for drone control platforms—allowing it to be used with other compatible unmanned aircraft.

Phones

Ballnux

• Amid criticism of the latest Galaxy S smartphone, South Korean firm Samsung Electronics has replaced Chang Dong-hoon, the head of its mobile design team, by vice president of mobile design Lee Min-Hyuk. According to Reuters, “Chang, a former professor who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will continue to lead Samsung’s design center which overseas its overall design strategy.”

Android

• Following the latest Google update (which I was given no option to reject) I noticed that Google had added a remote kill switch as an opition. It was enabed by default. “Allow remote lock and erase” is what Google calls it and it is essentially working like a back door. Google and its partners in government are gaining a lot of power not over a smartphone but over a tablet.

• Analysis In the 1990s, Intel and Microsoft dominated the “open” PC standard – and it appears that Google now wants to do the same for its Android system, via its Silver programme.

• Intel has finally joined the Chrome OS bandwagon ensuring it won’t become obsolete in the post PC (Windows) era. The two companies hosted a joint press event on May 6 where they announced quite a lot of Chromebooks powered by Intel chips. Intel enjoyed a monopolistic position during the Windows era and the partnership between Intel & Windows was known as Wintel, which unfortunately was bad for the industry as it lead to some anti-competitive business practices which heavily damaged (and almost destroyed AMD).

• Huawei’s new 4G LTE smartphone, the Ascend P7, is finally here. A significant upgrade from last year’s Ascend P6, the new smartphone offers an updated Emotion UI interface on top of Android 4.4.2 Kitkat mobile operating system. It also provides users with updated cameras, and a 5-inch 1920×1080 resolution 441ppi IPS display. At 6.5mm slim, Ascend P7 is being touted as one of the slimmest 4G LTE smartphones in the market. The phone packs dual 13MP and 8MP cameras.

• ThreatPost reports that the Reveton cyber-crime gang is advertising an Android version of CryptoLocker. This program seems to have no way to actively infect an Android smartphone or tablet. To get it you have to actually download the APK file.

Free Software/Open Source

• I’ve been waiting for this: Hashover is a free-software project that aims to replace hosted-comments services like Disqus and those offered by Facebook and others that keep your comments in their database.

• Nathan Sobo announced that GitHub is contributing its text editor for programmers, Atom, to the open source community under the MIT license. While GitHub will continue to have its dedicated team working on Atom, they are also looking for a thriving and long-lasting community around Atom, just like Emacs and Vim.

• Atom has been powered by open source packages from its Beta phase. The current announcement takes it to the next level by open sourcing the rest of Atom including the core application, Atom’s package manager and Atom’s Chromium-based desktop application framework, Atom Shell.

• Google has open-sourced their toolchain for providing automatic feedback-directed optimizations from perf data profiles to what can be used by GCC and LLVM.

Events

• OpenStack Summit is just around the corner, taking place May 12 – 16 in Atlanta, Georgia! Opensource.com is excited to be providing coverage of what’s new in the ecosystem of the open source cloud. Whether you’re planning on attending or watching from afar, we’ve provided a few key resources for you to get the most out of OpenStack Summit 2014, to compliment the top sessions we’re excited about attending

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• According to the changelog, support has finally been added to GStreamer 1.0. We say finally because most applications that use GStreamer switched to the new 1.0 branch a long time ago. The latest GStreamer available right now is 1.3.1, so you can imagine how far behind Firefox is.

• Also, the Mac OS X command-E will now set the “find” term to the selected text, a new sidebar button will provide easier access to social, bookmark, and history sidebars, it’s no longer possible to call WebIDL constructors as functions on the web, box-shadow and other visual overflow issues have been fixed, mute and volume will now be available per window when using WebAudio, background-blend-mode is now enabled by default, and ES6 array and generator comprehensions have been implemented…

• Net Neutrality has been quite the conversation during the last several months. Without the free flow of information, the topology of the entire Internet would be defeated in its entirety. So when Mozilla recently proposed that the FCC categorize remote delivery services as telecommunications services, I personally sympathized with the members of the well known non-profit.

SaaS/Big Data

• Scalable object storage, refined deployment tools and high availability highlight the feature list in Eucalyptus 4.0, the latest version of the open source platform from Eucalyptus Systems for building private and hybrid clouds.

Databases

• The final iteration of phpMyAdmin 4.2.0 has been released and comes with a large number of changes and improvements. It’s been a while since the previous major update and, after a few RC versions, it was time for more important fixes.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has announced that the final version for LibreOffice 4.2.4 is now available for all platforms, including Linux.

