● 07.12.14

● Links 12/7/2014: CrossOver, New Wine

Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• There is no shortage of open-source Linux distributions that are based on Ubuntu Linux, and Deepin 2014 is among them. Deepin 2014 was released July 6 and is based on the Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Linux distribution that debuted April 17. What tends to differentiate the various Ubuntu-based Linux distributions is the desktop environment, and Deepin is no exception.

Server

• I recently was talking with a friend over lunch about Project Atomic and Docker, and he asked: are we entering a “post-package” world?

• My short answer: No. The slightly longer answer is that we’re seeing an evolution of delivery coupled with a lot of innovation in management and orchestration.

• A few weeks ago, I covered the news that Google has released Kubernetes under an open-source license, which is essentially a version of Borg, which harnesses computing power from data centers into a powerful virtual machine. It can make a difference for many cloud computing deployments, and optimizes usage of container technology. You can find the source code for Kubernetes on GitHub.

• We analyzed the Docker repository and asked two questions:

• What other repositories are Docker contributors interested in? Who are the Docker contributors?

• We answered the first question in a prior post. This post tries to answer the second question.

Kernel Space

• AMD has just published a massive patch-set for the Linux kernel that finally implements a HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) in open-source. The set of 83 patches implement a Linux HSA driver for Radeon family GPUs and serves too as a sample driver for other HSA-compatible devices. This big driver in part is what well known Phoronix contributor John Bridgman has been working on at AMD.

• The Linux 3.16 kernel is set to debut with a fair amount of new ARM hardware / SoC enablement, which in turn will soon benefit Fedora ARM users seeing as they are likely to lock onto this new version for the Fedora 21 release.

• Linus Torvalds announced the final Release Candidate (RC) for what will become Linux 3.15, noting that he felt pretty comfortable with the state of things at this point. The 3.15- rc8 kernel contains just a smattering of core kernel fixes (some in the scheduler, some in the filesystem code), and a few more architecture- specific patches, but relatively little overall in the way of churn. In other words, 3.15 is largely baked and ready to go, with the weekly RCs serving their purpose of gradually tapering off toward the final RC7 or RC8 release. Oftentimes, final Linux kernels are released following the RC7 timeframe, with no need for an RC8 to be issued, but on this particular occasion there was enough in the way of small last-minute fixes for Linus to feel justified in holding off another week with an RC8 instead.

Graphics Stack

• One of the biggest challenges with the Nouveau open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware in recent times has been with regard to GPU / video memory re-clocking. As a minor step forward, NVIDIA has contributed re-clocking patches for the GK20A graphics processor.

• The Gallium3D mega drivers work is just like the other Mesa mega drivers model. This refactoring of the Mesa code is to basically shove multiple drivers/components into a single .so library file. By doing this, there’s potential minor performance improvements through allowing the compiler to apply link-time optimizations more broadly, and it can also reduce disk space.

Benchmarks

• RedHat Enterprise Linux is an enterprise-grade Linux distribution, which is frequently used in corporate data centers as an operating system for NAS storage devices. From the performance point of view, the new Linux kernel and the new default file system may have a significant impact on a NAS storage device and therefore it is very important to understand how the newly released RedHat Enterprise Linux version 7.0 compares to the last stable version 6.5.

Applications

• For nearly one year we’ve known about RealVNC being interested in Wayland support for their commercial VNC products and last year they proposed a remote access protocol for Wayland. Today, RealVNC has put out a developer preview of its VNC software for Wayland.

• On July 9, Oracle has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming VirtualBox 4.3.14 virtualization software for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.

Proprietary

• But some third party developers have adopted TrueCrypt and decided to continue the work on the TrueCrypt’s source code, under a new name: TCNext. No TCNext version has been yet released, but the good old TrueCrypt 7.1a can be still installed on Linux systems.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.22 is now available.

Games

• Peter Mulholland announced yesterday, July 9, that the first Beta of the soon-to-be-released native port of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition game is available for download and testing from the Steam for Linux client.

