• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The first Linux monument unveiled in Russia

Desktop

• Linux – you’ve come a long way baby

  I work in a small mom and pop computer store. I fix up older systems and install linux, then resell. I’ve put quite a few people on the path to open software and the freedoms of linux.

Server

• Turn a Pogoplug into a Full-Featured Linux Web Server

  Pogoplugs are great little storage devices, but they can do more than they let on. Let’s take a look at how you can hack a Pogoplug into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web server.

  This is a fun little project, but it does take some time and patience. Be sure to set aside a few hours this weekend to get it up and running. That said, let’s get started!

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Link Tech Show Sept 22 [Ogg]

• FLOSS Weekly 136: Emacs Org-Mode

  Org-mode is for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, doing project planning, and authoring with a fast and effective plain-text system.

  Guest: Carsten Dominik for Org-mode

• Episode 147: The Looming Tower

• KDEMU – Kolab Groupware

  This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kolab Groupware pusher, Paul Adams.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • nVidia – There is No Optimus Support for Linux

    I must say I am slightly torn, do I snatch up a single GPU nVidia system now – before I can no longer find them, do I wait and see if nVidia releases optimus technology for Linux, or should I just boycott the nVidia cooperation all together since they see Linux as a second class operating system?

  • Fglrx Finally Works With Ubuntu 10.10 (Xorg 1.9, Kernel 2.6.35/36) [ATI]

    Fglrx was updated yesterday in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and what’s special about this is that it finally supports Xorg 1.9 and 2.6.35 kernel. Up until now, ATI users who’ve tried to install Fglrx or upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 would get a blank screen. So if you have an ATI graphics card and want to use Fglrx, you can finally install / upgrade to the latest Ubuntu 10.10.

  • Running The X.Org Server Without Root Privileges

    Thanks to kernel mode-setting and other improvements to the X.Org Server, we are basically there, but it’s something that has been said for over a year. Moblin though has been running the X.Org Server as a user since their Moblin 2.0 release and now with the MeeGo operating system while others are now looking to get in on the root-free action.

  • Intel Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks

    With Mesa 7.9 just around the corner and it sporting a new GLSL compiler, support for new OpenGL extensions, and months worth of other changes to core Mesa and its drivers, we decided to run some benchmarks of the latest Intel Arrandale graphics processor with the past few Mesa releases to see how the performance compares. We also have ATI and Nouveau Mesa benchmarks on the way.

Applications

• Install DeadBeef-Ultimate Music Player in Ubuntu

  DeaDBeeF is an audio player for GNU/Linux systems with X11.It is mainly written by Alexey Yakovenko, with contributions from a lot of different people (see about box in the player for more details).

• FocusWriter 1.3.0 Released – Distraction free writing on Ubuntu

• Pithos Melds Pandora Streaming with Linux Desktops

  Pithos is a free download for Linux systems only, and requires a free Pandora account to use.

• OMG! 5! – Five Rhythmbox extensions

  Ubuntu’s default music player Rhythmbox comes with a host of handy plug-ins either enabled by default or waiting to be enabled via the ‘Edit > Plugins’ menu, but if the default selection leaves you wanting you can easily add more

• Keryx: Offline Package Installation made easy in Ubuntu

• AWN Lucido is an Absolute Delight to Use, Install AWN in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid via PPA

  Avant Window Navigator(AWN) is an awesome dock application for Linux. Over the years, AWN has evolved a lot and is now the almost-perfect dock application for Ubuntu/Linux users.

• Minimum Profit, a programmer’s text editor open source.

  Minimum Profit is a curses/GTK text editor for programmers.

• An rss2email fork that sucks less

• Introducing Irssi-autoghost : Automatically ghost your previous ‘ghost’ nick

• Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools

  System Administrators (SAs) need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments*. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have proven track records and have stood the test of time in the data center.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Command line tool for network analysis

  • Command line tool for network analysis 2

  • Listen to Text and Instant Messages with Gespeaker ‘Text To Speech’ Utility

  • Making a Watercolour-Paint Photograph in GIMP

  • Simple Snort Alert Log Parsing Script

  • Softlinks vs. Hardlinks: A Quick Explanation

  • How to Backup Your Linux PC with Simple Backup

  • Merge, split, and watermark your PDFs with PDF Chain

  • How to read Ext3/Ext4 linux partition from windows 7

  • Listen to Text and Instant Messages with Gespeaker ‘Text To Speech’ Utility

  • Quick Way to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

  • Anatomy of an exploit: CVE-2010-3081

  • Free-form note taking with Xournal

  • Hidden Linux : Sensing temperature

  • Linux Tip: How to set Shell Environment Variables (bash shell)?

  • Ratpoison and dmenu

  • Changing Mouse Sensitivity from the Command Line

  • Free Up Insane Amount of Disk Space in Ubuntu by Deleting Cached Package Files

  • Linux Tip: Understanding file permissions and modifying them using chmod

  • Writing Better Shell Scripts – Part 1

  • Writing Better Shell Scripts – Part 2

  • Writing Better Shell Scripts – Part 3

  • Restore suspend function in Xfce Xubuntu Maverick 10.10

  • Zeya- Streaming music server using HTML 5 | Ubuntu

  • Retrieve mail from Yahoo!’s webmail service – FetchYahoo

  • Building a Security Audit Toolkit

  • Ntop for Network analysis

  • Install Create Background Slideshow (CreBS) On Ubuntu 10.10

  • Free Up Insane Amount of Disk Space in Ubuntu by Deleting Cached Package Files

  • File Associations With Different Applications for KDE Desktop

  • Linux networking made easy

  • Ubuntu Maveric Meerkat

  • Bash Programming Tutorial 1 – A Quick Introduction

  • Compiling and running PulseAudio from git

  • Accessing your encrypted home directory in Ubuntu

  • Queue music into Rhythmbox from Nautilus

  • The GIMP metal wires and abstract background tutorial.

