• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Geeks.com Gives Full Refund When New Ubuntu Distribution Breaks Netbook

  Adam ordered an older netbook from geeks.com. When it arrived, the wireless Internet didn’t work, so he upgraded the version of Ubuntu Linux from 8.04 to 10.04. This just broke almost everything else on the computer. He returned the netbook to geeks.com, but didn’t expect them to offer a full refund of the purchase price and shipping — which goes against the stated return policy.

  A few weeks ago I bought a netbook laptop as a special from geeks.com. It was $199.95 plus $9.95 shipping — total of $209.50. It was an off brand and an older model, but would suit my needs…if it worked. It came installed with Ubuntu linux 8.04, a version that was two years out of date.

• 20% CAGR for GNU/Linux

  W3Schools.com has released their Browser OS shares for November. GNU/Linux is at 5% starting from 2.6% in November 2003. That is 13.3% CAGR in share over 7 years. In those years the number of PCs has increased 7% per annum (10% CAGR of shipments – 3% deaths) so the number of PCs received/installed of GNU/Linux has increased 20% per annum.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 23

  In this episode: The KDE team rebrands KOffice into the Calligra Suite. OpenSUSE unveils a rolling release version of its distribution and Google’s Chrome OS has been delayed until next year. This time, we remember our discoveries, and ask whether next year might really be the year of Linux on the desktop. Also, would you like to be part of the team?

• Chrome OS – All the Advantages of Thin Clients and No Need for a Server

  Thin clients have many advantages. One barrier to adoption has been that one needs special knowledge to set up a server to run them. Even with the availability of GNU/Linux installers that create a server, one needs to know stuff about networking or configuration to change or add things to the system.

  see

  * Skolelinux
  * Ubuntu, from the “alternate” CD
  * Debian GNU/Linux, using the package manager, APT
  * EdUbuntu

Google

• Google announces first Chrome OS notebook, beta testing program

  Google announced more details about its web-centric Chrome OS operating system, including a new 12.1-inch “Cr-48″ reference notebook that will be provided to beta testers. The first commercial Chrome OS notebooks will ship in mid-2011 from Acer and Samsung, and will be available with free cellular connectivity provided by Verizon, the company added.

• The Five Best Chrome Webapps That Aren’t Just Bookmarks

  To be honest, there’s a lot in the Chrome web store that is underwhelming; many apps are essentially links to popular webapps. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it does still provide a place for you to search out and find good webapps for what you need, and many of today’s webapps are pretty fantastic thanks to new technologies like HTML5. Once you find them, however, you’re left with something pretty similar to a custom start page from the likes of myfav.es—or just Chrome’s new tab page, but more customized. If you’re looking for the Chrome web store to provide something that isn’t already in your bookmarks bar, these five apps are sure to impress.

• Chrome 8 shines

  Also built into Chrome 8 is support for the forthcoming Chome Web Apps store. The store, which is still to be launched, will allow users to download paid-for and free applications for the Chrome browser.

  Synchronisation has been improved as well and all settings can be accessed from the Google Dashboard, with links to the Google Dashboard provided in the Chrome browser’s Options dialogue box.

  Performance wise, Google says that Chrome 8 should perform two to three times faster on most platforms than the version 7 release.

• Chrome’s new “Crankshaft” optimises JavaScript at runtime

  Optimisation only makes sense if the code in question is used a lot – this seems to be the philosophy followed by the compilers of the latest incarnation of Google’s free V8 JavaScript Engine. The new “Crankshaft” compilation infrastructure for V8 uses runtime information to see which parts of the code would benefit the most from optimisation. The developers say that the technique is mainly useful in large JavaScript programs; short scripts, such as those used by the SunSpider benchmark, do not benefit much.

• Useful extensions for Google chrome | Week49

• I signed up to be a beta tester of the new Google Chrome notebook

  I signed up to be a beta tester of the new Google Chrome notebook

• Chrome OS Notebooks Will Be Windows-proof

  The Chrome OS Notebook appears to be a rather basic system that’s almost the perfect definition of a netbook. Like the early netbooks, the Cr-48 runs a non-Windows operating system and its primary purpose is to run a browser.

  While Chrome OS aims to make things quite a bit more user-friendly compared to the early day 7-inch netbooks, there is always going to be the case where a user will ask where the start button is to find solitaire.

• Google Shows Off Android ‘Honeycomb’ Tablet

  Google Mobile Platform vice president Andy Rubin literally arrived with a bag full of tricks at the D: Get Into Mobile Conference, showing publicly for the very first time an Android “Honeycomb” tablet.

  The roughly 10-inch Motorola device was sleek, black, thin, and sported an Android interface unlike any we’ve seen before. There was a very clean homepage, but the app page looked almost Apple iPad-like. Plus, when Rubin brought up the Gmail app, it looked almost exactly like Gmail on the iPad.

Kernel Space

• The 233-Line Kernel Patch and the (Even Easier) Alternatives

Applications

• Nagios Face-lift with V-Shell

• Proprietary

  • Opera 11 Browser maintains its Small Cult-like Following after 15 years

    Longtime underdog Opera Software has released its browser Opera 11. Opera’s browser has developed a small cult-like following since its inception in 1996, its following based primarily on its speed, innovation and open-source ideals. In a series of browser firsts, Opera was the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing which has now become the industry standard.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ‘Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer’ Updated With Command Line Version

  • OpenShot – open source Videos and Movies editor program in Ubuntu

  • OpenShot – open source Videos and Movies editor program in Ubuntu

  • An Upgrade for SLAX Goes Awry

  • Using Variables That are Read Only

  • Create a GTK+ application on Linux with Objective-C

  • PAWS (TCP Sequence number wrapping) explained…

  • Managing A Single Firewall Policy For Multiple Servers Using Firewall Builder

  • Keeping your computers in sync

  • Installing Honeyd 1.5c And Arpd 0.2 Under CentOS 5 (With gcc 4.x)

  • Howto setup MySQL on a DRBD volume

  • Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 14 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

  • PXE network boot of grml rescue system

  • The Web on the Console

    Let’s say you want to surf the Web and find some content. The first utility to look at is also one of the oldest, the venerable Lynx. Lynx actually was my first Web browser, running on a machine that couldn’t handle X11. In its most basic form, you simply run it on the command line and give it a filename or a URL. So, if you wanted to hit Google, you would run:

    lynx http://www.google.com

    Lynx then asks you whether you want to accept a cookie Google is trying to set. Once you either accept or reject the cookie, Lynx loads the Web page and renders it. As you will no doubt notice, there are no images. But, all the links and the text box for entering search queries are there. You can navigate from link to link with the arrow keys. Because the layout is very simple and text-based, items are in very different locations on the screen from what you would see when using a graphical browser.

• Wine

  • CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver Games 9.2.1

    Twelve million addicts, err, players cant be wrong. Theres no doubting the draw of World of Warcraft. And today, as Blizzard rolls out its third, much-anticipated expansion to the game Cataclysm, CodeWeavers ensures that Linux gamers can play right along with their PC and Mac brethren. CodeWeavers Linux customers will be able to run Cataclysm as if they were running on Windows with today’s immediate shipment of CrossOver Games 9.2.1.

• Games

  • Minecraft Tips and Tricks for Newbies

  • Humble Bundle 2; Alpha Vid

    Wolfire, developers of the upcoming rabbit fighting game Overgrowth (sequel to the open-sourced Lugaru), have posted a teaser site indicating a second Humble Indie Bundle is in the works. The original bundle promoted several indie Linux games with a “pay what you want” offer; moreover, the source code for several of the games was released in the process.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 7th November 2010

  • Get Your Hands on Some KDE Gear

    Just in time for the holiday gift rush, the Promo team has set up stores where you can find a variety of shirts, hats, and accessories sporting cool KDE designs. Special thanks to Eugene Trounev, Bugsbane and Sebastian Kügler for some of the first designs.

• GNOME Desktop

  • [Neary:] Curing “Shy Developer Syndrome”

    It is one thing to have engineers answer questions when they have the knowledge to do so. It is another thing to have them submit their plans and patches to a community forum and have them exposed under the harsh light of peer review.

    On more than one occasion, I have heard a hiring manager say that he didn’t have time to have a developer go through peer review of specs or patches – after all, he was hired because he was competent to do the job, and what are we paying him for if he’s going to be second-guessed by “the community”? After a first job or internship, peer review is more an exception than the rule for professional software developers (regrettably, I might add).

Distributions

• Sabayon to Bring Christmas Surprise

  The holidays are upon us and many are running around trying to get loved ones shiny boxes to open Christmas morning. Oftentimes, Linux users get a cute plush penguin or a cool book. But sometimes surprises come from the most unexpected places.

  This is what will happen this year, only now it’s no longer a surprise. Despite being guilty of letting the cat out of the bag, Sabayon is planning a Christmastime Gaming Edition release. Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon founder and lead developer, said, “We can show the world that Linux is a valuable, performant Gaming platform.” This is sure to include a long menu of popular games native for Linux and demonstration versions for several commercial offerings.

  [...]

  So, be sure to hit the hay early Christmas Eve so Santa can leave your shiny new Gaming Edition under your keyboard.

• Linux New Media Awards 2011: Readers Choose Your Favorite Linux Distribution

  Readers are asked to decide who deserves to win the 2011 Linux New Media Award for Favorite Linux Distribution.

• Reviews

  • ITworld review: Arch Linux for Linux fundamentalists

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Enter Mandriva’s Wallpaper Contest

    As with previous version, Mandriva is holding a contest to bulk up its wallpaper choices in the upcoming release, Mandriva 2010.2. This is the second update to 2010 Spring due out around Christmas. This time though, you get to vote for which you like best. But hurry, contest ends December 16.

• Red Hat Family

  • UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) Boosts Price Target on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) to $50.00

    Equities research analysts at UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) boosted their price target on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from $44.00 to $50.00 in a research note to clients and investors on Wednesday. The analysts currently have a “buy” rating on the stock.

  • Red Hat gets rating boost from RBC Capital Markets

    Linux software developer Red Hat Inc.’s stock could rise 20 percent over the next year on better-than-expected revenue, an RBC Capital Markets analyst predicted Wednesday.

  • Red Hat rises on upbeat report

  • Red Hat Releases Next-Gen Business Rules Management System

    Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has announced the next generation Business Rules Management System, JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.1, as part of its open source middleware portfolio, JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

    In a release, the Company said that JBoss Enterprise BRMS is an open source business rules management system that enables active decisions with easy business rules development, access and change management. This functionality allows businesses to quickly change the rules and active decisions that underpin enterprise applications to respond to market dynamics and competitive positioning.

  • Notable Analyst Rating Changes by SGW: Red Hat, Dominion Resources, Ivanhoe Mines Ltd., Netflix

    The 52-week range of the stock is $26.51-$49. An analyst at RBC Capital upgraded shares of Red Hat from Sector Perform to Outperform this morning. The firm also boosted its pricetarget by nearly 43% from $40 to $57.

  • Red Hat Joins Brief Filed with U.S. Supreme Court Opposing Expansion of Standard for Inducing Patent Infringement

    Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that it joined in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking correction of the standard for inducing patent infringement.

    According to a release, the “friend of the court,” or amicus brief, submitted by Red Hat and others seeks reversal of a lower court decision that threatens to expand patent litigation. The brief argues that the law requires that only those who actually know of the specific patent at issue and know that it covers the alleged infringing activity can be found liable.

• Debian Family

  • Testing MEPIS 11 Alpha 4!

    It certainly is faster compared to Mepis 8.5 on my old desktop box, which by the way does not allow pretty effects regardless of the distro I use.

  • The new Debian wallpaper just rolled onto my Squeeze desktop

    The desktop-base package just updated on my Debian Squeeze desktop, and it brought with it the new wallpaper for the distribution’s soon-to-be-stable release. What do you think? (Click the image for the full 1366×768 view).

  • Debian Squeeze updates gdm3 today, and goofy spaceship theme is on the login screen too

    I wrote yesterday about the “whimsical spaceship” (that’s a good name, don’t you think?) theme coming to the Debian Squeeze desktop and Grub screen and wondering why the login screen still was so Lennyish.

    Today a new gdm3 package rolled into Squeeze, and once it installed (I’ve been using Aptitude on the command line to do the updates) I logged out and saw yet more spaceship whimsy.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10: A Couple of Gripes

      To be sure, every release of Ubuntu — just like every other operating system out there, open-source or proprietary — has its bugs, some of them quite serious. Ubuntu 10.10 is not a standout in this respect.

    • Ubuntu Certification: 101

      The Ubuntu Certification Programme has been around for a while. I think now is a good time to start sharing more on this activity with the community and invite participation. We have created a wiki with the following content to start the conversation.

    • Ubuntu One Music Supports AirPlay on iPhone

      Ubuntu One Music has now support for iPhone’s new AirPlay technology, which allows users to stream audio, video and image files stored in your Ubuntu One account directly to your Applet TV, stereo device, or any other AirPlay-compatible hardware. The AirPlay technology was made available by Apple via the new iOS 4.2 software update.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 10: A Perfect 10?

        Recently I said that Ubuntu 10.10 is really not a compelling upgrade. Linux Mint 10, though it’s based off of 10.10, is (in my opinion) worth the trouble. Like 10.10, Linux Mint 10 is not a revolutionary update, but the changes here are not focused on the Canonical services.

Devices/Embedded

• 1.8 Billion ARM CPUs

  That’s how many one FAB, TSMC, might produce in 2011. TSMC expects to produce about 1.8 million wafers for Qualcomm in 2011 and each wafer can hold about 1000 ARM CPUs. These CPUs will go into iPads, smart-phones, smart-thingies, and a variety of personal computers, few of which will run that other OS, certainly not “7″.

• Phones

  • Android

    • I’ll Take Gingerbread and Honeycomb Over Fruit

      Thankfully, Google has started the release process for their latest and greatest Android version — Gingerbread. I’m looking forward to installing CyanogenMod’s spin of 2.3 as soon as it’s available. The big frustration for me, however, is that Gingerbread turned out not to be the tablet killing OS we all hoped for. Oh sure, there are some Android tablets available, but until Google allows regular access to the Marketplace, tablets running Android are going to be a kludge.

    • Is Rubin’s 300,000-Androids-a-Day Tweet on Target?

      There’s no doubt that Androids are swarming, but 300,000 activations a day, as Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin tweeted? “Seems like a stretch,” said Frost & Sullivan analyst Michael Jude, who added the figure “may represent the number of phones being shipped from manufacturers, many of which end up in warehouses rather than in people’s pockets.”

• Sub-notebooks

  • Jolicloud 1.1 update released today will “reinvent the computing experience”

    The Jolicloud team have today announced their intention to release Jolicloud 1.1 for download later today with updates rolling out to current Jolicloud users during this week. Click through for more details…

    The message from today’s announcement is clear – with Jolicloud 1.1 the French developer is offering its users an experience one step ahead of what Google, Apple and Microsoft are announcing. “While everybody talks about HTML5 as the future, we deliver it today, now and for everyone,” explains the blog post. “But here is the trick, you should not be forced to buy an expensive device to benefit of these technologies. With Jolicloud, you just need to recycle any computer.”

Ex-Goldman Programmer Found Guilty in Code Theft

Mr. Marino contended Mr. Aleynikov simply made a mistake in trying to download open-source code from Goldman, but didn’t steal proprietary information from the investment bank. He said Mr. Aleynikov made no efforts to sell the information he took and didn’t share it with Teza.

OStatic’s Superguide to Free, Open Source Tools

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you’ll find an updated set of more than 45 collections and resources. Hopefully, you’ll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

LibreOffice 3.3 RC1 is released ! With Installation instructions -Fedora, LinuxMint, Ubuntu & Debian | PPA Ubuntu

LibreOffice RC1 is released, this new beta release comes to fix some known issues, now the Linux and MacOSX builds are English builds with the possiblity to install language packs. Find bellow the release notes in details, also the installation instructions for Fedora, Debian, LinuxMint and Ubuntu.

opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Update

opentaps In The Cloud with Amazon EC2

Want to get up and running quickly and easily on enterprise-class open source ERP and CRM?

Want to run it on demand on world class infrastructure and pay by the hour?

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • WebSockets disabled in Firefox 4

    Due to a vulnerability in the design of the WebSocket protocol, the Mozilla Foundation has decided to disable support for this protocol in the forthcoming Firefox 4 Beta 8 release. The vulnerability in the code for transparent proxies can potentially be exploited to poison the proxy cache and inject manipulated pages.

