Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Russel Crowe’s Robin Hood Is Powered By Linux

  Colorist Stephen Nakamura of Santa Monica-based Company 3 used DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci 2K high-end Linux systems for all the color grading work on Universal Pictures’ epic action-adventure “Robin Hood,” starring Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, directed by Ridley Scott and produced by Oscar winner Brian Grazer.

• Linux: The Final Frontier?

  Linux hasn’t overcome every challenge, but it’s succeeded over a majority of problems, and like any other mature product has begun to be more selective about the paths of innovation. One good example of this is the excitement generated by cloud computing and virtualization. Vendors see it as a way to make new money, and developers see it as the next new territory to explore and dominate. Cloud computing, until something new comes along, is the quantum physics of the Linux and open source community.

• Five things you can learn at Linux Day 2010

  Our specialists are keen on getting out into the community to show how to get the most out of Linux in the enterprise. That’s the purpose of the Linux Day 2010 Tour. We’re bringing them to a city near you, to provide live demos, share best practices, and arm you with real-world strategies you can apply today.

• OpenSolaris and its killer features. Coming to a GNU/Linux near you?

  When we think of free operating systems we tend to think overwhelmingly of the big hitters (all GNU/Linux) like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva and then of those niche distros that have been designed for low end systems or for specialist purposes like security and forensics. But Oranges are not the only fruit. There is a hinterland out there called Unixland, populated by other less well known systems whose roots are firmly Unix too. BSD for example, famed for its rock-like security. OpenSolaris is another one, perhaps less well known, but it has features that are well worth a punt. This article will look at those kernels and if porting them to mainstream distros is technically possible and permissible in terms of the perrenially thorny issue of licencing.

• Write Your Next Program on Linux

  We won’t be using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), at least, initially. We will just do it the simple way: write code using a text editor, save it, and compile/interpret it using an appropriate compiler/interpreter. In the Linux world, you have a plethora of text editors to choose from. One of the editors, such as gedit or kwrite, will definitely be installedwhen you install Linux—you can use either. If you install a distribution like Ubuntu, which has the GNOME desktop environment, then you will have gedit already installed. It’s just like Notepad, only more useful and feature-rich.

• Desktop

  • Sheldon’s favorite linux based operating system

  • Teo, the New Tough Linux Netbook From ZaReason

    The nice folks at ZaReason, the independent Linux OEM computer vendor, sent me their Teo tough netbook to review. This turned into a family affair as my excellent significant other Terry was charmed by the little netbook, and had to try it out. Executive summary: thumbs up.

• Server

  • IBM freshens up System x servers

    The System x3620 M3 is certified to run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2; Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3 and 11 (including the integrated Xen hypervisor); Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4; and VMware ESX Server 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 Update 1. The server will start shipping on June 8.

• Kernel Space

  • Thoughts on 2.6.34

    So, as most people will have heard, the 2.6.34 kernel was released on May 16. Back in February, I was predicting a mid-May release, so I hit it almost exactly. That says nothing about my prediction skills, though (which are horrible) and a lot about how the kernel development process is going. It has become a very predictable, nearly boring affair.

  • The First DRM Pull Request For Linux 2.6.35 Kernel

    The Linux 2.6.34 kernel was released only three days ago, but David Airlie has emailed Linus Torvalds and the Linux Kernel Mailing List with the first DRM pull request for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel.

  • SUSE Linux Is Hooking Up With Btrfs Too

    Fedora was the first tier-one Linux distribution shipping with support for optionally installing to a Btrfs file-system for the past year, but in recent weeks the adoption rate of Btrfs looks like it will be quickly rising. Fedora 13 is extending the Btrfs support to offer system rollback support by where a file-system snapshot is created via Btrfs each time a yum transaction takes place. Red Hat recently released the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and it includes Ananconda installation support for RHEL6 onto Btrfs, MeeGo will be using Btrfs by default in this distribution that marries Maemo and Moblin, and Ubuntu is making Btrfs plans where Btrfs may become the default file-system in Ubuntu 10.10. Novell / openSUSE is also getting in bed with Btrfs.

• Applications

  • XSane Brings Sanity to the Mad, Mad World of Linux Scanning

    Scanning documents into a computer running a Linux-based operating system can often be a maddening task if you approach it the same way you would with a Windows PC. For Linux, XSane can make a world of difference. Xsane is a scanner interface that uses the Scanner Access Now Easy driver.

  • For secure access, try this limited shell

    Sometimes, in otherwise restricted Linux environments, system administrators need to give shell access to users to accomplish certain tasks. Yet from the shell, savvy users can do almost anything on a system. One tool that can help resolve the conflict is lshell, a shell that lets you restrict a user or group’s environment to a limited sets of path and commands. Using lshell, an administrator can give a user who need, for instance, SSH access, only the commands he needs, without setting up a chroot environment or playing with system rights and ACLs. Everything is set up and controlled through one configuration file.

  • Instructionals

    • Linux Tip: Simplifying Commands

    • HowTo: See Contents of A .DEB Debian / Ubuntu Package File

    • updating to kde-4.4.2 from kde-4.3.3

    • Configurations for ssh that make some things more convenient

    • Set up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux server

    • Command line video processing using FOSS

    • How to manage apache’s htpasswd files on Linux

    • Give Me Liberty or Give Me Eth

    • Creating diagrams in OpenOffice.org Draw and Impress

    • Install Ubuntu Netbook Edition with Wubi Installer

    • Why my written shell script doesn’t work in cygwin?

    • Perl Debugger Tutorial: 10 Easy Steps to Debug Perl Program

    • Using Linux to Disinfect Windows

    • Unix How-To: When Telnet isn’t Telnet

    • Add Keyboard Input Language to Ubuntu

    • Clean your registry with gconf-cleaner

    • How to convert between packages (deb, rpm, tgz) using alien on Linux

    • Backup with rsnapshot

    • If Sound On Your Ubuntu Desktop Stops Working

  • Games

    • Transgaming customers can now save 25% off CrossOver Games

    • Porting Osmos to Linux: A Post-Mortem (part 2/3)

      Welcome to the second installment of our three-part Linux post-mortem. Part 1 lay the foundations for the article and where we’re coming from. Today’s post directly addresses the question “What worked and what didn’t?” with a set of ‘pros and cons’ that cropped up during the port. The final post will offer a more nuanced set of reflections on these experiences, their implications for game development, and my advice for moving Linux forward as a gaming platform.

    • Linux games mega collection – Part 9

      One more compilation born and raised. Some shooting, several online role-playing games, a bit of racing and strategy. Not my longest review by all means, but it has a bit to please everyone.

