This distinction between the underlying OS, and what most people actually use, is more apparent on smaller devices like mobile phones. As a user, does it make any difference to you, whether you are using Firefox on top of an Android-powered phone or on the one powered by Windows Phone 7?
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So when it comes to comparing operating systems, the real test is when things fail, and everything doesn't go as per plan. That's where Linux and Open Source software score over proprietary software.
With 3D currently being all the rage in the world of video entertainment, the technology will inevitably start spilling into the world of smartphones, which – in today’s world of handsets with large touch screens – are just as much mobile entertainment platforms as they are phones. While we don’t know much about the 3D capabilities of Sharp’s upcoming devices, a glasses-free 3D display sounds like the right path in the context of smartphones.
China may be no more than a year away from developing a supercomputer built entirely from its own technology, a big step toward freeing itself of Western technology.
This is the view of some research and industry experts in the U.S., but most notably Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), who says China is now working on a petaflop-class supercomputer "using entirely indigenous components that is expected to be complete within the next 12 to 18 months."
use that other OS. The best one was in 14th spot ordered by “failed request %”. Maybe M$ is aiming for “all out” instead of “all in”. In the top ten five are GNU/Linux and five are FreeBSD.
Another fun packed show! (A tip of the "fedora" to the Ubuntu UK Podcast. http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org)
With Google's new 'smartbook' Chrome OS almost ready for prime time, we decided to build a copy of Chromium OS ourselves and give it the once-over.
Looking through the gallery, you will notice that Chromium OS really is just a Chrome browser with a new Settings menu.There actually seem to be less features than when Lee last had a look -- gone is the Picasa integration, and Gmail lost its cool chat manager. The 'slideshow tab' is neat, though, and the 'docked' media player should be popular (you can't drag it away from the bottom of the screen, though).
Those rumours of a Google branded Chrome OS toting netbook launching last this month are beginning to look a touch more credible with our friends over at Chrome Story noting that the OS has entered Beta.
Samsung’s Galaxy S is the first smartphone certified to use Wi-Fi Direct, a new standard that supports peer-to-peer wireless transfers without an access point or hotspot.
Linus Torvalds just finished his soon-to-be infamous scuba dive among the sea life in the Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium. The tank simulates a Caribbean coral reef, but I don't expect Linus felt quite that tranquil given that attendees of the Linux Kernel Summit and Linux Plumbers Conference were watching through 52 windows as he socialized with penguins, sea turtles, stingrays, eels, barracuda and fish.
While we are still waiting for Unigine Corp (or their partners) to actually release a game based upon the Unigine Engine (Primal Carnage backed out and so their own OilRush game should be the first when it ships this quarter or next), the advanced multi-platform engine continues marching forward. The Unigine Engine already supports OpenGL 3/4 and has amazing graphics as shown by their tech demos like Unigine Heaven and many other features, but they have just made another huge update to this Linux-friendly game engine.
We're using nominations because there are a lot of Linux Twitter clients and I don't know which are the most popular 5 to use in a poll. Also, if we'd only vote using the comment system, the votes wouldn't be very accurate since a lot of people don't like to comment and just want to click the "vote" button. So, to have more accurate results, the actual poll will run in a week after todays' nominations and will include the top 5 most nominated Linux Twitter clients.
As anyone who has ever dabbled in 3D modelling will tell you – it sure ain’t easy. Becoming proficient in any powerful software suite takes time, patience, trial and error – and yet more patience.
Monitoring traffic on your network is only as important as the data and computers you want to protect. Understanding how to do basic network troubleshooting will save you both in wasted time and money. Every Linux operating system comes with a number of command line tools to help you diagnose a network problem. In addition, there are any number of open source tools available to help you track down pesky network issues.
In this article we'll take a look at what's available from the command line and from freely available applications. Knowing a few simple commands and when to use them will help you get started as a network diagnostic technician. We'll use Ubuntu 10.04 desktop as our test platform, although all of these work in other distros as well.
The controls of both the players are almost the same. Just give it a try by running the command in the terminal. In case you want a pre-appended playlist then pass the directory location as argument to the command.
S2 Games have released version 1.0.17 of Heroes of Newerth, their DoTA-inspired strategy game.
The beautiful Divergence IV: A New Hope theme (which we've previously covered HERE) got a big update today. The theme now comes with a script that allows you to choose from 3 Nautilus styles, 3 panel styles and 4 menu styles.
