Summary: Monetary evidence serving as a reminder of Microsoft’s improper business practices which still cost the company too little given what was gained
All four Palo Alto County schools join more than 1,000 other Iowa schools in reaping the benefits of a class-action lawsuit settlement. The Iowa School Microsoft Settlement program is the result of the 2007 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by Iowa consumers and businesses against Microsoft software.
According to the settlement, Iowa schools would receive a portion of the funds not claimed by consumers, which amounts to more than $60 million. The funds will be distributed through vouchers for the purchase of new technology. Approximately 75-percent of Iowa’s public schools are eligible to participate in the program, based on their free and reduced lunch rates.
One thing is missing. It doesn’t say if it will have to be spent only on software (i.e. repaid to Microsoft, which makes this the usual sham) in order to keep schools glued to Microsoft. Here is some more coverage of this:
Burlington will receive $722,000 from a settlement with Microsoft Corp., according to school Superintendent Lee Morrision.
The money is part of a nearly $180 million settlement in a anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft in 2007. The suit accused Microsoft of overcharging Iowa consumers and businesses for certain products. The settlement will bring an estimated $60 million to Iowa schools to buy new technology.
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If Iowa’s application is rejected, however, state officials will apply for the grant’s second round in June.
Iowa is eligible for up to $175 million.
It is the same in many other states. We previously wrote about Microsoft and Iowa in:
Real once provided the industry leading streaming media player, until Microsoft entered the market. The outspoken Glaser famously butted heads with Microsoft, testifying during a U.S. Senate hearing investigating the software giant’s business practices. Glaser argued that Microsoft’s media player purposely disabled the RealPlayer software when both products were installed on the same computer.
Real also sued Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior following Microsoft’s settlement of the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust case.
Rob Glaser, the idealistic founder of pioneering digital-media company RealNetworks, is stepping down as chief executive from the company he started in 1994 after he left Microsoft.
A pugnacious but innovative executive, Glaser battled Microsoft, his former employer, as he pushed digital audio and video technology products to the Internet. Already a wealthy man from his days as an early Microsoft employee, Glaser later tangled with Microsoft and won a huge $700 million-plus settlement from the software colossus in 2005.
Had Microsoft not broken the law, it would not have paid so much money. █
This is a long and drawn out answer. It isn’t a simple question.
I’ve been using computer systems for more than twenty years, from micros to mainframes, so I’m no beginner. I was in on Microsoft operating systems from DOS 3.2 and I dabbled with Linux for a number of years. It was only recently that I made the full switch.
The drive towards Linux has been partly because of what Linux offers, but more because of what Microsoft doesn’t, or rather how their company works. Apple are the same.
Enter an old Dell Dimension XPS R400 PC that has been gathering dust in the closet. It has an 80GB Western Digital IDE drive, a Startech 10/100 NIC and 192MB of RAM in it. I received this old PC from a client that bought a new, custom built system from my company in October 2007. He no longer needed the Dell and was just going to trash it. Instead I convinced him to let me wipe the drive, install Mandriva 2008 on it and try to sell it on eBay. It did not sell when I listed it. The client did not want it back, so I just stuck it in the IT junk closet with several other old systems and flaky monitors. I decided to make this old Dell PC into my “new” router. Since it already has Mandriva 2008 on it I figured I could use that to get routing going and then upgrade the Mandriva later.
Amarok has plugins that directly consume content from popular web sites and displays them to you as you play music. For example it can look in Flickr for photos of your currently playing track’s artist and display them in a nice slide show to enhance the mood, or display a Wikipedia page about the artists, or look up the lyrics of the song, or even look up similar Youtube videos and offer to play them – inside Amarok. Think you need a web browser to browse Youtube? Amarok has changed that! And this is what it is about – enhancing the power of desktop applications by giving them the ability to consume from similar web services. The possibilities are endless. Fact is that we have come to rely on the browser for too many things, and if you really stopped to think about it it’s really rather senseless. When I’m listening to music, why do I need to open an extra browser window just to find lyrics or look up artist/album information? When I’m writing a document, why should I have an extra browser window to look for material? When I’m writing a program, why should I have an extra browser window open just to look up API references? The browser is today trying to do too much! This awkward work flow needs to change – we need to make our desktop programs more ‘web-sensitive’ and independent of the browser. (Remember the documentation widget I built into PlasMate?). At KDE we have already identified this as a critical path in the evolution of the desktop, and are already setting plans in motion to this end. We even have a cool codename for the movement – Project Silk.
The stand received financial sponsorship from Red Hat, Linux IT, University of London Computing Centre and The Learning
Machine (Ingots) for which everyone is very grateful. Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu very kindly provided us with 600 Ubuntu 9.10 CDs (500 Desktop and 100 Server) to give away (thanks Larry) and there were a similar number of CDs containing a great collection of Education-centric Open Source desktop applications for Windows from Free Software for Students that was compiled and produced by Peter Kemp and David Wilmut. That’s around 1200 CDs in total full of completely Free goodness and fun. We encouraged all the recipients to copy, share and pass them on too! At the end of the show we had only a few (quite literally) of each remaining.
Wellington’s Convention Center this week hosted 700 open source software engineers – i.e. geeks – for a festival of discussion of all things linux at Linux.Conf.Au the annual Australasian Linux conference. Carl Suurmond was dispatched to catch the atmosphere with his camera on the final day. Tomorrow the conference will open its doors to the public for an Open Day for all things linux from 11am to 2pm.
New York University anthropologist Gabriella Coleman says the open-source software movement has emerged relatively unscathed from the economic downturn.
Ms Coleman was the opening keynote speaker at Linux.Conf.Au, a trans-Tasman conference held in Wellington last week that attracted more than 600 open-source software developers and enthusiasts.
She took the plunge and immersed herself in the world of open source in 2001, perceiving it was a culture worthy of academic study.
Simmtronics Semiconductors Ltd. has entered into a global agreement with IBM Corp. As per the agreement, IBM has authorized Simmtronics to preload its IBM Client for Smart Work software solution in the Simmbook on Ubuntu operating system. This includes Lotus Symphony office productivity software which is made available at no charge to Simmbook customers.
Since churches and ministries are always looking for ways to save money, learning as much as you can about free computer software alternatives is a good idea. Operating systems like Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux do pretty much the same things, but in different ways.
Cost and licensing
Linux operating systems are published under open source licenses that make the source code available to everyone. Microsoft products, including Windows Vista and XP, are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. As for cost, most Linux distributions are free and can be used on an unlimited number of computers. Windows operating systems are expensive, and legally each license can only be used on one computer.
Second: Remember that the way software is installed/maintained in the GNU/Linux world is completely different from Windows’. In Windows, as the writer said, you grab the software from internet (hopefully form a reliable location…. but we know that’s not always the case, is it?), click on it, maybe will have to restart your computer…. a couple times (why the hell installing Adobe Reader requires you to reboot Windows? Is Adobe Reader the equivalent for Windows of glibc or something?) and then finally you are done with the software. In GNU/Linux, at least in Ubuntu (and every other distro that prides itself of being such), you have to wait for the maintainers of Ubuntu to review software to make it available. That’s right…. they do that job for you, the user. And it’s not just firefox that they maintain… they take care of thousands (literally) pieces of software to make them fit together and not mess with each other when you installed them on your beloved Ubuntu-powered box. And that not only sounds like a dauntin task… it really is. And what would be the equivalent of that in the Windows world? It would be like waiting for Microsoft to review the software when it’s made available by its developers (have you seen how long it takes Microsoft to work on their own bugs? How long would it take them if they had to review other people’s software as well?) and make it available to you through the centralized software they provided Windows with so that their beloved customers don’t have to go leaping from site to site to grab the latest piece of malware-infested piece of software… oh, but there’s no such thing for Windows, is there? Such a shame, you know.