  • 7 Linux sudo Command Tips and Tricks

  • Setting Up An OpenVPN Server With Authentication Against OpenLDAP On Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

  • Matrix in Your Terminal is Cool!

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released

    PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released, it was a silent release and no changelog has been provided by the PlayOnLinux team.

• Games

  • REVIEW: Urban Terror – Linux 32/64bit

    As we see Linux get further penetration on the desktop, we see more Wine compliance, more native titles and traditional Windows packages having a Linux version too (I only need cite Utorrent producing a Linux version of their Windows software due to popular demand)

    The official page for Urban Terror is rather professional looking and there’s nothing to suggest that this is a free title as opposed to one for sale on your console.

  • EDuke32- A first person shooter game for Linux

    Eduke32 is awesome first person shooter game and a cross-platform Duke3D (Duke Nukem 3D) port which provides many new features for mod authors, including an enhanced scripting system and OpenGL renderer. It offers countless platforms on which to build and improve on and with no shortage of Duke Nukem enthusiasts it can only get better, Thanx to Eduke32′s creators we are able to match memory and relive our gaming youth with much greater graphics.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Clementine 0.5: New and Improved KDE4 Port of Amarok 1.4

    Clementine is a port to KDE4 of one of the most beloved music players on Linux, Amarok 1.4. The latest release brings several new features, including iPod, MTP and USB mass storage disks support, queue manager, support for Wii Remote to control it, and numerous bug fixes to already existing features.

  • 15 Cool KDE Wallpapers

    We all need a bit of a change now and again, right? Especially in the desktop department, us Linux people are always changing things around. And we like to shake things up a bit. So here , for your eye candy pleasure, we have hand-selected fifteen KDE-themed wallpapers for you to check out.
    Since the theme this time around was KDE, you’ll see some iteration of KDE branding in each of these desktop wallpapers. So let us present them now, for you, dear reader, and your downloading pleasure.

  • A walk around KDE 4.5

    Recently I did an introductory “walk around” GNOME (see “A walk around the GNOME desktop“) which offered the new users to Linux a look from the ground level at one of the most popular of the Linux desktops. This time around, I will do the same service to the KDE desktop. I will focus on KDE 4.5 (since that is the most recent release) with the goal of showing you just how user-friendly KDE makes the Linux desktop.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2.32 Screenshots needed

    A couple guidelines:

    * Screenshots must use the Clearlooks theme, a GNOME background / wallper and the default GNOME icons
    * The icon in the GNOME menu on the panel must show the GNOME foot, not a distribution logo
    * Your GNOME panel should be as clean as possible (If using Ubuntu, do not show the messaging menu in the panel)
    * If using openSUSE, your panel needs to be on the top
    * Your screenshots will be licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 license

  • A walk around the GNOME desktop

    Recently I had a reader request a bit of a “how to” on the GNOME desktop. After giving it some thought, and at first wondering why anyone would need a walk around for the GNOME desktop, I realized that some users simply don’t have the ability to look at the computer desktop from the same vantage point as those of us who “get it”. With that thought in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to give a sort of walk through of the GNOME desktop from the perspective of the new user.

Distributions

• The also-rans

  I’ve mentioned a few candidates for the 150Mhz, 32Mb machine, which I keep on hand to deliberately confound with software written 14 years after its creation.

• Surprised, and not surprised: Feather Linux at 150Mhz, 32Mb

  I don’t think I made any mention of it here, because if I search this site for “Feather Linux,” not much comes up. And to be honest, outside of this site, I don’t see much mention of it either.

• Red Hat Family

  • Atlanta hopes to draw Red Hat away from N.C.

    Red Hat, the publicly traded software firm that had revenue of $748 million last year, is checking out Atlanta and other cities with strong local universities as it considers a potential move of its headquarters.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Graphics Test Week this week

      As always, we’ll be testing a range of graphics driver functions, and we need as many people as possible to join in so we can evaluate the widest possible range of hardware and identify as many bugs as possible for the developers to fix. You can do all the testing from a live image – no need for an installed copy of Fedora 14, though you can test that way too if you like – and the testing is very easy, there are step-by-step instructions for each test and for entering your results. And of course, there’ll be many people in IRC to help with testing and debugging.

    • Fedora 14 Preview: What’s New in Fedora 14?

      As an end user you might not notice much difference between Fedora 13 and Fedora 14. You should notice an increase in speed overall, but from the perspective of the desktop — nothing much has changed. That doesn’t mean users of Fedora should not be excited. Fedora 14 promises to bring a much improved over all experience for the Linux user. And improving on Fedora 13 only means that Fedora is once again a serious contender for that much beloved best Linux distribution title.

      Although it seems 14 is targeted primary toward developers, it will prove to be a distribution that anyone can happily use. As of this writing, September 25, 2010, Fedora 14 is still in Alpha. The first beta is scheduled to hit the pipes September 28th, 2010. Fedora pre-release images can always be found on the pre-release page.

• Debian Family

  • Small Victories

    hen I patched them all. Some are Debian Lenny GNU/Linux and some are Squeeze. They both seem to work well. Squeeze had a ton of patches over the summer. I changed about 75% of the files on drives.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • How we build Ubuntu

      Freezes

      A freeze is when a particular type of development must stop, typically ready for release. There are different type of freeze, such as UI Freeze (no more changes in user interface elements), string freeze (no more translations), and feature freeze (no more significant feature development).

