04.21.10
Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 2:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Poor man’s ballot?
Summary: Microsoft makes it difficult to install a Web browser other than its already-installed and already-flawed Internet Explorer 8
THE BROWSER BALLOT has already been through many changes since it was first introduced. Microsoft kept cheating or simply left some self-serving bugs in tact. We wrote about the subject in:
- Browser Ballot Critique
- Microsoft’s Fake “Choice” Campaign is Back
- Microsoft Claimed to be Cheating in Web Browsers Ballot
- Microsoft Loses Impact in the Web Despite Unfair Ballot Placements
- Given Choice, Customers Reject Microsoft
- Microsoft is Still Cheating in Browser Ballot — Claim
Rob Weir from IBM shows that Microsoft’s ballot, which it was forced to implement in order to avoid fines (a lot of the press still gets it wrong by characterising it as Microsoft fairness), is simply broken. See the screenshots in Weir’s blog as they are self explanatory.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft’s “browser choice” ballot page in Europe, which in its debut used a flawed algorithm when attempting to perform a “random shuffle” of the browser choices, a feature specifically called for in their agreement with the EU. This bug was fixed soon after it was reported. But I recently received an email from a correspondent going by the name “Skoon” who reported a more serious bug, but one that is seen only in the Polish-language translation of the ballot choice screen.
In other news, there is a major new flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. [via]
The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat.
According to a presentation at this year’s Black Hat Europe conference, the issue introduces security problems at several high-profile websites, including Microsoft’s own Bing.com (screenshot), Google.com, Wikipedia.org, Twitter.com (screenshot) and just about any site that lets IE 8 users create profiles.
Yes, Microsoft’s browser is still lagging when it comes to security due to negligence and incompetence [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. But it’s not entirely surprising that while 4 governments encouraged their citizens to abandon Internet Explorer this year, the MSBBC continues to produce Microsoft adverts, including the many Internet Explorer endorsements that we find in the MSBBC [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] on a regular basis (and occasionally report those for scrutiny). Our reader ThistleWeb has more to say about the MSBBC’s latest Infomercial:
I saw this promo piece in the BBC about the launch of Microsoft’s new Fix-it service and a few things spring to mind. The first is that Microsoft have a long track record of causing more problems than they fix when applying updates. They set Windows to download and apply all critical updates without user intervention. So when a user goes to shut down their PC they have no idea if they have to hang around for 15 mins so that Windows can apply it’s updates or not. Similarly they have no idea if those updates will cause a problem when they next start up their PC.
The second is that Microsoft have a history of abusing the term “critical” and slipping in programs like the Orwellian titled WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage). This was apparently a feature a large number of their customers were screaming out for and Microsoft being a listening, concerned company felt they had no choice but to provide; if you believe Micorosoft’s PR about it. WGA checks regularly if the copy of Windows it’s running on is licensed or unlicensed. If it deems that install of Windows to be unlicensed it causes no end of hassle for the user by disabling services, rebooting, nagware messages about “please contact Microsoft to buy a Windows product key”. It’s no advantage to customers, only to Microsoft. Yet this has been defined by Microsoft as a “critical” update. To me “critical” means “your PC is at immediate risk without this update”.
We have written about this before; in fact, Microsoft marks as “critical” anything that’s critical to Microsoft, not to the user. This is probably why one in two Windows PCs is still estimated to be a zombie. █
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Posted in America, Apple, Asia, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 2:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How proprietary software disables freedom and discourages solidarity, based on the actions of Apple and Microsoft
LAST WEEK we highlighted a case where Apple was censoring applications based on their content and this week Apple is still receiving flak for blocking any application not written/developed with tools that Apple does endorse (because they’re Apple’s). “Steve Jobs bans all apps from iPhone (or thereabouts),” says this headline from The Register:
You could argue that the new Jobsian SDK bars developers from writing any application for the iPhone – unless they possess some sort of savant-like ability to think solely in Objective C.
The much-discussed software development kit for the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 says that native applications must be “originally written” in Objective C, C, or C++, forbidding developers from using any sort of “translation or compatibility layer.” If you take this legalese to its logical extreme, it rules out just about anything you can think of.