I run Mandriva 2010 at the moment on my desktop system here at the ERACC Intergalactic Spaceport and Karaoke Bar, otherwise known as my home office. I have been running releases of Mandriva for several years now. At first I too wanted to always have the latest, cutting edge release of every package out there. After a while I came to understand that if Mandriva package maintainers saw that a patch was necessary for an application I run then they would patch the version in the distribution and release the patched version in the update repository. If there were a new version of a software application that had security implications for a desktop user, then after testing the new version it would be included as an update for the life of that desktop release, usually 12 to 18 months. Long term desktop releases would get these updates if needed for their lifetime as well, usually 3 years. Then the next time I install updates I get the patched or new version.
I was really having fun! At one site, I found a laptop with Windows 7 installed, but also with a selection to have none and an instant price-reduction when the “No OS” choice was made. That felt good!
I finally found a computer which met all my needs; weight, size, quality of hardware and Ubuntu installed (one of many choices) at LinuxCertified.
I hope others will join me in buying your next computer this way. You will find competitive prices and the satisfaction of not paying the Windows tax.
Panasonic has signed a deal with IBM to migrate its global workforce from Microsoft Exchange to IBM’s hosted LotusLive service. IBM will initially migrate 100,000 employees to LotusLive iNotes, increasing to 300,000 over time. This is one of the largest commitments to cloud services by a global enterprise to date, and is a feather in the cap for IBM in its struggle with Microsoft for email and collaboration seats. However, in our opinion this is as much about delivering commodity services from the cloud as it is about IBM’s win over Microsoft.
Even though it recently landed a giant software deal with Japanese electronics firm Panasonic Corp., IBM Corp.’s Lotus unit, based in Westford, is still playing catch-up against archival Microsoft Corp.
Google last night released the second version of its Google Voice Chrome extension with some very notable new features. If you are using the Mac or Linux versions of Chrome, you’ll need to be running a beta version of Chrome that supports extensions.
An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.
The types of software included in an office suite typically consist of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database and much more. For many users the office suite (together with a web browser and email client) represents the cornerstone of their computing day. A high quality office suite is therefore a necessity for any computing platform.
Back to the 0.9 version and the developer himself describes the release a more of a “polish” than packing in shiny and “mind-blowing” new features. As such it fixes many issue users – including myself! – have found troublesome.
On the whole, Alarm Clock is an excellent application that can be used for so much more than just alarms. If only it could sync with one of the online calendar or scheduling web apps, it would be truly awesome. That being said, if you can find a use for it in your day to day work, it can prove to be much easier than using a combination of cron and zenity to remind you of tasks that need your attention.
Liferea (Linux Fead Reader) works on Linux and Unix, and is definitely our favourite. Rated 4 stars, it provides great functionality, including optional pop-up notification of new items. News items with headline, image and summary can be browsed easily in its clean GUI (see image at the top of this article), and it provides various options and great functionality.
[...]
We also tried the Blam feed reader, rated 2 stars by the Ubuntu community, but did not get good results with it. Canonical does not provide updates either. However, this may be a work in progress and the Blam developers site could be checked for any future developments.
Two weeks ago I was at the annual KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück. It was the eighth time that this meeting took place, and it was a blast, once again. This is amazing, so I’m taking the opportunity to reflect a bit on what makes this meeting so successful, how it evolved over time, and what we all can learn for running great developer sprints.
Day 2 of Camp KDE kicked off with a bang when Frank Karlitschek announced the start of a significant new KDE project. The ownCloud initiative will complement the Social Desktop and Get Hot New Stuff efforts which are already dealing with social and collaborative data. Like those, the ownCloud initiative strives to combine the rich desktop interfaces made possible by the Qt and KDE libraries with the large amount of social information and data users are putting online.
In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot. First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business. I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs. So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well. So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.
Overall, I am really happy with Arch, although to be fair, I haven’t been using it for more than a day yet. However, the documentation is great and the installation was relatively quick and painless, so I am pretty pleased at this point. I look forward to getting more comfortable with it and switching my other machines as well.
DigAnTel-2 is a FREE Digital / Analog VOIP Telephone system utilizing CentOS Linux (RedHat), Asterisk 1.4.22, FreePBX 2.6.0 with VoicePulse module, Openfire, vtigerCRM with click to dial, PostFix, OpenVPN, and automated Polycom Phone suppot. DigAnTel is the glue to bind these technologies thus creating a unified telephony system for your home or small business. The installation is completely automated and doesn’t require a working knowledge of Linux or Asterisk.
The novelty in this is not in the desktop arrangement; I’ve been slowly tweaking and adjusting this setup for the better part of a year. In fact the fun part of this is that I’ve never been able to arrange it on this machine, even though I wanted to for quite a while.
Test runs at 120Mhz suggest this is a clean and brisk way to browse without overburdening the machine to a point of unusability. Firefox with Flash it is not, but if you are an unbeliever and demand a graphical browser on a Pentium Pro, this will satisfy. Furthermore, adding fbi to your system brings along fbgs, which allows you to display images and pdf files, respectively. For the reverse, try fbgrab and share your desktops with the world.
Now that Alpha 2 of Lucid Lynx is available (it was posted late last week) it’s easy enough to install that code onto the same PC test bed and measure the results. This version of the Ubuntu 10.04 beta booted up in — wait for it — 15 seconds. If you were around during the days of Windows 3.1, the concept of a 15-second boot time would be almost unfathomable. Come to think of it, it would be tough to imagine during the days of Windows Vista.
I’ll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the “safe graphics mode” boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.
Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I’ve wanted to do in order to “plan” this laptop’s future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.
Ubuntu Lucid isn’t even in the beta stage, let alone a release-candidate or fully baked release, and on my hardware it’s looking very, very good. I’m no fan of free-software hyperbole, but Ubuntu Lucid really does look like the best Ubuntu LTS release ever, and I’m anxious to see it at release time in April.
The Ubuntu User Days Team would like to announce the first Ubuntu User Day, on January 23, 2010. This will be a very informative one day session geared towards beginner and intermediate Ubuntu users, as well as people who are interested in using Ubuntu. We have 14 classes covering topics ranging from installing Ubuntu, finding help, equivalent programs, using IRC, getting involved in the Ubuntu Community and more. We have enlisted the help of many talented people to lead these classes throughout the day.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #177 for the week January 17th – January 23th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Developer Membership Board election results, Ubuntu User Days A Big Success, Bugs and hugs, Ubuntu Developer Week: January 25th – January 29th, 2010, Canonical Blog: ISV support for Ubuntu Server Edition widens, January 20th America’s Membership Review Board Meeting, Ubuntu LoCo Re-Approval Process, LoCo Stories: the Ubuntu Honduras School Tour, Launchpad 10.1 roll-out 09.00-11.30 27th January 2010, Anonymous Access to the Launchpad Web Service API, Introducing Ubuntu Electronics Remix 9.10, and much, much more!
The Ubuntu Manual Project has stirred up veritable carnival of publicity over the last few months, signifying a huge appetite for such a document within the community.
