Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• If you’re Canadian, you use Linux and you like multimedia, you’re about to become a criminal.

  This is a kind of crosspost summary of a new copyright amendment bill that was announced yesterday. Bill C-32 attempts to ‘modernize’ copyright law in Canada to bring it up to spec with other developed nations (aka to meet US agenda).

  The bill would make it illegal to circumvent or break locks of any kind on digital media, even for personal use. This supersedes all other provisions of the bill, which means you may be a criminal if you

  * Own and play region-locked DVDs from other countries
  * Play regular DVDs on Linux
  * Play Blu-Ray Discs on Linux
  * Transfer media to an iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad using Linux
  * Listen to DRM’d music on Linux

  And anything else that involves protected content that lacks official Linux support.

  Speak up while you can. Find your MP and write them an email telling them why you are opposed to C-62.

  We don’t want a US style DMCA, please don’t let that happen.

  Edit: Android is also Linux, so this applies to all of you Android users too!

• Frank Zappa’s Influence on Linux

  And all this Zappa stuff has what, exactly, to do with Linux? Zappa may have been as much of an influence on Linux and FOSS development as LSD was on Apple, although the Zappa influence on Linux isn’t thought about as much as the Apple-counterculture connection.

  An awful lot of people were responsible for the early growth of GNU/Linux and Free and Open Source Software, most of whom were not famous like Linus Torvalds or Richard M. Stallman. One of them, Clay Claiborne of Cosmos Engineering, was the first person to sell Linux pre-loaded on a hard drive. This may not sound like a big deal now, in 2010, but back in the dial-up 1990s, when most Linux distros came on stacks of floppies, this was a major step forward for GNU/Linux usability.

  Was Clay influenced by Zappa? “Of course,” he says.

• Washing the windows myths. Legal liability.

  Software defects? Well, according to windows xp professionals eula there is plenty of wriggle room. I quote

  LIMITED WARRANTY FOR PRODUCT ACQUIRED IN THE US AND CANADA. Microsoft warrants that the Product will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying materials for a period of ninety days from the date of receipt.

  Notice the key word substantially? That is their escape hatch. Even if you find a bug and wish something done about it under warranty, what is done is entirely up to microsoft.

  In fact, if you really read, I mean really read the eula, microsoft have covered their rear ends any which way from here to kingdom come. There is no way you can bring legal action against them, no way you can claim damages and you don’t have a snowballs chance in the Sahara of winning if you did try.

  Not just microsoft either, as I mentioned before, just about every software is produced as is. No ifs, buts or maybes. Either take it or leave it, like it or lump it. You have no hook to hang your legal coat on. So to anyone who tries to bring out that legal liability myth I simply go phffft!

  This myth is just another FUD campaign to scare people away from open source. It holds no water and is as transparent as glass and just as fragile.

• Linux Users vs. Linux Culture

  A lot has changed since I first started knocking on doors to solve my problems. First and foremost, there are a LOT more doors. Second, there are a lot more people to ask as open source finds itself becoming more and more mainstream. What doesn’t seem to have changed much are the responses.

• Linux On The Top

  Realising this hurdle many committed Linux enthusiastic dedicated their time and energy to simplify the usage of Linux distributions. Today Linux is available for a wide range of products. Linux has become increasingly popular in recent years, partly owing to the popular Mandriva Linux, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu distributions. In fact these distributions now come with user friendly GUI that gives a look and feeling of other proprietary operating systems that user are currently using.

• Audiocasts

  • Linux Outlaws 153 – Tinfoil Wallpaper Millionaire

    This week on Linux Outlaws: Google and OSI fighting over WebM, FSF enforces GPL in the iTunes Store, Poettering now aiming at the init system, Microsoft sponsoring LinuxTag, Pac-Man madness and much more…

  • The Linux Link Tech Show #356 6/2/10 [Ogg]

• Kernel Space

  • The Big Linux 2.6.35 Kernel Problem Is Fixed

    With yesterday’s automated kernel tests via our Phoromatic-powered test farm that monitors the Linux kernel performance on a daily basis with the results being available at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. Using the 2 June kernel from the Ubuntu mainline PPA no longer causes a major performance hit and all of the test result values have returned to their levels prior to this kernel bug that lasted about one week.

• Applications

  • New Mephisto Backup v1.10.4 released and looking for devs!