With or without these compatibility layers, Apple has security problems, so the only apparent justification Apple may have here is one of control. Adobe will receive none and the same goes for Novell and Microsoft, whose MonoTouch toolset is being blocked [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (and yet, Miguel de Icaza and his team continue to ‘help’ Apple with Microsoft APIs).
We regularly stress that Free software is about one’s freedom, independence, and control. It’s not about price, although price is also a selling point, especially in particular areas of the world. Proprietary software, which Apple and Microsoft are championing, is the very opposite of all that. GNU/Linux or BSD cannot be assessed at the same level as OS X and Windows on a purely technical basis as that would be comparing apples and oranges or comparing commercials for a toothpaste to an advisory from Greenpeace.
“Brazil used unauthorized copies of software as an excuse in the 90s to arrest activists of the landless rural workers’ movement. [...] To protect themselves, they moved to GNU/Linux. Everyone else should do that too.”
–Richard StallmanOn we move to Microsoft. Last week we wrote about Microsoft agents (whom Microsoft used to work with) shutting down free speech in Kyrgyzstan [1, 2]. Carlo from TechDirt wrote about it, but he hadn’t gotten the update about Microsoft actually being indirectly involved. Richard Stallman wrote about this too, under the heading “Microsoft lends helping hand to global authoritarianism“; he explains that “Police in Kyrgyzstan used “unauthorized copies of software” as an excuse to shut down a TV station which was broadcasting news about protestors.
“I was disappointed that the article uses the propaganda terms “pirated” and “Intellectual Property”. The latter term is so misleading that even quoting a name in which it appears spreads confusion if you don’t deconstruct the term. See here for more information.
“Also, to say that “software piracy” is a “legitimate problem” whitewashes the real problem: proprietary software which forbid redistribution.
“Brazil used unauthorized copies of software as an excuse in the 90s to arrest activists of the landless rural workers’ movement. In that case, the copies really were unauthorized, but that didn’t alter the effect. To protect themselves, they moved to GNU/Linux. Everyone else should do that too.”
As we explained last week, the same thing happened to brave journalists in Russia. Proprietary software limits people’s expression and creativity. Nobody deserves this type of treatment. It is often being said the people come to realise what “freedom” really means only when they lose it; otherwise it’s taken for granted. █
“‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.”
–Richard Stallman
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04.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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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.”
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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.
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Desktop
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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.
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Server
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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.
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Kernel Space
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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.
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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.
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Graphics Stack
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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.
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Applications
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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)
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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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.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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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.
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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! 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Peppermint
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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.
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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.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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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.
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Red Hat Family
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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.
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Fedora
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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.
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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.
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Debian Family
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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.
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Ubuntu
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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.
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This blog post is about the recent work done in aptdaemon – the backend used by Ubuntu’s software-center to install/remove packages.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Android
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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.
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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.
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Sub-notebooks
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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.
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Tablets
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Events
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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.
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Databases
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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.
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CMS
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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.
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Business
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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.
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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.
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Releases
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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.
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Programming
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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.
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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?
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Standards/Consortia
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Security/Aggression
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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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.
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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.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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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.
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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.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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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”.
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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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.
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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.
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Copyrights
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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.
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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.
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ACTA
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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.
SourceCode Season 1: Episode 7 (2004)
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Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search, Ubuntu at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s Blake Irving becomes the chief technology officer of Yahoo! (latest among several Microsoft proponents who run the ‘new’ Yahoo!)
WHENEVER people depart from Microsoft they may actually become more of a problem than when they were inside Microsoft. The Microsoft influence grows wings and moves on to other companies, sometimes competitors.
It’s a good thing that Canonical abandoned Yahoo! right before the release of Ubuntu 10.04. As we have shown in recent weeks, Yahoo! is fast becoming just a department of Microsoft [1, 2, 3], having been hijacked through proxy agents like Carl Icahn.
The latest news is that Microsoft’s Blake Irving, whom we named as a rumoured candidate for a top position at Yahoo!, is now confirmed to be in. He will become Yahoo’s chief technology officer.
As it promised, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has moved very quickly to replace CTO and EVP of products Ari Balogh, who said earlier this month that he was leaving for “personal reasons.” The company says Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) veteran Blake Irving will be its new chief product officer. Irving had been a long-time executive at Microsoft, who—among other roles—led the back-end of its Windows Live platform, but “retired” three years ago, shortly before a major reorganization of Microsoft’s online operations. He’s worked since as a professor at Pepperdine’s business school.