• This is just a maintenance release for the 4.2.x branch and features a moderate number of fixes and changes, but users who have this office suite installed should upgrade as soon as possible…

• Today I would like to discuss a boring subject: Spreadsheets. Actually it’s not that boring when you come to think of it. At least I’m going to try not to make it boring. Let me set something straight first: Spreadsheets are not just about numbers; they are about data. You may have already read Michael Meeks’ article on LibreOffice’s major rewrite of its spreadsheet engine (the much famed Ixion engine that was alluded to first in 2010) and indeed this is a major development for LibreOffice and ultimately for office suites in general – I’ll come back to that later- but this post is not an appreciation article for Michael and Kohei, it’s about how we think of spreadsheets, why we tend to think of them in a very limited way, and how we could redefine the uses of LibreOffice Calc. 256px-LibreOffice_4.0_Calc_Icon.svg

Education

• In our recent survey on free and open source software in the UK education sectors, we asked colleges and universities for their main reasons for not selecting an open source solution according to 12 criteria. Below you can see how important each of the criteria were rated for software running on servers:

Funding

BSD

• An interview with George Neville-Neil about the network time protocol and the precision time protocol.

Programming

• At many companies, ‘devops’ has been twisted to mean that developers get conscripted to do myriad non-development tasks

Leftovers

• Wind River has announced that it has achieved industry-leading performance with its accelerated virtual switch (vSwitch) integrated within Wind River Carrier Grade Communications Server, which is designed for network functions virtualization (NFV). The accelerated vSwitch can deliver 12 million packets per second to guest virtual machines (VMs) using only two processor cores on an industry-standard server platform, in a real-world use case involving bidirectional traffic.

• According to the lawsuit, Edward J. Polchlepek III (aka Ed Nash) of the company, Altius Management, has failed to make good on a successful Kickstarter campaign for Asylum Playing Cards. The said campaign had a Kickstarter goal of $15,000, which they exceeded with a closing funding of $25,146 back in October 2012. The Attorney General’s office alleges Polchlepek’s company had collected the money but never made good on their promise of delivering the cards or the other backer rewards that were promised by them during the campaign. Since some of the backers were residents of the state of Washington, legal team of the state were able to get involved. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson stated in a press release, “Consumers need to be aware that crowd funding is not without risk. “This lawsuit sends a clear message to people seeking the public’s money: Washington State will not tolerate crowd funding theft. The Attorney General’s Office will hold those accountable who don’t play by the rules.”

Science

Hardware

• The last person that you’d expect to tell you that eight-core smartphone SoCs are overkill would be a man whose company licenses and gets royalties from those cores – but that’s exactly what ARM’s director of mobile solutions James Bruce told attendees at last week’s ARM Tech Day.

Health/Nutrition

• If you’re not from America, or you’re young and healthy enough to have avoided doctors up to now, you may not have been exposed to the delights of this country’s high medical costs. So here’s a demonstration, in the form of a $243K bill for a three-night hospital stay…

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Boris Johnson is right, Blair is ‘eel-like’ – but if the Chilcot inquiry is published soon, he might not wriggle off the hook

Finance

• May 1 is the day of international working class solidarity. It was born or created at a time of great working class militancy, a fight for the eight-hour working day and more. Over the years, there have been many peaks of working class struggle, just some of them, for example, the 1877 railroad strike, which went national and started right here in Baltimore; 1919, a general strike in Winnipeg, Canada; in 1930s, industrial unions were organized in both countries, both the United States and Canada; after World War II, in 1946, there were more strikes organized in the United States than there’d ever been before or have been organized since; and in the 1960s, another peak in working-class struggle.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• On May 6, federal Judge Rudolph Randa ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s long-running “John Doe” criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between political campaigns (including Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign) and the non-profit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth and its allies that spent millions during the state’s recall elections. Randa, who was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush and is a board member of the Milwaukee Federalist Society, compared limits on money-in-politics to “the guillotine and the gulag.”

Censorship

• Lawyers for Mediabridge Products, a wireless network device manufacturer, sent a scathing letter to a redditor on Monday, threatening to sue him unless he deletes his negative review of one of the company’s products on Amazon.com.

• In one of the harshest moves a search engine can take against a site, during the past few hours Google flagged torrent site Demonoid as likely to harm users’ computers. After arriving at the conclusion that malicious third-party ads had caused the problem, Demonoid responded by disabling every single advert on its site until further notice.

