• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Sony Zaps PlayStation 3 ‘Install Other OS’ Feature

Sony’s spin goes something like this: By removing the feature, the company says it “will help ensure that PS3 owners will continue to have access to the broad range of gaming and entertainment content from SCE and its content partners on a more secure system.”

Translation: You get something you already have (“access to [a] broad range of gaming” etc.) in trade for nothing, while Sony gets to close what it now deems a hacker loophole. What’s good for Sony is good for you, in other words.

Except when it’s not (good for you, that is). Running Linux on the PS3 allows amateur developers to tinker with the PS3′s Cell processor, Sony sanctioned, and cobble together home-baked utilities and games. It’s also been used by researchers to build “discount supercomputers” to run scientific simulations that might otherwise “cost thousands of dollars.” North Carolina State University professor Frank Mueller called it “$50,000 worth of computer power for a mere $5000.”

The majority reaction on Sony’s PlayStation blog won’t surprise anyone.

Mandriva 2010.0 on a Dell Latitude XT

Sound works out-of-the-box and so did Compiz desktop effects (once enabled) which is better than I expected for this weak of a CPU and GPU configuration in this machine.

This is not meant to be a review for Mandriva 2010.0, rather some comments regarding Mandriva 2010.0 being installed on a Dell Latitude XT notebook giving insight on what works natively and what doesn’t. I’m impressed with KDE4 and the Mandriva distribution, but I’ll save that talk for another post.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA Launches GeForce GTX 470/480

  If you wondered why NVIDIA chose today to announce its canning the xf86-video-nv driver for all future GPUs and diverting users to use the VESA X.Org driver (even though most of them will start out using the Nouveau driver) until downloading their proprietary driver, it’s because they have finally launched Fermi.

• H.264 VA-API Support For Intel Clarkdale/Arrandale

  Intel’s Zou Nan hai has published a patch for the Intel kernel DRM code that provides multiple ring buffer support for Clarkdale and Arrandale systems, in other words Intel’s new IGPs that are embedded onto CPUs such as the new Core i3 530 and its stellar integrated graphics.

• Mesa 7.7.1 & 7.8.0 Released For Open-Source 3D

  Ian Romanick has just released the 7.7.1 and 7.8.0 versions of the Mesa3D open-source OpenGL stack with the DRI/Gallium3D drivers. As planned, this release is coming right on time for the end of March with Intel preparing to make its quarterly Linux graphics driver update and there is also the release of X Server 1.8 coming in the near future.

• S3TC Support For Mesa Brought Up Again

  Besides the Mesa 7.8 release announcement hitting the Mesa mailing list over the weekend, also catching our interest is a new discussion concerning S3TC texture compression in this open-source software stack. One of the developers working on Spring RTS, an open-source real-time strategy game engine for Linux and Windows, is wanting the open-source Mesa developers to implement S3TC texture compression/decompression. But this is a rather sticky situation.

• Catalyst vs. Mesa Performance With Ubuntu 10.04

  Over the past two weeks, we have published a variety of articles looking at different aspects of the open-source Linux graphics stack. These articles range from comparing the Gallium3D and classic Mesa performance to comparing the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting performance. Today we are continuing with this interesting Linux graphics coverage by publishing benchmarks comparing the performance of the Radeon Mesa DRI graphics driver to AMD’s Catalyst 10.4 proprietary driver. Is the open-source driver finally catching up to AMD’s highly optimized driver? Continue reading to find out.

Applications

• dockapps: Everything old is new again

  I could spend most of the day just sifting through dockapps.org. I’ll admit that a lot of them look a bit outdated, but some of them are quite smooth. I mentioned two a lo-o-ong time ago that are still very attractive — wmhdplop and wmforkplop.

• Gwibber in Lucid: Adding More Columns

  Short post to help people get the most out of Gwibber as a lot of readers keep asking me “How I got a ‘multiple columns/tweetdeck style’ Gwibber?”.

• Library for reading and writing Quicktime files (utilities).

  This is the home of libquicktime, a library for reading and writing quicktime/avi/mp4 files. It provides convenient access to quicktime files with a variety of supported codecs.

• Esfera: A fascinating UI concept for window management in Ubuntu

  As a writer, I can instantly see the benefit of having access to the back side of a window. As a consultant and administrator, the perks of this idea are also readily apparent (imagine slapping a network diagram on the back of the Network Manager tool on your Ubuntu server…you would never forget where that diagram is).

  Of course what this very idea does (besides open up huge possibilities) is showcase the flexibility and open nature of the Linux operating system. It is this sort of thinking that keeps Linux at the forefront of innovation. And these types of ideas will continue to make the Linux desktop the single most impressive desktop available.

• 8 of the Best Free Linux Astrology Software

  Astrology is a set of traditions, beliefs and systems which hold that there is a connection between the movement of heavenly bodies and events that take place on Earth such as human affairs, and personality. Astrologists use the position of the planets to try to predict future events, and to inform the psychological understanding of an individual’s psyche.

• Instructionals

  • Firefox Optimization – Speed

  • How To Upgrade Packages in PCLinuxOS 2009.2

  • Hooking up a laptop to a projector using Nvidia Twinview on Kubuntu

  • Diagnosing font issues on Linux

  • A Quick Shortcut to Shortcuts

  • Troubleshooting Wi-Fi Issues With Ubuntu

  • Backppc and the USB Drive

    BackupPC is, well, “BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk.” (BackupPC Website)

  • How to update your Ubuntu system remotely using Webmin

  • How to disable Shutdown Timer in Ubuntu Linux

  • Sysinfo- Display your system information in Ubuntu | Gnome

  • Configure hostgroups for Nagios

  • Networking is a little more than IPs and netmasks

  • Comparing Files

Desktop Environments

• Clementine-player – A cross-platform music player based on Amarok 1.4

  Clementine is a modern music player and library organiser. Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4, with some features rewritten to take advantage of Qt4.

• Pretty penguin: five great themes for the GNOME desktop

  The GNOME desktop environment and its underlying Gtk+ widget toolkit—which provide a user interface and a standard set of applications for Linux—have an elaborate theme system that enables users to customize the appearance of their desktop.

  GNOME has attracted a vibrant community of open source artists who are collaborating to produce aesthetically sophisticated visual styles for the desktop environment. Many custom GNOME themes are published in online galleries so that they can be downloaded and installed by regular end users. The most popular of these repositories is the GNOME-Look.org Web site, which has become the de facto standard home of downloadable GNOME theming content.

Distributions

• An introduction to Igelle 1.0

  I think that is the audience Igelle is targeting: not the type of people who run Debian, Gentoo and Fedora, but the sort of people who enjoy technology like OS X, iPods and iPads. People who want to find a balance between the simplicity of a dedicated appliance and the power provided by Linux. In short, it looks like Igelle has the potential to make the netbook/tablet/mobile device market a very interesting place in the coming year.

• Minimalist

  • Minimalist Linux desktops

    Lightweight desktops have a multitude of uses, on netbooks, for mobile devices, for older hardware, for users with limited requirements of their systems, for connecting to applications in the cloud, and for bare knuckled programmers who prefer to work closer to the metal.

  • Greetings from Slitaz 3.0

    It’s been a year since the last “stable” release of Slitaz, and whether or not the yearlong break is part of the development plan, I have been chomping at the bit, waiting for this new version.

    [...]

    If I could build an entire system — and I have tried — I would want it to turn out just like Slitaz. Even my lightest, fastest efforts with outdated software in custom-built configurations can’t stand up to what Slitaz gives you for nothing. It’s fantastic stuff.

• Ubuntu

  • First look at Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1 ‘Lucid Lynx’

    There has been quite a bit of controversy of late in the Ubuntu and Linux communities regarding the decision by Canonical to move the buttons within the Window Manager of Ubuntu to the left hand side as opposed to the right. A lot of people are upset that this is actually more of a pain than an advance in usability and want it restored but it looks like we can expect it to stay regardless of the feedback from the community. Canonical seems convinced this is a good change and doesn’t seem eager to listen to their community on this particular topic. We’ll have to see how this affects (or doesn’t) the adoption of 10.04.

    In the interim, the first beta release has been made available and we decided to take it for a test run and see the changes for ourselves. Come along for the ride why don’t you?

  • Quick Review: What You Should Expect For Ubuntu 10.04

    Ubuntu is set to release their next Long Term Support version at the end of April, and we now have a beta version to look at and see what we can expect. There are some pretty big changes coming in Lucid Lynx, many of which are partly or fully implemented in the current beta. There are the surprising changes, the controversial changes, and the just plain cool. Though the full release is still a month away, Ubuntu 10.04 is clearly shaping up to be an impressive release.

    [...]

    While not technically a feature of 10.04 itself, the opening of Ubuntu One Music Store will coincide with Lucid’s release, and support for it is already built in. The simplest way to access it is by opening up Rhythmbox, the default audio player. In the panel on the left, you should see Ubuntu One. Clicking that will let you browse the available music.

  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 186

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #186 for the week March 21st – March 27th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: Less is more. But still less, Ubuntu Server Survey 2010 released, Ubuntu One Music Store now in public beta, Ubuntu One Blog: Updates to web contacts, Call for LoCo Council Elections, Launchpad read-only 11.00-13.00 UTC March 31st, 2010, Planning For 10.10 – Growing Our Translations Community, Ubuntu participates in Google Summer of Code, Reviewers Team – Where are we, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – Free Culture Showcase Winners, Full Circle Magazine #35 & Podcast #3, and much, much more!

  • Variants

    • Blankon Linux version 5 Review

      I was just installed a popular distro in Indonesia called Blankon. This distro is based on Ubuntu 9.04. Off course with all features and capabilities of Ubuntu 9.04. Here I want to write my opinion or self review regarding this Blankon Linux.

    • Xubuntu 10.04 Beta 1 remains borderline irrelevant

      Although not many readers of OMG! Ubuntu! use Xubuntu I thought it’d be polite of us to check in with the Xubuntu team and see what was going on in their forthcoming release of Xubuntu 10.04.

Devices/Embedded

• Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are officially coming to AT&T

  The Palm Pre Plus and Pixie Plus are coming to AT&T though the timing of the release is up to the carrier to announce at a later date.

• ARM

  • Netbooks Decline or ARM’s Ascent?

    The Atomic netbooks are still too pricey, heavy and brutal. Many consumers considering buying a netbook may be waiting for the expected flock of new offerings with ARM power, a kind of hardware-vapourware. The netbook will continue to have a growing market, just not with x86.

  • Scaling Arm Chips

    TFA also does hint that with ARM it is conceivable that devices for power users and servers are just around the corner. In the Year of ARM, all things are possible. AMD and Intel are now producing chips with multiple cores each of which is more powerful than necessary. ARM can just walk in and take up slack because there is no way Wintel can offer more than ARM can. We see that in smartbooks now. There are more apps available for ARM on smartbooks than that other OS because developers can move phone apps to ARM on a smartbook very easily. There are tons of phone apps out there.

Learning competence with free and open source software

This personal change is one of the biggest reasons that I am committed to free software. Using Windows only reinforced my belief in my own incompetence at fixing or improving things. By contrast, free software proved to my that I was capable of far more than I had ever imagined.

Tony Wasserman’s thoughts on joining the OSI Board

As a new member of the Board (as of 1 April), I thought that it would be useful to explain why I wanted to join the OSI Board and what I hope to achieve during my term. As you can see from my bio (on the Board member page), I’ve been involved with software, both proprietary and open source, for my entire career, both in industry and in the research community.

Articles of regional Free Software law violate the Italian Constitution

Can you see now what the real problem is? Especially considering that even recent law proposals at the national level aren’t so robust after all? This sentence may be just the first confirmation that several laws already approved, even with the best intentions, are in fact weak enough to not be enforceable. At this point, I really wonder how many local Free Software laws in other Countries are in the same situation. If you know the answer, please tell me! As far as Italy is concerned, it will be very interesting to hear what the new Piedmont Regional Council, that will be elected on March 29th 2010, will say about this, since there should be in it at least some of the 31 candidates that had officially committed to support Free Software if elected. Even other italian Regions, however, will have to rethink very carefully their Free Software strategies.

