• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Bank, the Linux User and the 9-Month Call for Help

Garrett Heaton has been struggling for months to get his bank to open up its deposit@home feature to Linux and Unix. As he and a few other savvy users have figured out, there’s no real technical barrier. All Linux users have to do is pretend to be a Mac. For nine months, the bank has been declining Heaton’s persistent, polite and helpful requests — and, amazingly, he is still a very loyal customer.

[...]

The bank does not currently support Linux for its Deposit@Home service, company spokesperson Lisa Carr confirmed, though she added that “we’re always considering ways to expand the services we offer to additional platforms.”

LinuxFest Northwest offers free open source event

Robots and beer-brewing computer programs are just two of the things to check out at LinuxFest Northwest this weekend.

This is the 11th year for the tech event, which will feature a variety of demonstrations and speakers. Sessions are geared toward computer novices and pros interested in open source software and Linux, a free computer operating system that is an alternative to for-profit operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Vista.

Desktop

• Future on Ubuntu and Desktop Linux!

  I honestly asked myself the other day, “do I really need to use Windows?”

  And then that’s when hit me, Ubuntu linux was now pretty up to par with Windows counterparts, there’s so much support and improvements happening, there was not many reasons I would need to continue using Windows.

Server

• London Stock Exchange readies Turquoise for big-bang Linux migration

  Turquoise, the London Stock Exchange’s large volume ‘dark pool’ trading platform, will go live on a new Linux-based platform in August or September.

  The move will be an ambitious “big bang” approach instead of a soft migration, according to a technical note the LSE sent to customers yesterday.The quick changeover is a response to “participant feedback”, the LSE said. Services across the Integrated and Dark Midpoint order books will commence trading on the same day.

Kernel Space

• The Planet Joins Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced The Planet as its newest member. The Planet is a global leader in IT hosting and will participate in community initiatives and projects that support enterprise Linux.

  The emergence of cloud computing and virtualized environments in the Web hosting industry has opened the door the Linux community to gain important competitive advantages. The Planet leverages Linux platforms to provide these services across its global customer base.

• Ceph: The Distributed File System Creature from the Object Lagoon

  The last two years have seen a large number of file systems added to the kernel with many of them maturing to the point where they are useful, reliable, and in production in some cases. In the run up to the 2.6.34 kernel, Linus recently added the Ceph client. What is unique about Ceph is that it is a distributed parallel file system promising scalability and performance, something that NFS lacks.

• Graphics Stack

  • The Gallium3D Driver That Few Know About

    Last night it was reported on VirtualBox not being convinced about Gallium3D and what it could provide its virtualization stack not only in terms of better OpenGL acceleration for the guest virtual machines, but also for accelerating other APIs like OpenVG and OpenCL. This is coming a year after VMware rolled out its own Gallium3D driver (called “SVGA”) that allowed Gallium3D to work on its virtualization platform. But there’s also another virtualized Gallium3D driver out there.

Applications

• LottaNZB 0.5.3 (HellaNZB frontend) & The future of the binary newsgroups?

  I wrote about Klibido quite a while ago and whilst its a KDE app (being run in a Gnome environment on my rig) I have to say that I found it a good choice. Despite issues surrounding the apparent lack of development for a few years and it has no facility for .par checking, its a solid enough package that never let me down.

  After receiving a recommendation for another KDE binary newsgroup reader I decided to investigate what else was available (since Im using gpar2 for my .par needs)

  Since Im not a fan of KDE (Xfce is my DE of choice) I extended my search to Gnome aswell and one thing struck me, lack of choice. The Xfce desktop has a distinct lack of choice in respect of binary readers which is a shame (and I’ll go into that later)

• Extcalc: An easy-to-use scientific graphing calculator for Linux

• 10 Tools To Add Some Spice To Your UNIX Shell Scripts

• Proprietary

  • IOGraph maps your mouse movements on Windows, Mac, and Linux

• Instructionals

  • 10 ways to make your Samba life easier

    Samba is essential for many SMBs. Not only does it work like a champ as a file server, it does so at zero software cost. The biggest hurdle to adoption is what most people consider to be complicated setup and administration. Like many assumptions about the Linux operating system, that’s a myth. Samba does not have to be a challenge to configure or administer. In fact, it can be downright simple. Here are some tips to make your Samba life is as painless as possible.

  • Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Mandriva 2010.0

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• An Introduction to KDE Games

  For a long time KDE has come with an assortment of games. Collectively, this suite of games is simply called “KDE Games“. With the advent of KDE 4, all of the KDE games were given face lifts and a standard set of features that make moving from game to game a seamless exercise.

  The games are two dimensional and do not run inside of a separate layer like SDL. Instead they run inside a normal KDE window, utilizing the standard QT interface. Nevertheless, the rendering of of the graphics is amazingly impressive because of the use of SVG vector graphics. With SVG, the animations are smooth and the images are scalable. You can play in a small window or maximize it without losing any of its quality.

• New kid on the block: Plasma Water Animation

  I’m glad to make available a fresh new Plasma animation: WaterAnimation. This animations uses the ripple effect to produce a liquefied behavior on the target widget. An example of the animation behavior can be seen below, enjoy!

• KDE time travel

  In my “quest” to update KDE-related Wikipedia articles, I had to do more research than I expected and I needed to fix things I didn’t expect. But that research was fun, too. It brought me back in time when I was still a teen who tried to get some ancient Linux distribution working and fiddled around with KDE 1.

• Grantlee Version 0.1.0 Out

  Grantlee version 0.1.0 has been released by the Grantlee team. For those not in the know, Django is a high-level Python Web framework. It can be used to develop websites, and offers numerous features to make such a task easier.

• Gluon Decides on New Structure in Preparation for First Release

  The freedom of gamers as it is now is limited by the game industry’s old fashioned insistence on limiting the distribution of games. Gluon aims at breaking this by providing both the makers of games and the players of games with a new platform for sharing the experience of playing games, and for providing feedback to each other – both in the form of comments and ratings, but also through a donation based payment system. So: There’s a revolution coming where the freedom of gaming is at the center.