  • Firefox 3.6.13 Update Available

    Just like promised Mozilla has delivered an update to the stable branch of the Firefox web browser. The update, which is released on the same day as the Mozilla Thunderbird update, fixes several security and stability issues in the web browser, making it a recommended update for all Firefox 3.6.12 and earlier users. Firefox 3.6.13 is currently in distribution to wordlwide mirror servers to ensure that updating Firefox users will not experience lags or slowdowns during the rush once the update has been announced officially.
    The official update notification can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, it is hard to say at this point.

  • Mozilla’s new CEO explains his love-hate relationship with Google

    Browser-maker Mozilla still has a tricky relationship with Google, judging from statements made last night by its new chief executive, Gary Kovacs.

    Reporters had a chance to ask Kovacs a few questions at the Mozilla open house yesterday, when the company invited us into its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters to preview some of the new features in its Firefox browser. The gathering came just a day after Google held its own press event, where it announced some improvements to its Chrome Web browser, as well as a pilot program for Chrome OS, its netbook operating system that’s built around Chrome.

Databases

• MariaDB 5.1.53 And 5.2.4 Released

  This past Monday updates in both the 5.1 and 5.2 series of MariaDB were released. It’s a pretty big deal, as some issues have been solved that affect a large number of users. You should read the release notes for MariaDB 5.1.53 and for MariaDB 5.2.4 as well as the release announcement. The annoucement contains download links from worldwide mirrors.

Oracle

• Apache is being forced into a Java Fork

  Everyone who follows Java knew that the Apache Software Foundation was going to resign from its nominal Java Community Process leadership position. Apache had given fair-warning that it was not going to rubber-stamp Oracle’s Java plans in November. Then, when Oracle rolled over Apache and Google’s objections to its Java plans in December, the scene was set for Apache to leave and, eventually, force a Java code fork.

  There’s a long story behind why Apache, a four-time JCP “Member of the Year” is going with its own Java-related plans. The story actually doesn’t start with Oracle, but with how Sun handled the “open-sourcing” of Java in 2006.

• Oracle Prepping for Server OS Domination

  Oracle is planning to take over the world. Or, at the very least, the server OS world. That’s the logical conclusion to reach after hearing the recent comments of Larry Ellison, Oracle’s bombastic CEO. “Solaris is clearly the No. 1 Unix, and we’re working very hard at making Oracle Enterprise Linux the number one Linux,” InfoWorld reported he said at a company event last week.

  [...]

  When it comes to security, the upgraded Unix server OS will include secure boot, so applications and data are secure as they start. The OS will also enforce role-based root access and encrypt ZFS datasets to provide extra security to stored data.

CMS

• Navigating the open source CMS selection process

  The popularity of open source content management systems, and the number of open source CMS options have grown exponentially in the last three years. However, it has become increasingly difficult for users to separate the good from the bad, in a market where–irony of ironies–even proprietary options are trying to look more like open source projects in order to get buyers’ attention.

Business

• Billion Dollar Open Source Companies? There Are Lots of Them

Project Releases

• LibreOffice RC1 arrives

• Miro 3.5.1 rc2 is released ! Download, Play videos and Internet TV in HD

• NetCitadel releases latest Firewall Builder V4.1 version

  NetCitadel LLC released version 4.1.3 of Firewall Builder today. Firewall Builder is a leading firewall management solution for Linux iptables and other firewalls.

Standards/Consortia

• Want to present your thesis? Please be compatible with Windows

  Last week I had a weird experience. I went to the Department of Communications and Social Research of the Faculty of Communication Sciences of La Sapienza, the first and biggest University in Rome. The reason I went there was to attend the presentation of the Italian Manifesto for Open Government, on which I’ll report soon in another article. The promoters of the Manifesto spent the whole morning explaining in detail all its ten articles, including the fourth and fifth that strongly assert the importance of opening public data, that is publishing them without restrictions in open file formats.

• A nail in Flash’s coffin: YouTube is running an HTML5 Beta

  Even though Adobe won’t produce a Flash Player for Linux on PowerPC, it still maintains the player for Mac OS X on PowerPC. Nice for the Mac users, shitty for the Linux users.

  Aside from all of that. Why should video — a growing component of information-delivery on the Web — be funneled through Flash?

  Luckily HTML5 is there to save us from all of this. Once it’s totally rolled out, video will come into Web pages through standard tagging that enabled web browsers understand, and the video will be presented in codecs that are already part of that browser’s collection of viewable formats.

  And if/when the biggest video site around, and that would be YouTube, dumps Flash for HTML5, look the #$$ out.

• Upgrading China’s ITC Standards Strategy

  To my mind, the biggest variable that will determine whether China will reap the largest benefits from its participation in global ICT standards activities will be whether it decides to only participate in the traditional “Big I” standards organizations, or whether it will also fully engage in participating in, and more importantly founding, standards development and promotional consortia. Least effective of all will be continuing to form inward-looking consortia limited to domestic companies. From this route I can see only institutionalizing antagonism, standards wars, and lost opportunities.

Ghosts of Unix past, part 4: High-maintenance designs

Security

• New version of OpenSSL fixes two vulnerabilities

Cablegate

• Ron Paul Vigorously Defends WikiLeaks

  Distancing himself from Republican Party orthodoxy (as he’s prone to doing), Texas Congressman Ron Paul gave a rousing speech on the U.S. House floor in support of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. “Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?” asked Paul. He went on to compare WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers, explaining how both exposed American wars that were based on “lies.” He also asked his colleagues which events caused more deaths, “Lying us into war, or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?”

• Un-Civil War on the Internet

  The nominal trigger for this was the denial of service to WikiLeaks by PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, supposedly for “illegal activities” although the USA has stated that the USA has not charged WikiLeaks with any illegal activity. PayPal was caught in a lie that it claimed PayPal had received a letter advising them of illegal activities by WikiLeaks. In fact, PayPal and other such services are only too glad to serve businesses such as porn and gambling regardless of their legality. Thus many see this action as a smoke-screen.

• The Stupidity of Locking Up Assange

  The stupidity of locking up a guy who voluntarily turns himself in to a police station and refusing him bail on questionable charges as a flight-risk is beyond belief. His lawyers have been unable to communicate with the Swedish prosecutors for months and yet the court in the UK took the matter seriously. This is clearly a case of judicial harassment and the UK legal system is being jerked around by the Swedish authorities.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Save as WWF? No, thanks!

  In spite of all this, as of December 3rd, 2010, the official “Save as WWF, Save a Tree” website says that this “green” format…is only usable with some version of Mac OS, will soon be usable with some versions of Windows… but no mention of Linux, which is the most environmentally conscious operating system around.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Brazilian Ministry of Education Plans Mandriva Deployment

  The Brazilian government education authority is set to deploy Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva.

  Mandriva is partnering with Positivo to deliver this large-scale, low-cost, open source solution for educational use in Brazil. Including hardware, operating system and other software applications, the per-student cost is estimated to be approximately US $200.

Google

• Google previews Chrome OS: Cloud computing, but without touch

  An operating system reduced to and optimised for the web browser – that’s the idea behind Google’s Chrome OS. While, at first glance, this doesn’t promise to be of much use, Google has incorporated technologies in Chrome OS which allow users to work without an internet connection and to install certain types of apps that can be used when offline. However, Google isn’t planning to present an alternative to Android, at least for now, touch screen tablets and smartphones are not supported.

• Google Chrome notebook unboxing photos and first impressions

  Today was Google Day in the Stokes household, as the same FedEx truck brought both a Nexus S and Google’s newly announced Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook. Below are some unboxing photos and very quick hands-on impressions of the unit.

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: An analysis of Linux kernel development

  With the next kernel version, Ext4 will reach new levels of performance and use a trick to increase its storage media formatting speed. Other new features include a discard function that is interesting for slow-trimming SSDs, the “Rados Block Device” for cluster devices, bug fixes and optimisations to Btrfs.

• Hurry! Win a $50 Gift Card to Linux.com Store.

• Self-Assessment Checklist: First Impressions After Release

  The Linux Foundation’s Open Compliance Program published its compliance self-assessment checklist on November 1 right on schedule. My blog last month, Self-Assessment Checklist: A Measuring Stick for Open Compliance Efforts | The Linux Foundation, described the organization and goals of the checklist. Over 500 company downloads at Self-Assessment Compliance Checklist | The Linux Foundation later, initial feedback has been gratifyingly positive. I’d like to share with you some observations based on comments received so far.

• Stable kernel updates

• Graphics Stack

  • Improving Video Streaming With GTK+ 3D Surfaces

    Within the open-source world, code examples and documentation can be particularly important in ensuring a lower barrier to participation. One developer, Jose Commins, has worked on creating demos, such as how to use OpenGL within GTK+. One of his projects is GtkGLApp, but now he’s working on a new one involving real-time video streaming to GTK+ 3D surfaces.

Applications

• Happy Birthday Scribus

  It is hard to believe Scribus is almost an adolescent. Just yesterday, Scribus turned ten years old, with the first bits of code written by Franz Schmid in December 2000. A few months later, it was linked on Freshmeat and then, well… it kind of had a life of its own. I googled DTP and Linux and stumbled across the link to Franz’ home pages. Of course it would not compile… (User error on my part.)

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Get TextMate Features And Styles In Gedit With GMate

  • Import Missing GPG Keys, Even Behind A Firewall (Port 11371 Closed) [Launchpad PPAs]

  • Salvation Army Statement on Toy Donation and Distribution

• Games

  • Linux Game Publishing Is Back Online

    Now it’s a matter of whether they can regain customer confidence seeing as this completely brought down their Digital Rights Management platform for most of this time, among other problems and damaging reputations. I guess we will have to see what their unannounced titles end up being.

  • Another Humble Indie Bundle Is Coming

    Earlier this year there was the “Humble Indie Bundle” where anyone could purchase a set of four Indie computer games (that are Linux compatible) for any price they wanted. The games included World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture. This ended up being such a success with the game developers that they ended up open-sourcing the games after raising quite a bit of money off this bundled deal. Now it appears the developers are working on a second Humble Indie Bundle.

Distributions

• FSFLA’s petition for Canaima GNU/Linux to be Free

  The Venezuelan Presidential Decree 3390, specifically in articles 2 and 7, explains and backs up the reasons why the Venezuelan state should develop a Free Software distribution. Canaima GNU/Linux is this distribution, so it ought to be a Free distribution, without parts that threaten its users’ freedoms.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat mulls offers to relocate corporate HQ

    Red Hat has offers on the table from multiple cities and developers, including some who are willing to build a new office tower for the Raleigh-based company if it decides to move its corporate headquarters, according to multiple sources.

    Raleigh faces keen competition for Red Hat, which sources said is looking for as much as 300,000 square feet of space. Red Hat currently occupies well under 200,000 square feet in two buildings on N.C. State’s Centennial Campus.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Workstation review

    Verdict: Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 6 Desktop and Workstation operating systems are a real option for enterprise deployment. We had no problems setting up the applications bundled in with version 6. The only driver/inhibitor for corporate rollout is how savvy firms’ workforces are with Linux, and the depth of Microsoft infrastructure they already have in place.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Canonical Hiring More Kernel Developers

      According to a recent email exchange departing COO Matt Assay stated that Canonical has 400 employees right now. In addition to this there are about 50 open positions on Ubuntu Jobs.

    • Orta Theme Gets An Ubuntu PPA (And A New Version)!

      Orta theme finally got a PPA so it’s now easily to install and update.

      Before adding the PPA, make sure you have removed any previous instance of the theme!

    • Ubuntu Certified Hardware

      Canonical maintains a list of hardware that is certified for Ubuntu. Victor Palau, Platform Services Manager at Canonical wrote a blog post about Ubuntu certification which caused me to wonder if my Dell, XPS M1330 laptop, running Ubuntu 10.10 was Ubuntu certified. Below are the screenshots and steps I took to find the answer that question.

    • Ubuntu to Drop GDM for LightDM

      Currently in the Natty Blueprints there is a blueprint to drop GDM (Gnome Display Manager) for LightDM a new multi-platform Display Manager.

    • Launchpad Finally Gets PPA Usage Stats; Might Also Get A PPA “Heat” Metric

      The Launchpad API was updated yesterday, finally bringing PPA statistics. For now, the stats can only be accessed by using a Python script, but they will probably be implemented on the actual website soon, especially since Mark Shuttleworth is also interested in these stats.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Andy Rubin: over 300,000 Android phones activated daily

      Cast your mind back to the ancient time that was this August and you’ll recall Eric Schmidt telling you, with no lack of pride, that 200,000 Android phones were being sold each and every day. Skip past Steve Jobs’ snide remarks about what’s included in that tally, and fast-forward to today, where Andy Rubin is blowing minds with the latest, very nicely rounded, total: 300,000 daily activations.

    • Google Instant now available in 40 new countries

      Last month’s beta launch of Google’s new “Instant” mobile search tool was a sadly US-only affair. But that’s been rectified today, with Google putting its predictive system onto smartphones in another 40 countries and 28 languages. You need Android 2.2 to make it work, though.

    • Android: 300,000 Activations a Day

      That’s right folks, Andy Rubin has tweeted his second tweet. Our “Early Adopter Platform” has been growing like gangbusters. We all knew that Android was growing but this is pretty phenomenal growth. I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the numbers. That means that there are 2.1 million activations a week. That’s amazing. As you can see below, over the course of the last 8 quarters Android has shipped a disproportionately large number of units compared to our unfriendly fruit competition.

• Tablets

  • Motorola Tab Running Android 3.0 Honeycomb Makes A Buzz

    With Christmas almost here, manufacturers and developers are doing their best to keep the public interested in their work, even if they’re not announcing products that are going to come out this year. This is why Android Chief Andy Rubin teased fans with a Motorola Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet set for a release date sometime in 2011. Although exact release dates haven’t been announced yet, some technical specs have been made public and if they are going to be implemented as presented, the tab seems to be out of a new and better generation.

’10 CG Shorts You Must See’

3D World Magazine features ’10 CG Shorts You Must See’. Big Buck Bunny is on it!

California’s safety codes are now open source!

Events

• GPG Keysigning at FOSS.in 2010

  I will be attending the FOSS.in event from December 15-17 in Bangalore, India.
  As part of the Fedora participation at the FOSS.in, I will be running a GPG keysigning party.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Thunderbird 3.1.7 and 3.0.11 Updates Are Here

    Thunderbird 3.1.7 and Thunderbird 3.0.11 updates are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from www.GetThunderbird.com. These releases fix several problems with large email folders stored on the user’s computer as well as several fixes to improve performance, stability and security.

Oracle

• The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee

  The Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. Apache has served on the EC for the past 10 years, winning the JCP “Member of the Year” award 4 times, and recently was ratified for another term with support from 95% of the voting community. Further, the project communities of the ASF, home to Apache Tomcat, Ant, Xerces, Geronimo, Velocity and nearly a 100 mainstay java components have implemented countless JSRs and serve on and contribute to many of the JCPs technical expert groups.

• Apache resigns from Java community

  Protesting what it perceives as Oracle’s undue control of Java, the Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, the organization announced Wednesday.

  “The commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem,” an unsigned blog entry from the foundation states.

• Apache quits Java governance group in protest of Oracle abuses

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that it is resigning from the executive committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), the governance body responsible for managing standards related to the Java programming language. The move is a response to Oracle’s ongoing failure to comply with the intellectual property policies established by the JCP.

  The heart of the issue is that Apache can’t certify that its open source Java implementation—called Harmony—conforms with the Java language standards because Oracle refuses to supply the necessary test suites under a suitably open license. Oracle’s position on the issue falls afoul of JCP policies, which stipulate that standards and other relevant materials must be freely redistributable and made available under terms that are conducive to enabling third-party open source implementations.

CMS

• Diaspora in Pictures: A Candid Walkthrough in Alpha

• What’s next for Drupal.org

  With the Drupal.org redesign launched, I’ve heard many ask, “what’s next?” We always do regular, incremental improvements through the infrastructure and webmasters projects. This will continue, with the new design as a foundation and deployment workflow improved by the redesign project.

• WordPress 3.0.3 Released

Project Releases

• Announcement: VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 2 released

  for the extended announcement and for a complete list of all changes since VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 1.

Government

• Whatever Happened to the EU Interoperability Policy?

  As readers of this blog will know, interoperability is a key issue in Europe at the moment. We are still waiting for the imminent version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework, where we will find out whether true restriction-free open standards will be recommended, on deeply-flawed ones based on FRAND licensing that for practical purposes exclude many free software projects.