Linux is so useful, you don't even need to install it before it gets to work. One of the popular uses of Linux is to create live media that can be used to run desktop systems or to create utility discs for all kinds of administration. Confused about the live CD that's right for you? No worries, we've got the top five live Linux CDs to get you started.
The popularity of live CDs has waned a little bit over the years, for a couple of reasons. One of the big reasons a lot of users chose a live CD, initially, was the difficulty of installation. Back in the day, Linux just wasn't as easy to install as it is now. And many users liked to use Linux on a live CD to get the hang of it before trying to dual-boot with Windows or replacing Windows altogether.
By the way, while we're talking about live CDs here, you're not restricted to CDs for most Linux live distros. Some ship full DVDs of software, and most are bootable from USB as well in case you have a netbook or other machine without a optical drive — or just happen to prefer carrying a USB key over a CD or DVD.
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) booked a new 52 week high today by trading above $43.47, traders are definitely monitoring Red Hat's price action to see if this move attracts further buying into the stock.
I thought it would be good to keep everyone in the loop with the current status of Unity and it's migration over to using Compiz.
Kubuntu Software Center comes with software which are provided by Kubuntu, software of companies who have partnered with Canonical, and you can also purchase software from the Kubuntu software center. Installation of any software is really easy. All you need is Internet connection and chose the software and click install.
Recently, two embedded Linux summit meetings were held, one in Tokyo, Japan and one in Cambridge, UK. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss among industry and community leaders things that might help improve the value or decrease the cost of embedded Linux. One initiative which came out of these meetings, was the notion of declaring a "flag version" of Linux, for embedded use. This would be a specific version of the Linux kernel, chosen as a rallying point for embedded Linux software, add-ons and products.
Hewlett-Packard's $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm is beginning to trickle down to the hardware and software level, with the upcoming release of the Palm Pre 2 on Verizon Wireless. While HP and Verizon have declined to offer exact pricing and a launch date, sample copies of the Palm Pre 2 are beginning to circulate at tech shows and other venues.
Lars Knoll, Nokia's director of Qt development, described the Qt roadmap in detail during a keynote at the Qt Developer Days conference. The direction of development is heavily influenced by feedback from Qt users, who are asking for improved performance, tighter integration with Web technologies, richer support for touch interaction, and better 3D graphics functionality. During his presentation, Knoll outlined some research projects that the Qt developers are working on in an effort to deliver key improvements in many of those areas.
At the Qt Developer Days event this week in San Francisco, Nokia CTO Rich Green discussed the value that applications bring to mobile devices and the role that the Qt toolkit will play in Nokia's mobile platform strategy. Qt will accelerate Nokia's own mobile application development and supply the third-party developer community with a unifying toolkit that will work across both of Nokia's mobile platforms.
Because open source draws developers, more than 57% of Android apps are free. (The figure is 28% for the iPhone's app store and lower for other smartphones.) And even the paid apps on Android are significantly more affordable, averaging $3.29 compared to the iPhone's $4.01 and Blackberry's $6.97. Many savvy app developers offer a useful “lite” version of their best applications for free, with the option to buy a full paid version for $1.99 - $3.99. I have found many of the lite versions satisfy the need I had, but they function so well and have such innovative paid features that I strongly consider upgrading. (And I've already told you what a tightwad I am.)
Perhaps more significantly, what can you say? Android market share is monotonically non-decreasing, so every quarter the Google-controlled alliance gets more good news.
I have no doubt that Linux-based tablets will eventually be winners. I've been unimpressed though at how slowly the Linux tablet OEMs have been about getting their products to market. Those that have made it tp store shelves, like the Augen GenTouch78, haven't been much good. Things are about to change. The forthcoming Nook Color and the rumored Amazon Kindle Tablet will bring good Linux-powered tablets to users this year after all.
Google has open sourced an Apache server module designed to speed website performance. Presumably, the module is based on the mystery Google Web Server the company uses to serve its own pages.
Known as "mod_pagespeed," the Apache module speeds performance "on the fly" in 15 separate ways, which include optimizing page caching, minimizing client-server round trips, and reducing payload size. "mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them," Google says. "It does this by rewriting the resources using filters that implement web performance best practices. Webmasters and web developers can use mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages when serving content with the Apache HTTP Server."
There is nothing in open source quite like the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
To outsiders it can be maddening. I just finished keynoting ApacheCon and I still don’t get it.
Jim Jagielski (right) is currently Apache’s president, but having been with the group since its start he’s also an unofficial historian.
Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria….countries in Africa that some people have to use an atlas (or at least Google Maps) to locate. While low cost computers, networking hardware and software are helping these countries develop the computer infrastructure they need those are only part of the answer. To really establish a sustainable infrastructure a lot of these countries, who may have been under colonial rule for decades, also need training in entrepreneurship and capacity building.
A number of years ago I started working with a company called InWent Capacity Building International. Based in Germany, InWent works with the German government, the United Nations and various countries on projects to “teach the teachers” and build economic capacity. Since the German government had embraced Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) early on, it was fairly easy to get InWent to recognize FOSS as advantageous for some of the projects the countries were undertaking.
A few months ago, we have featured here some of the best free and open-source project management software. To recap, project management software covers many types of applications that may include scheduling, tracking, reporting, resource allocation, communication and administration among others. It is designed to help companies or organizations complete a project quickly and efficiently.
For those of you who are interested, here is another round of excellent free and open-source project management software (in no particular order) that we have not included on our previous list.
Last spring I gave a talk at OSBC called “Asking the Hard Questions About Open Source Software.” Since that time I’ve given the talk several times to customers and partners, have added some more material about IBM’s use of open source, and tweaked it here and there.
First there was an opening talk by Jonathan Corbet, which was a report on the current state of the kernel. Some take-aways I got from the talk is we have about 1100 kernel developers currently, 300 are very active, and the pace is very fast. There isn’t any concern over attracting additional kernel developers as there is a steady influx. Jonathan went over various new features in the kernel, including a few long-term cleanup efforts that are finally getting finished up.
We received a lot of great feedback on the previous beta and addressed many of the issues reported, including reduced memory usage, improved text rendering and a 60% install size reduction on Android (from around 43 MB to 17 MB).
Disappointed when the Department of Justice allowed Oracle to acquire the assets of MySQL, putting together in one company the leading free software platform and the leading commercial platform for database services. Not surprisingly, Oracle has introduced sharp fee hikes to support MySQL, killed off low-priced support options, and more than doubled what it charges for the commercial versions of the database. More here and here.
A senior member of the Java Community Process has resigned from his position on the board's Executive Committee citing Oracle's role within the committee's processes as a driving factor.
Doug Lea —whose position on the board was due for renewal this year— won't be reapplying to sit on the JCP's executive committee in future years as he feels that "there is no remaining useful role for an independent advocate for the academic and research community on the EC," he said in his explanatory departure letter sent on Friday. "I believe that the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body," he added.
Michael Meeks, famous hacker and LibreOffice advocate, replied to my earlier post giving his perspectives on many different subjects related to LibreOffice development.
Having read his views with great attention - and keeping in mind his long coding experience with OpenOffice.org, as well as his ability to dig deep into complex subjects like copyright assignment – I want to take a chance to go deeper into some points.
The Drupal content management system (CMS) is one of the most successful open source projects on the Internet today, thanks in no small part to its community.
At the head of the Drupal community is the project's founder, Dries Buytaert, who started the project ten years ago in his dorm room. In 2008, Buytaert helped to found Acquia which is a commercial support vendor for Drupal, which to date has raised over $20 million in startup capital. The road from dorm room to open source rock star has given Buytaert some insight into how to build a successful open source community. Speaking at the Zendcon PHP conference this week, Buytaert detailed six key secrets to open source success.
Symbian, the mobile operating system that's huge in Europe but an afterthought elsewhere, has received a boost from its friends at home.
Senior officials in the Cabinet Office have banned their colleagues from talking publicly about Government IT, which will stop reformers arguing the need for radical change.
In recent weeks several officials in the Cabinet Office have spoken in public on the massive inefficiencies within Government administration. They have set out plans for reducing or cutting out widespread duplication of business processes and IT.
I love this video from Dave Cole (Senior Advisor to the CIO, Executive Office of the President) and Macon Phillips (White House Director of New Media). You hear the feds talk a lot about openness and transparency, but not often specifically about open source. But here, you can see that the White House really gets it.
Melanie Chernoff, Public Policy Manager for Red Hat, posted a story on opensource.com about the recent Open Source for America awards handed out at the Government Open Source Conference.
The theme of this year’s GOSCON, from my perspective, was that governments remain eager to embrace open source software, and are no doubt already doing so in many cases, but there is still a great demand for more commercial backing of more open source. Even though we continue to see more official adoption and procurement of open source among public organizations, it seems clear after GOSCON there is a need for more awareness, but also for more commercial support of open source.
There are many ways that vendors of proprietary products try to scare business customers away from open source software, and one of the more commonly heard examples involves vague fears about compliance with open source licenses. There's nothing like the specter of a good lawsuit to scare a company back into a paid vendor's welcoming arms.