  • Whyteboard aids in teachable moments

    One of Whyteboard’s main features is its ability to annotate PDF files. You can load a PDF into the application, where it is converted into a series of images, then draw as you please over the images. Developer Steven Sproat says the program has proven to be beneficial in teaching environments. “I’ve received feedback from schoolteachers in Italy who are using the program in their lessons. I developed the program to be really easy to use; the teachers I mentioned are teaching six-year-olds who also use the program, so things must be as straightforward as possible.”

  • Proprietary

    • *NIX family focus

      For FreeBSD and Linux, we have numerous font fixes, improvements to X11 mode, and the KDE file selector freeze is fixed.

  • Instructionals

    • The Ultimate Bash Array Tutorial with 15 Examples

    • The Perfect Server – Fedora 13 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]

    • My Top 5 Bash Resources

    • Python decisions

    • connecting to self signed SSL certificate from Java on Debian/Ubuntu

    • LXC with Gentoo Linux

    • How to: Install Linux without a CD-Rom

    • Playing AAC/M4a files on Mandriva 2010

    • Copy partitions with gparted

    • How I sped up my server by a factor of 6

    • Create Bootable USB / Flash Drive From ISO Image in Linux or Windows

    • How to update Spamassassin on ISPConfig 2

    • Renaming Photos with digiKam

    • Shutter – Fully Loaded Screenshot App For Linux

    • Browsing Man and Info Pages using Konqueror Web Browser

    • Datamining with Linux

  • Games

    • Maxi Mini Golf – Released !

      Dariusz Dawidowski let me know about his new game “Maxi Mini Golf” which is a Commercial mini golf game that offers 36 holes, realistic physics, special score system and up to four human players.

    • Aquaria goes open source!

      Aquaria has gone open source under the GPL! Now all four of the games that pledged to open in the Humble Indie Bundle are officially open source — the others are Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture. I am especially excited about the modding possibilities for Aquaria because of its excellent level editing tools. Here’s a video showing an early version of the editor:

      I show off their editor more in the beginning of the Aquaria Design Tour

      This kind of freeform layer-based manipulation is the basis for most modern 2D games, so it’s important to have good tools. Having access to a user-friendly editor like this could be a big head start both for Aquaria modifications and for separate total conversion projects.

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • Qt and Open Governance

    And we’ll also need to open up the decision-making structure. That is to say, contributors who have shown themselves to be trustworthy and good at what they do deserve the right of having a say in the decisions. Take, for example some of the contributors of the past year: there are a couple of cases where they know the code better than people working in the Qt offices. We have come quickly to the point where we have to say “I trust you that this contribution is good”. This is part of the meritocratic process that we want to have in place.

• Distributions

  • New Open-Source OS Will Feature ‘Disposable’ Virtual Machines

    Invisible Things Lab is creating these lightweight, throwaway VMs that work with traditional virtual machines in Qubes, the open-source, Xen-based OS it plans to release in beta later this summer. Qubes was architected to minimize the attack surface in the VM environment.

  • Mandriva Linux is a fantastic scientific platform

    Stéphane TELETCHEA is working in a french research laboratory. He is also contributing to Mandriva Linux as a tester and packager for some years now. Below is his testimony in Mandriva Linux use for his daily work.

    We started using Mandriva Linux (Mandriva at that time) in the laboraty for the great combination of an ease of use and a very strong development platform. At that time I was a starting my PhD and trying to migrate from aging SGI Indigo 2 to more powerful standard PC-based computers. I did test other distributions at that time but Mandriva was the only one offering a lot of scientific applications (one that comes to my mind is XmGrace). Perl/bioperl, python, fortran, gcc and libc stacks were and are still very up-to-date but functional as if they were tested for years. This very good combination of stability and recent releases also helped some colleagues in improving their programs (for instance with the stricter checks coming in c++ in the gcc 4 series). This stability was also very appreciated while writing my PhD thesis where LyX and Pybliographer, on top of the Tetex stack, showed no crash leading to text loss. The pressure was sufficiently high in other domains to appreciate this part (those using Word or even Writer can not understand the beauty of (La)TeX).