      Alphas

      Throughout a release cycle we make a number of snapshot releases as the release develops. These alpha releases are sometimes incomplete and buggy (owing to their work-inprogress nature), but provide a good opportunity to target features to them.

      Betas

      Beta release are feature-complete releases that need a lot of testing. We often recommend the beta as a good time for testers to upgrade, stresstest Ubuntu and file bugs.

      Release candidate

      A release candidate comes just before the final version, and is released to spur on a final chunk of testing from the community. This six-month cycle and these different elements are present in every release, and the community is welcome to upgrade to a new development release as soon as it opens for work – though regular users may wish to wait until the later stages of development before they try the new version out.

    • Maverick Meerkat: Can an Application Store Succeed in a Free Operating System?

      Popular open source software is of very high quality, often, e.g. in the case of media player software, surpassing its closed competitors. If the publishers in the Store decided to sell open source software, they would rarely sell anything that wouldn’t be viewed as a donation to support the project. It is a vicious cycle, since Linux users rarely appreciate a closed development model – open sourcing an application on the other hand would effectively eliminate their sales by enabling people to download the source code and simply repackage and redistribute the program. Someone would do it.

    • [Full Circle:] Issue 41

      * Command and Conquer.
      * How-To : Program in Python – Part 15, Virtualize Part 4 – FreeBSD, and Run A Business With Ubuntu.
      * Review – TuxGuitar.
      * Top 5 – Ways To Run Windows Apps.
      * plus: MOTU/Loco/Translation Interviews, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Edubuntu Maverick News

        Close to the end of the Lucid release cycle, I posted an update of what’s been happening in the Edubuntu project. Now seems like a good time to do it again! This release wasn’t as big shake-up as the last one, but it’s still a very good release for Edubuntu that builds on the work we did in the previous release.

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks

  • U.S. Gift for Iraqis Offers a Primer on Corruption

    The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the American taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.

Open Source vs Proprietary Software – The never ending Battle

Open Source provides solutions at the lowest costs possible or at no cost at all while Proprietary Software promises the provision of the best-in-the-business solutions at a higher cost.

Welcoming OpenIndiana

Perhaps it’s not fair to make a judgement call so early given that this is OpenIndiana’s first release and they’re just getting started, but this initial offering felt more like an early beta than a final release. The system is stable and there are some good features in place. I liked the installer and the Device Driver Utility is a great point in the operating system’s favour. Hardware support was a little better this time around than it was a year ago on OpenSolaris. But the heavy nature of the operating system combined with the fickle privilege escalation and small package repository makes OpenIndiana an unappealing choice right now for a desktop system. Hopefully these matters will get ironed out as the project matures.

There is one other thing I feel should be addressed. OpenIndiana seems to be lacking a focus. It has its roots in server technology, but it has become memory hungry, runs a desktop and uses a graphical installer. On the other hand it lacks the range of applications and drivers one might expect in a desktop system. Some people have told me it’s more of a testing ground for people migrating, testing and developing across platforms, but if that’s the case where are the great development tools and virtualization software?

The wonderful tools which were previously attracting people to OpenSolaris (ZFS, DTrace) have been ported to other operating systems. OpenIndiana doesn’t showcase Sun/Oracle technology; all it really does is give people an open source version of Solaris. And, if you’re into tweaking operating systems or you’re considering a migration to Oracle solutions, then I suppose that’s all OpenIndiana needs to be. As a former fan of Solaris, I was hoping to find something which stood out, something the operating system could hang its hat on, and I didn’t find that. OpenIndiana isn’t a bad system by any means, but I haven’t found a reason, besides curiosity, to run it either.

Will Code For Beer

People ask me why programmers write code and give it away “for free”. There are many reasons, but one I often give is that a programmer might end up at a conference and a grateful user of their code might “buy them a beer, or even a dinner.”

It was February or March of 1995, and the port of Linux to the Alpha processor was well underway. In talking with some of the developers over the Internet, I started to hear rumors that the Alpha port would not have “shared libraries”, but instead would have statically-linked binaries.

For those of you who do not understand the ramifications of statically linked binaries, it means that every program has all of the libraries it needs to run linked as one blob on the disk and even in the main memory of the computer with the rest of the code that the programmer wrote.

In the early days of programming this was not as horrible as it sounds, because few libraries existed that could really be “shared”, but as operating systems became more sophisticated and included math libraries, graphics libraries, security libraries and a variety of other functionality that could be shared between programs, the duplication of this code thousands of times on an individual system by linking it into every program took up huge amounts of disk space and additional memory space that became intolerable.

60 Great Open Source Developer Tools

If you’re looking for good open source developer tools, you literally have thousands to choose from. For this list, we focused on 60 of the best and most well known. Rather than trying to rank them, we’ve arranged them into categories and listed them in alphabetical order.

That said, we’re sure to have left off a few (or perhaps even a few dozen) that deserve to be included. Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.

One quick note about operating systems: Many of these open source developer tools run on a wide range of OSes. In some cases, they support more than a hundred different platforms.

For the sake of keeping the list short and readable, we noted whether each developer tool supports the big three – Windows, Linux and OS X. If you want to know whether a particular tool will run on Solaris or FreeBSD or another platform, you can click the link to check its Web site.

Web Browsers

• a bug or a feature?

  Google’s browser tells Google’s Analytics package that it’s a lot more popular than it actually is?