Oracle

• Oracle’s OpenSolaris 2010.03 Is M.I.A.

  We’ve known that Oracle is to make some Solaris / OpenSolaris changes, but all signs have been that they would move forward with the OpenSolaris 2010.03 release in March as planned. OpenSolaris 2010.03 will supersede OpenSolaris 2009.06 that was released last June.

Openness

• Base Map 2.0: What Does the Head of the US Census Say to Open Street Map?

  Ian White, the CEO of Urban Mapping, makes his living collecting and selling geo data. For next week’s Where 2.0 has put together a panel of government mapping agencies (the UK’s Ordnance Survey and the US’s Census Department) and community-built mapping projects (Open Street Map and Waze). Crowdsourced projects like Waze and Open Street Map have forced civic agencies to reconsider their licensing. They have similarly encouraged larger companies like Google, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas to implement their own crowdsourcing platforms (like Google Mapmaker and Tele Atlas’ MapShare). Ian and his panelists will discuss all of this in Base Map 2.0 on Thursday at Where 2.0 – you can consider their conversation as Part 1 of the panel.

• Open Source Ethics and Dead End Derivatives

  Open Source Hardware is hardware that has an open license. You can copy it, develop it, and even sell it yourself. You must provide attribution to the designer and you must also release the derivative source files under the same license. This applies even if you use a proprietary program for your designs.

• Search engine collects historical resources

  A search engine is being created to help historians find useful sources.

  The Connected History project will link up currently separate databases of source materials.

  Once complete, it will give academics or members of the public a single site that lets them search all the collections.

Programming

• Review: Geany IDE – Integrated Development Environment for all OS

  Geany is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that was created to be light-weight and independent as possible. I’ve used Geany for sometime now. I haven’t used it on C or anything like that, but I use it (daily) for xhtml, css, and php. When I learn JavaScript and Python I will be programming those in Geany also.

Standards/Consortia

• Document Freedom Day 2010 in The Netherlands

  Document Freedom Day is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Every year on the last wednesday in March, we celebrate his day. This year in The Netherlands in conferencecentre “Het Brandpunt” in Baarn, the former residence of the Dutch queen, we will have five speakers who will talk about the importance of open documents and open standards for the Dutch government.

Ex-IBM exec heads to court in insider trading case

IBM’s former server chief, Robert Moffat, is heading to court on Monday after he agreed to waive his right to a grand jury in a case related to the Galleon Group insider-training scandal, according to court documents.

The waiver sets the stage for Moffat to enter a plea in the case relating to his involvement in an insider-trading scheme that netted some stock traders millions of dollars in illicit profits.

Nokia Acquires Mobile Browsing Company

Nokia on Friday said it will acquire Novarra, a privately-held company based in Chicago that specializes in mobile browsing.

Geek Gang Signs

BT hijacks business browsers

BT is annoying business broadband customers by hijacking their browsers to nag them to download a branded desktop utility.

Apple boycotts Fox News because of Glenn Beck

A two-week old report by the Washington Post is only now gaining traction in the tech section. It appears that Apple has boycotted Fox News based on Glenn Beck and his ludicrous statements, including calling President Obama a racist and branding progressivism a “cancer.”

Security

• Zurich Insurance promises changes after data loss

  Zurich Insurance has promised to improve its information security after losing personal financial information on 46,000 British clients through careless handling of unencrypted backup tapes.

• Hackers hit where they live

  The countries of hackers originating malware-laced spam runs have been exposed by new research, which confirms they are often located thousands of miles away from the compromised systems they use to send out junk mail.

• UK government wants to secretly read your postal mail

  As Britain heads for the next general election, the Labour government is rushing through a new surveillance law that gives the customs office the right to open your mail without you present, replacing the old system that only allowed the government to read your mail after notifying you, giving you a chance to appeal, and only then could they open it, with you present.

• Obama Twitter hacker freed

  INSPECTOR PIERRE KNACKER of le Paris Yard has fingered the collar of the 25 year-old unemployed bloke who hacked into US President Obama’s Twitter account.

• WikiLeaks to release video of civilians, journalists being murdered in airstrike

  Whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is planning to release a video that reveals what it’s calling a Pentagon “cover-up” of an incident in which numerous civilians and journalists were murdered in an airstrike, according to a recent media advisory.

• Government holds too much info on citizens

  The UK Government holds more data on citizens than it needs to, according to members of the Chartered Institute for IT (the British Computer Society).

  Nudging two-thirds (61%) of the 400 IT professional members questioned said the state held more data on citizens than necessary. Only 17% believed that citizen’s rights were adequately protected by the current regulations.

• Top US domain name registrars lag on DNS security

  The leading domain name registrars in the United States appear to be dragging their feet on the deployment of DNS Security Extensions, an emerging standard that prevents an insidious type of hacking attack where network traffic is redirected from a legitimate Web site to a fake one without the Web site operator or user knowing.

• The Story behind the Nigerian Phishing Scam

  The campaign to freeze accounts associated with former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and former Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko led to the birth of Internet scammers, posing as family members with millions of dollars to hide from the authorities.

• Sneaky Flying Spy Cameras Provoke Civil Liberty Fears

  CIVIL liberties groups have condemned a sinister new plan for Scottish police forces to spy on ordinary citizens using unmanned surveillance drones.

  The Big Brother-style move will mean the public could be monitored constantly, under the pretext of a crime crack-down.

• Government plans fingerprint passport bill

  The home secretary has revealed plans for primary legislation requiring passport applicants to be fingerprinted and enrolled on the National Identity Register

Environment

• Greenpeace Protests Outside Dell Offices in Europe, India

  Greenpeace held protests outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen on Monday, to demand firmer commitments from the company that it will phase out harmful chemicals from its products by 2011.

  Officials at Greenpeace said that the environmental group planned the action ahead of a meeting on Monday at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, at which Michael Dell, the company’s CEO, is scheduled to discuss the phasing out of the harmful chemicals.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Researcher: China pays 280K people to boost its Web image

  If you thought corporate “astroturfing” (fake grassroots activity) was a problem at sites like Yelp and Amazon that feature user reviews of products, imagine how much worse it would be if the U.S. government employed a couple hundred thousand people to “shape the debate” among online political forums. Crazy, right? What government would ever attempt it?

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Ottawa joins the war on photography

  I suppose if terrorists were precision bombers who had to place their charges to the millimetre in order to succeed, this would make sense, but given that no one’s ever shown that terrorists attacks involve carefully photographing the attack-site (as opposed to simply walking up to it, finding a likely spot, and blowing up), this is simply a good way of absorbing police/security time that could be spent chasing actual bad guys.

• How the American phone companies used to feel about privacy

  Back in 2008, Matt Blaze put the push for immunity for telcos that participated in GW Bush’s illegal wiretapping program in context: “As someone who began his professional career in the Bell System (and who stayed around through several of its successors), the push for telco immunity represents an especially bitter disillusionment for me. Say what you will about the old Phone Company, but respect for customer privacy was once a deeply rooted point of pride in the corporate ethos.

• Wikipedia Founder Praises Google Over China Decision

  A co-founder of popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia praised Google for its decision to stop censoring Internet searches in China and called on other major U.S. companies, including Microsoft and Facebook, to follow.

• Cecilia Malström filters the net

  It’s been a long time but it seems Commissioner Cecilia Malström is the next person to pick up the poisoned apple of net filtering and apply cynical arguments from the proponents of these measures. Feels like 1996.

Lost Battles

• French pirates ‘dodge’ tough laws

  A small-scale study shows that some French people are changing their habits and getting pirated music and movies from sources not covered by the law.

• Peers warn of backlash fears over digital radio

  The government could face a public backlash over its plans to switch national radio stations over to digital transmission, peers have warned.

  The Communications Committee of the House of Lords says there is “public confusion and industry uncertainty”.

  It said people were still buying analogue radios which will be out of date in a few years’ time.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Makers audiobook: direct from the author, no DRM, no EULA

  I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.

• EU Demands Canada Completely Overhaul Its Intellectual Property Laws

  Late last year, a draft of the European Union proposal for the intellectual property chapter of the Canada – EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement leaked online. The leak revealed that the EU was seeking some significant changes to Canadian IP laws. Negotiations have continued and I have now received an updated copy of the draft chapter, complete with proposals from both the EU and Canada. The breadth of the demands are stunning – the EU is demanding nothing less than a complete overhaul of Canadian IP laws including copyright, trademark, databases, patent, geographic indications, and even plant variety rights.

• ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

  • Anti-ACTA poster on 4chan

    If you believed Rupert Murdoch’s droppings and other offerings from the lamescream press corpse, you’d think the net was a minor event, a passing fancy which, while it’s having a certain effect on traditional media, isn’t terribly important in the overall scheme of things.

    The reality is: modern 21st-century communications wielded person-to-person, direct, have already permanently unseated the old-style print and electronic media outlets. Increasingly, ordinary people are talking to each other one-on-one, or group-to-group, via blogs, citizen journalist sites, IM, chat, cellphones and other hand-helds, and so on.

    Rupert, et al, don’t stand a chance.

    [...]

    Bottom line, although ACTA being touted as a trade agreenment, it’s the thin end of a wedge which would ultimately give the cartels what amounts to governmental-type control over what people do and how they do it not only online, but off.

    But for the first time in history, People Power rules. And they know it.

  • Delusional EU ACTA negotiator claims that three strikes has never been proposed at ACTA

  • Secret ACTA fights over iPod border-searches

    The copyright industries wanted border-searches on anything digital you were carrying that could be used to infringe copyright, from your phone to your iPod to the laptop that had your confidential client documents, your personal email, your finances, pictures of your kids in the bath, etc.

  • IFLA Position on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

    IFLA and its members are gravely concerned by the extreme secrecy surrounding the ACTA negotiations and the complete lack of transparency related to ACTA’s procedures, provisions, and priorities, which is unprecedented for a global-norm setting activity among democratic nations. The issues involved have many facets and should be discussed in an open and fair manner at WIPO, the appropriate forum for such topics.

  • UK record lobby has vehement feelings on Digital Economy Bill debate, won’t say what they are

    My latest Guardian column, “Does the BPI want MPs to debate the digital economy bill properly?” addresses the British Phonographic Institute’s weird, vehement silence on Parliament’s debate on its pet legislation, the dread Digital Economy Bill. Vehement silence? Oh yes.

  • Leaked ACTA Text Shows Possible Contradictions With National Laws

    “No changes in domestic” law promised the partners currently negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A leaked 56-page recent consolidated version of the much-discussed agreement shows that this might not be completely true. The draft version with a lot of bracketed text shows that some countries are more open about the potential need to change their domestic laws than others.

  • Three core reasons for rejecting ACTA

    These three points have been repeatedly documented in each and every piece of information that has been disclosed, since the beginning of the ACTA process:

    * ACTA is policy laundering1 in which an international negotiation is used to circumvent democratic debates at national or European level and adopt policy that the Parliaments will have no choice but to reject completely or adopt as a whole. Congress might not even be consulted in the case of the United States2.
    * The promoters and drafters of ACTA have created a mixed bag of titles3, types of infringement and enforcement measures, in which life-endangering fake products and organized crime activities are considered together with non-for-profit activities that play a role in access to knowledge, innovation, culture and freedom of expression. ACTA would create a de facto presumption of infringement.
    * In the negotiations, the EU is pushing the worse parts of the former directive proposal on criminal sanctions for IPR enforcement (IPRED 2, withdrawn because of uncertain legal basis), that is criminal sanctions for abetting or inciting to infringement.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Datalight simplifies data storage for Linux-based devices

Datalight Inc. announced support for Linux kernel versions up to 2.6.29 with new versions of FlashFX Tera, the file-system independent flash memory manager and Reliance Nitro, its high-performance file system. FlashFX Tera version 1.2 offers out-of-the-box support for over 300 different flash memory parts from various suppliers, expanding the choice for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) using flash memory.