  [...]

  Aside from the fact that open source doesn’t seem to have been given a fair chance in this procurement process, there is also the matter of transparency. As far as I can tell, there are precious few details available about what exactly is in this 189 million Euro mega-contract. At a time when governments across the world are rightly beginning to open up all stages of procurement for public scrutiny, the EU’s old-fashioned “trust us, you little people don’t need to know the details” attitude is not just outdated and misguided, but positively insulting. After all, we are not only paying for all this proprietary software, but also footing the bill for the not inconsiderable salaries enjoyed by members of the European Commission.

Openness/Sharing

• CERN Library releases its book catalog into the public domain via CC0, and other bibliographic data news

  CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web, has released its book catalog into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication. This is not the first time that CERN has used CC tools to open its resources; earlier this year, CERN released the first results of the Large Hadron Collider experiments under CC licenses. In addition, CERN is a strong supporter of CC, having given corporate support at the “creator” level, and is currently featured as a CC Superhero in the campaign, where you can join them in the fight for openness and innovation!

• Promote Free Culture

• Open Data

  • Open Data and Public Sector Debt

    The volume of public domestic debt issued in developing countries has grown substantially in recent years, but consistent data on the domestic debt of developing countries have not been generally available until now. As part of the Open Data Initiative, the World Bank is launching an online, quarterly, Public Sector Debt database developed in partnership with the IMF, which will allow researchers and policymakers to explore questions about debt management in a comprehensive manner. The database promotes consistency and comparability across countries by standardizing the treatment of public sector debt, valuation methods, and debt instruments, and by identifying, where possible, the debt of central, state, and local governments as well as extra-budgetary agencies and funds.

Seemona Sumasar spent months behind bars after ex orchestrated elaborate frame-up to silence her

A Queens businesswoman has been to hell and back and it all started when she accused a former boyfriend of rape and, prosecutors say, he framed her for armed robbery.

Seemona Sumasar, 35, spent nearly seven months in jail for a crime she never committed, the Nassau County district attorney now admits.

Inside Saudi Arabia’s party scene

As a general rule, I will click on any WikiLeaks cable titled “Underground Party Scene in Jeddah.” And this account of a Halloween party at a prince’s residence in the coastal Saudi city does not disappoint.

WikiLeaks cables: Saudi princes throw parties boasting drink, drugs and sex

De Trop! French Is The Official Language For 2012 Olympics

Stone the crows! Or, rather, sacre bleu: the Telegraph has obtained a copy of the Olympic “technical manuals”, the IOC’s guidelines for hosting the Games, which reveal, amongst other stringent requirements, that the main language for 2012 will be the sexy tongue spoken by our Gallic neighbours, with English finishing in second place.

Scratch the Salvation Army off your charity lists, everyone

I used to always give my spare change to the Salvation Army at this time of year — there they were, ringing their bell outside the grocery store, so sure, I’d give a little. That changed when I learned about their anti-gay policies, though…and now there’s another reason to spurn the Salvation Army.

Salvation Army Statement on Toy Donation and Distribution

OAP poisoned police with sandwiches

Food safety officials said 70-year-old Muriel Morris received a four-month jail term, suspended for a year, and was ordered to pay £16,482.70p in costs.

Birmingham City Council, which prosecuted Morris for four breaches of food hygiene law, launched an investigation into the poisoning outbreak after nine officers were taken to hospital during an English Defence League demonstration near New Street station in July 2009.

AMD, Intel, PC builders plan to drop VGA by 2015

AMD, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Samsung and LG on Wednesday said they plan on focusing on putting digital DisplayPort and HDMI connections into their computer products. They hope to drop analog VGA and LVDS connections in AMD- and Intel-based products by 2015, the chipmakers said. VGA technology is over 20 years old, uses up more power, and supports lower resolutions and less colors than the digital alternatives.

The Best, Most Disgruntled Ink Cartridge Description You’ll Ever Read

I don’t know the name of the man responsible for the product description of Remanufactured HP 300 – (CC640EE) Black, but I do know that he’s an anonymous hero. Just a sample from the above:

Do you know what? I really can’t be bothered with writing these description anymore, it’s a printer cartridge! What am I supposed to write really??? It’s a cartridge that prints ink on to paper, you could print some work stuff or a colouring in page for the kids that they’ll half do and then leave laying around on the floor or a poster of the horrible Jonas Bothers for your teen daughter hoping that she might stop listening to there [sic] pathetic attempt of music so much.

And so on.

Czechs Blasted for Asylum “Arousal” Test

The European Union’s human rights agency has criticized the Czech government for using a “sexual arousal” test to determine whether applicants who seek asylum on the basis of sexual orientation are genuinely gay.

According to the BBC, the Fundamental Rights Agency said the Czech Republic was the only E.U. country that continues to use the test, which could violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

A New Nursing Home Population: The Young

I’m Having Unexplained Coordination Issues

Those who speak to me on Identi.ca and IRC may have noticed more typos than usual from me in the last day or so; this is why. Please take this into account. When I write static pieces like blog posts I always check and fix my typos, “live” chats such as IRC and Identi.ca don’t get the same retouching. It’s taken quite a while to type this post.

Core expands into network vulnerability testing

With the latest release of its flagship Core Impact Pro, Core Security Technologies has expanded its application penetration testing software to scan and test network devices as well.

Core Impact Pro version 11, released this week, also includes improved tools for scanning Web applications as well.

Science

• Google Maps App For Android To Offer 3D Texturing, Offline Support [Google Maps Android App Being Retooled To Work & Look Better]

Security

• Wikileaks DDoS tool downloads grow rapidly

• Security updates for Mozilla projects

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Walmart Partners with DHS on “If You See Something, Say Something” Campaign

  Janet Napolitano, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that retailing giant Walmart has joined the agency’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign.

• Flower arranger forced to resign after refusing criminal record check

  Annabel Hayter, the 64 year old chairwoman of Gloucester Cathedral’s Flower Guild, has been forced to resign from her post as a result of her refusal to submit to a criminal record check. As a result of her stance, five other elderly flower arrangers have also resigned in protest.

• TSA subjects India’s US ambassador to public grope because of her sari

  The TSA is refusing to apologize to India’s ambassador to the USA, who was flagged for an extended public grope because she was wearing a sari.

• Exposed: TSA’s X-rated scanner fraud

  Physicists who led the development of today’s most sophisticated medical imaging technology believe the federal government’s X-rated airport x-ray scanners are useless. Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson, both former professors of physics at the University of California-San Francisco have been described as the “scientific genius” behind the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines used in hospitals. The pair turned their considerable experience to investigate what the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is using to virtually undress millions of American travelers.

• Security Theatre [IMG]

• Thousands Of Students Gather In London

  Thousands of students have gathered ahead of a march on Parliament as MPs prepare to vote on trebling university tuition fees.

• Cleared, the father accused of leading Ryanair jet revolt

  Unable to get water for his two children and frustrated at the lack of information from staff, Mr Wilkie tried to disembark, followed by 30 fellow passengers.

  After being persuaded to stay, however, the rebels were stunned when police arrived and arrested their ‘ringleader’ for causing a security alert on a flight.

  In court, Mr Wilkie, 36, admitted the charge. But a Scottish sheriff refused to punish him after receiving dozens of letters from passengers supporting him. Instead, the sheriff called on Ryanair to apologise for its ‘ridiculous’ behaviour.

• Chinese hackers ‘slurped 50 MB of US gov email’

  The Chinese government may have used its access to Microsoft source code to develop attacks that exploited weaknesses in the Windows operating system, according to a US diplomatic memo recently published by Wikileaks.

Cablegate

• DNS Provider Mistakenly Caught in WikiLeaks Saga Now Supports the Group

  A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping DNS service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content.

  EasyDNS, a Canadian firm, was attacked last Friday after media outlets mistakenly reported it had terminated its service for WikiLeaks. The company sent an e-mail to customers Thursday morning letting them know that it had begun providing DNS service for WikiLeaks.ch and WikiLeaks.nl, two of the primary domain names WikiLeaks relocated to after WikiLeaks.org stopped resolving.

  “We’ve already done the time, we might as well do the crime,” Mark Jeftovic, president and CEO of EasyDNS, told Threat Level about his decision.

  DNS service providers translate human-friendly domain names to IP addresses, so when someone types www.Amazon.com into their browser, for example, they’re properly connected to 72.21.211.176, the address of the host.

• The crux of the WikiLeaks debate

  WNYC’s Brian Lehrer has spent the last week hosting one WikiLeaks critic after the next on his program, and it seems rather clear that he, too, is a fairly emphatic critic of the group and its founder, Julian Assange.

• Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed Or Blocked

  Last weekend, rather than read stories about the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released, I decided to read them directly myself. In doing so, I better understood why no one — certainly not the US State Department — is going to shove those cables back into the darkness.

• Save Julian Assange: Don’t outlaw WikiLeaks!

• Assange’s Poison Pill

  I am in the process of downloading a file that contains all the unedited cables that Wikileaks has obtained. You can do the same by downloading this link using a program like Vuze. This is a 1.4GB file so it may take a while. As far as I know it is not illegal to download it as it is not copyright material. In any case it is probably not illegal because you cannot read whatever it is that you are downloaded as it is encrypted. What this file is is a Poison Pill. Assange goes, this file is open for humanity to see.

  I am downloading this file for two reasons. One is because I believe that if it was so easy for Wikileaks to obtain this information whoever our enemies are probably have it as well. Secondly because while I had mixed feelings on what Julian Assange was doing, I am so disgusted about how Western democracies are reacting towards a person who has not been formally accused of any crime that I think it’s time to stand by Wikileaks to defend freedom of the press.

• Julian Assange cast as common enemy as US left and right unite

  The outcry against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is intensifying in the US, drawing a rare degree of consensus from politicians and pundits who have collectively cast him in the role of a common enemy.

  In the past few days the calls for action against Assange have grown steadily louder and more shrill, with leading Republicans labelling him a terrorist, and top liberal Democratic politicians, albeit in more moderate language, also calling for his prosecution.

• Why Julian Assange Is 2010 Person Of The Year

  He said he wouldn’t mind prison. Julian Assange sort of looked forward to it, even. He’d read a nice, long book in peace. And he’d get to sleep in the same bed for the first time in years.

  Assange got his wish when he surrendered to British authorities Tuesday. He is charged with allegedly sexually assaulting two women during a lecture stop in Stockholm this August. The first court appearance was predictably messy. He refused to be photographed, finger-printed, or DNA swabbed. And that was before the judge asked Assange for his current address. He gave some post office at first. Then some place in Australia he hadn’t visited in four years.

  To be fair, you can’t really ask Julian Assange where he lives. He moved 34 times by the age of 14. A quarter century later, he is even more nomadic. The most connected man in the world lives a rootless existence. He says he resides in airports and has virtually no material possessions, save for his Australian passport and a laptop.

• Assange Lawyers Prepare for U.S. Spying Indictment

  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the man behind the publication of more than a 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, could soon be facing spying charges in the U.S. related to the Espionage Act, Assange’s lawyer said today.

• England: Reliability And Longevity Of UK-US Relationship Confirmed

• Pro-Wikileaks hacker group’s DDoS tool downloads top 40,000

  Imperva, the web security specialist, has reported that the tool released by the Anonymous Hacker Group for would-be Wikileaks protesters has been downloaded over 40,000 times, with the majority of downloads occurring in the US.

  [...]

  Amichai Schulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, said, “The tool was originally developed as an open-source network stress-testing tool. It was recently tweaked to include a central command-and-control module.

• wikileaks samba

• Wikileaks donations going well despite Visa, Mastercard shutdown

  After both Visa and Mastercard stopped allowing donations to the whistle-blowing website, DataCell started helping people to donate directly by bank transfer. “The credit card companies are just not a part of the transactions. There are just as many donations as before, if not more, but they are just transferred direct,” Sigurvinsson told DV. “We have assisted some 2,000 people with that just today.”

  [...]

  DataCell has indicated that it intends to start legal proceedings against both Mastercard and Visa in Europe and Sigurvinsson says the company has received a lot of offers from lawyers wanting to take the case on for free. He said that the company’s own lawyers have written formal letters to the credit card giants and that other volunteer lawyers will arrive today to discuss strategy.

• Assange supporters rally in Brisbane

  About 100 protesters have rallied in Brisbane in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

  Assange remains in custody in the United Kingdom, facing extradition to Sweden for alleged sexual assault.

  Rally organiser Jessica Payne says the Federal Government is trying to stifle the democratic right to freedom of information.

• Pro-WikiLeaks protest rally draws 1200 supporters in Sydney

  HUNDREDS of people have taken to Australia’s city streets to pledge their support for detained WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.

• WikiLeaks cables: Shell, Operation Payback and Assange for the Nobel prize – as it happened

  7.52am: MasterCard, Visa, the Swedish prosecution authority, Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, PayPal, Twitter, PostFinance, Amazon and EveryDNS.net. It is an very eclectic mix, but their websites are all under attack, or threat of attack, by supporters of WikiLeaks.

• Bye bye PayPal

  Paypal has been reported closing Wikileaks’ account through which it obtained donations. This is unacceptable and arbitrary. This is derogatory towards the associations and the thousands of common people who cared enough of their Freedom of Speech to spend money on this. This is why I have decided that if they don’t want Wikileaks’ money, they do not want mine either, and I have closed my account with them.

  [...]

  Meanwhile, as also Visa and Mastercard have been reported fiddling with Wikileaks’ account without having received any court order compelling them to do so — and this is tantamount to stealing other people’s money if they have blocked incoming payments — I have decided that in protest they will not have the chunk of my not irrelevant Chrsitmas shopping, as I will only use other payments means. If they don’t listent to people’s voice, they will listen the language of money.

• EasyDNS to host Wikileaks

  At my company, we use EasyDNS to do our external DNS hosting (building a real, high availability DNS server infrastructure is outside of the scope of our financial resources, so we have them do it for us), and I’ve always been very happy with their service.

• Check Out The Greatest Hits Of Operation Payback, The Hackers That Took Down Mastercard

• Editorial – Statement on DDOS attacks

  Wikileaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result.

  The attacks are of a similar nature to those received – and endured – by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables.

  These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions.

  Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”

• U.N. rights chief slams China, defends Assange

  Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, pressed China to release this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, expressing hope that China will “come to recognize” the positive contribution the pro-democracy activist can make on Chinese society.

  In a rare, wide-ranging press conference in Geneva, Pillay presented the U.N.’s strongest public criticism of China’s imprisonment of Liu, who is serving an 11-year jail sentence for drafting the pro-democracy Charter 08 manifesto. Pillay also scolded China for placing Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest “that in my view is in contravention of Chinese national law.”

• China cracks down on activists ahead of Liu Xiaobo Nobel prize ceremony

  China today launched its most prolonged and severe crackdown on activists and dissidents in recent years ahead of tomorrow’s Nobel peace prize ceremony honouring the jailed writer Liu Xiaobo.

• What If There Were An Application For Dot Wikileaks?

  What would happen if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the domain name system oversight body, received an application for a .wikileaks top level domain name (TLD) next year, under its new system of opening up the internet for domains? It could make an interesting example of how well the complex system to apply for new TLDs works and how much political intervention is possible in the system. At the 39th ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia this week, the self-regulatory body is trying to finalise issues in the published Final Applicant Guidebook – and it is governments and trademark owners that are calling for more time and more procedures.

  The hot issue discussed by the worldwide internet community, the witch-hunt against Wikileaks by commercial service providers in the US and various countries, is no topic for the private DNS self-governance body, according to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom. “We have not been approached by governments on this,” Beckstrom said in answer to questions from Intellectual Property Watch at an ICANN press conference.

• Radio Berkman 171: Wikileaks and the Information Wars

  So today we pull together some of the brightest minds at the Berkman Center to talk about Wikileaks, with Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig moderating.

• WikiLeaks, Free Speech and National Security

  EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston joins Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET, Niles Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, and and Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of “The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern” in a discussion on “Wikileaks, Free Speech and National Security.”

• UN rights boss concerned at targeting of WikiLeaks

  U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay voiced concern on Thursday at reports of pressure being exerted on private companies to halt financial or Internet services for WikiLeaks.