• POLL RESULTS: Best Browser for Linux

  Internet Browser Votes
  Mozilla Firefox 128
  Google Chrome 49
  Opera 35
  Chromium 30
  SwiftFox 6
  SeaMonkey 6
  IE through WINE 4
  Epiphany 4
  Konqueror 3

• Mozilla

  • Seabird – Mind Blowing Community Driven Mobile Phone Concept From Mozilla Labs

    We have featured a number of mobile phone concepts before, Nokia Morph Concept Phone for example. But Seabird concept phone from Mozilla is in a league of its own. Seabird is a community driven mobile phone concept that debuted at Mozilla Labs ‘Concepts’.

CMS/Social

• Highlights of the First Week

  The community’s response to our release has been amazing. Within the first week of releasing code to developers, Diaspora is the 10th most popular project on Github with over 2500+ watchers. We’ve had 412 forks of Diaspora to date, and about a half a million views of the code as well. Many people have gotten the alpha running on their own machines, and have provided countless bug reports and feature requests.

• Beyond Diaspora: Another Facebook alternative has a head start

  StatusNet is a free software, aka “open source”, microblogging platform (e.g. Twitter). It successfully federates, and better yet, Diaspora has promised to implement OStatus, the same set of standards used by StatusNet so that if and when Diaspora goes public, users on each will be able to connect with each other seamlessly. Diaspora also promised to be free software under the GNU AGPL, same as StatusNet.[10] The most popular public instance is Identi.ca and you can sign up to try it for yourself. StatusNet alone may be a suitable replacement for Twitter, but by itself it doesn’t provide the same functionality as Facebook.

  This is where GNU Social comes in. GNU social aims to extend the StatusNet to provide the capabilities of a full social network. It will incorporate additional features for controlling privacy settings and sharing pictures or video, and it will display all of this in an interface that’s designed not for a microblogging site, but rather for a complete social networking site. The distinction between GNU social and StatusNet is a bit confusing as they has a unique relationship: when development on the original version of GNU social stalled, the developers looked for another codebase to work on. The result was the social/status alliance, between GNU social and StatusNet. Both projects are co-dependent and contain code from either other, thanks in no small part to the hard work of Craig Andrews of GNU social, and Evan Prodromou of StatusNet.

• Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress

  Microsoft’s killing another me-too Web 2.0 service, sinking its fledgling Live Spaces blog network and shifting 30 million users to WordPress.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Telephony Statement on new Internet Surveillance Laws

  Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.

  Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.

• Happy 27th Birthday GNU Project!

  A hearty Happy 27th Birthday to the GNU Project! Here is a link to the original announcement of the GNU Project posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Without the GNU project FOSS as we know it today would not exist. Thank You to everyone who works and has worked on the GNU project over the last 27 years. You have helped make the world a better place. We at LXer take our hats off to you.

Government

• Government wants to break free from Microsoft? – France shows you how.

  But then for any Linux user who already knows how good Linux/FOSS is, we have been saying this for years. Maybe the UK government could take the lead from the French who are already experiencing the benefits of migration?

Licensing

• Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works

  What is this “Free Culture” thing? What is “Free Software”? And how do I get my work out there? If you’re looking to participate in the “Commons”, you’ll need to get comfortable with the idea of free, public licenses and how to use them for your works. This won’t be hard at all, especially with this short guide, but there are different traditions that have sprung up around different kinds of works.

Standards/Consortia

• Digital Primer Video Available from the Xiph.Org Foundation

  Today, the Xiph.Org Foundation announced that they have released the first of a series of videos aimed at teaching us geeks what video is really all about. From the xiph.org site:

  “The program offers a brief history of digital media, a quick summary of the sampling theorem, and myriad details of low level audio and video characterization and formatting. It’s intended for budding geeks looking to get into video coding, as well as the technically curious who want to know more about the media they wrangle for work or play.”

Science

• This is a news website article about a scientific paper

  In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

  In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.

  If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Feds Pushing For New Legally Required Wiretap Backdoor To All Internet Communications

  It’s difficult to see how this is any different than foreign governments demanding access to others’ communications as well. It’s pretty ridiculous for President Obama to talk about open internet principles to the UN, while cooking this up at the same time. Pushing for this also means that the US will have no excuse when the governments of Iran, China and elsewhere also demand backdoors into all US-based communications.

  And, really, that’s the biggest problem with this law. Beyond the inevitable privacy violations by the feds, putting backdoors into communications technologies guarantees that those backdoors will be used by others (outside of the federal government) to snoop on communications. The FBI and the NSA (who are pushing for this) are being totally and completely naive if they think that they’re the only ones who will use this. We’ve pointed out in the past how large scale surveillance systems mean large scale security risks, and this is no different. We showed how a similar surveillance system in Greece was hacked into to spy on government officials. US officials should be aware that they’re opening themselves up to these same potential risks.

• Government Seeks Back Door Into All Our Communications

  For a decade, the government backed off of attempts to force encryption developers to weaken their products and include back doors, and the crypto wars seemed to have been won. (Indeed, journalist Steven Levy declared victory for the civil libertarian side in 2001.) In the past ten years, even as the U.S. government has sought (or simply taken) vastly expanded surveillance powers, it never attempted to ban the development and use of secure encryption.

  Now the government is again proposing to do so, following in the footsteps of regimes like the United Arab Emirates that have recently said some privacy tools are too secure and must be kept out of civilian hands.