Desktop

• AVG releases free boot utility

  Security software company AVG has released a free Linux-based boot utility that can be burned to CD or DVD as well as extracted to a USB flash drive.

• Young professional profile: Professional eager to help shape company

  MAC or PC?: Neither — Linux. I think the best operating system around is Ubuntu Linux and I’ve been using it pretty extensively for the last year or two.

Server

• IBM marks 10 years of Linux on SystemZ

  During celebrations at its Poughkeepsie plant of a decade of opening its mainframe to run Linux apps, a Canadian student is recognized as a winner of the 2009 Master the Mainframe Contest. An exec explains why the mainframe is “middle-aged”

• CloudLinux Issues White Paper on Web Hosting Server Load

  Hosting-oriented Linux operating system developer CloudLinux (www.cloudlinux.com) issued a white paper this week, offering the details of a study conducted by the company on server load issues faced by companies in the shared web hosting space.

• Rendering ‘Happy Feet 2′ at 30kW a Rack

  In the sequel to “Happy Feet,” the Penguins will be the same size. But the data center will be much smaller. The digital production company Dr. D Studios has packed a large amount of supercomputing power into a smaller package in its new rendering facility in Sydney, Australia.

Applications

• Histwi – A Desktop Twitter Account Management App for Linux

• 5 ‘Great’ Open-source Desktop Security Applications

  GnuPG & Gpg4winGNU Privacy is a free software encryption application that is a product of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Software project. GnuPG provides a complete free software implementation of the OpenPGP standard RFC4880, making it interoperable with other OpenPGP complaint systems. Out of the box GnuPG provides a command line interface (CLI) with numerous optional graphical add-ons available for nearly all platforms.

• Browsers

  • Is Opera 10.50 Really the Fastest?

    The results? Opera was slower than the development version of Google Chrome on Linux. Not by very much, but Opera scored 523.2ms vs Chrome’s 394.8ms and didn’t blow past Chrome as expected. Note that I re-ran the tests several times, but the links are to representative results.

  • Google Chrome Remains The Unhackable Browser

    Two years, and this time around no attempts. For the 2nd year in a row, Google Chrome has gotten through the Pwn2Own competition without being hacked.

    The competition, which focuses on security holes in mainstream software, is in its 4th year. To commemorate the anniversary, total prize money this year was increased to $100,000, with $40,000 being allotted to the hacking of Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers at $10,000 for the first hack on each respective software.

• Games

  • Nexuiz v2.5.2 Free

    The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.5 and new releases being developed.

  • Stop Wine-ing: 15 Games for Linux

    Many believe that Wine and other Windows emulation solutions may be their only recourse for high-quality gaming enjoyment. That, however, it not entirely true. There are plenty of smaller, independent gaming houses developing and releasing premium commercial games for Linux alongside Mac and Windows offerings. Search hard enough and you’ll find games ranging from low-resource puzzle solvers to 3D first-person shooters.

    Let’s have a look at some of the games recently released for Linux and a few up-and-coming prospects for the future. Stop Wine-ing. Start playing.

  • Is it Possible to Play Games When Running Linux?

    Any game that is based on the browser alone will work fine in Linux. For browser based games like Farmville, these will all work in browsers as long as there are the Flash and Java plugins. These work the same in Linux as on any other operating system.

    The second type of gaming is open source games. There are quite a few free games that are made for Linux as well as other operating systems. Since these are open source, it’s easy for programmers to port various versions of the game for the different operating system choices that exist.

Distributions

• Open source DVR MythTV 0.23 RC1 released

  The MythTV developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 0.23 of their open source digital video recorder (DVR). The latest development preview of the media centre for Linux includes several changes, updates and new features.

• JBoss Updates Open Source SOA Platform for BRMS, Cloud

  Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a single open source middleware platform integrated into a single, simple SOA integration and business process automation platform. The architecture is designed to find, integrate and orchestrate SOA business services, enterprise applications, and other IT assets into automated business processes.

• Ubuntu Linux Gets Social with 10.04 Beta Available Now

  “Lucid Lynx” is the codename given to Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux 10.04, now in beta, which adds social networking features and a new look to the popular Linux distribution. A final release is due April 29, the company said.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River in multicore alliance with Cavium

  Wind River, which is owned by Intel, and Cavium will sell versions of Wind River’s VxWorks and Linux multicore software optimised for Cavium’s OCTEON family of multicore processors.

  “Our partnership no doubt sends a strong message to the market about our long-term commitment to support multiple generations of Cavium products,” said Roger Williams, vice president, Alliances and Business Development, Wind River.

  In November, Cavium Networks agreed to acquire MontaVista Software for $50m, in a deal which confirms the growing importance of Linux software support for processor suppliers.

• Korenix Unveils Compact Programmable Embedded VPN Routing Computer JetBox 5430-w

  Korenix is pleased to release the brand new embedded programmable Layer3 Routing Computer – JetBox 5430-w with Linux computing capabilities and -40 ~80oC wide operating temperature range designed to provide advanced network performance in front-end industrial control applications.

• Paragon Software Group Teams with Iomega

  With the addition of Paragon NTFS for Linux and HFS+ for Linux, users will be able to attach their Windows and/or Mac-formatted external HDDs to the iConnect Wireless Data Station, thereby turning it into an NAS device.

• Phones

  • Palm Pre 800MHz Linux kernels unveiled

    Palm Pre overclockers will be thrilled to find out that new custom 720MHz and 800MHz Linux kernels have finally been released by unixpsycho and caj2008, and you can check out the demonstration as well as installation instructions from the video above.

  • Zinio Digital Newsstand Hits Android

    The new e-reader will likely end up working on various Linux platforms, not just Android.

  • ST-Ericsson uses Linux

    ST-Ericsson has developed a Linux-based chip platform that could reduce the wholesale price of smartphones to less than €100.

  • Nokia

    • ‘Symbian and MeeGo are quite separate’

      With MeeGo set to launch on ARM-based and Intel Atom-based devices this month, we grabbed a few minutes with Peter Schneider from Nokia recently to talk about MeeGo, the first fruit from the Nokia-Intel joint venture announced last June.

  • Android

    • ESC helps drive Android beyond cellphone

      Mentor Graphics, which has developed a set of Android software development tools, will host two talks on Android for embedded systems, including one that will describe how Android or Linux can co-exist with a real-time operating system. A third talk will be hosted by Bill Gatliff, an independent consultant.

    • 3 Reasons Why The Nexus One Phone Will Thrive

      2) Android Operating System

      Yes, Android runs on a lot of different phones, but it’s also the operating system for the Nexus One phone. The difference between the Nexus One and all the other phones is that Google owns it and puts its own stamp of approval on it.

      The open source Android operating system on the Nexus One phone means that Google will be employing their own engineers to make the Nexus One more efficient. This “in house” approach of Google will more than likely launch the Nexus One far ahead of their competitors that are equally powered by Android.

    • TheMarker gets up close and personal with Google’s top team

      “Don’t worry,” Schmidt smiles. There’s another kind of Android, which is totally open source. “Other companies do whatever they want, and we don’t even know about it. So when we go to these conferences, all of these random devices show up with Android in them, that we’ve never heard of. Which is the benefit of open source and very, very exciting. So it looks like we have got a huge, huge success with Android.”

    • Android Devices Crave Google’s Attention

      Android’s smartphone army is at least 20 phones strong, plus a ragtag rear guard of e-book readers, tablets and set-top boxes.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Intel’s AppUp gets Moblin Netbook apps

    Intel has launched a Moblin version of its AppUp Center, offering a storefront for developers looking to sell applications for the Linux-based Netbook operating system.

  • Intel Appup tips up

    The Intel Appup Centre Beta goes live today in the US and Canada and will be coming to 27 European countries at the end of the month.

  • Asus Eee PC 1201T Arrives, T101MT Next Month

    Two Asus Eee PCs are currently circulating the news, the first of which revealing that the AMD-powered Asus Eee PC 1201T has finally reached American shores thanks to Newegg.com. The 12-inch Eee PC seems priced just right, costing penny-pinchers $389.99. The drawback is that the device comes naked, baring no operating system whatsoever but can easily be solved with your favorite Linux distro.

  • Google Chrome includes OS app launcher

    The Google Chrome OS which is a Linux based operating system includes a newly released Chrome OS app launcher which is similar to the Windows start menu.

• Tablets

  • Will $99 Moby tablet swim or sink?

    In a development that it claims will be a game-changer in education, technology company Marvell has announced the prototype of a $99 tablet computer that students can use to surf the web, interact with electronic textbooks and other digital media, and collaborate with each other around the globe.

  • OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7 Bets It All On Flash

    Behold: the OpenPeak OpenTablet 7. It is a Linux tablet running on the Intel Moorestown 1.9 GHz chip. For those of you who don’t remember, Moorestown is an Atom-derived CPU for mobile platforms like smartphones.

Give your website some open-source sparkle

I’m currently in full-on development mode on two projects, a Mac application and a website, and while I’ve been toiling I’ve found some terrific open-source code that has saved me weeks of programming time. So this column is a bit of a goody-bag of assorted open-source utilities that I’ve been using in earnest.

How to buy GIS/mapping software

Also available are a number of “open source” GIS applications. Open source software is usually free, written by a community of users who all have access to the source code. The users constantly refine the software, posting new versions and specialized add-ins to the basic application. Open source products lack the flash of commercial packages, but often work as well or better than the high-priced types. There is an index of open source GIS products at http://opensourcegis.org.

Ada Lovelace will have her day after all

Nowadays her conceptions are commonplace in the world of technology. Sadly, her gender remains drastically under- represented and that imbalance remains particularly bad in the one area of computing that one would expect to be the most open to new ideas and communities – open-source software development.

Anyone can join an open-source project. Communally run, you need no interviews or prior experience to contribute. All you need is a computer and an internet connection to start work on these free-to-join, free-to- distribute, free-to-use,software and hardware projects.

In practice, open-source lags behind other disciplines in its gender diversity.

A 2006 census of the Ubuntu community, one of the more consciously welcoming of open- source projects, showed only 2.4 per cent who were identified as women. This is profoundly worse than the level of involvement by women in technical professions or academic computer science, which has levels of between 10 and 30 per cent.

Exadel Fiji: new forum, issue tracker, JavaFX support, open source soon

Exadel Fiji extends JSF by allowing the use of Flex with JSF components and within a JSF page. It comes with ready-to-use charting components based on Flash as well as universal wrapper which allows to wrap any Flash component as JSF component.

A New View: Introducing Doc Viewer 2.0

This is the version of document viewer we will be releasing as open source software in the very, very near future.

WeWebU Turns 10 and Gives out Presents

Going Open Source is another important step in WeWebU’s growth strategy. They have decided to adopt a Commercial Open Source business model in addition to the traditional license sale. Stefan Waldhauser, co-founder and CEO of WeWebU, is excited: “I think Commercial Open Source is a significant trend in the software industry. Since our foundation ten years ago, WeWebU has always been driven by technology and the power of innovation. A Commercial Open Source strategy fits perfectly to our OpenWorkdesk offering and the objective to deliver the best way to build Composite Content Applications.”

WeP Solutions reinforces services focus

The UTM offering, called Ubiq-Freedom which is available under an open-source licence includes open-source software such as Squid caching proxy for the Web and IP tables for the firewall.

Bletchley Park Gets £250,000 Government Funding

More recently Bletchley Park played host to a national partnership, designed to encourage the UK local authorities to work together to save £60 million a year across their educational ICT budgets, through the use of open source solutions.