Open Data Center Alliance, with more than $50B in collective IT spending, hope to yield a big stick
The Powerhouse Museum has moved to embrace Gov 2.0 principles, announcing plans to create an open-access image repository to showcase the organisations’ extensive image archive.
The portal will initially begin with about 5000 images and grow to include the museum’s glass-plate negatives collection, including some 7903 images from the Tyrrell Photographic Collection, which documents city and country life in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Data came from a free API which National Rail (a body representing the UK’s train companies) has run for years. Output was presented in the cleanest way possible – people on the move don’t want to be encumbered with advertising or excessive page furniture!
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.
One major venue for the advancement of OER is through the development and support of businesses that levage openly licensed content in support of education. Eric Frank is Founder and President of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of openly-licensed college textbooks. We spoke with Eric about faculty perceptions of open textbooks, customization enabled by open licensing, and the future of “free online and affordable offline” business models.
The Open Prosthetics Project has outlined the different ways members of their community can help and ingeniously spelled out how they need help within the list. Whether you're new to their community or returning, it's very clear how to get started. On their website, participation is as easy a being a user, donor, grant writer, service provider, researcher, or helping with their legal team.
Oracle has released details of a proposed standard API for managing the cloud. The draft specification, released Wednesday, has been submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for inclusion with the organization's proposed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) standard.
If a company like Facebook sees the value in an HTML5-based web application that can run across many modern mobile devices, that, to me is a great testament to the power of the web vs. native mobile apps. Clearly native apps have their place but the more fragmentation we see in the mobile space in both operating systems as well as devices (there are now tablet devices coming out in many different sizes from 11 inches to 7 inches an every size in between) the more important the web will be.
A dinner lady who told parents their child was being bullied was sacked as governors were "embarrassed by the public outcry", a tribunal has heard.
Carol Hill, 61, had made her bosses at Great Tey Primary School in Essex "cross" and was unfairly dismissed, her lawyer Claire Darwin told the hearing.
She was sacked from the school in September last year.
The Jack PC from Chip PC Technologies offers a neat and novel thin-client desktop computing solution where the computer doesn't just plug into the wall, it is the plug in the wall. Running on power provided by the ethernet cable that also connects it to the data center server, the computer-in-a-wall-socket supports wireless connectivity, has dual display capabilities and runs on the RISC processor architecture – which gives the solution the equivalent of 1.2GHz of x86 processing power.
The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has ordered Ofcom to investigate News Corporation's plan to take full control of broadcaster BSkyB.
Raymond Snoddy reveals all from the MediaPro conference - Guardian News and Media is making more money from its online dating service than NI is from Times online; The Independent's new i has only been selling around 125,000 a day; and Lebedev says the Standard and The Independent are "definitely doomed" if they stay as they are...
The issue, described by one legal commenter as "the most significant obscenity case so far this century", centres on a prosecution originally brought in May of this year against Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe, whose log of a private online chat he had with another individual was deemed by Kent Police to be obscene.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz today announced the appointment of Edward W. Felten as the agency’s first Chief Technologist. In his new position, Dr. Felten will advise the agency on evolving technology and policy issues.
Dr. Felten is a professor of computer science and public affairs and founding director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He has served as a consultant to federal agencies, including the FTC, and departments of Justice and Defense, and has testified before Congress on a range of technology, computer security, and privacy issues. He is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and recipient of the Scientific American 50 Award. Felten holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington.
On Sept. 22, Netflix began offering its streaming movie service in Canada. This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn't offering its traditional DVD-by-mail plan to Canadians, its prospects seemed questionable. How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted?
Two new publishing surveys predict rapid revenue growth for mobile apps in the next few years, although one shows most publishers rejecting the switch to an all-digital format.
The BBC faces a news blackout tomorrow across its main TV and radio news programmes, including Radio 4's Today, BBC1's 10pm bulletin and Newsnight, as star presenters including Fiona Bruce and Kirsty Wark join a 48-hour strike over pensions.
As we move from multicore to manycore processors, memory bandwidth is going to become an increasingly annoying problem. For some HPC applications it already is. As pointed at in a recent HPCwire blog, a Sandia study found that certain classes of data-intensive applications actually run slower once you try to spread the computations beyond eight cores. The problem turned out to be insufficient memory bandwidth and the contention between processor for memory access.
For dolphin mothers, successful parenting is as much a matter of having good friends as it is good genes.
