• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Professional Institute Announces New Affiliate in Greece

“LPI seeks out and recruits organizations worldwide to become our Master Affiliates who have significant knowledge of the IT industry and the regional Linux and Open Source ecosystem where they operate. In this regard, GREEKLUG is an ideal partner for us as they have one of the oldest Linux computer labs in Greece and the necessary academic partnerships and human resources to promote the growth of LPI Certification,” said Jim Lacey, president and CEO of the Linux Professional Institute.

Desktop

• The desktop market share

  It is due to the web analytic market share counters that the myth of “Linux is 1% of the market share” persists. We present three reasons below.
  1. Totally off-the grid systems do not get counted.

  * 1,494,500 deployed by One Laptop Per Child.
  * Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktops, SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop, or Ubuntu desktops on corporate or government networks behind a firewall.
  * Appliance deployments like cash registers.

  2. Nor do research institutions and Universities get properly counted.

  For example, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science uses Fedora on the desktop but it does not show up in Fedora’s update statistics. Why? The version of Fedora is so heavily customized to the environment that it needs its own update mechanism. None the less, with 26,307,719 unique ip addresses getting Fedora updates, Fedora alone must have have greater than 1% desktop market share.
  3. I agree with Caitlyn Martin, with all of the netbook sales, something is not adding up.

  A commenter asked for a 2009 and a 2010 market share report for netbooks. Here is one from November 2009 reporting 1/3 Linux market share. Regretfully, I have nothing for 2010 since the scoop is that netbooks are losing market share overall to iPad tablets. Never fear Linux Fans, The Android Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″ tablet has only been out for a month and has been selling nicely. By the way, Microsoft still lacks a significant market share in tablets.

  We won’t stand for the lies behind the 1% myth any more.

  We as non-Microsoft users need to stand up and say what we are using. If you use GNU/Linux, I urge you to participate in the Dudalibre “We > 1%” campaign. It takes one minute to say which distro you use.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Listen to Linux Radio!

Kernel Space

• ZFS For Linux Is Now Available To The Public!

  For those with some extra time this holiday week in the United States, perhaps you want to try out the ZFS file-system on Linux? As was said this week when publishing ZFS benchmarks on Linux using the native kernel module developed by LLNL/KQ Infotech, the public release of this kernel module wasn’t going to happen until the first week of January. Fortunately, we have been successful in overwhelming KQ Infotech with lots of interested users, so they have decided to go ahead and make the current beta ZFS Linux module available to the general public.

• Graphics Stack

  • A replacement for X finally!

    The good old X Server is finally getting a replacement. Wayland will provide a replacement but can co-exists along side X Server for compatibility and features. It will also reduce the complexity today where for 3D effect, we are running Compiz.

    The X architecture has been around for a decades now. It has gone through many iterations and improvements, however it still suffers from complexities and performance issues. These become bigger challenges when you are working on smaller devices such as phones, where X becomes an over head.

  • Karsk: Make Finding Software/Driver Optimizations Easier

    When publishing ATI Gallium3D benchmarks this week that compared the performance of the Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards with this next-generation driver architecture to the classic open-source Mesa driver and AMD’s high-performance proprietary Catalyst driver, the results were what one would mostly expect.

Applications

• 3 FOSS PIM Apps, 3 Personality Quirks

  Even when dealing in FOSS, choosing a personal information manager is sometimes a matter of deciding which app’s personality issues you find least bothersome. KOrganizer is a complete organizer, but its menus and user interface often comes off as crowded. Getting Things Gnome has powerful features, but task windows are size-limited. And Chandler Note to Self’s intriguing offering is limited by its difficulty to install.

• Foobnix 0.2.2 Comes With Lots Of Changes, Ubuntu PPA

  Foobnix, a very interesting music player we’ve wrote about a while back (check out that post for a complete review) has been updated to version 0.2.2 and also it finally got an Ubuntu PPA.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtualization With KVM On Ubuntu 10.10

  • Turn gedit into C++ Compiler !

  • How to Triple Boot Your Hackintosh with Windows and Linux

  • Now I can forget about Logmein!

• Games

  • Black Friday Sale !

    For those of you outside the United States (like myself), Black Friday is the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday that marks the first official shopping day of Christmas. It is the day when retailers offer all kinds of incredible sales opportunities that they hope will put them in the black for the year (enabling them to finish the year with a profit).

  • LGP Is Partially Back Online; More Unforeseen Issues

    It’s been seven weeks since LGP’s server disaster where their single server with a single disk with lackluster backup capabilities suffered a massive failure. The disk suffered from firmware corruption, chemical degradation, and file-system damage, among other problems, and located on this drive were LGP’s web-sites, their online store, and their entire Digital Rights Management implementation for the games they ported to Linux. Fortunately, their services are starting to come back online.

  • Open Ballot: does a lack of games hold Linux back?

    After getting sucked into Osmos last night when he should have been doing something far more useful, Andrew got to thinking about games on Linux. Osmos is beautiful, intelligent and original, but our neighbours on PC Format would likely scoff at anything less than the latest Assassin’s Creed or Counterstrike iteration.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Experts Needed for EU Research Project

    The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Pardus 2011 Beta Review – the most exciting distro of the year?

    The latest beta release of Pardus Linux sports a slew of tweaks and under-the-hood improvements. But does the new release make the distro a viable alternative to the Ubuntus and Fedoras of this world? Dmitri Popov investigates…

  • xPUD: A Quick Booting, Easy To Use 64 MB Linux Distro [Linux]

    Overall xPUD is a great example of Linux at its best: lean, lightweight and out of your way. I’m having a lot of fun imagining the possibilities of this distribution and hope you have fun with it too. Let me know of any successful experiments in the comments below.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Preupgrade kills Fedora 13-to-14 system; starting over with fresh Fedora 13 install

    • Is Xen Ready For Fedora 15?

• Debian Family

  • State of the Debian-Ubuntu relationship

    The Debian-Ubuntu relationships used to be a hot topic, but that’s no longer the case thanks to regular efforts made on both sides. Conflicts between individuals still happen, but there are multiple places where they can be reported and discussed (#debian-ubuntu channel, Derivatives Front Desk at derivatives@debian.org on the Debian side or debian@ubuntu.com on the Ubuntu side). Documentation and infrastructure are in place to make it easier for volunteers to do the right thing.

    Despite all those process improvements, the best results still come out when people build personal relationships by discussing what they are doing. It often leads to tight cooperation, up to commit rights to the source repositories. Regular contacts help build a real sense of cooperation that no automated process can ever hope to achieve.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu is ‘not changing to a rolling release’

      So there we have it: Ubuntu is not about to roll into instability but keeping up with the software Joneses may yet become that little bit easier.

    • Launchpad edge site deprecated

      I previously posted about our continuous deployment efforts in Launchpad. Since then the project has come a long way. We can deploy to nearly all our services without downtime. The remaining services are a bit trickier – but we are working on them.

    • Script To Automatically Apply the “200 Lines Kernel Patch” Alternative In Ubuntu

      The script was initially in Spanish, but I’ve translated it into English and I’ve also corrected 3 small errors which caused the script not to work.

    • Unity Place People – Day 3

      Sorry that I took a couple of days off to deal with other obligations, however I am back and hacking.

      If you missed the last 2 days of Unity Place People adventure please take a look at:

      1. Unity Place People – Day 1
      2. Unity Place People – Day 2

      What’s new:

      1. Get Folks and Zeitgeist to play along allowing sorting results using Zeitgeist (Favorite/Most/Recent)
      2. Find a nice grouping for the all section

Devices/Embedded

• Asus announces eReader-notepad hybrid

  The Eee Note will run the Linux operating system and will include a headphone jack, voice recording and a built-in camera.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Meet MeeGo

      Android might get all the headlines, but MeeGo, the little Linux that could, may yet become an important Linux for your phones, netbooks, tablets, and cars.

  • Android

    • Documentation of the W3C Cheat Sheet on Android

    • Rovio’s Angry Birds won’t fly on slow Android devices

      Rovio recently brought Angry Birds to the Android platform, but the popular (and oddly addictive) physics game is suffering performance problems on certain handsets with slow processors. In a blog entry published on Thursday, the company announced plans for a new “lightweight” version that will work better on legacy hardware.

    • What Android Is

      What happened was, for our recent South American tour I wanted an Android architecture overview graphic. I ran across, among the Android SDK documentation, a page entitled What is Android?, and it’s perfectly OK. Except for, I really disliked the picture — on purely aesthetic grounds, just not my kind of lettering and gradients and layouts — so I decided to make another one.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Ubuntu-ready netbook moves to dual-core Atom

    System76 is shipping a new version of its Ubuntu Linux-ready Starling Netbook equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, starting at $384. Meanwhile the company has begun shipping to the U.K, and is contemplating developing a tablet PC.

  • Jolicloud beats Chrome OS

    The next big thing in consumer computing is the cloud-based operating system. The most anticipated of these is Google’s Chrome OS, a Linux-based OS meant to be ideal for netbooks and tablet-like devices.

    While Google makes promises about a release date for Chrome OS, others are already moving into this space.

    One of the first is Jolicloud, which has already released a version 1.0 edition, is readying version 1.1 and has already announced a Jolicloud-based netbook in the UK. The so-called “Jolibook” will run version 1.1 of the cloud software.

Google Wave to become Apache project

Community interest in continuing the development of Google’s Wave communication platform has led to a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the Apache Software Foundation (OSM). The proposal was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration.

Copyright assignment – a little commercial perspective

Gather the pitchforks and light the torches. Hordes of marketing men are gathering, intent on invading the free and open source software village armed with copyright assignment policies and turning everyone into mindless corporate contributors. As Michael Meeks (via LWN.net) has warned there is “‘a sustained marketing drive coming’ to push the copyright-assignment agenda” As you read this very post, faceless marketing drones are calling your bosses, spreading pernicious lies about the necessity of copyright assignment policies.

Technology Innovation categories

In this new category we’re looking for examples of technology that is open source. This could be a publishing platform, a hardware toolset, a peer-to-peer communications service or software development tools. Well known examples of this could include Firefox or WordPress – but which developers are creating the next generation of open source tools which will transform the way we interact with the web?

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Be thankful for Mozilla: The least evil tech company of them all?

    Public perception is a commodity of which companies throw millions of dollars at a year, if not more. A company will have various sub-departments which handles their own perception in a different way, usually singing to the same finely tuned song of the directorship.

    But over the years, instead of the more obvious targets being harassed as the “corporate bad guy” such as ammunition companies, licensed arms dealers and fossil fuel suppliers – those which have a wider cultural dent on society, the technology companies are getting the flak.

  • State of Mozilla, Processing.js, Jetpack, Mozmill, games, Input 2.0, Prospector, SUMO, and more…

  • Mozilla Labs Night “Gaming Special” – Scrabb.ly Presentation

  • Miramar (Thunderbird 3.3) Alpha 1 available for testing

  • Mozilla Labs Night “Gaming Special” – Scrabb.ly Presentation

  • What’s up with SUMO – Nov. 23

    The big things this week:

    * Today is the KB code freeze!
    * Current KB article freeze, Nov 29th 1AM PST
    * KB Sprint happening Dec 2, 6AM – 2PM PST
    * The Polish localization team is kicking ass!

  • F1: sharing links even faster and easier

    We just pushed out a new version of the F1 add-on and the F1 service. Existing users should upgrade their add-ons (click on “Find Updates” in the Add-On manager).

  • A lower level: Making jsGB

    I get nostalgic sometimes. I think back to the days of the Commodore 64, the Gameboy and other such simple consoles of the 1980s, and I wonder: can you play those games on a modern computer? Is it possible to relive the original Tetris, to play Giana Sisters or Elite all over again?

Databases

• FR: Open source database new engine of France’s social security

  The open source database management system (DBMS) Postgresql is the new engine for France’s Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF). The organisation, responsible in 2009 for some 69 billion Euro in benefits distributed to 11 million claimants, earlier this year replaced its proprietary DBMS with the open source alternativ

Oracle

• New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m94) available

  Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m94 is available for download.

  DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.

CMS

• WordPress Global Translator Plugin

  Global Translator is a free and open source WordPress Plugin which is able to automatically translate your blog in 48 different languages:
  Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese, Thai, Turkish, Hungarian, Belarus,Irish, Icelandic, Macedonian, Malay, Persian.

• Open-source social network Diaspora goes live

  Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business today, at least for a handful of invited participants.

  “Every week, we’ll invite more people,” stated the developers behind the project, in a blog item posted Tuesday announcing the alpha release of the service. “By taking these baby steps, we’ll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible.”

• Is Diaspora too late

Education

• Cooperative principles can be applied in school settings

  Most schools today involve rows of students seated at desks, looking toward a teacher. That teacher, who is the focus of all the students, holds the power in the classroom, but has little power to make structural changes within the school system. The educational system in the United States right now is set up to teach kids how to follow directions—and it’s not doing that very well, either. Our students learn how to break the rules and not get caught. Our schools teach kids ways to negotiate power so that they are able to achieve some sort of reward or avoid punishment, but never to be in power. Conformity and submission to authority are clear strategies for success in the public school system. Students see clear examples of “power over” and “power under,” but rarely “power with.” Our schools are educating for empire.

  By not teaching children how to think critically, and not allowing students or teachers meaningful control over school environments or curriculum, our schools train workers who do not question authority in jobs or on battlefields. If students are unable to operate successfully in this system, they are often funneled into the prison industrial system. This connection between prisons and schools is becoming more and more transparent. Just last February a seventh grade girl in New York was arrested and taken directly to jail for writing on her desk in marker. The means by which schools operate are authoritarian and oppressive. Youth in schools do not experience a right of due process and are one of the only populations within the U.S. who to not have access to this right. There is no innocent-until-proven-guilty option in the principle’s office. This system invites little to no feedback from and does not empower those upon which it acts, whether students or teachers.

Business

• Control Points and Steering Mechanisms in Open Source Software Projects

  Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.

Project Releases

• Libre Office Beta 3 released

  The third beta of the OpenOffice.org fork ‘LibreOffice’ saw release this week.

• Moodle 2.0 is now available!

  Well, after about two and a half years of work by hundreds of people, I’m proud to say that we have a Moodle 2.0 ready for you to download.

  All the functional QA tests have passed, all the 3873 unit tests are passing, and enough people think it’s finished, so it must be finished. smile The last step was to take the (now traditional) Moodle version photo of my kids for this news post, which I did today.

Government

• Italian Parliament Migration Plan goes on

  The Italian chamber of deputies on the 22th of September 2010 approved unanimously a motion to move on with the adoption of open standards in order to make office suite migrations a reality.

• PL: Poznań city’s e-Government platform built on open source components

  The administration of the Polish city of Poznań is using many open source tools, allowing it to offer a variety of e-government services to its citizens, civil workers and politicians. “Free and open source software, open access and open standards allow us to create open government services.”

  Examples include the streaming audio of city council sessions, using the Ogg Vorbis open standard. The city also offers websites that combine city maps with city planning and providing public Internet access points. Using open source furthermore allows Poznan’s citizens to submit information to the Municipal police, in combination with digital maps.

• Italian Left Leader signs Berlusconi-like deal with Microsoft

  Nichi Vendola is president both of south-eastern italian region Puglia and of the Italian left party Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL or “Left, Ecology, Freedom” in English).

  Free Software is software that can save lots of public money. Even moms like Free Software like Linux, partly because it can be used without problems even by some disabled children. Besides, Free Software is such a good idea that European Parliament representatives of all colors like it !.

