12.20.10
Posted in Hardware at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Intel gives yet another reason to boycott its microchips
INTEL puts DRM on board and now kill switches too: “Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors have a remote kill switch”
Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors have a new feature that the chip giant is calling Anti-Theft 3.0. The processor can be disabled even if the computer has no Internet connection or isn’t even turned on, over a 3G network. With Intel anti-theft technology built into Sandy Bridge, David Allen, director of distribution sales at Intel North America, told ITBusiness that users have the option to set up their processor so that if their computer is lost or stolen, it can be shut down remotely.
For those who want to protect their computers from thieves, the ability to remotely disable them sounds great. We’re not sure the CPU is the component that should be targeted though. While a given stolen netbook, laptop, or desktop can no longer be turned on if Intel’s new kill switch is flipped, there’s nothing stopping the thief from taking out the HDD and putting it in another computer. As a result, you’ve only slightly slowed the criminal down and haven’t really managed to ensure your sensitive data is protected.
Given Intel's many crimes maybe it’s time to cheer for ARM or something else. █
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Posted in America, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 1:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Leaked diplomatic cables from Brazil show what Microsoft is up to around the school system which embraces GNU/Linux, affecting over 50 million children
ONE of the latest cables to be redacted and released is from Consulate of Sao Paulo and further down it states (“Microsoft” capitalised for emphasis):
¶21. Secretary Gutierrez next visited a branch of the National Commercial Apprenticeship Service (SENAC). SENAC is a University system begun in 1946 with the support of different Federations of Industry, including FIESP, which wanted to begin a system of schools that would increase the country’s stock of technically trained students. SENAC has 56 units in Sao Paulo State alone. The Secretary, Consul General, and Senior Commercial Officer were SIPDIS greeted by Joao Kulcsar, Director of the U.S. Study Center; Abram Szajman, President of SENAC and of the Federation of Commerce for Sco Paulo; and Emelio Umeoka, President of MICROSOFT. The group toured SENAC’s library, where they were given an overview of SENAC’s activities and resources, and then went across campus to MICROSOFT’s Center of Innovation learning center. Umeoka provided an overview of MICROSOFT’s investment in youth education and the goals of the Innovation Center, as well as a summary of other MICROSOFT corporate responsibility programs in Brazil. Following a photo with some of the Center’s students, the Secretary and others were escorted to a classroom, where they spent 30 minutes speaking to twelve students in a roundtable format about their different classes, incubator businesses, and hopes for future employment. A brief interview with SENAC’s internal television station followed, and Szajman and Umeoka and other SENAC representatives took their leave of the Secretary and his delegation.
This is very relevant to us because on many occasions before we have shown that Microsoft is trying to take schools in Brazil away from GNU/Linux and free/libre software. See for example:
Also see this wiki page about Brazil and Microsoft's high estimation of GNU/Linux market share in Brazil.
Do not let Microsoft hijack the minds of Brazilian children, who are tomorrow’s generation of leaders. Regarding Microsoft’s destructive hijack of Yahoo!, for example, Groklaw wrote some days ago: “So what are you trying to say? That partnering with Microsoft doesn’t pay off or something?”
Pay attention to it to avoid repeating the mistakes of others, including OLPC. The expert when it comes to abducting national education systems is the Gates Foundation.
As a side note, Microsoft has used Brazil to sell the impression that GNU/Linux is only for the poor, but according to these new numbers, GNU/Linux users spend the most money.
The Humble Indie Bundle #2 just came out three days ago with the Braid, Cortex Command, Mechanarium, Osmos, and Revenge of the Titans games for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. Like the original Humble Indie Bundle, you pay what you want. While this unique game offering has just been going on for three days, the developers have already raked in more than $900,000 USD. At the time of writing they have banked away $911,134.35 and it looks like over the weekend they should exceed $1 million USD.
Just like in last year’s Humble Bundle, GNU/Linux users are the most generous (or maybe richest). This also shows that money can be made by sharing. █
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Posted in America, Apple, Intellectual Monopoly at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Kashmera
Summary: Apple’s cultural grip is expended with help from the Canadian government, which ought to reassess its commitment to Canadian sovereignty
Canadian politics have been a stormy turf recently. With the G20 fiasco pretty much revived, Hollywood trying to rewrite copyright law in Canada, and also a tough debate around the Internet, it becomes clear that Techrights will dedicate more time to covering degradation of rights in the largest American nation. “Canada spends tax dollars promoting Apple” claims this famous Canadian blog, stating:
George W. Harper’s weenies are spending God knows how many thousands of tax dollars contributed by hard-pressed Canadians, and blowing how many man-and-women hours on promoting a pure-and-simple Apple commercial product?
This is not entirely shocking, neither is it acceptable because Apple is a proprietary software company from a foreign country. More interestingly, however, should Canadian politicians start charging Apple royalties for free endorsement in phrases like “iPod tax”? How come Canadians use this phrase? Watch the images where Apple brands are being promoted in Canada, going under matching descriptions which name only the hypePod. From Professor Geist:
Earlier today I walked a few blocks from my office to Ottawa’s Rideau Centre to attend a press conference with Industry Minister Tony Clement and Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, who promised an important announcement. The two ministers stood in front of an HMV and a group of students wearing t-shirts with No iPod tax logos on the back to declare that they were firmly set against a massive new tax on technology for all the holiday shoppers in the mall. The Ministers claimed that all three opposition parties supported a tax of up to $75, which (reminiscent of the Dion “tax on everything” campaign) would apply to all technology devices and even cars.