I decided to find out more on the project and its origins by interviewing the manual project leader (dare i say creator?) Benjamin Humphrey – also known as HumphreyBC.
Ubuntu 9.10 also offers its Server Edition, which provides the performance and security of Linux for the enterprise servers. Ubuntu Server Edition easily integrates with a user’s existing networks while providing a low total cost of ownership. The Server Edition goes further to offer multiple life cycle scenarios for users to choose from, and is supported by free life maintenance.
Version 6.1 of the system and network monitoring suite GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is now available. For this release the development team focused on improving performance and have also added support for Ubuntu Server to the monitoring solution. GroundWork Monitor Enterprise supports both Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and the latest Ubuntu 9.10 release.
Recently I popped down to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition here in Dublin. This is for secondary school students/ High school junior students in Ireland. It’s pretty amazing to see the enthusiasm they show for science and technology at an early age.
The process starts months ago, students submit a one page proposal on a topic, if it’s accepted they research and come up with the results, prototype or something to show from it all. It also gives Industries who are based over here to come and show case their projects and encourage students into those areas. IBM, Google, Analog Devices to name a few all took part and all have offices here in Ireland.
ÜberStudent is a free, Ubuntu-based operating system for higher education and emerging-generation high school students, those who wish to learn to excel at the tasks and habits of top students and researchers, and anyone who can benefit from easy-to-use yet powerful computing. Like Ubuntu, ÜberStudent is a complete operating system with programs for everyday computing tasks, but comes with an additional core of expertly configured programs, and many user-friendly extras, designed to increase your academic success. It’s Software Explorer enables you to easily extend ÜberStudent still further for specific academic disciplines, and it doesn’t stop there. Music and movie lovers, gamers, budding graphic designers, and those who insist on an ascetically eye-popping user interface will also be very pleased.
Linux is gaining popularity in the mobile phone industry, thanks to Android. Sony Ericsson has also joined the Gnu-Linux club and announced the launch of their first Android-powered phone — The Xperia X10.
The Xperia X10 phone, named SO-01B, will be launched in Japan in April 2010 with NTT DOCOMO. This Xperia phone creates a unique Sony Ericsson user experience by combining best-in-class entertainment features with signature applications.
The lead engineer for Google’s Chrome Operating System told Ars Technica the emerging product and its Chrome Web browser sidekick will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player. Chrome OS boots up a netbook in a fraction of the time it takes to start today’s existing computers. With Google’s Chrome Web browser, Chrome OS loads Web applications in just a few more seconds.
The latest AdMob metrics report is out today and it’s nothing we haven’t seen yet. To sum it up quickly, Android continues to grow both here in the US and abroad. In the span of one year Android traffic (in the AdMob network) has grown from 1% overall to 16% for North America and Western Europe.
[...]
This time last year year, Windows Mobile accounted for 12% whereas now it sits at 3% right next “other.” Ouch.
Google has just dropped Android software 2.1 (which the Nexus runs on) into the open source trough, making it rife for hacking and modding. This is the first, and is described as a simple job. Chris Paget of H4RDW4RE, describes the tweak as “very much low-level Linux kernel hacking as opposed to a full on ROM.”
I’ve seen many similar reports that talk of Linux overtaking Windows for UMDs in a broadly similar timeframe. One thing’s for sure smartbooks and the like are here to stay.
Despite the current developments and the latest advancements in x86 chips power efficiency, analysts seem to think that, even though Intel currently controls the netbook market with its new Atom chips, this dominance may be short lived. ABI Research suggests that the ARM architecture may make a strong incursion into this segment, likely taking away most of the mobile market share from Intel’s units.
Horizons Regional Council will take open-source software for a spin on its desktop computers early this year under a push to bring free software to public sector PCs.
New Zealand Open Source Society president Don Christie says NZ Post and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet will also trial the software as part of the Public Sector Remix project.
Fourteen government agencies have signed up for the project, and as of Wednesday 32 firms had responded to a survey seeking to identify the number and capability of New Zealand companies providing and supporting open-source software.
The code refactorings and clean ups that have been made to enable single-window mode to be implemented has also resulted in improvements to multi-window mode. The most significant is the support for multi-column dock windows, as you can see used in the screenshot above. People having dockables on one screen and an image in full screen on another will probably find this useful, for example. Before this, you could only have one column of dockables inside a dock window.
We’ve discussed the singlewindow GIMP before – even telling you how to install it! Now GIMP developer Martin Nordholt has revealed that the ‘target’ release date for version 2.8 (AKA ‘Single Window GIMP) is December the 27th 2010.
I have uploaded a pre-release version of IceCat 3.6, if there will not be major problems, at the beginning of next week I’ll make an official release. Please report on this mailing list any problem you may encounter.
However, permissive licences don’t ensure the ongoing freedom advocated by Richard Stallman, which underpins the FOSS philosophy. Significantly, though, Stallman is himself beginning to accept that they are sometimes necessary, as evidenced in a recent article in which he admits to having mixed feelings on selling licence exceptions. Could this shift in Stallman’s thinking be evidence of a fundamental change in the broader licensing landscape?
The Obama administration on Friday is posting to the Internet a wealth of government data from all Cabinet-level departments, on topics ranging from child car seats to Medicare services.
The mountain of newly available information comes a year and a day after President Barack Obama promised on his first full day on the job an open, transparent government.
When you combine the two, you elevate the art of literal misinterpretation to a higher form of genius. In Dr. Pun’s latest article, you will learn all about writing scripts using Python, just not the Python you may expect. The calembour or the equivoque is so potent here, that essentially a bad idea becomes fantastic. Follow me.
Recently, Vimeo and YouTube announced that they were moving to support the HTML5 video tag, as DailyMotion did last summer. This is an important step in making video a first-class citizen of the modern web, and that is great news. Unlike DailyMotion, however, Vimeo and YouTube chose to rely on the patented H.264 video encoding, rather than an unencumbered encoding like Ogg Theora. This means that the <video> pages on those sites will not work with Firefox.
The proprietary flash player has left alot to be desired for Linux and Apple users. Especially if you are running with accelerated 3d and with compiz fusion. Finally it is possible to watch youtube videos in html 5 format instead of the flash player. And I have found an easy way to take advantage of this new feature. This experience for me at least has been so much better. No more low quality jerky video, but instead with html 5 the video can be viewed in high definition and still be smooth.
Jack Straw, the justice secretary, today disclosed that he offered Tony Blair a last-minute way out of the war in Iraq by drafting a secret contingency plan that would have seen Britain support the US-led invasion but not send troops.
The Swiss Federal Administrative Court [official website, in French] ruled [judgment, PDF, in German; press release, PDF, in French] Thursday that an American taxpayer’s financial information at Swiss bank UBS [corporate website] may not be disclosed to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) [official website] pursuant to an August 2009 agreement [text, PDF; JURIST report]. The court ruled in favor of an undisclosed American taxpayer, who appealed a November decision by the Swiss Federal Tax Administration (AFC) [official website, in French] that would have allowed the disclosure.
We present Albert Edwards’ latest in its complete form as it must be read by all unabridged and without commentary. These are not the deranged ramblings of a fringe blogger – this is a chief strategist for a major international bank.