  On its own website, SEL says “we believe that for a modern party speaking of copyleft, Free Software and Net Neutrality is as necessary as speaking of jobs, environment, economy and civil rights”. Among the more than 100 political candidates supporting Free Software at the latest regional elections in Italy there were several SEL representatives. The Florence section of SEL even presented a motion to promote Free Software in Florence http://www.sinistraeliberta.eu/articoli/sel-per-il-software-libero-al-comune-di-firenze] in January 2010.

Licensing

• Viewsonic and the GPL

  Somebody linked me to this reddit story about the fact that Viewsonic appear to be engaging in the currently fashionable trend of shipping Android devices without providing any source. This one’s more interesting though, in that Viewsonic appear to be entirely happy to publicly state that they have no intention of following their license obligations. I’ve pulled the kernel image for the device and confirmed that it contains code that’s not present in the generic Android Tegra tree, so I don’t think they have a leg to stand on here.

Openness/Sharing

• Amazon #1 Bestseller, “Machine of Death,” goes Creative Commons

  In addition, some of the individual stories are released under the CC BY-NC-SA license, which allows you to translate and adapt the work as long as you abide by the noncommercial condition and release the derivative under the same license. Podcasts are also being created for all the stories, with three stories up so far.

• Open Data

  • Foreign Transparency Policies the US Government Could Learn From

    There is always progress to be made and the presumption to make data public and online (with teeth!) is an important cultural shift we hope to see soon. Just last week the United Kingdom took an unprecedented step to publicize all government spending over 25,0000 pounds. As governments around the world tighten their belts we think making the books fully transparent will allow citizens to be better informed about where their tax dollars go and how to move forward. Here in the US there is the Data.gov site (which could be greatly improved) and we are encouraged that the culture is shifting as we see folks like the United Nations, the World Bank, Russia, Spain, Finland, Australia and many others hopping on board.

• Open Access/Content

  • Harvard Divinity School Faculty Votes for Open Access Policy

    The faculty of Harvard Divinity School (HDS) voted, in a meeting on November 15, to allow Harvard University to make electronic versions of their current scholarly articles available to the public. With the vote for open access, the Divinity School faculty joined five other Harvard schools in a commitment to disseminate faculty research and scholarship as widely as possible.

    “While open access has grown more quickly in the sciences, the movement is of vital importance in all fields of scholarly inquiry,” said Laura Wood, librarian of Andover-Harvard Theological Library at HDS. “The HDS faculty has taken an important step—both practically and philosophically—toward broader dissemination of their scholarship.”

Standards/Consortia

• ODF usergroup started

  An excellent example of governments working together on open standards like ODF: the Dutch government program ‘The Netherlands Open In Connection’ started a Dutch ODF usergroup while Fedict, the Belgian Federal Public Service ICT, publishes an ODF news letter in Dutch and French.

Search Insurgents Pair Up Against Spam … and Google

On the one side, there’s Blekko, which debuted Nov. 1 after spending three years in development, using nearly $25 million in venture capital from some of Silicon Valley’s top investors to build a full-scale search infrastructure. Less than a month after the public launch, Blekko is attracting a million queries a day to its slashtag search system. Its algorithm searches only pre-approved sites in seven areas, including health, personal finance, cars and travel.

Armed lawmaker stopped by police in Highland Park

A state representative said it was a misunderstanding when he parked his car in the Planned Parenthood lot in Highland Park and was later stopped by St. Paul police because of the revolver he was carrying near his waistband.

Thomas Hackbarth, 58, was stopped in his car on Nov. 16 after a security guard saw him with a gun in the parking lot about 5 p.m., an hour after the clinic closed. Police ordered him out of his car at gunpoint and handcuffed and questioned him before taking his gun and letting him go.

Catching Up

This post rolls a few things into one in a kinda catchup way, since I’ve been a little lax in blogging and releasing screencasts recently. First thing to mention is that I appeared on the TechBytes audiocast with Roy and Tim as a guest speaking about Linux Mint and enjoyed it so much that I am now a regular co-host on the show. So far I’ve appeared on 5 shows.

Intel Is Dead on the Desktop, Says ARM Co-Founder

Intel is doomed, Hermann Hauser has claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal . If you don’t know who Hauser is, he happens to be one of the co-founders of ARM–possibly Intel’s most dangerous foe in the semiconductor marketplace, when also-rans like AMD and VIA are removed from the equation.

Alan Turing’s papers fail to sell

SCIENTIFIC PAPERS written over 50 years ago by the brilliant British mathematician, cryptologist and computer scientist Alan Turing failed to meet their reserve at auction.

The papers were set to be at the heart of a bidding war when they were auctioned at Christie’s yesterday, however they failed to meet their apparently lofty reserve. This means that the campaign to keep the papers at Bletchley Park has a second chance at success.

Security

• Debian Security Advisory

• Security updates for Wednesday

• Debian Security Advisory

  So just the leaking of a full or partial BGP table in itself isn’t too suspicious, although networks the size of China Telecom should know better. But doing so with the AS paths removed may be construed as a reason for a moderate level of suspicion by those so inclined.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Tom the Dancing Bug: A Security Issue at the Office

• TSA Gestapo Empire

  It doesn’t take a bureaucrat long to create an empire. John Pistole, the FBI agent who took over the Transportation Security Administration on July 1 told USA Today 16 days later that protecting trains and subways from terrorist attacks will be as high a priority for him as air travel.

  It is difficult to imagine New Yorkers being porno-screened and sexually groped on crowed subway platforms or showing up an hour or two in advance for clearance for a 15 minute subway ride, but once bureaucrats get the bit in their teeth they take absurdity to its logical conclusion. Buses will be next, although it is even more difficult to imagine open air bus stops turned into security zones with screeners and gropers inspecting passengers before they board.

• Happy Opt-Out Thanksgiving

  There has been a call for people who are flying to be with family for Thanksgiving tomorrow to opt out of the BS Scanner process in protest. We’ll have to see what happens but there are a couple of comments I read on boingboing that bear repeating, so I wanted to include them here. And because boingboing (unlike, say, CBC) publishes under a Creative Commons License I can happily and legally reprint the words of others.

• Pornoscanner CEO flew with Obama to India

• Several Readers Ask The Same Question:

  And reader Benjamin Wang emails:

  A disgusting thought, but I’ve never seen a TSA screener change gloves. It would be interesting to send in a HAZMAT team to test several sets of gloves and see what’s on them. And publicize the results.

  Remember: The gloves are for their protection. Not yours.

• Before the Junk Jokes: Airport Security Cartoons

• Human Rights and the TSA

  At best, the “BS Scanners” are an invasion of privacy, at worst, a serious health risk.

  Clearly what is being done to citizens by the TSA contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Presenting… Sing Along With Airport Security!

• TSA outrage critical mass: Angry White Guy Syndrome

  Since 9/11, disenfranchised groups have been trying to get traction about our eroding civil rights while traveling, without much luck. That’s why I was delighted to see angry white guys finally reach the tipping point. They are even more potent a force in creating a media frenzy than Missing White Woman Syndrome. Now that white guys are being objectified, scrutinized, touched, and considered guilty until proven innocent, they are finally getting a taste of what an encounter with authority can be like for other groups on a daily basis, and not just when traveling. Welcome to our world, dudes!

• Common Sense and Security: Body Scanners, Accountability, and $2.4 Billion Worth of Security Theater

  The Transportation Security Administration is feeling public heat these days over its combination of whole-body-image scanners and heavy-handed pat-down searches, and deservedly so.

  There’s no question that reform is needed to curtail TSA’s excesses. We especially applaud the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s efforts to increase public awareness about the body scanners. But will the heat now being generated produce the kind of light we really need?

  Consider, for instance, the all-too-common response that we need to
  accept the indignity and invasiveness of the body scanners and pat-down searches in order to be safer. That response assumes that body scanners actually make us safer — a dubious assumption that we explore below.

• Hartsfield TSA worker allegedly abducts, assaults woman

  A TSA employee based at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport tried to kill himself after allegedly abducting a woman, sexually assaulting her then giving her a suicide note to deliver.

• Students stage day of protests over tuition fee rises

  Police have dispersed the final student demonstrators in central London after a day of protests against higher tuition fees and university cuts.

  Police said 17 people were injured, including two officers as protesters were contained on Whitehall.

  There have also been occupations in at least 12 universities, including Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

• Insanity! Teacher Bans Students From Bringing Pencils To School

  This is yet another example of zero tolerance policy taken to an absurd level. Who knew that pencils were “materials to build weapons?” Are the school officials going to remove every last stone, rock and pebble from the school grounds, because they are materials to start a war?

• Student demos in Twitter age: no leaders, only chatter

  After two chaotic student protests in the space of a fortnight, the question police will be asking is: who are the new rebel leaders? The unfortunate answer for them is that there are none.

  Unlike student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, actions developed organically, with social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, providing an ideal platform for grassroots organisation.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• ‘Squid worm’ emerges from the deep

  The previously unseen creature has ‘arms’ growing from its head and swims by rhythmically beating its bristles

Finance

• The Microfinance Fallacy

  The impending collapse of the microcredit sector in India, in the context of lender and farmer suicides, makes it imperative to review the critiques of the model.

• A Description of the Inequality that Goldman Sachs Helps Perpetuate

  I especially like the quote below from Tasini’s book (emphasis mine):

  If you want to wring your hands about the bigger government deficit, don’t go pointing the finger at the president or Congress. Instead, you can thank Goldman Sachs, Angelo Mozilo, Robert Rubin and the rest of the smart boys who built a financial system that was a mix of a floating casino, Ponzi scheme and Fool’s Gold paradise—all patched together by lies, deceit and a healthy dose of massive public indoctrination of the wonders of the “free market”.

• Goldman Sachs Investor Buffett Thanks “Uncle Sam” for Bailout

  The peoples’ oligarch Warren Buffett just wrote a thank you letter to “Uncle Sam” published in the New York Times. It is the height of cynicism. (Image)

  Buffett has a carefully crafted public image as a brilliant but people-friendly master of investments. We hear about his regular table at an Omaha diner where he conducts business (just plain Warren) and we see his occasional public stands for reasonable policies like the inheritance tax.

• NY SECURITIES CLASS ACTION: DODONA v. GOLDMAN SACHS

• If you work for Goldman Sachs…

  You can cause a Subprime-Mortgage-backed Securities Meltdown that demolished financial markets worldwide, and took down countries, like Iceland directly and Greece indirectly, but since you work at Goldman you get a bonus.

  * Goldman Sachs was AIG’s biggest customer. Meaning, Goldman Sachs double-dipped on the bailout money. Goldman Sachs playing in Subprime fueled AIG’s demise.

  If you work for Goldman Sachs…

  You may be CEO when the Subprime Mess is brewing in the pot, but you can always move over to the US Treasury to mop up when the pot boils over the counter and onto the floor. Goldman Sachs, as the #1 recipient of the Wall Street $700 billion bailout, saw fit to thank the American Taxpayers by giving out more bonus money than the year before.

• What Good Is Wall Street?

  A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment or praising Facebook for its commitment to privacy. During the past decade, Citi has become synonymous with financial misjudgment, reckless lending, and gargantuan losses: what might be termed asset denuding rather than asset building. In late 2008, the sprawling firm might well have collapsed but for a government bailout. Even today the U.S. taxpayer is Citigroup’s largest shareholder.

• Chinese inflation and European defaults

  Its official – Spain and Portugal will need to be bailed out soon. How do I know? In one of my favorite TV shows, Yes Minister, the all-knowing civil servant Sir Humphrey explains to cabinet minister Jim Hacker that you can never be certain that something will happen until the government denies it.

• Why the Euro Will Survive the Crisis

  Europe is gripped by a sense of alarm, now that Ireland has become the second euro-zone country to ask for a bailout. Pessimists claim that the crisis means the euro is finished. But that scenario is unrealistic — in reality, there is little to suggest that the common currency is about to disintegrate.

  The mood in Europe is currently one of alarm — yet again. First, the EU’s member states had to pull Greece back from the precipice of bankruptcy. And now they are having to save Ireland from financial ruin.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Al Franken Asks Justice Dept. To Investigate Comcast

  Minnesota senator Al Franken is doing what he can to throw a wrench into the merger between cable giant Comcast and NBC, the network he once called home during his years on Saturday Night Live. Yesterday, he asked the Justice Department to investigate whether or not Comcast violated anti-trust laws when it announced who would fill the top positions in the acquired company, even though the deal has yet to get DOJ approval.

• Palin: ‘Obviously, We’ve Got To Stand With Our North Korean Allies’

  In recent days, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has hinted in her clearest language yet that she is seriously considering a run for the presidency in 2012. Many observers have argued that Palin could never win because of her embarrassing lack of expertise, knowledge, or interest in foreign policy. Her appearance on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s radio show today, captured by Oliver Willis, suggests they may be right:

  CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...]

  PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

  CO-HOST: South Korean.

  PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Digital Weapons Help Dissidents Punch Holes in China’s Great Firewall

  It was Huang’s first experience with prison, but not with Communist Party repression. When he was an electrical engineering student at Shanghai’s Fudan University in the 1980s, Huang marched in the pro-democracy protests that roiled China. But the heady days in the streets came to a bloody end when the government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square. Huang wasn’t arrested, but some of his acquaintances disappeared. And he was shocked by the way the government’s ensuing propaganda barrage convinced many Chinese that the protesting students were themselves to blame for the bloodshed. Disillusioned, Huang left China, got his graduate degree at the University of Toronto, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1992. He spent most of the 1990s quietly living the immigrant-American dream, starting a family and building a career. Along the way, he also became one of the Bay Area’s hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners, leading study sessions and group exercises. So when Beijing launched its crackdown on the sect, it felt to Huang like 1989 all over again: The government was brutalizing a peaceful movement while painting its adherents as dangerous criminals. This time, he was determined to fight back. His aborted trip to China and frightening weeks in jail only left him more resolute. “My experience told me that the persecution was more severe than what we can imagine,” Huang says in accented English. “I felt I needed to do something.”

• First Data Protection Act fines issued by commissioner

  A county council that faxed details of a child sex abuse case to a member of the public is to be fined £100,000 for breaching the Data Protection Act.

  Hertfordshire County Council is one of two bodies fined by the Information Commissioner – both have apologised.

• MP calls for pornography ‘opt-in’ to protect children

  Internet providers should create an “opt-in” system to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said.

  Claire Perry wants age-checks to be attached to all such material to reduce exposure to it.

• First Monetary Penalties issued by ICO for serious Data Breaches

  Today saw the ICO announce the first use of its new powers granted in April 2010 – the new monetary penalty (essentially a fine to you and I) for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the Act). For many years data protection lawyers have waited for this moment to happen, as no longer is business going to be hit by adverse publicity it can potentially be hit very firmly on the bottom line. Whilst the fines are no where near are severe as that which can be handed down under the Competition Law regime (up to 10% of a businesses annual turn over), any loss of income in the current climate (as well as any competitive edge that your business did have pre breach) is a worry and concern.

• EFF’s Guide to Protecting Electronic Devices and Data at the U.S. Border

  Amid recent reports that security researchers have experienced difficulties at the United States border after traveling abroad, we realized that it’s been awhile since we last discussed how to safeguard electronic devices and digital information during border searches. So just in time for holiday travel and the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, here’s EFF’s guide for protecting your devices and sensitive data at the United States border.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The False Link Between Locks and Levies

  The Bill C-32 legislative committee meets for the first time tomorrow with hearings likely to begin later this week. The digital lock provisions will undoubtedly be a major focus of discussion with all three opposition parties calling for changes to the current approach. Industry lobby groups will continue their effort to keep the C-32 lock provisions, one of the world’s most restrictive implementations of anti-circumvention legislation, unchanged.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Mallick: Corporate crimes and digital misdemeanors

    When copyright Bill C-32 passes, I will automatically become a criminal.