There is more to portable media players than hypePod. And by the way, it is amazing that James Moore is still in the government given the notoriety he earned. Cablegate is guaranteed to shed more light on the outrageous copyright lawmaking in Canada, just as it did in Spain. Only a fraction of the cables was redacted and released thus far. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 12:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New Microsoft study indicates that Windows — not applications for Windows — contains what’s needed for malware to run
Fake disk defraggers are one new form of threat to Windows users, who are of course forced to use a deficient file system such a long time after its inception. But the more noteworthy news is this piece from Glyn Moody where Microsoft gets ‘owned’ using its own ‘studies’:
This makes it clear that we are talking about code that is downloaded and then executed. According to the report, all the tests were carried out on a Windows 7 system. So in other words, we are talking about Windows malware. The undoubtedly thorough tests in the present report simply underline the huge scale of the Windows malware problem, and hints at the considerable costs it imposes on users, businesses and the economy as a result. What emerges from this test, then, is that Internet Explorer is better at solving problems of Microsoft’s own making than third parties without direct access to the Windows code and its flaws.
Frankly, I would expect no less: it is Microsoft’s responsibility to sort out these weaknesses in its own software, and if it produced a browser that exacerbated the problem it would be doubly culpable. But for a really fair test, what we would need to see would be Firefox running on a GNU/Linux system, Safari running on a Mac box and Chrome on ChromeOS, and then to compare those systems with Microsoft’s own combo of Internet Explorer and Windows. I’m pretty sure that Internet Explorer would not emerge as such a star in these circumstances.
But failing that kind of comparison, what the report’s test shows is quite simple: that irrespective of which browser you use, you really shouldn’t be running Windows at all if you want to minimise your exposure to malware.
Why use Vista 7 then? No point to it if one wishes to use applications like Firefox. GNU/Linux on the desktop is really painless these days. For reasons of security (Windows slowed down due to malware) I’ve moved people to GNU/Linux and they never complain. Microsoft understands that and it’s probably why even operating systems like Chrome OS are a real threat to Windows. For the sake of security it also makes some design improvements or compromises (a double-edge sword). We’ll soon post a lot of news about Windows security. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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With the above setup I just use my usual coding environment, which is emacs plus a bunch of GNU screen sessions in a gnome-terminal.
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Graphics Stack
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Development work towards the major Clutter 1.6 stable release has been progressing nicely within the Clutter 1.5 development branch. These recent development snapshots have brought performance improvements, a GLSL generation back-end, greater usage of OpenGL FBOs, new API functionality, and even a Clutter Wayland back-end. A new development release of Clutter (v1.5.10) is now here and it brings an evdev input back-end.
What good is an evdev input back-end for Clutter? Well, this provides support for input devices on Linux when using EGL-based back-ends rather than just a traditional X Server, etc.
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Applications
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“DBX big dock” pack is a DockBarX theme package especially created for those that use DockBarX with Avant Window Navigator and comes with updated “Unite” themes (Unite_v and Unite_h) with new blink attenton effects as well as versions for these themes without backgrounds and bigger icons for Faenza icon theme users (the themes are called Faenza_Unite_v and Faenza_Unite_h). The pack also includes a mod of the DockBarX “dock” theme with nice colors and attention effects.
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Desktop Environments
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In the past eight years or so, Gnome Desktop enjoyed more or less small yet steady improvements that have brought it to where it is now—IMHO one of the best desktop environments. However, along with the side push from the over-hyped release of KDE4, there has been a growing number of people who wished for a major change, instead of steady improvement. Their efforts are to be realized in GNOME 3 which will most likely be in Fedora 15. Let alone, for now, the tiny problem that this messes up my workflow in a way that it is much less efficient albeit much more eye-candy-ish. That’s not the point of today’s post. Today I want to focus on the problem of visual identity.
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Red Hat Family
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As a result the firm is raising their price target on the company to $55 from $48.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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XBMC 10 “Dharma” is released, this new release comes with many new features and support to many new media formats, now XBMC play all of the current media formats available, including the new WebM/VP8 codec that is the latest buzz. Hardware acceleration has been added in windows (Vista or 7) via DXVA2, CrystalHD has been added for all platforms (best supported in OSX and Linux), VDPAU support has been improved in Linux, and VAAPI support has been added for the hardware that supports it in Linux. This new version comes also with 11 different skins , all with distinct looks and personalities. There are far too many improvements to list here, so check out the changelog for a full list.
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Project Releases
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Standards/Consortia
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What was most interesting was the fact that the performance of HTML5 appeared to be superior to Flash-based casual games.
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The Ukrainian opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, has been charged with misusing state funds while serving as prime minister, her spokeswoman says.
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Science
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Physicists have stored information for nearly two minutes inside the magnetic spins of atomic nuclei, producing the longest-lasting spintronic device yet and what could be the world’s tiniest computer memory.
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Theoretical physicists are working to unlock the secrets of a new class of matter known as topological insulators and topological superconductors.
