• Distributions

Supporting Multi-Touch In Non-Multi-Touch Linux Apps

After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.

Desktop

• [compiz] The final piece of the puzzle

• LLVMpipe & Compiz 0.9 Still Don’t Play Along

  LLVMpipe is an especially interesting Gallium3D driver since it allows accelerating the state trackers atop any modern CPU, but for any close to decent level of performance when using OpenGL you need a hefty multi-core CPU (here’s some LLVMpipe benchmarks just from last week) that supports the latest SSE4 instructions as well. While some OpenGL games will run with LLVMpipe and the performance of this driver that leverages the Low-Level Virtual Machine is much faster and better than Mesa’s old software rasterizer or the Gallium3D Softpipe driver, Compiz nor the GNOME Shell (and most other compositing window managers) yet work with this driver.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 163 – The Frostbite Empire

  In this special episode we interview blind Linux user Jonathan Nadeau about his company Frostbite Systems that sells blind-optimised computers, his podcast network Frostbite Media and much more…

• Episode 0x2D:Updated Discussion

  Karen and Bradley discuss the enforcement activities of the Software Freedom Conservancy, recent conferences and medical devices.

• Podcast 81 Mona Interview (GentooApologetin)

  Interview with longtime Gentoo user Mona, third place finisher in the recent 2010 Gentoo screenshot contest. If you would prefer to read the interview, Mona provided a transcript below.

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 15

  In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 is going to add gesture support and 11.04 is going to be called the Natty Narwhal. Debian 6.0 has been feature frozen while Oracle sets its sights on Google. Discover how we fared with our Nethack challenge and how we filled the Open Ballot section without an Open Ballot.

Google

• Google now supporting voice and video chat on Linux

  Google now supporting voice and video chat on Linux

  Google has finally updated their web based talk service to support voice and video chat on Linux.

• Google’s App Engine now multi-tenant capable

  Further details about the release can be found in the release notes. Version 1.3.6 of the Google App Engine SDK is available to download from Google Code.

• Chrome Web Store Slated For October Launch, Google Taking A Mere 5% Cut Of Revenue

  Gaming portal 1Up.com has detailed a presentation given by Google developer advocates Mark DeLoura and Michael Mahemoff at GDC Europe that contains new details about the Chrome Web Store — a feature first announced at Google I/O that will allow users to purchase web applications from their Chrome web browsers. During their talk, the Google employees revealed that the Web Store is going to (probably) launch in October, and they gave more details on how the web store’s payments would work.

• Android Developers Bemoan Paid App Limits

  Android developers can distribute their software for free in 46 countries, but they can only sell apps in 13 countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Kernel Space

• The IRMOS realtime scheduler

  In the context of the IRMOS European Project (Interactive Real-Time Applications on Service-Oriented Infrastructures), a new realtime scheduler for Linux has been developed by the Real-Time Systems Laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of this new scheduler, describe its features and how it can be practically used, provide a few details about the implemented algorithms, and gathering feedback by the community about possible improvements.

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI’s 2D Performance With X.Org Server 1.9

    With the imminent release of X.Org Server 1.9, last week we delivered benchmarks of Intel’s 2D driver performance with X.Org Server 1.9. In those tests we found Intel’s UXA (UMA Acceleration Architecture) performance only changed a bit — for either better or worse — with the updated X Server, but today we are looking at the 2D EXA performance using ATI Radeon hardware using this soon-to-be-released X Server.

Applications

• ClamAV 0.96.2 released

  The ClamAV developers have released version 0.96.2 of their open source virus scanner toolkit. The latest version of the free cross-platform, anti-virus application addresses a number of bugs found in the previous version, including memory and error path leaks in the libclamav library. Other changes include memory management improvements, better database loading time and various scanning enhancements.

• 10 Things Any Monitoring Software Should Do (Nagios Does it)

• Busyhot – A Nice Little Gnome Panel Applet to Show Real Time CPU Load and Temperature

• VLC Media Player: The Cone Knows Its Formats

  The world of open source software has ample choices for editing and manipulating audio and video media files. But when you just want put your feet up and relax, fewer really ideal options are available. One solid choice is the Gxine is a media player (See my review here). But an even better pick is the VLC Media Player.

• Proprietary

  • Are we being too hard on Adobe?

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Scratch buffers for Emacs

  • Extracting information out of your hard disk

  • Extracting information out of your hard disk

  • Booting from a btrfs filesystem in a GPT-partitioned USB flash drive attached to a non-EFI system

  • Background a running process

  • Easy Backup and Recovery Ubuntu with Redobackup (GUI)

  • Easy Gmail reading with mutt

  • Debugging ARM programs inside QEMU

  • How To Make an RSS Feed from a Forum Thread

  • UNIX / Linux: 2 Ways to Add Swap Space Using dd, mkswap and swapon

  • Enable SSL on Apache-2.2

  • Mount Any Archive File In Two Clicks [Ubuntu]

  • Backup your Linux machine the smart way

  • Unix How-To: Sudo without Passwords

  • nethogs – Net top tool grouping bandwidth per process

  • Install and configure MailWatch monitoring tool for MailScanner

  • Reinstall Debian init.d scripts into default runlevels

  • Cloning Debian System Packages

  • How to free Linux Kernel page cache and/or inode and dentry caches

  • verify and compare two directories differences

  • Multiple IP address in Unbutu

  • How to Create a Family Friendly Ubuntu Setup

  • Emacs undo trees

  • The Tap Is Turned Off

  • Few tricks and info about sudo

  • [SOLVED] Module DateTime.DateTime, line 1145, in toZone

  • How to: Display pre-login banner on your SSH server

  • Using the /proc Filesystem to Examine Your Linux Inner Working

  • Playing With Python And Gmail – Part 2

  • apt-file: Locate Missing Package Files

  • Can You Make It? Compile C Programs on Linux Using Make Command

  • Use fsarchiver to backup Mandriva Linux system

  • Creating Fancy and Stylish Screenshots with Screenie

  • Hard Drive Caching with SSDs

  • How to enable proxy on opensuse 11.3

  • Epidermis-Manager Gnome Desktop themes with one Click

  • 10 things you can do to keep your new Linux users from bailing on you

    When new users are presented with a new operating system, their experience can be tragic or it can be magic. Which path it takes depends upon a number of issues. First among those issues is how easy the transition is. If users are faced with hurdle after hurdle, you know they are going to either be coming back to you or giving up. It doesn’t have to be that way.