    I suspect the bill will pass in its current form because it was written in a state of hysteria about people downloading things without paying for them, which is like total stealing, and American corporations are leaning on foreign governments to put a stop to it. If there was ever a Canadian prime minister more attentive to the corporate needs of the United (failing) States, it’s Stephen Harper.

  • Dutch Artist Unions Call Government to Legalize File-Sharing

    A strong coalition of two Dutch artists unions and the local consumer watchdog have submitted a proposal to permanently legalize file-sharing of music and movies. In exchange, the parties call for a levy on MP3-players and other devices that can play and record movies and music. In the future, this has to be changed to a general levy on Internet subscriptions.

  • Hurt Locker Makers Sue Lawyer Who Helped ‘BitTorrent’ Defendants

    Graham Syfert, the lawyer who offered self-help to alleged BitTorrent downloaders of films such as Far Cry and The Hurt Locker, has been sued by the makers of the latter movie. On behalf of Voltage Pictures, the US Copyright Group (USCG) is seeking sanctions against Syfert and demand $5000 for the ‘work’ the self-help forms have caused them. in reponse, Syfert has requested sanctions against the plaintiffs because their filing is “completely insane.”

  • Big Music attacks PC Mag, ignores RIAA, MPAA

    How’s this for supreme irony?

    The RIAA and MPAA recently published chapter-and-verse outlines of exactly where to find alleged ‘piracy’ purveyors not only online, but also off.

    p2pnet ran both items in full, singly and together.

    Shortly after the Big 4 record labels, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music used the US court system to shut down Limewire, PC Magazine posted an article suggesting six alternative P2P services and torrent trackers, saying “all of these services should be used for legal downloads, of course”.

    According to Billboard, totally ignoring the detailed RIAA and MPAA contributions, a coterie of Big Music acolytes claimed, “The harm done to the creative community when people are encouraged to steal our music is immeasurable. Disclaimer or no, when you offer a list of alternative P2P sites to LimeWire – and include more of the serial offenders — PC Magazine is slyly encouraging people to steal more music … ”

  • Pirate Parties Use Influence To Halt Anonymous’ Operation Payback

    In a letter to those coordinating Operation Payback, the series of DDoS attacks carried out against pro-copyright outfits since September, the UK and US Pirate Party are calling for an end to hostilities. They reason that the continuation of the operation plays into the hands of organizations that wish to “pervert” copyright law for personal gain and hampers the progress of those seeking copyright reform through legitimate means.

  • Winnipeg North first Canadian battleground for Pirate Party

    A 25-year-old Winnipeg businessman is the first Pirate Party of Canada candidate to run for federal election.

    Jeff Coleman, a former ESL teacher who owns a design and 3-D company, is running in the upcoming federal by-election on November 29 in Winnipeg North.

    His plan: to take to the streets of his home riding to engage voters in issues that surround the digital age.

  • ACTA

    • EU Parliament approves once-secret ACTA copyright treaty

      After 11 rounds of international negotiations, the final text of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has overcome its biggest hurdle yet when it was welcomed as a step in the right direction by the European Parliament, which voted 331-294, with 11 members abstaining, to approve the measure.

      Although the Parliament has called for some reassurances from the European Commission, the vote means that in principle the final legal text can now be agreed to by the Commission at a meeting in Sydney from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Under the Lisbon Treaty, Members of the European Parliament were required to give their consent to the measure and there were fears right up until the vote that they might halt the deal altogether.

    • ACTA – injunction powers going beyond those provided for in the EU acquis

      Given that, by laying down the thresholds for injunctions, the EU acquis has struck a delicate balance between enforcement and fundamental rights safeguards, how will the Commission ensure that these safeguards under the current EU acquis are maintained?

    • European Parliament fails citizens over ACTA

      At 331 to 294 it was close, but the EPP and ECR (UK Conservatives) between them have backed the rights-holder industries and failed citizens.

      Within the past hour, in a very tense vote, the European Parliament has adopted a weak and industry-favourable resolution, which supports the cover-ups that we have seen over ACTA and fails to address the issue within it. This has happened despite the efforts and hard work of many MEPs who oppose ACTA to obtain a stronger resolution.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • Government meddling is a danger to the Internet

      As reported by V3, a survey commissioned by the Internet Society found that 39 per cent of web users polled reckoned that meddling governments pose the greatest danger to the Internet.

      While no specifics were listed, rushed through legislation like Mandelson’s Digital Economy Act and attempts to turn ISPs into Internet police have created a culture of fear. That can’t help in a world where governments are acting as pawns of the big media companies and genuinely fear the open nature of the Internet.

    • Matthew Norman: Bring back Westminster’s Barbra Streisand

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

A Point That Deserves Illuminating: Linux Is Not “I-Cant-Believe-Its-Not-Windows!”

The difference between consumer needs and producer needs appear to be clearly understood everywhere else. You don’t sell a forklift to a soccer mom, and you don’t force a warehouse worker to try to drag pallets of boxes around in an SUV. I could go on with more examples, right? Everybody grasps the concept that the needs of a consumer and a producer are different?

Desktop

• Handing out Ubuntu CDs

  Better late than never, this Saturday Ubuntu Denmark finally got around to hand out Ubuntu 10.10 CDs in a mall in Aarhus.

  It’s been more than a year since we did it the last time, and the LoCo team had undergone some fundamentally changes in the meantime, and has been quite inactive. So the event was of great importance – not only to the spread of Ubuntu, but to the local community in general as well.

  The day was quite a success. We handed out about 120-130 CD’s which we’ve received from Canonical in the 6 hours we were there, and, just as importantly, showed the Ubuntu name and brand to thousands of people. I also think we “recruited” a lot of people to attend our bi-monthly Ubuntu meetups, where people can get technical help, listen to presentations and contributing to Ubuntu.

Server

• Avatar: behind the scenes at Weta Digital

  In its work Weta uses several different software programs to create its special effects. The company uses PCs running Linux and most animation is done using Maya. To complement this, the company created its own software including Mari, which is used to “skin” characters and monsters using scans of rubber molds taken from actors. Mari lets animators use skin like a brush to coat each of their figures.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Free as in Freedom: Episode 0×03: i Don’t Store

  Karen and Bradley discuss the debates regarding Apple’s online store restrictions that make it impossible to distribute GPL’d software via Apple’s store. Then, they discuss question the usefulness of the term “Open Core”

Ballnux

• 10 reasons I’m dumping my iPad for a Galaxy Tab

  Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is a 7-inch tablet that looks a lot like an overgrown Galaxy S phone, without the phone functionality. It debuted in the U.S. this month and will be available from all four major U.S. wireless carriers. (Note: Versions of the device sold outside the U.S. do have phone functionality; this is a limitation imposed by the U.S. carriers.) Reviews ranged from glowing (”It’s a Tablet. It’s Gorgeous. It’s Costly“) to scathing (”A Pocketable Train Wreck“).

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • VIA Graphics Still Lack Any Real Linux Progress

    While other hardware vendors are constantly improving their open-source support, this isn’t the case for all vendors. VIA’s open-source Linux support is still in very bad shape — two and a half years after they had envisioned themselves becoming open-source friendly.

  • Vandalizing Open-Source Drivers?

    While the RadeonHD driver is no longer actively developed, obviously this can come across as offensive to those who vigorously worked on this open-source Linux driver. More importantly though it puts into question the security of the FreeDesktop.org infrastructure. It took three weeks to spot as the Git notification email was not sent to the appropriate mailing list. Luc has already written to the mailing list.

  • Intel Windows vs. Linux GPU Performance Q4’2010

    The most demanding OpenGL test in this article is Nexuiz and here the Mesa 7.10-devel + Linux 2.6.37 kernel DRM struggled to compete with the proper Intel Windows 7 driver. On average, the Windows 7 driver was 56% faster than the open-source Mesa driver was and the gap widened at the higher resolutions.

    The latest Intel/Mesa driver code on Linux has resulted in some performance improvements and has made it more competitive with their Windows graphics driver, but still we are finding the Intel Linux performance to be at a loss in the more demanding test environments. The Intel Windows stack is also compatible with more games and OpenGL applications than the Mesa-based Linux solution. It will be interesting to see how the Intel Sandy Bridge performance compares between Microsoft Windows and Linux once released early next year.

  • If You Forgot, S3 Graphics Does Linux Drivers Too

    Last night when checking to see if VIA has made any open-source / Linux progress that went unnoticed (they haven’t), that also led me to see what S3 Graphics is up to these days. S3 Graphics doesn’t back any open-source driver strategy and they don’t have many GPUs on the market, but their binary Linux driver claims to support OpenGL 3, VDPAU, and even kernel mode-setting since last year.

  • Understanding the Necessity of Wayland

    Questioning the necessity for Wayland and the wiseness of the choice has become a phenomena, especially after Mark Shuttleworth annouced Ubuntu’s plans to eventually switch to Wayland. Following I will provide a concise reasoning why we want Wayland. At the end there are some more links for further reading.

  • Nvidia upgrades toolkit for GPU programming

Applications

• What Free Apps Are You Most Thankful For?

  At Lifehacker we love great software, but we especially love great free software. Many developers make our lives easier every day by providing their apps for free, so let’s give thanks to the free apps we’re most thankful for.

• Darktable ‘Lightroom for Linux’ 0.7 released with new plugins, features

  A new release of virtual light-table and darkroom application Darktable is available for download.

• Nautilus Dropbox Share Script, Now Available In An Ubuntu PPA

  ing this script is better then copying some files in your Public Dropbox folder:

  * because the script uses symbolic links, the files aren’t actually copied to your Dropbox public folder, so they won’t take the double amount of space
  * all the links are automatically copied to the clipboard
  * you can even share folders, even though Dropbox doesn’t allow this by default (the shared folder will have an “index.html” file and thus opening its link in a web browser, it can be easily accessed via a web browser)

• Startup Assistant

  I carefully designed this dialog so that it made the workflow more efficient, not less (unlike some “stupid” wizards I’ve seen over the years). It should really have been named an “Assistant” or “Welcome” screen, because it’s not a linear druid/wizard. I would personally not have included a “Skip” button (see the bug report for the reasoning), but hey, we’re not that short on space (and this button will probably prevent me from being assaulted by angry geeks).

• Proprietary

  • Opera 11 Beta Released With Tab Stacking

  • Opera 11 Beta Introduces Tab Stacking, Extensions

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Tutorial: Create cool rifts with translucent lights!

  • download all pdf from a url using bash

  • ATI drivers made easy in Debian

  • Latest World of Warcraft patch ‘works fine’ in Ubuntu 10.10

  • Google Tasks Tray

  • Testing RAM on a server without rebooting to run memtest86+

  • Configure Apache HTTP server with mod-pagespeed for high performance

  • Fix Alt+Print Screen, current window screenshot not working in Ubuntu 10.10

  • CentOS: Disable SELinux

  • CentOS: Disable SELinux

  • Mania Drive – Track Mania Clone

  • Mania Drive – Track Mania Clone

  • Use Nautilus’ Emblems feature to keep your home folder organised

• Wine

  • CrossOver Linux Review

    When I first started using Linux, I had heard about the CodeWeavers CrossOver software package that worked to run Windows applications in a Linux environment. However, I could not justify purchasing it (retail pricing starting at $40) because in my eyes, it did not offer any value. After all, it was based on the WINE project, and I saw it pointless to purchase something that was simply a re-branded version of something that was freely available. More recently, though, a few people have been telling me about the wonders of CrossOver and how it was so much more than the branded WINE package that I thought it was. For this reason, I decided to take the plunge and purchase CrossOver Linux Standard in order to run a few Windows applications in Linux.

• Games

  • Chex Quest – child-friendly non-violent first-person shooter

  • Mania Drive – Track Mania Clone

Desktop Environments

• Enlightenment… Now Running On Refrigerators

  The Enlightenment Libraries haven’t even hit version 1.0 yet (though they’re getting close and in beta right now), but these libraries and other parts of Enlightenment are already in production use. Besides Samsung getting in bed with Enlightenment for their smart-phone Linux OS, this open-source software is now appearing in… refrigerators.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Question: Why Use a Blogging Client?

    Yeouch. Hell, I’ve done everything I could to get Firefox to save space, and yet… ouch ouch ouch. Blogilo wins this one, even before you remove the toolbox.

    The reasons are obvious. WordPress.com suffers all the weaknesses of trying to make an application out of a document-layouting language, while Blogilo benefits from the full power of modern-day desktop application toolkits: this is evidenced by the fact that, despite not having enough room for the Visual Editor tab’s toolbar, the toolkit knows how to properly manage that situation (hide some buttons at the end). Moreover, because you only ever open Blogilo to actually post something to your blog, that’s all it has to display: web interfaces also need tools and navigation for visiting your blog, managing comments, visiting other people’s blogs, managing your account, managing media etcetera, and that stuff scoffs space. The website looks, feels and works like… you guessed it – a website. On the other side of the fence, the desktop client looks, feels and works more like a document creator, which is good – since the focus is on the document and not the rest of the interface.

  • Calendar Systems in 4.6

    So what’s new in 4.6 for Calendar Systems? Well, not much visible really. I had hoped to have the astronomical calendars (Chinese, Islamic, etc) done for 4.6, but I’m still in requirements gathering for that so it’s bumped to 4.7. Instead I’ve done some stuff to make date localization easy. If you’re looking for bling, you may as well skip to the next post (I’m sure someone has some nice Lenovo eye-candy to show off , but if you’re an app coder tired of how awkward date localization can be then stick around.

  • multihead saga continues

    I received no testing feedback from my last blog entry about multihead improvements for Plasma Desktop, which underscores the challenges we face with multihead support very nicely.

    In any case, today I went through plasma-desktop and moved all the relevant code over to the new solution and committed all the changes to trunk. In theory this should improve plasma-desktop on multihead even further, with things like moving panels around with the mouse working as expected and what not.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gtk3 vs HTML5

    The code is not really clean enough for public consumption yet, and a bunch of features are missing. However, its now at the stage where it can be demoed and evaluated.

  • Gnome Shell Automatic Workspaces Mockup (Tiled View Follow-Up)

    A while back we’ve told you about an interesting Unity mockup for managing multiple workspaces that automatically creates the workspaces and always keeps an empty workspace so you don’t have to create the workspaces yourself (and you always have the number of workspaces that you actually need).

    Unfortunately, Mark Shuttleworth didn’t like the idea (at least the way it was described back then) so it seems like we won’t have this in Unity. But on the other hand, it looks like we’ll have it in Gnome Shell (not exactly the same, but the same concept is being used). Read on!

  • Lucidity theme for Linux adds pastel elegance to the desktop

    Lucidity theme. Chances are you’ve seen it in a screenshot at some point in your life.

    The official blurb states that Lucidity is ‘set of themes which are smooth and subtle, while also being fairly high in contrast, and in which interactive elements are noticeable and responsive in order to deliver a lucid experience.’

Distributions

• Fav Distro (Nov ’10)

• Reviews

  • Stage 2 of The Linux Experience: Bodhi

    A while ago I noted that I have been exploring Lilliput, trying out a few of the lightweight distros that have been proliferating lately. A brand new one named Bodhi is currently being developed, and Susan Linton gave an alpha version of it a brief review on her OStatic blog under the title Just Another Ubuntu-based Distro or Something More. I gave Bodhi a try (just from the LiveCD so far), and I must say I definitely see it as Something More, a significantly new approach to providing a kit for making The Distro You Always Wanted.