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Security
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Anonymous is not making zombie armies, they make their protests with their own computers. They are not very anonymous either, as evidenced by the kids who have been caught. As in Gandhi’s time, public awareness can be raised by arrested protesters. Peaceful protest succeeds by making the population aware of injustice. Isn’t it ironic that Anonymous is not engaged in illegal “cracking,” unlike the authoritarian DDoS attacks illegally targetting WikiLeaks.
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The concept of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks finally entered the mainstream public consciousness this month after assaults on the websites of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal made front page news.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A 37-year-old former Transportation Security Administration officer has been sentenced to three years’ probation for stealing laptop computers from passengers’ luggage at Philadelphia International Airport.
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Cablegate
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Many intelligent women (including the European group Women Against Rape and one of my favorite bloggers, Furry Girl) recognize the pursuit of Julian Assange for what it is: A politically-motivated persecution of a man who embarrassed several of the most powerful governments on Earth, using rape as an excuse in order to win the support of silly, gullible women (including, apparently, a number of the staff at Jezebel). As Katrin Axelsson points out in the linked Women Against Rape article, this is no different from the old Southern practice of lynching uppity black men for looking at white women. It’s not a defense of women, but rather an exploitation.
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Explaining the parallels between WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg compares himself to Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange to the New York Times.
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Sites have been removed by their hosting companies, servers seized by police or other governmental authorities, take-down requests issued under the rule of law: none of these prevented information spreading.
But the issues run deeper than this. As former US president Thomas Jefferson once stated, “information is the currency of democracy”. Democracy – the rule of the people – as currently understood and practiced is, and has long been, severely restricted.
Power is abused in our name by governments and transnational corporations around the world: they fight illegal wars; abuse and kill people; pillage property and planet. The powerful accumulate wealth and force the majority – the rest of us – to pay for it: with our health, our freedom, our time, our money and with our lives. For a long time, we have been deceived about the reasons for this: it is our right for the truth to be known. Without that right, democracy cannot and does not exist. The current assault on WikiLeaks is yet another instance of democracy-hating by elites.
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Libraries are institutions with important values regarding information. They have their codes of ethics, which are derived from the broad field of information ethics and varies between countries.
35 Countries have official professional codes of ethics for libraries and the US is of course one of them, with American Library Association (ALA) codes of ethics.
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Back in more innocent times, in January of this year, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the Newseum (a 250,000-square foot monument to media complacency) in which she introduced the concept of “21st Century Statecraft” – a term referring to the recent State Department push for the use of social and new media for diplomatic and geopolitical ends. In this speech she affirmed the US’s commitment to the “principles of internet freedom”, a new Human Right for the 21st Century. Clinton waxed lyrical about the ethical, financial, political and practical reasons why freedom of access and use of the internet should be considered an absolute right – noting that America “stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas”. The State Department, it seemed, was committed to a comprehensive and open approach to online freedom and engagement, a new stance for a government which had hitherto tended towards a more iterative approach to interaction with the modern world.
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Assange offense to tabloid reporters sleazy questions.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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On Monday morning, Fang Binxing, the President of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications who is known as the “father of the Great Firewall,” opened a Sina Microblog account. Within the first three hours, over 3818 netizens followed him, and despite rapid deleting of comments to his posts by Sina editors, many comments still appeared, the vast majority of which made fun of or cursed him. At 12:55 pm Beijing time, about three hours after it opened, his original tweets and all the comments disappeared.
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THE UK Government is to combat the early sexualization of children by blocking internet pornography unless parents request it, it was revealed today.
The move is intended to ensure that children are not exposed to sex as a routine by-product of the internet. It follows warnings about the hidden damage being done to children by sex sites.
The biggest broadband providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, are being called to a meeting next month by Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, and will be asked to change how pornography gets into homes.
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Internet service providers are to be asked by the government to tighten up on website pornography to try to combat the early sexualisation of children.
Ministers believe broadband providers should consider automatically blocking sex sites, with individuals being required to opt in to receive them, rather than opt out and use the available computer parental controls.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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When I first heard about UN members wanting to regulate the internet, the first thing that popped in to my mind was, “will never work”. However, the second thing that came to my mind was that even if control was successful, one name – Galileo, the famous astronomer of the late 1500s to early 1600s.
Galileo put forth a theory that said that the Earth was not the center of the universe. The prevailing theory at that point in history was that the Earth, not the sun, was at the center of the universe. Unfortunately for Galileo, this drew controversy from the church and he came under significant pressure to denounce his theories.
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This, of course, implies that ISPs are somehow unfairly carrying the burden of the services people access online. It may sound nice, but the problem is that it’s almost entirely false. Individuals pay for their own bandwidth, and companies pay for their bandwidth. What the ISPs are hoping to do is to effectively double and triple charge both sides in an effort to squeeze even more money out of the system than they already do. What’s ignored is that broadband services are already quite profitable, and they’re already getting paid for this stuff. What’s really happening is that — just as content providers “overvalue” their content, this story is about ISPs overvaluing their own contribution, and wanting a larger piece of the pie concerning money made online. What they ignore is that the reason there are so many useful services online, that make it worthwhile to buy internet access in the first place, is because of the lack of such tollbooths.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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But some years ago I was in this position with what I consider one of the top television programmes of all time. Aaron Sorkin’s ‘ The West Wing’. Scheduling in the UK (on Channel 4 and its cable channels) meant one season was being broadcast at the same time as the succeeding one and, very clearly, not only would watching both spoiler me without any external interaction, but we were also somewhat behind my friends in the USA and elsewhere who, like myself, were deep in discussion about the series’ storylines and arc.