      And that would be all for now. I have many more games to offer, but I’m holding myself. You’ll see them all in the sequels, which just keep coming and coming.

    • In love with “Digital: a Love Story”

      It’s pretty rare that my heart goes pouding when I’m playing a game, but this one made it. Digital: a Love Story is quite a unique little adventure game.

• Desktop Environments

  • One of these things is not like the others

    Having a faster machine in the house means I have the luxury of trying out some of the bigger, heavier distros without feeling like I’m having my brain pressed through a bowl of mashed potatoes. I consider it homework, making sure I keep up-to-date on what the bulkier versions of Linux can do, and at what cost.

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Plasma Netbook 4.5

      Some of those changes are quite visible at a UI level, some other are more under the hood, but contribute to give to it a more “finished” look and feel to it.

    • Going where no gearheads have gone before…

      Thomas Jensch from the FSFE initiated our presence at the event and is networking with church representatives, something I could not do, since I know way too little about internal church organization (and probably don’t want to know either). I guess he will report more about that. What we (that is the KDE folks) talk about with people coming to our booth is free software in general and KDE in particular, depending on the interest of our visitors and their knowledge level. People here come with very varying backgrounds, we get the occasional Linux power user, but mostly it’s down to the basics. There is often an understanding why open standards are important and from there on we can talk about the freedoms (of free software) or drift off to how great KDE is. Sometimes it was interesting to see people running away when we ask them if they knew about free software. Typically they would mumble something about not knowing much about computers. But those are only very few people, most visitors are very interested. Sometimes on the other hand, people don’t want the philosophical talk and are happy instead to just play with our shiny KDE demo machine. This event we have different apps running, Palapeli worked quite well as eye-catcher, running on a big monitor. Of course we are happy to show more apps and give some introductions to how KDE works. Some teenagers enjoyed the puzzle and completely ignored our lecturing about philosophy behind it We gave away quite some Linux dvds and FSFE handouts to the people that are actually interested. For the next time I hope we’ll have a one page “what is KDE” handout. That would be nice…

    • Rekonq: A Quick Glance At Kubuntu Next Default Browser

      The talk of the town is that the next version of Kubuntu (10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat) will have a new default browser, replacing Konqueror, the longtime KDE favorite. The replacement browser may very well be Rekonq, a browser that could be viewed as a next-generation approach to Konqueror.

    • Yet Another GSoC update : libface gets Face Recognition

      To those who do not know: As part of my GSoC work, I’m committing to libface , an open-source face recognition library made by me and my mentor Alex Jironkin. libface shall be used for the upcoming Face Detection and Recognition support in digiKam.

      [...]

      And tagging. I’ve just checked out a fresh copy of Adrian Bustany’s nepomuk-peopletag project, which has been abandoned since about two years or so. I’ll be modifying it – actually it involves removal of code, not much actual coding. I’ll be removing the nepomuk-specific code from it (no offense to the Nepomuk people), as digiKam shall talk to Nepomuk through it’s own interfacing.

• Distributions

  • Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Business as usual for Mandriva?

      The response that was given on the posting entitled About Mandriva’s current situation, basically presented the current situation as business as usual. Stating that it is nothing new and that Mandriva has always been involved in investment and acquisition activities.

    • Best Mandriva Wallpaper Collections from Madriva-Art

      I look around the Mandriva-Art website to find some good Mandriva wallpapers. And I already compiled them into this post, so its easier to you to download the best Mandriva Wallpaper from Mandriva-Art.

    • Make your PClos Gnome 2010 look like PClos KDE 2010

      Just For fun, if you bored about pclinuxos 2010 gnome standar layout. This is how to make your pclinuxos gnome 2010 look like a pclinuxos kde 2010.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Paving the Way to Success: Red Hat Services Pathways

      Reducing the sprawl common in many of today’s heterogeneous data centers is often top of mind for CIOs and IT departments. From identifying a process to increase hardware homogeneity and meeting application and environment migration targets to utilizing cost-effective virtualization technologies, Red Hat is primed and ready to help companies pave the way to success with Red Hat Services Pathways.

    • CentOS 5.5 USB Device Mounting Annoyance

    • Another Educational Institute Opens Its Gates to Open Source

      Built on the CentOS distribution and with features like Qmail MTA, MailScanner, SpamAssassin, ClamAV anti-virus, Squirrel Mail, Group Office (a Web-based collaboration suite), MySQL, Joomla CMS, and a customised administration panel using a PHP and Ajax interface, TechnoMail was a perfect fit for Bharati Vidyapeeth.

    • Fedora

      • [Fedora] Elections are open.

        If you aren’t familiar with how the system works, check out the Fedora Elections Guide. I also encourage Fedora community members to review the logs from our Town Hall meetings, where the candidates talked openly about their goals and viewpoints. Get informed, and then vote appropriately.

      • Ubuntu vs. Fedora: The Latest Versions Square Off

        Ubuntu regularly claims to be the most popular Linux distribution. But, if so, Fedora is a competitive second. Both have thriving communities and are a major source of free and open source software innovation.

        Regularly, you can read on mailing lists of users having grown discontented with one and deciding to migrate to the other. In many users’ minds, each is an alternative to the other.

        [...]

        Both Fedora and Ubuntu are GNOME-centered distributions, with KDE, Xfce, and other desktops as alternatives. Fedora has included fresh art for each new release for several years now, so its wallpaper compares favorably with Ubuntu’s much-discussed new color-coded scheme.

  • Debian Family

    • Stefano Zacchiroli (Debian Leader): Local communities are important

      Stefano Zacchiroli, a new Debian Project Leader, in an interview with Polish Debian Portal speaks about this year’s campaign, realase policy of the project, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port and other non-linux ports, and the role of local Debian communities.

    • Debian Project News – May 18th, 2010

      Deadlines are looming for DebConf10 – some have already passed. For example, the last day to submit a BoF (Birds of a Feather) talk has come and gone. There is still lots you can do for DebConf10 however including volunteering time, lending equipment, and even donating money. Sponsors and donors are needed to help defray the costs of holding DebConf10 as Raphael Geissert wrote on his blog.

    • Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian

      Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new libpam-mklocaluser package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted into unstable. The pam-python package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the sssd package passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the libpam-ccreds package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.

    • Ubuntu

      • 10 things you’ll love about Ubuntu 10.4

        It’s here: A shiny new release of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. But why should you care? You may not use Ubuntu — or maybe you don’t really know much about Linux at all. Well, here are 10 new or improved features that make Ubuntu 10.4 worth caring about.