    [...]

    My own impression is that Bodhi, by the time it reaches final release, could easily turn out to be a nearly ideal distro for someone who has come recently to Linux with no prior IT experience, but who has begun to show an interest in doing something more than simply using a ready-made OS.

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core Linux 3.3 released

    Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the release of version 3.3 of Tiny Core Linux. Based on the 2.6.33.3 Linux kernel, Tiny Core Linux 3.3 features updates to the Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK), such as a new integrated file manager and a minimal editor under System tools.

  • SimplyMepis Celebrates 8th Anniversary with Release

    Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, has announced the release of SimplyMepis 11.0 Alpha 3 just in time to mark the eighth anniversary of MEPIS on November 21. SimplyMepis usually takes quite a while to cook and no final release date has been given.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat: Cowen Says Hold; A Buyout’s Unlikely

    A day after the second-biggest Linux vendor, Novell (NOVL), was offered $2.2 billion to merge, Cowen & Co.’s Gregg Moskowitz initiated coverage of the biggest, Red Hat (RHT), with a Neutral rating, writing that while Red Hat’s business is rebounding, its stock is rich and some of its opportunities are not as verdant as they once were.

    Red Hat has been very successful at turning users of the free Linux operating system into paying customers who receive support and upgrades on a subscription basis, creating a nice annuity revenue stream.

  • Fedora

    • I’m getting ever so close to pulling the trigger on a Fedora 13-to-14 upgrade

      I’m planning to make the move from Fedora 13 to 14. I’ve been running the Xfce spin for months now and have mostly enjoyed it. I still have Fedora 15′s release day plus one month of patches for Fedora 13 coming my way, but given that F14 isn’t a “landmark” release, I’m feeling more comfortable than usual in contemplating the upgrade.

    • I’m running preupgrade right now to move from Fedora 13 to 14

      I decided to start early today and attempt the Fedora 13-to-14 upgrade on my main “production” laptop.

    • Fedora 14 review

      Gareth Halfacree takes a look at the final release of Fedora 14, and sees if the Red Hat-based distro has what it takes to conquer the desktop market…

      [...]

      There’s a lot to recommend Fedora 14, from its well thought out security features to the wide variety of development tools available. An excellent installer caters to both end-users and power-users, but there are some issues with outdated software and SELinux that prevent us recommending it as a day-to-day OS for less technical users.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Becoming A Rolling Release Distro?!?

      According to Ostatic, Mark Shuttleworth, said that Ubuntu will likely be moving from its current six-month release schedule to daily updates which would make Ubuntu a rolling-release Linux distribution.

    • Ubuntu to Become a Rolling Release

      Mark Shuttleworth recently told reporters that Ubuntu will likely be moving from its current six-month release schedule to daily updates. A step of this nature would help Ubuntu keep up with the rapidly changing and increasing complex software and hardware landscape. This is especially true as Ubuntu finds itself on more mobile and smartphone devices.

    • ‘Ubuntu Invaders’ wallpaper is retro win

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Quick Look: Pinguy OS 10.10

        Pinguy OS 10.10 falls somewhere between Linux Mint 10 and Ultimate Edition 2.8 in terms of features and software. While it’s not as well known as some of these other distros, it’s definitely worth a look if you crave more than generic Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Multiple Twitter reports of people saying Android 2.3 Gingerbread now available on the Google Nexus One

      Do a search for “Gingerbread” on Twitter and prepare to be jealous at the mass of people who are reporting that Google just pushed an update to their Nexus One with the latest version of the Android operating system. We’ve written about Gingerbread before, many times, but here’s pretty much all you need to know about why you should be excited:

      NFC (Near Field Communication) support is coming, meaning that you’ll soon be able to tap on payment terminals when picking up your daily cup of coffee and croissant from the café. You’ll also be able to tap objects and get more information about them, from anything to pulling up a line of text, to a website, to initiating playback of a video. The best feature, at least for all the social butterflies out there, will be tap to exchange contact information. No more business cards!

    • Android dethrones Symbian as the most popular smartphone OS in Asia

      Last month we told you that Android became the No. 1 smartphone platform in the US, and now it’s time to take a look at how things are going in Asia.

      Well, Google’s OS has done the same thing: it’s now the most popular smartpohne OS in Asia, too – at least according to market research company GfK.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Going for gold

    The One Laptop Per Child project begun in 2008 has turned out as badly as most said it would, including the many millions of baht spent on buying the toy-like portable computers involved; a study from Chiang Mai University’s engineering faculty confirmed that students issued the cute little machines failed to improve their school performances as OLPC advocates insisted would happen; on the other hand, their marks didn’t get worse, either, perhaps because most of the students had access to real computers at home; schools in the pilot project for free computers _ the OLPC machines are just like real computers only crippled _ live in Lampang, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Rayong and Nakhon Si Thammarat; lecturer Anand Sripitakkiat, who introduced the study, said students needed a new type of classroom atmosphere more than a small, free notebook; he added that students in a regular school with old-fashioned teaching systems would likely not benefit no matter what computer access he had.

• Tablets

  • Update: Acer previews Android-, Windows-based tablets

    …three Android-based devices and one that runs Windows.

  • Trying out debian on 7inch Tablet.

Sky.com Open Source Software

I turned on my TV this morning to check the news before going to work to be greeted by a message informing me that my sky satellite box had been updated overnight and was now using some opensource software with a reference to this website for further information and instructions on how to obtain the software either by download or cd-rom.

Open Source has won precisely because we no longer notice it

Open source has won. Oh, how time flies. When I started writing in Database in May 2003, my first column was about how the ICT Ministry had got the budget PC programme all wrong. ICT Minister Surapong had announced his great success at negotiating the inclusion of Windows XP and Office XP at just 1,500 baht, a 90 percent discount. He saw it as success. I saw it as capitulation.

Back then, Thailand had a chance to lead the world in breaking the Microsoft addiction. Instead, we capitulated. Would it be considered a success to negotiate a 90 percent discount on cocaine?

In those days, Thailand was on the map in the open source movement. Mark Shuttleworth, head honcho of Ubuntu Linux and the world’s second space tourist, came here a number of times to talk about how Ubuntu on the desktop was ready and talk with the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa) on a number of things that did not end well.

Back then, we had Microsoft’s Ballmer liking Linux to Communism. We had the Evil Empire sowing doubts about anyone allowing any GPL code in an organisation, telling its clients that it would spread like a tumour and that every piece of intellectual property it came in touch with would suddenly be property of the great unwashed masses.

No matter. Fast forward seven years and Linux has won. Open source is everywhere. The business model is well understood and no longer something for ultra-leftwing activists.

Three things to not forget to make LibreOffice (and ODF) succeed

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an international standard for office documents like texts, presentations and spreadsheets. ODF is already widely adopted worldwide. Using ODF for all your office documents is by far the easiest, safest and most realistic way today to really free yourself from the cocain-like nature of Microsoft Office file formats. The fact that using secret file formats instead of ODF is what actually maintains the Microsoft monopoly in desktop computing is proved even by a Microsoft job offer.

New: OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Release Candidate 6 (build OOO330m16) available

OverView Zoomy presentations with OpenGL

Sky preaches benefits of open source

Sky boxes across the country have surprised their owners with a message about the benefits of open source software – apparently in a bid to head off a legal tussle from free software fans.

Sky+ HD boxes, used to receive the subscription-based satellite TV service, have tonight been flashing up a message when they are first switched on pointing their users at a page on Sky’s website about the values and benefits of open source software.

Open source feats to be proud of

When Rob O’Callahan moved home to New Zealand five years ago, there was a feeling of pride in this country’s small open source community at his achievements.

Like many of our top computer science students, O’Callahan had gone overseas to further his education.

Graphics

• 10 Incredible Wallpapers Made Using GIMP

  GIMP needs no introduction. GIMP is the Open Source answer for Adobe Photoshop, well, almost. We had already featured brilliant wallpapers made using Inkscape and now things are taking a ‘GIMP’ turn. Here is a nice and simple collection of wallpapers made using GIMP.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Panorama: Tab Candy Evolved

    I am happy to announce that Tab Candy is coming to Firefox 4. Starting today, Tab Candy will be called Firefox Panorama and be available as a feature in Firefox betas. Head to the Firefox 4 feature list, or watch the video below, to learn how to organize your tabs into groups and reclaim your browsing experience from clutter and information overload.

SaaS

• ownCloud 1.1 released

  I´m really happy with this release. Not only because we have a lot of new features and bugfixes but also because the ownCloud development team is growing and more and more people are contributing to ownCloud.
  I gave several presentation about ownCloud in the last few month and I´m trilled by the positive reactions I get. People really seams to like to idea behind ownCloud.

Oracle

• Oracle Doesn’t Get Open Source

  Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Hudson Open Source project woke up Monday morning and discovered he was no longer able to access the Source Code Repository to make commits. Oracle had decided to shut it down, as they are shutting down many projects in java.net to try to move it to their own infrastructure. Not only that, but the mailing lists were shut down as well. They said not to worry, they will have it up in a week.

CMS

• Diaspora private alpha just released

  For those who have been patiently waiting, the first round of Diaspora alpha invites has been distributed. They’re planning to first bring in those who contributed via Kickstarter way back when this all began. Next those on their mailing list will start receiving their invites.

  Their stated goal with this rollout method is to “quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible.” That sounds a lot like the open source “release early, release often” methodology. But it also sounds a lot like the Google method of slowly bringing in new users through invites. And while that wasn’t so bad for GMail, it was a miserable failure for a Google project far more analogous to Diaspora–Wave. And we all know how well that’s gone.

• Private Alpha Invites Going Out Today

• Is it Too Late For an Open Source Challenge to Facebook?

  “Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the web,” Berners-Lee said in a Scientific American journal article. As Network World reports, Berners-Lee even singled out Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as examples of what he means.

  We have made the point many times that the problem with the large, popular social networks is that they are walled gardens. At the last OSCON conference, today’s popular social networking services were compared to the closed systems of the 1990s. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon to, say, need to be on MCI Mail or CompuServe to be able to send another person on one of those services a message. They were closed e-mail systems. People didn’t tolerate that, and the current argument is that they won’t tolerate walled gardens among social networking services either.

• Open-source Social Network Diaspora Goes Live

  Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business today, at least for a handful of invited participants.

BSD

• Released: FreeNAS 8 (Beta)

  Warner Losh, of iXsystems, announced last week the availability of FreeNAS 8. Since there were some issues with the initial beta, ensure you’re downloading the latest version (r5605).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fellowship Interview with Brian Gough

  Brian Gough is one of the core developers of the GNU Scientific Library, which he has been contributing to for many years. He runs Network Theory Ltd., which publishes Freely licensed printed manuals and tutorials for Free Software projects, such as GCC, Perl, Python and PostgreSQL. He lives in Guildford in the United Kingdom, and regularly attends Free Software conferences and meetings.

Government

• Open Data Good, Open Source Bad?

  Last Friday, I went along to what I thought would be a pretty routine press conference about open data – just the latest in a continuing drip-feed of announcements in this area from the UK government. I was soon disabused.

  One hint was the fact that I ended up sitting one chair away from Sir Tim Berners-Lee – and that the intervening chair was occupied by Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General; another clue was provided by the short but personalised video that David Cameron knocked up for the occasion.

• US government moves towards cloud computing

• Massachusetts Posts Pharma Payments to Health Providers

  This week, Massachusetts became the first state to post an online database of payments from drug and medical device companies to the state’s health care providers. The searchable database covers reports from more than 280 companies and subsidiaries.

  The new database, detailed on Monday by the Boston Globe — one of our Dollars for Docs partners — is a result of a 2008 state law regulating industry conduct. The database lists nearly $36 million spent from July through December of 2009 for speaking, consulting, food, educational programs, marketing studies and charitable donations.

• Open Data: If British Conservatives get it right, the French…

  This is a pretty stunning press release from Access Info Europe concerning the French government’s response to the open data movement. Statist government’s were always going to struggle with the internet and open data… but this shows just how bad things can get.

Openness/Sharing

• Stories of people & projects using Creative Commons in education, government, and data

  The significance of Creative Commons and its licenses is often overlooked, embedded as it is into the fabric of sharing culture on the web. The current superhero campaign attempts to bring CC’s role to the forefront, by highlighting people and organizations that have made extraordinary contributions to this culture. But there are many more excellent stories of people and projects employing our CC licenses for educational, humanitarian, scientific, artistic, and just plain interesting uses. Some of these are currently reflected in our Case Studies on the wiki, but there’s a lot of work left to be done in making these more accessible and useful to the rest of the world.

• Meet our board members: Molly Van Houweling

  When Molly Van Houweling ran Creative Commons back in 2001, she was the only staff member, working out of a small office on the third floor of the Stanford law school building. Her work there was mundane but critical: taking off from the pivotal meeting among the founders at the Harvard Berkman Center earlier that year, the once-advisee of Larry Lessig was doing paperwork and drafting the legal language that would become the foundation of Creative Commons.

• Apply for the 2011 Google Policy Fellowship with Creative Commons

• Open Data

  • The World Bank Launches a New, Open Access, Digital Collection

    A new online, open access, collection of all World Development Reports since 1978 was launched today by the World Bank. The Complete World Development Report Online, which allows users to easily access and search across these World Bank annual flagship publications, is free and open to the public and may be accessed at http://wdronline.worldbank.org

Quit Bothering Superman, Judge Tells LAPD

Indian Media Where Art Thou on Media Scandal

A shadow has been cast over the Indian media — the bastion of the nation’s democracy. A telecom and political scandal rocking the country has now sucked in top journalists but the media coverage of this new twist is timid — a simple Google search shows that.

Indian journalists accused of secretly helping politicians, businesses

India’s fiercely competitive and hungry free press has become the rising nation’s watchdog, unearthing a long list of banking scandals, real-estate scams and most recently, extensive government corruption during the international Commonwealth Games.

But in recent days, Indian journalists have been accused of wrongdoing, including having inappropriate conversations with a corporate lobbyist and acting more like power brokers in recordings released as part of an investigation into an audacious multibillion swindle – considered the biggest scandal to hit the new India.

What’s An Internet Monopolist? A Reply to Professor Wu

Wu’s claim is that the modern “information monopolies” will be socially harmful. Consider the first quote above. These firms do not earn and keep their share by satisfying consumer demand from active consumers with preferences; it is “surrendered” by forces beyond the consumers’ control. And with the second, why would we be concerned about time limits if these concentrated markets (again, let’s assume arguendo the market definitions Wu has in mind for now) were generating competitive results?

Coulson’s imminent departure is just the beginning

Andy Coulson will resign as Downing Street communications director within the next few weeks. When the moment comes, his powerful but embarrassed friends will breathe a sigh of relief. They want it to be the end of the phone hacking scandal. It is just the beginning.

For, as any investigative journalist will tell you, it’s always the cover up that sinks you. Senior executives have been clinging onto the line that “Clive Goodman was a rogue reporter” like it was a life belt on the Titanic. The unanswered questions are pouring in.

There is a police investigation and at least three court cases. There are two Parliamentary enquiries on top of a damning report by the media select committee. There are whistleblowers. Insiders are breaking ranks, beginning to talk. Shareholders are asking questions. Coulson may be on his way, but the story won’t go away, despite hardly being reported in some of the best-selling newspapers.

Google donates $100,000 to Bletchley Park to save Turing Papers in Auction Google gives $100,000 to Bletchley Park

A report on Twitter is saying that Google has donated $100,000 to Bletchley Park to help them in their campaign to buy mathematician Alan Turing’s papers which are to be auctioned at Christies today.