So I torrented it to catch up.
And, whilst I admit that fact let me also add that I bought the DVD box sets for every season as soon as they became available (as well as re-watching it on UK television once it arrived here). No studio or artist lost out, indeed they profited over and above what they would have received had I solely watched it on the local services. I could also keep up with discussion online about the story arc of the show at the time it was happening. Even now I have an annual ‘re-watch all seven seasons from the start’.
And The West Wing isn’t the only show this applies too. Buffy, Angel, Dark Angel, Firefly, and others too have seen me buy the DVDs once they are available.
So I’m left wondering what the answer is. Where a television programme is going to be available to me and everyone else in the country to watch for free, is there any actual financial loss incurred by anyone if I were to download it ahead of broadcast?
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Succeeding in the music business isn’t just about selling albums anymore. The lead singer of OK Go on how to make it without a record label (treadmill videos help)
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The recent action by US authorities against so-called rogue websites comes on the heels of significant lobbying efforts by two well known anti-piracy groups. In the last quarter the MPAA and RIAA together spent a total of $1.8 million on lobby efforts in Washington. Public records reveal that the industry groups focused heavily on legislation and authorities involved in domain name seizures.
Assange in respect for himself
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Microsoft at 12:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With neither a tombstone nor an announcement, Microsoft products are popping
LESS THAN two years ago we started maintaining a list of dead products from Microsoft. We will need to catch up with ones we missed, hopefully at the end of this month.
It’s worth pointing out that Web sites today highlight the loss of “Genuine Advantage” in Microsoft Office. It’s dead, reveals a source close to Microsoft:
Late last week, with absolutely no public announcement, Microsoft quietly retired one cog in its antipiracy machine.
Microsoft has no “antipiracy machine”. It’s called counterfeiting, not piracy. And Microsoft loves counterfeiting in many cases. In a way, “Genuine Advantage” cannot possibly qualify as a product. It’s just a two-word euphemism which strives to spin an antifeature as a feature (using two positive words, “Genuine” and “Advantage”).
More recently we came to realise that Microsoft’s latest phone platform is a failure in the market, which ought to confirm the imminent death of Silver Lie [sic]. Microsoft tried using its phone platform to duck claims that Silver Lie was dead. Likewise, Zune has been carried along despite it being mostly neglected for years (but not formally discontinued). In IRC today, Oiaohm writes: “Really lot of MS dead products don’t get advertised any more. Instead they just fade out. [About Zune] Notice how they avoided saying this is dead. They just merged it into Xbox and Windows phone. Basically MS is getting better at hiding their dead.” There will be more of that in today’s IRC logs.
Microsoft “Lost Its Buzz And Became The ‘Underdog’” says one writer in the Huff & Puff, noting that: [via]
a lost decade that has seen its fortunes sag in multiple businesses, this same company is–not without justification–referred to affectionately as the underdog by the head of a Web business that did not even exist when Microsoft first developed an Internet browser. A Newsweek columnist recently dismissed Microsoft as no longer a source of fear in the technology world, but rather “a bit of a joke.” Nearly ten years ago, a newspaper had declared Microsoft a step away from “world domination.”
How did such a seemingly indomitable enterprise lose its formidable grip on the marketplace? Are Microsoft’s best days now behind it? Can it recover its former glory (if not its notoriety) in the twenty-teens?
Microsoft’s conspicuous slide attests to the tenuous nature of power and supremacy in the Internet age, and the degree to which the product itself–technology–can radically reshape business models, creating new markets for upstarts and opening pathways around previously insurmountable gatekeepers. In an era in which innovation is perhaps more important than ever, Microsoft’s experience illustrates how nothing is really certain for anyone.
Meanwhile it is claimed by Wired Magazine that Vista 7 won’t be suitable for mobile devices.
• Windows is not for fingers.
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• Windows is too bloated for mobile devices.
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Microsoft is more or less finished in this area, but it has the nerve to extort its rivals using software patents. When many of Microsoft’s products are dropped the company will technically be a patent troll in an increasing number of areas. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Many FOSS projects are on-par with (or better than) their closed source counter parts when it comes to the number of features and functionality. Why is it then that FOS softwares are (typically) less commonly used by the general public?
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IBM has been in the business of large migrations to GNU/Linux since before Limux.
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Shopping almost done now? Then let’s start thinking ahead to next year, when we can only hope Fossil’s drool-worthy Android-connected watch will be available. Cue the sugarplums for 2011!
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Desktop
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One interesting stat is that Konqueror shows 3.8%. KDE must be doing well. Perhaps the converts prefer the comfort of starting in the lower-left corner of things…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats.
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Google
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Sometimes we feel that we are spending a lot of time in updating Facebook status and checking twitter timeline, but did you planned that way? No, right. Actually, if you are active on Facebook like social networking sites and having lots many friends over there, then it is difficult to avoid to see their status and updates. Bloggers used to check their traffic every hour and sometime their earning at an interval of not more than 10 minutes. But we don’t plan things that way, it just happens.