Distributions

• 8 of the best tiny Linux distros

  The winner: Slitaz 9/10

  We hope you’ve seen that the world of light distros is more exciting than you may have imagined. Choosing the right one depends on the hardware you want to run it on and what you want to use it for.

  The Ubuntu-based distros are interesting, particularly the nascent Lubuntu, mainly because they have a tiny footprint but offer the promise of installing anything from the vast Ubuntu multiverse. However, we were looking for a a distro to work painlessly in a cramped hardware environment.

  Honourable mentions must go to DSL and Tiny Core at this point, which have clambered into the territory of the minuscule. It’s amazing how usable a system can be that takes up less space on your drive than your holiday pictures. Puppy Linux and Unity were both easy to use, although the latter was a bit more polished (and bigger).

• Peppermint

  • Peppermint: A New Linux Flavor for the Cloud

    A new cloud-focused Linux flavor launched recently; known as Peppermint, the operating system has entered a small, private beta and will open up to more testers over the next two to four weeks.

  • Peppermint: A New Linux OS for the Cloud

    The Peppermint distro is being developed by Kendall Weaver, the maintainer for the Linux Mint Fluxbox and LXDE Editions, and Shane Remington, who works alongside Weaver as a developer at their day job at Astral IX Media in Asheville, N.C.

• Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS 2010 Edition is now available for download.

  • PCLinuxOS 2010 (KDE)

    PCLinuxOS should definitely be at the top of anybody’s desktop distro list. There’s a version of it for pretty much everybody, from desktop eye-candy addicts to extreme minimalists that want total control over what applications go on their system. It provides a great alternative to Ubuntu, Fedora and some of the other prominent desktop distros.

• Red Hat Family

  • Always have an exit strategy when looking at cloud

    GH: Red Hat has been supporting the federal government in cloud computing in a number of ways.

    First, on a basic technology level, much of the innovation that’s going on in cloud computing and virtualization has been happening in the open source world, specifically, in the open source Linux project.

    Red Hat is best known as a vendor of Linux services and support and our engineers have been working for many years on virtualization technology, and doing what it is that we’ve always done with the open source community, which is creating an enabling layer that sits between your hardware and your applciations and actually gives your applications access to some of the really interesting innovations that are going on down in the hardware. So, in the role as a hypervisor — in the role as a software that hosts virtual guests in a cloud computing environment, we’ve been working in that space for some time.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora* taps Zarafa open source groupware for 13

      Fedora’s selection of Zarafa as an open source groupware component in Fedora 13 is very interesting.

      The beta of Fedora 13, code named “Goddard,” was made available on April 13. The final version is expected in mid May.

    • Fedora 13 Beta: The Seen and (Troubling) Unseen

      The Fedora 13 beta contains more enhancements that many users will ever know. That is not necessarily undesirable, because users will still benefit and many do not care to know.

• Debian Family

  • Freshly Squeezed Debian: Installing from Live DVD

    My impression is that Debian values stability and functionality over looks and release schedules. You can look at this alpha version as a preview of Debian’s next stable release, or you could simply run Debian Testing as a constantly-updated “rolling release.” Despite the “testing” moniker, it’s a pretty good balance between the stablity of Debian Stable and the more up-to-date applications in Debian Unstable. It’s also got a huge repository of over 25,000 available packages and an excellent package management system going for it.

  • Ubuntu

    • Canonical to update production-ready server Ubuntu

      Linux distribution vendor Canonical will soon release an updated version of its production-ready server operating system, the company announced Monday.

      Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition will be ready for downloading, for no charge, beginning on April 29, along with the desktop edition of 10.04.

    • Tell me what the future is

      This blog post is about the recent work done in aptdaemon – the backend used by Ubuntu’s software-center to install/remove packages.

    • Little things that matter: The Ubuntu print test page

      Print test pages, for those that don’t know, is essentially a lot of coloured blocks in a row that allow users to check if a printer is printing graphics and colours correctly.

    • Click & Buy no longer accepted in the UbuntuOne Music Store

      The UbuntuOne Music store no longer accepts Click&Buy as a payment method because Ubuntu/Canonical, who, given the Store is in Beta, are still experimenting with functionality “including the offered payment methods” according to a 7Digital spokesmen.

Devices/Embedded

• Rugged Linux powered video serving robot remote controlled over internet

  It’s a rugged robot based on the surveyor open source robot. It can be remote controlled over the internet or programmed for autonomous missions.

• ARM-based processor touted for 1080p encoding at 30fps

• Encoder system supports 1080p H.264 HD

  Z3 is shipping a Linux-based multi-format video encoder that’s said to support 1080p H.264 HD encoding with latency as low as 70 milliseconds. The Z3-MVE-01 Multi-format Video Encoder is based on a separately available, Linux-ready DM368-RPS design kit, which includes a DM368-MOD module that incorporates Texas Instruments’ new DM368 DaVinci system-on-chip.

• Linux development service supports new TI SoC

  Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework for custom embedded Linux devices now supports the recently announced Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM368 DaVinci video processor. The LinuxLink for DM368 service offers Linux development tools and a pre-integrated build environment for the ARM-based chip, the company says.

• Tiny DIY PC gets smaller, more powerful

  Via announced a tiny PC for do-it-yourselfers, available in a barebones configuration with room for a 2.5-inch hard disk drive. The Linux-ready Artigo A1100 has a 1.3GHz Via Nano processor, accepts 2GB of RAM, sports HDMI and VGA video outputs, and has five USB ports, the company says.

• Android

  • Snapdragon-based Android phone offers HDMI port, T-DMB

    Pantech’s Sky cellphone division announced a 1GHz Snapdragon-based Android smartphone in Korea. The Sirius IM-A600S is equipped with an 8GB flash card, WiFi, T-DMB mobile TV, an HDMI port, and a 3.7 inch, 800×480 AMOLED display, says the Korea-based Sky.

  • Will HTC Incredible Live Up to Its Name?