      • Life with Linux: Notes on installing Ubuntu 10.4 LTS

        This was on my personal home desktop, a rather powerful machine I built earlier this year (6Gb memory, quad core, 2Tb disk) specifically for 3D apps and personal software development. It’s a dual boot machine, so when I did the upgrade on the Ubuntu half I wanted to make sure the other side remained intact.

        [...]

        All in all this is a solid release, as far as I can tell so far.

        Update: I’ve switched to the new default Ambiance theme to get the full effect of the changes in the user interface. I’ve changed the background image (my favs are from InterfaceLIFT) but otherwise I should be living La Vida Lucid.

      • New Windicators (Window Indicators) Mockups [Ubuntu 10.10]

        Note: these are not official mockups, but they are still pretty close to what window indicators want to be.

      • Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

        Our testing was carried out on a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 dual-core processor, 4GB of DDR2-667MHz system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 7200RPM SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 512MB graphics processor. Tests we ran included 7-Zip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, FFmpeg, x264, World of Padman, OpenSSL, GraphicsMagick, Bullet Physics Engine, John The Ripper, SQLite, Apache, C-Ray, Unpack-Linux, PostMark, dcraw, Parallel BZIP2 compression, and MAFFT. Testing was done by the Phoronix Test Suite.

      • Variants

        • Lubuntu Netbook Remix: A Look

          All in all, there’s not much else to say about how LNR actually works. It’s a simple, straightforward product; what you see is what you get. When I was using it, the only criticism I had was that there are no keyboard shortcuts for navigating between the different categories of the netbook interface.

        • Puppy Linux slims Ubuntu down

          Puppy Linux’s latest release may be based on Ubuntu but it is still as small as ever

          Puppy Linux, a long-time maker of ultra-compact versions of Linux, has released Lupu, its first release based on Ubuntu Linux.

          Over the years Puppy Linux has typically released slimmed-down versions of Linux that clock in at around 100MB in size. Being that small Puppy Linux is both small to download as well as being compact enough to run entirely from RAM.

          Now the project has released a new branch of its operating system, basing it this time on Ubuntu Linux. The final download size is a little bit bigger than the usual Puppy releases at 128MB, but it is still significantly smaller than the 600MB+ downloads for the original Ubuntu Linux.

        • Mint

          • Linux Mint 9: A First Look

            From what I can see, Mint 9 looks to be a worthy successor to the Mint line. They’ve largely left intact what works, and have worked hard to improve that which needs improving. As a full-featured desktop OS with modern hardware, this really looks great, but older hardware really struggles with some basic tasks. Firefox is sluggish, and, as mentioned previously, Software Manager brings my computer to its knees. In a few weeks I’ll see how it performs on slightly newer equipment. For now, though, I’ll have to bide my time until the LXDE or Fluxbox editions come out before I can consider using it regularly on my existing hardware.

          • Linux Mint 9 (Isadora)

            The menu has been improved. If you turn on 3D effects, you can view a partly transparent menu. You can also now right-click on an item in the menu to edit it. You also have the option of changing the menu’s default behavior from showing what you looked at last to defaulting to your favorites. You can even right-click items to add them to your desktop and panel. I love the right-clicking features in the menu, it makes it very fast to change items or put them on your panel or desktop.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Android/Chrome OS

    • Google Teams Up With Intel, Sony To Help Make Web TV A Reality

    • Android 2.2, Google TV Expected at Google I/O

    • Google I/O 2010 opens tomorrow

    • Android 2.2 Google TV At Google I/O This Week

    • Google pounds the open standards drum during I/O keynote

    • Why I became an Android fanboy

      The iPhone is a force to be reckoned with, but Google’s operating system and the new phones on which it runs are competitive and for me at least, the better choice.

    • Phenomenon of Android-based phones

      Android is an open source computer code software so that a programmer can make new applications. Android makes available thousands of both free and paid applications as well as integrated Google applications, such as push email, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Calendar.

    • Froyo for You: Coming This June

      Demonstrations of Flash running on the Android OS have been made recently, and despite one minor setback, it has been proven over and over again that Flash works and runs great on mobile phones and that Flash controls actually map pretty well on the touch screen layout.

    • Android 2.1 becomes most used version, just in time to be obviated by Froyo

    • Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’ to get USB tethering and 3G-to-WiFi hotspot

      Google’s next update to Android adds two high-value features to the open-source mobile OS, with USB tethering and the ability to create a personal Wi-Fi hotspot.

    • Google Chrome OS Screenshots show Cover Flow Style Interface

      Screenshots uploaded recently to the Chromium website (the open source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS), reveal that Google [GOOG] could be using a Cover Flow style user interface for switching between open windows. This particular part of the UI is referred to by Google as “The Overview”. To access this particular function users need to swipe a finger on the screen or touchpad, or use an assigned hotkey. When opened up The Overview gives a run-down of everything that Chrome OS currently has open which includes both tabs and windows.

  • Tablets

    • HP Confirms Plans for webOS Slates, Web-Connected Printers

      Following the acquisition of Palm last month, Hewlett Packard (HP) wasted no time in scrapping its much hyped Windows 7-based Slate project, sparking speculation that HP would putting its newly acquired webOS platform to good use in a tablet form factor. Well, we don’t have to speculate anymore.

Free Software/Open Source

• Thanks, Yahoo, You Did the Right Thing

  It looks like Yahoo has reinstated the Linux/Open Source link on their Tech News page. Perhaps it was just a fat-fingered mistake or an accident of some sort that the link was removed from the main link bar but it certainly raised my hackles. And, frankly, my hackles don’t need raising over something like this. But, they’ve put it back in a different location (not a big deal) but at least they’ve put it back. And, for those of you who either believe that it never left or that my eyesight is somehow to blame, I have screen shots for you.

• Brazil: commercial adoption of free software continues to grow

  An annual survey conducted by CETIC (Center for Study of Information Technology & Communications) found that the use of free software in mid-sized and enterprise companies continued to grow through 2009. The survey, TIC Empresas 2009, has been surveying commercial trends in Brazil’s growing technology markets for five years now.

• Open Source Web-Mapping App in Douglas County, Nev., Offers Aerial View of Local Data

  In Douglas County, home to some 50,000 residents, officials decided to use open source software to cut costs, especially in budget-crunching times. The bulk of the expenses, Schmidt said, went to development consulting and Web hosting.

• Open Source: A license, a community or more?