• Leszek Godlewski of Nordic Games has shared that he’s ported the Darksiders game to Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m working on porting KDE Games to KF5/Qt5. After porting the libkdegames project, I ported three games – KMines, KNavalBattle and KBounce to test how these build against the new libs. Everything works as expected as of now. Here are the screenshots of the three games:

• KDE recently released the first version of KDE Frameworks 5, or shorter KF5. This is a set of add on modules extending and improving Qt, forming the base on which the Plasma Desktop is built. The nice thing is that KF5 is very modular and very reuseable.

• Randa is special because it lasts an entire week, giving participants the extended time needed for deep thinking and planning for the future of KDE with few outside distractions.

• So this morning, with a last-minute upgrade we very, very nearly broke the 20,000 euro level and Krita’s first Kickstarter campaign ended! Thank you, everyone who has pledged for Krita’s development. Your support will help make Krita better and better! We also received 846,99 euro through paypal.

• Today I wanted to share some of my experiences with using Plasma Next for the past couple of weeks. Since I had been working on some frameworks development (just a small bit here and there), I thought I’d try running Plasma Next a couple of weeks ago to see how things were coming along and to be able to work on and test some things I helped with back in KDE 4.0 days.

• The long awaited KDE Partition Manager 1.1.0 is now released. However, there are some sad news first. This release is dedicated to the memory of Volker Lanz who passed away this April. He was the main developer of KDE Partition Manager who wrote almost all of its code and maintained it for 5 years.

• KDE was proud to announce on July 8 that that RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Plasma 5 graphical desktop environment, which is now known as KDE Applications and Platform, is available for download and testing.

• On July 10, KDE officially announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.14 graphical desktop environment.

• I have been running KDE’s upcoming Plasma 5 on a test system for a while now. Today I gathered some courage to install it on a production machine which I use to files stories on The Mukt, and also as my primary computer. So far everything seems to be working fine.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Application sandboxing is a subject that I am passionate about. In recent months I have been involved in a design initiative to plan out how sandboxed applications would work on GNOME, and I gave a talk on this subject at GNOME.Asia early this year, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since.

• The Tracker 1.1.1 release brings a brand new extractor, improves the extraction of content from ODT files by omitting line breaks and embedded tabs, and adds previously untranslated strings to the control component of Tracker.

• I’ve last written about GtkInspector in early June. Since then, a few things have fallen into place, so it is time for another status update.

Distributions

• DistroWatch is the premiere desktop Linux distribution site. Over the weekend it mysteriously disappeared and is still unavailable at DistroWatch.com as I write this roundup. But you can reach it at DistroWatch.org. Ladislav Bodnar explained what caused the disappearance of DistroWatch in an announcement in DistroWatch’s weekly newsletter.

New Releases

• Now that all 4MLinux 9.0 editions, including Allinone, Media, Game, Multiboot, Server, Rescue, and Core have been officially declared stable, it is time to move on with the development cycle and introduce you to the 4MLinux 9.1 release.

• The OpenELEC team was proud to announce a couple of days ago the immediate availability for download of the seventh maintenance release of the stable 4.0 branch of OpenELEC, a Linux kernel-based operating system built around the award-winning XBMC Media Center project.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The Mageia development team, through Anne Nicolas, announced a couple of days ago, July 8, that the first Alpha of the upcoming Mageia 5 Linux kernel-based operating system has been officially released and is available for download and testing from the usual places.

Arch Family

• Even if it was officially announced last week, we think that it is very important to mention here that a brand new Arch Linux ISO image is now available for download from the usual places, even though it was expected on the first day of July.

Red Hat Family

• On July 9, Red Hat had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the last maintenance version for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 distribution, which is supported for 10 years.

• The current version of the long-term supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system is 5.10. The distribution will be officially provided with software updates, bug fixes, security patches, and general improvements for three more years, until March 31, 2017.

• For those still dependent upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the beta to the 5.11 point release is now out, which serves as the last planned revision to RHEL5.

• The third enterprise release of the open source software Relevant Products/Services company’s OpenStack offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5, is officially available.

• Red Hat is now testing the latest iteration of its Satellite server management technology with a beta release of Satellite 6.