    The steady rain of leaks about HTC’s Incredible smartphone has turned into a downpour, and the buzz has become a steady drone. If the Incredible is Verizon’s next launch, the company is making a smart move, said 451 Group analyst Chris Hazelton. It will give consumers their first opportunity to actually handle a phone that is expected to be strikingly similar to the much-ballyhooed Nexus One.

• Sub-notebooks

  • System76 Starling EduBook: Classmate PC with Ubuntu Linux

    Linux computer builders System76 have added a new netbook to their lineup. The System76 Starling EduBook is basically a rebadged Intel Classmate PC with a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor.

    But while most Classmate PC models are sold with Windows XP or Windows 7, the Starling EduBook will ship with Ubuntu 10.04 Education Edition Netbook Remix.

• Tablets

  • The SmartQ V7 is here

    In contrast to Android, the wireless works right out of the box, using good old NetworkManager. I couldn’t get Bluetooth tethering to fly, though; they use a rather odd setup for this. They have Blueman for controlling Bluetooth, and you’re supposed to use Blueman to set up a DUN link with the phone and then run gnome-ppp which somehow transforms it into an actual connection. I got this to work once in ten tries, for about five minutes. So I’ve given up and am just using my phone’s wifi router functionality, which eats battery life but works simply. Hopefully a future version of the Linux implementation (they do release updates fairly frequently) will come with the newer gnome-bluetooth and NetworkManager builds that allow much smoother Bluetooth tethering.

  • Are there really open source iPad alternatives? A follow-up.

    I want to create. And because of that, for me, the list of negatives greatly outweighs the list of positives. Of course, if this device is truly doing what you want and need, that’s great. That’s what’s important. But I’m willing to wait for something better. Something meant for sharing. Something more open.

  • Whatever the iPad is, it is NOT a Computer

    Don’t act, just absorb.

    Pretty different from giving the same kid a laptop or a netbook, isn’t it? With one of those, a kid can respond, can experiment, can act in the very way the human species most efficiently assimilates new skills and information: learn by doing. By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, the netbook costs less. Even the laptop often does.

Events

• Can’t Make DrupalCon? Catch Free Live Video Streams

  The live feed for this week’s keynote sessions will be broadcast via Brightcove’s blog post, the DrupalVolCon site, the Drupal UK site, the official Drupalcon San Francisco site, and any other site that uses the embed code available through the player.

Databases

• The H speed guide to NoSQL

  The rise of the NoSQL movement has brought debate back to the database space as the traditional relational model’s applicability to all problems has been questioned, not just in theory, but in practical code. At the heart of NoSQL is not a rejection of SQL itself; some have said NoSQL, rather than standing in opposition to SQL as “No SQL”, really stands for “Not Only SQL”. It more represents a deeper desire to explore database models which have, in the past and for various reasons, been left to languish in obscurity.

CMS

• Drupal upgrade to be slower but more scalable

  Drupal, the popular open source Web content management system, will sacrifice speed for scalability in the upcoming Drupal 7 upgrade, the founder of the project said on Monday afternoon.

  The upgrade to Drupal, meanwhile, could be available perhaps in the June timeframe or as late as September, said Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert in a presentation at the Drupalcon SF conference in San Francisco. Ideally, version 7 would be available this month, he said.

Business

• Talend Gets Another $8 Million in Funding

  Talend, which offers open source data management software and solutions, announced this morning that it has secured $8 million in Series D financing. Previous investors Balderton Capital, AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners, all participated in the round. With the new $8 million investment, Talend has now raised a cumulative $28 million.

• Open Source EU Funded Projects: SQO-OSS

  Among open source related projects funded under the sixth Framework Program, at least four of them – namely FLOSSMetrics, QualiPSo, QUALOSS and SQO-OSS – have been found overlapping around open source software development and quality.

  SQO-OSS – Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software – similarly to FLOSSMetrics was aimed at massive collection of data from thousands of projects, though with different goals.

Releases

• Bugzilla 3.6 Brings Extensions and Addresses Usability

  Bugzilla deserves props for enabling so many free software projects, but the ubiquitous bug tracking system has not been without its flaws. Namely, Bugzilla is known for being difficult to navigate and use, particularly for new contributors who have little experience working with bug ticketing systems. The 3.6 release sands off some of the rough edges following a usability study from Carnegie Mellon University. The list of bugs stemming from the research are not all closed, but the project has made significant progress.

Programming

• Python support in GNOME gets a boost from hackfest

  Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.

  The Gtk+ toolkit, which provides the underlying widget system of the GNOME desktop environment, is an important part of the desktop Linux ecosystem. Although the toolkit itself is built with C, it can also be used with other programming languages—including Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Java, and Scheme. Python is widely used by Gtk+ application developers and is important to the GNOME community. OLPC, the host of the hackfest, uses Python in conjunction with Gtk+ for its Sugar environment—the core user experience and activity collection that is shipped on its XO laptops.

• Will Wall Street require Python?

  On 7 April 2010, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency charged “… to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation”, proposed new rules covering “Asset-Backed Securities” [warning: 667-page PDF]. Administratively, this is a reaction to the trillion-dollar financial atrocities of the last few years, as well as a natural manifestation of the Obama administration’s commitment to enhance procedural transparency. Shockingly, “… Python, a commonly used open source interpretive programming language …” shows up on page 1 of the description. What is that about?

Standards/Consortia

• The Horse Race For Video in HTML5 Continues

  Another chapter in the “what will HTML5 support” soap opera opened last week with rumors that Google will open source the VP8 video codec. Many outlets were reporting that VP8 is the video codec that runs YouTube. But that is not true. VP8 is actually the code behind On2 Technologies, another web video play which Google acquired just a few months ago. The story goes that Google will support VP8 in You Tube as soon as the open source announcement is made. This would make it an instant standard.

  First of all, it seems that everyone has already concluded that HTML5 will indeed be the savior of web video. I am not sure web video needs a savior. Steve Job is perhaps looking for a savior from Flash and the millions of iPhone users and now hundreds of thousands of iPad users sure would like to view the web with video. I don’t think Adobe thinks that video support in HTML5 is that important.