As Peter Wallison argues in his great book on party finance, the real evil of American politics is that politicians must beg interest groups for the money to finance their campaigns. What we need is not “less money” and CERTAINLY not less speech – but more distance between donor and recipient. The mechanism for that is the political party. Reformers should be focusing on lifting limits on the flow of money from parties to candidates and restoring the role of the parties as the funders of campaigns. Instead of Candidate Smith asking Donor Gonzalez for money – and Donor Gonzalez asking for a favor in return – party chairman Robinson will ask thousands of donors for money on behalf of a slate of candidates, who will never know precisely whose gift was directed to them. That step will diminish corruption and the appearance of corruption.
President Barack Obama took a populist tone Saturday, denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision to ease curbs on big business spending on election campaigns.
Battered by a stunning Republican win this week in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts that robbed Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority, Obama defended his political agenda and vowed to continue fighting against “the special interests in Washington”.
“In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests,” the president said in his weekly audio and video address.
In a Special Comment, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann envisions a future United States in which today’s Supreme Court ruling permitting unbridled corporate campaign spending purchase all the power greed can afford.
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the constitutional right to a public trial in criminal cases means that jury selection, including questioning of prospective jurors, should not be done behind closed doors.
Google Inc., clashing with the Chinese government over Web censorship, praised U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for calling for an unrestricted Internet where people can operate without fear of repression.
“At Google we are great believers in the value to society of unfettered access to information,” the company said in a statement today. Google said it will work with governments, human-rights organizations and bloggers to promote free expression and increased access to information.
Remember the Russian cop’s YouTube narrative on police corruption? Reader Max_W writes with the news that Alexei Dymovsky, the cop whose videos started a movement, was arrested (Google translation; Russian original) on January 22, 2010. He is in prison in the south of Russia. Max_W adds: “It seems only a president is allowed to have a video blog in Russia.”
“Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again — apparently without avail.”
Suffice to say that it, ‘clixpy’, records everything I do when online to the text portal, key strokes, mouse movements, selections made etc., as shown by a live demo on clixpy.com, if I use a web browser. So it appears to be very intrusive and I’m extremely concerned for my privacy.
What is the reason for ‘clixby’s presence? Is it a consequence of new UK laws or EU regulations, or is it something else. WHATEVER, I *DON’T* LIKE IT! Makes me think of PHORM.
Russia’s police force was today at the centre of another national scandal after a journalist beaten in custody died in hospital from his injuries.
Konstantin Popov, 47, was arrested two weeks ago in his home town of Tomsk, Siberia, after neighbours complained that he was drunk and playing his guitar too loudly.
How is that possible? It cannot be found out because the mandate is not made public. Magic, it reminds me of the charlatans who say they live without food and water supply, and it is their personal secret what makes them survive.
The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.
Summary: Analysis of some of Canonical’s recent moves, which give rise to Novell’s Mono and proprietary software (at the expense of Free software)
“If you want to watch the mischief,” says one of our readers, “this might be the place to begin. The very harmful stuff is probably not as obvious as overt mischief.”
The page says: “Ekiga is not longer installed by default [in lucid]. Added link to download beta version for Windows in switching guide, and added an apt url for download in Ubuntu in internet section. LP: #508572″
Groklaw points to a somewhat old article about Ubuntu, which notes that Canonical “has had its CEO discard the executive mantle to “focus [his] Canonical energy on product design,” [...].” Pamela Jones believes that “it partially explains some of the decisions, by clarifying the goal.” That was a few days ago.
A poll from Ubuntu Forums (shown by Groklaw) indicates that Ubuntu users oppose the removal of the GIMP and a petition on the subject has amassed 768 signatures of people who oppose the removal of the GIMP. Is Canonical listening and paying attention to the users? The worry is that warning signs from people like Jeremy Allison get ignored for temporary convenience [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Shooting down messengers who show something that they do not want to see is not a wise decision. Messengers include the Free Software Foundation, users, and developers [1, 2, 3]. █
Summary: The Huffington Post is becoming filled with top Microsoft employees who use the publication for their lobbying that relies upon lies
A PUBLICATION is heading in the wrong direction when it decides to give room for convicted offenders to speak out, and moreover to spread a lot of lies. Yesterday we wrote about what was happening in the Huffington Post, whose accommodation of the whole Gates family adds an affiliation with white-collar criminals. As the screenshots above show (all from January), this has become a disturbing pattern. A few days ago, Microsoft’s Smith started lobbying Obama for almost-warrantless snoops and last night we included a link that shows the Obama administration defending the FBI’s violation of laws amid a snooping scandal (which the EFF is suing over). Microsoft’s lobbying for more of it is a subject we wrote about earlier and guess who is helping Microsoft by giving them a platform? That’s right, the Huffington Post.
“As the screenshots above show (all from January), this has become a disturbing pattern.”Gates, Ballmer, and Smith, all of whom happen to have also personally paid Obama, just treat the Huffington Post like it’s their blog. Microsoft’s new lobbying blog attracts very poor readership, so it would not serve them as much as this Huffington Post placement where Microsoft is being extremely dishonest. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, says: “Modernization of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act so law enforcement has the tools it needs to go after malicious hackers and deter instances of online-based crimes;…”
Over at Groklaw, Pamela Jones replies by saying: “How about Microsoft improves its software instead, so it isn’t so easy to break in? Or simpler, how about when Microsoft is informed of a security problem in its software in September, or August, it doesn’t wait to fix it until Google and other companies are hacked into by means of that very security breach in January? And how would a US law stop Chinese hackers? Really, just fix your software, please. That really would help a lot more than local laws.”
Jones refers to the recent Internet Explorer fiasco [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], which cost a lot of money, caused a lot of suffering, led to diplomatic tensions, and was caused due to Microsoft’s utter negligence [1, 2, 3].
It brings us back to the Huffington Post. Why would they want to support systematic liars and spinners? This is not healthy to readers.
What are they trying to say? That GPL and “commercial business software” are contradictory? This is partly the result of Microsoft indoctrination, although Microsoft is not the only company responsible for this FUD.
You forgot the real issue here, which is that Bono, Gates and similar pseudo-philanthropists are actively involved with making a variety of “teaching” (sharing of knowledge) expensive and/or illegal. This is the core of what Bono is ranting about this time, suggesting the world’s governments should go as far as the human rights violations in China to (theoretically — no proof of “benefit”) grant him more money.
There are those who think that making knowledge scarce, including criminalising private citizens owning and controlling their own communications technology, is the only way to make it possible to pay authors/inventors for their important contributions to society.
The scary thing ought to be that Gates is even controlling educational systems now. See for example:
The latest round of negotiations over the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA — a secret treaty that contains provisions requiring nations to wiretap the Internet, force ISPs to spy on users, search laptops at the border, and disconnect whole households from the net on the basis of mere accusation of copyright infringement) is just kicking off in Mexico, and activists from around Mexico and the world have converged on the meeting to demand transparent, public negotiations of this critical treaty.
The room, then, was mostly industry people, who were apparently concerned as to why everyday citizens were in attendance, and they even booed a lawyer who questioned the human rights angle. As for Geraldine, she tried twittering the event, and the industry folks demanded she leave (and had a guard escort her out). It’s almost like they’re trying to make themselves into a caricature of businesses plotting to harm the public.
Patent litigation between Motorola and Research In Motion is heating up, with Motorola filing a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission.
In the complaint, filed Friday, Motorola alleges that RIM engages in unfair trade practices by importing and selling products that infringe five Motorola patents. The patents cover technologies related to Wi-Fi access, application management, user interface and power management, Motorola said.
Patent reform – Patent trolls are reshaping the patent landscape; their litigation of broad, vague software patents is amounting to a “tax” on innovation.