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Ballnux
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T-Mobile has reduced the price of the Samsung Galaxy Tab from $400 to $350 which makes it the lowest priced Galaxy Tab available in the United States.
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Kernel Space
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Earlier this week there was the release of a new open-source Linux driver by an engineer at Texas Instruments. The TI DMM-TILER is this new driver and its for the dynamic memory manager block on Texas Instruments hardware. “Its purpose is to organize video/image memory in a 2-dimensional fashion to limit memory bandwidth and facilitate 0 effort rotation and mirroring. The TILER driver facilitates allocating, freeing, as well as mapping 2D blocks (areas) in the TILER container(s). It also facilitates rotating and mirroring the allocated blocks or its rectangular subsections.”
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David Airlie, the Linux kernel DRM maintainer who would need to approve the pulling of this TI DMM-TILER driver if it’s to live within the Direct Rendering Manager portion of the kernel, has already asked what is the use-case for this driver and what open-source applications take advantage of this DMM interface. So far there’s no response yet.
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SoftKinetic developed a 3D gesture recognition platform long before Microsoft released Kinect — and it supports Linux as well as Windows. Despite the head start, the promised consumer gaming and television controllers have yet to appear. That should change in 2011, a company spokesperson says, thanks to an influx of venture cash, some big league partners and a plan to lure Kinect hackers into become its developers.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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The latest Ubuntu 10.10 offers all that a desktop, server or netbook user needs. It has Open Office, which is the equivalent of Microsoft Office, in providing all the basic applications like text editors and spreadsheet software. It has media players and many other specialized apps, which can be downloaded and installed directly from the Internet. Let us have a look at the best Ubuntu 10.10 apps in the next section.
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Tomboy notes is a great tool when you are looking for a scribble pad to write down a few words, but sometimes you need more. What if you are asked to write a report on some topic; a scribble pad is good to jot down a few points but in a digital world you can get a lot more help from web links, various documents, images etc. combined together with the text than with only the latter. No scribble pad(physical or a software) will give you that kind of freedom. This is where I love Basket note pads. Its like working on a virtual scrapbook.
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Tux Paint is meant to be a simple drawing program for young children. It is not meant as a general-purpose drawing tool. It IS meant to be fun and easy to use. Sound effects and a cartoon character help let the user know what’s going on, and keeps them entertained.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Yesterday we figured the Humble Indie Bundle #2 would earn a million dollars during its seven day sale and likely hit that mark today. Well, it has succeeded in doing so! Literally just seconds ago it crossed the million dollar USD mark.
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The Linux user is paying nearly $14 for the bundle while Windows users are paying the least at about six and a half dollars and the Mac OS X gamers are paying about two dollars more than the Microsoft gamers.
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Zero Ballistics is a tank-based multi-player game that’s a combination of a first person shooter and military tank combat. It’s been over two and a half years since the release of Zero Ballistics v1.1, but arriving yesterday was Zero Ballistics 2.0.
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OilRush is being released in March of 2011, but we have secured an internal development build of this strategy game to offer you the very first and exclusive preview with a number of screenshots.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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While I agree with MJ in situations where the answer is accessible to the wider community, but often only developers working for you, the manager, are in a position to reply – at that point, you have a choice: get the information off your developer and answer yourself, or ask him to answer the question. and I’ve found that asking on the list has the positive side-effects I mentioned.
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WingPanel is a new ‘space-saving top panel’ created by, you’ve guessed it, the elementary team.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A new ISO image of PCLinuxOS, 2010.12, was released at the end of last week. This is even a bit ahead of schedule, since they generally release a new installed every three months, and the last one was 2010.10.
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For people coming from windows, PClinuxOS is a great Alternative, it is easy to use and with eyecandy interface. Find more informations about PCLinux in this Link.
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YES, MANDRIVA 2010.2 IS HERE!
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical today announced Ubuntu Developer Day to take place in India on the 27th of January. Ubuntu Developer Day will be the largest event in Bangalore next year that focuses on getting developers productive on this massively growing platform.
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DeviantArtist Musl1m has mocked up his idea of how the Ubuntu Software Centre should look as it evolves its ever-growing feature set.
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The latest update to Unity o’er on the Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha has restored window control panel integration for maximised applications.
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1. Android to catalyze growth in the commercial Linux market — As device manufacturers take Android into new application classes beyond mobile, the commercial Linux market will experience further growth.
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Robotis is shipping an 18-inch, humanoid robot developed as an open source research platform by Virginia Tech’s Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa). The Linux-ready Darwin-OP can walk, kick a ball, and pick itself up after falling over — thanks to an Intel Atom-based FitPC2i SBC (single board computer), an ARM Cortex-M3 based management controller, 20 actuators, and audio/video sensors.
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Phones
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Android
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It’s Dec. 16 and Google Nexus S hits the BestBuy stores today. Despite snow warning we drove to the nearest BestBuy to get the Nexus S. It was not available at the store nearby, so we drove to another store. We were lucky as they had only 3 more Nexus S left. We were planning to buy two but resorted on buying just one.
We overheard the guy while billing us, he was telling his colleague, “This phone is selling faster than the iPhone 4.” A big compliment for Google, Samsung and Nexus S.
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A flap has arisen between ITG Investment Research and market intelligence blog Asymco over data regarding Verizon, Android and Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) sales figures.