• “Satellite 6.0 is far more than the next release of Satellite 5, Satellite 6.0 is a totally new generation of Systems Management from Red Hat,” David Caplan, principal product manager, Red Hat Satellite told ServerWatch.

Fedora

Debian Family

• According to the changelog, Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-27 is an unstable release that uses packages from the Debian Sid software repositories as of July 8, 2014. It is powered by Linux kernel 3.14.10 and updates the Syslinux bootloader to version 6.03 Pre18.

• APT 1.0.6 brings various fixes, among which we can mention one for an issue with the Plural-Forms fields, several encoding problems, and issues with the format specifier order in translations and unfuzzy DocBook translations.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical, through Leann Ogasawara, has announced a few hours ago, July 10, that they will drop support for HWE (Hardware Enablement) Stack from the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

• While Ubuntu Linux looks towards switching to systemd in the next year or two, a new version of Upstart has been released with Ubuntu still being dependent upon init daemon software.

• The new release by Ubuntu’s James Hunt is Upstart 1.13. The new release brings various fixes, disables chroot sessions by default, new tests and documentation, and other changes.

Flavours and Variants

• Recently, the developers have implemented some interesting key combinations, all around the Super key (the Windows key on most systems or the Command key on Apple devices), for an easier and faster usage of the Pantheon desktop and Elementary OS system.

Devices/Embedded

• As we’ve noted here many times, when it comes to the top open source stories of the past couple of years, it’s clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. Surely, the diminutive, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi, priced at $25 and $35, is one of the most widely followed of these miniature systems. It’s been implemented for use in home security systems, synthesizers and even in a supercomputer mashup using Lego pieces to bind the parts together, as seen in the photo here.

• I like the Raspberry Pi website’s new redesign! It’s very nice. I went there to have a look at it and they’d announced a new Raspberry Pi. Is it a new Raspberry Pi model? It looked like a stick.

• On Kickstarter, Geekroo launched a “CoMo Booster” Pico-ITX baseboard for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module that adds WiFi, audio I/O, and wide-range power.

• Developers and makers that looking for a small Linux based wireless development board might be interested in a new device that has launched over on the Indiegogo crowd funding website in the form of the DPT board.

Phones

• In a statement sent to The Verge, the Korean company says that it “plans to postpone” the Russian release of the phone, but will continue to “actively work with Tizen Association members to further develop TIzen OS and the Tizen ecosystem.”

• The Samsung Z smartphone unveiled in June as the first Tizen phone, was a no-show at its launch event in Russia, and Samsung offered no revised ship date.

Ballnux

• No, this is not a case of life imitating art as The Brazilian Job, a sequel to The Italian Job, was never made and Croker’s crew prided themselves on not using guns. Samsung found itself the target of a massive heist of equipment at a plant located in São Paulo, Brazil on Monday as armed robbers made off with what was initially reported as R$80 million ($36M USD) worth of notebooks, tablets and smartphones. Samsung has since revised that estimate down to R$13.2 million ($6M USD). According to reports, approximately 20 men armed with submachine guns made up the crew that hit the factory. The incident occurred during normal business hours while about 200 employees were working on the site. Apparently most of the employees continued to work, although a few were taken hostage.

Android

• The best they can say of the Windows-dominated PC market is that it’s flat-lined. So, who’s winning in the overall end-user market? It’s Android, and no one else is even close.

• Although Nexus remains the flagship line for everything new and shiny Android, a new, or rather an old player is taking the market by storm. Motorola, with its simplicity and its unbeatable price has become the next big thing in the Android world. Bringing the same pure Android experience of Nexus smartphones and the cool features of many flagship phones, Motorola’s line of products seems to make everyone love Android. What makes Motorola’s new smartphones so special is the fact that they could fit into anyone’s budget. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One, iPhone 5s, or even Nexus 5, these devices are designed to fit your pocket, both literally and figuratively.

• So you have Android Wear! Maybe you have Google Glass! Want to check the football scores without having to go through the hassle of digging your phone out of your pocket? Well, know you can thanks to ‘Wearable Widgets’.

• Today OnePlus officially announced on their blog they will be attending the xda devcon event later this year.