A prototype for an electric vehicle -- code named Urbee -- is the first to have its entire body built with a 3D printer.
At first it sounded like a macabre coincidence. Within three days in March 1983, two California cousins learned from their doctors that they had non- Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. One month earlier, a sister-in-law of one of them, living in Washington, had received the same diagnosis. The family was stunned. What could be causing their unbelievable misfortune?
In Georgia, a few months later, when the married daughter of one of the victims discovered that she too had the malignancy, the family could not avoid what had earlier seemed an illogical, incredible conclusion: four of them had "caught" cancer from a 63-year-old South African aunt who in 1982 had crisscrossed the U.S., visiting her late husband's relatives.
Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.
In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.
European judges have rejected an attempt by British security officials to gain access to a huge new store of visa application data being set up to combat illegal immigration, organised crime and terrorism.
The government went to court to force the EU to allow agencies such as MI5, SOCA and the UK Border Agency to use the Visa Information System (VIS), which will store details of every foreigner who applies to enter the bloc, including their fingerprints and photograph. Intelligence on those who have previously been refused a visa by another country is seen as particularly valuable.
A suburban Oregon police department is paying a local man $4,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit in which he claimed he was pulled over for flipping off the cops in traffic.
Twice he saluted with his middle finger while driving, and was pulled over each time by a Clackamas County patrol officer, resulting in what he said was a tongue lashing and “bogus” citations that were later dismissed. He sued (.pdf) in March.
Even though water privatization has been a massive failure around the world, the World Bank just quietly gave $139 million to its latest corporate buddy.
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question -- tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.
Clearing tropical forests for farmland is bad for the climate – no surprises there. But now we've learned that it's also an inefficient way to feed people.
Paul West of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues worked out the potential yields of 175 different crops if they were planted in different parts of the world.
Then they estimated how much carbon would be released into the atmosphere by clearing these areas of wild plants.
An Icelandic volcano is showing signs of erupting, months after ash wreaked chaos on European air travel.
Flood water is pouring out of the Grimsvotn volcano in southern Iceland – a sign, scientists say, that an eruption could be imminent.
Recently there have been three articles that discuss releasing scientific software. Nature had a piece called Computational science: ...Error, the bloggers at RealClimate wrote about Climate code archiving: an open and shut case? and Communications of the ACM has an article entitled Should code be released?.
Devin says Capital One's online car loan rates differ depending on which browser you use to go loan-hunting. Apparently the bank's loan-offering robot doesn't think much of Firefox users.
Civil liberties advocates lost a Senate stalwart Tuesday night when Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) was defeated by Ron Johnson, a little-known plastics manufacturer whose shibboleths against health care reform and government spending tapped into populist anger.
For years, Feingold was one of the few — and sometimes the only — voice in the Senate skeptical of the government’s increasing demands for domestic surveillance power and control of the internet. He was one of 16 Senators who voted against the Communications Decency Act of 1996, an internet censorship bill later struck down by the Supreme Court, was the only Senator in 2001 to vote against the USA Patriot Act, and he introduced a measure to censure President Bush for his illegal warrantless wiretapping program.
Gaining entry to some movie theaters lately gives patrons an experience that is on par with going through a TSA security checkpoint at the airport. Then once you’ve gained access, there are cameras strategically positioned that record your every move. Unfortunately, the extent to which these companies monitor movie-goers is only going to get worse.
As Ban Ki-moon finalized his preparations for his visit this week to Beijing, one of his top advisors, Sha Zukang, traveled to China to present an award to a retired Chinese general who had authority over troops that fired on unarmed civilians during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
The European Union looks set to adopt tougher privacy laws for online companies. It’s looking into ways to update rules in line with technical advances, most notably the increase in data that is stored online rather than on a user’s computer.
There are many aspects of the Internet in China that make it unique (see Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China, a page that is no doubt blocked from view in China.)
* state censorship of non-Chinese content via the Great Firewall * internal (to China) censorship of content by Chinese Internet companies * self-censorship that is a hallmark of any regime that does not have free speech laws
These are but 3 of the many differences of the Internet in China vs. elsewhere.
Amidst all the shouting over Tuesday's transfer of the House of Representatives to Republican control, a distinct cry of pain could be heard for the loss of one voice—Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA). Republican Morgan Griffith, majority leader of Virginia's House of Delegates, has taken Boucher's seat.
As Chair of the influential Subcommittee on the Internet of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Boucher's imprint on tech issues—particularly online privacy—was clear as a bell. Now he is gone.