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Squeeze Pre-review

      Every two years or so, Debian puts out a new “stable” release. This is my favorite distribution because of the minimal number of bugs and the huge software repositories and the powerful package manager. Right now, Lenny (5.0) is the stable release, and Squeeze (6.0) is in testing. Sometime “soon” Squeeze will get frozen, which means the regular flow of package migration will stop, and from then on it will only get bug and security fixes through a method of back-porting. Once the number of “release critical” bugs is reduced to an acceptable level (which used to mean 0, more recently it means 50 or so), then Squeeze will be released as the new stable version.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Maverick Alpha 1 released

        Pre-releases of Maverick are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

      • Celebrate Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha with these awesome Meerkat-inspired Wallpapers

        Whether you intend to download and install Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1 or not the following meerkat-themed wallpapers will certainly get you in the Maverick-y mood.

      • Ubuntu LTS 10.04, a Linux OS at Its Best

        It’s convenient to have a server install that’s entirely separate from the desktop install, and while it may not be as visually slick as the desktop version, that’s not really what you want on a server. The install was straightforward; I really liked the package collections; and everything was functional on first bootup. Five years of support is good, and all the software installed was fairly up-to-date (within a couple of release points, which is reasonable given the testing cycle needed for a long-term release). Ubuntu provides security updates regularly, so any security improvements in more recent releases should be rolled out to your servers quickly.

        One problem I found was that the documentation available online is a bit shaky. In some cases, it still refers to earlier releases, which isn’t very reassuring. However, Ubuntu is obviously making an effort with its documentation, and it’s easier to find information than it is with some other distros.

        Overall, Lucid Lynx is an impressive offering and definitely something I’d be happy to use for my own servers. More console-driven system management tools and better documentation, would make it an even better option.

      • Linaro: Accelerating Linux on ARM

        At our last UDS in Belgium it was notable how many people were interested in the ARM architecture. There have always been sessions at UDS about lightweight environments for the consumer electronics and embedded community, but this felt tangibly different. I saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks, for example, and in desktop tracks. That’s new.

        So I’m very excited at today’s announcement of Linaro, an initiative by the ARM partner ecosystem including Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, to accelerate and unify the field of Linux on ARM. That is going to make it much easier for developers to target ARM generally, and build solutions that can work with the amazing diversity of ARM hardware that exists today.

      • 3-Chip firms form venture to boost Linux push

      • Variants

        • Mint 9

          Everything is stable. Everything just works. No messing around.

        • Peppermint OS – A New Take on the Web-Centric Desktop

          As a Linux, Peppermint is not particularly notable except for its suitability for machines with low hardware specs, or users who do not want system resources wasted on bells and whistles like 3D cubes and wobbly windows. Peppermint should run quickly on just about any PC. Regarding the Prism aspect, it’s harder to draw a conclusion. Mozilla is still developing Prism so its full capabilities have not yet been reached, but the current state does not seem to be especially remarkable. Much of the functionality can be replicated (though perhaps not as well) with simple browser shortcuts. When Prism has more polish it may be a central part of how we interact with our computers, but for now Peppermint is mainly a small, fast and simple OS, albeit with dreams of something bigger.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The Kno, a Tablet for the College Market

    The Kno, a dual-screen device aimed at the college market, falls in the latter category. The tablet/e-reader, which was first shown in public on Wednesday at the D8 technology conference in Southern California, allows students to view textbooks on its digital screens much as they would appear in their analog versions, with text, color images and graphics.

  • Kno dual-screen tablet appears at D8, we go hands-on

    Kno promised to launch a double-screened Linux-based e-reader designed for students at D8, and the undercover startup didn’t disappoint — believe us when we say it came out in a big way.

  • Jumbo dual-screen tablet Kno debuts at D8

    The Kno is a big device, having two 14.1 inch (1440 x 900) capacitive touch screens. Each screen has its own battery, giving the Kno 8-hours of battery life, but a hefty weight of 5.5 lbs (I suppose all that glass contributes to the weight as well). As a point of reference, the iPad weighs 1.5 lbs and people complain it’s too heavy. On the other hand, the Kno is so big that you’d probably lay it on a desk to use it. And the target audience is students; if Kno (the company) has its way, students will be carrying around a Kno (the device) rather than a stack of textbooks. That’s the reason for the huge screens; most textbook pages can be shown ‘full size’ on a 14″ screen. Five and a half pounds doesn’t seem so bad compared to a backpack full of textbooks.