  To Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, a “non-free program” – i.e., proprietary software – represents an attack on your freedom. See this interview he granted Jolie O’Dell:

  Stallman believes that even a patent violates this freedom. (He’s not the only one in the open source community to feel this way.)

• Use value and free software

  Why business is good

  Let us see how we have needed companies that exploit our free software commons. Let us see how they have actually added not only capital for themselves, but actual use value for all of us.

  In the late 1980s, before the Internet or the Linux project existed, a few guys realized that the GNU C compiler, the GDB debugger and Emacs made a pretty damn good set of developer tools, and decided to sell them to developers and support them. They listened to customers and fixed bugs, added features, and customized the tools for individual companies and users. The GNU project was not interested in doing any of this, so the users were better off paying Cygnus to do it for them. Cygnus was adding real use value to the GNU tools. Soon the company noticed that the GNU project was really slow in integrating their improvements to the official compiler tree, so they were left with no choice other than forking it. Eventually, the FSF realized that Cygnus’ version was far superior to them, and adopted it as official. Cygnus pretty much became the maintainers of the GNU C compiler.

  The GNOME project was created in 1997 to create a free desktop for GNU-based systems. It succeeded because Red Hat hired developers to work on it. Red Hat got a nice desktop for themselves, and the GNU project got a free desktop. Red Hat made sure the potential use value was created.

  In 2010, we are complaining when Canonical, Red Hat and Novell are leading the evolution of desktop systems, and IBM, Oracle, and others are in charge of the kernel. Why do we complain? What we are witnessing is the reconciliation of use value and exchange value. Everybody wins when commercial free software succeeds.

• The Psychology of Open Source Explained

  The video makes a powerful argument that a society set up for contribution to the common good may suit us better than one that assumes we are rational self-maximizers. The video is based on Pink’s new book, Drive.

• Marketcetera and Lakeview team on open source trading platform

  Marketcetera, a developer of innovative open source software solutions for algorithmic electronic trading today announced that it has partnered with Lakeview Capital Market Service GmbH, an investment, technology and consulting provider based in Starnberg, Germany, to enhance and broaden the reach of Marketcetera, the industry’s leading open source electronic trading and risk system.

• 50 Open Source Tools To Replace Popular Security Software

  For this list, we’ve compiled a set of open source security tools and their commercial counterparts. We’re not suggesting that the open source apps have all the same features and use the same methods as the commercial products they can replace.

• Consider open source deduplication

  Some vendors (e.g., NetApp, EMC) give away data reduction (aka capacity optimization) technology, while other solutions for compression and data deduplication can get pretty expensive pretty quick. There’s another alternative: open source deduplication.

• Open source Vaadin bridges Java to Ajax

  With rich Internet applications all the rage an open source Web framework dubbed Vaadin promises rapid Ajax development while keeping Java code on the server.

• Events

  • Lucid Imagination Announces Lucene Revolution — The First US Conference Dedicated to Open Source Search

  • Open source pushed at Ghana meeting

    Open-source software developers, governments and entrepreneurs are meeting in Ghana to address ways to promote innovation and develop legislation that does not favor proprietary software in procurements.

  • Help support free software – donate today!

    Teams from GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, Open Font Library and many other graphics projects will gather to improve their software and discuss new ideas for interoperability and shared standards.

  • SouthEast LinuxFest names speakers

    The organizers of the 2010 SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) have announced a second round of speakers for their second annual event, to be held June 11-13 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Some 52 speakers have been announced for the show, including Jon “Maddog” Hall, Wietse Zweitze Venema, and Keith Bergelt.

    [...]

    # Keith Bergelt — Bergelt is the CEO of Open Invention Network (OIN), an advocacy group for open source and Linux software.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla and leadership: Rethinking the CEO

    Why change the title? My interest is that the title communicate the message of Mozilla mission and its method. CEO’s are usually (although, admittedly not exclusively) associated with traditional companies, and to a lesser degree, hierarchical decision making structures. Indeed, if asked what words I were to associate with the CEO I think “authority,” “command” and “hierarchy” would be among the top to jump into my mind.

  • Should *Mozilla* Fork Firefox?

    What Ross’s complaint comes down to is that Firefox is suffering the inevitable side-effects of its own success. It’s no longer put together by a small, agile team that can turn on a sixpence, but has developed a complex, global group of skilled and generous people collaborating in different ways and at different levels. The need to achieve a certain consensus implies that things move much more slowly than in the early days; breaking things in any serious way for the sake of progress is hardly an option, which makes change incremental.

  • Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

  • A hungrier, more aggressive Mozilla

    In its search for a new CEO, Mozilla should be looking for someone more like Marc Benioff and less like Gandhi. Much of its former competitive advantage–community, open source–is increasingly shared by Google, a competitor with its entire business at stake.

• SaaS

  • Cloud computing’s secret sauce

    Along the way I suspect we’ll see open-source companies like Puppet Labs and Opscode, as well as open-source savvy companies like RightScale, really thrive. It’s one of the first times open source has taken the lead in simplifying IT, rather than feeding its complexity.

  • Servoy Simplifies SaaS with Open Source Servoy 5.2 and PostgreSQL

    Servoy today announced the first open source version of its award-winning SaaS application development platform, Servoy 5.2 using PostgreSQL. This change means that Servoy users have enormous flexibility in deployment to cloud hosting or desktop systems. It also enables open source developers looking for RAD tools, rapid prototyping and data application development to utilize a mature, easy-to-use environment.

  • The Challenge to Open Up the Cloud

    The question is whether this is enough. As we’ve seen in the past, it is very difficult to foster open source communities in environments dominated by a few top players. And with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and, increasingly, RackSpace calling the shots, it would take quite a counter-push on the part of the open source community to make any real headway. With the cloud is still in its infancy, says ZDnet’s Paula Rooney, that effort will have to come soon before the playing field is laid out by the big guys.

  • IBM punts commercial Hadoop distro

    Not everyone is a Google, where the MapReduce distributed data cruncher and its related file system was created, or even a Yahoo, where Hadoop was nurtured to do what Google does – but in an open source, community-driven fashion. Hadoop is used at Yahoo! and Facebook and Twitter, and it helps drive a portion of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But it is not widely understood in the corporations where IBM does its business.

  • IBM chooses Hadoop to analyze big data

• Databases

  • Jailer frees developers who test database apps

    Four years ago, the company that German software engineer Ralf Wisser worked for needed a tool to remove outdated data from its production databases. “We couldn’t find an appropriate tool,” Wisser recalls, “so I created Jailer.”