Android’s strong showing is killing off the RIM BlackBerry, according to an Asymco analysis, based on a report from ITG Investment Research.
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While many associate Android directly with Google, you might not know that it was actually developed by Android Inc., a company Google purchased in 2005.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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If you are a developer working on Firefox add-ons, here is good news for you. The Jetpack team has announced the release of Add-on SDK 1.0b1.
Add-on SDK 1.0b1 helps add-on developers in many ways as it “combines tools for creating, testing, and packaging add-ons with a set of high-level APIs that make it simple to access pages, tabs, and other browser features.”
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CMS
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Diaspora is a open source, distributed social networking software. The joindiaspora site is an instance that the primary authors of the code are running in order to help them fix issues before publishing a stable release (capacity and otherwise). So, after poking around on it for a few days, a few thoughts:
On the good side:
* Nice to see that everything is https all the time
* “Aspects” are cool. It’s basically a grouping of your friends. You can add friends to multiple aspects, create new aspects called whatever you like, etc. Then you can share something with just one or several aspects, or everything. It allows you to narrow things nicely if you want to only send something to close friends or co-workers
* The facebook connection at least works. I was able to share something to the world and it showed up on my facebook account. There’s a twitter connection as well
* There is a ‘export all my stuff as xml’ and ‘export all my photos’ function. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work currently, but it’s nice to be able to have the option to move all your data to another ‘seed’ (diaspora instance) and have everything keep working.
* There’s a checkbox to determine if you show up in searches or not, and one for email when people add comments, etc
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Standards/Consortia
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For the first time ever, the Open Document Format (ODF) event known as the ODF Plugfest is coming to the United Kingdom. The event, which will take place on the 24th and the 25th of February at the Maidenhead Town Hall in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, is expected to bring together both corporate and independent developers to test the interoperability of ODF documents.
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During Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings last summer, Sen. Tom Coburn asked her whether a law requiring Americans to eat their fruits and vegetables could be justified as an exercise of the federal government’s constitutional authority to “regulate commerce…among the several states.” Kagan’s stubborn resistance to answering Coburn’s question suggested it was not as wacky as it may have seemed.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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South Korea’s planned live-fire military exercises started Monday afternoon, the country’s ministry of defense said.
North Korea has said the drill could ignite a war and has promised to respond militarily, but has also agreed to a series of actions after former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson urged the North to not take an aggressive response.
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“Israeli War Crimes,” the enormous advertisement reads. “Your tax dollars at work.”
To the right of the image is a group of children — one little boy stares out at the viewer, the others gawk at a demolished building, all rebar and crumbled concrete.
It’s an ad you’ll be seeing soon on a handful of Metro buses in downtown Seattle.
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Donna D’Errico, who also modelled for Playboy, believes she was deliberately targeted by TSA security officials because of her figure and career as a swimsuit pin up.
“It is my personal belief that they pulled me aside because they thought I was attractive,” she told AOL Weird News.
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Canada’s privacy watchdog has launched a sweeping audit to find out whether the federal government is doing enough to protect the privacy of air travellers, given the heightened focus on national security.
Jennifer Stoddart, newly reappointed as the country’s privacy commissioner for a three-year term, has devoted many hours in recent years to taking on online giants Facebook and Google. Stoddart said “identity management” for citizens and consumers in the online world remains a priority — but so do national-security issues.
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Wave a tear-stained handkerchief for the drone that changed the face of air war: The Air Force won’t buy any more Predators. The Reaper drone is about to be in full effect.
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Cablegate
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Vice President Joe Biden says the Justice Department is looking at what the U.S. can do to stop more document releases from WikiLeaks.
Biden says he won’t comment on that process, but has strong words about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (ah-SAHNJ’).
Biden says if Assange conspired to get classified documents with a member of the U.S. military, then “that’s fundamentally different” than if a reporter were given classified material by a source.
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Spanish MEP Raül Romeva i Rueda (Greens/EFA) told the House that Assange revealed the truth and that should be protected.
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Karl Rove’s help for Sweden as it assists the Obama administration’s prosecution against WikiLeaks could be the latest example of the adage, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
Rove has advised Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt for the past two years after resigning as Bush White House political advisor in mid-2007. Rove’s resignation followed the scandalous Bush mid-term political purge of nine of the nation’s 93 powerful U.S. attorneys.
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The Agency today issues the following brief analysis of the information security events regarding Wikileaks.
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The release by WikiLeaks of US government cables is a sheer triumph for transparency.
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Shiar Youssef, a spokesman for the UK pressure group Corporate Watch, called the withdrawal of corporate support for WikiLeaks “pretty disgusting”.
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Companies including Amazon and PayPal have pulled the plug on Wikileaks, under direct pressure from the US government. As such, the US government is engaged in a campaign to suppress critical comment and free speech. They have a right to take the leaker to court, and no doubt will do so: but direct and personal political intervention to remove websites is highly dangerous.
These companies now hold the keys to our ability to exercise our freedom of expression. This is a greater responsibility than playing nice with outraged politicians. Corporations should be insisting on the due process of law.
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It’s unclear how Anonymous, or those represented by the Anon News post, want to proceed but certainly, moves such as the one perpetrated (word used advisedly) by whoever hacked Gawker, don’t help anyone.