The petition aims to unify the voices of concerned Europeans, associations and companies, and calls on our politicians in Europe to stop patents on software with legislative clarifications.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has defaced the MacBook Pro of young fanboi, and his sarcastic scrawling was caught on video.
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Thanks to AppleInsider, we learned today that during a visit to Tennessee’s Trevecca Nazarene University for a meeting of the Nashville Technology Council, Ballmer was approached by a long-haired youth who politely asked him to autograph his MacBook Pro.
Of course, this is only Ballmer’s latest public run-in with an Apple product. At least he didn’t pretend to stomp on the MacBook Pro. But no doubt this incident will go down as one of the greatest stunts in the history of Trevecca Nazarene. Writes the unnamed student in a blog post: “My apologies for the impending apocalypse.”
Recently many Software Freedom activists have started to question bundled operating systems. If one goes to buy a PC, you will have to pay for the pre-installed Microsoft Window. Today there are many alternatives to Microsoft Windows — GNU/Linux based Ubuntu is one of the most popular Operating Systems. It is not only free in terms of cost, but also free in terms of control that the user has over his or her computing. GNU/Linux operating systems are very much more secure than Microsoft technologies.
If you want buy a branded PC from HP or any other major player and you want to run GNU/Linux on it then what are your choices? Irrespective of what software you want to run on your machine, you will have to pay the cost of pre-installed Windows, even if you are going to remove it and replace it with GNU/Linux. Will Mrs. Clinton take measures to save citizens from paying forced Microsoft Taxes?
With the ever increasing user-friendliness of Linux, the fact that its not as demanding on the hardware, the fact that more and more companies are making programs for Linux and the strides of companies like Canonical with their Ubuntu product, I see the popularity of Linux doing nothing but growing.
This two-day introduction to Linux broadens attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. They get familiar with the architecture and various components of the operating system, learn both graphical and command line tools, and learn to do basic networking. This class is scheduled for January 28th – 29th, 2010.
Dell no longer has desktop systems available on their Linux system page. Only laptop and netbook systems are now available. This is the second time in the past few months that Dell has dropped Linux desktop systems. Attempts to contact Dell to ask about the status of desktop Linux systems have so far been unsuccessful.
Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will include a built-in media player. In an interview with ArsTechnica, Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, says that the developers are currently working on “integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS”. The Chrome browser, for example, already includes support for Flash and HTML5 audio and video playback, however, users also need to be able to “play JPEGs and MP3s and PDFs and all that stuff when you’re off line” said Papakipos.
Sometime in 2010, Google will release Chrome OS, its take on a netbook operating system. It will be far more than just that though. It’s an entirely new take on the desktop operating system. While a final version is still months away from release there’s already enough of Chrome available that we can begin to see what it’s going to look like.
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You also won’t need to be on the Internet to view or play some media files. We already know that Chrome OS will be able to read Adobe PDF files and play Adobe Flash videos. Now, we know that Google is integrating a media player into Chrome OS that will play at least MP3 music files. It will surely play other media file types as well, but exactly what those will be we don’t know yet. We do know that you won’t need to be on the Internet to play them. So, for example, if you have an MP4 movie on a USB stick, you’ll be able to watch it even if you’re not online. Again, the intent isn’t to have you click on a movie file and have a media player pop-up to play it. Instead, the movie will start playing in a browser window. Chrome OS is all about integrating everything into the Web browser experience.
Not a lot of fixes, LCA rather slowed down the patch flow. There’s a number of patches in the queue for master, so I expect 1.7.4.902 to be a bit more exciting.
The Swedes from Gothenberg that run Craft Animations have announced the first-ever Linux release of their Craft Director Studio software. Craft Director Studio, which is an advanced real-time 3D animations tool, is now officially supported under Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– A number of fixes in AVI file support.
– Several MSXML improvements.
– A few MSI fixes.
– Various bug fixes.
The Bordeaux developers have announced the release of version 2.0.0 of Bordeaux for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Bordeaux is a GUI configuration manager add-on for Wine and is also available for Linux and BSD. Wine, which is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native versions of Windows DLLs.
The third day of talks at Camp KDE was somewhat shorter, due to the afternoon Cmake training provided by Marcus Hanwell of Kitware. However, in order to provide complete coverage of the talks for the readers of the dot, summaries of the third day’s technical talks are provided within.
I have been really lazy to write anything here for quite some time now. I enjoyed the simple life away from the blogocube (it’s actually a dodecahedron, but blogododecahedron is a mouthful) but now I’m back.
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The next step was the /fork/ from the title. The data models (aka every item list you see in Lancelot) are moved into a separate library called liblancelot-datamodels. Both libraries (liblancelot and liblancelot-datamodels) now reside in kdeplasma-addons/libs so that they can be used by any other plasmoid (or any other program for that matter).
This is a way of saying “liblancelot is now considered stable enough to be used even outside of Lancelot”.
I used to have a silk dress shirt. It was a rich blue color, a bit loose fitting and just great for the hot and humid semi-tropical climate of Hawaii where I was living at the time. That isn’t the kind of silk this blog entry is about, however. Rather it’s going to be about KDE Silk which is a project which aims to deeply integrate online content and communication into the user experience.
To quote the KDE Silk wiki page: “The goal of Project Silk is deep coupling of the web with the user experience while overcoming limitations of the browser. “Freeing the Web From the Browser”, so to say. Project Silk takes the opposite direction of Google’s Chrome OS, instead of making the browser the Operating System, we integrate the content and the communication deeply into the desktop and application ”
When I was contemplating the topics for my “Key Quests for 2010″ list in December 2009, even before I had decided whether I’d share the list with others, the issue of KDE’s web footprint came up pretty quickly in the process. It is very often our first impression for people who would like to get involved or who would like to find out more about us. It is where people go before they know how to (or if they want to) communicate with us directly. It also has been something we’ve really struggled with improving.
The list of “Key Quests for 2010″ was alphabetical. It was a sensible ordering and it prevented me from having to prioritize them in some linear fashion that could never be definitive anyways: all the points are important, though often in different ways, for different reasons and even with different key audiences. So, alphabetical ordering it was! This meant that WebKit was going to be the last topic, and now here we are. (Honestly, I’m glad I’ll be able to get back to more “stream of consciousness, spur of the moment” blogging!
The first beta of what will become Element MediaOS version 1.0, an HTPC centric distribution based on Ubuntu 9.10, is available for testers and developers. Element is designed for HTPCs and aims to integrate GTK applications into a ten-foot user interface through a unique implementation of the XFCE environment. Its started as my own project to set up an effective media center for my own HTPC that would allow me to utilise certain GTK applications without straining my eyes to read the dialog fonts. I decided it would probably be beneficial to other users who were seeking something similar so I am hoping I can get an active community of media center enthusiasts to get behind it and support it.
While the recession has battered many U.S. software companies, Red Hat — which has staked its future on open-source Linux software, virtualization and cloud computing — has flourished. The company has a number of secrets behind its success, some of them unique.
Last month, more than 200 Fedora Project developers and contributors gathered in Toronto for FUDCon, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. Paul Frields, Red Hat’s Fedora Project Leader, talks about FUDCon, what lies ahead for the next generation of FOSS, and how to address some of the lingering problems of Linux communities.
It’s been over a week now, and my wife is settling in to her new Debian system with no further problems. There were a few extras I needed to install when I first brought Debian up, and a few more I’ve needed during the last week.