  • NTT and EnterpriseDB Contribute Code to Support Postgres Ecosystem and Encourage Further Development of Extensible Cluster Technology

    Based upon the open source Postgres code and utilizing the same application programming interface, Postgres-XC is a write-scalable synchronous multi-master Postgres cluster with both read and write-scalability. Designed to greatly increase Postgres’ scalability and reliability, Postgres-XC is being contributed to the open source community for further development in order to leverage the rapidly growing Postgres ecosystem of developers, partners and end-users. Postgres-XC, which is still in its early development stage, already includes significant feature functionality including Global Transaction Management and proven scalability.

• Oracle

  • Oracle Releases MySQL Enterprise Upgrade

    Database and enterprise application giant Oracle on May 17 released a new version of MySQL Enterprise, the first major upgrade of the open-source relational database since Oracle acquired MySQL with the buyout of Sun Microsystems. The major new component of this release is MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.2, which provides new query performance monitoring tools.

  • Sun’s stars: Where are they now? And why did they leave?

    Key departures have included Java founder James Gosling, XML co-inventor Tim Bray, and Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source officer.

  • OpenOffice.org

    • Organizations Switching from Microsoft Office Choose OpenOffice Over Google Docs: New Survey by Info-Tech Research Group

      Microsoft’s decision to discontinue support for Office 2003 or older means that organizations using these suites will soon have to bite the bullet and decide whether to upgrade to Office 2010 or find an alternative solution. Google has been pushing hard for organizations to make the switch to Google Docs, but Info-Tech Research Group suggests that most organizations should not make the switch. However, when a full or limited migration is validated, OpenOffice is the way to go.

      “Our research shows that no other alternative suite stands up to the features, reliability and familiar feel of OpenOffice making it the best option for organizations making a full switch or planning a limited deployment of an alternative suite,” said Tim Hickernell, Lead Research Analyst for Info-Tech Research Group. “Google Docs does have the collaboration aspect going for them, but when it comes to spreadsheets, presentations and word processing, OpenOffice is far superior to other alternatives.”

    • OpenOffice.org Conference 2010: Call for Papers

      This year’s OpenOffice.org Conference will take place from the 31st of August to the 2rd of September in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. The 10th anniversary event for the free open source office suite is open to users, developers and contributors and will focus on a number of topics, such as the OpenDocument Format (ODF), development and interoperability.

• Content Management

  • Uni college ups grade with open source CMS project

    The college considered advice to implement Joomla or Drupal (both open source) and after research by the IT officer decided on Drupal as it would better meet long-term requirements without too much additional costs.

  • Joomla! Upgrade – Pros and Cons

    For an open source project, that’s a lot of time between two versions. There have also been concerns raised about transparency and governance within Open Source Matters (OSM), the not-for-profit that manages the Joomla! project. However, with a new leadership team and much awaited release of Joomla 1.6, things seem to be back on track for the project.

  • Social networking: Diaspora aims to be an open source alternative to Facebook

    As of May 13, 2010 the four hopefuls raised in excess of $116,000 with the aid of the online fundraising website, Kickstarter, gained about 3,000 supporters by this date. Numbers are still steadily growing.

    Quite a nice sum and number of supporters to get their idea rolling. Apparently this is an idea that is grabbing a lot of attention.

  • The Diaspora Project: Grassroots Funding for an Alternative to Facebook

• Google

  • Google Wave: Now open to the public

  • Google Fonts Directory, Open Source Fonts For The Websites

    Google has released an exciting tool for website owners: Google Fonts Directory. All the fonts in this directory are available for use on any website under an open source license and served by Google servers. To use Google Fonts on websites, the site owners need to put a one line code in the head section of webpage. Here is an example page, created by me, which uses the Lobster font available in the Google Fonts gallery.

• Education

  • South Carolina Department of Education Sees Success with Moodlerooms — Reports Improved Support, Usability and Satisfaction

    Moodlerooms, Inc., trusted provider of managed open-source solutions wrapped around the world’s most widely used open-source learning management system, Moodle, has helped South Carolina Department of Education (SCDOE) increase success rates while decreasing its total cost of ownership by 35%.

• Healthcare

  • Medsphere’s OVID Makes Vista-Derived Solutions Java-Ready

    Subtitled OVID Unleashes Power of Open-source Health IT, the paper details how the new OpenVista Interface Domain (OVID) leverages the proven power and stability of VistA to facilitate an ecosystem oriented around advancing health IT quickly and affordably.

  • What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention

    Ben Mehling will introduce VistA, its open source distributions, and how community contributors are adapting it to civilian use. Joseph Dal Molin will show how it improves patient care and the health care delivery process. David Uhlman will continue the discussion with lessons from working with VistA code.

  • Screensaver: an open source lab information management system (LIMS) for high throughput screening facilities

    Results: We have developed Screensaver, an open source, web-based lab information management system (LIMS), to address the informatics needs of our small molecule and RNAi screening facility.

  • QRISK2 goes open source

    The heart disease risk assessment tool QRisk2 has been made available as open source software by Nottingham University and healthcare IT suppliers EMIS.

• Business

  • Software Freedom Means Business Success

    The free software definition does indeed read like a revolutionary manifesto, partly because it is. The people behind it often eschew the pragmatism of the term ‘open source’ and focus on liberty alone. It’s worth looking behind their philosophy though. I paraphrase the free software definition as guaranteeing the liberty to use, study, modify and distribute software without interference. Those four liberties create value for business:

    * The freedom to use the software for any purpose, without first having to seek special permission (for example by paying licensing fees). This is what drives the trend to adoption-led deployment, where iterative prototyping leads to rapid solutions.
    * The availability of skills and suppliers because they have had no barriers to studying the source code and experimenting with it. The market in open source tools and consultants is getting richer and more vibrant by the day because of this freedom.
    * The assurance that vendors can’t withhold the software from you because anyone has the freedom to modify and re-use the source code. If a vendor decides to end support for open source software, another company can step in and carry on where they left off – as I intend to prove.
    * The freedom to pass the software on to anyone that needs it, even including your own enhancements – including your staff, suppliers, customers and (in the case of governments) citizens.

  • Why Businesses Need To Work More Together On Open Source

    It’s instructive to look at an initiative going on in Thailand. As discussed here, a consortium of Thai businesses called the Business for Open Source Society (Boss) is pooling contributions from open source specialists and local software companies and launching training programs for open source developers.