But without the direct actions taken by Operation Payback supporters, and Assange, we’d still be where we were a couple of years ago.
Where do we go from here?
The only way is up, and providing the fuel are the people behind both groups, disparate as they may seem to be.
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Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism faculty and officers tell President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that “while we hold varying opinions of Wikileaks’ methods and decisions, we all believe that in publishing diplomatic cables Wikileaks is engaging in journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment” and that “as a historical matter, government overreaction to publication of leaked material in the press has always been more damaging to American democracy than the leaks themselves.”
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WikiLeaks is only the beginning.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The demand-shift response to the Quake of ’89 is actually a helpful narrative to understand larger demand-shifts now taking place in the global oil markets. And, the story also helps to clarify the primacy of supply, and how demand is only inelastic up to certain barriers. Yes, it’s true that Bay area drivers used many highways and roadways that were affected in the quake: right up until the time they collapsed. The expense of replacing those highways however, and the opportunity for other transport solutions obviated a full resurrection in the years following the temblor. In the same way that this transportation demand was never fully rebuilt but shifted elsewhere to other solutions, the OECD bloc of Japan, Europe, and the United States have been downshifting their own demand for oil the past decade as oil prices have marched higher, shifting oil supply to other parts of the world. This ongoing earthquake, if you will, of relentlessly higher oil prices keeps removing tranches of oil demand from here in the OECD. And it’s never been rebuilt. This process been underway for at least five years, and shows no sign of reversing.
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Finance
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The bonuses were agreed in 2008 months before Goldman took $10billion of U.S. bailout money, but due to technicalities there is no way to stop the bank from paying them out.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein will receive a bonus of $24million this year Goldman Sachs President and COO Gary Cohn will receive a bonus of $24million this year Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein (left) and President and COO Gary Cohn (right) will each receive a bonus of $24million this year Goldman’s largesse comes as America’s economy struggles to recover from financial meltdown caused by risky bank lending.
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ALL the revelations this year about dubious practices in the mortgage servicing arena — think robo-signers and forged signatures — have rightly raised borrowers’ fears that companies handling their loans may not be operating on the up and up.
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The news that some of Bernard Madoff’s victims could be getting half their money back was of little comfort to Richard and Cynthia Friedman, and others who saw their life savings erased in the mammoth fraud.
Just days earlier, the Long Island couple learned that Richard’s 85-year-old mother was one of hundreds of longtime Madoff clients sued in recent weeks for millions by the trustee handling the case.
“He is going after innocent people,” Cynthia Friedman said of the trustee, Irving Picard.
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The Woodbridge company, Total Realty Management, was formed in the mid-2000s by real estate agents Mark Dain and Mark Jalajel. The company marketed vacant pieces of land in the Carolinas as investment properties to be bought with no money down and no payments for two years.
Buyers said that Dain and Jalajel told them the properties could be flipped quickly for easy profit and that the modest salaries of a schoolteacher or a delicatessen worker, who were already paying a home mortgage, were not a problem.
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STRUGGLING homeowners can sometimes benefit from hiring a lawyer to try to modify a mortgage or avert foreclosure, but avoiding scam artists and sketchy practices requires vigilance.
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If we take a look at California employment, for example, we see that there is in fact no economic recovery taking place in the nation’s largest state. None of the jobs lost in the financial crisis and recession have been replaced. Worse, that California’s employed population is now running at levels last seen ten years ago, means that the unemployment rate itself is very high, and is not coming down. Well, California like the rest of the United States has a bigger population now than ten years ago.
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Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has been receiving a lot of media attention for his gadfly role as ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Since the Obama administration took office, he’s aggressively pursued investigations against favorite GOP targets like ACORN and alleged wrongdoing by the administration in trying to keep Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate race. Last week, he released a report entitled, “How the White House Public Relations Campaign on the Oil Spill is Harming the Actual Clean-up.”
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California Rep. Darrell Issa is already eyeing a massive expansion of oversight for next year, including hundreds of hearings; creating new subcommittees; and launching fresh investigations into the bank bailout, the stimulus and, potentially, health care reform.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Germany on Wednesday unveiled plans to beef up Internet privacy after a public outcry over Google’s Street View service. The new law would allow people to opt out from tracking services as well as ban services that combine data to create comprehensive profiles of individuals. German media on Thursday are critical of the plans, asking if they go far enough.
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A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected the Obama administration’s contention that the government is never required to get a court warrant to obtain cell-site information that mobile-phone carriers retain on their customers.
[...]
The most significant and recent decision came Tuesday, when a different federal appeals court said for the first time the government must obtain a court warrant for an internet service provider to grant the authorities access to a suspect’s e-mail.
The case that concluded Wednesday concerns historical cell-site location information, which carriers usually retain for about 18 months. The data identifies the cell tower the customer was connected to at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call — and is often used in criminal prosecutions and investigations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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That last comment refers to the brouhaha over Comcast’s demand for cash to deliver cached Netflix traffic to its subscribers, and its fight with Zoom Telephonics over cable modem testing (we’ll have a story on that battle soon).
Also on the FCC agenda for December: a Notice of Inquiry on how to bring texting, photos, and video to 911 services.