“The 17 Local Authorities comprising the North West Learning Grid will now be looking at the feasibility of implementing open source solutions in all areas of their education services,” said the CEO of the North West Learning Grid, Gary Clawson, in October.

Kit attacks Microsoft keyboards (and a whole lot more)

Security researchers on Friday unveiled an open-source device that captures the traffic of a wide variety of wireless devices, including keyboards, medical devices, and remote controls.

Keykeriki version 2 captures the entire data stream sent between wireless devices using a popular series of chips made by Norway-based Nordic Semiconductor. That includes the device addresses and the raw payload being sent between them. The open-source package was developed by researchers of Switzerland-based Dreamlab Technologies and includes complete software, firmware, and schematics for building the $100 sniffer.

SIGVerse open source simulator

Users are able to program a virtual robot in C++ and modify the virtual environment to suit a wide range of situations.

Magento: Reaching the Tipping Point?

Magento (formerly known as Varien), the company behind an open source ecommerce platform aptly named Magento, relaunched their Solution Partner Program in April 2009. And in last year’s Open Source 50 report, Magento was listed in the “Best of the Rest” section based on limited information and feedback from solution partners about the partner program. Fast forward to the present, and the company is showing some partner momentum. Magento’s story offers some important lessons for other open source partner programs.

Google

• Google Joins the Web Application Scanning Scene with Ultrafast Skipfish

  There are other tools and services that you can use for web app scanning. Nikto is one and it is open sourced. The formerly open source tool Nessus is another. There are also software as a service providers such as White Hat security who do web app scanning. NTSpyder is another non-open tool for web app testing.

• One crazy summer of Google code

  Their goal is to cultivate the next generation of open-source software developers in evolutionary biology and promote the open, collaborative development of reusable, interoperable, standards-supporting informatics tools. And for the first time, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, a umbrella group that guides the development of BioPerl, Biopython, BioJava, BioRuby, and several other open source bioinformatics projects, has also been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s GSoC.

Events

• Third International Event on “Open Source Software in the Embedded Systems” in Naples

  Open source software adoption in the embedded systems domain is gaining growing interest within the European industrial and academic communities. Despite it represents the key towards flexibility, cost reduction and increased competitiveness, it is not easy to assess and evaluate Open Source software quality, thus making industries still skeptic about its integration into proprietary solutions.

• Open World Forum 2010: Openness in the Land of Liberté

  Not familiar with the conference? The Open World Forum is “the leading summit bringing together decision-makers and communities to cross-fertilize free/Open Source technological, economic and social initiatives to build the digital future.” This conference discusses the future of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) projects, presents its Innovation Awards, looks at current trends and examines all of this in terms of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap (news, site).

• Why health care is coming to the Open Source convention

  This year for the first time, O’Reilly’s Open Source convention contains a track on health care IT. The call for participation just went up, soliciting proposals on nine broad areas of technology including health data exchange, mobile devices, and patient-centered care.

SaaS

• Start-up Abiquo manages public, private clouds via open source

  Coupling open source software with cloud computing expertise could help Abiquo make a big splash with U.S. customers looking to create and manage virtual resources pools on premise or in public environments. And with support for VMware, Xen, Virtual Box, KVM and now Microsoft Hyper-V, the Spanish start-up promises to deliver vendor-neutral, interoperable management at a reasonable price.

Oracle

• Daily Dose – Solaris 10 License Change

  Sun Solaris 10 was previously available for free without support after submitting a valid email. With the Sun acquisition finalized, Oracle has only given customers a 90-day free trial of Solaris 10, hoping to gain some paying customers from those with existing Solaris 10 systems. This change could lead to a mass migration to Linux vendors. Most of Linux’s new customers come from Unix migrations, and Solaris 10 is the largest Unix platform.

Business

• Alfresco: Microsoft SharePoint Alternative In the Cloud?

  Alfresco’s cloud efforts are part of a broader channel effort at the company, which has shown momentum in the past year or so. Alfresco landed near the top of the 2009 Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source partner programs (the 2010 research is under way now).

• Future of Open Source Survey – Results

  The growth of open-source software in the commercial sector was also noted, and the promotion of open-source projects by commercial open-source companies was cited as a factor. (REvolution Computing promoting the R Project was one example given.) The other theme I spotted was innovation: while lowering costs is still the #1 ranked feature of open-source, access to new methods and the rapid pace of innovation in FOSS compared to proprietary software is now being listed as a critical reason to switch.

• Eucalyptus New CEO Preps For Cloud Explosion

  During his seven year stretch as CEO of MySQL, Mickos turned the open source database market on its ear, growing MySQL from a startup to one of the most prominent open source company in the world. He grew MySQL to the point thatSun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) swooped in and acquired it with a $1 billion offer, an unheard of sum for an open source company.

Openness

• The Cass Sunstein Campaign against Open Source Leaks

  There is no evidence Sunstein’s theories of governmental information control have to do with the apparent increasing persecution of open source leak outlets, but it does seem to stem from the same kind of authoritarian instinct.

• New Wikipedia Redesign Is Coming Soon

  Wikipedia is close to rolling out a new design that it hopes will make the “user-edited” encyclopedia easier to use and navigate, and thus potentially appeal to new users more than the slightly clunky-looking current site.

• Collaborative² Futures

  FLOSS Manuals, true to its name, produces manuals for free software applications. The manuals themselves are freely licensed and often written in book sprints. This January, as part of the Transmediale festival in Berlin, FLOSS Manuals attempted its first non-manual booksprint — a considerably harder task, as no structure is implied. Only the book title, Collaborative Futures, was given — a collaborative experiment about the future of collaboration.

• Time to get the bike out – Kids traffic safety curriculum goes open source

  In the midst of Treena Grevatt’s twitter reminders of the early start of cycling in Ottawa (and her retweets of wise words and links such as this to remind motorists like me!), it was encouraging to read the recent story entitled Kids traffic safety curriculum goes open source.

• The Battle for Scholarly Publishing’s Soul

  Before Peter Suber became Mr Open Access, he was a philosopher by trade. This is evident in the long, thoughtful essays he writes for the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, which help console us for his absence these days from the world of blogging.

  Here’s the latest of them, entitled “Open access, markets, and missions”. It asks some deep questions about what kind of scholarly publishing we should strive for: market oriented or mission oriented?

• Free: Why Authors are Giving Books Away on the Internet

• Sales Impact of Free eBooks Dissertation Published

  Dr. John Hilton, who until just recently was a doctoral student of mine, has written a great dissertation on the impact giving away free ebooks has on sales of printed books. The findings may surprise you.

• Apple’s iPad to launch with 30,000-volume free library

  Apple’s e-book reader application, iBooks, may be more widely available than anticipated, thanks to the inclusion of more than 30,000 free e-books from Project Gutenberg.

Standards/Consortia

• Codec Status Pages

  Internet Wideband Audio Codec (Active WG)

Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions

Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.

Special relationship between UK and US is over, MPs say

The UK government needs to be “less deferential” towards the US and more willing to say no to Washington, a group of MPs have said.

Walk Like a Geek? Talk Like a Geek? Vote Geek

Security Watch: Beware the NSA’s Geek-Spy Complex

Illustration: Markus Hofko

Early this year, the big brains at Google admitted that they had been outsmarted. Along with 33 other companies, the search giant had been the victim of a major hack — an infiltration of international computer networks that even Google couldn’t do a thing about. So the company has reportedly turned to the only place on Earth with a deeper team of geeks than the Googleplex: the National Security Agency.

Security

• Brown’s costly propaganda assault

  Do this, do that, sit up, shut up and obey, we’re in charge.

  [...]

  “Anyone who has turned on a commercial radio station recently will have worked out his latest trick: a mass propaganda splurge before an election campaign. Get on a bus, and it can be 100 percent state adverts – advising how Big Brother will help you get a job, buy a car, see off door-to-door salesmen, give you a job in the prison services – anything you want.”

• My Police

  You may have read about the ‘confusion’ caused when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary crashed like an elephant from a great height on the small social innovation project already known as MyPolice.

  That the good Inspectorate a) failed to spot the existence of the MyPolice incumbents, b) demonstrated a complete inability to change anything when it was noticed, and c) thought that two entirely different propositions having exactly the same name wouldn’t confuse people are all pretty damning in their own ways.

• Intercepting mail is worthy of the Stasi

  Labour’s plan to allow tax inspectors to open private mail before it is delivered is unacceptable in a democracy

• Wikileaks Asks CIA to Stop Spying on It

  Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group and its volunteers, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their production meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. In a blog post on the Wikileaks site, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the spying “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.”

• Hostile Reconnaissance: pre-election rally on Terror Laws, Civil Liberties and Press Freedom – 7pm, Tuesday 13th of April, Friends House, Euston, London

• Rewired Culture

  If it could further ram home the point that violent crime is very rare – and its prevalence is something that’s continually hyped-up by those with a vested interest in accentuating negativity for the furtherance of their own agendas – it would be perfect.

• Indonesia adopts biometrics for border control

  Indonesia has launched a new biometric system to improve security at its airports and seaports.

  The system captures facial images and fingerprints of arriving passengers and are checked against the immigration database for clearance.

• Eric Cantor fires blanks on gunshot

  Following reports of multiple attacks on the offices of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform over the weekend, Republican House whip Eric Cantor held an angry press conference on Thursday claiming that his office had been attacked by gunshot and accusing Democrats of “dangerously fanning the flames”. But on closer examination the “attack” on Cantor’s office turns out to be ambiguous at the least.

• Blair Strikes Oil in Iraq

  Of concern to British politicians, too, is that a former prime minister has been stone cold silent about being on the payroll of an immense multinational oil corporation, specializing in oil exploration in Iraq, and one that coincidentally happens to find itself in another challenging part of the globe.

Science

• No ‘Simple Theory of Everything’ Inside the Enigmatic E8, Researcher Says

  Garibaldi, a rock climber in his spare time, did the math to disprove the theory, which involves a mysterious structure known as E8. The resulting paper, co-authored by physicist Jacques Distler of the University of Texas, will appear in an upcoming issue of Communications in Mathematical Physics.

  In November of 2007, physicist Garret Lisi published an online paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Lisi spent much of his time surfing in Hawaii, adding an alluring bit of color to the story surrounding the theory. Although his paper was not peer-reviewed, and Lisi himself told the Daily Telegraph that the theory was still in development and he gave a “low” likelihood to the prediction, the idea was widely reported in the media, under attention-grabbing headlines like “Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.”

Environment

• Madagascar bans rainforest timber exports following global outcry

  Under mounting pressure over illegal logging of its national parks, Madagascar’s transitional government on Wednesday reinstated a ban on rosewood logging and exports.

  The decree (no. 2010-141), which prohibits all exports of rosewood and precious timber for two to five years, was announced during a council meeting held yesterday at Ambohitsorohitra Palace in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital city. Madagascar’s Minister of Environment has already proposed a plan to address the illegal timber trade, according to the Madagascar Tribune.

• Films drive trend for keeping pet monkeys

  Hollywood movies and popular television shows featuring cute monkeys and other primates are driving demand for them as exotic pets, only to leave the animals psychologically damaged.

• How Japanese sushi offensive sank move to protect sharks and bluefin tuna

  To conservationists it was a gratuitous act of provocation; but to the Japanese officials whose embassy served bluefin tuna sushi to guests hours before last week’s UN vote on a trade ban on the fish, it was a show of confidence that their diplomatic offensive had worked.

• Watch: Yao Ming says no to shark’s fin soup

  Earlier this month, we told you about a WildAid public service announcement starring Chinese basketballer Yao Ming that discouraged people from eating shark’s fin soup.