  • WANdisco Gives Back to the Subversion Community

  • Oki Launches “Mission-critical Systems Migration Support Services”

    Oki has also proactively promoted open source in response to the needs of cost-conscious companies. In particular, for JBoss Enterprise Middleware(*9), an open-source-based middleware product line, OKI was the first Japanese company to conclude a JBoss Premier Business Partner contract with provider Red Hat in May 2009, positioning it as the ideal partner in Japan.

  • Magento Development Company is Providing Cost Effective Magento Development Services

    Magento is a highly popular among the open source ecommerce development community. Magento Development Company specifically provides topnotch Magento development services and solutions at competitive prices.

• Appointments

  • Former Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Joins Gluster, An Open Source Storage Platform Startup

    Back in March, long-time Plaxo President and CEO Ben Golub left the social address book company after five years. Today, he’s announcing his next move — he’s taking the reins at Gluster, a startup that offers an open source software solution for storing very large amounts of unstructured data. Golub will replace current CEO Hitesh Chellani who is transitioning to become VP of Operations.

  • Open Source Memcached Vendor NorthScale Gets New CEO and $10 Million

    The market for solutions based on the open source memcached distributed caching technology project is continuing to attract interest from investors and commercial vendors. Today, memcached-based startup NorthScale announced that it had raised an additional $10 million in venture funding and that Bob Wiederhold would be taking the reins as the new CEO.

  • ISKME Hires Open Source Expert Greg DeKoenigsberg as Chief Technology Officer

• BI

  • Saving Millions with Open Source Business Intelligence

  • Pentaho Top-Rated Open Source Vendor in Major BI User Survey

• ECM

  • Alfresco’s new Activiti en route to Apache

    Theoretically Alfresco could release Community Edition under the Apache License and could continue to generate revenue from the traditionally-license Enterprise Edition, as well as new complementary products and services, but that is something the company will have to think about very carefully.

  • Alfresco, SpringSource launch Activiti BPM open source project

  • Alfresco launches Activiti BPMN 2.0 Business Process Engine

  • Activiti BPM project questions value of LGPL GNU license

  • The Miller Group Builds on Open Source Foundations with Alfresco

  • Alfresco launches open source BPM tool

    In a new departure, the company is launching Activiti under an Apache licence rather than the LGPL licence that it currently uses for its Enterprise edition – that in itself was changed earlier this year from the GPL licence. The move to Apache is something that the company has been talking about experimenting with for some time, but had been hidebound by the inclusion of Hibernate for database access and JBPM for workflow. To aid the development, Alfresco has enticed away Tom Baeyens, founder architect of the JBoss JBPM project to lead the workflow development. “Workflow wasn’t our core competency,” said Alfresco’s chief technology officer, John Newton, “that was Tom’s expertise.”

• ESB

  • MuleSoft Ships Management Console for Open Source ESB

    MuleSoft is bringing a new level of management to integration architects using the Mule open source ESB. The just-released Mule ESB Management Console offers web-based UI console for centralized views of multiple ESB server instances, message flow debugger, and intelligent alerting against SLA violations.

  • FAA uses open source ESB to handle flight data

    Last year the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) selected an open source enterprise service bus (ESB) to provide integration support for a system that uses Web-based services to handle flight and weather data for airlines. Earlier this year, a SWIM Prototype became operational at the FAA’s William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, NJ.

• BSD

  • Next Testing Version of PC-BSD Available

    Kris Moore announced the availablility of the latest testing version of PC-BSD yesterday.

  • Gentoo: Emulating on FreeBSD 6.2-Stable

  • PC-BSD 7.1.1 on Samsung NC10 & Acer Aspire 1

• Project Releases

  • SalesLogix Cloud Prompts Open Source Release of Popular Apps

  • CKAN v1.0 Released

    We are pleased to announce the availability of version 1.0 of the CKAN software, our open source registry system for datasets (and other resources). After 3 years of development, twelve point releases and a several successful production deployments around the world CKAN has come of age!

  • Official Twitter App to be open-sourced

    It seems Google is trying to develop a set of templates for developers to base their app UIs on, or at least in part, which might help standardize the entire user experience within Android and its growing list of apps and developers.

• Government

  • FOSS vendors lick chops over ConLib IT plans

    Of course both the Tories and the LibDems currenty face an overwhelming problem with a multi-billion pound deficit. So is the pledge to support open source software procurement – that might just help drive down some costs – a happy coincidence for the Camelegg jamboree?

    “With the current coalition exploring a rather unchartered territory [sic] of power sharing and common interests, it will be interesting to see what change the new Cabinet will bring to the UK public IT policy,” Ingres global ops veep Steve Shine told The Register following the coalition’s formation.

  • UK dominates European ICT services market

    The report also covered the open-source market, noting that Europe is the world’s “main contributor” to the open-source software community. In 2008, open source accounted for €4bn (£3.4bn) of the total €229bn value of the European software market. However, the report’s authors predicted that the open-source software market will reach a value of €12bn in 2012 — a growth rate of 30-40 percent per year.

• Transparency

  • Launch of Australian Gov 2.0 Showcase

  • Local newspaper editors say public bodies becoming more secretive

• Openness

  • Culture

    • FutureEverything gathers technology’s avant garde

      Artists, musicians, engineers and hackers from around the world recently descended on Manchester for a three day celebration of digital culture.

      [...]

      The whole project is open source said team member Evan Roth – and the most technical component is a hacked webcam from a PlayStation 3.

    • Open sound series: Part 2 – OpenChord.org

      OpenChord.org develops open source controllers allowing you to play Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Frets on Fire using a real guitar. Right now, we’re offering a kit to let people build their own guitars, but hope to sell assembled guitars and devices soon.

  • Open Hardware

    • Startup’s Kits Help You Hack Your Home

      SuRF is powered by the company’s Open Source Home Area Network operating system. OSHAN is based on TinyOS, a platform for wireless sensors that currently has about 10,000 developers. Moss hopes OSHAN-powered devices could replace the networks we have at home — Personal Access Networks, with a range of about 30 to 40 feet — with something he calls Home Access Networks, with a range of 100-200 feet.

    • Touring New York Startups: Meet Bug Labs

      To upend the delays and financial dangers of the normal hardware process, New York-based Bug Labs offers an open-source hardware alternative.

• Standards/Consortia

  • If Mark Zuckerberg invented the Web

    The Web knows how pages are connected. Social networking sites know how people are connected. Both are obviously crucial. But, Facebook, for all its success, is not living up to the potential for social networking sites, not by a long shot. The social networking site that will do for the connections among people what the Web has done for the connections among sites is awaiting its own Tim Berners-Lee — a person or group that understands that control constrains, but gifts liberate.