StarCraft Rigging Scandal Hits e-Sports Industry

Towing co. wants $750K from WMU student

A Kalamazoo towing company that has received multiple complaints to the Better Business Bureau is suing the Western Michigan University student who started a Facebook page against the company.

The four-page lawsuit filed by T&J Towing against Justin Kurtz claims defamation of character and libel. It asks for $750,000 from Kurtz, who received the papers Friday.

Judge rules wax seal belongs to Maker’s Mark

A federal judge on Friday issued an injunction preventing a rival liquor company from using a dripping wax seal on its tequilas sold in the United States, ending a seven year legal battle over the bottle topper.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II comes in a long-running lawsuit between Maker’s Mark and competitors Diageo and Casa Cuervo over the Fortune Brands trademark on the wax seal. Fortune owns Maker’s Mark.

Pew Poll: Trust In Government Hits Near-Historic Low

Americans’ trust in government and its institutions has plummeted to a near-historic low, according to a sobering new survey by the Pew Research Center.

Only 22 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew say they can trust government in Washington “almost always or most of the time” — among the lowest measures in the half-century since pollsters have been asking the question.

Death-notice price gouging: Why?

Sure, newspapers are hard up, but exploiting bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices seems to be a distasteful and strategically inept way to try to make ends meet.

I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice.

Security/Aggression

• Rivals call for clarity over Lib Dem passport plans

  In the Blaydon constituency, home to the biometric passport makers, Labour’s candidate Dave Anderson, pictured, has asked his LibDem opponent Neil Bradbury to clarify his position on his party leader’s plans.

  It was last June that De La Rue Systems announced they could take on an extra 80 employees after winning a 10-year £400m contract to produce the UK biometric passport from the Government.

  Dave Anderson, who lobbied hard for the contract to come to Blaydon in the first place, said: “Scrapping these passports is part of the price Clegg demands to fund his gimmick giveaway of raising tax thresholds, which would disproportionately benefit well-off people.

• Police power could be given to nightclub bouncers and security guards

  Tens of thousands of nightclub bouncers and private security guards could be given sweeping police-style powers.

  Senior police officers have ordered a dramatic expansion of a controversial scheme that allows authorised civilians to issue fines for littering and other minor offences.

• Controversial medical records database suspended

  Although records will continue to be uploaded in some early adopter areas, Government plans to roll out the scheme across the country have been effectively halted.

  The Department of Health said that uploading of data would begin again only when public awareness had been raised.

  Information about more than 1.25 million patients have already gone on to the database, which eventually could hold up to 50 million records.

• Drink-drive ban for father who took toy Barbie car for a spin

  As a means of transportation it left something to be desired in terms of comfort and street cred.

  And when police asked the driver to pull over, the Barbie car, with its top speed of 4mph, was hopeless as a getaway vehicle.

  Paul Hutton, 40, is regretting his impromptu roadtrip after he was arrested for drink-driving when he tried to take the battery- operated child’s toy to a friend’s house.

• The Latest ‘Intelligence Gap’

  Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. The Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency has halted domestic collection of some type of communications metadata—the details are predictably fuzzy, though I’ve got a guess—in order to allay the concerns of the secret FISA Court that the NSA’s activity might not be technically permissible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

• School secretly snapped 1000s of students at home

  A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured thousands of images of students in their homes, sometimes as they slept or were partially undressed, according to documents filed in federal court.

  Using a system to track lost or stolen laptops, officials from the Lower Merion School District also covertly surveilled students as they used their school-issued Macs, logging online chats and taking screenshots of websites they visited, according to the documents.

• Math tutor uses numbers to fight red light camera ticket

  A woman was caught on camera running a red in Collier County. But after her husband fought the ticket, it was thrown out. Now officials say there may be other drivers who were wrongly ticketed as well.

Finance

• April 19 2010: Did the SEC plant a Goldman bomb?

  There’s some curious things about that SEC case, like who’s actually charged with what. There’s no Jonathan Egol, Fabrice Tourre’s partner at Goldman, no hedge funder John Paulson, no Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Instead, the only person the SEC names -far as I’ve seen- is Fabrice Tourre, who, at the time the Abacus deal involved played, was all of 28 years old.

  That age thing keeps on itching me. It somehow points to the degree of involvement of the likes of Blankfein, Goldman president Gary Cohn and CFO David Viniar. These guys don’t let a mere kid play with billions of their capital without keeping a close watch. They were all down there on the trade floor for extended periods of time, figuring out what exactly transpired, as can be proven.

  Moreover, the then (2006-7) 28-year old Tourre was claiming something that was the 180 degree opposite of what other traders at Goldman had a lot of the firms’ money invested in, namely the continued upward growth of the housing market. Tourre’s contrary claims were nothing short of revolutionary, certainly in the eyes of the older, and more bullish, traders. So it should not come as a surprise that the highest echelons of the firm spent a lot of time with Tourre and other traders. They would have been mad not to. That also means, however, that claiming they didn’t know what was going on is not believable.

• Democrats’ Banking Bill Struggles to Get G.O.P. Support

  Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner appealed on Monday to the centrist Republican senators from Maine for their support of legislation to tighten regulation of the nation’s financial system but came up empty-handed, leaving Democrats and Republicans on an apparent collision course.

• How Iceland’s banking flaws brought down the country’s economy

  Behind Iceland’s superficially booming financial markets in the mid noughties lay a financial system shot through with corruption and regulatory negligence that led inexorably to a dramatic economic meltdown 18 months ago, according to a damning truth commission report.

  The 2,300-page forensic investigation, presented to Iceland’s parliament yesterday, reserves its deepest criticisms for the island’s three largest banks – Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki – which failed in quick succession in October 2008. The long-delayed report, produced after interviews with about 300 key players, found these banks had effectively been captured by some of their powerful majority shareholders and that the true extent of their financial vulnerability had been deliberately masked.