• Forest Scientist Simon Lewis Files Formal Complaint Against UK Sunday Times Over Dishonest Reporting On “Amazongate”

  Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds in the UK, says the Sunday Times’ “inaccurate, misleading and distorted” story by Jonathan Leake in January left readers under the wrong impression that the 2007 IPCC AR4 report made a false claim by stating that reduced rainfall could wipe out up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest. Lewis filed a formal complaint this week with the UK Press Complaints Commission.

• Copenhagen what? China spends nearly twice as much on clean energy as US in ’09

  If investment is, in fact, directly proportionate to results, then you might one day be able to wave goodbye to the lingering cloud of pollution that keeps your skin ghostly white year-round. According to a new report called Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race? China outspent every country in the world, clean energy-wise, in 2009, beating the $18.6 billion spent by the US nearly two-to-one.

• Rajendra Pachauri: Climate scientists face ‘new form of persecution’

  The head of the UN’s climate change panel has accused politicians and prominent climate sceptics of “a new form of persecution” against scientists who work on global warming.

  In a strongly worded article published on the Guardian website, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hit out at those in “positions of power and responsibility” who try to portray “dedicated scientists as climate criminals”.

• Heathrow protesters win third runway court victory

  High court rules that decision to expand Heathrow airport must be reconsidered in respect to UK climate change policy

Finance

• Fired From the ‘Mommy Track’

  Charlotte Hanna did. The former vice president of Goldman Sachs Group filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Manhattan this week, claiming that the bank demoted her because she elected to take advantage of its part-time track after her first maternity leave, then fired her while she was on her second.

• U.S. take if it sells its Citi stake to settle cost of bailout: $8 billion

  Among the banks that rule Wall Street, Citigroup got a bailout that was bigger than the rest. Now the company is about to pay a king’s ransom for its federal rescue.

• What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it

  Against all the odds, a glimmer of hope for real financial reform begins to shine through. It’s not that anything definite has happened – in fact most of the recent Senate details are not encouraging – but rather that the broader political calculus has shifted in the right direction.

• Richard (RJ) Eskow: Meg Whitman’s Shady Goldman Sachs Past — Is It California’s Future?

  Just when you thought you’d had enough of Goldman Sachs running things — and running them into the ground — along comes Meg Whitman. Most Californians know she’s using her fortune to run for governor. They probably don’t know that she was once on the board of Goldman Sachs, and most likely still would be if she hadn’t been cited for a practice one law firm describes as “essentially … an illegal bribe … to corporate leaders.” Then came the Congressional investigation, and the investor lawsuit, and … well, it was probably best to just leave the board.

• Why Goldman Wants a Branch in Warsaw

  Goldman Sachs is looking to open a branch office in Warsaw, in a move to take advantage the Polish government’s plans to sell $10 billion worth of assets in share offerings this year, Bloomberg News reported.

• Goldman Sachs’ controversial ‘mommy-track’

  Former Goldman Sachs vice president Charlotte Hanna has filed a lawsuit against the financial giant, claiming she suffered discrimination and then termination for bearing children. Following the birth of her first child in 2005, Hanna returned to work part-time.

• Goldman Sachs thinks unwashed construction workers capping RWS casino takings

  It’s simply excellent how Goldman has managed to dress up xenophobia AND racism as “shareholder value maximization”. Amazing what you can get out of a Harvard MBA.

• Could Goldman Sachs do to California what it did to Greece?

  In February, major news organizations reported that the Federal Reserve Board is investigating the role that Goldman – a major recipient of federal bailout funds during our own financial meltdown – played in the Greek debt crisis. The firm used complex financial instruments called “derivatives” to help the Greek government hide the fact that it was in debt up to its eyeballs and getting in deeper.

  That, in turn, allowed Greece’s participation in the Euro, Europe’s common currency, under what may have been false pretenses. “One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from budget overseers in Brussels,” the New York Times reported. The deal, “hidden from public view … helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Surprise: Phorm Resurfaces In Brazil With Five Deals

  With its roots in software that some classed “spyware”, Phorm proposed helping ISPs make more money and advertisers more relevant audiences. Installed on ISPs’ networks, its technology would monitor consenting customers’ every web visit to build an anonymised profile of their browsing habits against which to target ads.

• Is Russia Google’s next weak spot?

  Big news from Russia today: RBK Daily, a respected Russian news agency, reports (in Russian) that the Russian government might soon be launching a “national search engine”. According to RBK’s anonymous sources inside Kremlin, it would aim at satisfying “state-oriented” needs such as “facilitating access to safe information” and “filtering web-sites that feature banned content.” It’s going to be an ambitious project: the government is prepared to invest $100 million in this new venture, does not want to allow any foreign funding, and intends to build it in cooperation with the private sector.

• A Bill of Rights in Cyberspace

  In my Media Guardian column this Monday, I will suggest that we need a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace as a set of amendments to John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Note that I do not suggest the establishment a Constitution of the Internet; I think that would violate the tenets Barlow so eloquently if grandiosely sets forth. We don’t need government in cyberspace; we need freedom.

• Navigating China’s web of censors

  Google’s face-off with Beijing over censorship may have struck a philosophical blow for free speech and encouraged some Chinese Netizens by its sheer chutzpah, but it doesn’t do a thing for Internet users in China. It merely hands the job of blocking objectionable content back to Beijing.

• Child-abuse survivors oppose EU censorwall

  A recently leaked European Council proposal seeks to create a “Great Firewall of Europe,” instituted to block sites that depict the abuse of children. As with other censorwalls, it’s unlikely that this will performed as intended, since paedophiles will circumvent it with proxies, or by using P2P or email or private websites to trade illegal material. But the creation of a continent-wide network censorship scheme is likely to cause new problems, inviting authorities to shoehorn ever-greater slices of the net into the “illegal” category — this has already happened in Australia and other countries that have built Chinese-style censorship regimes.

• How Internet censorship harms schools

  The Canadian National History Society was forced to change the name of its magazine, The Beaver, founded in 1920, because the name of the magazine caused it to be blocked by Internet filters.

  One teacher wanted to show students some pictures that would illustrate the effects of atomic testing. “However when I went to bring the wikipedia page up at school during class, it was blocked by our internet filter, BESS. The name of the islands? ‘Bikini Atoll,’” said Doug Johnson, quoting the teacher. Johnson, a director of media and technology at a Minnesota school district, put out a call in July for stories about how Internet filtering hobbles education, and got an earful. (“Censorship by Omission”)

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• BBC Activates DRM For Its iPlayer Content

  “The BBC has quietly added DRM to its iPlayer content. This breaks support for things like the XBMC plugin as well as other non-approved third-party players. The get-iplayer download page has a good summary of what happened, including links to The Reg articles and the BBC’s response to users’ complaints.”

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Real Copyright Reform

  I suggest, is to reallocate copyright’s benefits to give more rights to creators, greater liberty to readers, and less control to copyright intermediaries.

• The Politics of Intellectual Property

  This talk, delivered at the 2006 AALS mid-year meeting, briefly addresses the politics of copyright legislation before segueing into the politics of intellectual property scholarship. I urge that the metaphor of a “copyright war,” used by both copyright owners and copyright reformers, is uncomfortably apt. It reflects a polarization of the copyright community that has affected copyright scholarship in unhealthy ways, encouraging scholars to choose sides in the copyright wars and to tailor their scholarship to fit.

• What does Murdoch have in mind?

• Times and Sunday Times websites to start charging from June

  The Times and the Sunday Times are to start charging for content online in June.

  Users will be charged £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription for access to both papers’ websites, publisher News International has announced.

• News Corp’s UK Titles To Pull Out Of Nexis

  An exact date hasn’t been confirmed, but it was made clear that there will be no access to the content of these papers on Nexis from around the time the paywall goes up. LexisNexis hasn’t commented yet.

• Does The Times’s New Paywall Add Up?

  So here we go. After much speculation, we now know that News Corporation’s two flagship titles in the UK, The Times and The Sunday Times, will charge users to access online content starting in June. No freebies, no tiered access models, just a paywall. And the price, at £1 per day, is the same as the cover price of the print edition.

• Quarter of eight-to-12-year-olds on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo

  Ofcom’s annual Children’s Media Literacy Audit for 2009 also had bad news for the music industry, finding that 44% of children between 12 and 15 thought downloading shared copies of films and music for free should not be illegal.

• Copyright Problems

• World War II Veterans Must Pay To Sing War Songs

  Veterans of World War II who sang war songs at a free concert last year have now been told that they must pay fees to copyright holders. A collections society says they are owed money since the veterans sang the songs in public. The controversy has prompted an announcement in Russia’s parliament.

• Economists Urge Government to Stop War on Piracy

  In an advisory report two economy professors are urging a government to rethink new anti-piracy legislation currently being drafted. The professors argue that harsher anti-piracy measures will only benefit the large media companies and prominent artists, at the expense of users and upcoming artists.

  The Spanish Government has recently proposed new legislation under which BitTorrent sites could be taken offline without a judicial order. The new Sustainable Economy Law, sponsored by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, further includes a wide range of measures that are aimed at protecting copyright holders from online piracy.

• ACTA/Digital Economy Bill

  • New ACTA leak: 01/18 version of consolidated text

  • Toward an ACTA Super-Structure: How ACTA May Replace WIPO

    For the past two years, most of the ACTA discussion has centered on two issues: (1) substantive concerns such as the possibility of three strikes and a renegotiation of the WIPO Internet treaties; and (2) transparency issues. The leak of the comprehensive ACTA text highlights the fact that a third issue should be part of the conversation. The text reveals that ACTA is far more than a simple trade agreement. Rather, it envisions the establishment of a super-structure that replicates many of the responsibilities currently assumed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Given the public acknowledgement by negotiating countries that ACTA is a direct response to perceived gridlock at WIPO, some might wonder whether ACTA is ultimately designed to replace WIPO as the primary source of international IP law and policy making.

  • The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

    The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a plurilateral agreement negotiated outside of the WTO’s processes and protections, is the biggest set of new laws to hit international Intellectual Property. Many organizations have had serious concerns about the potential civil liberty and economic impact of ACTA. A draft text of ACTA has been leaked here.

    [...]

    6) Seizure of goods at the border: a potentially injured party may apply for the suspension of the release of potentially infringing goods- and that one application is valid for ONE YEAR from the date of application. This places the work burden on the government as opposed to the private companies who fear infringement (regulatory capture). Singapore proposes an alternative that applies to specific shipments and lasts for 60 days only.

  • Digital Economy: The Mandelson letters

    Last September, as debate raged about the government’s plans to crack down on illegal file-sharing – and the extent to which they might have been influenced by lobbying – the BBC put in a freedom-of-information request to the Department for Business. We requested information about any correspondence relating to online piracy or illegal file-sharing.

    Now, after a long wait, we’ve been supplied with a stack of letters to and from Lord Mandelson and other ministers relating to this issue. Those looking for a smoking gun – perhaps a despatch from a Hollywood tycoon warning “Cut ‘em off or else!” – may be disappointed.

    But the letters do show a sustained campaign of lobbying in favour of the Digital Economy Bill by music-industry trade bodies – and by opponents trying to persuade Lord Mandelson that some of its measures will be damaging to civil liberties, as well as being costly and ineffective.

  • LibDem MPs won’t fight for debate on Digital Economy Bill

    Rather than calling for a full debate on the bill’s provision allowing the record industry to take away your family’s internet access if they believe (but can’t prove) you’ve infringed on copyright, the LibDems have joined the other parties in supporting a short, 45-minute half-day second reading.

    After that, the Digital Economy Bill will disappear into “wash up,” a fast-track, no-debate way of passing bills, usually reserved for bills that everyone agrees on and that need to get pushed through before an election.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

M$ “Invents” Chroot

Sorry, guys, we’ve had that for years. Another marketing guys ploy got in the way of migration to “7″ so they took away the requirement to use virtualization. .

Wake up! M$ is jerking your change. Chroot has been around in the ‘NIX world since 1982. They tried to get you to buy new hardware to run “7″ and XP by virtualization but you realized your present hardware was adequate. Don’t migrate to “7″, just because M$ wants more money.

