A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzes more than 2,500 pages’ worth of FBI documents extracted using Freedom of Information Act litigation and finds disturbing, system-wide violations of civil liberties on a scale that is far beyond anything reported to date:

Using documents obtained through EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the report finds:

• Evidence of delays of 2.5 years, on average, between the occurrence of a violation and its eventual reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board

• Reports of serious misconduct by FBI agents including lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant

• Indications that the FBI may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the 9 years since 9/11

Release: EFF Uncovers Widespread FBI Intelligence Violations

Sanguine Gryphon’s selling this wicked knitting pattern to make a pair of socks bearing a reproduction of the introductory text in the oldest surviving manuscript of Beowulf. The design is by Gryphon Perkins, and costs $5. Needless to say, ZOMG WANT.

Hwaet! Listen! Thus begins the immortal tale of the hero Beowulf, the bard summoning the attention of his audience. And so begin these socks, which give the text of the first page of the surviving manuscript, a copy dating to around 1000 CE. The writing flows from one sock to the other, so that you may read it uninterrupted. Wondering what it sounds like? Check out Benjamin Bagby’s amazing performance. (On a goofy side note, while I was working on these socks my four year old daughter picked up the word and now, whenever she wants to get my attention, she says, “Hwaet, Mommy, hwaet!”)

Is this deranged “Turkish Doctor Who” remake for real or a spoof?

It looks too weird to be real, but the same could be said of Turkish Superman and Turkish Star Wars. Check out a Doctor Who monster you’ve never seen before — the deadly Bee-Deer!

And yes, we noticed that commenters on the Youtube page are pointing out that this video is in Arabic, not Turkish. So “Turkish Doctor Who” is a misnomer, but it’s what everybody’s calling it. In any case, we can’t find any info on this piece of televisual gold, so if you know anything about it, please let us know. And in the meantime, what do you think — spoof, or a real copy? [Via DoctorWhoTV]

wonderful!

Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic points us to the photo above making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook today, and explains:

Citizens linking arms in front of the Egyptian Museum to prevent looters from entering. I found this photo on Twitter, posted by @theplayethic, who also tweeted, “Power memes in #Egypt. Reports of soldiers roaming damaged Cairo museum, armed criminals in suburbs.”

Related, BB reader charlesj says,

Margaret Maitland, an Egyptology student at Oxford University, examines Al Jazeera video to assess what has been damaged during rioting at the Cairo Museum. She thinks the damaged objects include items from Tutankahmun’s tomb.

Here’s a link to Maitland’s blog post. I see there’s a similar report on MSNBC, with before/after photos of some of the same items.

Glyn Moody’s analysis of the LibreOffice fork from OpenOffice is a good guide to the resilience of free/open software projects, and the pitfalls awaiting corporations (like Oracle) that seek to compromise or shut down their open projects:

That is, LibreOffice has moved beyond just a bold idea to doing stuff, including boring stuff like setting up infrastructure to carry the project forward. The significance of this goes beyond the fact that it provides users with a free alternative to OpenOffice (which has also just released its latest version.) Choice lies at the heart of free software, so that’s certainly good news, not least because of the way LibreOffice handles copyright, which I discussed previously.

But I think that LibreOffice possesses an additional importance because it represents a conscious strike against Oracle’s handling of its open source portfolio. Sadly, the discontent that drove people to make that stand extends well beyond those working in the field of office suites.

As is becoming apparent, Oracle’s behaviour towards the open source community seems to be going from bad to worse. This is nicely summed up in this characteristic post from Marc Fleury. As the founder of Jboss, and one of the real innovators in terms of business models based around open source, he certainly knows what he is talking about when it comes to managing open source coders in a corporate context, which makes comments like these particularly significant – and ominous for Oracle…

The Deeper Significance of LibreOffice 3.3

(via The Command Line

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