Leftovers

• Panera Bread Testing The ‘Pay What You Want’ Model

  Popular restaurant chain Panera Bread has long been interested in experimenting with smart new business models. It was one of the first restaurants out there to push free WiFi in all its locations — at a time when many thought fee-based WiFi was the future — noting how much it helped bring in more business for the food. A bunch of folks are now submitting the news that Panera is testing out a pay what you want model in one of its new restaurants. There are “recommended” prices — but you can pay more or less than those numbers.

• UK’s Sunday Times Preparing To Lose 90 Percent Of Traffic Behind Paywall?

  Did The Sunday Times’ editor, in the UK, just admit his website’s about to lose nine tenths of its readers once charges are introduced?

• Implementing the “Publication as Aggregation”

• Science

  • Special report: Living in denial

• Security/Aggression

  • UK internet users becoming more security conscious

    Most UK internet users are becoming more knowledgeable about security issues and less willing to provide personal information online, according to new Ofcom research.

  • Student DNA scans in California prove controversial

    New students at the University of California, Berkeley, will get the results of one test before they attend a single class this year. Rather than a pass or fail, the results will be measured in the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that make up the genetic code.

    As part of their orientation, Berkeley’s incoming freshman class will be asked to “return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks”, reports Inside Higher Education.

• Environment

  • Mining garbage for tomorrow’s metals

    [T]he world is facing looming shortages of ruthenium, and other metals few people have ever heard of – indium, tellurium, selenium, gallium, neodymium and more.

    These metals are essential for the technologies that run the modern world – there are some in your cellphone – and they are crucial for many of the high-tech gadgets being touted to save us from our own polluting excesses, including semiconductors, solar cells, efficient lighting, wind turbine magnets, hybrid vehicle batteries, LEDs, fuel cells and catalysts. Demand for indium alone is projected to double by 2020.

  • One Million Chernobyl Fatalities?

    The book, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,” is by Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety in Minsk.

    Global assessments made ten years after the accident and reported at an IAEA conference in 1996 estimated that in the long run, the toll from Chernobyl in terms of premature or “excess” deaths would come to about 8,650. But because the number of “background” cancer deaths in the population most severely affected–the 600,000-800,000 involved in clean-up operations–would come to 825,000, most of the excess cancer deaths would be “hard to detect epidemiologically,” said Elizabeth Cardis, probably the world’s leading expert on the subject.

  • Demand for ivory soars in Asia, leads to death of African elephants

    Carefully, the Chinese ivory dealer pulled out an elephant tusk cloaked in bubble wrap and hidden in a bag of flour. Its price: $17,000.

  • I share their despair, but I’m not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain

    Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days has cause to doubt this. The world’s richest country decided not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled, drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places.

  • Our mission is to help the gulf coast recovery by creating a daily record of the oil spill.

  • Balloon Mapping the Oil Spill Proves Responsive, Open Source

  • Jeremy Jackson talks about How We Wrecked the Ocean

    We have been hearing a lot about what the oil spill is doing to the ocean. But something else which is also concerning is the condition the ocean was in, even prior to the spill. We live in a finite world. Our continued mistreatment of the ocean, the reduced fish population, and the disappearance of large fish in the last 50 years are all serious concerns.

  • Whistleblower Sues to Stop Another BP Rig From Operating

    A whistleblower filed a lawsuit today to force the federal government to halt operations at another massive BP oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, alleging that BP never reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation and is therefore risking another catastrophic accident that could “dwarf” the company’s Deepwater Horizon spill.

• Finance

  • Labour hid ‘scorched earth’ debts worth billions

    THE government last night accused Labour of pursuing a “scorched earth policy” before the general election, leaving behind billions of pounds of previously hidden spending commitments.

    The newly discovered Whitehall “black holes” could force even more severe public spending cuts, or higher tax rises, ministers fear.

  • Nations Over Banks (Who Serve Only Themselves)

    No nation can survive when it the rule of law becomes subordinate to a handful of rich and powerful people who simply steal anything they want with impunity. The economy of such a nation ultimately is bled dry by that corruption and theft, with the people over time refusing to innovate and provide their effort when it will simply be robbed away from them.

    There’s a lesson in here for Washington and President Obama, but the time available for both to act is limited; should the “let ‘em rob ‘em all” mentality persist the market will solve this problem in a most-unpleasant fashion.

  • Web of Debt

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Bank lobbyists make very direct quid pro quo argument

    Bank lobbyists are really laying it out there. The New York Times reported over the weekend that lobbyists presented their case against an amendment that could reduce debit card fees, the existence of which increase the price of pretty much everything you and I purchase, by threatening to withhold campaign contributions.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • 48 Hour Magazine gets cease and desist letter from CBS

    48 Hour Magazine, the project I took part in earlier this month in which a team of Bay Area journalists and designers created a print magazine in two days, received a cease-and-desist letter from CBS, owner of the 48 Hours TV series:

    On May 11, Lauren Marcello, the assistant general counsel at CBS sent a cease and desist letter, noting that “CBS is the owner of the rights in the award-winning news magazine televison series, ’48 Hours,’ and its companion series, including ’48 Hours Mystery,’” adding later in the letter, “your use is unlawful and constitutes trademark infringement, dilution and unfair competition …” along with a lot of other complicated, vaguely threatening legalese.

  • China Goes After “Illegal” Online Maps

    Xinhua, the Chinese news outlet, is reporting this morning that the Chinese government will be implementing new standards that are aimed at preventing “state secrets being disclosed and uncertified maps published online.”

  • Lhasa to require real name registration for printing and photcopying

  • Guest Post: Simon Singh on the BCA and Dishonesty

    Last week the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) hosted one of the world’s biggest gatherings of spinal manipulators, namely the European Chiropractors’ Union Convention in London.

    During the coffee breaks, there was probably lots of discussion about the BCA’s decision to sue me for libel over an article I published in the Guardian back in April 2008.

    The contentious part of the article questioned whether chiropractors should be treating childhood conditions such as ear infections, asthma and colic.

    Last month, after two years of legal wrangling, the BCA backed down and withdrew its libel action. It now has to foot its own legal bill and my legal costs, which I estimate will come to £300,000 in total.

    I am sure that the members of the BCA are annoyed that their subscriptions have been wasted on a horrendously expensive libel suit, but at least they can be reassured by some of the comments made in a press statement issued by the BCA last month.

    The BCA pointed out that the motivation for its legal action was that it believed that my article alleged that the BCA was a dishonest organisation.

    [...]

    Is it possible that the BCA threw in the interpretation of dishonesty merely as a tactical trick?