Sarkozy calls journalists paedophiles

Nicolas Sarkozy is on a pre-election charm offensive to show how calm and polite he is and draw a line under past outbursts, such as when he told a visitor to the Paris agricultural show: “Sod off, prick.”

But the jumpy French president is still finding it hard to keep a lid on his verbal assaults. During an off-the-record briefing at the Nato summit, Sarkozy lost his cool when asked about the “Karachigate” corruption scandal, which threatens to engulf him personally, calling the journalists questioning him “paedophiles”.

Time Flies

Health/Nutrition

• The Domino’s Effect

  Cheap, mass-produced pies from Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Little Caesars, and Domino’s have infiltrated our planet, making these companies very rich and billions of people too poor to afford a single slice. Is your appetite part of the problem?

• Conversation With Frederick Kaufman

  Fred Kaufman has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, and the New York Times Magazine among others. Periodically Fred sits down with Adventures to discuss his latest gastro work.

Security

• Hacking smartphones with ease

• EFF Tool Offers New Protection Against ‘Firesheep’

• EFF Tool Offers New Protection Against ‘Firesheep’

• Android vulnerability permits data theft

Defence/Police/Aggression

• A Waste of Money and Time

  A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn’t have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces — the level of magical thinking here is amazing — and they’re going to do something else.

  [...]

  Of course not. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one. What works is investigation and intelligence: security that works regardless of the terrorist tactic or target. Yes, the target matters too; all this airport security is only effective if the terrorists target airports. If they decide to bomb crowded shopping malls instead, we’ve wasted our money.

  [...]

  Neither the full-body scanners or the enhanced pat-downs are making anyone safer. They’re more a result of politicians and government appointees capitulating to a public that demands that “something must be done,” even when nothing should be done; and a government bureaucracy that is more concerned about the security of their careers if they fail to secure against the last attack than what happens if they fail anticipate the next one.

• TSA’s Nude Scanners, Former Homeland Security Head Chertoff, and How Our Government Works

  How our government works:
  1) Get a position in the government.
  2) Hype up some scare and advocate a solution to it
  3) Sell/convince the government on your proposed solution, leave your government position, and partner up with the company that provides that same solution.
  4) Sit back and enjoy your new money.

  Michael Chertoff, while he was the Head of Homeland Security under Bush, advocated and pushed for installation and implementation of these new full-body scanners at our airports. Once he was out of “public service”, Chertoff’s consulting company (Read: Lobbying Company) landed as a client (Surprise!), Rapsican, the company that makes the scanners

• Of The #TSA and the 4th Amendment

  It seems amazing to me that people are not considering the big picture. We’ve got UAVs and satellites using infrared to track who sleeps in our homes at night. We’ve got TSA taking nude photos and giving hand jobs before we get onto airplanes. We’ve got insane “zero-tolerance” policies in our schools. Now think about what happens when some Congressmember convinces his/her peers that these resources should be deployed against people who wear thong underwear or who believe in a creator or who voted for Ronald Reagan.

• Don’t TSA me, bro: Boing Boing open thread, and new rules for those who refuse patdown

• Canadian airport, port workers soon may have to take it all off

  Canada’s border guards could soon get new powers to strip search employees in airport and ports across Canada in a bid to crack down on the smuggling of illegal drugs, such as marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine.

  CBSA officers also would be allowed to frisk employees and to use various types of scanners and detectors to examine goods in their possession.

  The proposed regulations, which do not have to be passed by Parliament, are in a CBSA posting in the Canada Gazette. Interested parties have 30 days to give feedback.

• Adam Savage: TSA saw my junk, missed 12″ razor blades

  The TSA isn’t the most respected of governmental agencies right now, but at least it comes by the poor reputation honestly. The lack of standards, inconsistent application of searches and policies, and occasional rude agent all combine to make flying an unpleasant experience. It’s often derided as “security theater,” which describes the experience of Mythbuster Adam Savage before a recent flight.

  Savage was put through the full-body scanner, and while he joked that it made his penis feel small, no one seemed to notice the items he was carrying on his person. The video tells the rest of the story.

• The Twitter Joke Trial carries on

  Paul Chambers has announced that he is seeking to go to the High Court to challenge his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.

  He has instructed me to put the challenge together and I have, in turn, instructed Ben Emmerson QC, the leading human rights and criminal law barrister. The barristers who fought the Crown Court appeal — Stephen Ferguson and Sarah Przybylska — continue to be involved. There has been legal help from a number of other firms and individuals. This is a case which has attracted a great deal of support and offers of practical assistance.

  Why? After all, it was just a £350 fine (although now with prosecution costs, Paul is being asked to pay £2,600). And there has been no custodial sentence.

  But the case continues to cause concern about and widespread ridicule of the English criminal justice system. Writers as accomplished as Graham Linehan, Charlie Brooker, and Nick Cohen have brilliantly exposed the misconceived and illiberal nature of this prosecution and of the upheld conviction. And, although neither Paul nor I have encouraged the “#IAmSpartacus” movement (I personally prefer the use of the Betjeman line about dropping bombs on Slough), it is perhaps significant that Paul’s original tweet or variations of it seems now to have been tweeted over 18,000 times. However, it appears that only Paul will incur criminal liability for the words in question.

• A Celebration of Street Photography, as Anti-Terror Backlash Fades

  It may seem absurd, but since 2005 that scenario or something like it was playing out with surprising regularity on public streets in Britain, where draconian anti-terror legislation declared photographers “suspicious” merely for carrying camera equipment.

  At its height, a tweed-wearing photographer was branded a terrorist by a London Tube worker, police deleted a young Austrian tourist’s photos “to prevent terrorism,” an Italian student was arrested for filming in London’s financial district, and an architectural historian was detained for photographing a building designed by his grandfather.

Finance

• Ireland to get €85bn loan in deal that will nationalise its banks

  Ireland is to be offered an €85bn (£72bn) loan from the IMF and the EU to bail out its banks and fund its public finances.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Kuwait DSLR Camera Ban Now in Effect

  The image you see could get it’s photographer in serious legal trouble in Kuwait after authorities there have banned the use of DSLRs in public places unless you’re part of the press. Which is just ridiculous.

• Today’s Lesson: Make Facebook Angry, And They’ll Censor You Into Oblivion

  Facebook is well on its way to becoming the most popular way that people share links, photos, and other content with their friends. For many sites it’s becoming a powerful new driver of traffic — get people to ‘Like’ your stuff, and Facebook’s network effects will expose it to dozens of their friends.

  Just make sure not to do something that might make Facebook angry. Otherwise it might nuke every link to your site, choking off this river of traffic that you’ve worked so hard to build.

  That’s the message Facebook sent today with its censorship of links to Lamebook, a humor site that posts lewd conversations spotted on the social network. Facebook has confirmed that it is automatically blocking all links to Lamebook and that it has also removed the company’s ‘Fan’ page. Not because the content was offensive, mind you, but because Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook.

• Analysis: US alien tort law – A sword of international law blunted

  Human rights activists may no longer be able to raise actions against companies in US courts
  The US court decision came as a bombshell. Corporate liability is not recognised under international law and therefore multinational corporations are no longer susceptible to human rights claims filed by victims living outside US borders.

• Just one in 750 patients invited to take part sign up to Government’s online records programme

  A service set up to enable millions of patients to email their GPs and access their Summary Care Records online has proved to be unwanted by the vast majority of potential users, according to a major new study.

• EFF Urges Supreme Court to Block Government Overreach in State Secret Contract Dispute

  EFF and the plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit over a notorious case of illegal government spying urged the U.S. Supreme Court last week to reject a government attempt to have the Court address constitutional questions about the state secrets privilege in a contract dispute case involving the privilege.

  The state secrets privilege is a doctrine that allows the Executive to block evidence from being presented in a court on the grounds that national security requires the information to remain secret, and it’s been employed in both of EFF’s ongoing lawsuits over illegal domestic surveillance. Another lawsuit that’s had long-running battles over state secrets questions is Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, and we joined together with the Al Haramain plaintiffs in an amicus brief filed in this case: General Dynamics Corporation v. United States.

• Google Street View Lovers Egg Blurred German Houses

  Privacy lovers in Germany have egg on their house faces, thanks to a crew of Google-loving vigilantes. Google launched Street View in Germany last month, but allowed those uncomfortable with the service to blur their homes. About 3% of Germans opted to do so.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The Witcher 2 devs threaten pirates with fines, legal action

  Independent developers are having a tough time when it comes to dealing with piracy and DRM. If you include DRM, people complain. If you don’t, people pirate your game. It happened to World of Goo and it happened to Machinarium. But CD Projekt, the developer behind the upcoming The Witcher 2, has an idea about how to fight back: legal action.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A general public license for seeds?

  Background excerpted from a paper by Jack Kloppenburg:

  “The specific mechanism Michaels goes on to propose is a “General Public License for Plant Germplasm (GPLPG)” that is explicitly modeled on the GPL developed by the FOSS movement for software…”

• IP in the comics

• Copyrights

  • Judge to Righthaven: Show why lawsuit shouldn’t be dismissed

    A federal judge in Las Vegas is examining whether another Righthaven online copyright infringement lawsuit should be dismissed on fair use grounds.

    Righthaven LLC is the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner that since March has sued at least 172 website operators and bloggers throughout North America in federal court in Las Vegas, charging material from the Review-Journal was posted on their sites without authorization.

  • Judge Asks Righthaven To Explain Why Reposting Isn’t Fair Use… Even When Defendant Didn’t Claim Fair Use

    In yet another sign that things may not be looking so good for copyright lawsuit machine Righthaven, a judge has asked Righthaven to explain why a non-profit organization reposting an article isn’t fair use. There are two reasons why this is interesting. First, to date, most of the “fair use” claims in Righthaven cases have involved sites posting snippets of articles, rather than the full articles (Righthaven has recently said it will only sue for full articles going forward). However, this is a full article, and the judge is still considering whether or not it’s fair use. As we’ve noted in the past, there are certainly cases where using the entirety of a work still constitutes fair use, and this may be one of them.

  • What do we want copyright to do?

    A recurring question in discussions of digital copyright is how creators and their investors (that is, labels, movie studios, publishers, etc) will earn a living in the digital era.

    But though I’ve had that question posed to me thousands of times, no one has ever said which creators and which investors are to earn a living, and what constitutes “a living”.

    Copyright is in tremendous flux at the moment; governments all over the world are considering what their copyright systems should look like in the 21st century, and it’s probably a good idea to nail down what we want copyright to do. Otherwise the question “Is copyright working?” becomes as meaningless as “How long is a piece of string?”

  • Theft! A History of Music—Part 1: Plato and all that jazz

    Why did Plato argue that remixing should be banned by the state? What threats did jazz and rock ‘n roll pose? And what does all of that mean for the conflicts between artists and copyright today?

    Those are the questions Jennifer Jenkins, James Boyle, and Keith Aoki answer in layman-friendly language in Theft! A History of Music, a graphic novel expected next spring. The three have a previous comic book, Bound by Law, which (like Theft!) attempts to translate complex legal concepts to make them accessible to a wider audience through a friendlier format.

  • Some Common Sense at Bill C-32 Committee Hearings

    Sarah Schmidt is reporting that the C-32 Legislative Committee will meet only for four hours a week, not the 16 hours suggested by the Government members. This means that that the Bill cannot get through the House of Commons until well into next year.

  • Six Key Answers to Copyright Bill Questions

    1.Will Bill C-32 give education institutions the right to engage in massive uncompensated copying?

    No. The inclusion of education as a fair dealing category will not mean that any educational copying will be free. It will only mean that educational copying will be eligible for analysis under a six-part test developed by the Supreme Court of Canada to determine whether the copying qualifies as fair dealing. The changes in Bill C-32 are more modest than often claimed as they merely fill some gaps in the existing list of fair dealing categories.

  • ACTA

    • Common resolution on ACTA in EP proposed by Socialist, Green and Liberal groups

    • ACTA: Will The EU Parliament Give Up its Power?

      After last week’s release of the final version of the ACTA text, the European Parliament is about to adopt a resolution preparing the upcoming ratification process, during a plenary session scheduled tomorrow. This vote must be an opportunity for European lawmakers to restate their opposition to this agreement, which is bound to spread internationally some of the most extremist provisions regarding the civil and criminal enforcement of copyright, trademarks and patents. Disturbingly, the conservative EPP group tabled an isolated resolution, which gives up on the Parliament’s prerogatives.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Reasons to Be Thankful in Linux Land

“I’m thankful for Android phones providing real competition for iPhones — and keeping Windows Phones at bay,” Slashdot blogger yagu exclaimed over a fresh Peppermint Penguin, for example.

Desktop

• Ubuntu-ready netbook moves to dual-core Atom

  System76 is shipping a new version of its Ubuntu Linux-ready Starling Netbook equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, starting at $384. Meanwhile the company has begun shipping to the U.K, and is contemplating developing a tablet PC.

• Victory declared in Brazil over Windows XP

  Rumblings from Brazil suggest that the mighty Microsoft may have lost out in a landmark Windows licence row.

  A post on Techrights.org, said to be from Dr Roy Schestowitz, claims that a lowly consumer has gone to the small claims court in Brazil over not wanting to pay for a licence for Windows XP. And they’ve won.

• Linux on the Lenovo S10-3s: Scorecard

  - PCLinuxOS 2010.10: The clear winner in this case. This was the only Linux distribution which loaded on the Lenovo S10-3s without any problem, and on which absolutely everything I have tested works – CPU, graphics, wired/wireless/bluetooth networking, touchpad (including buttons and tapping), camera, Fn-keys for brightness and sound, and everything else. This will be the distribution I will be primarily using on this netbook.” rel=”nofollow”>Linux on the Lenovo S10-3s: Scorecard (Rap Sheet?)

Ballnux

• Samsung Sells 600,000 Galaxy Tab Devices At Launch Samsung Sells 600k Galaxy Tab Devices

  The Korea Herald is reporting that Samsung’s first Android-powered tablet device, the Galaxy Tab, has launched to a considerable fanfare, selling 600,000 units since launch and heading towards Samsung’s own target of one million units sold by the end of the year.

Kernel Space

• Running The Native ZFS Linux Kernel Module, Plus Benchmarks

  In August we delivered the news that Linux was soon to receive a native ZFS Linux kernel module. The Sun (now Oracle) ZFS file-system has long been sought after for Linux, though less now since Btrfs has emerged, but incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL licenses have barred such support from entering the mainline Linux kernel. There has been ZFS-FUSE to run the ZFS file-system in user-space, but it comes with slow performance. There has also been work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in porting ZFS to Linux as a native Linux kernel module. This LLNL ZFS work though is incomplete but still progressing due to a US Department of Energy contract. It is though via this work that developers in India at KQ Infotech have made working a Linux kernel module for ZFS. In this article are some new details on KQ Infotech’s ZFS kernel module and our results from testing out the ZFS file-system on Linux.

  [...]

  In terms of our ZFS on Linux benchmarks, if you have desired this Sun-created file-system on Linux, hopefully it is not because of the performance expectations for this file-system. As these results illustrate, this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux is not superior to the Linux popular file-systems like EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS. There are a few areas where the ZFS Linux disk performance was competitive, but overall it was noticeably slower than the big three Linux file-systems in a common single disk configuration. That though is not to say ZFS on Linux will be useless as the performance is at least acceptable and clearly superior to that of ZFS-FUSE. More importantly, there are a number of technical merits to the ZFS file-system that makes it one of the most interesting file-systems around.

  When KQ Infotech releases these ZFS packages to the public in January and rebases them against a later version of ZFS/Zpool, we will publish more benchmarks.