Debian developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has announced that security support for Debian 4.0 (code named “Etch”) will end on the 15th of February, 2010. Debian 4.0 was originally released on the 8th of April, 2007 and included version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel. After the 15th of February, no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available for Debian version 4.0.
The second alpha of Ubuntu 10.06 boasts 15-second boot-time, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project posted a controversial survey about which proprietary apps might be considered for inclusion with the distro, and Canonical announced a support plan for IBM’s Ubuntu/Lotus “Smart Work” cloud distribution.
To be worked on for Ubuntu Server 10.04 Alpha 3 is migrating from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, an upgrade to Eucalyptus 1.6.2, PHP/Python/Perl libraries for Amazon’s cloud computing platform, integrating Puppet and Etckeeper, boothooks and user based configuration for UEC/EC2, and various QA improvements.
Sams Publishing has published a 2010 version of its book Ubuntu Unleashed for Karmic Koala and Lucid Lynx releases. The publisher also launched an Ubuntu Linux Starter Kit combination book and boxed distribution, and has updated A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming.
Now that Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is out and stable I thought I would look into what is on the horizon for the next release of Ubuntu. There are a lot of questions that I have about the next release and I have found some solid answers, rumors and a lot of speculation as to what the next release will have.
Ubuntu has committed to have a regular release schedule. I came across a lot of mixed feelings about this idea/concept. Some people feel that this regular release gets in the way of how users see the distribution. Some users like to be on the edge of technology and what the developers have made for the release. Once people get used to that release it is about time for another release that uses new ideas and concepts.
Believe it or not, there are several distributions of Linux intended for use by children as young as 3 years old. Child-oriented Linux distros tend to have a simplified interface with large, “chunky”, colorful icons and a specialized set of programs designed with kids in mind.
The latest generation of devices are easy on the eye, lightweight and packed with some nifty features such as the ability to take notes, make lists and — for some — even watch video. They also offer far better battery life than any netbook or notebook, often come with an unlimited wireless connection for downloading new books, and give you access to libraries of e-books that can top a million titles. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, there were so many e-readers that they had their own special section carved out on the show floor.
Version 0.2 of both Flickr Addict and Flickr Addict Lite have been released on the Palm App Catalog, just three hours or so after submission, so kudos to Palm!
T-Mobile launched an Eric Clapton-backed Fender Limited Edition of its Android-based MyTouch 3G phone. Meanwhile, China-based Hisense announced an HS-E90 Android phone, Motorola is launching an Android app store in China, and Taiwan’s Gigabyte is rumored to be releasing an Android handset in Russia, say reports.
Pre-release downloads of Processing with built-in support for Android. Note that this code is incomplete and contains many bugs. It is not ready for widespread use. It should be considered “nightly build” quality. Do not use this code while operating heavy equipment. Do not rely on this code for thesis or diploma work, as you will not graduate. Do not use this code if you’re prone to whining about incomplete software that you download for free.
ARM-based systems introduces greater choice and differentiation for system vendors, although an estimated 90% of ultra-mobile devices (UMDs) shipped in 2009 were based on an x86 processor architecture, according to a new report by ABI Research.
The firm forecasts that annual UMD shipments of netbooks, MIDs, smartbooks and UMPCs based on ARM instruction sets will surpass x86-based UMDs by 2013.
ZSL, a leading ISV & Global Software Solutions and Services provider, today launched “PowerCube” DaaS (Desktop as a Service), an open source-based desktop collaborative solution with supporting ZSL consulting practice. Available today in the U.S., Africa, and India, “PowerCube” will help mid-market customers using proprietary platforms to migrate to the IBM Client for Smart Work on Ubuntu’s operating system.
At the Gran Canaria Open Desktop Summit in July 2009, the Open-PC project was announced. The statement said the project aimed to “cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community”. Further this PC would use only hardware for which there are free software drivers available. This would be a PC with the minimal compromise required for running a free desktop. In January 2010 the project announced the launch of its first product.
What you’re looking at above left is the construction site of the Cleopatra Water Courts project in Cairo, Egpyt, a shopping mall complex that’ll likely cost tens of millions dollars to complete. What you’re at looking above right is the architect’s conceptual model that got his design for it approved — not a real world model, not a watercolor painting, not even an AutoCAD file. Rather, it’s a build created in Second Life, which Los Angeles-based architect David Denton (known in SL as DB Bailey), showed his client, an Egyptian tycoon who funded the project. On that score, this is almost certainly the most expensive, ambitious real world project using Second Life as a platform.
linux.conf.au describes itself as a “conference about Open Source Software, including Linux that brings together the world’s community of Linux enthusiasts who contribute to the Linux operating system”. The description is apt because it clearly states how focused on the “open source” philosophy that conference is. Their views and conclusions would differ if they focused more on software freedom instead. “Free software” and “open source” are terms expressing different values and different values give rise to different conclusions.
Fidelity Information Services Free/Open Source GT.M Mumps database is gaining traction outside of private-sector Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record. Veterans Affairs VistA development in the private sector is proceeding at a furious rate. Companies such as M/Gateway, Astronaut (owned by the same conspiracy that owns Linux Medical News) Medsphere, DSS and others are making announcement after announcement of new development in the Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record or closely related space.
*Open source in consumer devices
*VMware-Zimbra deal highlights open source, cloud
*A capitalist’s guide to open source licensing
*Latest on Oracle-Sun-MySQL, M&A implications
This week there is only a little bit of GIMP, but a lot more about the free video editor Cinelerra. I use it to make a kind of slide show video used to illustrate a short “bumper” for Martin Bailey’s blog and podcast about his (mostly nature) photography. Martin is living in Japan and has a lot to tell about photography and Japan. Highly recommended!
I’m very grateful, personally, that the EU Commission cares about Open Source, but after its extensive investigation into MySQL, despite some misinformation, as I viewed it, it found, “The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.” That is true.
Intriguing stuff. But the really interesting dialog begins in chapter two, where Burkhardt shares his views on Oracle’s buyout of Sun, and the potential implications for MySQL.
OpenStreetMap and Sahana are two free software projects that are facilitating aid to Haiti.
We wanted to call attention to two free software projects that have been involved in the Haiti humanitarian effort, both because of the usefulness of their work and because they can surely use the help of skilled volunteers.
PatientOS EMR is an open source health care information system with a comprehensive toolkit to customize the EMR to meet the needs of Hospitals, Clinics and Businesses seeking to integrate an EMR with their software.
This latest release includes a new AJAX web client for end users to access the clinical documentation through the browser. PatientOS Inc. worked closely with the Ila Trust foundation to create a light weight application which can meet the needs of seeing hundreds of patients per session.
This release candidate is the final step before the official release of opentaps 1.4, which is expected in the next few weeks, and there should be only limited changes to opentaps 1.4 before its release.
The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.
In December the U.S. White House set guidelines for an open and transparent administration. The Open Source for America (OSFA) organization is now following up with tips for a governmental move to free software.
People are voting for Google to offer HTML5/Ogg video support on YouTube, in Google’s own product ideas voting space.
This piece of Ogg activism is getting some traffic on identi.ca and Twitter right now. If you haven’t already, you should jump in.
YouTube is, obviously, the largest source of videos in the world by far, so keeping pressure on Google to support web standards and free formats (over proprietary formats like Flash) is really important.
In early December a beta of Google Chrome for Linux was released (though Chromium could be built on Linux in an alpha form for months earlier) while just days prior was the first public code release of Google’s Chromium OS. Google’s Chrome web-browser has been quick to attract new users on Linux thanks to its speed and features, but some are having issues with this web-browser over its multimedia support.