• Android (x86) is a project which aims to port Android system to Intel x86 processors to let users install it easily on any computer, the way they do this is by taking android source code, patching it to work on Intel x86 processors and some laptops and tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

• We’ve heard a bit on BitPay’s doings in the open source field, and today, the company announced on their blog that they’ve got a multisig, open source wallet in the works called Copay.

• We’ve heard of Copay previously, but now it’s got its own website at Copay.io, and has launched in beta.

• I’ve been working as the documentation manager for the Koha project for six and a half years, so when I saw that Sarah White would be talking about documentation at OSCON this year I knew I wanted a chance to interview her.

• What do the numbers behind an open source project tell us about where it is headed? That’s the subject of Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona’s OSCON 2014 talk later this month, where he looks at four open source cloud computing projects—OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and OpenNebula—and turns those numbers into a meaningful analysis.

• Open source also helps the branding of our engineering team – the fact that we work on world-class technical problems, the scale of the problems we have to solve, and the complexity of the features that we’re building. Being able to showcase our technology to the world is something that hopefully is going to be attractive to world class engineers around the world, which we would love to have work for us.

• Networking technology vendor Metaswitch Networks announced the formation of Project Calico, which will focus on developing an open source networking virtualisation solution it claims will help enable the implementation of large, cloud datacentre infrastructures as IP-based starts to account for the majority of network traffic.

• UK-based Metaswitch Networks has given away some of its network virtualization code to the open source community, designating it as Project Calico.

• The technology integrates with OpenStack and provides the framework for orchestrated IP routing between virtual machines (VMs) and host machines, along with internal and inter-data centre interconnects. It describes Layer 3 virtualisation techniques, and is aimed at large cloud data centres.

• A former employee singled out the open source configuration management company for not practicing what it preaches, and as a result, Chef said it will be working on addressing its developer community.

• Two Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) information technology professionals wowed the crowd at this year’s Labman computer lab managers conference by presenting a live demonstration of their Remote Lab 2.0 software, which they recently released as open-source code.

• Everything happens somewhere. That’s the logic behind Odyssey.js, an open-source tool that utilizes maps to help turn data into interactive multimedia stories without the user needing coding skills.

• In late 2011, a lively discussion (we enjoy lively discussions here in Germany) among the IT managers of the publicly-funded research universities in Northrhine-Westfalia (NRW), Germany’s most populouIn late 2011, a lively discussion (we enjoy lively discussions here in Germany) among the IT managers of the publicly-funded research universities in Northrhine-Westfalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous federal state, started over a set of interrelated topics:s federal state, started over a set of interrelated topics:

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Being able to access a computer remotely, or let someone else remotely access your computer, can be an enormous convenience. It can help you retrieve a much needed presentation that you left behind while on a trip, and it can help you allow a distant user to make changes to or access your files.

SaaS/Big Data

• Kemp went on to found Nebula, which makes cloud computing hardware appliances, and now serves as the company’s chief strategy officer.

CMS

• A content management system (CMS is a computer application that allows publishing, editing and modifying content, organizing, deleting as

Funding

• The IRS is one of the most feared and loathed parts of the federal government. It has recently been found to target political groups that don’t tow the line of the people currently in charge of the US government.

BSD

• The latest programming language that can leverage using LLVM and its plethora of back-ends is Pascal-86, a language most Phoronix readers have probably never even heard of.

• While LLVM’s Clang compiler is predominantly used on Linux, OS X, and BSD systems, the Microsoft Windows support has been a focus over the past several months and is reaching an improved state for building native Windows programs with Visual C++ compatibility.

Public Services/Government

• UK councils are so far failing to tap into the full money-saving potential and speed of open source web service tools, but moves are underway to address this, delegates heard at yesterday’s ‘Building perfect council websites’ conference in Birmingham.

• Although most councils still run a Microsoft-based ICT infrastructure, almost all do also now run at least some open source software, Kevin Jump, director of digital services firm Jumoo, told delegates.

• Jump is former web manager at Liverpool City Council, which migrated to open source CMS Umbraco in 2011.