• New Benchmarks Of OpenSolaris, BSD & Linux

  Earlier today we put out benchmarks of ZFS on Linux via a native kernel module that will be made publicly available to bring this Sun/Oracle file-system over to more Linux users. Now though as a bonus we happen to have new benchmarks of the latest OpenSolaris-based distributions, including OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and Augustiner-Schweinshaxe, compared to PC-BSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

  [...]

  PC-BSD 8.1 pulled out another win. This time it was with LZMA compression where it ran in front of the Linux operating systems and well in front of the OpenSolaris alternatives.

  There you have it, the performance of the latest OpenSolaris distributions against PC-BSD/FreeBSD and two of the most popular Linux distributions. The Fedora and Ubuntu operating systems won most of the tests, but there were a few leads for PC-BSD while the OpenSolaris operating systems just one won test (Local Adaptive Thresholding via GraphicsMagick) at least for our benchmarking selection and workload. If you are using an OpenSolaris-based operating system hopefully you are not using it for a performance critical environment but rather to take advantage of its technical features like DTrace, ZFS (though that is becoming moot with its availability on PC-BSD/FreeBSD and even Linux), etc.

• A set of stable kernel updates

• The kernel column #94 by Jon Masters

  This month saw the final release of kernel 2.6.36, and the closing of the following ‘merge window’ for new features to be merged into what will become the 2.6.37 kernel (more details about the latter in a moment). The 2.6.36 kernel features concurrency-managed workqueues, preliminary support for the fanotify mechanism discussed here in the past, final merging of the AppArmor security system used by some distributions for many years, and support for a new architecture, among many dozens of other significant improvements. The new kernel received patches from over 1,100 engineers for a total of nearly 11,000 changesets (collections of related changes to various kernel files) overall.

• Graphics Stack

  • XvMC With iDCT Now Working On Gallium3D

    A month ago there was the surprising work done by Christian König to bring XvMC and VDPAU support to the open-source ATI Radeon “R600g” Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards. The XvMC state tracker with Gallium3D began working shortly thereafter for accelerating XvMC using shaders with this ATI Gallium3D driver, however, iDCT support was not implemented. Christian though has now added support for inverse discrete cosine transforms to this X-Video Motion Compensation code for Gallium3D.

  • No KMS? No Mesa? Run Wayland Off A Linux Framebuffer!

    Besides needing to get the various tool-kits and other libraries ported to run atop the Wayland Display Server, another requirement limiting the adoption of this X11 Server alternative so far has been the specialized graphics requirements. From the beginning, Wayland was designed for GPU drivers that support kernel mode-setting (KMS), Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) buffers, and OpenGL ES, among some other smaller requirements. Originally only the Intel Linux driver would work, but since then the various branches needed to support Wayland have been merged to their mainline code-bases and it’s possible to run Wayland with the open-source ATI Radeon and Nouveau drivers too. But those using the proprietary ATI or NVIDIA drivers have not been able to run Wayland nor those people utilizing the VESA driver or any of the other obscure graphics drivers that lack any of the needed GPU driver capabilities. This though has now changed as it’s been proved possible that Wayland in fact can run off a Linux frame-buffer.

  • Benchmarks Of AMD’s Newest Gallium3D Graphics Driver

    While we have already published two exciting articles today looking at the native ZFS file-system for Linux and also new benchmarks of OpenSolaris / BSD / Linux, here’s a third article for the day. We might as well test our new Phoronix serving infrastructure while already having excess load today due to Slashdot, etc (it’s good practice for OpenBenchmarking.org), so here are benchmarks of AMD’s newest Gallium3D driver compared to their classic open-source Mesa driver and also their proprietary Catalyst driver. Oh yeah, a fourth article is also in the queue for today or the very near future when AMD has a major Linux driver announcement to share.

    [...]

    The performance though of these open-source ATI drivers is still years behind that of the Catalyst driver, but at least there is open-source support and for these less demanding games, it is able to produce a playable experience. With the Gallium3D-based drivers there are also other interesting possibilities that emerge with state trackers, XvMC video playback via shaders, etc. It will also be exciting if the Radeon HD 6000 series open-source acceleration support is built upon the success of this R600g driver. The Gallium3D driver performance will also improve once the latest color tiling and page-flipping patches have been merged, which should happen soon. Another article is planned at this time looking at the Radeon page-flipping performance as it may bring sizable performance boosts.

  • Wayland License Changing To LGPLv2

    Wayland has experienced a surge in development activities from new developers since it was announced Ubuntu will deploy the Wayland Display Server with patches coming in from various developers that address issues from bugs to letting it run on a Linux frame-buffer. Wayland up to this point has been licensed under the MIT / GPLv2 code licenses (depending upon the component), but Kristian Høgsberg has now decided to change the licenses before it’s too late and complicated.

  • Open-Source AMD Fusion Driver For Ontario Released

    While we are still waiting on open-source support for the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series of graphics cards that were released last month, today AMD is releasing their initial open-source support for their Ontario hardware. AMD’s Ontario is their low-powered Fusion processor designed for use in netbooks and other such devices. This dual-core chip with integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics is only starting to ship now, but the open-source support for this first AMD Fusion chip is now available to Linux users, complete with 3D support.

  • Wayland VS X – Some Perspectives

    As with most things only time will tell if Ubuntu’s (and Fedora’s) transition to Wayland will be a success (or a death sentence) for the respective distros. In the mean time want to give Wayland a try? Well, currently it is barely functional and only works on a limited amount of hardware. That means, in addition to all the concerns above, a good deal of time, funding, and man power is going to have to be invested in Wayland just to make the project functional for a desktop operating system such as Ubuntu.

Applications

• Rethinking video editing with Novacut

  In this guest post, Jason DeRose of Novacut team explains about the design focus for their upcoming video editor.

• Keep Your Desktop Clean With Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer

  In my search for a clean Desktop (because I got tired of cleaning it manually), I came across “Directory cleaner and files organizer”, a script (with Zenity for a GUI) that automatically cleans any directory (and thus the Desktop folder) by moving the files to various folders such as all the pictures into ~/Pictures, the archives into ~/Archives, documents into ~/Documents and so on.

• Testing Email Clients

  As you can glean from above, my requirements are:

  * IMAP for Gmail
  * POP or IMAP or some method for Hotmail that isn’t too gnarly a hack
  * GPG encryption/signing – bonus points for integrating with Seahorse/KGPG
  * Auto-filters for organizing my email into folders
  * Preferred (almost required): Message Threading (sorting messages like Gmail)
  * Preferred: Ability to import/export from Evolution and other FLOSS email program formats
  * Bonus (not a deal breaker): Integrates with Gnome/KDE popups to let me know when I have a new email

  For completion’s sake, I thought I’d do a bit of research and give my impressions based on experience/websites before I actually try out the email programs.

• Why VIM is not my favorite editor

  The one editor I’ve found that provides the level of introspection I expect yet otherwise stays out of the way is KDevelop 4.1. It basically takes the Kate text editor, with awesome syntax highlighting and standard editing features, and adds some of the best auto-completion I’ve seen for C or C++. It’s fast too, and doesn’t require a ridiculous manual scan or gigabyte symbol database. It just works – automatically.

• Clementine music player adds Sound menu support

  Chalk another one up people for the latest developer builds of Clementine now supports the Ubuntu sound menu.

• Burg Gives Your Multi-Boot Screen a Big Facelift

  Linux/Windows: Based on GRUB but many shades beyond it in the looks department, Burg is a quick install for Linux users that lets anyone theme their multi-OS selection screen, or customize their own theme. It’s becoming install-ready on Windows and Mac, too.

• Proprietary

  • Tab Stacking is here

    Last week we already introduced you to some new features in Opera 11. Today we release Opera 11 beta with a new surprise feature: tab stacking.

    How do you like your tabs? Many of us like tabs and lots of them.
    We’ve added functionality to enhance your tab experience. Tab stacking allows you to organize your browsing, optimize the space on your tab bar, and keep yet even more tabs handy for use.

  • Opera 11 Beta Offers New Take on Tabs, Extensions

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install Pidgin 2.7.6 in Ubuntu (With MSN Certificate Fix And Multiple MSN Logins)

  • ‘Orta’ theme guide – Firefox, Docky, AWN, Chrome

  • Image Processing with OpenGL and Shaders

  • Set up easy file sharing with NFS on Linux

  • Tracking Linux Network Stats with vnStat

  • Multitail on Linux

  • How to Choose What to Back Up on Your Linux Home Server

  • [HOWTO] Make it easy to find recent files using Avant Window Navigator applets

  • Enabling and disabling services during start up in Linux

  • Booting an lvm snapshot of /

  • Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove

  • Tutorial: Create cool rifts with translucent lights!

  • How to list or show databases in MySQL

  • HowTo: 7 Steps for Linux vsftpd Install, Configuration, Users Setup

  • More about Linux Resource Containers and Gentoo

    I have written before that I strongly object at LXC userland to be considered production-ready and now I have another example for you.

    Let’s not even dig into the fact that the buildsystem for the userland tools is quite objectionable, as it “avoids” using libtool by using silly hacks into Makefile.am. Let’s not even spend much to say that they have no announcement-only mailing list, and they stopped using the SF.net File Release System (that has an RSS feed of the changes, and a number of mirrors) in favour of a simple download directory since that’s just project administration gone wrong.

• Games

  • Seven Weeks Later, LGP & Its DRM Is Still Down

    Last week we reported on the situation where LGP has been without its server for a month and a half after their single server lost its lone hard drive used to host the Linux Game Publishing web-site (along with the LGP-owned Tux Games and Happy Penguin web-sites), their online store, and their Digital Rights Management platform for their Linux games. LGP didn’t keep around any recent backups and this server was not mirrored but just running with an off-the-shelf Serial ATA hard drive that evidently failed and then additionally suffered from firmware corruption, chemical degradation, and file-system damage, according to Michael Simms, the CEO of LGP.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • ARM for Kubuntu and KDE

    Recently the Kubuntu developers received a donation of some terrific Genesi Efika MX devices featuring an ARM CPU.

    Some of them will be devoted to Kubuntu related porting work with regards to the ARM CPU, and others to continuously test build KDE trunk. Getting a KDE buildbot for ARM is very important because most KDE developers do not have access to an ARM device (or they would not want to test building their software on it, because it would be tediously slow), so we try our best to provide KDE the means to get notified about changes that are not compatible with the ARM architecture, so that it can be fixed.

  • Join the KDE translation team

    This is a reminder that the various KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but did not know how to do it, this is your chance, join the KDE Translation team!

  • Presentation by Sebastian Kügler

    Sebastian Kügler, Release Manager of KDE and member of the Board holds a lecture about managing a reference community for the Commons such as the KDE. He will also tackle how to manage code contributed by big communities and how to manage a community itself.

  • How a “Welded-to KDE3.5 User” Began a Move to KDE4.4 – Part 1

    In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..

  • Bangarang – What the dilly yo?!

    Anyway, it’s been a while since I last blogged about Bangarang development so I figured I should share a little (or long) insight into what to expect for the 2.0 release with a few screenshots to help explain.

    Before anything else, I need to mention that Stefan has been totally kick-ass with just about everything he’s tackled. He is the only other longer term coding contributor to the project and there’s absolutely no way I could list all the stuff he’s worked on, but I’ll mention a few: Lot’s of work on DVD support including subtitles, angles and audio channel support; Excellent star rating renderer that’s used all through out Bangarang; Shortcuts support and configuration; Filter support on the media list and playlist views; Tons of bug fixing, improvements and cleanup.

  • KDE Part of Google Code-in

    This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Tiled View: New Gnome Shell Mockup

    A new Gnome Shell mockup shows how the old Gnome Shell behavior (which is actually still the current Gnome Shell behavior) and the new Overview-Layout Gnome Shell branch can work together…

  • GNOME Control Center in GNOME 3

    Last week I sat down and implemented some of the gnome-control-center mockups for GNOME 3.

  • 10 Cool Screenlets for Ubuntu GNOME

    If you haven’t used Screenlets in your Ubuntu yet, it is an excellent application to experiment with. And hundreds of useful third party user contributed screenlets are available for free. Here is a quick review of some of the best user contributed screenlets available for Ubuntu GNOME.

  • Shell’s Tiled View

    Not so long after Florian cleaned up the overview-relayout branch to accommodate the visual tweaks initiated by Allan, here we are again to move the target a bit (engineers love me).

    Initially shell exposed two views. A tiled view for an overview of your workspaces (something we can’t expect majority will want to manage). A linear view that presents application windows for easier switching (and dropping documents on). Exposing the mode switch to the user wasn’t good design and even if we presented the tiled view only when rearranging windows or selections of windows across workspaces, it felt like too much of an odd case.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • FreeDiams v0.5.0 released

    FreeDiams is a drug prescribing assistant that manages drug-drug interactions, patients allergies, intolerances and high quality printing. FreeDiams is a free and open source application, GPLv3.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • What’s up, Man-driva?

• Red Hat Family

  • The most important updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • Red Hat Near the 50 Day

    New York, November 22nd (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading day at $41.87 close to its 50 day moving average currently set at $40.62. Red Hat’s price action is just above this important support level translating into a trading opportunity.

  • Fedora

    • switching from Mandriva to Fedora

      Well… all good things must come to an end, and so — very regretfully, I should add — I parted ways with Mandriva. I’d been a Mandrake user since ’99 or so, and a die hard fan and evangelist since not long after.

      Today I switched my work(horse) desktop from MDV to Fedora. The upgrade went amazingly smoothly, partly because ever since I started using git, almost everything I have except “documents” is in git; all I really did was restore my repos, my mail, and a “workdata” directory that contained all the ODT/ODP/ODS junk. A few commands here and there and it’s all set. Pidgin, FF, TB, all setup exactly as they were before.

• Debian Family

  • Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: netsele netselect

  • Brief Updates: Firebird 3, Iceweasel 4.0 beta, google code-in and DPL interview

    * An initial development snapshot of Firebird 3 is packaged and available from Debian Experimental. More information.

  • Will Debian 6 be Easier to Install?

    A new Debian release is coming… someday. One of the key components of the Debian 6.0 release, also known as “Squeeze,” is the Debian Installer, which entered beta at the end of October. Debian’s installer has improved, but still needs a bit of work before it can be considered user-friendly.

    Long before there was an Ubuntu, or even a Stormix, I was a devout Slackware user and kept hearing wonderful things about Debian. But almost every person I talked to cautioned that the installation was painful. As it turns out, it wasn’t that bad — at least, I didn’t find it any harder to install than Slackware and I was quickly sold on APT.

  • Bye Bye Ubuntu… Hello Debian

    Sorry for the delay in posting everyone. I needed a little time off to make an informed choice as to which distro I was going to switch over to. I haven’t been happy with Canonical in the past few months. Its pushing forward with Unity, Ubuntu One, and other such proprietary products.

  • How Ubuntu builds up on Debian

    I have been asked how Ubuntu relates to Debian, and how packages flow from one to the other. So here’s my attempt at clarifying the whole picture.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Cloud Screencasts Volunteers

      Interested in Ubuntu cloud community ? Want to help ? Awesome! here is your chance

    • An Interview With zkriesse

      This week we have zkriesse in the interview series. In my opinion, zkriesse is one of the Ubuntu community members who may not be well known, but certainly keeps things going as smoothly as possible. He’s involved in a great number of things, including the Ubuntu Beginners Team.

    • Patch Pilot Programme starts today

      we all know how important code review is for Ubuntu. It’s not only about spotting mistakes, but also about teaching new contributors how things are done. There’s always been busier times when we fell back in terms of code review and times where we did better.