• Pentagon Seeks to Establish Basis for 1970`s Espionage Act Against Wikileaks

Finance

• Geithner Calendar: Met Goldman’s Blankfein More Often Than Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, Boehner (EXCLUSIVE)

  Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has shown up on Geithner’s calendar at least 38 times through March 2010 since the Treasury Secretary took office in January 2009, three more entries than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 13 more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly four times as many as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner combined, according to a copy of Geithner’s daily log recently published online by the Treasury Department. The imbalance is striking, considering that Geithner was heavily involved in financial regulatory reform legislation, which Congress was grappling with during the period covered by the calendar.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• PI aims to pursue UK law firm for data breach

  Privacy International has announced that it is planning legal action against a UK law firm for breaching the privacy of internet users after a security breach.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Custom PS3 operating system in the works

PlayOS is Linux-based, will run on firmware 3.41, and will take 730MB of external HDD since it runs off the Backup Manager.

Kernel Space

• 2.6.36-rc5-git7 released

• The 2.6.32.23 and 2.6.35.6 stable kernel updates

• Geek Time with Linus Torvalds

  Linus Torvalds and Jeremy Allision were both in Sao Paolo, Brazil a few weeks ago for LinuxCon, where they were both presenters. Later in the week when they were waiting to go on a safari at the Sao Paolo Zoo, Jeremy seized the opportunity to go on a trip down memory lane when he asked Linus about the Sinclair QL they each owned while growing up. Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland, Linus wrote his own assembler and editor (in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries). They continue to reminisce about more archaic hardware like floppy drives, microdrives, 512 K RAM expansion packs and the Acorn Archimedes.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks

    With Mesa 7.9 just around the corner and it sporting a new GLSL compiler, support for new OpenGL extensions, and months worth of other changes to core Mesa and its drivers, we decided to run some benchmarks of the latest Intel Arrandale graphics processor with the past few Mesa releases to see how the performance compares. We also have ATI and Nouveau Mesa benchmarks on the way.

Applications

• Very Nice Music Player for GNOME: Decibel Audio Player

  Decibel is a music player built in GTK which takes a different approach when it comes to the way features are implemented, and that is, Decibel uses only plug-ins which can be enabled or disabled on demand. This makes it either a pretty featured player, or a very simple and basic one, depending on which plug-ins you need enabled.

• Hotot Twitter Client Feels Sophisticated, Install Hotot in Lucid, Maverick via PPA

  Twitter desktop clients for Linux keeps growing. The latest hottest entrant is called Hotot. It’s pretty hot indeed. Hotot twitter client is still in its early stages of development but already looks quite promising.

• Pylyglot

  Been working on a pet project to help out with the GNOME translations (as well as have a chance to learn more about Django) and the end product is now available at www.pylyglot.org. Basically, it is a database of all strings from all available GNOME packages parsed to (hopefully) help open source translators with their effort by providing suggestions based on existing translations.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Reset The Gnome Panels, Compiz Settings And More

  • Free Up Insane Amount of Disk Space in Ubuntu by Deleting Cached Package Files

  • 100+ basic linux terminal commands and tricks

  • Easily Integrate Thunderbird into the Ubuntu Messaging Menu

  • Beginners Guide: Monitoring Linux System Command

  • Synchronize your BlackBerry with Ubuntu

  • FolderView: Rhythmbox Plugin To Browse Your Music By Folders

  • Broadcast on icecast/shoutcast using ‘Butt’

  • Safely Remove PPAs and Roll Back to Stable Versions in Ubuntu

• Wine

  • Spotify-Notify Brings NotifyOSD Notifications For Spotify Running Under Wine

    Spotify is great for the music it brings to its users but it lacks a lot of features. There are some native Linux Spotify clients (including an official one), but they don’t support free accounts so those using the Windows version of Spotify under Wine (that’s the only way to use Spotify with a free account in Linux) must use tweaks to make it a bit more functional, like the “fix” to make it play local mp3 files we wrote about a while back.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Beats Street

    Red Hat is out with better than expected earnings, with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat president & CEO.

  • IBM benchmark tests show 10 Gigabit Ethernet outperforming InfiniBand

    The software configuration was standards-based as well, running RedHat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2.

  • Raleigh mayor tells Atlanta paper he’s ‘anxious’ to keep Red Hat

    Leaders in Atlanta believe they can lure the headquarters of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) away Raleigh, and N.C. leaders know they are in a fight to keep the Hatters’ red fedoras in the City of Oaks.

    In a report Saturday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said landing Red Hat “would be a huge feather in metro Atlanta’s fedora.”

    Following up on stories first reported by the Triangle Business Journal and the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the Journal-Constitution reported that Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker is concerned about Red Hat.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Standard Ubuntu on the Netbook

      Because I’m not sure about the new UNE layout, and I don’t necessarily want or need desktop effects. Also, I like having more than one desktop, and I found that to be a huge disadvantage to UNE.

    • Canonical to expand cooperation with Taiwan PC makers; launching new OS next month

      Melamut also noted that at the event, the company will discuss about cooperation with PC makers such as Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, Wistron, Inventec, Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and First International Computer (FIC), and expects the event will help the makers understand Ubuntu’s advantages. Most of the makers are giving positive feedback about the event, Melamut noted.

      [...]

      Melamut pointed out that Ubuntu-based PC shipments in 2010 are expected to grow 10 times than in 2009 with Lenovo to ship one million units in China. Shipments in 2011 will be even higher as more players will adopt Ubuntu for their PCs, Melamut added.

    • Interesting uses for Ubuntu One

      Ubuntu One is a great program/service with many uses, some obvious some not so obvious. Here are a few creative uses for Ubuntu One that some people have come up with.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android ‘to be most popular smartphone brand’

      Half a billion people will be using the Android operating system by 2015, according the analysts Inforna. The company also says that there will be more than one billion smartphone subscriptions by 2013.