Virus

• Do I need an anti-virus in Linux?

• STD: Social (Networking) Transmitted Disease?

  Most of us have experienced the need to disinfect a virus-laden system — though a near-total immunity is one of the many benefits of being a Linux user. If public health officials in northern England are to be believed, though, the term “computer virus” may be in for a new meaning.

Desktop

• Desktop Linux: An Average User Success Story

  Chuck is my average user desktop Linux success story. He has been so for about six years now. Chuck does not want to go back to Microsoft operating systems as he sees no benefit to that. He does see some negatives to going back though. He would have to go back to buying and installing anti-malware software and keeping that up to date. He would have to go back to worrying about malware infections through e-mail or cracked web sites. Certainly if Chuck were using a Microsoft operating system I would do all I could to secure his PC for him. But I could not guarantee Chuck would never get malware “owning” his PC in that case. I am not there to watch over Chuck every time he opens an e-mail or browses web sites. With desktop Linux Chuck and I both know that he does not have to worry about those problems. Chuck is happy to use Linux as an average PC user.

• Linux: This time, it really IS time

  But a couple of things happened recently that convinced me Linux has finally, truly, really, no-kidding gone beyond being a contender against Windows for the average desktop user. It has become clearly superior to Windows for the average desktop user.

• MicroCenter: The Hunt for Working Computers

  I was at MicroCenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts yesterday. I was helping one of my students find a new laptop that would work well with Ubuntu.

• Linux users? Who are these people?

  Among the three major operating systems, you may know that Linux has the lowest market share on the desktop but is leading the server market. However, Linux on the desktop is slowly but surely going mainstream that’s enough to scare the crap out of Microsoft.

• Alt. computing

  One thing holds true: the longer I use Ubuntu, the happier I become with the system. When Windows 7 came out, I moved almost completely away from Windows and I haven’t looked back. With the extra control I have to customize my computer to suit my needs, the extra money that I have from not paying for expensive programs and the extra time I have as a result of being able to quickly solve any problems that arise, I’m free to dabble in the endless possibilities of a Linux-based computer.

• ZaReason Teo – netbook with installed Ubuntu

  Company ZaReason introduced 10-inch netbook called Teo. The model possesses quite standard for devices of its class characteristics. It is equipped with 10-inch screen with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels and is based on Intel Atom N450 processor with a clock speed of 1.66 GHz. Also “on board” ZaReason Teo – Integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics, 2 GB of RAM and hard disk 160 GB (it is worth noting that the amount of memory larger than normal for netbooks 1 GB). Communication possibilities Teo presented 10/100 Ethernet and Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n.

Server

• Canonical bids for Ubuntu Linux server credibility

  Nearly three-quarters of the respondents (72%) said they see Ubuntu as ready for their mission-critical deployments. Mission critical applications in the respondents view included backup, file server, scientific applications, email and security tasks.

• Dell

  • Dell to offer blueprints for Ubuntu clouds

    Dell has announced that it will be adding Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) to its infrastructure solutions. The company plans to offer “blueprints” for optimising deployments of UEC of Dell hardware such as the PowerEdge C-Series. UEC joins the ranks of the proprietary solutions from VMWare and Microsoft, for which Dell already offers blueprints for deployment.

  • What does it mean that Dell chose Joyent to power the cloud?

    Today is a very important day for Joyent, and for software development.

    Joyent recognized early on that Web development was unlocking transformative new capabilities for software developers. We were founded with the idea of building applications to make business more productive, and we knew that Joyent needed infrastructure that could scale quickly to satisfy user demands, that could provide a persistent, stable platform for applications, and that could meet the day-to-day performance requirements needed to run a business.

  • Dell Brings Specialized Cloud Computing Infrastructure To The Mainstream

  • Dell announces support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

    On Wednesday Dell announced a comprehensive overview of its enterprise strategy. Significant in its announcement, was the addition of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as an infrastructure solution, joining the proprietary offerings from VMWare and Microsoft. This is the first major offering of a true open source Cloud solution backed by a major corporate vendor.

  • Dell to introduce cloud turnkey products

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver

  The VESA driver does not provide much besides user mode-setting for most all VESA-compatible graphics cards and its acceleration is limited to ShadowFB (a shadow frame-buffer on the CPU). It is really not a solution for anything besides being useful when recovering from a bad X configuration or other problems. Fortunately, for the end-user, this will not be the case with most distributions. The real reason NVIDIA is likely canning their xf86-video-nv mess is since the Nouveau driver is reaching a point where its entering the limelight with its mainline DRM, kernel mode-setting support, and emerging Gallium3D support for providing OpenGL acceleration in free software. The Nouveau kernel code entered the Linux 2.6.33 kernel a few months back. As of last December though, Andy Ritger told us that at that point they were not going to change their nv driver support strategy based on Nouveau.

Applications

• Analyze and fix what ails your music files with MP3 Diags

  Chances are you sometimes come across an MP3 file that won’t play properly or does something quirky in your favorite music player. You can try ripping or downloading the file again, or you can fix the problem yourself with MP3 Diags. This utility has two main goals: See what’s inside MP3 files and identify errors and potential issues, and change MP3 files to conform to standards and contain all the useful information they are supposed to contain.

• Prey Tracks Your Stolen Laptop So You Can Get it Back

  Prey is licensed under the GPLv3 license and available for free download from the project’s Web site.

• Proprietary

  • Opera Browser, Widgets as standalone Applications [Opera 10.5x]

    Opera 10.51 (and 10.52) for Linux has been completely rewritten from scratch, with the hope of resolving long time outstanding issues says Ruari, one of Opera’s developers in this blog post.

• Instructionals

  • Moving from Keyring on Palm to KeePass on Linux and Android

  • Bash Shell: Trim Leading White Space From Input Variables

  • Is this a mount point?

  • KVM how to use encrypted images

  • Bash Shell Exit Status Tutorial with Practical Examples

  • Easily extend Nagios’ functionality

  • Quickly install Nagios on Ubuntu

  • How To: Create Your Own Custom ROM for Android, Part 1 – Setting Up The Android Kitchen

  • Howto Setup a DLINK WUA-2340 USB Wireless Adapter in Ubuntu Hardy

  • How to make Video DVD on Ubuntu using Bombono DVD

  • Fix Popping Sound From Speakers, Ubuntu 9.10

  • [ How to fix ] Desktop Effects can’t be enabled for intel integrated graphic in Jaunty

  • How to Share Internet Connections in Ubuntu using bridge-utils

  • Troubleshooting Wi-Fi Issues With Ubuntu

  • How to Set Up a High Performance Cluster (HPC) Using Debian Lenny and Kerrighed -UPDATED

  • Perl – How to list installed modules

  • I’ll Get the MOP….

  • How to Uninstall .deb Packages – Reader Questions

  • Make Nautilus open Sub-Folders in current Window

  • Disable unwanted Daemons in Fedora for Faster Bootup & Memory Increments!

  • Uget – A complete Download Manager for Linux / Windows

  • Shutter screenshot tool updates; Gains Ton of new features

  • Debianpackagemaker – A simple and straight forward ubuntu package maker

  • Command Line Basics: List Hard Drives By UUID

  • MySQL Prepared Statements to Generate Crosstab SQL

  • Virt-install&Virt-manager at Xen 4.0-rc8 (2.6.32.10 pvops) Dom0 on top Ubuntu Karmic Koala Server

  • How To Install OpenOffice 3.2 in Ubuntu 9.10

  • Watermark Images With Nautilus Actions

  • Another Method for restore the default gnome-desktop-panels in Ubuntu Linux

  • How to view the performance details of individual CPUs in the top command

  • Python RRDTool Tutorial

  • How to install Open office 3.2 Stable version in ubuntu 9.10 using Scribblers ppa

  • Basic Package Management Operations Using Aptitude

• Games

  • Space Exploration: Serpens Sector Development Preview 10 Released/Screens #3

    Metal Beetle has released a new development preview version of Space Exploration: Serpens Sector, a role-playing game based on classics like Starflight and Star Control.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • Get Organized With BasKet

    Looking for an Evernote replacement on Linux? Take a look at BasKet! The BasKet Note Pads project is moving full steam ahead once again. The project has just released the first beta for BasKet 2.0, which is the long-awaited port to the KDE 4 platform using Qt4 and KDE 4 platform technologies like Akonadi and Nepomuk.

  • Yet another *full blown* database [1]

    Last weeks I’ve been looking (again) whether or not it was possible to create a working sqlite back end for Akonadi. The last time I tried was around august last year and by then sqlite just wasn’t able to meet the multi-threading requirements that Akonadi has for its database back ends. A couple of sqlite releases later things seem to have changed. I managed to clean up some problematic code paths in Akonadi server and voila, we’ve a sqlite back end that is on par (unit test wise) with the mysql back end.

  • Marble, an Atlas for your Desktop

    While looking for some applications similar to Google Earth I bumped into this KDE educational project Marble. Its a 3D Atlas and Virtual Globe application that aims to help students, teachers or anyone, in learing more about Earth, Mars, Moon and Venus. It provides a whole lot of features other than just the Atlas, with an interface similar to Google Earth.

  • digiKam Film Grain tool re-written…

    Finally, this new version of Film Grain tool will be available for digiKam 1.2.0, which will be released in few days. I hope that you will enjoy this tool…

  • [Review] Clementine 0.2 Music Player in Ubuntu

    Clementine is basically a port of Amarok 1.4 to Qt4. Techie Buzz author, Sathya Bhat, has already covered Clementine when it was at a very early stage of development.

  • Very rough plans for K3b 2.1

    Michał (the lead K3b developer) is busy preparing K3b 2.0 for release. However we have some rough plans how to proceed after that release. I’d like to share them with you.

  • KDE SC 4.4.1 Review

    KDE developers have always put big efforts on this department, and this version continues to deliver. This is obviously very subjective, but I am liking what I am seeing. I have to admit I was hoping for a bigger step forward, but it is a nice progression over KDE 4.3.x. Some new menus have been added, some features have been rearranged and a few seem to have been removed.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Make Your Coworker’s Day in Ubuntu

    Leaving your coworkers a nice message is easy and can brighten up their dull afternoon. We’re pretty sure that this method can only be used for good and not evil, but if you have any other suggestions of messages to leave, let us know in the comments!

  • First stable version of GNOME Media Player Released; gains ad-hoc engine support

    The first stable release of GNOME Media Player – formally GNOME VLC – is now available.

    This release sees the fresh-faced newcomer gain support for 3 engines (VLC, Xine and GStreamer) for playing media, with the option to easily switch ad-hoc between them.

Distributions

• Sabayon

  • Sabayon 5.2

    The Sabayon 5.2 release features Xorg 7.5, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.4.1, XBMC 9.11 and much more. Sabayon is know for offering cutting edge features, great application selection and out-of-the-box experience that is unmatched by any. The Sabayon 5.2 release also comes with a uniquely blue theme that I found to be quite attractive, check it out.

  • Sabayon 5.2 ‘Gnome Edition’ Review

    The 5.2 release of the Gentoo based Linux distribution, Sabayon Linux was released yesterday. For those unfamiliar with Sabayon, it is based on a binary distribution of Gentoo Linux.

    The download ISO files approximately 1.6 gigabytes (for the Gnome edition) and can be downloaded from the Sabayon Linux website.

• New Releases (Not Just GNU/Linux)

  • CDH2 is released

    We’re proud to announce that Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop Version 2 (CDH2) is officially released.

  • Element 1.1 Available For Free Download!!!

  • GParted LiveCD 09.5.2

  • Sabayon Linux 5.2 with KDE 4.4.1 and GNOME 2.28

    Sabayon Linux 5.2 is here for Linux enthusiasts who want the latest packages and the best performance, but don’t want to spend days getting things working properly. True to its mission statement, Sabayon 5.2 comes with pretty much cutting-edge software for both its GNOME and KDE flavors. The latest kernel, the newest GNOME and KDE software and eye candy for the most demanding users, they’re all here.