    • Weekly Ubuntu Cloud Meeting And Q+A

      As many of you will know, Ahmed Kamal is one of the horsemen, and he is focusing his community building skills on creating a rocking Ubuntu Cloud community. We have awesome technology for harnessing public, private. and personal clouds, and Ahmed is here to build a community of both users and contributors.

    • Planet Ubuntu Facelift

      Planet Ubuntu has had a facelift and its taken on the same theme as the other Ubuntu properties. Looks great!

    • Kinect + Ubuntu = Jedi. Obviously.

      YouTuber yankeyan shows off real-time lightsaber (Yes, lightsaber) tracking and rendering using nothing more than Kinect and Ubuntu.

    • Debian Project News – November 22nd, 2010

      Release Manager Neil McGovern gave an update for the upcoming Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” stable release. As “Squeeze is almost in its final form” he calls for upgrade and installation tests (see also the separate announcement for that). He also notes that even (experienced) users who have no systems available for installation or upgrade tests can help by triaging installation reports and upgrade reports, or propose text for the release notes.

    • Ubuntu Software Center Slowly Turning Around, Adds More Paid Applications!

      Ubuntu Software Center is getting updates almost everyday. The latest one brings in more paid applications into Ubuntu Software Center. And it’s good to see Canonical slowly waking up to one of its most important revenue making opportunity.

    • Canonical’s new partnerships for Ubuntu: A challenge in the enterprise space?

      Shortly after Ubuntu 10.10 was released Canonical managed to shore up some pretty hefty partners. Seven new partnerships, to be exact, and these sponsors all seem to point to one thing: enterprise. When you read through the list (patience now) it becomes very clear that Canonical has yet another trick up its sleeve.

    • Ubuntu’s Shuttleworth lands luxury NY crash pad

      Canonical owner and former cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth has found a new landing pad.

      Ubuntu king Mark Shuttleworth has bought a condo in Manhattan’s Superior Ink building for a record $31.5m, according to the New York Post.

      Other residents of Superior Ink – a 68-unit, 17-floor building – include actress Hilary Swank, fashion designer Marc Jacobs, and Showtime CEO Matthew Blank.

    • The Up-and-Comer

      Owners include [...] South African Internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth

    • Ubuntu Core Developer Team Gets New Members

      Emmet HIKORY has announced on the Ubuntu Developers mailing list that Ken VanDine (kenvandine) and Alessio Treglia (quadrispro) have become one of the Ubuntu Core Developers.

    • How Ubuntu Transformed From A Project To A Product [Updated]

      Ubuntu is one of the much loved GNU/Linux based operating systems. It has created a cult around it. But what is Ubuntu — a product or a project?

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Lubuntu Screencast: MtPaint create wallpaper

        In this Screencast I show you how to use the default painting application in Lubuntu mtpaint to create a nice looking wallpaper.

Devices/Embedded

• Cortex-A9 SoC targets 1080p-ready Android devices

  Amlogic has begun sampling a new system-on-chip (SoC) that combines a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, an ARM Mali-400 GPU, and Amlogic’s proprietary HD video decoding engine. Targeting next-generation consumer electronics running Linux and Android 2.2, the AML8726-M supports full 1080p HD video capabilities and a range of connectivity options, says the company.

• SOHO NAS servers tap 1.6GHz Armada 300 SoCs

  The TS-x19P+ NAS servers provide file sharing, backup, and UPnP-compliant media streaming between PCs, Macs, Linux, and UNIX-based computers, says Qnap. The devices ship with version 3.3 of Qnap’s Linux-based Turbo NAS firmware (see farther below).

• Phones

  • Palm webOS ‘Enyo’ framework paves the way for tablets and larger phones (video)

    Don’t expect HP’s webOS 2.0 to be tied to an HVGA screen for long — come “early 2011,” the company will introduce a number of “really interesting new form factors,” including tablets and phones. That was the message driven home at Palm’s Developer Day this year, according to PreCentral’s Dieter Bohn, and the software that’s going to make that shift possible is a little something called Enyo.

  • Is Mobile Making Linux Menus Obsolete?

    Are menus starting to disappear from the Linux desktop? A survey of the alternatives suggests that, at the very least, menus seem to be evolving out of recognition in response to modern trends, particularly the effort to make workstation and laptop desktops more like mobile interfaces. Ask usability experts, and the unexamined assumption is that the classic menu needs improvement — although whether users feel that way seems less clear.

    Ten years ago, desktop menus were straightforward. They listed most of the desktop applications, with sub-menus spilling across the desktop to help organize them. The most extreme case is the famous — or infamous — Debian menu, which descends four or five sub-levels, but contains every application installed on the system, if only you had the patience to keep searching. The Debian menu remains popular with some users today, including me.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Jolicloud Netbook Goes On Sale At Amazon For £280

    French company Jolicloud has finally started to sell its Jolibook netbook courtesy of Amazon but direct from Taiwanese manufacturer Vye.

    Amazon says that the device will usually be delivered (for free) within one to three months which might cause some potential customers to think twice.

  • Chrome OS netbooks postponed until 2011

    Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s cloud-oriented Chrome Operating System for netbooks has been delayed for several months. Google won’t say why, but analysts speculate that the Linux-based Chrome OS may have been delayed due to the huge success of the search giant’s own Android OS as well as the Apple iPad.

• Tablets

  • Worst gadget ever? Ars reviews a $99 Android tablet

    Usage time is even worse. We “used” the device as best we could for as long as possible, and the battery usually only gave us an hour or less before dying out. (Yes, there were times when we got less than an hour from a full charge.) This was usually with WiFi on, though as we noted in the Usage section, just because the device says WiFi is on doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

  • Black Friday 2010 Linux Tablet Deals

    One item on my shopping list this holiday season is a Linux based tablet device. I decided to check the Sunday ad section and put together this list of Black Friday 2010 Linux Tablet Deals.

Guest Post: How the Cloud is Driving Application Integration Up the Stack

Microsoft defined the building blocks for 90% of all presentations people create in a bad way (Powerpoint, anyone?), but that is not my point. My point is Microsoft focused on the tools customers need to solve problems because that is what they sell. The less of a standard there is, the better the conventional software market works. Enter the Cloud. Fantastic! All of a sudden standard data makes sense for vendors.

Community is Not Crowdsourcing

I was watching a presentation about business intelligence by one of my fellow faculty members the other day, and as one of his examples for the crowd of undergrads, he cited last year’s developer contest conducted by Netflix to build a better algorithm for their users’ movie preferences.

The contest, long over, awarded US$1 million to the team that could “substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences.”

Telling the open source story – Part 1

As open source software becomes more mainstream, it’s easy to forget how amazing it is. Countless individuals, donating their time and sharing their brainpower, work to build a shared infrastructure on which the world’s computing is done. Amazing. Even more amazing, in survey after survey, the big reason open source contributors give for their participation is that it’s “fun.” Even more amazing than that is the rate at which this technology improves because people are having fun building it.

2010 Packt Open Source Award winners announced

Packt Publishing has announced the winners of its inaugural Open Source Awards. According to Packt, the aim of the contest is to “encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects”. Awards were presented in six software categories: Open Source CMS, Hall of Fame CMS, Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source JavaScript Libraries, Open Source E-Commerce Applications and Open Source Graphics Software.

Open source: It’s not all or nothing

Too often open source software is portrayed as an all-or-nothing option. In reality a mixed environment is the first step to a successful migration.

Free and open source software is famously versatile. Think of just about any piece of software your business uses and chances are there is an open source alternative. And if there isn’t then there probably will be within the year.

Being so versatile open source software can be used in almost any situation, from desktop applications to cloud computing servers, which can often entice businesses down the path of a wholesale open source migration. The savings, flexibility and versatility of open source software are simply too good to miss out on. There are, however, risks in suddenly switching all of your systems over to open source software and a gradual, mixed-environment approach is often a better way to go about it.

LibreOffice/OOo

• FI: Scientific study into migration proves value of open source

  Finland’s ministry of Justice, its state legal aid offices, the court houses, the probation services and its prisons offer scientific proof of the advantages of open source and open standards. Martti Karjalainen, who studied one of Europe’s largest open source transitions, concludes that a large-scale migration to an open source office suite is feasible, resulting in substantial benefits, including cost savings.

• Steering Committee starts blog

  to support our open and transparent approach, the Steering Committee of The Document Foundation has opened up a blog at

  http://blog.documentfoundation.org

  It will be used by members of the Steering Committee and their deputies to share news and insight about our progress with the Foundation and about the future developments of LibreOffice. The blog enhances the public Steering Committee phone conferences [1], the public marketing phone conferences [2] as well as the public Steering Committee discussion list [3] and makes the work of the Foundation even more transparent.

Web Browsers

• Why browser speed benchmarks are meaningless

  Anyhow, Javascript benchmarking is all nice and well, but it has nothing to do with reality. For all practical purposes, you can have guinea pig powering your browser. Stop wasting your time worrying and caring about nonsense and focus on important things, like browser W3C compliance and stability. Now, you’re talking business.

• Mozilla

  • learn about Chinese Internet at the Sinica Podcast

    For those of you on Planet Mozilla who are interested in learning more about China and trends in the Chinese Internet, I’d like to recommend the Sinica Podcast. There’s a lot of great websites out there covering China but not many good podcasts. This one is the best, imo (at least in English.)

  • Firefox 4 Beta 7 – how it should look on Linux

    Yesterday we mentioned that Firefox 4 Beta for Linux now boasts a ‘menu’ button rather than a menu bar. Whilst it’s undoubtedly welcome it doesn’t look as good as it could – nor should.

  • Design Jam London #1: 50 design enthusiasts. 9 hours. 1 challenge.

    Design Jams challenge teams to solve a design challenge within a day. All in all come to think of it – it is a pretty intense time-frame within a highly concentrated environment!
    The general format of the day comprised of:

    * a welcome talk outlining the format of the day
    * an introduction of the days design challenge topic
    * team formation with a maximum of five (5) per team
    * x3 design phases & x2 presentation slots

  • Mozilla – Putting On The Brave Face As Decline Sets In?

    The big outlets are reporting that the revenues to Mozilla were up for 2009, 34 percent higher than for the 2008 year. The chairman for Mozilla has stated that Mozilla is an underdog, however, possibly to soften the blows when the results for 2010 come in.

Education

• Computing in School, the Naace Response

• DoceboLMS 4.0.2 open source E-Learning platform unveiled

  DoceboLMS 4.0.2, open source e-learning platform written in PHP and MYSQL, is online, scope of this release is to integrate new web training scenario like social training and third party applications interfacement. Platform is used on major hospitals and pharma companies.

Healthcare

• MEDILIG – Medical Life Guard

  Fully tested, fully operational open-platform EHR/EMR software for health professionals and IT developers.

BSD

• Raiders of the lost OpenBSD

  When looking at OpenBSD and evaluating it, I think it’s important to keep in mind what the project’s goals are. This isn’t a project trying to make a great desktop OS (though I have talked with people who happily use OpenBSD on their desktops) and it’s not making the most powerful server system. The OpenBSD team is interested in producing correct, secure code and they do that. Fortunately their work boils over into other areas of the open source world — OpenSSH being an excellent example. The operating system is small and simple, resulting in low-resource requirements and a responsive environment. I don’t think that many people would accuse OpenBSD of being intuitive, but the community does have sound documentation and the project’s processes are very open. These characteristics make OpenBSD not only a good firewall or server, but also a great teaching tool. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys building their system from the ground up, OpenBSD is a suitable place to begin. My only complaint while trying out the new release was in regards to hardware. I wasn’t able to get OpenBSD running in VirtualBox, nor on my laptop and, so far, I don’t have sound on my desktop. Otherwise it was a good adventure and I applaud the developers for producing another solid release.

• NetBSD 5.1 feature update arrives

  The NetBSD development team has announced the arrival of the first feature update to the 5.0 release branch, NetBSD 5.1. According to the developers, the major release includes a variety of critical security and bug fixes, as well as better hardware support and new features.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU contributor statistics for November 2010

  As part of an article for the forthcoming FSF bulletin, here are the latest numbers for GNU contributors, broken down by country.

Project Releases

• Announcing Ushahidi 2.0 (Luanda)

• Ushahidi developer meet up

• TaskView Release

Government

• Open Source and the Federal Budget Squeeze, Part 2

  “The United States government is the world’s largest purchaser of information technology, with an annual IT budget over (US)$80 billion,” Federal CIO Vivek Kundra told the World Economic Forum in early November.

  Just fractions of that amount are attractive to vendors, for whatever IT specialty they offer — including open source solutions.

  “We don’t really focus on an overall market figure, since open source can’t be described as a monolithic entity. We prefer to emphasize the value it creates in a specific application,” Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist at Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), told LinuxInsider.

Licensing

• Fusion Garage GPL update

  Fusion Garage have put up a website containing the source code for the kernel, bootloader and some miscellaneous tools (including their recovery system). As far as I can tell (by inspection – I haven’t tried building binaries) it corresponds to what they were distributing, which is excellent. On the other hand, that’s all the source they’ve provided.

Openness/Sharing

• MEPs to twitter their way into new communication

  People are increasingly using social media as a way to communicate with the members of the European Parliament and MEPs seem convinced that Twitter is the way to go, a new public affairs survey has found.

• E-petitions website shelved

  David Cameron often speaks about openness in government, but a Downing Street innovation to encourage greater public participation has been quietly shelved. Officially, the infamous No 10 e-petitions website, launched by the previous government, is under review.

  Senior Whitehall sources insist it will not return, however, partly because of the negative publicity it generated. Online petitions were used to embarrass Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Shortly after the site’s debut, 1.6 million people signed a petition demanding an end to road pricing, and nearly 100,000 used it to demand Brown’s resignation in April last year. “[Cameron's communications chief] Andy Coulson does not want to see a repeat of that,” said a Whitehall insider.

• Coalition shelves plans to protect public sector whistleblowers

  The coalition appears to have shelved plans to introduce new protections for public sector workers who blow the whistle on dangerous, corrupt or incompetent practices, the Guardian has learned.

  A promise to protect whistleblowers in the public sector was one of a series in the coalition’s plans designed to make government more transparent. It follows concerns that people have been too afraid to speak up when things are going wrong in government, schools, hospitals or social services, for fear of later being penalised.

• The British National Bibliography – wow! Try it out

  And very importantly we now know what the scale is. Let’s say we have 20 million possible books (a very rough guess as books in major libraries are counted with a tape measure). A gigatriple. This shouldn’t frighten us today. The main thing is that the web is scaling up for RDF and there are many potential suppliers and providers.

• Open Data

  • LUCERO : The Open University + JISC Open Data; mouthwatering

    In short, The OU (with the active and welcome involvement of JISC) is exposing its data (which could be anything, but think staff details, courses, research interests, I think) as Linked Open Data. I’ll post some snippets and then say why I think this is critical.

  • The British Library releases 3 million bibliographic records into the public domain using CC0

    The British Library has released three million records from the British National Bibliography into the public domain using the CC0 public domain waiver. The British National Bibliography contains data on publishing activity from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland since 1950. JISC OpenBibliography has made this set downloadable at CKAN; in addition, the Internet Archive also offers the data for download.

  • Free Data Services

    As part of its work to open its metadata to wider use beyond the traditional library community, the British Library is making copies of its main catalogue and British National Bibliography datasets available for research purposes. Files are initially being made available in RDF/XML (see sample) and are distributed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication licence.