    In this article, I am going to show you 10 steps to take a default Ubuntu 10.04 installation and make it as newbie-proof as possible. After this walk-through, you can also re-create the “complete distribution” so you always have that newbie-proof Linux distro at the ready. Let’s take a look at these steps.

• Games

  • O A.D. Alpha 1 Argonaut

  • 0 A.D. Releases Alpha Build, Launches PPA

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Ingo Malchow

  • KDE 4.5 Trades Revolution for Evolution

    By the standards of previous releases in the KDE 4 series, KDE 4.5 is tame. It has few new applications, and introduces no new technologies. Yet with its combination of small innovations and interface improvements, KDE 4.5 still manages to be a release worth installing. Although it does not try to expand the concept of the desktop, it does make KDE easier to use in dozens of small and satisfying ways.

    Released August 10, KDE 4.5 is already packaged for many major distributions, including Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, although in some cases you will have to look in the developmental repositories rather than the main ones. Source code is also available from the project. Those who want to try it before installing can download the latest CD from openSUSE’s KDE Four Live site.

  • The KDE 4.5 Semantic Desktop

    My last article I spoke about the new KDE Activities features Search and Launch Containment Activity (see my article “Using the KDE 4.5 Search and Launch Containment Activity“). This is the first visible sign of KDE’s use of the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop. Nepomuk is a system that uses metadata throughout the desktop to aid in file search and peer to peer collaboration. So far the project has yet to reach its full potential (as it is quite new to the desktop).

    Strigi, on the other hand, is the desktop search daemon that runs on the KDE desktop. It is these two components that help to create the KDE 4.5 Semantic Desktop (a desktop who’s data is easily shared between components). In this article I will introduce you to these two components and how you interact with them to make your KDE desktop as fluid as possible.

  • Working Upstream.

    On the website of an Austrian (no kangaroos!) newspaper, I read an interview with Canonical’s Jono Bacon. In this interview, Jono talks about the process of developing central components of the desktop inside Canonical. The process is basically that Canonical’s design department, Ayatana develops components. When they are finished, they’re offered for inclusion into GNOME, which was not a successful in all cases yet. According to Jono this is “working upstream”, explaining that in this context Ayatana is the upstream. GNOME is seen as a provider of components, building blocks for Ubuntu’s user experience.

    The definition Jono handles of upstream development is quite different from how it works for me. I can speak of personal and professional experience in this context, as I have been working quite a lot on central components of the Plasma Desktop (and Netbook as well). I have done this work both, as a voluntary contributor in my Free time (pun intended), and continue to do so in my working hours for open-slx. open-slx happens to sell and support Linux deskop operating systems.

  • Ubuntu One – The KDE Way

    Over the past couple of months I had the great opportunity of taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code. I moved out to bring Ubuntu One to the KDE desktop and I think I was rather successful with it, now all I need to do is find someone who is willing to maintain it … Now that Google Summer of Code is over I will continue focusing my efforts on Kubuntu and general distribution development which is the reason I would very much like to find someone who is willing to maintain it.

  • How to Install KDE 4.5

    For other Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and other operating systems, you should check the official websites, wikis, announcement sections of forums, and mailing lists to see if KDE 4.5 will be included in their repositories and/or future releases.

  • The KDE 4.5 Notification Area

  • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-08-18

    This week on a very steamy episode of KDEMU we have Lydia Pintscher, GSoC and Season of KDE cat herder.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2.32 Beta 1 Is Here

    The first beta of the upcoming GNOME 2.32 has landed to give early adopters, distro builders, developers and generally curious people a taste of things to come.

    GNOME 2.32 Beta 1, technically GNOME 2.31.90, is somewhat of a new development since the next release of the popular desktop environment was supposed to be the all-powerful GNOME 3.0.

  • The GNOME Developers Put Out The First SeedKit Release

    The GNOME developers have announced their first public release (v0.1) of SeedKit, consisting of both the GNOME SeedKit Viewer and the SeedKit library. GNOME’s SeedKit is designed to blend web technologies (namely HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) into the GNOME desktop by allowing native user-interfaces to be written in these web technologies. SeedKit leverages GTK+, WebKit, and Seed to lower the barrier to creating new user-interfaces for the GNOME desktop. SeedKit was inspired by Palm’s WebOS SDK and Mozilla’s JetPack.

Distributions

• Untangle Gateway- An open source solution for blocking spam, spyware, viruses, adware and unwanted content on the network

• Reviews

  • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 2 Linux Mint LXDE

    Day Two. Our weapon of choice: Linux Mint 9 LXDE.

    On the face of it Linux Mint LXDE is just a tweaked Lubuntu, but there is more to it than that.

    It features (many) more software packages on install, codecs pre-installed, and some “heavier” packages like Thunderbird.

  • Arch Linux – Minimal, Lightweight, Flexible & Easy to Use Linux Distribution

    Arch Linux is a lightweight, flexible and simple Linux Distribution which is targeted at competent GNU/Linux users. Its Development focuses on a balance of minimalism, elegance, code correctness and modernity. It provides a minimal environment upon installation, (no GUI), already compiled and optimized for i686/x86-64 architectures. We already discussed about a lot of Linux Distros and also How to create your own Linux Distribution.

  • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 4 – Sabayon Five-Oh LXDE

    Today we give Sabayon Five-Oh a run. Three of the four distros we reviewed this week have been using LXDE as its desktop environment.