• Goldman Accused of Cutting the Brakes

  One of the most salient analogies of the financial meltdown was offered by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chair Phil Angelides when he grilled Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, over the firm’s unsavory proprietary trading. Angelides was questioning Goldman’s practice of minting toxic, mortgage-backed securities and badgering credit-rating companies for the highest rating for those securities, while betting in the market that those securities would later fail.

  Angelides likened this business practice to “selling someone a car with faulty brakes and then taking out an insurance policy on the driver.” With Friday’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing of civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, we learned more about those faulty vehicles. We learned that Goldman had cut the brakes.

• Goldman Sachs taps ex-White House counsel

  Goldman Sachs is launching an aggressive response to its political and legal challenges with an unlikely ally at its side — President Barack Obama’s former White House counsel, Gregory Craig.

• Fuld says was in dark about accounting device

  Richard Fuld, whose October 2008 appearance before lawmakers was marked by protesters with signs reading “shame” and “cap greed”, returns to Washington D.C. on Tuesday to answer questions about the accounting gimmicks alleged by a court-appointed examiner.

• More Must be Done to Stop Foreclosures

  Foreclosure filings were at historic highs in March — 367,056 — an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, and the highest monthly total since 2005, according to RealtyTrac. Almost two years after the onset of the financial crisis with unemployment at historic highs, nothing is being done to put a stop to this on-going tragedy.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Chamber Publicizes Bogus Poll

  On its Web site, Ayres McHenry is open about its Republican leanings. It identifies itself as a Republican-affiliated firm. Its founder, Whit Ayres, belongs to the National Association of Republican Campaign Professionals, and the Web site says that Whit Ayres is a member of the Association’s Board of Directors.

  Media outlets broadcasting information about the Chamber’s polls and their conclusions would do well to research Ayres McHenry and its reputation, and inform readers know about the firm’s — and the Chamber’s — recent history of bias and poor poll quality.

• Will the Real Tea Party Movement Please Stand Up?

  The PR proposal obtained by Politico was written by Joe Wierzbicki, a principal at Russo Marsh & Rogers. In it, Wierzbicki suggests essentially taking over the Tea Party movement by rushing in with campaign-style event planning and advance work. He suggests obtaining a “proper luxury coach wrapped in ‘tea party’-themed graphical design,” and sending it out to “cross the nation, stopping in cities to conduct ‘tea parties.’ ” Wierzbicki suggests inviting local Tea Party leaders, talk radio hosts and fiscally-conservative political candidates to speak at each stop. Wierzbicki says a major fundraising effort would be needed “to ‘do this ‘right’ (have an awesome looking tour bus, getting the word out, having slick/persuasive/compelling advertising, paying for permits/insurance hotels, food, etc… ). He suggests that, to raise the money, “the bus tour rallies focus not on asking for funds to support the tour, but on the ” ‘Defeat Harry Reid’ or ‘Defeat Chris Dodd’ or ‘Defeat Arlen Specter’ political components to this effort.” In other words, Wierzbicki suggests exploiting the real Tea Partiers’ emotions to raise money, and take the focus off the PR project itself. He also suggests renting email lists from conservative news outlets like Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, etc. to begin direct fundraising — again, not a cheap endeavor.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Supreme Court rejects animal cruelty law, upholds free speech

  The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a federal law that criminalized photographs and other depictions of animal cruelty, saying the law violated free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.

• Is YouTube’s Safety Mode Safe? Not Very.

  Unfortunately, for me, the filter didn’t work. But because no two people share the same standard, here’s a short exercise so you can judge for yourself. You need a computer, a browser and a live Internet connection.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Filesharers to have internet cut

  An important High Court decision today allowing Eircom proceed with cutting off internet access to illegal music downloaders, mainly peer-to-peer music sharing groups, has major implications for all other internet service providers.

  Legal sources predict the judgment by Mr Justice Peter Charleton may compel other internet service providers to cut off services to illegal downloaders who fail to heed warnings to desist what the judge described as “theft”.

• Bush’s Illegal Wiretapping Tab: $612,000

  The two American lawyers who were illegally wiretapped by the Bush administration asked a federal judge Friday to order the government to pay $612,000 in damages, plus legal fees for their attorneys.

  The demand (.pdf) comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the former administration wiretapped the lawyers’ telephone conversations (.pdf) without a warrant, in violation of federal law.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Is Piracy Really Killing The Music Industry? No!

  For more than a decade the music industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. However, looking at the sales data of the music industry itself shows that the disappointing income might be better explained by a third factor that is systematically ignored.

• RIAA, MPAA Outline Plans for Draconian Copyright Laws

  Submit brief to govt “anti-piracy czar” Victoria A. Espinel bemoaning industry losses, and outlining a plan to crackdown on online copyright infringement. Among the proposals are website filtering, search engine keyword blocking, a crackdown on domain name registrars and proxy services, monitoring of social networks for promotion of infringing websites, bandwidth throttling, and “consumer tools” installed on home PCs that detect and delete illegally obtained copyrighted material.

• Copyrights

  • Keane ‘horrified’ by Tories’ use of hit single

    Rock band Keane have said that the Conservative Party did not seek their permission to use one of their hits at their election manifesto launch.

  • OK Go Chats With Planet Money About The Music Business

    That said, OK Go left EMI amicably, and Kulash is quite appreciative of the music labels. He calls them “risk aggregators” and commends them for funding the initial monetary investment necessary to get his band off the ground. However, with the costs of music production plummeting in recent years, the days of needing huge advances just to cut an album are numbered.

• ACTA

  • Now That Everyone’s Seen ACTA, USTR Says ‘It’s Time To Release It’

    That or the massive public rebuke the USTR has been receiving from almost every quarter on this particular agreement. The full document gets “released” on Wednesday, and we expect it to be… well, pretty much like what was leaked last month.

• Devices/Embedded

Synaptics Brings Advanced MultiTouch To Linux

Listen to Tom and Larry discuss this announcement in the April 20 episode (#100) of the Going Linux Podcast.

Is The Linux Brand Poisoned?