• “Anonymous” Posts Video Describing “Operation Payback” In Defense Of WikiLeaks

  For those unfamiliar with the depths of Internet sub-culture, “Anonymous” is a hard concept to understand. Simply put they are an anonymous crowdsourced set of vigilantes responsible for puling off some of the most newsworthy stunts in Internet history. But past projects like punking Scientology of flooding YouTube with porn fail in comparison to their recent attempts to disrupt the established entities who they deem to have alligned with the wrong side of justice over the WikiLeaks story. Now, in eerie and awesome fashion, a new video has been posted that describes their agenda in the most historic terms.

• WikiLeaks cables: Oil giants squeeze Chávez as Venezuela struggles

  Venezuela’s tottering economy is forcing Hugo Chávez to make deals with foreign corporations to save his socialist revolution from going broke.

  The Venezuelan president has courted European, American and Asian companies in behind-the-scenes negotiations that highlight a severe financial crunch in his government.

  Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is the engine of the economy but buckled when given an ultimatum by its Italian counterpart and has scrambled to attract foreign partners, according to confidential US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

• MultiBox.be mirrors WikiLeaks

  Freedom of speech isn’t a privilege, I posted a little while back.

  It’s a right, I said, and that includes having free access to everything which involves us, concerns us and affects us.

• Russian Premier Putin Criticizes U.S. Over WikiLeaks Arrest

  Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized the U.S. over the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• Dutch cops arrest Operation Payback suspect

• Holder Says U.S. Probes WikiLeaks-Related Web Attacks

  The U.S. Justice Department is examining cyber attacks that have been blamed on WikiLeaks supporters, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

  “We are aware of the incidents,” Holder said at a news conference in Washington today. “We are looking into them.”

  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, speaking at the news conference with Holder, said the U.S. is coordinating with the “private sector” on cyber issues. Separately, a Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency is working with companies to limit damages from the attacks.

• DDoS: How to take down WikiLeaks, MasterCard or any other Web site

  I can’t tell you who’s attacked first WikiLeaks and more recently MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa with Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) assaults , but I can tell you it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even, as such things go, that bad. Just ask Google if you want to know what a real DDoS attack is like.

• Is Twitter Playing Whack-a-Mole With Pro-Wikileaks Hacktivist Accounts?

  Distributed denial of service attacks, of the kind pro-Wikileaks hacktivists have been aiming at PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard, are not particularly complex to pull off.

• “Some Questions To Consider” Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks “Killing The Messenger For Bad News”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Brazilian farmers are unlikely climate heroes

  Here is the good news from Cancún. Brazil, so often demonised for its destruction of the Amazon rainforest, is turning over a new leaf. In the past year it has transformed a sketchy promise made in Copenhagen to cut emissions to 36 to 39 per cent below business-as-usual by 2020 into a detailed science-based plan. And much of the work will be done by the industry most responsible for trashing the Amazon – cattle ranching and commercial agriculture.

  World-wide, agriculture is directly responsible for roughly 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – a figure that does not include emissions from the deforestation is causes. Yet the climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, have so far failed to address this industry’s contribution to global warming. Against all odds, Brazil is now bidding to go from the bad boy of forestry and agriculture to their poster child.

• Blue whale’s gigantic mouthful measured

  A blue whale’s mouth cavity is so vast and stretchy that it can engulf a volume of water equivalent to its own body mass, say scientists.

  The whales – the largest animals on the planet – filter the krill they eat from these huge watery mouthfuls.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Ex-ministers face Commons ban in lobbying row

  Three former Labour ministers face being barred from Parliament after being rebuked for breaching lobbying rules.

  The Standards and Privileges Committee ordered ex-defence secretary Geoff Hoon to apologise and said his Commons pass should be suspended for five years.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The FBI Arbitrarily Covers Up Evidence of Misconduct: Is This the Transparency Obama Promised?

  EFF recently received documents in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that demonstrate a disturbing trend: the FBI’s arbitrary application of FOIA exemptions to hide, or in some instances, reveal, its unlawful activities.

• Nobel peace prize placed on empty chair in honour of Liu Xiaobo

  The 2010 Nobel peace prize was today placed on an empty chair in Oslo’s city hall in a symbolic act to mark its award to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and pro-democracy activist who is serving a jail sentence in his home country.

  In the centrepiece of a simple, moving ceremony watched by an audience of 1,000 people, among them Norway’s king and queen and a clutch of fellow Chinese dissidents, the chairman of the Nobel committee, Thorbjoern Jagland, placed the citation and medal on a simple, blue upholstered seat on a small row of chairs to the right of the hall’s stage.

• Cecilia Malmström Member of the European Commission responsible for Home Affairs Taking on the Data Retention Directive European Commission conference in Brussels Brussels, 3 December 2010

• YouTube raises the upload length for some users; now exceeds 15 minutes

  First, it was 10 minutes. Then, back in July, it went to 15. Now, according to the YouTube Blog, the site will be selecting some users to have that 15 minute limit raised even higher.

• 2010: E-Book Buyer’s Guide to E-Book Privacy

  With the 2010 holidays upon us, it’s time to update EFF’s E-Book Buyer’s Guide to E-Book Privacy, which summarizes and comments on the privacy-related policies of several e-readers.

• Gov’t crackdown spurs initiatives to route around DNS

  Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the principal investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led an alphabet soup of government agencies in seizing the domain names of 82 Web sites (PDF) that ICE said were “engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works” (See: Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0). The seizures were accomplished by getting the VeriSign registry, owner of the .com and .net top-level domains, to change the authoritative domain-name servers for the seized domains to servers controlled by DHS.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• The link between free WiFi and the future of roaming

  The next stage of the digital revolution is clearly the combination of mobile internet, cloud computing and billions of sensors to deliver a new generation of “smart” services. These technologies really will be a passport to a better way of living. But Europe will end up playing the second league of these markets if we don’t make good use of open platforms and standards to drive up competition. If we do embrace openness – the systematic use of generic and standardised technologies to create a level but elevated playing field to trigger cutting-edge innovation on top – I think we will be well placed to capitalise on our current leadership in mobiles, telecom, hardware and embedded software. And that means Europeans will take a bigger role in internet innovation.

• Chairman Genachowski’s Next Net Neutrality Proposal: What to Watch For

  EFF has been monitoring the net neutrality debate with an eye to two main concerns, both stemming from our conviction that however laudable the goal of neutrality–and it is a laudable goal–the regulatory and legislative paths that get us there must not amount to a “Trojan horse” that we’ll all regret:

  First, we have a well-founded fear of an open-ended grant of authority to the FCC to regulate the Internet, and attendant worries, especially about regulations that could create barriers to entry for the next generation of garage innovators.

Intellectual Monopolies

• “Read all about it!” Court rules web is permanent, newspapers are ephemeral

  Grisbrook had provided photographs for MGN for a number of years, without a written contract, being paid when his photographs were used. MGN archived the photographs it used; any subsequent use by MGN entitled the photographer to a further fee. It was conceded that Grisbrook licensed MGN to use his photos in this way while retaining copyright in them, though there was some dispute as to how far this licence extended. In particular, did it extend to the use of Grisbrook’s works on MGN’s websites?

• Copyrights

  • Record Labels Dismiss Lawsuit Against Porn Company

    The record industry has dropped its lawsuit against a porn company accused of featuring copyrighted music in its videos. The dismissal may be the result of a confidential settlement, although neither side will comment on the case.

    RK Netmedia, which describes itself as the “World’s Best Reality Porn Website,” hires adult actors who perform sexual acts at exclusive nightclubs and parties. As the actors “perform” their lewd acts, popular recordings from artists like Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson and Katy Perry provide the soundtrack accompaniment. Videos are allegedly named after songs, and actors are encouraged to lip-sync to the lyrics.

  • No harm, no foul? P2P user says $1.5M award should be zeroed out

    Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first US citizen to take her file-sharing lawsuit all the way to a verdict, has been hit with three separate damage awards: $222,000, $1.92 million, and recently $1.5 million. The judge has made clear that these figures are absurd; after the second trial, he declared $54,000 the most that he could possibly allow.

  • Consumer Focus claims legally naïve are being abused in an anti-consumer copyright court system

    Consumer Focus has entered the debate on the proposed reform of the Patents County Court (PCC). The PCC, soon to be renamed the Intellectual Property County Court, handles most small and medium-sized non-criminal copyright infringement claims.

  • Irish ISP offers free music, “four strikes” to subscribers

    Here’s the good news for Ireland’s millions of music lovers. Eircom, one of the country’s biggest ISPs, has launched a new streaming music service free of any additional charges to its subscribers. Eircom’s MusicHub will offer four million music tracks to the company’s customers without any restrictions or advertising (sorry Ars readers, unless you currently reside in the Republic of Ireland, you probably won’t be able to connect to that link).

  • Copyheart: Encouraging People To Copy

    Occasional Techdirt contributor Nina Paley, who has pointed out some problems with Creative Commons in the past, is pushing an interesting solution: the Copyheart. It’s not a huge license or anything like Creative Commons, but just a basic suggestion: where you might normally put a © symbol, instead put a ♥ — and perhaps an explanation.

  • 3D, Simultaneous Release Don’t Prevent Piracy, Paramount COO Says

    He identified a four-pronged strategy of consumer awareness, fine-tuning business models, technology and legislation to fight online piracy. However, a campaign to raise consumer awareness on online piracy might take decades, which he likened to anti-smoking or drunk driving.

  • Digital Garage ♥ CC

    Digital Garage, long time friend and supporter of CC, has just donated $100,000 to our annual campaign! According to Joi Ito, Digital Garage Co-Founder and Board Member and CC CEO – “Digital Garage considers Creative Commons to be a key piece of infrastructure for our global society. As a cutting-edge business that invests in internet companies and incubators that help facilitate this global society, it’s imperative that Creative Commons remains as strong as possible.”

  • CC’s Contribution to Welfare, Field-by-Field: The Separate Contribution to Art

    Last time on the CC blog I was sharing my thoughts about the evaluation of CC’s contribution to Collaboration and Sharing. There was a part there in which I was making the point that it is an impact which is distinctly challenging for estimation. Well, my full hearted belief that that analysis is, in fact, the pinnacle of prospective hardships can explain why when I first came to engage with CC’s contribution to the field of art, I was feeling lighthearted. After all, most of the characteristics which made sharing and collaboration such a tough domain to gauge, are not properties of art. So, I can begin by reporting that it was definitely light-minded to be lighthearted; the contribution to art is a completely independent pandora’s box.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Brazil plans large GNU/Linux deployment

The number of PCs deployed is likely to be as much as 1.5 million, making it one of the biggest deployments of GNU/Linux.

Linux without a command line. Is it possible?

I have to admit. I do like the command line and one of my favourite programs is Tilda. A drop down shell which allows me to run commands quicker than any mouse happy click lover. More often than not I run a quick command to do file operations, system operations and remote connections. It’s not pretty, all text and no fancy eye candy but it gets the job done, fast.

However, many proponents of proprietary operating systems ridicule us Linux lovers for our command line commando ways and maintain that it is not possible to use Linux without having to write a command line or two. I have always said pshaw to that and two seconds later found myself immersed in a bash shell. I put it down to my habits and choice of Linux (Gentoo) as well as knowing too much for my own good

[...]

So I have at least proven to myself, eaten my own dog food that Linux can be used in exactly the same way most people use other operating systems without having to fire up a command line. This was done not on a normal run of the mill pc either. This was done on exotic hardware which if there was going to be a problem, there would have been a problem.

TV show promoting Linux in schools!

We have an opportunity to introduce a mainstream TV audience to the great stuff that Linux can do in schools, but we need 25 Linux enthusiasts to commit to show up in order to accomplish it.

I just spoke with a program manager for a TV show called ABC 7 Live. They are interested in having supporters of Linux in schools (and particularly Partimus.org) attend a show. The show airs daily from 3 pm to 4 pm. I need a list of 25 people who will attend. I need the list by Thursday, 12/9/10 at 3 pm. You must be on the list to be admitted to the studio. I am coordinating the list, so please be sure to email me to get on the list. You can email me at einfeldt a t gmail dot com. You can watch shows from the archive here

http://7liveonline.com

They have had famous people like Mark Zuckerberg on this show.

Linux: Tux Goes to Church

Of course that “free” system is Linux. Usually some local system builder will be glad to build systems and preload Linux for a church. That same local system builder can likely provide support if asked. Any Linux distribution could serve as a good base on which a church could build its IT operations. On the desktop I would still recommend Mandriva despite its roller coaster history. Mandriva is a very easy to learn, user-friendly Linux distribution. It has easy GUI tools in the Mandriva Control Center to help the Linux novice get started with setup of a Linux system. At this point I would recommend the Gnome desktop for end-users coming from Microsoft that need a full-blown GUI to be comfortable. Once KDE 4.x is back to being at least as good as KDE 3.5.10 I may recommend that again. But I do not recommend KDE at this point.

Server

• Digging Into The Top500

  The Top500 is the favorite punching bag of many people in HPC. My beef is not with the Top500, it is with all those who make it out to be something it is not. In my opinion, it is good historical record of those machines that can run a single benchmark. There is of course certain bragging rights for landing on the Top500 and it may help people justify an expensive pile of hardware. I suppose getting your system listed on a web page is good thing™, but there are those who have real work to get done and can brag about minor things like application throughput, optimization, and utilization.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 23

Google

• Google Chrome OS: what you need to know

  The long-awaited Chrome OS is finally here, and the first Chrome notebooks are winging their way to happy beta testers as you read this.

  So is it the operating system reinvented, or just a nifty way to squeeze more speed out of laptops?

Kernel Space

• Who’s to Blame for the Linux Kernel?

  The Linux Foundation publishes an annual Linux report that shows (approximately) who has written and contributed to the Linux kernel. The report is put together by LWN’s Jon Corbet (also a kernel contributor) and kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, with additional contributions from the Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson.

• Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Red Hat, Novell, IBM Among Top Contributors to Linux Development

Applications

• Top 30 Most Popular Scientific and Engineering Packages for Linux

  In this article, I’ve come across 30 of the most popular Scientific and Engineering free and open source packages that students, scientists and programmers in the engineering field can greatly appreciate. These packages aren’t categorized in any particular way, it’s just a top 30 list of packages that has been most popular lately.

• Mind-Mapping Apps: Lightweight Labyrinth, Quick-Witted VYM and Simple Semantik

  Mind mapping applications are a way to sort and outline the various pieces and steps of any particular process or problem. Related ideas are connected, creating a visual web of interrelated concepts. Mind mapping forces both the logical and the creative sides of your brain to work together. Free software can help you through the task with apps like VYM, Labyrinth Maps and Semantik.

• The 5 Best Torrent Clients For Linux

  BitTorrent is a fast, reliable and fairly straightforward way to download files large and small. We’ve got a guide right here. Whether you’re regularly downloading meaty Linux distributions or simply prefer to try-before-you-buy, you’ll be needing a decent torrent client to keep your downloads in check.

• Security Tools in Linux Distributions, Part I

  With so many security tools available, it can be hard to know what to use. Many users do not want to be bothered with downloading, learning and configuring security software when so many other things need to be done. The good news is tools that system administrators would manually install, and checks that they would write scripts to do as part of a security audit, are available out of the box in Linux distributions.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux crontab, cronjob Syntax, How to and tips

  • Advanced Linux Server Troubleshooting (part 2)

  • nid in $form_state

  • Cross platform file encryption utility using blowfish – Bcrypt

  • Performing Searches with grep

  • SSH And SCP With PHP

  • Get alert about LAMP stack

  • Come prendere Screenshot su Linux

  • How to convert VirtualBox VDI to VMware VMDK disks

  • SSH Sessions Timing Out?

  • 40+ Best GIMP Tutorials of 2010

  • How to install Linux Kernel headers on Debian or Ubuntu

  • How to Create an Explosion

  • Fixing Dropbox startup issues in Ubuntu

  • Easy Record Ubuntu desktop, speaker output and microphone using Tibesti

  • Creating Animations With GNU Octave and the GNU Image Manipulation Program

  • ‘Directory Cleaner And Files Organizer’ Updated With Command Line Version

  • How to Setup a Home FTP Server – Part1

  • How to Setup a FTP Home Server – Part2

  • How to update your custom Ubuntu 10.10 kernel

  • Keeping your computers in sync

• Games

  • Linux Games: Gridwars

  • LGP And TuxGames Are Online !

    A few weeks ago LGN reported that Happypenguin aka The Linux Game Tome is back (although it wasn’t possible to submit news).