    Or, is it possible that the BCA was right (albeit late) in arguing that my article contained an accusation of dishonesty?

    Do the words “happily promote bogus treatments” imply dishonesty?

    It depends on the context, and for me the context clearly points towards an organisation that is naïve and reckless in promoting treatments that I believe are ineffective.

    For example, earlier in my original Guardian article I had written about chiropractors who have “quite wacky ideas”, which implies eccentricity or stupidity rather than dishonesty.

  • Collateral Murder, Collateral Damage

    That’s right, it was taken down on the basis of alleged copyright infringement, not because somebody thought it too shocking to be displayed. The idea that such an action would be taken because of an alleged infringement on somebody’s monopoly, while the underlying cold-blooded massacre of Iraqi civilians is swept under the carpet, is of course, repulsive. But it’s just another effect of the outdated law that is copyright – collateral damage, so to speak.

  • Samaranch, Kissinger and the Coca Cola company: a relentless fascist’s curious date with democracy

    Henry Kissinger, smaller and baggier than in his heyday, but still exuding an aura of power-celebrity, spoke of his ‘enormous confidence’ in Samaranch’s ‘meticulous adherence to the letter and the spirit of reform’. At the end of the day, Hill & Knowlton’s Gary Hymel strolled over to Upton’s counsel, Jan Faiks, and gloated, ‘that was just a great hearing.’ Faiks growled back: ‘You won one on me Gary and I am never going to forget it.’

    When Samaranch’s testimony was over he stood and turned to Kissinger who gripped him by the arm and pulled him close. It was an unsettling moment, the Jew who had escaped the Nazi holocaust embracing the fascist whose regime had kept Hitler’s Wehrmacht in supplies and smart grey uniforms, two old men united in the service of the ‘Movement’, McDonalds and the Coca Cola company.

  • Stop UCC from abusing its harassment policy to limit academic freedom

    It was also covered extensively in the international press. Dr Evans had been engaged in an ongoing debate with the colleague in question about the relevance of evolutionary biology to human behaviour, and in particular about the dubiousness of many claims for human uniqueness. He showed the article to the colleague in the presence of a third person, and to many other colleagues on the same day, none of whom took offense. Nevertheless the colleague to whom Dr Evans showed the article complained to HR that the article was upsetting.

    HR launched a formal investigation. Despite the fact that external investigators concluded that Dr Evans was not guilty of harassment, Professor Murphy has imposed a two year period of intensive monitoring and counselling on him, which may result in his application for tenure being denied.

  • Mucky private chat could be illegal soon

    First up is the case that got the green light yesterday. As already reported by The Register, Kent Police are in the process of using the Obscene Publications Act as a means to prosecute an individual, Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe for publishing obscenity in respect of a log of a private online chat he had with another individual.

    Due to reporting restrictions, we are unable to give any further details of the alleged content of the conversation at this point in time.

    What is beyond dispute is that this case marks an extension of the OPA into an area that its originators could never have envisaged – to wit, text chat or, as most internet users would regard it, person-to-person conversation.

  • Pakistan blocks access to YouTube

    Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube because of its “growing sacrilegious content”.

    Access to the social network Facebook has also been barred as part of a crackdown on websites seen to be hosting un-Islamic content.

  • Personal data privacy: What are your rights?

    Should you have the right to your own data? Privacy people think we should, and I think we should in many instances, but governments and some providers are no so positive about this.

  • DtO: Everybody Panic!

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • British Library to scan 40m newspaper pages

    The library holds 52,000 national and international titles covering 300 years. Currently researchers, 30,000 a year, have to go to Colindale in north London to scan through microfilm or hard copies.

  • Digital Agenda: Caution required for the future EU Net policie

    Today, with the release of Neelie Kroes’ Digital Agenda, the European Commission is unveiling major policy orientations regarding Internet-related policies. Several leaked drafts of the document revealed heavy pressures from various special interest groups. While the general outcome of the final document is encouraging, the crucial question of interoperability and open standards was eventually arbitrated in favour of US software vendors’ positions. On IPR enforcement and cybercrime, the worst has been avoided but some very ambiguous wording remains.

• Copyrights

  • Shazam shares big numbers: 75 million users, over 1 billion songs identified

    Mobile music recognition and discovery startup Shazam this afternoon revealed that it has grown its user base from 50 million to 75 million members in the last six months.

  • The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host

    After its previous bandwidth provider had to take the site offline due to concerns over an aggressive Hollywood injunction, today The Pirate Bay is fully back in operation with a surprising new supplier. From a few hours ago, in a move intended to “stand up for freedom of expression”, the Swedish Pirate Party became the site’s new host.

  • Four things you wouldn’t expect to be affected by piracy

    In some cases, the company behind the content being shared is another multi-billion dollar corporation while in other instances, it’s the work of an individual or small business. Either way, the content costs something to create, and sometimes Internet users aren’t even aware that what they’re sharing may be copyrighted.

  • Hurt Locker Producer Says That Criticizing His Plan To Sue Fans Means You’re A Moron And A Thief

    [T]he producers of the Oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker were supposedly gearing up to sue tens of thousands of fans for unauthorized file trading of the movie. Even if you’re against infringing on copyrights, it’s not hard to see why this is a strategy doomed to backfire massively. A Boing Boing reader found the email for Hurt Locker producer, Nicolas Chartier, who already has something of a reputation for… well… aggressive emailing, and received quite a response.

  • ACTA

    • Written Declaration 12 on ACTA: halfway there, participation still needed!

      185 signatures already, 184 left for an absolute majority! The Written Declaration 12 (WD12) on the ACTA agreement is still open for signatures from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs); it is now halfway completed. By setting red lines to the EU negotiators, it addresses key issues of the right to a fair trial and liability of Internet service providers. This week is a plenary week in Strasbourg, where MEPs will have an occasion to sign it. Who are the signatories so far? Who should be contacted in order to get to 369 signatories?

  • Digital Economy Bill

    • Ofcom cooks up a 3-strikes fudge – industry to do it themselves

      Ofcom proposes to leave it to industry to decide how the Digital Economy Act will operate. It will leave gaps in the Initial Obligations Code for industry to fill. Given that Ofcom has a mammoth £142 million budget, should we excuse this lack of attention to the public interest?

    • Ofcom #DEAct Code of Practice limited to ISPs with 400,000 subs & excludes mobile broadband

      ISPA Secretariat met with Campbell Cowie and Chris Rowsell from Ofcom this afternoon to discuss the ongoing work surrounding the DE Act.