  • NexentaStor 3.0.0 Community Edition Released

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat soars with fat profits, design wins

    Red Hat’s exceptionally strong fourth quarter and 2010 year-ending financial report released earlier this week shows that the company continues to defy the recession with its strategy of building a far-ranging services, middleware, and cloud business on top of its server-oriented open source Linux distribution. In its fiscal 2010 fourth quarter Red Hat earned $195.9 million in revenue, an increase of 18 percent from 4Q 2009, one year ago, and the company saw a 46 percent increase in 4Q profits, says Red Hat.

  • How much transparency is too much?

    The internal email “chatter” list went crazy. Responses ranged from the rule followers–and a few sore losers–who cried, “Isn’t this a violation of your employment contract?” to the hard core open source crowd who said, “Hey, Red Hat should publish everyone’s salary.” But there was one passing statement that intrigued me: an employee from Norway mentioned that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about; his country made everyone’s salary public information.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Open Source and Open Heart

      This all would not be possible if it was not for the Fedora Community, so we thank everyone that is, has been and will be involved with Fedora. Let us all rocket to better places with the new and upcoming Fedora 13.

• Ubuntu

  • Ubuntu’s new Linux tries getting cloud-friendly

    “It takes a long time to build traction in the enterprise market, but I now see that traction,” Shuttleworth said. “Our growth is something to be proud of.”

    As ever, he’s optimistic that the business will bear fruit. Revenue is growing, he said.

  • Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in

  • Time for a Synaptic makeover?

  • Ubuntu implements units policy, will switch to base-10 units in future release

    Ubuntu’s future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on.

  • Ubuntu Reverts File Size Reading Changes

  • Secret Future Ubuntu User Interface Plans Revealed!

    Finally, Mr. Gooey-Aubergine seemed to be the most excited about the possibility of adding an Ubuntu Menu. “Think of all the things we could do with that!” he exclaimed. “We could be the first Linux distribution bundled with a one-click “Upgrade to Debian” feature! Although,” he admitted, “we haven’t passed that one by Mark yet.” Nor, as it turned out, had he asked Mr. Shuttleworth about the “uninstall” option.

  • Esfera: New UI Element Proposal For Ubuntu 10.10

    Mark Shuttleworth posted a suggestion he got from Pablo Quirós for the free space on the top right window corner (now that the button(s) will be placed on the left side of the Metacity), on the Ayatana mailing list.

  • What to do with the top-right window space: Esfera

  • Little things that matter: Lucid restart warning

  • Ubuntu Ad

  • Ubuntu New Ad – Customization

  • 15 More Wallpapers from Ubuntu Artwork Pool for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

    Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr is now officially closed for further submissions and the shortlisting process is already underway. More than 1000 odd submissions were made and that itself speaks volumes about the resounding success of this novel idea of engaging with the community. After 15 Awesome Wallpaper Collection from Ubuntu Artwork Pool, we proudly present to you, 15 more wallpapers from the official Ubuntu Artwork Pool.

  • [Full Circle Magazine] Issue 35

    This month:
    * Command and Conquer.
    * How-To : Program in Python – Part 9, Digitally Retouching a Photo in GIMP – Part 2, and Installing Google SketchUp using Wine.
    * Review – Motorola Milestone/Droid.
    * MOTU Interview – Pedro Fragoso.
    * Top 5 – Android Applications.
    * Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and all the usual goodness!

  • Should the Ubuntu Release Cycle be Cut Back

    The end of March is near, and in about a month, we will be seeing Lucid Lynx, or Ubuntu version 10.04.

    [...]

    I also began thinking about Ubuntu’s quick release cycle. Do they need to release new versions every six months, or should they give themselves more time in between versions to try and release something more refined say once every year?

  • 11 Crucial Things an Ubuntu Newbie Should Know

  • Meet the New Apps Getting Ready for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

  • Subtitle Editor 0.36.1 Released [w/ Ubuntu PPA]

  • Lucid Dreams and Death By Techno

    If you haven’t already downloaded a copy of 10.04, it’s probably time. At Beta 1, it’s probably stable enough for those who consider themselves only ‘mildly adventurous’ to give it a try. It certainly looks different. Gone is the staid brown (or orange) of old, replaced by a playful, somewhat seductive purple. The new colors frankly made me wonder what Ubuntu was promising with 10.04 LTS. Given that this is a long term support release, I have to think it’s meant to be less of a fling and more of a long term relationship. You see, Lucid Lynx could also be called 10.04 SNR; the Social Networking Release. I’ll cover that topic and some social networking dangers and pitfalls in my next post when I tell you why being too social can be a bad idea.

    Until next time . . .

  • Ubuntu 10.04 Beta

    A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months, but Ubuntu 10.04 will be a little special. That’s because it is marked as Long Term Support (LTS). Most versions of Ubuntu get 18 months of security updates, but this will be supported for 3 years. So if you do not like upgrading this is the version for you.

    Before we go any further, we should point out that this is a beta version of Ubuntu 10.04, not an official release. It has worked without any major problems on our test machine but it should not be used on an important computer. That said, if you have a spare computer, it is worth giving a go.

Devices/Embedded

• A Review: Ben NanoNote Gets Small with Embedded Linux

  Qi Hardware was founded in 2009 by several former developers and engineers from the Openmoko project, which initially set out to build a completely-free Linux-based mobile phone, but has since turned its attention to other projects. Qi’s business model and product roadmap is decidedly more incremental than Openmoko’s, perhaps reflecting lessons learned from the previous company. Qi is self-funded; the plan is to use proceeds of Ben sales to fund the development on the next NanoNote revision as well as other projects.

• Android

  • Trial – A mobilephobics view of Android (complimented with the HTC Hero)

    I won’t continue on as this is not so much a review but more of my thoughts on a subject which Ive had strong opinions on in the past (Mobile phone computing) Whilst my Winmob experience probably prevented me from getting excited about it in the past, Android and the HTC has changed all that. I can now be productive on a mobile and whilst the touch screen is not the best keyboard in the world for me, I’m getting used to it and am certainly productive if Im on the train or wanting to keep up my online presence whilst on the move.

  • Why Android is a winning formula

    Out of all of these the one that appears to have the most traction is Android. Google is actively developing the OS, developers are building apps for the platform and you have a choice of manufacturers.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Get ready to supercharge those netbooks with Ubuntu 10.04

    Guess what? After using just the first beta for a day on my Lenovo S10 with a gigabyte of RAM and the first generation Atom, I’m not eyeing up Windows 7 anymore. Not only is this free, but it feels just as fast (if not faster) than Windows 7. This is seat-of-the-pants only, but let’s just say that it’s a significant upgrade from XP Home.

  • IBM, Canonical to sell Ubuntu-ready netbooks in Africa

    IBM, Canonical and Simmtronics today announced they will market a low-cost, Intel Atom-based Simmtronics netbook in emerging markets. The Simmbook will be preloaded with the IBM Client for Smart Work Linux distro, based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and will first be made available in Africa for just $190, says IBM.

  • IBM Cloud Services Included on Sub-$200 Netbook

    Canonical and Simmtronics on Thursday announced that the Simmtronics netbook, the Simmbook, is now available to emerging markets for just $190

  • Lenovo Slylight Ultra-light Notebook Breaks Cover

    The Skylight runs over a Linux-based OS, also called Skylight.

  • Jolicloud OS Makes The Switch From Mozilla To Chrome [Jolicloud OS Ditches Mozilla Prism In Favor Of Google Chrome For Web Apps]

    If you are a netbook user and have not yet checked out the Jolicloud OS, you may want to give it a quick look or two. Just to offer a quick explanation about what Jolicloud is, it is a Linux based operating system that is built on Ubuntu. It favors web apps, takes full advantage of the ‘cloud’ and is also excellent in being a relatively simple OS to install. Other perks of Jolicoud include quick boot times and support for a wide variety of netbooks.

• Tablets

  • Italian Ekoore ET10TA tablet PC with Ubuntu Linux

    Windows tablets, Google Android tablets, the iPad. We’ve heard a lot of talk about tablets over the last few months. Here’s one that’s a little different. The Ekoore ET10TA looks like a typical Windows tablet, complete with a 10 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor. But it ships with a choice of Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Old phones save lives

IntraHealth and the Senegalese Ministry of Health are using a simple mobile information system based on FrontlineSMS:Medic, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging. The software was customized for the project in partnership with RAES, the African Network for Health Education. Providers send health data via cell phones to a centrally supported automated response server in Dakar, where it is analyzed by Ministry of Health staff.

Making Sense of Open Source Diversity

Open source needs an app store.

No, I am not crazy. Well, not about this, anyway. I know that apps for Linux, and open source apps in general, are free and easy to download and install. They are also numerous. Very. To the point where it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of which apps are available to do which tasks. And that’s me talking–someone who is supposed to know what’s what in the community.

Editor’s Note: What is There Besides Money?

My county lives and dies by volunteer labor. If we didn’t have so many generous, far-sighted volunteers filling key positions we’d be in sorry shape. The fire departments are all volunteer, and they are required to have the same training and skills as big-city paid departments. Search and rescue, sheriff’s reserves, home health care and hospice, and on and on and on…all of these jobs that are ordinarily paid positions are capably filled by skilled, committed unpaid volunteers.

Sound familiar? It is true that a lot of FOSS development is paid, but a sizable amount is still done by unpaid volunteers. The value of diverse, open development and distribution should speak for itself, given its long and successful history, and yet one of the biggest unanswered questions is how can a person make a living from FOSS? Those folks who are quickest with answers like “give away the code, sell service and support” are people who have jobs with paychecks, and have never tried it.

Culture in computing.

This is my quick take on these three computing cultures in an already too long blog posting. In summary, I think that Apple culture is going the way of mobile gadgets, windows culture is as hard and mouldy as two week old stale bread and the open source culture is undergoing a renaissance and bringing computing back to an even keel. I also believe that a very important factor is that the younger generation are much more technologically savvy than my generation of fat balding greybearded eldergeeks They realise the intrinsic value and it is their thoughts and opinions which are influencing the change in the current cultures. What do you think? How are the current computing cultures evolving and how will they evolve in the future?

GIMP

• Adobe’s “Magic” Is Gimp’s Old Plug-In

  Suddenly the graphics world is all atwitter about this miraculous new feature they’re previewing in Photoslop. A Photoslop team guy has a video up with a “sneak preview” of what they’re calling “Content-Aware Fill.” As soon as I saw it, I remembered some plug-in that I’d tried in Gimp long ago, but couldn’t remember what it was.

• Episode 137: A Trip to Hamburg

  I mention two podcasts worth to follow. Jeff Curto’s “The History of Photography” and The World’s “Technology Podcast“. And then there is the Haus der Photographie in the Deichtorhallen, which has good exhibitions and a good bookstore. The map in the bbegin was provided by the Open Street Map Project.

• Photoshop’s CAF (content-aware fill) – unbelievable? Not quite.

  They can rest assured – it is possible and it has been around for years, e.g. in the GIMP plugin by Paul Harrison called Resynthesizer.

• Development GIMP Version 2.7 Review

  GIMP 2.7 seems to always start in multi-window mode, even if the user closes GIMP in single-window mode. Although this may have just been a misconfiguration with our GIMP, proper configuration won’t be completely implemented until GIMP 2.8′s release.

  There is another thing. If you maximize the window and then switch tabs it unmaximizes, bringing the window back to the size it was before maximizing.

  With minor GEGL improvements, the current development version of GIMP 2.7 doesn’t appear to have that many new features. We’ll review GIMP again in a while. Until next time…

Mozilla

• 7 Cool Firefox Add-ons

  One of the coolest things about Firefox is its extensibility. Everyone has their collection of favorite Firefox add-ons and I thought I would share mine. Some provide improved organization, some have a certain “WOW!” factor, and others just look pretty.