  • Phones

    • HP CEO: “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business”

      According to Hurd, HP was actually more interested in Palm’s IP — specifically webOS, which he wants to put on “tens of millions of HP small form-factor web-connected devices.” Sure, that makes sense, and it lines up perfectly with HP’s plan to “double down on webOS” and put it on everything from netbooks and slates to printers, but hey, Mark? You should really look into the smartphone business when you get a second, okay? Just trust us on this one.

    • Linpus Linux: Now with netbook, slate, MeeGo editions

      The first Acer netbooks to hit the market in 2008 were running Linpus Linux Lite, a custom Linux distribution optimized for small screens. While you don’t see many Linux netbooks anymore, the folks at Linpus haven’t given up on the mobile space, and they’re showing off the latest versions of Linpus for netbooks and tablets.

    • MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks Review

    • Webia Technologies Brings Us a $50 Android-Powered Set-Top-Box [Video]

      Webia Technologies introduced their budget-priced Bonux set-top-box prototype at Computex 2010 and it’s showing a lot of promise. The device is running an ARM11 SoC processor clocked between 700-720 mhz and the demo that they showed was speedy enough to make more than just a few people notice.

Free Software/Open Source

• Best Free and Open Source CRM Software

  Best Free and Open Source CRM Software: Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy for managing and understanding clients and sales prospects to help enhance customer satisfaction and thus increase profit and reduce operational costs. CRM software is needed to collect the correct information about a company’s customers and arrange that information for proper analysis and action. It is a tool for organizing, automating, and synchronize business processes for sales activities, marketing, customer service, and technical support. The information gathered by a CMS software needs to be kept up-to-date, accessible to employees, and provide the knowledge for employees to convert that data into products better matched to customers’ needs.

• Events

  • Liberation must replace domination in digital world

    I’M AT Open Source Bridge, a conference in Portland, Oregon for those who don’t only write software that’s free, but who care about it enough to plan, organise, and speak at an entirely volunteer-run programming conference. Portland is the second (and perhaps, the denizens here would say, the first) city of free software.

    It’s a strange time for this community, caught between their ideals and the business world. Back in the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, then a post-graduate at the University of Helsinki with a strange hobby of building a competitor to Windows in his spare time, would speak jokingly of his plans for “World Domination. Fast!”

    Now, 20 years on, the world domination phase of open source software has been and perhaps gone.

    Free software is ubiquitous and invisible: it powers Google and Yahoo!, a sizeable chunk of Fortune 500, and most of the internet’s infrastructure. I’ve seen it in use from Beijing to Tajikistan (which has volunteers who convert it to run in their native Tajik language, which Microsoft and Apple won’t deign to).

  • The Quintessence of Open Source

    The second Innovators barcamp – a meet-up organized by the Italian innovators group to pass from talking about innovation to do it in and for public administrations – was the perfect venue to share some ideas about “Open Source & Multi-sided Markets“.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Ditches the Dialog Box

    Get ready to say goodbye to Firefox’s multitude of dialog boxes. Recent design mock-ups show Firefox moving toward an “in-content” look where settings, the add-on manager, themes and other “things which formerly appeared in dialog boxes” will now become just another tab in your browser.

• Funding

  • Diaspora’s Final Tally: $200,000 From Nearly 6,500 Backers

    When Diaspora set out to raise money to build an open Facebook alternative site, they had a pretty modest goal: $10,000. Of course, they were raising the funds through a less than traditional means — using Kickstarter, an online fundraising site. Still, they shot past that goal in 12 days. And within 20 days, they had raised over $100,000. Yesterday, the fundraising closed, the final tally: just over $200,000.

• Openness

  • Open Sourcing Politics

    “Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond’s analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.

    That is precisely what the increasingly-important open government movement aims to do, an area I’ve been covering in this blog partly because of its close kinship with open source, but also because of the major implications it has for the use of open source – not least because open government tends to promote its deployment. But what exactly is open government, and how does it flow from open source?

  • Why “Naked Transparency” Has No Clothes

    First of all, I think we already have a data point on such radical transparency. Open source is conducted totally in the open, with all decisions being subject to challenge and justification. That manifestly works, for all its “naked transparency”.

    Now, politics is plainly different in certain key respects, not least because hackers are different from politicians, and there has been a culture of *anti*-openness among the latter.

  • WIPO To Open Its Doors To Public For First Time Ever

    The World Intellectual Property Organization is opening its doors to the public on Saturday for a glimpse at the organisation’s activities, during its first-ever “open day.”