Privacy

• We already wrote about how US Secretary of State John Kerry made some tone deaf remarks about “online freedom” and transparency during his appearance at the Freedom Online Coalition meeting in Estonia last week. However, it appears that his remarks fit in well with the theme of the event, which appeared to be “big governments ignoring that whole state surveillance online thing.” The Freedom Online Coalition is a group of 23 governments, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France and many others — and you’d think they’d pay some attention to the very vocal concerns about how those governments are engaged in lots of online spying. In fact, a bunch of public interest groups sent a letter asking the FOC to live up to their state commitments, and respond to claims of human rights violations against journalists and others via state surveillance online.

• A House committee on Wednesday unanimously voted to end the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program.

• The vote by the House Judiciary Committee was 32-0. The measure moves to the full House, where its passage is uncertain.

• “Today’s strong, bipartisan vote by the House Judiciary Committee takes us one step closer to ending bulk collection once and for all and safeguards Americans’ civil liberties as our intelligence community keeps us safe from foreign enemies who wish us harm,” committee lawmakers said in a joint statement.

• Six months after it was written to restrain the National Security Agency’s sweeping domestic surveillance, a privacy bill cleared a major legislative obstacle on Wednesday, even as its advocates worried that the compromises made to advance the bill have weakened its constraints on mass data collection.

Civil Rights

• A Saudi court has imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi for 10 years for “insulting Islam” and setting up a liberal web forum, local media report.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Each day, the open internet/net neutrality battle gets a bit more interesting. We just covered Tim Lee’s excellent look at how Comcast and other big telcos were effectively using interconnection disputes to get the same result as violating net neutrality, without technically violating the basic concept of what most people believe is net neutrality. And he’s back with an even more important explanation of how Comcast’s ultimate goal is to effectively make the internet more like the old phone system, post AT&T breakup, in which everyone had to pay to access the end points of the network. Ironically, they’re trying to recreate the internet in the form of the old telephone network, while at the same time doing everything to resist being classified as a telephone network by the FCC.

• As you know from my last post, I was recently in Thailand. On my way back, I learned that after much strife, Thailand had decided to oust its prime minister. And when I arrived back in the U.S., I learned that the FCC seemed to have decided to oust the notion of an open Internet.

• More than 100 technology companies have written to the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC), opposing potential changes to net neutrality rules.

• The FCC is considering allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to charge content providers to prioritise their traffic.

• Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon warn that such a move represents a “grave threat to the internet”.

• Despite FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s insistence that he is on the side of an open internet, the controversy over proposed net neutrality rules continues to expand. Resistance to the new rules is now coming from voices within the FCC and major internet companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Yahoo and more. The plan was for the five commissioners to vote on their approval next Thursday, but today one of them, Jessica Rosenworcel, called to push back that vote by a month (update: an FCC spokesman says the vote will go forward as scheduled). Citing “real concerns” with Wheeler’s proposal and a need for time to consider the “torrent of public response” received, she wants the delay so public conversation can continue. That would mean putting the agency’s legal staff out front to explain the measures and answer questions in ways that are accessible to the public, instead of starting a Sunshine Period that would end the ability to accept public comment.

DRM

• We’ve talked in the past about just how badly certain industries would love to expand the restrictions created by DRM onto physical goods. And that’s because, unlike what copyright system defenders like to claim, DRM allows companies to put restrictions on content that go way beyond what kind of restrictions can be placed on physical goods. For example: the right to resell something. In the copyright space, we’ve long had the first sale doctrine, which makes it possible for you to resell a physical book you own, without having to first get permission from the copyright holder. Of course, first sale has long been under attack, especially by academic publishers who absolutely hate the idea of a resale market. That’s because they are monopoly providers — professors assign the textbooks, and students need to buy them, leading to ridiculously inflated prices. Of course, what publishers still don’t seem to grasp is that a healthy used market actually increases the value of the primary market, since buyers are more comfortable knowing they can at least make back some of the money at the other end.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that the Pirate Party simply must change its name to the Internet Party, to be more conformant with MegaUpload owner Kim Dotcoms vision for the future of the digital space in New Zealand. Far be it from me to arrogantly dismiss the ideas and opinions of my internet policy elders, but in this case Mr Wales misses a big point and additionally generates harm to a healthy future debate about internet policy.

• For well over ten years we have been arguing about a private copying exception, to legalise everyday consumer behaviour of copying music to computer disks. Despite the fact that copyright industry groups have always said they’d never sue anyone, they claim that an exception would cause substantial damage that requires compensation.

• Open Rights Group is concerned that groups representing rightsholders are seeking compensation for consumers potentially copying music they have bought onto different devices, for example from a CD to their iPod. Last year, UK Music, which represents the live music sector, said that “the exception cannot lawfully be made without fair compensation”.

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