One reader of ours cites this article and says that “Yahoo will finally stop pretending to be an independent company and take up its new role as the search arm of Microsoft. Not being totally merged so as to escape the monopolies commission…” █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Ubuntu at 9:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Simon Law
Summary: Canonical’s chief technology officer talks about the problem with Microsoft controlling Mono
IN a new interview with Canonical’s CTO, Matt Zimmerman, he says “Free software” rather than “Open Source”, which is a good sign [1, 2]. For example:
UT: What are the targets and the plans of Ubuntu project in five years?
MZ: [Matt Zimmerman] Ubuntu is a vehicle for the expression of free software in people’s lives, so to some extent, the goals of Ubuntu are the goals of free software.
I think that free software must synthesize people’s experience of the web and the desktop. The divide between these two technological realms is limiting free software innovation by fragmenting the ecosystem. Along the way, we will need to resolve questions of freedom and autonomy on the web, and enable the community to embrace the web in ways which have not been possible yet.
The interview as a whole is very good, including the part where he talks about Mono and explains why it is further down in the list of priorities. The Source has already summarised the key points raised by Zimmerman:
There are risks in choosing the .NET platform to develop free software. And I am pleased that Mr. Zimmerman realizes that is exactly what Mono is: the .NET platform (albeit a gimped and tail-lights chasing stepchild implementation).
I also greatly appreciate Mr. Zimmerman’s points:
* Microsoft is in “ultimate control” (despite Team Apologista’s desperate protestations)
* Microsoft has multiple ways to wield .NET offensively
* It would be logical for them to do so
* they have acted similarly in the past
* they have said they would act similarly the future.
As the FSF has already stated quite formally, Mono or C# should not be treated as frameworks of choice. It’s nothing to do with “hate”; it’s simply a logical consideration. █
“[...] we know that Microsoft is getting patents on some features of C#. So I think it’s dangerous to use C#, and it may be dangerous to use Mono.”
–Richard Stallman, 2006
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Listen to Tom and Larry discuss this announcement in the April 20 episode (#100) of the Going Linux Podcast.
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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.
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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.
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Applications
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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).”
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Instructionals
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Games
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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
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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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”.
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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.
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Android
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sub-notebooks
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Events
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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.
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Mozilla
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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.
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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
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Education
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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.
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Government
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Licensing
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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.
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Programming
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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.
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Standards/Consortia
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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.
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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”.
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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.”
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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!!!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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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.
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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.
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04.19.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s an old debate among Linux enthusiasts, but new to me. Not because I haven’t heard it before, but because I haven’t really experienced it until now. There’s a lot of talk in the Linux and free open-source software (FOSS) communities about freedom and choice. It’s practically a mantra for many. Most of us non-geeky ordinary desktop users are simply grateful to have an alternative to Windows that doesn’t require a huge investment in new hardware and expensive software licenses. To us ordinary desktop users, “freedom” and “choice” in Linux and FOSS mean that we are no longer stuck with unsatisfactory and expensive Microsoft (or Apple, I suppose, as well) products.
But my “inner geek” apparently spent his vacation time mulling over a fuller meaning of Linux/FOSS “freedom” and “choice.” When he returned yesterday, he arrived with a Debian Linux installation CD and gave me a stirring speech about it. Most desktop users don’t concern themselves with things that they think have nothing to do with them. But I do, because I’m a wonderful, exceptional person.
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Applications
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On Friday we were briefed by Synaptics that they would be “announcing much-desired capabilities for notebook PCs running Linux and other open source operating systems”, which we found out to mean that they were bringing their Synaptics Gesture Suite software to Linux. Today this announcement has now been made in the form of a press release.
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Have you wanted multi-touch support on your notebook’s touchpad, but were out of luck because you’ve been running Ubuntu? Synaptics announced today the extension of its Gesture Suite to several Linux operating systems, which means that you can now zoom, flick, rotate, and ChiralScroll to your heart’s content on your Linux box.
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Apple’s multitouch finger controls on the iPad have inspired a wave of copycat tablet computers that will be out later this year. Those copycats are likely to get help from touch-sensor company Synaptics, which is announcing today that it has created a Linux version of its multitouch sensor system.