      “This growth will be driven by the ongoing competition between top tier manufacturers and challengers such as Google, RIM, Apple and Microsoft who are racing to create the best possible user experience at lower pricing points,” the company said.

    • Android edges past Microsoft in U.S. smartphone market

    • Half billion people will use Google Android by 2015

      Half a billion people will be using the Google Android operating system by 2015, according to the analysts Informa.

      “This growth will be driven by the ongoing competition between top tier manufacturers and challengers such as Google, RIM, Apple and Microsoft who are racing to create the best possible user experience at lower pricing points,” Informa said.

    • Project Porting MeeGo OS To Android Phones Starting To Yield Results

      People like Android because they like openness and because they like choice. The ability to boot a second, open-source operating system on your Android device is then a pretty compelling proposition. Following a flurry of activity around various fora, some progress has been made in booting the Linux-based Maemo 5 successor, MeeGo, on select Android devices. These devices, namely the Nexus One, Streak, and Desire are all based on the Snapdragon QSD8250 and it is that chipset the development community is focusing on.

    • Sony Ericsson Focuses On Android With No Symbian Devices In The Pipeline

      The company has mostly started using Android on its latest smartphones, although it also continued to use Symbian, which is the world’s best-selling OS, for its Vivaz-branded line of phones. The company still plans to support Microsoft’s upcoming launch of Windows Phone 7, and had continued building phones on Microsoft’s older Windows Mobile software.

    • Norton Mobile Security Provides Remote Lock and Wipe, Malware Scanning for Android

• Sub-notebooks

  • $1.8 Million in XO Laptops Lost to Corruption in Iraq

    There I am this morning, reading a captivating story in the New York Times. “U.S. Gift for Iraqis Offers a Primer on Corruption” tells the tale of a shipment of laptops destined for Iraqi schoolchildren that was lost in transit…

6 More Blender Made Movies and Animations You Probably Haven’t Seen Before

Like two weeks ago, we featured some of best and most popular blender made short movies in our 8 stunning blender made short films and animations post. Now, let’s take the road less traveled. The blender movies we are going to showcase here are those rare ones which you guys probably haven’t seen before.

The open source organization: good in theory or good in reality?

Most likely, these new employees will rebel with their feet. They’ll join a new breed of organization designed from scratch, like Red Hat, Google, and 100s of other yet unknown companies, built from the ground up to operate efficiently in an open world.

Old-skool companies will have a tough time attracting the best young talent. And if they are losing the race for top talent, they be hard pressed to stay competitive.

So this is why I love to talk about applying the open source way in organizations, even when I know that many of today’s corporate cultures would chew open source principles up and spit them out.

I’m just running with the wind.

Oracle

• Oracle aims to boost client-side Java with JavaFX improvements

  At the Oracle OpenWorld event, the database giant revealed some details about its Java roadmap. Oracle unsurprisingly wants to continue improving Java Enterprise Edition, but the company also highlighted its commitment to improving client-side Web support and mobile application development with JavaFX.

  The Java programming language plays an important role in facilitating third-party mobile application development, but the standard J2ME stack is increasingly being displaced on smartphones by custom frameworks or native toolkits because it doesn’t enable developers to create competitive user experiences. Java has long since lost to Flash for client-side Web development for similar reasons.

Openness/Sharing

• The benefits of publicness

  I’m reworking an early but foundational section of my book, Public Parts, arguing the benefits of publicness, a list I presented at the PII conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. I’d like to bounce my thoughts off you and ask for your views of the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole. I won’t go into great detail in this list because I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

• Learning to Share, Thanks to the Web

• Open Data

  • Small essay on Rewired State, Open Data and future of public service

  • A simple demand: let us record council meetings

    However, let’s step back a bit. This, ultimately, is not about councillors not understanding the web, failing to get get new technology and the ways it can open up debate. This is not even about the somewhat restrictive webcasting system which apparently only has the past six month’s meetings and is somewhat unpleasant to use (particularly if you use a Mac, or Linux — see a debate of the issues here).

The Grumpy Editor’s Twitter experience

Your editor, being the grumpy, older sort that he is, must confess that he has never quite understood the allure of services like Twitter. 140-Character broadcasts look an awful lot like a combination of the worst features of cellular short messaging and Usenet; it’s conversation via bumper sticker. A local disaster recently pushed your editor to spend more time on the site; what follows are some observations, somewhat tenuously tied to the world of free software.

Keynote at the Coffee Party’s Mock Constitutional Convention

25 September, 2010, Louisville, KY: Keynote given at the Coffee Party’s Conference, launching the “mock constitutional convention” that I hosted with Mark McKinnon. This extends the argument for Citizen Funded Elections, linking the movement to what I have elsewhere called “neo-progressives.” ;

Health/Nutrition

• Patients to be frozen into state of suspended animation for surgery

  Patients are to be placed into a state of suspended animation when they undergo surgery by using a ground breaking technique that freezes their bodies to the point of death.

Security

• A Tale of Two Root Exploits, and Why We Shouldn’t Panic

  “The article is alarmist,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson, referring to a warning about a kernel bug. “It was ONE shared-hosting public-facing server at iWeb.com, among their tens of thousands of servers. “Are you running a publicly-facing shared-host server? No? Then don’t worry about it, and when your distro comes out with a new kernel, just update.”

• Man gets 10 years for VoIP hacking

  A Venezuelan man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service.

  Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served.