• Mozilla Developers Talk Up Firefox as a Key Development Tool

  For many users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web.

  This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5,054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox — and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing.

• Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 Pre

Oracle

• OOo at CeBIT

Business

• Please break our open source business strategy model

  It included a partial explanation of my theory that those strategies do not exist in isolation, but are steps on an evolutionary process, and also introduced our model for visualizing the core elements of an open source-related business strategy.

• Reductive Labs, Home of Puppet, Changes Name to Puppet Labs

  Reductive Labs, the home of Puppet, the open source leader in data center automation, has announced that it has changed its name to Puppet Labs. This name better represents the focus of the company on guiding development of Puppet, supporting the large and growing Puppet community and delivering premium tools and services to enable broader deployments of Puppet in large enterprises.

• New Release of OrangeHRM’s Open Source HRM Software

  OrangeHRM, Inc. is pleased to announce that it released the latest version of OrangeHRM, its open-source HRM software today. Release 2.6 incorporates a Performance Module, a new feature designed to help small- and medium-sized enterprises conduct formal employee performance reviews.

• Mickos: What’s bigger than open source?

  Mickos is a smart guy. He has deep institutional knowledge of the industry. For Eucalyptus to be wildly successful, it’s going to have to be bigger than just open source, as The VAR Guy points out, i.e., bigger than just an open license attached to otherwise ordinary software. Customers pay for value, and that value, as Mickos thinks, sits at the nexus of cloud, open-source, and collective computing.

• Former MySQL CEO Mickos Says Open Source Needs More Money Flow

  Mickos also said that part of the reason MySQL kicked off so much open source code for community use was that revenues from it were constant.

• How do I know if an open source software product is right for my organization?

  More and more organizations are relying on open source software to build, test, deploy, and run mission critical IT applications. From small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, organizations worldwide are continuing to find open source as a cost effective means to deliver quality business applications. With a wealth of commercial and open source software options widely available, how does an organization know if an open source product is right for them?

• Coming to America: Abiquo Cloud Management

  Open Source or Enterprise License

  The company provides its cloud management product as an open source Community Edition and as a commercial Enterprise Edition. The former is offered via the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3. Abiquo 1.5 will be available within 45 days.

FSF/FSFE/GNU

• Tech Comics: “Another Geek in a Bar”

• grep-2.6 released [stable]

Standards/Consortia

• Let’s All Get Together

  But developing standards and open source software are not the only areas where people and companies would like to launch collaborative activities among nationally and internationally distributed participants. The question is, will they know how to go about doing so?

• ODF Plugfest

  The third in a series of plugfests, aimed at lead developers of commercial and open source ODF implementations, experts from local and regional governments, members of the OASIS TC’s and other stakeholders.

5 Websites With Strange & Unusual Facts

Finance

• Big Banks to Try Putting on Lipstick

  The Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies on behalf of around 100 of the country’s top banks, credit card companies and insurance firms, will undertake a professionally-organized public relations campaign to try to improve the tarnished image of the financial industry.

• Big Banks Begin Effort to Improve Image, Set `Record Straight’

  One of Wall Street’s main lobbying groups is starting an image-improvement campaign aimed at showing the financial industry as trustworthy and a positive force after more than a year of being chastised in Washington.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• State Insurance Commissioners Take Baton from Congress

  The NAIC, which comprises the insurance commissioners from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, is having its spring meeting today through Sunday in Denver. The fact that more than 1,700 insurance industry executives are also at the meeting should give you an idea of how important the NAIC is to insurers. Just as members of Congress are far out-numbered by lobbyists on any given day in Washington, the commissioners are far, far outnumbered by insurance company executives who come to NAIC’s conferences to try to influence everything the commissioners do.

• History in the Making

  I have been transfixed by the long health care reform debates in the US, which finally culminated with the House of Representatives passage of the health care reform bill on March 21, and which President Obama signed into law two days later. The House also passed the reconciliation bill which the Senate subsequently approved on March 25. The health care reform bill is now the law of the land.

DRM

• EA’s Own Employees Annoyed At Pointless DRM Solutions

  However, now it appears that it’s even pissing off EA employees. Slashdot points out that the editor of EA.com got really frustrated over the game kicking him out because his DSL was flakey:

  “Booted twice — and progress lost — on my single-player C&C4 game because my DSL connection blinked. DRM fail. We need new solutions.”

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Hollywood Seeks To Kill Off 3D Golden Goose With Much Higher Prices

  So what’s Hollywood doing? They’re just making it more expensive. Yes, they’re jacking up the prices on 3D movies, in a typical short-term strategy. Rather than recognize how this might just drive more people to more seriously consider getting a 3D setup at home, Hollywood’s simplistic business modeling seems to be “let’s see how much we can squeeze out of people as quickly as possible.”

• LEGO to Project Legos: Let go of our trademark

  Toymaking giant LEGO is suing a small Minneapolis nonprofit, saying it benefits from the high-profile name.

• Want to Use My Suit? Then Throw Me Something

  Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century — more than two, some say — and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them.

• Universal Music Funds Yet Another ‘Educational’ Propaganda Campaign Against File Sharing

  Back in January, we noted that Chris Morrison, the manager of Damon Albarn’s bands, Blur and Gorillaz, stated at a conference that “piracy can be stopped,” while also suggesting he wanted to personally beat up anyone who shared Albarn’s music (oddly, this was right after he had admitted how much wonderful free publicity Albarn had gotten from a leak of the Gorillaz album). Now it looks like Morrison and a former partner of his are involved in a silly and amusing new propaganda campaign, funded by Universal Music, to try to equate file sharing to drunk driving in some cases and racism in other cases. Seriously.

• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube

  Sony Entertainment has shut down Beyonce’s official YouTube site. Congrats to Sony Entertainment for wisely spending its legal dollars and working on behalf of its artists.

• Sony Music Claiming Beyonce’s Official YouTube Channel Violates Copyright?

• Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June

  The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced.

• Murdoch Puts Up Some More Paywalls

  Unfortunately, the details look like the rumor was wrong, or the plans changed entirely, because now it looks like both publications are going with your standard everyday super expensive paywall. Starting in June, both publications will begin charging a whopping £1 per day or £2 per week for access — which is actually pretty steep, especially in a market where there’s an awful lot of competition. On a yearly basis, it’s only a bit less than what Newsday is charging for its website — which has been a colossal failure.

• First Amendment Based Copyright Misuse

  We are at a crossroads with respect to the under-developed equitable defense of copyright misuse. The defense may go the way of its sibling, antitrust-based patent misuse, which seems to be in a state of inevitable decline. Or – if judges accept the proposal of this Article – courts could reinvigorate the copyright misuse defense to better protect First Amendment speech that is guaranteed by statute, but that is often chilled by copyright holders misusing their copyrights to control other’s speech.

• Fighting intensifies over how to enforce intellectual property laws [UPDATED]

  One fight stems from the secretive negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which began under President George W. Bush. Copyright holders have pressed for provisions that could force Internet Service Providers to do more to combat online piracy, such as cutting off broadband accounts that are used repeatedly for infringement. Such three-strikes provisions are anathema to tech advocacy groups, which also fear that the agreement would make it harder for them to bring some fair-use balance to the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

• Must Read: CCIA Sets US IP Czar Straight On Intellectual Property

  The RIAA, MPAA and the Screen Actors Guild teamed up to submit their own filing, and as the LA Times noted “it’s a doozy.” Consider it a wishlist of protectionist, anti-consumer, anti-innovation policies, basically demanding that the White House prop up their own businesses, because of their unwillingness to adapt:

  Among other things, the “creative community organizations” urged that:

  * The federal government encourage ISPs to use, and companies to develop, monitoring, filtering, blocking, scanning and throttling technologies to combat the flow of unauthorized material online;
  * Copyright holders be able to combat infringement by making a database of their works available to service providers, rather than submitting individual takedown notices. And once a work is taken down, service providers should be expected to employ “reasonable efforts” to prohibit users from uploading or even linking to them again;
  * Copyright owners be able to block unauthorized streams of live broadcasts without going through the formal notice-and-takedown process;
  * The federal government press search engines, social networks, hosting companies, domain name registrars and online advertising and payment networks to cooperate with copyright holders on efforts to combat piracy (“Encouraging these intermediaries to work with content owners on a voluntary basis to reduce infringements, and assuring these intermediaries that such cooperation will not be second-guessed, should be top priories that call for the personal intervention of senior government officials if necessary.”);
  * A federal interagency task force work with industry to interdict prerelease bootlegs of Hollywood blockbusters and crack down on U.S. services that assist foreign piracy hotbeds;
  * States adopt “labeling laws” that “defined unauthorized online file sharing and streaming as a felony,” giving state and local law enforcement jurisdiction to go after unauthorized copying online;
  * States use consumer protection laws to go after file-sharing sites that “expose consumers to intrusion, viruses and revelation of personal data.”

• Textbooks are too expensive, so Italian high school tries to produce them in house

  Every year italian families must spend hundreds of Euros in textbooks for every child, while the cost limits set by the government are regularly violated in spite of denounces and warnings from consumer associations. In order to solve this problem, Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini proposed to deduce cost (and weight!) of textbooks by encouraging schools to adopt digital textbooks starting from 2011.

• ACTA

  • Outrageous Treaty Nonsense, or The Copyright Tail Wagging the Internet Dog

    I’ve been remiss, as the VC’s (sort-of) copyright/Internet law guy, in not commenting previously about a truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf. I am referring to the ongoing negotiations about ACTA, the multilateral “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.” [See Jonathan Adler’s posting earlier today about ACTA here] The US Trade Representative’s office has been conducting these negotiations entirely in secret (on some ridiculous trumped-up ‘national security’ rationale) for several years now on this Agreement; a current draft was recently leaked to the press, and it confirms many peoples’ worst fears. Here’s my attempt at a summary of what’s going on — if you’re interested in more details (and I hope you are), I’ve listed at the end of this posting some excellent sources of further information.

  • The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

    In short, ACTA is geared up to do almost exactly what I predicted in a “Recent Development” in YJIL last year (The Origins and Potential Impact of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), 34 Yale J. Int’l L. 261 (2009)). It amps up IP protection and criminal sanctions, without respecting existing international institutional process and involving the interests of developing countries.

  • Some More Lowlights From The Leaked ACTA Draft: Whole Thing Can Be Rammed Through With 5 Votes

    Michael Geist points us to a rather thorough review, by Margot Kaminski, of some of the more troubling aspects of the leaked ACTA draft. Kaminski highlights 24 different points, but we’ll just pick out a few key ones. For example, she notes that ACTA would create an express lane for intellectual property cases in the courts, and questions: “Why should copyright take precedent over other cases and have such a fast turnaround?” There are a few concerning things about border searches. While ACTA negotiators and defenders keep insisting that ACTA won’t mean border searches for individuals, the draft highlights a few things that are troubling. For example, the US, Canada and New Zealand want to change the exemption criteria for border searches from the current “small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature” to the much lower standard of “reasonably attributable to personal use of the traveler.” In other words, this does, in fact, grant more powers to customs and border patrol to search laptops and iPods and the like, if there’s any indication of more information that is “reasonably attributable to personal use,” — though, that standard seems quite vague and subjective.

  • ACTA’s beginning of the end

    Secondly, Devigne denied the second item in the answer to Hammerstein, who asked about the Commission’s name and shame list. It seems riddiculous to deny such an approach and plan given the “Global Europe” strategy contents, also given earlier statements from the directorate. They would no do that, indicated Devigne. How pathetic!

    Oh, and let’s not mention the desasterous performance of Devigne regarding admitting that they won’t respect the parliament’s resolution on limit to counterfeiting. There he stressed being in line with the acquis again.