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As I’ve been learning to use DesktopCouch, I’ve come to understand the key role that writing map and reduce functions play. Basically, a view is stored map function and optional reduce function. I still haven’t quite figured out reduce functions, especially wrt rereduce.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Prey is a really great title. It has everything. Maybe too much. I’m not sure I’ll have the guts to see it through, just like I chickened out with Doom 3. Call me a sissy, but this is a great testimony to the game’s depth and quality. Then again, id folks always knew how to make games.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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The ‘focus‘ word has many meanings, ranging from the optical concept of ‘good convergence of light rays generated by an object’ to the cognitive process of directing the attention to a particular target while ignoring other targets.
Now the interesting part: this concept can be used in computers too, especially in user interfaces, to direct the user to relevant information or to help him through a step-by-step process. How to do that? Since every image you see on screen is ‘on focus’ by default, you can easily unfocus unuseful information.
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Arch Linux makes it acceptably light and fast, and with the addition of a very lightweight desktop, it’s a working-class computer. As you can see I added the old ath5k-based PCMCIA wireless card, which gives it decent download speeds, and the entire graphical desktop, plus nfs and ssh can all run in under 30Mb of memory with a little swap used. Triggering rtorrent and screen-vs over ssh takes care of the actual “work,” and all the rest is cake.
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As a test for my new torrent slave, I downloaded an ISO of VortexBox, which is something I hadn’t ever heard of, probably because I don’t travel in Fedora circles very much. I had no rationale for grabbing that torrent; it just happened to be at the top of the stack at linuxtracker.org.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Good news for all who are looking for a Mature “Just-Works” Desktop. PCLinuxOS 2010 bandwagon is released. This time Tex and the Gang has offered 6 releases: Main KDE Desktop, KDE MiniMe Desktop, Gnome Desktop, Gnome ZenMini Desktop, LXDE Desktop, XFCE Desktop and Openbox Desktop.
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Fedora
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While we were trying to find a few good activities to show off the collaborative capabilities of the OLPC, we found out that the wifi connection was no longer working on it. So we decided to go ahead and use our developer key and try out some of the newer OS versions for the OLPC.
We now have Sugar 0.84.14 and build version 13 running on it. Some things that we found out about this version is that it is running Fedora in a switchable desktop from Sugar to Fedora we have taken some pictures..
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Fedora 13 Beta has just been released for testing and bug reporting, with the stable version slated for release in May. Thanks to boot.fedoraproject.org, I didn’t have to download the full CD iso image. Used the same bfo iso image from last month and took the Fedora 13 beta out for spin. But rather than dish out a full review of this beta release (I only review stable releases), I’m using this article to showcase a new storage feature of Anaconda. A storage capability that is not available on any other non-enterprise Linux distribution.
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Debian Family
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There are some superb desktop Linux distributions that are designed to work with very old hardware. For example, Puppy Linux is a great choice to quickly turn an old PC into a secure, easy to use word processing, email and light web browsing workstation. Puppy can work minor miracles on very old hardware, and I carry a Puppy boot CD-ROM around with me as my emergency recovery system.
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Do you consider yourself to be fairly familiar with the Debian Linux distribution? I thought I was familiar with it enough to know its origin and history, how its name was derived and that Richard Stallman, the Father of the Free Software movement, uses a Debian derivative (gNewSense) for his own personal computer. There’s one significant piece of the Debian puzzle that I didn’t know about: Its Constitution.
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Ubuntu
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One of my biggest complains about Apple is iTunes. Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple. They offer fantastic (albeit overpriced) hardware, a solid operating system, and a killer aesthetic. But as for iTunes – you won’t find much love in this heart for that powerhouse music mecca. What you will find is contempt. I don’t think I need to go off on the why I loathe iTunes. Why? Because everything the UbuntuOne Music Store is is what iTunes is not.
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Ubuntu, undeniably, is in a great moment, one can say that it has achieved enough traction to trail its own way. When I first had contact with Ubuntu, and it was in the times of 6.06 and 6.10, Ubuntu seemed a better Knoppix than Knoppix . The Distro was very promising, showing signs that it would bring Linux, until then, an arcane magic of geeks and nerds, for the average user.
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The USC as it is in Lucid is really great. Well polished, nicely categorized and above all easy to navigate. However, don’t you think there is still one thing missing? Look up an application and it comes up with brief descriptions of what it does. Then you have a place there that tells you the price (in all cases that I have seen, FREE).