    Sabayon is the first distro we are having a look at that have not been Ubuntu based or a variant of Ubuntu.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva S.A. – Financial and Strategic Analysis Review – new company profile and analysis released

    Mandriva S.A. Mandriva is an online retailer of Linux software products. The company is engaged in the development and distribution operations of Mandriva Linux products, software applications, storage devices and drives, USB speakers, support and training applications and goodies. Mandriva’s main products are Mandriva directory server, Linbox rescue server, corporate server 4, Pulse 2 and corporate desktop. The company also
    provides online download of its software products. The company caters to corporate enterprises, government organizations, and educational and technical institutions. The company has operations across 140 countries, and offices across France, Brazil and the U.S.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Pursuing Certification For RHEL 6, Hypervisor

    Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.

    The Linux vendor has entered into an agreement with Atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4, according to a Red Hat blog post.

  • Red Hat (RHT) Price Soars Above the 50-Day Moving Average

    Red Hat shares have crossed above the 50-day moving average on lighter than usual volume. The crossing of the stock price above the moving average may signal the beginning of a bullish trend. Today, shares of RHT rose $0.86(+2.77%) to $31.88. RHT traded between the range of $31.20 – $32.08. Today’s trading activities for Red Hat stock may be a sign that the shares will continue to head higher in the foreseeable future assuming the moving average has upward slope.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle Support Launched

    Today, the Red Hat team is excited to launch Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is an optional subscription offering that provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for longer than its standard seven-year life cycle.

    With Extended Life Cycle Support customers can receive limited software maintenance and technical support services for an additional three years, extending the life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a full ten years. The seven-year life cycle of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release generally applies to major versions, so, for example, the standard life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 runs from October 2003, when it was released, to October 2010. For customers who purchase ELS, which is sold as an add-on to an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, the support life cycle can be extended to October 2013.

  • Fedora

    • Droid X and Fedora.

      I’d heard really good things about the new generation Android phones, especially their playing nice with Linux hosts. So I decided it was high time I tried something new rather than simply queuing up for a new and spiffier prison cell (iPhone). Based on the reviews of service in Consumer Reports, Verizon was far and away the leader in customer satisfaction. I decided to concentrate on their offerings, and was thrilled to find the new Droid X (info: Flash site) was now shipping, albeit with a few weeks’ wait.

    • fedoracommunity.org website design progressing

      So a while back I talked a bit about the fedoracommunity.org website project that the Fedora Websites team has been working on, including the vision behind it and the work that had been done on it up to that point.

    • Fedora 14 Alpha is go!

      As John posted last night, Fedora 14 Alpha was declared ready for release next week. Although there was a one-week slip to handle the fact that our blocker list wasn’t clear, Fedora developers and testers in the community have worked hard together both to resolve the remaining issues and make sure that our Alpha would pass the release criteria. There were a number of developers who hopped in to fix things quickly to yield package builds that would clear the runway, so thanks to all of you guys.

• Debian Family

  • Where do Debian Developers Come From?

    In a study not likely to cause controversy, Christian Perrier has published the results of his analysis of the number of Debian developers per country. He ran the analysis last year for the first time, so one can see the progress or recession in the last year. No matter where you call home, the numbers are quite interesting.

    The land that gave the world Linus Torvald also gives the world the most Debian developers per million population. Ranked number one last year as well, Finland is home to 3.92 active developers per one million souls. In second place is Switzerland with 2.83 per million. New Zealand holds a very respectable third place with 2.51 per million. The United Kingdom beats out the United States with their 1.03 developers per million to .53. In last place is the Ukraine, China, and India. Making their first showing this year is Ecuador with one new developer or .07 developers per million people. Sweden, who ranked third last year, fell to sixth this year. Ireland has gained three new developers bringing their total to nine which allows them to hold ninth place, up from 13.

  • Debian Project News – August 9th, 2010

    Welcome to this year’s ninth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

    * The Debian project Release Team announces an official Freeze
    * Annual Debian Developer Conference 2010 ended
    * A free (as in speech) Debian book in the making
    * Second alpha version for “Squeeze”-based Debian Live images
    * Net-installation CD images with firmware available
    * Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.0 alpha0 test release
    * ZFS support in unstable on kFreeBSD ports
    * Debian-Accessibility is using Blends web sentinel
    * Debian GIS project will release Blends metapackages in “Squeeze”
    * DebiChem project will release Blends metapackages in “Squeeze”
    * DebConf11 logo contest
    * When should services started by init.d scripts be operational?
    * Different statistics about Debian
    * Building all files from source

  • Debian: Yesterday’s Distribution?

    For another thing, while some distributions are more concerned than others about ease of use, today what increasingly determines that factor is not distributions themselves so much as the desktop that is in use. Using GNOME or KDE on Debian is not so different than using GNOME or KDE on Ubuntu, despite Ubuntu’s recent usability efforts.

  • Developers with feet in Debian and Ubuntu

    This is a list of people who are in ubuntu-dev or ubuntu-core-dev AND have their key in the Debian keyring, it’s not an indicator of how active that person may or may not be. Here are the scripts they used if you’re interested in working on this sort of thing.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 206

      In This Issue

      * Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!
      * Feature Freeze in place for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
      * Making Ubuntu More Accessible
      * Talking about Ubuntu Studio with Scott Lavender, Project Lead for Ubuntu Studio
      * Another Heated Discussion In the Ubuntu Community
      * Ubuntu Stats
      * LoCo News
      * Launchpad News
      * This week In Design – 13 August 2010
      * Finding The Ubuntu Font Design
      * How are your users feeling? Example from Rhythmbox
      * An Update to the Ubuntu Light Themes
      * Awesome Work Others Have Done
      * Hugs For Bugs!
      * Can We Count Users Without Uniquely Identifying Them?
      * Revving up the Ubuntu Manual Project for Maverick
      * Behind MOTU Relaunches As Behind The Circle
      * In The Press
      * In The Blogosphere
      * Linux Foundation Makes Enterprise Open Source Boring
      * KDE’s New Releases Make a Splash
      * LinuxCon Grapples With Challenges, From Mobile To Multicore
      * Fotoxx — the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You’ve Never Heard Of
      * Zenoss Releases 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey Report
      * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
      * Upcoming Meetings and Events
      * Updates and Security
      * UWN Sneak Peek
      * And Much Much More!