  • M.A.R.S. – A Ridiculous Shooter

    Features:

    * awesome 2D-graphics with an unique style
    * a stunning amount of particles
    * single- and multiplayer-support
    * an artificial intelligence using an aggro-system, which reacts differently upon varying situations
    * many impressive weapons
    * several game modes

  • 21 More Notable Free Linux Games (Part 1 of 3)

    Gaming on Linux is alive and kicking. There is a good base of free and commercial games to play with a steady stream being released and enhanced each month, encompassing a wide range of game categories. The purpose of this article is to identify some more remarkable free Linux games which are definitely worth investigating. The article is not restricted to any particular genre, so hopefully there will be something of interest here for any type of gamer.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Canonical Donates Server to KDE

    KDE is a growing community with growing needs. The KDE Sysadmin team works hard to keep up, but lately the servers have been coming under some strain.

    To help ease the situation, Canonical has donated a new server for the KDE Sysadmins to use. The server, named kundong, features an impressive 8 CPU cores, 6 GB of memory, and a 130 GB disk with space for several more disks as needed. It is hosted in Canonical’s data center in central London.

  • 7 Ways to Beautify Your KDE 4 Desktop

    Part of the big hype over the release of KDE 4 was its new and improved eye candy, mostly due to the Plasma workspace. Those who liked the changes, loved the new KDE from the beginning. Those who did not are still complaining about it. But like any good desktop environment, you are by no means stuck with the default look. In fact, KDE offers more easily customizable features than any other. What follows are 7 ways to get the desktop look you dreamed about when you were a child.

  • KDE 4.6 Beta: Finding New Directions

    Many of the changes in the beta are of interest mainly to developers and not directly observable to casual users, although the changes may affect development in future releases.

• GNOME Desktop

  • 13 Breathtaking Conky Configurations You Should See!

    Though we used to talk a lot about Ubuntu desktop eyecandy, Conky is something we never really discussed at all. Conky Ubuntu Lucid theme was the only exception, which is by far the most easy to install Conky theme I have ever used. So as to settle the Conky drought once and for all, here we feature one of the best collection of Conky configurations available.

  • Cheese webcam gets some crazy new effects

    Take a peek at some crazy new video effects coming to the Cheese webcam tool in this video by GNOME developers Daniel Siegel & Andreas Nilsson.

• Xfce

  • KDE Software Compilation 4.6 Beta2 Release Announcement

  • Second 4.6 Series Betas Preview New Kontact

    KDE today announced the immediate availability of a second set of beta releases for the upcoming 4.6 series. These releases, codenamed Caramel, bring previews of new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook workspaces as well as introducing major changes to applications and the KDE Platform.

Distributions

• ‘Tis the Season for Rolling Releases

  Yes, there must be something about this time of year that has made tongues more likely to wag and Linux bloggers more likely to think about daily updates. How else to explain the recent rash of rumors and discussions on the topic of release schedules for certain popular Linux distros?

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia Has an Official Logo

    After months of careful consideration, lots of contributions, and a set process, the Mageia project has decided upon a logo. Some may find it a bit understated, while other may find it offensive. In any case, the new bubbling cauldron is it.

    There were so many beautiful entries in contention for the new face of Mageia, but this simple design prevailed. The winning entry was submitted by Olivier Faurax. He says of the winning logo, “The cauldron with bubbles could imply magic – not really a theme to attract most potential users. Or it could refer to the development process – a sort of inside joke, which wouldn’t be understood by most without explanation.”

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to Speak at Economy Forum “The Road to Prosperity: Jobs for the Next Generation”

  • Red Hat: Making a Move, Up 2.6% (RHT)

    Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is one of today’s notable stocks on the rise, up 2.6% to $48.15.

  • Dell and Red Hat Strengthen their Partnership with RHEL 6.0

    Dell is proud to announce the launch of OEM support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RHEL 6) which is certified on 9G, 10G, and 11G Dell servers and is an excellent complement to Dell’s open standards-based strategy. RHEL 6 provides customers with a proven, scalable, manageable and reliable open standards-based operating system that delivers even more compelling reasons for customers to migrate off of proprietary, UNIX-based systems.

  • Red Hat Delivers New JBoss Business Rules Management System

    JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.1 is the latest piece of the Red Hat open-source middleware portfolio, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, and the first new release of the JBoss BRMS since May 2009. The new release brings additional authoring and management tools for use by business analysts and developers, said Pierre Fricke, director of product line management for middleware at Red Hat, in an interview with eWEEK.

  • Fedora

    • Distro Hoppin`: Fedora 14

      I found Laughlin to be the most stable and solid version of Fedora I’ve tried in years.

    • Why automatically push to rawhide?

      One of the things that bothers me about Fedora development is that things automatically end up anywhere after being built. I’m a big believer in having to do something to put software in the hands of users, even if they are running a development distribution, and even if they should “be able to fix whatever breaks”. Today, if you build something in rawhide, it’ll land on user machines tomorrow (in the default case). This applies especially if you do a “known good” build and then do “just one more” before the early morning hours when the mirrors get updated with today’s version.

• Debian Family

  • Making the Switch to Linux: Some Debian-based Recommendations

    Two years ago today my family made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu. This wasn’t an overnight decision, and it wasn’t without complications. At the time we only had one desktop in our home (now we have a couple of laptops as well) and I intended to set it up to dual-boot. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that the version of BIOS on the desktop didn’t recognize USB connections, so it wouldn’t respond to keystrokes from the USB keyboard. And no, there was no other type of port available. By late that evening a couple of years ago we were set up with Ubuntu 8.10 fully installed on our family desktop. Although I did install Windows in Virtualbox for my son’s games, other than that we’ve been an Ubuntu-only household since then.

  • SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Alpha TEST 4 Uploaded for Testing

    Alpha 4 is available. This is a test release not a production release. It is intended for MEPIS Testers only. The ISO files are: SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.82_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.82_64.iso

  • Debian Project News – December 8th, 2010

    A new update for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” has been released. Due to an issue with the preparation, the linux-2.6 packages included in this point release do not incorporate the security fixes released in DSA 2110-1. DSA 2126-1, which has just been released, includes the updates from both DSA 2110-1 and the linux-2.6 packages from this point release. All other recent security updates have been added as well as some fixes for critical issues. New CD and DVD images as well as update CDs and DVDs are available.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Video Of Current Unity

      Today I recorded a short screencast that showcases some of the excellent work going into Unity and that is available in the Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal developer version of Ubuntu.

    • Ubuntu Unity Desktop Review

      A few days ago I decided to upgrade my desktop Ubuntu OS from 10.10(Maverick Meerkat) to 11.04(Natty Narwal) Alpha 1. Previous experience upgrading to such an early alpha release told me that this would be very risky and likely I would have to re-install back to the stable release. But after the lengthy upgrade process was completed(took a few hours because I had Gnome, KDE, and LXDE desktop environments previously installed), I successfully rebooted and was greeted with the familiar GDM login screen.

    • Looking at Ubuntu Brainstorm: Idea #25801

      The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate Idea #25801: Help the user understand when closing a window does not terminate the app. In other words, figure out to signal to the user that an application will continue to run after all of its windows have been closed.

      This is more than a good idea, it’s an important gap in the usability of most of the desktop operating systems in widespread use today.

      It’s also come up in our user testing: Charline’s research on Unity identified a lack of feedback to users and she observed the same absence of good feedback in the Rythmbox interface, where Rhythmbox can continue running in the background, playing music, with no windows visible.

    • Ubuntu Certified To Linux Standard Base 4.0

      All the leading commercial Linux companies are certified to Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0), including Canonical, Kylin, Linpus, Mandriva, Neoshine, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag and Red Hat.

      The Linux Foundation has also released a beta of the LSB 4.1 and is soliciting feedback from the public. The official release of LSB 4.1 is expected in January. The LSB delivers interoperability between applications and the Linux operating system, allowing application developers to target multiple versions of Linux with just one software package. It also allows Linux vendors to demonstrate to their customers that they meet a common set of industry standards and that they work together as an industry on advancing Linux.

Devices/Embedded

• Kinect-powered helicopter is completely autonomous

  Yes, this helicopter has a Kinect on board, one that’s connected to a Linux box.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Android Doesn’t Create Value For Us: Nokia

      Prepare yourself for an all new Nokia experience in 2011. Nokia’s Director of Design Strategy Marko Ahtisaari said that Nokia is planning to launch devices based on a completely new approach to its UI and will be built on Meego. But, Ahtisaari did not not to give any details about the devices which are awaiting us. Ahtisaari revealed this at the LeWeb conference in Paris.

  • Android

    • Android Users Are More Active Than iPhone 4 Users ?

      A report by Arieso comparing data usage by Android and iPhone users highlights few interesting points. The study shows that Android user are more active online than the iPhone 4 users.

Technology To Aid The Disabled

The technology that drives the ‘wheel’ Mehta, an ex-employee of Siemens AG, is a vociferous supporter of open source platforms. He developed the tool, christened ‘Arpit’s Wheel’, using simple computing hardware and FOSS (free and open-source software) tools and frameworks, which later bagged him the Manthan Award in 2008 in the e-inclusion category.

Oracle

• New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m95) available

  Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m95 is available for download.

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

• Java SE 7/8 passed

• Ellison: Oracle Enterprise Linux Coming to Sparc

  Oracle will port its Enterprise Linux distribution to Sun’s Sparc processor, a move that could help it compete better against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server business.

  CEO Larry Ellison made the disclosure in response to a question about Oracle’s Linux strategy at the company’s Sparc systems launch last Thursday.

• Salesforce’s Benioff: ‘Ellison flunks vision test’

  Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, has fired back at Larry Ellison and his beloved Exadata for cloud computing, saying that the server fails the cloud test and that Oracle lacks a genuine vision.

BSD

• PC-BSD snapshots available: 8.2 and 9.0

  Kris Moore has announced two snapshots of PC-BSD work-in-progress: version 8.2 and 9.0. Any feedback (positive and/or constructive) is welcome on the Testing Mailinglist.

A personal blog post for December – Xmas is almost here!

Firstly, my thoughts are with my online friend (and co-host of Techbytes) Gordon, who’s under the weather at the moment and hope for a speedy recovery, certainly if he is absent from the show its going to leave a gap which will be noticeable to all the kind people who tell us they enjoy listening. If Gordon is absent I hope you will stick with us until he returns.

2010 Gift Guide for Storage Geeks

SME Server: Simple. Mature. Enterprise.

U.S. Arrests Online Seller Who Scared Customers

The merchant, Vitaly Borker, 34, who operates a Web site called decormyeyes.com, was charged with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. The mail fraud and wire fraud charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The stalking and interstate threats charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.

DIY fabrication hits a new price point (maybe…)

Pretty much every geek who has ever drawn breath lusts after a “Star Trek”-style replicator. The advent of 3D printing and CNC machines, such as the MakerBot, have started to make that dream a reality. They offer the DIY enthusiast the ability to create pretty much anything their minds can imagine (and render in a CAD program). But for all but the most devoted hardware hackers, the current price points — between $800 and $1,000 for 3D printers, around $600 for a CNC machine — are a little too high for comfort.

EXCLUSIVE: New Lawsuit Seeks to Expose Truth Behind ‘Catfish’

Science

• Secret Space Plane Finally Lands; Twin Preps for Launch

  After 225 days in orbit the Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane touched down Friday at 1:16 a.m. local time at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was only the second fully automated re-entry and runway landing in the history of space flight. The Soviets achieved the first in 1988 with the robotic prototype of their Buran Space Shuttle clone.

Health/Nutrition

• Foie Gras: a Disease, Not a Delicacy

  It persuaded British department store Harvey Nichols to remove foie gras from its fancy restaurant menu.s

• Roger Moore Wins Foie Gras Battle With Top British Store

  James Bond star Sir Roger Moore is celebrating after persuading bosses at a British department store to remove foie gras from their fancy restaurant menu.

  Harvey Nichols chiefs were urged to take action by the former 007 actor as part of his campaign against the delicacy on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Security

• Interesting kernel exploit posted

• OOPS – Root privileges under Linux

  On the Full Disclosure security mailing list, Dan Rosenberg presents a small demo program which craftily combines several security holes to obtain root privileges on Linux systems.

• Release Critical Bug report for Week 49

• Security advisories for Thursday

• Single software licence shared 774,651 times

  A single licence for Avast security software has been used by 774,651 people after it went viral on a file-sharing site, according to the company.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Let’s Stop Panicking Over Half-Assed Terrorists Already

  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab couldn’t manage to blow up a plane over Detroit last Christmas, kicking off a year’s worth of high-profile terror-fails. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from freaking out — putting naked scanners in airports and groping passengers. Overreactions like that compelled one of its senior-most counterterrorism officials yesterday to implore the public not to hand al-Qaeda victories from the jaws of defeat.

• US spooks illegally check your credit cards

  SPIES WORKING FOR THE JUNTA of revolting British colonialists in the Americas have started illegally monitoring credit cards.

  According to documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations. They have done all this without the nicety of getting a court order.

• Some Sanity From Those In Power In The US Government, Concerning TSA Security & Wikileaks

  Similarly, Wired has an article highlighting how Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is speaking more reasonably about anti-terrorism efforts and security as well, noting (as we have in the past) that “perfect security” is an impossible goal that is, itself, damaging to security.

  He points out that the US appears to be playing right into Al Qaeda’s hands by playing up each failed terrorist attempt and then overreacting to it, noting that (like internet trolls), a better response might be to just ignore them publicly, while continuing to do things quietly on the back end to protect the country.

• The War on Cameras

  Reinoehl denied the request, but Allison’s promise to record the proceedings apparently came through loud and clear. Just after he walked through the courthouse door the next day, Allison says Crawford County Circuit Court Judge Kimbara Harrell asked him whether he had a tape recorder in his pocket. He said yes. Harrell then asked him if it was turned on. Allison said it was. Harrell then informed the defendant that he was in violation of the Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it a Class 1 felony to record someone without his consent. “You violated my right to privacy,” the judge said.

• A nude awakening — TSA and privacy

  The odds of dying on an airplane as a result of a terrorist hijacking are less than 1 in 25 million — which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively zero — according to Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

• UK govt demands an end to evidence-based drug policy

  A new proposal from the UK government will remove scientists from the advisory council that analyzes and makes recommendations on drug policy, and allow the home secretary to ignore the committee altogether and ban any substance for a year regardless of scientific evidence or advice.

• “Going commando” on the TSA, redux: a kilt-wearer speaks

  So the big Thanksgiving airport opt-out opted-in after all. Widespread “regimental” kilt-wearing never materialized. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers were, by and large, spared a plague of True Scotsmen.

• Homeland Security Gets Walmart To Tell You To Inform On Your Neighbors

  Sometimes you just wonder what folks in our government are thinking half the time. The latest is that Homeland Security, when it’s not busy seizing domains of hip hop blogs, is apparently on a campaign to enlist shoppers at Walmarts in a somewhat creepy attempt to get people to spy on their neighbors. The program is officially called “If You See Something, Say Something” which could be shortened to “Inform on Your Neighbors” if DHS is looking for efficiency.

Cablegate

• Pakistani media publish fake WikiLeaks cables attacking India

  They read like the most extraordinary revelations. Citing the WikiLeaks cables, major Pakistani newspapers this morning carried stories that purported to detail eye-popping American assessments of India’s military and civilian leaders.

  According to the reports, US diplomats described senior Indian generals as vain, egotistical and genocidal; they said India’s government is secretly allied with Hindu fundamentalists; and they claimed Indian spies are covertly supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt and Balochistan.

• WikiLeaks supporters disrupt Visa and MasterCard sites in ‘Operation Payback’

• UN rights boss concerned at targeting of WikiLeaks

• Russia’s Putin raps West over Assange arrest

• Why do I Support Wikileaks? Because I live in Africa!

  Living on a continent with such a chequered history of very repressive governments, I am fully aware of the importance of access to information by the everyday people.

• Inside the mind of Julian Assange of Wikileaks!

• Lieberman Introduces New Censorship Bill In Kneejerk Response To Wikileaks

• Focus on the policy, not Wikileaks

  We may never know the whole story behind the recent publication of sensitive U.S. government documents by the Wikileaks organization, but we certainly can draw some important conclusions from the reaction of so many in government and media.

  At its core, the Wikileaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both political parties, insist on asking the wrong question. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead, the media focus on how so much sensitive information could have been leaked, or how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.

• Columbia University Reverses Anti-WikiLeaks Guidance

  Days after Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) caused an uproar by warning its students against linking to WikiLeaks or discussing the secret-spilling website’s latest cache of diplomatic cables online, the prestigious training ground for future diplomats has changed tack and embraced free speech.

  Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.

• How US Copyright Expansionism Created The Infrastructure That Now Stymies US Gov’t In Stopping Wikileaks

  Glyn Moody points us to a blog post by Brendan Scott that lays out the basic fact that the distributed distribution tools that Wikileaks now relies on were mainly developed in response to constant copyright expansionism at the behest of the US government (on behalf of the entertainment industry).

• Visa & MasterCard: KKK Is A-OK, But Wikileaks Is Wicked

  As Charles Arthur points out, the Ku Klux Klan’s website points you to a site that takes both MasterCard and Visa — suggesting the pure arbitrariness of both credit card companies’ decision here. It’s a bad idea when firms start making decisions for political reasons. There are all sorts of companies out there that take credit cards to support objectionable (to many) activities. Is it really the credit card companies’ job to pick and choose who they find objectionable to work with — and if so, what basis does it use for saying “KKK is okay, but Wikileaks is not”?

• WikiLeaks cables: Pfizer used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout

  The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.

  Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.

• Information is the Antidote to Fear: Wikileaks, the Law, and You

  Between the federal criminal investigation into Wikileaks, Senator Joe Lieberman’s calls for companies to stop providing support for Wikileaks and his suggestion that the New York Times itself should be criminally investigated, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and even the suggestion by some that he should be assassinated, a lot of people are scared and confused.

  Will I break the law if I host or mirror the US diplomatic cables that have been published by Wikileaks? If I view or download them? If I write a news story based on them? These are just a few of the questions we’ve been getting here at EFF, particularly in light of many US companies’ apparent fear to do any business with Wikileaks (with a few notable exceptions).

• Wikipedia Editors Delete Article Listing WikiLeaks Mirror Sites

  Ever since whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks began its latest round of document releases, it has found opposition and support in various places. It has hopped around from server to server, had its bank account closed, watched as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all shut down donations to the site, and even had an anonymous group of hackers retaliate in WikiLeaks’ name. One thing that keeps WikiLeaks going, however, is the simple fact that it has hundreds of mirror sites in different languages and locales.

  One such listing of these sites hosted on name-in-kind service Wikipedia has been deleted by the collaborative encyclopedia’s editors. Should we cry “Foul!” or is the deletion just more business as usual for the site?

• NYT Reporter Defends Publishing WikiLeaks Cables

  Sanger is one of the Times reporters who sifted through the leaked WikiLeaks documents and has since written several articles about what the documents reveal about President Obama’s approach to diplomacy with Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, China and other nations.

  He explains that the newspaper’s editors and its lawyers had lengthy and deliberate conversations before deciding to publish some of the cables.

• US State Department: ‘Assange must return stolen cables’

  US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to return the leaked US embassy cables, claiming they are “stolen property”.

• Wikileaked: a foreign policy journal devoted to the Wikileaks releases

  Wikileaked is a new foreign policy journal that covers nothing but the stories emerging from Wikileaks’s leaks, including the latest batch of #cablegate leaks.

Finance

• Running Backwards in the US Economy

  Oil is at 90 dollars a barrel. The governments of Europe, Japan, and the United States are saturated with debt. House prices in the US are falling again, and there’s no job growth in America. Put it all together, and for some reason, many are still imagining that we’re in an economic recovery.

  Today’s horrid jobs report contained some shock value in the sense that it missed expectations. But the novelty of a 39K print misses the larger point that, for a large population like the US, even a print of 100K or 125K would still be very bad news.

• Take Action: Crack Down on the Wall Street Casino!

• Ben Bernanke’s Secret Global Bank

  Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently-passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve Become the Central Bank of the world?”

  [...]

  Private foreign banks also received billions from the Fed in exchange for mortgage backed securities (MBS). The Fed created its MBS program in November 2008 and eventually paid out $1.25 trillion. These facts were known. What we did not know was that approximately half of these purchases were from overseas financial firms, including billions from Barclays Capital (U.K.), Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (England), UBS (Switzerland) and Nomura Securities (Japan). The numbers are huge. Duetsche Bank sold some $290 billion worth of MBS to the Fed.

• Labor uses jobless to lean on Congress to extend unemployment benefits

  The AFL-CIO pressed lawmakers to extend a “lifeline” to unemployed workers by extending benefits for out-of-work Americans.

  The labor group pressed Congress to approve another extension of unemployment benefits by featuring a video depicting jobless workers.

  “Congress is debating whether to restore this survival aid,” the video says. “This is not a debate. The choice is clear.”

  The unemployment benefits expired Nov. 30 and have lapsed since then. Such a situation has played out several times this year due to legislative wrangling.

• How to Balance the Budget Without Raising Taxes

  A value-added tax, a soda tax, a gas tax, banning earmarks, freezing a portion of federal spending at “pre-stimulus” levels – there’s no shortage of ideas being thrown out to fix the country’s disastrous balance sheet, which threatens not just near-term economic recovery but the possibility of long-term growth. Like last week’s report from the president’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, most of the current plans to fix the country’s finances rely more on increases in revenues than on cuts in spending. In part due to its heavy reliance on revenue hikes, the commission, charged with balancing the budget by 2020, failed to win enough votes of its own members to present its recommendations to Congress.

• A Leaner Leviathan

  Before it began its work eight months ago, one of the main knocks against the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was that it could do no more than recommend changes to Congress. In the end, it could not even do that, falling three votes shy of the 14 needed to officially submit its plan for congressional consideration.

  Still, the commission’s report, which was endorsed on Friday by a bipartisan majority of 11 out of its 18 members, is well worth a look. In addition to suggesting some much-needed reforms, including changes to the budget process and simplification of the tax code, it clearly shows, despite its talk of “painful” choices, that eliminating the federal deficit and reining in the national debt does not require radical change. Which is too bad, because even if Congress implemented every cut suggested by the report, the federal government would still be far too big, rife with programs that are unnecessary, unconstitutional, or both.

• Money For Nothing: Wall Street Borrowed From Fed At 0.0078 Percent

  For the lucky few on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve sure was sweet.

  Nine firms — five of them foreign — were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, which effectively act like cash on Wall Street, for four-week intervals while paying one-time fees that amounted to the minuscule rate of 0.0078 percent.

  That is not a typo.

  On 33 separate transactions, the lucky nine were able to borrow billions as part of a crisis-era Fed program that lent the securities, known as Treasuries, for 28-day chunks to the now-18 firms known as primary dealers that are empowered to trade with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The program, called the Term Securities Lending Facility, ensured that the firms had cash on hand to lend, invest and trade.

• What Is Wrong With Cutting Taxes?

  I suggest you talk to the Greeks (now in the International Monetary Fund’s emergency ward) or the Portuguese (who are headed in that direction.) For that matter, listen to any policymaker in the European Union – they are all focused on bringing down deficits in a credible manner. And watch the European financial markets – people there are doubting and testing the fiscal credibility of all governments throughout the euro zone.

  In fact, try persuading any responsible policy analyst anywhere in the world outside the United States that cutting taxes in the United States from current levels will boost growth so much that the cut will pay for itself” and end up reducing or at least controlling the fiscal deficit (the proposition of the Laffer Curve). You will be met great skepticism.

• Washington Rule Makers Out of the Shadows

  Federal rule makers, long the neglected stepchildren of Washington bureaucrats, suddenly find themselves at the center of power as they scramble to work out details of hundreds of sweeping financial and health care regulations that will ultimately affect most Americans.

• AIG files plan to pay off debt to New York Fed, prepare for Treasury stock swap

  Regardless, officials seem increasingly certain that taxpayers will recoup their investment in AIG – an outcome that seemed highly unlikely last year, when the total government commitment to the troubled company peaked at more than $180 billion.

• TARP Repayment and Legalized Counterfeiting

  The news outlets that insisted Congress approve TARP or world will end have been anxiously touting the prospect of repayments and possible profits for the taxpayers from one-time basket cases like Citigroup and AIG. It is worth noting that the question of the government showing a profit or loss on its loans to these companies has little to do with whether the bailout was a net benefit to taxpayers.

• NY trustee seeks $1B from 7 international banks

  Seven global banking institutions enabled disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme by “creating and offering derivative investment products linked to various Madoff feeder funds,” a court-appointed trustee alleged Wednesday.

• WH warns tax defeat could trigger new recession

  Raising the direst alarm yet, the Obama administration warned fellow Democrats on Wednesday that if they defeat the big tax-cut compromise detested by many liberals, they could jolt the nation back into recession.

• State budgets and finances

  Spending Remains Lower than Pre-Recession Levels State general fund spending is forecast to rise 5.3 percent in fiscal 2011 as 35 states enacted a fiscal 2011 budget with general fund spending levels above those of fiscal 2010. However, declines of 7.3 percent and 3.8 percent in state general fund spending in fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2009 respectively mean that state general fund spending remains nearly $42 billion, or 6.2 percent below its fiscal 2008 level. The fiscal 2010 general fund spending decline of 7.3 percent is the largest decline in state spending in the history of this report. See chart below.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• CPJ, OPC Need to Focus on Embattled U.S. Journalists

  A banquet of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) grossed $1.47 million at the Waldorf-Astoria Nov. 23 with the profits going to oppressed reporters and their families throughout the world.

  It is a noble effort supported by many blue chip corporate and media companies. Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, chaired the banquet. It was held on the first anniversary of the massacre of 57 people, including 32 journalists, in the Philippines. A video commemorated the tragedy.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Russian Press And Pakistani Courts Apparently Have More Respect For Free Speech Than Joe Lieberman

  The first, via Glyn Moody is a long and interesting opinion piece in Pravda, of all places, pointing out the hypocrisy of the US government’s response to Wikileaks and comparing it to the government’s response to the release of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent. It also runs through a nice history of the US’s back-and-forth battle with free speech issues, such as with the Alien & Sedition Acts and the McCarthy era. It also highlights how the Wikileaks’ release shows evidence of the US government covering up all sorts of politically motivated acts.

• Facebook revamp gives away even more info, warn pros

  The redesigned profile, launched earlier this week and due to be rolled out gradually over coming weeks, is designed to encourage punters to expose even more information about their day to day lives to the dominant social networking site, net security firm Sophos cautions.

• Popular Websites Sniff Browser History, Researchers Find

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Verizon LTE Blows Through Monthly Data Cap in 32 Minutes

Intellectual Monopolies

• Smoked turkey company alleges that competitor infringed copyright in directions

  Happy Thanksgiving. I’m grateful for your continued support and interest in Internet Cases. It truly is a pleasure to write these posts and to get your feedback and engagement. And it’s also a pleasure to bring you news of this ultra-timely new copyright lawsuit.

• Theft scribe picked for Intellectual Property review

  Five advisers have been appointed to Ian Hargreaves’ review into intellectual property growth, the IPO announced yesterday. Two of the choices may cause consternation among creators’ rights representatives.

  One is Scottish legal academic James Boyle, founding board member of Creative Commons, and co-author of two rabble-rousing comic books. One portrays Lawrence Lessig as the Statue of Liberty, the other Theft: Musical Borrowing from Plato to Hip-Hop, due to be published next year, portrays copyright holders as totalitarians.

• Imitation is the highest form of flattery

  Looks like someone liked our authentic Ristretto for iPad so much that they decided to copy it. This email was forwarded to us by a customer in Norway. Can any of you translate it for us? Our best guess is that this product is made in somewhere in Asia (not Norway) though we don’t know for certain. Are we mad? Not really. We’re too busy designing the next generation of laptop bags — the copycats will just have to keep up with us.

• The Dangers of COICA

  The entertainment industry’s newest legal tactic, the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA), sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. While Senator Ron Wyden exercised his right to place a hold on pending legislation — which will stop the bill from traveling to the Senate floor immediately — proponents of COICA can (and most assuredly will) reintroduce the measure the next time Congress convenes in 2011.

• Susan G. Komen Foundation Elbows Out Charities Over Use Of The Word ‘Cure’

• Even IP Lawyer Trade Group Thinks Viacom Is Wrong About Its DMCA Interpretation

  As you might imagine, I rarely agree with the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) on its positions. While there are plenty of “IP” lawyers who I know well and talk to frequently — many of whom seem to agree with my position on things — it’s no secret that the belief that “IP is all good” and “more IP is better” tends to be a bit more common among such practitioners than the views in the other direction. In fact, if you asked me, I would have just assumed that the AIPLA was 100% behind Viacom in its lawsuit against Youtube/Google. So, consider me quite surprised that the main part of the AIPLA’s amicus brief in Viacom’s appeal of the YouTube case is actually siding with YouTube and saying that Viacom’s argument (as we’ve said) goes way too far.

• Copyrights

  • State of the indy music industry looks rosy, so why all the doom-and-gloom about music?

    In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It’s a win for free expression and for art, but it’s a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.

    I don’t celebrate those losses: it’s terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren’t greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It’s sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday’s winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).

  • Piracy Is Over Like The Web Is Dead

    This, of course, is pure nonsense. That isn’t the way royalties with modern day recording contracts work. Through the magic of recording label accounting, the average musician makes roughly $23 for every $1000 in music sold — and that’s only if they actually recoup, which is difficult to do, thanks to the way the record labels account for things. For those of you who share my math skills and don’t want to reach for a calculator, that’s barely 2%. Some of that result stems from necessary things the bands may need to spend on: managers, lawyers, taxes. But a good deal of it also comes from neat little, and sometimes recoupable, charges from the record label, things like independent radio promotion, tour support, roughly fifty percent of the music video costs, etc. Other times, the record labels flatout don’t pay the royalties from truly successful albums. Bottom line is, at the end of the day, record labels make money off of selling music, musicians do not.

  • Google Won’t Recommend Most Popular Searches If It Thinks It Might Sorta Have Something To Do With Piracy

    In the last few months, there’s been a growing movement by the entertainment industry to blame Google for “piracy.” One of the favorite talking points is the claim that Google is “profiting from piracy,” by linking people to sites that point people to unauthorized infringing copies of content, and then placing ads on those sites. Of course, this ignores the fact that the standard “pirate” out there isn’t exactly the sort of person who goes around clicking on ads either — and is probably a hell of a lot more likely to ignore the ads entirely or use something like Adblock. Either way, it seems like Google has decided to try to end this argument for the industry by announcing some basic changes in how it deals with copyright complaints.

  • New Zealand leak: US-style copyright rules are a bad deal

    Michael Geist writes in with new leaks relating to the New Zealand government’s deep skepticism about US pressure to change its copyright law. The US wants New Zealand to add protection for “technical protection measures” (also called TPMs, DRM, or digital locks). This would follow the US law that makes it illegal to jailbreak an iPad, rip a DVD, or move your Kindle or Sony ebooks to competing devices (interestingly, the US copyright office just suspended the restriction on jailbreaking iPhones for three years, having concluded that the US law that’s being pushed in NZ does more harm than good).

  • ACS:Law Take Alleged File-Sharers To Court – But Fail On a Grand Scale

    Andrew Crossley, owner of the now infamous anti-piracy lawfirm ACS:Law, has always insisted that he has no fear of taking contested file-sharing cases to court. Now it has emerged that he recently tried to get a court to issue default judgments against individuals who offered no defense, but the hearing failed on so many levels its difficult to know where to start. Nevertheless, we’ll have a go.

  • Judge to copyright troll: get lost

  • EFF Demands Copyright Troll Pay for Suing Democratic Underground

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that the newspaper lawsuit factory Righthaven pay the EFF’s costs for its successful defense of the website Democratic Underground from one of Righthaven’s many copyright lawsuits.

  • MPAA to universities: curb piracy or lose federal funding

    The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to mimic the efforts of its music industry counterpart and put pressure on universities to curb student piracy. The organization notified its partners this week that it would begin sending out letters to college and university presidents in the US “calling their attention” to the anti-infringement provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The letter—copied to the campus CIOs—asks universities to cut off infringing students or face potentially crippling consequences.

  • Righthaven now working with Media News, sues over Denver Post column

    Las Vegas-based newspaper copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now doing business with Media News Group and has sued a blogger for alleged copyright infringement involving a column from the Media News-owned Denver Post.

    An attorney for Righthaven filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Charleston, S.C. This appears to be the first lawsuit Righthaven has filed in a federal court outside of Nevada, where since March it has filed 179 copyright infringement lawsuits.