  Pena was sentenced by Judge Susan Wigenton in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on computer hacking and wire fraud charges.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret”

  At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That’s not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

• Blackwater’s ‘black ops’ for European multinationals

  Here’s a question: what do Monsanto, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and the Netherlands police have in common with the US Military’s European Command?

  The answer, as Jeremy Scahill – author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army – explains in The Nation, is that they have all availed themselves of the services of one of the most controversial private security companies on the planet. Here’s most of the article…

• U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet

• Sept. 26, 1983: The Man Who Saved the World by Doing … Nothing

  A Soviet ballistics officer draws the right conclusion — that a satellite report indicating incoming U.S. nuclear missiles is, in fact, a false alarm — thereby averting a potential nuclear holocaust.

  Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system, when the alarm bells went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites signaled Moscow that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

• ‘The Only Option Left for Me Is an Orderly Departure’

  In an interview with SPIEGEL, Daniel Schmitt — the 32-year-old German spokesman for WikiLeaks who is also the organization’s best-known personality after Julian Assange — discusses his falling out with the website’s founder, his subsequent departure and the considerable growing pains plaguing the whistleblower organization.

• Small Change

  Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

  Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución.

• U.S. should be able to shut Internet, former CIA chief says

  Cyberterrorism is such a threat that the U.S. president should have the authority to shut down the Internet in the event of an attack, Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said.

  Hayden made the comments during a visit to San Antonio where he was meeting with military and civilian officials to discuss cyber security. The U.S. military has a new Cyber Command which is to begin operations on October 1.

Finance

• DMCA As Censorship: Citibank Doesn’t Want You To Remember What It Said About Obama’s Bank Reform Policy

  We’ve been discussing quite a bit lately how copyright law is often used not as a tool to provide incentive to create, but as a tool for censorship. Here’s the latest example. John Bennett points us to the news that Citigroup filed a DMCA takedown request with WordPress.com over the site LBO-news’ 18-month old post that presented a copy a Citigroup analysis of Obama’s (then new) bank reform plan, which noted that it was actually quite bank-friendly. The key quote in the report: “the US government is following a relatively bank-friendly, investor-friendly approach.”

• The Open University’s Patrick McAndrew: Open Education and Policy

  At the beginning of this year we announced a revised approach to our education plans, focusing our activities to support of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. In order to do so we have worked hard to increase the amount of information available on our own site – in addition to an Education landing page and the OER portal explaining Creative Commons’ role as legal and technical infrastructure supporting OER, we have been conducting a series of interviews to help clarify some of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today’s education landscape.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

  In an effort that raises fresh questions about privacy, officials are preparing to seek sweeping new Internet regulations, arguing that they are losing their capability to track suspects.

• PI appeals to European Parliament to reconsider blocking measures

  In an open letter to the European Parliament, PI calls on MEPs to reconsider proposals to introduce internet blocking measures.

• Privacy International launching legal action against ACS Law

  Privacy International (PI) has announced that it is planning legal action against controversial solicitors ACS: Law Solicitors (ACS Law), alleging a breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA).

  ACS Law, which is already under fire for sending letters to people alleged of copyright infringement, had its website hit by a denial of service (DoS) attack last Tuesday.

  The firm quickly suspended the site, but soon afterwards a file alleged to contain an archive of the firm’s email was uploaded to file sharing websites.
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  PI said this has led to the exposure of personal information of around 10,000 people alleged to have been involved in illegal file sharing.

• Adult video-sharing list leaked from law firm

  The personal details of thousands of Sky broadband customers have been leaked on to the internet, alongside a list of pornographic movies they are alleged to have shared online.

  The list, seen by BBC News, details the full names and addresses of over 5,300 people thought by law firm ACS:Law to be illegally sharing adult films.

  It appeared online following an attack on the ACS:Law website.

  The UK’s Information Commissioner said it would investigate the leak.

  Privacy expert Simon Davis has called it “one of the worst breaches” of the Data Protection Act he had ever seen.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• FCC approves white-space use for unlicensed ‘Super WiFi’

  When the Federal Communications Commission issued its press release about the approval of additional unlicensed spectrum in what are called “white spaces,” it referred to the coming technologies as “Super WiFi.”

  In reality, it’s not clear that this previously unavailable set of unused frequencies will necessarily become anything that resembles WiFi. As the FCC points out in its statement, this is spectrum space that’s going to be available to a wide range of technologies, of which wireless broadband is only one. Even if this turns out to be a significant use of these white space frequencies, it’s not clear whether WiFi (or something like it) will be related in any way.

• The Carriers’ Rebellion

  Before the Steve Jobs hypnosis session, AT&T ruled. Handsets, their prices, branding, applications, contractual terms, content sales…AT&T decided everything and made pennies on each bit that flowed through its network. Then the Great Mesmerizer swept the table. Apple provided the hardware, the operating system, and “everything else”: applications, music, ringtones, movies, books… The iTunes cash register rang and AT&T didn’t make a red cent on content.

• Revenge of the Titans 1.52, and Very Cool DRM

  Since the year 350BC, Puppygames have all had DRM. Oh noes!!11!! Shock! Horror! Puppygames have DRM! Boycott all their shitty games! Find inferior open source / Flash alternatives and say you’d rather play them all day than give evil Puppygames a single cent of your filthy lucre! Use DRM as an excuse to install Trojan riddled spyware installs of Puppygames!

  Well, except Puppygames DRM is a bit different to other flavours of DRM.