    • Reasons to Love Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Codename “Natty Narwhal” Release Schedule

    • Calling my shot

      I predict that Ubuntu 11.10 will be named “Ostentatious Ocelot”.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Peppermint Ice review

        Does Peppermint Ice, the new cloud-oriented desktop distro, have what it takes to do for desktops what Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks?

Be A Community Manager

Some communities put a great deal of emphasis on the developers/testers group with limited time for users while others engage the users at a higher rate than developers/testers and also increase time on champions. I believe in solution B as an engaged user community significantly increases the feedback for developers and allows the project to expand into a significant force in the industry. I also believe that champions come from the user group and the more champions a community has the more successful it is.

Open-source cuts through intell community’s red tape

Intelligence analysts will soon have a new idea- and decision-management tool. Called Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, the software is an open-source version of a proprietary program developed for the intelligence community.

ACH allows analysts to start with a great deal of data and find those data points that support or undermine various hypotheses, but it is a single-user system. Matthew Burton, a Web strategy consultant and former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, has tried for three years to develop a collaborative version so that multiple analysts could study the same hypotheses simultaneously, but he has been stymied by incompatibility with proprietary software specifications and licensing issues.

Open Source Contributor Agreements: Some Examples

The first part of this article explained the purpose and scope of Contributor Agreements in open source projects. This article presents an overview of some Contributor Agreements that are used in the community.

Contributor Agreements come in all shape and forms, ranging from full-fledged Contributor License Agreements (CLA) that have to be signed to informal consent to some set of rules. This article will take a look at a number of different agreements in order to show that community norms can vary widely.

Performance vs Readability: the biggest dilemma

Let’s say you want to start a FLOSS project.
How many people did that up to now? Many.
But there is a problem, or better, a conflict of goals.

In one hand, you have the need of making your code fast enough. Which task is even more complex if you are using an interpreted language (for reasons out of the scope of this blog post). On the other hand (:D) there is the very important requirement of keeping your code human readable.
Languages, in general, have several “syntax levels” basing on developer’s skills. Newbies tend to stick to what is the standard way of writing, say, a for loop, while more skilled people are able to exploit all the potential of the language by using very exotic “code constructs”. Again, I don’t want to get into any particular language here, I just want to explain the trade-off that a developer, especially a FLOSS one has to accept when writing software

Free Interaction Design for your FLOSS Project

Now, I know there are tons of you out there who are ready for interaction design help and are definitely willing to work with designers, because I hear from you all the time! There’s not enough interaction designers in the FLOSS community, and I believe programs like Matt’s that engage up-and-coming designers in the FLOSS community early on will help build up our interaction designer population. They provide a wonderful mutual benefit – the design students get to work on real-life projects, not just throw-away designs that are abandoned forever at the end of the semester – and the developers involved get the design help they desire but have such a hard time finding because of the dearth of designers. Help provide these students a great experience in interacting with our community, and maybe they’ll stick around!

Reaching Out To Which Community?

That non-technical user is the future of FOSS. If we don’t reach out to that person and get them using FOSS, it’s only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop is synonymous with OS/2. Yes, I acknowledge that Linux powers the Internet, and most of the search traffic and the most e-commerce and most supercomputers, etc . . . but that’s not enough. People have to know they are using Linux and FOSS and that means it has to power their desktop. In the absence of an awesome Linux desktop marketing machine (Canonical is good, but they’ve got a ways to go before they can match the awesome marketing of Microsoft, or that up and comer, Apple, it’s up to us. The community. We’ve got to speak with something resembling a unified voice, delivering a consistent, inclusive message.

Reducing Code Risks with Open Source

Ready to be an open source contributor but don’t know where to start?

In early 2009, as the stories of many websites begin, a few college friends were considering what kind of project they might start together. In this particular case, the result was OpenHatch.

OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don’t know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for “bite-size bugs,” the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors.

Events

• Software Freedom Day In The Free State!

  This year the Ubuntu Maryland Local Community Team will again be holding a day of talks and discussions about Free and Open Source Software at the Miller Branch of our co-sponsors the Howard County Library! We are currently planning to have the event from 10am until 2pm.

• Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: An international workshop

• European Open Source Think Tank 2010: Paris, 28-29 September

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4: One generation ahead of everyone else speedwise

  • Mozilla Sees You Using Chrome Alongside Firefox

    Blizzard also notes that the next major version of Firefox, 4.0, will be “a generation ahead” in terms of Javascript speed, but does it really matter if it’s so much faster than Chrome. Every iteration of benchmark tests between the two seems to show them neck-and-neck. As Blizzard notes many people are doing, I’m going to stick with both open source browsers, which, at this point, are defining browser innovation.

  • The popularity of Firefox around the world

    Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

    Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

Oracle

• When open source sells out.

  An open source project is generally conceived and implemented by a single person or small group. This conceiver and controller of the open source project has the most knowledge of the project. It is their vision which determines the direction of the project and they have the ultimate say in what contributions are accepted. When an open source project is sold out it is generally with their blessing and they continue working on the project under the mantle of the new owner.

• OpenOffice by the book

  Called Open The Door, the book is not so much a manual for the office suite as it is a guide to making the most of OpenOffice.org. So while it includes advice on installing and using OpenOffice.org on Windows and Mac OS X machines, it is also focused on helping users make effective use of OpenOffice.

• Illumos begins diverging from OpenSolaris

  According to Garret D’Amore, Illumos project leader, the recently launched derivative is beginning to diverge from OpenSolaris. D’Amore has noted in his blog that he believes the last commit to Oracle’s public repository for ON, the core of OpenSolaris, has been made. According to a leaked memo revealed earlier this week, Oracle are ceasing open development of Solaris and will discontinue OpenSolaris, migrating users to Solaris Express 11.