• Distributions

Google

• Not All Chrome Glisters

  Because Chrome OS is open source, it has been available for people to explore for some time, which means that it’s not really possible for any elements of it to be a surprise, rather deflating any attempt to launch it in the traditional sense. But in yesterday’s, er, confirmation, there were a number of new announcements separate from the underlying operating system.

Kernel Space

• Speeding Up The Linux Kernel With Transparent Hugepage Support

  Last month we reported on the 200 line Linux kernel patch that does wonders for improving the desktop responsiveness of the system. There was certainly much interest (over 100,000 views to both of our YouTube videos demonstrating the change) but this patch really didn’t speed up the system per se but rather improved the desktop interactivity and reduced latency by creating task-groups per TTY so that the processes had more equal access to the CPU. There is though an entirely different patch-set now beginning to generate interest among early adopters that does improve the kernel performance itself in compute and memory intensive applications and it’s the Transparent Hugepage Support patch-set. Here are our initial tests of the latest kernel patches that will hopefully be finding their way into the mainline Linux kernel soon.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA Comments On Its Linux Driver Architecture

    What Andy basically said is that they do have some plans for “larger scale architectural projects”, but there isn’t anything specific to mention or when we might see such changes. Some of these larger projects for the proprietary NVIDIA driver include improving video memory usage, rendering synchronization, and improving the window system interacitvity. Though due to the size of the NVIDIA Linux team, they are uncertain when such advancements may arrive.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE’s KOffice Forks Internally As The Calligra Suite

    The KDE community has announced the formation of the Calligra Suite, as a “continuation of the KOffice project” to reflect the larger KOffice package rather than just being an office and productivity suite. Calligra is meant to breath new life into the contained KDE programs after an unresolvable dispute by KOffice developers.

    Making up KDE’s Calligra Suite are productivity, management, and graphics applications. On the productivity side this includes Words (formerly KWord), Tables (formerly KSpread), Stage (formerly KPresenter), Flow (formerly Kivio), and Kexi. Calligra’s management application is Plan to replace KPlato and on the graphics side there is Krita and Karbon.

  • KDE Software Compilation 4.6 Beta 2

    Two weeks after the Thanksgiving Day release of KDE SC 4.6 Beta 1, the second beta is now here for this desktop environment update to be officially released next month. KDE SC 4.6 Beta 2 has fixed nearly 1,200 bugs while more than 1,300 bugs were reported in the past two weeks.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Cheese webcam gets some crazy new effects

    Take a peek at some crazy new video effects coming to the Cheese webcam tool in this video by GNOME developers Daniel Siegel & Andreas Nilsson.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Weekly News Reader Survey: feedback requested!

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Unity: An Ancient African Word Meaning ‘Rocking’

      This is Unity running, and a recent addition is intellihide in the launcher. This is where the launcher will only show if a window is not obscuring it (just like in GNOME Do). As such, in the screenshot above we can see the launcher as Gwibber is a smaller window, but if I maximize Gwibber so it takes up the full space of the desktop, the launcher slides into the left of the screen so I can access the Gwibber window easily. To then access the launcher I just hover over the Ubuntu button and it slides into view. It looks and feels really fast and sleek.

    • Mock up: Application overview in Unity

      Could Unity’s application over-view look better for Natty?

      Discussions currently taking place on the Ayatana mailing list certainly think so and the mock-up below is one such proposed solution.

    • Events are like Signals

      What do I mean by a Signal? If you’ve done any programming in Qt, GTK+ or even just used D-Bus you’ll probably already know exactly what I mean. They’re pretty much like good old fashioned UNIX signals too, except that they’re not predefined. If you’ve done programming in ObjectiveC, the analog is Notifications.

Corporate change: Contributing to open source

About five years ago I was hired by a software company that specialized in database security. Some of our software was used to protect databases in military assets and major banks. But a lot of development was very remote from top-secret weapons or classified information. For example, we wrote a small command line utility for driving virtual machines for integration testing. It helped us eradicate failures during installs and upgrades. Was I going to have to write that again at my next job? How could I share it with my friends working at other organizations?

The State of Open Source

This month’s Computing Now theme compiles a variety of articles that show the many current faces of open source. “Choosing an Open Source Software License in Commercial Context: A Managerial Perspective” provides some useful perspectives on how an enterprise should be aware of and properly use open source licensing (for both the components it might use in developing software and the release of software it produces). “Security in Open Source Web Content Management Systems” is an excellent overview (and reminder) about keeping up with plugging the known exploits in commonly used open source CMS tools. Don’t let the title of “Open Source Software Considerations for Law Enforcement” stop you from discovering principles, concepts, constraints, and ultimate uses of open source that are applicable to any organization. “Open Source Data Collection in the Developing World” is a wonderful article about an actual (and very influential) use of the Google Open Data Kit in saving lives in Africa. It might provide inspiration on how to solve data collection challenges you may be facing. If you’re looking for a strong overview of open source use outside of the US, “A Comparative Analysis of Open Source Software Usage in Germany, Brazil, and India” will give you a solid perspective on how three leading nations are employing open source in government, business, and education. “Commodification of Industrial Software: A Case for Open Source” provides some interesting theories, concepts, case studies, and visual models on how to properly value and employ open source in various business contexts. Lastly, “A Stage Model of Evolution for Open Source Software” discusses the 3 generations of open source evolution through the maturity curve (IEEE login is required to view the full text of this article). In addition to these articles, we’re providing a few links to open source sites to extend your research and learning on open source.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Who is Eating IE’s Lunch?

    When Chrome was launched, everybody termed it as Firefox killer (after all, Google used to fund Firefox development). But then, IE turns out to be the biggest loser. I decided to share Pluggd.in’s browser usage statistics and compared the current data with last year’s data (December 2009).

  • Please Participate in the “State of Mozilla” Survey

    Recently we posted our annual “State of Mozilla” which describes what we have been working on and plans for the immediate future. I want to make sure that the plans laid out in the State of Mozilla reflect and inspire the people who identify themselves with Mozilla and our mission. I am asking that you help me make sure of this.

Oracle

• JCP Executive Committee loses independent Java expert

  Tim Peierls, one of two independent Java experts on the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee (EC), has announced his resignation from the standardisation body. His decision to resign was taken shortly after the committee rubber stamped Oracle’s plans for the forthcoming Java 6 and Java 7. Peierls’ vote was one of three to oppose Oracle’s proposal. Google, the Apache Software Foundation and Peierls all voted against, in response to Oracle imposing restrictions on the availability of Test Compatibility Kits (TCKs) for Java.

Education

• Why can’t Penguins enter Federica square?

  In 2008 the Linux User Group of Naples had already defined Free Software in the Federico II University “a missed opportunity”, because “students are forced to buy expensive proprietary software and… there are online service like the ESIS exam booking website that are only accessible with Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer… A partial compensation is given by the academic tradition of the CSI (the University ICT service) of adopting Free Software for the main University services” (Note from Marco: that’s good, even if in November 2010 the CSI still called “Free Software” what is simply gratis proprietary software from Microsoft, while we all know that Free is about freedom, not price).

  In 2010, according to a press release issued on March 13th, 2009 “inside the Federica Campus visitors are free to stroll around the tridimensional spaces of the virtual University”.

• Jeff Mao and Bob McIntire from the Maine Department of Education: Open Education and Policy

  Maine has been a leader in adopting educational technology in support of its students. In 2002, through the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), the state began providing laptops to all students in grades 7-8 in a one-to-one laptop program. In 2009, Maine expanded the project to high school students. The one-to-one laptops paved the way for open education initiatives like Vital Signs, empowering students to conduct their own field research in collaboration with local scientists, and make that research available online. Recently, Maine has been engaged in some interesting and innovative projects around OER as a result of federal grant funds. For this installment of our series on open education and policy, we spoke with Jeff Mao and Bob McIntire from the Maine Department of Education. Jeff is Learning Technology Policy Director at MLTI, and Bob works for the Department’s Adult & Community Education team.

Project Releases

• GCC 4.5.2 Is Near With A Release Candidate

  While GCC 4.6 is nearing release, Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other H1’2011 Linux distributions will continue shipping with GCC 4.5, which was released in April and so far has been succeeded by just one point release. A second point release, GCC 4.5.2, is however being prepared for release shortly.

• Python 3.2 eases concurrent development

  The next version of the widely used Python programming language will offer greater support for writing multithreaded applications, a challenging duty for an increasing number of programmers in this age of multicore processors.

  This week, the developers behind Python have released the first beta version of the 3.2 version of the language. For this version, they have concentrated on bug fixes and general improvements while maintaining the language syntax and semantics defined in Python 3.0.

• Java SE 7 and SE 8 specs move forward amid protest

  Official specifications for upcoming releases of Java have been approved by an executive committee of the JCP (Java Committee Process), although the votes were not unanimous.

Programming

• Software CEOs talking fluent dork: its the developers, stupid. New Kingmakers

  Apart from conflating Ruby on Rails the development framework with Ruby the programming language, something which many Ruby developers hate, but which its easy to slip into (so easy i slipped into it yesterday) Benioff was clearly not talking the language of the line of business, but rather of technology.

The Internet’s IPv4’s Clock is Ticking Down

We all know that the Internet’s supply of Ipv4 addresses is running ever lower. What you may not know is that IPv4 exhaustion, when we’re completely out of available IPv4 addresses, is approaching even faster than the experts expected.

Verizon launches IPv6 transition services

Verizon’s professional services arm has introduced a service to convert networks to IPv6, anticipating that large organizations will soon need help with such projects.

Kindle for the Web: Sounds Like…The Web, Only For a Fee

Amazon’s Kindle books will soon be readable as content embedded on Web pages and Web page publishers will be able to land affiliate fees for Kindle books they sell to their own audiences, the company announced today.

You too can now pay $9.99 to read text on a Web page, in Amazon’s proprietary format, with the graphically limited format of a printed text-only book of yore. Sure, your bookmarks and notes will carry over from the Web pages you’re reading on to other devices – but could that possibly be enough to warrant paying for Web-embedded eBooks? I don’t think so. Once it hits the Web, premium content is only sellable because of scarcity or a superior user experience. I don’t see either of those being true in this case.

Chinese Nobel boycott divides EU’s ‘inner circle’

EU candidate country Serbia and four other nations on the Union’s periphery – Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco – have disappointed the European Commission by deciding to boycott a ceremony awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Pew Research: 8% of US adult Internet users are on Twitter, 2% use it daily

In “the first-ever survey reading from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that exclusively examines Twitter users,” the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has found that 8% of US adults that use the Internet use Twitter.

The survey found that Twitter users are more likely to be young (18-29), African-American or Latino (“twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users”) and are twice as likely to be urbanites. Women and college-educated are also slightly more likely than average to be using Twitter.

Science

• Republican Congressmen Crowdsource Attack on Science

  Under the guise of keeping federal spending under control, Republican congressmen have launched yet another attack on the basic scientific research that could lead to useful, potentially job-creating discoveries.

  House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) announced last week that the YouCut Citizen Review, a crowdsourcing tool for identifying “wasteful spending that should be cut,” would make its very first target the National Science Foundation.

  One would expect science-targeting politicians to have learned caution from Sarah Palin’s fruit-fly debacle, in which the 2008 vice presidential candidate mocked the methodology of research into neurological disorders like Down syndrome and autism, both of which afflict members of her family.

Health/Nutrition

• Over a million EU citizens finally have their say on GM crops

  Can you imagine how it feels to cross the finishing line of a marathon race… the smile, the thrill, the excitement, the urge to hug the fellows athletes, and also the exhaustion, the feeling of just sitting down to take several breaths before articulating a word? Well, this is exactly how I feel because we just finished an amazing race to get 1 million people calling for safe food and stopping genetically modified (GM) crops in the EU. But this is not your average petition. For the first time we’re using our citizens rights under the EU Lisbon Treaty.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• ‘Witness Management’ training for Special Constables

  The most interesting thing I learned that day was that if we had to hit anyone with an asp (a metal extendable baton which is more commonly used than the side-handled batons) it was best to do it as hard as possible on the first occasion, as repeated strikes “look bad on YouTube”.

• Khloe Kardashian: TSA Screenings Are Like ‘Raping You in Public’

  She’s not the only bargain basement celebrity to seek some sort of currency from the whole TSA body scanning thing. Former Baywatch meat model Donna D’errico claims she was subjected to a full-body scan simply because she is attractive, and that agents were laughing and whispering as she went through. Which, if that happened, it is awful and those employees should be fired. If D’errico is just exaggerating for an excuse to bring attention to how pretty she is, well she was fired by the court of public opinion many years ago, so who really cares.

• FBI plant banned by mosque – because he was too extreme

  The spying game wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Craig Monteilh, a convicted criminal recruited by the FBI to investigate the march of radical Islam into Southern California. His endless talk of violent “jihad” so alarmed worshippers at the local mosque, that they took out a restraining order against him.

• Met Requests For Oyster Data At Record Levels

  The number of requests from the Metropolitan Police for Oyster data have reached new highs this year, according to the Green Party. As any good tinfoil-hatter knows, this data can be used to track an individual’s movements and while it’s great for catching criminals and those seemingly omnipresent terrorists, concerns have been raised over the passing of sensitive data.

Cablegate

• PayPal Releases Funds to WikiLeaks as Supporters Strike Back

  The release of funds follows a number of denial-of-service attacks earlier this week that were aimed at the document-leaking site’s providers. Most of the providers are now refusing to work with WikiLeaks after the U.S. government accused it of being in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law.

• Facebook and Twitter Slam the Door on Would-Be WikiLeaks Avengers

  Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.

• Wikileaks Has Committed No Crime

  Since August, when Wikileaks first published 91,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, and in October, when they published approximately 400,000 more relating to the War in Iraq, many conservative commentators have been clamoring for the Justice Department to prosecute Wikileaks for publishing classified information.

  But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime.

• I am Julian Assange

  I want information so that I can hold my government accountable. If my country acts improperly and in my name, I want the proof. I want to know if there actually is no evidence proving weapons of mass destruction. I want to know if America is working with Israel to overthrow Iran’s leadership. I want data that has not been spun by reporters that work for publishers and broadcasters with political and business goals that conflict with the facts. I want to know.
  I am Julian Assange because I know unfettered information is valuable to democracy and a peaceful world. I can make the best decisions with the most knowledge. I can vote for the best candidates. I can support the smartest policies to help my country and the world. I am not naïve; I know that not every operation can be transparent but I have a right to know its outcome and how it has affected my country and me.
  I do not believe Julian Assange has done anything wrong. The cables that have been published have all been printed in newspapers and redacted to protect individuals at risk. I do not want my country to prosecute a man whose actions are changing the way we get information and how we make critical decisions. I now know that my president and my country’s military have not been honest about the war in Afghanistan. I know that my country has killed civilians and that we have refused to acknowledge our mistakes. I have learned that our allies are secretly consorting with our enemies.

• 4chan rushes to WikiLeaks’ defense, forces Swiss banking site offline

• Tom Flanagan and Ezra Levant

  Also calling for an assassination? Mr. Evangelical, Mike Huckabee! Oh, and of course Sarah Palin.

• Why WikiLeaks Is Winning Its Info War

  There was a time when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s voluntary surrender to the British authorities might have put an end to the crisis created by the Internet provocateur’s dissemination of tens of thousands of state secrets. But in the upside-down world of transnational crowdsourcing unleashed by WikiLeaks, in which thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange’s arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization.

• PayPal Busted for Bogus Wikileaks Excuse

  Facing a booing crowd in Europe, a PayPal executive tried to explain why his company blocked donations to Wikileaks. He cited a letter from the State Department calling the secrets-sharing site illegal. Sadly for him, no such letter exists.

• WikiLeaks cables: Lockerbie bomber freed after Gaddafi’s ‘thuggish’ threats

  The British government’s deep fears that Libya would take “harsh and immediate” action against UK interests if the convicted Lockerbie bomber died in a Scottish prison are revealed in secret US embassy cables which show London’s full support for the early release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

  Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, made explicit and “thuggish” threats to halt all trade deals with Britain and harass embassy staff if Megrahi remained in jail, the cables show. At the same time “a parade of treats” was offered by Libya to the Scottish devolved administration if it agreed to let him go, though the cable says they were turned down.

• Libya made threats to U.K. over Lockerbie bomber: WikiLeaks

  Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatened to cut trade with Britain and warned of “enormous repercussions” if the Lockerbie bomber died in jail, Britain’s Guardian newspaper said on Wednesday, citing U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

• Meet The New Public Face Of WikiLeaks: Kristinn Hrafnsson

  But there’s a second spokesperson for WikiLeaks who has been coming into the spotlight over the last few months: Icelandic investigative journalist and WikiLeaks staffer Kristinn Hrafnsson. Hrafnsson has been working with the whistleblowing group since April, and as Assange has become more reclusive and had his travel restricted by legal threats, Hrafnsson has become an increasingly visible spokesperson.

• Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

• Defend WikiLeaks or lose free speech

  Journalists cover wars by not taking sides. But when the war is on free speech itself, neutrality is no longer an option.

  The WikiLeaks releases are a pivotal moment in the future of journalism. They raise any number of ethical and legal issues for journalists, but one is becoming paramount.

  As I said last week, and feel obliged to say again today, our government — and its allies, willing or coerced, in foreign governments and corporations — are waging a powerful war against freedom of speech.

• IRONY: “You’re either with us, or you’re with WikiLeaks”

  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the intrepid young reporters working for The Washington Post when they broke the Watergate scandal which brought down the Nixon administration.

• The Internet Society on the Wikileaks issue

  This further underscores that the removal of a domain is an ineffective tool to suppress communication, merely serving to undermine the integrity of the global Internet and its operation.

• Diplomatic Source Code

  What Wikileaks has done is provide us with plenty of examples where the political and corporate elite will do anything and everything to maintain the status quo. We see various suspicious compiled binary announcements from companies who claim to spot “Wikileaks broke the terms and conditions of our product or service”. What we do not see is the source code, which many rightly suspect to include calls from US officials threatening everything from tax audits, blacklists from governmentt circles and contracts, being painted as “unpatriotic” to lose them money from “patriotic” consumers and so on. Those same companies like to claim on one had that they do not judge their clients, while several have deemed Wikileaks guilty without any trial. Both Mastercard and Visa happily allow the KKK as customers, but not Wikileaks for example.

  Given how governments and corporations are desperately trying to silence and smear Wikileaks, it simply adds fuel to the fire, it spreads the motivation of free thinking people around the world to stand up and defend what Wikileaks is doing against it’s detractors. Whilst I do not agree 100% with everything Wikileaks put out, I am 100% behind the need for them and others like them to exist. They are playing the role that the news outlets are supposed to play and all too often fail miserably at.

• Canadian firm caught up in Wiki wars

• They got the wrong person

  Then there are many war criminals who ought to be in jail and who are not. Most prominent of these are Bush, Blair, Cheney, Straw and their crew.

• True to its word, WikiLeaks releases more cables despite founder’s arrest

  WikiLeaks shrugged off the jailing of its founder by publishing a new tranche of secret diplomatic cables on Wednesday, heaping more embarrassment on the United States and some of its closest allies.

  After Julian Assange spent his first night behind bars as a remand prisoner in London, his website revealed Washington had branded Australia’s ex-premier Kevin Rudd as a “mistake-prone control freak” and that the British government was relieved when its Scottish counterparts freed the Lockerbie bomber.

• Does WikiLeaks damage the brand image of wikis?

  Instead, I want to explore the impact that the WikiLeaks brand name is having/will have on brands closely identifying with the word “wiki”, and analyze whether WikiLeaks will impact the acceptance of collaboration and transparency initiatives within corporations.

• Are we starting a full-out war on the Internet?

  I watch my friends root for the attackers and think this is the way wars always begin. The “fighting the good fight” spirit. Let’s go over there and show them who we are. Let’s make a symbolic statement. By the time the war is underway, we won’t remember any of that. We will wonder how we could have been so naive to think that war was something wonderful or glorious. People don’t necessarily think of wars being fought on the net and over the net, but new technology comes to war all the time, and one side often doesn’t understand.

• What Is LOIC?

  LOIC (“Low Orbit Ion Cannon”) is an application developed by 4Chan-affiliated hackers designed to—when used en masse by thousands of anonymous users—launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites. Like Visa.com and Mastercard.com, for instance.

• Pundit calls for development of magical anti-Wikileaks computer virus

  It’s hard to even begin to summarize coverage on Wikileaks-related stuff today. But if you read one thing, read Marc Thiessen’s fresh item at the Washington Post.

• PayPal VP On Blocking WikiLeaks: State Department Said It Was Illegal

  Bedier also said that PayPal’s decision was influenced by the fact that the State Department deemed WikiLeaks illegal in a letter sent on November 27th, a statement that was not followed up on by Yiannopoulos. It is still unclear what exact US laws WikiLeaks is breaking.

• Woman felt threatened by Flanagan email

  A Toronto woman says she felt threatened by an email she says she got from a former Stephen Harper adviser concerning WikiLeaks.

  Janet Reymond says she was “outraged” after Tom Flanagan recently suggested the founder of WikiLeaks should be killed.

  Flanagan, now a University of Calgary professor, has since apologized, but Calgary police are investigating the comment.

• Feds hint at charges for WikiLeaks’ Assange

  The U.S. government indicated today that WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange could be in legal jeopardy for disclosing classified information because he is “not a journalist.”

  When asked whether “traditional media” organizations that republish secret documents could be prosecuted, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said that the administration applauds “the role of journalists in your daily pursuits.”

• Join EFF in Standing up Against Internet Censorship

  Over the past few weeks, we here at EFF have watched as whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has fueled an emotionally charged debate about the secrecy of government information and the people’s right to know. We have welcomed this debate, and the fact that there have been myriad views is the embodiment of the freedom of expression upon which this country was founded.

• WikiLeaks: Moving Target

  If nothing else, the massive amounts of traffic they are attracting, and the efforts of actors unknown to shut them down, have created a unique laboratory for studying Internet resilience.

• US declares Wikileaks off-limits to government researchers

  The US government is clamping down on scientists’ ability to discuss and surf freely as part of its response to the release of classified cables by Wikileaks.

  Today at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, moderators who run an environmental science discussion group called Coral-List have begun deleting any posts that make reference to Wikileak documents. On Friday, at Fermilab in Chicago, access to Wikileaks was blocked by the IT department to “help prevent someone from inadvertently downloading a classified document to a machine on our network” The same day at NASA, employees were told not to use their computers to download information from Wikileaks.

• ‘Dangerous precedent’ set over Wikileaks ban

• Why Wouldn’t Google Mirror Wikileaks?

  Consider: Your mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” You thumbed your nose at Wall Street, and you proved them wrong. You’ve stood up to the entire media industry by purchasing YouTube and defending fair use in the face of extraordinary pressure. You’ve done the same with the political and economic giant that is China*. And you’re hanging the entirety of your defense against European monopoly charges on the premise of free speech.

  So why not take a bold step, and stand with Wikileaks? The world’s largest Internet company taking a clear stand would be huge news, and it’d call the bloviating bluff of all the politicians acting out of fear of embarrassment, or worse. The Wikileaks story may well be, as pointed out by many, the most important and defining story of the Internet age.

• How State Dept. Knowingly Put People At Risk

  Below is the text of the U.S. State Department’s letter to Wikileaks’ attorney – which includes/groups Wikileaks’ founder (or the well known of its founders) Julian Assange, together with his attorney Jennifer Robinson. The mere act of treating attorney and client together as one (guilty) party, according to international law, is subject itself to legal ramifications. Good job State Department. You’re nothing if not consistent – and we know this from the cables don’t we?

• Silencing Wikileaks is silencing the press

  Silencing Mastercard.com with pingfloods or malware isn’t going to do much to advance the cause of liberating those who would be silenced. But what exactly should be done? Normally I’d dismiss tweets describing this as “the world’s first great infowar” as hyperbole. But this time, everything really does feel unprecedented.

• Wikileaks FAQ

  According to the Associated Press, Wikileaks gave four news organizations (Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel) all 251,287 classified documents.

• Report: Wikileaks cables show Texas company “helped pimp little boys to stoned Afghan cops”

  In the Houston Press, an extensive blog post untangling an alarming story from the state department cables: “another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp, the private security contractor tasked with training the Afghan police,” and apparent proof that the company procured male children for bacha bazi (“boy-play”) parties.

• Berkeley Considers Honoring Private Suspected In WikiLeaks Case

  Berkeley City Council members are considering a resolution that would declare the Army private suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks a hero and call for his release.

  The council is expected to vote on the resolution in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is being held in a military brig, on Tuesday.

  It has already been approved by the city’s Peace and Justice Commission.

  Bob Meola, the peace and justice commissioner who authored the resolution, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that Manning is a patriot and should get a medal.

• Julian Assange extradition attempt an uphill struggle, says specialist

  A former extradition specialist for the Crown Prosecution Service today predicted it would be “very difficult” for Sweden to get the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, sent back to face sexual assault allegations.

  Raj Joshi, a former head of the European and International Division at the CPS, said Sweden’s lack of a formal criminal charge against Assange increased his lawyers’ chances of success in blocking the extradition attempt.

  Assange’s lawyers are scheduled to visit him tomorrow in prison for the first time since he was jailed on remand yesterday after Sweden requested his extradition.

• So WikiLeaks Is Evil For Releasing Documents… But DynCorp Gets A Pass For Pimping Young Boys To Afghan Cops?

  One refrain we keep hearing against Wikileaks is that the cable releases aren’t really “whistleblowing,” because they’re not really revealing anything. However, it seems like each day there’s another big revelation of rather horrible things being done (and covered up) by the US government. The latest, pointed out by Boing Boing, involves a report from a cable that US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party.

  The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them “foreign mentors”). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a “tribal dance,” rather than a party where young boys wear “scanty women’s clothes” and “dance seductively” before being “auctioned off to the highest bidder” for sex.

• Assange accuser may have ceased
  co-operating

  Anna Ardin, one of the two complainants in the rape and sexual assault case against WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, has left Sweden, and may have ceased actively co-operating with the Swedish prosecution service and her own lawyer, sources in Sweden told Crikey today.

• Why Leaks Are Scary

  Leaks hurt. Truth hurts, too. But always bother to check who it hurts the most. Therein lies the answer regarding the ethics of a leak.

• WikiLeaks

  1. Encryption isn’t the issue here. Of course the cables were encrypted, for transmission. Then they were received and decrypted, and — so it seems — put into an archive on SIPRNet, where lots of people had access to them.

  2. Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them. The more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to be made public.

  3. I’m not surprised that these cables were available to so many people. We know that access control is hard, and that it’s impossible to know beforehand what information someone will need to do their job. What is surprising is that there wasn’t any audit logs kept about who accessed all these cables. That seems like a no-brainer.

• UN rapporteur says Assange shouldn’t be prosecuted

  The United Nations representative for freedom of opinion and expression says he is now working on a new report on free speech and the internet.

  Frank La Rue says he doesn’t think that the United States Government will be able to make a case against Julian Assange. But he warns it would set a very bad example for free speech if it did take action against him.

• Lawyers demand protection for Assange

  THE Australian lawyer for WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has written to Attorney-General Robert McClelland asking him to take formal action against prominent North American figures calling for Mr Assange to be harmed.

• Parsing the impact of Anonymous

  The current chapter in the WikiLeaks saga has finally forced me to come out of my blogging semi-retirement! While I’m still trying to make sense of everything that has happened in the last ten days, here are some analytical notes on Anonymous and the challenges facing the Obama administratio as it mulls an appropriate response to WikiLeaks.

  The impact of the recent wave of cyber-attacks launched by Anonymous on a handful of companies that dropped WikiLeaks as their client – Amazon, EveryDNS, MasterCard, Visa and others – is hard to gauge. I’m certain these attacks won’t make any of these firms to reconside, strike peace with WikiLeaks, and offer them some vouchers in compensation. But could the attacks serve as a deterrent to other firms that have been considering dropping WikiLeaks?

• Stop the crackdown on WikiLeaks

  WikiLeaks has not been charged with a crime related to the release of documents, yet the site’s access to the Internet has been disrupted and major efforts are underway to block credit card processing of donations to keep the site running.

  Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have called WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a leading Democrat, has proposed that Julian Assange be prosecuted under the Espionage Act — potentially setting a precedent that could expose any journalist working on national security to a credible threat of imprisonment.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Climate pledges are 9 gigatonnes short

  The “gigatonne gap” looms large as UN climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, enter their final days without new commitments from big polluters to cut their carbon dioxide emissions. A five to nine-gigatonne gap, to be precise. That is the gap between what has been pledged and what is needed to avoid dangerous global warming.

  To keep the world on track to cap global warming at under 2 °C by mid-century, rising CO2 emissions should be kept below 44 gigatonnes a year in 2020, more than a third higher than today. But the UN Environment Programme warned here today that current national pledges would leave 2020 emissions anywhere between 5 and 9 gigatonnes too high.

Finance

• Want To Know Why Visa & Mastercard Cut Off Wikileaks? Because Its Latest Leak Was About Them…

  Visa’s slogan used to be “Everywhere you want to be,” but apparently one place it did not want to be was on Wikileaks. We’ve already covered how both Visa and MasterCard cut off Wikileaks quite quickly, with MasterCard even going so far as to claim that it did so because of illegal activity by Wikileaks — despite no charges or convictions for any actual illegal activity.

• Daily Show: The Big Bank Theory

  Americans outsmart themselves with fancy security measures to the point where their money is committing suicide on the press.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Hyperlink libel fears heard by top court

  “Hyperlinks are vital to the expression and use of the internet,” said Harvey Delaney, one of two lawyers representing the respondent in the case, B.C. resident Jon Newton.

• Brazil’s largest newspaper sues independent blog and begins a new era of censorship

  As we saw during Obama’s election and in others all over Europe, the internet also developed an important role during the 2010 presidential campaign in Brazil, which culminated in the election of President Lula’s candidate Dilma Roussef. While most blogs gave support to left-wing candidate Roussef, most TV networks, radios, newspapers and magazines took the side of the José Serra and his strong political-religious-didactic conservative coalition (who ended up losing the election). If there were any questions about the importance of the internet in Brazil, it is undeniable as of November 24th 2009, when Lula gave, to blogs only, the first online interview in the history of the Brazilian presidency, in a demonstration of respect for the important contrast that they had created against the traditional press.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Google To Make Video Services More Annoying After Buying DRM Company?

  You would think that the folks over at Google would know by now what a joke DRM is — especially after the company’s disastrous foray into server-based DRM on its original Google Video platform that required users to “check in” before they could watch videos they thought they had “purchased.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Wikileaks Cable Shows US Involvement in Swedish Anti-Piracy Efforts

    A yet to be released cable from the US Embassy in Stockholm will reveal that the United States Government was very concerned about file-sharing related issues in Sweden. The US Embassy actively worked with the Swedish authorities to reduce file-sharing related threats, which included The Pirate Bay which was raided in 2006 following US pressure.

  • ACS:Law come unstuck

    Default judgment is a speedy way for claimants to obtain judgment without a trial. In most cases a defendant served with a claim form and particulars of claim is supposed to acknowledge service and then file a defence. If not acknowledgement or defence is forthcoming the claimant can ask the court to give it judgment in default.

    This is where ACS:Law start to come unstuck. In 3 of the cases a defence had been filed in court. So default judgment does not apply. In a further 3 of the cases there was no evidence on the court file that the claim form and particulars of claim had been served on the defendant. It is ordinarily the court’s job to serve these documents, but there’s no presumption that it has. In my practice I have come across situations where some administrative mistake has been made and the court has failed to do so. Whatever the reason, it is bad practice to issue requests for default judgment without checking with the court that no defence has been filed. A slap on the wrist for ACS:Law in my view. As the judge said “The requests for judgment should never have been filed.”

  • Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived

    BitTorrent is a great technology to share files both quickly and efficiently, but like all other P2P-technologies it has an Achilles’ heel. The download process relies in part on central servers that can crash or go offline for a variety of reasons. To address this vulnerability the first truly decentralized BitTorrent/P2P client has been developed, meaning that no central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines are required to download movies, software and music.

  • MPAA Reminding Universities They Need To Crack Down On File Sharing — Leaves Out How It Lied To Get The Law Passed

    Back in 2008, we wrote about how the MPAA convinced Congress to pass legislation to make colleges and universities responsible for reducing copyright infringement on campus or lose federal funding. The law was really a trial run of sorts — an attempt to see how this could work for making ISPs responsible. Of course, in order to get the law passed, the MPAA flat out lied. It made up numbers, saying that 44% of “losses” from file sharing came from college campuses. This number was so ridiculously wrong that the MPAA later claimed “human error” before saying the number was really 15%. But even that was dubious — and when the GAO asked the MPAA to support these numbers, the MPAA refused to provide the data. Pretty telling.