"Tonight the Congress has lost one of its most intelligent and tech-saavy members," a press statement from Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge declared late Tuesday. "Rick Boucher has been one of the most moderate and thoughtful voices on communications and intellectual property policy."
Unlike most of the rest of the people commenting on Bill C-32 I’ve actually read the WIPO Internet Treaties. Heck, I’ve even quoted them often enough. You can read the specific treaty in question in PDF form here or read the text online here. At this point I’m going to be really nasty. Have you ever wondered why I’m the only person who is willing to post a link to the treaty? Don’t you think that it’s curious that Michael Geist, Barry Sookman, James Gannon, Howard Knopf, etc., etc., etc. never give you a link so that you can read the treaty on your own? Curious, isn’t it.
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The problem is that the Recording Industry (as separate from the Music Industry) is suffering from sales drops, and is panicking. In effect the Recording Industry has become obsolete, and they are fighting to try and retain some relevance. Any relevance. And they probably could except for one thing. A couple of days ago I published an article on Canadian military procurement titled F35 Joint Strike Fighter – The Biggest Procurement Mistake Ever in which I mentioned political instability in the United States. The article was published before their election, and my concerns about American political instability were based solely on the news articles of the time. It appears that things may be far worse than I thought. The new composition of the House of Representatives are going to push for enormous spending cuts, which is almost certain to turn the current Recession into a Depression, right behind the Brits and Irish. As the economy gets worse, they will probably attempt to cut spending further, possibly putting the United States economy into a death spiral. And of course if consumers don’t have money, they don’t spend it on things like music. It is quite possible that we could see one or more of the large Recording Industry companies forced into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the near future, because their customers won’t have any money to spend.
For most people going to a cinema is a good night out. Only a few realize that they are often subjecting themselves to extreme and privacy invading security measures that most airports could only dream of. Filmgoers are already being carefully watched for suspicious behavior by Big Brother’s cameras, but soon this technology will be upgraded with sophisticated emotion recognition software.
Righthaven is a company that was formed earlier this year with a novel business model: find websites that have copied newspaper articles without permission, and sue them for copyright infringement. Since March, it has sued more than 150 websites and reached settlements with more than 50. But now Righthaven faces its biggest challenge yet.
In its lawsuits, Righthaven typically asks for attorney’s fees and threatens to take over defendants’ domain names. It has used both of those demands very effectively as a hammer to force its targets to settle the lawsuit. A new motion filed by digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that Righthaven doesn’t have the right to demand attorney’s fees or take over defendants’ domains, even if it wins its lawsuits.
Yet another case of the DMCA putting in place ridiculous restrictions that do nothing to actually stop unauthorized copying.
In a move sure to outrage both file-traders on BitTorrent networks and legal watchdogs, a well-known pornographer has filed a federal copyright suit against 7,098 individuals.
In an effort to reduce illicit file-sharing, draft legislation was passed in Finland last week which will require Internet service providers to send letters to customers suspected of unauthorized sharing. The warnings will be initiated by copyright owners, but at no stage will Internet subscribers’ identities be compromised. A three strikes-style regime is not on the agenda.
World famous nightclub and independent music label Ministry of Sound have been forced to suspend their planned shakedown of tens of thousands of alleged file-sharers. The company had planned to send 25,000 letters demanding hundreds of pounds in compensation to customers of Internet service provider, BT. However, BT has deleted more than 20,000 of those records which now makes the identification of the account holders impossible.
Westergren has had a struggle to get to the top. If not battling the RIAA or pitching venture capitalists that would eventually turn him down, what kept him going was his belief in his idea of personalizing music. He shares his thoughts about building great teams, and inspiring faith and courage amongst his team members.
The first P2P case to come to trial in the US has lasted five years and now has three verdicts, this one coming after just two hours of deliberation. Jammie Thomas-Rasset must pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs at issue in the case, for total of $1.5 million.
"We are again thankful to the jury for its service in this matter and that they recognized the severity of the defendant's misconduct," said the RIAA after the case wrapped up. "Now with three jury decisions behind us along with a clear affirmation of Ms. Thomas-Rasset’s willful liability, it is our hope that she finally accepts responsibility for her actions."
Last month we reported on an interesting development taking place in the copyright enforcement front. Law firm Gallant Macmillan requested a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO) against BT in order to identify thousands of alleged copyright infringers of its music. Because of the ACS:Law email leak debacle, BT decided to fight the NPO, heralding the end of the assumption that IP evidence should never be contended by ISPs.
Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys
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