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I recently downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx Beta2 for testing. I love what I am seeing, so I want to share some of my initial impressions on what seems to be a release that could mark a milestone in Ubuntu’s history.
[...]
I definitely recommend installing and using Ubuntu 10.04 once it is released, you will be pleasantly surprised!
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On the one hand, I want to give Canonical credit: 12 million estimated users is a big figure. And it provides a foundation upon which Canonical can promote additional services — Landscape, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Music Store, etc. — to consumers and business users.
But just how well is Canonical doing? In March 2010, new Canonical CEO Jane Silber said the company had about 320 empl0yees and was on a path to profitability. But she conceded the company wasn’t yet profitable.
As a privately held software company, Canonical certainly doesn’t have to say much about its financial performance. But frankly, I think Canonical can share a bit more information without having to completely open its books.
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In this issue we cover: Archive frozen for preparation of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu Open Week, New Loco Council Members Announced, New operators appointed on #ubuntu, #ubuntu-offtopic and #kubuntu, Reminder: Regional Membership Boards – Restaffing, 1st Annual Ubuntu Women World Play Day Competition Announced, New Ubuntu Member, Lucid Parties, Hungarian Loco Team shares Release Party Badges, Lucid Release parties in Norway, Ubuntu-ni presentation at American College, Ubuntu Honduras Visited UNAH-VS, Minor Team Reporting Change, Feature Friday: project announcements, Links round-up 16th April, Facebook app for Lucid countdown banners, Free Software and Linux Days 2010 in Istanbul, Quickly 4.0 available in Lucid!, Out of beta: 40 Ubuntu-based TurnKey virtual appliances, Full Circle Podcast #4: It’s Everyone Else’s Fault, Ubuntu-UK podcast: Hear Em Rave and much, much more!
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Variants
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I always likes the ideas within Mint…make a good package better by adding little features and taking out what isn’t necessary. I remembered from the day that everything just worked. Websites played flash, video on DVD would play with audio, documents opened without too much effort or downloading extras. So what else is here that most people would like to know about?
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Their computer was then taken over by a botnet and started spewing spam left, right and center. Which I found out about a month or so later.
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Knowing what sort of computer user type this person is I decided to make sure I chose the right distribution for them. After careful thought and a bit of google trolling (in the searching sense of the word) I decided to give Linux Mint a go. So I backed up their computer and settled down to install Mint.
[...]
This is the latest story on how a “typical” computer user made a seamless transition from windows to Linux. Do you have any such stories? What about the other way around? While I had no problems transitioning this person doesn’t mean that there are none. What issues have you come up with when introducing people to Linux?
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These questions are natural, because a few years ago they wouldn’t even be possible. What reason would you have for breaking open an first-generation iPod, or hacking an original Playstation? The question of “unauthorized software” on System 9 and Windows XP was plainly moot. But as the capabilities of the PC, console, and phone have expanded, so have their magisteria. And as their power grew, so did their chains. These chains were so light before that we didn’t notice them, but now that they are not only visible but are beginning to truly encumber our devices, we must consider whether we are right to throw them off. The answer, to me at least, seems obvious: no company or person has the right to tell you that you may not do what you like with your own property.
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In what is becoming the rule rather than the exception, Digg is the latest social media player to “come out of the closet” and not only acknowledge that it is built on open source components, but they have contributed to and host several open source projects. Like Facebook and Twitter, Digg loves open source.
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They spend some time talking about the open source model and a few FLOSS-geeks from Washington, DC (maco and myself included) are featured near the end of the segment. There is also a nice shot of the KDE website featuring KDE 4.4.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 3.6.4 has been in the talks lately because of the intention of the Mozilla developers to add out-of-process plugins to that version of the web browser which basically means that popular plugins run in their own process instead of the main browser process. This is beneficial in case of a plugin crash as it will only take down its own process and not the whole web browser.
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Oracle
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Moving all of your apps and information in the cloud has been adopted by a great number of people. However, there are also a large number who still prefer having a desktop application.
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Programming
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We began our testing by first measuring the time it took each GCC release to build Apache, PHP, and ImageMagick.