Openness/Sharing

• In a nutshell, open-source is the opposite of proprietary. Consider the sale of a muffin. The person who sells you the muffin is selling you a proprietary product. The ingredients (what they are and from whence they came) are kept a secret. With open source, the person not just gives you the muffin; she also gives you the recipe and invites you to change it even more, and pass it along to the next person.

• “We call it an open source real estate company,” he says. That’s because Go Realty not only shares lessons that agents have learned within the company, but with other companies.

Open Access/Content

• Beatrice Martini shared the work she does alongside a talented group working to bring openness to the world for Open Knowledge with me earlier this year. This time she tells me what it’s like to bring to fruition an event like OKFestival 2014, organised by Open Knowledge. How does a gathering organized by one organisation (and a small team) reach out to the global ecosystem of open communities? How can participants co-create its message and mission?

Open Hardware

• It is not uncommon to hear that many people don’t like bugs. Those tiny, many-legged creatures are the source of our worst nightmares. Robots, on the other hand, are fantastic. Whether they come to us as Furby-sized companions or giant robot protector of the Earth Gundams, they amuse and entertain us to no end. So when we heard of the open source project combining insect-like parts and robotics, we timidly decided to check it out.

Programming

• Silk has recently open-sourced a REST framework for Haskell, called “rest”. It provides a DSL for defining REST services which can then be run in popular web frameworks such as happstack. This comes with features such as type-safe URLs, abstraction of format-type support, and a clean separation of API specification and business logic.

Standards/Consortia

• Intel, Samsung Electronics, Broadcom and other wireless and technology players joined forces to create a new group aimed at coming up with an open-source standard to connect devices to each other across operating systems and wireless protocols as part of the Internet of Things.

• The new Open Interconnect Consortium believes “a common, interoperable approach” to the Internet of Things “is essential, and that both a standard and open source implementation are the best route to enable scale,” said Wind River’s Ido Sarig. “To fully realize the vision of IoT, devices should be able to discover, connect and interoperate regardless of who makes them.”

Leftovers

• For most parents, seeing a random $358 charge on their credit card bill would elicit a lot of questions.

• But for the parents of the 71% of children who play mobile games such as Angry Birds or Temple Run, those seemingly random charges are becoming more common as the games allegedly trick children into buying virtual goods with real-world money.

Security

• OpenBSD developers have announced their first release of LibreSSL portable.

• The OpenBSD project has released the first portable version of LibreSSL, the team’s OpenSSL fork – meaning it can be built for operating systems other than OpenBSD.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• But there’s a pretty well-established pattern of corporate media trying to paint the conflict as between equals, a type of false balance that treats the threats to Israeli lives and Palestinians lives as similar. But at times it’s much more than that; this ABC report, and others like it, foreground the fear that Israelis are dealing with as sirens warn of incoming rockets from Gaza. “Running in terror as sirens wail” is how ABC correspondent Alex Marquardt began the segment right after Sawyer’s introduction. He conveyed Israel’s view of the conflict before shifting to life in Gaza.

• But determining when such a “cycle” begins is a political act. The current conflict is usually traced back to the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers on the West Bank (CNN, 7/7/14). When their bodies were found on June 30, Israel “retaliated” by attacking Gaza. The July 2 killing of Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir, allegedly a revenge murder by Israeli extremists, was reported as further escalating the conflict.

• Over a three-week rescue mission to find the three Israeli teenagers, more than 700 Palestinians were arrested, with more than 400 still being held, according to Palestinian prisoner’s rights organization Addameer. Many are being held in administrative detention, an Israeli practice that holds prisoners without charge or trial set, but renewable amounts of time. At least 58 of the arrestees are former prisoners released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap; their re-arrest directly contradicting the terms of the agreement. One of these prisoners is Samer Issawi, who was released last year after engaging in a prolonged hunger strike protesting his first arbitrary re-arrest.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• CBS Anchors Get An Oil Industry Tycoon To Admit “You’ve Proven Me Wrong” On Fracking Dangers

• Campaigners hail ‘major victory’ as council representing half a billion Christians says it will stop investing in fossil fuels

Finance

• TWO MILLION people defied Tory strike ban threats yesterday to come out fighting against poverty pay — and PCS union leader Mark Serwotka warned the government it was “just the beginning.”