    Visitors will be given the opportunity to ask WIPO staff, including the director general, questions during the day. The event is part of a larger Geneva weekend event to coincide with World Environment Day on 5 June. The UN Environment Programme is organising events on the Place des Nations, and the gardens of the Palais des Nations will also be open to the public on 5 June, and on 6 June the International Peace Bureau will have events along the Geneva lakeside.

  • Open Data

    • Local council? Want to publish your data? Here’s how

      In a very timely fashion, data.gov.uk has come up with a blogpost explaining for any local authorities who want to know (and are listening/reading) how to publish itemised local authority expenditure.

    • Opening up government finances

      The following guest post is from Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal, who advises the Where Does My Money Go? project on local spending data, and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.

• Programming

  • The False Uniformity of Oatmeal Code

    Here’s the interesting thesis: languages which allow you to write ugly code let you skim programs to find bad code. Languages which force you to write uniform code take away your ability to skim programs to find bad code.

    In other words, the superficial visual differences between good Lisp code and bad Lisp code or between good Python code and bad Python code or good assembly code and bad assembly code or good Java code and bad Java code (or good Befunge and bad Befunge code, if you haven’t had enough DFW yet) are smaller than the superficial visual differences between good Perl code and bad Perl code or good C code and bad C code or good C++ code and bad C++ code or good PHP code and bad PHP code.

Leftovers

• The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective

• Romania Cannibalizes its Anti-Corruption Institutions

  We don’t want to say we told you so. But we did. For the past few years, we’ve been repeatedly asked (with many a raised eyebrow) why our data assessing national-level anti-corruption mechanisms in countries like Bulgaria, Poland, Latvia, and Romania were so strong…amongst the strongest globally, in fact. Our answer has been straightforward: the EU and NATO accession processes in those countries had a real impact in terms of forcing governments to adopt some world-class anti-corruption institutions. Just don’t expect them to last forever, we cautioned.

• Science

  • Part-Human, Part-Machine Transistor Devised

    Man and machine can now be linked more intimately than ever, according to a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters. Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell’s own fuel.

    The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

  • Why Are Indian Kids So Good at Spelling?

    Consider the facts: Indian-Americans make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population; this year, an estimated 30 NSF-ers will compete at Scripps, 11 percent of the 273-kid field. Recent winners include Sai R. Gunturi from Dallas, who nonchalantly reassembled pococurante for a national title in 2003. Sameer Mishra from West Lafayette, Ind., nailed guerdon in 2008. And four-time finalist Shivashankar made it back-to-back titles for North South Foundation competitors last year, air-writing Laodicean for the win. If Shivashankar hadn’t come through, it’s possible another North South graduate would have: Four other NSF kids cracked the top 10 behind her.

• Security/Aggression

  • OpenSSL updates fix vulnerabilities

  • ID cards poster girl laments her £30

    Angela Epstein, the Manchester-based columnist and ID cards poster girl, has written a furious lament for the scheme – and she’s so angry she’s started a Facebook group.

  • Android rootkit is just a phone call away

    Hoping to understand what a new generation of mobile malware could resemble, security researchers will demonstrate a malicious “rootkit” program they’ve written for Google’s Android phone next month at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas.

  • Lieberman Bill Gives Feds ‘Emergency’ Powers to Secure Civilian Nets

    Joe Lieberman wants to give the federal government the power to take over civilian networks’ security, if there’s an “imminent cyber threat.” It’s part of a draft bill, co-sponsored by Senators Lieberman and Susan Collins, that provides the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to ensure that “critical infrastructure” stays up and running in the face of a looming hack attack.

  • Are Cameras the New Guns?

    In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

  • Police officer’s visual estimate of speed is enough for a conviction, Ohio Supreme Court rules

• Environment

  • Worst-Case Scenario

  • Rep. Don Young (R-AK) says BP oil gusher is ‘not an environmental disaster.’

    Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), an ardent supporter of the oil industry and adherent of the “drill here, drill now” chant, appeared on KTOK radio yesterday to discuss BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf. Like Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who dismissed the oil spill catastrophe as an “act of God,” Cole sought to downplay dangers inherently associated with offshore drilling.

  • Natural Oil Seeps and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster: A Comparison of Magnitudes

    Some reports in the media attempt to downplay the significance of the release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident by arguing that natural oil seeps release large volumes of oil to the ocean, so why worry? Lets look at the numbers.