When Google began soliciting feedback from users about what features they would most like to see in the next version of YouTube, the response was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic request for standards-based open video: users called for Google to support the HTML5 video element.
Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it’s no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn’t require Adobe’s software to stream content to viewers.
So the question rises: “Why is there no OGG support in Youtube?” Numerous people claimed it is because Google is afraid of submarine patents for the Theora video format. While Xiph, the foundation behind Theora claims it is not patent encumbered but you cannot be sure until it is used by the masses and it would be an interesting target for companies. It’s only an interesting target if royalties for patents will generate enough income to justify legal costs. Apart from that there is also the mid-2009 discussion about which format offered the best video quality.
[T]hey only offer video in H.264 format, and that is not good news for free software. A lot of people have noticed that Firefox doesn’t support H.264, and apparently many people don’t understand why, or know what the problems are with H.264. This is a good time to restate the facts and re-explain why Firefox does not support H.264. I’ll be mostly recapitulating the relevant chunks of my talk. (Hopefully a full recording of my talk will become available from the LCA site next week.)
The basic problem is simple: H.264 is encumbered by patents whose licensing is actively pursued by the MPEG-LA. If you distribute H.264 codecs in a jurisdiction where software patents are enforceable, and you haven’t paid the MPEG-LA for a patent license, you are at risk of being sued.
I’m sure there will be a lot of exciting events this year. Google is planning to release a simple OS centered around web browsing and web apps. It is intended for netbooks, but will surely impact the web platform, by proving that the shift towards the web apps is already happening today.
The sugar on top comes through with web applications. No matter what platform I am running there are many online application suites that promise to bring us OS independent applications. Google and Microsoft are both working on this, and in the future we can expect more of it. What does this mean?
POLICE have apologised to a man after he was given two speeding fines from a camera outside his house – despite the fact his car was parked at the time.
A driver was twice sent speeding tickets after parking in front of a camera because police officers failed to notice his vehicle was stationary, it has emerged.
Mr Hussain is calling for a change in the law to favour victims of burglary and home intrusion who act as he did in defence of their families, homes and property and I hope that he gets it. We ought to be entitled to defend ourselves in our own homes, and to know that the state will back us and not the criminal intruder when we do so.
One of the suspects, Doni, was caught when he was about to withdraw money from a Bank Mega ATM on Jalan Enggano in Tanjung Priok. The police confiscated 20 cellphones, hundreds of cellphone SIM cards and Rp 120 million ($ 12, 282) in cash.
A TSA agent at the Philadelphia International Airport slipped a baggie full of white powder into an unsuspecting passenger’s baggage, then terrorized her when he “found” it, before announcing that he was just kidding. When she complained to airport security, she was dismissed because “the TSA worker had been training the staff to detect contraband.”
One of the most common ways of preventing insider security breaches is to have an auditing system in place, which monitors who is doing what within the system. Another method of preventing insider security breaches is to implement a system of job rotation or separation of duties. But Multi-Party Authorization is a better method for proactively preventing insider security breaches because, as Knowledge Center contributor Craig Palmore explains here, Multi-Party Authorization requires two or more people in order to allow access to certain sensitive files.
Charlie Mitchener is a 61-year-old general building contractor with an office near Patrick Lane and Fort Apache Road in Las Vegas. He holds permits allowing him to legally carry concealed weapons in Nevada, Florida and Utah.
Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that the chief constable of Kent police, Mike Fuller, lobbied the power generation company E.ON UK to seek injunctions to counter protests against the proposed Kingsnorth power station.
A chief constable was tonight accused of undermining the public’s right to protest after documents revealed he urged the owner of a power station to do more to disrupt environmental demonstrators.
Last December, Congress approved a $290 billion increase of the debt limit to support the government’s borrowing through February. This lifted the total amount the federal government can borrow to $12.4 trillion.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley lost her special-election for the Senate seat vacated by the untimely passing of U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy. Much has been said about the role of health care reform in the race. Apparently everyone in Massachusetts has health care and reasonable doubts about an expensive national plan that might not improve their services.
President Obama proposed Thursday that banks should be restricted from making investments that are not intended to benefit customers, an activity known as proprietary trading.
Though the roots of the financial crisis were in lax loan underwriting, followed by lax underwriting of derivative products containing those loans and a poor grasp on the exposures banks were amassing on their books, the administration is relying on populist outrage to regain momentum.
The Obama administration struggled on Friday to secure confirmation of Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, underscoring the political upheaval as both parties tried to find their footing amid a powerful wave of populism.
President Barack Obama’s administration is scrambling to save the nomination of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke as more opposition emerges from members of the president’s own party.
Two Senate Democrats announced they would vote against Bernanke’s bid for a second term on Friday, underscoring a major populist shift in the political landscape after a Republican’s stunning Massachusetts victory ended the Democratic supermajority in the Senate.
Meredith Whitney, the banking analyst who forecast Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2008, said plans to limit risk-taking at financial companies will probably be approved and may “dramatically” reduce trading profits.
In what seems to be a relentless and increasingly dangerous mentality by Barack Obama concerning the banks of America, he continues to attack them from every angle as he suffocates the ability to generate revenue based on what looks like some type of inner torment from the failures of his first year in office as president.
Barney Franks and his House Financial Services Committee will open hearings today to discuss ways to impose limits on executive pay and the risks these bankers can take. Good for him. Will we skip the obvious question—what took Barney so long?—and wish him well.
One of Congress’ premier watchdog panels is investigating Goldman Sachs’ role in the subprime mortgage meltdown, including how the firm sold securities backed by risky home loans while it simultaneously bet that those bonds would lose value, people familiar with the inquiry said Friday.
The investigation is part of a broader examination by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the roots of the economic crisis and whether financial institutions behaved improperly, said the individuals, who insisted upon anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
The crisis that began in 2008, with the near-failure of Bear Stearns, triggered a host of policies to shore up the investment banks. First, investment banks like Bear and Goldman were allowed to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve’s discount window—a privilege heretofore afforded only to commercial bank holding companies. After the failure of Lehman Bros., Goldman and Morgan Stanley hastily transformed themselves into bank holding companies, which allowed them to take full advantage of all the Fed’s and FDIC’s new programs. First, the FDIC boosted the amount of deposits it would insure, and then it offered to guarantee debt issued by financial institutions. Goldman was one of the biggest users of this new subsidy.
Buffett also told Fox Business that he doesn’t plan to sell off his holdings in Goldman Sachs, and that he foresees holding the shares at least five years.
With the impact of President Obama’s banking plan on Goldman Sachs Group (GS) far from clear, some analysts trimmed their 2010 Goldman forecasts on other worries following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report.
Analysts have this morning scrambled to respond to President Obama’s surprise proposals for reform of the banking industry. Financial News summarises the views of some of the first to comment on the new regulations.
This move was applauded by public interest groups. “Ten years ago, the financial lobby convinced our leaders that the country’s most important banks should be allowed to operate like hedge funds. That deregulatory gamble cost us trillions in household wealth and millions of jobs. President Obama’s proposals greatly improve the reform package needed to prevent another crisis,” said Heather McGee from DEMOS.
When I look at Goldman’s staggering 2009 profits, I suspect some of their success comes from the fact that they have much of the field to themselves in the wake of Merrill Lynch’s collapse and the general retrenchment in the finance world. Regulations that crowd out JP Morgan and Bank of America would leave Goldman even freer of competition. This is how regulation often functions: driving out smaller competitors and keeping out new entrants, thus preserving profitability by alleviating competitive pressures.