• Open Access/Content

  • How open access to research benefits us all

    There are two distinct paths followed to provide open access, though they do occasionally intersect. The “Green” road is where authors provide access to their published work through self-archiving (on a personal website or a public or institutional repository). This path is readily accepted by a larger number of academics, because it enables them to publish in many highly prestigious journals that are not open access, while also providing their work to the general public.

    According to a study by Muluken W. Alemayehu, at the University of Oslo 32 out of 45 professors surveyed “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that the scholarly research results from the university should be available to the public in an institutional repository, 12 were “neutral” on the idea, and only one disagreed. Of the 45, 31 were previously unaware of the concept of an institutional repository, and of those 22 were from among the 32 who agreed with making the research available there. Five respondents were interested in adding other types of content to the repository but not their scholarly articles, citing conflicts with the publishers and other concerns.

  • Considering the benefits of Open Access

    Open Access is an aspect of free culture that I have not fully evaluated yet. I want to be able to take a position on the subject, should the question come up, so this week I’m making a concerted effort to understand what Open Access (capitalized) is, what its major tenets and who its major supporters are. I don’t want to take a knee-jerk reaction to it and say “I think free software is ethical, therefore open access is ethical.” That’s a little short-sighted. Furthermore, although I agree with certain arguments from open access immediately (scientists should make their data and source code available), I certainly don’t want to ally myself with a movement that I don’t understand. People could end up thinking I want to take away their jobs, and that might not be true.

Oxford Academics: Web Not To Blame For Newspapers’ Slide

The book challenges the conventional wisdom that the internet has undermined business models by claiming there is no correlation between internet usage and newspaper profitability.

The work, commissioned by the Oxford-based Reuters (NYSE: TRI) Institute for the Study of Journalism, examined newspaper industries in several countries, including the US, UK, Germany and Brazil.

Putting paid to bribery

Our lead story this week, on Dentons suing its former India head Gauri Advani following the allegation of a bribe (something she strongly denies) and costs of a subsequent court case, is a preview of the future for law firms.

Turkey rejects EU’s Cyprus offer to open talks on new chapters

Despite mounting pressure from the European Union to open its ports and airports to the Greek half of Cyprus, Turkey will not be doing so until a settlement on the divided island is reached, a senior state official has said.

Turkey strongly believes that the EU has not been constructive in its efforts for a permanent solution on the island and has rejected out of hand a proposal to open two more chapters of negotiation if Turkey complies with the EU’s demand. Turkey started its accession talks in 2005, but progress has been slow, largely because of the dispute over Cyprus. Turkey refuses to open its ports and airports to traffic from Greek Cyprus, urging the EU to first end the isolation of Turkish Cyprus as it promised back in 2004, following a referendum on a UN reunification plan in both parts of the island — accepted by the Turkish Cypriots and rejected by the Greek Cypriots.

Science

• Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Tells the Tale of the World’s First Computer

  Who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn’s engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the “first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer.” But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?

• Europe’s new astronauts graduate

  The European Space Agency’s (Esa) new intake of astronauts have completed their basic training.

  The six individuals – two Italians, a German, a Frenchman, a Dane and a Briton – received their graduation certificates at a special ceremony in Cologne, Germany.

  They are the first group of candidates Esa has put through a training programme of its own design.

Security

• Monday’s security updates

• Security advisories for Tuesday

• ‘Scary stuff’: Cyberattack arrest highlights risk

  How did a hacker in Malaysia manage to penetrate a computer network operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland?

  And what was the same accused cybercriminal doing this summer when he allegedly tapped into the secure computers of a large Defense Department contractor that managed systems for military transport movements and other U.S. military operations?

Defence/Police/Aggression

• President Obama, After Traveling With Naked Scanner CEO, Defends Naked Scans

  No surprise there. Of course, what he didn’t mention is that he just got done traveling with the CEO of OSI, the parent company of Rapiscan, the makers of the main naked scanner that is being purchased and put into all these airports. Apparently, OSI CEO, Deepak Chopra (no, not the new agey guy), “was selected to accompany US President, Barack Obama, to Mumbai and attended the US India Business Entrepreneurship meeting…”

• President Obama: TSA Pat-Downs “An Inconvenience For All Of Us,” Except Me

  With all the “junk-touching” and pat-downs required by new TSA rules that arrived just in time for the holidays, it was inevitable that at the first possible opportunity some intrepid reporter would bring the subject up to President Obama. Taking questions at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, the President attempted to explain the logic behind the pat-downs, but prefaced his reasoning with a disclaimer that he has never and will likely never experience such a thing.

• TSA has met the enemy — and they are us

  How did an agency created to protect the public become the target of so much public scorn?

  After nine years of funneling travelers into ever longer lines with orders to have shoes off, sippy cups empty and laptops out for inspection, the most surprising thing about increasingly heated frustration with the federal Transportation Security Administration may be that it took so long to boil over.

• Scientist: X-ray scanners deliver “20 times the average dose that is typically quoted by TSA.”

  U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a scientist and the Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, says the “TSA’s current obsession with fielding body imaging technology is misguided, counterproductive, and potentially dangerous.”

• TSA’s double standard

  Late last week, the Transportation Security Administration, bowing to controversy and the threat of lawsuits, ruled that airline pilots will no longer be subject to the backscatter body scanners and invasive pat-downs at TSA airport checkpoints.

  For pilots like myself this is good news, though at least for the time being we remain subject to the rest of the checkpoint inspection, including the X-raying of luggage and the metal detector walk-through. Eventually, we are told, the implementation of so-called CrewPASS will allow us to skirt the checkpoint more or less entirely.

  Not everybody agrees that air crews deserve this special treatment. That’s not an unreasonable point of view, and I don’t disagree with it, necessarily. As security experts like Bruce Schneier point out, if you are going to screen at all, it is important to screen everybody, lest the system become overly complicated and prone to exploitable loopholes.

• WikiLeaks Announces Release 7x the Size of the Iraq War Logs

  WikiLeaks has announced an important release on its Twitter account, claiming it’ll be seven times bigger than the Iraq war logs, which are widely considered to be the biggest military leak in history.

  “Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. intense pressure over it for months. Keep us strong” was the message posted to the Wikileaks Twitter account earlier today.

  The message was followed by an even bolder statement two hours later: “The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.”

• Paul Chambers has decided today to proceed with High Court challenge

  Our client Paul Chambers has decided today to proceed with a High Court challenge to his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. Paul was convicted on 10 May 2010 by Doncaster Magistrates’ Court and his appeal was turned down by Doncaster Crown Court on 11 November 2010.

• San Diego Airport Says Recording TSA Gropings Is An Arrestible Offense?

  We already covered the guy who was arrested after stripping down for the TSA, highlighting how one of the charges was his failure to complete the security procedure (after stripping down, he pointed out there was no need for a pat down…). However, there was a second charge that was even more troubling that actually deserves a separate post, which is that he was also charged with “illegally recording the San Diego Airport Authority.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Carbon emissions set to be highest in history

  Emissions of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are roaring ahead again after a smaller-than-expected dip due to the worldwide recession. Scientists are forecasting that CO2 emissions from burning coal, oil and gas will reach their highest in history this year.

  Levels of the man-made greenhouse gas being dumped into the atmosphere have never been higher and are once again accelerating. Scientists have revised their figures on global CO2 emissions, showing that levels fell by just 1.3 per cent in 2009 – less than half of what was expected. This year they are likely to increase by more than 3 per cent, greater than the average annual increase for the last decade.

Finance

• If I Were a Billionaire…

  If I was a billionaire, I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write. Firstly, because my training, and especially my experience of getting richer in a growth based economy would have taught me that these ‘perfect storms’ when resource/financial bottlenecks supposedly loomed, historically worked out to be opportunities that spiked my digital wealth and incremental social power. Secondly, if I were a billionaire I wouldn’t believe what Im about to write because all my peers, advisors and friends would tell me that it’s caca. And lastly I wouldn’t believe what Im about to write as the implications would be too threatening, at least on the surface, to comprehend let alone integrate into my world view. All the same, if I were a billionaire, based on my understanding of our particular juncture of history, likely on the verge of transitioning away from marker claims back to real capital, here is what I would do….

• What $200,000 in Student Debt Looks Like

  The average 2009 college grad had $24,000 in student loan debt. But in today’s debt-wracked world, some have it much worse. Meet one of the outliers: 23 years old, more than $200,000 in student loans, begging for help.

• ALBA trade office opens in Havana

  “Based on the daily knowledge of our needs, we can speed up exchanges between our countries,” Gracia said.

• Corporate Welfare

  Corporate welfare is a term describing a government’s bestowal of money grants, tax breaks, or other special favorable treatment on corporations or selected corporations.

  The term compares corporate subsidies and welfare payments to the poor, and implies that corporations are much less needy of such treatment than the poor.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich

  At a time when memory is being erased and the political relevance of education is dismissed in the language of measurement and quantification, it is all the more important to remember the legacy and work of Paulo Freire. Freire is one of the most important educators of the 20th century and is considered one of the most important theorists of “critical pedagogy” – the educational movement guided by both passion and principle to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency, justice and democracy. His groundbreaking book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” has sold more than a million copies and is deservedly being commemorated this year – the 40th anniversary of its appearance in English translation – after having exerted its influence over generations of teachers and intellectuals in the Americas and abroad.

  Since the 1980s, there have been too few intellectuals on the North American educational scene who have matched Freire’s theoretical rigor, civic courage and sense of moral responsibility. And his example is more important now than ever before: with institutions of public and higher education increasingly under siege by a host of neoliberal and conservative forces, it is imperative for educators to acknowledge Freire’s understanding of the empowering and democratic potential of education. Critical pedagogy currently offers the very best, perhaps the only, chance for young people to develop and assert a sense of their rights and responsibilities to participate in governing, and not simply being governed by prevailing ideological and material forces.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• BBC’s Panorama claims Islamic schools teach antisemitism and homophobia

  Children in Islamic schools are being taught antisemitic and homophobic views from textbooks, the BBC’s Panorama will claim tonight.

• Data Security And Privacy Laws Missing In India

  Have you ever noticed that projects like Aadhar, national intelligence grid (Natgrid), crime and criminal tracking network & systems (CCTNS), etc have some common features? The first is that they all have great potentials to violate civil liberties of Indians like privacy rights. Another common feature is that all of them are projects related to law and order and intelligence gathering, irrespective what government claims, thus promoting the e-surveillance capabilities of India.

• EFF Discusses the Future of Internet Privacy at UN Internet Governance Forum

  EFF recently participated in the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Vilnius, Lithuania, advocating for the respect of citizens’ fundamental rights online. The IGF is an experimental and influential multi-stakeholder policy forum convened by the United Nations Secretary General in 2006, where civil society, industry, the technical community, and decision makers discuss key aspects of Internet governance issues on an equal footing. The informal nature of the IGF is designed to promote the full and frank exchange of ideas on important Internet policy issues without the knock-down-and-dragged-out conflicts that characterize other international fora where recommendations or binding treaties are made. This year, IGF brought together over 1,400 participants from around the world. Videos and transcripts of all the official meetings are now online and make for interesting viewing.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Vaizey insists he favours net neutrality – and agrees with Berners-Lee

  The communications minister, Ed Vaizey, has insisted to the Guardian that he is in favour of net neutrality, and that his speech on the subject has been misinterpreted.

  Ed Vaizey, who last week gave a speech on the internet and regulation (PDF) to an FT conference, told the Guardian that “I say ‘don’t block input’ [to the internet]. It’s my first principle.” He added that he thought people who criticise him for abandoning net neutrality haven’t read his speech: “I say the same as Berners-Lee.”

• The rights and wrongs of digital books

  There is one bright spot in all this, though. Amazon’s business model offers us the clearest possible demonstration that we should not allow the law to treat the products of creative expression in the same way as we do physical property.

  The idea of “intellectual property” deliberately conflates the two and allows politicians to pretend that laws about physical property should extend to digital downloads. We need to challenge this unjustifiable elision if we are to think seriously about copyright and business models in the age of electronics.

• Cooks Source Magazine Ignites Copyright Firestorm; Magazine Ceases Publishing

  The saga of Illadore (Monica Gaudio) and Cooks Source Magazine (Judith Griggs) draws to an end, with the closing of Cooks Source Magazine.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • The State of The Music Industry and the Delegitimization of Artists: Pt. 6 – The Hills are Alive…

    Now for the glass half full perspective. Music is special. It speaks to us all. We all want to hear a great song and share the ones we love with others. We are fans of music and we value it. We spend money and/or time hunting for and listening to music that moves us.

    Despite all the challenges, mischaracterizations and confusion, the music industry is finally beginning to reach its full potential.

    More people in the world are choosing to hear and engage with more music and more artists then ever before. More music is being used in the ever-expanding video outlets of TV, Webisodes, Films, YouTube, Video Games and other User Generated Content websites.

  • MP3Tunes safe harbor challenge a legal test for cloud storage

    A key test of digital copyright law will soon be heard in New York federal court over whether online music storage services and search engines can be held liable when users upload copyrighted material. The outcome could have far-reaching implications for so-called “cloud-based” services, which allow users to store their content on remote servers accessible via the Internet.

    Among the key issues is the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects Internet service providers like Google, Yahoo and Facebook from copyright liability if they promptly remove infringing content upon notification. Last Tuesday several influential digital rights groups filed a brief supporting the defendant in the case, MP3Tunes, urging the court to uphold the “safe harbor” provision, lest online innovation be stifled.

  • Jauchzet: Bach’s Organ Music Free Online

    It’s another model that would be good to see utilised elsewhere, ideally with the results being put into the public domain.

  • “Copyright owners better off in a regime that allows downloading from illegal sources”

    This striking headline comes from a note received from Vivien Rörsch (De Brauw), on two recent and equally striking Dutch decisions handed down last week by the Court of Appeal of The Hague: in the two separate cases the court ruled that, since downloading from illegal sources for private use was permitted under Dutch law, this was to the copyright owner’s advantage.

  • States subsidising Hollywood: bad idea

    According to Hollywood’s MPAA and various associated spin outfits, the US economy would be in tatters were it not for the major movie companies.

    So state subsidies are essential, say Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios, and Warner Bros Entertainment

    But that’s not the case, says a new report, drawing a furious retort from an MPAA talking head.

  • ACTA

    • Why ACTA is a Doomed

      ACTA will make copyright law less fair and even more unreasonable. The inevitable consequence will be that people will respect its laws even less, and feel even more justified in doing so. And so we have a paradox: the more that ACTA is put into practice, the more it will weaken the edifice it was supposed to buttress.

    • FFII expression of concerns with ACTA

      Contrary to Commission statements, ACTA is inconsistent with the EU acquis. Moreover, by still including patents and harsh criminal measures, ACTA threatens legitimate businesses as detailed below. We urge the European Parliament to exclude patents from the scope of ACTA and to obtain the opinion of the Court of Justice as to whether ACTA is compatible with the Treaties.

      ACTA is inconsistent with the EU acquis. The most explicit example regards Council Regulation (EC) No. 1383/2003 concerning customs action against goods suspected of infringing certain intellectual property rights (BMR). With regards to trademark goods, the BMR is limited to counterfeit goods. ACTA’s border measures section is, with regards to trademark goods, not limited to counterfeit goods. This has implications on access to medicine. [1] A second example regards damages. ACTA’s damages (suggested retail price) are higher than the acquis, the EU Enforcement Directive sets damages as lost profit or royalties. [2] Especially in combination with the Union patent, which will make litigation more profitable, we may see, in the ICT sector, the same patent litigation battlefield in Europe as in the United States. This will be harmful for European SMEs. [3] We believe an independent assessment on the relationship between ACTA and the EU acquis is needed.