  • Salmon Study Pits Fish Against Alaskan Mega-Mine

    An Alaskan bay bitterly contested by fishermen and miners has become the site of a landmark study on population dynamics — and the findings favor the fish.

  • Earth holds less biodiversity than thought

    How many species share our planet? According to a recalculation by an international research team, the number is significantly lower than we thought – only around 5.5 million.

• Finance

  • Greece to Sell Assets to Help Pay Down Deficit

    Greece announced Wednesday its plans for a big sale of state-owned assets, as the struggling government moved to shrink its huge budget deficit and fulfill the terms of an international rescue package.

  • First-time jobless claims drop for second week

    New claims for unemployment insurance fell for the second straight week, fresh evidence the job market is slowly improving.

  • JPMorgan Penalized by Regulator in Britain

    JPMorgan Chase was fined a record £33.32 million ($48.6 million) on Thursday by the financial regulator in Britain for failing to keep client funds separate from the firm’s money.

  • Panel grills ratings services executives, Buffett about housing meltdown

  • Bailout recipient AIG ends sale of Asian subsidiary to Prudential

    Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the collapse of a deal to sell American International Group’s Asia life insurance division won’t undercut chances for taxpayers to be repaid the $180 billion set aside to bail out the insurance conglomerate.

  • Geithner urges swift ‘global agreement’ on financial reforms to support recovery

  • Geithner: Nations won’t agree on bank tax at G-20

    Geithner said Wednesday he did not think the Group of 20 major industrial and developing countries would reach agreement at upcoming meetings in South Korea over the question of imposing a new tax on banks.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Lawyers Claim Google Wi-Fi Sniffing ‘Is Not an Accident’

    Google spokeswoman Christine Chen said in an e-mail that the patent in question “is entirely unrelated to the software code used to collect Wi-Fi information with Street View cars.” In a follow up e-mail, Chen added that Google files “patent applications on a variety of ideas that our engineers come up with. Some of them mature into real products or services, and some of them don’t.”

  • Google to hand over intercepted data

    Google will begin handing over to European regulators the rogue data it intercepted from private WiFi internet connections within the next two days, in an effort to defuse growing controversy over its latest privacy blunder.

    [...]

    “We screwed up. Let’s be very clear about that,” Mr Schmidt said. “If you are honest about your mistakes it is the best defence for it not happening again.”

  • How Google Uses You

  • EU To Monitor All Internet Searches

    “The European Parliament is issuing a written declaration about the need to set up an early warning system to combat sexual child abuse. However, the substance of the declaration is to extend the EU data retention directive to search engines, so that all searches done on for example Google will be monitored. If you are a citizen concerned about the right to privacy and freedom on the Internet, you can help by sending e-mail to the MEPs from your country and explaining the issue to them.”

  • AT&T warns customer that emailing the CEO will result in a cease and desist letter

    Sure, Steve Jobs might be a one-man email PR machine, but his pal Randall Stephenson at AT&T doesn’t appear to be quite as gregarious — as reader Giorgio Galante found out today, sending AT&T’s CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T’s Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter.

  • Tweeter appeals against conviction over explosive airport message

    Paul Chambers, a former trainee accountant who was fined £1,000 after posting a message to the social network Twitter joking about blowing up an airport, is to appeal against his conviction.

  • CPJ denounces Israel’s use of footage seized in flotilla raid

    The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces Israel’s editing and distribution of footage confiscated from foreign journalists aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla that was raided on Monday.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • What’s Left Of The Sony Betamax Decision?

    When Cross puts all those stories together like that, you realize how much of the last few years has really been about the entertainment industry effectively dismantling the core concepts put forth by Stevens in the Betamax decision. A key component to what helped make the internet free to become the internet we know, love and use every day, is slowly getting chipped away by special interests who don’t want to allow that freedom because it undermines their business models. When you put all of that together in one place and realize how much has already been eroded, it’s downright frightening, and it makes you wonder what great new technology won’t be built and won’t be widely used because of these policies.

  • DE Act: does the UK qualify for a 2-tier copyright regime?

    A qualifying copyright holder is a new concept under the Digital Economy Act. But what is it? And is Ofcom introducing a two-tier copyright regime, where those with the valuable rights get privileges and individual authors get side-lined?