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That is not the case now, I am simply not satisfied with current levels of competition and prices. For example, retail data roaming prices have not matched falls in wholesale prices in 2010. In fact the average prices makes consumers’ eyes water. Frankly this is a nightmare for businesspeople, for tourists, for young people in particular.
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A new study suggests that the United States could do better when it comes to home ISP prices. The Technology Policy Institute’s latest survey of the global high speed Internet market finds that US residential broadband subscription rates have “remained fairly stable” over the last three years, rising by just two percent.
That’s good, of course, since they didn’t go way up. But residential broadband prices have fallen in most other countries, the paper notes—in some instances by as much as 40 percent.
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It still appears that the books themselves are no longer for sale. That’s Amazon’s prerogative, of course, but the lack of explanation still seems pretty weak — especially after supposedly defending not being about censorship. Also, there is no explanation of just what kind of technical “glitch” this was. Considering the trouble the company got into for deleting books in the past, you would think this would have been more carefully reviewed. Finally, the fact that it took nearly a week and numerous high profile media mentions to get Amazon to respond to questions from the authors is pretty weak customer service.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Paul Levy has been staying on top of a rather important aspect of the ongoing Rosetta Stone/Google lawsuit over whether or not Google is liable for trademark infringement over keywords ads that might point to counterfeit copies of Rosetta Stone software. So far, Rosetta Stone has lost badly and it seems likely that will continue. However, what caught Levy’s attention is that in the appeal, both sides worked out an agreement to file certain aspects of their briefs “under seal” thus hiding from the public large segments of the facts related to this case that will surely set an important precedent one way or the other. That’s hugely problematic and Levy complained about it. Both companies agreed to unseal their briefs, though Google has not yet done so, and Rosetta Stone only did so at the last minute, leaving little to no time for potential amici to make use of the unredacted filings in making their own arguments. However, once Rosetta Stone’s brief was released unredacted, it was quickly realized that the redacted sections had no reasons for the redactions in the first place, as they did not contain confidential information at all.
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According to some of the documents posted on Wikileaks, to lobby, nudge, pressure, threaten … (I let you pick the right one) foreign governments into adopting stricter “IP” laws, in order to “protect” our “strategic interests” in their countries.
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Quinn himself admits: “I know that over the last several years I have not been one to want to jump up and down over the problems created by patent trolls…”
I hope that this will mark the opening of a more constructive dialogue. If these posts of his are any indication, then we actually share the same broad goal of maximizing innovation. Before now, I honestly wasn’t sure he placed that goal as the prime directive.
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David Leonhardt reviews a new book, titled THE MASTER SWITCH The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu link here. The theme of the book is that “History shows a typical progression of information technologies from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel from open to closed system.”
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The MPAA and their colleagues in The Netherlands appear to have shut down more than two dozen BitTorrent, Usenet and other file-sharing sites today. Accused of linking to movies, music, TV shows and games, at least one domain appears to be redirecting to the website of Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN.
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Copyrights
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According to the Guardian, the Motion Picture Association filed an injunction against BT yesterday. The injunction requests that BT block access to a website called Newzbin2 because it links to other websites who host pirated copies of television shows and films for free download.
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This week, members of Pirate Party UK have been voting on whether the party should officially endorse a ‘Yes’ vote in the May Referendum on changing the electoral system to AV.
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A federal judge has ruled on summary judgment that BlueBeat.com is liable for violating copyrights in thousands of songs. In making the decision, the judge had swatted away one of the stranger defenses to infringement of sound recordings.
Last year, BlueBeat made headlines for selling tracks for 25 cents and streaming songs for free. Most notably, the company was one of the only venues at the time that offered for sale digital tracks from The Beatles — and the only U.S.-based company that claimed to do so legally.
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George Clinton has filed a copyright lawsuit against members of the Black Eyed Peas, UMG Recordings and Cherry Lane Music for allegedly sampling his song (Not Just) Knee Deep on a Grammy-award nominated album.
According to the complaint, filed on Friday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Clinton’s song wound up in remixes of the Black Eyed Peas’ Shut Up, first released in 2003.
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The saga of the domains seized by Homeland Security’s Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group continues to get more and more bizarre. We’d already noted that among the domains seized were a bunch of hiphop blogs that artists and record labels regularly used to promote their works and that at least the search engine Torrent-Finder was planning to fight back. As we noted at the time, it seemed like the blogs would have a much stronger case, as there’s pretty clear First Amendment problems with the governments’ actions.
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The post that got Lowcountry912 in trouble was a repost (now removed) of a September 23, 2010 column from Denver Post columnist Mike Rosen that was styled as an open letter to Tea Partyers.
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While I’m not convinced this strategy is as sustainable as focusing on giving people real scarce reasons to buy, it’s still nice to see more folks not reacting in angry ways that tend to only make the problem worse.
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ACTA
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DG Trade is organising a meeting to inform and consult civil society about the plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
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Canada
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Performers are calling on Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore to stop spreading misinformation about the proposed extension of the private copying levy and using artists’ rights to compensation as a crass political tool. The Ministers held a press conference today in Ottawa where they repeated a number of outright falsehoods regarding the private copying levy.
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ITBusiness caught Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore describing copyright reform critics as “radical extremists” that were acting “babyish” in an address to business leaders at the Toronto Board of Trade.
Violent clashes erupt in Italy after Berlusconi survives no-confidence vote
Credit: TinyOgg
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