To believe that the administration’s latest proposals alone are responsible for sinking the markets is to believe that what’s bad for Goldman Sachs is bad for America.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will benefit from President Barack Obama’s proposal to limit Wall Street risk because it may force its competitors to unwind trading operations, Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove said.
President Obama received a lot of support from Wall Street during his 2008 campaign. For the next election, he might want to plan accordingly without it.
Happy Goldman Sachs Bonus Day! As we mentioned earlier, Goldman announced today that its 2009 bonuses will total $16 billion, spread (very unevenly) among its 32,500 employees. We thought we’d take a look at how they spend our money.
Goldman Sachs’ decision to restrict its annual bonus pool to $16.2bn (rather than an expected $22bn or so) on the day that Barack Obama announced a sweeping set of Glass-Steagall like reforms that strike at the heart of its business model, turns out to be too little, too late.
As Goldman Sachs prepared to announce its fourth quarter earnings and employee compensation levels yesterday, the bank had bomb-sniffing dogs and police barricades on hand at its New York City headquarters, the New York Post reports.
New York isn’t alone among the cash-strapped states (read: all of them) in looking to take a tax sip from the nation’s “sugared beverages.” Today in New Hampshire, hearings are being held on soft drink taxes, and a bill is already in the pipeline. In Mississippi, a bill to impose a 2 cent per ounce tax is under consideration by the legislature. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says he is getting increasingly serious about soda taxes as well. And the California Senate must not have given way to total despair, since they are working up a plan for taxing sweetened drinks. Because legislators and governors tend not to be too hot on math, the pro-tax Center for Science in the Public Interest offers a handy little calculator that shows how much money could flow into state coffers from a soda tax. And once they see those numbers—$400 million in free money!—it’s hard to forget them when it comes time to add up the columns on a budget spreadsheet.
If you care about fighting spin and you are concerned about the health of American democracy, I hope you will join me in saying the Supreme Court really got it wrong today, and this must be fixed. You can help put Americans — and people — before corporations by signing here today. It’ll only take a moment to say NO to the Supreme Court’s arrogant effort to elevate corporations “rights” and undermine the power of the people in our democracy.
Bowing to Pentagon concerns and an international outcry, a Michigan arms company said Thursday that it would immediately stop embossing references to New Testament Scriptures on rifle sights it sells the military.
Cruise giant Royal Caribbean plunged into a public storm last week, when it resumed bringing passengers to Labadee for daylong beach retreats.
How do you snooze in a rope hammock while, on the far side of those emerald mountains, tens of thousands of desperate human beings are still trying to extract their dead from wreckage?
The Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission this week link here. It declares that corporations and other groups have the same rights as live humans. The left considers this a great defeat which will lead to a flood of corporate money in elections to the detriment of the average voter while the right only sees a justified extension of corporations and other groups freedom to speak and spend money to affect political races.
MrJM sez, “The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC allows corporations and unions to pour unprecedented amounts of money into elections. Now more than ever, when Congress acts, we won’t be able to know whether it was because of reason or judgment… or only because of the need for campaign money. The system is broken, and we need to act.”
China blocks Web sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and has long forced domestic Internet companies to censor their own services. Blog providers, for instance, are expected to delete user posts that include pornographic content or talk of sensitive political issues.
Amazon dropped a bomb on the publishing world Wednesday morning by announcing a new royalty program that will allow authors to earn 70 percent royalties from each e-book sold, but with a catch or two. The move will pay participating authors more per book than they typically earn from physical book sales so long as they agree to certain conditions—conditions that make it clear that Amazon is working on keeping the Kindle attractive in light of upcoming competition. Still, authors and publishers are split on how good this deal really is.
Amazon tells The Reg that no-DRM was always the default with its Digital Text Platform – used by small publishers and authors as opposed to large publishing houses. In the past, the company says, if authors wanted to add DRM, they had to download separate software. Now, they can add DRM simply by checking a radio button.
But in a surprise buried at the end of the 289-page report, the inspector general also reveals that the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections.
[...]
The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.
But an AT&T employee provided the unit with a way around some of those requirements. The employee introduced them to so-called ‘exigent letters.’ Those letters, first used immediately following 9/11, asked for information by saying that the request was an emergency and that prosecutors were preparing a grand jury subpoena. The letter falsely promised that the subpoena, which gives the telecoms legal immunity, would be delivered later, the report said.
What’s more, the report noted that the cozy relationship between the bureau and the telecoms made it hard to differentiate between the FBI and the nation’s phone companies.
“The FBI’s use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of all three communication service providers told us that they — the company employees– sometimes generated the exigent letters for CAU personnel to sign and return,” the inspector general reported.
In fact, one AT&T employee even created a short cut on his desktop to a form letter that he could print out for a requesting FBI agent to sign.
Even that became too much. Agents would request “sneak peeks,” where they’d ask if it was worth their time to file a request on a given phone number, the inspector general noted. The telecom agents complied. Soon it graduated to numbers on Post-it notes, in e-mails or just oral requests.
A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails.
“We’re deeply disappointed in the judge’s ruling,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law. Setting limits on Executive power is one of the most important elements of America’s system of government, and judicial oversight is a critical part of that.”
“General” Larry Platt — the musical mastermind behind “Pants on the Ground” — hasn’t seen a dime since everyone and their mother started singing his tune … and now he’s lawyering up in the hopes of finally raking in some cash.
Perhaps if you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the past few years, you were unaware of the popular hobby of creating subtitled videos of an angry Hitler reacting to something going on in the world today, using a clip from the German movie Downfall.
A mother who doesn’t understand computers and forbade her children from downloading and sharing music on the Internet has been held responsible for their actions. A court in Germany ruled that parents simply banning file-sharing is not enough, and this has to be followed up to check compliance.
Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.
Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We haven’t. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that there’s a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD.
Of course, right after the rumors, Glickman came out and announced that he would be stepping down at the end of his contract in September of 2010. So it seemed like maybe the studios would let him stick around to the end, since it was clear he wasn’t coming back. Apparently even that plan has been thrown out the window, as Glickman has now announced that he’s leaving as of April 1 in order to take over Refugees International, which seems like a worthy enough cause.
But a year after the RIAA made its announcement, not one major ISP had acknowledged supporting the RIAA’s plan. The question raised by Henson’s statement is whether Verizon has quietly signed on. An RIAA representative declined to comment.
To date, not a single major ISP has publicly acknowledged adopting a graduated response, yet Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast have for some reason stepped up the issuing of warning letters.
I was interviewed yesterday by Mark Edge, as part of his “Edgington Post Interview Series,” for his Free Talk Live radio show, about my Mises Daily article, “Reducing the Cost of IP Law.”
The IP advocate’s argument is dishonest. He says, well, my IP rule limits your property rights, but so do all property rights. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that the only limits we recognize are that you may not violate others’ property rights! Murder or normal theft or trespass is obviously an instance of this. But using my own property peacefully is not! The IP advocate needs to show that my use of my own DVD somehow interferes with his own property in his own scarce resources. Obviously, it cannot. So, it fall back on IP itself: it says, well, it doesn’t violate B’s physical property, but it does violate his intellectual property. Hellooooo–THIS is the circularity. The circular reasoning is done by the IP advocates, NOT by the libertarian who is simply a consistent opponent of aggression.
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