Of the 109 people asked, 71 did not know. 24 of them responded with the generic equivalent of “It’s some sort of computer program”. The remaining number were able to accurately describe Linux as an operating system or a server solution. Out of that 109 queried, 7 used Mac exclusively to run their businesses. I did not pre-choose the businesses I spoke to. They were chosen from a three block downtown area of Austin and a large business park located in North Austin.

Announcing the 2010 We’re Linux Video Winners

I am pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 We’re Linux Video Contest. We had quite a few amazing videos to choose from, many of which captured the spirit of Linux.

Applications

• Bombono DVD—Open-Source DVD Authoring Software

  Bombono is a simple to use DVD authoring program that doesn’t have the steep learning curve of many others in its field. Or in the words of the Web site: “Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is easy to use and has nice and clean GUI (Gtk).”

• Instructionals

  • How to View and Extract Files from rpm, deb, depot and msi Packages

  • Configure Tata Photon Whiz On Ubuntu Linux

  • Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard Drive

  • Integrating Zoho Online Office Suite with Ubuntu [Ubuntu 10.04]

  • Removing a column from a MySQL data table

  • Install Ubuntu Lucid Themes(Radiance/Ambiance) and Wallpaper in Ubuntu Karmic,Jaunty Using PPA

  • How to install Dropbox in Lubuntu

  • Ubuntu Restricted Extras – Lets Ubuntu Play Everything

  • Crontab Entries for Unix or Linux Servers Made Simple

  • Installing PowerDNS (With MySQL Backend) And Poweradmin On Ubuntu 9.10

  • Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 3

  • 7 Useful Linux Networking Commands

  • WordPress For the Web Developer: How To Write Your Own Plugins

  • Installing VirtualBox on Linux

  • Create Ringtones For Your iPhone Using Linux

  • ModSecurity: Allowing GoogleBot

  • Using a Hauppauge PVR 150/250/350/500 TV Tuner card in Ubuntu/Linux

• Games

  • 24 More of the Best Linux Commercial Games (Part 3 of 3)

    Shadowgrounds Alien-battling carnage festival
    Sacred: Gold Edition Action role-playing game
    Awesome Soccer Modern day homage to the legendary Sensible Soccer and Kick Off 2
    Mad Skills Motocross Fast and furious arcade motocross action
    Jack Keane Colorful and cartoon like adventure in the spirit of Monkey Island
    KreiselBall 2D action platform game with a classical game play with puzzle elements
    Mystic Mine Navigate your cart to collect coins against the clock
    Brukkon Puzzle game slightly inspired by Sokoban

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• Interview with Thiago Macieira

  Hello, my name is Thiago Macieira, Brazilian, 28 and I’m currently living in Oslo, Norway. I graduated with a double degree in Engineering in 2004 and I am also holding an MBA. I am now working for Qt Development Frameworks in Nokia and still somewhat involved in KDE activities (but not as much as I used to be).

  When did you first hear about KDE?
  Oh, sometime in 1998 or 1999. I don’t remember exactly. I remember being on IRC somewhere and someone pointed me to www.kde.org, which had that picture of a computer and was asking if Unix was ready for the desktop. I remember thinking, “yeah, right, this project will never be successful”.

Devices/Embedded

• Sharp updates NetWalker to be Linux tablet

  In August last year Sharp introduced a new device it referred to as an ultra-compact netbook. It was named the NetWalker, and went to market in September.

• Android

  • Xperia X10 To Get Multitouch and Android 2.1 in September?

    According to mobiles.co.uk, during the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, a rep said that the X10 is due for a very “big” update come second half of 2010, around September maybe.

  • Motorola Prototype Surfaces, Yet Another Form Factor

    You have to give Motorola credit for not churning out the same handset over and over. It’s simple to take the route of either a slab phone or sliding QWERTY, yet Motorola keeps coming up with various form factors for Android. Take a look at the pictures below and you’ll see the first images of a Motorola phone which borrows a tad from the KRAVE ZN4 design.

  • Hands on T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide

    We previously reported that several hundred myTouch 3G Slide phones were gifted to select T-Mobile employees last week in Las Vegas. These units were handed out early in a joint effort by T-Mobile and HTC so users could test out the phones and provide their feedback before launch. One of our sources was lucky enough to receive this phone and they were nice enough to provide us with a 30 minute virtual hands on.

  • HTC Desire To Launch On U.S. Cellular This Summer

    If you don’t know by now( and you probably do), the HTC Desire is a top-notch smartphone. Featuring Android 2.1, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, and a 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED screen, the Desire is loaded up with HTC’s custom Sense user interface, which many find classier than stock Android.

  • Comparing Apples and Androids

    Is Google perfect? Of course not, but at least with respect to Android, they are a more welcome dance partner than Apple at present.

    As a good friend recently commented to me about a situation out of my control, “you cannot always make other people do the right thing”.

    Let’s hope Apple relents and we can continue loving and hating them based on technology alone.

  • Google bypassing Chrome OS for its tablet device?

    Google is reportedly working on a tablet computer based on its Android operating system, not the Chrome OS. Google has declined to comment on the tablet rumor, but that hasn’t stopped analysts from mulling over the operating system choice.

• Sub-notebooks

  • New Solomons study puts hard evidence of OLPC’s positive impact

    The OLPC program provides rugged, low-cost, connected laptops to children in developing countries. The program seeks to encourage learning by engaging students in a range of educational software undertaken both individually and with eachother via the XO laptop. The software, called “activities” in the OLPC system, come pre-installed on the laptop for immediate use, or they can be adapted to suit local needs, or supplemented by wholly local content.
    OLPC Oceania is one of three programs carried out under the Pacific Plan Digital Strategy with the support of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. The Solomon Islands trial was also undertaken with the technical and resource support of the region-wide initiative, “One Laptop per Pacific Child”.

75 Open Source Tools to Replace Apps You Use Every Day

Can open source tools replace all closed source software? That is, are open source tools – freely downloadable software – really just as good as software you have to pay for?

In a lot of cases, the answer is yes. In fact, in some cases, open source tools offers features or performance benefits that surpass their commercial counterparts.