• Mr Serwotka rallied a sea of teachers, firefighters, council workers and civil servants in Trafalgar Square in his first major speech since recovering from heart surgery.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• NPR’s official response to the brouhaha was a memo, instructing staff to be more careful about sharing private thoughts on social media. Likewise missing the point that the problem lies in what the network does–and doesn’t do–in public.

• The “economists” in question would appear to be the Boston Consulting Group, a consulting firm that advises major companies. It’s not a stretch to think that Walmart is one of them. So you might want to take those job creation numbers with a grain of salt.

• But ABC’s newscast looked less like journalism and more like PR–even including footage from a Walmart infomercial and a comment from the company’s CEO that this initiative “is not a PR thing.”

Censorship

• Google Inc. (GOOG:US), once boastful that it was the leading defender of a free and open Internet, has gone into the shadows.

Privacy

• As a second Ger­man intel­li­gence officer was arres­ted for spy­ing for the Amer­ic­ans, here’s my recent RT inter­view on the sub­ject…

• Techdirt has been following the complicated German reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations about US and UK surveillance of people in that country, whether or not in high places, for some while now. Although the German public has been deeply shocked by the leaks, the German government has been keen to preserve good relations with the US.

• What is the way forward? – Is privacy already gone forever with the war being lost… or are there still some battles that may determine better outcomes for a subset of the human population? I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. In the mean time, I continue to fight off the little voice in my head that says I need a smart phone… and I try to learn more about and utilize some of the desktop tools that make me look suspicious.

• David Cameron says Iraq and Syria makes emergency data laws necessary, warning: ‘The consequences of not acting are grave’

• What if you are asked to perform a different kind of fasting – to log out from Facebook for 99 days?

• Do not fret as this is a challenge set out by a Dutch creative agency Just.

• Called “99 Days of Freedom”, the non-profit initiative asks whether people would be happier without Facebook.

• It asks users to give up Facebook for a 99-day period, completing anonymous happiness surveys on days 33, 66 and 99.

• SECURE COMMUNICATIONS OUTFIT Silent Circle expanded its encrypted calling service globally on Thursday, allowing people worldwide to make secure phone calls without incurring roaming charges.

• Until now, Silent Circle’s apps – which enable users to make encrypted calls, send secure messages and transfer files – had to be used by both parties, but the firm announced on Thursday that it is expanding the service worldwide, allowing users to make private calls to non-Silent Circle subscribers across 79 countries.

• Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.

• The European Court of Justice ruled in April that blanket data retention, which the government requires of ISPs, is illegal and ignores the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. However, rather than take the time to debate and redraft the law, they are pushing through a new Bill in record time: released today and put before Parliament on Monday.

Civil Rights

• The FCO claim that records of extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia were destroyed by water damage is an insult to all our intelligence. The FCO is refusing to say where the records were at the time, or what else was damaged in the (presumed) flood. This is of a piece with, but much more serious than, the “accidental” shredding of all Tony Blair’s parliamentary expenses claims. It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.

• His wife called 911. Thirty(!) SWAT team members, with machine guns, descended on the middle school at 5 p.m., and spent three hours searching it for the mysterious gunman. “At one point three news media choppers hovered overhead.”

• The overruling of a European Court judgement to assert individual privacy, and the anti-democratic rushing of emergency legislation through parliament where no emergency exists, are the antithesis of liberalism. So of course is the jettisoning of all the Lib Dem manifesto pledges on civil liberties.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FCC chief, Tom Wheeler, today tweeted that they have received over 647k net-neutrality comments on the FCC website, as it reaches the July 15 deadline. Reply to these comments are due September 10th. There is an anger in the US against Wheeler’s proposed ‘fast lane plan’ which would destroy the net-neutrality as we know it.

DRM

Copyrights

• Earlier this year the UK Government promised to legalize the copying of MP3s, CDs and DVDs for personal use, but the changes have yet to pass. The entertainment industry and some lawmakers have voiced concerns over the plan, but the majority appears to be in favor of decriminalizing format shifting.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.