  Nasty Big Corporation Ltd’s idea of DRM is that you are all thieving piratey scum who shouldn’t be trusted alone in a shop without being closely monitored by a big hairy security guard. Nasty Big Corporation Ltd likes to install rootkits on your PC. They like to insist on always-online validation to a server that sometimes goes titsup and stops you from playing. They’re pretty insistent that if you install the game on a couple of PCs that you’re probably just a filthy pirate, and that if you want to install it on your kid’s computer upstairs as well that you owe them another $59. Certain ones also reckon if you’re dissatisfied with a game in any way and want your money back you damned well can’t have it, and if you then go to the trouble of extracting the money back out of your credit card company, they erase all your games without any comeback, because unfortunately the small print dialog box you clicked through to get to your game said you agreed to this.

  Puppygames does it completely the opposite way around!

  Firstly and foremostly: if you don’t like our games, or they don’t work, we always refund you. Although we say no questions asked, we do like to ask anyway But we’ll never say no. Though we’d like to point out a couple of things: if the demo works, so does the full game, so you’d be kinda daft to buy the game without trying the demo first; and if you honestly didn’t think the full game was worth the cash, don’t be expecting to play it after asking for a refund, because it will mysteriously turn back into a demo again. What! You have a back door! I hear you cry. No, it’s a front door, and here’s me telling you about it. If your game is refunded because it doesn’t work or you don’t like it, it’ll connect to Puppygames, and find out, and turn back into a demo. Which of course should be just fine with you. Can you ever imagine a position where we’ll abuse this ability? No, because we’d look like total dicks.

  To date, only 18 customers have ever asked for a refund in 7 years. Because we use BMTMicro as our payment provider we’ve never had a single chargeback issued to us either, because we always refund.

  Secondly, we want you to share the full game with your friends and family. Yes, that’s right. We encourage you to spread the love to the people you care about. A Puppygames registration has your full name and email address encoded into it from your order (we’ve got your full postal address too, but that doesn’t get sent to the client any more). We think that anyone you care to share this information with, you probably trust enough to share your CDs and books with too, and so we also think you’d share your games with them. Your name flickers up on the title screen for a few seconds when the game starts just to remind everyone whose game it is, and then it fades away.

• BBC DRM response from Ofcom and intial thoughts

  So the key confidential arguments that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 used to convince Ofcom to permit DRM on the HD Freeview signal are to be kept secret because there is no public interest test to compel disclosure of that information under sections 41 and 44 of the Freedom of Information Act.

• DRM In (and Out) of Schools

  There are two major reasons why Kindles and iPads have no place in schools, both of which are related to DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).

  1. DRM prevents learning. It’s the information that is a resource. The access to this information is provided by tools. DRM actually makes it illegal for students to keep learning past a certain point, by preventing them from looking closely at how the devices work or from making their own methods for accessing, using, and sharing the information.
  2. DRM is, in the words of a guy I almost knew, “jus’ morally wrong.” Forcing DRM on people, even more so.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Leaked Emails Reveal Profits of Anti-Piracy Cash Scheme

    Friday night the anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law accidentally published its entire email archive online, effectively revealing how the company managed to extract over a million dollars (£636,758.22) from alleged file-sharers since its operation started. On average, 30% of the victims who were targeted paid up, and this money was divided between the law firm, the copyright holder and the monitoring company.

  • Streaming video introduces a new wave of Internet piracy

    University of Southern California student Elizabeth watched the season finale of HBO’s lusty vampire drama “True Blood” along with about 5.4 million television viewers.

  • Pirate Party Elects New Leader

    The election initially had 4 candidates – Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, Graeme Lambert, and Eric Priezkalns, however Erc and Graeme withdrew before the end of the nominations period, meaning voting was between Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, and the Re-Open Nominations option.

  • High-Profile, High Damages File-Sharing ‘Conviction’ Was a Farce

    In 2008, lawyers Davenport Lyons courted the mainstream media with the news that a court had found a woman guilty of sharing the game Dream Pinball 3D, an action which cost her around £16,000. Anyone with an understanding of these cases knew that something was wrong and now, thanks to yet more information from the leaked ACS:Law emails, we learn that this ‘conviction’ was built on foundations of sand.

  • In Copyright’s Future (IMG)

  • Copyright law needs a digital-age upgrade

    Did you ever imagine you could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends?

    If you did not get the copyright owner’s permission for these actions, you could be violating the law. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works.

    The statutory damage rule of U.S. copyright law originally was designed to provide some compensation to copyright owners when harm from infringement was difficult to prove. U.S. law authorizes judges and juries to award such damages in any amount between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work – and up to $150,000 per work if the infringement is deemed willful – without proof of any actual harm. The statute says the award should be “just” but provides no guidance about what this means. In one extreme case, a jury ordered an individual file sharer to pay nearly $2 million in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs. Is that really “just”?

  • Esther Wojcicki becomes CC’s Vice Chair, focused on learning and education

    We’re excited to announce that Esther Wojcicki, current Chair of the Creative Commons board, esteemed and award-winning teacher, and leader at the nexus of education and technology, will become CC’s Vice Chair focused on learning and education. CC’s current CEO, Joi Ito, will step into the role of both Chair and CEO.

  • The Pirate Bay Appeal Starts Tomorrow

    Last year The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. Tomorrow the appeal of the trial will start, but unlike last time there is is an awkward silence in the media, blogs and even on The Pirate Bay. Is this the proverbial calm before the storm, or perhaps a change of course?

  • ACTA

    • IPRED2 pulled

      Ironically the IPRED2 failed to get Council consensus but the EU is negotiating via the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade agreement criminal measures with third nations which go beyond IPRED2, for instance include patent infringments which were explicitly excluded in the IPRED2 process. The ACTA criminal chapter also does not get the European Parliament involved in the legislative process and includes no fair use clause.