Where’s the Summer of Documentation?

Google has been running its Summer of Code program since 2005. It has reached out to hundreds of open source programs and distributed millions of dollars to try to encourage more people to get involved with open source. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the pressing need that many projects have to develop more docs to go with the software they already have. Now Fedora is ramping up a “Summer of Coding for 2010, and yet again — it’s all about code doesn’t address any other forms of contribution.

On projects and their goals

More generally, every project has to have some idea of the problem it is trying to solve. In some ways, that’s a far more important part of a project than any specific body of code or any specific developer. One of the best things about free software is that it’s alive; it will evolve and, with any luck, be better tomorrow. A project’s goals say a lot about how it can be expected to evolve. In your editor’s opinion, both Subversion and Ubuntu have set worthwhile goals, and both seem to be trying to work toward those goals. These are good things; our community is richer for the existence of both.

Cisco completes Tandberg takeover and offers to open source telepresence code

Cisco has announced it has completed its £2.17bn acquisition of Norwegian video systems maker Tandberg and is launching a compulsory bid for the outstanding 8.9% shares it does not yet own.

Marthin De Beer , Cisco’s senior vice-president for its emerging technologies group, said the company “strongly believed” that telepresence, would allow everyone, everywhere, to be more productive through the pervasive use of video and face-to-face collaboration. The full Tandberg product line is now part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio, he said.

Events

• Open Source Think Tank: The Way Forward

  I have just finished attending the Fifth Annual Open Source Think Tank, hosted by Andrew Aitken and I at Meritage in Napa Valley. Andrew and his team did a great job of organizing the event.

Mozilla

• Firefox add-on said to blunt Google’s data collection tactics

  A computer security researcher has launched a project designed to provide people greater privacy when using Google, as the company expands the scope of data its collects about its users.

• Firefox Speed Test

  OK happily there has been a large speed up in 3.7.a4 as regards to the filtering.

  The filter operation in 3.7.a4 takes 6 times less than it did in 3.6.

  It does not look as if the reload time has seen any improvement.

  The improvements in 3.7.a4 are very encouraging but it makes you wonder what Google is doing to get such incredible sub 10sec times.

  Luckily as it is open source someone can go have a look

Education

• Open Source: Modernizing India’s education system

  Over the last few years, open source adoption has been growing within India’s education system. Five years ago, the South Indian state of Kerala, pioneered open source in schools with its famous IT@Schools project, that now covers three million students from the 5th-10 standards, involves 200,000 teachers across 4071 schools. Since then, other Indian states like Karnataka, Gujarat, Assam, West Bengal and others have made open source a key part of their school education initiatives.

Government

• NL: Open source desktops manage shared office space ministries

  Twenty desktop PCs running the Ubuntu Linux distribution are used to manage the services at a shared office building in the Hague for all Dutch ministries, since the beginning of this month.

  The shared office building, called Rijkskantoor Beatrixpark, facilitates ministries working together on temporary projects, and offers the ministries extra office space when needed.

• Citizens ask e-government project to use open source and standards

  Two hundred Romanians have signed a petition urging Gabriel Sandu, the Minister for Communications and Information Society, to support open source software on e-government projects. They also ask him to use open standards and to make government data public electronically.

  The petition was organised by APTI, a Romanian Association for Technology and Internet. It was organised on-line regarding the eRomânia project, a 500 million euro project proposal to make government services and information available electronically. The project has been discussed for the past few years, and minister Sandu is one of its supporters.

• PT: Government procurement agency approves use of open source

  The Portuguese government agency for public procurement has published a list of open source applications it deems suitable for use by public administrations.

  The selected open source applications are now part of the official software catalogue published by Portugal’s procurement authority, the Agência Nacional de Compras Públicas, ANCP. Included on ANCP’s list are the database management system MySQL, content management system Alfresco, email server Scalix and server and desktop operating systems Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux.

Licensing

• New binary analysis tool finds FOSS in device firmware

  The most popular copyleft license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), has become a powerful enabler of collaboration, but a growing number of companies fall afoul of its requirements. Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) revealed last year that he finds an average of one new GPL violator every day. A GPL violation constitutes copyright infringement and puts the violator in a position where they risk having their license to use the software terminated. The SFLC and a handful of other organizations such as gpl-violations.org, attempt to educate companies about GPL compliance and help them conform with the requirements of the license.

Programming

• Groovy++ goes fully open source

  Groovy++, the static typing compiler extension for Groovy, is to be released as open source under the Apache Public Licence 2.0. The Groovy++ project started last year and at the time Alex Tkachman, project founder said Groovy++’s compiler “uses several pieces of technology, which our company uses and plans to use in our commercial products. It was not critical when [the] project started as [an] experiment, but now we need to extract these parts and replace/rewrite [them] with proper open-source alternatives”. Since Tkachman has now announced that the source will be released under the APL 2.0 this process appears to be complete.

Standards/Consortia

• Final Notes from the ODF Plugfest in Granada

  A representative of the Spanish Ministry of Presidency, Miguel Angel Amutio Gomez, started the day explaining the crucial points of the Spanish law 11/2007: the right for everybody to use whatever digital technology they like best and the obligation for all Public Administrations to avoid discrimination of citizens based on their technological choices. In order to make this possible, the law stresses the importance of open standards, setting the goal that all e-government services and documents become available at least through such standards. In this context, Amutio said, the Spanish National Interoperability Framework (NIF) that A. Barrionuevo presented in the first day becomes an essential legal test for all Spanish organizations.

7,500 Online Shoppers Unknowingly Sold Their Souls

A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

Finance

• Paulson May Face Litigation Following Goldman Suit, Whalen Says

  Paulson & Co., the world’s third- largest manager of hedge funds, may face civil litigation for its role in the collateralized debt obligations that led to the fraud charges against Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to Christopher Whalen.

• Goldman Sachs faces scrutiny in EU

• Goldman Sachs Faces U.K., German Regulatory Reviews

• Germany considering legal action against Goldman Sachs: report

• European regulators to open own probes of Goldman Sachs

  Financial regulators in London and Germany on Monday said they would open investigations to see whether Goldman Sachs’s sale of mortgage securities broke any local laws following the disclosure that two European banks had lost money on what U.S. officials allege were fraudulent transactions.