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What’s so interesting about HelenOS that we can’t get from Linux, BSD or MINIX? Having played with HelenOS for a while, I have two answers:
1. HelenOS is still in a fairly early stage of development. It’s young compared to the other operating systems I mentioned. It’s small, clean and has several papers written on it. This makes the HelenOS project a great way for students to jump in and learn about OS design with a minimum of overhead. It’s light, highly portable and doesn’t have any spare parts left over from a previous decade.
2. For the same reason people build model cars – the fun of it. Some people stargaze, some collect stamps and some write kernel code. It doesn’t need to be practical to have a purpose. Though, given time, HelenOS may become practical too.
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Environment
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The impact of climate change on the Amazon rainforest could be much worse than previously predicted, new research suggests.
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Finance
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Pecora exposed the ways in which leading banks mistreated their customers – typically, retail investors. The SEC alleges, with credible detail, that Goldman essentially set up some trusting clients and deliberately misled them – to the tune of effectively transferring $1 billion from them to a particular unscrupulous investor.
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There is some good stuff in the bill, but it is riddled with loopholes. Far more important than the actual bill is the effort to actually enforce existing laws. While it is true that the near-complete absence of a regulatory structure to oversee derivatives trading is problematic, there is a lot the government could have done still, if it had wanted to, to prevent catastrophes like AIG and Lehman Brothers. The decision to take a whack at Goldman for this Paulson business is therefore the best news there’s been on this front…
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Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all
The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers’ colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud.
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This is a statement made by GS in their recent Annual Report filed with the SEC and is – BS from GS. As with many of their public statements, they deny any wrongdoing, knowledge or participation. This is the same position they are taking now after the SEC announcement. Not surprising and expected. But the reality is – as I have been saying for almost three years now – THEY KNEW. And knowing makes their crimes premeditated and intentional. Not only criminally wrong but morally wrong as well.
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My concern is that the American people even now do not understand how serious this crisis is. They are quickly distracted into ridiculous partisan spirit and frivolous diversions. This is the freedom and the welfare of their country that is at risk, and it is time to put aside childish things, and begin the serious work of reforming their financial system, the ownership of their media, and the political campaign process.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Two and a half years ago, we outlined our approach to removing content from Google products and services. Our process hasn’t changed since then, but our recent decision to stop censoring search on Google.cn has raised new questions about when we remove content, and how we respond to censorship demands by governments. So we figured it was time for a refresher.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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At 68 pages, the report [.pdf] is quite long, and very professionally produced. It is stuffed full of tables designed to bolster its case. In calculating the claimed loss from piracy, a fairly simple approach is adopted. The number of copyright infringements are multiplied by the substitution rate (the percentage of people who would have bought stuff if they had not downloaded it for free) times the unit retail price. This is calculated for the top 5 economies in Europe, and scaled up proportionally to include all the other EU economies. The claimed job losses caused by that revenue lost is obtained by dividing the latter by an average sales revenue per employee.
[...]
In other words, the IFPI is the global equivalent of the British BPI and French SNEP: another industry organisation, whose job is to push its particular interests. Indeed, for some countries in the “Building a Digital Economy” report – such as Italy and Spain – the IFPI is cited directly as the source of the figures for the alleged number of copyright infringements. The only major country that seems to draw on an independent source is Germany, where “GfK” is cited. This is the market research company GfK Group, but I was unable to find anything on their website regarding piracy figures, so there was no way to examine their underlying assumptions or reliability.
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We can hardly blame politicians for being fooled by such impressive-looking documents. It is only when you dig down through the Appendices at the back, and start hunting out the actual references given for the claimed figures in multiple national markets that it becomes clear the entirely spurious nature of those shocking headline claims. Given that the Digital Economy Bill passed in part because of this kind of misinformation, we can only hope that the politicians who were deceived by plausible-sounding industry lobbyists will reconsider their position in the new Parliament and repeal the most egregious clauses of this deeply-flawed Act.
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The draft Gallo report on “Enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market” contains the entertainment industry’s wishlist for the future of copyright policy: extra-judicial sanctions turning internet service providers into a private copyright police, harsher criminal sanctions paving the way for the revival of the IPRED2 directive, etc. These proposals are very similar to the provisions found in leaked ACTA drafts.
SourceCode Season 3 – Episode 8: Sustainability and Alternatives (2006)
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