• The OpenSolaris-Based Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 Released

  Last week we found out that Oracle is killing off OpenSolaris and that there will no be OpenSolaris 2010.xx release as we’ve been waiting on for months, their Solaris code-base will be developed behind closed-doors, and only after the enterprise Solaris release will there be a “Solaris Express” release intended as the replacement to OpenSolaris. Though derived from the OpenSolaris code-base there has been a few community derivative operating systems such as Nexenta, StormOS (based off of Nexenta Core Platform but shipping as a desktop OS), and BeleniX. While OpenSolaris may now be dead, Nexenta at least is still living and today they’re out with their Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 release.

• Oracle loses another DTrace creator

  Leventhal said, in a blog posting, that at Sun he had found himself “surrounded by superlative engineers” and that he felt lucky to have worked with Cantrill and Shapiro on DTrace. Most recently, Leventhal had been working on Fishworks, Sun’s Solaris based storage system technology. Leventhal does not say what he will be doing next, only that he is “off to look for my next remarkable place and time beyond the walls of Oracle”. It is possible he could follow in Cantrill’s footsteps; within days of leaving, it was announced he had become Vice President of Engineering at Joyent, one of the companies involved in the OpenSolaris derivative Illumos which was launched at the beginning of August.

• Oracle vs Google: Triple Damage!

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Eben Moglen on what it takes to keep defending FOSS

  Eben Moglen’s keynote address at LinuxCon last week, “Doing What it Takes: Current Legal Issues in Defending FOSS,” called for a strategic shift in the free software movement. Moglen, the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and one of the principal drafters of the GPLv3, said the economy of sharing and the economy of ownership are not mutually hostile, but mutually reinforcing, then outlined three steps for ensuring the continued coexistence between the free software and business communities. For those who missed Moglen’s speech, here is a summary of his ideas on what it will take to ensure the health of the FOSS ecosystem.

Government

• Spook developer speaks! An interview with Matthew Burton

  I’ve never seen it in action, but DHS’s Virtual USA project sounds remarkable. On top of using open source software to build it, the objective of the project is to break another government taboo: sharing information with other agencies and levels of government. Having been an intelligence analyst who relied a lot on mapping tools and was constantly frustrated by the inability to share geographic data even within your own building, it’s apparent that if Virtual USA delivers, it’s going to dramatically change how first responders work.

Programming

• Vim editor learns Python 3

  More than two years since the 7.2 release, Vim creator Bram Moolenaar has announced the arrival of version 7.3 of his open source text editor. Vim, an acronym for “Vi iMproved”, was originally created for the Amiga computer as an extended version of the vi editor, with several additional features aimed at editing source code.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Russian Scholar Warns Of ‘Secret’ U.S. Climate Change Weapon

  As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

  In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.”

• Earth’s Overdraft Notice

• Why has extreme weather failed to heat up climate debate?

• Scientists dispute White House claim that spilled BP oil has vanished

  Earlier this month, government scientists reported that about 75% of the oil had been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf.

  But University of South Florida scientists, returning from a 10-day research voyage, said they found oil on the ocean floor in the DeSoto canyon, a prime spawning ground for fish far to the east of BP’s rogue oil well. Preliminary results suggested that oil was getting into the phytoplankton, the microscopic plants at the bottom of the Gulf food chain.

Finance

• The Revolving Door Between Goldman Sachs and the Obama Administration

  At a time when Congressional hearings are set to call testimony from some Goldman Sachs employees, it is vital to understand how widespread that institution’s ties are to the Obama administration. This diary shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and Goldman created institutions (like the Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution), employees and influence peddlers in the Obama administration.

• UPDATE: The Revolving Door Between Goldman Sachs and the Obama Administration

• Wonkbook: GM announces IPO; FinReg covers banker pay; small biz losing jobs; the tax cuts and you

  In what is due to be among the biggest stock offerings in history, GM has announced its initial public offering after being bailed out by the federal government. You’ll be hearing a lot about this as the administration tries to sell its record this fall. Meanwhile, a little-noticed provision in FinReg will allow the federal regulators to limit executive pay if they so choose; the bulk of private-sector job losses are coming from small businesses; a handy interactive graphic allows you to see how different approaches to the expiring Bush tax cuts would affect you; a handy paper will help you figure out the Fannie and Freddie debate; and a handy cover of some 90s alt-rock will start your morning right.

• New rules on student debt shouldn’t be limited to for-profit colleges

  The Obama administration wants for-profit career colleges to better prepare students for gainful employment and to improve debt-repayment rates. The government is threatening to pull access to federal student aid for colleges that fail to show progress.

  Under the administration’s proposed rules, if a program graduated a large share of students with excessive debt compared with potential earnings in their chosen fields, it would be required to disclose this information to current and prospective students.

• Wall Street reform gives regulators power over executive pay

  The pay decisions made by regulators will apply not only to banks but also to brokerages, credit unions, investment advisers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and other financial firms with $1 billion or more in assets.

• SEC will discuss ‘proxy access’ rules for shareholders to nominate directors

  The SEC has considered permitting so-called proxy access since 2003, only to back away in the face of opposition from companies. Public pension funds, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers), say the change is needed to make directors more accountable to investors rather than rubber stamps for management.

• Judge criticises US over ‘soft’ fine for Barclays BankJudge criticises US over ‘soft’ fine for Barclays Bank

  A judge has attacked the US government for striking a “sweetheart deal” with Barclays to settle criminal charges that the British bank flouted international sanctions by doing clandestine business with Iran, Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Burma.

  At a court hearing in Washington yesterday, judge Emmet Sullivan refused to rubber-stamp an agreement under which Barclays consented to pay $298m to settle charges that its staff deliberately concealed transactions with financial institutions in regimes frozen out by US foreign policy.

• Prosecutors under fire from US judge over leniency for Barclays

  Barclays Barclays told a US court that the bank has tightened its procedures and improved staff training. Photograph Andy Rain/EPA

  A US judge reluctantly accepted a $298m (£191m) fine from Barclays today to settle criminal charges of flouting international sanctions, despite criticising federal prosecutors for using “kid gloves” by failing to throw the book at specific executives within the British bank.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Australia Considering iPhone App Censorship

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Net Neutrality: Threat or Menace?

  My personal take on Net Neutrality is that ISPs should treat all packets equally. I do not like the idea of being forced to host all my videos on YouTube or another huge site that can afford to make special deals with broadband providers such as Brighthouse, my local cable TV monopoly, instead of on my friend Joe’s Globaltap hosting service.

• U.S. Representatives Urge Net Neutrality

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Innocuous Network Solutions Web Widget Served Malware

  Growsmartbusiness.com is running a standard LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) stack and was hit with the Trojan Horse/PHP backdoor attack r57shell.

• Windows in the cloud: long boot times, other difficulties not seen with Linux

  Running Windows servers in the Amazon cloud may have just gotten a lot easier, but a project by the management vendor RightScale to improve Windows support shows that people who use the Microsoft operating system in cloud networks face difficulties not seen in the Linux world.

• The right to know – and to condemn to death

  Some news stories can be misleading, such as a recent one about the next version of Linux. It was reported that the “next Linux kernel has been released with a tidy little warning from Linus Torvalds for code committers to pay more attention and be more careful”.

  Many read this to mean that the next Linux version has problems. The actual story and comments from Torvalds was concerning the way people are dropping items into the Linux-next bucket which is for the next version(s) after the latest release. He and Andrew Morton have been annoyed that some of the items are not very stable and when it sits in that pile, people expect to see it in the next release. Linux-next is supposed to be for items ready for the next merge, not items that still need a lot of work before they can be. It pays to read a little deeper into some news stories.

• Kernel Progress Entering New Era of Innovation

  The last 12 months in Linux kernel development may have been less than exciting, but that may be just a breather before what’s coming up next, according to kernel developer and Linux Weekly News editor Jon Corbet.

  Last week at LinuxCon, Corbet delivered what has become a ubiquitous fixture in many Linux gatherings: The Kernel Report, a highly detailed and informative look at the current state of the Linux kernel, and what’s on the way. Corbet’s unique position as journalist and kernel developer lends the Kernel Report a sweeping scope over many facets of kernel development.

  Corbet is in strong company. 2,800 developers worked on the last five kernel releases, 16.6 percent of them volunteers. Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and IBM filled the remaining top five contributors’ slots, respectively.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to join a Linux machine to a Windows Domain

• Create fishbone diagrams with the XMind open source tool

• 3D Desktop at Xen 4.0.1-rc6 (2.6.32.19) on top of Ubuntu 10.04 Server

• Ubuntu Linux solution stack implementation, Part 4: Solution stack setup and integration

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Accenture predicts open source adoption, but does it “join in” too?

    Technology consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture used its appearance at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston earlier this summer to talk about mainstream adoption of open source. As such, the company says it is continuing its own investment in open source solutions and that it predicts the systems integration services around open source is a £4 billion market.

    [...]

    According to the Red Hat corporate blog channel, “Accenture is already investing in open source solutions like AMOS, which is built on Red Hat solutions. Accenture continues to invest in open source through its Innovation Centre for Open Source, which leverages Red Hat Solution Stacks, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat has worked with Accenture to create the Accenture SOA Reference Architecture, Accenture Foundation Platform for Java, Accenture Mobility Operated Services, and the Accenture Public Service Platform.”

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS Is Available for Download

      This first maintenance release brings to its dedicated users a lot of security updates and corrections, all with a single goal: to keep Ubuntu 10.04 LTS a stable and reliable Linux distribution!

      Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS fixes some installation bugs, various upgrade issues, improves support for many hardware components, and fixes annoying desktop bugs.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Taking the Android plunge

      The technology in question is the T-Mobile Pulse Mini smart (sic) phone, which runs the Android operating system. A smart phone with an Open Source operating system, that has a Remember The Milk app which means I can Get Things Done, all for under four ponies? What could possibly go wrong?

Open Source Software Soaring to Success

Linux server operating system vendors like Red Hat and even Novell could be heading for bumper sales over the next 12 months. Almost 40 percent of organizations are planning on migrating mission-critical workloads to open source software in that time frame.

That’s Accenture’s line anyway, and perhaps the mega-consulting firm has good reason for saying so: It asked 300 private and public sector organizations with annual revenues in excess of $500 million about their plans for open source software, and announced the results earlier this month. “What we are seeing is a coming of age of open source, ” said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology architect chappie.

Keep it simple, stupid

Koroth says that their company firmly believes in the power and strength of Open Source. Worldwide inventions have taken place because of the Open Source movement, he says. Further, it is simply because of Open Source technologies that people like him can start a company, and now be able to break even. “We will give back to that technology. People ask us if it isn’t an issue that people may be downloading Fedena and using it in their own name. But I believe that if the technology is good, they will come back, they will return to the source for more!”

Events

• Linux Security Summit 2010 – Wrapup

  The first Linux Security Summit (LSS) was held last Monday, 9th August in Boston, in conjunction with LinuxCon 2010 North America.

  This event has its roots in the Linux security development community which emerged in the early 2000s, following the development of LSM and with the incorporation of a wide range of new security features into Linux. We’d previously met, as a community, in OLS BoF sessions, various conference hallway tracks, and at project-specific events such as the SELinux Symposium. There have also been very successful security mini-summits at LCA in 2008 and 2009, and a double security track at the 2009 Plumbers Conference.

• New Zealand Open Source Awards open for nominations and judges announced

  The panel includes two New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) Presidents, current President Rachel Hamilton-Williams and past-President Don Christie; Foo Camp founder & author Nat Torkington; WebFund Chairman and tohunga rorohiko, Dave Moskovitz; Richard Wyles, Director of Flexible Learning Network/Mahara; and Telecom Mobile Engineer and gadgets and geeks evangelist Amber Craig.

• David Farrar joins Open Source Awards judging panel

• OpenOffice.org Celebrates Tenth Anniversary at OOoCon in Budapest

Web Browsers

• Chrome Dev 6.0.495.0 Released, Chrome 7.0 Coming Right Up

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla eases fears over phishy URL alert

    Developers of the open-source browser have known of the URL warning bypass since at least June, when it was reported here. Under most circumstances, Firefox will display a warning when users click on links that contain addresses that have been obfuscated to hide their true destination. But when users encounter encoded URLs in inline frames embedded in a webpage, no such alert is delivered.

Oracle

• Oracle sticks a fork in Illumos, OpenSolaris community

  The problem the OpenSolaris open source community has faced in the last several years is that important parts of the code distributed with OpenSolaris is closed sourced. But when he launched Illumos, D’Amore said progress has been made in some key areas of the Solaris closed source code. However, critical work in certain closed areas still needs to be done, such as the NFS/CIFS lock manager, full kdf module/daemon, trusted extensions and other drivers.

• Shuttleworth: Oracle dooms its prospects in open source business

  Oracle’s ill-advised patent infringement case against Google will backfire, and hurt its prospects in the growing open source business market.

  That, according to Ubuntu creator and Linux giant Mark Shuttleworth, is the natural outcome of Oracle’s case against the Linux-based Android operating system.

• Larry Ellison Goes Postal On Fortune Writer

  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on a feisty emailing tear, in the wake of his pal Mark Hurd’s ouster as CEO of HP.

  First, Ellison emailed the New York Times to tell them that HP’s decision to kneecap Hurd after a sex scandal was the worst HR move since “idiots” on Apple’s board fired Steve Jobs long ago.

  That prompted Fortune writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt to point out that Oracle seemingly had different ethical standards than HP, noting that Ellison had “a long history of office dalliances and at least one sexual harassment lawsuit (decided in his favor).”

Healthcare

• VA moves toward open source for electronic health record system

  The Veterans Affairs Department asked industry, government agencies and academic researchers last week for insights on using open source software as a key component of a modernized electronic heath record system, a move that could have serious implications for the Obama administration’s initiative for adoption of digital medical files nationwide.

• Open VistA for AHLTA?

  Last week the Military Health System detailed plans to replace its AHLTA electronic health record system — loathed by its clinicians — with a new system based on commercial products.

  At about the same time, the Veterans Affairs Department issued a request for information seeking comments on developing a new version of its VistA electronic health record system based on open source software and asked, “How would other federal agencies participate or benefit from an open source approach to VistA EHR?”

Government

• WhiteHouse.gov Expands Open Source Efforts

  The White House has jumped aboard the open source bandwagon. And we’re not talking about some cleverly named Silicon Valley upstart. This is the real deal.

  In late April, White House blogger Dave Cole announced plans to release some of the custom code the White House has developed.

Openness/Sharing

• Your complete guide to cheap college textbooks

  3. Use open source textbooks

  This movement, led by the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, applies the open-source mantra of the software world to textbooks. Progress is slow, but both Curriiki and FlatWorld Knowledge are steadily growing. You can either download a text for free or buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40.

• Praxis Bold as Love: When Open Source Technological Philosophy Meets Good Science Practice

Standards/Consortia

• Web Could Be Stylized by New W3C Font Platform

  The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Fonts Working Group has launched version 1.0 of the The Web Open File Format (WOFF). This format will provide a platform for open source and commercial providers of fonts to make their creations easily available across the Web, according to W3C fonts activity lead Chris Lilley.

Finance

• Investors Chide Michael Dell

  Dell’s shareholders delivered a sharp rebuke of Michael S. Dell, the company’s founder and chief executive, when a fourth of the investors withheld support of Mr. Dell in a recent vote.

  In a regulatory filing released Tuesday, Dell disclosed that about 378 million of 1.5 billion votes opposed Mr. Dell’s continued presence on the company’s board. Dell held its annual meeting with shareholders earlier in the month.

• Michael Dell given an unsubtle hint by displeased shareholders

• How Two Former Ringtone Giants Are Faring As That Market Crumbles

  Last week, on the eve of Jamba’s party, News Corp. confirmed rumors of its intentions to sell off the mobile division, and Fox Mobile, like other ringtone providers, are left scrambling to find new business models as the clock runs down out their traditional revenue streams.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Your fears confirmed: “up to” broadband speeds are bogus

  Broadband providers in the US have long hawked their wares in “up to” terms. You know—”up to” 10Mbps, where “up to” sits like a tiny pebble beside the huge font size of the raw number.

  In reality, no one gets these speeds. That’s not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report (PDF) shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that “up to” speed they had hoped to achieve.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Negotiators confirm ACTA not really a “counterfeiting” treaty

      What’s in a name? Not much, when it comes to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. As Luc Devigne, the top EU negotiator on ACTA made clear today, he has no intention of limiting ACTA to, you know, its name.

      ACTA negotiators gathered today for an informal luncheon at which some outsiders were invited, including several civil society folks. According to American University’s Mike Palmedo, who attended the DC event and took notes later sent to Ars, “[Devine] asked more than once how you could have an ‘IP Enforcement’ treaty and not include patents—and dismissed suggestions that ACTA was specifically an ‘Anti-Counterfeiting’ treaty rather than a broader enforcement treaty.” (Australia still objects strongly to including patents in ACTA, but the EU wants them included.)

• Distributions

Applications

• Busyhot – A Nice Little Gnome Panel Applet to Show Real Time CPU Load and Temperature

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Testdrive Let You Test Ubuntu With A Single Click

  • How to Install the Linux Operating System onto Your Computer

  • Using iSCSI On Ubuntu 10.04 (Initiator And Target)

  • Solving The Android Permissions And Malware Puzzle

  • TestDrive -Auto Download and test Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat ISO in a Virtual Machine the easy way

  • MySQL in Amazon EC2 – Beginners Guide

  • Learning FC++: The C++ functional programming library

  • Consolidation: CryptoPyThy

  • Debugging ARM programs inside QEMU

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Behind KDE: Ingo Malchow, the Guy Behind Many Websites

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

    I think what’s really underlying many of the complaints about the difficulty of reporting bugs in Debian is this:

    People think it is unfair that naive users find it difficult to report bugs in Debian and that they’re not encouraged to do so. People feel that those users are being disenfranchised, or ignored.

Events

• Mini-Education Summit LinuxCon Boston 2010

  I spent most of last week at LinuxCon helping Spot at the Fedora booth. However, the day before the main conference, Sebastian Dziallas organized a Education Mini-Summit to take place in conjunction with LinuxCon.

  I gave a talk on the Inkscape class Red Hat has done plus some other related initiatives, including one we are planning for next fall with the Free Software Foundation. The slides are available here.

BSD

• PC-BSD 8.1 review

  PC-BSD 8.1 was released on July 20, 2010, roughly five months after version 8.0 was released. Some of the suggestions made in the review of PC-BSD 8.0 have been carried out in this latest release. In fact, the changes were made within one month of that review being published. It is an encouraging example of how some distro developers respond to suggestions (or critical reviews).

  While I still think that PC-BSD is not yet ready for the masses, it is coming along very well. This review will offer another detailed look at some of the good and bad sides of this FreeBSD-based distribution, with the attendant recommendations and suggestions for improvement.

Project Releases

• Vim 7.3 released!

Openness/Sharing

• Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking

  WikiFactCheck wants not only to crowdsource, but also to centralize, the fact-checking enterprise, aggregating other efforts and creating a framework so extensive that it can also attempt to be comprehensive. There’s a niche, Lih believes, for a fact-checking site that’s determinedly non-niche. Wikipedia, he points out, is ultimately “a great aggregator”; and much of WikiFactCheck’s value could similarly be, he says, to catalog the results of other fact-checking outfits “and just be a meta-site.” Think Rotten Tomatoes — simple, summative, unapologetically derivative — for truth-claims.

NY Times Tests A Paywall With A Regional Paper

The idea is to hide certain local content behind the paywall — which will charge a whopping $14.95 per month to access. Now, looking around, it certainly does appear that the Telegram & Gazette is really the only major news source in Worcester (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find anything else significant). However, with various local news operations springing up all over the place, it certainly seems like it could make sense for one of them to quickly target Worcester and get a nice jump in traffic.

Blizzard Wins $88 Million in Private Server Lawsuit

Back in October, Blizzard Entertainment filed a lawsuit against Alyson Reeves and her company Scapegaming, for violating the end user license agreement of World of Warcraft by setting up a private server for her own profit. On Thursday, the California Central District Court ruled in favor of the game maker and ordered Scapegaming to pay back “$3,053,339 of inappropriate profits, $63,600 of attorney’s fees, and $85,478,600 of statutory damages.”

What, you ask, is a private server, how do you make a profit off of it, and why is it against the EULA? Allow me to explain.

Court Says California Mall Can’t Ban Customers From Talking To Each Other

The Westfield Galleria in Roseville, California takes the comfort of its patrons seriously–so seriously, in fact, that it wants them to shut up and focus on shopping, or else ask for permission first if they want to talk about any topic that’s not mall related. Last week, the state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal found that the rule violated the state’s constitution, so now mall shoppers can gab as much as they want to each other.

Health

• Can you hear me now? More teens can’t

  The authors of the report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. eliminated ear infections and exposure to loud noises in the environment as causes for the hearing loss, but could not identify a specific cause. A recent Australian study, however, found a 70% increased risk of hearing loss associated with the use of headphones to listen to portable music, and many experts suspect they are the primary cause of hearing loss in teens.

Security/Aggression

• Infected Widget Compromises Parked Domains

  Researchers at Armorize Technologies reported that as many as 5 million parked domains belonging to customers of Network Solutions fell victim to an infected widget and were serving up a side order of malware.

• Hackers: ‘ColdFusion bug more serious than Adobe says’

  A recently patched vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion application server may be more serious than previously thought following the public release of exploit code and blog posts claiming it can be used to take full control of systems running the software.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Will this summer of extremes be a wake-up call?

  This summer has been one of weather-related extremes in Russia, Pakistan, China, Europe, the Arctic – you name it. But does this have anything to do with global warming, and are human emissions to blame?

• Vedanta’s Indian mining project under threat

  In a strongly worded report, a four-member committee set up by India’s environment ministry accused Vedanta Alumina, a subsidiary of the London-listed firm, of violating forest conservation and environment protection regulations and displaying “total contempt for the law”. The report also noted “an appalling degree of collusion” by local government officials with Vedanta.

• Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief

  According to the UN Environment Programme, the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. Around 15% of mammal species and 11% of bird species are classified as threatened with extinction.

Finance

• US Treasury is Running on Fumes

  With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Big Brother: Obama Demands Access to Internet Records, in Secret, and Without Court Review

  The Obama administration is seeking authority from Congress that would compel internet service providers (ISPs) to turn over records of an individual’s internet activity for use in secretive FBI probes.

  In another instance where Americans are urged to trust their political minders, The Washington Post reported last month that “the administration wants to add just four words–’electronic communication transactional records’–to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval.”

• Chinese dissident Yu Jie tells of jail threat for criticising PM Wen Jiabao

  The political pressure on writers in China is growing, an outspoken critic of the government said today, as his highly sensitive book about the country’s premier went on sale in Hong Kong.

  Yu Jie said state security had warned him last month not to proceed with the release of his book, China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao.

• Thailand blocking WikiLeaks — official

  Thai authorities have used their emergency powers to block domestic access to the WikiLeaks whistleblower website on security grounds, a government official said Wednesday.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Delivering the ACTA petition: Sign before Thursday to have your voice heard!

  A month ago, we published a statement against ACTA and asked for your signatures in support. Over 3,000 of you joined us in calling on ACTA negotiators to either dramatically change the agreement or drop it all together.