• German Government May Take Legal Action Against Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS)

  It now appears that Germany may take legal action against Goldman Sachs because the New York-financial firm sold some of the CDOs to a German bank.

• Treasurys reverse some gains made on Goldman, Greece worries

• Goldman Sachs Stock, Board Under Pressure Amid Probe

  Prime Minister Gordon Brown called yesterday for the U.K. Financial Services Authority to start a probe, saying he was “shocked” at the “moral bankruptcy” indicated in the Securities and Exchange Commission suit against Goldman Sachs. Germany’s financial regulator, Bafin, asked the SEC for details on the suit, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

• CREDIT MARKETS: Recovery Eclipsed By SEC Goldman Probe

  Despite continued evidence of an economic recovery, bank and broker bonds continued to soften Monday, eroded by a steady stream of negative financial newsflow stemming from the SEC’s probe into misconduct at Goldman Sachs (GS).

• SEC Said to Vote 3-2 to Sue Goldman Sachs Over CDOs

• Goldman Sachs could roil California governor race

  The SEC investigation of Goldman Sachs could hurt California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who as CEO of eBay sat on the investment bank’s board.

• Goldman Sachs investigation could put Wall Street under microscope

  As Fabrice Tourre sat through a meeting on 2 February 2007, he appeared to know he was taking part in an unusual event. The Goldman Sachs executive, who is at the heart of the $1bn fraud allegations being levelled against the Wall Street firm, emailed a colleague during the meeting to describe it as “surreal”.

• Fabrice Tourre: Fabulous or Fatally Flawed?

  The S.E.C. case revolves around how much say Mr. Paulson had in building the portfolio that he would eventually short, whether that role was disclosed to ACA and those who eventually bought the C.D.O.’s, and if Goldman’s clients were given the impression that Mr. Paulson’s interest was aligned with theirs on the deal, or against them.

  Mr. Tourre’s words, like Henry Blodget’s before him, have come back to haunt him after the crash, with the the S.E.C. citing two especially colorful bits in its filing:

  [P]ortions of an e-mail in French and English sent by Mr. Tourre to a friend on Jan.23, 2007 stated, in English translation where applicable: “More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!” Similarly, an e-mail on Feb. 11, 2007 to Mr. Tourre from the head of Goldman’s structured product correlation trading desk stated in part, “the cdo biz is dead we don’t have a lot of time left.”

• Goldman Sachs substandard on its subprime disclosures

  In this Too Big To Fail world, people at every investment bank share different views on the same investments. While Goldman was buying these mortgages, one of its vice presidents, Fabrice Tourre, wrote: “The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. … Only potential survivor the fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

• With S.E.C. Suit, Goldman Faces Major Test

  But a few desks away, Mr. Tourre and Mr. Egol were quietly working on the Abacus deals.

  They were, former colleagues say, something of an odd couple. A slight man with a flair for salesmanship, Mr. Tourre joined Goldman in 2001, after coming to the United States to study business operations at Stanford. At Goldman, he courted investors like European banks and big hedge funds.

• Goldman Sachs: Too Big To Obey The Law

  On a short-term tactical basis, Goldman Sachs clearly has little to fear. It has relatively deep pockets and will fight the securities “Fab” allegations tooth and nail; resolving that case, through all the appeals stages, will take many years. Friday’s announcement had a significant negative impact on the market perception of Goldman’s franchise value – partly because what they are accused of doing to unsuspecting customers is so disgusting. But, as a Bank of America analyst (Guy Mozkowski) points out this morning, the dollar amount of this specific allegation is small relative to Goldman’s overall business and – frankly – Goldman’s market position is so strong that most customers feel a lack of plausible alternatives.

• AIG-Goldman Sachs Trades Should Be Probed by SEC, Cummings Says

• Goldman Sachs SEC Case May Hinge on Meaning of Word ‘Selected’

• Lehman Subpoenas Goldman Sachs, SAC Capital in Probe

• Oil futures end lower on Goldman Sachs worries

• Sen. Dodd cites Goldman Sachs in push for financial reform bill

  The financial reform bill pending in the Senate would have prevented the type of dealings that led to a civil complaint against Goldman Sachs, Sen. Christopher Dodd, the sponsor of the bill, said Monday.

• Goldman ‘Shenanigans’ to Be Barred by Bill, Dodd Says

  Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said failure to enact his financial overhaul bill would leave the American public vulnerable to “shenanigans” at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other large firms.

• Goldman Sachs Suit May Prompt Wider Probe, Regulation

• Goldman Sachs, the SEC and Countrywide

• The Fall Of Goldman Sachs?

  The last 72 hours have left Goldman Sachs with a shattered reputation among the people who matter to them, their customers and the politicians they have courted. The SEC’s civil fraud suit over one of their synthetic CDO deals is bad enough, but it’s just getting worse and worse for them.

• Wall Street waits for fallout from Goldman Sachs fraud allegations

Intellectual Monopolies

• RIAA Wants Gov. to Delete Your Illegal Downloads

  Big Brother is watching you. Actually, it’s the RIAA and the MPAA, especially if you’re parked on a BitTorrent client. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that both organizations–along with a few others–want to take the file-monitoring process a huge step further by infiltrating consumer PCs and deleting the infringing content off their hard drives. How? Through “anti-infringement” spyware developed and enforced by the government.

  This is no joke.

• Secret Anti-Piracy Treaty Details Going Public

  Countries negotiating a major cross-border agreement to crack down on intellectual property crimes have agreed to release previously secret draft language of the controversial accord this week.

  The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has confirmed plans to publish the draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) this Wednesday, following a series of successful negotiations in the eighth round of talks on the agreement last week in New Zealand.

  USTR spokeswoman Nefterius McPherson said that the negotiating countries are very close to a final deal, though differences remain over the language concerning enforcement mechanisms for dealing with trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy.